Why Is She Salt?

As Lot and his family are fleeing and the Lord is raining down sulfur and fire on these other cities, Lot’s wife turns around, she turns into a pillar of salt, and there’s no explanation. I was so ready for the explanation. Dan, help me out. I do not. Why is she salt?

Hey, everybody.

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we bring you.

The latest in biblical scholarship and do.

Our best to combat the spread of misinformation. With me is Dr. Dan McClellan, Bible scholar and TikTok star. And I’m non-scholar and TikTok nobody. Dan Beecher. Hi, Dan. How are you?

I’m doing well. How are you doing today, Dan?

I’m doing great. Coming up on today’s show, I’m gonna do a little chapter and verse. We’re gonna stick in Genesis.

Skipping over some stuff. Here’s what I thought. I thought I was going to talk about Abraham, but you know what? Abraham is a long and sort of stretched-out thing. And there’s this thing right in the middle of it that. That caught my eye. So we’re going to go with that.

And. And then you are going to do a. “What does that mean?”

Is that right?

Yes. Gonna talk about the word provenance, which some people pronounce provenience, but I prefer to pronounce it provenance. We’re gonna talk about what that means and some things in the news recently that relate to why provenance is such a big deal for scholars and particularly for archaeologists.

Can I call it provenance?

Yeah, if you’re nasty, I guess you can. You can do that.

And nasty I am. All right, well, let’s dive in. I wanted to talk about. As I said, I was looking at Genesis, I was looking at Abraham because I thought, you know, Abraham’s a big deal, kind of. Kind of the biggest deal. The godfather of the whole. Of the, you know, the religions of the book. If you will.

But right there in the middle, there’s this story about his nephew. And I thought we would check in with that.

Because the Abraham, the Abram/Abraham story is rudely and kind of inexplicably interrupted by this cute little chapter right in the middle about Lot. Now, back in Genesis 13 , we reveal Lot. Lot is traveling with. With Abram at that time. Is that how you would say it? Abram.

Avram.

Avram. And then they find that there’s not enough grazing ground for both of their flocks. So Avram takes the high road to a gated community called the Oaks. Very fancy. And Lot takes the low road to Sodom. And anyone who’s heard of Sodom knows what’s coming. So we get to fast forward to Genesis 18 , where Abram, who is now Abraham, but that’s a story for another day, is talking to some fellas. You don’t really know much about these fellas.

And the Lord jumps in and decides to reveal that Sodom is going to be destroyed because it’s wicked. And these guys start negotiating. There’s a very interesting negotiation that happens with. With the Lord where they’re like, hey, if there. What if there are 50 good people in Sodom? Would you. Would you save it?it? Then the Lord’s like, “All right, if there’s 50…” If there’s 50, it’s okay. I’ll… I’ll… I’ll let them live.

And they’re like, “Okay, I’m thinking of Pawn Stars here.” Best I can do is 50.

But it’s not, because they get him. They’re like, “45.” What if there’s… What if there’s only five? Less than that. 45. Come on. And the Lord’s like, “Okay, 45.” They keep going. It is the weirdest thing. They just… They just talk him down. 45, 40, 30, blah, blah, blah. They get down to 10. If there are 10 good people in Sodom. And here’s the interesting part. Correct me if I’m wrong here, Dan. The Lord doesn’t seem to know how many good people there are in Sodom. He has to go and check it out.

Yeah. And this is something we find in Genesis a bunch. Like when the Tower of Babel… In Genesis 11 , the story starts with them going, “Hey, let’s go see what’s going on down there.” And so… And this is one of those first-person plural verbs, and probably a reference to the divine council, but they’re like, “I heard a weird noise. Let’s go check it out.” They… They don’t really know exactly what’s going on. Just like Adam hiding in the garden, and God’s walking around like, “I thought he was… where are you?” He doesn’t really know where the… …what’s going on. It does.

See? Yeah. So, okay, the Lord… The Lord doesn’t know. The Lord doesn’t really have a set idea what he’s working on here. And so, yeah, they negotiate him down to 10 people. And then we launch into…

And I think… Sorry to interrupt real quick, but I think it’s also interesting to note, not only is the Lord God, the Lord here, not omniscient, but the last verse of chapter 18 says, “And the Lord went his way.” A reference to the fact that in this time period, God was very much conceptualized as an anthropomorphic corporeal being limited in a specific time and space and also not, like, clearly superhuman. We have stories where divine beings are confused for regular old humans. And that seems to be what’s going on here. So God is very much a human-sized and shaped and looking entity who is just chatting with Abraham and they’re kind of, you know, out on the veranda, taking a look over at that city over there and haggling over how much to save the city. So it’s, it’s a different concept of God than what we are…

God seems to be, like, walking around and stuff like…

…on, on his feet. He’s not, he’s not floating on a chariot in the clouds or anything.

All right, so speaking of divine beings walking around, chapter 19 opens with two of the guys who apparently were… …were two of the guys that, that Abraham was talking to.

Have now journeyed into Sodom. But the first three words of chapter 19 are, “The two angels came to Sodom in the evening.” Now what’s going on with the angels?

So in the beginning of chapter… what’s that?

Do we know what an angel is in this case? What’s going on?

So very much like God, angels…ike God, angels. The Hebrew word is just malak, which means a messenger literally. And it is used to refer to human messengers in a number of instances. So the word angel as we know it is an interpretation that we’re imposing on the text. Because if you’re reading this in the Hebrew, it just says two messengers.

Oh, weird.

And you know, we have in, in the books of Samuel, you have. And David sent messengers. And it’s the exact same word in Hebrew. And so the idea of a divine messenger is an interpretive lens that we’re putting on the text. But there’s enough, there are enough stories within the Hebrew Bible where it’s very clearly a divine messenger and not a human messenger that we’re kind of comfortable with this notion that angel is an appropriate way to refer to these entities. But the very second verse of chapter 18, so it starts off, Adonai appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre as he sat at the entrance of his tent. Verse two starts off, he looks up and he saw three men. And so here and in a number of other places, both God and these angels are referred to as an ish, as a man. And there’s a wonderful book on this by Esther Hamori called When Gods Were Men. And it’s an academic discussion of what she labels the ish theophany or a story about God appearing to someone.

And this is the narrator explicitly referring to God as an ish, as a man.

Well, you know, some people think of him as a man, some people don’t. To each their own is what I’d like to.

Oh, that was, that was very cheap. There you go.

Hey, man, low hanging fruit is still fruit. All right, so here we go. These two angels, messengers, whatever. What’s interesting to me about. I’m going to stick with the angels thing because I’m curious. Curious about this. What’s interesting to me is that nothing else in this story says to me that these angels are divine. They’re clear, they clearly have knowledge from God. They have the knowledge that the, that the town’s going to be destroyed. And maybe they have the ability to sort of check in with God. And there you. Maybe it is just that they are the ones who are in, who like later on are kind of in charge of when the destruction happens and kind of negotiating with Lot about when the destruction happens. So maybe they have some. Okay, okay. I’m talking myself into them having some divine power.

Well, if, if you’ve seen the movie Dogma, you will know that raining down fire and brimstone from heaven is one of the most physically taxing activities in the world, apart from soccer.

So, yeah, I haven’t seen that movie since the 90s. So I’ll, I’ll have. You and I were talking about it. Yeah, I can’t track it down. It’s nowhere.

Anyway.

But yeah, here they’re just like, hey, Adonai is going to destroy this city. So there’s not, it’s not like they’re playing a role. They’re actively engaged in this. They’re just kind of, you know, waltzing in to say, hey, you should probably get out of here.

Right, right. Okay. So these, these two guys come into town immediately. They encounter Lot who jumps up and says, hey, come and stay at my house. And they’re like, no, no, we’re gonna sleep in the square. And he’s like, no, no, no, I insist, I insist. Come, you’ll sleep in our house. You’ll wake up early in the morning and you’ll get out.230] Dan Beecher: Which is what I always want to tell my guests. You’ll get up very early and leave. Yes, you’re very welcome. Until tomorrow anyway. So he, he.

I’ll interrupt you real quick to just suggest that this is kind of the rhetorical point of the story is that unlike the people of Sodom, and previously, when it referenced Lot pitching his tent towards Sodom or alongside Sodom, it talked about Sodom being wicked. And so. And part of this may play on kind of a contrast between agrarian living folks and city dwellers. There’s a part of it that may be suggesting city dwellers are problematic. And, you know, that “farm living is the life for me” kind of perspective where we prefer folks who live off the land, who live in tents, rather than folks who live in cities. And that may be part of the message, is that Sodom is bad because it’s this city that’s filled with all these city dwellers, and, you know, they have apartments in these high rises, and you don’t get a yard or anything, and they just don’t like cities.

And so part of what is going on here is they’re representing Lot as being very hospitable. And this is something that was an ideal in this time period is hospitality to strangers. And so they’re like, “Nah, we’re just gonna sleep on the ground.” And he comes out and says, “No, no, come into my house. Take whatever you need. I will provide for you, and then I will not stand in your way. I will let you go do whatever it is you need to do afterwards.” So Lot is being shown as kind of the ideal offerer of hospitality, which stands in, as we will see, marked contrast to the rest of the people of Sodom.

Yeah, indeed. And that actually, spoiler alert, will come into play much later in the Bible. Is it in Ezekiel where they talk about what the sin of

Yes, Sodom is?

And spoiler alert, it ain’t the raping, at least not there, because it is It’s the hospitality. Right. They say that the sin of…

Yeah, the sin was an overabundance of bread and a failure to care for the orphan and the widow and the needy. Basically, this city was not taking care of its own. It was contributing to social inequality. And then at the very end, it talks about abominations, which can be a pretty vague term which can be used to refer to wearing two different kinds of fabrics at the same time.

Or eating shellfish.

Eating shellfish, that sort of thing. It’s not exactly clear what is being referred to with this reference to abominations.

Well, I mean, there’s something coming up that’s That’s pretty abominable.

It’s pretty bad. Yeah.

So, yes, They go to Lot’s house, and suddenly, out of the blue, kind of the whole town gathers outside of Lot’s house and starts yelling about, “Hey, you know, those two guys that you have in your house, send them out to us.” And you know, in different translations, it says different things. For instance, in the NRSV— NRSV. What is it? It’s the NRSV that I have in front of me. It says, “Bring them out to us so that we may know them.” Other translations are more explicit. But the idea is they want to rape these men.

Yeah, this is an attempt to violate these men. And I think it’s significant that the narration tells us that it is every man, old and young, in the city, down to the last man. And I think this is interesting for two reasons.ink it goes down to if there are ten people in the city. And so the story is telling us here, Lot’s the only one. Every other man in the city, whether young or old, is wicked. Now the other interesting thing is that when God talks about righteous people in the city, it seems to only care about the men. And in this time period, when you talk about full personhood, men were really the only ones who exercised a full personhood, full agency. And in some of my social media in the past, I’ve talked about how some biblical authors think of women as kind of NPCs.

They are there to play a role, but they don’t have full autonomy, they don’t have full agency, they don’t have full personhood.

And so here, 95% of the time, they don’t have names.

Exactly. Yeah. And there are stories where they play critical roles, particularly in genealogy and things like that. But for many authors, they’re not just a concern. And I think this is one of those instances where it’s telling us, hey, remember how God said that they were going to look for ten people? Well, here’s every single man in the city down to the last man. Kind of making the point that when we mentioned people, really we were talking about just the men, and there’s not a single one in the city apart from Lot, who is righteous.

Yeah, really. Which is strange because, well, we won’t get into the. The sons-in-law. Were they in the crowd? I don’t know. Yeah, you tell me. Anyway… As if the Lord wanted to illustrate your point about women not mattering much. The next thing that happens is one of the most horrific things. I have no place in my brain to put this.

Which is Lot’s answer to the crowd, which is to beg them not to rape the guests in his house. But here’s what I’ll do. Just because I don’t want you to have nothing, I’m going to send out my two daughters to you, and you can do with them as you will.

Yeah. And this is a way to, again, kind of hold up Lot as the ideal patron, the ideal offer of hospitality, because it is hyperbolic, it is rhetorical, but it’s saying Lot cares so much about the safety of anyone he brings in under his roof that he’s willing to sacrifice his two daughters in order to protect them. And this is not just in addition to being a denigration, a subjugation of their personhood, their autonomy, their agency, it’s also, again, showing Lot as willing to give up something. Because having two daughters means you have some money headed your way because you’re going to basically sell them off when they get married. There’s a bride price that’s going to come to you. And this is if they have been violated, if they’re no longer from the perspective of these authors, if they’re no longer potential wives, if they’re not wife material, then Lot is also sacrificing that future income.

So in a few different ways, it’s presenting Lot as willing to sacrifice his own resources, his own goods, members of his own family, in order to protect these houseguests. And now this story has a parallel. This is not the only place in the Bible where we hear almost the exact same story. Judges 19 tells almost the exact same story. And this is with a gentleman, an Israelite, who was traveling with his concubine. And very similar situation. He’s in a town, it’s supposed to be a town that is full of Israelites. He chooses not to stop at the closer town, but to go on to this other town where there are Israelites, because he trusts his own people.[00:19:08.920] Dan McClellan: He’s within. You know, he’s among his people. And he stops in and someone offers to let him stay in his house. And it’s the very same thing. This is a very hospitable house owner. And the same thing happens. Men surround the house and they say, “Send this dude out. We’re going to violate him.”

We’re going to violate him. And it’s important to note here, as with sexual assault today, it’s not about sex. It’s about power. It’s a way to exercise control over others. It’s a way to make yourself feel more powerful. And here it’s a way to shame and denigrate and humiliate another male Israelite. And so some people think this is a judgment on, a criticism of same-sex orientation or same-sex intercourse, and it’s really not. These men are playing a role where they are trying to humiliate someone from the outside who is staying the night, trying to exercise power over them. And a very similar thing happens where the man says, “No, I’m not going to send out my house guest, I’m going to protect him.” And the house guest says, “Well, I’m just going to shove my concubine out the door.” And the concubine—and you know, and we’ll see what happens in the Genesis story—but in the Judges story, the concubine gets shoved outside and is violated all night long and then ends up dying from her injuries on the very doorstep.

And in that story, the man comes out the next day and it is a horrific story when you read it. The narrative is like he stepped outside and he was like, “Come on, get up, we gotta go.” And then realized she was dead. And in the story he actually dismembers her, cuts her up into 12 pieces, sends one to each of the 12 tribes of Israel basically to say, “Look what they did to my, my concubine.” You know, I was supposed to be in Israelite territory, but the, the house of Israel is just in disarray. So it’s a shocking story. It is parallel in many ways to what’s going on in Genesis 19 . But I just wanted to make that point that this is, this is not saying these guys really just wanted to have sexual intercourse with other men. That’s not the point of the story in any way, shape or form. It is. The locals were trying to abuse and humiliate and shame someone from the outside.

And just to be clear, there’s no equivocation here, right? There’s no way around the facts of this. Like, this isn’t an interpretation problem where like you could interpret it a different way? Like no, they’re, the crowd is here to rape these two guys.

Lot then offers to—like is going to send his daughters out to the crowd to be raped. Yeah, okay. Fortunately, unlike the concubine in the other story, the angels stop him from sending the daughters out. They pull him back in, close the door, and then somehow blind all of the crowd so that they can’t come in and, and save the day. And then they tell him—so that that little escapade is over.

Right.

So then it’s time for the cities to be destroyed—the city, multiple cities actually get destroyed in this though. Sodom is sort of the center of this thing. And the men say to Lot, “Hey, do you have anybody else in town that you want to save?” Because we’re going right now. And Lot goes to his daughters’ boyfriends. They’re not really married yet. Right. These are, these—they’re called sons-in-law, but it seems like they’re not married yet.

So. So marriage anciently was a lot different. Once they got engaged, they were basically treated or they were referred to as if they were already married.dy married. So that engagement was like step one in a two-step process. And so it can refer to them as sons-in-law because there’s already a contract there. It has not yet been consummated.

So fiances.

Yeah. And that’s why Lot can offer these two women who are virgins in the story, because they have not yet consummated the marriage.

Interesting. All right, so he goes to the sons-in-law, he says, “Hey, we got to get out of here. The Lord is going to destroy the entire city.” And they go, “Ah, nah.” Yeah, they think he’s joking. They think it’s a—they don’t come. Which that’s an interesting thing to do.

Your potential father-in-law—you’ve also got to get that a lot of this is an etiology for some ethnic groups that are gonna get quite the zinger at the end of the story. And part of the point there was that there are no other men available. And so they’re kind of a MacGuffin in the story. They’re just there to be able to, for the narrators to say. And then these two idiots were like, “Surely you jest.”

So, one of my favorite little tiny moments in this story is that, you know, so Lot can’t get his sons-in-law. So it’s just him, his daughters and his wife. Morning happens. The… The angels say, “All right, let’s go.” And Lot dilly-dallies, apparently, a little bit. And the angels grab everybody by the arms and just say, “Let’s get out of here.”

So they all get out of there. And here’s what the angels say to them when they are outside of the city. They say, quote, “Flee for your life. Do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain. Flee to the hills or else you will be consumed.” And then Lot again with the negotiation. Lot’s like, “Ah, the hills. I don’t know about the hills. Can I go to a city? There’s another nice little city over here. Just don’t destroy that, and I’ll go to that.” And the angels are like, “Fine, go to that city.” And they start destroying Sodom and Gomorrah and sort of most of all of the Plain. And I was excited. I was excited when I was reading this to get to a part that I’ve always heard about and never understood, and that is that as Lot and his family are fleeing and the Lord is raining down sulfur and fire on these other cities—it’s napalm all the way—

Lot’s wife turns around and turns to a pillar of salt. Now, I had heard that story since I was a little kid.

And I was excited to read it now as an adult because I thought, “Okay, I’m finally going to understand why Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt.” Like, the crime of turning around does not seem to be a large crime.

Like when it’s being explained to them, it just sounds like you don’t want to dilly-dally. You want to run.

You want to—you want to get going. It doesn’t sound like, “And by the way, if you do turn around, catastrophe.”

Yeah, on you. It’s not saying “Don’t turn around, or else,” it seems like it’s just good advice.

Right.

Get going. Yeah.

It’s like “Don’t look down” when you’re on a high thing.

Yeah, whatever.

But it turns out, no, she turns into a pillar of salt and there’s no explanation. I was so ready for the explanation of what is happening here. Dan, help me out. I do not— Why is she salt?

So again, a lot of this story is just accounting for why we find things the way we find them now. And the region of Sodom and Gomorrah is supposed to be around the Dead Sea, which is a very low-lying sea. I want to say it’s a couple hundred meters below sea level. Right. And there are salt deposits all over the place. And so there are just natural pillars and deposits of salt all around the Dead Sea. And so this is a way to account for why that is. And so it’s not. It’s not telling a story because there’s something significant to the thrust of the story about this detail. It’s telling the story in order for people to go, “Oh, that’s why there’s all these pillars of salt down by the Dead Sea.” Oh, well, they all looked. Yeah, they. Everybody look.

Every pillar is somebody who turned around and looked.

Right. And so one of the things I see a lot on social media is people who are talking about, you know, proving the Bible true. There’s a specific pillar, a very old one, that is referred to as Lot’s wife, kind of colloquially. And so people will say, “Look, that’s Lot’s wife right there.”

She is.

I know where it is. And. And these people don’t realize that this is on the top of a mountain and that pillar is, like, over 50 feet high. So it’s definitely not Lot’s wife. And so there are aspects of the story that the original rhetorical intent, the rhetorical goal is lost on people who are trying to understand it as verbatim history, as an account of history as it actually happened. This is, you know, in some way, you’ve got to consider this like the story of the alligator who grabbed onto the elephant’s nose and pulled and pulled and pulled until it stretched out. What’s the point of that story? Oh, well, it is an etiology, a folk etiology for why elephants have long noses, and very similarly, Lot’s turning around and turning into a pillar of salt is an etiology for why there are pillars of salt around the Dead Sea.

Okay, okay. Well, we’re out of the… the bad cities. And you know, briefly, Lot. Lot and his family are in a little town called Zoar. Then they leave Zoar and run up into the mountains, and his two daughters decide to do the most inexplicable thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.

They say to him, “Our father is old and there is not a man on Earth to come into us after the manner of all the world.” Now, I’ve read up a little bit on the geography of what we’re talking about. They would not have to travel far.

To find husbands.

Right.

Like, there are men about. But they decide there aren’t going to be any men for them. The only guy in the world. It feels… it feels like they think they’re the only ones who survived. Of anybody who survived the… the… the… the firebombing of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Even though they just came out of a town.

Yeah. It says they came out of Zoar, which… which is kind of a word that means “little.” So this little place, and it doesn’t say anything about anyone living there as… as far as I recall. But, yeah, they.yeah, they… They flee into the mountains, and they must have thought of this as some kind of apocalyptic event, and surely no one is going to be left. And so it is down to us to carry on the human race.

We’ll repopulate the earth.

Unfortunately, the only dude is Dad.

Right.

Dad is… So they… So they come up with a plan because apparently Lot wouldn’t be up for this if they presented it to him. So on subsequent nights, they get their father drunk and they lie with him.

Right. So…

And… And both of them get pregnant.

Yep. And… And so here we’ve got another etiology, another way to say this is why the world is the way it is. And the story here is that one of them gives birth to the eponymous ancestor of the Moabites, and the other gives birth to the eponymous ancestor of the Ammonites, people who would be in conflict with the nation of Israel in the first half of the first millennium BCE. And it’s basically a way to say these two people that we’re not really fans of, they’re both the result of incest. So… Right. It’s not just a way to tell this story and say, look at the pillar of salt. And this is why this city was destroyed. And, oh, yeah, our neighbors are also the children of incest.

So it’s kind of nuts.

It’s like… Because we’ve just… We’ve just told our… Told this whole story about this good man Lot, about, you know, he is… He is Abraham’s kin. He is like you… He is the only good man in the entire Plain of Jordan or whatever it is. And yet we’re gonna just besmirch the crap out of all of that. And his entire lineage for the rest of time is… Is… Is tainted.

By incest.

And in part, it kind of absolves him of the responsibility a little bit by saying this was the daughters’ intentional decision, and they tricked him by getting him drunk, so he isn’t responsible for this. So in a way, it tries to tie off Lot’s righteousness and say this wasn’t his issue. But still, the Moabites and the Ammonites are, you know, gross people. And this is part of one of the main rhetorical thrusts of the Book of Genesis , is to create a single lineage for all the peoples on Earth so that we can account for where everybody came from. And it all goes back to a single individual initially, Adam and Eve. And we’re going to get… Then Noah and the Flood, and then we’re going to get all these peoples and the peoples we like, which are not really many people, except for Israel and the people descended from Israel, but the people we don’t like—everybody else—oh, we got some zingers in store for them. This is where they came from.

And including Hagar, whose son… This is Genesis 16 . Hagar gives birth to Ishmael. Ishmael is going to be the eponymous ancestor of the Ishmaelites. But… But this is a… An enslaved woman who only was able to have a child by Abraham because Sarah was barren. And so these are ways to kind of rhetorically taint all these other folks around them that they had different degrees of hatred for.

Yeah, no, I… I mean, it… It’s an interesting device to use, and I get why they did it. They… Let’s not talk about the fact that they score a bit of an own goal on themselves when Sarah and Abraham turn out to be half-brother, half-sister.sister. But we’ll get to that another time. That’s a story for another time. Yeah, as for that, this. That’s the end of this. The Lot story. That’s all we get. And so, you know, ends with the middle finger to the Moabites and the… And the Ammonites. The end. And then we’re back to the Abraham story, which we will get to at some point. But for now, let’s take a break.

All right, welcome to this installment of What Does That Mean? The segment where we try to talk about some terms, some concepts, some frameworks from the worlds of biblical studies, study of religion, archaeology. And today, I wanted to talk about a word that I pronounce provenance, but that some people will pronounce provenience or something like that, particularly if they’re of a European bent. But this is a word that fundamentally refers to the origins of something or when something began to be the way it is. And this is used a lot in archaeology to talk about where we found things. And so you will hear archaeologists distinguish provenanced artifacts from unprovenanced artifacts. And this is a big deal. An unprovenanced artifact is something that does not have a secure provenance. We don’t know precisely where it was first discovered, because at some point, everything that we find archaeologically was left somewhere.

And then at some point later, someone dug it up out of the ground, tripped over it, discovered it somehow. And that point of discovery is the provenance. Now, with unprovenanced artifacts, a lot of them will turn up on the market, somebody will be offered something for sale, and they don’t know exactly where it came from. And the big problem with this is without a good provenance, you don’t know if it’s a forgery or not. You don’t know where it came from, you don’t know when it came from. And so there’s a limit to the utility, the usefulness of such artifacts for scholars.

Part of what we’re talking about is kind of like the legal concept of chain of custody. Where, like, if we know whose hands a piece of evidence has been in and we can track, you know, we can definitively track where it’s come from and how, who’s handled it and stuff, then legally, it has much more force.

Than if it just shows up somewhere.

Yeah. And similarly, in scholarship, something has much more force and more utility for the scholarly discussion if we can say we were digging in this place, we kept careful notes, at this depth we found this. It was found right next to this other thing. It was found with these other things inside it, or it was found inside these other things. And that all helps us to provide context so that when we’re trying to reconstruct the history of this artifact, if we can say this bowl had a bunch of charred seeds in it, and we can carbon-14 test those seeds, and we can say they came from this time period, and this bowl came from a level, a stratum that also had these other artifacts in it that we can also date to a given time period, then we can say this bowl almost certainly came from this time period, or at least it was deposited in this time period.

It may have been made earlier, but when it had these burnt seeds put inside it, when it fell into disuse, when it was covered in dirt, this is when that happened. And that helps us, because other scholars are going to look at it and say, what does this mean? What was this used for? What does this tell us about the world in this time period? If we can say this came from this decade, maybe even this year, then it is a lot more useful to us as scholars. you see on eBay, I don’t even know if eBay is still a thing, but if you see on eBay, somebody selling a bowl and they said, oh, this came from 5000 BCE, you know, we have no idea if that’s the case. And we can try to compare things, what kinds of designs are on it, how was it made, what, you know, what shape is it in? We can try to fit it into things, but we may only be able to get within maybe 500 years. We may even not even be able to get into the right millennium.

And so provenance is so important, and these days, there’s an entire industry around creating fake artifacts.

You don’t say.

Believe it or not, there are people willing to create fake artifacts to make money. And some of them can make a lot of money. The Dead Sea Scrolls, we know that the Dead Sea Scrolls that were initially purchased way back in 1947 and in the years following, we know that those are authentic. And then we had archaeologists who went out to Qumran and the surrounding area and dug and discovered a bunch more. We have the provenance for those things. The original ones were found on the market, so they were initially unprovenanced, but we were able to trace them back to the caves from which they came from and we’re pretty secure in that. But since 2002, there have been a handful of fragments of texts that were associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls that were sold at auctions or sold privately by people who just showed up with these fragments and said, probably said, oh, yeah, they came from here.

And that influenced the scholarship for many years. In fact, one of them that I found fascinating was a fragment of Deuteronomy 27 , which suggested— So there are… We have the… In Deuteronomy, the blessings and the curses, one from Mount Ebal and the other from another mountain. But the Samaritans, the ancient Samaritans, claimed that it was Mount Gerizim. That was where the—one of these two things was—was pronounced from. And this fragment of Deuteronomy 27 , where it should have said Ebal, it said Gerizim. And this was like, oh, no. Or oh, yeah. It—the Samaritans may have been right. And this excited a lot of people, and me included. I was like, this is—this is fascinating. This is so cool. Fast forward almost 20 years. We had a lot of scholars who were starting to do research on these fragments and look closely at them, who decided, it seems like these are forgeries, that these aren’t real.

And a friend of mine was involved in that. Kip Davis, Dr. Kip Davis, that I worked with at Trinity Western University 13 years ago, was one of the scholars who did a lot of really great work looking at these things under microscopes, looking at the ink, looking at the— the—it’s not the animal skins that were used, and concluding with a high degree of certainty that these were not produced anciently. These are forgeries.

Interesting.

And a lot of money changed hands regarding those fragments. So… And some of these are in… that were in the hands or probably still are in the hands of, like, the Museum of the Bible. But there were also some universities that got involved, Azusa Pacific University, for instance, purchased at least one of these fragments. And so it influenced the scholarship, it caused a lot of money to change hands, and it also brought prestige to a lot of these places that, you know, boasted of having fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it turns out they were fake.[00:42:58.990] Dan McClellan: And so obviously there are a lot of folks who would rather not accept the findings of Dr. Kipp Davis and other scholars who still think they, they are genuine, but they’re almost certainly forgeries.

Well, especially when, like, you’re, when, you know, you’ve got some scholar whose work is dependent on these and really cool things, you know, and they’ve put in a lot of effort and they’ve put in a lot of time on this thing to then have to turn around and say, oh, you know what? Just disregard. Yeah, all of my books, all these publications, all this other stuff. That, that’s a painful, painful moment.

Yeah. And, you know, we don’t want anyone to have to go through that. And we don’t want universities to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. We don’t want folks like the Museum of the Bible spending even more than that, trying to maybe even smuggle in some of these things from, from other countries.

Yeah, they’ve been in some trouble. That Museum of the Bible. Those Greens made some sketchy purchases over the years.

Yeah, there are issues there. But I think I recently heard that rather than trying to purchase antiquities and things that are more or less relics, they’re starting to fund independent archaeological excavations. And when I say independent, I mean they’re paying money so that other people who are not associated with them and are not under their thumbs can go dig in places. And I think that’s a much better use of money. So, so that I, I think they are starting to learn their lesson in that regard. But, yeah, they have done a lot of stuff incorrectly because they had a.

Whole bunch of Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to not be authentic. They had, they’ve, they’ve had a lot of their, of their collection turn out to be phonies.

That, that’s been one of the issues. One of the issues has been that they’ve purchased antiquities and brought them into the United States when that was against the law, and some of that has been repatriated. So, yeah, there’s, there’s an issue with that. And, and this is one of the reasons that a lot of scholars are calling for a complete moratorium on publishing any scholarship that is based on or that is presenting unprovenanced artifacts.

Oh, wow.

And, and this would be a pretty significant step. But there are, there are folks who have taken this step for Instance, Biblical Archaeology Review was still is a very popular magazine that seeks to democratize biblical archaeology for folks. You can get a subscription to this magazine for not a lot of money. And you know, there will be articles talking about recent discoveries and scholarship on artifacts and places and things like that. And a friend of mine used to be the editor in chief, and while he was editor in chief, they wouldn’t even talk about unprovenanced artifacts. That was a high standard that was briefly set for Biblical Archaeology Review just so that they would not be contributing to problematic scholarship that could be erased tomorrow. That they would not be contributing to this industry that is profiting from the production and the sale of these fake artifacts. And then he left that publication a few years ago, and now they are back to discussing and publishing unprovenanced artifacts.

But there are other publishers who are trying to take seriously this discussion about. Should we completely avoid publishing any discussion, any scholarship on unprovenanced artifacts?

Well, because there is this question of like, okay, so we have an artifact that is unprovenanced. That’s problematic. But it could. It could be real.

And if it’s real, it’s telling us something.

Yeah. And. And there are cases, there are some artifacts where that could be the case. This could be groundbreaking if this is real. And it could just be something that some dude made in their garage 10 years ago.

Now, wait a minute. It can’t be that easy. Well, to trick people into seeing a piece of an artifact as real that very clearly wasn’t, can it? There are certainly people making a living doing it.

Yeah, the. Well, yeah, two things. So this industry is getting very, very sophisticated and a lot of people with a lot of expertise are moving into this area. And so it’s getting harder and harder to decipher forgery from authentic. But that does raise something that just happened just a few days ago where this was a discovery that was supposed to have been made by the media advisor to the president of Israel late last year, who was hiking at Tel Lachish. And Lachish is this city in central Israel, the ruins of this city, it’s a tel, meaning it’s a big hill. And the city was built on top of the hill. And this was one of the cities that was besieged by the Assyrian king Sennacherib back when Hezekiah was king. In fact, it is memorialized, the destruction of Lachish, on some bas reliefs that were set up in Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh.

But he was walking around the tell. And he said he picked up a potsherd. So that’s a broken piece of a clay pot. And saw writing on it and noticed that he could read it very easily. And then it said 24th year, or maybe it said second year, Darius, or Darius. And this would be a reference to Darius the Great, the Persian king. And he said he looked around thinking that this was a prank that was being played on him, but nobody seemed to know anything about this. So they took it to the Israel Antiquities Authority, the IAA, who ran some analyses on it and came back and said, and this is a quote, that “this is authentic. No modern hand could do this.” Wow. Unquote.

That’s a bold statement.

It’s bold. It is very bold. And on March 1st. Now, this discovery was supposed to have been made late last year. They sat on it until March 1st. So just less than a week before the beginning of the celebration of Purim, the Jewish holiday that derives from the story of Esther. And they released this story on March 1, announcing the discovery of this inscription. And I saw this early in the morning on Twitter, and I made a video about it, shared it on TikTok. And I said, “It feels rather convenient that this is coming out shortly before Purim.” And I’m sure there are some epigraphers who are going to have things to say about this, but this is an unprovenanced artifact. Now, this individual ostensibly just found it lying on the ground at this site, but this site has been trod for decades and decades by thousands and thousands of people. Archaeologists have dug all over this site.

And so for a potsherd to be just sitting on top of the ground means it was probably left there recently, or it has been moved from some other place. So this is an unprovenanced artifact. Meaning.

So just. Just the ground doesn’t count as provenance.

When it’s. When it’s. When it’s supposed to be 2700 years later, probably not. Anything that was deposited in its original state 2700 years ago is going to be under something. And so to have it just be sitting on the surface of this tell that has been dug up for decades and decades is an issue. an issue. Now, sometimes people will, you know, kick over a rock or turn something over and dislodge something. Right? But if it is found just kind of sitting unconnected to anything, not embedded in anything, but loose on the surface of the ground, that is probably. You probably cannot say you have a good provenance on that.

Right?

So that story breaks, a bunch of scholars start talking about this. And I have a friend who lives in Israel who was saying on Twitter by like 4:00 p.m. that day that there are rumblings that this is going to be announced as not authentic. And it was just. If it was not the next day, it was the day after that the Israel Antiquities Authority came out and said, turns out this is not authentic.

But how could they know?

Well, they knew because the person who ostensibly made it got in contact with them after the story broke. And the. What they shared was that someone who was part of an excavation that was taking place at Lachish the previous August had taken that potsherd and inscribed it with that text as part of a demonstration to a class regarding inscription techniques. Which means this person is, is quite an expert in these kinds of inscriptions. If they could just offhandedly, to demonstrate to a class how people inscribed pottery, created an inscription that the Israel Antiquities Authority said no modern hand could do. So there are still question marks about this story, but the idea is basically that they created this inscription to demonstrate this technique to students. They left it at the site. A couple of months later, someone stumbled upon it on the ground.

And so it was.

So was this. Sorry, was this shard actually an ancient shard that he just had lying around, that this person just had lying around and that they then inscribed?

Most likely, that’s what it sounds like. And if you’ve been to Israel, a lot of these sites do have a lot of broken pottery just scattered around.

Want a shard? I can get you a shard.

I can get you a shard by three o’ clock. And there’s a. There’s a site called Azekah, which is near the Valley of Elah, where David was supposed to have fought Goliath. And it’s just. There are just sherds strewn all over the place. And some of it is kind of like decoration. Like somebody had a bunch of pots made and shattered them all and just kind of scattered them. And some of it is, you know, it’s part of the ambiance, and some of it is ancient pottery where this has already been. You know, we found a bunch of shattered pots. We got what we needed. We’ve done all the research, we’ve documented everything. So we’re just going to scatter the stuff on the ground. And so it’s not unusual to find potsherds, but you can’t really date a potsherd. You know, you can’t carbon-14 date it. You. If you don’t find it in context, you either have to date it based on techniques that are used, images that are painted on it or inscribed in it or something like that.

So just a random potsherd could be from a thousand years ago, could be from 3,000 years ago, could be from last week. It is not easy to tell.

I guess they’re just made of dirt. So if it’s dirt from the same place, who knows when it was made?

Yeah, and so that’s a. That’s a difficult thing for the IAA, the Israel Antiquities Authority, to acknowledge. They did the right thing, though. They rather quickly came out with this press release saying, stop the presses.8.890] Dan McClellan: “We made a mistake.” And there is some— —some egg on their face. But at the same time, there are still some question marks to this story. But this is an illustration of one of the dangers of publicizing, publishing unprovenanced artifacts as if this was just created by somebody illustrating this technique for their students. If they never found out about the story being released or if they decided not to come forward, that artifact could be used in who knows how much research. Now, in this particular instance, the inscription—2nd year or 24th year, whatever, of Darius—that doesn’t really change much. We know quite a bit about Darius. It would be the first direct attestation to Darius that is found in Israel.

So in that sense, it would be noteworthy, but it wouldn’t really change any of the scholarship. But if they had said something that would be groundbreaking and then kept their mouth shut, that could, you know, there could be doctoral dissertations written about that, conferences held, books published, and all based on something that somebody may have just scribbled and kind of absentmindedly left behind. And that could change the shape of scholarship. And so because of just how serious those things can be, I think we need to take— —we need to take seriously the problem of unprovenanced artifacts. And people need to be aware of what artifacts that are being talked about in the public have provenance and which do not, because those that do not tend to generate a lot of problems.

I feel like the next thing you’re going to tell me is, like, the Noah’s Ark that they found in Turkey isn’t legitimate.

Well, that one’s still in the ground, but— —but it’s definitely not legitimate.

Oh, darn it. All right, fine.

That one’s— —we’ll talk about what wishful thinking means in another segment, but motivated reasoning. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

All right, well, thank you, Dan. That’s fascinating. Another— —another word in our pocket as we journey forth in the scholarship that’s useful. If you would like to contact us about that, or anything that we’ve talked about on today’s show, listener and viewer at home, you can write into us. The address is contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and you can, you can write to us there, find us on all of our social media and, and if you become a patron of our show, then we will not have to go forth and start forging things for people to find just to support ourselves. So that’s—that’s a good thing to do. Or will we? Who knows? There’s some question there in this economy.

Can’t rule it out.

We can’t rule it out. You can rule nothing out. Anyway, thanks for listening, everybody, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Why Is She Salt?

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