No Originals, No Mercy

There isn't a single surviving original manuscript for any book of the Bible, so how do scholars decide what the earliest recoverable text actually said? This week, it's a primer on textual criticism: why King James onlyists despise it (despite the KJV being a product of it), what Erasmus did when he ran out of Greek manuscripts for the last chapter of Revelation, and how one scribe's wandering eye can quietly delete an entire paragraph from Samuel. Then it's chapter and verse on Zephaniah — three short chapters of unrelenting doom that promise to sweep humans, animals, birds, and fish off the face of the earth, before pivoting rather abruptly to "sing aloud, O daughter Zion." Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store: https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/ 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What if you could get a private lesson each week from the best, most innovative golf teachers in the world?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Swaying correctly is physically easier to do than the stupidity that most golfers end up doing.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  I'm Josh Karp. On Golf Smarter's Corrected Mistakes, I speak to the brightest minds in golf to dig into their journey, their process, and the best advice for how anyone can improve their golf game. So if you're looking to get better at golf, search Golf Smarter's Corrected Mistakes on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Tuesday.

• 0:33Speaker 02

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

• 1:05Speaker 03

  So it's like death, death, death, death. You shall not be put to shame for all of the things that you did bad.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's death, death, death, death. Oh, you little scamps. I can't stay mad at you.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:25Speaker 04

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:38Speaker 04

  Yee-haw. It's a, it's a, it's a rip-roaring good time here in these United States.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Totally ripping is what the kids are saying. I think, I don't know.

• 1:50Speaker 04

  Maybe. Who knows? The last piece of slang that you tried to teach me, I don't appreciate, so I'm not...

• 1:58Speaker 03

  I didn't come up with it.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Right. And if you would like to hear that slang, friends, you can become a patron and go and listen to the, to the before-party of this very episode.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  The pre-game. Maybe that's what we've started calling it.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  The pre-game. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Now that the cat's out of the bag, that it's not an after-party anymore, because we changed when we recorded, yeah, pre-game might be kind of fun. All right, friends. Well, coming up today, we got some interesting stuff. We're gonna do a what's that? And I think this is gonna be critical. I think this one's a good one. That's literally critical, because we're gonna be talking about textual criticism. We've talked about it quite a bit on the show, but, but we're gonna do a little primer for you, a little, we'll get into it, figure out what it is, and, you know, then you can

• 2:53Speaker 04

  send that to your friends and family so that they understand what you're talking about when you tell them stuff that you've heard on the show.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  And if you ever wanted to baffle anybody at a dinner party, you can just go off on what Homoeo Teleuton is.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  And, you know, they won't know what you're talking about.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  We'll get there. We'll get there, maybe. We'll see. And in the second half of today's show, it's a, it's a chapter and verse, and, and really, it's three chapters and a bunch of verses, because it's, we're doing the Book of Zephaniah.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  Is that, is that the book? That's the name of the book, right?

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Zephaniah, yep. One of the minor prophets. I think it's minor prophet number eight.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Don't tell them you said that. That's so rude.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  It's not a ranking, but...

• 3:37Speaker 04

  You said minor.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that's the name of the collection, the 12 minor prophets.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Okay. If you say so, man. Anyway, we'll get into that, but first, it's time for what's that? So textual criticism. Now, not everybody is thrilled about textual criticism, I can tell you. When I was looking at it, when I was looking it up, I did find at least one place, Way of Life Literature at Way of Life Bible College has, has a little thing, and they, and in, in their thing on textual criticism, this is, this is excerpted from Faith vs.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  the Modern Bible Versions, a course on Bible texts and versions of a tenfold defense of the King James Bible.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  And they start with the words, "We further reject modern textual criticism because of its terrible fruit, increasing uncertainty and skepticism, a weakening of the authority of Scripture, and the promotion of ecumenical, of the ecumenical movement." And so what their claim is, is that modern textual criticism has resulted in uncertainty in the biblical text.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  And what I say to that is, if that's your main concern, and your main concern isn't trying to really understand what the text is trying to say, and what the text is, and what it means and stuff, you may be, you're not really searching for truth. You're just searching for certainty, and that could be a problem.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm a little curious, the Way of Life Bible College just sounds, sounds kind of silly just, just off the bat. I'm trying to find some information on this, but like their blog, the, they have a post that they just reposted, first from 2008, they just reposted it today, and the title is just Beware of Tony Campolo.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  I don't know who that is, but...

• 5:53Speaker 03

  I don't know, but they're doing personal attacks on the blog of this quote-unquote Bible college, so forgive me if I don't have a lot of confidence in anything that they do or say.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  But they, they, I see there's a book available, Why We Hold to the King James Bible. And here's the thing, King James onlyism is, you're basically required to hate textual criticism, at least modern textual criticism, because textual criticism, like, immediately you're like, okay, well, the King James Bible is out, because, and so if you want to hold on to the King James Bible, you have to be like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe the problem is with all of the experts. And you have to hate on modern textual criticism. But the King James Bible is a product of textual criticism as well. Like, the, the process itself is, is in the background.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  It's, it's baked into the foundation of the King James Bible as well. You just don't like the outcomes of, of more developed textual criticism. But textual criticism goes all the way back to prior to the life of Jesus, and it actually originates outside of the Bible.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  It's actually, we gotta go back to, like, the librarians at Alexandria, and people who were, were bringing together the, the main canons of Greek literature and things like that. And so specifically Homer and the Iliad, and these other things, where you have a variety of different manuscripts. There are different versions of it. And if you are bringing them together and you happen to be comparing them, you're like, wait a minute, these are different. Why are they different?

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Where's my favorite story? Why isn't it in here?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, all the way back over 2,000 years ago, they started asking, why do these manuscripts differ from one another, and which one is correct?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  And that is the main question of textual criticism. Correct is, is, you know, more of a value judgment. But textual criticism, we used to think of it as trying to recover the original text, the er text. We don't really talk about it that much anymore, because there might not be an er text for an awful lot of the texts we're talking about. Like, it gets really complicated if a given book of the Bible, like, was compiled from a bunch of different texts, and then those texts came together from different traditions, and some of them were written, and some of them were oral, and then later traditions altered, like, you can't go back to an original text a lot of the time.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  And so now, really, what textual criticism, at least textual criticism in the Bible, is mainly concerned with is trying to... Reconstruct the earliest recoverable form of a given text. And unfortunately for the biblical texts, the earliest recoverable form is not all the way back to the autographs. It's not all the way back to what was written by the authors. Again.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Because we don't have those.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  We don't have those.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  I think there's a lot of people that would be surprised to learn that there's, we don't have access to any original text for any of the books of the Bible, including the New Testament.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Right. The closest we have is there's a little fragment of papyrus, P52, which contains like 35 or 36 words, half on one side, half on the other of the fragment. It's about the size of a credit card that preserves parts of the Gospel of John. 35 or 36 words that really eager enthusiastic textual critics would say might date to around 120, 125 CE, which would be maybe 20, 30 years after the Gospel of John was written. Other, there are others who would be like, eh, maybe it's around 150, but it could be as late as like 200.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  But even, even that's not going to be in the handwriting of the original author.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  No, no, it's going to be, it's, it's going to be at least a copy of a copy of a copy. And, but the, you know, that's not the entire Gospel of John. We don't know what's going on with a lot of the parts of John that are open to text critical debate. So yeah, we don't, we don't even get close. When it comes to the Hebrew Bible, our earliest copies for the overwhelming majority of the verses in Hebrew come from a couple thousand years now, about 1500 ish years after they were probably originally written.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Now, we do have less than half of the verses of many books of the Hebrew Bible preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. When it comes to the book of Isaiah, we happen to have almost the entire thing, the overwhelming majority of it preserved in the great Isaiah scroll.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  And so there is a, you have this window from maybe as close as 20 to 30 years away from the, the original composition, all the way to 1500 years or more for any, for given verses. And so what can happen within those, those decades and those centuries? A lot.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Right. And that's, that's the problem that I guess textual criticism is facing is just, you know, there, there, over those, over the, the, this long period of time, this has been transmitted and transmitted and recopied and recopied and recopied. And there are scribal errors, as we've talked about on the show. There's scribal additions, there's amendations, all sorts of stuff. And you gotta figure out what's what. You gotta figure out what, so, so obviously that's impossible and we should all just give up.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's not an exact science. We can't rub a special piece of paper on the manuscript to see if it turns pink, meaning this is the original, you know, this matches the original text. But over the centuries, we've developed some observations about how things tend to happen. And, you know, again, some kind of textual criticism goes back over 2000 years, but we have when people are collecting manuscripts of the, the Bible at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, there's a degree to which there would have been some textual criticism going on as these people gathered these different manuscripts. And a lot of the manuscripts differ, some in, in very significant ways from each other, but they still held on to them.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  You go a few centuries down the road, you get to Origen in the third century CE, an early Christian who put together the hexapla, which is like a six column, side by side comparison of the Hebrew, a transliterated version of the Hebrew, the Septuagint, like a bunch of different versions and compared things and started using little symbols and signs to indicate, here's where this version has extra text. Here's where this version is missing text. Here's where this version has a different text. Here's where this version has a different word order. And, and we started kind of cataloging the different kinds of variants and the different kinds of differences that can occur between manuscripts.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  And then we have to go, we have to go many, many years down the road before it starts to become what we might call something approaching a science. In, in the Reformation, the Renaissance, when comparative literature begins to kind of become a thing, you have a lot more comparison of text. Translators who are putting together translations of the Bible, for instance, Desiderius Erasmus in the early 16th century. What did he do? And he wanted to put together the, the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. He went to his library in, in Switzerland and he said, give me all the manuscripts, the Greek New Testament manuscripts you got.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  And they, they've put, they threw seven of them on the, on the counter and said, this is, this is everything. And he then had to decide, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take two of them as my base text. And then the other five, I'm going to compare to the base text and I'll make changes where I think a certain reading is probably better. Now, Erasmus was not a textual critic in, in the sense that we use the, the label today. And so some of his decisions were better than others. And then for the, the last chapter of Revelation, he didn't have, they didn't have that chapter covered in any of the seven manuscripts.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  And so he just took the Latin Vulgate and just translated the Latin back into Greek and then, and then just wrote that down. But he did multiple editions of that. With each new edition, he had access to more manuscripts and made changes regarding the text critical decisions he made. So, so here's where you have kind of the, the collision of a concern for original text along with professional printing concerns and publishing concerns. It's like, okay, well, we want another edition. We want to make changes. We also want to sell books. So, you know, this turns this into something that people are taking more seriously.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  And we get into the, this 1551 is when a guy named Stephanos decided he was gonna divide everything in the New Testament out into individual verses. That division into chapters and verses had happened earlier with the Hebrew Bible. We talked about that in, in a recent episode.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  And then we get to, it's really in the 18th and 19th century that textual criticism turns into something we might call a science, something where, where people started methodologically kind of figuring out what are our standards? What are our rules? How are we doing things? And we, we adopted a number of observations. So for instance, and, and we still like to use these Latin titles, lectio difficilior potior, which, which means the more difficult reading is preferred.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  And the idea there is, look, when scribes make changes, more often than not, those changes are to make the text easier to understand or comprehend or accept, not harder.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  And so the more difficult reading, when we're comparing two manuscripts, the one that makes less sense is probably the earlier one. Not a hard and fast rule, but just a trend.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Just a, yeah, just, just a guidepost.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  And when it's, when you say, when you ended that phrase with is preferred, you just mean if we're guessing it older.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  Not, as opposed to, as it may not be a better message or whatever, it may not be, but it is, but it is more likely to get to originality.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, more likely to be earlier in, in the sense of the reading that preceded the other one.

• 17:33Speaker 03

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

• 17:39Speaker 04

  I've heard the construction.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  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. Cause we, I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do these, these improvements to the house, but we had to pay off our old car and that took actual planning, which you know, I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances. And we had to set dates and we had to create a budget and it was so satisfying to actually make a plan.

• 18:22Speaker 03

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

• 18:49Speaker 04

  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. 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 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.

• 19:34Speaker 04

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

• 20:07Speaker 03

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

• 20:23Speaker 03

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

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Do we have some examples? We should give like concrete examples of some of these things.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I suppose I could have pulled some examples up, but there are some, there are some famous ones. And here's why it's just a, you know, a tendency and not a hard and fast rule. Because let's take a look at the Gospel of John, chapter one, verse 18, has an incredibly famous text critical problem. And here is the, do, do, do, do, do, John 118 in the, according to the NRSVUE says, no one has ever seen God. It is only, it is the only Son Himself, God, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made Him known. And this is actually a very problematic attempt to eat one's cake and have it too.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Because in the Greek, uh, you have the manuscripts say, the, the main preferred manuscripts say one of two different things. Monogenes huios or monogenes theos. Monogenes means, you know, in the King James Version, it's translated only begotten, but really it means one of a kind or unique. And so is it the one of a kind or unique Son? Or is it the one of a kind or unique God? And we have manuscripts that say each. The ones that say God actually come from earlier. The ones that say Son come from a little later. However, once you get that reading, that is like almost every other manuscript that we have.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  And then, you know, you have little differences when it comes to whether or not it has a definite article or something like that. But lectio difficilior would come into play because monogenes theos is not anything that has ever, that is, you know, that phrase doesn't occur anywhere else in the, in the New Testament. Monogenes huios does occur in the Gospel of John. And so it would be more difficult because it doesn't match what we have elsewhere. And so it doesn't make as much sense. And so the argument is, does this mean monogenes or monogenes theos? If it was more early, somebody would have, a scribe would have been like, uh, why does it say that? I'm changing it to what I know it says elsewhere.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  So that, that's, uh, sounds like a more reasonable change. How did the change happen? Why did the change happen? At the same time, however, one could push back and say, well, it's actually the easier reading if this change occurred in the period of these Christological debates over the divinity of, of Jesus. During, during Nicaea, somebody might've been like, oops, I changed it to monogenes theos. Or it could have accidentally been changed. In the earliest manuscripts, we have what are called nomenis sacra, which are abbreviations of words and titles for divinity.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  And so in the Greek, it actually just says, it actually just, uh, has a theta and a sigma. And the difference between theos and huios in the, using nomenis sacra would have just been one letter. So one letter, if it was transcribed sloppily, could have resulted in the confusion. And so you have to, you have to bring all that into consideration to weigh which reading you think is more likely, because it's not impossible and it's not incredibly uncommon for scribes to correct something they know to be an error, in which case lectio difficilior might mislead you.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Because if, if huios is original and somebody, oops, I changed it to theos because I find that theologically helpful. And then other scribes came through later went, stop doing that and changed it back to huios. You know, that's, that's also something that could have happened. So, so this is what makes textual criticism in, in many ways, just as much an art as a science, because we're weighing probabilities. We have to consider all different kinds of ways to contextualize what's going on, to get inside the heads of the scribes who may have been transcribing this, to figure out when it may have been transcribed to when it dates and things like that. So that, that's one example.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Another example is lectio brevior, which would mean the shorter reading is the preferred reading. Now we had Lincoln Blumel, a friend of mine on the show, and I don't know if you recall, but he mentioned that there were a number of textual critics these days who are actually saying, sometimes the shorter reading is actually not preferred. In fact, the, to the degree that we may have to overturn that standard in textual criticism. Maybe lectio brevior is false. Maybe it is the longer reading, or it is the, um, the longer reading that is preferred. Now I have not followed up with that particular debate, but you know, we, we saw an example

• 26:04Speaker 03

  of that with our passage in John with the elect lady. And I don't remember what episode that was, but maybe in the, the show notes, we can refer to that episode if somebody wants to go check out the discussion there. So, so those are a couple of the most common text critical considerations that, that go into this. Interestingly enough, when we look at Hebrew Bible in the New Testament,

• 26:32Speaker 03

  The text critical industries are quite a bit different between the two of them. Although we're trying to kind of coordinate them and bring them closer together. So they're not operating under different standards. But when we get into, it's really the New Testament that kind of leads the way for textual criticism of the Bible. You have a guy named Johann Jakob Griesbach, who put together his own critical edition of the Greek New Testament. It was based on, this was in 18th century, 17, like 1772 to 1775, I think was, or 1777, something like that, was his first edition.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  And he was based on the textual receptus, so the tradition that was started by Erasmus. But he had access to even more manuscripts because in the 17 and 1800s, we discovered a lot of manuscripts of the New Testament, a lot more became available for scholarly consultation. And so he was like, okay, there are a lot of problems with the Texas receptus. So I'm going to use the Texas receptus as my base text, but I'm going to go through and make a bunch of notes and talk about why I think this reading is better. And that reading is, is better over there. So his critical edition was a bit of a departure from the Texas receptus, which was kind of dominated. And that's the, what is underlying the King James Version.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  So when people talk about how textual criticism is the devil, and the King James Version is, is the only version of the Bible that is the very word of God. They are champions of the Texas receptus.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  And then in the 1800s, we had 1831 Carl Lochman, published his critical edition. And instead of like Griesbach, using the Texas receptus as a base text and editing it, he just threw it out the window and said, I'm creating my own critical text, based on the manuscripts that are now available to us.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  And so this, this is the, the first iteration of the critical text as, as we understand it today, which is not tied to the Texas receptus. And this is, this is basically, you know, the, the kingdom of Satan coming home to roost, according to the King James onlyists.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  And that led to, in 50 years, 50? 50 or 51 years later, I can't, I think it's 1881. It might be 1882, but 1881 is in my head, is when we have the first English translation of the New Testament that is actually based on the critical text rather than the Texas receptus. And that's the RV, the revised version, which basically took the King James Version's New Testament and then edited it according to a critical edition of the New Testament that was available in that time. And I have that big old Bible that, that I pulled out to take our pictures with for YouTube thumbnails.

• 29:37Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  That is an 1882, I think, Bible, 1881 or 1882. It is the, the first publication where they actually put the RV and the King James Version side by side. So they published the two of them together. So you could compare the, the revised version to the King James Version. And that's where they actually have, you know, if you go look in Matthew 1721, or any one of a number of other, about 16 other passages, they just omit the verse altogether because through the process of examining all the manuscripts, comparing them and making judgment calls

• 30:20Speaker 03

  about which readings are better, we arrived at the conclusion that there are over a dozen full verses in the New Testament that are secondary additions to the text, that were not written by the authors of these texts. We have manuscripts where they are absent and we can, and it's the explanation that they were added later is a far stronger conclusion than the explanation that they somehow fell out.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Prior to our earlier, earliest manuscripts.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  And this, and the funny thing is that some of these things, you know, obviously the, the glaring example is the woman taken in adultery. We've talked about that.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are two glaring examples, that one and then the, what we call the long ending of Mark.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Versus nine through 20 of Mark 16, which are not in our earliest manuscripts.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  And the, and the point that I was going to make is that like the woman taken, the story of the woman taken in adultery is great.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Like it's a good, like it's a good addition to the book. I like it. But it, but like, so, so I, I think it's important to clarify that when we say, this is a good translation, or this is a, you know, texturally accurate thing. It's not, that's not actually a value judgment on what's good and what's not good in the Bible, so much as it is just try, like the, the, the project here is to get at some level of accuracy or some level of, of understanding of what the original text may have said.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I know we don't have a lot of time left, but this is, I mentioned that in New Testament and Old Testament Hebrew Bible textual criticism is, is different. And much of that has to do with the fact that we're usually aimed at producing different kinds of results. Like critical editions of the Hebrew Bible have historically gone at it a little differently from critical editions of the New Testament. And the main difference was that when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, almost all of our critical editions have always been what are called diplomatic editions. So now we'll get into some of the glossary things. Diplomatic edition is a critical edition that is based on a single manuscript.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  And then, and, and so our critical editions of the Hebrew Bible are the Leningrad Codex for the most part. And then in the critical apparatus, we might say, okay, there are Kumran manuscripts that say this, or the Septuagint says this, or something like that. And that allows a translator to make text critical decisions about what they're actually going to translate. The New Testament, there is no single manuscript that is considered as authoritative as the Leningrad Codex, which is the Maseratic text. So we have always used what we call eclectic editions. So diplomatic is based on one manuscript. Eclectic additions are based on an edition of the source text that has been cobbled together from a bunch of different manuscripts.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  So that's the Texas receptus. And that's all the critical additions that have been published ever since, unless you have like a critical edition of the Codex Sinaiticus, or something like that. But those are, are very rarely used for translations into English. That might be used for a translation into modern Greek, Demontikos, for, you know, the Greek Orthodox Church or something like that. And so that's one of the, the main differences. Some other glossary things that would be helpful for you. I use these words sometimes in my videos. I usually try to explain them, but when I don't, they just go scorching by over people's heads. But you, you'll hear about two different kinds of changes.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  One is haplography, one is ditography. Haplography is when something has accidentally been omitted. There's been a transcription error that results in text being lost and frequently. And there are two different reasons that that happens mostly. One of them is called homoyo arcton. One of them is called homoyo taleuton. So I promised I would get to these words, but homoyo arcton means same beginning. And so if you've ever, ever transcribed a text, you go to your, your exemplar, your source text, you read as many words as you can exactly remember. And then you go over to your blank manuscript page and you write down the words exactly as you remember them.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  And then you have to return back to your source text. Now, usually what you do is you either keep in your head how the word, the last word you wrote down ended, or you take note of how the next word coming up in the source text begins.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  So you go back, and then when you come back to your source text, you go back to what you recall the word ended with, or what you recall the next word began with, and you pick back up there. And if words that either end or begin the same occur multiple times within a line, or within a couple of lines, or even a few lines of each other, sometimes you accidentally go back to the wrong word. And you pick up either where you have already transcribed, or you skip over stuff to pick up again. And so if you, you know, if homoyo arcton, two words that begin the same, you accidentally go back and record a word or multiple words all over again, that's called ditography.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Ditography is where you have repeated or added material. And then if you skip lines or words because of the way a word ended, or because of the way a word began, that is haplography. That's where you have omitted material. So in textual criticism, if you listen to a presentation given by a textual critic, they'll, they, they might push their glasses up on their nose and go, and this was omitted because this is haplography as a result of homoyo arcton. And it all sounds very fancy and, and we are very proud of our ability to remember these, these Latin and Greek words and use them to try to help us figure out what reading was likely original.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  But it is, it is a fun exercise to actually look at a text and be like, oh, wow, I can see now exactly how the scribe went about doing this. And they went from that word and skipped over these words and picked back up on this other line. And that's why in the, the manuscript that I have, it skips over those things. And, you know, it either does or doesn't make much sense, the resulting text.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  There are a lot of examples of, of that going on. We can even see in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the largest. Correction, that the Dead Sea Scrolls have helped biblical scholars make to biblical manuscripts in terms of just number of words is a part in the Book of Samuel, where there is a whole paragraph that got omitted because of haplography, because the scribe skipped from, from one word to another.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  And, and we, we found a manuscript of the Dead Sea Scrolls where it has that paragraph. But what's funny is you can even see in the Dead Sea Scroll manuscript, that part of the paragraph had to be written into the margins by a different scribe, because even within that Dead Sea Scroll manuscript, they accidentally omitted some of the paragraph. Yeah, yeah. So they did it within that manuscript. And then later on, the Maseratic text. And, and that, that omission goes all the way back to the Septuagint. Like, that happened very, very early on in the transmission of the Book of Samuel. So, and, and then the last thing I'll point out is what we call conjectural emendations.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Because sometimes we are pretty sure this manuscript reading is not right, but we don't have an excellent manuscript that preserves a different reading. And sometimes we'll be like, we really, really, really think we know what happened here. And so you might have, if, if a critical edition or a translation is open to what are called conjectural emendations, they might just say, you know what, we're just gonna, uh, we're gonna call an audible. We're gonna make an executive decision here. I'm changing this to what we're pretty darn sure it originally read, even though we don't have a manuscript that directly attests to that. There are textual critics who'll be like, that is anathema. You can never do that. That is not allowed.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  You'll have other textual critics who'll say, yeah, we, we're pretty darn sure. We don't need to worry about this. We can make this change. So conjectural emendations are a somewhat controversial aspect of textual criticism today as well.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Well.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  And there's a whole lot more to get to that we don't get to talk about, but.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  Well, that's fascinating stuff. Uh, I hope you, I, I hope everybody's happy that you've now ruined the Bible and caused uncertainty in their world and skepticism. Because that, you know, apparently that's what textual, textual criticism does.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  That's, and that's why we need that textual healing.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  That's why you need it. So everybody go and heal yourself and let's move on to chapter and verse.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  All right, Dan, Zephaniah.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Zephaniah.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  It's three chapters long, so tolerable, not the worst thing in the world.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can get through this in a weekend. And that's, and that's if you are very, very slow at reading.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you're extremely slow, otherwise you can do it in, uh, in, easily in a single sitting.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  Uh, which I did. And, but I warn you, it hits hard. This one comes at you fast and it comes at you mean, right out, right out the gate.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, Zephaniah was not slow playing the, the point here. He was, uh, he was like, look, I'm Zephaniah anyway. And, uh, God comes in, "I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth."

• 40:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Says the Lord, like.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  It's a bit rough. It's a bit rough.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Yes. Uh, Zephaniah is, uh, he does not have the kid gloves on. Um, which is, uh, like his, the name Zephaniah, the "ah" at the end, uh, just in case you weren't aware, when you see that at the end of biblical names, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, that indicates a version of the divine name.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  So the Tetragrammaton, it's, it's a slightly shortened version of the Tetragrammaton. And so whatever comes before is usually going to be some kind of verb. A lot of names in ancient Hebrew were, were sentences, were clauses.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  This is the equivalent to names that end in L, like Daniel, which is our name or something. It's a theophoric name. I know the word even.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  I've been doing this show for a minute. Uh, okay. I did not know that about the "ah" thing.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Which is good, because, uh, then, then I understand that that reference is not just Zephaniah, but his grandpa Gedeliah and his grandpa, or his dad Amariyah, uh, and his dad Hezekiah.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. They all have Yahawistic theophoric elements in, in their name.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  So, uh, Zephaniah, uh, the meaning there is, uh, like the Lord covers, hides, protects, something like that.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Uh, now it's, there are a lot of places in the Hebrew Bible where the name is like an editorialization on the role of the individual in the story.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Like in, in Ruth, we have, uh, the Machlon and Hileon, which, which means sickly and frail.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Um, and that's kind of a dead giveaway that they are not long for this, this Moabite soil. Um, they are about to rejoin it. Uh, but I don't know that this has much to do with the message that Zephaniah is offering in these three chapters. Uh, part of the 12 minor prophets. Now, that is not a value judgment.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  It feels like one.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  It does kind of feel like that when, when we call them the lesser prophets, the minor prophets.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Is that just a reference to their shorter books?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yes, they are shorter books. So the, the Book of Isaiah has 66 chapters. Jeremiah's got dozens of chapters. Yes, yes. But then you get to Zephaniah who has three, you get to Haggai. Uh, you get to these shorter ones and.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Can I call them the merciful prophets? The, the, the easy reader prophets, the Reader's Digest prophets?

• 43:15Speaker 03

  But basically you have a scroll just for the minor prophets.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  So, so that, that's the reason there was one title for these 12, is because they fit on a scroll roughly the same size as the single scroll that would have held the Book of Isaiah. So you have the Isaiah scroll, you have the minor prophets scroll.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  So, um, and that, and that collection, the, uh, the inclusion of all these together goes all the way back to antiquity.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Let me get a, a sense of situating this now.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Verse one of the first chapter of Zephaniah says, uh, you know, it, it gives, it gives that history, that familial history going back to Hezekiah. And then it says, "In the days of King Josiah, son of Ammon of Judah." Now, we've talked about Josiah. Um, is this, I, I don't know. I never know how accurate those things are, whether this is, uh, whether this actually happened in the time of Josiah, or if we can't reliably say that. So where are we at with this?

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Um, there are, there are a lot of scholars who would suggest that this probably originates in, uh, something that was, that was offered by one of our itinerant prophets toward the, uh, the end of the 600s BCE, or, or more likely the beginning of the 500s BCE. So probably around the time of Josiah.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  But probably late in the career of Josiah, when the writing was on the wall. And it, we knew this, this kind of thing was coming. Now.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Knew which kind of thing was coming?

• 45:00Speaker 03

  The destruction of, uh, Jerusalem and the temple.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Which is what is being prophesied here. So.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Um, but at the same time, these texts would have been transmitted by schools, groups that were, that were dedicated to these prophets or to particular movements. And in the centuries that followed, they would have been edited. And so we can't say for sure exactly what goes back all the way and what might have been added later. Because if you've got a text from before the Babylonian exile, that is like, hey, guys, I'm gonna exile you, that becomes, you know, that's hot stuff. That's good stuff.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  And then, uh, if, if you have an opportunity to, you know, maybe something happens during, or, you know, the, the end of the exile, maybe you have an opportunity to add something to that, that makes your own generation feel like, oh, we're a part of this too. Like, you know, the, the, I, but I, in the end, I will bring you back. Kind of, um, prophecy of, um, of wheel or the, the good things, promise. Uh, you know, you tack that on there and then that makes the, the prophecy come full circle. You know, yeah, prophesied the, the exile, but also prophesied the return. So, uh, so it's likely that this has been edited in, in later centuries as well.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it, it does feel like if. I don't know. It's fascinating to me because it does start off with literally, I will utter, I will kill everything. And that is, the entire first chapter is just how much the Lord is going to kill everything and everybody. And let me just name a few of the things, but also everything, which feels a little, it feels redundant. You can, you can stop with everything, but then it, but then it like leaves some carve outs for, for some stuff.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  So what are we doing here? Why, why are we saying everybody like I'm, I, the Lord, am going to kill all, I will sweep away humans and animals. I will sweep away birds of the air and fish of the sea. I will make the wicked stumble. I will cut off humanity from the face of the earth, says the Lord. That's pretty extreme.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that goes beyond what actually happened with the, the invasion and the destruction of Jerusalem and all that.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  It would seem, the evidence would seem like, yeah, maybe some of the things survived.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is a bit of an exaggeration, but the point there is to kind of treat your existence in Jerusalem and Judea as kind of a microcosm. And so to say, you know, all of Judea was, was captured, Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was destroyed, a bunch of our people, excuse me, a bunch of our people were exiled from, you know, your perspective where the scope of your awareness doesn't really go much beyond your everyday life and what you can see. That seems like the whole world. The, reminds me of a, of a line, a foreboding line from the, the death

• 48:22Speaker 03

  of Superman narrative arc from back in the early nineties where the cyborg says to Superboy, it's not the end of the world. It's just the end of your world. Right. So the, yeah, this is rhetorical exaggeration, but it is intended to kind of increase the, the impact of, of this warning and this prophecy and say, it's all coming to pieces. It's all burning down. It's, we're getting rid of everything.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  And it does, it does flash on some stuff that we've seen before from, from the Josiah era, where, where we're talking about the, I will cut off from this place every remnant of Baal and the names of the idolatrous priests, those who bow down on the roofs to, to the hosts of the heavens, those who bow down and swear to the Lord, but also swear by Milcom, those who have turned back. So, I mean, again, we're, we're in that place where we're indicating that people are still worshiping both their God and then these other gods are also interspersed among the worship of the people.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and this is kind of your, your stock anti-idolatry, anti-other god rhetoric that we see in a lot of the other prophets. And, and this became kind of the main, this was the, the main accusation that was leveled against the people as a way to account for why the, the Babylonian exile happened. It was, all this bad stuff happened. And then everybody was like, see, I told you, you shouldn't have been baking the cakes for the mother of heaven or the queen of heaven. That's, and then that, because of how rhetorically useful it is, that then becomes the main thing that everybody's gonna hammer on. It was like, yeah, it was, it was definitely

• 50:21Speaker 03

  the praying to the hosts of heaven on the rooftop. Oh yeah, yeah. It was definitely the worship of Baal and Milcom. It was.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  When we say the hosts of heaven, because this comes up a couple of times, the hosts of heaven, and then later the Lord of hosts is a phrase that's used. And I realized I've heard that a bunch of times and never really bothered to understand what the Lord of hosts means. And suddenly it occurred to me like what it could mean. So what is your understanding of what that means?

• 50:49Speaker 03

  So the Hebrew word is sava, and it means host in the sense of army.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  So the, to say the host of heaven is to refer to the army of heaven, which would be the, all the marshaled deities that are the stars and the sun and the moon and the planets and the asteroids and all that kind of stuff. All of the celestial bodies were understood to be in some sense divine and to be identified with certain gods. And so Adonai is Lord of hosts because Adonai is sovereign over the entire host of heaven. And so it's interesting that, and, and there's a whole, you know, pantheon that, that has developed around this

• 51:39Speaker 03

  because if you go to Deuteronomy 419, you have the warning, you know, lest you, when you look up into the heaven, heavens worship the, the sun, the moon, the stars, all the hosts of heaven, which have been given to the nations, but you're not allowed to worship them. So we have to understand God as sovereign over them and they serve a purpose. They are subordinate to God and they serve a purpose, but you're not allowed to worship them if you're a part of the house of Israel. Therefore the other nations to worship. If you worship them, that's super, super bad. And, and also in Deuteronomy, you're not supposed to worship Adonai in the same way

• 52:22Speaker 03

  that the other nations worship their deities, the hosts of heaven. And you can go back further in time and you get Deuteronomy 32, eight and nine, where El Yon, the most high divides up the peoples according to the number of the Benet Elohim, the children of God and Adonai's

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Adonai's portion is his people, Jacob, his inherited allotment or allotted share or whatever. And so in, in that iteration of this tradition, Adonai is not the one who distributed the gods to the nations. It is El Yon, the most high, who distributes the nations to the gods with Adonai getting Israel. So, so you see a few different kind of chronological phases of this idea of the host of heaven. And there's a, there's a book called the reconsidering the concept of revolutionary monotheism. Beata Pongratz Leyston was the editor of that book.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  And she's got a, an essay in the book about the astralization of gods. There's another book called, oh, shoot, the God of Israel. And there's an essay in there about the de-deification of the gods, which has to do with identifying them as stars rather than as, as real gods. But it's a whole complex thing.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  It's a whole thing.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  I don't even remember where we are. We're in the book of Zephaniah. Right.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  We are, we are. And I, I wanted to move on to the great day of the Lord.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 04

  This is verse 14. We're still in chapter one.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  And the great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast. What is the great day of the Lord?

• 54:10Speaker 03

  So this would kind of be eschatology before there was eschatology.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it feels.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Eschatological, yes. And it would even cause some scatology in, in some people's pants, no doubt. But the, the interesting thing here is usually the, the great and dreadful day of the Lord is when God comes to judge God's enemies and defeats all of Israel's enemies. And, and many times when, when it's talked about, it's talked about as a good thing, at least for the righteous. And, and here the, a lot of people are, are getting their come up and seen and outside of Israel.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pretty rough.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements. I will bring such distress upon people that they shall walk like the blind because they have sinned against the Lord. Their blood shall be poured out like dust and their flesh like dung. So there's the scatological part of the, of the prophecy. Yeah. There is silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord's wrath. In the fire of his passion, the whole earth shall be consumed for a full, a terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants

• 55:38Speaker 03

  of the earth. So it seems again, like the author is, is getting out a little ahead of their rhetorical skis. They are like, everybody gets it.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  Everybody.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Everybody?

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Everybody.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Okay, not everybody. And you, the, the book has three different sections. You have the pronouncements of judgment against Jerusalem and Judah. And then you have, once you get into chapter two, you have oracles against the nations. Oh yeah. And also Jerusalem.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  You think you're getting away with this, Moab?

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're just piling the nations on top. And then the last segment, which is the last several verses of chapter three are announcement of, of Jerusalem's restoration. So it's like Jerusalem, you suck. I'm gonna destroy you. You're gonna get it so bad. But ultimately, things will be okay for you in the end. And it is, yeah, it is a very, very stark contrast. It's like, let's take 40 verses to grind you into the dust and then we'll give you 12.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  And then just, and then suddenly it's, and it is kind of a jarring turnaround because it goes from, I'm gonna kill everybody, every, you know, blah, blah, blah. All of these cities, all of these countries, all of these kingdoms are razed to the ground. Sheep will be, you know, your city is gonna be a pasture for sheep now. And then it says, sing aloud, oh daughter Zion, shout, oh Israel. I also realized I didn't know, as I was reading this, it's so funny how many things are so common. I've heard so many times that I don't realize I don't know what they mean. Zion, I don't, I like, I don't really know what that is.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  That ought to be, we ought to do a segment on Zion because it is used in a variety of different ways. But I think here the idea is the.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Is Jerusalem, basically.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it refers to daughter Zion and then daughter Jerusalem. So I wondered if they were the same thing, but.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so maybe this has been edited, you know, maybe, because I can't imagine Zephaniah gets through all of what he gets through. And now he's beet red. He's got sweat coming off the tip of his nose.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  It's been only fire and brimstone.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then he's like,

• 58:14Speaker 03

  but sing aloud.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Like, you know, people are like, hey, we're done listening to you, man. Um, you can't, you can't turn it around on us now. But I do want to point out, it is interesting. We have a lot of, a lot of nations and cities are named in chapter two, all of Israel's enemies. This is just like a, a catalog of who's who in the rogues gallery of the Hebrew Bible.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Um, you have, you're starting with in verse four, and I'm surprised I don't see this passage used more frequently today in defending genocide. For Gaza shall be deserted and Ashkelon shall become a desolation. Ashdod's people shall be driven out at noon and Ekron shall be uprooted. And then we have the Herethites, the Philistines. We have Ashkelon again. The, I have heard the taunts of Moab and the revillings of the Ammonites, how they have taunted my people and made boasts against their territory. Therefore, as they, as the Lord of hosts lives, Moab shall become like Sodom and the

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Ammonites like Gomorrah, a land possessed by nettles and salt pits and a waste forever. And then we go on and against the Kushites, uh, we're going to destroy Assyria, make Nineveh a desolation. Herds shall lie down in it, every wild animal of the earth, the desert owl and the screech owl shall lodge on its capitals. The owl shall hoot at the window, the raven croak on the threshold. Um, lots of owls involved.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  They really, apparently that's a bad sign. If owls have moved in, you, uh, you're really, uh, you're, you're really screwed.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, they didn't really like the owls very much, but, but let's, when we do kind of turn the tables on the audience, there's something interesting here because we've already heard, uh, all of the inhabitants of the earth are gonna, uh, die.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Right. And by inhabitants of the earth, we mean that small little part of the earth that was just listed here.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  And we've, we've rattled off the names of all of Israel's enemies and Judah's gonna get it too, and Jerusalem. But then it says, at that time, I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  That, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord. So the idea is all the nations are going to be converted to, uh, following the God of Israel. But didn't we just kill them all? And, um, so it, you know, it's, it's very rhetorical, but this is kind of what we get in Deuteronomy, Isaiah as well. Uh, you know, all the nations will, will come to the house of the Lord, go up to the mountain of the Lord and all this kind of stuff. For from beyond the rivers of Kush, my suppliants, my scattered ones shall bring my offering. Um, and on that day you shall not be put to shame because of all the deeds by which you have rebelled against me.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  So it's like death, death, death, death. You shall not be put to shame for all of the things that you did bad that I early said.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  It's death, death, death, death. Oh, you little scamps. I can't stay mad at you.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  And then, uh, they shall take refuge in the name of the Lord. Here may be Zephaniah, the Lord protects, the Lord hides. The remnant of Israel, they shall do no wrong and utter no lies, nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths. Then they will pasture and lie down and no one shall make them afraid. And then we get sing aloud, oh, daughter of Zion, shout, oh, Israel rejoice and exalt with all your heart, oh, daughter Jerusalem, the Lord has taken away the judgments against you. Now, this is where, you know, we should be like, because of Jesus. That's why, that's why God changes their mind. Obviously Jesus is nowhere in here. It is God's long suffering and mercy that results in ultimately their wrath being.

• 1:02:13Speaker 04

  Well, and that was one of my questions was, is there a, is there any kind of messianic concept, uh, at this time had there, because was, was there an idea of a single Messiah who would come? Cause it doesn't seem to be present in this at all.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  No, there's no individual who's going to facilitate this. No, no person represents the, the, the grand pivot towards, um, and there's no, no event either. It's just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, good, good, good, good.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Now that you're all killed, you've learned your lesson and I'll, and I'll be nice to you again.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  But, but this is kind of the pattern in so many of the, the prophets, the, the major and the minor prophets is, uh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then we're gonna, we're gonna close it off with a little wheel. So it's going to be good in the end, but most of it is, uh, just really haranguing the people. And, and this is what makes me wonder if it's not a, an editorial, um, artifact, if it's not, the prophets, probably the whole time, we're just out there wagging their finger at everybody saying God's gonna, uh, really tear us a new one for, uh, all of these things that you're doing. And then a couple of generations down the road, when they have all suffered and they

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  are in exile, or maybe coming out of exile, or, or at least hoping they'll come out of exile. Maybe they're like, can we put a part at the end about things getting better?

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  Um, because the, you know, the, the criticism sandwich of, of say, say something positive, give your constructive criticism, say something positive. You know, you don't get the first part of it. You don't get the bottom piece of bread on this sandwich. This is an open face sandwich.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  It's an open face sandwich for sure.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, um, that, it doesn't really make sense to me as the whole warning where he's like, ah, but God will love you in the end. Cause then what's the, what's the ultimate message? Everybody's like, oh, so we're good? We're good.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  We just gotta wait it out. We're good. Okay.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know. I, I'm, I'm a little mystified that nobody noticed that this, you know, this text was transmitted throughout, throughout time and nobody noticed that like, yeah, there was an exile, that was pretty bad. But the promised destruction to all of these different kingdoms and all of this stuff, like none of that, none of that happened. What, um, why are we still, why are we still like transmitting a text that doesn't, that, that failed in its prophecy? You know what I mean?

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  Well, and, and maybe that has to do with the rhetorical excesses. But at the same time, um, I think if this is written, when, when this was written, a lot of those nations were already gone. Hmm. The Moabites and the Ammonites, I mean, they, they're so, they were probably around to some degree, but the nations certainly were not there anymore.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  I mean, the Edomites, they become Idemia. Uh, so they're, they're, they stick around for a while and, but they're not mentioned in here. And so some of the, at least some of these groups had become either, you know, they were dwindling away to nothing, or they had already been conquered by Assyria or by Babylon or something like that. So there, there might be a degree to which you're supposed to hear those names and be like, yeah, check, check, they're gone.

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  So this is an explanation to what happened to them.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Um, it could be, I mean, that's, that's one way to look at it, but at the same time that, you know, we're not, the, the prophecy isn't coming down to us from 1,000 BCE. The prophecy is, is openly a prophecy from this late time period when we already know those, those folks.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'm saying it's an etiology for why they're gone or whatever.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it could be, it could be. Um, but yeah, there, there are a lot of prophecies like that where, uh, you know, what is the tire is supposed to be scraped off the earth and, and never re inhabited? And it's like, well, that never happened. So, um, and people, well, you know, their, their power was mitigated for a time. It's like, well, that, that's not what the prophecy says.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's a, it's just an interesting thing. Uh, I, you know, it's fun to hear this sort of apocalyptic language and know that it's like, because nobody's taking the Zephaniah and saying it's about now. You know what I mean? The way they do with, uh, with, with revelation where they're saying, oh, it's about.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Ezekiel and yeah.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it's fun to see something where it does feel so clearly rooted in its own moment. Uh, and, and just, uh, use that as a sort of comparison text to the, uh, the, the prophets that.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause it's, it's doing the same thing.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Or whatever.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's doing the same thing that all those other folks are doing.

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  It, it's just not scattered with, uh, kind of vague prophecies that we can exploit and appropriate and, and pretend are, are about today. Uh, it, there's just not a lot of low hanging fruit in Zephaniah for, for anybody to, to be using. I'm sure there are folks who have used this for that.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  Although I did see an owl once. And so now I'm wondering if that's a reference, if that, if, if, if I've, if it's happening.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I saw, I was on a, a drive. Uh, somebody would, would say this was a, um, an ominous sign. I was, when I was driving home from Crested Butte from Colorado, I was driving next to a, a river. And at one point the road turns right to go over the river and there was a barrier along the side of the bridge. And right on the end, I could see something large poking up, um, on the top of the, the post where the barrier began. And I was like, is that a bird? I think that's a bird. That's a big bird. And as I got closer, I was like, definitely a bird. And right as I was rounding the corner, passing this post, uh, a great horned owl just turned its head all the way around and stared right at me.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  And, uh, like first one I'd ever seen in the wild.

• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  I, I was like, that is awesome. That is probably, uh, as the ancient Mesopotamian omen list said, uh, unfavorable.

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it probably indicated the desolation of Nineveh is what I would say.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, it was, it was lodging on a fence post and not in the capitals. So it was not quite as severe. But, um, yeah, it did. I did have a little bit of stress making it to the next charging station in time. So I was down to like 5%. So maybe great horned owl on a fence post means you better get to that charging station quick.

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  You better hope that, uh, that, that your EV lasts.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Turn the air down a little bit, get a couple more miles out of that charge.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. All right. Well, friends, that's it for Zephaniah. Thanks so much for joining us. Uh, if you would like to, uh, if, if you enjoyed this, share it with somebody. We always appreciate that. You can also give us five stars on wherever you, uh, you might find five stars to give.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Certainly Yelp has that option.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  Are we on Yelp? I don't know if we're on Yelp. If you're on Apple Podcasts or, or Spotify or something, you might be able to find some stars to give us. Uh, or you can like, comment and subscribe on YouTube if that's where you're at. If you want to support the show, you can always head over to patreon.com slash data over dogma. Sign up there, get the bonus content every week if you can, get the, get the early ad free versions of every episode. That's always great. Thanks so much to Roger Gaddy for editing the show. Thanks to Sam, the right hand man for all of his work. And we'll talk to you again next time.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  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.