God's Big Fish Story

Dan Beecher I had to read this six or seven times, and I still don't have a handle on what the Lord is trying to say here.

Dan McClellan The idea is that Jonah is so upset about the destruction of such a small thing, but is looking forward to the destruction of such a big thing. And God's like, "You really want all these people to die, and also this cattle?"

Dan Beecher And the cows. What about the cows?

Dan McClellan Yeah. What about the cattle, Jonah? You never think of the cattle. Hey, everybody. I am Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we seek 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 you doing today, Dan?

Dan Beecher It's giant fish day- All right ... here on Data Over Dogma, so I'm happy about it. The deadliest- I once- ...

Dan McClellan of catches ...

Dan Beecher I once caught a fish this big. Or should I say it once caught me? Or should I say it once caught me?

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're going to be talking some Jonah stuff.

Dan Beecher And look, here's what today's episode is about. You just said it off the air. It's about ways that God is characterized in the Bible that might surprise you.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, stay tuned because we're getting into, this guy, this character of God is not one character.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You'd like to talk, Dan, about the univocality, the non-univocality of this book, and- Right ... it becomes clear the more you read it. These different authors have a different view of who and what God is, and we're going to be delving into it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. This is something that I've said a handful of times. There is no God of the Bible in the sense that there are numerous different gods of the Bible, and we're going to talk about two very different representations in the Book of Jonah and also in the Book of Genesis.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, let us dive into that with chapter and verse. So, I think we should start. The Book of Jonah is short. It is mercifully short.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher It is four chapters, very readable, and I've got to say, I read it multiple times in prep for the show, and the thing that we all remember and the reason that we all know this story is because you tell it to kids because it's got this fish thing in the middle. It's got this thing where he gets gulped up by a fish. But that's not the interesting part of this story for me.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher It's fascinating.

Dan McClellan Yeah, okay.

Dan Beecher He lives for three days inside of a fish. That's crazy. But the relationship between Jonah and God, and how they both act in this thing, it's got me baffled, man.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's got me baffled. So, let's go through it. I'm going to launch us in. We start, basically, there's no act one to this story. We are diving into the middle of the story because suddenly, and I literally went to the book beforehand just to see, is there any setup to this at all?

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher So, verse one says, "Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, 'Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.'"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Now, I need to know, do we have any previous references to wickedness of Nineveh? Where is Nineveh? Where is Jonah? Who's what? It literally starts very much in media res. I don't know what's going on.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there's a reason for that. So Jonah, the son of Amittai, is mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Which would purport to set this story pretty early in the first millennium BCE. Now, the problem with that is that it mentions Nineveh, the great city, which was made the capital of Assyria long after- Okay ... the Book of 2 Kings places Jonah, the son of Amittai. So, we have an Assyrian king, I believe it was Sennacherib, who moves the capital of Assyria to Nineveh. And so the story seems to be written from a much later perspective, looking back at claiming to be from a much earlier time.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Now, the Assyrians were just the ultimate villains in the time period in which this story was probably written, which is probably going to be 7th century at the very earliest, but probably a little later than that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan One of the things that Sennacherib did was invade the Northern Kingdom of Israel and come down into Judah during the reign of Hezekiah. And this just totally decimated the land, and Sennacherib was ultimately unsuccessful in taking the capital city of Jerusalem. The King Hezekiah had thrown off a vassalage. Up to that point, they had been paying a tribute to Assyria, and then Hezekiah said, "Not going to do it. Wouldn't be prudent." And so Sennacherib came through, and the idea is just devastate the whole land and then say, "Pay me my money." And there's a A story that is memorialized in some wall reliefs, so imagery carved into a wall in a palace in Nineveh that commemorates the taking of a city called Lachish, which was the second most populous, most important city in Judah in that time period, second only to Jerusalem. And that was Sennacherib's base of operations. But in this wall relief, we can see representation of the Assyrian army laying siege to the city of Lachish, and they have siege engines, they have archers, they have people slinging rocks, and then the people of Lachish are throwing down torches, they're throwing down rocks. They're trying to fend them off, and the Assyrians are decapitating people. The Assyrians are skinning people. The Assyrians are impaling people on pikes. The Assyrians are taking the survivors and marching them back to Assyria to be scattered around the Assyrian Empire so that basically their ethnic identity is destroyed.

Dan Beecher This all sounds very unpleasant. I'm just going to say it.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and you can see these wall reliefs have been, for lack of a better word, stolen and now appear in the British Museum. But you can go walk through, and you can see Sennacherib's representation of basically brutalizing this city and these people.

Dan Beecher Oh, I think I have seen that.

Dan McClellan Have you?

Dan Beecher Now that I think about it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You're kind of walking around. There's some corners and a lot of flat- Yeah ... and a lot of it's kind of fragmentary. And so this representation of Sennacherib is this brutal dictator who comes through and just murders indiscriminately and mercilessly. This is how the Assyrians were thought of in this time period.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So the idea that God would come to a prophet and say, "Hey, guess what? Destruction to Nineveh," would be an exciting time.

Dan Beecher Okay, but that's not what happens. That's not what happens. Because Jonah is told to go to-- First of all, this is the worst job you can be given by God.

Dan McClellan I understand.

Dan Beecher God says, "Go to the place that you hate the most and tell everybody there that they are wicked," which in general, people don't respond well to. I'm just going to say, I wouldn't want to have to go do that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And Jonah doesn't want to do it either, and literally runs away from God.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher He flees to Tarshish, which when I looked it up, a lot of maps had Tarshish located in Spain?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So Tarshish, it's a word that means sea.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so there are some people who try to identify it with specific locations, but I think it's probably kind of a Timbuktu kind of- Okay.

Dan Beecher Just a- ...

Dan McClellan this place far away ...

Dan Beecher a stand-in for not here.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But he's trying to get out from the presence of the Lord.

Dan McClellan Yes. And that's a good way to put it because this is a specific literary genre that we're talking about. We're talking about a prophetic text, and in prophetic text, the first thing you do is situate the prophet in a specific time period, and then you have the call, the prophet's call. And usually, that is either taking place in the temple or results in the prophet going up to the temple. You always went up to the temple- Mm ... even if it was downhill, because it was spiritually higher.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so if you're in Israel, you go up to Jerusalem. If you're in Jerusalem, you go up to the temple. But what does Jonah do? Jonah goes down.

Dan Beecher Mm. He went down to Joppa.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He went down into the ship, and then when he's in the ship, he goes down into the bottom of the ship.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So Jonah is the anti-prophet. Jonah is doing the opposite of what this genre typically represents the prophet doing. Instead of going up to the presence of God, Jonah is going down to escape the presence of God.

Dan Beecher So- I'll tell you what, all that going down, that is a good way to get yourself caught in a fish- ...

Dan McClellan if you're not careful.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan As the great poet once said.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And so he's doing everything exactly opposite of what is expected. So this generates some narrative tension. For folks who are familiar with the prophetic genre but are hearing the story for the first time, this is a bit of a head-scratcher.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan What's going on? This is the big leagues. This is the dream assignment, to go tell the Assyrians that God is coming for them. And so we've got some narrative tension that is not going to get resolved until the very end.

Dan Beecher Now, I'm going to jump in here and ask one thing.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher We have talked about how each region, each people, have their own deity in this time and place.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So presumably, the Assyrians have their own god.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher The Ninevites- ... have their own god. So when Jonah is meant to go there and call them to account, he's going on behalf of a god that isn't their god. Is there a tension there?

Dan McClellan Well, for the audience, there would not have been because this is probably coming from a time period when they accept Adonai as the god of the whole earth.

Dan Beecher Okay. So we've gotten that far.

Dan McClellan I think that's probably likely, and if that's the case, then it's later than the seventh century. It's more like late sixth century, maybe fifth century. I think that makes the most sense of that notion, but at the same time, you do have some notion of gods kind of beating up on other nations. However, they could not have gotten away with saying, "Our god beats up on Assyria When Assyria was actually powerful because that- Right ... would be absolutely laughable because- That wouldn't make sense ... Assyria owned these folks. So either this was something intended to be kind of thumbing the nose at Assyria, kind of internally just making fun of them, or it was written after Assyria was gone, had been defeated by the Babylonians.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But normally, yeah, that would be the situation. That's Asher's territory. That's Asher's purview.

Dan Beecher Well, we don't want to step on Asher's toes.

Dan McClellan No, absolutely not.

Dan Beecher So anyway, we're on a boat now. We're running away from our God. We being, I guess we are now all Jonah.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And there's a big tempest. All the sailors are freaking out. Meanwhile, somehow Jonah is a very heavy sleeper and is sleeping through everything. They have to wake him up. Whose fault is this? They actually draw lots to see whose fault it is. Apparently, that's a good way to determine who the problematic one is on the boat.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And it turns out to be Jonah- Yep ... who eventually admits that, "Yes, I'm running away from God." And they're like, "Well, what do we do?" And he has an interesting solution to the whole thing. It's not what would've jumped immediately to my mind. But in what becomes a theme for Jonah, he says, "Kill me now."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher In a sense. He says, "Throw me into the sea, and it will quiet down for you."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which is an interesting thing to do. It scares the crap out of the sailors because the sailors, and they've all prayed to their own gods to no avail. Now, I guess they pray to Jonah's God, who has- Yep ... caused all of this, to say, "Hey, don't get mad at... He's telling us to throw him off. Don't get mad at us. We shouldn't get into trouble just because we threw the guy off when he told us to, okay?" That's how I interpret. Is that about right?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. "Please, O Lord," they say in verse 14, "Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man's life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you." Presumably meaning, "You're the one that caused this storm. We're just trying to appease you."

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, it sounds like that's the last option. He's like, "Throw me overboard," and they're like, "Let's try to make it to land." And then they're like, "Look, God, whatever you're doing, we're not a part of this. And now, please don't get upset at us for doing this."

Dan Beecher Yeah. It also seems like, "Throw yourself overboard, man. Don't put this on us." But they do it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He's just sitting there like, "Okay, I'll just stand over here."

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly. But yes, they do it. They throw him overboard, and then the seas are calm, and that's fine. And then the fish thing happens. Jonah is swallowed up by a presumably giant fish.

Dan McClellan The Hebrew is dag gadol, which just means great fish.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So some kind of big fish.

Dan Beecher I've seen the Mediterranean. It doesn't generally support very large fish, but okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We have a very large fish that eats Jonah, and he's in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher That's a long time to be in a fish. Long time to be going without oxygen.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And swimming around in digestive fluids and whatever, but he seems to be okay. It gives you time to come up with a very long, weird poetic prayer- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan which he delivers. Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher As I read through it, I didn't see anything that was too interesting, although now that you've talked about going up to the temple, part of the prayer is, "Shall I look again upon your holy temple?" So now we've got him sort of yearning once more to be at the temple, which is interesting. And then eventually, the prayer is good enough, and the Lord speaks to the fish, and it hurks him out onto the dry land.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And he says, "I will sacrifice to you. I will do what I have vowed," basically. "I'll do what you told me to do since- Yeah ... I'm a prophet. That's why I get the big bucks, so I'm going to do what you say." And Adonai speaks to the fish and says, "Hey, induce yourself to vomit Jonah up." And he vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. And one interesting thing about this story is that the fish actually changes sex.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan It's originally referred to as a dag, which is just the masculine form of the noun fish. But at the end of Jonah 2:2, it refers to the belly of hadagah, which would be the feminine form of that noun.

Dan Beecher Huh.

Dan McClellan And then at the end of the story, the fish is masculine again. So that's something that has caused some commentators a little bit of acid reflux- Yeah ... over the centuries.

Dan Beecher What's going on? Well, for anyone who wants to deny trans identities, we refer you to Jonah's fish. Yeah, Jonah's fish.

Dan McClellan There you go.

Dan Beecher So anyway, when we last left our hero, he was vomit, and he was on dry land again.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And headed back to Nineveh, or headed to Nineveh, to which presumably he had never been before.

Dan McClellan Most likely he had never been there. And I'm looking for the message that God says to declare to Nineveh. So this is Jonah 3:4, "At the end of 40 days, Nineveh will be overthrown."

Dan Beecher Period.

Dan McClellan Okay. So this is not a conditional prophecy.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan This is not, "Repent, lest ye be overthrown." This is, "40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown." So, we've got a very definitive black-and-white prophecy here.

Dan Beecher Yep. So Jonah 3:2, just right before that, says, "Is the Lord saying, 'Get up, go to Nineveh, and tell it the message that I tell you?'" So we can assume that that message, that 40 days thing that Jonah is now walking through the streets of Nineveh shouting to people- Yep ... is actually the Lord's message, that 40 days is coming, you better repent.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And that raises an interesting point. We are likely to assume that that was precisely the message, but as we're going to see, maybe this is Jonah's editorializing.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Because- Yeah, there is some question there.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I just want to point out, the next thing that happens in this story is maybe the most remarkable thing I've ever read in the Bible. Because you read in the Bible a lot about people being called to repentance, and almost every time you hear, the people are like, "Nah. No, thanks."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "This guy again?" "We're doing good. We're fine." And it doesn't end well. The whole world gets flooded, or all of the firstborn of your people are killed, or whatever. But apparently, Nineveh was in a contrite moment, because everybody, and I do mean everybody in Nineveh suddenly goes, "Oh, God's mad at us? Well, darn. Let's just completely repent."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And they all do.

Dan McClellan They declare a fast, they put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. The king hears about it, gets up from his throne, took off his robe, put on sackcloth, sat in ashes. This is prototypical Israelite mourning convention.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so everybody hears Jonah's message and takes it to heart.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Apparently none of them knew. They were, "Wait, we were being wicked?

Dan McClellan Us?

Dan Beecher Are you sure? Oh my gosh. You guys."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then we have this decree issued by the king. "No human or animal, cattle or sheep, is to taste anything. They must not eat, and they must not drink water. Every person and animal must put on sackcloth and must cry earnestly to God." I'm imagining- "And cry earnestly to God, and everyone must turn from their evil way of living and from the violence that they do." And then here's the interesting part. "Who knows? Maybe God will relent and change his mind."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "He may turn from his fierce anger so that we do not perish."

Dan Beecher First of all, I want everybody to imagine all of those cows and everything in sackcloth, because that's- Yeah, and crying out to God.

Dan McClellan Their owners going, "Cry out to God."

Dan Beecher "Moo to God."

Dan McClellan "Moo."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher If there's one thing we can say about omnipotence and omniscience, it's kind of that you don't really have to change your mind ever, because you know everything that's going to happen.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And we actually have, in the Book of Numbers, in chapter 22 or 23, I forget exactly where the verse is, but in response to Balak pleading with Balaam to change his prophecy and his curse, Balaam says, "God is not a man that he should lie or a human, that he should change his mind. He cannot go back on what he decrees."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so the Ninevites here are like, "Eh, maybe God will change their mind." And then Jonah 3:10, "When God saw what they did, how they turned away from their evil ways," and I assume this means they successfully got their cattle to dress in sackcloth and cry out to God.

Dan Beecher I don't see how you can interpret it any other way.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That goes without saying. "God changed his mind about the evil, the calamity that he said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it." And that word for change his mind is the word that is nakhum, is the verbal root, and it is translated to repent frequently when it's used in reference- Oh, that's right.

Dan Beecher God repents ...

Dan McClellan yeah. Repents or changes their mind.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so this explicitly has God going, "Good point.

Dan Beecher Okay."

Dan McClellan Okay. "I am changing my mind."

Dan Beecher "My bad, you guys. I was just mad."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "I was just a little bit upset."

Dan McClellan But this brings us to the money shot. This is where we get the big reveal. We get into Jonah 4, "But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Then he prays to God, 'Oh Adonai, is this not what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.'" So what Jonah is saying is, "You want to know why I ran the opposite direction? You want to know why I did not take the dream assignment to go preach destruction to Nineveh? It's because I knew You would forgive them, and I would rather die than watch the Assyrians be forgiven.

Dan Beecher It's so crazy to me. When I first read this, I had to Google, "Why is Jonah angry?" Because it didn't make any sense to me- Yeah ... that he succeeded. He went, he called them to repentance. Somehow, he was so effective that they all believed him and did it. They actually did it, which is shocking.

Dan McClellan And then he's like- And you've got to imagine it was pretty half-hearted on his part, too.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan He was probably like- I don't know.

Dan Beecher He's- ...

Dan McClellan "Repent or something."

Dan Beecher Plus, he smells like fish. It was a bad time, but he's so effective, he actually achieves the goal that is set out before him, and he is furious about it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Just, "I want to die. Just kill me now. If you're going to forgive them and be nice to them, just kill me, because I don't want any part of it."

Dan McClellan And I think it's an interesting story about, because we're doing a couple things here. We're taking the prophetic genre and we're turning it on its head, and we're doing everything the opposite of what's expected. It's like starting out a story with once upon a time, but then it's like "Romeo and Juliet" with Leo DiCaprio, where it's like, "This is not once upon a time, this is 1996."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it's flipping all the expectations on its head. But then we're also including a bit of satire, because Jonah's like, "Tell your cattle to pray," whatever, "to God." So we're also engaged in a little comedy, but then it's a lecture on the merciful versus the vindictive God. God starts off all vindictive, and you don't know why Jonah's upset about this, but then you get the reveal at the end. Jonah knows that God ultimately is merciful, and knows- Yeah ... that, "If I go do this, God is going to forgive them, and I'm going to have to sit there and watch these people who are responsible for so much wickedness in our world, watch them be forgiven." And he would rather die than watch that happen.

Dan Beecher And speaking of watching- Mm-hmm ... we get to a booth. He goes to the one side of the town and makes himself a booth. I don't know what that means. I don't know what booth means in this context.

Dan McClellan Well, the Hebrew word is sukkah, and it's where we get the Sukkot- Oh, okay ... the festival of booths.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So yeah, it's basically just using branches and stuff like that to create a little shelter.

Dan Beecher Well, but it's not good shelter, because the sun is beating down on him, and the Lord decides to help out. And I've got to say- Kind of.

Dan McClellan He teases him a little bit.

Dan Beecher He's like- Yeah, exactly. I've got to say, this is one where I greatly prefer the King James version- Okay ... to any other version, because the KJV says that it's a gourd. The Lord makes a gourd grow up over his head- Mm-hmm ... which I think is delightful. I don't know why there's a gourd. How big is this gourd that the Lord has prepared?

Dan McClellan Well, and it's got, let's see, the Hebrew word there is qiqayon, and the yon ending there can be a diminutive. So it could be like a little gourdette.

Dan Beecher A little gourd? So it's like- It's nice.

Dan McClellan Yeah, it's like adding ito to the end of a Spanish word.

Dan Beecher So- Oh my gosh. Well, the NRSV has a bush. It says that God makes a bush grow to shade him and save him from his discomfort. I just like the idea that it's a gourd. I'm sticking with the KJV on this.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So anyway, so God makes a gourd grow, and then Jonah is nice, is pleased by the gourd, because it's a nice shade structure for him.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And then that night, God ruins the gourd or the bush with a worm. Just makes a worm go in and I guess eat the gourd?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And somehow it ruins that, so the next morning there is no more shade, and again, the sun rises, and Jonah, it's so hot, he passes out. And then he gets mad again and says, "You know what?

Dan McClellan Kill me."

Dan Beecher Again.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This is maybe the most suicidal guy in all of the Bible.

Dan McClellan I'm not sure. Well, I think this part is kind of poking him a little bit, being like, "Look at this whiny little brat." He's like, "Oh, it's sunny.

Dan Beecher Kill me now.

Dan McClellan It's better for me to die."

Dan Beecher He's probably very pale. He was one of those Judeans that's super redhead, very fair.

Dan McClellan And then God says, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?" And he said, "Yes, angry enough to die." Then Adonai says, "You're concerned about the bush for which you did not labor, and which you did not grow, it came into being in a night and perished in a night, and should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also a bunch of cattle?"

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Have mercy on the cattle, Jonah."

Dan Beecher And literally that's the end of the book.

Dan McClellan And that, yes, thus endeth the Book of Jonah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And also much cattle. Honestly, again, I had to read this six or seven times in different translations- Uh-huh ... and I still don't have a handle on what the Lord is trying to say here, which is something along the lines of, "Look, you How is he relating the bush/gourd to Nineveh? I am not making that metaphorical leap.

Dan McClellan The idea is that Jonah is so upset about the destruction of such a small thing, but is looking forward to the destruction of such a big thing, and God's like, "You really want all these people to die, and also this cattle?" And so it's- And the cows.

Dan Beecher What about the cows?

Dan McClellan Yeah. What about the cattle, Jonah? You never think of the cattle. So it's again, mixing this kind of rhetorical finger-wagging at people who want God to be vindictive with a little bit of satire, with a little bit of parody- All right ... because we're enjoying making fun of Jonah. But there's also a message there. God is forgiving. Are you right to want God to be vindictive and to kill? And so, I think it's a pretty biting satire on the prophetic genre, which so frequently is all about condemning everybody else to destruction. And here, it's kind of poking fun at that and also saying, "No, it's better to believe in a merciful God, and our God is merciful."

Dan Beecher Okay. And changes his mind, apparently.

Dan McClellan And also change...

Dan Beecher Yeah. And- And with that, I think that'll be our good segue point to get to another idea of ways that God can act. So, let's move on.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, here we are. We're discussing the nature, the character of the God of the Bible. And I'm just going to start this off with two different verses. We'll start with Titus 1:2- Okay ... which says that, "In the hope of eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised before time began." And then, I'll also give us Hebrews 6:18, which says, "So that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have a strong encouragement to seize the..." Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, both of them make it very clear. God cannot lie. It is impossible for God to lie. Take it away, Dan.

Dan McClellan And we saw the same thing in Numbers- Oh, yeah ... where Balaam says, "God is not a human, that he will lie, or a man, that he will change his mind."

Dan Beecher So, very clear. I guess that's- Yeah ... the end of the segment. Well- It's obvious that God doesn't lie. It says so multiple times. End of discussion.

Dan McClellan And then we've got other parts of the Bible, because there are- Uh-oh ... other parts of the Bible, and those other parts of the Bible frequently complicate attempts to assert that one part of the Bible governs all of the Bible.

Dan Beecher So- Okay ...

Dan McClellan I think we've got a lie pretty early on in the Hebrew Bible. At the very least, we have God saying something will happen, and then that thing just doesn't happen.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And I have characterized this particular not happening thing as a lie.

Dan Beecher When we- And I will say, you've gotten stitched about it numerous times.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher People are mad all over TikTok for this- Yeah ... assertion of yours. And so we're going to dive into it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. People seem to be a lot more upset about me saying the God of the Bible lies than pointing out that the God of the Bible seems to enjoy slavery and polygamy- Yeah ... and things like that. So, we have in Genesis 2, the creation of the human, and in verse 16, "The Lord God commanded the man saying, 'Of every tree of the garden you can certainly eat,' or, 'You will eat.'" And this uses a construction that is known in Hebrew as the periphrastic infinitive. And you don't have to suddenly put your linguist caps on, but basically, we have an infinitive version of a verb followed immediately by the finite version of the verb. So, an English equivalent would be, here it would be, "To eat, you will eat."

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan This means nothing in English.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But this has the rhetorical force of kind of emphasizing the certainty- Okay ... that something will happen. And there are a bunch of nuances that can be added to this. But then we get to verse 17, where God tells the human, "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall certainly die." And here, the Hebrew is mot tamut. So, it's that same periphrastic infinitive. To die, you will die. Insisting that the death is certain.

Dan Beecher Okay. Now- You're going to eat some things, but if you eat that thing, you are definitely going to die on that day.

Dan McClellan Yes. And it is five words in Hebrew. "Beyom achalcha mimenu mot tamut." In the day, on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. So, then we've got the rest of what happens in the famous story of the Garden of Eden.

Dan Beecher Spoiler alert.

Dan McClellan Spoiler alert, they go ahead and eat.

Dan Beecher They eat.

Dan McClellan Yes. I think it's been enough years. There was evidently, in my little video with Joel McHale, there was a spoiler alert about the "Succession" show, and- Oh ... I didn't pick up on that, but a lot of people jumped on my case for that, and I was like, "I thought this was in the past enough." But- If the story of Adam and Eve is not in the past enough, then you're listening to the wrong show.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So- That one goes back far enough.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If you haven't read it, that's on you.

Dan McClellan That's 100% your fault. Now, we get the creation of Eve. Eve talks to the serpent who says, and it starts off by saying, "The serpent was wiser or craftier," if you prefer, "than all the other wild animals that Adonai, the deity, had made."

Dan Beecher This is- And to be clear, we're not talking about the devil, we're talking about- We are not talking about Satan or the devil.

Dan McClellan This is just one of the animals that God made.

Dan Beecher Just an animal. It may not be a serpent as we now know it. It may have had legs.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Because it's not crawling on the ground just yet.

Dan Beecher Right, not yet.

Dan McClellan And the serpent says to the woman, "So did God really say you can't eat from any of the trees of the garden?" And she says, "No, we can eat the fruit of the trees of the garden. But God said you shall not eat from the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, nor shall you touch it or you shall die." And this is not exactly what God said to Adam, to the human. This is a slight change where we have this addition of you shan't even touch it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And there have been a lot of speculations about did Adam misreport the thing? Did God tell Eve and then Eve is paraphrasing? Did God tell it to Eve differently? Nobody knows. Really, it doesn't matter in the long run. In the story, Eve tells it a little differently. But then the serpent responds, "You will not die. God knows that when you eat of it," and I think, let me look at the Hebrew. Yeah, "On the day you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like the gods knowing good and evil." So the serpent says, "Hey, God's really just playing with you because God doesn't want something to happen- Right ... that's going to happen if you eat the fruit." And then the woman eats the fruit and gave some to her husband who was with her. And I've talked about this in some of my social media content. Some translations of the Bible omit the fact that the Hebrew very clearly states that her husband was with her- Right ... as a way to kind of blame Eve. And he ate, and then very next sentence says, "Then the eyes of both of them were open and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves." So what the serpent said would happen, happened immediately upon eating the fruit. Their eyes- Right ... were opened and we get later on in verse 22 of chapter 3, God says, "Look." And I think he's talking only about the man.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan "Look, the man has become like one of us to know good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever, let's kick him out."

Dan Beecher Yeah, you got to now because all of the lies about what will happen to you if you eat that fruit, the jig is up.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You got to kick him out at this point.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so there's some interesting things to point out here. It seems the serpent was right, at least about saying, "God's really doing this so that you don't become like the gods by having your eyes open, by knowing good and evil." The text explicitly has God acknowledge that they became precisely what the serpent said they would, and that's something that God doesn't want. And so to prevent some additional thing that God doesn't want, namely them living forever, which would be one of the two prototypical features of deity, all knowledge and immortality, they're going to kick them out. Now, this is after the curses have been announced. So the curses are that the serpent will slither on its belly, will eat dust. The curse to the woman is that she will have pain in conception and in childbirth. The curse to the man is that he will eat his food by the sweat of his brow. And the ground is cursed because of you, and from dust you are, and to dust you will return.

Dan Beecher What doesn't happen on that day- Yeah, there seems to be one conspicuous thing- Omission, yeah ... that doesn't occur.

Dan McClellan They don't die.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And a lot of people have tried to find a variety of different ways to rationalize this away, to harmonize verse 17 with the rest of the story. And this happened anciently. The Book of Jubilees, which was probably written around the middle of the second century BCE, is actually the first to say, "Hey, what's really going on here is that a day is a thousand years according to the Lord," which is something that we see in the Proverbs and also something that comes up in one of Peter's epistles in the New Testament. Adam lived to be 930 years old. So in that day of the Lord of a thousand years within that time period, Adam died. So guess what? Mission accomplished.

Dan Beecher On that thousand year day- Yeah ... it's a Jupiter day. What planet rotates slowly?

Dan McClellan I don't know. So we basically have in the ancient world attempts to try to make the two dots connect.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So that's one of the techniques that people will use to try to insist that this was real. The most popular attempt to try to make the statement in verse 17 accurate is to say that Adam did die because death is separation from God and they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, so on that day they died. This doesn't work because mot tamut and the other different forms of that particular periphrastic infinitive that involve that verbal root, though they occur like 50 or 60 times, never once does it refer anything other than to straight-up physical death.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Cessation of your life.

Dan Beecher So it's not used metaphorically or figuratively in any other context.

Dan McClellan It's not a spiritual death. It's not separation from God. The statement, "You will certainly die," means precisely that. You will certainly die. Now, the other attempt that is made to try to reconcile these two passages is to argue that mot tamut is used as a sentencing to death. And so the idea is not that the death will actually occur, but that you will enter into some state of being doomed to die. Your death is imminent in some way, shape, or form. And so the idea there is that on that day, the certainty of their death was accomplished or something like that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But this doesn't really work either, and there are a variety of different reasons for it, most of them having to do with the fact that that sense of that construction in Hebrew does not occur anywhere in the entire Hebrew Bible. That is a sense that must be imposed upon the text, and here, based entirely on the conviction that if God says it in Genesis 2:17, then it must be true. However, we've already seen that God changes their mind.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan We saw that in Jonah. It is elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible as well. And so, I think probably the best way to make sense of this passage is that God is being represented as a little capricious here, kind of getting a little trigger-happy with these threats, and I've compared it to a mom saying, "If you touch my sewing scissors, I will kill you." Or a dad saying, "If you touch my guitar, or if you touch my car again, I will kill you." And then they do it, and they're like, "Ugh. Well, I have to punish you." And then coming up with something short of- That's it.

Dan Beecher You're banished from the house.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You don't get to live here anymore.

Dan McClellan Yeah. "I'm setting up this cherubim out in the front yard- Yeah ... and he will mess you up."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Don't try to get past him. He's got a flaming sword.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Good luck.

Dan McClellan But it's always something short of the original threat, which I suggest is something that is a little hyperbolic. And so, yeah, I think if we understand a lie to be something that is intended to deceive, I think the idea here is that God was using the threat of immediate death to disincentivize them from eating of that tree. It didn't work, and then God had to settle for all these other punishments.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It seems very clear that, yes, there was an untruth told in this moment. I guess I can imagine what that must mean to a lot of people who read those scriptures that I sort of led into this thing with, that says it's impossible for God to lie.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher God cannot lie. I guess the framework, in order to make sense of that, it's very easy if you're willing to acknowledge the multivocality, the fact that these accounts were written by different authors in different- Mm-hmm ... timeframes, and even the character of God meant different things to these different people- Yeah ... as they want them. But I understand why people are so distressed when you point this out, when they've been taught and when they have committed to believing in a univocal or, heaven forbid, inerrant Bible. You've got a direct contradiction here.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and those are just anathema within that worldview, which is one of the reasons that I think inerrancy is such a fatal flaw in a lot of Christian and even some conservative Jewish worldviews because it forces you into a position of having to just deny the plain reading of the text and come up with all this mental gymnastics to get around what is so clearly being stated in the text. But when we look at some of the precursors for this, this is not unique within the literature of ancient Southwest Asia. In fact, there's this myth of Adapa, where you have this figure who's kind of a grand human champion named Adapa, and they get upset with the wind while they're on their ship, and they break the wind, and this upsets some gods, and so Adapa is called on to account. I forget what the saying is. Called onto the carpet by the gods, and one of the gods tells Adapa before he heads up there, "Hey, don't eat the food of death that they're going to offer you." And Adapa is all wise. The text says Adapa is wise, and now the other issue is mortality. The god says, "Don't eat the food of death." He goes up. The gods offer him the food of life, which would make him immortal, but he remembers what the other deity said. He refuses the food of life, and so is unable to achieve immortality and is sent back down to Earth as a mortal. And so in a story that many scholars have suggested likely influenced the development of the story of Adam and Eve, we have a deity Telling Adapa, the human, something that ends up denying that human access to immortality, and that thing that the deity told the human was not accurate.