Wrastlin’ With God

Hey there, YouTubers, it’s Dan Beecher. We had some technical difficulties and this week’s show will have no video, so sorry about that. But please join us and listen with your ears. And next week, you can see our bright shining faces once more. Thanks.

So there’s some tradition, evidently, anciently, where Israelites were like, “Nope, can’t eat that part.”

Wait, was this by the hip? Get out of. Get this out of here.

You didn’t bring me no hip meat, did you?

I don’t do hip meat.

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 and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are good. It’s springtime. It’s beautiful. The leaves are on the trees, the flowers are all over the place. I don’t have particularly bad hay fever right now, so.

All right.

I’m having a great time. How are you doing?

I’m doing all right. We have a bunch of the. What are they called? Is it peach white? No. We got some kind of trees lining our street that smell awful when they’re blooming, but that’s all over with, so I don’t have to deal with that smell.

Anymore. Yeah.

So there you go.

Yeah. Doing all right. What do we got on deck for us today?

I’m excited. Today, it’s all famous people. It’s Bible heroes, but we’re gonna call it the segment “Bible Heroes, Question Mark?” because, you know, beauty and heroics. Heroicism.

Heroism.

Hero heroism. That’s the one. It’s in the eye of the beholder, really. And I think a lot of both of these two characters that we’re going to be exploring, there are many questions, so hopefully we’ll get some answers about those. So let’s just dive into our first Bible hero. Up first, we have Jacob. Now, that is. Or at least that’s how he starts out the story. But by the end, I don’t think he’s going to be Jacob anymore. So that’s going to be confusing.

And I think we can go through and sort of like. I don’t think we need to tell the whole story of Jacob, but we should just give a little bit of background to the Jacob story to sort of get us to the point, because there’s one point that I wanted to get to. I’ve been asking you to do this one for a while because I find it odd and confusing. And I have also seen argument on the internet about what is happening. So Jacob is born into a family and his father is. You have to remind me, I’m not on the right part of the Bible.

Oh, Isaac.

Isaac, right, yes, of course. Yes, Isaac. And so. And he’s got a brother named Esau. And there’s a whole bunch of back and forth about who’s the important brother, which goes on for basically all of their childhood. It feels like this is the one. He was the one that like. One of them came out, started to. They were like twins. And one of them started to come out and got. The thing is that. What am I. Yeah, they did the string around the wrist or whatever.

The one like, grabs the heel. That’s a folk etymology for Jacob’s name. So, yeah.

What is that claim? What is the claim that the name means?

Means to grab or follow hot on the heels of something like that? I think that’s how it’s. I think in later Hebrew, that’s how they use the verb. But the idea is like supplanter or something like that.

Oh, okay.

But another argument is that it means “may he protect” or “God protected” or “protects,” like that.

Oh, okay.

So like a lot of these patriarchal figures, there are different stories associated with different interpretations of the name.

But here I think the idea is that because the older shall serve the younger, the idea is supplanting. That’s why the story is being told that way. But yeah, and then Jacob is, you know, that rascally supplanter goes in, tricks Esau out of his birthright for. What does the KJV say? A mess of pottage or something?

Something like that.

Yeah, but the. The word in Hebrew, it’s. It’s a doubled word, and it means like the red. Red.

Oh, the red. Red.

Yeah. Which is just a. Like, I think a lot of scholars would suggest it’s a way to represent Esau as kind of. Kind of clumsily just being like the red stuff. The red stuff. And because he’s. He’s desperate and they’re trying to treat him like fool. Yeah, but. Yeah, so he sells his birthright. And then Jacob gives him some bread and. And the. The red lentil stew.

The Red stuff, you know, so a little bit of red. Red goes a long way sometimes. Sometimes you just get a hankering for that red. Red.

Yep. And then we have Isaac dealing with Abimelech, which is. Sounds an awful lot like. Is it Isaac who deals with. Oh my gosh, it’s Abraham who deals with Abimelech, isn’t it? So I’m sorry, my. My head is not in the right space today. I’m on some. My. My wife is a. I’m on a muscle relaxer because of an injured back and my wife is like, that stuff messes with your brain.

Okay, so we got. We got a half assed.

Episode.

It’s gonna be a great show today.

Good show. This, this bodes well. This all bodes very well.

So, yeah, we’ve got some Isaac going on. Isaac is kind of a minor figure. It’s Abraham. Isaac and Jacob are the three main patriarchs of the book of Genesis . And Isaac is focused on the least. Yeah, it’s kind of like, oh, Isaac was Abraham’s son. Oh, Jacob was Isaac’s son. Isaac we’re not too worried about.

Yeah, I. I mean, Isaac’s probably best known for being. For not having been killed. Right. Like, the most famous thing he did was lie down and wait for his dad not to kill him.

And maybe. Or maybe his dad did kill him. Yeah. There are ancient and medieval Jewish traditions that Isaac was sacrificed.

There are other things in the story. Like when you look in the story, he. It says, and the two of them walked on together. And the two of them walked on together and they arrived at the place. And then whatever happens, happens. And then the story concludes by saying, so Abraham returned to his young men.

Okay, little.

Little ominous there.

But wait, how do we get a Jacob if there’s no if he, If Isaac was killed?

Well, that’s part of the story. A lot of scholars are pretty sure that these were three independently separated or circulating traditions that got woven together.

In other words, there were Abrahamites, there were Isaacites, and there were Jacobites. And at some point they were like, we got to make this one line. Let’s tell them as consecutive children of the other.

And some scholars think that Jacob is probably the earliest and that’s probably the main tradition of Israel’s origins. Oh, Abraham and Isaac were added on earlier. And you get the, the covenant with Abraham and everything. Because Isaac is the main. Is. Is the main character from then on. Because Isaac has his name changed.

No, Jacob. Sorry, you’re saying Isaac, but you mean Jacob.

Yeah, there’s the, the drugs again. Jacob has his name changed.

Right.

And becomes Israel. And Israel’s the main story, right?

Yeah. I mean, you want to talk about a usurper. Everybody talks about Abraham as being like the big daddy of, of all, you know, the, the, the Abrahamic religions and all that stuff. If he came after Jacob, that’s. He, he. He’s the one that should be called Jacob then, because he’s the one that’s.

There are a lot of folks who think that the earliest fragments of the, of Israel’s charter myth are found in the Jacob cycle. And then Abraham is. A lot of the stories in Abraham are later literary layers.

Okay, well, there you go. When your grandpa comes long after you, that’s a fascinating thing to do, but that’s not what we’re focused on today.

Right.

So let’s move on with. So Jacob, there’s a whole thing where he goes with his family or he goes, he’s tending flocks and he’s got, he’s got to wait for his wife. There’s a whole thing. There’s.

So he goes to, he goes find a wife.

And Laban is the guy who’s like, yeah, I got some, some daughters.

I got a wife or two.

And Jacob likes the look of Rachel and he’s like, work seven years and then you can have Rachel. And then he works for him for seven years and then he sneaks Leah into the, the bridal tent. Yeah. And tricks Jacob. And now here we got this idea that once a man sleeps with a woman, that’s kind of like the declaration, the, the, the reification of their marriage.

Right.

So, so he’s like, as far as they’re concerned, he has married Leah. And Jacob’s like, there’s a lot.

There’s one of the things about this, this whole story that bothers me is how much trickery is just okay.

Like it seems like it’s just okay to like fool people and con people. And like, you know, if you fool your brother out of his birthright, if you con him and he agrees to it. Haha, shame on you. I, I win. And you’re not the bad guy for doing that.

Yeah. But there’s. Jacob’s gonna. So Laban tricks Jacob, but Jacob’s gonna trick Laban back. And Jacob is actually going to attribute, attribute the trickery to God.

Oh, right. Yeah.

And I have a friend who wrote a wonderful book on this. Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception in the Jacob cycle.

In the Jacob cycle. But so he works for another seven years for, for Rachel, which is a.

Hell of a long. Like Rachel’s got. Must be very flattered at this point. This dude has worked 14 years to get her to, to marry him, by the way. 14 years is a long time. I, you know, hopefully, like, you know, Rachel’s still as cool as she was 14 years ago.

And I’m thinking of—shoot, I can’t remember the name of the movie, but I’m thinking of Marisa Tomei stomping her feet going, “My biological clock is ticking like this.” My Cousin Vinny.

Yeah, man, there we go. I, you’re lucky I’m here to fill in these blanks for you.

Yeah. I’ve got to say, this could go downhill quick. But, but Jacob’s trickery is he’s, he’s got his, his two wives and he’s ready to bounce. Yeah, but he doesn’t want to go empty handed. He’s been working for Laban for so long and he’s like, tell you what, go work for a while. All of the, all of the sheep and the goats that are speckled or striped or whatever, I’ll take those. Everything else you can keep and that’ll be my payment. And that’s what we’ll go off with. And then he does some sympathetic magic where he takes some branches and like tears off bark to make them striped and speckled and stuff and then puts them in the water troughs. The idea being when they come to to drink, they’ll. This will influence the color of the, of the offspring that they have, which.

Anyone who’s studied any kind of biology knows that’s how it works.

If, I mean, if a goat sees stripes, they’re going to give birth to a stripy kid.

And then the idea would be to have those in the water troughs when the, when the strongest and the biggest sheep and goat come by and then take them out when the weak ones do.

And so what happens is the, the litters that result next, all of the strongest ones are all speckled and striped and mottled and whatever adjectives you want to use there. And then all the weak ones are not. And so basically Jacob uses this sympathetic magic to trick Laban into producing a whole ream of sheep and goats that are, that are healthy and strong and big. And Jacob gets to take them all. And then he’s left with the runts of the litter and all the weaker ones. And then Jacob actually says that it was God who did it.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, God’s probably behind the magic, so it’s not a total lie. I again, the, the trickster thing, the, the con artist deal really messes with my head. I do not understand why this is all like. Because it’s never, none of that’s ever condemned in the book. All of that is like totally okay. Part of the. But you know, it’s a different, it’s a different time, it’s a different society. I’ll let it go. What we’re building toward though is Jacob’s on his way back to his, I guess, ancestral home.

Yeah. So he, he, he goes. Rachel steals Laban’s gods, Laban shows up and then they, they have a heart to heart and then they, you know, shake hands on it and they, they each swear to their, their different ancestral deities and they keep going on.

Oh right. Yeah, he, and yeah, he’s worried that Esau is going to, gonna kill him.

Right. And in the beginning it says Jacob went on his way and the angels of God met him. When Jacob saw them, he said this is God’s camp. So he called that place Mahanaim, Camps. And then in anticipation of meeting up with Esau, Jacob wants to grease the skids a little bit. So he sends some, some gifts on ahead just to show him. He, he comes in good faith.

But he’s gotta, he’s got to spend the night by the river. The river Jabbok.

Sure. Like you do, like you. Yeah, generally you have to.

Yeah. And he’s got all this stuff there and we just have this weird story. There’s no intro. They don’t ease it into you. They don’t.

It is literally my favorite, like one of my favorite things that has ever happened in the Bible is when, when Jacob is left alone. This is verse 24. It says Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. Which makes it sound like in ancient times every now and then someone was just lying in wait and would jump out from behind a bush and be like, “Wrestle!” And now we gotta wrestle. And so now he’s in the wrestle of his life. And yeah, generally speaking, if that happened to me, I would not just continue wrestling a stranger until daybreak. But yeah.

And what’s interesting is right before this happens, it says he got up, took his two wives, his two maids and his 11 children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream and likewise everything that he had. So he’s actually like, all right, everybody get on the other side of the river.

Go, go, go.

I got man stuff to do. And then that night, it’s just like, so anyway, some dude was wrestling with him. Yeah.

And he’s like, it’s very funny. He is like the object of the wrestle. Like, he was wrestled at is what happened.

Yeah. He’s not the agent. He’s not the subject of the verb.

Wrestled until daybreak.

And, yeah, go ahead.

Verse 25 says, when the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket. And Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. So Jacob’s winning,

Or at least not losing against said man. And then the guy gives him, you know, the little hammer fist to the hip.

And the old hip socket-aruni. I think that was Ric Flair’s big move, wasn’t it?

If it’s not Jake the Snake Roberts, it doesn’t matter. So then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” So his hip is out of socket, but he’s still got him.

He’s got him in the full nelson. He’s got him pinned, basically. He can’t get away, whoever this stranger is.

And for us, the blessing part seems odd.

Like, if you were just camping out and some guy jumped in your campground and was like, “We’re gonna wrestle,” and you subdue him,

Right.

You gotta be like, “Bless me!”

Yeah, exactly.

Why is that the outcome?

I’m not gonna let you tap out until I get a nice little blessing.

Yeah. And it’s not like, you know, maybe this is a kind of “say uncle” thing.

Yeah, exactly.

But then the man says, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” And this is another folk etymology for the name Israel.

Right.

Because the name Israel is not unique to Hebrew.

That is actually known in Ugaritic, is known at Mari. There are texts that go back a thousand years before this was written that have this name. And the name basically means “El Contends.”

Right.

But it’s kind of squishy. You can interpret it a few different ways. And so the idea that Jacob has striven or contended with God and with humans is kind of the, the folk etymology. In other words, Jacob is the one who, who contended with God.

Yeah. So by that, now I would. Now, you know, I’m just a naive guy. I’m just a small town country lawyer just trying to make sense of all of this. But it seems to me that what, what we have just learned is a. If you don’t even the loser of a wrestle can just change your name all of a sudden. No, but, but, but the main thing is this was God-like.

It says, you shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and have prevailed. That’s pretty clear to me. Would you say that that is a fair assertion?

I think at this point in the narrative with the details that have been given, you’ve got to arrive at that conclusion because it says you’ve striven or contended or wrestled with God and with man or with the divine and with the human. And up till now, all we’ve seen is stories of Jacob contending with humans like Laban, like Esau and others. And so it sure seems like this is a story about somehow Jacob contending with God. And then he asks for the man’s name and he, he says, why is it that you ask my name? And then he blessed him. And, and this kind of hiding the name is something that is, you see deities doing in narratives.

Right.

In the ancient world. Because once you know the, an individual, a deity’s name, you can influence them. You can invoke their presence. You can.

Interesting.

Exercise a little power. And then verse 30 says, so Jacob called the place Peniel, which would mean face of God, for I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.

Right. So, and with all of that in place, it seems to me that it, it’s a little weird to me because I have heard many, many people say Jacob wrestles with an angel.

So that is, it feels like I’m taking crazy pills when I hear that, because what I’m reading says he wrestled with God.

Yeah. Well, there’s, there’s nowhere in this text where the word for angel comes up at all.

And so we have. But the, the angelic reading finds evidence in another part of the Bible, specifically in the book of Hosea . So if we go to. This is the prophetic book of Hosea , chapter 12. We have, you’ll recall I said some scholars think Jacob is the main charter myth for the nation of Israel in Hosea. Chapter 12. The Prophet has kind of given the people a hard time, says the Lord has an indictment against Judah and will punish Jacob according to his ways. And elsewhere, Hosea suggests that Jacob was a wandering Aramean. He had to be a slave for 14 years just to get the wife he wanted. Loser. But we have Moses the prophet who led the people out from Egypt. And the idea being, hey, you got two choices regarding where Israel originates from. You’ve got the.

The patriarchal Jacob tradition or you’ve got the prophetic Moses tradition. So some people think that these are two competing myths about Israel’s origins. However, Hosea gives Jacob a hard time. He’s in the womb, he tried to supplant his brother, and in his manhood he strove with God. So we’ve got Elohim right there. And then in verse four, translations say he strove with the angel and prevailed. Now, an interesting thing about this. I’m going to pull up the Hebrew real quick.

Yes, please.

So in Hebrew, it’s vayasar el malak. So that is, and he strove. El can be used as a, a preposition to or in the direction of here. It seems to be functioning almost like a direct object marker with or to the angel malak. But I have argued that malak here was an interpolation, that somebody added it later. Because if you take it out and you treat El not as a preposition, but as the Hebrew noun God.

Right.

Then you have vayasar El. You have exactly the consonants in the name Israel, yod, sin, resh, aleph, lamed. And so this would be taking the folk etymology for Israel’s name and just kind of giving it a, a punch right in the nose.

So he strove with God, vayasar El. Although if you interpreted it that way, then El is the subject and it would be El prevailed or El contended. God is the one who won. And one of the reasons that I. That I think this is a preferable reading is because the very next clause says he wept and sought his favor.

Right.

At least it seems like we got two very different stories going on here.

Because the, the Genesis thing doesn’t say anything about anybody weeping. It does say that Jacob was like, bless me. Yeah. And the only favor that, that the other entity asked for was just to be released, and he was not. Not till I get my blessing.

So it seems Like, I. I imagine that the reading in. In Hosea 12:4 , and it’s verse 5 in the Hebrew is where we get the angelic interpretation of this. But I think that. That the word angel there was probably interpolated. Somebody added it in.

Right.

Probably not too long after the story was originally in circulation.

Well, and there’s good reason to do that, because it. Like, we know that there are parts of the Bible, Right. That say no one can see God and live. Right. Am I wrong about that?

You are not wrong about that.

So that’s. That is Exodus 33:20 . This is where God is talking with Moses, and Moses says, show me your glory.

And God says. Kind of like picks him up and says, I’m gonna put you on this rock over here, and then I will cause my goodness to pass by you, but I will take my hand and I’ll cover up your face until I’ve passed, and then I’ll take it away. So you will see my back, but you will not see my face, because no human can see me and live.

Right.

And the idea here is. Is basically that the deity is so brilliant and shiny that it’s deadly to look at.

It’ll cook your.

Staring at the sun.

It’ll cook your brain. Unless you’re Jacob. Like, if you wear him out and get him down to a. You know, if. If you go full Royce Gracie on him.

And. And wrestle.

It’s got to be. It’s got to be Brazilian or. Or capoeira.

Yeah, sure.

Dancing at the same time.

Yeah, man.

You want to kill him with your sublimeness.

But if you’re. If you’re a grappler and you. You. Then you can see. Because it literally says, I have seen God face to face. So that puts the light of this whole. So. So, yes, what we don’t want. It’s. It’s. It’s so rare that the Bible ever contradicts itself. I don’t even know why we’re talking about it, but I can see why people would have a problem saying that Jacob wrestled with God not just because of the death things, but because God is meant to be, you know, pretty big and strong. So, yeah, a guy who being able to, like, get a submission out of God is. That’s a hell of a wrestle right there.

Yeah. Yeah, those are. Those are some. Some pretty muscular bonafides. And. And you see this when. With a number of episodes where somebody had an encounter with a divine being where either the narrative or the characters themselves go back and forth between identifying the individual as God or an angel. And I’ve argued that. And you see them saying, oh, I’m. I can’t look at you, I’m going to die. Or is it possible that I’ve seen God and lived, or we’ve seen God, we’re going to die. Like that happens several times. And I think in, in all of those instances, other scholars have noted that the angel is not doing angelic things.

Right.

They’re not doing things angels are supposed to be doing. They’re doing things that God is supposed to be doing. And so these are probably stories that originated in traditions about God themselves interacting with people. And then later on, somebody came in and wrote angel in there just to kind of muddy the waters. They’re not, they’re not saying this wasn’t God, this was an angel. They kind of leave it half and half just to confuse things.

And I think that’s probably what you’ve got going on here. Even though the edit was. Wasn’t made until Hosea 12 , way off on the other side of the Bible.

You know what it is? It’s that kind of adding that level of confusion is an acceptable, is a permissible con. They’re doing the con thing.

Yeah, a little, a little bit of trickery there. And, and the idea is just to mask God’s. Who was it? God? We don’t know. You’re not sure.

Right.

But at the same time, it also refers to God as a man. You. You. Multiple times you have an ish, a man, the one who’s represented that way. And so Esther Hamori wrote a wonderful book called When Gods Were Men, and it was all about divine anthropomorphism and how you’ve got this story and a couple others where God is referred to as a man and somebody who’s. It doesn’t say whether people confuse God for a human, but they kind of just treat him as like a human. When God, for instance, in Genesis 18 appears to Abraham, doesn’t. There were three men. And Abraham was like, whoa, it’s you. And, and treats the entity like he knows who, who they are.

Well, and. And we also get the story in. In Genesis 3 . Three, I guess, of God walking through the garden.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that, that. It doesn’t seem like it’s some amazing giant, powerful. It just seems like it’s another guy.

Yeah. It says they heard the sound of him walking in the, in the garden, in the, in the cool of the afternoon, the breeze of the afternoon.

And so, yeah, repeatedly in the Bible, you have different representations of what God looks like. You have kind of apocalyptic theophanic visions of God where God is high and mighty on a throne, or God is, you know, riding this chariot made of living beings and Ophanim and kind of, you know what we get in Ezekiel 1 . Whereas, like the, where there should have been a body, it had the appearance of something that kind of looked like maybe humanoid. Ish. And like Ezekiel is really trying to say, this is what God looks like, but it’s not really what God looks like. Or, you know, you didn’t hear it from me.

Right?

But when you have narratives where God interacts directly with humans, which happen, it’s always pretty straightforward. God is human sized, human shaped, male-presenting, a very anthropomorphic depiction to the degree that the eponymous hero of the nation of Israel, Israel himself, Jacob, is able to subdue him in a wrestling match.

Yeah, yeah. Well, there you have it. That’s, that’s Jacob. That’s the. Or, or, sorry, now he’s Israel. I, I find that a fascinating story. I don’t know what to do with it, but there it is.

One more piece. There’s one more piece. Just in case you didn’t have enough loose threads.

Good, good, good.

The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore, to this day, the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle. So there’s some tradition, evidently, anciently, where Israelites were like, nope, can’t eat that part.

Don’t eat. No. Wait, was this by the hip? Get out of, get this out of here. Okay.

You didn’t bring me no hip meat, did you?

I don’t do hip meat. All right, that’s fascinating. And now let’s, let’s move on to another hero question mark. We’re gonna do Samson.

We’re gonna continue to muddy up the waters.

Yeah. Samson is another story that everybody kind of thinks they know, but when I read through it, first of all, like, his whole story is bananas. It’s, I, I, and a lot of it I didn’t understand at all. I, you know, there’s this whole thing about him encountering. He kills a lion at one point in his story, and then he comes back to it a couple weeks later and it’s rotting, but there’s bees that have built a hive in the lion’s carcass. And that all sets up a weird riddle that he tells that no one could possibly like, again, that he’s cheating at riddles is one of the things that I’m gonna say. Because you can’t. Like, you’re. If you have a riddle competition, you can’t be like, haha, what’s in my aunt’s basement underneath the sofa? Or whatever. Because, like, it’s gotta be something somebody could figure out.

Yeah. Can’t go all Bilbo on him.

Right.

Be like, what’s in my pocket?

Right. Exactly. But Samson proves throughout his story to be relatively easily duped, especially if it comes to a lady person.

Yes. He’s. He’s not a particularly smart man.

And to start, his birth was announced by, probably originally, God themselves.

Oh, wow.

This—this is one of the stories. Okay, you’ve got—his dad’s name is Manoah and it never says who his mom is. But in Judges 13 , they are there and suddenly the narrative says an angel of the Lord appeared to them and basically they’re going to have a kid. And the angel says, you know, not to cut his hair and all this, and no razor is to come on his head, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from birth. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines.

Now, we’ve heard the word Nazirite before. We heard that a couple weeks ago when we talked to Dr. McGrath about John the Baptist.

What is a Nazirite?

So a Nazirite—we find this in Numbers. I think it’s Numbers 6 , where this is a type of vow that a person can take upon themselves. And my understanding is that it was usually a temporary thing where you would be like, “Hey, I’m going to—I’m going to take the vow of the Nazirite for, you know, the—the next year. I’m going to go walkabout, do a gap year. I’m going to take the Nazirite vow.” And basically means you—you can’t cut your hair at all. You’re supposed to avoid grape products and particularly wine.

And then you’re supposed to entirely avoid contact with corpses.

Now normally that just renders a person ritually unclean for a certain number of days. And there are things to cleanse yourself of that ritual impurity. And, you know, you have to at some point or another. But the Nazirite is not allowed to, period. Not even for their own parents, for their own children. They’re supposed to avoid that entirely. And the idea seems to be just to kind of maintain a—a heightened sense of ritual—

Purity. Yeah, it’s sort of an ascetic, like an almost—a monastic sort of thing.

Yeah. And this—this probably is what made, you know, with John the Baptist, at least this is probably what allowed that tradition to kind of dovetail with asceticism, which was something that you did find in some Greco-Roman social groups. And so it kind of made it seem a little more natural. But normally, like I said, as far as I understand, this was usually a temporary thing. So we know of three people in the Bible that seem to have been lifetime Nazirites, or at least according to the story, that’s how they come across. John the Baptist was one, and then Samuel is another. Hannah says, “I’ll give him to you all the days of his life if—if I can have a son.” And so Hannah gives birth to Samuel and—and Samuel is dedicated to—to priestly service. And then we have Samson.

Who is supposed to be the third lifetime Nazirite, which kind of seems like a raw deal. I imagine once you’re, you know, as a kid, you’re like, “Why—why don’t I get a haircut, Mom?” And she’s like, “Oh, so, funny story. Yeah, you’ll love this.” But the—but as soon as this angel disappears after promising that Manoah’s wife would have a child, he says, “We shall surely die because we have seen God.”

Oh, hey. Oh, we—

Now another example.

We’ve tied it all back. It’s all—yeah, it’s all making sense now. It’s all—it’s all tying itself together. So speaking of tying itself together, can we just briefly mention the foxes? Because this is the—the most insane part of the entire Samson story. And I know you’re going to get to like, real stuff, but there’s a moment where Samson is like bitterly trying to ruin everything for—what was this? It was the—it was supposed to be his father-in-law, but then he didn’t get married at the last minute or whatever again because of trickery, I think. Anyway, the way that he exacts his revenge is like, here’s the thing. If I absolutely needed to, there’s just no way I could—I could gather, let’s say, five foxes. I couldn’t—I couldn’t trap, you know, 10 foxes. He gets like 300 foxes.

Ties them tail to tail with each other, lights them on fire and sends them into—into the—his—his potential—his supposed father-in-law’s fields.

Yeah, that’s…

How do you get that many foxes? You can’t get that many foxes, first of all. And also like—just why are you being cruel to foxes? That’s not very nice.

You can’t get them to hold still for long enough to tie—no, 300 of them together.

No, I mean, if his brother had a fox farm, he couldn’t get that many foxes. Anyway. Sorry, that’s. That. That’s neither here nor there.

So the. The interesting thing about Samson is that he’s. He’s growing up right on the borders of the Philistine territory and the Israelite hill country. So if you go to Israel and Palestine, one of the places you can visit is Tel Beth Shemesh, which is a very cool site that has a gigantic underground aquifer that you can go down into. It’s no water in it anymore, but you can go down into it. But from that site, you can see the places: Timna, you can see these other places. And you’re looking down a valley toward what’s called the Shephelah, or the coastal plains. And the Philistines occupied the coastal plains. The Israelites were in the hill country. Samson’s growing up basically right in the middle of this. So he’s just. He’s growing up at that kind of liminal space between Israelites and. And Philistines. And in this time period, the Philistines are supposed to be giving the Israelites a hard time. That’s. That’s one of their main kind of battlegrounds is those.

Those Philistines are after us again.

Yeah, it does feel like that is sort of a constant. Like if. If you need an enemy for your story, just chuck in a couple Philistines and you’ll. Yeah, you’ll be good to go. Or a thousand of them, which is the number that. That Samson manages to kill using only a. The jawbone of a donkey, which is impressive, I’ll give him that. They must have. They must have been, you know, learned how to fight, watching too much TV and movies where they all just wait their turn and go in after him.

Yeah, but it’s kind of a. Just a comedy of errors with Samson. He always seems to find himself butting heads with. With Philistines and is shown to have, like, superhuman strength and everything like that. And so the defeating of the lion is supposed to be this miraculous wow with his bare hands. Can you even imagine?

Right.

But the thing that. That keeps coming up is, is he keeps performing these feats of strength that are then somehow associated with symbols for fertility. So honey is a symbol of fertility.

And so is water, which comes up in. In another story. And I don’t think there’s a ton of significance to, to like the honey appearing in the, in the carcass of the lion.

But it’s so weird.

It’s like I’m taking some with me literally.

Like that’s the way. I, I did hear someone say an explanation about how they used to think that bees. I don’t know if I buy it that bees liked carcasses of animals. I, I don’t think that that’s true. I think there are some wasps that, that like the carcass. I did a whole. I went down a rabbit hole. But the, the bee honey, the, the lion honey thing is crazy. I think there’s a. A brand of syrup, of golden syrup in the UK that has a picture of a lion and some bees around it of like a dead lion and bees around it on as their logo. Which is weird. But we should get to the. The part of the. Of the Samson story that everybody kind of thinks they know.

Which is that he, he. We’re, we’re going to Judges chapter 16. Judges chapter 16.

So Samson went to Gaza where he saw a sex worker and went into her.

So patronized her business.

And that is not again, that is not condemned in this. Like that’s just a normal thing to do.

Yeah. And. And you see this a lot. You know, Judah does it. It ends up being Tamar, his, his daughter in law.

Right.

And. And again trickery. And he’s like, you got me.

You got me. Oh, you got me good.

Oh, you got me real good. They the, the Gazites were told Samson has come here. So they circled around and lay in wait for him all night at the city gate.

And. But Samson was like I’m gonna take off about around midnight. And it says he took hold of the doors of the city gate and the two posts, pulled them up, bar and all, put them on his shoulders and carried them to the top of the hill that is in front of Hebron.

Why did he take the door?

It’s, it’s another. You know, this is a Festivus feat of strength.

Yes, exactly.

He’s like, I gotta show these, these puppies.

He was really feeling his oats after that time with the sex worker. All right.

He couldn’t stop thinking about her.

And so Delilah is, is the one that he falls in love with. And, and as usual, everybody’s like, she’s a Philistine. Why you got to do this with Philistines?

Why can’t you, why can’t you find a nice Jewish girl? So, so yes, he find. He finds a Philistine woman named Delilah and just. And in a mirror of what happened in the previous thing, we didn’t really talk about it, but previously in his story, you know, he’s in love with this other woman. And the. The men enlist the other woman to trick him so that he will give them the answer to the riddle that was unsolvable. Now we have other men using Delilah to. To trick him, to try and trick him into revealing what will. What will cause him to lose his strength.

And each time he. The. The first few times, he’s like, oh, yeah, sure, baby. It’s. This turns out to be a lie. And she gets mad at him.

Yeah, you.

I. After he. He thwarts the assassination attempt, she’s like, do you really not love me?

Yeah, it’s. It’s.

Keep lying to me.

So let’s just go through it. He said, she. She says, hey, tell me what makes your strength so great and how you could be bound. She’s like, is it even possible? And he’s. He sees it coming. He gets that this is a trick, and he lies to her and he says, if they bind me with seven fresh bowstrings that are not dried out, then I shall become weak and be like anyone else. And they sneak in while he’s asleep, and they tie him up with seven fresh bowstrings that have not been dried out. And he wakes up and he’s just like, toing, I’m free. You didn’t get me. Beats up everybody or whatever. So he knows that she is trying to get him, that she’s in cahoots with bad men who want to get him.

So. And then she tries it again. She’s like, hey, but no, but seriously, tell me, though. And he’s like, oh, okay. If they bind me with new ropes that have not been used, then I shall become weak and be like anyone else. And she’s like, you promise? And she. He’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they do it again. They sneak in, they tie him up with new ropes that have not been used, and he just snaps those open too. He’s got. No, it’s no problem.

I like the. I like if you weave the seven locks of my head with the web and make it tight with a pin, then I shall become weak and be like anyone else. So basically, if you. If you give me a man bun. Yeah. I’m useless. Yeah. And if you break in, card is. Is revoked.

I think in some of the. Is it. Am I Wrong. In some of the translations, it says, if you, like, weave it into a loom, like, you have to loom my hair.

Which In.

How this guy did not wake up for any of this, I will never know. But again, a third time, the Philistines, like, come in and try and get him. They weave his hair and then they. And then they put it. Make it tight with a pin. You know, they do a pretty French braid. And then he wakes up and beats the crap out of him again. I just don’t. Okay, this is one of those moments where it just becomes, this is not believable.

This is.

There’s no way that this is believable, because then after every time she asks him something, he says a different thing, and suddenly there’s bad guys attacking him. A, he does not know when to leave a relationship. I’m just gonna say that. But B, she finally nags him enough, and she. And he tells her, like, is it. Is this just a. Oh, man, look, I just want to be done with this now.

So. Yeah.

And he’s like, hey, you know, if you cut my hair, that that would actually do it. And they’re like, okay, well, let’s just try it. And it works.

And it says. It’s interesting in verse 18, before it happens, it says, when Delilah realized that he had told her his whole secret, she sent and called the lords of the Philistines.

And. And then as soon as they cut his hair, and you know, he didn’t cut his own hair, but he gave away the secret, which allowed someone else to cut his hair. And it says, the Lord, his strength left him. And then it said the Lord left him.

Oh, wow.

So. So he has. He had responsibility for keeping his hair unshorn.

And he. He failed on that. And then they gouged out his eyes and brought him back to Gaza and bound him with bronze shackles and he ground at the mill in the prison. But the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaved. So that’s your little. Your little foreshadowing at the. The end of Act 2, right? You. You close in on him pushing the flour grinding thing, and you can see the. The hair.

One little hair goes.

So then we get to verse 23. The Lords of the Philistines are gathered to offer a great sacrifice to their God Dagon, and to rejoice, for they said, our God has given Samson, our enemy into our hands. And I. I would actually suggest that Dagon was probably not a Philistine deity. That was a northwest Semitic deity. And the Philistines were from further west in the Mediterranean region, so they could have adopted Dagon at some point, but it would not have been anywhere near this early. This is putting this like the instant they show up in this part of the world.

Interesting. So, so you’re. The idea that you’re saying is that whoever wrote this just grabbed a non-Israelite deity and just chucked it in there.

Or either that or they are writing from a much later time period when, when anybody who was Philistine may have adopted the, the worship of one of the local deities. Okay, so maybe Dagon is a Philistine deity in like the 8th or the 7th century BCE. Okay. But in the 12th, 11th century BCE they’re not even there for part of the 12th century, and they probably have not adopted the worship of a local deity.

And you’re saying, sorry, that the, that the 12th century BCE is when the Samson story is meant to have happened?

It’s around there. Depends on when you date Judges, but yeah, it’s. It’s supposed to be around that time period.

So they, so his. He’s grown a couple hairs, which seems to be sufficient because when they put Samson, blind Samson against two pillars in the Philistine, I guess, temple, he. He, you know, says a little prayer about like, give me just one more try, God, just one more last burst of strength, and he pulls the pillars down and drops the building on all of them, including himself.

Yeah. And it says those that he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So that’s, that’s a solid. I mean, does that include foxes? Because then it’s a big number.

Yeah. I don’t know if he was labeling the foxes Philistines, but it’s, it’s a story of, of this champion who was able to make the first big dent in the Philistine armor, because that, that had been their main enemies that we get in verse 31. Then his kindred and all his family came down and took him and brought him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol and the tomb of his father Manoah. And he had judged Israel 20 years. And some of these, a lot of these stories, like with Jephthah, for instance, they seem to be kind of tragic tales of, of warning more than anything else. But at the same time, the people are just celebrated for what they do. When, you know, Samson is celebrated. He’s given an honorable burial with his father, Jephthah was, was celebrated as well, was somebody who. And, and the text repeatedly says that the Lord’s spirit came upon him. So these judges are not just kind of.

It’s not like designate somebody a judge and they’re just off doing their own thing. And look, they happen to, to do a bunch of stupid stuff but they, they managed to kill some Philistines. Like a lot of the things that they do are, are explicitly designated as, as the outcome of God’s spirit rushing upon them.

Yeah, it does seem like. And, and we should talk a little bit because I don’t really know the judges. This was sort of before this was pre-monarchic in, in their culture. Right. Like this is the idea is that the judges, they’re not the kings, but they’re like bigwigs or important people. They’re. I don’t know what is a judge in this case? What are we talking about?

So the, the Hebrew term is shofet. And it’s just some, someone who judges. And the idea is that they have some kind of judicial power over a tribe or a group. So chieftain.

Yeah. Might be something that makes a little more sense to us today. But basically they’re warlords. They have, they’ve won battles. And so everybody’s like, you’re the man. You know, we’re not worthy. We’re not worthy. And then they’ll, they’ll follow them and they judge for however long they can keep their power. And you have major judges and then you also have minor judges that are listed where they’ll just rattle off some names so-and-so also judged. And, and they’re in different parts of the territory. And it’s basically like this is what happens without a king when we just kind of let the, the winds of change blow whatever warlord is in town into power. This is how it goes.

But at the same time it’s trying to suggest that, that God’s power is still acting in the area as well and God is bringing about their purposes.

Yeah, it does. I mean it like you said like, like Samson very clearly has, is, is, is meant to have had God with him this whole time because God’s taken away from him. But he’s not like he’s a might makes right kind of guy. He is not a wise, like he’s not any of the things that I associate with the term judge. He’s not a smart guy. He’s a pretty dumb guy. He manages to kill a lot of people, but only because he’s got this brute strength. He doesn’t manage. You know, he’s not a strategy expert or anything. Yeah, as a matter of fact. Yeah, he keep. He. He just bumbles his way through everything. I think that it’s very. It’s a really interesting story in that respect. Yeah, I find it baffling. I don’t know. I don’t know what the takeaway is meant to be.

Yeah, there. And that happens a lot in Judges. You’re like, all right, cool.

Great. Thanks, you guys.

Yeah, it’s not. It’s not exactly clear, but I think one of the main ideas. There is a statement you get repeated a bunch, is there was no king in the land. Everybody did what was right in their own eyes. And so part of it is. Is kind of an apology for the monarchy and for saying, hey, we want a king, because without a king, here’s all the goofy stuff that happens.

Right.

And so I think that’s at least partly what’s going on here. I don’t think that can account for everything, but that’s certainly in view with the way they’re bringing this together. Now. A lot of these stories are very old. A lot of scholars would say you have kind of a. There’s a narrative framework kind of weaving together all these stories that are being gathered from all over, some of them older, some of them younger. There are a lot of scholars who think some of the early parts of Judges, Judges 5 , maybe Judges 9 through 11, maybe some of these go back to traditions that existed before Israel was even a thing, back when they may have just been a bunch of kind of confederated tribes or bands roaming around. So Judges is a complex story, complex set of texts. Some of it’s very old, some of it’s very young. It’s very clearly not all doing the same thing either. So if. If you’re hoping to be able to put one lens on it and get everything out of it that’s.

there. That’s not gonna work.

Yeah, well, I.

That’s.

There you go. We didn’t even talk about the moment where Samson loses the bet, which he. By the way, he made a bet that he did not have. He could not back up. He did not have the sufficient things on his. He bet money he couldn’t afford. He didn’t have. Yeah, he. Or rather he bet tunics that he didn’t have and. And had to go and kill a bunch of dudes to steal their tunics so that he could pay his. His bet off. Is this a hero? Right? Yeah, that’s. That’s why the segment is called Heroes? Question mark. Anyway, that’s fascinating. You and I are about to go off and have and, and, and talk to our patrons. So if anybody wants to hear the afterparty, they can go to our Patreon. That’s patreon.com/dataoverdogma and sign up there and be and you’ll get an, you can get an early ad-free version of every show.

And you get the, you know, if you sign up at the right level, you’ll get the afterparty with us, extra bonus content. So go sign up for that. We’d really appreciate that. It just, it, it’s basically the main way that we fund this thing. So we really appreciate your help there. If you want to write into us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and Dan, we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Wrastlin’ With God

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology