Should Wives Submit?

As conspiracy theories go, okay, you know, so no, definitely not, but like, okay.

Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan, and I’m Dan Beecher, and you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things today, Dan?

They go, uh, things, things, things are trucking along. I’m pretty excited about today’s, uh, episode because A, we’re gonna uphold the patriarchy, which we always love to do, and B, we’re going to, uh, we’re gonna get into some, some, uh, some, some space stuff. We’re gonna get into some conspiracy theories. I hope everybody’s got their tin hats. Yeah, ready to go. Their tin foil hats.

Yeah, I don’t even know if I can say those notes or if that-

But yeah, I like that I’ve terrified you enough about copyright infringement or trademark or whatever the heck it is.

We’ve built a fence around the law, as it were, regarding my ability to sing anything terribly. Yeah, yeah.

And, and I think our listeners also thank me for beating that into your head.

When you said patriarchy, all I could hear was Fergie in that Tonight’s Gonna Be a Good Night. Is that what it’s called?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where she goes, smash it. So that’s all I thought about. I don’t know why it was Fergie’s voice doing it that way.

I like it. I like it. Well, why don’t we get into our chapter and verse and smash that patriarchy?

Let’s do it.

Okay, so the chapter and verse that we are- that we’re getting to is Ephesians 5 , uh, verse- oh, what verse is it? You know.

Well, 22 is the main one. Yeah, but like, if you wanted to try to get the whole sense unit, it’s really got to be like verse 18 through to the end of the chapter. Okay, but we’re not going to focus on all of that. We’re really going to, uh, zoom in on verse 22, which is-

Yeah, you don’t want to start with 18 because 18 says, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery.” And we don’t want anybody to know that it’s in the Bible. Yeah, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no. That’s actually where the sentence begins. And this is part of the controversy of Ephesians 5:22 . And if you have heard people talk about this, I’ll just read 5:22, just verse 22, from the NRSV-UE, and then we’ll talk about why it’s a bit of a mistranslation. Okay, it says, wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord. And then verse 23 says, for the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. So, and, and there’s a pilcrow in the, uh, in the NRSV-UE. And for those of you who, um, grew up on the right side of the tracks, a pilcrow, uh, is the little backwards P. Right, paragraph indicator, basically.

Right.

And a lot of translations of the Bible present verse 22 as the beginning of a new section. It’s not even its own sentence. In fact, it doesn’t have a verb in it. The verb is actually a participle that is in the previous verse. Now, this is actually relevant to what’s going on here. A participle is, uh, is like an -ing verb. Right, in Greek. So I am running has a subject, a verb, and then this gerund, right, running. But the verb in the sentence is am. You are saying I, and then you are connecting it to running with the verb am.

I’m doing run.

Yeah, so that is the am is the actual verb of that clause, right? And running is, uh, is helping out. And so in verse 22, we don’t even have a participle. It’s verse 21 that has the participle, and verse 22 is just- we’re going to borrow the force of the participle from verse 21. But even verse 21 is not its own sentence. We have to go all the way back to verse 18.

Okay, but I’m just going to interject here, because the thing that my head was bumping up against- I don’t know how Greek, ancient Greek, was structured.

And so, like, I know that I’ve seen ancient Hebrew texts, and it’s just letters without any spaces and definitely no punctuation or anything.

Right.

What should I be imagining when I’m thinking of an ancient Greek text?

Oh, same thing. It was, yeah, just continuous text. They didn’t put spaces between the words. They certainly didn’t have verses in the earliest manuscripts. They didn’t have chapters or anything like that.

And no punctuation?

No punctuation. They didn’t even have the diacritics. If you look in a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, you’ve got rough and smooth breathings, you’ve got acute, you’ve got grave, you’ve got circumflex accents all over the place. None of that is in the earliest manuscripts. It’s just the letters.

So when you say it’s not even the same sentence, you’re getting that— or that it is the same sentence, you’re getting that just grammatically. You’re not getting that from any kind of markings.

Just syntactically. Okay. So the— and this is one of the things you learn to do when reading Greek is you got to go, okay, where’s the verb? Oh, okay, there’s a verb. All right, I’m looking for objects, I’m looking for subjects and all this kind of stuff. And Greek is very cool. In English, word order tells you what role certain words are playing. So, “I am running,” the subject frequently comes first. If I say, “Am I running?” That sounds like a question. Right. Because we’ve switched the subject and the verb. In Greek, the word order doesn’t really matter too much. It is a case-based language, and anybody who’s learned like German or something like that will know that you use— in a case-based language, the word form itself changes to tell you what role it is playing in the sentence, right? Whether it’s a subject, an object, whether the thing is being done to it or something like that, you change the way the word looks in order to indicate that.

And which means you can fiddle with the word order all you want. And a lot of ancient Greek poets would fiddle with the word order like crazy.

Interesting.

Yeah, which makes it very hard to translate. But anyway, we got to go all the way back to verse 18, and it starts with this: Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery. And then we get the beginning of our sentence: But be filled with the Spirit. So we have this imperative: Be filled with the Spirit, right, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to one another, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts. So we’ve got another one of these participles, singing, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. So the being filled with the Spirit either is caused by these other things, by the singing and by the giving thanks and by the being subject, or it results in the singing, the giving thanks, the being subject.

And then we get to verse 22, which is again kind of borrowing the participle from the verse before. So wives being subject to your husbands as to the Lord. And apologists who want— well, there are actually two people who make this argument. There are folks who want this to not be misogynistic. They want this to be, um, something that is not misogyny. We’ll point this out and suggest that the fact that the, the participle, the verbal force of verse 21, is feeding verse 22, and verse 21 says being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ, you maybe borrow that sense. And so really what this is saying is wives and husbands, you’re both going to be subject to each other. So, okay, sometimes folks will argue that, but then verse 23 exists.

So, right.

Yes, that’s the main problem with this because it then goes on to explain, yes, the husband is like Jesus and the wife is like the church. Right. And so the wife has to submit to the husband as the church submits to Jesus. But then the other thing that folks who don’t want this to be misogynistic will point out is that, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. The husband has to love the wife as Jesus loved the church. Jesus died for the church. The husband has to have this self-sacrificing, unending love for his wife, which means it’s fair. It’s okay. Yeah, because while the wife’s got to make the sandwiches and got to do the dishes and got to do the laundry and got to do the, the vacuuming and everything like that every single day because the dad— because the husband said so— well, one day, probably not, but maybe one day he’ll have to sacrifice his life for her, but probably not. And so it’s even.

I see that so much in the sort of the Christian manosphere, uh, you know, when, when these guys are talking about how their job is as protector and provider and blah blah blah. And in their minds, when they start talking about this protector role, they bring up scenarios that are vanishingly small percentage chance that this could happen. Like, absolutely, you’re not going to get attacked in the way that you’re imagining.

Yeah, it’s a power fantasy.

And then, and then their wife is doing very real work.

Labor. Yeah.

Like continually.

While he is like, yes, but if this were to happen, you have no idea how awesome I would be.

Yeah, I’m gonna be over here emotionally masturbating about how cool I’m gonna, I’m gonna look when I, when I save everybody’s life. I, I see that, uh, a lot of times with, uh, every time there’s some kind of mass shooting that, that makes national headlines, uh, there, there are people who are like, I, I conceal carry even where I’m, you know, not allowed to, not protect me, it’s to protect everybody else, right? You know, these things are, are, you know, everybody needs, uh, some dude with a power fantasy about being John Wayne. Yeah, yeah, not John, um, Dirty Harry. I guess John Wayne too.

Um, if we didn’t have them—

Hero with gun.

Yes, I’ll come to your college campus and, uh, probably end up being the one shooting somebody.

Yeah, 99% of the time being— yeah, I will injure innocent people or kill innocent people.

But anyway, that’s the idea that they run with. It’s like, well, it’s okay that I’m in charge of my wife because I’m supposed to love her, and so, you know, I’m not going to exercise unrighteous dominion. Ideally. The reality is that they frequently are.

Well, the reality is that dominion in and of itself is is a pretty gross idea.

Yeah, but what Paul is— not Paul, pseudo-Paul.

Excuse me, pseudo-Paul. Fake Paul. We should have started with that.

Yes. By the way, this is one of the bad epistles.

Well, technically it’s one of the disputed ones, right? Like the pastorals, a good strong majority of scholars are like, yeah, that’s not Paul.

Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, I think it’s a little closer to half and half. Oh, okay. I think I would still give it to the people who reject Pauline authorship. But I’ve— and, you know, once I am able to get my survey off the ground, which I’m still working on, I’m still working on, we’re going to have—

We’ll believe it when we see it.

We’re going to have rock hard numbers.

And abs. Rock hard numbers and abs.

Yeah. And we’re going to end the list there. And the, uh, the, uh, uh, the majority of, or a good number of scholars don’t think that Paul was responsible for Ephesians, okay, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and there are a number of good reasons for that, but we digress. So this is probably not Paul anyway. However, what the author is doing here with this pivot— verse 21 is kind of a pivot point. We’ve been talking about the congregation as a whole, right? And then we say, uh, mutually submit to each other, and that submitting participle then becomes the hinge on which we pivot to what’s called household codes. And this is kind of a standard genre in the Greco-Roman period within broader Greco-Roman literature. So not just Jewish and Christian, but broader Greco-Roman literature. In fact, what the author is appealing to is a pretty standardized kind of checklist of the people involved.

And to demonstrate this, I want to read a little something from Aristotle. Oh, this is Aristotle on government. Since it is now evident of what parts a city is composed, it will be necessary to treat first of family government, for every city is made up of families and every family has again its separate parts of which it is composed. When a family is complete, it consists of freemen and slaves. But as in every subject, we should begin with examining into the smallest parts of which it consists. And as the first and smallest parts of a family are the master and slave, the husband and wife, the father and child, let us first inquire into these three, what each of them may be and what they ought to be. That is to say, the herile, the nuptial, and the paternal. Let these then be considered as the three distinct parts of a family.

Husband and wife, children, and enslaved people. So this is a pretty standardized way of approaching the question of the household and how it is governed. And we see this in, in other Jewish literature as well. So for instance, Philo in some fragments referred to what this fragment is, the Hypothetica. And this is something that you run into a lot when you’re dealing with ancient literature. You’ll have authors and you’ll have their complete works, and then there will be fragments. And what this is, is this is all the places where we have somebody saying, yeah, so-and-so wrote in their text you know, X, all this stuff. And it’s like, okay, we don’t have a copy of X. All we have is whatever this person quoted from X. And so that goes into the file as a fragment. But we have a fragment of a text called Hypothetica, and Philo says, wives must be in servitude to their husbands, a servitude not imposed by violent ill treatment, but promoting obedience in all things.

And if we go back to Aristotle and particularly ideas of ensoulment and personhood and things like that, Aristotle thought a woman was just an undercooked man.

Right.

That the gestation just moved more slowly for women and they were born before they were fully cooked.

Aristotle had an astoundingly weird sense of how a lot of things worked that then was picked up on and like held as gospel for thousands of years.

And, and you want to know the one— there’s a, there’s a— I have a friend of mine named Jonathan Jong. He’s a wonderful, uh, psychologist, cognitive scientist of religion, uh, and he, uh, in a paper he once commented, the ghost of Aristotle haunts us still. Yeah, because of how much we rely on definition.

It was so— yeah, he’s— he was a nut, that Aristotle.

Yeah. And one of the most influential thinkers in all of human history, obviously, and actually was profoundly prescient in a lot of ways about a lot of stuff, and then way off the mark with a lot of other stuff. But the practice of definition and our assumptions that everything can and should be defined, that’s the ghost of Aristotle.

Which is your favorite thing in the whole world.

Don’t get me started, don’t get me started. So, uh, and then we’ve got Josephus, who is writing, uh, the 90s CE, and Against Apion he says, the woman, says the law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed, for the authority has been given by God to the man which I don’t know if the author of Ephesians would really have a problem with.

With what? That sounds— that sounds perfectly in line with—.

It sounds— it sounds quite Ephesian. But, but yeah, this is very clearly a systemic power asymmetry. The idea that women are inferior, therefore they must submit, therefore they must be obedient, therefore the husband is in charge. Is misogyny.

I mean, this goes back to the, you know, we talked just a couple of weeks ago about the ideas of adultery and how it’s the absolute double standard of, like, sexual double standard between men and women.

Yeah, yeah.

It should come as zero surprise to anybody that this patriarchal view is what is being promoted at that time in this region. It just seems right. And of course, now, as you point out, the Greek influence is permeating the Jewish culture as well. So you get added and more, and perhaps more nuanced patriarchy and misogyny.

Well, and there are so many different ways, a lot of people don’t realize that there are so many different ways Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society contributed to Christianity becoming what it is, and contributed to the parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism. Because one of the things that Judaism did, one of the— with rabbinic Judaism, one of its priorities was trying to divest itself of this influence of the Gentile world. And there are debates to be had about the effectiveness and how committed to it everybody was. But there’s a reason that rabbinic Judaism and down to the Judaism of today is very, very distinct from Greco-Roman period Judaism. And it was precisely a refutation of that influence. They went back to the Hebrew Bible and said, you know what, we’re not going to do as much philosophizing like Philo and Josephus did.

We’re going to get back into the text of the Hebrew Bible, and we’re going to engage in halachic interpretations, hermeneutics, which is really just saying, what is the text telling us?

The bastion of feminism that is rabbinic Judaism.

No, no, no, no, no, no. But it is to say that Christianity leaned heavily into the influence of Greco-Roman social conventions. And Ephesians, you have it elsewhere, the Pastoral Epistles as well, appeal to these household code ideas. And really what it is, is it is the authors saying, we like this social convention, we’re taking it, this is ours now, and we’re going to come up with a gospel rationalization for it. We’re going to explain it in a Christological way. So you have the author doing that here in Ephesians 5 and Ephesians 6 . But this is the same thing that happens in, in 1 Corinthians 11 with Paul saying women have to cover their heads when they’re praying and prophesying.

Right.

That was just a convention. And Paul’s like, well, what if we said that it’s, you know, it’s about the Christ is the head of the man, the man is the head of the woman. So therefore, you know, if a woman’s head is uncovered, she’s glorifying the man, but she needs to be glorifying God. So she’s got to cover it. Like, it’s just saying, let’s, let’s slap a gospel rationalization onto the Greco-Roman social convention we’re adopting, right? Because we’re again leaning heavy into that. So when people talk about, you know, Christians not caring what society does, that’s the exact opposite of what happens, right? Since we’re like, what society does is all that matters, and we’re going to come up with rationalizations for why that’s what God wanted all along.

Christians were the Jews that wanted to be Greekified and Romanified.

And I think that with the destruction of the temple and with the debates that were going on with the development of rabbinic Judaism, with the Christian following and worshiping of Jesus, those kind of all just contributed to the parting of the ways. And when exactly that happened and precisely how is a huge debate. That I’m definitely not going to pretend to be an authority on.

You know, since you mentioned these household codes a couple of times, I’m just going to impress you with my knowledge of Greek because—.

You texted me about this. You texted me.

As I was doing some research on this, I did check in with ChatGPT. I find it a helpful research partner, but also I always find good reasons to double-check anything it tells me. One of them being that it said to me, “This passage sits in what scholars call the household codes.” And then in parentheses it said, “Greek: Haustafeln,” which I’m pretty sure ain’t Greek. I know enough German to know that Haustafeln, that’s not a Greek word.

I’ll have to go dust off an old Greek grammar, but yeah, it doesn’t sound as as Greek to me as it probably should.

Greek isn’t a Germanic language and I just didn’t hear about it, is it?

No, no, no, no, no. And the Greek word for house is not house. Yeah. We don’t go find a gasthof to— Yeah, exactly.

So there you go. The thing I think that I like that you were talking earlier about people who want to try to make Ephesians 5 not be misogynistic.

Rehabilitate it, domesticate it.

Certainly understand that impulse.

Absolutely.

Because if you want to be a Bible-believing person, who is also respectful of all of the genders, etc. Yeah, you’re going to not want— you don’t want that to be as misogynistic as it sounds. But I think we have to just allow that it is a product of its time and absolutely as patriarchal and misogynistic as we read it.

Yeah, it is definitely upholding the patriarchy of that time and place, which yeah, is a problem. And there’s a point to be made about the fact that it does take some baby steps because in this time period, you know, when we’ve talked about this before, how some Roman authors refer to Christianity as a religion for women and slaves because they had equality.

And we’ve talked about how in some ways that is harmful. So for instance, the idea that in 1 Corinthians 7 that the woman’s body is not her own, her husband—it’s the property of her husband, but her husband’s body is her property, right? Like it’s kind of saying, well, it goes the other way too, right? Which is an attempt at trying to gin up some parity, some reciprocity. It doesn’t work, of course, because, you know, great, what does that mean? It’s like saying, you know, the husband is going to beat the wife, but the wife is free to beat the husband right back, right? So it’s equal. There’s no problem. It’s the same. You know, that passage has been leveraged as an excuse for marital rape for literally millennia. I was alive when marital rape was not a crime, right, in more than one state in the United States of America. It’s only been since, I think, like 1993 that it has actually been outlawed in all 50 states.

And I think it’s—I think it started in 1971 or 1972. That’s when the first state said, “Hey, we’re actually going to make marital rape a crime.” Yeah, because people—the patriarchy has always treated marriage as a man basically having possession of a woman’s body and having rights over her sexual availability, right? Which, yeah, it’s sickening.

It’s not okay. It’s not okay. And I think, you know, one of the themes of our show has been that like, you have to reject certain tenets that are explicit in the Bible, that are explicitly like laid down as though they are laws, as though they are rules, you know what I mean? And I, but I think one of the things that can be comforting in all this is that the laws change from Old Testament to New. Like, the fact is that laws change. Well, even within the Bible, the law continually changes and modifies itself.

So, well, even you can just—and I’ll let you finish your point here, but even before you transition from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament, things were changing.

Like, you can just look at the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Already they’re reinterpreting stuff all over the place. And that’s one of the things that Jesus was doing too. So I don’t want to—I’m just saying this because I don’t want to create this binary between Hebrew Bible versus New Testament.

Totally understand that. Yeah, and that makes sense. The Hebrew Bible actually spans more time, and therefore it would make sense for the Hebrew Bible to actually have more changes even inside of itself. But I think that that’s the key to understanding how a modern believer should be looking at the Bible, not as a system of laws that apply today necessarily, but rather as a snapshot of that time period and the amount that they had learned up until then. And the fact that it’s so heavily influenced by Greek culture and Roman culture, it at the very least points out that cultural influence is important. And as cultures advance and learn more, the laws and the rules of societies should necessarily change.

Yeah, I think there’s good reason to be glad that the Greco-Roman world influenced Christianity, because I think the collaboration between the two took a long time to, but ultimately resulted in very good things. I think the Renaissance, I think the Enlightenment, were ways that there were new insights, there were new consensus. Obviously technology changed so much about the world as a result of collaboration between the followers and the adherents to these traditions and these texts and the world around them. And a lot of people want to claim that, you know, when it comes to like slavery, all the abolitionists were all originally Christians. Well, that’s not totally true, but it was in spite of the Bible, not because of the Bible. So let’s, let’s give credit where credit is due.

And when it comes to things like abolitionism, the credit is not to the Bible. The credit is to—is to other things, including the influence of classical philosophy, which was influential in the Middle Ages and was restored thanks to its preservation among Muslim and Jewish groups and its translation back into Latin and all of this stuff.

All right. Thus endeth my, my silly little rant.

Our, our rants. Yeah, absolutely. All right. We’re going to move on to our next, our next segment. And we came up with a title for this and it’s nerdy and it requires explanation and I apologize for it, but it’s going to make more sense on the screen. Welcome to The Chi Files. Okay. So The Chi Files. Tell me what the— talk to me about what we’re doing here. So that’s just a nerdy Greek joke, right?

Yeah. We’re just using the Greek character chi, which is written just like the X. The capital chi is like the X, but this is what you would see spelled out, C-H-I. So if you’re, if you’re in a college town and you see somebody going Chi-Rho or something like that, then they’re probably just mispronouncing C-H-I. But anyway, it looks like an X, looks like X-Files. Yeah, yeah, it’s because we’re going to be talking about aliens and that’s exciting.

Uh, so, uh, we, we had somebody ask us a few, a few weeks ago about like aliens and the Bible. And I dove into some stuff. You know, there’s that stupid show on, uh, History Channel called Ancient Aliens, which was a spin-off because they, like, they kept doing, like, shows about the, the pyramids or whatever. And this dude with his— with this crazy hair, yeah, would come on and be like, it had to be aliens because we didn’t have the technology to make these things and blah, blah, blah. And everybody— apparently he was— people glommed on to that and him. And, uh, and anyway, now it’s its own show and has like 200 episodes or something crazy like that. Um, okay, but I wanna— but, but a bunch of it is to like— is about the Bible and, uh, and aliens.

So, uh, let’s dive into that, shall we?

Yeah. And I want to start by talking about somebody who— this is also depressing that somebody sold millions and millions of copies of books promoting bizarre ancient alien conspiracy theories. Dude by the name of Zecharia Sitchin. Does that name ring any bells for you?

I mean, I’ve got his Wikipedia pulled up right here. Oh, you do? Yeah. I’m all over Zecharia. Also, okay, a little bit ironic that his name is Zechariah considering that’s a—.

That is one of the texts that we’re going to look at is in Zechariah. Yeah, but he published a book in 1976. He claims to have learned Sumerian autodidactically. Like, I’m— that’s great if you’ve taught yourself a language like that, but based on his arguments, he either didn’t learn any discipline and didn’t learn any method and didn’t learn any theory, or didn’t really learn Sumerian that well. But he wrote a book, uh, published a book in 1976 called The 12th Planet. And the idea is basically that we had more planets in our solar system long, long ago, and one of them was called Nibiru. And this planet is like outside Neptune or something like that, and it passes close by Earth every 3,600 years. And, um, there was a time when it collided with another planet called Tiamat.

And the idea is that the ancient Sumerian texts that talk about these gods are actually astronomical metaphors and narratives and things like that. So Tiamat was an actual planet. The collision resulted in, if I remember my 12th Planet lore correctly, resulted in the creation of Earth. And about 450,000 years ago, the extraterrestrials from Nibiru were— they had worn out their atmosphere and they came to Earth in order to get gold because they could aerosolize the gold and that could become kind of an artificial atmosphere that would help them maintain—.

Why is it always that, like, they go after whatever?

It’s because everybody’s borrowing from Spaceballs. It’s all about, you’re going to be in trouble because we’re going to steal your air.

I just feel like, I feel like they— you choose gold just because we sort of inexplicably still value gold.

Uh, even though it’s not really, you know, it’s just shiny metal.

But, um, but apparently it’s also good for turning into air.

And yeah, it’s good for what ails you, or for what ails the Anunnaki anyway. So, okay, so Anunnaki, that is a word that that we have in some of these ancient texts that is really just a class of deity.

Oh, okay. Okay. So, so we’re making a connection between ancient Sumerian texts and the Bible.

Yes. And so this is—.

Wait, Sumerian texts and the Bible and extraterrestrial life forms.

So this is an even more expanded scope of univocality, right, where it’s, it’s all talking about the same reality, right? And the, the key is to, is to get it all together. And the Anunnaki needed people to work the mines, and so they created, through genetic engineering of some kind, humanity. And so this is— and there was some kind of hominid race that was on Earth. Uh, something went on, uh, under the cover of darkness that resulted in, uh, humanity. And so, uh, the Anunnaki DNA, uh, ends up, uh, in humanity. So, and, and somehow, somehow this resulted in like 8 more books that where he further fleshes out this theory of the Anunnaki/Nephilim, right, and genetic engineering of humanity and all of this stuff, and sold millions of copies of this book.

So can I just say, one of the things that I like about this theory that makes me— that at least, you know, as someone who has read some— I have not studied astrophysics. I have read about astrophysics. I’ve learned a lot about astrophysics, but certainly I’m— I am no scholar of astrophysics.

But you’re a scholar of Dianetics, right?

Yes, 100%. But we’ll get into that in another episode. But I like that his thing wasn’t interstellar or intergalactic. His aliens were at least intrasolar, at least from our solar system. And that puts me at ease a little bit because the travel possibilities, it makes it that much more plausible. At least physics-wise. Yeah. So I appreciate that about it.

And, and unfortunately, there are a lot of people on social media who are sharing videos, most of them recorded in the ’80s and ’90s, where people are actually taking these ideas and running with them and going on TV and talking about, oh, you know, Elohim is plural, and, and that means it was the gods who created the heavens and the earth. And they, and they said replenish. What does replenish mean? It means to fill again.

It means it was— which it doesn’t— which it was already replenished, and then they replenished it.

Yes. Um, which is, uh, so, so misguided. But anyway, that’s an example of, uh, of one person’s, uh, very fecund imagination, uh, just coming up with all kinds of ways to read aliens into the Bible. But alright, let’s look at some other ways that people have found— yeah, negotiated aliens into the Bible. And I think one of the most common ones, one of the most famous, is to be found in Ezekiel’s vision. This is Ezekiel 1 , verse 4, I think is where we ought to start. I’m going to read a little bit of this and then we’ll— like, there are 25 verses that make up the kind of alien part of this, but we’ll just kind of get a little bit into it. And the thing you have to understand is some of you are like, “Just read the damn passage!” But the thing you have to understand is this is kind of like the Book of Revelation where it’s like, “And their breastplates were multicolored and like fire, and they had the heads of lions and their tails were like scorpions.” And people are like, “Well, that’s how an ancient person would describe a tank.” Yeah, because they didn’t know what a tank was.

That’s exactly like an Apache helicopter, if you think about it. Yeah, it’s exactly like it.

In the middle of it was something like 4 living creatures. This was their appearance: they were of human form, each had 4 faces, and each of them had 4 wings.

Okay, I’m gonna just say that’s not of human form. I’m just gonna— like, if you— if you can’t tell me that they are human form and then but they have wings and 4 faces. That’s just— that’s not how human form is.

If the faces look human, then sure. And the wings look human. Do you have another thing to compare it to?

Uh, just skip that. You don’t have to say— okay, fine, go, keep going.

Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot, and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings, on their four sides, they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another; each of them moved straight ahead without turning as they moved. As for the appearance of their faces, the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle; such were their faces. Their wings were spread out above; each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies. Each moved straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they went without turning as they went. In the middle of the living creatures, there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro among the living creatures. The fire was bright, and lightning issued from the fire. The living creatures darted to and fro like a flash of lightning. And I think we can just pause here for a little bit, but can I just say, you’ve convinced me I believe they are aliens.

I—that description to me is sufficient to say, yeah, it’s very— we’re talking about aliens. I don’t know why anyone’s arguing with this.

I mean, what else is it going to be? Do you have another category for this? Yes, we do. It’s apocalyptic imagery, right? This is just— and a lot of people, you know, this is one of the things that convinces a lot of people that they were all on drugs back then. Like, not every apocalyptic author was on drugs. Okay, I mean, it wouldn’t hurt to come up with this kind of imagery.

I think, I think drugs is a perfectly reasonable explanation for what’s happening here.

Um, and Ezekiel looks at the living creatures. Uh, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. And here’s something that gets brought up, um, you’ve heard of Dyson spheres, right?

So, and there was a paper—.

You need to explain what— it’s a sphere, but like, it’s like a planet, but you live on the inside. It’s hollow, right?

Well, the idea is, the, the idea is this is a hypothesized, uh, if there were these advanced civilizations, um, what would— what we would expect to see a lot more energy coming off these planets unless they created these things around the planets to absorb the energy. And that would explain why planets of certain mass, certain whatever, might be giving off less energy than we expect them to give off. And there was a paper, and I’m sure I’m getting that very wrong. And anybody out there who is an expert in this is going to be like, I’m so disappointed in you, Dan. Me too. Me too. But there was a paper published a bit ago that said, if there is such a thing as Dyson spheres, here are some candidates. Here are some planets we’ve identified that would be giving off less energy than we would expect. And, and it was just a hypothetical, like, hey, if we imagine that these things exist, these are a handful of planets or a handful of celestial objects that that could be.

And people took that to mean we’ve discovered Dyson spheres, right? Because people don’t read.

Right. And so, but can we just say, like, for the sake, just for everyone out there, the concept of a Dyson sphere is impossible.

Basically, like, you can’t— you wouldn’t have the materials, you wouldn’t have the— it’s just impossible.

But when we get to this part of Ezekiel, a lot of people are like, oh, that’s what the Dyson sphere is. So because they looked at artist renderings of what a Dyson sphere might look like, but As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction, their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl, and the four had the same form, their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel. When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved. Their rim— their rims were tall and handsome, for the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. When the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them, and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose.

What you’re saying is spaceship. That’s exactly what—.

Spaceship. Yeah. And actually, I tend to think that what Ezekiel is actually doing here is trying to say that God’s throne was pimped. We pimped God’s ride by mobilizing it, giving it these wheels that have to be fantastical and have to be grotesque. And have to be all these things because there’s a throne on top of a platform on top of wheels. Yeah. So like the idea—

Which if you just describe it like that, not that cool. But if it’s like wheels within wheels and it’s going like left, right, up and down, you don’t know which way.

And there’s blinking eyes all over. And the reason that I think Ezekiel is doing this— Ezekiel’s sitting on the river in Babylon. They’re exiled. They cannot access their God. That is way back in the temple in Jerusalem that has been destroyed. Woe is us, what are we going to do? We cannot sing the song of Adonai in a foreign land. And suddenly they hear the rumbling of God’s new ride, because suddenly the throne which used to be stuck in the temple has now been pimped out, and God can just floor it over to Babylon and ride his throne on his platform on his wheels to come visit.

Dude’s got a new Cadillac and he is ready to rumble.

And it’s got eyes all over it. And so I’m going to say something that sounds a little weird. It’s not that far off to think of this as kind of like a flying saucer or a UFO, because I think Ezekiel was probably thinking, what if God’s throne had wheels and could fly? So I— and we’re going to go back to the Hebrew Bible. Well, Ezekiel’s in the Hebrew Bible, but we’re going to go back to some imagery that is borrowed from Baal. You know how we feel about Baal, but Baal in the Ugaritic literature is the charioteer or the rider of the clouds. And this is a title that is taken over by Adonai, the God of Israel, becomes the charioteer, the rider of the clouds. And we see in Daniel coming, the Son of Man, you know, coming in clouds, riding the clouds. So for God to suddenly be like, oh, and just cruising over to Babylon in the clouds on this platform with these bizarre living wheels is just kind of like, it makes sense.

It— that’s what a stoner from, yeah, from Judah exiled in Babylon might come up with.

I am going to say, though, I think God, if that, if your theory holds, God took some extra stops before he came to Ezekiel.

Well, you got to get some snacks and supplies.

Because he came out of the north is what I’m saying. Verse 4, a stormy wind came out of the north.

So obviously, he like, did a circle around.

Did well when you when you come to Babylon, you’ve got to go up over and around because you can’t just go straight across because that’s all desert.

And so that’s the Fertile Crescent.

Is, is a crescent. And so when, when they left, when you left Babylon to go get to Phoenicia, you went north, you followed the river, you went north, and then you came down from the south. So, so yeah, that’s not, that’s not too far off. But, but I think God is like, I got to get some beef jerky. I got to get some caffeine.

I’m going to stop in and get a Turkish coffee real quick, and then I’m going to head over. I think what’s funny about this is it’s totally understandable to me to read all of this, to hear the things that you’ve mentioned about the Assyrians and the whatevers, and then to say, Like, I can’t— you can’t refute the idea that, like, like, it’s— I’m not going to say it’s a plausible explanation, but it is a valid—

I get it.

I get the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. This is a valid argument to say these were aliens.

And the— and they had spacecraft, and this is the best description that these guys could summon. For that. Yeah, it’s like Stargate.

I know what’s going on. It’s like, I’m not defending it, I’m not excusing it, but I understand.

But like, but like, yeah, as conspiracy theories go, okay, you know, so no, definitely not, but like, okay.

So here’s, here’s another one, okay, that I’m even more entertained by because I have I have heard this be described both as UFOs and as fighter jets dropping bombs.

So this is Zechariah 5 . And this is— I’m just going to jump right into it because there’s no prepping for this. Again, I looked up and saw a flying scroll. And he said to me, what do you see?

So I gotta say, a flying scroll does not sound to me like a fighter jet. I don’t know what these people are talking about.

I, I think of— you, do you remember the meme, the thing where the guy finds the scroll of truth and then reads it and, you know, whatever inconvenient truth is on there, and then he goes, “Ah!” and chucks it. That’s what I think of with the flying scroll. But it gets better. Then the angel who spoke with me came forward and said to me, “Look up and see what this is that is coming out.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “This is a basket coming out.” And he said, “This is their iniquity in the whole land.” Then a leaden cover was lifted and there was a woman sitting in the basket. And he said, “This is wickedness.” So he thrust her back into the basket and pressed the leaden weight down on its mouth. Then I looked up and saw two women coming forward. The wind was in their wings. They had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and sky. Then I said to the angel who spoke with me, “Why are they taking the basket? Where, excuse me, are they taking the basket?” He said to me, “To the land of Shinar, to build a house for it.”

And when this is prepared, they will set it down there on its base. And then we’ve got a vision of chariots coming out from between two mountains with red horses, with black horses, with white horses, and with dappled gray horses. And so, yeah, this is more apocalyptic imagery, but you can— this is where people are like, it’s a basket and there’s somebody in the basket riding in the basket and it has a leaden roof. This is obviously an airplane or a UFO or something like that. Obviously, because you can’t imagine the apocalyptic imagination of ancient Judaism having any actual validity or legitimacy to it.

Well, it’s so funny because I, you know, just think about the life of people in that time period, if you’re trying to describe, you know, a UFO or an airplane or something, I don’t think you go with basket. They had carts. They had a whole bunch of other things. I don’t think you start with a basket, to be honest, or a scroll. A scroll is the worst thing to do. I love the idea of a scroll, a flying scroll.

Well, that’s how you would describe a flying carpet, right?

Right. I did, I did come up with one possible potential justification for saying that a flying scroll could look like, could be fighter jets. The only thing I can think of is, you know how sometimes when a fighter jet goes, it goes through clouds or goes through whatever, and it’s got the little off, off of the wings, it’s got these little vortex things, little vortex things. Yeah, that’s kind of scrolly. That’s like a scroll. Yeah, not really. I’m stretching here. I’m trying to give these guys credit, but I think, yeah, I think probably the most plausible thing is that we can just say they were using metaphors. They were coming up with visual metaphors.

And we don’t have to say that it was actually a reference to any real thing.

Yeah, they didn’t have manga back then. They didn’t have anime. Right. They certainly didn’t have Disney. They needed an outlet for all this creativity, and they needed something that— and I think one of the main points of apocalyptic imagery is to be like bizarre. Yeah. Because it kind of forces you to think about this stuff and to kind of wonder what on earth is going on, and it makes you dwell on it a little bit if you’re taking it seriously. And I think that is part of the way that these were really speech acts. These were ways to achieve a goal, and the goal was to get these people to be like, “Eugh, I don’t want that to happen.” And, you know, so I guess I better shape up and ship out or something right or something. I don’t know what to say.

Straighten up and fly right.

Straighten up and fly right, um, so that we don’t have weird scrolls flying around, um, right, inhabiting and consuming houses. Yeah, that’s—that is grotesque, that’s bizarre, and that is what is intended to be achieved. This is why Revelation—people have spent so—they’ve just wasted so many years trying to figure out what all these symbols mean to, you know, the 21st century. Nothing. Yeah, it’s, it was just imagery.

Imagery.

Let it do what it’s, what it’s there to do.

You don’t have to, yeah, it’s there to be scary. Just, uh, just let it, just let it be scary.

Yeah. Be scared, dang it.

Just be scared. You don’t have to like think about what it means. Just be scared about it. Uh, all right, well, I think, uh, I, I think that the, the chances that there actually were ancient aliens are very low. Uh, but, uh, but, but I don’t think we’ve disproven it.

But never zero.

Never zero. I don’t think we have disproven the idea even that these texts were influenced by the visitations of ancient aliens. You know, it could well be that, that it’s not Nibiru. Nibiru. The Anunnaki from Nibiru made Adam and Eve.

So, and they’re coming back one day.

When the last 3,600-year cycle began.

But I mean, we got to—it’s got to be sometime soon, right? It’s got to be happening.

You would think. Yeah. Maybe, maybe next October 23rd.

Boy, are they going to be disappointed when they see what we’ve been up to for 3,000 years. They are going to be so mad. So there you go. All right. Well, friends, you know, the best people who listen to this show are the ones who give us their money. I’m just going to point that out. Only if you can, but if you can, it’s super helpful for us if you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. And, and, you know, give at whatever level you can. We give back in the form of an early and ad-free version of the show every week, as well as if you’re at the $10 a month level or higher, you can go as high as you want. But if you’re at the $10 level or a month or higher, you can get the, the after party, which is bonus content that we do for you every week. So please feel, feel free, feel encouraged to go and do that if it’s possible for you. Thanks so much to Reid Gowdy for editing the show, and thanks to all of you for tuning in.

We’ll see you next week.

Bye, everybody.

Should Wives Submit?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology