The Indiana Jones Episode!

Did the Red Hulk ever lift Thor’s hammer? And I guess he was—.

Now we’re crossing the streams. We’re crossing the streams.

And you know you can’t cross streams. It’s just— don’t cross the streams. 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, because why not? And we combat the spread of misinformation about the same, because we all know why. Uh, how are things today, Dan?

I’m, uh, things are great. Today’s gonna be fun. Uh, this is a— we, we are— we’re going, uh, we’re going cinematic on this one. Okay. Yes, we are taking a trip down, uh, down Indiana way. We’re gonna go down the Indiana Jones trail, if you will.

Well, that was the name of the dog. Not the road that he grew up on, right? I don’t know. I didn’t— yeah, anyway, moving on.

Moving on. Yeah, so we’re going to start as one does on one’s Indiana Jones special with the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant.

Yeah, we will not be doing any raiding per se, but we will—.

That would be unethical of us, as Indiana Jones was frequently.

Yeah, he— oh yeah, he wasn’t tremendously concerned about ethics, unless he was, and then it was like, why are you even bothering with that? Uh, and then at the, uh, for our second, uh, thing, we’re gonna do— we’re gonna do the grail, the Holy Grail.

We’re gonna skip right over, uh, the middle one, the one that my wife hates, but I was like, why did we pay for the three movie set if you refuse to have that movie on in this house.

There’s no Temples of Doom in the Bible.

Uh, yeah, we’re gonna unrelated, and we’re gonna Om Namah Shivaya right by, uh, that one.

And, and if we have time at the end, we’ll talk about a crystal skull. We’ll see. But for now, uh, let’s, let’s dive in with the Ark of the Covenant. All right, so We’ve all heard of the Ark of the Covenant. Yes, it’s— it is a very famous thing. But what the heck is it? It seems— it’s funny because, you know, it is very much in pop culture, not just in Indiana Jones movies, but in other things. We all know that it is now resting comfortably in a warehouse, in a U. S. government warehouse.

Yes. —And it’s evidently magnetic or something. I don’t know. Burns holes and stuff. But yeah, what’s funny is the Bible has two arks, and this is two different Hebrew words. Like, they’re not the same word, but they get translated as ark.

Okay, so one is a giant boat, an enormous, unplausibly impossible— Unplausibly, yes. Unplausibly large boat. Me fail English? And then the other is a box. Yes.

And they’re both kind of box-ish. Like the Hebrew word for Noah’s Ark is a chest, a casket, something like that. And the Hebrew word for the Ark of the Covenant, aron, is the same thing. It just means a box. Okay. And this Hebrew word is used in places to refer to the sarcophagus into which Joseph’s corpse was placed in Genesis. Jehoiada placed an aron next to the altar for the collection of money for the temple. We have a few different uses of this. And then we also have the phrase, well, we have several phrases. There’s several titles for this thing. We have Ark of the Testimony in Exodus 25 . We have Ark of the Covenant in Joshua 3:6 . Ark of Adonai in Joshua 3 . Ark of God, 1 Samuel 3 . So it’s got a bunch of different names, but—.

Oh, these are all referring to the Ark of the Covenant? To the same ark?

As far as we know, yeah. To the same box? Yes.

Let me ask you this. If you were translating this, because no one says ark in any context other than the biblical context. Yeah. So if you were translating this, would you be tempted to use the word box? The box of the covenant?

I don’t know.

You got to come up with something other than ark. Yeah. I wonder if the common—.

What the Common English Bible uses there, because that’s intended for folks who are— where English is a second language or something like that. It’s intended for folks who don’t understand it on as high a level. So at some point I’m going to have to look up and see what they call it—the CEB’s ‘chest’. The chest of the covenant? Oh, they do say chest. “Okay.” “Yeah, the soles of the priest’s feet who are carrying the chest of the Lord, ruler of the whole earth.” So chest also works. And this is all describing the same thing. It’s a box.

It’s a box. It’s a box. And it is a box that is described in Exodus. So before we get to stories about the box, maybe I’ll just go through quickly and describe this thing. It is made— Apparently it is, uh, in Exodus 25 we have how God is commanding this should be made. And it’s made of acacia wood, but, uh, I don’t want to call it acacia wood. I want to call it what the King James Version calls it, which is— oh, I’ve forgotten. Hang on, I’m going to click over to King James just because. Shittim? Shittim wood!

Shittim wood, yes. That is my favorite thing in the world.

Uh, okay, because I’m not saying anything dirty, I promise. No, that’s what the ark is made of. Uh, it’s made of shittim wood. Uh, we’ve got— we— and like the other ark, we have measurements in cubits. Uh, so 2 cubits and a half is the length, uh, and a cubit and a half is the— is the width, and a cubit and a half is the height. So a nice, you know, nice rectangular box.

Yeah. And there are a few different ways to measure what a cubit is. So it’s not exactly clear what the exact dimensions are of this box, but it is something that is made of wood, but then covered, overlaid with precious metals, gold and the like. Which— go ahead.

Well, we were talking last week about the letter of Jeremiah. Is that who it was? That we were talking about and how he talked, how he mocked the gods of the Babylonians because they were just wood with gold overlaid over them. And then this week I come here and I read all about this thing that is basically their god that is constructed of wood with gold and silver overlaid over it. And I was like, come on, you guys. This seems to be the thing that you do.

Yeah, this is a little on the nose. But, and you know what? There is so much more to it than that. Because there are a bunch of ways that the Ark of the Covenant is functioning, in form and function, it is a divine image. Right. And this is something that scholars have noted for a long time. For instance, we have, and I think there’s a little nuance to it, but for instance, you have things that are being placed before Adonai, “Lifnei Adonai,” or it is set before the testimony, which would be what the Ark of the Covenant is carrying. So if you can imagine this box up there on a pedestal or something like that, and somebody comes and bows down and places an offering in front of the box, right? It’s like, hmm, this is the vibes here are— it’s giving divine image is what my 13-year-old would say. She would say, look, chat, it’s giving divine image.

Yeah. And she will not stop addressing the chat in our living room when no one else is around. I don’t understand this slang, but—.

And this— it’s fine. It’s fine. Young people have their own thing. Yeah.

This, this closely parallels conventions from ancient West Asia where treaties and things like that are placed at the feet of or before the divine image. Right. And so you have some places in the Hebrew Bible where it says they placed these things in the Ark, and then you have other places where it says they put things before the Ark. And one scholar has argued this is probably a diachronic change, where initially it was placing things before the Ark, which is using the Ark as a divine image, and later on they were like, “What if we said they put it in the Ark?” Sounds less like a divine image. Well, we’re going to get to—.

We know what happens when you open the Ark.

Your face melts off. Yeah, you get hemorrhoids.

Well, hemorrhoids first. That’s right.

We talked about the hemorrhoids first. It progresses to face melting.

Eventually, if you’re a Nazi, your face is going to melt off. That’s just how that’s going to work. But yeah, and we’re going to get to more ways in which this is seen as a divine image when we get to 1 Samuel. But we’re still in Exodus right now. Because I want to describe the rest of it. Okay, so we’ve got a, we’ve got a wooden box made of shittim, uh, and then we’ve got gold and silver overlaid over it. Um, oh no, is it just gold? It may just be gold. Uh, yes, pure gold inside and outside. You shall overlay it. Uh, you shall make a molding of gold upon it all around. And then you got 4 rings of gold that you can put two sticks through, uh, that’s for holding it, right? So that’s good that you got a way to transport it. That’s always useful.

Yep, got to be mobile.

Uh, and then, uh, and then you got, uh, you got a, a, a lid, and the lid or the cover is also pure— is pure gold with, uh, and it’s, you know, it’s It— I don’t know why it feels like it has to specify the length and width of that.

There’s not— there’s no part of the Bible that calls them angels.

So Just, but like divine critters of some sort.

And these critters are, I think, comparable to the Lamassu from Babylon. So they’re like guardian hybrid creatures that have wings, but they have the body of a bull and they have the head of an eagle or a lion or something like that. Within the Bible, they seem to have more humanoid heads. And here’s something interesting. There was what’s called a closed shrine model, which is a little miniature shrine, and closed because it’s enclosed, it’s not an open model, that was discovered at Megiddo in Israel. And it’s very, very old. It’s very fragmentary, but it is a box that you would have put stuff in, and it has, um, what looked like cherubim at the corners of this box.

But it clearly was not intended, uh, to hide stuff because it has windows in it that you’re supposed to be able to see through. And, uh, a shrine model was basically a way to miniaturize the temple. Yeah. And then you would put miniature divine images on the inside. And we’ve found—.

I was really hoping you were going to say you put miniature people inside and they could go, “Oh, I’m at the temple. " “Oh, me too. " No, that’s in Egypt.

It’s in Egypt where you have the burials where there are hundreds of little miniature people. And this is supposed to replace the subsidiary burials. So if you were in really early Egypt and you were like one of the you were the Pharaoh’s assistants, you really didn’t want the Pharaoh to die.

‘Cause you had to go with him?

You had to go with him. Oh. Yep, everybody went with him and you did not, yeah, it was unpleasant. After a while they were like, this is really inconvenient and kind of ruins things for the next guy. So then they started making these models. And so you had models of the person who made the bread. You had models of the people who were the scribes. You had models of, the people who made the bricks. And then they were kind of reified as these souls in the afterlife for the pharaoh instead of dispatching your entire administration.

You’ve got the heir to the throne going, “I really like dad’s bread maker. I would like to keep that guy if I can. " You know what? Make a model of that guy. We’ll just throw that in there. Yeah.

Just put the blanket over him. It’s like that doesn’t look like the real one. It’s the real one. It’s the real one. Just trust. He’s not moving. He’s already dead.

Just trust. Yeah. All right. So we’ve got a box with gold. We’ve got cherubs on either end facing each other with their wings over covering the box itself.

Yeah. And the idea here is do not touch. Right. So these are the protective entities that are, that are kind of guarding the entry to what I, what I think is probably supposed to be a shrine model. In other words, a miniature version of the temple.

And it does say like verse 22 says, there I will meet with you. And from above the kapporet from between the two cherubim, that are on the Ark of the Covenant, I will tell you all that I am commanding you for the Israelites. Yeah. So one thing— Is there going to be a little, just a little God that’s right in the middle? That’s talking to you? His mouth appears? I am the Lord. Pay no attention to the guy behind the curtain, sort of thing.

No, I think one thing to note is this part of Exodus is being written much later. In fact, the Ark probably didn’t exist anymore. Oh, right. When that part of Exodus was written, they’re kind of like, “Make it gold, make it this length, give it poles. Remember, it has to have poles. " And so they’re probably reconstructing what they wanted the Ark to be. And they have the sense that this is supposed to be reifying God’s presence. And so they kind of describe it more as a throne, like God is enthroned between the cherubim. That’s one way that the language there is commonly interpreted. And so, and that’s why they call the lid the mercy seat, because it’s the seat of the throne on which God is sitting, although not really.

That is really hard to— like, all I can do is picture this tiny little God that’s just like, “Haha, I will give you commands. " Well, I don’t think that’s what’s intended.

No, but if you look at—there’s an ivory plaque that is also from—I believe it was found in Megiddo, but the motifs are all Egyptian. But there’s a ruler sitting on a throne and the armrests are cherubs, cherubim. And so like the idea of cherubim flanking a throne on which the ruler sits is something that was in circulation back then. And so I think we’ve got this imagery is kind of coming together and they’re like, “Well, let’s make it seem like the throne.” I think in earlier time periods it was probably more like this is the miniature temple that we can cart around so that our deity, whose presence is inside the temple, can go with us where we need to go.

Since you mentioned that, let’s jump ahead to Joshua and talk a little bit about Jericho, because we know—because this is one of the places that we know the Ark plays a big role, because they march the Ark around the city, and they march the Ark through the river, and all of this stuff, which I find to be really interesting.

It becomes this—it’s a war palladium. Yeah, kind of. It is the—it is their, their banner. It is what they kind of rally around because it represents the presence of God. And that’s what makes the waters of the Jordan River stop. That’s what allows them to march across. This is God’s presence. The waters are all going to stop. And then they use a pretty solid trick right there.

Yeah, it’s hard to duplicate.

Penn and Teller would have no chance figuring out what’s going on there. And then they march it around the city 7 times and then blow the trumpets. And legend tells that the walls came a-tumbling down. And yeah, that’s the presence of God. God there doing the miracles for them.

So fighting the battle for them. Yeah, it definitely is a magic box. This box, in and of itself, has—I mean, it is imbued with God’s power, yes, in some very strong way.

There’s a—I don’t know if you look these verses up, but if you go to Numbers 10 , did you happen to look at Numbers 10 ?

Oh, no, I don’t have Numbers 10 . That’s not—okay, I’ve got—

So verses 35 and 36. They’re talking about the cloud during the day and the fire during the night and all this. And then it says, “Whenever the Ark set out, Moses would say, ‘Arise, Adonai, enemies be scattered and your foes flee before you.’ And whenever it came to rest, he would say, ‘Return, Adonai, thousands, thousands of Israel.’” And so, movement of the Ark represented the movement of God, and where the Ark was, God was. And so, yeah, this is manifesting the presence of God.

And he’s saying, “God,” to this box.

We don’t have any stage direction here. We don’t know exactly what direction he’s pointed. But yeah, it seems to be, if he is not speaking to the Ark as if it is Adonai, he is speaking about the movement of the Ark as if it is Adonai’s movement. So they’re very closely entangled, and I think that makes the story of the Ark narrative that much more significant. And this is—unless you wanted to stay in Joshua for a little bit longer.

No, I’m fine. You know, eventually we got to get to Samuel anyway, so I’m not in any—we don’t have to stick around because we’ve talked about the story of Joshua. And I just think it’s interesting how they use it because, you know, in the Joshua story, it’s basically all of the Israelites. Is that right? They’re just—they’re traveling together. And then they’ll pitch a tent and make a sort of makeshift temple and put the Ark in the middle of it.

Yeah, the tabernacle is the traveling temple that they have. And then they have camps that are supposed to be on all four sides. Yeah. Which, by the way, if you see anybody say that the camp, when it’s laid out in the wilderness, looks like a cross, that’s totally made up. It does not look like a cross.

If it’s on all four sides, Dan, I don’t know what it looks like. An X? Come on, man. What are you trying to do?

Oh, gosh. Yeah. So, yeah, they’re traveling around and the tabernacle with the Ark in the Holy of Holies that’s representative of God’s presence. And by the way, I think, and this is just a little aside, they talk about the fire at night, the pillar of fire at night, and the cloud during the day that followed Israel around. What I think this is doing is using the temple imagery, because the idea is that signified God’s presence. But let’s say you’ve got a temple that’s operating day and night. You’ve got sacrifices being burnt and everything like that. During the day, what’s going to be hovering over the top of that space? A bunch of smoke, a big cloud. What is it going to look like at night when they’ve got all these fires going?

There, and it’s going to be— it’s Burning Man. It’s going to be comparable to fire. So I think these stories are supposed to make people think, oh, that’s like what I see when I look at the temple, and there’s a cloud over it during the day, and it looks all fiery at night. So that must mean that God’s presence is there at the temple. I think personally, I think that’s what those stories’ imagery is supposed to be communicating to an audience that is operating much later down the road. Right. But anyway, anyway, yes, you’ve got all Israel walking along.

Let’s, let’s, let’s scurry on to the story of— because in, in Joshua, we’ve got the Ark operating as a sort of a powerful instrument of war. Because they go and they defeat things. What happens if the Ark runs out of war juice? And we get to 1 Samuel when the Philistines come in to make war.

So we’ve got this situation, and there are a couple of storylines that are converging here, because you got Eli, who’s the high priest, but his his sons are kind of worthless, and they’re not doing a great job at the temple. But in 1 Samuel 4:1 , word of Samuel came to all Israel. In those days, the Philistines mustered for war against Israel, and Israel went out to battle against them. They encamped at Ebenezer, and the Philistines encamped at Aphek. And they drew up lines, the battle was joined, Israel was defeated by the Philistines who killed about 4,000 men on the field of battle. The elders of Israel go, “Why has the Lord put us to rout today before the Philistines? Let us bring the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh, so that he may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies.” So, you know, we’ve got the story of Jericho. We know this is like a war palladium. This is supposed to be God’s presence among the people, and God will fight our battles for us.

So let’s go get the Ark and just bring it next time we go to battle. Yeah. And then bing, bang, boom.

It’s a pretty effective tool at the beginning. Yes. Because the Philistines, they look at it and they are terrified.

Yes. They heard— there’s a big shout when, you know, somebody shows up, “We got the Ark!” And they, you know, bring it out before the army and everybody’s shouting, “Huzzah!” And then the Philistines hear the noise of the shouting. They said, “What does this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean?” When they learned that the Ark of the Lord had come to the camp, the Philistines were afraid, for they said, “Gods have come into the camp.” Yeah. And so the Philistines at least understand this thing to be functioning as the divine image which bears the presence of the deity, and so they’re like, “Oh crap, God’s with them.” They understand it to be multiple deities.

They— yes, they understand multiple times they say gods.

Yes.

“Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods?” Yes.

And then they, you know, they sing the praises of this God. “These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness.” Kind of, you know, doing the work of the narrator for him so he doesn’t have to boast about his own people. Yes.

Is there any chance that the author of 1 Samuel actually had the idea that— like, I get that it’s easy to just say that this was from the Philistines’ mouths, and so they didn’t understand that it was not multiple gods. But is there any chance actually that at one point they were thinking that it encapsulated multiple gods?

There is certainly a possibility, and there are a few different theories that bear on that question, because there’s stuff that’s going into the Ark. The Ark is containing things, and we all know about the tablets of the law. And here’s something interesting: the tablets of the law are basically two little mini standing stones with the law written on them, right? And we already have stories with Moses and Joshua where God says, “Set up standing stones, write the law on them, and then worship.” And so those are divine images, and the law is being written on them. And if the Ark is a shrine model, it’s a miniature temple. What do you put in the miniature temple? Miniature divine images. What’s a miniature standing stone with the law written on it? Couple of little tablets with the law written on it. So it’s— this is like mini divine images going into the, the model of the temple.

And, uh, there’s, there’s a scholar named, uh, Rana Eichler who published a paper arguing that it’s possible this story is intended to obscure the fact that an Asherah pole would have been in the Ark of the Covenant. In other words, another deity’s divine image.

That’s what I was wondering. Yes, it was in the Ark. The gods that have shown up are the Tetragrammaton and Asherah.

Yeah. So this is, you know, the timeline and everything is very, very muddled because these stories are being written down long after any such historical event could have taken place, but maybe reflect some kind of hazy social memory about what actually happened. But yeah, certainly it’s within the realm of plausibility that the Ark would have been the miniature temple for the many divine images of more than one deity.

So I mean, certainly the author of this, of 1 Samuel, doesn’t rebuke this idea that there are gods.

Well, no, but—and I think that by the time this is being written, they’re probably representing the Philistines as just pagans who don’t know what’s really going on. That’s another way to read what’s going on here.

Absolutely. And that makes sense too. But it doesn’t seem like anyone’s fighting this idea anyway. No.

Here’s the interesting thing. Yeah, they bring out the Ark, they cheer, they, they, you know, give each other the slaps on the butt as they’re rounding third, and then they lose the battle. Right. And there was a very great slaughter. 30,000 foot soldiers fell of Israel. The Ark of God was captured, and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died. And so there’s a scholar named Ben Sommer, a wonderful scholar. I spent almost 2 weeks—no, I spent a week with him in Italy 2 months ago.

Would you call that your Ben Sommer?

The summer of Ben? It was the summer of my discontent because there was a heat wave going on in Italy and it was in the high 90s, low 100s. It was awful. But anyway, he published a very influential book called The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel. And his theory is that this story is intended to be a rebuking of the idea that the Ark actually contained the divine presence because they lose. Right. His theory is the author is going, and then they lose because it was never God’s presence. It never housed God’s presence. It was not a divine image. Tell that to Joshua, man. Now, in my book, I actually disagree with Ben, and I argue that this is not about the Ark not actually being a divine image. It is about the unauthorized use of the Ark, because every other time that the Ark represents God’s presence and facilitates military victory, it is because the prophet went and inquired of God and said, do we do this thing?

And God says, I give you my blessing. And yeah, thumbs up.

God gives it the, uh, the old thumbs up. Okay, you can do it.

And, and we have absolutely no hint of that here, right? And so, uh, in, in our last episode, we talked about how the deity will abandon the divine image when it needs to, right? If they’re, you know, the people are doing things wrong and everything.

So, and, or at very least, that’s the way you rationalize.

Yes.

When, when you lose and you’re supposed to have won because your God was supposed to fix it for you, right?

That’s the retconning that goes on. And so I argue that this is actually—it understands the Ark of the Covenant as a divine image, but they didn’t get Adonai’s permission to go up against the Philistines to battle. And so Adonai was like, you’re on your own, sorry, I’m abandoning my ark for the time being. Yeah. And then, uh, the Philistines take it back and they do what you do with a captured divine image—they put it in their temple. Yeah. Next to their own divine image of, of their deity. And, and the text represents their deity as Dagon, but that wasn’t a Philistine deity. Um, and then we have—there you go—then we have the battle of the divine images where the next day they show up at the temple. They, you know, come in and go, “Let’s get you some breakfast, Dagon.”

“Oh, you’re on the ground!” Which just means that like their rock tipped over, right?

Yeah, yeah, basically. And then they set Dagon back up, they dust him off, you know, they rub the dust off of the gold. Yeah, polish him up a little bit. Yeah, as the Letter of Jeremiah mocked. And then the day after that, they come in and, oh no, his hands and his head are cut off. And so it’s basically the battle of the divine images, and obviously Adonai wins even in another deity’s territory.

Yeah, and in another deity’s temple, no less.

Yes. Yeah. So not just, they come into our house, they’re going to come into our house and beat us. Yes, Adonai is going to do that. And so I think this is the story where Adonai is like, “Ooh, wait till they get a load of me.” You know, they’ve abandoned the divine image and now it’s in the temple, and Adonai is like, “Zoop,” right back in there, and then defeats Dagon. And then, as we discussed previously, afflicts the Philistines with awful hemorrhoids. And certainly UTIs were a part of it, I have no doubt. That there was a lot of cranberry juice being passed back and forth after all the things in the undercarriage were out of sorts. Sorely afflicted, as you might say. Sorely afflicted, yeah. As the great poet once said. Yeah. And so I think this is a story about the Ark being abandoned by God God reentering the Ark in order to show forth signs and wonders and, you know, tickle the Philistines’ perineum, as it is correctly pronounced.

Or what was the— what was the name? It’s taint. There we go. Taint.

And then 2 episodes in a row I get to say taint. I’m happy.

Yes. And then the Philistines put it on a cart attached to some cows and go, “Hiya!” And the cows march off to Israel and walk right up to Beit Shemesh, and the people go, “What’s that?” And they look in the Ark, and that’s when we get the face melter, according to the story. So yeah, dangerous box, this one.

Yeah, it’s not just any old box.

No, no, no, no, no, no. But then we have you gotta skip over the rest of 1 Samuel and get to 2 Samuel 6 . And what happens is Beit Shemesh is like, “Get this out of here. We don’t want this around here.” And it goes to another city, and there’s a guy there who is like, “I’ll watch your Ark for you.” And, you know, and I imagine that now I’m— dang it, I’ve forgotten the actor’s name. In The Italian Job, who was Handsome Dan? Oh, or Handsome Rob. Was it Handsome Dan or Handsome Rob?

I mean, we’re Handsome Dan, so it must have been Rob.

Well, yeah, but Seth Green is like, “I’m Handsome Dan.” Gosh, I forget his name. That’s who I imagine saying that. “I’ll watch your ark for you.” But— and then David comes and brings it to Jerusalem. So the ark is not in Jerusalem. Until 2 Samuel 6 , when David is like, “Where’s the— why don’t we— let’s bring the Ark. Let’s bring the Ark to Jerusalem.” And so goes and takes the Ark from the house of this fella who’s watching after it.

Who’s Jason— played by Jason Statham.

Jason— why can’t— I’m awful with names. This is why I didn’t make it into the movie.

I had to Google it. I knew exactly who you were talking about, and I also couldn’t think his name.

So I used to, when I used to shave my hair pretty low, I used to get a lot of Jason Statham from folks. And on TikTok, it’s all Woody Harrelson. Oh yeah, okay. But yeah, so this is the story of how the Ark comes into Jerusalem during the time period of David, even though it was lost long before. And has run a rocky path to get back to Jerusalem. And this is— it’s called the Ark of God. And this is where Uzzah— it’s on the way to Jerusalem. And, you know, the cart that it is on is rocked and Uzzah is like, whoa, and reaches out to steady it. And he gets zapped. And then—.

So mean. He’s just trying to help.

Yeah, and thus was— and the worst part of it was that then results in the phrase “steadying the ark,” which bad faith people use to try to tell people you’re not allowed to correct ecclesiastical leadership because that’s steadying the ark and you might get zapped.

You’ll get zapped. Yeah. All right. So don’t do that. I think that does it for the first Indiana Jones movie. That’s a fascinating thing. So far we have no evidence that any Nazis actually came anywhere near this.

Wasn’t buried in Egypt, not in the right place or the wrong place they were digging. Not that we know about. Yeah, certainly not in a warehouse in D.C. And who knows, maybe that’s what the folks taking over D.C. are on the hunt for. Right. Yes, exactly. This is all a cover to go find the Ark. So, but somebody can— take over the world.

But speaking of being on the hunt, there is no greater, more hunted thing than our next segment, the Grail. The Grail. So, okay, uh, if you are looking for the biblical references to the Holy Grail, Dan, where should people—what book in the Bible should we turn to to find the reference to the Holy Grail?

You should not waste your time because it’s not there. You are better off looking in The Da Vinci Code, um, because there is no reference to the Grail. The Grail grows out of traditions associated with the Last Supper where Jesus has the Passover meal with his followers.

Can I say that I was genuinely shocked when I started researching this and discovered that it is not in the Bible, a biblical thing? I was like, come on, there’s got to be something about a cup or something. Yeah. Yeah. No. But alas, it—so where did this crop up? Like, where are we getting this from?

So I think the roots of it—you don’t have discussion of a grail, but in the Gospel of Nicodemus, which is a 4th century text—and was Nicodemus the owl from Sword in the Stone?

I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Dang it. Let’s say yes. My daughters would be so disappointed in me. But this is a 4th century text, this apocryphal gospel, and it talks about vessels that are associated with Christ’s passion. So the last week of Christ’s life. So this is probably the seeds that sprout in the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe with these French texts that are openly fictional novels. They’re just stories. They’re just stories.

But they talk—or rather, aren’t they, uh, they’re like, uh, heroic poems.

Yeah, and some of them, one of them is, uh, is about Joseph of Arimathea, and another one is about Percival, uh, the Conte du Graal. And they talk about this, um, mysterious radiant vessel that, uh, is some kind of relic that becomes associated with the cup of the Last Supper, and it has mystical and magical powers in these stories. And then it becomes part of Arthurian legend. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s funny because I mentioned to you as we were prepping for the show that I did—look, I’m not familiar with the legends of King Arthur. I didn’t read any of those things, but I kind of thought that like maybe, uh, the Monty Python guys just kind of came up with that on their own and thought it would be an interesting thing to do. But no, uh, very much that is what the legend of King Arthur, uh, centers around, sort of.

Yes, it is, it is central to, um, like, I think Galahad was, was one of the, the purer knights. This was the one who had to turn away all of the nuns. Yes, yes, had to be saved from temptation. Um, let me have some of the peril. Uh, I think, uh, around 1225 you have a text, The Quest of the Holy Grail, which is associated with this. And then it becomes, uh, associated with chivalry, with questing, with, um, all of this kind of stuff. With all of the legendary kind of medieval European motifs that get recycled all the time these days into things like Shrek and Monty Python and the Holy Grail and all that kind of stuff.

But the idea is that there’s this vessel and it was—.

It had a pestle. It had the brew. Maybe it had a brew in it.

Yeah, who knows? Who’s to say? But it was the one that that Christ drank out of at the Last Supper, and then maybe also Joseph of Arimathea caught his blood in it.

Yes, that is the other part of the tradition, that he was like, oh, don’t want that to go to waste, and, um, oh, let’s keep that. But, uh, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, we have a bit of a retreat to the tradition. You don’t really have a lot of people caring about the Grail. After all, this is when people are getting all into rationalism and all the—.

Silly, silly rationalists.

Yeah, at least they weren’t nihilists though. They did have a nice marmot is what I heard. And then in the 19th century, when you have the Romantic era and you have kind of a renewed antiquarian interest in medievalism, then you have these stories that bring the Grail back into focus, which leads to our modern interpretations and, uh, and masterpieces like Monty Python’s, um, or Dan Brown, as you, as you mentioned, Dan Brown, which, uh, yes, is, uh, a thousand poxes.

He’s just, he’s just trying to entertain the people.

He’s just trying to entertain. Yeah. And, and I cannot blame Dan Brown because like he told people this is totally fiction. And like there was a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, right, which was published back in 1982, which is full of these ridiculous conspiracy theories.

That conspiracy theory was, if I remember correctly, was just based on how the word Saint Graal in French, meaning Holy Grail, sounds a lot like sang real, which is like the bloodline, which— yeah, sang meaning blood and real. Anyway. So like, I mean, if two words sound the same as two other words, obviously there’s— obviously, uh, it wasn’t a cup, it was a bloodline. Yes. And Jesus has, uh, relatives living in France, right? Right. We all know, look, it’s all that makes sense, people.

Yep. Married Mary Magdalene, had a daughter, uh, named Sarah, uh, they ran away to France, they started up the— what was it? The Merovingian dynasty or something like that. Right. And all of that stuff. And yeah, even today you’ve got TikTokers who are, you know, breathlessly telling you about the secrets that they kept from us. And they’re just kind of blithely sharing ridiculous conspiracy theories published in books written by non-specialists. And when somebody says this word looks an awful lot like this word, if you just squint at it a little bit and you ignore all this stuff over here, and then you just imagine these connections here, that’s evidence that this entire conspiracy theory is true. It’s the number of idiotic conspiracy theories that are born of that kind of amateur just parallelomania, right?

Uh, cannot be counted. The thing that surprises me, having learned that not only is there no biblical precedent for this cup, but that it didn’t even arise as a story until, you know, the Middle Ages— it surprises me that there are so many cathedrals that claim to have it. Oh gosh, yeah, like literally, you know, there’s one in Seville and there’s one in somewhere— where’s— somewhere in Italy, Genoa, I think. Uh-huh. Uh, like all of these— there are lots of places that have just claimed that they have this holy relic, and it’s like, okay, but, um, it’s not a thing though. What about that?

You can’t let them know that, then they’re gonna start asking questions about all the other relics like the piece of the true cross, and you know, that skull that’s over there in the corner, and that finger bone over there, and, and somebody’s, uh, somebody’s foreskin, right? We’ve got a collection of foreskins in the back, and we got a whole, a whole bag of them.

Yeah, the holy prepuce. Yes. Um, is that what it is?

Anyway, yeah, and, and that is Yeah, this is an outcome of, uh, of a lot of these things spreading during the medieval period. And, uh, and I think that brings us to my beef with the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Ah, because Indy chose poorly.

Let me set the scene and then you can, you can explain why it’s no good. Yes, for the, for them as ain’t seen it There is a spoiler alert. Yeah, yeah, spoiler alert, but you’ve had plenty of time. Yes, it ends with them going, finding this room full of mugs, full of chalices, your various and sundry, you know, grails. And you have— and it’s all about pick the one that is the real one, and then you dip it into the very musty water. Yeah. And drink out of it, and then it’ll help you survive or help you live forever or whatever. Uh, and the first guy does it. He picks the most lavishly, you know, gold and, and bedazzled with jewels one, and he drinks it, and then he turns— he instantly grows old and dies. And so now it’s Indy’s turn. He has to pick the right one because his dad’s dying out, out front. And he goes and chooses one, and it is— he, he looks at all these elaborate, beautiful things, and sees one that’s just a very simple thing made of wood, and he says, that’s the cup of a carpenter.

Is it— is it— is it clearly made of wood? Uh, is it just painted?

I always thought it was made of wood. Yeah, I don’t— because I— Indiana. Anyway, yeah, the idea is that it is a simple thing and probably, uh, probably made I assumed it was made of wood.

It looks like it’s supposed to have like plating of some kind around it. But so yeah, it was probably a wood interior that had some plating or something. Or so. Okay. Yes. Or something. So why was this wrong? Problem? Yes, we— because in the first century CE, this was a period when there were a lot of concerns for ritual purity. And while some people think that Jesus was like, we’re doing away with all of that, he wasn’t.

And so for clay, the only way to dissipate it is to break the clay, to shatter it, and then the impurities go, ooh, and rise into the sky. Kind of like the Ed O’Neill story about killing a man in the dead of winter.

And you lost me entirely, but that’s okay.

Somebody’s laughing their butt off.

Yeah, from Wayne’s World. Oh, okay. But anyway, they would have had these like limestone carved vessels, plates, cups, bowls, things like that. And so I don’t— I would have to watch the scene again to see if they had any stone cups there. I don’t remember seeing any clearly stone cups, but that would have been, uh, what would have most likely been on the table at an early 1st century CE Jerusalem Passover dinner. Okay, would not have been what Indy ultimately goes for. And also that Harrison Ford, I, I doubt he was, uh, doing set design, uh, but no, who knows.

Yeah, uh, well, there you go, uh, a fun little, a fun little way to end the show. Uh, get, get your cups right if you’re good. If you’re, if you, if you’re ever asked to pick a holy relic that never actually existed, but you got to pick the correct one. Yeah. Go with stone every time.

And isn’t that great that the end of this quest to find the divine, the guy’s like, pick a suitcase. It might have a million dollars in it. You might die. Yeah. So it’s a game of chance in the end, evidently, in that universe.

It’s a game of are you pure enough. I submit to you, Dan, that it doesn’t matter which cup Indiana Jones chooses because it is the purity of his heart that actually renders it.

Yes, renders the transubstantiation of the cup into the body and the blood of Jesus. Boom.

I don’t see how— I don’t see how I could be wrong on that.

Yeah, well, he— maybe he was worthy to lift the hammer. Yeah, exactly. Did the, did the Red Hulk ever lift Thor’s hammer? And I guess it was—.

Now we’re crossing the streams.

We’re crossing the streams, and you know you can’t cross streams. It’s just, don’t cross the streams.

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