Who Deserves to Eat?

Does the context support that interpretation? I’m going to say, along with the majority of scholars, hahaha, of course not, you jerk. 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 are things today, Dan?

As good as can be expected, I think, is the answer to that.

All things considered. Yeah. Yeah.

Weighing one thing against another. We’re coasting on it. We’re going just fine.

In this economy, with a man in the White House, what else can you expect?

Well, yeah. What can one do? We’re doing okay. Today we’re going to be talking about some interesting stuff. I’m actually fascinated by a few of the things we’re going to be talking about. First, we’re going to do a chapter and verse. We’re going to hit some 2 Thessalonians.

Love Thessalonians.

Yeah, yeah. Well, one, one, you know, I like to write an epistle to a Thessalonian if I can every now and then. This is chapter 3. And the way that it is used to be a jerk.

Yes, yes, very jerky.

This is one of the jerk passages. And then we’re going to jump to Hyksos.

The Hyksos, yes.

And I have never heard of Hyksoses. The Hyksos, the very— your various Hyksies.

We’re still trying to figure out the plural there, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, I looked at it, but I’m excited to hear about it and whether or not it actually helps us understand the Exodus, maybe Joseph. There’s so many things. This is—.

Of Arimathea? Or no, not that Joseph. That’s much later.

No, Joseph Fiennes. Just pick a Joseph. Pick a Joseph.

Joseph Smith. You can’t mess with a Joseph.

Right. That one, we’ll leave that one to lie. And we’ll go on with our first thing, chapter and verse. And as we said, this chapter and verse is 2 Thessalonians chapter 3. We’re gonna do sort of a whole paragraph, basically.

Yeah, a sense unit, if you will.

A sense unit.

Yes.

6 Chapters, or verses 6 through 13.

There you go. We’re going to really land on one verse though, because this is the jerk verse. This is where if you bring this up, like, jerk automatically.

If someone says 2 Thessalonians chapter 3, verse 10, you know you’re about to get a really a jerk argument. Somebody’s, somebody’s about to be a real piece of work for you. But let’s dive in.

Uh, we’ll read through the thing, okay? And then I want to talk a little bit about context. I want to talk about what scholars think is going on here, and before we get into how people are leveraging this, um, since you mentioned context, this is an epistle from Paul.

Is this one of the actual epistles, Pauline epistles?

No, this is, this is one of the disputed Pauline epistles. So I think it’s more common among your critical scholars than among your apologists and your, uh, and your theologians to acknowledge this. It’s not unheard of among the conservatives and the theologians, but, uh, most critical scholars would say that this was likely written by somebody pretending to be Paul after Paul’s death.

This isn’t the ones, one of the ones that we’re pretty sure?

No, the— so we, you’ve got the spurious, which is generally just the Pastoral Epistles. So that would be 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. And these are the disputed. So we don’t have as much of a consensus as we do with the Pastoral Epistles. But, and these would be Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, probably not written by Paul, but we’re not going to put as big a punctuation mark on it as we are with the Pastoral Epistles.

Was it actually sent to Thessalonians?

Yeah, it probably was sent to, or at least was circulated among the inhabitants of what we now refer to, at least when I was there, as Thessaloniki. So up in the top portion of Greece, of the Aegean. Nice little port city. Last time I was there, there was a TGI Fridays there.

Don’t know if it’s still there, but that is, that is an interesting marker of civilization. I will say that. I’m not sure. I’m not sure what it portends. I don’t think it’s good.

Probably not good. No. But I— yes, I spent much happier times in, in some of the ancient sites there in Thessaloniki. But, but yeah, it was— there was a European League basketball game on the TVs. There. So it was like going to Canada. You’ve been to Canada many times, and it’s like going to Canada and it’s like, okay, they’re speaking my language. I don’t recognize the football teams, right, on the TV screen. Everybody says, eh. Um, it’s, you know, it— I’m like, wow, gas is pretty cheap. And they’re like, no, that’s per liter.

Per liter.

Yeah.

At one point I wanted— I was— my mom lives up in Canada and I wanted to translate miles per gallon. I wanted to understand what her mileage on her car was.

Yeah.

And I was like, kilometers per liter. Kilometers per liter. I can’t— what am I like? I was mystified. And then to try and figure out how the gas prices— yeah, like Canadian dollars per liter versus American dollars per gallon. I was just like, I give up.

I’m not doing this. That math is beyond me. Yeah. I tried to do it in my head driving by a gas station and I was like, I give up. I don’t know.

There’s literally no amount of math that can possibly figure that out. Yeah, it doesn’t exist.

We have not cracked the code yet. Um, anyway, so 2 Thessalonians, we got chapter 3 here now, and, and this is NRSV-UE, as we are wont to, uh, to default to.

Yeah.

Now we command you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from every brother or sister living irresponsibly and not according to the tradition that they received from us. So they’re getting a little bit of a tongue-lashing.

Or who’s the we? It’s not I, it’s we.

Yeah, well, it would be Paul and whoever his companions were, ostensibly various Paul and the Paulettes.

Yes, it was the Pips.

Turtle was there. They probably had different members of his entourage. Yes.

Scooby, Shaggy, Velma. Okay.

All right. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us. We were not irresponsible when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day so that we might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have the right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. Boom.

That’s— put a sticker on that one.

That’s the one we’re going to come back to. We’ll circle back to that. For we hear that some of you are living irresponsibly, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right. So the verse that gets wrenched out of context and quoted in Congress, that gets quoted on social media all over the place, “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command,” and usually that’s omitted, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” So the idea, and this obviously recently has been salient because of the government shutdown and the threat of ending of SNAP benefits for the poor and needy. And there were just an obscene number of people, some of them in positions of prominence and power and privilege, who were just tickled pink about the poor and the needy being denied SNAP benefits.

It’s shocking to me. The cruelty seems to be the point with these people.

Oh, absolutely. I think there’s an idea that poor people don’t deserve these things. Like, you know, things like food and shelter. Yes, yes. You’ll hear people be like, they shouldn’t be allowed to buy sodas and things with sugar. It should just be meat and bread and milk and stuff like that.

They were buying delicious things. How dare they? Yeah, they were buying food that they would enjoy instead of just sustenance gruel.

Things where they’re going to get a lot of calories efficiently and quickly. Yeah, it’s not going to take a long time to prepare and it makes them feel good. Like, I don’t know how many people listening have lived in poverty. I grew up in, I would call it, poverty conditions. I have, I don’t know, there are some people out here, out there who will get this, but I know the Bishop’s Storehouse well.

Whatever your poison is. So yeah, the cruelty is absolutely the point. And it is.

So yeah, the other thing I’ve been seeing is people who are like, you know, I saw a thread just the other day that said jobs that deserve $20-something an hour, and it listed, you know, like EMT and blah, blah, blah. And then jobs that don’t, McDonald’s worker. And I was like, what are you talking about? Yeah, that person works just as hard. That person— like, like these people, it’s so weird to me that there’s this hunger to keep people poor and miserable.

Yeah. And like, yeah, there were— you also get a lot of the, you know, well, McDonald’s job, that’s intended for high school kids. That’s right. That’s intended for part-time high school kids so they can have a little walking around money or something like that. And I think this is overwhelmingly coming from people who live in very nice areas where maybe their McDonald’s is populated primarily by high school kids.

Right.

There are plenty of places where it is.

You can’t afford in that neighborhood to live there and on the subsistence salaries that they choose to pay.

Yeah. But and the whole idea of a minimum wage, when you go back to when it was established, it was supposed to be a living wage and explicitly not merely a subsistence living, but a dignified living wage. And it is, objectively has not been that for many, many years.

For decades.

Yeah, so anyway.

30, 40 years, something like that.

Yeah, and so just the fact that there were a lot of people, and particularly people in, in ecclesiastical positions.

Yeah.

Who were just like licking their chops at the opportunity to see people go without.

And they had this—.

This passage.

Passage in their back pocket ready to whip out.

And so does the context support that interpretation? I’m going to say, along with the majority of scholars, of course not, you jerk. And that’s, you can quote me on that. That is the formal academic response, yeah.

And we’ll make that the official position of the podcast as well.

Yes, there are a couple of different readings of this that I think are interesting. One is the consensus reading. This is where if you look in commentaries, this is overwhelmingly going to be the one that is preferred by the majority of scholars. There’s another one that is a bit more of a minority reading, but I think is attractive. And I’ll start with the minority reading just because I think it makes better sense of the verses that come before. The author pretending to be Paul, talking about when Paul was there and it’s like, you know, I had a right to demand the food, but I didn’t because I was working for my wages.

I was being a good little worker bee. Yeah, and specifically to teach all of you how to be good little worker bees, to set an example.

And so the idea here is that he was someone who had an ecclesiastical office and he was fulfilling duties associated with that office, but rather than treat the fulfillment of those duties as meriting payment through the resources provided by the community—food being the main one—he said, no, no, no, my duties towards the church I’m not charging for. I’m going to work to earn the food that I am served and fed. So the reading that I find attractive, that unfortunately— just for me, unfortunately— is not the majority reading, is that Paul here is talking about people who actually have responsibilities within the governing body of the church. People who hold offices within the church who are like, “Well, I’m a bishop, I’m an overseer, I’m a pastor, I’m a teacher, I’m an evangelist, whatever.

I don’t know why they wouldn’t. That’s, uh, it seems so strange that they wouldn’t want everyone to think that they should also have to have a day job.

Yes, yes. Well, the, you know, we’ve merged the day job with the ecclesiastical duties within most, uh, within most, uh, Christian traditions, denominations.

Well, that’s true. Your tradition does not do that.

Kinda, yeah. Once you get into central leadership, there is a stipend that is—.

Yeah, the higher-ups get paid, but like, you know, the parish leader, the bishop of the ward, he gets bupkis.

Yeah, and that’s because he has a day job. He’s not being, you know, he’s getting nothing. It’s volunteer. It’s the lay clergy is what they call it. And then the higher-ups, that is their only job that they have, which is the rationalization for the stipend. Whether or not you think the stipend is fair or exorbitant or whatever is going to depend on other factors. But one way to understand this is, hey, these are people who are working for the church and then saying, I shouldn’t have to have a day job. And the passage is saying, no, if you’re going to eat the church’s food, you need to earn it. So it’s not talking about the poor and the needy. It’s not saying that when the, you know, people come into the soup kitchen and it’s like, how many hours did you work down at the, you know, the shipyard?

Right.

But before I ladle your soup into your bowl, that’s not what it’s saying at all. It’s saying, hey, don’t be a lazy apostle. Okay, you’ve got to have your day job.

So that’s, that’s, that’s one reading, interpretation number one.

The more common reading is based on the understanding that this is coming when people are like, second coming any day now. Yes, any day now. And that was the historical Paul was like, you know, don’t even bother getting married. Don’t bother having kids if you don’t have kids, because it’s coming any day now. So you don’t want to be stuck in some kind of transition period. You don’t want to be having to go through your orientation videos when the Lord comes.

So with a kid on your side, like, that’s just, that’s just gonna bug everybody.

And so based on that, most scholars today suggest that this is a reference to people who again are not poor, are not needy, are relatively well off, who are deciding they’re just going to coast into the eschaton. The church has everything I need. I don’t need to continue with my day job because Jesus is coming back too soon anyway. So that’s the more popular reading, that this is about folks who have the means to work, who have the resources, but are deciding, you know what, I’m going to put my feet up and I’m just going to let the church prop me up until Jesus arrives. So it’s an eschatological laziness, right, that is being condemned in verse 10 according to what seems to me to be far and away the most common reading of this passage.

What weirds me out about that is if the eschaton is coming, why not coast? Let them coast. What are we doing here? Look, it’s all over in just a little bit. If you have the means to coast, feels like coast, baby. Have fun.

Well, and that is a question that you would bring up if maybe this were actually written by Paul. Right. But that’s one of the reasons probably for the post-Pauline authorship of this text is the delayed parousia, the delayed eschaton. Hey, it hasn’t come yet. Generations are passing on. It was supposed to be here. And that’s when you get— yeah, that’s when you get people going, okay, back to having kids, back to work. Let’s, you know, we can’t just rest on our laurels and, and, um, just wait for this thing to happen. We gotta knuckle down and, and, uh, support ourselves. So that may be the reason that this is in this passage is because people were doing that. People were like, I thought y’all said it was going to be any day now. So I decided to cancel, you know, my contracts and this work trip and all that kind of stuff. And they’re going, well, we need to do something about this.

We’ll write another letter. And okay, well, what are we going to say? Well, tell them they just don’t work. They don’t get their asses back to work. They’re not gonna eat, you know, the Bishop’s Storehouse is gonna close.

That’s right.

So I think that’s the more popular reading.

Don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.

Okay, I don’t want to quote more of the song. You have made me paranoid.

How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? That’s all I’m saying.

Anyway, how can I be expected to speak naturally when I’m not allowed to sing. And, you know, I’m an awful singer, so that’s part of it. But so, so I think that’s, that’s the most common reading. And that still does not validate the, the folks who are slinging this passage around to demonize and to try to deny SNAP benefits to the poor and the needy, demanding they have work requirements and things like that. And we’ve seen that kind of rhetoric from a number of prominent evangelical Christians.

Very much so.

Eric Hovind is one who has come out and said this. Somebody named Pastor Joseph Hall. I’m not familiar with Pastor Hall. Christopher Arps is another. And then there’s a guy on social media. I wish I could remember his name, but he does a lot of videos where he’s in Disney World or Disneyland wearing a MAGA hat, and he’ll be like, heh heh, and film people’s reactions to him being a jerk in public and then make fun of them. But he likes to dance offbeat and have anti-woke slogans on the screen. And he was doing the same thing. And this is an example of someone, you know, he’s doing this celebratory dance. Yay, kids are going to go hungry. That’s how Christian I am.

And I also see it used by people like talking about, here’s why you don’t be a socialist, and blah blah blah. And, and, and often in the context of people pointing out that like likely Jesus would have been considered a socialist now, considering some of what he said. I don’t know that that’s correct. We should get into that at some point.

Oh yeah, that would be a great topic for sure.

Uh, But I do think that it is, because here’s the thing. Okay, I believe you that scholars have that perspective, those different potential perspectives on this passage. But it does seem to me that a plain reading of the passage feels to me pretty clear. Like, it feels like it is a valid interpretation of this passage to say, if you don’t work or if you’re unwilling to work, you should not eat. Now, unwillingness is a very slippery slope concept, especially considering the fact that, you know, it doesn’t take into account mental illness. It doesn’t take into account inability to work. It doesn’t— you know what I mean? Not all disability is visible. You know, it’s easy to say, oh yeah, the guy in the wheelchair. Probably shouldn’t be made to do construction or whatever. But like, it’s not easy to see everyone’s disability and not everybody’s capable of work.

Yeah.

However, so I think that that’s a— I think, I think it’s a valid thing to say, look, it says if anyone unwilling to work should not eat. It says that. But it seems to me that there are many passages, red-letter passages at that, that quickly refute it. And if you’re willing to ignore passages that are quotations of Jesus Christ himself in favor of a potentially pseudepigraphical Pauline epistle, it feels like you’re on the wrong track.

Yeah, yeah, there’s— and there are plenty of passages where Jesus talks about the need to provide for the poor and the needy without adding any qualifications to it. And yeah, and you know, you have a lot of Christians today who will talk about it, and this is particularly popular among the folks who confuse Jesus for a libertarian. Surprisingly common, but people who are like, you know, no, the, uh, in the New Testament, you know, the, uh, Jesus was all about your, your own liberty and, you know, didn’t want to force anybody to do anything. And it’s like, have you read the New Testament?

Right, Jesus was all about forcing everyone to do this.

And then, and then what? And then they, they do the whole, the, the role of the government is just to protect the rights of the people, everything else is, is the role of the individual. It’s like, that’s a, that’s an Enlightenment, maybe 18th-century, but that’s an Enlightenment-era, at very best, idea. It’s developed more in the 19th century, but that’s like Austrian School libertarianism, not the New Testament. And they appeal to this in order to obviously defend not funding or not supporting welfare programs, a strong, robust social safety net, as if you could make the plausible case that when you look in the New Testament, Jesus is like, look, my priority is not that they get fed, it’s just that the correct mechanism is used if they are going to get fed.

Right.

Like, the notion that Jesus would be like, look, it doesn’t matter if they end up with food, if it’s going to go through the government, because I don’t want it to go through the government.

Right.

That’s asinine. That’s just laughable. And they say, “No, it’s our responsibility. We gotta do this.” Nobody’s been stopping you. And this is not to say Christians and atheists and Jewish folks and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindu and pagans and other traditions and non-traditions don’t give generously. There are generous givers across all of those social identities. But Christians have not been stopped from solving themselves the problem of poverty. Oddly enough, it hasn’t been solved.

Yeah, that is a funny question. Like, yeah, if someone’s like, that should be—that should be up to the individual. Okay, well, are you doing it?

Yeah.

If not, then shut up.

Yeah, because what did Jesus say in Luke chapter 12? The commandment: sell your possessions, give the money to the poor.

That’s right.

Like, you can—you can dismiss the rich young ruler as like, oh, that was just his—that was just the sidebar where he is like, “this is just for you. This is what I’m going to tell you and nobody else. Don’t write this down. This is just for you.” But Luke 12 , you don’t really have that option. Jesus is like, all y’all, all y’all.

“Whoever has two coats must share one, must share with another who has none.” Slightly different context there, but I don’t know, it just seems like a thing, right? I don’t know. I have two coats. I should probably give one away.

But the point is that rhetoric is very clearly intended to absolve them of the responsibility to do it, because they’re saying, “we got to do it ourselves.” You’re not doing it. And guess what? You couldn’t possibly do it.

Yeah.

Without the government, you cannot, as a group of Christians, no matter how many you are, you cannot and you will not solve the problem.

And that’s the real issue. I mean, that was pointed out—anyone who has been on TikTok over the last three weeks or whatever has—oh gosh, the experiment. The experiment. The woman who—she went and started calling churches, all kinds of churches, and then other religions, and a Buddhist temple and whatever, asking for a thing of formula for her non-existent baby. She claimed that she had a baby, she had run out of food and her baby needed to eat, and she just said, “can you help me?” And of the something like 40 churches that she called, I think nine said yes, including the Islamic Center and the Buddhist Center and stuff. It was rough. If you listen to those conversations, you hear people just outright saying, “oh yeah, no, we don’t do that.”

Yeah. And there’s a degree to which the receptionist or whoever it is—and I don’t know if she was like, “put me in touch with your boss,” if she was getting up to decision makers or if it was just whoever answered the phone. And some of them have mechanisms for that. They were like, “oh yeah, we work with this organization. You just need to call them and they will get you the stuff.” There was an example where she was like, “oh, I called them and they said no.” And they were like, “well, they actually have been closed today and here’s the person, I know them personally and there’s no way they told you no.” So there are—I think that there are mechanisms in place for a lot of these organizations. A lot of them were just being straight up jerks though.

Yeah. It was like—to me, I don’t care if the church, if the organization that your church has set up to provide things is closed today. If there’s a baby that’s not going to eat unless you help, that to me, like, I don’t—if I’m the receptionist, I’ll go out of pocket. That’s okay. Like, it’s absurd to me that anyone would say no to that. But all of these churches that purport to be following Jesus with all of the commands from Jesus about, you know, again, red letter commands about, “I was hungry and you gave me food. Inasmuch as you do it to the least of these, you did it to me.” Like, that seems like the most important mandate possible.

Yeah.

And she wasn’t asking for money. She was like— she made it very clear, I just want the formula.

Yeah.

Crazy. It was, it was nuts to me.

And there are some people who have— there have been videos of sermons that were preached where people brought this up and criticized and condemned the woman, called her— somebody called her a witch. And then there’s—.

She was casting spells on all the people, making them not be nice.

She turned me into a newt. But then there’s this There’s this pastor named Steven Anderson.

Oh, gosh.

Oh, I know this guy.

Oh, I am familiar with Steven Anderson.

Here’s what— here’s what he posted.

He’s banned from many countries. Did you know that? He is literally not allowed to go to, like, dozens of countries.

Yeah. And he’s like— he’s— he’s just downright a jerk. Yeah. Like, I’ve responded to a bunch of his videos. He does not have the first clue what he’s talking about. Oh no, he gets everything wrong. But he posted on Twitter, I would be pissed if I donated to a church and found out that they were giving— content warning, by the way— they were giving the Lord’s money to single mother whores. I would want it to go to the Lord’s work or towards helping godly Christians who are in need. Churches should not be funding fornicators and their bastards.

Who does he think— what?

Yeah, yeah, the Lord’s work.

What does he think the Lord’s work is?

Yeah, like the Good Samaritan. Yeah, remember that was the people that they were supposed to hate? Who was his neighbor? Oh, it was the people we hate because he treated him well.

Famously also, like, Jesus dealt well with prostitutes. Like, Jesus, like, if you’re a single mother, is not a whore. But B, if she were a sex worker, guess what Jesus would want you to do? Guess, guess how he would want you— like, look at how he responded to the sex workers and maybe go thou and do likewise.

Yeah, go read Les Mis.

Yeah.

And, you know, Ah, okay. So, um, so there you go. Uh, so you got, you got a lot of people who are, who are trying to dig through the Bible to find excuses to not help other people, find excuses to literally demonize, in some cases, the poor. Yeah, find excuses to basically hoard more of their money and not not share it with the poor and the needy, which is repeatedly commanded of followers of Jesus in the New Testament. So 2 Thessalonians 3:10 , I get the appeal on the surface. It certainly sounds like, hey, we could use this to demand work requirements if you want SNAP benefits. But if you understand the context, you can see it’s not addressing that at all. And if you actually consider it within the broader context of the New Testament as a whole, You can see that kind of undermines and directly contradicts the spirit of the command to love your neighbor.

So, go thou and do likewise is the official position of the Data Over Dogma podcast.

Indeed. All right, let’s jump into Taking Issue. And we’re Taking Issue with Hyksos.

The Hyksos.

The Hyksos. Okay, let’s start by explaining who, who slash what are slash is Hyksos.

So Hyksos is a term that we get from the Greek, and I think probably from Manetho, who was a 3rd century BCE author, historian who wrote about ancient Egypt. And he referred to these as— oh, where is the— Hyksos would be the Greek. And so that has come into English probably through Latin as Hyksos. And this is a Greek transliteration of an Egyptian phrase that is actually— and I know people who know how to pronounce Egyptian are probably going to be like, “Dan.” Heka-Khasut. And this means foreign rulers or foreign lords or something like that.

Okay.

That is where the Egyptian seems to come from. But Josephus, another Greek writer, a Jewish Greek writer toward the end of the 1st century CE, he came up with a different etymology. He called them shepherd kings. So you can kind of, you can see where he’s going with this. Because this is a group of what scholars generally refer to as West Asians. These are people who are from the land of and around Israel, but probably mostly north of Israel, Amorite territory. Moving east to northern Mesopotamia. So they are Semitic peoples.

I saw the word Levantine.

Levantine, yes. The Levant is the, the Fertile Crescent, which would include Mesopotamia up over and down to the eastern Mediterranean shores. So Syria, it would be Lebanon, it would be Israel, down to the Sinai Peninsula, but then also Mesopotamia. So so that seems to be where these people are from, but they were rulers in Egypt. In fact, they took over a portion of Egypt from the native Egyptian rulers. And this happened 1650 to 1550 BCE, somewhere in there, 15th Dynasty. This is what is known as the Second Intermediate Period, and intermediate periods in Egyptian history are kind of where things got really shaky, and then, you know, there was a power vacuum, or rule broke down, or, or something like that. And so you have foreign rulers who come in and take over rule of Lower Egypt, and particularly the Nile Delta.

And here’s one of the confusing things about Egyptology: we’re used to thinking about countries on a map. Lower Egypt is north of Upper Egypt, right? Because it’s a reference to geography, to the direction of the flow of the river, the flow of the Nile River, right? So Upper Egypt is higher Egypt, and, uh, Lower Egypt is Lower Egypt, the Nile Delta. So there was a city of Avaris that is, uh, considered to have been the capital of Egypt, the Lower Egypt, during this period. Um, and there were more native–like, native Egyptian is kind of an odd term because the Egyptians, their ethnicity is, was, has always been kind of complex. But about 500 miles south of the Mediterranean Sea on the Nile is Thebes. And that’s where there was another dynasty that was ruling. And they were like, no, you know, they were shaking their fist at the at the foreign rulers.

Okay.

And we have, we have like little scarab seals where some people adopt–they would identify themselves as the Hyksos, as foreign rulers.

Oh, interesting.

During that period of rule. And for a while, people were using the Egyptian literature that said these people came in and conquered and they were bloodthirsty. And they were vicious and, yeah, and, you know, they, they just took over. And then we, we kicked them out. One of our heroes rose up and, and was able to expel the bloodthirsty heathens from, from the land.

Right.

Sounds like the way a lot of people talk about immigrants to the United States today. But that is not what happened. Based on archaeological and other data, we know that they actually had been been not infiltrating, but they had been moving into the land and settling and intermarrying and just getting along just fine for centuries prior to the rise of their dynasty, their rule. And their rule was probably something that was pretty organic. They were like, “Hey, we’ll take over while you’re trying to get things figured out. Until you get back on your feet, we’ll go ahead and we’ll be in charge.” And while they did seem to–there does seem to be some kind of uprising against them, there were still Semitic West Asian people all over that area for centuries afterwards as well.

So a lot of rhetoric and propaganda tries to reduce things to simple binaries, right? And then vilify one side, glorify the other side. And that is what was probably going on in Egypt. But the reason we bring up the Hyksos is because I’ve been seeing a lot of people trying to argue that the Hyksos represent evidence that the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt, or that this was the context for Joseph’s rise to power, uh, in the Book of Genesis . And, uh, there have been folks who have argued that, well, if there was already a Semitic, uh, administration in power, it makes it so much more likely that they would have elevated this other Semite, even though–yeah. And in the Book of Genesis , when Joseph invites his family to come to Egypt, he says, “Tell them you’re shepherds.”

And then Egyptians hate shepherds. They’ll tell you, “Ooh, go over, take that land over there.” And then they get Goshen. And so for Josephus to call them shepherd kings is kind of, hmm, yeah, suggesting, oh, these are people associated with Joseph and Jacob’s family. And so the timelines don’t really work out though. So that’s a problem if we take the–.

So when are we thinking? You mentioned that the Hyksos were sort of mid-1600s to mid-1500s BCE.

Yeah, 17th to 16th centuries BCE.

And so when would Joseph theoretically have been supposed to have been alive?

Well, okay, so it depends on when you date the Exodus. They were supposed to–.

Joseph was before the Exodus, right?

Yes. Yes. Joseph was well before the Exodus.

I mean, I know Genesis is before Exodus, but I don’t know how— if it’s supposed to be chronological in that way.

Yes, it is supposed to be. And Joseph gets sold into slavery in Egypt, and then the family comes to Egypt to escape famine. Joseph is in power. Joseph says, hey, uh, you know, stay with me. And, um, and then that is supposed to explain how it is that the Hebrews became, um, you know, located in Egypt. And then, oh, okay, another king rose up that did not know Joseph, and he was like, hey, there are a lot of these Hebrews around, let’s enslave them, precisely as, uh, you know, Columbus when he arrived in 1442 or ‘92 and said, hey, we could, we can enslave all these people, right?

There doesn’t seem to be any gold, but look at all these people we could just decide we own.

Yeah, they’re like money.

Yeah.

So the— if you date the Exodus to the 1400s BCE, which is what a lot of folks do, they’ll say, oh, this is Amenhotep II, that was the Pharaoh. 1440 to 1420, somewhere around there is the date of the Exodus. That only gives, you know, like max a little over 200 years from Joseph to Moses, which doesn’t really make sense. They were supposed to have been in Egypt for around 400 years.

Well, and there were millions of them.

Yeah, 2 to 5 million participating in the Exodus based on calculations from what the text says.

So it feels like to go from Joseph’s family to 2 to 4 million people in 200 years, that feels like a stretch.

Yeah, it is enthusiastic, definitely.

They were enthusiastic.

But you know, this is folks like Ron Wyatt, folks like Chuck Missler, Ron Wyatt’s a favorite of the podcast. Yes, yes. And even actual archaeologists like Bryant Wood, who is somebody who gets appealed to a lot when it comes to Jericho. He’s one of the ones who provided this argument against Kenyon and the consensus view that the big walls fell down around 1550 BCE. He was like, no, it’s closer to 1400 BCE. But even he, while being a little more cautious, was like, it could have been when Joseph showed up. But that’s— that only works if you date the Exodus to the late 1200s BC, which some people do and say, well, that’s Ramses. And, you know, you got the city Pi-Ramses is one of the cities that they built. So the 1200s must work better. None of them work. Like, yeah, neither of those dates works.

And as we’ve talked about, there was no Exodus. We can also just say, like, yes, we’re entertaining the thought so that we can just sort of follow the logical thing through. But yes, I mean, the thing is that we do have evidence of the Hyksos, but we don’t have evidence of any of the rest of this stuff. Yeah, yeah. And other than the Bible itself.

And just the fact that they were Semitic peoples, they came from West Asia, is not enough, because there were lots of Semitic peoples. And I think most scholars think that they were probably further north. They were probably coming from areas of Syria and around there and into Mesopotamia, because there seems to be some cuneiform, Akkadian influence and stuff like that. So, I mean, it makes sense, right?

There’s a land bridge there. You can just go from Israel to Egypt. It just, it’s you just go there. So like, it makes sense that, you know, if there was a power vacuum in Egypt and there were a bunch of people who were powerful in Israel, you could just go. It’s just like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t seem like it needs any more anything greater than that.

Yeah. And, and there was a lot of genetic admixture. You had people going into Egypt from elsewhere. Just like same with the US. And they didn’t even have Border Patrol back then. You could just walk in and you might be treated quite differently as a foreigner. But yeah, they wouldn’t say, “Hey, where are your papes? Your papers?” Right.

They might say, “Hey, what are you doing here?” And if you say, “I have an army,” and/or, “Look at how much money I have. Look at how much goods and gold I have to trade.” Say, “Hey, you might get welcomed.” Yeah.

Or robbed. Or robbed. So yeah, attempts to find Joseph, Jacob, the enslaved Hebrews, Moses, those folks in the Hyksos is misguided at best. Yeah. And does not work. And please, please, please, please, anybody out there, if you hear somebody say, well, there’s a canal called Joseph’s Canal in Egypt, please, please, that is—

Is there such a canal? There is.

There is such a canal. However, that name is only a few hundred years old. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that canal, it connects the Nile to the Faiyum, which is— but it is, it is basically a, a deepening of a natural, not constant waterway. Yeah, that, that broke through like in the Pleistocene. So yeah, Joseph didn’t dig that canal.

Yeah. I mean, that’s one of those things like Mount Ararat or whatever. Yeah, it’s like Yeah, don’t read too much into that. That name is newer than you think it is.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think it might be, I think it only might have been like the 1800s that that name was added to that canal. I don’t remember. And it was Islamic in origin, the attribution of that canal to Joseph.

So the Bahr Yusuf. Yes, there’s— that’s the one. Yeah, I Googled it while you were talking.

I can do that. Yes, he of— not Cat Stevens. Oh, right. That’s Yusuf Islam. That’s right.

That’s a different thing.

Wrote some of the— one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time. But yeah, yeah, we’re not talking about him.

Not talking about him. All right, friends. Well, there you go. That’s the Hyksos. A little bit of fun with history and archaeology there. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, and let me tell you something, it’s the main thing that makes this show go is the support from our listeners. You can go to our Patreon, which is patreon.com/dataoverdogma, and and, uh, sign up where, you know, if you sign up at the $10 a month level, you can get the after party, which is bonus content. Uh, sign up at the $5 a month level and you can get early access to an ad-free version of every episode. That’s always great. Um, if you can’t afford that, that’s fine. Why don’t you find a way to share us if you like us? You know, share on your Talk about us on your socials, share the, the YouTube, uh, do whatever you can.

We appreciate all the help we can get. We can always use more help. Uh, thanks so much to RJ Heald for editing the show, and thanks to all y’all for tuning in. We sure do appreciate you. Bye, everybody.