You're Speaking My Language!

Dan Beecher They place so much importance on the different languages and how much that just destroyed everything. It takes humanity from literally the precipice of godhood to, "Oh, now you're all just screwed. Huh, sorry. You're all just dumb now."

Dan McClellan "Now you're Bronze Age goat herders."

Dan Beecher "Yeah. Suck it.

Dan McClellan Ha." Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. And we're going to be doing some combating today.

Dan Beecher There might be a little misinformation out there.

Dan McClellan You got them combat boots on.

Dan Beecher Yep.

Dan McClellan There's some.

Dan Beecher It's kind of fun.

Dan McClellan I'm looking forward to it.

Dan Beecher But astute listeners will need to sort of really carefully parse out this entire episode, because we've hidden messages in, if you know how to truly discern the words that we're saying. So, go back and re-listen a whole bunch of times.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher And listen to the ads while you're at it, and- ... it'll be good for you.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, what we're breaking down today, we're going to do two, obviously, as we normally do, two different segments. One is going to be a chapter and verse.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Just a little genesis for you, a little fun origin story, an etiology, if you will, Dan.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I don't know if you've ever heard that word before, but I'm glad to teach you it.

Dan McClellan Well, I appreciate that.

Dan Beecher And then, and I'm excited about this, you guys are going to want to wait around for the last segment, because we're going to be talking about, we're calling it Watch Your Language, because we're going to be talking about the idea of did the ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek have mystical, sort of magical words sprinkled in that have extra meaning or extra power? And I'll bet you can figure out what our answer's going to be on that. But don't jump ahead. Don't get ahead of us. We're going to talk about all of that. But first, let's just jump in with our chapter and verse.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher So, Dan.

Dan McClellan Yes, sir.

Dan Beecher We're in Genesis chapter 11.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Right at the beginning. And we have a really weird story. It's weird in, considering it's only what, nine verses? They pack in a lot of weird- Yeah ... in these nine verses.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, this is the end of what's called the primeval history, Genesis 1 through 11, right before we get to Abraham.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And one thing I think it's good to note about the primeval history is we've got three main narrative arcs. We've got the creation in the Garden of Eden, we've got Noah and the flood, and then we've got our story at the beginning of Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel. And then interspersed between them are these genealogies.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So, this is kind of the way they did things anciently, when they're trying to tell these origin stories, and they want to get from as far back as they can imagine, all the way up to when the story of their people begins.

Dan Beecher And there's nothing spurious at all about those origin stories. Don't worry about the fact that everybody lived 400 or 700 years.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's fine.

Dan McClellan And we've got etiologies kind of in the same vein as Aesop's Fables.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan It's like, "Oh, snakes, how did they lose their feet? Oh, well, the snake tricked Eve into eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God was like, 'Bam, no legs.'"

Dan Beecher That's right.

Dan McClellan "You're Slytherin now. The Sorting Hat has put you in Slytherin." And we've got a bunch of different ways that the way society and civilization and the world is when these people are writing, they got to get from point A to point B. And so, we've got a bunch of stories to do it, and one of those things is the fact that all the nations of the Earth speak different languages.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And we should say, we've used the term etiology a couple times.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Some of our listeners probably haven't caught the definition of that before. Definition, you hate that word. But an etiology is just sort of an origin story.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's a story that is meant to explain why something is, why a certain phenomenon is, or why people were in a certain place or whatever.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And it's interesting to me, first of all, one wonders why they even felt they needed a reason why everyone spoke different languages. I don't think we know the answer to that, but do you have any insights or thoughts on why it was important to them to know why there were multiple languages?

Dan McClellan Well, a large part of it was that ethnic identities were frequently divided by language.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And particularly written language. So, different scripts were often associated with specific ethnic identities. Now, in the end of the second millennium BCE, beginning of the first millennium BCE, you've got your main empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, whether the Assyrian or the Babylonian, and they are a very clearly defined... Well, not incredibly clearly defined, but you know who they are. And then you've got a bunch of tribes and city-states, and less well-defined people groups kind of spread out in between. And so, this is the period when we have the rise of what are known as secondary states. These are smaller, local powers that are trying to unify and create- Kind of a kingdom identity. And one of the ways that they begin to do this is to use a language, a shared language, and a shared script in order to demarcate things.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so you have the Moabites popping up around this time, the Ammonites, the Edomites, the Israelites, the Judahites. And so Mesha's monumental inscription, second half of the ninth century BCE, this is the first use of alphabetic script in historical narrative prose, and there's an argument to make that this is kind of a means of establishing their identity and their ethnic identity, their kingdom. And so language is critical to identity. And so we've got a people as a part of this secondary state of Israel, that has its own identity, is beginning to crystallize the lines between the us and the them. And this is just a way to say, "Oh, we got all these nations." We've listed 70 nations in Genesis 10. That's what's known as the Table of Nations, all descended from the three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so this is the known world back then. And so the next logical step is, okay, well, we've got these national identities, and language seems to be one of the identity markers, and so how did we get that? Why is that different?

Dan Beecher That makes sense.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I think it makes sense to say, especially since these books are delineating where each of these different tribes comes from as descended from Noah and his progeny.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher It makes sense that then they would say, "Well, but why do they all speak different languages?" Because they were all on the same boat together. Why would they all speak different languages?

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Now that makes sense. Now I'm with you. I'm on board, as it were.

Dan McClellan And another thing to point out is that chapter 11 is kind of backtracking a little bit.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Because chapter 10 is like Shem, Ham, Japheth, and then we got all these nations, and then chapter 11 says, "Now look, the whole world had one language. They all used the same words, and they migrated from the east." So we got the idea that they have come off the boat, they are beginning to proliferate, and they're coming from the east, and they came to the land of Shinar, which is supposed to be Babylonia. So this is Mesopotamia, and they settled there. So, the land of Mesopotamia or Babylon represents major stop number one after these groups are coming off the boat, and you have generations enough to multiply to have all these different identities. But they're all still speaking one language.

Dan Beecher And since this was after the flood, that means that these are literally the only people on the whole Earth, according to this story.

Dan McClellan Yeah. According to the story, don't know how seriously the story was taken when it was initially circulating because there were a bunch of other ideologies for the people groups that were no doubt in circulation, and this story is probably coming from the seventh century BCE. So pretty late in the game- Mm ... when it comes to the spread of civilization.

Dan Beecher But yeah, the idea is- But I'm just saying, to be internally consistent, the people that we're talking about here that are settled in Shinar are the only people in existence.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Okay. And they decide to make bricks and fire them thoroughly, and they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar, and they decided to build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. There you go. So that sounds fine. That sounds pretty normal, by modern standards, to build towers.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then they say, "And let us make a name for ourselves, otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

Dan McClellan That's one I've never understood.

Dan Beecher I don't know why they need to make a name for themselves, or else they'll be scattered. That doesn't make any sense to me. Does that make sense to you? Is there a sense to be made of that?

Dan McClellan So I think part of this is foreshadowing because they're writing in a period when everybody has already been scattered across the whole face of the earth. And so I think that's just the existential dread is that, "Oh, no, we want everybody to be together as one," and for whatever reason, whatever MacGuffin you want to imagine they were thinking of, the threat is that we will be scattered. And I think it's important to point out a couple of things here. The tower with its top in the heavens, a lot of people think, "What idiots. They thought they were going to build a tower and climb up and hop off onto the clouds, and they were in the heavens." And there's probably a degree to which that is true, but at the same time, we have buildings that we call skyscrapers. So how many people think that they actually scrape the sky? So I think there's a degree to which this is just rhetorical. I think the main focus is let us make a name for ourselves. So this is that question of identity.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But at the same time, a name is associated with permanence. And so, for individuals, this is one of the reasons that you had your name inscribed in your tomb, and you wanted people to invoke the name because that was a means of ensuring that you were remembered and your afterlife was extended, the more you were remembered. Going back to the whole Coco analogy that your afterlife lasts for as long as you are remembered.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so to make a name is to extend the afterlife and in a sense, to divinize oneself.

Dan Beecher Well, and that becomes literally the worry in just a second.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And we're going to be talking about the importance of names later on in the show as well.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Because that's going to become important.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But yeah, this idea of making a name for themselves, becoming a divinizing...

Dan McClellan Divinizing?

Dan Beecher Can I use that word?

Dan McClellan Does that- Mm-hmm ...

Dan Beecher mean anything?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Because, yeah, we've talked about, you've talked about a name being a... Wait, I'm going to come up with the phrase. A divine, oh, what do you call it?

Dan McClellan Ah.

Dan Beecher What's your book called?

Dan McClellan Oh, Divine Agent? Yeah, or something like that. Or Divine Image?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And so it seems like that's the concern here, that they are literally trying to become godlike somehow- Mm-hmm ... by touching the sky with their tower. And the way that we know that is because God becomes very worried about this.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We have in verse five, "Adonai came down to see the city and the tower." So God is represented as like, "What's going on down there?"

Dan Beecher Yeah. He is above- I got to- And then he just, me, me, me- Let me get my shoes on ... comes down.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Do, do, do. Takes the elevator and then- Yeah ... comes down to Earth To see what the humans have built.

Dan McClellan What is the word there? Yeah, ha-adam, the humanity had built. And then in verse six, "And Adonai said, 'Look, they're one people and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.'"

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And basically, the idea is, man, if they can do this, they can do anything. And I think this kind of reveals the porous boundaries that separate humanity and divinity and the- Yeah ... understanding of the primordial civilizations. And we think of it as more this binary, these incommensurate categories, where according to Rudolf Otto, the divine is the wholly other. But anciently, humanity kept knocking on the door of divinity. We have it in the Garden of Eden. We have it where the bene Elohim, the children of God, are mating with humans to produce demigod offspring. So they can- Right ... also mate their way into divinity. And here, they're building a tower their way into divinity, and God is not happy- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher about this. It's so weird to me, the thought that they might build a building so big that then they'll realize, "Oh, we can actually do anything." Once we finish up this building- Yeah ... nothing can stop us.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It is just a building.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It doesn't seem... But there you go.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so we get to verse seven, and here's a part I like. In the Hebrew, it says, "Narada," which is the cohortative or the first-person plural imperative for "Let us descend. Let us go down." So God is talking to the other gods again.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So God is- I mean, he's clearly talking to somebody- Yeah ... because even in all of the translations, it's, "Let us go down." It's never- Mm-hmm ... "I'm talking to me, and I'm going to say to me-" "... I'm going down to do a thing."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This- So yeah, we did talk about this a little bit a long time ago on one of our episodes when we were talking about there being a divine council. It's not just one guy up there in the clouds.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher There's a whole group of them up there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. They've got a deliberative body. They got their nice cushy chairs, and they- ... sit there and talk about what's to be done with this Homer Simpson. But no, here it says, "Let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another's speech. So Adonai scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city."

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan "Therefore, it was called Babel," or Bal'el, "because there Adonai confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them over all the face of the earth."

Dan Beecher And the NRSVUE has a little footnote that says that Babel is a play on the verb meaning to confuse in Hebrew.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But it comes from bab-ilu, Gate of the Gods- Oh ... is the Akkadian idea. And so- And it- Yeah, that's just a play on words.

Dan Beecher Is it related to Babylon?

Dan McClellan To- Yes, it's Babylon.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Babylon is a transliteration that comes to us through the Greek.

Dan Beecher Okay, so that is what we're talking about.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher The city, this is also an ideology for Babylon.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Okay. I didn't- In fact- ... realize that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. In fact, we know the tower that they're talking about. We have the remains of the tower.

Dan Beecher Is this like a ziggurat sort of thing?

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's called the Ziggurat or the Tower of Etemenanki.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And this was started in, I believe, the 8th century BCE. It's just outside of the city of Babylon, and it was completed and then kind of partly demolished, dismantled, and when the Babylonian Empire... So the Babylonian Empire started it. I think the Neo-Assyrian Empire came in and, in taking over, demolished some of it, and then it was such a big tower and such an important part of the landscape that some Neo-Assyrian king was like, "Eh, you know what? We're going to-" We're going to rebuild this thing. But it sat unfinished or partly dismantled for 70 or 80 years.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And this is in the seventh century, the period when these stories are being written. And so, a lot of scholars think that this story is kind of thumbing the nose at those morons over in Babylon who've got this gigantic unfinished tower.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so, it's saying, "We're going to take that. What if we took that unfinished tower and crafted this story around the main imperial power in the region being the origin of the scattering of the peoples and the confounding of the languages?" So it's a bit mocking them. It's a bit using the Tower of Etemenanki as inspiration for this story.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It suddenly occurs to me, this Babel being Babylon thing has blown my mind a bit, and I think it's funny that modern translators don't just translate it to Babylon instead of Babel, just because whether it's Babel or Babylon, we're not going to get the joke. The joke of- ... they called it Babel because the Lord confused the language.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher That's not in our language. We're not going to get that joke, so why not just translate it other than tradition? It just seems weird not to translate it to Babylon.

Dan McClellan I think you have babbling as a verb in English. Babies babble.

Dan Beecher Yes, that's true.

Dan McClellan Baboons babble.

Dan Beecher Or babble meaning blather or sort of dumb.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think that is almost certainly derived from the idea of the Tower of Babel.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But I can look that up real quick.

Dan Beecher Babel. Okay, so there is an extra joke in there in English. Okay, fine. I never made that connection, and I don't know how I would've without your help, and I think the story becomes much more interesting to me when I realize that not only is this an ideology for the origin of the multiplicity of language, but also for this city and for that dumb tower that they never finished. They're really packing in a whole bunch of different sort of origin stories here.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I think that makes it more cool.

Dan McClellan Yeah, it shows how creative they were.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan People sometimes ask me, "What are the biggest mistakes that believers and non-believers make about the Bible?" And when it comes to non-believers, one of the things I usually will bring up is this notion that these are Bronze Age goat herders.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan These were some of the most elite thinkers in the world back then, and they were crafting quite complex stories about what was going on, and this wasn't in the Bronze Age either. This is late Iron Age. So, I'm getting on the online etymological dictionary that this compare to babalus, Latin, which means babbler in Greek, barbaros, non-Greek speaking, and that's based on the mimicking of unintelligible speech as bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, they say, "No direct connection with Babel can be traced, though association with that may have affected the senses." That's what the OED says- Interesting ... about that.

Dan Beecher So- Okay ...

Dan McClellan yeah.

Dan Beecher Well, there you go. I am appealing to future translators to translate it as Babylon.

Dan McClellan As Babylon. Therefore, it was called, yeah, Babel, because there Adonai confused the language of all the earth, and from there, the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Yeah, it's like wink, wink, get it? And it's like, well, if I got it, I'd be reading the Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Of course, I don't get it. Let me tell you something.

Dan Beecher That is my response to so much of the Bible. There are so many things- ... where it's like, and it was called blank because of X. And it feels like they're like, "Huh?

Dan McClellan Get it?"

Dan Beecher And I'm like, "No. I don't know how to get that. I have no way of understanding that."

Dan McClellan Oh, well, the Septuagint, the Greek says, "They called its name Synchesis"- Oh ... which means confusion- Oh, okay ... in Greek. Or Synchesis. So they don't even try to replicate the Babel in the Greek.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan They just say, "Oh, that means confusion."

Dan Beecher Interesting. But yeah- So they're going the opposite direction. There you go. Yeah, but if you- I guess you can either highlight the joke or you can highlight the actual thing that it was and- Yeah ... or you can- And in- ... shoot straight down the middle- You look- ... and just come up, invent a name of Babel ...

Dan McClellan if you look throughout the Bible, everywhere it says Babylon, the Hebrew is Babel, the exact same word that- Okay ...

Dan Beecher we have here.

Dan McClellan So.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Weird.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, I find that interesting. I do like, and this is going to be sort of important in our second segment, but they place so much importance on the different languages and how much that just destroyed everything.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher To separate out the languages seems to have take-- It takes humanity from literally the precipice of godhood to, "Oh, now you're all just screwed. Huh, sorry. You're all just dumb now."

Dan McClellan I- Now you're Bronze Age goat herders.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Suck it. I just think that's really interesting. I think it's really weird that one change would have that much power. But clearly, when you think about it, and even in modern times, but back then especially, if people just two towns over speak a different language than you, you can't do commerce. You can't even find a place to stay. Travel becomes a problem because you can't communicate. And so I can see that, especially in a time when, I don't know why they didn't just use Google Translate, but it was basically a no-go. It meant you were starting from scratch.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it is also interesting that around this time, more like the second half of the second millennium BCE, so before this time, is when we get the development of alphabetic scripts, which significantly democratize the ability to read and write. Now, the literate folks were still the overwhelming minority of society, but for languages like Akkadian and like Egyptian, you had to know literally hundreds of different characters.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Whether it was syllabic or ideographic or whatever. And then with the invention of alphabetic script, it became a matter of 22 to 30 characters that represented just the consonants. So, in this early period, the scripts of Israel and Moab and Ammon and Edom and further north in Syria, these are abjads, where it's just the consonants that you are writing. So, it became a lot easier to read and to write. But the larger empires around them were still using those other systems. And so, yeah, for someone who was concerned with commerce and stuff like that, and 8th century BCE is when both Israel and Judah become regional powerhouses. They both have kings that reign for unusually long periods of time, more than 40 years each.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And they're able to establish themselves as trading partners with Phoenicia, and then by way of Phoenicia, with other parts of the eastern and central Mediterranean. And even Judah is a secondary trading partner in this sense. They're going through Israel most of the time, but they're making a lot of money as well. So now they're starting to interact with the regions around them a lot more, and so it bubbles to the surface. It's something that is a lot closer to the surface for the intelligentsia, the elite of these nations. So yeah, this story would resonate with the elite more than with anyone else, which is probably how it was circulated initially, was among the elite.

Dan Beecher Yeah, it does seem like the literate who are actually able to read this would be the ones who would be most susceptible to its message.

Dan McClellan Yeah. The snootiest of the snooty.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan Who would be like, "Yes, that's why I have to constantly learn another language to engage with the help."

Dan Beecher Exactly. Well, speaking of snootiness- Snooty ... I think we should move on to our bit of snootiness, which is- Snoochie boochies, as no one would ever say.

Dan McClellan Who talks like that?

Dan Beecher Nobody anymore, man.

Dan McClellan That's- It's a bit of a deep cut. That's a bit of a deep cut ...

Dan Beecher that's from the '90s, buddy. Nobody talks like that.

Dan McClellan It's from the '90s.

Dan Beecher Nobody.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher We're going to move on to our next segment, Watch Your Language. All right, here we are. We've been talking about language this whole time, but there are other ways of talking about language, and not just in the sense of it's hard to do commerce or it's hard to get by with your neighbors when you don't know what they're saying. But there's also a sense in which you, on your channels, on your TikToks and whatever, end up encountering a lot of other creators who have a lot to say about why it's desperately important that you go to the biblical language, that you go to the original Hebrew, the original Greek, because otherwise you just... And yeah, we talked earlier about how you can't get the joke if you don't know the original language or whatever.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher There's plenty of meanings that will be lost if you don't understand the original language. But that's not what a lot of these guys are talking about.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher There are many creators out there. You and I were exchanging videos earlier, and one of the creators that you sent me, I'm not even going to say who it was because I don't want anyone to look him up because I don't want him to get any more views or whatever. But he was adamant, and he's made multiple videos about this, that if you say Jesus, the phonemes Jesus, you are not saying his name, and you're missing out on the magic powers of his real name.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there are actually two different ways that I see this represented. One is you're missing out on the power. There's power in the real name, and God wants you to use the real name. The other is, if you say Jesus, you're actually invoking demonic powers.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Oh yeah, if you say- So, there's a positive and a negative kind of incentive.

Dan Beecher If you say it right, you get good magic, and if you say it wrong- Right ... you get bad magic.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I think one of the And this is from people who think that studying the underlying language is kind of like amassing doTERRA oils or crystals, that this somehow endows you with magical power, but only if you don't really understand the language at all, but you just get yourself a "Strong's Concordance," which is kind of the contemporary mystical Christian's spell book.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you just understand barely the surface of what's going on. Because I've responded to a number of videos, and I've seen this repeated all over the place, that the name Jesus, pronounced as Jesus, actually means Hail Zeus.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And so you're actually evoking an entirely different deity, and then they have to go on and say, "Well, Zeus was an Anunnaki. Zeus was a demon. Zeus was associated with Moloch and Beelzebub," and all that kind of stuff. And no, it absolutely doesn't mean Hail Zeus. I think some people just hear it in Spanish, Jesús, and think, "Man, that sounds-" Hey Zeus.

Dan Beecher "...

Dan McClellan an awful lot..." Shove a lightning bolt up your butt, Zeus.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan Another '90s deep cut. But, yeah, Hail Zeus would be Haile Zeos. It would have absolutely nothing to do with the way we pronounce Jesus.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Well, and the funny thing is that so many of these things are that. It sounds a little bit like X, and therefore- Reminds me of it, yeah.

Dan McClellan Therefore.

Dan Beecher Right. Which they don't ever notice that lots of English words sound pretty close to other English words and have no relation whatsoever to them.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher But if it's in another language, then whoa. I wanted to point out, I'm going to hit you with an example. We have not talked about this beforehand.

Dan McClellan Oh, okay.

Dan Beecher But I'm going to hit you with an example that I'm sure that you've encountered before.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher And to sort of talk about it, this is a claim that your favorite misinterpretation or mistranslation in the Bible, the first word of the Bible- Oh, God ...

Dan McClellan Bereshit.

Dan Beecher How'd I do?

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher Sound okay?

Dan McClellan Pretty good. Pretty decent, yeah.

Dan Beecher Actually is talking about Jesus.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh.

Dan Beecher It's Jesus in the thing.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher I will now explain to you. The letters, in order, are beit, resh, alef, shin, yud, and tav. Beit and resh together form the word bar, meaning son of, in Aramaic, it says. Which, why are we going to Aramaic? This is in Hebrew, but it says in Aramaic. In Hebrew, it's ben. Anyway, alef equals the ox head, meaning power, authority, strength, said to be used by the Hebrews to represent God. Okay, so now we have son of God. See where we're going with this? Shin, two front teeth, meaning sharp, press, eat. And then it says the function of teeth when chewing is to consume and destroy. If this feels like a stretch to y'all, yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Dan is banging his head against his microphone. Yud equals arm, meaning work, make, and deed, the functions of the hand. And tav is crossed sticks, meaning mark, sign, signal, monument. I don't know how crossed sticks mean those things, but there you go. So, the claim is that the first word in the Bible, in the beginning, it doesn't mean in the beginning, but in the beginning, holds this idea, the Son of God will be destroyed by his own work on a cross.

Dan McClellan Ta-da.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Oh, I see there's a content creator on TikTok who talks about Bible tea, time to spill the Bible tea- Uh-huh ... who made a video about this a few years ago, and I responded to it, pointing out why it is complete and utter nonsense, but I see it getting reposted and reposted and reposted and getting millions of views all the time.

Dan Beecher And- So, you're saying that it's not true?

Dan McClellan What? It's entirely false. And the first thing to note about this is that this notion that all of this meaning is inhabiting each of these letters whenever they're being written is absolutely laughable when it comes to the Hebrew Bible. Because these letters do descend graphically from ideographic scripts, but those ideographic scripts were adopted into alphabetic scripts centuries before the Hebrew language even existed. I mentioned in a previous segment about how second half of the second millennium BCE, we have the development of alphabetic scripts.

Dan Beecher And- And we should just be-- Sorry, I just want to clarify because we didn't earlier, but ideographic scripts mean that each picture represents a word, right?

Dan McClellan A concept, yeah.

Dan Beecher Or an idea.

Dan McClellan Yeah, a couple of word, yeah.

Dan Beecher So, you have to memorize each of the little graphs, each of the little images, and know what each of them represents, whereas an alphabetic script, each of the little things represents a sound. So, you're piecing together the- Yeah ... the sounds of words, right?

Dan McClellan But much like Japanese, anciently, the ideographic scripts were often mixed in with syllabic.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And syllabic is different from alphabetic as well. Syllabic would be not just the sound buh, but the sound ba or bi or buh or bo or boo. You would have- Right ... a different character for each of those.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, syllabic scripts had hundreds of characters as well. And what they did to create the alphabetic scripts was they created what's called an acrophonic script. An acrophonic- Basically means beginning sound. And so each character, which used to represent a word or a concept, was borrowed, and in order to represent the sound made by the first letter of the word or concept. So a drawing of a house, which was kind of like a little spiral circle, only if you then make it square, it looks like walls kind of turning in on themselves. It looks kind of like a house. And in Northwest Semitic languages, house is bayit. And so the word bayit begins with the sound b. And so the picture of the house indexes or represents the sound b.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan That's it. So once you've moved from an ideographic/syllabic into an alphabetic or acrophonic script, you have lost all of the other connections. People are aware of them, but they don't use them to make those associations. The character that looks like a house just means b.

Dan Beecher So you're saying that when this says that alef equals an ox head, what probably happened, was the alef actually meant to-- Like, was that- Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah ...

Dan Beecher initial picture an- Think- ... actually an ox head?

Dan McClellan Think of a capital A.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Turn it upside down.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It looks like you've got an animal face and with horns coming off of each side. So yes, the alef came from alf or elf, which meant ox.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, it represented the sound that started it off, which is actually a glottal stop. So initially, the alef represents the glottal stop. So it just indexes, or signals, or represents the sound that starts the word. Now, the association with the concept of God is actually based on a false etymology. People think that the word Elohim, which starts with an alef, is based on a root, ayil, which means to be strong or to be mighty or something like that. And so fundamentally, an el, a deity, is a mighty one or a strong one or something like that. That etymology is rejected by the majority of scholars today.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So that's a false etymology, and we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that anyone during the period of the Bible understood the character alef to, in any way, represent deity or a specific deity. After the biblical period, when we get into mystical streams of Jewish and Christian tradition, they start to read these concepts back in.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you start to get this mysticism read in. And so some of those concepts are re-put back into the letters with differing degrees of accuracy. So they didn't always know exactly where these things came from, but they did it anyway. And then once Christians started going, "Hey, if we can use Hebrew to make it sound like we have all this extra access to information and insight," then they started adding Christian overlays to everything that was going on. And the thing with the tav at the very end, we'll get to that, but that's one of the prime examples of that.

Dan Beecher You just hit on a key to this whole thing, which is that I think people who are engaging the text in this way are trying to at least make the claim to having that extra insight.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Or some sort of added spirituality or some sort of added magic to the whole thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which is an impulse that I actually understand. That impulse- Absolutely ... makes sense, but they don't recognize or admit that they are imposing this and overlaying these ideas. They want it to be a truth or something.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and this is part of the fact that everybody has to negotiate with the text. And this text has been around for 2,000-plus years, so there's not a ton to discover unless you find new dimensions of analysis and new ways to say, "Hey, I just found a bunch of stuff."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "I struck a vein of information by imagining that the letters themselves have all this additional significance." And so every time someone says, "Well, what if we thought about it like this?" Suddenly, that opens up an entire new universe of ways to approach it. So once you say, "Oh, all the letters have this significance. We can go look at Bereshit, and oh, well, now this means all this stuff." Well, no, it doesn't. No, it didn't mean that ever until you decided you were going to put this specific lens on it. But once you make it sound mystical and cool like that, you get millions and millions and millions of views- Yeah ... on social media by saying that, because suddenly you've made a dusty old text that people have seen a million times more interesting and more meaningful.

Dan Beecher And that's actually fine. That's actually kind of fun as an exercise.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I've- As long as it- ... said that many times. Keep it to yourself. If you're doing that in your own household and you're like, "Wow, this could mean this. This makes me feel connected. That's what really gets me riled up and excited and passionate about this," knock yourself out. Go to town. But once you start spreading it publicly, and start trying to convince other people that this is what it really meant, then you're in the realm of misinformation and maybe even disinformation.

Dan Beecher And- Yeah. People start buying that, and they start- ... going down some weird roads. I was thinking about this in the context of other things because I think that there's this tendency to ascribe sort of mystical power to other languages. I think it happens a lot actually.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think we don't always notice it. But I remember being in a coffee shop and I was just working on my laptop, and a woman next to me was sort of pontificating to the person that she was sitting with about yoga and how amazing yoga was. And she started- Mm-hmm ... talking about these Sanskrit words and how these Sanskrit words have all of this meaning and how the word namaste at the end of every yoga session had this deep meaning of the light in me acknowledges the light in you. And while I was there, I just sort of quietly just Googled what namaste means because- Right ... I've been to India, and they just say it as like namaste, and it- Yeah ... really does just mean sort of hello and goodbye. It's kind of the aloha of India. And to add these extra layers of meaning, I think it makes it more interesting and more engaging for a lot of people to hear the Sanskrit words, to hear something asana instead of just like- Yeah ... touch your toes.

Dan McClellan Shavasana.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Instead of just child pose, you say Shavasana or whatever, I don't know the poses. But it gives it that extra little bit of like sort of oomph. It makes it- Yeah ... and puts people in a different mindset, and I get that, but also you're not getting the words. The words don't actually have those extra meanings. And I think it's important that we talk about like, okay, you're imposing a new meaning that you're choosing onto this stuff.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And the foreignness is important because- Right ... you need people who don't understand.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because when people come to me and say, "Hey, guess what this means?" And I go, "I don't have to guess." It kind of deflates the balloon a little bit. You need people to not know the reality of the situation, which is why it's so much more effective with foreign words. And if you can tap into a specific type of foreignness that is considered exotic and- Mm ... mysterious and ancient like Sanskrit, and things like that, then it lands with greater impact than if you said- Well, even- ... "Hey, there's this Russian word." And people are like, "I don't care about- Right ...

Dan Beecher Russian."

Dan McClellan Well, I mean, and we do- And it's like, "Well, what about Sanskrit?" "Ooh, I like Sanskrit."

Dan Beecher We do have different associations with different languages. I know that- Mm-hmm ... most native English speakers have an almost intuitive sense that the Anglo-Saxon words that we use, the words that have an Anglo-Saxon root, are a little less fancy than the Latinate words that we use. And one of the examples that I always use on this is just, and this is just because of how sort of the court and aristocracy worked in England in the past.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher But we use one set of words for animals that are in the field: cow, pig, horse, whatever. And then once they're on a plate in front of us, we use a whole other set of words that are from the French- Yeah ... which is beef.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Like beef, pork, all of those things are, mutton. Why aren't we saying sheep or cow when- Toubaise. But even then, it's just the French sounded fancier and, well, at that point, French was just sort of the language of the aristocracy, so the aristocracy didn't bother themselves with animals when they were in the field. It only got to them when it was on their plate.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher But we still to this day, like French is the language of love, and Italian is the language of passion, and- Yeah ... we have all of these associations.

Dan McClellan German is the language of anger.

Dan Beecher Yes. German So it's like I- Although- Yeah, go ahead.

Dan McClellan I had to condition myself out of something when I got into graduate school. I wanted to use all these Latin and German words and stuff like that, and maybe, "What a fascinating Weltanschauung." And people are like, "What does that mean?" And, "Oh, it means worldview." "Just say worldview then, you idiot."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I had to disabuse myself of that temptation to make myself sound fancier and more educated, by using foreign words.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And you can make yourself sound more mystical and more, if you start to employ these different words, including the correct pronunciation of the name of Jesus or whatever.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Even though all of these different creators have a different correct pronunciation- Yeah ... of the name.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Some of them think it's like Joshua, only with a Y.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it's like you've just taken the English version of Joshua, which is also not exactly how the Hebrew name was pronounced, and just replaced the J with a Y.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Or the Yeshua is probably the most common one- Mm-hmm ... even though many scholars think that in first-century CE Galilee- The "a" on the end, which was an Ayin, probably wouldn't have been pronounced. So it probably would've been something more like Yeshu or something like that.