The Rapture is not Coming!

The Rapture is, is something that some, some dudes made up that was then leveraged as a means of. Of trying to influence people to be good, to eat their vegetables, to not touch themselves. That’s just a tool, a piece of leverage that people use to try to control behavior and incentivize or disincentivize certain behaviors. And it has been phenomenally harmful to entire generations. And, and stop it. Hey, Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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

Oh, man, I am. I’m worried.

Worried?

What? I am. I, I. I am desperately concerned that all of my loved ones are going to fly away and leave me behind.

And not, not a Lenny Kravitz kind of fly away, but something.

Maybe in a Lenny Kravitz. I.

Little less melodic.

I don’t know if it’s a Lenny Kravitz sort of way. I’m going to need you to teach me that. Yes. Today we’re going to be talking about the Rapture and, and the Velocirapture.

Right, is the full name.

That’s the best one. That’s the Jurassic version.

And then, and then we’re gonna be going over some stuff. You had me. You. You went through and said, hey, let’s talk about Daniel 10 . And I was like, cool. So I went and I read Daniel 10 , and I understood exactly none of it. So I’m very excited to figure out what the heck that thing is talking about. And you relate it to Revelation, so that’s going to be fun. And, and we’ll just. We’ll just figure that out as we go.

Yeah, we’re just going to go with it. No need. We don’t have to put labels on this.

We can do whatever we want. It’s our show. They can’t stop us. All right, well, let’s. Let’s get into. Oh, we didn’t come up with a good name for our Rapture segment.

Do we have an End Times?

I guess we could just. We could just call it eschatological.

I love it. Okay. Oh, gosh. The, the. The only reason I know what scatological means is because of the movie Revenge of the Nerds.

Oh, okay.

Because there’s. There’s a part in where they’re having a belching contest, but it is introduced by a very milquetoast character who says he does not like scatological things. So.

All right, well, I’m. I’m gonna tell our. Our editor to leave all of this in because I think that that was great. But we’re. Let’s. Let’s do our first. Our. Our first segment called Eschatological.

Dun dun, dun.

So I’m gonna. You know, it’s so funny. I. My other podcast, Thank God I’m Atheist, started because me and my friend Frank were. We went. Do you remember back, I think it was 2011, when Harold Camping decided to. That he had calculated the exact date of the Rapture.

Right.

And. And he, you know, he put up billboards all across the country. I remember seeing one here, which. That’s a waste. There are not enough evangelicals in Salt Lake City to put up a billboard. That’s just silly. But people were ready and also freaked out because this was because the. The Rapture was coming. And Frank and I did this thing called Rapture Watch on a local radio station, and we did a whole very, very silly thing where we were, you know, we pretended like our friend was calling in from Kansas City, and we were pretending like the Rapture was following sort of the time zones, so it was like, coming towards us.

It’s like Santa Watch.

Yeah, exactly.

Over the Atlantic Ocean now.

Yeah. But, you know, since then, I have spoken to, you know, we were making light of it, but I have spoken to people who have very serious Rapture anxiety and people.

And people who were raised with the Rapture who don’t even believe in it anymore, who still have terrors about being left behind, about not being caught up in. In. In the. The Rapture. So I. I think it’s. You know, we’ve mentioned the Rapture on the show before, but I think it’s important that we go over what it is, who believes in it, if any, you know, and who doesn’t believe in it and where it comes from and all that sort of thing. So let’s start with the question of has this. Has the Rapture. Okay, let’s start with what is the Rapture? What are we talking about?

So this refers to the. The snatching up, the being carried away of believers, of followers of Jesus at some point near the end times. And this is where it gets kind of convoluted, because there are a bunch of different theories about when this happens.

Right. You hear phrases like post-tribulation and pre-tribulation and that sort of thing.

Yes. There’s premillennialism, there’s postmillennialism, there’s amillennialism.

Did you just have a stroke?

It’s a mouthful. And post-tribulational, pre-tribulational. And you know, the kids these days say post-trib and pre-trib because they’re.

Because they’re cool and hip.

Yeah, yeah, they’ve got that, they’ve got that skibidi Ohio rizz. That’s all the. All the parents aren’t sure if they should be concerned about that rizz or what. But is that the good?

Which one’s the good.

Should I say toilet when I say skibidi?

I don’t know, but it originates in. In this idea that I think the idea of the Rapture begins with this pre-trib idea, or at least pre-millennial idea that everyone who is a follower of Jesus, who is righteous enough, is going to just be suddenly sucked up into the air and flown off to heaven again, Lenny Kravitz style, while everyone else is left behind to experience a period of seven years or something like that of tribulation, which is followed by the millennium. Right. And usually the Second Coming is what ushers in that millennium where we have a thousand years of peace and Jesus reigning on the earth. At the end of that millennium, we have the Last Judgment. So that’s a pre-tribulation, pre-millennial rapture idea.

But sometimes people say, you’ve got postmillennialism, you got amillennialism. Now, postmillennialism is the idea that the Second Coming and the Rapture are the same thing that happen at the end of the millennium. Amillennialism is the idea that this millennium is. Is figurative. It’s just something that we’re actually in right now. But it’s symbolic. It’s not an actual physical earthly reign of Jesus.

And the term millennial. Millennial just refers to a thousand years of whatever.

Yeah. Some kind of reign of. Of Jesus over the earth, on the earth, something like that.

Right.

And a lot of people think that this is something that’s clearly stated somewhere in the Bible and it’s not. In fact, no one talked about this thing called the Rapture until the second quarter of the 19th century. It started around like 1827-ish. And it really gets kind of the ball rolling by the 1830s.

Yeah, I think a lot of people would be shocked to hear that.

Yeah, it’s.

I think people who were raised with this tradition, like it just I the way that, that it is talked about, especially in evangelical, American evangelicalism, which is basically where it lives.

I think a lot of people would be shocked that this hasn’t just been what Christians have always believed.

Yeah, I. And this is something that’s, that plagues. I think a lot of our thinking is that we get raised and conditioned with certain frameworks and certain ideologies and certain received traditions and conventional wisdom. And because, you know, we may spend a lifetime experiencing these same things, we assume that they just go all the way back. And when we look into the past, we retroject those things into the past because we have to reconstruct what we’re seeing in the past. And so we use those same frameworks to facilitate that reconstruction. And the reality is that, no, the, this Rapture idea is a creation of the early 19th century. Now, we find the word rapture in earlier literature because it comes from a Latin term, rapio, which means to, to seize, to snatch, to carry away. And it’s frequently used with reference to theft and things like that. But in the, that verb gets used in some places in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible.

And so there’s probably the, the place where we see it prior to the 19th century, where we see the word rapture being used is in reference to Paul’s reference in 2 Corinthians 12:2 . He says, I know someone who was caught up, snatched up to the third heaven, whether in the body or not. I, I don’t know. And that is that verb rapio in the Vulgate.

I don’t want to get off on too much of a tangent, but third heaven, is that something we’re going to have to have a whole episode about?

How many? Interesting discussion.

How many heavens are there?

Well, Paul is probably referring to a kind of Greco-Roman idea about different levels in the atmosphere that correspond to different levels of heaven. Oh, so the, the third heaven, he calls it paradise as well. And that may or may not be identifiable with the eschatological Garden of Eden, this kind of restoration of all things, return to innocence. Again, second time I’ve quoted that. But yeah, there, there are a bunch of different levels of heaven. And, and in medieval Christianity, you see levels of heaven as well as nine levels of hell in Dante, for instance.

Okay, I, I’m sorry, we’re, I, I’ve taken this off track. We can get back to, to Raptus or. Yeah, Raptura, if you, if you’re going.

Medieval Latin or, or Reptar, if you’re going Nickelodeon-ish. But the, the Greek term there is harpazo, which means to, to steal or carry off, to take by force, to carry away by the Spirit. And it occurs, the verb occurs over a dozen times in the New Testament. But the verse that was instrumental in the development of the concept of the Rapture, and by the way, it is a guy named John Nelson Darby who, who really innovated, created the concept of the Rapture as we understand it today, even though it has kind of developed in a lot of different directions since then. He based this on 1st Thessalonians 7:14, where we have Paul’s talking about people who have died, and then there’s this worry: what’s going to happen to the people who have died before Christ comes back? And in the passage, Paul says that they’re going to be raised.

And then. Let me pull it up again. Here’s the NRSVUE.

You said, you said 7:14, but I think you meant 4:17.

Did I say 7? 4:17. Oh, gosh, sorry. 4:17. I have a little bit of the, of the dyslexia from time to time. If we look in verse 16, it says for the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. So Paul is comforting them that the, the dead are going to be raised up.

And then in 17, we have. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

And so now it’s funny because when I read that, I did think of, you know, there’s all this imagery that I have seen associated with the Rapture of like, sort of, you know, the good people of the church being sort of just sort of being beamed up.

And and just everyone else is looking up from below, going, “Come back!” or whatever. So I like this, that scripture to me does call up that kind of imagery like that makes sense to me.

Yeah. And this, this corresponds to something in, in Matthew and the Olivet Discourse where Matthew’s talking about, yeah, there’ll be two in the field, one will be taken and one will be left. And then you also have Revelation 20 . There’s some, some ideas about the second coming in or about something happening in Revelation 20 . And then you also got some imagery from Daniel that, that Darby kind of mushes together and negotiates into this concept that Jesus is going to come back and be like, “Here, everybody.” And then, you know, fwoop! Yeah. And you’ve got everybody gets sucked up into the air.

The great pneumatic tube to the sky.

Yeah. I’m just thinking of the, the Treehouse of Horror episode with, with the presidential candidates. “Bob Dole doesn’t like this,” where he’s getting sucked up into the spaceship and, and then Jesus flips a u-ey and everybody just screams off into heaven. And that’s where they just get to, you know, squeal and laugh and point fingers at all the people left on earth who get to suffer under the, the tribulation. Right.

And if you’re, if you’re in the pre-trib camp.

Yeah. If you’re in the pre-trib. And this idea gets. And so Darby’s British, I think Irish. And this begins to spread in England, but spreads very quickly to the Americas. And this is, you mentioned earlier that we’re kind of the, this is where the, the rapture lives these days.

And, and this is a theme we find in some literature from this time period where someone who is returning victorious from battle or who is showing up to take up their rule in a city-state or a kingdom or something like that. The citizenry comes out of the city to meet them outside of the city gate, and then they usher them in. And so the idea here is to just flip that, that orientation vertically and have everybody being lifted up into the air to meet the descending Jesus and then usher Jesus into his earthly kingdom. So based on the imagery, it makes more sense to understand this not as being raised up to be flown off to heaven, but being raised up so that you can meet Jesus and then usher Jesus into his earthly rule.

I get like, part of the, the essential quality of this is the idea, the notion that it seems like they had that heaven is up, heaven is in the sky.

So I, I, so, I mean, I, I can see why it’s confusing to think, okay, you go up into the sky only to come back down or whatever, as opposed to staying up there. I’ve, I’ve actually heard people, pastors making both arguments: “Oh, they’re going up to come back down,” or, “Oh, we’re going up and we get to stay, and then everybody else has to be on the ground.” But I do think it’s interesting that all of these ideas are cobbled together from pretty scant scriptural bases.

Oh, yeah.

Like, it’s very—like they’re taking—they’re taking very small things that could mean any number of things and just saying, “Well, I’ve decided it means X, and therefore, then that means that the Rapture means Y,” or whatever.

Yeah. And this is something that in all different kinds of fields of study, you, you have to try to establish certain principles and foundations on which to build other things. And so once you’ve established something that becomes conventionalized and, you know, we’re going to just accept this, whether it’s because we’ve proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt or because it makes the most sense to us, you then kind of build up from there. And so you can construct pretty complex constellations of ideas off of agreements. And sometimes those agreements later fall to pieces, and then everything around it falls to pieces as well. And so, and, and that’s probably one of the reasons that throughout the rest of the Christian world, the Rapture has kind of fallen to pieces a bit. America is really the main stronghold of Rapture ideology these days. Even though there’s, there’s a lot of debate about pre-trib, post-trib, amillennial, postmillennial, premillennial, all that kind of stuff.

I think most other folks have, have decided that this doesn’t really make a ton of sense to them. But one of the reasons that it has the footing it does in America is because of the Scofield Reference Bible.

Yeah. What, what is that?

So this is a—one of the first study Bibles that was ever published in English. There had been others, but this was definitely one of the most popular. It was published, I think the first edition was around 1909 in the US by a dude named Cyrus Scofield. I think it was in the US—I could be wrong about that—but it, okay, it’s published by Oxford University Press, so it would have been published over there, but I think it was most popular in the US. But Cyrus Scofield was a guy who was big into dispensationalism. And dispensationalism is another $2 word that refers to the idea that God’s relationship with their people kind of occurs in dispensations. And it’s different in each dispensation. And this is something—

Does that mean just like a time period or what, what is a dispensation?

Yeah, it’s, it’s a period in which something is, is being dispensed.

Something is being given. And so—and this is something that Latter-day Saints will resonate with a little bit because we have ideas about dispensations as well. And there are, you know, six or seven dispensations, depending on your particular theological bent.

But this stands Triassic and then.

Yeah, and. And the stratigraphic and. But this stands in contrast to something called Covenant Theology, which is this idea that. No, it’s not dispensations, it’s covenants. And where you have the first covenant and then the second covenant. So basically there was the. The first covenant with the people of Israel, the. The Jewish folks, and then Jesus came, and now we’re all under a new covenant. So two different main ways to organize our understanding of how relationships with God work for Christians because they do have to kind of renegotiate what’s going on because of, you know, the big difference between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Right.

But Scofield Reference Bible is filled with commentary and cross references and stuff like that. And there is a. You have in the Book of Revelation , in chapter 20, it talks about the Day of the Lord. And Scofield’s notes say the Day of the Lord is preceded by seven signs. One, the sending of Elijah, two, cosmical disturbances. Oh, cosmical and not. Not cosmic, but cosmical. Yeah. Three, the insensibility of the professing church, Four, the apostasy of the professing church, then become Laodicea. Five, the Rapture of the true church. Six, the manifestation of the, quote, man of sin, that is to say, the beast. And seven, the apocalyptic judgments. I don’t know why it’s not the apocalyptical judgments, but to each their own. So. And. And this is one of the main popularizers of. Of this Rapture ideology.

Even though there was a. Evidently there was debate among the editors of the Scofield Bible about. About premillennialism versus postmillennialism and stuff like that. But this was an incredibly popular study Bible in the early 20th century, which I think is probably responsible for the dissemination of. Of Rapture ideology in the United States, and was one of the most popular editions of the King James Version for Americans in the 20th century.

So when Scofield put that note into the Book of Revelation , was that just, was he just sort of making that up? Like, was he.

Was he drawing on a tradition that. That existed or was he. Well, like, where did that come from?

Revelation 20 is one of the passages that was critical to the development of the idea of, of the Rapture and for Darby and, and those who, who kind of curated that tradition afterwards. And he’s got a, he’s got a cross reference to 1 Thessalonians 4:17 . Okay. In, in the note. And then he’s referring to a bunch of other verses along the way. Most of them in, oddly enough, they’re in Malachi, Revelation, Matthew, Acts, and First and Second Thessalonians. That’s. Most of the, those references are, are to those passages. So, so it’s not really, it’s not altering it too much. It’s taking up this, this reading, but what it’s doing is it’s getting it out to an awful lot of people who, it’s broadening its reach to a lot more people. But also because that, that Bible was so popular for so long, the Rapture was always there, right?

It was. Whereas in places where, you know, you did not have the Scofield Reference Bible, pretty much all non-English speaking Christian communities, you didn’t have as you didn’t have that anchorage there holding the Rapture in place.

Right.

And so I, I think they were able to outgrow it in other parts of the world.

Well, and I think, you know, a boots on the ground Christian in the 1800s could be forgiven or in the early 1900s could be forgiven for like just assuming that if it’s a note in the Bible, it’s not just some guy’s cobbling together of a few sort of disparate scriptures to make up his own timeline as he sees it, you could be forgiven for thinking that like, this must be what it’s always been and you know, like if it’s in that and it’s stated as a fact, it’s not stated as a. This is a potential. Here, here’s one way it might work. It’s stated as a fact. It makes sense that people would just. Okay, I guess that’s how it is then.

Yeah. And because it’s not, it’s just stated the Rapture of the true church. Boom, there it is. Now, you know, I have a little piece in the SBL Study Bible where they put a little, a little mini essay of mine in there. And so as much as I wish that, you know, that would cement that in the, in the, in the psyches of, of readers of the Bible. They put my name there to basically say blame him.

I think you are underestimating the power of TikTok and, and podcasts, my friend. You are cemented now. Whatever you say is, is gospel, be careful.

Well, that, and, and this is, I’ve talked with a lot of people who think that this is, and, and now going back to the Latter-day Saint faith community, there are a lot of Latter-day Saints who want the church to produce a study Bible. And one of the reasons I’ve heard from a lot of folks who are in positions to know that that’s not going to be forthcoming anytime soon is because a lot of leaders would say if we put commentary between the covers of a Bible that’s going to be held up in Gospel Doctrine and in sacrament meetings and all over the place as doctrine.

Right.

When really that’s not incredibly helpful because people do that now with footnotes and explanatory footnotes in the LDS scriptures and some of them are, are just flat wrong.

Yeah, I, I think that it, if nothing else, I think one of the lessons here is that I think, you know, especially in this same community of people where you know talking about sort of American evangelicalism, they’re not a monolith. But I think it’s safe to say that there are plenty of people within that group who are Bible, who consider themselves Bible literalists. They believe that the Bible is literally true and they don’t realize that even some of their most proclaimed traditions are, are not just like they’re, they’re new innovations. Yeah, it’s, it’s not, you know, that’s not just not obviously contained in the Bible. It’s a brand new thing.

Yeah. This is not original sin which develops in like the fifth century CE. This is something that developed 1300 plus years after that. So yeah, it is. And, and I’ve talked about this an awful lot on, on my social media channels. You know, you, the Bible is, is multivocal or, or polyvocal if you want, and it’s not univocal. And when you want to try to draw out unified, consistent, singular messages or perspectives or frameworks, you have to impose some kind of unifying apparatus over the text to give priority to certain things, to silence other things, to reinterpret still other things. And that’s exactly what this does. This says, I want an idea about the end times, exactly how they’re going to come to pass. Even though when you look in the different authors they tell, they’re telling very different stories. And so what they came up with was this apparatus of so Jesus is going to come and then going to suck everybody out of their clothes up into the sky and you know, a bunch of seven-year-olds are going to wake up in the morning and their parents are going to be gone and they’re going to be left behind because you know, they, they said a swear word or something like that or the 16-year-old who masturbated once is now left behind because they’re wicked.

And, and, and they come up with this framework to try to consolidate all of the different messages and all of the different pieces of imagery and then they give generations of people trauma.

And, and a complex and terror about their family being taken away and them being left behind to be, you know, who knows what, who knows what kind of horrors their, their parents told them would happen to the people who are left behind. What, what’s the guy who did the Left Behind series? Is that LaHaye?

Oh, I don’t remember. I don’t know who wrote it. All I can think of is Kirk Cameron. Wasn’t he part of the.

Yeah, Tim LaHaye. Tim LaHaye was the, was the originator of the Left Behind series. I didn’t read a single word of, of any of those books. But, but who knows what horrors dwell within the, the pages of, of those books.

But well, yeah, and, and you know, so yeah, so many people given so many nightmares and so much therapy to, to, to work through it. And it’s so funny because even within that group, the fact that you were able to list off all of these sort of competing ideas within that theory, the pretribulation, the post-tribulation, the dispensation, you know, whatever, all of the things are the millennialisms of the various, your various and sundry millennialisms. The fact that they can’t even agree on how or when this takes place should be an indicator that this is not solid set obvious stuff that they are working through things that they’re processing this, that it is that, that it is almost like, I don’t want to say guesswork, but like a project of creation.

Absolutely. Yeah. It is a productive endeavor. They’re trying to create something and, and you know, it’s not like you, you come up with an idea and all of a sudden bells are ringing or something like that and everybody’s like, oh, turns out that’s the right one.

And it has been phenomenally harmful to entire generations and stop it.

Right? Yeah. All right. I think that’s a great message. Let’s, let’s then switch gears a little bit. We’ll say, you know, we’re downshift Rocket.

2 in the Porsche. Okay.

But we are going to stay. We’ll call this a chapter and verse.

So this chapter and verse is, is Daniel 10 . We’re, we’re. We’re keeping it sort of end timesy. Yeah, rather well, kind of. Except that it’s not. I, it kind of is kind of isn’t.

I don’t know, keeping it eschatological.

Right. Yeah. I. There’s a whole bunch in this, in this Daniel chapter 10. And my eyes glazed over because I couldn’t figure. First of all, the first thing that happens in Daniel chapter 10 is that it starts out in third person talking about Daniel. And then the second verse switches to first person. And that really messed me up. It starts out with like, in the third year of King Cyrus of Persia, a word was revealed to Daniel who was named Belteshazzar. The word was true and it was concerned and he understood the word. So it’s like this third person thing. And then verse two starts, at that time, I, Daniel, had been mourning for three weeks. I had eaten no rich food, blah, blah, blah. And that. That took me a little minute. Okay. I guess we’re just bouncing around.

Yeah, you’ve got, you’ve got somebody. Let’s check in on our main character.

So then, so then Daniel now.

And, and I love that, that they have to be like, remember, this is the Belteshazzar guy.

Yeah, yeah.

So don’t forget that’s same person, same person.

These are not two different distinct people. So don’t.

Not definitely different people. They are the same, same. Same guy.

And they’re me, by the way, in verse two, they are me. It’s. I am me. And I am talking now third year.

Of King Cyrus of Persia, by the way, who comes after Darius within the timeline of the Book of Daniel , but in real life came before Darius.

Yeah. You’ll. You’ll recall from the movie that we watch that.

That we lampooned on.

Another podcast on the God Awful Movies podcast. Okay. So what you wanted to talk about were these princes that happen later in. In the thing.

Yes. Two princes standing here before you. One. I’m just kidding. So that’s Spin Doctors, of course. But in. In verse four, we have. On the 24th day of the first month, as I was standing on the bank of the great river that is the Tigris, I looked up and saw a man clothed in linen with a belt of gold from Uphaz around his waist. So we have this kind of apocalyptic vision motif. This is what we see in Ezekiel, when Ezekiel’s in Babylon by the. The great river. And then suddenly this vision unfolds to Ezekiel. Daniel says, here, I, Daniel, alone saw the vision. The people who were with me did not see the vision, though a great trembling fell upon them, and they fled and hid themselves.

Which is my. One of my favorite things is that right after that, he says, everybody ran away. And he says, so I was left alone to see this great vision. My strength left me, and my complexion grew deathly pale. Well, how did you know that, Daniel? I was there to see it.

Yeah. I had the presence of mind to pull out my compact and be like, I wonder how my complexion is at the moment.

I quickly switched my phone into selfie mode to see what my cheeks looked.

Yeah. And when I heard the sound of his words, I fell into a trance, face to the ground. But then a hand touched me and roused me to my hands and knees. So not. I’m not getting all the way up.

He said to me, Daniel, greatly beloved, pay attention to the words that I am going to speak to you. Stand on your feet, for I have now been sent to you. So while he was speaking this word to me, I stood up trembling, and he said to me, do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and humble yourself before your God, your words have been heard. And I have come because of your words. And then here we got this interesting statement in verse 13. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me 21 days. Oh, you know what? We skipped a verse. Oh, it’s like I thought he described the person. Yeah, we got to get to verse 6. And this is also in keeping with the vision in Ezekiel. His body was like beryl, B-E-R-Y-L. Yeah, what is that? A semi-precious stone? Something like—what does the KJV have? The KJV has beryl as well. The NET says yellow jasper.

Oh. So his—yes, his, his body is rock-like. His face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze. Yes. And the sound of his words like the roar of a multitude. And so, and then the gleam of burnished bronze. In some of the ancient Greek translations, it, it’s talking about glowing bronze. So like if you take the metal and you stick it in the, the fire and it glows white-hot. And so this is basically what we’re describing here is, is a prototypical deity who in, in literature from this time period was, was understood to glow, have this brilliance, this shininess, which in Mesopotamian literature, the shininess signaled their deadliness. This is someone who can mess you up, right? So, you know, tremble in fear.

Right.

In, in the Bible though, we get this idea that this is the kavod of God, the glory, that it itself is deadly. If you look directly at the shininess, the shininess will mess you up. And so this is why, you know, you have…

I think, I think that’s, that’s why the, the Jack Nicholson movie was so…

Scary, The Shining, because like, that’s what, what left him frozen out in the, in the garden overnight. Don’t look. Hey look. You can’t, can’t look directly in it. We saw what happened to the, to the Nazis at the end of Raiders, of Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know, that old tale from the sea. So the idea is that this is a divine being. And, and there’s some, some texts from ancient Mesopotamia that also talk about gods not only having bodies like stone, but also being gigantic. So there’s, there’s a tradition there as well that doesn’t come through too frequently in the Hebrew Bible, but is definitely there.

So what—who is this person that’s all burnished and bronzed and, and shiny so that…

So this is probably the Son of Man.

Oh, okay. The Son of Man, if we’re talking New Testament, is Jesus. Is that, is that—who is that? Is this messianic in some—is that what we mean when we say the Son of Man?

We’re talking about somebody who was introduced in Daniel 7 . Okay, so in Daniel 7:13 , as I watched in the night visions, I saw one—and the NRSVUE says like a human being. And this is translated in the KJV like the Son of Man. And, and so in, in the Hebrew Bible, son of man is a phrase that just means a human. You know, like son of the prophets is a prophet, son of the gods is a god, son of man or humanity is, is a human. Right, but the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven and then came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. But in some ancient Greek translations, this, the, the preposition changes from heos to hos. And so instead of came to the Ancient One, it says he came as the Ancient One. And so it kind of conflates whoever this mediatory figure is with God. And so this is one of the ideologies that I think contributes to the conflation of, of Jesus’s identity with God later in Christianity.

But here it seems to be this, this figure who is mediatory between God and humanity. Because they’re going to go on to talk about how the, the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me 21 days. And here we’re getting into a little bit of history. This is about, this is about warfare between Persia and Judah because the idea of the prince of Persia and later on we’re going to have the idea of the prince of Greece. These are references to guardian angels. And if we go back to, you recall Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9, we have the Most High dividing up the nations and distributing them to the Bene Elohim, the children of God, which reflects the idea that every nation on earth has a patron deity who is sovereign over their nation.

But once we get the universalization of Adonai, which I argue is the work of Psalms 82 and some other texts where Adonai goes from being sovereign only within the nation of Israel to being directly sovereign over all the nations. Now we have to renegotiate the idea of patron deities. And what happens is they get squished down from deity, full deity status, second-tier Bene Elohim, sons of God status, to angelic status. Okay, very much Monty Python foot comes out of the heavens, squirt. They’re now all angels. And so they’re not, they’re obviously not the patron deities over the nations. They’re just angels that have been assigned to guard the nations.

They’re now guardian angels and we’re calling them princes.

Yeah, they’re princes of Egypt or gosh, that damn movie. So, yeah, no, it’s not a movie.

It’s a video game. Prince of Persia. It’s a totally different thing. Actually, there is a movie though. Yeah, there is a movie. Okay.

Yes. Where. So we’ve got the, the Prince of Persia here is, is fighting with the Son of Man. And it says, so Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me and I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia. And so Michael is probably the guardian angel over the nation of Israel who’s considered one of the chief princes. So he’s.

Or archangel, would you say is this Archangel Michael? Is that what. Isn’t, isn’t that a thing?

That. Yeah, that’s who the, the reference is to. But no, I, we got one of the angels of the, the, the heads. So the Aramaic is head angels. Let me see if we have. Yeah, so we’ve got one of the first rulers in the.

In the Greek. But this is general. Yeah, this is where you get the idea of archangels is because he’s one of the, one of the chief angels.

Right.

And so the Son of Man is like here, guardian angel of Israel. You take over fighting the guardian angel of Persia. I’ve got to go talk to this dude by a river. Okay, right. And then it says, I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia and have come to help you understand what is to happen to your people at the end of days. For there is a further vision for those days. Woo. And then. Yeah, and so I, I just think this is, this is a fascinating little bit of Greco-Roman Jewish geopolitical theology, basically that we’ve got these different guardian angels representing the different nations. And you only go, you only get to Greece. There’s no one after Greece, Persia, Greece, obviously, because the text was composed during the Hellenistic period, during Greco-Roman period. So they don’t know about Rome.

So when people talk about that statue and say, oh, that one’s Rome and that one’s the toes or the United States or something like that. That’s, that’s nonsensical. While he was, while he was speaking these words to me, I turned my face toward the ground and was speechless. Then one in human form. So Son of Man-ish, one who looked like a human touched my lips. Now we’re getting Isaiah 6 , where Isaiah is in the temple and the seraph comes with the coal from the, from the altar and touches Isaiah’s lips. And I opened my mouth to speak and said to the one who stood before me, my Lord, because of the vision, such pains have come upon me that I retain no strength. How can my Lord’s servants talk with my Lord? For I am exhausted. No strength remains in me and no breath is left in me. So Daniel’s like, look, I’ve had a long day. This is hard. I don’t have the mental, you know, I’ve got, what, too many forks in me right now?

I don’t know if you know this, but you’re super scary. And I am freaked.

And then the one in human form again touched him and strengthened him. He said, do not fear greatly, beloved. You are safe. Be strong and courageous. When he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, let my Lord speak, for you have strengthened me. So he had a snack, had a snack, had a nap. We’re. We’re back to where we need to be. Then he said, do you know why I’ve come to you? I assume for the reason you just explained, but says now I must return to fight against the Prince of Persia. And when I am through with him, the prince of Greece will come. So Daniel 10:21 is the last verse in the chapter. So he tells him, look, I gotta fight Persia. And then, and then Greece is gonna show up. And then, just so you know, Michael is the only one with me.

And then I gotta go back.

So my guess, because we talked about the book of Daniel in general several months ago, and it sounds like all of this is a way of saying is it is a contemporary author going back and, and saying that this, that everything that was happening in that author’s time period was predicted. Is that, is that kind of what’s happening here? Yeah, probably.

Yeah. The, the idea is to. It’s almost like a. You know, you could think of Daniel as like a found footage thing where we’ve got these stories about Daniel and all these apocalyptic visions that are telling stories about things that the people who are actually reading or hearing this text know about that happened long before. So it would be like if somebody unearthed some plates that had some writing on them and they were. And they prophesied of the, the establishment of, of a republic on. In the New World. And then, and then there was. There was this great war that was civil in character, that, that resulted in the abolishment of the, you know, the enslavement of, of.

I’m going to point out that you’re the one that’s saying all of this. It is not me. This is not me doing this.

And, and so that’s, that’s basically what you’ve got going on with Daniel. But the further back into time the authors look, the less sure they are of the history.

Right.

So we’re getting, we’re getting mixed up timelines and stuff like that.

So tell just briefly, can you sort of go through, I mean I don’t know the history that well. I don’t know the Persians and the Greeks and like how all of that happened. I know that there was a Babylonian empire and, and that, you know, we’ve talked about the exile of the Israelites or the Judahites or whoever into the Babylonian empire.

Right.

But I don’t know. I. What, so what are we talking about historically speaking and how much so is true and what. Yeah, that sort of thing.

So what we have at the beginning of the 6th century BCE, culminating around 587 BCE, the Babylonians come, destroy Judah and cart off the Judahites to forced migration into Babylon. And then unlike what happened with Assyria and the northern kingdoms, the Judahites are allowed to kind of stay together and to maintain their identity. And then in 539 you have Cyrus the Great who comes in with the Persian kingdom and conquers the Babylonians, takes over and basically just says okay, I have a flag. This is all now Persia. And in, during the Persian kingdom the Judahites were allowed to return to the land of Israel. And so but we also had a bunch of people who stayed behind, stayed in Babylon. And then there are several Persian kings that rule. We have what’s called the Achaemenid Kingdom which is kind of a, a later iteration of, of the Persian kingdom.

And then in the late 300s BCE we have Alexander the Great who comes through and says I have my flag now. This is all, I don’t, I, I don’t know if he identified himself as Macedonian or Greek or what, but basically the, the Hellenistic empire came through and took over everything in the name of, of that empire. And then in the wars of succession that followed after that, after Alexander the Great drinks himself to death in some way shape or form, his generals and others are fighting over who gets to control the land. And we, and that’s called the Diadochi, the Wars of Succession. And we get the Ptolemies who, who take over the part of the Hellenistic empire that is in Egypt; we have the Seleucids who take over Syria and the land of Israel and they kind of fight over their borders and it goes back and forth.

And so by the time we get down to the early 2nd century BCE, specifically the 160s, which is when a lot of the Book of Daniel is probably coming together and being completed, you basically have the Seleucids trying to stamp out the Judean way of life, which is sometimes referred to as Judaism in some translations. But scholars today would say it probably isn’t close enough to how we understand the concept of an ism to, to be Judaism. But they’re, they’re.

Would you say it’s like a more, more a cultural idea that rather than a religious idea or?

I, I think that would be a way to understand it. Yeah, that, that this seems to be more about sociocultural conventions and, and identities than it is about beliefs about a relationship of, of the people to God. But you, you have particularly Antiochus, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who is credited with, with this harsh suppression and oppression and trying to stamp out the Judean way of life that, that results in the Maccabean revolt and then the successful fighting off of the Seleucids, that results in the rededication of the Temple and the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom. So you don’t have an independent Judahite Jewish slash Israelite kingdom from 586, 587 BCE until like 165 BCE and then in 165 BCE with the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom, suddenly you’ve got a marginally autonomous independent kingdom all over again.

And as we’ve talked about in other shows, that’s probably when the Torah becomes widely known and the rules and regulations become implemented as a way of, of kind of creating this cultural identity now that we have our freedom back.

Right.

And so Daniel is, is coming probably right before the defeat of the Seleucids, when everything is, is looking kind of rough. And it is trying to create a sense that God is working behind the scenes, that God is in control, that you know, the Son of Man is like, okay, I came from the battle with the, the Prince of Persia. I got to go back to battle the Prince of Greece. But just to let you know everything’s cool, we’re gonna win. Okay, bye. And goes back. And, and so it’s, it’s trying to comfort, bring comfort to the people and, and say in the end God is going to win. Our people are going to, to be, you know, exonerated and everybody will be happy and we will clasp hands and sing Kumbaya.

Right. Do, do we want to. Since I teased it earlier, do we want to quickly tie that into Revelation?

Well, one of the main things that happens in Revelation, because Revelation is doing the exact same thing. It’s another apocalyptic vision, only this time it’s Rome that is the oppressive power. And so we’re having all these visions about. We’re going to have all these visions about what’s going to happen. But remember the, the Son of Man came as the Ancient of Days. And now we have Jesus, who is the Son of Man according to the Gospels. And Jesus is, is kind of subtly, I. Jesus identifies themselves or himself as the, the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last. And then by the end of the book of Revelation , God says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. So it’s kind of a wink at saying, just like the Son of Man came as the Ancient of Days, Jesus is coming as the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega. But Jesus appears with a girdle. And, and I love the. I don’t remember exactly what the King James language is, but he’s girt about the paps.

Oh, yes, I remember. I remember the paps.

Yeah. Which basically means he’s hiked his belt up to, to his nipples and. But he’s described in, in much the same way. He’s got glowing white hair, his eyes are like fire, and you know, his, his skin shines like, like glowing hot bronze.

And his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace. And his voice was like the sound of many waters, which.

Exactly what Daniel says about the, the voice of this one who looked like a human being. So where basically we want folks who are familiar with this imagery to be like, I remember that, guys. And only this time it’s Jesus and doing the same thing, saying, look, we’re going to peel back the fabric of reality. And it’s grotesque, but God is, is in control. God is the one who, who is working behind the scenes. And in the end, everyone who remains faithful to God will be vindicated, will be saved. Only, you know, it’s, it gets a lot bloodier in Revelation than, than it did in Daniel.

Yeah, Revelation is, I mean, we’ve talked about it. It’s. It’s spooky. It’s a little, it’s a little wackadoo. I mean, right at, right after the Son of Man’s voice being the sound of many waters. We got a, we got a two-edged sword emerging from his mouth. So it’s like, we know, you know, some stuff’s about to go down.

Yeah, this, this does not bode well when you see the sword coming out of the mouth.

When the dude regurgitates a sword, you’re, you know, some stuff’s about to happen. All right, well, I, that’s very interesting and I, I think that’s a lot of fun. So I guess, I guess the, the, the, the, the takeaways are, don’t worry, the rapture is not going to happen.

Yeah, it’s a lot easier to get it right. Yeah.

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Bye everybody.

The Rapture is not Coming!

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The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology