The Rapture is not Coming!

Dan McClellan The rapture is something that some dudes made up that was then leveraged as a means of trying to influence people to be good, to eat their vegetables, to not touch themselves. That's just a tool, a piece of leverage that people use to try to control behavior.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And incentivize or disincentivize certain behaviors. And it has been phenomenally harmful to entire generations, and stop it. 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 misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Oh, man. I'm worried- Worried?

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher is what I am.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher I am desperately concerned that all of my loved ones are going to fly away and leave me behind.

Dan McClellan And not in a Lenny Kravitz kind of fly away, but something- Maybe in a Lenny Kravitz. A little- I don't know ... less melodic.

Dan Beecher I don't know if it's a Lenny Kravitz sort of way. I'm going to need you to teach me that.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher But yes, today we're going to be talking about the rapture, and- The velocirapture, right?

Dan McClellan Is the full name.

Dan Beecher Well, that's the best one. That's the Jurassic- "Jurassic Girl" ...

Dan McClellan version.

Dan Beecher Okay. And then we're going to be going over some stuff. You went through and said, "Hey, let's talk about Daniel 10," and I was like, "Cool." So I went and I read Daniel 10, and I understood exactly none of it. So, I'm very excited to figure out what the heck that thing is talking about.

Dan McClellan Insane.

Dan Beecher And you relate it to Revelation, so that's going to be fun, and we'll just figure that out as we go.

Dan McClellan Yeah, we're just going to go with it. No need- We're just going to- We don't have to put labels on this. We're just going to go.

Dan Beecher We can do whatever we want. It's our show.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They can't stop us.

Dan McClellan Nope.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, let's get into... Oh, we didn't come up with a good name for our rapture segment.

Dan McClellan Do we have an end times theme?

Dan Beecher We could just call it "Eschatological."

Dan McClellan I love it.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Eschatological. Oh, gosh. The only reason I know what scatological means is because of the movie Nerds.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan Which- Because there's a part where they're having a belching contest, but it is introduced by a very milquetoast character who says he does not like scatological things.

Dan Beecher Ah.

Dan McClellan So.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, I'm going to tell our editor to leave all of this in because- Perfect ... I think that that was great. But let's do our first segment called "Eschatological."

Dan McClellan Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher So, it's so funny. My other podcast, Thank God I'm Atheist, started because me and my friend Frank- Mm-hmm ... do you remember back, I think it was 2011, when Harold Camping decided that he had calculated the exact date of the rapture.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And he put up billboards all across the country. I remember seeing one here, which that's a waste. There are not enough evangelicals in Salt Lake City to put up a billboard. That's just silly.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But people were ready, and also- Yeah ... freaked out because the rapture was coming, and Frank and I did this thing called Rapture Watch on a local radio station, and we did a whole very silly thing where we pretended like our friend was calling in from Kansas City, and we were pretending like the rapture was following sort of the time zones. So it was coming towards us.

Dan McClellan It's like Santa Watch.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan He's over the Atlantic Ocean now.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But since then, we were making light of it, but I have spoken to people who have very serious rapture anxiety, and people- Oh, yeah ... and people who were raised with the rapture who don't even believe in it anymore, who still have terrors about- Yeah ... being left behind, about not being caught up in- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan in the rapture.

Dan Beecher So, we've mentioned the rapture on the show before- Mm-hmm ... but I think it's important that we go over what it is, who believes in it, and who doesn't believe in it- Mm-hmm ... and where it comes from and all that sort of thing. So, let's start with the question of has the rapture... Oh, okay, let's start with what is the rapture? What are we talking about?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, this refers to the snatching up, the being carried away of believers, of followers of Jesus at some point near the end times, and this is where it gets kind of convoluted because there are a bunch of different theories about when this happens.

Dan Beecher Right. It originates- You hear phrases like post-tribulation and pre-tribulation- Yes ... and that sort of thing.

Dan McClellan Yes. There's premillennialism, there's postmillennialism, there's amillennialism.

Dan Beecher Did you just have a stroke?

Dan McClellan Ah, it's got to be your bull. And post-tribulational, pre-tribulational, and the kids these days say post-trib and pre-trib, and- Because they're cool and hip.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan They've got that skibidi Ohio rizz that all the parents aren't sure if they should be concerned about that rizz or what.

Dan Beecher Is that the good rizz? Which one's the good rizz? Should I say toilet when I say skibidi?

Dan McClellan I don't know. But it originates in this idea that, I think the idea of the rapture begins with this pre-trib idea, or at least premillennial idea that everyone who is a follower of Jesus who is righteous enough, is going to just be suddenly sucked up into the air and flown off to heaven, again, Lenny Kravitz style- Mm-hmm ... while everyone else is left behind to experience a period of seven years, or something like that, of tribulation, which is followed by the millennium.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And usually, the second coming is what ushers in that millennium where we have 1,000 years of peace and Jesus reigning on the earth, and then at the end of that millennium, we have the last judgment. So, that's a pre-tribulation, pre-millennial rapture idea. But sometimes people say you've got postmillennialism, you got amillennialism. Now, postmillennialism is the idea that the second coming and the rapture are the same thing that happen at the end of the millennium. Amillennialism is the idea that this millennium is figurative. It's just something that we're actually in right now, but it's symbolic. It's not an actual physical earthly reign of Jesus.

Dan Beecher And the term millennial just refers to 1,000 years of whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Some kind of reign of Jesus over the earth, on the earth, something like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And a lot of people think that this is something that's clearly stated somewhere in the Bible, and it's not. In fact, no one talked about this thing called the rapture until the second quarter of the 19th century. It started around 1827-ish, and the ball gets rolling by the 1830s.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I think a lot of people would be shocked to hear that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I think people who were raised with this tradition, the way that it is talked about, especially in American evangelicalism, which is basically where it lives- Yeah ... I think a lot of people would be shocked that this hasn't just been what Christians have always believed.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this is something that plagues, I think, a lot of our thinking is that we get raised and conditioned with certain frameworks and certain ideologies and certain received traditions and conventional wisdom. And because we may spend a lifetime experiencing these same things, we assume that they just go all the way back. And when we look into the past, we retroject those things into the past, because we have to reconstruct what we're seeing in the past. And so we use those same frameworks to facilitate that reconstruction. And the reality is that no, this rapture idea is a creation of the early 19th century.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Now, we find the word rapture in earlier literature, because it comes from a Latin term, rapio, which means to seize, to snatch, to carry away, and it's frequently used with reference to theft and things like that. But that verb gets used in some places in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible. And so there's probably the place where we see it prior to the 19th century, where we see the word rapture being used is in reference to Paul's reference in 2 Corinthians 12:2, where he says, "I know someone who was caught away, snatched up to the third heaven. Whether in the body or not, I don't know." And that is that verb rapio in the Vulgate. So, people talk about the rapture of Paul, his being caught up into the third heavens. And so, the word rapture predates the 19th century, but when we have- I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent, but third heaven?

Dan Beecher Is that something we're going to have to have a whole episode about?

Dan McClellan That would be an interesting discussion.

Dan Beecher How many heavens are there?

Dan McClellan Well, Paul is probably referring to a kind of Greco-Roman idea about different levels in the atmosphere that correspond to different levels of heaven.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan So, the third heaven, he calls it paradise as well, and that may or may not be identifiable with the eschatological Garden of Eden, this kind of restoration of all things return to innocence. Again, second time I've quoted that. But yeah, there are a bunch of different levels of heaven, and in medieval Christianity, you see levels of heaven as well as levels of hell- Huh ... in Dante, for instance.

Dan Beecher Okay. I'm sorry, I've taken us off track. We can get back to raptus or raptura, if you're going medieval Latin, apparently.

Dan McClellan Or reptar if you're going Nickelodeon-ish.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan But the Greek term there is harpazo, which means to steal or carry off, to take by force, to carry away by the spirit, and it occurs- The verb occurs over a dozen times in the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan But the verse that was instrumental in the development of the concept of the rapture, and by the way, it was a guy named John Nelson Darby who really innovated, created the concept of the rapture as we understand it today, even though it has kind of developed in a lot of different directions since then. He based this on 1 Thessalonians 7:14, where we have Paul talking about people who have died, and then there's this worry, what's going to happen to the people who have died before Christ comes back? And in the passage, Paul says that they're going to be raised, and then, let me pull it up again. Here's the NRSVUE. You said 7:14, but I think you meant 4:17. Did I say 7 point? Oh, gosh.

Dan Beecher Sorry.

Dan McClellan 4:17. I have a little bit of the dyslexia from time to time. If we look in verse 16, it says, "For the Lord himself with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first." So Paul is comforting them that the dead are going to be raised up.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then, in 17 we have, "Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever."

Dan Beecher And so- Now, it's funny because when I read that, I did think of, there's all this imagery that I have seen associated with the rapture of the good people of the church just sort of being beamed up.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And just everyone else is looking up from below going, "No, come back," or whatever. So, that scripture, to me, does call up that kind of imagery. That makes sense to me.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this corresponds to something in Matthew, in the Olivet Discourse, where Matthew's talking about, "There'll be two in the field, one will be taken, and one will be left."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And then you also have Revelation 20. There's some ideas about the second coming in, or about something happening in Revelation 20, and then you've also got some imagery from Daniel that Darby kind of mushes together and negotiates into this concept that Jesus is going to come back and be like, "Here, everybody."

Dan Beecher And then, floop.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you've got everybody gets sucked up into the air.

Dan Beecher Wow. The great pneumatic tube to the sky.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I'm just thinking of "The Treehouse of Horror" episode with the presidential candidates. "Bob Dole doesn't like this," where he's getting sucked up into the spaceship. And then Jesus flips a U-ey and everybody just screams off into heaven, and that's where they just get to squeal and laugh and point fingers at all the people left on Earth who get to suffer under the tribulation.

Dan Beecher Right. And- If you're in the pre-trib camp.

Dan McClellan Yeah, if you're in the pre-trib camp. And this idea gets... And so Darby's British, I think Irish, and this begins to spread in England, but spreads very quickly to the Americas.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And you mentioned earlier that this is where the rapture lives these days. It spread out pretty quickly in the 19th century, but then most other traditions have kind of outgrown it.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Decided, "This isn't really for us." And part of this has to do with critical scholarship, which has looked at this passage and finds a better kind of contextual footing in this idea that what Paul seems to be doing here is describing not Jesus coming to collect his people and turn around and head back to heaven, but showing up to enter his kingdom. And this is a theme we find in some literature from this time period where someone who is returning victorious from battle or is showing up to take up their rule in a city state or a kingdom or something like that, the city comes out of the city in front of it to meet them outside of the city gate, and then they usher them in.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so the idea here is to just boing, flip that orientation vertically and have everybody being lifted up into the air to meet the descending Jesus, and then usher Jesus into his earthly kingdom. So based on the imagery, it makes more sense to understand this not as being raised up to be flown off to heaven, but being raised up so that you can meet Jesus and then usher Jesus into his earthly rule.

Dan Beecher I guess part of the essential quality of this is the notion that it seems like they had that heaven is up. Heaven is- Oh, yeah ... in the sky.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, I can see why it's confusing to think, okay, you go up into the sky only to come back down or whatever, as opposed to staying up there. I've actually heard people, pastors- Making both arguments. Oh, they're going up to come back down, or oh, we're going up and we get to stay, and then everybody else has to be on the ground.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But I do think it's interesting that all of these ideas are cobbled together from pretty scant scriptural bases.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher They're taking very small things that could mean any number of things and just saying, "Well, I've decided it means X, and therefore, then that means that the rapture means Y," or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this is something that in all different kinds of fields of study, you have to try to establish certain principles and foundations on which to build other things. And so once you've established something that becomes conventionalized and we're going to just accept this, whether it's because we've proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt, or because it makes the most sense to us, you then kind of build up from there. And so you can construct pretty complex constellations of ideas off of agreements, and sometimes those agreements later fall to pieces, and then everything around it falls to pieces as well. And that's probably one of the reasons that throughout the rest of the Christian world, the rapture has kind of fallen to pieces a bit. America is really the main stronghold of rapture ideology these days, even though there's a lot of debate about pre-trib, post-trib, amillennial, post-millennial, all that kind of stuff.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think most other folks have decided that this doesn't really make a ton of sense to them. But one of the reasons that it probably has the footing it does in America is because of the Scofield Reference Bible.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan What is that? So, this is one of the first study Bibles that was ever published in English. There had been others, but this was definitely one of the most popular. It was published, I think the first edition was around 1909 in the US by a dude named Cyrus Scofield. I think it was in the US. I could be wrong about that. Okay, it was published by Oxford University Press.

Dan Beecher So- Mm ...

Dan McClellan it would've been published over there, but I think it was most popular in the US. But Cyrus Scofield was a guy who was big into dispensationalism, and dispensationalism is another $2 word that refers to the idea that God's relationship with their people kind of occurs in dispensations. And it's different in each dispensation.

Dan Beecher And this is something that you- Does that mean just like a time period, or what is a dispensation?

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's a period in which something is being dispensed.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Something is being given. And this is something that Latter-day Saints will resonate with a little bit because we have ideas about dispensations as well.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And there are six or seven dispensations, depending on your particular theological bent.

Dan Beecher Right. But this stands- There's the Jurassic, and then the- Yeah. And the stratospheric and the- That's right.

Dan McClellan But this stands in contrast to something called covenant theology, which is this idea that no, it's not dispensations, it's covenants.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And where you have the first covenant and then the second covenant. So basically, there was the first covenant with the people of Israel, the Jewish folks, and then Jesus came, and now we're all under a new covenant. So two different main ways to organize our understanding of how relationships with God work for Christians, because they do have to kind of renegotiate what's going on because of the big difference between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But the Scofield Reference Bible is filled with commentary and cross-references and stuff like that. And you have, in the Book of Revelation in chapter 20, it talks about the day of the Lord, and Scofield's notes say, "The day of the Lord is preceded by seven signs. One, the sending of Elijah. Two, cosmical disturbances."

Dan Beecher Ooh, cosmical.

Dan McClellan And not cosmic, but cosmical.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Three, the insensibility of the professing church. Four, the apostasy of the professing church then become Laodicea. Five, the rapture of the true Church. Six, the manifestation of the, quote, 'man of sin,' that is to say, the beast. And seven, the apocalyptic judgments." I don't know why it's not the apocalyptical judgments, but- ... to each their own. And this is one of the main popularizers of this rapture ideology, even though evidently, there was debate among the editors of the Scofield Bible about premillennialism versus postmillennialism and stuff like that. But this was an incredibly popular study Bible in the early 20th century, which I think is probably responsible for the dissemination of rapture ideology in the United States, and was one of the most popular editions of the King James version for Americans in the 20th century.

Dan Beecher So when Scofield put that note into the Book of Revelation, was he just sort of making that up?

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher That was- Was he drawing on a tradition that existed, or where did that come from?

Dan McClellan Revelation 20 is one of the passages that was critical to the development of the idea of the rapture- Sure ... for Darby and those who kind of curated that tradition afterwards. And he's got a cross-reference to 1 Thessalonians 4:17- Okay ... in the note, and then he's referring to a bunch of other verses along the way. Most of them, oddly enough, they're in Malachi, Revelation, Matthew, Acts, and First and Second Thessalonians. Most of those references are to those passages. So it's not altering it too much. It's taking up this reading, but what it's doing is it's kind of spreading it out to an awful lot of people. It's broadening its reach to a lot more people, but also because that Bible was so popular for so long, the rapture was always there.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Whereas in places where you did not have the Scofield Reference Bible, pretty much all non-English speaking Christian communities, you didn't have that anchor there holding the rapture in place.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so I think they were able to outgrow it in other parts of the world.

Dan Beecher Well, and I think a boots-on-the-ground Christian in the 1800s, or in the early 1900s, could be forgiven for just assuming that if it's a note in the Bible, it's not just some guys cobbling together of a few sort of disparate scriptures to make up his own timeline as he sees it. You could be forgiven for thinking that this must be what it's always been.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If it's in that and it's stated as a fact, it's not stated as a, "This is a potential. Here's one way it might work." It's stated- Yeah ... as a fact. It makes sense that people would just, "Okay, I guess that's how it is then."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And because it's just stated, the rapture of the true church. Boom, there it is.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Now, I have a little piece in the SBL Study Bible where they put a little mini essay of mine in there.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And so as much as I wish that that would cement that in the psyches of readers of the Bible, they put my name there to basically say, "Blame him."

Dan Beecher I think you are underestimating the power of TikTok and podcasts, my friend. You are cemented now. Whatever you say is gospel.

Dan McClellan Be careful. I've talked with a lot of people, and now going back to the Latter-day Saint faith community. There are a lot of Latter-day Saints who want the church to produce a study Bible.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And one of the reasons I've heard from a lot of folks who are in positions to know that that's not going to be forthcoming anytime soon is because a lot of leaders would say, "If we put commentary between the covers of a Bible, that's going to be held up in gospel doctrine, and in sacrament meetings, and all over the place as doctrine."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan When really that's not incredibly helpful because people do that now with footnotes and explanatory footnotes in the LDS scriptures.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And some of them are just flat wrong.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I think that if nothing else, I think one of the lessons here is that, especially in the same community of people, talking about sort of American evangelicalism. They're not a monolith- No ... but I think it's safe to say that there are plenty of people within that group who consider themselves Bible literalists.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher They believe that the Bible is literally true, and they don't realize that even some of their most proclaimed traditions are not just like... They're new innovations.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's not just not obviously contained in the Bible.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's a brand-new thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. This is not original sin, which develops in the fifth century CE. This is something that developed 1,300-plus years after that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And I've talked about this an awful lot on my social media channels. The Bible is multivocal or polyvocal, if you want. Mm-hmm. And it's not univocal, and when you want to try to draw out unified, consistent, singular messages or perspectives or frameworks, you have to impose some kind of unifying apparatus over the text- Right ... to give priority to certain things, to silence other things, to reinterpret still other things, and that's exactly what this does. This says, "I want an idea about the end times, exactly how they're going to come to pass." Even though when you look in the different authors, they're telling very different stories.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so what they came up with was this apparatus of, so Jesus is going to come and then going to suck everybody out of their clothes up into the sky, and a bunch of seven-year-olds are going to wake up in the morning and their parents are going to be gone, and they're going to be left behind because they said a swear word or something like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Or the 16-year-old who masturbated once is now left behind because- Right ... they're wicked and- And they come up with this framework to try to consolidate all of the different messages and all of the different pieces of imagery, and then they give generations of people trauma- Yeah ... and a complex, and terror about their family being taken away and them being left behind- Right ... who knows what? Who knows what kind of horrors their parents told them would happen to the people who are left behind. What's the guy who did the "Left Behind" series? Is that LaHaye?

Dan Beecher Oh, I don't remember. Who wrote it?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All I can think of is Kirk Cameron. Wasn't he part of the team?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Tim LaHaye was the originator of the "Left Behind" series.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I didn't read a single word of any of those books, but- No ... who knows what horrors dwell within the pages of those books.

Dan Beecher But I- Well, yeah. So many people given so many nightmares and so much therapy to work through it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And it's so funny because even within that group, the fact that you were able to list off all of these sort of competing ideas within that theory, the pre-tribulation, the post-tribulation, the dispense, or- Yeah ... whatever all of the things are, the millennialisms of your various and sundry millennialisms. The fact that they can't even agree on how or when this takes place should be an indicator that this is not solid set, obvious stuff. That they are working through things, that they're processing this, that it is almost, I don't want to say guesswork, but a project of creation.

Dan McClellan Absolutely.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It is a productive endeavor. They're trying to create something and it's not like you come up with an idea and all of a sudden bells are ringing or something like that, and everybody's like, "Oh, turns out that's the right one." It's just who can produce the argument that wins the most support- Mm ... and that's the one that carries on, or who can produce the argument that gets enshrined in the most popular study Bible of the century.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so that's the one that gets carried on. So yeah, in short, the Rapture is something that some dudes made up that was then leveraged as a means of trying to influence people to be good, to eat their vegetables, to not touch themselves. That's just a tool, a piece of leverage that people use to try to control behavior- Yeah ... and incentivize or disincentivize certain behaviors. And it has been phenomenally harmful to entire generations, and stop it.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All right. I think that's a great message. Let's then switch gears a little bit.

Dan McClellan We'll say we're- We're going to downshift- Yeah ... Rock II in the Porsche.

Dan Beecher Okay. But we're going to stay, we'll call this a chapter and verse.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher So this chapter and verse is Daniel 10. We're keeping it sort of end times-y.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Or rather, well, kind of, except that it kind of is, kind of isn't. I don't know what we're talking about. We're keeping it eschatological.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah. There's a whole bunch in this Daniel chapter 10, and my eyes glazed over because I couldn't figure-- First of all, the first thing that happens in Daniel chapter 10 is that it starts out in third person talking about Daniel, and then the second verse switches to first person, and that really messed me up. It starts out with, "In the third year of King Cyrus of Persia, a word was revealed to Daniel, who was named Belteshazzar. The word was true, and it concerned, and he understood the word." So it's like this third-person thing, and then verse two starts- Yeah ... "At that time, I, Daniel, had been mourning for three weeks. I had eaten no rich food," blah, blah, blah. And that took me a little minute to okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I guess we're just bouncing around.

Dan McClellan You've got to picture this.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You've got somebody, "Let's check in on our main character." So then Daniel, now- And I love that they have to be like, "Remember, this is the Belteshazzar guy."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So don't forget, that's same person.

Dan Beecher Same person. These are not two different distinct people.

Dan McClellan So don't- They're not definitely different people. They are the same guy.

Dan Beecher And they're me, by the way. In verse two, they are me.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's I am me, and I am talking now.

Dan McClellan And third year of King Cyrus of Persia, by the way, who comes after Darius within the timeline of the Book of Daniel, but in real life came before Darius.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, there- You'll recall from the movie that we- Yeah.

Dan Beecher That- ...

Dan McClellan had to watch.

Dan Beecher That we lampooned on- Yeah ... another podcast, on the "God Awful Movies" podcast.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay. So what you wanted to talk about were these princes that happen later in the thing.

Dan McClellan Yes. Two princes standing here before you.

Dan Beecher One...

Dan McClellan I'm just kidding. So that's "Spin Doctors," of course. But in verse four, we have, "On the 24th day of the first month, as I was standing on the bank of the great river, that is "The Tigris. I looked up and saw a man clothed in linen with a belt of gold from Uphaz around his waist." So, we have this kind of apocalyptic vision motif. This is what we see in Ezekiel, when Ezekiel's in Babylon by the great river, and then suddenly this vision unfolds to Ezekiel. Daniel says here, "I, Daniel, alone, saw the vision. The people who were with me did not see the vision. Though a great trembling fell upon them and they fled and hid themselves."

Dan Beecher One of my favorite things is that right after that, he says everybody ran away, and he says, "So I was left alone to see this great vision. My strength left me, and my complexion grew deathly pale." Well, how did you know that- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan Daniel?

Dan Beecher Like I- No one was there to see it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I had the presence of mind to pull out my compact- ... and be like, "I wonder how my complexion is at the moment."

Dan Beecher I quickly switched my phone into selfie mode to see what my cheeks looked like.

Dan McClellan Yeah. "And when I heard the sound of his words, I fell into a trance, face to the ground. But then a hand touched me and roused me to my hands and knees." So I'm not getting all the way up. Just put me on all fours.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "He said to me, 'Daniel, greatly beloved, pay attention to the words that I am going to speak to you. Stand on your feet, for I have now been sent to you.' So while he was speaking this word to me, I stood up trembling. And he said to me, 'Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words.'" And then here we got this interesting statement in verse 13. "But the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me 21 days." Oh, you know what? We skipped a verse. Uh-oh. It's like I thought he described the person. Yeah, we got to hit verse six, and this is also in keeping with the vision in Ezekiel. "His body was like beryl," B-E-R-Y-L.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan What is that? A semi-precious stone, something like- Oh, okay ... what is the KJV? The KJV has beryl as well. The NET says yellow jasper.

Dan Beecher Oh, right.

Dan McClellan Yes. His body is rock-like.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan "His face like lightning. His eyes like flaming torches. His arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze."

Dan Beecher Sexy.

Dan McClellan Yes, and the sound of his words like the roar of a multitude. And then the gleam of burnished bronze, in some of the ancient Greek translations, it's talking about glowing bronze.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So, if you take the metal and you stick it in the fire- Oh, sure ... and it glows white hot. Basically what we're describing here is a prototypical deity, who in literature from this time period was understood to glow, have this brilliance, this shininess, which in Mesopotamian literature, the shininess signaled their deadliness.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan This is someone who can mess you up.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Okay. So, tremble in fear.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan In the Bible, though, we get this idea that this is the kavod of God, the glory, that it itself is deadly. If you look directly at the shininess, the shininess will mess you up. And so this is why you have, "Ah."

Dan Beecher I think that's why the Jack Nicholson movie was so scary, The Shining. Because, like- Yeah.

Dan McClellan That's what left him frozen- Yeah ... out in the garden- He looked ...

Dan Beecher overnight. Don't look.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Hey, look, you can't look directly in it. We saw what happened to the Nazis at the end of- Raiders ... of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know that old tale from the sea. So, the idea is that this is a divine being, and there's some texts from ancient Mesopotamia that also talk about gods not only having bodies like stone, but also being gigantic.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So, there's a tradition there as well that doesn't come through too frequently in the Hebrew Bible, but is definitely there.

Dan Beecher So, who is this person that's all burnished and bronzed and shiny?

Dan McClellan So this is probably the Son of Man.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay. The Son of Man, if we're talking New Testament, is Jesus. Is this Messianic? Is that what we mean when we say the Son of Man?

Dan McClellan We're talking about somebody who is introduced in Daniel 7.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, in Daniel 7:13, "As I watched in the night visions, I saw one," and the NRSVUE says, "like a human being," and this is translated in the KJV, "one like the Son of Man."

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And so in the Hebrew Bible, Son of Man is a phrase that just means a human. Like Son of the Prophets is a prophet.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Son of the Gods is a god. Son of Man or humanity is a human.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and then came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. But in some ancient Greek translations, the preposition changes from eis to hos. And so instead of came to the Ancient One, says, "He came as the Ancient One."

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And so it kind of conflates whoever this mediatory figure is with God. And so this is one of the ideologies that I think contributes to the conflation of Jesus's identity with God later in Christianity. But here, it seems to be this figure who is mediatory between God and humanity. Because they're going to go on to talk about how "the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me 21 days." And here we're getting into a little bit of history. This is about warfare between Persia and Judah, because the idea of the prince of Persia, and later on, we're going to have the idea of the prince of Greece. These are references to guardian angels.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And if we go back to, you recall Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9, we have the Most High dividing up the nations and distributing them to the bene Elohim, the children of God, which reflects the idea that every nation on earth has a patron deity who is sovereign over their nation. And Adonai's portion is Jacob. Israel is his share of the inheritance.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, the God of Israel is sovereign only over Israel. But once we get the universalization of Adonai, which I argue is the work of Psalm 82 and some other texts, where Adonai goes from being sovereign only within the nation of Israel to being directly sovereign over all the nations. Now we have to renegotiate the idea of patron deities, and what happens is they get squished down from full deity status, second-tier bene Elohim, sons of God status, to angelic status.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Very much, Monty Python foot comes out of the heavens, squirt. They're now all angels. And so they're obviously not the patron deities over the nations. They're just angels that have been assigned to guard the nations. They're now- Dude ... guardian angels. And we're calling them princes.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan They're princes of Egypt. Or Prince of Egypt. Oh, gosh. That damn movie.

Dan Beecher So yeah, Prince- No, it's not a movie. It's a video game.

Dan McClellan "Prince of Persia."

Dan Beecher It's a totally different thing.

Dan McClellan It's also a movie though.

Dan Beecher Actually, there is a movie.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher There is a movie.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan So we've got the Prince of Persia here is fighting with the Son of Man. And it says, "So Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia." And so Michael is probably the guardian angel over the nation of Israel, who's considered one of the chief princes.

Dan Beecher So he's- Or archangel, would you say?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Is this Archangel Michael? Isn't that a thing?

Dan McClellan Yeah, that's who the reference is to, but, no, we got one of the angels of the heads. So the Aramaic is head angels. Let me see if we have... Yeah, so we've got one of the first rulers in the- Okay ... in the Greek. But this is where you- General Michael. Yeah, this is where you get the idea of archangels- Okay ... is because he's one of the chief angels.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the Son of Man is like, "Here, guardian angel of Israel, you take over fighting the guardian angel of Persia. I've got to go talk to this dude by a river."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Right. And then it says, "I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and have come to help you understand what is to happen to your people at the end of days, for there is a further vision for those days."

Dan Beecher Woo.

Dan McClellan Okay. And then, yeah. And so I just think this is a fascinating little bit of Greco-Roman Jewish geopolitical theology, basically, that we've got these different guardian angels representing the different nations. And you only get to Greece. There's no one after Greece.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Persia, Greece. Obviously because the text was composed during the Hellenistic period, during Greco-Roman period. So, they don't know about Rome. So when people talk about that statue and say, "Oh, that one's Rome, and that one's the toes, or the United States," or something like that, that's nonsensical. "While he was speaking these words to me, I turned my face toward the ground and was speechless. Then one in human form," so Son of Man-ish, "one who looked like a human, touched my lips." Now we're getting Isaiah 6, where Isaiah's in the temple, and the seraph comes with the coal from the altar and touches Isaiah's lips.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan "And I opened my mouth to speak, and said to the one who stood before me, 'My Lord, because of the vision such pains have come upon me that I retain no strength. How can my Lord's servant talk with my Lord, for I am exhausted, no strength remains in me, and no breath is left in me?'" So Daniel's like, "Look, I've had a long day."

Dan Beecher This is hard.

Dan McClellan "I don't have the mental... I've got too many forks in me right now."

Dan Beecher I don't know if you know this, but you're super scary, and I am freaked.

Dan McClellan And then, "The one in human form, again touched him and strengthened him. He said, 'Do not fear greatly, beloved.

Dan Beecher You are safe. Be strong and courageous.'

Dan McClellan When he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, 'Let my Lord speak, for you have strengthened me.'" So he had a snack. Had a snack, had a nap. We're back to where we need to be. Then he said, "Do you know why I've come to you?" I assume for the reason you just explained, but says, "Now I must return to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I am through with him, the prince of Greece will come." So Daniel 10:21 is the last verse in the chapter. So he tells him, "Look, I got to fight Persia, and then Greece is going to show up. And then just so you know, Michael is the only one with me," Michael being your prince. Got a big seal upon his jacket. And yeah, that is the story of what someone who appears to be the son of man visiting Daniel while he's standing by the river and scaring the crap out of him before saying, "Hey, I left this battle because you've got to know something that you're not really going to understand, and then I got to go back."

Dan Beecher So my guess, because we talked about the Book of Daniel in general several months ago, and it sounds like all of this is a way of saying, is a contemporary author going back and saying that everything that was happening in that author's time period was predicted. Is that kind of what's happening here?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Probably?

Dan McClellan Yeah. The idea is, it's almost like you could think of Daniel as a found footage thing. Where we've got these stories about Daniel and all these apocalyptic visions that are telling stories about things that the people who are actually reading or hearing this text know about that happened long before.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So it would be like if somebody unearthed some plates that had some writing on them, and they prophesied of the establishment of a republic in the New World, and then there was this great war that was civil in character that resulted in the abolishment of the enslavement of certain classes of people.

Dan Beecher I'm going to point out that you're the one that's saying all of this. It is not me. This is not me doing this.

Dan McClellan And so that's basically what you've got going on with Daniel. But the further back into time the authors look, the less sure they are of the history.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So we're getting mixed-up timelines and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher So, just briefly, can you sort of go through, I don't know the history that well. I don't know the Persians and the Greeks and how all of that happened. I know that there was a Babylonian Empire and that we've talked about the exile of the Israelites or the Judahites or whoever by the Babylonian Empire.