Old Testament God Bad, New Testament God Good?

Open an English Bible and you'll mostly see "God" and "Lord," but underneath is a whole divine vocabulary: El, Eloah, Elohim, the tetragrammaton, and a few choice insults, including gillulim, which likely comes from a word for dung (shit gods, basically). First, we sort out which plural belongs to which singular (spoiler: Elohim isn't the plural of El), why Deuteronomy uses Elohim more than any other book, and how the Shema's "your God" quietly assumes other gods are out there. Then we take issue with the old line that the Old Testament God is wrathful and the New Testament God is all love—where it came from (hello, Marcion), why its roots are antisemitic, and why it falls apart once you notice where eternal torment actually shows up. 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

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  Lamentably, no.

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• 3:08Speaker 01

  The authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible didn't want to use the word God. So they replaced Elohim with some kind of pejorative. Now Gilunim is the fun one because it probably comes from a word that means feces. And so you're approximating the word God, but really what you're calling these things are shit gods.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  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. Because what a fool believes is, I don't have anywhere to go with that, but.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  We were just singing, we were just singing that song.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  We were harmonizing.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  We got Michael McDonald ringing in our ears and, and you know, sometimes that just happens. There's not much you can do about that.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  The musicals are right on that. Every now and then you just break into song. And the dance routines are not as well choreographed in real life as in La La Land, but you know, what can you do?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  You do what you can. I've been known to do a dance routine in, on, both on stage and in my life. So there you go.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Very famous jig that Bruce Willis danced at the end of The Last Boy Scout, that everybody hearing this show definitely recalls. So.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Even I don't know that one. All right. Yeah. So today we are going to do a show. Did we even say our names? I'm Dan Beecher, you're Dan McClellan. I don't know.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  We did say that. Yes, we did get that far.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Okay. I wasn't sure how early we interrupted our standard.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Our brains are putting right now.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  We did just get back from a fun, but tiring thing, trip to Los Angeles, where we rubbed shoulders with Famous Falcon, whatever. Anywho, today we're going to be doing a couple of cool things. We're going to be talking about, first, we're going to do a watch your language. And the language we're going to be watching is the language of deity in the Bible. How it's referred to, what it all means. And then in keeping with the theme of deity in the Bible,

• 5:45Speaker 00

  we're going to do a taking issue and what we're taking issue with is, is it cool? Is it okay to, to say that New Testament Bible, New Testament God is better than Old Testament God or vice versa? Is there, is that, is that a valid, valuable thing to say? Or is it maybe antisemitic? All right. So we will be covering that later in the program. But let's dive in with watch your language.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  All right. So here we are with the Bible. It's interesting because as I read the Bible in English, in English translations.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  I tend to see like two words, God and Lord, maybe. It doesn't seem like there's that many ways of referring to deity in the Bible. But you and I have done this show long enough that I know there's way more than that. It just gets sort of compressed into Lord, God, God of hosts sometimes, or whatever. Like it, but, but I think that there's a lot more to it. So, so walk me in, where, where, help me out with, with the words for gods.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  God and gods.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  God. And in the New Testament, the Greek is pretty easy. We can talk a little bit about the Greek later on, but I think the Hebrew is much more fascinating because we've actually got three different words that can be translated and really should be translated. God, G O D, just like that. And all three of them could be used to refer to the God of Israel. So like in an appellative, this is the God, capital G God. Or they could also be used to refer to lowercase g God, any old run of the mill God. So the, the, one of my famous mean tweets is when they had Larry King on and he read a tweet that said,

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I thought, I think I saw Larry King at dinner yesterday, or it could have just been a run of the mill goblin. But anyway, we've got three different words. The most basic term for God in Hebrew is just L. This is spelled Aleth Lamed. You may hear people translate it or pronounce it ale, so a little bit of a longer E. But L is also a, a common way to pronounce it.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Can I say Al? I'd like to say Al.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Well, only if you, you've got to put the P on the end, which is pronounced as an F, because then it becomes an acronym for alien life form. But, and that's the one that eats cats.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Little known fact, but that's why you don't have any reference to cats in the Hebrew Bible. But they were all over Egypt. Why? No God. No God. Yep. So, and.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Wow, that is, that is some Gen X deep cutting right there slash early millennial nonsense.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  You can't have been born after 85 to really have firsthand knowledge of what's going on there. But so L is the generic word for God. If you just want to refer to any old God, use L, but it's also the name of the patriarchal high deity over the Northwest Semitic pantheon. And so L is, can be a personal name, or it can mean, it could just mean God. And then the plural of that is Aleem. That's just your standard Yodmem masculine plural ending on that. And so on L. So Aleem is something that occurs a number of times in the Hebrew Bible, dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible, but is just a plural reference to, to gods.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Then you have a different singular, Eloah, which is usually Aleph, Lamed, Vav, and then a He. And this is a peculiar singular. I think it occurs maybe 30 to 40 times in, in the entire Hebrew Bible. It's not very common. What do we got? 58 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, with approximately eight occurrences referring to gods other than the God of Israel.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  And Elohim actually comes from Eloah. So the most common singular is based on the most rare, or the most common plural, excuse me, is based on the most rare singular.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  So Elohim is technically not the plural of L.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  It's the plural of Eloah.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  And Aleem is the plural of L.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. This is too confusing, Dan.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  It gets, it gets complicated.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Oh, thank goodness. Yeah, yeah. I thought you were gonna say it gets worse.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Well, it does get worse when it comes to Elohim, because Elohim can mean either God or gods. It can be singular or plural. And grammatically, the term is plural. And I, and I think we've discussed before, Joel Burnett's book, A Reassessment of Biblical Elohim, is probably, in my opinion, the best discussion of what's going on there. It's a concretized, abstract plural, which is a fancy way of saying, just think of it as a plural or a singular, depending on the verbs, the pronouns, the adjectives that are associated with it. If they're plural, you're looking at a plural use of Elohim. If they're singular, you're looking at a singular use of Elohim.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  And usually, a context will, will help you through. You know, when we say the word deer, that can mean multiple deer or a single deer. And we just take it out of, take it from context. Is, are there some contexts in which it is unclear whether Elohim is singular or, or plural?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  There, there are some, well, there, yeah, there, there are a couple of rare contexts, but it's, it's kind of odd that you wouldn't be able to tell based on the person speaking, whether they're referring to plural or singular. I think what's most common, though, is you get a plural Elohim and a plural verb, but it's like, it really seems like this should be singular.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  So, so there are examples of that. And a good example of that would be like the, the necromancer of, of Aindor. You are, you are familiar with, with that story.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Love that story. She's, she's like, she's my girl.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's, she's awesome. First Samuel 28. Let me pull up First Samuel 28, the, the beginning of it, because there's a part where, when he shows up and she's like, all right, well, let me, let me get into my groove here. And then it says that she, she kind of freaks out. And, uh, cause he, he's like, uh, give me Samuel. And, uh, she freaks out and she says, why have you deceived me? You're Saul. And he says, whoa, whoa, what did you see? What did you see? And she says, I see Elohim coming up out of the ground. Only the, the coming up out of the ground should be a participle

• 13:12Speaker 01

  that is in the plural. Elohim, right, T, Aleem, yes. So that's, that's the plural participle for rising up. And Saul's question is, what does he look like?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Oh, I get it. So she basically said, I see gods rising up out of this, out of the ground. And he's like, what does he look like?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  So the plural participle, it's like, okay, is the plural participle just kind of harmonizing with the grammatical plural ending of Elohim? Like, that's, that's something that can happen in some prose and poetry. Where it's like, we want the, we want the rhyme. We want the, the symmetry. So when we got an em on the noun, we're gonna do an em on the, on the participle or something like that. So, so that's, uh, that's an instance where it's kind of like, meh, we shouldn't have anything.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Or was Saul non-binary and went with a they/them thing?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  You, you do not have any of that going on, um, in, in the Hebrew Bible, and certainly not with Paul, or Saul, excuse me. Uh, but there's another example that's interesting in Genesis 20, verse 13, because, um, Abraham is talking to Abimelech. And this is, you'll recall the, the story where he says, well, this is my sister. And Abimelech's like, I like the cut of her jib.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Um, let me get some of that jib. And goes to marry her. God visits Abimelech in the dream and everything. And Abraham, in verse 13, and says, "When God caused me to wander from my father's house, I said to her, this is the kindness. You must do me at every place to which we come. Say of me, he is my brother." Only the verb there, it's not a participle. It's an actual verb. Let me just verify that. Yes, it's a, it's a hiphill. And it, uh, and it came to pass when, "He tu o t Elohim," when the gods or gods, they caused me to wander. And so here, though, it's like, okay, maybe that's singular. Maybe it's not.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Maybe Abraham was talking about, uh, ye old gods. Or, as we discussed the other day, the old gods, because we know what a thorn is. Um, so that's an interesting instance where, you know, it's, it's debatable what exactly is going on there. Now, a lot of people are like, how dare you say that Abraham was not a monotheist? Uh, but I, I think there, there are good reasons to think that Abraham was happy to refer to the gods.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  So in the Dan McClellan translation, what do you think you do there? Because obviously, the, the traditional translation is just going to say, God is just going to make that easy on the reader.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  What, what, what is, what is a scholarly translation translator do?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Wait a minute. You didn't say a scholarly translator. You said the Dan McClellan.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Well, okay, that's right. The, the, the DMT.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the DMV.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  DMV, okay.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Cause it's taking forever. Um, it is, I would, I would, I would render what we find in the text. The gods, when the gods caused me to wander. And I have a note there.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  There'd be a footnote saying, hey.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Other people, other people write it this way.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And because I, I, I think, you know, we've got to deal with what, what is there in the text unless we have a really, really good reason not to. And as you know, in my opinion, monotheism is not a really good reason not to in the Bible. So, so I, I, I think there, there are some fuzzy areas where it's not clear exactly what's going on here. But here's a, here's an interesting thing about the word Elohim. I counted up, I didn't like by hand count up. I used a program to do it all, but the book, can you guess what book of the Hebrew Bible has the most occurrences of the word Elohim?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Genesis.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Deuteronomy.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Genesis is third.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Deuteronomy is number one. Psalms is number two.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  That's interesting that it's the deut.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Why, why is it the deut?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  One of the reasons is because Deuteronomy is just hammering home that Adonai is your God. This is your God. Those are other gods. This is your God. Do you recall that this is your God? There are many like it, but this one is yours.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  And so 374 occurrences of Elohim in Deuteronomy, 365 in Psalms, 219 in Genesis. So third place is a pretty big drop off. And then, uh, fourth place with 204 occurrences is first and second. Nope. Oh, I skipped over First and Second Chronicles. Okay, Genesis is fourth place. Uh, First and Second Chronicles, 321. That's neither here nor there. But I think it's pretty interesting that.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  When Deuteronomy is doing it, are they use, is, is the Deuteronomy, is the author using Elohim in the plural? Most of the time in the singular?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  It's in the singular most of the time, but, uh, there are definitely occurrences of Elohim in the plural in Deuteronomy. But the interesting thing about the use of Elohim in Deuteronomy, and particularly with like the, the Shema, which is Deuteronomy 6, 4. Uh, Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad, which I think should, ought to be translated, here, oh, Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one, or Adonai is one. But this is taken as, as kind of the quintessential expression of monotheism. But nothing about it is monotheistic. And, and even the first part of the clause throws into doubt monotheism, because what is,

• 19:10Speaker 01

  your God is the generic use of Elohim with a possessive suffix, which means it's not an absolute use of Elohim. It is identifying the one among the many that pertains to you.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And so right there.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Your God as opposed to their God.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Right. So right there, it's not just saying, hey, the God, which one? What do you mean, which one? There's only one. It's saying, the one that pertains to you. And which is a tacit acknowledgement that not only are there other gods out there, but we recognize that there are gods that pertain to many others. And we're talking about the one that pertains to you. And, and you can go to Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9 with, uh, with El Yon, the Most High, distributing the nations to, uh, according to the number of the Ben Elohim, the children of God, with Adonai getting his portion, his share of the inheritance, being Jacob, being his people, being Israel. You go to, uh, Deuteronomy 4, 19,

• 20:13Speaker 01

  where the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole host of heaven, they are distributed to the nations for them to worship. But you, you're supposed to just worship Adonai, the God of Israel. So there's, in Deuteronomy, the overwhelming, uh, majority of the occurrences of Elohim are not in the appellative sense. They're not in the sense of capital G God. And so you brought up the, the DMV. In the DMV, most of the time that you see the word God in Deuteronomy, it's gonna be a lowercase g. Even when it says, Adonai, your God.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  It's gonna be Adonai, your lowercase g God.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Right, right. Differentiating, this, this is your God, that's their God.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  That it's, in that case, it's a title. It's not the name.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's a, they're a member of a class.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  And, uh, and you don't get a capital G just by virtue of being a member of, of the class.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Well, that brings up an interesting point.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Yes, it does.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Is there a point to using a capital G if you allow the tetragrammaton?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  I think there is a point at which it's probably, I don't know if it's in the priestly literature, it might be a little after that, but there is a point where the title begins to take on the sense of a name.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Even in the Hebrew?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  In the Hebrew Bible, yeah. In fact, in my, in my second master's thesis, which I wrote at Trinity, Twinity Western, Trinity Western University, I addressed the idea that it goes from being kind of a generic class to, you would see Ha Elohim, the God, with the definite article on the front, as a way to kind of identify a specific God that is understood to be the, the main God. And then the, the definite article drops off, but the usage still seems to be understanding Elohim to be referring to the main God. So, and, and you see that, go ahead.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  But if I were to write the words, "the main God," your main God, a main God, I would still not capitalize that, right?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Right. But would you capitalize "the president"?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Would I? Is that, do we do that?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Now I gotta consult my style manual. I don't know. I guess, maybe, I guess you do.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but if, if it's like, your president, our president, their president, the president.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  So I, I think there's, it's interesting. It's a discussion that a lot of people don't want to have and don't like having, but I, but I think it needs to be had. And a lot of people want to read the Trinity into Elohim. They're like, oh, it's plurality and unity all in one. It's, yeah, and it has nothing to do with the Trinity.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Just, it's, there's no case to make that the Trinity has anything to do with, with the plural use of Elohim.

• 23:21Speaker 01

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

• 23:27Speaker 00

  I've heard the construction.

• 23:29Speaker 01

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

• 24:14Speaker 01

  in 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.

• 24:37Speaker 00

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• 25:19Speaker 00

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• 27:08Speaker 00

  Well, since I brought it up, should we get to the Tetragrammaton?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's get to the Tetragrammaton. The, the four letters, Yodeh Vavhey, this is the personal name of God, which, by the way, probably wasn't the earliest patron deity of Israel.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Because Israel, the name, means "L contends." It's that, it's that personal name of the patriarchal high deity. And so Israel was probably originally dedicated to the Northwest Semitic Patriarchal High Deity, L. And we, we have that name. We have the name Israel in reference to a people group that occupied roughly this territory around 1208 BCE in the Merneptah victory stele. So-

• 27:57Speaker 00

  I, I'm curious about that because Israel, that L is definitely that, that theophoric

• 28:07Speaker 00

  suffix.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Good work.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Thank you. I do learn some things sometimes. But that's also in Daniel, like our name, but also the name of the guy who he was writing much later.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  And presumably the Tetragrammaton has come into, into usage by the time Daniel comes around.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yes. So what we're dealing with here is a question of conflation, because we get, Adonai seems to show up somewhere before the middle of the 9th century BCE, because by the 9th century BCE, we have the Mesha inscription talking about Adonai. We have the Teldan stele talking about Jehoram and Ahaziah, which have the theophoric elements, the Tetragrammaton in their names. And we have Jehu in the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, which was my band in high school. But, so by that time period, Adonai has shown up and is now the patron deity of Israel. And the, the theory that I think makes the

• 29:11Speaker 01

  most sense, and seems to me to be the most popular, is that L and Adonai were originally distinct deities. L was the original patron deity of Israel. Adonai is a Johnny come lately. Adonai gets brought into Israel, probably by some nomadic tribe coming from deeper in the east and in the south in the Arabian Peninsula. And they bring their ancestral, in my opinion, deity with them, whose name is or becomes Adonai. And they insert Adonai into the Israelite pantheon on the second tier as the storm deity, which brings Adonai into conflict with Baal, who is the Northwest Semitic storm deity. And so there's conflict

• 29:53Speaker 01

  with Baal, but there is, later on, and probably because a king who was a devotee of Adonai, or a king who recognized the value of the deity Adonai, acceded to the throne or said, we're bringing Adonai with us, and asserted the identity of Adonai and L. Basically said, as the great poets once said, "when two become one."

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Be a little, I'm gonna screw up something. That's an Old Spice Girls song. Again, but anyway, um, and El and Adonai became one and the same God. And you actually see this, you see some of the vestiges of the attempt to assert the equation of the two deities in some of the names and in some of the textual transmission of the Hebrew Bible. Like the name Joel, um, our good buddy Joel McHale is named after Adonai is El. Not Adonai is God. Yeah. Not Adonai is God. When, when the, the term L appears at the end of a name, and particularly when there's another theophoric element in there, that is using L as the divine name.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  So what I, I, I, there's a point of confusion here that I think I need to sort of separate out for our listeners because, uh, the, so the tetragrammaton, Yodeh Vavhey. We, we resist saying that name because, uh, because it, it's diff, you know, it's, it's sacred to certain people and we don't want to, uh, we want to be respectful of that. But I do have to say, other people pronounce it differently. So the Jehovah's Witnesses, they pronounce it Jehovah.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  And I, you know, I had, I had heard from scholars like you that, uh, that that's the, you know, that I know why they make the switch with the, uh, with the vowels. Yeah. Cause there's a, there's an Adonai switch thing happening where they inserted Adonai vowels. The, uh, right?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Okay. But the J sound.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  I, you're telling me that the theophoric element that is, uh, that is to do with the tetragrammaton has the J sound. Joel, Jehoram, the J, J, right? Am I wrong?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  As, as we pronounce it, because we're pronouncing it as it has gone through transliteration into Greek, into Latin and into English. And in the 1600s, we formalized the, uh, the letter J. And even before the letter J came into being, we had already gone through some, some jismo where the, the, the I or Y vowel, when it's used as a consonant at the beginning of the word, began to harden a little bit. Uh, so it was already, uh, pronounced closer to Jehovah before the J existed.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Okay. So, so what was, what you're saying is that Brother McHale should be properly pronounced Yoel or something like that?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  If, uh, yes. In, in Hebrew, it'd be Yoel. It would be, um, Yehu. It would be Yahoshua, not Joshua. So, so yeah, in Hebrew, that's a, uh, that's a Y sound.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Okay. Sorry. Just, I just had to go off on that. And, and also, uh, just to make sure that everybody, like new, new people won't know that when you say Adonai, you're often using that as a, as a.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Substitution.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Substitution for the tetragrammaton.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  For the divine name. That's something that I decided to do on my social media channels a while ago because of requests that I'd gotten from members of the audience. It's not a difficult affordance for me to offer. So, uh.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  But every now and then we need to step in and make sure and make that clear.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. Uh, and there are, there are other ways to, uh, refer to God or gods, uh, in the Hebrew Bible. We've gone through most of them. El, Elime. Uh, sometimes the mem on the end of Elime is really just an inclitic mem. And that's this, this grammatical category you don't need to worry about. So sometimes Elime itself is being used in the singular. Uh, and yeah, we, I wanted to cover some interesting circumlocutions though.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Where the Hebrew, the authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible didn't want to use the word God, or they wanted to use some kind of pejorative. So they replaced Elohim with some kind of pejorative. And the, the three, the three that I think are interesting are the first one is, uh, shakuts, which means a detestable or disgusting thing.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  And so, uh, in first Kings 11, for instance, you, they're rattling off the names of the patron deities of some of the territories around them. And so they call Milcom the shakuts of the Ammonites and Kemosh, the shakuts of Moab. And, and this is a, a way to say the God of, but they're replacing God with shakuts, which means detestable thing, or the, the, the disgusting one.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  They're like, their garbage God is Kemosh and their garbage person.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you, you get even closer to the sound Elohim with two other words. One of them is Gilulim and the other is, uh, Elilem. Now Gilulim is the fun one because it comes from a word that it probably comes from a word that means feces. And so Gilulim is using, uh, you've got the Lamed sound and you've got the Im sound, but you're switching up some of the other sounds to make it sound like you're approximating the word God, but really what you're calling these things are shit gods.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  When, if you've ever seen Dogma, there's a shit God, a literal God made of shit.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  In the movie Dogma.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  I haven't seen Dogma since the nineties. So alas, I don't remember it well. We need to, I, we need, it's, it's back. It's out somewhere.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  It's back there. Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  We, we need to find that thing.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  It's accessible. But, uh, yeah, when, when they have their run in with, uh, uh, with, oh gosh, why can't I remember her name now? The only name that's coming into my head is Eva Mendes, which just.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Alanis Morissette?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Um, From Dust Till Dawn, Desperado.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, um, oh, we're bad at names. Don't, don't get old.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  But this happened to me at, uh, at the, uh, Ray Wilson's thing where.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  I literally saw her last night on an, on a rerun of, uh, of 30 Rock.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, you, you can tell who is, who has, uh, taken over my, my top spot. Uh, anyway, um, when they find her, they run into her. That's when.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Salma Hayek.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Salma Hayek. Oh my gosh. How could I not think of that name? Um, but that's when they run into the, the shit God. But the other one is Elilem, which is generally translated idols. And so, uh, like there are passages that say, all the gods of the nations are Elilem, are idols. It doesn't actually mean idols. It means worthless things. That's like, when you look at, at how it's used, that's what it seems to be. But there's an argument to make that it's actually riffing on the name of another God. A friend of mine actually published a really interesting article that suggests that Elilem is actually based on the name Enlil, which is, which is a, a Mesopotamian god, one of the main gods of the Mesopotamian

• 37:44Speaker 01

  pantheon. But the noon in Hebrew, when the noon occurs right before another consonant and there's not a vowel in between, the noon tends to assimilate, which means the noon tends to turn into the double of the letter that follows. And this happens in English. The word illegal comes ultimately from in legal. Only the N turns into an L and that's why there are two L's at the beginning of illegal. So Elilem could be Enlil and it could be a way to say that God is a worthless thing. And so now you're all little Enlilites. You're, you're little worthless things. And that became a way to refer to idols, because

• 38:26Speaker 01

  they would have been prominent in Mesopotamia, but we're going to refer to them as these worthless things. So it, it really doesn't mean idol. It means worthless thing, perhaps as a reference to Enlil.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  That is, this is, this is a really fun, uh, conversation and it's so much richer. I, I really want to see that translation of the Bible. I want to see the translation that, that goes with the complicated, uh, setup and just translates it directly. Cause it's so, it feels like such a much more rich environment.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the rhetoric lands a lot more squarely when you can actually see what's going on.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Uh, because when they, when they say the gods of the nations are idols, you're just like, yeah, idols aren't real gods, but that's not at all what they're saying. Like, they're not calling them idols. They're calling them worthless. They know they exist. They're not saying there are no other gods. They're saying those gods, oh yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  They're just, they're just being dismissive about them.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Even though they, they, they acknowledge the existence of them.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like me and the Raiders.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  It's trash talk.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  I acknowledge their existence, but I don't acknowledge their significance.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  They still play football, but yeah, come on.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Come on. Kinda. Um, although I think we just lost against the Chiefs, uh, recently. So, so I'm going to keep my mouth, my pretty mouth shut when it comes to that. But, uh, we could, we could go on for a long, long time. We didn't talk about the Shaddim.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  We, we, okay.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  We didn't talk about some other things. So.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  And Theos and Kyrios are just gonna have to wait.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah. We'll have to do a, a new test. We'll have to do the, the God redux.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Come back and revisit this, because there's more to talk about.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  El Shaddai? We don't, we didn't get to any.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  El Shaddai, El Alam, El Roy, El, El Yon. There, there are lots of.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  We did, you did say El, you said Eleon, but we didn't actually get to it.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  There's so much. There's so much. Yeah. All right. Well, uh, that's a lot of fun. Uh, and I think it's time now then to move on to talking about the God of the Hebrew Bible versus the God of the New Testament. It's take an issue.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  All right. So here we are. We got, we got a, we got a Hebrew Bible. We got a new thing. And I have heard many people talk about, and here's the thing. What I know of the Bible, and I have not read the thing cover to cover. We know this, I admit this. But when I read things from the Hebrew Bible, God can be kind of a jerk. He is, he can be awful and he can also be great. Or he can just be great to some people and awful to others. And when I look at Jesus, at very least, in the, in the New Testament,

• 41:36Speaker 00

  he seems a lot more love focused. So what I hear, what you hear a lot is God of the Bible, mean and bad, or God of the Hebrew Bible, mean and bad, God of the New Testament,

• 41:51Speaker 00

  sweetness and love and sugar and spice and everything nice. So, and then you hear somebody go anti Semite. And that is a tricky thing.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  So let's, let's dive into, you know, last segment, we talked about all the different ways that God was not only referred to, but the, but how God was part of a pantheon and God was

• 42:18Speaker 00

  not just one God, but there are many gods. And so, so walk, walk me into this. Let's, let's, let's get chest deep into, into Old Testament, New Testament. What do we got?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think of a cartoon that I saw a while ago, whenever I think about this. This was something years ago, it was a couple of kids. It was Christmas and they're peeking around a corner and they see Santa who looks very angry and is holding an axe. And it says, oh, it's Old Testament Santa. And, and

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Undeniably a cute little, little comic.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I saw, I saw a number of comments from, from friends and colleagues who were excoriating the, the antisemitism that lurked beneath the, the hood of this joke. And the problem is there's a, there's this notion that God is evil in the Old Testament and God is merciful and good in the New Testament. And this is not a modern thing. In fact, it goes back to the very earliest generations of Christianity and even before we had a New Testament, because Marcion is probably the first person to try to draw this distinction. We've talked a little about Marcion. We need to have a Marcion specialist on to help us fill in

• 43:44Speaker 01

  some of the gaps, but, but this is probably an early adopter of some brand of what would later be called Gnosticism. But, but a big part of this was imposing a specific kind of middle platonic cosmology on the Bible, or incorporating the Bible into this middle platonic cosmological framework. And what this gives us is the Creator God as a kind of JV squad wicked God, who creates using, using flesh and, and material to imprison or capture divine,

• 44:25Speaker 01

  the spirits of, of the divine, of the Pleroma in these fleshly prisons. And now there's, I don't know the degree to which Marcion gets into all of that, but Marcion

• 44:40Speaker 01

  dismisses the God of the Hebrew Bible as a wicked God, a secondary God, and talks about the God of his version of the New Testament as the supreme God, the good God. And so Marcion's, Marcion's New Testament is really just a version of the Gospel of Luke that fiddles with some things here or there, or might've been the original version prior to someone else fiddling with things in response to Marcion.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Some got fiddled.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then 10 of the letters of Paul. So Marcion rejects some of the letters of Paul and nothing else is in his, his version of the New Testament. And with Gnosticism, you have a few different streams of tradition that develop, but there's a very similar take that the, that Adonai is Yaltabout, which is the, the demiurge, which is the Creator God. And this is the evil God who wants to imprison people. And Jesus came to free people from the imprisonment of that God. And what, what this does is it identifies the God worshiped by the Jewish people as evil. It identifies the God of their scriptures as

• 45:52Speaker 01

  a single deity that is evil and distinguishes that God from the superior good God of the New Testament. And this is kind of the root, the historical roots of this dichotomy. And there is, there is some anti Judaism going on there because to say that all Jewish people worship an evil God is anti Semitic. It is to say that they are themselves evil, that they are, you know, and people say the same thing about Islam, suggests that Allah is an evil God, and therefore that evil God's followers

• 46:34Speaker 01

  are all evil. And it's to say, it's, it's kind of a supersessionism that, that Christianity is better than Judaism, that the God of Jesus Christ and Christianity is better than the distinct inferior God of the Hebrew Bible slash Old Testament and the Jewish people.

• 47:00Speaker 04

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• 47:32Speaker 00

  Just as a, just to put a fly in the ointment, can I not, is it not kind of inherent to Christianity that we are a level up of Judaism? Like it, it feels like there's, that's inherent in the sort of, in the New Testament.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's certainly a case to make that supersessionism is baked into the foundation of Christianity. And there have been a variety of different ways that both Christian and Jewish folks have, have tried to engage with that. But generally, you, there are an awful lot of Christians who are trying to do what they can to shed the, the most supersessionist and most problematic features of, of that approach. But yeah, it is, it is something that is, that is kind of a fly in the ointment.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  And in fairness, I don't think, like, they didn't invent supersessionism all throughout the Hebrew Bible is our God is better than their God. We are the chosen people. We're better. Like, it seems like that's just continuing a tradition at that point of, of like, we, we're just better. Our group is always good. Their group, other groups are either less good or just pure evil or something along those lines.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  I, and, and I think what I would say in response to that, which is, which is definitely accurate, is that there are systemic power asymmetries that are involved. And there is a history of oppression and persecution. And there's also an ethnic dimension that, that is, that overwhelmingly attends that supersessionism and that attend, that, that othering. But, but also fundamentally, it's taking the, the origins of Christianity, the, the mother of Christianity to, to put it a certain way, and rejecting that as

• 49:38Speaker 01

  a, an unworthy husk of what it should have been. And, and so I think there is, yeah, again, it is kind of baked into the, the foundations of Christianity. But it is obviously, it's something that we need to be aware of and careful of, particularly in light of the way that Jewish people have historically been treated.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  And that's what's, that, again, you know, we talk about how muddied a lot of these waters are. The, I think that people who refuse to acknowledge, like, part of this conversation has to be that acknowledgement that this, that, that the historic power asymmetries can, cannot mean, or inherently mean that this cannot be a pure conversation where it's just, well, I'm just looking at these facts and saying this thing. Like, you can't, you don't get to ignore. You know, 2,000 years or more of ugly history.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  And only talk about facts and figures and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  And that brings up another issue is that this this clean dichotomy of Old Testament, bad, New Testament, good is fundamentally inaccurate.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  It is misrepresenting the data. And I want to make the point that when you misrepresent the data, what you're doing is you're retreating to the historical oppression and that becomes the foundation. Because you're not, the foundation is not the data. The foundation is now, well, this is the way that their oppression has been rationalized. And so let's just use that rationalization. The the foundation of it all becomes Jewish people bad.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  So it is not accurate because if you, there are occurrences of merciful, kind, gracious God rhetoric in the Hebrew Bible, and there are also occurrences of punitive, hateful, kill you and torture you for all of eternity God in the New Testament.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  And if you have to try to identify a tipping point where one outnumbers the other and then the other eclipses the one, it's not at the scene between the Old and the New Testament. It's actually in the Old Testament.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Because we get this trend, we get this kind of movement with, within Judaism. And it starts in post-exilic Judaism into the Persian and Greco-Roman period. And Christianity is really just kind of a crystallization of a specific movement of Judaism. And all that Jesus is doing is repeating a lot of stuff that is found, if not in the Hebrew Bible, in other contemporaneous Jewish literature. Like, there've been, there've been a lot of scholars who have tracked down, and you know, if you pick up, I highly recommend picking up the Jewish Annotated New Testament. The third edition was just released a couple of months ago.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  And it's edited by Amy Jill Levine and Mark Zbretler. And it talks an awful lot about this, gives the Jewish background to a lot of what's going on. There's not really much, if anything, that Jesus says that cannot be traced back to some Jewish tradition at some point.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  That makes sense.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so the the good God of the New Testament is really building on a foundation of Greco-Roman period Judaism.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Right. Because, I mean, one of the things that we, that we saw last week, or last episode,

• 53:29Speaker 00

  last segment is what I'm trying to say.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  And that we've seen and discussed many times on this show is that this idea, the idea of God and who is our God and who God is evolves over time. It keeps changing. And so, yeah, it makes total sense to me that Jesus's version of God is maybe, you know, it may have been a controversial version of God at the time, but, but one that people are talking about.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This is, and that's, and that's how it gains purchase.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Like, this is something a lot of people don't, don't like thinking about when it comes to new ideas. There are no totally new ideas. The way that ideas get picked up and get shared is that they resonate with others. And that usually means there have to be points of contact. There have to be things that are already in the air. These, this is not, these are not revolutions so much as just incremental elaborations on existing traditions.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Little by little, we're, and you know, you have this thing called punctuated equilibria, where you have, you know, evolution is kind of steady, steady, and then boom, you have huge changes and then go steady and steady and steady and boom, and you have huge changes. And that happens as well. But for the most part, those huge changes are also not just complete whitewashes and breaks from what came before. It's usually rearranging the things that already exist or, you know, incrementally elaborating on things, just in larger increments and much more quickly. So I think the, the, the main point to make is that the shift happens before you get the New Testament. It happens when you still have the Hebrew Bible.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And, and there's also a shift between the God's people as an ethnic designation and God's people as more of a cultural ideological designation. And this gets real fuzzy. But there's a point in following the exile where God's love is kind of extended to all and all are invited in. And some people will identify the New Testament as a break from the, the earlier notion that God's people is just this ethnic group. But there is, you see it even in Deuteronomy Isaiah, which is maybe late 6th, early 5th

• 56:01Speaker 01

  century BCE, and in other literature where God's people as a designation is kind of expanding and is kind of expansive. Now, you also see that alongside some ethnocentrism in Ezra, Nehemiah, for instance, and other places.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Well, and, and of course you do, like, you know, we look, you look at right now, and there is a constant tension between, you know, one group of people who want to move forward in a way, you know, you just look at liberalism versus conservatism or whatever. It's not like all, it's not like societies all just go, oh, our new idea is X, that's what we all believe now. There's a, there's always push and pull and the, you know, the scale slides slowly in one direction or another.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  But, but both things are believed at the same time, within the same, within the same culture.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  And there's just that tension there.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and so I think there's, it's just, it's just an inaccurate dichotomy. And, and I think that what I want to kind of dwell on the most is that the God of the New Testament is the author of the Book of Revelation, anyway, is fantasizing about the God of the New Testament bathing their sword in blood that runs up to, you know, over their feet.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  And you don't have the idea of eternal conscious torments in the Hebrew Bible. That is something that is exclusive to the New Testament. The notion that God would torture people for all of eternity, that's, that's not a merciful, loving God position. That is a vengeful, wrathful God position. And, and you know, you have the sermon of the sinners in the hands of an angry God kind of thing. That's, that's Christianity saying that. And, and you can go look in the Hebrew Bible at all kinds of different texts, particularly in the prophetic literature, but also places like Ruth and elsewhere, where God is long

• 58:08Speaker 01

  suffering and God is kind and God aids the poor and the widow and the orphan. And when God, there are some parts of the Hebrew Bible where God's most severe punishments are reserved for the people who hurt the foreigner.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  And who, who violate the, the social justice standards set up by the prophetic literature. And granted, there is an awful lot of hypocrisy going on there because they are ethnocentric and sexist and in their own different ways. But when we try to map the goodness versus badness of the representations of God in the Bible, it's all over the place in both corpora.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  It is, it is not one and then another. It is a mix of both in the Hebrew Bible and a mix of both in the New Testament. And, and the, the exact manifestations of that goodness or badness change because times change.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  And because the, the way they conceptualize of God changes. But to reduce it to Old Testament God, bad, New Testament God, good, is phenomenally inaccurate. And again, is really mortgaging everything to the anti-Semitic notion that the gods, that the Jewish people worship an evil God and Christianity had to come in and save it. And that's, that's just deeply anti-Semitic.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  That part, yeah. I, I do want to just flag one thing, which is that I think a lot of well-meaning people who aren't anti-Semitic might read, you know, the Sermon on the Mount and go, oh, that's a really nice God. And might think, and then they might think of like the flood or, you know, like some of the sort of more horrific stories that we all know from the Hebrew Bible and might innocently go, okay, I see good God here and bad God there. And that, that doesn't mean that they are being anti-Semitic in that moment. But it does, but I think that, I think what we're saying is that.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  It's inaccurate. And it's, and so let go of it because it, because that's because that position of good, you know, New Testament, good Hebrew Bible, bad is, has far too much antisemitic history and underpinning. And so, and so like, there's, there's no good reason to hold on to that. It's, it can be arrived at in an innocent way, but it is important to let go of it very quickly.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I think one thing to add is that this does not mean you're not allowed to criticize the God of the Bible. You can still do that. I do that all the time. The difference is, I don't say it's everything in this book. Yeah. And then everything in this book is good. You can point out that in this particular passage or in this book, this is a hateful God. This is a God that does, that endorses enslavement, that endorses sex slavery, that endorses sexual assault, things like that. You can, you can point out that there are problematic ways that God is being represented in particular texts.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  The problem is when you say, they all fit into this box right here, and that's the Old Testament. And they're not in this box over here, which is the New Testament. That's where the good God resides. Cause that's just not true. Cause you can, you can point to, in the book of Revelation, there's, there's a part where God threatens to throw the, the personification of the wicked onto a bed, this female personification of the wicked onto a bed. And the, this usually gets translated sick bed. But I think this is, there's a good case to make that this is dodging the implications of what's actually being stated here.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  That this is actually about sexual assaults.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Sexual violence, at least. And you have similar things going on in parts of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and things like that. So the, the, the representation of God as violent and vengeful is sprinkled all throughout. So what I'm arguing is, don't reduce it all to this binary of Old Testament versus New Testament, because that is phenomenally inaccurate. But by all means, criticize the way the God of the Bible is being represented. It, you can find those things to criticize all across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think that's a, that's a, a great place to end it. Um, I think it just makes sense. It's, it's, and as long as people, people just need to sensitize themselves to the fact that it can, it, it, it's more than just being wrong. You could be wrong in a way that also plays into the hands of people who are hurting other people. And in this case, you know, it, people who want to attack Jewish people, use that as, as one of the fronts of their attack. So, so no, we're just not gonna, we're just gonna not do that.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, most of the Sermon on the Mount is riffing on Hebrew Bible stuff.

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  The meek will inherit the earth. That's quoting the Psalms. Like, it's all, again, I don't know that there's much, if anything at all, that Jesus said that isn't in some way riffing on some kind of existing Jewish tradition. So.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  So if you like the things that Jesus said, then you like the parts of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus liked. And there you go.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  The, and the interpretations that, that the authors of those texts, yes, favored.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

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• 1:05:25Speaker 01

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• 1:05:30Speaker 00

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