Episode 240: Dan McClellan – Why God Is Like a Hotdog

Pete  

You’re listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Pete  

Hey, folks, before we get started today, we wanted to tell you about our next class called, “The Bible is Not a Sex Book.” I thought maybe it was. 

Jared  

Yeah, I mean-

Pete  

It’s not.

Jared  

-You’re blowing my mind right now,

Pete  

I know. “The Bible is Not a Sex Book: A Survey of The Bible’s Diverse and Sometimes Questionable Sexual Ethics and Where We Go From Here. ” 

Jared  

Wow. Well, it’s going to be taught by our nerd in-residence, Anna Sieges-Beale, and it’s happening live for one night only on April 25th. Put it in your calendars, April 25th, from 8-9:30pm, Eastern Time. But if you can’t make it live, don’t worry, you’ll still get the recording to watch later. So go ahead and sign up. 

Pete  

And as is always the case, this class is pay-what-you-can, that is, until it’s over and then it costs $25 for the recording. And for more information and to sign up, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/sexbook. That’s one word—and if the internet blocks that URL, blame the marketing department.  

Jared  

Pete  

Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Bible for Normal People. Today, our topic is: Why God is Like a Hot Dog. And I’ll bet none of you have ever asked yourself that question. I know I haven’t. And our guest is our good friend Dan McClellan.

Jared  

Yeah, Dan is a public scholar of the Bible, similar to the stuff that we do on Bible and religion. You can find him and his work on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, but you know—don’t let the fact that he’s on TikTok fool you. He’s no slouch, as you will soon find out from this episode.

Pete  

Jared  

Alright, let’s get into it.

Dan  

Pete  

Dan, welcome to our podcast!

Dan  

Thank you for having me. I appreciate your time.

Pete  

Our lowly podcast. When you’re all over TikTok…

Jared  

Pete  

And you have time for us. We’re very happy about that. Anyway, so—Well, listen, we’re gonna talk about some pretty heavy stuff, I think, here today. And let’s ease into it by actually going to a biblical passage that you mentioned, that illustrates what it is that is inspiring you to think about God in certain kinds of ways, especially a God, not so much personally today, but in antiquity. So, the passage is Numbers 10:35-36, why don’t you just tell us what’s in there? And then maybe let’s try to identify the problem that you’re seeing that you want to try to explore and explain.

Dan  

Yeah, absolutely. So, the setting here is the Israelites are in the wilderness and we’ve set out from the mount of the Lord, going three days’ journey into the wilderness, and the Ark of the Covenant is going before them. And then we have—in verses 35 and 36, I’m just gonna read from the NRSV here—says, “Whenever the Ark set out, Moses would say, ‘Arise, oh, Lord, let your enemies be scattered, and your foes flee before you.’ And whenever it came to rest, he would say, ‘Return, oh, Lord, of the ten thousand thousands of Israel.’” And so, the text seems to be suggesting in some way, shape, or form, Moses is equating the movement and the activity of the Ark with the movement and the activity of God themselves. And this overlaps with a big discussion that’s been going on in Assyriology for a while. A discussion about the nature and function of divine images, and the fact that in a lot of texts, we have people referring to the divine images, either as distinct from the deity or simultaneously identified with the deity. So, you have sacrifice—

Pete  

So, both.

Dan  

So, both, exactly. 

Pete  

Yeah, okay. 

Dan  

It doesn’t make sense to us, given our ontology and so—and that would mean our theory of the nature of being. So, it’s a discussion that’s going to have been going on for a long time: How do we make sense of how they are treating divine images as the deity and simultaneously as not the deity?

Jared  

Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say, is it, sort of, it violates, in our kind of Western modern thinking, the law of non-contradiction. That it can’t both be identified with but also distinct from these objects. So, there’s something in in terms of how…

Pete  

It’s something that needs explaining.

Jared  

Right, right, exactly. 

Pete  

So, before we get into all that, Dan, is there another example, or maybe a couple of examples, again, just to sort of, get us all…to prime the pump, so to speak, as we get into this discussion?

Dan  

I think there are a couple of really good examples. Another one is a story—it’s still the Ark of the Covenant, but—what’s called the Ark Narrative and the beginning of 1 Samuel, we have the Philistines coming to battle. And we’ve got the Israelites showing up, and they go and grab the Ark, and bring it to the battle. And they don’t ask for any permission or anything like that. They just go and do it. And when the Ark shows up, it’s kind of a war palladium. It’s the thing they parade before their troops to get them all jazzed. 

And the Philistines can hear the gods have come into the camp, and they get terrified. But the Philistines end up winning the battle, and they end up taking the Ark. And the Philistines treat the Ark exactly as they would a divine image. They’ve captured it after defeating an enemy in battle, and they take it back to their temple and they set it up in the temple, opposite their own divine image of Dagon, their grain deity. And the next day they come in and their image of Dagon has fallen to the ground. So they set it back up. And then the next day, it’s fallen to the ground again, but its head and his hands have been severed. And this is kind of representing the Ark of the Covenant as a divine image that represents Adonai, the God of Israel, and it’s defeating the divine image of Dagon. And then it afflicts the Philistines with hemorrhoids or something like that and so, they get spooked and…

Pete  

Of all things to inflict them with, but yeah.

Dan  

Yeah, this was- That was the bad one. 

Dan  

So, they’re sending it around, and it is afflicting all of their people and so they put some offerings in a cart, they lash the cart to some cows, and they just send them on their way. And the cows march all the way to, I think, Beit Shemesh is where they go, and some people they’re looking the Ark and end up dying. But the story is kind of treating the Ark very much like a divine image, saying it is the counterpart to the Philistine divine image of Dagon. And it is very similar to what we have in Numbers that is being treated as the very presence of God, as if the Ark manifests God’s presence and carries God’s power and authority with it. 

And I think, another really good example is one that I’ve discussed a handful of times, is the angel of the Lord, the Messenger of Adonai, who in a handful of narratives in the early Hebrew Bible, seems to have their identity kind of overlapping with God’s own identity. Like in Exodus 3, we have Moses at Horeb. In verse 2, it says, “a messenger of Adonai appeared to him in the flame of fire in a burning bush.” And then the rest of the chapter has God themselves speaking, but there’s no indication that the speaker has changed. It seems that Moses is engaging with this messenger, but this individual, this entity, in verse 6 says, “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” And there are a handful of others with Abraham, with Hagar in Genesis 16, with Gideon in Judges 6, with Manoah and his wife in Judges 13, where it seems like the messenger both is the deity and is not the deity, the narrative seems to kind of go back and forth very much like what we would expect, with a discussion about divine images from the world around and outside biblical Israel.

Jared  

Okay, I’m so curious how you’re going to address this. So what’s the way to talk about this? Or I guess, the question is, how do you address this? How are you framing what’s happening here? And maybe even talking about it in a way that distinguishes it from how maybe biblical scholars would have historically dealt with this phenomenon?

Pete  

Well, can I ask, just to backup on that to get to Jared’s question, maybe one just preliminary question is: Is the problem that we’re looking at how deities can be both the messenger or the Ark, but also not that? Just, very simple, is that the problem we’re looking at? Basically?

Dan  

That’s one way to say it. I think, treating the Ark or the messenger as, simultaneously, the deity and not the deity is, I think, is a clearer way to state it. Because, talking about if we use “the deity” as the reference point, that’s just not how I usually talk about it. 

Pete  

That’s—Yeah, I see your point. It was starting more, like, anthropologically, really just starting from the ground up. Okay. 

Dan  

Yeah.

Pete  

Alright. Yeah, that’s good. So, yeah. Now, Jared. 

Jared  

Pete  

That—I needed that, I needed to hear that before we get into the other stuff.

Dan  

Totally.

Jared  

Yeah, so yeah, go ahead. And how would you, you frame it—or that’s why I was tripping over my language because I want to not center things you don’t want to center, or maybe even reconceptualize how you’re even thinking about this.

Dan  

Well, this problem grew out of the master’s thesis I wrote while I was at Trinity Western University, and I wanted to write on the development of the concept of monotheism. And I just couldn’t gain any purchase, I just couldn’t get a grip on what a deity was in the Bible. And all of the research I was seeing was talking about definitions and ontology, and being, and these frameworks that did not make sense to me as ancient ways of organizing knowledge. 

And I got a bit into cognitive linguistics, because I found some ideas within cognitive linguistics that helped me make sense of this. When we use definitions, we are trying to reduce categories down to the shortest list of necessary and sufficient features. What are the features of this category that 100% determine whether you are in or out? And that’s not how our minds organize our understanding of categories and so that’s not how we use categories in everyday speech. And an example that I like to use is the idea: is a hot dog a sandwich? Because if you look at the definition of a sandwich, it’s reducing it down to, well, it has to have these features and if it has these features, then it is a sandwich, if it doesn’t have these features, it’s not a sandwich. But nobody refers to hot dogs as sandwiches. So, what that’s doing is taking this definition, which is supposed to be trying to capture usage, and it’s using the definition to show that it applies to things that are never used that way. 

But if you just look at usage, say, let’s look at all of the occurrences of the word “sandwich” and the word “hot dog,” there’s not really much overlap at all. And what cognitive linguistics tries to do is try to account for how the human mind develops categories, and then how we use them in our language. And I felt that was a much better framework for trying to get at what the Bible describes as a deity. And so, the thesis I wrote there was, “What does the Hebrew Bible mean when it uses the words for deity?” And what I found was that we can’t really reduce it down to a set of necessary and sufficient features, it doesn’t fit in a box where it’s either all in or all out. It’s really kind of a category with fuzzy boundaries and overlaps into other things. And really, we treat personhood the same way. Kind of intuitively, when we’re not really thinking hard about why we treat people as the phrase that’s become common and anthropology is, “partable and permeable.” That is, there are aspects of our personhood, our self, our agency, that are distinct from other aspects of our agency. So, when we talk about our head being in conflict with our heart, that’s a way of kind of dividing our personhood into two separate locations of agency that can be in conflict with each other. 

Pete  

That’s the partable part, right? 

Dan  

That’s the partable part. And then the permeable part is the idea that vehicles of agency can permeate the person, and can become part of a person. And so, this is, like, the concept of spirit possession, or the concept of two people becoming one flesh, or the man with two brains—that great Steve Martin movie—these ideas sound really, really intuitive and natural to us, so they’re all over our media, our entertainment, and our stories. But we don’t…We haven’t really thought hard about why it is that we do that. And it’s because of the person, like the categories that we use, is not firmly bounded. It’s not a clear dichotomy. It’s something with fuzzy boundaries, and there can be overlap and integration. And the same seems to be true of the way the Bible talks about deity. 

And a couple of examples of this when Saul is… He runs into the prophet who tells him, “God is going to put a new heart and you and you’re going to become a new person.” And then that happens a couple of verses later. But the heart is kind of conceived as some kind of location of agency and so we’re switching out one seat of agency and putting in another so that God’s agency is kind of indwelling Saul, if you want to think about it that way. And so, as I started looking into the cognitive science of religion and the research that talks about this, I realized we have something very similar to divine images today. I watched a movie—I forget what movie it was, I wish I remembered what movie it was—but somebody was at a cemetery, and they were talking to a headstone. And they were talking to the headstone as if it were the person who was buried underground, and I was looking at the headstone and I thought, “Man, that looks an awful lot like the standing stone that’s sitting in the Holy of Holies in the Judahite Temple at Arad,” and they’re addressing that stone as if it were—

Jared  

As one does, by the way.

Pete  

Jared  

I’m sure lots of people had the same thought watching…

Pete  

Immediately, yeah.

Dan  

And so, I was like, “That has to be related!” And I make the argument in my book “Adonai’s Divine Images” that it’s absolutely related, these are shared kind of intuitive, impulses that we feel to kind of materialize the agency of something or someone who’s important to us in something that we can see, something that’s tangible. And so, headstones in a cemetery function very much the way that a standing stones in a temple or divine images might function. They can house some kind of sense of that person’s presence or agency. And so, if you take that elsewhere, you can bring that individual’s agency with them.

Pete  

So, I guess, what you’re contending against is like an artificial imposition of categories for thinking about how the deity is conceptualized that doesn’t really take into account these fuzzy boundaries.

Dan  

Exactly. 

Pete  

Okay. 

Dan  

I think what scholarship has long done is it has taken categories and frameworks that were developed philosophically, and tried to account for human behavior with those philosophical frameworks.

Pete  

Can you give an example or two of what you mean by the philosophical frameworks?

Dan  

Well, the practice of definition is one of those. That comes from an Aristotelian notion of categories. This idea that, you know, a category is binary, you’re either 100% in or you’re 100% out. And categories are…

Pete  

Like a chair. 

Dan  

Yeah.

Pete  

Right. 

Dan  

Yeah. 

Pete  

Like, that kind of thing? Alright. Yeah. 

Dan  

And, so, you know, there are a bunch of examples of people using definitions to try to structure power. What is a woman? What is life? What is racism? What is sexism? These are things that people argue over. “Well, no, it should be this necessary and sufficient feature.” “No, this definition is right.” And this is the imposition of these contemporary philosophical categories to concepts that developed entirely independently of those categories, and are used entirely independently of those categories.

Pete  

So I mean, not to get political here, but like, we’ve seen probably all of us on social media, the news, politicians interrogating people to say, “Define what a woman is, or define what a man is.” That’s, what you’re saying is that’s part of…That’s an example of the problem, definition.

Dan  

And when people ask me to define something like that, I frequently will ask them back, “define furniture.”

Pete  

Dan  

Wittgenstein did this 75 years ago saying, “Can you define game?” The word “game.” No, there’s no boundary. You can draw a boundary. There hasn’t been one there before. But that never bothered you before, when you use the word. And it’s the same with all of the words that we use and furniture is the one that I just find handy, because everybody knows what furniture is. But if you looked it up in a dictionary, and you said, “Okay, what all does that apply to?” It applies to so much stuff that no one would ever dream of referring to as furniture, because the definition is an artificially imposed, philosophical framework that has no relationship to how our minds developed those categories, how we communicate about those categories, how we learn those categories. And so, yeah, the whole “define a woman” thing is just an example of people misusing this philosophical framework that is really entirely inadequate for performing the work that they want it to do.

Jared  

Well, you know, you use Wittgenstein, I think that then brings in this entire kind of philosophical tradition around this where, you know, thinkers like Jacques Derrida also pointed out how we’ve utilized like Aristotle in these categories, and we don’t even realize that throughout the history of Western thought, it’s based on these binaries and a privileging of one side of the binary over the other. 

Dan  

Exactly. 

Jared  

And so, that kind of thinking, you know, I think, we’re just now beginning to kind of think past it with these thinkers and so—I guess my question with that is, what’s the work being done? Do we see this implication in other parts of studying how God is represented? Do we see some of these ways of thinking and then some of the cracks in the foundations of this way of thinking?

Dan  

I think there are some examples in some places. Carol Newsom has incorporated some features of cognitive linguistics and particularly prototype theory, which is this theory that we… our categories kind of form around a prototype of a given category. And you know, the further away it is from it, the less good an example of that category it is, and then it extends out to fuzzy boundaries. And so, she’s used that to talk about genre in the Dead Sea Scrolls and also to talk about concepts of personhood. Her recent book, I believe, it’s called “The Spirit Within Me,” is a discussion of ideas of personhood, and ideas that the boundaries are fuzzier than we think. Now, there are…there have been some applications of cognitive linguistics to studies of deity, not a ton that I think have been phenomenally helpful. [Chuckles] I’m hoping that my application in my book will kind of open doors for other people to look in this direction. But there have been some philosophers who’ve kind of touched on this.

Pete  

How have they not been helpful? Like help us to understand your thesis better, where are they falling short? What are they not addressing that you feel should be addressed?

Dan  

I think something that I’ve seen frequently is the use of these frameworks to try to reinforce existing ideologies and dogmas. So when they’re coming from within a conservative Christian tradition, for instance, they’ll frequently be used to try to buttress conservative Christian ideologies. And when they’re being used to try to draw firmer boundaries around things, I think, that’s one of the times when they can be more harmful than helpful. Because, I think, whenever we’re trying to draw firmer boundaries around things, we have to be very careful that we’re not just trying to… it’s not just confirmation bias trying to help us make us feel better about the ideologies that we happen to adhere to. 

One good example of somebody, I think, who’s doing this work well and profitably is a scholar named Beate Pongratz-Leisten, who was the editor of a book from a little over 10 years ago, called “Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism.” And she applied this to Assyriology and talked about the astralization of gods and how stars could be both the deity and not the deity. That’s an example of something in relation to deities. And then, there was Gebhard. J. Selz, has done some research on Mesopotamian notions of gods and goddesses using this concept of prototype theory and cognitive linguistics to better understand why they talk about deities and Mesopotamia the way that they do and he’s, I believe, at the University of Vienna. So, there have been some folks who’ve done this. 

Ellen van Wald has applied cognitive linguistics to biblical studies, I think, pretty helpfully and particularly in looking at the book of Job but she published, back in 2009, she published a paper where she argued that the the verb “bara,” in Genesis 1 doesn’t mean “to create,” but “to separate,” I don’t know if you recall that at all, Pete, but that created a little firestorm in the world of biblical scholarship. A bunch of people firmly disagreed with her there. So I think the approach is still trying to find its footing within biblical scholarship. There are ways that it’s been applied productively, I think there are other ways that it has been applied in ways that have not been widely accepted, have not been so productive. But, I think there’s…Hopefully there’s a good future for this research in biblical studies.

Jared  

I want to come back to what we were talking about in this example, because the summary that I have is, we’re saying that whenever we’re coming across these passages, like in Numbers 10, or in First Samuel, there’s a tendency for us—because of the way that we think about categories and definitions—it’s almost like a glitch in the Matrix. Where we’re like, “Wait, it both is the deity, but it isn’t the deity”. And that makes no sense and, I think, that’s important, because, just thinking in the history of Biblical studies, but kind of in our culture, too, you know, I’m thinking of even when we had tradition, you know, source criticism, and J P and all of this, there’s sometimes this this sense of, “Oh, they’re just kind of dumb, primitive people and they’ve made, you know, mistakes and it’s because they have this very, like, primitive understanding of beings and people and how they relate.” And I think it’s important that what you’re saying is, “No, our cultural limitations are keeping us from seeing what is actually going on in their context in their history and it’s not appropriate to label that better or worse, or good or bad. But it’s actually our limitations, and the constructs we’re putting on to things that are keeping us from seeing.” We’re the ones making it a problem, it probably wasn’t a problem to them.

Dan  

Yeah, I think there are a number of ways our society has decided what knowledge is going to be authoritative and is not going to be questioned. And then, what frameworks are going to be constantly questioned, and usually it’s whatever is important within some kind of battle over structuring power. And so, if all the sides agree on something that is intuitive, that is not easily explainable, I think we just let it slide. I mean, how many people have come from the cemetery and somebody’s been like, “Why on earth would you talk to a headstone?” And, like, challenge them and criticize them for doing that or call them to account for it. “Explain why you were doing that?” I mean, we don’t have to explain a lot of the things that we do because it’s intuitive, because it scratches an intuitive itch for us, because lots of people did them, or lots of people do them and people just don’t care to question which is, I think, exactly what was going on when it came to deities, anciently, until the authors of the Hebrew Bible and the cultic authorities began to kind of renegotiate exactly how they were going to understand the use of material media to manifest God’s presence and to access God’s power.

Jared  

Maybe we can broaden this out even further then—if we haven’t gotten in enough hot water, maybe we can go an extra step—because you also talk about religion itself. I think there’s a parallel here of we’re talking about this particular illustration in our Bible of this kind of way of thinking that is a construct, that isn’t inherent in the way the universe operates in some trans-historical, universalizable, once for all time, absolutely true way, and you talk about religion as a modern social construct, too. So, can you tie those two together and, maybe, broaden the argument you’re making to religion as a whole?

Dan  

Yeah, I think this is another example of something that for a long time people just haven’t bothered thinking hard about. And the concept of religion, at least within the European world, there’s an argument to make that Islam developed this conceptual package that overlaps significantly with what we would call religion today, well before. But it was really in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, that Europeans came up with this idea that there is this discrete socio-cultural domain where these activities belong, and that they called religion. But if we go back anciently, and we try to take all the constituent elements, all of the different parts of what we label religion, and go try to find them in the ancient world, we can find them. But what we can’t find is anyone ever kind of cordoning them off, and saying, “We can group these things together, and they’re a thing.” 

And we have the word religion—which most scholars believe comes from a Latin word “religio”—and if we go look at that word being used in the Greco-Roman world, it’s not referring to that same package, it’s referring to different ideas that extend well beyond what we would label religion today. So, it’s, I think, if you had to reduce it down to one concept, anciently, they use that word “religio” to refer to what we might call “scrupulosity,” or kind of anxiety about making sure that we’re doing the right things in our relationship with other people. Now, it slowly began to be used in reference primarily, and then exclusively, to deity, but that’s something that took place over the course of centuries. And, even like Augustine says, “Nah, and we don’t like referring to Christianity as a religion, because that word can refer to relationships with other humans, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with deity.” 

And so what happened in the Renaissance and the Reformation, and particularly as we came in close quarters with Islam, and there was a lot of conflict as you had thinkers trying to come up with a way to—kind of, humanist thinkers trying to come up with a way to unite these two factions. And one of the things that they came up with was this idea that our rights and our worship, even though they’re so different, are really two different manifestations of the same impulse, this internal impulse to worship God. And so, it’s the same thing being shined through these social filters, and so coming out differently on the other side. And then it gets later turned into something that is private and interior in the Reformation. Where they talk about, you know, “We got to distinguish the realm of the state, and kings, and authorities, and things like that from the realm of what is private and interior.” And that’s where we get critiques of ritual, and critiques of priesthood, and critiques of the materiality of exercising religion, and now everything is interior, and it’s all spiritual, and it’s all noncorporeal and non-material. And that’s what Protestant does…or Protestantism, that’s how they renegotiate this concept. 

And so what we bring into the Enlightenment is this idea of religion as this socio-cultural domain that is interior to us, that has to do with belief about deity, belief about the proper ways to worship and the proper ways to live. And so, we have created this conceptual package that we now call religion, but when we use these words and use them in reference to things going on anciently, the whole package goes with the word. And so, when we try to talk about Israelite religion, maybe we are just talking about the way they worship God. But when we say Israel had religion, Israelites had religion, everybody else is thinking about the whole package and everything that comes with it. And so, we start to assume things about the way they worshiped. And we start to say, “Oh, well, that religion was a set of beliefs about God.” And, you know, that’s not something that—it wasn’t used to refer to that for, you know, almost two thousand years. And so, it distorts the way we reconstruct what’s going on, anciently, when we retroject, or superimpose these modern categories onto the ancient world, because all of the other aspects of the category gets superimposed with it. And so, I—in my dissertation, I had a whole chapter I wrote on that—that I actually pulled out. I’ve got to publish that at some point, because, I think, it makes a good case.

Pete  

Jared  

What- I think it’s an important point and it sounds slight, like, I wonder if our listeners are even picking up on the difference. But I want to point out what you said around, when we say religion, and we give it a definition of elements, “this is what it contains,” we can find those elements in the ancient world. But, I think, it’s important to recognize that’s not the same thing as all the baggage—the package, as you call it—that we bring to it now. And I think that’s really important when it comes to things like finding justifications for our ideology, or our politics in the Bible. We’re doing kind of the same thing, which is, yeah, we find the elements there and therefore we just assume. We bring all the baggage that we have at our modern concept, or the modern use of that word, and we take it straight back to the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament and we just say, “See, there it is right there.” And then, for the common person who doesn’t have a lot of tools to really think critically or behind that, it can be a pretty compelling case, like, “Oh, yeah, there’s the elements. Of course, it’s in the Bible!” 

Pete  

Unless they turn to Numbers 10:35-36. Right? Then those are the kinds of passages—

Jared  

Because it violates the—

Pete  

It violates the weakest categories…

Jared  

The Law of Noncontradiction—

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

Of like, “Oh, okay, now I see a problem.” But without that to highlight it, I think it’s just hard for people to make that distinction.

Dan  

Yeah. And, I think, when we let those categories govern how we understand the texts, and the material remains, and the history, I think that does significant damage to them. We have to renegotiate stuff. Like, someone bringing this idea, this Law of Noncontradiction, contemporary notion of “deity,” and divine images to Numbers, is gonna say, “Oh, well, that is just this.” And that may be how somebody would rationalize it today, but may have absolutely nothing to do with what the author back then was trying to communicate and, in that sense, we’re silencing the authors of the text, and we’re telling the text what it is and is not allowed to say, and, I think, a little more humility before the text, you know, is never a bad thing.

Pete  

Yeah. Well, you know, this is getting me thinking too—I don’t have any concrete examples that come to mind immediately—but can we like transpose this discussion to the New Testament? Like, are there similar things happening there?

Dan  

Yeah, absolutely. So, the story of the Angel of the Lord, the Messenger of Adonai, that gets accommodated to later theological sensitivities elsewhere in the book of Exodus. We have in Exodus 23—so the angel who, not sure exactly what’s going on here, is it the deity? Is it the angel? It seems to be both, it seems to be neither—in Exodus 23 we have God telling the Israelites, “I’m gonna send my angel before you, and pay attention to them, don’t tick them off, because they don’t have to forgive your sins.” And then the text says, “Because my name is in him.” And the idea here is that the divine name is a vehicle, a transferable vehicle of divine authority, and divine agency, and divine presence. And so in Greco-Roman period Judaism, you have these traditions developing about these mediator figures, who are able to do what only God is supposed to be able to do, because they bear the divine name. We have Yaʿaqov el in the Apocalypse of Abraham, you have the Son of Man, probably I would argue that that’s what’s going on in the Parables of Enoch, you have Metatron in 2 Enoch. You have a number of these figures who have been endowed with the divine name, and so, can identify as deity and can do what only God is supposed to do, which sounds an awful lot like what’s going on with Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus repeatedly identifies himself as the Son of God and as the Son of Man, and I would argue that Jesus never comes out and says, “I am the God of Israel.” But the text has Jesus kind of skirting that line.

Pete  

He dances around that, doesn’t he? 

Dan  

Yeah, yeah. 

Pete  

Yeah.

Dan  

And I would suggest, and I argue in an appendix to my book, and I have argued in a paper that was published in Biblical Interpretation a handful of years ago, that this is the logic of divine images, was applied to the Messenger of Adonai, was applied to these mediator figures in Greco-Roman period Judaism, and is being applied to Jesus in the New Testament. It’s basically just taking the idea of a divine image and saying we’re gonna overlay it upon this sentient, walking, talking, breathing entity, and then Jesus kind of consolidates all these Jewish traditions into one. And we have discussions in hymn in Philippians 2. We have John deploying the Greek reference to the divine name, Ego Eimi, a bunch of times, in ways that I argue are reflections of this idea that Jesus is the authorized bearer of the divine name. And so, as Jesus claims in Mark 2, as a result of that, he has authority on earth to forgive sins. He has the authority to exercise divine power, he reflects the titles and the activity that belongs to God from the Hebrew Bible, only now, it is this name bearing figure who consolidates all the different earlier figures in one.

Pete  

Would it be fair to say, then, extending the discussion that we had earlier about the Hebrew Bible that, like, say, the Angel of the Lord, Jesus is and is not the deity?

Dan  

Yeah, I think that would be fair to say. I think the authors of the New Testament were a little more circumspect, at least initially, I think, it’s in the very latest portions of the New Testament things written at the end of the first century, beginning of the second century CE, that we have authors kind of tiptoeing in and, you know, having Thomas say, “My Lord and my God,” and things like this. So, I think there’s…

Pete  

Which Mark wouldn’t say.

Dan  

Which Mark wouldn’t say, which, I think, it’s because these people are wrestling with how to account for this. You know, you’ve got Mark, maybe, has this kind of adoptionist perspective, John has this emanation, kind of, logos perspective, but as they’re encountering Greco-Roman thinkers, and they’re having to account philosophically rationally for what’s going on, I think you start to get into the idea, “Oh, well, there is some sense in which Jesus is God.” But Jesus doesn’t say anything nearly as explicit as what the angel says, way back in Exodus 3:6, “I am the God of your father.” So, and, I think that’s because the tradition was, “Oh, we don’t go that far in the Greco-Roman period. You know, they could do that back then but you know, we’re going to be a little more circumspect here.”

Pete  

Again, your culture affects how you think, [chuckles] it seems to be a common theme in a lot of our podcasts. But…

Jared  

Well, thank you for coming. I love that we were able to go from this particular text in Numbers 10 all the way through Jesus and…

Jared  

—how this impacts how we read the New Testament. So, and then, even these broader implications, I think are really helpful for how we’re engaging the scripture, but also engaging our culture and some of these religious and political conversations and being careful in how we’re using language and how it can often be co-opted for these positions of power. So, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us, Dan, we really appreciate it.

Dan  

Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate your time.

Outro  

Jared  

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Outro  

You’ve just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People. Don’t forget you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, Faith for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Stephen Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.