Jezebel!

According to some early Mormons, they inhabit an oasis behind ice walls up at the North Pole. So, wow.

Yeah, just throwing that out there, man. You’re just chucking that bomb and then running away.

Okay, it’s what we do here. We show up, we muddy the waters, and we scamper off. 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 that wacky misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Uh, wacky. Things are very wacky. We’re going to get into some wackiness.

I feel like I’m like the morning talk radio guy.

We need an air horn.

Well, yeah.

Or the trusty boing is always good.

A slide whistle. We need all the things we need, but we won’t have them even though we are going to be talking about some clowns.

Or at least in our estimation, we’re bringing in a new segment category. Yes, we’re calling it Twisted Scripture, because we’re not going to take it anymore. Because we’re not going to take it. And we are going to go after some, some guys who are very interested in weaponizing some scripture against a group. We’re going to, we’re going to be talking about that Jezebel spirit.

Yeah, that’s good. That’s the one. Yeah. And then old-timey Jezebel spirit.

Yeah, Jezebel spirit. And then we’re going to go into— we’re going to do a What’s That? We’re going to delve into some Sadducees, some Pharisees, some dirty knees. Look at these.

Some dirty deeds and dirty knees. And yeah, and we’re going to figure out the difference between these two groups.

I think I just referenced a very racist thing from my childhood and didn’t mean to. Uh, the, the, the dirtiness thing. So let’s just pretend like that didn’t happen, everybody. That just came out of my head.

Do you remember? I never mind. We’re not gonna go into it, but if anyone was triggered by that—.

Blessings—.

Yes, I’m going to, uh, I’m going to voluntarily apologize for that. Uh, it was just, it was just lurking in the background of my, of, of my childhood in my brain. And, uh, we’re— well, We’ll get out of that and we’ll go on with the show, plow valiantly forward with Twisted Scripture. And this week’s Twisted Scripture is the Jezebel spirit. And the reason that we’re calling it twisted is that the way— first of all, the phrase Jezebel spirit does not appear in ye olde Bible. It’s nowhere in there.

So, so why do we have all of these preachers and, and also like white, you know, Christian nationalists talking about it? I, you know, I brought it up because I saw a thing. I brought it up to you because I saw a thing on Threads that was Charlie Kirk talking about how great it is that young men are going back to church and how— but young women, women of the new, the young generation, got to get rid of that Jezebel spirit. And I’ve heard this phrase many times, and I was like, you know what, we got, we got to go after that. We gotta, we gotta talk about it.

Yeah, you see it quite a bit in, um, uh, Charlie Kirk has said it. Oh, I’m forgetting the, the gentleman—Mars Hill? Was that the name of the—.

Mark Driscoll?

Mark Driscoll. I’ve heard Mark Driscoll talk about it.

Oh, he loves it. I saw a whole— I watched some of, as much as I could tolerate, of a video of his called The 29 Signs of the Jezebel Spirit. I think I made it through 4.

You’ve done your research today.

I did my— I tried to do some research about these things. And so yeah, this guy, First of all, uh, yeah, that Pastor Driscoll, he’s, he’s a, a real peach. Uh, he, he, he started off his, his sermon by making a joke about how he had set up a website where the, the men in his congregation can send pictures of their wives so that they could be shown while he talks about the different The 29 Signs of the Jezebel Spirit, meaning, haha, it was a joke that he was making about how the men in his congregation have Jezebel spirit wives.

That’s, uh, that’s pretty loathsome. Yeah, like, did men actually were like, yeah, put my wife up on the screen, talk about her Jezebel spirit?

They laughed about it. They, they, they were excited to do it. Uh, it, it felt very gross. Um, but let’s look, I’m putting the cart before the horse here. Okay, let us talk quickly about Jezebel herself. Yes, because there is a biblical Jezebel. Help me out there. Is there a historical Jezebel? Do we know?

So the name Jezebel would be “where is the prince” in Hebrew.

So it would be “Iy” and then “Zebul.” And this is related to the whole Beelzebub being a corruption of Baalzebul. So this is supposed to be the daughter of the king of Tyre. The name is probably related to, like, Isabel is related to this name.

I think we do have records of this name in some cognate literature, although it might be slightly different. We do have a name Ibaal, which would be the same where it’s Baal instead of Zebul. So it’d be, “Where is the Lord?” in reference to Baal. And so this is in 1 Kings 16 . This is described as the wife of King Ahab, daughter of the king of Tyre. So this would be the Israelite king taking a Phoenician wife. Okay. And she was—

Is that like, would that be like a sort of, you know, you hear about in European history, if the king of France marries a princess of Germany, then they’re creating alliance by doing that.

Yes, yes. And you have this, like even King Solomon married a bunch of women, including the Queen of Sheba, ostensibly. So we have— this is not unusual, although it is kind of represented as the king betraying his fidelity to Adonai, the God of Israel, and particularly because Jezebel is then supposed to go on and persecute and kill a bunch of the prophets, including hunting down Elijah. And Jezebel is supposed to have died an ignominious death as well. But she is represented as being someone who promoted idolatry and the worship of deities, specifically Asherah and Baal. Right. Is represented as promoting the worship of those two. And so she’s held up as this corrosive influence on Israel as, uh, one of the queens, uh, who was married to King Ahab.

So this would have been, uh, 900 BC, uh, to 850 BCE, somewhere around there.

Yes. I—

Yeah, you, you mentioned how she’s held up, and maybe we should say that— maybe we should— here’s what I think. I’m gonna say some of the things that are attributed to her.

And then we can go back as we talk about the actual biblical accounting of her and see if it lines up with what is— with how she is described.

Because she is described as domineering and overbearing and unwilling to submit to authority. Oh, by the way, you mentioned her name meaning— what did it mean?

Where is the prince?

Where is the prince? Well, you’re gonna have to explain to Mark Driscoll why it means that, because he was very sure that it means without husband, which is a very— which is— I had to look that up. I looked up why it said that. And let’s see if I can have that somewhere. I didn’t find it, but it looks like it was just sort of a corruption. It was one of those things where it’s like, like instead of, like, something— instead of Zebul, it was Zebel, and that meant dung or lofty/noble, which meant not lofty or noble. And then so then they said it meant without honor or without— and then somehow that was— anyway, this was a—

Was interpreted apparently a husband.

Yeah. I don’t know. Anyway, I think that’s nutty because the entire thing about her is that she has a husband. So what are we even talking about here?

Um, I don’t know why he would make that argument. That— I mean, where is the prince? If it were, uh, Ibaal, it would be where is Baal. But Baal is also a word that can mean master, lord, or husband, right? So where is the husband is a way you could interpret that if you really wanted to squeeze that interpretation in there, but that’s not her name.

Right.

So I don’t think that makes much sense. But yeah, certainly that doesn’t really fit with anything. The whole thing is that she is the husband of the wicked King Ahab, but she orchestrates the murder of Naboth to seize his vineyard land consolidation for Ahab, right? Uh, uses deceit, uses, uh, false witnesses, uses her cunning, uh, to get what she wants. And actually, she does it—

She uses it to get what he wants.

Yes, she’s doing the bidding of—frequently doing the bidding of her husband. Or, um, and, and, you know, a lot of this comes down to interpretation. If you want to interpret it as, as her at the reins, right? Her being the one making the decisions and just holding up her husband as the authority figure, as the rubber stamp. Like, I’m sure people who, who don’t like women being independent would, would be happy to interpret the text that way.

Yeah, I think we’re going to get to it, but I think that will be—we’ll find that to be the crux of a lot of things.

But because the Bible, you know, one of the things that they accuse her of is, like you said, she promoted the worship of Baal and Asherah. And she like—and there is a scripture, I did a lot of research on this. There is a scripture that says that, like, you know, where are these priests of Baal and Asherah that sit at Jezebel’s table?

Or something. Yeah.

But I’m going to point out that in—we’re in 1 Kings, is that where we are? Yeah, 1 Kings 16 , down at the bottom, it says of her husband Ahab, he erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal that he built in Samaria—Samaria. Ahab also made a sacred pole. I assume that that’s an Asherah pole.

That would be an Asherah pole. Yeah.

Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him.

No mention in any of that of Jezebel. Just says he did it.

Mm-hmm.

It’s earlier, like the verse before that, it says he took as his wife Jezebel. And then he erected the altar for Baal. So you could say, I don’t know, does chronology equal causation? Because it doesn’t seem like it does.

Well, we do have a parenthetical comment in 1 Kings 21:25 , where this is the NRSV-UE: “Indeed, there was no one like Ahab who sold himself to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, urged on by his wife Jezebel.”

Right.

And so the Hebrew has hesattah, which is based on a verb which means to incite or mislead—Jezebel, his wife. So the text there suggests that Jezebel is inciting him to do all of these things. So it sounds like she is functioning as a bit of a scapegoat for Ahab, but certainly it’s not leaving Ahab blameless.

Yeah, it just seems to me that, like, I mean, and yes, that is there, that sort of, that parenthetical that you referred to is tucked in with Elijah pronouncing a sentence upon them or whatever, because of Naboth’s vineyard. But that’s deeper. That’s 20—that’s, you know, that’s many chapters later into, you know, into this whole thing. And she, you know, in that, in that chapter, we do see her doing her, like, being very integral in everything she did. She was the one that orchestrated things in that chapter for—yeah, for which she is being, you know, they’re being sentenced or whatever.

Well, there’s something—let me just—1 Kings 18 . So we’ve got Elijah is confronting Ahab, and then we have Elijah’s triumph over the prophets of Baal or the priests of Baal. It says prophets, but the section heading in the NRSV-UE says priests. But here’s the interesting thing. You said that it says that they sat at her table, right?

That’s verse 19 in chapter 18.

So here’s the funny thing. With the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah who eat at Jezebel’s table. So here’s the funny thing.

That’s a big table.

It is a big table. She’s got a large table, lots of chairs. The rest of the story entirely omits any reference to any prophet or priest of Asherah. It is entirely and exclusively about the 450 prophets of Baal. And then it says, seize—at the very end, 18:40—Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal, do not let one of them escape.” Then they seized them and Elijah brought them down to the Wadi Kishon and killed them there. And that’s the end of that. Well, you have—and then Elijah says to Ahab, “Go eat and drink, for there is a sound of rushing rain.” And so the drought ends. So a lot of people, a lot of scholars will suggest that the reference to the prophets of Asherah is probably a later addition.

Some editor was probably like, “Yeah, throw the one about the the Asherah folks and Jezebel in there as well.” And then they did and just ignored that they’re not in the rest of the story.

Huh. So that’s very interesting. Yeah. I think one of the things that has me sort of baffled by how Jezebel is seen and how she is portrayed by people recounting the story, not in the Bible itself, but by people talking about the story, is that everything she does, if it were done by a man, would just—like, yes, she’s the bad guy because she and Ahab are pro the wrong God, right?

But like, So, you know, when she starts killing all of the prophets or the priests of Adonai, that’s bad. But when Elijah kills all of the prophets and priests of Baal, that’s good. They’re doing the same stuff. So like, but turnabout isn’t fair play when it’s a woman who does it.

You know, like, it’s definitely a gendered villainy. Yeah, that, that, that she’s painted with. And you don’t really see much of that elsewhere in, in the Hebrew Bible. Like the, the women, the, the sex workers are generally treated quite well. Yeah. You have, you have, for instance, Judah’s Judah and Tamar. Judah’s like, oh, you got me there. That was a good one. That was a good one. Because she cosplayed as a sex worker. And all the way through to the end, and you know, you have Rahab at Jericho, you have other women who are treated as, you know, they have a positive role in the narrative, in the story. But Jezebel is the one kind of negative one where she gets Like, there’s no indication she ever functioned as a sex worker. Like, promiscuity isn’t a part of her story, right?

But it gets represented that way because we need a female villain. And what’s the worst thing that a female can do? It’s be promiscuous. Well, you know, she just— by— there’s a guilt by association.

She’s a female, so it must be And I have seen a lot of talk about how Jezebel spirit involves promiscuity. But I will say that it is not entirely unbiblical, because there’s the reference to her in Revelation.

Revelation. Yeah. And this is where we have the two— in the letters, in chapters 2 and 3, we get these references to Jezebel. And then the other one is Balaam. These two kind of symbols of unrighteousness and wayward leadership. And the author is criticizing these folks. And so Jezebel is accused of seducing Christians to practice sexual immorality and eat foods sacrificed to idols. Those are the two things for which Jezebel is condemned. And I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before, but there is a theory out there. It’s certainly not the leading theory, but it is a theory that the author of Revelation is condemning Paul as the Jezebel. Oh yes, because what— what a couple of the things that Paul talks about in his letters, one of the things he says is that, uh, because they would have— they evidently, they referred to followers of Jesus married to non-Christians, they said that was porneia, that was sexual immorality.

And Paul said, no, no, it’s not sexual immorality to be unequally yoked for a follower of Jesus to be married, because stay married, you might convert and save the soul of your spouse. And so if there were folks who were committed to the other position, that no, this is sexual immorality, then Paul would have been responsible for seducing Christians to practice sexual immorality. And Paul quite openly said eating food sacrificed to idols is nothing. Who cares, right? That’s no big deal. It’s only if you’re in the presence of a weaker follower of Jesus who doesn’t know that an idol is nothing in this world that it then becomes a problem for you to scandalize them.

Oh, that’s really interesting.

Yeah. And so that is Paul advocating for, or at least not condemning, eating food sacrificed to idols, even though according to Acts chapter 15, that’s one of the four things that non-Jewish Christians were responsible for. But there’s an argument that it’s actually followers of Paul that the author of Revelation is condemning because of this Jezebel spirit, so to speak.

To be clear, the reference, the Revelation reference, which is in Revelation 2 .

Yeah. Verses 20 to 23.

It, it does seem to be just using the word Jezebel, but, but, but it’s actually definitely referring not to Jezebel in the past, but to someone who is in this congregation.

Right.

Currently someone who is like a real person Yeah, who is being— who is leading the congregation of Thyatira astray.

How do I do that pronunciation?

Fair enough.

Thyatira. I don’t know. Anyway, so yeah, it’s not an actual reference to the Jezebel of history or of 1 Kings.

It’s, well, it’s using her as a symbol, right, and a substitution for naming an actual person. And maybe it’s a movement rather than an individual person. But that’s where we get this idea. And that’s really the— unless I am misremembering, that’s really the only association of Jezebel with sexual immorality.

Yeah, there’s nothing else.

There’s an indirect notion that worship of Asherah, like, was invariably associated with sexual immorality, which would not be that accurate. Yeah, that’s, that’s also just a way to demonize the worship of Asherah, who, by the way, prior to probably the 7th century BCE was worshiped as God’s wife. And we don’t have any indication, we don’t have any data that make it most likely that anybody in any kind of institutional position had any problem with that.

Right.

Like maybe some prophets did. But even the couple of references in some of the prophetic literature to Asherah in a condemnatory way are dated by some scholars to the Deuteronomists—they’re a Deuteronomistic layer, according to a number of scholars. So, uh, so, and this might be why this story about the prophets of Baal has somebody scribbling in the prophets of Asherah afterwards, because they’re coming from a time period later when Asherah is now the villain. Asherah has been demonized, right? So, um, yeah, so the, the association of, uh, Asherah with sexual immorality is, is a later development as well.

Now, when 1 Kings was written, which I take to not be the time of the actual King Ahab? King Ahab? Yeah.

No, because you don’t have— here’s an interesting tidbit. You don’t have historical prose in alphabetic writing until after Ahab was dead.

The second half of the 9th century, that’s when it first pops up in the record. And what that means is, and by historical prose, I mean that genre of historical narrative. Like, you had poetry, you had letters, you didn’t have historical narrative. “So-and-so was the king of so-and-so, and then they did this, and then they did that, and then they did the other thing.” That genre doesn’t show up in alphabetic writing until the second half of the 9th century BCE. So in the Hebrew Bible, if you see narrative prose, that was written after the late 9th century BCE. So Kings, Samuel, the overwhelming majority of all of that, apart from a few scattered pieces of poetry, were written after Ahab was dead and gone. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not telling stories that were passed down from the period of his reign and her life, but it would have been committed to text in a later period.

And that means it would have been articulated in a way that served the interests of the people doing the committing to text.

So, well, that’s part of what I wanted to ask you about. Who’s writing this? Because this is about Israel, but I read something that indicated that maybe the author was a Judean.

This is probably, um, coming from the Deuteronomistic historian. So what this means is this is somebody— so around the time of Josiah, um, we have the, uh, Deuteronomy begins to take shape, which is Josiah saying, “I want the laws to do this,” and then they, one day they’re like, “Guess what we found in the temple? The book of the law.” And guess what? It says everything you want it to say.

And Josiah was a king.

Josiah was a king. And so after that, you then have the Deuteronomistic history, which is probably taking the historical annals that precede it by, you know, a couple centuries. And it is, kind of narrativizing these things, but telling the stories in a way that represents the Northern Kingdom as wicked and the Southern Kingdom as good.

Because the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed a century—

Specifically, Northern Kingdom is Israel.

Israel. Southern Kingdom is Judah. Yeah.

Right.

So the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed 722 BCE, and so they’re not there anymore. And there are a lot of scholars who think that Judah was just like, “Oh, that was us the whole time. We were all— it was always this united kingdom, or at least it started out as this united kingdom, and then they were wicked up in the north, and that’s why God carted them off to the lands to the north and dispersed them throughout the world.” And according to some early Mormons, uh, they inhabit an oasis behind ice walls up at the North Pole. So, wow.

Yeah, just throwing that out there, man. You’re just chucking that bomb and then running away.

Okay, it’s what we do here. We show up, we muddy the waters, and we scamper off. So they are writing the story explaining why the Northern Kingdom got the boot, explaining why they’re the good guys.

But they’re just glossed over in the Deuteronomistic history and treated as just, meh, they were there. And this is because they’re telling the story in a way that makes David the big hero, and Josiah is, you know, supposed to be continuing on the Davidic dynasty. So I see.

So yeah, it’s all propaganda. Yeah.

Well, and the propaganda continues because now we have guys like Charlie Kirk, like Mark Driscoll, and many others using this phrase using the name of Jezebel, using the phrase Jezebel spirit, and sometimes meaning like an actual spirit, like a demon. Yeah, that is wandering the earth, that is like, that is influencing people badly. But, and it’s funny because Driscoll keeps saying things like, you know, a man can have it, a woman can have the Jezebel spirit, or a man can have the Jezebel spirit, a woman can have the Ahab spirit, but it’s always a woman that has the Jezebel spirit. Yeah. And, you know, he didn’t say wives, send up pictures of your husbands who have the Jezebel spirit. He’s very clear that this is like, the Jezebel spirit is women who are bad, and women who are, who will not submit to authority, and women who are overly controlling, and blah, blah, blah.

And really, what did I mean, Listen, obviously, the Jezebel who is presented in the Bible is not a good person. Like you said, she does that whole thing with the vineyard of Naboth. She did a bad thing there. You know, she set him up, got him killed, just so that her husband could have the land. She’s, at least in that part of the story, she is very much a Lady Macbeth type character. But the way that she is used, the way that she is crafted as a bludgeon against women who won’t submit to their husbands, who won’t submit to the church, who actually want to have equal place in their marriages and in society, it’s pretty gross.

I’m just going to say it’s pretty gross.

Yeah. And it always— the Jezebel spirit rhetoric is always about trying to undermine women seeking after a role that these men believe is their unique and exclusive prerogative. So authority in the church, oh, if a woman wants that, that’s the Jezebel spirit. An equal partnership in the home, if a woman wants that, the Jezebel spirit. If a woman wants a career, the Jezebel spirit. It is a rhetorical trump card for right-wing authoritarian sexual politics.

I really may have first heard that phrase, now that I think about it, when Hillary Clinton was running for president.

Oh, really?

Yeah, that may have been my first introduction. And then, of course, it came back very strong also when Kamala Harris was running for president.

These are women who are possessed of the Jezebel spirit.

Because they want to do something that these pastors and Christian nationalists want to reserve solely for men.

Yes. And you know who they don’t say has the Jezebel spirit? Jael or Deborah in Judges 5 . These are women who have not just local but military authority. Jael kills another man, uses, you know, invites him in to let him rest and then drives a tent peg through his forehead.

It’s pretty hardcore. She’s pretty hardcore.

Yeah. And yeah, I think there would probably be a lot of people if the full story of— oh my gosh, I’m blanking on the name— Mary Magdalene, excuse me. Mary Magdalene, if the name Magdalene truly was an epithet, was a a title that was given to her, Towering One, uh, or Toweress or something like that. Certainly that is a result of her not only seeking after but obtaining and exercising authority, including, uh, over men. You never hear about, uh, the Jezebel spirit of, of Mary Magdalene. Of course, you do have people, um, falsely accusing her of being a sex worker. Yeah, uh, based on a, uh, a homily given by the Pope in 591 CE, which falsely identifies her with another woman who had a bunch of sins.

And basically the idea again is when it comes to what a woman can do to sin, really there’s just sexual sin. That’s about it, because that’s all they function as, right, is a sex receptacle. And so if they are— if she’s a sinful woman, she must have been a sex worker. And then identifying that unnamed woman as Mary Magdalene results in the idea that Mary Magdalene was a sex worker. Yeah, all features of the story that don’t really play into how folks like Driscoll and others— Driscoll, by the way, who has been accused and even found liable for all kinds of abuses of authority.

And intimidation and manipulation and lying and deception and all this kind of stuff.

I would say he’s domineering, overbearing.

In control and not willing to be controlled. I would say he is definitely possessed of a Jezebel spirit.

As long as a man can be possessed of the Jezebel spirit, he’s— yeah, he’s our poster child.

He’s an exemplar. Absolutely. So there you go. That’s the Jezebel spirit for you. I think Jezebel is definitely being unfairly treated in this, but that’s par for the course in terms of the sexism of how these guys treat almost all— any, any woman’s, uh, any woman’s story that they come across. As you say, Mary Magdalene definitely didn’t— definitely gets the short end of the stick too. Uh, so there you go. I think we should move on to our next segment. Uh, what’s that? And the what’s that of this, uh, segment, the that in this case, are two thats. Who? What is they? Which is the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

The Sadducees and the Pharisees. These are two of at least four different what Josephus calls philosophies of Judaism, which we would call sects these days, S-E-C-T-S.

Right.

We have the Pharisees, you have the Sadducees, you have the Essenes, which are another group that I think probably most scholars today would say is how the folks at Qumran who are responsible for storing at least the Dead Sea Scrolls, how they would have identified. And then you have the Zealots, and there are some other groups that are identified by like Philo and stuff like that. But we’re focused on the Sadducees and the Pharisees. And these groups probably begin to distinguish themselves around the middle of the 2nd century BCE. So this is when we have the Second Temple is operating, everybody’s bopping along. The Hellenistic empires are fighting over this territory. The Seleucids cause a lot of problems for the Judeans, and then you have Antiochus IV Epiphanes who comes in, does a lot of bad stuff.

It’s what First and Second Maccabees is all about. This is what the celebration of Hanukkah is about. They come in and they desecrate the temple, and then Judah Maccabee, they fight back. They wrestle control of the temple back from the Seleucids, they rededicate the temple. That’s what Hanukkah is celebrating, the rededication of the temple.

Will you just briefly remind me who the Seleucids are? That’s not what this is about, but just as a quick rabbit trail.

Sorry, Seleucid is, uh, is a reference to one of the, um, kind of groups that controlled a part of Alexander the Great’s kingdom. So after he died you had a bunch of his, uh, subordinates fighting over control of his territory. And rather than one person stepping in and taking control of everything that Alexander the Great controlled, it split up into a bunch of different territories. And you had the Ptolemies controlling Egypt and the Seleucids— so Ptolemy was the one who was in Egypt, Seleucus was the one who was in Syria. And so Israel-Palestine is right in between those two. And so they’re kind of a battleground between these two groups, and they kind of went back and forth. But the Seleucids caused some trouble. The Maccabees fight back, they win. And this is actually the reestablishment of a semi-autonomous, semi-independent kingdom.

So, in the 160s BCE, like the Daniel, the book of Daniel is written right around this time, a lot of the apocalyptic literature of Second Temple Judaism is written around this time. And for the people living in that time, this must have felt like the fulfillment of prophecy, because for a long time you’ve been waiting on restoration and the return of the Kingdom of Israel, and suddenly, the Maccabees win, drive off the invaders, and establish what becomes known as the Hasmonean dynasty and kingdom. Now, they are kind of like, hey, Rome, we’re going to play nice. You know, can we get some help?

And then they went, oh crap, they conflict with each other in a bunch of ways, and we got a bunch of gaps, and we got And so you have a bunch of schools of thought that are trying to figure out how we’re going to approach this. The Sadducees may have grown out of the Zadokite priests, and Zadok would have been one of the descendants of Aaron. So this is a priestly household, a priestly family. And so Sadducee is thought by most scholars to be a callback to this idea of the Zadokite priests. And so these are wealthy elite people associated with the temple, and they want stability, and so they’re very happy to play nice with Rome as long as this gives us stability. And so there’s the high priest is in later periods after 63 BCE, um, you have Pompey who annexes Judea for Rome.

So 160 BCE to around 63 BCE, you have an independent Judean kingdom, right? Um, and then Rome takes over, and from this point on, the high priest is appointed by Rome. And so it’s coming from the Sadducees, So they’re basically the temple authorities. The Pharisees are kind of a, a lay movement that are about, uh, the law and they’re about purity. And so this is why in the 1st century BCE and around the turn of the era, right around the time of Jesus’s life, you have a lot of people focusing on purity and you have things like stone pots and cups and vessels that do not transmit impurity to the things that they’re holding. Like, this is something that pops up in this time period because of the Pharisees. And the biggest differences between the two, the Pharisees accepted this oral tradition and the authority of traditions about how to interpret the law.

‘Cause remember, they were like, “All right, let’s get rolling with the implementation of all these laws.” And then they were like, “Oh wait, it doesn’t all fit.” “We gotta do all these things to, you know, smooth over the— iron out the wrinkles and everything.” And this is what later—.

Square the circles, etc.

Yeah, and this is what later turns into the rabbinic literature and the halakhic literature, which is basically trying to figure out legal questions, answer legal questions and things like that. The Sadducees reject that. They reject the oral interpretations, and they want to go back to just the Torah. So their text is the 5 books of Moses, which means that they don’t have things like Daniel. They don’t have other texts that develop the concept of resurrection. They don’t have discussion of angels and all this other kind of stuff that’s later in the Hebrew Bible, in Second Temple Jewish literature that the Pharisees do have. So while the Pharisees are exploring heaven and hell and resurrection and all this other kind of stuff, the Sadducees are sitting there with their 5 books of Moses like, “Y’all are nuts.

Don’t know where you’re getting all this.

None of this is in here. " “These extremists over here with their resurrections and whatnot. " Yeah, yeah.

And so they were— these were some movements that clashed on a lot of things. And even in the New Testament, You see, at one point Paul is like caught between a rock and a hard place, and he’s like, “Angels!” And, you know, starts the fight over his head between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and then, you know, slips out the back door while they’re all fighting. So he’s exploiting the differences between these two groups. And then because the Sadducees’ authority is based entirely on the temple, and not on like household religion. Like the Pharisees, it’s all about, you know, I’m going to school, I’m reading the law, I’m, you know, I’ve got stone cups at home, I’m washing my hands before the meal and all this. That’s kind of this ritual and ideological framework that governs all different parts of life. Sadducees are like, we just deal with the temple.

We just deal with the temple. And then the temple gets destroyed. And they’ve got nothing, right? They’ve got, they’ve got no way to— they’ve got no framework that they can provide for how to go on. And so for all intents and purposes, the Sadducees disappear, just stop within a decade or two after 70 CE. And the Pharisees basically become rabbinic Judaism. Because they have everything else.

And so they had— yeah, those are the main differences between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, as I recall them.

Okay. Talk to me a little bit about— because Look, I don’t know if everyone knows this. I am not a scholar of the Bible. I have not read all of the Bible, nor have I. But my memory of the word Pharisees is that it only comes up in the Bible in the New Testament as a pejorative. Like, these are the bad guys in a lot of in a lot of the stories of the Bible. Is that, is that right? Am I remembering that correctly?

There, there are definitely, uh, those who are Pharisees who are not represented as bad guys. Like the, the New Testament, most of the New Testament, I think it would be unfair to say it’s anti-Pharisaical. I think they would attribute a lot of the faults of, of the Judaism against which they were representing themselves as the product of the Pharisees, but a lot of that was incidental. That was the fact that the Sadducees were off in their temple doing weird temple stuff. The Pharisees were the ones in the streets. And by the time of the Gospel of John , it’s just the Jews is how Jesus’s enemies are generally represented. There is certainly, I think, what we could call Judeophobia, if not straight up antisemitism, in different parts of the New Testament. I don’t think it is, you know, if you’re a Pharisee, you’re a bad person or something like that, because Paul represents himself as a Pharisee.

Right now, so today people use the term Pharisee pejoratively, and it’s wildly inappropriate. That is antisemitism today. Because it’s—.

So it’s an antisemitic sort of dog whistle.

Yeah, it’s accusing someone of being overly legalistic. And I even recorded a video with a friend, Logan Williams, when I was in Italy at this Enoch seminar, where he was pointing out— he’s got a paper that he’s going to publish soon on this, that when you look at the Essenes, when you look at Jesus in the New Testament, when you look at other non-Pharisaical interpretations of the law, the Pharisees were commonly dismissed as casuals. Mm. They were not strict enough. And they were. And even when you look in Matthew, Jesus says your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees or you cannot enter the kingdom of God. So like when you look at the texts themselves, the Pharisees are not represented as these strict legalists. They’re frequently represented as folks who are not legalistic enough. And today, people use Pharisee to mean overly legalistic person, and it’s inaccurate and it’s pejorative.

And like I said, the Pharisees would become rabbinic Judaism, which is the mainstream of Jewish tradition. Today. And so it is directly maligning the ancestor of contemporary Judaism. And in that sense, it is anti-Semitic as well. And yeah, there’s the whole anti-Pharisee thing, pejorative use of Pharisee is— it is incredibly common within contemporary Christianity, not just evangelical Christianity. It is widespread all over Christianity. And there is a wonderful book that was recently published that I should have gotten handy for this discussion called Judeophobia in the New Testament. And in the back, there is a handy flowchart That answers the question, can I call this person a Pharisee?

Do all of the things go to no?

Basically. It is the only time you can call somebody a Pharisee is if you’re referring to a person in first century or first century CE, first century BCE Judea who identifies as a Pharisee.

Right.

And everything else all goes to, “Do not call this person a Pharisee. " So that’s the lesson here.

Are you referring to Paul? Then yes. Are you referring to your neighbor Paul who lives down the street? Then no.

Yeah. Stop using it pejoratively. It’s antisemitic. It is inaccurate historically, textually, academically, grammatically. You know, in all the senses, it’s not a good thing to use the term Pharisee pejoratively.

I assume, though, that I can use the term Sadducees pejoratively.

Well, I tend not to, but I don’t— there’s not really— yeah, they don’t really— there’s not really a reputation to, you know, for that pejorative.

You wealthy temple guy, you’re such a Sadducee.

That might work within Mormon circles.

But well, that’s true. They do like temples.

Yeah, we would have to be a little careful about that. But yeah, I am just in the— I am of the mind that you should not use designations of other ethnic and religious and ideological groups as pejoratives just in general.

Just in general.

Yeah. And except the one that I make an exception for is doofus. I don’t think that really counts as an ethnic group or anything like that. Well, that—.

What was it?

I, oh, I have no idea where the word came from.

It’s just a pejorative term.

Yeah, the only time you’ll ever see me name-calling is if I call somebody a doofus, because I feel like that’s a pretty tame—.

Oh man, somebody right now is heading to the comments section on YouTube to tell us about the origin of the word doofus and how it’s horrible in some way. But well, until that happens you’re clear to use the word doofus.

Um, probably related to doodoo and goofus.

Student slang, dolt, idiot, nerd. Yeah, by the 1960s.

There you go.

All right.

Uh, well, that, that’s great. Thank you for setting it. I’m so glad when I like actually know what a thing is because you hear the I have heard the words Pharisees and Sadducees so many times, and I haven’t really known what we were talking about. So thank you for that. That is very handy. Yeah.

And in the New Testament, you will frequently see in the Synoptic Gospels distinctions between those two. And frequently, it’s significant that they’re dealing with the Sadducees because they’re dealing with like temple authorities or something like that, or they’re dealing with the Pharisees because it’s people in the streets, and sometimes the Sadducees and Pharisees team up. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And then they form Voltron together and fight against—.

Captain Planet. Yeah.

All right, that’s it for this week’s show. If you would like to hear Dan talk about his experiences at Comic-Con, you can become a patron of the show. And then go over and, and catch the after show because the after party, because that’s probably what we’re going to be talking about this week, at least in part. It is such an important part of how we keep this show going. If you’re willing and able to, we would love for you to become one of our patrons over at patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Helps us out a ton. Thanks so much for tuning in this week. Uh, thanks to Roger Goudy for editing the show. Uh, if you want to get in touch with us, you can reach out at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Jezebel!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology