The Holy Ghost (and Bears!)

Here’s the thing, if nothing else, bears. Bears can’t kill 42 boys.

Yeah. Unless they…

You’re gonna have a couple get away. Yeah, you’re gonna have a couple get away.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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

Oh, man, life is good. We’re… For the end of the show. We’re tackling one of the ones. One of the things that I have been asked. We have been asked to tackle since the beginning. It is. It’s not much of a tackle. It is just a… One of the weirdest stories in the book.

In two little verses. Yeah.

And boy, does it just throw you for a loop when you… When you first encounter it and then every subsequent time thereafter. So we’re going to get to that. That’ll be a fun Chapter and Verse. But first, it’s a big dog. We’re going… We’re going heavy. We’re hitting heavy.

And diving into… What is that?

I have no idea. But we’re talking about the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit.

God, yes.

The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And not to be confused with the Holy Hand Grenade.

Right.

But the Spiritus Sanctus is there. I don’t know how many places are named Espiritu Santo now that I think about it. I’ve been to like multiple places. Named that.

Named that. Including a place in Vanuatu, in Melanesia.

Oh, wow.

But yeah. Yeah. The Holy Spirit. Let’s… Let’s talk a little bit about it. I’m going to actually suggest that to understand what’s going on with the way the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit is working in the Bible, we need to understand a little bit about how people conceptualize of a human spirit because it’s modeled after the human spirit. And this is actually something that I discuss at some length in my book, Adonai’s Divine Images, which is an open access volume that is freely available online. But one of the…

You’re foolishly giving it away. Just foolishly.

Yes. I’ve… I’ve gone over many times about how the only… The only compensation that I have from that… From that book is actually the book that I’m holding in my hand right now. They were the… The contract said remuneration, 10 hard copies of your book. I gave nine of them away. The… This is all that remains. So, so when, when I… I spoke at a university in Kansas a couple weeks ago and they were like, “We’ll get a bunch of your books here to sell and make you a little money.” And I was like, “Not making me any money.”

You’re like, “I don’t see any of that.” “Do it if you want to.” “It’s… it’s got nothing to do with me.”

Yeah. So people are like, “Oh, they sold out of your book.” And I was like, “You can get it for free online.”

You should, you should pull a Taylor Swift and, and rewrite exactly the same book. And then, and then you’ll own it.

Well, I actually, I had a bunch of people request audio versions and I went to the publisher and I was like, I will record myself reading it for free as long as I can distribute it for free. And I have not heard back from them yet.

So that’s great.

Anyway. Anyway, there’s so once upon a time there was this spirit thing.

Yeah. So to, to understand this in a way that I think will be most helpful. I, I’m gonna go all the way back to infancy. Because one of the cool things about human infants is that we develop quite quickly a concept of the self, and it is based on some evolutionarily installed hardware. One of these things is the mirror neuron system where we see other people moving and doing things and we just have this kind of intuitive sense that they’re like us. And so we actually learn how to move from watching other people move. And we map their movements onto our body and then we map our movements onto their body and we begin to perceive that we have thoughts and goals and intentions. So we’re like, I want the ball or the cookie and I can reach my hand out to grab it. And we see other people reaching out and we’re like, oh, they want the thing that they’re grabbing for.

And we begin to project the perception of goal oriented action onto other people. And this, this mirror neuron system is, is this just awesome thing that is in our brains that helps us to learn how to do things. And we also have this thing called the teleological outlook, which is based on this idea of goal oriented action. As, as this becomes more sophisticated and complex, we begin to assume that everything that we see has a purpose and a goal. And so when things happen in the world around us that we don’t understand intuitively, we’re like, oh, this happened for a reason. Something, someone, somebody with a mind or agency caused this to happen. And we also perceive a distinction between Our. Our intentions and our thoughts and the body, because we can hide our intentions and our thoughts, they are inside of us. They’re not visible on the outside.

And that contributes to a perception that the self is not the same thing as the body and that there is something inside of us that is distinguished from the body. And then we also have ideas about what are the limits of this thing, how is it contained, what happens when we die. And intuitively, we think that this thing just keeps going on. And so this is the reason that most human. Well, all human societies that we’ve ever been able to document, but most humans within them, think of the world as occupied by unseen forces and agents of some kind. And in my book, I refer to these as unseen agents. And evolutionarily, you know, the. The primate that was quickest to think the rustling in the bushes might have been something with teeth passed on their genes more regularly than the one that immediately assumed it was just the wind.

Right.

And so this installed in us a hyperactive agency detection. In other words, we are incredibly sensitive to the presence of agents in the.

World around us, whether they’re there or not.

Whether they’re there or not. And so an interesting thing happens. The brain has a bunch of different ways it can be cued to the presence of something. And our brain kind of projects a lot of our experience of other people. And if one of those cues gets tripped when there’s nothing there, it can still seem like there’s somebody there, just as real as if there actually is somebody there. This is why scary movies freak us out. And we think there’s something in the shadows or why we are quick to get up the stairs out of the dark basement and stuff like that. And this contributes to the presence in all known societies of concepts of ghosts, spirits, jinn, you know, ancestors, some kind of unseen agents out there. And they’re usually based on the concept of. Of the human person.

Yeah, they’re. They’re an anthropomorphized concept, which it makes sense if that comes from our perception of ourselves and others. When, you know, you. If you start the conversation with this, with the mirror neurons, it makes sense that, like, the unperceived agents sort of in the ether that we’re worried about would look, think, act like people.

Yeah, yeah. And we don’t confine them to bodies. And there. There are. I think there are such fascinating ways that this manifests in the world today, like people who go to cemeteries and talk to the headstones of their deceased loved ones, because intuitively, it just kind of makes sense that we’re focused on this thing, their names on it, that this is somehow either housing their agency or it is channeling their agency or, or something like that. And there are a bunch of different ways that this bubbles to the surface within society, but it also means we think of people as having spirits, of having souls. And what exactly the difference between these two things is is not very clear.

Right.

And the exact same thing is true of the Bible. They have the ruach, which means spirit, and you have the nephesh, which means soul, more or less. It’s arguable that those are adequate translations of those words, but the spirit is usually understood as kind of an animating force, whereas the soul is kind of the life force. And then there are a bunch of other ways that parts of your body are loci or locations of agency.

Yeah, I don’t know that I yet appreciate the difference between the two things you just described.

Yeah, so. And in the Bible, the spirit will. It’s used synonymously with soul in a lot of places. Nephesh and ruach, you’ll have the same phrase where, you know, there’s parallelism and they’re used interchangeably. But the spirit is kind of like what keeps you alive, but the soul is your actual life. And so the spirit, once you die, the spirit goes away, but your soul remains. And so it’s. And this is the concept of life after death. There is some sense in which the locus of that person’s agency continues to exist, which is why we find evidence of necromancy and ancestor cults and all this kind of stuff in the material remains of, of ancient Israel and Judah.

And so I’ve seen this, you know, even people who leave their religion of, of their birth, I’ve seen plenty of people hold on to some sort of sense of. Of spirit or ghost or they, like. It is a pervasive and powerful idea.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it’s, it’s because it’s, it’s kind of baked into our cognition, and it’s not something you can just turn off. And there’s been a lot of research that shows even, even people who flatly reject any kind of supernatural at all, intuitively, they still feel that even if the reflective side of their cognition can kick in and override it. Yeah, it’s still just something that our, our, our brains kind of do.

Yeah, they want that. It just, it’s. It’s. Yeah, I’m, I’m in that category. I don’t, I don’t believe in any, anything supernatural, but I. Yeah, you spook me on a, on a, you know, late night when I’m alone and in the forest or whatever. And yeah, I’m going to start seeing like, shadows in the distance or whatever.

Yeah. And like, I remember when I was in college, before I got kicked out of the University of Northern Colorado, I walked by somebody’s room and there was a woman in the room who had a certain kind of perfume. And I had only smelled that perfume on one other person before my entire life, and that was my high school girlfriend. And like, immediately she was there. Like her presence was there, because that was one of the cues in my brain for her presence. And so it’s not even that it has to be supernatural, it’s just how your brain kind of helps you experience the world. But so when we get in the Bible, people have a ruach and a nephesh, just like God does. And so in the Hebrew Bible, we have the ruach Elohim, which you see in Genesis 1 , verse 2, and it’s usually translated spirit of God. But both the word ruach and nephesh fundamentally refer to breath.

And so it’s kind of this sense that whatever this animating force is, whatever this life force is, it’s kind of conceptually represented as breath, but it can also mean wind. So there are some people who will translate the divine wind. There are some people who will translate the wind of God or the breath of God or something like that. And so from the very beginning, this is representative of the animating force of God. And just like with humans where you can have spirit possession and you can have this concept that the soul or the spirit can leave the body, so too God’s spirit can leave their presence, their body, wherever it may be. And so that becomes kind of the active agent for God on earth. And you see this reflected in a bunch of different ways. And in the Hebrew Bible, I think one of the most fascinating ways is in the idea of ecstatic prophecy.

And one, I think, fascinating example is in 1 Samuel, chapter 10, where Saul has been chosen to be king in Israel. And in chapter 10, verse 6, you get Samuel explaining to Saul. Then this from the King James Version, it says, “And the Spirit of the LORD will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man.” Yeah, and in the Hebrew, the verb there that is usually translated “come upon thee,” tsalach, actually means force entry into, or penetrate. And so the idea is that the spirit of God is going to penetrate you. And it says, turn you into another man.

And in a couple verses later, that’s what happens. And it says God gave him another heart. And basically the idea is that spirit—that animating agent of God—went into Saul’s body. And the heart is kind of constitutive of personhood for them. And so it altered Saul’s heart, turning him into another man, and he had a new heart. But this is also what allowed Saul to prophesy. And this is specifically turned him into the heart of Patrick Swayze.

And that was when Whoopi Goldberg could speak on behalf of Patrick Swayze.

Right. It was a very intimate scene, and the Righteous Brothers playing in the background and everything.

But this is spirit possession. This is someone else’s spirit. And in this case, God’s spirit is forcing entry into the person, taking over executive function of their body. And probably in the early conceptualization of ecstatic prophecy, threw him on the ground, tore his clothes off, and he was probably convulsing in an ecstatic frenzy. And that was how you prophesied.

It’s pretty exciting stuff, man.

Yeah, that’s, that’s what the spirit of God does in the Hebrew Bible.

And. But that, that concept of this, this agent, this extension of God’s agency changes as the society changes. Once we get into the Persian and the Greco-Roman period, you’re incorporating ideas from the Persian period about dualism. You start to get in the Greco-Roman period ideas about demons who are also these unseen agents. And so by the time we get to the New Testament, you have demon possession. So, yeah, I.

Presumably, if a good guy can take over your body, a bad guy can probably do it too.

Exactly. And, and this is something that we see people worrying about this in what are called magico-medical texts. So they’re, they’re like medical textbooks and texts in the ancient world, only it’s more magic than it is medicine, but it addresses things having to do with the human body and pathologies and things like that. So I, I, in a previous episode of the show, I joked about demons getting in through the ear or during menstruation. And, and that’s literally what some of these texts say, is that women are particularly susceptible when their openings are where the boundaries are. You know, their integrity has been, has been compromised.

And so, yeah, it’s funny that an incorporeal entity would need a physical entrance, but.

Right, there you go. That’s, that’s how it works.

Just open a door, then in they go.

And so the, you know, the ears were considered particularly susceptible to this. And, and you had magical spells that you had to do to, to try to get that, get that demon out of there. Kind of like I get my left ear, like if I go swimming or anything like that, or even if I just move my head wrong in the shower, like immediately gets plugged up with water and then I’ve got to be like trying to get that out.

I think you mean plugged up with demons, Dan.

Well, that’s, that’s, yeah, but a demon possessed person would never admit that. And so the, you have the, the further development of this concept of these unseen agents that can possess your executive functions and can do good or bad things to you. And by the time of the New Testament you’ve got these, these demons floating all over the place. But you’ve also got development in the concept of God’s spirit and the Holy Spirit. So Ruach Elohim would be the spirit of God, but you also have Ruach ha-Kodesh, which would be Holy Spirit. And it’s the same thing. It’s God’s spirit, but because it’s from God, it is holy. It becomes personified more and more. And this is something that you see with a lot of the features of deity, the aspects of deity when we get into the Greco-Roman period. So like Hokhmah, wisdom in Proverbs 8 is personified, treated as this woman who was, you know, I was conceived back before the foundation of the earth and I was birthed and all this kind of stuff.

So Hokhmah becomes Sophia once we get into Greek and that becomes personified and it resonates with the Greek concept of Sophia as this deity. And so you have kind of a goddess concept and you have other things that are personified as well. But one of these things is the spirit which comes into Greek as the pneuma.

I’m trying to follow it all, man. This, this concept is bouncing all over the place.

Yeah, it’s, it’s such a complex thing to try to reduce in a non-erratic and chaotic way. And.

Well, and I think that’s what spawned a lot of the confusion about this entity, this, you know, this Holy Spirit being. And yeah, I mean maybe we’ve talked about the invention of the Trinity as a useful tool because it does seem like the Holy Spirit is both its own thing and part of God. And. Yeah, that, that feels confusing.

Yeah. And, and you know, it is confusing. It’s because it’s such an intuitive thing in terms of if we just let the natural intuitive cognition just kind of run wild, it’s like, sure, we do that. It’s just as natural as a lot of things. It’s not until we’re required to sit down and explain it. And usually it’s how can you maintain these things in tension? That you have to be like, well, just checking the overhead rotary girder or like it just. You have to. You’re trying to rationalize something irrational.

And it usually requires ginning up all kinds of crazy stuff. Like the person who talks to a headstone in a cemetery. If you were such a jerk as to go up to them and be like, why on earth would you do that? You know, they’re not in there.

That’s just a piece of rock, man.

Yeah, it’s like, well, what. Yeah, first of all, that’s a real dick move. But second of all, the person’s not gonna be able to be like, well, you see intuitively what’s going on. It’s like, this feels right. This is just how I feel like interacting. And there’s a story, I don’t know if I’ve shared it on the podcast before, but it’s in my book where I talk about how the heart is still constitutive of the person even today. And so there’s a story about a guy whose 21-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident, but she was an organ donor. And so her heart went to another guy named Lamont and he went to visit him and he brought a stethoscope and listened to his heartbeat and was like, that’s her heart within him, holding him up. He’s like, I was so glad I got to meet him and I got to spend time with my daughter.

And like if you, you know, if you stuffed a microphone in that guy’s face and be like, account for yourself. Explain how you can think that that’s your daughter in there. Like, you know, they’re not going to do that again. Dick move. But also it’s just kind of an intuitive thing that you just let happen and you don’t worry about it.

Psychologically useful to sometimes to, to just have a, an object that you can sort of imbue with, with, with the meaning that is useful to you, that is emotionally meaningful to you. And you can just say, hey, you know, I’ve, I have literally talked to my dad’s, to my, to my grandparents headstone and to my dad, who is. Who, who I keep. He was cremated. So I have him at my house. And.

I’ve talked to him before. And. Yeah, I. Yeah, I mean, I don’t recognize the idea that there’s a spirit of him in it. Right. For me, it has the symbolic usefulness of, like, me communicating with. With my past and trying to sort of reconcile my understanding of who he was with who I am and all this other stuff. But. Yeah, it’s like emotionally and psychologically cathartic.

Yeah. And. And that ex. That intuition expresses itself in. In all kinds of different ways. And, you know, the. And. And another. Another thing. Somebody might be, you know, if someone were such a jerk to demand an explanation. I’m sure that guy, after he left wherever Lamont was and went back home, I’m sure he still visits his daughter’s grave and talks to her. It’s like, but she was over there, but she’s also over here.

She’s in that Lamont guy. What are you talking about?

And so the, the concept of this spirit being both God and not God and being located in one spot, but also being, you know, accessible anywhere, it’s just intuitively natural. And it doesn’t require explanation for it to. To bubble to the surface in social interactions.

It doesn’t until it does. And until it does, here’s the problem with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, is that it becomes a character.

And so, for instance, I recently. I was going to mention this. I recently, there was a. A tweet by Answers in Genesis, which is Ken Ham’s organization.

And it simply said, because the Holy Spirit has a mind, a will and emotions, we know that he is a person. And I thought, wow, there’s a lot packed into that one very small sentence. And I, I tweeted back at them and was like, hey, would you please show us where in the Bible it says this about the Holy Spirit? I don’t know. Like, I genuinely don’t know. Does the Bible say that the Holy Spirit has a mind, a will and emotions?

Did they. Did they respond?

No. Nobody responded?

No response? No. No surprise there. Off the top of my head. I can’t. I can’t think of any place that there is some personification of the Holy Spirit, but it is overwhelming. It would overwhelmingly be in poetry and in. In metaphor and stuff like that. And, and it’s odd because a lot of. A lot of conservative Christians would say you can’t build a doctrine off of, of, you know, like a psalm or.

Right.

Or poetry or things like that. And, and why it would be male strikes me.

As well.

Because God’s male. Right.

The word. Yeah, that’s definitely the assumption. The word ruach is. Is feminine in Hebrew, although in the places where it talks about spirits as actual agents, sometimes, as in 1 Kings 22 with Micaiah, it uses masculine verbs, so it can conceptualize of a masculine ruach spirit. And then once you get into the Greek, I believe it’s neuter, so it’s in the middle. So it would actually be the third gender if. If.

There you go.

If the New Testament Greek were considered inerrant.

Right.

It would have to be something in between.

Interesting. I was… I was mistaken. By the way, one person did answer my tweet.

And mentioned John 15:26 , which says, when the advocate.

That’s just the comforter.

Yeah, I will send you. I will send to you from the Father the spirit of truth who comes from the Father. He will testify on my behalf. So is that the spirit of God? Is that the same spirit? You know, this says, I will send to you from the Father the spirit of truth. Is that the same thing that we’re talking about, Spirit, the Holy Ghost?

I don’t know. I. I think it treats these. These spirits, it uses different names for them. But I think it’s. It’s basically just dancing around the idea that this is this. This active agent that. That comes from God and it’s the. The comforter or the advocate. Paraklitos is. Is the Greek word which means a mediator or an intercessor or something like that. And so, yeah, I think it’s. It’s referring to God’s spirit that way. But, yeah, the. The fact that this actually personifies the spirit is a. Is a little squishy because the. The whole idea of. Of testifying. Well, that’s just something that, you know, the spirit could just be transmitting an understanding or a feeling to your heart. It’s not like the. The comforter is sitting there and whispering into your ear. It’s testimony. That. That seems like a kind of squishy proof text for this notion that. That the spirit has a mind and emotions and a hairy chest and stuff like that.

Well, and it’s funny because the guy that tweeted that to me, me, I said, that doesn’t say anything about a mind, a will, or emotions. And he was like, oh, that’s right. That’s true.

You got me there. That was. That was the only response you got, though.

That was the only response I got other than a joke from a friend of mine. So. Okay, well, yeah, and someone else says, and someone else pointing out that dogs have minds, wills and emotions. So I guess they’re persons too. It’s just. Can you talk a little bit about. I don’t know if you even know this, but it seems like the concept has evolved a lot over time, the concept of, you know it. Because it seems like most of the scriptures that I’ve read about the Holy Spirit are a very soft notion, like you said. Like it’s this. It could be its own entity or it could just be God just sort of whispering something across the, the, the universe to you or whatever. But at some point, theologically it became a distinct entity. It became important enough that like every Catholic priest blesses someone in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Yeah, yeah. This, this seems to be a New Testament development because it’s treated as one of the things you have in, in as you get from the Hebrew Bible into the New Testament is you have a lot of consolidation. A lot of things that are done by different figures in the Hebrew Bible or in the, the Greco Roman period, Jewish literature get consolidated into individual characters. So like Satan is. Every bad thing that happens in the Hebrew Bible is, is Satan in the New Testament? Everybody from Baal to, in early Christianity, I would say after the New Testament, but you got Lucifer, you got the serpent, you got Leviathan, everybody becomes Satan. And, and just like Jesus is consolidating a lot of different traditions about mediatory figures. And so I think what you have is a lot of the different kind of personified extensions of God get consolidated in the Spirit and because it is personified. And you’re getting to this Christological debate where we have these big questions about Jesus’s relationship with God.

There were probably people saying it says the same thing about the Spirit over here. And so it became rhetorically necessary to create space for that additional person of the, of the Trinity and which then compelled it to be even further personified and concretized as an individual person. So I think that’s contributing to the development. That’s contributing to the development. But certainly it is among the different semi-autonomous agents that are discussed in Greco-Roman period Jewish literature. When you get into rabbinic stuff, you have, like, the Shekhinah, which is the Presence; you have the Hokhmah, you have the Wisdom; you have the Kavod, the Glory. Even the name of God is kind of a semi-autonomous personified entity in some literature. And so I think the Spirit is just the one that became the centerpiece of this concept.

And I think there was also, when they had three, I think they kind of felt like that completed the set because I don’t think they wanted to get to a set of 11 different entities that comprise this Trinity. And so because when you look at Nicaea and the Nicene Creed and the Christological arguments, the Spirit is not the center of discussion. The Spirit is kind of like, “We gotta have the Spirit there.” It’s kind of a third wheel to the Trinity until subsequent centuries where it’s like, “It’s here, we might as well deal with it.” And they kind of flesh out a more full conceptualization of the Spirit as this third person of the Trinity. But it’s certainly just one.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t fit into the other. Category, like Father and Son makes a lot of sense that that is a relationship that we know and understand. Person and Spirit is a relationship that would be understandable also, though to separate them as different entities feels a little weird to me. But like, those two relationships are nothing to each other. Like, you know, Father and Son and person and Spirit feel like they are completely different relationships and completely different categories of relationship.

And when you see Jesus talking about the Spirit, particularly in the Gospel of John , it’s like, “I’m here, the Spirit can’t be here.” “And when I’m gone, then the Spirit will be back.” And so, yeah, it’s certainly not like the relationship that Jesus has with God is identical to the relationship that Jesus has with the Spirit. Has with the Spirit. It’s, it’s kind of like they’re competing brothers.

And yeah, Spirit tries to show up and he’s already, Jesus is already there. He’s like, “I wanted to go to that.”

“You beat me.” And in Greco-Roman period Judaism, when you look in Philo and things like that, you know, you have the Logos, which is what Jesus— The Word, which is what Jesus is identified with. But you have a handful of other figures as well, and they all get, they just kind of get brushed aside in favor of the Spirit or they kind of get mushed together with the Spirit because like Hokhmah, the Wisdom, that is. There are early Christian texts where Jesus is identified as Sophia, as the Wisdom, and there are others where the Spirit is identified as Sophia. So it’s kind of still being worked out until you get to the councils and the philosophers who are like, “We’re gonna nail this down once and for all.”

We’ll figure it out. Well, let’s vote on it. All right. Well, I’m still confused about it, but that, that gives me some, some background. Some, some stuff to go on. Maybe we’ll come back to it. Who knows? Maybe people will have enough questions and we’ll come back to it. But for now probably say, “Hey, that…”

Don’t talk about that again.

Don’t. Please don’t do that ever again. Please don’t do that. But let’s… But I’ll tell you what they will be excited about. Bears. Bears, duh. Bears. We’re gonna do a Chapter and Verse. So this Chapter and Verse we are… We are going to Second Kings. We are going to Second Kings. Oh, I clicked away from it. Oh, what a… I am.

Second. Second Kings, chapter two. And this, this is one of those ones that like, I don’t even know what to do with it. I literally. I… it… It… It’s a very self-contained story. I’ll just do the setup which is that the prophet Elijah starts off this chapter and he, he and his sidekick Elisha are, you know, tooling around the various parts of the. Of the ancient land, prophesying as they are wont to do. Elijah gets in a truck and, and hitches his way back home to heaven.

A fiery truck, literally a. A chariot of fire with horses of fire, which I think. And then in a whirlwind, which that may be the coolest earthly exit that has ever occurred unless you get Thanos involved or something. I don’t know. Anyway, a pretty, a pretty strong exit.

But it leaves, it leaves us with the, the prophet. Now Elisha, who is. Who. Who is. Has some pretty big shoes to fill now when it comes to Elijah, including like just people not mixing up their names and thinking that they’re the same person. So now we’re on to Elisha. And the funny thing is that this section of the Bible, if you look, if you’re looking as I am at the NRSVue, they like to, to sort of give chapter headings or so like headings to subsections.

Right.

And this one is called “Elisha Performs Miracles” and that sounds really nice. Yeah, it’s. It’s maybe not. I mean the first thing has to do with like a bowl and some salt and, and then a spring, you know, get. Making water nice. Which is. That’s good.

That’s good.

That’s a spring. A spring that isn’t. Is. Has bad water and then he miraculously turns it into drinkable water. That’s good. But the next one is a little something. Do you want to do you want to read it? Do you want me to read it? What do you like this?

I can go ahead and read it. So we’re in Second, Second Kings, chapter two, verses 23 and 24. He went up from there to Bethel. And while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him saying, “Go up, baldhead! Go up, baldhead!” When he turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord.

Then, which I understand, I’m just going to pause you and say, as a man who, who has felt the sting of male pattern baldness, I, I am, I, I am understanding of him cursing them. Yeah, I just didn’t know what cursing them in the name of the Lord, what the implications might mean.

Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.

And then from there he went on to Mount Carmel and then returned to Samaria. That like it is so just, just a tossed-off little story.

42 kids.

Yeah. Like that bear. Those bears were hungry.

Not only that, they were efficient.

Yes, you would think that if you.

Got a crowd of 42, even two bears can’t like corral that many kids as they go and murder them one by one. But yeah, these, these were, these were God-bears. So they, they apparently were capable.

Yeah. I wonder what it must be like to feel the power of fulfilling a curse in, in that way. I, I imagine it has something to do with how Mike Tyson felt in the 90s when he would just send men to the shadow realm.

I mean, I. It feels like. It feels like maybe this was a. Don’t know my own strength moment for Elisha, because you gotta feel bad.

He doesn’t seem too upset about it.

No, no, that’s true. He just goes on vacation.

And this is something that, a point I’ve tried to make on social media in the past. A lot of times when we’re reading these stories and we’re trying to understand what on earth they mean, we try to recreate these scenarios in our head and imagine them being historical. Imagine what the characters are thinking, imagine what’s going on in the background. Imagine what other people might be thinking, which is in many cases totally distorting things, because most of these things are literary creations. They’re not intended to operate on that level.

Listen, every literary creation I’ve ever made, I at least try to think about what the characters are thinking.

Well, that’s, that’s responsible literary creation. But sometimes what’s going on on the page is the extent of, of what the author is intending, at least in terms of the details that are supposed to evoke whatever response from. From the reader. But there are some things to point out here. There’s. There. There is an apologetic response that tries to understand these. Not as small boys as the NRSV translates. The KJV says little children. The NET says young boys. This and, and the Hebrew here is literally naarim katanim, and that means small boys. And the, the naar is, is a. Can be everything from a newborn up to an adult. But when it talks about adults, it’s usually talking about someone who is in a servile role.

They’re a servant or they’re. They have some role within either a household or a kingdom or something like that. And so like in, in what is. What does Princess Buttercup call Westley in the beginning of The Princess Bride? Right. She calls him boy, doesn’t she?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. Like, it’s because, you know, you’re in a servile position. You’re a boy, even if you’re an adult. But usually the, the kind of generic sense is a child.

Everything from a newborn up to, you know, someone in their late teens.

And making fun of a dude for being bald is a pretty childish thing to do.

Yeah. And these are not just boys. These are little boys. So it is. These are young children. And the idea, they’re making fun of him. They’re challenging his authority, basically because they’re saying, you’re not the successor. Get on out of here. Or the way the NRSV translates it with go away. If you. Some people translate it, go up.

Yeah. I think the KJV is go up, thou bald head. Go up, thou bald head.

And let me see the verb there is alah, which means go up, which could be saying, hey, follow after your predecessor. Why don’t you go catch a chariot on out of here. Why don’t you peace out just like him? And so it is, in a sense, it’s challenging his prophetic authority.

We like our prophets with hair, idiot.

And, and so the, the curse is, is this, this is like a, a scary story to tell. Kids don’t curse the prophet or, you know, rather than a witch cooking you in an oven to eat you, it will just be. Some bears will come out of the woods. Bears eat you. Yeah.

So it is pretty gruesome. I mean, the Brothers Grimm got nothing on this. This is like and, and, and the specific number of 42 just, it just gives it that je ne sais quoi. That little bit of extra like reality because we named the number of them. It’s not just random crowd.

It’s not just a bunch of them. It’s. But it’s. And it’s. Yeah.

And it’s not even. Normally you would use 40 or 70. That’s, that’s kind of, you know, the, the ancient equivalent of saying a million. Right.

Like it’s, it’s a lot a gazillion or something. It’s a. Yeah. It’s a fill in number for like a large amount.

Right. But here we’ve got 42 specifically.

Six times seven. Which the. Yeah. The. There are debates about the significance of that. I don’t think any of them make any more sense than, than the others. But yeah, we do have, we have this weird story that is probably a. Something that was circulated around the time period that these texts were coming together as just a way to, to warn against challenging the authority of the prophet because of what might happen. And yeah, back then if, if you were a young boy, there was, there wasn’t really mercy to spare for you. Yeah. You. If you mocked the prophet, you were going to get what you deserved.

Yeah, I guess so. Boy, between that and like Ham making fun of his dad for being naked, it just feels like the Bible is very fine with disproportional punishments for seemingly minor infractions.

Yeah. Yeah. And. And I think there, there are, you know, nursery tales and, and stories where there are similar what we might consider disproportionate reactions. But. But yeah, those are things that, that definitely strike us as. As far enough outside the kind of ethical norm that they are troubling.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. You know, it’s funny because this, this you mentioned that there are like apologetic discussions of this story and you don’t need them like this this story doesn’t prove anything negative. Like it’s, it.

You can’t like there’s nothing in this story specifically that disproves the Bible unless you twist it this way or that way or that, you know, says something that like disproves the existence of God unless you twist it this way or that. Like it’s just so gruesome.

That it feels like there’s no way this could have come from a, A, a good and benevolent Lord.

And, and I think that’s why apologists feel compelled to, to try to reinterpret it is because it is something that is just used to mock the, the moral system of the God of the Bible. It’s like, hey, minors, little boys. He doesn’t care. He’ll kill him. In fact, something I. When we were discussing the segment, I shared a video. I. It just randomly showed up on, I think, Twitter somewhere. It’s a video of Sydney Sweeney. That’s her name, right?

I think so, yeah.

Sydney Sweeney reading this story from the Bible. Yeah. And it’s like, you know, it’s. It’s like the video starts with her sitting in a big comfy chair, and it’s like Sydney Sweeney reads the Bible and then she’s got this gigantic Bible and opens it up and just reads these two verses and then shuts it.

And it’s like, just plays it completely straight. Yep. Yeah, it. It definitely speaks volumes. These two verses for sure.

But. But that’s a source of embarrassment for. For a lot of folks who try to hold up the, you know, the God of the Bible as some kind of moral lodestar. And it’s like, no, they’re pretty messed up morals in the. In the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament.

It’s yet another. I mean, if there’s any takeaway for a believer, it’s. This is yet another reason to let go of the need for it to be a literal truth at all times and gravitate much more toward the understanding that this was a product of its culture and of its time. And not everything it says has to be the literal truth about an omnibenevolent, omnipresent God.

Yeah. And I’m sure there are many people over the last 2000 years who have taken this as a personal challenge to find Jesus in here to. Because everybody’s like, every word of the. The Old Testament’s about Christ. It’s like, no, figure out how.

How a bald dude murdering kids with bears is into that rubric.

And. And, yeah, the fact that it specifically says she-bears. And I was looking at the Hebrew and it is. Where did it go? Yeah. Shtayim dubim. Which is the two feminine bears, which is a weird thing to add.

Yeah. Another. Another, like, little detail that, you know, adds some spice to the story. And.

And this, I think this. I’ve seen a lot of. Not a lot, but I have seen apologetic arguments before that have been like, well, how do you know those boys weren’t messing with their cubs? Because it says they’re. They’re. They’re she-bears. So they were probably screwing with their cubs earlier, and so they were just. They were just coming to exact revenge or something like that.

Oh, my God. Here’s the thing. If nothing else, bears, bears can’t kill 42 boys.

And let’s say you’re going to have a couple get away. Yeah, you’re gonna have a couple getaway. All right, well, we’ll leave it at that. For those of you who want more discussion from us, you can find it at patreon.com/dataoverdogma where Dan and I have an afterparty every week that is often related to the episode and sometimes not. We can talk about whatever we want. It gets a little more personal, so please feel free to head over there and become a patron. Otherwise you can contact us by reaching out. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll see you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

The Holy Ghost (and Bears!)

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology