Did the Exodus Really Happen?

The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.

Yikes.

Yikes indeed.

I mean, if I’m reading that correctly, that cannot mean what it seems to mean, can it?

You’re supposed to redeem your child so that it does not get sacrificed. It’s like, why not just not have the commandment to sacrifice them in the first place? If anyone is under the misapprehension that we are claiming this is something we should be reinstituting, I don’t think they understand our podcast very well. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are great. You and I just got back from a trip to Denver where we learned about how to podcast. We’ll maybe do it right one of these days.

We’re getting there.

We’re getting there slowly but surely. So that’s great. We— I had a good time. I hope you did as well.

I did. It was. It was a good time. I’m glad you talked me into it. Productive for us. And we’ll have— we’ll have some updates in the future about about new directions. Yeah. Not changing the content at all, but we’re going to hopefully be able to improve the quality and the reach of our podcast.

I, unfortunately, will be fired from the program, but other than that, everything should stay the same.

Yeah. And— and, yeah, other than that, things will be— will be awesome.

Yes, indeed. Hey, we got a great show coming up.

We’re—

We’re gonna stick to Exodus. We’re gonna have some fun in— in one of the Bible’s weirdest books, I think. So let’s dive into that.

Okay. Okay. So our first segment is entitled That’s History. And really the question is going to be, is that history?

Yeah, that’s a good question.

The Exodus narrative, Moses, the enslaved Hebrew peoples taking off from Egypt, and all of the details that surround it.

Yeah, it’s— it’s something that I’ve wondered about a lot. I’m very glad that we’re getting into this because as you read Exodus and, and I have done this story, and it’s a story we’re all familiar with. Right. Cecil B. DeMille gave us all a— a wonderful, if fanciful, primer on— on this story of, you know, the— the— the Hebrew slaves in Egypt going through a whole bunch of stuff.

Yep.

God saves them. And I don’t know, saves is a pretty strong word when you see what happens to these people who then are wandering in the desert for 40 years. Yeah, it doesn’t, they don’t feel very saved a lot of the time.

Yeah, Cecil B. DeMille gave us a great representation of that. And then Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey gave us a great soundtrack to that. That was the era in which I grew up. And I have, and I am not even joking when I have heard people in like Sunday school classes talk about how Moses became brothers with the Pharaoh and he gave him his ring because he loved him so much. And I had to be like, you’re thinking of The Prince of Egypt. That’s actually not in the book of Exodus .not one of the things.

That’s not an actual Bible thing. So wait, that’s an interesting point right there. Cecil B. DeMille just made that part up. Is that right?

I don’t know what role Cecil B. DeMille had to play in the production of the Prince of Egypt.

No, no, no, I’m saying the being raised as a prince in Egypt part.

No, in the Book of Exodus , it talks about him being raised as, as the, one of Pharaoh’s own daughter’s children.

Right, okay, so that part’s true.

But there are, yeah, there’s.

The rest was, was a cartoon.

Yeah, they’re adding details and, and things like that to, to the story because they got to flesh it out. Because it is a pretty bare-bones narrative at the beginning. You don’t really get much in terms of detail.

Well, and the other part is that the details that you do get, you can’t show to children. There’s a, there’s a heck of a lot of stuff that’s there.

I.

Here, here’s one of the big questions and I think this is the question that we’re looking to answer on this segment today. In the, in, in the Book of Exodus , we, we get through, you know, Moses goes back to Pharaoh after having sort of talked with God, game planning with God about how they’re going to get the Hebrews unenslaved from Egypt. And when they go back, there are, we’ve all heard of the plagues. There are all the plagues. The livestock is all dead. The crops are all gone. The water has turned to blood. Eventually the firstborn child of every household in Egypt dies. Then they end up losing, you know, I’m talking Egypt ends up losing, you know, well over a million people, you know, of their enslaved workforce and after, you know, the crossing through the, the Red Sea, Egypt loses basically their entire armed forces in one big splash.

Yeah, did Egypt. Now I know Egypt as a country, you know, as a society was not that big on recordkeeping, but you’d think that those events all happening within like a one-month period or whatever would show up in their records somehow. Like that seems like you don’t ignore that month. That was a bad May.

Yeah. And there, there are a couple of points to make here. One is that the Egyptians tended to keep fairly, not necessarily accurate, but fairly comprehensive records. However, counterpoint to that is the fact that we only have a tiny, tiny fraction of all the records that were ever kept.

Of course.

And there is a, what’s called a bias towards particularly funerary and mortuary remains because those are the ones that tend to get sealed up and buried in dry parts of the nation where they’re more likely to be preserved. And many of the records that survive only survive because maybe they are carved into rock or they are carved into little stones or survive in clay tablets or something like that. Right. The survival of papyrus for that long is, is very, very unlikely. And particularly if we’re talking about the Delta, when we get further south in Egypt where the floodplains and the Nile are more narrow and you have more stuff going on beyond the boundaries of that floodplain where the floodwaters would rise to, it’s more likely that stuff is going to be preserved. But the Delta where much of this is supposed to have been going on, it’s, it’s rare that we find records and we have found lots of records that have yet to be transcribed, that have yet to be translated, that have yet to be studied.

And so I do want to make the point that there’s a lot we don’t know about Egypt based on recordkeeping. However, back to your point, we should have noticed something about this because we have a pretty good idea of who was reigning, we have a pretty good idea of population size, we have a pretty good idea of what was going on in what cities based on the material remains that we do have.. And this would have entirely devastated the entire society, the economy, and their food supplies. This would have absolutely devastated everything. There would be a very large gash in the historical record, in the material record, if this happened the way it is described in the biblical text. And the simple fact is that we see absolutely no such data whatsoever. Things just seem to be carrying on as usual. Now another issue here is when we place this chronologically?

Yeah, you were talking about the where and the when of this. I don’t actually know the where and the when of when this is meant to take place. Do we have a sense of that?

There is a. There is a rough window with kind of fuzzy boundaries where there are folks who will argue for an early date, like the earliest I think I’ve ever heard is somewhere around 1450 BCE, all the way down to a late date, which would put it down into close to 1200 BCE. So we’ve got a period of about 200 to 250 years where folks want to try to date the Exodus. And they’re usually moving things around within this window because they’re looking for the most likely period where these things could have happened. The biblical text is not incredibly clear, and you have to make some judgment calls in trying to do the math to find out when we’re talking about, which itself assumes that the numbers and the ages and the chronologies and everything like that in the Bible are historical, which is problematic in and of itself.

But I think the folks who come the closest, or come the closest to thinking critically about this, would say if this happened at all, it would have had to have happened probably 1250-ish, around there. So I think the later date is the most likely. That’s not to say probable, but the closest we get to plausibility, I think, would be a later date.

Okay.

Yeah. But that is also not without problems because we still don’t see these societal upheavals. We still don’t see this sudden death of every firstborn child in Egypt. We still don’t see the army, the armed forces being decimated. We see none of this in the material remains. So not just the text, not just people writing down, “Dear Diary, this is what happened in Egypt today,” but just looking at the houses that we have, looking at the remains that have been dug out of the earth, we don’t see any indication of any of this having happened.

Yeah, one of the things that interests me is that, I mean, you know, I do have Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, sort of those images are seared in my brain. I mean, forget Nefertiri in her gauzy dress, I’m also thinking of, like, the giant structures that these, you know, Hebrew slaves were in the process of building. I don’t know. You know, we don’t know what they were actually doing at that time, supposedly. But it does seem like a whole lot of work was halted in that moment. Like when you lose a million-strong workforce, you’d think that even just in, you know, whatever they were making, whatever they were doing would stop. Even just that would be somehow present in the record.

Yeah, and that is, we don’t see that. We see indication that there were a variety of different types of workers coming from outside Egypt, whether they are enslaved or corvee workers. A lot of scholars think that the workers who were doing this were not so much enslaved as just locals who just had an annual responsibility to go dedicate so much time to the work. We do see indications of that. That doesn’t, however, support the notion that there was this discrete kind of compartmentalized community of people who are identified as Hebrews, who had grown to this massive size.. And, and we have some, some records from before this time period that have lists of names and some of these are Semitic names.

And we have, we even have some drawings of some Semitic peoples in the, in a tomb at Beni Hasan where the color is still preserved. So they had pretty colorful pieces of clothing that they were wearing, but they’re identified as Semitic peoples.

And so some people, Semitic in this case is a reference to a language group. Is that so?

Yeah. So people who are speaking Semitic languages, which are going to be people from ancient Southwest Asia, so up the coast of Syria, Palestine, and probably not too much further to the east, so but into the desert a bit. We see in some of the different Egyptian discussions they had a few different names for these people. They called them Asiatics. They call, they have a name for the Habiru or Hapiru, which some people think sounds an awful lot like what could have turned into Ivrit, the Hebrews. There’s still debate about the degree to which that is the case, but we have references to a bunch of different societies that come from that area that is now Syria, Palestine, Israel area. And so there were many people that spoke Semitic languages at this time.

And it’s even within, it’s even workers in mines and in other places on the Sinai Peninsula who are probably Semitic in origin, who develop, begin to develop what we now know as the Phoenician alphabet by taking Egyptian hieroglyphs and different forms of these hieroglyphs and basically turning them into an alphabet. So Egypt has a long history of relations, usually tense relations, but sometimes cooperative relations with the peoples of ancient Southwest Asia. And so it’s no surprise to see Semitic names. It’s no surprise to see this kind of stuff. And some people try to leverage that as evidence. These are, you know, we see Semitic names and it’s like, ah, that must be the Hebrews. Well, no, it could be Moabites, it could be Ammonites, it could be Amorites, it could be people from Ugarit, it could be Midianites. It could be a number of different societies that are doing that.

So, yeah, we don’t see evidence that points in the direction of Israelites being enslaved in Egypt. We see evidence that does not absolutely preclude the presence of enslaved Israelites in Egypt, but that doesn’t necessarily say this is how it had to be. This is something that kind of frustrates me about some apologetics. We have data that indicates something happened or points in the direction of something happening. If we follow the data where it is leading, if we follow the data, if we allow it to operate on its own terms, sometimes it points us in a specific direction, it points us to a conclusion. Other times it’s ambiguous. But among the variety of different conclusions that are plausible, we could say the conclusion we want falls within that range. And this is what a lot of apologetics is. It’s not showing that the data lead to our conclusion, but showing that the data don’t preclude our conclusion saying it’s.

Possible that it happened.

Yeah, it’s possible. And there are some data that we could say it’s even plausible that it happened. And so I would say it’s plausible that there were people who would later be identified or would later be incorporated into the. The people group that we now know as Israel, who were enslaved in Egypt and who escaped enslavement to make their way into the northern hill country to become a part of the people of Israel, if that happened. However, this was a very small group, and the events of their escape do not resemble in any way, shape or form whatsoever the events described in the Book of Exodus . So it’s certainly plausible that there is a historical core to what’s going on here.ere. But what we see described in the Book of Exodus is centuries of elaboration and innovation and flourishes, and all these things added to the text in order to make the text more useful for the time period.

And, you know, the… The story of a people who are trapped in a foreign land who are coming out and are going to return home, sounds an awful lot like people who are part of the Babylonian exile who are trapped in a foreign land who are going to be allowed to leave and return home. And so it’s not to say that it’s entirely mythological. But it is to say that the way the story is told is likely intended to resonate with the audience for which it is being told, which is…

The post-exilic audience or…

Yeah, I think the tradition of the Exodus predates that, but I think the form in which we have it now is largely attributable to the way the story would be told for people either trapped in exile or returning from exile. And we have similar scholarship, has similar ideas about what’s going on with Abraham and others who are moving into a land that they have not occupied either ever or for a while, and so have to kind of adjust. And it’s a way to kind of forge a relationship with this earlier group in our own social memory. So we’re just like them. We’re doing the same thing that they were doing. Here’s a story that helps us think about our relationship with the God who is making this possible and what is expected of us and how we can maintain our social cohesiveness and integrity.

And this also is the context for the development of all this legislation, some of which predates the Babylonian exile, but some of which also was probably written in response to the Babylonian exile and the return from exile. And so even from a literary point of view, the most likely context for the composition of the story as it has come down to us as we find it in the Masoretic Text, the most likely context is the middle of the first millennium BCE, during or just after the Babylonian exile. And so what we see in the data on the ground in Egypt don’t really support the overwhelming majority of the details of the story. But it is certainly plausible that there is a historical core where on a much, much smaller level, there was a group that escaped. The details of the story, as they have come down to us, fit a much later time period, rhetorically, literarily.

There are folks who argue, well, you’ve got a high concentration of Egyptian words in the Hebrew—loan words from Egyptian into Hebrew. So like tortilla and taco and quesadilla, those are loan words from Spanish into English.

And I thought you were going to say they were Egyptian, and I was gonna be blown—

I’m giving an example of what’s called a loan word or a borrowing, something that originates in another language, we bring it into our own, and it becomes a part of our vocabulary. Well, there are a number of words in Hebrew that are loan words from Akkadian, from Egyptian, and from other languages. And so scholars have noted, there is a high concentration of these loan words in the story of the Exodus. And so some folks will argue, oh, that means that it was most likely written when they were in Egypt. No, because we can give rough kind of, not necessarily dating, but chronological relationships to when these words came into the Hebrew language. Some of them come in early, some of them come in much later. And so I think the most likely explanation for what’s going on there is that the authors are aware of what things are coming from Egypt or sound Egyptian and so are infusing the story with this sense of authenticity and archaism and things like that.

And another thing to note is that Egypt frequently had close relationships with this area. In fact, King Hezekiah, we have, was under vassalage to Egypt in the late 8th century BCE. So around 700 BCE, King Hezekiah had—we have these, they call them lamelekh jar handles.] Dan McClellan: They’re state-produced jars and dishes and things like that. And they have a little stamp seal on them, lmlk, “for the king” is what it means. And many of them have a little Egyptian scarab on them because there were a lot of resources that were coming from Egypt based on this vassalage relationship. And so there are frequent and very comprehensive points of contact between Israel and Egypt, not just when they would have been enslaved in Egypt. So we can account for a lot of these details that apologists will say are indications of the historicity of the Exodus in ways that don’t require we just accept the historicity of the Exodus.

Yeah. And, and again, like those things that could account for it, for those apologetics don’t disprove the apologetic, but it’s an interesting note.

Yeah, yeah.

And just part of the data.

Yeah. In history we’re weighing probabilities and frequently what we have to consider is a whole series of concerns or questions. And what we want to try to do is maximize the probability across the board. To try to come up—the best theory is going to maximize probability across the board. Because if we have something where some things are plausible, a lot of things are implausible, and then a handful of things are impossible, that theory is not very strong. If we have some things that are probable, loads of things that are plausible, and nothing is impossible or nothing is too implausible, that theory is going to be, on the whole, on balance, going to be stronger. And so if we consider all of the different arguments that we have to make and all the different theories that have to come together for the Exodus to be historical, there’s just not—it’s not a strong argument.

It is a very weak argument and it includes a number of things that are literally impossible. Miracles are literally impossible. And so the fact that, oh, we can highlight some things that are plausible, that’s not strong enough evidence to overcome the fact that we would have to accept a bunch of things that are totally implausible or totally impossible. And so on balance, I and most scholars, the overwhelming majority of critical scholars, would say the Exodus, as it is told in the book of Exodus , is entirely implausible. It is plausible that there’s a historical core, some kind of little kernel of history that just grew and grew and grew as these stories were being told over the centuries that involved a small group of people who were enslaved, who escaped, who made their way to the northern hill country and were incorporated into the people known as Israel. And we know there were peoples known as Israel around the end of the 13th century BCE.

So around 1200 BCE we have an inscription from an Egyptian pharaoh named Merneptah dating to around 1208 BCE where he talks about beating the Libyans. And you know, it doesn’t say it, but I wish it said, “They found me. I don’t know how they found me, Marty, but they found me.”

I was going to do a Doc Brown. I knew you were going to go there. I knew you were going to go there.

But he talks about defeating the Libyans in the west, but then he talks about the east, the Asiatics and regions that he defeated. And he mentions Israel, says “their seed is not,” and this is a reference to their grain and basically that they devastated this group known as Israel. And the determinative that accompanies that name—and the determinative is a little hieroglyph that categorizes what they’re talking about—is a people determinative. So it’s not a state, it’s not a nation, it’s not a city-state, it’s a people. And so this likely indicates that there was some kind of group that was not established as a kingdom, probably did not have a capital city or anything like that, but they were known as Israel.e known as Israel. And some people will point to that as saying, oh look, that’s Moses wandering in the wilderness. They don’t have a capital yet. And try to leverage that as evidence. But this is another thing where that’s eh, it’s possible, but the data make far more probable a different explanation for this.

Sure, let’s talk about those people. Because one of the, one of the things, one of the questions that I’ve had for a long time. You know, I’ve, I, I’ve. I’ve heard people saying that there’s no, you know, that there was likely no Exodus or whatever, but I don’t. Do we have any sense if Moses was a real person? Because Moses is an enormous figure in all three of the Abrahamic religions. Moses is just an insanely. He looms over, over, you know, everything.

Yeah, yeah. One of those, one of the tent poles of, of ancient Judaism. I, I would say that we don’t have evidence, evidence for the existence of a figure named Moses that is anything remotely associated with the story we have in Exodus. However, there is a piece of evidence that suggests there could be another historical core somewhere in there, and that’s the name Moses, which in the text, it tries to associate it etymologically with this idea of drawing out. However, Moses is also an element in ancient Egyptian names. In fact, Thutmose and Ramses and a bunch of other famous Egyptian pharaohs have this element in them where Moses means born of or son of or something like that. And when you have that name, you have a deity associated with it. Thutmose born of or son of Thoth.

Ramses born of son of Ra.

And so Moses is the connection. Sorry, is the connection that we’re making there. The, the ses on the end is that.

No, the, the mo or the m and the s and the, the vowels are kind of squishy because we’re not exactly sure how they vocalized. Right. The syllables in ancient Egyptian, we have some pretty good guesses, but they can, they can vary as well, depending on where, where these consonants are appearing in the word and how they’re being used. And so Moses would, if it is a name, it could be a legitimate Egyptian name, but it would be incomplete because it would mean son of. And so there’s an argument that this was originally an Egyptian name and there was an Egyptian deity’s name associated with it that was taken away because of embarrassment, because we don’t want this figure who looms so large, who plays such a significant role, to have a pagan name, a pagan deity associated with them.

So there’s an argument to make that Moses could be an actual name of a person who came out of Egypt whose name was altered to give us this incomplete Egyptian name precisely because they didn’t like that it would have been associated with an Egyptian deity. So that is plausible. I don’t, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s probable, but that is certainly plausible. And that, and that’s one of the pieces of evidence that I think contributes to having to take seriously the notion that there could have been something there, but certainly not as we see in the text as it has come down to us and all the traditions and all the miracles and all the fabulous events associated with it. It.

Yeah, it’s a pretty, it’s a miracle heavy story. It is a very much magic laden story and we may have to get back to it and like dive into the, the actual bits and bobs of what actually occurs in it. Because it’s, it’s a lot.

Yeah.

Going on there.

I think covering the, the plagues would be interesting. I think talking about. Yeah, there, there are lots of things we could cover in the Exodus.

And also, you know, we talked about it a little bit when we were talking about, you know, the, the, the pantheon of gods, you know, the, the fact that in, in that story, the Hebrew God does battle essentially, or at least does like who, who’s got the best tricks with the Egyptian gods.tricks with the Egyptian gods. And the Egyptian gods show up. They actually, they actually are, are part of the story. So that’s fascinating. We may have to get to that. But that’s a, that’s a story for another time.

Yes, sir.

In the meantime, though. Chapter and verse.

Chapter and verse. All right, let’s do it. Hey, everybody. If you enjoy what you’re hearing on the Data Over Dogma podcast and you want to help us ensure that we’re able to continue to create this content that hopefully you think is great and that we think is great, you can help us by subscribing to our Patreon.

That’s right. If you go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, you can choose what level you want to join up at. You’ll get usually early access to every, to, to the show. Every week you, you’ll get access to our patrons-only content, which is, you know, we talk about that, you know, each week’s show, but we take, we, you know, we go off into different directions. We sometimes just have fun conversations. It’s just a behind-the-scenes look. Go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Thanks.

Thanks everybody. We’re gonna pull one from the Exodus because we like to keep things topical here. And we’re gonna go to Exodus chapter 22, which is part of what’s known as the Covenant Code.

Yeah, I wanted to start by saying that, like, this is, I, I was sort of like looking over this and reading through it and I went back a couple chapters and realized that two chapters before, it starts with what we call the Ten Commandments. Yeah, but like, the book itself doesn’t say Ten Commandments. It just starts listing rules, and then you go to the next chapter, and there’s way, way, way more rules, and then go to the next chapter, and it’s all laws. It should be like the 97 commandments or something like that, because it just keeps going and going and going, and it gets minutely specific in some cases.

Yeah, yeah. And there’s a lot of repetition as well. There are over 600 commandments according to the traditional enumeration of the commandments within Judaism. But just within the book of Exodus , we actually have several different layers of collections of commandments. And that’s ignoring that we also have another set of commandments in Deuteronomy, and we have other sets of commandments in Leviticus.

Yeah, we’re gonna have to do a “Just a Ten Commandments?” question mark.

Oh, yeah, because we’ve got at least three different iterations of the Ten Commandments, and they are not all the same.

And not only that, like, they’re not broken out easily.

No.

In the text, as like—

Yeah.

There are different ways to count the commandments.

Yeah, yeah, there are different ways to count the Ten Commandments. Just in Exodus 20 , Exodus 34 is actually the only place where it calls them the Ten Words in Exodus 34 . And that’s the closest we get to the label Ten Commandments, which is then transferred to Exodus 20 . Because Exodus 34 is primarily about festivals and rituals and things like that. It’s not your set of moral laws. But we digress.

So back to Back to Exodus 22 , Exodus. Is that. That’s what we’re on, right?

Yes, Exodus 22 . So this is part of the Covenant Code, which scholars identify as probably the earliest layer of legislation that is found in the book of Exodus . So this is something that’s coming from maybe 10th, probably more likely 9th or 8th century BCE and it’s being incorporated into this growing narrative. And so these are the earliest layers of legislation. And in verse 29. And in. If you’re looking in the Hebrew, it is actually verse 28, but in virtually all English translations, it’s verse 29. We have this statement, and I’ll read it in the KJV just for those who. Who are nasty. Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits and of thy liquors. So we’re talking about offerings, sacrifices, colon, the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.

And then I’m going to briefly go into verse 30. Likewise, shalt thou do with thine oxen, and with thy sheep, seven days it shall be, with his dam on the eighth day thou shalt give it to me. Yikes. Yikes indeed.

I’m. That, that is, I mean, if I’m reading that correctly, they just chucked something in there in the middle because, like, this whole chapter has been about, like, what you do if someone steals an ox and what you, you know, how, how all of this happens. It’s about like livestock and stuff. And then this starts with, with, with sacrifices. And then just in the middle there, they’re like, and your sons, your firstborn sons. That cannot mean what it seems to mean, can it?

Well, that’s, that’s the argument that a lot of folks make. To begin with, we don’t have the, the traditional word for sacrifice here. We have this verb natan, which means to give, you will give it to me. And so some people are arguing that that has a different, that’s got to have a different nuance here, like give to me in the sense of turn them over to priesthood service. So, like what we see at the beginning of Samuel with Samuel’s mother promising to give Samuel to the priesthood if she is able to conceive a son.

I think I can see where that argument might fall down though, because generally speaking, this is just a guess. I don’t think that the God of Israel wants people to give the firstborn of their sheep and oxen into priesthood.

Ding, ding. So the very next verse complicates that because. And in the Hebrew it says ken taaseh, which means, thus you will do, in other words, do the same thing with your oxen and with your sheep. And then it repeats the, the verb natan at the very end, on the eighth day, you will give it to me. So, yeah, that’s natan titten li. So you will give it to me. So that is very clearly a reference to sacrifice. And so given that verse 30 is referencing, is referring back to, it’s resuming the verb at the end of verse 29, we should understand them to be employed with the same sense, with the same nuance which would indicate sacrifice. And there is another passage in the Hebrew Bible that I and many others argue is another biblical author interpreting this passage in precisely that way.

So that is in the book of Ezekiel , and it is Ezekiel, chapter 20, and it’s verses 25 and 26. And here we have. Ezekiel is going off about how you’re not the. The Israelites were not living up to. They were given laws, they were not living up to them. They were given laws, they were not living up to them. And then. And then we have in verse 25, and I’ll go from the KJV again, just, just for fun. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good and judgments whereby they should not live. And this is actually contrasting the statutes and judgments that God is talking about. Having given at Sinai says, you will live by them. And so here he’s saying, I gave them also statutes and judgments whereby they should not live.d not live. And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate to the end, that they might know that I am the Lord.

And this phrase “pass through the fire” is a colloquialism that refers to child sacrifice, offering children as burnt offerings. And so here it looks like Ezekiel is looking back at Exodus 22:29 and trying to explain why we seem to have this commandment to sacrifice children in the Covenant Code. And Ezekiel’s explanation seems to be, I gave you laws, but you were too busy worrying, trying to live by the laws of your forefathers, your ancestors. And so I said, great, let’s do that. And the point was to desolate you and to show you who was boss.

Okay.

And so Ezekiel’s kind of saying, I gave you some good laws. You decided you didn’t like them, I gave you some bad laws just to show you who’s boss. And there are scholars who have gone to great lengths to try to reinterpret this as referring to something else. Like one popular argument is that the laws that were not good is a reference to the Deuteronomistic laws. We talked about how we got the ones in Exodus and we got the ones in Deuteronomy, and the Deuteronomistic ones are from later. And so it’s talking about how those were the ones that these authors didn’t like. And… But it’s not a strong case. It rests on a very thin argument that when they refer to statutes and judgments here, they must be referring to something other than actual “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” commandments. But we see earlier in this chapter, in verse 18, I said unto their children in the wilderness, walk ye not in the statutes of your fathers, neither observe their judgments nor defile yourselves with their idols.

So the reference to statutes and judgments is looking back at the way they, like Joshua says, are you going to follow the gods of your fathers on the other side of the river or the flood or whatever, or are you going to follow… After Adonai, they kept returning to their ancestors’ gods which resulted in all this stuff. So Ezekiel is understanding Exodus 22:29 to refer to child sacrifice, but we have other approaches to this as well. In Exodus 13 , for instance, we have a reference to this idea of giving the firstborn, but it supersedes that with a commandment to redeem the firstborn. So it’s an odd way to think about this. Like you’re supposed to redeem your child so that it does not get sacrificed. It’s like, why not just not have the commandment to sacrifice them in the first place?

I mean, if the point is, you know, we need some walking around money. If you have a baby, just say, hey, you have a kid, pay a little bit of money as an offering to God as a thank you for allowing us to have a healthy child. No need to say, well, what if we require they sacrifice the baby and then at the last second we pull it back and we say, no, we just want some money from you.

I mean, there is one example of that, that yanking it back. Yeah, that jumps immediately to mind. But yes, it does seem like a bad system, especially if you’re going to apply it sort of across the board.

Yeah. And yet it is so firmly embedded in the kind of ideological, historical foundations of both ancient Judaism and Christianity. The idea that child sacrifice is somehow baked into these traditions with—we have Isaac and Abraham. Abraham didn’t seem like this was too much of a shock.

He kind of just shrugs and goes along with it to some extent.

He really took it in stride, but then says God will provide. And then we have the—the substitution for Isaac is offered. And then there is Jesus who is offered in sacrifice in one interpretation of the significance of that story, and that’s one where God does not provide, so to speak.00:45:11.350] Dan McClellan: There’s one interpretation is that Jesus is the, the, the lamb that is provided so that the rest of humanity doesn’t have to not be sacrificed, but at least suffer in sin and die and be punished for eternity. And there’s a.

But back in Exodus 22 , that’s, that’s still centuries away.

Yeah. And there’s a, there’s a great book called The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son by a great scholar named Jon D. Levenson. Subtitle is The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, which talks about the role of child sacrifice in these traditions. So that’s. That’s an older book. I think it’s 30 years old by now from 1993. But if anyone’s interested in. In a wonderful discussion of the fact that child sacrifice seems baked into these traditions, I would highly recommend that.

One, I’m just. I. Sorry, I am still reeling about just the. Just that initial Exodus commandment to. To sacrifice your firstborn son right to God. Because there’s no indication that it doesn’t. That it applies only to one small class of the people.

Right.

There’s. It. I’m looking at it. I looked for a while trying to figure out if this was just like only the. The priests would have to sacrifice their firstborn or only the. This group or the elite of some sort. But it seems like it’s a blanket statement that’s supposed to be about everybody. Am I wrong on that? What am I.

No, no, it’s. It’s pretty straightforward. This is a commandment to the Israelite people, and it’s embedded right within these other commandments about, you know, bringing your. Excuse me. Bringing your oxen and your sheep and everything like that. So, yeah, there’s no indication that this is kind of an isolated. Only for. For these people over here. Commandment. However, it. It seems very likely two things. One, we have. We have no material remains that attest directly to any child sacrifice in ancient Israel.

Okay.

And two, it seems like, based on the literature around it, that this was very quickly reinterpreted, renegotiated in another direction.

But it doesn’t seem like it would be good for a society if every firstborn son of that society had to be, you know, chucked.

And. But this. This raises another interesting observation. There is a related society where we do have a lot of direct physical evidence of child sacrifice. So in Northern Africa, in Carthage, we have a Punic Phoenician settlement. And there is an area that is frequently referred to as a Tophet, which is the name of an area in Jerusalem where child sacrifices were rumored to have happened. And so this area in Carthage is being referred to as a Tophet. They have found over a thousand burials of infant remains. And scholars have argued for a while, well, this must be funerary. They’re just. These are infants that died in childbirth or shortly thereafter, which is something that was even more common anciently than it is now.

Far more common anciently. But many of these burials, one, show indication of having been burnt, and two come with inscriptions that refer to these things as offerings and as things that are being given to a deity. Sometimes this deity is Baal, sometimes it is other deities.l, sometimes it is other deities. And there’s an interesting word that is included that seems to identify the specific type of offering that it is. And this Phoenician Punic language, very closely related to Hebrew, they did not use vowels. So the consonants are MLK, which many scholars think is the Phoenician Punic version of what we would pronounce Molech or Moloch from the Hebrew Bible. Now, traditionally, that’s been understood as the name of a deity in the Hebrew Bible, and we’ve talked about this to some degree in the past, that this was.

This was some god of child sacrifice. Sometimes it’s identified with Baal. Everybody who’s upset about Hollywood right now refers to them, you know, worshiping Baal and Molech. But based on these inscriptions at Carthage, it talks about how this. This infant is a. Is a molk for Baal, where the usage indicates that word is a noun. That word is a, is a category of offering or sacrifice.

Okay, that’s interesting.

Yeah. So there was a scholar named Otto Eissfeldt who back in 1935, argued that based on. On these inscriptions, if they are relevant to the Hebrew Bible’s discussions of child sacrifice and this Moloch figure, we probably need to reinterpret that word Molech as a reference not to a deity, but to a type of sacrifice. And so the tide has, over the last almost hundred years, the consensus has been shifting in the direction of understanding this as a reference to a type of sacrifice. And I would say the balance is probably both beginning to favor that. That it’s not yet an overwhelming consensus. But in the publications that I’ve seen over the last 10 years or so, scholars increasingly are favoring that understanding. And a wonderful book, if. If anyone is interested in looking into this, and I think we’ve recommended it before on the podcast, is Heath Dewrell’s Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel, where he goes into great detail about these things.

So what this would mean is that there was no deity named Molech, but there are references in the Hebrew Bible to children being offered as this specific type of Molech offering, which is pretty horrifying. But one thing that scholars who are looking into the child sacrifice that went on in Carthage are commenting on is that if they believed that these sacrifices would bless them in the future, in a world where polygamy was common and where pregnant women spent most of their time pregnant, if you gave up the firstborn, that that would mean you would have more successful and more pregnancies and births in the future that would not seem to be such an enormous sacrifice. And they also talk about how in the literature and in the way children are conceptualized in this time period, because infant mortality was so high, there was not as strong a connection between the parent and the child until it had survived for a couple of months and seemed like it had a chance of making it into childhood, if not into adulthood.

And so this is not to say they didn’t care about their kids back then, but it’s to say when they’re weighing their, their families survival and the odds of children surviving. The notion that sacrificing a child as a way to try to increase the odds that we’ll have more healthy children in the future is, was not as horrifying to them as it would be to us.

That makes sense to me. I, you know, I’ve often thought that even up until fairly recently in our own history, infant mortality was just a fact of life and it was just something that, that people had to deal with very regularly and they must have had psychologically a very different approach to it than we have.

Yeah, yeah. If it was, it was probably over 50% back then. So if you were hoping, you know, if we are hoping to have four or six pregnancies, maybe we’re lucky if two or three of them actually survive into adulthood. And so taking one of those and saying we’re going to do this ourselves so that maybe the deity, whoever it is, will allow more to survive in the future.n McClellan: That was a, that was a calculation that very clearly was made at least by people in Carthage.

Isn’t there somewhere in I think the Exodus laws there? Or maybe, oh, maybe it’s, maybe it’s in Numbers that I’m thinking of, but there is some discussion somewhere of sort of a baby not really becoming a person almost until X amount of time in, after its, after its birth. I’m not, I’m not getting to this correctly and I’m not.

Well, this, this is something I’ve talked about in the past and particularly in, within discussions about the morality of abortion and things like that. The, the child was not considered to, to be a person until they, they drew first breath. That’s when life begins within the, the ideologies of the societies that produce the Hebrew Bible. But yeah, there is indication and I don’t think it’s in the Bible. I think it’s, it’s in some of the extrabiblical early Jewish literature where like full personhood was, it was, you know, it was a spectrum, but full personhood was really something that was achieved a couple months after.

Right.

Just when you are through that window of greatest threat to the life of the infant, that was when they were probably not considered as fully a person as they were a little later down the road. And I know it sounds kind of callous to talk about children in this way and to talk about the way parents are thinking about their children, but these are just, as I think you called them, just kind of psychological ways to deal with the stresses of the reality of survival in this time period. This is just a way to minimize the trauma of the inevitability of losing children in this time period. And so it’s not fun to talk about, but it is something that I think people need to understand as they look at texts like Exodus 22:29 , that it’s not justifying it, it’s explaining it. It’s saying this is not something that just could not be possible in this time period.

It absolutely was possible in this time period. We have evidence that societies did precisely this on a large scale. And so there’s no reason to say we can’t, that this is not possible for the societies that produce the Hebrew Bible. And at the same time, we have no indication that despite even though that law is there, we have no indication it was ever enforced or that anyone in Israel ever engaged in that. In fact, there’s a good argument to make that this legislation was not widely known, was not widely enforced until we get down to around the 2nd century.

BCE although it seems unlikely to me that it would make it this far to us like that this law, this, that this commandment would have been recorded enough that it got all the way to us without some of the people actually doing it, it seems almost impossible that it would never have happened.

It’s. Well, it depends on how quickly it was reinterpreted. And this is something that I talk about in my, in my 2022 book, Adonai’s Divine Images, is that if there is ambiguity in a term or in legislation or something like that, a lot of times it sticks around precisely because it is easily reread. And so things that we look at today, we’re like, how on earth could Psalms 82 or some of these other passages, how on earth could they have been preserved for thousands of years? And people have considered them inspired and a part of their authoritative literature? And if you have a way to kind of influence a reinterpretation of that verse to go from theologically problematic to theologically not problematic. That’s all it needs. And then every other generation after it is like, oh yeah, that’s not a problem. And so I don’t know if anyone ever did it.

I think it’s plausible that this happened for a time anciently, but we don’t have any direct evidence of it. And another example of something that is a piece of legislation and we don’t know if it ever happened is the sotah in Numbers 5 , the, the ordeal of the woman suspected of adultery.dultery. That’s, that’s something where we see like rabbis debating about whether or not it’s appropriate to involve a pregnant woman and all this kind of stuff. But we have no indication anyone ever did this, that anyone was ever put through this ordeal. But it served a rhetorical function in its place in the literature in which it was embedded. And, and maybe that’s why it’s there, to serve a rhetorical function, not necessarily something that was expected to be carried out.

Well, one thing I can say with absolute certainty, I feel positive that, that I am in the clear to say this even biblically. Don’t follow this particular commandment ever for any reason. You do not need to sacrifice even, even your livestock, don’t. You don’t even have to do that, but definitely don’t sacrifice your own firstborn sons. Leave them alone, they’re fine.

Yeah. There’s a theory of ritual that categorizes ritual as things that are what they call causally opaque. What that means is that there is no clear connection between the action and whatever the desired outcome is. And ritual and sacrifice is an example of this. We don’t really have a way to show there’s any connection between sacrificing animals and, and anything good happening. But you know, and this extends beyond the religious sphere into what we would consider the secular world. There are all kinds of different rituals that we engage in socially on a day to day basis because there are ways to show others that you know the rules, you’re an upstanding member of society, you can be trusted, you’re a good person. There are a bunch of different ways we engage in rituals to do that. But according to ritual theory, there, these are things that are causally opaque. And so I would say that this is one that is not only causally opaque, but objectively harmful.

And yeah, and I think you’re in the clear on that. I don’t think many people will argue with you.

So if anyone is under the misapprehension that we are claiming this is something we should be reinstituting, I don’t think they understand our podcast.

And I think it’s okay to. Yeah. Even if it is in the Bible. I think, I mean this is just another example of like one of the things that you’re not. Like nobody thinks that you should do this. So anyone who says I obey all of the laws of the Bible is a pretty good one to just point out and say, yeah, you don’t.

And, and as I’ve said many times on, on different social media channels, nothing is non-negotiable in the Bible.

Right.

Everything is negotiable and everyone has negotiated things and this is just an example. Everybody renegotiates this because nobody thinks this is something that is one is of God, two has any value to us today. And so yeah, so if someone gets.

Legalistic with you about like ah, you know, your, your view on X, Y or Z is non-biblical and therefore blah, blah, blah, you, you just ask them when, how they, how they did.

Sacrificing their firstborn, that it’s, it’s pretty low-hanging fruit. But, but yes, anytime someone like this is the word of God, you got to do it. It’s like what do you think about this?

Right?

That’s always something that, that will have been renegotiated away. But I think the case is strong. It, I would call it the academic consensus, even though it’s probably pretty close, that this was originally a commandment for Israelites to sacrifice their firstborn children and specifically their firstborn sons.

Yes, that’s. Yeah, that’s rough. But there you go. It’s there in black and white on the papyrus.papyrus. There’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Well, thanks for that, Dan. What a horrifying little jaunt into the laws. If you friends at home listening, viewing us on the YouTubes or in your, in your various pod blasters, if you would like to become a part of making this show go, please feel free to become one of our patrons over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you’d like to write into us about anything, you can reach us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody. Hope you have a good week.