Faith vs. Works vs. Chaos Monsters

This week we crack open the Epistle of James — a letter that may claim to come from none other than James the brother of Jesus — and wade into one of Christianity's oldest arguments: faith versus works. Does James contradict Paul on how a person is saved, and is that why Martin Luther dismissed the whole book as an "epistle of straw"? Then we go monster hunting for Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth, the primordial chaos beasts lurking in Job, the Psalms, and Isaiah — and find out that yes, there are dragons in the Bible, and they're far older than the Bible itself. Get your "Tribe of Dan" merch at our new online store: https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com Shop from our classic collection before the old store closes: https://datadoverdogma.printful.me Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron:https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma Watch every episode on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma Follow us: Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@data.over.dogma.pod Threads — https://www.threads.com/@dataoverdogmapod X — https://x.com/data_over_dogma Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So:https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:10Speaker 00

  I don't think that part of the passage is about its tail. And, you know, additionally, who's like, check out how stiff I can make my tail.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:31Speaker 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. And my AC just kicked in, so I'm feeling real good right now. How about you, Dan?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I'm cool as a cucumber, even though it is hot outside. My AC is fixed. It was broken last week, but it's doing all right now. So all is well with us. I can't imagine living in any of the centuries previous to us that did not have AC.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  It seems insane.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Uh, but we got a show to do AC or no. So we're gonna, we're gonna dive right in and talk about it. The first thing we're gonna do is a chapter and verse and it's, it's actually just a few chapters. We're gonna do a book. And that's the book of the Epistle of James. And I am excited to talk about it. I read it and I like it.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good one.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  So there we go. We're, we're actually doing one that like, we're not gonna tear it apart. We're not gonna be.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Oh, we're gonna tear it apart, but we might not be as mean about it. We'll see. We'll see.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Well, we'll see. We'll get to some stuff that's mostly it's great. And then we're gonna get monstrous. It's, I don't even know what we're, we didn't discuss what our, what, what, what our segment title is gonna be, but maybe we'll call it, uh, what's that? Or let's get topical or I don't know. We're not taking issue. It's monsters.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about three specific monsters at least. That's, that's how many I planned on it. I don't know. I don't know if you came up with more, but.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Well, no, I just went with the ones that you told me. So, so we're, we're good. But yes, if you want to talk about Leviathan, Behemoth, and Rahab, no, not that one. Uh, then we will, uh, then we'll get to that in the second half of the show, but for now, chapter and verse.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so here we are. It's, it's the Epistle of James, or as my brain will never not hear it, the Epistle of James. Because as a Mormon kid growing up, that's how I was taught the New Testament books in order was a song. So there you go.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  And I was never taught that song. So you are in one dimension, a better Mormon than I am. And there are probably a few of those dimensions, but that's neither here nor there.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Let's be honest, I don't think either of us is a particularly good Mormon. So.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  I think, I think I have a, I think I have a good chance in a couple of arenas, but, but, not if Twitter has anything to say about it. So.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Okay, well, all right, uh, let's, let's start off.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Well, let's start talking about this, but, but first thing I want to point out is, uh, when you look in the Greek, it actually doesn't say James. Do you recall what it says?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  No, I don't read it in Greek.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Well, I, okay, sorry.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you may, you may have told me at some point.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jacob.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Yes, so when you, when you open up this, uh, this book in Greek, the title is Yakobu,

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Epistle, so this is, uh, the Epistle of Jacob, which has become James, uh, through its various iterations in a bunch of, of different languages, so.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so confused, like, like, I, I remember being a, a young, a teenager, and I used to go out and perform, uh, Shakespeare for the schools as a kid, and at one point, a, a vice principal decided to really, uh, show off his knowledge and said, "Do you know the different, tell me about the difference between Elizabethan Shakespeare versus Jacobian Shakespeare?" And I was like, "I don't, who's Jacob? I don't even know who Jacob is."

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Cause they, that's, they refer to King James as the Jacobian, so, okay.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Here we go, this is, this is the Epistle of Jacob.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Uh, all right, so Jacob, the servant of God and the Lord of, and of the Lord Jesus Christ, all right.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that is, that is, um, uh, Dulos, uh, of Jesus Christ and God, which I think is better rendered slave, but, uh, and, and this is something that we see in Paul, but yes, "To the twelve tribes in the dispersion."

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  "Greetings," uh, he says to them, but here's, here's a question, who is this James?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Because we, we have a bunch of different people named James.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've got, we've had a lot of Jameses, we've talked about quite a few Jameses.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've got, uh, there's Jim. There's Jimmy. There's Jaime.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Jimbo?

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, James, the brother of Jesus. We've got, and these are early Christian people by the name of James. James, the father of Judas, and not Judas Iscariot, but the other. James, the son of Zebedee, one of the 12. You've got James, the son of Alpheus, also of the 12. James, the son of Mary, known variously as the lesser, the little, or the younger, and sometimes identified with James, the son of Alpheus. So maybe that's two different Jameses.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Wait, James, the son of Mary, is not James, the brother of Jesus? Even though Jesus was the son of Mary?

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Different, different, uh, different.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Different James, different Mary. Okay, fine.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  And here I'm, and here I'm reading from Dale Allison's 2013 International Critical Commentary on, on James, which is a wonderful volume. But there, there are a bunch of different possibilities. I think the majority of scholars would say this is probably intended to be James, the brother of Jesus, because in, in early Christianity, if you just, if you wrote a letter and you were like, "It's me, James."

• 7:46Speaker 00

  You, the, the reader would probably be expected to know, "Oh, it's, it's the big James." Uh, who would be the leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem, the brother of, you know, the Lord. So, um.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And, and a guy who has, who has sort of the cojones to write an epistle not to a specific person, not to a, a city of people, but rather to the 12 tribes in the dispersion. That feels a little grandiose.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  It feels a little presumptuous, yes. Um, and there are some interesting things about, about this epistle. One of the ones that, that I thought was, the first time I found out about this, I was like, huh. That's surprising. Can you guess who the first person, you, you've heard the names of a variety of different early Christians on this show for a while now. Can you guess who the first person to ever explicitly refer to the Epistle of James is in early Christianity?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, no.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Cause we have, we already have references to New Testament texts, either quotations or explicit references, starting at the beginning of the second century CE and maybe even the end of the first century CE. But we don't get a clear and explicit reference to the Epistle of James until the third century. And it is Origen.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Writing toward the, closer to the middle of the third century CE, who is the first person to actually explicitly refer to the Epistle of James. And there are folks who have argued that, well, the Shepherd of Hermes has some, there are some, you know, resonances and, and points of contact. And so maybe Hermes knew about James, or maybe James knew about Hermes. Or maybe they both were kind of swimming in the same waters. There are possible allusions in First Clement, uh, which is probably end of first century, beginning of second century. There are possible allusions in Irenaeus at the end of the second century and Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century. But nobody clearly refers

• 9:55Speaker 00

  to or quotes from the, the Epistle of James until like the second quarter of the third century CE. So, and this raises an interesting question. When, when the heck was this text written? Because if, if this was written in like the early to mid first century CE, as, as some scholars have argued, um, why didn't nobody talk about it when they were talking about all the other texts that were written by, uh, other prominent Christians? James, like James, Peter and Paul were like three of the most prominent Christians, uh, after the death of Jesus. They were the ones who basically led communities in Jerusalem

• 10:39Speaker 00

  and elsewhere. So, um, it's, it's a head scratcher. And for this reason, there are a lot of scholars who think that it was not actually written by James. It is pseudographic. It's a, a false writing. And this has to do with when we think it was written, because if it was actually written by James, the brother of Jesus, it was obviously written in the middle of the first century CE.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we can, I think we can safely assume that James himself didn't live to like 115 years.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Unlikely, right. We don't know if he went paleo and all of a sudden, you know, got rid of his gout and got rid of everything and made him live to be 110. But yeah, no, he's actually on record as being martyred.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Fairly early in the history of Christianity. So, um, so that raises the question of the pseudopigraph, uh, pseudographic nature of the text. And so I am of the opinion, and I'm, I'm, I'm working on this, this survey that I've talked about many times in the past. I think my part of the work is done in terms of composing it. I just need to get, um, sign off from some other folks. But one of the questions on there is, is do you think this, uh, the letter James, letter of James was written by, uh, the brother of Jesus or, or was written pseudographically? I think the majority of scholars are going to say it's pseudographic.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. It's like, like, I mean, what we know of that time period, we know for sure that some people were writing under other famous Christians' names. We know that that happened.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  So it makes sense that, uh, that, that everything, with everything that you've said, I, I think that's a reasonable thing to assume. Not that it matters because the content is what's important.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. But, but one of the things that might be going on in James is it sounds an awful lot like James is disagreeing with Paul. And this is something that's been argued in the scholarship for a while. Is, is James contradicting Paul when it comes to salvation by faith? Because the second chapter goes off on a bit of a rant.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  About the relationship of faith and works and cites the same examples that Paul cites in arguing for salvation by faith. And so I, I and many other scholars would say that he's responding to Paul, or at least the way Paul is being represented in the time period in which the, the letter was written.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  And because there, there are scholars who are going to be like, ah, that's not actually what Paul's argument was. But it's certainly not clear to me that the author of the Epistle of James was not allowed to misread Paul. I, I think the, the author is disagreeing with a reading of what's going on, specifically in Romans, which is pretty late in Paul's career and probably would have precluded the actual James, the brother of Jesus from, from writing this. But there are other scholars who would say that Paul was actually riffing on James.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  If this was written before Paul. But I, I think that's going to be, I think that's going to prove to be a minority view. But why don't we get into some of the, some of the contents?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  The, yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Epistle of James. Do you want to skip to chapter two and just get to the meat of it? Or, because chapter one, it's, it's a lot of like, there, there's a little bit about how the rich are not great and how you're, and we're going to get, there's lots of that.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Don't, don't be rich, be cool, or at least be cool to poor people is a, is a big deal in this book.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Well, and, and chapter one brings up some interesting things because I think chapter one is, this is functioning kind of in the wisdom genre. Like this, this has resonance with, with Proverbs, with Syrah, with, with the wisdom of Solomon. You've got a lot of these, you know, these are the rules to living a good life kind of thing. And even the Shepherd of Hermes is have some overlap with this. But, you know, let the brother or sister of humble means boast in having a high position and the rich in having been humbled because the rich will disappear like a flower in the

• 15:18Speaker 00

  field. So, Comrade James is very much in the wisdom tradition. And there are scholars who would argue that, you know, if you if you left out the a couple of references to Jesus, this might sound like just Jewish wisdom literature. We might not even be able to identify this as Christian because of how how resonating it is with with wisdom literature, with the Sermon on the Mount, with concern for the poor and stuff like that. So I like the social setting of James. And yeah, I think that brings us to chapter two, where we have some of the juiciest fruit, the the sweetest plum.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  That juicy fruit, it's gonna move.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Oh, I walked right into that.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  You're welcome, Gen X. Have fun with that.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh. We have, I think, chapter two, verse five, starts with, Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. And we have this. And actually, is that? Yeah, it's just, it's just adelphi, or alaphi in Greek. So it's it's the masculine plural. But in Greek, if it is a mixed gendered group, you would you would default to the masculine. So so the rendering, my beloved brothers and sisters is not necessarily inaccurate. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor

• 16:58Speaker 00

  person. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into the courts?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Is it not? Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Is it not they who have a secret society that charge you $16,000 to attend their secret meetings? Or the people who are in charge of, of regulating industries and the people who make money off those industries, sit there and play grab ass while, you know, the world burns to the ground around us? Anyway, that's not in the Epistle of James for anybody.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  It's mostly in there, Don. It's a, that's, that's a light paraphrasing, but it's in there.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Uh, is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? Don't blame the poor, blame the rich. It's their fault. If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You do well. And then, and then here's something interesting. It says, but if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point, has become accountable for all of it.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a little, that, that was a big one. I, when I read that, I was like, oof, that's rough.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, but this also is, uh, this has shades of, uh, Sermon on the Mount. And particularly, Matthew 5:19, where we have the author of the Gospel of Matthew, having Jesus say that, uh, my words shall not, or the, the, neither a jot nor tittle of the law shall pass away until heaven and earth pass away. And anyone who teaches you to violate the least of these laws, um, yeah, it, bad for them. So, um, and, and a lot of scholars understand what's going

• 18:52Speaker 00

  on in Matthew to be advocacy for the continued relevance and authority of the entire law of Moses.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  And there are scholars who will say, it sounds like the author of the letter of James is cut from the same cloth.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, because the literal next thing that he says is for the one who said, you shall not commit adultery, also said, you shall not commit murder. If, now, if you do not commit adultery, but you can, but you murder, you have become the, a transgressor of the law. So yeah, I mean, it's a direct reference to the, uh, the, the Decalogue there.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 00

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

• 19:39Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 19:41Speaker 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 I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do 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. And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in

• 20:26Speaker 00

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

• 20:49Speaker 01

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• 22:23Speaker 00

  But then we have, there are scholars who will say the next two verses actually kind of throw that into doubt. Because it says, "So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy." And one of my favorite passages in the New Testament, mercy triumphs over judgment.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I loved that, too. That is, that is an awesome, a powerful statement that really goes against a lot of what we're hearing right now in the sort of far-right extremist Christianity, where it's like, the Lord, God's gonna judge you. And you know, these, this person in this group and these LGBTQ whatever people are evil, and they got demons in them. And it's just like, it's all judgment and exactly zero mercy.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Yes. And this is one of, one of my concerns with the way people talk about the difference between judgment slash justice and mercy. We tend to think of, and particularly within the Latter Day Saint tradition, but in a lot of different Christian traditions, there's this notion that justice and mercy are kind of a standing tension, where justice is, is the demands of the law. And then mercy is, you know, overcoming the demands of...

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Of the law and, and the idea is, oh, we gotta maintain both. And I think this is a misunderstanding of what justice is. One, when we look in the Hebrew and we look at what Mishpat is and what Setika is and things like that, it's not isometric with our contemporary concept of justice as basically the proper and right and, and prescribed consequences of the law. It really, in the Hebrew Bible, it has to do with just generating the proper relationships, the proper outcomes, the proper equilibrium.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  It's, it's kind of making sure society is just rather than making sure the people who do things wrong are punished, punished. But I love that James just says, nah, mercy triumphs over judgment. But this could be understood to be, be contrasting the idea of the law of Moses and the idea of the law of liberty. Similar to the way Paul talks about, are we under the law? And saying, you know, we're no longer under the law because of the gospel. So I can see that reading as well, but this is something that is, that is debated by scholars and, and there are plenty of scholars out there who would say that James probably thought that the, the whole law of Moses was still in effect.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  So, and, and one last thing I'll say about that is, is there's this word Chesed in the, in the Hebrew that I, I see brought up a lot on social media. And it gets transliterated because it's a Chet, uh, which is a Ch. It gets transliterated with a C H. And so when, when I hear somebody say, there's this word in Hebrew, it's Chesed. Um, it's like, immediately, no. Uh, you, you very clearly don't know Hebrew. But, um, But it gets translated as like loving kindness and things like that in the King James Version and some people will render grace or something like that. And it's, it's kind

• 25:54Speaker 00

  of a squishy term, but I think the best explanation I've ever heard is that it is, it's a combination of two things. It's doing things for people that they can't do for themselves and doing things for people that are not necessarily demanded by the law. So you see Chesed brought up in the book of Ruth, where the idea seems to be that like Ruth goes above and beyond what is expected of her by society, by the law in relation to Naomi. And then Boaz goes above and beyond what is demanded by the law and expected by society in relation to Ruth. So it's a story of people, and this is referred to as Chesed.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  And so it's a story of people who are going above and beyond. And I think that is much closer to the idea of mercy than it is to the idea of justice or judgment. And so when you talk about people today, say, well, we got, we gotta have mercy, but also justice or judgment, and they're judging based on what they understand the law to allow them to do or require they do. Yeah, it certainly does seem like, wouldn't it be better to go above and beyond what the law demands and show mercy and treat people better than you are required to by the law that you, that you imagine you're under, whether that's

• 27:18Speaker 00

  the law of liberty or whatever. So we, we can, we could be doing a lot better.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  When it comes to the way we're treating other people and particularly people who are, have historically been minoritized, marginalized and oppressed.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  It is the official stance of this podcast that mercy triumphs over judgment.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. Put that on a shirt.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then we get into the

• 27:51Speaker 00

  What I think is, is one of the best little diatribes in the, in the New Testament. Starting in verse 14 where James goes, "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?' So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, that's a big deal.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  In, in, in one of the prominent debates of Christianity, that's a pretty big deal nail in a coffin.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it certainly seems like it. Although what, the, the interpretation of this passage that I hear most commonly from, from Christians who, who want to understand James as imperfect alignment with Paul, when it comes to the relationship of, of works to salvation. What they will argue is that the works are just the downstream outcome of a saving faith.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  So James seems to be saying, "You must construct your faith by your works, and demonstrate your faith by your works," and, and what they get from that is, "No, you gotta have the faith, and then the works are just this magical thing that happens because you, your faith is, is adequate." And, and it is the next couple of verses that actually supply their proof text for that. Because it says, "But someone will say, 'You have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you faith.'"

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  And, and so the idea is, see, see, the works are just to show other people your faith. And, and I, and, and I think this is pretty presuppositional because it's basically, you're renegotiating what's going on in James so that you can make James align with Paul. As I've said many, many times, you approach the text, you figure out which texts agree with the presuppositions you've brought to it, and then you reinterpret all the other texts to bring them into alignment with the texts that agree with your presuppositions. So I think, I think that's what's going on there. But also, I, I think it's funny that- It turns faith, it turns faith into something that you are required to

• 30:28Speaker 00

  display to others so that they can accept you.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  It really does make it more of a social club. It's, it's not that the faith is there, you know, is, is all about this vertical relationship with God. No, your faith is so I can judge you whether you are good enough, whether your faith is adequate for me to consider you part of the group. So, so I, I think it kind of, it shows that they're wearing on their sleeve, the, the approach to faith as, as an identity marker and as a, as a bit of costly signaling, as a way to put on display to others that, that your faith is good enough.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Which I think-

• 31:10Speaker 01

  As opposed to what, what I would interpret this to say, which is just that,

• 31:18Speaker 01

  the important thing here, regardless, like faith aside, the important thing is, are you doing good things and are you being, are you, are you treating your brothers and sisters kindly? Uh, and I, I always, I, I must admit, from the first moment I heard the faith versus works debate and like which, what gets you into heaven? What's the real one? Is it faith or is it works? I just thought, like, the first time I actually heard it, two, two guys going at each other over faith versus works. And I was like, you guys are saying the exact same thing. Like, what, what is happening right now?

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And it seems so weird to me to even have a debate because, yeah, I, it seems to me that the theology should be faith is vital and doing kindnesses to others is vital. And you don't get, you don't get away without having either. You, you have to have both.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think- I, I think James's point is if your faith does not generate good works, it is not saving faith. It is not adequate, not in the sense of you, the faith alone is the soteriological principle. And then the works are just how you prove to other people that your faith is good enough. But in the sense of, hey, the point is to make a better world. And so faith is not an end in and of itself. Faith is just a component that contributes to creating a better world. He goes on to say,

• 32:52Speaker 01

  And if, and if it doesn't have works, it's dead. It's literally dead faith. What good is dead faith?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and so I, I don't think it's perfectly aligned with Paul. In fact, I think James is going to go on to disagree with Paul in a couple of verses down.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  But he says, "You believe that God is one, you do well, even the demons believe and shutter." Or shudder, excuse me. They shutter the windows.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yes, they close, they close their windows.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  I don't know why I decided to remember that as S H U T T E R. Um, but the idea being that, hey, demons are not going to get saved, but they believe in God and they believe that God is one. So you can see that just believing God is in and of itself is not enough.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Insufficient, yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so I think the idea is faith minus works equals dead. Um, faith, faith plus works equals salvation and not faith equals salvation. And the works are just there to, to prove to the online apologists that you get to be called a Christian.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Um, it goes on, "Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is worthless? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works and by works, faith was brought to completion." And here I, I want to point out, James is pretty clearly saying that the faith was contingent on the works.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  Not the other way around, the works. Are what? Put in the reps for the faith, so the faith could get stronger. Thus the scripture was fulfilled, that says Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And to me, this is explicitly, directly calling out Paul in Romans, where Paul says, that appeals to Abraham, quotes the same verse, and says that, you see, you are justified by faith apart from the works of the law. And so I, I think that we-

• 35:08Speaker 01

  And so James is pointing out, like, hey, that was a work.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Why are you talking about that? That was a work moment.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and, you know, when we, what do we have? Romans, I think it's four. For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift, but as something due. But to one who does not work, but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. We're quoting the exact same verse and arriving at a different conclusion. Now, again, there are scholars who are gonna say, that's probably just the reading of Paul that was not perfectly accurate, that was in circulation at the beginning of the second century,

• 36:00Speaker 00

  when this was probably written, not necessarily James saying the actual apostle Paul was wrong. Now, and, and there are people who are like, well, did James think that's really what Paul meant? Or was James just responding to something he knew to be a misunderstanding of Paul? That's a little more granular that I want to get in this discussion, but-

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  But, yeah, that, that, people are discussing that, so you don't have to worry about that.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  But I, I think James is disagreeing with that reading of, of Romans four. And I, I think this is, by the way, why Martin Luther called this an epistle of straw.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Because for Martin Luther, this was rejecting Paul's grace alone salvation, or faith alone salvation. And so for Martin Luther, this was something up with which he could not put. So he called this an epistle of straw. And this, along with a number of other texts, like Revelation, like Hebrews, like the Apocrypha. Martin Luther, in the first edition of the new translation of the Bible that he published, moved them into a different section of the Bible. And the only thing that stuck from that was moving the Apocrypha into a separate section.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Everybody else was like, no, we're bringing these other things back.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  We're gonna bring these other ones back. He was a little, he was having a bad day that day. And I think he just got a little too grumpy.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, the mutton just wasn't lean enough. So, yeah, so I think the case is stronger to make that James is disagreeing here, at least with a common reading of Romans 4, if not Romans 4 itself. And then, and then he goes on, likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works? When she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead. So I think that's, that's an effective diatribe against.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  There you go. I wish we had more time because.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  One more thing we need to say, though.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  We will go soon. James 1, verse 27, the last verse of the first chapter of James, is where he says famously, and the NRSVUE translates Thrischia as religion. Religion, as we understand it, was unknown back then. Thrischia should be piety. Piety that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  To care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. And I think that's the message of James.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  If you really want to be a follower of Jesus, care for the orphans and the widows, which is, which is symbolic of

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  the, a kind of social justice that we see in the prophets and, and in the gospels. And then keep yourself unstained by the world, unstained by the algae growing in the reflection pool of the world. Somebody, somebody said, the paint is now coming off.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Because of all of the hydrogen peroxide that they dumped into the, yeah, yeah. So that's neither here nor there. That is not related to the Epistle of James, unless you understand this movement to be condemned within the Epistle of James, which I think you could make an effective case for. But anyway, that is all we have time for.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's too bad. We can't get on to chapter three and the dangers of speech, which is a very interesting thing. But, but yeah, you can go and read it. You, you have a Bible.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  That, that unwieldy tongue is, it's, yeah, a problem.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. That's great. But I think it's, yeah, it's time to get, you had just mentioned Rahab in James. We're going to have another Rahab coming up.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Yes, we are.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  But it's a very different Rahab. So let's move on to what's that?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  All right. We, we got three that, that, that we have prepared.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Three, yes. That we'll, we'll talk about Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Which

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And not that Rahab. We, last time, the last segment we did, we, we talked about a Rahab, but that was the prostitute that was helpful at the walls of Jericho.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  And that's not, that's not who we're discussing.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Right. This, this Rahab got out of sex work pretty quick. Quickly and was pretty much in the chaos monster business after college. So.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  I can I be in the chaos monster business? I feel like that's a good gig. How do you get that one?

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it involves a lot of stomping and.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure my.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  I don't know if you have the body type for it, but.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure my high school teachers would have called me a chaos monster.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  My high school teachers just said, man, you would really get somewhere if someone just would just light a fire under your ass. So, um, yeah, which is related, but anyway, so Leviathan, I think, is one of the coolest monsters and definitely the monster that is mentioned the most.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Of the three. And we have references in a couple of times in Job, a couple of different places in the Psalms, as well as a fascinating one in Isaiah 27. And I wonder if we can start there. Isaiah 27:1.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  I'll allow it this one time.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Okay, I appreciate it. And here we have the beginning of a story of Israel's redemption. And it says in the, this is the NRSV Uy, "On that day, the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, Leviathan, the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea." So a couple of things to point out about this. This is eschatological. This is looking forward to some day off in the future where God is going to take a sword

• 42:38Speaker 00

  and kill a dragon that lives in the sea, not in a pineapple, not under the sea, but.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  We don't know about the pineapple. It does not mention pineapple or no pineapple. So. What is, what's ancient Hebrew for pineapple? I don't think they.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh, I don't think the, yeah, I think, I don't think we have that until we get the two different variations on it. The, the pinea or the pineapple variation. Anyway, and, and what is fascinating about this is that this text was probably written somewhere in the late 8th century BCE or maybe a little after that.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  We have an almost identical statement in a Ugaritic text that comes from about 500 years earlier.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  That is an early predate.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, so we're talking 500 years ago was before Shakespeare.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  So it is an old and, you know, we have a much, a much more robust publishing environment these days than they did back then. But anyway, there's the, the Baal cycle, which is not something you do at little league practice.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, you're talking about Baal?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Baal, or Baal, if you're nasty, is a storm deity. And there's a fight that happens between Baal and a chaos monster called Lotan. And here, I'll remind you Leviathan, the V there is really a Vav in Hebrew, which can be understood as a W or an O. So these are, these are cognate names. In other words, this is the Ugaritic version of the Hebrew name Leviathan. And it says that Paul, Paul, Baal, excuse me.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Saint Baal's epistle to the, to the Ugarites.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  The Ugarites. The Baal destroyed Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, or Lotan, excuse me, Lotan, the fleeing serpent, Lotan, the twisting serpent. And the Ugar, the Ugaritic adjectives there are identical. They're cognate to the Hebrew adjectives. And then it says, the dragon with seven heads. So not the dragon that is in the sea, but the dragon with seven heads. And And this is fascinating because a sea serpent slash dragon slash monster with seven heads is actually pretty common in ancient ancient West Asia. This is a kind of a standard

• 45:23Speaker 00

  trope that there's this dragon with with seven heads out there. You know, the Hydra is related, but we've really, we've recently discovered an inscription that has a little, somebody etched a drawing of a seven-headed sea serpent into this inscription that came from around the 8th century BCE in Israel. So, so we're, we don't have a mention of seven heads in this passage.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  But we are very clearly borrowing from some kind of sociocultural matrix, traditional matrix that the Ugaritic author of the ball cycle also drew from.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  I don't think we can say Isaiah was like, where's that ball cycle? I wanted to, I thought there was a cool part in there I wanted to copy out. I don't think that's what Isaiah did, but very clearly this is something that was in the air. This was a tradition that people knew about. And Isaiah plucks it from the air and includes it in chapter 27. And while it does not say anything about having seven heads here, I want you to go with me, if you will, to Psalm 74.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  I thought we were headed there. I was, I have been doing my research. So I knew Psalm 74 was coming up because

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Because of that head thing.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in Psalm 74, we've, we've got a very fairly early Psalm, but it's at least incorporating some early traditions. And here we have, "Yet my God, yet God my King is from of old working salvation in the earth." So Isaiah 27 was looking forward to some kind of eschatological defeat of the chaos monster. And so in that text, the Leviathan is probably representative of just the general chaos of the world. So God is going to defeat that chaos and bring every, bring peace to everybody. Here we have, "My God, my King is from of old working salvation in the earth." You divided the sea by your might.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan. You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. So here we have a multi-headed Leviathan.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  And one of the things that I think is interesting is when we look at this, Leviathan is called a dragon in this passage. Leviathan in Isaiah 27:1 is called a fleeing serpent, a twisting serpent, the dragon that is in the sea. There's an interesting thing in the book of Revelation that refers to somebody as a dragon and a serpent. Do you recall who that was?

• 48:22Speaker 01

  No, wait. Satan? Okay.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Yes, in Revelation, we have a reference to Satan as that great red serpent and dragon. And people think that that's talking about the serpent in the Garden of Eden. But guess who was there before the Garden of Eden? And guess who was the only one who was actually referred to as both a serpent and a dragon? Leviathan.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  The book of Revelation is about Leviathan as Satan, not the serpent from the Garden of Eden, because that was not identified with Satan. But I digress. In Psalm 74, we have a clear reference to the many heads of Leviathan. Oh, right, Revelation also says that this Satan beast has seven heads.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  So, you know.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  I will just briefly push back a little bit and say that 74 doesn't say many heads. It just says the heads.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Plural heads.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  We know it's plural. Could be two, could be 11.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Probably more than two. If there were two heads, they could have used. They were not necessarily required to use, but they could have used the dual form.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Because Hebrew has a dual form. So, but Revelation also says.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Probably seven heads, because there's a tradition here. We have a whole tradition.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  That's a clear tradition that goes all the way down to Revelation. So, you know, jot that down. Anyway, so we have.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Leviathan as this primordial chaos monster. Psalm 74 is talking about salvation being worked in the earth in the past. And the reference to dividing the seas sounds like the way that creation is sometimes described.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Because creation is about dividing things. You divide the light from the dark. You divide the waters from the waters. You divide the dry land from the seas. And so we have in a few different parts, a discussion of the taming or the defeat of Leviathan as somehow associated with the taming of or the compartmentalizing and restricting of the seas. So Leviathan is also a symbol of chaotic waters, the seas. And so to delineate them, to restrict them, to contain them is also to bring order to creation. So.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  It's funny, because when I read that myself, I saw you divided the sea by your might. And I thought, and I thought of Moses. But yeah, you're right that it probably makes a lot more sense that it is like dividing the seas from this, the waters above, from the waters below, and all of that sort of thing.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there are, there are a few different places where we get this relationship of Leviathan to some kind of process of creation. And, and in the Anuma leash and elsewhere, creation is, is an act of subduing chaos and bringing order. So as the like main symbol of chaos, to defeat Leviathan is symbolic of bringing order through the subduing of chaos. So it's creation. So this is, you know, we talk about the two creation accounts in Genesis one and Genesis two. This is the Hebrew Bible's third creation account, where it's not just, you know, pronouncing things. It's not just forming the human from the dust of, of the earth. We also are fighting a dragon

• 51:48Speaker 00

  to, to bring about order to this chaotic world. And then the Leviathan is also representative of political enemies. And this where, this is where Rahab comes into view. Because Rahab is also represented in Job, in the Psalms, in Isaiah. Notice a pattern here?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  We have.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Those are the books that really like the big monsters.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yes, these are pro-monster, at least pro-representation of monsters. You have in Isaiah 51:9, so this is no longer Isaiah 27, this is no longer first Isaiah, this is second Isaiah. We've had first Isaiah, what about second Isaiah? Here is second Isaiah. It is much later, by the way. Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord, awake as in days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces? Who pierced the dragon? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea away for the redeemed to cross over?

• 52:53Speaker 00

  So here we have, we're bringing the Exodus into play here. We have the parting of the Red Sea. And Rahab is represented as Egypt, as one of these political enemies. So we can have the chaos monster representative of general chaos. We can also have Rahab, another chaos monster who is associated with the sea, representative of specific political enemies. So I think you have, it's, these stories, I think, make use of a broader kind of conceptual palette that they could, for, you know, putting together these compositions,

• 53:36Speaker 00

  for telling these stories in a way that are going, that's going to invoke specific emotional responses. And if you've got these monsters, it's just a lot more fun.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and I think it's so interesting, you know, they're, it, these are very clearly metaphors. And it's, it's sort of explicitly using them metaphorically.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And yet there are people out there who who want to insist on

• 54:02Speaker 01

  sort of the the inerrancy of the Bible, who who want it to be so literal that that if it says that there are dragons, then there must have then been dragons back in the back in biblical times or whatever.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Well, didn't you hear those? That's the dinosaurs.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Right. Yes.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Dinosaurs walked with humans.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  We should probably do that. A dinosaur segment where we just talk about Ken Ham and Kent Hove and talking about all the dinosaurs on the ark or whatever. And but I but but the but it's so funny to me to back yourself into that corner. Because then it's just then then people are going to say like, OK, now you have to be accountable for the the idea of there being dragons.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  On the earth. What?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  What are you doing to yourself? It's just.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  This is this is an own goal. It's an unforced error.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's

• 55:03Speaker 00

  it's not necessary. So so Rahab could be a personification of the sea, or at least a monsterfication of the sea. Or it could be another name for Leviathan. We don't have it. We don't have a ton of details about what precisely where this is coming from. But the the word is also used to to mean proud one. So we see it used that way. And that might be why it's associated with with Egypt.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Is that is that also the name? What the name of the prostitute in Jericho?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Would have meant?

• 55:40Speaker 00

  No, no, the the names are are spelled differently.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Oh, they're not in my book. They're spelled the same in mine.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Well, remember when I talked about Chesed? And you've got the well, the the sex worker from Jericho.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  Or the linen maker from from Jericho. I think the I think the description of her profession differs, but that's Rahav with a with a Chet, whereas Rahav with just a hey is what's going on with the monster.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Hey.

• 56:21Speaker 00

  So it's not, "Hey, girl," it's, "Hey, monster," it's, "Chet, girl."

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  So, um, yeah, but, uh, but yeah, Rahab is, uh, or Rah, uh, Rahab, excuse me, is the monster, which leaves us with the, the other one that a lot of people think is a, is a dinosaur. That would be Behemoth.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Well, I, what's funny is I haven't heard dinosaur, but I have heard hippopotamus.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  So, uh, Behemoth, Behemoth, finally, we're, we've got mostly a land critter.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Uh, so let's, let's talk about Behemoth.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. One, one of my favorite jokes that I've seen on Twitter from a, from a Bible scholar was they were like, "The book of Job is basically like, Job is like, why is there so much suffering?" And God says, "How dare you speak that way to the inventor of the hippopotamus?"

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Which is not wrong.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not that wrong, but, um, when we go to Job, chapter 40, verse 15, we have, "Look at Behemoth. Consider the Behemoth of the fields."

• 57:31Speaker 00

  It says, "Which I made just as I made you. It eats grass like an ox. Its strength is in its loins and its power in the muscles of its belly. It makes its tail stiff like a cedar. The sinews of its thighs are knit together. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like bars of iron. It is the first of the great acts of God. Only its maker can approach it with the sword. For the mountains yield food for it where all the wild animals play. Under the lotus plants it lies, in the covert of the reeds and in the marsh, the lotus trees cover it for shade, the willows of the wadi surround it.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Even if the river is turbulent, it is not frightened, it is confident, though Jordan rushes against its mouth. Can one take it with hooks or pierce its nose with a snare?" And then it goes on to talk about Leviathan.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  It's such a weird argument. Uh, first of all, talk to me about... Uh, about it being the first thing.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  So I, I think the majority-

• 58:39Speaker 01

  The first of the great acts of God.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the majority of scholars would probably say that behemoth is not describing a hippopotamus. It's not like this, this fantastical description of a hippopotamus. I think they would say it is a, another primordial creature, monster. And so basically, this is when God is in their, um, you know, let's see what I can get away with phase, and is making fantastical beasts and where to find them. And, uh, is, so the first great act of God might just be God is, is stretching the, their creative legs and, and just like, bam, look at that. Look at that thing.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Look at what I did.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  I, I, I have to admit that when I was reading the description, I imagined the, the big buffalo from Avatar, The Last Airbender.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  The six-legged giant buffalo thing.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  It, cause it seemed, cause unlike Leviathan and Rahab, uh, this, this one seems kinda gentle. It's just, I mean, like it's really, really strong, but it's just chilling under the, under the, the lotus plants.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's just laying in the river.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Eating, uh, grass like an ox. It just seems nice. I, I like, I like behemoth.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  I, I wanna point out something interesting about, particularly for people who say this is some kind of sauropod or something like that.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Um, verses 16 and 17, "Its strength is in its loins and its power in the muscles of its belly. It makes its tail stiff like a cedar. The sinews of its thighs are knit together." So we've got four different clauses here, and they're all parallel. We, we got couplets, two repeated couplets. Um, and so we've got a reference to loins, a reference to muscles of the belly, a reference to a tail, and then a reference to thighs.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Now, we're, we're kind of homed in on a particular part of this animal.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  But what's funny is the word that is, um, translated in, uh, in most translations, "tail", might not mean tail.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  It, uh, can also, it could be used metaphorically to mean penis.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  So, which, which a lot of scholars would say is, um- Is more appropriate to the context because we've got loins, belly, penis, thighs. And what does it do with with its zanav? It makes it stiff like a cedar.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  So I think the what the author of Job is, for whatever reason, kind of affixed on, uh, might be something other than, uh, how wiggly and big its tail is.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  So, uh, so that that's a strike against, I would say, the people who try to identify this as a sauropod. I I cannot account for sauropod, uh, penile qualities. So, you know, but, um, but I don't think that part of the passage is about its tail.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Because and, and, you know, additionally, who's like, check out how stiff I can make my tail.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Check that out. You could stand on that. Um, yeah, I don't know that that means anything, uh, in in the ancient world. And also a hippopotamus doesn't really have much of a, a stiff tail.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  I cannot comment on the, uh, the cedar like tails of hippos.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  But it doesn't really match. If you look at all the details, it doesn't match any animal that we know about. So, which is why most likely this is one guy's just kind of fever dream about this. Uh, maybe it's another kind of dream, uh, about this, this fantastical beast that is, uh, among the the first great works.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, the invention of mythical beasts is, goes back thousands and thousands of years and crops up in almost every society that we have any records for. It's just a thing that humans do. They invent crazy, big fantastical critters and, uh, and then talk about them.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we, we still do it down to today in our, in our, in the Harry Potter stuff and the fantastical, fantastic beasts and where to find them. And even in, uh, what, uh, what I watched with my family, I think it was called Sketch.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  I loved the sketch.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  You liked it?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought it was a great, it was a super fun movie. I was surprised it didn't do better.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  I, I thought it was a, it was a great movie. The, it was, it was heavier than I thought it was gonna be. But, but I, I think poignant. Um, and so, but yeah, it's all about beasts that, that a child is imagining uh, and drawing. So yeah, it's something we've done forever. We, we go back to medieval, uh, the medieval periods and, and we've got, you know, knights, what did they go out and do? They went out and they slew a dragon.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  And, uh, and, and won the hand of the fair maiden kind of, kind of stuff. So, uh, this is, uh, this goes all the way back to, to Hori antiquity, to the days of old, when, when God, my king was working salvation in the earth by killing that animal over there. Uh, and, and there are others, uh, the, you know, when we go back to the Ugaritic literature, you've got other kind of monstrous-y, uh, characters, taneen. Uh, these are the sea creatures. They're, uh, that are, we see them in the, uh, they're whales or the great sea creatures that are mentioned in a bunch of places

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  in the, in the Hebrew Bible. Yam, Yamu was, uh, was the, the sea in, uh, the Ugaritic literature, which was a deity that was associated with the sea and, and the, uh, the storm deity has to do battle with Yamu and, uh, and, and with mote, mote apen, open, apens, opens up his maw to, um, to consume Baal, uh, which is representative of death. So like, there's, there's mythology in the Bible. Like you can, you can not like it all you want, but it's very clearly there. And these, and these three monsters are just part of that mythology. They get worked into a more, um, a, a worldview

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  that is, is trying to figure out how to make it seem like God is the only divine being out there. But, but these are primordial divine chaos monsters, um, like quite clearly.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  All right. Well, uh, that's amazing and interesting. If you, like us, are chaos monsters and you want to get the word out about our kind, you can share this with your family and friends, have some fun with it. Uh, you can also help us keep the, our stuff going by going over to, uh, patreon.com slash data over dogma and joining up there. You give us a little bit of your money and you can get in return, uh, depending on what level you sign up at, you can get early and ad free versions of every episode. You can also get our, uh, patrons only content that is the, we call it the after party and it happens

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

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• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

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