Lean Not on Your Own Understanding (and Other Conversation-Enders)

I can play this game with their stuff too.

Yeah.

You know, Bereshit is a house controlled by leaders who claim divine authority, consume, and mark their own violence as a covenant.

Yeah. Or you could just say, does a Bereshit in the woods?

Affirmative. Okay.

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?

Uh, the world’s on fire. Um, literal fire.

How about yours? That’s the way I like it. Um, anyway, yeah, don’t sue us.

I don’t know, I don’t know if you’ve ever— if you’ve gone out for a walk. I don’t know what it’s like, you know, you and I live 20 miles apart or something like that. And, uh, here in my neck of the woods, uh, it’s—.

Well, you’ve got a like a thousand square, uh, something fire burning just up the hill from you.

Yep. So that’s not fun. It’s, uh, it’s a— it’s— you go outside and it smells like camping. So that’s kind of nice, but not the good kind. Yeah, the good kind.

Yeah, yeah. Um, it is— it’s not great. The air quality is, uh, trash. The vibes in shambles, basically. It’s— I like this morning, my daughter came down and she let— we have two dogs— let them out of the kennel. They’re pretty big dogs. And they can get— what’s the word? Smelly. Particularly if they’ve been given treats or something like that. Like I could smell their breath from my office. And I was like, ugh, the dogs stink. And I went and opened the back door. And I was like, ugh, smells like a forest fire. And my wife was like, Why does it smell like that? And came down and was like, hey, you got to shut that. Um, yeah, so yeah, it’s, it’s not great. I, I want to— I’m— I would like to go for a run tomorrow, but I don’t know if, if that’s going to be in the best interest of my survival. I—.

Yeah, I just—.

Because the air—.

I want to find an indoor track if you’re going to do that.

Yeah, I could— I can go to the gym. I got a gym nearby that I can go to, but I just— I prefer to run outdoors.

Yeah, it’s nice. But not now.

Anyway, I like to see the mountains when I do. Right now you cannot see the mountains because they’ve been erased.

They’ve been— it is nice for our world to have a metaphor for how things have felt recently. Just the world does feel like it’s on fire. So yeah, it’s cute that now it’s actual fire that we’re dealing with instead of just the fascism and all that kind of stuff. Exactly.

So the world’s on fire. I’m sorry, I keep interrupting and you keep trying to move things along.

I’m trying to do a show here, Dan. And we’re— we have promised the people that we’re gonna do a show. Uh, today’s show is going to be kind of fun. We got, uh, a Twisted Scripture where we are going to be talking about the ways that people use certain scriptures to make sure that, uh, that you’re always wrong and they’re always right. And then we’re going to move on to a Watch Your Language, uh, and this time the lang— we’re gonna We have talked before about how ancient Hebrew letters can be thought to have, um, uh, their own meanings or what. Anyway, we’re gonna get to it, but it’s, uh, we’re gonna get back into some, some Hebrew letters and what they— what, what words in Hebrew really mean. So a lot of fun coming up. Let’s dive in with Twisted Scripture.

And for today’s Twisted Scripture, uh, we’re going to one that was sent in to us by one of our listeners, um, but it’s some— one that I’ve actually been seeing out in the wild deployed quite a bit, uh, and this is, uh, from Proverbs— not from Proverbs— yes, from Proverbs 3, uh, verse 5 and 6, um, and that’s the one you’ve probably heard it before. I We normally do the NRSVUE, but I’m going to read from the King James Version because that’s where I first— that’s the language that I got used to that I had heard, which is, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he shall direct your paths. " And the listener who wrote into us with that, wrote in to say, hey, uh, when I, you know, when I used to go to church at the, you know, as I was growing up, anytime I had a question, anytime something in the Bible didn’t seem right or didn’t work from how I was seeing the world, my pastor would just whip this one out and say I don’t get to have an opinion about it.

And I think that that’s a, I think that that’s a, a fair thing. You know, I saw on Threads just just the other day, someone posted a thing about, you know, they were an atheist because they read the Bible, which has been known to happen from time to time.

And even Pew has said that atheists know the Bible better than virtually every other religious group.

Yeah.

In no small part because atheism is frequently the outcome of seriously taking a look at things.

Yeah, um, anyway, uh, one of the responses—multiple people had sort of the similar response, which was just, this happens when you lean on your own understanding, but I read the Bible with the Holy Spirit, so hahaha. So I, you know, I just wanted to talk about this idea of kind of stopping the conversation and, uh, and and the idea that reading, you know, the whole idea of just reading with the Holy Spirit versus being a dirty, dirty scholar like you, Dan.

Like moi, yeah. No, and I get that all the time. People will just comment that I cannot understand the Bible because you can only understand the Bible adequately if you have the Spirit with you.

Right.

Which is which is kind of funny. It strikes me as a kind of special pleading that, um, that there’s—

It’s the definition of special pleading—

That they, they have some kind of special access to, uh, to an epistemological level that, um, you know, we just cannot achieve. They’ve leveled up because, right, because they have, uh, the Spirit with them. But and what baffles me is like, we study this kind of stuff, particularly within psychology of religion, cognitive science of religion, related fields. We study what’s going on with this. And even within the Latter-day Saint tradition, you get a lot of this, the, you know, the burning in the bosom kind of idea. And, you know, reading under the influence of the Spirit. And it strikes me that, well, one, let’s take a look at Proverbs. You’ve got did you go through and read it?

Yeah.

Yes, you went through and read it. And the idea here, a lot of people think this means, you know, whatever the word of God says goes. And that’s simply not true, because we don’t have any access to what God says or what Adonai or the Lord says, independent of our own understanding.

Right.

Like we have to understand.

Whose understanding am I supposed to use then?

Yeah, yeah. It’s not like, you know, Big Hero 6, where you’ve got a chip and you can just take out my understanding and, and plug in, uh, God’s understanding. Like, if, if by the understanding of the Lord you mean what’s in the Bible, as we’ve talked about many times on this channel, it has no independent inherent meaning of its own. Like, just the meaning itself is something that we create in negotiation with it, and we frequently overrule it. Like, as we’ve talked many times in the past, there are lots of parts of the Bible that are, you know, non grata now. We don’t like those things. We have overruled them. We’ve come up with rationalizations and with interpretive lenses and hermeneutic maneuvers to decide that we are past it. Slavery is kind of the parade example, the easiest one to go to. Like, if we’re supposed to lean on the Lord and not onto our own understanding, slavery should be a-okay.

Right.

But, you know, and I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that countless times abolitionists were told to trust in the Lord and lean not on their own understanding when they were arguing, this is what we’re doing is bad. This is wrong. This is immoral. This is evil. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, they were frequently told to trust in the Lord and lean not on their own understanding. And, uh, there’s a— there’s a— it’s kind of silly. There’s a commentary, um, in the Hermeneia series that I, uh, that I really like, and there’s a volume on, on Proverbs. But there’s this paragraph that just says, one should not interpret Proverbs 3:5 as a general disparagement of intellect and understanding. Rather, this verse has to do with a fundamental question: is human insight the point of departure for sapiential reflection, or does wisdom ultimately come from Adonai. Proverbs 3:5 is unequivocal here and thus resembles a line of thought that is fully expressed in the critical wisdom of the Book of Job and in the Book of Qohelet, which would be Ecclesiastes, which we’ve talked about in the past, which shows around the time that this dates to.

This is probably Persian period, maybe even Hellenistic period. But yeah, I get kind of frustrated with the notion that, uh, there’s some, some special kind of access to, um, to God’s understanding to which I do not have access because I’m, uh, you know, using my brain.

Well, maybe that’s the problem, Dan, is that you’re using your brain and you’re not— you know, there’s Matthew 11 and Luke 10 that says if you have— that, that extols the virtue of things that are hidden from the wise and the intelligent and have been revealed to the infants. So what about that, Dan?

Well, I think here we’re talking about, and this is kind of similar to a lot of attempts to suggest that there is that kind of epistemological leveling up is something that only happens once you take, you know, step a foot in the dark or something like that. After the leap of faith, the trial of your faith, you’ll be endowed with this, with this super secret special understanding that nobody else has access to or can measure or can test or scrutinize in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. And really what people are just talking about is their intuitions.

Right.

They’re just talking about their intuitions.

Well, and the way that I demonstrate that, or try to, with people who start to use this line of reasoning is just to point out that like, yes, you think you’re reading using the Holy Spirit, Mm-hmm. That person over there thinks that they’re reading using the Holy Spirit, and you’ve come to differing conclusions.

Yeah, yeah.

So either one of you doesn’t actually know how to read with the Spirit and is doing it wrong, which I know you’re about to say that that’s the other guy, but come on.

Yeah.

Or you’re just using your own— you’re, you’re leaning onto your own understanding. Yeah, that, that’s exactly what you you have no option but to do that.

Yeah, there’s not really any other way to engage in any kind of cognitive activity. We’ve talked about how there’s a spectrum from intuitive cognition to reflective cognition, and sometimes you can get something from your intuitive cognition where you’re like, “Oh, where did that come from?” And that is frequently held up as, “Oh, that’s the spirit. I was given this. This is a revelation from God.” It’s your intuitions. It’s, it’s the same thing that is responsible for optical illusions and for the way cartoons work. It is your brain doing its default settings. And, uh, that gets— and because so many, so many of our intuitions are rooted in our identity politics and the worldviews that, that we have become accustomed to and have been conditioned to, that they confirm a lot of the features of our identity politics and our worldview is not God telling you it’s true.

It’s just your intuitions doing intuition things.

And that’s not to say that intuition is bad. Our intuition is vital to how we live our lives. We have to operate on some level using our intuitions. It’s not the only thing we should be using.

Right. Obviously we need to bring our reflective cognition into play frequently. And when there’s conflict, frequently the reflective cognition overrules the intuitive cognition. And that helps us to better understand ourselves, the world around us, and our place within it. Our intuitions are really there to help us survive long enough to mate. And people will, I see this a lot where, particularly among creationists and people who are arguing against evolution. They’ll be like, well, the, the, you know, materialism— if you’re a materialist, if you believe in evolution, then you believe that our brain is unreliable. Yeah. And don’t you want something that’s reliable? It’s like, well, we can’t step outside of our unreliable brain and somehow still access knowledge. Like our brain is the only way we can get to anything. And yes, it is absolutely unreliable.

Yeah, anyone who has observed their brain for— in any honest way will recognize there have been moments of unreliability from every brain.

Yeah, and, and this is, uh, going back to the optical illusions, like, we can, we can demonstrate beyond a— like, demonstrably, this is very clearly not the image that your brain is telling you you’re looking at.

Right.

And it’s because your brain is unreliable. And we’ve been able to figure out many of the different ways that our minds are set up and the way they assume the world around them is functioning and is not isometric with the actual world around us, but it is good enough for us to do the things that we need to do to survive.

It doesn’t work like that.

Yeah, even if the Spirit told me something, I would still have to lean onto my own understanding to know what the heck it means. Yeah, like, like, you, you still at some point have to get your own understanding of the thing.

Yeah, you— it’s all contingent on our ability to understand. If something transcends our human understanding, we’re not understanding it.

Yeah, you can’t understand that.

Yeah, yeah. And, and I think a lot of people will confuse— they’ll try to retreat to the notion of qualia. Have you heard that word before?

No.

Qualia is a way to refer to experiential things that you can’t really transfer. Yeah. Like, you know, teaching a person who was born blind what the color red is like.

Right.

That’s a qualia. You can’t really transfer that understanding. You don’t know what a symphony sounds like until you have heard one in some way or another. There are a lot of ways that these experiences can be talked about, but you can’t really have the experience. You know, the Good Will Hunting, you know, the famous scene where Robin Williams finally gets his, where he’s like, “Ah, you’re just a kid.” And you know, you don’t know what it’s like to look up at the Sistine Chapel and you don’t know what all this stuff, and you can read it in a book, but you don’t, you haven’t had those experiences. So a lot of times people appeal to qualia as if that is what’s going on with spiritual experiences, that there is something there that is not accessible unless you actually commit and are sincerely devoted to the particular ideology. And I think that is special pleading as well.

That, no, it’s just quoting 1 Corinthians 2 where it says, those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them. So there you go.

Uh, well, you gotta read the rest of it.

Spiritual enough to, uh, yeah, you gotta, you gotta read the rest of it.

They are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Yeah, which is, you know, going back to the, the Latter-day Saint burning in the bosom thing, or, and, and we, I, I mentioned it to you earlier, this, uh, mathematician John Lennox who, a very folksy British scholar, was on the Diary of a CEO podcast, and he was talking to Stephen Bartlett, who asked about how he as a non-believer could approach, you know, trying to develop belief in Christianity and Jesus. And Lennox gave this analogy. He was like, imagine I tell you there’s a red Ferrari parked outside and it’s just for you. You just have to go get in it. We can sit on the couch and argue about it all night long, and you will not know whether or not it’s out there. You just have to get up and go look. And the idea is, once you actually sincerely commit to trying to find out, you’re going to find out that it’s true.

But this— but this is a— this is an acquisition of knowledge that is only accessible if you actually sincerely try to believe. And when I heard this, it reminded me of this thing from Carl Sagan’s, I think it’s from his Demon-Haunted World, talks about the dragon in my garage. And the dragon in my garage is another analogy. He says, imagine I tell you I’ve got a dragon in my garage. You want to see it? Sure. Okay, we get into the garage. I don’t see a dragon. Well, that’s because it’s invisible. Well, I don’t feel it anywhere. I can feel all the space in the garage. There’s no dragon. Well, it’s also immaterial. Okay, does it make any noise? No, it doesn’t make any noise. And the point is, when it comes to ideas about God and things like that, it’s always unverifiable, unfalsifiable. It’s every question is sidestepped. We’re not providing evidence, we’re telling you why you don’t get to have any evidence.

And you know, the biggest problem is this is unverifiable, unfalsifiable. And in my opinion, what Lennox is talking about is the exact same thing. And fundamentally, the claim is you don’t get to know it’s true until you choose to believe. Yeah. Because we have all kinds of people out there who have left tradition, faith traditions, and even the very same faith traditions that Lennox or other apologists might identify with. And they would say, “Oh, I’ve gone outside. There’s no Ferrari out there.” And what’s the response gonna be every single time?

It’s gonna be, “You didn’t really do it. You didn’t really look for the Ferrari.” Yeah.

If you did, you would’ve found it. Yeah. And what’s that doing? It’s doing the exact same thing. Oh, the dragon’s invisible.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I have had people tell me, “Oh, you don’t know Lennox would say that. If you said you sincerely looked and it wasn’t there, he would acknowledge that.” And I was like, “That would make him one of the worst apologists I have ever heard of.” He would acknowledge that because otherwise his whole thing doesn’t work. It falls to the ground. It falls to pieces. And he’s a smarter man than that. However, it does mean that he’s doing the same thing. I got a dragon in my garage. Yeah. And you don’t get to believe it’s true. You don’t get the evidence until you choose to believe it’s true. And that’s when we get back to the intuitions. And that’s when we get back to, I feel it’s true because I’m getting this collective effervescence of truthiness. That is really just my intuitions being tickled by my, my membership in this community. And now I have this new thing that is good, this worldview that makes me feel good about myself, makes me feel good about the future, makes me feel good about questions I have not had answers to.

And that’s striking the tuning fork in the loins of your dogmatism or your identity politics is precisely what Lennox is imagining is this magical evidence that only manifests itself once you have chosen to believe.

Well, and it’s so weird to me because I— every time I hear someone make an argument like that, I— you have to point out that people have that same experience entering into Muslim belief. Oh yeah. Or entering into, uh, Buddhist belief. They have the same, you know, exactly that same experience of like, oh, I feel like I’ve been get— you know, the veil has been lifted from my eyes.

I see—

I like it. I had a spiritual understanding of the truth of this thing, and then it’s just like, oh well, that didn’t count.

Yeah, yeah. ‘Cause you have a lot of folks who will say, “Well, Mormons are doing it wrong.” Right, right. They’re like, “No, I felt the burning in my bosom. I know what’s going on there.” They’re like, “Eh, that’s actually the devil.” Yeah, right. “You’re being possessed by Satan.” Yeah. “Even though it’s exactly what I said you should be looking out for, it’s a different, it’s a different—” tradition. You know, the devil can disguise himself as an angel of light. Which is like— he knows this.

Which is hilarious. Because, you know, at what point— what do you— what can you offer me then? That is the distinguishing factor. Yeah. What can you give me? Because unless— because if the only way— and unfortunately, the distinguishing factor, the way that they will say, the way that you know for sure whether you’re being led correctly or falsely is ‘If you land on my exact conclusions, and then we can verify that yes, you were actually led by the Spirit.’ Yeah.

And what’s funny is in this interview, I think it was before he brought up the red Ferrari analogy, but Bartlett actually challenged him on that. Was like, ‘You talk about evidence and you take happiness and you take a sense of fulfillment and you take all these different qualia that people report when they become Christian.’ And he’s like, and we’ve got research that shows that the exact same thing happens with other traditions all around the world. And so what’s special? And that’s where again, Lennox got into, well, the dragon’s invisible, can’t you see? It’s that you can’t actually see it and had to just dodge. Yeah, and it was, it was so ironic because he began the interview by saying that he expects evidence, that Christians who are out there doing apologetics need to be able to provide evidence, and he’s a skeptic and he demands evidence.

And then he spent the rest of the interview dodging questions about evidence and explaining why you don’t get any evidence. Again, until you choose to believe. Not pursue an understanding, but actually choose to believe, uh, which, which I found remarkably sophomoric for someone who’s supposed to be, uh, the number one expert on Christianity, I think is how the, how the interview was, was titled, uh, on YouTube.

And, and yet, and yet there’s this conversation-ending cliche.

Thought-stopping cliche. Yeah. Which is what it is when people pull that out as a trump card. It’s just a thought-stopping cliche. It’s, “I’m not having this discussion.” Right. And it’s also, “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

“The end.” Yeah.

And what I find so funny is I also get this all the time. “I don’t need no scholar to understand the Bible.” You would not understand a single letter of the Bible if it were not scholars who went before you and did all this work, used their brains, used critical thinking to help you understand what’s going on in the Bible. Just translating it. Yeah. Is something that requires scholarship and requires critical thought. How’s your ancient Hebrew?

Yeah. Because otherwise you got nothing.

Yeah. So I- yeah, I agree with you. When people try to pull that out as a thought-stopping cliche, oh boy, that gets my hackles up.

Because I’m just going to remind everyone, Dan’s the believer. I’m the non-believer. I think in case it was unclear, they might have gotten it confused during this segment because-

And I get this a lot too. But what people are like, you, you criticize people for beliefs. No, I criticize people for harmful beliefs. I don’t care what you believe on your own. If you want to go into your house or into a place of worship and believe things that make you feel good, blast off, man. I am not going to stop you because you know what? I do the same. Yeah. But once you get on social media, once you start getting into legislatures, once you start affecting how other people are living their lives, once you start spreading misinformation or these claims publicly, you’re in my house. And, and as much as I am a person of faith privately. When it comes to what’s going on publicly, I have very, very different feelings about things and about what is in bounds and what is out of bounds. So that, that’s the biggest distinction. That’s when people, when people imagine that I am putting every last thing that I believe onto social media- nein, uh, that, that’s, that’s not accurate, uh, but yeah, I think we can be adults about this.

We can talk about this like adults using critical thinking, using proper methodologies, using the evidence that is available to us, and we can be adults about this.

Well, and I think that your point is well taken that you can still have what you interpret to be a spiritual understanding of an idea, of a concept, or whatever. But the second you try to export that to another person or to, you know, to everybody-

Impose this on-

Yeah, this has to apply to you as well as me, then, then you’re going to get into some problems. And that’s when- yeah, I think anytime you say it is definitely X because the spirit told me it was X, you’re in trouble because someone else is going to have a spiritual experience that points them in the opposite direction. Yeah. And now you’re just denying their spiritual experience in favor of your own.

I think one of the funniest ways this happens within the LDS community, which is also part of the patriarchal, the fundamentally patriarchal nature of the LDS community, is when guys say the Spirit told them they were supposed to marry some girl.

Oh my gosh. That is one of the most cringy parts of the LDS thing. I hope it doesn’t happen as often as it used to. Oh gosh. But yeah, BYU is just overrun with guys thinking that they can just skip courtship by saying, “The Lord told me that we’re supposed to be married,” or whatever.

And I know that it happens outside of the Latter-day Saint tradition as well. I’ve seen on social media examples of- the wording is different, the concept is dressed up a little differently, but fundamentally the idea is the same. Somebody’s trying to leverage the notion of their spiritual authority or insight or acumen to, uh, to control someone else. Yeah. Which, yeah, and, and I think it’s the same with the, the appeals to Proverbs 3:5-6. It’s, it’s just an attempt to, to draw the scriptures out as a trump card because you don’t want to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, you don’t want to communicate about it. You don’t want to use that language that we developed in order to curate personal relationships. You would just rather get the other person to shut up. And, uh, yeah, unfortunately it’s- it is profoundly misguided. Yeah. And where the- you, you came up with Matthew and Luke, a couple verses there, 1 Corinthians 2:14, you had, uh, you had Proverbs 3.

Did you, did you have any other thought-stopping passages that, uh

Uh, you know, there’s, there’s 1 John 2 that says you do not need anyone to teach you, uh, which is like, okay, yeah, I guess not. Uh, it’s nice to be taught some things though.

Yeah, revelation is how you, is how you learn how combustion engines work, right?

Right, yeah, exactly. Plumbing is fine, you can just sort of, the, the, the Spirit will teach you, I mean, how to connect pipes.

I’ve seen Phenomenon. Even he had to get a book on Portuguese in order to learn the Portuguese language on the way over to the place. Yeah, see? You got to have the data. Got to have the data. The data’s got to be there somehow. You can’t just say, “Nope, no data. We’re only dogma here. We’re full up on data.” As the hat should have already made clear.

Yes, indeed.

The official position of the Data Over Dogma podcast is data over dogma.

Yeah, that’s right. And by the way, if you’re listening at home and not watching this on the YouTube, I’m wearing a Data Over Dogma hat, which you can get on dataoverdogmapod.com. So go do that. And then, and let’s move on to—.

It’s a lovely bowler’s cap.

So it is not, it is not at all.

But I think they call that a trilby, right?

That’s what that is. This is— this one is a snapback embroidered baseball cap. But I think we should definitely get logo trilbies and bowlers.

That sounds amazing. Some m’lady caps.

Yeah, something to doff to someone as they pass by. Yeah, in a tasteful way. All right, let’s move on to Watch Your Language. Okay, so for Watch Your Language, uh, we have done— we have talked— I’m gonna sort of bring us back up to speed because on older episodes, yeah, we have talked about the Hebrew alphabet. Yeah. And the way in which it evolved from probably Egyptian hieroglyphic sort of imagery, and the way that happened. And then we also, on another episode, talked about this big magic meaning that each of the letters in ancient Hebrew has, because someone just made it up, where the first word of the Bible, Bereshit, “It has special meaning.

Everything has special meaning." Yeah.

Jesus is there in the very first word.

Yes, exactly.

Just like Jesus is in all the names of Genesis 5, and Jesus is everywhere you look as long as you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Or as long as you make something up, make up a code. So the code that they made up, they took all the letters in Bereshit: beit, resh, aleph, shin, yod, tav. And then they turned it into— beit means house, and resh means head or son, and aleph means God or strength, and shin means destroy, and yod means hand, and tav means cross. And so it means that, uh, Jesus was crucified— God was crucified by his own hand, or God was destroyed by his own hand on the cross, or something something like that.

Yes. And this still gets shared every single day on social media. I can find the person who spread this having their video shared.

So maybe we should talk a little bit about the ancient— just let’s also do a quick recap of the alphabet and where they’re coming up with this.

A quick last time on. We’ll go— you cannot skip the recap. This time. Well, I guess you could, but anyway, um, so Hebrew has what’s called an acrophonic script. Now, what that means is “beginning sound,” and it comes from ideographic scripts, or script where the characters actually communicated or indexed entire ideas and concepts and words and things like that. Now, it came from that script. It does not preserve the features of that script. Once it becomes an acrophonic script, then the character just indexes or represents the sound that used to start the word that the character represented. For instance, Beit, that means “buh” in Hebrew. That’s all, “buh.” Now it came from a character that meant “bayit,” which meant “house.” Okay.

But it does not contain, it does not index the entire concept of house. Now, the problem with folks who argue that, you know, the Christian gospel is in the first word of the Bible is that they’re not actually basing their understanding on the characters these things actually came from. Right. Because like shin does not mean “to destroy,” and tav does not mean “covenant” or the cross, like a crucifix, or anything like that.

Right. Well, there are a few. There are actually a couple that do that. Oh, you found a few different? Yeah. Because there’s the one that we have talked about where it’s like, one means breathe in, or it’s like there’s the breathe in and breathe out. Yahweh somehow, like, mean breathing.

Yeah, that’s the sound of natural breathing. Yeah, yeah. If you never mind, never heard somebody naturally breathe.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that—it doesn’t work at all. But this one was an interesting one, which was, uh, the divine name broken into its letter symbols. Yod is meant to mean hand, right? Uh, Heh, there’s two Hehs in it, so Heh is behold. And I believe it’s because, and you know, I saw a thing where it’s like they took the, not the actual Hebrew letters, but like old pictographic versions of those letters, right? And, and Yod looks like an arm with a hand.

Yeah, well, it’s, it’s kind of, so Yod is, is like the, the lower arm, the forearm, and the hand, and, and there’s, it kind of looks like the claw or something like that in some of the, the early depictions. But sure, yeah, it’s, it’s the hand. Wait, did you say Yod or Heh?

Yod is that, and then Heh is like a dude.

Yeah, he had like arms up.

Yeah, a dude with his arms up.

Yeah, and sometimes it looks kind of like, uh, the genie from the bottle because the bottom is just like a squiggle. Okay.

And, uh, but yeah, it looks more like surrender than behold, but they interpret that as behold, which is not what it comes from.

Okay. It came from ho or hoy or something like that, which was basically, hey. It’s an interjection. It’s just somebody getting somebody’s attention, or somebody, ah, you know, just exclaiming. So that where it comes from. Okay. Behold, meaning look, see, is not really what’s going on there.

Right. And then Vav, they say, is a nail.

—Which is also not quite right. Vav is based on a word that refers to a hook, specifically a hook that might hold up a curtain. That’s where we see it used in Exodus. And you really have to squint at it pretty hard to get it to get fuzzy enough that you can say nail. Well, so they did say—.

So what they said was, Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh, hand behold, nail behold, which then they flip it around and say, look at the—behold the hand, behold the nail. Yeah. But I mean, that’s—you’re stretching in so many ways on that.

Yeah, yeah. And you’re like, but—and word order, that’s just a suggestion. We can actually put these in any order we want. Right. Which is silly. But yeah, and that again is like, it’s the crucifixion. And this is as silly as saying that our DNA has the divine name inscribed upon it.

Well, there’s that too. Talk about that. Walk us through.

Oh, gosh. There is a claim that I think originates—the idea is that there was a scientist, they’re like, “An Israeli scientist discovered that there are these—” What did he call them? He called them something, something bonds. Um, no, it wasn’t nucleotides, uh, because that act—that’s actually accurate. It was definitely, it was definitely entirely false. But, but basically it was like, if you, if you, um, take apart DNA, there are these, uh, gaps or sequences where you get, uh, 10-5-6-5. And they call them—I would have to look it up, but they call them—it’s not a hydrogen bond, it’s some kind of bond. But anyway, it’s something that doesn’t actually exist. There’s no such thing in DNA, and there is no sequence of 10-5-6-5.

But if there were, they would say the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is Yod, the 5th letter is Heh, the 6th letter is Vav, the 5th letter is Heh. And so, provided you just arbitrarily say we’re gonna start and stop here, you would get Yod Heh Vav Heh. Amazing. And it’s all entirely false. It’s entirely made up. All right. But yeah, so anyway, there are a lot of attempts on the part of otherwise—I’m being charitable, I’m saying well-meaning Christians—to try to read features of the gospel, particularly features of the Christian gospel, into ancient Hebrew because it makes it sexier.

Yeah, it, it, it’s not— I get the impulse. Like, yes, you’re— you want— you, you know, you’ve got this New Testament thing and you want the, the other part, the part that came before, to point to that because then it confirms your beliefs, and that’s— that feels good. To feel like your beliefs are being confirmed. But then you make up a bunch of stuff about Aleph Tav and things go— So I think we do have to get into the Aleph Tav thing.

Oh, Aleph Tav. Yeah, obviously we’ve got to get into Aleph Tav. So Aleph and Tav are the first and the last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. So you already know where this is going. First and last letters?

That’s— That’s your Alpha and Omega right there, baby. Yeah.

First and last. Yeah. So Aleph Tav is— there are two different words in Hebrew. There are actually a few different words, but the two main ones that occur the most that are spelled Aleph and Tav are one, what’s called the definite direct object marker, which is a syntactical particle that is not translated into English. You basically put that before the direct object of a verb. You don’t have to, but you can if you need to clarify. Because in Hebrew, you know, in English we use word order to determine, you know, what’s the subject, what’s the object, and things like that. In case-based languages, you would use cases. So you would decline a Latin word differently if it is in the nominative versus the accusative. In Hebrew, Hebrew used to have cases. There are some vestiges of the case system, but in order to indicate the direct object, you have et, and that goes right before the word.

And then et can also be a preposition that means with. Okay. However—

So et is spelled aleph tav. Is spelled aleph tav.

And so because you don’t translate the direct object marker, It’s secret. It’s hidden.

It’s a word. Okay, so what you’re saying is, if you’re looking at it in the Hebrew and you’re looking at it in the English, there’s this one word that doesn’t get translated. Doesn’t get— it’s just hiding in the Hebrew, and it’s not in the English translations, and therefore something’s being hidden from us. Yes.

And what is it? It’s the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega. It is Jesus Christ.

And so, yeah, so Jesus is sprinkled as this Aleph Tav formation throughout the Bible.

Yeah, and a heavy sprinkling. Like, they didn’t open up the side with all the little holes. They opened up the side that had the spoon on it and just dumped.

And yeah, because there’s a lot of direct objects.

Oh, I’ve heard of it. Well, yeah, you have two of them just in the very first verse of the Bible. So Genesis 1:1, “Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim veet haaretz.” And so you’ve got two et’s there. And there’s this edition of the Bible, I’m not gonna call it a translation because it’s really just stealing another translation and editing it. Uh-huh. But it’s called the Eth Cepher Bible, and it was put together by people who did not know Hebrew. But what they did, their two main things is, one, they want to have the Hebrew aleph and tav there where there’s a direct object marker, so that you can see where the Alpha and the Omega is, because you got to read it in Hebrew. And so if you go look at Genesis 1:1, they do that. “In the beginning Elohim.” They also want to transliterate all of the names exactly as they imagined they were pronounced in Hebrew.

And this is another thing they get horribly wrong.

The Tetragrammaton they transliterate as “Yahuwah.” I’ve seen videos of people saying “Yahuwah,” which just sounds like, it sounds like They’re Marines. Al Pacino from that one, from Scent of a Woman. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought you were gonna say she’s got a great ass, um, but I don’t think that’s— you can’t get there from the Tetragrammaton. But no, no, um, and then they also, they don’t translate spirit, they transliterate ruach. And then, uh, and then Jesus is not Yeshua, and it’s certainly not Iesous. They’re obviously not transliterated in Greek. They’re reverting back to Yahusha. That’s what they think Jesus’s name was pronounced as. And by the way, try to tell me the etymology of Yahuwah. Because if you think it was pronounced Yahuwah, you just don’t know Hebrew and obviously cannot even begin to pretend you know the etymology. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. But this is a— there are movements that like doing this, Hebrew Roots movement. There’s some Messianic Jewish things that do this.

Well, not so much why, but they’re going to talk about the fact that they’re doing these things. Right. But they go to like Brown-Driver-Briggs. Brown-Driver-Briggs tells us that this word, and then they’ll transliterate it, and then they’ll give you the Strong’s number. What is the official position of the Data Over Dogma podcast on appeals to Strong’s, Dan? I don’t know if it is our official position, but I’m—.

I think you’re allowed to make certain— certain official positions can’t come from me, so I’m gonna defer to you on this, but Strong’s— Strong’s is bad, okay?

Yeah, basically, if your argument retreats to Strong’s, you definitely don’t know Hebrew. And the preface retreats repeatedly to Strong’s. Strong’s tells us that kodesh, H6944, is from H6942, kadosh, and means a sacred place or thing. Again, if you’re appealing to Strong’s, that means you don’t have access to a resource that was published this century, right? And so it means that you do not have formal training and you do not know Hebrew.

Well, I should be clear, I made a joke about it being bad. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it’s out of date and that it’s— and that there is better work.

Well, yeah, and the main thing is that it’s— When you said Strong’s is bad, my understanding, and hopefully everybody else’s understanding, is that what it— what he means is appealing to Strong’s is bad, right? Because it’s a concordance, and a concordance has a specific utility. And if you know how to use a concordance, Strong’s is perfectly fine. It’s not a lexicon, and it’s not actually telling you what these words mean. Overwhelmingly, Strong’s Dictionary, it’s just telling you how the King James Version or some other translation translated this word, right? And it’s giving you a gloss based on a specific translation. It’s not telling you, hey, by the way, if it occurs with this preposition, or if it occurs with this as the subject, or if it occurs with this as the object, then it means this. It’s not really giving you a clear idea of what’s— if you’re looking at a verb, uh, if it’s in the Hitpael, what does that mean? And how is it different if it’s in the Hiphil?

And, you know, the people who are responsible for the Eth Cepher Bible, I don’t think know what those words mean. But yeah— And they’re in good company.

I also don’t know what those words mean, but that’s okay.

And they also, and one of the other indications they don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about, is in all their transliterations, they include like an apostrophe to represent the aleph, which is a glottal stop. But they put the apostrophe after the vowel. Okay. And if you know anything about Hebrew, the glottal stop precedes the vowel. You’re supposed to put the apostrophe before the vowel in transliteration. You don’t even know how to transliterate accurately. Like, holy crap, this is bad. But you will find people on social media trying to, you know, it’ll be in their TikTok shop. Get your, get your Eth Cepher Bible in the TikTok shop. Um, if you, if you don’t know anything about Hebrew and you want your knowledge to get further away from the Hebrew, get yourself an Eth Cepher Bible. Uh, but, but, you know, it’s based on this idea that et is, uh, is some kind of magic word because it doesn’t get translated, and, and that’s, that’s hiding the, the Alpha and the Omega in the, in your very first word of your Bible.

Yeah, yeah.

And it’s, uh, you know, I can see why that— again, I get why this feels compelling. I get why this feels cool because it feels like secret knowledge. It feels— it’s Da Vinci Code stuff, right? Like, this is what we’re dealing with is someone who is, is an idea. You know, there’s the— there was the Bible Code that was— that came out a while back where they just had a computer sort of look at all of the words in the Bible and then cross-reference them in a way that we think we can make. And then, you know, if you, if you look at it just, just the right way, then it’s— it says Kennedy’s— it predicts Kennedy’s assassination. And yeah, Nostradamus or something. Like, it’s just, it feels cool. Like, that’s kind. It’s just, um, they made it up.

Yeah, it’s— there, there are a lot of people out there who recognize that that there are a lot of systems of power that, that try to gatekeep all kinds of knowledge. And, and it would be nice to feel like you’re not— I’m not a part of your system, um, I know better.

Well, Dan, as, as a fun experiment, uh, I decided with the help of a friend of mine named ChatGPT, I— Chad Gupta? Yeah, something like that. I developed my own alphabetical deciphering tool. Okay. And now I know how English actually works because I now know what each of the letters of English actually mean.

Oh, really?

And I have the ability now to discern what they mean.

So for instance, the English alphabet is based on the Semitic alphabet. Exactly.

Yeah, but I, but I, I have, uh, basically, I, it, I just associated a bunch of, uh, words with letters, with the letters based on a spiritual understanding and how they looked because obviously how they look is important. So, you know, A is for ascent because it looks kind of like a mountain or a ladder pointing upward.

And I can dig it. I can see that. Yeah.

B is, uh, B is breath. It’s, it’s like lungs. It’s like this double sort of humped thing is like lungs.

Uh, I, I have a, uh, there could be other double hump things that are, that are B is for butt.

That’s, that’s the other part.

That’s actually not the thing I was thinking of.

Oh, okay. Well, or boobs or whatever, whatever, whatever your pervy brain has decided on.

Well, yeah, if you just— have you just outed me as, as a boob man?

I guess so. I guess so. Uh, I do, I do like that what it came up with. Uh, I— so the word Bible is breath plus incarnation plus breath plus, plus law plus extension, which means the breath made flesh, breathed again and again into law and extended outward, extended the law to us. Nice. So that’s really amazing. Yeah.

Uh, and now I can’t— that kind of thing can’t be faked. Like, that’s not a coincidence.

No. Uh, also, if you look at the word data, uh, that’s a door. The door ascends a tree. So a is ascent, t is tree. Uh, so data is, you know, the door of ascension leads to the tree of higher ascension. So data, data sends us up. What’s amazing about this, uh, and then I, and then I did dogma, but I wanted it, it, it did dogma, but I wanted it to be a negative, uh, idea of dogma. Yeah. So that was, uh, then, then you can say that like dogma is bad, the, uh, you know, any like the, the door of gathered mystery is against ascension sort of thing. But what that pointed out to me is I can play this— right, right, exactly. I can play this game with their stuff too. Yeah. So I can take Beit is house and Resh is head or leader or person and Aleph is strength or God or authority and Shin is destroy and blah, blah, blah.

And I can make that mean a house ruled by the head of power where destruction is worked by hand under the sign of sacred authority. Or Bereshit is a house controlled by leaders who claim divine authority, consume, and mark their own violence as a covenant.

Yeah. Or you could just say, does a Bereshit in the woods?

Affirmative. Okay. All right. How did I not see it coming? That’s what I want to know. How did I know?

It was right there the whole time, Dan. This is not a—.

Oh, it’s been hanging.

That can’t be a coincidence.

Like low-hanging— You think this is a coincidence? Like the low-hanging fruit in Eden. I did not see it. And somebody’s got to pick that fruit. You partook of it. And now, and now we’re all—.

And now we are all damned. That is the original sin.

All right, well, there you have it. That’s, uh, don’t, you know, if you like fun codes, go out and make some, but just don’t claim that they’re real because people will believe you. And then there, then you have a whole, it just turns into a whole thing. Yeah.

And, and when you wink and say this is for entertainment purposes only on your video, just mean it. Just, yeah, just mean it. Yeah, it’s not— you’re not, um, trying to get away with some plausible deniability. Just mean it.

Have fun with it if you want, but yeah, but actually cop to it being nonsense.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, well, uh, this nonsense is over, so I’m glad of that. If you would like to become a part of keeping this nonsense going, we would sure appreciate it if you’d become one of our patrons.

Sometimes we repeat them. Sometimes we repeat them.

That’s accidental. There’s a little bit of a— it’s not a perfect system, but, uh, we try real, real hard.

Yeah, we have, we have yet to answer a single question two different ways though, as far as I know.

As far as we know, we, uh, we’ve been We have— we’re stubbornly consistent about things. Thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing. Thanks to Sam for being our right-hand dude. And we will talk to you all 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.