Written in the Stars!

This week, it's a double-feature! Two totally different topics, both coming from the same chapter in Acts. So open your Bibles to Acts chapter 7, and let's dive in. First, we're looking at a fascinating little twist of linguistics that gives us insight into who the author of acts was. Or more accurately, who he wasn't. It's a mystery that can only be puzzled out by comparing ancient versions of the Hebrew Bible in semitic languages (Hebrew or Aramaic) and the septuagint in Greek. What does all this tell us about who wrote this book? And was that author present for the events he's describing? Then, we're looking to the heavens, and divining what we can about biblical astrology. But we're not the first to do it. A bunch of creators online have been using lines from Acts 7 as an antisemitic bludgeon, and we're going to look at their claim. What is "the tent of Moloch"? Who is the god Rephan? And what does any of this have to do with the star of David??? ---- 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, shop.com is giving away $1 million in Shop Cash.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  A lot of you are familiar with Shopify, which hosts a lot of cool entrepreneurs websites. Now shop.com is combining them all together. It has all the stores that you love and lets you track every order in one spot. So now 1,000 shoppers are each gonna win $1,000 in Shop Cash just in time for the holidays.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Get gifts for everyone on your list, or maybe get yourself something a little merry and bright.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Woo hoo!

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Find exactly what you're looking for at shop.com.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, stocking stuffers, cookware, toys, everything you're gonna need for the holidays, you're gonna find on shop.com.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  From cult favorites to the world's biggest brands, score sweet deals and checkout fast, all at shop.com.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com, shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Venus, AKA Morning Star.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  AKA Somebody in Isaiah, AKA Lucifer, AKA what are we talking? That one got me really messed up.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:03Speaker 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, Dan?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Things are glorious. It's a, it's a beautiful day outside. I'm no longer in Canada, where it was extremely cold, eastern Canada at that.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Yeah. It is, it's rough on the other side of the, the continent.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, for us right now, for, for you paying attention at home, this was a couple of weeks ago, or three weeks ago, or something. And you'll recall that some major weather hit the eastern part of North America. And it was awful. I mean, it was most awful for, you know, the south of the United States, where-

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Folks not used to it.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  They're not used to it at all. Canadians are used to it. The Canadians are, are going for walks and skating on the canal and whatnot, but-

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Reminds me of, I, I went to elementary school just outside of DC. And we had, we had three or four snow days every single winter. Half inch of snow, inch of snow, schools canceled.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  And it's, and it snowed several times every single winter. I moved to Colorado, four years of high school, one snow day.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  And that was because some, some wet snow got too heavy and down some power lines.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  And, and yeah, because there, as soon as the first snowflake hits the ground, the snow plows are like, and they're ready to go.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  And also, everybody's just, everybody just shrugs off. There's a foot of snow. Okay, I'll just go. It's fine. We used to have snow here in, in Salt Lake. That used to be a thing. I don't know. We don't, I guess we don't anymore.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I still have some in my yard, but it's just the crusty leftover stuff.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Sloppy seconds.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  All right. Uh, let's, uh, let's move on from that quickly and talk about what we're going to be discussing on today's show.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Yes, let's.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Because it's, what's funny is, you and I had discussed several different topic possibilities, and we realized that two of them- Let's sort of take their launching point from the same chapter of the Bible.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And we got very excited about that. And we decided that we would make that a single episode. So we're going to be talking about Acts seven. Open, open your books, open your hard covers to Acts, chapter seven.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Time to get your crayons and your pencils.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  And we're, and we're going to be doing first, a chapter and verse, just discussing Acts seven as a, as a whole, but also how, and I think this is fascinating, how the New Testament interacts and quotes from and gets wrong, question mark, the Hebrew Bible. That'll be interesting. And then we're going to go into some astrology. And that's going to be really fun.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  So let's start with our chapter and verse.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  All right. So chapter and verse is Acts, chapter seven.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  A lot of verses, actually. We should call it chapter and verses.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  But let's, where do you want to start with this? Do you want to start with Stephen talking about some stuff?

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Well, let's just lay our scene.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yes, please.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  In, in.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  In fair Verona.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Two houses alike in dignity. We have, we have some, the leaders of the synagogue are basically call Stephen to task. He's doing great signs and wonders among the people. And they call him to, to, they bring him before the, the council. And they say, Hey, you've been doing all this stuff that people said you've been doing? And Stephen basically takes the opportunity to just wax historical for 52 verses, basically outlining the history of the people of Israel, starting from Abraham, and then going all the way down to.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Verse 53 and saying, you know, there was the coming of the righteous one and you have become his betrayers and murderers and you have not kept the law. And then they become enraged, they grind their teeth at Stephen, they go, and then they cast stones at him.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's not great. That's not the outcome you're looking for.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know, it's, it's not a good review of his history of Israel. But, um, but I think it's, it's interesting because what it represents is the author of the book of Acts, negotiation with the history of Israel as told in the Hebrew Bible as they have access to it and as they have negotiated with it. And I just wanted to, to jump around to a handful of verses and talk about some of the ways that they are representing the history that might indicate they're going from the Greek and not the Hebrew, that might indicate they're, they're picking and choosing which passages they're basing this on, and some places where they even contradict what's going on in the Hebrew Bible and contradict themselves.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Uh, and so I think, I think it's just a fascinating study of how the New Testament, one New Testament author, anyway, is engaging with the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. And I want to start in verse two. This is the very beginning of, of Stephen's performance. Brothers and fathers, he says, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our ancestor Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia. Before he lived in Haran and said to him, leave your country and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you. Then he left the country of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After his father died, God had him move from there to this country in which you are now living.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  And so this is, this is basically the end of Genesis 11 and the beginning of Genesis 12, but we, the author has Stephen stake a pretty clear claim that Abraham did not leave Haran until after his father, Tara, died.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  And this is where we're seeing, uh, the author's interpretation of kind of a squirrely part of, of Genesis. As if we go to Genesis 11, uh, we have Haran.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Has some kids, uh, when Tara had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. So that's Genesis 11:26. So Tara's 70 years old, Abraham is born when Tara is 70 years old. Now, we have down toward the end of, uh, chapter 11, that Abraham was 75 years old, um, when he takes up and leaves, picks up and leaves, excuse me. Um, I'm trying to find the exact verse where it says this. Yes, so Abram went, this is Genesis 12, verse 4,

• 9:28Speaker 00

  "So Abram went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him." Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. So Tara was 70, Abraham 75. Put them together, what do you get? 145 years. Abraham leaves Haran when Tara is 145 years old. It says, according to Genesis 11:32, however, that Tara was 205 years old when he died in Haran. So if you go by Genesis 11 and 12, Abram departed from Haran, waved bye-bye to his dad. When his dad was 175 years old, he lived for another, or excuse me, 145 years old, he lived for another 60 years in Haran without

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Abraham. Right. Abraham. Except in Acts, the author says that Abram didn't leave Haran until Tara had died. So we've got a little bit of a problematic thing there. And that's probably just because the author of Acts is not doing the math, is not looking closely at this and being like, wait a minute, that doesn't add up. Right. And so Tara had to have lived for 60 more years after Abraham left. I mean, you're blaming the author of Acts. You could just as easily blame Stephen.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Stephen could have gotten it wrong.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Well, I, I, I'm gonna, there are a number of places where I blame the author and not the character, precisely because the texts are written, are very clearly written in Greek, and are very clearly appealing to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which indicates it's probably not this Jewish person talking in a Jewish synagogue, when they're being represented as speaking Aramaic, or maybe even Hebrew.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  So what you're saying, if I can just sort of repackage it a little bit, is that Stephen himself would have been, would have read it in the Hebrew. He would have been a Hebrew speaking Jewish person, and so if he had encountered the old, the Hebrew Bible, he would have encountered it in Hebrew and not made some of the mistakes that we're about to talk about. Is that what you're saying?

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Either, yeah, either Hebrew or in some Aramaic translation, one of the Targum Mim or something like that.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  But what we see is that the author of the book of Acts is relying on the Septuagint. And we see this even more clearly in Acts 15, and I think we've talked about this before. This is the Jerusalem Council, and there's a part where they talk, excuse me, they talk about how the tabernacle of David will be restored, and for the remnant of humanity who seek after the Lord. And this is the Septuagint's pretty flagrant mistranslation of a part of Amos that in the Hebrew says something entirely different, that has no relevance at all to the context where it's being deployed in the book of Acts. So it has to have been

• 12:33Speaker 00

  the Greek that was being, being used. And so, yeah, there's, it's, it's definitely a literary composition here.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  We are, we do not have the verbatim recording or transcription of somebody speaking in Aramaic or Hebrew.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  So, yeah, problematic. Another, another interesting one, we can...

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Scoot down to verse six. This is where we're talking about the Israelites in Egypt. And God spoke in these terms, that his descendants would be resident aliens in a country belonging to others who would enslave them and mistreat them during 400 years. And so this is the time that the the Israelites are in Egypt. And if we go to like Genesis 15 13, there's this prophecy about the Abraham's descendants being, you know, they'll be oppressed 400 years.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  But if you go to Exodus 12, verse 40, the time that they were in Egypt was 430 years being oppressed. So you've got you've got two different ways that the Hebrew Bible is is representing the length of the sojourn in Egypt. It's either 400 or 430 years. And so here we see that the author of the book of Acts is siding with Genesis over and against Exodus about the story that is actually in Exodus. So picking and choosing here. This is an example of of the author deciding to go with one and not the other.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, you start in Genesis, you might as well hang out there.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  When, you know, when you're talking about Abram and whatever. Yeah, just stick with what you with what you know. Why read a whole other book?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  And and here's another instance where we can see that the author is pulling from the septuagint. Then Joseph sent in, this is verse 14. Then Joseph sent and invited his father Jacob and all his relatives to come to him, 75 in all. Great. We can go look at Genesis 46, verse 27, as well as Exodus 1 5. And it says there were 70 people. Who came down to Egypt. But if you go look at the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint of Genesis 4627. Hey, what do you know? It says 75. So.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  That's interesting. What accounts for that discrepancy? Do you know? Do you have a sense of why they just changed the number?

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Um, I, I don't, you know, this is, this would be interesting to look into because 70 is a really important number in the ancient world, you know, you, the, uh, the table of nations in Genesis 10 has 70 nations. If you have 70, uh, and you know, Deuteronomy 32, eight, we have the El Yon, or excuse me, just El Yon, the most high divides up the nations according to the number of the sons of God in the early Hebrew, but in the Masoretic text, it's sons of Israel. And that traditional number is 70. So you would think that they would, uh, want to stick with 70, but for whatever reason, the Septuagint changed it to, um, 75. And I'm just gonna look.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm gonna dive in real, just really quickly and remind everybody what the Septuagint is. Because we've been referencing it and we want to, we're going to keep referencing it. And, uh, it's, so it's the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. That was produced, uh, when was it produced? Somewhere in the?

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Between like the third century BCE and like the first century BCE. So the books were translated independently and kind of came together over the centuries.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Okay. And, and so anyone, so the, what we're talking about is that anyone who was a Greek, a reader and probably speaker of Greek around this time, who wanted to read, uh, the, the Hebrew Bible would have read it as the Septuagint in this form. Okay.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  And, uh, technically the Septuagint really refers to the translation of the first five books of Moses. Those would have been the first books translated, each one by a different translator. And, and they were not coordinating. It was not a systematic process. Uh, but you know, there's kind of the narrow sense of what the Septuagint is. And then the broader sense, we're speaking about the broader sense. And the Septuagint also has 75 in Exodus one. So both, both of the passages that in the Masoretic text say 70 are 75 in the Septuagint. So we have another example of, of the author, uh, relying not on the Greek, but, uh, on the.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Uh, or excuse me, not on the Hebrew, but on the Greek. Right. And then the next two verses I think are really fascinating. I really like verse 15 and 16 because says, "So Jacob went down to Egypt. He himself died there, as well as our ancestors, and their bodies were brought back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem." So, that's pretty clear. Jacob, all the, the sons of Jacob who came down to, uh, to stay in Egypt.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  They all died, bodies were brought back. They were all buried in Shechem in a tomb that was purchased by Abraham. The problem is that Abraham never bought anything in Shechem and not from any sons of, of, uh, Hamor. Abraham bought, uh, land and a cave, which was used as a tomb at Machpela, which is near Hebron, from Ephraim the Hittite. And you can go to Genesis 23 for the story of this purchase. This is where this, there's kind of this haggling back and forth. It's a weird, it's, it's, it's up-haggling. It goes in the wrong direction. Cause the Hittite's like, "Let me just give it to you." And Abraham's like, "Ha, ha, ha, good try. I'm gonna pay for it."

• 18:56Speaker 00

  And, and really the point- Come on, what, what's 400 shekels between friends? Yeah. And, and you get to the end and he's like, "Mmm, 400 shekels." Um, and, and I think the point there is really, what the story is supposed to illustrate is that this really does legally and fully belong to Abraham and his family, and they did pay for it. Cause you know, if they, if they were like, "Just take it," and he just takes it, it's kind of like, ah, that was, that wasn't a real legitimate transfer of property. That was a, that was a gift or something like that. It, it weakens the claim to the property. But if, if Abram can say, "No, I'm paying for it,"

• 19:36Speaker 00

  um, uh, then, then that's really his property. So, so Abraham buys that plot and that is where Jacob is buried, according to Genesis 49 and 50. So, yeah, so nothing to do with Shechem.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  So I just to, just to be clear, are Shechem and

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Hebron.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Machpala are not, they're, they're not next door.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  To each other. Where, where are we talking about?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Uh, Hebron is, is a little bit, it's closer to Jerusalem. Shechem is way up north in the, um, the Northern Kingdom.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  So we're talking close to

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Very, very different places.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. You, it's, it's a long walk between, uh, those two places.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  So Stephen wasn't just, uh, just getting a little confused here.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  No, and, and we'll talk about what likely Stephen was doing, but so, so where's the sons of Hamor and Shechem coming from? Well, that's coming from Genesis 33, where Jacob, not Abraham, pays the sons of Hamor, uh, an amount of silver to purchase some land in Shechem. And then it wasn't Jacob who was buried there. Jacob's buried in Machpala. It's Joseph who was buried at Shechem, according to Joshua 24, verse 32.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  And so what we have is Jacob's burial in Machpala, the place that was purchased by Abraham, and Joseph's burial in Shechem, in the place that was purchased by Jacob. And the author seems to be just, just squishing them together and says, and, and you know, there, some of the folks who want to argue that this is not actually a contradiction, uh, will argue, well, it says Jacob died and then all the ancestors. And when it says they were brought to Shechem, it just means the ancestors, Joseph specifically, since he was actually buried in Shechem. And so there, there are attempts to try to kind of dodge what the text, uh, is, what's actually in the text.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Uh, but you can't get around the fact that Abraham did not purchase the plot of land in Shechem. That was Jacob who purchased that. So what seems to be the, uh, the problem is, he just, instead of taking the time, cause you know, they're already picking up rocks and, and they're taking, getting a good look at, at a good round rock. And he's like, okay, I gotta hurry. I'm going to just squish these accounts together and just be like, they were all buried in Shechem and, and. You know, just save some ink.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Listen.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Save a little bit of papyrus.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Our current president can't keep Iceland and Greenland straight. It makes sense to me that a guy would like maybe mess up who was buried where.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Especially when he's facing down some very angry.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Audience members.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  If if someone as sharp and as insightful as Trump can talk about the airports being taken during the Revolutionary War, I think we can forgive Stephen this this little peccadillo. That by messing up exactly what's going on with the the graves. But yeah, that's that's another instance of of engagement with and negotiation with the tradition coming from the Hebrew Bible.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  We are. Heard the construction.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, you 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.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and were 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.

• 24:22Speaker 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. 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.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Monarch has other things like, uh, you can watch your timeline move. You can play out the options. You can choose the fastest way to alleviate your debt. Most apps just tell you what you've spent and how much debt you're in, not Monarch. Monarch even has an AI assistant that will tell you, help you with anything to do with your finances. You can ask, how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or can I afford the vacation that I want to do? And it'll walk you through it all. It's super easy. It's super useful. I love it.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code DOGMA at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code DOGMA.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network and no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  There are a handful more that I think are interesting. One of them is, well, actually, I want to go all the way down to the last verse 53, because I think this is pretty interesting.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Acts 7:53, "You are the one," and we've gotten all the way down to Jesus. Verses 42 and 43 have some interesting stuff in it we're going to talk about in another segment. But in Acts 7:53, Stephen's conclusion is, "You were the ones who received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it."

• 27:09Speaker 00

  And then they say, "How dare you!" And then they take their shiny new stones and they stone him. But the law was not given through angels. At least, that's not really what we find. We find the law being given directly by, I don't know, the God of Israel in Exodus 19 and 20. And so, hmm, where are these angels coming from? This is not exactly what we see, even in the Septuagint. And here, it's not that we're going directly from the text. Here, it is second temple interpretive tradition that is standing in between the text and what we see Stephen saying.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Because you had a bunch of traditions about angels mediating what's going on as a way to kind of distance God from what's going on here. So rather than God themselves being the one to deliver the law, God's presence is represented or borne by angels. And I think this probably has a little bit to do with this concept of the angel of the presence or the angel of the Lord. Who is kind of the, the identity of the angel is conflated with the identity of God in, in a handful of stories. And we've talked about this before on the show. You have Hagar

• 28:35Speaker 00

  runs into God in the wilderness and it, you know, in one verse, it says it's the angel of God, but then Hagar says, I'm naming this place this way because have I seen God and, and lived? And you have something similar going on in Exodus three. In verse two, it says, "An angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in the flame of fire in the midst of the burning bush." And then a few verses later, "That angel says, 'I am the God of Israel.'" And you have Judges six, Judges 13, Judges five, probably. You have a handful of places where the identity of God and the angel is, is kind of conflated. And in my opinion, and the opinion of, of a

• 29:18Speaker 00

  number of other scholars, this kind of literary prophylaxis, "Hey, it says God, but remember, it could be the angel," probably became very, very useful in the second temple period to distance God from what was going on. And so at any point in the text where it talks about God doing these things, they could say, no, that was just the angel. Cause remember the angel can identify as God.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  And so I, I think this is another witness to the proclivity to reinterpret stories about God themselves as stories about angels. And, and you even see this in the Septuagint, because you, at some point, we, have we addressed Exodus 424, the bridegroom of blood passage? Do you remember that one?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  I don't remember that one. No.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  That's where.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  But I, I could very easily have forgotten.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, that's, um, we both could. Uh, that's where God tries to kill Moses. God like shows up at the hotel, uh, and.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  And then the poor, uh, his, his wife.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  His wife.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Circumcises him and.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  As an astonishing, uh.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Or, or the circumcises son.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Circumcises their kid and flips the foreskin at him.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  At his feet. Yeah. And, um, and says, "You're a bridegroom of blood." Um, well, what's, what's interesting is in the Septuagint, it's not God. It's angels of God.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  So in the, in the translation, they've gone ahead and they've already inserted the angels. And, and you have similar things going on in, in a number of other passages.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought we had talked about the, the idea that, that the Septuagint authors were so uncomfortable with the idea of it being God that they, they just kept making it angels.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, God, God doesn't personally put out a hit on anybody. God sends angels to go.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Carry out his dirty deeds.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Done dirt cheap. Did you ever see the movie Dirty Deeds?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Who was that?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Was it called Dirty Deeds? Uh, that was Norm MacDonald.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I saw Mr. Deeds.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  That was Adam Sandler.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Adam Sandler, that's right.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no. Dirty Deeds was Norm MacDonald. It was, um. Eh, it was funny in parts.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Kind of like Norm MacDonald. Eh, it was funny sometimes.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Was it? Wait, was it Dirty Deeds? I, I'm seeing another movie come up.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  We are way off track here. I'm.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, Dirty Work. Excuse me. Dirty Work was Norm MacDonald. Okay.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Um, it's Norm MacDonald. You know what you're getting with Norm MacDonald, but, um. So I think that's what's going on there at the very end and, and to kind of tie all this off in a, in a nice little bow. We've got a very creative, second temple period literary negotiation with the history of Israel here. That's, that's certainly not something that someone speaking Aramaic or Hebrew was going to, um, you know, just rip off the cuff. Standing in front of the Sanhedrin. Uh, this is obviously something that took some care and some time. And, uh, and some thoughtfulness on the part of the author going through and being like, well, should I say 430? Should I say 400?

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Hmm. And, uh, squishing together the, the accounts of Abraham and, and Jacob buying the, the plots of land and huge tracts of land, as, as the great poet once said. Um, and, and so it is, it is a creative and an ongoing kind of negotiation with, uh, the author's own, um, heritage. It's, it's, and it conflicts with that heritage as it has been preserved down to us in the Hebrew Bible. And in another segment, we're going to talk a little bit more about one of the ways that. Conflicts and and represents later ideologies.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  But but I think taking this text seriously and trying to allow it to operate on its own terms means recognizing that this is a literary creation, that this is something that is the product of of thoughtful and again, creative engagement with the author's heritage. That is, is definitely not something that this Stephen, who I I'm willing, I don't know for sure if there was really a martyrdom of a dude named Stephen, I'm willing to allow it, that it's that it's certainly plausible. But if that person did actually rattle off the history of Israel, just to to try to

• 33:55Speaker 00

  buy some time and ended up getting stoned for his troubles, it wouldn't have matched what we have here in Acts seven. But it is, but it is a fascinating story.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Love it. That's really fascinating. All right, well, uh, let's, let's move on to our next segment, which is, what is that?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  And today's what is that?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Is a star. Now you and I have talked before about references to stars. We talked about the star of David.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Yes, there's a new star search evidently.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Started up.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Boom, that's great. There's a star that was over a certain infant's house. However, that ends up working.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  But this is a different star and it's a little confusing. We're, we're still in Acts, chapter seven, as we said. But now we're looking for, uh, we're, we're looking at verse 43.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Guide me in. I don't know what's going on here.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so you've got, we're, we're in Stephen's review of the history of Israel. And we're talking about the fact that Israel was slipping back into idolatry. And verse 42 says, God turned away from them and handed them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets. Did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices for 40 years in the wilderness, oh, house of Israel? No, now we're in verse 43. You took along the tent of Moloch.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  And the star of your god, Rayfan, or Remfan, or Rofan? Or there are a bunch of different ways that this is actually found in the manuscripts in Greek. But Remfan seems to be the one that the social media butterflies like. The images that you made to worship. So I will remove you beyond Babylon.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  And that was, so that was a, that was Stephen quoting God. Is that, is that quotation, a quotation, a ref, a reference to a quotation in another book? Or is that, or did he make that up?

• 36:23Speaker 00

  No, this is a quotation of the prophetic book of Amos, specifically chapter five. And we've got verses 25 and 26. And a little bit of verse 27 thrown in there for good measure. But when we go look at the Hebrew of what's going on in Amos 5, it's a little different. So I'm going to read Amos 25 through to where we get to in the middle of verse 27 from the NRSVUE. And this is based on the Hebrew. Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, oh, house of Israel? You shall take up Sakut, your king,

• 37:05Speaker 00

  and Kaiwan, your star god, your images which you made for yourselves. Therefore I will take you into exile beyond Damascus.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  So a little different.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. We didn't say Moloch, we didn't say Remfan or Refan or whatever it is.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  So what's going on there?

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Well, uh, the, so the word, the, the reference to Moloch is, and this seems to be coming through in the Septuagint, our beloved ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  But they take this name Sakut, which seems to be the name of probably a Mesopotamian deity.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  And it looks an awful lot like the Hebrew word for Sukkot, uh, which is why in the, uh, in the book of Acts, it renders it the tent of Moloch. So you have the name of a deity that gets confused for the Hebrew word for tent or tabernacle. And so you, you bring along the tent, but then we need the name of a deity. And so instead of Sakut, your king, you change the name of the deity to tent and you change the word king to Moloch. Because king in Hebrew is Melik. And

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Moloch is just different vowels.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so you take two words that have meanings.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  And then you go, they sound kind of like these two totally other words. That have totally different meanings.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  That's a weird thing to do. Well, like I, I mean, I get that that could happen, but it's just, it just seems so strange. Did, is the idea, is the guess that the, uh, the translators of the Septuagint just didn't know those, just didn't know the I, what was going on there?

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Probably, probably at least, um, well, when it comes to, uh, when it comes to the word for king, like they shouldn't have been confused because there is a second masculine plural pronominal suffix on the end of Melik. So it, it, it shouldn't be confused for the name Moloch, but, and also as we've discussed before on the channel, there was no deity named Moloch. That is some, that's a misunderstanding of a Hebrew noun that probably just referred to a specific type of sacrifice. And so by the time of the Septuagint, they're like, maybe it's that Moloch guy. Okay. Well, just throw that in there. And you know, this kind of thing happens. Is it, is it, um, slide down my rain barrel or rainbow?

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Like, you know, they, they're, they're somewhat similar. They're not the exact same word, but, um, I grew up with rain barrel.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Okay. But And I suppose that, I mean, it makes even more sense when I think about it, like, when I think about words that sound the same in English. If I'm reading them, I have vowels. They didn't have vowels to go on.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  They did not have vowels, yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  So these would have been spelled the same, Molek and Moloch.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Except for that pronominal, that possessive suffix that is attached to the word in Hebrew. But yeah, they wouldn't have had vowels and they would have gone either by an interpretive tradition that would have been active, or just by their own interpretation. And this happens a lot in the Septuagint. There are some times when they have no idea what's going on and they just transliterate it. So they just go, "Oh, just write it in..." And, you know, that kind of thing happens as well. So we've gone from "Sakut, your king," to the tent of Moloch.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  So Sakut, yes. So let me just make sure I'm following this. Sakut, your king. Sakut is a person, is a king person.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  A deity.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  A deity.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  A deity, yeah. Probably a Mesopotamian deity. And then the next phrase, "Kaiwan, your star god." And the Hebrew is "Kiun," and then it says "Salmechem," which would be your image kochav, your image of a star. And so the idea there is that Kiun is some kind of divine image of some kind related to a star. And then it says "Elohechem," which would be your plural god. So the star of your god, probably what it is. Your image is the star of your god.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  And so here, Kiun gets altered a little bit into Raifan. And probably because Kiun is also probably a Mesopotamian deity, Kiwan, Kaiwan, something like that is what it would have been in Akkadian. And this was probably a deity associated with the planet Saturn.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  And so probably the Septuagint translators render Remfan or Raifan, or let's see what the alternatives are. We've got Remfam, Remfan, Romefa.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Refa, Refan, Reaphan.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Can I just say, none of those sound like a Kiwan or whatever it is?

• 42:35Speaker 00

  But I, I think that probably was a deity in the Greco-Roman world that would have been associated with the planet Saturn.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  So, that's, that's what makes sense of, of why they altered it so wildly.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  So, in this case, they're not trying to translate the name, they're just trying to substitute in a, a, the name of a-

• 42:57Speaker 00

  An equivalent deity.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  An equivalent god, okay.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And so, it doesn't, it doesn't say anything at all about the nature of this star. However, if it is associated with Saturn, a lot of people have pointed out, there's an interesting, uh, pattern at the north pole of Saturn.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  A Saturn pattern?

• 43:19Speaker 00

  It is a Saturn pattern, yes. And, um, the, uh, the Saturn pattern is a, um, a hexagon that is created by the clouds and the storms and everything like that.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  I've seen that, sure.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  You've seen that, okay. And, uh, the idea that, that a lot of people have come up with is that the hexagon, if you connect, there's a way to connect the points of the hexagon to create a hexagram.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Or-

• 43:49Speaker 01

  A star of David.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  A star of David, a six-pointed star. Now, uh, we didn't have, uh, the ability to, we didn't have telescopes that were powerful enough to be able to see that pattern on the top of Saturn until, you know, the last, I don't know, it was probably,

• 44:10Speaker 00

  it was definitely after 1500, I'm gonna say it's probably closer to like 19, okay, I was way off, 1987.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, yeah, that's, that's not the kind of thing that you can see with just optics.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  No.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  You have to have, uh, you either have to get the optics very, very close, or-

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  We're looking with different things.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  David Godfrey in 1987 pieced together flyby views from the 81 Voyager mission.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  So that was Viger that gave us the hexagon. So definitely not on the radar of the author.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Authors.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Yes, of Amos 5. That would be a kind of prescience that you probably need some evidence for. But so, yeah, the, one of the reasons we're bringing this up is because on social media these days, you see all kinds of people saying that the star of David is the star of Rem fan. It's an idol. It is idolatry. It's worshiping a false god and all this kind of stuff. This is just rank antisemitism that is trying to dismiss the star of David as, as a false god.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and trying to associate the Jewish people who invented, like, whose book you, you still use, Christian person, to say, to say that the Jewish people are the idolatrous ones.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  I think it's so interesting, but I, and you know, you know, the, a, an antisemitic video was sort of our jumping off point for looking at this. But what became instantly more interesting to me as I was reading about this is this sort of

• 45:54Speaker 01

  old, ancient view of the stars in the heavens as not, not like, you know, we think of them, you know, planets and stars as sort of inert.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Balls of gas burning millions of miles away.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Giant rocks, whatever you got. But they were, when, when, you know, going back to act seven, when Stephen says, but God turned away from them and handed them over to the worship of the host of heaven.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  The host of heaven is not a group of, it is a group of gods, but it's the stars. It's the planets.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Those are the gods.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Yes. So the, the host is tsevah in Hebrew. That means it's like military host. It's, uh, it's a group of, of soldiers. And, and this, the idea of the stars as the host of heaven descends from this notion that the stars are gods. That they are God's army.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Right. And I, I think all of the ancient world had some version of this, which is why, you know, we associate, you know, Saturn, the, the planets themselves are not named after gods. They're associated with gods because they were gods.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like Saturn and Venus and all these things, they were the gods. That was the God. He's up there.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Looking down on us. And the reason that they chose the planets specifically is because those are the ones that move around in the night sky.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yes, the wanderers.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Because they're not, they're, they're not in a fixed pattern. And we, you see this in, in Philo, you see this in Paul, the idea that, that those are gods. And Philo is pretty explicit, the stars are gods. And, uh, there, and we can go to Deuteronomy, there's an interesting, uh, part of Deuteronomy four. When you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them. Things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven. And so according to Deuteronomy four, they're the gods that the nations worship.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  God created the, the host of heaven so that the nations would have, uh, deities to worship. But Israel must only worship at Onai. And Israel must not follow the worship practices that the other nations use to worship. Those are the gods. So the hosts of heaven work for God, but they're also considered the, the idolatrous, uh, gods of the heathens.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero Powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade. Hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  There's all this tech shit going on right now. We have facial recognition. We have our Ring cameras giving data to police. We have the Flock Safety Cameras. We have Amazon Echo and all these devices that are constantly listening to us and using our data for one purpose or another. Hey, we have a national security problem. When a company like Flock turns it into this organized system that law enforcement can access.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  To hear more on why you should rethink every safe camera you drive past, check out episode 1308 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  And yet again, we have this idea that keeps popping up for us, which is the idea that these are not, that there isn't just one God.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, they place their God over and above these other gods and maybe make him the creator god of these other gods or whatever. But it's very specific that these are other gods, like the, like the other, the people in Babylon or, you know, Moab or whatever are worship, they're not worshiping a God that doesn't exist. They're worshiping a God that does exist, but isn't your God.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Sort of thing.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, precisely. And you see this in? In a number of places in the pre-exilic literature, but it lasts down into the New Testament. And for instance, the idea that the other gods are ruled, the other nations are ruled by other patron deities, you know, this is Deuteronomy 32:8. This is, God goes down to Egypt in the Exodus to render judgment upon the gods of Egypt. You have David telling Saul, as Saul is pursuing David and like chasing him outside of the land of Israel, David's complaining, "Your men are forcing me to worship other gods by forcing me out of Adonai's inheritance." There are a bunch of manifestations of that idea.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  And even in Deuteronomy Isaiah, this is supposed to be like the high watermark of biblical monotheism. You even have in Deuteronomy Isaiah, God saying, you know, "Who musters the host of heaven and names them, and not one is missing." Like that's talking about calling the gods out to muster for battle, and all of them show up because they all obey the God of Israel, not one is missing. And the God of Israel knows all their names and commands them. And it is in the Song of Deborah in Judges 5, when they are, they're fighting against

• 52:19Speaker 00

  the Canaanite general Sisera, and it says, "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera," which is another reference to the idea that the stars not only are deities, but also are armies. And they can be called upon to come fight against the enemies of the people of God. So it's all throughout the Hebrew Bible, and again, even down into the New Testament, where they're frequently referred to as powers, principalities, and powers, and dominions, and stuff like that. Those are The, the references to powers in Paul frequently, and, and I haven't looked to see if it's unilaterally,

• 53:00Speaker 00

  but frequently that's references to divine beings that are identifiable as stars. So when you get into later rabbinic literature, there's this famous debate in rabbinic literature about two powers in heaven. And this is supposed to be kind of a euphemistic way to refer to the heresy about there being two gods in heaven. The main god and then like a deputy god. And some folks think that this has to do with, with Christianity, but there are other Jewish scholars who are, will argue. It seems to just have to do with this idea of a kind of subordinationism in early Judaism, where there was some kind of mediatory figure that was, was being endorsed by Jewish folks.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  So that's, that's an ongoing debate, but, but powers are gods.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  All I know is that when you said a main god and a deputy god, I had Andy, Andy Fife jump into my head.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, the deputy god gets one bullet and he has to carry it around in his pocket.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  I may need to, uh, that made, that made me very happy. Let me ask you this, uh, one of the things that I found when I was looking up some of this stuff was references to a, an ancient Hebrew zodiac.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  So like, can we get a little bit into that? Because one of the things that we see is, you know, Adonai is our god. Is Adonai one of the, one of the star gods or is he separate from the stars?

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Considered, considered separate because you have the, the sun, the moon, the stars, all the host of heaven. That is all distinct from and subordinate to Adonai.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Although, although in the earliest periods, you do have some indications that Adonai, worship of Adonai was associated with worship of the sun.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  So there, there is, it probably had, was in some periods associated with astral phenomena.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, uh, one of the things that keeps popping up that even I've noticed, but then, uh, when, in my reading was associated then with this astrology business is the number 12.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  12 tribes of Israel, 12 stones on the high priest's breastplate.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  12 loaves in the temple, all of this stuff. And people were connecting that with signs of a zodiac.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Mazarot, is that a word that I'm, that I'm looking for?

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Mazarot, yes, that's, that occurs in the book of Job. And that's probably a reference to, uh, the mazarot just means the, the stars of the constellations.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, um, I don't know that it's, uh, so, I, I think it's the majority position that this is a reference to constellations, the zodiac. Uh, Job is, is Persian period, so if this is influenced by, uh, Zoroastrian astrology, then it could be a direct reference to, uh, the, the 12 signs of the zodiac. But that's it, that's the only, you, you have, I think you have some references that are generally, that are translated like, uh, the Pleiades or something like that.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  But, uh, but when it comes to the zodiac, that's the closest you get is the book of Job.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  So, uh, so do, do you think that there's anything to this idea that the, the number 12 is popping up as a zodiacal reference?

• 56:31Speaker 00

  No, um, I, I don't think there's a case to make for that because it, the, the number 12 is significant long before we see any references to a zodiac. Um, and so, so I think it's, it's more likely just that, that this is a, a, a number that became highly significant early on in, in the history of Israel. And you've got a bunch of those, 3, 7, 12, 70, 40. There, there are a bunch of numbers that are symbolic and have significance and so get repeated an awful lot. Um, so, so I, I don't think there's a good case to make for that.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Okay, I guess it was, I guess it was as a reference to the temple itself and was talking about. The, the, the stones on the breastplate and 12 loaves in the temple.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  12 pillars and, and they were talking about the, the temple as a sort of model for the cosmos.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Cosmos, yeah. Yeah, there, there's a case to make for that and, and a lot of the texts about the temple are probably exilic or maybe even post-exilic. So that's much closer to that. But the significance of 12, I think predates that. Um, and, and you know, it's, it's a, um, it's a, there's a much shorter line to draw from 12 tribes to 12 stones, 12 pillars, 12, 12, everything. So.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Right. That makes total sense.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. But, but I, it would be, I would be interested to see, uh, what a, a close interrogation of the number 12, uh, throughout the history of Israel reveals, uh, cause.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It doesn't seem obvious to me that 12 would necessarily, you know, different cultures looking at the sky might not subdivide it into 12 the way many cultures have like it, like it, that just seems like an arbitrary division. You don't need to divide things into 12. But maybe I'm not, I'd look, I'm, I am neither an astrologer nor an astronomer. So I, I, I, I don't necessarily know.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  All I know is that it's the age of Aquarius.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  It's the dawning of that.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  The dawning of, well, it was, it was the dawning back in the sixties.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Back in the sixties. We gotta be there by now, right?

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, certainly, certainly. Yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  In the year 2525, if man is still alive.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  And they were.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  They'll, they'll, they'll get there hopefully.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, we, it turns out we were still alive then. Um, all right. Anything else we wanted to get into in terms of astrology, did Magi, yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Zoroast- the Zoroastrians and you know, when we talked about the Magi, they were likely Zoroastrian.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Uh, priests or whatever, or astrologers.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Scholars, yes. Poet warrior kings or whatever. Yeah. I should have said that in a Scottish accent, but um, no, the I, yeah, the, the Magi, that, that's such a fascinating bit of astrology. Because it's, it's like, they're not, they're not Israelized. They're not Jewish folks.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  They come from a completely different region, a completely different ethnic group, a completely different tradition. And it's like, look, their divinatory practices were accurate.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Is that what the author is trying to say?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the author is like, hey, these guys know what they're talking about.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, if they tell you that the, the stars are telling you something, they got it right here. So.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Um, which, which I think is, uh, I would love to see somebody tease out the implications of that a little more because it, it just suggests to me that the author, in my opinion, the author of Matthew is probably just toying with how obvious it is that, that this was a sign of, of the coming of the, the Savior, that even those, those goofballs out in, uh, in the Zagros Mountains over there, they, even they can figure it out. And, and, and here we have Herod going, I don't know what's going on. Where, where is that? Um, what's the, uh, Gomer? Uh, I don't even remember the characters' names.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Andy, Andy. Um, the, the other one thing that I thought I would just dive into just a little bit.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Because it's always confused me is, uh, Venus, AKA morning star.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  AKA, somebody in Isaiah, AKA Lucifer, AKA, what are we talking? That, that one got me really messed up.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Well, the, you have in, in Isaiah 14 12, you have the sarcastic reference to the king of Babylon. Like the text is explicitly saying, okay, and now I'm going to talk about the king of Babylon. And then it sarcastically refers to him exalting his throne over the stars of God.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  And, uh, and, and talks about it, you know, how you have fallen. And refers to him as Heelel Ben Shacher, which would be shining one, son of the dawn. And this would seem to be a couple of different ways to refer to the king sarcastically as some kind of deity associated with the planet Venus.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Because Venus was widely divinized and considered an important deity in so many different pantheons. And so when you get down to the Septuagint, they render it Heosporos, which would be light bearer. And so it's not, they're not transliterating it. And that is evidently a name that is occasionally used to refer to a deity in the pantheon associated with the planet Venus. And then when you get down to the Latin, they use Lucifer, which is also a name that is used occasionally to refer to a deity in the pantheon that is associated with the planet Venus. And you also have Lucifer.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  There's a passage in, I want to say it's First Peter. It could be Second Peter. It's in one of the Peters. Pete and Pete, just as a call back to the good old days of the Nickelodeon 90s. But it talks about the morning star rising in your hearts. And that is supposed to be a reference to Jesus. And in the Vulgate, it's rendered Lucifer. So the Latin Vulgate is clearly not using Lucifer to mean something bad. In fact, there was in the 300 C E, a bishop named Lucifer.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Yeah.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, which was just light bearer or light bringer. And so you can see how that could be associated with Jesus. And then after you identify Lucifer with Satan, then Lucifer becomes a naughty name and a naughty character.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Somebody needs to, somebody go out after you've seen this and do a video that we can then respond to. Where you claim that Jesus is actually Satan because of the Lucifer Lucifer creation.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  There are, there are more than enough people getting millions of views on videos saying that. And a lot of them will, a lot of them are using Gnosticism to do it.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  Because one of, one of Gnosticism's claims, based on this middle platonic cosmogony, that suggests that the material world is bad. And so whichever deity created the material world was bad. And so the Gnosticism, certain streams of tradition within Gnosticism, reinterpret the Hebrew Bible as a story of the evil kind of JV squad deity who trapped us in these fleshly prisons. And so nowadays you get the people who are like, well, yeah, Gnosticism, ooh, and we can bring the Luciferian stuff into it too. And so it just resonates at a higher frequency and then you get into frequencies. And so, yeah, there are plenty of people doing that out there.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  All right. Well, there you go. What a fun, weird, sort of difficult to follow grouping of things that that was, but I really enjoy it. Hey, listen, friends, if you would like to become a part of making this show happen, and boy, we'd really appreciate it if you would, if you do, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and that's where you can get early and ad free versions of each episode. You can get the after party, which is bonus content that we do for you. There's a lot of, a lot of stuff happening over there. Who knows? Maybe new stuff will start happening.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  We'll do some patrons only stuff. You don't know, we might. And if we do, you're going to want to be a part of it. So head on over there. We sure do appreciate you. We also appreciate Roger Gowdy for editing the show and we will talk to y'all next time.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Data Over Dogma is a member of the Airwave Media Network. It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC, copyright 2026, all rights reserved.

• 1:05:43Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  In January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance became encased in the ice in the Weddell Sea. Through determination, grit, and savvy, Shackleton would lead his men through a brutal winter, then over hundreds of miles of Antarctic ice, followed by 800 miles across some of the roughest waters in the world. It is one of the most extraordinary and inspirational journeys in the history of exploration. Find this story and many others at the Explorers Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts or at explorerspodcast.com.

• 1:06:46Speaker 07

  Every Sunday, we cover the week's tech news on This Week in Tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte from the Twit Podcast Network, inviting you to join me this week for a doozy. Jason Calacanis and Gina Smith join me. We're going to talk about so many things. The flying car from Tesla, the guy who bugged the OpenAI conference room, wrapped it in toilet paper, and the new Surface Laptop. It's all coming up on Twit. You'll find it at twit.tv and wherever you get your podcasts.