Connecting with Source

Dan McClellan That's where you get the ritual in Leviticus 16, the famous Day of Atonement ritual, where the priest has to lay his hands on the head of that scapegoat and confess all of the sins of the Israelites over it, and then banish that goat into the wilderness. It's only the rabbis who say it has to get driven over a cliff. That's not actually in Leviticus. Love that addition, but it's not actually in Leviticus. Just gets driven into the wilderness in Leviticus.

Dan Beecher Also, I've seen goats on cliffs. They're actually very sure-footed. I don't know- I know ... that that would work, so.

Dan McClellan They are quite good climbers, I have to say. We need a David Attenborough special following the scapegoat into the desert. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Man, I'm excited. We're going to increase some public, whatever you just said.

Dan McClellan Access.

Dan Beecher Access. We're going to do that thing because we have- We got work to do. We got double the scholars on today's show, so I think that's always a good thing.

Dan McClellan Speaking of which, we have a guest today. This is Leanne Feldman, Assistant Professor of Religion at Princeton University, newly minted Assistant Professor of Religion there. How are things today, Leanne? Things are great. It's finally starting to feel like fall, so I'm excited. I'm not as excited. My oldest daughter started high school a couple weeks ago, and so I'm having a whole new type of existential crisis.

Dan Beecher You're an old man.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it's also still in the 90s in Utah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah, that doesn't help. It does not. Leanne is the author of the recent "The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source from Creation to the Promised Land," which is a wonderful, not incredibly thick book, very accessible translation of what scholars so lovingly refer to as P, the priestly source. And I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to discuss a little bit about Pentateuchal composition, the theories that are out there, and the nature and function of the priestly source for our audience. And thus, we have Leanne here with us today. Just to start, I read through the preface and the translator's note and everything else, but would you mind telling our audience where the idea for this book came from, and why this is an important book for the public to have?

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan So the idea for this book initially came from, honestly, a lot of my colleagues. I realized as I was working on my first book, revising the dissertation, turning it into a book, that I had a good sense of what P was and what the scope of the story looked like and all of its ins and outs, but that a lot of my colleagues who aren't Pentateuchal specialists had no idea. Or they would know some basics like we all know Leviticus is part of P, but I would get these requests from colleagues of mine like, "Could you send me the P story of the plagues?" Or, "Could you send me the P story of the flood?" And so I was making these one-off Word documents, using NRSV or JPS translations, just putting it together and then adjusting where necessary for a lot of my colleagues who were asking for these things, and I realized pretty quickly, gosh, it would be really useful if I could just take this knowledge that's in my head, that I've been working on for a decade, that a lot of us specialists, and I say a lot of us, probably 20 of us in the world have in our head, but for me, that sounds like a lot, and make it a little bit more accessible. So- And then the pandemic hit, and the project that I was supposed to be working on, I didn't have access to libraries. So I was like, you know what? I have everything I need to do this at home, mostly. And so it was an opportunity for me to take time during COVID and just dive into this project since I couldn't work on what I had planned to work on.

Dan Beecher So for those of us who aren't in the world of biblical scholarship, let's go back and start at the very beginning of this and talk about what is P? What are we actually referencing with that?

Dan McClellan Sure. So what we're referencing with that is there has been, for the last, I don't know, 250 years or so, 200, 250, depending on where you want to date it, this theory that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, are a composite text, meaning the materials in Genesis through Deuteronomy are written by a number of different authors that were later combined together by one or more editors. That's a sticking point. I can get into it if you want, but we don't have to. And so one of those sources, one of those distinctive strands, has been identified pretty early on as the priestly source. I actually hate that terminology.

Dan Beecher Do you have a sense of why it was called that? It was called that because of Leviticus, largely.

Dan McClellan Because Leviticus is the only book in the Pentateuch, in my opinion, that belongs wholly to one source, and Leviticus is full of sacrificial instructions, rules around the ordination of the priesthood, laws around purity and impurity, so it has to do with things related to the cult and the priests who run that cult. So that is largely, I think, where it got its name. It wasn't its original name. In fact, back in the late 1900s, early... Or sorry, late 1800s, early 1900s, Wellhausen actually called it the Q source for covenants, which is one of the narrative themes that he saw in it, but that didn't stick, and we instead got the P source. And much as I don't love that terminology, it is what stuck, and so I did keep it for this because that way people know what it is. If you were given the prerogative to rename it, do you have something in mind that you would prefer? Yeah, that was the hard one. I actually don't know what I would rename it. We obviously called it The Consuming Fire. That was more of a work of the editorial team at the University of California Press than myself. Mm-hmm. They wanted something a little bit catchier, so they went with that, and I think it at least fits the source, so I'm okay with it. I actually am not quite sure if there's a quick, easy name that I would name it. If I were taking ancient naming conventions, I might just call it When God Began. Let's start with Bereshit, and start with the first couple of words. That doesn't really capture what the story is about, though. So how would, let's say, one of the people anciently responsible for the collation of this source, let's say they got into an argument with somebody who was a proponent of D or something like that. What would they highlight as the most important parts of their source? What stands out as why it's important to have what we now refer to as P?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So I think one of the most important parts of this source, one of the things that comes through in P that doesn't necessarily come through quite so strongly in any of the other sources, D included, is the idea that the Israelite cult, the sanctuary, the sacrifices made at that sanctuary are really the center of the life of Israelites, and that it's not something that is distant from their day-to-day activities, but that it's wholly and completely bound up in how their community is organized, how their life is arranged, and that the Israelites are fundamentally necessary for the maintenance and ongoing continuation of this cult. And that right there is why I don't like calling it the priestly source, because it makes it sound like it's about the priests. Mm-hmm. And I really think that the priests are a part of it, but they are a means to an end of the Israelites really supporting this enterprise. And by calling it the priestly source, you kind of erase some of the lay Israelite involvement in the enterprise.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So everybody is contributing to the successful execution of all these cultic maneuvers and everything.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And within P, do we see the concern for how this activity contributes to cosmic order, to social order, to all those things, or is that coming from outside of P?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So I do think it's coming from within P to a degree. And here I should say I'm talking about P as if it's a unified whole, and I sort of treat it as a unified whole in this book, and that's a specific editorial decision on my part. P itself is multiple strata written over the course of a few hundred years by multiple different scribes, so not- Yeah ... every stratum of P thinks exactly the same thing. But I think what binds them together is that they all buy into fundamentally the same story- Mm-hmm ... and largely the same worldview, even as they quibble about how that might be executed.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan So with that caveat in place, so some of the cosmic order that P is working with, developing, advancing in this text, it's actually far more pronounced than in some of the other sources that we have. And here it's the idea that there's a place for everything, and there's a particular sequence that everything works or functions in.

Dan Beecher But what's interesting to me is it's not fixed.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. So we see this at first in Genesis 1 with things being put in order on each of the six days, and then the seventh day being rest, and God creates this world that is good. And almost immediately after the creation of that world, it's no longer good. What God sets up in Genesis 1 is supposed to be a well-oiled machine that runs on its own without much interference from him at all, and it falls apart and the wheels come off right away. And by Genesis 6, which comes pretty closely after Genesis 1, and we don't have any of the Cain and Abel or the Adam and Eve story in P, so by Genesis 6, the world is full of violence. The order that God has set up between animals and humans not killing each other, that has fallen apart.

Dan Beecher There's bloodshed everywhere.

Dan McClellan And God realizes very quickly, "This idea that I had about how things would work, it's not going to work. I have to revise." And this is, I think, one of the really unique parts about P, is it's a God that's constantly revising and reacting to what's going on on the ground. So it's not a sort of all-knowing God that knows what's going on from the beginning. It's a God that's reacting to the unpredictability of their creation. And so some of that is actually built into the fabric of how this works. That's actually the impetus for why the cult exists in the first place, is that because of that, P's God decides, "I'm going to have to live on the Earth so I can keep a little bit of a closer eye on them."

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And the entirety of the sanctuary, the tabernacle, the sacrificial rules, the purity laws, all of that- is actually enabling God to live on Earth. That's the how is this going to work? So that's bringing a kind of cosmic order of the separation between holiness and impurity, because God is fundamentally imagined as this holy thing.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The epitome of holiness, not so hard to understand why. But holiness in P can't really coexist with impurity. It's kind of like oil and water, they repel. Mm-hmm. And impurity is not a bad thing, but it's just what human beings are. Just by the nature of living, they generate impurity. So in order for God to exist on Earth, there has to be some sort of pure space. Now, this pure space there, for a long time, the understanding of a lot of the ritual and cult that's going on in places like Leviticus, the idea was that this was cleansing the people. But my understanding is that since the '70s and later, and even before that to some degree, the idea is now, no, this is cleansing the space from the people so that God's presence can dwell there, so that they are not driven out. And we see similar ideas where this sin that people are committing, it generates kind of a metaphysical contamination that pollutes the land. And so it's not so much something internal, interior to people or their spirits, it's the fact that we are generating contamination that is polluting the space or the land, and then either God cannot dwell there or the land cannot tolerate the presence of the people there. Is that a fair assessment of where things stand these days on ritual theory?

Dan Beecher Yeah, absolutely.

Dan McClellan So this was like Baruch Levine, Jacob Milgrom, these are the people in the '70s, '80s, and '90s who really advanced this. Jacob Milgrom's 3,000-page commentary was my introduction to Leviticus as a first-year master's student. Oh, gosh. That's intimidating. I know.

Dan Beecher If you survive that, then you must really like Leviticus.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, yeah.

Dan McClellan That was really one of the things that Jacob Milgrom really advanced, and there's quibbles and disagreements around the finer details of how this works. But by and large, I do think Jacob Milgrom was largely right, especially when it comes to P, proper Leviticus 1 through 16, give or take a few things here and there. Mm-hmm. It gets a little bit different when we get into the holiness code, which is one of those other strata of P that I was talking about, that, that actually does have a little bit more of a focus on purifying the people themselves, and this is one of the things that it extends.

Dan Beecher It's both/and.

Dan McClellan It's purify the space and purify the people in the holiness code. But the fundamental base level of P, the ritual materials really are largely focused on keeping the physical space pure and removing the things, the contaminants from impurity, the contaminants from sin. This is where people often conflate impurity and sin, and this is where we get this idea that impurity is sinful.

Dan Beecher Right. The way that this system imagines it working, at least in P, it's again a little bit different in H. But the way that the system in P imagines it working is both impurity and sin generate this miasmic contaminant, which then magnetically attaches itself to holy things.

Dan McClellan So you think for me, if I'm wearing a white shirt, I will always, always find some kind of dirt. It just somehow magnetically attracts. It's kind of that same idea- Yeah ... but on an invisible level. This is why I don't wear white.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I'm just kidding. I can't do it. So we have this contamination from impurity or from sin. So the mechanism is the same, but the implications are different. So impurity is just natural. It's an inevitable part of human life. Sin is obviously not inevitable. And so the ways that these two things contaminate are a little bit different, but the fundamental premise is that they both contaminate, and so both things need to be purified from the sanctuary quite regularly in order to keep that clean zone, that pure zone, so Yahweh can remain.

Dan Beecher I'm curious, would you talk just a little bit about what kind of ritualistic things they would do to purify these areas?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So I'm happy to talk about what they are, as long as you don't ask me why this is how it works, because- Absolutely no idea. I have yet to see a good explanation for it.

Dan Beecher So largely, the way that it seems to be imagined to work is that it's via the sacrifices.

Dan McClellan So this is largely what sacrifice is for, especially the involuntary ones, the what I translate as decontamination offering, and I hope at this point it's a little bit clearer why I'm translating it as decontamination offering and not just purification offering. So the decontamination offering and the asham, the guilt offering, these two are the ones that really do the work of cleaning, and it's these two types of sacrifices in particular where the priests, well, the regular Israelite slaughters the animal, but the priest manipulates the blood. And the blood of the animal gets smeared on very specific places, depending on who's offering the animal and what subtype of decontamination offering it is. So often it's on the horns of the altar, and there's two altars, so which horns and which altar depends on how severe the contamination is. But the idea is that by putting the blood on the horns of whichever altar is necessary, that is actually part of the decontamination process. This blood becomes a kind of ritual detergent that- removes the impurity, and removes, I would say the low to moderate level impurities. The really, really severe stuff, sort of the worst of the impurities, that's where you get the ritual in Leviticus 16, the famous Day of Atonement ritual, where the priest has to lay his hands on the head of that scapegoat and confess all of the sins of the Israelites over it, and then banish that goat into the wilderness. It's only the rabbis who say it has to get driven over a cliff. That's not actually in Leviticus.

Dan Beecher Love that addition.

Dan McClellan But it's not actually in Leviticus. It just gets driven into the wilderness in Leviticus.

Dan Beecher Also, I've seen goats on cliffs. They're actually very sure-footed. I don't know that that would work, so.

Dan McClellan I know. They are quite good climbers, I have to say. We need a David Attenborough special following the scapegoat into the desert. So I have a question. We've kind of talked a bit about P, but I'd like to situate this within the broader scholarship regarding Pentateuchal composition, just so people can gain a little bit better purchase on the relationship of this to other texts. And you've talked a bit about how P begins in Genesis 1, goes a tiny bit into Genesis 2, and then we pick up some genealogical stuff in Genesis 5. We skip over the bene Elohim in the beginning of Genesis 6, and we go right into the story of Noah. So those other stories come from somewhere. So could you talk a little bit about the other sources that are hypothesized to have been brought together into the Pentateuch, and then we'll get into the controversies about neo-documentarianism and some of the other stuff. I was going to say, which tack do you want me to take here?

Dan Beecher And I promise you, listeners at home, I'm going to try to make sure that we all understand this, everything that's ...

Dan McClellan Because these two can clearly get into weeds that I will never be able to climb into.

Dan Beecher So yeah. We'll get there. I love it.

Dan McClellan All right. This is great practice. I'm doing this with my students in two weeks, so this is great practice. Oh, awesome. Keep me out of the weeds. Glad we could help.

Dan Beecher So yeah.

Dan McClellan I was going to say, there's a couple different ways to go about this, right? The most basic thing to say is that the Pentateuch is made up of three main blocks of material, and I think pretty much whatever methodology you come at this from, a supplementarian methodology or a neo-documentary methodology, we all fundamentally agree about this. There's the priestly material, there's the Deuteronomic material, which is mostly everything in Deuteronomy, but not every single word.

Dan Beecher And then- That's what we're calling D? What we're calling D, yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay. I don't think supplementarians would necessarily call it D, but they would identify the same block of material as- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher largely.

Dan McClellan And then what I often diplomatically just call the non-priestly material. That is everything that's not P and not D.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And the easiest way I can put this is that almost all of the ink that's been spilled over Pentateuchal composition is about that material, the non-priestly material. That's where our greatest disagreements lie. Not to say we don't have quibbles over bits and pieces of P and D.

Dan Beecher We do.

Dan McClellan But most of the disagreement is around the non-priestly materials. So from a neo-documentarian perspective, which is the methodology into which I was trained, and I will caveat this with saying I spent all of my graduate years training as a neo-documentarian. I do think it's the best explanation for the evidence that we have, but I also am very much not an expert on the J and E, and I have only ever used neo-documentarianism insofar as it came to identifying P.

Dan Beecher Can we take just a second to describe what neo-documentarianism as opposed to the other thing that you said?

Dan McClellan Yeah, sure. So neo-documentarianism is a, let's say revision, updating, rehabilitation perhaps, of the idea introduced by Wellhausen, most famously by Wellhausen, in the late 19th, early 20th century, that there are fundamentally four sources that make up the Pentateuch. What he named the Yahwist source, for us J. German has no Y, so in German it's spelled with a J, so that's why we call it the J source. The Elohist source, E. The Priestly source, P, and the Deuteronomist source. Wow, that one is a tongue twister.

Dan Beecher Or D.

Dan McClellan So the idea that there's these four. And these four sources is called the Documentary Hypothesis because the idea is that they were four independent documents- Exactly ... that were circulating on their own and then were brought together.

Dan Beecher Exactly.

Dan McClellan So that these were four somewhat parallel but still rather different stories that were written by at least four different people/groups of people, that at some point, most scholars would say in the Persian period, were joined together. And now it might've happened once, it might've happened a few times. I'll stay out of the weeds on that. But that's sort of the Wellhausen approach, and one of the ways that he initially differentiated between these sources, and most famously, was by the use of the divine name. If it says Yahweh, it's the J source. If it says Elohim, it's the E source. And this is one of the ways that it started to get divided up in Genesis, and lexical considerations of other types of words also became important later on, but the most famous recognizable one is J says Yahweh and E says Elohim. It works like 80% of the time. But the problem is P also says Elohim for all of Genesis. Hmm Because it's a plot point in the story in Exodus 6 that God introduces himself to Moses as Yahweh and says, "Your ancestors knew me as X, El Shaddai in that case, Elohim and El Shaddai, but actually my name is Yahweh." So it's not a foolproof situation. And this is one of the, I know folks who prefer Mosaic authorship, not many scholars, but in the broader public, a lot of folks believe that the documentary hypothesis is built entirely on this foundation that, oh, if it says Adonai or if it says Elohim, then that's a different source, and that makes for a rather brittle foundation, and so it's a way to kind of dismiss the whole thing. But that's really not the strongest evidence that we have for these literary layers. And so yeah, this is largely the evidence that was leaned on most heavily in the early 20th century, and that mostly continental European scholarship, I don't want to differentiate it completely geographically because there are some American scholars who also take this approach, but largely. But the continental European scholarship, especially German language scholarship in the mid-20th century, really rightly critiqued and tore apart and said, "This doesn't work."

Dan Beecher And they're right.

Dan McClellan It doesn't. So in the late 20th century, 1970s, '80s, and really '90s, a movement at Hebrew University, Baruch Schwartz was one of sort of the spear headers of this, sort of revitalized the documentary hypothesis, and this is what we call the neo-documentary hypothesis. Very obvious naming reasons there. But there's a much greater focus on concepts of what makes a narrative and how do we understand narrative continuity, narrative coherence. What are the things that we can point to that show the breakdown of a story? So from a methodological standpoint, neo-documentarians will start with the final form of the Pentateuch. We'll take all five books and I'll just start reading, and I'm making it sound easy. It's really not. So just to be clear.

Dan Beecher None of this sounds easy, I promise.

Dan McClellan Great. Well, I start reading, and then when I get to a point where something that's already happened once happens again without explanation. So the most obvious one is the world is created in Genesis 1, and then it's created again in Genesis 2.

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan There's no sort of reconciling of that. Or when I get two sort of irreconcilable facts. The flood lasts 40 days, or it lasts 150 days. The bird is a dove, the bird is a raven. These are some of the flagship main things that we point to. But there's all sorts of smaller contradictions like that. A character all of a sudden seems to forget something that they had just said or just done and proceeds in a completely different direction. The characterization of a particular character is completely, wildly different. These are the kind of things that we sort of flag, and we start to delineate sources on the basis of what we call narrative inconsistencies or narrative contradictions. So, another famous one is in Exodus, Moses goes up the mountain twice in a row without coming down.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan How's that work? So we sort of look at that. And when you start looking at these, when you start tracking these, you can sort of break them apart and see different strands. That's the really basic way of putting it. And what neo-documentarians argue is that when you break apart these strands without adding any words, without subtracting any words, without changing the order of any words, with a few exceptions, I literally just published an essay with changing a couple orders. But without changing the order of most words, you have very continuous, coherent, consistent stories. And that's what makes it so compelling to me is that you can get these four continuous stories that really make sense, and they actually tell fundamentally different stories, and they're internally consistent in terms of their characterization, in terms of their worldviews, in terms of the particular arguments that they're making. So when I'm talking about J, E, P, and D, I'm talking about four independent stories.

Dan Beecher So are we-- Sorry. This just clicked for me. When you talk about these different sources, do we have ancient source materials, or are these reconstructions based on pulling what we currently have apart? These are complete reconstructions.

Dan McClellan This is all- Okay.

Dan Beecher I had not understood that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I'm kind of dumb, so- ... that's really interesting to me.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And most people don't realize that this is all hypothesis. Same on the supplementarian thing- Yeah ... which I'm happy to explain also. I think a really fun example is, well, for me, fun, for most people, just mind-numbingly dull.

Dan Beecher But- ...

Dan McClellan a fun example is the story of Joseph being sold into slavery. Because we seem to have, again, these narrative incongruities, and is it the Midianites? Is it the Ishmaelites? And there are all kinds of apologetic attempts to kind of gin up background details that aren't in the story to make it all fit. But you can tease these things apart based on these incongruities, and you come up with two somewhat parallel stories, their own beginnings, their own middles, and their own ends. And they tell the story in a different way. And that's one example where it doesn't seem like anything was lost. It seems like someone literally just took two stories and just kind of wove them together. Which I think is very strong evidence that, at least in that case, we have two very clear different sources for this story. When we think about the Pentateuch as five separate books, you point out in the introduction that this division into five books was probably a product of technological limitations where they could not preserve the entire thing on a single scroll. And so it might not have been that all these sources came together to produce Genesis and then came together to produce Exodus, but that there was a single corpus that was being brought together, and then at some point along the line, they were divided up into these kind of macro narratives with all the different patriarchal cycles of Genesis and then getting into the story of the Exodus. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that might surprise an awful lot of people.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So I find this surprises my students all the time, is that the idea of these books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, no scribe set out to write Genesis. No scribe even set out to write Leviticus, and I can get into some arguments with, especially I'm thinking here of Christoph Nihan might disagree with me here. But I think no scribe set out to write Leviticus.

Dan Beecher Instead, what we have is, so when these stories were put together, at least from a neo-documentarian perspective, it's really on the basis of chronology within the world of the story. So, Moses goes up the mountain, and the next thing that happens is he's on the mountain. The next thing that happens is that he comes down.

Dan McClellan So when you have different parts of the story or with the Genesis 37 example, Joseph being sold, when you have two stories that you have, and I often do this exercise with my students, right? I often say, "You have these two stories, put them together, turn them into one story without getting rid of anything. How would you do it?" And very often they do actually use chronology. I don't tell them. I don't give them any hints about how it might have been done, but the thing that makes the most sense is to follow the chronology of the story. And so when we do that, these texts obviously become much longer. Mm-hmm. And so this idea that technology is the limiting factor, I get from a series of articles that Menahem Haran wrote in the '70s and '80s. I think there's 10 or 11 articles or something like that that he wrote in various venues for about a decade. That he talks about and analyzes, given what we know about the scrolls at Qumran, how long could a scroll have been? How long could a physical scroll, how much text could it actually support? Mm-hmm. And so he looks at some of the longest scrolls we have, and he finds that it could support about the length of one of the Pentateuchal books, and that give or take, most of the Pentateuchal books are about the same length. And that we have, I guess I should say, I should correct that and say a little bit more. It's just a little bit more than what the Pentateuchal books can hold because we actually do have scrolls from Qumran that are Genesis/Exodus or Exodus/Leviticus that- Hmm ... contain parts of both books that sort of go over- Mm-hmm ... not the entirety of both, but at least parts of both books. But what Haran really importantly argued is that these divisions between the books are not arbitrary. It's not the scribe wrote until he got to the end of the scroll and said, "I'm going to stop here. Guess I need a new page." Or, "I guess I need a new notebook to fill this in," in sort of modern terminology. Though nobody uses notebook anymore, so- ... it's not so modern. But they're also thematic. So you pick a point in the story where it makes sense, that's about the length of material that would have fit on a scroll but makes sense. Mm-hmm. So what we get is the creation to the Israelites in Egypt. That makes sense. The departure from Egypt to the story that starts in Exodus 1, until they get to the setting up of the tabernacle, what I call the dwelling place in the translation, at the end of Exodus, that makes sense as a unit. We have sort of the cultic rules and the purity laws. That makes sense as a unit. The wilderness wanderings make sense as a unit. So it's sort of grouping almost five acts of a play, if you want to use- Mm-hmm ... drama language, figuring out where those most logically break. And in some cases, it makes perfect sense. In some cases, I would quibble a little bit, and you can see, I put my divisions in this translation often across book lines.

Dan Beecher Okay. My chapters don't quite line up with the chapter or book divisions that we currently have.

Dan McClellan But yeah, these decisions were often made based on technological limitations and based on thematic arcs, so to speak. So you mentioned at Qumran, some texts where you go over the book and include a little bit of Exodus. I don't recall having seen in the manuscripts, but is there a very clear break in the transcription where we get to our book divisions? So the main question is, do we already have our standardized book divisions when these scrolls are being transcribed, or is it something that's in flux even in that time period? I love this question so much because the assumption is that yes, we have standard book divisions, but I actually think, one of the entirely different project I'm working on that I'm not going to get into because it's still incredibly hypothetical at the moment, and I may be very, very wrong. But part of it was looking at sort of the extent of these scrolls. Mm-hmm. And as best as I can tell, there is one fragment, because the thing to remember about these Pentateuchal texts is that they are so incredibly fragmentary.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan There are very, very few pieces that contain more than at most Two lines, three lines. There's a section of Leviticus that's longer that I got to see in person this summer that was incredible. But for most of these texts, we're talking tiny fragments with a few words on them, a couple of letters. So we don't actually have a continuous text. So when I'm talking about these scrolls that are Genesis/Exodus or Exodus/Leviticus or Leviticus/Numbers, these are scrolls that the original editors determined were in the same hand, largely material that looks like it's from the same parchment, so they're calling them the same scrolls. Probably found in the same area. Mm-hmm. So they determined that these are from the same scrolls. There's actually DNA testing being done- Yeah ... on some of these scrolls right now, which is super interesting to figure out are they actually from the same parchment? Can we corroborate some of this?

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan But all that to say, as far as I can tell, there's exactly one fragment that has the last letter of the Book of Genesis and perhaps the first letter or two of the Book of Exodus on it, and there's a gap. And there's a gap.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's not like a line gap, it's just a gap in the line. Mm-hmm. But it is also a change in scene in the story.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan We have fragments very clearly that have chapter breaks- Mm-hmm ... or logical breaks that also have gaps like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, I don't know. The question is, it may have been preserved, but the fact that we have what scholars tell us is Genesis/Exodus, Exodus/Leviticus, and those don't line up, they're not all the same, right?

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan They don't line up at the same start in Genesis and the same ending in Exodus. Some of that may just be because we don't have those fragments.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So I don't want to read too much into it, but to me it seems like it may not have been quite as stable as we think it is.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But hypothesis. So it could still be an open question- Yeah ... if the divisions of the books had become standardized by that point.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We know that they're pretty standard, but it's later, a few centuries- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan into the Common Era, that's when we have really good evidence that they've- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher standardized.

Dan McClellan So, speaking of dating, I know a question that I have and I imagine a lot of people are going to have is you've mentioned that there were several literary layers, that the coming together of P is something that took a long time. When do you date the first attempt to collate what we would call the first layer of P? So what I think the oldest layer of P is?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think it's funny, the more I work on this text, the later the date starts to get. But I do think I would still hold to late seventh, like seventh to sixth century context. I do think we have some material here, and it's mostly me looking at the architecture- Mm-hmm ... described in the tabernacle and really seeing Neo-Assyrian style temple blueprint.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And that a lot of the temple sites that we see in places like Tell Dan, Tell Tayinat, Ain Dara, Tell Arad as well, they all share this kind of tripartite three-room sanctuary plan, which is a very sort of Neo-Assyrian plan that we see from roughly the 10th to the seventh, sixth century, that that's sort of its heyday. So part of it is I'm still kind of clinging to that a little bit and saying, "This is what's being reflected here."

Dan Beecher Maybe.

Dan McClellan I hold it very lightly, but I do think- Okay ... that some of what we see here may be seventh, sixth century, but probably not the majority of it.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Now, once we get into the sixth century, now we're talking about the Babylonian exile. We're talking about a period when there was no temple. Are you of the opinion that a lot of this is really folks who are outside of Israel kind of fantasizing, trying to put together and organize in their heads how they want this all to work, even in the absence of the cult? Or is this mostly coming after they come back and are reestablishing the cult?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So this is a hard question for me to answer because, so here I really love Benjamin Sommer's piece on pseudohistoricism and the perils of dating the Pentateuch. I'm messing up that title, but it has all those pieces in it in some order.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And he makes a really compelling argument in that article that we could just as easily place something like, I don't know if he uses P specifically, but we could just as easily place something like the construction of this elaborate narrative about a sanctuary in the exile with somebody longing for a return, like Ezekiel, trying to imagine what will be when the time comes. We can also very easily place it at the return as a program for the rebuilding, as a program for sort of the ideal in the early Persian period about what it should be, or we could put it pre-exilic and say, "This is how it was," and they're reflecting. So for me, when it could equally make sense in any of those contexts, I don't want to guess which context it's in because it doesn't feel like there is solid ground to do so, and then it just becomes guesswork on my part. And I think it's one of the things I say in the dating section, because as much as I often resist dating, I did write a section in the introduction on the dating But at the end of that section, I said one of the things that's very distinctive about P is that it fundamentally, in the way it tells its story, resists being dated in a way that kind of makes the story present itself as timeless, present itself as trying to defy geopolitical movements and changes in particular situations. So I want to respect the fact that it's actually not giving us any good hooks. There are a few in terms of economics and architecture. We can get a few hooks that at least there's things in the real world that are being reflected. Mm-hmm. But in terms of dating the whole, dating why somebody might have written this, I have no idea. And I wish I did.

Dan Beecher I wish I could go back to that period and ask or watch somebody write this so I could figure out when it was.

Dan McClellan But I think that's one of the things that's both frustrating and beautiful about this text, is that it really does actively resist that. And I think that's ambiguity. The fact that it can work in so many different settings, I think is one of the reasons that Genesis 1 at least does seem to transcend that and seem to function as something that a lot of people understand as just this very poetic kind of absolute beginning that is not easily reducible to a given ideology or historical period. Which brings me to another question I wanted to ask about translation, because you talk a little bit about translation philosophy in here, and there are two parts that I wanted to get your thoughts on. One, I appreciated very much the way you talked about the fact that a lot of the kind of lexicalized terms that we use in contemporary translations are really just kind of incidental lexicalization of overly literal renderings from the King James Version and elsewhere. And could you talk a little bit about why you think it is more helpful to kind of break that habit, how it can render things both more foreign and more familiar to not use the terms that have become traditional?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So one of the big ones for me in this translation was tabernacle, and I've used it I don't know how many times in this interview because it's a- ... really hard habit to break, and when it comes to speaking with other scholars, I just default to tabernacle because that's what they know, and that's- Yeah ... how I can communicate effectively. But I categorically refuse to translate mishkan as tabernacle in this translation. Now, I never learned Latin, so forgive me all those who are listening who do know Latin, but my understanding of the research I did is that tabernacle is a pretty literal translation of mishkan in the Latin, meaning like hut, house, and that's fantastic because that means that when we had it translated via the Vulgate and into the King James, tabernacle really was capturing the idea that this sanctuary, this mishkan, is a physical home for the deity to dwell in. But my issue with using that is that it's become a pretty static term in modern American English, and my aim was to translate this into modern American English. That was what I was going for. And we hear tabernacle, and we think either the Mormon choir- There's that. We think there's churches with the name Tabernacle in the name, or we think some weird structure that I'm not quite sure what it is. It's some particular ritual thing, and I don't know what that is. That's often what I get from students, "Oh, that ritual thing," when I say tabernacle. And that actually takes the structure that is quite literally, in my opinion, the beating heart of the P source, and makes it completely sterile. It makes it something so other that we actually forget, and the word tabernacle enables the reader to forget what it is- Yeah ... because it's not something that we're familiar with. And mishkan quite literally in Hebrew means the place of dwelling. The verb there means to dwell or to live, and the mem on the beginning of it is sort of a type of noun that indicates a place where something happens. So it quite literally means dwelling place. And that really is one of the fundamental points of this story. The reason this exists, the reason we have all of these complicated, to our perspective, complicated instructions, is so that the deity can dwell among the Israelites on Earth. And that is fundamentally what this mishkan structure is for. And so I wanted readers to be confronted with that over and over again, as dwelling place so that you can't forget the central role of this. You can't think of it as something sterile or other, but that it actually becomes hopefully that home, that breathing entity that it actually is in the text.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I think that's such an important part of translating a text with which so many people are familiar is defamiliarizing things so that we take notice of it and then actually dedicate some cognitive effort to figuring out what is this referring to, because yeah, we'll just glide right past the word tabernacle without thinking about it at all.