Thou Shalt Not

Like in Egypt, you have all. You’ve got the God of bricks, you got the God of lovemaking, you got the God of beer.

Those gods knew how to party.

Yeah. You got your bricks, you got your beer, you got your lovemaking. And you’ve got a weekend.

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 we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. We got a hot one today, don’t we?

Oh, oh, we’re. We’re like coming off the heels of. Of some. Some current events.

We’re gonna get topical. We are.

You know, we try. We’re. We’re maybe a couple weeks late, but it’s okay.

Like an effective cream. Today, we’re. We’re topical. We’re going to be talking about recent legislation that was signed into law by the… the… Landry… no, the governor of Louisiana.

Habakkuk 71 , House Bill 71, which requires that all public school classrooms have prominently posted a specific version of the Ten Commandments. Yeah. And we’re going to talk a little bit about what specific version they’re using and why, and then get into some of these commandments, how they’re. How they’re written up, why it’s a little confusing, and then talk more about some of these commandments and. And then move on to some name of God stuff. You know, just… your… just an average Thursday.

Yeah, exactly. I. It’s gonna.

Or Monday, whatever. I don’t know. When you’re listening to this.

Yeah, you listen whenever you listen. It’s Thursday for us. But time is a flat circle, so it all. None of it makes any sense. All right, well, let’s. Let’s dive in.

To this. Louisiana has, as you say, has chosen to. To try to force all of the schools to have the Ten Commandments on a poster in every. In every classroom. Feels a little weird. Definitely problematic, I think. Problematic and, and, and controversial.

Yeah. So this is. This has been tried in a bunch of states. Texas tried it recently. Here in Utah, they tried it and it didn’t get passed. And this ought to strike most people as a pretty flagrant violation of the Establishment Clause of the very First Amendment to the Constitution. And we’re going to get into that. But shall we. Shall we just kind of. I want to read one of the paragraphs that introduces the Ten Commandments, and then we can read through. Does that sound okay?

I love it.

Okay, so paragraph. Let’s see, line 11 on page three of the final form of this bill that was signed into law no later than January 1, 2025. Each public school governing authority shall display the Ten Commandments in each classroom in each school under its jurisdiction. The nature of the display shall be determined by each governing authority with a minimum requirement that the Ten Commandments shall be displayed on a poster or framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches. The text of the Ten Commandments shall be the central focus of the poster or framed document and shall be printed in a large, easily readable font. The text shall read as follows.

And then it starts with “The Ten Commandments.” That’s the first bit of text that you have to have on there.

Which I think should probably be read only in your best Charlton Heston impression.

My. When I think Charlton Heston, I think of Wayne’s World.

Because I never. I never watched the movie The Ten Commandments.

Really?

Never seen it.

Oh, yeah. DeMille is rolling in his grave.

Well, he can. He can roll around all he wants. I just have. I was not raised in a religious household. It was just never a movie that, that we watched. And so I know I’m a heretic already to a lot of people out there, but that makes me even more heretical. So that’s the movie that I first saw Charlton Heston in. I was like, okay, this guy’s a much better actor than the first guy that they had in the gas station. But I don’t get the significance. And then later on, I. Ah, okay.

Moses.

I am the Lord thy God. That’s my. That’s, that’s my best Heston. Right.

Which is also the next few words in—in the Commandments. Should we go through? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t—we don’t need to read all of the Ten Commandments. But the point is, or at least one of the points for the purposes of this conversation, is that they chose a very specific translation, a very specific version of these because—

Different translations of the Bible do these differently, word these differently.

Yeah, we—there—there are a bunch of different ways to understand the Ten Commandments. We’ve already done a show where we talked about the fact that Exodus 20 is not labeled the Ten Commandments. It’s actually Exodus 34 where we have the 10 things, the 10 words, the 10 commandments. But that’s the Ritual Decalogue. This is a different set of 10. So we’ve discussed that.

But the specific version, it’s—not only is it not labeled as Ten Commandments, it’s not numbered either. Like, there’s—there’s vast disagreement on which are the 10, and it’s very reasonable to say there are not 10.

Yeah, you could.

You could number it at as few as nine easily, or as many as 12. Like, that—

It’s—

It’s not obvious in any way.

Right.

This is supposed to be ten different commandments.

Yeah. This is—this is a negotiation of the text. This is our decision to impose that organizing framework. But you can even organize it different ways. You can split the commandments up in different ways. Some people think of “you shall not covet your neighbor’s house” as one commandment, and then “you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or slaves” as a separate commandment. Sure. The first commandment can be split up in a variety of different ways. Is the statement, “I am the Lord your God,” a commandment? Within most Jewish streams of tradition, that is considered the first commandment. But within most Christian traditions, it’s the actual proscriptive, “you shall have no other gods before me.” And is the commandment to not make any graven images—is that part of the same commandment? Is that a separate—? So there are a lot of different ways to do this, and this legislation is prescribing a very specific way to do it to some degree, because it doesn’t number them like you were—

You were saying before we started recording. You could even divide up the—the laws, the commandments as they’re represented in the bill, to 12.

Like there are—there are—

Looks like 12 to me when I read it, because of how—because they do—they do have line breaks.

Right.

And a couple of them extend beyond the line breaks. And it’s very obvious when that has happened.

Right.

And then there are—but if you just go down and you—

You don’t count sentence by sentence, sentence by sentence.

It looks like 12 different commandments to me.

Yeah. Yeah, so—so that’s unclear. So if somebody wanted to thumb their nose at—at the—this legislation, they could, like, number them by 12 or something.

And they definitely should thumb their nose at this legislation. It’s true.

But the—the reason that they have picked the version that they have and the specific translation that they have, because you will not find this exact list of—of commandments in any translation. This comes from a document that was created in the 1950s by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. And this is not Don Henley fans. This is a charitable order.

Eagles, man.

That’s the only part of that movie I—I don’t like. It’s—it’s funny. But I’m like, you have lost points.

You’re like, the Dude doesn’t like the—you’re telling me the Dude doesn’t like the Eagles?

Now, I will be clear. I prefer CCR over the Eagles, but I do love me some Eagles. Now this is a charitable organization that does a lot of good work. But back in the ’50s, they were involved like a lot of people in red-baiting in the Red Scare. We had a lot of—communism is destroying the world. We need to develop kind of an identity that distinguishes us from the Ruskies.

And so one of the, the main thing that kind of took over US identity was, was this idea that they are godless communists and we are God-full.

I don’t know, fearing.

God-fearing. Yes. We are the theosebes. We are the. We follow the commandments of God. And so there was this push to consider the Ten Commandments an identity marker.

Right.

Now, it had never been an identity marker prior to that time period. There is an argument that this sits at the foundation of our, our nation’s heritage and its laws. All entirely false.

Right.

There is absolutely no case to make that the Ten Commandments sit at the foundation of any of our laws or our nation in general. Sure. The Bible does. Sure. Even the King James Version of the Bible does. Sure. The Ten Commandments are something that appear in like old spelling books from the 19th century.

Right?

Sure. That does not a foundation make.

Well, and this bill actually references a couple of textbooks and just. And, and for. And in language that’s meant to also go on these posters. Yeah. It says, you know, the, the Ten Commandments were. Was in this book and the Ten Commandments was in that book. And it, and it makes it sound like every child in, in school for the entire history of the United States has had to read these words and blah, blah, blah. And that’s just silly.

Yeah, it’s, it’s nonsense. But in, in the 50s, Cecil B. DeMille and the Fraternal Order of Eagles hooked up and decided that they were going to produce these big kind of monumental displays of the Ten Commandments and distribute them throughout the country to put like next to, you know, your capitol building or your, your courthouses or and stuff like that. And so you had a bunch of these go up. Right.

And for DeMille, it was just like it was publicity for his movie.

Well, and he was, he was also very much, you know, he would have been a McCarthy stan. He was also very anti-communist, so I’m sure this was personal for him as well, but. Yeah, but it was. It was mainly going to be publicity for his movie. Yeah. And so they go up all over the place. And then I think it’s 2003, somebody sues, because one of these, I think it was in. It might have been the one in Texas, I don’t remember where. But sues saying this violates the Establishment Clause.

Right.

Because this is establishing a religion. And there was a big flurry of activity, and most of them were just kind of like, you know, off in a park. Nobody cared about it. They don’t even make an association between this thing and, you know, a government building. Right. And then we get this ruling in 2005, Van Orden versus Perry, where. And this actually is released the same day as another ruling about the display of the Ten Commandments in public spaces that ruled the other way. So we got two rulings, each of them, five, four going in opposite directions. And it was. I think it was Breyer who, who was the one who. Who was the deciding vote. But they said the display in Texas is good. This can stay. This does not violate the Establishment Clause, but a bunch of other displays, I think in Kentucky or.

Or somewhere around there, they violate the Establishment Clause. And part of it was because, like, it was a part of a bunch of displays, and they were asserting this. You know, the Ten Commandments are the foundation of our. Of our legal system and of our nation, just kind of reflecting that 1950s era, you know, that ethos.

Right.

And they get rejected. And so. And that was McCreary County versus ACLU. And so we’ve got a version of the Ten Commandments that passes constitutional muster. And we’ve got other versions of the Ten Commandments that don’t. The version of the Ten Commandments that Louisiana put up is identical to the version in Texas that passed, which is from the 1950s era.

And I think that there were. I, I don’t remember this well, but I think that there were other issues at play as to why they allowed the. The Texas one to stand, including, like, you know, they claimed that it was there. It had been there for so long and no one had complained about it for so long that it now had sort of a traditional standing.

And. And that sort of thing. So it wasn’t just the wording that was important. But you’re right that they. That. That the lawmakers in Louisiana grabbed on to the wording as being like, well, if it’s okay there then it must be fine here.

Yeah. Because the goal here is to to get something up to the Supreme Court. Like, the reason they’re doing this is so they can get it to the Supreme Court and they have precedence because it’s already passed once. But the interesting thing is the. In the McCreary case, one of the things that they cited in rejecting the other displays was what’s called the Lemon test, which goes back to 1971, Lemon versus Kurtzman, where this is another Establishment Clause case, but they established a three-prong test to determine if something violates the Establishment Clause. The purpose prong, it says the statute must have a secular legislative purpose. The effect prong, the principal or primary effect of the statute must neither advance nor inhibit religion. And the entanglement prong, the statute must not result in an excessive government entanglement with religion. And so that’s been what’s kind of governed Establishment Clause cases, evidently, ever since in the.

In the Supreme Court until two years ago.

When we had Kennedy versus Bremerton School District. This is the football coach who prays after the games in the middle of the field, and got his contract was not renewed by the school, and he sued. And this went up to our justices, and as with so many things recently, it’s a 6-3 ruling. We know what that means.

And in this ruling, they basically said, we don’t care about the Lemon test. Our test is tradition. If it’s a part of our nation’s tradition, then fair game. And I’m I’m simplifying quite a bit. But more or less the main test that some the main piece of scrutiny that it has to pass now is just whether or not it is an established part of American tradition.

I mean, but but these justices go against that all the time, too.

I mean, these justices, the only test that they care about is what are my personal feelings about this?

I mean, you got people like Alito and Thomas, and it’s just they they they don’t care. They say that they’re originalists, but they don’t really care at all what the what the Founding Fathers had to say. They say that they are, you know, that they that they’re like, literally, this is a very strange assortment of judges that’s currently on our our bench.

A majority of our Supreme Court justices right now are Catholic.

Like a lot of them. Which is which is weird because.

Weird. Yeah.

This is also a very Protestant version of the Ten Commandments that that has been approved. And and what I hear from lawyers. To my knowledge, neither of us are lawyers.

I haven’t checked recently, but yes, last time I checked I wasn’t a lawyer.

Yeah, I my insurance won’t pay for the test right now, but to my knowledge, I am not a lawyer. But people who are lawyers, who know a lot more about the law and particularly constitutional law than I have said that in light of the basically abolition of the Lemon test, when this makes it to the Supreme Court, unless something drastic changes, it’s going to be 6-3 in favor. Yeah. Of this. So. Which means that Utah, Texas, 30 other states tomorrow are going to suddenly have the same legislation.

Yeah. So let’s talk about these commandments a little bit. I think, I think we’re all sort of somewhat familiar with them. I think these, the I, you know, I think they should, they should have done the Colbert check on all of the legislators who co-signed on this bill to say, hey, can you name all ten of the Ten Commandments?

Because they can’t. I want to tell you a story. The first time I ever went to General Conference. This is LDS Church, LDS General Conference. Yeah. This is every six months they have this big meeting. This was, I think this was a special treat. Like I traveled to Utah. It was before I left on a mission. I was crossing the street to go into the recently built Conference Center.

Right.

And there was one of the street preachers on the corner challenging people to recite the Ten Commandments. And at the time I was like, I don’t know. And ever since then I’ve been like, ah, I want to go back and see if that guy’s there.

There’s always somebody protesting out there. And it’s always, it’s very funny because it’s always some. Someone of a different denomination, you know, Christian. But like, why are you protesting this anyway? It’s very, it’s all very weird. The. So these are, Are they not King Jamesian in their wording?

Remarkably, King Jamesian with small divergences.

And, and that’s, and that’s what threw me off the first part because I looked at it and I was like, yeah, that’s King James. And then I looked it up and I was like, wait a minute. No, it’s not. There are some small differences, but it is, it is based on King James. So it’s a, it’s a revised King James.

Interesting.

Yeah. And I don’t really understand the reason for the revision. So for instance, one of them is, thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.

But when we look in the King James, what we have is thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

Oh, so we’ve gone from.

Kids don’t know what the word thee means.

Well, but they know. Yeah. To thyself.

Right, exactly.

Maybe. Maybe they were like, we could say to thine own self. But then they’ve also changed it from the singular to the plural. Graven image has now been pluralized in here and in the Hebrew, it is not plural. It is singular. It’s just one word. Pesel.

Can we talk a little bit about what that means? Because that is a very strange and confusing commandment. And I don’t. I. I think most, you know, I looked at different translations of it, and most. A lot of the newer translations, including the, the NRSV, they. They replace it, the words graven images with an idol, shall not make for yourself an idol.

What. What. What does the original seem to be saying? And, and what. What are the. The sort of more common interpretations of it?

So pesel is a Hebrew word that refers to an image that has been crafted from wood or from stone. And so the graven image, the idea is it is an image that has been engraved or some. Or a carved image or something like that. And you have, in Judges 17 , you have a story of Micaiah who makes a graven image. But I, I want to say it says a graven molten image. And so it’s not clear if there’s a process going on here or if there. Some people understand it as two different types of images, but yeah, it’s an idol. So divine image would be the. The object that is the focus of worship, that is considered the index for the deity and their presence and all that kind of stuff. And usually these would be. These would be carved out of wood or carved out of stone, and then they would be covered in gold and silver or they would be cast in gold and silver or something like that.

Variety of different ways to make divine images, but that’s fundamentally what we’re referring to here.

But it does go on like the verse goes on to say, and I’ll read KJV right now just because it says, it says, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath, or that is under. That is in the water under the earth. So, and, and it goes on after that to say, thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them, so that. That you know, verse five indicates to me that, yes, it’s an idol or whatever, but it does seem like, you know, when I look at, you know, Islam has a prohibition against imagery, which is why when you go to, like, the Alhambra in Spain, you’ll see really ornate writing, but no, but. But no picture.

And a lack of representative imagery.

Yeah, no represented. And I wonder if this was. If there was any of that prohibition of just representative imagery contained in this.

It was certainly understood that way because you do have. It’s not nearly as. As programmatic as within Islam, which comes from many centuries later and develops within kind of a more philosophically oriented social environment. But you do have an omission of an awful lot of imagery. You don’t really have any. You don’t have much ancient artwork within Judaism depicting animals or other kinds of sentient beings. Now, the interesting thing, and the idea here is probably we know that nations around us make divine images that look like people, that look like animals, whether swimming in the sea or flying through the air or walking on the land. So the idea is almost certainly don’t make images in order to worship that look like anything that you might see running around.

Right.

And we know that five minutes after this, you know, he comes back down the mountain and there’s a cow there that everybody’s worshiping.

But. And, and we do actually have, from the lands of. Of Israel and Palestine, from the end of the Bronze Age, beginning of the Iron Age, we have divine images that have been discovered, mostly miniature divine images, but we know that bulls and calves were a. One of the forms that was frequently used to represent deities and almost certainly to represent Adonai, the God of Israel.

That’s. That’s insane. That’s not insane, but it’s, like, very interesting that, like, yeah, the, The Israelites in the Exodus story get in big trouble for a calf.

Considering the fact that the calf slash bull was used as, you know, as a proxy for their God.

And you. And you see it in other places throughout the. The Hebrew Bible, the fact that you have horns put on the. The incense altars and the sacrificial altar and things like that reflects this idea of a pedestal animal that is associated with Adonai. And you have a. The King James renders it mighty one of Jacob, but that’s the word for bull, the bull of Jacob. And so there are. There are a bunch of different vestigial relationships between Adonai and bull imagery as well as El and bull imagery. And if you look in the Ugaritic literature and other Northwest Semitic literature, you see El and Baal, the storm deity, the Northwest Semitic counterpart to Adonai. You see both of them are represented with bulls as well. So the. This is probably coming from much later on, but it’s a way to kind of create this blanket proscription that includes in it the prohibition of Adonai’s pedestal animal and that kind of imagery.

But it gets interpreted as. Don’t have artwork.

That represents people or animals or things like that. So you don’t really see it apart from the commandment to put like cherubim on the curtains of the. Of the temple and stuff like that.

Right.

So it’s not until you get down into the Greco-Roman period, around the turn of the era, around the time of Jesus’s life, that you see a lot of like, pomegranates and rosettes and you see some other animals and plants and things represented in some imagery in synagogues and. And things like that.

I just, you know, it’s funny because I thinking about how the next. The next verse does talk about don’t bow yourself down before it to me takes the curse off of just, you know, drawing a lamb or drawing whatever. But that gets me thinking about images that I see all the time of someone kneeling down in front of either a picture of Jesus or, you know, a candle of a saint or, you know, a crucifix. Crucifix or anything and praying. It feels like that could run afoul of this graven images idea.

It certainly could. And you have a lot of people who. Particularly Protestants and particularly Evangelicals today who accuse Catholics of violating these commandments all day and twice on Sunday because they understand particularly the worship of Mary and images and things like that. But at the same time, the way that a lot of Protestants treat the Bible as the word of God and hold it up as its own icon. There’s. There’s plenty of scholarship out there talking about the Bible as icon, as a divine image, you know, that could run afoul of this as well.

I mean, not for nothing, but you put a poster up in a classroom and, you know, say. Say that it has deep importance. That could easily be a. A graven image in this. In this sense if.

Yeah. And. And particularly because it is. It’s functioning as an icon.

Like it’s not functioning as a text, like it’s functioning as an icon. Because even if you can’t read it, you know what it is?

This is going into kindergarten classrooms. It’s like the kids are going to be going, oh, adultery is probably a bad idea for me.

Yeah, yeah. Like what? You know, once it’s up there, you’re going to have high school kids. They, you know, in however many years, until our legislatures grow up and get over this, these petty and naive identity politics, however long they’re in classrooms, you’re going to have high school kids who know exactly what’s going to be there. They’ve read it a billion times, but they’re not going to take it down. It’s going to remain up there because it is a symbol and it is a symbol of authority.

I, I, I do love the idea of these, of these things breaking their own commandments. I think that’s brilliant.

Well, and yeah, so I want to just see some kind of fundamentalist who’s just part of such a niche, like, little tiny corner of American evangelicalism, who tears it down and, and stomps on it like, like that doofus did for the, the Church of Satan or the Satanic Temple display in the one place, because it’s functioning that way.

Yeah, I, I also wanted to talk a little bit. Sorry, you were going to do something.

No, no, go ahead.

I wanted to jump on to the. Thou shalt not. Not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. We will, that’s going to eventually transition us to our second, to the second half of the show. But I wanted to talk about what it means, what, what it, what, what that means. Because I, I know growing up in my life, I had, I, I had the idea that to take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. You know, if I were, if I, you know, if I said, oh, my God, like, to me, to, like, I thought that that was what it meant to take the name of. I don’t think that’s what it means now.

No, that’s, that’s not what, what it means. And I want to point something out as well. The, the official text, the language that has to be on there. I am the Lord thy God. I am is in all caps, right?

Oh, yeah, I hadn’t caught that.

So they’re, they’re, they’re trying to say the great I am.

Right.

They want you to, they want to make note of that. However, in in the text of Exodus 20 , that’s just anoki, which is just the, the first person singular personal pronoun. It is not the phrase in Exodus 3 that is rendered I will be what I will be or I am that I am, or something like that. So it’s actually imposing that on the Hebrew and it’s not in the Hebrew.

And it’s sneaky too, because it is a way of differentiating this God from, I mean, you know, no one, no one associates Allah with I am.

So I, it feel, it does feel like they’re very clearly putting down a marker that this is the Christian or, or Jewish, I suppose, God and not. And not any other God. So you can’t. You. You’re not allowed in their minds to interpret I am the Lord thy God as being, you know, this could be Shiva or this could be, you know, some other God.

And that. And that comes from the original displays from the 1950s. They have both I am and Lord in all caps.

Right.

So that’s an interesting. Yeah, that’s an interesting thing to note. However, we get back to Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. The. The word here that is translated in vain is, for vain in Hebrew, shav. It is a word that means make it worthless, make it useless. That’s basically what it is. So in vain is an okay translation.

Our word vain in this sense is like, you know, Shakespeare used it a lot and would say, yeah, yeah, to go somewhere to. To do something in vain is to do it fruitlessly or without. Without the right effect or something.

To no effect or something like that. Right. And the. What is translated thou shalt not take is nasa, which means to lift, bear or carry. And the idea here of lifting, bearing, or carrying the name in vain is. Is almost certainly a reference to swearing an oath. That’s how this is used elsewhere. In fact, we’ve got in Leviticus another commandment. I think it’s Leviticus 19 . I’ll just verify real quick, but can’t find it. But it’s. It says not to swear by the name of Adonai falsely.

Right.

For as a lie. And so that’s almost certainly what’s going on here. The idea being for an oath, an ordeal in court, whatever, don’t say, don’t lift your hand to the square and say God’s name as part of an oath. If that oath is false or if it’s something that you promise to do that you’re not going to carry through with. Right. And. And so it’s really just saying, don’t invoke me.

And then. And then forsake that.

Or. Or fudge.

Or. If you’re in. In court. Yeah. So in court, you know, you put your hand on the Bible or you raise your right hand and. And you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God. That’s a way to bear. Lift. Bear. Carry the name of God there. It’s just the title of God. But if you’re lying in your testimony in court, that would be directly a violation of that commandment. Now, it became inappropriate to use the divine name at all shortly after this, probably in the Greco-Roman period. Okay. Second-first century BCE which is why.

You don’t say it on the podcast.

Yes, that’s because.

Because there are still people that hold to the. To the.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And. And a lot of friends of mine, and several of them have, have said if I would not mind making that accommodation. And that’s not a costly accommodation for me. I’m used to hearing it in academic conferences and stuff like that. I’m. I’m fine with that. So, yeah, around that time period, it became considered inappropriate. And my opinion on this, based on work that I’ve published, is that the divine name was considered a way to invoke God’s presence and authority. Kind of like how in Russian, they don’t say the actual Russian word for bear.

Right.

Because they’re afraid they’re. The bear is going to show up or something like that. The idea being you only invoke it. You know, there’s only one person who can say it in the Holy of Holies, because when you say it, God is. Is invoked. And so to be outside the temple and to say it is to bring God into a profane non-temple context. And that would be considered inappropriate. And so I think it was probably that. That sensitivity, that taboo developed because the name was thought to invoke deity, which is probably why this tradition developed of not destroying texts that had the divine name on it. You had to use the genizah. You had to. Sometimes you buried the text. There were specific processes you went through to discard text that had the divine name. And there were even debates that arose within Judaism when the internet became a thing of typing divine name on a screen that, you know, would just go away.

So it’s something that was taken very seriously within Judaism. But once that happened, you can’t bear the divine name anywhere. And so what does this commandment mean? And And I think that’s probably when it got renegotiated to refer to other things. I. I think one of the things that. One of the renegotiations was this idea that to. You bear the divine name when you represent the deity in public, in private, and in your dealings with your fellow man.

So would you say that, for instance, if you wanted to display a series of. Of scripture, that would be a. An instance of maybe bearing the divine name, and if you were to do so under false pretenses, like, let’s say you claim that they are just historical and. And falsely so, then, then. Then would that be perhaps bearing the name of the Lord in vain? I’m just. I’m just.

No, no spitballing here.

Yeah. No examples in mind.

Just thinking about it, that could certainly be according to that renegotiation of the text. That could certainly be an example of bearing the. The divine name in vain if you’re just using it to try to structure power. Absolutely. That could be understood according to that renegotiation. And then it would be further renegotiated to be, you know, any kind of use in an expletive of the word God or something like that. That. And. Which is. Which is, I think, how. How most people from our generation and generations around us were probably raised with this idea that you weren’t supposed to say, use the word God or Lord or anything like that in. In expletives. Right. Even though there are. There are ways that oh, God can be used devoutly. Yeah. But really your inflection is the only thing. Like if you. If you’re in a prayer and you say, oh, God, just a little bit wrong, it might come across.

Right. Right.

And that’s definitely. It’s definitely not okay if you, if you do it just after stubbing your toe.

But then if you pray for healing, then it’s okay. Yeah. The lines get. Could get blurry.

And who know, who knows? Maybe Genesis 38 , Onan, maybe he let out an oh, God. And that was really why God was like, zap.

Well, there. Yeah, there you go. We’re gonna have to. I don’t. Did we do. Have we done that story? We haven’t. We. I don’t know that we’ve ever done that story.

Did we not do Onan?

Maybe we did. I don’t know. I don’t remember. I look, the second we record these things, I forget everything. So let’s talk. So. Okay, I think. I think it’s interesting that they’re putting these 10 commandments up, let’s. Since the first four or five, depending on how you number it, of the commandments are about God and, and specifically, you know, at least one of them is specifically about God’s name.

Let’s talk about that name. Let’s talk about the development of that name, where it came from. What. What’s going on with that?

Yeah, so the first thing you need to know is that Jehovah begins with an I. If you, if you ever find yourself in a life or death situation where you have to spell out the name of God, just keep that in mind. In the older Latin, Jehovah begins with an I.

We did a whole show about, about, or we talked about the Tetragrammaton, some, but not, not sort of the development of it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So we’ve probably mentioned that the, the earliest known occurrence of the divine name, the Tetragrammaton as a reference to the God of Israel comes from the, probably the third or fourth quarter of the ninth century BCE. So the Mesha Inscription where Mesha talks about carting away the vessels of Adonai after having defeated the nation of Israel at Nebo. And we got a couple.

Sorry, I, we, we should just do a quick reminder that Tetragrammaton is a reference to four letters. Yod, He, Vav, He, if I’m recalling correctly, you recall correctly the. And. And that is. That is the. The name of God. So, so you’re saying that this thing was the first time we saw those letters in that order in that reference.

As a reference to a deity. And then we also have, we have most of the letters of the Tetragrammaton used in names in some other inscriptions. So the Tel Dan Stele, which is probably written by an Aramean named Hazael who’s boasting about defeating a handful of kings. And they have Yahwistic theophoric elements in the name. And by the way, I say Adonai, most scholars pronounce it Y, A, H, W, E, H. And the name Jehovah is an alternate form of this based on the combination of the consonants Yod, He, Vav, He, and the vowels that come from the Hebrew word for my lord, a special form of it that’s pronounced Adonai. If you put those two together and then you transliterate them into modern English, Jehovah or Jehovah is what you would get.

So if you’ve ever wondered where the name Jehovah comes from, it comes from the. The combination of the consonants of Adonai. The consonants of Adonai and the vowels of Adonai, the consonants of the Tetragrammaton and the vowels of Adonai of the word Adonai.

Right?

Yeah. And that probably happens in the medieval period in, in a couple of different languages and becomes very common because if we go look in the Masoretic Text and if we look at ancient texts, they were already using those letters as substitutions for the divine name in ancient texts. So anyway, we’ve got Adonai, we’ve got Jehovah, we’ve got the Tetragrammaton, we’ve got the divine name. It first appears on the scene suddenly in the names of kings and in the name of the patron deity of Israel around 850-825ish BCE.

Like, like who. Who give me some of this, these names that this is appearing.

Jehoram, Jehu, names like that. So the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III talks about Jehu, a king in Israel, and is actually the, earliest artistic depiction of an actual known Israelite. It shows him bowing down to the ground in front of Shalmaneser III.

Oh, wow.

And I, and I actually ran across this. I was in the British Museum last October and I was just kind of do to do looking around, and then it’s right there in front of me. I was like, oh, my gosh, Shalmaneser. So that was a fun experience. But then we don’t have anything before that. And we have an inscription. We have the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, who talks about a people known as Israel around 1208 BCE. So like over 300 years earlier than that. Israel is a people, but there’s no indication that Adonai is their deity. But we can go back even further, deeper into the 1200s and even into the early 1300s BCE. And we have a couple of inscriptions in Egyptian on the sides of pillars that use three of those letters. Yod, He, Vav. And then like an Egyptian version of a glottal stop or an Aleph or something like that, as a reference to either a people or a land that is associated with a group known as the Shasu.

And this is an Egyptian term that probably refers to nomadic Asiatic peoples from West Asia. So down into Arabia, up further north around the lands of Israel and Palestine and elsewhere. And they’ve got a bunch of lands listed, the Shasu of this land, the Shasu of that land, the Shasu of that land. And then they’ve got the Shasu of Yod, He, Vav, glottal stop land. And so a lot of scholars think this. Most scholars think this has some kind of relationship to the divine name. And so the question is, what’s the exact relationship? And I think many scholars would say if there is a relationship, then whoever occupied this land or whoever bore this name probably named their deity after the land or the people and at some point made their way into the northern hill country of Israel, bringing their deity with them and introduced that deity into this Northwest Semitic group that was probably already devoted mainly to El, but also to other deities.

And now we have the introduction of this deity known as Adonai, according to the way I pronounce it.

Right.

And they were probably inserted into the pantheon on the second tier. They initially were one of the offspring of the high God who was either El or Elyon or. Or maybe Elohim. And they seem to have adopted a storm deity profile very similar to Baal, who’s already operating in the area, which is probably the reason that throughout the Hebrew Bible we keep having conflicts. Adonai and Baal keep butting heads, like with the challenge between the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal.

Would this have operated similarly to, you know, when I hear about, you know, ancient Greeks and how there were all of these gods, but, you know, there would be a certain group, there would be some people who would just devote themselves, there would be a cult of this God or that God. Is that how this would have operated, likely with these people? Is that there are. There are sort of, you know, there’s. There’s the high God and then there’s these other sort of lower individual gods that some people would go to, and there would be like, maybe patron gods of a certain group or tribe or something.

Yeah, absolutely. They. There were all kinds of different deities and levels to the hierarchy, but they were also associated with different kinds of. Of functions. Like in Egypt, you have all. You’ve got the God of bricks, you got the God of love making, you got the God of beer.

Right.

You got all these different kinds of gods.

Who, those gods knew how to party. That was a. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got your bricks, you got your beer, you got your love making, and you’ve got a weekend.

And those gods were thought to, like, oversee those industries and the people associated with them. And so if you were a part of that guild, maybe that was, you know, one of the main gods that you liked. You know, if you were a wife and mother, maybe you were concerned with Asherah, because Asherah, or Athirat in the Ugaritic text was associated with child rearing. With conception, with lactation, breastfeeding and things like that. So, you know, if you’re having trouble getting an adequate latch, you know, maybe you burn some incense to set up a votive offering to Asherah or Athirat or something like that. If you’re going off to war, maybe you, you know, pour out a little extra for the, the whatever deity you want to watch over you in battle. And, and you also had ancestral deities in this time period. You had great granddaddy who passed away a long, long time ago.

But you know, there’s his mortuary chapel. We go in and we have a meal in front of his stele. We just talked about this recently, right? The idea of the soul being in the stele. And so maybe you petitioned him for insight about something. You know, I really want Jennifer to know how much I care about her and that I love her and, and I just want her to notice that I exist.

So you would go to ancient Hebrew name Jennifer, right?

Yeah. But you would go to the, you might go to the ancestral deity because they were more concerned for your well being. The national deity El, who was over the whole nation didn’t have time to worry about you.

Right.

And so, you know, you, you went to whichever deity you thought was most likely to help you out in your, in your specific circumstances. And so Adonai, I think, in my opinion, and in the opinion of some scholars, certainly not all scholars, but I think probably started out as an ancestral deity, was probably the, this clan was probably named after or took their name from an ancestral deity who they had particular devotion to, and then they took it into Israel and then this deity, for whatever reason becomes a storm deity.

Maybe they were like, let’s take that deity and let’s merge it together with El. Right. And El and Adonai become a single deity. And that’s something that happened anciently as well. You see it in Egypt, you see it in Mesopotamia, you see it in, in other Semitic inscriptions where you have a deity with a combined name, where the, you see both divine names squished together. There will be like a little hyphen with them, or when they become combined, you have a new name. So when Ra and Horus are combined in certain parts of ancient Egyptian mythology, it becomes Ra-Horakhty, which is a somewhat different name. And sometimes you have a male and a female deity put together and you have the two of them hyphenated. So, you know, if, if somebody gets married and, and the wife doesn’t take the husband’s last name, they have a hyphenated name.

You can say, hey, this is divine. This goes back thousands of years. You’ve got nothing to complain about. Even Adonai did this. Because if you go to Elephantine in Egypt, there was a Jewish garrison that was stationed there. They had their own temple. And when it was destroyed by locals, they asked for permission from Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. And as far as we can tell, they got permission. But the locals prohibited them from offering animal sacrifices. They were only allowed to offer vegetable and fruit offerings. Okay, but there’s, there’s a deity there called Anat-Yahu which seems to be a combination of the goddess Anat and a version of the divine name.

Interesting.

Yeah, so at some point along the way, the, the two were, Adonai and El were combined and you have the single deity who adopts the divine profile of, of both of them. And I think that probably happens around a thousand BCE, maybe a little after that, because I think it would have had to have happened early enough that by the time we get down to the middle of the 9th century, Hazael can be defeating multiple generations of kings in both Israel and in the southern dynasty of the house of David who have Yahwistic theophoric elements in their names. So I think there had to be some time for these names to spread out a little bit among the leadership.

Interesting. So, well, there we have it like this, this name that is, that is mentioned in these 10 commandments. It’s, it’s not, it’s not a direct and easy thing to, to track down. This is not like, this is not obvious and, and, and clear cut, clean cut, nor are the, the commandments about it. But what does seem obvious to me is that several of these commandments that are, that now all the children of Louisiana are going to be so familiar with. They weren’t intended for children of Louisiana. It seems clear to me that they were actually intended for this ancient tribe. Like it was specific to them. Even, even in that time frame. Wouldn’t they have known that this is, this is for them and not for other, other tribes, other people?

Well, you would you would think, particularly because the last commandment says not to covet your. Well, one, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. Which means this is probably not aimed at women.

Yeah. Right.

Much less children. This is intended for men, but it also says right after that, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant. Or to translate that into something we would understand today, don’t covet your neighbor’s slaves.

Right.

Or enslaved people. So this is coming in a time period where they presuppose that slavery is normative. Yeah. And I, I didn’t think they were actually going to put that on there, but they, they did. So now we’re also teaching the children of Louisiana that, you know, your neighbor’s got slaves.

Right. But don’t covet them. It doesn’t matter even if they have good ones. Don’t covet the slaves.

Yeah. And that’s, that’s another problem too, you know, we’ve got, we’ve gone over that. That.

Yeah. Before it’s, it’s such a deeply problematic piece of legislation. Legislation. And a lot of people are, are very keen on brushing off the, the problematic parts and just sort of saying, well, what, what’s wrong with, you know, everybody.

They hopefully. Yeah. I mean, for all the people who insist that it’s the parents’ responsibility to educate the children about this stuff, they’re the same people who are suddenly wanting everybody else’s kids to be educated about not only this, but also the I am the Lord thy God part. Like that’s imposing religion on, on other folks. But what, what baffles me is the same people who want this stuff up here are trying to get back into power. A man who explicitly, proudly, repeatedly, consistently violates literally the majority of these commandments, commits adultery.

He might have done it a few times. Yeah.

Covets neighbor’s wives.

Steals, bears false witness.

About everything.

Constantly.

The dude. The dude lies about literally everything.

Doesn’t honor the mother and father. Doesn’t keep the Sabbath day holy. Does not refrain from taking the name of God in vain. And I would suggest that he also puts an awful lot of things ahead of God and worships other things.

Yeah. So I think, I think a strong case could be made in that direction. Absolutely.

We have no evidence that, that he has engaged in the, the ratsakh. He violated the thou shalt not kill command. So I’m I’m gonna, I’m happy to give him that one.

But that’s, that’s one.

Yeah, yeah, it’s, it is, it’s funny. The, the, the way people want to talk about it.

It’s disingenuous for in large part, it’s an identity marker. It’s about trying to set up that stele in this space to claim that space for your identity, to say, we are in charge here. We’re in control. We’re the ones who get to…

…decide and to, to send the message to anyone who doesn’t abide by this that they are less valued.

Yeah, you don’t belong.

That this system doesn’t, it won’t serve them right.

It’s, it’s not for them, it’s for the other people. And so you can get in line or you can just be marginalized the whole time.

Well, there you go. I think I, I, I think our positions are pretty clear on this. For those of you who want to hear us chat more and maybe answer some patrons’ questions and have some fun with our patrons, you can become a patron of the show. You will, you will definitely receive early access to an ad-free version of every episode. And we have the after party bonus content every week if you’re there at the right level. So please consider joining there. patreon.com/dataoverdogma we would greatly appreciate it. It’s how we pay our bills. And if you want to write into us, you can do so. You can write to contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Thou Shalt Not

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology