Save Me!

So God was like, I need you to be naked for the next three years. And he’s like, oh, my gosh, I.

Need three years of nudity for a metaphor that I’m working on.

Yeah, it’s gonna pay off. Don’t worry. It’ll pay off.

Trust me. You’re gonna love this. Everybody. Everybody’s gonna be thrilled about this.

Yeah. 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 the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things today, Dan?

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. A little too hot, but that’s to be expected.

It is. It is. In the 90s. It is July, however.

July, that’s fine.

It’s.

They both start with Ju, so, you know, it’s also to be expected in June, but July is even worse.

It’s the summer months.

Yeah. How are you doing?

I. It’s cooler here than I than I was in Italy, though.

Oh, okay.

And I just got a text from a friend who is in Italy right now, and I was like, it was in the high 90s when I was there. What’s it like now? And he’s like, oh, it’s low 80s. It’s cooled off quite a bit.

Oh, wow.

He got lucky.

It was a joke on you.

Yeah. I was there for the heat wave and it was brutal, but came back to Utah and now. Yeah, it’s still in the 90s and.

Now just more brutality.

Yeah. The sun feels closer in Utah than in many other places. Like, even though it is, like, drier here, it just feels like the sun is more punishing.

But that drier makes a lot of difference because when I was, when I was in Montreal recently and, you know, western or eastern Canada. Yeah, it was quite moist there, and so even lower heat felt just so oppressive. Anyway, you know, it’s nothing compared to the fires of hell that we’re all going to be burning in.

Sooner than others.

Let’s, let’s, let’s get to our show, which involves the fires of hell, I guess, or rather the avoiding thereof, because our first segment is going to be about salvation, which sounds great. And and then in the second section, I’m kind of looking forward to this. You guys are going to want to stick around for it. We’re going into Isaiah and we’re going to be talking about six-winged angels and just not angels.

Not angels. We’ll get to that.

Hey, tradition says they are angels. The Bible itself doesn’t. Anyway, seraphim are going to make an appearance and, and, and also a bunch of other stuff, and Dan is going to explain to me what, what the heck I just read, because I read that, that chapter and I was like, so, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’ll be, that’ll be fun. But first, what’s that? And this week’s what’s that? is being saved. The concept of being saved. Yeah, we talked a little bit about this when April A. Joy was on the show, and we talked about how she and her family used to go and ask their poor servers at restaurants if they would pray with them. And, you know, I, none of my religious background, none of the theology that I was raised with, ever had a concept where one prayer with a family at a restaurant was enough for, for salvation, period, for the forever.

But that seemed to be their contention. Their contention was that if this waiter just humors us and prays with us, boom, they’re saved.

So let’s talk about salvation. Let’s talk about the concept of being saved.

Yeah. And the, I don’t even know if they use the acronym, but like, OSAS, once saved, always saved goes along with that. But, but I wanted to, I wanted to go back to the beginning, a very good place to start with the fact that in the Hebrew Bible, being saved was an entirely different concept from what it is in the New Testament, but particularly after the New Testament, because you got, you know, you’ve, you’ve got the name Yeshua, which is, which is Jesus, which is supposed to be related to salvation. And, and it’s Aramaic. And it is either the, the clause Adonai is salvation or it’s just the regular Old Aramaic word for salvation.

I, I happen to think it’s just the word for salvation, but it derives from the Hebrew Yehoshua, which I think would better be interpreted as Adonai is salvation or Adonai saves. But you’re the, the verbal root here. Yasha, yod shin ayin is the verbal root that underlies the names in, in whether it’s Hebrew or Aramaic or your Greek transliteration Iesous. And this just means to like, to help. It can be in the, the Niphal, which is the passive sense, means to receive help or to accept help. In the, the Hiphil or the causative sense, it means to help with the work or to help or to save. But it’s overwhelmingly used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to saving someone from some kind of temporal distress. Okay, so and by temporal, I don’t mean having to do with time.

I was going to say. Yeah, I mean, oh, no, I’m worried about. I’m, I’m going to be late.

Yes, yes. For a very important date. No, it, it means not having to do with spiritual.

Right.

It means the, the real material world. So the first time the verb I’m.

Stuck in, in quicksand, Please help me.

Get out of here. Yeah. And it usually has to do with some kind of enemy or some kind of threat of violence. So the very first occurrence of the verbal root Yasha in the Hebrew Bible comes in Exodus 2:17 . So it doesn’t even really occur in Genesis. But in Exodus 2:17 you have. When Moses, he’s, he’s run off and he sees the, the people who are harassing the, the folks at the well. It says Moses got up and came to their defense or saved them and watered their flock. So Moses chased off some people who are harassing them. And that is, that is the verbal root that underlies the name Jesus. And then you’ve got a lot of stories in Exodus of Adonai, saving Israel and elsewhere. It’s always he, God has saved them from their enemies.

And, and so the sense is very much deliverance from some kind of threat of danger.

Right.

Usually having to do with an enemy, an illness, some kind of accident, something like that. So it’s, it’s deliverance in a temporal sense, not in a spiritual sense.

Right.

And that is what we have throughout the Hebrew Bible. And I think one of the reasons is that the notion of a spiritual salvation has mostly to do with the afterlife.

Right.

And particularly avoiding enemies or threats in the afterlife. But in the Hebrew Bible, everybody had the same afterlife. Everybody went to the same place. Everybody went to Sheol, which was just the abode of the dead, this murky existence that we didn’t know a lot about. But there was no other afterlife existence other than Sheol.

And so, yeah, we’ve talked a bit about, about the, the sort of evolving idea of what happens after death.

Yeah. And so you do have some references to being saved from Sheol in the Hebrew Bible. But I think the idea there is not that you’re going to be resurrected or you’re going to have eternal life or anything like that. I think the idea is just you’re being saved from an early death. So if you’re, if you’re sick and you’re on your deathbed and somebody cures you, you have been saved from Sheol. Not in the sense that you go to heaven.

Right.

But in the sense that you narrowly avoided death.

You were saved from Sheol. For now.

Yeah. Because Sheol also just means the grave or death.

Right.

And so the idea isn’t some kind of eternal spiritual salvation. It just means deliverance from death.

It’s the idea that, like, you saved my life doesn’t mean you saved my life forever.

It means you saved my life this time.

Yeah. Yeah. And I am in your debt, but again, not forever.

Right. Well, try to come and collect after I die. See what happens.

I, I love those, those movies from the 80s and 90s where somebody would always like, be in someone else’s debt for saving their life and then they would, they would do something and then be like, my debt is paid, goodbye. Which is always fun. That, that was a, a movie trope that I don’t think you see very frequently anymore.

And then once we get into the Greco-Roman period, then you have this. You begin to develop concepts of postmortem divine punishment and postmortem divine reward. And this is where now suddenly your afterlife can go in one of two directions. And I think this is where we begin to lean into the notion that salvation has an eternal implication.

Right.

That salvation means taking the, the correct turn once we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

That we are going to be on the good side of the, the smooth places that are described in, in First Enoch, as we’ve talked about in, in episodes past.

One doesn’t want a non smooth. The bumpy afterlife is, is the less pleasant one.

Yeah. You, you don’t want that turbulence going on in, in your afterlife. And, and so by the time you get to the New Testament, you’ve got one. The New Testament is written in Greek. And so you’ve got an entirely different word that means to save. Sozo is the word in Greek. And it can mean to preserve a rescue from natural dangers and afflictions, to keep from harm, to preserve, to rescue again, to save from death. So there’s a lot of conceptual overlap with what we are finding in the Hebrew Bible. And so, for instance, the first time it occurs in, in the New Testament is Matthew 1:21 , where the idea is you will name him Jesus. Why? He will save people from their sins. And so here’s where it’s not. It’s no longer enemies, it’s no longer some kind of immediate danger. It’s no longer an illness or something like that. It’s sin.

And sin kind of metaphorically becomes the enemy.

And so you have this, I think, slow transition from the enemy being, you know, temporal threats to, to the enemy being these spiritual threats, that is sins. But you have, but it can also mean to, to be healed or to be made whole. Oh, you have some, some uses like that. So for instance, the woman with the issue of blood, she says, if I only touch his cloak, sothesomai, which would mean I will be saved, made whole, healed, something like that. So you still have the sense of salvation as something temporal, but I think you’re also adding on to it the idea of sins. And, and there’s another interesting development going on and this is the, the origins of evil. And I think this has a lot to do with how Christians understand salvation today because, and we’ve talked about First Enoch, this very, very influential Greco-Roman period Jewish text, which is responsible for an awful lot related to ideas of postmortem, divine punishment and reward, ideas about Satan, ideas about demons, all this kind of stuff.

And one of the points of the Enochic literature is to account for the origins of evil. And so according to the Enochic literature, evil is introduced to humanity into the world when the angels decide to rebel, to come down onto Mount Hermon to share all this knowledge about, about weaponry, about war, about how to cause abortions, about makeup. Like that is what introduces evil to humanity. But you’ve got another account that takes over for early Christianity and that is Genesis 3 . That is the story that becomes the Fall.

Right.

See, in the Hebrew Bible, there’s no such thing as the Fall. Like the story of Adam and Eve is, is just a story of. Basically it’s an etiology for how humanity spread out and populated the earth.

Yeah. Not much is made of it other than like, you know, oh, you, you, you ate the, the fruit. You’re, it looks like you’re going to have pain bearing children for the rest of your life, for the rest of eternity or whatever. And then, and then it doesn’t, it doesn’t make a big deal about like this has implications forever or whatever. It’s just kind of. This is, this is what happened to you.

Yeah, it’s, it’s like an Aesop’s fable. It’s like, why, why is it that that pregnancy, which seems like it’s such a good thing, hurts so much. Well, there were, there was this lady.

Yeah. And you know, she wouldn’t believe what she ate.

And then there’s the, you know, the. He will bruise your. No, what is it? You will bruise his heel and he will crush your head. This is the Protevangelium. This is the, the proto-Gospel, which is understood as, as this grand, significant prophecy about how Jesus will destroy Satan. In reality, it’s why do snakes hate us so much? And why do we hate snakes? Well, see, there was this lady, right? And it, it’s the same thing. It’s an etiology for why we hate snakes. Right, but. And, and you know, you look throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the name Adam is mentioned once in a genealogy in First Chronicles somewhere the reference to Eden. I think Eden is mentioned in Ezekiel 28 . And the story is completely different from what we have in Genesis 2 and 3. It’s, it’s like you were the, you know, the covering cherub and you walked among the stones of fire and you had the covering and in the mountain of God.

And Genesis 2 and 3 never mention a mountain anywhere. Like the story as understood by the author of Ezekiel 28 does not seem to come directly from what we have in Genesis 2 and 3. It’s some other tradition, but you never have anybody else referring to, oh, you know, when I shake my fist at Adam for eating the fruit and causing all of this trouble. None of that happens till the New Testament.

Right. We should do that Ezekiel story, by the way.

Oh, yeah, yeah, we definitely have to do that because it is.

Somebody remind us to do that. That’d be a good one.

Because there are textual issues, there are interpretive issues. It gets to—a lot of people think it’s Lucifer that is talking about and it’s not. So, so yeah, that’s a fun one. But like, that is just not a salient story about the origin of evil until the New Testament. So you really had two competing accounts from where evil came. And in the Greco-Roman period Judaism, the rebellious angels introducing evil is kind of the leading account. And it’s not until you get into Paul and you get to Augustine that the thing changes. And it’s no longer about the angels introducing evil to humanity. It’s about humanity shooting itself in the foot or, or stepping itself on the head, as it were, with the Fall. And that is a way to account for how we get from everything is good and perfect to where we are now, where everything sucks.

And you know, and Epstein didn’t kill himself until, until it became expedient to say it turns out he did kill himself.

Right, right.

So you have this, this interesting conflict, this interesting competition between these two accounts of where evil comes from, and Christianity ends up picking and choosing what it’s going to do. It’s going to take the, the ideas of heaven and hell and, and things like that from the Enochic tradition and Greco-Roman period Judaism, but it’s then going to reject the, the authenticity, the inspired nature of First Enoch and like the third century CE is when they, they begin to go, you know what, I don’t think this is real and give preference to the account in the book of Genesis for the origin of evil. So it’s kind of a mishmash of, of these Jewish influences. But we get down to Christianity and suddenly salvation is, is not just about temporal salvation. It’s now about eternal spiritual salvation. And we go from the idea of the Messiah as the one who’s supposed to show up and deliver us from our oppressors and re-establish the independent kingdom of Israel to oh, it turns out we’re just gonna have crappy lives forever, but then once we die, then we’ll go to heaven.

That’s how we enter into the kingdom of God. And, and I think you see some, I think you see some conflict in the gospels where the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is something initially kind of perceived to be an earthly kingdom, but also represented as not of this world and something that’s, that’s going to be located somewhere else. I, I think you probably have a little bit of conflict there because I imagine that Jesus’ followers initially understood Jesus according to a traditional understanding of the Messiah as someone who was going to come deliver them from their, their yoke, deliver them from subjugation to Rome and lead to an independent Judean kingdom. And when that didn’t happen, when, when they’re all looking up at him hanging on the cross going oh crap. What?

Excuse me, we weren’t done.

I think that’s when you, you had a bunch of people returning to the drawing board, right, in a, in a quite literal way to figure out how to renegotiate their understanding not only of the identity and the mission of the Messiah, but the nature of salvation. So I think, I think Jesus is where salvation pivots and particularly the death of Jesus is where salvation pivots. And they’re like, no, we gotta, we gotta adopt the thousand-yard stare, the eternal perspective. We’re not, it’s not just about Rome now, it’s about the afterlife. And that is where we’re going to be placing all our eggs. That’s the basket that is going to hold all our eggs from now on. And, and so I think that does, that really gets firmed up in the early Christian literature and you know, Tertullian and Irenaeus and Augustine and these others develop concepts of original sin, develop this notion that sin is the big baddie, that’s the enemy.

Big baddie, that’s the enemy. It’s, it’s no longer temporal enemies, it’s no longer human enemies, it’s no longer illness. It is now sin because that is what causes death. That is what separates us from God. And so salvation is ultimately overcoming of that particular enemy that returns us to communion with God and returns us to that happy blessed state that we were in when it was just Adam and Eve in the garden.

Right.

And yeah, now when it comes to salvation as it’s represented in like Paul and particularly among the sola gratia, the grace alone folks, this is something that I’ve been… I’m contemplating doing a video on this because I just saw last night, I was poking around on I think Instagram or TikTok and saw a video where somebody was talking about how with God, you don’t have to do anything to be saved except all this stuff, right? And then it’s like, but it’s not. But you don’t have to do anything to be saved because somebody… some… What is it? Oh yeah, they were watching a Sarah Silverman stand-up special where she was like telling a joke about how there’s all this, you know, Christianity says there’s all this stuff, but as if as long as you say you’re sorry, then it all goes away. And the person was like, “How dare you? It’s not just a matter of doing. You also have to, you know, repent of everything and change your life and all that.” And it just kind of is like, but wait a minute, you don’t actually have…

To do all of that, right?

You really just have to have faith. But you have to do all of that because that’s the fruit of your faith.

And the argument was basically that the good works, they’re not a requirement. You don’t have to do the good works, but if you’re not saved, then you won’t do the good works. And if you’re saved, then you will do the good works. And so they said it’s the evidence of your faith. And my thought was, evidence for whom? Yeah, like for God? God’s the one who saved you. God doesn’t need evidence that they have saved you. Even if they didn’t, even if they weren’t the one who did it. They were like, “I was on vacation. This is a subordinate who did this.” They ostensibly have all knowledge, so they already know you’re saved. They don’t need to be given evidence of this. So for whom is the evidence? It can only be for other Christians.

Right.

In other words, or other non-Christians. Or other non-Christians. But I think the main, the primary target audience is other Christians.

Right.

Because what is evidence of faith for if not to demonstrate to other Christians that you’re one of the good ones, that you are saved, that you belong?

That you’re one of the… yeah, yeah.

It’s, it’s costly signaling. It’s a way to show you’re a member of, you’re a faithful member of the in-group. Which kind of makes the whole project sound an awful lot like just a social club.

And this is, this is something that baffles me because even, I think even Paul was kind of struggling with this in the New Testament. Paul is like, “We’re not under the law. We’re not under the law. We don’t have to do anything.” But does that mean we let sin abound? Of course not. We’re still kind of, you know, you… you still got to do the stuff, but not because we have to do the stuff.

Right.

And like trying to square that circle.

Yes. It’s always baffled me. This has always been a really difficult theology for me to wrap my head around. Because the logical conclusion, if you follow any of the trails to their logical conclusion, they don’t lead where these people, where the people that I’ve talked to say they lead. Like for instance, I, as an atheist, I’m not saved. But if you get saved and then you become an atheist, there’s the whole “once saved, always saved”—you can’t unsave yourself. So then if you stop believing after you were saved, do you lose your salvation? Well, no. I mean, most people say no, you don’t lose your salvation. So like why, if I was never saved, but I’m still believing exactly the same way as someone who was saved, why don’t I get to go? What’s, what’s happening there? Like what’s, why am I, why am I excluded from this?

And if good works are just evidence of faith or salvation, if there are atheists out there who are better people…

Who do good works, who do good…

Folks who just do better than people who claim to be saved, like what does that mean? It’s like your, your salvation ends up being inferior to someone’s non-salvation.

Right.

And, and again, and I’m going to come back to this endlessly. Because this is the part that I, I think people don’t think critically about. If you tell someone once you’re saved, that’s it, you’re good. It doesn’t matter what you do, but we still demand you do the right thing.

Right.

Because that is how you put on display the reality of your salvation. All you’re doing is incentivizing people to try to do good works, which is really just saying you need to earn your salvation, at least in the most relevant sense, in the sense that we all believe you are saved. Like the, yeah, the focus of it all is, is putting on display to other members of the in-group that you have passed the test. And so for, for people to talk about how it’s a free gift, but once you’re given the gift, you will pay for it, right? Not, not because you have to, but because you have, you know, you will just be compelled to buy—buy the free gift. Like, that’s, that’s nonsensical. And it all comes down to the costly signaling, they’re hard-to-fake signals to others that you are toeing the line, that you are…

That you will honor the standards and the mores and the expectations of the social group. And so if, if you know, dancing is a sin according to your tradition, that’s how you incur the costs of showing everybody that you’re saved. You don’t dance. And, and it’s not going to be because you have suddenly been divested of any urge or desire to dance. It’s because you’re going to go through the effort of preventing yourself from dancing.

And I think everybody understands that. You know, I, I’ve been on some, you know, in sort of researching for this segment, I went on some forums of people asking about, like, you know, “I’m new, I just got saved. But I don’t fully understand how this works. I’m still, I still feel the impulse to sin. I still do sin sometimes. Am I not saved? Am I still saved?” And everybody understands, like the whole comment section is just like, “No, no, no, no, no, don’t worry, we’re all sinners. This happens. You can’t avoid it. Yeah, just, you know, try to be better, try to be a good person.” And it’s like, well, but you’re not supposed to try. But if we all understand that, then what? Yeah, it feels like, it feels very circular to me. It feels like it keeps, it keeps rolling back on itself.

Yeah. And it’s because it’s the, the ideology, the expectation does not align with reality, right? And so I think it’s one of the things that everybody just kind of winks at when it comes to how we represent things to the public and how we engage in, you know, online discourse and all that kind of stuff. We’re going to say this, “Oh, yeah, no, no, it’s a free gift. You don’t earn it at all.” But what about the fact that you have to do all this stuff? “Well, you’ll just do it anyway.”

Don’t you just want to now that—yeah, now that you’re filled with the Spirit or whatever?

And then, and then they can turn around to their own group and be like, “Hey, I do struggle with stuff still.” And you know, according to the rules, as they’re represented, that would mean you’re not actually saved. But when it comes to internally, they’re going to be like, “No, no, we’re a support group. We’re here to help you through this. Everybody struggles with this. Nobody…” And you know, they recognize that, no, you have to earn this, you have to work hard in order to put on display that you are saved. And I think it’s—yeah, I need to come up with a way to kind of—I need to distill this down so I can put it in a, in a three-minute video and point this out. Because I, I think it—because I see more and more like this person mocking Sarah Silverman for saying all the bad stuff that you’re doing that condemns you to an eternity of punishment, as long as you say I’m sorry and believe it, it all goes away. And they’re like, “That’s not how it works.”

Well, yeah, it is how it works, isn’t it? Yeah, you’re saying it’s how it works, but then you’re also saying on the other side of your mouth, that’s not how it works. Which one is it? Is it: once I have faith, that’s it, I’m saved, I cannot be unsaved? Or is it my salvation is something that I have to work out?

And to be clear, I am very much in support of any theology or any sort of social construct that gets people to be better to each other and that gets people to do good and kind things in the world. So and so.

Great.

If you have found a way to motivate yourself to be a better person. Like if you’re really being a better person, not just talking about it.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that makes for a better world. And this raises another point. What it means to be a better person.

Well, that’s a trick.

Is relative, is subjective.

Because in, you know, for Paul, a better person was somebody who didn’t beat their slaves arbitrarily.

You beat them with a reason.

Yeah. You don’t, you know, you don’t discipline them unless you have a good reason to. And you know, you can go to, you can go to Augustine, somebody who is widely considered one of the most influential and best Christians around, who said, hey, you need to whip your slaves. God is mad at you if you do not whip your slaves, but you have to whip them with a heart full of love, not hate.

Good loving, whooping. Yeah, you need to divvy out.

So in 400 CE, that was the good work.

Right?

To whip your slaves with a heart full of love. That is no longer a good work.

Not because something changed about the actual inherent morality or immorality of whipping your slaves with a smile on your face, but because we decided that that was no longer a good thing.

Because we have grown, we have outgrown the idea of both slavery and whipping, hopefully in general. Yeah.

Well, although according to Grok, maybe it sounds like that might be backslip backsliding a little bit.

Yeah, Grok is. Grok is a terrifying sort of bellwether of humanity backsliding.

We, we don’t know exactly what the situation is going to be when this episode comes out, but as of recording, we are we. Yesterday Grok started claiming to be Hitler. Literally.

And cheering on Hitler because somebody evidently took the governor off of Grok and was like, hey, stop being woke. And they were like, all right, well, this is the alternative.

Yeah, welcome. Welcome to non-woke Grok.

Yeah, but now I just totally lost my train. Okay, so, but the, you know, what we think is righteous today is, is entire entirely different. And even among Christians today, one Christian might be like, hey, you know, going and picketing outside an abortion clinic or bombing an abortion clinic. That might be a way to put your faith on display.

Right.

Or someone else might be like, well, I actually think that maybe protecting women’s rights would be a better way to put my faith on display. Which demonstrates that ultimately it all goes back to whatever your particular social in-groups determines is good for it.

And so having faith is not where God suddenly takes over as the puppet master and manipulates you like a marionette to, to go and do this, that or the other, or not do this, that or the other. It’s. It’s just you learning what your social group expects of you and then you going out and incurring the cost to do that. Yeah. Which, yeah, I think puts the lie to a lot of the rhetoric that we see these days about faith on social media.

Yep. Well, there you go. All right. I don’t know that we’ve cracked anything, that we’ve solved anything here, but. But it. I just find it such a fascinating discussion. Maybe we’ll get deeper into it at some point.

Because I found so many different scriptures that say things that I don’t understand why this scripture says this and that scripture says that. But we didn’t even get to that. That’s fine. We did the overview and. And I think that will suffice. So let’s move on to our chapter and verse. And this week’s chapter and verse is Isaiah 6 . And boy, let me tell you something. If you want to read something that you will not immediately understand what the heck is going on, that’s a great place to start.

Just to lock everybody into our setting. This is the year that King Uzziah died. So, yes, everybody understands that. We all know who that dude is.

Yeah. Now that we’ve got our bearings.

Yeah, I have no idea who King Uzziah is or when that places us, but where are we? Where. Tell me about Isaiah. And like.

Yeah, so Isaiah was an 8th-century prophet. He was mainly a, probably a court prophet, probably one of the prophets that was under the employ of the king in Judah. And Uzziah was one of the kings. So the 8th century was a big century for both Judah and Israel because, mainly because they had two kings—Judah had Uzziah and Israel had another king—that reigned for like 40 to 50 years each, which allowed them to gain a lot of traction. They established a lot of treaties, they did a lot of trade. And this is the period of the most significant growth in the history of not just the northern kingdom of Israel, but also the southern kingdom of Judah. Okay, so Uzziah reigned for 52 years according to the biblical text. And you have different estimates about when exactly that was, but it puts Uzziah’s reign from somewhere around 790 to 780 BCE down to somewhere around 750 or 740 BCE.

So the year of King Uzziah’s death is somewhere around 740 to 750 BCE. Okay, so the very beginning of the second half of the 8th century BCE, and this puts us 20-ish to 30-ish years away from the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. So that’s going to happen in 722 BCE.

And Judah is going to be safe, however. So.

Yeah, so at this point, that has not yet happened. That is not yet indicated here.

Right.

But in that year, Isaiah has something funky happen to him.

Right. How do we get through this? What do we do? First of all, there’s a dream. Or is it a dream? Or maybe it’s just a vision.

Yeah, let’s just say it’s a vision.

It just says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple.” You want to talk about that?

Yeah. So the vision is a throne theophany. That’s the $2 word for what’s going on here, where you have a vision of God sitting upon a throne. And Isaiah is not the only one who has this.

No, as a matter of fact, the main character in the new Wes Anderson movie, The Phoenician Prophecy, has one of these.

Oh, really?

Is that movie out already?

Have you seen The Phoenician Scheme is what it’s called?

Yeah, I saw the ads for that.

I went and saw it just the other day.

Oh, very cool. It looks like an interesting movie. I like many of the actors.

Exactly. Like a Wes Anderson movie. Well, yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

You know what you’re getting. So you have the—he sees the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty. And then the traditional understanding is that the hem of his robe or his train filled the temple. And the Hebrew there is shul, which, I mean, for lack of a better way to define it, it means hang-downs. It is something that hangs down from something. And so you have two different main uses. There is a sense that we find primarily in Exodus, where it is the seams of the garment of the priest. And the other use is genitals. And so you have that in places like Jeremiah, Nahum, and Lamentations and things like that, where it’s primarily talking about shame associated with the exposure of these parts of the body. So there have been scholars who have argued that, no, this just means the hem of the robe. There are other scholars who argue, no, this means the Lord is hanging dong in this vision. There are others who say the author might be toying with the ambiguity of this term and might be intentionally kind of being unclear about it. Is it his robe or is it his junk? Right, that’s up for you to decide.

But the NRSVUE does not have—

It doesn’t have a note there.

A note about this particular thing. So just for the sake of argument, imagine that the Lord’s garment or the Lord’s something is filling the temple. Yes, it’s full. The temple’s full. We’ll just say that.

This is where the seraphs come in. It says, this is verse two: “Seraphs were in attendance above him. Each had six wings. With two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.” Why do their faces and feet need to be covered?

Well, and there’s a, at the beginning of the verse, the, the first two words are seraphim omdim, which the NRSVUE has rendered “were in attendance above him.” But that’s, that’s the verbal root for “to stand.”

So it, it would better be translated the seraphim were standing above him.

It just said that they were flying. So.

But that—yeah. And then by the end of the verse, it says covered their faces and with two, covered their feet. And feet here could be a euphemism. This is an argument made by the folks who, who think that shul is referring to genitals. The seraphim are embarrassed. They’re put to shame by the divine junk. And so they are covering their own wedding tackle and then also covering their faces because they—

Genitals all the way down.

All right. Because of how bashful they are. That’s. That’s one way to read this. “Don’t look at me.” And the notion that these are angels is not biblical. That is a post-biblical kind of systematization of the, the characters that inhabit the heavens, the sort of the—

The heavenly host, as it were.

Yeah. They all get reduced to angelic status, even though the word angel is never used to refer to seraphim or ofanim or cherubim or anything like that anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. And so we, we’ve got these, these winged creatures. And, and there’s an argument to make that this—is that the idea here is not to kind of literally represent something, but to just kind of symbolically talk about what’s intended here. These, these are entities who can—they have a bunch of wings, which means they are mobile, they can fly anywhere they want. They can. They can do what they need to do. But here they are being reserved and they are, you know, covering things up. But they’re going to act in just a moment here.

Okay. Verse three: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.” And the whole temple is full of His—never mind the smoke. And then what? This—there is a note here that I neglected to check out.

Oh, okay.

It says—note—I’m moving on to verse four. “The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called.” Does that mean, like the pivots? Does that mean the hinges? Or—

What is the—the word here?

It says the meaning of Heb is uncertain.

Of Heb? Amma is probably what they’re—

That’s. That’s.

Then I don’t see Heb anywhere. Oh! Oh, Hebrew. The meaning of the Hebrew.

Oh, okay.

Some—something’s rattling. Something’s shaking as these voices are—they’re—they’re powerful voices, I think is what we’re meant to understand.

Yeah. And the house filled with smoke. So here we have the—the—the smoke from the incense which is supposed to obscure the vision of the Ark of the Covenant when the high priest goes in on the Day of Atonement, and all this kind of stuff. So.

Oh, I’ve never heard that. That’s—yes, that’s what the smoke is for. That’s what the incense is—is meant to do.

Yes. Half reveals, half conceals, according to the great poet. So it is the—the idea is to, yeah, kind of mask the divine a little bit, but also represent the presence of the divine. And then we have Isaiah, who is—who is just seeing all this stuff. Things are shaking around him. There’s smoke everywhere. And he goes, “Woe is me. I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. Yet mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” And yeah, here we just have—this is a throwback to the idea that no one can see God and live. What we find in Exodus 33 , where Moses says, “Show me your glory.” And God says, “I’m gonna walk by you. I’m gonna put my hand in front of your face and go by. And then take my hand away and—and you’ll see my nalgas. You’ll see my backside, but you won’t see my face, for no one can see me and live.” And so Isaiah, in the classic motif, sees God and is like, “Oh, crap, I’m going to die.”

I’m going to die.

Do you care to talk a little bit about what unclean lips might be referencing? I just. I’ve said I’ve spoken bad things or I don’t know what unclean lips might be.

Yeah, it’s. It’s pretty literal. Just unclean or. Yeah, impure lips. Okay. And. And I. I think the idea is just that, you know, the mouth is one of the sources of. Of sin. And so if a sinful people will be a people that have spoken sin, so are. Are of unclean lips. He’s just saying, I’m. I’m a sinful man.

I live among a sinful people. Yes. Which is not to be confused with Simple Man, the Lynyrd Skynyrd song. But then one of the seraphs flew to me holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said, now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out. So we got fire as a cleansing agent.

Right.

This is the coal from the altar in the. The Holy of Holies. It would have been an incense altar. And this allows the uncleanness of Isaiah’s lips to be purged, and that allows him to then be commissioned by the divine council. Because what we’re looking at here is. Is a divine council scene, right? And the seraphs are the attendants in the divine council. And Isaiah is about to be given an assignment by the divine council.

Yes. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, who? Saying, whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And I said, here am I. Send me. And this is somewhat reminiscent of a vision that Micaiah has in. I believe it is 1st Kings 22, where Ahab is deciding whether or not he’s going to go up to Ramoth Gilead to fight against the Arameans. And he calls in his prophets and he’s like, what does the Lord say? And they all say, oh, yes, you should go up. God will deliver them into your hands. And then he says, you are a bunch of yes men. Why don’t you bring me? Or somebody says, let’s get Micaiah in here. And he’s like, Micaiah always says bad things about me. I hate Micaiah. Micaiah sucks. And Micaiah’s like, what do you want? And he’s, should I go up? And he goes, yeah, sure, you go up. God will deliver him into your hands. And the king’s like, you’re lying to me. And he’s like, yeah, I am. And proceeds to prophesy that if he goes up, he will die.

But then says, I saw the Lord sitting on the throne surrounded by all of the host of heaven. And the Lord calls out for a volunteer who will go entice the king to go up so he can be killed. And, and then it’s. He says, the spirit came forth and said, I will be a lying spirit in the mouths of his prophets and I will get him to go up. And God says, oh, I like it. Yeah, let’s make that, let’s make that happen. And then he does go up and he does get killed. So that’s where God lies to the king through his prophets in order to get him killed. But we have something similar going on here. We’re asking for a volunteer only here instead of a member of the divine council. Another deity being the one who’s commissioned it is Isaiah who volunteers. And I wanted to bring this up, this is not the, the reason I wanted to do this chapter, but just yesterday the Department of Homeland Security put a video on X or Twitter or whatever.

Did you happen to see this video? No, I missed it. It shows a bunch of footage of Border Patrol patrolling around in helicopters and night vision goggles in the middle of the night, patrolling the border and showing menacing looking grandmothers, you know, trying to cross the border as, as they do. But they had two things, two pieces of audio that were being played over this video. And one of them was a clip from the 2014 movie Fury. Did you ever see that movie?

I don’t remember. Yeah, I did. I just don’t remember it.

Well, World War II, Brad Pitt running a tank. And so you’ve got Shia LaBeouf plays a character whose name was Boyd “Bible” Swan. And there’s, there’s a part where he’s, he’s there sitting in the tank. They know that death’s coming, fighting against the, the Nazis. And he says, this is, this is a righteous act here, gentlemen. He says there’s a, there’s a scripture I think of sometimes, many times. And then he quotes this. Whom shall I send and who will go for us? And I said, here am I, send me. And you know, he’s on the verge of tears here. And Brad Pitt is like Isaiah, chapter six. And it’s kind of a bonding moment for these men right before almost all of them are killed. Right. But they’re playing this over this footage of, of like Homeland Security, Border Patrol. And then they begin to play God’s Gonna Cut You Down. Not the Johnny Cash version, but some.

Some contemporary bro country version of God’s gonna cut you down. And like, I’m just baffled by all of this as. As I watch this video because. Well, I think the appeal to Isaiah 6 is grotesque.

And we’ll talk about what exactly the message that Isaiah is. Is offering here and. Or is. Is supposed to share here. But. But yeah, the. The appeal to a song that was made famous primarily by Johnny Cash, who was someone who routinely criticized the government for spending too much money on the military and not spending enough money on education and on welfare and on children and on the elderly and stuff like that. And who also sang a protest song written by Woody Guthrie called Deportee, condemning the US for their dehumanization of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. But yeah, I. I saw that video and was like, holy crap, this is bad. But I guess. I guess we don’t have an excuse for being surprised anymore. The. No, we should not be. We should not be surprised.

That and more is coming. Oh, yeah, we can rest assured that more and worse is coming down the pike. So anyway, let’s get. Let’s get into what Isaiah was actually sent to do.

And this is kind of the baffling part for a lot of people. The next two verses.

Oh, this is the baffling. Listen, every part of this is the baffling part for me.

So, okay, so. But yes, 9 and 10. And he said, go and say to this people, keep listening, but do not comprehend. Keep looking, but do not understand. Make the mind of this people dull and stop their ears and shut their eyes so that they may not look with their eyes and listen with their ears and comprehend with their minds and turn and be healed. So it sounds like God is like, I need a volunteer to go and preach deliverance and also prevent the people from receiving. Yeah, this. And why. What’s going on here? And I think there. There’s been a lot of scholarship on this. And, and I think the. The best argument is that this is being written after the exile, so after 722 BCE when. When the Northern Kingdom has been destroyed, probably even after the. Or maybe after. Even after the Babylonian Exile.

So they know what’s coming. And. But they know Isaiah was also actually prophesying in this time period. And so I think what’s most likely going on here is they’re trying to craft the message that God gives to Isaiah in a way that allows the failure of the society to save themselves to be the fulfillment of the prophecy of the assignment. So God is like, it’s kind of the same thing that we had with, oh, what was the story where God was like, go do this, but it’s not going to work. Oh, with Moses. With Moses, yeah. Where he’s like, go and you know, do all the miracles and I’m going to stop Pharaoh from listening to you.

Right.

It’s kind of like God wants this to happen. And so God is going to, or the authors are going to represent God as, as telling the, the servant to go do this and it’s not going to work.

Make sure it doesn’t work. See to it that this doesn’t work. It does feel like. Just to clarify, so this, the, the history, the time period that you gave us at the beginning of this segment was when this was meant to have been taking place, but not likely when it was actually written.

Right. So the, the, the king, the year that King Uzziah died would have been 18 to 28 years or. 18. Yeah, 18 to 28 years before the destruction of the Northern Kingdom. And then there would have been another hundred and some years until the, the Babylonian Exile.

So you’re saying this was not written by Isaiah?

Oh, no, probably this is the. There are portions of Isaiah 1 -39 that are agreed to have been written by Isaiah. I think that scholars probably understand at least chapter six and, and probably the majority of the chapters that came before were probably written later on as part of kind of an introduction to the, the book of Isaiah , but probably not something written by the actual historical Isaiah. But most scholars agree there was probably a court prophet in the 8th century BCE who was named Isaiah and prophesied and, and some of whose writings are preserved in, in the modern book of Isaiah . And then, so we have, we have what, three more verses? Yeah. And then, then I said, how long, O Lord? And he said, until cities lie waste without inhabitant and houses without people? And the land is utterly desolate until the Lord sends everyone far away. And vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.

…emptiness in the midst of the land. And even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump. And so there are a couple different ways to interpret this. If this is about the Northern Kingdom, then this would have been fulfilled in just a couple decades when Tiglath-pileser comes through and routs the, the Northern Kingdom and sends them away packing. So if this is about the Northern Kingdom, that would have been a very… that would have been fulfilled very soon. If this is… but this could also be interpreted as about the Babylonian exile, and it could be referring to the Southern Kingdom, to the forced migration of the people of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. So it’s unclear which exactly I think is in view. I think scholars have argued about this for many years, but the idea is, is basically, yeah, Isaiah is being sent out to…

To preach something, but… but mainly just to make sure that nothing works and that, yeah, the land is desolate.

Just confuse the crap out of everybody so that they’re all too dumb to actually defend themselves when the time comes for us to just wreck everything.

Is that a fair assessment?

I… I think so, yeah.

Okay. Keep listening but do not comprehend. I know that when I was reading this, I felt like I was listening but not comprehending. So it works.

And I’m sure if… if there was a historical Isaiah who was out there, like, so here’s the deal. There were an awful lot of people who were listening but not comprehending. Yeah.

Was he just… maybe he was speaking in pig Latin.

Well, I wonder. I’m curious if… I don’t remember when exactly it is, but there were two years during which Isaiah was nude. Oh, he was in… when he was doing his itinerant prophesying.

Well, if it’s good enough for the Lord in the temple, it’s good enough for him.

Looks like it’s Isaiah… Isaiah chapter 20. At that time the Lord spoke to… yeah, 20, verse 2. At that time, the Lord had spoken to Isaiah son of Amoz, saying, “Go and loose the sackcloth from your loins and take your sandals off your feet.” And he had done so, walking naked and barefoot.

Then the Lord said, “Just as my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush, so shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians as captives and the Cushites as exiles.” So God was like, “I need you to be naked for the next three years.”

I need you…

Oh, my gosh.

I need three years of nudity for a metaphor that I’m working on.

Yeah, it’s gonna pay off. Don’t worry. It’ll pay off.

Trust me. You’re gonna love this. Everybody… everybody’s gonna be thrilled about this.

Oh, man. All right. Well, I… that… what a fascinating and weird book Isaiah is. We should probably dive into more of it, because I’m guessing that it doesn’t get less weird. I mean, if you, you just teased the naked, the naked parts. So we’ll, we’ll get, we’ll get more Isaiah in the future. But for now, thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become part of helping make this show go and in the process, maybe get access to an early and ad-free episode of every show as well as potentially the, the afterparty, which is bonus content that we deliver every week. Please head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you would like to reach us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Thanks so much to Reid Gower for, for editing the show and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Save Me!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology