Blessed Baruch!

Dan Beecher Maybe Paul read this. Maybe Paul was into this thing.

Dan McClellan Maybe Paul was, I think Paul was probably into a lot of the more underground stuff. You've probably never heard of it. It's Baruch.

Dan Beecher I liked Baruch back when it was-- I liked his early stuff the most.

Dan McClellan When it was Hebrew, yeah.

Dan Beecher Hey, everybody.

Dan McClellan I'm Dan McClellan. And I'm Dan Beecher. And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, 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 Good. You're coming in kind of mellow. You got an NPR vibe going right now. I'm coming in hot. I always come in hot.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I'm a brash goofball.

Dan McClellan But yeah.

Dan Beecher I was just going to say, this week is going to probably be a slightly truncated show. Dan is being very kind and going and recording on a day that we normally don't record. He's taking time away from his family, that normally they get some Dan time, because I have to go and take care of some family business, and an emergency trip's coming up, so.

Dan McClellan Yes. You must abandon our good nation.

Dan Beecher I'm fleeing the country.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Fleeing, I say.

Dan McClellan But it is all for a good cause.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So- So, yes ...

Dan Beecher hopefully, be forgiving, oh ye of listeners, of listen-dom.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And we'll come back hot next week with something- Yeah ... extra spicy, just for you.

Dan McClellan And it won't just be the chili- It won't just-- Yeah, that's right ... that I'm going to be having in Cincy.

Dan Beecher You're going off to Cincinnati. I'm going to Canada.

Dan McClellan Yes. It's going to be crazy.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher So, we're only going to be doing one segment this week. One segment.

Dan McClellan And it's going to be, Is It Canon? Will it canon?

Dan Beecher Will it blend?

Dan McClellan And you can too.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And this week's Is It Canon?

Dan McClellan is interest-- So, it's Baruch.

Dan Beecher Now, we've mentioned the Book of Baruch- We have ... before, in conjunction with the Letter of Jeremiah.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. That's the one.

Dan Beecher Which is sometimes tacked onto the end of Baruch as- Yep ... just the final chapter of Baruch.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It is chapter six, just right on the end there, although most scholars agree this is definitely not written by the same crew, and it is included- Well- ... in other parts, in many traditions ...

Dan Beecher and as I read it, when I got to chapter five of Baruch, I was like, "Wait, this is literally exactly the same thing- ... as the Letter of Jeremiah." It's not identical, but it just does the same thing, and it does- Yeah. It's so weird. It's weird to tack on...

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If I were to read that as one book, I would be like, "Why are we doing this again?" It's like someone was trying to remember what they just wrote, and wrote it- Yeah ... and rewrote it again.

Dan McClellan That's the funny thing. If anybody out there ever ends up taking a course in, like, Ugaritic or something like that- Uh-huh ...

Dan Beecher you're going to- Which, who among us hasn't?

Dan McClellan Yes. That's the perennial question. When the leaves start changing, and everybody wonders, "Is now the year that I take a course in Ugaritic?"

Dan Beecher But when you start- Hey, are you in first-year Ugaritic with me? Who do you have for Ugaritic?

Dan McClellan But, you read these mythological texts, and there's an awful lot of repetition.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The same thing over and over again. I don't know how many letters I translated where I would skip over the first line because I knew it was going to say, "So and so to so and so. At the feet of my lord, I fall seven times. Even eight times, I fall at the feet of my lord."

Dan Beecher Just the groveling- Uh-huh ...

Dan McClellan at one's feet.

Dan Beecher It's grovel.

Dan McClellan It's grovel.

Dan Beecher But- Yes ... yeah, so there's- You could gravel. I mean, it depends on what the feet are standing on, I suppose.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It depends where you are at the moment that you collapse at their feet. But yeah, there's a lot of repetition, and there's just so much of this kind of rhetoric in the text of Greco-Roman period Judaism.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's just over and over again, "Look, we've got to stop with the idols." "We've got to stop with the worshiping the other deities. We've been over this- Yeah ... and over this." It's kind of like being on Twitter right now. Where it's like, "No, we've been through this.

Dan Beecher We've- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan been through this."

Dan Beecher But yeah.

Dan McClellan Today, we're talking about the five chapters of Baruch.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And Baruch is the son of Neriah.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan So, Baruch ben Neriah, and he is well-known from the Book of Jeremiah. So, this is the prophet who operated toward the very end of the seventh century BCE, and then in the early sixth century BCE. So, he was the one who was getting in everybody's face out on the street about the coming destruction of Jerusalem and forced migration of the Judahites. And this made him obviously very unpopular among the who's who of late exilic- The hoi polloi. Well, no, not the hoi polloi. It would be the elite.

Dan Beecher The- Oh, okay ...

Dan McClellan hoi polloi would be the masses.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And yeah, there was some unpopularity there, but it was mainly- ... the king.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay. There's a famous chapter, 36, Jeremiah chapter 36, where Jeremiah is- God's like, "Okay, Jeremiah, write all the words of this prophecy down and send it to the king." And Jeremiah's like, "Baruch, get over here."

Dan Beecher He's like, "Come here."

Dan McClellan "Write down everything I say in a scroll." And Baruch goes, "Okay." And writes it all down, and then goes and reads it to the people. And it's all the Jeremiahs, basically. A Jeremiah is kind of a finger-wagging, a ranting at everybody for their sins.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And somebody who's in the crowd goes and tells some of the officials, and they invite Baruch in to read the scroll to them, and he reads the scroll to them. They take it to the king, they read it to the king. And the king evidently is sitting there by the fire and has the person reading. Every section that they read, they use a penknife to cut off that section of the scroll and then just plunk, drop it in a fire. And so the king is really not happy with Baruch. And Baruch goes back to Jeremiah and is like, "They burnt the scroll."

Dan Beecher "They didn't like it."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "Let's do a different one."

Dan McClellan And then Jeremiah goes to God, and God's like, "Well, I guess we'll just do it again." And has Jeremiah dictate the words of the prophecy all over again, and Baruch writes another scroll. "And gave it to the secretary Baruch son of Neriah, who wrote it at Jeremiah's dictations, all the words of the scroll that King Jehoiakim," by the way, "of Judah had burned in the fire, and many similar words were added to them." So, the king is not on their side. And this is kind of how the story of Baruch, the apocryphal text, begins.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But before we get to that, is there anything that you wanted to add about Baruch, or you- Well, I- ... you're like, "Let's move it."

Dan Beecher No, what I want to do is situate us. So, you've connected this to Jeremiah. So within the stories of the Bible- Uh-huh ... if we were to take them as true- Mm-hmm ... then this is during the exile.

Dan McClellan Yes. So Jeremiah 36, that's happening right before the exile.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The exile comes in waves, and the main ones, like 587, 586 BCE, that's when the Jerusalem Temple is actually destroyed by the Babylonians, and that's the final wave of forced migrations. And so the letter of Baruch actually begins by situating itself five years after that.

Dan Beecher Right. And so- When we have in the past talked about books that theoretically take place during the exile- Mm-hmm ... you have made it clear that these books were not written in that time but were actually written much later in the Hellenistic sort of periods or whatever it is.

Dan McClellan Overwhelmingly, yes.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Now, the Book of Jeremiah, portions of that are thought to be authentic- Okay ... to come from the exilic period. Baruch, no.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Baruch is definitely coming from well after that. There's an awful lot in Baruch that is quoting, alluding to, paraphrasing other parts of scripture, including non-canonical texts and things that are written well after the 6th century BCE. And so most scholars would say Baruch was probably written 1st century BCE, 1st century CE.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan So the century before the life of Jesus or the century of the life of Jesus, somewhere in there.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And scholars suggest that it's divided into four kind of general pieces.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And the first two pieces make up the first half. They go to Baruch 3:8. And this, scholars suggest, may have an underlying Hebrew source text.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So it might have been composed in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. All the manuscripts that we have of Baruch are in Greek. We don't have any existing Hebrew manuscripts. And then for the second half, which basically switches over to poetry- Right ... from 3:9 to 5:9, you have a wisdom poem, and then you have a poem about return from exile.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there are fewer Semiticisms. So one of the ways that scholars can tell if something has been translated is if the Greek is using constructions and sayings and idioms and things like that that are not very Greek- Right ... but are very Hebrew. So for instance, the master's thesis I wrote at the University of Oxford, which was about textual criticism of the Septuagint and anti-anthropomorphism, that old chestnut.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan I was making the argument that there's this passage in the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, Exodus 24:10, where Moses and the 70 elders go up Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, and it says they saw the God of Israel, and under his feet, it was like a brickwork of sapphire and shininess and all this kind of stuff.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And they broke bread, basically. In the Greek, it says, "And they saw the place where the God of Israel stood." However, the Greek says it in a very weird way.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan It says, "They saw the place there where the God of Israel stood." And that's not how you would normally say that in Greek. However, it is a perfectly normal way to say it in Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, it's this resumptive adverb thing. And so, the argument that I made was that this suggests that the Greek, the disappearance of God, the translating it so that they're not actually looking at God. My argument was that this was not the work of the translator saying, "Well, I don't like that.

Dan Beecher I'm going to change it."

Dan McClellan Because what they changed it to is not natural Greek. My argument was that they were translating something they found in their Hebrew source text, and it was written that way in Hebrew in a very natural Hebrew way, and then they very woodenly translated it into unnatural Greek. So, that was the argument I made. There's a very prominent Septuagint scholar who heartily disagrees with me and has published stuff on that.

Dan Beecher Thinks you're a ding-dong about that.

Dan McClellan Well, maybe not a ding-dong, but- ... at least wrong about that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And since that was something I wrote as a recent graduate of my undergraduate degree, I've just kind of backed away slowly. So I have not taken up that cross recently. But that's an example of one way that scholars can say, "This was probably written in Hebrew."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Is if the Greek is a little weird, but works well if you back-translate it into Hebrew. But you don't really get that for the second half of Baruch, which maybe is an indication that the book came together in stages.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Maybe is an indication that maybe the author translated the first half from a Hebrew source text and then was like, "I'm on a roll.

Dan Beecher I'm going to keep pumping out-" I'm going to keep going, man.

Dan McClellan "...

Dan Beecher stat text."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Why stop here?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, we've got the four different segments divided into two. You can divide it in half. The first half is a little more narrative and talks about a prayer. You've got to admit the guilt. You got all these petitions that you offer, and then the second half is just poetry. But it's set in around 582-ish BCE, somewhere in there. And one of the ways we know this is not actually written in 582 BCE is- Uh-huh ... it starts with Baruch sending the words of this book to Jeconiah or Jeconiah, son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah. And talks about passing the hat around, basically, to get a bunch of silver, send it to the priest in Jerusalem, and they basically want them to do these temple offerings.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it says Baruch took the vessels of the house of the Lord that had been carried away from the temple to return them to the land of Judah. But the temple was destroyed.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it would not be rebuilt until 519 BCE, so several more decades.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, this is probably being written by somebody who knows about the existence of the Second Temple, and for whatever reason, misunderstood the availability of the temple to- Didn't get the timeline exactly right.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Got a lot of begats correctly. Like got Baruch, son of Neriah, son of Mahseiah- Yeah ... son of Azariah, son of Hilkiah, blah, blah, blah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But yeah, the timeline got a little wiggly there.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and this is kind of par for the course for Greco-Roman period Judaism, like the Book of Daniel does this as well. We've talked about that in the past.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That Daniel was like, "Yeah, and then there was this other guy, and he did this." And it's like, "Oh, no, there was like Darius the Mede conquered Babylon." "And then Cyrus the Great came in after Darius." And it's like, "No, Cyrus conquered Babylon. And then there was a Darius, who was a Persian, who came after Cyrus." And so even the most popular text from that time period that made it into the canon, unlike Baruch, but Daniel made it into the canon, got a lot of the details wrong. So yeah, that is suggestive of somebody who's not writing in this time period. And so we have Baruch basically instructing the people, saying basically, "Look, the exile is because y'all were naughty."

Dan Beecher Yeah. And so- Everybody, all of us- Yes ... the entire people- Yes ... we were all bad, and we need to now pray and admit that we were bad and say we're just so very sorry.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And then one of the weird things, what do you make of verse 11 in chapter one that says, "And pray for the life of King Nebuchadnezzar." This is the Babylonian king.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher "And for the life of his son Belshazzar, so that their days on earth may be like the days of heaven."

Dan McClellan Oof. Yeah, and this is related to something that happens in the Book of Jeremiah, where in Jeremiah, you have a bunch of people who are saying, "Let's get God to send us back home right away. Don't even unpack your bags, and God's going to send us right back." In Jeremiah 29, Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles in Babylon and basically says, "Get comfortable."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Y'all going to be there a while." And then in, I think it's verse seven. Is it seven? Yes, verse seven, "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare." And this is something that has been appealed to by Christian nationalists. We talked about Charlie Kirk appealing to this passage- Mm ... to endorse Christian nationalism, the idea that your Basically, that your religion should be involved in statecraft and in ensuring the success of the government, even though really what's going on here is Jeremiah is just telling them get cozy because- Buckle up ... yeah, because you're not going anywhere anytime soon.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so I imagine that Baruch here is kind of reflecting on that, where in order to try to draw lines of connection between what he's talking about and the scripture that already exists- Right ... that everybody knows about, he's just going to touch those bases, hit those beats so that they can be like, "Oh yeah, this is the guy."

Dan Beecher This felt different from that, though. It just felt weird to pray for the conquering king.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher You know what I mean? Pray for the guy that's oppressing us, not just for us while we're here or for it to be a comfortable stay or whatever.

Dan McClellan But- Mm-hmm ...

Dan Beecher yeah, it just seemed a little weird. Well, and then- Pray for them to feel like they're in heaven.

Dan McClellan And the next verse says, "The Lord will give us strength and light to our eyes. We shall live under the protection of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and under the protection of his son, Belshazzar, and we shall serve them many days and find favor in their sight." And then, a few years after that, 587, 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great comes in and conquers Babylon, and then suddenly everybody's like, "Oh, pray for that guy over there now."

Dan Beecher Yeah. He's even better.

Dan McClellan Great. And Isaiah 45:1, I don't know why I'm confusing 45 and 47. Yeah, it's 45:1. Begins with, "Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes." So Cyrus is referred to as the Lord's Christ, the Lord's anointed, the Lord's Messiah in- Wow ... Isaiah 45. So you have some of that similar, this is our guy language, not just for Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, but also for the guy who conquered Nebuchadnezzar- Right ... and Belshazzar, at least their kingdom.

Dan Beecher So the allegiance- It's just so weird to do that when you're writing so far after the fact.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and I think it really is just an attempt to try to draw points of contact- Right ...

Dan Beecher between- To make it sound like the other texts that have come before.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and to make it seem like, "Oh, this is Baruch. Jeremiah wrote that letter and said the same thing, so now our guy is saying the same thing." And according to, I don't remember if it's in the text of Jeremiah. If any Jeremiah scholars are listening to this, they're going to be yelling at me. But Jeremiah was supposed to have fled to Egypt with Baruch.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan So they weren't even supposed to be in exile.

Dan Beecher Oopsies.

Dan McClellan But yeah.

Dan Beecher Oops. You don't even go here.

Dan McClellan Okay, so- Stop trying to make Baruch happen. So yeah, I think that's the origin of that rhetoric. And yeah, you've got the confession of sins. You've got prayers for deliverance that are supposed to be offered, where you say, "Oh now O Lord God of Israel, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with signs and wonders, and with great power, an outstretched arm, and made yourself a name that continues to this day, we have sinned. We have been ungodly, we have done wrong, O Lord our God, against all your ordinances. Let your anger turn away from us."

Dan Beecher And there's, I've got to say, a lot of that stuff.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It is repetitive. It is just, "Oh, we are not worthy. We are such-" "... pieces of crap. Please don't be mean to us."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "We beg of you. We know that we're awful." And it just keeps going and going and going.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It is the lady doth protest too much. That's not what that phrase means. But yeah, there is an awful lot of that. It makes it sound like the author is trying to, I don't know, the more heartfelt the performance of this, maybe the more effective it will be.

Dan Beecher I guess.

Dan McClellan If you just go, and maybe God's like, "And 45 minutes. Okay, I'll go ahead and answer your prayer or bless you according to your wish." I just think of Evan Almighty. No, not Evan Almighty. Bruce Almighty. Bruce Almighty- ... when he's getting all the emails from all the prayers and- Yeah ... it's overwhelming him.

Dan Beecher It makes me think of the very spot on joke that Monty Python made at one point where they did, "And now to recite the prayer. Oh, Lord, ooh, you are so big." "So absolutely huge. Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell you." That's barely satire of what this actually is.

Dan McClellan Well, all it's doing is taking the sentiment- Yeah ... and then articulating it in a way that is not hiding behind- ... sophisticated, highbrow, archaic language.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan If you translate it into what it would be saying now.

Dan Beecher Down to earth, yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So anyways- But anyway, it is so obsequious.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So Lord God Almighty, God of Israel, yada, yada, yada.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Have you ever yada, yadda-ed repentance? And then we move on, chapter three. It just goes on like this.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then, after verse eight, we get to the poems about wisdom.

Dan Beecher About wisdom. And then I think, as I read it, and a couple of times I had to sort of shake myself out of the stupor that this kind of- ... biblical poetry puts me in.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But as I read it- Okay.

Dan McClellan What was that?

Dan Beecher It seems like it's about "wisdom," but basically, what it's about is you can't get wisdom in the big cities. You've got to just follow the rules of the law- Mm-hmm ... and the end. That's all the wisdom there is. You don't get any more wisdom than that.

Dan McClellan So wisdom is personified. It's this divine gift, but it's really identified with Torah- Yeah ... with the Law. And so basically, it's like, "You want wisdom? There's your wisdom right there."

Dan Beecher "We already wrote it down. What more do you want? Stop looking for other wisdom. There's no more wisdom. We wrote down all the wisdom."

Dan McClellan For Latter-day Saints, wisdom we already have wisdom. We have no more need of wisdom. And this is riffing on Proverbs 8. That's where wisdom is personified.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And was like, "I was engendered before the hills, and I was birthed before God drew the circle of the earth." And then we also have Sirach, chapter 24, I believe, is also related to this. So again, we're trying to create points of contact with scripture that's already in circulation in order to increase the gravitas, the authority of- Right ... our text. And Israel has forsaken wisdom, but then we have the promise of redemption from a figure who comes from on high. I think this is 3:29. "Who has gone up into heaven and taken her and brought her down from the clouds? Who has gone over the sea and found her and will buy her for pure gold? No one knows the way to her or is concerned about the path to her. But the One who knows all things knows her. He found her by His understanding, the One who prepared the earth for all time, filled it with four-footed creatures." Anything more or less than that is of the devil, evidently. "He called them and they said, 'Here we are.' They shone with gladness for Him who made them. This is our God. No other can be compared to Him." And yeah, "He found the whole way to knowledge and gave her to his servant Jacob and Israel, whom He loved. Afterwards, she appeared on earth and lived with humankind. She is the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So we've got a lot of wisdom going on, and then we get a bunch of encouragement for Israel. We've just been like, "I suck. You're the greatest. I'm the worst. You're awesome. I'm awful. You're beautiful. I'm ugly." And then we get the wisdom poetry, and then we get these poems of consolation. It's basically saying, "It'll be okay."

Dan Beecher "It's cool, man.

Dan McClellan You're going to be all right."

Dan Beecher Yeah. "There's going to be some joy. There was sorrow, and now there's going to be joy."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there's still some lamenting. "I was left desolate because of the sins of my children because they turned away from the law of God. Had no regard for His statutes. They did not walk in the ways of His commandments."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Is this how you treat me after all I've done for you?"

Dan Beecher It's the Jewish mother, for sure.

Dan McClellan But, "How can I help you," in verse 18, "for He who brought these calamities will deliver you from the hand of your enemies." Which sounds an awful lot like a lot of the prophetic texts- Yeah ... that's like, "God just beat you down, but God'll be nice to you again. God's going to pick you back up, and everything will be okay."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Not in your lifetime. Oh, no.

Dan Beecher But yeah. Your kids are going to get a nice condo back in Judah- Yeah ... when we're all done with this.

Dan McClellan "Take courage, my children. Cry to God, and He will deliver you from the power and hand of the enemy, for I have put my hope in the Everlasting to save you." I remember learning something called the, what was it called? I think it was called the criticism sandwich. When you're coaching- Right ...

Dan Beecher people. The compliment sandwich.

Dan McClellan Compliment sandwich, yeah. Where you say something nice, give them some constructive criticism, and then say something nice again.

Dan Beecher You're actually more correct. They used to call it a compliment sandwich, but it's a criticism sandwich.

Dan McClellan The thing between the bread- Yeah, the meat is the criticism.

Dan Beecher Yeah ... is what you name the sandwich after. So, you're right. It is a criticism sandwich, not a compliment sandwich. But yeah, that's what we have here.

Dan McClellan Yeah. A nice MLT, where the mutton is nice and lean.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan Right. "I sent you out with sorrow and weeping, but God will give you back to me with joy and gladness forever." And it just goes on like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So you've got a lot more of that, and then Jerusalem is addressed in the vocative, "O Jerusalem, take courage, for the One who named you will comfort you."

Dan Beecher So Yeah.

Dan McClellan And this is the second half. Chapter 5 is only nine verses. "Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of righteousness that comes from God." This is sounding very Pauline. "Put on your head the diadem of the glory of the everlasting, for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven, for God will give you evermore the name Righteous Peace, Godly Glory. Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height, look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west to east." And it continues on like that.

Dan Beecher That's interesting that you say it's Pauline, because you said there's a possibility that this could've been influenced by Paul.

Dan McClellan If it's at the very late chronological window of composition, who knows?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I think it is considered a Jewish composition and not a Christian one. But yeah, the whole "Put on the robe of righteousness, put on your head the diadem of the glory of the everlasting" sounds an awful lot like Paul saying, "Put on the helmet of righteousness- Right ... and pick up the shield of faith," and all that kind of stuff.

Dan Beecher Well, maybe Paul read this. Maybe Paul was into this thing.

Dan McClellan I think Paul was probably into a lot of the more underground stuff. You've probably never heard of it. I liked- It's Baruch.

Dan Beecher Yeah ... Baruch back when it was... I liked his early stuff the most.

Dan McClellan When it was Hebrew, yeah.

Dan Beecher Tell me this, because when I was doing some research, essentially, this is a Jewish text.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But Jews don't take ownership of this. Jews now- Oh, right ... don't include this in their scripture.

Dan McClellan So, this is something that was included in the Septuagint. Now, Septuagint is a designation that is more closely connected with Christian transmission of the scriptures, but it comes from an ancient Jewish tale of the pseudo-Aristeas. And so, it is part of the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was in circulation among Greco-Roman period Jewish folks, probably until second and third centuries CE, as you're having this division of Judaism and Christianity, where Judaism kind of rejects the Greek foundation of what's going on in Christianity.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Judaism, the rise of rabbinic Judaism is kind of based on a rhetorical, not entirely historical, but at least a rhetorical rejection of the influence of the Greek world and a return to the more ancient, pristine, original Hebrew worldview. And so, it takes a while, but ultimately, their canon settles on things that were composed in Hebrew and Aramaic. And so, things that only existed in Greek were overwhelmingly rejected.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, they're preserved in the Greek Septuagint, which was the Old Testament of early Christianity. And there's a great book written by my thesis supervisor when I was at the University of Oxford, Timothy Michael Law, called "When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible," which talks all about how basically Greco-Roman period Judaism brings the Jewish scriptures from Hebrew into Greek. Christianity develops and runs with the Greek scriptures, whereas Judaism goes, "We changed our minds. We're going back to the Hebrew." And so, a lot of these Jewish texts that were either composed in or primarily transmitted in Greek exist and were transmitted and perpetuated because they were used by Christians and not so much by Jewish folks.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so, even things like a lot of the manuscripts of Josephus and Philo and things like that were not really preserved within Jewish communities nearly as much as within Christian communities. And so, this is one of the things that would've been translated into Latin as part of the Vulgate. But then by the time we get to the Protestant Reformation, and Martin Luther is like, " Ew, I don't like this stuff." And so, that gets put into the Apocrypha, and then- Yeah ... Protestants in the 19th century decide, "We don't want to hang around you anymore, Apocrypha. Go home."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, yeah, Baruch is a Jewish text that primarily is preserved in Christian manuscripts, like the Septuagint manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries CE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So yeah, and that's a peculiarity of the development of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. And in fact, when we look at... And I think we talked about this in one of the discussions that we had about ideas about fetal personhood and abortion, where Christianity sticks with the Greek philosophical perspective, whereas rabbinic Judaism returns to the perspective of the Hebrew Bible, abandons the Greek philosophical perspective, and goes back to the Hebrew Bible. And so, the parting of the ways whenever this occurs, in a lot of ways, is a question of who's going to return to Hebrew Bible stuff and who's going to carry on the Greek philosophical tradition as overlaid upon the scriptures.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, let's close this out.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher We're looking at Yeah, I guess as you say, Baruch 5 is short, but again, it is literally the same as Baruch 6, which is the- The letter of Jeremiah.

Dan McClellan Yeah ... the letter of Jeremiah.

Dan Beecher It's all just, "Don't worry about the bad guys, gods. Don't worry about them. They can't do anything."

Dan McClellan They're nothing.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan They can't bake a cake. They can't do any of this stuff.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and it's interesting. You've got four different texts in the Vulgates that are related to Jeremiah. You've got Jeremiah, you've got Lamentations, you've got Baruch, and you've got the letter of Jeremiah, and they're all basically doing the same thing in terms of trying to convince people not to adopt the worship practices of the people around them, because that's what caused the exile in the first place. And it looks like in ancient Septuagint manuscripts, the order goes Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, letter of Jeremiah. Whereas in the Latin tradition, the Vetus Latina, the old Latin, went Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, letter of Jeremiah. So that's the same. Although it looks like Baruch is appended to Jeremiah without a break.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So Baruch is basically the end of Jeremiah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then Jerome's Vulgate has Jeremiah and Lamentations, but then omits Baruch and the letter of Jeremiah. So yeah, different people did different stuff with it and put it in different orders. But, yeah, it's an interesting tradition, and if you want to understand how Christians would've engaged, at least for the first four centuries-ish of followers of Jesus, how they would've engaged these texts, you've got to read Baruch. You've got to see the lens through which they're looking at Jeremiah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And they weren't incredibly critical about where this came from, and why it feels so Greek to them because everything they were dealing with was some kind of Greek.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I've never thought of the Christian-Jewish divide as being linguistic as well as sort of theological. But it does seem like that's as good a place to draw the line as any, almost.

Dan McClellan I think it was certainly a big factor because I think the use of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, became an identity marker for Christians. And in fact, you have folks like Origen of Alexandria, who creates what's called the Hexapla, which is a six-column manuscript of the Bible where he's got the Hebrew, and then he's got a transliteration of the Hebrew into Greek, and then he's got the Septuagint, and he's got different recensions of the Septuagint, and he's got little annotations that he makes where the Hebrew differs from the Septuagint.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And a lot of people were saying that the differences were because Jewish folks realized the Septuagint, their scriptures were too Christian.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And so they revised the Hebrew away from- ... Christianity to make their scriptures sound less Christian.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so early Christians were like, "Those Jewish people, they're changing their texts. They're changing the Bible to make it sound less Christian." And it's the complete opposite, obviously. The Septuagint was translated in a period of heightened Messianism and Greek thought.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so it's really the sociocultural influences that gave rise to Christianity, and that Christianity kind of ran with, that are responsible for the differences, introducing the differences.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so I laugh when people today buy a new translation of the New Testament, and they're like, "They took out the verses." And the unnamed they- Right ... is doing all this stuff. And it's like, "No, they're giving you a more faithful, more accurate Bible."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The verses were added by other people after the fact, and so they're not taking stuff away from the word of God. They are restoring a more accurate version of the quote-unquote "word of God."

Dan Beecher So- I feel like whoever the they is, when you do a new version of the Bible and you make the choice to make it more accurate to what we believe the original text would've been- Oh, you're playing with fire ... and you cut out some stuff.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But what I'm saying is just yell about it. Just scream, "Here's what I'm doing, everybody."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "Here's why I'm doing it. I just want you to know." Don't just release the version.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Don't just put it out into the world and hope that- ... people read the footnotes.

Dan McClellan And I'm sure that there's a degree to which they try to do that, but it's never going to be enough.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because there are always people. As many times as I've made that video and have said, "Look, Matthew 17:21 wasn't in the earliest manuscripts."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "That's why it's not there." Until the sun expands and consumes the Earth- ... there are going to be people who make videos going, "I just discovered this."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And ugh.

Dan Beecher Well, there's good clicks in outrage.

Dan McClellan So- Oh, yeah. Oh, woo. And so conspiracy theory. Well, yeah. And unfortunately, the internet and brain rot and meme culture and all that stuff is just making it harder and harder for people to find good info, good data, and to think critically about it because it's a mess. Well- I'm upset about this ...

Dan Beecher on that note, hey, everybody, share our stuff because we're out here trying to do some data. We're out here trying to do some critical thinking.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, share far and wide if you can.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All right. I think that that's a good place to close it out. Friends, thank you so much for listening. If you would like to become a part of making this show what it is, we can't do it without our patrons. So, if you happen to have some extra coin kicking around that you'd be willing to share, go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and get yourself early access to an ad-free version of every episode, as well as potentially at certain levels, you'll get the after party with bonus content every darn week and potentially other bonuses that we come up with as we come up with them.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But yeah, that would be how to help us out. Otherwise, go and leave us a five-star review wherever you're listening to this. That's also helpful. Sharing, liking, subscribing, all those things on the YouTubes or whatever is always a great thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, we really appreciate that.

Dan McClellan And- Toss a coin to your Data Over Dogma-ist.

Dan Beecher That's right. Tribe of Dan, get in there. We need you.

Dan McClellan And while we appreciate the money that jingles, we prefer the money that folds. Do you know where that's from?

Dan Beecher I remember that.

Dan McClellan That's "Coming to America."

Dan Beecher Oh, right.

Dan McClellan That's when the, "Donations!

Dan Beecher Donation!" You know what the best nation in the world is?

Dan McClellan Donation.

Dan Beecher Donation. All right, thanks all for joining us, and we will talk to you again next week.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.