Literally Not Literal!

This week we're diving in to some deep controversy, and we gotta say: come on in, the water's fine. First, we're looking at biblical literalism. There are a lot of Christians out there these days who claim that they believe that the Bible is to be taken exactly at face value. It's literally true exactly as it is, no interpretation needed. Well, if you've been with us for any amount of time, you already know that's a position that's not going to work around here. But what is biblical literalism really? When you boil it down, what are the literalists really saying? Is literalism a dogma that goes back to beginning of Christianity, or is it relatively new? Then, we're going crazy with orthography! Or maybe scriptology? Or maybe even grammatology? Whatever it is, we're looking at Hebrew letters. What could be so interesting about letters, you might ask? Well, according to an onslaught of online Christian influencers, the Hebrew letters in the Bible have coded messages that all point to (brace for the shock): Jesus! Does the Hebrew Bible have a whole second level of meaning to decode when you look not at the words, but at the letters? Well, no. But the topic of how Hebrew (and English) got its letters is fascinating, so we're going to talk about it! ---- 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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  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

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  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

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• 1:25Speaker 00

  You know, you go to the Song of Songs and it's like, why is this erotic poetry in scripture? And it's like, oh, this is, this is Jesus in the church, you know? Jesus is just like, "I love your breasts, church. They look like some deer."

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:48Speaker 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?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Things are good. We actually got snow in the Salt Lake Valley for the first time.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. I heard, I heard Davis County got dumped on. I was hoping for a little bit more, just, just for fun. Cause so I didn't have to just scrape a tiny layer of ice off my car, but, but no such luck here in Harriman. We did not get much snow at all.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Alas. Well, uh, we've got a fun show coming up. Uh, today we're going to be talking about two very interesting things. And you know what, Dan? We didn't even come up with like segment titles for these. Cause there's not going to be a chapter and verse this week, which is unusual and I kind of like it. This week, we're going to be, we're going to be talking about biblical literalism. It's something that we have talked about quite a bit in the sense that we've like pointed out a whole bunch of reasons why the Bible cannot be taken literally, but let's talk about like what literalism actually is, where it comes from, all that sort of thing.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  That'll be our first segment. And then later on in the show, uh, Dan, you, I've seen some videos that you have pointed out that are about the Hebrew alphabet.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  And how if you take the letters, each of the letters means a thing and that does a thing and da, da, da, da, da.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  We're gonna, we're gonna be taking issue, I think.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yes, we'll take issue with that.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Primarily we'll, we'll be discussing where the Hebrew alphabet came from and how it functions in the Hebrew Bible.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  And it's really cool. Like the, like it's also where our alphabet kind of came from.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  It is.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  It's so, so there's like a really, there's a lot of really cool stuff to delve into in that.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  So let's get on with it and do our first, we'll call it a what's that?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  I think that works.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  We'll dive into what's that?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  All right. So biblical literalism, the taking of the Bible literally, I guess, is what we're talking about. The idea that everything that we read is prima facie what it says it is, or what it is, or something, what King James decided it would be. I don't know. What are we talking about here?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, little, first off, my hot take, if I'm, if this is a metro or subway hot takes, I don't think there's such a thing as a biblical literalist.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Oh, snap.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Right off, right off the, the top rope, I'm just gonna say it. There's no such thing.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Coming in hot.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Yes. Biblical literalism is, is a fiction that is used to try to curate the authority of the Bible and to assert authority over what the Bible actually says. But that, I think that is how we'll, we'll circle back and round off this discussion because what I want to talk about, I want to start way back in, in the early church with what's going on as soon as the Bible is completed and we begin to have readers of the Bible. Because while everybody always had some notion that, you know, these as inspired texts, these

• 5:18Speaker 00

  things are true. But what precisely that meant was not really hammered down. And it could mean a lot of things. There could be literal applications. There could be moral applications. There could be all kinds of different applications. So the, like, the main representatives of a more thoughtful and a more insightful approach to what exactly are these things we call scriptures, I think are represented best by folks like Origen and Augustine. So Origen is third century CE. Augustine is end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century CE. And these are authorities who

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Swung a lot of weight in their day and also what they had to say about a number of doctrines influenced how Christianity would develop for basically down to today in certain segments of Christendom. But, but Origin was, was famous, in my opinion, for asserting a few different ways to read the texts. And one of them was what he called the plain sense, or the historical sense, or the literal sense would be what the words themselves seem to mean just on the surface. And the thing is, if you're, if you're approaching this collection of texts thoughtfully, you

• 6:41Speaker 00

  recognize that there are some issues with asserting that the plain sense of these texts is all 100% accurate and true because there are places where things conflict with each other, and there are also things that are problematic. And for instance, Origin, very famously, we have our Psalm 137, the imprecatory Psalm, where, you know, we have the blessed are the ones who take your babies and dash them against the rocks.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  And this is, this is the post-exilic author kind of fantasizing, basically about killing Babylonian children and is just so looking forward to it so much. And Origin realizes this is problematic.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  So Origin was anti-baby killing? That's weird.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, he was, he was one of the first, back before it was cool.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Nobody had thought of that before, not killing the babies.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Well, there's, and you know, this goes back to the fact that, well, that's another discussion. At some time, at some point, we'll have to talk about how we went from God cares only about our people to God cares about all people.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  But still mostly only our people and like, which is stuff we get even down to today with your, how dare you be toxically empathetic and it's supposed to be about our people. So, anyway.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, J.D. Vance and his, his circles, his concentric circles of caring about people.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  And the Pope was like, uh, no. No, I don't like that. But anyway, he argued that the surface sense, the plain sense was like the least important or the least significant sense. Interesting. And that it was moral and anagogical and other senses that were more spiritually profound and more important and were what the scriptures intended. So when it came to our imprecatory Psalm, Origin said, no, no, no, no. This is not literal. This is not suggesting that it would be a good thing to kill these babies. The babies of Babylon are your impure thoughts.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  And so you've got to take those thoughts and you gotta cherish them against the rock really, really hard. And I'm having a baby of Babylon right now.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  And the idea there being that what the author is trying to communicate, or at least what God is trying to communicate through this is something more moral, is something more spiritual. And so that is the sense that we should be looking out for. And we shouldn't worry about not, not just the parts that are immoral, but we shouldn't be taking literally the notion that there was evening and morning, day and night before the creation of the sun. So like Origin was like, yeah, the, the whole six days of creation, those aren't literal 24 hour periods. We're not, we don't need to think of it like that.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  And, and he also acknowledged, hey, you know, sometimes the gospels didn't agree with each other on certain things and you need to just relax. Right. Yeah. Just chill. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Enhance your calm. See if anybody gets that one. And, and Augustine was kind of the same. He, he took a more of a hard line stance on some things like creation. He insisted was, was a little more historical. That's how creation happened. You know, he, um, he wasn't, you know, I can imagine Origin being kind of like

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, take it easy. It's not, it's not like that. It's all good, man.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  August, Augustine was more like, it'd be like that. And, um,

• 10:45Speaker 00

  but he did warn, warn people about, um, you know, asserting things that were just scientifically dumb. He was, he was more educated philosoph- Well, they were both very, very philosophically erudite and educated. But Augustine, um, wore that philosophical erudition closer to the surface and was so like, don't assert the literalism of things that, uh, are just gonna make us look stupid. That, that, that we know just aren't true. And so there was a brand of, of literalism, if you want to call it that, only to the degree that they understood there was truth in the scriptures.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  But it might not be resting on the surface. It might be a little under the surface. We might have to dig down a little bit, look for a moral sense and anagogical sense, uh, something like that. And so, you know, the Song of Songs, you don't want to take that too literally. Uh, it's erotic poetry. And so, you know, folks like Origen, who, some people think Origen castrated himself in order to facilitate, uh, a more easy, uh, celibate life. Uh, and so he was not gonna be the kind-

• 11:52Speaker 01

  That's one way to do it.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  It is one way to do it.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  It'll be effective.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  It's, uh, it's probably the more expensive way to do it, depending on what quality of, of, uh, of guy he went to.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  I don't know what they called them in that time period, but, um-

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I got a guy.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  But, um, you know, you go to the Song of Songs and it's like, why is this erotic poetry in scripture? And it's like, oh, this is, this is Jesus in the church, you know? Jesus is just like, I love your breasts, church. Um, they look like some deer. Um, so-

• 12:27Speaker 01

  We have not, have we done the Song of Songs? We, we need to do that.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  We need to do the Song of Songs, yeah. There's-

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I hope someone's, I hope someone's listening right now who can write that down for us. That would be great.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  So the last thing they were gonna do is champion the plain sense of this erotic poetry.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  And what was, what was most important was the Christological sense. This was, this was how you find Christ in, in the scriptures. And, and I'm sure you recall from growing up among the Mormons as, as one of them for a time, the whole, everything is about Christ. And you know, that's kind of, that's, that's the Where's Waldo project of Latter Day Saint engagement with scripture is find Christ in the scriptures. And it's like, oh, there's, it talks about a rock over here. Oh, the rock is Christ. You've found Christ in the scriptures. Congratulations. And so if there were problematic parts of it, you just had to find a way to read Christ into it. And you were like, see, the Christological sense overrules any other sense.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  I have, I have won the day. Huzzah. And, and this, this gives way in the medieval period to your, your literal, your allegorical, your moral, and your anagogical. And, and the find, the, you know, whatever is salvific, whatever is about salvation, whatever is about Christ, that's the most important.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And what is the word? You said anagogical, and I don't know that word.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's, you're gonna make me look it up too. Cause it's a, a method of mystical or spiritual interpretation, particularly in scripture that looks beyond literal, allegorical, or moral meanings, those are the other three, to discover a text hidden reference to eternal life, heaven, or the afterlife, leading, derived from Greek for leading up.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Okay. So, but that's the, that's the highest sense. And though, and so that's, if you can find that sense, you're, you're golden. And particularly if it means overcoming.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  You can stop looking at it. You can no longer, you, you have then achieved that particular scripture and you can move on forever.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and so you have an awful lot of that going on into the, into the medieval period. And this is where, you know, we get to the Renaissance and the Reformation where there's, you know, now we have battles between the, the individuals and, and some of the clergy and the church. And if. If the scriptures have four different layers of meaning, and a lot of it is kind of up in the air, who's the ultimate authority over that? Oh, well, the church is, which endows the institution with an awful lot of authority, an awful lot of power. And this is one of the vectors of the concern of the reformers,

• 15:21Speaker 00

  was the church has too much authority over what the scriptures have to say. And so there's an attempt to wrestle that back a little bit by suggesting that the sense needs to be located in the actual text itself. And so you have a bit of a pushback against the anagogical and the other three ways to read the scriptures, to try to collapse it down a little bit and suggest, we need to rely on the text. Solus scriptura comes out of the Reformation period and the rhetoric against the church's authority.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And that's just, solus scriptura just is the idea that the scripture only is the authority.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. The scripture alone is the sole and sufficient authority for all things. And in this period, a lot of folks are related to faith and salvation, not necessarily related to the origins of the earth, or not necessarily related to the genetic origins of humanity. Certainly, there were a lot of folks who asserted that as well. But when you backed them into the corner, it was really mostly about matters pertaining to faith and salvation.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny because when I started to look into this a little bit, and I didn't, you know, I couldn't read 10 books about it for today's episode. But when I looked into it, I came into it assuming that Luther and Calvin was where literalism was going to start in finding its footholds. And it turns out not. Like, they still had plenty of allowance for metaphor and poetry and figurative speech and sort of a non-literal view of cosmology.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's absolutely a sense in which they're, they're definitely moving the needle, but really what we're talking about is, because everybody recognizes there, there is poetry, there is metaphor, there is allegory, there are all those things in the scriptures. And so really what we're looking for is where we're going to put the threshold.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Between this is literal versus this is figurative.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  And also like what you have to believe. Like there's this sense of like, where, where do we put the line of like, you know, this is fuzzy, or this is open to these kinds of interpretations, but this you have to believe it this way, sort of idea.

• 17:56Speaker 00

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

• 18:02Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you heard the construction too. We're, we're finishing our basement. We're actually adding on to the house. We're, 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, 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. And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in

• 18:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:11Speaker 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.

• 19:56Speaker 01

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• 21:00Speaker 00

  And, and so there are, there is a sense that, you know, we're going back to a six day creative period. We're, we're going back to all of humanity descended from Noah and his three sons and their three wives. Uh, and the table of nations represents, you know, the, the genealogy for all humanity. Um, it's It's not nearly as strict, though, because, you know, the threshold is closer to the allegorical side than, or actually, I should say the other way around. The threshold is moved so that there's more room for allegory, metaphorical interpretation and things like that. And in

• 21:40Speaker 00

  no small part, because the more literal you interpret things, the more you introduce inconsistency and the more you stake claims that might get you in trouble. Because, you know, we have things like Galileo, who said, you know, I think we might be going about this the wrong way, and had an awful lot of pushback. And when you get into the nitty gritty of the debates and what the church was really saying, like, you have to get pretty deep into where we're drawing the line between what is figurative and what is not. But it's still nothing compared to what would happen after the Enlightenment

• 22:24Speaker 00

  and once we get into the modern period. Because that's where we get, a number of things happen. One, with the Renaissance and the Reformation, we get the printing press. And one of the things that this does is it actually changes the main way that people are experiencing Scripture, at least, regular old people are experiencing Scripture. Because normally, they would hear it read.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Right, from the pulpit.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Right. And they would not have the opportunity to actually hold and read the text unless they learned to read, which was not within everybody's grasp. And also, they had to be able to afford to purchase, or at least have some kind of access to those handwritten manuscripts. But with the printing press, that began the ball rolling on greater access to the text. Now, it was still the case that, you know, Bibles were incredibly expensive, they were very big, they were usually chained to the pulpit, they were intended for the clergy to be read out loud. But so people were hearing the Scriptures. And one of the things this meant was that

• 23:30Speaker 00

  They weren't reading it back to front. And, and you know, this is kind of relates to how our discussion with Michael Peppert about how Catholics encounter the Bible.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  That is kind of closer to how Christians have experienced the scriptures throughout history. And so it wasn't like they were hearing all these things and they were like, wait a minute. I recall this passage over here says this one thing, but then this passage way over here says this other different thing. So there was.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you couldn't go back and even if you did recall two things and you were like, I'd love to check that out. You had no means of checking it out. You couldn't just, you couldn't flip through and be like, ha, ha, I've found something because you didn't own the book.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  So the inventing of the, the printing press and the reformation, which, which arrogated more authority to interpret the scriptures away from the institution, um, that kind of created this snowball effect where people were gaining more access to the text. People were, were reading it a little bit more, uh, literally. And then we get into the enlightenment, we get into historical criticism where suddenly the way we're thinking about the world changes. Rationalism, uh, becomes more salient, uh, we're less dependent upon, uh, the claims to revelation and, uh, miracles and all that kind of stuff. You got Thomas Jefferson with his little pen knife, cutting all the, all the miracles out of the New Testament.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  And so you've got a much more critical approach that develops. And then we get into the 19th century and, and this is where I think we really have the confrontation, uh, where, uh, the trajectories kind of clash.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  And it mainly has to do with things like the origins of humanity, uh, the nature.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Of the species, if you will?

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Uh, if you will, yes, uh, if you're nasty, so to speak, um, according to the parlance of our times. Uh, yeah, you, you have that, you have, uh, what the relevance of that to the practice of enslavement. You have, um, growing concern for how long the earth has been around. And you have the discovery of dinosaurs, which kind of threw a wrench into, uh, a lot of these things. And so, um, the rise of modern science, the scientific method, um, critical theory, all these kinds of things challenge, uh, traditional interpretations of the Bible.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  And the response was to lean into literalism.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Was to say, no, we gotta take it more literally. And, and that's when we get into the 20th century, we get this, uh, this, the publication of this series called The Fundamentals, which I think were published between 1910 and 1917-ish, somewhere in there. Have you ever heard of the, these publications?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  No, I've never heard of The Fundam- I guess, I, yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  So, so this is what I, I think is kind of the main pivot towards what we might call fundamentalist Christianity.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Because this is, uh, this is a series of publications, basically arguing, uh, lashing out against, uh, the historical critical method, against critical scholarship, to draw the line in the sand and say, these are the fundamentals of being a Christian, and you have to accept these in order to be on our side of things. And it was, it was doubling down on some concept of a literal approach to scripture, where it's, it's no longer just kind of, you know, your, your hippie dippy origin, um, you know, hit the blunt and then say, uh, you know, just relax about these contradictions and stuff.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  They, they developed the, uh, the notion of the inerrancy, the historicity, the univocality, all these things of the scriptures as, as more firm identity markers, as a way to object to rising, uh, critical scholarship. And then we get the, the, the Moakes scumpy, no, the Scopes Monkey Trial, uh, 1925, uh, last July was the 100 year anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial. And this was suddenly how we interpret-

• 27:50Speaker 01

  We, we should just, if you don't know, that was the trial here in the United States, where, uh, they were, they were sort of, uh, adjudicating whether or not evolution could be taught in schools.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and, and this was basically, how literally should we be interpreting the Bible? And should that literal reading of the Bible- Govern how we, how public education works.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Um, and so, you know, you have things like creation as six 24 hour periods, the global flood, historical Adam and Eve, uh, the genealogies from the table of nations. All these things were asserted as 100% true, not because we had been studying it and we arrived at this conclusion, but because we needed to assert this as a rhetorical line in the sand to try to prevent the further encroachment of, uh, critical scholarship and the historical critical method.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's literally.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  Have your attention, please.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Have your attention, please.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  A fire has been reported in the building.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, that was exciting. Uh, I literally just spent the last 20 minutes bundling up all of the animals in my, uh, we have a guest, we have a house guest who has, who's, who's cat is here now. So not only, I had to bundle up two cats and a dog and I was halfway down the stairs, uh, you know, six flights of stairs when I was informed that, no, it was just a test. So we, that was fun. Uh, we had a little, little adventure there, but let's get back to what we were talking about. Fortunately, uh, we, we kind of know, uh, what we were talking about, uh, which was.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  Which is out of, uh, which is not our norm, but, um, yeah, we.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  We don't pay attention to us. We don't know what we're, what we're on about.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  We were talking about the establishment of these, of these fundamentalist Christian positions on, on literalism, six 24 hour creation days, the global flood, historical Adam and Eve.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Literal genealogies, as, as we've said many times on the show before, dogs and cats living together.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Mass hysteria.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Mass hysteria. Yes. Um, so, and, and this leads to, and, and obviously the fact that the development of a more strict literalism functioned as an identity marker over and against, um, you know, festering, uh, critical scholarship.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Is, is, that's not going to make things go away. It's just going to make things get worse. And I think I wanted to just briefly mention the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. Are you familiar with this?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  I've heard of it, but I'm, yeah. So, so walk us through what that was and.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  So they decided in October of 1978 to, to get a bunch of folks together for the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Oh, this is 78. Wow. Okay. Late in the game, it feels like.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you, you know, you've got a, um, civil rights happened. Uh, so that's, you know, that's causing an issue. We've got a lot of, the seventies were a rough time for a lot of evangelical Christians who really didn't like, um, civil rights. And so there's a lot, a lot of conflict going on in, uh, among literalist readers of the Bible and who are not really literalist readers. Anyway, um.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  We'll call them fundamentalist readers of the Bible.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  We have the, the, the.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  The fundamentals, yes.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  The fundamentals having been published, so.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  They come together for the purpose of affirming afresh the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture, making clear the understanding of it and warning against its denial. And it's, uh, I've, I've seen a few different iterations of this, but I think I may have pulled up the 1978 one. It's got 25 articles.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  It's a lot.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Each article is like, we affirm X and we deny Y and.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Oh, you got one of each. Okay.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. This is, this is like, if you wanted to get, if you said to Siri, print out dogma over data, this is what you would get.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  I think you just made a bunch of people's phones do something.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  I don't think, only if Siri has access to their printer. Um, but Article 15 is one that I highlighted because I think it kind of gets to the heart of what we're talking about here. We affirm the necessity of interpreting the Bible according to its literal or normal sense. The literal sense is the grammatical historical sense. That is, the meaning. Which the writer expressed, interpretation according to the literal sense will take account of all figures of speech and literary forms found in the text. We deny the legitimacy of any approach to scripture that attributes to its meaning, which the literal sense does not support.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  So, so this is basically dredging origins body back up to once again announce it anathema. Because the literal sense is the only sense, however, literal here also includes the intent to use things figuratively.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Which is funny because, uh, yeah, A, that's not what literal generally is, is referring to and B, it, that's open to interpretation again.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  So like you've, you've just said it only literal, except when it's not.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  That doesn't seem helpful to me.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and, and here's why there's no such thing as a literalist. Who gets to decide when it is or isn't?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Obviously I do, and by me, I mean whoever is talking.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Me, Mark Driscoll, or me, Franklin Graham, or Billy Graham, or.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  So when you have two passages where a, a critical approach would say the literal sense of this one, latterly contradicts the literal sense of this one, um, then you've got to pick one. You say this one's the one that's really literal and the other is the, um, the figurative one. You've got to wave that away and reinterpret it because really what, what the authority is, is not the Bible in its literal sense. The authority is your tradition and whatever interpretive tradition is propping it up.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Um, and so. Whatever, whatever way we can interpret this to prop up, uh, the, the hate du jour or the, uh, the, the.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  The ideology, the dogma du jour, yes. Um, because they've got a lot of things in here as well, talking about how the, um, the scriptures can never. Disagree with each other and they deny any reading that disagrees with. And you know, none of these things are based on any kind of evidence or pure logic or reason. We're starting from the dogmas and then we're constructing the rationale, the rationalization for the dogmas. Cause when it comes down to it, you've got a like, you've got a bunch of passages that very clearly acknowledge other gods. And you know, we've talked about

• 35:11Speaker 00

  2 Kings 3, like this is not poetry. This is not a psalm. This is the author who seems to be kind of in a slightly reluctant and embarrassed way acknowledging that, well, Adonai got beat by the god of another nation. So moving on anyway.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Or even, even if he's not beat, you've got all of Exodus talking about all of the Egyptian gods and how they're performing miracles, just like the, just like Adonai has done. And so like, yeah, I guess it's all literal until that point, in which case those are just demons and, or that's the devil or whatever. And.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  And so when you, when you look at literalism, it's just ideological literalism. It's not textual literalism. Textual literalism results in acknowledging contradiction. It results in acknowledging scientific falsehoods. It results in acknowledging perspectives and facts and historical events that don't line up with what we know about reality. And, and that, you know, that's just a bridge too far for, for folks who are trying to push back against what they call modernism. I mean, we're already post, post-modernism,

• 36:29Speaker 00

  but they refer to, to historical criticism as modernism. And there's a whole other discussion to have there, but pushing back against that, they can't give any ground. They've already decided we, we are deeply entrenched in this opposition. And in fact, one of the articles, we affirm that Genesis 1 through 11 is factual, as is the rest of the book. We deny that the teachings of Genesis 1 through 11 are mythical and that scientific hypotheses about Earth, history, or the origin of humanity may be invoked to overthrow what Scripture teaches about creation. So basically, just saying, yeah, the Bible overrules science.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  It's so funny because they are so mad about all of these modern, this modern science. And what's weird is that this, their perspective, this literalist perspective is super modern. It is less than 100 years old, really, in the way that they're practicing it. And yet, there's still, or maybe 150 or something like that. But up until that point, Christianity didn't look like that.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's, it's, it's all contextual. And at least in the case of things like inerrancy today, it's reactive. It's reacting against stuff more than it's actually going out and seeking stuff. It's trying to protect the ground that they have, that they feel they have won in the culture wars. And it results in, you know, if you have this in Galileo's day, ooh, you know,

• 38:17Speaker 00

  we'd have a much different public school system today. They, this is, this is not giving any wiggle room to, to the Scriptures. This is dictating to the Bible what it is and is not allowed to be, to do, and to say. And which demonstrates where the real authority rests, rests with the tradition and the interpretive tradition. It does not rest with the Bible.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Well, and what's funny is that it starts by, it starts with the notion of we have these dogmas that we are going to hold to. And so, we're going to craft a sentiment about literalism that gives us space for these dogmas to stay real, even in the face of modern science. And then that's, and then they, it gets pushed too far. It gets like, other people take that and run with it. And then we got flat earthers again, which we didn't have.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  It goes, it goes beyond, well beyond where they're trying to go because that's the natural conclusion to what they themselves have put in place.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  If, do you want flat earthers? Because that's how you get flat earthers.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, and we have, you know, I don't, oh my gosh, there's so many people on social media, the, the whole, uh, the firmament people.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  We, we never been to the moon.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  You just hit the, you just bounced off the firmament. You can't get, um.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I think, I, I think that's a great, uh, a great sort of primer on, uh, on the, on literalism. Uh, so I'm going to call it at that.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  All right.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  So let's move on to taking issue.

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• 41:19Speaker 01

  And this week's taking issue, uh, we're taking issue with the Hebrew alphabet.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Well, not the Hebrew alphabet per se, but the way that people have tried to leverage the Hebrew alphabet.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  No, I'm taking issue with the alphabet. It goes, it goes the wrong direction.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  It's strutting around like it owns the place.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Where are your vowels, Hebrew? Come on.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Little, little big for your britches. Um, so, so there, there are way too many videos that I've come across and, and I've responded to many of them that are, uh, that are saying, hey, look at this Hebrew word. Now it's spelled with these letters and this letter means this and this letter means that and the other letter means the other thing, which means this word actually means this whole sentence. And it always is pointing to Jesus.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  So they're, they're, they're taking origins advocacy for a Christological, uh, layer of meaning a little too far.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  I mean, if they were just seeing it as sort of metaphorical or interesting in some way, that would be one thing.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is a mystical tradition within Judaism that does this.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are we, are we talking about Kabbalah?

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. That's, and, and the, uh, and the kind of precursors to Kabbalah, which, which are, uh, make use of the fact that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet ultimately derive from hieroglyphs that at one point in time were associated with syllables and entire words. However, that is a kind of mystical interpretive innovation that posts, postdates the Bible. Nothing that is in the Bible was trying to do that. And, and that's what.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  And I was going to say, that's why I want to talk about the, where the Hebrew alphabet comes from.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  That's what I was going to say. Yeah. Let's, let's go back to that. Let's figure out some origins. Uh, cause I think that it's, it's super fascinating stuff.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And, and the first thing to note, a lot of people don't know this, but when you see Hebrew script today, if you buy a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, the BHS or something like that, if you get some kind of Hebrew text where it's in print. That's actually not the original Hebrew script. That is what's called the Ashurite. That is the Aramaic square script. That was a script that was adopted by speakers of Hebrew after the Babylonian exile, when they spent a couple of generations in Mesopotamia, where they were using the Aramaic script for their imperial Aramaic. So, so the first thing to note is that

• 44:06Speaker 00

  the, the traditional Hebrew that we're used to seeing is not the Old Hebrew.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Okay, that is, that is interesting.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot, a lot of people don't realize this. And, and this is particularly interesting when it comes to textual criticism, because there are some places where we might have a manuscript where there's two different readings. And it's like, well, one of these letters could be confused for the other, but only in the square script, meaning that any such confusion would have had to have happened after the Babylonian exile and, and, or vice versa. This is a confusion that only would have happened in the Old Hebrew. And some people refer to it as Paleo Hebrew. In my experience, Paleo Hebrew is used primarily to refer to, like in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where they kind of intentionally use throwback script. So you've got a bunch of Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts where,

• 44:57Speaker 00

  for instance, it'll be the, the regular square script, but then every time there's the divine name, the tetragrammaton, it's in the Old Hebrew.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. Okay, so, so I was going to ask, the, the, the Dead Sea Scrolls are in the square script, they're in that Aramaic square script.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  The majority of them, the ones that are in Hebrew, the majority are in the Aramaic square script. There are some that are entirely in the Old script. And then there are some where they're written in the square script. And then the scribe would actually leave a space. And then the more senior scribe would come in and write the tetragrammaton in the Old Hebrew script.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Because there are some manuscripts where the, the person didn't come in and, and remember to write the, the thing. And so there's a gap where the divine name should be, or something like that.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Oh, that's really interesting. So wait, do we have full texts in ancient?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  In the Old Hebrew?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  In the Old Hebrew?

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Yes, and there are a bunch of different ways that we have them. We have some of them inscribed in stone.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  We have some of them inscribed in silver. We don't have any like papyrus or other kinds of texts that are written in Old Hebrew in the period when Old Hebrew was normative. We do have some of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts. But when we go back to the Old Hebrew, this is much more closely related to Phoenician. In fact, it's basically a borrowing of Phoenician. And then there are some, there are a couple of changes here and there related to how the script works. The script type, it's called an abjad, which basically means that only the consonants are written. The vowels are not written.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  And this is, this is why Hebrew looks so unique, where if you do get a Hebrew Bible and you look in it, it's got a bunch of letters and then you've got dots and dashes below, within and above the letters. And that is, that is basically a secondarily developed vocalization system that, it's called the Tiberian system. And it was something that was developed between like the 5th and the 9th or 10th centuries CE. And so there, you also have two other versions of that that did not have as many different vowels that they used. But, but if you go to Israel

• 47:26Speaker 00

  or even many places in Palestine today, you'll see Hebrew on signs and stuff and there won't be any vowels. You just gotta know.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  You just gotta know. And that, that like, anciently, that's how we came up with some problems, some questions about Molech versus Malek or what? Is that like, like you, they didn't write a vowel. And so like, if two words, if there were two words that had all the same consonants. Context was the only way you were gonna figure that out.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. And, and there are a number of ways that that is still an interpretive issue. So for instance, Genesis 1:1, "Be'ashit bara Elohim et ha'shemaim be'et ha'aretz." "Bara" is vocalized in, in our medieval Maseratic text as if it is a third masculine singular call verb, a finite verb. But you could change the vowels to turn it into an infinitive construct without changing any consonants. In fact, that's exactly how it occurs in Genesis 5:1.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  So say those two different things, because not everybody knows all of the grammar words that you just used.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  So, so in English, an infinitive would be where we add "to" to the beginning. So, "I run" is, that's a, that's a finite verb. "To run" is infinitive or, or the, the infinite. And, and that is where you're referring to the verbal idea. You're not saying, "This is the verbal idea put into action by this subject." So it's not conjugated would be another way to say it, but it's-

• 49:05Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. So translate the, the, the, uh, the bara-

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Okay. So, so basically-

• 49:11Speaker 01

  In the two different ways that you just mentioned.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  So basically, that's the difference between, uh, well, there, there are arguments for both ways, but, but basically if you understand it to be a, a finite verb, you probably want it to mean, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." If it's an infinitive construct, it has to be in the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth, in which case, that would make it a construct phrase, which would make it a temporal clause, which would make the best translation, "When God began to create the heavens and the earth", which would flatly undermine any attempt to try to read Creation ex nihilo in there. However, there is also a grammatical way to understand it as a temporal clause, even if it is a finite verb. So-

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  We're getting a little deep there, but-

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Vowels are crazy. Uh, it can change things in very big, important ways.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, another thing to note about, uh, the Hebrew alphabet is that it's what's called an acrophonic script. So, beginning sound script. And what that means is that-

• 50:19Speaker 00

  The, the characters descend from an ideographic script. So the characters descend from characters that could be used either to refer to syllables or full words. And so this is what people are talking about when they're saying, oh yeah, the, what do they say? Yah, hey, means reveal, a revelation, or something like that, or behold, or something The letter hey, you're saying? Right, the letter hey. Now, it does come from a character that meant that hundreds and hundreds of years before the Hebrew language existed. By the time the Hebrew language existed, it had already been used for centuries to

• 51:02Speaker 00

  index the sound that begins the word. So in other words, you take, when they're developing the, the alphabet, see, it used to be you had, you had characters that were entire words or were syllables, which meant to be able to write stuff, you had to memorize hundreds of characters. Right. The innovation of the alphabet was, no, we're just gonna reduce it down to individual sounds, starting with consonants, but, but later also vowels, which reduced the number of characters you had to learn down to between 22 and 30. So Hebrew has 22 characters, Greek has 24, Ugaritic has 30, like it's a limited number

• 51:45Speaker 00

  of characters, which meant that a lot more people could learn these characters and could, and hypothetically learn to read. But what you, you got your characters from those earlier ideographic characters, and so aleph is the very first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and it looks kind of like an X, but if you go back to the old Hebrew, it looks like a sideways A, where the horizontal bar extended past both sides. Like a sideways capital A in English? Correct. So if you turn it... One more, uh, twenty, you know, uh, ninety degrees more, so that the point is, is pointing

• 52:27Speaker 00

  down, you're looking at an ox head, you're looking at a drawing of an ox's head. And so that was a character that meant, that referred to an ox. But all we're taking from it is the sound that began the word, which was a galal stop.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  So we've, we've adapted the character, but now instead of representing the whole word, it just represents the sound that began the word. So, uh, that's aleph. Bet is, uh, descends from a character that referred to a house. And it originally was kind of like a swirl, and then it became kind of a blocky, like a floor plan, and then it turned into what we have in the Hebrew alphabet. But that was the word byte. And byte begins with the sound buh. And so for an acrophonic alphabet, the byte just represents the sound buh. So there was a time when these characters did mean that.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  They turned into an acrophonic script between like 1800 and 1600 BCE. This is when, uh, like in the Sinai, you had Semitic peoples, uh, who might've been miners, they might've been korve laborers, they might've been enslaved folks, but they began altering Egyptian hieroglyphs to turn them into what we now know as the alphabet. And that then contributed to Proto Canaanite, which continued, contributed to Phoenician, which contributed to Hebrew.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  And, and Hebrew didn't exist until like between 1100 and 1000 BCE.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  So when people- As both a written and a spoken language?

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Yes, it was indistinguishable from a generic, broader Canaanite language until somewhere in between, uh, 1100 and 1000 BCE.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  And, and, and this is why when people are like, oh, the Hebrew, the book of Exodus, it reflects the borrowings from Egyptian from the 1400s. Hebrew didn't exist in the 1400s. So no, it doesn't.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Hebrew didn't exist until much later. And then narrative prose in Hebrew didn't exist until even later than that. But by that time, they were not associating the full concepts with these letters. So-

• 54:38Speaker 01

  So by the time it gets to being Hebrew, you're saying, independent, individual letters had no- Like independent symbolic meaning anymore.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  It was just, it was, it was just a phoneme. It was just a sound.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  It was just a sound. Yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  And, and the aleph isn't even really a sound. It's just a glottal stop. So it depended on what, what, uh, what vowel followed after. And so the, the Hebrew alphabet, usually you refer to it as the aleph bet. Because that's, that's the origin of the, um, alphabet comes from Greek. But, uh, and another interesting thing is, is a lot of people talk about gamatrya. You've heard of gamatrya, right?

• 55:19Speaker 01

  We've talked about gamatrya in, in the context of the, uh, the six, six, six.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  For example.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  In, uh, in the periods when the Hebrew Bible was being composed, you didn't use individual letters to represent numerical values. You, uh, borrowed some of the hieratic symbols for numbers from Egypt, or you wrote out the word in, in Hebrew.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Oh, the word for the number.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  So it would be T W O instead of.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Right, right. So there was the, the, the character two. Yeah, we didn't have any of the, we didn't use the, the Arabic numerals. Um, by the, by the way, the joke that, uh, that, you know, the progressives are out of control now they're teaching Arabic numerals in, uh, in the public schools. I love that joke so much. Mainly because there's so many people who don't understand.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  It's a great little gotcha.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, but, uh, so the, the Hebrew characters did not come to, uh, represent numerical values until post-exilic period. Uh, like around 200 BCE, somewhere around there. And so it's, it's only shortly after that, that, that you get the rise of gamatrya. So when we're talking about the Hebrew Bible, except for maybe like the book of Daniel, or maybe Ecclesiastes or something like that, they weren't even using individual letters to represent numbers yet. So there's not an awful lot of gamatrya going on, uh, in there. So, um, yeah, it's the, the, now after the Hebrew Bible, you, you do have these mystical traditions that are developing in third, fourth, fifth centuries CE

• 56:50Speaker 00

  within Judaism where people are starting to try to find more significance. And they're doing this, they were doing the same thing that people. are doing today when they try to say, hey, check it out. If you look at the names in Genesis five and the meanings of the names, it creates a sentence that talks about the Christian gospel. And you know, they're doing the same thing. They're trying to find more significance, deeper significance, richer significance in the text. And they're going about it by trying to understand how the authors could have been inscribing special hidden significance in the in the characters using gamatria and numbers or using these significations. And so later on, like the,

• 57:32Speaker 00

  what's one, the Shema, Shema Israel, right? Hero Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. There's a, there's a very early Kabbalistic reading that says Shema is Shin Mem Ein. Well, Shin and Mem, put them together, that means name. Ein has a numerical value of 70. So what is the Shema Israel? The 70 names of God. And so like that, so that that kind of thing is going on in late antique Judaism and into particularly into medieval Judaism. But people today who are aware that that was going on, but then they try to read it back into the Hebrew Bible. There's not a

• 58:16Speaker 00

  historical case to make for that kind of thing.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so funny to me because I don't see any reason to to say, if you find that interesting, or if you find that fun, you know, Dan Brown it up, you know, or dive back in and, and let it be instructive to your own understanding or to your own, you know, theology. But be honest about what it is. Don't like be, just be honest that, okay, the authors didn't intend this. I mean, I guess you could make the claim that, you know, God programmed it in when the authors weren't intending it somehow.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  That's, that's part of the Chicago statement on inerrancy. Which was, I think exactly what they said was something along the lines of, we deny that the authors were fully aware of all the significance of what they wrote, or something like that. But basically saying, yeah, that we reserve the right to read anything into here that we want, even if it's entirely anachronistic. Because we think God, you know, it's inspired and so God sees all, so.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess you could make that claim, but it's just so, it's just so much nicer to just say, okay, this is interesting to me. It's, you know, not unlike astrology. I have no problem with it if it's just instructive to you. But if you start to say, no, this is fact. Did you know what I mean? No, the, you know, this being, this being here and that being there. This letter means this and this letter means that. And that's the fact and it proves X, Y, or Z.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  That's when, that's when you have a problem. That's when you're, you're, you're in bad waters.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, this is a frustration of mine. A lot of people talk, will accuse me of spending all my time on social media attacking people's beliefs. And every time I want to be like, I don't care about your beliefs. If you want to believe any of this stuff, blast off. I, it is when you go onto social media and tell other people that this is true, that you have stumbled onto or stumbled into my territory. You're in my house now. And, and when you're, when you're telling people that this is true. Cause if you want to say, you know, I, this is something that, that I'm, you know, I, I found

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  meaning to this and I'm aware that this is not how it was actually worked anciently, but you can just think about it this way and isn't this cool? I would never make a response video to that and tell those people to, you know, to take a hike, but it's when people say that, that this is the way it really is. And particularly when they're doing it. When it's harmful. Beliefs that are harmful, yes, I will, I won't seek people out, but I will, I will criticize beliefs that are harmful, but, but believing that, that the letter Aleph represents God, until you go make a video on social media declaring that to be fact, I could not care less.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Believe what you want to believe. Don't be a dick. I think is, is that, that's still the official position of the

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  That is the official position of our podcast, absolutely. Uh, yeah, don't, don't be a, don't be a jerk and, and, and also like know when you're just making something up that's useful to you. Like, yeah, if you're, if, if it's useful to you, great. If it's mystical to you, great. Uh, present it that way. You could even, you could even go on social media and be like, here's something that, like, I heard, it may or may not be true, but it's interesting to me. You could do that. Dan won't come up, won't come for you for that.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  But, uh, just don't, don't get on social media and say, uh, you know, uh, God's rainbow has seven colors and the pride flag has six. They took, they took out indigo and that's Jesus.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  And that's why, that's why gay people are bad.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, that's satanic. Satan took out indigo and that's Jesus. When you do that, you're, you're inviting, uh, criticism.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  And then Dan has to make a video that brings in Isaac Newton and music and it doesn't, none of it makes any sense. So just don't.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Don't make, don't make me talk about music.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I think that's fascinating. That was a lot of fun. If you thought it was a lot of fun, hey, uh, go ahead and share it, like, comment, subscribe. If you're on the Youtubes, uh, if you're just listening at home or if you're on the Youtubes, please feel free to, uh, to go to be a patron of our show over on patreon.com slash data over dogma. We, uh, we, those are our favorite of all of you. So, uh, if you want to be one of our favorites and get in our great graces, uh, becoming a patron is a great way to do it. Um, thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show and to JJ Neward for being our producer. And we'll talk to you again next week.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:03:24Speaker 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.

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