With Counter-Apologies

Why do you hate the Bible, Dan?

Well, it’s because I hate God. Can’t you tell?

It’s all that Satan worship you’ve been doing.

Hey, once you pop, you can’t stop. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of that ever-present—I forget—misinformation is the word you’re looking for. Misinformation of the same.

It’s amazing that you would forget that particular word because today is all about misinformation.

It’s, it’s a veritable smorgasmore. Smorgas… I don’t know what the word is. It’s a cornucopia of misinformation.

All right, this is gonna be a fun episode. If Dan doesn’t know how to word today, that’ll be… this is going to be a tricky one. But yeah, we’re doing a bit of a grab bag of apologetics. I’m going to, I’m going to call it, I don’t know, something along the lines of My Apologies. What do you think of that?

Yes, that works. My…

Yeah, because… because it is. We’re going to be talking about a lot. Look, there are plenty of fine apologetics out there. There are plenty of ways of looking at, at, you know, the stories of the Bible and, and, and harmonizing them with your worldview and whatever. There are also some really, really bad ways.

Lots of them. Yeah.

Trying to take what’s in the Bible and mold it to what we actually know about the world around us. And it, it doesn’t always work.

Yeah, it’s. It’s highly problematic and mostly because we, we… and a friend of mine on Facebook was… a scholar friend of mine was talking about this yesterday. You’ve heard the term exegesis. And then we also talk about eisegesis. One is—explain them both. Okay, so exegesis, the idea would be interpretation “out of.” You’re reading from your, your… you’re basically trying to figure out what the text means. Eisegesis would be “reading into.” You’re putting stuff into the text. And the concern that my scholar friend was expressing was the notion that they’re a strict dichotomy because there’s not. Because there’s no such thing as, as pure exegesis. Because we’re not just extracting meaning from a text. You are generating meaning with the text. Something that I have harped on many times. And so all interpretation is eisegesis to one degree or another.

And, and so when all engagement with the text to one degree or another is remaking the text in our own image, the, the difference is what are our concerns and our goals and our methodologies? Are we trying to reconstruct the text in a way that we think is going to most closely approximate what the original authors and audiences would have understood? Or are we trying to construct meaning in a way that serves our own interests today? And this is something that I point out in the introduction to my forthcoming book, The Bible Says So.

Gosh, you’re good at squeezing that in. That’s awesome. Pre-orders available now.

Yeah. What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues coming out April 29, 2025.

Link in the show notes, baby. Everybody, everybody pre-order. We want this thing on the, on the New York Times bestseller list. We want it. We want to rocket this to stardom.

Yeah, this… we want it coming out number one. But one of the things I point out is that if you are not willing to let the Bible mean something that you disagree with, then then you’re not really concerned for the Bible. You’re just concerned for the Bible as a proof text. You just want it to be the authorization for your own dogmas. And that’s what bad apologetics—that’s the foundation of bad apologetics is where really it’s only, you’re only attempting to perform a concern for context or history or textual things like that. It’s a performance. You want to make it look like you are concerned for all those things. But in reality, the Bible is not allowed to contradict your dogmas. And we’re going to see a bunch of ways that apologetics does that in today’s show.

Indeed. Indeed. So let’s pick… let’s… let’s start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start in… in Genesis. One of the things, one of the things that you proposed to me as we were looking through ideas that we could explore today.

It was an indecent proposal, one might say. Indeed.

But it is ways that certain Bible translations can, can fudge the translation to, to harmonize what it was, what they think the book is supposed to be saying, rather than to present what the book actually says.

Is that a fair, is that a fair description of what we’re looking at here?

Yeah, I think that’s a fair description. We’re talking about Genesis 2 , right?

Yeah. Okay. So. And this is. And this kind of came up because of some videos that I made recently. One of them, I was talking about the difference between the creation account in Genesis 1 and then the creation account in Genesis 2 and 3. These are two entirely different creation accounts. One, and, and we’ve talked at length about this. In fact, I think our very first show talked about the differences between these two creation accounts. But inevitably there was pushback from folks who suggest that they are one and the same narrative and that they are entirely harmonious and that we just need to stop hating the Bible and just succumb to the dulcet tones of their harmony.

And why do you hate the Bible, Dan?

Well, it’s because I hate God. Can’t you tell?

It’s all that Satan worship you’ve been doing.

I’m. Hey, once you pop, you can’t stop. So. And this, and this comes from the. The main verse I want to talk about is Genesis 2:19 . But also Genesis 2:8 is a, a companion verse to this because there was a video that was made. It actually, I don’t think was responding to me. I think it was responding to a comment from another comment on my video or something like that. But the person said that the notion that these two texts contradict is a product of a misunderstanding or a mistranslation or misinterpretation of Genesis 2:19 . And in the Hebrew, Genesis 2:19 is just carrying on the narrative of God’s creation of the earth. So we have God taking the. The man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, you may. You know, all that stuff. It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner. And then Genesis 2:19 says, so out of the ground, the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. And this is an attempt to find a suitable companion and ezer kenegdo, help meet for Adam. And, and it fails. God is like, back to the drawing board, what if I just tore a piece of his flesh off? And that’s where we get woman. But if you go look at the NIV and the ESV, two translations with which we have quibbled, this is the New

International Version and the English Standard Version, right?

And, and funny enough, the English Standard Version exists because the people were. The certain white men were like, hey, the NIV is too woke, although they used whatever they, they would have used for woke back in the 90s, right? But the New International Version in verse 19 says, and here’s the reason this is a bad thing, because according to Genesis 2 , God creates Adam, then creates all the animals, right? But in Genesis 1 , the animals are created before humanity is created. So we’ve got a pretty clear contradiction. Genesis 2:19 in the New International Version says, now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky he brought down.

We’re getting down to the minutia again. We got. We’re hinging on a single word again.

But yes, a helper verb had, which communicates in the English what is known as the pluperfect tense, where instead of just talking about a simple past tense, we are talking about a. A past that is anterior to. To the past tense called the pluperfect. The idea being this creation of the animals had already taken place before the story we’re telling you right now. And so there’s no contradiction. The problem is that is not a valid translation of the verb form at the beginning of this verse. It’s what’s called the wayyiqtol verb form, or some people call it the. The imperfect verb form. Some people call it the prefix verb form. It’s a way to say it’s incompleted action. But because of its form, it’s kind of thrown in the past tense. And this is. This is part of, in Hebrew, what’s called past-time narrative sequence. When you’re telling a story in Hebrew, this, it goes this happened and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and thus.

And so. But if you want to interrupt it to provide some background information, like a pluperfect thing, now he had done this, then what you would do is you would interrupt that, that sequence of wayyiqtol verbs with what’s called a qatal verb, which is the perfect, the completed action, the affix form, you know, whatever you want to call it.

And we don’t want to call it any of those things.

That’s fair. That’s totally fair. Neither do any of the students I’ve ever taught Hebrew. But that is how you would indicate a pluperfect. But we don’t have that here, okay? And we do have it in Genesis 2:8 , oddly enough, because Genesis 2:8 says, and and the Lord God Adonai Elohim planted a garden in the east in Eden, and and there he put the man he had formed. So the formation of ha-adam the human occurred before the planting of this garden. And if you look in the Hebrew, it’s the wayyiqtol at the beginning of the verse, and then it’s the qatal, that interruption of the past-time narrative sequence to indicate this has an anteriority to the current narrative.

So this, so what that means is that that’s putting the creation of Adam before planting the garden.

Yes. Which is another contradiction.

Another contradiction.

Right. If you go look at the beginning of Genesis 2 . Well, Genesis 2 :4b is where this creation account begins. In the day that Adonai Elohim made the earth and the heavens, verse 5, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up. For Adonai Elohim had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground. But a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground. And then God makes the human, and then God plants a garden in Eden and there places the human that he had created. Right. And, and because of this issue, because Genesis 1 has plants on the earth before humanity as well, guess what? The NIV does—translates Genesis 2:8 as a pluperfect as well, but not the second verb. Well, it does translate the second verb as a pluperfect, but also the first in the NIV.

It says now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east in Eden, and there he put the man he had formed.

They’re both. He had done all of this. He, he re… he likes to front load the, the… the effort and then just plonk it all in.

There’s a lot of resumption, a lot of reflection, a lot of allusion backwards to things that are nowhere described in the text.

Right.

Well, except for in Genesis 1 . And so the NIV even like—you don’t get a pluperfect from a yiqtol verb. You get a pluperfect from interrupting a yiqtol verb with a qatal. Verse 8. They’re just like, there is a wayyiqtol verb that is interrupted by a qatal verb. And they’re like, both of them are pluperfect. So it’s like, well, there’s no interruption with the wayyiqtol and then the interruption with the qatal. You’re interpreting as carrying on the same sense as the wayyiqtol. So it’s doubly stupid. But the NIV’s priority, as like it explicitly says in the introduction, is the inspiration, the inerrancy, the univocality, the historicity of the text—that is their priority. Right. What the text says is secondary.

Which is, which is the, the biggest problem with all this. It’s like you, you want the text… what the text says. Sola Scriptura. The text is all that matters. The text. The text, the text. But then you’re telling the text what—yeah, you’re telling the text what it is and is not allowed to say. So in reality, it’s your tradition that is the, the authority, and the text is just the proof text, and it’s going to say what you tell it to say.

Right.

And in this case, you’re telling it not to contradict Genesis 1 because it do contradict Genesis 1 .

Yeah. It just feels so… I mean, I understand the impulse when, when this book contradicts itself. That feels really scary if you’ve already decided that this book isn’t allowed to contradict itself. Yeah, the… it feels, it feels obvious to me, though, that the answer to that is to just, like, deal with your emotions about the contradictions rather than, like, fixing it, which would… which is not… like, that’s not what they think they’re doing. Like, they think they’re honoring it in some way, but really all they’re honoring is, is their a sort of emotional discomfort?

Yeah. And then, and then you’ve got a bunch of scholars who will then go out in search of arguments that the wayyiqtol can communicate the pluperfect or the past perfect sense.

Right.

And so there are publications that are like, we’re… we’re certain that this can, this can communicate the, the pluperfect. And then there are other scholars who are just saying, no, it doesn’t.

And, and so, and all the, they, they bring up a handful of examples, and all of them are, are contested by other scholars or other scholars are like, yeah, no, that doesn’t have to be read as a pluperfect. None of that works. But, but it shows that that apologetics is, is not about following the data, where the data lead. It’s certainly not about giving priority to what the text says. Apologetics is always about def. Defending a predetermined conclusion, defending a dogma against the data.

Right.

Saying the data doesn’t stop us from arriving at our predetermined conclusion. You can’t prove it’s impossible. And there’s that, that ginning up of the tiniest little sliver of not impossible where apologetics lives and breathes and has its being. So that’s, that’s a particularly, that’s a particularly bad one, I feel.

I feel like one of the, one of the interesting things about this particular thing, Genesis 2 and, and these, these pluperfect moments is that it makes it so clear how utterly unqualified all of us who aren’t you and you know, the people that we met, that we talked to at SBL, like the rest of us are completely unqualified to make comment on this. It’s like I, we literally so many people are like, I don’t have to listen to the experts, so-called experts about things because I could do my own research. No you can’t. Unless you like, learn as much ancient Hebrew as you know, Dan. Like, and you know, I’m not willing to devote as much of my life to this study as you are. Like that’s, it’s just not, you know, you are, you pursued multiple degrees in it and I’m not going to be doing that.

So we all have to sort of, we all have to find what, figure out which experts we believe.

Or, or you know what, it makes it a very difficult pursuit.

And, and the, the same is true of, of the experts. Like none of us can. None of us are, are capable of gathering the experiences and the resources and the data and the training to be able to drill down to the bedrock of every single argument related to every single issue related to the Bible at some point. Even the people who are the most expert in certain fields are just relying on the judgment of other experts. And for folks who don’t know these languages or the secondary literature or the archeological or the textual or the other data very well at all, they’re just unilaterally relying on the judgment of other experts. And so it always, it’s always going to come down to who you’re going to accept as, as an expert. And so yeah, that’s, that’s a reality for all of us. And, and so yeah, but the folks out there on, on YouTube and, and in the TikTok comments sections and Instagram and Bluesky and Threads and what, Mastodon, is that still a thing?

What folks out there who are like, well I just have to read the text. Like you can’t read a single syllable of the text until one of those experts has translated it for you and you are relying entirely on their ability to accurately translate it. And.

Right.

And all the arguments from the translation are just appeals to the authority of the translator until you can drill down to that bedrock which very few people have the ganas, the desire, the resources, the time or the interest in, in acquiring. So yeah, we, we have a problem is what we have who do want to. To be able to drill down to the bedrock of all of this.

So speaking of expertise, let’s move on to another thing in which neither of us has any expertise. Not. Not you nor I.

Let’s.

Let’s go to NASA.

NASA. Doesn’t that, doesn’t that mean to deceive in Hebrew?

I’m pretty sure it does, or at very least I’ve definitely seen it claimed that the word NASA. I mean, do you want to just answer that really quickly since we’re.

Oh, yeah. So no, it doesn’t mean to deceive. There is a verbal root that a lot of people will look this up and like Strong’s Concordance or something like that, which anybody who might. Yeah, it’s what I give out every year for Christmas to all my friends and family. But people will look it up and they will look for words that mean deceive and they will see NASA and they will think, ah. Although what they will entirely ignore is the diacritics on these letters, including a little chevron above the S, a downward facing kind of arrow. Caret shape.

That indicates that is not pronounced “s”; it’s pronounced “sh.” So nasha is a verbal root that can mean deceive, but only when it occurs in a particular verbal stem. And in Hebrew, like in English, we have these helper verbs: had, did, cause to—like all these different ways to give nuance to our verbs. In Hebrew, you actually change the word itself. And so one of these stems, the causative stem, turns a verb from “to do” into “cause to do.” So, like the verb “to see,” if you put it in the causative, it would be “cause to see,” and we would translate it as “show” or something like that.

So nasha only means to deceive in the causative stem. But in order to put it in the causative, you actually have to change the letters. You add—you add a he to the beginning. And with a verbal root that begins with a nun, like nasha, that creates a consonant cluster with the first two consonants. And the nun actually assimilates to the sh sound and becomes a second sh sound. And long story short, when this verb is used to mean deceive, it has never been NASA, and it’s not even nasha. It sounds completely different. The vowels change as well. So in Genesis 3 , where people say, “Well, that’s what Eve says in Genesis 3 , when the serpent deceived me, beguiled me, tricked me, that’s NASA.” No, the verb there is hishiani, “he deceived me.” And okay, that’s… so basically people who say nasha means deceive don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about.

I feel like “don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about” is going to be a theme.

It is, it is going to be the through line, yes, of so much of apologetics and particularly the bad apologetics.

So, so the claim that we’re looking at, the specific NASA claim, isn’t about nasha deceiving, but is really about believing NASA.

It is. When the claims of NASA support your dogmas, then they are the most authoritative voice in the discussion. And here it has to do with when Jesus was crucified.

Because some people will go onto a website, eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov, and there’s a page, the NASA eclipse website. And there’s a page that has lunar eclipses of historical interest. And they’ll share the screenshot of this list of lunar eclipses of historical interest. And one of them is 04343. And in the description of the event on this page, it says, “Crucifixion of Christ?” And so people are like, “NASA has confirmed Jesus’s crucifixion, right?” And then they’ll go to the accounts of the crucifixion where it says it got dark for three hours.

Right.

And most of them, it’s noon to 3:00 PM. The Gospel of John actually places the crucifixion earlier than that, but we ignore that because we’re trying to nasha some folks out there. But anyway, they say, “Well, this eclipse probably is why it got dark for three hours.” Now what’s the first thing that jumps out at you here?

I feel like you used a word early in this moment in this description, an adjective, and that might shed some—not light—that might shed some darkness on this.

Not enough to make the earth dark.

But no, no, you said it was lunar eclipses, did you not?

Lunar eclipse, yes. Like, and every time they show the screenshot, it says in big bold letters on the very top of the screenshot, “Lunar Eclipses.”

I mean, lunar eclipses are cool and all, but like, it’s not going to make it dark in the middle of the day because that’s not how eclipses of the moon work.

Right. So that’s going to happen in the middle of the day? No, it just…

And also, like, I do… you know, first of all, looking for a scientific explanation for what is overtly meant to be miraculous seems backwards to me. Well, it seems like the exact opposite of what you want to be doing if there were to be no scientific explanation.

Seems backwards to me.

Right. But it’s what we have been doing since the 19th century because since the Enlightenment there’s been… the scientific method has gained an awful lot of authority and has made an awful lot of advances, and people live longer and we have medicine and we put a man on the moon.

Right.

Because of science. And in the 19th century, when people started scratching their heads about the age of the earth and about evolution and things like that, it put the religious community on their heels because it was like, whoa, we gotta respond to all of this science. And what they did was adopt the scientific method in response and say, well, wait, wait, we can use science to prove this. We. It’s a, it’s a way to try to beat them at their own game. And, and not because they, they wanted to, but because they had to. They had no other choice. And so ever since the mid 19th century, it has been the, like, the goal has been to show that these things are rational, that these things are scientifically supportable. And all of this because if you just punt and say it’s a miracle, we’re not supposed to be able to explain it, then the other side is going to declare victory.

And that is intolerable. So you have to be able to say, no, no, we can explain. There was a gust of wind and the very shallow part of the Red Sea. The water was pushed back. Right. And that created the dry ground that allowed Moses to, to march across. You got to come up with naturalistic explanations to satisfy a naturalistic worldview. But yeah.

Can I just say, as someone who is, who has a naturalistic worldview, I don’t. I think that’s exactly the opposite of, of the, the position you should be coming from.

Because it’s so much less convincing. Well, in part because we know about lunar eclipses and what they can and can’t do.

Yeah. There’s not a lot of wiggle room.

Even if it was a solar eclipse, it, I’ve seen a full totality of solar eclipse. It lasts minutes.

It doesn’t max. Max seven minutes.

It doesn’t last three hours and not.

Less than three hours.

No, you’re, you’re just like, you’re not going to explain these things through natural means. And you shouldn’t like, the whole point is unnatural things happened here and that’s. And, and, and therefore we can, we can attribute them to an, a supernatural cause. It just seems so weird and backwards to me.

It, I, I think it is. But a lot of apologetics is. Well, one, the main goal of apologetics is not to convince skeptics. The main goal of apologetics is to make the people who already agree with you feel validated.

Because if they can think, because they’re on edge, they’re like, I have this belief, I’m not sure the data support my belief. And you’ve got to make a case. And as I’ve stated many times before, usually all it requires is ginning up the tiniest little sliver of not impossible because that gives them an opening, that gives them that little tiny space where they can live, breathe and have their being of. At least it’s not impossible. And, and that’s the main goal of apologetics now. It has to perform validity within the broader academic world, but it just has to perform it for its audience that does not know the broader academic world well enough to know if that is, these arguments are valid. And, and for those of you who don’t know, a lunar eclipse is where the sun is. Excuse me, the Earth is in between the sun and the moon.

Right.

And so the sun is shining on the earth and casting a shadow on the moon. And so what you’re seeing is the moon with a shadow going across it. Right.

With the Earth’s shadow, which happens to be much bigger. Subsume it.

Yes. And, and then the solar eclipse is where the moon is in between the Earth and the sun. And then, you know, the moon actually exactly matches the, the size of the sun when it crosses in front of it for.

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a fun little coinky dink. I love that.

Yeah. And so the other thing that, to know about this particular lunar eclipse is that in Jerusalem it started around 6:20 pm, right. Because lunar eclipses usually happen in the evening. Well, they happen in the evening or at nighttime and, or in the early morning. And so this was not at noon, this was not, didn’t last until 3:00 pm it was in the evening. And there was like things were already getting dark, so didn’t cause any unusual darkness.

That’s a good, that, that’s a good way to explain three hours of darkness is night time. If you want a naturalistic reason why it might be dark for three hours nightfall. That’s a good way.

Well, that just makes me think of the PJ Masks opening sequence, but that’s for another time and place. What were you about to say?

I have no idea. Let’s move on to our next thing.

Well, I just want to point out one other thing, though, before we go. Some people are like, well, maybe there was a solar eclipse. Okay, well, then the Gospels are all wrong.

Because the Gospels say that Jesus was crucified on the Passover, and the Passover is the full moon. And here’s a little thing about the full moon. The full moon is when the moon is on the other side of the Earth from the sun. It is literally and physically impossible to have a solar eclipse on the Passover. It’s the exact opposite of the new moon. So, yeah, if there was a solar eclipse that caused darkness for, you know, 20 times the physically possible length of a solar eclipse, it didn’t happen at the Passover. And so the Gospels are all entirely wrong about when Jesus was crucified. So.

So there’s…

Pick your thing what you think the Gospels are wrong about. Just go ahead and choose which one if it’s…

If you’re trying to come up with a naturalistic explanation.

Right. All right, well, I think that is a good… that’s a good moment for us to move into another weird claim.

There are more of them there.

Look, we could just do a separate podcast entirely about weird apologetic claims, and maybe we should.

Fair enough, fair enough.

But we’re not doing that just yet.

Right now we’re just going to focus on a few other things. Okay, let’s go to Isaiah, the book of Isaiah , chapter 40. Here’s the thing. For a long time in the world, it’s been a while since this was the case, but for a long time in the world, the Earth was assumed to be a plane, a flat plane.

Yes. Now, the idea, at least that was the conventional wisdom. We have evidence of awareness that things are of a spherical nature going back to probably the middle of the first millennium BCE, but not widespread knowledge of this.

Right. Yeah. And that was Greece. That’s its own… Right. We’re talking… I mean, that was the first…

Yeah, yeah. These are philosophers, the original, the OGs of the natural sciences who were measuring things and being like, well, that’s peculiar. Yeah. And coming up with a round Earth. But yeah, that’s not widespread knowledge.

Right. So I think we can assume safely, though it’s not 100% clear, that the authors of the Bible, particularly the Hebrew Bible, were assuming a flat Earth. And you know, if you look at the Genesis description of the Earth, you look at a flat… it’s basically because they’ve got that darn dome. The sky is a dome.

So talk a little bit about that. The Earth is… it’s got land and water and a dome over it and then more water on the other side of the dome. Am I right about that?

Yeah. In most of the creation accounts from ancient West Asia, creation is basically a process of separation amidst chaotic waters, the primordial chaotic soup. There’s a separation. And one thing that needs to happen is dry land needs to appear. And that either happens from the receding of the waters or it happens through the rising of the dry land. But one thing that you need for either of those things to happen is for space to be between the waters. And so in the Hebrew Bible, this happens. The waters of creation are already there. And God creates a raqia, which comes from a verb that means to hammer or flatten out. And the idea is, think of hammering out like a metal bowl or something like that.

And this raqia appears there. And God actually creates it. God says, let there be. And then instead of just saying and there was a raqia, God makes the raqia, and this suspends the waters above, so from the waters below. And this creates the space. And then later on, you have the separation of the waters. You have the appearance of the dry land. But that raqia is basically a large crystalline dome. This is why it’s blue and shiny and sparkly. And the waters above are suspended above. And then you have the waters beneath recede and you have the dry land. And this is where the idea of Leviathan or Rahab or the sea, the dragon, the archaic battle between God and the sea monster are kind of a metaphorical representation of.

But what you have here in the ancient West Asian conceptualization of the Earth is this notion that there’s more or less flat dry land. There are mountains on it, but more or less, it’s flat and it’s more or less circular in shape. And then beyond the dry land are seas which also are more or less circular in shape. And at the edge of the seas, you have the edge of the dome. So think of the Truman Show. If you take a boat out there far enough, you’re going to clunk into the—yeah. And that’s gonna be—that’s gonna be where the dome meets the seas. And then it’s gonna go straight up and you’ve got the skies above. And so the, this Earth, the land was thought to be flat and here.

Not that it ever says the word flat in reference to the Earth.

No, no, we, I, I think this is a situation where to talk about a flat Earth, you’ve gotta have a concept of a round Earth.

Right.

Because otherwise, you know, it’s just the Earth. Right. You don’t have to qualify it unless there’s an alternative. Yeah. So.

And yeah, it’s so funny to me, as you say, like, it’s been millennia that humans, some humans have known that the Earth was a sphere. It’s been hundreds of years since everybody agreed that the Earth was a sphere. And yet it does seem like there’s an—I mean, there definitely is a group of people who have sprung up who don’t like that idea.

And want to. And it feels like a lot of them, when I’ve drilled down on the flat earth people, very many of them are again trying to justify what they read into their Bible reading.

Yeah. Or it’s a part of some conspiracy theory where the government is hiding everything from them. And because I think they fantasize about this being the Truman Show and they enjoy being part of a community that kind of enjoys the effervescence of this asinine conspiracy theory.

Right. But however, there is a counter to that theory, theoretically a counter to it from the Bible itself. There are people who say, “Aha! The Bible also disputes the flat earth.”

Right.

And that’s where we get to Isaiah 40 .

Yes. And this is part of the apologetic that the Bible is inerrant. And so even in matters scientific, it’s going to be accurate. Therefore, the Bible promotes a globular—globular—a spherical notion of the earth. And thus we turn to the words of Isaiah chapter 40, verse 22. And this is part of Deutero Isaiah 40 , which we have talked about recently. Second Isaiah, probably written in the late 6th or 5th century BCE. And we have Isaiah referring to the circle of the earth. “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in.” So this is talking about God, obviously. Yeah. And we have some people who say this word circle in Hebrew means globe or sphere.

Yeah. No, it doesn’t. Just not for nothing, but like the word circle is—we have two words for a reason. I suppose a translator could just use a word that means sphere and just say circle. But that seems weird, but yeah, so go on with what you’re saying.

Yeah, so the, so this word occurs I think three total times in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 40:22 , Job 22:14 and Proverbs 8:27 . And if you look this up in a lexicon, it’s going to probably talk about a circle that would be drawn with a compass because you get it. The noun occurs anyway three times; you have a verb that means to describe a circle and in which one is it? I think, yes, Proverbs 8:27 uses the verbal root—excuse me, hok and hug, two different words. Hok means to inscribe or decree. And at the end of Proverbs 8:27 , it says, “in his inscribing of a hug upon the face of the deep.”

And the idea is the inscription of a circle like you might use a compass to create. In other words, it’s a flat circle.

Right.

And it is being inscribed upon the deep, basically to delineate the waters where the dome is going to encapsulate them in this circular shape. And so you don’t draw a globe on the waters. On the top of the waters, the face of the waters, you draw a flat circle. And so hug, if you look it up in, for instance, the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, probably the most commonly used lexicon for the Hebrew Bible, it refers to the circle of the earth and it says, “the earth conceived as a disc.”

It’s the disk dome theory of earth shaping.

I, yeah, so there you go.

You gotta imagine a, a snow globe. And in, you’ve got a little circle of, of land and some little mountains poking up in that little circle of land. And then around it is the waters. And then over it you’ve got this glass dome. And then you just go and shake it when, when the people start looking at naughty magazines and things like that. Because, because there’s nothing worse than that.

Or every now and then you got to just open up the, the water, the, the, the dome and let the waters come in and just drown everybody and then, then suck it back out.

And. Yeah, yeah, we’re starting all over. We’re starting from scratch. Well.

And finally I want to. I want to bring us back to Genesis. All the answers are in Genesis.

All roads lead back to Genesis ultimately. Yes.

Where in. In the fourth chapter thereof, there’s a moment where anyone who’s, like, reading for the first time and kind of paying attention, everyone just goes, hang on.

And that is the qanah portion. Excuse me.

We’ve got Adam, we’ve got Eve, they have a few kids and then two children.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, they have Cain and Abel, couple guys, and then suddenly wives show up. Talk a bit about that. Let’s just dive into that.

So chapter four, verse one begins, the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying. And this is the NRSVUE, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” And you. You mentioned that the NIV that you ran across something where the NIV had had a different rendering. What is the.

Yeah, yeah, the NIV on that. Let me. Let me find it. Hang on. I think NIV says with the help. With the help of the Lord, I have brought forth a man. Yeah, but I don’t think that the word help is in there, is it?

No, no, the word help is not in there. In fact, it’s. It’s pretty short in Hebrew, va-tomer, and she said, which qaniti is the first common singular qatal—there’s that word again—form of the verbal root qanah, which is generally associated with acquisition. You buy, you purchase, you receive, you get something. But there are scholars out there. I have argued this. I have a friend who has argued in print directly against this and directly against me, that it. That it never has a procreative nuance, or at least that it doesn’t mean to create whether or not it has a procreative nuance. But this verb occurs in Ugaritic as well. And there are certain times when it seems to mean procreate. And so she probably is saying, “I have procreated a man.” And then et Adonai.

And et here is a preposition that means with. So she says, “I have procreated a man with Adonai.” And so there are. That.

That could be sketchy.

Yeah, yeah. Adam’s like, now, hold on a minute.

Although it doesn’t seem to recall being.

A part of this later in the book.

We do. There is a moment where a woman has a child, theoretically, without her husband’s help. We do know that Jesus.

Yes. The. The Holy Spirit. Yes. Was the holy dove was moving too. Yeah.

And according so it’s not unprecedented, the idea of. Of a woman conceiving with God rather than with her husband.

But there are scholars out there who suggest that this perhaps betrays the preservation of some kind of archaic myth where the first woman was impregnated by God through sexual intercourse. I don’t think that’s the consensus view. The consensus view is that the idea here is that as with most childbirth and child rearing in the ancient world, it was so fraught with risk that any successful conception, gestation, delivery was attributed to the blessing of a deity. Sure. And so the idea is probably with Adonai’s support and help. Right. I have been able to get a man or procreate a man or something like that.

So even if the word for help is not in the original Hebrew.

Right.

It. It might be elucidating the actual meaning of the thing.

Yeah. Because that’s a choice. Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely a choice. And. And that is the translator saying, this is the direction we’re going here.

I mean, I just noticed that NRSVue also uses the word help in there.

Yep, it does. And so literally you would say, whatever she has done, she has done with Adonai. So with Adonai, I’ve brought forth a man or something like that. But, you know, that lends itself to some other interpretations. Sure. But while I was a scripture translation supervisor for the LDS Church, our. Our mantra was maintain the ambiguity. The. The idea being it is better to default to an ambiguous reading rather than make a choice. And one, restrict the options that the reader has. Right. But two, perhaps make the wrong choice. So, but. But anyway, we have Cain, then we have Abel. Now it mentions the conception of Cain. Never says, she then conceived Abel. It says, it says later she gave birth to or next she bore his brother Abel and.

And yalad to bear is actually the process of delivering the child.

Oh, okay.

So there. There is a reading out there that she conceived twins and then first gave birth to Cain and then later gave birth to Abel.

Oh, interesting.

They grow up. And. And as brothers do, they fought. Yeah. And in short, Cain murdered Abel.

And then God is like, the hell did you do that for?

I only have two of you. What are you doing?

And God in verse 11, now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then Cain says, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Today you have driven me away from the soil. I shall be hidden from your face. And I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the Earth. And anyone who meets me may kill me. And here’s where a thoughtful reader is going. Anyone.

There’s two other people.

There’s three of you. Yeah. You killed the fourth guy. You reduced the world population by 20, 25%. Yeah. Yeah. So you know everybody on the planet.

But you know how. Yeah. Could kill you.

And we don’t know how he feels about this, but maybe that’s what he meant. Mom’s gonna kill me. And then God says, no, no, no, no, no, no. Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance. And Adonai put a mark on Cain so that no one who came upon him would kill him. And the. The. Yeah. This has nothing to do.

Let’s not get into the mark of Cain. There’s a whole. We’re not going to.

We got to do. We got to do the. Yeah, we got to do the Curse of Ham mark of Cain stuff at some point. Take a note.

Yeah, I’m writing it down right now, anyway.

And. And then in verse. So verse 16 says, Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. So there’s. There’s a land that’s named Nod, evidently. And then the very next verse says, Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch, and he built a city and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. So. So Cain was evidently married. Yeah. And then his son built. He builds his son a city. And so again, the thoughtful reader is going to. They seem to be presupposing an already inhabited world.

Yeah. Very much like there’s a land of seemingly people.

Yeah. And then we have. We have all these people being born. And Ada bore Jabal. He was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal. He was the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and pipe. So we’ve got. We’ve got a bunch of different people who. Who seem to be etiological ancestors of. Of these different disciplines and industries and things like that. But. But yeah, it. It seems very clear. And. And then Lamech said to his wives Ada and Zilla, hear my voice, you wives of Lamech. Listen to what I say. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man, for striking me like there’re. There’re people around. So I made a video a bit ago where I said, hey, why does the author of Genesis 2 … 4. Excuse me, Genesis 4 seem to presuppose an inhabited world, whereas Genesis 2 and 3 seem to describe Adam and Eve as the only humans on the entire planet. They are the first humans to exist.

And that’s it. And, and my, and the answer is that these are two separate traditions. One, the Adam and Eve tradition in the Garden of Eden, that’s just the creation of humanity. Genesis 4 , this is a separate tradition. Whether it’s earlier or later, I, I don’t know. But these, these are people who live in an inhabited world. And so Cain is worried because there are other people out there and, and word spreads fast in small towns, and so he’s worried about other people killing him. And he’s got a wife because, you know, he’s got a wife. You took a wife when you became an adult in that time and place. And so they, they contradict each other in that regard. And an awful lot of people just can’t accept that. And so I had a bunch of comments that said, Dan, you ignorant slut, Adam and Eve had a bunch of other kids.

It says it in the text. Incest wasn’t a problem. And, and this, this always gets into these problematic notions of pure bloodlines and stuff like that.

It’s so funny to me, like the idea that like, oh, I’m very uncomfortable with two different stories being merged together in a way that doesn’t quite make sense, but I’m much more comfortable with like a whole lot of incest until we’re all, until the place is like densely populated. Like that’s more comfortable to you.

Yeah, yeah. And, and the, the argument is that the, the bloodlines were pure. They had not yet been corrupted by something. Right. And sometimes, yeah, the, sometimes it’s the flood. After the flood, the, the, the atmosphere was dirtier or something. I don’t know. Some people think that the, the Bene Elohim, the children of God in Genesis 6 , these people corrupted the bloodlines. They introduced impure blood. And so again, wildly problematic arguments, but not supported by any data. And, and Genesis 4 actually directly refutes that argument because here’s what happens in verse 25. So we had Adam. The human knew his wife. They did the horizontal mambo. And then we had Cain and Abel. Right? Verse 25 says Adam knew his wife.

Again, so in Hebrew, that’s ode. It happened again. And she bore a son and named him Seth. And this means appointed. For she said, God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel because Cain killed him. In other words, God has replaced the child that I lost because they’re like pairs of jeans. When you lose one, you just get another. But the text is pretty clearly indicating that the birth of Seth represents the third child total in toto that Adam and Eve have had.

Right.

And Seth is the replacement of, of Abel.

And that, that, that scripture comes after Cain has gotten.

Has met all of these other people and blah, blah, blah.

And, and Cain has already had a bunch of kids and his kids have had kids and all that in the narrative.

And after, and immediately after that, Seth has a son.

You know, so, and unless that son was born to his mama, that means, I think we’re meant to assume that Seth also gets a wife.

Yeah. And, and if we, if we go on to Genesis 5 and Genesis 5 is again, probably from another source. But if you want to read this all, if you’re arguing this is all univocal, this is all one continuous narrative. Genesis 5 , verse 3. When Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of a son in his likeness according to his image and named him Seth. So basically Adam was 130 years old when his third child was born, Seth.

Right.

The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years and he had other sons and daughters. So this is that explicit mention that Adam had other sons and daughters. And it is after the birth of Seth. The birth of Seth occurred after the death of Abel. So according to the narrative, these things all happen sequentially, consecutively. And in between child number two and child number three, Cain has a wife. Yeah. And Cain goes off to the land of Nod. Cain is afraid of strangers. Cain builds a city. Like all this stuff goes on when there should be a grand total of three people on the planet. So the text does not leave room for Adam and Eve to just be, you know, doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel.

Right.

And, and just generating all these other people for his children to, to marry and raise children with. So it’s, it’s another situation where the text is not the authority. The text is not the most important thing here. The most important thing is the dogma. The text is secondary. We will tell the text what it is and is not allowed to say because the text is just there to facilitate our dogmas.

All right, well, I, you know, I’m sure we’re gonna get some, some emails.

Some lovely, lovely messages, some, some comments.

In the, in the comments section over on YouTube, etc., but thank you, Dan. The apologists are, are mad and the–

Apologists are always mad.

That’s kind of their, that’s kind of their thing. But yes, if you friends appreciated these counter-apologetics, then please feel free to become a patron of our show over on Patreon. You can do that, uh, where you can get an early, ad-free version of every episode of the show, as well as you can gain access to the, the After Party, where that’s, that’s bonus content every week that we make just for our, our $10-a-month and over patrons. That would be patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you’d like to write into us with your angry emails, then write to somebody else. But if you want to write into us about anything else, go ahead and email us at contact@dataoverdogma.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

With Counter-Apologies

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology