The Holy Dunk

What do you know about baptism? Why do Christians do it? Where does it come from? This week, we're exploring the most important baptism of all: that of Jesus. It's clearly a pivotal moment in the narrative of the life of Jesus, but it also presents some pretty important theological problems. And if it's so important, why do the gospels seem to disagree about how it went down? Then, it's the rules of war! Deuteronomy 20 presents some pretty specific rules about how the Israelites are supposed to conduct themselves when they go up against other groups, and WOOF! Let's just say that it's definitely no Geneva Convention! ---- For early access to an ad-free version of every episode of Data Over Dogma, exclusive content, and the opportunity to support our work, please consider becoming a monthly patron at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on the various social media places: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/data_over_dogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have you ordered Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Bible Says So⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ yet??? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:41Speaker 01

  You came really close to doing like a Bill and Ted voice on that part. "We're proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things today, Dan?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Rockin' and rollin', ready to go. We're, we're gonna take a dip today into the, the world of baptism, which is, I'm, I'm, I'm excited about. We are, we, I tried to plan, look, look, guys, I'm trying to plan things so that they sort of fall on liturgical calendar moments. And like the bat, we're like now, this area of time is sort of when they, the, the feast of the baptism of Jesus takes place somewhere around here. I did not really look up when. I know it's in January at some point. So we're gonna talk about the, that for our what's that? We're gonna talk about the baptism of Jesus.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  And then in the latter half of our show, we're gonna look at, in a chapter and verse,

• 3:03Speaker 01

  gonna look at some crazy rules of war.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  We're, we're getting deuteronomical.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Deuteronomistic.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Or deuteronomic, or however, whatever you like. Yeah, but we're gonna talk.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Or His Dudeness, or Dude.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  If you're not into the whole brevity thing. Yeah, that's gonna be, that's gonna be a heavy discussion.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  It's going to be crazy. You guys, this is, we're just diving into war crimes. So that'll be a lot of fun in the second half of the show. But for now, let's go into our what's that?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  All right. So last week, Dan, we talked about John the Baptist's death.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  And, uh, and we dealt, we dealt with, uh, old John and, uh, and how controversial he was and how he was a big figure,

• 4:01Speaker 01

  in the area at the time.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Jesus was, uh, starting his ministry.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  And so, so, so it makes sense, I think, for us to talk also about the, uh, the baptism itself, the, the, the big,

• 4:18Speaker 01

  big handover of power.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  From John the Baptist to Jesus.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Which is, which is something that we see in, in all four gospels. And this is really the main point of contact between Jesus and John the Baptist in the gospels. And it is interesting that being baptized by somebody else is to some degree, kind of a performance of subordination to them or to their authority. So there is, there is a degree to which Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist is a little bit of an embarrassment.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  And so. It's a bit of a problem. And, uh, a few of the gospel writers, um, try to, uh, soften that blow or try to work their way around it or something. So that's a, it's, it's an interesting thing.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're going to talk about the development of that. And, and I think it marks an interesting contrast where the theology of the baptism kind of grows, whereas the significance of, of John the Baptist's death kind of effaces, goes away as we progress through, through time in the composition of the gospels as, as it becomes more important to have Jesus actually being the one who's, who's in charge when it comes to this baptism.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  But. Maybe one of the things that we should do before we dive into the, uh, the actual accounts of the baptism is talk a little bit about what baptism is and what it's for. And like, when did it start happening? I don't.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  I, it's a weird, it's, I mean, it's, it's a very interesting ritual and I don't, did it start in the Hebrew Bible or is it new?

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Well, it's

• 5:59Speaker 01

  New to the New Testament, sort of.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, we talked a bit about this when James McGrath was on the show, talking about his biography of John the Baptist. And I think, and we talked a bit there about how baptism seems to have been kind of an incremental elaboration on the mikvah, which was a purification bath. That was something that Second Temple Jewish folks did quite frequently. And we even have examples of this at Kumron among the Essene community that occupied that area and seems to have been responsible for gathering most of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts. And this was, this was a way to ritually purify yourself.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  And the elaboration, the change that we talked with James about was that it was not so much a matter of ritual purification, so much as a means of receiving forgiveness for sins. So that's the main contribution that John the Baptist maybe made. It might be John the Baptist who actually was like, "We're gonna do it like this from now on," and introduced this new way of thinking about the significance of immersion within water. But it seems to have built on the foundation of the mikvah.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Sort of a, yeah, like a ritual cleanliness sort of thing.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, where rather than just ridding yourselves of temporary impurities that you may have accumulated through the course of your day, or in preparation for doing something that requires ritual purity, now it is this kind of liminal ritual between a period of sinfulness, you know, purification from your sins, forgiveness for your sins, and now you are a new person moving forward. So it almost kind of becomes a rebirth kind of thing. And that gets picked up later on by later Christian authors. But a lot of scholars think this is, this is probably historical. We've got that embarrassment criterion that

• 8:08Speaker 00

  why would, why else would they have Jesus subordinating himself to another?

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Claimants to this messenger from God role. And then the, the gospel authors kind of struggling to make it not seem like Jesus is subordinating himself. If it was not something that, that goes back to the very origins of the story.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Meaning it's probably historical.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Okay. That's interesting. There, the other thing that I, that sort of blows my mind is like, that, that I think is along those same lines, this embarrassment line is like, you know, the Jesus that we are introduced to in, you know, that, that you hear about in church, there, there aren't supposed to be any sins for him to have forgiven. Like, if that is the primary idea of baptism, um, we, we might have a little bit of a theological issue if, if we're supposing that Jesus was pure and clean from the jump.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and you get, uh, at least Matthew is trying to account for that. Not Mark, but Matthew is like, we gotta address this.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  The elephant in the room.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  And, and, and I, we, we remember that Mark is, Mark is probably previous to Matthew.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Mark in priority is the, is the technical term for that.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Yes, that Mark comes first. And, and it's just three verses. We can go ahead and read the, the Mark's account of the baptism in Jesus as, as is our wont from the NRSVUE.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Which by the way, now is approved by the LDS church.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Uh, for use in meetings and in, uh, in classes.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Oh, you, you're gonna make some Mormons mad when you, in your, in your ward, when you go in and start using the NRSVUE.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  They have me ferreted away in primary. So I never see, I never see the inside of a gospel doctrine classroom, even though this coming Sunday will be the start of, uh, the Old Testament year.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  The big scary Old Testament. All right, go on.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Um, so Mark 1:9 is where it starts. "In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan." And that's the, the account of the actual act of the baptism. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, "You are my son, the beloved. With you, I am well pleased." And all kinds of stuff to, uh, to talk about here.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, can I just point out a few things? Can I flag a couple of things that I, that, that stood out to me as I read the different things?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I will, so A, yes, uh, as we talked about, no, it, no need in this one. Mark feels no need, the author of Mark feels no need to worry about why Jesus is being baptized. Or if like Jesus needs baptism, it's just so normal. It's just like, oh, so Jesus went through the process as you do.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  And, and this is preceded by setting the stage by describing John as the forerunner of the, uh, of the, you know, the chosen one, the anointed one.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  So this, and, and specific, and more directly like the forerunner of God, not because Jesus is God, but because Jesus is God's representative and the bearer of God's authority and presence on earth. So we, we already have a, a backdrop for this. And so Mark just cruises right on by the uncomfortable part.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's interesting in verse 10 that Jesus said, that it says that Jesus, it says, "He saw the heavens torn apart."

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  And the spirit descending. It, it, you know, it, it almost seems like maybe this is a thing that's exclusive to Jesus.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Jesus is having this experience. And then a voice came from the heavens, "You," addressing just Jesus, "you are my son, the beloved. With you, I am well pleased."

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Like, yes.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  That could all have just been, Jesus had a moment with this, uh, also descending like a dove. I'm going to point out that it's like, that it's a, that it's a simile. Here.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Because it stops being a simile by the time of Mark.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, he says, did it, did you and to host peristeron cathe benon. Yes, so it is, it is a simile. It does seem to be Jesus perceiving all of this and the, the address is directly to you. So this is a second person speech in Mark's account. And what we have here is a paraphrase or a bit of a quotation from Psalm, chapter two. And I don't know if you looked up Psalm, chapter two, but this is widely considered to be a royal coronation event.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  So in Psalm two, starting in verse four, he who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord has them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury, saying, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell the decree of the Lord. He said to me, the king, you are my son. Today I have begotten you. And this is kind of an adoption motif.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth, your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. So this is basically the coronation of a king who's going to go out and run the world, basically.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  And so what we have with, with God saying this to Jesus is reflecting this idea that Jesus has been, this is the coronation of Jesus as king of Israel, but even more so as the Messiah, the anointed one. And there, and there's a secondary reference as well.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Actually, there are a handful of references from Isaiah. Oh, okay. Mark loves Isaiah. And we have the very first servant song. We're familiar with Isaiah 53, where people say, "Oh, it's a prophecy about Jesus," even though it's talking about a servant. And the servant is explicitly identified numerous times in Deuterero Isaiah as Israel. But the very first servant song is in Isaiah 42. And verse 1, "Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, and whom my soul delights. I have put my Spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the nations; he will not cry out, or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street. A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  He will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth, and the coastlands wait for his teaching." So the whole "the Spirit has descended on Jesus," combined with the "you are my Son," kind of brings these two ideas together of Jesus as the anointed one and the coronated, crowned king of Israel. So as I've mentioned many times, Jesus is really the grab bag of all of the imagery from the Hebrew Bible. You just toss it all in there and you get Jesus. Okay. And there's one other place I want to bring up, Isaiah 11. Okay.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Verse 1, "A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge, and the fear of the Lord." And so, we've got another case of this all being prophesied. And so, the baptism represents the fulfillment of these prophetic ideas about what the Messiah is going to do.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And this stump of Jesse stuff plays into the sort of the, the idea that Jesus was from the lineage of David and David was Jesse's son.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is actually one of the, well, it's the main scripture that people will go to. When you have Matthew saying that they went up to a town in Galilee, Nazareth, and settled there, so that it might be fulfilled, which said, he shall be called a Nazarene. And there's no such prophecy anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. However, Isaiah 11 does have the, the branch that shall grow out, branches netzer in Hebrew. And so people are like, netzer, Nazarene, eh, eh, eh, eh. So maybe they, they imagine that what Matthew is doing is kind of squinting

• 17:10Speaker 00

  at a Greek translation, or a transliteration at least of Isaiah 11:1 and saying, I can get behind that. Maybe that's where Jesus of Nazareth is to be found foreshadowed in, in the Hebrew Bible.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  So yeah, Isaiah, very important to everything that's going on here.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Let, yeah. Shall we move on to Matthew?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's get to Matthew. Uh, this is, this is Matthew 3. The, the first thing, Mark launches in with this stuff. Mark, this is all Mark 1, because Mark doesn't handle, doesn't deal with the birth.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Correct. Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  So now we're, now we're in Matthew 3.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  And this, and this, that's an important point to make because for a lot of scholars, Jesus was just a regular old dude until his ministry begins. And so the baptism could be like the, the moment of adoption where God says, you are now my Messiah. And so-

• 18:12Speaker 01

  That's definitely the sense you get from Mark.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  That, that is a hundred percent what you get from him.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  You get no background.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  But once Mark's in circulation, then you start to get questions about, wait, he came from Nazareth? Don't you know Micah says the Messiah is going to come from Bethlehem? And then Matthew was like, oh, I got you. Um, but yeah, we're in Matthew 3, verse 13. Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him saying, I need to be baptized by you and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  You came really close to doing like a Bill and Ted voice on that part, which I love that. It's proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. There's just something great about that. Anyway.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. We're gonna fail most egregiously. So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've heard the construction too. We're finishing our basement. We're actually adding on to the house. We're doing some stuff in the backyard. And I was thinking the other day about how nice it was to be able to do this because we, I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do these, these improvements to the house, but we had to pay off our old car and that took actual planning, which you know I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances and we had to set dates and we had to create a budget and it was so satisfying to actually make a plan.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and we're able to pay off a car, got a brand new car. And it feels so relieving to know that if we actually set these goals and plan for them and stick to them, it goes from, oh, this will never end, actually feeling like you have control over stuff. And that has made a huge difference to me and to my family.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you can try to do that on your own, or you can use a phenomenally useful tool like Monarch to do something like that. Uh, Monarch is set up exactly for that kind of financial planning. They have things like their debt pay down simulator and visualizer to help you track your progress, which I, this is brilliant. Uh, the, the fact of the matter is that all of these concepts are so ethereal, it's hard to sort of wrap your head around it a lot of the time. And with this visualizer, you can see how that debt is going to go down. You can actually simulate your freedom occurring in front of your very eyes. And I think that is an amazing thing.

• 21:23Speaker 01

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• 22:41Speaker 00

  And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were open to him. And he saw God's Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, "This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased." So we got lots of changes here.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, Matthew was getting real artistic-y licensee, where he's, one, addresses the elephant in the room, "Wait a minute, why would Jesus go subordinate himself to this dude?" And has John the Baptist recognize, "Whoa, I don't hold a candle to you."

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  "Why would I need to baptize you? I need to be baptized by you." And Jesus says, "Just do the thing." And it's to fulfill all righteousness, which, what does that mean? Well, maybe it just means, as an example to everybody else, "You have to get baptized. None of you have any excuse." Because, look, Jesus, who had no sins, got baptized.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  And he even recognized, "I got to. I don't need it, but I gotta do it anyway."

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  So Matthew has thought of everything.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Nothing more important than jumping through all the hoops.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. This is just-

• 23:55Speaker 01

  You literally have to do the bureaucracy. You gotta fill it out in triplicate. You gotta send one half to HR.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Look, if the gospel's not a checklist, what is it?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  What are we even doing here?

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And then we do have, "Jesus is the one who sees God's Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him." And here, we're kind of inching a little closer to actually seeing a dove. Because it's like, it lands on, and alights on him. And then the-

• 24:27Speaker 01

  It does still keep it simile. It says, "Like a dove."

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  And then- Pinning that.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  And then the voice changes, though. It does not say, "You are my beloved son."

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  This is, so now, we, we have to understand this voice being heard by others. This voice is assigned to others, an identification of Jesus to others as God's Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Again, Psalm 2, again, Isaiah 11, Isaiah 42. All of this is still in the background, but Matthew's like, "Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna juice this up. We're gonna..."

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Matthew's, and, and yeah, it is explicit that like, God is now talking to the crowd. God's, God's now working the audience on this one.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Doing some crowd work.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Which is, you know, is, it's necessary. If you're gonna get up on stage, you gotta do some crowd work. I don't know anything about comedy, as, as most of y'all know. Now, Luke, once we get to, to Luke, who is, who is working with Matthew and Mark, we, we kind of pull it back a little bit. We still have, Luke actually, I think, wants to go back to some Markan stuff. So Luke doesn't care about Matthew's rationalization of why, why Jesus needs to be baptized. We just have two verses. Luke 3:21, "Now, when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying,

• 25:57Speaker 00

  the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, like a dove."

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Like a dove.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Yes. "And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my son, the beloved. With you I am well pleased.'" So, uh...

• 26:13Speaker 01

  So again, the voice addresses Jesus again, but there is a bird. There's like, it seems like there's an actual, physical bird now.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Yes. So the Greek here is somatico evi, which would be bodily appearance.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Uh, this, the, the spirit, the holy one bodily, uh, as the bodily appearance of a dove. So now it actually, it is a dove that is in view. And, uh, and now it descends upon him. And, and, and Luke doesn't actually narrate the actual baptism itself. It says, when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was open.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And can I point out something about that? Because the verse before this

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Is John getting shut into getting imprisoned by Herod.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  So we're, we're kind of having to go back and forth narratively, chronologically.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  It, yeah, I mean, or some other dude baptized Jesus. Cause it doesn't say that John baptizes Jesus here. Uh, it's confusing is all I'm saying.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. Look at that. It doesn't say John's name in, in these two verses.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  So, so like, I don't know, like that, that I, I read that and I was like, uh, wait, wait. John's in prison? What's happening? Why is John in prison? Jesus isn't baptized yet. What are we doing?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, John is, is baptizing and yeah, he's denying being the, uh, uh, the Messiah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you go back to, to verse, uh, 15 through 17, John is talking plenty about how good Jesus is and like,

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, and, and even, even says, cause, cause Luke is going to touch a little bit on their, their, uh, relative, uh, power.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  John answered all of them by saying, I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming. And I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. So yeah, John the Baptist is even more prophetic in Luke. And interesting thing to note here as well, the Gospels are all coming well after, like the letters of Paul. And we have some interesting things in the letters of Paul that suggest to some scholars that the story is being crafted with this notion of baptism being an adoption. Because we've got, let's see, Romans 8:14,

• 28:54Speaker 00

  "For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption when we cry, 'Abba, Father.' It is that very Spirit bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him." And then also in Galatians 4, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, and in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba, Father.'

• 29:38Speaker 00

  So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child, then also an heir through God." So in the baptism, we got the same thing. Spirit sent, you are my son. And so maybe the whole baptism story is intended to reflect or kind of resonate with people who have understood their own reception of the Spirit as their own adoption into the family of God, and now they are joint heirs with Jesus. Oh, and now the story of Jesus being baptized says the same thing. So it might be an attempt on the Gospel authors to try to appeal to that conceptualization of adoption into the family of God.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  So there are levels to all of this. Yeah, there are lots of levels. Anything else you wanted to say about Luke?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  I not not particularly, other than just, um, this seems to be the, the last time. Yeah, I don't know. I, we get, we get back to you are my son. So I, you know, the, the, the voice is now addressing Jesus again, instead of the crowd.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  It's just a, yeah, it's just a very interesting, uh, sort of refinement, or, or just, everybody's got their own thing that they're doing with this story.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  And I'm still, I'm still mystified by the fact that John's in prison. I just like that. I, it's funny to me because, uh, what, I guess you're right that like the, the probable, uh, way that we're meant to look at that is that John's in prison, but when we look at now, when all the people were baptized and when Jesus had also been baptized, that refers to before John went to prison.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Luke's like, wait a minute, back it up. I gotta talk about something that, that happened before. Um, and, and immediately after that, it's, Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his work. Um, so this, the, it's, it's kind of like, uh, Luke is, is rushing through the recap on Netflix, um, and doing this and then this, but wait, we gotta go back to this and then this. Um, and, and that brings us to John, which is, which is a peculiar one, because whereas, uh, Luke has, has John the Baptist kind of more prophetically announce all of this stuff. John seems to take the baptism out altogether, at least in, in the

• 32:06Speaker 00

  verses that are usually cordoned off as, uh, as the story of the baptism. Uh, John 1, verse 29, "The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, 'Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.'" So we got a very developed, uh, kind of soteriological framework going on here.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  And this, the, the he here is, uh, is John the Baptist.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  John the Baptist, yes. "This is he of whom I said. After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me." I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason that he might be revealed to Israel. And John testified, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, he on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the chosen one.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  And so, we've got, the baptism again, isn't narrated at all, but here, the whole point of baptism is kind of reconfigured to be a means of identifying Jesus. It's, it's, uh, it's kind of like God, uh, you know, we could go to the, the Gethsemane scene where, where Judas is like, the one I kiss, that's, that's Jesus. And here, John, God is like, hey, go dunk people in water, uh, so that I can use that as a mechanism for pointing out to you who the chosen one is.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Look for a guy with a bird.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it won't have anything to do with the actual process of dunking this person. It will have to do with the bird landing on him. And that's, and, and it's all symbolic because he's going to baptize with the Holy Spirit. So we've got a very, very literarily creative reconfiguration of the purpose of baptism here.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Can you help me understand one thing real quick?

• 34:08Speaker 00

  No.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yes, what?

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Uh, verse 30, this is he of whom I said, after me comes a man who ranks ahead of me.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Because he was before me.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  How was he before him? I don't, I don't.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  How Jesus was before him?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Jesus, yeah. He says, after me comes a guy who's ahead of me because he was before me. That's a lot of prepositions, and I don't know what, what they mean.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  So, so John and the, the- There are 10 verses before these, which are usually are labeled in the NRSVUE, "The Testimony of John", where John is kind of out there going, "Everybody, listen", and, um, and he says, they come to him and say, "Who are you?" He confessed and did not deny it, but he confessed, "I am not the Messiah", and they asked him, "What then? Are you Elijah?" And he said, "I am not. Are you the prophet?" He answered, "No", then they said to him, "Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?" And then he, he quotes, uh, the passages from the Hebrew Bible, like Isaiah and Malachi that, that are in Mark. "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord", as the prophet Isaiah said.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  And, um, then they're asking, "Why are you baptizing?" He says, "I baptized with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me. I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandal." This took place in Bethany, across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. So, um, so we set this up a little bit, but the idea is, I'm, I have a public ministry now. Someone's going to enter into a public ministry after me, but that person came before me in the sense that Jesus is the logos, the word, that was at the very beginning. So John knows that Jesus is an eternal being, who is, um, who is divine, and so long predates John's existence or his mission.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  However, Jesus's mission will not start until after John's has been ongoing. So this, this is a more theologically complex and rich way of having John,

• 36:19Speaker 00

  defer to the authority of Jesus.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I just knew that John was like, a few months older than Jesus. So I was like, he didn't come before. John came before.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, John was born.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  I know, I know who's older. John, I know who jumped in the womb. I've had to argue with people who say that abortion's not okay.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  And, um, and, and again, that kind of reaffirms the purpose of John baptizing is precisely as a mechanism for identifying the Messiah, the chosen one.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  And, and what's, what's interesting is John could be presenting Jesus as, because they ask him, are you the Messiah? Are you Elijah? Are you that prophet? And that probably refers to Deuteronomy 18, the prophet like unto Moses. Jesus could be argued to be all three of those things. Again, he's a grab bag of all of the, uh, the imagery from the Hebrew Bible.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  What do you need? He can be it.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. He's the utility savior.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  But Billy, what about this?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Swiss army Messiah.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But wait, there's more.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Um, so, so yeah, Jesus, and this is how Jesus can be all things to all people. And, um, and I'm very excited to write my chapter on that for my forthcoming trade book, God's Biography of Biblical History, because I'm going to talk about that, about how, um, you have the accumulation of all these different ideologies and all these different notions of divine mediation. And for Jesus, they're just like, we'll take them all. Just throw them in the back.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Just put them in there.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and, and the same is true of Satan. All the bad things, we'll take them all. Just, he's a, he's the grab bag of everything that's bad.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  So, so those are the four accounts of, uh, kind of accounts of Jesus's baptism. That's kind of the focus of them, but really they're about, uh, John the Baptist kind of handing the keys over to Jesus and getting out of the way, uh, willfully or, or not so much, uh, in some of the accounts.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, in all of these accounts, it makes it seem very much like this guy was super on board with Jesus. He was definitely like, oh, he's not even worthy to unstrap his sandal, blah, blah, blah.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Whether that was actually like how-

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Historically the case?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  How it went down, uh, that's definitely what these authors want us to think.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I can ima- You can imagine some people coming to John being like, hey, man, this Jesus guy is kind of taken off. And he's like, how dare he? I baptized him.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  You're not gonna like this text that is going around. It says that you said he was greater than you.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  How very dare he, that little punk.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  And then it's only a little bit later that John, in the Gospel of John, John the Baptist says, "He must increase and I must decrease," to, again, perform that deference to Jesus's authority and divinity. So, yeah, the baptism is, and this is kind of, it's the coronation, it's, in some scholars argue, it's the point of the act of divinization. It is the endowment of Jesus with the Messiah-ship. And it does, it appeals to a lot of Jewish themes, but also the idea of the heavens cracking open and all this kind of stuff. That also has some Greco-Roman theophanic resonances as well. So, it is something that's going to

• 39:57Speaker 00

  appeal to Greco-Roman period Jewish listeners, and also for folks who are not in the Jewish community but know some of these traditions. They're gonna be like, "That sounds familiar. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go see what's going on here. Do you have some literature I can take with me?" And, and that's, so it's, it's, it's checking off a lot of boxes. And again, if the Gospel is not a checklist, what on earth is it? So, so there we have the baptism of Jesus in a, in a rather irreverent retelling.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's great for now. We'll, we'll, we'll put that back in the River Jordan and we'll move on to our chapter and verse.

• 40:48Speaker 03

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• 41:17Speaker 00

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• 41:39Speaker 04

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• 41:48Speaker 00

  Hey there. I'm Travis Hoyam, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, "It pays to listen." Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  And boom, the chapter and verse is Deuteronomy 20, or the chapter is Deuteronomy 20, and good luck, because we're about to have us some fun.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's a mess. Yeah. This is, Deuteronomy means the second law. We know this was probably begun under the reign of King Josiah toward the end of the pre-exilic period, and it was kind of added to over the following centuries. And it's basically trying to prop up a Davidic line and the necessity of a Davidic king and all this stuff. But one of the things- That it does is it purports to be Moses's kind of farewell tour. Before he goes off to wherever he goes off to.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  And he reviews an awful lot of the stuff that that God told him and that he turned around and told to Israel. Only when you compare it to all the other stuff from Genesis to Numbers, it differs in a lot of ways. And one of the main ways it differs is that it's it's really about a covenant that is being made between God and Israel. Only this covenant is framed in language that is very, very reminiscent of what are called Neo Assyrian Vassal Treaties and particularly those of like Essar Haddan and and other emperors. And so a lot of critical scholars, again, this is something probably written toward the end of the 7th century BCE.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  So that it would make use of the most authoritative kind of treaty literature of the 7th century BCE. Makes an awful lot of sense.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  So it's talking about a time period that is several hundred years before these texts are being written. So it's basically inventing a golden age in the past.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Right. And it's not just talking about it. It's talking as though it the the author is in the midst of it.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  It's talking as though this is somewhat a contemporary talking to the the contemporaries of that time.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Yes. And one of the giveaways that it is not from that time is is the authors, particularly in the Deuteronomistic layers of other texts outside of Deuteronomy, will frequently say, and then this happened, and then this happened. And that and to this day, you can still go see that place. Oops. So. But here in Deuteronomy 20, we've got a series of rules about warfare.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  How to engage in warfare. And there are three main segments. The first one is verse 1 through 9, and then we have 10 through 14, and then we have 15 through 20. And all of them are very different, and they get increasingly disturbing.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the, yeah, the first bit is just like, the, the, the, 1 through 9 is just like, you know, the, the priest is gonna go out and address the troops and just say, buck up, you guys. And there's some weird stuff about, that I didn't really understand about, like, if your house isn't dedicated, you better go, better go home.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Dedicate it.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  It's basically put your house in order, kind of, uh, kind of stuff. So the, the priest is out there to, to be like, we are consecrated to go out in, in battle. Has anyone become engaged to a woman but not yet married her? He should go back to his house lest he die in battle and another marry her. And, you know, at which point immediately, everybody goes, I'm out.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't, it, it feels like this is a comedy, uh, sketch, where, you know, I, I could see Monty Python having this, having this scene and the, and the, you know, the priest is like, if you, if you haven't dedicated your house, you better go back to your house. And a bunch of guys are like, okay, I'll, I don't want to go to war. And then if you haven't married your wife, your betrothed person, better go do that. And then a bunch of other guys go, and it's like, does anybody have any fruit on their trees? Cause if you haven't eaten your fruit, you gotta go eat your fruit.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then, and any, any of you scared? If you're scared, we don't need you.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And then there's just one guy left on the battlefield, ready to go.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then verses 10 through 14 are rules about what to do when you go fight against a town. And, and it's odd, but let's take a look. When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. That sounds good. It sounds good, but let's, but let's be clear. They're engaged in a campaign of conquest. They're not just out enjoying their day frolicking when suddenly a town shows up. And it's like cake or death. And you, and you have to offer it peace.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. So the terms of peace are be subjugated to us. Right. Become our corvee labor, become enslaved to us. Right. Slave or death is a much worse choice than cake. Yes. Um, I'll have cake, please. Very well.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Didn't realize there was gonna be, should have brought more cake. Yeah. But if it does not accept your terms of peace and makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may however, take as your plunder, the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the town. All its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. And this is, and, and this is particularly disturbing. This, this is describing basically a genocide because at this time, these towns are basically individual people groups.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  These are ethnic groups and, and you're basically destroying them. And then, and then I've heard apologists say, well, no, it's incorporating the women and the children into your family. Giving them a life, allowing them to survive. That's still cultural genocide. This is what went on in the 19th century with indigenous peoples in the United States. Where they would go kill a bunch of indigenous men and frequently a lot of the women as well. And then they would take the children and just scatter them among white families and and put them in boarding schools and try to basically re-educate the indigeneity right out of them.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Try to make them imagine that they're they come from savage, uncivilized stock. And even the LDS church was deeply involved with these programs with the the United States government. And that is that is cultural genocide. You are erasing those identities. So this is not defensible.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  No, no, in in no way is any part of it. Yeah, from here on in, there's nothing defensible.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, no.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  As as we progress through the rest of this text, it is not. We're going to remain indefensible.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  And when when you take as your plunder the women.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  You're they they're sex slaves, basically.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  They're they have they're becoming your concubines. And you have more explicit descriptions of this as well as precisely what process they should go through and what timeline you have to wait before you can actually go and and sexually assault them. Like, this is this is not ambiguous.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  And the way that it talks about with the women and children.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  As property.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Just in a list of properties.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  That it also includes livestock and dot, dot, dot, everything else. It is not, there is no, it is so dehumanized. It is, it is just take, you know, you get you get this property now.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And verses 15 through 18, I'm actually going to split the last segment into two of itself. Verses 15 through 18 are usually agreed by scholars to be part of a secondary layer, literary layer, that this has been added on later. Because when when you read through from verse one all the way to verse 14, it's like, OK, here are rules for war. Here's what happens when you go and you out to conquest other cities. But then verse 15 qualifies everything that it has just said.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Thus shall you treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of these nations here, but as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. In other words, Verse 15 jumps in and says, "What I just talked about, that was only for the people who are not occupying the land of Canaan that the Lord your God is giving you." When it comes to the towns in the land of Canaan, "You must not let anything that breathes remain alive. Indeed, you shall annihilate them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Parizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their

• 51:59Speaker 00

  gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God." Woof. Yes, indeed. And the NRSV UE has rendered annihilate a verb, well, the noun is "charem", and this is kind of ritual slaughter of a people. And we find this, and this is a term that is used in the Mesha inscription, and it's also known from some Sabian inscriptions. The Sabian people and language were an old South Arabian language and people who occupied deeper inland in Arabia.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  But that was, that was the notion basically of ritual slaughter of a people. So in, in the previous verses, it was, "Kill all the men. They're of no use to us. They're only going to get in the way. You know, we will take and enjoy the women and the children because they can function as concubines, or we can raise them as our own, either enslaved population or children." And they're unlikely to fight back. Right, and they're not gonna, they're not gonna fight back. But when it comes to "charem", that's ritual slaughter. Everything must go. It's a fire sale, and you're not allowed to keep anything. And there are stories about...

• 53:19Speaker 00

  God commanding Chiram and then somebody holding on to some stuff. And then thing them having a very bad day as a result. And and there's an argument to make that what's going on here? Because when we get in other parts of Deuteronomy and particularly into Leviticus, once we get into the holiness code, you have this idea that the that all this purity stuff is basically to prevent you from um, desecrating, contaminating either God's holy precinct or the land of Israel. So you get these ideas that uh, if you do all these things, then the land of Israel will vomit you out, just like it has done to the people who came before you.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  And so you have to make sure to avoid all this stuff so that you uh, or you have to purge this evil from the land. And so the idea is the these sins create a kind of metaphysical contamination that gets out on the land and um, these impurities contaminate the land. And then the land is going to be like, oh, bleh, and and vomit it out because the land can't take it. And one of the things that some scholars suggest this Chiram idea is doing is saying these people are impure. And so in order to purify the land, they all must be annihilated.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  So it would be, it's basically ritual slaughter or human sacrifice as a means of purifying the land that you are now going to occupy. And oh, by the way, here are all the things you have to avoid doing so that you don't contaminate the land and require that you be purged from the land either. So I I think that's an interesting way to look at this idea that the the people who occupy this land, they all must go. They have to be ritually slaughtered.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  I do want to push back a little bit on on just that idea, just because it is explicit that uh, the re or there is an explicit reason given for the complete annihilation of all of these other people, which is. So that they don't teach you their ways, so that they don't teach you their, their bad magic, or whatever it is that, and that's, that's, that's, that's almost more nuts to me.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Well, and

• 55:43Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, they could teach me, but I know that I'm supposed, like, just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll just not do the thing that they're doing, and I'll do that thing. How about that? Do I have to kill them all? Can't I just, can't they be alive? And I'll just not do the things that they're doing?

• 56:01Speaker 00

  Well, and that's, that's kind of the rationalization that, that sidesteps the idea that this is kind of ritual slaughter for the sake of, of human sacrifice that purifies the land. But, you know, if you're, the, the women, you have other parts of the Hebrew Bible that discuss women corrupting their husbands, foreign women corrupting their husbands.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Yeah, we've talked about that.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  But like the children, you don't have to kill the babies, because they, they have not yet been taught those things. And, and also, the, the idea that it's everything that breathes, you will not let anything that breathes remain alive, that's a command to kill livestock.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  You're not even allowed to take the animals, not because they're going to teach you to worship Baal. I, I think there's, while we have kind of these token rationalizations for what's going on, I, I think undergirding a lot of what we're talking about, and it comes through in different ways and different parts of the text, depending on the authors, the editors, things like that. But I think underlying it is the notion that the land must be purged of the impure blood, for lack of a better word. It is, it is pretty sick genocidal language that is going on here.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  And it is, as if to add insult to that injury, because, yeah, we're killing the livestock, we're killing anything that breathes. And then verse 19 comes in and goes, but you stay away from those trees.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, this is something that has been much debated by, by scholars, 19 and 20. If you besiege a town for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. Although you may take fruit from, food from them, you must not cut them down. Any trees in the field, human beings.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Any, are trees, excuse me, hold on. Are trees in the field, human beings, that they should come under siege from you? You may destroy only the trees that you do not, that you know do not produce food. You may cut them down for use in building siege works against the town that makes war with you until it falls. So there, there are a lot of scholars who, who in the past, who've said, okay, look, it was a practice of the Assyrians when they were doing their scorched earth campaign to cut down fruit bearing trees. And particularly the ones in the region that would, that would be important would be like date palms and olive trees and stuff like that. Things that take five to 20 years to mature, but can then produce fruit for a century.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Um, like those are very, very important, um, uh, resources. And so, uh, there, a lot of scholars thought, okay, so what this is doing is kind of looking at the, the Neo Assyrian siege tactics and saying, don't be like them. That is usually not taken so seriously these days. Um, there's got to be something else going on here. And, and there, there are scholars who suggest that, uh, this is having to do with, um, not destroying things that are producing fruit. So you've got other parts of Deuteronomy, uh, where it's like, you know, don't boil a, a, um, a kid in its mother's milk.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  And, uh, it talks about, there's another part in Deuteronomy 22, where it, it talks about not destroying things that are bearing fruit. Uh, maybe that has something to do with this. Maybe it just has to do with, uh, trying to offer kind of a tiny little token, um, suggestion of humanity. However, it is pretty inhumane to be like, don't hurt the trees. The trees aren't people.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Why would you hurt the trees?

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Expressly saying, they're not jerks like humans. They're, they're just trees. They didn't do anything to you.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it, it is an odd little, uh, attempt to try to, um, to try to qualify the, the genocidal instructions that are going on here. Um, but I think it demonstrates just the complexity of what's going on in the book of Deuteronomy. This is something that was handed down for centuries with people adding to it from time to time. And, and I think we probably have three very different segments where you initially have, okay, here are the rules and then somebody else come in and, no, just the rules for that, those people over there, these people, we gotta kill them all. And then, um, and then somebody coming in later and be like, hey, we can be, we can be humane about this. We can be civilized about this. Just don't cut down the fruit trees. Okay?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Be cool with the trees, man.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  So I mean, I do remember, I do remember, uh, is it in Kings, uh, Second Kings, I think, when we, we talked about the, the campaign against-

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. They, and it says, cut down every good tree.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  They cut down all of the trees when they're doing it. Yeah. So it's not like the Israelites never did that.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Right. And one of the, one of the arguments that scholars have made is, hey, maybe this is looking at Second Kings 3. Ultimately, that campaign failed. And we, we know that it's because Kemosh, um, rode the lightning into town and, and chased the, the invading force off. But maybe they were like, well, maybe it was because they cut down the trees.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  If maybe they'd left the trees alone, it would have been fine.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So maybe that's what's going on here. I'm, I'm sure there, um, I, I do have, uh, friends who, who are colleagues who listen to this podcast. If somebody has a better idea, uh, Jacob Wright, who's been on our show, he published a paper on, on this very passage. Uh, he makes a, a very, um, erudite argument, but if anybody listening has, has a better idea, they're convinced they know why they, uh, the, the fruit trees were to be left alone. I would love to hear the explanation.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. Uh, friends. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, the best thing you can possibly do, the thing that actually literally sustains us and keeps us going, is become a patron of the show over on patreon.com slash data over dogma, where you can get early access to an ad-free version of every episode of the show, as well as the, uh, the after-party, which is bonus content for you that we do every week. Uh, and you get the warm fuzzy feeling of helping us, uh, keep this thing alive. So that is a wonderful thing

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  to do. Thanks to all of our patrons. Thanks also to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and we'll talk to you again next week.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

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