Uh-Oh, Jericho

Dan McClellan The walls of Jericho came tumbling down a number of times long before any historical Joshua could have existed, and that was because of battering rams and siege ramps and torches, and not because of the Ark of the Covenant, the blast of a ram's horn, and everybody yelling really loud. 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 I'm doing better than you are.

Dan McClellan Yeah, that is not difficult to do, but yes, you are doing better than me. I am trying to get over something. It wasn't COVID, but might've been the flu or something like that. I got- Yeah ... I've been hammered.

Dan Beecher We postponed this recording as long as we could to give you as much time to recover as possible, and you're still not there yet, but- Not 100%, yeah. So if this show goes a little short or whatever, hopefully our kind listeners and viewers will cut us some slack.

Dan McClellan Yeah. If once we edit out all the coughing fits- Right ... it's down to 14 minutes or so. Give us a break.

Dan Beecher What happened? It said it was 60 minutes. What are we doing here? All right. We got a fun show. I'm excited about what we're going to be talking about.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Look, we've mentioned him on the show before. Some of our listeners may know that there was a guy named Noah in the Bible. This is- I know a guy ...

Dan McClellan King Noah from the Book of Mormon, right? Who we're talking about?

Dan Beecher Yes, exactly. We're going to talk about the flood narrative. We're going to talk about the Noah stories.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And I say stories, not because it's multiple stories sort of sequentially, but because there's multiple stories at the same time happening, and I think that's going to be fun. We'll call that one a Bible versus Bible- Yes ...

Dan McClellan segment.

Dan Beecher And then at the end of the show, or our second segment, we're going to do a chapter and verse, and we're going to talk about those famous fabled walls of Jericho.

Dan McClellan Which went tumbling down.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed. From, yeah, as quote, the great poet, they- Meredith Willson was where I was going.

Dan McClellan Oh, man, okay.

Dan Beecher Well, that- That was good ... in a sense, that's from "The Music Man," the first musical I was ever in. I played- Oh, yeah?

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher Winthrop in "The Music Man."

Dan McClellan You played who?

Dan Beecher Winthrop.

Dan McClellan Winthrop.

Dan Beecher A little kid. I was the kid- Yeah ... in "The Music Man," yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay, so you didn't get to sing "Shipoopi"?

Dan Beecher No, I didn't. It's the most fun number in the show.

Dan McClellan Yeah?

Dan Beecher I like- If for no other reason than you get to repeat the word poopi all the time.

Dan McClellan Yeah, it's just a nonsense word. I really enjoy "Trouble." That was the one that I really enjoyed.

Dan Beecher Well, that was what I was quoting.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "Just remember, my friends, what a handful of trumpet players did to those famous fabled walls of Jericho."

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher "Those billiard parlor walls come a-tumbling down." All right.

Dan McClellan Can we sing that? That's not public domain, is it?

Dan Beecher I don't know. Come at me, Meredith Willson. We'll see what you got.

Dan McClellan See, for whatever reason, I was thinking "Swing Low," Oh ... those walls of Jericho, but... And then I'm thinking "Blazing Saddles." "Swing low, chariot?"

Dan Beecher So that's- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan yeah, a little glimpse- There you go ... into the nightmare that is my head.

Dan Beecher Jericho, apparently, is frequently referenced in popular culture.

Dan McClellan Yes. My brother was once in a band called Housefly Army.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And they gave an album of theirs to somebody who went to serve in one of the armed forces and ended up in Serbia.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And somehow their album ended up on the radio, and there was a week where they were number one in Serbia. And so they made T-shirts that said, "Housefly Army, number one in Serbia." Serbia or Bosnia. Bosnia and Herzegovina, I believe, as it's known today.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But their favorite song, and probably the best song on that album, was called "Jericho," so- There you go ... I also think of that. So there you go.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed. Number one in Serbia/Bosnia/Bosnia Herzegovina. All right.

Dan McClellan Good.

Dan Beecher But we've got a whole show to do, so let's dive into Bible versus Bible. All right, this week, Bible versus Bible. We're not looking at a very specific contradiction- No ... but a series of things that don't add up or don't line up.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Right?

Dan McClellan Yes. A suite of contradictions- ...

Dan Beecher you might say.

Dan McClellan We're going to look at a narrative that when you look at the details, it's like there are a lot of different things going on here. It seems like a bunch of narratives have been inter-stitched, have been woven together, and we're going to try to tease some of these apart.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I think because I remember reading the story, and there are multiple moments where it kind of jolts you because you- Yeah ... thought you understood that it was one thing, and then suddenly it's another thing, and it just keeps sort of contradicting itself as it goes through.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and there's some repetitions, some couplets, some contradictions, and some things that have led scholars over the years to scratch their heads furiously and to come up with conclusions that basically what we have are a bunch of originally independent traditions, some of which ran parallel to each other, some of which were entirely different, and they were brought together and kind of woven together to create what we have now as the story of Noah and the flood.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But I actually want to- That's interesting ... I actually want to go back before the flood and start in Genesis 4.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And we've talked about the primeval history. We had David Carr on a while ago, wonderful scholar who just published his own commentary on Genesis 1 through 11, talked about what's going on in the primeval history, how a lot of these stories are etiologies.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Stories of origins, where things came from, why they are the way they are. So, you really got to think of Aesop's fables.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And these stories about why elephants have trunks and all that kind of stuff.

Dan Beecher And here it's like why- Or like Greek mythology where it's like where does lightning come from? Well, it comes from Zeus on the hill or whatever.

Dan McClellan Right. And in chapter 4, toward the end, you've got a genealogy here and you've got Lamech took two wives. Adah was one, and the other was Zillah. And then Adah bore Jabal, and this is verse 20, "He was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So we're talking about where certain groups of people that we know today, now not we, we, not the dude wearing the X-Men T-shirt today- Right ... but the we of whoever the audience of Genesis 4 is. Okay, oh, those people over there who live in tents and have livestock, they descend from Jabal. His brother's name was Jubal, and he was the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah bore Tubal-Cain, who made all kinds of bronze and iron tools. And we saw him in the Noah movie- ... Aronofsky's Noah movie. The sister of Tubal-Cain was Naamah. But we've got these stories about where these groups of people came from, except they're all supposed to have been killed in this flood- Right.

Dan Beecher Right ...

Dan McClellan that happened. And so there would be no connection between these people and the folks that dwell in tents today and so on.

Dan Beecher It's also obviously a very weird thing to say everyone who plays music- But yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah ...

Dan Beecher came from one person and everyone who lives in a tent came from another person. That's obviously just not how civilization works.

Dan McClellan Well, I think, and ethnicities were divided according to features like this, I think, anciently. I think a lot of identity markers were- Oh, okay ... were like that, where it was like the nomadic peoples are this ethnic group over here. And today, you can have people who are, somebody may not know a lick of English, may have spent their entire life growing up in San Francisco speaking Hmong, may be 100% American. Ethnicity is a very different category today, but anciently- Okay.

Dan Beecher So, sorry. So the idea is that, oh, that nomadic tribe is the tent and livestock nomadic tribe, and those guys over there, I don't know what we call them, but they play the lyre and the pipe all the time.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, we'll just call them the lyre and pipe people.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's the idea.

Dan McClellan Okay. I think these are the ways they characterize these ethnic groups.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But they're supposed to descend from these people who ostensibly all died in the flood.

Dan Beecher Right. So- It would've been smarter to put that particular bit of text after the flood.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So we have this indication that at least this part of this genealogy is not aware of a great worldwide flood.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And another indication of this is the fact that this genealogy in Genesis 4 sounds an awful lot like the same genealogy in Genesis 5 that ends with Noah.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And so because you've got Cain, she conceived and bore Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad. To Irad was Mehujael. To Mehujael was Methushael, and then Lamech.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then when you go to 5, you've got Seth, Enosh, Kenan, not of Ivory Wayans fame- No ...

Dan Beecher but Kenan, Mahalalel.

Dan McClellan Then Mahalalel went to Jared, and Irad and Jared are spelled the same way- Right ... in Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then after Jared, you've got Enoch. Wait a minute, we already had Enoch in the other one as well.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Right. And then after that, you have Methuselah, which is an awful lot, very close to Methushael.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then Methuselah became the father of Lamech, who's also in the Genesis 4 genealogy. So we've got two genealogies that line up in a bunch of ways, but these are supposed to be entirely different stories.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which is indicative of two different traditions that have run parallel to each other to some degree, and then they're being put on the same scroll one after the other.

Dan Beecher So, and- And also, a really good indication of how trustworthy... If we assume that these two genealogies were supposed to be the same set of genealogies that just sort of evolved on their own as they were passed down probably orally from- Yeah ... one generation to the next in parallel, it shows us how reliable that way of transmitting information actually was anciently, and how we maybe shouldn't count on them to be Factually useful.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Oral transmission was pretty ripe for exploitation, manipulation when it became necessary. When it wasn't necessary, yeah, it could be incredibly accurate, but if someone is incentivized to change it, there's less stopping them when it comes to oral transmission than there is with textual transmission.

Dan Beecher So anyway- Well, and all it takes is one sloppy historian, and you've got something new.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so we've got these two genealogies. One of them is like, "And that leads to Noah, and guess what's going to happen with Noah?" And the other is like, "Yeah, these are all the people who were the ancestors of all these weirdos that we live around today."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Totally unaware of what's going on in Genesis 6. And then we get to Genesis 6, and we've got those scamps, the bene Elohim, the children of God- Mm-hmm ... who develop a bit of a fancy for the daughters of humanity. And so they descend and take some of them as wives and have children that may or may not be identified as the Nephilim, the warriors, the heroes of old.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And God is like, "Ooh, boy," does not like what's going on downstairs.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And so he says, "I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created, people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them." And yes, the text quite literally and indisputably says that God regrets- Right ... having made humanity, is sorry that they created humanity.

Dan Beecher See whatever our episode was that- Yeah ... where we talked about God being sorry.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So the no regerts dogma, that crowd, I'm afraid you're not very interested in what the Bible actually says.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then enter Noah, stage left. Noah is not quite a man of the cloth, but a man of the soil, as we're going to find out.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But we're not there yet. In chapter 6, Noah is described as a righteous man, blameless in his generation. And I want to bring this up because I want to correct a particularly heinous way that people have gone about interpreting this.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan Blameless in his generation, the word could be interpreted to mean perfect. And people are like, "Well, only the Lord was perfect." So, they reject the identification of Moses as blameless in his generation.

Dan Beecher Of Noah. You said Moses.

Dan McClellan Do I say Mo- Why do I keep doing that? This is not the first time I've misspoken and said Moses when I meant Noah. So anyway, blameless in his generation, perfect in his generation is whatever. There are people out there who are like, "Ah, this is coming right after we have had the Nephilim, these fallen angels, corrupt human bloodlines by having children. And so what it really means is that Noah is the only pureblood human left on Earth."

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan "Everybody else is a mudblood. Everybody else- Yeah ... has been corrupted with angel DNA." And this is an attempt to try to rationalize why God would kill everyone else- Right ... women, children, babies, men, everyone in between, and for whatever reason, save Noah. But if your solution is they were purebloods, you have stumbled upon an awful solution- Yeah ... which leads to ideas about being pure of blood- Right ... and other people not being pure of blood.

Dan Beecher So- Which is funny, because if you believe in the Noah narrative, then everybody is descended from him. So we're all pure. So- Everyone on the earth is of equal purity.

Dan McClellan Well, in the 19th century, there were actually some folks, it was certainly not the majority of white folks, but there were some folks who insisted that Black folks were not descended from Noah.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan That they were actually...

Dan Beecher Yes. So- They had their own boat, I guess.

Dan McClellan We won't get into that story. Maybe another time we can talk about that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But yeah. Don't repeat that idiotic theory about what it means for Noah to be blameless in his generation. Basically, Noah was doing everything right because the line that we draw between perfect and imperfect today wasn't really relevant to the audience for Genesis 6 back in the middle of the first millennium BCE. So yeah, stop doing that because it's gross.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So then, I want to get to the end of chapter 6. God is like, "All right, Noah, I'm killing everybody except for you, and I guess your wife and kids too, and their wives, because you've got to repopulate the earth, so enjoy."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But God says to Noah, verse 19, "And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, and of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind. Two of every kind shall come unto you to keep them alive. And also take with you every kind of food that is eaten to store it up, and it shall serve as food for you and for them." Noah did this. He did all that God commanded him. So how many animals did Noah bring on the ark? Two of every kind.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan No qualifications there. All the birds, all the animals, all the creeping things. Every living kind of animal on the planet, two.

Dan Beecher Right. And that's what we see when you look at a depiction of it or whatever.

Dan McClellan When you see the two lions, both of them with the big manes- Right.

Dan Beecher Exactly ...

Dan McClellan making their way onto the ark.

Dan Beecher Inevitably, if someone draws a cartoon of Noah herding animals onto an ark, you're going to see two male lions. That's just a guarantee.

Dan McClellan That's required. That's just how it works. Because it's like, well, they got to know other lions, and if we draw a female lion, they're not going to know it's a lion.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then we get to chapter 17. The screen goes dark. Suddenly, we've got a new setting. "Then the Lord said to Noah, 'Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth. For in seven days, I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights, and every living thing that I've made, I will blot out from the face of the ground.' And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Suddenly the story changes.

Dan Beecher Right. That's more than two pair, one pair.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's 14 of all the clean kinds of animals, and then two of all the unclean kinds of animals.

Dan Beecher What does clean mean in this case?

Dan McClellan Edible?

Dan Beecher Like within the Levitical law or something?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the idea seems to be appropriate for sacrifice.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan But yeah, appropriate for eating as well. But what we seem to have here are two different sets of instructions. One set of instruction is concerned about ritual purity and sacrificial actions and things like that. And then the other set of instructions does not seem to care.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And one of the things that happens is as soon as they get off the boat, they offer sacrifices.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so you got to have animals to sacrifice- Yeah ... because they're not on there long enough for most of the animals that can be sacrificed to reproduce.

Dan Beecher To have been busy enough to- Yeah ... do the thing.

Dan McClellan Most of it's probably going to be spent vomiting from the seasickness because these are land animals. You remember "Waterworld", don't you?

Dan Beecher Oh my gosh.

Dan McClellan "Waterworld" was a- Starting to bring that up again ...

Dan Beecher incredible... It's an incredible show, and everybody should watch it, but not because it's good.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Some of us had to live through the whole it actually being released in the theaters finally, and then- Yeah ... actually going to see it. But the part where he gets on the dry land and it's kind of like .

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I always think about that part when I think about Noah and them getting off the ark.

Dan Beecher Have you ever spent enough time on the sea that when you get back on the land, there's several hours of the land just being wobbly?

Dan McClellan I have not. I try to avoid, as much as possible, spending time on the sea. I think apart from taking boats here and there and between little islands in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific, which is some time. I think I took a ferry from the main island of Malta out to Gozo, one of the smaller islands, and that was probably the most time I spent on the sea.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And we didn't get to do our cruise, so I didn't get to spend- Oh, right. But I get off a treadmill and I'm kind of like, "Whoa." And it takes me a while to get recalibrated. So we've got these two different sets of commandments regarding how many animals to bring on the ark, which indicates, again, two different stories were going on. And both of these things end with, "And Noah did everything that God commanded him." And scholars have noted this for a long time. In fact, the first scholars to say, "Hey, it looks like there are multiple sources," Jean Astruc, a French scholar from the 17th century, I think was the first to say, "I bet Moses had multiple different sources that he wove together to create what we have now." And he was a theologian. He was a faithful Christian. He wasn't a proto-Marxist coming in to- To try and- ... corrupt the youth ...

Dan Beecher to try and ruin everybody's faith.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so scholars have noticed this for a long, long time, but these days, most scholars divide it up into at least two different stories about the flood, each with its own beginning, middle, and end. And you still have pretty internally coherent and comprehensive stories when you disentangle the different narratives. And the how many animals to bring on board is just one of the, what are called couplets.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And a couplet is where you have the same story told twice, either in quick succession or nearby.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But they're told slightly differently.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So another one would be somebody going to spend time in a city, and going in and telling their wife, "Tell everybody I'm your sister." And then the leader of the city getting the hots for the sister, and then God punishing the city, and then the guy having to go, "Okay, she's not really my sister, she's my wife." That happens twice in the Book of Genesis, in very different times. They're not one after the other.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan But that's an example of a literary couplet.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so we've looked at texts that we know came together- ... incrementally over long periods of time. And this is one of the things that is present frequently when people are putting texts together from earlier sources. So couplets is one example of that.

Dan Beecher Okay. And then- So- Go ahead ... so we've got either 14 or two of all the animals. We're gathering them on the boat.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher All right, what's next?

Dan McClellan Sorry.

Dan Beecher Well- I'm jumping the gun here ...

Dan McClellan we've got a few different accounts of how long whatever was going on went on. Because, "In the 100th year of Noah's life, second month, on the 17th day of the month, on that day, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. The rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights." So we got- I'm just going to jump back.

Dan Beecher You're sick, so it's fine. I think you said in the 100th year, and it's the 600th year.

Dan McClellan Oh, 600th. Excuse me.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan 600th year. I was about to say I thought it was 600th. Yeah, I skipped over that. So then we have, the rain stopped. Chapter 8, "The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, and rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of 150 days, the waters had abated. And in the seventh month, on the 17th day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to abate until the 10th month. In the 10th month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared." And then it says, "At the end of 40 days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent out the raven, and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth." So we've got long periods of time, 150 days, the waters abated, but then we go back to 40?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, the story's like, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and it stopped raining, and then Noah let the bird out.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But we've also got, hey, there were another 110 days or maybe 150 days where the boat was just kind of adrift, but it wasn't raining anymore, and the waters were just slowly abating.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And scholars have pointed this out as well for a long time. When you look at the chronology, it does not add up. Something is wrong here with the chronology. And then you've got sending out a dove and sending out a raven, right? And then it says, "In the 601st year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth." And again, this is considered evidence by scholars that we've got multiple different stories here that are being combined.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So it's unclear exactly what the original story was, if there was an original story.

Dan Beecher Right. But we- Well, it seems likely that it was original stories, right? Certainly, we've talked about how the Epic of Gilgamesh has a flood story. There were lots of flood stories floating around.

Dan McClellan Yeah, absolutely. And it was probably at least inspired by... The central and northern hill countries of Israel, flooding is not a problem there.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan It is the plains of Mesopotamia, where the annual floods are critical for their agriculture, and where when the floods don't come, or when the floods are erratic or get too high, that it can be phenomenally destructive to- Right ... their agriculture and their infrastructure. And the same is true of Egypt. That's where flooding is a problem. When you're living at the tops of mountains- ... flooding is less frequently something that keeps you up at night.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so just like tornadoes. If they're like, "There was this great tornado, and it took everybody," it's like, maybe that originates in Kansas and not- Right ... in the tops of the mountains. So most likely, this is borrowed from Mesopotamia, and probably when folks were in Mesopotamia, or at least under the thumb of Mesopotamia, and were influenced by their literature. So they're probably taking from the traditions that are in circulation in the middle of the first millennium BCE, traditions about devastating floods.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And it becomes the flood of the whole earth. And then we get this weird story, we've talked about it before, at the end of chapter 9, where verse 20 starts out, "Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard."

Dan Beecher And I'm going to have to cut you off there and say that I don't care what translator says what, an husbandman is what I want- ... for all time.

Dan McClellan And you know why it has an, right?

Dan Beecher Because, well, H's weren't pronounced, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It was an husbandman.

Dan Beecher An husbandman.

Dan McClellan Right. And this is a funny... So for other members of the LDS faith, something funny about the fact that we use the Blayney version of the King James version is it still has an.

Dan Beecher An help meet.

Dan McClellan Right. Eve is an help meet. What's funny is, when Joseph Smith was working on his translation of the Bible and creating the book of Moses and the book of Abraham and all this kind of stuff, he was using an updated edition of the King James version that changed that.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan So that it said a help meet and a husbandman. So he was like, "Nah, we're not going to do the old stuff. We're going to bring in the updated stuff." And this was actually an American edition of the King James version.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan And we have since been like, "Nah, we're going to go back to the old stuff." So, if you look in the book of Abraham and stuff, it says a help meet, and then you go to our official translation of the Bible into English, the King James version, and it's like, "An help meet, guv'nor."

Dan Beecher I love it.

Dan McClellan Because we're like, "Nah, we don't want to- Joseph Smith was up in the night.

Dan Beecher We're going to go back- It sounds fancier and- Yeah ... and more weirder.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So he was a man of the soil anyway.

Dan Beecher Okay, fine.

Dan McClellan Was the first to plant a vineyard.

Dan Beecher And this- It seems, that seems like a mean way to call him dirty. He was a man of the soil.

Dan McClellan But doesn't this sound like the way you would begin a story, though?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's like, imagine you've just watched an hour and 15 minutes of the Noah movie, and then it's like you have a new scene and it's like, "Now there was this dude named Noah, and he was a man of the soil."

Dan Beecher Once upon a time. Wait, once upon a time?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it's like, wait a minute.

Dan Beecher What's happening?

Dan McClellan We know this guy, yeah. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent, and higgledy-piggledy, we know that story.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And we've discussed this story at length before, but the point we want to make here is that it certainly seems like this is another story that was in circulation independently of the flood narrative that was- Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah ...

Dan McClellan that was just like, hey.

Dan Beecher This is the origin of that delicious drink that we all like.

Dan McClellan Which gets us back to Genesis 4. It's like, so and so was the origin of the people who dwell in tents, and so they're the origin of the people who wear pleated slacks. And these are the origins of the people who wear flat front pants and- Right ... they're the origins of the cargo shorts. And then there was this dude, Noah, and he was a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. And so we've got another etiology for viticulture. This is where we get the folks who grow wine, and grow grapes and make wine and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then we get this weird story where Canaan, who's not even supposed to be there yet, gets cursed because of whatever.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Because of the most weirdly conceived story of all time.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So it's a bizarre collection of stories, but it is precisely that. It is a collection of stories, and it has been woven, I was going to say competently, but maybe not so competently. If they're trying to hide their stitches, they're not doing a great job of it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You see an awful lot of seams in here. You can tell that these things were probably part of another story. So I think, and many scholars would agree, that initially Noah was really just the first viticulturist.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And that the flood story was added later, and it was like, "Well, just put it after the Tubal-Cain stuff, but before the table of nations and him getting drunk and something weird going on in his tent stuff." And so the flood is an interjection into what was probably initially just a very brief story about this dude who is a good warning story about why you shouldn't get too drunk.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And also don't...

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And be an husbandman if you can. Yeah, all right.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher I like that.

Dan McClellan And Noah, by the way, Noah means rest.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And the story there at the end has Noah resting.

Dan Beecher Okay, yes.

Dan McClellan But a lot of people will try to read Noah's name into the story of the flood. It's like it makes much better sense as a name associated with the first viticulturist- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher than it does with- The flood narrative provides very little that seems restful. There's almost nothing that feels like, oh, he's a guy who, by hand, with maybe the help of his sons, built the most enormous boat that has ever been built up until that point.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher There's nothing restful about it. And he did it as a 600-year-old man. It's not a restful story.

Dan McClellan Or a historical one.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan But he's the guy who's like, "I need to lay down." Yeah, that's our viticulturist.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan There you go.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, from there, let's take a journey into our chapter and verse. And this time, we're heading to, we've finally made it. We've emerged from the Pentateuch into Joshua.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So it seems like what we have is we're following the story of the Exodus, we're following the story of Moses. Moses is gone now. Joshua has taken over as the leader, and they're on a rampage.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So guide us through, what are we doing here? These people just came out of Egypt. They were just freed. They've been wandering in the desert for 40 years or whatever it was.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And now it's time for them to just start destroying people?

Dan McClellan So Moses was told he wasn't going to be allowed to enter the Promised Land. The best he got was he got to see the Promised Land from across the valley.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so Joshua is really the story of the generation that gets to enter the Promised Land because he and Caleb were supposed to be the only ones who gave the honest reports when they were sent as spies. And so the old generation has all died off, and this is- Okay ... the new generation that has arisen, but the problem is people already occupy the Promised Land.

Dan Beecher Yeah, that seems like a problem.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So instead of just saying, "Hey, can we come a little over here? You got some space?" They want to run them out because it's like they already got the buildings built. Why would we want to take the time to build more buildings?

Dan Beecher They've got buildings.

Dan McClellan And dig the wells and...

Dan Beecher Yeah. They've got a big wall. The walls won't end up being useful later on.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We don't need those. And so they have to engage in this conquest. And the conquest narrative is among the most disturbing. It starts back with Moses and Ammonites and everything that they've... And they weren't collecting Ammonite fossils. They were genociding the Ammonite people.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan At least trying. And then keeping the women as sex slaves or as concubines. So, pretty awful stuff. And then Joshua in Judges is like, "And here's how they routed everybody." And it's human sacrifice.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because what they have to do is purge the land of these people who are not worthy to be there. And so they engage in what is called herem, which is a word that is translated a variety of different ways. Devoted to destruction is one way to think of it. But basically, it's that you've got to destroy all of this stuff so that it is devoted to God. You are not keeping any of it for yourselves, whether animals or property or people, everything gets destroyed. And by so doing, by sacrificing everything, the land is purged- Right ... of the evil that is the people of Canaan. So it's human sacrifice.

Dan Beecher Dogs and cats living together.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Mass hysteria.

Dan McClellan Mass hysteria indeed. And so, it's awful, it's horrific, and it didn't happen. A lot of people get rightfully upset about this rhetoric, and it's not historical.

Dan Beecher It didn't happen.

Dan McClellan So Jericho is kind of the main event for the start of their routing of the people of Canaan.

Dan Beecher Do we think there was an actual historical Jericho? Is this a real place?

Dan McClellan I have been to the historical Jericho, yes.

Dan Beecher Okay. In fact, we go- Don't act like I'm dumb for asking. I don't know that.

Dan McClellan Jericho is the oldest, more or less continually inhabited, city on Earth. So, if you go there, there's a sign that says, "World's oldest city" or "World's first city" or something like that.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And so it's a tell. It's a big hill that sticks up around the geography around it. It's next to some cliffs and mountains and things like that, but it's on a relatively flat land in the Jordan River Valley, and it's just northwest of the northern end of the Dead Sea. So if you're in Qumran and you head out of Qumran, you turn left, you head north, and then you've got a road that goes west, and that takes you up over the hills to get into Jerusalem. Or, you can turn right, and you head up to Jericho. So it's in the West Bank. It is Palestinian territory right now. Some lovely restaurants there, some lovely souvenir and tourist shops there. And then you can go to the tell, which is where Jericho is, and they've been excavating it for many years.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, put a pin in that because you're going to have to explain something to me at the end of this story then.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher So, okay.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Now, let's go back. They arrive at Jericho.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And we'll skip the spies that they sent in and the- Yeah ... and the sex worker who protects them.

Dan McClellan Rahab.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. They do the whole thing where the Lord tells them how to take the city.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And it involves marching around the city- Yep ... once a day until the final day, where they do it seven times, right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Seven times around the city.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher They blow their horns and then scream.

Dan McClellan And all the people will shout.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And then that shouting and horn blowing is sufficient to crumble the city walls.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And then they just go in and kill everybody.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And they're marching the Ark of the Covenant- Right ...

Dan Beecher around the city.

Dan McClellan And yeah, the walls come a-tumbling down, and that allows you to get into the city. Because that was your defense anciently, was your city. You built the city up on a hill, and you built walls around it, and that just made it that much more difficult to get up over the walls and to get into the city to access the people that you would like to un-alive.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, you had siege ramps that would be built up. You would fire arrows at them. You would stop up their wells and their springs to try to starve them out and stuff. And God's solution is just, "What if I just make the walls fall down?"

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And yeah.

Dan Beecher It's an elaborate methodology.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher I'll tell you what, it would feel weird and intimidating for people in a walled city to have this group of people, just every day they march around your city and blow their horns and whatever. That would feel weird.

Dan McClellan It would be a little off-putting, yeah. That's one way to put it. And what's interesting is these are case-mate walls, which means that, or From the story, it sounds like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan There's a part where Rahab, she's got a ribbon tied to the window or something like that. Which means that her window or her house would have had to have been built into the city wall.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And that's frequently the case, particularly with casemate walls. And casemate walls are where you've got two walls, and there's several feet to several yards of space between them, and then they're filled in with rubble or something like that to make them thicker.

Dan Beecher There you go.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's just supposed to fall down. And there's a theory that the reason they came up with this story is because Jericho was around. We have no indication that it was a walled city or that those walls came a-tumbling down anywhere near where the historical Joshua would have had to have been located.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We have indications that this was a fortified city earlier in the Bronze Age, and that there were destruction levels associated with some of those earlier fortified cities. But basically, the last time Jericho had significant walls, and we have evidence that those walls were destroyed, at least in part. You didn't go down and destroy all the walls. You just destroyed enough of the wall to get through.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So it wasn't like, "Keep knocking it down. All right, now go around the other side.

Dan Beecher Now we got a clear... You got one part, you can just- Boy, you guys are in trouble when we finish demolishing this wall.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It was usually just there was one or two spots where you would find a big hole in the wall.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Unless they managed to set fire to everything and other parts crumbled. But the most significant and the latest destruction layer from that time period dates to about 1550 BCE, which is long before any historical Moses could have been born.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So it clearly has nothing to do with any historical Joshua that came through. But the story could have been told because they were aware of the fact that there were these big walls that had fallen down in Jericho.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So that might account for what's going on there. But the archeological data do not line up with the biblical account. So, there are certainly folks who will be like, "No, no, the new Italian archeological report says that there was a wall that they discovered." And there may have been a wall associated with a very small settlement at Jericho in the 14th or the 13th centuries BCE, but there's no evidence of any destruction associated with that wall at any point. So, the archeological data is not going to come to the salvation of this story.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan The walls of Jericho came tumbling down a number of times long before any historical Joshua could have existed, and that was because of battering rams and siege ramps and torches, and not because of the Ark of the Covenant, the blast of a ram's horn, and everybody yelling really loud.

Dan Beecher Right. And that is the thing that actually does it, isn't it? It's the yelling- Yeah ... that actually takes down the walls.

Dan McClellan Yeah. "And then you shall shout."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then, in verse 21 of Joshua. What is this?

Dan McClellan Joshua 6.

Dan Beecher Six.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Verse 21, "Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher That's not very nice.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher I'm just going to say it.

Dan McClellan And that's that idea of herem, where everything is supposed to be destroyed. It's a bit of costly signaling. It's saying, "We just want to show you all we're not doing this so that we can take all this for ourselves. We're doing this because God told us, and so we're going to destroy all the goods that we would be expected to take- Right ... to signal to you that we're serious about this. It's because God said so."