Old Testament God Bad, New Testament God Good?

The authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible didn’t want to use the word God, so they replaced Elohim with some kind of pejorative. Now, gilulim is the fun one because it probably comes from a word that means feces. And so you’re approximating the word God, but really what you’re calling these things are shit gods. 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. Because what a fool believes is, I don’t have anywhere to go with that.

But we were just singing. We were just singing that song.

We were harmonizing.

We got Michael McDonald ringing in our ears and. And, you know, sometimes that just happens. That’s. There’s not much you can do about that.

The musicals are right on that. Every now and then you just break into song.

And the dance routines are not as well choreographed in real life as. As in La La Land, but, you know, what can you do?

You do what you can. I’ve been known to do a dance routine in. On both on stage and in my life. So there you go.

Very famous jig that. That Bruce Willis danced at the end of The Last Boy Scout that everybody hearing this show definitely recalls.

So even I don’t know that one. All right. Yeah. So today we are going to do a show. Did we even say our names? I’m Dan Beecher, you’re Dan McClellan. I don’t know.

We did say that. Yes, we did get that far.

Okay. I wasn’t sure how. How early we interrupted our standard.

Yeah, our brains are pudding right now.

We did just get back from a fun but tiring trip to Los Angeles where we rubbed shoulders with famous folk and whatever. Anywho, today we’re going to be doing a couple of cool things we’re going to be talking about. At first, we’re going to do a Watch Your Language. And the language we’re going to be watching is the language of deity in the Bible, how it’s referred to, what it all means. And then in keeping with the theme of deity in the Bible, we’re going to do a Taking Issue. And what we’re taking issue with is, is it cool? Is it okay to say that New Testament Bible, New Testament God is better than Old Testament God or vice versa?

Is that a valid, valuable thing to say? Or is it maybe anti-Semitic? All right, so we will be covering that later in the program, but let’s dive in with Watch Your Language. All right, so here we are with the Bible. It’s interesting because as I read the Bible in English. In English translations, right. I tend to see, like two words, God and Lord. Maybe it doesn’t seem like there’s that many ways of referring to deity in the Bible, but you and I have done this show long enough that I know there’s way more than that that just gets sort of compressed into Lord God, God of Hosts sometimes or whatever like it.

But. But I think that there’s a lot more to it. So. So walk me in. Where. Where. Help me out with. With the words for gods. Yeah, well, God and gods.

God. And in the New Testament, the. The Greek is pretty easy. We can talk a little bit about the Greek later on. But I think the Hebrew is much more fascinating because we’ve actually got three different words that can be translated and really should be translated God, G, O, D, just like that. And all three of them could be used to refer to the God of Israel. So like an appellative, this is the God, capital G, God. Or they could also be used to refer to lowercase g, god. Any old run of the mill god. So the one of my famous mean tweets is when they had Larry King on and he read a tweet that said, I thought, I think I saw Larry King at dinner yesterday. Or it could have just been a run of the mill goblin. But anyway, we’ve got three different words. The most basic term for God in Hebrew is just El. This is spelled Aleph Lamed.

You may hear people translate it or pronounce it ale. So a little bit of a longer E, but El is also a. A common way to pronounce it. And this is actually El.

I’d like to say Alf.

Well, only if you. You’ve got to put the pe on the end, which is pronounced as an F, because then it becomes an acronym for Alien Life Form. But. And that’s the one that eats cats.

Yeah, exactly.

Little known fact, but that’s why you don’t have any reference to cats in the Hebrew Bible. But they were all over Egypt. Why? No God. No God. Yep. Okay. So.

And wow, that is. Yes, that is some Gen X deep cutting right there.

Slash.

Early millennial.

Yeah, nonsense. You can’t have been born after 85 to really have firsthand knowledge of what’s going on there. But. So El is just the generic word for God. If you just want to refer to any old god, use El, but it’s also the name of the patriarchal high deity over the Northwest Semitic pantheon.

And so El can be a personal name, or it can mean. It could just mean God. And then the plural of that is Elim. That’s just your standard yod mem, masculine plural ending on that and so on El. So Elim is something that occurs a number of times in the Hebrew Bible, dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible, but is just a plural reference to gods. Then you have a different singular, Eloah, which is usually Aleph, lamed, vav. And then a He. And this is a peculiar singular. I think it occurs maybe 30 to 40 times in. In the entire Hebrew Bible. It’s not very common. What do we got? 58 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible with approximately 8 occurrences referring to gods other than the God of Israel.

And Elohim actually comes from Eloah. So the most common singular.

Is based on the most rare or the most common plural. Excuse me. Is based on the most rare singular.

So Elohim is technically not the plural of El.

Correct.

It’s the plural of Eloah.

Correct.

And Elim is the plural of El.

Correct.

Oh, my gosh. This is too confusing, Dan.

It gets. It gets complicated.

Oh, thank goodness. Yeah. Yeah. I thought you were going to say it gets worse. And I was like, well, it does.

Get worse when it comes to Elohim, because Elohim can mean either God or gods. It can be singular or plural. And grammatically, the term is plural. And I think we’ve discussed before. Joel Burnett’s book, A Reassessment of Biblical Elohim is probably, in my opinion, the best discussion of what’s going on there. It’s a concretized abstract plural, which is a fancy way of saying, just think of it as a plural or a singular, depending on the verbs, the pronouns, the adjectives that are associated with it. If they’re plural, you’re looking at a plural use of Elohim. If they’re singular, you’re looking at a singular use of.

And usually a context will. Will help you through. You know, when we say the word deer, that can mean multiple deer or a single deer, and we just take it out of. Take it from context. Is. Are there some contexts in which it is unclear whether Elohim is singular or. Or plural?

There. There are some. Well, there. Yeah, there are a couple of rare contexts, but it’s. It’s kind of odd that you wouldn’t be able to tell based on the person speaking whether they’re referring to plural or singular. I think what’s most common, though, is you get a plural Elohim and a plural verb. But it’s like. It really seems like this should be singular. Okay, so. So there are examples of that, and a good example of that would be, like, the. The necromancer of. Of Endor.

You are. You are familiar with. With that story.

Love that story. She’s. She’s like, she’s my girl.

Yeah, she’s. She’s awesome. 1 Samuel 28. Let me pull up 1 Samuel 28. The. The beginning of it, because there’s a part when. When he shows up, and she’s like, all right, well, let me. Let me get into my groove here. And then it says that she. She kind of freaks out. And. Because he. He’s like, give me Samuel. And she freaks out, and she says, why have you deceived me? You’re Saul. And he says, whoa, whoa, what did you see? What did you see? And she says, I see Elohim coming up out of the ground. Only the coming up out of the ground should be a participle that is in the plural. Elohim raiti olim. Yes. So that’s the plural participle for rising up. And Saul’s question is, what does he look like? And so it’s like, I get it.

So she basically said, I see gods rising up out of the. Out of the ground. And he’s like, what does he look like?

Right.

So. So the plural participle, it’s like, okay, is the plural participle just kind of harmonizing with the grammatical plural ending of Elohim? Like, that’s. That’s something that can happen in some prose and poetry where it’s like, we want the. We want the rhyme. We want the. The symmetry.

So when we got an -im on the noun, we’re going to do an -im on the. On the participle or something like that. So. So that’s. That’s an instance where it’s kind of like.

Or was Saul non binary and went with a they. Them thing.

You. You do not have any of that going on in. In the Hebrew Bible, and certainly not with Paul or Saul. Excuse me. But there’s another example that’s interesting in Genesis 20:13, because Abraham is talking to Abimelech, and this is. You’ll recall the. The story where he says, well, this is my sister. And Abimelech’s like, I like the cut of her jib.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me get some of that jib. And goes to marry her, God visits Abimelech in the dream and everything. And Abraham in verse 13 and says, When God caused me to wander from my father’s house, I said to her, this is the kindness you must do me at every place at which we come. Say of me, he is my brother. Only the verb there, it’s not a participle, it’s an actual verb. Let me just verify that. Yes, it’s a, it’s a hiphil. And it came to pass when hitu oti elohim, when the gods or God they caused me to wander. And so here though, it’s like, okay, maybe that’s singular, maybe it’s not. Yeah, maybe Abraham was talking about ye old gods, or as we discussed the other day, the old gods, because we know what a thorn is. So that’s an interesting instance where, you know, it’s, it’s debatable.

What exactly is going on there. Now a lot of people are like, how dare you say that Abraham was not a monotheist. But I think there, there are good reasons to think that Abraham was happy to refer to the gods.

So in the Dan McClellan translation, what do you think you do there? Because obviously the traditional translation is just going to say God is just going to make that easy on the reader.

Right.

What does a scholarly translation translator do? Just wait a minute.

You’re a scholarly translator. You said the Dan McClellan translation.

That’s right. The DMT.

Yeah, the DMV.

Because it’s taking forever. It is. I would render what we find in the text. The gods, when the gods caused me to wander. And I’d have a note there.

Yeah, sure.

Be a footnote saying, hey, other people,.

Other people write it this way.

Yeah. Because I, I think, you know, we’ve got to deal with what, what is there in the text unless we have a really, really good reason not to. And as you know, in my opinion, monotheism is not a really good reason not to.

Right.

So, so I, I, I think there, there are some fuzzy areas where it’s not clear exactly what’s going on here. But here’s, here’s an interesting thing about the word Elohim. I counted up, I didn’t like, by hand, count up. I used a program to do it all. But the book, can you guess what book of the Hebrew Bible has the most occurrences of the word Elohim?

Genesis.

Deuteronomy.

Genesis is third.

Deuteronomy is number one. Psalms is number two.

That’s interesting that it’s the Deut. Why is it the Deut?

One of the reasons is because Deuteronomy is just hammering home that Adonai is your God, this is your God, those are other gods, this is your God. Do you recall that this is your God? There are many like it, but this one is yours.

Right?

And so 374 occurrences of Elohim in Deuteronomy 365 in Psalms 219 in Genesis. So third place is a pretty big drop off. And then fourth place, with 204 occurrences is first and second. Nope. Oh, I skipped over first and 2 Chronicles. Okay, Genesis is fourth place, first and second Chronicles 321. That’s neither here nor there. But I think it’s pretty interesting that.

When Deuteronomy is doing it, are they use. Is. Is the Deuteronomist. Is the author using Elohim in the plural most of the time in the singular?

It’s in the singular most of the time. But there are definitely occurrences of Elohim in the plural in Deuteronomy. But the interesting thing about the use of Elohim in Deuteronomy, and particularly with like the. The Shema, which is Deuteronomy 6:4 Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad, which I think ought to be translated Hear, O Israel, the Lord, your God. The Lord is one, or Adonai is one. But this is taken as kind of the quintessential expression of monotheism. But nothing about it is monotheistic. And even the first part of the clause throws into doubt monotheism, because what is your God is the generic use of Elohim with a possessive suffix, which means it’s not an absolute use of Elohim, it is identifying the one among the many that pertains to you.

Right?

And so.

Right, your God as opposed to their God.

Right. So right there it’s not just saying, hey, the God. Which one? What do you mean, which one? There’s only one. It’s saying the one that pertains to you and which is a tacit acknowledgment that not only are there other gods out there, but we recognize that there are gods that pertain to many others, and we’re talking about the one that pertains to you. And. And you can go to Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9 with. With Elyon the Most High, distributing the nations to according to the number of the Bene Elohim the children of God, with Adonai getting his portion, his share of the inheritance being Jacob, being his people, being Israel. You go to Deuteronomy 4:19, where the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole host of heaven, they are distributed to the nations for them to worship. But you. You’re supposed to just worship Adonai, the God of Israel. So there’s. In Deuteronomy, the overwhelming majority of the occurrences of Elohim are not in the appellative sense.

They’re not in the sense of capital G, God. And so you brought up the. The dmv. In the dmv, most of the time that you see the word God in Deuteronomy, it’s going to be a lowercase g even when it says Adonai, your God.

Right.

Is going to be Adonai, your lowercase g. Right, right.

Differentiating this. This is your God, that’s their God.

Right.

In that case, it’s a title, it’s not the name.

Well, they’re a member of a class.

Right.

And you don’t get a capital G just by virtue of being a member of the class.

Well, that brings up an interesting point.

Yes, it does.

Is there a point to using a capital G if you allow the Tetragrammaton?

I think there is a point at which it’s probably. I don’t know if it’s in the priestly literature, it might be a little after that. But there is a point where the title begins to take on the sense.

Of a name, even in the Hebrew.

In the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. In fact, in my second master’s thesis, which I wrote at Trinity Western University, I addressed the idea that it goes from being kind of a generic class to, you would see, ha-Elohim, the God with the definite article on the front as a way to kind of identify a specific God that is understood to be the. The main God. And then the. The definite article drops off. But the usage still seems to be understanding Elohim to be referring to the main God. So. And. And you see that. Go ahead.

But if I were to write the words the main God, your main God, a main God, I would still not capitalize that. Right, right.

But would you capitalize the president?

Would I. Is that. Do we do that?

Yeah. Yeah.

I got to consult my style manual. I don’t know. I guess maybe. I guess you do.

Yeah. But. But if. If it’s like your president, our president, their president, the president.

So I think there’s. It’s interesting. It’s a discussion that a lot of people don’t want to have and don’t like having. But I. But I think it needs to be had. And a lot of people want to read the Trinity into Elohim. They’re like, it’s plurality and unity all in one. It’s. Yeah. And it has nothing to do with the Trinity.

Yeah, sure.

Just. It’s. There’s no case to make that the Trinity has anything to do with. With the plural use of Elohim.

Well, since I brought it up, should we get to the Tetragrammaton?

Yeah, let’s get to the Tetragrammaton. The. The four letters.

Yod, he, vav, he. This is the personal name of God, which, by the way, probably wasn’t the earliest patron deity of Israel, because Israel, the name means El contends it’s that it’s that personal name of the patriarchal high deity. And so Israel was probably originally dedicated to the Northwest Semitic patriarchal high deity El. And we. We have that name. We have the name Israel in reference to a people group that occupied roughly this territory around 1208 BCE in the Merneptah victory stele.

So I. I’m curious about that, because Israel, that El is definitely that. That theophoric suffix.

Good work.

Thank you. I do learn some things sometimes. But that’s also in Daniel, like our name, but also the name of the guy who. He was writing much later.

Right.

And presumably the Tetragrammaton has come into. Into usage by the time Daniel comes around.

Yes. So what we’re dealing with here is a question of conflation, because we get Adonai seems to show up somewhere before the middle of the 9th century BCE because by the 9th century BCE we have the Mesha inscription talking about Adonai. We have the Tel Dan stele talking about Jehoram and Ahaziah, which have the theophoric element, the Tetragrammaton in their names. And we have Jehu in the black obelisk of Shalmaneser III, which was my band in high school. But so by that time period, Adonai have shown up and is now the patron deity of Israel. And the. The theory that I think makes the most sense and seems to me to be the most popular is that El and Adonai were originally distinct deities. El was the original patron deity of Israel. Adonai is a johnny-come-lately. Adonai gets brought into Israel probably by some nomadic tribe coming from deeper in the east and in the south in the Arabian peninsula.

And they bring their ancestral, in my opinion, deity with them whose name is or becomes Adonai. And they insert Adonai into the Israelite pantheon on the second tier as the storm deity, which brings Adonai into conflict with Baal, who is the Northwest Semitic storm deity. And so there’s conflict with Baal, but there is later on and probably because a king who was a devotee of Adonai or a king who recognized the value of the, the deity Adonai acceded to the throne or said, we’re bringing Adonai with us and asserted the identity of Adonai. And El basically said, as the great poets once said, when two become one, be. Be a little. I, I’m going to screw up. So that’s an old Spice Girls song again, you got. But anyway, and El and Adonai became one and the same God.

And you actually see this, you see some of the vestiges of the attempt to assert the equation of the two deities in some of the names and in some of the textual transmission of the Hebrew Bible. Like the name Joel, our good buddy Joel McHale is named after Adonai is El. Not Adonai is God. Yeah. Not Adonai is God. When, when the, the term El appears at the end of a name, and particularly when there’s another theophoric element in there that is using El as the divine name.

Right.

So, so what?

I, I, I. There’s a point of confusion here that I think I need to sort of separate out for our listeners because.

So the Tetragrammaton Yod, he, vav, he, we, we resist saying that name because, because it, it, it’s difficult. You know, it’s sacred to certain people and we don’t want to, we want to be respectful of that. But I do have to say other people pronounce it differently. So the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they pronounce it Jehovah.

Right.

And I, you know, I had, I had heard from scholars like you that that that’s, you know, that I know why they make the switch with the, with the vowels.

Because there’s a, there’s an Adonai switch thing happening where they inserted Adonai vowels. The.

Right, right. Okay.

But the J sound. I, you’re telling me that the theophoric element that is, that is to do with the Tetragrammaton has the J sound. Joel, Jehoram, the J sound. Right? Am I wrong?

As, as we pronounce it, because we’re pronouncing it as it has gone through transliteration into Greek, into Latin and into English. And in the 1600s, we formalized the. The letter J. And even before the letter J came into being, we had already gone through some gizmo where the I or Y vowel, when it’s used as a consonant at the beginning of the word, began to harden a little bit. So it was already pronounced closer to Jehovah before the J existed.

Okay, so what you’re saying is that Brother McHale should be properly pronounced Yoel or something like that.

If. Yes, in. In Hebrew, it’d be Yoel, it would be Yehu. It would be Yehoshua, not Joshua. So. So yeah, in Hebrew, that’s. That’s a Y.

Okay, sorry, just. I just had to go off on that. And, and also just to make sure that everybody, like, new, new people, won’t know that when you say Adonai, you’re often using that as a.

As a substitution.

Substitution for the Tetragrammaton, for the divine name.

That’s something that I decided to do on my social media channels a while ago because of requests that I had gotten from members of the audience. It’s not a difficult affordance for me to offer, so.

But every now and then we need to step in and make sure and make that clear.

Yes. Yes. And there are other ways to refer to God or gods in the Hebrew Bible. We’ve gone through most of them. El, Elim, sometimes the mem on the end of Elim is really just an enclitic mem, and that’s this. This grammatical category you don’t need to worry about. So sometimes elim itself is being used in the singular. And yeah, we. I wanted to cover some interesting circumlocutions though.

Where the.

The authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible didn’t want to use the word God or they wanted to use some kind of pejorative, so they replaced Elohim with some kind of pejorative. And the three, the three that I think are interesting are. The first one is shikkuts, which means a detestable or disgusting thing.

And so in 1st Kings 11, for instance, you. They’re rattling off the names of the patron deities of some of the territories around them. And so they call Milcom the shikkuts of the Ammonites and Chemosh, the shikkuts of Moab. And. And this is a way to say the God of. But they’re replacing God with shikkuts, which means detestable thing or the. The disgusting one.

Like their garbage God is Chemosh and garbage person.

Yeah, but you. You get even closer to the sound Elohim with two other words. One of them is gilulim and the other is elilim. Now gilulim is the fun one because it comes from a word that. It probably comes from a word that means feces. And so gilulim is using. You got the lamed sound and you got the im sound, but you’re switching up some of the other sounds to make it sound like you’re approximating the word God. But really what you’re calling these things are gods.

And if you’ve ever seen Dogma, there’s a God, a literal God made of.

In the movie Dogma.

I haven’t seen Dogma since the 90s, so.

I don’t remember it. Well, we need to need. It’s. It’s back. It’s out somewhere.

It’s back there.

Yeah, we need to find that thing.

It’s accessible. But yeah, when. When they have their run in with. With. Oh gosh, why can’t I remember her name? Now? The only name that’s coming into my head is Eva Mendes, which just.

Alanis Morissette.

No, no, no, no. From Dusk Till Dawn. Desperado.

Oh, we’re bad at names.

Don’t.

Don’t get old, sport.

This happened to me at the Rainn

Wilson’s thing where I literally saw her last night on an. On a rerun of. Of 30 Rock.

Oh, yeah, okay, well, anyway, you can tell who has, who has taken over my, my top spot. Anyway, when they find her, they run into her. That’s when.

Salma Hayek.

Salma Hayek. Oh my gosh, how could I not think of that? Name. Name. But that’s when they run into the. The God. But the other one is elilim, which is generally translated idols. And so like there are passages say all the gods of the nations are. Elilim are idols. It doesn’t actually mean idols. It means worthless things. That’s like when you look at. At how it’s used, that’s what it seems to be. But there’s an argument to make that it’s actually riffing on the name of another God. A friend of mine actually published a really interesting article that suggests that elilim is actually based on the name Enlil, which is. Which is a Mesopotamian God, one of the main gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon. But the nun in Hebrew, when the nun occurs right before another consonant and there’s not a vowel in between, the nun tends to assimilate, which means the nun tends to turn into the double of the letter that follows. And this happens in English. The word illegal comes ultimately from inlegal.

Only the N turns into an L. And that’s why there are two Ls at the beginning of illegal. So elilim could be Enlil, and it could be a way to say that God is a worthless thing. And so now you’re all little Enlilites, you’re. You’re little worthless things. And that became a way to refer to idols because they would have been prominent in Mesopotamia, but we’re going to refer to them as these worthless things. So it really doesn’t mean idol. It means worthless thing, perhaps as a reference to Enlil.

That is. This is. This is a really fun conversation and it’s so much richer. I. I really want to see that translation of the Bible. I want to see the translation that. That goes with the complicated setup and just translates it directly because it’s so. It feels like such a much more rich environment.

Oh, yeah. The. The rhetoric lands a lot more squarely when you can actually see what’s going on.

Because when they, when they say the gods of the nations are idols, you’re just like, yeah, idols aren’t real gods. But that’s not at all what they’re saying. Like, they’re not calling them idols, they’re calling them worthless. They know they exist. They’re not saying there are no other gods. They’re saying those gods. Oh, yeah.

They’re just. They’re just being dismissive about them.

Even though they, they. They acknowledge the existence of them.

Yeah. It’s like me and the Raiders.

It’s trash.

I acknowledge their existence, but I don’t acknowledge their significance.

They still play football, but. Yeah, come on.

Come on. Kinda. Although I think we just lost against the Chiefs recently, so I’m gonna keep my. My pretty mouth shut when it comes to that. But we could. We could go on for a long, long time. We didn’t talk about the shedim. We didn’t talk about some other things, so.

And Theos and Kyrios are just gonna have to wait.

Ah, yeah, we’ll have to do a New Testament. We’ll have to do the. The God redux.

Yeah, yeah.

Come back and revisit this, because there’s more to talk about.

El Shaddai. We don’t. We didn’t.

Oh, yeah. Eloi. El Elyon. There. There are lots of.

We did. You did say El. You said Elyon, but we didn’t actually get to it. There’s so much. There’s so much. All right, well, that’s a lot of fun. And I think it’s time now then to move on to talking about the God of the Hebrew Bible versus the God of the Bible, the New Testament. It’s taken issue. All right, so here we are. We got, we got a, we got a Hebrew Bible, we got a new thing. And I have heard many people talk about. And here’s the thing, what I know of the Bible and I have not read the thing cover to cover. We know this. I admit this. But when I read things from the Hebrew Bible, God can be kind of a jerk.

He can be awful and he can also be great, or he can just be great to some people and awful to others. And when I look at Jesus, at very least in the New Testament, he seems a lot more love focused. So what I hear, what you hear a lot, is God of the Bible mean and bad or God of the Hebrew Bible mean and bad? God of the New Testament sweetness and love and sugar and spice and everything nice. So. And then you hear somebody go anti Semite, and that is a tricky thing.

So let’s, let’s dive into, you know, last segment we talked about all the different ways that God was not only referred to, but, but how God was part of a pantheon and God was not just one God, but there are many gods. And so, so walk, walk me into this. Let’s, let’s, let’s get chest deep into, into Old Testament, New Testament. What do we got?

Yeah, And I, I think of a cartoon that I saw a while ago. Whenever I, I think about this, this was something years ago. It was a couple of kids, it was Christmas, and they’re peeking around a corner and they see Santa who looks very angry and is holding an ax. And it says, oh, it’s Old Testament Santa. And,.

And a little, little comic I.

Saw, I saw a number of comments from, from friends and colleagues who were excoriating the, the anti Semitism that lurked beneath. Okay, the, the hood of this joke. And the problem is there’s a, there’s this notion that God is, is evil in the Old Testament and God is merciful and good in the New Testament. And this is not a modern thing. In fact, it goes back to the very earliest generations of Christianity and even before we had a New Testament, because Marcion is probably the first person to try to draw this distinction. We’ve talked a little about Marcion. We need to have a Marcion specialist on to help us fill in some of the gaps. But.

But this is probably an early adopter of Some brand of what would later be called Gnosticism.

Right.

But. But a big part of this was imposing a specific kind of middle Platonic cosmology on the Bible or incorporating the. The Bible into this middle Platonic cosmological framework. And what this gives us is the creator God as a kind of JV squad, wicked God.

Creates, using, using flesh and, and material to imprison or capture divine. The spirits of, of the divine of the pleroma in these fleshly prisons.

Oh, wow.

Now there’s. I don’t know the degree to which Marcion gets into all of that, but Marcion dismisses the God of the Hebrew Bible as a wicked God, a secondary God, and talks about the God of his version of the New Testament as the supreme God, the good God.

So Marcion’s. Marcion’s New Testament is really just a version of the Gospel of Luke that fiddles with some things here or there or might have been the original version prior to someone else fiddling with things in response to Marcion.

Son got fiddled.

Yeah. And then 10 of the letters of Paul. So Marcion rejects some of the letters of Paul and nothing else is in his, his version of the New Testament. And within Gnosticism, you have a few different streams of tradition that develop, but there’s a very similar take. That Adonai is Yaldabaoth, which is the demiurge, which is the creator God. And this is the evil God who wants to imprison people. And Jesus came to free people from the imprisonment of that God. And what this does is it identifies the God worshiped by the Jewish people as evil. It identifies the God of their scriptures as a single deity that is evil and distinguishes that God from the superior good God of the New Testament. And this is kind of the root, the historical root of this dichotomy. And there is some anti Judaism going on there because to say that all Jewish people worship an evil God is anti Semitic.

It is to say that they are themselves evil. That they are. You know, people say the same thing about Islam, suggest that Allah is an evil God and therefore that evil God’s followers are all evil. And it’s. To say it’s. It’s kind of a supersessionism that. That Christianity is better than Judaism, that the God of Jesus Christ and Christianity is better than the distinct inferior God of the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament and the Jewish people.

Just as a. Just to put a fly in the ointment, can I not. Is it not kind of inherent to Christianity that we are a level up of Judaism. Like there, it feels like there’s, that’s inherent in the sort of in the New Testament.

Yeah, there’s, there’s certainly a case to make that supersessionism is baked into the foundation of Christianity. And there have been a variety of different ways that both Christian and Jewish folks have, have tried to engage with that. But generally you, there are an awful lot of Christians who are trying to do what they can to shed the, the most supersessionist and most problematic features of of that approach. But yeah, it is, it is something that is, that is kind of a fly in the ointment.

And in fairness I don’t think like they didn’t invent supersessionism all throughout the Hebrew Bible is our God is better than their God. We are the chosen people. We’re better. Like it seems like that’s just continuing a tradition at that point of, of like we, we’re just better. Our group is always good. Their group. Other groups are either less good or just pure evil or something along those lines.

I, I and, and I think what I would say in response to that, which is, which is definitely accurate is that there are systemic power asymmetries that are involved and there is a history of oppression and persecution and there’s also an ethnic dimension that that is, that overwhelmingly attends that supersessionism and that attempt that, that othering. But, but also fundamentally it’s taking the, the origins of Christianity, the, the mother of Christianity to, to put it a certain way and rejecting that as a, an unworthy husk of what it should have been. And and so I, I think there is, yeah, again it is kind of baked into the, the foundations of Christianity. But it is obviously it’s something that we need to be aware of and careful of, particularly in light of the way that Jewish people have historically been treated.

Well and that’s. What’s that again. You know, we talk about how muddied a lot of these waters are. The. I think that people who refuse to acknowledge like part of this conversation has to be that acknowledgement that this, that, that the historic power asymmetries cannot mean or inherently mean. That this cannot be a pure conversation where it’s just. Well, I’m just looking at these facts and saying this thing like you can’t, you don’t get to ignore, you know, 2,000 years or more of, of ugly history, right and only talk about facts and figures and blah blah, blah, blah blah.

And, and that brings up another issue is that this, this clean dichotomy of Old Testament bad, New Testament good is fundamentally inaccurate. There’s no representing the data. And, and I want to make the point that when you misrepresent the data, what you’re doing is you’re retreating to the historical oppression and that becomes the foundation because you’re not. The foundation is not the data. The foundation is now. Well, this is the way that their oppression has been rationalized. And so let’s just use that rationalization. The, the foundation of it all becomes Jewish people bad.

Right?

So it is not accurate because if you, there are occurrences of merciful, kind, gracious God rhetoric in the Hebrew Bible and there are also occurrences of punitive, hateful, kill you and torture you for all of eternity God in the New Testament.

Right?

And if you have to try to identify a, a, a tipping point where one outnumbers the other and then the other eclipses the one, it’s not at the seam between the Old and the New Testament. It’s actually in the Old Testament, right. Because we get this trend, we get this kind of movement with, within Judaism and it starts in, in post-exilic Judaism into the Persian and Greco-Roman period. And Christianity is really just kind of a, a crystallization of a specific movement of Judaism. And all that Jesus is doing is repeating a lot of stuff that is found, if not in the Hebrew Bible, in other contemporaneous Jewish literature. Like there have been, there have been a lot of scholars who have tracked down and you know, if you pick up, I highly recommend picking up the Jewish Annotated New Testament. The third edition was just released a couple months ago and it’s edited by Amy-Jill Levine and, and Marc Zvi Brettler.

And it talks an awful lot about this gives the Jewish background to a lot of what’s going on. There’s not really much, if anything that Jesus says that cannot be traced back to some Jewish tradition at some point. And so that makes sense. Yeah. And so the, the good God of the New Testament is really building on a foundation of Greco-Roman period Judaism.

Because I mean, one of the things that we, that we saw last week or last episode, last segment is what I’m trying to say and that we’ve seen and discussed many times on the show is that this idea, the, the idea of God and who is our God and who, who, who God is evolves over time. It keeps changing. And so yeah, it makes total sense to me that Jesus’s version of God is maybe, you know, it may have been a controversial version of God at the time, but but one that people are talking about.

Yeah, yeah, this is this. And that’s. And that’s how it gains purchase. Yeah, like, this is something a lot of people don’t like thinking about when it comes to new ideas. There, there are no totally new ideas. The, the way that ideas get picked up and get shared is that they resonate with others. And that usually means there have to be points of contact. There have to be things that are already in the air. These, this is not, these are not revolutions so much as just incremental elaborations on existing traditions, little by little. And, you know, you have this thing called punctuated equilibria where you have, you know, evolution is, is kind of steady, steady, and then boom, you have huge changes and then go steady and steady and steady and boom, and you have huge changes. And that happens as well. But for the most part, those huge changes are also not just complete whitewashes and breaks from what came before. It’s usually rearranging the things that already exist or are, you know, incrementally elaborating on things just in larger increments and much more quickly.

So I think the, the, the main point to make is that the, the shift happens before you get the New Testament. It happens when you still have the Hebrew Bible. And, and there’s also a shift between the. God’s people as an ethnic designation and God’s people as more of a cultural, ideological designation. And this gets real fuzzy. But there’s a point in following the exile where God’s love is kind of extended to all and all are invited in. And some people will identify the New Testament as a break from the, the earlier notion that God’s people is just this ethnic group. But there is. You see it even in Deutero-Isaiah, which is maybe late 6th, early 5th century BCE and in other literature, where God’s people as a designation is kind of expanding and is kind of expansive.

Now, you also see that alongside some ethnocentrism in Ezra-Nehemiah, for instance, and other places.

Well, and, and of course you do. Like, you know, we look, you look at right now and there is a constant tension between, you know, one group of people who want to move forward in a way. You know, just look at liberalism versus conservatism or whatever. It’s not like all, it’s not like societies all just go, oh, our new idea is X. That’s what we all believe. Now. There’s a, there’s always push and pull and the, you know, the scale slides slowly in one direction or another.

But both things are believed at the same time within the same culture and there’s just that tension there.

Yeah. And so I think it’s just an inaccurate dichotomy. And I think that what I want to kind of dwell on the most is that the God of the New Testament is the author of the book of Revelation anyway, is fantasizing about the God of the New Testament bathing their sword in blood that runs up to, you know, over their feet.

Right.

And you don’t have the idea of eternal conscious torment in the Hebrew Bible. That is something that is exclusive to the New Testament. The notion that God would torture people for all of eternity, that’s, that’s not a merciful, loving God position. That is a vengeful, wrathful God position. And, and you know, you have the sermon of the sinners in the hands of an angry God kind of thing. That’s, that’s Christianity saying that. And, and you can go look in the Hebrew Bible at all kinds of different texts, particularly in the prophetic literature, but also places like Ruth and elsewhere where God is long suffering and God is kind and God aids the poor and the widow and the orphan. And when God punished. There are some parts of the Hebrew Bible where God’s most severe punishments are reserved for the people who hurt the foreigner.

Right.

And who, who violate the, the social justice standards set up by the prophetic literature. And granted, there is an awful lot of hypocrisy going on there because they are ethnocentric and, and sexist and in their own different ways. But when we try to map the goodness versus badness of the representations of God in the Bible, it’s all over the place in both corpora.

Right.

It is, it is not one and then another. It is a mix of both in the Hebrew Bible and a mix of both in the New Testament. And the exact manifestations of that goodness or badness change because times change.

And because the, the way they conceptualize of God changes. But to reduce it to Old Testament God bad, New Testament God good is phenomenally inaccurate. And again is really mortgaging everything to the anti-Semitic notion that the gods, that the Jewish people worship an evil God and Christianity had to come in and save it. And that’s, that’s just deeply anti-Semitic.

That part. Yeah. I do want to just flag one thing which is that I think a lot of well-meaning people who aren’t anti-Semitic might read, you know, the Sermon on the Mount and go, oh, that’s a really nice God and might think. And then they might think of, like, the flood or, you know, like some of the sort of more horrific stories that we all know from the Hebrew Bible and might innocently go, okay, I see good God here and bad God there. And that doesn’t mean that they are being anti-Semitic in that moment, but it does. But I think that. I think what we’re saying is that it’s inaccurate and it’s. And so let go of it because it, because that’s, because that position of good, you know, New Testament, good, Hebrew Bible bad has far too much anti-Semitic history and underpinning.

And so, like, there’s no good reason to hold on to that. It can be arrived at in an innocent way, but it is important to let go of it very quickly.

Yeah. And I think one thing to add is that this does not mean you’re not allowed to criticize the God of the Bible. You can still do that. I do that all the time. The difference is, I don’t say it’s everything in this book.

And then everything in this book is good. You can point out that in this particular passage or in this book, this is a hateful God. This is a God that does. That endorses enslavement, that endorses sex slavery, that endorses sexual assault, things like that. You can, you can point out that there are problematic ways that God is being represented in particular texts.

Right.

The problem is when you say they all fit into this box right here, and that’s the Old Testament, and they’re not in this box over here, which is the New Testament, that’s where the good God resides. Because that’s just not true. Because you can, you can point to. In the Book of Revelation, there’s, there’s a part where God threatens to throw the, the personification of the wicked onto a bed, this female personification of the wicked onto a bed. And the. This usually gets translated sick bed. But I think this is. There’s a good case to make that this is dodging the implications of what’s actually being stated here.

That this is actually about sexual assaults.

Right.

Or sexual violence at least. And you have similar things going on in parts of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and things like that. So the, the, the representation of God as, as violent and, and vengeful is, is sprinkled all throughout. So what I’m arguing is don’t reduce it all to this binary of Old Testament versus New Testament, because that is phenomenally inaccurate. But by all means, criticize the way the God of the Bible is being represented, it. You can find those things to criticize all across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Yeah, I think that’s a, that’s a, a great place to end it. I think it just makes sense. It’s, it’s. And as long as people, people just need to sensitize themselves to the fact that it can. It’s more than just being wrong. You could be wrong in a way that also plays into the hands of people who are hurting other people. And in this case, you know, it. People who want to attack Jewish people use that as, as one of the fronts of their attack. So. Yeah, so no, we’re just not gonna, we’re just gonna not do that.

Yeah. And if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, most of the Sermon on the Mount is riffing on Hebrew Bible stuff.

The meek will inherit the earth. That’s quoting the Psalms like it’s all. Again, I don’t know that there’s much of anything at all that Jesus said that isn’t in some way riffing on some kind of existing Jewish tradition. So.

So if you like the things that Jesus said, then you like the parts of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus liked. And there you go.

The, and the interpretations that, that those texts. Yes. Favored.

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Old Testament God Bad, New Testament God Good?

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