Modest is Hottest?

I mean, in. In fairness to Ham, there were like seven people left in the whole world. So, like, you know, there’s not. There’s not many people that can satisfy whatever sexy feelings you’re having. But still, your dad or your mom is probably the wrong choice.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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

Things are good. It’s finally actually like, kind of looking like winter here in Salt Lake City. There was a little bit of snow this morning, and it’s coldish.

Global warming’s failing us again.

My dogs are. They don’t like the snow.

Oh, really?

Yeah, the. Well, the older one is kind of like, don’t make me go outside. And then I don’t like doing it. And then the. The. The puppy is just like. But is, you know, kind of confused about what’s going on.

The first dog I ever had, the first day that it saw that he saw snow, he bolted. Like, I’ve never seen him bolt. He ran out the door and down the street, like into neighbors’ yards. I’ve. He had never done this before. He was just so excited about snow. And from then on, like, if we were shoveling, he wanted to be out there and he wanted us to shovel the snow onto him. Like he just. Anything involving snow, he wanted us to throw it at him. He wanted. He just was always loved the snow.

He was a snowman, huh?

He was. He was indeed. Well, hey, there’s a whole show that we’re gonna be doing. We’re gonna. We’re gonna do a Chapter and Verse. All right, start us off. And then we’re going to do a. We’re gonna dive into a new segment that we’re calling Your Patriarchy and You. So that’ll be a lot of fun. And, and we’re going to. We’re going to have a great time with it. So let’s. Let’s launch into Chapter and Verse.

All right, and our Chapter and Verse today comes courtesy of the book of Genesis . We’re in chapter nine, and we’re talking about verses 18 through 27 here.

There are a lot of Answers in Genesis.

I hear.

I hear that it has all of the answers that we need.

There can be. This is an interesting story, though, that I think catches a lot of people off guard if they’re reading through Genesis and they get through the primeval history. They’re like, what the hell was that? Yeah, I could.

I will say the first time I encountered this story, you know, this is about Noah. I thought I knew the Noah story. I got through the whole flooding thing, and then I got to this, and it’s only a few verses. It’s not long. You could miss it if you’re. If you were drowsy. But I wasn’t drowsy. And I went.

Like, I literally.

And I reread it, and I thought maybe I had read it wrong. And I was utterly baffled by what happened here. So I’m very glad that we get to talk about this, because I think a lot of people could use some. Some Dan guidance on this one, and not me. You, Dan.

Yeah. Well, I’m gonna go ahead and read it, and I’m going to read from the New Revised Standard Version and then talk a little bit about some of the issues that we have and how. How we go about interpreting this. Because there are some oddities here, and I’m going to suggest that we’re probably not getting the story as it was originally told. We’ve got some theories about how it may have looked originally, but I’ll go ahead and read.

Okay. I might. I might stop you as we. As we go on, just because.

Yeah, feel free to. So verse 18, the sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan, which.

I’m going to stop you right there, because that jumps out at you.

Right.

We don’t talk about, like, Shem and Japheth have their own lineages that go on from which we are all descended. Theoretically, you know, these are the three from whom we are all descended. But it just takes a whole little moment to separate out Ham and his lineage.

Yeah. And then in a bit later, we’re going to mention Ham again, and then we’re going to get another parenthetical remark of the father of Canaan, just so you’re aware. So, yeah, we are being. They’re leading us. There’s some foreshadowing going on here, which is indicative that. That maybe there’s some literary shenaniganing going on here, and we’re going to talk about what that might have been.

Yeah. So you’ll. You’ll need to explain in a minute. We’ll pull the pin on. On. On Canaan.

Yeah. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these, the whole Earth was peopled. Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. And I’m going to stop myself here to point out that a lot of scholars think that the story of Noah before the flood story was. Was put in here, was just a story of the etiology for viticulture.

Oh, weird.

Noah was just the first viticulturist, and that’s. That was his role in the story. And then we get. The flood gets introduced later. So we get this. Noah, man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. It seems kind of hard.

I am gonna jump in here. Sorry, I had to switch things up on my screen to the KJV, because that line that he’s a man of the soil, the first to plant a vineyard, the way it’s rendered in the KJV is maybe my favorite wording in the universe, which is. And Noah began to be an husbandman.

And he planted a vineyard. Yeah, he began to be an husbandman first. I don’t think. I don’t think husbandry. We. We don’t. First of all, we don’t use the word an husbandman much these days.

And. And for those who are wondering what’s going on with the n, the an husbandman. So. So on an indefinite article, you can have a or an. And usually you have an if the next word begins with a vowel. And so in the period when the King James Version was translated, you didn’t pronounce the H. Yeah, it was an usbandman. So it just was more natural that way. So, yeah, there we go. Okay. So sorry to interrupt again.

We’ll—

I promise I’ll try. I’ll— I’ll try to let you get through this thing.

So we’re getting reintroduced to Noah as someone who is significant only because he makes wine, even though we’ve had two and a half chapters of discussion about Noah so far. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent, as, you know, as you like to do sometimes.

You know what? Everybody’s done it. It’s a fun day. You know, you got a warm day and you’re drinking your wine.

There’s nobody else on the planet except—

For your children, your family.

Yeah. And Ham, father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth and let him live in the tents of Shem and let Canaan be his slave.”

And that is so harsh. I mean, look, I don’t know how to interpret that other than what it actually says, which is—correct me if I’m wrong— Ham accidentally walked in on his dad naked. And his dad was like, “Okay, all of your descendants for the rest of forever are slaves now because you did something so bad.”

That is— That is a good surface reading of this, but I’m going to raise some questions here.

Thank God, because the surface reading gives me no comfort. So.

Yes, well, it’s not going to get appreciably better, but we’re going to raise some questions here. Okay, so he says—it says, “When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him.” Now, when they mention the children, it’s Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In the Hebrew Bible, when they list children, they list them oldest to youngest. Okay, Ham is not the youngest, according to the way they list them: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. According to that convention, Japheth would be the youngest.

Right.

Ham would be the middle child. But here it says “his youngest son had done to him.” Okay, now here’s another convention issue. If Canaan is Ham’s son, “lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth and let him live in the tents of Shem and let Canaan be his slave. Those are his uncles,

not his brothers.

Right.

So we got something funky going on, Dan.

Yeah. If we’re cursing Canaan, then, yeah, that’s weird.

There is a way to resolve this.

And the resolution is that Canaan was the youngest son of Noah, and Ham was not even in this story originally. If you have Shem, Japheth, and Canaan as his three sons: “Cursed be Canaan. Lowest of the slaves shall he be to his brothers,” namely Shem and Japheth, his two older brothers, making him the youngest. So a lot of scholars think originally this story was probably about Shem, Japheth and Canaan. And so our little curse that Noah levels against the youngest son was probably just leveled at Canaan. And so this raises the question, well, what’s Ham doing in here? And one theory is that Ham would, according to Genesis 10 and the other genealogies, Ham would be the eponymous ancestor of the Egyptians and other Africans, Ethiopians and things like that. And so it may be that in order to ensure that, as it says in Genesis 9:19 , from these, the whole Earth was peopled, they’re like, we need somebody to cover Africa.

Let’s get this guy Ham. And. And we need to stick him into the Noah story. Well, we got Canaan in there right now. Okay, well, we’ll make Canaan a son of Ham. Now, this leaves these kind of narrative incongruities. Got continuity problems here. And so that’s what. What scholars suggest is probably going on here.

What makes Ham eponymous for the Africans?

For if you. You talk about. And. And this is not a. A word that is used a lot, but Hamitic people.

Oh, okay.

And also in the 18th and 19th century, when European and American scholars used it to authorize and validate the enslavement of Africans, then this curse became their proof text.

The Hamitic curse. The curse of the. The offspring of Ham to be slaves. Well, right there. There you go.

We get to. I have heard that used. Like, I remember that being a thing that people talked about.

Yeah. And. And there are a couple of good books that talk about this. This concept of the. The curse of. Of Ham by a. An author. I think it’s gold. Yeah. Goldenberg, in 2003, published a book called The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That is a wonderful book. And then there’s another one that is even more recent that is from 2017. David M. Goldenberg, and Slavery: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham goes over how this idea kind of sprang from the Bible and then became the proof text for enslaving Africans for the modern European world. So that’s how it’s been deployed. But, yeah, initially it was probably just covering the ground saying, okay, now we got somebody to cover Africa.

We got somebody to cover the Semites. We. We got somebody to cover the other people out there. And so we can say that the whole Earth was peopled now that we’ve got Ham in place. And it. And it caused them, you know, a little hiccup in the narrative, but they’re not too upset about that.

Now, the Israelite people, the people who would be deploying this. Who would be reading this, believed that they came from. From which. From Shem, from Ja… from Shem.

Yeah. This is where we get the word Semitic.

Oh, oh, there you go.

Okay, great. And then there. And then frequently in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Canaanites are their enemies.

So, so this is, this is sort of an ideology for the beginning of that.

Yeah. And in, in it, in that time period, the idea here was we don’t like the Canaanites. We want to dominate the Canaanites. We want to enslave the Canaanites. And our authorization. So in the ancient world, it was, well, this authorizes our enslavement of the Canaanites. And then in the 18th and 19th century, well, this authorizes our enslavement of the the Hamitic peoples. So it’s being deployed to structure power and values in the service of their own identity politics. So here’s an interesting question. What on earth does it mean that Ham saw the nakedness of his father?

Yeah, I mean, that’s the big, big glaring problem of the story. Right? Because a. The story doesn’t indicate at all that anything like, it was an accident. He just happened to walk in.

Yeah. And bada bing, hey, dad, have you seen my PS5–whoa.

Yeah, exactly. And then he immediately, like, takes steps. He’s like, hey, brothers, don’t, don’t. You know, he goes and, like, gives them warning. And like.

Well, there’s. And that’s one way to interpret it. I think most people have, have interpreted to be like, he went outside and was like, guess what I just saw? And then the brothers were like, how dare you? And they, they’re the ones who, who carefully back their way in.

Right.

But, but one of the reasons. There are two reasons that a lot of very early in the history of the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, we’re talking early rabbinic literature. They’re like, something else is going on here.

And one of the reasons is that the, the curse of Ham or Canaan seems to be a bit of an overcorrection.

Maybe a little, tiny, tiny bit disproportional.

Yeah. And the other thing is, it says he. He woke up and knew what his youngest son had done to him. And people are like, well, what if he just walked in and was like, oh, crap, and then walked out? How would Noah have known what his son did to him?

Right.

And so in the, in the early rabbinic period, you have this reading that he castrated him. And the idea. Yeah. And the idea being this accounts for the curse. He ended Noah’s line, so now Noah is going to curse his line, not Ham, but Canaan. So everybody who comes from his line is now cursed. So that was an early rabbinic interpretation. We have another interpretation in other rabbinic literature that reads it as a case of paternal incest, that Ham sexually assaulted his unconscious.

Right.

Drunk, naked father, which is, yeah, let that marinate.

Like both. All of that is pretty intense. Both of those are very like. You get the curse more. But what. What’s baffling to me is how. How completely unspoken either of those things are.

In the text now there’s.

There is a datum, a piece of data that folks have appealed to, to, to reinforce the sexual interpretation of Ham’s sin, and that is the fact that Ham sees his father’s nakedness. Now, this is something that. This is a phrase that occurs elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Now, there is one occurrence in Leviticus 20 , verse 17, that has to do with an act of sexual intercourse. And this is in. In a piece of legislation that talks about not a man not marrying his sister. And the issue, though, with. With understanding seeing nakedness to mean a sexual act is that seeing nakedness in no other passage has to do with a sexual act. Uncovering somebody’s nakedness refers to a sexual act dozens of times. Okay, so this.

The. The idiom is uncovering one’s nakedness. In fact, in that passage in Leviticus where it says, if a man marry his sister, and then he has seen her nakedness, she has seen his nakedness, he has uncovered her nakedness, and then, you know, there it’s trouble.

So that’s a different act than seeing the nakedness. Right, right.

The uncovering the nakedness is. Is still kind of governing the. The act of. Of sexual congress there and everywhere else in Leviticus where it talks about not, you know, a man not sleeping with his father, sleeping with his sister, sleeping with his. I was gonna say wife, sister, but I’m not sure if they really cared. But there were. There were. There are a bunch of places where uncovering one’s nakedness is a reference to a sexual act. Seeing nakedness usually is a reference to the exposure of vulnerability or shame. Because when. When Adam and Eve first gained knowledge of good and evil, what’s the first thing they realized they saw? That they were naked and they were shamed or they felt shame and they covered themselves up. And, and. And then you have, like Joseph, when. When he’s pretending to be Pharaoh and his brothers show up, he says, ah, you’ve come to see the nakedness of the land, referring to the vulnerability of Egypt during the famine and this. And this happens throughout the Hebrew Bible. This idea of seeing someone’s nakedness is seeing their shame or their vulnerability.

And this was. This was a serious thing. Anciently and still in. In that part of the world, the idea of nakedness is. Is considered very shameful. And this was one of the reasons that during the. The Gulf War, one of the things that sometimes soldiers did in an awful and criminal act was strip their prisoners naked. Right. And then take photographs of them and, you know, make them engage in all kinds of acts while they were naked. And this was considered just supremely shameful. Yeah. And so seeing someone, seeing your father’s nakedness, seeing your father’s vulnerability and shame and not protecting it, but actually going and telling other people about it would have been considered a pretty serious indiscretion at the time. And so I. I think that is the most likely reading that. Yeah, it may not make much sense to. To most readers today, but. Yeah, the idea is just that Ham walked in, and instead of covering up his father, protecting his honor, he went and spread his shame, and then his brothers had to go in and cover him up.

And the story about the brothers covering him up also makes the other readings nonsensical. So if seeing his nakedness refers to castrating him or sexually assaulting him or sexually assaulting his wife, how does this fit? Where they walk in backwards with a garment, and they’re very careful not to accidentally sexually assault him.

Right.

Very careful not to accidentally castrate him.

They make sure not to. Not to. Not to cut his balls off again.

Yeah, we gotta walk in backwards. Avert your eyes. Let’s drop this garment over him. So we don’t.

We will offer no medical attention, but we will make sure. We’ll put a nice blanket on you.

Yeah. And that’ll soak up most of the blood. Yeah. So I, I think it very clearly needs to be read as a reference to just seeing his father’s shame.

And. And I think there’s a, oh. And I don’t know if I mentioned it, but one of the other readings that has been promoted more recently is that it was maternal incest, that this was not a reference to sexually assaulting Noah, but Noah’s wife. And that was a reading that was promoted in a Journal of Biblical Literature article from 2005 by John Bergsma and Scott Hahn called Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan, where they argued this was maternal incest. So that. That has kind of become in vogue recently because of. Of that article. But these. These readings are more salacious, and so people find them more interesting because, I mean, in.

In fairness to Ham, there were like, seven people left in the whole world. So, like, you know, there’s not. There’s not many people that can satisfy whatever sexy feelings you’re having. But still, your dad or your mom is probably the wrong choice.

And I’m just gonna say.

And when it comes to Noah waking up and knowing what his youngest son had done to him, that’s kind of a MacGuffin.

Like, Noah has to find out for this curse to. To happen. And so if you’re. You’re. You’re not gonna go through this lengthy discussion of. Of here’s how Noah found out. You’re just gonna say, and look, Noah found out. Okay, don’t worry about why, but. Or how Noah found out. And so I, I don’t think that creates any. Any problems for a straightforward reading. So I think we need to understand this on a literary level and not on a historical level. Way too often people are trying to imagine what’s going on behind the scenes, what’s going on in the minds of the actors. And. And it’s like, that’s not helping you make sense of a story that somebody wrote.

Right.

What’s going to help you make sense of a story that somebody wrote is how do authors think about this? How do authors utilize characters? What literary conventions might be influencing how they’re telling the story, the way they’re telling the story?

Well, and. And as we’ve talked about, it’s not just, you know, first you have to think about the author, and then you have to think about how this has been transmitted through time. Because it seems to me that the Ham, the father of Canaan, you know, that father of Canaan being inserted a bunch of times, that seems likely to be an afterthought that somebody else jammed in there.

Right. When they’re. When they’re getting the story together, they’re like, hey, man, you left Canaan as the. As the one who’s getting cursed. And you’re telling this story about Ham, and it’s like, oh, don’t worry about it. We’ll do. Say, Ham was the father of Canaan. And then that will prime the pump, and everybody will be like, oh, I got you. That’s why. Because he’s. He’s his father. So, yeah, I think we can see the… The authorial seams in here as this story is coming together. And so it’s not as salacious a reading to say, yeah, Ham saw Noah naked, and rather than protect his father’s honor, he went and spread his shame. His brothers protected his father’s honor. And so Noah said, I curse you. And initially the story was about Canaan, and later on they wrote Ham into the story because they needed… They needed somebody to be the eponymous ancestor to the Africans and Ham was their guy. So, so we got…

It’s both more complex and more simple.

The readings that have been ginned up to try to account for this.

I gotta tell you, you have not convinced me that this is a good passage. This is that like anything positive has occurred here.

Or that I should like it at all.

No, certainly that’s not the goal of me trying to clarify what’s going on here. I had something I’ve noticed recently as on… On Twitter, I’ve gotten a lot more attention from Christian nationalists and others. There seems to be an uptick in people who will see a video or a tweet of mine where I say something along the lines of “the Bible supports slavery from beginning to end.” And they’re like, “Oh, you’re saying slavery is good?” No, no, I’m telling you what was in the Bible. I’m not saying I endorse biblical morality or biblical ethics. I’m saying this is what the Bible says. And so now some friends of mine are like, “You should probably put a disclaimer on there just to kind of cut off those claims.” And I think it’s the most ludicrous thing in the world that I would need to let people know… Just because I’m saying the Bible says this does not mean I’m saying this is the word of God and everybody should be doing it.

Yeah, that…

Well, but I will make it explicit that it is the official position of the Data Over Dogma podcast that slavery is bad. Okay. And as… As is cursing someone’s line forever, period. Really, I just don’t think that that’s okay. I don’t think that that’s a great thing to do.

Yeah. And even in the Bible, you know, you got some people who say, well, God will curse your offspring to the fourth generation or whatever. And then you got other ones who say they will not visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. So whichever God of the Bible you endorse, let’s hope it’s the one that does not visit the iniquities of the father on the children until the fourth generation.

Yeah. Especially if those iniquities are like just like snickering a little bit at his ding-dong.

Yeah. Walk in on… On your dad naked. I mean who, you know, let he who has not done that cast the first stone.

Yeah. One of the…

One of the… In like their cartoons and things like that where you have… Oh like Flash and… And what’s the… What is it, Reverse-Flash or something? Like who’s… Who’s got the yellow costume? Like there’s…

I’m out of my depth on this one.

Yeah. They usually have like an anti-character for some folks.

So says the guy who’s wearing a bizarro Superman shirt as we speak.

Yeah. At. When. When we first hopped on Dan was like, is your video backwards? No, it’s not. What’s going on? The S on your shirt is backwards. Yeah, but. And so the Bible has your. Your God and your. And your Yahweh God or your anti God or your. Your whatever. However you want to qualify the hero with their anti counterparts. But yeah, I’m gonna have to start.

Doing a bizarro God segment on the show.

Yeah. One that. Yeah. When we. We talked about that in Revelation a little bit. The Bizarro God of Revelation.

That’s true.

So yeah. Spay and neuter your pets, everybody.

Okay. I think that’s a great way to leave it off because it’s going to lead us. You know, just this talk of nakedness and shame I think is a great lead in to our next segment. Your patriarchy and you. So here. Here’s the thing. Recently you got into some. Some Twitter dust ups as you are.

Known to do as is my wont.

It is your wont. You. You. You occasionally will disagree with some people on. On Twitter.

Yeah. Or. Or X. If. If you care what Elon Musk thinks.

I will. I don’t think I’ll ever call it that. I don’t think I’m willing.

My. The. The book. I. I’m working on a trade book right now and there’s a. There’s a chapter where I start off with an anecdote and I talk about Twitter and I was like so and so wrote on Twitter and then parenthetically I just have. Or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Whatever it is, it’s going to die soon anyway. It’s already lost billions of dollars anyway. Yeah, here’s the thing. One of the things that you were talking about was a concept that is near and dear to many Christian and Jewish and Muslim people’s heart, which is the dressing modestly of women.

The modest dressing of women. It’s a.

How this all started.

No, I don’t.

Okay. Oh, there’s a beer company called Conservative Dad.

Oh, God.

And the full name is Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer or something like that. Wow. And they released a 2024 Real Women of America calendar. So a pin up calendar with conservative women like Dana Loesch and. And other folks like that who are well known in the conservative world in various states of dress and undress. So it is intended to be titillating. And a lot of the blue checks on Twitter just went ballistic. Called it satanic. Called this. Yeah. Said that this was soft porn. Said it was, quote, not conservative in perhaps the most vicious cut of all.

And. And you had a lot of Christians who were just loudly braying about how upset they were that these women would appear in this calendar and they would purport to be conservatives. And, and so that then caused all of these Christians to find their, let’s say, find their relief in spewing scripture all over Twitter. Well, about.

I mean, this is a tradition that goes back a long way. And, and there are a whole bunch. You know, I went and did a bunch of poking around to find who was saying what about how the ladies should dress. Interestingly, so many of the places that I found. And we’ll, we’ll talk about this a little while later. But so many of them said that. That men should also dress modestly. But no time was spent on like what that looked like. But a lot of time was spent on what women dressing modestly looks like.

Right.

And they did. They. They should. I just rattle off a few of the, the scriptures that we’ve. That, that have been given to support the idea that. That women need to dress modestly. And we’ll get to what modesty might mean.

Yeah. Well, as the, as the mediocre poet once said. All right, let’s see it.

Indeed. I’m going to start with First Timothy, chapter two.

Which I. Which I saw a lot of. And that starts on. On verse nine. It says also that the women should dress themselves in moderate clothing with reverence and self-control. Not with their hair braided or with gold, pearls or expensive clothes, but with good works as is proper for women who profess reverence for God.

Now, I have never seen anyone berate a woman, a Christian woman, for wearing.

Gold or pearls or for braiding her hair.

Or for braiding her hair. There’s a lot of braided Christians out there.

That’s the word of God.

It’s right there in Timothy.

So we’ve talked about Timothy before, which is not Pauline. It comes from later on, written by somebody who was pretending to be Paul. But they’re reflecting pretty standard Greco-Roman ideologies regarding the household. The oikonomia of. Of the standard house, which, where everyone had a specific role and a place and everything stayed in its place. And the woman’s role was to be respectable, to bring honor rather than shame to her household and to her husband, and to basically be seen and not heard. And the word here that is translated modest is kosmios. And I’ll read from a lexicon here. One sense, which is probably not the sense we’re talking about, is having characteristics or qualities that evoke admiration or delight, an expression of high regard for a person: respectable, honorable. The sense that we’re probably dealing here with is related to being appropriate for winning approval, or appropriate.

So it’s just saying wearing appropriate clothing. And then we have the explanation of what that means. Not braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothing. So appropriate here very clearly means not ostentatious displays of wealth.

Yeah, that very clearly seems to be about showing off. Yeah, it’s about. I mean, so like, I would imagine that a modern equivalent would be not with like, Louis Vuitton labels and like, you know, Gucci all over everything.

Yeah, well, and in this time period, early Christians, Greco-Roman period, Jewish folks, pretty conservative socially, probably dressing pretty conservative as well, there wouldn’t have been too much of a. There wouldn’t have been a, A very large standard deviation from how most folks were dressing. And so, yeah, brilliant. Braiding your hair, wearing gold, wearing, you know, fancy stuff probably would have been considered, you know, trying to stand out.

Right.

And. And the idea here is don’t stand out. Don’t show people up, do good things, look respectable, bring honor to the, to the household. And so, yeah, the, the admonition here is very clearly to not try to display wealth or status.

Are you saying that showing that a woman showing her shoulders is not what second or what First Timothy is all about?

Nobody is saying anything about shoulders at all.

Nobody mentioned skin.

No. There’s no part of. There’s only one part of the entire Bible that has anything to do with identifying a body part that a woman must cover. And that’s in 1 Corinthians 11 . And that’s where Paul says, when you’re praying or prophesying, please, for the sake of all that is good and holy, put a cover on your head.

And and this is. This is a temporary thing. This isn’t. You know, men are going to be driven crazy with lust if they see your forehead or your hair. It’s just. It has to do with. With probably kind of ritual conventions of the. Of the time period. And Paul’s just rationalizing it. He probably doesn’t want to overturn the apple cart. And this was a convention. And so he’s coming up with a rationalization.

He goes pretty hard on it, like.

He does go hard on it. Yeah.

He says if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair. But if it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut off or be shaved, she should wear a veil.

Yeah. So. And Paul elsewhere says nature itself testifies that long hair on a man is shameful.

So, you know, he’s a biologist. He knows what he’s talking about. He knows nature has agency, so.

Right. And. And not only is it shameful if a man has long hair, but it’s glorious if a woman has long hair.

If a woman has long hair, it is her glory.

Her hair is given for her a covering. Yeah. It’s given to her for a covering. Yeah. But.

But you still got to cover the covering.

You got to cover the covering, which is a weird. Okay, fine.

For the sake of the angels and scholars really don’t know what on earth is going on here. There are ideas that maybe there was a cultic practice where women were not covering their head and these practices were seen as unseemly, and so they didn’t want to be associated with these other cultic practices. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, but one thing we can say for sure is this has nothing to do with. With ensuring that nobody’s getting wood from watching you pray. Yeah, that.

That seems to be very true because it’s only when she’s praying that she’s. That she’s doing this.

Yeah. And I mean, not to kink shame, but if that’s your thing, maybe leave the ladies alone at church.

So what. What else do we got? I think you.

I think, you know, there’s, you know, Deuteronomy has a whole thing about a woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on Deuteronomy 25 . Yeah, that’s that, that, you know, I. What is a woman or a man’s apparel changes dramatically over time.

I mean, depending on. We can all sort of look back at any costume drama and see that, like, what is a woman’s clothing has been different, and what is a man’s clothing has been different for forever. And a lot of the things that women wear, you know, wore were men’s clothing first. High heels were men’s first. You know, makeup was invented for men first, all of that sort of thing. So that seems situational and is not at all specific. It doesn’t say, here are the specific garments that men wear that women wouldn’t.

Yeah. And, and there’s also not a parity. Like if it said don’t a woman should not wear a man’s clothes and a man should not wear a woman’s clothes, like, that would be, that would be some parity. But they actually use different words to describe each thing. And so this has confused a lot of people. There are some folks that think this has to do with, like, armor. Like, women should not put on the work clothes of warrior men and things like that. So women need to, you know, be in the domestic sphere. They should not go out and, and fight battles. I, that’s reading a lot of extra stuff into it. That’s, that’s not there. But yeah, this is. I, I, I personally don’t know that I would be able to distinguish the apparel of a man from the apparel of a woman in the time period of the composition of Deuteronomy 22 .

If I were just thrown back in time and some, somebody I saw somebody from behind and they were wearing clothes, I wouldn’t, probably wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a man or a woman.

Yeah. To a, to an, a modern eye, it’s like, oh, look at that robe that that person is wearing.

Yeah. And this has, this has something to do with. There’s a passage in. Oh, shoot, I forget where it is. You may have run across it, but there’s a part where they talk about somebody dressed in the clothes of a sex worker.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I, I did bump across that, but I didn’t actually, I didn’t pull.

It didn’t. Okay. So the, and, and here’s a passage where some people think, oh, that must be similar to what we talk about when we talk about somebody dressing like, you know, a lady of the night.

She’s dressed like a hooker.

Yeah. It’s like I, they probably didn’t do the same thing with their dress to signal their profession. Anciently. It was, there was probably some kind of way that they used their clothing to indicate what they did. And it probably didn’t have to do with showing more skin.

Yeah. And jaunty hat.

Yeah, you put a feather in your hat and then everybody knows. Yeah. So there was probably some kind of coded apparel that allowed people to identify.

I do have Zephaniah 1 , which I thought was confusing. Zephaniah 1 , verse 8 says, and on the day of the Lord’s sacrifice, I will punish the officials and the king’s sons and all who dress themselves in foreign attire.

That’s the, the NRSV.

Yeah, go ahead.

So, so again, you know, it’s a prohibition about how we dress, but clearly, like, obviously that has nothing to do with modesty in any sense that we think of it. It’s. Yeah, yeah, it’s about signaling your tribe or whatever.

Yeah. And, and some of the, the three like most essential features of an ethnic identity, a, a people’s identity, language, food, dress. And so there are many different ways that people signal belonging through dress. And it does not have to be the percentage of skin that is covered or uncovered. It can be so many different ways. And so, yeah, here it’s, you know, maybe they, you know, point the bill of their cap the other direction and in the other, in the other country, maybe they butter the other side of their bread. Maybe they open their soft boiled egg from the other end. There are just so many different ways that you can create the schismogenesis. You can create these identity markers by doing little changes. They wear blue and they wear red. You know, you could do a bunch of different things.

And so when, when you were in the UK, did you, did you pick up the habit of turning your fork upside down and smushing all the food onto the back of the fork? I think that that’s, that’s one where, where we could rumble with, with, with the Brits on how to, how to use a fork.

I did not do that. I’m sure that I horrified a number of the locals when I, when I was there. Let’s see, two Octobers ago, I was, I was in the UK for work and I swung by Oxford and a friend of mine was doing a, a fellowship at Magdalen College and so he invited me to come have lunch at the college with him, which is like a fancy affair. But yeah, it was, it was, it was fun. And I’m sure that there were people looking at me like, you silly Yank.

They forgave your evil American fork usage.

Yeah, well, I think I might have actually been wearing my, my Bizarro t-shirt. Now that I think about it. It’s like I’m almost positive I was wearing a, a, a graphic tee. And it might have been this one. So to. To return to modesty, I think we’ve got something in 1 Peter 3 , which is basically the same thing that we’ve got in 1 Timothy 2 .

Right.

Do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing. Literally the exact same three things.

Right.

That is, that are mentioned in 1 Timothy 2 . Rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God’s sight. Oh. And. And it’s just saying the same thing that this modesty here is about avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth. And so I, I said something on Twitter that a lot of people immediately wanted to try to refute me on, but there’s not a single passage anywhere in the Bible that tells women they have to cover up their bodies so that men are not driven to lust after them or sexually assault them or just get upset with them for. Well, you know, whatever.

That is the, the thing that you see all the time. That is the, the excuse that all of these. And you know, it’s. It’s not. And it’s not just men making this argument. Women make this argument to other women as well.

That somehow if they dress sexily or in a way that. That could encourage men’s lust, they are then responsible for. For causing their brothers in Christ to stumble. You know, there’s a reference to. In. In Romans 14 , verse 13 that says, Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother or sister. Which. Yeah, that. I mean, you could interpret it that way, but that’s not what. That doesn’t seem to be what that passage actually says. It’s not about women dressing in one. One way or another.

Yeah. This has, this has nothing to do with. With governing how. How women are dressing. I mean, it’s just. It just doesn’t say anything about that.

Ironically, it says don’t pass judgment on somebody else.

Which it seems like everyone who comments on how a woman dresses in a negative way like this is. Is very much passing judgment on that woman.

Yeah. And. And what is appropriate or inappropriate is, Is subjective, is relative. They’re. They’re. It’s going to horrify a lot of people who have never left the country or never learned another language. But there are many parts of the world where degrees of nudity that would make us uncomfortable are just part of everyday life where that is just the way it is and nobody bats an eye at it. And so if a guy. So there’s this guy, Joshua Hames on, on Twitter, who is a, you know, a mustache and cigar enjoyer who says, and I. This was one of the tweets that I responded to. He says, I was once put into the position of having to address a woman for regularly not wearing a bra to church on Sunday. Horrific. That was my editorializing. Joshua continues. I was accused of body shaming. Pause for gasps.

Right.

The truth is it is incredibly unloving to allow a fellow sister in Christ to continue causing brothers to stumble without addressing it. So here we’re not even talking about covering your body. We’re talking about restraining covered parts of your body.

Right.

So that somebody else doesn’t catch wood.

Which is asinine. And that is certainly not in the Bible.

No, absolutely not. The other thing is, the thing that’s really interesting is that when you delve into this conversation, when you start to look at how this conversation happens, I mentioned earlier how there’s there’s frequently a, a sort of compulsory but half hearted nod to yes, gentlemen should also. Men should also, you know, dress modestly or whatever.

But one thing that is never mentioned in talking about how men dress is their bodies.

Nobody ever says. Never, nobody ever says the word body when they talk about a man’s dress. But man, a woman’s body is cut, you know, oh, you have to wear enough to cover your body. Oh, you shouldn’t. The contours of her body. Oh, the this and that. And it’s just like that. And in all of the scripture that I see cited for this, there’s never a mention of the woman’s body. The scripture is, is completely devoid of that. That is just imposed upon it.

Yeah. And this is today, obviously, the, the, this discourse is largely governed by the male gaze. This is about what is of concern and what is of interest to men. And for the most part, you know, they’re not, they’re not worried about it. This is something that there are some comic book artists that I used to be fans of. I a fan of. I’m no longer a fan of them because when a debate erupted about the way women are portrayed in comic books, they were ones who went out of their way to sexualize women. And a lot of them would be like, we do the same for men. And it’s a power fantasy when you do it for men.

Right.

It is something entirely different when you do it for women. And, and that’s part of the how the male gaze governs comic books as well. A very disappointing feature of something that I really enjoy.

Yeah, I, I, I think that one of the, the eye opening moment for me was when someone decided to use Matthew 5 , verses 28 and 29 to say that women should dress X or Y. Like, like there’s a way that women should dress. Because that, and that verse came up a number of times as I was.

Talking about renegotiating the Bible.

Right, exactly. Because literally, because if you just read verse 28, it says but I say to you. And usually it’s just verse 28, I should be clear that only verse 28 is mentioned. It says, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

And what should they do?

Tell the woman to cover up, obviously. Oh, wait, no, that’s not what Matthew says. What Matthew says is verse 29, if your right eye causes you to sin, aka lust after the woman, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. Which very clearly to me says the responsibility for the man’s lust has nothing to do with her.

And everything. Like if you want to remedy it, it’s your eye that’s the problem.

It is your, and you had, you read, you read a translation that said if your right eye causes you to sin.

The word there in Greek is skandalizo, which means cause to stumble. So when this guy says cause women are causing men to stumble. Well, the scripture says it’s your own eye that is causing you to stumble. So it blames someone for lusting after a woman. And it is the man’s eye. So yeah, it is, it is pretty clear in the scriptures you will not find a passage that says women are responsible for this or that women have to cover up so that they don’t cause this. It is entirely on the men. And, and this is not to say that the, the Bible is, you know, this is not the yas-queenification of the Bible. Bible is, is very misogynistic in, in many, many places and patriarchal and, and sort of.

It, it is to say, however, that what we have decided is going to be a battleground for us was not a battleground anciently. And when we try to reach back into the ancient world for a proof text, in order to leverage the authority of the Bible for our own identity politics and our own identity markers, we have to read it into the text because it’s not there.

Yeah, Yeah, I. Which is funny to me. I. I’ll be honest with you. Like, I knew where we were going with this conversation when I was. When I started researching this, but I honestly did think that I would find some. Some scriptures that would say that would support the argument in some way.

I’m shocked to find literally nothing.

Literally nothing. There was. There was one. Another. Another guy on Twitter quoted one of the Proverbs, Proverbs 11:22 . And. And he was like, I got you. This one’s crystal clear. And it says, like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion. And he. And he— And he was commenting that all these conservative women who pose for this calendar— He called— He said they were covered in swine snot.

Which was— Yes, he was trying to be as vulgar as he could while still maintaining plausible— the plausible deniability of a Christian man.

But he doesn’t know his Hebrew because that word for discretion does not refer to modesty in dress. The word is taam in Hebrew, and this refers to good sense or judgment. And it’s used elsewhere. Abigail gives David some— some advice, and David considers it and then goes, “Blessed be your— your judgment,” not your dressing modestly. So, yeah, yeah, you go ahead, tear the Bible apart. Try and find a place where it explicitly tells women they need to cover up so that they don’t cause men to lust after them. You will be looking for an awfully long time.

That is so crazy to me. I— because it has become such a whipping boy for the— the Christian right in this country. It is such an important thing to them that— that the fact that it’s just not there. Yeah, it actually did take me by surprise.

Oh, I do want to bring up one passage. First Corinthians—

1 Corinthians 12:23 . Okay, let me pull this up. So this is right— So here we have Paul is talking about the body of Christ, as in the— the congregation, the membership, how we all have different roles and we make up different parts of the body. And in 12:23 says—and this is the— the NRSV: “And those members of the body that we think less honorable, we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect.” And this word that the NRSV translates greater respect is euschemosyne. And this word refers to the state of being appropriate for display, propriety, decorum, presentability. They have a word that refers to what we could plausibly argue means modest in dress, covering up what is considered shameful or private.

And it is only ever used to talk about everybody who is a Christian as a member of the body of Christ. It is not used— and, or actually, let me verify that. I—I don’t think I found anything. Yeah. This is the only passage in all the New Testament where this word occurs. So they have the means to refer to women dressing in a way that is modest in dress, covering up. And they never use it to—

Do we have any sense of where the word modest when— like how the word, the English word modest, which has the meaning, like—you know the meaning from Timothy and from—from Peter. Of being modest about your wealth. Of being modest, meaning, like, not showing off, not being like— That makes sense to me as a—as a—as a way of using the word modest.

So I like to go to the Online Etymological Dictionary to find out when—when words started being used to mean certain things. If you have a subscription to the online Oxford English Dictionary— Great. Most people don’t. Online Etymological Dictionary is free: etymonline. E T Y M online dot com. You can look up any words you want. Modest, adjective, 1560s. Having moderate self-regard, restrained by a sense of propriety or humility. So this is the sense that we see in the Bible.

From Latin modestus: moderate, keeping due measure, sober, gentle, temperate. From modus: measure, manner. From Proto-Indo-European root med: take appropriate measures.

None of that so far has anything to do with, like, right, cleavage.

Right. Of women: not improper or lewd. Pure in thought and conduct. So we’re, we’re moving that direction. That usage starts in the 1590s.

Oh, okay.

Of female attire: not gaudy or showy. That is the 1610s.

So we’ve got a few different senses of this word.

Right.

And today. Yeah. When you would use the word modest, most people would tie it immediately to— Unless the context indicates otherwise. Most people would tie it to women covering up an appropriate amount of their body.

Yeah. Like growing up, the only time I heard the word modest, and you know, in the context of women’s dress—again, never men’s dress—but it was always about, oh, you’re showing too much leg. Oh, you’re showing too much boob. Oh, you’re showing too much shoulder, whatever. But it was literally about how much skin is, is being revealed by whatever clothing this person chose to wear.

Yeah. And an interesting thing, this, this gentleman from Twitter, Joshua, who— Who was put in the uncomfortable position of having to try and police a woman’s nipples. Yeah. At church. He had a—he— He’s a blue check. So he writes novels and posts them on Twitter.

To be clear, for those of you who haven’t kept up with how Twitter goes now, it used—a blue check used to mean that you are a person, like a famous person, a public figure. Public figure who has been— And your account has been verified to be the. Actually you. Now it just means you paid Elon $8 a month or whatever. And, and you get to, to, you know, blather. More than 240 characters or whatever.

Yeah. And many of them far more than 240 characters. But this rant ended with him saying, remember, modest is hottest. Which. Two comments I would add. One brings it all back around to say, remember women, you still only have value in public as a sexual object.

Right.

And two, if modest is hottest, isn’t that going to drive more men to lust after?

Right. Yeah, exactly. Modesty. Oh, darn.

Because if somebody’s gonna get extra aroused by modesty, then, you know, they’re stumbling and that’s all your fault for dressing. Dressing modestly.

There is literally no good reason to ever— Other than the pleasant rhyme of the thing. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a terrible phrase to use.

Yeah, it’s uh, thoughtless. Thoughtless rhetoric from, from the male gaze. Right.

Yep. All right, well, I, that—I’m. I’m again mystified and, and, but pleasantly relieved to find out that all of this— “You have to cover up” stuff, they’re just making up. It’s not biblical. So, so ladies, get out there and, and horrify some, some fragile men if you want to. That’s, that’s, that’s.

That’s.

That’s their problem if they have an issue with it.

Well, if you would like to write into us and tell us how wrong we are about all of this, please feel free to do so. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the email address. If you would like to support this show, get early access to every episode, ad-free versions of the episodes. You can can do so by going to our Patreon, that’s patreon.com/dataoverdogma and just sign up at. At the level that feels happy to you. Other than that, thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Modest is Hottest?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology