I Got Soul, and I'm Super Bad

Dan McClellan They are literally taking these pillowcases and like and, "Oh, I got your soul." And then God is like, "You naughty little minxes. I'm going to grab those pillowcases, and I'm going to open them up, and the souls are going to be able to get back out." Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

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

Dan Beecher I'm pernicious, man. I'm out here being-- My sister has a tattoo.

Dan McClellan On a weekday?

Dan Beecher My sister actually has a tattoo of the word pernicious on her elbow because- Oh, does she?

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher someone wrote an article about her music in a sort of underground rag and- Mm-hmm ... called her Pernicious in Pink because she had pink hair at the time. And she was like, "Okay, I'm going to be Pernicious then."

Dan McClellan She's just going to lean into that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All right. Not making it her whole identity, but at least the identity of her elbow.

Dan Beecher That's right. That's exactly it.

Dan McClellan Okay. There you go. Fair enough.

Dan Beecher So, speaking of pernicious, today's show's going to be a little pernicious.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher We're going to talk about, or rather, it's going to be about a concept that has been pernicious.

Dan McClellan Promiscuous.

Dan Beecher It's been promiscuous- ... in my life. So we're going to ask about the soul.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then in the latter half of the show, we'll do a chapter and verse that sort of uses that concept, and we'll see how that plays out.

Dan McClellan Yeah, we're going to push back a little bit against the conventional wisdom about the concept of souls in the Bible.

Dan Beecher Nice.

Dan McClellan But using my own research, one of my books, a book from another very well-respected scholar named Richard Steiner, and some material remains that have come to light in more recent years that are going to help us get a better grip on what the Bible's talking about when it talks about a soul. And there, in my head, I'm quoting Lisa Simpson from- ... one of the best Simpsons episodes ever, where Bart sells his soul.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed.

Dan McClellan To Milhouse, right?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And one of my favorite Comic Book Guy lines, when Bart is sleeping out front of his store because he wants to get his soul back, and the Comic Book Guy says, "As my breakfast burrito is congealing rapidly, I will be brief." And then tells him he sold his soul.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Found a buyer right away for that.

Dan Beecher So- I, on the other hand, have tried to sell my soul, and no one will take it.

Dan McClellan No buyers, huh?

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's very sad.

Dan McClellan It's not a seller's market right now.

Dan Beecher No. I think they're just...

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Not for an atheist's soul. An atheist's soul means nothing to anybody. As an atheist, I will say, I have people talking to me using this word soul or a spirit, or whatever. Which aren't necessarily synonyms but can be used as synonyms.

Dan McClellan There's certainly semantic overlap, but at the same time, they are different concepts.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So I have people use that word with me, and then I say, "I don't know what that is." I don't have a concept of that that applies to my philosophy of the universe or whatever.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And it blows people's minds. Even other- ... non-believers who still have some sort of sense of a spirit or whatever. It really confuses people for me not to have that sense.

Dan McClellan And maybe we can clear up a little bit of that today because I'm going to start from the cognitive sciences and our conceptualization of the self, because that has a lot to do with why pretty much every society that has ever existed that we can document has, maybe not has an authoritative version of this, but has some concept of an unseen locus of animacy, of agency, of cognition, concepts of spirits, souls, ghosts, things like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so it's actually a very natural what's called a... Well, it's kind of a side effect of human cognition.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Of how our brains became the way they are. But to start, one of the ways that cognitive scientists try to better understand how our concepts of the world around us and of ourselves develop is by looking at infants and newborns and trying to see if there are features of perception that maybe are innate to us that are not things that we developed during our childhood. And one of the things that they've shown, for instance, is that even in the womb, they did an experiment where they shined lights through the pregnant women's bellies and then saw how the fetuses reacted. And they used a variety of different shapes, and some of them are three dots with two dots on top and one on the bottom, which kind of somewhat looks like a face.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then they would have it at different orientations. And when it was oriented with the two dots on top and the one dot on the bottom, so it looked more like a face, there was statistically significant feedback, reactions coming from the fetuses compared to all of the other orientations, which suggested to these scientists that there is something innate. Even fetuses within the womb are somehow programmed to recognize A human face.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then when they're born, there's a lot more attention that newborns will give to human faces as opposed to other kinds of shapes and things like that. And one of the things that they notice growing up, about a quarter of primary school-aged children develop imaginary friends. Mm-hmm. And we just went and saw "If" with my girls in the theater.

Dan Beecher Did you like it?

Dan McClellan It was a fun little show. You kind of see where it was going.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But it was a fun little show. And there were great voices that you had to try and recognize for the different imaginary friends that were- Yeah, that does seem to be the game, right?

Dan Beecher Yeah. Figure out who... Because there's 100 different famous people voices in it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So there were some fun ones, like George Clooney is in there and stuff like that. But what's going on here is as kids grow up and they're starting to observe things happening around them, some of the things that they notice are that people have intentions. They move their body in space in order to achieve things. And so we begin to intuitively develop this notion that things happen for a reason. If somebody knocks something over, they intended to do that. There was some kind of action that caused some other action because some agent intended for that to happen. And so we develop this sense of intention and of agency, but we don't only limit it to things that we know are intentional agents. And so we can start to attribute intentional agency to movements and actions and things that are totally natural in the world around us. In fact, there was a very famous experiment done back in the '40s where they showed animations of shapes, triangles and circles and squares, moving around inside a box and outside a box, and a door opened and some of them come out and some of them come in. And then they asked people questions about what they saw. And people attributed not only agency but personhood to these shapes.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because they were behaving how they would expect persons to behave.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so intuitively, they just understood them to be persons.

Dan Beecher And- So the scientists who were conducting the experiment didn't say, "What did the triangle people do?"

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher They just said, "What did you see?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And people were like, "Well, the triangle people moved over there, and the square people and person man hates triangle man."

Dan McClellan Right. Who's as big as the universe.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But they didn't call them people, but they would say, "Oh, the triangle wanted to get out."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And the circle was getting in the way, and the circle wanted to do this, that, and the other. And so they were attributing agency and intention. And one of the things that we also notice is that our intentions and our thoughts are all internal to us. They're hidden from everybody else. We can speak and act in ways that mask and hide our intentions. And so we also develop this notion that our self is something that is interior to us and is not necessarily isometric with our body.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And we also project that onto others, and we imagine that everybody else has some kind of self inside them that is unseen that we can't access. And so as the concept of personhood develops in infancy into childhood, into young adulthood, this notion that the self is something that is inside the body and is not identified with the body isometrically stays with people.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we have this notion. And so this is where most people will be like, "Ah, you're getting into the..." Oh man, I can't remember people's names today. Who said, "I think, therefore I am"?

Dan Beecher Descartes.

Dan McClellan Descartes. Okay, so we're getting into Cartesian dualism, and you can't do that. And it's not exactly Cartesian dualism, but what it is is a concept of body agency partibility.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan That we conceive of different locations of agency and cognition and things like that. And some of these become socially conventionalized. People will say, "Oh, my heart is in conflict with my head."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It's like, no, they're not.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because your heart is not an agent, nor is your head a separate agent. They are just different organs or body locations, regions of a single agent. But we conventionalize these notions, and there's been research that shows that around the world in numerous different languages, from all different types of cultures, there are three main ways that people organize the locations of agency. There's one that locates it in the chest, there's one that locates it in the guts- Mm ... and then there's one that locates it between the head and the chest.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So those are the three main regions where societies and languages locate the self.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so one of the things that also develops from this is the idea that the self and the body can separate, and you can have different body parts that are responsible for different things. Do you remember the "Seinfeld" episode where Jerry is dating this beautiful woman who's not very smart?

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And he says, "My penis and my brain are engaged in a chess match." And he's like, "How long does the penis always beat the brain?" And George goes, "Until you're 40. Then it's just not as much of a blowout." But the idea being that these are different There are loci or locations of different kinds of interests.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then, your gut is where fear is, and your heart is where love and passion is, and your head is where your analytical thinking is, and all this kind of stuff. So, you have different locations of this.

Dan Beecher Although my understanding is that those specific locations are fairly new. Having the head be the location of almost anything is a fairly new development, right?

Dan McClellan Yes. These are all socially conventionalized.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, it's modern. Societies influenced by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, tend to have that idea that the head is where the analytical part is, and the heart is where the emotional part is.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Guts is where the fear part is. Because, yeah, anciently, the brain wasn't thought to have any significance.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And even if you go look in the Hebrew Bible, when it talks about the heart, that's usually what it's identifying as the location of cognition.

Dan Beecher Of thought, right.

Dan McClellan And the statement that Jesus says in the New Testament, "Love God with all your heart, might, mind, and strength," that's not in the Hebrew. That's something that was added when the Hebrew was translated into Greek.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Because the Greek societies had a concept of the mind up here, and so they added that. And so, frequently, in the Hebrew Bible, the word lev, heart, is translated as nous, mind, in Greek.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, it's different from society to society.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there are societies, there have been people who looked at certain Melanesian societies, where the person is not only constituted by their body, but also by their possessions- Mm ... and then who they're married to, and things like that.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And there are these fascinating rituals that go on, where if someone marries into the wrong bloodline, then they've got this problematic confluence of bloodlines, and they actually have to give away possessions in order to right the ship.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting. That's crazy.

Dan McClellan So, the personhood can be constituted in all these different kinds of ways. And so, when we look in the ancient world, one of the times when you see how people understand the different locations of agency, and things like that, is in death.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Even today, we see this, where I think I might have told this story before on the podcast, but there's a story about a guy whose daughter was killed in a car accident, and she was an organ donor. And her heart went to a young man who needed a new heart. And the father of this young woman rode his bike across the country to go meet this guy, and brought a stethoscope and listened to his heart beat, and said, "I got to spend some time with my daughter."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because that was, for him, if she had donated some kidneys- Yeah ... he wouldn't have been like, "Let me get on those kidneys. I can feel my daughter's presence there." But because the heart is so socially significant in terms of personhood, you can hear the heartbeat from outside the body. That brought him to tears, because for him, that was the sensation of being in the presence of his daughter. So, in death, we see a lot of this, and anciently, we got to go to death in order to try to understand their concepts of personhood for a couple of reasons. One, because that's when it sits so close to the surface, but also, we have a lot more stuff that is mortuary and funerary in orientation, just because of the- Oh, right ... the accident of preservation.

Dan Beecher Like writings and that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because they tend to bury stuff, and so the stuff that gets buried tends to be stuff that is preserved.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, that's a bias that we have in archeology, is we're heavily biased towards the mortuary stuff.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But that helps us see how they understood the person. And there's some fascinating stuff from the Levant, or ancient Southwest Asia. And one of the things I want to talk about, because we're going to talk about it a little bit, is the concept of the stele.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And not Steely Dan. Every time I bring up the Tel Dan Stele, people are like, "Is that where Steely Dan got their name from?" No, of course, that's not where Steely Dan got their name from. But you can go back to the Neolithic, and you find stones that are taller than they are wide, where they have a flat face and then a rounded back, that are set up along in different patterns and arrangements and things like that. And some of them are thought to be intended to represent deities, and others are thought to mark internments, inhumations, where people have been buried. Although they're not necessarily right above the burial, they're an index for a burial- Right ... that could be at some distance from the marker. But we start to see these things begin to function the same way, that these markers seem to be housing some kind of concept of a soul, some kind of portable vehicle for the agency of the deceased. And so, in that sense, divine images and headstones, ancient headstones, are functioning identically. They're both there to index the unseen agency of this entity, whether it's a deceased loved one or a deity or something like that. And when we get into ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and things like that, and we get to see texts associated with this, there's some cool stuff that comes up. So, in ancient Egypt, the The torso was one of the main containers of the body, and it housed the ib, which is translated heart. That's the seat of intelligence. And then there was also the hati was also associated with that area. And then there are a bunch of other kind of parts of the person. The kheperu was a manifestation of a person. You also had the ran, which was the name of the person. You had the akh, which was the spirit of the person. But in their burial, there were ways for each of these different elements of the person to be preserved. But the most important thing for the survival of the person into the afterlife was the ka, which was an animating force or a twin that existed on in the person's statue once their corpse had disintegrated. Because the soul was thought to kind of stay with the body- Mm ... and at night it could fly off and go do stuff. So it's kind of like a dream soul. If you've ever heard of a dream soul, it's the idea that you have a soul that leaves your body when you're asleep, and so your dreaming is that soul experiencing the world, and then it comes back to your body.

Dan Beecher So in death- My dream soul is weird, man. I'm just going to say.

Dan McClellan Mine gets into a lot of trouble. But you had this idea of the ka that could stay close to the body, but then when it disintegrated, it needed some kind of house. When the body was gone, it needed somewhere to be, and so there- Right ... was usually a statue that was used as the house. And then there's also the ba, which was kind of a flexible concept that usually was associated with deities and then with kings, and then was kind of democratized later on. And it was represented as a saddle-billed stork or a bird with a human head.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And similar to this idea of this thing that goes and can travel around.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there's a cool story if anybody ever wants to read some cool ancient Egyptian literature. "The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba"- ... is a story about a guy who's contemplating suicide, and he's debating with his ba about whether or not to do this because he's afraid his ba will abandon him.

Dan Beecher Which means- The ba, I'm still confused about the ba concept. The ba is the stork thing? I would...

Dan McClellan Yeah. So this is another, it's like the ka. It's very similar to the ka.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's like spirit and soul. There's some overlap, so it's not clear exactly how they're different. But this is basically some element of personhood that's got to be close to the body.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But he's afraid if he takes his own life, the ba's going to be like, "You're a loser. I'm out of here." And then his afterlife is basically over. And the ba is supportive of this idea and then realizes, "Oh, shoot. If I run off when this guy's dead, then I'm not going to be able to get the food and the provisions that are going to be provided in this guy's mortuary chapel."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "So then I'm up a creek." And so they're both kind of trying to figure out how to not get hosed by this guy's plan. It's a weird story.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then when we get to ancient Mesopotamia, we also have multiple different elements. The atemmu was the body spirit. That was the one that had to be close to the body. We got the napistu, was the animating force, and the zakikku, which was the breath, the wind, or the spirit. And again, there's some overlap, but also some distinction. And then the spirit of a deceased person could leave the underworld and invade the bodies of the living, usually through the ear.

Dan Beecher Whoa.

Dan McClellan That was your weakest point of entry. And this- I don't like that. I don't want them to do that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan No, you had to be, that's why the headphones are- Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's why we have the headphones when we do the show.

Dan McClellan That's why the kids are wearing headphones everywhere they go these days. I still think it's weird to see somebody inside a car with big over-the-ear headphones on.

Dan Beecher I do want to see some headphone manufacturer, Skullcandy or somebody, Apple, just listing as one of its features, "Will block souls from invading- Yeah, invading spirits ... your body through your ear."

Dan McClellan So that you don't get possessed.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then there were rituals that had to be done when the person died, so that they could occupy these statues after their body disintegrated. And that brings us to the main stele I want to talk about, which is the Katumuwa stele, which was discovered in a place called Sam'al, which is in southeastern Anatolia, southeastern Turkey. And this was discovered in a Syro-Hittite town called Zincirli, and it dates to the 8th century BCE. And the stele looks a lot like a headstone in its shape. Most headstones are a little taller than they are wide. This one is just a little bit taller. It has a rounded top. Mm-hmm. But then there is this very expertly carved relief on the stone that it shows a figure seated in front of a table, and they're holding a cup and a pine cone. And the pine cone is very important. You can't forget the pine cone. And then it has a table that has a duck and a bowl and a stack of bread on it. And then the rest of the space is filled with an inscription, and I'm going to read a translation of the inscription done by a friend of mine named Seth Sanders. And the inscription begins, "I am Katumuwa, servant of Panamuwa, who commissioned for myself this stele while still living."

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan "I placed it in my eternal chamber." So this is like your mortuary chapel, and these exist in Israel, ancient Israel, they exist all over the place. "And established a feast at this chamber." And then they're going to list the offerings that are made. "A bull for Hadad, a ram for," personal name. "A ram for Shamsh, a ram for Hadad of the vineyards, a ram for Kubaba, and a ram for my neveš," which is equivalent to the Hebrew nephesh, so my soul, "which is in this stele. Henceforth, whoever of my sons or of the sons of anybody else should come into possession of this chamber, let him take from the best produce of this vineyard as a presentation offering year by year. He is also to perform the slaughter prescribed above in proximity to my soul, and is to apportion for me a leg cut." So if you had the means, before you died, you want to do a-- These days, it's like we get shared burial plots, and we got our, "This is what we want our headstone to say." Anciently, you were like, "Okay, here are the sacrifices that I want to be made to me- Right ... as I am occupying this headstone." And it literally says, "For my soul, which is in this stele." And so we have this notion, similar to what's going on in Egypt, similar to what's going on in Mesopotamia, this Anatolian guy, Katumua, anticipates that when he dies, some part of his neveš, his nephesh, his soul, is going to have to occupy that stele, and he wants to ensure that he's being fed enough, to ensure a lengthier afterlife.

Dan Beecher That's something-- Okay, so a couple things come to mind when you tell me this. One thing is that obviously, this is very close to how gods want their worshipers to act.

Dan McClellan Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. This is a point I make in my book. Your treatment of deceased kin is no different from your treatment of deities.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan And deceased kin could be referred to as deities.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Remember when Samuel gets called up by the necromancer of En Dor, she says, "I see an Elohim. I see a god."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And this is the deceased Samuel. And you have ancestor worship going on. Because there's nothing different between going to a special little space where there's a little standing stone to offer food- Right ... to your deceased kin, and going to a temple that has a little standing stone- Right ... to make offerings to a god. And so there's an argument to make that very anciently, this is what people were doing with deceased kin, and it morphed the deceased kin into what we now would call a deity.

Dan Beecher That's interesting, yeah.

Dan McClellan In other words, the worship of gods in temples may originate in the worship of ancestors in mortuary chapels.

Dan Beecher And ancestor worship is a worldwide phenomenon.

Dan McClellan All over the place.

Dan Beecher That's happened everywhere.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher The other thing that struck me when you said that, when you talked about making these offerings to the dead, is that when I think about an offering or a sacrifice to a god, it never occurred to me that it was for eating, that it was for the god to be eating. But in this case, it seems very clear that it is, that this person believed that their soul would need food.

Dan McClellan Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Beecher And that's- Do you think that the sacrifices to gods was also like, "Here, have some food?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Like it was actually an eating thing?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Something interesting about rituals is most rituals are what cognitive scientists would call causally opaque. We don't have a clear idea of the relationship between what we're doing and some kind of outcome.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan People develop rationalizations.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan "Oh, we do this because this, that, and the other." And so when you look at the parallels between my deceased kin, I want to have them have a lengthy, successful afterlife, so I'm going to continue to give them food and drink, and also light. One of the things that- Mm ... we frequently find with burial assemblages is lamps.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan They need light, they need food, they need drink. And the only reason is that they have a need of this.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan When you look at what's in the Jerusalem Temple, you got a lamp, you've got a table of shewbread, you've got offerings that are made. So it's the exact same stuff, and it must originate from the same perception that the gods stand in need of this.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And when we go back to the literature that existed before the Hebrew Bible, the humans are created to be enslaved to the gods so that they can provide the gods with all the things that they need and want.

Dan Beecher Interesting, yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, the idea that, oh, this is just, God wants us to show that we're willing to make sacrifices, and it's like, well, it seems an awful lot like God just needs the food, and needs the wine- ... and needs the light. And so I have not made a full case for this, but in my book, I point out that it seems awfully convenient that in form and function, they're both doing the exact same thing and looking the exact same way.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan In fact, there are a lot of archaeologists who argue, if they find something that looks like a table- They will disagree over whether this is an altar for a god or an offering table for an ancestor. And one publication will say, "This is very clearly an offering table," and another publication will say, "This is very clearly an altar." And it's because in form and function, they are the same.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, the deity, and in my book, I make the case that deities, the concept of a national deity probably develops out of this notion that after death, there's this unseen spirit soul thing out there that we still have to provide for. But also, it can give us information. We can go to it and say, "Hey, can you curse so and so because she stood me up for a second date," or because so and so is not returning my power tools or something like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan There are ways to petition your deceased ancestors to have them do favors for you or to have them give you information that you need. So again, exact same things that gods are doing for you. And Susan Ackerman has made a case years ago that one of the things that Josiah, that pernicious little king of Judah in the late eighth century BCE, that one of the things he was doing in Deuteronomy was trying to put an end to ancestor worship because he wanted Adonai, the God of Israel, to be the one that everybody had to go to instead of going to Old Man River, who died and- Right ...

Dan Beecher is- That is interesting because if ancestors go on after death, and it definitely seems like the concept is that these ancestors can then also provide some help to the living. Given these offerings and whatever, there's some agency there where they can provide some sort of help.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher If everybody has ancestors who they can go to for help, that's something that's beyond the control of the sort of centralized organization.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And so it sort of dissipates their power structure.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that kind of arrangement, the national deity is really only there to address national concerns- Right ... communal group things. But when it comes to the everyday stuff, they can just go to their ancestral deities, and that may be one of the things that Deuteronomy is trying to do is say, "No, we want you coming to us, to Adonai, for everything." And there's a wonderful book that was published a couple years ago by Carrie Sonja called "Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel" that goes into detail about, not just the cult of the dead, but ancestor worship, and how that's represented throughout the Hebrew Bible. And then, Christopher Hayes also has a wonderful book called "A Covenant with Death," and on the cover is an image of ye old Katamuwa stele- Okay ... which is all about the nephesh, the soul that is in this stele. So, I think the concept of the soul is integrated with the concept of deity in the Hebrew Bible, the concept of worship in the Hebrew Bible. So, I think it's so thoroughly integrated into the foundations of so much of that we think about today when we think about what's going on in ancient Israel and Judah and early Judaism, and even Christianity is developed from some of these ideas about souls that ultimately are rooted in what are called spandrels. That's an old Carl Sagan term that refers to the byproducts of the evolutionary process where- Mm ... it's addressing something, but then there's this byproduct off to the side that also pops up. And so the concepts of souls and deities are an example of an evolutionary spandrel that informs so much of what we understand today about religion- Yeah ... about the religion of the self as well as the religion of the gods.

Dan Beecher Did the idea of the soul, and maybe we don't know this, but one of the things that I'm wondering about, because most of the things, like you say, we're talking a lot about funerary texts and sort of things that have to do with death- Yeah ... which means that the concept of the soul has established itself as something that continues on after the death of the body.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Was that always the case? Do we know of whether the soul, like maybe there was a development where the soul started out as just sort of this animating idea of... I guess you kind of talked about that in the beginning.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher But do we know of a time period before the idea of the soul going on, or was that pretty instantaneous? Because it seems like a lot of people would come up with that idea pretty quickly.

Dan McClellan So, from the perspective of the cognitive sciences, this would be something that has always existed. Because one of the things that everybody's always been around death. Mm-hmm. And your mind, when you get to know somebody, your mind has certain ways to trigger your perception of their presence. And there are some folks who have this situation where they can't recognize faces.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so if you can't recognize a face, all of your background, all the history, all the memories that would be associated with that recognition, they don't get cued up. And so you don't have that connection that you normally would, and that is your mind projecting. When you recognize somebody's face, your mind is projecting all that stuff onto your experience of the world around you. We experience the world kind of, it's a two-way street. We're receiving input, but our minds are also projecting the experience.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan If a loved one, a child, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a celebrity you have a crush on passes away, probably not the last one, but somebody you've spent a lot of time around passes away, your mind doesn't just turn all that off.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which means that you continue, a perfume, a room that you go into, a photograph, a food that you eat, all kinds of things can turn that on in your mind even though the person is not there. And this is why people report experiencing the presence of deceased loved ones. It's because the mind can make that perception as real as when you're actually in their presence. And so, that would be going on in the ancient world as people are just kind of developing ideas about what the world around them is like, and they, around the campfire might say, "So and so, Ogg, died- Right ... but he came to me in a dream," or, "I was out in the woods hunting, and he was beside me and helped me." There are all these different ways that they could perceive that this agent is still out there in the world somehow.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And because just the nature of cognition has the world just potentially teeming with unseen agents anyway, it just fits naturally.

Dan Beecher And so- You joke about a celebrity dying as being sort of... But I think that does fall into the category.

Dan McClellan The way that people- It could, yeah ...

Dan Beecher respond when a beloved Alan Rickman passes away and- Elvis ... people res- Yeah, and people mourn deeply, I think, and maybe that's just because, especially with actors, you develop what feels like a relationship with these people. You know what I mean?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They're substitutionally present in your life.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher You know what I mean?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You've never met that actor maybe, but gosh, you went to Mordor with them.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You've gone through a whole bunch of stuff.

Dan McClellan So I think- Or you might have done unspeakable things with Britney Spears or with- Right ... any one of a number of different celebrities- Yeah ... in your mind.

Dan Beecher It makes sense to me. A friend of mine from college passed away just a couple years after college, and he had a specific look. I don't know what it is about his look. He had very dark black hair and a fairly average build, but I kept seeing dudes from behind who looked a lot like him.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And it would spark the exact thing that you're talking about. All of those synapses that were programmed to Eric suddenly would flash, and I would be like, "Oh, it's Eric." And then I'd be like, "No, no, not Eric. I know for a fact that's not Eric."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But I would have to go through a process to sort of walk myself out of, "Hey, it's Eric."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And that's your intuitive cognition, the automatic not in your control side of the cognitive spectrum is flashing those cues, and then the reflective side has to overrule it, has to say, "Oh, no, that can't be."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there was a girl I dated in college, bad breakup, but I knew what kind of car she drove, and if I looked out of an airplane window at 35,000 feet and one of those cars was down there, I was going to spot it and suddenly going to be like- ... "Is that her?" So yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. That's the reality. People have been dealing with that for thousands and thousands of years, ever since we developed the capacity for imagination and what's called the theory of mind, the ability to project and simulate other minds. We've been experiencing that, and that's just a side effect of human cognition.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which a fascinating one that- Yeah ... I think we haven't even scratched the surface of the relevance of this to things like religion and worship and things like that.

Dan Beecher Well, I think that's all fascinating. From a cognitive perspective, I think all of that makes sense. I'm not 100% sure that I understand a biblical idea of a soul because we've gone through several different religiously oriented- Right ... ideas, but maybe we should just move on to our chapter and verse- Yeah, let's do it ... and get to the biblical concept.

Dan McClellan Absolutely.

Dan Beecher So, the chapter and verse that you gave me, we're launching into Ezekiel 13.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And I looked at this in several different translations because the first thing I did... Now, we're Ezekiel 13 verses like 17 through 23-ish. Is that what we're talking about?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And I went to our go-to, the NRSVUE- Uh-huh ... and saw nothing about a soul. And went, "What are we doing here?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So I went and looked in other places, and then it started to make more sense. KJV mentions the soul. The NASB, the New American Standard Bible, 1995 edition. It's all different.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I'm going to start with the KJV. Can I just read- Okay ... some of the KJV so that people can get a sense of it?

Dan McClellan Read on.

Dan Beecher I'll start with, so in verse 17, "Likewise, thou son of man, set thy face against thy daughters of thy people, against the daughters of thy people, which prophesy out of their own heart; and prophesy thou against them. And say, thus saith God, the Lord God; Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature to hunt souls."

Dan McClellan Whoa, man.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Man, the '90s references just flow from you, man.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher 90% of our audience has no idea what's going on. That's okay. "Will ye hunt the souls of my people, and will ye save the souls alive that come unto you?" That's crazy. That's some crazy stuff.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher The New American Standard Bible says, "Woe to the women who sew magic beads on all wrists and make veils for the heads of persons of every stature to hunt down lives."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher These are very different. I think you can see that. And then NRSVUE says, "Woe to the women who sew bands on all wrists and make veils for the heads of persons of every height in the hunt for lives." So, lives and souls become sort of interchangeable in these different translations.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But also, what? What are we talking about?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher What are these women doing?

Dan McClellan Yeah, this has long been kind of a puzzle.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we have the NET, the New English Translation.

Dan Beecher Oh, another version.

Dan McClellan Cool.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, "This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to those who sew bands on all the wrists and make headbands for heads of every size to entrap people's lives." And NET is heavily annotated. And so for bands, the note says, "The wristbands mentioned here probably represent magical bands or charms." And then there's a reference to Daniel Block's Ezekiel commentary from the New International Commentary series. And then the headbands, it says, "Daniel Block suggests that given the context of magical devices, the expected parallel to the magical armbands and the meaning of this Hebrew root, it may refer to headbands or necklaces on which magical amulets were worn."

Dan Beecher So- Okay ...

Dan McClellan yeah, there's a bit going on here. But there's a book that was published in 2015 that I really enjoy and that I referenced a lot in my own dissertation by a scholar named Richard Steiner. And the book is called "Disembodied Souls: The Nephesh in Israel and Kindred Spirits in the Ancient Near East." So, the nephesh is the Hebrew word that is sometimes translated soul.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And the cool thing about this book is it is open access, just like my book. So, you can Google that title, and you can just go find the PDF.

Dan Beecher Awesome.

Dan McClellan And you are able to read it, share it, consume it in whichever way blows your hair back. But the point of this book is, one, to talk about what on earth is going on in this passage, and then to talk about what significance that has to our concept of souls. And so, the words here that is translated in the KJV pillows- Uh-huh ... in the NAT, and the NRSV bands, it is keset. And it only occurs here in 18, and I think again in verse 20.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. And then in verse 20, and it occurs in the plural. And scholars have long thought that this is cognate with an Akkadian term, kasitu.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, this is one of the ways that linguists try to figure out what words mean. They see if there's an equivalent term in another language, and if their literature uses it in a way that makes it more clear what is intended there. But the Akkadian kasitu has something to do with binding. So, bands here has something to do with binding, so I imagine somebody might think they've got bands that they're going to go use to garrote somebody or- Okay ... or something like that to trap their life. But Steiner argues that we've got a much closer parallel in Mishnaic Hebrew, which is probably deriving from Aramaic, and that the author of Ezekiel is probably basing this on an Aramaic term, where it would mean pillows, which is what we have in the King James Version. However, Steiner goes on to argue it actually probably is just the pillowcase, not the filling.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And the idea here is that they have these empty pillowcases, and they also have kerchiefs on the head. They're hunting dream souls.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan They're going to trap somebody's dream soul. So, we talked about this. At night, the dream soul goes off- ... on walkabout.

Dan Beecher And so the idea here- And ends up naked at high school.

Dan McClellan I know.

Dan Beecher It's terrible.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Or is suddenly sitting down for a final that they didn't even study for.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But the idea is that these women are going around to trap somebody's dream soul and then hold it for ransom. So when it says hunt for lives, that's a specific interpretation of nephesh. It's interpreting nephesh as soul in the sense of synonym for a life.