00:01:27.000I try to give people as much grace as possible when they meet me because I've probably been in their head more than, you know, headphones and shit for thousands of years.
00:01:37.000So I'm sure it's odd for other people too.
00:01:38.000And I'm, Kind of like, I don't even recall if I'm proud of everything I've ever said, but so I don't know what kind of impression somebody has of me.
00:02:14.000We talk about this, and they're like, two weeks ago, we talked about that.
00:02:18.000Yeah, that is an issue with you, I would imagine, more because you're dealing with very specific structure and texts.
00:02:25.000And it's also something that you have this incredible deep knowledge of, so there's probably no way you can remember the specific instances in which you talked about it.
00:02:38.000But it's also, I think, something that's kind of baked into the reason my My channel is so beneficial to a lot of people because I can repeat stuff over and over again.
00:02:47.000Because as my audience grows, there are always new people who haven't been exposed to a lot of things.
00:02:51.000So there are actually a handful of things I kind of, not programmatically, but every six months or so, I'll be like, yeah, it's probably time to talk about this again.
00:02:59.000And then I already have the foundation there.
00:04:55.000Definitely that's a choice that I've made.
00:04:58.000I try to minimize all the different stuff I'm putting in my body, but I have a slew of vitamins and things like that that I'm taking in addition to it.
00:05:22.000But there are quite a few people that have zero fiber and that exist on a carnivore diet.
00:05:27.000And I think a lot of these people are people with autoimmune issues that tend to have problems with plant based chemicals, like chemicals that are in plants.
00:05:39.000And then there's a real problem with the American diet, which is glyphosate and herbicides.
00:05:45.000There's a lot of different herbicides and chemicals used in industrial fertilizer that get into your food.
00:05:52.000And a lot of people have extreme sensitivities to those things.
00:08:03.000Short term three step eating plan to temporarily restrict specific poorly absorbed sugars to help manage digestive distress like bloating, gas, and abdominal pain.
00:08:12.000So I started noticing if I was eating certain things throughout the day, I was a lot more bloated and uncomfortable by the time night came around.
00:08:20.000And I did all kinds of investigating and I figured out when I was.
00:08:24.000Avoiding things that are high in FOD maps.
00:08:33.000It is a, the word is fermentable, boy, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, and monosaccharides, and polys, polyols, polyols, polyols, short chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols that small intestines absorb poorly.
00:09:11.000Suitable on a low FODMAP diet fruit, obviously, vegetables, cereals, milk, tofu, and then the bad ones excessive fructose, lactose, fructans, galactans?
00:09:29.000Well, I think that's the category, and then there are certain members of that category that are high, and certain members of that category.
00:09:35.000Yeah, it has here baked beans, chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils, soybeans.
00:09:39.000And what I really noticed there was one day I had, we got a watermelon, and I had like half of it.
00:10:00.000And so I'm sensitive to that kind of stuff, but that's just my own biological makeup.
00:10:04.000Some people are genetically gifted in other ways.
00:10:07.000Well, it also depends on what you've done that day.
00:10:10.000Like, if you've gone a long hike through the mountains and you're exhausted, like, a high carbohydrates and high sugar diet or a meal is actually good for you.
00:10:21.000There are times when I'm definitely craving it and I'm like, got to listen to my body.
00:10:26.000Especially when you're worn out, like hiking in particular.
00:10:29.000Like, you know, you think about if you're at altitude and you do like a three or four mile hike and you're climbing, that's at the end of it, you're fucking spent.
00:10:45.000I got, I got plenty of fat stores so that when I go out for my run, I can, I can last a little longer.
00:10:50.000But I, I run at altitude in, uh, by Salt Lake.
00:10:53.000So, um, so whenever I come, whenever I travel elsewhere, like I go to San Diego a couple times a year or I'm on the East Coast or here, what, The altitude here is not very high.
00:12:36.000There's some devices that you can use that actually strengthen the diaphragm muscles and you breathe through them and you do breathing exercises.
00:12:44.000But those restrictive masks, I don't know about those.
00:12:47.000I would imagine they would have the same similar function.
00:12:50.000It reduces the amount of oxygen you get.
00:12:52.000But they were a thing, the training mask.
00:12:54.000It was a thing among MMA fighters for a while.
00:13:51.000Well, it's a bunch of fragments that were brought together that were discovered that dates to about 800 BCE.
00:13:57.000And it's one of my favorite artifacts because we have an inscription over top and then a drawing of a male and a female deity.
00:14:05.000And the inscription talks about somebody asking for or thanking somebody for blessings by Adonai of Shomron or Jehovah of Samaria, the Lord of Samaria, and his Asherah.
00:14:20.000And so I think the majority of scholars.
00:14:23.000Agree, this is probably intended to reflect the interpretation of these two deities as the God of Israel and God's wife, Asherah.
00:14:33.000Yeah, well, they kind of look almost bovine, and this is probably because they're appealing to some iconographic motifs associated with deities Bess and Besset, which are Egyptian deities that That appears bovine, do you?
00:16:08.000This is this to me is the most fascinating thing about pretty much all religious texts.
00:16:13.000Is like, what was the original thing that they were trying to document, whether it was through oral tradition, then eventually written down?
00:18:03.000Yeah, I think there's definitely some kind of genetic relationship between the two.
00:18:08.000And specifically, it's the story of him as a baby being placed into a container and set adrift in a river.
00:18:15.000That is Sargon the Great, who dates to long before a historical Moses.
00:18:21.000I think the earliest version of it we've found in the Akkadian literature dates to maybe 9th or 8th century BCE, which is around the time that people think that, or at least scholars think that, the tradition of Moses and the narrative of the Exodus was beginning to come together.
00:18:37.000So it makes sense that they would draw from that tradition.
00:18:42.000And I think there are a couple of different reasons for it.
00:18:44.000One of the reasons is to because that already has some purchase in the zeitgeist.
00:18:52.000And so if you kind of reflect something that people already are aware of, it kind of makes it a little easier to incorporate into their worldview.
00:19:00.000And then also, it can also be kind of a challenge to the other tradition.
00:19:05.000It's like, well, you got your guy, we got ours.
00:19:09.000And this is a lot of what's going on with the representation of Jesus in the New Testament, because there are certain turns of phrase, there are certain things that Jesus does in the New Testament that reflect What the Greco Roman world expected from their emperors and their god men.
00:19:27.000And so in the New Testament, it's kind of a way to do both of those things to say, we got one of those two, only ours did it better.
00:19:34.000So I think one of the key things to keep in mind is every text, whether it's a text that's inscribed on a piece of pottery or something that wound up in the Bible, every author wrote it down because they wanted to achieve something.
00:19:46.000We tend to think of language as just about communicating information, but nothing happens in a vacuum.
00:19:51.000It's all happening in circumstances, in contexts where they're trying to achieve something.
00:19:57.000And so scholars go to great lengths to try to figure out, well, what precisely would have been achieved by writing this down or by writing any of the texts in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament.
00:20:09.000The best way to figure that out is to try to situate the composition within whatever historical period makes the most sense, whatever we can make the best case for, and figure out how it would have worked in that period, which is why there are some texts that we think were intended as propaganda.
00:20:26.000There are texts that we think were intended to kind of place one person struggling for power over another person struggling for power.
00:20:34.000There's a lot of political propaganda going on.
00:20:37.000And then there are other texts that are intended to try to make people feel better about why.
00:20:42.000Things aren't going well for them, why bad things are happening to good people and good things aren't happening to bad people.
00:20:49.000There are tons of different reasons that people are writing texts, but a good illustration of this is genre.
00:20:58.000All texts have a genre of some kind, and that's basically just a conventionalized set of things that are in the text that help cue people to what kind of text they're looking at.
00:21:09.000If I start a story once upon a time, you already know it's going to be a specific type of text.
00:21:14.000So, without even knowing that you're aware of genre, you're aware of the genre of a text.
00:21:21.000And if you found a piece of paper in a parking lot and it said, dozen eggs, pound of ground beef, you know, prophylaxis, stuff like that, prophylactics actually would be the plural, you know you found a grocery list, a shopping list.
00:21:37.000And so that's a genre of text as well.
00:21:39.000So, just by being aware of these conventions, we can say, oh, well, I know exactly what this text was trying to do because it has all these markers of a given genre.
00:21:49.000To helping us figure out what texts are trying to do.
00:21:52.000And when people wrote on pottery, generally this was a little more ritual.
00:21:57.000This was something that was intended to be like a votive offering, which might be an offering to a deity so that the deity will then bless you, or it might be something that people are intended to come in and read out loud so that they invoke the presence of the deity in the space.
00:22:14.000And then the drawing the deity would also be a way of doing that.
00:22:17.000So there are a lot of different reasons for what's going on.
00:22:31.000There's worship of a lot of different animals or the sacralization of a lot of different animals in a lot of different places.
00:22:39.000And this is probably drawing from Egyptian iconography.
00:22:43.000So, yeah, the Sinai Peninsula is right in between Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.
00:22:50.000And there was an awful lot of Egyptian influence on things.
00:22:54.000So even if you look at, for instance, Hezekiah, there's a bulla that was discovered, which is something that was left from an impression, a signet ring or something like that, that has the name Hezekiah on it.
00:23:11.000And there's an Egyptian drawing of a winged, I think it's a winged scarab or something like that, which is directly from Egypt because Israel was under Egyptian hegemony for a long, long time.
00:23:28.000You were talking about Jesus and the New Testament, and that some of it seems to have been like the way it was done to appease the people that lived in the same era?
00:24:05.000And at this time period, there's already a following that is developing.
00:24:09.000And so the people who are writing these texts are writing them for a literary audience, but they also want them to speak to the experiences of the people who are followers of Jesus.
00:24:18.000So for instance, there's a part where Jesus says, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
00:24:27.000And I will set father against son and mother against daughter.
00:24:32.000And people have wondered, well, what on earth is going on here?
00:24:35.000And there are scholars who suggest that the point of that would have been to make it sound like to people who are struggling with inner family relationships, you know, I'm a follower of Jesus now and I got kicked out of my house.
00:24:47.000Or I'm a follower of Jesus now and I constantly fight with my wife or with my brother or something like that.
00:25:13.000I think that's probably an awful lot of what's going on.
00:25:16.000It's either to make them feel okay or to try to push them to agree with living a certain way or something like that or try to make them feel like this is what's coming up for us.
00:25:30.000Which is a problem with taking everything literally and people deciding that all of it is the Word of God when some of it is just like, okay.
00:25:54.000Yeah, the word of God thing is interesting because that phrase is never used anywhere in the Bible to refer to texts specifically as the texts that are in circulation.
00:26:06.000So, word of God is always a reference to.
00:26:09.000Just the message, however it's circulating, whether it's oral or whatever, or to Jesus.
00:26:14.000In the New Testament, Jesus is the word.
00:26:16.000But it's never used to refer to a specific textual manifestation of the message.
00:26:22.000And so there's not really a case to make that any author of any text that's in the Bible used that phrase to refer to the scriptures or the Bible.
00:26:32.000And so even in 1 Corinthians, in a couple of places, in Paul, he says, This is not coming from the Lord, this is just coming from me.
00:26:40.000And then we take it and say, okay, wink, wink, we know what you mean.
00:26:46.000The more I get into Paul, the more I'm like, this guy, first of all, killed a bunch of Christians, lit churches on fire, at least ordered the death of Christians.
00:27:53.000A lot of people treat all the Pauline texts as As equally one inspired and two from Paul, but scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that there are several of those texts that weren't written by Paul.
00:28:03.000They were written decades after he was dead.
00:28:06.000So 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus are called the Pastoral Epistles, and they are widely agreed to have been written toward the end of the first century, beginning of the second century, maybe 30 years after Paul was dead or more.
00:28:20.000And then you've got Colossians, 2nd Thessalonians.
00:28:24.000And Ephesians are a little more debated, but there is a good solid core of scholars who would argue that they were not written by Paul.
00:28:35.000And one of the things, one of the interesting things that happens when you divide up the letters between the genuine Pauline epistles and then what are called the disputed and then the spurious Pauline epistles is Paul's message in the genuine Pauline epistles is different from the message in the others.
00:28:53.000And for instance, in the genuine Pauline epistles, Paul was like, you know, Jesus is coming back any day now.
00:29:02.000Don't get married if you're not married.
00:29:05.000If you're married, don't get divorced.
00:29:07.000And he suggests that everybody should be celibate, unless you just can't hack celibacy, in which case Even while married?
00:29:15.000Because you're waiting for Jesus to return.
00:29:17.000Because in this time period, I think Paul fancied himself a philosopher, but he's kind of cobbling together a bunch of different philosophical movements.
00:31:08.000There's a part in Matthew in 19 when he's talking about divorce and then his followers are like, it would be better for somebody not to get married.
00:31:16.000And then he goes, hey man, there are those who are born eunuchs, there are those who are made eunuchs by men, and then there are those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.
00:31:25.000And he says, that's a difficult saying, but for those who can accept it, they should accept it.
00:31:31.000Basically saying, the higher law is to be celibate because they thought Jesus was coming back so soon that having a kid would be a waste of time.
00:31:41.000And so there was no other reason for intercourse, really.
00:31:44.000And so the idea was, okay, be celibate.
00:31:47.000And Paul says, you know, if you can't hack it, then go ahead and have occasional sex with your spouse, but it should be basically for keeping down the urges.
00:31:56.000Because if trying to remain celibate is just driving you nuts, the risk that you might engage in some kind of sexual immorality is so great that you need to have that little valve to.
00:33:25.000They're never right, which is so crazy that people keep listening to them.
00:33:30.000And this is one of the things that scholars see when they separate out the genuine Pauline epistles from the later ones, because in the later ones, you have Paul saying stuff like, oh, there's going to be a delay.
00:34:30.000And you have this man of sin that's supposed to show up, or there's supposed to be this falling away, or there's supposed to be something that gets in the way and that causes a delay in Jesus' return.
00:34:41.000And 2,000 years down the road, we're still wondering when that delay is going to.
00:34:59.000So, there are a bunch of different versions of Enuma Elish, but we probably go back to Sumerian stuff because you actually have these king lists from long, long ago written in Sumerian.
00:35:14.000There's no flood story yet in these king lists, but they talk about these kings that range for 10,000 years at a time.
00:37:10.000Because Genesis was probably written between around the 8th century BCE down to the 5th century BCE.
00:37:17.000And a lot of it is riffing on the literature that's circulating within Babylon during the exile, or it's literature that's circulating within Assyria when Assyria is beaten up on Israel.
00:37:34.000And so, for instance, the Tower of Babel.
00:37:39.000There's a tower called the Tower of Etem-Ananke that is just outside of Babylon that was famous because it was built by – I want to say Old Babylonian.
00:38:18.000There are a lot of scholars who suggest that the story of this tower that was supposed to be built to heaven that was left unfinished is a reflection of the unfinished tower of Eteman Anki.
00:38:49.000There's no historical narrative prose in any alphabetic script, any language that was written in an alphabetic script until the middle of the 9th century BCE.
00:39:00.000That first happens in Moabites and Aramaic and some other languages like that.
00:39:07.000Most likely, our ancient narrative prose in Biblical Hebrew was written around that time or shortly after.
00:39:15.000The stuff that's older than that is written in poetry.
00:39:18.000And so the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible are not the creation account in Genesis.
00:39:24.000There are some poems that we find in like Judges 5.
00:39:28.000So this is a fascinating story about Deborah, the general who goes and defeats Sisera.
00:39:35.000And we have stories in Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea.
00:39:38.000Some scholars think that's a very, very old poem, which is basically a shortened version of the Exodus story.
00:39:44.000And then Genesis 49 has some blessings that Jacob gives to his children.
00:39:52.000There are a handful of poems that may go back to around 1000 BC.
00:39:57.000So when Genesis is talking about the things that we think are related to Enuma Elish, the closest connections are actually two versions of that story that were in circulation in Babylon around 600 BCE.
00:40:13.000So that's probably where Genesis is getting that from, not directly from Sumerian tablets, not directly from oral traditions that are 1000 years older.
00:40:25.000The scholars who are looking at that, I think, have made a good case that the closest connections are 8th to 6th century BCE.
00:40:33.000That's probably where the traditions that were recorded in Genesis were mainly borrowed or mainly adopted and adapted to serve the interests of the Judeans who were around in that time period.
00:40:45.000Aaron Ross Powell So, what is the oldest creation story that we're aware of?
00:40:49.000Aaron Ross Powell I think it's probably got to be an Egyptian one.
00:41:05.000There's a wonderful set of texts called the Contexts of Scripture, a three volume set published by this very expensive publisher called Brill.
00:41:15.000They have translations of all of the texts that we have from ancient Egypt, from ancient Anatolia, from ancient Assyria, Babylon, from the cultures of ancient Canaan that are not in the Bible.
00:41:27.000And so they have one of the volumes, the first third of it is creation accounts.
00:41:32.000And so it may be the masturbation one.
00:41:46.000Well, the Egyptian language by itself is very bizarre because it kind of emerges out of nowhere.
00:41:51.000Like hieroglyphs emerge sort of fully formed.
00:41:57.000There's a development in the way hieroglyphs are used.
00:42:01.000But we first start seeing inscriptions popping up, like monumental inscriptions.
00:42:06.000Most of the early writing probably took place on materials that deteriorated really quickly.
00:42:12.000And so what we have is the stuff that was written in stone, which is where the language has got to be a little more developed for us to start taking all day to inscribe something in stone.
00:42:24.000So I don't think there's a good case to make that it just popped out of nowhere.
00:42:32.000Is fun, but we don't have a lot of evidence that gets us to that being really even a plausible solution to the problem.
00:42:43.000There is definitely a mystery about why, in similar time periods, people in different parts of the world came up with very similar ideas all at the same time.
00:42:54.000That might have something to do with the evolution of the brain or something like that.
00:42:59.000It's also, we're probably underestimating the amount of travel people were capable of doing back then.
00:43:05.000But the writing seems to develop from receipts or from counting.
00:43:11.000And this is your receipt for how many goats you bought or whatever.
00:43:16.000And so as your needs develop, in your economy is growing, I think you begin to develop labels for things, you begin to develop characters for things, and then it goes from there.
00:43:30.000There are a bunch of really good academic discussions about the origins of language and the origins of the alphabet, and even the stuff that we see-ancient Hebrew ultimately derives from Egyptian.
00:43:45.000That is where you have we have some inscriptions from around 1700 to 1900 BCE where they look like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they're not doing what Egyptian hieroglyphs do because they are either syllabic or ideographic or logographic, where one sign represents a syllable, so a consonant and a vowel, or one sign represents a word or one sign represents an idea.
00:44:12.000And they change them so that each sign represents just a single sound.
00:44:19.000And the sound is whatever sound is at the start of the word that the symbol represents.
00:44:24.000So, for instance, the word for house, bait, and that starts with a b.
00:44:29.000And so, if you drew a house, that meant the b sound.
00:44:32.000And this is the development of the alphabets, because to learn ancient Egyptian, you had to memorize hundreds and hundreds of signs.
00:44:40.000And to learn Sumerian or Akkadian or something like that, hundreds of signs.
00:46:45.000I wanted to learn ancient Hebrew, I wanted to learn ancient Greek, I wanted to learn about the literature, I wanted to learn about the history, I wanted to learn about the archaeology.
00:46:52.000And so, I started off not really having a narrow focus, but just I want to try and get as much of it in as I could.
00:46:58.000And over the course of getting these degrees, you know, you kind of have to narrow your focus on stuff.
00:47:04.000And so, as I progressed, I decided I wanted to learn.
00:47:10.000Not only what was going on with the languages, but I wanted to focus on how people thought about God and gods.
00:47:16.000And so my PhD is actually using biblical studies and then something called the cognitive science of religion.
00:47:23.000I put those two together to try to figure out what we can know about how the authors of the Hebrew Bible would have thought about and interacted with gods as they understood them.
00:47:36.000And that's using a lot of experimental research.
00:47:40.000On living informants, so interviews and experiments and things like that to figure out how the brain works and how we come up with ideas about deities, ideas about rituals, ideas about religious identity and stuff like that.
00:48:16.000Especially when you're talking about these different translations and different languages, which is what I've always felt like is the weirdest part about all this it's very difficult to translate languages to something that makes sense in whatever language you're currently using.
00:48:33.000There's certain concepts that we use that if you tried to use them, you know, and if you try to, like, I'm sure you've seen Russian translated to English and you're like, What are they saying?
00:49:11.000When you get into more minority languages, languages that are spoken and, you know, Tiny little islands like Yap or Kiribati or something like that.
00:49:21.000It can get very, very alien to someone who has only spoken English their entire life.
00:49:28.000Because learning Spanish, like there are ways it's difficult.
00:50:31.000And this is why a lot of people will go out and they'll get an interlinear or they'll go on a website that provides the Hebrew to English or something like that and imagine that they now understand.
00:50:41.000When the reality is that there is a lot more under the hood of that relationship between the Hebrew and the English translation that they don't have any idea about.
00:50:49.000And so there's a saying that somebody who goes online and uses an interlinear or something like that, they know just enough Greek to be dangerous.
00:50:59.000Meaning they really imagine that they know a lot more than they do.
00:51:03.000And when they go out and try to To use that knowledge to try to go make videos on social media or something like that, they end up stepping in it because they really don't know what they're talking about.
00:51:12.000Or the main reason I'm on social media and the main thing I'm trying to combat, they will spread misinformation falsehoods that other people are going to eat up because they might have a platform with millions of followers.
00:51:56.000Obviously, modern Hebrew is spoken, but it's not a language that anyone would ever grow up learning by speaking with their mother.
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00:53:09.000There are some differences in the way they pronounce things anciently from the way they pronounce things today.
00:53:15.000But most scholars who are looking at the Biblical Hebrew, ancient Hebrew, are going to adopt a modern pronunciation system.
00:53:23.000So there are absolutely scholars out there who advocate for or have a reconstructed way of pronouncing ancient Hebrew.
00:53:33.000But for the most part, if I go to a conference and I read a text in Hebrew, I'm going to use something approximating a modern Hebrew pronunciation.
00:53:39.000And I'm not awesome at it, but someone who speaks modern Hebrew should understand what I'm saying.
00:54:33.0001929, a guy is plowing a field along the coast of Syria and he hits a big rock that he can't move and he digs it up and basically discovers an entire ancient city.
00:54:47.000Calls out the archaeologists, they all come descend on this field and they discover the ancient city of Ugarit, which we knew from some texts that referred to this city called Ugarit.
00:55:00.000Around a thousand or so texts, but nobody recognized the language because it was written in cuneiform, but there were only 30 cuneiform signs.
00:55:08.000So that means it's got to be alphabetic and not the other way they use cuneiform signs.
00:55:15.000And they decided, okay, the most common Semitic consonant is mem, the equivalent of our M.
00:55:22.000And they said, so let's take the most common sign that we see and let's designate that mem.
00:55:28.000And then let's look at all the two letter words.
00:55:29.000And there are only a handful of words that can be two letters and have.
00:55:33.000The mem in one position or another, and let's try to decode from there this language.
00:55:39.000And now we have, we've decoded Ugaritic, and now we, a lot of people who go and learn Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic will also learn Ugaritic because some of these mythical texts mention things that are in the Bible.
00:55:53.000And so they talk about deities like El and Baal and Asherah.
00:56:01.000And there are some things that are in there that help us better understand Biblical Hebrew, there are some things that are in there that help us understand.
00:56:08.000Some of the cultic rituals that would go on in relation to El and Baal and Asherah.
00:56:14.000And there's even one text that's almost directly quoted in the Bible.
00:56:20.000And the thing is, Ugarit was destroyed around 1200 BCE, so with what's called the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
00:56:30.000And there's a wonderful book by Eric Klein, 1177 BC.
00:56:36.000Phenomenal book on how the Late Bronze Age Collapse happened.
00:56:41.000So, the destruction of Ugarit happens before the invention of Hebrew.
00:56:45.000So, Hebrew didn't even exist in this time period.
00:56:49.000But this helps us recover what the languages that were being spoken in that region were like as Hebrew began to develop.
00:56:56.000But there's a passage, there's a reference to Baal fighting a deity named Mot, and Mot means death.
00:57:02.000So, this is the god of death that's fighting Baal, who is the storm god.
00:57:07.000And Mot is like, I know you've won some battles in the past, you're going to lose this one.
00:57:12.000But he says, I know you slew Lotan, which is the Ugaritic version of Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, the twisting serpent, the dragon with seven heads.
00:57:23.000And what's funny is in Isaiah 27, 1, we have Isaiah talking about Adonai, the God of Israel, and says, On that day, so now it's off in the future, on that day, you will strike Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, Leviathan, the twisting serpent, the dragon that lives in the sea.
00:57:44.000And so the words for wriggling and twisting serpent are identical to the Ugaritic, and lotan and leviathan are both the same word, just in two different languages.
00:57:55.000And so this passage in Isaiah was probably written somewhere before 700 BCE, but that's coming 500 years after the Ugaritic text that says almost the exact same thing.
00:58:10.000So it's not that Isaiah had access to this text and was quoting it, but it was probably kind of a poetic saying.
00:58:18.000That was just transmitted all around the area, and at some point Isaiah decided to write it down.
00:58:26.000And while the Ugaritic one makes reference to seven heads, Isaiah doesn't say anything about seven heads, but we do have in Psalm 74 a reference to Leviathan's multiple heads, that God crushed the heads of Leviathan and the seven-headed serpent dragon is kind of a pretty common motif in that time period.
00:58:43.000Just recently in a Tel Hatzor in a little north in Israel, they discovered a little inscription with a drawing that shows a warrior fighting a seven-headed serpent dragon.
00:58:58.000So, the Ugaritic literature helps us an awful lot with understanding what was going on before the Bible happened, but also helps us better understand the Hebrew of the Bible and also the relationship of these gods to one another and the tradition that was inherited by the Israelites and then how they engaged with it as they passed it on down the line historically.
00:59:23.000Aaron Powell Why so many references to dragons?
00:59:27.000So, they didn't have a word for lizard, right?
00:59:29.000And they didn't have a word for reptile.
01:00:03.000And the chaos of the waters became kind of personified as a deity who could be represented as a dragon, just because that's where the sea monsters live.
01:00:16.000That's where the giant fish and the alligators and stuff like that.
01:00:20.000And so you get traditions that develop about the monster that lives in the sea, and then our god tames that monster as a way to show that our god has power over chaos, our god can bring order to chaos.
01:00:36.000And you talked about creation stories earlier.
01:00:38.000A lot of the original creation stories were mainly about overcoming the chaos to create order.
01:00:43.000Order is what allows us to live in harmony.
01:00:45.000Order is what allows civilization to develop.
01:01:23.000Yeah, you touched on a couple of different things because someone's watching all the time is definitely a central feature of how scholars think that religion dominated the development of civilization.
01:01:37.000And there's a wonderful book by a scholar named Ara Noren Sion called Big Gods, which is all about this.
01:01:45.000But the idea there is that gods develop in a variety of different ways, but it's rooted in the fact that our minds, because evolution has conditioned us to be very sensitive to the presence of agents and agency in the world around us.
01:02:02.000Anciently, the primate that interpreted the rustling in the bushes as something that might have teeth rather than as just the wind survived longer.
01:02:13.000And so our minds became very, very sensitive to the presence of agency in the world around us.
01:02:18.000And so anyone who's ever watched a horror movie and then has gone up the basement stairs a little quicker than normal, or you don't close your eyes at night because you feel like there's something there, that is a product of this evolutionarily installed sensitivity to agency.
01:02:35.000And as this kind of plays out through human sociality, we curate relationships with deceased relatives.
01:02:47.000We interpret certain events as the work of some kind of entity that we can't see, whether an animal or something more human like that.
01:02:56.000And one of the things that interactions with these entities then allows us to do is it allows us to suggest there is an eye in the sky.
01:03:07.000There is someone out there who is, the phrase is, covertly monitoring us.
01:03:13.000And once you become in charge of the relationship between the people and the covert monitor, You then have an awful lot of power to say, well, it turns out we're all supposed to do this, and the deity is watching us, and anybody who is not doing this is going to be punished by the deity, and that exerts a lot of influence over people.
01:03:34.000But it also allows societies to grow and get larger and more complex without descending into chaos because we have kind of this social superstructure that allows us to trust other people that we may not know.
01:03:50.000This is one of the weird things about.
01:03:52.000Human evolution is if you're in a family, you know your family, your kin are important to you.
01:03:58.000And so you can cooperate with your kin.
01:04:00.000But if you happen to run into somebody that you don't know, you have no idea if they're going to kill you or what.
01:04:07.000And as societies grow beyond kinship units, you need signs and signals to be able to let other people know that you're okay.
01:04:52.000I'm doing all the things to let you know that I can be trusted.
01:04:55.000And so that's kind of an outcome of just being a part of a human society.
01:05:02.000And gods, these covert monitors, are very effective rule setters, only they're not there to directly set the rules.
01:05:11.000Somebody has to mediate between the deity and the people.
01:05:15.000And that's where we get religious experts and we get priests and we get things like that.
01:05:21.000And so, you know, it would be the elders in very, very archaic human societies who would be the ones.
01:05:27.000To say, these are the stories that we're going to tell, that we're going to share, so that our kids grow up adopting these expectations about how they live their life and who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
01:05:41.000And that's one of the big problems in this empathy is something that we develop in human evolution, but empathy frequently only goes so far.
01:05:50.000There's frequently a boundary to empathy, and that's called parochial empathy.
01:05:54.000I'm very empathetic for anyone in my in group.
01:06:12.000And that's one of the reasons that empathy, you know, we hear a lot about toxic empathy these days, or at least I do because the algorithm hates me.
01:06:21.000But the idea that we shouldn't extend our empathy beyond a particular in group boundary is the most toxic kind of empathy.
01:06:33.000Because that is the empathy that others someone else and says, no, I care about my people.
01:06:40.000I dislike or am apathetic to someone who's not part of the in group.
01:06:46.000It's so weird because that extends to, well, in this country particularly, it extends to ideologies and politics.
01:06:52.000And to the point where left versus right, one is the enemy depending on which side you're on, and they need to be eliminated.
01:06:59.000Yeah, and the more you can dehumanize them and other them and make it seem like they are just so alien and so corrupt, the more you can do that, the easier it is to justify.
01:07:10.000Not just treating them bad, not just Voting for the other guy, but even imprisoning them.
01:07:16.000Trevor Burrus Or celebrating their death.
01:07:36.000But yeah, this is one of the outcomes of just being human is that we tend to draw a line around those.
01:07:46.000Who congregate around the social interaction or the social identities that are most important to us.
01:07:52.000That's what politics is frequently trying to exploit.
01:07:56.000That's why the more we can paint somebody on the other side of the aisle as so other as to be evil and even not human, the easier it is to justify torturing them, killing them, a genocide.
01:08:14.000I think of Toxic empathy as parochial empathy rather than the global empathy that I think we should all be striving for, which is a phenomenally difficult thing to do and it's phenomenally complex.
01:08:25.000But yeah, the more we can humanize people, I think the more we can learn to get along.
01:08:32.000That's what allowed human civilization to flourish.
01:08:34.000In fact, I'll share one more detail about this.
01:08:46.000It's a skull and a few other scattered bones.
01:08:51.000And the skull shows some deformities that indicate that this was a person who was profoundly deaf, probably mostly blind as well, and had other disabilities that would have made it so they could not have survived very long.
01:09:07.000But the skull aged to pretty old age for a Neanderthal, which indicates that that was only possible if they had a social support group around them.
01:09:20.000That did things for them that they couldn't do for themselves.
01:09:24.000And it almost certainly would have been kind of a social in group, so it's not a lesson about global empathy.
01:09:31.000But if we understand humanity to be defined by, and I don't like definitions, but to be defined by the way we're most different from the animals that are closest to us, I think sacrificing our own efforts, time, resources, things like that, to care for someone who can't care for themselves, I think if.
01:09:54.000That's about the closest I think we can get to a necessary and sufficient feature of what it means to be human.
01:10:02.000And one of the most universally admired qualities.
01:10:09.000And this is something that we believe these ancient Neanderthal remains preserve in the injuries and the disabilities that are very clearly present in that individual.
01:10:24.000So, you could say Chanadar 1 is the oldest human if you wanted to, because I think it shows that this was someone who grew up in a society that was like, we're going to take care of you.
01:11:49.000So, if we got wiped out, and then millions and millions of years from now, you know, whatever natural catastrophe happens, AI gets wiped out, and then primates evolve slowly over time.
01:12:01.000I mean, and then they find human brains.
01:12:11.000Well, it's probably, you know, I mean, I think the earth has had numerous enormous natural disasters, and there's a lot of evidence of that.
01:12:22.000The Toba volcano knocked us down to a few thousand people 70 plus thousand years ago.
01:12:28.000I think that's happened a ton of times, and I think it's super possible that it could happen where there's zero, and you got to start from scratch.
01:13:56.000There are some folks who try to find inspiration for the Garden of Eden story in other later traditions, even going down to Nordic traditions and things like that that weren't copied down until only a thousand years or more ago.
01:14:14.000I don't know that we can hunt down a single source for the story because it's primarily cobbling together a bunch of different things, but overwhelmingly, it's an ideology.
01:14:26.000Etiology is an origin story for something that is going on today.
01:14:33.000I don't know how many you can remember, but I used to know all the, you know, this is how the elephant got its long nose, and this is how, this is why the ants are industrious, and there are all kinds of these stories.
01:14:43.000But when you look at the Adam and Eve story, and particularly the curses in Genesis 3, it's like, oh, this is why childbirth is painful.
01:14:53.000This is why men have to work hard to make plants grow.
01:15:40.000There's a and part of the beginning, you've got Enki Doo as his bud and maybe more.
01:15:51.000But there's a story about basically they have to kind of grow up and become civilized.
01:15:59.000Initially, they're running around naked, and then there's a sex worker who shows up, and that Intercourse is what kind of catalyzes a maturation.
01:16:11.000And now they're going to wear clothes and they're going to not run around in the nude like an animal.
01:16:17.000And that's very similar to what I think we've got going on in Adam and Eve because they're innocent, they are naked, and they don't care.
01:16:25.000And then when they eat the fruit, their eyes are open.
01:16:29.000Suddenly they're like, oh, I'm ashamed of being naked in public.
01:16:33.000I'm going to, you know, we're going to have clothing now.
01:16:36.000And so, the fact that we've got this maturation going on in the early history of humanity where we go from more like an animal to more like a civilized human.
01:16:46.000What is your take on the origin for this concept that we were better off ignorant?
01:16:51.000Because that seems like you're eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
01:16:58.000Well, that seems like a good thing to be able to know what's good and evil, but the idea is that all that is the original sin and all of our issues happen because.
01:17:09.000People ate from the knowledge of the tree of good and evil, and if they didn't, we would be in paradise still.
01:17:14.000Well, I think that's a Christian interpretation.
01:17:16.000Because in the Hebrew Bible, here, one interesting thing about the story of Adam and Eve, specifically Adam and Eve, their story is never mentioned once again anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.
01:17:28.000You have in one book You would think that would be kind of important.
01:17:32.000Nobody talks about it until we get to the New Testament.
01:17:35.000There's a reference to Adam at the very beginning of a big genealogy in Chronicles.
01:17:39.000And in Ezekiel 28, there's a reference to the mountain of Eden, which you would imagine would be the same thing, but there's no mountain in the story in Genesis 2 and 3.
01:17:52.000Whatever's going on in Ezekiel 28 is not just they're aware of much more than just what's in Genesis 2 and 3.
01:17:58.000But so throughout the Hebrew Bible and even in Greco-Roman period Judaism and down into some parts of the New Testament, it's not Adam's and Eve's fault that evil exists.
01:18:10.000That's not the main story that they use to understand why evil exists.
01:18:14.000The main story that they use is from Genesis 6, where the angels well, they're angels in later interpretation, but they're second tier deities, they come down and they have children with the human women.
01:18:26.000And this is what causes God to send the flood.
01:18:29.000But you're familiar with the book of 1st Enoch.
01:18:31.000And so that is a version of that story where that is what caused evil to be on the earth.
01:18:39.000The angels came down and brought all of this knowledge and gave it to the humans, including how to make weapons of war.
01:18:46.000And makeup is listed as one of the evil things that the angels taught humanity.
01:18:52.000And so I think that, up until the New Testament was written, that was probably the dominant tradition about where evil came from.
01:19:02.000And then in the New Testament, we kind of see both of them.
01:20:11.000Now, ultimately, it's still don't eat the fruit, but she says we shouldn't even touch it or we'll die.
01:20:19.000There are a couple of details that and so this has puzzled people for centuries.
01:20:24.000Where did Eve get her idea of why they weren't supposed to eat the fruit?
01:20:31.000So, did Adam report it to her and get it wrong?
01:20:34.000Did God show up off camera, off stage, and tell Eve the same command but in a slightly different way?
01:20:42.000Now, this is probably a literary creation, but for the earliest audience who heard someone sharing this story, they would have probably thought the same.
01:20:52.000That's not the same thing that God said to Adam.
01:20:54.000So, the author probably had something in mind about how to account for.
01:20:59.000For why Eve's story was different, and we don't have any access to that.
01:21:37.000Well, it's so fascinating because if you just imagine our version of the Bible today and if we continue to exist as a society a thousand years from now, most likely it would be the exact same version because we're really good at keeping records, right?
01:21:54.000I think there would be versions that are very close, if not exact, but I think at the same time there would be versions that are very different because the - so the King James version is the - I think it's probably still - The highest selling Bible translation.
01:22:38.000And we have been able to do a lot more study and a lot better study on those manuscripts to figure out what most likely these manuscripts originally said.
01:22:48.000Originally is a complicated term in academics.
01:22:53.000But our ability to reconstruct the text as it was in its earliest stage.
01:23:00.000And we know that some of the passages that are in the King James Version were added later on.
01:23:15.000And because versification is kind of complex to just redo, we just leave the verse out entirely.
01:23:21.000So if you look in Matthew 17, for instance, you'll see verse 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24.
01:23:26.000And there'll be a footnote at the end of verse 20 that'll say, Some ancient manuscripts add, and then it'll quote a translation of verse 21.
01:23:36.000And this freaks people out when they discover this, if they don't know the history, the reason.
01:25:28.000But also, the ending of Mark, the whole story of Jesus' post resurrection appearance at the end of Mark, scholars agree that's not original.
01:25:38.000So, chapter 16, verses 9 through 20, a lot of translations will put them in brackets, and a footnote will say, you know, this comes from later manuscripts.
01:26:01.000We even have a whole paragraph that was omitted that we didn't really know.
01:26:06.000We knew something was supposed to be there, but we had no idea what, and we found out what was supposed to be there in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:26:12.000So maybe we discover another cache of ancient manuscripts of the Bible, and maybe they're earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:26:34.000I think people like that will be around a thousand years as well.
01:26:37.000But I think we will just multiply the available versions of the Bible, and some of them will probably be closer to what was originally written, originally.
01:26:47.000And some of them will be people trying to hold on to their favorite translation or their favorite version.
01:26:52.000Trevor Burrus It's just such an insane story that a sheep herder or a goat herder threw a rock into a cave and hit a clay vessel and heard it shatter, and then realized there was something in there and decided to go look.
01:28:25.000Well, not just the bodies, but that's the circumstance that's most likely to preserve stuff.
01:28:31.000Because when they burn things to the ground, particularly if you have things on clay tablets, that bakes the clay tablets and they stay exactly as they are until we find them.
01:28:41.000So some of our best discoveries have been because somebody burnt a building down and it happened to be an archive.
01:28:49.000Or at a library, or the palace where the king stored all the annals, or something like that.
01:28:55.000And then the reason that we have all of the.
01:29:48.000I mean, it's so interesting trying, you know, or not me, you know, archaeologists, trying to piece together.
01:29:55.000This understanding of human civilization just based on what's left over and knowing that in a lot of places there's not going to be anything left over and just guessing.
01:30:04.000That's called the accident of preservation.
01:30:05.000And it results in a problem because we gather all the data that we might get and we think that this is everything.
01:30:13.000We have to constantly remind ourselves no, this is like only what we're finding in tombs.
01:30:19.000We try to reconstruct so much stuff from just what we find in a tomb.
01:30:23.000An entire, even household, much less society.
01:30:28.000And a lot of our stuff has what we call a mortuary bias, precisely because we tend to find stuff when it gets buried.
01:30:38.000And usually, tombs are the things that tend to get buried, or we find stuff when cities are destroyed in what we call a conflagration.
01:32:23.000I love going in and seeing the domestic stuff where it's like, oh, this is where a kid played with toys in the corner of this house or something like that.
01:32:33.000You get a weird feeling when you go to old places.
01:32:35.000And it's hard to understand what you're feeling.
01:32:55.000Well, I think we see people doing that a lot when they go travel and visit places they don't know a whole ton about, but they might visit one of their sacred places.
01:33:08.000Sites and frequently not treated very sacredly at all.
01:33:12.000Well, especially if it's an opposing ideology or religion.
01:33:58.000But there's that thing where you're like, okay, am I adding meaning to this?
01:34:03.000Well, I'll tell you about a place that I visited that I'm probably the only person on earth who thinks of this as a particularly sacred site.
01:34:10.000But there's in the southern Negev, there's a site called Arad, which is Where's the southern Negev?
01:34:21.000So, Arad is a place where they've got a tell, a big hill, and there was a Bronze Age village there.
01:34:27.000But on the very top, there are the remains of a fortress that existed in the 8th century BCE.
01:34:31.000And in the corner of the fortress is an Israelite temple.
01:34:35.000And they've got the remains of the walls, they've got the three different rooms the courtyard, the broad room, and the Debir or the Holy of Holies.
01:34:50.000And they found a standing stone, which would have represented the God of Israel.
01:34:56.000They had discovered a bunch of inscriptions.
01:34:59.000It talks about the house of Adonai, the God of Israel.
01:35:02.000And they also found a couple of incense altars that were on the steps of the Holy of Holies.
01:35:09.000And so I go there, and that's where, because I'm fascinated by the fact that, you know, the biblical story that there was just one temple in Jerusalem is just not accurate.
01:35:21.000There were temples scattered all around.
01:35:25.000In fact, just like, 10 to 15 years ago, we found another one only a few miles outside of Jerusalem at a place called Tel Motzah.
01:35:32.000So they had temples operating all over the place.
01:35:35.000And because of propaganda, like the book of Deuteronomy, a lot of scholars believe was written so that the king in Jerusalem could say, close down all the temples.
01:35:48.000Mine's the only one that gets to stay open now.
01:35:50.000And this might have been one of the ones that was closed down as a result of that.
01:35:54.000But interestingly enough, people ask me a lot about.
01:35:58.000Narcotics in the Bible and stuff like that.
01:36:01.000But this is one where they tested the burnt residue that was on top of the incense altars, and one of them had three different kinds of cannabis on it.
01:36:08.000So we know for a fact they were using cannabis in their worship practices in ancient Israel.
01:37:06.000Thorkel Jacobson is a Sumerologist, and Barr, James Barr, was one of the leading Hebrew Semiticists in the world.
01:37:15.000The argument is basically that the Hebrew and the Greek all go back to these Sumerian words that have to do with semen, with mushrooms, and all this kind of stuff.
01:37:28.000The problem is, Hebrew and Greek are not descended from Sumerian, and there's not a lot of contact.
01:37:35.000Was overwhelmingly gone by the time that Hebrew started existing.
01:37:41.000There were just a handful of liturgical uses and words and things like that.
01:37:46.000But the connections that are made are just not considered plausible by linguists today.
01:37:54.000And so, yeah, it's not been well received by scholars ever since it originally came out.
01:38:00.000In fact, I think that some of those scholars who were friends of Allegro's, because he was a phenomenal textual critic, when it came to the Dead Sea Scrolls, A lot of the scholars who were assigned fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls just sat on them for years and years and years.
01:38:14.000They were doing research, but it was so slow getting out.
01:38:17.000Allegra was the first one to get research out the door.
01:38:23.000From what I understand, some of his friends tried to urge him not to publish that book because they thought it would be pretty detrimental to his career.
01:38:33.000My understanding is that it was, unfortunately.
01:38:35.000Well, it seems like the book was removed from circulation.
01:38:37.000And then only within the last decade or so, someone brought it back.
01:39:37.000I remember reading that part of the book a couple years ago.
01:39:40.000And it was like, okay, basically recreating a Sumerian word that we have no evidence ever existed and saying that that recreated Sumerian word was the etymological origin of the word Christ.
01:39:55.000And the connection there is, as far as any scholars can tell, entirely imaginary.
01:40:47.000Which is really weird when you get into the ancient Sumerian stories and how they're similar to some of the stories that are in the Bible, like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
01:40:59.000Are in the Bible, like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
01:41:50.000They probably date it to somewhere around the 6th to 5th century BCE because Noah is a horticulturist in the oldest tales of what's going on here.
01:42:45.000That's a big question a lot of scholars have been trying to solve for a long time.
01:42:50.000But some people think that Genesis 6, the story of the B'nai Elohim, the children of God, they come down and have children with human women, and that ticks God off.
01:43:01.000And so that seems like an original catalyst for sending the flood.
01:43:06.000I'm sending the flood to kill all of these folks because that's gross.
01:44:04.000And we don't know if that story is actually maybe earlier than the story of the flood that we have in Genesis.
01:44:11.000So it's how it came together is something that I don't think we're ever going to be really, really sure about.
01:44:18.000We just got a bunch of speculation that is based on the observation that some things don't seem to fit together quite right.
01:44:25.000And then we have other versions of the story that would fit much better.
01:44:29.000And the same is true of the book of Daniel.
01:44:32.000There are some fragments in the Dead Sea Scrolls that talk about Nabonidus and talk about these stories related to Daniel, but they're not in the book of Daniel.
01:44:41.000And so some scholars wonder if the book of Daniel was being cobbled together around that time period.
01:44:47.000And we have some of what was left on the editing room floor.
01:44:56.000So, it's how it all came together is phenomenally complex, and there's constantly a debate between how much we can say, how much we can speculate or hypothesize about versus how much we should be limiting ourselves to saying because we can speculate about all kinds of stuff, but until we have enough data to be confident, it's not really much more than speculation.
01:45:28.000So, the Ethiopian Bible, we have a couple of manuscripts of Gospels called the Garamah Gospels that date to between the 4th and the 6th centuries CE.
01:45:39.000And the Ethiopian Bible descends probably from some people who probably brought a version of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Bible, down to the kingdom of Aksum, probably late 3rd or early 4th century CE.
01:45:59.000This is right around the time of the Council of Nicaea.
01:46:01.000This would have been something that looked similar to what we have in Codex Sinaiticus.
01:46:07.000That collection of Septuagint texts, which included 1st Enoch, Jubilees, a bunch of other apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts, it seems like down there in Ethiopia they were just content to keep on keeping on with what they had, just ignoring all of the canon debates that were going on up north.
01:46:27.000Trevor Burrus Were they just not in contact?
01:46:32.000didn't feel any obligation to honor the authority of the folks who were arguing in Constantinople and Rome and stuff like that.
01:46:40.000So, as they were figuring out their canon up north, down south, they were happy to continue to transmit their texts.
01:46:47.000So, today, the earliest manuscript of any kind we have translated into Ge'ez, the ancient Ethiopic languages, are the Garima Gospels from the 4th to 6th century CE.
01:46:58.000Most of our manuscripts come from the medieval period, around the 11th century or later.
01:47:05.000It's popular to say that the Ethiopian Bible is the earliest Bible, but it is based on the ancient Greek translation.
01:47:13.000While the ancient Greek translation probably does preserve some earlier readings than our later Hebrew does, we have better ways of sussing that out.
01:47:20.000The Dead Sea Scrolls help us an awful lot.
01:47:23.000Text critically, in trying to reconstruct the earliest possible Bible, the Ethiopian manuscripts are of very little value.
01:47:36.000And trying to understand how Christianity evolved in Ethiopia and how the texts that they were using evolved in Ethiopia.
01:47:43.000And then, since the world became aware of the Ethiopian Bible and texts like 1st Enoch and Jubilees and things like that, because we didn't have the whole of 1st Enoch until we had those Ethiopian manuscripts.
01:47:58.000So they were getting it from an early Greek translation.
01:48:04.000So 1st Enoch was in the earlier Greek translation.
01:48:07.000So, when did 1 Enoch get removed from the canon?
01:48:11.000So, 1 Enoch probably fell out of favor before the canon was formalized.
01:48:16.000Because if the people bringing the Septuagint down to the kingdom of Aksum did so at the end of the third century, beginning of the fourth century CE, it seems quite likely that 1 Enoch was still considered, if not an inspired text, at least an important text.
01:48:36.000And particularly because we have in the letter of Jude in the New Testament this direct quotation.
01:48:41.000Introduced by saying, Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied.
01:48:47.000So, this is something that the author of the Epistle of Jude recognizes as inspired prophecy.
01:48:53.000So, we have scholars arguing over the canonicity, the inspired nature of 1st Enoch in early Christianity.
01:49:02.000There's one guy in particular named Tertullian, who's toward the end of the second century CE, who defends the authenticity and the canonicity of 1st Enoch.
01:49:16.000He writes a text called On the Apparel of Women because, you know, He's gonna.
01:49:21.000And one of the chapters is entirely defending the authenticity of 1st Enoch.
01:49:27.000And because the criticisms were, it seems unlikely that this text survived the flood and has been faithfully transmitted ever since then.
01:49:36.000And it seems to contradict itself in a variety of places.
01:49:40.000The stories get told over and over in slightly different ways.
01:49:45.000And then also, it contradicts a lot of the stuff that Christians are finding in the New Testament and in their Hebrew Bible.
01:49:53.000And so it was becoming unpopular in the second and into the third century.
01:49:58.000But by the time we get to our Codex Sinaiticus and our Codex Vaticanus in the fourth century, in the middle to the late fourth century, there's no sign of 1st Enoch.
01:50:26.000You have the animal apocalypse, which is basically retelling the story, but everybody's an animal.
01:50:33.000So, like, the star falls from heaven, and then these other stars come down, and then they breed, and they're cows, and then their offspring are a certain color.
01:50:46.000And these are like different social groups that they're supposed to represent.
01:50:50.000And it's kind of a compressed history of Israel being told.
01:52:01.000It pops up in the time that it does because this is where we're getting a lot of suffering on the part of the people of Israel and Judah because they've gone through the Babylonian exile.
01:52:10.000They're basically going to be under the boot of some larger empire from then on, except for a little slice of time.
01:52:19.000They're going to be subordinate to larger empires that are going to be beating up on them.
01:52:23.000And so this is the time when a lot of them are wondering why is all of this going on?
01:52:27.000Where is our God who loves us so much?
01:52:30.000And this is where the idea of Okay, where are we going to see our justice?
01:52:35.000Where's the punishment for the bad people?
01:52:37.000Where's the reward for the good people?
01:52:39.000That's probably what gives rise to the idea that, oh, it's probably in the afterlife where this is going to happen.
01:52:46.000And so we first see concepts of heaven and hell in Enoch and in this time period, and they develop as we get into the New Testament.
01:52:55.000And so I think it's trying to accomplish a lot of those bigger questions.
01:53:29.000It's so complicated to try to figure out what they were trying to do.
01:53:40.000When they were explaining certain concepts, and there's certain things that get explained today that aren't necessarily really in the Bible.
01:53:50.000So, the concept of hell, let's get into that.
01:53:54.000Because, like, when is that so it's first introduced in Enoch?
01:53:58.000Yeah, I think that's the first time we get something like that.
01:54:01.000I think you get inklings of it at the very end, like the very last verse of the book of Isaiah, and maybe in Daniel 12.
01:55:16.000I think we've got a lot of different translations of Isaiah and a lot of different scholars who've done a lot of good work.
01:55:22.000There's not really much that's going to be much different.
01:55:26.000But also we have that idea that is repeated a few times in the New Testament where they're referring to Gehenna as the place where the fire never goes out and the worm doesn't die.
01:55:37.000So whoever wrote the New Testament passages in that time period, they understood it in pretty much the same way we understand it now.
01:55:47.000One of the most disturbing ideas that a lot of secular people have is this notion that Christians like to project that if you do not follow Jesus, you're going to burn in hell forever, no matter how good of a person you are.
01:56:54.000It's not the text itself that's authoritative, it's the interpretation that is authoritative, the interpretation that allows the text to all be consistent.
01:57:05.000It speaks with one single, consistent, unified voice from one single, unified, and consistent perspective.
01:57:11.000So, when we get to hell in the New Testament, scholars suggest there are three different ideas about post mortem divine punishment that seem to be represented there.
01:57:20.000One is annihilation, that the wicked just cease to exist.
01:57:25.000One is temporary conscious torment followed by either salvation or annihilation.
01:57:30.000So, you go somewhere, you're punished for a little bit, and then you cease to exist, or you go somewhere, you're punished for a little bit, you've paid your price, you now go on to salvation.
01:57:38.000And then the third idea is eternal conscious torment, which is where you are tortured forever.
01:57:44.000Now, in my opinion, and there are scholars who have done a lot more work on the development of the concept of hell than I have.
01:57:54.000But in my opinion, hell originally developed as a way to feel good about the fact that these huge empires and these wicked emperors, they're going to get theirs.
01:58:05.000So I think that hell probably initially developed as a way to feel like God's justice.
01:58:12.000Is going to have its day on the truly wicked people of the world.
01:58:17.000But the distance between your average Judean and hell probably got smaller and smaller over time because the threat of hell became a useful stick in the hands of people who wanted to influence behavior.
01:58:35.000And so by the time we get to Augustine in the fourth, fifth century CE and Christianity is trying to nail down its doctrines.
01:58:44.000I think we probably get to the point where everybody is under threat of going to hell unless you do the thing.
01:58:51.000Because originally it probably wasn't you have to do the thing or you go to hell.
01:58:54.000Originally it was we're good over here.
01:58:58.000The wicked people over there who are beating up on us, they're going to go to hell.
01:59:37.000Because something I'm fond of saying is that what is authoritative changes.
01:59:43.000It always changes based on our reception of the received tradition, which we then have to negotiate with.
01:59:51.000In light of our social, historical, rhetorical circumstances and what we want for the future.
01:59:59.000And so there are hard won and really deeply held beliefs that people will abandon in a moment if their circumstances change enough to incentivize them to abandon those beliefs.
02:00:17.000And as groups pass through time and their circumstances change and their needs change.
02:00:23.000They're constantly renegotiating their tradition.
02:00:27.000And yeah, that results in things like everybody's under threat of hell and, oh, Jesus is the only way, therefore you have to follow Jesus or you're going to hell.
02:00:39.000And I think that's a post-biblical thing.
02:00:42.000Certainly some folks who wrote the New Testament, I'm sure that if they were asked that, they would have been like, yeah, I would agree with that.
02:00:51.000But it's not something that's ever stated anywhere in the New Testament, at least not in those words.
02:00:56.000I think it's something that we have to Read into the text afterwards.
02:00:59.000Well, it's very disturbing to people today.
02:01:08.000I'm kind of - the fact that there are an awful lot of folks within Christianity who are trying to draw a harder line between the believers and the non-believers - including biblical scholars, which is really weird.
02:01:19.000It's really weird when you study it, but yet you find things to sort of reinforce your beliefs instead of - Being objective about the interpretations and how complex this all is.
02:01:33.000Trevor Burrus Well, and it's phenomenally difficult to be objective because we are experiencing the world.
02:01:40.000We're not experiencing it directly in an unmediated way.
02:01:44.000Our intuitive cognition is governing everything.
02:01:48.000So when we're reading a text that's supposed to be important to our in group, the set of identities that are mine, it's phenomenally difficult to read it in a way that crosses, goes against the grain of what our groups tell us.
02:02:04.000In fact, I wonder if I can illustrate how our intuitive cognition is governing everything.
02:03:09.000It happens because your mind thinks it's looking at an object in space.
02:03:13.000And objects in space, as we know from a whole lifetime of experience, when they're in the sun, they're lighter, and when they're in the shade, they're darker.
02:03:22.000And so this is toying with us by making them the exact same shade of gray.
02:03:27.000So the part of our brain that is in charge of how we perceive things is saying this does not compute.
02:03:33.000Okay, I'm just going to make it look like this.
02:04:27.000One of them is called The Phantoms in the Brain, the other is called The Telltale Brain.
02:04:31.000But he shares this story about when he was working with people who had phantom limb pain.
02:04:38.000And there's a particular type of phantom limb pain for folks who are missing the bottom part of their arm, where they would report feeling like their fist was clenched so tightly that their fingernails were digging through the flesh of their palm.
02:04:52.000And it was just excruciating pain, but there was nothing there.
02:04:55.000And he devised an instrument to try to treat this.
02:05:00.000He got a box and cut some holes in the box and put a mirror inside so that when the person put their existing hand in one hole and then their absent hand in the other, they would look at the mirror and they would see two hands.
02:05:14.000And then he would say, Clench your fist.
02:05:25.000And the idea there is that your brain is creating that pain because of something not going right.
02:05:32.000And even though you know you're fooling your brain, you're tricking your senses into believing that your phantom limb that is in so much pain is actually now releasing that fist.
02:05:46.000And there's just so much about the way the brain works that shows we are not experiencing the world in an unmediated way.
02:05:58.000That helps us experience in a way that is going to make it more likely for us to live long enough to pass on our genes.
02:06:04.000But also, a big part of that is survival within a society.
02:06:08.000And so, our identity politics are also a big part of how we not only experience the world but think about things, and particularly things like values and things like that.
02:06:19.000So, there's a wonderful book by a guy named Jonathan Haight called Have You Heard of?
02:06:31.000Of an elephant and a rider, where you have this quick, kind of intuitive mind that we're not in control of.
02:06:40.000And then you have the quick, intuitive one, it's been a while since I've read his metaphor, but his particular metaphor distinguishes our intuitive cognition, which we don't really have control over, and usually we're not even aware it's happening, and our conscious, what we call reflective cognition, which is where we're reasoning.
02:07:05.000So, if we like something, if we like a political candidate, if we like a particular interpretation of the Bible because that serves our interests within the communities that are important to us, we're going to be loath to accept a different interpretation that complicates things for us.
02:07:20.000That's our intuitive cognition trying to protect us socially, and it causes all kinds of problems.
02:07:27.000Everybody has it, nobody's immune to it.
02:07:30.000Well, I think a good example of that is this Lindsey Clancy thing.
02:07:37.000There's people that sympathize with her and want to visit her at the courthouse and say she didn't get enough care and they're wearing the pink t-shirts.
02:07:47.000Then there's people that think she's a monster and she should be killed.
02:07:51.000The people that believe that one juror was wrong in not releasing her or not convicting her by reasons of insanity, those people are.
02:08:04.000So firmly entrenched in this ideology that they are incapable of seeing other people's positions.
02:08:12.000And this is one of the reasons that we try so hard to ensure that when we put people on a jury, they're not already deeply entrenched in one side or another because they then become so impossible to convince of whatever may or may not be the truth.
02:08:28.000So, yeah, it is problematic, but we all experience the world in different ways.
02:08:32.000And nobody is in charge of how we experience the world.
02:08:35.000Right, and there's no way you could really truly understand how another person is seeing the world.
02:09:09.000Are susceptible to our intuitive cognition, and we just have to try to at least what I try to do is become aware of when it's led me wrong and then try to correct for that.
02:09:20.000You can only be fixing it looking back.
02:09:22.000You can't really like the illusion, you can't turn that off.
02:09:26.000You can't say, I'm now going to stop seeing it that way.
02:09:44.000In cognitive science, there are two ways that we refer to what happens when our intuitive cognition conflicts with our reflective cognition.
02:09:52.000You've got decoupling, which is where your reflective cognition overrules the intuitive.
02:09:57.000So if you're asleep at night and you hear a bang and then you realize, okay, that's probably just the furnace kicking on or something like that, that's your reflective cognition saying, go back to bed, intuitive cognition.
02:10:11.000And then the other is rationalization.
02:10:12.000And that's where you use your reflective cognition to try to defend and rationalize the intuitive cognition, even though it may be entirely wrong.
02:10:22.000Which is something we really should have all been taught in school.
02:10:25.000They're still doing so much research on it.
02:10:26.000It changes so much that, yeah, every At least the concepts of understanding why you form decisions.
02:10:49.000And then again, what we talked about before charisma and confidence and your decisions when most people don't have confidence in their version of the world.
02:11:21.000No, I don't talk publicly about my own personal faith just because I try to keep it compartmentalized from what I'm doing professionally and online so that I can keep the main thing the main thing because an awful lot of people just want to tear into whatever it is going on in here that allows me to share these things while acting.
02:11:53.000And in no small part because I do believe that it is as Jesus in the New Testament says when you pray, go into your closet and pray in secret, and your Father will reward you openly.
02:12:05.000And pray in secret, and your father will reward you openly.
02:12:08.000And don't pray as the hypocrites who are on the street corner to be seen of men because they have their reward.
02:12:16.000And the more I study religion and how it functions, and the fact that those costly signals are such an important element of lived religion, the less I want to be involved in going out there and shouting on the street corner about my faith.
02:12:34.000So I've kind of leaned into it, I'm keeping this for me because I think it makes it.
02:12:39.000It makes me more effective as a scholar who is trying to communicate publicly about religion, and it also has become a more meaningful way for me to live it privately where I could be out in public influencing a lot of things religiously.
02:12:57.000I think that would be an abuse of the platform that I'm trying to build here.
02:13:03.000That's a very admirable position in my perspective.
02:13:14.000Not just that, but the real issue is the hypocritical nature of a lot of the humans that are involved in promoting whatever their version or projecting in a very performative way whatever their version of whatever religion it is.
02:13:32.000That they wear it like a shield of virtue.
02:13:35.000Yeah, and that's really when we get into the New Testament, that's precisely what Jesus was criticizing.
02:13:42.000There's a concept called the prophetic critique.
02:13:46.000that we find in some of the prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible that's kind of picked up again in the New Testament.
02:13:53.000And while there are definitely problems with the authors who are responsible for spreading this, because they are somewhat hypocritical themselves, I think the message is an interesting one.
02:14:04.000Because the prophetic critique is basically God saying, I hate your worship.
02:14:08.000I hate your new moons and your Sabbaths.
02:14:11.000And I don't delight in the blood of bulls.
02:14:13.000And I will have mercy and not sacrifice.
02:14:15.000And that's what gets quoted twice in Matthew.
02:14:18.000And there's a whole series of passages from Isaiah and from Micah and from Amos and from elsewhere where it sounds like God is saying, I hate all the stuff I commanded you to do.
02:14:29.000And so scholars for a while have been like, well, why would God hate the rituals that God commanded?
02:14:34.000And I think the best answer to that is that what they then go on to say is, I want justice and I want mercy and I want righteousness.
02:14:43.000And what seems to be in the crosshairs is people who go out and put on display their piety so that they can benefit from publicly being pious, but then behind everybody's back in secret, they're actually undermining what their religion demands of them, whether that be kindness to the immigrants or supporting the poor or whatever it is.
02:15:12.000And in the Hebrew Bible, you have talk about grinding the faces of the poor and you multiply your houses, which is talking about land consolidation, basically exploiting poor people and stealing their land.
02:15:22.000And all kinds of different ways that they exploit the economic system and the justice system and all this stuff.
02:15:27.000And then they go offer sacrifices to show everybody that they're following God.
02:15:31.000And Jesus says one of the things that Jesus says that I think kind of puts on display what's going on here is he accuses some people of tithing mint and dill and then says, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law.
02:15:48.000And the weightier matters of the law are mercy, justice, righteousness, basically ensuring that we live in a righteous society.
02:15:55.000Righteous society where people are not killed, are not underprivileged, are not facing additional obstacles only because of the circumstances that they were born into.
02:16:10.000This is a negotiation with the text as well.
02:16:14.000I'm kind of interpreting all these passages for you, but I think the idea there is don't practice your religion in public to serve your own benefit, your own needs, while then going around screwing over all the people around you.
02:16:28.000When your religion actually expects you to be taking care of them as well.
02:16:33.000In fact, if Jesus is right, those are the weightier matters.
02:16:38.000You should be concerned more about what's going on with the people around you than with getting more clicks, more views, more money, more power, more influence from going out and publicly saying the right thing or doing the right ritual or whatever.
02:16:57.000Which is one of the weirdest aspects of us being supposedly a Christian nation, but not.
02:17:02.000Developing any of our inner cities, not taking care of any of our areas that we've had in this country that have been crime ridden and impoverished for decade upon decade and give it no attention.
02:17:16.000And we kind of designed the inner cities specifically to trap certain people in them.
02:17:22.000And then we now are saying, well, you got there yourself.
02:18:21.000Right now, my big thing is walkability.
02:18:23.000Like, go into a village in the English countryside or something like that, where, or even some of their cities, some of their bigger cities, you can walk around.
02:18:34.000Like, it's the place is not set up for cars.
02:18:38.000Oh, yeah, we also better put a sidewalk in there.
02:18:45.000It's a lot older, and we have some old places in the U.S. that are very much like that, but more and more our new cities that are popping up are not designed for people to walk around in.
02:18:59.000They're designed for people to drive around in, and if you're walking, you've got to be careful because you're going to get hit by a car.
02:19:04.000Or you've got to Well, Los Angeles is the best example of that.
02:19:08.000Los Angeles is really hard to walk in.
02:19:29.000Like that's walking around that city is a completely different experience from any place I've been in the U.S., which is why I think they designed Yale after it to try to mimic that.
02:19:38.000But that's just one example of I'll come back from somewhere and be like, man, I wish we could do this here.
02:19:46.000And there are so many things I think we could do here.
02:19:56.000Because they get too caught up in the wrangling over power.
02:20:00.000Well, not only that, they're allocating so much money to other things.
02:20:03.000The idea that saying, like, let's cut the Pentagon's budget, but let's dump all this money into Detroit and Baltimore and fill in the blank, whatever impoverished city you have, and have a systematic sort of a plan from A to B. Be of how we are going to change the economic outcomes of all the people that live there, how we're going to improve the education, stop the crime, what we're going to do to provide more opportunities, more safety.
02:20:54.000I mean, and it's just weird how we consider ourselves a Christian nation, but we don't do those things, and that no one ever holds you to task for that.
02:21:08.000That's never a talking point for someone running for election saying there's an issue that we can take care of in this country that will radically transform what this entire society looks like in 100 years for the better.
02:21:23.000And my perspective has always been if you want to make America great again, what's the best way?
02:21:30.000So, what's the best way to have less losers?
02:21:34.000Have more people, have more opportunities, more education, and more safety.
02:21:37.000So, then you would automatically have more people succeed, more people contribute.
02:21:42.000Who knows how many more inventions, more innovation, more ideas, more art, more fill in the blank.
02:21:49.000I think I sometimes wonder how many Isaac Newtons or Thomas Edison's lived and died.
02:21:56.000In poverty in an inner city somewhere because they were never given the opportunity to go gain the resources and the access to the resources that they needed to flourish.
02:22:08.000And it's because we, yeah, it's a big problem that unfortunately we, what is the, there was a saying that I thought was apropos there and I completely forget it.
02:22:25.000But yeah, this is a problem I think a lot of people recognize.
02:22:28.000But unfortunately, When it comes to actually trying to do something about it, we have to get past the problem of the people in power are really there to be in power more commonly than they're there to fix problems.
02:22:42.000Trevor Burrus And their motivation is to keep us at each other's throats.
02:22:44.000They would like us to keep arguing and fighting with each other and to keep looking at each other as the other so that they don't have to change anything really and just offer these fake solutions and then when they get in the office, they don't do anything to change it.
02:22:57.000But in the meanwhile, there's your YouTube channel.
02:23:01.000There's plenty of things that are interesting and beautiful in the world today.
02:23:06.000And I think it's, you know, I was just talking about this yesterday.
02:23:10.000I'm reading this Alan Watts book from 1952.
02:23:12.000And it's so interesting because he's talking about the age of anxiety in 1952, about how much things are changing, how much the world is changing.
02:23:25.000And it sounds like he's talking about 2026.
02:24:26.000It's a time machine into this particular period in history that, at least in terms of the things that he's describing, mirror some of the issues we're dealing with today.
02:24:38.000He's like literally talking about technology and improvement of society and all these different things that are like the changing of the family and what it means.
02:24:52.000It just looks different, smells different, it dances different.
02:24:56.000And I'm sure in 75 years there will be people look back on now and be like, we sure made a ton of money off of AI or off of exploiting this or that resource.
02:25:06.000And there will be, there are a lot of people look back and be like, I remember it differently.
02:25:10.000And we were not the recipients of all that funding that the government was handing out, just like there were a lot of people who were not the recipients of funding.
02:25:47.000Well, I was trying to mainly annoy the.
02:25:50.000The two incumbents, and also just try to move the needle a little bit.
02:25:56.000I live in a very, very conservative part of Salt Lake County, and I had, I think, a 50 point deficit to make up against the state rep, and then a 40 point deficit to make up against the state senator.
02:26:08.000And I think I took around 16 points off of both of them.
02:26:12.000So I did make a little bit of progress, but that was a bizarre experience.
02:26:15.000And now I think both of them are gone.
02:26:22.000One of them resigned, I think, the term after. That election and the other resigned just, I believe, last year or so.
02:26:30.000And now we just had another state senator who had some felony charges against him for fraud.
02:26:38.000Well, that is the real problem the type of people that want to run for office are almost all out of their fucking minds for the most part, other than people that are just trying to shake things up, like yourself.
02:26:50.000I think the people who are doing it for reasons that are going to be beneficial to others are in the minority.
02:27:02.000You know, maybe with more conversations like this and more people realizing that if we keep going in the same direction that we're going now, we're not going to ever improve.
02:27:15.000There are people out there that think differently.
02:27:17.000It's not like these are alien ideas that most people are not willing to even consider.
02:27:22.000Most people listen to what you're saying, what I'm saying, and they're probably thinking, yeah, that would probably be better for everybody.
02:27:35.000And also, it's one thing to be sitting down and wherever you listen to this podcast and hear these ideas.
02:27:41.000It's another when you're in the thick of things and suddenly you're getting defensive about your position or getting critical of another's position.
02:27:50.000It's once the rubber hits the road, that's where it becomes difficult and where it becomes a lot harder than it is to sit across a table and say, yeah, we agree on this.
02:27:59.000It's also like you and I, I could tell from you, you're very careful with the way you think about things.
02:28:17.000And you might grow up in an environment within a family that is like very rigid in their belief system and very angry if you deviate from that.
02:28:27.000And it's a lot of times people just to fit in, they just adhere.
02:28:33.000And it's easier to get the Ten Commandments in a school than a critical thinking.
02:29:55.000And I've always tried to live by that.
02:29:58.000And when it comes to the U.S. as a Christian nation, I can understand Tallarico's concern for what that's going to do to Christianity.
02:30:07.000And absolutely, I understand that we don't want the state indoctrinating our children.
02:30:13.000And one concern I see getting brought up less is what it does to someone who's in the minority for them to go to state sponsored education and have the states tell them, you are unwanted here.
02:30:29.000We're going to let you be here, but know that you're a second class citizen.
02:30:33.000And I don't think that is certainly not a comfortable situation to be attending school and probably not a safe situation in a lot of ways for attending school.
02:30:43.000And at the same time, if people are indoctrinated and do adopt.
02:30:47.000Christianity as a result of that, that's not really a desirable conversion in my mind.
02:30:53.000Oh, the state wants me to be Christian, so I'm going to be a Christian because I'm doing what the state is.
02:30:57.000For your own safety, you've adopted it.
02:30:59.000You've adopted it so that you can benefit from the resources that you are given access to.
02:31:06.000And this is the same argument they would make if you were in a school district that adopted an Islamic education system and was under Sharia law.
02:31:15.000You'd be like, no, this is not freedom.
02:31:16.000And I think the Confederate statues, these came up in the early 20th century, and we know explicitly the goal was to terrorize the black population, to let them know who was in charge around here.
02:31:30.000Not only that, they were shitty statues.
02:31:33.000They weren't even, this is the thing, like people were defending it.
02:31:35.000Like the removal, I don't think they should be removed, but I think people should understand why they were put there in the first place.
02:31:41.000But they wanted kids walking to school, little black children walking to school and seeing this explicitly white supremacist statue so that they knew we honor this or this is at least who we are, just so you know for the future.
02:31:55.000Just keep that in mind as you grow up in our state.
02:31:59.000Yeah, that conversation was lost in the outrage over the removal of the statues.
02:32:03.000Well, it had to be for the removal to be defended.
02:32:07.000They couldn't allow that conversation to happen.
02:32:11.000But listen, man, I really love your channel.
02:34:26.000And the point I want to make is that there are people who lived that, who are still around, who can talk about it, but that's not how we tend to represent that time period.
02:34:37.000That's not how we tend to think about it.
02:34:38.000And if we go back 2,200, 2,500 years, our reconstruction of that history. Is even further removed from how we tend to think about it.
02:34:49.000And the deeper we dig into the data, the more information we have to understand what was going on.
02:34:58.000And anybody who wants to actually try to understand what's going on, you have to let these kinds of things inform your reconstruction.
02:35:12.000And that's the name of my podcast, Data Over Dogma, which is all about trying to ensure that we're letting the data set the terms for the discussion rather than the ideologies, the things that we want to happen, the dogmas that we bring to it, rather than ensuring that they're setting the terms for the discussion.