Wrastlin’ With God

Dan McClellan Hey there, YouTubers.

Dan Beecher It's Dan Beecher. We had some technical difficulties, and this week's show will have no video. So, sorry about that. But please join us and listen with your ears, and next week you can see our bright, shining faces once more.

Dan McClellan Thanks. So there's some tradition evidently, anciently, where Israelites were like, "Nope, can't eat that part."

Dan Beecher Wait, was this by the hip? Get this out of here. You didn't bring me no hip meat, did you? I don't do hip meat.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody.

Dan Beecher I'm Dan McClellan. And I'm Dan Beecher. 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? Things are good. It's springtime. It's beautiful. The leaves are on the trees. The flowers are all over the place.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I don't have particularly bad hay fever right now.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher I'm having a great time. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. We have a bunch of the... What are they called? Is it peach, white?

Dan McClellan No, we got some kind of trees lining our street that smell awful- ...

Dan Beecher when they're blooming. But that's all over with, so I don't have to deal with that smell- Okay ...

Dan McClellan anymore.

Dan Beecher Yeah, so. There you go.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Doing all right. What do we got on deck for us today? I'm excited. Today it's all famous people. It's Bible heroes, but we're going to call it the segment Bible Heroes, question mark. Because beauty and heroics?

Dan McClellan Heroicism?

Dan Beecher Heroism? Heroism, that's the one.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's in the eye of the beholder, really, and I think a lot of both of these two characters that we're going to be exploring, there are many questions.

Dan McClellan So- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher hopefully we'll get some answers about those. So let's just dive into our first Bible hero? Up first we have Jacob.

Dan McClellan Now- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher that is, or at least that's how he starts out the story. But by the end, I don't think he's going to be Jacob anymore, so that's going to be confusing.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yep. And I think we can go through and sort of... I don't think we need to tell the whole story of Jacob, but- Right ... we should just give a little bit of background to the Jacob story to sort of get us to the point, because there's one point that I wanted to get to. I've been asking you to do this one for a while because I find it odd and confusing, and I have also seen argument on the internet about what is happening.

Dan McClellan So- ...

Dan Beecher Jacob is born into a family, and his father is? You have to remind me. I'm not on the right part of the Bible.

Dan McClellan Oh, Isaac.

Dan Beecher Isaac, right.

Dan McClellan Sorry.

Dan Beecher Yes, of course.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yes, Isaac. And he's got a brother named Esau, and there's a whole bunch of back and forth about who's the important brother- Mm-hmm ... which goes on for basically all of their childhood, it feels like. He was the one that, one of them came out, they were twins, and one of them started to come out and got the thing. Am I- Yeah. They did the string around the wrist or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. The one grabs the heel. And that's a folk etymology for Jacob's name.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan So, yeah. There's a- So, what do we say? What is that claim? What is the claim that the name means? Means to grab or follow hot on the heels of, something like that.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay. I think in later Hebrew, that's how they use the verb.

Dan McClellan Oh. But the idea is supplanter or something like that.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay. But another argument is that it means may he protect, or God-protected, or protects, or something like that. Oh, okay. So, like a lot of these patriarchal figures, there are different- ... stories associated with different interpretations of the name.

Dan McClellan Okay. But here, I think the idea is that because the older serve the younger, the idea is supplanting.

Dan Beecher That's why- Right ... the story's being told that way.

Dan McClellan But yeah. And then Jacob is that rascally supplanter, goes and tricks Esau out of his birthright for, what does the KJV say? A mess of pottage or something like that?

Dan Beecher Something like that, yeah. But the word in Hebrew, it's a doubled word and it means the red-red. Oh, the red-red. Yeah, which is just, I think a lot of scholars would suggest it's a way to represent Esau as kind of clumsily just being like, "The red stuff, the red stuff." Because he's desperate and they're trying to treat him like a fool.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But yeah. So he sells his birthright, and then Jacob gives him some bread and the red lentil stew.

Dan McClellan The red stuff.

Dan Beecher The red stuff. So a little bit of red-red goes a long way sometimes. Sometimes you just- ... get a hankering for that red-red.

Dan McClellan Yep. And then we have Isaac dealing with Abimelech, which sounds an awful lot like... Or is it Isaac who deals with...

Dan Beecher Oh my gosh.

Dan McClellan It's Abraham who deals with Abimelech, isn't it?

Dan Beecher I'm sorry. My head is not in the right space today.

Dan McClellan My wife is... I'm on a muscle relaxer because of an injured back, and my wife is like, "That stuff messes with your brain."

Dan Beecher Okay. So we got a half-assed- Yeah.

Dan McClellan Oh, man ...

Dan Beecher episode. It's going to be a great show today. Good show.

Dan McClellan This bodes well.

Dan Beecher This all bodes very well. So yeah, we've got some Isaac going on. Isaac is kind of a minor figure. It's Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are the three main patriarchs of the Book of Genesis. And Isaac is focused on the least.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's kind of like, "Oh, Isaac was Abraham's son. Oh, Jacob was Isaac's son. Eh, Isaac, we're not too worried about him."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Isaac's probably best known for not having been killed, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher The most famous thing he did was lie down and wait for his dad not to kill him. And maybe, or maybe his dad did kill him.

Dan McClellan Oh.

Dan Beecher Yeah. There are ancient and medieval Jewish traditions that Isaac was sacrificed.

Dan McClellan Whoa. And then there are other things in the story, like when you look in the story, it says, "And the two of them walked on together, and the two of them walked on together, and they arrived at the place." And then whatever happens happens, and then the story concludes by saying, "So Abraham returned to his young men."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Little ominous there. But wait, how do we get a Jacob if Isaac was killed? Well, that's part of the story. A lot of scholars are pretty sure that these were three independently separated or circulating traditions that got woven together. Oh, okay. In other words, there were Abrahamites, there were Isaacites, and there were Jacobites, and at some point they were like, "We've got to make this one line. Let's tell them as consecutive children of the other."

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Oh. And some scholars think that Jacob is probably the earliest, and that's probably the main tradition of Israel's origins.

Dan McClellan Oh. And then Abraham and Isaac were added on earlier, and you get the covenant with Abraham and everything, because Isaac is the main character from then on, because Isaac has his name changed, becomes Israel.

Dan Beecher No, Jacob. Sorry, you're saying Isaac, but you mean Jacob. Yeah, there's the drugs again. Jacob has his name changed- Right ...

Dan McClellan and becomes Israel, and Israel's the main story.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You want to talk about a usurper? Everybody talks about Abraham as being the big daddy of all the Abrahamic religions and all that stuff. If he came after Jacob, he's the one that should be called Jacob then, because he's the one that supplanted. There are a lot of folks who think that the earliest fragments of Israel's charter myth are found in the Jacob Cycle.

Dan McClellan Oh. And that a lot of the stories in Abraham are later literary layers.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Well, there you go. When your grandpa comes long after you, that's a fascinating thing to do. But that's not what we're focused on today.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher So, let's move on. So Jacob, there's a whole thing where he goes with his family, or he's tending flocks, and he's got to wait for his wife. There's a whole thing there.

Dan McClellan Right. So he goes to find a wife.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And Laban is the guy who's like, "Yeah, I got some daughters." "I got a wife or two." And Jacob likes the look of Rachel.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. And he's like, "Work seven years and then you can have Rachel."

Dan Beecher And then he works for him for seven years, and then he sneaks Leah or Leah into the bridal tent- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan and tricks Jacob. And now here we got this idea that once a man sleeps with a woman, that's kind of like the declaration, the reification of their marriage.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, as far as they're concerned, he has married Leah. And Jacob's like, "Argh, I want the other one."

Dan Beecher One of the things about this whole story that bothers me is how much trickery is just okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It seems like it's just okay to fool people and con people, and if you fool your brother out of his birthright, if you con him and he agrees to it, "Ha ha, shame on you. I win." And you're not the bad guy for doing that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So Laban tricks Jacob, but Jacob's going to trick Laban back, and Jacob is actually going to attribute the trickery to God.

Dan Beecher Oh, right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I have a friend who wrote a wonderful book on this, "Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception-" Yeah ... in the Jacob Cycle. So he works for another seven years for Rachel. Which is a hell of a long... Rachel must be very flattered at this point.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This dude has worked 14 years to get her to marry him. By the way, 14 years is a long time. Hopefully Rachel's still as cool as she was 14 years ago.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I'm thinking of, shoot, now I can't remember the name of the movie, but I'm thinking of Marisa Tomei stomping her feet, going, "My biological clock is ticking like this." Oh, My Cousin Vinny. My Cousin Vin is the one.

Dan Beecher Yeah, man.

Dan McClellan There we go.

Dan Beecher Whew. You're lucky I'm here to fill in these blanks for you.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I've got to say, this could go downhill quick. But Jacob's trickery is he's got his two wives, and he's ready to bounce.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But he doesn't want to go empty-handed.

Dan McClellan He's been working for Laban for so long, and he's like, "Tell you what. "Go work for a while. All of the sheep and the goats that are speckled or striped or whatever, I'll take those. Everything else you can keep, and that'll be my payment."

Dan Beecher Right. "And that's what we'll go off with." And then he does some sympathetic magic- Right ... where he takes some mandrake branches and tears off bark to make them striped and speckled and stuff, and then puts them in the water troughs. The idea being when they come to drink, this will influence the color of the offspring that they have. Which anyone who's studied any kind of biology knows that's how it works.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If a goat sees stripes, they're going to give birth to a stripey kid. And then the idea would be to have those in the water troughs when the strongest and the biggest sheep and goat come by, and then take them out when the weak ones do.

Dan McClellan Ah. And so what happens is, the litters that results next, all of the strongest ones are all speckled and striped and mottled and whatever adjectives you want to use there. And then all the weak ones are not.

Dan Beecher And so basically, Jacob uses this sympathetic magic to trick Laban into producing a whole ream of sheep and goats that are healthy and strong and big, and Jacob gets to take them all, and then he's left with the runts of the litter and all the weaker ones. And then Jacob actually says that it was God who did it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Well, God's probably behind the magic, so it's not a total lie. Again, the trickster thing, the con artist deal really messes with my head. I do not understand why this is all... Because none of that's ever condemned in the book. All of that is totally okay. But it's a different time, it's a different society. I'll let it go. What we're building toward, though, is Jacob's on his way back to his, I guess, ancestral home.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So he goes, Rebekah steals Laban's gods. Laban shows up, and then they have a heart to heart, and then they shake hands on it, and they each swear to their different ancestral deities, and they keep going on.

Dan Beecher And Jacob is nervous because he's going to meet up with Esau. Oh, right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher He's worried that Esau's going to kill him.

Dan McClellan Right. And in the beginning, it says, "Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him. When Jacob saw them, he said, 'This is God's camp.' So he called that place Mahanaim."

Dan Beecher Camps.

Dan McClellan And then in anticipation of meeting up with Esau, Jacob wants to grease the skids a little bit, so he sends some gifts on ahead just to show him he comes in good faith.

Dan Beecher Yes. But he's got to spend the night by the river Yabok.

Dan McClellan Sure.

Dan Beecher Like you do.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Generally, you have to.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And he's got all his stuff there, and we just have this weird story.

Dan Beecher There's no intro. They don't ease it into you. It is literally one of my favorite things that has ever happened in the Bible, is when Jacob is left alone. This is verse 24. It says, "Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which makes it sound like in ancient times, every now and then, someone was just lying in wait and would jump out from behind a bush and be like, "Wrestle!"

Dan McClellan Just wrestle.

Dan Beecher "And now we got to wras-" And so now he's in the wrestle of his life.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Generally speaking, if that happened to me, I would not just continue wrestling a stranger until daybreak.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And what's interesting is right before this happens, it says, "He got up, took his two wives, his two maids, and his 11 children, and crossed the ford of the Yabok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise, everything that he had." So he's actually like, "All right, everybody, get on the other side of the river."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Go, go, go. "I got man stuff to do." And then that night it's just like, so anyway, some dude was wrestling with him.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And he is the object of the wrassle.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher He was wrestled at, is what happened.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He's not the agent. He's not the subject of the verb.

Dan Beecher This other guy who's- He just got wrestled. Until daybreak.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And- And verse- And yeah.

Dan McClellan Go ahead.

Dan Beecher Verse 25 says, "When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him." So Jacob's winning- Yeah. Or at least not losing ...

Dan McClellan against said man. And then the guy gives him the little hammer fist to the hip.

Dan Beecher The old hip socket-a-roonie.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I think that was Ric Flair's big move, wasn't it? If it's not Jake "The Snake" Roberts- ...

Dan McClellan it doesn't matter. So then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking," but Jacob said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

Dan Beecher So his socket's out of hip, but he's still got- He's got him in the full Nelson ...

Dan McClellan a good hold on him.

Dan Beecher Yeah. He's got him pinned, basically. He can't get away, whoever this stranger is. And for us, the blessing part seems odd.

Dan McClellan Yeah. If you were just camping out and some guy jumped in your campground and was like, "We're going to wrassle." And you're like, "Subdue him."

Dan Beecher Right. You're going to be like, "Bless me." Yeah, exactly. Why is that the outcome of the- I'm not going to let you tap out until I get a nice little blessing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it's not like- You know, maybe this is a kind of say uncle thing.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan I don't know. But then the man says, "What is your name?"

Dan Beecher He said, "Jacob."

Dan McClellan Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed." And this is another folk etymology- Mm ... for the name Israel.

Dan Beecher Right. Because the name Israel is not unique to Hebrew.

Dan McClellan Oh, interesting. It's a name that is actually known in Ugaritic, it's known at Mari. There are texts that go back 1,000 years before this was written that have this name, and the name basically means El contends.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But it's kind of squishy. You can interpret it a few different ways. And so the idea that Jacob has striven or contended with God and with humans is kind of the folk etymology. In other words, Jacob is the one who contended with God.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So by that, now I'm just a naive guy. I'm just a small-town country lawyer just trying to make sense of all of this. But it seems to me that what we have just learned is, A, even the loser of a wrestle can just change your name all of a sudden. No, but the main thing is this was God.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It says, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God, and have prevailed."

Dan Beecher That's pretty clear to me. Would you say that that is a fair assertion?

Dan McClellan I think at this point in the narrative, with the details that have been given, you've got to arrive at that conclusion because it says you've striven or contended or wrestled- ... with God and with man, or with the divine and with the human. And up till now, all we've seen is stories of Jacob contending with humans like Laban, like Esau, and others.

Dan Beecher Right. And so it sure seems like this is a story about somehow Jacob contending with God. And then he asks for the man's name, and he says, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And then he blessed him. And this kind of hiding the name is something that you see deities doing in narratives- Right ... throughout the ancient world.

Dan McClellan Because once you know an individual deity's name, you can influence them. You can invoke their presence.

Dan Beecher You can- Interesting ... exercise a little power. And then verse 30 says, "So Jacob called the place Peniel," which would mean face of God, "for I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved."

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher So- And yeah ... with all of that in place, it's a little weird to me because I have heard many, many people say Jacob wrestles with an angel.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So- That is- It feels like I'm taking crazy pills when I hear that. Because what I'm reading says he wrestled with God.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, there's nowhere in this text where the word for angel comes up at all.

Dan Beecher Okay. But the angelic reading finds evidence in another part of the Bible, specifically in the Book of Hosea.

Dan McClellan So if we go to, this is the prophetic book of Hosea chapter 12. You recall I said some scholars think Jacob is the main- Yeah ... charter myth for the nation of Israel. In Hosea chapter 12, the prophet has kind of given the people a hard time. It says, "The Lord has an indictment against Judah and will punish Jacob according to his ways." And elsewhere, Hosea suggests that Jacob was a wandering Aramaean. He had to be a slave for 14 years just to get the wife he wanted.

Dan Beecher You know, loser. But we have Moses, the prophet who led the people out from Egypt, and the idea being, hey, you got two choices regarding where Israel originates from. You've got the patriarchal Jacob tradition, or you've got the prophetic Moses tradition. So some people think that these are two competing myths about Israel's origins. However, Hosea gives Jacob a hard time. In the womb, he tried to supplant his brother, and in his manhood, he strove with God. So we've got Elohim right there.

Dan McClellan Right. And then in verse four, translations say, "He strove with the angel and prevailed."

Dan Beecher Hmm. Now, an interesting thing about this, I'm going to pull up the Hebrew real quick.

Dan McClellan Yes, please. So, in Hebrew, it's "Wayyasar El malach."

Dan Beecher So that is, and he strove El, can be used as a preposition to or in the direction of. Here it seems to be functioning almost like a direct object marker, with or to the angel, malach.

Dan McClellan But I have argued that malach here was an interpolation, that somebody added it later.

Dan Beecher Hmm. Because if you take it out and you treat El not as a preposition, but as the Hebrew noun God- Right ... then you have wayyasar El. You have exactly the consonants in the name Israel.

Dan McClellan Oh. Yod, shin, resh, aleph, lamed. And so this would be taking the folk etymology for Israel's name and just kind of giving it a punch right in the nose.

Dan Beecher Okay. So he strove with God, wayyasar El. Although, if you interpreted it that way, then El is the subject, and it would be El prevailed or El contended. God is the one who won. And one of the reasons that I That I think this is a preferable reading is because the very next clause says, "He wept and sought his favor." And a lot of people suggest it wasn't God who wept and sought Jacob's favor. It was Jacob who wept and sought God's favor.

Dan McClellan Right. At least, it seems like we got two very different stories going on here.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Because the Genesis thing doesn't say anything about anybody weeping. It does say that Jacob was like, "Bless me."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the only favor that the other entity asked for was just to be released, and he was, "Not till I get my blessing."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So it seems like, I imagine that the reading in Hosea 12:4, and it's verse five in the Hebrew, is where we get the angelic interpretation of this. But I think that the word angel there was probably interpolated. Somebody added it in.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Probably not too long after the story was originally in circulation.

Dan Beecher Well, and there's good reason to do that, because we know that there are parts of the Bible, right, that say no one can see God and live.

Dan McClellan Right?

Dan Beecher Am I wrong about that? You are not wrong about that.

Dan McClellan Okay. So that is Exodus 33:20. This is where God is talking with Moses, and Moses says, "Show me your glory."

Dan Beecher Yeah. And God says, kind of picks him up and says, "I'm going to put you on this rock over here, and then I will cause my goodness to pass by you. But I will take my hand, and I'll cover up your face until I've passed, and then I'll take it away. So you will see my back, but you will not see my face because no human can see me and live."

Dan McClellan Right. And the idea here is basically that the deity is so brilliant and shiny that it's deadly to look at. It'll cook your- Like staring at the sun.

Dan Beecher It'll cook your brain. Unless you're Jacob. If you wear him out and get him down to a... If you go full Royce Gracie on him- Yeah ... and wrestle him.

Dan McClellan It's got to be Brazilian or Capoeira- Yeah, sure ... where you're dancing at the same time.

Dan Beecher Yeah, man. You want to kill him with your sublimeness. But if you're a grappler, then you can... Because it literally says, "I have seen God face to face."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So that puts the light of this whole... So yes, what we don't want, it's so rare that the Bible ever contradicts itself. I don't even know why we're talking about it, but I can see why people would have a problem saying that Jacob wrestled with God. Not just because of the death things, but because God is meant to be pretty big and strong.

Dan McClellan So- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher a guy being able to get a submission out of God, that's a hell of a wrestle right there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Those are some pretty muscular bona fides there. And you see this with a number of episodes where somebody had an encounter with a divine being, where either the narrative or the characters themselves go back and forth between identifying the individual as God or an angel. And I've argued that... And you see them saying, "Oh, I can't look at you. I'm going to die," or, "Is it possible that I've seen God and lived?" Or, "We've seen God, we're going to die." That happens several times, and I think in all of those instances, other scholars have noted that the angel is not doing angelic things.

Dan Beecher Right. They're not doing things angels are supposed to be doing. They're doing things that God is supposed to be doing.

Dan McClellan Mm. And so these are probably stories that originated in traditions about God themselves- Right ... interacting with people, and then later on, somebody came in and wrote angel in there just to kind of muddy the waters. They're not saying this wasn't God, this was an angel. They kind of leave it half and half just to confuse things.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And I think that's probably what you've got going on here, even though the edit wasn't made until Hosea 12, way off on the other side of the Bible. You know what it is? Adding that level of confusion is a permissible con. They're doing the con thing.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. A little bit of trickery there. And the idea is just to mask God's presence. Well, was it God?

Dan Beecher We don't know.

Dan McClellan You're not sure.

Dan Beecher Right. But at the same time, it also refers to God as a man.

Dan McClellan Mm. Multiple times you have an ish, a man, the one who's represented that way. And so Esther Hamori wrote a wonderful book called "When Gods Were Men."

Dan Beecher Mm. And it was all about divine anthropomorphism and how you've got this story and a couple others where God is referred to as a man, and somebody who's... It doesn't say whether people confuse God for a human, but they kind of just treat him as like a human.

Dan McClellan When God, for instance, in Genesis 18 appears to Abraham, says, "And there were three men."

Dan Beecher Mm. And Abraham was like, "Whoa, it's you." And treats the entity like he knows who they are. Well, and we also get the story in Genesis 3, I guess, of God walking through the garden.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher And it doesn't seem like it's some amazing, giant, powerful... It just seems like it's another guy.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It says they heard the sound of him walking in the garden, in the cool of the afternoon, the breeze of the afternoon.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And so, yeah, repeatedly the Bible, you have different representations of what God looks like.

Dan McClellan You have kind of apocalyptic, theophanic visions of God, where God is high and mighty on a throne, or God is riding this chariot made of living beings and ophanim and kind of what we get in Ezekiel 1, where it was like where there should've been a body, it had the appearance of something that kind of looked like maybe humanoid-ish and like- Ezekiel is really trying to say, "This is what God looks like, but it's not really what God looks like," or, "You didn't hear it from me."

Dan Beecher Right. But when you have narratives where God interacts directly with humans, which happen, it's always pretty straightforward.

Dan McClellan Yeah. God is human-sized, human-shaped, male-presenting, a very anthropomorphic depiction. To the degree that the eponymous hero of the nation of Israel, Israel himself, Jacob, is able to subdue him in a wrestling match.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Well, there you have it. That's Jacob. Or sorry, now he's Israel. So, I find that a fascinating story. I don't know what to do with it, but there it is. There's one more piece. Oh, okay. Just in case you didn't have enough loose threads.

Dan McClellan Good. "The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Therefore, to this day, the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle." So there's some tradition, evidently, anciently, where Israelites were like, "Nope, can't eat that part." "Don't eat.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher Wait, was this by the hip? Get this out of here."

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher "You didn't bring me no hip meat, did you?" "I don't do hip meat."

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher That's fascinating. And now, let's move on to another hero, question mark. We're going to do Samson. We're going to continue to muddy up the waters.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Samson is another story that everybody kind of thinks they know. But when I read through it, first of all, his whole story is bananas.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And a lot of it I didn't understand at all. There's this whole thing about him encountering... He kills a lion at one point in his story.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then he comes back to it a couple of weeks later, and it's rotting, but there's bees that have built a hive in the lion's carcass, and that all sets up a weird riddle that he tells that no one could po-- Again, he's cheating at riddles is one of the things that I'm going to say. Because if you have a riddle competition, you can't be like, "Ha ha, what's in my aunt's basement underneath the sofa?" Or whatever, because it's got to be something somebody could figure out.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Can't go all Bilbo on them.

Dan Beecher Right. Just be like, "What's in my pocket?"

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Exactly. But Samson proves throughout his story to be relatively easily duped, especially if it comes to a lady person.

Dan McClellan Yes. He's not a particularly smart man.

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan Well, and to start, his birth was announced by probably originally God themselves.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow. But this is one of the stories.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher You've got his dad's name is Manoah, and it never says who his mom is, but in Judges 13, they are there, and suddenly, the narrative says an angel of the Lord appeared to them. And basically, they're going to have a kid, and the angel says not to cut his hair and all this, and, "No razor is to come on his head, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from birth. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines." Now, we've heard the word Nazirite before. We heard that a couple of weeks ago when we talked to Dr. McGrath about John the Baptist.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher What is a Nazirite? So, a Nazirite, we find this in Numbers, I think it's number 6, where this is a type of vow that a person can take upon themselves, and my understanding is that it was usually a temporary thing.

Dan McClellan Hmm. Where you would be like, "Hey, I'm going to take the vow of the Nazirite for the next year. I'm going to go walk about, do a gap year."

Dan Beecher Hmm. "I'm going to take the Nazirite vow."

Dan McClellan And basically means you can't cut your hair at all. You're supposed to avoid grape products, and particularly wine.

Dan Beecher Oh. And then you're supposed to entirely avoid contact with corpses.

Dan McClellan Okay. Now, normally, that just renders a person ritually unclean for a certain number of days, and there are things you have to do to cleanse yourself of that ritual impurity. And you have to at some point or another, but the Nazirite is not allowed to, period. Not even for their own parents, for their own children.

Dan Beecher Right. They're supposed to avoid that entirely.

Dan McClellan And the idea seems to be just to kind of maintain a heightened sense of ritual purity.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's sort of an ascetic, almost a monastic sort of thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this probably is what made, with John the Baptist at least, this is probably what allowed that tradition to kind of dovetail with asceticism, which was something that you did find in some Greco-Roman social groups.

Dan Beecher Hmm. And so it kind of made it seem a little more natural.

Dan McClellan But normally, like I said, as far as I understand, this was usually a temporary thing. So we know of three people in the Bible that seem to have been lifetime Nazirites, or at least according to the story, that's how they come across. John the Baptist was one, and then Samuel is another. Hannah says, "I'll give him to you all the days of his life if I can have a son." And so Hannah gives birth to Samuel, and Samuel is dedicated to priestly service.

Dan Beecher And then we have Samson- Okay ... who is supposed to be the third lifetime Nazirite, which kind of seems like a raw deal.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I imagine once you're, as a kid, you're like, "Why don't I get a haircut, Mom?" And she's like, "Oh, so a funny story."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "You'll love this." But as soon as this angel- disappears after promising that Manoah's wife would have a child, he says, "We shall surely die, because we have seen God."

Dan Beecher Oh, hey, oh.

Dan McClellan So another example.

Dan Beecher We've tied it all back.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's all making sense now. It's all- Yeah ... tying itself together. So- Speaking of tying itself together, can we just briefly mention the foxes? Because this is the most insane part of the entire Samson story, and I know you're going to get to real stuff, but there's a moment where Samson is bitterly trying to ruin everything for...

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher What was this? It was supposed to be his father-in-law, but then he didn't get married at the last minute or whatever. Again, because of trickery, I think.

Dan McClellan Anyway- Mm-hmm ...

Dan Beecher the way that he exacts his revenge is, here's the thing. If I absolutely needed to, there's just no way I could gather, let's say, five foxes. I couldn't trap 10 foxes. He gets like 300 foxes- Yeah ... ties them tail to tail with each other, lights them on fire, and sends them into his supposed father-in-law's fields.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher How do you get that many foxes? You can't get that many foxes, first of all, and also, just why are you being cruel to foxes? That's not very nice.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You can't get them to hold still for long enough to tie- No ... 300 of them together.

Dan Beecher No. If his brother had a fox farm, he couldn't get that many foxes.

Dan McClellan Anyway- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher sorry. That's neither here nor there. So the interesting thing about Samson is that he's growing up right on the borders of the Philistine territory and the Israelite hill country.

Dan McClellan So if you go to Israel and Palestine, one of the places you can visit is Tell Beith Shemesh, which is a very cool site, that has a gigantic underground aquifer that you can go down into. There's no water in it anymore, but you can go down into it. But from that site, you can see the places, Timnah, you can see these other places.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And you're looking down a valley toward what's called the Shephelah or the coastal plains, and the Philistines occupied the coastal plains. The Israelites were in the hill country. Samson's growing up basically right in the middle of this. So he's growing up at that kind of liminal space between Israelites and Philistines. And in this time period, the Philistines are supposed to be giving the Israelites a hard time.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan That's one of their main kind of battlegrounds is, "Those Philistines are after us again."

Dan Beecher Yeah, it does feel like that is sort of a constant, if you need an enemy for your story, just chuck in a couple Philistines and you'll- Yeah ... you'll be good to go. Or 1,000 of them, which is the number that Samson manages to kill using only the jawbone of a donkey.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which is impressive, I'll give him that. They must have learned how to fight watching too much TV and movies where they all just wait their turn and go in after him.

Dan McClellan Yeah, but it's kind of just a comedy of errors with Samson.

Dan Beecher Yeah. He always seems to find himself butting heads with Philistines and is shown to have superhuman strength and everything like that. And so the defeating of the lion is supposed to be this miraculous, "Wow, with his bare hands. Can you even imagine?"

Dan McClellan Right. But the thing that keeps coming up is he keeps performing these feats of strength that are then somehow associated with symbols for fertility. So honey is a symbol of fertility.

Dan Beecher Okay. And so is water, which comes up in another story. And I don't think there's a ton of significance to the honey appearing in the carcass of the lion, but- It's so weird. It like- ... "Cool, I'm taking some with me." Literally, that's the weirdest thing. I did hear someone say an explanation about how they used to think that, I don't know if I buy it, that bees liked carcasses of animals. I don't think that that's true. I think there are some wasps that like the carcass. I went down a rabbit hole. But the lion honey thing is crazy. I think there's a brand of golden syrup in the UK that has a picture of a lion and some bees around it, of a dead lion and bees around it as their logo, which is weird. But we should get to the part of the Samson story that everybody kind of thinks they know.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're going to Judges 16. So Samson went to Gaza, where he saw a sex worker and went into her.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So patronized her business. And again, that is not condemned in this. No way. That's just a normal thing to do.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you see this a lot.

Dan Beecher Judah does it. It ends up being Tamar, his daughter-in-law.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And again, trickery.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And he's like, "You got me."

Dan Beecher "You got me. Oh, you got me good. Oh, you." "You got me real good." The Gazites were told Samson has come here, so they circled around and wait for him all night at the city gate.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But Samson was like, "Uh-" I'm going to take off about around midnight, and it says, "He took hold of the doors of the city gate and the two posts, pulled them up, bar and all, put them on his shoulders, and carried them to the top of the hill that is in front of Hebron."

Dan Beecher Why did he take the door? It's another, this is a, a feat of his feat of strength. Yes, exactly.

Dan McClellan He's like, "I got to show these puppies who's boss."

Dan Beecher He was really feeling his oats after that time with the sex worker.

Dan McClellan All right. He couldn't stop thinking about her.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And so Delilah is the one that he falls in love with, and as usual, everybody's like, "She's a Philistine. Why you got to do this with- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan a Philistine?"

Dan Beecher "Why can't you find a nice Jewish girl?" So, yes. He finds a Philistine woman named Delilah, and in a mirror of what happened in the previous thing, we didn't really talk about it, but previously in his story, he's in love with this other woman, and the men enlist the other woman to trick him so that he will give them the answer to the riddle that was unsolvable.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Now, we have other men using Delilah to try and trick him into revealing what will cause him to lose his strength. And the first few times he's like, "Oh, yeah. Sure, baby, it's this." Turns out to be a lie, and she gets mad at him.

Dan McClellan Yeah. After he thwarts the assassination attempt, she's like, "Do you really not love me?"

Dan Beecher Yeah. "Is he lying to me?" So let's just go through it. She says, "Hey, tell me what makes your strength so great and how you could be bound." She's like, "Is it even possible?" And he sees it coming. He gets that this is a trick, and he lies to her and he says, "If they bind me with seven fresh bowstrings that are not dried out, then I shall become weak and be like anyone else." And they sneak in while he's asleep, and they tie him up with seven fresh bowstrings that have not been dried out, and he wakes up and he's just like, "Pling, I'm free. You didn't get me." Beats up everybody or whatever. So he knows that she is trying to get him, that she's in cahoots with bad men who want to get him.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then she tries it again. She's like, "Hey, but no, but seriously, tell me though." And he's like, "Oh, okay. If they bind me with new ropes that have not been used, then I shall become weak and be like anyone else." And she's like, "You promise?" And he's like, "Yeah." And so they do it again. They sneak in, they tie him up with new ropes that have not been used, and he just snaps those open, too. It's no problem. I like, "If you weave the seven locks of my head with the web and make it tight with a pin, then I shall become weak and be like anyone else."

Dan McClellan So basically- ... if you give me a man bun- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher then I'm useless.

Dan McClellan Yeah. If you braid it- My man card is revoked.

Dan Beecher I think in some of the... Am I wrong? In some of the translations, it says, "If you weave it into a loom," like you have to loom my hair.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher How this guy did not wake up for any of this, I will never know. But again, a third time, the Philistines come in and try and get him. They weave his hair, and then they make it tight with a pin. They do a pretty French braid, and then he wakes up and beats the crap out of them again.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher This is one of those moments where it just becomes, this is not believable.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher There's no way that this is believable because then after every time she asks him something, he says a different thing, and suddenly there's bad guys attacking him. A, he does not know when to leave a relationship. I'm just going to say that. But B, she finally nags him enough, and he tells her? Is this just a, "Oh man, look, I just want to be done with this now," so.

Dan McClellan Yeah.