A Critique of the Prophetic Critique

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan 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?

Dan Beecher Rocking and rolling, enjoying life- That's what I like to hear ... having a good time. How about you?

Dan McClellan I am tasting blood in my mouth because my dental trays, I have a new set of dental trays in my mouth today, and- Uh-oh ... I need to take the emery board to them to file down some of the back parts, because they are very clearly cutting open my tongue.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan But- Exciting.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan No, this is what it's like being a 45-year-old man who goes in and gets dental trays and- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher my wife is experiencing similar results, so there's a reason- I'll loan you my angle grinder, and then you can just get in there and do whatever you gotta do.

Dan McClellan There's a reason we do this to high school kids and not to... And you don't choose to do it when you're an adult.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So Well, hopefully it's worth it when you have a beautifully, perfectly straight smile- Yeah ... a few months from now.

Dan McClellan We'll see. I'm sure I'll find other things to dislike about myself. I always do.

Dan Beecher If you want help, I'm happy to stop and chime in.

Dan McClellan You can help out. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Dan Beecher Well, today we've got a really interesting show. We're going to be talking about a, we're going to do a What's That?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And the What's That? We don't need to preface it. Let's just dive in with What's That? So, the What's That? that we're talking about is the prophetic critique, which sounds like something that a single prophet didn't like his food and decided to say, "If you had added a little more salt and maybe some MSG- Yes ... we could've gotten there."

Dan McClellan No, I want- I do not care much for the amenities.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan No, it is not a one-star review of- No ... of the housing. This is a reference to something that begins with the eighth-century prophets. Most scholars agree that there are parts of, large parts of, some of the prophetic books that were actually written in the eighth century BCE by people who presented themselves as prophets. And a lot of the criticism in the eighth century BCE arises because of the accumulation of a lot of wealth, because the eighth century BCE is a period where we have unusually long reigns for kings in both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. They're reigning for, like, 40 years.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And so there's a lot of stability that is achieved, and this facilitates a lot of growth.

Dan Beecher There's- The stability meaning, the reason these reigns are long is because nobody's challenging them. There's no wars. There's nothing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's just everybody's just chill.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and they're allowed to initiate a lot of economic growth. There's a lot of trade going on. Now, the northern kingdom of Israel is much larger than the southern kingdom of Judah, and there are multiple major cities, whereas the southern kingdom of Judah, the capital city of Jerusalem, is the city, and it's just smaller villages around it, where the northern kingdom of Israel has a number of large cities. But they're exporting all kinds of stuff, likely up through Phoenicia, and it's probably olive oil, wine, things like that that are their primary exports. So everybody's, not everybody, a lot of people, not a lot of people, some people are getting quite wealthy. The elites are getting quite wealthy. We're seeing a lot more social inequality, where you're getting more and more poor people and more and more rich people, and they're exploiting the poor.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan There's land consolidation going on. You have where everything used to be, everybody was basically, it was all subsistence living. You just grew what you needed to grow to survive, and then if you had a little bit left over to take to the market, bully for you.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But now we're having people who are loaning money, and in an economy where a lot of the resources for farming is based on loans, you go from a subsistence living to a command economy, where you grow what your dueño, what your patron is telling you to grow.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And one of the things that this does is it creates a more vulnerable system because normally you would spread out what you're growing so that if a certain crop didn't do well, it didn't do too much to you. You could- Right ... you had other crops.

Dan Beecher You can lean on- You diversified ... the rest of what you're doing, yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah, you diversified your crops. But in a command economy, they say, "No, we need more of this. You're growing this and nothing but this." And then if that crop happens to fail, you're in a deep. And then you've got a lot of, usually if you were in a bad way, you could get a survival loan from your community, and these are people who know that they could be next, and so their interest is illegal in this time period, so there wasn't a lot of that going on. In a command economy, you got to pay back the loan at the harvest time when it's worth the least, and they're probably charging interest and stuff like that. So, in short, the rich are getting phenomenally wealthy, and the poor are getting hosed, and this is when the eighth century- I feel like you're trying to...

Dan Beecher I know I'm not supposed to be sitting here just drawing parallels to now, but anyway, please continue.

Dan McClellan So this is where the eighth-century prophets step in, and they start excoriating the wealthy And it's because... But the interesting thing is the target of their excoriation, what they're excoriating them for, is their offering of sacrifices and their celebrations of the festivals and the Sabbaths and the new moons and all this kind of stuff. And so the critique takes on an odd flavor. So for instance, here is Amos 5:21 through 24, "I hate, I despise your festivals and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs. I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." So you have this contrast between all the kind of public displays of piety- Right ... which are required by the law, and the righteousness and justice. And then here we have Isaiah, the very first chapter of the Book of Isaiah. Verse 11 is where this starts. "What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?" says the Lord. "I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts. I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?" And we talked in a recent episode about why it's actually, "When you come to see my face."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "Who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more. Bringing offerings is futile. Incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation, I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Remove your evil deeds from before my eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Rescue the oppressed. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow." So again, we're condemning- Yeah, Peter Thiel. We're condemning these folks who no doubt are the superstars of their society.

Dan Beecher Well, and they're very clearly doing the religion.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher They're not being condemned for not doing the religion, for not being participants and for... It's quite the opposite. They're doing their job.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher The way that I interpret what you just read, and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, is just that it isn't as a condemnation of the sacrifices as much as it is a condemnation of doing the sacrifices but not doing the righteousness that should be attendant to those sacrifices.

Dan McClellan Right. And that's, I think, exactly what the issue is, is that according to the eighth-century prophets, and this is where it starts. You do see it in Jeremiah. You do see it in some of the Exilic and post-Exilic literature. Not just Deutero-Isaiah, but Third Isaiah, you see it a little bit in there as well. But the idea seems to be you are... And where is the passage where it says this? There's a reference to, I think it's in Isaiah, there's a reference to grinding the faces of the poor. But the poor, the oppressed, the orphan, the widow, these always come up as kind of the canary in the coal mine of social justice. These are the people whose well-being is how you can tell if your society is doing well or not. And I think the condemnation of the public displays of piety is precisely because for the eighth-century prophets, the purpose of the law is to generate a just and righteous society where not everybody necessarily has to be on the same footing, but everybody has to have what they need to get by.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They need to be able to survive. They need to be able to have the things that they need and not be oppressed. And so when the wealthy are exploiting the justice system, exploiting the economy, exploiting the system of cult and things like that, they are basically undermining the intent of the law. They're skirting around it. They're destroying it. But at the same time, they're going out to participate in the public-facing demands of the law, the demands of the law that allow them to engage in costly signaling and show everybody else out there, "Look how righteous I am."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "I was at the sacrifice." Somebody was just talking about... What's the spokesperson for the White House's name?

Dan Beecher Leavitt?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Karoline Leavitt.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Came up to the podium and was like, "Did you just hear that very loud amen? Because we were just doing a prayer back there."

Dan Beecher Yeah, I saw that.

Dan McClellan That was- And it's like, whoa, why would you come out and be like, "Could you tell we were praying?"

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "We wanted to make it very loud."

Dan Beecher Like- "Should we go back and do our costly signaling again?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "Or did you catch it on mic?"

Dan McClellan Yeah. We can do it again.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And this is a way to put on display, "Look how righteous and pious we are," when she's then going to talk about how, "No, screw all the LGBTQIA. Screw the poor. Screw the immigrants."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "Screw the minorities. It's wartime, baby." I used to be baffled by that Buffalo Springfield song And now I forget the title. Something happened in here, what it is, I know exactly.

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan You know the old- Right ... children's tale from the sea. Anyway, there's a part of the song where it goes, "People waving signs, most of them say, 'Hooray for our side.'"

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And I'm like, "Wait a minute." From the way I'm reconstructing the Vietnam War in my own memory based on what I've heard, everybody hated the Vietnam War. And why is the song saying that most of the people are cheering it on?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And now I'm realizing, well, I'm looking at so many people cheering on an obviously asinine, unnecessary, stupid war that somebody who cannot think a half a move ahead has started. And so, yeah, I can see it now. I get it. Thank you, Buffalo Springfield. I get it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But that's an example of this very thing, of performing for the public in order to advance your own standing within the social identities that are important to you, while behind their back grinding the faces of the poor.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, yeah. And it goes on, you see it in Amos, you see it in third Isaiah, you see some in Jeremiah. And you even have Hosea 6:6, "For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." And how do you put on display steadfast love and the knowledge of God? Well, obviously, you create a just society. You will stand up for the poor and the needy and the oppressed and the orphan and the widow. And so, this passage is quoted twice in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus twice tells people to go figure out... Well, one time he says, "Go figure out what this means. I will have mercy and not sacrifice." And another time he talks about how they tithe mint and cumin and dill, and they leave the weightier matters of the law unfulfilled- Right ... and then quotes this, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice." And the point is, if you're using religion to advance your own interests while ignoring the weightier matters of the law, what it's telling you about justice, you are in violation of the whole law, and God is going to, as the great poet said, cut you down.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Now, having said all that, this is as preachy as I get on social media. I've made a video on the prophetic critique a handful of times just because I don't think I've lived in a time where what was being criticized is so abundantly on display.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I agree- You have been- ... I agree with the prophetic- ... with the prophetic- Yes ...

Dan Beecher prophetic critique. As do I.

Dan McClellan Yes. However, I have been called out by a member of my own Patreon community.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Somebody who wrote a wonderful treatise about where I've gone wrong, and when this individual pointed me to this, I was like, "Ah, okay. You got me."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is not something I'm unaware of, it's just something that I have neglected because I've done the very thing that I've criticized others for doing- Okay ... which is isolate the part of the text or the tradition that is helpful to me and my identity politics, and ignoring the parts that doesn't serve that rhetorical interest or those rhetorical goals.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Because while the prophetic critique seems to be making all these very righteous kind of distinctions between where things go right and things go wrong, is that the people writing it also were advocating for a lot of very bad stuff, up to and including there was a lot of ethnocentrism going on.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan There was a lot of maltreatment of foreigners and things like that. It's more rhetoric. The appeal to the orphan and the widow is more rhetoric than it is actual concern. And this is something that I've talked about in other contexts where the poor and the orphan and the widow and the foreigner function kind of rhetorically as the canaries in the coal mine, but in actual practice, they usually still get neglected by the very people who appeal to them.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And an example that I bring up is how the laws of Hammurabi, the prologue to the laws of Hammurabi is basically like, "Oh, Hammurabi's such a righteous king, and he has made provision for the widow and the orphan." And then you can look throughout all of the laws of Hammurabi, and there is nothing- ... that provides anything for the widow and the orphan.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan In fact, the only time they're mentioned is when either they're being restricted or something like that is going on. So it's rhetorical, and I lost sight of that in these videos where I've talked about the prophetic critique because... And I want to read some from this. Simone is the name of my friend. "Remembering the Prophetic Critique: A Response to Dan McClellan" is the title of their Substack- Mm ... post on this. But I am accused accurately of stripping context from the texts and from not paying attention to what's important about this. And I want to try to find, okay, "The poor treatment of the most vulnerable in society might be condemned," Simone writes, "but so are foreigners in the many oracles against the nations," such as in the first chapter of Amos and throughout the rest of the prophets. "And the social order envisaged as ideal is still thoroughly hierarchical, in which women serve more of a role as symbols than people, and those symbolic women are often subjected to horrific abuse. The restoration of the proper order of the world in Deutero-Isaiah involves the humiliation of the feminine Babylon, and the restoration of Israel to their proper place at the height of the order of creation, redeemed to serve the cult of the Creator." And you can see sexual violence is frequently used in this rhetoric about how God is going to punish not only members of the House of Israel, but the foreigners as well.

Dan Beecher Okay. Which is something that we've talked about before, where- Is that considered a part of the prophetic critique, or is that a separate thing that's happening alongside in the same books? It's happening alongside in the same books.

Dan McClellan Okay. So it's not necessarily that it is an element of the prophetic critique, but it is definitely the prophetic critique is being abutted to these other things.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "This narrative of redemption is couched in cosmogonic language, which is also an ideology of cult, hierarchy, and property relations in which God is supreme monarch and Israel, both the land and the people, are his hereditary property. It is not only the mistreatment of the vulnerable, which is a sign of cosmic imbalance, but any disruption of this entire system. And when disruption occurs, punishment is collective and brutal." And don't have time, obviously, to go through the whole thing. It's a pretty long post, but I think it's a very insightful- We'll try to remember to put the link- Yeah, we can link to it in the- ... in the show notes ... in the show notes, yeah. And so I think it is an insightful critique of my misrepresentation to some degree of the prophetic critique.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I have thanked Simone for pointing this out through other channels. But I think it's helpful to know what the prophetic critique is because I do think that in many ways what was being criticized is still going on today. I think it is very similar to Jesus' criticism of those who stand on the street corner and pray to be seen of men, and disfigure their faces when they fast to be seen of men so that they can get that social reward. And the Carolyn Levitt thing, the first thing I thought of is when you pray, go into a closet and pray in secret.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Don't come out before the cameras and say, "Could you hear us praying? We just want to make clear we were praying." We can go keep praying if the... But at the same time, the prophetic critique is kind of self-defeating in that it is surrounded by so much that points in the opposite direction, so much maltreatment of women, of the oppressed, of widows, of the foreigner, and as well as she points out or as they point out, I'm going to be honest here, I've never checked to see what Simone's preferred pronouns are. But when disruption occurs, punishment is collective and brutal. Punishment in this time period, including punishment administered by prophets or advocated for by prophets, was violent, was retributive, was not the kind of thing we should be advocating for.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan So I think a helpful corrective and a mea culpa, and also a thank you to Simone for pointing all this out so publicly so that I could not ignore it.

Dan Beecher I see the point, which is that these people who are pointing out vast amounts of hypocrisy are themselves hypocrites in the sense that they're calling for justice over performative religion, but then they're not really that into justice. I get that.

Dan McClellan There's a degree to which it's still just structuring power.

Dan Beecher Right. But by the same token, the critique itself is important and valid and necessary, and we should be employing that critique of the hypocrisy of today because there is this same level of calling on scriptures, calling on gospels, calling on religion, and saying, "This is what's guiding my support for the maltreatment of my countrymen or of people who are foreigners here," or whatever.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And I think that it's fair to say that that is a hypocritical position.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I think so. I think we can take the good from it and reject the bad, and I think what Simone is saying is if we're going to do that, we need to be transparent about the fact that we're leaving the bad, and that's what I have been leaving out.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I have been ignoring the fact that there's an awful lot of bad. So yeah, I think absolutely the critique can and should be leveraged. But this is ... an act of negotiation.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan This is us going into text and saying, "Okay, we're fiddling with it. We're going to take this, we're going to leave that because this more directly supports our rhetorical goals, and this rather undermines them or doesn't align with our morals," or things like that. So, I take the critique.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I do think the prophetic critique is something that people should be aware of, and I am glad that it was pointed out that I've been a little selective in the past in my leveraging of the prophetic critique in light of everything that is surrounding it. And there are other things that I didn't highlight from that critique. So by all means, go check it out. And in the future, I will be more transparent when I am negotiating with the text in that way.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan So for those of you who are wondering or suggest that I do nothing but just be an apologist for Mormonism or- ... just promote woke leftist ideologies, I too am willing and able to acknowledge when I have been wrong. And this is not the first time this happened, certainly won't be the last.

Dan Beecher Literally the worst Mormon apologist of all time.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. I think Mark Hoffman beats me out to some degree, to the degree you want to call him an apologist. But these days it seems like you're an apologist if anybody doesn't like you- Yeah ... for whatever reason.

Dan Beecher So, woof.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But I'm not an apologist.

Dan Beecher Well, that's it for today. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, we sure would appreciate it. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and become one of our patrons where you can get access to the weekly after party, which is a lot of fun. Dan and I talking about everything from pop culture to answering our patrons' questions, and diving deep sometimes. It's really fun, really interesting stuff. So go check that out over on Patreon. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to JJ for being our producer, and thanks to all y'all for tuning in. We'll see you again next time.

Dan McClellan Bye everybody.