The Truth About Ruth

We scared him away, everybody. Yeah, with our, with all of our gold. We terrified them and they ran like cowards.

What were all those trunks that they were carrying out of Jerusalem? Never mind, never mind. You didn’t see any of them. 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 that ever-present misinformation about the same. How are things?

Things are good. Ever present. It’s a good day to discuss the Bible.

Today was a good day, as the great poet once said, to discuss the Bible. And we’re going to be discussing a couple different parts of the Bible today, is my understanding.

Yes, indeed. We’ve got a chapter and verse, or rather a chapter and a chapter and a chapter. We’re just doing a whole book.

A whole book of the Bible. Yeah.

And then we’re gonna do a Who’s That? And we’re gonna… we’re gonna go through a… a name that you have mentioned, Sennacherib to me. You… you’ve mentioned him on the show a bunch of times and it has always just been a random bunch of syllables to me.

Yeah, yeah.

And so hopefully you can clear up what we’re talking about when you say that word because it… it sounds… it sounds like maybe snack chips or a… some sort of cracker. So.

Yeah, something you might see a commercial for it on a football game, something like that.

Exactly.

Yeah, we’re going to talk a little bit about that. So… so everybody can have a little background. So in the future when I rail about Sennacherib, you can be like, ah, I remember where to place that.

Yeah, that was… so, yeah, stick around for that. But for right now, let’s start with chapter and verse. We’re doing Ruth, everybody. This is the… the Book of Ruth . It’s only four chapters long and it’s interesting. It… the first two chapters are about as straightforward. It feels to me like… and you can correct me on this, Dan, because, you know, there’s always something that I miss, but it feels like the most straightforward thing in the world. We start out in Bethlehem, in Judah, and we’ve got a family. We’ve got a guy named Elimelech, and Elimelech has a wife named Naomi.

And then they’ve got two sons. Yes, Mahlon and Chilion, Chili dog, Mahlon and Chilion. Yes. Okay, says you.

By the way, one of the interesting things to point out about this is their sons’ names mean in Hebrew, sickly and frail.

So. Right.

I did see those, those, those footnotes there.

Okay, so right off the bat, like, they’re telling you something. There’s… there’s a little bit of foreshadowing. This feels like.

It feels like one of the things they’re telling me is we’re making this up. That’s what it feels like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t get used to these characters. They’re MacGuffins. They are. You know, it’s like if you had a… what was the… what show has the MacGuffin Institute? Oh, that’s Community. Silly me. Yeah, so there’s a… there’s a… an institute that comes in for this specific narrative arc called the MacGuffin Institute.

If you hadn’t remembered, I would tell Joel on you.

But… so, yeah, they’re… these characters. These characters are disposable already. You know, they’re not meant for the long haul.

Well, and what’s interesting about that is that, you know, this… this is one of those rare books where we follow women mainly because almost instantly… well, so all of these people, this little family, there’s famine in Judah and they pack up their stuff and move.

To Moab, which is an odd choice because Moab is like more desert than Judah.

Right.

Or at least Bethlehem. Bethlehem is more in the… in the hill country a little bit. And so if there’s famine in, in Judah, most likely there’s going to be famine.

But I mean, that… we’ll get to this part. But I read a whole bunch of different sort of explanations of this story. And one of the explanations that I read said, and by the way, every time I read someone’s big explanation of what’s happening in things, I… and I’ve read the passages that they’re talking about. I find they are including so much stuff that’s like nowhere in the book. Like, it’s not there at all. So one of the things that they were like is that, you know, there, there, there.

Yeah, well, they. And that. That’s because in order to try to better understand this, people want to situate it in a context. Right? What, what time period are we talking about? And then we need to know who’s. Who’s writing this, what time period is the writer operating in. That’s how we’re going to best understand. And so people have constructed a lot of elaborate different frameworks to, to surround and undergird the story. But the, the book starts off Vayehi bime shephot hashoftim so it happened in the days of the judging of the judges. So we’re setting this in the period of the judges and, and Ruth is going to be. Spoiler alert. Ruth is going to be the great grandmother of King David.

Right.

So we’re, we’re around 1100-ish BCE according to the setting of the book.

Right now, it’s clearly written after that period.

You don’t, you don’t start a period. You don’t start writing about the present by saying in the days of the blank.

Yeah. And then later on in the book it’s going to say in the, in the before times when they did this, they would take off their sandal and give it to the other person. You don’t need to clarify. Hey, this. The social convention that is currently going on, they’re very clearly quite explicitly putting this deep in the past.

Right.

And so some people put this pre-exilic. This is before the Babylonian exile, during the. The monarchy. That’s. And the idea is that Moab is not quite yet treated as an enemy. So maybe it’s during the monarchy. Others say no, this is post-exilic. The themes here are related to, you know, kind of international families coming back to the land of Judah and they need to be made to feel like they are not unwelcome. So, okay. There are arguments for different social settings for the author. I happen to think it’s probably more likely post-exilic, but that’s just me.

Okay, so let’s just, let’s just fast forward through the first several parts of this. They go, they go to Moab. Both of the boys get wives. Dad dies and boys die.

Sort of in quick succession.

Yes. So what we have, they were sickly and frail after all.

They were. What are you supposed to do? Don’t name your kids these things if you don’t want them to turn out to be that.

Hey, don’t name your kid Jeeves if you don’t want him to buttle.

Yeah, exactly. So off. So they’re good. So now this leaves Naomi and her daughters-in-law, who are Orpah and Ruth. Orpah, by the way, did you know that Oprah’s given birth name was Orpah?

And that I have heard. I just reversed it.

I heard her tell that story at one point. Anyway.

Orpah decides. So Naomi decides to go back to Judah. Orpah decides not to go with her. She, she tells Ruth, stay here with your family. Don’t come with me. I got nothing to offer you. Ruth decides to go with her anyway.

Yes. And we have the, the famous passage where she says, where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus to me. And more as well, if even death parts me from you. Which is considered a. This is very poetic. Very strong indication of, of this love that is shared between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Yeah. At least in the NRSVUE, it’s, it’s separated out and written in poetry. Poetic form. It’s not again.

Right.

It’s. It’s. So there you go.

No such luxury. Yeah. No such luxury with the KJV where every verse is its own separate paragraph, no matter what. So suck it. Yeah.

So off they go back from Moab to Bethlehem and they’re. They arrive at the beginning of the barley harvest.

Which, which is like sort of important in terms of the plot. But several people that I read said that it was also sort of thematically important because it was. There was a, there’s a fertility idea involved.

I, I don’t think it’s a stretch. I, I think it’s certainly plausible. There’s, there’s this idea that because the, the, the climax, she’s able to, to bear children and then Naomi’s line is able to be carried on—Naomi’s line because of Ruth’s righteousness and all of this. So. Right. Yes, she is. She’s going to be ripe.

Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Ruth’s righteousness is an interesting question as we continue onward. I don’t, I, I don’t question it, but I think a lot of people—anyway, we’ll get to it. We’ll get to it. They get, they get back to Bethlehem and one of Naomi’s kinsmen apparently is Boaz, kinsman to Elimelech, Naomi’s widowed husband.

Right.

So now they hatch this plan to at least have some food, which is—and correct me if I’m wrong—which is that Ruth is going to sort of follow behind the reapers in the field and just sort of collect like the cast-off bits or what? Like, what is she doing?

Yeah, so she’s gleaning. And this is something that you see in, in some of the biblical legislation that they were to leave the gleanings for the poor. And so basically they’re harvesting and as they go around and harvest, there are going to be things that they miss.

Right.

Like if they’re going through with the sickle or however they’re harvesting, they’re not going to get every last stalk. And, and as they go and pick it up, there’s, there’s going to be stuff that, that gets left behind. And so the idea is don’t go back through and pick it all up. Yeah, leave the stuff that, that’s left in the margins for the poor so that they have—it’s, it’s a bit of a social safety net. But here we have—

I had never gleaned that that was the meaning of the word glean. Yeah, I’m glad, I’m glad to understand that now.

Yeah. And so Ruth is, is going to go in and basically put herself in front of someone who is part of the family, someone who is prominent. It’s, it’s a calculated thing that they’re doing here.

Yeah, it’s a—it—yeah. So this is, this is her way of meeting the big celebrity, the big rich guy in town. Because they say that specifically that Boaz, though he is kinsman, apparently you can’t just go up to him, you can’t just approach him. He’s—you have to, you have to like, actually, you know, bump into him in his field or something.

Well, certainly not an—a widowed Moabite wouldn’t really have standing.

Right.

More or less to, to go up to him and, and be like, “Hey, can I marry you so that I can have some money?” That’s, that’s frowned upon in this time period.

Okay, sure. So she apparently works very, very hard. Boaz comes by and is like, “Hey, who’s the, who’s the hardworking chick in the back there?” And they’re like, “Oh, she’s actually related to you, sort of just, you know, on the side,” whatever, blah, blah, blah. And he takes an interest and, and lets her actually like work with the reapers, right, somehow?

Yeah. Well, he tells them to like, don’t give her a hard time, let her work alongside you. And also, you know, she’s gonna get a little bit of a kickback too.

Like, yeah, leave a little extra for her. So. And then he’s, he invites her over to his table at mealtime: “Come, you know, sit at the cool kids’ table.”

“With me.” Because he saw the cut of her jib.

Yeah. The, the, the interest seems to be there. And you know, she’s pretty, she’s pretty pleased by this. She says, “Why have I found favor in your sight that you should take notice of me when I am a foreigner?” And Boaz is very nice and says, “All that you have done for your mother-in-law.” Since he had heard the story—he apparently heard that, that she came back with Naomi, which, which apparently was a very nice thing to do.

And this is—well, and that’s gonna, that’s gonna play throughout this story. You have certain things on the part of Naomi, on the part of Ruth, on the part of Boaz, where they’re going above and beyond what is expected of them.

Right.

And so there’s, there’s an argument to make that this idea that’s hesed. It’s translated loving kindness, sometimes grace or mercy in, in the Hebrew Bible. It’s a reference to going above and beyond what’s required by law in order to help somebody out who’s in trouble.

Right.

And so like Ruth does that; she doesn’t have to go with Naomi. She doesn’t have to abandon her land, none. Nothing in the law requires that of her. But she does it because she loves Naomi. And then also Boaz later on, we’re going to see he doesn’t have to redeem her, but he does it because he respects what she’s been doing for Naomi. And so everybody is basically doing a kindness to the other in this story to show that the law, the law is not adequate. You need to go above and beyond the law.

And, and so is that why he redeemed her though? Well, we’re gonna get into that conversation. But yeah, I think there’s some question there. But unquestionably at the beginning here in chapter two, he’s being a nice guy to her. Yeah, he’s really, he’s really embraced. He’s really, he’s really taken her under.

His, under his. Good guy Boaz is, is treating her well.

Yeah. No mention how he treats any other poor people who are gleaning behind his harvesters. But he’s really real nice to her.

Now, now we get to chapter three and things get, if I may, very, very, I will say metaphorical. I want to say there’s a lot, there’s a lot that I think is open to various interpretation. Everything up until now seems very straightforward. Now we get into some stuff. Now Naomi—so, so Ruth goes to Naomi and said, like, basically tells her all of the story about what’s happened.

Right.

And. And Naomi hatches a plan. Now, help me. I’ve read many very differing accounts of what this plan is or. Or interpretations of what this plan is.

Okay, what?

What. What I see in the text is Naomi says, go, you know, wait until—so wait until he’s done with that day’s harvest. And when he’s done there, he’ll be on—he’ll be threshing. He’ll be on the threshing floor. And apparently at the time of harvest, the dudes, they—they do the work, and then they just—they—they sleep there at the threshing floor. They don’t go back to their house. They—

They—

They sleep there. And, you know, I guess that makes sense because at harvest time, there’s, like, suddenly an abundance of work that all needs to be done really, really quickly.

So Naomi says to Ruth, go wash. First of all, wash and anoint yourself and put on your best clothes. I assume anointing in this case isn’t like, some ritualistic thing, but rather just make yourself smell good.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so wash and anoint yourself and put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor, but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, observe the place where he lies. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down, and he will tell you what to do. She said to her, all that you say, I will do. Now, I—I guess this is the moment where we have to talk about feet. And do we have to? Yes, we have to. The uncovering of feet seems to be a—a huge point of contention.

This just reminds me a tradition that my wife and I have started is on my birthday, we go get pedicures together. We go to a place nearby, and—and I always get my toenails painted. And so after this last one, I was gonna—we took a picture of our—our feet next to each other with both our toenails painted, and I was gonna post it on, like, Facebook or Twitter or something like that. Then I was like, there’s some weirdos out there. I think I’m just gonna keep my feet to myself.

So weirdos have their fun. It doesn’t hurt.

So I did not uncover my feet on Twitter. But yeah, so—so feet are frequently a euphemism for the genitals in the Hebrew Bible. That does not mean every time the word foot occurs that the author is trying to sneak some—some phallic metaphor or something into the story. But, you know, you have the idea of uncovering one’s feet is a euphemism for sex, but at the same time, covering one’s feet is a euphemism for defecation. So there are a variety of different ways that the body parts can signal different—different semantic content.

Is—is there anything in the—is it always the same word that means feet? Or are there—are there different Hebrew words that—sometimes.

Normally it’s just regel, which is… which is actually like the lower leg. But let me look and see what… All right, 3:4. Is that where we are?

Yeah. Uncover his feet. Yeah. Regel is the… is the word. Okay. So, yeah. And like, if you saw, uncover, galah, to… to expose or reveal or uncover the feet, you would kind of be like, “Oh, really?” But in the story, like, the… the narrative seems to be pretty literal. It’s like, she uncovered his feet, and you think he woke up and then was like, “Hey, there’s somebody laying at my feet.” So I… what I think is you’ve probably got… the story is probably being a little suggestive. And here’s why I think it’s being suggestive. I think Naomi’s plan is basically, “Hey, when he’s… when he’s passed out, you know, go do your thing.” And the act of sexual intercourse with an unmarried woman is… is basically a… a legal marriage that was considered.

You could… you could go to the… down to the courthouse and you could sign the papers, or you could just have intercourse. And then according to the society, “Hey, boom, you’re married.” And so Naomi’s plan may be saying, “Hey, when he’s nice and drunk, you know, put on a pretty dress, get some… some lipstick on and go down there and, you know, yada, yada, yada. And then, boom, you’re married.” And now you’ve… you’ve tricked your way into his household, except she goes down there and uncovers his feet, and he wakes up, and he… I… in my opinion, he sees what’s going on, but is like, “No, no, there’s a better way to do this.” See, according to the law, there’s a closer next of kin. And so I want to make sure this is all good and proper. And so he’s going above and beyond here to say, “Oh, you don’t have to trick me. We can do this above board. We can do… we can make this nice and legal.”

Not now, mind you, before he… he says that. And then he says, but stay with me tonight. Yeah, yeah, for a while.

But still leave under the cover of darkness. So I… it, to me, the… the claims that they didn’t have sex seem pretty thin to me.

I agree. I agree. I… I think the narrative is suggestive of that. Very much suggestive of that. But the narrative never makes it explicit.

Right. And that’s, and that’s, that’s sort of like the whole thing. She goes down. Let me just go through it really quickly, just so that we’re clear about it. She goes down to the threshing floor. She hides until Boaz has eaten and drunk and is in a, quote, “contented mood,” which I think I read as drunk, or at the very least pleasantly happy with his drinking.

And then he lies down at the end of the heap of grain. Then she came stealthily and uncovered his feet. We think we know what that might mean, but it might… but plenty of people think it just means uncovered his feet and lay down at midnight. So this seems to feel like… so this is verse 8, and it seems to feel like there’s some time passes and it says at midnight, the man was startled and turned over. And there, lying at his feet, at his feet was a woman. He said, “Who are you?” And she answered, “I am Ruth, your servant. Spread your cloak over your servant, for you are next of kin.” Now, “spread your cloak over your servant” is probably not just a… a fabric concept.

Well, there… there could be a couple different metaphorical things going on here because the cloak is also symbolic of the protection of the household. So in a sense, she’s saying, spread your… the protection of your household over me. And metaphorically, it could also mean invite me into your… the holy of holies.

In under your cloak.

So, because what’s going to happen? Because literally… the literal… if we look at it literally, if he spreads his cloak over her, she is then within…

Right.

They’re… they’re both naked under there or whatever.

Right, right. And so like, much like Peter, Paul and Mary, I think the… the narrator here is thinking, “But if I really say it, the radio won’t play it unless I lay it between the lines.” So I… I think what the… the narrative is being told in… in a quite literal way with… but wink… but with winks in the direction of what’s going on. Now at the same time, this… there’s absolutely no indication any of this is historical. So it’s… it’s not like the narrator is… is saying, we got to tell it this way, but it really happened this other way. I think they’re just… this is the entertainment part of this folklore.

Right. And, and this is where we sort of… I mean, we… we got the sense earlier that Boaz might be an older guy, but he’s very… but he very clearly says, “Hey, I love that you didn’t just go and try and, you know, seduce all these younger guys.”

So. So he says, I’m gonna do that. But like you said, there’s this. He’s got like, there’s a sense of propriety. There’s another dude who has a better claim, who is nearer of kin and therefore has a better claim to. And, and what becomes clear is this isn’t just about her, it’s about the inheritance of her father-in-law.

Right. So this is.

We talked about Elimelech’s land or whatever.

So we, we talked about Levirate marriage a bit ago. We did. Right. Is that a dream I had or.

No, no, no, we talked about that in the context of, of Tamar, Judah and Tamar.

Right.

I’m like Boaz. No, Judah and Tamar. Yeah, it’s.

It’s a very similar thing here. The, that property can’t be owned by Naomi or Ruth. It’s got to go to, to a man. And so it’s in, it’s in limbo currently. And so this is an opportunity for Boaz to take on a little bit more property, but at the same time it means taking on the Moabite wife who is linked with that property. And so there’s a. It’s a Levirate marriage thing. Now, technically, with Levirate marriage, the children would be raised up in the name of the deceased.

Right.

But that doesn’t really end up happening here. Ruth’s children are attributed to Boaz everywhere else they’re mentioned. Interesting. Yeah. So we’ve got the nod in the direction of Levirate marriage, but it doesn’t really fit with what we would expect for Levirate marriage. But. And this is going to have to do with why the next of kin makes the decision that they make because you’ll notice that Boaz kind of slow plays his hand a little bit. He’s like, hey, got all this land here, want some land? And. And then springs the woman on him there at the end, which is what’s, which is what spooks him and drives him off so that he.

Yeah, that’s an interesting thing he does. So anyway, just to finish out their, their night on the threshing floor. Yeah, he does say, stick around till morning. We’re. We’re going to hang out and apparently just play cards or something, according to many of the things that I read. And then, and then he gives her some, some free.

He hadn’t, he hadn’t finished yet, so.

Right, yeah, exactly. Well, and also he was drunk, so it was probably like, give me a minute here. I probably need some time. Then, you know, he sends her on her way before, before the light comes, but he gives her six measures of barley as a nice going away present as a nice consolation prize.

There’s some barley on the barley on the counter. On your way out. You can.

Yeah, exactly. And then. Yeah, look on the nightstand. I’ve got some barley for you. And then they go and do the, the thing with the other next of kin. And as you say, basically Boaz is like, hey, he gathers the, the dude who is unnamed, right, the whoever the other next of kin is.

Next of kin. Yeah, we don’t, we don’t need a name. There are other parts of the Bible where there are like stock characters whose, whose names are no name. So like this, you know, this, this is just part of storytelling.

Yeah, yeah.

So in, in Spanish you would say fulano de tal or, you know, Peloni Almoni if. But I, I think this is a fascinating part of the story because it reveals some understanding about, about how these cultural processes were carried out. They’re, they’re at the city gate, and I’ve been to city gates in, in these lands and they’re like chambered gates, so they’re like little recessed rooms in there and there were benches and people would hang out. It was, it was kind of like, you know, the, the, the town square, city’s mudroom, something. Yeah, something like that. And, and it says like, like I said before in, in the before times when you wanted to make a deal or something like that, you took off your sandal and you, and you gave it to the other person and. But he, he goes, he’s like, I’m sure then this, this other guy’s gonna come by at some point.

And it says, as soon as he sat down, the next of kin was there. And you know, he’s like, pull over, take a load off. Hey.

And he gets the elders of town.

Also, because they’ve got to witness this, right? We got to witness the, the handing off of the chancla to, to make it nice and legal. And, and he. And it says, let me find it if you will redeem it. Redeem it, but if you will not tell me so that I may know, for there is no one prior to you to redeem it. So basically Boaz is like, I’m actually not next in line. There’s another guy next in line. Let’s go see what that other guy thinks. And the other guy says, oh, yeah, I’ll redeem it. Then Boaz says, oh, by the way, there’s this lady.

Yeah, there is a literal.

Yeah, there’s a ball and chain attached to this, to this property. And the guy goes, ooh, on second thought, yeah, I’m gonna.

And he doesn’t show the dude Ruth, because apparently Ruth was a decent looking lady. He just says, Ruth the Moabite. Yeah, but sure, you want a Moabite.

And so he says, I cannot redeem it for myself without damaging my own inheritance. So now we’re back to the levirate marriage idea. Oh, if I have to raise up. So basically that property is not in my name, that is in their name. And so there any children are going to be raised up in the name of the deceased and they’re going to take that property.

And it says that explicitly. It says you are acquiring Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead man, to maintain the dead man’s name on his inheritance.

Exactly.

So it’s very explicit about that. And that’s when the guy’s like, you know, when I think about it, nah, you can, you can have her. You can, you can go ahead.

And then, and then that’s when, that’s, that’s when the exchange of the sandal occurs.

And then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, you are witnesses today, that I have acquired from the hand of Naomi and all that belong to Elimelech and all that belong to Chilion and Mahlon. I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, the wife of Mahlon, to be my wife, to maintain the dead man’s name on his inheritance in order that the name of the dead may not be cut off from his kindred and from the gate of his native place today. You are witnesses. And they all bowed their heads and said, yes. And so they are witnesses. May Adonai make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you produce children in Ephrathah and bestow a name in Bethlehem. And through the children that Adonai will give you by this young woman, may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah. So we’re going to cap it off with another reference to levirate marriage.

Right.

So we’ve got these, these two examples of what don’t really fit as standard marriages.

Right? Yeah. Because, I mean, just as a reminder to everybody, Tamar had. It was another trick, another trick marriage thing. Tamar had to trick Judah into having sex with her by, by posing as a. As a prostitute in order to make that happen.

Right.

And then this is like. This started as a trick, but Ruth was like, it’s me, Ruth. It’s. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t know. I don’t know how much of a trick this one was. What’s your sense of how tricky Naomi’s plan for Ruth was? It feels a little tricky, I think.

Naomi. So in, you know, this is a fiercely patriarchal society, and in order for women to. To get their own, they needed to exploit that, the patriarchy. They were, they were not privileged by any segment of that society, and so they had to take advantage where they could. And so I get the sense that Naomi is the one saying, hey, if you sleep with him, then you’re his wife. You’re in like Tony Gwynn, like Errol Flynn, you are in. And, And Boaz is like, oh, we don’t have to do it this way. We can make it nice and, and official with the chancla, and we can make sure that the, the family name carries on and we can do it all out in. In the public in the sight of the judges so that they can all be witness to this. And so I, I get the sense that the trick, the plan started off as a bit of a scheme that Boaz kind of came over the top to, to say, no, we’re going to do this legit.

And so both of them are kind of putting on display their, their willingness to go to bat for someone who is in need. And I think that’s one of the rhetorical messages here is go above and beyond.

I think I, I think I can see that. But I, I also look at chapter three, and then when I read it and I read it in different translations and I read a bunch of people’s explanation of it, but to me, she goes in and she uncovers his feet and lies down. Now, to me, the way that makes sense to me is she actually does something to him, but he may be passed out and—

Maybe it didn’t count or he can’t consent.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

And so when he does wake up and it’s like, “Ah, who are you lying at my feet?” I don’t know that that’s at my feet. I don’t know why that isn’t just like they’re spooning or something. And he’s like, “Well, I don’t know who you are.” So, so I don’t know. I feel like she did the trick. I feel like she did it. But then he’s like, “Let’s make this as… Let’s make the whole city see this as not a trick” or something. Like he, like he legitimates it further. It’s like the trick—the trick is kind of legitimate, right? Like if she sleeps with him and she, you know, she tricks him into sleeping with her, that could almost… that almost counts. Especially if she like bears his child from it.

And that’s what we learned from Tamar.

And I, I can’t argue against that reading. I don’t think there’s, there’s an argument to make that the, that the story definitely precludes that. That’s just my reading of the story. Certainly they’re using very… you know, the story is wearing the uniform of one of these euphemisms. So, so yeah, you can take the—

Euphemism to the, to however far you need the euphemism.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like, that’s the thing about this is that there’s nothing definitive.

Yeah. When I was, when I was getting licensed as a massage therapist, the, the phrase we were taught to use when, when we’re introducing, when we’re bringing somebody into the area, we say, “Undress to your comfort level.” Right. So interpret to your comfort level.

Yeah, I suppose so. But, but what I wanted, I guess what I want to say is like, you know, I read so many different blog posts and, and various whatevers, and all of these people were like, certain. You know what I mean?

They… Yeah.

None of them were writing as though there was any question in their mind one way or the other about what’s happening. And it’s just like we, we don’t know. How about a little uncertainty, people?

Yeah, I think that’s, that’s folly when people are just so committed to one dogma or another that it has to be one way or another that they, they’re like, “Oh, this very clearly means this. This obviously means that.” And you know, frequently we’re wrong when we try to dig in our heels on that stuff. So I, I don’t, I don’t know for sure. I have the way that I think makes better sense to me, but I’m not going to pretend that I can say another reading is wrong. So.

Right, fair enough. All right, let us then move on to our “Who’s That?”.

All right. And who is that that we’re “Who’s That”-ing?

I mean, we said earlier that it’s Sennacherib.

That’s right.

And I don’t, and I don’t think that we’re any closer to understanding, or at least I’m not, because as I said, I have no idea who this guy is.

Yeah. Okay, so we’re going to start at a 30,000 foot view. And, and really the event that we’re wanting to talk about here is the invasion of Sennacherib when he comes into the Northern Kingdom of Israel down to Judah and lays siege to Jerusalem. And, and I want to introduce the story because there’s a… well, with this, this paper that was recently published in a journal that was trying to suggest that the author thinks they know where the siege camp where Sennacherib was staging this invasion is located. And, and this was, unfortunately, this was publicized with the claim that archaeologists proved the supernatural story of the angel having killed 185,000 Assyrian troops that is associated with Sennacherib’s siege. So.

So that’s, that’s somebody trying to, trying to say everybody should doubt everything that I’m saying.

say everybody should doubt everything that I’m saying. Yeah, yeah, it was ridiculous. But. Yeah, but there is something very interesting behind it that I want to get to. But to start, Sennacherib was a king within the Neo Assyrian Empire. So the Neo Assyrian Empire is the first millennium BCE Empire where the Neo Assyrians, they took over from the Babylonians and then later on the Neo Babylonians are going to take over from the Neo Assyrians, the land of Mesopotamia. Okay. But Sennacherib takes Mesopotamia.

Sorry, is like modern day Iraq area.

Yes, around that area. So prior to Sennacherib, we got Sargon II. He dies in 705 BCE. So Sennacherib takes over in 705 and he rules from 705 to 681 BCE. So about 24 years. Ish. He’s in charge of the Neo Assyrian Empire. Okay. There’s a part where he’s got a bunch of nations that are vassals. So a vassal is basically somebody. You’ve gone and roughed them up and then you’ve said, you’re going to pay me so much money every year and you’re going to send me soldiers when I go to war and you’re going to support me and I won’t kill you and so squish you. Yes, because they are larger, they are stronger, they can mess you up.

So we heard about vassalage in the context of when we talked about Moab throwing off vassalage from Israel.

Right. So that was Second Kings three.

Right.

That was just, that was a little bit before what’s going on here? And this is a parallel story because we have Hezekiah is the king in Judah, and Hezekiah decides to throw off vassalage to Assyria after Sennacherib takes over. And so Sennacherib, the new king, he’s got to go in and he’s got to show who’s boss. So he decides to invade to restore. There. There are two options. You restore them to vassalage or you run a scorched earth campaign. And the Assyrians are the innovators basically of the scorched earth campaign. They are the ones who made this famous. So Sennacherib comes through and destroys pretty much everything in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Now, 17 years earlier, either Shalmaneser V or Sennacherib’s dad, Sargon II had already come through and routed the Northern Kingdom, sent the Northern Kingdom into exile. But they go through again. They, they, they beat up the Northern Kingdom, they come through Judea, they beat up a bunch of Judea.

And Sennacherib is stationed at a place called Lachish, which is about 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem. And he’s making plans to go lay siege to Jerusalem. And Hezekiah and all the people in the area are. They’ve kind of gathered into Jerusalem and they’ve fortified the walls and Hezekiah has carved the tunnel that we now know as Hezekiah’s tunnel that goes from a spring that brings water inside the city walls. And so they’re, they’re preparing for this siege. And there, there is so much archaeological data left over from this because one Sennacherib destroyed a bunch of stuff. But at the same time there, there are also indications that the, the Judahites actually like dismantled stuff, decommissioned temples, they may have. They may have. Like, the temple at Arad that we have discovered and, and partially reconstructed was found under six feet of soil.

They may have actually hidden the temple under earth in order to protect it from the invasion. That’s one theory about how it got the way it was. But Sennacherib comes through and home base is basically Lachish. And if you go there, you can see a lot of really cool artifacts there. You can go through the city gate where they would have attacked. You can see the. The big hill that they created in order to get their siege engines up to the top to break down the walls. It’s. It’s a fascinating place. But Hezekiah gets obviously kind of spooked by this because he doesn’t have a lot of. Doesn’t have a lot of options. So we’re in. We’re in second kings 18. And I. I think there’s something fascinating about this story. Hezekiah has taken over. He’s thrown off vassalage. I think that’s in. That’s in 2nd Kings 18:7. Adonai was with him. Wherever he went, he prospered. He rebelled against the king of Assyria and would not serve him.

And. And so Sennacherib gets wind of this and goes, oh, really? So we have in verse 13, in the 14th year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. King Hezekiah of Judah sent to the king of Assyria at Lachish. So Sennacherib’s in Lachish. King Hezekiah sends him something, saying, I have done wrong. Withdraw from me. Whatever you impose on me, I will bear. The king of Assyria demanded of King Hezekiah of Judah 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold. Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king’s house. At that time, Hezekiah stripped the gold from the doors of the temple of Adonai and from the doorpost that King Hezekiah of Judah had overlaid and gave it to the king of Assyria.

And then in verse 17, it’s weird, because then Sennacherib suddenly says again, pay me my money. Like repeats the same stuff. Why are you rebelling against me? And then we have this story about Rabshakeh is the messenger who comes to Jerusalem and basically gives him this ultimatum. Don’t think that your God is going to protect you. None of the other gods of the other nations protected them. You’re going down, son. And. And here we have. Then Hezekiah’s, you know, wringing his hands, doesn’t know what to do, goes to Isaiah, gets help from Isaiah. You can look in Isaiah, chapters 36, 37 and 38 are all about what happens during this siege. So it’s interesting that we’ve got two different responses.

Hezekiah’s first response is, take my money. Hezekiah’s second response is not going to do. It wouldn’t be prudent. And a lot of scholars will say this. This sounds an awful lot like two different tellings of the same story. And one of the things that I think is fascinating is when you look into Hebrew, the first story where Hezekiah immediately pays Sennacherib the money. His name is written in Hebrew, Hizqiyyah, which is, you know, Hezekiah in Hebrew, right. Verse 17 on. So the second, pay me my money and everything after that, his name is spelled Hizqiyyahu. So there’s a. His name is spelled differently in the. In those few verses where Hezekiah immediately pays Sennacherib the money. So I think that we probably have two different stories that were woven together to exonerate Hezekiah for his kind of cowardness.

Cowardliness, if that’s a word. I don’t know, because, I mean, it.

Seems like the fact that they go through and, and have Hezekiah not just giving all of the money out of the. The royal coffers, but also like just.

Scraping it off the doors, just tearing.

Up the temple to try and. To try and pay things like that. I. It’s very clear that, like, we’re supposed to. We’re supposed to boo here.

Yeah. And then. And then for Sennacherib to come back and be like, where’s my money?

That wasn’t enough.

You could tell that some of that had been scraped off of a door, sir.

Yeah. So we’re literally down to door scrapings. I think. I think, you know, we’re done.

Yeah, We. We don’t have gold fillings in our teeth yet. That’s not. That kind of dentistry won’t be available for. For many generations to come. So. So, yeah, it makes sense to me that we have two different versions of the story, however, and. And this may be trying to account for the fact that Sennacherib didn’t take Jerusalem. We think we’re pretty sure that Sennacherib laid some kind of siege to Jerusalem but had to go back home. Either it was taken too long. There’s, there’s an idea that there were, there was treason going on back home, that Sennacherib’s family members were trying to take the throne and he had to rush back to, to check on things. And in, in the story, in, in 2nd Kings 19, we have, you know, the angel of, of the Lord went through and killed 185,000 Assyrian troops. And they got up in the morning and everybody was dead. And they were like, it’s time to bone out. We’re gonna, we’re gonna take off. And, and that’s the, that’s the story that most people who read the Bible are familiar with.

Can I offer one question, which is, could it not be that the actual story was that Sennacherib came to Hezekiah said, pay me my money. Hezekiah said, I’m sorry, sir. Yes, sir, very much, sir. Gave him all of the stuff. And then Sennacherib was like, all right, we’re out. That was, that was all I needed.

Absolutely. A hundred percent.

That just seems like. That seems very plausible to me. Like, yeah, yeah, strip everything. Give me everything you’ve got. All right, fine. Yeah, you’re back under the. You’re back under the wing.

Yeah. Would you like your receipt printed or emailed? And. And then he said, all right, we’ll see you guys. Have a nice summer.

And then. And then afterwards they were like, but also, oh, did you see that angel thing that happened?

Yeah. And the, the folks wouldn’t have, you know, the public wouldn’t have had much of a clue of what was going on if they saw Sennacherib’s army setting up shop across town and hanging out there for a while. And then suddenly they, they bounce. They might not know what’s going on.

You can see them with. They’ve got archers, they’ve got slings. You can see the people inside the city throwing down torches to try to light their siege engines on fire, all this kind of stuff. And then you see people being marched away, and you see Sennacherib sitting on a throne in a little camp a little ways off. And then even further off, there’s another, what looks like a. A circular camp with some walls around it and a wall down the middle. And what some researchers recently did was say, hey, we found some old aerial photography of Lachish from the 1940s before a bunch of stuff was excavated and built up around it. And we think that the Lachish bas reliefs in Nineveh are actually an accurate representation of the topography of Lachish, because we have the city of Lachish, we have a little hill, and now there’s a. There’s a settlement there.

And then opposite the hill, there’s another little circular hill that has the remains of first millennium BCE rough stone walls around it. And we think if we overlay the Lachish bas reliefs on this topography, that it is accurately representing things, which means this little hill off in the distance with these rough stone walls around it would have been Sennacherib’s camp where the army would have camped out. And then they said, let’s look at Jerusalem. And it just so happens that about the same distance away from Jerusalem, towards the north, there’s a little hill that matches more or less the dimensions of the hill by Lachish. And they said this might have been the. The camp that Sennacherib set up when he was either in the process of or about to lay siege to Jerusalem.

And that’s. That hill is called Ammunition Hill. And it is, you know, there. There have been things living there for many, many hundreds of years, and there’s been settlement there, and there’s been all kinds of stuff. So there aren’t remains of an ancient wall there like there are outside of Lachish. But this scholar postulated that based on what we see at Lachish and a couple of other locations that match this pattern of setting up a camp at such a distance away, we think Ammunition Hill might have been where Sennacherib’s camp was. And that is what got misinterpreted in a lot of reporting as saying archaeologists proved that an angel killed 185,000 Assyrian troops, which is just nonsensical. And I made some videos about that, and I got a bunch of people saying, well, why else would Sennacherib leave without taking the city? And good grief, there could have been any one of a number of different reasons, including he got his money.

But he went back home and had what’s called the Sennacherib Prism. There’s actually an inscription from Sennacherib where he describes trapping Hezekiah in his capital city like a bird in a cage. So he represented himself as coming out.

On top on that, as victorious.

Yeah. And it seemed, you know, if he got paid his money and was like, all right, we’re packing up. We’re. We’re not going to spend any more of our money here because, you know.

Enjoy your cage, little bird.

Yeah, you know, those. Those military campaigns are not cheap. And that’s one of the. That’s one of the reasons. If somebody threw off vassalage, if you went and attacked them, you better get something out of it, because just attacking them is going to cost an awful lot of money. And you’re now out one of your streams of income. And so, yeah, I. I think it’s likely that he probably showed up. And Hezekiah went, please take my money. And. And he said, yeah, all right, we’re out. And. And that gets written later on. They’re like, yeah, an angel killed a bunch of them and they had to retreat.

We scared him away. Everybody. Yeah, with our. With all of our gold. We terrified them and they ran like cowards.

What were all those trunks that they were carrying out of Jerusalem? Never mind.

Never.

You didn’t see any.

That’s probably the remains of the dead soldiers from the angel. Shut up.

Didn’t the temple doors have gold leaf around them? Never mind.

We thought that looked tacky. We didn’t like that anymore. We wanted to go much more naturalistic. All right, well, there you have it. Sennacherib. Interesting. I think I’m going to remember who he was now.

Yeah. And so you had two kings between Hezekiah and Josiah, and Josiah is the one who institutes a bunch of cultic reform. But hopefully Sennacherib can—people can have a firmer place in their memory for where said Sennacherib is involved in all of this. So he was the—the Ninevite. When you think of Jonah being sent to Nineveh to go preach against that wicked city, that story was supposed to have taken place centuries before Sennacherib. But Nineveh wasn’t even an important city until Sennacherib. So, okay, so that story was obviously written after Sennacherib. So it’s—all the puzzle pieces fall into place once you understand all the history of this.

It’s so—it’s so one of the hardest things about the Bible is trying to piece out what is like, coinciding with actual history. What’s an actual, like, snippet of history woven into the narrative of the Bible and what isn’t that?

So it’s nice to have, you know, a bunch of other things attesting to this time period and giving us a sense of a sort of larger, a larger view of what we’re seeing. Even if we can’t fully, like, figure out what the Bible—like, you know, the thing with the angels and whatever. Even if we can’t have that, it’s nice to know that this was a real guy, you know, he, the—the Neo-Assyrian Empire, all that stuff. It’s fascinating.

Yeah. And I think it’s important to also point out that this is what we find in the Bible is tracing around actual historical events.

Right.

So when it comes to who’s king where, who’s ruling, who’s fighting who, who’s supporting who, who’s rebelling against who, a lot of that is historical in the Bible. And we have the receipts. We don’t have the receipt that Sennacherib gave to Hezekiah, but in terms of the fact that these two people were, you know, one besieged the other and the other did something, that’s historical. And so when people dismiss all of the Bible as fairy tale, as fable, as BS, whatever they dismiss it as, there’s plenty in the Bible that corresponds with what we know about the history of this time period. So, yeah, important thing to keep in mind, in my opinion.

Yeah, absolutely. I love it. Well, thank you so much, friends. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen every week and get yourself early ad-free access to every episode and then, you know, depending on what level you choose, even get access to our bonus content, the afterparty every week, you can do so by going to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Our patrons are the main way that we fund this thing. So it’s very important to us and we thank all of our patrons all the time. If you would like to write in to us, it’s contact@dataoverdogma.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

The Truth About Ruth

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology