Hear, O Israel!

What’s the Song of Songs all about?

Songs. Oh, sex.

No, there you go. The hibbity-dibbity. So we’re going to go to Song of Solomon 6:9 . Thank you for that.

That was a gift to me.

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 in a couple of pleasing baritone voices. Isn’t that correct, Dan?

It’s all good over here, baby. Yeah, baby.

I’m thinking of lines from I’m Gonna Git You Sucka now.

Oh, okay.

With Isaac Hayes.

Neither of us have an Isaac Hayes voice.

No, no, I’m not I’m not even gonna try.

Well, today we got some fun, some fun show coming up. We have our first segment, our chapter and verse is maybe should just be called a verse, not chapter and verse, because it is literally a verse, which you have assured me we have enough to talk about just with a single verse.

We could be talking about this for the rest of the existence of our podcast. This verse, this is the verse when it comes to the Hebrew Bible. And this is something that everybody knows about. But yeah, this is Deuteronomy 6:4 . All right. Also the main part of the Shema.

Shema. We’re going to— we’re going to get super Shema on this.

Yes. You’re going to Shema me now and believe me later.

And then we’re going to do a segment that we’re now calling even though that we’ve done other parts that should have been in this segment, but we’re going to call it Is It Canon? And we’re going to be discussing, what is it, the letter of Jeremiah.

The letter of Jeremiah, yes. This quirky little letter that just seems like—.

Why isn’t it an epistle? Why does Jeremiah have letters and not an epistle?

Well, you know what? I bet if you went back into the King James Version, in fact, while we’re chatting, I’m going to pull it up. I bet you it says the epistle of Jeremiah. In the table of contents. No, I’m not looking for a document that dates to 1611. Damn.

Wait, are you saying that the King James had this? ‘Cause I thought this is apocryphal. Did this make it into the King James?

The King James Version had the Apocrypha for over 200 years.

Oh, that’s right, that’s right. I remember now, I remember now.

I was about to be like, do we need to do a show on this?

No, look, I can’t be held responsible for knowing all of the things that we’ve talked about on this show. I don’t listen to the show.

Little and a little. I don’t either. But a little behind the scenes BTS. Right. Every week, not every week, most weeks, what happens is either the day before or the morning of recording the show, we text each other and go, what are we going to talk about? And frequently the next response is, have we talked about this?

Yeah.

And we’re like, I don’t know, let’s go look.

And somebody will— somebody, please make a database for us, because I started a database when we started this, and then I did not keep it up. And now we have no way of searching. We have no way of knowing what we’ve talked about.

It’s a mess.

We have no way. Yes, we can search on our YouTube channel.

Point of order.

Yes.

The book’s called Apocrypha in the table of contents of the 1611 King James Version. Baruch with The Epistle of Jeremiah.

Okay. All right. Yes. And that was back before we’ll talk about that because, uh, because yeah, we, in some, in some things I read that it is the last chapter.

Yep.

All right.

Boom. All right.

Well, let’s, let’s start our show. Let’s do a show.

Yeah.

Let’s do the first thing first and then we’ll do the second thing second. I think that’s a great idea.

Awesome. Yeah. I’m just nodding, but you can’t see that on the radio if you’re listening to this.

Yes. Verbal responses are required for audio medium.

Yeah, I, I took to this like a fish to a bicycle. This, this medium just comes so naturally to me.

It’s— yeah, yeah, no, I think you’re a natural. I think you’re, you’re a pro at this point. We’ve done 100 and some— who knows how many of these we’ve done. Anyway, I think, I think this is 126. I don’t know. Anywho, uh, let’s do a chapter and verse. And the chapter is Deuteronomy 6 . The verse is 4. Should I just read it?

5 is right out.

3, shalt thou count. Actually, you know, before we read it, why don’t you give me a little bit of like sort of like situate me in—.

Yeah, the 30,000-foot view of—.

Yeah, in Deuteronomy. What are we looking at here? Why? What is this? Where are we? Who’s talking?

Who’s the dude? Um, who’s, uh, Deuteronomying? Yeah, yeah. So, so Deuteronomy, uh, second law is what this means. This is basically kind of a recapitulation of, of, uh, everything that has gone on with Moses. He’s like, uh, gather round, children, and I’ll tell you a tale of how you all kept screwing up and God kept punishing you, and, uh, and I was there the whole time. Um, but Deuteronomy is, uh, the kind of recapitulation of the law that adds a bunch of stuff. It is very different from the laws that we have in Exodus and Leviticus and scattered around Numbers and things like that. Right. And Deuteronomy 6 is important, particularly verse 4. The book of Deuteronomy came together over the course of a long time, centuries. It probably began, as we’ve talked before, during the reign of Josiah, toward the latter portion of the 7th century BCE, because we have this discussion, 2 Kings chapter 22.

Somebody shows up and says, “King Josiah, we were, you know, doing our spring cleaning in the temple, we’re renovating, and we found the Book of the Law!” And Josiah says, “Bring it here and we’ll read, you know, take it to the prophet Huldah and we’ll read it.” And “And lo and behold, it does all this stuff that serves my interests.”

I will, you know, tear my clothes in that place. Who would have thought that the law that we just found that no, you can’t see, happens to say a whole bunch of stuff that I really like?

“Can we look at it?” “No, you may not.” And Deuteronomy 6 is understood by an awful lot of scholars to probably have been the beginning of the earliest layer. Oh, and then you have laws in chapter 12 and, and elsewhere that were other central chunks of, uh, the probably first layer of Deuteronomy. And so this is probably, um, how the first version more or less of Deuteronomy would have started out. And then we also have the Deuteronomistic History as another part of this project, which is kind of rewriting the history of Israel and Judah in order to give the book of Deuteronomy a softer landing in the literary milieu for the elites. This is all going on on a very high level. It’s not like the people on the street are like, “Did you hear about the new edition of the law that was just published?” “Oh man, the new history just dropped and it’s fire!” They’re locking the representatives in the chamber.

They’re not letting them out until they get this written.

Oh, that joke is not going to make any sense when someone listens to this in a year and a half, but that’s okay.

Nobody’s going to listen to this in a year and a half. But this is— so this is going on, on a high level. This is propaganda. This is something that doesn’t really— scholars are moving in the direction of the conclusion that these texts were not widely known and certainly not widely forced until starting probably in the Hasmonean dynasty around the middle of the 2nd century BCE. So Deuteronomy 6:1 starts, “now this is the commandment, the statutes and the ordinances that Adonai your God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy.” And you have all these little kind of like tongue-in-cheek, uh, “when you get to the place that Adonai will choose to place his name,” wherever that might be, we don’t know for sure, but wherever that might be, rhymes with Jerusalem. Like, you have all these references to the temple, and it’s basically saying, you know, don’t worship Adonai anywhere but the Jerusalem temple.

Don’t use any priesthood other than the Levitical priesthood. You know, it’s one nation, one God, one king, one law, one man, one vote, all that kind of stuff. And then Deuteronomy 6:4 is, probably the most famous— within Jewish traditions, Deuteronomy 6:4 is probably the most famous passage in the entire Hebrew Bible.

One thing I want to get to is this whole chapter, it starts not with a word, but with a punctuation, which is a quotation mark. The whole thing is a quote, at least in NRSVUE that I’m looking at. I assume that that means that we’re trying to put this into Moses’s mouth?

Yes, this is Moses speaking.

Okay.

Yeah.

So verse 4 is also in quotes, because the whole darn thing’s in quotes. But it says— should I just read it?

Well, hang on, just to further contextualize that, this in Hebrew, like in Latin-influenced cultures, we call this Deuteronomy. In, or in Greek as well. In Hebrew, it’s Devarim, which means words. And the book begins, “Eleh haddevarim asher dibber Mosheh.” These are the words that Moses spoke. And so, yes, that’s the narrative framework that then leads into quotation mark, and then you get Moses speaking in his best— now I forget the actor who did it.

Are you thinking of Charlton Heston?

Charlton Heston, yes. In your best Charlton Heston, “Hear, O Israel.” Yeah, so tell you what, I’ll do— and I mentioned earlier Deuteronomy 6:4 , six words in Hebrew, very short, and we’re going to cruise on past the first two. In Hebrew, it’s Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Boom, that’s it. And then what is the translation from our beloved NRSVUE?

NRSVUE has it, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” Ooh. But they do have a— you’ve thrown a flag already.

Yes.

Flag on the play.

Yes.

There is a footnote that says, or “the Lord is our God, the Lord, the Lord is the Lord our God is one,” or “the Lord, our the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” or “the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”

Wow.

That’s a— it sounds like it’s not definitive in the Hebrew.

There’s— yeah, I’m going to quibble with this translation. But this is a hotly debated, or it has a history of being hotly debated. I think scholars for the most part have more or less settled on a way to understand this. But yeah, if we move past Shema Yisrael, which is just the imperative, “Hear, listen.” “Just listen to me.” Yeah. And “O Israel” is supposed to indicate the vocative. The “O” means “you.” And so, “Hey, you Israel, listen. Look up here, listen.” And then we’ve got “Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad,” and it is using Adonai, the Tetragrammaton, the divine name, Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh, twice. And then we have these words that follow after, Eloheinu and Echad. And the question is, are we to understand these as verbless clauses, the null copula? Where it is—.

You just said a whole bunch of words.

I’m going to explain. Is it an “X is Y” sentence? Because in Hebrew you don’t need the “to be” verb all the time. In fact, you very rarely ever need it. So you can just put two things together and it can be understood as “X is Y.” Or is one thing just qualifying the Adonai? And this phrase, “Adonai Eloheinu,” those exact words occur multiple times in the book of Deuteronomy . I think like 20-ish times, something like that. And every single time it is used the exact same way where Eloheinu is in apposition to Adonai. So it is not a verbless clause. It is just saying Adonai, that is to say, our God.

Okay. So Eloheinu means our God. It is the possessive plural first person of Elohim.

Elohim, exactly. So, uh, and this occurs a bunch of times, and it always means, uh, the Lord our God. So it never is used in Deuteronomy, as near as we can tell, to mean Adonai is our God. So that translation, I’m gonna argue, not likely. Not—.

So you, you like the translation to be, uh, Adonai our God—

Correct.

Comma.

But it’s also kind of a casus pendens or left dislocation, which is where you—.

I had one of those. I had to go see my shoulder. It was— I had to go see a PT for a while.

And the— and that’s where you state the subject, but then you kind of start the sentence over. So if I go, Dave, he went and did this. What I’ve done is I’ve taken the subject of the sentence and I’ve just removed it and stuck it at the beginning of the sentence, and then I’ve restated it in the sentence. So it would kind of be like saying, “Let me tell you something! Let me tell you something! Adonai our God, he is such and such.” You’re kind of punctuating, “This is the subject, and now I’m going to carry on.” And then we have “Adonai echad,” and that, uh, could be, uh, Adonai alone.

You would need to interpret the first phrase as a sentence, “The Lord is our God,” in order for it to be “the Lord alone. " So I think most scholars would say, “The Lord our God, namely, the Lord is one,” or “Adonai is one. " Okay. And so this raises the question of, what the hell does that mean? What does that mean?

Right. Yeah. You haven’t gotten me closer to understanding yet. Yes. I’m still—.

Because a lot of people understand this as the quintessential declaration of monotheism, but it’s not a question of how many gods there are. It appears to be a question of how many Adonais there are.

Right. Because when we are saying Adonai or the Lord, we’re not just saying a God. We are— we are— it is the Tetragrammaton. It is his name. So like, we’re naming a very specific being, a very specific entity, right?

And then using Eloheinu is interesting. A lot of people don’t look hard at this, but Eloheinu, as you pointed out, is the noun Elohim with a first common plural pronominal suffix or possessive suffix. So that presupposes the existence of other gods. Because it’s saying, “God. " Well, which one? “Our God. " Right. The one that pertains to us. Not that one over there, not those over there. Our God. So it’s already presupposing the existence of other gods. And this is much like the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me. " The first commandment is not, “Everything’s cool because there are no other gods. " First commandment is, “You shall have no other gods before me,” which from the beginning presupposes there are other gods, and the same is true of Deuteronomy 6:4 . So I don’t think there’s a good case to make for a monotheistic reading of this, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever heard me speak before, because I’m kind of big on that one about no monotheism in the Bible.

Yeah, you should get in and edit the Wikipedia page about the Shema, because it’s It’s literally, the first paragraph says that it encapsulates the monotheistic essence of Judaism.

Oh, well, and you know, once it has been, it gets taken up in early Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism and late antique and later Judaism. And that’s how it has traditionally been interpreted, as that quintessence of the one Godness. Or the oneness of God. I’m talking about what it would have meant for the authors who originally wrote this out for the first edition of the book of Deuteronomy , the Josianic edition. So, and there’s a wonderful book by a friend of mine, you met him too, when we were coming home from SBL last year in the airport in San Diego. You’ll recall the tall British guy stopped me and chatted with me. That’s Nathan MacDonald. He wrote a wonderful book called Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism, and he’s got a whole chapter reviewing where scholarship has been, the critical scholarship, where it’s been on Deuteronomy 6:4 , and reviewing what it most likely means.

And I think he makes a compelling case. And one of the interesting things that he talks about is how throughout Deuteronomy, uh, the the way the law is set out, the covenant that God makes with Israel, where Moses is like, so this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and this is all trying to show that God has made a covenant with you, Israel. And this covenant is patterned after the vassal treaties of Neo-Assyrian emperors, folks like Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon. These were folks who are writing, um, vassal treaties. And a vassal treaty is basically where a larger empire or nation state, a sovereign, is beating up on a smaller one and says, “We’re going to enter into an agreement. " And here’s where you have to imagine some henchman walking into a mom-and-pop shop in New York City going, “It would be such a shame for something to happen to such a lovely little establishment. " and demanding payment in exchange for protection from me, right?

And what I would do to you if you did not give me the payment. Um, the money. Yeah, um, that’s a, that’s a running joke with my wife and me.

Uh, my wife has always shared it with all of us.

Yes. Um, but, uh, and so the Assyrians were kind of the ones who invented or at least they might not have invented it, but they perfected the vassalage where— and they wrote out these treaties, which was basically like, here’s the agreement.

“Someday, and this day may never come, I may call on you to do a favor for me.”

Yeah. And so Deuteronomy is framed according to this idea of covenantal love, right? And, um, and there are—the apologists don’t like that because that means Deuteronomy is coming from the 7th century at the earliest, right? And it’s supposed to be, you know, like 14th or 12th century. And so they’ll say, well, it shares some similarities with some Hittite treaties from the 2nd millennium BCE, so we’re going to focus on those and not on the Neo-Assyrian stuff. So they’re not big fans of that. But one of the things that Nate points out is there’s one other occurrence of this use of “one,” where somebody is identified as “one.” So-and-so is “one.” And it’s such a fascinating example. It’s in the Song of Songs. And it’s an easy one to remember. What’s the Song of Songs all about?

Songs.

No, sex. No, there you go, the hibbity-dibbity. So we’re going to go to Song of Solomon 6:9 . And thank you for that. That was a gift to me. This is not my joke. This—I—this is real. Um, so Song of Solomon 6:9 , um, and it says, “my dove, my perfect one, is one,” and that’s the feminine form of what we see in Deuteronomy 6:4 , which is the masculine form. And then it says, um, the—the NRSVUE says, “the darling of her mother, flawless to her who bore her.” And I’m not a big fan of—of that, but it says, it says she is “one” to her mother, uh, the favorite she is to the one who bore her. And so we have two occurrences of this identification of the lover’s dove and perfect one as “one.” And it does not mean this is the only woman out there, right?

No other women exist. And we know this because the previous verse says there are, there are sixty queens and eighty concubines and maidens without number. And then they go, “but my dove, my perfect one is one.” And so the idea here is not this is the only one that exists. The idea here is that this is the only one for me. Okay. This is the only one that matters. And so when we—and then we go to the next part, “she is one to her mother.” And so people think, oh, well, that means she’s an only child. But then it calls her the favorite, right, to the one who bore her, which, uh, a lot of scholars have pointed out doesn’t support the idea of an only child. Rather, this is the mother’s favorite child. In other words, again, the only one for me. Of all the ones that are available, this is the one that matters to me. And so this would suggest, in accordance with the context of Deuteronomy that is all about a covenant where God is saying, “Me and you, me and you, just me and you, and now you have to acknowledge that Adonai is one,” meaning I’m the only God for you, right?

And you shall have no other gods, the first commandment. So I think Nate makes a wonderful case that the idea here is not that Adonai is the only God that exists. The verse actually presupposes the opposite, that Adonai is one of many other gods, but Adonai is our God and Adonai is one to us, right? Which is exactly what we have in like 1 Corinthians when Paul says, “There are many gods and many lords, but for us there is one God.” And so I think this is all interrelated. It is about an exclusive relationship, not some kind of exclusive existence. And this would fit with a lot of the rhetoric elsewhere in Deuteronomy and elsewhere in Deutero-Isaiah and the other literature from around this time period that frequently insists “there is no other god beside me,” not in the sense that no other gods exist, but in the sense that no other gods—that no other gods matter to you.

This is again, like it’s, when you look at all the rhetoric that has been identified as monotheistic, when you situate it within its setting and its context, it all makes the most sense by far as rhetoric about how this is the only God that matters. All the other gods are meaningless in light of what we have.

This thing that we have is special, right? Especially in a—in a time and place where I assume nearby cultures have multiple gods. It becomes important to be—to be very clear. You don’t have multiple gods. You don’t get multiple gods. Don’t go—don’t go straying your eye to other gods, you get one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, you get one. There’s, uh—and, and, and this is really the whole—like, this is the emphasis in the Bible that for so long people have suggested is monotheism. It’s not there’s only one that exists, it’s you get one, right? I’m the one. And that’s how God is a jealous God. What the heck does it mean to say God is a jealous God if there aren’t any other possibilities? Right. It’s only meaningful if there are other possibilities.

If you could cheat on him. Yeah.

And so, you know, worshiping other gods is frequently represented as cheating on God in Hosea, in Isaiah and Jeremiah and everywhere. So, um, so yeah, Deuteronomy 6:4 is really about an exclusive relationship, uh, with God. I, I think that’s the best argument out there. Uh, I think it fits, uh, the situation. It fits this first layer of Deuteronomy. It fits what Josiah was trying to do. Now, there is an interesting other reading that I really—that I—is my number 2. This is my backup reading. Okay. Um, and this is because this is the first layer of Deuteronomy. This is going on when there were other cult sites besides the Temple of Jerusalem. Now, Sennacherib had destroyed them a century before. The kings before Josiah were probably rebuilding them, trying to reestablish this worship of Adonai and Asherah and things like that at these other cult sites. Another interpretation is mono-Yahwism, which would be there is no Adonai of Teman and Adonai of Shomron.

And Adonai of Jerusalem. There is only one Adonai, that is the Adonai of Jerusalem. In other words, it would be an attack against the worshiping manifestations of Adonai at other locations. Oh, okay. Because you’re only allowed to worship in the one location where Adonai will choose to place his name, which would be Jerusalem. So there’s another interpretation that understands this to be saying You can’t go to other temples to worship Adonai. Adonai is one, and that one is in Jerusalem.

Meaning the one is actually the address.

It’s One Jerusalem Street. Yeah, One Jerusalem Street in Jerusalem.

Yeah, don’t go anywhere else. A1 A1 A1. Well, I think that that is fascinating.

I think we got to cut it off. We could go on for weeks. We could go on for weeks.

I want to ask you why Jews who do the Shema prayer now cover their eyes, but we got to go on. We got to move on. I got to go on. So we’re going to do that, and someone can explain the covering eyes thing in the comments of the YouTube channel or something. Anyway, I do think that this is actually a great transition point, talking about physical locations of temples and/or gods. So let’s move on to Is It Canon? And the canon, uh, the quasi-canonical, the possibly canonical, uh, questionably canonical book that we’re going to be talking about is the Letter of Jeremiah. Right. And, uh, and this, as we said before, this was—this sometimes has been just is the last book of the other questionably canonical book of Baruch.

Yes. So it’s usually chapter 6 of Baruch in the Latin, certain Latin traditions and manuscripts.

Okay. Yeah. But it is an interesting—it’s a one-chapter deal. But it’s a longish chapter, as biblical chapters go.

Yeah, 70, 72. 72 Verses. Ironically, that’s 6 times 12. That’s the number of elders that were supposed to have gone to Alexandria to go translate the Septuagint. Okay, certainly the versification is modern though.

The versification has me baffled frequently in this, in this chapter, in this book specifically. The verse just starts in the middle of a sentence. Yeah, yeah, you, you have to know frequently that—were they just counting a certain number of words and then just chunking a number there? Like, verse 5 starts in the mid— like, literally verse 4 says, so beware of becoming at all like the foreigners or of letting fear of these gods possess you. There is no punctuation. Verse 5 starts, when you see the multitude before. Like, come on, man. Just put an end stop.

I was actually getting confused between the verse numbers and the footnote markers. Oh, right. Because sometimes they occur in pretty close succession. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, one’s a number, one’s a letter, one’s a number, one’s—I can tell the difference between these two. But this is a letter. It’s in the form of a letter or an epistle if you’re nasty. And this purports to be a letter from Jeremiah sent to those who were to be taken to Babylon as exiles by the king of the Babylonians.

So it’s still before the New Testament.

And just to remind me, when the exile happened?

When? So, uh, the Babylonians, there are, uh, two main waves: 597 BCE and then 586 BCE. And it’s the 586 invasion that results in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Uh, I think some folks think this is probably the 597, uh, wave that this letter is supposed to be associated with. Okay. Uh, but yeah, this is, uh, purportedly Jeremiah writing to the exiles. And this, as you mentioned, this is sometimes connected to the end of the Book of Baruch, which itself is sometimes connected to the end of Jeremiah. Oh, okay. But it also sometimes will be separated from Baruch by the Book of Lamentations . Oh. So Jeremiah’s got a lot of books attributed to him. He’s got some reach. Yes, some of more and less dubiousness in terms of canonicity.

But it starts off as you would expect a letter to start off: Because of the sins that you have committed before God, you will be taken to Babylon as exiles by Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians. Therefore, when you have come to Babylon, you will remain there for many years, for a long time, up to 7 generations. After that, I will bring you away from there in peace.

Wow, what an amazing prediction that ended up being.

Yeah, it’s like this— it’s so amazing. 7 generations from now won’t matter to you, but 7 generations from now, yeah.

And is that about the length of the exile, 7 generations?

That’s a traditional way to measure it. Okay. So yeah, this is definitely written by someone much later on down the road.

Just after the fact, just Yeah, working that in. I do want to say, when I first read that opening line, “Because of the sins that you have committed before God,” like explaining that the reason for the exile is the sins of these people. I was like, why is that the setup here?

Why is it? Was that really necessary? Why is it you guys suck?

And so you get to have to put up with this. But it becomes clearer as we move into the rest of the book. Yeah. Because, because we definitely can’t— because there’s the danger that if it’s not because of our sins, then, then that means that our God couldn’t have protected us from this. Yes. So somehow, This is a punishment rather than our God not protecting us.

This is the classic rationalization for being conquered, right? Or being invaded. And you see it in the Mesha Inscription, the oldest alphabetic narrative text that we have ever found, has Mesha explaining that the Omride dynasty was able to basically subjugate Moab because Chemosh was angry with his land. And so this is, you know, within your nation’s worldview, you’ve got to protect that worldview if your identity is going to carry on. And so if you get defeated, you got to come up with a reason why God allowed you to be defeated. Because, you know, we got smoked by that. Go for it. Yeah. Adelante. Yeah, we got smoked by the god next door doesn’t do good things for the power structures. And so you’ve got to come up with a reason that God allowed it to happen. And this is all over the rationalizations for the exile. And so, you know, it’s, oh, you sinned, God was angry. And, you know, it happens when temples are destroyed and when invading forces carry off your divine image. They’ll be like, the god abandoned the image and didn’t care what happened to it, and so he allowed it to be carried off. They— everybody’s got an excuse, and right, and, and the excuse never hurts the person who has failed. Just like right now, the excuses always protect the one responsible for all the trouble and all the problems because he is monumentally incompetent. It’s always like, well, it’s not his fault, it’s everybody else for not recognizing how awesome he is. So, but yeah, this is a, this is a, a meeting that could have been an email. And you know what, I think, I think the email could have been verses 3 through 5 because that is the thesis statement that is just unpacked in a redundant way over the next 67 verses.

You ain’t kidding, man. It is.

It rehashes, it retreads the same ground a lot.

Yeah. So 3 through 5 is just, now in Babylon you will see gods made of silver and gold and wood that people carry on their shoulders and that cause the nations to fear. So beware of becoming at all like the foreigners, or of letting fear of these gods possess you when you see the multitude before and behind them worshiping them. But say in your heart, ‘It is you, O Lord, whom we must worship. ’ For my angel is with you, and he is watching over your lives. Fine. That could have been the end of the letter.

That’s the whole thing. Because literally, it just— it gets infuriating. I’ll be honest with you. It’s painting a picture.

And it is getting a little muddy.

Well, it’s painting a picture and then repainting the same picture over that picture and then doing it again and again. And the thrust of it really is just, hey, you guys are going to see a bunch of other gods. Don’t worry, they’re not real. And that is, that is the entirety of the thing over and over and over again.

And you’re going to hear about wood, silver, and gold. Like 30 times. Yeah. It is always repeated that these are just, these are the works of human hands, wood plated with silver and gold, and they can’t— and I love, there’s a lot of, there’s a note in the SBL Study Bible that points out there are a lot of references to women associated with ritual work, and it may be highlighting just how involved in ritual and worship and cult women were in the ancient world. And I think there’s a debate to be had about the degree to which this is intended to be a contrast with Judahite worship practices, versus perhaps this reflects the fact that women were integrated into Judahite worship practices as well prior to everything becoming patriarchalized.

But there are some interesting things in here, and they love to make fun of the other priests. I’ve got to find— because they’re like, they sell this stuff and they use the money to go visit sex workers.

Oh my gosh. It is just nonstop, like, complete slander of the other priests. Yeah. They cut their hair, they shave their beards, They steal the clothes off of their gods and give them to their kids.

Yeah. “Likewise, their wives preserve some of the meat with salt, but give none to the poor or helpless. Sacrifices to them may even be touched by women during their periods or after giving birth. " Yeah. So yes, the horror. But it is— They don’t like the gods. They obviously don’t like the priests, the cult personnel, the officials who are involved in curating them and their worship. And so yes, they become— they are adulterers, their wives are gross, they’re visiting the sex workers, they’re doing all the bad stuff. They’re not giving anything to the poor or the needy. And because it’s all wood plated with silver and gold.

Can I ask you a question? Like, so one of the things that this brought up for me is, because you mentioned just earlier, as we were talking about this segment, you mentioned that the, you know, the idea of like, oh, they took our, they took our divine image, our, you know, whatever statue or whatever, and carted it away. Well, it’s okay, because God left that. Did the Judahites or whoever it was that wrote this, did they have imagery that was meant to contain their god? Because it doesn’t— 100%. Because here’s why that’s like, that’s crazy-making, because he keeps making all of these arguments about why the Babylonian gods, you shouldn’t, you don’t have to worry about them at all. They’re just made out of wood. If they fall down, somebody has to pick them up. ‘If they do this, you know, if they get dust on them from the temple, what are we even talking about here? ’ Yeah, they’re kind of cool with that.

Somebody has to wipe the dirt off of the gold so that you can see that it’s gold. Yeah. So this is coming in a period when— because the exile was when they really chose to use idols, divine images, as the wedge issue. Okay. And in my book, Adonai’s Divine Images, I talk about this, how there seems to be a renegotiation of divine presencing. What kind of material media are we going to use in order to manifest God’s presence? And because the temple in Jerusalem would have had divine images, we have a Judahite temple preserved at Arad that had a divine image in it that had— it’s still there, you can go look at it. It’s a standing stone. It looks like a headstone from a cemetery. And that would have been the thing that housed the divine presence, the divine agency.

And was all of this just jealousy because they had better looking gods?

Well, the larger empires around them definitely had more gods, more money, more experts, a bigger market. So they had a lot more anthropomorphic statuary and things like that. And there was a lot more silver and gold, where we think that the ancient Israelites and Judahites were mainly working in clay and stone.

And these Babylonian gods were definitely anthropomorphic because it describes they have a tongue, but that it was “Blah, blah, blah. They have eyes, but they can’t see.” Like, this is definitely a human figure.

Frequently, not exclusively. There were divine images that were not anthropomorphic, and there’s a wonderful book that was edited by Barbara Porter called What Is a God? That was all about Mesopotamian divine imagery and deity and what it meant to be a god. It seems like in ancient Israel it was primarily standing stones or miniature statuary that was in the shape of a bull or maybe a horse or maybe a human or something like that. In fact, one of the other temples that was more recently discovered at Tel Motza, they found incorporated into one of the walls a broken probably standing stone that has two little legs in a smiting pose that were probably—so probably there was a standing stone that was an image that depicted either Baal or Adonai, the storm deity, in a smiting pose.

And at some point it was broken and the stones were just reused architecturally. Why not? Yeah, but what I argue in the book is that the realization that the divine images are vulnerable, that they can be destroyed, and the fact of that happening in 586 BCE led to a renegotiation where they’re like, “We need to find a better way to do this.” And my thesis is that it moves to text. And this is why you have texts in Deuteronomy and in Joshua where they’re supposed to set up standing stones and write the text of the law on the standing stone, which is the divine image, and then they worship because the standing stone with the law on it has facilitated the presence of the deity. And so the law then becomes kind of the locus of divine agency, right?

Um, but I, uh, I—we can also look in, uh, what’s called the Ark Narrative in Samuel. What happens when the Philistines come up to battle against the Israelites and the Israelites go, we got our Ark! The Philistines take the Ark, they abscond with the divine image, and what do they do? They go put it in their temple right next to their divine image of Dagon. Now, the Philistines wouldn’t have been worshiping Dagon anywhere near this period. But then they get in a divine image battle, and the Ark of the Covenant wins. The first morning they come in and they see that Dagon has fallen over. The second morning they come in and Dagon’s head and hands are cut off. Oh, wow. And so, the Ark of the Covenant is the Yahwistic divine image that, you know, just dominates the other divine images. It’s kind of your celebrity death match going on in the temple at night when nobody can see.

Between two inanimate objects. Right, right.

But that’s the exact same thing. That is what divine images do. And so when you ask that question, did they have divine images that might have gotten carted off? We have stories about their divine image being carted off by the Philistines. And then it has to make its way back, back to Israel, you know, and it gives them all hemorrhoids.

The Philistines are—I’m pretty sure it actually melts their faces if they try to open it.

I saw a whole documentary called something called Raiders of the Lost Ark with a very handsome leading man, right? So that’s actually based on an interpretation of the Ark narrative, because the Ark gets—the Philistines are like, this is too much for us. We’re putting it on a cart with some cows. We’re slapping them on the rump and we’re just sending the Ark packing. And it makes its way and the cows just march the Ark right up to Beit Shemesh, a city, and they just stop and they’re like, oh, it’s the Ark of the Covenant.

And it says that—Did somebody order these cows with an Ark?

And it says they look—the, the text is corrupt. We don’t know exactly what it originally said, but the—how it’s traditionally interpreted, the, uh, the people of that community looked into the ark and either 50 or 70 of them, or like 50,000 of them, were killed. Oh wow. And it wasn’t 50,000 because there wouldn’t have been 50,000 people living in that entire settlement. Seems like a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but that’s one of the—that’s the story from which we get the, uh, the Face Melter.

Because we’re not good at this.

We have made it clear we don’t know what we’re doing here, uh, and it is very easy for us to lose the plot. But yeah, if we haven’t done that frequently—.

Frequently we’ll say something in passing and then like 6 months down the road we’re I think we did an episode on that.

We did it in that one episode. Yeah. So I don’t think we’ve done the Ark. I think we should do it. I think you just ruined one of the best punchlines from that episode, but that’s fine. The whole cows and the people losing their faces thing. We’ll get back to it. Anyway, don’t let us forget to do this, you guys.

Yeah. But the Letter of Jeremiah is kind of your classical idol polemic, which starts with Jeremiah, with Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and others who are basically just saying, “Those aren’t real gods, you dumb-dumbs. Those are just idols of stone and wood and gold, and they can neither eat nor drink nor breathe nor see nor speak nor hear nor any of that kind of stuff.” And here’s the thing to point out: this is a very crafty little piece of polemic, because they know that the wood and the gold is not the god itself. They know that’s just the channel that transmits the agency because they’ve been doing the same thing. They did the same thing with the Ark. They do the same thing with standing stones. They did the same freaking thing with the Nehushtan when Moses puts the serpent, the bronze serpent on the staff. Exact same logic. So they know that saying that piece of stone or that wood covered in gold isn’t a real god.

They know that’s not what they believe, right?

They’re basically saying those guys are idiots with their idols. It’s idol worship over there. When we do it, it’s actually fine. It’s real. Yeah, we do it. But those guys, what are they even doing?

Yeah, I don’t know what they’re doing. And yeah, it’s So you’ve got to divert the— they were doing all the same stuff in the pre-exilic period. Then you begin to diverge in the exilic period, and they have to kind of misrepresent the logic of divine images, of idols, and that misrepresentation becomes the truth for them and for almost everybody ever since, because that, you know, that it works for Paul. Paul says the same thing, “An idol is nothing in the world.” But then he also kind of gives away the game when he’s like, “But you know, when they worship that, they’re actually worshiping these demons.” So he knows there are divine forces and agencies that are associated with that.

Yeah, he ascribes power to it, but then he’s like, “Eh, don’t worry about it.” Yeah, it’s stupid.

Look at it, you can push it over. Poke it in the eye, it can’t feel. It doesn’t know what’s going on.

Don’t worry about it. Don’t do that to ours though. Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. Can I ask one just sort of dumb side question? That’s— that it just kind of— I’m trying to imagine this in the middle of this, uh, of this book, of this chapter. Chapter, yes, which is the book. Uh, there is a, a little side note, just sort of— we’re continuing to make fun of how dumb the way the Babylonians worship is, and this is around verse 40. It says they have no sense. And it says, verse 41, “And the women with cords around them sit along the passageways burning bran for incense. When one of them is led off by one of the passersby and is taken to bed by him, she derides the woman next to her because she was not as attractive as herself,” and her cord was not broken. Did they have prostitutes that were like bound in rope?

And then—.

That’s a— we’ve addressed the idea of cultic sex work recently. We don’t have good evidence for it. This is another example of a kind of obscure reference to something that some people think could be cultic sex work, but we don’t really have a good idea of what’s going on here.

I mean, it’s a— it seems very much to be an accusation of cultic sex work.

Well, it might, and it might not even be cultic. It might just be regular old, regular old sex work.

Yeah, I’m just more— I’m more fascinated by this cord thing. I need to know how the cords work. You cut someone’s cord and then you’re like, you come with me. Let me just cut this.

It’s kind of like, it’s kind of like the beads at Mardi Gras.

I mean, maybe, maybe you just got to break the string or whatever. They’re all behind some cords. Sorry, I found that fascinating.

But yeah, I mean, I, there’s— I don’t think we have any background that we can fill in on that. I think that’s just something that, you know, we’re like, well, that’s weird and we have to move on.

But it does feel like it is sort of in the context of pooping on their temple and saying that it’s— that their sort of cultic practices are bad. So it makes sense to me that even if, you know, whether that’s evidence that cult— that, you know, again, this is a smear campaign. So we don’t know how much of it is based on any kind of truth about the Babylonians. But it does seem to me to be an accusation that there were sex workers.

And this is also coming from someone who never lived to see a Babylonian in their entire life. This is written centuries after they were gone. And so this is probably going to reflect— and the point here is probably to suggest, hey, when you see this going on in Greco-Roman culture, here’s how you should think about it. So I imagine that it probably has more to do with Greco-Roman culture. And there’s a note here, um, in the SBL Study Bible: according to Herodotus, Histories 1:199, it was the obligation of every Babylonian woman once in her lifetime to sit in the temple precinct of Aphrodite or Ishtar until selected for sexual intercourse by a stranger. Presumably as part of the fertility rites associated with the goddess. And you’re supposed to see also Strabo’s Geography. Herodotus makes no mention of the burning bran, which may have been a form of grain offering or perhaps an aphrodisiac.

I have been around bran muffins that have become burnt. Didn’t work, if that’s what that’s for.

Were you tied up with a cord at the time?

That might have been what I was missing. And so Herodotus also didn’t have a great understanding of what was going on in Babylon, and historians don’t really take much of that incredibly seriously because we have no evidence for these fertility rites associated with cultic sex. Okay. That’s, yeah, that’s something we don’t really think went on. But, you know, the author of the letter of Jeremiah was probably just going off of what they were finding in Herodotus and elsewhere. So yeah. All right.

Well, there you go. Don’t be afraid of Babylonian gods.

Well, and I think, I think it would be instructive to just tie it off by reading the very end. Okay. ‘Like a scarecrow in a cucumber bed that guards nothing, so are their gods of wood overlaid with gold and silver.’ In the same way, their gods of wood overlaid with gold and silver—did we mention that? Overlaid with gold and silver—‘are like a thorn bush in a garden on which every bird perches, or like a corpse thrown out in the darkness. From the purple and linen that rot upon them, you will know that they are not gods.’ and they will finally be consumed themselves and be a reproach in the land. Better, therefore, is someone upright who has no idols. Such a person will be far above reproach. Love, Jeremiah. Kindest regards, Jeremiah. XOXO. Um, my, uh, I always sign off emails with hyphen D-A-N. And I do it really fast, and the M is right next to the N on my keyboard.

And I am dead serious, I have probably sent more than a dozen emails where I accidentally signed off “damn.” Damn. Yeah, D-A-M-N. Yeah, hyphen D-A-M-N. And some of those were actually like formal emails, so I’m like, oh crap, thank you so much for your kind, uh, yeah, words and blah blah blah.

Damn. All right, well, that’s it for this week’s show. Uh, thank you guys so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, uh, you can join our Patreon. It’s a legion of great people. We’re calling them the Tribe of Dan, or the, uh, the Danites. We’re not sure. Anyway, go become one. Uh, you can, you can get access to an ad-free version of every show. At a certain level, you can get the, uh, after party, which is bonus content for every episode that we do. Uh, thanks so much to our patrons. Uh, it’s over there on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Uh, thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and thank you for tuning in. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.