America (Almost Never) Reads the Bible

If all going to church does is make you support ICE and hate your neighbor, one, your church is doing it wrong, but also just the act of going to church or just the act of reading the Bible doesn’t accomplish what you think it’s going to accomplish, precisely because it’s just performative. 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, things are good. We, uh, you and I just spent some lovely time out in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Uh, talking to some folks over at the Harvard Divinity School, and that was it. A barrel of laughs.

I got to have some Dunkin’ Donuts, which was great.

I skipped it. I shouldn’t have, but I did not become a Dunk King, huh? No, I managed not to dunk this trip. We’ll do it again another time.

All bets are off. Yeah, next time.

Yeah, but yeah, it was a wonderful time. If you want to hear us talk more about it and heap praise upon the organizers of it and talk about the Religious Trauma Symposium that we went to. You can become a patron and hit us up over on patreon.com where we talked about it quite a bit on the, uh, after party that, uh, that our patrons get. That’s the bonus content. Plus, if you sign up for that, you get to listen to those— this whole show early and without any ads. So it’s a great reason to, to go and head on over there. Anywho, uh, we have a fun show to talk about This week, we got some interesting stuff going on. We’re going to start with— we’re going to get topical and talk about America Reads the Bible.

Which is a marathon event in which a whole bunch of mostly smiling white folks read a bunch— read the Bible straight the way through.

Mm-hmm.

Sort of 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM over at the, what do they call it? The Museum of the Bible.

In Washington, DC.

It was a marathon reading of the Bible.

Fun for everybody.

We’re actually still in the middle of it as we record.

As we record, it is happening probably as we speak. Yes.

It will have been entirely forgotten by the time this episode airs. So we’re filling you in on recent events in the recent past. Yes.

So there’s that. And then in the latter half of the show, we’ve got a chapter and verse, and we’re going to be talking about the death of Saul, which happened in a very specific way and has implications beyond just his own death.

So it’s a really interesting topic. I will say, just as maybe a trigger warning, that we will probably be discussing— we will definitely be discussing suicide. So keep that in mind for the latter half of the show. But for this first half, let’s, let’s get topical. And the topical— the reason— I don’t know, like, is the Bible topical?

I think that’s a funny question because I mean, increasingly, yes, the Bible is controlling our lives to a degree that we have not experienced in our generation.

So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s I mean, it’s perpetually topical on our show, but what has happened, as we sort of hinted at, was a whole bunch of people, a laundry list of people, have each been asked to read a small portion of the Bible.

And it’s just a cavalcade of sort of people from the religious right. I sincerely doubt anyone on the— even, you know, prominent Christians on the left side of the spectrum were invited to this.

I did find out that they did reach out to some politicians and some religious leaders. I don’t know which ones exactly. They said that they did invite some and they turned it down. So, and I don’t know if it was just a token invitation to, to a couple of people, but overwhelmingly, yes, this is This is the who’s who in people you don’t want to know.

So we should list off a few of the people that we’re talking about.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, the one that I was most surprised by, Kathy Ireland. Oh yes.

Model.

Yeah. It was like a big— one of the most important models in the ’90s, I guess. Maybe ’80s and ’90s.

I don’t remember exactly when her heyday was, but yeah, it was around that time period. But yes, I recall knowing about Kathy Ireland as a younger man.

Knowing about, gotcha.

She is going to be reading, as of today, we have not arrived at the New Testament, but she’s going to be reading Luke 21 through Luke 22:38. Okay. But wait a minute, that just seems like the end of Luke 22. Why would they, by the way, when I looked up on the Christians Engaged website, which is kind of the home base for this America Reads the Bible thing.

Uh-huh.

I don’t know who they had putting this together, but they needed an editor. It was bad. It was real bad. But yeah, Kathy Ireland, Dallas Jenkins, the creator of, now I forget the name of the show.

I don’t know anything about Dallas Jenkins.

I’ve never— The Jesus television show.

Oh, oh, uh, uh, uh, oh, oh my gosh. I don’t remember what it’s called.

Anyway, I keep the— in my head, um, The Departed keeps popping into my head and I’m like, I’m almost positive it’s not The Departed. That just may be the residual Boston, um, right, uh, in me. But it was The Chosen.

Sorry, The Chosen.

The Chosen.

Okay. I hope my friend who is one of the actors in that television show does not listen to this episode.

But oh well. You got it eventually.

I mean, there’s a whole bunch of politicians, you know, there’s Mike Johnson, there’s Ted Cruz and his pappy Rafael Cruz are both taking passages.

We got Mike Huckabee. Dan Patrick of your grandparents will sacrifice their lives for the economy fame during the pandemic. Uh, Paula White-Cain, the, uh, spiritual advisor, I guess, mascot for, um, Trumpian religiosity. Uh, Erica Kirk is there. Uh, Ron DeSantis, Pete Hegseth, who, uh, is just a never-ending fount of ridiculousness.

You got Ron DeSantis, who’s the, the, the Governor of Florida. You’ve got Greg Abbott, yeah, the governor of Texas. You got the governor of Tennessee, I think, uh, and then out of nowhere you got Victoria Jackson, uh, who was a goofball on SNL for a couple years. Gosh, for a few years actually. She was on there for a long time and now she’s just a, uh, a lunatic.

Uh, geez, Lee Ann Womack. Okay. The country singer.

Yeah, I recognize a song or two of hers, but I got to say, we’re burying the lead.

The lead. Yes.

What we’re building to is that President of the United States Donald John Trump reading, which is never a good idea.

More like, more like grimacing at.

He definitely— I did watch the video of him. Uh, and here’s the thing. So yes, they released his video. He didn’t, he didn’t go to the event and read it from there. No. And part of the reason becomes very clear when you watch the video, and they have these weird cuts back and forth from one camera angle to another, very making it very clear that they’re like, these are edited points.

They had to stitch it together. Yeah.

And there were still a couple of places where I, where you can hear that they’ve done something digitally to fix what he said. And he’s still got a lot of things wrong. Yeah, yeah. He got it wildly wrong a bunch of times.

My favorite is in the very first verse that he read. So he was responsible for 2 Chronicles 7:11-22.

12 verses is all he had to read. And the very first word, very first verse, he got out “prosperiously,” because I think he was, he started thinking the word was “prosperous” or “prosperity” or something like that, and then it was “prosperously,” and he went “prosperiously” and through his clenched teeth, and yeah, it was a struggle to hear him struggle to read these passages. But the— and I think the, the main parts of, uh, the, the whole passage that he was chosen for, that was chosen for him, is that, um, he— this is the part that says, uh, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

And that’s from the NRSVUE. He read from the King James Version, obviously.

He read from the New King James Version.

Was it the New King James Version?

Indeed it was. That is the version that the entire event is focused on. Oh, but he didn’t even get that right.

Yeah, um, because he— I know he, uh, he and Lee Greenwood are selling their, uh, their God Bless America Bibles. Yeah, that are, that are, uh, King James versions.

But the But I think that the idea of the organizers of this event was that they didn’t want to make anyone have to do some of the words that the KJV— some of the more arcane words. Yeah, they didn’t want to hear anybody say, “He who pisseth against the wall.” But also, there are big words that are not in common circulation anymore, and I think some people, uh, including our president. Forgive me, I, I just don’t think he has the acumen to get at some of these words. But what’s amazing is they gave him— you rightly point out which, what portion of this, uh, of his bit, what they were trying to highlight. Yeah, but he didn’t know that. He just like literally droned through the entire thing at a monotone not understanding a word of it.

And also, it’s— it was a pretty small thing. Like, you could have given him— there’s a bunch of stuff you could have given him. This was a shocking thing. Like, literally, when you find out that he’s willing to do it, you find the best thing for the president to do.

Well, well, here’s the thing. The, uh, the opening celebration, the main— the big song that, that some guy named Phil King— I don’t— I’ve never— I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Phil King. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Phil King. He was performing his original theme song. So the theme song for the event is called “Heal Our Land.” So this was very clearly the money shot of the whole thing. And they got a grimace Trump face in that money shot. But yeah, it was— and the idea seems to be that we’re hurting as a nation, read the Bible, that will magically fix things.

Right.

Which is not how things work, but also—.

I mean, it’s not how it’s worked yet, Dan. You don’t know. Maybe it’s coming.

Maybe that teapot is out there in space circling around as we speak. You can’t say it’s not. But the— and the idea seems to be that, you know, we all need to just read the Bible and just say we’re Christian, and then God will be like, boom, healed. Yeah. And it’s one of the most pathetic brands of Christian nationalism I’ve ever seen. And in no small part because the list of people who are reading is a who’s who of not just hatred, but just of degeneracy as well. Like the guy who read the main passage is a serial sexual predator.

Is a serial adulterer. Not only that, you know, there are a bunch of people like, “God can forgive people. God forgives people. We can’t blame him for past sins.” Trump has never once owned up to doing those things, said he was sorry for doing those things. He’s even said he has no need for repentance. Yeah. Like, this is not a—.

Yeah, he was asked if he had ever repented for anything, and he was like, “No, not that I can think of.” Yeah, he says he doesn’t do anything wrong.

So why does he need repentance. And on multiple occasions, he’s said that. So this is your guy? This is your guy? The guy we all heard?

This is the guy. I mean, the heal the land part is nice, but if you go back just a few words, as you pointed out, it says, “Humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways.” And I don’t see humbling of self happening whatsoever.

No. And when they say wicked ways here, they obviously mean being a woman or being Black or being trans.

Or being an immigrant or—.

Yeah, being an immigrant, wanting healthcare that you can afford. These are the iterations, the manifestations of wickedness that this public reading of the Bible is supposed to magically purge from the land. And these are the people who are responsible for most of the social ills that plague our land today. This is— it’s such performative piety on the part of deeply bad people. Like I mentioned, Dan Patrick was the guy who during the pandemic was like, “Yeah, your grandparents will be okay dying so that we can have, you know, so that the economy can recover.” Yeah, that’s like, how much of a misanthrope do you have to be to actually say that publicly and then start accusing other people of engaging in, just making it all up?

Right. And Eric Metaxas, he was on the list too. What was, Eric Metaxas read Isaiah 52 and 53. He got to read the big Isaiah 53 Suffering Servant song. And yeah, he’s out there saying this is all— everything was a hoax. Everything that has ever happened that has been bad for the right has been a hoax. Everything from Trump having the election stolen from him in 2020, all the way to COVID and everything in between. These people are causing— like you said, Ron DeSantis was on there, right? Yeah, Ron DeSantis is causing all kinds of suffering.

In Florida that is spilling out into other states as well.

And it’s not just, you know, he’s trying to solve a problem. These people aren’t just trying to solve societal problems and it accidentally causes some harm and they just consider that—

That’s a feature, not a bug.

Yeah, it’s, it’s absolutely baked into what they’re trying to do. They want to punish people who disagree with them. They want to hurt people that they don’t like. So, so like, you know, you, you look at how ICE is handling, uh, has been handling people for the last year, uh, in terms of just not even bothering to look at— you know, I heard a story the other day where a guy who is an American citizen who had a Real ID ID on him, which you can’t get unless you’re an American citizen, right? And like, he was arrested because he was brown and he had, you know, he had a last name that ended in -eezy or whatever. And he was arrested and driven around town and, you know, for hours and hours and then, you know, locked up with a bunch of other people. And they didn’t— he had the documents that he needed on his person that whole time.

Yeah. And they refused to look at it.

Because the pain because the suffering, because the cruelty is the point.

Yeah. These are people who want to get off on being jerks. This is the O’Doyle rules theory of governance.

And it’s so disgusting that these are the people who are pretending to be the representatives of Christianity. And it’s not that they are not, they are representatives of a particular brand of Christianity that unfortunately unfortunately, has been too prominent for, for far too long in our nation. But they are clearly worshipers of power more than anything else. That’s what this is really all about. This is—

It’s hard to make an argument against that. You know, there are some people, I’m sure, that are in this list, group of people who aren’t just sort of right-wing ideologues. Obviously, all of the politicians I don’t trust to be anything other than just right-wing ideologues. But I’m sure that some of the pastors who have come in are just, you know, are actual— they’re just trying to, you know, their heart’s in a right place.

Yeah. Yeah, I have no doubt in my mind that there are an awful lot of— like, I saw some of the people here were prison pastors and things like that. There are a lot of people going through a lot of stuff to try to make lives better for certain people.

But along the way, they’re hitching their wagon to a movement. Exactly. And the movement is not concerned with helping individuals. The movement is concerned with power. And these folks have gotten caught up in it because their particular brand of Christianity is too entangled with this movement. Even if they are trying to help the poor, even if they are trying to help the incarcerated, even if they are trying to help the sick, and the immigrants and others, they are too entangled in a movement that is concerned with structuring power and values and boundaries so as to advance their right-wing authoritarian and social dominance orientation, identity politics. Jenna Ellis, Trump’s former lawyer, I think, is on there. Betsy DeVos. Betsy DeVos, Betsy DeVos. I don’t know if you recall watching any of the hearings for her to be Education Secretary.

She got so humiliated in those hearings and very clearly did not have the foggiest idea what she was there to do or what was going on.

Yeah, she was not—

And they were still like, “Approved.” Mike Pompeo was reading, Franklin Graham was reading some. Dean Cain, Superman himself, like the worst Superman, read, read John 5.

Yeah. So now it’s, now it’s getting personal to you when Superman is doing this. I want to know who read— I should have done this research. I should have figured this out before we went in.

Yeah, so that’s Matthew 6, that’s the Sermon on the Mount. Yeah. Let me see if the— where is the— because I’ve got the website open, but they make it such a pain to find this stuff. So it’s not happening yet, because right now I think we’re still in— we’re in the middle, we’re in the late Jeremiah chapters. I don’t recognize any of the names there, but if you give me a second, I’ll look that up. Because I remember somebody was reading Matthew 5. Mike Pompeo is reading Matthew 5, and I was like, woof, Mike Pompeo, he gets the Beatitudes. Yeah, that’s, um, so, uh, I, and I remember thinking, okay, who gets the rest of the, uh, Sermon on the Mount? And I, I think I didn’t recognize the name, but, um, yeah, look it up real quick.

I, I mean, it’s just one of those things where, uh—that’s actually, you know, that is so pertinent to this, I would say. I don’t know, you tell me, because you know that verse better than I do. You know, I, I saw— I don’t know if that, if that would apply. It feels like it would apply. It feels like this, you know, this whole thing is such a performative display. It feels like it’s, it like that particular bit of the Sermon on the Mount is apropos, but am I reading too much into it is part of my question.

So the— I think it would be apropos. I think when we think about what kind of stuff is God asking for in order to, according to 2 Chronicles, heal the land? Well, what does everybody around 2 Chronicles have to say? Basically generate a just and a righteous society, uh, have mercy, do justice, all those kinds of things. Some, some dude named Kris Kubal is, uh, was reading the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and Kris is the chief program officer at Intercessors for America, a national network of state leaders who are mobilizing intercessors to pray for and engage with state legislators. So I’m not hopeful that Kris really is concerned for what is actually being advocated for in the Sermon on the Mount.

Right. One wonders if she’ll just, if she’ll do a sort of— She. Do not pray on the street.

Kris is a she. Okay, well, Kris is a woman, um, as far as I can tell. I imagine that the pronouns are going to be what, what, uh, what we think they are.

But, um, yeah, one, I, I can’t imagine that anyone invited to this event has pronouns that do not match their, uh, no, no, their assigned at birth gender. But, uh, you know, who knows? I, yeah, it seems impossible. That that would be.

And it, it, it baffles me that there’s a whole organization that people are obviously making millions and millions of dollars off of inviting people to pray for stuff to happen. Yeah, that’s not how things work. Yeah.

All right. Well, I, I don’t know that there’s that much more to say about it other than, you know, this is an event where— and this, I think, what’s made clear, especially clear by Trump’s entry into this, is that this is a drone. This isn’t— no one’s trying to highlight anything scriptural in this. No one’s trying to bring out a message from the Bible for this. They’re just saying all of the words of it. And then, you know, and I assume probably there are speeches before and after that are actually like more, more about what they’re really getting after. Mm-hmm. But as you say, the, the, the— this is designed not to accomplish anything. It is just for show.

Oh, it’s performative. Yeah, 100%. That’s, that’s what this is all about. Now, now, certainly there are people who believe this is going to affect some kind of change. And a lot of people are sharing it on Twitter. For instance, the first time I saw Trump grimacing at the camera, trying to squeak out 2 Chronicles 7, it was because somebody shared it on Twitter and they were like, “The President of the United States reading the Bible from the Oval Office. This is a new world. We’re through the looking glass, people. This is unreal.” It doesn’t— it’s not going to change anything. It’s just performative to make people feel like they’re— make people feel important, like they’re making a difference when they’re doing nothing.

But they’re also— I mean, there is this secondary thing that they’re trying to do, which is they’re making themselves feel important, but they’re also trying to make non-Christians or people who disagree with them feel like they don’t have a place at the table.

Yeah, look how representative this is of the real America.

So I think a lot of the messaging here is, if you’re not one of us, if you’re not a Christian, if you’re not, you know, if you’re Muslim, if you’re Hindu, if you’re atheist, if you’re whatever, you’re not a real American. This is what real Americans do.

Yeah. And it’s coinciding with a push for people to start attending church more. Like Ben Shapiro was on a show and somebody was like, what does a nation have to do? What does a broken nation have to do to heal? And he said, go to church.

The Jew said go to church?

Well, yeah. What he said was, so I would, you know, if you’re Jewish, go to synagogue. But “Go to church ‘cause this is a Christian nation.” And ugh. And it was like, well, I don’t know if Ben Shapiro knows the period of the founding when the US Constitution was constructed and our nation was created is the period of lowest church attendance and church membership in all of US history up until now. So we’re kind of, by not going to church, returning to the founders and their approach to things. So yeah, going to church, if all going to church does is make you support ICE and hate your neighbor, one, your church is doing it wrong, but also just the act of going to church or just the act of reading the Bible doesn’t accomplish what you think it’s going to accomplish, precisely because it’s just performative. It is just a way to toe the line, to put on display your willingness to sign off on these credences so that other people will think you’re a real one.

And that just advances your own interests. It’s all selfish. It’s all entirely about advancing their own interests.

Yeah, I, you know, I think coming up soon, you and I need to do a thing about the—we’ll do a whole segment about the claim that the Founding Fathers quoted the Bible more than any other book or whatever.

Oh gosh, I’ve heard that for years now. Yeah. And yes, we’re definitely gonna need to do a segment on that one.

Yeah, well, that’s enough of that. Let’s run away as quickly as we can and get into our chapter and verse. All right, so the chapter, the verse. We’re in 1 Samuel 31. It is the last chapter of 1 Samuel. And maybe give us some background leading into this chapter. There’s a battle. We are in medias res in a battle.

Well, there’s always a battle over there.

There’s always a battle. What are these guys doing? As long as you’ve got Philistines, you’ve got a battle somewhere.

Yeah. And right now, Saul and David are, you know, they’re at odds with each other.

They’re on the outs. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, Saul has been trying to kill David for a while now.

—Which will harm a friendship, I’ve got to say.

It is hard to come back from that. And David has—and this is important—David has refused to kill Saul. He has had the opportunity and he has turned it down, and he has even made it clear why, and that’s because Saul is the Lord’s anointed and David is not going to harm the Lloyd’s—the Lloyd’s anointed? No, the Lord’s anointed. That’s a different guy. And this is some hagiography. This is later authors who are responsible for curating the David tradition who are trying to make it seem like, “No, David would never have killed his rival.”

No, no, no. There’s no evidence of that anywhere else in the book.

Yeah, he had the chance, but he turned it down, and that made Saul upset. So we have Philistines doing their thing. And that’s how chapter 31 starts off. The Philistines fought against Israel, the men of Israel fled, and many fell on Mount Gilboa. And then the Philistines overtake Saul and his sons, they kill Jonathan—so that’s David’s boy, yeah—Abinadab and Malchishua, the sons of Saul. And then Saul’s not dead. He’s been hit by some archers. He’s got kind of a Boromir vibe going here. They have wounded him badly. And then in verse 4, Saul said to his armor-bearer, “Draw your sword and thrust me through with it, so that these uncircumcised may not come and thrust me through and make sport of me.” The idea seems to be that, you know, they’re going to abuse my body, this is going to be a big problem.

Which, that’s going to happen anyway. Yeah. So, but he just— but he didn’t want them to have the satisfaction of killing him.

Yes, but his armor bearer was unwilling, for he was terrified. And, and the, the narrative kind of makes it sound like, you know, the armor bearer himself is, is scared to kill the Lord’s anointed. He doesn’t want to have that on his hands. So Saul took his own sword and fell on it. When his armor bearer saw that Saul was dead, he also fell on his sword and died with him. So we have what is represented tacitly. There is no commentary on the morality of any of this, but it is tacitly represented as an honorable death.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s not— like you say, nobody mentions whether this was a good thing or an evil thing to do. It just seems like it’s— it feels like it’s represented as being good.

As being noble. Yeah, he is avoiding capture, he’s avoiding humiliation, he is avoiding giving the enemy the pleasure, the opportunity to do bad things. And so it is, you know, this is a society, an honor and shame society, and this would have been an honorable move. So I don’t think we have any reason to think that anyone would have looked negatively upon this action. It would have probably been fairly unilaterally understood to have been an honorable death that Saul did. And he initially says, “You do it,” and the armor bearer is unwilling, so he has to take it into his own hands. And so, and this is how a warrior would honorably die in a situation where the tides have turned against him. He has no opportunity for escape or for victory, and so you just fall on your own sword.

Help me out. When was this written? Like, do we have a sense of the timing of the authorship?

So there are a few different layers in here, but this is probably written somewhere around the 8th or 7th centuries BCE. So I think it is probably pre-exilic. There may be some post-exilic layers in here, but I think the story here is pre-exilic.

Yeah, I guess I just flashed on a line from Shakespeare where, uh, I believe it is Macbeth who says, “Why should I play the Roman fool to die upon my own sword?” Uh, and I, and, and I know, and when, you know, when I was in that play many moons ago, I did some research and just sort of figured out that that was, at very least to an Elizabethan author, that was a— it was attributed to Romans. It was, it was a Roman idea, this idea of falling on one’s own sword as a noble thing rather than be captured.

Yeah, well, by the time of Shakespeare, I think that would have taken on a pretty negative stigma. But yeah, certainly within Rome as well, that would have been seen as an honorable death. You have that with— they’re very military people. The military is kind of in charge of so much. So yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.

I was just wondering if that was influential on this, but it seems like the timing would be wrong on that.

Way off. Yeah. Well, at least in terms of Rome’s influence. Yeah. Is that— yeah, no. I think Rome felt that way. Rome didn’t invent that, basically, is what I’m trying to say. We do have some other prominent self-inflicted deaths in the Hebrew Bible. Probably the most prominent would be Judges 16:28-30, which is Samson. Oh, I want to talk to Samson. Okay. Fly me to the moon and have a temple fall on you. He— that’s where he is between the two pillars that are load-bearing pillars in this temple, and he knocks them down bringing down the whole temple upon himself. And so this is a way for him to take out as many Philistines as he can along with himself. Which is treated as, you know, the judges are sometimes represented as kind of antiheroes.

They are kind of amoral. They do some odd stuff. And we’ve talked, for instance, about Jephthah and how they were probably looking a little sideways at Jephthah. But Samson, yeah, did a lot of stupid stuff, did some heroic stuff, and then brings down a temple on top of himself to take out as many Philistines as he can.

Which seems to be approved of in the story of Samson. It seems to be, it’s his final heroic act.

Yeah, there’s not really, he is kind of represented as a bit of a tragic figure, so it’s not really clear that, there’s no moral point being made, I think, by the author. Certainly they don’t comment on the morality of it, but yeah, there’s certainly no condemnation. If you’re looking for somebody saying suicide is bad in the Bible, you’re not going to find it.

I think that’s fascinating because obviously— now I jump to another Shakespearean quotation, which when Hamlet says, you know, he says, “Or that the everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter.”

Yeah. We begin to get a kind of moralizing of this, I think, in the Greco-Roman period. I think Josephus talks about Saul and talks about it as understandable yet regrettable. Okay. Like, it was a bad thing. And it’s like Augustine is one of the ones who comes out hard against suicide as explicitly sinful. So it’s not until we get deep into the period when Jewish folks and then followers of Jesus are incorporating, you know, philosophical, ethical philosophy, incorporating all these frameworks that they begin to wonder about the ethics of these kinds of things. And so it’s within Greco-Roman period Judaism, late Greco-Roman period Judaism, almost into rabbinic, and then early Christianity that we see the idea pop up, oh, this, this is a bad thing, where philosophy overtakes the honor and shame, um, impulse.

Yeah. So I, I think that’s probably where it originates, yeah. But yeah, it’s, it’s certainly not in the Bible. I, I have people reach out to me every now and then and ask about this, um, that they’ve had a parent, a brother, a child, or something like that, and their, and their pastor or whatever or they’re worried about whether or not someone has told them that this is sinful and they’re in hell. Yeah, it’s such a cruel thing.

Yeah. To say to a grieving person who’s lost a loved one. Yeah.

And I think it’s people feel like they need to toe the line. People feel like they need to advocate for the, you know, socially costly position that, yeah, they’re in hell. And, you know, you get that in all kinds of different— you know, there will be some brands of Calvinism where somebody will be like, oh, so-and-so, you know, was part of a community that hadn’t really been churched, hadn’t really been witnessed to, and so so-and-so never heard of Jesus and never had an opportunity. And they’re like, yep, hell. And some people seem to relish in being able to do that precisely because of how offensive it is to the people on the other side. But I think there are also people who feel awful about it, but still feel like it’s their responsibility to toe that line. Even though, again, it’s not biblical. It’s not something they’re getting from the Bible.

That’s an amazing— that, you know, it’s such an interesting thing. I mean, the innovations in terms of philosophical thought are just basically that, A, it’s killing and thou shalt not kill, and B, that something to do with the idea that it takes away God’s prerogative of life, like somehow the natural law, God has authority over what is and isn’t.

Yeah, your life is not your own.

Yeah, which, you know, these are things that, like you said, Augustine and, you know, Aquinas and stuff came up with these a fair bit after the Bible came out. And I guess, you know, I think about how this is a particularly sticky thing. People like, as you say, people love to condemn other people to hell. They do it all the time. They love to say, oh, you’re going to hell. To me because I’m an atheist, or, oh, you’re going to— like, they do relish it. But there’s something especially difficult or problematic about doing it about suicide, because it is a final act. There’s no— you know, if you say to me as an atheist, you’re going to hell, there’s a redemptive path. You’re at least saying you’re going to hell if you don’t— Yeah. But yeah, it is a particularly intractable problem with this because there’s no redemptive path.

There’s nothing to follow where the person can redeem themselves.

Yeah. And these days, it is less often a question of someone, you know, in battle having no way out. Yeah, and falling on their sword. There’s, there’s not really much honorable, um, taking of one’s own life these days, at least in our culture. Certainly there are cultures where this kind of stuff does happen, but these days, usually when someone takes their own life, it’s because they are so despondent, because there is such an acute episode of despair and depression, uh, it outweighs their their ability to endure it. And, you know, they have access to means. So there’s a— yeah, there’s a particularly heinous aspect of taking that approach when so much of suicide these days is an outcome of depression and mental health issues.

And circumstances that frequently are not within the control, not within the conscious control of the individual. So I think that is, I think that’s a big flaw in this notion, which again is something that is a post-biblical moral development rather than something that is commanded anywhere in the Bible.

Well, and there are other examples in the Bible of people taking their own lives. Yeah, Judas comes jumping to mind.

Yeah, yeah. And this is the one where it’s, you know, it’s an example of a villain who does it. Right. So, and then there’s another, there’s a guy named Ahithophel who offers some counsel and the people don’t take it. And so, 2 Samuel 17, he saddled his donkey and went off home to his own city. He set his house in order and hanged himself. He died and was buried in the tomb of his father. So even, even this, in that context, he hanged himself, but he was still given a standard burial, right?

Yeah, I was going to say that what that sounds like is that is because, because someone who was shameful would probably not have been given that, that same burial.

Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s in, in this time period, I don’t, I don’t know that there are a lot of things that someone could have done to have earned, you know, non-burial. I mean, certain kinds of— yes, yeah, certain kinds of criminals and things like that, I imagine there would have been mass burials. But to be buried in the tomb of your father is unquestionably an honorable burial. And so this is— and the fact that Ahithophel is doing this after failing to win the voice of the people on this matter could be perceived as another honorable way to go. “This is so important to me that my voice be heard that when the people rejected my voice, I said, ‘I will honor your rejection of my life and my counsel and everything, and I will go and take my own life.’” So I can see how this could be understood as a tragic but an honorable death.

Or even just a, you know, my mind flashes on, you know, I remember at various points hearing about Buddhist monks in Asia who would self-immolate as a way of raising awareness of the suffering of a people or that sort of thing.

Yeah, that Incubus song is about— what’s it called? I don’t want to sing it, but it talks about seeing a— took a look in a book, saw a guy fried up above his knees. This is about the monk. I think it was in— this was a Vietnam War protest.

Yeah, there was definitely one of—.

That happened within the last couple of years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There have been— I think it was a veteran who, or an active duty— somebody recently self-immolated to raise awareness of ongoing problems with, with— I think that it was war efforts on the part of the US. But—.

Or I think it maybe speaks— maybe this isn’t a very effective technique, you guys, if we don’t know what this— if we remember the instance but not the cause.

Well, we got one of them. Yeah, we got at least one. One of them was more widely publicized and was actually a catalyst for a lot of discourse and some change. But yeah, the other one, unfortunately, ‘cause that’s like, what an extreme measure to take to raise awareness. But yeah, that’s the kind of thing that I think you have to take seriously, the notion that as a conscious decision, to sacrifice one’s own life, uh, for something like that. I mean, why is that any worse than saying you’re willing to sacrifice your life for your country, right? Um, by going off to fight in, you know, a war that might be waged for money or for oil or something like that. Like, there, there are, um, I, I think there are certainly mitigating and, um, extenuating circumstances that that need to be taken into account. I think the blanket rejection of all of this as unilaterally sinful, constituting murder, thus, and that’s where most people are going to say, well, the Bible does condemn it.

It talks about you shall not kill. Well, right. Ratzach is really illegal killing. And so it depends on the laws of the country. And in the Bible, at least, text was written, taking your own life would not have— would probably would not have been considered ratzach. So it probably wouldn’t even qualify according to the Ten Commandments. And there are countries where, as long as you have gone through appropriate steps and everything like that, you can, uh, you can legally end your life on your own terms. Yes, I want to say there was a, there was a woman recently who did that, didn’t she?

Within the last few weeks. Who did what?

It was, it was a victim of sexual assault. Oh. Who, um, had been advocating for years, who I think— I can’t remember if she was hospitalized or, or not, but she had been engaged in a legal battle between her and her father because she wanted to end her own life and her father didn’t want to let her.

And she wanted a physician-assisted suicide. Right, exactly. Yeah.

And I think she ultimately won that. And the way it’s represented, there are an awful lot of Christians who have come out and said, you know, the state, you know, killed a woman over and against the objections of her father, misrepresenting it wildly. Yeah. That she didn’t know what she was doing. Right.

And her father was trying to save her and the state stepped in and was like, “We’ll kill your daughter against your wishes.” Well, I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it on the show, but just a few months ago, my mother, who was terminally ill, opted to have medical assistance in dying in Canada. And, uh, and the, the— it was a mercy. It was a beautiful mercy. Yeah. For her to have that option. And, uh, we were, you know, my sister and I were able to be present for it, and she was surrounded by people that she loved. And, uh, and then I went and spoke to the, um, the, the people at the funeral home that was handling the disposition of her remains. And she— and this woman talked about how so many people who are religious get into huge battles, huge family fights about this. And, you know, they— if, you know, especially if the family is Catholic or whatever, suddenly it becomes this this roaring battle, and nowhere in that conversation is the person’s pain.

Nowhere in that conversation is the mercy of that moment. And I think that people don’t choose to take their lives— Lightly. Lightly. That is not something that you enter into in a flippant manner. So, uh, you know, I definitely, I was grateful that, you know, Canada has lots of different hoops you got to jump through and lots of, you know, you have to, you have to be able to affirm that you are of sound mind and you, that you’re not being coerced into it. You have to have multiple meetings with multiple people and all this sort of thing. But, uh, but yeah, if it, it’s nice. And I think that, I think that maybe the takeaway here should be that if people are trying to make biblical arguments against this sort of thing, you can tell them to go pee up a tree.

Yeah, there’s an awful lot that goes into that. And that’s where I think we’re trying to put the data over the dogma and allow the people’s own feelings and own thoughts about these things and their own suffering. I don’t think that any kind of attempt to critically engage with the Bible’s position on this thing will come away with the perspective that someone who is being tormented by chronic suffering because of any one of a number of different states or conditions or pathologies or whatever, that they’re supposed to suffer indefinitely because you’re not supposed to take a life, even if it’s your own, which is, which is something that’s nowhere said in the Bible. The gentleman was Aaron Bushnell, 25-year-old serviceman in the Air Force who was, who self-immolated in front of the Washington, D. C. Embassy of Israel.

Okay. Protesting against the genocide. In Palestine. So, wow.

All right, well, heavy thoughts, uh, today, but you know, we got to, we, we got to get to, to the deep stuff sometimes.

So yeah, and then, um, just to, to finish up with the story of, uh, Saul’s death.

Oh sure, okay, Saul, back to Saul.

We’ll go back to Saul. Absolutely. Saul and his sons all, uh, have all passed away. The Philistines came through, they occupied the towns, they stripped the dead. They found Saul and his three sons. They cut off his head, stripped off his armor, and sent messengers throughout the land of the Philistines to carry the good news to the houses of their idols and to the people. They put his armor in the temple of Astarte, and they fastened his body to the wall of Beit Shean.

So when he was hoping— when, when Saul was hoping that they would not make sport of him, uh, sport was made.

Yeah, but at least, but at least he got to end it on his own terms. Yes. Um, now, now here’s the interesting part. When the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul, all the valiant men set out, traveled all night long, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beit Shean. They came to Jabesh and burned them there. Then they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh. And fasted 7 days. Now this is relevant because the first thing that Saul did when he became king after he was set apart and anointed and installed as king was go help the people of Jabesh-gilead from, they were being oppressed by a dude named Snake.

He was in Ziklag. On the third day, a man from Saul’s camp with his clothes torn and dirt on his head, when he came to David, he fell to the ground, did obeisance. David said, “Where have you come from?” He said, “I have escaped from the camp of Israel.” David says, “How did things go?” He says, “The army fled from the battle, but also many of the army fell, and Saul and his son Jonathan also died.” And then somebody who’s standing by said, “How do you know that Saul and his son Jonathan died?” The man said, “I happened to be on Mount Gilboa, and there was Saul leaning on his spear while the chariots and horsemen drew close to him. When he looked behind him, he saw me and called to me. I answered, ‘Here, sir.’ And he said to me, ‘Who are you?’ I answered him, ‘I am an Amalekite.’ He said to me, ‘Come stand over me and kill me, for convulsions have seized me, yet my life still lingers.’ So I stood over him and killed him, for I knew that he could not live after he had fallen. I took the crown that was on his head and the armlet that was on his arm, and I have brought them here to my lord.” Then David took hold of his clothes, tore them. All the men who were with him did the same. They mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and his son Jonathan.

And then, um, David said to the young man who had reported to him, “Where do you come from?” He answered, “I am the son of a resident alien, an Amalekite.” And David said, “Were you not afraid to lift your hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?” Then David called one of the young men and said, “Come here and strike him down.” So he struck him down and he died. Okay. And David said to him, “Your blood be on your head, for your own mouth has testified against you, saying, ‘I have killed the Lord’s anointed.’” Couple things to note here. That’s not the story from the previous chapter. Yeah. So it directly contradicts that story. But this raises a question. Is this two different accounts of Saul’s death, or is this this Amalekite who came upon the scene and was like, “Ooh, I’m gonna grab that, I’m gonna grab that,” and came to David and lied to him in order to—‘cause he thought, “Well, David is Saul’s enemy. I will be richly rewarded for reporting this and also being like, ‘I was the one who took him out.’” And I am intrigued by the possibility that it is just an alternative account of the death of Saul.

I think most scholars would probably say the easier explanation is just that the Amalekite was lying. Yeah.

I also wonder, like, when I read it, and I don’t have any background in this, but when I read it, I read it as this was the second half of the story. Saul had already done his thing to himself, and then was seizing and convulsing, and was asking for the mercy of death. And this Amalekite was there, and he asked him to please just finish the job. And he did. So that’s how I read it. Is that—that’s not what I was meant to have taken from that?

I think that’s certainly a possible interpretation. The text isn’t going to stop you from reading it that way. But the fact that Saul leaning on his spear—he’s upright. He’s leaning on his spear, I think, is, um, is not Saul falling on his sword. Um, and also the, the armor bearer is, is nowhere, not in the story. Yeah. So, um, and, and he says, “Convulsions have seized me, yet my life still lingers.” Um, it makes it sound like injuries other than getting run through with a sword. By his own sword. Yeah, so yeah, I think most scholars would say the Amalekite’s just making stuff up, but we don’t really have enough background details, and I’m intrigued by the possibility that it’s just a contradictory account of the death of Saul. But this is another way to have David be like, “Oh, look what they’ve done to my boy!” You know, David is mourning and is so upset about the death of his enemy that he even killed the guy who claimed to kill him, which is a way to be like, there’s no way on earth David could have been the one who killed Saul.

Yeah, absolutely not.

There’s no chance of it. So this Amalekite was there. He saw, he saw the whole thing.

Yeah, David was in tears, man. He was in tears. So it’s, it’s more hagiography about David, just how exemplary he was, at least when it comes to things other than sleeping with somebody else’s—well, sexually assaulting someone else’s wife and then having him sent off to die. Yeah, which is coming up.

Yeah, there you go. All right, friends, well, uh, thank you for joining us. That’s it for today. If you would like to become one of our patrons, we encourage it, we beg of you, uh, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and, uh, and join up there. You can get access to our after party. That’s bonus content that you’re not going to get anywhere else. And then, uh, also early and ad-free versions of every episode of the show. Uh, thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing. Thanks to JJ for being our, our producer. And, uh, we’ll talk to 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 2024. All rights reserved.

America (Almost Never) Reads the Bible

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