The Queen of Heaven?

Just when you think you have biblical theology figured out, they throw you a curveball! In this case, the curve in question is the character explicitly referred to in Jeremiah as the queen of heaven. "Wait!" you might be saying to yourself, "I know heaven has a king, which is God, but what's all this about a queen!" Well, apparently yes. And Jeremiah is none too pleased about it! Then, we're tackling a claim that American Christian nationalists have been making all over the internet lately. Did the "founding fathers" of the United States actually quote the Bible more than any other text? And did they do it expressly to make it clear that this was to be an explicitly Christian country? It's an idea that's gaining a lot of attention, but how true is it, and what are the implications for now? ---- For early access to an ad-free version of every episode of Data Over Dogma, exclusive content, and the opportunity to support our work, please consider becoming a monthly patron at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on the various social media places: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/data_over_dogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have you ordered Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Bible Says So⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ yet??? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from Star.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 1:18Speaker 04

  Make them remember you.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  You just do not see the Bible coming up in the actual formation of the federal government, the US Constitution. It just doesn't happen.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:44Speaker 00

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

• 1:55Speaker 01

  It's a glorious summer, or spring day.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Summer, you are living...

• 1:59Speaker 01

  It's not quite summer, but it's getting warmer, and I do appreciate that.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Yes. It's windy today, but the last couple of days, it's been nicer.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, life is good. We have some crazy stuff to talk about this week. I'm going to enjoy talking about it. First, we're doing a what's that, or maybe it should be a who's that, because we're we're gonna hit the queen of heaven!

• 2:28Speaker 00

  The very same, yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Which, uh, which I, I was surprised by, uh, and, uh, and I think it's, I think it's going to be a really fascinating topic of conversation. And then we're going to take issue. Uh, and the issue we're going to take is with the notion that, uh, that these here United States of America were founded by, uh, and founded as a Christian nation. And, uh, and, and boy, we're, we're, I think the, uh, the, the jumping off point is the claim that was made recently by, uh, most recently by the, uh, the, the America reads the Bible thing that we talked about, uh, a bit ago,

• 3:14Speaker 01

  that the Bible is the most quoted, uh, text from any of the founding fathers.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, uh, so we're gonna, we're gonna dive into that. We're gonna, we're gonna get into it. So that'll be a lot of fun. But first, uh, what's that?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Okay. So the Queen of Heaven, uh, not the Queen of Hearts.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  No.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  But the Queen of Heaven, we, you say it could be used multiple ways.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  What are the, what are the different? Now, the one that you had me look up is the one that, that is mentioned a couple of times in the book of Jeremiah.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  What's the other way? Let's start with the other way and then we'll get to Jeremiah.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Well, the other way is that Mary, the mother of Jesus is, can be referred to, uh, as, uh, the Queen of Heaven. I think that's primarily in, uh, within the Catholic tradition. I don't know if the Orthodox tradition adopts that title as well. I can't imagine they do, but, um, yeah, this is one of the titles that is, uh, that is attributed to Mary based on the notion that Jesus is the King and Mary was, uh, his mother. So she is-

• 4:34Speaker 01

  She should be by rights, the Queen Mother of Heaven.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, and, and Queen Mother is, is a title that is like closely associated with that. Like when people talk about her as the Queen of Heaven, they will explain she's the Queen Mother. So-

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did bump into that when I was looking into this. I also bumped into people being, using that as a bludgeon to beat up Catholics and point out how dumb they are. The Queen of Heaven is bad.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Is condemned in the book of Jeremiah.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And therefore, they should, they should be ashamed of themselves. So let's dive over to Jeremiah.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, let's. So we're gonna start in Jeremiah 7. There are several more references if we go into Jeremiah 44. And we'll, we'll read some of those in a little bit. How many more references? I think three more references just in Jeremiah 40. No, four more references just in Jeremiah 44. But starting in Jeremiah 7, I'm gonna start in verse 16. And, and the people of Judah are getting harangued here.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is this Jeremiah, Jeremiah himself? Is that whose voice is, is doing the haranguing?

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Well, the, the chapter begins, "The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: Stand in the gate of the Lord's house and proclaim there this word."

• 5:58Speaker 01

  So is the Lord's house, are we talking about the temple?

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Yes. Not, not the summer home, not, not the place in the Poconos.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  It can mean different things, but okay. The Lord, so, so Jeremiah has, has posted up at, at the, the, the door of the temple, and he is now hollering in about how bad everybody is.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and in verse 16, he starts, "As for you, do not pray for this people; do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede for me, with me, for I will not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven. And they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger." So this is obviously God speaking through Jeremiah, saying, "Hey, I'm not having this."

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, "Don't, don't ask me for help for them. They're making cakes, those jerks."

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. When they know I prefer muffins. Yes. So

• 7:13Speaker 01

  I am on a diet, you guys.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Rude. And then we get, this is repeated, Jeremiah 44, we have three verses in a row, verses 17, 18, and 19. And here we're, this is talking about Egypt. This is, and these are diaspora folks in Egypt. Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed. Make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food and prospered and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations

• 7:59Speaker 00

  to her, we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine. And the women said, indeed, we will go on making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her. Do you think that we made cakes for her, marked with her image, and poured out libations to her without our husbands being involved? Guys are probably like, don't bring me into this.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Dude, don't throw me into that bus. He's already mad enough already.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  You had to bring me into this. And then down in verse 25, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, you and your wives, because you brought the husband into it, have accomplished in deeds what you declared in words, saying, we are determined to perform the vows that we have made, to make offerings to the queen of heaven and to pour out libations to her. By all means, keep your vows and make your libations. So God is kind of saying, yeah, keep on doing it. See what happens. By all means.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  See what happens.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so there we have it.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  The, clearly, there was a practice. I mean, this is Jeremiah, I think you've mentioned a bunch of times, was into putting the kibosh on a bunch of different practices

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  that were already in play, that were happening.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  Yes. We have, we have a lot of this in this period. So this is, this is stuff being written, um, right at the time of the exile and during the exile, and maybe a little before, depending on when you think Jeremiah was written. Because Jeremiah begins before the exile occurs. But, um, basically, we're coming up with explanations for how the exile could have happened. How could a foreign nation have come in and violated our autonomy and come in and destroyed the temple and forcibly migrated so many Judaites, uh, over to, uh, Mesopotamia? And the idea is, oh, well, it must have been punishment. And this-

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Right. Our, our God must have abandoned us, uh, to, to our captors.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yes. And, and this is a classic, uh, literary motif, rhetorical motif in ancient, uh, West Asia. Cause you see it in, in Babylonian writing. You see it, like the, the Moabite, uh, the Mesha inscription from like 850 ish BCE. There's, uh, there's a part where King Mesha is trying to account for why, uh, Moab was allowed to be a vassal to the nation of Israel, why Israel was allowed to, um, to subjugate them. And he says it was because Kemosh was angry with his land, which is, which is basically the same argument. Our patron deity got mad at us and was like, just for that, I'm making you a vassal to

• 10:59Speaker 00

  this other nation over here. And so the same thing happens, uh, in ancient Israel and Judah. Um, we've got, you know, every time that somebody's cult statue was stolen, the rationalization, because you don't want to just be like, well, I guess that God actually sucked. You, you want to maintain the belief that this God has power and is your patron. So you go, oh, well, this God, uh, this God fled the temple and fled the statue, not out of fear, but because they're, they're disgusted by us. And that is what allowed, that's what facilitated the destruction of the temple. And, um, The violation of the integrity, the sovereignty of our land. So, so yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna say, you're talking about them taking the icons or whatever out of it. It just sounded a little bit like a frat, a fraternity stealing the other team's mascot or something.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I don't mean to.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  I don't want to diminish it, but it kind of has that vibe.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  But yeah, yeah, that is kind of what's going on. And because it's, you know, it's something that's larger than the building, it's larger than the statue itself. It's the notion that this represents what holds us together as a people and establishes our identity and all these things. And I write about that in my book, Adonis Divine Images, that the notion that, oh, well, God's not actually in the statue, God's actually up in heaven. You can't, you know, and don't make divine images. A lot of that is kind of damage control. Well, if they can, if they can just run off with our statue, maybe we need to find a way to have God with us without a statue.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  So that they can't, this can't happen again.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Because God, because, because God did live in the statue. God was the statue, or was directly associated there with.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and so you had ways to rationalize it, but then you also get this renegotiation going on. But anyway, one of the pre-exilic things that, that became very, very unpopular around the time of Josiah is a, you could say, a queen of heaven, you can say Adonis consort partner or wife. And we've talked about this before with Asherah, the Israelite goddess. And there are some scholars who think that, that the queen of heaven is a reference to Asherah. But I'm going to say it's not.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Okay. I had wondered that. I did, I did delve into that a little bit, and it did seem like it was a controversial question.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  And definitely not a slam dunk by any means.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  No, not, not a slam dunk. I think it's probably not Asherah. And we get Asherah, like, we have explicit. Connections between Asherah and Adonai. We have inscriptions.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  The Cantila Dajrud inscription.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I've seen that. I've seen that there is an inscription on a T-shirt that I have seen multiple times.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  That it's actually printed on the T-shirt, not inscribed.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  It is a, it is an image of an inscription. Yeah, but it talks about blessings by Adonai and by his Asherah. And we have a couple of different inscriptions that make reference to that. And even have a drawing of the male and female divine figures. And you do have in ancient Akkadian, you do have Asherah referred to, or Ashratu, or Ashratum is how she's referred to in Akkadian. She's referred to as Kalat Sharshami, which would be bride of the king of the heavens. So, so there's a sense in which Asherah could be the queen of heaven. But I think there's a, there's a closer connection to make. But, but first, one of the things that we've talked about how

• 14:49Speaker 00

  in the past, we've talked about how Josiah likely criminalized, vilified, demonized Asherah and Asherah worship. And there are a lot of scholars who think this was part of a broader kind of cult centralization, where we're doing away with not just worship of other deities, not just worship of God's wife, but even like ancestor worship. And even what, what scholars these days refer to as family religion. Because notice something interesting about the passages that, the first passage in Jeremiah 7. "The children gather wood. The fathers kindle fire, and women knead dough."

• 15:33Speaker 00

  This is something that involves the entire family. This is a, this is a domestic practice.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  And this is, this is not something that's going on downtown at the, you know, at the super temple. This is something that's going on in people's individual homes. And we have all kinds of evidence for, for this family religion going on in pre-exilic Israel, where people are doing their own thing. And this seems to be one of the things that falls under the knife with Josiah's cult reforms.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  And so it's, it's not just the, the feminine divine that is cut out. It's also other deities. It's also probably ancestor worship, because a lot of the, a lot of the domestic family religion is probably, you know, you have, you go to your mortuary temple and you share a meal with your deceased ancestor. That's worship.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  And in Deuteronomy, again, the, the project of Deuteronomy, and, and the opinion of a lot of scholars, myself included, began under Josiah as, as his vehicle for accomplishing, to some degree, this, this cult centralization. But to, to so, I say to some degree, because a lot of what's in the, in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic literature is later rhetoric, is not an accurate, accurate reflection of what was going on on the ground. But there's even a part in Deuteronomy which says if you're bringing a food offering to Adonai, it cannot have been shared with the dead. So like, they're making pretty explicit, they're, pretty explicitly, they're coming after a lot of domestic religious practices

• 17:19Speaker 00

  and worship.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Ancestor worship and the queen of heaven. And I'm going to argue, and there's a, there's a phenomenal book on this by a wonderful scholar named Susan Ackerman. And it's called Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them, which is, which is all about the worship of, of gods on the part of female clergy, priests, and things like that, as well as goddesses. And she makes what I think is the best argument for identifying the queen of heaven as a starte.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And Astarte is not Asherah. Astarte would be the West Semitic equivalence of the East Semitic deity Ishtar.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  I was gonna say that I was go, I, I, I am smart enough that I, I did think of that. That those, those sound familiar enough.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  They sound familiar, yes.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And see, and sound linked enough that, that they sound like they could be the same thing or a version of each other.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we have, um, Ishtar is, is, is Astarte in, uh, in the West Semitic world. And so in the Bible, we have Ashdorot is one of the ways, one of the, um, it's kind of a, a demonizing, um, pejorative way to refer to, um, Astarte by making it feminine plural as a way to kind of, um, abstract what's going on here.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Your various Astartes.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Uh, that, that's one of the ways to understand it. But she is, uh, the lady of heaven. She is queen of heaven. Uh, in some places she is associated with the heavens, with the stars. Uh, she is associated with a bunch of other deities in the Greek world that are associated with heaven, uh, and the stars. Uh, we also have her, um, associated with war. So, uh, you'll, you'll notice that one of the things that the people who are worshippers of the queen of heavens say is, once, once we stopped worshiping her, the famine happened.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Uh, the, the land's fertility failed us, but also we've been subjected to violence and we are no longer at peace and we are not prospering. And so it could be that we have lost our, our patroness, uh, who, who, you know, ensures that we are protected. So, um, Astarte is, is mistress of horses, lady of the chariots. Uh, this is one of the ways she's represented as, uh, as, you know, battle worn, battle tested. But also we have some inscriptions that talk about, um, bakers who baked basket of, baskets of cakes. For Astarte, the queen.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  So, um, one of the things that the women do, uh, according to the passage is make cakes for the queen of heaven. And these might be, uh, they're probably like raisin cakes, um, is what, is what a lot of scholars suggest is, is going on here. And they probably would have been, uh, they probably had some kind of form, some kind of mold, uh, that, that the dough would have been in that would have made it so when they baked, they took a shape that included either it was a, like shaped like a goddess, or there was some kind of symbol that was baked into it that would have represented, uh, Astarte.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  And so, uh, and, and the interesting thing about that is, what are the, what are the men of the household doing? They're gathering wood, they're building a fire. The women are the ones actually engaged in the material production of, of the actual, uh, offering the means of worship. So this would be a cult that was focused on the labor of women and was something that was primarily mediated, uh, by the, uh, by women. So, I, I think Ackerman makes a wonderful case for understanding Astarte as the queen of heaven.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Um, and this would also, um, be one of the things that fell under the ax as a result of, uh, not just of Josiah's reforms, but probably if Jeremiah's being written during the, um, during the exilic period, being written in a time when, when the Judaites, who are away in exile are more directly exposed to the worship of Ishtar, which is probably going to be a lot more prominence, uh, in Mesopotamia. So they're, they're in the lion's den, um, and getting exposed to that kind of stuff. And so it's, it's probably going to be a lot more attractive, the worship of Ishtar.

• 22:20Speaker 00

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

• 22:26Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 22:27Speaker 00

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

• 23:09Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 23:36Speaker 01

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• 25:08Speaker 02

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Film for IMAX.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Make them remember you.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Weeping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Give me the, sorry, Josiah, give me the timeframe of Josiah and sort of overlay it on the Jeremiah timeframe that we're guessing.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  So there's probably if, and I, my late 7th century BC history, I need to bone up a little bit on, but, but there's probably a overlap between Josiah and Jeremiah. So he reigned from 648 and I want to say it was in a battle with the Egyptians, Neco maybe? Not the wafer, but the pharaoh? I think like 609 BCE was, was when Josiah died, was killed in battle. And then Jeremiah, I'm pretty sure starts in like 25 years before that,

• 26:14Speaker 00

  like the last quarter of the 7th century. And then is writing into, or at least is represented as writing into the exile.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  So Jeremiah, it feels like, it feels like what's happening, as I read those passages in Jeremiah, it feels like these are just accepted practices that he is decrying. Like everybody's kind of doing it. Everybody's into.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  You know, making these cakes for the queen of heaven. And he's saying, hey, we shouldn't be doing this. And then by the time we get to Josiah, he's like, no one's gonna do it. And he commands it and, and it's not no longer just being decried. It's like, we're gonna kill everyone who, who, who goes against us on this.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and you've got in the, and, and again, parsing apart the, the Deuteronomistic literature that is later rhetoric versus what might have been Josiah's actual cultic reforms. You, you've probably got vilification of precisely this kind of stuff. One of the things that you've got in, in the books of Kings is you've got a description of Josiah taking an Asherah pole out of the temple, which indicates there was an Asherah pole. The worship of Asherah alongside Adonai, the God of Israel, was taking place in the Jerusalem temple.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  And, you know, the way the story is told, Josiah, 2 Kings 22, Josiah is just, just bopping along, doing his thing. And then suddenly somebody shows up and goes, hey, we found this book of the law. And turns out we've been getting it all wrong. And then he's like, oh, shoot, the, the, um, the Asherah pole's gotta come down. That was my favorite thing.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, Josiah is like, and the book's in my handwriting. That's weird. How did that happen?

• 28:13Speaker 00

  And, you know, they take all that stuff out and they grind it to dust and they burn it in the valley of Kidron. And, and then the priests are all, the illegitimate priests are also put to death. And, and there, there's a lot of violence that, that goes on. At least the way the story is told in, in 2 Kings. The degree to which that's historical, we don't know for sure. I'm, I'm sure there was some pressure put on folks. But, but I think it is, it is interesting that how the queen of heaven is, is kind of one of the. One of the representatives of an earlier time, when there was more and broader worship going on,

• 28:57Speaker 00

  where piety could be directed at a variety of different deities, even on an individual household basis. And that was all taken from people. And then after that, you could only worship adequately, properly, if you took sacrifices or offerings down to Jerusalem. And if you didn't live anywhere near there, and you couldn't afford to make that pilgrimage. I mean, you were kind of, you were kind of cut off to some degree. So I, and I'm, I'm one of the people, and you know, I get called a heretic for this kind of thing all the time. But, but I'm one of those people who is sad for the loss of that old timey religion

• 29:39Speaker 00

  that probably made the relationship with, with the God of Israel and, and the family of the God of Israel a lot more meaningful to individuals and households back in the pre-exilic period, before this, this king decided to, um, you know, decided to get rid of all of that and, and make it so you weren't allowed to,

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  to worship that way. So it's, I, I think that the, the point I want to make is that, as you said, this was just something that was going on. This, this was not something that was considered problematic for probably centuries.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Until somebody was like, time to tighten up the belt, God wise, anyway. And you're not allowed to do that anymore. And oh, by the way, we're going to vilify and demonize you for ever having done that.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Well, and it's not just about centralizing the God worship, right? This is about centralizing power and,

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  and structuring power so that it, so that it becomes, so that you have to get your salvation, your, your, salvation's such a New Testament phrase.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  But you have to get,

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Your deliverance of some kind.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You have to get your, your, your holy intercession through us, through me. Like you can't, you can't just bake a cake in your house, get the whole family involved and feel like you, you know, feel like you've done something holy and feel like you've done something that, to benefit yourself.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  You don't get to benefit you, I benefit you.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and all of my representatives, who are all, by the way, men.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  So the, the women, the, the, the role of women, the direct role of women in, in worship is, it's just disintegrated. It's gone entirely. The, the mother in a household no longer gets to play that direct role, no longer gets to participate directly, uh, and is now an NPC for all intents and purposes, uh, when it comes to the worship of the God of Israel. The only way you get to do it is, is through a man.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  So, yeah, there, there's a, there's, there are some folks out there, there's a book, I, I, shoot, I, I think it was called When God Was a Woman. And it was Merlin. I know the guy's first name or, or the person, now shoot, now I forget who wrote it.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  You keep talking and I'll look it up.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Okay, um, but I think, I'm pretty sure it's called When God Was a Woman.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Merlin Stone.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Merlin Stone, yes. And, and there are an awful lot of people who, who take that book and, and treat it as, as accurate. And, and the book is basically making the claim that, that religion was basically thoroughly matriarchal. And, and then one day it was all just entirely overturned. And they were like, we're not going to do the matriarchal anymore. We're just going to turn it over and we're going to make it all patriarchal. And there, and there's a sense in which the role of women was, was significantly marginalized and downplayed and, and overturned, but it was not the case that it was the opposite up to Josiah or, or any Israelite.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  The, the patriarchal nature, nature of, of worship was, had pre-existed the, the land of Israel, the nation of Israel, the, the Hebrew language by many, many generations.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  But there was a role for women in that, a central role, and particularly when it comes to folks like Astarte and Asherah and Anat, and there were other deities as well, uh, goddesses that were involved in this, but. But yeah, I think Jeremiah represents, we get a little peek at a little bit of family religion going on that, that unfortunately, at least from my perspective, it's going to be fortunate for, I think, the overwhelming majority of the people who are reading the book of Jeremiah. But unfortunately, in my opinion, we lost some of that old timey family religion that probably, I think probably went a lot further towards kind of generating

• 33:56Speaker 00

  a sense of community and belonging for all the members of the household than, than what we were left with.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that's a, the fact that Jeremiah literally describes, you know, the kids gathering the wood, dad building the fire, mom making the cake, literally describes a really heartwarming scenario, a scene, sets a scene. And then it's like, and it's bad.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  It's crazy to me. I think, but I'm really grateful that the author actually did write that whole scene out, because I think that it gives us a little slice of life, a little, a little peek in the window of just sort of a standard household where they might be doing this sort of thing.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and I highly recommend Susan Ackerman's work for anybody who's interested in learning more about this, and particularly her book, God's Goddesses and the Women Who Serve Them. The, it's a, it's a great book. It is a little technical, but if you'd like to learn more about what's going on there. That's wonderful. Also, there's a book by Bill Dever, William Dever, called Did God Have a Wife? Now, that's not about a star day, that's not about the queen of heaven as I'm representing it, that's about Asherah. But that goes in into what, what Dever calls folk religion, as opposed to like official

• 35:30Speaker 00

  state religion. And, and that's, that's kind of a false dichotomy, but.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  But I think that's a, that's a helpful book as well.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's it for the Queen of Heaven. She has been dethroned. Sad days for her and for us, because that she, how much more interesting would everything be? If there was still a Queen of Heaven. But let's move on and take issue.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Was the Bible the most quoted document by, by the luminaries of the early moments of the, our country?

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yes. No, it was not.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I mean, it was very highly quoted.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  I think. Highly quotable.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it was such a big part of culture of, you know, European and therefore American culture.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  For so long, I, I don't see how it could avoid being quoted. I don't, you know, it was, it was a cultural touch point.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  For everybody.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it was not trying to avoid being quoted, but, but yes, the, the claim here though, and, and David Barton, the founder of Wall Builders.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Which just sounds like a love your neighbor kind of organization. Right off the start. But they, and here's, here's the, I guess this is their mission statement. American liberty is being eroded. And our biblical foundation is under constant attack. Here at Wall Builders, we provide education, training and resources to equip people to know and defend the truth, to protect our freedom. And obviously by our freedom, it does not mean the freedom to walk the streets without being attacked by ICE agents or the freedom to do all kinds of things that traditionally have been associated with freedom.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  No, it obviously means the freedom to amass hordes of, of wealth and to oppress people.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  And to exert Christian control over non-Christians in this country. I feel like, I feel like he doesn't have the Satanic Temple in mind when he says our freedom.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  No, no, obviously, because he, he will have defended the, the dude who went and vandalized

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  the, the display of the Satanic Temple, because freedom for me, not for thee, is, is the, the real idea here. And as part of the America Reads the Bible puppet show, I guess we can call it, he said, "The Bible was the most cited source of our founders." And, and this, this goes back to a claim I've, I've responded to many times on social media. I mean, Charlie Kirk has said it. We have heard this said by a number of, Glenn Beck has said it, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, has said it, Kirk Cameron, for some reason, is, is in the public and is saying it. Dinesh D'Souza has said it, Dan Patrick has said

• 38:49Speaker 00

  it, Newt Gingrich has said it. We've got a lot of people who are sharing this idea that the Bible was the most cited text by the founders. And it's all coming from one paper. And it's a paper that they obviously never read.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  And, and it's a paper written by a scholar named Donald S. Lutz. And if, if you are unable to understand through the, the slight lisp because of my dental trays, that's L-U-T-Z, Lutz. And the paper is called "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late 18th Century American Political Thoughts." And this was published in 1984 in the journal, The American Political Science Review. And there's a, there's a table that appears on like the fourth page of the paper. And, and, and what Lutz did for this paper was he tried to gather all of the, the texts he could that were labeled political from the year 1760 to 1805.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  And he gathered somewhere in the neighborhood of almost a thousand documents. And then this was just a comprehensive kind of review of every citation. And there's a table that says distribution of citations by decade and percent of total number of citations, the Bible comes in at a muscular 34% of all citations.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  The Enlightenment era authors come in at 22%.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Okay. So like a John Locke sort of thing?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Monesque, Locke, Hume. The Whig literature comes in at 18%.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Common law comes in at 11%. Classical literature comes at nine, comes in at 9%. Peers, so other people writing in the same time period, that comes in at 4% and then other is 2%. So right off the bat, look at that. By 11% more than second place, the Bible is the most quoted text of this period. 1760 to 1805. Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Proved. We, we, we need to shut up now then.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. But there's, there's an important qualification here. And this is, I'm reading directly from page 192 of this paper. Anyone familiar with the literature will know that most of these citations, specifically the Bible and Deuteronomy, by the way, is the most quoted text from these citations. Most of these citations come from sermons reprinted as pamphlets.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Hundreds of sermons were reprinted during the area era.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Oh wow, 10%.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, pamphlets were a huge way of, that was the social media of this time period. If you had something to say, one, you took on a nom de plume, something clever.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  And then, two, you published a pamphlet.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  10% of all pamphlets published, reprinted sermons. These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations, making this non-sermon source of biblical citations roughly as important as the classical or common law category. In other words, the 34%, if you take out all of these sermons reprinted as pamphlets, which by the way, are not coming from your Madison or your Jefferson.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, this isn't, this isn't George Washington.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Right. These are preachers who are giving sermons and then reprinting the sermons as pamphlets. You take that away, you're left with about 10%. So you're actually coming in somewhere between third and fifth place on this list.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  So, and then he goes on to say, "It is relevant nonetheless to note the prominence of biblical sources for American political thought, since it was highly influential in our political tradition and is not always given the attention it deserves." And then Lutz actually cites his own paper from a few years earlier called "From Covenant to Constitution in American Political Thought," where he talks about the Bible and the notion of the American people as kind of like, "The glue that holds us together is a compact, which is, which is like closer to a covenant than it is to a contract." So it's kind of a merging of Locke and something akin to the people of God.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  You know, "We are an American people because we come together under this compact and this establishes our identity and it's kind of inspired by drawing from biblical principles." So, and, and he talks about how that heavily influenced the drafting of state constitutions.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  And state constitutions are hugely influential on the US Constitution, and a lot of them had religious tests for office.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  You know, that could just be, you know, you confess belief in a God or something like that, or the Almighty, or all the way up to a specific denomination of Christian. But when we actually take out the sermons reprinted as pamphlets, the wind comes significantly out of the sails of this argument, and it no longer becomes the most cited thing. The most cited thing outside the Bible, or once you take the reprinted sermons out, the top three: Monoscu, Blackstone, and Locke.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  So, and obviously, if you know about the influence of common law and Enlightenment era, you know, rational literature, that's not a surprise, and that makes the best sense of how the Constitution came together.

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• 46:13Speaker 01

  Well, and, and when you look at America in that timeframe, in the sort of founder timeframe, you've got two things happening. You've got the Enlightenment era stuff that, you know, that started almost a century beforehand, but, but continues through that. And you've got the, the Great Awakening stuff that's happening in the US. And that's explicitly Christian, but it's also like very, very American view of Christianity.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Very, very evangelical. Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  But, but, and the interesting thing is, the period of the, the drafting of the US Constitution, that's right in between the first and second Great Awakening.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  And it's actually the period of the lowest church attendance in the history of the United States of America. So this is what, who, who's the, oh gosh, I forgot the guy's name, but he, he's a real fast talker. He's kind of like Charlie Kirk, but he's Jewish.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Oh, Ben Shapiro?

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Ben Shapiro, yeah. He was, he was saying something. He's like, somebody was like, what do you do to heal a nation that is, you know, broken like ours? And he goes, go to church. And I say that as you, you know, I want you to go to the temple, but go to church. This is founded as an American nation. You've got to go to church. And it was like, well, it was founded in the period when the fewest Americans were going to church.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  So if, if that was this grand revelation, it occurred in spite of the, the low going to churchiness in America. But, and, and then let's goes on though. And, and I think this is what kind of drives the nail in the coffin of this claim that, you know, our nation was founded as a Christian nation based on the fact that the Bible is most cited by the founders. Because if, if it means anything to say,

• 48:03Speaker 00

  The, we're a Christian nation. It means we are politically somehow founded upon something Christian.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  But Lutz goes on to say, we're going to look just at political writings between 1787 and 1788. And that is the drafting and the ratification of the Constitution. And when we look at that, you get a, you get small percentage of quotations from the Bible. But if you break it down, the Federalists quoted the Bible, 0%.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, that's not their thing.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yes. 9% of anti-Federalist citations are of the Bible. So when it comes to the nuts and bolts of actually creating the federal government, the Federalists, the folks who wrote the Constitution, said, now we're good.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  And, and did not bring up the Bible. You, you have a couple, when you look at the, the accounts of the Constitutional Convention, you have a couple of references to, to Providence and, and God and this kind of stuff. But, but these are offhand and unrelated things to the actual composition of the US Constitution. And you just do not see the Bible coming up in the actual formation of the federal government, the US Constitution. It just doesn't happen.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Well, and it's so interesting, you know, one of the things I, you know, I look at David Barton's Wall Builders, you know, website. And one, you know, in one place, he has an article that's like, "The Founding Fathers on Jesus, Christianity, and the Bible." And first of all, the opening paragraph, the introductory paragraph of that part of his website is astonishing. And I should say, David Barton is hailed as a luminary historian. This is, this man is a garbage historian.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Well, yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Like.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  He's got a BA in religious education from Oral Roberts.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Like, that's it.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  That's basically a correspondence degree.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Right. No, no one in, in the world of history, history respects this man.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  But he is, he is hailed as, as a major historian by those who want to use his work as cover for creating, for, you know, for creating laws that sort of go against, go directly against the church state separation that was intended in, in the US constitution, et cetera. I love that the opening, the opening lines of, of this, of this page on his website say, "For decades, accusations against the founding fathers have abounded. One of the common criticisms is that the founding fathers were a collective of, a collective group of atheists,

• 51:09Speaker 01

  agnostics, and/or deists," which you and I were laughing about because that's a hell of a group, like.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Atheists, agnostics, or not atheists, or slash, like, deists are, yeah, anyway, "who wanted a strict separation of church and state resulting in a secular government and a public square." He's framing that as an accusation against the, no, that's explicitly what they said they were doing.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, quite, quite clear. And, and a lot of the discussion that is intended to muddy the waters will, like, I've, I've been looking at, at folks trying to defend this claim, and they, they immediately get into state constitutions. It's like, okay, what are you, why did they come together for the constitutional convention and create a government that superseded the state, the states and their constitutions? And they explicitly said that we will have zero religious tests for office, because a bunch of state constitutions have religious tests for, for office. And so when, when they come together to say, well, we are going to reject this feature of the lower level.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Governance. You can't say that feature of the lower level governance governance is in the the federal, you know, it's not baked in when they explicitly said, ooh, I'm leaving you out.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  So that is, that is a ridiculous fallacy, but it, but you know, I think that's par for the course for somebody who, who is not phenomenally well educated when it comes to history and is, is really just been making a fairly comfortable living, spreading misinformation and engaging in, in identity politics and trying to keep people angry.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  It's the problem that we run up against whenever we see apologists, whenever we see, like, the problem is when you have to start from a conclusion and then backfill everything.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  All of your premises to, to hit the target of the conclusion that you cannot allow not to be true.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  You're not going to do good work.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  That it's the opposite of, of what we say we're trying to do, which is they're doing dogma over data and we're trying to come at it from the other direction.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  So I, and, and I don't think, and it's funny because, you know, the, the web wall builders page that I was talking about then follows, follows up with a whole bunch of quotations from different founders that declared their Christianity. And it's like, okay, nothing to do with the point.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, plenty of them believed it. I mean, you know, let's not talk about the fact that, that Jefferson literally physically cut things out of his, but cut all of the sort of miracles out of his Bible because he liked Jesus as a philosopher and did not like the, you know, was not into the whole miracle thing. They, yeah, that, that, that's a little inconvenient for them, but.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Well, and, and Jefferson was the one who wrote about the Creator and nature's God and providence in the Declaration of Independence. And they're like, see, it mentioned God there. Jefferson was the most deist.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Of, of the founders and was, and, and people try to make the point, well, oh, he, he identified as a Christian. He said, I'm a Christian to the degree that it is Christian to do this. And. Yeah, these folks, and even Madison, probably the most pious of the main founding fathers. He was one of the most ardent about maintaining a strict separation between church and state. And it was not because, you know, I've heard people argue now, oh, the church and state division was actually to protect Christianity and make sure that it was the foundation of everything. No, it was because they saw what happened when church got involved with the

• 55:19Speaker 00

  government and they'd wanted to avoid that. They have explicitly, we've got letters, we've got all kinds of stuff from founders explicitly saying, "We're trying to avoid all of the problems that arrives when state power gets entangled with church power." And so, yeah, it was very clearly an attempt to create a government that would not be under the thumb of any kind of religious authority. And, you know, you've got...

• 55:47Speaker 01

  And wouldn't impose any kind of religion on the people. Like, not only did they want it not to be under the thumb of a religious authority, but they also didn't want the government to impose religion of any sort on their constituents.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there are folks who appeal to, like Adams, saying that, you know, "Our nation is designed for a religious people and for no other." And this is kind of an old Enlightenment-era notion that morality is founded upon religion. And it didn't mean Protestant Christianity, it just meant religion. Religion is where you get morals from. And that this is a socio-cultural domain that is the seedbed of morality. And that's just not true. But that is not saying that the government is Christian. It's just saying, "We want the people to exercise some kind of religion because morality is necessary

• 56:51Speaker 00

  for this experiment to succeed." And Adams, a while later, in the Treaty of Tripoli... Signed a treaty that says that the US is in no sense founded as a Christian nation.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  So you're gonna find quotations back and forth, but when it comes down to it, for it to mean anything to the wall builders and these folks today to say that the US is a Christian nation, it must mean that structurally, the government is Christian in orientation. And that's just demonstrably false.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  And it doesn't matter that these folks were all heavily influenced by a Protestant worldview. Duh, obviously, that does not make the US a Christian nation. I just, I'm baffled by the juvenility, the, just how jejun the arguments for this idea are. It's just a dogma. It's just a straight up dogma that people are trying to defend because.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Well, and even if, even if we were to say, you know, the Bible is the most heavily quoted, you know, certainly, many of these guys made reference to the Bible in their writings. Okay, you know, if I were to write a thing and I was to say, you know, Dan, Dan McClellan is such a hufflepuff, that doesn't mean that what I'm saying has anything to do, like, the point that I'm making is that I am endorsing full throated the, you know, Harry Potter world or whatever. It's just a cultural touchstone. It's a cultural reference that everyone would understand and that is sort of immediately digestible.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's just because you speak the language of it. And just because you've grown up in the world of it does not mean that therefore all output is appropriatable by the thing. So, yeah, we can, yeah, it's a silly argument, but definitely Donald Lutz's work does not establish the claim in any way, shape or form whatsoever. And when people say that, you know, they heard something on the internet and they liked it and they repeated it and they didn't bother to go check out whether or not it was true or what the actual source said at all.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  So. Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 01

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  Bye, everybody.

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• 1:01:25Speaker 07

  Hey, it's Micah Sargent from Tech News Weekly, and this week we go hands-on with Jennifer Patterson-Tuey. Jen was at the Apple Welcome Home event and had an opportunity to try out HomeView, the new device from Apple for the smart home. We talk about how it's kind of like a big Apple Watch tied to a low HomePod Mini, and we also talk about the other gadgets Apple announced that day, including the Apple TV 4K at its most expensive price, the HomePod Mini 2 at, well, its less saturated colors, and so much more. Then I've got a quick little story about how eight states have decided to sue OpenAI as part of a consumer protection lawsuit,

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  but how it's really about getting the reins on training AI with AI. You can check out Tech News Weekly by looking for Tech News Weekly wherever you get your podcasts, or by heading to twit.tv/tnw.