Did the Bible Steal Its Stories?
Were the authors of the Bible just writing firsthand accounts of events that actually happened? That's a pretty tough case to make. As a matter of fact, we have very good reason to believe that many of the stories of the bible have shared roots with many other stories/myths of ancient southwest Asia and northern Africa. This week, we'll look at many of those stories, and discuss their parallels and origins from around the region. We'll discuss what evidence scholars use to come to these conclusions, and have some fun trying to figure out who came up with what first. Then in our second segment, we'll look at Haggai. It's a book of only two chapters, and those chapters frankly don't seem like much on first blush. Is there more to Haggai than meets the eye?
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Dan McClellan This seems like something that was just appropriated- Right ... by the psalmist, the worshipers of Adonai, who were like, "Like the sound of that. Why don't you shove that in your bag real quick?"
Dan Beecher Right. Let me just cross out the word Baal here.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher I will just add, we'll just say Lord. That'll be fine.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.
Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.
Dan McClellan 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, apart from feeling like crap?
Dan Beecher I am fighting a cold, which is not fair because the weather is warm, and that's not how that's supposed to go.
Dan McClellan No.
Dan Beecher But I'm feeling great otherwise, in good spirits mostly. We just got back from our tour.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher In listener time, that was weeks ago, but- Yes ... in our time, we just barely got back.
Dan McClellan Yeah, just a few days ago. I flew back from DC. You trained on to New York for an arts gallery viewing.
Dan Beecher Oh, yeah. And then- The Met has an extraordinary John Singer Sargent special collection going right now. Highly recommend it. Very, very good.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher But yeah, we got to meet all kinds of people. We met several of the listeners to this very show.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher And what a treat that was for us.
Dan McClellan It was definitely wonderful to get out on the road to meet some of y'all, to hear your stories, and to get to sign some of these books and enjoy each other's company for a while. It was a great time.
Dan Beecher Yes, indeed.
Dan McClellan So thank you to every single one of y'all who came out to see us and to hear us- Yeah ... and in various ways, figurative and literally, to touch us.
Dan Beecher We're sorry it was terrible, but we had a good time.
Dan McClellan Most of the jokes landed, and if they didn't, we just moved right on ahead.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Absolutely.
Dan Beecher Yeah, so we should probably do a show, I'm thinking.
Dan McClellan Yeah, I guess, if we must.
Dan Beecher If we want to have a show, we should do a show. So, we're going to do two different segments as we usually do. The first one, we're going to be taking issue, and the issue we're going to be taking is mythological in nature.
Dan McClellan Hmm.
Dan Beecher Yes. We almost called it Good Mythical Evening- ... as an homage to friends of the show, Rhett and- Link ... his friend Link. Link we haven't met, but we met Rhett.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher And he's great.
Dan McClellan But I used to play the video game Zelda all the time when I was a kid, so that's Link, isn't it?
Dan Beecher Yes, I think so. Link is the character.
Dan McClellan Okay.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Anywho. That's neither here nor there, of course.
Dan Beecher We're off on all kinds of tangents.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher But what we're going to be talking about is mythological in nature, or rather, is stories in nature. And we're going to talk about how stories come from, how they may have been transmitted into the Bible from various external sources.
Dan McClellan Hmm.
Dan Beecher And that's exciting and interesting. And then, in the second half of the show, we're going to do a chapter and verse, and we're going to talk about Haggai, the Book of Haggai, and I read the whole thing a couple times and will require your assistance in knowing why I read those things. So, that'll be great, but I actually am excited about it. I'm looking forward to learning about the second year of Darius. But first, let's take issue. And the issue that we're taking, as I said, is with the notion, I suppose, that the Hebrew Bible, that the Bible in general, is only stories that erupted of their own accord, or that are stories that belonged exclusively to the Israelites, the Judahites, et cetera.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher It's different than that, and this might not be great for some people. Some people might not be happy about this one.
Dan McClellan Yeah, this is an accusation you hear an awful lot from people who are critical of the Bible. They'll say, "Oh, the Bible stole the story of the flood from Atrahasis, or stole the creation account from this, that, or the other, from the Enuma Elish."
Dan Beecher Wow.
Dan McClellan And there are other folks who say, "No, no, you find them in different cultures just because they're true, and they really happened, and so everybody has a version of this story."
Dan Beecher Right. Of course there would be other writings about a global flood. Never mind the fact that only one guy survived it, all the other people, of course they would have writings about it.
Dan McClellan So you have two sides to this argument about where a lot of these mythological traditions come from.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And I think there are three main positions. One is that the accounts that we have in the Bible are verbatim accounts. They are literal, they are historical, and they either originate with or have not been at all altered by the biblical authors.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So the authors from ancient Israel, ancient Judah. The other is that the authors of the Bible were just rummaging around through the pockets of their neighbors after they beat them up and stole these stories from them.
Dan Beecher Right. And the third- Somehow in a nefarious attempt to subsume the other cultures.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Like a- Like, what was that video game where you roll the thing and it gathers all of the detritus in the world, and the ball gets bigger and bigger?
Dan McClellan Man, I don't know what tax bracket you were playing video games in as a kid, but- ... not one that I recognize.
Dan Beecher No, yeah. There are a few of our listeners who are going crazy screaming the name of a, I want to say Tamagotchi, but that's the wrong thing, so I don't, it's- I think it's- ... it's different.
Dan McClellan Anyway.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Anyway.
Dan Beecher A bunch of people know it and love it.
Dan McClellan Anyway.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan No doubt.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And then the third position is that these are stories that are in the Bible because the Bible shares an ideological and ethnic, a cultural background with many of the nations around them. In other words, they're just drawing from a shared literary and mythological inventory or matrix. In other words, it was in the air in these nations, and so this is just the Israelite or the Judahite version of this kind of generic thing that was just around. So it's not that it was stolen, it was just one version of one of these more generic stories.
Dan Beecher Yeah. Maybe as a bit of set dressing for this- Yeah ... to set the scene for this, let's talk a little bit about how, because we have these stories because someone wrote them down.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher But was the surrounding area, was this a generalized area and period? And we're talking a period of probably, what, 1,000 years, for the Hebrew Bible, 800 years?
Dan McClellan Give or take, yeah, about 1,000 to 1,100 years if you go from the earliest poetic fragments down to the Book of Daniel.
Dan Beecher Okay. So, yeah, there's a lot there. But it occurs to me that there would've been a lot of oral tradition as well as just written tradition.
Dan McClellan Absolutely. There would've definitely been oral tradition, and this is why I think you have, and this is what I'm talking about in another video that I posted on my channels a few days ago, where we can't really speak about what's known as an ur-text, a base text, an original autographic text of books like Genesis and Deuteronomy and Isaiah, and the majority of the books in the Hebrew Bible, and even some New Testament books, because what we know as the Book of Genesis has come together over numerous centuries as different traditions were brought together and woven into a single narrative, and many of those would've been in circulation as oral traditions. And who knows how many times different people wrote them down- Hmm ... and how many times those written-down versions may have collided with each other and then been woven together, and then collided with another version or something like that. We don't know the background of the transmission, oral and textual, of all of these traditions, but we know it's probably pretty complex. And this results in things like the story of Abraham coming into, I think it was Gerar, and telling the king, "Oh, this isn't my wife, it's my sister, I promise." And then God gets angry with the king for making a move on Abraham's wife. That story happens twice. And separate from each other.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And then you've got stories like the two creation accounts, where they're just abutted one after the other. And then you've got stories like Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt, where they have taken two complete narratives and basically stitched them together. And then you've got other things where they are supplementing one story with another, or they're weaving things together in different ways. So you've got a bunch of different ways that these stories come together, and we want to try to tease them apart in whatever way we can, but it's not very easy. But yeah, what I want to talk about tonight is, or this morning, whenever you happen to be listening to this- ... you might be on the way to work at 4:30 in the morning.
Dan Beecher There you go. Depending on- Time is a flat circle, everybody.
Dan McClellan Yeah. But what I would like to talk about is where these come from. Are these original to the nations of Israel and Judah? Are they from the shared heritage that Israel and Judah has had with other nations around them? And this is a point that a lot of people don't know about. Most scholars these days would say that the nations of Israel and Judah are Canaanite.
Dan Beecher Hmm.
Dan McClellan That the Bible is just the records of a group of Canaanite tribes that just at one point began to distinguish themselves more aggressively from the other nations that were around them. And really, they're all based on the same kind of ethnic roots.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And this is why we find some of the stories in the Hebrew Bible that maybe we find in the Ugaritic literature, or that maybe we find in other texts or traditions or rituals that come from the nations around ancient Israel and Judah.
Dan Beecher Were the Ugaritic people also considered Canaanite?
Dan McClellan I think they would've been labeled Canaanites had they been around when the Bible was being written, but the city of Ugarit was destroyed somewhere around 1200 BCE. So that's right around the time Israel begins to be a thing.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And so, they wouldn't have been known about really. However, we do have preserved, and I guess this is one of the first things we can talk about. Some people have pointed to Leviathan as something that seems to have been snaked from other traditions. Pun definitely intended- Oh ... because Leviathan is a serpent- Right ... creature, seven-headed serpent dragon thing.
Dan Beecher That's the worst kind. You give me a seven-tailed serpent, I'm feeling fine about it.
Dan McClellan But the head- Seven-legged, I mean.
Dan Beecher Yeah, sure.
Dan McClellan Absolutely.
Dan Beecher It's the head that's the problem when it comes to a serpent.
Dan McClellan Seven eyes, I can deal. But So Leviathan, you have a seven-headed serpent. Well, we have in Psalm 74, there's a reference to Adonai crushing the heads, plural, of Leviathan. And so this seems to reference this multi-headed serpent entity. But we have a more direct connection to the mythologies of other civilizations around ancient Israel and Judah, and I think we've talked about it before on the channel, and that would be Isaiah 27:1. It's about the eschaton, the end times, and it says, "In that day, Adonai will visit punishment with his hard and great and strong sword upon Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, and upon Leviathan, the writhing serpent, and he will kill the monster," hattanin, the dragon, whatever, "that is in the sea." And so if this is original to the actual prophet Isaiah, then this dates to somewhere in the late 8th century BCE.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And there's a text from the Ugaritic literature, part of the Baal Cycle, KTU 1.5.1, lines one through three, where there's praise that is being directed at Baal, the Northwest Semitic storm deity. And it refers to, "When you struck Lotan," or Litan, depending on how you vocalize it, "the wriggling serpent, you finished off the writhing serpent- Ah ... the powerful one with seven heads." And these are my translations of both Isaiah and this Ugaritic text, but the words I've translated wriggling and writhing are direct cognates.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan It's one in Ugaritic, and it is the same word in Hebrew. Litan or Lotan is cognate with Leviathan.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan The difference is the powerful one with seven heads, or the potentate with seven heads, is different from the dragon that is in the sea. However, this was still a dragon. This was still associated with the sea, and as we've seen in Psalm 74, they had more than one head. Leviathan had multiple heads.
Dan Beecher And so- Right ...
Dan McClellan it's pretty safe to conclude that this was a seven-headed sea monster that the Bible is talking about. But this is in a text that was written in Ugaritic, a language that nobody who wrote anything in the Bible probably ever really knew about, and it was written 500 or 600 years before- Right ... the Book of Isaiah was written. So it's very, very unlikely that an author was like, "Hey, I was up north in Syria, and I dug up this text, and then I happened to decipher the language, and I'm just going to quote this text."
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan It's not quoting the Baal Cycle as found in the Ugaritic literature, most likely. But a better conclusion is probably that this is just a tradition that was in circulation, and as far back as probably the 13th century BCE, further up north in Ugarit, and then was in circulation in the 8th century BCE in Israel and Judah. And so this was something that the author of Isaiah drew from.
Dan Beecher And so- Interesting that those adjectives would make it through.
Dan McClellan That this is the wriggling and the writhing serpent.
Dan Beecher Those markers seem so specific. It's fascinating that that has made it through the centuries, through the languages.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher Across all of these boundaries and borders, and that's been preserved the whole time.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and I think the idea, it's very short, is probably just this motif that was just shared widely.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And as Latter-day Saints, we have this saying about with all your heart, might, mind, and strength.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan And that's something that kind of takes on a life of its own a lot. And there are a lot of sayings from the Bible that people just use without knowing they're from the Bible.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan "By the skin of his teeth," for instance, is from the Bible.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan But people use that all the time, and it becomes a tiny little motif that just has its own circulation and its own life. So I imagine this idea that there was some chaotic seven-headed sea dragon that was a wriggling serpent and a writhing serpent and had seven heads, and it was the responsibility of the storm deity to defeat it, was just something that was around in circulation.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so that's an example of something where I would say it's unlikely that this could be referred to as stolen. This is not something where they were maliciously were like, "I'm taking this." This seems to be something that was just a part of their tradition because they grew out of an ethnic and a literary stock where this was just in the air. It was part of their literary and their mythological heritage, so.
Dan Beecher Well, and it occurs to me that stories like these, that the mythos of a region would cross boundaries, wouldn't need to stick with its own people.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher It would have a larger scope as people relate these stories to their friends and neighbors, and then someone goes traveling and relates the story on their travels, and then they're like, "Oh, that's a cool story. I'm going to tell my friends that."
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher Yeah, it seems very easy for stories like that to transmit their way through various populations and just sort of ebb and flow and move and change and just become part of. And then if it's retold enough times, it's now part of your local lore.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And at which point, ownership, to the degree you can talk about ownership, is a moot point.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And there's another one I want to talk about that is similar, because it's about the storm deity still, but this time it probably is an example of someone stealing something from- Okay ... surrounding cultures. So this is Psalm 29, and I think we've probably referenced this psalm once or twice on the show before. But this is where the psalmist is singing praises to Adonai, and they're singing praises to the voice of Adonai, Kol Adonai. It's a sevenfold praise thing, where you have seven different ways that God's voice is spectacular.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And all of the imagery has to do with storm deity imagery. So the Kol Adonai is over the waters. The God of glory thunders. Adonai over mighty waters. The Kol Adonai is powerful. The Kol Adonai is full of majesty. Breaks the cedars. Breaks the cedars of Lebanon. Makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox. Flashes forth flames of fire. Shakes the wilderness. Shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. Causes the oaks to whirl and strips the forest bare. And so you've got the sevenfold praise of a storm deity, and particularly the voice of the storm deity, which is likened to thunder and lightning. But the weird thing is, it mentions several toponyms, several place names.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Lebanon, Sirion, Kadesh. All of them north of Israel, in the territory of another storm deity.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Specifically Baal. So a lot of scholars are like, "Huh, isn't that peculiar?"
Dan Beecher That does seem very strange.
Dan McClellan Yes. It seems like the kind of poem that might originally have been dedicated to the storm deity who actually occupied that region and was worshiped in Kadesh and in Sirion and in Lebanon. In other words, this seems like something that was just appropriated- Right ... by the psalmist, the worshipers of Adonai, who were like, "Like the sound of that. Why don't you shove that in your bag real quick?"
Dan Beecher Right. Let me just cross out the word Baal here.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher I'll just add, we'll just say Lord. That'll be fine.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And so, instead of the Kol Baal, we have the Kol Adonai. And then that becomes one of the very cool, little mythological pieces of poetry that we find in the Psalms. And I love how it starts. Verse one says, "Ascribe to Adonai, sons of the gods. Ascribe to Adonai glory and strength." So it's being sung to other gods as well, which I think is wonderful. And bene elim is the word for sons of gods, and elim is the more basic plural of the Hebrew noun el, which means deity. But you have- Yeah.
Dan Beecher I've heard you use the phrase bene elohim.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Bene elohim is more common in Genesis 6 and Job, and places like that.
Dan Beecher Okay. But this would mean roughly the same thing.
Dan McClellan Roughly the same thing, although more clearly plural, because bene elohim, you could interpret that to mean children of the god.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Namely, the one head deity. But elim is definitely plural.
Dan Beecher Oh, okay.
Dan McClellan This is not a singular noun. This is a plural noun. So it's sons of gods.
Dan Beecher Oh, interesting.
Dan McClellan And when you look in the King James Version, I think it says, "Sons of the mighty." Is that what it says?
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan "Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty."
Dan Beecher Huh.
Dan McClellan Which is a pretty slippery way to get out of acknowledging what's really going on here.
Dan Beecher Yeah. NRSVUE has, "Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings."
Dan McClellan Yeah, and you'll notice there's a footnote there that says, "Hebrew, sons of Gods."
Dan Beecher There you go.
Dan McClellan Okay. But I'm curious about, there are some other translations that can get a little squishy when it comes to this kind of thing. I'm curious where the... Oh, man, where are all my translations? I'm curious what the NIV and the ESV, and those translations- You go NIV, I'll go ESV.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Looking for the NIV. I have the ASV, the American Standard Version. Says, "O ye sons of the mighty."
Dan Beecher Oh, okay. ESV has, "O heavenly beings." O heavenly...
Dan McClellan I think that's a silly way to talk around it. It says gods.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Heavenly beings just means you're too chicken to say gods.
Dan Beecher Right. Well, and the ESV also has the same footnote. Hebrew, sons of God or sons of... Well, no, their footnote- ... is a little sneaky.
Dan McClellan Yeah, that is sneaky.
Dan Beecher Sons of God- Singular ...
Dan McClellan or- Inaccurate ...
Dan Beecher sons of might.
Dan McClellan Interesting. Yeah, and this is based on a very outdated etymology for the word El.
Dan Beecher Oh.
Dan McClellan One etymology is that this comes from a verbal root that means to be mighty or powerful. Now, this has been largely rejected for 70 years or so.
Dan Beecher Oh, wow.
Dan McClellan There was a scholar named Marvin Pope back in 1955 who published a book on El in the Ugaritic texts, and what he points out is that the word elu or El, the Northwest Semitic and Hebrew word for God, you cannot evaluate it any further than that it just means deity. Or God.
Dan Beecher Interesting.
Dan McClellan It's just a basic noun that means God or deity. So yeah, the ESV is appealing to some very outdated scholarship. But we digress a bit. But still, I think it's a fascinating Psalm that was likely borrowed, if we're being kind, swiped, if we're not being so kind- ... from praise that was probably directed at Baal, the Northwest Semitic storm deity.
Dan Beecher Interesting.
Dan McClellan So that's an example of one where I would say, "Yeah, we could probably say the author is stealing that from the nation around them."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so we've got other examples, I think, of things that are being borrowed and they're being responded to. So for instance, Genesis 1, the creation account in Genesis 1, you've got the seven creative periods. A lot of people have noticed some resonances with the ways that the creation is described in Enuma Elish. And there, the Judahites are in Babylon or have just come back from Babylon when this is being written, but they probably were not saying, "Ooh, I like the sound of that.
Dan Beecher Yoink."
Dan McClellan They were probably writing this text in order to engage with the other text, the other tradition, in order to say, "Oh, let me tell you how I heard it, and this is our version." And there are points of contact, but those points of contact are intended primarily to allow the story to gain a little purchase.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan If people are like, "Oh, that sounds a little familiar," but it's going in a different direction, that's still going to allow it to gain a little purchase and allow it to spread a little more within this literary context into which it is proliferating. And so you probably have tehom is the Hebrew word that is for the deep or the abyss, and this is probably cognate with Tiamat, the Akkadian chaos monster, who is split in two by Marduk, and half of the body becomes the heavens, the other half becomes the earth.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan And what happens in Genesis 1? The depths, the waters, the tehom, are split in two, and then there's a dome that holds up the waters above, and then the dry land is able to appear as the depths recede. And so it's not the exact same thing, but there's just enough of a vibe for people to be like, "I'm picking up what you're putting down."
Dan Beecher Yeah. It's not unlike when peddlers of New Age ideas use quantum physic talk- ... quantum physics words to sort of say, "Hey, look at the vibrational blah, blah, blah." And then get all of the quantum physics wrong, but- Yeah ... boy, does it make it sound science-y or whatever.
Dan McClellan And you see apologists do the same thing when they try to appropriate the methods and the theories of critical scholarship and science- Right ... in order to try to prop up their own apologetic ends. They'll be like, "Well, you go dendrochronology when you look at the global flood."
Dan Beecher Yeah. Anyone who, like me, has been to any of Ken Ham's establishments- ... including the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, you see so much, and it always baffles me. I'm mystified by it, but so much really smart science talk- Yeah ... to explain the flood and to prove that the Grand Canyon is there because the flood carved it out, and here's why we know that, and blah, blah, blah. And it's actually so much really good effort went into that, and it's like, the thing that we do with science is we make sure that all of the scientific literature as a whole is taken into account.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher And then fringe things are usually basically easy to shunt aside.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher And so why bother even using the science talk? Just don't use it.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher You could just say the words miracle and be done. You don't have to pretend like this is in the realm of science.
Dan McClellan And I think that's an example of engaging with the authoritative knowledge and demonstrating the engagement by using the words.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan But really what you're trying to do is tell a different story.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And so I think with Genesis 1, that's probably what's going on there- Interesting ... rather than them being like, "We're too dumb to come up with our own thing. Let's just steal their thing."
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan The folks who think of the Bible as the scratchings of Bronze Age goat herders have absolutely no clue what they're talking about. These were some of the most well-trained, and the most intelligent, and the most sophisticated writers of this time and place.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And they're engaging with the literature around them, not because they're thieves, but because that's what you did when you wanted to try to challenge the dominant narrative. You had to engage it and show you could engage it while telling your own story.
Dan Beecher Well, and also there's this sense of, like we were talking about before, these ideas and these stories are not owned by one group.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher They are proliferated.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher And so, it isn't a matter of theft. You can't steal something that belongs to everyone.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher You can just write it your way and see how people glom onto it or not?
Dan McClellan Yeah. It would be like a kid growing up today and going off and creating his own comic book, where it's a superhero who flies and has a cape, but has totally unique powers and a totally unique name and all this kind of stuff, and somebody else being like, "Well, you can see that this is stolen from Superman because he flies and has a cape, and so obvious." And a kid could grow up today and never hear the name Superman, never read a Superman comic, and still be exposed to enough of that imagery and those traditions to come up with a superhero who flies and has a cape, and who maybe is not directly influenced by Superman.
Dan Beecher They could come up with it just from watching the T-shirts on your channel.
Dan McClellan You're going to see some Superman, though.
Dan Beecher Well, yes.
Dan McClellan You might not know who- There's nothing I can do about that. That just comes with the territory. And I just want to share real quick, one other example. This one is a fascinating one. In Proverbs 22 and 23, Proverbs is wisdom literature. We've talked about wisdom literature an awful lot. This is people just waxing wisdomly, I guess- Right ... about how to live a good life, about how to be s- Proverbally waxing, I guess? Proverbially, yes.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Those are big words. But anyway, in Proverbs 22 and 23, you have a bunch of references. "Don't move an ancient boundary stone, or encroach on the fields of the fatherless," for instance. "Don't rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate. Incline your ear, hear the words of the wise, for it will be pleasant if you keep them within you." And a lot of scholars have noted, "Hey, a lot of this sounds an awful lot like this Egyptian wisdom text- Ah ... from several hundred years before, the Instruction of Amenemope, who is not a creature that lives in the sea- Okay ... but is a dude's name.
Dan Beecher I'm just going to say, don't try to steal the thunder of the goofball name thing, because that's the second half of the show.
Dan McClellan But this is probably an example where there is probably some direct influence, where the person who is responsible for collating or compiling or writing these proverbs was probably inspired by some of these other texts that they knew about that were written in Egypt many centuries before but were still in circulation around the Persian period. And whether it was writer's block and they were just like, "Well, I'll just take some of Amenemope's stuff. He's not going to know." Or if this just, again, had become embedded in their literary psyche or matrix or whatever- Right ... is not clear. But there does seem to be some kind of literary influence from these Egyptian texts. So it comes from far away, and like Psalm 104 seems to have some sun god imagery that a lot of scholars would suggest is taken from a hymn of praise to Aten, the sun deity, during the reign of Akhenaten. So, there's an awful lot of that. You can find it sprinkled throughout the Hebrew Bible, where there is inspiration, where it's either from a shared sociocultural matrix, or it's engaging with these traditions in order to try to one-up them or build upon them, or it's just straight-up stealing Yeah ... from the nations that are around them. And it helps if what you're stealing is a hymn of praise to a Northwest Semitic storm deity because- Right.
Dan Beecher True ...
Dan McClellan Adonai is a Northwest Semitic storm deity. The story we haven't talked about enough is how the deity themselves, Adonai, the God of Israel, seems to be taken from the divine profile- Right ... of the existing Northwest Semitic storm deity. So maybe that was the elephant in the room the whole time. That the deity themselves seems to be based on somebody else's divine profile.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan But the notion that the Bible is just pure ex nihilo Israelites tradition, that this was something that was revealed to these authors who had no other influences whatsoever, that's just pure and utter nonsense. They're very clearly aware of, engaging with, and in some cases, apparently swiping the literature from the nations around them.
Dan Beecher Swiping left on, or swiping right on.
Dan McClellan Swiping left. Well, I was going to go the kids route and do a swipe or no swiping, but- Okay ... that's Dora the Explorer, for those who don't have the kids running around.
Dan Beecher Yeah. I didn't catch it.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher All right. Well, I think that that's a great way to look at the...
Dan McClellan Yeah. It is- Great way to muddy the waters a bit and- Well, no ... say, "Just a little bit of all of it."
Dan Beecher It's such a better viewpoint than either the, "Ah, they're stealing, and therefore it's all stupid," or the, "It's all perfect, and therefore you can't-" "They stole it from us."
Dan McClellan "...
Dan Beecher you're not allowed to ever question it," and blah, blah, blah.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher It's just such a better way of viewing the world.
Dan McClellan That's what a lot of early Christians did. They were like, "Plato was trained by Moses," and- ... it resonated so well that they were like, "I think they might have taken this from us."
Dan Beecher So. That's amazing. That's amazing.
Dan McClellan All right.
Dan Beecher Well, let's move on to Chapter and Verse. And our chapter and verse today is Haggai, the entire book.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher Its chapters and verses. Or we could just say book. The book, yes.
Dan McClellan Yes.
Dan Beecher And Haggai, I think I said this at the top of the show. I read it multiple times.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher I'm interested as to- Baffled?
Dan McClellan Oh.
Dan Beecher What's that?
Dan McClellan I said baffled. But no, you said you're interested.
Dan Beecher Well, I'm interested into why you wanted to talk about it, because when I read it, it seemed like it said in 300 sentences what I could say in four.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher So- Which is like the first... I'll just do a quick summary, and then the Dan version, which I think the DBV would be a much shorter Bible.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher And I think we could all look forward to that. But the Dan Beecher version is, Haggai 1 is, "Hey, you guys should build a temple again." And Haggai 2 is, "Hey, your temple looks like crap. Do better." Did I do it?
Dan McClellan Those are the main- ... yeah, those are the things that the whole narrative pivots on, more or less.
Dan Beecher But I will say this. One of the things that interested me was that I somehow accidentally, when I was first looking at this, I clicked on the wrong book. I didn't click on Haggai. I accidentally clicked on Zechariah- Uh-huh ... which is the book directly after Haggai. And they start- More interesting book in many ways. They start almost exactly the same.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher They both start with a time marker.
Dan McClellan Uh-huh.
Dan Beecher Zechariah starts in the eighth month of the second year of Darius.
Dan McClellan Uh-huh.
Dan Beecher And then when I went to Haggai, it starts in the second year of King Darius in the sixth month. So, they start two months apart.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher That's really interesting to me.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And chapter two, starting in verse 10, that's like a month after Zechariah- Oh, okay ... his book starts. Yeah, because chapter one, it's August of 520 BCE.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Chapter two says one month later.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And then- The- ... the end of the chapter two is like two months later.
Dan Beecher The thing that's interesting to me about that is that I always sort of think, in my mind as I'm reading these stories, I always want it to be like there's one group of people, there's one kingdom, there's one prophet, there's one high priest, there's one king, or whatever.
Dan McClellan Uh-huh.
Dan Beecher And I want that to just... And then, one guy dies and another guy takes his place.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher But this is all happening concurrently- Yeah ... and it's different prophets- ...
Dan McClellan and it's different people, and it's- And they don't seem to be aware of each other.
Dan Beecher Yeah. They're very confusing.
Dan McClellan They're not engaged.
Dan Beecher Yeah. And- So, maybe set the table a little bit with- Yeah ... Darius and where we're at.
Dan McClellan Where we are.
Dan Beecher Okay. And all that sort of thing.
Dan McClellan So, this is what's going on in the Persian period. So, 587 BCE, we have the destruction of Jerusalem, we have the forced migration of the people of Judah to Babylon. In 539-ish BCE, you have Cyrus the Great besieges, lays siege to Babylon, and conquers it, effectively ending the Babylonian Empire and taking over, and now we have what we affectionately refer to as the Persian period. So, the Persian Empire has taken over Mesopotamia.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And shortly afterwards, we have Cyrus, and this is praised in the Book of 2 Isaiah, allows the Judahites to return to their land. Some of them go, some of them stay. Some of them are coming back and forth. Because this is now one of the provinces, and it's under the supervision of a Persian governor of some kind, but they appoint locals and things like this. So, we're around 520 BCE. So, this is 19 years after the conquering of Babylon by Cyrus the Great. So, the Judahites have been under Persian hegemony, or hegemony- ... if you're nasty, for 19 years now.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan So, they're kind of settling in, and the story is we're back in the land of Israel, and how are things going? What would we expect to have happened by now?
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Hopefully, we would have the restoration of the temple and everything is flourishing, because this is supposed to be the fulfillments of the prophecy about the return.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And it's supposed to be grand and all of this stuff, and that's what we get into, chapter one, where you said, "Hey, what's going on with this temple?"
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Because they're taking care of their own houses, and their own crops, and stuff like that, and there's a bit of a famine. And Haggai was like, "It's because you all are neglecting the temple. You're neglecting God's house. That's what you need to prioritize, because otherwise, this is covenant rebellion. God's not going to fully fulfill the prophecy unless you're actually following the rules."
Dan Beecher Right. And it does say that. It does talk about how, "You have sown much and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough. You drink, but you never have your fill." So yes, and the idea here is that God is punishing everybody because the temple ain't built yet.
Dan McClellan Yes. It is more or less in ruins, because they got more important things to worry about.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And Haggai's like- This is the most important thing.
Dan Beecher Worry about that.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And I gestured, for those of you who are listening and just have the audio, you should've seen it. Anyway, and then we get into chapter two of Haggai, the other chapter of Haggai.
Dan Beecher Yes.
Dan McClellan And it starts one month later. So you got to imagine your little bikini bottom one month later. You get in there, and they're starting to rebuild the temple, and it's just not as grand as- We should be clear, for one thing, about who Haggai is talking to.
Dan Beecher The governor of Judah is, would you say that name, please?
Dan McClellan Zerubbabel.
Dan Beecher Zerubbabel, which that's super fun.
Dan McClellan Or, yeah.
Dan Beecher Son of- Son of- And that's Shealtiel. Or Shealtiel, as it looks- Shealtiel ... on the page to an English speaker.
Dan McClellan This is where the sporting goods store got their name from.
Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.
Dan McClellan They cut it down a little bit.
Dan Beecher But- So Zerubbabel is the governor of Judah, and Joshua, son of Jehozadak- Jehozadak, yeah ... is the high priest.
Dan McClellan So this is interesting. Jehozadak, that name begins with a version of the Tetragrammaton.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So for folks who are like, "Well, they didn't say the Tetragrammaton," if they said this dude's name, they kind of did- Uh-huh ... say the Tetragrammaton.
Dan Beecher But yeah.
Dan McClellan And Jehozadak, that would be like Melchizedek.
Dan Beecher Uh-huh.
Dan McClellan That means my king is tzedek, which could've been the name of a deity, or it could just mean righteous or righteousness. And this is Adonai is righteous or righteousness or something like that.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan So and Shealtiel, that is the first common singular affix form of the verb shaal, which means to ask. So this is I asked, and then El would be the god.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So I asked this of God would be what that name means.
Dan Beecher Okay. But yeah, they definitely- Not to be confused with Sheol-tiel. No, that would be- Which would be a totally different thing ...
Dan McClellan that would be different. So you've got one that's still around, so you still know people named Josh.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Not too many Zerubbabels.
Dan Beecher No.
Dan McClellan Well, one of the best names is, oh gosh, now I've forgotten his name because I know it's not the exact same, but Isaiah was supposed to name his son Maher-Shalal-hash-baz. And so we have Mahershala Ali is the one actor who's got- Yeah ... most of that name. But yeah, in the 19th century, it was a lot cooler to have bizarre biblical names.
Dan Beecher Biblical names.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Mephibosheth and stuff like that.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So I would've loved to have known a Zerubbabel or a Jehozadak or a Shealtiel or two, but alas.
Dan Beecher I'm just going to name-drop a little bit. Mahershala Ali, when he was giving his Oscar acceptance speech- Uh-huh ... name-checked my own acting teacher as one of his influential acting teachers.
Dan McClellan Oh, very cool.
Dan Beecher So I share a little bit of that Oscar, I think.
Dan McClellan But you don't share any of the infamy of that other actor you've talked about who was- No ... kind of a jerk.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan But did he study under the same acting teacher?
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan Okay.
Dan Beecher There you go. Yes, he did indeed.
Dan McClellan Anyway. So you win some, you lose some.
Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.
Dan McClellan They can't all be home runs. And so we get into chapter two, it's one month later, and the elders who were like, "I was a little boy when Solomon's temple was around," they're like, "That doesn't look like Solomon's temple, man. That's kind of what are we doing here?" And to which Haggai is like, "Hey, come on, man. Remember the promise. God's future kingdom. This is just a shadow of things that are to come," in that day kind of language where we're going to have the new Jerusalem, and everything's going to be happy, happy, joy, joy.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Since I'm in old cartoon- Yeah ...
Dan Beecher mode.
Dan McClellan And so that's chapter two, verses one through nine, and then we get a call to covenant faithfulness in verses 10 through 19, and this is two months later. We have this discussion about ritual purity. In fact, I want to read some of this.
Dan Beecher Let me just...
Dan McClellan So on the 24th day of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Haggai saying, "Thus says the Lord of Hosts, 'Ask the priest for a ruling.'" So he's on the golf course. He's like, "I need a ruling over here."
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So they call the priest over, and he says, "If one carries consecrated meat in the folds of one's garment, and with the fold touches bread or stew or wine or oil or any kind of food, does it become holy?" And this is kind of a theological question. It's like, I've got this holy piece of meat. I stuck it in my pocket.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan If I touch other stuff, does the property of holiness transfer to the other stuff?
Dan Beecher Right. Can this make my stew holy? Because I would like to have holy stew.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Well, who doesn't want their stew to have a little bit of holiness to it?
Dan McClellan What is it? All I said was that dinner was good enough for Jehovah. Stone him. There aren't any women in the crowd today, are there?
Dan Beecher No, no.
Dan McClellan No, no, no, no. The priest answered no. Then- Where'd I go? There it is. "Then Haggai said, 'If one who is unclean by contact with a dead body touches any of these, does it become unclean?'" So now we have the reverse of this. So we've got uncleanliness. Is that the transitive property of uncleanliness? Does that transfer over? And the priest answered, "Yes, it becomes unclean." Haggai then said, "'So is it with this people and with this nation before me,' says the Lord, 'and so with every work of their hands. What they offer there is unclean. But now consider what will come to pass from this day on.'" And the idea is basically that they are ritually impure, they're doing stuff wrong, and they're going to try to rebuild God's temple, which is supposed to be holy.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And it's not that building the temple creates something holy that then transfers holiness to them. They're building something holy while they're unclean, meaning they're transferring the uncleanness to the temple. Basically, you're trampling dirt all around in my temple.
Dan Beecher I don't know if you've ever been on a construction site, but you're going to get dirty.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher It seems like uncleanness is the de rigueur sort of thing there.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And obviously, this is not about literal physical- Right ...
Dan Beecher uncleanliness.
Dan McClellan But yeah, they are sullying the temple. And so Haggai is saying, "Hey, we're going to do this right. If we're going to do this in a way that helps to bring about God's kingdom, this future new Jerusalem that's going to happen, we need to ensure that we are all holy. So we need to be obedient. We need to put behind us all this unfaithfulness." Basically, he's checking them on their faithfulness to God's requirements. And then, the last few verses, 20 through 23, this is the final segment, and it's on the exact same day. So we got August 520, we got one month later, we got two months later, and then we got later that same day. "The word of the Lord came a second time to Haggai: 'Speak to Zerubbabel governor of Judah, saying, "I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms. I am about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations, and overthrow the chariots, and their riders and horses and their riders shall fall, everyone by the sword of a comrade." On that day, says the Lord of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel, my servant, son of Shealtiel, says the Lord, and make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, says the Lord of hosts.'" And this is a weird way to finish this story because it's mainly been about Haggai going, "Come on guys, and- Build a temple ... and then the very end is kind of like, "You're my boy, Zerubbabel." And this has some messianic undertones.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan This future kingdom is supposed to be ruled over by this anointed one.
Dan Beecher And so is- It feels like, and let me just throw this out there.
Dan McClellan Okay.
Dan Beecher If all of that last bit of prophecy had come true about overthrowing the throne of kingdoms and destroying the strength of kingdoms and the nation, and blah, blah, blah, the chariots and the riders, and blah, blah, blah, it feels like we would've heard more about Zerubbabel. If he had been raised up in this grand way that Haggai seems to have promised.
Dan McClellan Yeah. But really all you hear about him is that the temple that was built was named after him.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Zerubbabel's Temple. The Second Temple is known by a number of folks as Zerubbabel's Temple, at least up until the period when Herod kind of renovated everything. Well, you have the Hasmonean kingdom, it gets desecrated, it gets rededicated. They do some construction work, and then Herod does some construction work.
Dan Beecher So there are constantly people doing work on it, but- And then finally they call it the Delta Center again.
Dan McClellan And I think 519 is the traditional dates of the dedication of the Second Temple.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan So it happens shortly after this. But yeah, this promise seems to suggest something big should've happened- ... toward the end of the sixth century BCE, but no, Persia's going to be in charge for a while, down until around the second half of the fourth century BCE. So it's going to be still another 190 years or so before the Persian kingdom gets overthrown by Alexander the Great. So yeah, this is kind of hinting at something messianic that doesn't really seem to come to pass.
Dan Beecher Can I propose an alternate interpretation?
Dan McClellan Propose away.
Dan Beecher I think that what the lesson we are to learn from this is, if you want to get a big project done, and I think I've seen this many times in modern day. Let's face it, this is a real estate deal. If you want to get a big project done, what you do is you promise the governor that he's going to be famous, he's going to be the biggest thing ever. Everybody's going to love you.
Dan McClellan They're going to love your big, beautiful temple.
Dan Beecher Yeah. Look, everyone's going to think you're the biggest thing that's ever happened. You butter them up as much as you can, and then you get the gold and the silver for the temple. Otherwise, he's going to give up his gold and silver? No, he's not going to do it.
Dan McClellan And we didn't cover Haggai's name.
Dan Beecher No, we didn't.
Dan McClellan I just remembered. Haggai seems like a masculine plural ... version of chag, which is a pilgrimage or festival or something like that.
Dan Beecher Oh.
Dan McClellan And it might have a first common singular pronominal suffix. It might be like my celebration or festival or something like that. Exactly what it means is debated, but it could indicate that Haggai might've been born during one of the big festivals that was celebrated in- So that's- ... in Israel or something like that ...
Dan Beecher and that root word is probably the same root word as the Arabic Hajj, which is the- Pilgrimage ... the journey, the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Dan McClellan There is probably some etymological link there, but my Arabic is muy malo, so I'm not- Okay.
Dan Beecher Fair enough.
Dan McClellan But, yeah, it is... Yeah, I forgot what I was going to say. I had something, and now I don't.
Dan Beecher Well, I derailed you.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher And that is my job.
Dan McClellan It was a little nudge. It was a little nudge.
Dan Beecher But yeah.
Dan McClellan But that is, yeah, Haggai is... And like I said, one of the re- I don't remember if I said this, but like I was thinking, one of the reasons I wanted to go over this is because this is one of those texts that a lot of people just don't know about.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan You could stop most people who say they read the Bible a lot and be like, "Tell me about Haggai." And they'll be like, "Who?
Dan Beecher No." Ah, he was a prophet, I'm pretty sure.
Dan McClellan But now you know. It was about the cleanliness of the people, their priorities related to the temple, looking forward to the new Jerusalem and God's kingdom, making sure they were pure enough, ritually clean enough to be able to participate in the building of this temple, and then some weird promise at the end that Zerubbabel was going to be the next hot thing that doesn't seem to have come to pass, but- But they did get a temple out of it.
Dan Beecher That's the most important thing They did get a temple.
Dan McClellan Second temple.
Dan Beecher You say what you got to say to get that temple.
Dan McClellan Which lasted until 70 CE in some form or another. It's the temple of Theseus to some degree because it was being renovated. It was being built over again. It had different things taken from it, different things added.
Dan Beecher Not unlike the temple here in downtown Salt Lake City, which is currently- Yeah ... under deep renovation also.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Didn't they say they were going to be done in 2025?
Dan Beecher They did say that.
Dan McClellan I think they originally said that. I think now April 2026 is when they're like, "That's when we're going to have our soft opening celebration," or they're going to have- There you go.
Dan Beecher Yeah, so. And behold, Zerubbabel said to the people...
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Okay. Well, thank you for that. This has been an interesting journey- ...
Dan McClellan into Zerubbabel the name.
Dan Beecher All right, friends, if you would like to become a part of making this show go and be one of our grand patrons, and they're all grand, and we love them deeply- Mm-hmm ... you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and donate the amount that you would like as a monthly donation. Donors can get an early and ad-free version of every episode, as well as the after party, which is you and me, Dan, doing some extra bonus content every week. So head on over there if you have the dosh to do it. If you don't have the coin for that, then please leave us a five-star review on whatever thing you're on that you're listening to, and share us to all your family and friends.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher If you want to contact us, it's contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. We'll talk to you again next week.
Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.
