Holy Sex Work?

Well, if you use “an,” you don’t pronounce the H, because that’s why it’s “an,” because they didn’t pronounce the H.

Don’t tell me how to pronounce things. People are in our comment sections telling us how to pronounce things, and frankly, pedantry is the most boring thing in the world.

Hey, I make half my living off of pedantry, so don’t be badmouthing pedantry. 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?

They go, they go, and they go. We’re supposed to be diving in. We’re having fun. Uh, we get to talk about sex work today.

Sex work is, is work.

We get to find hidden secret scriptures.

That’s right, almost forgot about, uh, the, the secret Psalm.

Yeah, yeah, it’s only the Masons and, uh, and other very clandestine organizations know about this.

Not even the Mormons have this one.

Yeah, no, like, no, yeah, this one’s super devil extra secret. They, they may come for us. I don’t know, QAnon might get us or something. Yeah, I’m not sure. I’m not sure who’s gonna come for us, but we’re gonna reveal the secrets of the Psalms. Yes, but first we gotta take issue. And this week on Taking Issue, the issue that we’re taking is with cult prostitution, question mark. What are we doing here? What are we talking about? I’m karate chopping the air because I don’t know what’s going on.

So in the recent interview that CNN put out with what’s his name, that Doug—Doug guy, Doug Wilson. You know, the guy who says really stupid stuff just to have all of America go, “What the hell is wrong with you?” He’s listed on Google as Doug Wilson, Theologian.

I guess you could call him that. I’d probably call him pastor.

Yeah, but you know, I mean, that’s, that’s what he is. Although he does, uh, he did like start a school.

Well, that’s true.

He found—I think he founded, uh, what do they call it, New St. Andrews? Yes, which is, which, which is just basically rip off St. Andrews. We want the clout.

Um, it’s one better. It’s St. Andrews but newer.

Plus, yeah, this one goes to 11. Yeah, exactly. But he said in this infamous interview, he was talking about punishment for homosexuality. And he talked about how two kings, Asa and Jehoshaphat, ran the homosexuals out of ancient Israel. And this was the point he was making, was that there’s a range of potential punishments for homosexuality that could be reinstated that fall short of the death penalty. And he brought up Asa and Jehoshaphat. And I saw this and was like, that never happened. Whatever he’s talking about, it wasn’t that.

And he’s gotten something wrong.

Yes. And I—all I could think of was that he was confusing a handful of passages in 1 Kings and in 2 Kings, and I think it’s Genesis and Deuteronomy or something like that as well. I assumed that he was confusing those passages for references to homosexuals, and the reason is probably because he was going off the King James Version. Because we have in 1 Kings 15:12 , here’s a reference to—we’ve got some reforms that are taking place. And 1 Kings 15:12 , this is the King James Version. Content warning, going to be using some pejoratives, some homophobic terminology. 1 Kings 15:12 says, “And he took away the sodomites out of the land and removed all the idols that his fathers had made.”

And so I was like, well, okay, it sounds like he’s looking at this passage and he thinks this is talking about just homosexuals in general. And in addition to the fact that it would only be talking about males, not females, because female same-sex intercourse is never once mentioned anywhere in the entire Hebrew Bible.

Not addressed.

No. But this is also a mistranslation. And I looked up the translations that came before it. As fans of this show hopefully have had drilled into them enough, the King James Version is not an original translation. It is just a revision of earlier translations.

How dare you?

And the Bishops’—sorry, that cow, that sacred cow has been slaughtered long ago. There’s no meat on those bones anymore.

Listen, I’ve heard from some evangelicals here in these United States. I’m pretty sure that the King James Version is—is actually the original version, not a translation, just the original.

I saw a pastor one time stand up and he was being tongue-in-cheek, but everybody took him to be literal and said he uses the King James Version to correct the Greek. And I was like, you don’t know Greek. Nobody who knows Greek likes the King James Version. But right, anyway, um, it’s also a mistranslation. Uh, in the earlier translations, I couldn’t understand the Bishop’s Bible because it said the stewes, S-T-E-W-E-S, and I was like, I do not know that word. And I looked it up and it’s, it’s evidently like a, uh, 1500s word for a brothel. Oh, so, um, yeah, so, uh, and then earlier passages referred to, um, like houses of ill repute or something like that. So, uh, but the word in Hebrew there is hakedeshim, which, uh, that’s the masculine plural form of this noun, and the feminine, uh, form is kedeshah.

And these passages, there, there are a handful of passages that have either the masculine or the feminine Genesis 38:21 and 38:22, and this is Judah and Tamar. Deuteronomy 23:17 and 18, 1 Kings 14:24 , 15:12, 22:47, 2 Kings 23:7 . And then we got once in Hosea 4:14 and once in Job 36:14 . But this has led to the notion of cultic sex work in the Hebrew Bible.

Okay, so we’re not, we’re not talking about homosexuals.

We’re talking about, or at least your King James Version thinks it is, and I’m gonna, and, and, uh, down the road a piece we’ll talk about how this connection is made, but also how that connection should be obliterated.

Oh, interesting.

But yeah, we’re gonna start with spoiler alert.

You just gave away the game. All right, that’s fine.

Striptease. You gotta let them know what’s coming. Um, And so these passages led to this idea that, okay, so one of the things that was going on in the temple, that was one of the things that Hezekiah and Josiah and these others all got rid of as part of their reforms was cultic sex work. And I think the main clue about this is, well, we can start in Genesis 38:21-22 . We have discussed the events of Judah and Tamar and how she pulled one over on him.

And he was her father-in-law.

Father-in-law.

And then her husband died.

Husband died.

Tell me if I’m getting all this right. And then he was not— like, he was supposed to take care of her, but he wasn’t doing it. And so she—.

He was supposed to give her his next son. Oh, right. He was like, you’re the Black Widow. I’m, I’m holding off for a bit. And, and then she was like, oh, oh, well, we’ll get this figured out.

Yeah. And, but, but her scheme is that she, she becomes— she like pretends to be a prostitute and he, uh, goes ahead and pays. Like, she veils herself so that he doesn’t know who it is.

He, he patronizes her establishment, right?

Yes, he, uh, he partakes of her wares, and then, and, and in exchange for, uh, there’s a whole thing about he gives her his signet.

Yeah, he’s like, I don’t got the cash on me, but you can hold on to this.

Here’s collateral in the form of a goat, if I’m not mistaken.

Yeah.

Anyway, so she takes goats. Yeah. Okay, so, so she pretended to be a sex worker. That’s probably, that’s probably the only salient part to what we’re talking about.

So when, uh, and, and And then he comes back and he can’t find her, and he’s like, “Hey, where is the kedeshah that was here? " And they say, “No, there’s no kedeshah here. " And earlier, the word that had been used was zonah, which is sex worker, female sex worker. Usually it gets translated more vulgarly than that. Like, ho?

Is that what they do? No. And lo, she went unto him as an ho. I just want that to be in one translation. Can we just do that? An ho?

Okay. Well, if you use an, you don’t pronounce the H, because that’s why it’s an, because they didn’t pronounce the H.

Don’t tell me how to pronounce things. People are in our comment sections telling us how to pronounce things. And frankly, pedantry is the most boring thing in the world.

Let’s not worry about it. If you understand what we’re saying, Hey, I make half my living off of pedantry, so don’t be badmouthing pedantry. But all right, so there’s this parallelism. It sounds like he’s using kedeshah as a synonym for a sex worker.

Uh, but kedeshah and, uh, kadesh are based on a word kadosh, or kodesh, which means to be holy. And it has something to do with the temple. And so we’ve got some kind of conceptual proximity to the field of sex work. And then we’ve got, uh, we also have an etymological foundation in reference to holiness and the temple. So what’s going on here? And, and there for a long time was this notion that there was sacred sex work going on in the temples. Like, you would go and you would make your sacrifices, and then you’d just be like, I’m gonna go, uh, I’m going to go in the other room. Yes. Now you would have females and males, and the assumption is just that if you have males there, it’s probably for other males. So they would have been there to be in the role of the receptive partner.

Right.

So that’s probably where negative connotations would have become associated with that concept. And this is an assumption. Like, there’s no hard evidence that this took place, but it kind of— you can see how it makes sense to arrive at this conclusion.

Yes, although I can also see that you in your videos frequently yell at people about the etymological fallacy.

Yes, the etymological fallacy is a big one. Um, but we’ve had, uh, we’ve had a bunch of scholars since the 90s just shaking their fists at other scholars because there’s just no evidence that this notion of cult sex work or sacred sex work or anything like that took place. And I think the best discussion— there was a book published in 2018 by Phyllis Byrd. The title was Harlot or Holy Woman? A Study of Hebrew Kedeshah. And back in the 90s, she published a paper called The End of the Male Cult Prostitute? A Literary, Historical, and Sociological Analysis of Hebrew Kadesh, Kedeshim, and she takes scholars to task for this and uses linguistic evidence, uses the archaeological evidence, uses the literary evidence, uses everything that she can marshal to show that the idea here is somewhere between either it just refers to a regular old sex worker, not a sacred one, or it refers to some kind of cult personnel that was not a priest and was unrelated to sex work.

And so we might have different senses in different contexts.

Okay, this is the— I’m interested in this because, uh, NRSVUE, uh, you gave me—.

NRSV—.

NR—.

S—.

Look, arrange the letters how you need to, to make it make sense. Uh, but I looked out— you gave me several of these, um, scriptures.

Yes.

And I’m looking at 1 Kings 15 Asa reigns over Judah. And verse 12 that you said earlier, you were doing the King James Version.

Right. I avoided the NRSVUE because that would have given away the whole striptease.

Right, right, right. But let’s get to it. King James said what? Do you remember what King James said on that?

He took away the Sodomites out of the land.

Right. Now, NRSVUE, are we ready for this? Is this— I don’t mean to— yeah. So NRSVUE says he put away the illicit priests out of the land.

Yes.

Illicit priests.

So this is, so this is based on—.

That does sound like sex work priests. I don’t know what else could an illicit priest be.

This is the priest from Fleabag, right? Yeah. No, illicit here doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, naughty. It means a priest who’s not authorized, a priest who’s not one of the right priests. He’s not from the Levitical priesthood. He’s not from the right line. But I think they may have used illicit in order to try to split the difference a little bit. Right.

It does sound like they’re walking a line. Yeah, purposefully not making a choice on that.

purposefully not making a choice on that. But there’s, there’s, there are those who will argue that this cultic personnel, whatever their functionality, they weren’t priests. They may have had to do with like circumcision. They may have had to do with things dealing with menstruation. Uh, we know there was even, uh, there may have been— it takes place in some other societies. Uh, maybe before a woman got married, she went to the temple to have her hymen intentionally, uh, broken. Or the idea being let’s make it so there’s not a mess and you’re not making your husband, uh, uncomfortable. Uh, so there are a variety of things that could kind of bump up against the, you know, the conceptual semantic field of sex work that are not actually sex work, that these cultic— this cultic personnel could have been responsible for.

We’re not sure. But what most scholars these days will say is whatever it is, cultic sex worker, probably not it.

Why? Why do you have to ruin the fun parts? Well, because I got to say, like, the idea of the temple gets a lot more interesting if it does have official cultic sex work.

Yeah. Well, yeah, and that raises all kinds of issues. The main reason I was annoyed about Pastor Wilson, Doug— hey, Doug— bringing this up, that probably doesn’t mean anything outside of Utah. Okay, what if I said, “Hello, Douglas”? Hopefully that means something outside of Utah. But he’s trying to say this refers to all homosexuals. Even if we understand it as cultic sex worker, it’s only referring to sex workers, which would actually lend credence to the argument that a lot of people make that when the Hebrew Bible does condemn same-sex intercourse, it’s condemning sex work, right? Not just same-sex intercourse in and of itself. Or it’s condemning abusive or exploitative, uh, or other types of male same-sex intercourse.

So, so Doug, by appealing blithely to a text that he very clearly doesn’t understand— by the way, he has no relevant training or expertise, um, he has a bachelor’s and a master’s in philosophy. And you know what that gets you.

So, yes, a job as a river rafting tour guide.

But he’s making a case against the foundation of his bigotry if he’s going to appeal to the Bible for that bigotry. So, yeah, so his argument is garbage. But also at the same time, I think people should be aware that you’re going to hear about cultic sex workers an awful lot if you are around arguments about the Bible. And particularly human sexuality and homosexuality and all that kind of stuff. But the notion that they put the— when the TV show, they were like, “He looks like he might be meant to be one of the kedeshim,” or something like that. The notion that they had these men that were just in the temple that were there for that doesn’t really fit the data. And so there probably was not any cultic sex work going on in ancient Israel. And whatever Asa and Jehoshaphat, whoever they were running out of Israel, it was— and even if it is sex workers, it’s not clear that it’s same-sex sex workers.

It’s certainly not the case for the women because it was Judah who patronized what he labeled a kadesha, and that would not be same-sex. So it’s not even clear that it’s homosexual sex work. It’s probably either just regular old sex work, or it has something to do with the non-illicit functionality of the temple.

But yeah, I— are— is— sorry, I’m just trying to get an idea of like, is the female version of this treated significantly differently throughout the Bible as the kedeshim?

You do have— so, kadesha— Hosea refers to the kadeshot, and that is used in parallel to the zonot. So, here, I’ll read that passage in the NRSV-UE. “I will not punish your daughters when they prostitute themselves, nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery. For the men themselves go aside with prostitutes, and with the kadeshot they sacrifice.” Okay, so the NRSV uses “and sacrifice with temple prostitutes.” So it’s not clear exactly what’s being condemned here.

Are they—.

Is it because they’re offering sacrifices with the help of a woman being the one who is engaged in the cultic activity? Is that— are they like, “For shame, they had a woman offering a sacrifice!” Sorry, what does this suffix -ot mean? That’s the plural. That’s the feminine plural.

Female plural.

Okay. Sorry.

Okay.

You said, “Oh, like there’s something more significant than—” Yeah, just the feminine plural. So they’re sacrificing with the kadeshot. So there, the context is an actual cultic activity, sacrifice. So this, while it’s parallel to zonot, which is the feminine plural of zonah, it’s not suggestive that they are there to do— and you know, it’s not like they come out of the room and it’s like, “Let’s go do a sacrifice together!”

Okay, so yeah, we don’t have a ton of context to be able to gain a lot of contextual purchase on what exactly is going on here, which is why a lot of people will retreat to references in Akkadian literature or in Ugaritic literature, where the resonance with sex work is even less prominent, less clear. So, okay. So yeah, there’s not a good case to make that this is a reference to cultic sex workers. Could be a reference to regular sex workers. I don’t think there’s a decent case to make that when it’s referring to males, that is a reference to same-sex sex workers, but that’s a possibility. Or it could just be a reference to cultic personnel. Could be different from one context to the other. Yeah, I mean, that—

Yeah, none of this precludes the possibility of it meaning different things in different contexts, right? Same words frequently do that. Yeah. So that’s tricky. This is all very tricky, Dan. It’s not easy to figure out.

That’s what we do here. Yeah. Muddy the waters and then we scamper away, giggling.

The giggling is important. I mean, it’s not like, you know, cultic or—and when we use the word cultic, we should probably figure out what we mean by that. Just, just sort of to do with ceremonial slash religious.

Yeah. So, whatever. I don’t know. The word cult has overwhelmingly, and for the overwhelming majority of the existence of the word, it has referred to the ceremonial features or aspects of religious life. Right. So people try—every time people hear me say the word cult, they imagine I’m using it in the Jim Jones sense, right? And no, I’m using it in the—every religion has a cultic dimension. Not every religion, but the main religions that we talk about on this channel, religions associated with the Bible, whether that’s prayer, incense, sacrifice, um, those things are all that religion’s cult. Now, it—and I’ve mentioned earlier, we need to do a show on cult with some specialists who are getting quite annoyed with the use of this word recently. But yeah, when we are talking about a cultic something, we’re talking about some kind of religious activity that has to do with ceremonial worship practice-related stuff.

Right. So, okay.

Sorry, but we derailed something. Let me see if I can get us back on track. I don’t remember what we were doing. Oh, just that there is no—so what I was going to say is there are historical and ancient precedents for cultic sex work or cultic sex, at least.

We don’t really have clear evidence for it. Like, there’s even—

I’m saying just like, it may not be in this context, but like, ancient Greece, right?

Yes. No, this is kind of a—in all of ancient West Asia, the notion of cultic sex work is widely just assumed. There’s not a lot of good evidence for the conclusion, whether it’s Greece or Rome. Now, you have an awful lot of just run-of-the-mill sex work going on in all these places. And frequently they are attached to institutions. And so I don’t know that they were—a lot of this has to do with the assumption that fertility cults included sex work. And that’s something for which we do not have clear evidence, because those kinds of cults, you know, people weren’t out there writing texts about, “Here’s all the things that happened in my mystery religion today,” because they’re mystery religions. You’re not supposed to talk about them. That’s the first rule of mystery religions. You don’t talk about mystery religion. So, um, you know, this is why people will talk an awful lot about—and now I’ve completely forgotten the dude’s name.

I have Osiris in my head and it’s not Osiris, but there’s the Tauroctony. The guy kills a bull as part of this, and there were sacred meals and things like that, and it had to do with the sun. And we don’t really know because they didn’t leave any texts explaining what was going on and what their thinking was. And without texts, we’re like, well, could be, could be this.

But, but everybody’s like, I mean, it’d be more fun if there was sex involved. Let’s just, let’s just chuck it in there.

I just think so-and-so has been sleeping on the couch for too long and he’s just like, man, you say everything is about sex.

So, but no, I will say this. I have watched plenty of cult in the bad way documentaries and yeah, usually sex is involved.

Sex gets involved.

Let’s just get real about it. Especially in the early days of any new religion, the religious leader, unless it happens to be a lady person, which is more rare than it ought to be, and sometimes when it happens to be a lady person, it ends up being about getting that person, getting that leader some some strange—.

Yes, yes, it veers into that, um, quite quickly. Pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, we, we just don’t have a ton of evidence for, uh, temples like hosting or having their own, uh, sex work industries, so to speak. So, and for— and, you know, if you go to an archaeological dig and they, they find something and it’s not immediately clear what it is. Like, the next thing they’ll do is go, okay, probably cultic. Like, if it’s, if it’s some sort, you know, like if you look, Gary Larson’s Far Side, tools for cows. Yeah, like one of the things is clearly a saw, and Gary Larson knows he screwed up by making one of the things look like it could be identified. But all the other stuff, like We find that kind of crap in archaeological digs, and they all stand around and go, “Probably cultic. " “This was probably used as a ceremonial something. " “Yeah, and probably sex.

It’s probably a ceremonial dildo. " Oh, that’s—.

At some point we need to do a segment on the dildo in Ezekiel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. What?

Yeah, you guys remind us to do a thing about the Ezekiel dildo. That’s a— yeah, that’s a good one.

All right, but well, yeah, so as far as we can tell, no, uh, cultic sex workers in, in the Bible. So sorry, Doug.

I’ll try to mask my, uh, my own disappointment. Doug’s disappointed for an entirely different reason. Doug’s disappointed on the exact opposite side of the spectrum from my own disappointment. But yes, let’s not— let’s not let Brother Wilson’s bad misinformation get away from how stupid his—.

The bigotry he’s trying to pawn off is.

Yeah, yeah, it’s so bad. All righty. Well, let’s— let us then move on to our next thing, which is a chapter and verse. And this week’s chapter and verse— everybody open your Bibles right now and go to Psalms 151 . And as you start flipping through, we’re going to giggle to ourselves because you’re not gonna find it. Well, hang on. Oh, wait a minute. I may have spoken too soon.

I’m curious if the SBL Study Bible has Psalms 151 , because it has the Apocrypha. Yeah, okay. And, but if it is included, it seems to me like it would be in a different section. But I’m just scrolling, scrolling.

I’m looking in my trusty Gideon Bible.

It’s not in the SBL Study Bible.

And it’s not— yeah, the King James ends in 150. So what are we even talking about, Dan? There’s no 151. Oh, no, wait, there it is.

Page 1624. It is in the Apocrypha section. Ah, okay. Yes, yes. Sneaky. Sneaky. It’s a sneaky psalm. You underestimate the sneakiness. That is good old John Turturro.

Yeah. Okay. That one I remember.

You remember that one? All right. Psalms 151 is a psalm that is included in the Septuagint, and it is not included in the Masoretic Text. Now, when I mentioned this to you, I was like, “Yeah, it was written in Greek. Wait a minute, holy crap, no, it wasn’t. " It was actually written in— it was actually written in Hebrew.

In the Septuagint, it was in Greek.

Yes. So we’ve known about it for a long time because the Septuagint was in circulation before Jesus was even born. Right. And so, you know, it is in some translations of the Vulgate and stuff like that. But Psalms 151 claims to be an autobiographical account written by David. Yeah, it’s written in first person.

Yes. In the character of David. Yeah. Yes.

So I’ll go ahead and read the whole thing. And then we can get into the nitty-gritty. This psalm, and this is a, this is a, like, what is a prologue? There’s a part of it that introduces it and says, This psalm is ascribed to David as his own composition, so autobiographical, after he had fought in single combat with Goliath. So this is, uh, yes, post-killing. I was small among my brothers and the youngest in my father’s house. I tended my father’s sheep. My hands made a harp, my fingers fashioned a lyre.

I beheaded him and removed disgrace from the people of Israel. So this psalm was probably composed after a tradition developed that the Psalms were written by David, and somebody was like, we need something, we need a first-person, “I’m David, here’s what I did” kind of psalm.

Could it not have been composed, could it not have been the genesis of the idea that David wrote the Psalms?

No, because we have—

I think I just broke scholarly ground here. I think I just blew the doors off.

Well, there are a bunch of Psalms that say, “Mizmor leDavid,” which means Psalm to David, belonging to David, of David, something like that. Like, the exact sense of leDavid is unclear. It’s open to interpretation. So no, a lot of the Psalms lend to this idea that David was either the possessor, the intended audience for, or the author of the Psalms. And so I think this is just in those waters without necessarily being the origin of it. But for a long time, nobody had any evidence of any Hebrew version of this psalm. We had it in the Peshitta, which was a translation into Aramaic, the earliest versions of which date to shortly after the New Testament. So that’s a Semitic language, but no Hebrew.

And so like 100 years ago, there’s a quote from a scholar that says there’s no evidence that Psalms 151 ever existed in Hebrew. Done and dusted, right? Until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls and found, guess what, not only a version of Psalms 151 in Hebrew, but two separate psalms which were probably the origin of the single Psalms 151 .

So 151a and 151b. Yes.

And, uh, we have 151a is in, uh, is in Hebrew. This was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s a part of the Great Psalms Scroll, 11Q5, or 11Q Psalms is another way to refer to it. But this is just a bunch of columns of Psalms one after the other, and they’re grouped together, but they’re not arranged exactly as we find in the Masoretic Text, which lends credence to the theory that the arrangement of the Psalms is actually pretty late—is actually something that occurred quite late in the life of these texts. But so 151a has pretty much all the 7 verses that we talked about. Yeah. But 151b, or actually no, 151b has the reference to Goliath. 151a doesn’t. Right. We have: “The mountains cannot witness to God, the hills cannot proclaim him, but the trees have cherished my words, the flocks my deeds.”

Who can proclaim? Who can announce? Who can declare the Lord’s deeds? God has seen everything, God has heard everything, God has listened. God sent his prophet to anoint me, Samuel, to make me great. My brothers went out to meet him, handsome in form and appearance, their stature tall, their hair beautiful. But the Lord God did not choose them. Instead, he sent me. Or it said, “He sent and took me from following the flock, anointed me. God made me leader for his people, ruler over the children of his covenant.” And then 151b is where he says, “I went out to attack the Philistine who cursed me by his idols, and I cut off his head, and so I removed the shame from the Israelites.” And so it looks like the Greek version is kind of folding the two together. Right.

Is there a possibility? Because look, we’ve talked about David, we’ve talked about the fact that there was another guy who also slew Goliath. Yes. And so now I’m wondering if 151b and the harmonizing of the two for the Greek is actually—if that actually arises as an apologetic? Yeah, as a sort of like, we got to get this Goliath—like, the original David story didn’t include the Goliath thing. And when they decided to attribute the Goliath thing to David, they went back and sort of retrofitted the psalm with a little bit of Goliath action just to spice it up.

Well, I think the attribution of Goliath killing to David is much earlier than this psalm. But you do have the tension. You do have—because 1 and 2 Samuel probably were not, you know, it’s not like they wrote 1 and 2 Samuel from beginning to end and then were like, “Whew, that was a lot of work. Now we have the whole thing. Now it all gets published at once.” It was probably those two books, which anciently were one book, probably would have circulated as independent stories first. And so it’s probably not until the collation of the books of Samuel, whenever that happened, that people were suddenly like, “Well, wait a minute, we got 1 Samuel 17 over here, we got 2 Samuel 21:19 over here.”

And it’s probably around that time that Psalms 151 was composed, or at least these constituent parts. So yeah, I imagine that it could have had something to do with trying to clarify that issue, but it certainly wasn’t something that goes all the way back to the original. Okay. Let’s say David did it. That’s centuries earlier.

So yeah, but— All right. It’s very interesting. One of the funny things about this is that as I read it, it offers very little in the way of like, it doesn’t elucidate anything. It doesn’t make any claims that aren’t made elsewhere in the Bible.

It’s not tremendously useful. Well, and it also oddly is kind of thin on the praise. Yeah. Because you have the “the Lord hears” stuff, but for the most part it’s like, “And then I did this, and then I did that, and then God did this, and then I did that. " And so it’s— “My brothers were tall and handsome, but I still got it, so ha ha on them. " Yeah, and I’m looking for the word for the foreigner. Allophylos, I think, is what we have in the— I think the Greek says allophylos, which would be— which has been interpreted as foreigner, but is a reference to— is used in reference to Philistines. But yeah, I think it meant— I think it just meant foreigner.

But that’s what the Greek has— I don’t have the Hebrew. I don’t have the Dead Sea Scroll fragment in front of me, but I suppose I could pull it up.

Call Kip. Go, let’s get him on the line here. Not so that we can see the— but so that you can actually have a physical fragment in front of you.

I don’t think he carries them on him.

You don’t think he’s got one in his wallet? A little, just a little, a little Dead Sea Scroll bit.

Hey, buddy, you want to see something cool?

Whips it out on his Tinder dates just to show off.

Yeah, 11Q Psalms a. Okay, there are— there’s the psalm scroll. It would take a while for me to dig through here to find the Hebrew of this particular one, but it probably says Philistine because allophylos is something that was pretty typical of the Greek, rather than Hebrew. But yeah, when we were talking about this, you said secret psalm, and I immediately, because, you know, it’s David talking about himself, I was like, “I heard there was a secret psalm that David wrote. " And, you know, there are the rhyming—.

And it pleased his mom. It’s his mom.

There you go. But you don’t really care for scriptures, do you?

Scripture anyway.

Yeah, it goes like this: the harp, the lyre.

That is the harp and lyre thing. In mine, it’s translated, my hands made a musical instrument, my fingers strung up a lap harp. A lap harp.

I strung a lap harp. Well, musical instrument, like, man, that’s punting if ever anybody was. Take a stand, man. Stand for something, man.

You’re looking at that like it’s some kind of musical instrument. On the translation of 151a, the Hebrew, it actually says, “My hands made a flute, my fingers a lyre. " So that’s interesting. Who knows? I, I, you’re, you’re the one that can translate these things, but I, I just like that, uh, he’s, he, he’s a very musical fellow, this David. He— yeah, that’s, uh, that’s the rumor. And apparently he made his own instruments, which maybe that’s impressive too. I don’t know.

I, I think that’s probably also legendary.

Um, He was— you don’t think that he was actually a luthier?

I don’t think so. I certainly not on par with, uh, with your Martin or your Les Paul or, or, right, or anything like that. I exclusively play Martin, by the way, just so— oh, okay. Uh, that’s what that was sitting, uh, against my wall right now for those in the video. But I am awful, so don’t ask me to play anything.

Well, then it’s good that you picked an exclusive maker of your instruments.

Yes, it’s funny that, uh, the, the only two people in the Bible, or at least in Christian tradition, who are like known for being these cool musicians are David and Satan.

Wait, what did Satan play? Now, why don’t—.

This is just part of— this is just part of Christian tradition.

It’s not actually real. Oh, it’s not in the Bible?

It’s— no, it’s not. But, um, so in Ezekiel 28 , we we have the proclamation against the king of Tyre. And this is where we have God says, “You compare your mind with the mind of a god, therefore I will bring strangers against you,” blah, blah, blah. “Mortal, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord God: You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was your covering. ‘” and then lists precious stones after precious stone. So, you know, maybe the guy who did your translation would be like, “This kind of precious stone, and then a different kind of precious stone. " Emerald, and then there’s, uh, yeah. And then there’s one part where I think that the NRSV-UE renders it more clearly. It talks about, uh, yeah, “worked in gold were your settings. " and your engravings.

Now, that’s using some unusual Hebrew words, but traditionally that was understood to refer to musical instruments. Oh, in fact, if we— if you give me just a second, I want to pull up and see what the King James has to say. Silly King James. Verse 13: The workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Um, and, and then it goes on to say, thou art the anointed cherub that covereth, and I have set thee so. Thou wast upon the holy mountain of God, thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire, thou wast perfect. And it goes on like this. Yeah, yeah. Now this is, this is a very unique Eden tradition that is using the King of Tyre. The text is constantly calling the King of Tyre mortal. Mortal, you mortal.

You know, the contrast. I’m God, you mortal. And then it’s talking about Eden and talking about the King of Tyre as if the King of Tyre was Adam, since Adam means human, mortal. But it gets misinterpreted as a reference to Lucifer because there’s a later translation that understands Lucifer as an angel. And so when it says ‘Thou art the anointed cherub. ’ Obviously, that’s got to be Lucifer. He’s the only other one who was in the Garden of Eden, even though at this time period Lucifer or Satan had nothing to do with the Garden of Eden. But it talks about his musical prowess, and then there are some other later traditions that have him being this super sexy angel who was the prettiest and the most talented and everything. So You will hear that a lot, that Lucifer was this awesome musician, like the angel of music. And now I don’t even know if I’m allowed to sing Angel of Music or if we’ll get in trouble for that.

So I’ll just— and nobody wants to hear me sing, so.

Well, we’ll skip over it. Yeah. It’s a— yeah. Well, that’s interesting. It’s a mess. That’s a fun little side note. The music of the Bible. Yes. Apparently not much.

Well, the Psalms are quite musical, and although the ancient Hebrew, the musicality was enjoyed for different reasons. But if you— I found this out one time I was in Athens and I went to a Bible store. It was, I forget what it was, it was the Bible Society, some Bible society. ‘Cause I wanted to check and see what kinds of versions of the Bible they had. And I picked up a translation of the Septuagint. Now it was a translation from ancient Greek to modern Greek. Interesting. But it was all the Septuagint and, you know, the—.

Did it do a side-by-side? Yes, yes. Oh, wow.

And then the Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint, Greek Orthodox. Sure. And so they have Psalms 151 in there. So this, this is a part of the, the liturgy and part of scripture for a number of groups around the world, um, Christian groups, particularly Orthodox Christian groups, or any that descend from the tradition of the Septuagint. And so there are those who, who treat this as scripture. So Psalms 151 should not be dismissed offhand, and particularly because we have 2 versions of the original 2 elements of it preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And 151, so it’s placed in the Bibles that include it, specifically the Orthodox Bibles that you’re referencing.

And the Slavonic.

Is it placed at the very end of the Psalms? Is it the last Psalm?

Yes, it is the last Psalm. That’s weird.

It doesn’t feel like a last psalm. No, it feels like the beginning of something.

Yeah, you don’t tie off the whole book of Psalms with, “And then I cut his head off. " Right, right.

Right, right. Yeah, this feels like the— or like it feels like the opening gambit of an origin story or something.

Yeah, yeah, you would expect some— there’s no resolution here. In music, you got to resolve things. You can’t be ending on this kind of crescendo. So yeah, it does feel a little out of place. And who knows if there was a Psalms 152 that, you know, for whatever reason was left out. There are a number of places in the, well, not a number, there are a few places in the Bible where scholars have been like, this story is weird. Something’s missing, we don’t know what. And there are fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that preserve the missing part. Yeah. There’s this weird story in 1 Samuel 10 and 11 where it’s talking about this dude named Nahash, which means serpent. And he’s like, “Come over here and make a deal with me and I’ll gouge out your right eye.” And it’s kind of like, well, that was odd.

It just kind of comes out of nowhere. And scholars have noted for a long time, this is weird. And it turns out there were like 4 sentences that were left out because of something called homoioteleuton, which means like ending. And the idea is basically the guy who’s copying this, when you’re copying something, you got to look at the source and then you go over and you look at your paper and you write it down. You go back to the source, you find where you were, and then you remember what you see, and then you go write it down. And if the thing that you remembered ends a specific way, right, you run the risk of returning to the source text and picking back up in the wrong spot. Yeah. If there’s another similarly ending word or phrase somewhere else.

And so like if you’re— if the last sentence you wrote down ends with the phrase, ends with like, and that’s why we go to the market. And then 3 paragraphs down, there’s another, there’s another paragraph that ends with, and that’s why we go to the market. You could jump back, you could jump to the wrong place and just continue on from there.

If, if you are 3 paragraphs off from where you just were in your source text, you probably need to sit a few plays out.

You were sleepy that day. It’s not my fault.

Normally it’s like a couple of words or a line or two. Here it was like 3 or 4 sentences. And the funniest part is that the Dead Sea Scroll manuscript, the little fragment that preserves the missing portion, they did the same thing in the missing portion and they had to scribble the text in between the lines.

Oh crap. Oh crap. Hang on. No, let me get this part in.

Which is just a testimony of the risks that transcription has because they got like the first couple of lines of the missing portion, and then they skipped over a line and they had to come back in later and write in the missing line.

It’s the problem with hand scribing because Clippy doesn’t pop up and say, hey, it looks like you went to the wrong place.

You missed a spot. Yeah, you don’t get the red squiggly lines telling you— telling you that you spelled— what is the name— Dwigt? You, uh, when you did the find and replace from Dwight to whatever, you misspelled the name once, and so it didn’t— that’s how they get you. But that’s, I think, an interesting story of how the Dead Sea Scrolls have helped fill in some gaps. And here it helps restore knowledge of an original Hebrew version, not just an original Hebrew version, but two different Psalms, right, that were combined into one to create the source text for what was later preserved in our Septuagint.

Meaning it should probably be included in versions of the Bible, though I’m just going to say, I will repeat, it’s kind of boring. It doesn’t really—.

Uh, well, and, um, yeah, and, and what should be or shouldn’t be in our Bibles is, you know, I mean, we still have nobody. Nobody’s going to take the ending of Mark out of their Bibles. But we know that.

Tearing it out right now. Wait a minute.

Well, except for Thomas Jefferson, right? Yeah. Who famously took a scalpel to his New Testament. Yeah, he shredded that thing. Yeah. There are a bunch of things we know are secondary additions, but it’s like, we love it so much though, we can’t let it go. And similarly, there are some things that we didn’t have that we now know were there, that why not throw them back in there? Yeah. In the case of Psalms 151 , because it throws off the balance of the composition. But hey, let’s, you know, the order of the Psalms isn’t written in stone.

Yeah. So I will just say this. Y’all can just do with it as you please. It’s your Bible. Go with what pleases you. Yeah. And cut out what you want and leave in what you want. Chuck some new stuff in there.

It’s all like, as I am wont to say, it’s all negotiable anyway. So throw in some Spider-Man.

I don’t know. Have some fun with it.

I mean, hey, look, New York City, we know the place exists. We can go to New York City. We can even go to Hell’s Kitchen. Yeah. I mean, like Daredevil too. You got to throw that in there. And I think the NRSV-UE, the SBL Study Bible- I’ve lost my place, but I believe they stuck Psalms 151 right before 3 Maccabees. Yeah, so it’s right after the Prayer of Manasseh and right before 3 Maccabees. And I think it’s odd that they have all 4 Maccabees in here, but not one after the other.

You got to break up the Maccabees, otherwise they just-.

Too much Maccabees is-.

They start bullying the other books. It’s no good. You got to put them in different parts of the classroom.

2, 3, and 4 are basically the same story. At least 3 and 4 are kind of retelling a lot of the same stories. So that might be where they’re like, move it down a little bit. He’ll forget what the story was. They’ll think it’s a new composition.

They need a reminder later. Yeah. Let’s let him read a psalm in the middle. It’ll be-.

And this is why Luther was like, this is all crap.

This is nonsense. I’m moving this all to the back of the book. Yeah. Yeah. All right, friends. Well, that is it. We, we have done our job of muddying waters. So thank you for joining us for this week’s show. If you would like to become a patron of the show, which is the way that our show works, that would be great. And you, because of our gratitude for it, could receive an early and ad-free version of every show. You could get the after party, which is bonus content that we do on the weekly. So that’s exciting and fun. And you, and you get the warm glow of knowing that you’re helping us out. So please feel free to do that. It’s patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Thanks so much to Robert Goudie for editing the show. If you’d like to reach us, it’s contact@dataoverdogma.com. At dataoverdogmapod.com, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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