I Got Soul, and I'm Super Bad

They are literally taking these pillowcases and like, and you know, oh, I got your soul. And then God is like, you naughty little minxes. I’m gonna grab those pillowcases and I’m gonna open them up and the souls are gonna be able to get back out. 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 that pernicious spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

I’m pernicious, man. I’m out here being. My sister has it on her body. My sister actually has a tattoo of the word pernicious on her. On her elbow because.

Oh, does she?

Someone wrote a. An article about her music in. In a sort of underground rag and, and called her pernicious in pink because she had pink hair at the time. And she was like, okay, I’m gonna call. I’m gonna be pernicious.

She’s just gonna lean.

All right. Not making it her whole identity, but at least the identity of her elbow.

That’s right. That’s exactly it.

Fair enough.

So speaking of pernicious, let’s get. We’re. We’re. Today’s show is going to be a little pernicious. We’re gonna. We’re gonna talk about, or rather it’s going to be about a concept that has been per. Pernicious. Promiscuous. It’s been promiscuous in my life. So we’re gonna. We’re gonna ask about the soul.

In. In. And then in the latter half of the show, we’ll do a chapter and verse about that that sort of uses that concept, and we’ll see how that, how that plays out.

Yeah. We’re gonna push back a little bit against the conventional wisdom about the concept of souls in the Bible. But using my own research, one of my books, a book from another very well respected scholar named Richard Steiner, and some material remains that have come to light in. In more recent years that are going to help us get a better grip on what the Bible’s talking about when it talks about a soul. And there I’m. I’m in my head, I’m quoting Lisa Simpson from one of the best Simpsons episodes ever, where Bart sells his soul.

Yes, indeed. To Milhouse. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. And one. One of my favorite Comic Book Guy lines when Bart is sleeping out front of his store because he wants to get his soul back and the Comic Book Guy says, as my breakfast burrito is congealing rapidly, I will be brief. And then tells him he. He sold his soul, found a buyer right away for that.

So I, on the other hand, have tried to sell my soul and no one will take it.

No buyers, huh?

Yeah, it’s. It’s very sad.

It’s not a seller’s market right now.

No, not. Not for an atheist soul. An atheist soul means nothing to anybody. Here’s the. As an atheist, I will say, like, I have people talking to, you know, using this word soul or. Or a spirit or, you know, whatever, which I. Which aren’t necessarily synonyms, but can be used as synonyms.

There’s certainly semantic overlap, but at the same time, they are different concepts.

Yeah. And I. So I have people use that word with me, and then I say, I don’t know what that is. Like, I don’t have a concept of that, that. That applies to how. To my philosophy of the universe or whatever. And it blows people’s minds, even other. Even other, like, non believers who still have some sort of, like, sense of. Of a. Of a spirit or whatever. It really confuses people for me not to have that sense.

And maybe we can clear up a little bit of that today. Because I’m going to start from the cognitive sciences and our conceptualization of the self, because that has a lot to do with why pretty much every society that has ever existed that we can document has maybe not has an authoritative version of this, but has some concept of an unseen kind of locus of. Of animacy, of agency, of cognition, concepts of spirits, souls, ghosts, things like that. Right. And so it’s actually a very natural. What’s called a. Well, it’s kind of a side effect of human cognition. Right. How we became. How our brains became the way they are. But to start, I want to go. One of the. One of the ways that cognitive scientists try to better understand how our concepts of the world around us and of ourselves develop is by looking at infants and newborns and trying to see if there are features of perception that maybe are innate to us, that are not things that we developed during our childhood.

And one of the things that they’ve shown, for instance, is that even in the womb, they did an experiment where they shined lights through the pregnant women’s bellies and then saw how the fetuses reacted. And they used a variety of different shapes. And some of them are three dots with two dots on top and one on the bottom, which kind of somewhat looks like a face. Yeah. And then they would have it at different orientations. And when it was oriented with the two dots on top and the one dot on the bottom, so it looked more like a face, there was statistically significant feedback reactions coming from the fetuses compared to all of the other orientations, which suggested to these scientists that there is something innate. Even fetuses within the womb are somehow programmed to recognize a human face.

Right.

And then when they’re born, there’s a lot more attention that newborns will give to human faces as opposed to other kinds of shapes and things like that. And one of the things that they notice growing up, about a quarter of primary school-age children develop imaginary friends. And we just went and saw IF with my girls in the theater.

Do you like it?

It was a fun little show. You kind of see where it was going. Yeah, but it was a fun little show and there were great voices that, you know, you had to try and recognize for the different imaginations.

Yeah, that does seem to be the game, right? Figure out who, because there’s like a hundred different famous people voices in it.

Yeah, yeah. So there were some fun ones like George Clooney is in there and stuff like that. But what’s going on here is as kids grow up and they’re starting to kind of observe things happening around them, some of the things that they notice are that people have intentions, they move their body in space in order to achieve things. And so we begin to kind of intuitively develop this notion that things happen for a reason. If somebody knocks something over, they intended to do that; there was some kind of action that caused some other action because some agent intended for that to happen. And so we develop this sense of intention and of agency, but we don’t, like, only limit it to things that we know are intentional agents. And so we can start to attribute intentional agency to movements and actions and things that are totally natural in the world around us. In fact, there was a very famous experiment done back in the 40s where they showed animations of, like, shapes, triangles and circles and squares moving around inside a box and outside a box.

And like a door opened and some of them come out and some of them come in and then they ask people questions about what they saw. And people attributed not only agency but personhood to these shapes. They were like, they were behaving how they would expect persons to behave. And so intuitively they just, like, understood them to be persons.

So the scientists who were conducting the experiment didn’t say, “What did the triangle people do?” They just said, “What did you see?” And people were like, “Well, the triangle people moved over there, and the square people.” And, you know, Particle Man hates Triangle Man.

Right. Who’s big as the universe. But they didn’t. They didn’t call them people, but they would say, oh, the triangle wanted to get out.

Right.

And the circle was getting in the way, and the circle wanted to do this, that, and the other. And so they were attributing agency and intention. And one of the things that we also notice is that our intentions and our thoughts are all internal to us. They’re hidden from everybody else. We can speak and act in ways that mask and hide our intentions. And so we also develop this notion that our self is something that is interior to us and is not necessarily isomorphic with our body. And we also project that onto others. And we imagine that everybody else has some kind of self inside them that is unseen, that we can’t access. And so, as the concept of personhood develops in infancy, into childhood, into young adulthood, this notion that the self is something that is inside the body and is not identified with the body isomorphically stays with people.

And we have this notion. And so this is where most people will be. Like, you’re getting into, you know, the. Oh, man, I’m. I can’t remember people’s names today. Who said, I. Who said, I think, therefore I am?

Descartes.

Descartes. Okay. So we’re getting into Cartesian dualism, and you can’t do that. And it’s not exactly Cartesian dualism, but what it is is a concept of body agency, partability that we conceive of different locations of agency and cognition and things like that. Like. And some of these become socially conventionalized. Like, you have. People will say, oh, my heart is in conflict with my head.

Right.

It’s like, no, they’re not. Because your heart is not an agent, nor is your head a separate agent. They are just different organs or body locations, regions of a single agent. But we conventionalize these notions, and there’s been research that shows that around the world, in numerous different languages, from all different types of cultures, there are three main ways that people organize the locations of agency. There’s one that locates it in the chest. There’s one that locates it in the guts. And then there’s one that locates it between the head and the chest. So those. Those are the three main, like, regions where societies and languages locate the self. And so one of the things that. That also develops from this is the idea that the self and the body can separate and you can have different.

You can have different body parts that are responsible for different things. You remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry is dating this beautiful woman who’s not very smart, and he says, my penis and my brain are engaged in a chess match. And. And he’s like, how long does the. How long does the penis always beat the brain? And George goes, until you’re 40. Then it’s just not as much of a blowout. But the. The idea being that. That these are different. They’re loci or locations of different kinds of interests. And then, you know, your gut is where, like, fear is, and your heart is where, like, love and passion is where your analytical thinking is and all this kind of stuff. So you have different locations of this.

And although my understanding is that that’s fairly. Those specific locations are. Are fairly new. Like, having the head be the location of almost anything is a fairly new development.

Yes. These are all. These are all socially conventionalized. Right. So it’s. Modern societies influenced by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment tend to have that idea that the head is where the analytical part is and the heart is where the emotional part is, guts is where the fear part is. Because, yeah, anciently, the brain was thought to be. Wasn’t thought to have any significance.

Right.

And even if you go look in the Hebrew Bible, when it talks about the heart, that’s usually what it’s identifying as the location of cognition of thought.

Right.

And so it’s when. And the. The statement that Jesus says in the New Testament, love God with all your heart, might, mind and strength. That’s not in the Hebrew. That’s. That’s something that was added when the Hebrew was translated into Greek, because the Greek societies had a concept of the mind up here, and. And so they added that. And so frequently in the Hebrew Bible, the word lev heart is translated as nous mind in Greek.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. So that you. It’s different from society to society.

Right.

And there are. There are societies like. There have been people who’ve looked at certain Melanesian societies where the person is not only constituted by their body, but also by their possessions and then who. They’re. Who they’re married to and things like that. And there are these fascinating rituals that go on where if someone marries into the wrong bloodline, then they’ve got this. They’ve got this problematic confluence of bloodlines and they actually have to give away possessions in order to right the ship.

Interesting.

So the person, the personhood can be constituted in all these different kinds of ways. And so when we look in the ancient world, one of. One of the times when you see how people understand the different locations of agency and things like that is in death. And even today, we see this where. I think I might have told this story before on the podcast, but there’s a story about a guy whose daughter was killed in a car accident, and she was an organ donor, and her heart went to a young man who needed a new heart. And the father of this young woman rode his bike across the country to go meet this guy and brought a stethoscope and listened to his heartbeat and said, I got to spend some time with my daughter.

Right?

Because that was for him. Like, you know, if she had donated some kidneys, he wouldn’t have been like, let me get on those kidneys. I can. I can feel my daughter’s presence there. But because the heart is so socially significant in terms of personhood, you can hear the heartbeat from outside the body that, you know, brought him to tears because for him, that was the sensation of. Of being in the presence of his daughter. So in death, we see a lot of this, and anciently, we got to go to death in order to try to understand their concepts of personhood, for a couple of reasons. One, because that’s when it sits so close to the surface. But also we have a lot more stuff that is mortuary and funerary in orientation just because of the accident of preservation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because they tend to bury stuff. And so the stuff that gets buried tends to. To be stuff that is preserved.

Right.

So that’s. That’s a bias that we have in archaeology, is we’re heavily biased towards the mortuary stuff. But, you know, that helps us see how they. They understood the person. And there’s some fascinating stuff from. From the Levant or ancient Southwest Asia. And one of the things I want to talk about, because we’re going to talk about it a little bit, is the. The concept of the stele and not Steely Dan. A lot of people, every time I bring up the Tell Dan Stele people are like, is that where Steely Dan got their name from? No, of course that’s not where Steely Dan their name from. But you can go back to the Neolithic and you find stones that are taller than they are wide, where they have a flat face and then a rounded back that are set up along in different patterns and arrangements and things like that. And some of them are thought to be intended to represent deities, and others are thought to mark interments, inhumations, where people have been buried.

Although they’re not necessarily right above the burial. They’re kind of an index for a burial that could be at some distance from the. From the marker. But we start to see these things begin to function the same way that these markers seem to be housing some kind of concept of a soul, some kind of partable vehicle for the agency of the deceased. And so in that sense, divine images and headstones, ancient headstones, are functioning identically. They’re both there to kind of index the unseen agency of this entity, whether it’s a deceased loved one or a deity or something like that. And when we get into, like, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and things like that, and we get to see texts associated with this, there’s some cool stuff that comes up. So in. In ancient Egypt, the.

The torso was one of the main containers of the body, and it housed the ib, which is translated heart. That’s the seat of intelligence. And then there was also the haty was also associated with that area. And then there are a bunch of other kind of parts of the person. The kheperu was a manifestation of a person. You also had the ren, which was the name of the person. You had the akh, which was the spirit of the person. But in their burial, there were like, ways for each of these different elements of the person to be preserved. And the. But the most important thing for the survival of the person into the afterlife was the ka, which was an animating force or a twin that existed on. In the person’s statue once their corpse had disintegrated. Because the soul was thought to kind of stay with the body, and at night it could fly off and go do stuff.

So it’s kind of like a dream soul. If. If you’ve ever heard of a dream soul, it’s the idea that. That you have a soul that leaves your body when you’re asleep. And so your dreaming is. Is that soul experiencing the world, and then it comes back to your body.

So in death, my dream soul is weird, man. I’m just gonna say get.

Mine gets into a lot of trouble. But you had the. This idea of the ka that could stay close to the body, but then when it disintegrated, it needed some kind of house. When the body was. Was gone, it needed somewhere to be. And so there was usually a statue that was used as. As the house. And then there’s also the ba, which was kind of a flexible concept that usually was associated with deities and then with kings, and then was. Was kind of democratized later on. And it was represented as a. As a saddle-billed stork or a bird with a human head. And similar to this idea of this thing that goes. And, you know, can travel around.

Right.

And there’s a cool story, if anybody ever read some cool ancient Egyptian literature. The dispute between a man and his Ba is a story about a guy who’s contemplating suicide, and he’s debating with his Ba about whether or not to do this and because he’s afraid his Ba will abandon him.

I’m still confused about the Ba concept. The Ba is. Is the stork thing. I would.

Yeah. So this is another. It’s. It’s like the Ka. It’s very similar to the Ka. It’s like spirit and soul. There’s some overlap, so it’s not clear exactly how they’re different, but this is. This is basically some element of personhood that’s got to be close to the body. But he’s afraid if he takes his own life, the Ba is going to be like, you’re a loser. I’m out of here. And then his afterlife is basically over. And the. The Ba is supportive of this idea and then realizes, oh, shoot, if I run off when this guy’s dead, then I’m not going to be able to get the food and the provisions that are going to be provided in this guy’s mortuary chapel. So then I’m up a creek, and so they’re both kind of like, trying to figure out how to not get hosed by this guy’s plan. It’s a weird story. And then when we get to ancient Mesopotamia, we have. We also have multiple different elements. The etemmu was the body spirit. That was the. The one that had to be close to the body.

We got the napishtu was the animating force, and the zaqiqu, which was the breath, the wind, or the spirit. And again, there’s some overlap, but also some distinction. And then the spirit of a deceased person could leave the underworld and invade the bodies of the living, usually through the ear. That was your. Your weakest point of entry.

I don’t like that. I don’t want them to do that.

Yeah, no, you had to be. You know, that’s what.

That’s why we have the headphones.

That’s why the kids are wearing headphones everywhere they go these days. I. I still think it’s weird to see somebody inside a car with like big over the ear headphones on.

I do want. I do want to see some headphone manufacturer, Skullcandy or somebody, you know, Apple. Just listing as one of its features will block souls from invading through your.

ear so that you don’t get possessed.

And then there was. There were rituals that had to be done when the person died so that they could occupy these statues after their. Their body disintegrated. And that brings us to the main stele I want to talk about, which is the Katumuwa stele, which was discovered in. In a place called Samal, which is in southeastern Anatolia, southeastern Turkey. And this was discovered in a Syro-Hittite town called Zincirli. And it dates to the 8th century BCE. And the. The stele is. Looks a lot like a headstone in its shape. Most headstones are a little taller than they are wide. This one is just a little bit taller, has a rounded top. But then there is this very expertly carved relief on the stone that it shows a figure seated in front of a table, and they’re holding a cup and a pine cone.

And the pine cone is very important. You can’t forget the pine cone. And then it has a table that has a duck and a bowl and like a stack of bread on it. And then the rest of the space is filled with an inscription. And I’m going to read a translation of the inscription done by a friend of mine named Seth Sanders. And the inscription begins, I am Katumuwa, servant of Panamuwa, who commissioned for myself this stele while still living.

Oh, wow.

I placed it in my eternal chamber. So this is like your, your mortuary chapel. And these exist in Israel, ancient Israel. They exist all over the place. And established a feast at this chamber. And then they’re going to list the. The offerings that are made. A bull for Hadad, a ram for Panamuwa, a ram for Shamash, a ram for Hadad of the Vineyards, a ram for Kubaba, and a ram for my nabash, which is equivalent to the Hebrew nephesh. So my soul, which is in this stele, henceforth, whoever of my sons or of the sons of anybody else should come into possession of this chamber, let him take from the best produce of this vineyard as a presentation offering, year by year, he is also to perform the slaughter prescribed above in proximity to my soul, and is to apportion for me a leg cut. So if, if you had the means before you died, you want to do a rain, you know, these days it’s like, we get shared burial plots, and we got our.

This is what we want our headstone to say. Anciently, you were like, okay, here are the sacrifices that I want to be made to me right as I am occupying this headstone. And he literally says, for my soul, which is in this stele. And so we have this—this notion similar to what’s going on in Egypt, similar to what’s going on in Mesopotamia. This Anatolian guy, Katumuwa, anticipates that when he dies, some part of his nefesh, his nephesh, his soul is going to have to occupy that stele. And he wants to ensure that he’s being fed enough to ensure a lengthier afterlife.

You know, that’s something. Okay, so a couple things come to mind when you tell me this. One thing is that this is—he’s obviously—it—this is very close to how gods want their worshippers to act.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. This is a point I make in my book. Your treatment of deceased kin is no different from your treatment of deities.

Interesting.

And deceased kin could be referred to as deities.

Right.

Remember, when Samuel gets called up by the necromancer of Endor, she says, “I see an Elohim, I see a god,” and this is the deceased Samuel. And you have ancestor worship going on because there’s—there’s nothing different between going to a special little space where there’s a little standing stone to offer food to your deceased kin and going to a temple that has a little standing stone.

Right.

To make offerings to a god. And so there are—there’s an argument to make that very anciently, this is what people were doing with deceased kin. And it morphed—it—it morphed the deceased kin into what we now would call a deity. In other words, the worship of gods in temples may originate in the worship of ancestors in mortuary chapels.

And ancestor worship is a worldwide phenomenon.

All over the place.

That’s happened everywhere. Yeah, I—the other thing that—that struck me when you said that when you talked about the, you know, making these offerings to the dead, is that it had never—when I think about, you know, an offering or a sacrifice to a god, it never occurred to me that it was for eating, that it was for the god to be eating. But in this case, it seems very clear that it is that, you know, this person believed that they—that their soul would need food.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you think that the sacrifices to gods was also like, “Here, have some food”? Yeah. Like it was actually an eating thing.

There’s something interesting about rituals is most rituals are what we—what cognitive scientists would call causally opaque. We don’t have a clear idea of the relationship between what we’re doing and some kind of outcome, right? People develop rationalizations. We do this because this, that, and the other. And so when you look at the parallels between my deceased kin, I want to—I want to have them have a lengthy, successful afterlife. So I’m going to continue to give them food and drink and also light. One of the things that we frequently find with burial assemblages is lamps. They need light, they need food, they need drink. And the only reason is that they have a need of this. When you look at what’s in the Jerusalem temple, you’ve got a lamp, you’ve got a table of showbread, you’ve got offerings that are made. So it’s the exact same stuff.

And it must originate from the same perception that the gods stand in need of this. And when we go—when we go back to the literature that existed before the Hebrew Bible, you know, the humans are created to be enslaved to the gods so that they can provide the gods with all the things that they need and want. And so, you know, the idea that, oh, this is just—God wants us to show that we’re willing to make sacrifices. And it’s like, well, it seems an awful lot like God just needs the food and needs the wine and needs the light. And so I—I have not made a full case for this, but I—in my book, I point out that it seems awfully convenient that in form and function, they’re both doing the exact same thing and looking the exact same way. In fact, there are a lot of archaeologists who argue with—if they find, like, something that looks like a table, they will disagree over whether this is an altar for a god or an offering table for an ancestor.

And one publication will say, “This is very clearly an offering table,” and another publication will say, “This is very clearly an altar.” And it’s because in form and function, they are the same, right? And so the—the deity—and in—in my book, I make the case that deities, the concept of—

And you know, is, that is interesting because if it, if ancestors go on after death and if it, and it definitely seems like the, the concept is that these ancestors can then also provide some help to the living. You know, given, given these offerings and whatever they can sort. They. There’s some agency there where they can provide some sort of help. If everybody has ancestors who can, who they can go to for help, that’s something that’s beyond the control of the sort of centralized organization. And so, and so it sort of dissipates their, their power structure, right?

Like, and, and, and that kind of arrangement, the national deity is really only there to address national concerns, communal group things. But when it comes to the everyday stuff, they can just go to their ancestral deities. And that may be one of the things that Deuteronomy is trying to do is say, no, we want you coming to us to Adonai for everything. And there’s a, there’s a wonderful book that was published a couple years ago by Kerry Sonia called Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel that goes into detail about not just the cult of the dead, but ancestor worship and how that’s represented throughout the Hebrew Bible. And then Christopher Hayes also has a wonderful book called A Covenant with Death. And on the cover is an image of the Katumuwa Stele, okay, which is all about the, the Nephesh, the soul that is in this stele. So I, I think there’s the, the concept of the soul is integrated with the concept of deity in, in the Hebrew Bible.

The concept of worship in the Hebrew Bible. So I, I think it’s so thoroughly integrated into the foundations of so much of that we think about today. When we think about what’s going on in, in ancient Israel and Judah and early Judaism and even Christianity is developed from some of these ideas about souls that ultimately are rooted in the, what are called spandrels. That’s an old Stephen Jay Gould term that refers to the byproducts of the evolutionary process where it’s, it’s addressing something, but then there’s this, this byproduct off to the side that also pops up. And so the concepts of souls and deities are an example of an evolutionary spandrel that informs so much of what we understand today about religion, about the religion of the self as well as the religion of the gods.

Did the idea of the soul. And maybe we don’t know this, but I mean it. I’m one of the things that I’m wondering about because most of the things, like you say, we’re talking a lot about funerary texts and, and sort of things that have to do with death, which means that this, the concept of the soul has, has established itself as something that continues on after the death of the body.

Was that always the case? Do we know of, of whether the soul like maybe had. There was a development where the soul started out as just sort of this animating idea of. I mean, I guess you kind of talked about that in the beginning. Do we know, do we, do we. Is do we know of a time period before the idea of the soul going on or was that pretty instantaneous? Because it seems like a lot of people would come up with that idea pretty quickly.

So I, from the perspective of the cognitive sciences, this would be something that has always existed because one of, one of the things that, you know, everybody’s always been around death. And you know, your mind, when you get to know somebody, your mind has certain ways to trigger your perception of their presence. And there are some folks who have this, this situation where they can’t recognize faces.

Right.

And so if you can’t recognize a face, all of your background, all the history, all the memories that would be associated with that recognition, they don’t get queued up. And so you, you don’t have that connection that you normally would. And that is your mind projecting. When you recognize somebody’s face, your mind is projecting all that stuff onto your experience of the world around you. We experience the world kind of—it’s a two-way street. We’re receiving input, but our minds are also projecting the experience. If somebody, if a loved one, a child, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a celebrity you have a crush on passes away—probably not the last one, but somebody you’ve spent a lot of time around passes away—your mind doesn’t just turn all that off, which means that you continue, you know, a perfume, a, a room that you go into, a photograph, a food that you eat, all kinds of things can turn that on in your mind, even though the person is not there.

And this is why people report experiencing the presence of deceased loved ones. It’s because the mind can make that perception as real as when you’re actually in their presence. And so that would be going on in the ancient world as people are just kind of developing ideas about what the world around them is like. And they, around the campfire might say, “You know, so-and-so Og died. But he came to me in a, in a dream or I was out in the woods hunting, and he was beside me and helped me.” And, you know, all these, there are all these different ways that they could perceive that this, this agent is still out there in the world somehow. And, and because just the nature of cognition has the world just potentially teeming with unseen agents anyway, it just fits naturally.

You joke about, about, you know, a celebrity dying as being sort of silly. But I think that does fall into the category the way that it could respond when a beloved, you know, Alan Rickman passes away.

Elvis.

Yeah. And not only, like, people mourn deeply, I think. And, you know, maybe that’s just because especially with, with actors, you develop what feels like a relationship with these people like you. You know what I mean?

You, yeah, they’re substitutionally present in your life. You know what I mean?

You’ve never met that actor, maybe. But, you know, gosh, you, you’ve had, you, you’ve been, you, you went to Mordor with them. You’ve, you’ve done, you’ve gone through a whole bunch of stuff.

So you might have done unspeakable things with, with Britney Spears or with—

Right.

Any one of a number of different celebrities.

Yeah, but so, so I do. I, I mean, it makes sense to me. I have a friend. I, I when I was a, when I was a friend of mine from college, passed away just a couple years after college, and he had a specific look. I don’t know what it is about his look. He had very dark black hair and, and a, you know, a fairly average build. But I kept seeing dudes from behind who looked a lot like him and I. And it would spark, like the, the exact thing that you’re talking about, like all of the, all of those synapses that are, were programmed to Eric suddenly would flash and I would be like, “Oh, it’s Eric.” And then I’d be like, “No, no, not Eric. I know for a fact that’s not Eric.” But I would have to, like, go through a process to sort of walk myself out of hey, it’s Eric.

Yeah, that. And that’s your intuitive cognition. The automatic, not in your control side of the, of the cognitive spectrum is flashing those, those cues, and then the reflective side has to overrule. It has to say, “Oh, no, that can’t be.” And you know, there was, there was a girl I dated in college, bad breakup, but I could, like, I knew what kind of car she drove, and if I looked out of an airplane window at 35,000 feet and one of those cars was down there, I was gonna spot it and suddenly gonna be like, “Is that her?” So, so yeah, I, I know exactly what you’re talking about. That’s, that’s the reality. People have been dealing with that for thousands and thousands of years, ever since we developed the capacity for imagination and a, and what’s called the theory of mind, the ability to project and simulate other minds.

You know, we’ve been, we’ve been experiencing that, and that’s just a side effect of, of human cognition, which is a fascinating one that I think we haven’t even scratched the surface of the relevance of this to things like religion and worship and things like that.

Well, I think that’s, that’s all fascinating. I don’t know, like, from a cognitive perspective, I, I think I re. That. That really makes all of that make sense. I’m not 100% sure that I understand a biblical idea of a soul, because, because we’ve, we’ve gone through several different religiously oriented ideas, but I. Maybe we should just move on to our chapter and verse.

Yeah, let’s do it.

And, and, and, and get to the biblical concept.

Absolutely.

So the chapter and verse that you gave me, we’re, we’re launching into Ezekiel 13 . And I looked at this in several different translations because the first thing I did. Now we’re, we’re Ezekiel 13 , verses like 17 through 23. Is, is that what we’re talking about?

And the. I went to, to our go-to the NRSVUE, uh-huh. And saw nothing about a soul and went, what are we doing here? Yeah, so I, I went and looked in other places and, and then it started to make more sense. KJV mentions the soul, the NASB, the, the. The New American Standard Bible, 1995 edition. It’s. It’s all different. I’m going to start with the KJV. Can I just read some of the KJV so that people can get a sense of it?

Read on.

I’m gonna, I’ll start with. So in verse 17. Likewise, thou son of man, set thy face against thy daughters of thy people, against the daughters of thy people which prophesy out of their own heart and prophesy thou against them and say, thus saith the Lord God. Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature to hunt souls.

Whoa, man.

Yeah, man. The, the 90s references just flow from you, man. Yeah, there’s. 90% of our audience has no idea what’s going on. Will you hunt the souls of my people and will you save the souls alive that come unto you? That’s, that’s crazy. That’s some crazy stuff. The New American Standard Bible says, woe to the women who sew magic bands on all wrists and make veils for the heads of persons of every stature to hunt down lives. It’s these, these are very different. I, I, I, I think you can see that. Like, and then NRSVUE says woe to the women who sew bands on all wrists and make veils for the heads of persons of every height in the hunt for lives.

So lives and, and souls become sort of interchangeable in these different translations. Yeah, but what, but also, what, what are we talking about with the, what are these women doing?

Yeah, this is, this has long been kind of a puzzle. And we have the, the NET, the New English Translation.

Oh, another version. Cool.

Yeah. So this is what the Sovereign Lord says. Woe to those who sew bands on all the wrists and make headbands for heads of every size to entrap people’s lives. And the NET is heavily annotated. And so for bands, the note says the wristbands mentioned here probably represent magical bands or charms. And then there’s a reference to Daniel Block’s Ezekiel Commentary from the New International Commentary series. And then the headbands, says Daniel Block suggests that given the context of magical devices, the expected parallel to the magical armbands and the meaning of this Hebrew root, it may refer to headbands or necklaces on which magical amulets were worn. So, okay, there’s, yeah, there’s, there’s a bit going on here, but there’s a, there’s a book that was published in 2015 that I really enjoy and that I referenced a lot in my own dissertation by a scholar named Richard Steiner. And the book is called Disembodied Souls: The Nephesh in Israel and Kindred Spirits in the Ancient Near East.

So the nephesh is the Hebrew word that is sometimes translated soul.

Right.

And the cool thing about this book is it is open access, just like my book. So you can Google that title and you can just go find the PDF and you are able to read it, share it, consume it in whichever way blows your hair back. But the. The point of this book is to talk, one, to talk about what on earth is going on in this passage and then to talk about what significance that has to our concept of souls. And so the. The words here, that is, that is translated in the KJV pillows in the NET and the NRSVUE bands. It is keset. And it only occurs here in 18 and I think again in verse 20. Yeah. And then at verse 20, and it occurs in the plural. And scholars have long thought that this is cognate with an Akkadian term. And so this is one of the ways that. That linguists try to figure out what words mean. They see if there’s an equivalent term in another language and if their literature uses it in a way that makes it more clear what is intended there.

But the Akkadian kasitu has something to. To do with binding. So bands here has something to do with binding. So I imagine somebody might think, you know, they’ve got bands that they’re going to go use to, like, you know, garrote somebody or. Or something like that to trap their life. But Steiner argues that we’ve got a much closer parallel in Mishnaic Hebrew, which is probably deriving from Aramaic, and that the author of Ezekiel is probably basing this on an Aramaic term where it would mean pillows, which is what we have in the King James Version. However, Steiner goes on to argue it actually probably is just the pillowcase, not the filling.

And the idea here is that there they have these empty pillowcases, and they have. And they also have kerchiefs on the head. They’re hunting dream souls. They’re. Okay, they’re gonna trap somebody’s dream soul. So we talked about this. At night, the dream soul goes off on walkabout.

And so the idea ends up naked at high school. I know, it’s terrible.

Yeah. Or is suddenly sitting down for a final. That they didn’t even study for.

Right.

But the idea is that these women are going around to trap somebody’s dream soul and then hold it for ransom. So when it says hunt for lives, that’s a specific interpretation of nefesh. It’s interpreting nefesh as soul in the sense of synonym for a life.

Right.

So. So like a ship manifest might say there were 170 souls on board.

Right.

And the idea is hunting literally for souls. I’m going to go steal souls. And then you take it. You go. But you send a message to the person. You know, you got your little tablet with your little. Send a message saying, I got your dream soul. If you want it back, it’s going to cost so many shekels or whatever.

What an interesting concept. Yeah, it’s. It’s like a snipe hunt, but for. For souls.

But you remember. You remember the conversation between the man and his ba where the ba is like, oh, crap, if I’m away from this body and I’m not getting the sustenance, then I’m gonna wither away and die.

Right.

And the idea is, hey, pay me my money or else I’m gonna hold on to your dream soul. And you’ve only got so many days before the absence of your dream soul will result in your own demise.

Interesting.

And so they don’t even have to do anything other than hold up a sack and say, I got your soul and now you owe me money. So this. This is probably something that was going on somewhere around this time period. This is. This is one of the ways that people were trying to con other people and take advantage of them.

It’s a good con. It’s hard to. It’s hard to prove you don’t have my soul. I don’t know.

Yeah. And, you know, probably most people in this time period, in any given day are probably feeling pretty down on their luck. So if somebody was suddenly like, hey, things been going wrong recently, it’s because I took your soul. You know, half the time they’re probably going to believe you because things have been going poorly for them.

So, you know, you’ve got the. You’ve got the pillowcase, you’ve got the kerchief on your head. Obviously you’re a soul stealer. So. Yeah.

And I. I don’t know if everybody else has the same experience that I have, but every now and then you’ll just get some random text from some random number where somebody’s like, hey, good to see you the other day. How you doing? Right. And block. But, you know, one out of every thousand of those, somebody’s gonna be like, who’s this? And then they’re gonna be able to take advantage of them. So. Right. Probably something similar going on. But this reflects the idea that anciently, they. They did have this notion that a soul could depart from the body. You had the dream soul, a specific kind of soul that probably departed during sleep. But then you also had your main soul that, you know, after you died was probably. You hope to keep it close to your body until the body disintegrated, and you hope to provide a home for it. And, and this makes sense of one of the ancient Aramaic and Greek words for a divine image. A betyl, which is a bet el or bayt el, which means house of God, which is what Jacob refers to with the standing stone that it literally houses the deity.

And so the, they, you know, in Ezekiel, they had, they, maybe they had pillowcases that they used to capture and wrestle to the ground your, your dream soul, which might have been, you know, a stork that was, that you snatched out of the sky or something.

I, now I’m. Okay, so now I’m picturing women with kerchiefs and a bird in a bag going around saying, I will release yours, your dream soul for money. Yeah, I mean, it does.

The, the, the, the, it was the Wild West.

The scripture does go on to reference birds. To ensnare people like birds. I will tear them from your arms. So, yeah, I guess there’s a bird thing.

And you have, in Isaiah and elsewhere, you have the association of birds and souls, because souls, souls chirp like birds and things like that. And remember, they’re flying around. So they, the, the bird is, is one symbol for the soul, not just in ancient Egypt, but in parts of the Bible as well.

Interesting.

And that’s something that you can learn more about it in Christopher Hays’s book, A Covenant with Death. Yeah, it’s, it is bananas.

I mean, it’s kooky, but like, instinctively, and I think this is kind of the point that you were making earlier. Instinctively, I kind of get it. Like, you think about your soul and you think it flies. I don’t know why, but it just feels like it flies. It feels like, like, you know, all of this image and maybe it’s because of all the imagery that we’ve seen of like, you know, you think about you, this idea that we die and then, you know, in movies, in, in paintings, whatever, the soul rises from the body. You know, I’m thinking of the movie Ghost or “You in danger, girl,” he’s.

Got your dream soul.

Any number of ideas. Like, I, I, I think it makes intuitive sense that not only that we have a, an, a non, an immaterial part of us. And again, I, this is not a belief that I have. It’s just, it just makes intuitive sense. Yeah, that there’s this divorced from my body. There is this immaterial thing that, that, that is bigger than me or that moves that, that houses my personality or my, my essence that isn’t that. That isn’t locked to my body.

I think I, I think that, you know, we can put the lie to that concept fairly easily. You know, we. When someone gets a brain injury, their entire personality changes and suddenly it’s like, okay, well, that was in the brain. You know, at least that part of that personality was clearly a brain thing.

Yeah, it’s all, it’s all material. Like thoughts are material things.

Right.

And. And this is, this is all projections of the mind. And you, you mentioned the, the passage that talks about birds. And, and I think this is one of the good, one of the things that, that supports Steiner’s argument in verse 20. This is from the NRSVUE, but I’m going to replace the words with what Steiner argues they are. Therefore, thus says the Lord God, I am against your pillowcases with which you hunt souls. I will tear them from your arms and let the souls go free. Oh, the souls that you hunt down, like birds.

So I think that’s a pretty good illustration of, of the, the concept that they are, they are literally taking these pillowcases and like, and, you know, oh, I got your soul. And, and then God is, is like, you naughty little minxes, I’m going to grab those pillowcases and I’m going to open up and the souls are going to be able to get back out. And who among us has not had a dream where we suddenly discovered one day, oh, shoot, I can fly? Yeah.

The other thing about that verse that makes it that I hadn’t really caught on to the time I read it, you know, when I read it earlier, is that it’s clear that, that the author of this, of these verses believes that this is a real thing.

Believes that, that, that these, these women, and it is specifically women can, can use these bags and catch people’s souls. Like that’s, that’s real. That’s. I, I’m. I’m still processing that.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. This is, and you know, like, we, I mentioned the, the necromancer of Endor. Like that story represents the necromancer as successfully calling up a deceased person.

So that’s a real thing that can happen.

Yeah. And, and they, they condemn it not because it’s not real, but because, you know, you’re, you’re messing with the, the, the wrong side of the, the spiritual tracks here. And so you’re not supposed to be.

Doing and the dude you call forth might, might be real mad. And then, and then, then what are you going to do? Yeah. All right. Well, I, this is a really interesting conversation. I think the whole concept is fascinating and I think people are going to have a lot of fun with it. And here’s the thing. If you’re a patron of this show, our patrons have a fairly lively conversation in the comments section of our of our Patreon page. So I recommend if you want to have a conversation about this episode, you, you could become a patron and then go and be a part of that conversation. You can do that by going to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and become a patron. If you are a patron at the $10 a month level, you will get our After Party which is bonus content. If you’re a patron at a $5 a month level, you will be able to get early ad-free versions of every episode and and be able to participate in that conversation.

So I recommend you go there. We it’s certainly the way the we the the main way that we pay our bills. And also if you if you need want to get in touch with us for anything, please feel free to reach out at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Dan, thanks for a great conversation and we’ll talk to y’all next next week.

Bye everybody.

I Got Soul, and I'm Super Bad

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology