God's Big Fish Story

I had to read this like six or seven times, and I still don’t have a handle on what the Lord is trying to say here.

The idea is that Jonah is so upset about the destruction of such a small thing, but is looking forward to the destruction of such a big thing. And God’s like, you really want all these people to die? And also this cattle and the cows.

What about the cows?

Yeah, what about the cattle, Jonah? You never think of the cattle? Hey, everybody, I am Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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

You know, it’s, it’s, it’s giant fish day here on, here on Data Over Dogma. So I’m, I’m happy about it.

The biggest.

I once, I once caught a fish this big.

Or should I say it once caught…

Me, or should I say it once caught me? Yeah, we’re gonna be talking some, some Jonah stuff and that. Look, here’s what today’s episode is about, you and I. You just said it when we were off the air. It’s about ways that God is characterized in the Bible. That might surprise you. Yeah, so, so stay tuned because we’re getting into this, this guy, this character of God is not one character. He. There’s, there’s, you know, you like to talk, Dan, about the univocality, the non-univocality of this book and…

Right.

It becomes clear the more you read it. There’s these different authors have a different view of who and what God is, and we’re going to be delving into it.

Yeah. This is something that I’ve said a handful of times. There’s. There is no God of the Bible in the sense that there are numerous different gods of the Bible. And we’re going to talk about two very different representations in the book of Jonah and also in the book of Genesis .

All right, well, let us dive into that with chapter and verse. So I think we should start. The book of Jonah is short. It is mercifully short. It is four chapters, very readable. And I, I gotta say, I, I read it multiple times, sort of in prep for the show. And you know, the thing that we all remember and the thing that, you know, you… The reason that we all know this story is because you tell, you tell it to kids, because it’s got this fish thing in the middle, it’s got this thing where he gets gulped up by a fish. But that’s like, not the interesting part of this story for me. No, I mean, it’s fascinating. It’s. Yeah, okay. He lives for three days inside of a fish. That’s crazy. But, like, the relationship between Jonah and God and how…

And. And how they both act in this thing, it’s got me baffled, man. It’s got me baffled. So I… So let’s go through it. I’m going to launch us in. We start. Basically, there’s no act one to this story. We are diving into the middle of the story because suddenly… And I literally went to the book beforehand just to see is there any setup to this at all? No. So verse one says, now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it for their wickedness has come up before me. Now I need to know, do we have any previous references to wickedness of Nineveh? Where is Nineveh? Where is Jonah? Who’s what? It literally starts very much in medias res. I don’t know what’s going on.

Yeah, and there’s a reason for that. But. So Jonah, the son of Amittai is mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25 , which would purport to set this story pretty early in the first millennium BCE. Now, the problem with that is that it mentions Nineveh, the great city which was made the capital of Assyria long after 2 Kings places Jonah, the son of Amittai. So we have an Assyrian king, I believe it was Sennacherib, who moves the capital of Assyria to Nineveh. And so the story seems to be written from a much later perspective, looking back at claiming to be from a much earlier time. Now, the Assyrians were just the ultimate villains in the time period in which this story was probably written, which is probably going to be 7th century at the very earliest, but probably a little later than that.

Okay. One of the things that Sennacherib did was invade the northern kingdom of Israel and come down into Judah during the reign of Hezekiah. And this just totally decimated the land. And Sennacherib was ultimately unsuccessful in taking the capital city of Jerusalem. The king, Hezekiah had thrown off a vassalage. Up to that point, they had been paying a tribute to Assyria. And then Hezekiah said, not going to do it wouldn’t be prudent. And so Sennacherib came through. And the idea is just devastate the whole land and then say, pay me my money. And. And one of the. There’s a story that is memorialized in some wall reliefs. So imagery carved into a wall in a palace in Nineveh that commemorates the taking of a city called Lachish, which was the second most populous, most important city in Judah in that time period, second only to Jerusalem.

And that was Sennacherib’s base of operations. But on. In this wall relief, we can see representation of the Assyrian army laying siege to the city of Lachish. And they have siege engines, they have archers, they have people slinging rocks. And then the people of Lachish are throwing down torches. They’re throwing down rocks. They’re trying to fend them off. And the Assyrians are decapitating people. The Assyrians are skinning people. The Assyrians are impaling people on pikes. The Assyrians are taking the survivors and marching them back to Assyria to be scattered around the Assyrian Empire so that basically their ethnic identity is destroyed.

This all sounds very unpleasant. I’m just going to say it.

Yeah. And when you. And you can see these. These wall reliefs have been, for lack of a better word, stolen and now appear in the British Museum. But you can go walk through and you can see Sennacherib’s representation of basically brutalizing this city and these people.

Oh, I think I have seen that.

Have you?

Now that. Now that I think about it, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Kind of. You’re kind of, like, walking around. There’s some corners and a lot of flat, and a lot of. It’s kind of fragmentary. And so this is this representation of Sennacherib is this brutal dictator who comes through and just murders indiscriminately and mercilessly. This is how the Assyrians were thought of in this time period. So the idea that God would come to a prophet and say, hey, guess what? Destruction to Nineveh would be an exciting time.

Okay. But that’s not what happens.

That’s not what happens because.

No, because Jonah is told to go to. First of all, this is the worst job you can be given by God.

I understand.

Like, God says, go to the place that you hate the most and tell everybody there that they are wicked. Which I, in general, people don’t respond well to. I’m just gonna say, I wouldn’t want to have to go do that.

And Jonah doesn’t want to do it either, and literally runs away from God.

He. He flees to Tarshish, which, when I looked it up, a lot of places, a lot of maps had Tarshish located in Spain. Yeah.

So Tarshish is. Is not. It’s a word that means sea. Okay. And so there are some people who try to identify it with specific locations, but I think it’s probably kind of a. A Timbuktu kind of.

Just this place far away.

A stand-in for not here.

Yeah, but he’s trying to get. He’s trying to get out from underneath the. From out from the presence of the Lord.

And that’s a good way to put it because this is a specific literary genre that we’re talking about. We’re talking about a prophetic text. And in prophetic text, the first thing you do is situate the prophet in a specific time period. And then you have the call, the prophet’s call. And usually that is either taking place in the temple or results in the prophet going up to the temple. You always went up to the temple, even if it was downhill because it was spiritually higher.

Right.

And so if you’re in Israel, you go up to Jerusalem. If you’re in Jerusalem, you go up to the temple. But what does Jonah do? Jonah goes down.

He went down to Joppa. Yeah.

He went down into the ship. And then when he’s in the ship, he goes down into the. The bottom of the ship. So Jonah is the anti-prophet. Jonah is doing the opposite of what this genre typically represents the prophet doing. Instead of going up to the presence of God, Jonah is going down to escape the presence of God.

I’ll tell you what, all that going down, that is a good way to get yourself caught in a fish.

That’s as the, as the great poet once said. And so he is. He’s doing everything exactly opposite of what is expected. So this generates some narrative tension for folks who are familiar with the prophetic genre but are hearing the story for the first time. This is a bit of a head-scratcher. What’s going on? This would be. This is the big leagues. This is the dream assignment to go tell the Assyrians that God is coming for them. And so we’ve got. We’ve got some narrative tension that is not going to get resolved until the very end.

Now, I’m gonna. I’m gonna jump in here and ask one thing.

You know, we have talked about how each region, each people have their own deity in this, in. In this time and place. So presumably the Assyrians have their own God. Yes, the, the, the. The Nineveh Ninevians, Ninevites.

Right.

Have their own God. So when Jonah is meant to go there and call them to account, he’s. He’s going on behalf of a God that isn’t their God. That’s a. Is there a tension there?

Well, for the. The audience, there would not have been because this is probably coming from a time period when they accept Adonai as the God of the whole earth.

Okay, so we’ve gotten that far.

I. I think that’s probably likely. And if that’s the case, then it’s later than the seventh century. It’s. It’s more like late sixth century, maybe fifth century. It’s that. I think that makes the most sense of that notion. But at the same time, you do have some. Some notion of gods kind of beating up on other nations. However, they could not have gotten away with saying our God beats up on Assyria when Assyria was actually powerful, because that would be absolutely laughable because Assyria owned these folks. So either this was something intended to be kind of thumbing the nose at Assyria, kind of internally just making fun of them, or it was written after Assyria was gone, had been defeated by the Babylonians.

Right.

But normally, yeah, that would be the situation. That’s. That’s Ashur’s territory. That’s Ashur’s purview.

Well, we don’t want to step on Ashur’s toes.

No, absolutely not.

So anyway, we’re on a boat now. We’re running away from. From our God. We being. I guess we are now all Jonah. And there’s a big tempest. All the sailors are. Are freaking out. Meanwhile, somehow, Jonah is a very heavy sleeper and is sleeping through everything. They will have to wake him up. Whose fault is this? They actually draw lots to see whose fault it is. Apparently that’s a good way to determine who the. Who the problematic one is on the boat. And it turns out to be Jonah.

Yep. Who.

Who eventually admits that, yes, I’m running away from God. And they’re like, well, what do we do? And he doesn’t. He has an interesting solution to the whole thing. It’s not what would have jumped immediately to my mind, but I. In what becomes a theme for Jonah, he says, kill me now. In. In a sense, he says, throw me into the sea and it will quiet down for you.

Which is an interesting thing to do. It scares the crap out of the sailors because the sailors, they. Then they have to. And they’ve all prayed to their own gods to no avail. Now I guess they pray to Jonah’s God who has caused all of this to say, hey, don’t get mad at. He’s telling us to throw him off. Don’t get mad at us when we don’t get. We shouldn’t get into trouble just because we threw the guy off when he told us to. Okay. That’s how I interpret. Is that. Is that about right?

Yeah. Well, please, oh, Lord, they say in verse 14, Please, oh, Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood. For you, O Lord, have done as it pleased. You, presumably meaning you. Have done as it pleased you. Cause you’re the one that caused this storm. We’re just trying to appease you.

Yeah, well, it’s. It sounds like they’re. That’s the. The last option. He’s like, throw me overboard. And they’re like, let’s try to make it to land. And then they’re like, look, God, whatever you’re doing, we’re not a part of this. And now, you know, please don’t get upset at us for doing this.

Yeah, it also. It also seems like, throw yourself overboard, man.

Don’t.

Don’t put this on us. But they do it like he’s just.

Sitting there like, okay, I’ll. I’ll just stand over here.

Yeah, exactly. But, yes, they do it. They throw him overboard, and then the seas are calm, and that’s fine. And then the fish thing happens. He’s. Jonah is swallowed up by a presumably giant fish.

The Hebrew is dag gadol, which just means great fish.

Okay. Some kind of big fish does. That’s a. You know, I’ve seen the Mediterranean. It doesn’t generally support very large fish, but. Okay, we have a very large fish that eats Jonah, and he’s in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

That’s a. That’s a. That’s a long time to be in a fish.

Long time to be going without oxygen.

Yeah, yeah. And swimming around in digestive fluids and whatever. But he seems to be okay. It. It gives you time to come up with a very long, weird, poetic prayer.

Which he. Which he delivers. I don’t. I don’t. I didn’t. As I read through it, I didn’t see anything that was, like, too interesting. Although you. Now that you’ve talked about, like, going up to the whole. To the temple part of the prayer is, shall I look again upon your holy temple? Like, so now we’ve got him sort of yearning once more to be at the Temple, which is interesting. And then. And then eventually, you know, the. The prayer is good enough, and the Lord speaks to the fish, and it urps him out onto the dry land.

Yeah. And he. He says, I will. I will sacrifice to you. I will do what I have vowed. Basically, I’ll. I’ll do what you told me to do. Since. Since I’m a prophet. Um, that’s why I get the big bucks, so I’m gonna do what you say. And Adonai speaks to the fish and says, hey, induce yourself to vomit Jonah up. And he vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. And one interesting thing about this story is that the fish actually changes sex. It’s originally referred to as a dag, which is just the masculine form of the noun fish.

But at the end of Jonah 2 , verse 2, it refers to the belly of hadagah, which would be the feminine form of that noun. And so. Yeah. And then at the end of the story, the fish is masculine again. So that’s something that have. That has caused some commentators a little bit of acid reflux over the centuries. What’s going on?

For anyone who wants to deny trans identities, we refer you to Jonah’s fish.

Yeah, Jonah’s fish. There you go.

I. So anyway, when we last left our hero, he was. He was vomited and he was on. On dry land again.

And headed back to Nineveh. Or headed to Nineveh, to which presumably he had never been before.

Most likely he had never been there. And it. I’m. I’m looking for the message that. That God says to declare to Nineveh. So this is Jonah 3 , verse 4. At the end of 40 days, Nineveh will be overthrown. Okay, so this is not a conditional prophecy. Right. This is not repent lest ye be overthrown. This is 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown. So we’ve got a very definitive black and white prophecy here.

Yep. And. And you know, so Jonah 3 , verse 2 has said, just right before that says, is the Lord saying, get up, go to Nineveh and tell it the message that I tell you. So we can assume that that message, that 40 days thing, that Jonah is now walking through the streets of Nineveh. Nineveh, shouting to people.

Is actually the Lord’s message that 40 days is coming. You better. You. You better repent.

Yeah. And this is. And that. And that raises an interesting point. We are likely to assume that that was precisely the message. But as we’re going to see, maybe this is Jonah’s editorializing.

Yeah, yeah. There is some question there. Yeah. I just want to point out the next thing that happens in this story is, is maybe the most remarkable thing I’ve ever read in the Bible, because you read in the Bible a lot about people being called to repentance. And almost every time you hear, like, the people are like, nah, no thanks.

Yeah, this guy again, we’re doing good.

We’re fine. And, you know, it. It doesn’t end well. The whole world gets flooded or, you know, all of the firstborn of your. Of your people are killed or whatever. But in. But apparently Nineveh was in a contrite moment because everybody, and I do mean everybody in Nineveh suddenly goes, oh, God’s mad at us. Well, darn, let’s just completely repent.

And they all do.

They declare a fast. They put on sackcloth. From the greatest to the least of them.

The king hears about it, gets up from his throne, took off his robe, put on sackcloth, sat in ashes. This is prototypical Israelite mourning convention.

And so everybody hears Jonah’s message and takes it to heart.

Yeah. Apparently none of them knew they were. Wait, we were being, we were being wicked? Us? Are you serious? Oh, my gosh.

And then you guys have this decree issued by the king. No human or animal, cattle or sheep, is to taste anything. They must not eat, and they must not drink water. Every person and animal must put on sackcloth and must cry earnestly to God. And cry earnestly to God. And everyone must turn from their evil way of living and from the violence that they do. And then here’s the, the, the interesting part. Who knows? Maybe God will relent and change his mind.

Right.

He may turn from his fierce anger so that we do not perish.

First of all, I want everybody to imagine all of those cows and everything in sackcloth.

Yeah. And crying out to God. Their, Their owners going, cry out to God.

Moo to God.

But, yeah, I, the whole. Okay, if there’s one thing we can say about omnipotence and, and omniscience, it’s kind of that you don’t really have to change your mind ever, because you already know what’s, you know, everything that’s going to happen.

Yeah. And we actually have in the Book of Numbers , in chapter 22 or 23. I forget exactly where the verse is, but in response to Balak pleading with Balaam to change his prophecy and his curse, Balaam says God is not a man, that he should lie, or a human, that he should change his mind. He. He cannot go back on what he decrees. And so the Ninevites here are like, maybe God will change their mind. And then Jonah, chapter 3, verse 10. When God saw what they did, how they turned away from their evil ways. And I assume this means they successfully got their cattle to dress in sackcloth and cry out to God.

I don’t see how you can interpret it any other way.

Yeah, I mean, that goes without saying. God changed his mind about the evil, the calamity that he said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it. And that word for change his mind is the word that is nacham is the verbal root and it is translated to repent frequently.

Oh, that’s right. God repents.

Yeah, repents or changes their mind. And so this explicitly has God going. Good point. Okay, I am changing my mind.

My bad, you guys. I was just mad. Yeah, I was just a little bit upset.

But this brings us to the money shot. This is where we get the big reveal. We get into to Jonah, chapter 4. But this was very displeasing to Jonah and he became angry. Yeah. And then, then he prays to God, O Adonai, is this not what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning. For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and ready to relent from punishing. So what Jonah is saying is, you want to know why I ran the opposite direction? You want to know why I did not take the dream assignments to go preach destruction to Nineveh? It’s because I knew you would forgive them. And I would rather die than watch the Assyrians be forgiven.

It sounds crazy to me. Like I, when I first read this, I read it, so I had to like, Google. Why is Jonah angry? Because it didn’t make any sense to me. Yeah, that like, he, he succeeded. He went. He called them to repentance. Somehow he was so effective that they all believed him and did it. They actually did it, which is shocking.

And then you got to imagine it was pretty half-hearted on his part too.

He was probably like, I don’t know.

Just repent or something.

Plus he smells like fish. It’s like it was, it was a bad time. But like, he’s so effective. He actually achieves the goal that is set out before him and he is furious about it. Yeah, just. I want to die. Just kill me now if you’re going to forgive them and be nice to them, just kill me, because I don’t want any part of it.

And I think it’s an interesting story about. Because we’re doing a couple things here. We’re taking the prophetic genre and we’re turning it on its head, and we’re doing everything the opposite of what’s expected. It’s like starting out a story with Once upon a Time, but then, you know, it’s. It’s like Romeo and Juliet with Leo DiCaprio, where it’s like, this is not once upon a time, this is 1996. And it’s flipping all the expectations on its head. But then we’re taking this. We’re also including a bit of satire because we’ve got, you know, Jonah’s like, tell your cattle to pray, whatever, to God. So we’re also engaged in a little comedy, but then it’s kind of a lecture on the merciful versus the vindictive God. God starts off all vindictive, and you don’t know why Jonah’s upset about this. But then you get the reveal at the end. Jonah knows that God ultimately is merciful and knows that if I go do this, God is going to forgive them, and I’m going to have to sit there and watch these people who are responsible for so much wickedness in our world, watch them be forgiven.

And he would rather die than watch that happen.

And speaking of watching, we get to a booth. He goes to the. To the. To this, you know, one side of the town, and makes himself a booth. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what. what booth means in this context.

Well, the. the Hebrew word is sukkah, and it’s where we get the. the Sukkot, the festival of booths. So, yeah, it’s. it’s basically just a. using branches and. and stuff like that to create a little shelter.

Well, but it’s not good shelter because the sun is beating down on him and. and the Lord decides to help out.

And he kind of teases him a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I. I gotta say, this is one where I greatly prefer the King James Version.

The other version, because the KJV says that it’s a gourd. The Lord. the Lord makes a gourd grow up over his head, which I think is delightful. I don’t know why there’s a gourd. How big is this gourd that the Lord has prepared? Well, and.

And it’s got. let’s see. The. The. The Hebrew word there is kikayon, and the -on ending there can be a diminutive. So it’s. it could be like a little gourd-ette, a little gourd-ette. It’s like. Yeah, it’s like adding -ito to the end of a. a Spanish word.

Oh, my gosh. Well, the. the NRSV has a bush. It says that God makes a bush grow to. to save him from. to shade him and save him from his discomfort. I just like the idea that it’s a gourd. I’m just. I’m sticking with KJV on this.

So anyway, so God makes a gourd grow, and then Jonah is nice. is pleased by the gourd because it’s. it’s a nice shade structure for him. It’s a nice shade structure for him. And then that night, God ruins the gourd or the bush with a worm. Just makes a worm go in and I guess eat the gourd. Or somehow it ruins that. So the next morning, there is no more shade. And again, the sun rises, and Jonah, it’s so hot, he passes out. He. And then he gets mad again and says, you know what? Kill me again.

Yeah, this is.

This is maybe the most suicidal guy in all of the Bible. I’m not well.

I think this part is kind of poking him a little bit, being like, look at this whiny little brat. He’s like, oh, it’s sunny. Kill me now. It’s better for me to die.

He’s probably very pale. He was one of those. One of those Judeans. That’s. That’s super redhead. Very fair.

And then God says, is it right for you to be angry about the bush? And he said, yes. Angry enough to die. Then Adonai says, you’re concerned about the bush for which you did not labor and which you did not grow. It came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left? And also a bunch of cattle. Have mercy on the cattle, Jonah.

And literally, that’s the end of the book.

And that. Yes, thus endeth the book of Jonah .

Yeah, and also much cattle. Honestly, again, I had to read this, like, six or seven times in different translations, and I still don’t have a handle on what the Lord is trying to say here, which is something along the lines of, look, you. You are some. How. How is he relating the bush slash gourd to Nineveh? I so am not making that metaphorical leap.

The. The idea is that Jonah is so upset about the destruction of such a small thing, but is looking forward to the destruction of such a big thing. And God’s like, you really want all these people to die? And also this cattle. And so.

The cows. What about the cows?

Yeah, what about the cattle, Jonah? You never think of the cattle. So it’s, it’s again, mixing this kind of rhetorical finger wagging at people who want God to be vindictive with a little bit of satire, with a little bit of parody, because we’re, we’re enjoying making fun of Jonah. But the message… There’s also a message there. God is a forgiving God. You know, are you right to want God to. To be vindictive and to kill? And so it is. I think it’s a pretty biting satire on the prophetic genre, which so frequently is all about condemning everybody else to destruction. And here it’s kind of poking fun at that and also saying, no, it’s better to have to believe in a merciful God. And our God is merciful.

Okay. And. And changes his mind, apparently.

And also changes. Yeah.

And with that, you know, I think. I think that’ll be a good. A good segue point to get to another idea of ways that God can act. So let’s move on.

All right, well, here we are. We’re discussing the, The. The nature, the, The. The. The character of the God of the Bible. And I’m. I’m just gonna start this off with two different verses. We’ll start with Titus 1 , verse 2.

Which says that in the hope of life, of. Of eternal life, that God who cannot lie, promised before time began. And then I’ll. I’ll also give us Hebrews 6 , verse 18, which says so that through two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have a strong encouragement to seize the. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, both of them make it very clear God cannot lie. It is impossible for God to lie. Take it away, Dan.

And we saw the same thing in Numbers where Balaam says God is not a human, that he will lie, or a man, that he will change his mind.

So very clear. I guess that’s the end of. That’s the end of the segment. Well, it’s. It’s obvious that God doesn’t lie. It says so multiple times. The end of discussion.

And then we’ve got other parts of the Bible, because there are other parts of the Bible. And those other parts of the Bible frequently complicate attempts to assert that one part of the Bible governs all of the Bible. So I think we’ve got a lie pretty early on in the Hebrew Bible, at the very least, we have God saying something will happen, and then that thing just doesn’t happen. And I have characterized this particular not happening thing as a lie.

And, And I will say you’ve gotten stitched about it numerous times.

People are mad all over TikTok for this assertion of yours. And. And so we’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna dive into it.

Yeah. People seem to be a lot more upset about me saying the God of the Bible lies than pointing out that the God of the Bible seems to enjoy slavery and polygamy and things like that. So. So we have in Genesis 2 , the creation of the human. And in verse 16, the Lord God commanded the man saying, of every tree of the garden, you can certainly eat or you will eat. And this uses a construction that is known in Hebrew as the paronomastic infinitive. And you don’t have to suddenly put your linguist caps on. But basically we have an infinitive version of a verb followed by immediately by the finite version of the verb. So an English equivalent would be. Here it would be to eat. You will eat. This means nothing in English. But this has the force of. The rhetorical force of kind of emphasizing the certainty that something will happen. And there are a bunch of nuances that can be added to this. But then we get to verse 17, where God tells the human, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall certainly die.

And here the. The Hebrew is mot tamut. So it’s that same paronomastic infinitive to die, you will die, insisting that the death is certain.

Okay, you’re going to eat. You’re going to eat some things, but if you eat that thing, you are definitely going to die on that day.

Yes. And it is five words in Hebrew, mot tamut in the day. On the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. So then we’ve got the rest of what happens in the famous story of the Garden of Eden.

Spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert. They go ahead and eat. Yes. I think it’s been enough years. I. There was, evidently in my little video with Joel McHale, there was a spoiler alert about the show Succession, and I didn’t pick up on that, but a lot of people jumped on my case for that. And I was like, I thought this was in the past enough. Enough. But, but if the story of Adam and Eve is not in the past enough, then you’re listening to the wrong show.

Yeah, that one. That one goes back far enough. If you haven’t read it, that’s on you.

That’s 100% your fault. Now we get the creation of Eve. Eve talks to the serpent who says, and it says. It starts off by saying the serpent was wiser or craftier, if you prefer, than all the other wild animals that Adonai Elohim had made.

And to be clear, we’re not talking about the devil. We’re talking.

We are not talking about Satan or the devil. This is just one of the animals that God made.

Just an animal. It may not be a serpent as we now know it. It may have had legs. Yeah, because it’s not crawling on the ground just yet, right?

Not yet. And the serpent says to the woman, so, so did God really say, you can’t eat from any of the trees of the garden? And she says, no, we can eat the fruit of the trees of the garden. But God said, you shall not eat from the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, nor shall you touch it or you shall die. And this is not. Not exactly what God said to Adam, to the human. This is a slight change where we have this addition of, you shan’t even touch it. And there has been a lot of speculation about, you know, did Adam misreport the thing? Did Adam or did God tell Eve? And then Eve is paraphrasing, did. Did God tell it to Eve differently? Nobody knows really. It doesn’t matter in the long run in the story, Eve tells it a little differently. But then the serpent responds, you will not die. God knows that when you eat of it.

And I think, let me look at the Hebrew. Yeah, on the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like the gods, knowing good and evil. So the serpent says, hey, God’s really just playing with you because God doesn’t want something to happen that’s going to happen if you eat the fruit and then the woman eats the fruit and gave some to her husband who was with her. And I’ve talked about this in some of my social media content. Some translations of the Bible omit the fact that the Hebrew very clearly states that her husband was with her.

Right.

As a, as a way to kind of blame Eve. And he ate. And then the very next sentence says, then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. So what the serpent said would happen happened immediately upon eating the fruit. Their eyes were opened. And we get later on, in verse 22 of chapter 3, God says, Look. And I think he’s talking only about the man. Yes, look, the man has become like one of us. To know good and evil now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever. Let’s kick him out.

Yeah, you got to now, because all of the lies about what will happen to you if you eat that fruit, the jig is up. You got to kick him out at this point.

Yeah. And so there’s some interesting things to point out here. It seems the serpent was right, at least about saying God’s really doing this so that you don’t become like the gods by having your eyes open, by knowing good and evil. The text explicitly has God acknowledge that they became precisely what the serpent said they would. And that’s something that God doesn’t want. And so to prevent some additional thing that God doesn’t want, namely them living forever, which would be one of the two prototypical features of deity, all knowledge and immortality, they’re going to kick him out. Now, this is after the curses have been announced. So the curses are that the. The serpent will slither on its belly, will eat dust. The curse to the woman is that she will have pain and increased conception and in childbirth. The curse of the man is that he will eat his food by the sweat of his brow. And the ground is cursed because of you, you.

And from dust you are, and to dust you will return. What doesn’t happen on that day?

Yeah, there seems to be one conspicuous thing.

Omission. Yeah.

That doesn’t occur.

They don’t die.

And a lot of people have tried to find a variety of different ways to rationalize this away, to harmonize verse 17 with the rest of the story. And this happened anciently. The book of Jubilees, which was probably written around the middle of the second century BCE, is actually the first to say, hey, what’s really going on here is that a day is a thousand years according to the Lord, which is something that we see in the Psalms and also something that comes up in one of Peter’s epistles in the New Testament, Adam lived to be 930 years old. So in that day of the Lord of a thousand years, within that time period, Adam died. So guess what? Mission accomplished on that thousand year day.

Yeah, it’s a Jupiter day. What planet rotates slowly? I don’t know.

So we basically have in the ancient world early attempts to try to make the two dots connect, right? And then. So that’s one of the techniques that people will use to try to insist that this was real. The most popular attempt to try to make the statement in verse 17 accurate is to say that Adam did die because death is separation from God and they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. So on that day they died. This doesn’t work because mot tamut and the other different forms of that particular paronomastic infinitive that involve that verbal root, they occur like 50 or 60 times. Never once does it refer to anything other than to straight up physical death, cessation of your life.

So it’s not, it’s not used metaphorically or figuratively in any other context.

It’s not a spiritual death. It’s not separation from God. The statement you will certainly die means precisely that, you will certainly die. Now, the other attempt that is made to try to reconcile these two passages is to argue that mot tamut is used as a sentencing to death. And so the idea is not that the death will actually occur, but that you will enter into some state of being doomed to die. Your death is imminent in some way, shape or form. And so the idea there is that on that day the certainty of their death was accomplished or something like that. But this, but this doesn’t really work either. And there are a variety of different reasons for it, most of them having to do with the fact that that sense of that construction in Hebrew does not occur anywhere in the entire Hebrew Bible.

That is a sense that must be imposed upon the text and here based entirely on the conviction that if God says it in Genesis 2:17 , then it must be true. However, we’ve already seen that God changes their mind. We saw that in Jonah. It is elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible as well. And so I think probably the best way to make sense of this passage is that God is being represented as, as a little capricious here, kind of getting a little trigger happy with these threats. And I’ve compared it to like a mom saying, if you touch my sewing scissors, I will kill you. Or a dad saying, if you touch my guitar or if you touch my car again, I will kill you. And then they do it and they’re like, well, I have to punish you. And then coming up with something short.

Banished from the house. Yeah, you don’t, you don’t get to live here anymore. Anymore.

Yeah. I’m setting up this cherubim out in the front yard and he will mess you up.

Yeah, don’t try to get past him. He’s got a flaming sword.

Yeah. But it’s always something short of the original threat, which I suggest is, is something that is a little hyperbolic. And so, yeah, I think if we understand a lie to be something that is intended to deceive, I think the idea here is that God was using the threat of immediate death to disincentivize them from eating of that tree. It didn’t work. And then God had to settle for all these other punishments.

Yeah, I, I, it, it’s very, it seems very clear that, yes, there was, there was an untruth told in this moment. What I, I guess I can imagine what that must mean to a lot of people who, you know, who read those, those scriptures that I, that I sort of led into this thing with that says, you know, it’s impossible for God to lie. God cannot lie. You know, I, I guess the framework has to, in, in order for that, in order to make sense of that. It’s very easy if you’re willing to acknowledge the multivocality. The, the, the, the fact that, like, these were written, these accounts were written by different authors in different time frames. And, you know, and it meant different, you know, this, even the character of God meant different things to these different people.

As they want to.

But I understand why people are so distressed when you point this out when they are, you know, when they’ve been taught and when they have committed to believing in a univocal or, or, you know, heaven forbid, inerrant Bible. You’ve got a direct contradiction here.

Yeah. And, and those are, those are just anathema within that worldview, which is one of the reasons that I think inerrancy is such a, a fatal flaw in a lot of Christian and even some conservative Jewish worldviews because it forces you into a position of having to just deny the plain reading of the text and come up with all this mental gymnastics to get around what is so clearly being stated in the text. But we have a, when we look at some of the precursors for this, like this is not unique within the literature of ancient Southwest Asia. In fact, there’s this myth, Adapa, where you have this, this figure who’s kind of a grand human champion named Adapa, and they end up, they get upset with the wind while they’re on their ship and they break the wing and this upsets some gods. And so Adapa is. Is called to account.

You know, I forget what the saying is - called on the carpet by the gods. And one of the gods tells Adapa, before he heads up there, hey, don’t eat the food of death that they’re going to offer you. And Adapa is all wise. The text says Adapa is wise. And now the other issue is mortality. The god says, don’t eat the food of death. He goes up, the gods offer him the food of life, which would make him immortal, but he remembers what the other deity said. He refuses the food of life and so is unable to achieve immortality and is sent back down to earth as a mortal. And so in a story that many scholars have suggested likely influenced the development of the story of Adam and Eve, we have a deity telling Adapa, the human, something that ends up denying that human access to immortality. And that thing that the deity told the human was not.

Not accurate. And so even in a likely precursor in some way, shape or form to the story of the Garden of Eden, we have deception, or at least inaccurate information on the part of the deity. And there is. There’s a. A book by a friend of mine, John E. Anderson. He wrote a book called Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and Adonai’s Fidelity to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle. There’s scholarship on the fact that the notion of a trickster, the notion of someone who can manipulate others to get what they want, is idealized in some ancient Southwest Asian literature, including in parts of the Bible, where Jacob has to deceive and Abraham has to deceive in order to advance their interests. And in some cases, God is telling them to do this so that the ancestral promise can be fulfilled. And so we have the deity represented as willing to bend and break the truth so that their own prophecies and their own promises can come to pass.

Well, and there’s. Remind me what story I’m thinking of. There’s a story of God sending a prophecy to a prophet that is specific or, or one of God’s messengers says, I’ll go and I’ll deceive the prophet, right? To. To. To. To. So that the. The bad thing happens to them in your name. Right? What am I thinking of here?

So this is the story of Micaiah and King Ahab. So Ahab wants to know if he’s going to go up to Ramoth Gilead to do battle. And Ahab has all his court prophets. And he says, should I go up and they all say, yes, yes, you should go up. You’ll be fine. And then he says, what about that Micaiah loser? That guy, he really gets under my skin. And he invites Micaiah out and says, shall I go up? And Micaiah’s like, yeah, yeah, go up, Adonai will deliver you. And he’s like, I told you, this guy never tells me the truth. Why don’t you tell me the truth? And then Micaiah says, you know, I saw the Lord sitting on their throne surrounded by all the host of heaven. And God said, who will go entice Ahab up to Ramoth Gilead for me? And a spirit came forth. And actually the Hebrew says, the spirit came forth and said, I will go and be a lying spirit in the mouths of his prophets, so that he will go up and will fall at Ramoth Gilead.

And Adonai says, I like it. Go do it. And so Micaiah is telling the king, God is lying to you through your prophets because God wants you to die. And then, and then, and then one of the people, one of Ahab’s assistants, slaps Micaiah and says, you’re gonna speak to the, the Lord’s anointed that way. And, and kind of as a rhetorical question asks is like, which way did the, did the, the spirit of the Lord go? Something like that. And, but identifies, did he do any crazy Ivans? And he basically identifies this spirit as the spirit of the Lord. And so the idea there is that God sent God’s very own spirit to go lie to the court prophets to deceive Ahab to his death.

So there are multiple parts of the Bible that represent the God of Israel as having no compunction whatsoever with deception and with lying.

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a tricky one. It says, you know, these are God’s prophets. They’re doing their job. They’re actually getting it right. They’re saying exactly what God told him to say. Don’t go up on that hill.

Don’t go.

Don’t you go up on that hill, though. Well, there you go. Thank you so much for that. This is Data over Dogma. We’re gonna get some letters and you’re welcome to write into us. Our, our email address is contact@dataoverdogmapod.com if you would like to catch our show ad free and, and get some free bonus content every week, you can go to our. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and we’ll, we’ll, we’ll hook you up over there. You choose how much you want to donate to us. The more, the better you get. More, uh, we. We can promise you, you will get, uh, gifts in heaven for giving, uh, unto us. Uh, that. That’s. That’s pretty much guaranteed. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

God's Big Fish Story

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