Does God Regret this Podcast?

The question becomes, how could God regret or repent himself of something? And someone online has this answer to that.

So the Hebrew word for regret is nacham, and it’s difficult to translate into English. Well, I’m gonna have to say. All right, let’s see it.

Boom, baby. That’s a golden phrase right there.

Hey, everybody, everybody. I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things going this second time around, Dan?

Things are going great.

Okay.

I like that you. You’ve done a nod to the fact that we started to record this and then had a technical difficulty in the form of my brain not having done something it very much needed to do. And now everything’s running smoothly and we’re. We’re rocking on all four cylinders.

So we’ve already had a mulligan. So if we screw it up this time, that is totally on us.

Yeah, if we screw it up this time, you’re just getting the screwed up version and that’s that we’re not.

We’re not going.

We’re not going back again. Dan, you, my friend, have just come back from what sounds, by all reports, like an amazing trip to the. The Holy Land.

Israel, Palestine. Yes, I was leading a tour group there. I was there from. What was it, June 10th to 21st. Had a great time. It was the first time I’ve led a tour group out there. We visited a number of spots in Israel and in Palestine and helped a lot of really cool people better understand not only the archaeology and the history and the literature, but also understand a little better what’s going on today between these two areas and their people. And they got to meet a bunch of great people from both sides of that tension that’s. That’s going on out there.

Oh, do they have a little tension out there?

There’s quite a bit of tension out there.

I hadn’t heard of it. Is that new? Is that, is that a new thing?

Quite, quite old, actually. And I was supposed to be going with my, my wife, as you know, and then it sounds like the State Department is having trouble with ye olde passport renewals these days. They’re taking a lot longer than they normally do. And so she was not able to go with me. But we had a contingency plan in place and I had the, the treat of getting to text a couple of close friends of mine who know the area very well and had wanted to travel there with me at some point and say, hey, do you have two weeks off and a passport? And one of them did. So a friend of mine named David Burnett joined me for the trip and had a wonderful time. He’s doing a PhD at Edinburgh right now and we are actually organizing a conference on monotheism for next year at Brown University and I’m hoping to have him on, on the show at some point soon. He’s a very gregarious person.

I think you’ll enjoy him. And yeah, we had a great time and I was a little nervous about what kind of weirdos would pay a bunch of money to travel to Israel, Palestine with me. And it turns out, very cool weirdos. So nice. Yeah, it was a wonderful time. I met some great people and I, yeah, got to eat a bunch of great food. I got to enjoy an area that I love. I got to visit some places I hadn’t been to before and got to share it with a good friend of mine. So all in all, it was a wonderful trip.

That’s awesome. You know, I should say that this is something that we are working towards, you and I, for this show. We’re working towards doing some, some tours, various tours. We, we… We’re in talks with a travel company right now. So if any of our listeners would like, after hearing some of this stuff, would, would think that that would be a fun thing to do or an interesting thing to do, you can let us know right now. We don’t have anything planned. We, our first tour will probably not be till the spring of next year. But uh, send us an email which is contact@dataoverdogma.com and, and let us know that you’re interested in joining us. We’ll compile, you know, we’ll keep a list of all the people who are interested, maybe put tour in the subject line and then we can, we can let you know when we, when, when we’re going, how much it’s going to cost, all of that sort of thing because I think a lot of you are going to want to do this, especially after hearing some of what Dan, you have to say today.

Yeah.

Because we’re going to be talking about some of the stuff that you, that you went to. So let’s dive into that. Let’s look at archaeology of Israel.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the… There are a bunch of different ways to do a tour in Israel. Some of the tours are, are all about contemporary geopolitics. Some tours are, you know, schoolchildren go on tours to, to learn about their, their people. Sometimes it is about getting, having spiritual experiences in churches, very old churches, or less old churches. And what I tried to do was make this tour predictably more about putting Data Over Dogma and so trying to understand the history and the archaeology. And so we spent a lot of time at sites that many tours don’t go to, don’t visit because they may not be directly mentioned in the Bible or directly relevant to the Bible, but they are archaeologically interesting and help us to fill out a better background and backdrop for understanding the Bible. And one of those places was one of the places we visited on the very first day of the tour, the first day we started out in Tel Aviv and we kind of went down into what’s called the Shephelah, which is the transition from the coastal plains to the hill country.

So these valleys that kind of run east and west up to the hill country. So we stopped at Beth Shemesh, which is in the Sorek Valley. We stopped in the Valley of Elah, which is where David was supposed to have defeated Goliath. And one of the things we did in the Valley of Elah, we’re sitting there looking at this valley, talking about the account in 1 Samuel 17 , also talking about what may be the original account of Goliath’s defeat at the hands of Elhanan.

I was going to say you, you said David defeated Goliath. Point of order, sir.

No, I, I saw it on a newscast. Yeah, it was a long time ago. I, I swear it was David. And they had all the people on the roof cheering for David. But interestingly enough, there’s a site right over the hill from, from the Valley of Elah, called Qeiyafa. And some scholars identify it as the biblical Shaaraim, which would be the city of two gates. But there’s an excavation that has been ongoing there for a long time that has uncovered some interesting, some interesting artifacts. And there’s even been a handful of books published about some of these artifacts and an inscription that some scholars argue is the oldest known inscription in the Hebrew language that may date to around 1100 BCE. But I would side with a scholar, Chris Rollston, and some other epigraphers who argue that this is not yet what we can label Hebrew. This is still an early alphabetic inscription; it hasn’t transitioned into the Phoenician alphabet, which is what is picked up when Hebrew is committed to writing.

So a lot to debate about that. But we went further south, we went to visit Lachish, which a lot of people don’t know about, but played a very important role in the history of Israel. There is a bas-relief, a wall relief from Nineveh that depicts the Assyrian king Sennacherib’s siege of the city of Lachish, where they have siege engines going up the, the siege ramp that they built to, to break down the wall. And they have the, the people, the inhabitants of Lachish throwing, throwing torches and boulders and things over the, the cliff. And you have somebody with a, with a big ladle, like throwing water on top of the siege engine to try to put out the fires that are being thrown down on top of them.

So, so this is, this is like a mechanical thing that they would use to try. And I’m picturing, I don’t know, I’m sure it’s not like Iron Man, but that’s all I’ve got in my mind right now.

So a siege engine is, is basically a big battering ram on wheels.

Okay.

That they had some kind of front to that was intended to protect them. And so they would throw torches down on it to try to set it on fire to get, you know, the people to abandon it and scatter, which is why you had the guy with the big spoon throwing water on top of it at the same time to try to put out the fire. Funny, but Sennacherib memorialized the siege of Lachish in these wall reliefs that are on display in the British Museum now, but cover several walls within his palace in Nineveh. And this became his base of operations for his siege of Jerusalem when King Hezekiah threw off vassalage to the Assyrian empire, when King Hezekiah basically said, I’m not paying you any more tribute. And Sennacherib said, we’ll see about that. And so attacked and destroyed a bunch of towns in Judah and then made it all the way to Jerusalem, but was unable to take Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem, and so had to abandon this campaign and go back to Assyria.

And, and this lines up with, with, with events in the Bible.

Yes. Yeah. So we can, we can.

We have archaeological evidence for events that are also detailed in the Bible.

Yes. And then we, we also have what’s called the Sennacherib Prism, which is a cuneiform text written around a, a kind of prism-shaped pillar where Sennacherib boasts about taking all these towns and taking all these people. And then it says he trapped Hezekiah in his royal city like a bird in a cage, which was basically him trying to make it sound like he was winning when he had to ultimately abandon the campaign. But we visited Lachish, where you can still see the siege ramp. You can still see the, the stones that were, that were gathered to create this siege ramp. And you can go up and see the city gates. And it’s, it’s just a fascinating place that I really like and that many people who read the Bible, it’s mentioned a couple of times in there, but not in any important stories. And then you also have Lachish playing a large role in the Babylonian exile, when the Babylonians come to take Jerusalem and they succeed in doing this a little around 587 BCE, Lachish and Azekah are two cities, two of the last cities that fall before Jerusalem falls.

And they discovered some texts at Lachish that talk about this event where we have this very kind of terrifying text where they’re talking about how the Babylonians are coming. And there’s a statement at one point where they say, we can no longer see the fire signals of Azekah. And this is from Lachish, kind of somewhat like Lord of the Rings, where you light the fires, the fires of Gondor, calls for aid kind of thing. But the signal fires are to indicate that they’re there. And, you know, they’re, they’re fighting. And then at one point they, they can no longer see the fire signals of Azekah, which is kind of this ominous… Lachish has fallen.[00:12:44.660] Dan McClellan: We’re next. Which is ultimately what happens. The, the cities are destroyed and then Jerusalem is destroyed. So it’s always.

How far would you say Jerusalem is.

From Lachish, Jerusalem from Lachish? Not incredibly far. I would say if you’re, if you’re driving, you know, it’s maybe 20, 30 minutes drive on foot. Obviously it’s going to take an awful lot longer, particularly because you got to weave through some valleys to get up into the mountainous region in which Jerusalem is located.

I only ask because, like, part of the thing I think that would be useful about the kind of trip that you took is just getting a sense of the size, the scale of things. Because one of the things that I’ve always struggled with as I read the Bible was, you know, this is like when we talked about the Moabite king, you know, in a battle with all the. And we, you know, I had to go and look up how big each of these kingdoms were.

Yeah.

Because I just, you know, you just don’t, don’t have a sense of how, you know, it’s by a sea is the Dead Sea, as you know, is the Sea of Galilee. How big is it? You know, the word sea sounds really big. And then, you know, you do a little bit of research and you realize, oh, that that’s just a lake. That’s just a not very big lake.

Yeah, it’s. It’s smaller than Bear Lake in Idaho. It’s much smaller than the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea itself much smaller than. Several times smaller than the Great Salt Lake.

Yeah.

Also also a lake fed by the Jordan River. And the entire region that we know of as ancient Israel was smaller than the state of New Jersey. So it’s actually, you know, when you’re talking on foot, it kind of grows two sizes because you’re moving a lot more slowly. But in a car. Yeah, you can get around fairly easily as long as the traffic’s not too bad, which it sometimes isn’t. Yeah. And as long as you’re in parts of driving around in parts where there are not a lot of people, which for some of the spots that we were visiting. Yeah, we. There were not a lot of people there. That’s awesome. Such as the last place we visited on the first day, Arad, which is a place in the Negev, which is the southern desert of Judah. And Arad is mentioned a handful of times in the Bible and specifically as a place where there’s a king of Arad who comes out to fight Joshua or something like that and gets defeated.

But in the 60s, archaeologists discovered at the top of a big hill, a Judahite fortress that had been in existence for probably around three or 400 years. And it was destroyed or at least decommissioned out of service somewhere around the year 700 BCE. And in the corner of this fortress, they discovered a Judahite temple. And they discovered texts that referred to the house of Adonai, which is probably a reference to that Judahite temple. This is not some foreign temple. This was a temple run by Judahites, obviously, was administered from Jerusalem, was part of the hierarchy’s network of sacred precincts. And the texts, there are also texts that talk about different priestly families that are known from the Hebrew Bible as well. So this is a temple that was integrated into the biblical world.

When it was discovered, it was covered in about six feet of earth. And when they removed all this soil, they found in the temple a very well preserved sacrificial altar made of unhewn stone. They found the Holy of Holies, they found a standing stone, so a divine image laying on its side in the Holy of Holies.y of Holies. And they found two incense altars laying on their side just outside of the Holy of Holies. And the archaeologists who excavated this in the 60s, I think this was Yigael Yadin, insisted or concluded that this was all a product of Hezekiah’s reforms. There’s a part in the text where it says that Hezekiah went and dismantled all the high places and cut down all the altars to Baal and things like that. Oddly enough, though, when this kind of thing was done, when you destroyed a temple because the worship was considered inappropriate or unsanctioned or something, you always broke the divine images and the vessels that were used in the worship, and none of these were broken.

These were all just laid on their side and covered in soil. And so some other scholars have postulated that this is all happening around the same time that Sennacherib is getting set to come through and wreak havoc on everything. And so another possibility is that this was not a temple that was destroyed, but a temple that was decommissioned and then hidden so that it would not be destroyed by Sennacherib. Because following Sennacherib’s invasion, pretty much all of the sacred precincts in the temples outside of Jerusalem which Sennacherib did not destroy were gone. And this created something we’ve talked about before on the channel, this de facto cult centralization, where because everything else was destroyed, nobody had any choice but to take their worship and their talents to Jerusalem. So there are competing theories about what is responsible for the decommissioning, the ending of the use of this temple at Arad.

But most people don’t visit this. It’s quite a bit out of the way, and it is not directly related to the Bible. And I imagine that a lot of folks who go to Israel, Palestine to go on tours are not interested in hearing about this extra temple that happens to have a divine image of Adonai in it that you can go walk up to. And the originals, the actual items, are now on display in the Israel Museum. And I have a video on my TikTok channel from the Israel Museum, where I’m showing you some of these items and showing you, for instance, that the incense altars had burned substances on top of them, and those were all sent off for testing and analysis. And the smaller incense altar had three different types of cannabis that had been burned on the top of it during its use, as when it was being used for worship.

Interesting. They were definitely having spiritual experiences.

Yeah, yeah, they were. They were definitely communing with the Most High.

Yeah. And do me a favor, paint me a picture, because you’ve mentioned standing stones, you’ve mentioned altars. What size is a standing stone? You know, you say it’s a divine image. Give me a sense of the scale of this thing.

Well, the particular one at Arad is probably about three feet high and maybe a foot and a half, yeah, about a foot and a half wide. And it’s shaped like a headstone. Okay. And yeah, so it’s flat on the sides and then has curves off and has a rounded top, and then it’s kind of flat on the front side, and then the back side is a little more rounded off.

And is it inscribed?

So it’s the one. The ones that we found there were actually two standing stones discovered in the Holy of Holies at Arad. One of them, however, was incorporated into the wall, so it had become part of the architecture. They had repurposed this as material for the wall, and then the other one was free. So scholars for a time thought that both were on display at the same time in the Holy of Holies.of Holies. But I think the consensus view now is that only one at a time would have been in use, and it would have been. Probably would have been painted anciently and probably would have had the divine name perhaps painted on it. We don’t. There was. There’s nothing inscribed into it that we can tell. But how it looked anciently would have. Would have been quite different from how. How its surface looks today.

Weird. It’s weird that the paint didn’t survive the centuries in dirt in the end.

Yeah, it’s pretty dry dirt, but. But, yeah, the paint did not survive. Yeah. So there are still debates about this and, and my own. In my own book, I talk a bit about the functionality of. Of this standing stone, how this maybe helps us understand a little better how they thought about and used divine images anciently. And we’re going to talk about that in a, in a forthcoming segment of the show. Yeah, but, yeah, and then from the top of this fortress, you can actually. It’s. It’s a pretty high hill, but you can look down on a lower portion of the hill where there is a Bronze Age Canaanite settlement with. It has a big wall. Well, you can see this whole city, or at least the ruins of this whole city. And so it’s a fascinating place to go. It’s part of the national parks system, but not a lot of people visit it. So I’ve. I’ve visited there twice, and both times our group has been the only group on the property.

That’s a great thing to be. I’m looking at an image of it and. And, yeah, it’s. It’s the. It’s. It’s the top of a hill, and you can see. I mean, it’s one of the. The higher hills in the area. It looks like. And. And you can just see for. For. For miles in every direction. It looks like. Like it looks really fascinating.

Kilometers in every direction. When you’re, when you’re in. I can see.

I can see for miles because I’m American. Other people can only see for kilometers. Miles are better. Miles are longer. So that means I have better eyesight than Europeans, I think.

And that’s something that a lot of people noted when they were up there. They were like, I can see why you would want to build a fortress on top of this place, because one you can see forever. And then to anybody coming at you, you know, they’re running across open desert and then they got to climb this steep hill. The whole time you’re throwing stuff at them like it’s. Yeah. It would not be an easy place to. To attack.

Right.

So. Yeah, but how it came to an end is still a mystery to some degree. So. But. But I was very excited to be able to return to there, and I was excited to be able to give the folks in our group that experience of understanding a bit about the history of Israel that is a little off the beaten path. Not really.

Really cool.

Yeah. And. And then from there, we. We actually had to race because they were like, we are closing down in, like 30 seconds.seconds. So we had to get everybody on the bus, on the bus, on the bus and. And out of there. And. And then we just cruised on down to the coast of the Dead Sea, which is quite an experience because you have these kind of plateaus and ridges, and then you just descend hundreds of meters down into the bottom of this Rift Valley where the Dead Sea is. And we stopped at a hotel right on the coast and got to go swim in the Dead Sea, which is quite an experience. It’s unlike any other place you will ever go swimming in your entire life. The only place I’ve ever been where if you wade out and the water starts getting up to your hips, you start to kind of lose your balance because the buoyancy of what is under the water is starting to lift you off the bottom a little bit. And so you can’t, like, plop down and sit on the bottom. You can plop down, and you will just kind of float to the top.

And so everybody got a kick out of going out and sitting down and then just kind of laying back and being like. And you’re just floating above the water. And it is. It is an odd experience. And if you go. There were two warnings that we were given that. I’m glad we were given these warnings. One, bring flip-flops, they said, because it’s sand for about two feet into. Into the water, and then it turns into just rock salt and salt crystals and just little chunks of salt all over the bottom. And then the other warning they gave was, whatever you do, don’t get the water on your face. So the. Somebody was telling everybody when they were in the water, oh, you know, taste some of it, see what it’s like. And everybody who did that regretted doing that.

I’ve tasted salt. Thank you.

I’m okay. Yeah, it is. The salinity of the Dead Sea is. Is around 10 times what the salinity of seawater is. And it’s even a few times more saline than. Than the Great Salt Lake. Surprisingly, it does not stink like the Great Salt Lake does, so.

Well, it might be, too. I mean, the Great Salt Lake smells bad in the summertime because of the brine shrimp.

Yeah.

Which then die, and then their carcasses wash up on shore and rot.

Yeah.

It may be that the. The.

The.

The Dead Sea is too saline even for. Even for brine shrimp. I don’t know.

Yeah, I. I didn’t see anything living in the water there. And if there’s.

I wouldn’t want to live in it, that’s for sure.

Yeah. If there’s one thing that I always do when I’m near a body of water is look for fish, critters. Yeah, there’s a. There’s a. There’s an old Far Side cartoon where there are a bunch of, like, medieval knights storming a castle, and they’re running over the drawbridge, over the moat, and one of them points down and goes, look, a fish, or something like that. And I’m like, that’s me. I would be. I would be combing the area. I grew up fishing. So, like, when I’m near a body of water, I’m just automatically, instinctively, I’m scanning where the fish are gonna be. Can I see a fish? So, no.

No luck. No luck on that one.

Not that time. And that reminds me, there’s another thing. One of the other things that we did the very last day of the trip was walk through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, which is a tunnel that was dug in order to divert water from the Gihon Spring, which was outside of the city walls, cover up that spring and divert the water to inside the city.ity. This was something that Hezekiah did in order to be able to provide water to the inhabitants of the city. But the. And so you can go walk through this tunnel. And it is an unnerving experience to be 100 feet below the bedrock that is the City of David in a little tunnel where for parts of it, like, if you’ve got broader shoulders, you got to kind of squeeze them together. You’re kind of bouncing off the sides of it. And parts of it you have to squat down because it’s only maybe five feet high. Unnerving. But when you get to the end, there’s a little pool area. And the first time I came out, the first thing I did was go scan the water for… for the fishes.

And I. And I. And I have a photograph on my phone of—I saw a fish swimming around. And I was like, sweet. So I have a little picture of this fish. And after I took the picture, I looked at it and I noticed that the fish was swimming right above a Band-Aid that was sitting in the water. So it’s like, okay, I’m out.

That’s a little less enticing.

But that, that little pool at the end of Hezekiah’s Tunnel was long thought to be the Pool of Siloam because that’s… that’s where Jesus was supposed to have done one of these miracles. But it doesn’t really fit the description of one of these pools that would have existed in Jesus’s day. And yeah, the. The archaeology suggests that this little pool at the end of the tunnel was probably built around the Byzantine period. And so people are like, do we call it the Pool of Siloam?

Anyway, when’s the Byzantine period? I don’t know when that is.

Byzantine is like 4th through 6th century is the main kind of the height of the Byzantine period. And this is where we have the emperors in Byzantium that are kind of running things.

Right?

And so this is a few centuries after Jesus. But when you’re in this area, most everything that is identified with some event, particularly in the New Testament, probably originates in the Byzantine period because that is when. That is when Queen Helena, the mother of Constantine, came to the area to kind of map out where everything is. And so they literally went around and asked locals where things happened. And so you have enterprising—

And any enterprising local would be like, yeah, totally take you there. How much money are you paying? I’ll definitely show you where Jesus was born for sure. It’s absolutely right.

So one of the things you run into when you go and do tours in this area, whether it’s Israel or in Palestine, is you’re going to run into a lot of traditional locations. And almost without fail, those traditional locations were identified in the Byzantine period. And then a church has been built over it. Some of them in the Byzantine period, usually in the 6th or 7th century or no, 7th century, usually, or sometimes eighth, they are destroyed either by conflict with Muslims or because of a couple of major earthquakes that happened in those centuries. And then usually they are rebuilt in the Crusades, in the Crusader period. So you hear that repeated a lot. In fact, our. When we were there, it was kind of like, okay, Byzantine or Crusader. What do you think?

Interesting.

Yeah.

So, but, but unlikely to be the actual place that it purports to be. Is that, is that what you’re saying?

For the most part, there are some exceptions. For instance, there’s one.0:31:29.890] Dan McClellan: There’s a place called Mount Zion. And Mount Zion is not the Temple Mount. It is a mountain on the other side of what’s called the Central Valley or the Tyropoeon Valley. And so when you look at Jerusalem, you have the Temple Mount, you have the City of David to the south, and then just to the west you have this other mountain. It would have been inside the city gates in the time of Jesus, but it’s called Mount Zion. And they have a church there called the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu or the Church of St. Peter at the crow, at the crowing of the cock. Oh, and this, this is the church, when you go visit it today, what you see is something that was built, I think, in the, in the middle early to mid 20th century. But it is built over some old crypts. They, some of them are probably wells.

They are probably for some reason. I’m blanking on, on the name of a place where you store water.

A cistern.

Cistern, yes. Thank you. I said that word a billion times two weeks ago. So some of them are cisterns that were later converted into like, dungeons. And the traditional identification of this site is the place where Jesus was held overnight. It is also identified with the palace of Caiaphas. Now, most archaeologists would say this is something that was probably. These were cisterns that were probably converted to dungeons in the Byzantine period or maybe the Crusader period. But there’s a set of stairs. There’s a staircase that runs just north of Caiaphas’s palace that has been unearthed that archaeologists date to around the first century CE. So this staircase, if Caiaphas’s palace is anywhere on Mount Zion, and some people think it could be further up the hill where the richer homes would have been, this staircase would have led up there.

And so if Caiaphas’s palace was on Mount Zion, then that staircase would have been where Jesus would have been led to go from Gethsemane to Caiaphas’s palace. So there’s a mixture. Some of it is later stuff. Some of these are traditional sites, and some of it is earlier. But we try on. On trips like this, we try to let people know there’s no metaphysical significance to these sites, like whether it’s the actual place where something happened or not. The point is not to take you in and let you feel the power of this site that is, you know, residually residing there since the first century CE. It’s to give you an experience so you have something tangible, something material, some kind of experience that makes those events more real for you, that gives you a material tether to what’s going on. So you can, in your mind, return to that spot and you can kind of experience that materiality and the reality of that place when you’re imagining these stories, when you’re reading these texts.

And so it’s more about recreating what things would have been like than about saying, this is the very spot where this happened.

I think that is a great way to look at it. A good reason to want to go out there. And a fantastic place to end our segment today. All right, so thank you for that, Dan, and let’s move on to our next segment.

All right.

All right. Dan.

Yes, sir.

Something has come across our desk from the Internet that we need to answer. It is. It is a question from Genesis 6 . It is. We are Genesis 6 . We are about to get into a very famous story in which.

The Lord.

Makes a pretty big decision for the whole Earth.

Yeah. Yeah. One of his better known genocides.

Yeah, it’s a pretty popular one. Basically everybody’s going, but… But one family. But we’ll get to that another time. The question at hand is… Comes from Genesis 6 , verse 5. No, verse 6. And there’s different versions of it. The… The King James renders it, and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. The NRSV says, this is verse six, and the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the question becomes, is God capable of… You know, we’re talking about someone, an omniscient and omnipotent being. How could God regret or repent himself of something?

And someone online has this answer to that.

So the Hebrew word for regret is naham, and it’s difficult to translate into English. Well, I’m gonna have to say… All right, let’s see it.

Boom, baby. That’s… That’s the golden word. That’s a golden phrase right there for…

For…

For McClellan fans. That’s the… That’s the… That’s the good stuff. This creator has some more stuff to say. Let’s listen to some more.

Okay. John Walton notes, there’s no English word that readily captures the meaning of naham. In Genesis 24 , it refers to Isaac being comforted over the loss of his mother. In Genesis 27 , it refers to Esau comforting himself while planning to kill Jacob. In Deuteronomy 32 , it refers to having compassion. And in Judges 2 , it refers to God moving to feel pity for his people. So right off the bat, I notice a concern from the perspective of a linguist. The idea that we should expect an English word or an English conceptual framework to be able to capture all of the different meanings of this verbal root is fallacious. That’s just not something we should expect, because these languages are not just giving different labels to the exact same conceptual content. These languages develop the conceptual content very differently. And so I would have a concern with an attempt to try to reduce a bunch of different usage in a bunch of different contexts down to a single kind of root concept.

There are times when that’s appropriate. But the assumption that that framework can be imposed on any word or any verbal root I don’t agree with. So I’m going to say that these different places where it can mean different things is just a product of different contextual uses rather than some confusion on the part of translators. So right off the…

It does seem like, I mean, you know, we have the same concept in English. There are plenty of words that mean very different things, and you just have to use context clues to understand which version of… Of the… Of meaning they’re… You… You know, which version of that word they’re using for this particular moment.

Yeah. And… And here the reference to John Walton is a reference to a scholar named John Walton, who in this case, it’s to his NIV Application Commentary on the Book of Genesis , where Walton is trying to make the case that there is a way to reduce this all down to one set of concepts. But let’s let this creator, and this is a creator who goes by Inspiring Philosophy, by the way… Let’s let him take over. Okay. The word has been translated in multiple ways because, as commentators note, there’s no English word that can really capture its meaning.ng. What the verse is getting at is that God was deeply saddened by the actions of mankind, but still needed to act to do something to fix the situation. So if we look at Walton’s commentary here, what he’s trying to do is trying to figure out a way to interpret this in a way that does not allow God to be repenting.

And this is pretty explicit. He starts off in this commentary. I’m going to read through some of the commentary so we can see what Walton is doing. And he points out that we have a bit of a dilemma here. The passage seems to be saying that God regrets or repents. And he says there are three ways to seek resolution. One, we can simply rethink our view of God. This is exactly what is happening in the new theology called the Openness of God. Two, we can justify the terminology by seeking to understand ways in which anthropomorphic language is used in describing God’s actions without imputing human limitations to Him. This is the path followed in most commentaries. Three, we can reassess the lexical data to see if we are on the right track when we translate terms in particular ways. And this is the tack that, that Walton is going to take and is actually going to introduce a brand new understanding of this framework, because the other two ways of approaching this are unacceptable.

And so we already have a theological dogma that we are trying, that we are trying to avoid. We cannot accept that God regrets. And so we have to find another way to interpret this passage.

Yeah, the phrase reassess the lexical, whatever data. It seems like that’s just saying. That’s just a fancy way of saying, let’s just change the meaning of the words.

Well, he. He goes on a little further, that the job of the lexicographer is to come to an understanding of categories of meaning that exist for a word, and to identify the common denominators that define and bring cohesion to each category. And so here’s where he’s saying we should be able to distill everything down to a single root. And what he says is that this word can be best understood in accounting terms. And now keep in mind that the root here is nacham, which is related to a noun that refers to the womb and generally has to do with great feelings of pity or regret or compassion or things like that. So we’re nowhere in the lexicographical universe of accounting. But he continues, in bookkeeping, the ledgers must always be kept in balance. Debits equal credits. If the books get out of balance, something must be adjusted.

The Niphal of nacham. Now, Niphal is one of the stems that is used. And basically this is a pattern of how we change the verbal root in order to give it specific meanings. And so the Niphal usually gives it either a passive or a reflexive meaning. And so, like, if you have the word love, you usually, in a transitive sense, you love someone else, but in a reflexive sense, you would love yourself, or in a passive sense, you would be loved. So the Niphal stem, which is what this verbal root occurs in, indicates it is reflexive or passive. The Niphal of nacham can be viewed in terms of acting to keep personal, national, or cosmic ledgers in balance. Now, my concern here is that Walton provides no argument for this, does not say, if we look here, we see that it’s referring to bookkeeping.

If we look over here, we can see it’s occurring in the context of bookkeeping, of accounting. There’s no argument for why we should look at bookkeeping. It just says, let’s try bookkeeping. And.

And then next let’s do it in the context of zookeeping. And then we’ll.2.850] Dan Beecher: And then we’ll. We’ll see what it does if we do it in that way.

So he comes up with a few examples. If someone has suffered personal loss and is in mourning, his ledgers are brought into balance by some action or situation that gets him back on his feet by a silver lining he sees to the cloud. And he has a bunch of different passages where this verb occurs and then says, “These can all be understood in these bookkeeping terms.” Taking this information back to Genesis 6 , we’re now in a position to suggest that naham in Genesis 6 , verses 6 through 7, has nothing to do with regrets, grief, or being sorry. Being sorry, excuse me. Adonai is seeking to redress the situation. He is auditing the accounts because he had made humankind. So this is. This is a tortured argument to begin with. This is an argument that you can’t find in any lexicon, that you can’t find in any theological dictionary. This is something that Walton invented in order to escape recognizing that the text is explicitly saying God regrets.

And here’s my biggest concern with that. If we go look back at these ways to seek resolution, he says we can simply rethink our view of God. Now, ostensibly, one’s view of God derives from the biblical text. If they are the ultimate authority about God, why would we need to rethink our view of God in order to understand a text in the sixth chapter of the Bible? Shouldn’t this text have helped us formulate our view of God? Right. If we’re returning to this text and saying we have a view of God and it seems to be out of place with where we get our view of God, the problem is not with the text. The problem is with the view of God.

Yeah. This should have been. This verse should have been informative in your view of God, not your view of God needs to then inform how you view this verse.

Yeah. And so it indicates one, the view of God is not based on the Bible. And that’s perfectly accurate. I think very few people’s view of God, if anybody’s view of God, is unilaterally derived from the Bible. They come from tradition. And those traditions are usually tethered in some way to the Bible. But more of it has to do with how their view of God is interacting with their circumstances and how their view of God serves their interests and their structuring of power and values, and how their view of God interacts with other groups’ views of God. And so toward the end of this, he says, despite the discomfort of not having an English term to use in translation, this present proposal, the conceptual framework that he just made up and said, “Let’s just slap it on there and it’ll work,” says this proposal lends a credible cohesion to the meaning of the root, something that we do not otherwise have, and resolves the theological difficulties by eliminating any need to explain how God could be sorry or repent.

In other words, this text can be reinterpreted so it doesn’t conflict with the view of God that we did not get from the text.

So what confuses me about it is that you’re trying to. I mean, I understand that it is difficult if you have an omnipotent and omniscient view of God. It’s confusing to say God regretted something because how could he have not seen it coming and created it differently or, you know, how could it, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

I understand that difficulty. But in the next few verses, God then acts on that regret. Like, it’s very clear that he, like, he created a whole race of people, a whole group, a whole, you know, species, and then didn’t like it and literally floods the entire earth and gets rid of them all. So, like, yeah, okay.Beecher: So, like, yeah, okay. Even if you found a way to sort of work around the language that says God regretted, he did the action of that regret. So I don’t understand what you’ve solved, you know what I mean? Other than just that one little phrase.

It’s trying to offload responsibility from God because for the text to say God regrets, it means ultimately this is God’s doing. And in the text it’s pretty explicit. So, vayyinnahem Adonai ki asah et haadam. So, and whatever, naham—it is naham Adonai that he made, that he had made humanity—so like his own action. God’s own action is the proximate cause of whatever feeling God is having that descends from this root that refers to the breathing and the gut and feelings of compassion and remorse and things like that. And so to then say, well, very clearly God is upset with what humanity did is like it’s two steps removed from the text itself.

It first has to reread the verb and then has to try to reinterpret the rest of the sentence, which very clearly puts the burden of this action directly on God themselves. And so it just does not work for me. But it is such an excellent illustration of what I’ve described in the past as the life cycle of religious dogmas. The text is, when the text is written, nobody had a problem with the idea that God regrets or repents. Later on down the road, we develop this idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent. And this idea develops slowly over time as ideas about God are competing with other ideas about God and are just kind of enmeshed in this milieu of being used as identity markers and things like that.

And in the competition, you always want to one-up the competition. Our God created this. Oh, well, our God created all this. Oh well, our God created all this. Until you get to this idea. Yeah, well, our God created everything and you get to these superlatives and nobody can trump a superlative. And so the superlative becomes kind of the pinnacle of the concept of God in the marketplace of ideas about God. In the. This marketplace of ideas about God. And so our God knows everything that’s going to happen in the future. Yeah, well, our God also knows everything that happened in the past. And our God knows everything that you’ve done. Yeah, well, our God knows everything you’re thinking about. And then ultimately you get to: Our God knows all. Yeah. And so you get to that superlative. So then you have omniscience, and then you have: Our God can do all things. That’s the superlative, which is omnipotence. And then you have: Yeah, well, our God is everywhere.

And so you get to that superlative of omnipresence, and you can’t go any further. But now you have to deal with the consequences of those doctrines. And so once you get to omnipotence and omniscience and omnipresence, you turn around and you see, oh, crap, that text says God regrets and God repents. Well, time to reread that text.

Right.

And this is because this is not a static thing. You’re always having to engage with these negotiations between the text and the ideas and the groups that are competing with them. And so every dogma that you can find in groups that read the Bible confessionally, whether Christian or Jewish or somewhere in between, is having to constantly negotiate with what the text says and try to refigure out ways to make the dogmas that they’ve developed fit with the text. Because ultimately, you want everything to have descended from the text, and the reality is that it does not.reality is that it does not. It is a product of the interaction of people in circumstances. And the text is usually the ultimate authority. It’s usually just a proof text. And so they’ve got to look back at the text and be like, how are we gonna… How are we gonna… How are we gonna resolve this issue?

And, you know, they’re explicit about it. We have to seek resolution. We have this theological difficulty, and we’ve got to try to make everything fit together, which is just a manifestation of the fact that these… These dogmas don’t derive from the text. The text is the proof text for the dogmas. And the further you get, the further the dogmas get away from the text, the more and more work and the more and more creative and crafty you have to be in order to make it sound like the dogmas and the texts are not at odds with each other.

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing because you…

When.

Because in that moment where your theology sort of clashes with the text of the… Of the book, if… If the text were truly the… You know, if the Bible were truly the genesis of your theology, then that moment would be a moment not where you say, we have to fix the text, but it’s where you say we have to fix the theology. Yeah, like, my theology is, what’s the problem here? But clearly that’s not the response that many people have when they encounter this moment.

Yeah.

And that’s not wrong. That’s just… But it just says that, like, if your claim is that your theology comes directly from the Bible, then you’re going about this backwards.

Yeah. And… And I think it illustrates… And… And I think you’re right. That is not wrong. It’s an inevitability because there’s, you know, the Bible does not exist in a vacuum. The Bible exists in an ever-changing world made up of different people in different groups who are all vying for the resources and the power and the values and everything. And so it’s constantly changing, and it’s just an inevitability that we have to negotiate with the text. But, yeah, I think that’s an illustration that the Bible is not the ultimate authority. The tradition is the ultimate authority. Whatever your group decides is best for the group is the ultimate authority. And the text is just there for you to point to as the, as the, the proof text, as the authority, when in reality it has the least authority. It’s… You get… You can decide it means whatever the group decides it needs to mean. Yeah, that’s… That’s one of my big concerns with, with arguments like this.

And I’ve looked around to try to see if there are other examples of people picking up this argument of linguists, of lexicographers, going, oh, yeah, Walton noticed something that we all missed. And I have not been able to see anything. But the argument does the job for this volume, which is written for evangelical Christians who want to be told that it all fits, that it all works. And so if Walton can make an argument that is semi-plausible and that most of the readership will be like, okay, yeah, I get it. I, you know, hooray for us. We got it right. Then… Then it will have done the job. And I think that that’s what we’re looking at here. And unfortunately, we have a content creator on TikTok who is then trying to spread that… That theological shoehorn even further.

There you go. You know, it’s a thing that happens all over the place at some point, Dan, I’m gonna.e you come with me to Kentucky, and we’ll go to the Creation Museum.

That would be…

And see what Ken Ham does, because he’s the master at… …at these kinds of things. It’s…

I wouldn’t… I… amazing. That’s a great idea. Yeah. We honestly need to do that.

We’re going to do it. All right.

I want… I’m not sure if they’d allow us to record in there.

No, no, no. But we… I mean, we can be sneaky. We’ll figure it out. Anyway, thank you all for listening. If you would like to become a part of getting Dan and me to Kentucky, you could become a patron of the show. That would be really helpful. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma to do that.

I hear it’s pretty easy. You just head north and then kind of turn west. Shoot, what’s the line? Last of the Mohicans. When he goes… he’s on the way to Kentucky. Dang it. I forgot the line.

You are a flowing font of pop cultural references. Also, just a reminder, you can reach us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and if you want to be… …to be on the list to get information about our tours, whatever tours we have, please send in an email and we will keep track of that. And other than that, hey, thanks so much for listening. We sure do appreciate you. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.