Modest is Hottest?

Dan Beecher I mean, in fairness to Ham, there were like seven people left in the whole world. So, there's not many people that can satisfy whatever sexy feelings you're having. But still, your dad or your mom is probably the wrong choice.

Dan McClellan 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 combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are good. It's finally actually kind of looking like winter here in Salt Lake City. There was a little bit of snow this morning, and it's cold-ish.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Well- Global warming's failing us again.

Dan McClellan My dogs, they don't like the snow.

Dan Beecher Oh, really?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, the older one is kind of like, "Don't make me go outside in that. I don't like doing it."

Dan Beecher And then the puppy is just like But is kind of confused about what's going on because- The first dog I ever had, the first day that he saw snow, he bolted like I've never seen him bolt. He ran out the door and down the street, into neighbors' yards. He had never done this before. He was just so excited about snow. And from then on, if we were shoveling, he wanted to be out there, and he wanted us to shovel the snow onto him. Anything involving snow, he wanted us to throw it at him. He just was always- He loved the snow ... wanting to be-- Loved the snow.

Dan McClellan He was a snowman, huh?

Dan Beecher He was. He was indeed.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, hey, there's a whole show that we're going to be doing. We're going to do a chapter and verse- All right ... to start us off.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And then we're going to dive into a new segment that we're calling "Your Patriarchy & You." So, that'll be a lot of fun.

Dan McClellan Sounds exciting.

Dan Beecher And we're going to have a great time with it. So, let's launch into chapter and verse.

Dan McClellan All right. And our chapter and verse today comes courtesy of the Book of Genesis. We're in chapter nine, and we're talking about verses 18 through 27.

Dan Beecher We got- I hear there are a lot of answers in Genesis. I hear that it has all of the answers that we need.

Dan McClellan There can be. This is an interesting story, though, that I think catches a lot of people off guard. If they're reading through Genesis, and they get through the primeval history, they're like, "What the hell was that?"

Dan Beecher Yeah. I will say, the first time I encountered this story, this is about Noah.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher I thought I knew the Noah story. I got through the whole floody thing, and then I got to this, and it's only a few verses. It's not long. You could miss it if you were drowsy.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But I wasn't drowsy, and I went, "What?" And I reread it, and I thought maybe I had read it wrong, and I was utterly baffled by what happened here. So, I'm very glad that we get to talk about this because I think a lot of people could use some Dan guidance on this one.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And not me, you, Dan.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, I'm going to go ahead and read it, and I'm going to read from the New Revised Standard Version, and then talk a little bit about some of the issues that we have and how we go about interpreting this, because there are some oddities here, and I'm going to suggest that we're probably not getting the story as it was originally told.

Dan Beecher Ah.

Dan McClellan We've got some theories about how it may have looked originally, but I'll go ahead and read.

Dan Beecher Okay. I might stop you as we go on, just because of- Yeah, feel free to ...

Dan McClellan a few things. So, verse 18: "The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan."

Dan Beecher Which I'm going to stop you right there, because that jumps out at you.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher We don't talk about-- Shem and Japheth have their own lineages that go on, from which we are all descended, theoretically.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher These are the three from whom we are all descended.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But it just takes a whole little moment to separate out Ham and his lineage.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then in a bit later, we're going to mention Ham again, and then we're going to get another parenthetical remark, "of the father of Canaan"- Yeah ... just so you're aware. So, yeah, they're leading us.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan There's some foreshadowing going on here, which is indicative that maybe there's some literary shenaniganing- Right ... going on here, and we're going to talk about what that might have been.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So- You'll need to explain in a minute.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We'll pull the pin on Canaan.

Dan McClellan Yeah. "These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was peopled. Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard." And I'm going to stop myself here to point out that a lot of scholars think that the story of Noah, before the flood story was put in here- Mm ... was just a story of the etiology for viticulture.

Dan Beecher Oh, weird.

Dan McClellan Okay. That Noah was just the first viticulturist, and that was his role in the story. And then the flood gets introduced later. So, we get this. "Noah, man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard." It seems kind of odd that- Wait, I am going to jump in here.

Dan Beecher Sorry. I had to switch things up on my screen to the KJV because that line, that he's a man of the soil and the first to plant a vineyard, the way it's rendered in the KJV is- Yeah ... maybe my favorite wording in the universe- ... which is, "And Noah began to be an husbandman- Yes ... and he planted a vineyard."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "He began to be an husbandman." Say that 10 times fast. First of all, we don't use the word an husbandman much these days.

Dan McClellan And for those who are wondering what's going on with the N, the an husbandman, so on an indefinite article, you can have a or an, and usually you have an if the next word begins with a vowel.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so in the period when the King James version was translated, you didn't pronounce the H.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It was an husbandman. So, it just was more natural that way.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan There we go.

Dan Beecher Okay. So we're- Sorry to interrupt again.

Dan McClellan No worries.

Dan Beecher I promise I'll try to let you get through this thing.

Dan McClellan So we're getting reintroduced to Noah as someone who is significant only because he makes wine.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Even though we've had two and a half chapters of discussion about Noah so far. "He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent," as you like to do sometimes.

Dan Beecher You know what? Everybody's done it.

Dan McClellan It's hot outside.

Dan Beecher It's a fun day.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You got a warm day, and you're drinking your wine.

Dan McClellan There's nobody else on the planet- Right ... except for your children. Except for your family.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "And Ham," father of Canaan, "saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, 'Cursed be Canaan. Lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.' He also said, 'Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem, and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth and let him live in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave.'"

Dan Beecher End scene. That is so harsh. Look, I don't know how to interpret that other than what it actually says, which is, correct me if I'm wrong, Ham accidentally walked in on his dad naked, and his dad was like, "Okay, all of your descendants for the rest of forever are slaves now, because you did something so bad."

Dan McClellan That is a good surface reading of this, but I'm going to raise some questions here.

Dan Beecher Thank God! Because the surface reading gives me no comfort. So yes- Well, it's not going to get- ...

Dan McClellan raise some questions ... it's not going to get appreciably better.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But we're going to raise some questions here.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So he says, "When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him." Now, when they mention the children, it's Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In the Hebrew Bible, when they list children, they list them oldest to youngest.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Ham is not the youngest.

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan According to the way they list them, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan According to that convention, Japheth would be the youngest.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Ham would be the middle child.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan But here it says, "His youngest son had done to him." Okay, now here's another issue. If Canaan is Ham's son, "Lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers. Blessed be the Lord my God, by the Lord my God be Shem, let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth and let him live in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave." Those are his uncles- Yeah ... not his brothers.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So we got something funky going on here.

Dan Beecher Yeah. If we're cursing Canaan, then yeah, that's weird.

Dan McClellan There is a way to resolve this.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And the resolution is that Canaan was the youngest son of Noah, and Ham was not even in this story originally. If you have Shem, Japheth, and Canaan as his three sons, "Cursed be Canaan, lowest of the slaves shall he be to his brothers," namely Shem and Japheth, his two older brothers, making him the youngest. So a lot of scholars think originally this story was probably about Shem, Japheth, and Canaan.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so our little curse that Noah levels against the youngest son was probably just leveled at Canaan. And so this raises the question, well, what's Ham doing in here? And one theory is that Ham would, according to Genesis 10 and the other genealogies, Ham would be the eponymous ancestor of the Egyptians and other Africans, Ethiopians, and things like that. And so it may be that in order to ensure that, as it says in Genesis 9:19, "From these, the whole earth was peopled." They're like, "We need somebody to cover Africa. Let's get this guy Ham, and we need to stick him into the Noah story." Well, we got Canaan in there right now.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Well, we'll make Canaan the son of Ham.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Now, this leaves these kind of narrative incongruities, got continuity problems here.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so that's what scholars suggest is probably going on here.

Dan Beecher What makes Ham eponymous for the Africans?

Dan McClellan For- You talk about, and this is not a word that is used a lot, but Hamitic people.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And also in the 18th and 19th century, when European and American Christians were trying to authorize and validate the enslavement of Africans, then this curse became their proof text.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The Hamitic curse, the curse of the offspring of Ham to be slaves. Well, right there There you go.

Dan Beecher We get to enslave- Yeah, I have heard that used.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I remember that being a thing that people talked about.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, there are a couple of good books, that talk about this concept of the curse of Ham, by an author, I think it's, yeah, Goldenberg. In 2003, published a book called "The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam." That is a wonderful book. And then there's another one that is even more recent, that is from 2017, David M. Goldenberg, "Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Goes over how this idea kind of sprang from the Bible and then became the proof text for enslaving Africans, for the modern European world. So, that's how it's been deployed. But yeah, initially it was probably just covering the ground saying, "Okay, now we got somebody to cover Africa, we got somebody to cover the Semites, we got somebody to cover the other people out there. And so we can say that the whole Earth was peopled now that we've got Ham in place." And it caused them a little hiccup in the narrative, but they're not too upset about that.

Dan Beecher Now, the Israelite people, the people who would be deploying this, or who would be reading this, believed that they came from which? From Shem, from Japheth?

Dan McClellan Shem.

Dan Beecher From Shem?

Dan McClellan Shem.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah, this is where we get the word Semitic.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan There you go.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Okay, great. And then frequently in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Canaanites are their enemies.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So, this is sort of an ideology for the beginning of that- Yeah.

Dan McClellan And in that time period, the idea here was, "We don't like the Canaanites. We want to dominate the Canaanites. We want to enslave the Canaanites, and here's our authorization." So, in the ancient world, it was, well, this authorizes our enslavement of the Canaanites, and then in the 18th and 19th century, well, this authorizes our enslavement of the Hamitic peoples. So, it's being deployed to structure power and values, in the service of their own identity politics. So, here's an interesting question. What on earth does it mean that Ham saw the nakedness of his father?

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's the big glaring problem of the story, right? Because, A, the story doesn't indicate at all that anything... It was an accident. He just happened to walk in- Yeah ... and bada bing.

Dan McClellan He said- "Hey, Dad, have you seen my PSf- woo."

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly. And then he immediately takes steps. He's like, "Hey, brothers, don't..." He goes and gives them warning, and like- Well, that's one way to interpret it.

Dan McClellan I think most people have interpreted it to be like he went outside and was like, "Hehe, guess what I just saw?" And then the brothers were like, "How dare you?" And they're the ones who carefully back their way in.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But one of the reason, there are two reasons that a lot of, very early in the history of the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, we're talking early rabbinic literature, they're like, "Something else is going on here."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And one of the reasons is that the curse of Ham or Canaan seems to be a bit of an overcorrection. A bit of an overreaction.

Dan Beecher Maybe a little, tiny bit disproportional.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the other thing is, it says he woke up and knew what his youngest son had done to him. And people are like, "Well, what if he just walked in and was like, 'Oh, crap,' and then walked out? How would Noah have known what his son did to him?"

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so in the early rabbinic period, you have this reading that he castrated him. And the idea- Wow.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And the idea being this accounts for the curse. He ended Noah's line, so now Noah is going to curse his line. Not Ham, but Canaan. So everybody- Yeah ... who comes from his line is now cursed. So that was an early rabbinic interpretation. We have another interpretation, in other rabbinic literature that reads it as a case of paternal incest. That Ham sexually assaulted his unconscious- Right ... drunk, naked father. Which is- Yeah, let that marinate.

Dan Beecher All of that is pretty intense.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Both of those are very, like you get the curse more, but what's baffling to me is, how completely unspoken either of those things are- Yeah.

Dan McClellan Now- ...

Dan Beecher in the text.

Dan McClellan Now there is a datum, a piece of data that folks have appealed to reinforce the sexual interpretation of Ham's sin, and that is the fact that Ham sees his father's nakedness. Now, this is a phrase that occurs elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Now, there is one occurrence in Leviticus 20:17 that has to do with an act of sexual intercourse, and this is in a piece of legislation that talks about a man not marrying his sister.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And- The issue though, with understanding seeing nakedness to mean a sexual act, is that seeing nakedness in no other passage has to do with a sexual act. Uncovering somebody's nakedness refers to a sexual act dozens of times.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, the idiom is uncovering one's nakedness. In fact, in that passage in Leviticus where it says, "If a man marry his sister, and then he has seen her nakedness, she has seen his nakedness, he has uncovered her nakedness," and then it's trouble.

Dan Beecher So that being a different act than seeing the nakedness.

Dan McClellan Right. The uncovering the nakedness is still kind of governing the act of sexual congress there. And everywhere else in Leviticus where it talks about a man not sleeping with his father, sleeping with his sister, sleeping with his, I was going to say wife's sister, but I'm not sure if they really cared. But there are a bunch of places where uncovering one's nakedness is a reference to a sexual act. Seeing nakedness usually is a reference to the exposure of vulnerability or shame.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Because when Adam and Eve first gain knowledge of good and evil, what's the first thing they realize? They saw that they were naked and they were shamed.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They felt shame, and they covered themselves up. And then you have Joseph, when he's pretending to be Pharaoh, and his brothers show up, he says, "Ah, you've come to see the nakedness of the land," referring to the vulnerability of Egypt during the famine. And this happens throughout the Hebrew Bible, this idea of seeing someone's nakedness is seeing their shame or their vulnerability. And this was a serious thing anciently, and still in that part of the world, the idea of nakedness is considered very shameful. And this was one of the reasons that during the Gulf War, one of the things that sometimes soldiers did, an awful and criminal act, was strip their prisoners naked.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then take photographs of them, and make them engage in all kinds of acts while they were naked, and this was considered just supremely shameful.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, seeing your father's nakedness, seeing your father's vulnerability and shame, and not protecting it, but actually going and telling other people about it, would have been considered a pretty serious indiscretion at the time. And so I think that is the most likely reading. That, yeah, it may not make much sense to most readers today, but yeah, the idea is just that Ham walked in, and instead of covering up his father, protecting his honor, he went and spread his shame.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And then his brothers had to go in and cover him up. And the story about the brothers covering him up also makes the other readings nonsensical. So if seeing his nakedness refers to castrating him, or sexually assaulting him, or sexually assaulting his wife, how does this fit where they walk in backwards- Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah ...

Dan McClellan with garments, and they're very careful not to accidentally sexually assault him?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They're very careful not to accidentally castrate him.

Dan Beecher And they cover- They made sure not to cut his balls off again.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We got to walk in backwards. Avert your eyes. Let's drop this garment over him so that we don't- We will offer no medical attention.

Dan Beecher But we'll put a nice blanket on you.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And that'll soak up most of the blood.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, I think it very clearly needs to be read as a reference to just seeing his father's shame.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I don't know if I mentioned it, but one of the other readings that has been promoted more recently is that it was maternal incest, that this was not a reference to sexually assaulting Noah, but Noah's wife. And that was a reading that was promoted in a "Journal of Biblical Literature" article from 2005 by John Bergsma and Scott Hahn called "Noah's Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan," where they argued this was maternal incest.

Dan Beecher So that- Hmm ...

Dan McClellan has kind of become in vogue recently because of that article.

Dan Beecher But these readings are more salacious, and so people find them more interesting because- I mean, in fairness to Ham, there were like seven people left in the whole world. So, there's not many people that can satisfy whatever sexy feelings you're having. But still, your dad or your mom is probably the wrong choice.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And- I'm just going to say ...

Dan McClellan and when it comes to Noah waking up and knowing what his youngest son had done to him, that's kind of a MacGuffin.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Noah has to find out for this curse to happen.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so if you're not going to go through this lengthy discussion of, "Here's how Noah found out," you're just going to say, "And look, Noah found out, okay? Don't worry about why or how. Noah found out." And so, I don't think that creates any problems for a straightforward reading. So I think we need to understand this on a literary level and not on a historical level. Way too often, people are trying to imagine what's going on behind the scenes, what's going on in the minds of the actors, and it's like that's not helping you make sense of a story that somebody wrote.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan What's going to help you make sense of a story that somebody wrote is, how do authors think about this? How do authors utilize characters?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan What literary conventions might be influencing how they're telling the story the way they're telling the story?

Dan Beecher Well, and as we've talked about, first you have to think about the author, and then you have to think about ... how this has been transmitted through time, because it seems to me that the Ham, the father of Canaan, that father of Canaan being inserted a bunch of times- Mm-hmm ... that seems likely to be an afterthought that somebody else jammed in there.

Dan McClellan Right. When they're getting the story together, they're like, "Hey, man, you left Canaan as the one who's getting cursed, and you're telling this story about Ham." And it's like, "Oh, don't worry about it. We'll just say Ham was the father of Canaan, and then that will prime the pump," and everybody will be like, "Oh, I got you. That's why."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "Because he's his father." So, yeah, I think we can see the authorial seams in here, as this story is coming together. And so it's not as salacious a reading to say, yeah, Ham saw Noah naked, and rather than protect his father's honor, he went and spread his shame. His brothers protected their father's honor, and so Noah said, "I curse you." And initially the story was about Canaan, and later on they wrote Ham into the story because they needed somebody to be the eponymous ancestor to the Africans, and- Interesting ... Ham was their guy. So, it's both more complex and more simple- Yeah ... than the readings that have been ginned up to try to account for this.

Dan Beecher I've got to tell you, you have not convinced me that this is a good passage That like anything positive has occurred here- Yeah ... or that I should like it at all.

Dan McClellan No. Certainly, that's not the goal of me trying to clarify what's going on here. Something I've noticed recently as on Twitter, I've gotten a lot more attention from Christian nationalists and others. There seems to be an uptick in people who will see a video or a tweet of mine where I say something along the lines of, "The Bible supports slavery from beginning to end." And they're like, "Oh, you're saying slavery is good?"

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan I'm telling you what was in the Bible. I'm not saying I endorse biblical morality or biblical ethics. I'm saying this is what the Bible says. And so now some friends of mine are like, "You should probably put a disclaimer on there just to kind of cut off those claims." And I think it's the most ludicrous thing in the world that I would need to let people know, just because I'm saying the Bible says this- Right ... does not mean I'm saying this is the word of God and everybody should be doing it.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But I will make it explicit that it is the official position of the "Data Over Dogma" podcast that slavery is bad, okay?

Dan McClellan Mm.

Dan Beecher And as is cursing someone's line forever, period. Really, I just don't think that- Yeah ... that's okay. I don't think- Yeah ... that that's a great thing to do.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and even in the Bible, you got some people who say, "Well, God will curse your offspring to the fourth generation," or whatever. And then you got other ones who say they will not visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. So whichever God of the Bible you endorse, let's hope it's the one that does not visit the iniquities of the father on the children until the fourth generation.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Especially if those iniquities are just like snickering a little bit at seeing- Yeah ... dad's ding-dong.

Dan McClellan Yeah, walk in on your dad naked. Let he who has not done that cast the first stones.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. In their cartoons and things like that where you have Flash and, what is it? Evil Flash or something? Who's got the yellow costume?

Dan Beecher Man, you're- You've got Sonic- I'm out of my depth on this one.

Dan McClellan Yeah. They usually have an anti- Uh-huh ... character for some folks.

Dan Beecher Says the guy who's wearing a Bizarro Superman shirt as we speak.

Dan McClellan Yeah. When we first hopped on, Dan was like, "Is your video backwards?" "No, it's not. What's going on?" "The S on your shirt is backwards."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, the Bible has your God and your yellow god, or your anti-God.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's right.

Dan McClellan Or your whatever, however you want to qualify the hero with their anti-counterpart.

Dan Beecher But yeah- We're going to have to start doing a Bizarro God segment on the show.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Anyway.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We talked about that in Revelation a little bit.

Dan Beecher That's true.

Dan McClellan The Bizarro God of Revelation.

Dan Beecher That's true.

Dan McClellan So yeah. Spay and neuter your pets, everybody.

Dan Beecher Okay. I think that's a great way to leave it off. Because it's going to lead us, just this talk of nakedness and shame, I think is a great lead in to our next segment, Your Patriarchy & You. So, here's the thing. Recently you got into some Twitter dust-ups, as you are known to do.

Dan McClellan If anyone- As is my wont, let's be honest.

Dan Beecher As is your wont. You occasionally will disagree with some people on Twitter.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Or X, if you care what Elon Musk thinks.

Dan Beecher I don't think I'll ever call it that. I don't think I'm willing.

Dan McClellan I'm working on a trade book right now.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And there's a chapter where I start off with an anecdote, and I talk about Twitter, and it's like so-and-so wrote on Twitter, and then parenthetically, I just have, "or whatever."

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly. Whatever it is, it's going to die soon anyway. It's already lost billions of dollars. Anyway- Yeah Here's the thing. One of the things that you were talking about was a concept that is near and dear to many Christian and Jewish and Muslim people's heart, which is the dressing modestly of women.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher The modest dressing of women.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's a phrase that- Do you know how this all started?

Dan Beecher No, I don't.

Dan McClellan Okay. There's a beer company called Conservative Dad.

Dan Beecher Oh, God.

Dan McClellan And the full name is Conservative Dad, I think it's Ultra Right Beer or something like that.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And they released a 2024 Real Women of America calendar. So a pin-up calendar- Mm-hmm ... with conservative women like Dana Loesch and other folks like that who are well-known in the conservative world, in various states of dress and undress.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan So it is intended to be titillating, and a lot of the blue checks on Twitter just went ballistic. Called it satanic.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan Said that this was soft porn.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan Said it was, quote, "not conservative" in perhaps the most vicious cut of all.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And you had a lot of Christians who just loudly braying about how upset they were that these women would appear in this calendar, and they would purport to be conservatives. And so that then caused all of these Christians to, let's say, find their relief in spewing scripture all over Twitter- Well ...

Dan Beecher about this. This is a tradition that goes back a long way.

Dan McClellan It does.

Dan Beecher And there are a whole bunch. I went and did a bunch of poking around to find who was saying what about how the ladies should dress.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Interestingly, so many of the places that I found, and we'll talk about this a little while later, but so many of them said that men should also dress modestly, but no time was spent on what that looked like.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher But a lot of time was spent on what women dressing modestly looks like.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And they did.

Dan McClellan Should I just rattle off a few of the- Let's dive in ...

Dan Beecher scriptures- Yeah ... that have been given to support the idea that women need to dress modestly, and we'll get to what modesty might mean.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, as the mediocre poet once said, "All right, let's see it."

Dan Beecher Indeed. I'm going to start with 1 Timothy chapter 2- Okay ... which I saw a lot of, and that starts on verse nine. It says, "Also that the women should dress themselves in moderate clothing, with reverence and self-control, not with their hair braided or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God."

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Now, I've never seen anyone berate a Christian woman for wearing gold or pearls. Or for braiding her hair. Or for braiding her hair. Yeah, that's- There's a lot of braided Christians out there.

Dan McClellan That's the word of God.

Dan Beecher It's right there- Yeah ... in Timothy.

Dan McClellan So we've talked about Timothy before- Mm ... which is not Pauline. It comes from later on, written by somebody who was pretending to be Paul, but they're reflecting pretty standard Greco-Roman ideologies regarding the household, the oikonomia of the standard house, where everyone had a specific role and a place, and everything stayed in its place. And the woman's role was to be respectable, to bring honor rather than shame to her household and to her husband, and to basically be seen and not heard. And the word here that is translated modest is kosmios. And I'll read from a lexicon here. One sense, which is probably not the sense we're talking about, is having characteristics or qualities that evoke admiration or delight and expression of high regard for a person, respectable, honorable. The sense that we're probably dealing here with is related, being appropriate for winning approval or appropriate. So it's just saying wearing appropriate clothing. And then we have the explanation of what that means, not braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothing. So appropriate here very clearly means not ostentatious displays of wealth.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That very clearly seems to be about showing off.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I would imagine that a modern equivalent would be not with Louis Vuitton labels and- ... Gucci all over everything.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and in this time period, early Christians, Greco-Roman period Jewish folks, pretty conservative socially, probably dressing pretty conservative as well. There wouldn't have been a very large standard deviation from how most folks were dressing. And so, yeah, braiding your hair, wearing gold, wearing fancy stuff probably would have been considered trying to stand out.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And the idea here is don't stand out. Don't show people up. Do good things. Look respectable. Bring honor to the household. And so yeah, the admonition here is very clearly to not try to display wealth or status.

Dan Beecher Are you saying that a woman showing her shoulders is not what First Timothy is all about?

Dan McClellan Nobody is saying anything about shoulders at all.

Dan Beecher Nobody mentioned skin?

Dan McClellan No. There's only one part of the entire Bible that has anything to do with identifying a body part that a woman must cover.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And that's in First Corinthians 11, and that's where Paul says, "When you're praying or prophesying, please, for the sake of all that is good and holy, put a cover on your head."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And this is a temporary thing. This isn't men are going to be driven crazy with lust if they see your forehead or your hair. It has to do with probably, kind of ritual conventions of the time period, and Paul's just rationalizing it. He probably doesn't want to overturn the apple cart, and this was a convention, and so he's coming up with a rationalization where he talks about the angels.

Dan Beecher In fairness, he goes pretty hard on it.

Dan McClellan He does go hard on it, yeah.

Dan Beecher He says, "If a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair. But if it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut off or be shaved, she should wear a veil."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And Paul elsewhere says nature itself testifies that long hair on a man is shameful.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan So, he's a biologist. He knows what he's talking about. He knows nature has agency.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And not only is it shameful if a man has long hair, but it's glorious if a woman has long hair.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If a woman has long hair, it is her glory.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher For her hair is given for her a covering.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's given to her for a covering, yeah. But you still got to cover the covering for the sake of- You got to cover the covering, which is a weird... Okay, fine.

Dan McClellan Yeah. For the sake of the angels.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And scholars really don't know what on earth is going on here. There are ideas that maybe there was a cultic practice where women were not covering their head, and these practices were seen as unseemly, and so they didn't want to be associated with these other cultic practices. We don't know exactly what's going on, but one thing we can say for sure is this has nothing to do with ensuring that nobody's getting wood from watching you pray.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That seems to be very true, because it's only when she's praying that she's doing this.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So.

Dan McClellan And not to kink shame, but if that's your thing, maybe leave the ladies alone at church.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, what else do we got?

Dan Beecher I think you- Deuteronomy has a whole thing about a woman shall not wear a man's apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment. Deuteronomy 22:5, yeah. What is a woman or a man's apparel changes dramatically over time.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher We can all sort of look back at any costume drama and see that what is a woman's clothing has been different, and what is a man's clothing has been different forever.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And a lot of the things that women wore were men's clothing first. High heels were men's first. Makeup was invented for men first, all of that sort of thing. So, that seems situational and is not- Yeah ... at all specific. It doesn't say, "Here are the specific garments that men wear that women wouldn't."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there's also not a parity. If it said a woman should not wear a man's clothes and a man should not wear a woman's clothes, that would be some parity, but they actually use different words- Right ... to describe each thing. And so this has confused a lot of people. There are some folks that think this has to do with armor, like women should not put on the work clothes of warrior men- Oh ... and things like that. So women need to be in the domestic sphere. They should not go out and fight battles. That's reading a lot of extra stuff into it that's not there. But yeah, I personally don't know that I would be able to distinguish the apparel of a man from the apparel of a woman in the time period of the composition of Deuteronomy 22.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan If I were just thrown back in time and I saw somebody from behind and they were wearing clothes, I probably wouldn't be able to tell if it was a man or a woman.

Dan Beecher Yeah, to a modern eye, it's like, "Oh, look at that robe that that person is wearing."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this has something to do with, there's a passage in... Oh, shoot, I forget where it is. You may have run across it, but there's a part where they talk about somebody dressed in the clothes of a sex worker.

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah. I did bump across that, but I didn't pull it.

Dan McClellan Okay. And here's a passage where some people think, "Oh, that must be similar to what we talk about when we talk about somebody dressing like a lady of the night."

Dan Beecher She's dressed like a hooker.

Dan McClellan Yeah. They probably didn't do the same thing with their dress to signal- their profession- Right ...

Dan Beecher anciently.

Dan McClellan There was probably some kind of way that they used their clothing to indicate what they did, and it probably didn't have to do with showing more skin.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It probably- It was a jaunty hat.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You put a feather in your hat, and then everybody knows.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So there was probably some kind of coded apparel- Right ... that allowed people to identify.

Dan Beecher But I do have Zephaniah 1, which I thought was confusing.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Zephaniah 1, verse 8 says, "And on the day of the Lord's sacrifice, I will punish the officials and the king's sons and all who dress themselves in foreign attire."

Dan McClellan Uh-huh. That's the NRSV.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Unless- And this- Go ahead.

Dan Beecher So again, it's a prohibition about how we dress, but clearly, obviously that has nothing to do with modesty in any sense that we think of it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. This- It's about signaling your tribe or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And some of the three most essential features of an ethnic identity, a people's identity, language, food, dress.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And so there are many different ways that people signal belonging through dress, and it does not have to be the percentage of skin that is covered or uncovered. It can be so many different ways. And so, yeah, here it's maybe they point the bill of their cap the other direction in the other country. Maybe they butter the other side of their bread. Maybe they open their soft-boiled egg from the other end. There are just so many different ways that you can create this schismogenesis. You can create these identity markers by doing little changes. They wear blue, and they wear red. You could do a bunch of different things.

Dan Beecher And so- When you were in the UK, did you pick up the habit of turning your fork upside down and smushing all the food onto the back of the fork? I think that's one where we could rumble with the Brits- Yeah ... on how to use a fork.

Dan McClellan I did not do that. I'm sure that I horrified a number of the locals when I- ... when I was there, let's see, two Octobers ago, I was in the UK for work, and I swung by Oxford, and a friend of mine was doing a fellowship at Magdalen College. And so he invited me to come have lunch at the college with him, which is like a fancy affair.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan But yeah, it was fun, and I'm sure that there were people looking at me like, "You silly Yank."

Dan Beecher They forgave your evil American fork usage?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, I think I might have actually been wearing my Bizarro T-shirt. Now that I think about it. It's like, I'm almost positive I was wearing a graphic tee, and it might've been this one.

Dan Beecher So- Oh, my gosh ...

Dan McClellan to return to modesty, I think we've got something in 1 Peter 3, which is basically the same thing that we've got in 1 Timothy 2.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "Do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing." Literally the exact same three things- Right ... that are mentioned in 1 Timothy 2. "Rather, let your adornment be the inner self, with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God's sight."

Dan Beecher Aw.

Dan McClellan And it's just saying the same thing, that this modesty here is about avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth. And so I said something on Twitter that a lot of people immediately wanted to try to refute me on, but there's not a single passage anywhere in the Bible that tells women they have to cover up their bodies so that men are not driven to lust after them or sexually assault them or just get upset with them for- Well- ...

Dan Beecher whatever ... that is the thing that you see all the time. That is the excuse that all of these... And it's not just men making this argument. Women make this argument to other women as well- Yeah ... that somehow, if they dress sexily or in a way that could encourage men's lust, they are then responsible for causing their brothers in Christ to stumble.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher There's a reference in Romans 14, verse 13, that says, "Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother or sister." Which, yeah, you could interpret it that way, but that doesn't seem to be what that passage actually says. It's not about women dressing one way or another.

Dan McClellan Yeah. This has nothing to do with governing how women are dressing. It just doesn't say anything about that.

Dan Beecher Ironically, it says don't pass judgment on somebody else.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which it seems like everyone who comments on how a woman dresses in a negative way like this is very much passing judgment on that woman.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And what is appropriate or inappropriate is subjective, is relative.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it's going to horrify a lot of people who have never left the country or never learned another language, but there are many parts of the world where degrees of nudity that would make us uncomfortable are just part of everyday life- Yeah ... where that is just the way it is, and nobody bats an eye at it. And so there's this guy, Joshua Haynes, on Twitter, who is a mustache and cigar enjoyer- ... says, and this was one of the tweets that I responded to. He says, "I was once put into the position of having to address a woman for regularly not wearing a bra to church on Sunday."