No Originals, No Mercy

So it’s like death, death, death, death. You shall not be put to shame for all of the things that you did bad.

Yeah, it’s death, death, death, death. Oh, you little scamps. I can’t stay mad at you.

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 combat the spread of. Of misinformation. About the same. How are things today, Dan?

Yeehaw. It’s. It’s a. It’s a rock, rip roaring good time here in these United States.

Totally ripping is what the kids are saying. I. I think.

I don’t know, maybe. Who knows the last piece of slang that you tried to teach me. I. I did. I don’t appreciate. So I’m not, I’m not.

I didn’t come up with it right.

And if you would like to hear that slang, friends, you can become a patron and go and listen to the. To the before party of this very episode.

The. The pre game. Maybe that’s what we start, the pre game.

Oh, that’s interesting. Okay, we’re gonna. Now that the cat’s out of the bag that it’s not an after party anymore because we changed when we record it. Yeah, pregame might be kind of fun. All right, friends. Well, coming up today, we got some interesting stuff. We’re gonna do a. What’s that? And I think this is gonna be critical. I think this one’s a good one. That’s literally critical. We’re gonna be talking about textual criticism. We’ve talked about it quite a bit on the show, but. But we’re gonna do a little. A little primer for you. A little. We’ll get into it, figure out what it is, and, you know, then you can send that to your friends and family so that they understand what you’re talking about when you tell them stuff that you’ve heard on the show.

Man, if you ever wanted to baffle anybody at a dinner party, you can just go off on what homeoteleuton is.

And you know, they want.

We’ll get there. We’ll get there. Maybe. We’ll see. And in the second half of today’s show, it’s a. It’s. It’s a chapter and verse and. And really it’s three chapters and a bunch of verses because it’s. We’re doing the Book of Zephaniah. Is that, Is that the book? That’s the name of the book, right, Zephaniah?

Yep. One of the minor prophets. I think it’s Minor Prophet Number 8 In. In.

Don’t tell him you said that. That’s so rude.

It’s not a ranking.

You said minor.

Yeah, well, that’s the name of the collection. The twelve Minor Prophets.

Okay, if you say so, man. Anyway, we’ll get into that. But first it’s time for. What’s that? So textual Criticism. Now, not everybody is thrilled about textual criticism, I can tell you. I. When I was looking at it, when I was looking it up, I did find at least one place way of life literature at Way of life Bible college has. Has a little thing and they. And in. In their thing on textual criticism. This is, this is excerpted from Faith Versus the Modern Bible Versions, a course on Bible texts and versions of a tenfold defense of the King James Bible.

And they start with the words, we further reject modern textual criticism because of its terrible fruit, increasing uncertainty and skepticism, a weakening of the authority of Scripture and the promotion of ecumenical. Of the ecumenical movement. And so what their claim is is that modern textual criticism has resulted in uncertainty in the biblical text. And what I say to that is if that’s your main concern and your main concern isn’t trying to really understand what the text is trying to say and what the text is and what it means and stuff, you may be, you’re not really searching for truth, you’re just searching for certainty. And that could be a problem.

Yeah, I’m a little curious. The way of life Bible college just sounds, sounds kind of silly. Just, just off the bat, I’m trying to find some information on this, but like their blog, the, the. They have a post that they just reposted first from 2008. They just reposted it today and the title is Just Beware of Tony Campolo.

So I don’t know who that is,.

But I don’t know. But they’re doing personal attacks on the blog of this quote unquote Bible college. So forgive me if I don’t have a lot of confidence in anything that they do or say.

Right?

But they, they. I see there’s a book available Why We Hold to the King James Bible. And here’s the thing. King James Onlyism is you’re basically required to hate textual criticism, at least modern textual criticism, because textual criticism, like immediately you’re like, okay, well the King James Bible is out because. And so if you want to hold onto the King James Bible, you have to be like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe the problem is with all of the experts, and you have to hate on modern textual criticism, but the King James Bible is a product of textual criticism as well. Like the, the process itself is, is in the background. It’s, it’s baked into the foundation of the King James Bible as well. You just don’t like the outcomes of, of more developed textual criticism. But textual criticism goes all the way back to prior to the life of Jesus and it actually originates outside of the Bible.

It’s actually, we got to go back to like the librarians at Alexandria and people who were, were bringing together the, the main canons of Greek literature and things like that. And so specifically Homer and the Iliad and these other things where you have a variety of different manuscripts, there are different versions of it, and if you are bringing them together and you happen to be comparing them, you’re like, wait a minute, these are different. Why are they different?

Where’s my favorite story? Why isn’t it in here?

Yeah. And so all the way back over 2,000 years ago, they started asking, why do these manuscripts differ from one another and which one is correct?

And that is the main question of textual criticism. Correct is, you know, more of a value judgment. But textual criticism, we used to think of it as trying to recover the original text, the Urtext. We don’t really talk about it that much anymore because there might not be an Urtext for an awful lot of the texts we’re talking about. Like, it gets really complicated if a given book of the Bible, like was compiled from a bunch of different texts and then those texts came together from different traditions and some of them were written and some of them were oral, and then later traditions alter. Like you can’t go back to an original text a lot of the time. And so now really what textual criticism, at least textual criticism of the Bible is mainly concerned with, is trying to reconstruct the earliest recoverable form of a given text. And unfortunately for the biblical texts, the earliest recoverable form is not all the way back to the autographs.

It’s not all the way back to the autographs.

It’s not all the way back to what was written by the authors.

Again, because we don’t have those.

We don’t have.

I think there’s a lot of people that would be surprised to learn that there’s—we don’t have access to any original text for any of the books of the Bible, including the New Testament.

Right. The closest we have is there’s a little fragment of papyrus P52, which contains like 35 or 36 words, half on one side, half on the other of the fragment. It’s about the size of a credit card that preserves parts of the Gospel of John. 35 or 36 words that really eager, enthusiastic textual critics would say might date to around 120, 125 CE, which would be maybe 20, 30 years after the Gospel of John was written.

Right?

Other, there are others who would be like, maybe it’s around 150, but it could be as late as like 200.

But even, even that’s not going to be in the handwriting of the original author.

No, no, it’s going to be, it’s, it’s going to be at least a copy of a copy of a copy. And, but you know, that’s not the entire Gospel of John. We don’t know what’s going on with a lot of the parts of John that are open to text critical debate. So yeah, we don’t, we don’t even get close when it comes to the Hebrew Bible. Our earliest copies for the overwhelming majority of the verses in Hebrew come from a couple thousand years now, about 1500-ish years after they were probably originally written. Right now we do have less than half of the verses of many books of the Hebrew Bible preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. When it comes to the Book of Isaiah, we happen to have almost the entire thing, the overwhelming majority of it preserved in the Great Isaiah Scroll. And so there is a, you have this window from maybe as close as 20 to 30 years away from the original composition all the way to 1,500 years or more for any, for given verses.

years away from the original composition all the way to 1500 years or more for any, for given verses. And so what can happen within those, those decades and those centuries? A lot.

Right. And that’s, that’s the problem that I guess textual criticism is facing is just, you know, there, there over those, over the, this long period of time, this has been transmitted and transmitted and recopied and recopied and recopied. And there are scribal errors, as we’ve talked about on the show. There’s scribal additions, there’s emendations, all sorts of stuff. And you got to figure out what’s. What you got to figure out. So, so obviously that’s impossible and we should all just give up.

Well, it’s, it’s not an exact science. We can’t rub a special piece of paper on, on the manuscript to see if it turns pink, meaning this is the original, you know, this matches the original text. But over the centuries we’ve developed some observations about how things tend to happen. And you know, again, some kind of textual criticism goes back over 2,000 years. But we have, when people are collecting manuscripts of the, the Bible at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s a degree to which there would have been some textual criticism going on as these people gathered these different manuscripts. And a lot of the manuscripts differ, some in very significant ways from each other, but they still held on to them. You go a few centuries down the road, you get to Origen in the third century CE, an early Christian who put together the Hexapla, which is like a six column, side by side comparison of the Hebrew, a transliterated version of the Hebrew, the Septuagint, like a bunch of different versions, and compared things and started using little symbols and signs to indicate, here’s where this version has extra text, here’s where this version is missing text, here’s where this version has a different text, here’s where this version has a different word order.

And we started kind of cataloging the different kinds of variants and the different kinds of differences that can occur between manuscripts. And then we have to go many, many years down the road before it starts to become what we might call something approaching a science. In, in the Reformation, the Renaissance, when comparative literature begins to kind of become a thing, you have a lot more comparison of text translators who are putting together translations of the Bible. For instance, Desiderius Erasmus in the early 16th century, what did he do when he wanted to put together the, the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament? He went to his library in Switzerland and he said, give me all the manuscripts, the Greek New Testament manuscripts you got. And they, they put, they threw seven of them on the counter and said, this is, this is everything.

And he then had to decide, okay, what I’m going to do is I’m going to take two of them as my base text and then the other five I’m going to compare to the base text and I’ll make changes where I think a certain reading is probably better. Now, Erasmus was not a textual critic in, in the sense that we use the, the label today. And so some of his decisions were better than others. And then for the, the last chapter of Revelation, he didn’t have, they didn’t have that chapter covered in any of the seven manuscripts. And so he just took the Latin Vulgate and just translated the Latin back into Greek and then, and then just wrote that down. But he did multiple editions of that with each new edition. He had access to more manuscripts and made changes regarding the text critical decisions he made. So, so here’s where you have kind of the, the collision of a concern for original text, along with professional printing concerns and publishing concerns.

It’s like, okay, well, we want another edition. We want to make changes. We also want to sell books. So, you know, this turns this into something that people are taking more seriously. And we get into the, this 1551 is when a guy named Stephanus decided he was gonna divide everything in the New Testament out into individual verses. That division into chapters and verses had happened earlier with the Hebrew Bible. We talked about that in a recent episode.

That’s right.

And then we get to, it’s really in the 18th and 19th century that textual criticism turns into something we might call a science, something where where people started methodologically kind of figuring out what are our standards, what are our rules, how are we doing things. And we, we adopted a number of observations. So for instance, and we still like to use these Latin titles, lectio difficilior potior, which which means the more difficult reading is preferred. And the idea there is, look, when scribes make changes, more often than not, those changes are to make the text easier to understand or comprehend or accept, not harder.

Right.

And so the more difficult reading, when we’re comparing two manuscripts, the one that makes less sense is probably the earlier one. Not a hard and fast rule, but just a trend.

Just a. Yeah, just. Just a guidepost.

And when it’s. When you say when you ended that phrase with is preferred, you just mean if we’re guessing at older.

Yeah, all of the things as opposed to.

As. It may not be a better message or whatever. It may not be, but it is. But it is more likely to get to originality.

Yeah. More likely to be earlier in the sense of the reading that preceded the other one.

Do we have some examples we should give, like concrete examples of some of these things?

Yeah, I suppose I could have pulled some examples up, but there are some famous ones. And here’s why it’s just, you know, a tendency and not a hard and fast rule. Because let’s take a look at the Gospel of John, chapter one, verse 18 has an incredibly famous text critical problem. And here is the John 1:18 in the. According to the NRSVUE says no one has ever seen God. It is the only son himself, God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. And this is actually a very problematic attempt to eat one’s cake and have it too. Because in the Greek you have the manuscripts say the—the main preferred manuscripts say one of two different things, monogenes huios or monogenes theos. monogenes means, you know, in the King James Version, it’s translated only begotten, but really it means one of a kind or unique.

Okay, and so is it the one of a kind or unique son, or is it the one of a kind or unique God? And we have manuscripts that say each. The ones that say God actually come from earlier. The ones that say son come from a little later. However, once you get that reading, that is like almost every other manuscript that we have. And then, you know, you have little differences when it comes to whether or not it has a definite article or something like that. But lectio difficilior would come into play because monogenes theos is not anything that has ever. That is, that phrase doesn’t occur anywhere else in the. In the New Testament. monogenes huios does occur in the Gospel of John. And so it would be more difficult because it doesn’t match what we have elsewhere. And so it doesn’t make as much sense. And so the argument is, does this mean monogenes huios or monogenes theos?

If it was more early, somebody would have. Scribe would have been like, why does it say that? I’m changing it to what I know it says elsewhere.

Right.

So that. That sounds like a more reasonable change. How did the change happen? Why did the change happen at the same time? However, one could push back and say, well, it’s actually the easier reading. If this change occurred in the period of these Christological debates over the divinity of Jesus during Nicaea, somebody might have been like, oops, I changed it to monogenes theos. Or it could have accidentally been changed. In the earliest manuscripts, we have what are called nomina sacra, which are abbreviations of words and. And titles for divinity. And so in the Greek, it actually just says. It actually just has a theta and a sigma. And the difference between theos and huios in using nomina sacra would have just been one letter. So one letter, if it was transcribed sloppily, could have resulted in the confusion.

And so you have to bring all that into consideration to weigh which reading you think is more likely, because it’s not impossible. And it’s not incredibly uncommon for scribes to correct something they know to be an error, in which case, lectio difficilior might mislead you.

Right?

Because if huios is original and somebody, oops, I changed it to theos because I find that theologically helpful. And then other scribes came through later, went, stop doing that and change it back to huios, you know, that’s also something that could have happened. So this is what makes textual criticism, in many ways, just as much an art as a science. Because we’re weighing probabilities, we have to consider all different kinds of ways to contextualize what’s going on, to get inside the heads of the scribes who may have been transcribing this, to figure out when it may have been transcribed to when it dates and things like that. So that’s one example. Another example is lectio brevior, which would mean the shorter reading is the preferred reading.

In fact, the, to the degree that we may have to overturn that standard in textual criticism, maybe lectio brevior is false. Maybe it is the longer reading or it is the, the longer reading that is preferred. Now, I, I have not followed up with that particular debate, but, you know, we, we saw an example of that with our passage in John with the elect lady. And I don’t remember what episode that was, but maybe in the, the show notes we can refer to that episode if somebody wants to go check out the discussion there. So those are a couple of the most common text critical considerations that go into this. Interestingly enough, when we look at Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the text critical industries are quite a bit different between the two of them, although we’re trying to kind of coordinate them and bring them closer together, so they’re not operating under different standards.

But when we get into it’s really the New Testament, that kind of leads the way for textual criticism of the Bible. You have a guy named Johann Jakob Griesbach who put together his own critical edition of the Greek New Testament. It was based on - this was in 18th century, 17, like 1772 to 1775, I think was, or 1777, something like that was his first edition. And he was based on the Textus Receptus, so the tradition that was started by Erasmus. But he had access to even more manuscripts because in the 17 and 1800s, we discovered a lot of manuscripts of the New Testament, a lot more became available for scholarly consultation. And so he was like, okay, there are a lot of problems with the Textus Receptus. So I’m going to use the Textus Receptus as my base text, but I’m going to go through and make a bunch of notes and talk about why I think this reading is better. And that reading is.

Is better over there. So his critical edition was a bit of a departure from the Textus Receptus, which was kind of dominated. And that’s the, what is underlying the King James Version. So when people talk about how textual criticism is the devil, and the King James Version is, is the only version of the Bible that is the very word of God, they are champions of the Textus Receptus. And then in the 1800s, we had 1831, Karl Lachmann published his critical edition. And instead of, like Griesbach, using the Textus Receptus as a base text and editing it, he just threw it out the window and said, I’m creating his own critical text based on the manuscripts that are now available to us. And so this is the first, first iteration of the critical text as, as we understand it today, which is not tied to the Textus Receptus. And this is - this is basically, you know, the.

The kingdom of Satan coming home to roost according to the King James Onlyists.

Right.

And that led to, in 50 year, 50, 50 or 51 years later. I can’t, I think it’s 1881. It might be 1882, but 1881 is, in my head, is when we have the first English translation of the New Testament that is actually based on the critical text rather than the Textus Receptus. And that’s the RV, the Revised Version, which basically took the King James Version’s New Testament and then edited it according to a critical edition of the New Testament that was available in that time. And I have that big old Bible that, that I pulled out to take our pictures with for YouTube thumbnails. That is an 1882, I think, Bible, 1881 or 1882. It is the - the first publication where they actually put the RV and the King James Version side by side. So they published the two of them together. So you could compare the Revised Version to the King James Version.

And that’s where they actually have, you know, if you go look in Matthew 17:21 or any one of a number of other, about 16 other passages, they just omit the verse altogether. Because through the process of examining all the manuscripts, comparing them and making judgment calls about which readings are better, we arrived at the conclusion that there are over a dozen full verses in the New Testament that are secondary additions to the text that were not written by the authors of these texts. We have manuscripts where they are absent. And the explanation that they were added later is a far stronger conclusion than the explanation that they somehow fell out prior to our earlier earliest manuscripts.

And the funny thing is that some of these things, you know, obviously the, the glaring example is the woman taken in adultery. We’ve talked about that.

Yeah. There are two glaring examples: that one, and then the, what we call the long ending of Mark.

Right.

Verses 9 through 20 of Mark 16, which are not in our earliest manuscripts.

The, and the point that I was going to make is that like, woman taken, the story of the woman taken in adultery is great. Yeah. Like, it’s a good, like it’s a good addition to the book. I like it. But, but like, so, so I, I, I think it’s important to clarify that when we say this is a good translation or this is a, you know, textually accurate thing, it’s not, that’s not actually a, a value judgment on what’s good and what’s not good in the Bible. So so much as it is, just try like the, the, the, the project here is to get at some level of accuracy or some level of, of understanding of what the original text may have said.

Yeah. And I know we don’t have a lot of time left, but this is, I, I mentioned that New Testament and, and Old Testament Hebrew Bible textual criticism is, is different. And much of that has to do with the fact that we’re usually aimed at producing different kinds of results. Like critical editions of the Hebrew Bible have historically gone at it a little differently from critical editions of the New Testament. And the main difference is that when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, almost all of our critical editions have always been what are called diplomatic editions. So now we’ll get into some of the glossary things. Diplomatic edition is a critical edition that is based on a single manuscript. And then, and so our critical editions of the Hebrew Bible are the Leningrad Codex for the most part. And then in the critical apparatus, we might say, okay, there are Qumran manuscripts, say this, or the Septuagint says this or something like that. And that allows a translator to make text critical decisions about what they’re actually going to translate.

The New Testament, there is no single manuscript that is considered as authoritative as the Leningrad Codex, which is the Masoretic Text. So we have always used what we call eclectic editions. So diplomatic is based on one manuscript. Eclectic editions are based on an edition of the source text that has been cobbled together from a bunch of different manuscripts. So that’s the Textus Receptus, and that’s all the critical editions that have been published ever since. Unless you have like a critical edition of the Codex Sinaiticus or something like that. But those are very rarely used for translations into English. That might be used for a translation into modern Greek Demotikos for, you know, the Greek Orthodox Church or something like that. And so that’s one of the, the main differences. Some other glossary things that would be helpful for you. I use these words sometimes in my videos. I usually try to explain them, but when I don’t, they just go scorching by over people’s heads.

But you, you’ll hear about two different kinds of changes. One is haplography, one is dittography. Haplography is when something has accidentally been omitted, there’s been a transcription error that results in text being lost. And frequently. And there are two different reasons that that happens mostly. One of them is called homoiarkton. One of them is called homoioteleuton. So I promised I would get to these words. But homoiarkton means same beginning. And so if you’ve ever, ever transcribed a text, you go to your, your exemplar, your source text, you read as many words as you can exactly remember, and then you go over to your blank manuscript page and you write down the words exactly as you remember them, and then you have to return back to your source text. Now, usually what you do is you either keep in your head how the word, the last word you wrote down ended, or you take note of how the next word coming up in the source text begins, right?

So you go back, and then when you come back to your source text, you go back to what you recall the word ended with or what you recall the next word began with, and you pick back up there. And if words that either end or begin the same occur multiple times within a line or within a couple lines or even a few lines of each other, sometimes you accidentally go back to the wrong word and you pick up either where you have already transcribed or you skip over stuff to pick up again. And so if you, you know, if homoiarkton, two words that begin the same, you accidentally go back and record a word or multiple words all over again. That’s called dittography. Dittography is where you have repeated or added material. And then if you skip lines or words because of the way a word ended or because of the way a word began, that is haplography.

And it all sounds very fancy. And, and we are very proud of our ability to remember these Latin and Greek words and use them to try to help us figure out what reading was likely original. But it is a fun exercise to actually look at a text and be like, “Oh, wow, I can see now exactly how the scribe went about doing this.” And they went from that word and skipped over these words and picked back up on this other line. And that’s why in the manuscript that I have, it skips over those things and it either does or doesn’t make much sense, the resulting text. There are a lot of examples of that going on. We can even see in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The largest correction that the Dead Sea Scrolls have helped biblical scholars make to biblical manuscripts in terms of just number of words is a part in the Book of Samuel where there is a whole paragraph that got omitted because of haplography, because the scribe skipped from

From one word to another.

And we found a manuscript of the Dead Sea Scrolls where it has that paragraph. But what’s funny is you can even see in the Dead Sea Scroll manuscript that part of the paragraph had to be written into the margins by a different scribe because even within that Dead Sea Scroll manuscript, they accidentally omitted some of the paragraph. Yeah, so they did it within that manuscript and then later on in the Masoretic Text, and that omission goes all the way back to the Septuagint. Like that happened very, very early on in the transmission of the Book of Samuel. So, and then the last thing I’ll point out is what we call conjectural emendations, because sometimes we are pretty sure this manuscript reading is not right, but we don’t have an extant manuscript that preserves a different reading. And sometimes we’ll be like, we really, really, really think we know what happened here. And so you might have if

If a critical edition or a translation is open to what are called conjectural emendations, they might just say, “You know what? We’re just gonna call an audible. We’re gonna make an executive decision here. I’m changing this to what we’re pretty darn sure it originally read,” even though we don’t have a manuscript that directly attests to that. There are textual critics who’ll be like, “That is anathema. You can never do that. That is not allowed.” You’ll have other textual critics who say, “Yeah, we’re pretty darn sure. We don’t need to worry about this. We can make this change.” So conjectural emendations are a somewhat controversial aspect of textual criticism today as well. Well, there’s a whole lot more to get to that we don’t get to talk about, but.

Well, that’s fascinating stuff. I hope everybody’s happy that you’ve now ruined the Bible and caused uncertainty in their world and skepticism, because that, you know, apparently that’s what textual criticism does.

And that’s why we need that textual healing.

That’s why you need it. So everybody, go and heal yourself, and let’s move on to chapter and verse. All right, Dan. Zephaniah.

Zephaniah.

It’s three chapters long, so tolerable. Not the worst thing in the world.

Yeah. You can get through this in a weekend. And that’s if you are very, very slow at reading.

Yeah, if you’re extremely slow. Otherwise you can do it easily in a single sitting.

Which I did. But I warn you, it hits hard. This one comes at you fast, and it comes at you mean, right out the gate.

Yeah. Zephaniah was not slow playing the point, as he was like, “Look, I’m Zephaniah,” anyway, and God comes in: “I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth,” says the Lord.

Like, it’s a bit rough. It’s a bit rough.

Yes. Zephaniah does not have the kid gloves on, which is like the name Zephaniah, the yah at the end. Just in case you weren’t aware, when you see that at the end of biblical names, particularly in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, that indicates a version of the divine name.

So the Tetragrammaton, it’s. It’s a slightly shortened version of the Tetragrammaton. And so whatever comes before is usually going to be some kind of verb. A lot of names in ancient Hebrew were. Were sentences.

So this. This is the equivalent to names that end in El, like Daniel, which is our name, or something. It’s a theophoric name. I know the word even.

I’ve been doing this show for a minute. Okay. I did not know that about the iah thing.

Yeah, yeah.

And which is good, because then. Then I understand that that reference is not just Zephaniah, but his grandpa Gedaliah and his grandpa, or his dad Amariah and his dad Hezekiah.

Yeah, they all have Yahwistic. Theophoric elements in, in their name.

So Zephaniah, the meaning there is like the Lord covers, hides, protects, something like that. Okay, now it’s, there are a lot of places in the Hebrew Bible where the name is like an editorialization on the role of the individual in the story. So.

Like in, in Ruth we have Mahlon and Chilion, which, which means sickly and frail.

Right.

And that’s kind of a dead giveaway that they are not long for, for this, this Moabite soil. They are about to rejoin it. But I don’t know that this has much to do with the message that Zephaniah is offering in these three chapters. Part of the 12 minor prophets. Now that is not a value judgment.

It feels like one.

It does kind of feel like that when, when we call them the lesser prophets, the minor prophets.

Is that just a reference to their shorter books?

Yes, they are shorter books. So the book of Isaiah has 66 chapters. Jeremiah’s got major books. Yes, yes. But then you get to Zephaniah, who has three, you get to Haggai, you get to these shorter ones, and can.

I call them the Merciful Prophets, the Easy Reader Prophets, the Reader’s Digest Prophets.

But basically you have a scroll just for the minor prophets.

Right.

So, so that, that’s the reason there was one title for these 12 is because they fit on a scroll roughly the same size as the single scroll that would have held the Book of Isaiah. So you have the Isaiah scroll, you have the Minor Prophets scroll. So, and that, and that collection, the, the inclusion of all these together goes all the way back to antiquity.

Let me get a sense of situating this now.

Verse one of the first chapter of Zephaniah says, you know, it, it gives, it gives that history, that familial history going back to Hezekiah. And then it says in the days of King Josiah, son of Amon of Judah. Now, right, we’ve talked about Josiah King. Is this. I, I don’t know. I never know how accurate those things are, whether this is whether this actually happened in the time of Josiah or if we can’t reliably say that. So where are we at with this?

There are, there are a lot of scholars who would suggest that this probably originates in something that was, that was offered by one of our itinerant prophets toward the, the end of the 600s BCE or more likely the beginning of the 500s BCE so probably around the time of Josiah.

But probably late in the career of Josiah. When the writing was on the wall and we knew this, this kind of thing was coming.

Now which kind of thing was coming?

The destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

Which is what is being prophesied here. So.

Right.

But at the same time, these texts would have been transmitted by schools, groups that were, that were dedicated to these prophets or to particular movements. And in the centuries that followed, they would have been edited. And so we can’t say for sure exactly what goes back all the way and what might have been added later. Because if you’ve got a text from before the Babylonian exile that is like, hey guys, I’m going to exile you, that becomes, you know, that’s hot stuff. That’s good stuff.

And then if, if you have an opportunity to, you know, maybe something happens during or, you know, the, the end of the exile, maybe you have an opportunity to add something to that that makes your own generation feel like, oh, we’re a part of this too.

Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it, it does feel like if I, I don’t know, it’s. It’s fascinating to me because it does start off with, literally, “I will utterly sweep away everything.” And that is the entire first chapter is just how much the Lord is going to kill everything and everybody. And let me just name a few of the things.

But also everything, which feels a little. It feels redundant. Yes, you can, you can stop with everything. But then it, but then it like leaves some carve outs for. For some stuff. So what are we doing here? Why, why are we saying everybody? Like, I’m, I, the Lord, am going to kill all. I will sweep away humans and animals. I will sweep away birds of the air and fish of the sea. I will make the wicked stumble. I will cut off humanity from the face of the earth, says the Lord. That’s pretty extreme.

Yeah. And that goes beyond what actually happened with the, the invasion and the destruction of Jerusalem and all that.

It would seem, the evidence would seem like, yeah, maybe some of the things survived.

Yeah, it is a bit of an exaggeration, but the point there is to kind of treat your existence in Jerusalem and Judea as kind of a microcosm and so to say, you know, all of Judea was. Was captured, Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was destroyed. A bunch of our people. Excuse me, a bunch of our people were exiled. From, you know, your perspective, where the scope of your awareness doesn’t really go much beyond your everyday life and what you can see that seems like the whole world. It reminds me of a line, a foreboding line from the. The Death of Superman narrative arc from back in the early 90s where the cyborg says to Superboy, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of your world.

Right.

So the. Yeah, this is rhetorical exaggeration, but it is intended to kind of increase the impact of this warning and this prophecy and say, it’s all coming to pieces, it’s all burning down, we’re getting rid of everything.

And it does flash on some stuff that we’ve seen before from the Josiah era, where we’re talking about the. I will cut off from this place every remnant of Baal and the names of the idolatrous priests, those who bow down on the roofs to. To the hosts of the heavens, those who bow down and swear to the Lord, but also swear by Milcom, those who have turned back. So, I mean, again, we’re in that place where we’re indicating that people are still worshiping both.

Their.

God and then these other gods are also interspersed among the worship of the people.

Yeah, and. And this is kind of your. Your stock anti-idolatry, anti-other-god rhetoric that we see in a lot of the other prophets. And. And this became kind of the main. This was the. The main accusation that was leveled against the people as a way to account for why the. The Babylonian exile happened. It was all this bad stuff happened. And then everybody was like, see, I told you you shouldn’t have been baking the cakes for the Mother of Heaven or the Queen of Heaven. That’s. And then that. Because of how rhetorically useful it is, that then becomes the main thing that everybody’s going to hammer on. It was like. Yeah, it was. It was definitely the praying to the hosts of heaven on the rooftop. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was definitely the worship of Baal and Milcom.

It was when we say the hosts of heaven, because this comes up a couple times. The hosts of heaven. And then later the Lord. “Lord of Hosts” is a phrase that’s used. And I realized I’ve heard that a bunch of times and never really bothered to understand what the Lord of hosts means. And suddenly it occurred to me, like what it could mean. So what is your understanding of what that means?

So the Hebrew word is tsava, and it means host in the sense of army.

Right.

So to say the host of heaven is to refer to the army of heaven, which would be all the marshaled deities that are the stars and the sun and the moon and the planets and the asteroids and all that kind of stuff. All of the celestial bodies were understood to be in some sense divine and to be identified with certain gods.

So we have to understand God as sovereign over them. And they serve a purpose. They are subordinate to God and they serve a purpose, but you’re not allowed to worship them. If you’re a part of the house of Israel, they’re for the other nations to worship. If you worship them, that’s super, super bad. And also in Deuteronomy, you’re not supposed to worship Adonai in the same way that the other nations worship their deities, the host of heaven. And you can go back further in time and you get Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9, where Elyon, the Most High, divides up the peoples according to the number of the Bene Elohim, the children of God. And Adonai’s portion is his people, Jacob, his inherited allotment or allotted share or whatever. And so in that iteration of this tradition, Adonai is not the one who distributed the gods to the nations. It is Elyon, the Most High, who distributes the nations to the gods, with Adonai getting Israel.

So you see a few different kind of chronological phases of this idea of the host of heaven. And there’s a book called Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism. Beata Pongratz Leisten was the editor of that book, and she’s got an essay in the book about the astralization of gods. There’s another book called, oh, I shoot, The God of Israel. And there’s an essay in there about the stellarization of the gods, which has to do with identifying them as stars rather than as real gods. But it’s a whole complex thing.

It’s a whole thing.

I don’t even remember where we are. We’re in the book of Zephaniah, right?

We are. And I wanted to move on to the great day of the Lord.

This is verse 14. We’re still in chapter one.

And the great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast. What is the great day of the Lord?

So this would kind of be eschatology before there was eschatology.

Yeah, it feels eschatological.

Eschatological, yes. And it would even cause some scatology in some people’s pants, no doubt. But the interesting thing here is usually the great and dreadful day of the Lord is when God comes to judge God’s enemies and defeats all of Israel’s enemies. And many times when it’s talked about, it’s a good thing, at least for the righteous. And here, a lot of people are getting their comeuppance, and outside of Israel.

Yeah, it’s pretty rough.

Yeah. That day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements. I will bring such distress upon people that they shall walk like the blind because they have sinned against the Lord. Their blood shall be poured out like dust and their flesh like dung. So there’s the scatological part of the doom of the prophecy. Yeah. Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord’s wrath. In the fire of his passion, the whole earth shall be consumed, for a full, a terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth. And so it seems again, like the author is getting out a little ahead of their rhetorical skis. Yeah, they are like, everybody gets it.

Everybody. And everybody.

Everybody. Okay, not everybody. And the book has three different sections. You have the pronouncements of judgment against Jerusalem and Judah. And then once you get into chapter two, you have oracles against the nations. Oh, yeah. And also Jerusalem. Yeah.

You think you’re getting away with this, Moab?

You’re not getting away with this.

We’re just piling the nations on top. And then the last segment, which is the last several verses of chapter three, are announcement of Jerusalem’s restoration. So it’s like Jerusalem, you suck.

And then just. And then suddenly it’s. And it is kind of a jarring turnaround because it goes from, I’m gonna kill everybody every. You know, blah, blah, blah. All of these cities, all of these countries, all of these kingdoms are razed to the ground. Sheep will be. Well, you know, your city is going to be a pasture for sheep now. And then it says, sing aloud, O daughter Zion. Shout, O Israel. I also realized, I didn’t know I. As I was reading this. It’s so funny how many things are so common. I’ve heard so many times that I don’t realize. I don’t know what they mean. Zion. I don’t. I like. I don’t really know what that is. I have not to be.

We ought to do a segment on Zion because it is used in a variety of different ways. But I think here the idea is the. Is Jerusalem, basically. Yeah.

It refers to daughter Zion and then daughter Jerusalem. So I wondered if they were the same thing. But.

Yeah, so. So maybe this has been edited, you know, maybe. Because I. I can’t imagine Zephaniah gets through all of what he gets through. And now he’s beet red. He’s got sweat coming off the tip of his nose.

Oh, it’s been only fire and brimstone. Yeah.

And then he’s like, but sing aloud. Yeah, like, you know, people are like, hey, we’re done listening to you, man. You can’t. You can’t turn it around on us now. But I. I do want to point out it. It is interesting. We have a lot of. A lot of nations and cities are named in chapter two, all of Israel’s enemies. This is just like a. A catalog of who’s who in the rogue’s gallery of the Hebrew Bible. Yeah, you have. You’re starting with. In verse four. And I’m surprised I don’t see this passage used more frequently today in defending genocide. For Gaza shall be deserted, and Ashkelon shall become a desolation. Ashdod’s people shall be driven out at noon. And Ekron shall be uprooted. And then we have the Cherethites, the Philistines. We have Ashkelon again, I have heard the taunts of Moab and the revilings of the Ammonites.

How they have taunted my people and made boasts against their territory. Therefore, as they as the Lord of hosts lives, Moab shall become like Sodom, and the Ammonites like Gomorrah, a land possessed by nettles and salt pits and a waste forever. And then we go on against the Cushites. We’re going to destroy Assyria, make Nineveh a desolation. Herds shall lie down in it every wild animal of the earth. The desert owl and the screech owl shall lodge on its capitals. The owl shall hoot at the window. The raven croak on the threshold. Lots of owls involved.

Yeah, they really. Apparently, that’s a bad sign. Yeah, owls have moved in. You. You’re really. You’re really screwed.

Yeah, they didn’t really like the owls very much, but. But let’s. When we do kind of turn the tables on the audience. There’s something interesting here because we’ve already heard all the inhabitants of the earth are gonna die, right?

And by inhabitants of the earth, we mean that small little part of the earth that was just listed here.

And we’ve rattled off the names of all of Israel’s enemies. And Judah’s gonna get it too. And Jerusalem. But then it says at that time, I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord. So the idea is all the nations are going to be converted to following the God of Israel. But didn’t we just kill them all? And so it, you know, it’s. It’s very rhetorical, but this is kind of what we get in Deutero Isaiah as well you know, all the nations will. Will come to the house of the Lord, go up to the mountain of the Lord, and all this kind of stuff. For from beyond the rivers of Cush, my suppliants, my scattered ones, shall bring my offering. And on that day, you shall not be put to shame because of all the deeds by which you have rebelled against me. So it’s like death, death, death, death.

You shall not be put to shame for all of the things that you did bad that I earlier said.

Oh, you little scamps, I can’t stay mad at you.

And then they shall take refuge in the name of the Lord. Here, here, maybe Zephaniah, the Lord protects, the Lord hides, the remnant of Israel. They shall do no wrong and utter no lies. Nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths.

And that was one of my questions. Was, is there a, is there any kind of messianic concept at this time? Because was there an idea of a single Messiah who would come? Because it doesn’t seem to be present in this at all.

No, there’s no individual who’s going to facilitate this. No person represents the grand pivot towards restoration. And there’s no event either. It’s just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Good, good, good, good.

Now that, now that you’re all killed, you’ve learned your lesson and I’ll be nice to you again.

But, but this is kind of the pattern in so many of the prophets: the woe, woe, woe, woe, and then we’re going to close it off with a little weal. So it’s going to be good in the end. But most of it is just really haranguing the people. And this is what makes me wonder if it’s not an editorial artifact. The prophets probably the whole time were just out there wagging their finger at everybody, saying God’s going to really tear us a new one for all of these things that you’re doing. And then a couple generations down the road when they have all suffered and they are in exile, or maybe coming out of exile or at least hoping they’ll come out of exile, maybe they’re like, “Can we put a part at the end about things getting better?”

Right.

Because the, you know, the criticism sandwich of say something positive, give your constructive criticism, say something positive—you don’t get the first part of it. You don’t get the bottom piece of bread on this sandwich. This is an open-faced sandwich.

An open-faced sandwich for sure.

Yeah, yeah. But that doesn’t really make sense to me as the whole warning where he’s like, “Ah, but God will love you in the end.” Because then what’s the ultimate message? Everybody’s like, “Oh, so we’re good? Yeah, we just got to wait it out.”

Good. Okay.

Yeah. I don’t know. I’m a little mystified that nobody noticed that this text was transmitted throughout time and nobody noticed that, yeah, there was an exile that was pretty bad, but the promised destruction to all of these different kingdoms and all of this stuff—none of that happened. Why are we still transmitting a text that failed in its prophecy? You know what I mean?

Well, and maybe that has to do with the rhetorical excesses, but at the same time, I think if this is written when this was written, a lot of those nations were already gone. The Moabites and the Ammonites—I mean, they were probably around to some degree, but the nations certainly were not there anymore. I mean, the Edomites, they become Idumea, so they stick around for a while, but they’re not mentioned in here. And so at least some of these groups had become either dwindling away to nothing, or they had already been conquered by Assyria or by Babylon or something like that. So there might be a degree to which you’re supposed to hear those names and be like, “Yeah, check, check.”

They’re gone. So this is an explanation for what happened to them.

It could be. I mean, that’s one way to look at it. But at the same time, the prophecy isn’t coming down to us from 1000 BCE. The prophecy is openly a prophecy from this late time period when we already know those folks.

Yeah, I’m saying it’s an etiology for why they’re gone. Right?

Yeah, it could be. It could be. But, yeah, there are a lot of prophecies like that where, you know, Tyre is supposed to be scraped off the Earth and never reinhabited. And it’s like, well, that never happened. And people say, “Well, you know, their power was mitigated for a time.” I was like, “Well, that’s not what the prophecy says.”

Yeah, it’s a. It’s just an interesting thing. I. You know, it’s fun to hear this sort of apocalyptic language and know that it’s like. Because nobody’s taking the Zephaniah and saying it’s about now. You know what I mean? The way they do with, with. With Revelation, where they’re saying, oh, it’s about.

Yeah, and, and 2026. Yeah.

Yeah. So it’s fun to see something, words. It does feel so clearly rooted in its own moment and, and just use that as a sort of comparison text to the, the, the prophets that.

Yeah, because it’s doing the same thing or whatever. Yeah, it’s doing the same thing that all those other folks are doing.

Right.

It’s just not scattered with kind of vague prophecies that we can exploit and appropriate and, and pretend are. Are about today. There’s just not a lot of low hanging fruit in Zephaniah for anybody to be using. I’m sure there are folks.

Although I did see an owl once, and so now I’m wondering if that’s a reference, if it’s happening.

Yeah. I was on a drive. Somebody would say this was an ominous sign. When I was driving home from Crested Butte from Colorado, I was driving next to a river, and at one point, the road turns right to go over the river. And there was a barrier along the side of the bridge. And right on the end, I could see something large poking up on the top of the post where the barrier began. And I was like, is that a bird? I think that’s a bird. That’s a big bird. And as I got closer, I was like, definitely a bird. And right as I was rounding the corner, passing this post, a great horned owl just turned its head all the way around and stared right at me. And I like, first one I’d ever seen in the wild. I, I was like, that is awesome. That is probably, as the ancient Mesopotamian omen list said, unfavorable.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it probably indicated the desolation of Nineveh.

What I would say.

Yes. Well, it was, it was lodging on a fence post and not in the capitals, so it was not quite as severe. Okay. But yeah, it did. I did have a little bit of stress making it to the next charging station in time. So I was down to like 5%. So maybe great horned owl on a fence post means you better get to that charging station.

You better hope that. That your EV lasts.

Yeah. Turn the air down a little bit. Get a couple more miles out of that charge.

Exactly. All right, well, friends, that’s it for Zephaniah. Thanks so much for joining us. If you would like to, if you enjoyed this, share it with somebody. We always appreciate that. You can also give us five stars on wherever you. You might find five stars to give.

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Bye everybody.

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