Banning the Bible?

Eglon came immediately to mind. You want to talk about violence, that’s where the dude goes in. He’s a large man, he’s fat. And he gets stabbed all the way to the hilt so that the dirt came out. I remember the first time I read that, I was like, that is awesome. 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 Bible. How are things today, Dan?

Things are great. Things are good. You know, we survived the holiday season.

Most of us, which I think is a very good thing. Now we’re just, now it’s coasting until the light comes back. It’s just keep your head down and get yourself through it.

Yeah, we’ve got the—the first few months of the year are always weird, especially January because now all of a sudden I’m like, ah, taxes.

Don’t. Don’t say that. Don’t make me think about that.

But I’m also—look, like normally April, I’m like, I dread April. But this year my book’s coming out at the end of April. And so, like, 2023 was the busiest year of my entire life, and April and May of this year are going to be busier than all of ‘23.

Oh, we’re gonna.

I imagine so.

And I’m gonna get caught up in it. So there we go. Yeah, that’s gonna—it’s gonna be a lot of fun though.

We’re coming to a city near you.

Yeah, yeah. So, so don’t—don’t hesitate to reach out to us and let us know that you want us in your fair city, and let us know maybe—maybe even let us know a few venues that you think we could book that wouldn’t be too expensive and that would hold a hundred or two people.

I had, in fact, last night I was on a live and I had a few people say, “I haven’t heard Philly yet.” So I have not been to Philadelphia in a long, long time. It’s a great city. So that—that was a new one. But yeah, we’re gonna have to make plans for that shortly.

In the meantime, however, we haven’t booked anything.

No, nothing. Nothing is booked. But in the meantime we have a show to record. We do, we do. From what I understand, we’re gonna be

doing two, I think really fun topics this week.

Both of them under the same category. We’re calling these segments Above the Law. Yes, we’re gonna—we’re gonna get legal first. We’re gonna talk about what you have told me is called the Covenant Code.

The Covenant Code.

And you’ll—you’ll explain that. And then we’re gonna talk about Book Bannon, who’s related to Steve Bannon.

Yeah, I was gonna say. That’s his brother, right?

Yes. We’re going to talk about banning books. And there are—there are laws happening all over these United States. And we’re going to talk about the book that this show is about might run afoul of some of those. And we’ll get to that.

Yeah. It has run afoul in at least one instance, and in multiple cases. We’ve got to do this over again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but let’s start off with Above the Law.

And—and here I picture like a freeze screen. I don’t know if you’ve seen Above the Law, but like Steven Seagal throws somebody through a windshield of a car and then it’s like, shows him like looking through the windshield and it’s like a freeze screen.

It’s like, “Above the Law.”

And so that’s what I—I get a lot of mental imagery in my head. Like every time I say Covenant Code, for—for some reason I picture Samwise saying, “share the load.” That little slow-motion close-up of his mouth, only he’s going, “Covenant Code.” I don’t know why. Maybe, I don’t know, it might be because we watched all of the Lord of the Rings shows over the holidays with my 12-year-old, and I just—I just got her started on Rings of Power last night, and now I’m—now I’m thinking Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire.” Oh, I probably can’t sing that, but

this is a great view into Dan’s brain.

It’s a mess in there. But anyway, the Covenant Code is—is a term that scholars use for a more or less consistent collection of texts in Exodus. The broadest designation would cover Exodus chapter 20, verse 22—so right after the end of the Ten Commandments—all the way through to chapter 23, verse 19. But a smaller designation, more restricted look, would be chapters, chapter 21, verse 1, through chapter 22, verse 16.

This is probably exilic in its final form.

You’re talking about Exodus 20 and.

Yeah, yeah.

The first part of Exodus 20 , you’re claiming.

Hold on, wait a minute. Let me just be clear about this. You’re claiming that God did not give those laws to Moses on a rock in, in on Mount Sinai.

That is what the data indicate. And, and you know, you can look in Exodus 24 . I, this is one of the ones I, I love pointing people to. It’s like, so Moses went up the mountain. Turns out Moses had to go up the mountain. So Moses went up the mountain anyway. Then Moses went up the mountain. Like, it’s, it’s a very choppy narrative. But, but right, so the Covenant Code is probably the earliest bit of legislation that we have in the Hebrew Bible. And things in Leviticus, things in Deuteronomy, even some stuff in Numbers. These are probably later renegotiations of what’s in the Covenant Code. They’re expanding on it. They’re, they’re changing some of it. And we’re going to, we’re going to talk a little bit about a few of those instances today, but okay, but we’re going to start. I think it would be a good idea. Did you find anything in chapter 20 that you wanted to look at or did you want to get into 21?

I mean, most of, so most of chapter 20 is what we know as the Ten Commandments. And people can refer back to our episode about that if they want to hear us talk about that. And then the very end, it just talks about sort of the, the altar and how you’re supposed to make an altar. And you’re not supposed to chisel it. It’s just a rock.

Well, and I like, I like verse 23. You shall not make gods of silver alongside me, nor shall you make for yourself gods of gold. It’s like, well, we know. You just told us that.

You literally just got so mad at us about that. We got it.

And that’s, and that’s the very first commandments from the Ten Commandments, which just came 20, 20 verses earlier, so.

Right, exactly.

You can tell there’s a bit of a literary seam here. Yes.

Yes, indeed.

And, and that seam continues, I noticed, because in the next chapter there was a lot, I don’t remember what it was, but it was basically one of the, one of the Ten Commandments just being reiterated.

Yeah. Yeah. In a different way. Yeah.

So, yeah, I think we can skip the altar stuff.

People tend not to do altars much anymore, so we can, I think we can move past that, though. It seems to have been very important at the time.

Yeah. How, how the altar is supposed to be made. Hewn or unhewn? What’s your pleasure? God was like, definitely unhewn. I’m an unhewn guy.

How. Don’t you dare hew.

If you hew, you’re out. All right, let’s move on to chapter 21. Let’s talk about, it starts with slavery.

It does.

And the law. And you know, if you’ve been listening to the show or you’ve even read the Bible at all, you know that the, the law is not going to be about how slavery is bad.

Right, right. That was part, that was on the five commandments on the third tablet that Moses dropped. Right. God is like, I’m not doing this again. So, unfortunately, slavery is evil, got blotted out.

Instead we have a whole bunch of laws about how, like, it’s not even about how to treat your slaves. It’s about what to do if things happen to your property.

Yeah. And it starts with, when you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, but in the seventh, he shall go out a free person without debt. And basically, this is debt slavery. And so it’s like he serves six years. No matter what the debt is, it’s wiped out. And if he comes in single, he goes out single. If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him.

So, and. And people are like, well, when. How often does that happen? This is really the only instance where a woman could be a debt slave because they don’t really have much property of their own. They’re not going to get into their own debt.

This doesn’t even sound like a debt slave, because it’s a man selling his daughter well, to.

To cover his debts.

Yeah. So this is. Ooh, I can’t. I can’t pay this bill for, you know, re. Renovating the bathroom is like, well, you got that daughter over there. He’s like, ooh, how about the younger one? Yeah. And so according to Exodus 21 , only male debt slaves go free in the seventh year. Female debt slaves are perpetual debt slaves. And, and the reason seems to be that they’re basically concubines or sex slaves. That’s the only reason you have a female debt slave. And verse eight says, if she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people since he has dealt unfairly with her. And it’s so weird. It is very weird. But there are some things to note from this. So this in. There are some protections that are being offered here. So she’s a perpetual debt slave as a concubine or a sex slave, but he’s not allowed to sell her to a foreign people, which would suggest that he could sell her to other Israelites.

Yeah, she. She could enter the slave trade as a perpetual debt slave and then get sold to other folks.

So it also suggests that there was a thriving, like, foreign slave trade. Yeah, just. Oh, yeah, like that was just. It’s clear that this was very common in that era in that. In, in, in that area.

Yeah. And then we have a few more verses and. And yeah, it makes it sound like everybody’s in on this. This is just something that’s. That’s going on. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as a daughter. Basically. If he’s going to make her his concubine, he’s got to treat her as a wife. And if he’s like, man, if he doesn’t treat her appropriately, then. Then there are some protections offered to her. He can designate her for his son. He has to treat her like he would his own daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. In other words, he can’t, you know, demote her if he takes on another wife. And if he doesn’t do these three things, she goes out without debt, without payment of money. In other words, there is a circumstance where she is released and that’s if her master doesn’t treat her right, but

she is still like. I mean, and women as property is kind of a theme that runs through this, even if they’re not debt slaves, like women are our kind of property, you know.

Well, marriages. And we talked with Jennifer Bird about this. Marriage is taking a woman. It’s purchasing her sexual availability and her procreative capacities from another man, basically.

Right. And we get to that. We get. I. I mean, because immediately after that we. We start to get into some. Well, immediately after that we’ve got violence and we should get into that. Yeah, let’s. So let’s do that first.

This is where we get. I. And I think we talked about this when we. We discussed abortion a while back. And one of the, one of the relevant passages that we talked about is here because there’s a whole bunch of stuff about like, striking a slave. When a man strikes his slave,

a slave, male or female. So. Yeah, and I want to talk about those verses when, when we’re done.

Yeah, we’ll.

We’ll.

We’ll get right back to that. Let’s just do get into this. This moment where.

Oddly, it’s the weirdest thing. It’s not if you, if you purposefully punch a pregnant woman. It’s if two people are fighting, they happen to be in a fight, and a pregnant woman’s walking past and gets like, whacked and falls down and she’s fine, but she miscarries the baby. Then they have to pay. Then you have to pay some money for it. But if she’s not fine and she dies, then eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, right hand. Yeah.

Burn for burn. Yeah. Lex talionis, or talionic justice, which is the retributive justice due to the perpetrator what was done to the victim. Right. Which, as we’ve talked about, indicates that a fetus was not considered a full legal and moral person, but was more treated as property. And there’s an interesting thing there. It says there the very last clause of verse 22, and the NRSVUE says paying as much as the judges determine. In the KJV, it says, the woman’s husband will lay upon him and he shall pay as the judges determine. Elsewhere we have, he will pay what the court decides. And this is interesting because when it comes to the life of an enslaved person, there’s a socially standardized value, 30 shekels. That’s what it is. Enslaved person, 30 shekels.

Fetus court determines, which suggests that there’s no socially standardized value. But the husband is probably the one who is making the determination. He’s like, I’m going to need, I’m going to need at least 350. And then the court is there to arbitrate to ensure that it is not exorbitant. Most likely. Yeah, it’s, it’s not perfectly clear because the word there that they’re using, pelilim, is a very rare word. And so we’re not exactly sure what’s going on there, but that seems to be what that means is, hey, this is, there’s no standardized value. The husband’s like, I was really looking forward to this one, so I’m gonna need a little bit more. But it is, yeah, it’s a pretty, it is a pretty harsh system.

Yeah. And, and gets into some. Like, the, the other theme that we’re going to notice throughout all of this is that, is that this code gets into weird minutia that seems like, so vanishingly rare.

Like, how often are two guys, two people gonna be fighting and this pregnant woman’s gonna walk by?

Right.

Like, how, how often could that possibly have happened?

Well, and this gets into the famous Goring Ox Law. And that’s, that’s in this, in this chapter. But one of the things that it highlights is that the Covenant Code is not an original composition. There were not some Israelites who were like, you know what? I, I got an idea. Let’s write all this down. And it certainly did not descend ex nihilo from the heavens on a tablet or anything else. They’re actually borrowing from Hammurabi’s law. So these are, these laws are being adapted and adopted from Hammurabi’s law. There’s a great book that discusses all the evidence for this by a wonderful scholar named David Wright called Inventing God’s Law. And he goes through and shows that you can start at the beginning of Exodus 21 , the beginning of the Covenant Code, go all the way through to the end. And every law has a parallel in Hammurabi’s law. And a lot of them are in the same order.

They appear in Hammurabi’s law. And he even talks about they switched order here and goes into why. Like, it’s a, it’s a phenomenal analysis, but this seems to be an alteration of one of Hammurabi’s laws. It was, let’s see, it was law 207. 206, 207. There’s men fighting. There’s an injury, but there’s also associated with that. What happens if 209 through 214 is what happens if a man strikes a woman and causes a miscarriage. But like, the, the penalties are different depending on the social status of the victim. Okay, so. Which is something that we’re going to see in the Covenant Code as well. But there’s the Goring Ox Law. It’s like what happens if an ox gets out and gores somebody? If it’s never happened before, then the owner has this penalty. But if it’s happened before and the owner’s been warned, then it’s life for life. But if the victim’s family is like, we just want to fine them, then they can fine them and they save their life.

And it’s like were oxen just running rampant in the streets in these, in these societies. And Hammurabi’s law is from a thousand years before the Covenant Code.

I was going to ask you to sort of give us a, oh, yeah, on, on all of that.

Yeah. So Hammurabi’s law is much earlier, around 1800-ish BCE. The Covenant Code is probably somewhere, though its earliest layers are probably 8th century, 700 to 800 BCE, so just around a thousand years later.

Yeah. Literally grabs the other guy’s genitals to help him win, help her husband win. What… what are we talking about?

Yeah, well, and it’s because these were not… these laws were not like on-the-ground, actual jurisprudence. There’s a famous saying: every stupid law exists because somebody did something stupid. Not necessarily when it comes to these laws. This actually probably originates in literary exercises and in rhetorical exercises. They’re probably… and this is the case with Hammurabi, for instance. Like Hammurabi’s law, it starts off, you know, “great king, he did all this, he ensured justice, ensured that there was justice for the orphan and the widow and the oppressed.” And then you go look through all of Hammurabi’s laws, and it’s like, nope, not a single law says anything about justice for the orphan or the widow. It’s rhetorical. And you have… and those are just kind of your prototypical victims. They’re the canaries in the coal mine of justice.

The orphan and the widow. And so it is basically putting on display how just and ordered your leader is. They’ve thought of everything. Well, surely they haven’t thought about what happens if an ox gets out and gores somebody and the owner has already been warned. And they’re like, “No, we got that. That’s in there too.”

Wait, wait, wait. What if my donkey falls in a ditch? Then what?

Yeah, yeah. And then you’ve got your “But wait, there’s more.” We also thought about what happens if the ox gores an enslaved person or the ox gores the child of a citizen. Like, it is an attempt to show how ordered and just and righteous the sovereign is. And with Hammurabi’s law, it’s Hammurabi who’s the sovereign; in the Covenant Code, it’s God.

Right.

But it’s basically trying to show off that God has thought of everything, even…

And it’s like, we’re not going to actually go event by event through all the possible iterations of a given law, but we’re going to drill down to the bedrock of some weird stuff just to make it seem like we’ve thought of everything.

It would be nice if just at the beginning of all of this, there was some text that just said something along the lines of, “Here’s a smattering of representative laws that we just… as examples of things that might come up or whatever.” Because it makes it seem like the way that this is all worded makes it seem like here is the totality of our laws.

Things. Yeah, things.

Things that are important to us are…

Slavery, violence, animals falling into holes and goring people. I keep mentioning that one because that’s my favorite one. We’ll get to it later.

Well, and you have all these opportunities to do this because, like, they start this off very similar ways multiple times. Like Exodus 20 , verse 1: “Then God spoke all these words.” And then you get to the beginning of the Covenant Code: “Then the Lord said to Moses, thus you shall say to the Israelites.” And then you get to chapter 21, verse 1: “These are the ordinances that you shall set before them.” Like they repeatedly are saying, “here are our laws.” And you know, that is one of the reasons that scholars are like, “Okay, it seems like they just stacked up a bunch of different collections.”

But yeah, you don’t see “including but not limited to,” right? They needed a lawyer to proofread this and be like, “Well, you’re going to run into problems here.” And that’s what like Deuteronomy is for. Because you get into Deuteronomy and they’re actually repeating a lot of these laws and improving on them. So like, you know, the male debt slave goes free on the seventh year. The female is perpetual. You get to Deuteronomy 15 and it explicitly says male and female slaves go free in the seventh year.

No, no, no. I was just going to say that you, you wanted to go back to some of the violence earlier in.

Yeah, you know me, I’m all about violence. But Exodus 21:16 , I made a video about this recently. Whoever kidnaps a person, whether that person has been sold or is still held in possession, they shall be put to death. That’s what the NRSVUE says. The Hebrew is literally, and the stealer of a man, if he sells him or is caught in his hand, shall be put to death. And, and this is interesting because people who say, well, the Ten Commandments says do not steal. A lot of people say that that is prohibiting kidnapping.

Oh, interesting.

Now the verbal root is the same, but ganav. But here it’s, it’s stealing a man. So it’s, it’s more explicit. But again, they’re repeating things. If that does mean kidnapping. But it says ish, gonev ish or ve-gonev ish. That is a technical term. Throughout the Covenant Code, when they say ish, they mean an adult male Israelite, a citizen.

Because when they, when, when they want to talk about kids, they’ll talk about a son or a daughter of an ish. When they want to talk about a woman, they will say an ishah. When they want to talk about a foreign person, they will say a nakhar. When they want to talk about an enslaved person, they will say an eved. Like they’re very clear about who these laws apply to. And here it’s about kidnapping, specifically an adult male Israelite. And this is another instance where in Deuteronomy they improved on it because they, maybe that’s a little ambiguous. And so in Deuteronomy it says anyone who steals one of their brethren, one of the sons of Israel. So they’re, they’re more explicit about that. And, and the ambiguity here is what leads some folks, Frank Turek comes to mind, other Christian apologists to say, no, no, the slave trade was prohibited because it says right here, you can’t steal a person to sell them. And I, I hear that all the time about how. No, it actually, in the very same chapter that it tells you what you can and can’t do to your slave and how long slaves serve.

It evidently entirely prohibits the slave trade. So. Right. Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s a bad interpretation of that passage. But another example of something that we find in the Covenant Code and we find revised in Deuteronomy.

And that, you know, it’s funny because that one, Kidnapping a person against their will, holding him or, or selling him. Death penalty seems strong to me, but I get it. But that is sandwiched between two other verses that hold the death penalty.

One of them being whoever strikes father or mother shall be put to death. That seems a bit strong. I know several people who got in fights with their dads.

It doesn’t seem like I know several people where. That was like a sport for their dad. Yeah, yeah.

And then the, the other one. And this is. This one kills me. Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death.

I, I don’t know what curses means in this case, but it just seems like death seems like a strong thing no matter what.

Yeah, they’re, they’re, they’re pretty trigger happy when it comes to the death penalty.

Here. But these are. And again, this is a repetition of honor your father and your mother so that your days will be long in the land from the Ten Commandments. Now it’s like, let’s get into the nitty gritty of this. You hit your parents, you die. You curse your parents, you die. Like, it’s pretty strict. Yeah.

Although that’s followed directly by when individuals quarrel that we. We’re off the father, mother thing. And one strikes another with a stone or a fist so that the injured party, though not dead, is confined to bed, but recovers and walks around outside with the help of a staff. This is a very long.

Like if.

Then one of those drill down to the bedrock ones.

Right. Then the assailant shall be free of liability, except to pay for the loss of time and to arrange for full recovery. I just like. Like, you can’t. You can’t get in a fight with mom or dad, but, boy, you could. You could hit a guy with a rock, and if he recovers, you got to pay him for some time lost or whatever.

Yeah. And then the one after that is like, oh, what if it happens to an enslaved person?

So, like, see, we thought of everything, and this is the one where it says, when a slave owner strikes a male or female slave, again, they’re very careful about this with a rod, and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. And it doesn’t say death penalty, it just says punished. And it’s likely because if it is a debt slave, then it’s probably an Israelite, and they want to treat that crime more harshly than if it is a chattel enslaved person who was a foreigner. They don’t really care as much about the life of the foreigner, so they’re kind of hedging their bets by just saying, yeah, there’s a punishment. You know what to do. And then the next verse says, but if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment, for the slave is the owner’s property. And this is a. This is a passage that gets interpreted a couple of different ways because most scholars would say in the Hebrew, the idea here seems to be that if the slave lives for a couple of days and then dies, then he’s free of punishment.

And it says, for the slave is the owner’s property. The idea being, hey, man, that’s his property. He relies on that slave. If that slave dies, it probably wasn’t intentional. Like, if he beats him to death, that seems premeditated. It seems intentional. But if he’s like, you know, this is. This is an instructional beating, and then

you gotta be able to beat him. I don’t like, what are you gonna do?

I mean, he doesn’t listen, right? So. But then it seems like it’s accidental and it’s punishment enough that he has lost his property. And so I was like, well, we’ve already deprived him of his property, so, you know, all good, no harm, no foul. But the other way to interpret that is to say if the slave recovers in a day or two. Very similar to the previous passage, but the Hebrew is very different. It does not say if the slave recovers in a day or two. So, yeah, again, Rough times.

Yeah. Next we get. Next we get to some. The. Some ox and stuff. We’re. We’re talking about property. This is where we get the. The ox goring a man or woman to death. You talked about.

I love one of the, like, seven verses.

Yeah. It’s. It’s way more intense than, like.

It’s five verses, I think. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s. It. If we’re going by pure word count.

This is by far the most important thing in all of Hebrew law. Like, absolutely. Just, like, forget about it.

Thou shalt not kill. Not a big deal. But let’s talk about oxen.

Yeah. For a minute. And even with the. With the kidnapping, it’s like, don’t kidnap a man. And here it’s like, well, the ox might gore a man if the ox gores a woman. If the ox gores a child, if the ox gores an enslaved person. But with kidnapping, it’s like, we really only care about the man, so. So we’re not worried about the others. Very inconsistent in the scope of their legislation here.

By the way, in case anyone’s wondering, if the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall pay to the slave owner 30 shekels of silver and the ox shall be stoned. They’re going to stone the ox. I just. That’s a spectacle I. I hope never to see, I’ll say that.

Well, if you go to Leviticus, chapters 18 and chapter 20, we have our prohibitions on bestiality. And there the. The human participant as well as the animal are. Are both required to. To be killed. So. Yeah, you. It’s. It’s quite a spectacle to see. You know, somebody pulls a donkey out into the town square. What happened? Uh, it was, you know, some bestiality. So. So we’re gonna kill the donkey. Yeah, that’s what the law says.

That’s what we’re. Yeah. Verse 33 talks about. This is the one that I keep referencing because I love it. If someone leaves a pit open or digs a pit and does not cover it and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restitution, giving money to its owner, but keeping the dead animal so you get something out of it.

What are you doing? A dead donkey.

People are digging donkey traps apparently as well. Happening.

Yeah. It’s like, what if somebody’s kid falls into it? Like, it doesn’t say anything about that.

They can’t help. Look, if the kid’s so dumb they fall in a pit that’s on them.

It shouldn’t have been standing there. Yeah.

Let’s get to Exodus 22 really quickly, because now we have laws of restitution.

Which are all about, like, very various scenarios that might. That probably won’t, but might happen.

Yes. Very detailed and oddly specific scenarios, including,

but not limited to if your field is grazed over and you let your livestock loose to graze in someone else’s field. What to do.

If fire breaks out in a field, what to do when someone’s, you know, if they, like the. Like if someone. If you keep your. If you let your neighbor take care of your. Your money or goods for safekeeping and then it’s stolen, how often could that have been coming up? Like, how many people are doing. Although it’s actually a good deal? So, like, I think everybody probably should have just let their neighbors hold their. Everybody just trade goods and hold on to it for your neighbor. Because then if the thief is caught, they have to pay double.

I don’t know why that doesn’t apply. If the stuff like is, if the thief steals it from your house, they just have to pay it back, but if it’s from your neighbor’s house, they have to pay double. Is that what I’m getting? I just. It’s very confusing.

Well, and. And this is an interesting set of passages too, because we have a bit of an ordeal as the. To resolve this, because.

Right.

So it’s. You’re letting somebody borrow something, and they’re like. You’re like, hey, can I have my lawnmower back? And they’re like, oh, sorry, it got stolen. And they’re like, what? And in verse eight, it says, if the thief is not caught, in other words, you don’t have evidence of this. The owner of the house shall be brought before God. Now, the word here is Elohim, which can be the singular God, but can also be gods to determine whether or not the owner had laid hands on the neighbor’s goods. And most scholars would say, this is an ordeal. You’re basically trotting them before the divine image and say, yeah, tell it to God’s face. And you’ve got to be able to say, I swear according to all the things that I didn’t take this. The idea being, hopefully they’ll be too scared to lie to God. And so if they can. If they can swear the oath before God and, you know, lightning does not strike them where they stand, then they must be telling the truth.

But it says in. In verse 9 in the English, and this is verse 8 in the Hebrew NRSVUE. In any case of disputed ownership involving ox, donkey, sheep, clothing, or any other loss of which one party says, this is mine. The case of both parties shall come before Elohim. The one whom Elohim condemns shall pay double to the other. Here’s the interesting part. The verb condemns there, that is, of which Elohim is the subject, is plural. It says the gods condemn.

The one whom the gods condemn shall pay double to the other. And we. We actually have something very similar in the previous chapter in Exodus 21 about another ordeal that somebody has to. To do before Elohim. And so I think it’s interesting that this, again, earliest legislation in all the Hebrew Bible, we have indications that they are doing ordeals before almost certainly images of multiple deities, not just.

Which is another reason to believe that, like this is separate from Exodus 20 and the idea of thou shalt have no.

No other gods. Yes. Yes. Separate.

And earlier. And earlier.

Yeah. The end of this chapter has the. I think the. The. The clearest indication we’re dealing with an incredibly early set of laws here. Which is what. Which is what the child sacrifice requires.

Okay. Right.

Shall we hop to that, or.

Yes, let’s hop.

We’re running out of time here, so. Yes, hop away. We have talked about it before.

Yeah. But the… the tyranny of that darn clock. Okay, so this is in English… this is usually verses 28 and 29 in Hebrew. Or… no, this is usually verses 29 and 30 in Hebrew. It’s verse 28 and verse 29 NRSVUE. “You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep. Seven days it shall remain with its mother. On the eighth day, you shall give it to me.” And so the question is, what does this mean, “give it to me”?

Okay. I… I gotta not quote song lyrics. Uh, because there was a Disturbed song that… that I thought would have gone really well right there. Anyway, the… because whatever giving is going on here, it’s the same giving that is supposed to happen with the oxen and the sheep who have to be… who are left for seven days with the mother before being taken away. And… and something is done with them. Yeah. Now… yeah, this—

Before we talked about this. Either you give your firstborn into priesthood, and then also you have to give your sheep and your oxen into priesthood.

Yes. The animal priesthood.

The animal priesthood. Or it’s that other thing. And that seems pretty freaky.

Pretty freaky and also pretty correct in terms of how we interpret this passage. And I think one of the… one of the clearest giveaways of this is in the story of Abraham, in the story of the Passover, in the other legislation we have in Exodus 13 and in Exodus 34 and elsewhere, there is always child sacrifice that is required, but then superseded by another law to redeem the intended sacrifice with some other animal. And so, like, if you’re putting together laws and you’re like, “Hey, what if we had them sacrifice their children?” It’s like… and somebody was like, “Better yet, what if we didn’t have them sacrifice their children? But we started off by saying they had to, and then swooped in with ‘just kidding, you’re going to redeem them.’” Yeah, like there’s no reason for the psych unless the thing is there to begin with.

You don’t start from the position of, look, we don’t want to sacrifice children, but I think we should say we do and then turn the tables on them.

I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it.

Yeah. So… so this is probably a part of this incredibly old legislation, the earliest legislation we have that got adopted by Israel and later legislation again. They’re… they’re already modifying it. We know they’re modifying it. And their modification here is, let’s… let’s put a psych in there. Gotcha, suckers. Turns out all you have to do, you got to redeem them. They’re intended for sacrifice, but we’re going to require you redeem them. So. And I… I was on a… I recorded a… a discussion with Heath Dewrell and Kip Davis a bit ago. Heath Dewrell published about six years ago a book called Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel that talks about this. So… so if you’re interested in a far more boring discussion, go check out Kip Davis’s YouTube channel.

Get all the way into the weeds with it.

Yes. Yes.

All right, cool. Let’s… is there… is there anything more that we need to… that we should be covering in this Covenant Code? I mean, we could go on and on for clearly for hours about it.

Yeah, you… you have next you get into kind of Justice for All stuff and… and not—but… but they are… including the bassline for that might be a little too deep a cut. But… but you have false reports and lawsuits and stuff like that that… that come in chapter 23. But which might be a part of a later layer. So.

And those false reports things again, like we already have the… the Ten Commandments just a few chapters earlier about, you know, “thou shalt not bear false witness,” and yet up it pops again. So.

Yeah, so. And yeah, the… the Jason Newsted joke was about how his bass audio was basically muted in the Metallica’s …And Justice for All album, uh, because they were upset about… about the death of their original bassist. But that’s neither here nor there. That has no—

I’m… I’m so glad you went there. I’m so desperately glad you went there. Um, let’s move on to our next above the law. And this one is not about ancient laws based on Hammurabi and various codes, but they will claim a lot of these lawmakers that they’re based on older, ancient, more important law. Namely, a lot of them are citing the Bible when they start to come up with reasons for their laws. We’re talking about the spate of… of new book banning laws that are sweeping the country here in these United States.

Including in our own fair state of Utah. It’s, it’s something to be very, very not proud of. I’m, I am horrified by what’s happening.

In, in, in America right now.

And, and you know, if, if the power of these legislators was not limited to the schools that they would be reaching into the homes as well. Like.

Where we’re not at too far a distance from 1984 where you got to find a corner of your house where the video cameras don’t get to you so that you can read the, the contraband literature. But luckily they’re, they’re limited to the things that the state is sponsoring. And right now, however, that is the public education of our children.

Yeah. Such as it is. And for however long that ends up lasting, we’ll see.

Yeah. It’s all going to be privatized. It’s going to be Musk-ular before too long.

Where everybody will be taught how to code and then kick to the curb if they’re not performing right.

And well, they’ll be taught how to code. And, and the Bible. Yeah. But here’s the. But one of the sort of funny things that has happened in all of this as, as they sort of try to limit the, the, the knowledge and breadth of, of the humanities education that children get is that in so doing, as was the case with in Texas House Bill 900 passed and this has happened in many places. I’m just using this as an example. It happened here in Utah, too, but in Texas, this House Bill 900 passed, which is meant to prevent kids from seeing scary content. It specifically.

Any. Any kind of smut. Any kind of sexual. Anything.

Which led one superintendent to take the Bible off the shelves of. Of all of the schools.

To which then the state representative of Texas, who sponsored the bill, wrote a scathing letter to that superintendent saying, I don’t know how you could possibly have interpreted it such that the Bible would run afoul of these indecency laws or whatever, but put it back on. Which then he. The. The superintendent did.

So here’s the question. And I’ve looked at lots of. There’s bills from Tennessee and bills from Iowa. There’s bills all over the place. And I wanted to see if this book. If the Bible actually runs afoul of these things. The Tennessee bill was. I looked up, and then they had a section that was about definitions. So the Tennessee bill talks about excess violence, and they define that as the depiction of acts of violence in such a graphic or bloody manner as to exceed common limits of custom and candor or in such a manner that it is apparent that the predominant appeal of the material is portrayal of violence. I feel like there’s a lot of violence in the Bible. Like, I. I can remember. I mean, even just, you know, there’s. There’s.

There’s wars in which violence is. Are there. Is there, like, explicit violence throughout? Because I tried to remember. There’s. Oh, there’s. What’s her name? Stabbing the head of the dude.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Driving it through until the. Until the. The spike hit the ground on the other side. Yeah, there’s. Well, there’s tons of violence in. In the Bible. You have. You have. Of all kinds. There’s swordplay. There’s people being burned to death. There’s people having their heads chopped off. There’s people being run through. You have Saul has his armor bearer kill him, and then David has the armor bearer killed for killing Saul at Saul’s own request. There’s. You have. Oh, gosh, all kinds of. Of violence. Uh, David cutting Goliath’s head off, which is what’s funny. David hits him with a stone and it kills him. And then David cuts his head off, which kills him. Right. So maybe giants have double lives of some kind. But you got.

You got what’s his name with the sack of foreskins.

Oh, yeah, he had quite a collection. Yeah. You have Samson killing a bunch of Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.

Oh, yeah. That was like a thousand dudes, right?

It was. It was an awful lot of dudes. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, well, the main violence.

Check.

Violence check and double check. Yeah, it’s. It’s a very violent book. And.

And. And a lot of people. And here’s one thing I want to be clear on. It’s not just Hebrew Bible stuff. Like, the dichotomy of the violent God of the Old Testament versus the loving God of the New Testament is anti-Semitic and also entirely false, because you have a mix of different representations in both. And in the Book of Revelation , you have a deity who threatens to sexually assault folks. You have somebody talking about bathing their sword in the blood of their enemies. You have, you know, blood running up to people’s ankles and things like that. Like, there’s an awful lot of violence. And at least the Book of Revelation , I don’t. I still don’t know why people thought that would be a good book to include in there.

Yeah, I wonder about that, too. But the real. I think. I think so. I think the violence. I think that is a good reason not to have kids read this book. I think. I think violence is far worse for children than sex. Like, depictions of violence is going to be far more impactful on a child’s mind than sex is. But these legislators are far more worried about sex, so let’s talk about that.

Well, they’ve got. They’ve got some deviant sexualities that they’re trying to police here, which is the main problem. Right.

So let’s. Yeah, that’s true. Because most of this legislation, even. Even if it doesn’t mention it at all, most of this legislation is about policing.

Yeah, yeah.

Like LGBTQIA plus things. They just. They just don’t want to be seen as that, so they call it community standards or whatever. Anyway, this Tennessee bill has lists. Has a phrase called harmful to minors, and they very generously defined that for us. Harmful to minors means that quality of any description or representation in whatever form of nudity—so I. I assume that that means described nudity or. Or visual nudity—sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse when. When the matter of performance A would be found by the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, there’s a lot of sex in the Bible.

Yes. Yes.

Can you give us some examples of. Of what might. What might run afoul of. Of this?

Well, are we including incest in here?

Because I think that’s a great thing to include.

Okay. Because I know some of. Some of the legislation explicitly calls that out. Yes, it does. And. But yeah, we’ve got. In Genesis, you’ve got the case of. We’re gonna skip over Noah, because I really don’t think that’s sexual in nature. It just talks about the fact that Noah was nude.

There’s nudity. That’s nudity, though.

But in Genesis 19 , you have Lot escapes to the hills with his two daughters, who seem to imagine that they’re the only humans left on Earth after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain. So they seem to take it upon themselves to try to repopulate the Earth by getting their father drunk and engaging in coitus to impregnate themselves, resulting in the people of Moab and the people of Ammon.

And this is basically a way to say, aha, you guys suck. You were the product of incest.

Right.

So. So they’re describing incest in. In not incredible detail, but being quite explicit about what’s happening here. And yeah, you have a description of. Of Onan. Who can forget Onan? Poor Onan. Great, sweet Onan. Who. It says. And there’s a. We think of it as a euphemism, but it’s not really a euphemism. The. In intercourse frequently in the Bible is framed as the man going into the woman.

Which is not a euphemism, but the. I think it’s Genesis 38 talking about Onan says every time he would go into his wife, he would spill his seed on the ground. So we’ve got some coitus interruptus going on, which then required somebody either, like, you know, kick some dust over that or. Or I don’t know what they’re doing there, but there is pretty explicit sexuality going on there. We’ve got a bunch of other.

Oh, I. I was just thinking of the Book of Judges , but Eglon came immediately to mind. You want to talk about violence? That’s where the dude goes in. He’s. He’s a. A large man. He’s fat. And, uh, he gets stabbed all the way to the hilt so that the dirt came out. Like, I remember the first time I read that, I was like, that is awesome.

It’s always Jerusalem. Yet she increased her prostitutions, remembering the days of her youth when she prostituted herself in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions. I wanted to see what the Hebrew was. “Emissions” there is a word, zirmah, which seems to mean phallus, rod, branch, phallus. So it’s—it’s at least in Hebrew—it pretty explicitly is saying their phalluses are like the phalluses of stallions. So. Oh, in fact, that’s—oh, it’s the very next verse. “Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth when the Egyptians fondled your bosom and caressed your young breasts.”

But I don’t know how you can get more explicit than that.

I mean, that’s pretty explicit.

Yeah. Anyway, I—I think—

I think we can safely say that, Dan.

Right. Well, no, I’m just saying we can safely say this runs afoul of these laws. Like this is—

We haven’t even gotten to the Song of Songs.

Right, right. That is all about it. I know. I noted that in—in the Iowa law which went into effect in 2023, it says no sexual acts can be depicted in—in any book from—for all of K through 12, that’s kindergarten, 5-year-olds through 12th grade—

For seniors in high school, 17-year-olds, sometimes 18-year-olds in some places.

Right. So they can’t. So—so we’re protecting them all the way up to 12th grade from sexual acts except for religious texts. Because they thought, “We—we see them coming. We’re going to make sure that the Bible’s safe.” Yeah, but that exception is a dangerous one considering the fact that the Kama Sutra, for crying out loud, could very easily be considered a religious text.

I think whatever—whatever state it says that in, somebody needs to go put a Kama Sutra in the library.

Absolutely, man. If you’re in Iowa and you want to mess around with some people, just demand that the Kama Sutra be in the—yeah, maybe don’t do it in an—

Elementary school, but yeah, high school.

Yeah, definitely get it into a high school there.

I mean, I—you remember, you remember Field of Dreams, right? Huh? Like, there’s a—there’s a part where they’re at a PTA meeting. Remember, they’re like in the gym and he’s just, you know, he’s—he’s like the Close Encounters of the Third Kind guy. He’s just playing with his mashed potatoes in his head and his wife is like, freaking out at these people who are like, “It’s pornography!” And like, these fights have been going on for the longest time and it’s—it’s so depressing that we’ve gotten to the point where—where they’re like, “Oh, we—we want to keep this stuff away from kids.” Hey, man, your holy book says that stuff. Okay. “We want to keep this stuff away from kids, but we’re making an exception for—for our holy book.” Well, it has to be all holy books. Okay, we’re going to keep this away from kids, but we’re going to write in an exception. We’re going to do a little carve-out for any holy books, but really we just mean the Bible because that’s all we care about. And the—the ignorance, the historical ignorance, the—

Just the—the malice of trying to shape public education so that everybody will end up being a Christian nationalist.

Right.

Just infuriating.

And—and it always backfires. It always goes wrong. And—and also I—and I think part of the—the reason I wanted to talk about this is that the fact that the Bible is so clearly, so explicitly runs afoul of these laws, and yet they want to insist that—that the Bible be in these schools proves the hypocrisy of their position.

Yeah. And not only that, they insist that the Bible—that we need to require the Bible be taught in all classes.

Right.

Because that will result in a more moral people. It’s like, well, no, it’ll result in people who think slavery is okay and that women are property.

Right.

And it will result in a lot of, you know, a lot more insurrections at the Capitol. But it’s not going to result in moral people. Telling a story about how it’s okay to be, you know, for a high school kid who’s worried, you know, isn’t sure what’s going on sexually, a book that makes them feel okay in their own body, that’s going to help the morality of this country infinitely more than saying, “Hey, read the story about Onan. You gotta read this.” Like, that’s, that’s.

I mean, utter nonsense, for lack of…

Yeah. What you’re talking about is like, there are books that are like, literally written for teenagers at their level.

It’s to save their lives.

To help them with their own burgeoning… to help them understand what’s going on in their own bodies. And these people are worried about—are banning those books. And, you know, because they say the word gay in them and, you know, half of these bills are nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bills. But so the re… you know, things that would give them real life knowledge that would be helpful and useful to them are banned. And then this book, which is like, it’s a valuable book, and it’s a book that I think I like—I’ll be—I’ll be honest. I don’t think it’s appropriate at all to give to children.

Right.

But like late teens, they… yeah, let them. Let them start looking at this book. I think that it’s… I think that the Bible is an important book, and I think there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.

But if—if we’re talking about what’s actually appropriate and good for children, especially, yeah, before high school, this book is not okay.

Yeah. And—and what’s unfortunate is—is we mentioned it earlier, but I think the driving impetus here is they want to be able to control whether or not you’re allowed to say that it’s okay to be gay in—in public spaces. That’s what frequently this is all coming down to. And—and—and increasingly, it’s “okay to be trans” and “trans people exist,” but basically, they don’t want anyone who is growing up thinking they might be gay or trans or something like that being told that’s okay. They want to be able to—to beat into them or at least compel, condition them to think that it’s not okay and that they need to change.

And on a wider level, they’re actually looking to provide cover for bigotry. They’re looking to provide cover not just against LGBTQ people, but, like, these same book bans also have cover for all these reasons. Why… and, you know, it’s not explicit in them. But then you look at which books actually get banned and like, Toni Morrison suddenly disappears from all of the bookshelves. And, you know, it, like, all of these Black and—and people of color authors are suddenly disappearing. And—and, oh, they would.

They would relitigate Brown v. Board of Education yesterday if they could. Like, this is the… and it’s the exact same argument. Parents ought to have control over public education. That—that was the argument against desegregation. It was like, “No, no, no. Parents have to have control.” And that is what gave rise to private education. And you had your—your desegregation or your segregation academies which turned into private school and—and then charter schools and stuff like that. And—and why does it always come back to white supremacy, Dan? Why does it always come back to white supremacy?

And that—that’s where we’re at. That’s where we’re at. And trying to divorce Christian nationalism from white supremacy is a fool’s errand that you will never be able to achieve. So. Oh, gosh, there you go. Please, if you have any white supremacy or Christian nationalist in you, grow the hell up already and—and, you know, go—go get this book banned, I guess, or I don’t know, I guess that’s it for the show. Thanks everybody, for—for paying attention. We appreciate you.

If you’re still paying attention, if you’re

still with us, we appreciate it. You can write into us pod… oh, no, wait. You can donate to us and help make the show go and become a part of it. And also you can get access to an early ad-free version of the show of every episode. And you can get access to the—to—to our after parties, which are for patrons only over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. We appreciate that. If you want to get in touch with us, contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the way to do that. And we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Banning the Bible?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology