Out of Nothing

Dan McClellan He says, "Sir, I have never seen Babylon, and I know nothing about the den." Then the angel of the Lord took him by the crown of his head and carried him by his hair. So the angel was just like- Nope, you're coming ... "You stupid little..." He's kind of like, "Ow, ow, ow." 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 the spread of that pesky misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Good. Just having a lovely time. You and I are recording this well before it's going to be coming out because we're all going on trips, and we're going to be having fun times, so- Yep ... we only have things to look forward to now.

Dan McClellan By the time this comes out, I might be in San Diego for the San Diego Comic-Con. I don't know when this is going to come out.

Dan Beecher Or it will have already happened, and who knows?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We'll both be tan. You never know.

Dan McClellan I will probably be just as white as now- ... just because I'm so susceptible that I just drench myself in sunscreen, whenever I remember, because the last thing I need is another sunburn. I grew up perpetually peeling dead skin off- Yeah ... of old sunburns, so.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So yeah. That's lovely.

Dan Beecher That's always fun.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's always fun. I did see a thing, this is not relevant to our show, but I just saw a thing, that there's a new vaccine for skin cancer that they've been working on.

Dan McClellan Oh, really?

Dan Beecher Yeah. An mRNA thing that has been very effective for stopping melanomas and stuff. So maybe it'll save you.

Dan McClellan Good grief.

Dan Beecher Who knows?

Dan McClellan Man, wish I would've known about that in the '80s and '90s.

Dan Beecher Right?

Dan McClellan Good night.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I don't know anything more about it than that, but I'm sure there will be conspiracy theories about it soon. Coming up on today's show, we are going to be looking at a couple of really interesting things. First of all, we are going to be diving into the creation of the universe, you guys.

Dan McClellan Ooh.

Dan Beecher So that's pretty fancy.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I don't know if you know this, but it was us. It was me and Dan. We built it. And then after that, one of the lesser-known but fascinating books of the Apocrypha. I always want to say "Belle and Sebastian," but we're doing "Belle and the Dragon."

Dan McClellan "Belle and the Dragon," and not technically its own book, but one of the additions to the Book of Daniel. So we'll talk about that when we get there.

Dan Beecher How dare you, sir. How dare you- Oh, I dare ... deny it its book status. But yes, it's a fun one. You're going to want to stick around.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But first, let's launch into creation stories.

Dan McClellan Dun, dun, dun. Creation ex nihilo, to be more specific.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan We've talked about some creation accounts before, in fact, I think our very first episode of this podcast, we talked about Genesis 1:1, and one of the things that we pointed out is that correctly interpreted, there's no creation ex nihilo going on there. That everything- Yeah ... seems to have been created from the chaotic, murky, waters of creation that probably had some kind of unformed earth submerged beneath them, and creation was a process of separating things out, light and dark, water from water, dry land from water, and so on and so forth, and thus and so. But when we get a little closer to the New Testament, we get some passages that people, who are willing to give a little on creation ex nihilo in Genesis 1:1, these passages, people are a little more strict about. They're a little more insistent.

Dan Beecher Before we get too far into this, let's define ex nihilo as a- So yeah.

Dan McClellan Creation ex nihilo, half of it is Latin, out of nothing, and this is the idea that the universe was created from nothing, that God brought all the material that makes up the universe into existence from nothing.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so therefore, God is the ultimate creator of and source of all matter that exists, and- Yeah, and it's so funny.

Dan Beecher Like you say, that Genesis 1 creation story, it is clear that it's not from nothing. There's already plenty of something when that starts. But boy, man, if you get into an argument with a young earth creationist online, ex nihilo is the only way to go.

Dan McClellan Absolutely, and there's a reason for this, and this is something that we've talked about in some of the other videos, particularly where we talked about monotheism with David Bernet.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan When we get the development of monotheism, part of the requirement is that you have creation ex nihilo, because if not, then you had something that existed apart from God eternally, and there's a question of how God can have sovereignty over all of matter if it is co-equal and co-eternal with God.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so part of the doctrine of monotheism is reliant upon the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. So this is pretty important, but the question is, when do we get it? And a lot of people think it's in the Bible or maybe in the Apocrypha, but- Hmm ... the academic consensus right now is that we don't get it until the last couple of decades of the second century CE.

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan So, like 180 CE is probably where we first see any clear articulation of the idea that God created everything out of nothing. So- How dare you? Oh, I dare. Not in the Bible. Oh, there's so much that's not in the Bible. But, usually when you point out that you don't have creation ex nihilo in Genesis, people are like, "Fine, but it's in 2 Maccabees 7:28, and don't you dare try to tell me it's not."

Dan Beecher Okay. And 2 Maccabees- So we're diving right back into that old Apocrypha.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're going to get apocryphal on your butt, so to speak, to paraphrase the great poet. In chapter seven of 2 Maccabees is one of the most fascinating stories, I think, in all of 2 Maccabees. If you've never read 1 and 2 Maccabees, you've really got to, because a lot of this is agreed to be historical. This is about this great series of battles between Antiochus Epiphanes IV, the Seleucid ruler, and the Jewish people in the 160s BCE. And the story in chapter seven is not historical. It's usually referred to as the mother and her seven sons. And the idea is that the Seleucid ruler was trying to force people to consume pork, and force them to offer sacrifices to other gods and everything like that in an effort to try to stamp out Judaism.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And in this chapter, we have a story where Antiochus IV Epiphanes comes upon a mother and her seven youngish sons, and one by one tortures each of her sons and then kills them- Mm ... because they refuse to violate the laws of their people.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The Jewish purity laws. And each time, the mother exhorts the sons before they are killed to remain faithful, and there are a series of promises and statements that go into this. In verse 28, we have this statement that she says, "I beseech you, child, to look toward heaven and earth, and on seeing all that is in them, to know that God did not make these things from what existed, and the human race came into existence in the same way."

Dan Beecher And so- Okay ...

Dan McClellan it kind of sounds like creation ex nihilo, and people are like, "That is definitely creation ex nihilo. God did not make these things, the universe around you, from what existed." And so case closed, or so everybody thought. Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, the Greek there is, "Did not make these things ex onton," which is out of the being stuff- Mm ... or what bes, what is, what exists. And this is actually referring, as most scholars today agree, to a traditional Greek philosophical concept that we find most clearly in Aristotle but is found elsewhere, that matter exists either in a state of being or non-being.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And it all comes down to whether or not it has form and function. And so you can just have unorganized, chaotic matter, and according to Aristotle, that is existing in a state or a realm of non-being. But once you impose form and function on it, you have moved it into a state of being. So he has this statement in a text called "On the Generation of Animals." Aristotle says, "For generation is from non-being into being." Generation meaning creation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "And corruption from being again into non-being."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so when things deteriorate- Yeah ... they go from having form and function to not having form and function.

Dan Beecher To being soggy and gross.

Dan McClellan Yes, and stuff that you don't want to eat. Or play with or whatever. And so the author of 2 Maccabees 7:28 is saying the heavens and Earth were created ouk ex onton, or not out of being stuff. And so the idea is adopting this Greek philosophical view that basically God took unformed, unorganized, chaotic matter and squished it together and shaped it and made little eyes and a nose and created the universe. And then as the verse goes on to state, the human race came into existence in the same way.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which is definitely not out of nothing. The human race, even according to Genesis, was created out of being stuff.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Or was created out of the dust of the Earth according to Genesis 2.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, yeah, this is not a case of creation ex nihilo. This is a case of creation ex materia. And we've even got a bunch of passages in the New Testament that people will cite and say, "Well, at least this is very clearly creation ex nihilo." So we've got Romans 4:17, where Paul concludes by referring to God as the one who calls into existence the things that do not exist, and that's how the NRSV translates it. But this things that do not exist is different Greek words to say the same thing. Ta me onta, which is the non-being things. It is a neuter plural instead of a masculine plural word for being. And so it's the same idea. And then we've got Hebrews 11:3, "By faith we understand that the universe was ordered by God's word, so that what is seen came from what is not visible." And so people will be like, "Well, what is not visible obviously means nothing."

Dan Beecher Means it doesn't exist.

Dan McClellan Doesn't exist, yeah. Because if you can't see it, it doesn't exist. But others have pointed out, we go to Colossians 1:16, we got the invisible features of God's creation, which are the powers, thrones, dominions, rulers, and so forth. And these are always understood as divine forces. They're just not seen.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They're invisible. So that's obviously not creation ex nihilo either.

Dan Beecher Yeah. One would point out that God himself is unseen and yet is also there.

Dan McClellan According to a lot of New Testament authors, yeah. God is themselves unseen, but exists according to those New Testament authors.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Now, what the apologists who are aware of the current academic consensus but don't like it- ... will go on to argue is that in the New Testament, we have repeated references to God being the creator of all things. And the idea is, if God created all things, then obviously, it came out of nothing. And this is a pretty strained argument because it would have to mean that this extends to all things that exist or that have ever existed. In other words, nothing could exist that was not created by God, including material that preexisted creation by God. But that's expanding the rhetorical scope of these statements well beyond what was obviously intended by the authors, because the New Testament authors are very clearly trying to make the case that God has sovereignty over all things. What things specifically? Well, the things that are around us right now.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So there's a temporal scope to this rhetoric. It's talking about now, now.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That was then, this is now. When will then be now?

Dan Beecher Soon.

Dan McClellan And so, we still don't have any concept of creation ex nihilo. And we also have in the New Testament, there are plenty of places where people use that word panta, which means all things, in ways that obviously don't actually mean all things. The woman at the well in John 4 goes to her town and says to the people, "Come see a man who told me all things that I have done." It's like you had a long conversation- Yeah ... if Jesus told you literally all things that you have ever done.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And in Matthew 17:11, Jesus says Elijah is going to return to restore all things. Don't think that literally all things that have ever existed, down to the minutest atom, will be restored. So it's not taking seriously the rhetorical context of these phrases in the New Testament. So there's just no case to make that we find creation ex nihilo in the Hebrew Bible, in 2 Maccabees 7:28, in the New Testament. We don't see it anywhere in the Bible or the literature that was composed around the same time as the Bible. What we see is the earliest Christians agreeing with the conventional wisdom that matter is eternal, that matter goes all the way back, that out of nothing, nothing can come. But things start to change in the second century, because in the second century, we've got this effort on the parts of Christians to intellectualize the gospel. The apologists take over. These are educated folks who are trying to make the gospel palatable for the Greco-Roman intelligentsia so that the gospel can then be disseminated on a higher social level rather than the traditional notion of Christianity as a religion for women and slaves- Mm ... which is how it's described right when we get into the second century CE.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan And we have these debates between Christians and Gnostics and other Greek thinkers, philosophers, arguers, about the, one, morality of eternal matter, and two, the rationality of the resurrection. Because within the Greek philosophical mindset, the only thing that is divine and eternal and unchanging is spirit. The flesh is corrupt and dumb, and we just don't like it. We want to get rid of it. And this is why in the Gnostic worldview, salvation is about escaping the prison of our fleshly bodies so that our spirits can ascend to the pleroma and be one with the divine forever. And so you basically have Christians going, "Oh, no, our bodies are going to be resurrected, and we're going to live eternally in fleshly bodies." And they're like, "Why would we want these- ... to live forever basically strapped to this pigsty that we're trying to get away from?" They didn't like the idea.

Dan Beecher These are the worst part.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it was like, hey, these bodies die. They get consumed by animals and then ejected as waste from animals, and you're saying that that excrement is going to come out- And reconstitute the body, and we're going to just live like this forever? That's gross.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, there's a lot of criticism of the idea of the resurrection, and you have arguments that begin with this idea of, oh, well, God can create a human being out of what begins as just a tiny little bit of matter. So God can reconstitute a body that has been burned to cinders or that has been consumed by an animal, that has deteriorated at the bottom of the sea.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan That's not a big obstacle for God. But then there's also the problem of the morality of eternal matter. If you've got matter existing eternally and matter is dumb and corrupt and changing, then it exists eternally apart from God, and God is not sovereign over it. And it just creates this kind of tension with the way the direction Christians are wanting to go with how they're representing God within the Greco-Roman milieu. If we want to make this sound rational and reasonable to Greek-thinking people, we have to do something about this. And, the idea that we get is that matter and the divine are not co-eternal twin principles. And I think the first person who clearly articulates this idea that no, God created all matter from nothing, which is a flagrant violation of the conventional wisdom about how matter exists. So, this guy Tatian, who was a student of Justin Martyr, around 170 CE, he's got this text called "Address to the Greeks," where he argues that God created all matter out of nothing. And, I've got a quote here, "Neither is matter without cause, as is God, nor is it equal in power to God because it is without cause. It was generated, and it was not generated by anyone else, but it was expressed only by the Demiurge of all. Therefore, we believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies after the consummation of everything." So it kind of combines both of these ideas. Matter's not co-eternal with God, and the resurrection is not stupid.

Dan Beecher And- Shut up.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Shut up, man. And we have the first articulation of creation ex nihilo, of creation out of nothing.

Dan Beecher Right. And then we have the- And the first mention of the special pleading for God, the uncaused causer.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Where everything else was caused, but that doesn't have to apply to him.

Dan McClellan Well, and that goes back a little further with Platonic philosophy, but certainly the first use of that argument to defend Christianity and its belief that our soggy, messy- ... fleshly bodies are going to be resurrected.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then we've got this dude named Theophilus of Antioch, who comes after Tatian, and he mocked the Platonists who believed that matter existed eternally and argued that God created all matter. Around 180 CE, he wrote in a text that, "Just as God is changeless because he is ungenerated, so also if matter is ungenerated, it is also changeless and equal to God, for that which is generated is mutable and changeable. The ungenerated is immutable and unchangeable." Therefore, matter can't be co-equal and co-eternal with God, and we have to have this idea of creation out of nothing.

Dan Beecher And this- I find that so interesting. Just quickly, this idea, because what you just said, that argument, the thing doesn't follow for me. These two things share one set of features, that is eternality, and therefore, they're equal? I don't know why that would necessarily follow. But okay, fine.

Dan McClellan Well, there is an idea in some philosophical surfaces. Surfaces, what?

Dan Beecher Circles?

Dan McClellan Sure.

Dan Beecher That- More circles.

Dan McClellan Circles makes more sense than surfaces. That what comes before is superior.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan What comes after is inferior. And so if matter and deity neither precedes the other, then chronologically, at least, and therefore morally, they are equal.

Dan Beecher It makes sense. I'm older than my sister, and I'm way better than she is. So there's some logic to that. I can see that.

Dan McClellan I can see that, too. I'm older than my brother, but he's three inches taller than me, so that's the only part where our relationship just totally violates these natural laws. So- You should tell him that. You violate natural laws. Oh, I have. And so once we get this idea, then we have Christians looking back on those passages that we talked about and stroking their beards and clucking their tongues and saying, "Hey, look at that. Creation ex nihilo." Mm-hmm. So they look back at Romans, and they look back at 2 Maccabees 7:28, and they look back at these passages, and there's another one, Shepherd of Hermas, 26:1. This is a text written around 100 CE. Didn't make it into the Bible ultimately, but was included in some of our earliest editions of the Bible. I think it's in Sinaiticus.

Dan Beecher I can see why it didn't make it in.

Dan McClellan Even the name just sounds like they made it up.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's just made up.

Dan McClellan But, in the Shepherd of Hermas it says, "Truly then the scripture declared, which says, 'First of all, believe that there is one God who has established all things and completed them, and having caused that from what had no being, all things should come into existence.'"

Dan Beecher Ugh.

Dan McClellan And so they're now saying, "Hey, look at these passages. This is all confirmation of creation ex nihilo."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So basically, we came up with this new way of thinking about creation, and that became the interpretive lens. And then when they turned that interpretive lens back on the biblical text that never meant that before, it was like, "Ah, it makes sense. It makes perfect sense.

Dan Beecher It all- There you go ...

Dan McClellan fits together."

Dan Beecher Everything's working, baby.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. I think I probably got that backwards, but I don't know.

Dan Beecher It'll be fine. We'll survive.

Dan McClellan And then, we have later, kind of authoritative Christian philosophers, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and others kind of come in and further flesh out how this all fits within the Christian worldview, as well as within a philosophical kind of canon. They make it philosophically defensible. They set up the reinforcements for it. And then, by the time you get to the medieval period and then into the Enlightenment, it is rock solid, baby. It is in the foundation of Christian theology. And so when we get to the creation of monotheism in the 17th century with Henry More and Ralph Cudworth and the deists in the 18th century, creation ex nihilo is just presupposed and, in fact, forms the foundation of the concept of monotheism. So, these things are all interrelated.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Ultimately, in the long run, that's how it turns out. But yeah, totally made up. Second century CE.

Dan Beecher That's neat.

Dan McClellan To be food.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's so funny because I've had conversations online with people, I've had conversations in person with people who presuppose ex nihilo creation to the point where even questioning it makes you heretical, utterly heretical.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And now they're going through and they're sort of back-filling it with astrophysics and all of the stuff that we hear. Every time the word quantum comes into the picture, it's just like, "Okay.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher There you go."

Dan McClellan There's definitely an apologetic argument these days where it'll be like, even Stephen Hawking thinks that the universe was created, or there was a time when it didn't exist or something like that. It's like, well, that kind of misrepresents the physics a little bit. But, yeah. The doctrine didn't exist when the Bible was being written.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there are a bunch of wonderful books on this if anybody wants to read up. There's a book by Gerhard Mai from the '90s called "Creation ex Nihilo." James Hubler wrote a doctoral dissertation, I think, at the University of Pennsylvania, on creation ex nihilo, and talks about the philosophical discussion all the way up through to Aquinas. There, Markus Bockmuehl and Anderson have an edited volume on creation ex nihilo, where they're talking about a lot of moral and theological implications. But the first chapter of the said edited volume is saying basically, "Yeah. We have the building blocks. We don't have a clear articulation until the second century CE, but it's biblical-ish." So, there's a pretty widespread acknowledgement that the idea was not articulated until 170, 180 CE.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan Yeah, but if you question it today, for a lot of people, it just totally undercuts God's sovereignty. How can it possibly be that God is not the creator of all of the material that exists in the universe? And that, I think, shows that a lot of people are operating in their theology, not on the level of the biblical text or the biblical authors, but on the philosophical level.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Which is this conceptual fortress that is constructed in the thousand years after the Bible was written, not during the writing of the Bible.

Dan Beecher Fair enough.

Dan McClellan All right. Well, we're going to switch gears then. We're going to downshift. We're going to- Like "Rocky II."

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan In that Porsche, just and downshift.

Dan Beecher All right. Let's do a chapter and verse.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher And this chapter and verse is fascinating. We're back into the Apocrypha. We spent a little bit, a moment or two, in the Maccabees in the first half of the show. Now, we're in Bel and the Dragon. And I will never be able to get it right because that's just what's going to pop into my head. But Bel and the Dragon, which I was only made aware-- Look, I don't know the Apocrypha. I never read any of the Apocrypha before very recently. I wasn't raised with it, certainly. And so- When someone told me that there was a biblical book called Bel and the Dragon, I got very, very excited. When I found out it was an actual dragon, I got even excited-er because that's amazing. And then when I found out that these are stories of a beloved biblical character that we already know, I thought, "Oh, that's really cool." So take us in, man. What have we got?

Dan McClellan So, we're in the part of the Apocrypha that is known as the additions, and this means that they're not independent books. It's not First and Second Maccabees. It's not those independent books, but it's versions of things from the Hebrew Bible that were probably added later on. And so this is actually chapter 14 of the Greek version of the Book of Daniel.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And so it's an additional chapter that's tacked on at the end of Daniel and was probably written in Greek, and added into the Book of Daniel. And there's an argument to make, in fact, a lot of scholars think that this story of, particularly the story of Daniel in the lion's den, comes from before the story that actually gets preserved in the canonical Book of Daniel.

Dan Beecher Really? Oh, interesting. Yeah, so- And you said this was in Greek. Was the Book of Daniel-- What language was the Book of Daniel originally written in?

Dan McClellan So some of it was Hebrew, some of it was Aramaic.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But it comes together in the final form as we know it, can date no earlier than, the early 160s BCE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, it came together fairly late.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And, the story is, we have this kind of contest, between Daniel and the priests of Bel, where the Babylonians have this idol called Bel, and this is probably related to Baal.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And every day they provided for it 12 bushels of choice flour and 40 sheep and six measures of wine.

Dan Beecher And this, by the way, this story does answer, after we talked about... I don't remember what specifically we talked about, but we were talking about ancestor worship, and we were talking about people leaving offerings- Mm-hmm ... for ancestors and that sort of thing. And there was some question among some of our listeners about did they think that their ancestors, or whoever the idol was, whoever these offerings were going to, did these people think that they were actually eating them? Because we talked about how people wanted to be provided food- Mm-hmm ... in their afterlife. And did they think they were actually eating it? Because surely it just sat there. If you take it into your ancestral whatever, the food just stays. But this is an awful lot of food to just stick around.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there were a few different ways they did these funerary meals and stuff. One way was just, they just ate in their presence. So the living people are consuming the food themselves.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Another way is the burnt offering idea, that by burning it, you're allowing the sustenance to take smoke form and rise up or something like that. And then the other way was just putting stuff in the tomb and then you wouldn't see it for a year. And guess what? The chicken wing- It's gone ... has deteriorated- ... in the year. And if they're boneless, then there's nothing left.

Dan Beecher So- Right ...

Dan McClellan which is probably what the deceased folks prefer anyway, because- ... the gristle just gets in the way. So yeah, what you've got here is basically, they're mocking how they were trying to represent the consumption of the offerings. So, the king says to Daniel, "Do you not think that Bel is a living god? Do you not see how much he eats and drinks every day?" And Daniel guffaws and said, "Do not be deceived, O king, for this thing is only clay inside and bronze outside, and it has never eaten or drunk anything." So we've got some idol mockery going on here.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We've got- It's bold.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And this king, by the way, is Cyrus, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah, it is Cyrus.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, Daniel's like, "Ha ha ha, you fool. The deity is not eating these things." And the king is angry and calls all the priests of Bel and says, "We've got to prove that this deity is eating all these things." And the priests of Bel had a little trap door inside.

Dan Beecher They were sneaky.

Dan McClellan Yeah, they were sneaky. And they would come in at night, the doors are all shut and locked. I don't know if you remember from Dr. No, James Bond does a little boink, takes out a little hair and licks it and puts it across between the door and the frame- ... so that he can tell if someone has opened this door.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They've got all that in place.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But because they've got this trap door inside, they can sneak in and they can eat all the food themselves.

Dan Beecher It's not exactly David Blaine levels of magic.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's a pretty obvious trick, but they haven't told anybody about it. So when Cyrus is like, "We're going to put this to the test"- Mm-hmm ...

Dan McClellan yeah.

Dan Beecher Daniel's like, "All right, we'll put it to the test." They go in, they put in all the food.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But Daniel has an extra. Daniel's going full Amazing Randy on this one.

Dan McClellan Yeah. This is where it would've been really nice to have Gallagher come in and...

Dan Beecher Oh, that's a reference to a totally different podcast.

Dan McClellan Call back to our time on God Awful Movies, the podcast.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So Daniel's like, "Hey, King, check this out. Everybody's gone for the evening. You and I are the only ones here. We're going to take a bunch of ash. We're just going to sprinkle ash around everywhere."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And the priests don't know about this. So it's dark. They are tripping over each other. They come out of the trap door, they go munch on the food, and then head back down.

Dan Beecher And it's not just the priests, by the way. It's the priests, their wives, and- Yeah, their families ... all of their children. And there are 70 priests, I think. So it's mayhem in there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then the next day, Daniel and the king show up, and the priests are like, "Ha, the food is gone." And Daniel's like, "Oh my gosh. Look at the floor, everybody."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Did you notice that?

Dan McClellan And the king says, "I see the footprints of men, and women, and children." Then the king was enraged, and he arrested the priests, and their wives, and children, and they showed him the secret doors, which they used to enter to consume what was on the table. And therefore, the king put them to death- Yeah ... and gave Bel over to Daniel, who destroyed it and its temple. So this is anti-idol polemics- Yeah ... which has kind of taken a... This probably brings a tear of appreciation to the eye of some of the more militant of the online atheists these days. Maybe not that people were killed, but the fact that Daniel was able to cleverly expose the ruse.

Dan Beecher Yeah. One of the things that it sort of points out is that at very least, according to the story, the King Cyrus actually believed that this god was eating all of this food.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So at very least, the story claims that people believed that. I don't know how much people actually believed it, but that's interesting. So there you go. Daniel has slain one god. He is the god slayer.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But that god was just a statue.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But anybody can prove a statue's not a god. But his next task, it's starting to feel like the tasks of Hercules or something- ... because he's confronted by another more differenter god, and that is a dragon. It's Trogdor.

Dan McClellan Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher Trogdor.

Dan McClellan Trogdor!

Dan Beecher So yeah. Where does this come from? Do we have any sense? Because this is not like a metaphor or something.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher The story is the king's like, "Oh yeah, well, what about the dragon though?" That's a god, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So- What does he say? You cannot deny that this is a living god?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So worship him.

Dan Beecher So worship him.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So what's going on there?

Dan McClellan So- ... dragon/serpent, and this is based on earlier mythology associated with Leviathan- Mm-hmm ... which is a serpent/dragon. We've talked about that, Isaiah 27:1, Psalm 74, Job. On Twitter, I think I saw the best summary of the Book of Job, and it was God saying to Job going, "What's up with all the suffering?" And God saying, "How dare you speak that way to the inventor of the hippopotamus." So the Leviathan is this classical mythological chaos dragon monster sea serpent.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so in this period, the idea is that there were these things in antiquity, and this is being written probably in the 2nd century BCE, 3rd or 2nd century BCE. And so the Babylonian exile is hoary antiquity, and so maybe the dragons were around back then.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So Cyrus is like, "Well, what about the dragon down there?" And rawr, you got a little dragon over there.

Dan Beecher No, no, it is a great dragon. It says so right in verse 23.

Dan McClellan And Daniel says, "I worship the Lord my God, for he is a living God. But give me permission, O King, and I will kill the dragon without sword or club." The king said, "I'll allow it." "I'll allow it.

Dan Beecher Just this once."

Dan McClellan So Daniel took pitch, fat, and hair, and boiled them together and made cakes. And I think I've had one of these cakes before, but- Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's dense, but it's delicious.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, you just get- And boy, dragons cannot resist.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That's their Achilles' heel. And he fed them to the dragon, and if you get the SBL study Bible- Oh ... there's a wonderful 16th-century painting of Daniel slaying the dragon- Oh, I love it ... by a Dutch artist, and it shows Daniel feeding these cakes to a dragon- ... who's kind of like, "Oh, I've had enough. No more." And the dragon eats them and explodes.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So yeah.

Dan Beecher There you go. Poor Trogdor. He is done.

Dan McClellan Daniel- And then Daniel says, "See what you've been worshiping."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The idea being, hey, if this thing can get aced by You know, a rough cake- Yeah ... then you know, you don't have a god, you have something with a pretty weak constitution.

Dan Beecher You have a dragon, which is pretty darn cool. I feel like, I get that he didn't want him to worship the dragon and that, if you're claiming godship for the dragon, that's probably not right, but don't blow up a dragon with cakes just to make a point. A dragon's a cool thing to have, man.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan But because God is the destroyer of the Leviathan and- Yeah ... the tamer of the savage beast, they're representing Daniel as wielding the same power.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But then the Babylonians are upset because you killed our dragon.

Dan Beecher You killed our statue and our dragon.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This sucks.

Dan McClellan And then they make a weird accusation, "And they were very indignant and conspired against the king, saying, 'The king has become a Jew. He has destroyed Bel and killed the dragon and slaughtered the priests.'"

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Going to the king, they said, 'Hand Daniel over to us, or we will kill you and your household.'"

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I don't know if this is all the Babylonians.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's kind of an eat the rich situation where- Yeah ... the whole town is just like, "We outnumber you significantly."

Dan Beecher Yeah, Cyrus didn't seem to have a handle on this- Yeah ... particular situation.

Dan McClellan Yeah. The king saw that they were pressing him hard, and under compulsion, he handed Daniel over to them. At which point Daniel gets thrown where? In the lions' den.

Dan Beecher Right. Which differs from the other account of why Daniel was thrown in the lions' den, which was- Right.

Dan McClellan And also the account of Daniel being in the lions' den, because here he's in there for six days.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's not just like, "The lions are hungry."

Dan Beecher And if you're wondering to yourself, "How did Daniel eat for six days? What happened?" Oh, we've got a story for that.

Dan McClellan But first you've got to know that these lions are voracious, because normally- Well, that's true ... there were seven lions in the den, and every day they had been given two human bodies and two sheep. But now they were given nothing, so that they would devour Daniel. And then we've got a cameo.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The prophet Habakkuk shows up and just incidentally, this prophet's here.

Dan Beecher Yeah, and he's chilling far away from there. He's all the way in Judea.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And he's hanging out, and he's made a stew, which is nice. That sounds delicious.

Dan McClellan As one does, yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And suddenly- Can you imagine he's sitting down, he's got it all laid out nice, and he's like, "Ooh, I get some stew."

Dan Beecher It's stew time, baby.

Dan McClellan And then who shows up? The angel of the Lord says- ...

Dan Beecher says, "Take this to Babylon- Yeah ... and give it to Daniel," which- And Habakkuk's like, "I don't...

Dan McClellan What?

Dan Beecher Babylon?" "Can I make him another stew when I get there? That's a ways away."

Dan McClellan Yeah. "I'm low on gas, and you need a jacket." So he says, "Sir, I have never seen Babylon, and I know nothing about the den." Then the angel of the Lord took him by the crown of his head and carried him by his hair. So the angel was just like- Nope, you're coming ... "You stupid little..." With a gust of wind, he set him down in Babylon right over the den. Presumably with the stew in tow.

Dan Beecher Right, yeah.

Dan McClellan He was like, "Grab the stew. Pick it up."

Dan Beecher "Grab your stew.

Dan McClellan We're going."

Dan Beecher You'd think they'd have other modes of transportation, but the dragon is dead, so all you got is the gust of wind and some hair grabbing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then Habakkuk shouted, "Daniel, Daniel, take the food that God has sent you." It sounds like the angel could have just taken Habakkuk's food, because Habakkuk- Right?

Dan Beecher ...

Dan McClellan is out of the picture.

Dan Beecher Daniel- It does seem like a very elaborate way- Yeah ... to get food to Daniel.

Dan McClellan Yeah, picking him up by his hair and then flying him to Babylon. He's going to be like, "Ow, ow, ow." And Daniel says, "You have remembered me, O God, and have not abandoned those who love you." So Daniel got up and ate, and the angel of God immediately returned Habakkuk to his own place. Like, "You're not needed anymore."

Dan Beecher At which point Habakkuk said, "Was all of this necessary? Why was I involved in this?"

Dan McClellan "Now I've got to go make some more stew."

Dan Beecher "My head hurts. I'm out of stew. This is terrible."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then on the seventh day, the king came to mourn for Daniel. When he came to the den, he looked in and there sat Daniel! Exclamation point. The king shouted with a loud voice, "You are great, O Lord, the God of Daniel, and there is no other besides you." Then he pulled Daniel out and threw into the den those who had attempted his destruction, and they were instantly eaten before his eyes. The rest of the nation of Babylon, he threw into the den? Because it sounded like it was all of them.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The people who came to the king and was like, "We're going to kill you if you don't do this," and the king's like, "I give, I give."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan This is probably not Gallagher and the Two Stooges- ... from The Book of Daniel.

Dan Beecher From the movie. Let me ask you this, because I'm not remembering my Book of Daniel, the book, well enough. Was the king that threw Daniel into the lions' den in Daniel, was that Cyrus? Because I don't remember which king it was But I don't think it was Cyrus, was it?

Dan McClellan So it's a post-Babylonian king, but it's Darius.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan Who is represented in the Book of Daniel as the Median king who defeats Babylon. And then Cyrus comes after Darius.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan I imagine this other text might be representing Cyrus as the one who conquers Babylon.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan But if it is integrated into the rest of the Book of Daniel, then it was probably following their chronology, even though it comes after all of the apocalyptic visions and everything from chapter 7 through 12.

Dan Beecher So, yeah. So, up until the Apocrypha was sort of yeeted out of the Bible, did this just sit next to it? What happened with this? Why was it in? I guess I can see why it was rejected, why it was scooted out. But just sort of give me the... Because it doesn't seem like it aligns with the rest of the Book of Daniel, for example.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, none of the Book of Daniel seems to align with the rest of the Book of Daniel, but- Right.

Dan Beecher That's a good point ...

Dan McClellan yeah. You got to remember, for early Christianity, their Bible was the Septuagint.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Which was the Greek translation. And so this was part of the Greek translation. So when they get together and are like, "All right. These are our books. These are our guys. This is our canon," and they put it together, our earliest editions of a codex with all of the text of the Bible in one volume are these Greek editions. And so they have these texts that were either composed in Greek or primarily circulated in Greek, including these editions. And so this was just a part of the Bible. When we get to the Vulgate, Jerome is including most of what is in the Greek Septuagint. And so this is just part of the Bible until we get down to the Protestant Reformation. Now, Christianity is doing their thing with their version of the Bible, but Judaism is actually just focusing on the texts that are circulated in Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So their version of Daniel is Hebrew and Aramaic. It's not Greek. And so it doesn't include these additions. And so by the time we get down to Martin Luther in the beginning of the 16th century CE, he wants to translate his own version of the Bible, and he's like, "Now, we're doing the Greek New Testament, and then we're going back to the Hebrew." He learns Hebrew, he learns how to translate, and goes back to the Jewish manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. And so he's like, "Hey, all this other stuff isn't here. Instead of just having it integrated into the Old Testament, I'm going to take them out, and I'm going to go put them over here in an entirely separate section."