The Grandfather of the Hebrew Bible (and What Is Zion?)

You see this in some of the Psalms, maybe in Isaiah. Jerusalem cannot fall.

Famously, Jerusalem kind of fell a time or two. So.

Yes. Yeah. Every. Every time somebody’s like, God is with us. We cannot be defeated. That is usually the sign for somebody to be defeated.

Somebody’s gonna be playing Taps pretty soon.

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? Ready to do some combating? I’m. I’m a lot less hot than you because my cool works currently, so. That’s nice.

Yeah. We are 12 years into this home and. And the AC has been not working for the last two days, so crapping.

Out a little bit. So.

So if you’re watching this on. On YouTube and you see Dan a glowier than normal. Let’s. Let’s be kind.

There’s a hue. But. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, today we have some fun to get into. And so the first thing we’re going to talk about is it’s going to be a What’s That? And I’m just going to say Baal Cycle. I’m not. I’ll explain nothing else. I. You can’t make me until we get into it.

Thus the segment What’s That?

What, what is that? And the second one, we’re going to do a History’s Mysteries. A couple weeks ago, Dan, you and I asked the question or you and I were talking about it and I realized that I didn’t know. There’s a word that I had used much, and that word is Zion.

Or Zion or whatever. And we’ll talk about how it’s pronounced, but I didn’t really know what it meant. And. And in that episode a couple weeks ago, you said that make a good segment. And I said, well, okay, let’s do it then.

And in one of the first examples ever of this happening, we actually followed up.

We actually did it.

So that’s. So that’s. That’s what’s coming up. But first, What’s That? Okay, so the Baal Cycle, it sounds like a. I. I can’t even say what it sounds like. Sounds like an exercise bike at the gym that you don’t want to use. But talk to me about this. We’re talking about Baal. We’re talking about.

Yes. Or Baal, as some folks prefer to call him, because in. In spelling it’s usually B-A-A-L or B, A, and then you’ve got some kind of indication of an ayin and then L. So it’s the name of a deity.

Right. And, and we’re, we’re not about to get pedantic about how you pronounce it. You pronounce it however you want.

Yes, you pronounce it how, how it’s easy for you to understand and pronounce. As with maybe the word wont, if that happens to be your wont or happens to be your wants, whatever your.

Own personal however you want to wont, we won’t want to correct you.

But this comes to us courtesy of the Ugaritic literature. And we had to have talked about Ugarit to some.

We have mentioned Ugarit. We have talked a little bit. You know, the word Ugaritic comes up from time to time. But I think we should start by a quick brush up on, on what Ugarit is, where it was, all that sort of stuff.

Okay, so to lay our scene, it’s 1929. A French farmer, well, a farmer in French-occupied Syria, is plowing a field, hits a rock, cannot move the rock, uncovers what turns out to be the top of an ancient stone doorway or sarcophagus. Actually, I think it is not a doorway. But anyway, calls some archaeologists and, and discover a whole damn city. And, and we did not know where this city was. It is called Ugarit. We, we know that now; at the time they didn’t know what city this was. I think that, I think there were some scholars who were like, could this be Ugarit? Because this was a city that was mentioned in some other literature. But we found a bunch of texts written in cuneiform. But we didn’t know that it was not anything anyone had ever seen before.

Cuneiform is just thumbtack writing.

Well, it’s little wedge-shaped impressions in clay or carved in stone. And people went to work trying to figure out what’s going on here. They counted up all of the different signs and they realized there were only 30 of them. Now the thing with cuneiform is it usually has well over a hundred different signs because they’re usually reflections of a syllable, so a consonant plus a vowel. But you can’t write in a syllabic script that only has 30 characters.

So we went about deciphering it based on the assumption that it was that. And one of the assumptions that helped us is, okay, in Northwest Semitic, the most common letter is the mem. And so we’re going to catalog how many times all of the different characters occur. And whichever occurs the most, we’re just going to say, that’s a mem.

Our best guess is mem.

And then we’re going to say, where are all the two letter words that have a mem? Because there are only a handful of words that can be that. And so then we went, the other letter has got to be one of these two or three or four different letters if we do that. And basically we deciphered this Northwest Semitic language and it is Ugaritic. And we found a bunch of receipts, we found a bunch of letters, we found. We found a bunch of ritual texts, we found a bunch of mythology. And one of those texts happens to be this thing called the Baal cycle. And what, what fascinates scholars like me about Ugaritic is it basically stops and is just lost about the same time that the people of Israel first show up on the scene many miles south of there.

Interesting.

And so the languages are very, very closely related. In fact, if you want to learn Ugaritic, you should start with Biblical Hebrew. And then you have a foundation. People can say, okay, this is just like Hebrew with this word over here and this over here. And so there are a lot of ways that it helps us to fill in our understanding of the development of Northwest Semitic languages and helps us better understand what’s going on in Hebrew. It’s revolutionized our study of the Hebrew Bible in a lot of different ways. But the Baal cycle has a lot of language, has a lot of terminology, has a lot of titles, has a lot of deities that are very closely related to what we see in the Hebrew Bible. And we’re going to talk about a few of those points of contact and why this is such a boon for the study of the Hebrew Bible.

As I was reading this and looking at it, even I was like, oh, I’ll bet that is a cognate to this person. So, yeah, I’m catching them too. Yeah, and I’m just the ding dong.

In the show, so that’s fun. It’s called the Baal cycle because there are three different main kind of storylines. So these are narrative arcs and there are three of them. So similar to how scholars talk about the Abraham cycle or the Jacob cycle in Genesis, because we got several stories that are going on and Wagner’s Ring cycle or, or, yeah, whatever. And you have three different main ones. They have to do with kingship and they have to do with Baal, obviously. But, but one of the cool things is that Baal is not the head of the pantheon. Baal is one of the second tier deities. The head of the pantheon is a dude named El. Yeah, now we know El. Yeah, because El’s all over the Bible. El is God, El means God and El is the paterfamilias.

Point of order. El isn’t always God in the way that the Bible refers to God. Right. Like Elyon, like high. El is the guy that gives Adonai dominion over Israel. Right, right. So like, but then they become conflated later.

So did I get that right?

Yes. Initially, El and Adonai were distinct deities.

Right.

And at one point they were conflated and they became the same deity. But when we look at the way that El is represented separate from Adonai, El is elderly, El is benevolent, El has seniority, is basically the ruler over the pantheon, basically a patriarchal high deity. And what did we find in, in the Baal cycle, we found an elderly patriarchal high deity who ruled over the pantheon. And then when we look at the way Adonai is represented, distinct from El, when it’s just Adonai on their own, Adonai is a youthful, violent warrior associated with storm imagery. And guess what we find in the Baal cycle? A youthful violent warrior associated with storm imagery in the character of Baal, who is a second tier deity. In other words, who’s one of the sons of El.

Now, when, when we look throughout all the Ugaritic literature, Baal is, is actually sometimes the son of Dagon, sometimes the son of El. It, it, it’s not consistent. What do you know? Just like the Bible.

Yeah, that, that was the one that I was like, hey, I caught one. I, I, and then I had to look it up. Is this, is this sort of, is this the same? Yeah, basic thing. So, yeah.

And so Baal and all these other second tier deities are the offspring of Athirat. She is the creatrix of the gods. She is the mother of the 70 sons of El.

Is she the consort of El, or is she just.

Okay, yes, so she’s, she’s the consort. But when you look in the literature, it is. It does have a very kind of. It’s an odd kind of royal state of affairs because there’s a part where Athirat is going to go to El to butter El up so that she can request Baal be given a palace.

Right. She advocates for Baal.

Right. And one of the reasons Athirat has to go do it is because another goddess, Anat, went and threatened Baal.

Right.

And that didn’t work. So. Yeah. So Athirat’s like, I’ll take care of it.

Let me smooth this over.

Yeah. And then you’ve got some other deities. Yam. Yam, who’s also referred to as Nahar. And interesting. Yam in Hebrew would be sea. The sea.

From sea to shining sea, and then.

Naharum to shining Yam.

Yeah, that. So that’s when you go into the grocery store and see yams. That’s where they come from. Etymologically, it’s not important anyway, is it really? No. And then Nahar means river. Okay. So Nahar is another way to refer to Yam. So this is basically the waters. And it. This is. This deity is representative of chaotic waters because the sea is dangerous, my friends.

It was angry that day. And. And, you know, you’re. You never know what you’re gonna get when you go out on the sea.

Right.

And it consumes a lot of lives. And then you also have Mot and literally means death in ancient Northwest Semitic languages. So in Hebrew, as well as in Ugaritic. And so there’s a deity named Mot. And then you have Kothar wa-Hasis is. Is a crafts person deity.

Not. Not. Not in the. Not in the. The television and film version. Crafty is crap. The craft station is where you get your food, where you get.

Right, right, right. Not services.

Not craft services.

No, no.

But he does person. Right, right. He’s a. He’s a. He’s a builder of things and a things.

So. So this is the deity you go to when you need, you know, your supplies, when you need weapons or when you need to build the palace or whatever.

This is some fancy clubs to beat somebody up.

Yeah, yeah. Try this one. Oh, that didn’t work. Okay, try this other one.

He’s the equivalent of the guy that made Thor’s hammer.

Yeah, yeah. It was Peter Dinklage, wasn’t it?

Peter Dinklage. That’s right.

He can play that guy too.

Yeah. And then Shapash is the Semitic word for sun. So You’ve got the sun goddess who, who functions as kind of a mediator deity as well. So these are the main characters and, and they are cognate, parallel to what’s going on in a lot of the, the parts of the Bible. So in the, the first cycle, Yam says, hey, everybody, I’ve been doing really well lately. You know, I’ve been racking up a lot of, a lot of W’s. And, and so I want to be king over the divine council. And divine council is another thing that we see a lot of in the Ugaritic literature that had a lot of scholars going like, oh, this is in the Bible too.

Oh, okay. So this is helping us. Just like the frog DNA helps create dinosaurs in that, that documentary I saw back in the 90s. The Ugaritic literature helped us fill in some of the gaps in the pantheon DNA of, of the Hebrew Bible.

Right.

So all the other deities are like, you know, bowing down. We’re not worthy. We’re not worthy. Except for Baal and Baal’s. Like, don’t think so. And, and interestingly, this has a lot to do with geography and environment and stuff like that, because there are parts of ancient civilization where the river is what makes civilization possible.

That is what makes things that makes agriculture possible, particularly when you get into the mountains. Now, now Ugarit is kind of close to the coast. It’s, it’s more coastal than it is mountainous. But these deities are all operating far to the north or to the south in the more mountainous regions where the rain is what you count on. And, and this is what. This is also the case in the, the central and northern hill countries of Israel and Judah. It was not rivers and seas that made their civilization possible. It was the rain. And who’s responsible for the rain?

Not Yam, the storm deity.

The storm deity is responsible for the rain. So the storm deity stands up and says, no, I’m more important. And El is kind of like, yeah, sure, Yam, you can take over. And El is kind of represented as your, as your elderly kind of, you know, on the back nine deity who’s.

He’s the King Lear. He’s. He’s ready to. He’s ready to turn over his. His rule.

Yeah. He’s kind of treated as a lame duck now. There, there are some times when. When he will throw it down if he needs to. Right. But. But here he’s like, he doesn’t oppose Yam’s kingship. So. And there are a lot of different ways that. That people try to explain that. But. But basically Baal and Yam are going to fight. Yeah. And so Baal goes to Kothar-wa-Hasis and gets some weapons. And I wanted to read just some of that just so you can get a sense for what this language is like. And it’s very fragmentary. This is one of the most frustrating parts of this. There are a lot of lacunae. It’s. It’s, you know, you get a sentence or two and then a gap of maybe a letter or two or maybe 50 lines.

We should make it clear these. So what we have, where we’re getting this is from clay tablets.

That the. The letters were impressed into the clay and then they were fired. And so that’s. That’s why they’ve survived this long. But if the tablets are broken and you got a chunk missing or whatever, then what are you going to do? You just fill it in as best you can.

So I’m reading in from Religious Texts from Ugarit, which is Nicholas Wyatt’s translation of all these texts, which includes the Baal cycle and a bunch of other texts.

It’s funny because the cover of the book just says Wyatt. And I was like, Ron Wyatt?

It’s not Ron, but Nick was one of the readers for my doctoral dissertation, so always been a fan of Nick. So there’s a part where Baal is getting angry, says, I shall knock down his houses. Into the underworld will fall my strength, and into the dust my power from his mouth. His speech barely went forth from his lips his word. And he gave forth his voice in groaning beneath the throne of Prince Yam. So Baal is. It’s not looking good for Baal. But then Kothar, this translation says Kothar-and-Hasis, and that’s what the W means in. In Ugaritic spoke. Indeed I say to you, O Prince Baal. I repeat, O Charioteer of the Clouds. And by the way, that’s a title that Adonai has.

Oh, really?

Bible? Yes.

Yes. Charioteer of the Clouds. Rider of the clouds.

Because the storm deity goes. Yeah. And rides the clouds around now your foe, Baal. Now your foe. You must smite. Now you must destroy your adversary. Take your everlasting kingdom, your eternal dominion. Kothar fashioned two maces, and he pronounced their names. You. Your name is Expeller. Expeller. Expel Yam. Expel Yam from his throne, Nahar from the seat of his dominion. You must leap from the hand of Baal like a falcon. From his fingers strike the shoulders of Prince Yam. The chest of Ruler Nahar. The mace leapt from the hand of Baal like a falcon. From his fingers it struck the shoulders of Prince Yam, the chest of Ruler Nahar. But Yam was strong. He did not flinch. His joints did not tremble. His visage was not discomposed. Kothar fashioned two maces, and he pronounced their names. You. Your name is Alldriver. Alldriver, drive Yam away. Drive Yam from his throne Nahar.

You must leap from the hand of Baal like a falcon. From his fingers strike the skull of Prince Yam. The brow of Ruler Nahar. Let Yam collapse in a heap. Let him fall to the ground. Then the mace leapt from the hand of Baal like a falcon. From his fingers it struck the skull of Prince Yam. The brow of Ruler Nahar. Yam collapsed in a heap. He fell to the ground. His joints trembled and his visage was discomposed. Baal gathered up and drank Prince Yam to the dregs. He exterminated Ruler Nahar.

So you know what that is? That is harsh. When you. When you’ve defeated an enemy and then you drank him. That’s. That’s pretty definitive.

It’s. Yeah, well, that’s what you got to do to. That’s. That’s the flex over the sea. When you defeat the sea, you just slurp it up and. Yeah, there are some other examples in Enuma Elish, the Babylonian, the Neo-Babylonian version of the creation account, Marduk defeats Tiamat, who is also representative of the chaotic waters of the sea. But when Marduk defeats Tiamat, Marduk splits Tiamat’s body into two, and the one half becomes the waters of the heavens and the other half becomes the earth, which should. Which should sound familiar to you if.

If you’ve read Genesis, chapter one.

You may recognize that where the depths.

Are referred to as Tehom, which is the Hebrew cognate term for Tiamat. Only it’s not this chaotic deity. It’s now just inert water, but it’s still split the waters above the waters beneath to facilitate the creation of the Earth. So. So, yeah, you have a lot of parallels there. And then, so Baal fights Yam, Baal defeats Yam. It’s the classic story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, girl dies in a blimp accident over the Orange Bowl.

Boy drinks girl.

And then the next part, Baal wants a palace because Baal gets the kingship. But you wanted. He needed to be fully in charge.

You can’t be the king if you don’t have a. If you don’t have a castle.

Right. And, you know, we see something very similar going on in the Hebrew Bible when David’s like, yeah, we got our. We got our capital city, we got everything that we need, but God is still dwelling in a tent. We need a home. My boys need a home. Jerry. We need a temple for our God. And so in order for Baal to be truly the leader of the gods, Baal needs to have a temple. And so Kothar wa-Hasis is going to help, but first they need permission. And this is where Anat goes to El. And it’s like, give my boy a temple. And that doesn’t work out.

Instead, threatens him, like, threatens to bloody his beard.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like chunks of your. Your brain or something are gonna. Are gonna be scattered on your. Your gray beard.

And I’m not.

If I’m not mistaken, it might be Baal’s sister. Like, she keeps referring to him as brother. Is that right?

Yes. Although there. There are some places where their relationship is a little more amorous.

So, yeah, it’s. It’s a messed up system, but it’s also very inconsistent. But interestingly enough, there is a text from the late 5th century, early 4th century BCE from a Jewish garrison in Egypt, in Elephantine that refers to the Jewish God as Anat-Yahu, which is widely understood to refer to the divine pair. And so Asherah is not the only consort of Adonai. We also have, at least in Egypt, end of the fifth century, beginning of the fourth century, we have an Anat-Yahu divine pairing. It would seem so interesting. Yes, very interesting. So Athirat negotiates with El. Permission is granted. El remains supreme. But Kothar wa-Hasis builds the palace. And there’s a debate about whether or not it should have windows. You know, and this is something that you always have your. With your contractors.

You can’t do it, can’t come at you. You know, we didn’t get the permits. I got three bids. It’s going to be out of the budget. I don’t know what you want to do.

Yeah. Now, you know, if I had like a thousand dollars right now, maybe I could do something with that. But I, I assume everybody works with contractors that extort you. But maybe that’s. But the. And interestingly, windows in Baal’s palace, the palace of the storm deity, resonates with this idea of windows of heaven, because what comes out of the windows of heaven?

And storm clouds. That’s where. That’s how they get in. That’s how they get you. So Baal begins to rule. The thunder rolls, as the great poet once sang. Rain falls, agriculture flourishes. And then the next cycle begins. We got a problem, though. Somebody else shows up. Mot, the death, basically sends Baal an invitation. And this is kind of like in the movies where death, you get a note from Death. It’s like, we have an appointment that means you’re going to die. And so when you get an invitation from Mot, that means you’re going to die. Oh, and something fascinating about the Ugaritic literature is you’ve got a bunch of angels running around. Only in the Ugaritic literature, the angels don’t communicate between gods and humans. The angels communicate between gods and gods.

Right.

You send divine messengers to other gods.

Right.

Yeah. So we have kind of a parallel pantheon, but in the Bible, it has been renegotiated. It has evolved to serve different functions. Yeah, because.

Yeah, it’s. It, it’s. That part is very interesting. But I’m, I’m trying to speed us up a little bit because we got to get through this.

Okay. So anyway, Mot is characterized by having this great maw that just swallows people whole. Death is, you know, swallows you whole. And, and Baal doesn’t win this fight.

He dies, goes into the underworld, disappears, rain stops, the earth becomes barren. Very much like the droughts that we have in the Hebrew Bible that are Adonai’s responsibility. El is mourning, tears his clothes, throws dust on himself. He’s a cutter, cuts his skin. This is kind of conventional mourning behavior rituals. And Anat is not going to take it and so searches for Baal. Anat is the one who ultimately Anat is like, in, in the Ugaritic pantheon, the people you were most scared of were the women. The, the, the men were, were, you know, they were warriors. Sure. But when Anat was coming at you.

Yeah, that was like, vicious. And that seems terrifying.

Yeah. Heck. She, like, there are parts of the narratives where, where Anat has like the hands of her fallen enemies, like strewn together to create like a sash or, or they’re, they’re like hanging off of her back, just kind of dangling there as a favorite accessory. Yeah. So she’s vicious, but she hacks Mot to pieces and then death itself is, is treated like harvested grain. She winnows him, burns him, grinds him, scatters him to in the fields because that is, you know, the ultimate flex to, to not just defeat him, but do all that other crap. Yeah. And Baal comes back, rain returns, life returns. And so there are a lot of people are like, oh, this is, this is cyclical agricultural cycle. This is the, the changing of the seasons. There, there’s a degree to which it’s, it’s related to that.

But the dying and rising God motif, which is what a lot of people like to latch on to, that’s an outdated 19th century framework. It’s not so much dying and rising as it is dying and returning. Because dying is geographic rather than ontological. To die is to travel to the underworld.

It is interesting to me. Like I, you know, you mentioned the season idea, but to me what makes a lot more sense is what you referred to before, which is the idea that there may have, there. There are periodically in any area droughts, and if a period of drought was particularly devastating, people are going to be asking, where is our God? Where is our storm deity that we’ve been worshiping, who has been providing for us for this time? And you know, coming up with a way in which, you know, he was eaten by death is a, is an interesting, you know, that’s an interesting explanation. And then a few years later, back he comes after he’s been rescued, after.

His sister has gone and committed some violent crimes.

And yeah, interestingly, when death is killed, death also comes back eventually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is, this is something, this is an interesting part of the Hebrew Bible because you have, you, you kind of have the death of the gods. Like at least Psalms 82 consigns the, the gods of the divine council, the, the patron deities of the nations, consigns them to mortality. You will fall like men. You will die like any prince.

But then they all come back. They’re, they, you know, and they get, they get squished down into, into more angelic slash demonic status, but they come back. And I, and I think that reflects this fascinating feature of this literature, that the literature sticks around, even the older stuff. And so you’re always having to renew your kind of engagement with the text. It’s kind of, you know, like the Simpsons. How old is Bart Simpson by now? Every season it starts over.

He’s deep in his 40s. Yeah, yeah, but 50s probably.

At this point I think I’m supposed to be the same age as Bart Simpson because when I, the first time I saw the Simpsons I was like, hey, it was when it first came out and I was like, hey, I’m also a 10 year old blond kid who is kind of stupid. But you know, this is kind of a feature of this. You can’t really. Because the literature and the stories kind of establish the foundation of things. You can’t move away from them, you can’t depart from them. They have to be there. And so if you, you know, if you have the anvil falling on Wile E. Coyote, Wile E. Coyote’s got to come back.

So I think that’s an interesting feature of all this and that’s what’s going on in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as well. By the time you get down to the New Testament, a lot’s been changed, but guess what? Nothing’s been changed because all these things still have to be there. Their, their exact nature is just a little different. They’re, you know, dismissed as, as powers and, and dominions and thrones and angels and demons and, and all that kind of stuff. But they’re the same patron deities. They are just described.

This whole thing has been so interesting and it’s funny because, you know, as I, as I’ve been sort of present while you’ve had discussions with other, with other scholars about, about this stuff, it is clear that studying Ugaritic has become integral to understanding to, to, to Bible studies. Even though that, you know, this is not considered biblical by any means. But, but yeah, everybody’s clamoring for like, where can I study Ugaritic? Where can I, you know, where can I study the, you know, Ugarit? And I think that that’s, that’s really interesting and yeah, and yeah, it does. It sheds a lot of light on where this stuff came from because this, all this definitely precedes everything biblical, right?

Everything. In fact it probably when Ugarit gets destroyed in the late Bronze Age collapse and Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C. is far and away the best discussion of that. If you want a book on the late Bronze Age collapse, that’s what you should check out. But that is probably the demise of Ugarit. Most of these texts were written in the 13th or 14th centuries BCE. Our earliest reference of any kind whatsoever to any people group known as Israel dates to about 1208 BCE. So right about the time that. That right just before Ugarit is going to fall. So. So yeah, the. Everything that’s written in the Bible is coming from a couple hundred years after the fall of Ugarit, where the language has changed a little bit more. We’ve lost case endings and stuff like that. So. So it’s basically taking the pieces of that. The Ugaritic literature is basically the grandfather of biblical Hebrew.

So cool.

You have to study it if you want to really dig down to the bedrock of what’s going on in biblical Hebrew.

So cool. So interesting. All right, well, I think that is genuinely fascinating stuff and I am excited that we got to talk about it, but it’s time to move on. So let’s get into it with histories, mysteries. So the histories mystery is the word Zion or the concept of Zion or whatever Zion is.

So let’s start by. Since I said. Since I said we would, let’s start by talking about how it is pronounced. What is this word?

So it’s a Hebrew word in Hebrew. It’s spelled tsade yod vav nun. So it would be pronounced Tsiyon in Hebrew.

So we’re all.

Most people are not going to say Tsiyon. We’re going to Zion National Park down in southern Utah. So in. In transliteration, we usually. You can say Zion. You can say Tsiyon. You can say whatever you want.

Yeah. If you’re a Wachowski, it’s going to be Zion. If you’re a Utahn, it’s going to be Zion.

Yeah, but it’s, you know, there’s. Again, we’re not prescriptivists on the Data Over Dogma podcast. Not at all, because we’re adults.

But the—I’m not sure about that, but it’s debated among scholars. Yes. So, but this is a word that is used. It’s actually used a few different ways.

Yeah. And—yeah. And within the Latter-day Saint tradition, it’s used even a few more different ways.

Even differenter ways. Yes.

But the—what I wanted to do is go back to the earliest uses and see what we could figure out there and go back to etymology and stuff like that. And there’s not really a universally agreed-upon etymology, but it probably has something to do with being dry. It probably comes from a root that has reference to being dry, but is being used to refer to a—a place that is like a rocky outcropping that is used for protection and the—one of the—one of the probably—

Stronghold sort of thing, kind of.

But—but because you—we’re getting a little—we’re conflating some different terms because the first—one of the earliest references to Zion is from 2 Samuel chapter 5. And there we have—this is where the Jebusites are occupying Jerusalem and David is going to fight up against them. And—and they do. Okay. But then verse seven says nevertheless, David took the matsudat Zion, the stronghold of Zion. And then it says hi Ir Dawid, or that is the city of David. And so the City of David is the new name for the—the stronghold of Zion. And this was probably the name that was given to the location that is to be identified either with the entire little outcropping. So the—the, if you’re—if you’re looking at a satellite photo of Jerusalem, the City of David is kind of the Florida of the Temple Mount.

It kind of pokes down. There’s a—

There’s a ridge, a dangling appendage. Is that what you say?

That—that—that comes down from the kind of southeastern side of the Temple Mount and that is known as the City of David. And so Zion probably originally referred to, if not that whole thing, maybe kind of a rocky outcropping, an acropolis that was at one point a part of that—that dangling participle. So that’s probably the stronghold of Zion. It probably comes from something associated with—with dryness where it refers to something that is all rock instead of having any kind of soil and things on it. But it became associated with a place of protection. You could climb up on top of this. So basically the movie Tremors, where did they find protection? In the rocky outcroppings. So they had to start just sort of—

I mean, it’s interesting that just by dumb luck, the LDS people who named the—the national park down south in Utah, they actually nailed it when they used their word Zion for a dry—a dry rocky place in—in southern Utah.

So that’s—that’s kind of cool.

So the—the name may even predate the Judahite occupation of the area. Okay. Because since they—they renamed it the City of David, so it may have been like a Jebusite or—or some other kind of pre-Hebrew Semitic name that was given to this site, which may be why it doesn’t—it’s kind of hard to gain kind of etymological purchase on what’s going on there. But then later on, David brings the Ark to Jerusalem, Solomon builds the temple. And then you get the mergence—the—the merging of different ideas about the ark and divine presence and Davidic kingship and—and all this kind of stuff. And so Zion begins to take on this sense of God’s holy mountain. And even though the temple was not built in the City of David, the temple was built to the north, Mount Moriah, the larger Temple Mount that is the—the, you know, torso of which the City of David is the Florida.

So, but—but Zion becomes shorthand for the place where Adonai dwells. And so, okay, you begin to see it used that way as kind of a way to refer to the presence of God. And this—and this leads to what some people have called Zion theology, which is this idea that because God dwells there, Zion is special, it’s protected, it’s not going to be harmed. And you see this in some of the Psalms, maybe in Isaiah, Jerusalem cannot fall. And, you know, it’s an idea that is—is kind of mocked in public discourse today. This idea that, you know, this is—the ship is unsinkable kind of stuff.

Right.

And famously, Jerusalem kind of fell a time or two. So.

Yes. Yeah. Every—every time somebody’s like, God is with us, we cannot be defeated. That is usually designed for somebody to be defeated.

Somebody’s going to be playing taps pretty soon.

Yes. They’re going to go down with the ship. Like, what’s her name, Dido, who did not go down—no, she did go down with this ship. Dang it. Screw that one up. But other 90s, other late Gen Xers, or elder Millennials will know what I was trying to get at. But then the exile obviously happened, and so Zion theology gets busted, which doesn’t mean, okay, we throw it out the window. We get rid of it entirely. It means we renegotiate it.

Right.

We rewired it.

Ha ha ha.

I don’t even know how the Tim the Tool Man Taylor grunts work anymore, but.

All your references, so contemporary, so hip.

And now, hey, if anybody’s topical, it’s me.

That’s right.

So, yeah, I was gonna make some “you might be a redneck” jokes too, but just because, you know, that’s what everybody’s talking about these days. So you have this. When you have a temple that God inhabits and God is the highest God, if that temple falls, you’ve got to rationalize how that happens. And usually you’ve got a few options. One option is to say, well, our God lost. Usually you don’t like that option?

It’s less appealing for sure.

Yes, yes. Um, another option is to say, okay, God is upset with us and God abandoned the temple. And without that protection, then it was just a regular old building and, you know, you can knock it over. So that’s, that’s generally what you do. In the Hebrew Bible, they went a step further where they were like, it’s not just that God abandoned it and enemies destroyed it, it’s that God brought the enemies in to destroy it. It was God’s plan all along.

Right.

But because God temporarily abandoned Zion, the Zion theology has to be—it has to become more symbolic.

It has to be updated.

Yeah, yeah. It has to be something that we are yearning for, a return to innocence. Just like the commercials that you would hear in your dreams because you fell asleep on the couch with the TV on and then you had some Enya going when you woke up. But when the Second Temple is being built, you get—Zion kind of expands its scope. It now becomes a lot more stuff. And today Mount Zion is actually the name of one of the hills in Jerusalem.

Oh, okay.

One to the west a little bit, which is the kind of the hill that overlooks the western side of the Valley of Hinnom.

What’s the rocky outcrop situation there?

It’s not, it’s not incredibly rocky, but one of the very interesting features, if it becomes possible to return to this part of the world recreationally.

At some point in the future. There are, there are some stone steps going up Mount Zion that have been uncovered, that have been dated to the first century CE. And so a lot of scholars would suggest that if Jesus was brought to Caiaphas, whose palace might have been located on Mount Zion, that those steps—he would have been dragged up those steps. So, okay, so that’s always a fun place to visit. If you happen to be in the area right now, don’t be in the area. There are bad things happening, but Zion becomes increasingly symbolic. The whole world could be Zion because God’s presence is there within the Latter-day Saint tradition. You know, you have this idea that Zion is the pure in heart. So wherever the pure in heart will be, there Zion is.

Yeah. There’s a whole history with the Latter-day Saint tradition of—

Zion being Jackson County, Missouri, and then not that anymore. I mean, it’s the same thing. There was like, literally—that’s interesting that it’s so parallel to, you know, there was an exile. The Mormons were exiled from Missouri. They were literally given the boot.

And then, and then suddenly the concept of Zion became far more—

A lot more flexible and a lot more portable.

Yeah. And then it came here to Salt Lake. That’s nice.

But you have this throughout a lot of what’s going on in the Bible. You have this hope of restoration, of return. And Zion is one of the main foci of that idea where Zion is now, this cosmic kind of God’s presence city, the New Jerusalem, all this kind of stuff. We want to return to the way things were, and that will be our ultimate return to Zion.

And Zion is, is a part of that. So we could, you know, I, maybe I’d have to have my friend Ben Park come on the show to talk about Zion within Mormonism. He’s got a whole book on, on American Zion is what the book is called. But, yeah, he, he would be able to talk more about how complex it gets within LDS tradition. But, but yeah, it is parallel. We, we have the, the events of our times have to. They, they force us to kind of renegotiate how we’re representing our relationship to God, what God wants from us, and, and, you know, our spatiality and, and all that kind of stuff. So.

So where is Zion? Zion is wherever you want it to be.

It’s a. So, you know, it starts as a thing, it starts as a, as, as a, as a stronghold, and then it becomes a bigger thing. It becomes a temple, it becomes a city, or. So, I mean, I. Did we get to it being the city of Jerusalem? Because, because I believe that that’s what we talked about on the episode a couple of weeks ago, was that in that particular case, Zion was the city of Jerusalem.

Yeah. Because when once it gets to the point where Zion is, is the. Where God dwells in the temple, that kind of becomes metonymy for the city of Jerusalem. So the city of Jerusalem is the body of which the temple is the beating heart. And so Zion kind of represents. Can represent all of it. And it’s used poetically in parallelism, where you got Jerusalem and Zion and Zion and Jerusalem and, and things like that. So.

Right.

And. And I imagine there are probably some more expansive poetic uses where it’s. It’s representing Israel as. As a whole, either as a territory or as a people. But I have. I didn’t look any of that up. So. But yeah, that’s. That’s what Zion is. It’s also a national park that has some wonderful stuff. Don’t. Don’t go on Angels Landing if you don’t have good shoes, though.

Yeah, that’s true. And don’t go if you’re afraid of heights either.

That too.

I. Zion also becomes. Wait a minute. There’s one more. I think there’s one more.

Because does it not become kind of the people of Israel? It’s not like rather that. Rather than just Jerusalem? Or is it. Doesn’t it also at some points become the. The. The. The people of Jerusalem?

I. That’s. I’m used to hearing that within LDS discourse.

Oh, really?

Yeah, but less that.

Less so in. In biblical stuff. I.

Surely, surely Zion is personified because Zion as a city, it’s. It’s feminine in Hebrew, and so it becomes personified. And so sometimes you get references to Zion as a daughter or something like that, or you get. You get references to the people as the children of Zion. And so almost certainly Zion, when it’s personified, can be used as metonymy for the people as well.

Let me see. If. Because you have references where God will talk to Zion but is talking to the people. Yeah, so. So that could be metonymy, where the city is representative of the people, or Zion could have taken on representation of the people themselves. So, yeah, I’m sure that that is in use in. In different places.

There’s. There, you know, we’ve been talking about the sort of. The LDS traditions surrounding that word. There’s another modern usage of that word that we’ve been kind of avoiding, which is the ism.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Which I, I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds of Zionism except to say that it can be that. That. That has become a flashpoint of a. Of a word, and I think it means different things to different people, and it’s become troubling. So do you have a. Do you feel competent to talk a little bit about Zionism as it is used in modern Judaism and as it relates to Israel or I would feel.

More comfortable, I think we ought to avoid it largely because I would feel more comfortable talking about problems with Christian Zionism, particularly among evangelicals.

I am well out of my lane to talk about Zionism within Judaism, although I would say the notion that anti-Zionism is fundamentally anti-Semitic is phenomenally problematic because it is trying to use a political ideology as a proxy for a very broad and diverse group of people.

Right.

And so that—and this gets to kind of the personification of Zion and its use as metonymy for all the people and all that kind of stuff. So usually Zionism these days is collecting a set of positions regarding the relationship geopolitically of the nation of Israel to the other nations around it, which is not about the Jewish people qua people so much as it is about political concerns.

Right.

And so I would just suggest that Christian Zionists just leave it alone. Christian Zionism is incredibly harmful and, in my opinion, also itself rather anti-Semitic because it is using folks who are committed to this particular political ideology as props. Basically, you are pawns in our eschatological game and we support you because we know what’s coming next. Right. And those Jewish folks don’t come out on the winning end of that event. So I think Christian Zionism is phenomenally problematic and that’s the only one I feel at all qualified to speak on. Although I will say the overwhelming majority of my friends who are Jewish and colleagues of mine who are Jewish would probably identify as anti-Zionists.

Yeah. I just think I will say that as just sort of a caution. If you don’t genuinely understand all of the nuances that surround that word, just avoid it. Just don’t start talking. Don’t call a group of people Zionists because they have a political ideology. I don’t know. I’m just like, if you don’t understand it, I would say avoid it because it can get you in a mess. Yeah. And a mess that causes pain to a lot of people. So yes, those are bad messes.

All right. Well, it’s an interesting word. And oh yeah, there was one more thing I did want to ask. You know, we’ve been talking about the use of the word Zion in the Old

Testament.

Testament, and it is a Hebrew word. Does it come up in the New Testament at all? Does that word—

Yeah, yeah, we do have Zion comes up a couple of times. I think there’s a reference to Mount Zion, at least in the New Testament. Let me do a quick search. I got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 occurrences of Zion in the New Testament. Okay, Matthew 21:5, where we’re quoting the prophecy of the king riding in on the donkey: “Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you.” Okay, John 12:15, same thing: “Don’t be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt.” Romans 9:33: “As it is written: See, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make people stumble, a rock that will make them fall.” So we got another quotation. Romans 11:26: “And in this way, all Israel will be saved. As it is written, out of Zion will come the Deliverer.” “The Deliverer,” I assume that’s supposed to say. Yes, the Deliverer. Hebrews 12:22: “But you have come to Mount Zion, into the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering.”

1 Peter, again, we’re quoting Scripture, 2:6: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone.” And then Revelation 14:1: “Then I looked, and there was the Lamb standing on Mount Zion.”

Okay, there you go. Fascinating stuff. We know the word now. I feel competent at very least in the biblical use of that word.

Yes. Hopefully we have caused the waters to muddy a bit. But you understand now the complexities a little better. Right? And that’s what learning is—realizing it’s not as simple as you wanted it to be.

It’s not one thing. It’s a bunch of things.

All right, friends, well, thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, we would really encourage you to become a patron if you can. Look, the show’s free. You don’t have to. But if you would like to become a part of the team, as it were, head on over to patreon.

Thanks so much to Roger Gowdey for editing our show, thanks to Sam for being our producer, and thanks to all of you all for tuning in. We’ll talk to you again next time.

Bye, everybody.

The Grandfather of the Hebrew Bible (and What Is Zion?)

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