The Curses of Cain and Ham

It still goes on today. There are plenty of folks today who try to find ways to read racism into the Bible. We’re still struggling with trying to figure out how to not read the Bible with the goal of hurting other people. So the vindicatory approach to the Bible is still very much in vogue. 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 combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Good. We’re going into combat mode for this one, man. When it comes to misinformation, this week we got some. It’s less in play, the misinformation part of this episode, than it used to be,

but the damage is done.

And it’s still out there. It’s still floating around. It’s still in the ether. So it’s time to. It’s time to dive into it. I like that.

Alrighty.

So in the first half of the show. The second half of the show, we’re going to. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re getting biblical-ish with some Apocrypha. So if you’re of the Catholic/Orthodox persuasion, then this is just Bible for you.

And if you’re Protestant, this is heresy. So let’s launch into our first topic with Taking Issue. All right. And this week, what are we taking issue with, Dan? That’s the big problem here.

We’re taking issue with a couple of curses that happen in the primeval history, which is Genesis 1 through 11, the very beginning of the book of Genesis . Because these curses have contributed to untold suffering, enslavements, death and persecution and prejudice. Yeah. So, yeah, we’re gonna look into the curse of Cain and the Curse of Ham.

Yeah. Which is funny because we call it the Curse of Ham. It’ll turn out to not be the Curse of Ham, but that’s. We’ll get to that. Let’s start with Cain and. And I’ll just remind our listeners sort of where we are in the story. Adam and Eve, there. There were just two people. They came out of the garden. We’re in Genesis 4 now. They make a couple of kids and Cain. And we talked about this just briefly a couple of weeks ago, I seem to recall, anyway.

Yeah. Genesis 4:1 .

They have a couple kids, and suddenly one of them kills the other one. Cain kills Abel. That’s bad. The Lord is unhappy about that very much. And. And pronounces some stuff about it. I’ll just. I guess I’ll just read it. Yeah. The Lord says, this is Genesis 4 , verse 10. It says: And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength. You will be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth.” Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face.

I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me." Then the Lord said to him, “Not so. Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Now, leaving aside the problem of who would come upon you, there’s only two other people left. Because we talked about that and how there aren’t just two people left. He goes and lives in the land of Nod, and there are a bunch of other people, and that’s a whole mess.

He’s already got a wife.

Yeah, that’s right. So that’s. But that’s not what we’re talking about. This mark that has been put on Cain. Talk to me about what, because what is it? Sounds like a good thing. Like, it sounds like the Lord is like, I’ll put this mark on you and nobody will kill you. You are unkillable. Now, that seems positive.

It would seem like good news.

He’s really worried about somebody killing him, but he certainly doesn’t like the idea. And the mark has turned into something incredibly bad. The Hebrew word there is ot. This could mean a sign, an omen. It is. We don’t know what it is. Some kind of mark is probably visible, so it’s probably something on his person in some way. Some people think it was a character, like, as in an alphabetic character or a logogram or a syllabic character, something perhaps from Sumerian or something like that.

It. It’s not remotely described in any way. It’s not like we are not given any sense of what this thing is.

Yeah, but it’s just supposed to identify him as the one you shouldn’t kill.

Right.

Otherwise, yeah. Bad things happen to you right now.

That. Okay, so that’s the background, huh? But it didn’t just stay like, oh, it could be this, it could be that. No, at some point somebody decided, hey, I know what it was. It was black skin or dark skin or something like that. How did that. Do we know how that came to be? Like, I, When I first. Because I remember hearing this, I remember this being told to me. And, and it’s just sounded like one of those things that we just knew for. For forever since the beginning of the Bible or whatever. But it’s not.

Huh? Really? The, the further back we go, the more and more people are talking about this as some kind of letter. However, in the medieval period, as European Christians are establishing their dominance over things like the slave trade and things like that, as they are setting out and making their way to other parts of the world and finding out that other peoples are already occupying other. Those parts of the world, there began to develop a concept of race, not as a question of descent or nation or language, which is how the word race was always used prior to this time period. Now it became a question of skin color. And you begin to have this. This hierarchy of the races based on skin color. And once you begin to have criticism of that, you need a defense of that.

And so this is when this interpretation begins to become salient and prominent, is, oh, we need a defense. Oh, well, guess what? It’s in the Bible, sucker. Yeah, I’m allowed to, because this is the curse that is put on Cain. This is dark skin. And this became really prominent once criticism of slavery became very, very prominent, particularly in Europe and in the United States.

Yeah. And it wasn’t just slavery, even. So. So, yes, this was widely used, especially in the United States during, during the periods of slavery. But even after abolition happened here in the United States, it was also used by segregationists who wanted to make sure that the, that the races stayed separate.

Yeah, yeah, this was.

It’s not a nice thing. And especially. And so was there any. Like, we talked about this. There’s really no biblical basis for assuming that it is a. That the mark of Cain was to do with skin color.

Oh, none whatsoever. The. They didn’t really have a concept of skin color as we understand it today in the Bible. There’s no part of the Bible that divides up any peoples according to skin color.

Right.

So that. That wouldn’t have been relevant to them.

Probably largely because everyone around them, everyone that the writers and readers of the Bible encountered would have likely had roughly the same skin color that they had.

And an awful lot of them, they do make note of Ethiopians. Oh, that’s. And they. Now, they don’t. They don’t suggest that this is a different race or anything like that, but Ethiopians are a people who they recognize look different. And there are. And the folks who would argue that the curse of Cain is relevant to racism would suggest that the Ethiopians are dismissed as wicked or evil or something like that in the Bible. And they’re not. They’re treated as other only in the sense that they are so far away and they considered everything close to them to be good and everything far away for them to be bad. So the only time you ever have any kind of moral judgment associated with the Ethiopians is basically they’re so far away, they’re losers.

Proximity as a, As a. As a measurement of evil.

Yeah, that’s. It really was down to that in a lot of ways. And a lot of people look at the Bible today and they think, oh, well, this is about. It talks about white skin in ways that value it, but it doesn’t. There’s no part of the Bible that associates any kind of value with any color skin, apart from ruddy skin, skin, red skin, as in flush with blood, that is youthful, that is vigorous, that is lively, that’s good skin to have, but that’s also kind of a. A temporary thing. And then when it talks about white, it actually is using a. A word that means shiny. And the idea is that it’s shiny like milk, not white like milk. Shiny like milk. In other words, you know, your complexion

is glowing, you’re glistening, you’re positively glowing.

And then the only time it ever talks about black skin is when it’s talking about certain diseases that create necrosis and things like that.

And then, you know, you have in the Song of Songs, the woman says, I am blackened and beautiful. The idea being that she is working class. She gets made fun of for being working class because her skin has been darkened by the sun. And but she doesn’t understand that as a harsh value judgment. But yeah, there’s no part of the Bible that says anything about skin color as a moral barometer.

So that’s read back in by folks who want to feel like, oh, yeah, white skin good, dark skin bad. But that’s something that postdates the development of the concept of race as a question of skin color. So it’s like 16th through the early 20th centuries is when that’s a thing. And really most prominently in the 19th century when the debates about slavery are leading to civil war.

Okay. Yeah. There is one, what feels like glaring problem to me with the idea of the mark of Cain being the origin of skin-based racial divides. Wouldn’t that have

to do with the fact that Cain’s descendants would have perished in the flood?

Everybody was killed. Yeah, the entire world was killed except for one family. And that, that does seem to be a big problem. That’s just a few chapters later in Genesis when we get to the story of Noah and the Ark.

Well, this is a fun story for Latter-day Saints is there’s a tradition that goes back to, I think it was Spencer Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness that popularized this story. But an early, one of the first apostles told a story. Evidently we don’t have their account. We have somebody else decades later telling a story about how this early apostle was on horseback in the woods and suddenly noticed that there was someone walking alongside of him, whose head was equal, was level with his head sitting on his horse, who was covered in hair and had a dark complexion and identified himself as Cain.

Right. And yes, that very Cain.

Yeah, the very Cain who had been walking the earth ever since. And his goal was to make humanity miserable or something. And this early apostle rebuked him in the name of Jesus Christ. And that evidently told the tale.

But and that’s how the legend happened. And this is true. Plenty, plenty of Mormons believe that Bigfoot is Cain.

And this happened in like Tennessee, but in like 1980 or 1981, there were some Bigfoot sightings in like central and southern Utah. And that it was The Miracle of Forgiveness in like 1970 or 71 that spread that story. And then in like, you know, a decade later, it’s like Bigfoot sightings. And all of a sudden everybody’s like, it’s that old Cain up to his tricks. And so folks who grew up in the 80s probably grew up hearing the story about Bigfoot being Cain.

I guess, I guess he was treading water through the, through the flood.

Well, there was, I think it was Bruce R. McConkie or somebody was famously asked if Bigfoot was Cain. And he was like, unless Cain turned into a duck during the flood, he died like everybody else.

Well, so even the Flood, though, is not a huge problem. If you really, really want to go hard with the racism.

Yeah, you have. You pick it back up immediately after the.

Because they’ve got another in with it. This is a story that we’ve also talked about a while back on the show. This is the story of the son of Noah, Ham, who—and this is, again, this is one of the most baffling stories for me. I’ve never really—even your explanation didn’t help me out all that much, which is that Ham sees his dad naked after his dad gets drunk. His dad gets drunk and passes out naked in a tent. Ham, his son sees it, runs out, tells his two brothers. The brothers come in and sort of tiptoe backwards and cover dad up with a blankie. And then when dad wakes up, when Noah wakes up, he is furious with Ham. And it’s not 100% clear what Ham’s great sin was in this.

But regardless of what it was, it seems—no matter what, the punishment seems outsized and wrongly attributed, wrongly ascribed for what happened, which is that Noah curses Ham and says that his son Canaan will be the lowest of slaves.

Well, there’s no curse of Ham at all.

Oh, that’s right.

Ham is absent from the narrative.

That’s right.

Once. Once Ham tells his brother what happened, Ham vanishes. Because it’s ostensibly Noah’s three sons are Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And they’re listed in that order, which means that’s oldest to youngest. Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And then Ham does this. And verse 24 says, When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, it’s like, whoa, that would have to be Japheth, right? Not Ham. He says, cursed be Canaan, who’s not even involved.

It’s. This is all very confusing.

Yeah. And. And likely the original story had three sons, Shem, Japheth, and Canaan, but Ham was probably written in there in order to round out the table of nations from Genesis 10 , which tries to account for the three main broad populations that they’re aware of. Basically, they’ve got Europeans, they’ve got Semitic peoples, and they’ve got African peoples. And so the theory is that Ham was just thrown in there.

But yeah, okay. I mean, it makes. Although I will say, just sort of fading into the background and. And letting someone else take the fall. Seems like a very middle kid thing to do.

Yeah. Ham’s like I’m out, peace and sorry, son.

So anyway, yes, Ham’s son Canaan takes the full brunt of the curse, confusingly. And, and, and the curse is that he has to be, he and his progeny presumably have to be slaves to the other sons.

Yeah. And, and the, the, the rhetorical point here is Canaan is, is the, the one who’s cursed. And so the Canaanites, therefore, they’ve been cursed by God. Turns out we’ve got to invade the land. We’ve got a genocide them all. We’ve got to take over. They’ve. We’ve got to enslave them whenever we have the opportunity because that’s what God said. So, so rhetorically, this is a later Israelite Israelite slash Judahite attempt to, to denigrate the, the other that is around them, their neighbor, in short.

Right.

And say, oh, turns out you were destined to be enslaved by, by us.

Of course we’re supposed to treat you badly. Look at what that one guy did all those, you know, so many years ago. We don’t know when it happened.

Yeah. And then when we had this development of, oh, suddenly we’re going to make race about skin color and we’re going to make enslavement based on skin color. Suddenly a new justification emerges where this is the curse of Ham. And we’re going to suggest that Ham is the African peoples. And, and which is weird because Canaan, from whom the Canaanites are supposed to descend, is the one child of Ham that is mentioned here.

Right.

And so, and, and elsewhere. And Kush is also supposed, supposed to be another son of Ham. And this is one of the ways that they say, well, Kush is Ethiopia. So that’s, so it’s the African peoples. And there have been some. This is what I find fascinating. If you go back in and look in history and you go all the way back to Philo, who is like end of the first century BCE first half of the first century CE Okay. Philo argues that the, the name Ham means black and means hot and means servant.

Okay. That’s a lot of different things for one syllable name to mean.

Well, when you, when you try to do the etymology of this, you find a bunch of different options. And rather than picking one, these folks went, it’s all of them at the same time.

Right.

Which is a common fallacy among, among eisogetes of the Bible. But it’s also a false etymology. Ham has nothing to do with any of those things. And, and, and, but up until the early 20th century, a lot of people thought Ham’s name meant black and meant hot. And guess where. Guess what Africa is? It’s hot, and it also means servant. Well, guess what that means? This justifies us enslaving Africans. But. And there’s. There’s some really great scholarship that has looked at the etymology and has said. Well, the. The first letter of the word Ham, which is Chet, which is kind of a guttural, pronounced letter, actually indicated two different consonantal values in early Hebrew. And when you go back and look at the Greek transliterations and translations, like you find in the Septuagint and things like that, that one letter is translated or transliterated two different ways. So those two different consonantal values are preserved in the Greek.

And when you look at that, the way they, that they spell Ham in the Greek, preserving that the original pronunciation is the different value from all the words that mean black or hot or servant. And so Ham’s name does not mean any of those things. But this was another one of the justifications for enslavement of black Africans, the notion that they were associated with Ham, because Ham obviously had to be associated with the African continent because everybody descended from Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And the idea is Shem is the Semites, Japheth is Europeans, and Ham was, is Africans. And in addition to the fact that there are a lot more people than that in the world right there, there’s this old theory that Shem came from an Akkadian word, shumu, that was supposed to—what was it supposed to mean? Oh, gosh, I forget what it was supposed to mean.

But the, the crazy one was that Japheth, they thought, came from the Hebrew word yafeh, which means beautiful. And so, of course, even in the Hebrew Bible, they were like those beautiful Europeans. More beautiful than us. Yeah. And then obviously, Ham was—was those—

Those obviously—Europeans are going to look for a reason why their name means beautiful.

And then I think there was another etymology that, that tried to associate Ham with, like, hypersexuality or something like that. Oh, my God. And they were like, “Yep, that tracks.”

And so that was, that just added to the fuel that you—you know, you have a bunch of things are coming together, right?

To point the confluence.

A confluence, if you will, to point these people towards even stronger conviction that all of this is justified and that black folks were destined by God to be enslaved.

Yeah. None of which is in the Bible. Although what’s, what’s very odd is that there’s plenty in the Bible through which to justify slavery.

Oh yeah. Slavery as a practice, yeah. The buying and selling and owning of other human beings is, is fully two thumbs up, approved from beginning to end.

And throughout the Bible.

So it’s, it’s just that racial justification that ends up becoming the bugaboo that they, that they end up making up all of this stuff over, which is so surprising. Like it’s, I mean it’s nice when the Bible is more progressive than the modern people because it’s—because it’s rare. But yeah, I mean the, the skin color doesn’t seem to be a problem at all in the Bible.

Yeah, there was, there was no concept at the time. The, the concept of race as a question of skin color is an invention of European Christianity from starting in the medieval period, but really picking up steam once you get into the 15 and 1600s. So yeah, it’s, it’s a problem.

Yeah. Well, if you—so if you’re out there and you hear a reference to the, the mark of Cain or the curse of Ham—or Canaan, because it wasn’t Ham. Like I can’t get over that. I have heard the phrase “the curse of Ham” for decades. For decades.

For decades.

And never once did anyone point out: Basically, he wasn’t, though.

Well, what about that part?

Yeah. You have to substitute Ham for Canaan and then you have to substitute black Africans for Ham’s line, which is supposed to be like Mesopotamians, Canaanites,

And Arabians and, and… and then a little bit of, of Ethiopia. And so it’s, it’s doubly problematic. And then we’ve got, we actually have support for that, that doctrine in LDS scripture. In the Book of Abraham, chapter one, Abraham has, has got to flee from the wicked priests. And it talks about a king and it says, “Yeah, broke down the altar of Elkanah and of the gods of the land and utterly destroyed them and smote the priest that he died.” And there was great mourning in Chaldea—so Mesopotamia—and also in the court of Pharaoh, which Pharaoh signifies “king by royal blood.” Now this king of Egypt was a descendant from the loins of Ham and was a partaker of the blood of the Canaanites by birth. So, so we’ve got both Ham and Canaan.

From this descent sprang all Egyptians. And thus the blood of the Canaanites was preserved in the land. The land of Egypt being first discovered by a woman who was the daughter of Ham and the daughter of Egyptus, which in the Chaldean signifies Egypt.

And probably the rest of.

Very explicit. I remember, I remember hearing the phrase “cursed and marked with darkness,” which I thought was biblical and was surprised to learn wasn’t.

No, no.

Yeah. Oh, and one other folk etymology. Kemet is the Egyptian word for Egypt. And there was an argument that when the Egyptian made its way into Hebrew, the K sound was aspirated and the T on the end was dropped. And so Kemet would have been pronounced “Khem,” and then the E dropped off. And so Kemet, which refers to the black lands, dark soil, basically, according to this etymology, is the same as Ham. So they also had that one to suggest. Yeah, this is definitely about Africans. Yeah. Which, yeah, as we can see, influenced an awful lot of people.

And, oh, there’s an awful story about when Brigham Young was trying to get Utah statehood. He said the curse of Cain required slavery. And he argued that—and this is off of a quotation from Wikipedia—he argued that because they did not have the right to govern the affairs of the church due to the priesthood ban, they should also not have the right to govern the affairs of the state, including the right to vote. He warned that if they made the children of Cain equal to them, they would be cursed. He also argued that if someone married a descendant of Cain, they would also have the same curse. Yeah.

So Brigham Young, for those of you who don’t know, was the second president and prophet of the LDS, the Mormon Church.

Yes. And profoundly racist.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, he was. He loved him some racism. Big, big fan. Well, there you go. Reading racism back into verses that don’t contain anything remotely like it. Which is very interesting.

And we talk about this from the 21st century looking back like you numbskulls, but it still goes on today. There are plenty of folks today who try to find ways to read racism into the Bible, try to read jingoism and xenophobia and anti-immigrant and even misogynist ideas about access to power and resources into the Bible. And so, yeah, we’re still struggling with trying to figure out how to not read the Bible with the goal of hurting other people. So the dickish approach to the Bible is still very much in vogue, unfortunately.

It is. And that we’re in a period of that worsening. So hopefully, hopefully we can chill that out. Yeah. All right, let’s move on to our next segment. This is Biblical-ish. All right. And what’s Biblical-ish today is a one-chapter book. It’s one of my favorite things when a book is only one chapter. That’s—oh yeah, that’s an easy read. This one’s called “Susanna, Don’t You Cry For Me,” though she does have reason to cry. And the Lord,

Yes, this book comes from—it’s one of the additions to Daniel. So Daniel, as we have talked about multiple times before, composed early 160s BCE. This is one of the stories that was probably just in circulation as part of the broader Daniel traditions’ lore, if you will. And it’s found in different parts of Daniel. Some places it’s in the middle, some places it’s in the end.

But this is Daniel fanfic. Yeah.

Well, and there’s an argument to make that it is as old as some of the other stories in Daniel, but it just wasn’t included in one of the early versions of Daniel. So, but yeah, I think.

Is it ever—I mean, I read that this was at one point just included as a chapter of Daniel in the early Greek versions.

The early Greek versions, yes.

It’s interesting that it was then extracted therefrom.

Well, it was not in the Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts that were considered more authoritative. So within—one of the things that led to the kind of separation of the Jewish and Christian canon was the fact that Rabbinic Judaism was like, “Yeah, we don’t want the Greek anymore, we’re just sticking with the Hebrew from here on out.”

And just as a reminder for, you know, for people who haven’t listened to our show all the way through with the most careful ears, why was this not in my Bible growing up, but was in my Catholic friend’s Bible growing up?

Well, that’s a long and fascinating story.

Just broad strokes, we’ve talked about the Apocrypha before.

Yeah, we’ve talked about the Apocrypha before in broad strokes. Like I said, Christians stuck with the Greek. The Septuagint primarily, that gave way to the Vulgate with Jerome around 400 CE. And the Vulgate was the authoritative edition of the Bible for Catholic and Orthodox congregations all the way up to the early 1500s. And one of the first things that was done as part of the Protestant Reformation movement was to translate the Bible into German. This was what Martin Luther did, only instead of basing it on the Vulgate, he went back to the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek of the New Testament. And when he noticed that the Hebrew did not have a lot of these things, he separated them off and called them the Apocrypha and said, we’re going to put these in their own section. Initially, he put them in the back along with texts like James and Hebrews and Revelation and said, these all suck.

I want to get rid of them. Now, that didn’t fly, but the separation of the apocryphal texts from the Hebrew Bible did fly, and that was the new Protestant norm. And so Bibles after that would be printed with an Old Testament, an Apocrypha, and a New Testament. And then around the 19th century, when folks like the British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society were busy churning out Bibles and trying to get them into homes all over Great Britain and the Americas, they decided, yeah, we’re going to make a smaller Bible without the Apocrypha. And that became very popular. And so by the end of the 19th century, the Apocrypha was just no longer a part of the Protestant Bible. So.

And yet left in Revelation.

Yeah, unfortunately. And Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, they continued to include the Apocrypha. Now they also were like, okay, we get it, the Hebrew is better. And so they started to translate from the Hebrew and the Greek rather than from the Vulgate, but they kept all the other parts of it in place. So this is one of the additions to Daniel that is in the Greek Septuagint and the Vulgate, but is not in the Hebrew.

Okay, so this is an interesting story. It’s just kind of a very straightforward story. No, nothing confusing about it or anything. Which is a relief. And well, I think

It’s a fun illustration of the fact that awful men have been scapegoating women for their own awfulness for thousands of years.

Yeah, yeah, we had the racism. Now we’re going to get into the sexism.

And that is through. So what happens in this is that there are some. So Susanna is just a beautiful woman who is married to a guy named Joachim. Joaquin. Anyway, Joachim. So, you know, they live in. I don’t know, where do they live? Oh, in Babylon.

Yes. And Joachim is very rich. He’s got a nice garden adjoining his house.

And he was the most honored of them all. So they used to come by his house all the time.

It’s a walled garden, meaning you can lock people in and or out of it. That will be useful later. And it is also big enough of a garden that you can hide in it. So those are points to remember for later.

In. So in this story, two elders are appointed as judges, which I guess, you know, means that they get to decide the fates of people. And it says something about wickedness coming forth from Babylon.

Yeah, it says that year two elders from the people were appointed as judges. And then it says concerning them, the Lord had said, “wickedness came forth from Babylon from elders who were judges who were supposed to govern the people.” And we don’t know what’s being quoted there. This may be. It sounds kind of close to a couple of things that are found in Jeremiah, but.

Okay, well, there you go. Both of these fellers hang out at Joakim’s house, apparently to do. To do their judging.

Their. Their bikes are on the lawn in the front. They don’t even knock anymore. They just come on in.

Yeah. And.

And if you. And if you need some judgment, go. Don’t go to their house. They’re over at Joakim’s place. So go to his place, get some judgment. And then. And then Joakim’s place.

And then everybody goes home at noon. Everybody takes a long lunch break, and it’s. And. And it’s all done. So a little bit of.

A Little bit of a siesta.

Which is great. Exactly.

Yeah. So then these two judges both independently develop major crushes on Susanna.

Which is, you know, fine. Except that they are intense about it. And one day. And it ends up becoming a problem. Yeah, it’s.

Yeah. And they are. They are disgusted with themselves and disgraced, but not about to stop.

Right, Right. And what ends up happening is they’re both. It’s one day. It’s like it’s lunchtime. Everybody’s headed home. Both of them are like, should we go? Let’s go home and have lunch? And she’s. And. And they’re like, yeah, okay, I’ll see you next time. And they all. They both go and they take. They both take a walk around the block and end up back, heading back to. To spy on Susanna in her garden. And they see each other and they’re like, oh, why are you going back? Oh, why are you going back? And eventually they confess to each other that they both are just wanting to spy on Susanna in the garden.

Presumably because she takes baths there and they want to peep. They are peeping Toms.

She. She gives him the tingles in a funny place. And so they are like, well, we got to do something about this. So we’re gonna team up. Yeah. And putting a team together to ogle and leer at this. This woman who is married to another man.

And let me tell you something, nothing goes well when men conspire to ogle things. Things get out of hand when that happens. So, yes, they’re about to. Susanna does indeed decide to go take a bath and tells her maids to go and lock the doors to the garden so that she’s not disturbed. But she doesn’t know the two fellers have been hiding inside the garden. Those old, old pervs are hiding inside the garden peeping. And as soon as the maids go out, this. This was weird. Then the two fellas run up to her. It literally says they ran. They got up and ran to her from their hiding place behind the trees or whatever. And they said. And this is verse 20. They said, look, the garden doors are shut and no one can see us.

We are burning with desire for you, so give your consent. Oh, that’s nice. You’ll learn later that’s not what they were really asking. Give your consent and lie with us. If you refuse, we will testify against you that a young man was with you and this is why you sent your maids away. Dun dun dun. So, yes, they are coercing her. Let us do what we want, have our way, or you’re. And. And the sentence, by the way, apparently for her having this affair that they’re going to pretend she had is death.

So she’s in a bad spot. Either do the thing. Either do the thing that she should be sentenced to death for according to the law, or just get sentenced to death for it. And. And that’s that.

And. And then she did. She did what Deuteronomy 22 says is advisable.

Right.

She cried out With a loud voice. And. And this is the part I. I find comical in verse 24. And the two elders shouted against her. And so I’m picturing her screaming and then go. And then just like, trying to drown her out, like. Ah.

Yeah. Only what they’re shouting is, you know, probably something along the lines of.

Who was that.

Boy we saw running away from here? That young whippersnapper. And why are we here? We’re. We’re just. I don’t know. But. Yeah, but you did something bad.

And says one of them ran and opened the garden doors. When the people in the house heard the shouting in the garden, they rushed in at the side door to see what had happened to her.

Yeah. That’s not like Susanna.

That’s so weird.

Do that.

She did that.

Oh, no, it’s me.

And why are you two trapped inside with her? That’s odd, too. I find all of this very strange. But.

Yes. And so they.

You two are elders and judges, so why shouldn’t we believe you?

Yes, they. They bring the people together. The next day they send for Susanna, daughter of Hilkiah, the wife of. Wife of Joakim. And she comes with her parents, her children, by the way, she’s a mother and all her relatives. And she was veiled. The scoundrels ordered her to be unveiled so that they might feast their eyes on her beauty.

Even when they’re, like, trying to sentence her to death, they still want.

Yeah, they’re still like, I want another piece. And everybody’s weeping and they. It says they laid their hands on her head. And through her tears she looked up toward heaven, for her heart trusted in the Lord. The elders said, while we were walking in the garden alone, this woman came in with two maids, shut the garden doors and dismissed the maids. And then a young man who was hiding there came to her and was intimate with her. We were in a corner in the garden, and when we saw this wickedness, we ran to them. Although we saw him have intercourse with her, we could not hold the man because he was stronger than we. And he opened the doors and got away. We did, however, seize this woman and asked who the young man was, but she would not tell us these things. We testify.

And everybody was like, sounds reasonable.

Holy cow. That’s a crazy story. She must be awful.

Yeah, yeah.

So. So then. So then she cries out with a loud voice to God and. And basically says, Listen, you know that this isn’t right. Please help. I need help right now. This is bad. And. And initially, it does say the Lord heard her cry. She’s about like. But this is happening as she’s being carted away to her execution. Like, they are ready to rumble with this thing. There is no there. There’s no appealing the case or anything.

Right.

They’re just gonna. They’re just gonna kill her. And suddenly, a hero emerges, and it’s Daniel.

And it’s Daniel. God stirred up the holy spirit of a young man named Daniel, and he suddenly cries out, I want no part in shedding this woman’s blood.

Yeah. And so I guess. I guess when it says a young man named Daniel, this is meant to be sort of the introduction of this guy.

Like, I guess so.

Presumably before he’s in Nebuchadnezzar’s service or whatever.

Guess so, because he’s. He’s just kind of walking around free.

He’s just a guy. He’s not. He’s not a prophet. He’s not a. A man of God. He’s just a kid who’s like, no, I don’t like it.

And they are like, pray tell, Daniel, what’s. What’s. What’s up?

What’s the deal, man?

Yeah. He says, are you such fools, oh Israelites, as to condemn a daughter of Israel without examination and without learning the facts? Return to court, for these men have given false evidence against her. So they all are like, oh, well, I. I can’t argue with that.

And, oh, yeah, we did forget to have a trial, didn’t we? I guess we should probably do that.

And. And the rest of the elders said to him, come sit among us and inform us, for God has given you the standing of an elder. Daniel said to them, separate them far from each other, and I will examine them. And so basically does the. So tell me when this happened. And, yeah, interrogates the one and then brings the other back and interrogates the other. And.

Yeah, which is it. Which is a technique used to this day in police procedurals throughout the land. Separating. Separating the bad guys and then having them tell their story and finding the inconsistencies therein.

Yes, I, I can imagine these authors, like, “Let’s check the Apocrypha. Maybe there’s some inspiration in there for how we should…” These writers of police procedurals.

Yeah, exactly.

And basically, Daniel’s like, “Gotcha.” And they are guilty. The whole assembly raised a great shout and blessed God, who saves those who hope in Him.

Yeah, he basically, he asks them, “Under what tree?” This is his big gotcha. He says, “Which tree were you sitting under?”

And one of them says, “The mastic tree,” and the other one says, “The evergreen oak.”

So, ha-ha, two different, two different trees. That means you’re lying now. You guys are the bad guys. Susanna is, is redeemed

and, and the people are like, “Look, we got to kill somebody today.”

“You interrupted a perfectly good killing. Let’s, let’s do that.” So, so then they kill those two guys instead.

Yeah. And thus innocent blood was spared that day. And Hilkiah and his wife praised God for their daughter Susanna, and so did her husband Joakim and all her relatives because she was found innocent of a shameful deed. And from that day onward, Daniel had a great reputation among the people. And so, scene and scene.

Yeah, it is, it is as neatly told and as neatly wrapped up as any biblical story I have ever read. Yeah, yeah, like, and by biblical standards, this is the most, the best told story that exists as far as I’m concerned.

There’s no prerequisite for reading this story. There are no characters you already need to know. It’s like, “Oh, we’re gonna introduce everybody. Don’t worry about it.” Yeah. And yeah, and it all gets wrapped up in a tidy little bow. I mean, I can’t promise you that it did not take me exactly 22 minutes to read this chapter. That would have been pretty slow reading actually, but yeah, it is. It is basically a sitcom episode. Yeah, a pilot, if you will. And leaving you wanting more. Tell us more about this mysterious young man, Daniel, who was, was so tuned into human behavior and was like, “I’m going to ask him about trees” is what I’m going to do.

They’re like, “Tune in next week for more in the Amazing Adventures of Daniel.”

Well, and, and then according to the ancient Greek version, next week was… tune in next week to find out, to find out what happens when priests steal the food and say it was a deity. And then we’ve also got the dragon. Yeah, that famous story that was next.

Okay, there you go. So, and by the way, I’m just going to note that there were two footnotes that were of, of sort of minor interest to me to do with the, the trees that, that they all, they both said they were under. All right, the, the note in the NRSVue, when, when the first elder says that he was under the mastic tree, he says it says the Greek words for mastic tree and cut are similar, which makes, which makes sense. When Daniel then after, after he says “under mastic tree,” he, Daniel says, “Very well, this lie has cost you your head, for the angel of God has received the sentence from God and will immediately cut you in two.” So I don’t…

So I don’t know what word that is, but there you go. Cut is the same. And then when the other guy says, “Under an evergreen oak,” the, the note says the Greek word for evergreen oak and split are similar. And, and then it’s a, and Daniel says to the other guy, “Very well, this lie has also cost you your head, for the angel of God is waiting with his sword to split you in two.” So there’s, there’s some clever wordplay going on also.

Yeah, yeah, that.

But only in Greek.

Like, yeah. And that, that sounds like this kind of literature. This is, this is somebody flexing their, their rhetorical muscles there with some clever wordplay.

Well, and… but it’s also an interesting sort of key to, like, key you into the fact that this was probably written, this was probably invented in Greek as opposed to in Hebrew. So, yeah, probably a pretty easy thing to see that it wasn’t original to the story of Daniel or, or, or, or crafted in the same time and place as the rest of the story of Daniel.

Well, at least, at least not, yeah, the Hebrew and the Aramaic portions, but it’s, it’s probably a story that was being told orally around the same time. There’s, there’s probably a lot of stories, many of which never got written down and many of which have been lost, associated with this Daniel guy. In fact, a hero named Daniel goes all the way back to Ugaritic.

Oh, really?

Yeah, there’s a… It’s Danel in Ugaritic, but there are stories about Daniel going all the way back then as well. And so.

Interesting.

Yeah, this was. This was just your, you know, imagine Hercules. You got all kinds of different stories about Hercules in circulation. Sure. Some of them better than others, none of them eclipsing the Disney masterpiece Hercules.

Oh, of course.

And the soundtrack. You can’t. You can’t hang with the Disney Hercules soundtrack. But it’s a. It’s a very similar idea. There are just characters who are just stories circulate about them, and people make up new stories and alter old stories and.

And you.

And we don’t need to talk about The Rock’s portrayal of Hercules. That’s. I shouldn’t even have brought it up. Forget I said that.

Right.

Portrayal of Hercules. That’s. I shouldn’t even have brought it up. Forget I said that.

I. And not unlike Hercules, what’s interesting is that, you know, you with a lot of these stories, you pick a one thing that is sort of central to this person, this character. So with Hercules it’s strength, right? Physical strength. And all of these stories that circulate are mostly just about how he can pick things up that are very heavy or, or beat you up. Yeah, with Daniel it’s the same except that it, except that now it’s like wisdom. Right?

So yeah, divine, he’s taps into God and. Yeah, yeah, has that divine wisdom.

So there you go. He’s got enough wisdom to, to figure out what, how to, how to separate the two witnesses before interrogating them and, and ask them tree-related questions. All right, well that’s it for the show. This Daniel has enough wisdom to know when a show is over. So I am going to, I’ll call it right there. If you would like to become a patron of the show, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. It’s really what helps, helps the show go. You can get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode. And at the right level you can also get access to the after party which we will be, which Dan and I will be jabbering on about immediately after we record this. And you can get all of that by becoming a patron over there on Patreon. If you’d like to reach us about anything, you can email us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Thanks so much.

We’ll talk to you again next week.

Week. Bye everybody.

The Curses of Cain and Ham

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology