#117 Dan McClellan - The Bible Has More Than One God

28:05and was later posthumously condemned as a heretic for it. But I think you do see the notion that God is kind of the possessor of these spirits or these spirits are kind of emanated from God. In Ecclesiastes, it talks about the spirit after death going back to the God who gave it. So I think it would be an interesting argument to make. I would like to see what kind of data, what passages, what rhetoric could be adduced for both sides of it. Because I don't think those questions specifically were asked. And so I don't think you have clear answers, which is why I think you probably see quite a bit of ambiguity.

28:53People kind of talking about things as if both X and not X were true at the same time. sure okay let's talk about then the christian interpretation of the plural god we've still got the divine council to deal with there are a few things to say here right i'm going to put on my christian cap and say okay this is really interesting dan mcclellan however i'm a christian and my view is that of course god says let us create him in our image because god is a trinity and he's talking about the three persons of the trinity and it's usually the father that does the creative stuff like through the sun you know he creates the world through the sun so that makes perfect sense of the fact that he says let us create man in our own image but then it's the one singular father who does the creative act in the end you know what i mean because it switches from the plural to the singular yeah and yes there is like this idea of the divine council that it might be referring to but like in the book of job there's a divine council and like satan is one of the people on the divine council.

29:57So we're clearly not talking about divine emanations and beings like Yahweh. We're clearly talking about Yahweh having some kind of angelic council, given that Satan is a fallen angel. And the plural is because God is a trinity. So normally what I start with is the argument that there's not really any evidence that the Trinity preexisted. Well, even like I would say the second century is the first time you get any idea of a Trinity in any way related to what we see from Nicaea. But certainly there's no evidence that is in the Hebrew Bible. And I get people talking about, you know, binitarianism and how certain scholars have have talked about binitarianism and, and there, I think we have an idea of divine mediation,

30:48Dan McClellan:uh, whether it's the son of man from Daniel or whether it's the, the angel, uh, the Malak of Adonai. Binitarianism being two as opposed to Trinitarianism being. Right. That there was a, um, a second power in heaven, uh, something like that, which is something that we see in Greco-Roman period Judaism. And then within, um, rabbinic literature, there's actually a, not really a debate so much as a condemnation of it, a discussion and a condemnation of this idea that God shares their throne with somebody else. But we also see things like Metatron, the Adonai Katon, the little Adonai who sits in a throne alongside God.

31:31And so I would say that that requires reading into the passage things that are not there. And again, if we go back to the primeval history, the Trinity holds that there's one deity. And yes, three persons, but one divine being, one God, one entity. But you have in Genesis 3, when the serpent is talking to Eve, says you will be like the gods, Elohim, knowing good and evil, and the participle for knowing is in the plural. and you might say, well, that's referring to Adam and Eve. You will be like God in that you too will be knowing good and evil. But then in verse 22, 322, God goes, the human has become like one of us.

32:18Yeah. And so we've got the plural again. And then when we get to Genesis 6, the B 'nai Elohim, the plural again. And so there are definitely plural gods that have salience in the primeval history. And so saying, well, Genesis 1.26 is about the Trinity doesn't make the problem go away. Do you think it's good? Because I understand what you're saying, that there's no evidence that, let's say, that the people who put Genesis onto paper or whatever the hell they wrote it on, like didn't have a Trinity in mind. But as a Christian, there might not be evidence separately, like just looking at Genesis, that there's a Trinity there.

32:59But is it inconsistent for me as a Christian to say, look, I believe in the Trinity. And when I'm confronted with this mysterious passage in Genesis, it's at the least consistent for me to just say, well, that's the Trinity. There's no problem there for me. Well, I would wonder how you're making the decision that... Well, let me start over. The every other time God talks about themselves, it's in the singular. Why would it even when it would have if the Trinity were there, God would have to be talking to given the concept of perichoresis, this idea that that the multiple different persons converse with each other, even though they're supposed to share the same mind.

33:45But why do we have the plural in this passage and not in every other passage where God is conversing with themselves? When they're saying, you know, I plan to do this or I'm going to do this. I change my mind. You don't see the plural in any other places. And so part of the concern I have with that is that it seems pretty arbitrary. It goes around saying, oh, well, it's singular here because whatever. of, you know, you make up an explanation. It's plural here because I believe in one God, but it's plural here because God is a trinity and you can just pick whichever fits. I mean, it is interesting that, you know, it's not like thou shalt have no other gods before us.

34:29Like that would be kind of interesting. And the Christian will look at that and say, well, of course he's only speaking in the singular there because there's one God, but then there is this mystery of why it seems to sort of swap and change. As a sort of historian or a textual critic, you're going to look at this and think, well, it's because these texts represent a different kind of belief of the people who wrote the text. One thing that's important to specify here is that we've talked about the idea of God evolving over time. People might be under the misapprehension that Genesis is the earliest Jewish source, then Exodus and so on.

35:04But that's not the way that the Old Testament actually works, right? There are debates about it, but we have some idea of which texts and which verses within which texts are older and newer. And so if you want to reconstruct this journey that Yahweh takes as who he is and whether he's the only God, you kind of got to have an idea of which texts come first and which texts come last. So maybe you can give us an indication of some of the earliest Old Testament passages and what they tell us about... Mint is still$15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should.

35:45One, it's$15 a month. Two, seriously, it's$15 a month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. the multiplicity of gods. Yeah. So when we look at Genesis 1 and then Genesis 2 and 3, those come from different time periods. Genesis 1 is a later creation account. Genesis 2 and 3 represent an earlier creation account.

36:24But the earliest passages in the Hebrew Bible are pieces of poetry because narrative developed well after poetry. And so, in fact, we think we can date the beginning of historical narrative prose in alphabetic scripts, of which Hebrew would have been one, to around the middle of the 9th century BCE. That's the first time we see historical narrative prose in alphabetic scripts. And so when we see narrative in Hebrew, that's probably middle of the 9th century BCE or later. We think there's some poetry, and specifically little fragments embedded within larger poetic compositions that are earlier than that.

37:06So, for instance, the Song of Deborah probably has some very early fragments. And there we have this Canaanite general Sisera, and it says that the stars fought in their courses against Sisera, which reflects the idea that the stars are an army. They are an army of gods. And so when it talks about the host of heaven in the Hebrew Bible, that would be the divine council. That would be the military arm of the divine council, the host of heaven. And so we see that perhaps in an early part of poetry in Judges 5. We look at Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9, which I've already mentioned. This is within the larger Song of Moses, which is probably a fairly late composition.

37:52But if we look in verses 6 and 7 of Deuteronomy 32, the singer says, ask your forefathers and they will tell you, ask your parents and they will say, and then we get quotes, verses 8 and 9, when the Most High divided up the nations, when he separated the peoples, he fixed the number of the nations according to the children of God. And so here we have what is probably a much earlier poetic fragment that has been embedded within a later composition that seems to be distinguishing Adonai from Elyon. so the most high is a different god from adonai and adonai is receiving their inheritance the nation of israel from the most high as as part of this idea that uh the nations were distributed to the the second tier deities by the high deity uh some other i want to i want to i want to look at this because this jumps off the page at me in this context this is deuteronomy chapter 32 and I suppose we can read from verse 8 when the most high gave the nations their inheritance when he divided all mankind he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Elohim because of course I'm reading the NIV here and it says he set up boundaries for the people according to the number of the sons of israel now for the christian they're going to prefer this interpretation because there are multiple sons of israel and that is how god like divvies up the nations and the people talk to me about where like that that comes from because just just to be clear here when i read this passage if you read the niv it says that god divides up the nations and the people according to the number of the sons of Israel.

39:46But as far as I'm aware, a better textual understanding is that God divides up the nations according to the sons of God. Yes. So the sons of Israel reading comes from the Masoretic text. That's the authoritative ancient-ish, around 1000 CE manuscript. And in the Septuagint, which dates to about a thousand years earlier, we have a different reading. It says according to, well, in the majority reading of the Septuagint, it says according to the number of the angels of God. But we also have some manuscripts, and there's a scholar named Chris Hansen. She has identified a bunch of not only Septuagint, but even later Latin manuscripts, where the reading is sons of God.

40:33And a lot of scholars recognize, hey, the translators of the Septuagint really like to take the Hebrew Elohim and translate it as angels. and so angels of God in those Septuagint manuscripts probably reflects a four log of source text that in the Hebrew said sons of God and then in the 1960s we discovered a fragment

40:55Dan McClellan:of Deuteronomy among the Dead Sea Scrolls that preserves precisely that reading that it's sons of God so so yeah clear here the Masoretic text which actually most of my viewers will probably know what that is now, thanks to some discussion about the Isaiah scroll. But our sort of standard source for the Hebrew Bible, which dates around the Middle Ages, says in this particular passage that God divides up the nations according to the number of the sons of Israel. The Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Old Testament, it's earlier than the Masoretic text, says angels of God. But we know that the Septuagint liked to translate what was originally sons of God into angels of God, giving us an indication that the Septuagint was using a Hebrew source, which would have been really early, which said sons of God.

41:48And then we discover a fragment in the Dead Sea Scrolls of an actual Hebrew ancient section, which preserves the reading sons of God. So textually speaking, the original was sons of God. Yeah, that's about as close as you can get to a slam dunk when it comes to a textual reconstruction. And there are other places in this poem, in Deuteronomy 32, where that happens. Verse 43, for instance, a lot of people will throw at me, you know, the passages say, I am and there is no other, is monotheistic. They'll insist that means there are no other gods. And you see that in Deuteronomy 32, 39. I think the exact statement is I am he I am he there is no God besides me and but then when you get to Deuteronomy 32 43 and if you're reading the King James version you're not going to see this but again we have something odd going on in the Septuagint and then we found a fragment a manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls that shows us what it originally read So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it says, worship him, all you gods.

42:58And this is actually probably being quoted in Psalm 97.7. But if you look in the King James Version, you have rejoice, O ye nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants and will render vengeance to his adversaries and will be merciful unto his land and to his people. That doesn't really have anything to do with gods. but if you go look in the septuagint you have strengthen him all you angels of god and um again septuagint likes to translate elohim as as angels but the septuagint seems to double up the uh the passage it has two different takes on it kind of the it's it has closer to the original take and then it has something a little closer to the masoretic text so it was probably preserving two different variations on this tradition.

43:47And then the Masoretic text went one way, but we've recovered the Dead Sea Scroll fragment. And so already you can see, even anciently, there are folks who are uncomfortable with all these references to gods going on and are trying to edit them to try to mitigate not just the presence and the existence, but the function

44:10Dan McClellan:of these other gods. Okay, so we've got this fascinating passage in Deuteronomy where nations seem to be being assigned by the Most High. So whoever the Most High is seems to be divvying up the world and its nations according to the number of the sons of God, meaning that there are these minor deities underneath the Most High, and the nations are split up amongst those deities. And so Yahweh presumably is one of these deities and Yahweh gets Israel, but other nations go to other gods. So the idea that we end up with here is that Yahweh, at least in this passage, is sort of given the land of Israel, but nothing else.

45:00So Yahweh is a local God. Christians are going to listen to that and go, no, Yahweh is the singular God of all people. So the first piece of evidence they might give to say that, as you've already mentioned it, God says, there are no other gods beside me. In the same passage in Deuteronomy, he says, I am he or whatever, I am God, there is no other. He doesn't say I'm the best. He doesn't say I'm better than anyone else. He says, I am the only one. Yes. And I can talk about two things. One, there are data elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible that are supportive of this interpretation of Adonai as a territorial deity.

45:43And we can get to that in a second. But the there are no other is also kind of territorial rhetoric. And Nathan MacDonald is a scholar out of Cambridge who's written a wonderful book called Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism, where he goes into a very close reading of all these texts as they exist in Deuteronomy to talk about what seems to be going on here. And the language of there is no other or there's none besides me, he shows that in other places where this is used, it is limited by the rhetorical scope. Like it always has to do with whatever the context is. Like there's somebody who's in a tent and the question is, do you have a sword?

46:27And he says, there is none. And that does not mean universally swords do not exist. It means within the scope of relevance of this circumstance, there's not one here. And he shows that when you see this, I am and there is no other rhetoric, it's always in the context of telling Israel, I'm the one who saves you. I'm the one who delivers you. it's me there is no other and what he suggests is that a close interrogation of this language leads to the conclusion that this language is saying i'm the only one for you don't look anywhere else i am the only one that matters it's about an exclusive relationship not any kind of ontological exclusivity and one of the reasons that we think this is that particularly in Deuteronomy, but we see it as well in Deutero-Isaiah, there are references to other gods.

47:27And so why would they be saying there are no other gods exist, but also there are these gods over here? That rhetoric doesn't make much sense unless this is about an exclusive relationship. And there's a really good comparison in the Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs, chapter six, verses eight and nine, you've got the lover is singing about their dove and their perfect one. And in verse 8, the lover says, you know, there are all these concubines, there are all these maidens all over the place. And then he says, but my dove is one, which is pretty much the exact same thing that we find in the Shema.

48:07Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. And in the Song of Songs, the statement is very clearly not to say that my dove is the only woman who exists. is to say, as far as I'm concerned, this is the only one for me. This is about an exclusive

48:25Dan McClellan:relationship. Yeah. And again, the problem with this, with all of this is we began by talking about bias, right? And anybody is capable of reading in an interpretation to a text. And I understand that people are going to listen to this. And God is going to say, there is no one besides me. I am God. I am God alone. There is no one beside me. And here are we saying, well, what he really meant was like he was sort of using hyperbole and he didn't actually think they didn't exist he just thought he was the best and they're going to say you're just reading all of this into the text two things i kind of want to note here one is that we know that this hyperbolic language sort of does exist and is used you've given the example of the song of solomon but also most interesting to me is in isaiah 47 so in isaiah 47 god is speaking and he's speaking to Babylon.

49:13And he says to Babylon, you have said to yourselves, I am, and there is none besides me. So he's chastising Babylon for having said, there is none beside me. Now, Babylon doesn't believe it is literally the only nation on the planet, right? But God is telling them off as saying that there is none beside me. If that is just Babylon being egotistical and saying we're the best, and they've worded it by saying there is none besides me, then we know that sometimes this is how it's used. When Ed Sheeran sings, you are the only one, but he's doing so in a stadium of thousands of people, I don't think he's confused about the non-existence of other women.

49:56I think it's quite clear that he's speaking poetically, and it seems like a similar kind of thing. Again, I want to stress this, at least might be happening here, because Christians are going to say, no, no, sometimes it's used like that, sometimes it's not. But At the very, very least, it opens up the door to the idea that there are multiple gods. So what I'm trying to say here is that this verse, where God says there are none beside me, we're not trying to say here that this proves polytheism in the Old Testament. Instead, at least what I'm interpreting this as is, if we think for other reasons that there are multiple gods in the Old Testament, and you point to this verse where God says I'm the only one as a rebuttal, that rebuttal doesn't work because we've shown that that language is used elsewhere to not mean the same thing right i think i just want to just basically make that clear to people listening yeah and that's and that's not the only place that occurs you have it in zephaniah as well it's either nineveh or moab where they they say the same thing you have said in your heart i am and there is no other which is and the the the nation is not saying nobody else exists they're saying i'm the only one that matters for my constituency for my for my people and you also have very similar rhetoric, and this is the rhetoric of incomparability.

51:11That's what scholars refer to this as, because you have very similar rhetoric going on in other literature. But you also have in Deutero-Isaiah the idea that the gods are nothing and less than nothing. But if you look in other parts of Deutero-Isaiah, it talks about how the other nations before me are nothing and are less than nothing, or the manufacturers of idols are nothing and are less than nothing. And so the rhetoric that gets appealed to regularly as indicating God is asserting soul existence is used in reference to other entities where it is very clearly not asserting soul existence. So again, as you're saying, there's not really a good case to make that we should be interpreting these passages as asserting the non-existence of the other gods.

51:59As I say, this lays squarely outside of my expertise, and I would quite like to have someone on the show to, I guess, defend monotheism in the Bible. I know you've had a back and forth with Gavin Ortland about this recently. Yeah. In fact, I owe him a response, I think, but I would be open to... Sort of going back and forth. Or maybe the two of you... Again, I don't know if you like debates in the sense of being together. Maybe I should talk about conversation. I think a conversation, a discussion is... I'm perfectly happy to do that, even if it gets a little debatey, but the idea of a formal debate, that's what I'm kind of allergic to.

52:36But yeah, I would love to talk with Gavin about this because he's brought up some stuff that I need to respond to. But yeah, I think he makes a thoughtful and a sincere case for his position. But yeah, I still think it is motivated by protecting the dogmatism, the monotheistic belief. Well, one thing that Gavin points out is that like in 2 Kings, for example, in 2 Kings chapter 19, verse 18 onwards, we have, truly oh lord the kings of assyria have laid waste to the nations and to the lands and have cast their gods into the fire so he's referring to the other gods of these other nations and then says for they were not gods but the work of men's hands wood and stone therefore they were destroyed so it's talking about idols here wood and stones like yeah these these gods of other nations they were not gods they were just idols and gavin points to this and says like clearly the gods of other nations that we've just been discussing here are not real gods and the point is that they think they're gods but here we have an indication that they're not gods it specifically says they're not gods now i i know what you've said in response which is essentially that this passage is saying that the it's sort of talking about the idols themselves but just before you present that response i want to point out that at the very end of this passage it says now lord our God, deliver us from his hand so that all the kingdoms of earth may know that you alone, Lord, are God.

54:16So this whole passage, to recap, is we've sort of laid waste to these other nations. We've thrown their gods into the fire because they were not gods, but just idols. And every kingdom on earth will know that you alone, Yahweh, are God. Is this not monotheism? still not monotheism for for a couple of different reasons but one of the one of the things i pointed out in my initial response to gavin was was as you kate they seem to be limiting the god to the idol and and i think this is a part of the uh the idol polemic and one demonstration of the fact that even the narrator of the bible is um represents people talking about idols as if they were gods while also recognizing that the actual deity is elsewhere.

55:09The story of Laban and Jacob departing from each other, one of the things that happens in this story as Jacob is taken off is Rachel takes the teraphim, steals Laban's teraphim, and they take off and Laban comes after him angrily, you've taken my gods. And this is the teraphim, which are probably, I think they're probably representative of ancestral deities. But at the end, when Jacob says, oh, well, whoever took anything, they're going to pay, and Rachel doesn't get caught. But at the end, they then swear. They have this oath that they swear. And Laban has them swear by the god of Jacob and the god of Nahor, which would be Laban's deity.

55:59And they're not the same deity. Some people interpret it as the same deity. That's what I was about to ask. Is it not like in the way that Jesus would say, your God and my God and something like this, and they're talking about the same God? The verbs in the plural. When it talks about, and let me, I'm trying to remember exactly what passage it's in. It's in Genesis in the 30s somewhere. But he says, let them judge between us. So the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor are discussed in the plural. And so we've got Laban talking about his gods in reference to these idols. But then we've also got in the very next scene, Laban talking about the God of Nahor that he's swearing by, which is obviously not the idol that he no longer possesses.

56:47He's got to be swearing by the actual separate entity that the idol only indexes. Now, when we get into the idol polemics, I was pointing that out, and Gavin responds by pointing to this passage where they seem to be suggesting that the other nations are limited to idols as their gods. And I think this is still part of the same rhetoric. The idea is we're denigrating the other gods, whether we're saying they're nothing and less than nothing, or whether we're calling them Gilulim, which would mean shit gods, we're just denigrating them. And so if, you know, Sennacherib comes through and destroys all these other nations and their gods were not able to save them, it kind of fits the rhetoric to just be like, well, I guess their gods were just those pieces of wood and stone.

57:41They were impotent. They were unable to do anything. And so it fits the rhetoric without necessarily reflecting this sincere belief that those idols were not intended to index deities that actually existed elsewhere. And something else I point out is that even Paul says, Paul says an idol is nothing in the world and Paul denigrates the idols. But then there's another part where Paul says when they worship idols, they're actually worshiping demons, gods that they did not know.

58:13Dan McClellan:So the idols are nothing, but the thing that the idols represent are still something. Yeah. And so we see that earlier in the Hebrew Bible. We see it later when we get down to the New Testament. It doesn't make sense to me that suddenly and for just temporarily, they would decide, okay, we're actually for a couple of centuries, we're just going to think that the idols are all there are and there are no other gods. So I think if we're trying to take seriously that this is rhetoric, I think too many people try to think of the biblical text as somebody's manifesto of what I believe. It's not. It's rhetoric intended to achieve a certain purpose.

58:57It's not necessarily a reflection of what these folks believe down at the bedrock. And so I think it's a thoughtful argument. I think it's clever. I don't think it demonstrates that they thought the other nations had no gods. I think it demonstrates that they wanted to mock and deride the other nations by saying, ha ha, all your gods all got chopped into pieces and burnt. Ha ha ha. and this is also a later text this is probably a post-exilic text so the idea that that adonai has got over all the earth i think is reflecting this universalization that probably took place after the exile so but yeah that's that's something i'd like to converse a little more with gavin about i've just looked up this passage which i think is the one you were referencing about uh like your god and my god and the different gods and i'm looking at genesis 31 37 and i'm not sure if this is the right passage genesis chapter 31 uh from 30 from verse 36 onwards jacob was angry and took laban is it laban or laban how would you say that laban laban to task what is my crime he asked what did you say laban laban yeah he asked laban how have i wronged you that you hunt me down now that you have found and searched through all of my goods what have you found that belongs to your household put it here in front of your relatives and mine and let them judge between the two of us i'm seeing the word relatives here and i don't know if i've just got the wrong passage are you in the niv still i'm in the niv but i'm having a look at a comparative study and i also just looked at the hebrew interlinear and um seems to be like before your brothers and my brothers uh yeah that that's not the word for god so um

1:00:58hang on let me i think you've got to go back to uh verse 32

1:01:09Dan McClellan:it starts in but if you find anyone who has your who has your gods, that person shall not live. In the presence of our relatives, see for yourself whether there is anything of yours here with me. If so, take it. Now, Jacob did not know what Rachel had stolen, the gods. What is going on here? Yeah. So Rachel has stolen her... Jacob's like, okay, I worked my 14 years for your two daughters. We're bouncing. And Jacob takes Rachel and Leah and they leave. And Rachel on the way out the door makes some of these teraphim, which are household gods, which I think probably were intended to index ancestral deities, but other people have different arguments about that.

1:01:53Even David has a teraphim in his palace. And then Laban comes after Jacob and says in verse 30, and let me, the NRSVUE, even though you had to go because you longed greatly for your father's house, why did you steal my gods? And in Hebrew, that's et elohi or elohim with the first person possessive suffix. And so there's the back and forth between Jacob and Laban. He's like, I didn't take anything. I don't know what you're talking about. And then says, whoever is found with them, they're going to get what's coming to them. And then in verse 42, go ahead. I was just going to say, Jacob down in verse 42 says, well, no, not 42, God save me.

1:02:43And then they, where do they swear the oath?

1:02:49So verse 53. So Jacob has said, we've got this pillar of Mishpah, the Adonai watch between you and me. And then in 53, Jacob says, may the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor judge between us. And the verb there is in the plural, yishpatu. So that's may they judge between us. And so we've got Laban referring to the teraphim as his gods, but then we've also got him swearing

1:03:21Dan McClellan:to a separate God that is very clearly the God to which he is devoted. There's also a really interesting passage in the book of Exodus, which, again, my listeners will be quite familiar with the discourse around slavery in the Old Testament. And in In the context of talking about slaves in Exodus 21, there is this idea that if you buy a Hebrew servant or slave, then you let him go free in the seventh year. If he comes alone, he goes alone. If he has a wife when he comes to you, then she goes as well. But if you give your slave a wife while he's your slave, then he goes free and the wife doesn't.

1:04:18And if there are children of that marriage, then the woman and the children still belong to the master. It's only the male that gets to go after seven years. Women aren't let go after seven years and wife and children from the slavery aren't allowed to go free too. However, if the man decides that he wants to stay with his wife, then he can become a slave for life. and thereby stay with his life. And the way he does this is, this is Exodus 21, verse 5. If the servant declares, I love my master and my wife and my children and do not want to go free. I've always found it funny how they put the word master in there, as if it can't just be the wife and children motivating him to stay as a slave.

1:04:58It says, then his master must take him before the judges in the NIV. He shall take him to the door or doorpost and pierce his ear with an owl then he will be his servant for life so there's this weird ritual where he's taken and has his ear pierced like his cattle um and if he wants to stay a slave for life then he's taken before the judges right so who are the judges the yeah the word there in hebrew is elohim ha elohim and we have the same thing going on in the next chapter in chapter 22 and this is another uh ritual, if you go to verse 8, if the thief is not caught, the owner of the house shall be brought before ha-elohim to determine whether or not the owner had laid hands on the neighbor's goods.

1:05:46So this is a situation where you don't have evidence, you don't know, and so you've got to bring the accused to a place where they're going to swear an oath, basically. And then it says, this is mine, the case of both parties shall come before ha-elohim, and the one whom ha-elohim condemn again in the plural shall pay double to the other and so i imagine if you're in the niv

1:06:13Dan McClellan:still it probably says judges there as well yeah it has a footnote and says or before god god declares it's god singular of course so so the niv can't decide whether it's talking about the plural judges of like humans who would determine what happens to the slave or the singular God who's determining what happens to the slave. So you said the word is Elohim. We know that the word Elohim means God, but doesn't the word Elohim just also mean judges in a human context? Because the NIV is translating the word Elohim here as judges. Yeah, no, that's a misreading. Elohim never means judges. But because of these two passages, that reading has developed.

1:06:53And it's plural in 21.6 because it's very clearly plural here in 22.8 and 9. And so they've got to let this reading influence the reading in 21.6. The best reading of both would be the gods in the plural. Because the idea here is that they're going to the household gods because they index the presence of a deity or other deities. It should be the plural gods. And interestingly, are you familiar with the NET, the New English Translation? I don't know what it says about this. What is the NET? I mean, I've read the NET, but I don't know what it's like. Translation philosophy is. The main thing that it offers is an awful lot of explanatory notes.

1:07:39So if you want to get a sense for where the debates are, where the discussions are, they've got tons and tons of notes. And the note here is funny because it's like, oh, this should be God. But, you know, this would have been overseen by human judges. And then at the end of the note, it says, and others have made a stronger case that Elohim refers to human judges. And then it quotes Cyrus Gordon and Anne Drafkorn. And these two papers where Cyrus and Anne, in their own papers separated by decades, argue strenuously that it does not mean judges. It means gods. And so whoever edited that note was either just straight up lying or wildly misunderstood those papers or did not read them at all.

1:08:21But the idea here is in Greco-Roman period Judaism, I mentioned that the gods get squished down into angelic status. They're all angels. And that becomes kind of the conventional wisdom that gets handed down from generation to generation. But then somebody raises issue with Genesis 6, with the story that is, you know, you get the fan fiction in First Enoch of this, where it's the angels who come down and they have children with the human women. And then toward the end of the Greco-Roman period, you have some Jewish thinkers saying, wait a minute, angels can't be disobedient. Angels aren't sexually compatible with humans.

1:09:04What's going on here? And so you have a human reading of Genesis 6 that pops up. And they say, well, no, these are humans. The B 'nai Elohim is a reference to the line of Seth. So these have to be humans. And so now a human reading of Elohim becomes a possibility. And this, I think, kind of cascades down through the generations as the interpretive lens that we're then going to turn on Psalm 82. We're then going to turn on to Exodus 22. And this idea develops that Elohim is based etymologically on a verbal root that means to be mighty or to be strong or to be powerful. And so Elohim must mean powerful ones, or it must be used honorifically to refer to judges.

1:09:49And the only way they can make sense of this ritual where the person, whether it's the accused thief or it's the slave who wants to stay on in their master's house, they've got to come before ha Elohim, they're like, well, let's pick the judge's reading. Maybe that one will work out. But yeah, the idea here is that they go before the gods.

1:10:08Dan McClellan:And the gods... Go ahead. Just more indications of a multitude of gods sort of splattered throughout the Old Testament. Yeah. Although here, I think the reference to the gods is a reference specifically to divine images as deities. Just like in Exodus 20, verse 3, you shall have no other gods before me. That is, most scholars agree in the earliest. Prime delivery is fast. How fast are we talking? We're talking puzzle toys and lick pad delivered so fast, you can get this puppy under control. Fast. We're talking chew toys at your door without really waiting fast. P-pads, clothing mat, and pad camera.

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1:11:06Circulation of that text, the idea was probably referring to no other divine images, no other gods qua idols or divine images in my presence in the temple or something like that. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, one of the surface level indications of what they call henotheism, which is the view that there are multiple gods, but one main God, so the other gods do exist, but they're not the ones to be worshipped, is the idea of God saying, not I'm the only God, but you shall have no other gods before me, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. who are you jealous of if these other people don't exist it seems like jealousy doesn't have something to attach itself to now again of course christians just interpret this verse differently but it's worth noting that we have these indications which are worth exploring and as i say you know i want to hear the other side and maybe we can set up a discussion with someone like gavin or maybe someone else i'm not sure yeah but a couple more little things to iron out i think before we sort of wrap up this idea is like the story, right?

1:12:16Because we've talked about how in the Old Testament, we've got the divine council and it seems like we've kind of got gods, but the gods are kind of subordinate to Yahweh, but it's not entirely clear. Firstly, it's this idea that Yahweh, if we do have a divine council and Yahweh is at the top of it, then this verse where we talked about the mighty one divvying up the lands and giving Israel to Yahweh wouldn't make much sense, right? So who is the mighty one as opposed to Yahweh in this context? So Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9, the Most High, El-Yon, that is a much earlier passage. And so Adonai is not identified with El-Yon, but there's a point at which El, El-Yon, Adonai, they become conflated and they're a single deity, at which point Adonai kind of exceeds to the top

1:13:08Dan McClellan:of the divine council. And so - Just to be clear here, when you say Adonai, you're talking about Yahweh. Yes. That's the substitute I use as an accommodation to Jewish members of my audience who've asked me to use that. And that's a pretty common thing in scholarship. Because they don't pronounce all right the tetragrammaton. Divine name, yeah. Yahweh, right. Which is why if you read the Old Testament in English, you'll see the word LORD in all caps, which in the Hebrew text will say Yahweh. But if the Hebrew itself says, I suppose, Adonai, then that is just the word for LORD. So it can be a bit confusing when you're reading an Old Testament translation, because there'll be LORD in all caps, and there'll be LORD in the lowercase.

1:13:57When you see LORD in all caps, the original text specifies Yahweh, and when you see LORD in lower caps, it does just mean LORD. Yeah. Although the word Adonai is a specific form. It's actually the plural with the first common singular possessive suffix. So it's literally my lords is what Adonai is. Adoni would be my lord. Oh, right. Adonai would be my lords.

1:14:20Dan McClellan:But yeah, that's the substitution that begins in the first century BCE. I actually have an entire episode with Justin Sledge from Esoterica on the history of Yahweh, which weirdly it feels like we're kind of doing a history of Yahweh here as well but like it's gone in a completely different direction um but there is still this this trajectory that happens because we start with Yahweh being like potentially subordinate to the most high and then somehow this changes to either Yahweh like swapping places and being the the sort of main God above the council. And then eventually the idea develops that Yahweh is like the only God in Christianity.

1:15:05So how can we like trace this trajectory? That's actually, that might be the topic of the next book that I write. Because in fact, the first book that I proposed as a trade book that became The Bible Says So was a book tracing the development of the concept of God from the earliest recoverable layers down to the Trinity. And so, yeah, tracing it would require one, chronologically ordering the literary layers of the Hebrew Bible, figuring out what's early, what's late, and then accounting for diachronic and synchronic difference. How do things change from time to time as well as from place to place?

1:15:50And developing an account for why it is that these things are changing. And a lot of it has to do with responding to crises. The exile was a significant crisis. And the way that God was understood changed an awful lot following that.

1:16:05Dan McClellan:In fact, I think you can see - And the exile, you're talking about the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian exile, yeah. When does that happen and what happens? So that's 587 BCE to about 539 BCE. And that is where Jerusalem is conquered by the Babylonians. And the majority of folks, at least the majority of the elite, are forcibly exiled to Babylon, scattered around Babylon. But then when the Persian Empire conquers Babylon in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great then allows the Judahites who want to return to Jerusalem. And then we get the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the rededication of the temple, and second temple Judaism begins there.

1:16:51But this crisis of exile results in a lot of renegotiation of who God is and what God's relationship is. Because remember, if in a pre-exilic setting, God is limited to the nation of Israel, if you get exiled to another nation, you can't worship God. What are you going to do? And so this is why we have like Daniel is praying in the direction of Jerusalem. This is why you have in the Psalms, the Babylonians asked them to sing one of the songs of their land. And they said, who can sing the song of Adonai in a foreign land? And we've got a bunch of indications that Adonai is not accessible outside of Israel until you get folks like Ezekiel.

1:17:35What is his vision of? God suddenly has wheels. God's going around in their Dragula with their wheels and their platform and everything. We've mobilized the divine throne. Whereas in Psalm 82, the idea is all the gods of the nations get sued and get deposed. And now God is going to take over their seats on the divine council. So you've got to...

1:18:27And he says of these gods, they walk in nothing. They understand nothing. Sorry. Yeah, they know nothing. They understand nothing. They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, you are gods. You are all sons of the Most High. So again, this like Most High. And then the sons of the Most High being this like these other gods. But you will die like mere mortals. You will fall like every other ruler. And then it ends, rise up, O God, and judge the earth. For all the nations are your inheritance. all the nations are your inheritance like how does this all come together it seems like psalm 82 is describing a transition remember earlier it's like the nations are all divvied up according to the different sons of god and now he's saying i've called you sons of god but you will now die like mere mortals rise up god and all of the nations are your inheritance as if to say that inheritance of those nations is no longer split up amongst those gods those gods have been demoted one god elevated and all the nations are now yours.

1:19:26Tracking this trajectory in the Babylonian exile from Jews believing that Yahweh is like a localized Israel God to being the God of all nations, which is probably a response, as you say, to the fact that they've literally been exiled. I mean, you've got to understand the importance of the location of Jerusalem to Jews, the location of the temple the the religious rituals that have to be performed in the temple when jesus speaks to the uh the woman at the well in john's gospel she says you jews say we have to worship at the temple the temple is incredibly important and so if you get kicked out then what are you what are you going to do so this episode i did with esoterica his assessment is that the jews were exiled as I think he calls them like Yahwists, essentially, and they come back as monotheists.

1:20:22That's kind of the conventional wisdom. It has been for decades now that the exile is what provides the catalyst for monotheism, that God is the only God that exists. But there are cracks forming in that foundation because not only within Deutero-Isaiah, which is supposed to be the quintessential monotheistic assertion in the Hebrew Bible, but in the later literature, the Greco-Roman period literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls text, even in the New Testament, we kind of go back to talking about all these gods, only they're angels now, but they're still considered divine beings, they're still considered sons of God and and sons of Elyon, and there are even some humans who are exalted to divine status.

1:21:12So if the Judahites return as monotheists, they did not stay monotheists very long, because they go right back to talking about the other gods. And I tend to think that there's a better reading of Deutero-Isaiah, Isaiah 40 through 55, which understands this as the rhetoric of incomparability and is just saying, like the same rhetoric that is used in Deuteronomy, I'm the only one that matters to you, speaking to the Judahites. And so I would suggest that monotheism, as the word historically has been understood, requires creation ex nihilo. And so we can't really talk about monotheism existing in the way we have used the term until the end of the second century CE at the earliest, because you still have gods.

1:22:04Even down into the New Testament, you have references to other gods.

1:22:10Dan McClellan:And so that was the convention. What are the gods mentioned quickly? What are you referring to there when you say the New Testament refers to other gods? So they are, remember the angels and the demons are gods. So for instance, when Paul says, talks about how when they worship the idols, they're worshiping demons. He quotes Deuteronomy 32, 17, which is in our Song of Moses. And it's a reference to, and it talks about how they worshiped Shedim, which doesn't mean demons, but was translated that way in the Septuagint. And the very next clause, which is in apposition to the demons, it says, gods they did not know.

1:22:55So they worship Shedim and not God, gods they did not know, newly arrived, and all that kind of stuff. So Paul is referring to this passage in Deuteronomy 32, 17, when he refers to the subject of idols as demons. And in the Septuagint, they are also referred to as thei, as gods. And so Paul seems to recognize that these demons are gods. That would be how everyone around them would have understood gods. That's how the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Greco-Roman period literature refers to gods and demons. And then you also have references to other principalities and powers and thrones and things like this, which is usually understood to mean either angels and or demons.

1:23:42And then Paul also talks about in any gods and lords. But then he says, but for us, there is one God. And while you could choose to interpret this to mean, as far as we know, we believe only one God exists, I think in the context, a much better interpretation would be, as far as we're concerned, only one God matters. We have this exclusive relationship. There's all those other angels and demons and what have you, but as far as we're concerned, only one God matters. And there's a wonderful scholar named Paula Friedrichsen who recently wrote a paper on Herod and Philo and Paul and the many gods of Jewish monotheism.

1:24:25So it goes into more detail about how everything, all the data about this time period is just chock full of other gods that are just kind of being denigrated and referred to as demons and things like that. it's interesting i think i mean it's not like it's it's certainly not clear to me um like i think that at the very least what you're doing here for me is opening this door like i say to saying like there is some weird stuff going on there are some weird passages that seem to indicate the multiplicity of gods and at the very least the arguments for strict monotheism in the old testament maybe don't work uh i i i still remain of course as i'm going to be after speaking on one podcast with you about this agnostic on it, but I think it is fascinating.

1:25:12What I want to do to close, if you don't mind, is just to ask if you had to say what the strongest indication in the opposite direction was, like if you had like a couple of minutes and your life depended on it, and you had to defend the idea that monotheism is definitely in the Old Testament, what would you point to as the strongest case? I would probably try to point to, in the Old Testament, I think I would struggle a bit. But I think I would probably use what folks like Gavin use, the notion that the God of Israel is being exalted so far above the other gods, that they are treated as some kind of, it's a qualitative, or it's a qualitative, not just a quantitative distinction.

1:26:01And I think I would point to, in Greco-Roman period Judaism into the New Testament, the fact that Judaism is characterized by non-Jewish and non-Christian authors as odd because they only recognize one God. There is certainly one God rhetoric that we find in the other literature of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. And I think that's where the best case is going to be made in the notion that Judaism and Christianity are distinct and are distinguished by the other groups because of the fact that they refuse to acknowledge or worship the other gods. And I have a paper that's going to be coming out in an edited volume soon that will talk about what exactly is going on with this one God rhetoric.

1:26:51But I would probably try to prioritize that if I needed to convince folks that monotheism is found in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. It seems like one of Gavin's strategies was to look at, I mean, he lists on screen a bunch of quotes from the book of Isaiah. I'm the Lord your God besides me. There is no savior. Besides me, there is no God. Is there a God beside me? There is no other. There is no other. Like listing all of these out. We've already talked about why we think that this language might not indicate monotheism, but that seems to be his strategy. all i'll say to people is uh i think this all got kicked off because you made one of your standard sort of vertical videos about monotheism it's cool it'll be called something like you know monotheism is in the in the hebrew bible like dan mcclellan like monotheism gavin's response your then like hour-long-ish response to gavin and then gavin's final response to you go and check it out guys like i'll i'll put the links in the description go and have a look uh see what you think.

1:27:49I think it's an interesting conversation, if nothing else. And of course, it's one of the chapters in your book, The Bible Says So, which is out now. It's linked in the description. And as should be obvious to anybody, any one of these chapters just has an endless pit of biblical scholarship to dig into, but also interesting and problematic verses to explore. So lots more to do here. And hopefully at some point in the future, we can set up a conversation, maybe with gavin um or at the very least i can have someone on my show to defend the alternate hypothesis but i hope people found this interesting and christians found it challenging without being super frustrating because they're looking at me going why are you not bringing this up or how have you missed that that's not what the hebrew means sorry everybody i'm doing my best but we'll try to be fair over the long run by by giving everyone a voice here so thanks for uh it's the second time you've come on the show so you've and not not uh at least also considering the contributions you made to my discussion on the Isaiah scroll.

1:28:47You've given a lot to this channel, so I appreciate your time, and I hope people go and buy the book and all of that good stuff. But thanks again for coming on. Thank you. I appreciate your time.