Faith vs. Works vs. Chaos Monsters

I don’t think that part of the passage is about its tail. And, you know, additionally, who’s like, check out how stiff I can make my tail? Boing! 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, and my AC just kicked in, so I’m feeling real good right now. How about you, Dan?

Uh, I’m, I’m cool as a cucumber even though it is hot outside. Uh, my AC is fixed. It was broken last week, uh, but is, but is doing all right now. All right, so all is well, uh, with us. I can’t imagine living in any of the centuries previous to us that did not have AC. Oh God, it seems insane. Yeah. Uh, but we got a show to do, AC or no. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna dive right in and talk about it. The first thing we’re gonna do is a chapter and verse, and it’s, uh, it’s actually just, uh, a few chapters. We’re gonna do a book. Yeah. Uh, and that’s the book of the Epistle of James, and I am excited to talk about it because I read it and I like it.

Yeah, it’s a good one.

So there we go. We’re gonna— we’re actually doing one that, like, we’re not gonna tear it apart, we’re not gonna be—.

Oh, we’re we’re going to tear it apart, but we might not be as mean about it. We’ll see. We’ll see.

We’ll, we’ll see. We’ll get to some stuff that it’s mostly it’s great. And then we’re going to get monstrous. It’s, I don’t even know what we’re, we didn’t discuss what our top, what, what, what our segment title is going to be, but okay. We’ll call it what’s that? Or let’s get topical or I don’t know. We’re not Taking Issue. It’s monsters.

Yeah, we’re going to talk about 3 specific monsters, at least. That’s, that’s how many I planned on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know if you came up with more, but—.

Well, no, I just went with the ones that you told me. So, okay, so we’re, we’re gonna— but yes, if you want to talk about Leviathan, Behemoth, and Rahab— no, not that one— uh, then we will, uh, then we’ll get to that in the second half of the show. But for now Chapter and verse. Okay, so here we are. It’s the Epistle of James. Yes. Or as my brain will never not hear it, the Epistle of James, because as a Mormon kid growing up, that’s how I was taught the New Testament books in order was a song. So there you go.

And I was never taught that song. So you are in one dimension, a better Mormon than I am. And there are probably a few of those dimensions, but that’s neither here nor there.

Let’s be honest. I don’t think either of us is a particularly good Mormon.

So, well, I think I have a good chance in a couple of arenas, but not if Twitter has anything to say about it.

Okay, well, all right, let’s start off.

Well, let’s start talking about this, but first thing I want to point out is when you look in the Greek, it actually doesn’t say James. Do you recall what it says?

No, I don’t read it in Greek.

Well, okay, sorry.

You may have told me at some point.

Yeah, Jacob.

Oh yeah, okay, there you go.

Yes, so when you open up this book in Greek, the title is Iakobou epistole. So this is, uh, the Epistle of Jacob, which has become James, uh, through its various, uh, iterations in a bunch of, of different languages.

So, uh, yeah, it’s so confus— like, like, I, I remember being a, a young, a teenager, and I used to go out and perform, uh, Shakespeare for schools as a kid, and at one point a vice principal decided to really, uh, show off his knowledge and said, do you know the difference? Tell me about the difference between Elizabethan Shakespeare versus Jacobean Shakespeare. And I was like, I don’t know, who’s Jacob? I don’t even know who Jacob is. Yeah, because that’s— they refer to King James as the Jacobean. So, okay, yes, here we go. This is, this is the Epistle of Jacob. Yes. All right, so Jacob, the servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

All right. Yeah, so that is doulos, of Jesus Christ and God, which I think is better rendered slave. But, and this is something that we see in Paul. But yes, to the 12 tribes in the dispersion.

Yeah.

Greetings, he says to them. But here’s a question. Who is this James? Okay, because we have a bunch of different people named James.

Yeah, we’ve had a lot of Jameses. We’ve talked about quite a few Jameses.

Yeah, you’ve got, there’s Jim, there’s Jimmy, there’s Jaime.

Jimbo.

Yeah, James, the brother of Jesus. We’ve got, and these are early Christian people by the name of James. James, the father of Judas, and not Judas Iscariot, but the other. James, the son of Zebedee, one of the 12. You got James, the son of Alphaeus. Also of the 12. James the son of Mary, known variously as the Lesser, the Little, or the Younger, and sometimes identified with James the son of Alphaeus. So maybe that’s two different Jameses.

James the son of Mary is not James the brother of Jesus, even though Jesus was the son of Mary?

Different, different, uh, different James, different Mary. Okay, fine. And here I’m reading from Dale Allison’s, uh, 2013 International Critical Commentary on James, which is a beautiful volume. But, uh, there, there are a bunch of different possibilities. I think the majority of scholars would say this is probably intended to be James, the brother of Jesus, because in, in early Christianity, if you just— if you wrote a letter and you’re like, “It’s me, James,” you— the, the reader would probably be expected to know, “Oh, it’s, it’s the big James,” who would be the leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem. The brother of, you know, the Lord.

So, um, and, and a guy who has, who has sort of the cojones to write an epistle not to a specific person, not to a, a city of people, but rather to the 12 tribes in the dispersion. That feels a little grandiose.

It feels a little presumptuous. Yes. Um, and there are some interesting things about, uh about this epistle. One of the ones that I thought was the first time I found out about this, I was like, huh, that’s surprising. Can you guess who the first person— you’ve heard the names of a variety of different early Christians on this show for a while now. Can you guess who the first person to ever explicitly refer to the Epistle of James is in early Christianity?

Oh, uh, No, we have—

We already have references to New Testament texts, either quotations or explicit references, starting at the beginning of the 2nd century CE and maybe even the end of the 1st century CE. But we don’t get a clear and explicit reference to the Epistle of James until the 3rd century. And it is Origen—

Okay—

Writing toward the closer to the middle of the 3rd century CE, who was the first person to actually explicitly refer to the Epistle of James. And there are folks who have argued that, well, the Shepherd of Hermas has some— there are some, you know, resonances and points of contact. And so maybe Hermas knew about James, or maybe James knew about Hermas, or maybe they both were kind of swimming in the same waters. There are possible allusions in 1 Clement, which is probably end of 1st century, beginning of 2nd century. There are possible allusions in Irenaeus at the end of the 2nd century and Clement of Alexandria at the end of the 2nd century, but nobody clearly refers to or quotes from the Epistle of James until like the second quarter of the 3rd century CE.

Wow.

And this raises an interesting question. When the heck was this text written? Because if this was written in like the early to mid-1st century CE as as some scholars have argued, why did nobody talk about it when they were talking about all the other texts that were written by other prominent Christians? James, like James, Peter, and Paul were like three of the most prominent Christians after the death of Jesus. They were the ones who basically led communities in Jerusalem and elsewhere. So it’s, it’s a head-scratcher. And for this reason, there are a lot of scholars who think that it was not actually written by James. It is pseudepigraphic. It’s a false writing. And this has to do with when we think it was written, because if it was actually written by James, the brother of Jesus, it was obviously written in the middle of the 1st century CE.

Yeah, I think we can— I think we can safely assume that James himself didn’t live to like 115 years or—

Unlikely, right? We don’t know if he went paleo and all of a sudden, you know, got rid of his gout and, and got rid of everything and made him live to be 110. But, um, yeah, no, he, he’s actually on record as, as being martyred fairly early in the history of Christianity. So, um, so that raises the question of, of the pseudepigraphic nature of the text. And so I am of the opinion, and I’m working on this survey that I’ve talked about many times in the past.

I mean, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s like, like, I mean, what we know of that time period, we know for sure that some people were writing under other famous Christians’ names. We know that that happened. Yeah, so it makes sense that, uh, the, the every— with everything that you’ve said, I, I think that’s a reasonable thing to assume. Not that it matters, because the content is what’s important.

Yeah, but, but one of the things that might be going on in James is it sounds an awful lot like James is disagreeing with Paul. And this is something that’s been argued in the scholarship for a while. Is, is James contradicting Paul when it comes to salvation by faith? Because the second chapter goes off on a bit of a rant.

Yeah.

Um, about the relationship of, uh, faith and works, and cites the same examples that Paul cites in arguing for, uh, salvation by faith. And so I and many other scholars would say that he’s responding to Paul, or at least the way Paul is being represented in the time period in which the letter was written, right? And because there are scholars who are going to be like, “Ah, that’s not actually what Paul’s argument was.” But it’s certainly not clear to me that the author of the Epistle of James was not allowed to misread Paul. I think the author is disagreeing with a reading of what’s going on specifically in Romans, which is pretty late in Paul’s career, and probably would have precluded the actual James, the brother of Jesus, from writing this. But there are other scholars who would say that Paul was actually riffing on James.

Okay. If this was written before Paul. But I think that’s gonna prove to be a minority view. But why don’t we get into some of the, some of the contents.

Okay.

The— yeah. Epistle.

Do you want to skip to chapter 2 and just get to the meat of it? Or— because chapter 1, it’s a lot of like— there’s a little bit about how the rich are not great and how you’re— and we’re going to get— there’s lots of that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Don’t be rich. Be cool. Or at least be cool to poor people is a big deal in this book.

Well, and, and chapter 1 brings up some interesting things because I think chapter 1 is— this is functioning kind of in the wisdom genre. Like, this, this has resonance with Proverbs, with Sirach, with the Wisdom of Solomon. You’ve got a lot of these, uh, you know, these are the rules to living a good life, uh, kind of thing. And, and even the Shepherd of Hermas has some overlap with this. But, you know, let the brother or sister of humble means boast in having a high position, and the rich in having been humbled, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. So, yeah, um, Comrade James is very much in the wisdom tradition. And there are scholars who would argue that, you know, if you left out the— a couple of references to Jesus, this might sound like just Jewish wisdom literature. We might not even be able to identify this as Christian, uh, because of how, uh, how resonating it is with wisdom literature, with the Sermon on the Mount, with concern for the poor and stuff like that.

So I like the social setting of, of James. And, and yeah, I think that brings us to chapter 2, where we have some of the juiciest fruit. The sweetest plum.

That juicy fruit, it’s going to move.

Oh, I walked right into that, I guess.

You’re welcome, Gen X. Have fun with that.

Oh gosh. We have, I think, chapter 2, verse 5 starts with, listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. And we have this. And actually, is that— yeah, it’s just, uh, it’s just adelphoi mou in Greek. So it’s the masculine plural, but in Greek, if it is a mixed-gendered group, you would default to the masculine. So the rendering, my beloved brothers and sisters, is not necessarily inaccurate. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor person. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into the courts?

Yeah.

Is it not— yeah. Is it not they who have a secret society that charges you $16,000 to attend their secret meetings? Or the people who are in charge of, of, uh, regulating industries and the people who make money off those industries? Sit there and play grab-ass while, uh, you know, the world burns to the ground around us. Anyway, that’s not in the Epistle of James for anybody.

It’s mostly in there, though. Yeah, it’s a— that’s a, that’s a light paraphrasing, but it’s in there.

Uh, is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? Don’t blame the poor, blame the rich. It’s their fault. If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You do well. And then, and then here’s something interesting. It says, but if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.

Yeah, that was a little— that, that was a big one. I was— when I read that, I was like, oof, that’s rough.

Yeah, but this also is, uh, this has shades of, uh, Sermon on the Mount, and particularly Matthew 5:19, where we have the author of the Gospel of Matthew having Jesus say that, uh, my words shall not— or the, the— neither a jot nor tittle of the law shall pass away until heaven and earth pass away. And anyone who teaches you to violate the least of these laws, um, yeah, it’s bad for them. So, um, and, and a lot of scholars understand what’s going on in Matthew to be advocacy for the continued relevance and authority of the entire Law of Moses.

Yeah.

And there are scholars who will say it sounds like the author of the letter of James is cut from the same cloth.

Well, yeah, because the literal next thing that he says is, for the one who said you shall not commit adultery also said you shall not commit murder. If now, if you do not commit adultery but you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So yeah, I mean, it’s a direct reference to the, uh, the Decalogue there.

Yeah. But then we have— there are scholars who will say the next two verses actually kind of throw that into doubt because it says, “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty, for judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy.” And one of my favorite passages in the New Testament, “Mercy triumphs over judgment.”

Yeah, I loved that too. That is an awesome, powerful statement that is— yeah, that really goes against a lot of what we’re hearing right now in the sort of far-right extremist Christianity where it’s like, the Lord God’s going to judge you. And, you know, these— this person in this group and these LGBTQ whatever people are evil and they got demons in them. And it’s just like, it’s all judgment. And exactly zero mercy.

Yes, and this is one of my concerns with the way people talk about the difference between judgment, justice, and mercy. We tend to think of, and particularly within the Latter-day Saint tradition, but in a lot of different Christian traditions, there’s this notion that justice and mercy are kind of a standing tension, where justice is the demands of the law, and then mercy is, you know, overcoming the demands of the law. And the idea is, oh, we gotta maintain both. And I think this is a misunderstanding of what justice is. One: when we look in the Hebrew and we look at what mishpat is and what tzedakah is and things like that, it’s not isomorphic with our contemporary concept of justice as basically the proper and right and prescribed consequences of the law. It really, in the Hebrew Bible, it has to do with just generating the proper relationships, the proper outcomes, the proper equilibrium.

It’s kind of making sure society is just rather than making sure the people who do things wrong are punished. But I love that James just says, nah, mercy triumphs over judgment. But this could be understood to be contrasting the idea of the Law of Moses and the idea of the law of liberty, similar to the way Paul talks about, are we under the law, and saying, you know, we’re no longer under the law because of the gospel. So I can see that reading as well. But this is something that is debated by scholars, and there are plenty of scholars out there who would say that James probably thought that the whole Law of Moses was still in effect. So, and one last thing I’ll say about that is there’s this word hesed in the Hebrew that I see brought up a lot on social media, and it gets transliterated because it’s a chet, which is a ch, it gets transliterated with a ch.

And so when I hear somebody say there’s this word in Hebrew, it’s chesed, No, it’s like immediately no, you very clearly don’t know Hebrew. But it gets translated as like loving kindness and things like that in the King James Version, and some people will render grace or something like that. And it’s kind of a squishy term, but I think the best explanation I’ve ever heard is that it is a combination of two things. It’s doing things for people that they can’t do for themselves, and doing things for people that are not necessarily demanded by the law. So you see hesed brought up in, uh, in the Book of Ruth, where the idea seems to be that, like, Ruth goes above and beyond what is expected of her by society, by the law, in relation to Naomi. And then Boaz goes above and beyond what is demanded by the law and expected by society in relation to Ruth. So it’s a story of, of people and this is referred to as hesed.

And so it’s a story of people who are going above and beyond. And I think that is much closer to the idea of mercy than it is to the idea of justice or judgment. And so when you talk about people today saying, “Well, we gotta have mercy, but also justice or judgment,” and they’re judging based on what they understand the law to allow them to do or require they do, yeah, it certainly does seem like, wouldn’t it be better to go above and beyond what the law demands and show mercy and treat people better than you are required to by the law that you, that you imagine you’re under, whether that’s the law of liberty or whatever? So we, we can, we could be doing a lot better.

Yeah.

When it comes to the way we’re treating other people and particularly people who have historically been minoritized, marginalized, and oppressed.

It is the official stance of this podcast that mercy triumphs over judgment.

Exactly. Put that on a shirt.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And then we get into the— what I think is one of the best little diatribes in the New Testament. Starting in verse 14, where James goes, what good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm, and eat your fill, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Yeah, that’s a, that, that’s a big deal, uh, in, in one of the prominent debates of Christianity. That’s a pretty big deal nail in a coffin.

Well, yeah, it certainly seems like it. Although what the, the interpretation of this passage that I hear most commonly from, from Christians who, who want to understand James as in perfect alignment with Paul when it comes to the relationship of, of, uh, works to salvation. What they will argue is that the works are just the downstream outcome of a saving faith, right? So James seems to be saying you must construct your faith by your works and demonstrate your faith by your works. And, and what they get from that is No, you got to have the faith, and then the works are just this magical thing that happens because your faith is adequate. And it is the next couple of verses that actually supply their proof text for that, because it says, “But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you faith.” Right.

And so the idea is, see, see, the works are just to show other people your faith. And I think this is pretty presuppositional because it’s basically you’re renegotiating what’s going on in James so that you can make James align with Paul. As I’ve said many, many times, you approach the text, you figure out which texts agree with the presuppositions you’ve brought to it, and then you reinterpret all the other texts to bring them into alignment with the texts that agree with your presuppositions. So I think that’s what’s going on there. But also, I think it’s funny that it turns faith— it turns faith into something that you are required to display to others so that they can accept you. Yeah, it really does make it more of a social club. It’s not that the faith is there, you know, is all about this vertical relationship with God. No, your faith is so I can judge you.

Whether you are good enough, whether your faith is adequate for me to consider you part of the group. So I think it kind of— it shows that they’re wearing on their sleeve the approach to faith as an identity marker and as a bit of costly signaling, as a way to put on display to others that your faith is good enough.

Right. - Which I think - As opposed to what I would interpret this to say, which is just that the important thing here, regardless, like faith aside, the important thing is, are you doing good things and are you being- are you treating your brothers and sisters kindly? And I must admit, from the first moment I heard the faith versus works debate and like, which- what gets you into heaven? What’s the real one? Is it faith or is it works? I just thought, like, the first time I actually heard it, two guys going at each other over faith versus works, and I was like, you guys are saying the exact same thing. Like, what is happening right now? Yeah. And it seems so weird to me to even have a debate because, yeah, it seems to me that the theology should be faith is vital and doing kindnesses to others is vital.

Yeah. And you don’t get away without having either.

You have to have both. Yeah, I think James’s point is if your faith does not generate good works, it is not saving faith. It is not adequate. Not in the sense of you- the faith alone is the soteriological principle, and then the works are just how you prove to other people that your faith is good enough. But in the sense of, hey, the point is to make a better world. And so faith is not an end in and of itself. Faith is just a component that contributes to creating a better world. He goes on to say, and if it doesn’t have works, it’s dead.

Yeah, it’s literally dead faith. What good is dead faith?

Yeah. And so I don’t think it’s perfectly aligned with Paul. In fact, I think James is going to go on to disagree with Paul in a couple verses down. Okay, but he says, you believe that God is one, you do well. Even the demons believe and shudder- or shudder, excuse me, they shudder the windows.

Yes, they close their windows.

I don’t know why I decided to remember that as S-H-U-T-T-E-R. Um, but the idea being that, hey, demons are not going to get saved, but they believe in God and they believe that God is one. So you can see that just believing God is in and of itself is not enough. Insufficient. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I think the idea is faith minus works equals dead. Um, faith, faith plus works equals salvation, and not faith equals salvation and the works are just there to, to prove to the online apologists that you get to be called a Christian. Right. Um, uh, goes on, do you want to be shown, you senseless person, That faith apart from works is worthless? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and by works faith was brought to completion. And here I, I want to point out James pretty clearly saying that the faith was contingent on the works, right?

Not the other way around. The works are what put in the reps for the faith so the faith could get stronger. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And to me, this, uh, is explicitly, directly calling out Paul in Romans, where Paul appeals to Abraham, quotes the same verse, and says that, you see, you are justified by faith apart from the works of the law. And so I, I think that we-

So James is pointing out like, hey, that was a work. Yeah. Why are you talking about that? That was a work moment. Yeah.

And, and, you know, when we- what do we have? Romans, I think it’s 4. For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift, but as something due. But to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. We’re quoting the exact same verse and arriving at a different conclusion. Now again, there are scholars who are going to say that’s probably just the reading of Paul that was not perfectly accurate that was in circulation at the beginning of the 2nd century when this was probably written, not necessarily James saying the actual Apostle Paul was wrong. Now there- and, and there are people who are like, well, did James think that’s really what Paul meant, or was James just responding to something he knew to be a misunderstanding of Paul? - that’s a little more granular than I want to get in this discussion.

Paul? — that’s a little more granular than I want to get in this discussion. But sure, but yeah, that people are discussing that, so you don’t have to worry about that. But I think James is disagreeing with that reading of Romans 4, and I think this is, by the way, why Martin Luther called this an epistle of straw. Oh, because for Martin Luther, this was rejecting Paul’s, uh, grace alone salvation or faith alone salvation. And so for Martin Luther, this, uh, this was something up with which he could not put. So, uh, so he called this an epistle of straw. And this, along with a number of other texts like Revelation, like Hebrews, uh, like the Apocrypha, Martin Luther, in the first edition of the new translation of the Bible that he published, moved them into a different section of the Bible. And the only thing that stuck from that was moving the Apocrypha into a separate section.

Everybody else was like, “No, we’re bringing these other things back.” “We’re going to bring these other ones back.” He was having a bad day that day, and I think he just got a little too grumpy. Yeah, yeah.

The mutton just wasn’t lean enough. So yeah, so I think the case is stronger to make that James is disagreeing here, at least with a common reading of Romans 4, if not Romans 4 itself. And then he goes on, likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead. So I think that’s an effective diatribe against— There you go.

I wish we had more time because—.

One more thing we need to say though. Okay, okay. We will go soon. James 1:27, the last verse of the first chapter of James, is where he says famously, and the NRSV-UE translates “threskeia” as religion. Uh, religion as we understand it was unknown back then. Uh, threskeia should be piety. Um, piety that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. And I think that’s the message of James. If you really— if you really want to be a follower of Jesus, care for the orphans and the widows, which is symbolic of a kind of social justice that we see in the prophets and in the gospels. And then keep yourself unstained by the world, unstained by the algae growing in the reflection pool of the world.

Somebody said the paint is now coming off. Oh no. Because of all of the—because hydrogen peroxide that they dumped into the—yeah, yeah. So that’s neither here nor there. That is not related to the Epistle of James, unless you understand this movement to be condemned within the Epistle of James, which I think you could make an effective case for. But anyway, that is all we have time for.

It’s too bad we can’t get on to chapter 3 and the dangers of speech, which is a very interesting thing. But yeah, you can go and read it. You have a Bible.

That unwieldy tongue is, it’s, yeah, a problem.

Yeah. All right. That’s great. But I think it’s, yeah, it’s time to get— you had just mentioned Rahab in James. We’re going to have another Rahab coming up. But yes, we are. But it’s a very different Rahab. So let’s move on to What’s That? All right, uh, we got 3 that, that, that we have got.

3, Yes, that we’ll talk about. Uh, Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth, right?

Which— and, and not that Rahab. We, uh, last time, uh, the last segment we did, we, we talked about a Rahab, but that was the prostitute that was helpful at the walls of Jericho. Yes. Uh, and that’s not, that’s not who we’re discussing.

This, this Rahab got out of sex work pretty quickly and, uh, was pretty much in the chaos monster business, uh, after college. So I, um, I—

Can I be in the chaos monster business? I feel like that’s a good gig. How do you get that one?

Yeah, well, it involves a lot of stomping and I’m pretty sure my—

I don’t know if you have the body type for it, but I’m pretty sure my high school teachers would have called me a chaos monster.

My high school teachers just said, “Man, you would really get somewhere if someone just would just light a fire under your ass.” So, um, yeah, which is related. But anyway, yeah, so Leviathan I think is, is one of the coolest, uh, monsters and definitely the monster that is mentioned the most. Yeah, of the three. And, uh, we have references in a couple times in Job, a couple different places in the Psalms, as well as a fascinating one in Isaiah 27. And I wonder if we can start there. Isaiah 27:1. Okay, I’ll allow it this one time. Okay, I appreciate it.

Isaiah 27:1. Okay, I’ll allow it this one time.

Okay, I appreciate it. Um, and here we have the beginning of a story of Israel’s redemption. And it says in the—this is the NRSVUE—on that day, the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

So a couple things to point out about this. This is eschatological. This is looking forward to some day off in the future where God is going to take a sword and kill a dragon that lives in the sea, not in a pineapple, not under the sea, but we don’t know about the pineapple.

It does not mention pineapple or no pineapple. So what is— what’s ancient Hebrew for pineapple? I don’t think they—

Oh gosh, I don’t think the— yeah, I think— I don’t think we have that until, uh, we get the two different variations on it, uh, the, the pina or the pineapple variation. Anyway, and what is fascinating about this is that this text was probably written somewhere in the late 8th century BCE, or maybe a little after that. We have an almost identical statement in a Ugaritic text that comes from about 500 years earlier.

Oh, wow. Yes. And that is an early predate, right?

Yes. Yeah. So we’re talking 500 years ago was before Shakespeare. Yeah. So it is an old, and, you know, we have a much more robust publishing environment these days than they did back then. But anyway, there’s the Baal Cycle, which is not something you do at Little League practice. I was gonna say, you’re talking about Baal? Baal, or Baal if you’re nasty, is a storm deity, and there’s a fight that happens between Baal and a chaos monster called Lotan. And here I’ll remind you, Leviathan, the V there is really a vav in Hebrew, which can be understood as a W or an O. So these are cognate names. In other words, this is the Ugaritic version of the Hebrew name Leviathan. And it says that Paul— Paul— Baal, excuse me.

Uh, oh boy. Saint Baal’s Epistle to the, to the Ugarites. The Ugarites.

The, uh, Baal destroyed Leviathan the fleeing serpent, or Lotan, excuse me, Lotan the fleeing serpent, Lotan the twisting serpent. Okay. And the Ugaritic adjectives there are identical. They’re cognate to the Hebrew adjectives. And then it says the dragon with 7 heads. So not the dragon that is in the sea, but the dragon with 7 heads. And, and this is fascinating because a sea serpent/dragon/monster with 7 heads is actually pretty common in ancient West Asia. This is a kind of a standard trope that there’s this dragon with 7 heads out there. You know, the Hydra is related, but we’ve recently discovered an inscription that has a little— somebody etched a drawing of a 7-headed sea serpent into this inscription that came from around the 8th century BCE in Israel.

So we don’t have a mention of 7 heads in this passage, right? But we are very clearly borrowing from some kind of sociocultural matrix, traditional matrix, that the Ugaritic author of the Baal Cycle also drew from. Yeah, I don’t think we can say Isaiah was like, where’s that Baal Cycle? I wanted to— I thought there was a cool part in there I wanted to copy out. I don’t think that’s what Isaiah did, but very clearly this is something that was in the air. This was a tradition that people knew about, and Isaiah plucks it from the air and includes it in chapter 27. And while it does not say anything about having 7 heads here, I want you to go with me, if you will, to Psalms 74. I thought we were headed there.

I thought we were. I was. I have been doing my research. So, yeah, 74. I knew Psalms 74 was coming up because— nice— uh, because of that head thing.

Yeah, so in Psalms 74, we’ve got a fairly early psalm, but it’s at least incorporating some early traditions. And here we have, yet God my King is from of old working salvation in the earth. So Isaiah 27 was looking forward to some kind of eschatological defeat of the chaos monster. And so in that text, the Leviathan is probably representative of just the general chaos of the world. So God is going to defeat that chaos and bring peace to everybody. Here we have, my God, my King is from of old working salvation in the earth. You divided the sea by your might. You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan. You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. So here we have a multi-headed Leviathan, right?

And one of the things that I think is interesting is when we look at this, Leviathan is called a dragon in this passage. Leviathan in Isaiah 27:1 is called a fleeing serpent, a twisting serpent, the dragon that is in the sea.

No, wait, Satan.

Okay, yes, in Revelation we have a reference to Satan as that great red serpent and dragon. And people think that that’s talking about the serpent in the Garden of Eden. But guess who was there before the Garden of Eden? And guess who was the only one who was actually referred to as both a serpent and a dragon? Leviathan, right? The Book of Revelation is about Leviathan as Satan, not the serpent from the Garden of Eden, because that was not identified with Satan. But I digress. Uh, in Psalms 74, we have a clear reference to the, the many heads of Leviathan. Oh right, Revelation also says that this Satan beast has 7 heads, right?

So, you know, I, I, I will just, uh, briefly push back a little bit and say that 74 doesn’t say many heads, it just says the heads. Plural heads. We know it’s plural. Yeah, it could be 2. Well, it could be 11.

Probably more than 2, uh, if there were two heads, they could have used—they were not necessarily required to use, but they could have used the dual form, right? Because Hebrew has a dual form. So, uh, but Revelation also—

Probably seven heads because there’s a tradition here.

We have a whole tradition. That’s a clear tradition that goes all the way down to Revelation. So, uh, you know, jot that down. Anyway, um, so we have Leviathan as this primordial chaos monster. Psalms 74 is talking about salvation being worked in the earth in the past, and the reference to dividing the seas sounds like the way that creation is sometimes described. Oh yeah, because creation is about dividing things. You divide the light from the dark, you divide the waters from the waters, you divide the dry land from the seas. And so we have in a few different parts, a discussion of the taming or the defeat of Leviathan as somehow associated with the taming of, or the compartmentalizing and restricting of, the seas. So Leviathan is also a symbol of chaotic waters, the seas, and so to delineate them, to restrict them, to contain them, is also to bring order to creation.

So it’s funny because when I read that myself, I saw “you divided the sea by your might,” and I thought, and I thought of Moses. But yeah, you’re right that it probably makes a lot more sense that it is like dividing the seas from this, the waters above from the waters below, and all of that sort of thing.

Yeah, and there are a few different places where we get this relationship of Leviathan to some kind of process of creation. And in the Enuma Elish and elsewhere, creation is an act of subduing chaos and bringing order. So as the, like, main symbol of chaos, to defeat Leviathan is symbolic of bringing order through the subduing of chaos. So it’s creation. So this is, you know, we talk about the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. This is the Hebrew Bible’s third creation account where it’s not just, you know, pronouncing things. It’s not just forming the human from the dust of, of the earth. We also are fighting a dragon to, to bring about order to this chaotic world. Uh, and then the Leviathan is also representative of political enemies. And this where—this is where Rahab comes into view, because Rahab is also represented in Job, in the Psalms, in Isaiah.

Notice a pattern here.

Yeah, we have, uh, Those are the books that really like the big monsters.

Yeah. Yes, these are pro-monster, at least pro-representation of monsters. You have in Isaiah 51:9, so this is no longer Isaiah 27, this is no longer 1 Isaiah, this is 2 Isaiah. We’ve had 1 Isaiah, what about 2 Isaiah? Here is 2 Isaiah. It is much later, by the way. Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord! Awake as in days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to cross over? So here we have, um, we’re bringing the Exodus into play. Here we have the, the parting of the Red Sea, and Rahab is represented as Egypt as one of these political enemies. So we can have the chaos monster representative of general chaos.

We can also have Rahab, another chaos monster who is associated with the sea, representative of specific political enemies. Yeah. So I think you have—it’s these stories, I think, make use of a broader kind of conceptual palette that they could for, you know, putting together these compositions, for telling these stories in a way that’s going to invoke specific emotional responses.

Well, yeah, and I think it’s so interesting, you know, these are very clearly metaphors, and it’s sort of explicitly using them metaphorically. And yet there are people out there who want to insist on sort of the inerrancy of the Bible, who want it to be so literal that if it says that there are dragons, then there must have then been dragons back in biblical times or whatever.

Well, didn’t you hear? That’s the dinosaurs. Right. Yes, exactly. Because the dinosaurs walked with humans.

We should probably do that, uh, a dinosaur segment where we just talk about Ken Ham and Kent Hovind talking about all the dinosaurs on the ark or whatever. And, uh, but I— but, but the— but it’s so funny to me to back yourself into that corner because then it’s just— then, then people are going to say like, okay, now you have to be accountable for the, the idea of there being dragons. Yeah, on the earth. What? Yeah, what are you doing to yourself? It’s just—.

This is an own goal. It’s an unforced error. Yeah, yeah, you— yeah, it’s, uh, it’s not necessary. Um, so, so Rahab could be a personification of the sea, or at least a monsterification of the sea, or it could be another name for Leviathan. Uh, we don’t have— we don’t have a ton of details about what precisely, where this is coming from, but the word is also used to mean proud one. So we see it used that way, and that might be why it’s associated with, with Egypt.

Is that also the name— what the name of the prostitute in Jericho would have meant?

No, no, the names are, are spelled differently.

Oh, they’re not in my book. They’re spelled the same in mine.

Well, remember when I talked about hesed? Uh-huh. And you’ve got the ch. Well, the sex worker from Jericho, or the linen maker from Jericho, I think the description of her profession differs, but that’s rachav with a chet, whereas Rahav with just a hey is what’s going on with the monster. Hey, hey. So it’s not hey girl, it’s hey monster. It’s het girl. Okay. So yeah, but, but yeah, Rahab is or Rahav, excuse me, is the monster, which leaves us with the other one that a lot of people think is a dinosaur.

That would be Behemoth. Well, what’s funny is I haven’t heard dinosaur, but I have heard hippopotamus. Yes. So behemoth, behemoth. Finally, we’ve got mostly a land critter. Yes. This is it. Let’s talk about behemoth. Yeah.

One of my favorite jokes that I’ve seen on Twitter from a Bible scholar was they were like, the Book of Job is basically like, Job is like, why is there so much suffering? And God says, how dare you speak that way to the inventor of the hippopotamus.

Which is not wrong.

It’s not, it’s not that wrong. But, um, when we go to Job 40:15, we have, look at Behemoth, consider the Behemoth of the fields. Um, it says, which I made just as I made you. It eats grass like an ox. Its strength is in its loins and its power in the muscles of its belly. It makes its tail stiff like a cedar. The sinews of its thighs are knit together. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like bars of iron. It is the first of the great acts of God. Only its maker can approach it with the sword, for the mountains yield food for it where all the wild animals play. Under the lotus plants it lies. In the covert of the reeds and in the marsh, the lotus trees cover it for shade. The willows of the wadi surround it. Even if the river is turbulent, it is not frightened.

It is confident though Jordan rushes against its mouth. Can one take it with hooks or pierce its nose with a snare? And then it goes on to talk about Leviathan. Yeah, yeah, it’s such a weird argument.

Uh, first of all, talk to me about about it being the first thing.

So I think the majority of the great acts of God. Yeah, I think the majority of scholars would probably say that Behemoth is not describing a hippopotamus. It’s not like this, this fantastical description of a hippopotamus. I think they would say it is another primordial creature monster. And so basically this is when God is in their, you know, let’s see what I can get away with phase and is making Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them. And so the first great act of God might just be God is stretching their creative legs and just like, bam, look at that.

Look at that thing. Look at what I did. Yeah, I have to admit that when I was reading the description, I imagined the, the big buffalo from Avatar: The Last Airbender, the six-legged giant buffalo thing.

I like Behemoth. I want to point out something interesting about— particularly for people who say this is some kind of sauropod or something like that. Oh, okay. Verses 16 and 17: Its strength is in its loins and its power in the muscles of its belly. It makes its tail stiff like a cedar. The sinews of his thighs are knit together. So we’ve got 4 different clauses here, and they’re all parallel. We got couplets, two repeated couplets. Um, and so we’ve got a reference to loins, a reference to muscles of the belly, a reference to a tail, and then a reference to thighs. Yeah. Now we’re kind of honed in on a particular part of this animal, but what’s funny is the word that is, um, translated in, uh, in most translations, tail, might not mean tail. Okay. It can also— it could be used metaphorically to mean penis. Oh, so which, which a lot of scholars would say is, is more appropriate to the context because we’ve got loins, belly, penis, thighs.

And what does it do with, with its zanav? It makes it stiff like a cedar. Yeah. So I think what the author of Job is, for whatever reason, kind of affixed on might be something other than how wiggly and big its tail is. Yeah. So that’s a strike against, I would say, the people who try to identify this as a sauropod. I cannot account for sauropod penile qualities. So you know— but I don’t think that part of the passage is about its tail because additionally who’s like check out how stiff I can make my tail? Boi-yoi-yoi! Check that out. You could stand on that. Yeah, I don’t know that means anything in the ancient world. And also a hippopotamus doesn’t really have much of a a stiff tail. I cannot comment on the cedar-like tails of hippos, but it doesn’t really match.

If you look at all the details, it doesn’t match any animal that we know about. So, which is why most likely this is one guy’s just kind of fever dream about this. Maybe it’s another kind of dream about this, this fantastical beast that is among the first great works of Tolkien.

Well, yeah, I mean, the invention of mythical beasts goes back thousands and thousands of years and crops up in almost every society that we have any records for. It’s just a thing that humans do. They invent crazy, big, fantastical critters and then talk about them.

Yeah, we still do it down to today in the Harry Potter stuff and the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And even in what I watched with my family, I think it was called IF. I loved IF. You liked it?

Yeah, I thought it was a great, it was a super fun movie.

I was surprised it didn’t do better. I thought it was a great movie. It was heavier than I thought it was going to be, but I think poignant. And so, but yeah, it’s all about beasts that a child is imagining and drawing. So yeah, it’s something we’ve done forever. We go back to medieval, the medieval periods, and we’ve got, you know, knights. What did they go out and do? They went out and they slew a dragon. Yeah. And won the hand of the fair maiden kind of stuff. So this goes all the way back to hoary antiquity, to the days of old when God my king was working salvation in the earth by killing that animal over there. Uh, and, and there are others. Uh, the, you know, when we go back to the Ugaritic literature, you’ve got other kind of monstrous-y, uh, characters. Tannin, uh, these are the sea creatures. They’re, uh, that are— we see them in the, uh, their whales or the great sea creatures that are mentioned in a bunch of places in the, in the Hebrew Bible.

Yam, Yammu was the sea in the Ugaritic literature, which was a deity that was associated with the sea, and the storm deity has to do battle with Yammu and with Mot. Mot opens up his maw to consume Baal, which is representative of death. So there’s mythology in the Bible. Yeah. You can not like it all you want, but it’s very clearly there. Yeah. And these three monsters are just part of that mythology. They get worked into a worldview that is trying to figure out how to make it seem like God is the only divine being out there. But these are primordial divine chaos monsters. Like quite clearly.

All right, well, uh, that’s amazing and interesting. If you, like us, are chaos monsters and you want to get the word out about our kind, you can share this with your family and friends, have some fun with it.

Thanks to Sam for being our right-hand man. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. 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.