The Holy Dunk

You came really close to doing like a Bill and Ted voice on that part. “It’s proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan. And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation. How are things today, Dan?

Rocking and rolling, uh, ready to go. We’re, uh, we’re gonna take a dip today into the, uh, the world of baptism, which I’m, I’m, I’m excited about. We are— we— I, I tried to plan— look, look, guys, I’m trying to plan things so that they sort of fall on liturgical calendar moments. And like, the bat— we’re like, now this area of time is sort of when the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus takes place, somewhere around here. I did not really look up when. I know it’s in January. So we’re going to talk about that for our What’s That? We’re going to talk about the baptism of Jesus. And then in the latter half of our show, we’re going to look at, in Chapter and Verse, we’re going to look at some crazy rules of war. Yeah. We’re getting Deuteronomical.

Deuteronomistic.

There you go.

Or Deuteronomic. Or whatever you like. Yeah. But we’re going to talk.

Or his Dudeness or Deuter.

If you’re not into the whole brevity thing. Right. Yeah. That’s going to be a heavy discussion.

It’s going to be crazy, you guys. This is— we’re just diving into war crimes. So that’ll be a lot of fun in the second half of the show. But for now, let’s go into our What’s That? All right. So last week, Dan, we talked about John the Baptist’s death.

And we dealt— we dealt with old John and how controversial he was and how he was a big figure in the area at the time that Jesus was starting his ministry. And so it makes sense, I think, for us to talk also about the baptism itself, the big handover of power from John the Baptist to Jesus, which is, which is something that we see in, in all four gospels.

And this is really the main point of contact between Jesus and John the Baptist in the gospels. And it is interesting that being baptized by somebody else is to some degree kind of a performance of subordination to them or to their authority. So there is, there is a degree to which Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist is a little bit of an embarrassment.

And so it’s a bit of a problem, and a few of the Gospel writers try to soften that blow or try to work their way around it or something. So that’s a— it’s an interesting thing.

Yeah, we’re going to talk about the development of that, and I think it marks an interesting contrast where the theology of the baptism kind of grows, whereas the significance of John the Baptist’s death kind of effaces, goes away as we progress through time in the composition of the Gospels, as it becomes more important to have Jesus actually being the one who’s in charge when it comes to this baptism.

But maybe one of the things that we should do before we dive into the actual accounts of the baptism is talk a little bit about what baptism is and what it’s for. And like, when did it start happening? I don’t— yeah, it’s a weird— it’s, I mean, it’s a very interesting ritual. And I don’t— did it start in the Hebrew Bible? Or is it new? Well, it’s new to the New Testament.

So yeah, we talked a bit about this when James McGrath was on the show, talking about his biography of John the Baptist. And I think we talked a bit there about how baptism seems to have been kind of an incremental elaboration on the mikveh, which was a purification bath. That was something that Second Temple Jewish folks, uh, did quite frequently. And we even have examples of this at Qumran among the Essene community that occupied that area and seems to have been responsible for gathering most of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts. And this was a way to ritually purify yourself. And the elaboration, the change that we talked with James about was that it was not so much a matter of ritual purification so much as a means of receiving forgiveness for sins.

So that’s the main contribution that John the Baptist maybe made. It might be John the Baptist who actually was like, we’re gonna do it like this from now on, and introduce this new way of thinking about the significance of immersion within water. But it seems to have built on the foundation of the mikveh, sort of a—.

Yeah, like a ritual cleanliness sort of thing.

Yeah, where rather than just ridding yourselves of temporary impurities that you may have accumulated through the course of your day, or in preparation for doing something that requires ritual purity.

I mean, it’s probably historical.

Okay, that’s interesting. The other thing that sort of blows my mind is like, that I think is along those same lines, this embarrassment line is like, you know, the Jesus that we are introduced to in, you know, that you hear about in church, there aren’t supposed to be any sins for him to have forgiven. Like, if that is the primary idea of baptism, um, I don’t— that means we might have a little bit of a theological issue if we’re supposing that Jesus was pure and clean from the jump.

Yeah. And you get, uh, at least Matthew is trying to account for that. Not Mark, but Matthew is like, We gotta address this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The elephant in the room.

And we remember that Mark is probably previous to Matthew.

Yes, yes. Markan priority is the technical term for that.

Yes, that Mark comes first. And it’s just 3 verses. We can go ahead and read Mark’s account of the baptism in Jesus, as is our wont from the NRSV-UE.

Yes, indeed.

Which, by the way, now is approved by the LDS Church for use in meetings and in, uh, in classes.

Oh, you, you’re gonna make some Mormons mad on you in your, in your ward when you go in and start using the NIV.

They have me ferreted away in primary, so I never see, I never see the inside of a Gospel Doctrine classroom, even though this coming Sunday will be the start of, uh, the Old Testament year.

Scary Old Testament. All right, go on.

Um, so Mark 1:9 is where it starts. In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And that’s the, the account of the actual act of the baptism. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased. ’ And all kinds of stuff, yeah, to, uh, to talk about here.

Yeah, I mean, I can— can I just point out a few things? Can I flag a couple things that I— that that stood out to me as I read some different things.

Absolutely.

Uh, I, I will. So, A, yes, uh, as we talked about, no, it— no need in this one. Mark feels no need— the author of Mark feels no need to worry about why Jesus is being baptized or if, like, Jesus needs baptism. It’s just so normal. It’s just like, oh, so Jesus went through the process as you do.

And this is preceded by setting the stage by describing John as the forerunner of the, uh, of the, you know, the chosen one, the anointed one, right? So this— and, and specific, and more directly, like, the forerunner of God, not because Jesus is God, but because Jesus is God’s representative and the bearer of God’s authority and presence on earth. So we, we already have a, a backdrop for this. And so Mark just cruises right on by the uncomfortable part.

I think it’s interesting in verse 10 that Jesus said that it says that Jesus, it says he saw the heavens torn apart, right? The Spirit descending. It, you know, it almost seems like maybe this is a thing that’s exclusive to Jesus. Like, yeah, Jesus is having this experience. And then a voice came from the heavens, you addressing just Jesus, you are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased. Like, yes, that could all have just been Jesus had a moment with this. Also descending like a dove. I’m going to point out that it’s like, that it’s a, that it’s a simile here.

Because it stops being a simile by the time.

Yeah, he says, hos peristeran katabainon. Yes, so it is a simile. It does seem to be Jesus perceiving all of this, and the address is directly to “you,” so this is second-person speech in Mark’s account.

And this is kind of an adoption motif.

Uh, ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. So this is basically the coronation of a king who’s going to, uh, go out and run the world, basically.

Right, right, right.

And so what we have with with God saying this to Jesus is reflecting this idea that Jesus has been— this is the coronation of Jesus as King of Israel, but even more so as the Messiah, the Anointed One. And there’s a secondary reference as well. Actually, there are a handful of references from Isaiah. Oh, because Mark loves Isaiah. And, uh, we have the very first servant song. We’re familiar with Isaiah 53 where people say, oh, it’s a prophecy about Jesus, even though it’s talking about a servant. And the servant is explicitly identified numerous times in Deutero-Isaiah as Israel. But the very first servant song is in Isaiah 42 , and, uh, verse 1: Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry out or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench. He will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth, and the coastlands wait for his teaching. So the whole ’the Spirit has descended on Jesus’ combined with the ‘you are my Son’ kind of brings these two ideas together of Jesus as the anointed one and the coronated crowned king of Israel. So as I’ve mentioned many times, Jesus is really the grab bag of all of the imagery from the Hebrew Bible. You just toss it all in there and you get Jesus.

And there’s one other place I want to bring up, Isaiah 11 .

Uh, verse 1: A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its— his roots. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And so we’ve got another, uh, case of this all being prophesied. And so the baptism represents the fulfillment of these prophetic ideas about what the the Messiah is going to do.

And this stump of Jesse stuff plays into the sort of the idea that Jesus was from the lineage of David and David was Jesse’s son.

Yeah. And this is actually one of the— well, it’s the main scripture that people will go to when you have Matthew saying that they went up to a town in Galilee, Nazareth, and settled there so that it might be fulfilled, which said, He shall be called a Nazarene. And there’s no such prophecy anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. However, Isaiah 11 does have the branch that shall grow out. Branch is netzer in Hebrew. And so people are like, netzer, Nazarene, eh, eh, eh, eh? So maybe they imagine that what Matthew is doing is kind of squinting at a Greek translation or a transliteration at least of Isaiah 11:1 and saying, I can get behind that. Maybe that’s where Jesus of Nazareth is to be found, uh, foreshadowed in, in the Hebrew Bible. Okay, so yeah, Isaiah, very important to everything that’s going on here.

Yeah, let’s—.

Yeah, shall we move on to Matthew?

Yeah, let’s get to Matthew. Uh, this is, this is Matthew 3 . The first thing, Mark launches in with this stuff. This is all Mark 1 , because Mark doesn’t handle, doesn’t deal with the birth.

Correct. Yeah.

So now we’re, now we’re in Matthew 3 .

And this, and this, that’s an important point to make, because for a lot of scholars, Jesus was just a regular old dude until his ministry begins. And so the baptism could be like the moment of adoption where God says, “You are now my Messiah.

That’s definitely the sense you get from Mark.

Yeah, that—.

That is 100% what you get from him.

You get no background.

Right.

But once Mark’s in circulation, then you start to get questions about, “Wait, he came from Nazareth? Don’t you know Micah says the Messiah’s gonna come from Bethlehem?” And then Matthew was like, “Oh, I gotcha.” But yeah, we’re in Matthew 3:13 . “Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’” Then he consented.

You came really close to doing like a Bill and Ted voice on that part, which I love. That “it is” proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. There’s just something great about that.

Anyway, yeah, um, we’re gonna fail most egregiously. Um, “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him, and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” Yeah, so we got lots of changes here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matthew was getting real, uh, artistic-y, license-y, where he, one, addresses the elephant in the room. Wait a minute, why would Jesus go subordinate himself to this dude? And has John the Baptist recognize, whoa, I don’t hold a candle to you.

Yeah, yeah.

Why would I need to baptize you? I need to be baptized by you. And Jesus says, just do the thing. And it’s to fulfill all righteousness, which— what does that mean? Well, maybe it just means as an example to everybody else, you have to get baptized. None of you have any excuse because look, Jesus, who had no sins, got baptized, right? And he even recognized, I got to— I don’t need it, but I got to do it anyway. So, right. So Matthew has thought of everything.

Nothing more important than jumping through all the hoops.

Yes. Yes. This is just—.

You literally have to do the bureaucracy. You got to fill it out in triplicate. Yeah. So one half to HR.

Look, if the gospel is not a checklist, what is it?

What are we even doing here?

Yeah, yeah. And then we do have Jesus is the one who sees God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And here we’re kind of inching a little closer to actually seeing a dove because it’s like it lands on and alights on him.

And then it does still keep it simile. It says like a dove.

Right. And then with that, and then the voice changes though. It does not say, “You are my beloved Son,” right? This is— so now we have to understand this voice being heard by others. This voice is a sign to others, an identification of Jesus to others as God’s Son, the Beloved with whom I am well pleased. Again, Psalms 2 . Again, Isaiah 11 , Isaiah 42 . All of this is still in the background. But Matthew’s like, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna juice this up. We’re gonna—.

Yeah, Matthew’s responding. And yeah, it is explicit that like, God is now talking to the crowd. God’s, God’s now working the audience.

Yeah, on this one, doing some crowd work. Yeah, which is, you know, it’s necessary. If you’re going to get up on stage, you got to do some crowd work. I don’t know anything about comedy. As most of y’all know. Now, um, Luke— once we get to, uh, to Luke, who is, who is working with, uh, Matthew and Mark, we, uh, we kind of pull it back a little bit. We still have, uh— Luke actually, I think, wants to go back to some Markan stuff. So Luke doesn’t care about Matthew’s rationalization of why, uh, why Jesus needs to be baptized. We just have two verses, Luke 3:21 . “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.”

Like a dove.

Yes. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

Beloved. With you I am well pleased. So, uh, so again, the voice addresses Jesus again. But there is a bird. There’s like— it seems like there’s an actual physical bird now.

Yes. So the Greek here is somatikos, which would be, uh, bodily appearance. Uh, this— the, the Spirit, the Holy One, bodily— as the bodily appearance of a dove. So now it actually— it is a dove that is in view. And, uh, and now it descends upon him. And, and, and Luke doesn’t actually narrate the actual baptism itself. It says, when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, yeah, heaven was open.

And can I point out something about that? Because the verse before this, uh-huh, is John getting shut into— getting imprisoned by Herod.

So we’re kind of having to go back and forth narratively, chronologically.

If— yeah, I mean, or some other dude baptized Jesus, because it doesn’t say that John baptizes Jesus here. Uh, it’s confusing, is all I’m saying.

Oh yeah, look at that, it doesn’t say John’s name in, in these two verses.

So, so like, I don’t know, like that, that I, I read that and I was like, uh, wait, wait, John’s in prison? What’s happening? Why is John in prison? Jesus isn’t baptized yet. What are we doing?

Um, yeah, John is baptizing, and yeah, he’s denying being the, uh, uh, the Messiah.

Yeah, if you go back to verse, uh, 15 through 17, John is talking plenty about how good Jesus is.

And then also in Galatians 4 , uh, doo-doo-doo-doo, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, and in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child, then also an heir through God. So we, in the baptism, we got the same thing— Spirit sent, ‘You are my son.’ And so maybe this, the, the whole baptism story, is intended to reflect or, or kind of resonate with people who have understood their own reception of the Spirit as their own adoption into the family of God, and now they are joint heirs with Jesus. Oh, and now the story of Jesus being baptized says the same thing. So it might be an attempt on the Gospel authors to try to appeal to that conceptualization of adoption into the family of God.

So there are levels to all of this. There are lots of levels. Anything else you want to say about Luke?

Not particularly, other than just, this seems to be the last time. Yeah, I don’t know. We get back to, “You are my Son.” So, you know, the voice is now addressing Jesus again instead of the crowd.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s just a very interesting sort of refinement, or just everybody’s got their own thing that they’re doing with this story.

And I’m still, I’m still mystified by the fact that John’s in prison. I just like that. I think it’s funny to me because what I guess you’re right, that like the probable way that we’re meant to look at that is that John’s in prison, but when we look at now, when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus had also been baptized, that refers to before John went to prison.

Yeah, yeah. Luke’s like, wait a minute, back it up, I gotta talk about something that happened before. And immediately after that, it’s Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his work.

And this is the— the “he” here is, uh, is John the Baptist.

John the Baptist, yes. “This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the chosen one.” And so we’ve got— the baptism again isn’t narrated at all, but here the whole point of baptism is kind of reconfigured to be a means of identifying Jesus. It’s kind of like God, you know, we could go to the Gethsemane scene where Judas is like, “The one I kiss, that’s Jesus.”

And here in John, God is like, “Hey, go dunk people in water so that I can use that as a mechanism for pointing out to you who the chosen one is.”

And look for a guy with a bird.

Yeah. And it won’t have anything to do with the actual process of dunking this person. It will have to do with the bird landing on him. And that’s— and, and it’s all symbolic because he’s going to baptize with the Holy Spirit. So we’ve got a very, very literarily creative reconfiguration of the baptism here.

Can you help me understand one thing real quick?

Probably.

Maybe.

Verse 30: “This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me.’”

“Because he was before me.”

Mm-hmm.

How was he before him? I don’t—

How Jesus was before him?

Jesus? Yeah. He says, after me comes a guy who’s ahead of me because he was before me. That’s a lot of prepositions, and I don’t know what they mean.

So John, and there are 10 verses before these, which are labeled in the NRSV-UE “The Testimony of John,” where John is kind of out there going, “Everybody listen!” And he says they come to him and say, “Who are you?” He confessed and did not deny it, but he confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” And then he quotes the passages from the Hebrew Bible like Isaiah and Malachi that are in Mark. “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said. And then they’re asking, “Why are you baptizing?” He says, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me. I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandal.” This took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

So, um, so we set this up a little bit, but the idea is, “I’m— I have a public ministry now. Someone’s going to enter into a public ministry after me, but that person came before me,” in the sense that Jesus is the Logos, the Word. That was at the very beginning. So John knows that Jesus is an eternal being who is divine, and so long predates John’s existence or his mission. However, Jesus’s mission will not start until after John’s has been ongoing. So this is a more theologically complex and rich way of having John defer to the authority of Jesus.

I just knew that John was like, a few months older than Jesus. So I was like, he didn’t come before John. Yeah, John, I know, I know who’s older. John, I know who jumped in the womb. I’ve had to argue with people who say that abortion’s not okay.

And, and again, that kind of reaffirms the purpose of John baptizing is precisely as a mechanism for identifying the Messiah, the chosen, right? And what’s, what’s interesting is John could be presenting Jesus as ‘Cause they ask him, “Are you the Messiah? Are you Elijah? Are you that prophet?” And that probably refers to Deuteronomy 18 , the prophet like unto Moses. Jesus could be argued to be all three of those things. Again, he’s a grab bag of all of the imagery from the Hebrew Bible.

What do you need? He can be it.

Yeah, yeah. He’s the utility savior.

But wait, what about this? Swiss Army Messiah. Yeah, yeah.

But wait, there’s more. Um, so, so yeah, Jesus—and this is how Jesus can be all things to all people. And, um, and I’m very excited to write my chapter on that for my forthcoming trade book, God’s Biography: A History, because I’m going to talk about that, about how, um, you have the accumulation of all these different ideologies and all these different notions of divine mediation. And for Jesus, they’re just like, we’ll take them all, just throw them in the back, just put them in there. Yeah. And the same is true of Satan. All the bad things will take them all. Just he’s the grab bag of everything that’s bad. So, so those are the four accounts of kind of accounts of Jesus’s baptism. That’s kind of the focus of them. But really, they’re about John the Baptist kind of handing the keys over to Jesus and getting out of the way willfully or not so much. In some of the accounts.

Yeah, I mean, in all of these accounts, it makes it seem very much like this guy was super on board with Jesus. He was definitely like, oh, he’s not even worthy to unstrap his sandal, blah blah blah. Yeah, whether that was actually like historically the case, how it went down, uh, that’s definitely what these authors want us to think.

Yeah, I can imagine. You can imagine some people coming to John being like, hey, man, this Jesus guy is kind of taking off. And he’s like, how dare he? I baptized him. You’re not going to like this text that is going around. Yeah, it says that you said he was greater than you. How very dare he, that little punk. And then it’s only a little bit later that John in the Gospel of John , John the Baptist says he must increase and I must decrease. To again perform that deference to Jesus’s authority and divinity. So yeah, the baptism is—and this is kind of, it’s the coronation. It’s, in some scholars argue, it’s the point of the act of divinization. It is the endowment of Jesus with the messiahship, and it appeals to a lot of Jewish themes, but also the idea of the heavens cracking open and all this kind of stuff, that also has some Greco-Roman theophanic resonances as well.

So it is something that’s going to appeal to Greco-Roman period Jewish listeners, and also for folks who are not in the Jewish community but know some of these traditions, they’re going to be like, that sounds familiar. I’m going to go see what’s going on here. Do you have some literature I can take with me? And, uh, and that’s—so it’s, it’s, uh, it’s checking off a lot of boxes. And again, if the gospel is not a checklist, what on earth is it? So, uh, so there we have, uh, the baptism of Jesus in a, in a rather irreverent, uh, retelling.

Well, I think that’s, uh, great for now. Uh, we’ll, we’ll, uh, we’ll put that back in the, the River Jordan and we’ll move on. To our chapter and verse. And boom, the chapter and verse is Deuteronomy 20 , or the chapter is Deuteronomy 20 . And good luck, because we’re about to have us some fun.

Yeah, well, it’s a mess. Yeah, this is—Deuteronomy means the second law. We know this was probably begun under the reign of King Josiah toward the end of the pre-exilic period, and, uh, it was kind of added to over the following centuries. And it’s basically trying to prop up a Davidic line and the, the necessity of, uh, of a Davidic king and all this stuff. But one of the things that it does is it purports to be, uh, Moses’s kind of farewell tour, uh, before he, um goes off to wherever he goes off to, and he reviews an awful lot of the stuff that, that God told him and that he turned around and told Israel. Only when you compare it to all the other stuff from Genesis to Numbers, it differs in a lot of ways. And one of the main ways it differs is that it’s, it’s really about a covenant that is being made between God and Israel.

Only this covenant is framed in language that is very, very reminiscent of what are called Neo-Assyrian vassal treaties, and particularly those of like Esarhaddon and other emperors.

So it’s talking about a time period that is several hundred years before these texts are being written. So it’s basically inventing a golden age in the past.

Right. And it’s not just talking about it, it’s talking as though the author is in the midst of it.

In that period. Right, right.

It’s talking as though this is somewhat a contemporary contemporary talking to the contemporaries of that time.

Yes. And one of the giveaways that it is not from that time is the authors, particularly in the Deuteronomistic layers of other texts outside of Deuteronomy, will frequently say, “And then this happened, and then this happened, and to this day you can still go see that place.” Oops. So but here in Deuteronomy 20 , we’ve got a series of rules about warfare. Yes, how to engage in warfare. And there are 3 main segments. The first one is verse 1 through 9, and then we have 10 through 14, and then we have 15 through 20. And all of them are very different, and they get increasingly disturbing. Yeah, yeah.

The first bit is just like the, the 1 through 9 is just like, you know, the priest is going to go out and address the troops and just say, “Buck up, you guys.” And there’s some weird stuff about that I didn’t really understand about, like, if your house isn’t dedicated, you better go home.

Dedicate it.

It’s basically put your house in order kind of stuff. So the priest is out there to be like, we are consecrated to go out in battle. “Has anyone become engaged to a woman but not yet married her? He should go back to his house lest he die in battle and another marry her.” And, you know, at which point immediately everybody goes, “I’m out.” Yeah, it doesn’t—

It feels like this is a comedy sketch where, you know, I could see Monty Python having this scene and the priest is like, “If you’re—if you haven’t dedicated your house, you better go back to your house.” And a bunch of guys are like, okay, I don’t want to go to war. And then if you haven’t married your wife, your betrothed person, better go do that. And then a bunch of other guys go. It’s like, does anybody have any fruit on their trees? Because if you haven’t eaten your fruit, you got to go eat your fruit.

Yeah. And then, and any, any of you scared? If you’re scared, we don’t need you.

And you know, there’s just one guy left on the battlefield ready to go.

Yeah. And then, uh, verses 10 through 14 are rules about what to do when you go fight against a town. And, and it’s odd, but let’s take a look. When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace.

Now, that sounds good. That’s a good start.

Sounds good. But let’s, but let’s be clear, they’re engaged in a campaign of conquest. They’re not just out enjoying their day, frolicking, when suddenly a town shows up and it’s like cake or death, um, and you, and you have to offer it peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. So the terms of peace are be subjugated to us, right? Become our corvee labor, become enslaved to us, right?

Slave or death is a much worse choice than cake.

Yes, um, I’ll have cake please. Very well.

Um, but it was gonna be more cake.

Yeah, but if it does not accept your terms of peace and makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your plunder the women, the children, the livestock, and everything else in the town—all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies which the Lord your God has given you. And this is, uh, and, and this is particularly disturbing. This, this is describing basically a genocide because at this time these towns are basically individual people groups. These are ethnic groups and you’re basically destroying them. And then I’ve heard apologists say, “Well, no, it’s incorporating the women and the children into your family, giving them a life, allowing them to survive.” That’s still cultural genocide.

And then they would take the children and just scatter them among white families and put them in boarding schools and try to basically reeducate the indigeneity right out of them. Try to make them imagine that they come from savage, uncivilized stock. And even the LDS Church was deeply involved with these programs with the United States government. And that is cultural genocide. You are erasing those identities. So this is not defensible. No, no, no.

In no way is any part of it. Yeah, from here on in, there’s nothing defensible. Oh yeah, no. As we progress through the rest of this text, it is not—it’s going to remain indefensible.

And when you take as your plunder the women, yeah, they’re sex slaves, basically. Right. They’re becoming your concubines. And you have more explicit descriptions of this as well as precisely what process they should go through and what timeline you have to wait before you can actually go and sexually assault them. Like, this is not ambiguous.

And the way that it talks about the women and children as property, just in a list of properties, right, that it also includes livestock and… everything else. It is not—there is no—it is so dehumanized. It is just, take, you know, you get this property now.

Yeah. And verses 15 through 18, I’m actually going to split the last segment into two itself. Verses 15 through 18 are usually agreed by scholars to be part of a secondary literary layer that has been added on later. Because when you read through from verse 1 all the way to verse 14, it’s like, okay, here are rules for war. Here’s what happens when you go out to conquest other cities. But then verse 15 qualifies everything that it has just said. Yeah. Thus shall you treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of these nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance—in other words, verse 15 jumps in and says what I just talked about, that was only for the people who are not occupying the land of Canaan that the Lord your God is giving you. When it comes to the towns in the land of Canaan, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive.

Indeed, you shall annihilate them: the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, just as the the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God. And woof, yes indeed. And the, the NRSV-UE has rendered annihilate, uh, a verb, while the noun is herem, and this is kind of ritual slaughter of a people. And we find this—and this is a term that is used in the Mesha inscription, and it’s also known from some Sabaean inscriptions. The Sabaean people and language were an Old South Arabian language and people who occupied deeper inland in Arabia. But that was the notion basically of ritual slaughter of a people. So in the previous verses, it was kill all the men.

They’re of no use to us. They’re only going to get in the way. We will take and enjoy the women and the children because they can function as concubines or we can raise them as our own, either as an enslaved population.

And they’re unlikely to fight back or what? Right.

And they’re not going to fight back. But when it comes to herem, that’s ritual slaughter. Everything must go. It’s a fire sale and you’re not allowed to keep anything. And there are stories about God commanding herem and then somebody holding on to some stuff and then them having a very bad day as a result. And there’s an argument to make that what’s going on here, because when we get in other parts of Deuteronomy and particularly into Leviticus, once we get into the holiness code, you have this idea that all this purity stuff is basically to prevent you from desecrating, contaminating either God’s holy precinct or the land of Israel. So you get these ideas that if you do all these things, then the land of Israel will vomit you out, just like it has done to the people who came before you. And so you have to make sure to avoid all this stuff so that you—or you have to purge this evil from the land.

And so the idea is these sins create a kind of metaphysical contamination that gets out on the land, and these impurities contaminate the land, and then the land is going to be like—and vomit it out because the land can’t take it.

They have to be purged.

I do want to push back a little bit on just that idea, just because it is explicit that the— or there is an explicit reason given for the complete annihilation of all of these other people, which is so that they don’t teach you their ways, so that they don’t teach you their, their bad magic or whatever it is that— and that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s almost more nuts to me. Well, and it’s like, yeah, they could teach me, but, uh, I know that I’m supposed— like, just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll just not do the thing that they’re doing and I’ll do that thing. How about that? Do I have to kill them all? Can I just— can’t they be alive and I’ll just not do the things that they’re doing?

Well, and that’s kind of the rationalization that sidesteps the idea that this is kind of ritual slaughter for the sake of human sacrifice that purifies the land. But, you know, if you’re the women, you have other parts of the Hebrew Bible that discuss women corrupting their husbands, foreign women corrupting their husbands. Oh, right, right, right.

Yeah, we’ve talked about.

But like, the children, you don’t have to kill the babies because they, they have not yet been taught those things. Yeah. Um, and, and also the, the idea that it’s everything that breathes— you will not let anything that breathes remain alive— that’s a command to kill livestock. Yeah. You’re not even allowed to take the animals, not because they’re going to teach you to worship Baal. Um, I, I think there’s while we have kind of these token rationalizations for what’s going on, I think undergirding a lot of what we’re talking about, and it comes through in different ways in different parts of the text depending on the authors, the editors, things like that. But I think underlying it is the notion that the land must be purged of the impure blood, for lack of a better word. It is, it is pretty sick genocidal language that is going on here.

And it is as if to add insult to that injury because, yeah, we’re killing the livestock, we’re killing anything that breathes. And then verse 19 comes in and goes, but you stay away from those trees.

Yeah, this is, this is something that has been much debated by, by scholars. 19 and 20. If you besiege a town for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them. Although you may take fruit for food from them, you must not cut them down. For are trees in the field human beings— any— are trees, excuse me, for are trees in the field human beings that they should come under siege from you, you may destroy only the trees that you do not— that you know do not produce food. You may cut them down for use in building siege works against the town that makes war with you until it falls.

Right. Like, those are very, very important resources.

And so, a lot of scholars thought, okay, so what this is doing is kind of looking at the Neo-Assyrian siege tactics and saying, don’t be like them. That is usually not taken so seriously these days. There’s got to be something else going on here. And there are scholars who suggest that this is having to do with not destroying things that are producing fruit. So you’ve got other parts of Deuteronomy where it’s like, you know, don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk. And it talks about— there’s another part in Deuteronomy 22 where it talks about not destroying things that are bearing fruit. Maybe that has something to do with this. Maybe it just has to do with trying to offer kind of a tiny little token suggestion of humanity.

However, it is pretty inhumane to be like, “Don’t hurt the trees. The trees aren’t people.” Yeah. Why would you hurt the trees?

Literally expressly saying they’re not jerks like humans. They’re just trees. They didn’t do anything to you. Yeah.

So it is an odd little attempt to try to qualify the genocidal instructions that are going on here. But I think it demonstrates just the complexity of what’s going on in the book of Deuteronomy . This is something that was handed down for centuries with people adding to it from time to time. And I think we probably have three very different segments where you initially have, okay, here are the rules, and then somebody else coming in, no, just the rules for those people over there, these people, we got to kill them all. And then somebody coming in later and be like, hey, we can be humane about this. We can be civilized about this. Just don’t cut down the fruit trees.

Okay, be cool with the trees, man.

So I mean, I do remember, I do remember, uh, is it in Kings, 2 Kings, I think, when we talked about the campaign against the Moabites?

Yeah, yeah, they—and it says cut down every good tree.

They cut down all of the trees when they’re doing it. Yeah. So it’s not like the Israelites never did that, or—

Right. And one of the arguments that scholars have made is, hey, maybe this is looking at 2 Kings 3 , ultimately that campaign failed. And we know that it’s because Chemosh rode the lightning into town and chased the invading force off. But maybe they were like, well, maybe it was because they cut down the trees.

So let’s just leave the trees alone.

It would have been fine. Yeah. So maybe that’s what’s going on here. I’m sure there—I do have friends who are colleagues who listen to this podcast. If somebody has a better idea. Jacob Wright, who’s been on our show, he published a paper on this very passage. He makes a very erudite argument. But if anybody listening has a better idea, they’re convinced they know why the fruit trees were to be left alone, I would love to hear the explanation. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, there you go, friends. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, the best thing you can possibly do, the thing that actually literally sustains us and keeps us going, is become a patron of the show over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can get early access to an ad-free version of every episode of the show, as well as the After Party, which is bonus content for you that we do every week, and you get the warm fuzzy feeling of helping us keep this thing alive. So that is a wonderful thing to do. Thanks to all of our patrons. Thanks also to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

The Holy Dunk

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology