The Why Question with Jacob Wright

Jacob Wright That's where the Bible really gets going in interesting ways. It's, in a certain sense, very real sense, all responses to what makes a people, what brings us together as a people, how do we survive? What role does a kingdom play in all? How is that not everything? What do we do when that kingdom is defeated and conquered? And the biblical project, I think, is just this magnificent collaborative effort to prepare for that or to respond to it in very honest ways and also creative ways.

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

Dan Beecher Things are good. We've got a great guest today, hawking a book that I have found very interesting. Why don't you introduce him, Dan?

Dan McClellan Yeah, so, this is Jacob Wright. He is a professor of Hebrew Bible at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, down in Hotlanta. And, welcome to the show, Jacob.

Jacob Wright Well, it's nice to be here, Dan and Dan. And, it's not too hot today. It's actually like maybe 45, 50 degrees. I guess that's pretty warm for you.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow. Yeah. Right now it's 31 where I am. I imagine in Atlanta, the people are walking around in full-on winter parkas at that temperature. Exactly.

Jacob Wright I have my gloves on to go out.

Dan McClellan Well, it's getting toward wintertime, and so, fewer people being carried off by mosquitoes, I imagine right now.

Jacob Wright That's true. I just, as I know, I got a call from the exterminator for the mosquitoes, and they said, this is the only three months that they're not going to spray for mosquitoes, but they'll pick up in March.

Dan Beecher There you go.

Dan McClellan Well, hopefully that's because they're not around and not because they just- Yeah ... not worried about it right now. Jacob, you've just come out with a book through Cambridge University Press, "Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins." And Dan and I have been poking around in the book. And there have been a handful of books in recent years that have talked about this kind of thing, both scribal practices behind the composition of the Bible, the source-critical theories behind the composition of the Bible, how the Bible got started. Can you tell us why you decided to throw your hat into this ring? What was the impetus for this book?

Jacob Wright Thanks for that, Dan. I mean, the why question I still think has not really received the attention it deserves. It's a question that we as scholars, I think, Dan, you would agree with this, to explain why something happens is a really tricky and messy problem. We can say what, where, who, when, but why? That's a philosophical issue, and it's like, why is there something rather than nothing? And it gets really to existential kinds of questions, but also to culturally difficult questions. Like, does it say something about the superiority of monotheism, or is it about Jewish genius, or all these kinds of really culturally problematic things that we want to avoid. And we set aside that question, and I think to our detriment, because the answers to the why that we have informs the way we think, but we're not doing it in an explicit way. Mm-hmm. And the thing that really informs us is an answer that had been provided long ago to the why question, and it's Wellhausen's answer. Wellhausen was this scholar in the late 1800s in Germany, and Dan, your work engages him still, right? We all are- Oh, yeah ... working in the shadows and in the following Wellhausen. And what his approach was to this why question is that what emerges in Israel and Judah is some kind of transition to religion. Mm-hmm. Right? From a political community to what he called das Judentum, Judaism, which was a new artificial construct, and it was a separation of religion from the political sphere. Mm-hmm. Which we might appreciate in our democracies, but for Wellhausen, that was problematic because he didn't want the French imperialism of the age. He was working after that, where he wanted Germany to be a spiritual nation in which religion and nature and all of that came together. And he kind of was poking his finger, not at Jews, really, he didn't have that much, but at Christians and at the church, and he did that by showing how the church claims the inheritance of what begins in the Hebrew Bible, and how that is something that we need to avoid. So he had this idea of the why question. Well, the Bible exists because it's scripture. For a religion, there was this nation, and it was destroyed, and something new emerges from it, and it is what he called a cult, religious cult, or religious community, or religion itself, and it's created by imperialism, where imperialism wipes out the place for individual nations to flourish. And I'll stop there, but for me, that really gets it wrong in terms of the concepts of nation. Maybe we should talk about that. I was going to ask you what you guys make of the term nation.

Dan Beecher Well, I mean, in your book, you talk about nation, and you talk about how the people that coalesce around the Hebrew Bible Cease to be a nation, and you call them a people rather than a nation. Talk about that differentiation. Talk about why we're no longer talking about nation or state or whatever, or kingdom.

Jacob Wright I would say this. So, there's two different kinds of things. Generally, I would say a state is a kingdom or a country in the modern sense, like America, Canada, Venezuela. Those are countries, states. They may have a nation within them, but we often confuse nation with state. Why would I say they have a nation within them? A nation is the people. And, Wellhausen had problems with the term nation in my mind, too, because he conflated nation with kingdom. And what I'm actually trying to argue, Dan, is that peoplehood is the term I use to avoid that problem with nationhood, because it's so misunderstood. But really, nation refers to the people, and I call it a state of mind. It is a people coming together around memories, around a narrative, around future aspirations, and it's something that's very difficult for armies to conquer. Whereas a state has institutions and borders and armies, and things that are very physical, and that armies can actually destroy. And what emerges from the destruction of ancient... Go ahead, Dan.

Dan Beecher Well, no, I was just going to say that the idea of destruction of armies, of stuff, this is central to what happens. You talk a lot about the Assyrian conquest and you mentioned specifically the primary factors behind the Bible's formation are political division and military defeat. So I wanted to, you started in with the military. Let's talk about both of those ideas. Okay. Yeah, good.

Jacob Wright Thank you, Dan, for also spending so much time with the book. You really have gotten it very well. Do I say Dan A and Dan B? How does this work? We'll just assume that everybody will figure it out. It'll be fine. Dan Beecher, thank you for spending time with the book. I appreciate also that you've brought these questions to a head, like nation, and do we understand that? Briefly, again, Wellhausen is saying there's this nation, and it gets destroyed, and then this religion forms. And I'm saying, no, there's this kingdom or state. It gets destroyed, and what emerges is properly what we'd call, actually, nation, even though that's misunderstood. So I call it people or peoplehood in order to avoid that. So people really focus on the kind of communal dimension. Communal in the sense of not religious community, but political community.

Dan McClellan Yeah, if I may interrupt here, I think that's also a little more accurate when we look at the terminology that's used in the Bible. In Greek, the word we translate nation in the New Testament is ethnos. That's an ethnic identity. In Hebrew, you have amim. You have goyim. Mamlakut would be kingdom, but amim is used synonymously for nation, and those are peoples. They're just different ways to kind of organize a sense of identity, a sense of community.

Jacob Wright Dan, you're good at Hebrew. What is the Biblical Hebrew word for religion?

Dan McClellan Well, that's the thing. You bring up Wellhausen in my field, in the cognitive science of religion. Religion is something that developed between the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. This is not a discrete sociocultural dimension that existed in the ancient world. And so to speak of this becoming a religion is thoroughly anachronistic on Wellhausen's part.

Jacob Wright Yeah, I agree with that. Thank you for that.

Dan McClellan And so, got to find new terminology to think about what they're organizing their understanding of identity around. And I think that's one of the things that you're striking out to do in this book is say, let's not think about it in our modern terms, but in terms that are a little more native to the texts themselves.

Jacob Wright And it's not just in terms of being more accurate in terms of the emic versus the etic. Emic refers to how the text or the communities describe it themselves, and etic is how we as scholars describe it. So emically, there's no concept, there's no word for religion, but there's something greater at stake than that. And that is, we miss that the making of the Bible and the why question and more of the how question should occupy our attention as societies, as communities, more than the what question. What is the what question? It's like, what the Bible teaches. And Dan, you're doing such a great job in terms of, I've watched you grow over the years, and I wanted to say, "Go, go," and you didn't need me to say that because it's just taken off. What are you doing? You're addressing that what question. What does the Bible teach? How has it been misinterpreted? How do we push back against that? And you see how it becomes a battlefield of biblical teaching in society, whether it should apply to us or not. And what we miss by this is not just historically not getting it right in terms of the category, but also that what the biblical authors are doing in terms of connecting stories of rival communities, bringing a defeated, traumatized community together around text, and refocusing the attention on the lives of average folk, re-envisioning gender roles, making wisdom available for the whole people, not just for the elites. All of these things are not You know, laid out explicitly so that one can argue or quote a verse. But it requires us to step back and to appreciate the whole. And when we do that, and I'm not expecting everyone to get on board with this, but what I'm really encouraged by is that people across the globe find that to be useful. This began as a Coursera course long ago, and there are a lot of students in America and Europe, or maybe from Christian places throughout South America, but there are a lot of students who were from Muslim countries, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, as well as China and India. And their interest was that how and why question. Why does the Bible exist? What is this about, this literature? And they come at these texts with, that's quite remarkable of how you create a community around text and how you don't create a master narrative, but you connect multiple narratives to bring people together so that they have a common story, and to affirm that we all go back to one family originally. Those kinds of things are really wonderful for them. What is not really wonderful or interesting to them is what the Bible teaches. Like, okay, thou shall not kill. We all agree on that. Great. We don't need the Bible to tell us that.

Dan McClellan Some people seem to, even more so today. But I think that's a wonderful 30,000-foot view of why that question of why is so important here. And in a lot of ways, the question of why helps us to understand the what a little better. Yeah. Interpretation is guided by our own assumptions about, I'm fond of referring to rhetorical goals. What's the intended function of the text? But I wanted to go dive into the book a little bit. You start off, each of the chapters uses some kind of vignette, some character to kind of introduce the theme of a given chapter. And, you start off talking about really the history of the rise of Israel. But for people who are in scholarship, this is a history that is fairly well-known. But, I was struck by how reading through this, there are a lot of things about the history as you lay it out that are not well understood among the general public. What do you think are some surprising aspects of the rise of Israel and Judah that someone in the general public might not be aware of? Thank you for that. Yes, it is kind of a part of the book.

Jacob Wright It's 150 pages where I go over the rise and the fall before I get to really the post-fall place where everything starts to happen. And like so many books, those first chapters, you get into the weeds and you have to kind of do some boring stuff. And people have criticized. I see like on Amazon reviews, like, "Man, those first chapters are difficult to get into because it's so many facts and figures and so forth." Here's the takeaway I think that's going to surprise people. There are many different points, but one would be that Israel and Judah were never together and that these are two very different countries. It could've easily been Israel and Moab. There's nothing within Judah that goes back ethnically to a common population or some kind of monotheistic sensibility that they shared or anything. It's quite coincidental that Israel had really overshadowed Judah and then placed one of its own members, Atalia, a wonderful queen, on the throne, and really had subordinated Judah to its interest. And that then Judah regretted that, resented that, and Judah really probably would have been very, I call it Judas jubilation, would've been happy to see Israel fall. We see that in various texts. And this division is one of the, like you pointed out, Dan A., Dan Beecher, the division is really one of the most important reasons why we have a Bible. All countries, all kingdoms were defeated. So why, for me, the question is like, we got to get defeat. That's an essential component, but it's not sufficient. Meaning that there's other factors. Without defeat, there is no Bible. But what's the other more sufficient factors? And that's this division, this relationship between Israel and Judah. And I'm building here on Dan Fleming's work, from NYU, where he really shows how Judah, he calls his book "The Legacy of Israel in Judah's Bible." And the Bible we have is a Judean product. The difference between me and Dan Fleming, whom I really adore as a scholar, is that he would say that there is some commonality among the populations. And I'm saying it's easier to say, no, it's purely political, and the first move in terms of affirming some kind of union was a political affirmation, meaning that Judah and Israel were once united under David and Solomon, which I argue is totally fictional. It's an attempt by later Judean kings from Hezekiah, Josiah, to say, "What we're doing, what we're asking you to do as the defeated northern population to join our fold is something not new. What we're doing is going back to the way it was and the way it was supposed to be. Yahweh, our God, chose David and Jerusalem, and all of that, and you guys have left the fold, so you can return now."

Dan McClellan We're going to make Israel great again, right? Yes.

Jacob Wright Make Israel great again, and it's going to be from a Judean's perspective. It's not even going to be Israel itself doing that in a real sense. I would complicate that a little bit by saying that the biblical text that really that we appreciate most, the stuff about the patriarchs and the matriarchs and the exodus and so forth, doesn't come from Judah. The Judean stories are the Davidic stories and the stuff in the Book of Kings. It's placed way back in the narrative, and the stuff that goes back to some older Israelite stuff is the stories of peoplehood, of liberation, and so forth. And so why we have that, if you would think that it's just a Judean Bible, the Judean kingdom would have then shaped it by beginning their narrative with David. David is the one who brought us to the land. David liberated us from bondage, but they have Yahweh. They're trying to think of their past without a monarchy, a native monarchy. And that explains how David gets pushed back and bracketed so that whatever the kingdom becomes, it also falls and one can have an expectation that there can be a enduring political community, some kind of identity. It doesn't depend on our political power. It doesn't depend on the Davidic dynasty. So it's very much, I think, an Israelite Bible, and the Judeans are picking up on stuff that had begun among the defeated northern population 130 years earlier. And maybe some of the scribes from the north, I know you know a lot about this, Dan, had maybe come down after the destruction, and maybe they are continuing to work, even if they're working-- These were great scribes. This is from a great kingdom, and I think that they probably would have found employment in the Davidic court. Mm-hmm. This is how I imagine. They're probably listening all day to the Davidic kings saying this propaganda, and in the nighttime, writing their text about, "We can be a people without a king." Yeah. And I know that's speculative, but what do you guys think?

Dan McClellan Well, there's a lot to go off of there. But yeah, I think it makes sense that, well, the northern kingdom was a much larger, much more complex kingdom than the south, and it only makes sense to me that the south would try to appropriate whatever resources and experts they could from the north following their fall in 722 BCE. And I liked how you divided the stories into a people's history and a palace history. Could you talk a little bit about the origin of that and how that fits into the rubric you're developing- Yeah ... of an identity that can outlast the destruction of a kingdom? Outlast. That's right. Yeah. Thank you for that word.

Jacob Wright So the common approach to the narrative, what's called the primary narrative from David Noel Freedman, and a lot of us still use that. What is the primary narrative? It begins in Genesis with the creation of the world. It ends not like in Christian Bibles, with Ezra-Nehemiah, the return. Mm-hmm. Ezra-Nehemiah is in a totally different section of the canon, and it's called a late section called the writings, the Ketuvim. Mm-hmm. It ends with this, the destruction of Jerusalem, the exile. So creation to exile, like the banishment out of Eden, east of Eden. That kind of exile is then recapitulated on the national level. Yeah. So that whole narrative has often been understood in terms of the Pentateuch, and you have the JEDP stuff, and then you have this thing called the Deuteronomistic history, which begins in Deuteronomy, and it continues on, and that's the second section. And they were brought together. And I find that difficult for various reasons. I find it also better just for practical purpose to distinguish between a large block of text. It's not that they all came from the same hand or from the same period, but the history in Genesis is a history of how we got to this land. And building on the work from some European scholars, my doctor father included, in Germany, that Genesis is its own story. And I think everybody agrees now about this, that it's a separate story than the Exodus story. And so we have the Genesis and Exodus story. What they have in common is thinking about a people without a king. And the Exodus story continues into the Book of Joshua, where they take the land by storm without a king. And the enemy consists totally of kings. We know all their names. We don't know much about their people. And on the other hand, there's this kind of citizens army and militia guided by Joshua, who is a non-king. And so all of that has this orientation away from the palace, and I call it the people's history. It consists of various blocks. The palace history begins in the Book of Samuel, and it's a problem because the Book of Joshua ends with this high point of, we conquer the land, choose this day whom you shall serve. We're going to serve the Lord, and it's all going to go well. The book of Samuel begins with the Philistines and the Ammonites. They're in a supreme role, and they're subordinating Judah and Israel, and Israel and Judah are once again in bondage in a certain sense. And who rescues them? Saul, then David. They are the saviors. So that's very much a palace-oriented history that doesn't replace the deity with David and the dynasty, but it makes the dynasty to be the instrument of the deity. And- I think that palace history had to, at some level, be older than the people's history because the people's history responds to it in so many ways. It says the salvation, the word is the same word we have for Jesus, Yeshua, salvation, the Savior. The Savior in our history, the primary one, was our God, and he did it, Yahweh, building on your doctor mother, Dan, is a male God. I firmly agree, it's not God as in the general kind of title sense, but Yahweh, this personality, is the one, not David, who saved us. He's our primary savior. He's also not connected to any kind of political faction so that we can come across our own divisions and affirm our unity and covenant with this deity, and this covenant is going to take precedence over any kind of covenant that the deity makes with the Davidic dynasty or the palace. And so those are the two sides. You mentioned that you think the palace history probably comes before the people's history. Yeah.

Dan McClellan But certainly some of these stories are coming from deep antiquity in the north- Yeah ... as far as we can trace them. So the suggestion here is that these are collections of stories that have been inherited for generations and generations that are being given new life by arranging them within this narrative framework so that they can function to kind of set up a trajectory towards where we want to be when things go south. I love that.

Jacob Wright New life, yes. It's breathing some new life into these texts that would have been buried in the sands of time- Mm-hmm ... if they had not been. And why would we say that? Because one of the most important inscription that we found for the history of Israel, I hope you agree with me this on, Dan, is the Mesha Stele. We found it in the ground, right? Mm-hmm. We found the archives of Nineveh and all of the great empires in the ground. Why? Because they had not undergone that transformation. No. That breathing new life into them from a perspective of people, of peoplehood, of a community that had faced great destruction and devastation. Yeah. And it lives on the margins of the civilizations that controlled the world. And that's, I think, where a great innovation begins is on the margins. And for me, this is not about trying to say anything about the Bible's authority in society or its inspiration, but just looking at a great example, perhaps one of the most impactful bodies of literature ever written, and showing its cultural human relevance to communities on our margins who are rethinking the way things should be done- Mm-hmm ... and doing some of the most important stuff where our centers of civilization could be eclipsed by that very easily.

Dan McClellan And I think for a text that comes from a community that historically has been fairly marginalized and in many ways oppressed and was very small in these stories that it's telling about itself anciently, its survival is a testament that they were onto something- Yeah ... with the way they were structuring their understanding of their shared identity, and including taking these probably independent cycles of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of others, and setting them up to tell the story of a single lineage that is now what governs the whole national or people's identity.

Jacob Wright I think that- And that connection of those, I agree with you, those kind of probably independent cycles that have antiquity of some sort and serve different communities and represented them, that the real biblical move, if you will, what makes the Bible the Bible, is the connecting of the dots. Mm-hmm. The connection of these texts, the formation of something new from them, to breathe new life in them, if you will. But they already were kind of peoplehood-focused, but what's really remarkable is I had just published a piece on the sojourners for Thanksgiving. This is a couple weeks now after Thanksgiving. And at Thanksgiving time, I've always find it really weird when we perform the pilgrims pageants, as if we all go back to the Mayflower. And that Mayflower narrative has become the kind of master narrative, and we haven't found ways to tell the story as the biblical authors did, and they said, "Well, it's not the Genesis story or the Exodus story. It's both. And it's not the David story. It's both." It's not all equal, right? There are some decisions made, and that's necessary. There can't be a narrative without some kind of decisions being made. But what really makes it so wonderful, for me, is that the will there to connect, to include. We think of the Bible being so exclusivistic and exclusionary, and there's definitely that other, and the problem to the other is really present. But the will there is to say, "Not this law code or that law code, both law codes, and you all figure it out how it works." "You come to the text, and you figure it out because it's all about the text, it's all about us, and we have to find some modus vivendi for coming together and overcoming our rivalries if we're going to survive."

Dan McClellan I had a question, something that I've been mulling over in my own research that I anticipate will turn into something at some point. It strikes me that the diminutive size of Israel or Judah might have been an asset in its development of this narrative, in its preservation of its ethnic identity, because I don't imagine- Tell me more about that. That's very intriguing Because I don't think it would've been possible for a gigantic empire like Assyria or Babylon or any of these. I don't think this project would've gotten off the ground if they were dealing with such a stratified, gigantic empire. Okay.

Jacob Wright So I think- I thought you meant that if it had been the other way around, that Judah had been conquered first, and Israel never laid claim to Judah's legacy. Judah was a small kingdom. So it had to be the greater kingdom, the north, to be conquered first, because Judah had been in its shadows and had said, "We are the new Israel." And this is like the first supersessionism, although as a Jew, I think this is okay supersessionism, what have you, but it has a longer history. They're saying, "We are the new Israel," just like the Christian Church will say, "We are the new Israel," what have you. But you're right about the great empires. They had only known success, triumph. They maybe lost some of their provinces. What they weren't prepared for was the day after. And when you're small, you already think of yourself in terms of the David-Goliath mentality. We are Davids, not Goliaths, and we have to prepare for the next day. And what makes the Bible the Bible also is, like we see in Jeremiah, there is a lot of people pushing back against that. Not because they said, "No, we're not small, we're big," but rather, "Our God is big. Jerusalem is big," in the sense that it's never going to be destroyed. And that continues on into modern Israeli politics and Jewish politics around this fervency that there's something that's always going to save the day. We're something special. And others saying, "We need to figure out a way to persist and endure." By the way, Jews are like 0.1% of the population. So any idea that we have something special on our side can get us into a lot of trouble. And that goes way back to Jeremiah, who says, "Jerusalem is going to be destroyed." And he was put in jail for proclaiming heresy. And I think it's just too relevant to today that it gives me goosebumps sometimes.

Dan Beecher I'm going to jump in as the non-scholar here in the room and just, I want to go back to a basics thing, because I know a lot of our listeners don't have the background in this history that you two have.

Jacob Wright So maybe- Are we getting too much in the weeds?

Dan Beecher You're in the weeds- It happens, yeah ... but it happens, and believe me, lots of our listeners are loving it. But I would like to talk about the history that led up to all of this stuff that you've been talking about. I want to go back to this military defeat idea and why you think it's so vital to the creation of what we now call the Bible. Good.

Jacob Wright Thanks, Dan Beecher, for that, because we've focused now on the division. The stuff that Dan and I have been getting into the weeds about are these, the relationship between Israel and Judah. And that's missed by many readers of the Bible, primarily because the term Israel or the name Israel can refer to the people of Israel, but also the state of Israel. So readers of the Bible just don't get how extensively the division between the north and south shapes the Bible. But defeat, yes, that's the bigger and perhaps more meaningful one. Although the north-south division, I think, is so relevant to what goes on in East and West Germany and North and South Korea and so forth in terms of real artistic and intellectual political creativity. North and South in the US too, elsewhere. But defeat, right? Picking up on what we just said about Assyria, when you're not prepared for defeat, when you're not small, and all you know is really triumph. Like if America were to fall today, I don't think that it would be possible for an American people to persist because we rest on our laurels in terms of imperial power and statehood and all of that, that there's not a kind of plan B of what do we do when we're no longer militarily superior to others? And that goes for a lot of countries, but it doesn't go for a lot of small countries. A lot of small countries are much more focused on education, like in Europe and elsewhere, where they don't have strong militaries. So defeat is central, and defeat is, for me, also the most intellectually stimulating part of this whole project and the Bible. And there were a lot of communities that were defeated, as we noted, and what the biblical authors are doing is not trying to consign that to oblivion. And I noted some examples that when peoples were defeated and conquered, you were prohibited from speaking about it. Hmm. And think about Trump losing the election. You just deny it. "No, we didn't lose. We didn't lose. It was robbed from us." And Germany after World War I, they were blaming Bolsheviks and Jews, saying, "We didn't lose World War I. They sold us out. They stabbed us in the back." The stab-in-the-back myth. And so many countries that just are problematic politically and political programs like Trump's just have an inability to admit to things and to grow from them and to say, "Okay, we really lost. What now?" And the biblical authors perhaps are making defeat even more than it actually was historically. The Book of Lamentations, which is like the most graphic description of the devastation, some of it goes back to the early days, but some of it goes late. It continued to be written for centuries. So why? Why are they continuing to make this defeat so central? It's because they want their readers to know that there was a beginning to something and an end to it, and that was the kingdom. That society, there's no going back. We have felt this deep, and we have to continue to feel it deep if we're going to persist in our project of thinking beyond the state, beyond the kingdom. And that's where the Bible really gets going in interesting ways. Well, how do you think about beyond the state? What does it mean to be a people? People had not asked that question, and I don't know if the biblical authors are even conscious of the fact that they are asking that question. But what makes this whole corpus so coherent is it's, in a certain sense, very real sense, all responses to what makes a people, what brings us together as a people? How do we survive? What role does a kingdom play in all? How is that not everything? What do we do when that kingdom is defeated and conquered? And the defeat and the reinvention of oneself, I think, if the book is getting some traction, it's because that speaks to people. That speaks to people saying, "Okay, I hit a brick wall," or, "We as a community hit a brick wall," or, "We're facing devastation as a society and as a globe." And how do we think about the day after? And why is it so difficult, as Lear writes in his work on the Crow Nation, why is it so difficult for us as civilizations to imagine our own ends? Why can't we deal more with that? And you would think, well, there's a lot of kind of sci-fi literature that deals with that. But yes, and maybe that's something where the most creative stuff is being done in terms of thinking about the day after. But as thinkers, as theologians, as philosophers, as biblical scholars, and so forth, we really spend very little time thinking about what happens when the stuff that we take for granted is no longer here. What are we going to do? And the biblical project, I think, is just this magnificent collaborative effort to prepare for that or to respond to it in very honest ways and also creative ways.

Dan McClellan I wanted to come back to something you said earlier. You talked about the Mesha Inscription, and you mentioned Moab earlier. It could've just as likely been Israel and Moab. Yeah. But they're both what we might call secondary or territorial states that are rising in the shadow of these larger empires as there are some power vacuums around them. There's an interesting part of the Mesha Inscription where Mesha is explaining why Israel was able to subjugate Moab to Vassalage. It says Chemosh was angry with his land. And this is a way to account for defeat, but it's a very familiar one- Yeah ... for biblical writers as well, because Dan, you might've been asking for a fifth-grade kind of- ... historical outline here where we have Assyria comes in and destroys the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE and leaves the South. But then just 120-ish years later, then we have the Babylonians coming in and taking out the Kingdom of Judah as well. And each time, the authors who are responding to this are appealing to some of the same rationalizations. God was angry with us, and they come up with the things that they were doing wrong in the previous years. But once we get into the exile, this is where the rubber hits the road, and this is where we see the Bible really coming together and kind of pointing in a direction. Could you talk a little bit about when we get to the exile, when we're starting to bring things together, when the project is taking shape, what are the rationalizations for why all this has happened and what are the ways forward? Yeah. Thank you for that.

Jacob Wright And sorry, Dan Beecher, that I kind of lost the thread of that question you wanted to- No, that's fine ... know the basics about.

Dan Beecher We'll get to that because we're getting now to this- I do want to say something, Dan, just right before you answer that. I went to fifth grade, and none of this was covered. This is not fifth-grade stuff. So, in defense of those of us who don't know all of this stuff. But yes, please, go on. I know.

Jacob Wright We assume so much. And it's hard for us to write, I don't know about you, Dan, to put ourselves in the shoes of people who have not read the Bible all their lives and know all about that, and scholars and stuff. But thank you for reminding us to keep it straightforward. So Dan has drawn attention to this Mesha Stele that was pulled out of the ground, and King Mesha from Moab says, "We suffered defeat, but it was because our God was angry with us." And then we look at the Bible. This was so groundbreaking because when scholars said, "Oh my God," literally, "How has Mesha picked up biblical theology?" The theology of divine punishment for somehow being it. The deity becomes angry at some kind of behavior. And if you think about the Bible as, "Thou shalt, thou shalt," and if you don't, then you're going to face exile, punishment, and all of that. The prophets, the laws, and so forth. That's very fundamental to it. But the Bible has, like Dan says, also various ways of dealing with that. And what makes the Bible different from the Mesha Stele is that Mesha tells that about the past, and then he moves to the present of triumph. And the Bible flips that on its head. So the triumph begins with the Exodus, the salvation that Yahweh brings, but also David and Saul and Solomon and all the great kings, but it goes down. And it's as if Mesha talked about, "We used to have a great kingdom, but now we're defeated." The end. Mm. And made a huge monument about that. But the Bible is not just that kind of monument. It's much more massive, and it does it on grand proportions, and it develops that theology in many different dimensions and really embellishes it and makes it grand and all kinds of stuff. And the reason why is because it's not coming from a palace. It's coming from a defeated people. And they are picking up on things that we can see that are familiar to their neighbors, but they are taking them in new directions. And it all emerges in this time between 722, where the northern kingdom, the Israelites, not Israelites, but the Israelis, we would say, kind of the people of this kingdom called Israel, the house of Omri, when it was defeated. And then 130 years continues where now Judah is left alone in the southern Levant, and it really rises, and it takes over a lot of different kinds of operations that Israel had long performed. But then it too is defeated. So it had resisted what was going on in the north about defeat, saying, "We can be a people even without our kingdom," in Samaria and so forth. That was on the other side of this Davidic dynasty saying, "You need to join us in Jerusalem. Yahweh chose the Davidic dynasty," and all this territorial power statehood kind of thing. And that's kind of this tension in the Bible. But what happens is the Judean kingdom is itself destroyed, and they have to gulp. And they say, "Okay, so what do we do now?" Well, we're going to pick up that project of the northern kingdom and say, "We don't need necessarily to have a kingdom, a dynasty, even a temple, to persist and to see a future." And that's why this text becomes this great grand monument to defeat, and something that's portable, and something that people can take with them into exile and always remain on the same page, whether they're divided, and create a public that is interested in reading text and makes text the center of their lives, and on and on and on, in terms of just something that begins in terms of, well, we can be a people, to, well, what does it mean to be a people? And the books of Proverbs and Song of Songs and Psalms and all kinds of different things like Esther and Ruth discuss these matters from that, that begins with that question. Yeah.

Dan Beecher You talk about how, you say that you have basically two central theses. One being that the Bible, as you put it, is to be appreciated as a project of peoplehood, and the second is that it's fundamentally a pedagogical one. Talk a little bit about how it's meant to be used, how the people who inherited this project were meant to use it. Because we were talking about religion is a newer concept. We're not talking about- Yeah ... a religion idea. So what is it? How are we supposed to use it? Or how were they meant to use it?

Jacob Wright Thank you, Dan, once again, Dan Beecher, for getting to the larger question that we would otherwise miss. And that is a big part of the book, that the Bible is, what is the Bible? It's a curriculum is what I would suggest. And so how's the Book of Psalms a part of the curriculum? What's a curriculum? I know that's anachronistic, but I call it a pedagogical project in terms of what shapes a people without a kingdom, without power, is some kind of larger narrative, some kind of education around common text and laws and songs and love poetry and what have you, wisdom. And that what is expected to be inculcating themselves in that tradition so that they can be part of a project. And education is the key to the kingdom, if you will, right? And to be able to participate in public life, one needs to be able to draw on various traditions and laws and stuff that the public appreciates. And that then changes the orientation of from the battlefield, where one gets honor by being just a great soldier, to one who is really well-educated, or scribes, or teachers, or parents and families and different kinds of things where they are commanded to teach their children. And the Book of Proverbs goes back to this ancient curriculum, but it was a curriculum for elites. And my son, listen. Well, what was my son? Dan knows this very well. In Egyptian wisdom literature, the father was a teacher, wasn't really the physical father, and the son was the student. And what happens in the Book of Proverbs is that they actually become biological. The father, because how it goes is, "My son, listen to the words of your father and the Torah, the instruction of your mother." It's mother and father who are now part of this, and this wisdom is now becoming part of the family life, not the court life, not the elites who are going to study with fathers who are going to train them for their careers in some kind of some kind of elite activity. And so this wisdom is being democratized, if you will. It's become an educational curriculum for average folks, that everyone should be wise, going back to Deuteronomy, that what's going to make us wonderful and honored on the world stage is not our military power, but our wisdom and our devotion to learning. And I think that just goes a long ways to explaining the coherence of the whole. And people would say, "Well, what does Song of Songs have to do with education?" And there are some outliers, but I address those, and I think they really are very much a part of the education process. Love poetry. By the way, I think all of us had in school, we had to learn Shakespeare sonnets. But that's not really the point here. What Song of Songs is doing is trying to model an I-thou relationship of real intimacy between two individuals in which the woman is equal with the man, and it lends itself to actually non-hetero relationships. But the most fundamental thing is that a society cannot exist unless two people can really come together in some deep intimacy that you can't have between three people. And that part of learning how to do that through poetry. There's so much wonderful work being done in biblical studies on the educational capacity of poetry, how poetry shapes us as readers in a deep way. And so I think I've made a good case for that the Bible is a curriculum. I will say that I'm building on a little bit on David Carr's work at Union Theological Seminary in his book, "Writing on the Tablets of the Heart." Mm-hmm. What I'm pushing back against is that he sees it as a Hellenistic elite project, so that the Bible is Hellenistic literature for the training of male elites. And I think that misses a lot of it. There are parts of it that are older than the Hellenistic period that have that education, and we don't have to explain the idea of curriculum and pedagogical project by always making it derivative from something else. I think peoples on the margins are always going to gravitate to the necessity and the advantages of education. You think of colonized peoples and how they turn to educational projects because they need to come together around something. And so the point here is we don't need to appeal to the Hellenistic influence to explain why the Bible is so pedagogically shaped. Does that help, Dan Beecher?