Jesus is so Fulfilling!

And then Ashurbanipal came to power after Esarhaddon.

But you’re just making names up now.

Hey, I haven’t even gotten to Tiglath-Pileser III. Okay, so that’s one of the greatest.

One of the greatest. I think that’s one of the cats from the show Cats.

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 about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good. You know, I recently saw a comment on our YouTube channel that just said, I’m always concerned because Dan M always asks Dan B how he’s doing, and Dan B never asks Dan M. So I’m fine.

How are you, Dan?

You know what?

I’m doing all right. Uh, we’ve got, we’ve got normal, like, high school kid drama that, uh, that we’re trying to navigate, uh, here today. But, uh, but other than that, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. A little on the cold side, woke up to a little snow for the first time this year, apart from a dusting, uh, I think the day after Christmas. But, uh, so I did have to scrape something off the car this morning, although actually not— it wasn’t that difficult because now I have a new car that allows me to start it from my app 15 minutes before I go out there. So it was a lot easier.

Nice and toasty by the time you get there, huh?

Yes, yes, it was quite fun. I’ve never used the seat warmers. I don’t like having directly under me very hot and then the edges that my thighs are touching cold. That is an off-putting sensation. So I don’t know if other people are like, oh yeah, give me more of that, but I don’t like that. So anyway, that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Yeah.

And also this is why we don’t actually— like, we don’t actually care how we’re doing.

We’ve already been talking for a few minutes before we actually start the recording.

So if you hear Dan ask me how I’m doing and I don’t reciprocate, it’s because neither of us cares how the other is doing. What we do care about, however, is what’s going to be on the show. And coming up, we’ve got a fun show today. We’re going to be talking about the law being fulfilled, uh, and what that means. What did Jesus mean when he said he fulfilled the law? Because I have been very confused about that, and yes, and I’ve been told very different things about what that ends up meaning. So indeed, uh, so there’s that. And then in the second part of the show, we’re going to talk about, uh, Well, I don’t really know. We’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about vassalage. We’re going to be talking about Deuteronomy, and I don’t know how it all fits together.

Well, the, the rug that really ties the room together is going to be the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon. And, and so that’s a What’s That segment where we’re going to address what exactly that is. Yeah.

All right. So a lot of fun coming up. Let’s dive in with our first thing. We’ll call it a chapter and verse. Okay, so the reason, Dan, that I wanted to do this topic is because I have heard, I’ve been told by multiple people from different religious backgrounds, all Christian, but different Christian backgrounds. And I’ve asked about, you know, a question about why is one law still very much in effect? And why is another law, you know, why is it okay to eat shellfish now and okay to blah, blah, blah. But, you know, obviously, we can’t, you know, stone our wives if they are whatever, or, you know, sell our girls, our daughters off into slavery or any of those sorts of things. Just because it feels like there’s a, you know, that’s a hypocrisy, or that’s a question that needs answering in a modern Christian context.

And a lot of the time, what I got back was this idea that Well, Jesus fulfilled the old law, the Law of Moses, the whatever, and that means that it doesn’t apply anymore. And then I would ask, okay, but why do you want— why do you care then about things like the Ten Commandments or whatever? And then they’re like, oh, but that’s still good law. And it just gets very confusing to me. I don’t know what’s happening. So I’m going to make you talk about it. And figure out what Jesus is actually saying in Matthew 5 .

Yeah, and this is just one of multiple different ways that people have tried to rationalize the fact that Christians are really not hip to a lot of the legislation that is in the Hebrew Bible. And I think you’re going to bring up the division of the law into different categories and stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe we need to save the idea of the ceremonial laws versus the moral laws for its own segment. I don’t know. Maybe that should be a thing.

I thought we had done a segment on that already.

Oh, maybe we did. Maybe. I don’t know.

Gosh. I’ve got the pleasure of having a parallel social media life to the podcast. And after years of doing this, they begin to blend together.

But I mean, you know, if we retread a little bit of ground, we’re only helping you remember it better, right?

Yeah, please, please don’t hold it against us. So we’re in Matthew 5 , which is the grand Sermon on the Mount.

Oh yeah, it’s a good one.

We’ve just got done with the Beatitudes.

His sermon in the hole was no good at all, but once he got on the mount, it was great.

Yeah, um, and we’ve talked about the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and on and on. And then we get to, uh, verse 17. I want to read 17 through 20.

Yeah.

And then talk a little bit about what’s going on here. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whosoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” And then it goes on to, uh, have the antitheses where Jesus says, “You’ve heard that Moses wrote, ‘You shall not do this.’ Well, I say unto you—” And then he escalates things. It’s not just, “You shall not murder.” You can’t even get angry.

You can’t even accuse your brother of being a bad person or something like that. And it’s that first verse that a lot of people seem to get snagged on, and they don’t seem to move past it. But one thing that I’ve pointed out in a number of videos is that if you’re trying to rationalize why Christians don’t need to follow the law, you run into a problem with Matthew 5 , because it certainly sounds like Jesus is saying, yeah, you do need to follow all the law.

Yeah, I mean, I guess one of the— I guess sort of a lot of it hinges on this question of what the heck does he mean by, “I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill”? Like, what does that even mean? I don’t— like, in terms of a law, I know what it means if it’s like, fulfill a promise or fulfill, you know, an order of French fries or something.

Yeah. And the Greek word here is pleroo. Which, uh, I’m looking in the, uh, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament— no, I’m looking at BDAG, not TDNT. I’m looking in BDAG. Uh, to make full, to fill, probably not that. To complete a period of time, fill up, complete, probably not that. Um, to bring to completion that which was already begun, complete, finish. Yeah, we’re getting, we’re getting closer. Uh, and then to bring to a designed end, to fulfill, here like a prophecy, an obligation, a promise, a law, a request, a purpose. So in other words, if one of these things suggests this is the circumstance we’re trying to arrive at, or this is how things are going to be until this moment, it seems to be that. But Jesus also— and what I hear a lot of people say, because Jesus says, um, “till heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter,” and in the KJV this is jot and tittle. These are little flourishes on the letters.

“Will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” And what I hear people say is, well, Jesus accomplished everything that was supposed to be accomplished, and so that’s the time when everything is fulfilled or something like that. But we’ve got two chronological markers here. Okay, because it doesn’t just say until everything is accomplished, it says till heaven and earth pass away. So it sounds like— yeah, that’s a different thing. Yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got dual chronological markers here, and I think we really have to assume that these are supposed to be synonymous events. The heaven and earth passing away is supposed to correspond to all being accomplished.

Yeah, which suggests, um, apocalyptic, uh, an apocalyptic vision. This is about everything wrapping up at some point in the future. It really sounds like, uh, Matthew has Jesus saying none of this is going away.

But some people think, well, Jesus did accomplish all, and so like all of the requirements are subsumed in, in Jesus, and they’re still—they still exist, they’re still active, but Jesus like holds them all within him and no, you’re not getting away.

And this is all I—all the laws are bouncing around inside of him and can’t get to us somehow.

Yeah, so for some arbitrary reason they still need to exist, but they need to exist entirely consumed by Jesus’s righteousness. The notion that, you know, this event, the atonement, his sacrifice once and for all kind of trapped the laws within his being, and they are still in force but within a limited scope or something silly like that. Like, that’s a—I think that’s a rather ridiculous way to think about what’s going on here, because if you do think of it that way, that the laws are, you know, the no jot or tittle has, uh, has been loosed or passed from the law, we just don’t have to obey them anymore. If you want to interpret it like that, that kind of renders meaningless verse 19 where Jesus says whoever breaks one of these will be called the least in the kingdom of God, and whoever teaches others to break them, uh, will be called least in the kingdom of God.

So it seems that what Jesus is saying here is that you have to continue to follow these laws until heaven and earth pass away, and that it’s not just this notion that his sacrifice subsumes all of the law and frees us from the expectation of following them. Jesus quite explicitly says, no, you still have to follow them. Yeah. So I don’t think that reading makes much sense. And then he goes on to, like we said, escalate things, saying you have to be better followers of the law than the Pharisees. And this is something interesting.

And presumably the Pharisees were really good at following the law.

Well, that’s the thing. The New Testament tries to make the—in some parts tries to make it seem like the Pharisees were like the super strict followers of the law. But when you look at some of the other literature from early Judaism, the Pharisees were kind of mocked as kind of relaxed, loose followers, if not interpreters of the law, and which is probably one of the reasons that Jesus is saying Pharisees are not good enough. You got to be better than the Pharisees, those slouches. They’re not going to make it into the kingdom of heaven.

But at least it’s a lower bar to clear, so that’s nice. If they’re not like super—if, you know, I was thinking—.

Yeah, we can do that. Oh, the Pharisees. Yeah, we got it.

Oh yeah, I can do better than—look, I’m not great, but I can do better than one of those Pharisees.

Yeah, as long as you’re not talking about the Essenes. Like, I don’t want to mess with them Essenes, but the Pharisees, I think we can swing Pharisees. And so, yeah, I don’t think that reading makes much sense. It certainly seems to me to be an attempt to try to harmonize what’s going on with Matthew with what’s going on in the other Gospels, particularly Luke, because we have the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. But what Luke has Jesus say is not that not one jot or tittle will fail until heaven and earth pass away. What Luke has Jesus say is it would be easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one jot or tittle of the law to fail. And that’s a different kind of dimension here. We’re not talking about time, we’re talking about difficulty.

And that’s something that you could argue Jesus is able to do because as the creator of heaven and earth, ostensibly, or at least the mechanism for the creation of heaven and earth, if that, if that understanding of Jesus’s role in creation already obtains within Luke, he has the authority to end heaven and earth. So it, it alters things a little bit. But if you demand that they all agree, then you really have to squint at Matthew until the edges blur and begin to run together with Luke and the others.

I do want to understand what Matthew is saying, though. I think you’re right that it doesn’t make sense to say those laws don’t count anymore because somehow Jesus Jesus, I don’t know what, like, followed them so perfectly that they’re done? Like, how do you—like, I understand the fulfillment of a law if it’s a law that says, you know, X, Y, and Z need to happen, and then that is fulfilled.

Just, is that true? Or did I just like, did they call it the Law and the Prophets or something like that?

So this gets into a complex discussion of how the concept of scripture and the concept of canon, you do have either a two-part or a three-part concept of scripture in this period within Judaism, where it’s either the Law and the Prophets, or the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. And so this, it’s probably not indicative of a closed, complete canon, but it does seem to be indicative of a kind of general genre division of the different types of literature that make up the early Jewish scriptures.

So in the same way that we would refer to an Old and a New Testament, Would it have been a common practice to refer to one sort of subdivision of old scripture as the law and another subdivision as the prophets?

Is that what you’re saying? Something like that. Because you would look at the Pentateuch and there are a few different divisions. You have like the word Tanakh. That’s how many modern Jewish folks refer to their Bible, and it’s an acronym. Um, for, uh, the Torah, the Neviim, and the Ketuvim. And so that would be the Torah, which would be the law, the Neviim is the prophets, and the Ketuvim are the writings. Okay. And so that would, that would be a three-part. And then you have some Christians who come in and say, no, it’s four-part. It’s the law, the prophets, the writings, and the histories. Because you have folks who take like 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings and that would be lumped in with the prophets. But for a lot of Christians, and they look at that and they’re like, it’s different enough, it should have its own category. And so we would say, no, those are the histories, not part of the prophets.

And so, yeah, it’s a division of the genre-based division of the Jewish scriptures. And yeah, the idea is that This is— Jesus is addressing what is the relevance of all of the instruction, all the law that has been passed down to us in the Jewish scriptures. Do we still have to follow all of this? Uh, because it’s not just the Ten Commandments, um, and you know, they count up like 613 laws, but you can also find all kinds of— you know, you look in the Proverbs and you’ve got all kinds of of wisdom that probably could be leveraged as something authoritative or at least prescriptive. A lot of people do that today, talking about why it’s good or bad to do this or that because, you know, they’ll appeal to a psalm or a proverb or something like that. Not one of the 613 commandments of the halakha, or at least the commandments that are interpreted within the halakha, or halakhot, but it’s just good advice and it’s in the Scriptures, so therefore it should be authoritative.

And I think what Matthew has Jesus doing is saying, “No, we’re still sticking to all of this. " And I think the idea of fulfill is everything is going to be completed, fulfilled, when the heaven and earth pass away. And so at that point, there’s no more context for the law. There’s no more reason for the law. And so the law wraps up and it’s finished. And so I think that’s, that’s probably what’s, what’s going on here. It’s all done. We’ve, we’ve completed our, our turn in this mortal coil. And, and so there’s no more reason to have a law. I think that’s probably what’s going on there. I don’t think we can superimpose upon the author of the Gospel of Matthew our own notion of eternity, of heaven, the way we think about it as strumming harps in the clouds or whatever the Reformed folks have turned it into these days.

I wonder if maybe in light of what you just said, because one of my questions is what question is he trying to answer with this? And I wonder if maybe it’s being asked of him as a prophet in a time when it seems like eschatology is sort of heavy on the minds of people. I wonder if it’s being asked, are you bringing about— I mean, he talks about himself bringing about the end times, right? Or somebody talks about him doing that.

So well, yeah, you’ve got Matthew has a pretty eschatological outlook, or at least there’s an eschaton off in the future. However, we’re kind of presupposing that this might be historical when we say Jesus might be responding to a question asked of him. I think more than likely what we have is the author aware that there are followers of Jesus out there saying, “Hey, guess what? We don’t have to keep all the law anymore.” And Matthew’s like, “Oh, we’ll see about that. Wait ’til you get to this part of what I’m writing, and I’m gonna have Jesus say this, that, and the other.” And, you know, it’s, uh, it’s like if, you know, you can imagine, uh, Jesus being like, and some guy named Dave will borrow something from Matthew and not give it back, and that guy sucks. Like, it’s not because somebody asked Jesus about this, it’s because the author wants to achieve something with their composition. And, uh, and so this is, this is the perfect opportunity to, to slide this into the narrative when he’s on his sermonizing soapbox.

But I guess it doesn’t actually matter to me for the purposes of my question whether this is just the author of Matthew sort of making this up, putting some words into Jesus’s mouth to conveniently serve a need, you know, some sort of theological need that he needs to convey. Or if it’s actually a historical thing that happened and that Jesus said, like, to my mind, it doesn’t actually matter. Because the— because what I’m still trying to get at is like, is he— is he trying? Yeah, I mean, it’s that it’s like people are starting to think in their minds, maybe this is the end. Maybe, maybe, you know, Jesus represents the cataclysm. The end of everything, and we can just relax on all of the laws. And Jesus is saying, nope, sorry, you can’t relax on the laws. I’m going to make them even harsher, even more.

Yeah. And at the time that this is being written, the gospel is already being shared among the Gentiles. And so you’ve got a lot of Gentiles coming in, and they’re the ones who were like, don’t like that circumcision thing. I’m gonna— can I not do that? And that’s what Paul was— that was Paul’s big challenge decades before these texts were written. And so I think it’s not so much an inner Jewish exegetical thing where Jewish folks were like, well, now that we have Jesus, I guess we don’t need any of the other stuff. It’s a social thing. It’s because we’re now bringing Gentiles in, and to make, to open the door to Gentiles, we have to consider what’s required of them. And I think you have people scattered across the entire spectrum of, yes, they must keep every last law, all the way to no, they don’t have to keep any law.

I was going to bring that up. That is fascinating because I did remember like Paul talking about you don’t have to keep the kosher eating laws and you don’t have to— do the Gentiles have to get circumcised? Eh, it’s probably fine. And so, and what’s funny is that in my mind, probably just because of the order that the books are in, in the book, I was thinking of Matthew as predating Paul, but obviously not. So is Matthew— is the author of Matthew trying to refute Paul’s assertion that it’s okay for the Gentiles not to follow some of these laws?

I think that’s a reasonable way to interpret what’s going on. Matthew is coming around 80 to 90 CE, somewhere around there. Paul was mostly active in the ’50s and early ’60s CE, and so the followers of Paul are probably getting pretty large, and I think the Gospel of Matthew is probably pushing back from the other end of the spectrum, saying, no, it turns out Jesus doesn’t want you to not follow these laws. And anybody who teaches you otherwise, Paul, you know, is going to be least in the kingdom. Like, I think that’s a reasonable understanding of the background of this. I would have to— I’m sure there are New Testament scholars out there who would know a lot better than me where this discussion stands precisely. But I think that’s probably a reasonable question to ask, and it makes sense to me. And we have, you know, in the other gospels, they’re a little closer to Paul than the Gospel of Matthew is.

But Matthew is the place where you find a lot of stuff about making sure you keep the law. So for instance, when Matthew has Jesus scold the Pharisees saying, you tithe dill and cumin and, you know, you neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice, righteousness, mercy. He says you should make sure you do these without leaving the other undone. In other words, the, the Matthean Jesus is still saying, yes, you still tithe, you still have to do the tithe. So go ahead and tithe your mint and your dill, but just make sure you’re being exactly as precise with the other weightier matters of the law. And there’s no part of Matthew where Jesus actually endorses the just straight-up rejection of any Mosaic law.

I guess, you know, I think that one of the things about this discussion that is something that we circle back to a lot, which is that there is, you know, the tension between that I described early on with me having conversations with Christians about things that seem to be conflicting in their theology. I think that it’s very clear that the Bible itself has plenty of those tensions where it is not clear one book to the next what the— like, you have to bend it to come up with a unified biblical theology where probably the more The more honest look at it, and maybe the more useful but more complicated look at the theology of the Bible, is just that it’s not clear. It argues with itself about it.

And it should be seen as a conversation more than anything declarative or final.

Yeah, I think the reason Matthew writes a gospel, or whoever the author of the Gospel of Matthew was, It’s not because Mark got everything right. It’s precisely because, wait, what about all this other stuff? And oh, I disagree about that. And so Matthew is really— it is putting up another— it’s a volley. It’s kind of a discursive volley. Mark’s like, ha! And Matthew goes, uh! And they’re kind of going back and forth. And suddenly Luke drops onto the court and goes, haha! And then John is like, I got you all beat.

And John’s just sitting in the back with a cigarette waiting.

Yeah. In the shadows. Um, but, but yeah, I, I think what happens is you’ve got all these folks making their case for a way of thinking about Jesus’s identity and mission and the responsibility of those who are going to follow Jesus, and they’re different cases. And then when that was all done, all the followers of Jesus were like, we need to come together, guys. Why can’t we all just get along? And they took the, the the texts and went, okay, now they’re all one collection. Now let’s figure out the one thing that they all mean. And they didn’t mean one thing. They meant a bunch of different things. And so now we, we look back at the text and we impose this unifying framework of, of inspiration, inerrancy, univocality, historicity. And you have no choice but to just meddle with and do violence to what the authors were trying to get across and what they were trying to accomplish.

And I think that’s one of the biggest problems with the presupposition of univocality, is that it basically says, “I’m in charge of what this is allowed to say. " And you know, if James says, “I disagree with Paul,” we gotta figure out a way to screw with James’s text until we can understand it as being in perfect harmony with Paul. And that’s— I think that’s problematic.

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s just so much like you’re just going to do your own brain a big favor if you just relax and go, okay, they disagree. So I’m going to figure out what, what’s meaningful to me and make it work in my mind. But like, like, it’s just like the cognitive dissonance is, is too painful. It’s too— yeah. So yeah, I don’t know, just Treat yourself.

Just like, let that weight just vanish. Yeah. And you know, there are a lot of things that people are white-knuckling because it’s tied up with that conception of Scripture. But good golly, you’re going to shorten your lifespan, if not just the acid reflux that you’re going to cause by just bearing down on this this understanding of Scripture for all that is good and holy. Just let the text be what they were intended to be. It’s so much easier, and also I think more interesting. Yeah. Because if you get to say, “Wow, what is this author trying to do here? " without saying, “Whatever it is, it has to agree with everything that I’m bringing to the text and my pastor and my parents and my wife,” are telling me I’m not allowed to deviate from. It’s pretty milquetoast, it’s pretty bland. But if it can be whatever the author wanted it to be, I think it’s just so much more fascinating and intellectually honest.

But that’s just me.

It’s just we. It’s just the official position of this podcast.

The royal we, if you will.

It is the royal us. All right. Well, that, that was fun. Let’s move on to our What Is That? So as we said, this week’s What’s That is about, is about this, this darn treaty and how— yes, I know. Get me— first of all, should we just start with the treaty? Where do we start?

Yeah, let’s start with the treaty just to kind of lay the— and then, and then we’ll kind of cover some, some background. So, okay, this is the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon. Now, Esarhaddon was a ruler in Assyria. He reigned—

Sure that S. R. Haddon isn’t a, uh, like a sci-fi novelist or something?

That’s what it sounds like. S. Robert Haddon. Yeah. Um, I— oh gosh, if I ever am involved with making a TV show, I’m going to have a character named S. Robert Haddon, and then nobody will get it until they go S. R. Haddon. And he will be a powerful man. Yeah. And he will accede to some manner of authority around 681 BCE, and then he’ll reign for about 12 years. So this is early 7th century BCE, ruler of the Assyrian Empire. He was preceded by Sennacherib. Everybody knows who Sennacherib was. He was—

We’ve talked about him. I don’t know if that means we know who he was, but we’ve definitely mentioned Sennacherib a bunch of times.

Yeah, he’s the one who swung through and caused problems for Lachish, for instance, and then for Hezekiah toward the end of the 8th century BCE. And then Ashurbanipal came to power after Esarhaddon.

But you’re just making names up now.

Hey, I haven’t even gotten to Tiglath-Pileser III, okay? So okay, that’s one of the greatest, uh, one of the greatest.

I think that’s one of the cats from the show Cats, isn’t it? I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I saw it back in the ’80s.

I don’t know, it wasn’t— you were probably pretty high, uh, when you saw it.

As a 6-year-old, I was super messed up.

Well, you grew up in a family of academics, so they were probably, uh, experimenting with all kinds of, uh— I think that’s fair. I’m sure that’s fair to say.

They’re all dead now. They can’t defend themselves.

But so he’s important because he kind of— he didn’t really invent this thing, this convention, but he really mastered it in a way that later Israelite scribes would admire. He mastered the art of vassal treaties. And vassalage is basically on a geopolitical scale. It is some henchman coming into a mom-and-pop shop downtown, excuse me, or downstairs, I don’t know— and saying, this is such a lovely establishment. We would hate for something bad to happen to it. So you pay us so much a month in protection money and we will protect you from us.

We will keep you safe from the us’s that are wandering the streets stealing from you.

It is basically the policy that some people in parts of the world are trying to re-implement with their idea of who’s gonna stop us from taking over Greenland.

Yeah, or Venezuela. Or Venezuela.

Whatever happens, happens. Yeah, at some point he’s gonna go for Puerto Rico and people are gonna go, okay, that’s enough. You’ve gone too far, sir. You know that this is already a part of your country.

We already have it.

But it was basically a larger nation going in and beating up on a smaller nation and saying, look, here’s the deal. You work for us now. You’re gonna pay us. And it could be money. It could be gold, silver, it could be sheep, it could be olive oil, it could be whatever. Every year, this is how much we want from you, and we will not beat you up further. And then you also have to make sure that you’re looking out for our interests. So if, if the neighbor on the other side of you starts talking bad about us, you need to let me know so we can go beat them up too. And then you’re going to send us soldiers whenever we go out to battle and all this kind of stuff. It was not an enviable position to be in.

Yeah, I mean, we first talked about this, I think, when we talked about the moment in Judges where Moab threw off vassalage. Right. And told Israel to go vassal itself. And then there was a whole war about it and stuff. Yes. So, yes, I like that it’s called a treaty rather than a forced mechanism. Like, treaty sounds so nice and so voluntary. Yeah.

Well, wait till you hear about some of the details of this treaty. Okay. Because we have several versions of it. It’s not like there was one version that they just copied and pasted everywhere they went. It was drafted anew every time for every individual, but there were a lot of, uh, elements that were pretty consistent. But here’s a preamble to one of them, um, the Treaty of Esarhaddon, King of the World. King of the World. King of the World. Yes, very Titanic-y. That’s a, it’s a great title. King of Assyria, son of Sennacherib, likewise King of the World. King of Assyria, with whom Barizi, city ruler of Nishpiya, etc., his sons, his grandsons, with all the Nishpiyans, etc., the men in his hands, young and old, as many as there are from sunrise to sunset, all those over whom Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, exercises kingship and lordship, with you, your sons, and your grandsons who will be born in days to come after this treaty.

And then we get into— the next thing we do is go and name all the divine witnesses to this. Oh yes. In the presence of Ashur and Anu, and Enlil and Ea and Sin and Shamash and Adad, and literally dozens of names. By all the gods of Nineveh, by all the gods of Calah, by all the gods of Arbela, and on and on and on. Wow.

And we’re just going to make sure that everyone’s accounted for. So if you think that you’re going to get away with this and your god will not have seen you, no, no, no. All the gods.

Now, now here’s a— we get down to like section 24. You shall love Ashurbanipal, the great crown— okay, the great crown prince designate, son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, your lord, like yourselves. So Esarhaddon is saying, my son is, is our—.

Is, uh, the point man here, and you shall be in charge of you, and you have to love him.

Love him like you love yourselves. And this is— this covenant love idea ought to be ringing some bells with people who are familiar with the book of Deuteronomy . Interesting. Because it’s very much the same idea, the— what we get in Deuteronomy 6:4 , the Shema: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, might, and strength. Uh, and, and we have a variation on the ’like yourself’ with the second great commandment, you will love your neighbor as you love yourself. So the, the point I’m trying to make here is that a lot of critical scholars for, for a long time now, uh, have been convinced that the book of Deuteronomy was basically patterned after the vassal treaty of Esarhaddon, at, at least as the main kind of template for what was going on, because a lot of the segments kind of follow the same themes, and even a lot of the language has a lot of significant overlap, up to and including this idea that, look, this is the sovereign and then the vassal.

We’re making a deal, we’re making a treaty, a covenant, and your main responsibility is to love me as I love you.

So what we’re saying, I mean, Deuteronomy, for those who are not tremendously familiar with the Bible, ends up being basically a book of laws.

Yeah, Deuteronomy comes from a Greek word that basically means second law, and it is supposed to have been composed, or at least dictated by Moses toward the end of his life. In fact, the last chapter narrates his death, but it’s supposed to date to or after the Exodus, uh, the, the 40 years wandering before everybody enters into Israel. So 1200 BCE, 1400 BCE, depending on where you imagine this, uh, what time period you imagine this happened in. The reality is that it was probably brought together under King Josiah toward the end of the 600s BCE. And this is why the resonances with the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon is such a problem for folks who think it is historical, because it very clearly is drawing a lot of inspiration from texts that would not exist for anywhere from 700 to 500 years later.

So the Book of Deuteronomy is basically Esarhaddon is God, and then the Israelites are whatever vassal nation Esarhaddon has just whooped up on. And there are a few different things that we can compare here. Let me pull up Deuteronomy 5:7 , for instance, says— sorry, I’m looking for Deuteronomy in the New Testament. That’s not going to work, at least according to Accordance. Doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Um, Deuteronomy 5:7 , you shall have no other gods before me. That should sound familiar. That’s Exodus chapter 20 as well. Uh, but we can look in, uh, segment 17 of, uh, the vassal treaty of Esarhaddon, and we find, you shall hearken to whatever he says and do whatever he commands ‘And you shall not seek any other king or any other lord against him. ’ It’s basically saying, ‘I am the captain now, right?

And you shall— you will not go looking for other captains. ’ And then section 25, ‘Do not place any other king or any other lord over you. ’ So this resonates quite a bit with the ‘you shall not have any other gods before you. Uh, we can go to, uh, let’s see, Deuteronomy 30 , uh, verse 19. Pull that up. And this is, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live. And this is famous part of Deuteronomy. God gives the law and then says, okay, If you do everything, you get these blessings. If you don’t, you get these curses. And guess what? That’s in the vassal treaty as well. We can look in— but here, what they’re doing is calling upon heaven and earth. But we have Esarhaddon calling upon all the gods of heaven and earth as witnesses to this treaty.

So again, you’ve got some parallels there. Deuteronomy 28 , this is the chapter that famously has the curses in it. And we have one curse: in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege— and the curse is basically you’re going to be constantly under siege from enemies. In the desperate straits to which the enemy siege reduces you, you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your own sons and daughters whom the Lord your God has given you. And that also happens to be in the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon, where we have as part of the curses, if you don’t do these things, may Zarpanitu, who grants name and seed, destroy your name and your seed from the land, which by the way is Deuteronomy 28 . But in Section 47, may a mother bar the door to her daughter, ‘in your hunger eat the flesh of your sons. In want and famine may one man eat the flesh of another.

May one man clothe himself in another’s skin. May dogs and swine eat your flesh. May your ghost have nobody to take care of the pouring of libations to him. ’ So, um, pretty nasty curses, uh, going on here. And Deuteronomy—.

I like that it really didn’t build to a crescendo. That was an anticlimax. Like, you don’t— and you don’t get drinks, uh, in the afterlife. Well, so ha on you.

But, but that was a big deal because your afterlife— now, now here you got to think of Coco. You’re the, the ofrenda is basically saying you’re not going to have anybody taking care of your ofrenda. Yeah. And, uh, and that’s basically saying your afterlife is going to disappear like a fart in the wind. Yeah.

Uh, and you’re going to be thirsty.

You’re going to be a thirsty boy because you needed, you needed, uh, food and drink. And you needed your name invoked in order for your afterlife to continue on. So yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got a lot of points of contact between these two, which is why most critical scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that Deuteronomy is, is picking up a lot of inspiration from what is going on in the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon, which means the idea of covenant comes from this. So when people talk about covenants in the Bible, they’re talking about the borrowing of the idea of vassalage and vassal treaties from the Empire of Assyria. And that then becomes the metaphor for your relationship with God. God is the one who comes in and says, this sure is a lovely establishment, right? I would hate for something bad to happen.

Yeah, there’s a, there’s a meme that has gone around for years, especially—.

Oh, is this Jesus knocking on the door? Yes, yes, that’s what I immediately thought of. Yeah, Jesus.

And for those of you who don’t know, uh, it’s Jesus knocking on the door and saying, hey, let me in. Uh, why? So that I can protect you. Against what? Against what I’m gonna do to you if you don’t let me in. Yeah, it’s that idea. Yeah. Um, but I mean, obviously Deuteronomy sort of portrays this vassal overlord of God as a benevolent, loving thing. Does Esarhaddon also have a sort of, “I’m your benevolent overlord,” or is it just like, “I will murder you if you don’t do this”?

You do have some parts where he does talk about ‘As long as you do this, we will— as long as you swear you will not make rebellion or insurrection, then there will be peace,’ basically. ‘That you will have what you need. ’ It’s not like we’re going to come throw a party for you. It’s not like we’re going to— you’re going to get $2,500 cash back upon signing. That’s not part of the thing, but it is We will not destroy your nation.

Well, and I guess the fact that Deuteronomy has sections of curses is maybe not as benevolent as one might imagine God to be. Like, that feels like there’s definitely some stick and it’s not all carrot on this.

Yeah, yeah. And the carrot is really just kind of token carrot. It is because it’s most realistic. Yeah. The real point is the stick. And that’s what you get with— and even today, you know, when— dang it, I keep forgetting his name. He’s the child star who’s now the fundamentalist Christian who’s on— who I’ve talked about recently. He recently came out and said he doesn’t believe in— Kirk Cameron. Kirk Cameron. That’s the one. Kirk Cameron, he was saying that it does not— he can’t believe in a merciful God that would torture someone for eternity for insignificant violations of their law. And somebody who was defending eternal conscious torment retorted, no, it actually demonstrates God’s mercy because you have to imagine the punishment as being the most horrific thing you can ever imagine, and that makes God’s salvation all that much more merciful.

Yeah, like that— this is what you could be getting if it weren’t for God. But if what you could be getting is that you just cease to exist, then that makes God’s mercy not all that powerful. And I feel like that’s a— like, yeah, that’s a way to think about it. If you’re just really, really concerned for trying to make God sound— trying to instill fear in people. Like, that is saying, well, wait a minute, we need the stick. Yeah, that makes that tiny little bit of carrot— if the stick is so big, that makes the tiny little carrot all that much more attractive. If the stick and the carrot—.

Look at how great this carrot looks. Oh my gosh, it’s the most amazing carrot.

It’s just a baby carrot. It didn’t even grow that way. We had to cut it down to that size. But look how attractive that is when the alternative is this giant stick. But if the carrot is bigger than the stick, well, what kind of incentive is that? What kind of decision is that? And so I find that to be highly problematic, the way that people are trying to rationalize what ultimately comes down to identity politics. It’s the tradition they’re committed to, and they’re going to make that tradition sound good, no matter how ridiculous they have to sound trying to make the case for that.

Yeah, I think, you know, I mentioned that I’m in atheist circles, I run in atheist circles. And I think one of the things that sort of resonates with people who take an outside look at biblical law, is that it becomes clear that it is, you know, I hesitate to say tyrannical, but I mean, if it’s patterned after a vassalage treaty, there’s tyranny there. You know what I mean? That feels emotionally right to me that there is a parallel between the sort of the laws of of Deuteronomy and, you know, what’s being laid out by a conquering nation to the conquered.

Who were world famous for their brutality. Right. And, you know, if you ever find yourself in the British Museum, you’ve got to ask where the Lachish reliefs are.

I remember those. Yeah.

Oh yeah, you’ve seen them, right? Haven’t you? That commemorates And then you got to go to Lachish. But that commemorates— that commemorates Sennacherib’s taking of this— of this city. Yeah. And you can still go to the city and you can see the siege ramp that they built up and you can go look at some of the buildings and— and on the— but on the reliefs, you can see what they’re doing there. They’re skinning people. Yeah. They’re cutting off heads. They’re throwing babies from city walls. They’re doing all of this stuff while Sennacherib literally sits on a throne and gets fanned with palm fronds and, you know, sipping on Mai Tais or whatever. Right. And yeah, they are famous for their brutality. The entire kind of rhetorical leverage of the Book of Jonah is the fact that the Assyrians were so hated for their brutality and their viciousness. But and yeah, the Book of Deuteronomy takes a look at it and goes, “We should make God like that.

That sounds like my version of God. I like that.

I’m gonna keep some of that. " Yeah, and, uh, and, you know, you sympathize more and more with Job, uh, indeed, and less and less with his friends. Um, but the— yeah, so that’s the, uh, the— a little bit about the vassal treaty of, of Esarhaddon, um, and and his son Ashurbanipal. And but you definitely want to check out Tiglath-Pileser III. Yeah, check them all out.

It’s the best names that we have access to anyway. I think that’s tournament. That was a— that’s a really fun discussion. And I’m guessing some people will want to comment and get mad at us and all that sort of stuff.

Um, so we will take any corrections that are, that are accurate happily and humbly.

Yes, indeed. I, I don’t know how humble we are, but we’ll, but we’ll, we’re humble enough to take correction when it’s, when it’s accurate. Uh, anywho, thanks so much for tuning in. Uh, if you would like to become a part of making this show happen every week, the best thing you can do is head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can get early ad-free versions of every episode as well as access to our weekly bonus content that we do, the After Party. It’s a lot of fun and you can ask us questions and get a really good— there’s a really good chance you’ll get an actual answer from us, which is not always the case because we’re us and we try, but we’re not great at everything. And, uh, it’s a— anyway, it’s a vibrant, wonderful community over there. And also it helps keep the show going and that’s vital to us.

So thanks so much to all of our patrons and, uh, go be one. And we will— oh, and also thanks to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. And we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

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