Literally Not Literal!

You know, you go to the Song of Songs and it’s like, why is this erotic poetry in Scripture? And it’s like, oh, this is Jesus and the church. You know, Jesus is just like, I love your breasts, church. They look like some deer. 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. We actually got snow in the Salt Lake Valley for the first time.

Yeah, I heard. I heard Davis County got dumped on. I was hoping for a little bit more just, just for fun because I didn’t have to just scrape a tiny layer of ice off my car. But, but no such luck here in Herriman. Yeah, we did not get much snow at all.

Yeah, alas. Well, we’ve got a fun show coming up. Today, we’re going to be talking about two very interesting things. And you know what, Dan, we didn’t even come up with like segment titles. Because there’s not going to be a chapter and verse this week, which is unusual. And I kind of like it. This week, we’re going to be, we’re going to be talking about biblical literalism. It’s something that we have talked about quite a bit in the sense that we’ve like pointed out a whole bunch of reasons why the Bible cannot be taken literally. But let’s talk about like what literalism actually is, where it comes from, all that sort of thing. That’ll be our first segment. And then later on in the show, uh, Dan, you— I’ve seen some videos that you have pointed out that are about the Hebrew alphabet.

Yes.

And how, “If you take the letters, each of the letters means a thing, and that does a thing, and da da da da da.” And we’re gonna, we’re gonna be Taking Issue, I think. Yes, we’ll take issue with that.

But primarily, we’ll be discussing where the Hebrew alphabet came from, right, how it functions in the Hebrew Bible.

And it’s really cool, like, the— like, it’s also where our alphabet kind of came from. Like, it is. It’s so, so there’s like a really There’s a lot of really cool stuff to delve into in that.

Absolutely.

So let’s get on with it and do our first— we’ll call it a What’s That?

I think that works.

We’ll dive into What’s That? All right. So biblical literalism, the taking of the Bible literally, I guess, is what we’re talking about. The idea that everything that we read is prima facie what it says it is, or what it is, or something? What King James decided it would be? I don’t know. What are we talking about here?

Well, yeah, first off, my hot take, if this is Meadowlark or Subway Hot Takes, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a biblical literalist.

Oh snap!

Right off the top rope, I’m just going to say it. There’s no such thing.

Coming in hot.

Yes, biblical literalism is a fiction that is used to try to curate the authority of the Bible and to assert authority over what the Bible actually says. But I think that is how we’ll circle back and round off this discussion, because what I want to talk about, I want to start way back in the early church with what’s going on as soon as the Bible is complete and we begin to have readers of the Bible. Because while everybody always had some notion that, you know, these are inspired texts, these things are true, but what precisely that meant was not really hammered down. And it could mean a lot of things. There could be literal applications, there could be, uh, moral applications, there could be all kinds of different applications. So the, the like the main representatives of a more thoughtful and a more insightful approach to what exactly are these things we call scriptures, I think are represented best by folks like Origen and Augustine.

So Origen is 3rd century CE, Augustine is end of the 4th, beginning of the 5th century CE. And these are authorities who swung a lot of weight in their day. And also what they had to say about a number of doctrines influenced how Christianity would develop for basically down to today in certain segments of Christendom. But Origen was famous, in my opinion, for asserting a few different ways to read the text. And one of them was what he called the plain sense, or the historical sense, or the literal sense, would be what the words themselves seem to mean just on the surface. And the thing is, if you’re approaching this collection of texts thoughtfully, you recognize that there are some issues with asserting that the plain sense of these texts is all 100% accurate and true, because there are places where things conflict with each other, and there are also things that are problematic.

And for instance, Origen, very famously, we have our Psalms 137 , the imprecatory psalm, where, you know, we have the blessed are the ones who take your babies and dash them against the rocks. And this is the post-exilic author kind of fantasizing basically about killing Babylonian children and is just so, woo, looking forward to it so much. And Origen realizes this is problematic. So—

Origen was anti-baby killing? That’s weird.

Like, yeah, he was one of the first, back before it was cool.

Nobody had thought of that before, not killing the babies.

Well, there’s— and you know, this goes back to the fact that, well, that’s another discussion. At some time, at some point, we’ll have to talk about how we went from God cares only about our people to God cares about all people, but still mostly only our people. And like, which is stuff we get even down to today with your, how dare you be toxically empathetic? And it’s supposed to be about our people.

So anyway, yeah, JD Vance and his circles, his concentric circles of caring about people.

And the Pope was like, uh, no, that’s incorrect. But anyway, he argued that the surface sense, the plain sense, was like the least important or the least significant sense.

Interesting.

And that it was moral, anagogical, and other senses that were more spiritually profound and more important and were what the scriptures intended. So when it came to our imprecatory psalm, Origen said, no, no, no, no, this is not literal. This is not suggesting that it would be a good thing to kill these babies. The babies of Babylon are your impure thoughts. And so you’ve got to take those thoughts and you got to “dash them against the rock really, really hard.” And so—

I’m having a baby of Babylon right now.

And the idea there being that what the author is trying to communicate, or at least what God is trying to communicate through this, is something more moral, is something more spiritual. Yeah. And so that is the sense that we should be looking out for, and we shouldn’t worry about not not just the parts that are immoral, but we shouldn’t be taking literally the notion that there was evening and morning, day and night, before the creation of the sun. So like Origen was like, yeah, the, the whole 6 days of creation, those aren’t literal 24-hour periods. We’re not— we don’t need to think of it like that. Um, and, and he also acknowledged, hey, you know, sometimes the gospels didn’t agree with each other on certain things, and you need to just relax, right? Just chill, don’t worry about it. Yeah, enhance your calm. Uh, see if anybody gets that one. Um, and, and Augustine was kind of the same.

He, he took a, a more of a hardline stance on some things, like creation. He insisted was, was a little more historical, that’s how creation happened. You know, he, um, he wasn’t, you know, I can imagine Origen being kind of like, “Yeah, man, take it easy.

You don’t gotta—

It’s not like that. It’s all good, man." Augustine was more like, “It’d be like that.” But he did warn people about, you know, asserting things that were just scientifically dumb. He was more educated, philosophically— well, they were both very, very philosophically erudite and educated, but Augustine wore that philosophical erudition closer to the surface and was so like, don’t assert the literalism of things that are just going to make us look stupid, that we know just aren’t true. And so there was a brand of literalism, if you want to call it that, only to the degree that they understood there was truth in the scriptures, but it might not be resting on the surface. Might be a little under the surface. We might have to dig down a little bit, look for a moral sense, an anagogical sense, something like that. And so, you know, the Song of Songs, you don’t want to take that too literally.

It’s erotic poetry. And so, you know, folks like Origen, who some people think Origen castrated himself in order to facilitate a more easy celibate life, and so he was not going to be the kind of—

That’s one way to do it.

It is one way to do it.

It’ll be effective.

It’s probably the more expensive way to do it, depending on what quality of guy he went to. Right. I don’t know what they called them in that time period, but—

I got a guy.

But you go to the Song of Songs and it’s like, why is this erotic poetry in Scripture? And it’s like, “Oh, this is Jesus and the church.” Jesus is just like, “I love your breasts, Church. They look like some deer.” So we are not—.

Have we done the Song of Songs? We need to do that.

We need to do the Song of Songs. Yeah, there’s—.

I hope someone’s—I hope someone’s listening right now who can write that down for us. That would be great.

So the last thing they were going to do is champion the plain sense of this erotic poetry, right? And what was most important was the Christological sense. This was how you find Christ in the Scriptures. And I’m sure you recall from growing up among the Mormons as one of them for a time, the whole “everything is about Christ.” And, you know, that’s kind of—that’s the Where’s Waldo project of Latter-day Saint engagement with Scripture is find Christ in the Scriptures. And it’s like, “Oh, there’s the—it talks about a rock over here. Oh, the rock is Christ. You found Christ in the Scriptures. Congratulations.” And so if there were problematic parts of it, you just had to find a way to read Christ into it, and you were like, “See, the Christological sense overrules any other sense. I have won the day. Huzzah!” And this gives way in the medieval period to your literal, your allegorical, your moral, and your anagogical.

And the, you know, whatever is salvific, whatever is about salvation, whatever is about Christ, that’s the most important.

And what is the word you said, anagogical? And I don’t know that word.

Yeah, um, that’s—you’re going to make me look it up too, um, because it’s a method of mystical or spiritual interpretation, particularly in Scripture, that looks beyond literal, allegorical, or moral meanings—those are the other three—okay, to discover a text’s hidden reference to eternal life, heaven, or the afterlife, leading, derived from Greek for “leading up.”

Okay. Okay.

So, but that’s the, that’s the highest sense. And so that’s, if you can find that sense, you’re golden.

And particularly if you can stop looking at it, you can no longer—you have then achieved that particular Scripture, and you can move on forever. Yeah.

And so you have an awful lot of that going on into the medieval period. And this is where, you know, we get to the Renaissance and the Reformation where there’s, you know, now we have battles between the individuals and some of the clergy and the church. And if the Scriptures have four different layers of meaning and a lot of it is kind of up in the air, who’s the ultimate authority over that? Oh, well, the church is, which endows the institution with an awful lot of authority, an awful lot of power. And this is one of the vectors of the concern of the Reformers was the church has too much authority over what the Scriptures have to say. And so there’s an attempt to kind of wrestle that back a little bit by suggesting that the sense needs to be located in the actual text itself. And so you have a bit of a pushback against the anagogical and the other three ways to read the Scriptures, to try to collapse it down a little bit and suggest we need to rely on the text.

Sola Scriptura comes out of the Reformation period and the rhetoric against the church’s authority. And there’s—.

And that’s just—Sola Scriptura just is the idea that the Scripture only is, is the authority.

And right, yeah, the Scripture alone is the sole and sufficient authority for all things. And in this period, a lot of folks are like, related to faith and salvation, not necessarily related to the origins of the earth, or not necessarily related to the genetic origins of humanity. Certainly there were a lot of folks who asserted that as well, but when you back them into the corner, it was really mostly about matters pertaining to faith and salvation.

Yeah, it was funny because when I started to look into this a little bit, and I didn’t, you know, I couldn’t read ten books about it for today’s episode. But when I looked into it, I came into it assuming that sort of Luther and Calvin was where literalism was going to start finding its footholds. And it turns out not. Like, they still had plenty of allowance for like metaphor and poetry and figurative speech. And sort of a non-literal view of cosmology.

Yeah, there’s absolutely a sense in which they’re definitely moving the needle. But really what we’re talking about is—because everybody recognizes there is poetry, there is metaphor, there is allegory, there are all those things in the scriptures. And so really what we’re looking for is where we’re going to put the threshold, right, between this is literal versus this is figurative.

And also like what you have to believe. Yeah, there’s this sense of like, where do we put the line of like, you know, this is fuzzy or this is open to these kinds of interpretations, but this you have to believe it this way sort of idea.

And so there is a sense that, you know, we’re going back to a six-day creative period. We’re going back to all of humanity descended from Noah and his three sons and their three wives, and the Table of Nations represents, you know, the genealogy for all humanity. It’s not nearly as strict though, because, you know, the threshold is closer to the allegorical side than—or actually I should say the other way around. The threshold is moved so that there’s more room for allegory, metaphorical interpretation, and things like that. And in no small part because the more literal you interpret things, the more you introduce inconsistency and the more you stake claims that might get you in trouble. Because, you know, we have things like Galileo who said, you know, I think we might be going about this the wrong way.

And had an awful lot of pushback. And when you get into the nitty-gritty of the debates and what the church was really saying, like, you have to get pretty deep into where we’re drawing the line between what is figurative and what is not. But it’s still nothing compared to what would happen after the Enlightenment and once we get into the modern period. Because that’s where we get—a number of things happen. One, with the Renaissance and the Reformation, we get the printing press. And one of the things that this does is it actually changes the main way that people are experiencing scripture, at least regular old people are experiencing scripture, because normally they would hear it read.

Right. From the pulpit.

Right. And they would not have the opportunity to actually hold and read the text unless they learned to read, which was not within everybody’s grasp. And also they had to be able to afford to purchase or at least have some kind of access to those handwritten manuscripts. But with the printing press, that began the ball rolling on greater access to the texts. Now, it was still the case that, you know, Bibles were incredibly expensive. They were very big. They were usually chained to the pulpit. They were intended for the clergy to be read out loud. But so people were hearing the scriptures. And one of the things this meant was that they weren’t reading it back to front. And, you know, this kind of relates to our discussion with Michael Peppard about how Catholics encounter the Bible.

Right.

That is kind of closer to how Christians have experienced the scriptures throughout history. And so it wasn’t like they were hearing all these things and they were like, wait a minute, I recall this passage over here says this one thing, but then this passage way over here says this other different thing. So there was—

Yeah, you couldn’t go back and even if you did recall two things and you were like, I’d love to check that out, you had no means of checking it out. You couldn’t just flip, you couldn’t flip through and be like, haha, I’ve found something because you didn’t own the book.

So the inventing of the printing press and the Reformation, which arrogated more authority to interpret the scriptures, away from the institution, that kind of created this snowball effect where people were gaining more access to the text, people were reading it a little bit more literally, and then we get into the Enlightenment, we get into historical criticism where suddenly the way we’re thinking about the world changes. Rationalism becomes more salient. We’re less dependent upon the claims to revelation and miracles and all that kind of stuff. You got Thomas Jefferson with his little penknife cutting all the miracles out of the New Testament. And so you’ve got a much more critical approach that develops. And then we get into the 19th century, and this is where I think we really have the confrontation where the trajectories kind of clash. And it mainly has to do with things like the origins of humanity, the nature of the species, if you will.

If you will. Yes. If you’re nasty, so to speak, according to the parlance of our times. Yeah. You have that. You have the relevance of that to the practice of enslavement. You have growing concern for how long the Earth has been around. And you have the discovery of dinosaurs, which kind of threw a wrench into a lot of these things. And so, um, the rise of modern science, the scientific method, um, critical theory, all these kinds of things challenge, uh, traditional interpretations of the Bible. And the response was to lean into literalism. Yeah. Was to say, no, we got to take it more literally. And that’s when we get into the 20th century, we get this, the publication of this series called The Fundamentals, which I think were published between 1910 to 1917-ish, somewhere in there.

Have you ever heard of these publications?

No, I’ve never heard of The Fundamentals. I guess I, yeah.

So this is what I think is kind of the main pivot towards what we might call fundamentalist Christianity. Right, because this is a series of publications basically arguing, lashing out against the historical-critical method, against critical scholarship, to draw the line in the sand and say, these are the fundamentals of being a Christian, and you have to accept these in order to be on our side of things. And it was doubling down on some concept of a literal approach to scripture where it’s no longer just kind of, you know, your hippie-dippy Origen, you know, hit the blunt and then say, you know, just relax about these contradictions and stuff. They developed the notion of the inerrancy, the historicity, the univocality, all these things of the scriptures as more firm identity markers as a way to object to rising critical scholarship.

And then we get the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925. Last July was the 100-year anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial. And this was suddenly how we interpret—.

We should just If you don’t know, that was the trial here in the United States where they were sort of adjudicating whether or not evolution could be taught in schools.

Yeah. And this was basically how literally should we be interpreting the Bible, and should that literal reading of the Bible govern how public education works? Yeah. And so you had things like creation as 6 24-hour periods, the global flood, historical Adam and Eve, the genealogies from the Table of Nations, all these things were asserted as 100% true, not because we had been studying it and we arrived at this conclusion, but because we needed to assert this as a rhetorical line in the sand to try to prevent the further encroachment of critical scholarship and the historical-critical method.

Well, yeah, it’s literally— May I have your attention, please? Oh, shit. May I have your attention, please? Sorry. Oh my God. Okay, well, that was exciting. I literally just spent the last 20 minutes bundling up all of the animals in my— we have a guest, we have a houseguest who has— whose cat is here now. So not only— I had to bundle up 2 cats and a dog and I was halfway down the stairs, uh, you know, 6 flights of stairs when I was informed that no, it was just a test. So we— that was fun. Uh, we had a little, little adventure there, but let’s get back to what we were talking about. Fortunately, uh, we, we kind of know, uh, what we were talking about, uh, which was—.

Which is out of, uh, which is not our norm, but yeah, right.

Yeah, we don’t pay attention to us. We don’t know what we’re what we’re on about.

We were talking about the establishment of these fundamentalist Christian positions on literalism, 6 24-hour creation days, the global flood, historical Adam and Eve, literal genealogies. As we’ve said many times on the show before, dogs and cats living together.

Mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria, yes. So, and this leads to, and obviously the fact that the development of a more strict literalism functioned as an identity marker over and against, you know, festering critical scholarship is— that’s not going to make things go away. It’s just going to make things get worse. And I think I wanted to just briefly mention the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. Are you familiar with this?

I’ve heard of it, but I’m not. Yeah. So walk us through what that was.

And so they decided in October of 1978 to get a bunch of folks together for the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.

Oh, this is ‘78. Wow. Okay. Late in the game, it feels like. Yeah.

Well, you know, you’ve got civil rights happened. So that’s, you know, that’s causing an issue. We’ve got a lot of— the ’70s were a rough time for a lot of evangelical Christians who really didn’t like civil rights.

There you go. Because we have the Fundamentals having been published.

So they come together for the purpose of affirming afresh the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, making clear the understanding of it and warning against its denial. And it’s—I’ve seen a few different iterations of this, but I think I may have pulled up the 1978 one. It’s got 25 articles.

Okay.

Yeah. And it’s a lot. Each article is like, we affirm X and we deny Y.

And oh, you got one of each. Okay.

Yes. This is, this is like if you wanted to get a—if you said to Siri, print out Dogma Over Data, this is what you would get.

I think you just made a bunch of people’s phones do something.

I don’t think—only if Siri has access to their printer. But Article 15 is one that I highlighted because I think it kind of gets to the heart of what we’re talking about here. We affirm the necessity of interpreting the Bible according to its literal or normal sense. The literal sense is the grammatical historical sense, that is, the meaning which the writer expressed. Interpretation according to the literal sense will take account of all figures of speech and literary forms found in the text. We deny the legitimacy of any approach to scripture that attributes to it meaning which the literal sense does not support. So, so this is basically dredging Origen’s body back up to once again announce it anathema. Because the literal sense is the only sense.

However, literal here also includes the intent to use things figuratively, which is funny because, uh, yeah, A, that’s not what literal generally is referring to, and B, that’s open to interpretation again, right? So like you’ve just said, it’s only literal except when it’s not, right? That doesn’t seem helpful to me.

Yeah, and here’s why there’s no such thing as a literalist. Who gets to decide when it is or isn’t? Well, obviously I do. And by me, I mean whoever is talking.

Me, Mark Driscoll, or me, Franklin Graham, or Billy Graham, or—.

Yes.

Yeah.

So when you have two passages where a critical approach would say the literal sense of this one flatly contradicts the literal sense of this one. Um, then you’ve got to pick one. You say this one’s the one that’s really literal and the other is the, um, the figurative one. You’ve got to wave that away and reinterpret it because really what, what the authority is, is not the Bible in its literal sense. The authority is your tradition and whatever interpretive tradition is propping it up.

And so whatever way we can interpret this to prop up the hate du jour or the—.

The ideology, the dogma du jour, yes. Because they’ve got a lot of things in here as well talking about how the scriptures can never disagree with each other, and they deny any reading that disagrees with—And you know, none of these things are based on any kind of evidence or pure logic or reason. We’re starting from the dogmas and then we’re constructing the rationale, the rationalization for the dogmas. Because when it comes down to it, you’ve got to—like, you’ve got a bunch of passages that very clearly acknowledge other gods. And, you know, we’ve talked about 2 Kings 3 . Like, this is not poetry, this is not a psalm. This is the author who seems to be kind of in a slightly reluctant and embarrassed way acknowledging that, well, Adonai got beat by the god of another nation. So moving on anyway.

Or even if he’s not beat, you’ve got all of Exodus talking about all of the Egyptian gods and how they’re performing miracles just like Adonai has done. And so like, it—yeah, it—I guess it’s all literal until that point, in which case those are just demons, and yeah, or that’s the devil or whatever.

And so when you look at literalism, it’s just ideological literalism. It’s not textual literalism. Textual literalism results in acknowledging contradiction. It results in acknowledging scientific falsehoods. It results in acknowledging perspectives and facts and historical events that don’t line up with what we know about reality. And that’s just a bridge too far for folks who are trying to push back against what they call modernism. I mean, we’re already post-postmodernism, but they refer to historical criticism as modernism.

We deny that the teachings of Genesis 1 through 11 are mythical and that scientific hypotheses about Earth history or the origin of humanity may be invoked to overthrow what scripture teaches about creation. So basically just saying, yeah, the Bible overrules science.

It’s so funny because they are so mad about all of these modern— this modern science. And what’s weird is that this, their perspective, this literalist perspective, is super modern. It is less than 100 years old, really, in the way that they’re practicing it. And yet there’s still— or maybe, you know, 150 or something like that. But up until that point, Christianity didn’t look like that.

Yeah. And it’s all contextual. And at least in the case of things like inerrancy today, it’s reactive. Yeah. It’s reacting against stuff more than it’s actually going out and seeking stuff. Yeah. Trying to protect the ground that they have, that they feel they have won in the culture wars. And it results in, you know, if you had this in Galileo’s day, ooh, you know, we’d have a much different public school system today. This is not giving any wiggle room to the scriptures. This is dictating to the Bible what it is and is not allowed to be, to do, and to say, which demonstrates where the real authority rests. It rests with the tradition and the interpretive tradition.

It does not rest with the Bible.

Well, and what’s funny is that it starts with the notion of we have these dogmas that we are going to hold to, and so we’re going to craft a sentiment about literalism that gives us space for these dogmas to stay real, even in the face of modern science. And then that’s— and then they— it gets pushed too far. It gets like other people take that and run with it. And then we got flat earthers again, which we didn’t have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It goes— it goes beyond— well beyond where they’re trying to go, because that’s the natural conclusion to what they themselves have put in place. So do you want flat earthers? Because that’s how you get flat earthers.

Yeah. Oh, and we have, you know, I don’t— oh my gosh, there’s so many people on social media, the whole, uh, what, the firmament people. Oh yeah, we never been to the moon because, right, you just hit the fir— you just bounce off the firmament, you can’t get out.

Um, all right, well, I think, I, I think that’s a great, uh, a great sort of primer on, uh, on literalism. So I’m gonna call it at that.

All right.

So let’s move on to Taking Issue. And this week’s Taking Issue, we’re Taking Issue with the Hebrew alphabet.

Well, not the Hebrew alphabet per se, but the way that people have tried to leverage the Hebrew alphabet.

No, I’m Taking Issue with the alphabet. It goes the wrong direction.

It’s strutting around like it owns the place.

Where are your vowels, Hebrew? Come on.

A little big for your britches. So there are way too many videos that I’ve come across, and I’ve responded to many of them, that are saying, “Hey, look at this Hebrew word. Now, it’s spelled with these letters, and this letter means this, and this letter means that,” and the other letter means the other thing, which means this word actually means this whole sentence, and it always is pointing to Jesus.

Right, right.

So, they’re taking Origen’s advocacy for a Christological layer of meaning a little too far.

I mean, if they were just seeing it as sort of metaphorical or interesting in some way, that would be one thing.

Well, there is a mystical tradition within Judaism that does this.

Yeah, are we talking about Kabbalah?

Yes, yes. And the kind of precursors to Kabbalah, which make use of the fact that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet ultimately derive from hieroglyphs that at one point in time were associated with syllables and entire words. However, that is a kind of mystical interpretive innovation that postdates the Bible. Nothing that is in the Bible was trying to do that. And that’s what—

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

And I was going to say, that’s why I want to talk about where the Hebrew alphabet comes from.

That’s what I was going to say. Yeah, let’s go back to that. Let’s figure out some origins, because I think it’s super fascinating stuff.

Absolutely. And the first thing to note, a lot of people don’t know this, but when you see Hebrew script today, if you buy a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, the BHS, or something like that. If you get some kind of Hebrew text where it’s in print, that’s actually not the original Hebrew script. That is what’s called the Ashurit. That is the Aramaic square script. That was a script that was adopted by speakers of Hebrew after the Babylonian Exile, when they spent a couple of generations in Mesopotamia where they were using the Aramaic script for their Imperial Aramaic. So, the first thing to note is that the traditional Hebrew that we’re used to seeing is not the old Hebrew.

Okay. That is interesting.

Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize this. And this is particularly interesting when it comes to textual criticism, because there are some places where we might have a manuscript where there’s two different readings. And it’s like, well, one of these letters could be confused for the other, but only in the square script, meaning that any such confusion would have had to have happened after the Babylonian Exile and/or vice versa. This is a confusion that only would have happened in the old Hebrew. And some people refer to it as Paleo-Hebrew. In my experience, Paleo-Hebrew is used primarily to refer to, like, in the Dead Sea Scrolls where they kind of intentionally use throwback script. So you’ve got a bunch of Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts where, for instance, it’ll be the regular square script, but then every time there’s the divine name, the Tetragrammaton, it’s in the old Hebrew.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so I was going to ask, the Dead Sea Scrolls are in the square script. They’re in that Aramaic square script.

The majority of them. The ones that are in Hebrew, the majority are in the Aramaic square script. There are some that are entirely in the old script, and then there are some where they’re written in the square script, and then the scribe would actually leave a space, and then the more senior scribe would come in and write the Tetragrammaton in the old Hebrew script. Oh, because there are some manuscripts where this— the person didn’t come in and remember to write the thing, and so there’s a gap where the divine name should be, or something like that.

Oh, that’s really interesting. So wait, do we have full texts in ancient Hebrew?

In the old Hebrew?

In the old Hebrew?

Yes. And there are a bunch of different ways that we have them. We have some of them inscribed in stone. Oh, sure. We have some of them inscribed in silver. We don’t have any, like, papyrus or other kinds of texts that are written in old Hebrew in the period when old Hebrew was normative. We do have some of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, but when we go back to the old Hebrew, this is much more closely related to Phoenician. In fact, it’s basically a borrowing of Phoenician. And then there are some, there are a couple of changes here and there related to how the script works. The script type, it’s called an abjad, which basically means that only the consonants are written, the vowels are not written.

Right.

And this is why Hebrew looks so unique, where if you do get a Hebrew Bible and you look in it, it’s got a bunch of letters and then you’ve got dots and dashes below, within, and above the letters. And that is basically a secondarily developed vocalization system that— it’s called the Tiberian system, and it was something that was developed between like the 5th and the 9th or 10th centuries CE. And so there you also have two other versions of that that did not have as many different vowels that they used. But if you go to Israel, or even many places in Palestine today, you’ll see Hebrew on signs and stuff, and there won’t be any vowels. You just gotta know.

You just gotta know. And that, like, anciently, that’s how we came up with some problems, some questions about “Molech” versus “melech,” or what is that? Like, they didn’t write a vowel, and so if there were two words that had all the same consonants, context was the only way you were going to figure that out.

Exactly. And there are a number of ways that that is still an interpretive issue. So for instance, Genesis 1:1 , “Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim veet haaretz.” Bara is vocalized in our medieval Masoretic Text as if it is a third masculine singular qal verb, a finite verb. But you could change the vowels to turn it into an infinitive construct without changing any consonants. In fact, that’s exactly how it occurs in Genesis 5:1 .

So say those two different things because not everybody knows all of the grammar words that you just used.

So in English, an infinitive would be where we add “to” to the beginning. So “I run” is—that’s a finite verb. “To run” is an infinitive or the infinite, and that is where you’re referring to the verbal idea. You’re not saying this is the verbal idea put into action by this subject. So it’s not conjugated would be another way to say it, but it’s—.

I’m sorry, so translate the bara.

Okay, so basically—.

In the two different ways that you just mentioned.

So basically, that’s the difference between, well, there are arguments for both ways, but basically, if you understand it to be a finite verb, you probably want it to mean, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” If it’s an infinitive construct, it has to be, “In the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,” in which case that would make it a construct phrase, which would make it a temporal clause, which would make the best translation, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth,” which would flatly undermine any attempt to try to read creation ex nihilo in there. However, there is also a grammatical way to understand it as a temporal clause, even if it is a finite verb. So, okay, we’re getting a little deep there, but vowels are crazy.

It can change things in very big, important ways.

Yeah. Another thing to note about the Hebrew alphabet is that it’s what’s called an acrophonic script. So beginning sound script, and what that means is that the characters descend from ideographic script. So the characters descend from characters that could be used either to refer to syllables or full words. And so this is what people are talking about when they’re saying, oh yeah, the—what do they say? Yeah. He means reveal, a revelation, or something like that, or behold, or something like the letter He. Right, the letter He. Now, it does come from a character that meant that hundreds and hundreds of years before the Hebrew language existed. By the time the Hebrew language existed, it had already been used for centuries to index the sound that begins the word.

So in other words, you take when they’re developing the alphabet, see, it used to be you had characters that were entire words or were syllables, which meant to be able to write stuff, you had to memorize hundreds of characters. The innovation of the alphabet was, no, we’re just gonna reduce it down to individual sounds, starting with consonants, but later also vowels, which reduced the number of characters you had to learn down to between 22 and 35. 30. So, uh, Hebrew has 22 characters, Greek has 24, uh, Ugaritic has 30. Like, it’s a limited number of characters, which meant that a lot more people could learn these characters and could hypothetically learn to read. But what you—you got your characters from those earlier ideographic characters. And so aleph is the very first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and it looks kind of like an X. But if you go back to the old Hebrew, it looks like a sideways A where the horizontal bar extended past both sides.

Like a sideways capital A in English.

Correct. So if you turn it one more, you know, 90 degrees more so that the point is pointing down, you’re looking at an ox head. You’re looking at a drawing of an ox’s head. And so that was a character that meant, that referred to an ox. But all we’re taking from it is the sound that began the word, which was a glottal stop. So we’ve adapted the character, but now instead of representing the whole word, it just represents the sound that began the word. So that’s aleph. Bet descends from a character that referred to a house. And it originally was kind of like a swirl, and then it became kind of a blocky, like, floor plan, and then it turned into what we have in the Hebrew alphabet. But that was the word bayit, and bayit begins with the sound /b/. And so for an acrophonic alphabet, the Bet just represents the sound /b/.

So there was a time when these characters did mean that. They turned into an acrophonic script between like 1800 and 1600 BCE. This is when, like, in the Sinai, you had Semitic peoples who might have been miners, they might have been corvee laborers, they might have been enslaved folks, but they began altering Egyptian hieroglyphs to turn them into what we now know as the alphabet. And that then contributed to Proto-Canaanite, which continued, contributed to Phoenician, which contributed to Hebrew. So, and Hebrew didn’t exist until like between 1100 and 1000 BCE. So when people—.

As both a written and a spoken language?

Yes, it was indistinguishable from a generic, broader Canaanite language until somewhere in between 1100 and 1000 BCE.

Okay.

And this is why when people are like, oh, the Hebrew of the Book of Exodus , it reflects the borrowings from Egyptian from the 1400s. Hebrew didn’t exist in the 1400s. So no, it doesn’t. Hebrew didn’t exist until much later. And then narrative prose in Hebrew didn’t exist until even later than that. But by that time, they were not associating the full concepts with these letters.

So, so, so by the time it gets to being Hebrew, you’re saying independent individual letters had no like independent symbolic meaning anymore. It was just a phoneme. It was just a sound.

It was just a sound, yeah. And the aleph isn’t even really a sound. It’s just a glottal stop. So it depended on what vowel followed after. And so the Hebrew alphabet, usually you refer to it as the aleph-bet because that’s the origin of the word alphabet, comes from Greek. But, and another interesting thing is a lot of people talk about gematria. You’ve heard of gematria, right?

We’ve talked about gematria in the context of the 666, for example.

In the periods when the Hebrew Bible was being composed, you didn’t use individual letters to represent numerical values. You borrowed some of the hieratic symbols for numbers from Egypt, or you wrote out the word in Hebrew.

Oh, the word for the number.

Yeah.

So it would be T-W-O instead of—.

Right, right. So there was the, the, the character 2. Yeah, we didn’t have any of the— we didn’t use the, the Arabic numerals. Um, by the, by the way, the joke that, uh, that, you know, the progressives are out of control now, they’re teaching Arabic numerals in, uh, in the public schools— I love that joke so much, mainly because there’s so many people who don’t understand.

It’s a great little gotcha.

Yeah, but so the Hebrew characters did not come to represent numerical values until post-exilic period, like around 200 BCE, somewhere around there. And so it’s only shortly after that that you get the rise of gematria. So when we’re talking about the Hebrew Bible, except for maybe like the Book of Daniel or maybe Ecclesiastes or something like that, they weren’t even using individual letters to represent numbers yet. So there’s not an awful lot of gematria going on in there. So yeah, it’s the— now after the Hebrew Bible, you do have these mystical traditions that are developing in 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries CE within Judaism where people are starting to try to find more significance. And they’re doing this— they were doing the same thing that people are doing today when they try to say, hey, check it out, if you look at the names in Genesis 5 , and the meanings of the names, it creates a sentence that talks about the Christian gospel. And, you know, they’re doing the same thing.

They’re trying to find more significance, deeper significance, richer significance in the text. And they’re going about it by trying to understand how the authors could have been inscribing special hidden significance in the characters using gematria and numbers or using these significations. And so later on, like the— what’s one? The Shema. Shema Israel, right? Um, hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. There’s a very early Kabbalistic reading that says Shema is shin, mem, ayin. Well, shin and mem, put them together, that means name. Ayin has a numerical value of 70. So what is the Shema Israel? The 70 names of God. And so like that, so that kind of thing is going on in late antique Judaism and into particularly into medieval Judaism. But people today who are aware that that was going on, but then they try to read it back into the Hebrew Bible, there’s not a historical case to make for that kind of thing.

Yeah, it’s so funny to me because I don’t see any reason to say, if you find that interesting or if you find that fun, Dan Brown it up, or dive back in and let it be instructive to your own understanding or to your own theology.

That’s part of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, which was— I think exactly what they said was something along the lines of, we deny that the authors were fully aware of all the significance of what they wrote, or something like that. But basically saying yeah, that we reserve the right to read anything into here that we want, even if it’s entirely anachronistic, because we think God, you know, it’s inspired, and so God sees all.

Yeah, I guess you could make that claim. But it’s just so much nicer to just say, okay, this is interesting to me. It’s not unlike astrology. I have no problem with it if it’s just instructive to you. But if you start to say, no, this is fact, you know what I mean? No, you know, this being— this being here and that being there, this letter means this and this letter means that. And that’s the fact. And it proves X, Y, or Z. Yeah, that’s when— that’s when you have a problem. That’s when you’re— you’re— you’re in bad waters.

Yeah. This is— this is a frustration of mine. A lot of people talk— will accuse me of spending all my time on social media attacking people’s beliefs. And every time I want to be like, I don’t care about your beliefs. If you want to believe any of this stuff, blast off. I— it is when you go onto social media and tell other people that this is true that you have stumbled onto or stumbled into my territory. You’re in my house now. And when you’re, when you’re telling people that this is true, ‘Cause if you wanna say, you know, this is something that I’m, you know, I found meaning to this and I’m aware that this is not how it was actually worked anciently, but you can just think about it this way and isn’t this cool? I would never make a response video to that and tell those people to, you know, to take a hike. But it’s when people say that this is the way it really is, and particularly when they’re doing it when it’s harmful.

Beliefs that are harmful, yes, I will— I won’t seek people out, but I will criticize beliefs that are harmful. But believing that the letter Aleph represents God, until you go make a video on social media declaring that to be fact, I could not care less. Believe what you want to believe. Don’t be a dick, I think, is— is that— that’s still the official position of Data Over Dogma?

That is the official position of our podcast, absolutely. Yeah, don’t, don’t be a, don’t be a jerk. And, and, and also like know when you’re just making something up that’s useful to you. Like, yeah, if you’re, if it’s useful to you, great. If it’s mystical to you, great. Present it that way. You could even, you could even go on social media and be like, here’s something that like I heard, it may or may not be true, but it’s interesting to me. You could do that. Dan won’t come for you for that.

But yeah, just don’t, don’t get on social media and say, uh, you know, uh, God’s rainbow has 7 colors and the pride flag has 6. They took it, they took out indigo, and that’s Jesus.

And that’s why, that’s why gay people are bad.

Oh yeah, that’s satanic. Satan took out indigo and that’s Jesus. And, um, when you do that, you’re, you’re inviting criticism.

And then Dan has to make a video that brings in Isaac Newton and music, and none of it makes any sense. So just don’t—.

Yeah, don’t make— don’t make me talk about music.

All right, well, I think that’s fascinating. That was a lot of fun. If you thought it was a lot of fun, hey, go ahead and share it, like, comment, subscribe if you’re on the YouTubes. If you’re just listening at home, or if you’re on the YouTubes, please feel free to go to be a patron of our show over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. We, we, those are our favorite of all of you. So if you want to be one of our favorites and get in our great graces, becoming a patron is a great way to do it. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show and to JJ Neward for being our producer. And we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

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