Written in the Stars!

Venus, AKA Morning Star.

AKA somebody in Isaiah. AKA Lucifer.

AKA—

What are we talking— that, that one got me really messed up.

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, Dan?

Things are glorious. It’s a, it’s a beautiful day outside. I’m no longer in Canada where it was extremely cold. Eastern Canada at that.

Oh wow. Yeah, it is. So it’s rough on the other side of the, the continent.

Yeah. For us right now, for you paying attention at home, this was a couple of weeks ago or 3 weeks ago or something. And you’ll recall that some major weather hit the eastern part of North America and it was awful. I mean, it was most awful for, you know, the south of the United States where folks are not used to it, they’re not used to it at all.

Canadians are used to it.

Yeah, the Canadians are, are, are going for walks and skating on the canal and whatnot.

But it reminds me of, uh, I, I went to elementary school just outside of D.C. and we had 3 or 4 snow days every single winter. Half inch of snow, inch of snow, school’s canceled. And it snowed several times every single winter. I moved to Colorado, 4 years of high school, 1 snow day. And that was because some wet snow got too heavy and downed some power lines. And yeah, ‘cause as soon as the first snowflake hits the ground, the snowplows are like, grrr, and they’re ready to go.

And also everybody just shrugs it off. There’s a foot of snow. Okay, I’ll just go.

It’s fun.

We used to have snow here in Salt Lake. That used to be a thing. I don’t know. We don’t— I guess we don’t anymore.

Yeah, well, I still have some in my yard, but it’s just the crusty leftover stuff.

Sloppy seconds.

Oh, gosh.

All right. Let’s move on from that quickly and talk about what we’re going to be discussing on today’s show.

Yes, let’s.

Because what’s funny is you and I had discussed several different topic possibilities, and we realized that two of them sort of take their launching point from the same chapter of the Bible.

And we got very excited about that, and we decided that we would make that a single episode. So we’re going to be talking about Acts 7 . Open, open your books, open your hardcovers to Acts chapter 7.

Time to get your crayons and your pencils.

And we’re going to be doing first a chapter and verse just discussing Acts 7 as a whole, but also how, and I think this is fascinating, how the New Testament interacts and quotes from and gets wrong, question mark, the Hebrew Bible. That’ll be interesting. And then we’re gonna go into some astrology. And that’s gonna be really fun.

So let’s start with our chapter and verse. All right, so chapter and verse is Acts chapter 7.

A lot of verses, actually, we should call it chapter and verses.

But let’s— where do you want to start with this? Do you want to start with Stephen talking about? Yeah.

Well, let’s just lay— set our scene.

Yes, please. In fair Verona?

Yes, exactly. Two houses alike in dignity. We have some— the leaders of the synagogue basically call Stephen to task. He’s doing great signs and wonders among the people, and they call him to— they bring him before the council. And they say, “Hey, you’ve been doing all this stuff that people said you’ve been doing?” And Stephen basically takes the opportunity to just wax historical for 52 verses, basically outlining the history of the people of Israel starting from Abraham and then going all the way down to verse 53 and saying, “You know, there was the coming of the Righteous One, and you have become his betrayers and murderers, and you have not kept the law.” And then they become enraged. They grind their teeth at Stephen.

They go, and then they cast stones at him.

Yeah, that’s not great. That’s not the outcome you’re looking for.

Yeah, but, you know, it’s not a good review of his history of Israel. But I think it’s interesting because what it represents is the author of the Book of Acts negotiation with the history of Israel as told in the Hebrew Bible as they have access to it and as they have negotiated with it. And I just wanted to jump around to a handful of verses and talk about some of the ways that they are representing the history that might indicate they’re going from the Greek and not the Hebrew, that might indicate they’re picking and choosing which passages they’re basing this on, and some places where they even contradict what’s going on in the Hebrew Bible and contradict themselves. And so I think it’s just a fascinating study of how the New Testament, one New Testament author anyway, is engaging with the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. And I want to start in verse 2. This is the very beginning of Stephen’s performance.

Brothers and Fathers, he says, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our ancestor Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, leave your country and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you. Then he left the country of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After his father died, God had him move from there to this country in which you are now living. And so this is, this is basically the end of Genesis 11 and the beginning of Genesis 12 , but we— the author has Stephen stake a pretty clear claim that Abraham did not leave Haran until after his father Terah died.

And this is where we’re seeing the author’s interpretation of kind of a squirrely part of Genesis, because if we go to Genesis 11 , we have Haran has some kids. Uh, when Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. So that’s Genesis 11:26 . So Terah, 70 years old. Abraham is born when Terah is 70 years old. Now we have down toward the end of, uh, chapter 11 that, uh, Abraham was 75 years old um, when he takes up and leaves— picks up and leaves, excuse me. Um, I’m trying to find the exact verse where it says this. Yes, so Abram went. This is Genesis 12 , verse 4. So Abram went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran.

So Terah was 70, Abraham 75. Put them together, what do you get? 145 years. Abraham leaves Haran when Terah is 145 years old. It says according to Genesis 11:32 , however, that Terah was 205 years old when he died in Haran. So if you go by Genesis 11 and 12, Abram departed from Haran, waved bye-bye to his dad when his dad was 145 years old. He lived for another— or excuse me, 145 years old. He lived for another 60 years in Haran without Abraham, right? Abram. Except in Acts, the author says that Abram didn’t leave Haran until Terah had died. So we’ve got a, a little bit of a problematic thing there, and, and that’s probably just because the author of Acts is not doing the math, is not looking closely at this and being like, wait a minute, that doesn’t add up, right?

Um, and so Terah had to have lived for 60 more years after Abram left.

I mean, you’re blaming the author of Acts. You could just as easily blame Stephen. Stephen could have gotten it wrong.

Well, I, I’m going to— there are a number of places where I blame the author and not the character, precisely because the texts are written, are very clearly written in Greek and are very clearly appealing to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Which indicates it’s probably not this Jewish person talking in a Jewish synagogue when they’re being represented as speaking Aramaic or maybe even Hebrew.

So what you’re saying, if I can just sort of repackage it a little bit, is that Stephen himself would have read it in the Hebrew. He would have been a Hebrew-speaking Jewish person. And so if he had encountered the Hebrew Bible, he would have encountered it in Hebrew and not made some of the mistakes that we’re about to talk about.

Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, either Hebrew or in some Aramaic translation, one of the Targumim or something like that.

Oh, okay.

But what we see is that the author of the book of Acts is relying on the Septuagint. And we see this even more clearly in Acts 15 . And I think we’ve talked about this before. This is the Jerusalem Council. And there’s a part where they talk about, excuse me, they talk about how the Tabernacle of David will be restored and for the remnant of humanity who seek after the Lord. And this is the Septuagint’s pretty flagrant mistranslation of a part of Amos that in the Hebrew says something entirely different that has no relevance at all to the context where it’s being deployed in the book of Acts .

We do not have the verbatim recording or transcription of somebody speaking in Aramaic or Hebrew.

Right.

So yeah, problematic. Another interesting one, we can scoot down to verse 6. Uh, this is where we’re talking about, uh, the Israelites in Egypt. And God spoke in these terms, that his descendants would be resident aliens in a country belonging to others who would enslave them and mistreat them during 400 years. And so this is the time that the, the Israelites are in Egypt. And if we go to like Genesis 15:13 , there’s this prophecy about Abraham’s descendants being, you know, they’ll be oppressed 400 years, right? But if you go to Exodus 12 , verse 40, the time that they were in Egypt was 430 years being oppressed. So you’ve got two different ways that the Hebrew Bible is representing the length of the sojourn in Egypt.

It’s either 400 or 430 years. And so here we see that the author of the book of Acts is siding with Genesis over and against Exodus about the story that is actually in Exodus. So picking and choosing here. This is an example of the author deciding to go with one and not the other.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you start in Genesis, you might as well hang out there.

Yeah, yeah.

When, you know, when you’re talking about Abram and whatever, yeah, just stick with what you know. Why read a whole other book?

And here’s another instance where we can see that the author is pulling from the Septuagint. Then Joseph sent in— this is verse 14— then Joseph sent and invited his father Jacob and all his relatives to come to him. 75 In all. Great. We can go look at Genesis, um, 46:27, as well as Exodus 1:5 , and it says there were 70 people who came down to Egypt. Uh, but if you go look at the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, of Genesis 46:27 , hey, what do you know, it says 75.

So that’s interesting. What accounts for that discrepancy? Do you know? Do you have a sense of why they just changed the number?

Um, I, I don’t. You know, this is— this would be interesting to look into because 70 is a really important number in the ancient world. You know, you— the, uh, the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 has 70 nations. If you have 70, uh, and, you know, Deuteronomy 32:8 , we have the El Elyon or excuse me, just Elyon the Most High divides up the nations according to the number of the sons of God in the early Hebrew, but in the Masoretic Text it’s sons of Israel, and that traditional number is 70. So you would think that they would want to stick with 70, but for whatever reason the Septuagint changed it to 75. And I’m just going to look—.

I’m going to dive in real just really quickly and remind everybody what the Septuagint is because we’ve been referencing it and we want to— we’re going to keep referencing it and and it’s the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was produced— when was it produced? Somewhere in the—.

Between like the 3rd century BCE and like the 1st century BCE. So the books were translated independently and kind of came together over the centuries.

Okay. And so what we’re talking about is that anyone who was a Greek reader and probably speaker of Greek around this time, who wanted to read the Hebrew Bible, would have read it as the Septuagint in this form. Yeah. Okay.

And technically, the Septuagint really refers to the translation of the first 5 books of Moses. Those would have been the first books translated, each one by a different translator, and they were not coordinating. It was not a systematic process. Uh, but you know, there’s kind of the narrow sense of what the Septuagint is and then the broader sense. We’re speaking about the broader sense. The Septuagint also has 75 in Exodus 1 . So both, both of the passages that in the Masoretic Text say 70 are 75 in the Septuagint. So we have another example of, of the author, uh, relying not on the Hebrew but on the Greek, right? And then the next two verses I think are, are really fascinating. I really like, uh, verse 15 and 16 because says, so Jacob went down to Egypt. He himself died there, as well as our ancestors. And their bodies were brought back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.

So that’s pretty clear. Jacob, all the sons of Jacob who came down to stay in Egypt, they all died, bodies were brought back, they were all buried in Shechem in a tomb that was purchased by Abraham. The problem is that Abraham never bought anything in Shechem and not from any sons of Hamor. Abraham bought land and a cave, which was used as a tomb, at Machpelah, which is near Hebron, from Ephron the Hittite. And you can go to Genesis 23 for the story of this purchase. This is where there’s kind of this haggling back and forth.

It’s a weird— it’s up-haggling. It goes in the wrong direction.

Yeah, because the Hittite’s like, “Let me just give it to you.” And Abraham’s like, “Good try. I’m gonna pay for it.” And really the point—

Come on, what’s 400 shekels between friends?

Yeah. And you get to the end and he’s like, 400 shekels. And I think the point there is really what the story is supposed to illustrate is that this really does legally and fully belong to Abraham and his family. And they did pay for it. Because if they were like, just take it, and he just takes it, it’s kind of like, ah, that wasn’t a real legitimate transfer of property. That was a gift or something like that. It weakens the claim to the property. But if Abram can say, no, I’m paying for it, then that’s really his property. So Abraham buys that plot, and that is where Jacob is buried according to Genesis 49 and 50. So yeah, so nothing to do with Shechem.

So just to be clear, are Shechem and Hebron, Machpelah, they’re not next door to each other? Where are we talking about?

I don’t know. Hebron is a little bit closer to Jerusalem. Shechem is way up north in the Northern Kingdom.

So we’re talking close to Samaria.

Very, very different places.

Yes, yes. It’s a long walk between those two places.

So Stephen wasn’t just getting a little confused here.

No. And we’ll talk about what likely Stephen was doing. But so where’s the sons of Hamor and Shechem coming from? Well, that’s coming from Genesis 33 , where Jacob, not Abraham, pays the sons of Hamor, uh, an amount of silver to purchase some land in Shechem. And then it wasn’t Jacob who was buried there. Jacob’s buried in Machpelah. It’s Joseph who was buried at Shechem according to Joshua 24:32 .

And so what we have is Jacob’s burial in Machpelah, the place that was purchased by Abraham, and Joseph’s burial in Shechem in the place that was purchased by Jacob. And the author seems to be just, just squishing them together and says— and, you know, some of the folks who want to argue that this is not actually a contradiction will argue, well, it says Jacob died and then all the ancestors. And when it says they were brought to Shechem, it just means the ancestors. Joseph specifically, since he was actually buried in Shechem. And so there there are attempts to try to kind of dodge what the text is, what’s actually in the text. But you can’t get around the fact that Abraham did not purchase the plot of land in Shechem. That was Jacob who purchased that. So what seems to be the problem is he just, instead of taking the time, because, you know, they’re already picking up rocks and they’re taking it, getting a good look at a good round rock.

And he’s like, okay, I got to hurry. I’m going to just squish these accounts together and just be like, they were all buried in Shechem. And, and, you know, just save some ink, save a little bit of papyrus.

Our current president can’t keep Iceland and Greenland straight. It makes sense to me that a guy would like maybe mess up who was buried where.

Especially when he’s facing down some very angry audience members.

Verses 42 and 43 have some interesting stuff in it we’re going to talk about in another segment, but in Acts 7:53 , Stephen’s conclusion is, “You were the ones who received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.”

So rather than God themselves being the ones the one to deliver the law. God’s presence is represented or borne by angels. And I think this probably has a little bit to do with this concept of the angel of the presence or the angel of the Lord, who is kind of the— the identity of the angel is conflated with the identity of God in a handful of stories. And we’ve talked about this before on the show. You have Hagar runs into God in the wilderness, and it, you know, in one verse it says it’s the angel of God, but then Hagar says, “I’m naming this place this way because have I seen God and lived?” And you have something similar going on in Exodus 3 . In verse 2, it says, “An angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in the flame of fire in the midst of the burning bush,” and then a few verses later, that angel says, I am the God of Israel. Uh, and you have, uh, Judges 6 , Judges 13 , Judges 5 probably.

Uh, you have a handful of places where the identity of God and the angel is, is kind of conflated. And in my opinion, and the opinion of, of, uh, a number of other scholars, this kind of literary prophylaxis— hey, it says God, but remember ‘It could be the angel.’ Probably became very, very useful in the Second Temple period to distance God from what was going on. And so at any point in the text where it talks about God doing these things, they could say, ‘No, that was just the angel,’ because remember, the angel can identify as God. And so I think this is another witness to the proclivity to reinterpret stories about God themselves as stories about angels. And you even see this in the Septuagint, because you— at some point we have— we addressed Exodus 4:24 , the bridegroom of blood passage. Do you remember that one?

I don’t remember that one.

No, that’s where—.

But I could very easily have forgotten.

Well, yeah, that’s— we both could. That’s where God tries to kill Moses. God, like, shows up at the hotel Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Zipporah, his wife, circumcises him and throws—.

Has an astonishing—.

Or circumcises his son.

Circumcises their kid and just flips the foreskin at him.

At his feet, yeah. And says, “You’re a bridegroom of blood.” Well, what’s interesting is in the Septuagint, it’s not God. It’s angels of God. So in the translation, they’ve gone ahead and they’ve already inserted the angels, and you have similar things going on in a number of other passages.

Yeah, I thought we had talked about the idea that the Septuagint authors were so uncomfortable with the idea of it being God that they just kept making it angels.

Yeah, God doesn’t personally put out a hit on anybody. God sends angels to carry out his dirty deeds. Done dirt cheap. Um, did you ever see the movie Dirty Deeds?

No. Oh gosh, who was that?

Uh, that was Norm Macdonald.

I saw Mr. Deeds.

That was Adam Sandler. Yeah, no, no, Dirty Deeds was Norm Macdonald. It was, um, it was funny in parts, kind of like Norm Macdonald.

It was funny sometimes.

Was it— wait, was it Dirty Deeds? I’m seeing another movie coming up.

We are way off track here.

Yeah, Dirty Work. Excuse me, Dirty Work was Norm Macdonald. Okay. Okay. It’s Norm Macdonald. You know what you’re getting with Norm Macdonald. But so I think that’s what’s going on there at the very end. And to kind of tie all this off in a nice little bow, we’ve got a very creative Second Temple period literary negotiation with the history of Israel here. That’s certainly not something that someone speaking Aramaic or Hebrew was going to, you know, just rip off the cuff standing in front of the Sanhedrin. This is obviously something that took some care and some time and some thoughtfulness on the part of the author going through and being like, “Well, should I say 430?

And it conflicts with that heritage as it has been preserved down to us in the Hebrew Bible. And in another segment, we’re going to talk a little bit more about one of the ways that it conflicts and represents later ideologies. But I think taking this text seriously and trying to allow it to operate on its own terms means recognizing that this is a literary creation, that this is something that is the product of thoughtful and again, creative engagement with the author’s heritage that is definitely not something that this Stephen, who I’m willing— I don’t know for sure if there was really a martyrdom of a dude named Stephen. I’m willing to allow it, that it’s certainly plausible. But if that person did actually rattle off the history of Israel just to try to buy some time and ended up getting stoned for his troubles, it wouldn’t have matched what we have here in Acts 7 .

But it is a fascinating story.

Love it. That’s really fascinating. All right. Well, let’s move on to our next segment, which is “What is That? " And today’s “What is That? " is a star. Now, you and I have talked before about references to stars. We talked about the Star of David.

Yes, there’s a new star search evidently. Okay. Started up. Boom.

That’s great. There’s a star that was over a certain infant’s house. However that ends up working. But this is a different star, and it’s a little confusing. We’re still in Acts chapter 7, as we said, but now we’re looking for— we’re looking at verse 43.

Guide me in. I don’t know what’s going on here.

Okay, so, um, you’ve got— we’re, we’re in Stephen’s, um, review of the history of Israel, and we’re talking about the fact that Israel was slipping back into idolatry. And verse 42 says, God turned away from them and handed them over to worship the host of heaven. As it is written in the book of the prophets, did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices for 40 years, uh, in the wilderness, O house of Israel, no. Now we’re in verse 43. You took along the tent of Moloch and the star of your god, Raiphan, or Remphan, or Rophan, or— there, there are a bunch of different ways that this is actually, uh, found in the manuscripts in Greek, but Remphan seems to be the one that the Septuagint carries for the images that you made to worship.

So I will remove you beyond Babylon. So, okay, yes.

So that was Stephen quoting God. Is that—?

Is that quotation a quotation, a reference to a quotation in another book? It is. Did— or did he make that up?

No, this is a quotation of, uh, the prophetic book of Amos , specifically chapter 5. And we’ve got verses 25 and 26 and a little bit of verse 27 thrown in there for good measure. But when we go look at the Hebrew of what’s going on in Amos 5 , it’s a little different. So I’m going to read Amos 5:25 through to where we get to it in the middle of verse 27 from the NRSV-UE, and this is based on the Hebrew. Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the 40 years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You shall take up Sakut, your king, and Kaiwan, your star god, your images which you made for yourselves. Therefore I will take you into exile beyond Damascus. Okay, so a little different.

Yeah, we didn’t say Moloch, we didn’t say Remphan or Rephan or whatever it is, right? So what’s going on there?

Well, the— so the word, the reference to Moloch is— and this seems to be coming through in the Septuagint, our beloved ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Right. Um, but they take, uh, this name Sakut, which seems to be the name of, uh, probably a Mesopotamian deity, and it looks an awful lot like the Hebrew word for Sukkot, uh, which is why in the, uh, in the book of Acts , it renders it the tent of Moloch. So you have the name of a deity that gets confused for the Hebrew word for tent or tabernacle.

And so you bring along the tent, but then we need the name of a deity. And so instead of “Sakut your king,” you change the name of the deity to tent, and you change the word king to Moloch, because king in Hebrew is melek. And Moloch is just different vowels.

Okay, so you take two words that have meanings, And then you go, “They sound kind of like these two totally other words that have totally different meanings.” Yeah. That’s a weird thing to do. Well, like, I mean, I get that that could happen, but it just seems so strange. Is the idea, is the guess that the translators of the Septuagint just didn’t know those, just didn’t know the— what was going on there? Or—.

Probably, probably, at least. Well, when it comes to, when it comes to the word for king, like, they shouldn’t have been confused because there is a second masculine plural pronominal suffix on the end of melek. So it shouldn’t be confused for the name Moloch. But, and also, as we’ve discussed before on the channel, there was no deity named Moloch. That is some— that’s a misunderstanding of a Hebrew noun that probably just referred to a specific type of sacrifice. And so by the time of the Septuagint, they’re like, maybe it’s that Molech guy. Okay, we’ll just throw that in there. And you know, this kind of thing happens. Is it, is it, um, slide down my rain barrel or rainbow? Like, you know, they, they’re, they’re somewhat similar. They’re not the exact same word, but, um, I grew up with rain barrel.

Okay. But I suppose that, I mean, it makes even more sense when I think about, like, when I think about words that sound the same in English, if I’m reading them, I have vowels. They didn’t have vowels to go.

They did not have vowels. Yeah.

So these would have been spelled the same, Molech and Moloch, except for that pronominal, that possessive suffix that is attached to the word in Hebrew.

But yeah, they wouldn’t have had vowels, and they would have gone either by an interpretive tradition that would have been active, or just by their own interpretation. And this happens a lot in the Septuagint. There are sometimes when they have no idea what’s going on and they just transliterate it. So they just go, “Oh, just write it in.” And, you know, that kind of thing happens as well. So we’ve gone from “Sakkuth, your king” to “the tent of Molech.” So, “Sakkuth,” yes.

So let me just make sure I’m following this. “Sakkuth your king.” Sakkuth is a person, is a king, a deity.

Yeah, probably a Mesopotamian deity. And then the next phrase, “Kaiwan your star god,” and the Hebrew is “Kiyyun,” and then it says “tsalmekhem,” which would be “your image,” “kochav,” your image of a star. And so the idea there is that Kiyyun is some kind of divine image of some kind related to a star. And then it says Eloheichem, which would be “your” plural God. So the star of your God, probably what it is. Your images, the star of your God. And so here Kiyyun gets altered a little bit into “Reiphan.” And probably because Kiyyun is also probably a Mesopotamian deity, Kiwan, Kaiwan, something like that is what it would have been in Akkadian.

And this was probably a deity associated with the planet Saturn. And so probably the Septuagint translators render Remphan or Reiphan or Let’s see what the alternatives are. We got Rempham, Remfan, Romefa, Refa, Refan, Reafan.

Can I just say none of those sound like Kaiwan or whatever it is? No, no.

But I think that probably was a deity in the Greco-Roman world that would have been associated with the planet Saturn. So that’s what makes sense of why they altered it so wildly.

So in this case, they’re not trying to translate the name, they’re just trying to substitute in an equivalent god.

Yeah. And so it doesn’t say anything at all about the nature of this star. However, if it is associated with Saturn, a lot of people have pointed out, there’s an interesting pattern at the north pole of Saturn.

A Saturn pattern?

It is a Saturn pattern, yes. And the Saturn pattern is a hexagon that is created by the clouds and the storms and everything like that.

Oh, I’ve seen that, sure.

You’ve seen that, okay. And The idea that, that a lot of people have come up with is that the hexagon, if you connect, there’s a way to connect the points of the hexagon to create a hexagram or a Star of David, a Star of David, a six-pointed star. Now, uh, we didn’t have, uh, the ability to— we didn’t have telescopes that were powerful enough to be able to see that pattern on the top of Saturn until, you know, the last— I don’t know, it was probably— it was definitely after 1500. I’m gonna say it’s probably closer to like 19— okay, I was way off— 1987.

I was gonna say, yeah, that’s, that’s not the kind of thing that you can see with just optics.

You gotta—.

You have to have, uh, you either have to get the optics very, very close or Okay, yeah, we’re looking with different things.

David Godfrey in 1987 pieced together flyby views from the ‘81 Voyager mission. Yeah, so that was V’ger that gave us, um, the hexagon. So definitely not on the radar of, uh, of the author. Yes, of Amos 5 . Uh, that would be a kind of prescience that you probably need some evidence for, but, um, So yeah, one of the reasons we’re bringing this up is because on social media these days, you see all kinds of people saying that the Star of David is the Star of Remphan, it’s an idol, it is idolatry, it’s worshiping a false god, and all this kind of stuff. This is just rank antisemitism that is trying to dismiss the Star of David as a false god.

Well, yeah, and trying to associate the Jewish people who invented all— like, whose book you still use, Christian person, to say that the Jewish people are the idolatrous ones.

I think it’s so interesting. But I— and yeah, you know, an antisemitic video was sort of our jumping-off point for looking at this. But what became instantly more interesting to me as I was reading about this is this sort of old, ancient view of the stars and the heavens as not, not like, you know, we think of them, you know, planets and stars as sort of inert balls of gas burning billions of miles away, giant rocks, whatever you got. But they were— when going back to Acts 7 , when Stephen says, “But God turned away from them and handed them over to the worship of the host of heaven,” the host of heaven is not a group of— it is a group of gods, but it’s the stars, it’s the planets. Those are the gods.

Yes. So the host is tsaba in Hebrew. That means it’s like military host. It’s a group of soldiers. And this, the idea of the stars as the host of heaven descends from this notion that the stars are gods, that they are God’s army.

Right. And I think all of the ancient world had some version of this, which is why, you know, we associate, you know, Saturn, The planets themselves are not named after gods. They’re associated with gods because they were gods. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like Saturn and Venus and all these things. They were the gods. That was the god. He’s up there. Yeah, looking down on us. And the reason that they chose the planets specifically was because those are the ones that move around in the night sky.

Yes, the wanderers. Yeah, because they’re not there. They’re not in a fixed pattern. And we— you see this in Philo, you see this in Paul, the idea that those are gods.

And Philo is pretty explicit. The stars are gods. And there— and we can go to Deuteronomy. There’s an interesting part in Deuteronomy 4 . When you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them. Things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven. And so according to Deuteronomy 4 , they’re the gods that the nations worship. God created the, the host of heaven so that the nations would have deities to worship, but Israel must only worship Adonai, and Israel must not follow the worship practices that the other nations use to worship those other gods. So the hosts of heaven work for God, but they’re also considered the idolatrous gods of the heathens.

And yet again, we have this idea that keeps popping up for us, which is the idea that there isn’t just one God. Right. And, you know, they place their god over and above these other gods and maybe make him the creator god of these other gods or whatever. But it’s very specific that these are other gods, like the, like the other, the people in Babylon or, you know, Moab or whatever are worshiping, they’re not worshiping a god that doesn’t exist. They’re worshiping a god that does exist, but isn’t your God. That sort of thing.

Yeah, precisely. And you see this in a number of places in the pre-exilic literature, but it lasts down into the New Testament. And for instance, the idea that the other gods are ruled by— the other nations are ruled by other patron deities, you know, this is Deuteronomy 32:8 . This is God goes down to Egypt in the Exodus to render judgment upon the gods of Egypt. You have David telling Saul, as Saul is pursuing David and like chasing him outside of the land of Israel, David’s complaining, “Your men are forcing me to worship other gods by forcing me out of Adonai’s inheritance.” There are a bunch of manifestations of that idea.

Like, that’s talking about calling the gods out to muster for battle, and all of them show up because they all obey the God of Israel. Not one is missing, and the God of Israel knows all their names and commands them. And it is in the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 when they are—they’re fighting against the Canaanite general Sisera, and it says the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, which is another reference to the idea that the stars not only are deities but also are armies, right? They can be called upon to come fight against the enemies of the people of God. So it’s, it’s all throughout the Hebrew Bible, and, and again, even down into the New Testament where they’re frequently referred to as powers, principalities and powers and dominions and stuff like that. Those are the references to powers in Paul frequently, and I haven’t looked to see if it’s unilaterally, but frequently that’s references to divine beings that are identifiable as stars.

So when you get into later rabbinic literature, there’s this famous debate in rabbinic literature about two powers in heaven. And this is supposed to be kind of a euphemistic way to refer to the heresy about there being two gods in heaven, the main god and then like a deputy god. And some folks think that this has to do with Christianity, but there are other Jewish scholars who will argue it seems to just have to do with this idea of a kind of subordinationism in early Judaism where there was some kind of mediatory figure that was being endorsed by Jewish folks. So that’s an ongoing debate, but powers are gods.

All I know is that when you said a main god and a deputy god, I had Andy Griffith and Barney Fife jump into my head.

Yeah, the deputy god gets one bullet and he has to carry it around in his pocket.

Andy! Andy! Aunt Bee neither. That made me very happy. Let me ask you this. One of the things that I found when I was looking up some of this stuff was references to an ancient Hebrew zodiac. So like, can we get a little bit into that? Because one of the things that we see is, you know, Adonai is our God. Is Adonai one of the star gods, or is he separate from the stars?

Considered separate, because you have the sun, the moon, the stars, all the hosts of heaven, that is all distinct from and subordinate to Adonai.

Although, although in the earliest periods, you do have some indications that Adonai—worship of Adonai was associated with worship of the sun.

So there is—it probably was in some periods associated with astral phenomena.

Okay. Well, one of the things that keeps popping up that even I’ve noticed, but then when in my reading was associated then with this astrology business, is the number 12. 12 Tribes of Israel, 12 stones on the high priest’s breastplate, right? 12 loaves in the temple, all of this stuff. And people were connecting that with signs of a zodiac. Yeah. Mazzarot, is that a word that I’m looking for?

Mazzarot, yes. That occurs in the Book of Job , and that’s probably a reference to—The Mazzaroth just means the stars or the constellations.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, so I don’t know that it’s—I think it’s the majority position that this is a reference to constellations, the zodiac. Job is Persian period, so if this is influenced by Zoroastrian astrology, then it could be a direct reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac. But that’s it. That’s the only—you have, I think you have some references that are generally translated like the Pleiades or something like that. But when it comes to the zodiac, that’s the closest you get as the Book of Job .

Okay. So do you think that there’s anything to this idea that the number 12 is popping up as a zodiacal reference?

No, I don’t think there’s a case to make for that because the number 12 is significant long before we see any references to a zodiac. And so I think it’s more likely just that this is a number that became highly significant early on in the history of Israel. And you’ve got a bunch of those—3, 7, 12, 70, 40. There are a bunch of numbers that are symbolic and have significance and so get repeated an awful lot. So I don’t think there’s a good case to make for that.

Okay, I guess it was as a reference to the temple itself and was talking about the stones on the breastplate and 12 loaves in the temple, 12 pillars. And they were talking about the temple as a sort of model for the cosmos. Cosmos, yeah.

Yeah, there’s a case to make for that. And a lot of the texts about the temple are probably exilic or maybe even post-exilic. So that’s much closer to that. But the significance of 12, I think, predates that. And, you know, there’s a much shorter line to draw from 12 tribes to 12 stones, 12 pillars, 12 everything. So— Right. That makes total sense. Yeah. But I would be interested to see what a close interrogation of the number 12 throughout the history of Israel reveals.

Yeah, it doesn’t seem obvious to me that 12 would necessarily— different cultures looking at the sky might not subdivide it into 12 the way many cultures have. That just seems like an arbitrary division. You don’t need to divide things into 12. But maybe I’m not— look, I am neither an astrologer nor an astronomer, so I don’t necessarily know.

All I know is that it’s the Age of Aquarius.

It’s the dawning of the—.

Dawning of— Well, it was the dawning back in the ’60s. Back in the ’60s. We got to be there by now, right? Yeah, certainly. Certainly. In the year 2525, if man is still alive. And they were. They’ll get there, hopefully.

Yeah, it turns out we were still alive then. All right. Anything else we wanted to get into in terms of astrology? Magi? Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Zoroastrians. And you know, when we talked about the Magi, they were likely Zoroastrian priests or whatever.

Yeah, scholars. Yes. Poet warrior kings or whatever. Yeah. I should have said that in a Scottish accent. But no, the— I— yeah, the Magi, that’s such a fascinating bit of astrology because it’s like they’re not Israelites, they’re not Jewish folks. They come from a completely different region, a completely different ethnic group, a completely different tradition. And it’s like, look, their divinatory practices were accurate? Is that what the author is trying to say?

Yeah, the author is like, hey, these guys know what they’re talking about.

Yeah, if they tell you that the stars are telling you something, they got it right here. So yeah, which I think is— I would love to see somebody tease out the implications of that a little more, because it just suggests to me that the author, in my opinion, the author of Matthew is probably just toying with how obvious it is that this was a sign of the coming of the Savior, that even those goofballs out in in the Zagros Mountains over there. Even they can figure it out. And here we have Herod going, I don’t know what’s going on. Where’s that? What’s the Gomer? I don’t even remember the character’s names. Andy! Andy!

The other one thing that I thought I would just dive into just a little bit, because it’s always confused me, is Venus, aka Morning Star, yes, aka somebody in Isaiah, aka Lucifer, aka— what are we talking about? That one got me really messed up.

Well, you have in Isaiah 14:12 , you have the sarcastic reference to the king of Babylon. Like, the text is explicitly saying, okay, and now I’m going to talk about the king of Babylon, and then it sarcastically refers to him exalting his throne over the stars of God. Okay. And talks about how you have fallen and refers to him as Helel ben Shachar, which would be shining one, son of the dawn. And this would seem to be a couple of different ways to refer to the king sarcastically as some kind of deity associated with the planet Venus. Okay. Because Venus was widely divinized and considered an important deity in so many different pantheons. And so when you get down to the Septuagint, they render it Heosphoros, which would be light bearer. And so it’s not— it’s— they’re not transliterating it. And that is evidently a name that is occasionally used to refer to a deity in the pantheon associated with the planet Venus.

And then when you get down to the Latin they use Lucifer, which is also a name that is used occasionally to refer to a deity in the pantheon that is associated with the planet Venus. And you also have Lucifer. There’s a passage in— I want to say it’s 1 Peter. I could— it could be 2 Peter. It’s in one of the Peters. Pete and Pete, just as a callback to the good old days of the Nickelodeon ’90s. But it talks about the morning star rising in your hearts. And that is supposed to be a reference to Jesus. And in the Vulgate, it’s rendered Lucifer.

Oh wow. Yeah, yeah.

Which was just light bearer or light bringer. And so you can see how that could be associated with Jesus. And then after you identify Lucifer with Satan, then Lucifer becomes a naughty name and a naughty character.

You’re not— somebody needs to— somebody go out after you’ve seen this and do a video that we can then respond to where you claim that Jesus is actually Satan because of the Lucifer, Lucifer equation.

There are, there are more than enough people getting millions of views on videos, uh, saying that. And a lot of them will, uh, a lot of them are using Gnosticism to do it. Okay. Because one of, one of Gnosticism’s claims, based on this Middle Platonic cosmogony that suggests that the material world is bad, and so whichever deity created the material world was bad. And so the Gnosticism, certain streams of tradition within Gnosticism reinterpret the Hebrew Bible as a story of the evil kind of JV squad deity who trapped us in these fleshly prisons. And so nowadays you get the people who are like, well, yeah, Gnosticism, ooh, and we can bring the Luciferian stuff into it too. And so it just resonates at a higher frequency, and then you get into frequencies. And so yeah, there are plenty of people doing that out there.

All right, well, there you go. Uh, what a fun, weird, uh, sort of difficult to follow grouping of things, uh, that was. But I really enjoy it. Uh, hey, listen, friends, if you would like to become a part of making this show happen— and boy, we’d really appreciate it if you would— if you do, uh, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. And, uh, that’s where you can get early and ad-free versions of each episode. You can get the after party, which is bonus content that we do for you. There’s a lot of, a lot of stuff happening over there. Who knows, maybe new stuff will start happening. We’ll do some patrons-only stuff. You don’t know, we might. Uh, and if we do, you’re going to want to be a part of it. So head on over there. We sure do appreciate you. We also appreciate RJ Gawley for editing the show, and we will talk to y’all next time. Bye, everybody.

Written in the Stars!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology