Tucker Vs Ted: The Israel Throwdown

Ezekiel is like, “I can fix it. I’m gonna give God wheels. We’re gonna mobilize the throne so that God can just go crashing out of the temple and vroom, go.” Yeah, God’s like, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat that ever-present spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good. We’re wading in chest-deep on this one today. Yeah, we’re going in hard and we’re going in heavy.

Yes, we are. We are gonna—cause we’re gonna ruffle some feathers—

—today. But I don’t think it—it might be—

Deeper than chest-deep. We might—we might need snorkels at this point. We’ll see.

I don’t think it is—it’s not unwarranted, as the kids are saying these days. I believe, in other words, it’s not unjustified. But, but yeah, we’re going to be wading into some controversy which, you know, we, we don’t ever do.

So we’ve never—we’ve, we, we’ve managed to avoid it for so long. It’s finally time. So let’s—the first half, we’re going to be talking about a subject that has come up thanks to, of all people, one Ted Cruz. Thank goodness for him. We’re all just so happy that he’s around. And Tucker Carlson—I feel similar about him. And, and then in the second—and that’s going to be, oh, heaven help us, it’s going to be about Israel. And then in the second half of the show, we’re going to talk about a psalm. That is interesting. Yeah, I’m going to give it that.

One might say maybe a little problematic.

For, for many of us. So, so we’ll get, we’ll dive deep into that. But first let’s get into a Taking Issue, and this week’s Taking Issue—we’re taking issue with something that, you know, there—this interview that Tucker Carlson did with Ted Cruz. The main thing that sort of went viral was Tucker grilling Ted Cruz about, “You don’t know anything about Iran and you want to blow them off the face of the earth,” and there’s all this Iran stuff. But sort of what got lost in the shuffle was the thing that you picked up on, Dan, when he was talking, when they were talking about Israel, and specifically what happened was Ted Cruz said, “Well, I’m a Christian, and in the Bible, we are commanded to bless Israel.”

Yes. Which he seems to interpret to mean never question, but always blindly support.

Right. But before we get there, Tucker Carlson immediately jumps on him. And Tucker Carlson is such a jerk in this interview. They’re both jerks. They’re both just insufferable humans that you—

—would think they would be friendly to each other, though. Yeah.

They’re on the same team. They both support the same bad president.

Yeah. They’re both fascists.

For the most part. They are in 100% agreement, but apparently not on this point.

And so—and so Tucker Carlson just—if you disagree with him, apparently you’re his enemy. And he came—he’s coming after you with—with both barrels. And so what he—so he was like, “Okay, well, what—what scripture is that? This—this scripture that says that you support, that you need to bless Israel.” And Ted Cruz didn’t know.

Yeah. Well, I loved—I loved that. He was—he was like, “Oh, I—I don’t remember it. Somewhere in the back. You can—” and he’s like, “Pull up Google and look for it.”

And then—

—and immediately Tucker Carlson was like, “It’s in Genesis.”

With like, as much venom as—as he could muster. It was like, “You child. It is in the book of Genesis .”

Well, and Tucker Carlson had clearly been planning his gotchas, so of course Tucker knew where it was because he was planning this gotcha from the beginning.

But it is in Genesis, specifically Genesis 12 . Is that correct?

That is correct. Genesis 12 , which is the beginning of the Abraham cycle. So this is—this is immediately after we—we have Genesis 1 through 11, the primeval history. So this is the—the second main set of narrative arcs of the entire book of Genesis . And here we basically have—and it’s pretty early in Genesis 12 because you have in Genesis 11 that Terah was Abram’s father. He dies. He was 205 years old. He died in Haran. And then Genesis 12 begins. “Now, the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

By you, through you, as you know, the. The. You are the instrument of their, their blessing.

Right.

And so the idea is Abraham’s offspring, which right off the bat, one thing to point out is that Abraham had a lot of offspring according to the Bible, which includes like Ishmael, who’s supposed to be the father of the Arab people, and an awful lot of people beyond just the 12 sons of Israel. And so.

Yeah, and that’s important to point out Israel, AKA Jacob. Right. Is that, am I getting that right? Who, who is Abraham’s grandson?

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.

Right. So yeah, you’re right. Like that’s one line of the thing. But yeah, the Arabs, the Muslims, another line of. I mean if we’re going to take this seriously, literally, then this is not.

The actual ancestry of the Arab.

No, of course not. Of course not. But, but if Ted Cruz were actually going to take his own theology seriously, he wouldn’t be, he wouldn’t be talking about the state of Israel, the current nation state of Israel. I guess, I guess he’d be talking about all of the occupants of that whole region.

Including the Palestinians, the Iranians, the, everybody.

Yeah, if, if you take this, this lineage seriously. Yeah, but and, and most people I think would, I think the, the audience of Genesis 12 . And, and this is probably a, an exilic, post-exilic layer. This is, this is probably written by people who were coming back to, or who had recently come back from exile. So, so because, you know, Abraham, stranger in a strange land story kind of resonates quite a bit with the people who are coming back to, to the land, the, the whole sojourner thing. So in this time period they would have understood Abraham’s main offspring to represent Israel. They, that they would have been like, eh, we don’t care about the Edomites, we don’t care about the Arabs, we don’t care about all those other folks who are also ostensibly descended from Abraham. They probably had in mind Israel.

Now the question is, what does that refer to? It certainly doesn’t refer to the nation state that was founded in the middle of the 20th century CE because the author was living 6th century BCE, had no concept of, of any of this, and was probably not living in a period when there was a, an actual nation where they had autonomy and their own identity. And so Israel almost certainly referred to the people of the house of Israel who were actually scattered well beyond the land that is labeled Israel in the Bible.

Right.

And so that, you know, Israel is the name of Jacob, the legendary eponymous father of the twelve tribes of Israel themselves. The legendary origins of the twelve tribes of Israel, the people of the House of Israel, who, you know, the 10 tribes get carted off in the forced exile, forced migration in 722 BCE they are disintegrated. They’re no longer around. You have mainly Judah, a little bit of Benjamin, a smattering of the other tribes that are in Judah and Jerusalem, and they kind of take on the identity of the House of Israel. And so the people of Israel are who knows how far dispersed into the world and diffused among the world’s populations. But overwhelmingly, they are identified today with the Jewish people. Right. So I think if you do actually take. And. And he says it’s a commandment, but it’s not.

No, it’s not.

It’s.

It’s just. It’s just a. Like, it’s like a. It’s like a thing. I. If people bless you, I’ll be happy with them. I’ll bless them.

Yeah. And if they curse you, and it’s not like those are the two options. It’s not like you are either blessing or you are cursing. There’s a lot of indifference.

There’s.

There’s. It’s a mixed bag. And, you know, nobody unilaterally responds the same way. And so, yeah, this just doesn’t make sense as a commandment. It doesn’t make sense as something that, that we should be expected to follow. But. But Rafael Edward Cruz says this is. I think he’s. I don’t remember what his exact words were, but basically he said, I was taught growing up in Sunday school, right.

Right. And that’s. This is a weird sort of thing that has happened. I like the fact that he said, I grew up with this sort of ties him in with a movement that is. That’s been around for a long time. But it. I think. I think it really caught on in the middle of the 20th century, this idea of Christian Zionism, which is, Which. Which became a thing that, you know, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson talked about, which is this idea that we need to support Israel and we need to support the Jews of Israel specifically. Not. And kind of specifically in opposition to the Palestinians of Israel or like any. Any other claim to it, and frequently.

In opposition to the rest of the Jewish people.

Yeah. Which.

Which makes up the majority of the Jewish people.

And, and all of this came from this idea that, that some. Excuse me. That the, that the Jewish reoccupation of that land that happened in the middle of the 20th century was fulfillment of prophecy.

Yes. In the Bible, this, this is the first time since 63 BCE when this area was annexed by Pompey the Roman general, that there has been a formal autonomous nation of Israel. So it was a big deal.

Right.

Fulfillment of prophecy. I don’t think we can go that far. But for Christian Zionists, this is opening the door to the rest of the events that are supposed to precede the Second Coming and usher in Jesus’s return. So for Christians, it’s an even bigger deal that has nothing to do with the well-being of Jewish folks per se. It primarily has to do with their own eschatology and their own idea of, of the end times and the licking of the chops for, for the world to be destroyed.

Yeah. And it’s so interesting because there’s this there, you kind of hinted at it before, but there’s this dichotomy between we must support Israel, we support the Jews. We’re so anti-Jewish hate and all this stuff. And then, and no. And it’s so disingenuous. There’s no mention like I read several articles by Christians about why we need to support Israel and whatever and there was always this like they’re very anti-antisemitism which by the way, and you, the word antisemitism becomes this bludgeon where no one’s allowed to question us because if you question our support of the nation of Israel then we get to call you a Jew-hater. We get to call you an antisemite and, and there, and, and just never address any of your concerns because you’re, you’re obviously just bigoted. And then, but they never mentioned like, like I saw one and one article and there was a whole thing about Jewish hate is nothing new.

And it was decrying Jewish hate, not mentioning who had been doing the hating for centuries.

Yeah. Which it’s when we’re, when we’re looking at at least when it comes to Zionism. I mean most of the Jewish folks I know are vehemently antizionist. Not all, but an awful lot of the Jewish folks I know are vehemently antizionist.

Right.

And so we have a situation where you have a lot of Jewish folks who are being accused of antisemitism for pushing back against the Israeli government, which is problematic. And, and, and this is particularly sticky because there is an awful lot of antisemitism that attends Christian and non-Christian, non-Jewish antizionism. Like there’s definitely a problem with the antisemitism that, that we frequently see attending a lot of the antizionist rhetoric on the part of people who are Christian, who are atheists, or who are other things. And that’s a big problem. And it becomes a matter of just lumping in everybody and we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think when. When, well, we got to avoid antisemitism and identifying criticism of a government as indistinguishable from.

From antisemitism.

Right.

And what’s funny is I see it’s not funny. It’s actually rather tragic and horrifying. But I see a lot of Christian nationalists who seem to be doing the same thing with Americans. Like, I saw somebody on Twitter today who said, I used to love Colorado and now it’s disgusting and I wish Americans would take it back for themselves. It’s like Colorado is one of the whitest states that has ever graced the face of this planet.

Right.

It’s overwhelmingly Americans who are making it what it is today. And so it seems—sounds like they’re saying, if you don’t agree with Christian nationalism, with America first, if you’re a progressive or a liberal or a leftist or any of those other labels, you’re not even an American.

Right.

Which kind of sounds an awful lot to me like this idea that if you don’t support Netanyahu, that that makes you antisemitic, as if he constitutes Judaism or is the essence of Jewishness, as if Trump is the essence of being American or anything like that. There, there are a lot of attempts to reduce this down to these simple and ridiculous binaries on all sides of this and related arguments. So I get really annoyed by those attempts to try to reduce everything.

And there’s this sense, you know, I think one of the problems here is the linguistic problem that we so often run into, which is, you know, one word is a synecdoche for other words or can be. Can be like the word Israel can be used to mean, you know, the new name of the guy Israel, the, you know, the character of Jacob in the Bible. Or it can be used to mean his offspring, or it can be used to mean, you know, a political group of people. Or it can be used to mean—

It can be used territory.

Yeah, yeah, it can be. Yeah, a landmass. It can be used to mean any number of things. And if you—like Ted Cruz says, “if it’s just”—and you know, Genesis 12 isn’t even about Israel. Israel has not even been born yet. So Genesis 12 is about Abraham, which is a very different thing, but then can be used as a synecdoche for other things, you know, the Abrahamic religions we often hear about. So it’s like if we cannot get specific, if we cannot—at one point, Tucker Carlson actually makes the point to Ted Cruz about, well, what is Israel? Are they talking in the ancient, in the Bible? Are they talking about the modern nation state? When they—and Ted Cruz goes, “You don’t know what Israel is?” Yeah. And it’s such a dodge. It’s such a pathetic dodge.

Yeah. And, and it—I don’t know if it’s insincere or just profoundly ignorant because he—I would think that Senator Cruz would understand that Israel can refer to geography, it can refer to government, it can refer to ethnicity, it can refer to Jacob, it can refer to all these things. And so either he knows that and is just being dishonest and evasive, or he just doesn’t know that.

In which case, holy crap, we have a lot of work to do to weed profoundly unfit public servants out of government. But—and, and here’s the part that I dislike the most about this. If this were a commandment to unilaterally support and endorse and champion the actions of a government, it would basically endow that government and whoever’s in charge of it with unilateral infallibility, inerrancy, authority to do whatever they wanted. It could never be wrong.

And the notion that anyone merits that kind of authority is just so far beyond the pale. Like that’s—

Oh, absolutely.

There’s no case to make it possible. Yeah.

Like, honestly, if an almighty God made that kind of a declaration, that God would have to make sure that in perpetuity, the leader of that nation, whatever nation it was, could never make a mistake. Yeah. Because that’s the only way in which that kind of commandment to support something could possibly make any sense.

And even, even within an organization, a global organization that does assert infallibility. Yeah. You have an awful lot of people being like, yeah, well, you know, and a lot of people who push back—push back against the one person who is endowed with that infallibility, however they conceptualize it, whether they say, well, he’s got to be wearing this robe and it’s got to be this kind of day, and the weather’s got to be such and such. And, you know, like, even the people who want to reduce the context for infallibility down as as tiny as they can make it, they’re still like—they give a lot more wiggle room to that than this idea that, “Well, bless Israel, you gotta.” Yeah, you gotta. You know, because I was taught as a child in Sunday school this, and let me—like the things that you are taught as a child in Sunday school you should have outgrown because a lot of them are being taught to you precisely because you’re a child, right?

And you’re not thinking about these things in the ways that they need to be thought about and the frameworks that people use to transmit these ideas and these identity markers and things like that to children.

It’s so interesting, you know that I went onto a website called Christians United for Israel which claims and may well be the largest organization for the promotion or in defense of Israel in the country as they have. They claim to have over 10 million members. And you would think that that would be a comforting thought to Jewish, to Jewish people around the world. It is not. Most, most Jewish people that I know of and you know, in polling most Jewish people wildly mistrust the, the, the Christian especially the Evangelical Christian Defense of Israel.

And as the kids are saying, “based.” Yeah, they should distrust that because it is, there’s an agenda that is motivating that, that support which is very much one sided and isolated and, and very targeted.

It’s a poison pill because these people, like we said, they believe that this is all in service of getting to the end of days, getting to the eschaton. And at that point they assume that Israel will be then handed over to them, the Christians as the fulfillment of that prophecy and blah blah, blah. It’s like preserve it for the Jews so that we can have it so.

That God can then say thank you, I’ll take that. Now this goes to them. So yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s pretty bad. And yeah. And the notion that these, that these ideologies are so deeply entrenched in the power, the halls of, of the US government, in among the people who make decisions about going to war. And, and this is, and this is one of the reasons that a lot of people think Tucker Carlson was pushing back against Senator Cruz. A lot of people have pointed out he seems to be very pro Russia. Iran is, is a big supporter of Russia. They’re mutually supporting. And so it’s not that Tucker Carlson suddenly had a bout of conscience. It’s, it’s that he has a very isolationist and in many ways pro Russia approach to America first.

Whether that’s the case or not, whether that’s motivating things, I don’t know. It certainly is reason to not throw your hat into the Tucker Carlson ring.

Don’t put all your eggs in.

That you might line up with him once on a thing. Don’t, don’t, don’t get pro Tucker by any means.

But, but yeah, we, the, the notion that we would be going to war with Iran using Israel as a proxy, even though they are not developing a nuclear weapon, like all of the experts are in pretty widespread agreement about that is, is, it’s baffling to me. And, and yeah, trying to leverage the Bible as, as rationalization for that. Gotta do better, man.

Do you want to know one of the, one of the biblical references that I saw made about Iran and, and Israel?

Did it have something to do with Gog and Magog?

Yes. Ezekiel 38 . Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know what that is. Like, I read it and then I went and checked out Ezekiel and was like, wait, that’s not about now. But none of this is about now. That’s the other thing is that like, one of the things that you and I have talked about a lot is that all of these people who are very into the idea that, you know, this is all the fulfillment of the prophecies of Revelation and Daniel and whatever. No, no, it was very clearly about a very specific time and that time was a long time ago.

And, and we can, and when you look in Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are a place and a ruler of a place. As near as we can tell when we get into the Book of Revelation , they seem to be both rulers of places rather than one and, and the other. Like even the, the authors of the New Testament are at quite a distance from the composition of, of that quote unquote prophecy and so are interpreting it in, in different ways. And now people are like, oh, it’s Iran, it’s Russia, it’s China, it’s Turkey, it’s all. And, and it’s whoever.

I don’t like yeah.

That’s really all it is. It’s. You’re just looking at the world and through the lenses of this is coming, this is in the post. This is gonna happen. So I, I gotta be ready for it and which is literally understanding the Bible as kind of a Ouija board as a way to divine the future, which as we, we have talked about in, in the recent past, is something a lot of people kind of unwittingly use the Bible to try to do.

Right.

They’re looking at their own times. They’re trying to prognosticate out into the near future.

And they’re, they’re hoping that something happens. They’re worried that something happens. They’re warning people that if they don’t change their behavior, maybe this will happen. That’s what those prophecies are. And the, the fact that geopolitical events can pivot on somebody’s interpretation of one of these biblical passages, just makes me so disappointed in humanity. Like, come on.

Well, the other thing is that like when we say, oh, that was fulfillment of prophecy. Oh, that was fulfillment of prophecy. That totally disregards the fact that events since the first century CE have, have been said to be the fulfillment of the same prophecies throughout the centuries.

When some world event happens, you know, in the 600s, in the 1600s, in the, in the, whenever somebody was saying that’s the fulfillment of this prophecy, the eschaton is around the corner.

That’s been, that’s been a line, an unbroken chain of, of proclamations since Revelation began. Since Revelation existed. You know what I mean?

When everything is a fulfillment of prophecy, nothing is a fulfillment of prophecy.

Right.

Like we people can find ways to interpret anything as a fulfillment of prophecy, as 666, as the Antichrist, as all of these things. And yeah, it’s all, it’s all how they’re negotiating, using this text to inform their experiences, give meaning, give significance to their experiences today. And there’s not really a circumstance where somebody’s going to be like, I can’t see anything that fits. Sorry. Like everything gets to be a fulfillment of prophecy. Which again means nothing is actually a fulfillment. Actual prophecy.

Not for nothing, none of them has actually led to the eschaton.

It has yet to happen. It won’t happen this time.

Unless you’re a preterist.

Oh, sure.

We gotta. We gotta do a segment on preterism at some point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody remind us that we wanted to do that. I’m not writing it down right now, so I don’t know. All right, well, I think that was fascinating. I think. Yeah. Watch out for your. Maybe. Maybe give a little gentle nudge to your family members who think we’re in the final days and just, you know, just. Just be like, no, what’s happening is just geopolitical turmoil, and we shouldn’t support war of any kind, especially the kind that is really, really hurting a bunch of people.

And especially not because a book from 2000 years ago commands you to support the actions of a government. There’s no such thing.

Yeah. All right, let’s move on. Our next thing is going to be a chapter and verse, and this week’s chapter and verse is a psalm.

Yes, we’re in the Psalms.

Where are we at? We’re in 1.

Yeah. And this is. There are nine verses in this psalm, and I actually want to go through the whole thing just because it starts. It starts in an interesting way. And. And there’s actually a passage in here I’ve used many times in the past in my scholarship that is distinct from the one I want to land on.

But it is a mercifully short psalm. Some of them can be.

Yeah, it’s. It’s one verse longer than Psalms 82 . My, my. The psalm I’ve probably done the most work with. But it begins “By the rivers of Babylon.” So we’re in the exile. So not written by David.

Oh, how dare you.

There we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps, and there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” And here I’m thinking of Blazing Saddles.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Swing Low Chariot.

Never heard of that.

And here’s the verse that I’ve used before where they say they lament, “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” And this is a passage I use to illustrate the fact that Adonai’s purview or authority, sovereignty was understood to extend to the borders of the nation of Israel.

Right.

Not beyond that. Once you get beyond that, that’s the purview of some other deity. And this is why we have Ezekiel is like, “I can fix it. I’m gonna put, you know, I’m gonna give God wheels. We’re gonna mobilize the throne” so that God can just go out of the temple and go. God’s like, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” And like, that’s Ezekiel’s way of solving the problem. And then Psalms 82 ’s way of solving the problem is to have God sue the other gods. God stands up and presents their rib, their lawsuit, and deposes the other gods of the divine council. And then the psalmist calls on God to rise up and inherit all nations. In other words, the seats of the divine council sit empty. You now take over all of the divine council for yourself. And that universalizes Adonai’s rule. But here we have another reflection of this idea that we’re in a foreign land. We can’t access Adonai, we can’t see Adonai.

We’re not going to sing the songs of Adonai. And then we get in verse 5: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth. If I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, ‘Tear it down, tear it down, down to its foundations.’ O daughter Babylon, you devastator. Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us.” And then we get the imprecatory. “Happy shall they be.” And the word here in Hebrew is ashre, which is the exact same word that is translated in the Septuagint as makarios, which is what is in the Beatitudes. Blessed, fortunate, happy. “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.” Scene. Yes, that’s, that’s the end of this passage.

So it’s a lament. It’s an exilic lament. They’re lamenting the fact that they’re outside of Adonai’s purview, and they’re fantasizing about the folks responsible for this forced migration getting their comeuppance, right? And it, you know, the climax is the very end: “Happy or blessed shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.” In fact, I think the Septuagint. Yeah, the Septuagint here has makarios, the exact same word that’s in the Beatitudes. So what do we do with that?

Right. It does seem a little macabre.

Yes, a little.

I mean, yes, we’re talking about… and maybe the claim here, you can help me out with this, is part of the claim here that Babylon, when they took over and kicked everybody out, that they went and dashed Israel’s little ones against the rock?

I think the assumption is that…

Because it says, “Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us.”

Right. Yeah. I think the assumption is that this would be reciprocal. They would be doing to Babylon what was done to Israel. Certainly there would have been, as a part of the conquest of Jerusalem and this forced migration, there would have been people who would have been executed in the course of the conquest and also probably for show afterwards. Like, we see that from the Assyrians. We see that even in the wall relief in the palace in Nineveh that shows the sacking of Lachish. You see people, you know, being impaled, you see babies dying, you see this kind of thing. So, so yeah, certainly that would have been a part of Babylon’s…

So it’s kind of the dark side of the golden rule coin, which is doing to others as they did unto you.

The upside down of. Yeah, and didn’t we recently hear somebody say that? I’m trying to remember when this happened, but somebody, some prominent commentator… I don’t know if it was a politician, it might have been, but somebody said the golden rule was “do unto others as they’ve done to you.”

Oh, my gosh.

And the idea was we’re going to get you back. Oh, I got to look that up. I got to figure out who that was that said that, because that deserves its own video at some point. But yeah, it is fantasizing about revenge, about vengeance. And I mean, if you’re a group that’s been forcibly migrated into another nation and people are trying to basically destroy your identity, it’s…

And so the fact that it’s included in the Psalms is not a huge surprise, but it does leave us with the question of, okay, now it’s, it’s in the authoritative literature, and if, if you’re a Christian, for instance, it’s inspired, it’s univocal, it’s inerrant, it’s infallible. So what are we gonna do with that?

Yeah, it is. Yeah, that’s a tricky, like, fantasizing about killing children seems particularly nutballs. But I will say this. I, I peeked at the psalm immediately preceding this one, 136, and it’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s a praise of God and his work in creation and history. It says. And one of the things that it talks about is, yeah, you know, this is the God who liberated us from Egypt by killing all the firstborn and specifically calls out the killing of the firstborn as being this wonderful thing. So I, so, like, child murder is kind of in, in the Zeitgeist here.

Yeah. And it’s a time period, I think, when there’s an. And we’ve talked about this in a recent episode. There’s an awful lot of ethnocentricity. There’s an awful lot of othering.

And, and you know, the, you have that representation of God as these are my people, everybody else. Meh. There’s an awful lot of that. You’re going to, you got to wipe out every living thing that breathes, leave nothing alive. There. There’s an awful lot of that, which obviously includes children. And unfortunately, that rhetoric still, there are these vestigial bubblings to the surface of this kind of rhetoric when it comes to children. I know members of the LDS Church are familiar with similar rhetoric back in the, the 19th century where people would say that, you know, you. And I’m forgetting exactly what the words are, but basically you got to kill them before they develop into Mormons because then they’re, you know, they become this, that, and the other. And you hear the same thing. In the, the early to mid 20th century, the same kinds of things were said about Jewish folks, and today the same kinds of things are being said about Palestinians.

And so there’s, there’s an, that rhetoric is not unfamiliar and the, the devastating effects of that rhetoric are still being felt. And so it’s a problem. But I wanted to, I wanted to share a little bit about some of the way early Christian and Jewish interpreters read this, because there’s, there’s a guy, Origen of Alexandria, and I think Origen of Alexandria is one of the unsung influencers of early Christianity. Like he, he was condemned as a heretic for some stuff a little later on, even though he is responsible for, I would say, like, some of the, the most important features of early Christian orthodoxy. Origen was the one who, who put them on the road to where they went.

Give me a time frame where, where.

Origen is 3rd century CE in fact, if you’ll give me just a second. And he was. I believe he was a presbyter in Alexandria, which is northern Egypt, right by the Delta, right by the Med.

I believe you’ll find it’s in Virginia.

We were just there.

We were just there. You should have known that, Dan.

Born around 185 CE, died 253. 3. Okay. CE so Alexandria, province of Egypt, Roman Empire. Yeah, probably somewhere around Tyre is where he died, which was still in the Roman Empire, but no longer in Egypt. So he’s responsible for a lot of stuff. But here’s. Here’s what he says about this. Blessed is the one who seizes the little ones of Babylon, which are understood to be nothing else but these evil thoughts that confound and disturb our heart. For this is what Babylon means. While these thoughts are still small and just beginning, they must be seized and dashed against the rock who is Christ. And by his order, they must be slain so that nothing in us may remain to draw breath. And that is going back to Joshua 11 , like I said, the command to kill everything, leave nothing alive that draws breath.

And so Origen here is. Is skipping over the literal sense, right? And going right to what he calls the anagogical sense. There, Origen argued for four different layers of meaning for Scripture. You had the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. And the anagogical was the highest. That’s what we should be focused on. We should be striving to understand the scriptures in their anagogical sense.

I don’t know what that word means. Can you explain what he meant by anagogical?

He. He writes that it is what you are to strive for. Okay, so it’s a method of. And I’m just reading off of a website here, a method of interpretation that focuses on the spiritual or mystical meaning and its relation to the afterlife or ultimate destiny. So it’s basically what is the ultimate goal or end of. Of what’s going on here. And for Origen, this idea was that we are supposed to take the little ones of Babylon, which is a metaphor for our evil thoughts and inclinations and motivations, and metaphorically smash them on the rock that is Jesus.

So that’s nice. I’m fine.

That’s nicer. Yeah, it’s.

It’s a lot better than talking about actually killing children. That’s. That’s much better.

Yeah. And. And this is actually. This becomes pretty. Pretty widespread. You have a handful of people within Jewish as well as Christian tradition that understand it this way, that, that this is about sinful thoughts, evil inclinations, because Babylon becomes a metaphor for all that is evil in the world. And so whether it’s demonic spirits or are the sinful desires of our heart, we got to take those little ones and we gotta smash them against the rock. And, and in the Hebrew Bible, the rock is Adonai, the God of Israel. For Christians, the rock is Jesus. So that becomes a widespread sidestepping of the apparent phenomenally immoral blessing of those folks. And, and then you also have another common reading is to understand this as not a call for people to actually do this, but a hope that God punishes folks who will murder, you know, other children in like manner.

So it’s basically saying, oh, this isn’t, this isn’t talking about us. This is talking about God. He’s the blessed one. So God is the one who is going to be meting out these punishments that, you know, our response is in kind to whatever kinds of sins people commit.

Yeah, that seems, that seems a trickier interpretation considering the, the plural nature of the happy shall they be.

Well, actually, let me, let me.

Oh, oh, yep, you better, you better.

I’m gonna check the Hebrew. Check in the Hebrew. We are in 136. Where’s 137? There’s 137 ashrei. So that’s a particle and it looks like that’s the masculine singular. Oh, yeah.

So happy. So it’d be better translated happy should he be.

Or happy is he who will pay you back. All right, well, there you go.

Yeah. So there are a bunch of different ways to handle this. But, but I think this is a good illustration of the fact that everything is negotiable and everything has to be negotiated. If you want to try to extract consistent principles from the Bible, you’re going to have to deal with these things that, that at first glance and, and at correct glance do not fit. And so you have to work your way around them. You’ve got to negotiate with them.

Well, and also, if we’re going to, if we’re going to take Origen’s theory as, as a jumping off point, the literal version of this sort of, the literal interpretation of this psalm has nothing to do with anybody now. Yeah, it’s like nobody is now lamenting their, you know, their exile in. And their, you know, the Babylonian, Babylonian conquest of their people.

So no Babylonians around right now.

So literally, like the only thing, the only way you could possibly make this relevant to yourself is to find some sort of either allegorical or metaphorical or figurative way To. To look at it.

Which inherently is. Is an interpretation, is a negotiation, as you like to say.

Yeah. As. As is my wont. And. And. And that. That raises the other point. Does it have to be relevant? Do we have to preserve every last syllable of the Bible? Or can we say this was a vengeance fantasy, you know, that. That expired long ago, so we can just be like, huh, they were. They had undergone an awful lot of trauma. Trauma theory and, and trauma lenses, I think, are a great way to look in an awful lot of what’s going on in the Bible. Shout out Alexiana Fry, who’s doing great work on that. And she’s on social media too, if you want to check out her work. And that’s, you know, that stopped being relevant. Right. Yeah, yeah.

Or just see it as interesting literature that you don’t have to think of as, like, sacred and holy to your life, that you have to find the way to make it useful to you or whatever.

Yeah. I think the… you know, I’m… I’m sure that there are a lot of actors who have played roles where they did terrible, terrible things.

And learned things from that, but didn’t, like, go on to be like, it’s important that I… that… that, you know, I… I kind of live this out. Like, you know, there are ways to learn, take lessons from awful, awful things without endorsing the awful, awful things. And, and, you know, if you then go to, you know, you go to Jonah from here, which is about the Assyrians who did the same kinds of things and even worse to Israel. And this is why Jonah was like, no, I’m not preaching destruction to them because you’re just gonna forgive them. And I would rather die than watch them be forgiven. Like, you have a very similar sentiment. And then God wags the finger at Jonah and is like, if I forgive them, you know, you got no case. You got no leg to stand on. And the cattle. Consider the cattle.

Right. Forgot about the cows.

So… so you have differing perspectives between Jonah and… and Psalms 137 . And, you know, when you impose that presupposition of univocality, which you get to choose which direction you’re going to go.

Yeah, I think… I think that. I mean, like, I guess thematically for the whole show, the idea is overcome the bad readings.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right.

Don’t… don’t leverage the Bible to do harm and evil. That’s… that’s a problem.

Absolutely. As they… one of the first things we learned in Spanish in the MTC, “menos eficaz” means “less effective.” Okay? Because they were, they were trying to teach us methods that were eficaz and menos eficaz. Okay? Because they didn’t want us to learn, like, bad things like “estupido.” So we learned to call everything menos eficaz.

Okay. All right. Well hopefully this has been eficaz anyway for some. Thank you all so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of keeping this show alive and and vibrant and also gain potentially early access to an ad-free version of every show and the Afterparty, which is bonus content weekly done by us, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and become one of our patrons. We so appreciate it when people are able to kick us a couple coins. That is always a lovely thing. If you would like to reach us it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show and we will talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Tucker Vs Ted: The Israel Throwdown

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology