I Will Have Mercy, Not Dogma

I have been called out, uh, by a member of my own, my own Patreon community. And when this individual pointed me to this, I was like, ah, okay, you got me. 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.

It’s a rainy day today here in Salt Lake City, and it was snowing a minute ago.

Oh, that’s—look, all of that is good stuff. We need it.

It’s still snowing down here too, a little bit.

There you go. We need the moisture. So I’m happy. There’s a sort of an LDS—

That’s a very Mormon turn of phrase there.

Yeah, it’s almost a meme at this point in Mormonism. And we pray for moisture.

Yes, uh, precipitation is always moisture.

That’s what—that’s what happens when a, uh, when a culture-slash-religion comes of age in a desert, I suppose. Yes, they kind of—they get their own language around.

We’ve got a Mormon-coded way to refer to precipitation.

That’s right, that’s right. Anywho, uh, things are good. So today’s show is going to be interesting. We’ve got a History’s Mysteries. Both of the topics of today’s show I brought to you as things that we have mentioned several times sort of on the journey of this podcast. And I realized that I kind of knew what they were, but we had never really like worked through them and talked about them as their own segments. So I wanted to actually know what they were. So for the History’s Mysteries, we’re going to be talking about the Maccabean Revolt. Because if there’s something, if there’s one thing to be said about Maccabees, they’re revolting. And then we’re going to do a What’s That? And we’re going to talk about the prophetic critique. And that sounds very fancy, but it’s actually, it’s really cool and interesting. And also, you’re going to bring some objections up that I haven’t heard.

Yes, I’m going to share criticisms from somebody who has got me dead to rights.

Oh, this is how I have talked about the prophetic critique in the past. So this is a—this is a—maybe, maybe this will have to be a hopefully rare but regular feature of the Data Over Dogma podcast where I say, you got me.

Oh, man, we could—maybe we should call the segment mea culpa. Anyway, all right, let’s, let’s dive in first, though, to History’s Mysteries. All right. So it’s the—it’s—I said it. It’s the Maccabean Revolt.

This is something that, you know, the Maccabees were never in my Bible growing up. Right. First and Second Maccabees. Right. There’s two of them.

Well, there—oh, there are. I think there are seven books of Maccabees, seven or eight. As well as the Ethiopic Meqabyan, which are named after the Maccabees but are completely different texts. But the two—there are two that are in the Apocrypha, and then there are two more that are in like an expanded Apocrypha, and then there are like four others that are usually either, um, in some Syriac or Arabic or Greek traditions but are not usually recognized by most Christians or Jewish groups. But most folks know 1 and 2 Maccabees. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, most Catholics. Well, I was gonna say.

And that was my first exposure to the books of the Maccabees, because when I was serving an LDS proselytizing mission in Uruguay, I was gifted by somebody a Spanish translation of the Bible, a Catholic translation. So it had the Apocrypha. And then a Spanish Bible dictionary. And I just, I devoured both. And I particularly, I was fascinated by the Apocrypha because these were texts that just were not in the Bible that I had not grown up with, but at least become churched—that was difficult for me to say—churched into. So, but 1 and 2 Maccabees were fascinating because it was a history that I’d never heard before. Although I could tell that it overlapped with traditions I knew about, such as Hanukkah, which is based on a story from Maccabees. So I just found it fascinating. But yeah, to understand what’s going on though, we’ve got to go before the Maccabees.

We’ve got to cast your mind back, if you will, to the Diadochi. And you know that old tale from the sea. So when Alexander the Great dies, he has managed to conquer most of the known world up to the Indus River and has this huge kingdom and drinks himself to death in Babylon or something. And then—

He lived the dream is what you’re saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He lived the dream. And then that leaves a gigantic kingdom without a clear, or at least without a respected line of succession. And so basically what happens is all of the generals that are leading the different parts of his army basically plant a flag and say, “This is mine, I take this.” They sort of subdivide the kingdom and just—.

And everybody takes a piece.

Yes. And for folks who are living in the Holy Land, they are right at the contested zone between two of the biggest of these territories.

Uh, and this is, uh, the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic kingdoms. And so these are rulers who, um, are, are fighting over this territory, and it kind of goes back and forth a little bit. And we recently talked about, uh, the, um, the Letter of Aristeas and the origins of the Septuagint.

And that was based on Alexandria, where for a time the Ptolemies held sway. But one of the things that happens is the Seleucids come in and they’re governing in and around Judea for a while, and you have Hellenistic cultures kind of taking over. They come in and they’re like, “This is how we dress now. This is the food that we eat. These are the clothes that we wear. This is how we leave the skin on our genitals,” and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And the locals are kind of like, “Ew.” But you do have a lot of folks who are in the upper echelons of society who can see the writing on the wall, and they understand that, “Hey, we need to kind of integrate if we want to have livable lives.” And so, because my—.

Sorry, my understanding is that while they were sort of under the Seleucid Empire’s purview, they were still allowed quite a bit of autonomy. They were still like—it was still their rulers were still allowed to rule the area and stuff. But like, that’s always a tenuous position.

Exactly. It’s always the whim of the overlords. Could, you know, the winds of change might be blowing in another direction at any moment. And so you’ve got a lot of folks who want to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this vast network economically and all this kind of stuff. And so there’s a little bit of waning of some of the Torah observance and some of the practices. You get people like, hey, we should have a gymnasium. That’s kind of like, you know, that’s like getting an NFL football team. You’re on the map now. But, you know, you’ve got a—if you go participate in the gymnasium, you’ve gotta do so in the nude. And you know, you’ve got kind of a conspicuous handicap.

I was kicked out of my gymnasium for doing that.

That’s not fair. Yeah, well, things have changed. And you basically get this internal conflict between the Hellenizers, the ones who are like, we should integrate, we should reform our culture to be in agreement with theirs, and the more traditionalists who are like, no, we’ve got to observe our laws and rules and we cannot integrate. And so there’s—it’s a bit of a, um, you know, there’s some insularity there. They’re not quite separatists, but they’re, they’re definitely, uh, not letting their kids go and play with, uh, with the Hellenizers. So we’ve got some internal conflict, and then the winds of change change, as is their wont, although I’ve been ridiculed that it should be pronounced as is their want.

Well, then how do you separate the two? One’s with an O and one’s with an A.

Come on. And we get Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who accedes to Seleucid rule around 175 BCE.

And is he named Antiochus just because the seat of the Seleucid power was in Antioch? I believe I read that it was in Antioch, and I just thought Antiochus—that just—is he named after the place?

I mean, it certainly sounds like it’s related. I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head which direction that relationship flows, but some listener is going either yes, obviously, or no.

Some listener knows. Anyway, go on.

And we have accounts of what happened because of Antiochus’ ostensible desire to kind of mitigate the influence of Jewish conventions and traditions. Was tired of these people being their own, doing their own thing. And so—and our sources, our main sources for this are like 1 and 2 Maccabees, because they are considered—1 Maccabees more so than 2 Maccabees, but to some degree 2 Maccabees as well—they are considered to be pretty historical.

And then we also have, in this time period, you have the high priesthood is kind of, that’s the main thing, that’s the big leagues. And you have competing high priests, and they’re starting to use—they’re starting to forge political alliances. And the high priesthood is something that is going to be an installation of the Seleucid rule rather than something that’s hereditary, something that is internal. And so there begins to be a lot more friction, and the Hellenizers find themselves in kind of an unfortunate position, and the traditionalists are now finding themselves more directly under the boot of the Seleucid Empire, but now ready to fight back.

Do you get the sense that Antiochus was—was Antiochus trying to do something to sort of calm the tension between the Hellenizers and the traditionalists, or was he just being a jerk? Was he just like, we’re just going full Hellenizing and you guys need to just do what I say?

I think both of the books of Maccabees present him as kind of just being a jerk, but certainly—.

And I mean, they would, wouldn’t they? Like, considering the perspective from which they’re being written, they have a very distinct perspective. Do we have any Seleucid, like, documentation of this?

From their side?

I’m trying to think. Nothing springs to mind.

But I do—let me think. And I’m, you know, there’s some archaeological data from some of the sites and cities and things like that. Sure. But textual stuff, apart from maybe some brief inscriptions just letting us know who was where, I don’t think we have anything that represents the Seleucid side of the story.

Interesting.

But the book of 1 Maccabees and the book of 2 Maccabees are also quite different in their kind of ideological bent. Because 1 Maccabees is more like, let’s—it’s trying to tell the story in as historical a way as the author is able to, which is, you know, it’s still not Herodotus, but it is, it’s not 2 Maccabees, because 2 Maccabees is more dramatic, it’s more rhetorical. You’ve got martyrdoms and you’ve got speeches and you’ve got miracles and things like this. And there’s a degree to which 1 Maccabees is also more about political alliances. It’s not talking about God as much. And it is ending with trying to prop up the legitimacy of the Hasmonean dynasty, which is where this is all headed.

This is going to end up with the establishment of the Hasmonean or the Hasmonean, you know, you will hear it pronounced two different ways, dynasty, which would be when Judaism kind of is autonomous and free once again. And that would last for a handful of decades. Whereas 2 Maccabees is not so much about, it’s not so much a political national manifesto as it is talking about a religious and a moral struggle, where we get these famous stories of the mother and her 7 sons and representing Antiochus as basically Satan. So they’re also not on the same page in that regard. And 1 Maccabees was probably written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. We only have it in Greek. I don’t think there’s anything from the Dead Sea Scrolls that preserved like a Hebrew fragment or anything like that.

I’m pretty sure of that. But—.

Well, we should finish the story because we haven’t actually gotten to the revolt yet.

Anyway, we have this priest who shows up, Mattathias, and he manages to—in the story, he’s supposed to perform a pagan sacrifice, and he refuses and then kills the guy who’s trying to force him to do it, the official from the Seleucid Empire. And he and his sons flee into the hills and call all the faithful rebels to him. And his son Judah becomes the main general, Judah Maccabee, Judas Maccabeus, and they lead this kind of guerrilla warfare campaign against the Seleucids. And I want to say this is 167 BCE. And the battles go back and forth, and around 164, that’s when the rebels manage to capture Jerusalem, and then we have the rededication of the temple.

Because meanwhile, the Seleucids have been desecrating the temple. They’ve got to rededicate it. And we have the famous story about how the oil that was only supposed to last for 1 day lasted for 8 days, which allowed them to do the rededication of the temple. And thus, we have the celebration of Hanukkah.

The fighting continues. Taking the temple back doesn’t end the battle. In fact, I want to say it continues on until like the 140s, because it goes back and forth. The Seleucids managed to take back over some territory. You have a bit of autonomy within Judea from late 150s to like 141 BCE, and then you have a high priest appointed in 141 BCE who institutes the Hasmonean Kingdom. And basically, this is where they declare independence from the Seleucids. And so at this point, you have, you basically have an independent Judean Kingdom all over again. Now, and everybody knows we’ve been waiting for hundreds of years for an independent Judean Kingdom to be reestablished. And so—

Because we haven’t had that since the— what’s it called?

Since the Babylonian exile.

The exile.

Thank you.

Man, don’t turn 50, suddenly you can’t think of words anymore.

And something that’s interesting, and one of the reasons that a lot of scholars think that the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees were probably written fairly close to what’s going on, is because they treat the Romans as allies. And the Romans were allies for a while until 63 BCE when a general named Pompey annexes Judea and basically comes in and says, “This is ours now.” And so the Hasmonean dynasty kingdom lasts from 141 BCE down to 63 BCE. So you got almost 80 good years. Of an independent Judean kingdom, which was also characterized by a lot of infighting and a lot of fractured alliances and things like that. And this is also the context for the retreat of the Essene population to Qumran.

Oh, wow.

The real separatists. And there’s an argument there, I think the majority of scholars would probably say that one of their main beefs was that they don’t believe the Hasmonean priestly line has a legitimate claim to the priesthood. Interesting. That they are not— because the palace and the temple were supposed to be separate. And so this kingdom was established based on the conflation of the two. This one family is going to take over rule of both. Okay.

So the high priests at the temple are now the rulers of the people as well.

Yeah. And so this is considered a no-no by these traditionalists who run off to Qumran.

And to be clear, for those who didn’t catch onto this, the Essenes in Qumran were the ones who tucked away the Dead Sea Scrolls that we found.

Correct. Mostly, yeah. It’s a lot more complicated than that. But yeah, these texts are probably being brought in from a variety of places for a variety of reasons. And it’s probably different groups over the centuries who are stuffing them in these caves.

But, but yeah, I think it’s just one guy who collected them all and just put them in his attic and then they found them. Okay, so we’ve gotten rid of the sort of the Greeks, the Hellenists, the whatever, and now Rome’s encroaching. Coming from the other side, I guess.

Yeah. And initially Rome is friendly toward the Hasmonean dynasty. So there’s kind of a little brother-big brother thing going on there where they’re friendly. And this is why the scholars think that 1 and 2 Maccabees were written before 63 BCE, because Rome is treated as more of an ally than an enemy. If these were written after then, it would be hard for the authors to represent Rome as friendly and not as ultimately the enemies to this new kingdom that was being set up.

Sorry, I’m just going to process one thing really quickly. The Seleucid Empire still exists, it just doesn’t extend through Judah, is that right?

Correct. Although I’m not sure when the Seleucids are not going to last for too much longer. I think they’re— unless, do they— I think that 63 BCE might have been the end of the Seleucid Empire as well.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, I think, because I think the whole Seleucid Empire is part of that annexation.

In fact, let me take a look real quick. Yeah, the Seleucid dynasty ends. It’s dissolved around 64 BCE. They’re a rump state. They’re occupying a small part of Syria, and then the Roman Republic annexes them in 64 BCE under Pompey the Great.

Those Romans. Yeah.

And this is—the Maccabean Revolt is also likely the context for the main apocalyptic eschatological layers of the Book of Daniel . Daniel, which is also primarily about the Seleucid Empire, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. And only it’s probably written long before 1 and 2 Maccabees because they’re still in the thick of it. And the book of Daniel imagines that God is going to intervene and overthrow Antiochus IV Epiphanes, which would suggest that Antiochus IV Epiphanes has not yet been defeated or is not gone, is still in charge of the Seleucid Empire when these prophecies are being written. And this is the funny thing about these prophecies. People are like, “Oh, they’re just so accurate that scholars just said there’s no way on earth they’re real because, you know, prophecy is not real.” And the reality is that no, they’re inaccurate.

They start to get more and more accurate to the point where it’s very clear that this is an eyewitness, and then they go back to being entirely inaccurate once the account says, “And then God showed up.” Right. Which, you know, the best way to account for how that can be is that they’re being written by someone who’s in this specific time period right before they say God showed up. And they’re, you know, the stuff that just happened, they can represent very accurately. The stuff that happened two centuries ago, they’re a little fuzzy on.

Right, right.

But then, you know, the stuff from their own day, yeah, remarkably accurate. And then the stuff that’s in their future, remarkably inaccurate, which is precisely what we see. So the abomination that makes desolation that is, you know, is going to stand in the temple and all that kind of stuff, that is supposed to be representative of Antiochus IV Epiphanes taking over the temple and desecrating it, using pagan offerings on the altar to desecrate the temple. So when people talk about Daniel and, you know, the 70 weeks and all that kind of stuff, that all culminates in the Maccabean Revolt. That’s what that is looking forward to. So it is not about Jesus. It’s certainly not about the 21st century. So that’s another source that people use for trying to understand what was going on, only it’s such a difficult source to use because we’re taking these eschatological prophecies and we’re trying to tease out what actual historical events might be going on behind them and might be inspiring these prophecies that are so loosely connected to what’s going on, where they’re using coded language to try to refer to these events.

And then you also have—there is an argument to make that part of 1 Enoch, particularly the Animal Apocalypse, might be ending with Antiochus IV Epiphanes as well, which would put it around the same time period. So there seems to be a lot of apocalyptic eschatological Greco-Roman period Jewish literature that was generated in reaction to the Maccabean Revolt. So it was a very literarily generative event. And also something that cost thousands and thousands of people their livelihoods and their very lives. But it’s such a central event to so much of what the transition between Greco-Roman period Judaism and what would come after that.

Well, it’s funny because we say Greco-Roman period Judaism, we say that, you say that all the time. But it does seem like it’s Greco period Judaism, and then Roman Judaism. And it seems almost weird to combine them considering how, I mean, yeah, it feels like a pretty straight pivot.

Yeah, there’s a clear line between the two.

And there’s a—and yeah, man, and there’s these—this group of people in the middle just getting buffeted by the waves. Yeah, yeah.

And this is also the period that’s probably responsible for the rise of ideologies about resurrection and ideologies about heaven and hell, because a lot of scholars think it’s in this time period that they’re contemplating, why is all this bad stuff happening to God’s people? And why are we not seeing God’s enemies being punished? And this is when, you know, a lot of the literature that’s being generated is starting to contemplate the possibility that this is being offloaded to the afterlife, where you wait until the afterlife to get your just deserts, whether for good or for bad. And that’s why 1 Enoch has stuff about, you know, postmortem divine punishment, as well as postmortem divine reward.

This might be what actually results in the rise of what we can refer to as Judaism as an identity. Because it would be, you know, you’ve got a new Hasmonean kingdom; we’ve restored what we have not had since the end of the 7th century BCE, the beginning of the 6th century BCE. We’ve got all these texts from that time period. Let’s now use this as our charter myth, as our kind of—this is the tradition that establishes our identity as a new actual kingdom. We’ve done—we’ve restored things. And we’re looking—we’re reading the literature that was written hundreds of years ago saying, “Oh, it’s going to be so great when we restore things.” And maybe the Hasmonean priests and rulers were like, “That’s now.” So let’s get this literature out there and that will help shore up the identity of our people as an independent autonomous kingdom. There’s an argument to make that that’s when finally everybody becomes aware of the Pentateuch and all the laws and all of these writings, because it’s in that time period, it’s in the 2nd century BCE, that suddenly you start to see evidence of widespread concern for purity and you start to see awareness of, “Oh, we’re not supposed to eat pork.”

And you begin to see literature where they’re suddenly debating, well, how do we reconcile, you know, parts of Deuteronomy with parts of Exodus where they don’t fit well together? And so I think there’s—I’m interested in seeing where the discussion goes, but I think there’s probably a good case to make that this is when the scriptures actually become a public document and a public force within the life of Judeans. So yeah, this is a pivotal—pivotal? Pivotal. This is a pivotal period in the history of Judaism and would give rise to a lot of the messianic stuff that gives rise to Christianity as well.

Crazy.

Yeah, don’t—you can’t be sleeping on the Maccabean Revolt.

Yeah, I mean, now it seems very—we’ve run out of time for this segment, but it just seems like we should be talking about why, you know, Martin Luther decided that these books shouldn’t be in the Bible anymore, because it just seems like that’s, if nothing else, at least it’s got a historical grounding, you know?

That’s something, that’s worth something right there.

There’s just one quick story before we end the segment. There’s a part in 2 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees chapter 12, pretty sure it’s verse 42, but Judah Maccabee and his troops, they come upon some of their other soldiers and they’re dead. And they find that they have contraband on them. Then under the tunic of each one of the dead, they found sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. And it became clear to all that this was the reason these men had fallen. So they have pagan contraband on them. And then it says, so they all bless the ways of the Lord, the righteous judge who reveals the things that are hidden, and they turn to supplication, praying that the sin that had been committed might be wholly blotted out. The noble Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened as the result of the sin of those who had fallen.

He took up a collection man by man to the amount of 2,000 drachmas of silver and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a purification offering. In doing this, he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. So this is basically an endorsement of, or at least an acknowledgement, that the people who were in charge of the Maccabean revolt believed that they could offer posthumous sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple that would result in forgiveness of the sins of dead people.

So proxy ordinances for the dead, forgiveness of sins after you’ve died.

Well, and the resurrection of those people.

Yes. And so they’ve already died. They’re going to be resurrected. Or at this point, maybe the resurrection is only if you’re righteous. And so they’re making the offering on the behalf of already dead people in the hopes that they can turn their fate around even after death.

Fascinating.

Sounded too much like purgatory.

And also, like, you know, give us the money and you can get free. Give us the money and you can even get your deceased ancestors out of spirit prison.

So fascinating. All right. Well, I think that’s very handy. I can finally say that I know what we’re talking about when you say things like Seleucids and Maccabees. That’s very useful. But it’s time to move on. Now we’ve got the What’s That? So the What’s That? That we’re talking about is the prophetic critique, which sounds like something that a single prophet didn’t like his food and decided to say, you know, if you had added a little more salt and maybe some MSG.

Yes. We could have gotten there. No, I don’t care much for the amenities. Yes, no, it is not a 1-star review of the housing. This is a reference to something that begins with the 8th century prophets. Most scholars agree that there are parts of, large parts of, some of the prophetic books that were actually written in the 8th century BCE. By people who presented themselves as prophets. And a lot of the criticism in the 8th century BCE arises because of the accumulation of a lot of wealth, because the 8th century BCE is a period where we have unusually long reigns for kings in both the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. They’re reigning for like 40 years.

Oh, wow.

And so there’s a lot of stability that is achieved. And this facilitates a lot of growth. There’s—.

The stability meaning the reason these reigns are long is because nobody’s challenging them. There’s no wars, there’s nothing. Yeah, it’s just everybody’s just chill.

Yeah. And they’re allowed to initiate a lot of economic growth. There’s a lot of trade going on. Now, the Northern Kingdom of Israel is much larger than the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and there are multiple major cities, whereas the Southern Kingdom of Judah, the capital city of Jerusalem is the city, and it’s just, you know, smaller villages around it, where the Northern Kingdom of Israel has a number of large cities. But they’re, you know, they’re exporting all kinds of stuff, likely up through Phoenicia, where— and it’s probably olive oil, wine, things like that, that are their primary exports. So everybody’s— not everybody, a lot of people, not a lot of people, some people are getting quite wealthy. The elites are getting quite wealthy. We’re seeing a lot more social inequality where you’re getting more and more poor people and more and more rich people, and they’re exploiting the poor. There’s land consolidation going on. You have where everything used to be, everybody was basically it was all subsistence living.

You just grew what you needed to grow to survive, and then if you had a little bit left over to take to the market, uh, you know, bully for you. And but now we’re having people who are loaning money, and in an economy where you have— where a lot of the resources for farming is based on loans, you go from, um, a subsistence living to a command economy where you grow what your patron is telling you to grow. And one of the things that this does is it creates a more vulnerable system because normally you would spread out what you’re growing so that if a certain crop didn’t do well, it didn’t do too much to you. You had other crops. You diversified. You can lean on the rest of what you’re doing, yeah. Yeah, you diversified your crops. Command economy, they say, “No, we need more this. You’re growing this and nothing but this. " And then if that crop happens to fail, you’re in it deep.

And then you’ve got a lot of, usually if you were in a bad way, you could get a survival loan from your community. And these are people who know that they could be next. And so their interest is illegal in this time period. So there wasn’t a lot of that going on in a command economy. You got to pay back the loan at the harvest time when, you know, it’s worth the least, and you’re going to— they’re probably charging interest and stuff like that. So in short, the rich are getting phenomenally wealthy and the poor are getting hosed. And this is when the 8th century—.

I feel like you’re trying to— I know I’m not supposed to be sitting here just drawing parallels to like now, but, uh, anyway. Please continue.

So this is where the 8th century prophets step in and they start excoriating the wealthy. And it’s because— but the interesting thing is the target of their excoriation, what they’re excoriating them for, is their offering of sacrifices and their celebrations of the festivals and the Sabbaths and the new moons and all this kind of stuff. And so the critique takes on an odd flavor. So for instance, here is Amos 5:21-24 . “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. And the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals, I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs. I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” So you have this contrast between, you know, all the kind of public displays of piety, which are required by the law, and the righteousness and justice.

And then here we have Isaiah, the very first chapter of the book of Isaiah . Verse 11 is where this starts. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says the Lord. I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts. I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?” And we talked in a recent episode about why it’s actually, “when you come to see my face.”

Right, right.

Who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more. Bringing offerings is futile. Incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation, I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals, my soul hates. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, remove your evil deeds from before my eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. So again, we’re condemning—.

Peter Thiel.

We’re condemning these folks who no doubt are the superstars of their society.

Well, and they’re very clearly doing the religion. They’re not being condemned for not doing the religion, for not being participants. It’s quite the opposite. They’re doing their job. I mean, the way that I interpret what you just read, and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this, is just that it isn’t as a condemnation of the sacrifices as much as it is a condemnation of doing the sacrifices, but not doing the righteousness that should be attendant to those sacrifices.

Right, right. And that’s, I think, exactly what the issue is, is that according to the 8th century prophets, and this is where it starts, you do see it in like Jeremiah, you do see it in some of the exilic and post-exilic literature, not just Deutero-Isaiah, but Third Isaiah, you see it a little bit in there as well. But the idea seems to be, you are, and where is the passage where it says this? There’s a reference to, I think it’s in Isaiah, there’s a reference to grinding the faces of the poor. But the poor, the oppressed, the orphan, the widow, these always come up as kind of the canary in the coal mine of social justice. These are the people whose well-being is how you can tell if your society is doing well or not. And I think the condemnation of the public displays of piety is precisely because for the 8th century prophets, the purpose of the law is to generate a just and righteous society where not everybody necessarily has to be on the same footing, but everybody has to have what they need to get by.

They need to be able to survive. They need to be able to have the things that they need and not be oppressed. And so when the wealthy are exploiting the justice system, exploiting the economy, exploiting the system of cult and things like that, they are basically undermining the intent of the law. They’re skirting around it, they’re destroying it. But at the same time, they’re going out to participate in the public-facing demands of the law, the demands of the law that allow them to engage in costly signaling and show everybody else out there, “Look how righteous I am. I was at the sacrifice.” Like, we just had somebody was just talking about— what’s the spokesperson for the White House’s name? Leavitt?

Yeah, Karine Leavitt.

Yeah, came up to the podium and was like, “Did you just hear that very loud amen? Because we were just doing a prayer back there.” Yeah, I saw that. And it’s like, why would you come out and be like, “Could you tell we were praying? We wanted to make it very loud.” Were you all able—.

Should we go back and do our costly signaling again, or did you catch it on mic?

Yes. And this is a way to put on display, look how righteous and pious we are, when she’s then going to talk about how, no, screw all the LGBTQIA, screw the poor, screw the immigrants, screw the minorities. It’s wartime, baby. That’s, you know, I used to be baffled by that Buffalo Springfield song. And I forget the title. “For What It’s Worth,” what it is. Oh, yeah. You know the old children’s tale from the sixties. Anyway, there’s a part of the song where it goes, “people waving signs, most of them say hooray for our side.” And I’m like, wait a minute, from what I have, the way I’m reconstructing the Vietnam War in my own memory based on what I’ve heard, everybody hated the Vietnam War.

And why is the song saying that most of the people are cheering it on? And now I’m realizing, well, I’m looking at so many people cheering on an obviously asinine, unnecessary, stupid war that somebody who cannot think a half a move ahead has started. And so, yeah, I can see it now. I get it. Thank you, Buffalo Springfield. I get it. But that’s an example of this very thing, of performing for the public in order to advance your own standing within the social identities that are important to you while behind their back grinding the faces of the poor. So, yeah, and it goes on. You see it in Amos, you see it in Third Isaiah, you see some in Jeremiah, and you even have Hosea 6:6 , “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” And how do you put on display steadfast love and the knowledge of God?

Well, obviously, you create a just society. You will stand up for the poor and the needy and the oppressed and the orphan and the widow. And so you— this passage is quoted twice in the Gospel of Matthew . Jesus twice tells people to go figure out— well, one time he says, go figure out what this means, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” And another time he talks about how they are— they tithe mint and cumin and dill, and they leave the weightier matters of the law unfulfilled. And then quotes this, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” And the point is, if you’re using religion to advance your own interests while ignoring what, you know, the weightier matters of the law, what it’s telling you about justice, you are in violation of the whole law. And God is going to, as the great poet said, cut you down.

Now, having said all that, this is as preachy as I get on social media. I’ve made a video on the prophetic critique a handful of times, just because I don’t think we’ve— I’ve lived in a time where it is— what was being criticized is so abundantly on display.

Right. I agree with the prophetic critique.

As do I. Yes. However, I have been called out by a member of my own Patreon community, somebody who wrote a wonderful treatise about where I’ve gone wrong. And when this individual pointed me to this, I was like, “Ah, okay, you got me.” Okay. Because, and this is not something I’m unaware of, it’s just something that I have neglected because I’ve done the very thing that I’ve criticized others for doing, which is isolate the part of the text or the tradition that is helpful to me and my identity politics, and ignoring the parts that don’t serve that rhetorical interest or those rhetorical goals.

Because while the prophetic critique seems to be making all these very righteous kind of distinctions between where things go right and things go wrong, the people writing it also were advocating for a lot of very bad stuff. Up to and including— there was a lot of ethnocentrism going on. There was a lot of maltreatment of foreigners and things like that. It’s more rhetoric. The appeal to the orphan and the widow is more rhetoric than it is actual concern. And this is something that I’ve talked about in other contexts where the poor and the orphan and the widow and the foreigner function kind of rhetorically as the canaries in the coal mine, but in actual practice, they usually still get neglected by the very people who appeal to them.

And an example that I bring up is how the Laws of Hammurabi, the prologue to the Laws of Hammurabi is basically like, “Oh, Hammurabi’s such a righteous king and he has made provision for—” the widow and the orphan. And then you can look throughout all of the Laws of Hammurabi and there is nothing that provides anything for the widow and the orphan.

And I want to try to find— okay, the poor treatment of the most vulnerable in society might be condemned, Simone writes, but so are foreigners in the many oracles against the nations, such as in the first chapter of Amos and throughout the rest of the prophets. And the social order envisaged as ideal is still thoroughly hierarchical in which women serve more of a role as symbols than people. And those symbolic women are often subjected to horrific abuse. The restoration of the proper order of the world in Deutero-Isaiah involves the humiliation of the feminine Babylon and the restoration of Israel to their proper place at the height of the order of creation, redeemed to serve the cult of the Creator. And you can see sexual violence is frequently used in this rhetoric about how God is going to punish not only members of the house of Israel, but the foreigners as well. Okay. Which is something that we’ve talked about before, where—.

Is that considered a part of the prophetic critique, or is that sort of separate, like a separate thing that’s happening alongside in the same books?

It’s happening alongside in the same books. So it’s not necessarily that it is an element of the prophetic critique, but it is definitely— the prophetic critique is being abutted to these other things. Okay. This narrative of redemption is couched in cosmogonic language, which is also an ideology of cult hierarchy and property relations in which God is supreme monarch and Israel, both the land and the people, are his hereditary property. It is not only the mistreatment of the vulnerable, which is a sign of cosmic imbalance, but any disruption of this entire system. And when disruption occurs, punishment is collective and brutal. And I don’t have time, obviously, to go through the whole thing. It’s a pretty long post, but I think it’s a very insightful—.

Well, I’ll try to remember to put the link in the show notes.

Yeah, we can link to it in the show notes. In the show notes, yeah. And so I think it is an insightful critique of my misrepresentation to some degree of the prophetic critique. So, and I have thanked Simone for pointing this out through other channels. But I think it’s helpful to know what the prophetic critique is, because I do think that in many ways what was being criticized is still going on today. I think it is very similar to Jesus’s criticism of those who stand on the street corner and pray to be seen of men and disfigure their faces when they fast to be seen of men so that they can get that social reward. And, you know, the Karoline Leavitt thing, you know, the first thing I thought of is when you pray, go into a closet and pray in secret. Yeah, don’t come out before the cameras and say, “Could you hear us praying? We just want to make clear we were praying.” We can go keep praying if that— but at the same time, the prophetic critique is kind of self-defeating in that it is surrounded by so much that points in the opposite direction, so much maltreatment of women, of the oppressed, of widows, of the foreigner.

And as well as she points out, or as they point out, I’m going to be honest here, I’ve never checked to see what Simone’s preferred pronouns are, but when disruption occurs, punishment is collective and brutal. Punishment in this time period, including punishment administered by prophets or advocated for by prophets, was violent, was retributive, was not the kind of thing we should be advocating for. So, I think a helpful corrective and a mea culpa, and also a thank you to Simone for pointing all this out so publicly. So, so that I could not ignore it.

I mean, okay, I see the point, which is that these people who are pointing out vast amounts of hypocrisy are themselves hypocrites in the sense that they are calling for justice over performative religion, but then they’re not really that into justice.

There’s a degree to which it’s still just structuring power.

Right. But by the same token, the critique itself is important and valid and necessary. And we should be employing that critique of the hypocrisy of today because there is the same level of calling on scriptures, calling on gospels, calling on religion and saying, you know, this is what’s guiding my, my support for the maltreatment of, of my countrymen or of people who are, you know, foreigners here or whatever. And that is— and I think that it’s fair to say that that is a hypocritical position.

Yeah, I think so. I think we can take the good from it and reject the bad. But, and I think what Simone is saying is, if we’re going to do that, we need to be transparent about the fact that we’re leaving the bad. And that’s what I have been leaving out. I have been ignoring the fact that there’s an awful lot of bad. So yeah, I think absolutely the critique can and should be leveraged. But this is an act of negotiation. Yeah. This is us going into text and saying, okay, we’re fiddling with it. We’re going to take this, we’re going to leave that, because this more directly supports our rhetorical goals and this rather undermines them or doesn’t align with our morals or things like that. So I take the critique. I do think the prophetic critique is something that people should be aware of. And I am glad that it was pointed out that I’ve been a little selective in the past in my leveraging of the prophetic critique in light of everything that is surrounding it.

And there are other things that I didn’t highlight from that critique. So by all means, go check it out. And yeah, and in the future, I will be more transparent when I am negotiating with the text in that way. So, for those of you who are wondering, or suggest that I do nothing but just be an apologist for Mormonism, or just promote, you know, woke leftist ideologies, I too am willing and able to acknowledge when I have been wrong. And this is not the first time this happened, certainly won’t be the last.

Literally the worst Mormon apologist. Of all time.

Oh yeah, I think Mark Hofmann beats me out to some degree, to the degree you want to call him an apologist. But these days it seems like you’re an apologist if anybody doesn’t like you for whatever reason. So, woof. Yeah, but I’m not an apologist.

That’s it for today. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, We sure would appreciate it. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and become one of our patrons where you can get access to the weekly after party, which is a lot of fun. Dan and I talking about everything from pop culture to answering our patrons’ questions and diving deep sometimes. It’s really fun. Really interesting stuff. So go check that out over on Patreon. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to JJ for being our producer. And thanks to all y’all for tuning in. We’ll see you again next time. Bye, everybody. Data Over Dogma is a member of the Airwave Media Network. It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC, copyright 2026, all rights reserved.

I Will Have Mercy, Not Dogma

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology