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For everyone out there who supports putting data over dogma

INTRODUCTION

I love the Bible. I really do. Without denying it has inspired significant harm, I believe it has contributed to a lot of good in this world. I’m also a scholar of the Bible who makes my living combating the spread of misinformation about the Bible on social media, and a lot of this misinformation comes from Bible believers. So to an awful lot of people, it feels like I am attacking the Bible itself, and they let me know about it every single day.

I go back and forth between being disappointed and being amused by this. I think the Bible is the single most fascinating, complex, and influential text that has ever existed. Beyond its role in my own faith—which is not a part of this book—I have dedicated my professional life to better understanding the Bible’s history, significance, and meaning.

To do this well, I have to try to understand the Bible on its own terms. What that means is I try to understand it as its authors, editors, and earliest audiences understood it. I recognize that to understand the Bible on its own terms, I need to be willing to allow for those terms to diverge from my own. I have to be willing to distinguish “the Bible” from “my interpretation of the Bible” or “what I want the Bible to be.” What the original authors and audiences of the Bible intended and understood it to say isn’t always going to be the same as what I understand it to say when I read it. I think this is one of the most exciting parts of researching the Bible. It means there’s space for the Bible to continue to surprise, fascinate, and challenge me.

However, most people who approach the Bible as an authoritative text like to keep it on a pretty short leash. They maintain firm boundaries regarding what it is and isn’t allowed to say. Allowing the Bible to transgress those boundaries can raise doubts regarding deeply held beliefs that most people don’t want to see subjected to scrutiny. These are not beliefs that people adopt because they’ve been convinced by data or evidence. They’re beliefs that people choose to accept because doing so is required or incentivized within the social identities that are important to them. Sometimes these beliefs are supported by data and sometimes they are not, but what is true of all of them is that they’re not negotiable. I call this type of belief a dogma.

A long-standing and openly aspirational motto of mine is that I seek to put “data over dogma.” In my research, in my writing, and in my discussions on social media, I strive to prioritize the data over and against any dogmas to which I or others may be knowingly or unknowingly adhering. On my end, this requires constantly picking through my own research to try to weed out influences that might be lurking under the surface that aren’t supported by the data but that still might nudge my judgment in the direction of conclusions that serve my own interests, whether related to my religious identity, my social standing, or even my livelihood. However, if there is something that could plausibly be labeled a dogma that I’ve always and openly allowed to influence my work, it’s this: As long as all other things are equal—and that’s an important caveat—I strive to give the benefit of the doubt to the less powerful group.¹ As you’re going to discover in this book, I really don’t like when people use the Bible to hurt vulnerable people and groups.

Three very widespread and deeply embedded dogmas that I frequently run across when I talk with Bible believers are inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality. Not a single one of these is supported by any data. These are beliefs that arose over time as people contemplated the implications of different approaches to the Bible and constructed perspectives that made the scripture most useful to their structuring of power, values, and boundaries. Let’s briefly consider them.

I would describe (not define) the dogma of inspiration as the belief that the folks who wrote the texts of the Bible were so thoroughly influenced by God that their compositions are in some sense the very “word of God.” While human agency is selectively given some kind of role in the articulation of the biblical texts (particularly where they’re problematic), because of the implications associated with human imperfections, that influence is carefully restricted.

The belief that they are inspired leads to the dogma that the biblical texts are in one sense or another inerrant. There are varieties of this particular dogma, but a fairly common denominator is the notion that the texts—at least as they were originally penned by the authors—are free from error. This freedom from error can run a spectrum from only matters related to salvation all the way to any and all propositions related to salvation, history, logic, or the material world.

This leads to the third dogma, univocality, which is just a fancy word for “one voice.” This is the belief that because the biblical texts are inspired and inerrant, they come from the same single divine source and so speak with one single, unified, and consistent voice, and from one single, unified, and consistent perspective. In other words, the biblical texts can never disagree with or contradict one another.

Like I said, none of these three dogmas is supported by the data. They cannot be demonstrated. There are no good arguments for them. They can only be asserted, and in a discussion about what the Bible says, those assertions mean anything only if all participants have agreed to accept them as authoritative. That’s putting dogma over data, though. In this book, as I strive to prioritize what “the Bible” says over what “our interpretation of the Bible” says, the dogmas of inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality are simply not admissible. You might be surprised how many arguments about what the Bible says just fall to pieces when we don’t presuppose those dogmas. As I noted earlier, when we engage the Bible on its own terms, it can have a lot of surprising things to say.

In December 2023, a pastor named Wendell Phelps declared on Twitter (X, or whatever), “If God’s word says it, then that settles it.”² Statements like this shouldn’t sound unfamiliar to anyone who’s had experience with Evangelical Christianity in twenty-first century America. One of the central tenets of Protestant Christianity, after all, is sola scriptura (“scripture alone”), which means that the Bible is the only sufficient source of direct divine guidance. It is held up as the inspired, infallible, inerrant, and final authority on all things pertaining to faith and practice. As Pastor Phelps says in another tweet, “Yes, I fully believe the Bible is perfect and is without any errors or contradictions. Do you?”³ For folks who would answer this pastor in the affirmative, figuring out what the Bible actually “says” ought to be of immense importance.

Even for folks who don’t adopt this position, though, what the Bible says can exercise immense influence on their lives. The National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL) is working hard within state and federal legislatures to support “clear biblical principles,” “address major policy concerns from a biblical world view,” and “restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.”⁴ An Oklahoma state legislator named Dusty Deevers wants to outlaw no-fault divorce because of the Bible. Another Oklahoma state legislator named Shane Jett opposed a 2024 bill that would prohibit schools from corporally punishing students with disabilities because he says it conflicts with the Bible. In late 2023, when Representative Mike Johnson became Speaker of the House—and thus third in line for the presidency—he said to Fox News’ Sean Hannity, “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview, that’s what I believe.”⁵

Does Speaker Johnson really believe this? Even where it explicitly endorses chattel slavery? Even where it treats rape of a woman as a property crime against whatever man has rights over the victim’s body? Even where it acknowledges that the God of Israel demands child sacrifice? Even where it insists women aren’t allowed to teach and are supposed to just shut up because they were the ones who got duped by the talking snake? What about where it endorses communalism? What about where it says a man should gouge out his eye if that eye causes him to lust after a woman? What about where it says the most pious people will castrate themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven? Isn’t that what the Bible says?

If only it were that simple. Readers of the biblical texts have been arguing for more than two thousand years about what the Bible actually says, and the Christian groups that hold to the Bible as inspired and authoritative have shattered like splinters into countless different divisions because of disagreements about the Bible’s meaning and significance. Oddly enough, for most Christians today, the concern doesn’t seem to be about figuring out what the Bible actually says as much as it seems to be about convincing others of what it says. Most Christian groups feel confident they already know precisely what the Bible says, and it’s just everybody else who needs to be brought up to speed. Conveniently for most of these groups, the Bible always seems to offer surprisingly clear, relevant, and topical guidance regarding all kinds of social and political issues that didn’t even exist when the Bible was being written. The Bible always seems so conveniently to say precisely what they need it to say. (I’m going to discuss what we mean by “the Bible” in more detail in chapter 1.)

Now this is where I get really annoying. When people say, “the Bible says X,” sometimes they’re quoting directly from the Bible, but most of the time they’re not repeating the exact words on the page but just stating what they believe the Bible means. Even when they are quoting the exact words on the page, they usually have to follow up by explaining what they mean. That’s what I was doing when I just rattled off that list of things the Bible says. And this is an issue, because in that sense, the Bible simply doesn’t say anything at all. The Bible is a collection of texts, and texts do not have inherent meaning.

This is going to sound pretty counterintuitive to a lot of y’all, but a text is just a collection of squiggles, and there is no “meaning” inhabiting any of them (whatever that might mean). Meaning is generated in, and confined to, the mind of a reader based on their experiences with and understanding of agreements that have been reached about what meaning is going to be linked with what combinations of sounds, and then what combinations of sounds are going to be linked with what combinations of squiggles. All texts are basically just codes, and we can decipher them only to the degree we know the code. Because these meanings are frequently very nuanced and complex, and because words, phrases, and clauses can be put together in countless different ways and can often mean multiple different things on their own, there are potentially numerous different meanings and shades of meaning that could have been intended by whoever wrote a given text, including the texts gathered together in the Bible.

Reading a text is not a matter of excavating or extracting meaning from it; it’s a matter of creating it ourselves and trusting that we’ve come close enough to what was intended. I’m oversimplifying quite a bit, but there’s a two-stage process going on subconsciously when we read. First, our minds generate as many different potential meanings as they can that might be associated with a given linguistic expression. Then, our minds use whatever clues might be available to whittle them down to the meaning we feel was most likely intended. For experienced readers, this process is subconscious and almost instantaneous, so it seems like meaning is just being transmitted to us directly from the text. The reality is that we’re always generating the meaning ourselves, and while this process is usually good enough for communication to be successful, errors can and often do creep into both stages of this process. This is particularly true when we’re dealing with texts from times and cultures that are different from those with which we have experience. You know, texts like the Bible. Translations can bridge some of that gap, but that’s just because someone else is standing between the Bible and us going through that process themselves and then trying to pass it on to us in language that’s closer to our experiences and understanding.

What this all means for the Bible is that we’re never just extracting pure and unadulterated meaning. We’re always constructing it ourselves. A common metaphor for interpreting the Bible is the notion that the Bible is like a jigsaw puzzle and, to best understand how the pieces fit together, we have to look at the picture on the box. The idea is that the whole Bible and its broader message should guide how we understand the individual pieces. This is a profoundly misguided metaphor for a number of reasons. To begin, there’s no such thing as a “picture on the box” for the Bible unless we create one. To create one, we have to determine what the individual pieces mean and then use those pieces to construct the desired picture—and yes, there is always a desired picture. This “picture on the box” is really just whatever the given religious tradition needs it to be. This metaphor is really just telling us that to understand the pieces, we have to understand what our tradition allows the pieces to mean. The tradition is the real authority. The Bible is just the proof text.

The next problem with this metaphor is that it presupposes that all the pieces come from the same source and are all intended for the same end result. They all fit perfectly together. This is that univocality I discussed earlier, and it’s so useful because it means we can clarify any passage anywhere in the Bible by looking for a passage anywhere else in the Bible that addresses the same issue. They all share the same origin and are all pointed in the same direction. The presupposition of univocality also means we can combine passages from all over the Bible to build complex constellations of meaning to address all kinds of contemporary circumstances that the biblical authors never dreamt of.

A better metaphor for Bible interpretation is a toy chest full of LEGO blocks. The blocks in the toy chest are a combination of numerous different sets and random blocks, and there are no instructions or pictures to guide us. We basically have two choices regarding how to put them together. We can listen to the religious tradition when it gives us a picture of what it wants the blocks to build, or we can use our own understanding of LEGO and the colors, themes, imagery, and so on to try to figure out what might go with what. There are clearly multiple sets, and they don’t match, but we could certainly create a plausible model of what the tradition wants us to create. There’ll be plenty of stuff left over and plenty of gaps, and we’ll probably have Gandalf’s head on Dumbledore’s body, and the Millennium Falcon is going to have panels made from Jurassic Park fencing and pieces of the TARDIS, but if we squint at it, it should look kind of like what the tradition demands.

On the other hand, if we want to try to reconstruct what the engineers of each set intended, we’ll have a lot of work to do to understand each set on its own terms. We don’t have instructions, and the sets are not going to be complete. This makes the process of reconstructing what we imagine the engineers of each set intended phenomenally complex. (Other engineers will also likely have come along and changed things.) We’re never going to get it just right, and even if we do get pretty close, we’re probably not even going to like everything we put together. Much of it is not going to be meaningful or useful to us.

What this metaphor helps show is that the meaning is being generated by us. The finished product doesn’t just tumble in one perfect piece out of the toy chest when we tip it over. Whichever approach we choose, we’re creating meaning with the Bible. Going back to linguistics, the Bible—or more accurately for most of us, the translator—just provides the signs and symbols, and then it’s up to us to generate the potential meanings that could be associated with those signs and symbols and whittle them down to what we think they were most likely intended to mean.

I frequently refer to this process as “negotiating” with the text. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I think it’s helpful to highlight the fact that we’re not extracting meaning from the Bible but constructing meaning with the Bible. Because this happens subconsciously, we’re not really aware of either stage of the process, and we generally don’t question it, which is particularly true if we have some kind of incentive not to question the result. This doesn’t happen with every verse of the Bible, but for folks who treat the Bible authoritatively (and even in many cases for those who don’t), a specific meaning may be important or valuable enough to us to exercise quite a bit of gravitational pull on that process of meaning production. If you’re strongly for or against the legality of abortion, for instance, and you think the Bible has the definitive and authoritative answer, you’re probably going to find that it happens to say precisely what you want it to.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we’re being incentivized to construct inaccurate meanings; it’s that we don’t have enough data to construct the “right” meaning. To illustrate this, I want to look at a biblical passage that probably won’t be too foundational to anyone’s love of (or hate for) the Bible. The King James Version renders Jude 1:22, “And of some have compassion, making a difference.” What do you understand this verse to be saying about having compassion? Most likely, when you read “making a difference,” you thought of something like having a positive impact or influence. That’s probably the conceptual content you’ve most often associated with that phrase. In that subconscious process of generating potential meanings and whittling them down to what is most likely intended, your mind didn’t have far to go to land on that sense. When we have compassion, we can have a positive influence or impact on the lives of others. It’s a beautiful message, but is there any other possible meaning you can think of? Think hard, because that message has absolutely nothing at all to do with what the King James translators were trying to say.

You find that hard to believe?

Well, we didn’t connect the squiggles that spell out the phrase “making a difference” with the notion of having a positive influence until around the year 1900. Prior to that, we connected that phrase to an entirely different conceptual package that had to do with making a distinction. Its usage in Leviticus 11:46 brings that sense a little closer to the surface. That verse commands Israel to “make a difference between the unclean and the clean, and between the beast that may be eaten and the beast that may not be eaten.” With the preposition “between” connected to the phrase, your mind probably had an easier time creating a meaning that was closer to what was intended. If you look at Jude 1:22 again with that sense in mind, you now have adequate experience to create a meaning closer to what the King James translators intended—something like “of some have compassion, but be discerning.”

So, you now have a specific experience with the agreements related to this phrase so that you can construct a meaning that has a much better chance of being what the King James translators were trying to say. Without those data, most readers would be very unlikely to ever create adequate meaning for the passage. They would feel confident in the meaning they did create (I mean, it’s not a complex sentence), but because that meaning was based on the wrong experiences with those squiggles, it entirely missed the mark. The fact that it makes sense to us, and can even be a very beautiful or powerful message, is not confirmation that it is in fact the meaning that was intended by the translators. In fact, if that powerful message that made a lot of sense to us were also critical to our self-image or to our access to power and resources, we might be entirely unwilling to even consider the fact that it might be mistaken.

This raises an important point: The more meaningful and powerful a specific reading is today, the more careful we should be with that reading. It’s actually less likely to be what was intended by the original authors. Why? Because the needs, circumstances, values, and goals of authors and editors writing two thousand years ago are wildly different from those of today, and the odds are incredibly low that they intended to say just the exact right things to make that tuning fork in our loins ring today.⁶ Jesus and Moses were definitely not MAGA Republicans, but they also weren’t democratic socialists, and they certainly weren’t Austrian school libertarians. Jesus was a first-century CE Jewish apocalyptic preacher from the Galilee, and no one has been that for almost two thousand years. As for Moses, there’s not really a strong case that Moses existed at all (at least, not in the way he’s represented in the Bible). So, he was whatever the authors who composed his stories imagined he was, and no one has been that for even longer.

This is not to say there’s nothing in the Bible that has direct significance to our needs, interests, and circumstances today—far from it—but the more it feels like the Bible may be speaking directly to us, reflecting our ideals and our circumstances, or demonizing our enemies, the more closely we need to interrogate our interpretations and what may be motivating them. Claims about what the Bible “says” can be (and are being) weaponized in many different ways today. Those claims can influence people’s lives in a lot of different ways. They can influence legislation on state and even federal levels that can restrict access to power, to resources, to employment, and even to public services. They can affect the mental, emotional, and physical health of children and adults. They can limit employees’ abilities to live as their authentic selves during working hours. They can allow content creators to gain clout and money from the anxieties and the traumas of people who struggle to think critically about the Bible and religion. I get messages on a daily basis from folks who have been affected by the way the Bible and what it says has been wielded as a weapon or as a tool of coercion in public and in private.

And that’s where this book comes in. My main goal in The Bible Says So is to use my academic skills and resources to interrogate a variety of claims about what the Bible “says” about issues like Jesus’s relationship to God, homosexuality, slavery, abortion, inspiration, hell, the mark of the beast, creation out of nothing, and God’s wife. In interrogating these claims about what the Bible says, I am approaching the text as a critical scholar, and there are several ways this approach differs from how most folks read the Bible. I already discussed putting data over dogma, but there’s more.

My approach can be broadly described as historical-critical, meaning I’m using critical methodologies to try to reconstruct what people at certain points in history likely understood these texts to mean. In other words, I’m not trying to make the biblical texts meaningful to me. I’m trying to find out what made them meaningful to their authors, editors, and earliest audiences. In doing so, I try as much as possible to take my own needs and interests out of the equation and gather enough data to be able to reconstruct how these texts could have served the needs and interests of those groups responsible for their production and initial reception.

This is the approach I use on social media, but it is not remotely the only approach that I think is valid or useful. Because texts have no inherent meaning, once they begin to circulate, they mean whatever people understand and use them to mean. Sometimes that’s linked with what the authors and editors intended, and sometimes it’s not. The texts of the Bible have been deployed to mean countless different things to countless different individuals and groups.

I use a historical-critical perspective because I think the earliest reconstructible meanings make for a useful point of departure for discussing what the Bible means to us and how it’s used by us today. I think this is particularly important because so many discussions going on in public today about the Bible focus on what it “originally meant” and are also deeply entangled with access to power and resources. I think those discussions are much better served by an approach that is founded on data and not dogma. My focus on the historical-critical approach is a calculated decision I’ve made to help focus my content and give it clear and strict boundaries so that my work doesn’t creep into areas where I’d be better off keeping my mouth shut.

A big problem with dogmas is that they are not subjected to scrutiny and are usually controlled at high social levels by people whose personal and institutional interests are entangled with those dogmas. Dogmas often serve the structuring of power, values, and boundaries, and often at great cost to minoritized, marginalized, and oppressed individuals and groups. Another dogma I’ve only mentioned in passing relates to the authority of the Bible. This is the notion that what the Bible says goes—the Bible dictates our morality to us. According to this dogma, whatever the Bible says is right or wrong should govern what we understand to be right or wrong. This is problematic. We should be able to acknowledge that the Bible condones and even endorses some actions and behaviors that we widely agree today are harmful, hateful, or otherwise just wrong. But folks who assert this dogma of the authority of the Bible respond in a couple of different ways to this challenge. They have to either come up with a rationalization for why those behaviors are actually good, and thus authorize and perpetuate the harm they cause, or they have to insist the Bible is actually saying something entirely different, and thus sidestep the problem and turn a blind eye to that harm. Both of these responses just perpetuate harm.

And this brings up something I’m going to do in this book that may rub some folks the wrong way. Most scholarly writing avoids passing moral judgments, but this book is not written for a scholarly venue. As I said earlier, when all other things are equal, I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt to the less powerful group. In this book I’m going to be talking about and criticizing some ways that the Bible is weaponized against such groups. Sometimes that’s going to mean correcting misinterpretations that are used to authorize modern prejudices, and other times it’s going to mean criticizing harmful passages from the Bible that are being accurately interpreted but are being used to turn the Bible into a weapon. Sometimes the Bible is the problem. Just because something’s in the Bible doesn’t mean it’s good. Like Steve Rogers said in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), “I don’t like bullies; I don’t care where they’re from.”

I think I’m well situated to write about these different issues in ways that are academically robust, accessible, and also aware of and sensitive to how the Bible is being used within discussions and debate related to these issues. My educational background includes degrees focused on ancient Near Eastern studies (Brigham Young University), Jewish studies (Oxford University), biblical studies and cognitive linguistics (Trinity Western University), and the cognitive science of religion (Exeter University). I worked for ten years as a linguist for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where I focused on scripture translation. My research incorporates methodologies from a variety of fields within the critical study of the Bible, as well as from cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion, and it focuses on conceptualizations of deity, scripture, and religious identity. I’ve also spent more than twenty years engaging in online discussions about these issues.

Some folks will not be so convinced that I have any business writing this book. After all, I write as an active Latter-day Saint (or Mormon), which has long been a cause of concern for folks who don’t think an active Mormon committed to the principles and methodologies of critical scholarship computes. It’s also long been a source of condemnation from Christians who presume to declare that I’m not really a Christian, that I have no business telling the public anything about a holy book that I clearly hate, and that I am secretly just an apologist for Joseph Smith or for Mormon doctrine. “Your Mormon is showing” is a comment that repeatedly gets posted on videos of mine. Anyone who knows much at all about my social media content as well as about Mormonism will have chuckled at the notion that I am engaged in Mormon apologetics, though. It’s laughably uninformed, as I am wont to say.

Maybe that doesn’t set everyone at ease, though. To be more explicit, my scholarly positions are not influenced by my membership in the LDS Church. In fact, my positions overwhelmingly and directly conflict with Latter-day Saint ideologies, and if they don’t, the overlap will be only partial and will be entirely incidental. As a specialist in the cognitive science of religion, I spend an inordinate amount of time studying and thinking about subconscious biases and motivations related to how we think and speak about the Bible and religious questions.

When people accuse me of trying to smuggle Mormonism into my scholarship, it’s usually in response to a video of mine about Asherah as God’s wife, about God’s body, about the mistranslations and textual corruptions of the Bible, or about the New Testament not identifying Jesus as the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. These folks very clearly don’t understand Mormonism or my scholarship, though. None of the academic positions I maintain on these issues are compatible with Latter-day Saint doctrine. For instance, the official doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that Jesus “was the Great Jehovah of the Old Testament, the Messiah of the New.”⁷ Accusing me of promoting Mormon doctrine when I argue directly against Mormon doctrine is pretty silly. On the other issues, I largely represent the academic consensus, which involves textual and historical arguments that undermine Latter-day Saint positions on scripture. It also involves conceptualizations of deity and divine agency from ancient Southwest Asia that—once we get into the weeds—don’t remotely agree with Latter-day Saint theology.

Most of the time, but not always, I’m trying in this book to represent the academic consensus. What this means is that I’m trying to communicate positions that are shared by the majority of biblical scholars who study and publish on the relevant research questions. What this does not mean is that I think the academic consensus determines truth (it doesn’t), or that it’s always right (it’s not). But very few people can access all of the data and scholarship on all of these questions—much less interrogate the data and the arguments—so the shortest and easiest route to the state of the field on any given research question at any given point in time is through the consensus view.

As a result, when I say, “this is the consensus,” I’m not saying, “therefore this is true.” I’m just saying, “therefore this is what the majority of scholars believe is most likely true based on the data that are available to us at this time.” Since I’m not a specialist on every last issue I will address, I frequently have to lean on the consensus view. I’m better informed on some matters than on others, and on some of these issues there isn’t a clear consensus, so in some cases I’ll share whatever leading position makes the best sense of the data according to my professional opinion. Where I don’t agree with the consensus view, I’ll let you know. What I’m trying my best to avoid is endorsing a position only or even primarily because doing so serves my own interests in one way or another. That would be putting dogma over data, which is going to come up again and again in this book as a big-time no-no.

SOME HOUSEKEEPING

There are two things that I do in the videos that I post on social media that draw questions from viewers every single day. One is the avoidance of the pronunciation of the divine name. Scholars are in widespread agreement that the Tetragrammaton as it’s spelled in the Hebrew Bible was probably vocalized something like “Yahweh” (YA-way). This is the academic standard, and I used this pronunciation in my early days on social media. It’s been a tradition for more than two thousand years within Judaism to avoid pronunciation of the divine name, though, and after several Jewish viewers reached out to request that I use one of the traditional substitutions, like Adonai (a special form of the Hebrew word “my Lord”) or HaShem (“the Name”), I agreed to do so. This was not a costly accommodation on my part, and it was something I’d done from time to time in different academic contexts anyway.

Rather than write out “Adonai” in this book, though, I’m spelling out Yahweh for the sake of clarity and accessibility.

Another habit of mine on social media is to always use gender-neutral pronouns when referring to deity (except when I’m translating the ancient texts themselves). This is something I also did in my doctoral dissertation and in my first book, YHWH’s Divine Images.⁸ Because I’m trying to make this book as accessible as possible, and because I’m only going to be talking about deities as they exist in ancient Southwest Asian texts, where they are explicitly gendered male and female, I’m going to use pronouns that are gendered according to the ways the deities are discussed in their respective texts. That means I’m going to use masculine pronouns in reference to Yahweh. I don’t think this will present many problems for the readers.

The chapters progress in a roughly chronological/thematic way. Apart from chapter 1, each chapter will address a different claim about what the Bible says. Chapter 1 will discuss some of the issues associated with referring to “the Bible” and then provide a very brief outline of scholars’ beliefs about the origins of the Bible. I think both parts of chapter 1 will be helpful to keep in mind throughout the rest of the book, since some of the discussions are going to rely on scholarly consensuses about what the Bible is and where certain texts came from, and these consensuses are not common knowledge. Neither discussion will be remotely comprehensive, but I’ll give plenty of references that you can track down if you’d like to do more in-depth research.

Finally, unless I indicate otherwise, all the translations of ancient texts in this book will be my own. I quote from a few different translations of the Bible, but the one I default to is the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version, which I would argue is the most accurate available translation of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament together. It’s certainly not perfect, and I’ll point out problems here and there, but it’s the most up to date and the one I think most consistently gets things right.

I know what you’re thinking now: “Alright, let’s see it.”

1 How Did We Get the Bible?

Before getting into what the Bible does and doesn’t say, I think it would be helpful to set the table a bit by clarifying a few things. First, I’ll discuss what we mean when we refer to “the Bible.” Then I’ll share a brief forty-thousand-foot view of how scholars believe the texts of the Bible came together and became scripture and canon.¹ The second part of this chapter will be quite selective, but I still think having a rough sketch of the Bible’s nature and history will be a helpful backdrop for getting the most out of the rest of this book. Additionally, having a more accurate understanding of where the texts of the Bible came from, how they came together, and how the Bible turned into what we know today will help us to set aside some of the conventional wisdom and received traditions that distort and get in the way of thinking more critically and clearly about what the authors of the Bible were trying to achieve.

For instance, no one who composed anything that ended up in what we now know as the Bible ever lived to see any collection of texts known as “the Bible.” But we frequently think of the authors of the Bible as not only knowing about it, but even referring to it. Anytime someone says the Bible “says” anything about the Bible, they’re presupposing the biblical authors knew of the Bible as we know it today. A presupposition like that is going to heavily influence how we interpret it. But even just talking about “the Bible” is already imposing an organizing framework on these texts that didn’t exist for any of their authors and wouldn’t have meant anything to them. For the sake of accessibility and convenience, I’m going to continue to refer to “the Bible,” but what I’m referring to is the various independent texts that we have since gathered together into a collection we now refer to as “the Bible.”

This raises another issue. All too often, we assume we’re communicating with people who already agree with us about what “the Bible” is, but that’s not always the case. When Jewish people talk about the Bible, they’re usually referring to the TaNaKh, or the thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Bible as represented almost exclusively by the traditional Masoretic Text (specifically the Leningrad Codex). The Protestant Old Testament has the same thirty-nine books, but Protestant translations of the Bible are more informed by other ancient manuscripts and translations; they’re arranged in a different order; the chapters and verses are sometimes slightly different; and they sometimes make very different translation choices. Samaritans, on the other hand, only consider the five books of the Pentateuch to be canonical, and the manuscripts they use are distinct from the Masoretic Text.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century CE, most Protestant Bibles also included a separate section between the Old and New Testaments called the Apocrypha, which contained fourteen additional texts: 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manasseh, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the additions to Esther, and the three additions to Daniel that are known as the Song of the Three Children, the Story of Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon.² Contrary to popular belief, the 1611 King James Version included the entire Apocrypha, although more compact editions of the KJV were frequently published without it. During the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century CE, the American Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society were pushing hard to distribute Bibles, and they began to omit the Apocrypha from their standard editions of the Bible, in part to make printing and distribution cheaper. By the time the Revised Version was published in 1885, Protestants considered the Apocrypha superfluous to the canon.

Prior to the Reformation, these texts were dispersed throughout the Old Testament, but that was because the Roman Catholic Church’s authoritative version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, was based in large part on the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures. The texts of the Apocrypha were composed or primarily transmitted in Greek, and so they were included in the Septuagint. But they weren’t a part of the canon that rabbinic Judaism would begin to establish, based on Hebrew manuscripts, in the second century CE. At the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther prioritized that Jewish canon, and so the additional texts were moved into a separate section he called the Apocrypha. This move by Protestants influenced the Catholic Church to reorganize their own understanding of their canon. While they didn’t move those texts into a different section in their Bibles, they now refer to them as the “Deuterocanon,” which means “second canon.” (This also seems to be what incentivized them to formally assert the canonicity of the book of Revelation.)

The canon of Eastern Orthodox traditions includes the texts of the Apocrypha, as well as 3 Esdras, Psalms 151, and an additional Esdras text. The Armenian Apostolic tradition includes those texts and also adds a fourth Esdras text. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church includes those texts found in the Armenian Apostolic tradition, apart from the books of Maccabees, but adds three Ethiopic books of Maccabees, as well as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Ethiopic Pseudo-Josephus, Ethiopic Lamentations, and 4 Baruch. Are all of these texts inspired? Many Protestants and Catholics and most all Jewish folks would say absolutely not, even though authors of biblical texts sometimes quote or refer to those texts as authentic and authoritative. For example, Jude 14–15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9, and Hebrews 11:35 refers to 2 Maccabees 7.

I don’t know how strong the majority will be, but I am assuming the majority of my audience for this book will be people who have overwhelmingly interacted with the Bible in its modern Protestant form, whether the King James Version or a more recent translation like the New International Version (NIV), the English Standard Version (ESV), or even the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSVue). This tends to be the case within the broader field of biblical scholarship, too. As a result, when I refer to “the Bible,” I’ll be referring to the Protestant canon of the Bible, which includes the Old Testament and the New Testament. However, rather than refer to the “Old Testament,” I will refer to the “Hebrew Bible,” which is not a perfect alternative but is the academic standard. I will also refer to the Apocrypha (outlined above) and the Pseudepigrapha, which is a far less bounded category of early Jewish and Christian writings that are not part of the canon and are falsely attributed to famous figures from Jewish and Christian history.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BIBLE

There’s a very common claim that I see repeated all the time on social media that the Bible is sixty-six books that were written by forty-five different authors, in three different languages, across three different continents, and over the course of around 1,500 years. This is based on the assumption that every last syllable of the Bible is historically accurate, though, and from the point of view of critical scholarship, it’s only partly correct. It would be more accurate to say that more than one hundred authors and even more editors wrote, edited, and compiled the Bible in three different languages, across two different continents, over the course of somewhere around 1,100 years. Here’s how that happened.

The earliest parts of the Bible are probably fragments within larger poetic units found in places like Genesis 49, Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, Judges 5, and perhaps Psalm 68. Some of this may go back to poetry circulating in or around the northern hill country of Israel before 1000 BCE, although they are embedded within larger poetic compositions that date to much later. Historical narrative doesn’t seem to have occurred in languages that used alphabetic scripts until the ninth century BCE, so the historical narratives in the Hebrew Bible couldn’t have been written down prior to that. Oral traditions about folks like David, Moses, Jacob, and Israel’s early judges may have been in circulation in some form in earlier periods, but they wouldn’t have been written down in the narrative form that we find in the biblical material until the ninth or, more likely, eighth century BCE at the earliest. The written forms they took also would have served the rhetorical needs and interests of the folks committing them to writing. In other words, the ways these stories are told represent the periods in which they were written down and not the periods of their original creation.

The earliest traditions associated with Israel circulated within charter myths, genealogies, prophetic literature, legislative collections, and royal annals. These were most likely transmitted through scribal groups, whether associated with cult centers or with royal courts. The earliest of these traditions would have circulated in the northern kingdom of Israel, but the kingdom of Judah would have had its own traditions circulating in the eighth century. Following the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722 BCE, the kingdom of Judah seems to have taken over many northern traditions and even their identity as “Israel.” Under the reign of King Josiah (c. 640–609 BCE), a version of these histories began to be edited and compiled with new legislation to become the earliest literary layers of the book of Deuteronomy. Over the centuries that followed, more layers were added. Versions of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings would also be added to this growing library to create what scholars call the Deuteronomistic History. This history largely describes the kings of the destroyed northern kingdom as wicked, while describing the Judahite kings Hezekiah and Josiah as righteous restorers of God’s will.

Around a century later, during or after the Babylonian exile, a group concerned for priestly authority and ritual purity had a similar project underway that would produce portions of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and perhaps Joshua. We refer to the source they produced as the Priestly source, or P. At some later point, the P source was brought together with Deuteronomy (D) and the Deuteronomistic History (Dtr), as well as with other earlier and later narrative and legal traditions to create the earliest version of the first five books of Moses, also known as the Torah or the Pentateuch. The Documentary Hypothesis is one theory regarding how these different sources were created and combined. This theory identifies D and P as main sources but also identifies two other earlier sources, the Yahwist (J) and the Elohist (E). Many scholars today—myself included—have come to the conclusion that these sources aren’t cohesive enough to be considered independent Pentateuchal sources. So, instead of referring to J and E sources, we refer to the other more fragmentary sources as “non-P.”

Initially, these projects were the work of scribal schools and other elites working to structure power, values, and boundaries in their favor. The general public, which was overwhelmingly illiterate, wouldn’t have been aware of most of what was going on. Festivals like the Passover were known and practiced as far away as Elephantine in Egypt by the end of the fifth century BCE, but the way it’s described there doesn’t match up exactly with what’s prescribed in the biblical literature. So, these texts were probably not widely known in these early periods. This is one of the reasons that multiple different legislative collections that conflicted in so many different ways could still be brought together under one textual roof. They weren’t being enforced, so nobody was put in the position of having to harmonize all the different law collections. It’s not until around the second century BCE that we begin to see evidence of the widespread awareness and enforcement of the many restrictions, requirements, and celebrations of the Pentateuch.³ It’s no coincidence that some of Judaism’s earliest non-biblical legal texts are trying to harmonize the different law codes of the Bible.

In the time between the Babylonian exile and the democratization of the Pentateuch, other texts were being composed by the literate elite that contemplated the problem of evil (Job, Ecclesiastes), aimed praises and laments at God (Psalms, Lamentations), prophesied of destruction and restoration (Jeremiah, Ezekiel), told stories about God’s people and how their boundaries were policed (Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel), and offered counsel on how to live (Proverbs). There was even some erotic literature thrown in, too (Song of Songs). Some of the apocalyptic chapters in Daniel are probably the most recently composed texts that would be included within the Hebrew Bible. Some fragments of Daniel discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls might even come from before the book achieved its final form. A lot of other literature was written during this time period as well that wouldn’t end up included in the later Jewish biblical canon, including influential texts like 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), the Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees, and many others. These make up the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic literature of early Judaism. “Pseudepigraphic” means “falsely written,” and it means they were attributed to famous figures from Jewish history but weren’t actually written by them. By the first century CE, authoritative Jewish texts were being referred to as “scripture,” but this was not yet a bounded category.

After Jesus of Nazareth was executed and traditions about his resurrection began to be circulated, texts that would become part of what we now know as the New Testament began to circulate. The earliest of these were the letters of Paul to the churches that he established during his missionary journeys, which were probably written between around 48 to 64 CE. We’ll talk in chapter 2 about some of the letters that are traditionally attributed to Paul but were actually written by other people long after his death. Written collections of Jesus’s sayings probably started circulating near this time period as well, but none survive apart from whatever sayings were incorporated into the Gospels. The earliest Gospel is the one attributed to Mark. It was probably written very close to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. The Gospel of Matthew was probably written within a decade or two after that, and the Gospels of John and Luke, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, were probably composed toward the end of the first century CE, although some scholars are making a compelling case that both Luke and Acts weren’t written until the early second century CE. The majority of scholars agree that the Gospels were written and originally circulated anonymously, and only had the authorship that we’re familiar with assigned to them between the mid- to late-second century CE.

The book of Revelation was likely written in or near the mid-nineties CE. The epistles of Jude, James, John, and Peter are understood by most scholars to be pseudepigraphic texts written in the late first century or in the first half of the second century CE. The letter to the Hebrews was probably written around the same time, and nobody’s really sure exactly who wrote it. While some of the texts that are now in the New Testament weren’t even written until the first half of the second century CE, it was around this time that the Gospels and the writings of Paul began to be considered scripture. Up until that point, the orally transmitted “words of Jesus” were considered to have greater authority than the “dead letters” of Jewish scripture. Within a couple generations of Jesus’s life, though, nobody really had a good claim to having heard Jesus’s words directly or even from someone who heard them directly, and so the location of authority seems to have transitioned from orally transmitted words to those that had been committed to text, at which point the texts of the New Testament began to be elevated to the status of scripture.

Around this same time, first Jewish and then later Christian leaders were debating the boundaries of scripture. There were certain texts, like the Pentateuch and the Gospels, which weren’t up for debate, but there were other texts around the periphery that were. Within Judaism, debates about inspiration focused on Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, while Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) was sometimes included. Within Christianity, the book of Revelation and the Pastoral Epistles (Titus, 1 and 2 Timothy) were omitted from early manuscripts, while texts like the Letter of Barnabas and Shepherd of Hermas (which would ultimately be omitted) were sometimes included.

The earliest volumes containing more or less the entire Bible as Christians know it today are the great uncial codices of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which probably date to the middle or end of the fourth century CE. It’s around this same time that the debate heats up regarding where to carve out the boundaries of scripture, and the most authoritative volley comes from Athanasius of Alexandria, who had been engaged for many years in struggles for power with Arians, Gnostics, and those pesky—according to him—monasteries out in the desert. Athanasius was one of the most powerful Revelation stans, since he saw it as an effective tool for his boundary maintenance against both the heterodox and the lukewarm. His canon list, which was sent out in 367 CE as part of his Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter, ended with Revelation, and he tied it off with the neat little rhetorical bow of asserting that “nothing to these may be added, and nothing from them may be taken away.” Athanasius’s canon is more or less the list that would be formalized by the Council of Rome in 382 CE; the Synod of Hippo in 393 CE; the Council of Carthage in 397 and 419 CE; the Council of Florence, convened between 1431 and 1449 CE; and finally the Council of Trent, convened in response to the Protestant Reformation between 1545 and 1563 CE.⁴

CONCLUSION

Most folks don’t think very hard about what lies beneath their use of the phrase “the Bible,” but it’s a mess. There is no one Bible. Not in Greek, not in Hebrew, and certainly not in English. When we give priority to a specific set of manuscripts, a specific translation, or a specific canon, we’re already making decisions that are going to dictate what our Bible is allowed to say. In this book, I’m going to try to go back to the earliest recoverable layers of the biblical and other texts to reconstruct how the authors and earliest audiences most likely would have understood them. I discussed my reasons for that methodological approach in the introduction, but I want to wrap up by briefly mentioning some implications in light of what this chapter has shared about the Bible’s background.

Trying to reconstruct the earliest recoverable literary layers of the Bible means looking at Ugaritic and Akkadian literature, ancient Hebrew inscriptions, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, early papyri of the New Testament, and so on. Sometimes I’m going to use these texts to overrule a reading we find in our modern translations. Sometimes I’m going to recommend a conjectural emendation, which is a fancy way to say a reading that isn’t actually preserved in any manuscript, but that we think is likely based on what we do find in the manuscripts. Sometimes it’s going to mean relying on a theory about a version of the story as it existed centuries before our earliest manuscripts. Sometimes the manuscripts are going to be fine, but I’m going to argue that the translation could be better, or that the translation we find in most Bibles today is motivated by dogmas. In short, I’m going to use all the tools and methodologies provided by the various disciplines associated with the study of the Bible, languages, and religion to try to get at what the authors and earliest audiences of the biblical texts understood them to be saying. That’s not always going to represent “the Bible” as you know it, but, again, none of the authors of the Bible was ever aware of “the Bible” as you know it.

2 The Bible Says the Bible Is Inspired

I argue about the Bible on the internet for a living, which means I have a very weird way of making a living. It also means I see a lot of logical fallacies. One of the most common is called “begging the question” (which is different from “raising the question”).¹ “Begging the question” is when someone’s argument is based on premises that already assume their conclusion is true. In other words, their argument only works if you already accept that their conclusion is true, which isn’t how arguments are supposed to work. For example, if someone argues “the Bible is inspired,” you might ask for evidence, at which point they’ll likely say, “2 Timothy 3:16 says the Bible is inspired.” This verse says that “all scripture is God-breathed (theopneustos), and is profitable for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness.” Appealing to this verse as evidence the Bible is inspired begs the question because it assumes (without any argument) that 2 Timothy 3:16 itself is inspired and therefore true. There’s no other reason to accept that the author is accurately representing the rest of the Bible. The argument requires you just agree to that. Why? Because it’s in the Bible, dummy, so it’s inspired.

This particular example of begging the question is phenomenally common in online discussions about the Bible. For example, one TikTok creator who goes by @bibletalk2 posted a video a few years ago responding to the question, “Why do you believe in a book written by people?” The creator answered: “2 Timothy 3:16 says all scripture is profitable, God-breathed. In other words, I don’t believe the people that wrote the book. I believe in the Holy Spirit that inspired them to write.”² But that just skips over the question’s premise, which is that 2 Timothy 3:16 was something written by a person. This creator doesn’t even acknowledge, much less engage, that premise. He just overrules it. You already have to accept that 2 Timothy 3:16 was inspired in order to leverage it as evidence that all of the Bible is inspired and therefore not “written by people.” But let’s set aside the fact that the argument is begging the question and just take a close look at the passage. Does 2 Timothy 3:16 actually say that the Bible is inspired?

CAN THE BIBLE TALK ABOUT THE BIBLE?

The Bible can’t really talk about “the Bible,” because the Bible simply didn’t exist until long after anyone involved in its composition was long dead. The scriptures existed, sure, but “scripture”—he graphe, literally “the writing”—was an unbounded category of authoritative Jewish writings that included far more and different texts than we would now include. It also didn’t include the writings of the New Testament, or at least it didn’t until the early second century CE. It wouldn’t be until more than two centuries later that the scriptures began to be brought together into individual codices and we could start to talk about a single volume called “the Bible.” Jewish scriptures had always been kept on separate scrolls, and those who spoke Greek used the plural noun ta biblia, “the books,” to refer to that broad and unbounded category. When the New Testament was being written, the word “scriptures” referred to a wide and unbounded variety of texts that simply did not match what the overwhelming majority of people today consider to be scripture.

Christians were the first to use the codex to record authoritative texts, which is what would ultimately make it possible to bring the scriptures together into one volume. The earliest references we have to individual volumes containing “the scriptures” is in the early fourth century CE, and by the end of that century, an authoritative biblical canon would be asserted (and later only slightly revised). It’s at this point that we have the first known use of the word ta biblia, “the books,” in reference to the Old and the New Testaments together.³ That word would then be borrowed into Latin first as the plural and later the singular Biblia, “the Bible.” Whatever the author of 2 Timothy had in mind when they referred to “all scripture,” it absolutely wasn’t what we understand to be “the Bible.”

Now that begs the question, what do we understand to be “the Bible”?* As I pointed out in chapter 1, what gets considered part of the Bible, and therefore what gets to be “inspired,” depends entirely on what people decided to include in “the Bible” long after the author of 2 Timothy was dead. Different groups include different things in that category. For us, whatever the author believed about what constituted scripture is irretrievable and thus entirely irrelevant. We are the ones who decide. That authority has been appropriated and is located entirely among the groups of people determining the boundaries of the canon. The Bible itself never mentions any such canons, much less endorses their inspiration. But that begs another question: Did the author of 2 Timothy actually have any authority to begin with?†

THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR?

Christians who assert that 2 Timothy 3:16 is inspired—and therefore identifies all the Bible as inspired—might be interested to know that the academic consensus is that the epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus were not written by Paul and were most likely written well after his death, toward the end of the first century CE or even into the beginning of the second century.⁴ There are a number of observations that have been raised since the middle of the nineteenth century CE that have contributed to this view, but modern scholars clearly weren’t the first to doubt the authenticity of one or more of the Pastoral Epistles.

Marcion was an early second-century CE Christian who was one of Paul’s biggest stans. He was an early adopter of Gnosticism, which would make him one of the most reviled of heretics, but he was also one of the first to outline a biblical canon, and all it appeared to include was only a version of the Gospel of Luke and all of Paul’s epistles, except for the Pastoral Epistles. He didn’t seem to think they were authentic.⁵ According to Jerome (the translator of the Latin Vulgate), Marcion, Basilides, and other Christian heretics rejected Hebrews and the Pastoral Epistles. It wasn’t only heretics, either. He also says that a late second-century CE Christian named Tatian (famous for compiling a Syriac harmony of the Gospels known as the Diatessaron) liked Titus but didn’t accept the authenticity of 1 or 2 Timothy.⁶ The Pastoral Epistles are also absent from Papyrus 46, which dates to around 200 CE and is our earliest manuscript witness to the Pauline epistles as a collection. The Pastoral Epistles are also omitted from Codex Vaticanus, one of the two oldest copies of the full Bible ever discovered. Despite these early doubts, the Pastoral Epistles would be championed by all other known Christian authorities and would coast easily into the canon in the fourth century CE.

So, what’s the concern with the Pastoral Epistles? The biggest issue is that they just don’t sound like Paul. There is less theological argumentation and a lot more attacks on opponents. The writing is also less sophisticated, and many themes that are very important to Paul’s other writings are either absent from the Pastoral Epistles or are represented in different ways. The retired New Testament scholar and Roman Catholic priest Raymond Collins explains,

Some of the more important terms in Paul’s theological vocabulary, “body” (sōma), for example, are not to be found. The title “Lord” is not a particularly striking element in the Pastorals’ Christology even though it is the apostle’s preferred christological title. “Righteousness” (dikaiosynē) has nuances different from those that the word has in Romans and Galatians. Paul’s characteristic “in Christ” (en Christō) formula has a different theological connotation in the Pastorals. As used by the apostle, the phrase is to be understood almost in a mystical sense. When the phrase appears in the Pastorals, the phrase means little more than does the adjective “Christian.”⁷

A large portion of the terminology that is used in the Pastoral Epistles is also absent from the other Pauline epistles (or from the entire New Testament). Collins notes that of the roughly 850 words that occur in the Pastoral Epistles that are not names of people or places, almost a third are entirely absent from the genuine Pauline epistles.⁸ A lot of that terminology is also historically concentrated in Hellenistic Jewish texts from the end of the first century CE and the beginning of the second—texts like 4 Maccabees and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The Pastoral Epistles are also frequently concerned with the administration of the Christian church as an established institution with a developed hierarchy of offices. This doesn’t fit well within Paul’s lifetime and his concern for spirit-led ministry. It fits far better within the growing church at the turn of the century.

Another consideration is where these letters fit into Paul’s lifetime. The activities suggested by the Pastoral Epistles don’t fit comfortably into the ministry narrated in the book of Acts. For instance, the book of Acts ends in chapter 28 with Paul imprisoned in Rome, where he presumably dies. But he doesn’t seem to have taken the journeys mentioned in the Pastoral Epistles yet. Additionally, in 2 Timothy 2:8–9, the author mentions that he is in chains for preaching the gospel. Some scholars therefore suggest that he must have been released, must have taken the trips indicated by the Pastoral Epistles, and must have been imprisoned a second time. Others suggest that Paul took these trips during his other travels mentioned in Acts, but they were omitted from the narrative. Both rationalizations are examples of ginning up scenarios that are not in evidence to sidestep the data and arrive at the desired goal rather than follow the data to the conclusion to which they most naturally lead.

Defenders of the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles generally try to skirt the evidence by shifting weight onto the witness of the early Church and the lack of a clear alternative account of the epistles’ composition. Until critics can offer a more likely explanation of who wrote them, how they wrote them, and why, the argument goes, we should default to Pauline authorship. One scholar who argued this even emphatically asserted that “the Epistles are innocent until proved guilty!”⁹ Others, in an effort to explain the composition of the epistles in a way that takes the data seriously—but also “allows escape from the allegations of deception and falsehood in the process”¹⁰—argue that one of Paul’s close students or followers wrote in Paul’s name while working from Paul’s own notes or reproducing his genuine teachings from memory.

The data indicate it’s very unlikely Paul wrote the statement we find in 2 Timothy 3:16. Even scholars who want to preserve a link to Paul’s own teachings frequently propose that someone else actually wrote the passage as we have it now. While some scholars would shy away from the characterization of this passage as deception, at best the data indicate that whoever wrote our passage wanted their audience to attribute Paul’s inspiration and apostolic authority to their own position on the inspiration of the scriptures. But was that author even declaring that the scriptures were inspired?

JUST BREATHE*

The Greek word that is usually translated “inspired” in 2 Timothy 3:16 is theopneustos, which literally means “God-breathed.” What does it mean for something to be “God-breathed”? Most readers of the Bible have only ever heard this word as an explanation of what inspiration is, so the only semantic connection they’ve ever had for this word is inspired. As a result, it’s the only thing that makes sense. It obviously means “inspired” and there’s absolutely no need to question this for a single moment.

Christian apologists frequently fall into this presuppositional thinking, and so they just end up reinforcing it. For instance, in 2020, Craig Keener published a paper in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society that compared Greek and Jewish concepts of inspiration to shed further light on what 2 Timothy 3:16 might have to say about accuracy.¹¹ The abstract begins: “Second Timothy 3:16 speaks of Scripture as θεόπνευστος, ‘God-breathed,’ ‘inspired.’ What would ancient audiences who heard such a claim assume that it entailed regarding accuracy?” Asserting that the passage “assumes a standard Jewish conception of the inspiration of Scripture,”¹² Keener went on to examine the usage of entirely different words that clearly refer to inspiration, such as the Latin inspirat or the Greek entheos. Not a single occurrence of theopneustos was evaluated as a reference to inspiration.¹³ In other words, he simply presupposed the word referred to inspiration and published a whole paper giving the artificial impression that the word is deeply embedded within a rich literary context related to entirely different words. But what happens if we start by asking what ancient audiences would have understood by the word theopneustos?

John Poirier did precisely that in his 2021 book, The Invention of the Inspired Text, which reviews the ancient literature that uses the word theopneustos (and its variant forms).¹⁴ What he showed is that the sense of “inspired” didn’t seem to be intended in the use of the word prior to the third century CE, and, more specifically, prior to the writings of Origen of Alexandria. Origen quoted 2 Timothy 3:16 dozens of times, and he seems to have been the one to innovate the interpretation of the word as “inspired.” Prior to Origen, the word was used to refer to things like streams of water, sandals, God’s creatures, ointments and perfumes used in preserving dead bodies, and many other things (including Israel, as Keener notes). Referring to these things as “inspired” doesn’t make much sense in their respective contexts (which is probably why Keener entirely ignored them).

As Poirier argues, the notion of “God-breathed” seems to have more to do with the notion that God’s breath gives life, as in Genesis 2:7: “YHWH God formed the human from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” “God-breathed” in reference to streams and sandals seems to mean either that those items have God-given life or, more likely, that they themselves give life. So, God’s breath gives life to his creations, while streams and sandals can preserve and extend life in different ways. They are thus “enlivening,” or “life-giving.”

But what about ointments and perfumes used to treat a corpse? The Testament of Abraham 20:11 refers to treating “the body of the righteous one with theopneustic ointments and perfumes until the third day after his death.”¹⁵ The idea here seems to be that they are theopneustic because they preserve the life-like qualities of the body in case the spirit returned to it within the three-day window. To support this, Poirier discusses some Greek literature that claims dead bodies were preserved and as a result were able to come back to life when the spirit returned to them within the traditional window of time.

The three-day window during which the Testament of Abraham says these theopneustic ointments and perfumes were used should remind readers of the Bible of a well-known explanation of John 11’s account of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus brought Lazarus back to life on the fourth day after his death, and this is frequently explained as amplifying the supernatural nature of the miracle, since the spirit of the deceased was thought to remain close to the body for three days before departing forever.¹⁶ It wouldn’t have been quite as mind-blowing a miracle if it happened on the second or third day. Understanding these ointments and perfumes as “life-giving”—or at least “life-extending”—because they preserved the liveliness of the body certainly makes better sense than interpreting them as somehow “inspired.”

According to Poirier, Origen was the first one to assert the modern interpretation of theopneustos in 2 Timothy 3:16 as verbal inspiration.¹⁷ Prior to Origen, some Jewish or Christian writers used the word once, one writer used it twice, and one writer used it four times. None of these writers used it in a way that clearly meant anything other than “life-giving.” By contrast, Origen used it twenty-eight times.¹⁸ This was no accident. Origen makes the most ardent and sustained case in early Christianity for the unified, univocal, and verbally inspired nature of the scriptures. It makes sense that he would be incentivized to understand “God-breathed” to refer to the divine source from which all the scriptures were dispensed. It was often a focus of his rhetoric. In one passage, Origen argues “in principle it was not possible to demonstrate the theopneustia of the old writings before the sojourning of Christ. But the sojourning of Jesus led those who might have suspected that the law and the prophets were not divine to the clear conviction that they were written through heavenly grace.”¹⁹

While it is still relatively new and hasn’t been subjected to extended scholarly scrutiny, I think Poirier makes a convincing case that the author of 2 Timothy wasn’t referring to the scriptures as “inspired” but as “life-giving.” Origen, writing a century or more after the pseudonymous author of 2 Timothy, was the first one to read it as a reference to inspiration. Because of the rhetorical value of that reading, that’s the way that passage—and that word—have been understood ever since.

CONCLUSION

So, this begs a final question: What was the author of 2 Timothy actually trying to say?* Were they actually trying to say that the Bible is inspired? Well, to begin, the author was writing in the late first or early second century CE, but they wanted us to believe they were Paul writing in the 50s or 60s CE. The author was trying to arrogate authority to their positions that did not belong to them. Next, they seem to have been specifically defending the usefulness of the Jewish scriptures. The text was written near a time in the second century CE when Christians would be debating the value and the proper place of Jewish scriptures within Christianity. We know which side our author would have taken.

The only passage in all the Bible that refers to a Christian text as scripture is 2 Peter 3:16, which refers indirectly to Paul’s letters as scripture. This passage, however, was probably written even later than the Pastoral Epistles, likely around 120 to 150 CE.²⁰ If Paul’s letters were considered scripture by that time, then the gospels certainly would have been as well. They still seem to have been circulating anonymously, though, and writers around that time period like Justin Martyr would refer to them simply as “the memoirs of the Apostles.”²¹ But as the repositories of the words of Jesus—which superseded the authority of the Jewish scriptures—they would have carried even more weight than Paul’s letters. If the Gospels had achieved that status by the time of 2 Timothy, and the author had any Christian texts in mind, the Gospels likely would have been primary, and Paul’s letters may possibly have been included as well.

Based on the evidence gathered by Poirier, the author didn’t seem to have been identifying anything as “inspired.” Instead, they were asserting the life-giving qualities of the scriptures and their utility as rhetorical instruments. The passage could thus be translated, “All scripture is life-giving, and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness.” 2 Timothy wasn’t itself understood as scripture by its own author, whoever they were, but with a proper understanding of the passage’s origins and the sense most likely intended by that author, we could say that 2 Timothy 3:16 is still useful for refuting and for correcting the fallacious notion that 2 Timothy 3:16 says the Bible is inspired. It says no such thing.

3 The Bible Says God Created the Universe Out of Nothing

A popular video prompt on TikTok back in 2021 featured a young woman who says, “Tell me something that is not in the Bible, but people think it is.”¹ The idea was to play the first part of her video and then add your response to it. There were a ton of hilarious videos of people responding with things like “white people,”² “punctuation,”³ and “the truth.”⁴ One response that ended up getting almost nine million views came from a creator who goes by @m_hostilis.⁵ After talking about the names of some of the books of the Bible in Hebrew, he shows the first chapter of Genesis in Hebrew. He points to the very first word, bereshit, pronounces it, and then says, “and y’all wanna know what it means? It means ‘in a beginning,’ not ‘the,’ like everybody fucked up the translation. When I was a kid, my dad used to go to every hotel room Bible and cross out the first part and write ‘a.’ He’d be like, ‘Son, this is a mistranslation. Don’t let these idiots that don’t know Hebrew tell you otherwise.’”

@m_hostilis and his dad are absolutely right. The first word of the Bible is not definite. And his dad is not the first one to point that out. The medieval French rabbi Rashi—perhaps the most authoritative Jewish grammarian of all time—said that if the verse intended to mean “in the beginning,” the first word wouldn’t have been bereshit; it would have been barishonah.⁶ This is what we find in places like Genesis 13:4, 2 Samuel 7:10, and Jeremiah 7:12.

But if we end the explanation there, we’re leaving it incomplete. It would actually be incorrect to translate it into English as “in a beginning,” because the omission of the definite article in Hebrew is a signal that the word is in a specific grammatical relationship with the words that follow. I won’t get into the technical details, but this word doesn’t mean “in a beginning (something happened).” It’s used in sentences that mean, “in the beginning of (something happening…).” With the rest of the verse, it would read, “In the beginning of God creating the heavens and the earth…” This would be translated more naturally into English as, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth…” But now we just have a temporal clause that is still an incomplete sentence.

The full sentence spans the first two verses of Genesis 1, and the whole thing reads something like this: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was mire and murk, and there was darkness over the surface of the abyss, and the spirit of God moved over the surface of the waters.”⁷ Many newer translations of the Bible translate the passage close to this way, including the Jewish Publication Society’s TaNaKh, Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible, and the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version. This means Genesis 1:1–2 are laying our dark and murky scene so that God can begin his creative act. The first thing to change about this scene—the first act of creation—was God’s declaration, “Let there be light!” And then there was light, and creation was underway.

BECAUSE OF THE IMPLICATION*

This seems like such a small change, but the implications are far-reaching. Most importantly for this chapter, it means that there were already dark and murky waters before God’s creation of the heavens and the earth. The earth is already there, too, submerged beneath those waters in a state of mire and murk. The days of creation begin with division: light from dark, waters above from waters below, and finally waters from dry land. The division of this first set of three days results in the environments that are going to be filled by the creations of the second set of three days.

On day four, celestial bodies were created that would inhabit the day and night that were created on the first day. On day five, the fish of the seas and the birds of the skies were created, and they would be the inhabitants of the second day’s division of the waters below and the waters above. According to this understanding, the firmament is really a solid dome that suspends the waters above the earth. This is why the sky is blue and why water occasionally falls from it. On day five, God created the creatures that would inhabit the dry land created on the third day. It’s a nice and symmetrical way to present the creation of the universe as something ordered, balanced, and good. What it clearly does not present is the notion of creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing.

The second creation account that begins in the second half of Genesis 2:4 doesn’t fare any better. It begins, like Genesis 1:1, with a temporal clause and a description of an earth that already exists when God begins the act of creation. Note that the heavens aren’t even a part of this creation. This time, the initial creative act appears to be a mist that rises up to water the ground, allowing for a male human to be molded from the dust of the ground. It presents a more anthropomorphic deity whose feet make noise as he walks through his garden and who creates by directly manipulating raw materials. Yahweh even recognizes in Genesis 2:18 that it is “not good” for his creation to be alone, and so tries (unsuccessfully at first) to create a suitable “helper.” This is a creative process that begins with existing materials and that even involves trial and error.

Many scholars think Genesis 2 is the earlier of the two creation accounts, and that Genesis 1 was composed precisely to correct and replace this rather problematic account. Genesis 1’s repeated insistence that God immediately saw that his creation “was good” (1:4, 10, 12, 18, and so on) contrasts starkly against Genesis 2’s statement that the human’s solitude was “not good.” Genesis 1 also significantly expands the scope of creation, starting with the heavens and only afterward focusing in on the earth. Creation in Genesis 1 is also achieved by divine fiat. God says, “Let there be light,” and suddenly there was light. Genesis 2 doesn’t even address light and dark. Genesis 1 is a much more sophisticated account of creation, though there are still some vestiges of the earlier account. For instance, in Genesis 1:6, God says, “let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters.” There’s the divine fiat part, but where we might expect the text to just say, “and there was a dome,” verse 7 actually points to manual creation, saying, “So God made the dome.” The beginning of Genesis thus preserves two originally distinct creation accounts, neither of which presents creation as occurring ex nihilo, or out of nothing.

THE OTHER SERPENT

These aren’t the only creation accounts found in the Hebrew Bible, though. There’s another one, but it’s spread across a few different texts, and the story is slightly different with each telling. This account also shares a number of points of contact with a tradition we find in other societies that involved battle with malevolent divine forces associated with the sea. The clearest points of contact come from the literature of Ugarit, a Syrian coastal city that flourished between the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. In these texts, the Northwest Semitic storm deity Baal does battle with Yamm, which is the Ugaritic word for “sea.” Through this battle, Baal establishes his sovereignty and kingship, though creation isn’t mentioned in direct connection.

The victory does, however, enable Baal to construct a palace on Mount Zaphon, which allows Baal’s power and sovereignty as storm deity to be fully realized. A related battle between Baal and a creature associated with the sea is mentioned by the deity Mot (whose name means “death” in Ugaritic). Addressing Baal, Mot refers to “when you struck down Litan, the wriggling serpent, finished off the twisting serpent, the powerful one with seven heads, the heavens bared themselves and became limp like the ridges of your tunic.”⁸ Litan is a monster that represents the chaotic and dangerous seas, and elsewhere in the Ugaritic literature it is associated with Yamm as well as with a sea monster called Tunnan.

Now, there’s no direct reference to creation in this text, but there’s something interesting about the description of this serpent as “wriggling” and “twisting.” It happens to closely match the description of Leviathan in Isaiah 27:1:

On that day Yahweh with his hard and great and strong sword

will punish Leviathan, the wriggling serpent,

Leviathan, the twisting serpent;

He will kill the monster that is in the sea.

The words “wriggling” and “twisting” here are the Hebrew equivalents of the Ugaritic words used to describe Litan (the Ugaritic equivalent of the Hebrew Leviathan). The word “monster” in the last line renders the Hebrew word tannin, which is the Hebrew equivalent of the Ugaritic sea monster Tunnan. Isaiah is unlikely to be quoting directly from a Ugaritic text, but both texts obviously descend from a shared tradition regarding the storm god’s defeat of a chaotic and serpentine sea monster. We see echoes of this notion of the head deity doing battle either with the sea itself or with a monster representing the unruly sea in several places around the Hebrew Bible.

Habakkuk 3:8–15 and Psalm 77:17–20, for instance, refer in parallel ways to God doing battle with the sea and its waters. They both describe the waters being fearful and erupting from the depths and from the clouds. Both describe Yahweh sending his arrows to light up the world, and both describe the waters foaming and Yahweh treading over the sea. This tradition is also picked up in Psalm 18:7–17 and 2 Samuel 22:7–17, which are two different versions of the same poem that combines Yahweh’s military prowess as the storm deity with concepts associated with Yahweh’s victory over the waters. Verse 8 has the earth reeling and the foundations of the heavens trembling at Yahweh’s anger, which is imagery associated with thunder and lightning. In verses 10–12, thick and heavy storm clouds are represented as Yahweh’s chariot and canopy. Verses 13–15 use imagery of thunder and lightning to represent Yahweh’s voice, and verse 16 refers to the rebuke of Yahweh laying bare the foundations of the world and the channels of the sea. All this is held up as evidence of Yahweh’s ability to deliver the psalmist from their enemies.

Psalm 104:2–9 also refers to this rebuke of the waters, which flee and take flight at the sound of Yahweh’s thunder, traveling to the places appointed by Yahweh for them. Here we see this notion of God’s domination of the sea and its receding connected with creation, and specifically with the withdrawal of the waters of the deep that reveals the dry land beneath. This is a part of the creative act we saw in Genesis 1, though we’re seeing more details here that seem to be remnants of the idea of Yahweh doing battle with the unruly waters of the sea. We see echoes of the military process, but it has been innovated as Yahweh’s sovereignty is being further exalted. The sea is represented as a sentient agent that stands opposed to the divine champion—as it is in the Mesopotamian and Ugaritic accounts—but it doesn’t put up a fight. It has already learned its lesson. The sea knows who’s in charge.

Job 26:7–13 and 38:4–11 also refer to this tradition. Job 26 preserves the notion of the sea being rebuked in connection with the creation of the earth, but also retains the more archaic idea of God slaughtering the great sea monster Rahab and piercing the “wriggling serpent.” Job 38 describes the sea bursting forth as if from the womb, only to have God slam a door to shut it in. The waters above the earth are represented as confined or bound by a garment, a swaddling band, as well as bars and doors. Verse 11 has God rebuking the sea, saying that it’ll come no further, and that its “proud waves” will be stopped. Again, the unbound sea is confined by Yahweh, who stands opposed to it, but doesn’t so much do battle with it as simply bind and limit it.

In Proverbs 8 we have the personified Wisdom discussing her own conception prior to the creation of the heavens and the earth. Note that these traditions commonly refer to hills and mountains as one of the main features of creation, but neither hills nor mountains are mentioned a single time in Genesis 1 or 2. This chapter shares the similar idea of everything beginning with the watery depths, and then starting in verse 27 we have the face of the depths being delineated. Verse 28 refers to the skies above and the fountains of the depths, which likely refers to the waters suspended above and below. In verse 29, the sea is assigned limits so that the waters won’t transgress Yahweh’s command. It is this compartmentalization of the watery depths that enables the dry land to appear and thus the inhabitable world to flourish.

When we group these texts according to their details, we see a trajectory forming as changing concepts of God’s sovereignty demanded the traditions be renegotiated. It begins with an archaic tradition of Yahweh defeating the great sea dragon, Leviathan, in battle. This then gives way to Yahweh fighting with the sea, then rebuking the sea, then confining or compartmentalizing the sea, and finally just commanding the sea, which simply obeys. Some of these passages represent the overlap of two of the different stages within this trajectory, but there’s a general progression. The biblical authors are renegotiating the traditions of the past in a way that preserves some of their features so that there’s some familiarity and resonance with the older traditions, but they’re also innovating them so the tradition can serve new rhetorical needs and goals associated with the transcendence and incomparability of Yahweh’s sovereignty. God is being exalted so high above everything else that the thought of any entity challenging God—or even opposing God’s will—cannot even be entertained.

Some texts incorporate this tradition into creation accounts, and others use it to praise God’s salvation. The most common use of this tradition as an account of creation describes a technical process, where God is moving back, confining, or compartmentalizing the sea. In the more recent versions of this tradition, God’s command is all it takes to accomplish this. Throughout the entire developmental phases of this tradition, however, creation always involves existing materials.

IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME

The Hebrew Bible lacks any reference at all to the concept of creation out of nothing. So where did the idea come from? When I bring up this question on social media, I can count on a lot of people telling me to go look up 2 Maccabees 7:28. 2 Maccabees is part of the Christian Apocrypha (or Deuterocanon), but it was a text composed in Greek by Hellenistic Jewish authors, and it narrates the events that surround the institution of the celebration of Chanukah. The seventh chapter tells a famous story of a mother and her seven sons, who—as a result of being circumcised by their mother—are one by one tortured and killed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the wicked Seleucid ruler who sought to stamp out Jewish customs and culture. Before each son is killed, their mother exhorts them to remain faithful. In verse 28, she says to her final and youngest son, “I beseech you, child, to look toward heaven and earth and, on seeing all that is in them, to know that God did not make these things from what existed, and the human race came into existence in the same way.”⁹

It seems clear to a lot of people that the mother here is appealing to the notion of creation out of nothing, and there are plenty of apologists who continue to strenuously argue that that’s the case,¹⁰ but the academic consensus has long been that the passage is doing no such thing.¹¹ See, the phrase translated “from what existed” comes from the Greek phrase ex onton, which more or less means “from the being stuff.” This is referring to a traditional Greek philosophical concept most clearly articulated within the Aristotelian traditions that viewed matter that had form and function as belonging to the realm of “being.” In his book On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle wrote, “For generation is from non-being into being, and corruption from being again into non-being.”¹² If matter lacked form and function—if it was part of the universe’s unformed material substrate—it belonged to the realm of “non-being.”

The author of 2 Maccabees 7:28 says heaven and earth were created ex ouk onton, or “out of non-being stuff.” This would be matter that belongs to the realm of “non-being.” For ancient Greek thinkers, it still existed; it just lacked form and function. This isn’t creation out of nothing but creation out of unformed matter. From the mother’s statement it is clear that humanity was created the very same way. The Bible pretty explicitly describes humanity as created from existing matter. Greek authors felt the same, and they even used our phrase to refer to creating humans. The fourth-century BCE author Xenophon, for instance, refers in his book, Memorabilia, to parents creating their children ek men ouk onton, or “out of non-being stuff.”¹³

This idea of unformed matter occupying the realm of non-being is also behind the statements from the New Testament that some scholars highlight as clear assertions of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. Romans 4:17, for instance, concludes by referring to God as the one who “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (NRSVue). Obviously, this is creation out of nothing, right?! Well, no. The translated Greek phrase “the things that do not exist” is ta me onta, which is literally “the non-being things.” God calls things from the realm of non-being into the realm of being. It’s the same idea, though the phrase looks different because it uses another word for “not” and uses a definite article along with the neuter plural instead of the masculine plural word for “being.”

Hebrews 11:3 is sometimes understood according to this philosophical framework, but that’s not the only way to interpret it. It states, “By faith we understand that the universe was ordered by God’s word, so that what is seen came from what is not visible.” Some scholars understand “what is not visible” to refer to the “non-being things,” but others have pointed out that Colossians 1:16 also mentions the invisible features of God’s creation, referring to them as divine powers like thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers. Either way, it’s not a reference to creation out of nothing.

Apologists will frequently cite those passages that emphasize that God (or God through Jesus) created all things (Romans 11:36; Colossians 1:16; 1 Corinthians 8:6). The idea here is that God’s creative act extends to absolutely everything, which must also extend back in time to include any unformed matter out of which the universe was created. As evangelical apologists Paul Copan and William Lane Craig have argued, “it would seem odd to say that from, through, and to him are all things—except primordial matter.”¹⁴ This shouldn’t seem odd, though, for authors who never once mention “primordial matter” or hint at ever having contemplated it. The notion that “all things” must be a self-conscious and philosophical declaration of absolutely all things that exist or that have ever existed, including primordial matter, just isn’t supported by the texts of the New Testament. The most natural understanding of the rhetoric about God creating “all things” in the contexts in which that rhetoric occurs would be as a reference to “all things that currently exist,” which would exclude primordial matter.

Additionally, the New Testament authors frequently use the phrase “all things” (panta) hyperbolically when they clearly don’t mean to refer to literally all things. For instance, after Jesus finishes speaking with the woman at the well, she goes back to her town and tells the people there, “Come see a man who told me all things that I have done” (John 4:29). Did Jesus really recount to the woman all things that she had ever done? In Matthew 17:11, Jesus says that Elijah must return to “restore all things.” Does anyone really interpret this to mean absolutely all things that have ever been will be restored? In the Olivet Discourse as found in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus reminds the disciples, “I’ve already told you all things.” Really? All things? Even primordial things?! “All things” is rhetorical and its scope is limited by the rhetorical context. None of the statements about God creating “all things” occurs within a context that plausibly extends the temporal scope to include absolutely any unformed primordial matter that would have ceased to exist upon the creation of the heavens and the earth.

The Bible nowhere makes any statement that could plausibly be argued to be a conscious declaration of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. So where does the doctrine come from?

NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING, OR DOES IT?

The conceptual building blocks of the theoretical model of creation ex nihilo were created during Greco-Roman–period Judaism, though they had not yet come together to form the doctrinal edifice we know today. The pieces wouldn’t come together until debates in the second century CE with Gnostics and other Greek thinkers put Christians in the position of having to deploy Greek philosophical trends to innovate on their concept of the creation of the universe.¹⁵ The primary foci of these debates were the rationality of the resurrection and the morality of eternal matter.

The conventional wisdom within the Greco-Roman thought of the first and second century CE held that ex nihilo nihil fit, or “nothing comes from nothing.” In other words, matter cannot be generated from nonexistence, and so the material that constituted the visible universe had always existed in some state or another alongside the spiritual world of the divine. It was ever-changing, though, which was one of the fundamental ways it was distinguished from spirit, which never changed. Because it was corruptible and irreconcilably distinct from the divine, which was the sole source of all that was good, matter was also considered fundamentally evil.

As a result, the resurrection made no sense within Greek philosophical traditions. How could a corruptible material body become incorruptible and unchanging? Any hope for an eternal life meant the spirit transcending the prison of the corporeal body to unite with the divine. It also seemed entirely irrational to imagine that a material body that had entirely decomposed, been lost at sea, or had been consumed and expelled as waste by an animal could be reconstituted. Even if it could, why on earth would you want such a body back? Origen of Alexandria quotes the ridicule of an opponent named Celsus to this effect: “What sort of human soul would desire a body even though it had rotted?… What sort of body completely corrupted is able to come back to its prior nature and to its first composition from which it was loosed?”¹⁶ It must have struck the philosophers of this time as unseemly to imagine God mucking around in the pigsty of decomposed material bodies to populate the eternities.¹⁷

Christian thinkers in the late second century CE and later developed a response that argued all matter ultimately derived directly from God. Justin Martyr’s student Tatian was the first to argue (against the Stoics) that God and matter were not coeternal twin principles. By around 170 CE, he had written in his Address to the Greeks that God was the ultimate source of all matter: “Neither is matter without cause as is God, nor is it equal in power to God because it is without cause. It was generated and it was not generated by anyone else, but it was expressed only by the demiurge of all. Therefore, we believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies after the consummation of everything.”¹⁸

After him, Theophilus of Antioch ridiculed the inconsistency of Platonists who believed both that matter existed eternally and that God had created all that exists. Much like the New Testament authors, Platonists didn’t see any conflict here, but by this time, questions had been raised among Christians about where primordial matter came from, and answers were needed. Around 180 CE, Theophilus wrote in a text called To Autolycus, “just as God is changeless because he is ungenerated, so also, if matter is also ungenerated, it is also changeless and equal to God. For that which is generated is mutable and changeable. The ungenerated is immutable and unchangeable.”¹⁹ Matter cannot be coeternal and coequal with God if God is the creator of and sovereign over all. Theophilus even quotes the Aristotelian notion of creation “from non-being stuff” but warps the classical sense to force it into the service of his new doctrine of creation out of nothing. This would give future Christians a new interpretive lens for finding proof texts for creation out of nothing in earlier literature that initially had nothing to do with it.

Around the same time, Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, cosigned a lot of Theophilus’s arguments in his conflicts with Platonists and the Gnostics. He would leverage this new understanding of “non-being stuff” to reinterpret Shepherd of Hermas 26:1 (which he refers to as scripture) as a declaration of creation out of nothing: “Truly, then, the scripture declared, which says, ‘First of all believe that there is one God, who has established all things, and completed them, and having caused that from what had no being, all things should come into existence.’”²⁰ Elsewhere, he asserts, “While men, indeed, cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of matter already existing, yet God is in this point preeminently superior to men, that He Himself called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence.”²¹

In the centuries that followed, Christian powerhouses like Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas would add further flesh to the conceptual skeleton that had come together so rapidly over the course of just a few decades in the late second century CE. Because thinkers like Tatian, Theophilus, and Irenaeus of Lyons had ridiculed and overturned the earlier notion of matter existing eternally in a realm of non-being, the initial intended sense of passages like 2 Maccabees 7:28, Romans 4:17, Hebrews 11:3, and even Shepherd of Hermas 26:1 was almost lost to time. In the end, though, careful critical scholarship helps us to reconstruct a more accurate picture of the Bible’s approach to the creation of the universe, which from beginning to end involved preexisting—and sometimes even sentient—material.

4 The Bible Says God Lies

Judging purely by the number of Christians who hop into my comment sections to judge, demonize, and condemn me, the single most awful thing I’ve ever said is that the Bible describes God lying.¹ The notion that God would, could, or does lie just makes some Christians big mad. Usually, the passage that immediately gets thrown at me is Numbers 23:19, which insists, “God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of a human, that he should change his mind. Has he said something, and will he not do it? Or speak, and will he not fulfill it?” The biggest problem with quoting this passage is that it presupposes univocality to insist that every other syllable of the Bible must agree with this perspective. The biblical authors frequently disagreed with each other, so Numbers isn’t actually relevant to anything beyond the texts originating from the same authors and editors. There are multiple different authors who represent God both lying and influencing humans to lie to serve his interests. These are their stories.*

ADAM’S SONG*

Something I’ve heard numerous times online is that the first lie told in the Bible is the serpent’s statement to Eve in Genesis 3:4–5 that “You will not die, because God knows that on the day y’all eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like gods, knowing good and evil.” This never sat well with me because God himself confirms in verse 22 that what the serpent said would happen is precisely what happened: “Then Yahweh God said, ‘Look, the human has become like one of us, to know good and evil.’” It seems clear that God knew this would happen and intentionally withheld this information. At least that part of the serpent’s statement to Eve was completely true. The other part of the statement is a little trickier, but even if it’s not true, it might not be the first lie told in the Bible.

If we go back to Genesis 2:17, God’s warning to Adam is quite specific: “and from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, because on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.” This means that if Adam eats that fruit, he would literally and physically die either instantaneously or within a short period of time that roughly corresponds to the same twenty-four-hour period as the act. This interpretation upsets a lot of people, and primarily because Adam did eat the fruit and did not die within roughly the same twenty-four-hour period. According to this reading, what God said would happen simply didn’t happen. It certainly sounds like God may have told the Bible’s first lie.

Because of the implications of this interpretation, alternatives have been offered for more than two thousand years.² As far as I know, the first attempt to sidestep the plain sense of the text comes from the book of Jubilees, a second-century BCE Jewish composition that is kind of like Genesis and Exodus fan fiction. It expands, elaborates, and adds to some of the main traditions from each book. Jubilees 4:29–30 discusses Adam’s death, saying, “He lacked 70 years from 1,000 years because 1,000 years are one day in the testimony of heaven. For this reason it was written regarding the tree of knowledge: ‘On the day that you eat from it you will die.’ Therefore he did not complete the years of this day because he died during it.”³ Jubilees may have been borrowing from Psalms 90:4, which states, “Because a thousand years in your eyes are like yesterday when it has passed, and a watch in the night.” 2 Peter 3:8 is probably riffing on the same tradition when it says, “one day for the Lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.” So, as long as we reinterpret “on the day you eat from it” to mean “within a thousand years of eating from it,” there’s no problem.

This is—again—presupposing univocality, though.⁴ It also ignores that these passages in Proverbs and 2 Peter are rhetorical flourishes, not systematized frameworks that govern narrative prose. Leveraging them to renegotiate the sense of Genesis 2:17 just arbitrarily overrules the ways the phrase beyom, “on the day,” is used. When beyom is used to delineate the temporal scope of some kind of event, activity, or state, the rhetorical context and the nature of the event, activity, or state generally govern how we should understand that temporal scope. For instance, Jeremiah 18:17 prophesies that “I will scatter them before the enemy, I will show them the back of my neck and not my face on the day of their calamity.” Here the prophetic context and the temporal ambiguity of “their calamity” suggest a broader and more imprecise reference to some kind of period of time that probably extends well beyond a twenty-four-hour period. The same is true of references to long-term events like “on the day of the wrath of Yahweh.” On the other hand, when Genesis 21:8 says Abraham held a great feast “on the day of Isaac’s weaning,” the narrative context and the temporal precision of both the completion of weaning and the holding of a feast suggest “on the day” here refers to a period of time roughly corresponding to twenty-four hours.

The context of God’s warning in Genesis 2:17, as well as the temporal precision of the act of eating from a tree, suggest beyom refers to a twenty-four-hour period or something roughly approximating it. And this gets us to where the serpent’s statement could be understood as a lie. God said Adam would die the same day he ate of the tree, but when the serpent tells Eve they wouldn’t die, he doesn’t say “you won’t die on the very same day.” He shifts the “on the day” statement to explaining when their eyes would be opened, and they would become like the gods. According to verse 7, those results occurred immediately, precisely as we would expect from something promised to happen “on the day” they ate from the tree. But if we understand the promise that “you will not die” to mean “you will not ever die,” then it’s a false statement.

But because God’s statement that Adam would die “on the day” he ate from the tree is also false, we have to find another argument to make if we want to protect God’s honesty. We have to reinterpret the nature of the consequence, namely that “you will certainly die.” One way of doing this is to reinterpret the consequence as spiritual death. Another way is to understand it to refer not to the event of Adam’s death, but just to its inevitability or to Adam’s realization of it. In other words, what will happen “on the day” is that Adam will be condemned to mortality or will become aware of his inevitable death at some undetermined point in the future. I don’t think either argument makes good sense of the text.

To begin, there isn’t actually anything in the narrative that suggests Adam and Eve were ever anything but mortal, so it wouldn’t make much sense for God to threaten Adam with mortality. The narrative doesn’t mention any prohibition on eating from the tree of life prior to Genesis 3:22, and so some folks infer that means they’d been eating from it already and it had been sustaining their lives, but this raises more questions than it answers. If they needed it to sustain their lives, then that still means they were mortal; they were just unknowingly and incidentally consuming a fruit that was kicking the can of mortality down the road. But verse 22 says pretty simply that if they take from it and eat, they’ll live forever. That seems like a one-off. It doesn’t indicate taking from it provides only temporary eternal life—which isn’t a thing—and it doesn’t say they need to be stopped from partaking of it. I’d suggest the tree of life is being sprung on the hearer at this point in the narrative just to ratchet up the rhetorical impact of the consequences. The concern for keeping them from living forever also doesn’t seem to be part of the long game. In fact, Yahweh seems to suddenly stumble upon the realization, not even completing the sentence before it’s abruptly interrupted by the narration explaining that Yahweh kicked them out.

Next, the Hebrew of Genesis 2:17 uses a construction called the paronomastic infinitive to emphasize the certainty that the verbal action would occur.⁵ This construction involves the infinitive form of the verb followed immediately by a finite (conjugated) form of the same verb. This construction is used more than fifty times with the verbal root mot, “to die,” and in every single occurrence, the reference is to literal, physical death. The notion Genesis 2:17 refers to spiritual death is not supported by the data. The two main ways mot can occur in this construction are active and passive. The active construction means someone “will certainly die,” as we see in Genesis 20:7, 1 Samuel 14:39, and Ezekiel 33:14. The passive construction means someone “will certainly be put to death,” and it’s used in legal contexts as a formal death sentence, as we see in Exodus 21:12, Leviticus 24:16, and Numbers 13:22.

The most forceful argument against my reading of Genesis 2:17 that engages with the grammar of the paronomastic infinitive is that provided by Ziony Zevit in his 2013 book, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? ⁶ According to Zevit, “In most contexts where the mōwt tāmūwt occurs, it refers to death by natural causes at some undetermined point in the future (Gen 20:7; 1 Sam 14:44; 2 Kings 1:4, 6, 16; Ezek 3:18; 33:8, 14). Such a death was understood to be a divine curtailing of what might have been a longer life span.”⁷ There are two reasons I don’t think this is a strong argument relative to Genesis 2:17. First, as Zevit notes, it’s the context that indicates which sense is intended. I don’t think Genesis 2:17 shares any such contextual guidance. In fact, the context of Genesis 2:17 points in the exact opposite direction, since unlike the passages Zevit cites, there is an explicit temporal scope attached to it. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen “in the day” he ate from the tree or, at most, “when” he ate from the tree, which still refers to a pretty short window of time. I don’t think the data support reading the warning as referring to a natural death at some indeterminate point far off in the future.

What God said would happen to Adam if he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil simply didn’t happen. God’s threat is a rash one that I think can be characterized as a lie. This behavior seems to me to fit the characterization of God in the main narrative arcs of the Primeval History (Genesis 1–11) as an antagonist to humanity who was jealous of his divinity and would do whatever was necessary to keep humanity on the outside of it. In the Garden of Eden, they are kept out by being confined to mortality. In Genesis 6, God prevents them from mating their way into divinity by destroying the world with the flood. In Genesis 11, God confuses their language to frustrate their attempt to build a tower to the heavens and thereby make an enduring name, or reputation, for themselves, which could basically render them immortal (think of Disney-Pixar’s 2017 film Coco).

When the story of the Garden of Eden was composed somewhere around the seventh century BCE, it was ultimately an etiology for how the world got to be the way it was. Killing Adam would totally undermine the point of the story. Instead, God just cursed him to have to work hard to produce food. God’s reference to Adam returning to dust was an explanation for the role of the ground in the curse, not an additional curse. Eve was cursed with the physical pains of childbirth, and the serpent’s curse just seems related to the fact that snakes didn’t have legs and were generally thought to dislike humanity and to be disliked by humanity. God’s threat that Adam would die the very same day he dared to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not fulfilled. It just didn’t happen. Depending on how you understand the rhetorical point of the story, you could consider it the first lie of the Bible.

MICAIAH’S SONG*

Another biblical account of God lying is quite a bit more explicit. According to 1 Kings 22, the unrighteous king of Israel, Ahab, wanted to go up to battle against the king of Aram to retake Ramoth-Gilead. In this time period, if you wanted to go to battle with another people, you had to ask your patron deity to see if they approved of the campaign. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t fight for you and that was generally considered a bad sign. So, when Ahab asked the king of Judah, Jehoshaphat, to join him, Jehoshaphat wanted to enquire of Yahweh. Ahab’s group of court prophets all reported that Yahweh said he would deliver the city into their hands. For whatever reason, though, Jehoshaphat wasn’t convinced, so he asked if there were any other Yahwistic prophets hangin’ around that they could ask.

Enter Micaiah. Ahab whined that Micaiah never prophesied good things for Ahab, but Jehoshaphat wanted to give him a chance, so they sent a messenger to fetch him. The messenger urged Micaiah to agree with the court prophets, but he insisted that he’d share only whatever Yahweh told him. Initially, though, he shared precisely the same message as the court prophets, namely that Yahweh would deliver the city into Ahab’s hand. Oddly, Ahab seemed to think Micaiah was lying, so he demanded the truth. Micaiah responded, “I see all Israel scattered on the mountains like sheep that have no shepherd. And Yahweh said, ‘They have no masters, so let each return to his house in peace’” (verse 17). The implication is that the king has been killed.

At this point, Ahab barks at Jehoshaphat, “I told you so!” But Micaiah wasn’t done:

I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne, with all the army of heaven standing by him, on his right and on his left. And Yahweh said, “Who will entice Ahab so that he goes up and falls at Ramoth-Gilead?” And this one said this, and the other said that, and then the Spirit came forth and stood before Yahweh and said, “I will entice him.” And Yahweh said, “How?” And he said, “I will go forth and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” And Yahweh said, “Entice him, and succeed. Go and get it done.” Now you see that Yahweh has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets of yours, and Yahweh has decreed disaster for you. (1 Kings 22:19–23)

Then one of the king’s officials slapped Micaiah across the face, sarcastically asking, “Which way did the Spirit of Yahweh go when he went from me to speak to you?” Micaiah answered, “Look, you’ll see on that day when you go into an inner room to hide.” Ahab then ordered Micaiah thrown in prison, and Micaiah’s final statement was a warning he wanted the whole royal court to hear: “If you really come back in peace, then Yahweh hasn’t spoken to me!” It turns out, according to the narrative, that Yahweh had indeed spoken to Micaiah. Ahab decided to go into battle in disguise, but he was killed anyway.

As Dethklok lead Nathan Explosion would say, “That’s brutal.”⁸ But what I’m interested in here is the fact that the story pretty openly depicts Yahweh deceiving the king of Israel to his very death. A couple of details are worth mentioning. The verb that’s usually translated “entice” is patah, which more or less means to persuade someone by making a tempting offer. The verb is also used in Exodus 22:15 to refer to the seduction of a virgin. The verb is frequently used in contexts that indicate deception is involved, as in Ezekiel 14:9, where Yahweh says, “If a prophet has been enticed, and spoken a word, I, Yahweh, have enticed that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him and destroy him from among the people of Israel.” This is about false prophecy. Yahweh had explained in the verses just before that if the people of Israel worship idols and then go to a prophet, they’re going to get an answer, but it’s going to be one that serves Yahweh’s ends, not their own. The sense here is clearly deception (and translations usually catch it), and I think that’s what’s intended by its use in 1 Kings 22 as well.

According to Micaiah’s vision of this divine council scene, Yahweh explicitly asked for proposals regarding how to entice the king to his death. The spirit whose plan was commissioned is not referred to in the text as any old spirit, but as “the Spirit,” with the definite article. That usage in this context suggests this is a reference to the Spirit of Yahweh. It seems to me that this is confirmed by the official who slapped Micaiah and referred explicitly to “the Spirit of Yahweh.” In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh’s Spirit is an extension of and vehicle for Yahweh’s own agency, power, and authority. When the Spirit speaks, it’s Yahweh speaking, and that’s certainly how Ahab’s prophets understand and present the “word of Yahweh” that they sought. According to Micaiah’s vision, it was a lie all along.

There have been a variety of attempts to absolve Yahweh of responsibility for deception in this story, but they’re not very convincing. The main approach is to deny that Yahweh’s request included deception, thereby outsourcing the lie to the spirit that came up with the idea. This argument also requires that the spirit that came up with the idea not be identified as the very Spirit of Yahweh, but instead as some run-of-the-mill divine spirit that evidently possesses his own agency and will and can take the fall for the Big Guy. Translations will lean into this understanding by translating “a certain spirit,” or something like that. But the plain sense is that this is Yahweh’s Spirit, as indicated by verse 24.

Another approach is to insist that the deception is canceled out by Micaiah’s accurate prophetic vision. In other words, Ahab was provided a true and a false prophecy, and it was up to him to decide which direction to take. According to this argument, Yahweh thereby absolves himself of responsibility for the lie, and because Ahab chose to believe the lie, he takes over that responsibility. This strikes me as a nonsensical argument for a couple of reasons. I’m entirely unaware of the transitive properties of deception that seem to be required for this argument to work. It also presupposes that Ahab knew which prophecy was true.

The only reason to manufacture such tortured rationalizations for rejecting the plain sense of the text is the dogmatic refusal to accept that plain sense. The far simpler conclusion is that the narrator is presenting Yahweh as wanting to mislead Ahab to his death, which he successfully did. That may not fit with many people’s concept of God or even how they believe mid-first–millennium BCE Judahite authors thought about God, but the evidence that the authors of the Hebrew Bible represented God as approving of and engaging in deception extends well beyond these two stories.

A THEOLOGY OF DECEPTION?

In 2011, a friend of mine named John Anderson published a fascinating book titled Jacob and the Divine Trickster.⁹ The subtitle is A Theology of Deception and YHWH’s Fidelity to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle. This hints at Anderson’s thesis, which is that deception within the Jacob cycle (Genesis 25:19–35:29) plays an important role in ensuring the fulfillment of the ancestral promise given to Abraham in Genesis 12:1–3. Jacob is represented in these stories as a trickster who deceives and takes advantage of others to advance his interests. Anderson contends “that God is intimately involved in and at times complicit in Jacob’s deceptions.” According to Anderson, “God’s purpose in engaging in trickery appears intimately tethered to God’s concern for the perpetuation of the ancestral promise.”

So, what’s an example of this “theology of deception”? One of the more interesting ones relates to Jacob’s securing of a wife in Genesis 29–30.¹⁰ He was initially the victim of deception himself when he sought Rachel’s hand in marriage and her father, Laban, tricked him into marrying Leah instead. After finally marrying Rachel and having a dozen children with Leah, Rachel, and their enslaved women, Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 29:32–30:24), Jacob decided it was time to leave Laban’s household and head home. He has to negotiate his wages from his years of service to Laban, though, and he offers to take only speckled and spotted goats and black sheep from Laban’s flocks (Genesis 30:25–33). Laban likes the idea, and thinks he’s being crafty by transferring spotted, speckled, and black animals from the herds Jacob was watching over to the herds his other sons were watching at a distance of a three-day journey (Genesis 30:35–36).

But Jacob is craftier. He takes a bunch of branches and peels pieces of bark off them to give them a speckled and spotted appearance. Then he places them in the watering troughs when the larger and stronger members of Laban’s flocks come to drink and to breed, using a type of what’s called sympathetic magic. If the trick works, the animals that breed in sight of the branches will produce speckled and spotted offspring that will resemble the peeled branches. When the weak animals are at the water troughs, however, Jacob removes the branches. In this way, the new litters of animals destined for Jacob’s possession are the bigger and stronger ones and the animals left for Laban are the weak ones (Genesis 30:37–42).

The most interesting part is that in chapter 31, Jacob seems to attribute the deception to God. According to verse 8, Jacob told Rachel and Leah that whatever type of offspring Laban would have offered as his wages was going to end up being the majority of what was born to his flocks and herds. Why? Because God was going to make it so, as a means of blessing Jacob. In verse 9 he declared, “Thus God has stripped away your father’s property and given it to me.” He then recounted a dream in which God showed him striped, speckled, and mottled flocks being born and said, “for I’ve seen all that Laban is doing to you.” In other words, the deception worked because God made it work. Rachel and Leah were then annoyed with their dad for wasting their bride prices, and they responded, “All the wealth God has stripped from our father—it belongs to us and to our children. So now, do whatever God has told you” (Genesis 31:16).

The way the story is told, God directed Jacob to act as he did so that he could be avenged for Laban’s own trickery. Not only that, though, this is what allowed Jacob to return home with two wives, twelve sons, and a great deal of wealth, securing not only the offspring, but the prosperity that would make it possible for the ancestral promise to Abraham to be successfully fulfilled. When that promise is considered—and it rhetorically bubbles to the surface in parts of the narrative—the deception is more easily rationalized. God is going to make this promise happen, come hell or high water. If he’s gotta grease some palms, mark some decks, and pull the speckled wool over some eyes along the way, so be it.

As Anderson notes, this understanding of the things God will do to ensure the fulfillment of the ancestral promise could cast new light on other similar narratives outside the Jacob cycle, like Abraham’s deception of the Pharaoh in Genesis 12 and of Abimelech in Genesis 20. In both stories, Abraham lied about Sarah being his sister, and in both stories the victims of his lies suffer while he is ultimately sent away blessed so that the narrative can be advanced toward the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise. Anderson describes God “not [as] an aberrant, devious God but a divine trickster who will go to any lengths for the sake of the ancestral promise.”¹¹

CONCLUSION

The Hebrew Bible’s discomfort with divine deception seems to be limited to certain rhetorical contexts where authors are trying to make a point about God’s sovereignty and exaltation over the frailties of humanity. But God is pretty consistently represented as jealous, petty, quick to anger, and violent. God is frequently portrayed in the Bible as using deception to advance his interests, and particularly if it can be a means of defeating an enemy. Ethical frameworks developed later make us uncomfortable with the idea of a deceptive God. But negotiating deception right out of the biblical portrayals of God is an example of trying to make the Bible more meaningful and useful to us, rather than trying to better understand how these texts were meaningful and useful to their authors and their original audiences. While there are a few passages where the authors insist that God can’t or won’t lie, in other passages, the Bible absolutely says God lies.

5 The Bible Says Slavery Is Wrong

In April 2015, a Christian apologist named Frank Turek debated the founder of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, at Stony Brook University in New York. Their topic was “Is Morality Better Explained by God or by Science?” At one point in the debate, Shermer stated that “the creator of the universe wrote a book, and he didn’t even get it right on slavery.”¹ Turek responded with prepared comments about slavery, claiming that (1) slavery in the Hebrew Bible was “a voluntary means of working off debt or keeping captives from mustering a rebellion,” (2) “slave trading is condemned in the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments,” (3) the Bible teaches all are made in the image of God and so “slave and master are equally human, protected and one in Christ,” (4) “Jesus came to set the captives free,” and (5) “the Bible’s main goal is spiritual redemption, not social reform.” According to Turek, the circumstances in the Hebrew Bible related to slavery were not “ideal,” but they were “forward-looking” to better circumstances in the New Testament.

Apologists have since widely shared clips of Turek’s argument across social media from the YouTube account of his apologetics outfit, “Cross-Examined.”² Now, I’m not so much interested in his last three points, since they’re pretty squishy moral arguments that don’t really have anything to do with how slavery is represented in the Bible. I’m more interested in his claims regarding what the Bible has to say about slavery, as well as in the broader apologetic approach to slavery. The three main claims associated with that broader approach are that (1) the Hebrew Bible’s approach to slavery was more merciful and just than those of the nations around Israel, (2) the Bible prohibits the slave trade, and (3) God incrementally moved first Israel and then Christianity toward acknowledgment of the fundamental evils of buying, selling, and owning other human beings. In short, the Bible says slavery is wrong, but the people of Israel and Christianity were slow on the uptake. But do the data really support these apologetic claims?

Before I begin, though: Discussion of enslavement in the United States today overwhelmingly evokes mental images of abused Black bodies scattered around cotton fields and plantation buildings, but the slavery of the Bible is not race-based slavery—at least, not as we understand the concept of race. The New Testament uses a word we frequently translate “race,” but in that time period it had no connection to skin color. It had mainly to do with national, ethnic, or social identities, none of which were divided according to skin color. Enslavement could be organized around these identities—as we’ll see—but not always. Turning the concept of “race” into a question of skin color begins with medieval Europeans, and in large part precisely to rationalize and authorize European imperialism and the enslavement of non-European peoples through the notion that European “races” and the resulting cultures were superior and therefore had a right to be in charge.³ (Modern attempts to covertly defend white supremacy often rather transparently attempt to mask it by insisting they’re really just asserting the supremacy of “Western culture.”)

BIBLICAL ENSLAVEMENT

The Hebrew word for an enslaved person is eved, which is used in the Bible to refer to two main types of enslavement. The first is debt slavery, which is a state of servitude one could enter into to resolve a debt. Biblical legislation related to debt slavery is found in three main places: Exodus 21:2–11, Leviticus 25:39–55, and Deuteronomy 15:12–18. The passage in Exodus 21 is part of the Covenant Code and is the earliest of the three. The passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy are later renegotiations of what’s in Exodus, and there are significant differences between the three.

Exodus 21:2 states that a male Israelite debt slave serves for six years, after which he is released. A female Israelite wouldn’t really have debt of her own that could result in her going into debt slavery, but she could be sold into slavery to settle a debt owed by her father. Verses 7–11 describe her status more as a concubine or a sex slave, but they also indicate that she doesn’t go free after six years of service. She’s a permanent slave. She can, however, be bought back—redeemed—if she doesn’t satisfy her master.

Deuteronomy 15 describes a rather different state of affairs. Verse 12 explicitly states that both male and female debt slaves were to be freed after six years. Additionally, verses 13–15 command slave masters to give provisions to their enslaved people upon their release, and to be kind to them in light of the fact that they, too, were once enslaved in Egypt. Leviticus 25:39–43 similarly tells Israelite slave masters to treat their debt slaves more as hired workers than as enslaved people, but verse 40 also significantly lengthens the terms of their service to forty-nine years. There’s also no requirement in Leviticus that provisions be offered upon release. Both Deuteronomy 15 and Leviticus 25 are innovating in different ways on the legislation their authors found in Exodus 21, but as I’ll explain in more detail in chapter 8, these laws were written as scribal exercises and as elite propaganda. They were preserved and passed on in most cases to help train the palace and/or the temple’s scribes. The vast majority of Israelites and Judahites were illiterate and would have had no occasion to hear, much less read, these texts. It was really only intended for circulation among the literate elite of society. It’s doubtful they ever actually governed the terms of service or release of any ancient Israelite or Judahite debt slave.

The other type of enslavement mentioned in the Hebrew Bible is chattel slavery, which is heartily endorsed in Leviticus 25:44–46:

Regarding your male and female slaves that you own: from the nations that are all around you—from them you will purchase a male or female slave; and also from the foreigners residing among you—you will purchase from them and from their families that are among you that have been born in your land, and they will be your property. And you may pass them down as inherited property to your children after you forever. You may enslave them, but as for your siblings, the children of Israel—one shall not rule over his brother in cruelty.

The text here explicitly designates enslaved foreign people as “property” that can be bought, sold, inherited, and enslaved forever. There is no ambiguity here. Chattel slavery is openly endorsed, although it is reserved exclusively for non-Israelites and sharply distinguished from the debt slavery described earlier in the chapter.

Now, Turek claimed that slavery in the Hebrew Bible was either “a voluntary means of working off debt or keeping captives from mustering a rebellion.” While debt servitude is clearly approved for Israelites, nothing in the texts indicate it was always voluntary (see 2 Kings 4:1), and particularly if we consider the sex slavery into which a man may sell his daughter. Turek entirely ignores the chattel slavery endorsed in Leviticus 25, and there’s also absolutely nothing anywhere in the Bible that indicates chattel slavery was voluntary or had anything at all to do with keeping captives from mustering a rebellion.

Deuteronomy 20:10–13 describes what was almost certainly the standard approach to captives that might rebel. There the text instructs Israelites who are besieging a population to first offer them vassalage, or national enslavement, and if they refuse and want to fight, to conquer them and then kill all the men. That’s what they are said to have done to the Midianites in Numbers 31:7. Enslaving them wasn’t really an effective means of stopping them from rebelling. Enslaved people are just as capable of revolt as captured people. Turek’s first claim is easily and entirely refuted by a review of the biblical passages related to enslavement.

A MORE JUST SLAVERY?

But what about the broader apologetic point that Israel’s system of slavery was more just than the systems of the nations around Israel? We’ve already seen that different texts within the Hebrew Bible portray systems of enslavement of significantly different degrees of cruelty, but how do they compare to the systems of slavery of surrounding nations? We have several collections of laws from first- and second-millennium BCE Southwest Asia that include regulations on slavery to which we can compare those of the Hebrew Bible, including the laws of Ur-Nammu, the laws of Lipit-Ishtar, the laws of Eshnunna, the laws of Hammurabi, the Hittite laws, and the Middle-Assyrian laws.

There are two important points to make at the outset here. The first is that Exodus 21 is a part of the Covenant Code, which, as David Wright has convincingly demonstrated in his book Inventing God’s Law, is actually adopting and adapting legislation directly from the laws of Hammurabi.⁴ The biblical laws were based on the laws of the nations around Israel. The second is that all but the Middle-Assyrian laws come from more than a thousand years before the compositions of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy (and the Middle-Assyrian laws still predate the Covenant Code by centuries). So, the Covenant Code and all the later biblical legislation about slavery should have the benefit of centuries of supposed progress.⁵

According to Exodus 21:32, if a man negligently allows his ox to escape and it gores another man’s male or female enslaved person to death, he owes that man 30 shekels—the standard value of an enslaved person. This is only a slight variation on the fine of 20 shekels—the standard value—imposed for the same indiscretion by Hammurabi’s law number 252 from more than a thousand years earlier. Oxen were not running amok and goring people left and right in ancient Southwest Asia. The authors of the Covenant Code were just copying the idea from Hammurabi’s laws.

Exodus 21:16 as well as Deuteronomy 24:7 address the kidnapping of an adult male Israelite (likely with the intent to sell him into slavery). Deuteronomy more explicitly refers to the victim as an Israelite citizen, but the reference in Exodus 21:16 to an ish, a “man,” is a technical term in the Covenant Code that designates an adult male Israelite. These laws outline different punishments depending on the sex, age, and the enslaved status of the victims, and when the authors wanted a punishment to apply across those divisions, they listed all the different categories. So, for instance, we just discussed Exodus 21:32, which prescribes a specific punishment for a person whose ox gores an enslaved person. According to verses 28 and 29, the punishment was different if the ox gores “a man or a woman,” referring to adult male or female Israelites. Verse 31 clarifies that the punishment is the same if the ox gores “a son or a daughter,” referring to male or female Israelite children.

If the text only refers to an ish, a “man,” then it’s only referring to an adult male Israelite. This would align with the more explicit passage in Deuteronomy 24, which designates the victim, “one of his brothers, one of the sons of Israel.” According to both law collections, the penalty for kidnapping an adult male Israelite was death. The same is true in Hammurabi’s law number 14, although there the victim is the child of a citizen. The Covenant Code was likely broadening the law it was adapting, which is simply being repeated in more detail in Deuteronomy.

Elsewhere the relationship between the Covenant Code and other Southwest Asian laws is not so direct but is probably still the result of drawing from a broader shared sociocultural matrix. For instance, according to both Exodus 21:2–6 and the laws of Ur-Nammu, if an enslaved man marries an enslaved woman, and then the man is released from his enslavement, his wife remains enslaved.

If a man beats an enslaved person to death, Hammurabi’s law number 116 imposes the death penalty. Exodus 21:20 says that an enslaved man or woman who is struck with a rod and immediately dies “will certainly be avenged,” but there is no detail given regarding what that might entail. This likely has to do with the fact that the punishment for killing a debt slave, who would be an Israelite, would differ from the punishment for killing a chattel slave, who would not be. Rather than take additional space to spell this all out, the authors just vaguely promise vengeance.⁶ However, if the enslaved person survives the beating for a day or two and then dies, verse 21 explains that there is no punishment, since the enslaved person was his “money,” meaning his property. A rod was considered a prototypical implement of discipline (see chapter 12), so the idea seems to be that disciplining a slave in a way that results in their immediate death indicates an intent to kill, which was punished. “Disciplining” them so that they survive a couple of days and then pass away seems to have been understood as accidental, and so the loss of the property was considered punishment enough.⁷ No such qualification is found in the other Southwest Asian laws, which seem to have granted enslaved people a bit more legal protection.

In some ways, the nations of ancient Southwest Asia treated their enslaved people better than does the Bible. Exodus and Deuteronomy require Israelite debt slaves work for six years to earn their release, while Leviticus saddles them with forty-nine years. According to Hammurabi’s law number 117, a citizen subjected to debt slavery was only required to serve for three years before earning their release. According to law number 118, a person who was already enslaved who had debt slavery imposed upon them served as a debt slave until the debt was paid off, at which point they most likely reverted to their prior enslaved status.

The two clearest and most conspicuous ways the legislation of the Bible seems to offer greater rights and protections to enslaved people are found in Deuteronomy 15 and Deuteronomy 23. In chapter 15, verses 13–14 require Israelite debt slaves be given provisions upon their release. The purpose seems to be to reduce the occurrence of recently released debt slaves having to borrow for basic necessities and winding right back up in debt slavery. While there’s no parallel in the legislation of broader ancient Southwest Asia, there’s also no indication this law was ever put into effect or enforced. On the literary level, though, it presents an example of a more compassionate approach.

Deuteronomy 23:15–16 presents another example. It states, “You shall not hand over to their masters a slave who has escaped to you from his masters. He shall dwell in your midst with you in whatever place in one of your cities he chooses as best for him. You shall not oppress him.” The other ancient Southwest Asian laws include quite complex and detailed laws as well as punishments related to harboring or aiding escaped slaves, which is forbidden in all cases. The only exception may be a fragmentary law from Hammurabi’s collection, which may prescribe that a runaway slave not be returned to their master if that master has beaten them.⁸ Deuteronomy’s law, then, would seem more merciful, but there is a caveat here as well. The reference to allowing the escaped slave to choose a city “in your midst” to dwell is agreed by scholars to indicate that this passage refers to a slave who has escaped from a foreign master in a foreign land.⁹ The point seems mainly just to be to stick it to other nations. Even if this is the case, though, it’s the only legislation related to runaway slaves, so aiding or harboring them wouldn’t otherwise be prohibited—at least not in the propagandistic legislation that was preserved in the Hebrew Bible.

So, in some instances, the Bible’s literary regulations represent a more compassionate approach to slavery than what we find elsewhere in ancient Southwest Asia. In some instances, the Bible presents literary regulations that are less compassionate than what we find elsewhere. In the majority of instances, though, what we find is more or less equivalent to the treatment of slaves that is reflected in the legislation of the nations around ancient Israel and Judah. The notion the Bible represents a marked improvement on that treatment is just not supported by the data.

A SLAVE TRADE DEADLINE?

Turek’s second point is a good illustration of the next apologetic point: “slave trading is condemned in the Bible.” Turek cites Exodus 21:16 and 1 Timothy 1:10 in support of this claim, and both are basically just prohibitions on kidnapping. The notion that this effectively outlaws the slave trade is pretty common, but would this really have anything to do with the slave trade?

The Exodus verse says, “And whoever steals a man and sells him, or is found with him in his hand, will surely be put to death.” The notion that this prohibited the slave trade relies on the assumption that the slave trade mainly or exclusively comprised kidnapping victims, which is just laughably off-base. The Bible itself describes multiple different ways that a person—even a freeborn person—could find themselves cruising the slave circuit. The authors of this very same chapter in Exodus describe in verses 7–11 what happens when a man sells his own daughter into slavery to pay debts. Nothing prohibits the buyer from turning around and selling her to someone else. In fact, the prohibition in verse 8 on selling her to non-Israelites suggests that her sale to native Israelites would neither be prohibited nor out of the ordinary. Slaves purchased from foreign peoples could be bought, sold, and passed down as inheritance, according to Leviticus 25:44–46. The slave trade was very clearly not only not prohibited in ancient Israel but—if these texts reflect the realities on the ground—was quite active.

1 Timothy 1:10 requires a bit more attention. The passage is just part of a vice list that’s rattling off the type of people who engage in activities that are “contrary to sound doctrine.” One of the types of people are the andrapodistes, which is a Greek word that has been translated “manstealer” (KJV), “slave trader” (NRSVue), “enslaver” (ESV), “kidnapper” (NET), and so on. The word derives from the word andrapodon, which referred to one who was captured in battle and sold as a slave. In its early usage in Classical Greek, andrapodistes could refer to anyone who acquired enslaved people for the slave trade, by legal or illegal means. If that’s how 1 Timothy 1:10 is using the word, then it would seem to indicate anyone engaging in any kind of slave trading was involved in what pedants like me like to call a “no-no.” This would provide some support for the notion the New Testament prohibited the slave trade. But it would also raise questions about other passages in the same book, like 1 Timothy 6:1–3, which demands enslaved Christians treat their masters as worthy of all honor, and even more so if their masters are Christians. Is slavery being both condemned and endorsed by the same author?

The reality is that the author of 1 Timothy was not using the word to refer to any and all slave trading. By the time of the New Testament, the sense of the word andrapodistes that came to predominate within Koine Greek—the style of Greek used in the New Testament—was that of a person engaged in illegal slave trading. We see this in an entry in Harpocration’s Lexicon of the Ten Orators, probably written shortly after the composition of 1 Timothy. This lexicon illustrates the intended senses of certain technical terms used by ten famous orators by quoting their usage. For the word andrapodistes, Harpocration has the following: “Lykourgos in Against Lykophron: ‘But I am amazed if we sentence andrapodistas to death just for robbing us of our slaves.’”

There’s an even clearer illustration of this sense in a Greek story called Callirhoe, which was written by a man named Chariton, likely around the same time as 1 Timothy. In the story, a woman of exceptional beauty named Callirhoe was married to an abusive husband, who at one point accused her of cheating on him and hit her so hard that she collapsed as if dead. A funeral was held for her, and she was put in a tomb, only to come to just in time to startle some pirates who were robbing the tomb. The pirates arrange to sell her as a slave to a man named Leonas, who was enslaved to a master named Dionysius. Leonas pays for Callirhoe, thinking she will make a wonderful wife to Dionysius, and arranges to pick up the contract the next day so everything will be nice and legal. The pirates never show up.

Leonas reluctantly goes to Dionysius and tells him he lost some money in his botched attempt to buy him a slave girl. Dionysius asked if the girl ran away, and Leonas responds, “No, not she, but the seller has.” Dionysius responds, “Then he was a kidnapper (andrapodistes) and that is why he sold you someone else’s slave in an isolated place.”¹⁰ The context could not be clearer that andrapodistes doesn’t just refer generically to anyone involved in the slave trade, but specifically to someone illicitly acquiring enslaved people to sell illegally. The same sense is intended by the author of 1 Timothy 1:10, which means neither Exodus 21:16 nor 1 Timothy 1:10 provide any support at all for Turek’s claim that the Bible prohibits the slave trade.

THIS INCREMENTALISM AIN’T INCREMENTALIZING

The final main apologetic claim, that the Bible is incrementally trying to bring Israel and Christianity to an understanding of the fundamental evils of slavery, is rooted in the idea that God tolerated slavery as a compromise because Israel was too deeply embedded within societies that relied on it. According to this line of argumentation, it would be too jarring a change for them to quit cold turkey, and it would put them at a disadvantage amidst the empires around them. God wouldn’t want to interfere too directly anyway. This argument entirely overlooks that God is represented throughout the Bible as miraculously interfering in human affairs to overthrow and overturn entire social systems on multiple occasions without ever hesitating. Additionally, any incremental change that is identifiable within the Bible has entirely and exclusively to do with how well or poorly enslaved peoples are treated, not with the fundamental morality or immorality of the system of enslavement itself. That system is never questioned in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.

Any differences we do see between the ideal treatment of enslaved people in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament are also largely based on social and rhetorical circumstances. The legislative collections of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy were mostly rhetorical works aimed at structuring power among the elites of Israel and Judah. There are no indications that any of these collections was ever enforced on their own, and they are too contradictory to have been enforced together. (Judaism’s halakhic literature exists precisely to render the judicial cacophony of the Torah coherent and enforceable.) The New Testament literature was written by individuals who had no authority to legislate at all and were reacting to broader Greco-Roman social mores. Both corpora suggest that enslaved members of one’s in-group ought to be treated with greater dignity and respect. Native Israelite debt slaves aren’t to be treated like chattel slaves but like hired workers (Leviticus 25:39–40). Similarly, Christian enslavers are exhorted to think of their own enslavement to God, and so to treat their own enslaved people justly and fairly (Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 4:1).

That exhortation raises another point. Slavery was so deeply embedded in the social fabric of the biblical authors that not only is it never questioned, but it also becomes one of two main governing metaphors for an ideal relationship with God. (The other is the notion of Israel as God’s wife—sometimes faithful and sometimes not.) In the Hebrew Bible, the main verb for “worship” is avad, which fundamentally referred to tilling the ground (see Genesis 2:5), but it was overwhelmingly used to refer to doing work or service for someone, and most commonly the work of an enslaved person (see Genesis 15:13; Exodus 1:13; 21:2; Leviticus 25:46; Deuteronomy 15:12). To “worship” God in the Hebrew Bible is to “serve” him, and this language repeatedly evoked the concept of enslavement.¹¹

We see this in the Hebrew Bible notion of redemption, too. Isaiah 48:20 explains that Yahweh has “redeemed his slave, Jacob.” Today we tend to think of redemption as liberation, but the word “redeem” means “to buy back.” In the Hebrew Bible it has more to do with the restoration of a former relationship, primarily a slave/master relationship. Why does it need restoration? Because the enslaved individual has been sold to another master. In his Hermeneia commentary on Isaiah 40–55, Klaus Baltzer explains: “The slave who has been sold by his master because of some misdemeanor will be bought back and readmitted to the relationship of protection and service. That is ‘redemption.’”¹² When God “redeems” his people in the Hebrew Bible, the idea is that he’s buying them back from another master to whom they were sold.

This framing of redemption is picked up by New Testament authors as well, who frequently represent Jesus’s sacrifice as a payment meant to buy his followers back from enslavement to sin. Romans 6:22 is probably the most explicit about this: “But now that you are freed from sin and enslaved to God, the fruit you have is for sanctification, and the end is eternal life.” In 1 Corinthians 7:22, Paul insists that a free person who was called by God to follow Jesus “is a slave to Christ.” He continues in the next verse, “You were bought with a price.” Paul repeatedly introduces himself and his colleagues as slaves of Jesus or of God (Romans 1:1; Philippians 1:1; Colossians 4:12). The pseudonymous authors of Titus and James say the same in the very first verses of their letters. The Gospels frequently have Jesus telling parables in which his followers play the role of enslaved people (Matthew 18:23; 25:14; Mark 12:2; 13:34; Luke 12:37). If any of these authors were trying to incrementally move followers of Jesus in the direction of rejecting the practice of slavery as immoral, representing the ideal relationship between Jesus and follower as one of enslaver and enslaved doesn’t seem like a particularly productive rhetorical tactic.

The history of slavery between second-century CE Christianity and the widespread abolishment of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE also shows no consistent or curated trajectory toward justice.¹³ The rhetoric of the Bible certainly doesn’t achieve any such progressive incrementalism. While there are sporadic and notable exceptions beginning from the earliest generations of Christians, the Bible was leveraged overwhelmingly by Christian readers to defend the institution of slavery, and the reason is that the Bible repeatedly endorses that institution. In my opinion, the consensus view regarding the morality of slavery was overturned primarily because of (1) advocacy on the part of enslaved people themselves and abolitionists who supported them—frequently via liberationist renegotiations of the biblical texts—and (2) the influence of Enlightenment rationalism and the philosophical arguments it developed for universal human rights. If one wants to argue that these two processes were orchestrated by God, that’s one thing—and a dogmatic one at that—but to argue they’re baked into the biblical texts or were an inevitable outcome of what’s in the Bible is just pure and utter nonsense.

CONCLUSION

The modern apologetic argument that God didn’t get it wrong on slavery in the Bible rests on three main rhetorical pillars: (1) the Hebrew Bible’s approach to slavery was more merciful and just than those of the nations around Israel, (2) the Bible prohibits the slave trade, and (3) God incrementally moved first Israel and then Christianity toward acknowledgment of the fundamental evils of buying, selling, and inheriting other human beings. All three of these pillars are either not clearly supported by the data or are flatly precluded by it.

There’s not a single syllable of the Bible that condemns or disapproves of the practice of slavery itself. At best, the Bible encourages (in inconsistent ways) the fair and just treatment of enslaved people, whatever that might have meant for ancient Israel, early Judaism, or early Christianity. That encouragement also only ever existed as rhetoric that doesn’t seem to have been widely known, much less enforced, until around the second century BCE. If there is any incremental change at all, it is in the New Testament’s expansion of the scope of that encouragement from the enslaved Israelite to any and all enslaved peoples. Whether or not this actually resulted in discernibly better treatment of enslaved peoples within early Christianity is not clear. What is clear is that the Bible absolutely nowhere says that slavery is wrong.

6 The Bible Says God Has a Wife

The first TikTok video of mine that got more than a million views was recorded in anger. Back in 2021, a video caught my eye that was made by a creator who goes by @the.bible.teacher. In the video, the creator was looking up at an article headline above his head that read, “God’s Wife Edited Out of the Bible—Almost.”¹ The subheading read, “God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar.” A voice-over on the video asked, “You ever just…?” and then the creator threw his head down on a table in frustration and let out a discouraged scream while references to Exodus 20:3 and Deuteronomy 16:21 popped up on the screen.²

Because I had been researching the Israelite goddess Asherah for some time and had also done one of my graduate degrees at Oxford, I decided to Google the article and see what scholar they were talking about. I figured I might know the person this TikTok creator was denigrating with such histrionic condescension.

The article turned out to be from more than ten years before the video was made. It featured Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who got her doctorate from Oxford and taught there before moving to the University of Exeter … where she supervised my doctoral dissertation. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a well-respected scholar and a close friend of mine. This TikTok creator was presuming to condescend to a good friend who—because she’s a woman—has had a long history of being harassed, dismissed, and spoken down to by mediocre and insecure men. To say I was annoyed would be an understatement.

The idea that God was thought by the earliest generations of Israelites to have a wife is not controversial among scholars. In fact, it is the consensus view that the Northwest Semitic mother goddess Asherah was worshipped alongside Yahweh as his partner or consort in the earliest periods of Israel’s history. This TikTok creator obviously wasn’t aware of how scholars have long talked about this issue, and he thought that referring broadly to two biblical passages (without ever checking to see if she addressed them) was enough to undercut Francesca’s position. But let’s consider the original question. Does the Bible say God had a wife, and was she edited out?

YAHWEH’S GOT NARDS!*

Let’s start with some archaeological data to establish a bit of context. In the 1970s, archaeologists excavated a site in the Sinai Peninsula called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud.³ The site seems to have been briefly occupied between around 800 and 770 BCE, and a handful of texts, wall murals, and drawings on large pottery were discovered there. Among these drawings are two hybrid standing figures who have human bodies, cow-like heads, and headdresses (figure 6.1). Some (but not all) of their features are reminiscent of the Egyptian protector deities Bes and Beset. These are either drawings of Bes and Beset, or they’re drawings of other deities using Bes and Beset’s features to evoke their protective powers. The figure on the left displays … uh … prominent genitals and is clearly male-presenting, while the figure on the right is widely agreed to be female-presenting.⁴ Their arms are either overlapping or interlocking. They seem to be a couple.⁵

Fig. 6.1

The more interesting part of this drawing is that there is an inscription centered above the male figure and written over top of the ink of that figure’s headdress. It’s a different ink and was probably added later by an entirely different person. The mostly preserved inscription reads, “… speak to Yaheli and to Yoasa, and to … I have blessed you to Yahweh of Samaria and to his asherah.” Multiple other inscriptions found at the site refer to “Yahweh of Teman and his asherah.”⁶

Now, the phrase “his asherah” (asheratah) has caused some controversy among scholars. Personal names don’t take possessive pronouns, so many scholars insist this isn’t a reference to the goddess Asherah, who was the partner of the Northwest Semitic high god El and an important goddess in and around the regions associated with the Bible. Others insist the way the name is spelled, asheratah, is just a standard alternative spelling of the personal name Asherah.⁷ If it’s not the personal name, it could be the cultic object known in the Hebrew Bible as an asherah, a pole of some kind that represented a stylized tree. Such a cultic object would have originally been associated with the goddess herself, but scholars think Yahweh at some point took over the object and divested it of associations with the goddess. If asheratah is understood as a reference to a cultic object, there’s not really a good way to determine if it was still linked with Asherah.

Alternatively, “asherah” could refer to a category of goddess or to a specific manifestation of the goddess. Judges 3:7 says the Israelites did evil in God’s eyes and “worshipped the baals and the asherahs,” which doesn’t seem to refer to cultic objects but to either categories or manifestations of deities.⁸ A modern analogy might be the many different manifestations or apparitions of the Virgin Mary. There’s the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Walsingham, the Virgin of Palestine, the Virgin of Lebanon, and so on. If you had the means, you could go on a tour of “the virgins.”

Any of these uses of asheratah would have derived from the name of the goddess, however, and I agree with the scholars who suggest the goddess herself was in view in these inscriptions, even if indirectly.⁹ In the specific case of this drawing, writing the inscription on the male divine figure indicates they represented—at least for whoever added the inscription—Yahweh and his consort or partner, Asherah. Several folks living around 800 BCE seem to have linked Yahweh with Asherah at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, and at least one person decided Pithos A included a drawing of God and his wife.

There’s another inscription from within a century of the one from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud that similarly associates asheratah with Yahweh. This inscription comes from a tomb chamber that was carved out of stone at a place called Khirbet el-Qom. The inscription appears around a carved depiction of a downward-facing hand (figure 6.2), and it is probably intended as a means of protecting the tomb, the remains, and the afterlife of the person who commissioned it. The main part of the inscription reads, “Uriyahu the rich wrote it. Blessed be Uriyahu to Yahweh and to his asherah.” It would seem that Asherah was not only acknowledged and addressed by ancient Israelites, but even commonly and positively associated with Yahweh. These data support the conclusion that Asherah was represented as the wife, consort, or partner of the God of Israel in the early first millennium BCE.

Fig. 6.2

JOSIAH AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD CULT REFORM*

The Bible itself seems to acknowledge that there was a time when Asherah was widely worshipped, even alongside Yahweh in the Jerusalem temple. The authors are not too enthusiastic about it, though. In fact, they seem to present it as a big problem. Deuteronomy 16:21 states, “you shall not plant for yourself any tree as an asherah next to the altar that you make for yourself of Yahweh, your God.” 1 Kings 15:13 says that Judah’s king Asa had to strip his own mother of her title as queen mother because she created an “abominable image for Asherah.” 2 Kings 21 paints Manasseh as the worst king ever in part because he made a graven image of “the asherah” (21:7) and had it placed in the Jerusalem temple. 2 Kings 22 begins the story of Josiah’s cult reforms, and one of the first things he did in chapter 23 was command that all the cultic objects in the Jerusalem temple dedicated to Baal and to Asherah be brought out of the temple to be burned in the Kidron Valley and pounded to dust (2 Kings 23:4–7). These narratives go to great lengths to paint the Asherah worship that preceded Josiah as depraved and wicked violations of God’s law, but if we look at when scholars think these texts were all written, an interesting pattern emerges.

There are exactly forty occurrences of the word “asherah” throughout the Hebrew Bible, with the majority referring to the cult object that would likely have been some kind of wooden stylized tree. The other references are to the goddess, to a type of goddess, or perhaps to a manifestation of the goddess. All of them are negative references that treat Asherah and/or her worship as an abomination. But here’s the rub: Not a single one of them is confidently dated by scholars to before the reign of King Josiah, who ruled from around 640 to 609 BCE. References in Isaiah 27:9 and Micah 5:13 are sometimes identified as pre-Josianic, but there’s a good case to make that these two passages are later insertions.¹⁰ All other thirty-eight passages are either widely accepted as later insertions, or they are clearly part of the Deuteronomistic History.¹¹ There are no negative references to Asherah that we can confidently say existed prior to the reign of Josiah.

Scholars suggest the earliest layer of what would become the book of Deuteronomy was likely begun by scribes working under Josiah as part of a campaign of cult centralization. What this means is that Josiah was trying to take over all the authority and the institutions related to worship in ancient Israel. To help this process along, he created traditions he attributed to Moses that criminalized and demonized (1) the worship of deities other than Yahweh (including Asherah and personal ancestors), (2) the use of temples and shrines other than the one at Jerusalem, and (3) priesthoods other than the one he controlled in Jerusalem.

Josiah was likely doing this to overturn the work done by the kings that came just before him. Almost a century before Josiah, in 701 BCE, the Assyrian King Sennacherib invaded Israel and destroyed all of the main cities and their cult sites, apart from Jerusalem. Judah’s capital city managed to fend off Sennacherib’s siege until he was forced to return to Assyria. This left the Jerusalem temple as the only operable large-scale worship site in the area. Anyone who wanted to worship in a temple had to come to Jerusalem, which meant all of the nation’s resources were now focused there. The kings between Sennacherib and Josiah were probably trying to restore the previous cult sites and their operations.¹²

When Josiah rose to the throne, he would have recognized the lucrative opportunity of everyone coming to his temple to worship, and so he seems to have tried to bring that restoration to a halt. As a part of his campaign, the book of Deuteronomy served to formalize Jerusalem’s exclusive status as the only location where the only manifestation of the only God in Israel was allowed to be worshipped with the aid of the only legitimate priesthood.

The Deuteronomistic literature then rewrote the earlier history of Israel to make it seem as if worship had always been limited to Jerusalem and Yahweh, and that any worship of Asherah was intentional rebellion against God’s laws. The destruction of the other worship sites at the hands of Sennacherib was reframed as the work of Hezekiah’s own cultic reforms, which were supposed to have purged Israel of inappropriate worship.¹³ The next king, Manasseh, is represented in 2 Kings 21:3–5 as a wicked king who rebuilt the “high places,” set up asherahs, and built altars in the Jerusalem temple for the whole host of heaven. According to 2 Kings 21:20–22, Manasseh’s son, Amon, did the same. So, the Deuteronomistic authors argued, it was up to the righteous Josiah to finish the job started by Hezekiah.

Most likely the worship of Asherah wasn’t considered much of a problem prior to the reign of Josiah, but it fell in the crosshairs of his campaign of cult centralization. The goddess would end up being demonized, and her worship would end up being outlawed. Scribes then wrote this demonization into the histories they were retelling about the earliest periods of Israel’s history. The result is that people today aren’t surprised to hear about archaeological evidence that Asherah was worshipped prior to the reign of Josiah. The Deuteronomistic rewriting of Israel’s history prior to Josiah provides a handy explanation: The people of Israel were disobedient and rebellious. This assumes that the Israelites and Judahites prior to Josiah had been prohibited from worshipping Asherah, but the data do not support that. That’s something that can only be assumed, but assumptions like that are small potatoes for folks who are dogmatically committed to the inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality of the Bible.

RECOVERING THE GODDESS?

The data suggest the worship of Asherah alongside Yahweh was likely considered unproblematic in Israel prior to Josiah. The data further indicate that prohibitions on that worship likely originated with Josiah, although they would later be inserted into stories about the time periods before Josiah. But this means what we see is mostly Asherah being edited into the Bible in a negative way, not being edited out of the Bible. The original claim this chapter is addressing is that Asherah was edited out of the Bible. If we assume that Asherah was discussed somewhere in the records handed down from prior to Josiah’s reign, then we can speculate that those references were edited out over the course of his campaign of cult centralization, but we don’t have a ton of data to work with. And yet, there are scholars who have made the case that we can identify the vestiges of some potentially positive textual references to Asherah.

2 Samuel 5:23–24 contain a message from Yahweh to David regarding how to confront the Philistines: “Don’t go up. Go around behind them and come upon them from opposite the balsam trees. And when you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees, then be on the lookout, for then Yahweh has gone out before you to strike down the army of the Philistines.” The Hebrew phrase rendered there, “marching in the tops of the balsam trees,” reads quite a bit differently in the Septuagint: “the enclosure of the grove of weeping.” “Grove” is the way the Septuagint translators usually rendered the Hebrew asherah, and theologian Richard Worthington has argued that this indicates those translators had a version of the Hebrew in front of them that had the word asherah where the traditional text has berashei (“in the tops of”).¹⁴ According to this theory, the author could have been referring to “the enclosure of the ‘Weeping’ Asherah.”

Worthington (and others before him) also argues that the Septuagint shows signs that Asherah was edited out of Ezekiel 8.¹⁵ The Hebrew at the end of verse 3 refers to an “image of jealousy that makes jealous,” which is … weird. The Greek has “the standing stone of the acquirer.” The differences come down to the spelling and interpretation of the words haqinah and hammaqneh. The way these two Hebrew words occur in the traditional text doesn’t make a ton of sense, and the Greek translators seem to have had only one word in front of them: hammaqneh, which they interpreted—probably more accurately—as a participle deriving from the verb qanah. This verb usually means “to acquire” but does seem to have a procreative nuance in some contexts (for example, Genesis 4:1, Deuteronomy 32:6, and Proverbs 8:22).¹⁶ A title for Athirat in the Ugaritic literature is qnyt ilm, “creatress of the gods,” which uses the Ugaritic version of the Hebrew verb qanah.¹⁷ The Septuagint translators may possibly have had a more original Hebrew text in front of them that referred to an image of “the creatress.”

Another reference to an image of the creatress may have fallen to the proverbial cutting room floor around 2,500 years ago. Raanan Eichler has argued that the story of Aaron’s budding staff in Numbers 17 may have been written by the priestly authors as cover for the placement of an asherah pole before Yahweh and even in the Ark of the Covenant.¹⁸ The story seems to be an origin story for an object that was placed “before Yahweh” in the tabernacle. This object is described in Numbers 17:8 as a staff that produced buds, blossoms, and almonds. Eichler points out that the asherah pole is generally considered to have been some kind of stylized tree, and he highlights another drawing from Pithos A at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud that seems to depict one such stylized tree, which has ibexes feeding on each side (figure 6.3).¹⁹ Eichler argues that the drawing features eight blossoms that alternate with six buds, as well as two items coming out of the top of the tree that look like they could represent almonds. If that’s what’s intended, it would be a striking parallel to the description of Aaron’s budding staff.

Fig. 6.3

And there’s another important object known from the Jerusalem temple and described in the Hebrew Bible that some scholars have argued may have represented Asherah. The menorah was a candelabra that held lamps at the tops of seven branches, six of which curved upward from the central branch that also functioned as the trunk. It has long been understood to be a stylized version of some kind of sacred tree, and a thirteenth-century BCE inscription and drawing discovered at the city of Lachish may provide a link between the menorah and the stylized tree so commonly associated with Asherah. The inscription is dedicated to “my lady, the goddess.” Both of these titles are used in the Ugaritic literature to refer to Asherah. A drawing immediately below the three letters that spell out “goddess” shows two ibexes feeding on either side of a stylized tree that has a central trunk with three semicircles superimposed on it that curve upward like branches toward a canopy (figure 6.4). It bears a striking resemblance to early depictions of the menorah.²⁰

Fig. 6.4

Perhaps the most plausible case that can be made for Asherah being edited out of the Bible comes from Deuteronomy 33:2, which is very old poetry that has long been difficult to interpret. Right before his death, Moses is said to have blessed the Israelites. That blessing begins in verse 2 with the idea that Yahweh came up like a warrior marching from locations south of Israel like Sinai, Seir, and Mount Paran. The final sentence is the confusing one, and here’s how it reads in the KJV: “and he came with ten thousands of saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.” The whole sentence is difficult, but our main concern is the word in the final clause that has traditionally been translated “a fiery law.” In Hebrew it’s eshdat, which would only mean “fiery law” if we separated the word into two: esh and dat. Then we’d have to interpret the word dat as “law,” which would be a problem because that word didn’t exist in Hebrew until it was borrowed from the Persian language many centuries after this text was likely written. So, it’s not that.

Several other readings have been proposed by scholars, and most of them require we fiddle with the text a bit, but there’s no consensus. Some scholars have proposed we understand the letter d (dalet) in eshdat to be a misreading of an original r (resh).²¹ These two letters have always looked quite similar in Hebrew, and we know scribes sometimes got them confused. That alone could give us ashrot, which would be a form of the plural “asherahs.” In the form of Hebrew that was used after the Babylonian exile, the t (tav), could also be confused for the letter h (he). If that’s the case, the word could be reconstructed as asherah. The text would have Yahweh coming forth for battle with “his own asherah” at his right hand. This reading would resonate with the “his asherah” inscriptions found at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom. These are plausible reconstructions, but we just don’t have enough data to be able to say much more than that.

CONCLUSION

So, did the Bible say God had a wife before she was edited out? Maybe, but we don’t really have enough data to be able to say for sure. What is clearer is that the Israelites and Judahites before Josiah worshipped Asherah, and there’s no indication there was any institutional opposition to this. Certainly, there could have been prophets, priests, and others who didn’t like Asherah or her worship, but if there was widespread opposition, it hasn’t left any footprints in the material remains. The earliest signs of the disapproval and prohibition of the worship of Asherah arise with the campaigns to consolidate cultic power undertaken during and after the reign of Josiah, and that campaign easily accounts for the sudden shift to condemnation of the worship of Asherah. From the beginning of that campaign on, we can speak with more confidence about the Bible being edited so as to vilify and literally demonize God’s wife.

7 The Bible Says Abortion Is Murder

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which since 1973 had secured federal protection of legal access to abortion prior to twenty weeks.¹ When Roe v. Wade was first decided, evangelical leaders around the nation condoned or even endorsed the ruling, but that would change before the 1970s were over. Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and others would spend the next several years traveling around the country and ginning up outrage among evangelicals about the practice of abortion.² Scholars have unearthed documentation that seems to indicate the purpose of their campaign was at least initially to galvanize a movement of right-wing religious folks that would become politically powerful and would then help them put pressure on the government to stop it from forcing evangelical universities to admit Black students.³

A big part of this campaign was making the case that a Bible-believing Christian couldn’t possibly tolerate the practice of abortion. This required coming up with a biblical case against abortion—a case that more often than not had to retreat to long-standing tradition. The ultimate goal of their plan—the “keeping out the Black students” part—didn’t quite go as well as they would have liked (though the fight doesn’t seem to be over for some), but they did successfully rile up an incredibly powerful movement of the religious right organized around their newfound anti-abortion identity marker. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court was an outcome of their campaign.

But was their case about the Bible accurate? An image posted on Instagram in 2021 read, “Abortion is only mentioned once in the Bible—Numbers 5:21—where it provides instructions on how to perform one.”⁴ More than 200,000 people liked the image, but it set off a long series of enthusiastic rebuttals on social media from pastors, apologists, and others—particularly evangelical Christians—who insisted that the Bible could not possibly be instructing people on how to perform an abortion because the Bible emphatically asserts that abortion is murder. I’ll get to that claim, but first I want to address Numbers 5.

According to the Bible, if a man was filled with a spirit of jealousy and suspected that his wife is cheating on him, but he didn’t have any evidence, he could invoke a ritual described in Numbers 5:11–31 that has become known as the Sotah, the Ordeal of Bitter Waters, or just the Jealousy Ordeal. It required the man bring his wife to a priest at the temple along with an offering of about three pounds of barley flour. The woman held the offering and was taken by the priest “before Yahweh” (a reference to being in God’s presence in the temple). The priest then mixed dust from the temple floor with water in a clay pot and made the woman swear an oath that she had not cheated on her husband. The priest wrote out a curse on a scroll and then scraped the ink from the scroll off into the dusty water, creating the “bitter waters.” After the priest burned a handful of the barley flour on the altar, the woman drank the bitter waters. If the woman had been cheating on her husband, the curse states that the bitter waters would cause her womb to swell up and her thigh (a euphemism for her genitals) to “drop.” If she was innocent, however, the bitter waters would bless her with enhanced fertility so that she would be able to conceive.

Is this really describing an abortion? The Hebrew verb in the curse that describes the woman’s womb swelling up could also be interpreted to refer to a flower sprouting or blossoming, which could figuratively be describing the womb discharging. If that’s how the text was intended to be understood, then the bitter waters could be understood as a type of magical abortifacient (a bit of dust, ink, and water can’t actually end a pregnancy). But there isn’t really a clear consensus regarding whether or not the authors of the Sotah envisioned the accused being pregnant. There are some complex linguistic arguments involved here, but the fact that the outcome if the woman is innocent is explicitly that she “will conceive” suggests to me that she wasn’t already pregnant. The rabbis also debated whether or not it would be appropriate to subject a pregnant woman to this ordeal (they decided it would be). As we saw with the Instagram post earlier, folks who read the Sotah as potentially involving a pregnant woman have pointed to it as an indication that the Bible seems—at least in this instance—to require abortion, and even to give instructions for administering it.

Even if the text envisions or allows for the accused to be pregnant, the death of the fetus wouldn’t be the primary purpose of the ordeal, and I don’t think it’s useful to leverage Numbers 5 in defense of the notion the Bible approves of abortion. The loss of the pregnancy would be part of a larger punishment, and the accused would be subjected against her will to a process that would (in the imagination of the authors) not only end her pregnancy but (if she survived) also permanently disfigure her so that she would become a grotesque reminder of God’s justice. At most, the passage would indicate its authors considered the life of a fetus conceived in adultery to be negligible in God’s eyes. But this is nothing new. Across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, God frequently treats human life as negligible and in some circumstances even orders humans to treat it the same way. Numbers 5 is unlikely to be a recipe for abortion, but do we have a good idea what the biblical authors’ position on abortion may have been? Does the Bible say abortion is murder?

MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN*

The Bible nowhere directly addresses the practice of abortion, but it does address issues that are relevant to contemporary debates about the morality of abortion. For instance, folks who insist that abortion is murder generally rely on a pretty simple logical argument that goes something like this:

First Premise: It is murder to kill an innocent human being.

Second Premise: A human fetus is an innocent human being. 

Conclusion: Therefore, it is murder to kill a human fetus.

This line of argumentation reduces the entire question of the morality of abortion to a binary question of whether or not a fetus is a human being. The same binary is at work today in the widespread concern for identifying the start of human life. If a newly conceived fetus is a human being, killing it is murder. As a result, according to this argument, we really need to bring only one question to the Bible: “Is a fetus a human being?”

For folks who insist that abortion is murder, this question is easily answered in the affirmative by isolating and then imposing some assumptions on a couple of passages from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The first to come up is usually Jeremiah 1:5, which says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I chose you. Before you came out of the womb, I consecrated you. A prophet to the nations, I appointed you.” If God knew Jeremiah in the womb, he must have had an identity and therefore must already have been a human being. Or so the argument goes. But this interpretation has critical problems.

First, the passage actually indicates God knew Jeremiah before his formation in the womb. Jeremiah’s identity would precede his conception, which suggests this passage is about God’s foreknowledge and is not an identification of when human identities become legally viable. Also, shouldn’t an omniscient deity have had eternal foreknowledge of all humans who would ever be born? This reading would mean people born thousands of years from now are already legal human beings with legal protections. The problems with such a ludicrous reading are obvious. The reality is that the passage is only intended to rhetorically amplify Jeremiah’s prophetic authority by insisting that—in contrast to other prophets called in adulthood—his consecration as a prophet preceded even his conception and birth. This is a remarkable exception, though, and not the rule, so it’s also not generalizable to all humanity (though the later authors of Isaiah 49:1 and Galatians 1:15 would cosign the same claim). Jeremiah 1:5 just doesn’t indicate the biblical authors would have thought of any fetus—much less all—as a legally viable human being.

A more frequently cited passage for this line of argumentation is Luke 1:41–44, which describes the fetal John the Baptist hearing the voice of the pregnant Mary and leaping “for joy” in Elizabeth’s womb. This reading insists that if John could experience joy, he must have been a conscious and viable human being. The interpretive problems here are even clearer. To begin, this is another example of a rhetorical exception to the rule, and it is also not generalizable to all humans. The author makes this pretty explicit in verse 15 by explaining that John would be filled with the holy spirit even within the womb. The author isn’t saying this because it’s normal, but precisely because it’s not. The author wants to emphasize that John is a shocking exception to the norm. The fetal leap is described as a unique, supernaturally orchestrated event, and it is Elizabeth who interprets it as a leap “for joy.” But fetuses do not experience emotions like joy. Those only begin to develop after birth. A fetus also can’t identify a woman they’ve never met by her voice alone, much less know the identity and mission of the fetus she herself is carrying based only on hearing her voice. This passage also just doesn’t work.

Many commentators bring up Psalm 139:13–16 as an indication that God takes special care with the gestation of the human embryo. The psalm as a whole is about God’s love and closeness, and in verse 13, the psalmist poetically praises God for his care and oversight of their development in the womb: “It was you who created my insides; you wove me together in my mother’s womb.” Verse 16 then says “your eyes saw my golem,” which is a word that could be translated “embryo” but seems to refer fundamentally to material in an unfinished or undeveloped state. According to bioethicist David Albert Jones, “The focus is on God’s intimate personal understanding of the human individual from the very beginning of his or her existence, to the present and into the future.”⁵ Evidently there’s some kind of threshold of divine knowledge and concern that is crossed with this figurative rhetoric that indicates the author and their audience thought of the fetus as indistinguishable morally and legally from a born human.

An omniscient deity should have intimate personal understanding of each individual creature of all species, though. This seems to be the rhetorical gist of Jesus’s statement in Matthew 10:21 that not a single sparrow falls to the ground without God’s knowledge and attention, or his other statement in Luke 12:6 that you can buy sparrows super cheap, but God doesn’t forget a single one of them. Does this not also extend to their own gestation? Do we imagine that God says, “They’re not my problem until the eggs hatch”? If God feeds the birds and even clothes the flowers (Matthew 6:25–30), it sounds like that intimate personal care and understanding extends beyond the fauna to include the flora as well. “That’s just rhetoric!” you might object, and you’d be right. The same is also true of Psalm 139, Jeremiah 1:5, and Luke 1:41–44. The praise and the rhetorical turns of phrase we find in these and other passages are powerful and moving, but they’re not part of a self-conscious and systematic anthropological theory that harmonizes seamlessly with their moral and legal frameworks. They don’t tell us what the biblical authors and audiences thought about the legal status of the fetus or the morality of abortion.

If we want to answer questions about ancient perspectives on the legal status of the unborn, we have to snoop around in the Bible’s legislative district. It’s here that we find different ways of approaching legal consequences to the loss of life. The Hebrew Bible punishes what it clearly considers to be murder with what is called “talionic justice,” or the principle of “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life.” If you illegally take another person’s life, the penalty is that your life is taken. But a careful reading shows that its conceptualization of what might and might not constitute murder is more complex than a simple binary of human life or not human life.

For instance, Exodus 21:28–32 lays out penalties associated with an ox that gores an Israelite citizen to death. If it’s a first offense, the ox itself is killed and its meat is not allowed to be eaten. If the owner has already been warned about his ox’s aggression, the ox is still killed, but there are two possible outcomes for the owner: He’s either killed or the victim’s family can determine a price the owner must pay to “redeem” himself. Presumably that price could get very steep. The “life for life” principle is in play here, but the victim’s family has the option of exercising a bit of a relief valve, since the owner’s culpability is still somewhat indirect. It’s kinda murder, but also kinda not.

Here’s the rub, though: Verse 32 then says that if the victim is an enslaved person, the owner is just on the hook for 30 shekels, which was the traditional price of an enslaved person (see chapter 5). The enslaved person was considered a human being, but the “life for life” principle was simply not on the table. Their life was not equivalent to the life of an Israelite citizen, and so the loss of their life was not punishable by the loss of the citizen’s life. The standardized monetary penalty indicates the enslaved person was thought of as occupying a specific prescribed space somewhere between person and property.

This is made rather explicit in verses 20 and 21 of the same chapter. Verse 20 explains that a man who beats his enslaved person to death should be punished (it conspicuously does not indicate the death penalty). Verse 21, however, states that if the enslaved person survives for a day or two before passing away, he is not to be punished, since the enslaved person is “his silver” (meaning “his property”). The idea here is that if the enslaved person survives for a day or two, the beating must have been intended as disciplinary rather than done with the intent to kill. In that case, the death was unintentional, and the loss of property is considered punishment enough. Even more explicit still, Leviticus 25:44–46 endorses chattel slavery for enslaved people acquired from foreign nations, explicitly describing them as ahuzah (“property” or “possession”). It says they may be bought, sold, and passed down as inheritance.

At least for these passages, the question of whether or not something is murder can’t be reduced to a binary question of human being or not. Some human beings were more human than others. A more appropriate framework would be a continuum, or spectrum, of personhood running from “person” to “property,” where a specific degree of personhood is required for the killing of an individual to be considered murder. So, what degree of personhood did the biblical authors believe was possessed by a fetus? It just so happens that Exodus 21 is the only place in all the Bible that offers a clear answer. Exodus 21:22–25 describes the penalties to be imposed if men who are fighting injure a pregnant woman. The penalties are tied to two different outcomes of the injury. If the injury causes the woman to miscarry, the woman’s husband determines a fine for the perpetrators that must be approved by some kind of arbitration (the Hebrew word is not clear). If the injury causes harm to the woman, the punishment is talionic, or retaliatory. The text states, “then you will give life for life, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.” In short, you punish the perpetrator with whatever injury the woman sustained, up to and including taking their life.

The difference in penalties here clearly indicates a fetus was not considered to have the same degree of legal and moral personhood as a born person. Like the enslaved person, “life for life” was not on the table—not even “bruise for bruise”—but unlike the enslaved person, society had assigned no standardized value. Instead, the woman’s husband determined the value to assign, which I would argue indicates two things. First, a fetus occupied a position on the spectrum of personhood even closer to “property” than an enslaved person. It was entirely up to the husband to determine the value of the fetus. Society had no stake in that, apart from requiring arbitration that would prevent too exorbitant a fine. Second, a fetus was considered the property of the husband. In light of this, there is no real case to make that the authors of Exodus 21 would have considered abortion to be murder.

THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT

Many conservative readers of the Bible recognize the implications of this reading and so have argued strenuously for a different interpretation. Instead of understanding the first outcome to be miscarriage, they argue it refers to premature birth that results in no other harm to the child or the mother. They understand the second outcome to be the death of the fetus, which results in the death penalty. The main support for this reading comes from the argument that the description of the first outcome is unlikely to refer to miscarriage. Literally it says, “her children go out and there is no tragedy.” According to this interpretation, the Hebrew verb yatza, “to leave/come out,” is being used to refer to a healthy delivery and not to miscarriage, and therefore the outcome here is premature birth that results in no other harm to the infant. The “tragedy” that occurs in the second outcome must therefore refer to the death of the infant following the premature birth.

This interpretation is flawed for four main reasons. The first is that the argument from the Hebrew is inaccurate. While the verb yatza isn’t the normal way to refer to miscarriage, it is still used in some places in connection with stillbirth and miscarriage, like Numbers 12:12, Job 3:11, and Psalm 144:14. Additionally, when referring to live birth, it’s always a normal and natural delivery and not a premature one or one induced by injury. This reading also doesn’t make sense of the plural noun “children.” Does this law only apply if a woman is pregnant with twins? The plural more likely refers to all the substances contained within her womb, which is imagery more clearly associated with the loss of a pregnancy than with a healthy delivery.

This alone doesn’t settle the question, though.

The second reason is that the imposition of a fine for the premature birth of a child who is close enough to full term to survive violates the entire logic of the fines found throughout the Hebrew Bible. Fines are imposed where there is real material or monetary loss, not where one could imagine that the premature birth of a healthy baby could impose some slight inconvenience.

The third reason is even more compelling. This same law is found repeated in the law collections of several different ancient Southwest Asian societies, and all those other laws refer even more explicitly to the same two potential outcomes of injury to a pregnant woman: miscarriage and the death of the woman. Exodus 21:22–23 is adapting laws 209–210 from the Laws of Hammurabi, which state, “If a citizen strikes the daughter of a citizen and he causes her to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh out ten shekels of silver for her fetus. If that woman dies, they shall kill his daughter.”⁶

A Sumerian law code from the century before Hammurabi states that if a man “strikes the daughter of a man and causes her to lose her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver 30 shekels of silver. If she dies, that male shall be killed.” Hittite and Middle-Assyrian law codes similarly impose fines for causing a female citizen to miscarry and impose some kind of retaliatory justice for causing the death of a female citizen. In the Hittite laws, the fine is higher if the woman’s pregnancy was in the tenth month. In the Middle-Assyrian laws, the assailant is executed if the fetus was male and the woman’s husband had no other male children. If the fetus was female, only a fine is imposed. Injury to a woman that results either in miscarriage or her death is repeatedly addressed in the laws of ancient Southwest Asia. Injury to a woman that results in a premature birth and no further injury to the newborn is never addressed. While it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that Exodus is intentionally overturning the pattern to assign more value to a fetus, there are no data that point in that direction.

The fourth reason the conservative reading is flawed is that it contradicts the consistent perspective of the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism, where the most essential feature of human life is breath. In Genesis 2:7, the human become a “living soul” once the “breath of life” is breathed into “his nostrils.” In Genesis 7:22, the flood was said to have killed birds, animals, creeping things, and humans—everything that had the “breath of the spirit of life in its nostrils.” The basic Hebrew word for “life” is hayyim, but two other words that are frequently used as synonyms for “life” are ruah, which is sometimes translated “spirit” but refers to breath or wind, and nefesh, which is sometimes translated “soul” but refers to the neck or to breath. Passages in Leviticus 17 that say “the life of all flesh is its blood” refer entirely to a restriction on eating blood, and even the word there rendered “life” is nefesh (“breath”).

The early rabbinic literature and medieval and modern Jewish authorities affirm the same understanding. Rashi, Ramban, Abraham ibn Ezra, Malbim, Baruch Epstein, and many others interpret Exodus 21:22–23 to mean a fetus does not possess legal personhood. In early rabbinic writings, fetuses are described as “mere fluid” prior to forty days of gestation, at which point they become a part of their mother’s “thigh.” According to the Mishnah and medieval Jewish commentators, a fetus did not become a nefesh—a “soul”—until their head or the majority of their body had departed from the womb. Mishnah Oholot explains, “When a woman is in difficult labor, one may cut up the fetus in her stomach and take it out limb by limb, for her life takes precedence of its life. Once most of it has come out one may not touch it, for one may not push aside one soul for another.”⁷

A woman named Amanda Herring provided a striking illustration of this belief within modern Judaism when she attended a protest in Washington, D.C. following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The striking part was that she was due to give birth the very next day to her second child, and she had written on her very large and exposed belly “NOT YET A HUMAN.” Her one-year-old son, Abraham, wore a shirt that had “A HUMAN” written across it. She had no intention at all of terminating her pregnancy, but she wanted to make a point about her own religious beliefs. She said, “I’m Jewish and according to Jewish law and tradition, life begins with the first breath at birth, and that if anything were to happen up until then that it is part of me, and it is my decision, it’s part of my body—it’s like a limb. It’s a significant part of me, but it’s my decision.”⁸

This traditional Jewish understanding of life as beginning at birth has influenced Christian concepts of personhood as they have existed apart from debates about abortion. Except for special regulations about abortion, fetuses have never been given rights associated with legal personhood within nations like the United States that have been governed or heavily influenced by Christianity. There are no state or federal certificates of conception or of quickening. Measuring the population never takes fetuses into account. “Conception citizenship” would cause even more apoplexy among right-wing authoritarians than is currently being caused by birthright citizenship. Don’t even think about life insurance or tax breaks for embryos upon a positive pregnancy test.

Even within conservative Christian religious traditions today, miscarried fetuses are only assigned personhood by groups that use such assignments to advance an anti-abortion agenda. My own Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has no formal doctrine of when ensoulment occurs (when the soul enters the body). As a result, proxy temple ordinances that are considered necessary for the salvation of deceased people who did not receive them in life are not performed for miscarried fetuses or stillborn children. Across the modern Christian world, legal and moral personhood is only assigned to fetuses within the debate about the morality of abortion and for ideologies directly influenced by that debate. Outside of that debate, they are consistently denied legal and moral personhood.

ABORTION IN THE GRECO-ROMAN AND CHRISTIAN WORLD

To segue into the next part of the chapter, let’s return to the law in Exodus 21:22–25 about injury to a pregnant woman or to her fetus. This passage was probably translated into Greek in the third century BCE, multiple centuries after its original composition, and in that Hellenistic context the translators understood the passage in a much different way. The Hebrew word that refers to the death of the woman is ason. The Greek translators, however, seem somehow to have associated the Hebrew word ason with the Greek word soma, which means “body.” As a result, they understood the fine to be imposed if there was “no body”—the fetus was not fully formed—and the death penalty to be imposed if there was a “body”—the fetus was fully formed. According to this reading, once a fetus was fully formed, they achieved a degree of moral and legal personhood that meant their killing was punishable by death. Philo of Alexandria certainly understood it this way when he referred to Moses pronouncing “the sentence of death against those who cause the miscarriage of mothers in cases where the foetus is fully formed.”⁹

So what changed?

The translation of the book of Exodus into Greek would have been done by highly educated Greco-Roman Jewish people likely living in Alexandria, Egypt. These folks would have been familiar with existing Greco-Roman ideas about personhood, and around that time, a fetus was thought to become a person when the human soul entered the body (“ensoulment”). There were three general views on this that corresponded to popular philosophical schools of that day. According to Stoicism, it was contact with the air at birth that marked the joining of soul to body and the initial achievement of personhood. Within Epicureanism and Pythagoreanism, ensoulment was understood to correspond with conception. The Aristotelian view held that human ensoulment occurred around day forty of the gestational period for male fetuses and day ninety for female fetuses (women were thought to develop more slowly and to basically be underdeveloped men).

The wildly inaccurate science aside, this was frequently linked with the “quickening,” or the point at which a mother can begin to feel the fetus moving. The English word “quick” originally meant “alive,” and so “quickening” would mean “coming to life” or “receiving life.” This would happen with the fetus’s full formation and likely influenced how the Septuagint translators interpreted Exodus 21:22–23. This may also make sense of Ecclesiastes 11:5. The text was written either during the Persian or Greco-Roman periods, and although it’s difficult to interpret, one way to read it is as a reference to the “breath” coming to “the bones in the womb of the pregnant one.” If this interpretation is accurate, the quickening is being represented as the fetus becoming enlivened by a kind of figurative breath.

Within a few centuries of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, Rabbinic Judaism moved away from the use of Greek and distinguished itself in many ways from the more philosophically oriented thinking of Greco-Roman period Judaism. As a result, the literature of rabbinic Judaism doesn’t preserve the Septuagint’s unique interpretation of our passage in Exodus 21. Early Christianity, however, developed more directly out of Greco-Roman period Judaism and used Greek for much longer, so a lot of what rabbinic Judaism left behind was preserved within early Christianity. This means the Septuagint and its interpretations, as well as the philosophical perspectives that influenced it, were prominent within the development of Christianity.¹⁰ Early Christians also pushed back against the violent and dehumanizing systems within the Roman Empire, which led to a deeper concern for the human soul and its sanctity. The Bible was largely appealed to as a proof text for these concerns, but any search for a position on abortion or the personhood of fetuses in the New Testament turns up empty. The closest we can get is the speculation that the condemnation of pharmakon (“poisons,” “potions,” or “spells”) in Revelation 9:21 may possibly include abortifacients.

The earliest Christian texts to explicitly condemn abortion are the early second-century CE Didache 2:2 and The Epistle of Barnabas 19:5, and they subsumed this condemnation under the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. All early Christians who comment on abortion condemn it as immoral, often lumping it together with the Roman practice of exposing unwanted infants—personhood in the Roman world often wasn’t fully achieved until days or even months after birth—but it wasn’t always considered to be murder. It became murder only if a human soul was understood to be present, and a consensus regarding where to locate that threshold wouldn’t emerge until Augustine. According to Rabbi Daniel Schiff, by the third century CE,

Christianity had absorbed the Pythagorean Greek view that the soul was infused at the moment of conception. Though this view was confirmed by St. Gregory of Nyssa a century later, it would not be long before it would be rejected by Augustine in favor of the Septuagintal notion that only a formed fetus possessed a human soul. While Augustine speculated whether “animation” might be present prior to formation, he determined that abortion could only be defined as homicide once formation had occurred.¹¹

CONCLUSION

The Bible never suggests that abortion is murder. Even for those within early Judaism and Christianity who spoke most harshly about the depravity of abortion, its identification as murder didn’t come down to the question “is a fetus human?” but to the question “when is a fetus a person?” The clearest answer we can find in the Hebrew Bible seems to be that a fetus becomes a person at birth. This position shifted once early Judaism and Christianity fell under the influence of Greco-Roman society and Greek philosophy. Different theories of human ensoulment led to different ideas about when abortion transitioned from an unseemly act to an act of murder, though none of these positions bubble to the surface in the New Testament. Rabbinic Judaism would slough off most of the trappings of that particular philosophical bent in favor of a jurisprudence informed more directly by the Hebrew Bible, but Christianity remained wedded to the Greek philosophical worldview and would ultimately arrive at the consensus that abortion became murder at the quickening. Aristotle would win the day. It would stay that way for more than a millennium and a half.¹²

8 The Bible Says Rape Victims Must Marry Their Rapists

In December 2023, a Christian YouTuber named Allen Parr posted a video attributing the following claim to an atheist: “Your Bible says a woman must marry her rapist!”¹ Parr began his response by providing the reference for this claim (Deuteronomy 22:28–29) from the NIV: “If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.” The punishment here applies to the perpetrator and not the victim, but the agency of the victim isn’t really taken into account at all. Does it really require she marry her rapist? Parr doesn’t answer this question, because he doesn’t even think the passage is referring to rape.

After reviewing the context of the passage, Parr insisted the NIV is poorly translated, and recommends the New Living Translation’s rendering of verse 28: “Suppose a man has intercourse with a young woman who is a virgin but is not engaged to be married…” This changes everything, according to Parr. See, verses 28–29 are about consensual sex. The penalties associated with rape were already dealt with in verses 23–27 of this chapter. According to Parr, this passage can’t require rape victims to marry their rapists because this passage isn’t even about rape at all. Here I want you to imagine the GIF of Tim Robinson tilting his head to the side and asking, “You sure about that?”²

THAT’S NOT ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT

The second half of Deuteronomy 22 contains laws related to sex. The first couple of laws concern what to do if a man marries a woman and accuses her of not being a virgin. There’s a law about what to do if he’s lying, and another about what to do if he’s right—or at least, if his wife can’t produce some kind of evidence that she was a virgin when they consummated the marriage. The traditional understanding is that the “evidence” of virginity would be bloodstained bedding or clothing of some kind, which raises questions about the authors’ grasp of how a woman’s body works.

Verse 22 addresses adultery. If a man is “found lying with” a married woman, they’re both condemned to death. This is how the “evil” that is generated by these acts is purged from the land of Israel. Verses 23–27 then pivot to describing two different scenarios related to a man who “finds” and then has sex with a woman who is engaged but not yet married. In the first scenario (verses 23–24), he finds her in the city. The text states that the death penalty is imposed for both parties because she didn’t cry out for help, so she bears guilt for the “evil.” Scholars frequently suggest that consent is assumed here, but I don’t think there’s a good case to make that consent would have been particularly relevant. I would argue that the man “finding” her in the city suggests he’s stumbled upon her, which suggests an assault far more than it does something consensual. The concern is just whether or not she stopped him, and that’s not the same thing as consent.

This passage is also assuming that her crying out definitely would have prevented the rape. Like the scenario a few verses earlier with the “evidence” of virginity, the authors here seem to be making some pretty naïve assumptions about how these things work. What happens if the man rapes her, but she does cry out? There’s also no word at all regarding what happens if the man attempts to rape the woman but is stopped before he’s able to complete the act. It sure doesn’t seem like attempted rape was considered a crime. According to the way the passage is structured, if he finds her and has sex with her in the city, then she didn’t cry out. That’s the only scenario this law addresses. Maybe she did cry out, but help didn’t arrive in time. Maybe she couldn’t cry out loud enough. Maybe nobody thought it was their business. Maybe she tried, but he put his hand over her mouth. Maybe she wanted to, but he was choking her. Maybe he threatened her. Maybe she was paralyzed with fear. This law is not very thoughtful or insightful, and it very clearly wasn’t based on or intended for actual jurisprudence. It’s intended to paint a rather superficial rhetorical picture of careful and detailed oversight by a God of justice and order, even as it neglects actual care and detail.

In the second scenario (verses 25–27), the man finds her out in the open field, “seizes her and lies with her.” The Hebrew word for “seize” is hazaq, which means “to grasp,” “to seize,” or “to keep hold of.” This is more clearly represented as a case of rape. The engaged woman bears no guilt because she’s the helpless victim of an attack, similar to when “a man rises against his neighbor and kills him” (verse 26). (This passage absolutely does not equate the severity of rape with the severity of murder.) In this case, only he is condemned to death since “she cried out and no one was around to save her” (verse 27). Notice her crying out is just presupposed. What if she didn’t cry out for any one of the number of reasons mentioned earlier? The law doesn’t even raise the question. It’s a simple formula here: If it happens in the city, she didn’t cry out. If it happens in the field, she did cry out. It’s nice and symmetrical, and for people who have no experience with sexual assault or knowledge of how it occurs, it gives the illusion of justice and order.

Verses 28–29 describe a situation related to a woman who is neither engaged nor married. Again, a man “finds” her. Here, though, there is no concern for whether this happens in the city or in the field. The authors have already demonstrated in the previous scenario that they can perform the illusion of thoughtfulness and mercy by acknowledging the possibility of extenuating circumstances. They don’t need to repeat that demonstration here, so the law here just ignores those scenarios. The man “seizes her and lies with her.” Again, this is clearly a case of rape, but the verb here is tafas (“to seize”), not verse 25’s verb, hazaq, which is roughly synonymous. Apologists try to make the case that it means something other than rape. As an example, one TikTok apologist named Paul Bock (@tiktoktheologic) lectured me about this verb, saying, “The word tafas simply means to lay hold of or grab. There is no actual indication of force here in this passage. Even critical scholars recognize that this is dealing with a seductor, not an assaulter. The authors are using the word in contrast to the word hazaq back in verse 25, where it is referencing force and assault.”

Paul’s problem here is a familiar one for folks with only a passing familiarity with the biblical languages. If you look up tafas in a Biblical Hebrew lexicon, the basic sense it provides might be something generic like “lay hold of,” but if you look any closer at the use of the verb, you’ll see that it only means to hold or handle in a nonviolent sense when the direct object of the verb is an inanimate object. When the direct object of the verb is a person, it always refers to force.³ In 1 Samuel 23:26, David is running away while Saul and his men are closing in on David to tafas him. In 1 Kings 18:40, Elijah wins the contest with the prophets of Baal and then commands his officers to “tafas the prophets of Baal! Don’t let a single one escape!” He then proceeds to kill them. After Jeremiah has preached God’s word in Jeremiah 26:8, the priests and the prophets tafas him and say, “You’re gonna die!” The verb is never used with a human as a direct object where it does not refer to physical restraint against someone’s will. You simply cannot argue based on the verb tafas that this passage does not refer to sexual assault.

The other main argument to which apologists appeal is related to the statement that “they are found.” According to this line of argumentation, stating that “they are found” clearly indicates consent. The idea seems to be that the two of them were mutually engaged in hiding the act. This logic is questionable, particularly in light of verse 22, where both the man and married woman are put to death, but the text uses the singular in describing the discovery: “if a man is found lying with a woman, a wife of a husband…” None of the other verses in this section of Deuteronomy 22 say anything at all about the pair being found, whether the act is argued to be consensual or an assault. The fact that the text states they were “found” doesn’t really have any relevance to consent (which I would argue wasn’t relevant anyway). The idea here seems to be that the act somehow has to be discovered for the law to come into play, since otherwise it’s just accusations.

A LIFE SENTENCE IN YOUR ARMS*

Our passage clearly refers to a case where a man rapes a virgin who is not engaged or married. So, what about this penalty? He was required to marry her at a significantly elevated bride price, and he could never divorce her. What this collection of laws in Deuteronomy 22:22–29 indicates is that rape was thought to be a crime against the property rights of men. The autonomy and agency of the victim was not relevant. What was in play was the conceptualization of the woman’s sexuality as a commodity, as well as the conceptualization of marriage as one of the most socially significant transactions in ancient Israel and Judah. A marriage constituted a man’s sale of his daughter to another man, and the resulting relationship between the husband and wife was considered sacrosanct. To rob the man of his sexual property and violate that relationship—whether or not the marriage had been consummated—was an offense against the husband worthy of death.

But until she was engaged or married, a woman’s body was the property of her father, who stood to benefit financially from the bride price that would be paid upon her marriage. The rape of a virgin who was neither engaged nor married was a property crime against the father. According to Deuteronomy 22, then, the punishment for rape depends on the type of claim that a man has to the victim’s body.

Professor Carolyn Pressler published a wonderful essay in 1994 that discusses this.⁴ She states, “The Deuteronomic laws regard female sexuality as the possession of the woman’s father or husband. The father’s claims are akin to property claims; the husband’s claims are more extensive. It follows that the woman has no claims over her own sexuality; she therefore cannot be sexually assaulted.” Her sexuality is not her own, and so she is not the one who is victimized by a violation of that sexuality. Pressler concludes with what I think are important points about “the values and assumptions that underlie the Deuteronomic laws”: “1. sexual violation of women is an invasion of male legal and social claims; 2. the woman’s guilt or innocence is a major issue; 3. a raped woman or girl is damaged goods; and 4. underlying all: female sexuality is male property.”

So where do apologists get the idea that they have some kind of case to make here about this not being rape? Well, the presupposition of univocality can relieve a lot of the pressure of trying to renegotiate this passage away from the plain sense of the text. Exodus 22:16–17 describes a very similar circumstance, and so apologists will frequently insist that passage be given priority in trying to understand what’s going on in Deuteronomy 22. The text in Exodus says, “And if a man entices a virgin who is not engaged, and he lies with her, he will certainly pay the bride price to him for her. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he will pay out money according to the bride price of virgins.” In the JPS Torah Commentary on Exodus, Nahum Sarna states that the verb I’ve translated “entices” means “by persuasion or deception but not by coercion. There is a presumption of consent on the part of the girl. For the law of rape, see Deuteronomy 22:22–29.”⁵ This won’t do for the apologist, though, who would rather just arbitrarily assert that the two laws must refer to the same circumstance and penalty, and that the law in Exodus must take priority, since that’s the one that says what the apologist wants. That’s just presupposing univocality.

To be fair to them, however, this does seem to be how later ancient interpreters made sense of the two passages. Professor Rob Hiebert points out that early Jewish writers seem to conflate the two, as we see in the Temple Scroll from Qumran, the Greco-Roman Jewish philosopher Philo, and the late first-century CE historian Josephus. They also all treat the crime as a violation of the woman’s agency. It’s also interesting to note that the Temple Scroll, the Septuagint, and the Vulgate actually have the verb “found” in the singular, suggesting it is the man who is discovered, not the pair. If that reading was original, it would undermine the already quite weak argument that their being “found” suggests consent. As Hiebert points out, however, it’s unlikely the singular is original.⁶

There is a way that the passage in Exodus 22 could be relevant to our interpretation of Deuteronomy 22, though, and it gets to the heart of the question at the beginning of this chapter. In Exodus 22, the father has the option to refuse to give his daughter to the seducer. This suggests that the authors of the Covenant Code were accounting for a situation where a father didn’t want to marry his daughter to some dirtbag who had seduced or sexually assaulted her. The authors of Deuteronomy 22 make no such concession, but the notion the agency of the injured party—the father—would have had no relevance to the punishment is nonsensical. The authors of Deuteronomy are just not addressing that question. These laws were about the rights of the father, and he would certainly have been able to refuse the marriage. As a result, if this law had ever seen the inside of a courtroom, it wouldn’t necessarily have compelled the victim to marry her rapist.

DID THESE LAWS EVEN COUNT?

This raises a critical point: We don’t have any evidence the law in Deuteronomy 22 was relevant to any court proceeding for centuries. In fact, we have no evidence that the law codes of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy were widely known—much less enforced—until around the middle of the second century CE (see chapter 1). Certainly, many of the laws we find in those codes align with actual jurisprudence and the outcomes of court proceedings from those time periods, but many others are widely agreed to be literary creations intended to serve the rhetorical goals of the authors of the legislation. There’s no indication any court from anywhere near the composition of these texts relied on or were bound to these laws. They are not the foundations of the actual legal experiences of ancient Israelites and Judahites.

If this doesn’t make sense, think of the many large, engraved stone versions of the ten commandments being put on display in front of courthouses in conservative states in the United States. There’s no court in the nation that relies on or is bound to the ten commandments. They just serve propagandistic purposes. The same seems to be true of the law codes we find in the Pentateuch.

We see something similar in other nations in ancient Southwest Asia, as well. In addition to law collections that were inscribed on giant stelae, we have lawsuits, court cases, and all kinds of legal documents from Mesopotamia, and the courts frequently deviate from the standards prescribed within those collections. They don’t seem to be operating under the authority of the law collections. Additionally, there is not a single instance of a court document or a contract referring to any known law collection.⁷ Such collections seem primarily intended to put on display the justice and the order of the sovereign, rather than to actually direct the courts. The same is likely the case with the legislation given a place of prominence with the Pentateuch.

The earliest data we can find that indicate the Bible’s collections of laws were widely known or enforced comes at the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom in the middle of the second century BCE.⁸ The codification of the Pentateuch was probably an important part of generating a sense of shared identity and values under the (mostly) independent Judean kingdom that had finally (and briefly) been restored. Unsurprisingly, oral traditions immediately arose that sought to harmonize and reconcile the many different laws of the Pentateuch. These unifying traditions would later be committed to text in the Mishnah and the Talmud. All this is to say that just because there’s a law in the Bible doesn’t mean anyone ever enforced it. We cannot reconstruct day-to-day life in ancient Israel or Judah based on an artificial harmonization of the Pentateuch’s different legislative collections.

So, what’s the point of this particular passage, then? It doesn’t make much sense to us today, but it was another attempt to show that Israel’s divine lawgiver was just and ordered. A virgin who was raped was damaged goods and was considered no longer eligible for proper marriage in decent Israelite society, so she would most likely have to remain as a part of her father’s household for the rest of her life. The rapist was thought to have “violated” the victim in the sense that he destroyed her sexual integrity and thus her viability as a bride. The requirement that the rapist pay the father multiple times a standard bride price tags the base of restitution to the injured party for his lost income. Requiring the rapist to marry the victim and prohibiting him from divorcing her as long as he lived basically ensured that the victim would be provided for and could have a legitimate role within Israelite society. The authors surely imagined this to be a display of divine mercy, order, and justice, though in reality it erases the personhood and the agency of the actual victim of the rape.

CONCLUSION

So, does the Bible require rape victims marry their rapists? Kinda, but not really. The apologists who try to argue this isn’t even about rape have no compelling case to make. They’re not arguing for the conclusion to which the data lead; they’re arguing for the conclusion they need to cling to in spite of the data. What we have in Deuteronomy 22 is legislation that doesn’t seem to have been intended to govern any actual court proceedings and isn’t at all concerned for the agency of the victim of rape. It demands that a rapist of an unengaged virgin marry the victim at an inflated bride price and then care for her for the rest of his life. If the authors thought at all about the consent of the victim, they might have imagined they were signaling God’s mercy and care by providing for her future, but if any rubber were actually to have hit any judicial road, we have to hope most if not all fathers likely would have stepped in to stop things. If Exodus 22 were also in play, then the father would have been able to demand the inflated bride price while also keeping his daughter within his own household.

9 The Bible Says Satan Is God’s Enemy

There are a lot of ridiculous conspiracy theories out there about Satan, but one that keeps popping up that just absolutely baffles me is related to NASA. It starts with NASA’s logo, which includes a wavy red chevron that is supposed to resemble wings and represent aeronautics. However, some people seem to think it resembles an elongated serpent’s tongue. But that’s only the beginning of the ridiculousness. A TikTok creator who goes by @jontruth began one video by announcing that “Satan is using NASA to deceive everyone! Watch this!”¹ He went on to insist that the acronym NASA, which stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is actually a Hebrew word that means “to deceive.” He supported this claim with an appeal to James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, which offers “to deceive” as one of the senses of a verbal root it transliterates as nāšā’.²

The first red flag here is using Strong’s Concordance. This nineteenth-century publication is out of date, was never even intended to be a formal lexicon in the first place, and is superseded by far better resources today. People only use it today because it’s freely accessible online. When someone cites Strong’s Concordance, it’s a dead giveaway that they have no training in Greek or Hebrew and don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about.

Now, the most glaring problem with @jontruth’s argument is that this root is not pronounced nasa; it’s pronounced nasha. He just doesn’t know how to read transliterated Hebrew. But even more problematic, the root doesn’t mean “to deceive” unless it is conjugated in the Hiphil stem, which means the root letters and the consonants in between them are altered. In this case, the consonant he is added at the beginning and the vowel between the nun and the shin drops out, creating a consonant cluster that results in the nun being assimilated to the shin and disappearing. Then the vowel after the shin changes to an i-quality vowel. In short, when this verb means “deceive” it bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the acronym NASA. @jontruth insists Eve’s claim that the serpent “deceived me” in Genesis 3:13 refers to NASA, but the verb there is pronounced hishiani. And this doesn’t even get into the fact that Genesis 3 doesn’t identify the serpent as Satan (see the discussion later in this chapter). This creator’s argument is just pure and utter nonsense.

But these conspiracy theories aren’t going away anytime soon, and Satan continues to be a big draw on social media. How did it get this way? Why is this Satan figure so important to so many Christians’ ideas about the future? Overwhelmingly, Satan is represented today as God’s main enemy and the tempter and accuser of humanity. But is this a fair representation of the way the Bible talks about Satan? Let’s take a look at the data.³

FINDING THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

The Hebrew noun satan occurs twenty-seven times in the Hebrew Bible. It fundamentally refers to someone who is an enemy or adversary of someone else, and most of the authors who use the word use it to refer to humans opposing one another. For instance, in 1 Samuel 29:4, the commanders of the Philistines are suspicious of David and don’t want him going into battle with them, so they say, “he will not go down with us to battle so that he doesn’t become a satan to us in the battle.” The word can also be used to refer to divine agents, as when the angel of Yahweh confronts Balaam. Numbers 22:22 says the angel “took his stand on the road as a satan.”

There’s also a peculiar occurrence of this noun in 1 Chronicles 21:1, where the text states that either “a satan” or “Satan” opposed Israel and incited David to “count Israel.” I lean in the direction of the indefinite use (“a satan”), but Esther Hamori’s phenomenal book, God’s Monsters, has a great discussion that favors understanding it as the personal name (“Satan”).⁴ In this verse, “to count Israel” means to find out how many men of fighting age are available for battle. The author seems to think this is a bad move because it means David didn’t have enough faith to rely on God to fight Israel’s battles. The really peculiar part is that the parallel story in 2 Samuel 24:1 says that it was Yahweh who was angry at Israel and incited David against them. Scholars have accounted for this difference in a variety of ways, but what seems most likely to me is that the editors of Chronicles wanted to avoid making Yahweh the inciter of something bad, and so outsourced the incitement to an unnamed satan. If the chronicler intended to use the word as the proper name Satan, it’s the only such occurrence in all the Hebrew Bible.

Seventeen of the twenty-seven occurrences of the noun satan—fifteen in Job and two in Zechariah—occur with the definite article, meaning they refer to “the satan.” In both of the books, the satan is some kind of divine figure, and so the word is no longer being used to refer to a human occupying a temporary role as opponent or adversary. The satan is still a role, but now it seems to be a kind of divine office or assignment within the divine council (the pantheon’s administrative hierarchy). It’s not a name so much as a responsibility within the heavenly bureaucracy.

This is most clear in Job 1 and 2, where “the satan” presents himself before God with the other gods (called “children of God”) and challenges Job’s faithfulness. The book of Job is contemplating the problem of evil and why bad things happen to good people, but the majority of the chapters are poetry likely composed separately from the narrative of the satan’s wager with God. The narrative framework in chapters 1:1–2:13 and 42:7–17 was probably added later to provide an introduction and a resolution that paints Job’s suffering as the product of the machinations of an antagonizing divine agent and a rather aloof God. Zechariah 3 tells a very brief story of the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of Yahweh and “the satan,” who stood to his right to act as accuser or adversary. The text then says Yahweh rebuked the satan and removed Joshua’s sins.

It’s literature from Hellenistic Judaism that begins to develop stations and names for the angelic hierarchies, as well as a concept of malevolent divine forces. The main point of this development seems to be to account for the presence of evil in the world. Passages like Isaiah 45:7 seem to attribute the good and the bad directly to God, but this didn’t sit well with a lot of folks in the ancient world. A lot of scholars think the early Jewish debate about the origins of evil was likely influenced by Zoroastrian dualism and the figure of Angra Mainyu, a spirit of death and destruction who opposed the righteous Spenta Mainyu and sought to tempt humanity. We don’t have a lot of data from the Persian period to help reconstruct how this happened, though. Most of the development takes place within texts from the Hellenistic period like 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which elaborate on the story from Genesis 6 of the sons of God having children with human women (see chapter 14) and on the reception of the law within the book of Exodus.

In 1 Enoch’s various retellings, these sons of God are represented as a cohort of rebellious angels who descend to earth under the leadership of a head angel referred to alternatively as Azazel, Asael, and Shemihazah. Giants are born to these sons of God, and they then reproduce to create the Nephilim. The word satan occurs four times in 1 Enoch. The plural “satans” occurs in 1 Enoch 40:7 and 65:6, which seem to use the term to designate a specific malevolent class of angels. The singular “Satan” occurs as a title in 1 Enoch 53:3 and 54:6, and the latter passage seems to be using the title to refer to Azazel.

There is less variation in Jubilees, which follows after the narrative of Enoch and refers to the leader of the spirits of 1 Enoch’s dead giants as Mastema. This name derives from the root satam, which is a variation on satan. Another title for some kind of malevolent entity is Belial, which is based on a Hebrew word meaning “uselessness” or “wickedness.” There is a reference to “the satan” in Jubilees 10:11, but the other uses of the word occur in the phrase “no satan or any evil one,” which seems to understand it as a type of malevolent spirit, an adversarial human, or perhaps both.

The word satan occurs a few times in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not as a title or name. The titles and names used to refer to the head malevolent angel in the Scrolls are Melchiresha (“King of Wickedness,” a twist on Melchizedek, “King of Righteousness”), Angel of Darkness, Mastema, and, most commonly, Belial. Like the word satan, Belial can be used as a title for a specific malevolent agent but also as a reference to a type or class of malevolent spirit. It also occurs in Greek as Beliar in a number of pseudepigraphic Jewish texts written around the same time period as the Scrolls. So, we don’t have an individual named Satan anywhere in the Jewish literature that precedes the New Testament. In fact, the leader of the forces of evil in that literature is more commonly identified with titles other than satan.

Today we think of the word satan more as a name than as a title or a generic noun. We don’t usually talk about “the Satan” or about plural “satans,” but there’s a related word that we do use that way that can help us better understand how the Hebrew word satan functioned anciently before it turned into the personal name of the Devil. It’s precisely the word “devil.” The English word comes from the Greek diabolos, which means “slanderer” and comes from the verb diaballo, which means to bring charges against someone or to accuse them, either justly or falsely. Diabolos occurs in a variety of ancient Greek texts to refer to human and divine adversaries and was one of the main words chosen by the ancient Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible to render the Hebrew word satan. The way we use the word devil today—as a title (“the Devil”) and as a generic noun (“a devil,” “devils”)—is precisely how the word satan seems to have been overwhelmingly used before the New Testament moved it in the direction of a personal name.

EVERYTHING IS THE DEVIL TO YOU, MAMA!*

The Hebrew word satan is transliterated into Greek for the New Testament as satanas, where it occurs thirty-six times and is used either as a title or a personal name. It is frequently used in conjunction with ho diabolos, or “the Devil,” which is more clearly used as a title. This follows in the tradition of the Septuagint, which used the Greek ho diabolos to translate the Hebrew ha-satan, “the Satan,” in places like Job 1:6 and 2:1. The New Testament is clearly elaborating on the Enochic tradition by representing the Satan figure as the head of a group of malevolent angels who will all face God’s judgment for introducing wickedness to humanity. For example, in Matthew 25:41, Jesus warns that when the Son of Man returns, the unrighteous will be consigned to “everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels” (see chapter 19). The precursor to this imagery is the tradition developed within the Enochic literature. Satan also becomes the primary tempter and accuser of humans in the New Testament.

Oddly, the other titles that were used in earlier Jewish literature to refer to this lead angel don’t really appear in the New Testament—or if they do, only very rarely. Beliar, for instance, occurs only once, in 2 Corinthians 6:15, while the names and titles Mastema, Shemihazah, Asael, Azazel, Melchiresha, and Angel of Darkness don’t occur anywhere in the texts that would become the New Testament. Satan’s divine profile did, however, have other names and titles added to it as the New Testament began a long process of conflating various malevolent divine figures from the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism together into this single figure who would become known primarily as Satan or the Devil.

For instance, in Matthew 12:24, the Pharisees accuse Jesus of casting out devils “by Beelzebul, the prince of the devils.” In other words, they were accusing Jesus of having been given his authority over demons by their own leader, Beelzebul. In the next verse, Jesus responds by saying Satan can’t cast out Satan, so it doesn’t make sense that the Son of Man would be able to cast out devils by Beelzebul. Here the authors seem to be identifying Beelzebul as Satan, or at least as the head of Satan’s angelic forces.⁵ Now, you may not be used to seeing the name Beelzebul spelled that way. Maybe Beelzebub is more familiar to you, but the Greek very clearly has Beelzebul. A lot of translations change it to Beelzebub because that’s closer to the name Baalzebub, which is how the King James renders this title in 2 Kings 1:2, 3, 6, and 16. Baalzebub means “Lord of Flies,” which is pretty metal, but is not the actual title that was used to refer to Baal (whose name just means “Lord” or “Master”). The Northwest Semitic storm god Baal was sometimes referred to as Zebul Baal, or “Prince Lord,” but the biblical authors—like they so often did—changed it to make fun of the storm god. Baalzebub is a fake name used to mock Baal. The New Testament authors preserve the more accurate title.

Another identification of Satan with a figure from the Hebrew Bible has caused a lot of confusion. In Revelation 12:9 and 20:2, Satan is referred to as the Devil as well as a “dragon” and “that ancient serpent.” Now, most people immediately think of the serpent from the Garden of Eden, but that’s not who these verses are talking about. There’s only one divine agent anywhere in the Bible that is referred to both as a serpent and a dragon, and that’s Leviathan, the primordial chaos monster of early Israelite myth. The author of Revelation would have been reading the Septuagint, which translated the Hebrew name Leviathan into Greek as drakon, “dragon.” Isaiah 27:1 explains that Yahweh will punish and kill Leviathan, who is also referred to in the verse as the ophis (“serpent”) and the drakon (“dragon”)—the same two Greek words used to refer to Satan in Revelation 12 and 20.

Revelation 12:3 also says this great red dragon has seven heads. This is usually thought to refer to the seven hills of Rome, but there are additional resonances with the figure of Leviathan. Part of the lament in Psalm 74 praises Yahweh for his salvific as well as creative acts. Verse 14 says Yahweh was “king from of old” and “crushed the heads of Leviathan.” This seems to be part of what made the creation of the earth possible, and it indicates Leviathan was even more “ancient” a serpent than the one from Eden. Now, this doesn’t say how many heads Leviathan had, but there’s another text from centuries before the Bible was written that indicates Leviathan was thought to have precisely seven heads.

In the Hebrew, Isaiah 27:1 says Yahweh will punish “Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, Leviathan, the twisting serpent, and he will kill the monster which is in the sea.” This isn’t Isaiah’s work, though. Isaiah is quoting a tradition from centuries earlier, and we have another version of that tradition from around five hundred years earlier. In the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, a deity named Mot (“Death”) refers to Baal’s defeat of a serpent named Litan (the Ugaritic version of the Hebrew Leviathan). Mot says, “you struck down Litan, the wriggling serpent, finished off the twisting serpent, the powerful one with seven heads.” It seems likely that the author of Revelation is aware of at least part of this tradition of a seven-headed dragon from the sea.

Leviathan makes far better sense of the imagery that the author of Revelation is linking with Satan. Additionally, by the time Revelation was written, it’s unlikely anyone had identified the serpent from the Garden of Eden as Satan. There are only two texts that have a plausible case to make for linking the two figures prior to the close of the New Testament. The first is the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, probably written in the first century BCE. Chapter 2 verse 24 says, “but by the envy of a diabolos, death entered the world.” I would say most scholars think that this probably refers to the serpent in the garden, but even that would only identify the serpent as a diabolos, not necessarily Satan. But this also strikes me as a forced reading. The Wisdom of Solomon never refers to any kind of malevolent divine force, and death is represented as a product of human wickedness that is alien to God’s creation (1:14–16). I think the argument is stronger that the indefinite diabolos (“adversary”) who brings death into the world is probably to be interpreted as Cain, who envied Abel and killed him as a result—the first death within God’s creation.⁶

The other passage that could plausibly identify Satan as the serpent from Eden is Romans 16:20, which says, “And the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” This is understood by some interpreters to be referring to the serpent’s curse in Genesis 3:15, where God says, “I will put enmity between you and between the woman, and between your offspring and between her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

In my opinion, there are two problems with this reading. The first is that the notion of God placing the wicked under the feet of the righteous is pretty stock imagery that’s known from other Jewish and Greco-Roman literature and iconography. For instance, the depiction of Aphrodite in the north frieze of the Pergamon Altar depicts her with her left foot on the face of a giant she is killing. David praises Yahweh in 2 Samuel 22:39 because, thanks to him, his enemies “fell under my feet.” The pseudepigraphic Testament of Levi 18:12 promises that God will “give his children power to trample upon the wicked spirits.” The imagery in Romans 16 doesn’t remotely have to be alluding to Genesis 3:15. The other problem is that Paul would have been relying on the Septuagint’s version of Genesis, which doesn’t actually refer to anyone striking or crushing the head of the serpent’s offspring. The ancient Greek translation renders the passage with a verb that means the offspring of the woman will “watch out for” or “keep an eye on” the head of the serpent’s offspring, while that offspring will do the same for the heel of the woman’s offspring.

The serpent from the Garden of Eden is not the only figure who would become firmly identified with Satan only after the completion of the New Testament. Isaiah 14:4 directs Isaiah to take up a taunt against the king of Babylon, and in verse 12, the prophet sarcastically refers to this king as helel ben shahar, or “Shining One, Son of the Dawn,” and insists he has fallen from heaven after arrogantly aspiring to raise his throne above the stars of God. The Septuagint would later translate the Hebrew helel into Greek as heosphoros, or “dawn-bringer.” This was the name of a god in the Greek pantheon who was identified with the planet Venus, the “morning star.” When Jerome produced the Vulgate (a fresh translation of the Bible into Latin) around 400 CE, he borrowed the name of the Roman god associated with Venus and translated heosphoros as lucifer, or “light-bringer.”

The title Lucifer was never intended as a reference to Satan. The Hebrew title “Shining One” is never mentioned anywhere else in the Bible, but Jerome did use the title lucifer to translate the Greek word phosphoros—another reference to Venus as the “light-bringer”—in 2 Peter 1:19. The passage talks about this “morning star” (as it’s usually translated) rising in the hearts of believers, which is thought by many scholars to be alluding to Jesus.⁷ This is certainly the case in Revelation 22:16, where different Greek words are used to identify Jesus as the “bright and morning star.” As you can see, it complicates things to identify the “Shining One” of Isaiah 14:12 as Satan.

It doesn’t seem to me that any biblical author links Satan with Isaiah 14:12, but some folks argue that Luke 10:18 makes precisely that link. In that passage, Jesus declares, “I saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven.” This is argued to allude to the fall of the “Shining One” from heaven, but this isn’t the only divine agent who falls from heaven within earlier Jewish tradition. I and other scholars suggest a more likely source would be the fall from heaven of the head of the malevolent angels within the Enochic tradition—precisely the divine agent who would provide the conceptual framework for the figure of Satan. In 1 Enoch 86:1, Enoch says, “I saw the heaven above, and look, a star fell from heaven.” Later, in verse 3, he says “I looked to heaven, and look, I saw many stars descend and cast themselves down from heaven to that first star.” These are the head angel’s minions. (In Revelation 12, the Dragon’s tail sweeps a third of the stars of heaven down to the earth.) This far more influential tradition strikes me as a much more likely source for Jesus’s statement.

CONCLUSION

The identification of a malevolent divine agent named Satan who stands opposed to God and to his followers is an innovation that is unique to the New Testament, but the divine profile of Satan that we know today has been significantly expanded and elaborated on since the completion of the New Testament, and particularly with the identifications of the serpent from the Garden of Eden and the “Shining One” from Isaiah 14:12 as Satan. The Hebrew Bible knows of no entity named Satan, but it does use the word satan to refer to humans and divine agents who operate as opponents or adversaries. That word later became used as a title for a specific role or office within the divine council, as we see in Job and in Zechariah. The Enochic and other Hellenistic Jewish literature would further develop both senses of the word. The plural “satans” was used to refer to some kind of class of malevolent divine entity, and then “Satan” became a title for the head malevolent angel, who was known by a variety of different names. The New Testament seems to consolidate these and other figures from the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish literature into the figure of Satan, who also became known as the Devil. This is finally God’s enemy who fights against him and his followers, accuses humanity, and tempts them with wickedness. But this figure is a literary creation of the first century CE.

Also, Satan has nothing whatsoever to do with NASA. For the love of all that is, was, or even will be holy on, above, or anywhere near this earth, please stop spreading these idiotic conspiracy theories.

10 The Bible Says God Has a Body

In April 2024, an account on Twitter that goes by @5Solas2 shared an image of a tweet from a pastor in Alaska named Nathaniel Jolly.¹ It said, “If the Bible says ‘X’ is true and you disagree with ‘X,’ you are wrong, period. Your opinion doesn’t matter. Your experience doesn’t matter. Your preference doesn’t matter. ‘X’ is still true if God says it is true.” I’ve always found this approach to be humorous, since the Bible “says” all kinds of things that folks like Nathanial who identify as biblical literalists just refuse to accept. When the opinions, experiences, or preferences of “literalists” compel them to dislike something that’s in the Bible—which they frequently do—they just negotiate the undesired thing right out of the Bible and pretend they’re still being literalists. The reality is that there’s no such thing as a biblical literalist. Everyone who treats the Bible as an inspired and/or authoritative document negotiates with it. There is no other possible choice.

When I saw Nathaniel’s tweet, I thought I’d point this out by retweeting the image and posting the following with it: “The Bible says YHWH was defeated by the god of another nation, can’t compete against chariots, has a penis, commands child sacrifice, changes his mind & endorses spousal abuse, chattel slavery & genocide. Watch these folks insist their opinions have more authority than the Bible.”² Predictably, responses immediately started challenging the notion the Bible “says” any of these things, but what surprised me was that the statement that drew—by far—the most ire, the most challenges, and the most curiosity was the statement that Yahweh has a penis. This seemed to come as quite a shock to a lot of folks. Most of the folks who denied it asserted that any representation of God’s body in the Bible is just metaphor, and that God is spirit and therefore doesn’t have a body. But is this really what the Bible “says”?³

I AIN’T GOT NO BODY (AND NOBODY CARES FOR ME)*

The Bible makes repeated reference to God’s hands, arms, feet, loins, legs, and so on, but many generations of Bible readers have dismissed these as knowingly inadequate metaphorical representations of a God who exists beyond our parochial anthropomorphism (the belief that God has a human-shaped body). “God is spirit!” such readers insist, quoting John 4:24, as if this precludes possession of a corporeal body. As the very same authors show just one chapter earlier, it doesn’t. Jesus is represented in John 3 as telling Nicodemus that one must be born of the Spirit to enter into the kingdom of God. In verse 6, Jesus declares, “that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” It would seem that according to the authors of John, one can be spirit and still have a physical body—unless folks who are born of the Spirit have suddenly forfeited their corporeality and materiality but have somehow managed to keep it a secret from the rest of us.

Asserting that a specific interpretation of John 4:24 governs the entire Bible presupposes univocality, which is a big no-no. But the Hebrew Bible also says God is spirit. At the beginning of Isaiah 31, Isaiah wags his finger at those who would run to Egypt for military support rather than trust in God. In verse 3, he says, “the Egyptians are human and not divine. Their horses are flesh, and not spirit. When Yahweh stretches out his hand, the helper will stumble, and the helped will fall, and they will all come to an end together.”

This sounds like a pretty strict distinction is being made between material humans and an immaterial God, but that’s only because we’re looking back on this text through the interpretive lenses of platonic philosophy, which is overwhelmingly responsible for popularizing the notion that the divine is immaterial.⁴ In ancient Israel and even in early Christianity, “spirit” was a type of matter, and specifically an incorruptible and impervious type of matter. The word for “spirit” in Hebrew is the same as the word for “wind.” They thought of spirit as conceptually related to wind. Can you destroy wind? Can you hurt it with a sword? Does it corrode or decompose? Don’t let’s be silly. Isaiah 31’s parallel description of humanity as flesh and divinity as spirit is not a distinction between the material and the immaterial, but between the vulnerable and the invulnerable.⁵

One indication that God was thought of as occupying a specific and limited point in time and space is that fact that he must “go down” to see what the humans are up to (Genesis 11:4–5) or to visit Moses (Exodus 19:20; 34:5). This is also indicated by narratives where people and God enter and leave each other’s presence (Genesis 4:16; 18:22, 33; Deuteronomy 16:16; Isaiah 1:12; Jonah 1:3). God is not omnipresent in any meaningful sense in the Hebrew Bible. God has access to all space, including the interior of human minds and bodies, but he does not simultaneously occupy all that space.

Stories about people who actually got to see and interact with God indicate God was thought not only to be located in a specific point in time and space but also to have a corporeal, anthropomorphic, and male-presenting body. For instance, God makes noise walking in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8). When Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up Sinai, they saw the God of Israel, and the text notes, “under his feet there was something like a paved work of sapphire, clear as the very skies themselves” (Exodus 24:10). God is described as an ish, “a man,” in Genesis 18:2 and 32:24.⁶ In the latter of these two narratives, Jacob wrestles with “a man” until daybreak and was actually winning until the man “hit him in the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint” (verse 25). The story is intended as an etiology, or origin story, for Jacob’s second name, Israel. The name fundamentally means “El Contends,” but this folk etymology understands it to mean “Contends with El.” In this and all other stories where God is physically encountered by humans, the narratives always describe God anthropomorphically and always use masculine verbs and pronouns.⁷

In Isaiah 6:1, Isaiah sees the male Yahweh sitting on a throne. According to most translations, “the hem of his robe filled the temple,” but the Hebrew word translated as “hem of his robe” is shul, which fundamentally refers to things that are low or that hang down. It refers to the edges of the priestly garments in Exodus, but in Jeremiah 13:22, 26 and Nahum 3:5, God metaphorically threatens sexual violence against cities that are personified as women, and these threats include uncovering and exposing the woman’s shul, which likely means their genitals.⁸ In light of this, some scholars suggest that Isaiah 6:1 could be playing with the ambiguity of this word to wink at the idea that God is supernaturally endowed.⁹ The fact that the seraphim cover their faces and their “feet” (a common euphemism for genitals) with their wings could be suggesting God’s junk puts them to shame. The drawing of Yahweh on Pithos A from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud certainly supports that thesis (see figure 6.1 on page 80).

Ezekiel 1 also describes a vision of an anthropomorphic God sitting on a throne, but the author works really hard to try to avoid describing God’s body directly, and he doesn’t say anything at all about his face. Instead, the author hedges the description, saying in verse 26 that “above the likeness of the throne, a likeness like the appearance of a human was over the top of it.” Verse 27 continues, “And I saw something like glowing amber, like the appearance of fire which it enclosed all around, from the appearance of his loins and upward. And from the appearance of his loins and downward, I saw something like the appearance of fire, and brightness surrounded it.” Ezekiel wants you to know that God seems to be a really shiny dude—this is how most gods were represented in this period—but don’t tell anybody you got it from him.

This reluctance to describe God directly—or even mention seeing his face—is most likely based on the idea that seeing God’s face directly is deadly. This is most clearly explained in Exodus 33 (which also represents God as thoroughly anthropomorphic). In verse 18, Moses says, “please show me your glory.” The Hebrew word for “glory,” kabod, in this context refers to God’s body or self.¹⁰ Yahweh responds by saying his “goodness” will pass by, but “you can’t see my face, because a human can’t see me and live” (verse 20). The Septuagint’s translation is more explicit: “a human can’t see my face and live.” In verses 21–23, Yahweh says he will place Moses on a rock, then “I will cover you with my hand until I’ve passed by, then I’ll take my hand away, and you’ll see my back, but my face will not be seen.” Here God is represented as having a physical and anthropomorphic body which is visible to humanity, but seeing his face is deadly to humans. The reason people don’t see God isn’t because he’s invisible; it’s because it’s deadly to look directly at his face.

This deadliness seems to be related to the brilliance and shininess of God’s face, which is reflected in the story of the Israelites fearing Moses because his face was shining when he came down the mountain from God’s presence (Exodus 34:30). Moses seems to be carrying some vestigial divine glory down the mountain with him.¹¹ The deadliness of a shiny god is shared with the Mesopotamian concept of melammu, which refers to a brilliance or radiance with which deities and divine objects could be clothed. Exposure to melammu was terrifying to viewers, but not because it was deadly on its own. It was mostly frightening because it signaled that you were in the presence of the gods, and the gods could seriously mess you up. So, the biblical notion that God’s shininess was deadly was probably a renegotiation of the Mesopotamian notion that it was frightening because the gods had violent reputations.

Another indicator that the ancient authors and audiences of the Hebrew Bible understood God to look like a male human is that he creates humanity in his own likeness and image. Scholars and others have long interpreted the ideas of “likeness” and “image” in Genesis 1:26–27 to refer to humanity’s endowment with moral, reproductive, or royal qualities that resemble God’s, but scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that the fundamental sense is physical appearance.¹² Interestingly enough, according to Genesis 1:27, both male and female humans were created “in the image of God.” This is usually understood to mean that the bodies of men and women roughly approximate the body of God, but some folks interpret it to mean men are patterned after a male deity and women are patterned after a female deity (see chapter 6). It has also been understood to refer to the creation of a human with both sexes, potentially reflecting the belief that God also has both sexes (and everything in between).

It should also be noted that the Hebrew word for “image” here is tselem, which is the basic Hebrew word for an idol or a divine image. The authors of Genesis 1 may be picking up on a theme that’s more clearly found in Genesis 2. There the creation of humanity from the dust of the ground, followed by their enlivenment by breathing breath into their nostrils, is reminiscent of the creation of divine images from clay, which are “enlivened” through ceremonies that open their mouths and allow them to breathe, eat, speak, and so on. These images were thought to bear the power, authority, and the very presence of the gods they represented. In places like Mesopotamia and Egypt, only royal individuals were thought to be divine images and agents, but Genesis 1 and 2 may be trying to democratize that status, describing all humanity as divine images resembling God and bearing God’s presence and authority over creation.¹³

The interpretation of humanity’s creation in God’s image and likeness as a reference to physical resemblance to God’s own male-presenting physical body was so widespread that many centuries later during the Rabbinic period, Avot d’Rabbi Nathan A 2 declared that Adam “emerged already circumcised, as it says, ‘And God created the human in his image.’” According to this text, a “pure and righteous man” is a circumcised man, and since God is obviously pure and righteous, Adam’s creation “in his image” must include circumcision. This seems to align with Midrash Psalms 9:7, which identifies Adam and several other key male figures from the Hebrew Bible as having been born circumcised. Now, Genesis Rabbah 11:6 could be suggesting that Adam wasn’t circumcised, but in Genesis Rabbah 8:11, Rabbi Hoshaya does say that God’s ministering angels almost proclaimed “holy” before Adam because they confused him for God. So, he’s got that goin’ for him.

By the time of the New Testament, Greek philosophical influence had incentivized some followers of Jesus to think of God in more abstract and incorporeal terms, but most Christians probably continued to think of God as corporeal, anthropomorphic, and male-presenting. We don’t have any references to God’s incorporeality until after the completion of the New Testament. Clement of Alexandria around 200 CE and then Origen shortly after were the first Christians to borrow the Greek word asomatos, “incorporeal,” from Middle Platonism and to apply it to God. Clement only uses the term in passing, but Origen was far more confrontational about it. He acknowledged that the Bible didn’t describe God as incorporeal, and he seemed quite put out about the fact that Christians of his day took this to mean God had a material and anthropomorphic body.

One of the main topics Origen tackled in his book On First Principles was the question of “how God himself is to be understood—whether as corporeal, and formed according to some shape, or of a different nature from bodies—a point which is not clearly indicated in our teaching.”¹⁴ In On First Principles 1.1, Origen sounds irritated that early Christians understood John 4:24 (“God is spirit”) to mean that even though his body was made of spirit, God still had one, all shiny and chrome. He didn’t like the idea of a corporeal deity, but not because the Bible taught otherwise. It didn’t. He didn’t like it because it conflicted with the philosophy of Middle Platonism. In his third Homily on Genesis, he scoffed, “the Jews indeed, but also some of our people, supposed that God should be understood as a man, that is, adorned with human members and human appearance. But the philosophers despise these stories as fabulous and formed in the likeness of poetic fictions.”¹⁵

The rejection of anthropomorphism within Judaism took quite a bit longer.¹⁶ As we’ve seen, the rabbinic literature consistently affirmed that God was corporeal, and the Rabbis didn’t seem to be concerned. There is one Mekhilta that many interpret to be commenting on this anthropomorphic tendency. Bachodesh 4 quotes Amos 3:8, which compares the Lord to a lion, and then explains, “we compare him to his creatures to break in the ear regarding what it’s able to hear.” If this is a reference to anthropomorphic representations of God, Jewish ears spent many centuries getting broken in. It was medieval Jewish philosophers writing in Judeo-Arabic who would bring anthropomorphism to its end within Judaism.

The first clear critique of anthropomorphism came with Rabbi Saadia Gaon, who was active in the first half of the tenth century CE. He suggested that anthropomorphisms were philosophically indefensible but were commonplace because restricting Jewish folks only to descriptions of God that were philosophically true would leave “nothing left for us to affirm except the fact of His existence.”¹⁷ It was Moses Maimonides, though, writing a little over two centuries later, who, according to professor Shamma Friedman, “swept away all Jewish belief in an anthropomorphous God.”¹⁸ His influential Guide for the Perplexed, which imposed an Aristotelian lens upon rabbinic theology, went to great lengths to deny a physical or visual dimension to the declaration in Genesis 1:27 that humanity was created in God’s own image and likeness.

In what must have been considered a pretty devastating burn, Maimonides dismissed any intellectual lessers who couldn’t accept that the Bible’s anthropomorphisms were clearly intended to be understood spiritually: “Those who are not sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the true interpretation of these passages in the Bible, or to understand that the same term admits of two different interpretations, may simply be told that the scriptural passage is clearly understood by the wise, but that they content themselves with knowing that God is incorporeal.”¹⁹ Boom. Roasted.

IT’S JUST A METAPHOR!

When confronted with what ancient texts say about God’s body, most folks today who have been conditioned to think about God in more philosophically sophisticated ways immediately retort that it was all metaphor. The ancients didn’t actually believe God had a corporeal and male-shaped body. God’s nature has always been transcendent and beyond description, and so if ancient authors wanted to talk about him at all—his maleness is evidently literal—they had to represent him in some kind of visual way. Professor Marc Zvi Brettler explains, “If the entire vocabulary used of God were distinct to him, he would be ‘incomparable,’ but also not grounded in human experiences, and therefore, not understandable. For this reason, biblical rhetoric uses language typically belonging to the human sphere and applies it to God.”²⁰ They just needed to use some kind of language to talk about God in a way they could grasp, even though they all knew God couldn’t possibly be encapsulated by the meager capacities of human cognition.

In my opinion, this rationalization suffers from two weaknesses. To begin, there’s absolutely no indication that any of the biblical authors were ever aware of any such restrictions. They certainly never discuss or explain their language in that way, and those explanations don’t pop up until the notion of God as incorporeal begins to be discussed. And this brings up the second problem. If the reason a specific understanding of God’s nature is never shared is because it can’t be, then that is an understanding of God’s nature that simply cannot be transmitted or agreed upon. Whether across a community or down through time, you cannot share a conceptual framework that you are incapable of describing, depicting, or even indirectly talking about. Now, you could share a notion of all the things that God is not, but that’s a specific approach called apophatic theology, which is also nowhere discussed in the Bible. That kind of rationalization is the work of philosophical enquiry, which doesn’t really seem to have been a thing for the authors of the Hebrew Bible, and it was only prominent for a couple of New Testament authors. As we’ve seen, it wasn’t until the third century CE that thinkers like Clement of Alexandria and Origen leveraged Middle Platonic language to overrule the plain sense of the biblical texts.

Origen himself appealed to the metaphor argument to counter that plain sense. In one of his homilies, he countered the argument from the Bible by suggesting that “those carnal men who have no understanding of the meaning of divinity suppose, if they read anywhere in the Scriptures of God that ‘heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool,’ that God has so large a body that they think he sits in heaven and stretches out his feet to the earth.”²¹ Origen doesn’t seem aware that the Bible was directly influenced by ancient traditions that understood the gods to be literally gigantic.²² Origen was projecting his own philosophical sensibilities onto biblical authors who overwhelmingly did not share them. But his argument also sounds very similar to the kinds of responses I get on social media when I point out that the Bible describes God as thoroughly anthropomorphic and corporeal. They usually involve pointing to a text like Psalm 57:1 and then blurting out that, “The Bible says God has wings. Does that mean they believed he was a bird, too?!”

This is a fallacy of composition, though. Just because metaphorical language is used in one place to describe God doesn’t mean all language used to describe God must therefore be metaphorical. It’s not hard to identify clearly metaphorical imagery in the Bible’s poetry and prose about God, but whenever God is represented interacting with humanity in sober historical narrative, he’s anthropomorphic and corporeal. Sometimes this anthropomorphism is so complete that God is indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill human. Other authors who lean more into apocalyptic motifs overlay God’s anthropomorphism with imagery of the divine as indescribably and intolerably brilliant and shiny.

As a result of our long-standing efforts to read our own philosophically sophisticated notions of God’s nature into the biblical texts, we commonly portray biblical authors as imagining God as a kind of shape-shifter who manifests himself in a variety of different ways according to the circumstances and purposes of his appearances. I personally don’t think that’s what’s going on in the heads of the authors, though. I think the variability of God’s forms is more likely a function either of literary concerns or the practical restrictions of ritual. In other words, God is described in whatever ways serve the text’s literary genres and rhetorical goals, or in whatever ways are required by the realities of ritual worship. But we tend to ignore or gloss over those considerations to make the texts fit more comfortably with what our theology compels us to expect, and particularly if we assume the historicity of all the Bible’s narratives.

For instance, some folks point to Deuteronomy 4:12 as a clear assertion of God’s incorporeality. Moses tells the Israelites, “Yahweh spoke to you from the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but you saw no form. There was only a voice.” Did God temporarily and materially manifest himself in the form of fire to appear to the people? I don’t think that’s the case. According to verses 16–19, the point here is to prevent them from going off and making divine images that resemble God. So, there’s a very concrete rhetorical purpose for the way God is literarily represented, and that purpose that doesn’t seem to me to lead to, suggest, or presuppose the complex philosophical framework of God’s incorporeality and immateriality.

In verse 36, Moses says that Yahweh “caused his voice to be heard from the heavens,” which seems to me to indicate that the author imagined God’s anthropomorphic and corporeal self to be physically located in the heavens but to be using the fire as a kind of intercom system. This would align with how divine images were thought to work in ancient Israel as well as in the surrounding societies where the gods were thoroughly anthropomorphic and corporeal. Wherever the deity’s physical self was thought to be located, their agency, authority, presence, or voice could be accessible through material media that channeled or manifested it. Think of someone standing in a cemetery speaking to the headstone of a deceased loved one as if it is channeling their agency or their presence. The intuitive idea is the same.²³

In Deuteronomy 4, the author wanted to exalt God and keep him in the heavens, but also didn’t want God communicating through a divine image that might result in the people crafting more of those images. So, they represented God speaking from a fire that reached up to dark clouds in the heavens. The story thus serves to undermine and discourage the production and proliferation of divine images. If we don’t presuppose the historicity of these narratives, they can all be simply harmonized with a belief maintained by the authors that God’s corporeal and anthropomorphic self existed somewhere in time and space, and that it was only directly visible in an entirely unmediated way in extraordinary circumstances and to extraordinary people.

CONCLUSION

The authors and audiences of the Bible understood God to be corporeal and material, even when they understood him to be “spirit.” This was neither metaphor nor just a “way of speaking” that they all agreed to use because there was no other way for them to eff the ineffable. The God of the Bible had a male-presenting body that was viewed in certain circumstances by prominent figures from biblical history. The precise constitution and nature of that body differed from time to time, from author to author, from genre to genre, and from rhetorical goal to rhetorical goal, but anchoring their conviction to the belief that humanity was made in God’s image, the authors of the biblical texts consistently represented God in one sense or another as having a human-shaped body composed of some kind of material that was—even if deadly—visible to the human eye.

It was later philosophical enquiry, heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, that led to the belief that God couldn’t be divine if he were fundamentally confined to any material form, much less to an anthropomorphic material form. Folks like Origen of Alexandria and Moses Maimonides wrote the most forcefully about the importance of accepting these philosophical truths. The curators and inheritors of this renegotiated concept of God’s nature have since had to find ways to rationalize to themselves and to others how this understanding could have been there all along while the authors of the Bible spoke so consistently (and so inerrantly?) about God’s corporeal and anthropomorphic body.

11 The Bible Says to Sacrifice Your Firstborn Child

In late 2023, a Utah senator named Mike Lee retweeted Kayleigh McEnany (former press secretary to Donald Trump), who berated California governor Gavin Newsom for refusing to say there should be any restrictions on abortion as late as the ninth month of pregnancy.¹ The accuracy of McEnany’s characterization aside, Senator Lee’s retweet included an image of a large and burning bronze statue of an anthropomorphic bull with outstretched arms awaiting the delivery of a baby for sacrifice. He commented, “Gavin Newsom: willing to sacrifice full-term babies to Moloch.”² This rhetorical equation of abortion with child sacrifice to Molech has grown quite common in recent years, but it has always struck me as particularly misguided. Using the Bible to condemn abortion is problematic in and of itself, as I discussed in chapter 7, but using it to condemn abortion as child sacrifice is even more problematic. Characterizing abortion as child sacrifice to Molech further escalates its problematic nature.

The Bible has a complicated relationship with child sacrifice.³ Sure, it overwhelmingly condemns it, but for Christians at least, the central redemptive act of God—Jesus’s death on the cross—checks all the boxes of child sacrifice. At the same time, the Abrahamic promise was explicitly granted because Abraham was willing to sacrifice his child. Other parts of the Bible indicate that God issued a variety of commandments as a means of preventing the very child sacrifice that he also commanded. The Bible seems to be at war with itself regarding child sacrifice. Let’s take a look at the data.

IT’S NO SACRIFICE AT ALL*

When most people who are familiar with the Bible think of child sacrifice, the first thing to come to mind is the story from Genesis 22 of Abraham being commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac. This story is known within Judaism as the Aqedah. Abraham is willing to go through with the sacrifice, but according to the story as it has come down to us, he’s stopped by the angel of Yahweh just before he delivers the killing blow. According to Genesis 22:12, the angel then says, “Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld your son—your only one—from me.” Abraham then sees a ram in the thicket, which serves as an animal substitute to stand in for the sacrifice of Isaac. Isaac is not sacrificed, and obviously so because God abhors child sacrifice and would never actually demand it, right? A sacrifice still takes place, though, and it’s represented as fulfilling the original divine command.

A close reading of the story raises some questions. Neither the narrator nor the characters seem to think there’s anything at all improper about the command. There are no shocked reactions or qualifications on the part of the narrator or any of the characters. Child sacrifice is just not presented as problematic, and Abraham is praised by God for his unblinking willingness to sacrifice his own child. But the angel also doesn’t say, “because you were willing to do this,” or “because you almost did this.” The angel said, “because you haven’t withheld your son from me.” In verse 16, the angel says, “Because you’ve done this thing, and you haven’t withheld your son.” It almost sounds like Abraham actually sacrificed his son.

Verse 19 sounds pretty chilling if we consider this possibility. Setting aside the angel’s intervention for a moment, verse 5 has Abraham tell his young men, “Stay here with the donkey. I and the young man will continue on, and we will worship and then we will return to you.” Verses 6 and 8 each end with the statement “and the two of them walked on together.” Verse 9 begins, “Then they arrived at the place God had mentioned to him.” Then we get whatever happens on the mountain, and verse 19 states, “Abraham returned to his young men.” The narrative explicitly mentions two going up the mountain, but only describes one coming down.

Additionally, according to the ritual legislation of the Hebrew Bible, when a sacrificial offering was placed on the fire of the altar, the fire was already supposed to be lit and the offering was already supposed to have been slaughtered. According to verse 9, Abraham had built the altar, arranged the wood on the altar, and placed Isaac on the wood that was on the altar. This text was likely written after that ritual legislation, and if it was written with that legislation in mind, it could have been understood to suggest Isaac was already dead. On the other hand, verse 10 describes Abraham reaching out his hand with the knife to slaughter his son as he lay on the wood on the altar. The narrative seems to be pointing in two different directions.

Maybe this doesn’t sound convincing to you, but from antiquity down to today, these and other considerations have concerned Jewish readers. Many have understood the burnt offering to have taken place, but they also came up with ways to account for Isaac’s later return to the narrative. According to a seventeenth-century collection of midrashim known as the Yalqut Reubeni, angels took Isaac to paradise for three years to heal from the wound delivered by Abraham’s knife. A medieval midrash called Lekah Tov suggests Isaac was reduced to ashes that were then scattered upon Mount Moriah—the future temple mount—but God caused dew to appear in a way that allowed Isaac to be reconstituted and revived. According to the Talmudic text Zevachim (62a), Rabbi Yitzhak Nappaha said the builders of the second temple knew the location for the altar because they saw Isaac’s ashes on an altar in a vision. The influential Jewish philosopher Abraham ibn Ezra referred to the tradition that posited that Abraham did sacrifice Isaac, which is why he returned alone to his young men, but ibn Ezra rejected this as entirely contrary to the scriptures.⁴

All this is to say that the Aqedah isn’t a clear-cut rejection or condemnation of the practice of child sacrifice. What has come down to us is probably the final product of a string of editorial changes, with each layer renegotiating the story as they received it. But the form that has reached us must have made some kind of sense to thousands of years of readers. What is such a conflicted narrative related to child sacrifice really trying to accomplish here?

Some read Genesis 22 as an origin story for the sacrifice of animals in place of the firstborn child. The sacrifice of the ram in the place of Isaac would represent the original act of “redemption,” and something similar is precisely what is commanded in Exodus 13. In verse 11 of that chapter, Moses tells the Israelites that when they arrive in the land that Yahweh would be giving them, they were supposed to “pass each firstborn of the womb over to Yahweh.” The rest of the verse states, “All firstborn of the litter of a beast that belongs to you—the males will belong to Yahweh.” Verse 13 continues, “Every firstborn donkey you will redeem with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck.” This is very clearly a reference to sacrifice, and here the concept of “redemption” is about substituting the intended sacrificial animal with another. Then verse 13 ends, “And every firstborn human among your children you will redeem.” The same commandment is found in Exodus 34:19–20.

Exodus 13:15 goes on to explain that Yahweh punished Egypt by killing the firstborn of their animals and humans, therefore Israel must sacrifice to Yahweh every firstborn male, but every firstborn human male is to be redeemed. According to the Passover, a lamb is ritually slaughtered, cooked, and eaten, and the blood of that lamb is put on the door frame to signal to the destroying angel that they are to “pass over” that household. The Passover lamb isn’t a traditional sacrifice, and certainly isn’t a burnt offering, so it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense as the inspiration for the commandment to sacrifice—but not really—the firstborn male child. There’s certainly a symmetry between God killing firstborn children and animals and the commandment to sacrifice firstborn children and animals, but why one event should result in the other commandment isn’t clear to me. The story of Abraham and Isaac also doesn’t really fit as an inspiration for the commandment to sacrifice—but not really—the firstborn male child. Both stories seem to be straining to try to explain why Israel is expected to sacrifice their firstborn children, but also why they shouldn’t really go through with it. What’s going on here?

GIVE IT TO ME, BABY*

The oldest laws in the Hebrew Bible are in the collection of laws known as the Covenant Code, which runs from Exodus 20:22 to 23:19. Most scholars believe these laws predate the version of the Abraham story we find in Genesis 22 as well as the laws in Exodus 13 and 34. The end of Exodus 22:29 and the beginning of verse 30 contain the following commandment: “The firstborn of your sons you will give to me. You will do the same for your oxen and your sheep.”⁵ On the surface, it would seem that God is commanding Israelites to sacrifice the firstborn of their oxen, their sheep, and their children. Could this be the commandment to sacrifice animals and children that Genesis 22 and Exodus 13 are trying to renegotiate?

I would venture to guess that scholars are roughly split on whether or not this verse was originally intended to command child sacrifice. There’s no clear consensus, but I don’t think the argument against the sacrifice reading is strong. Usually that argument has to rely on asserting that the verb “to give” indicates it’s not necessarily about sacrifice. There are other perfectly good words that more clearly refer to sacrifice, so why does it just say, “you will give to me”? According to one argument, the firstborn are “given” to Yahweh in the sense that they are dedicated to priestly service. After all, Samuel was dedicated to serving Yahweh after his mother, Hannah, asked for a male child, promising to “give him to Yahweh all the days of his life.” That’s clearly not what’s going on with the oxen and sheep in Exodus 22:30, but one way to reconcile the tension is to suggest that “to give” something to Yahweh just means to bring it past the threshold of the temple and therefore into the possession of Yahweh, whether it is then sacrificed or given room and board.

Numbers 3:12–13—also a later text—is usually cited in support of this reading:

Look, I take for myself the Levites from the midst of the children of Israel in the place of each firstborn of the womb of the children of Israel. So, the Levites will belong to me, because every firstborn belongs to me. In the day I killed every firstborn in the land of Egypt, I consecrated for myself every firstborn in Israel, from human to beast. They will belong to me. I am Yahweh.

Numbers 8:17–19 repeats this commandment, but Numbers 18:15–18 falls back on the command to redeem, describing a precise amount to be paid to redeem unclean animals and firstborn children.

But all of this still seems to me to indicate Exodus 22:29 was understood as a command to sacrifice. Numbers 3 and 8 indicate Levitical priesthood service still functioned as a substitute. It’s possible to read the substitution as service for service, rather than service for sacrifice, but that doesn’t really work for Numbers 18, where money is explicitly a substitute for sacrifice. I don’t think these requirements are cumulative, either. God would be double-dipping if money were paid to redeem the firstborn but then the Levites were also taken for priesthood service as a substitute for firstborn Israelite children who have already been redeemed. There isn’t really any support for the notion that there were two separate and entirely different commands to turn over firstborn Israelites to Yahweh. All these passages seem to be renegotiating one single command. Numbers 3 and 8 may understand this command to be to “give” firstborn Israelites to Yahweh for priesthood service, but the other passages all understand the command to be to “give” firstborn Israelites to Yahweh through sacrifice.

EVEN EZEKIEL THINKS THAT MY MIND IS GONE*

Ezekiel offers his own rationalizations for the existence of some kind of commandment to sacrifice children. In Ezekiel 20, Yahweh is explaining, through Ezekiel, why the Israelites were exiled to Babylon. Yahweh explains that their ancestors who came out of Egypt profaned his Sabbath and refused to follow his statutes and ordinances. “I thought I would pour out my anger upon them and spend my anger on them in the wilderness,” Yahweh says in verse 21, but he ultimately decides to slow-play his hand, swearing to them in the wilderness that they would one day be scattered among the nations. In verses 25–26, he continues, “And I also gave them statutes and commandments that were not good. And I defiled them in their gifts, in their passing each firstborn of the womb over, in order to desolate them, so that they would know that I am Yahweh.”

The reference to “passing each firstborn of the womb over” connects the passage directly to Exodus 13:12, which is the only other place in all the Hebrew Bible where the verb “pass over” has “each firstborn of the womb” as the direct object. Exodus 34 could be in view, too. Those texts, along with Numbers 18, acknowledge an existing requirement to sacrifice firstborn children but provide a way to avoid it. Ezekiel quite clearly does not. Instead, he leans into it, accounting for it as a type of punishment that fits the crime. According to Ezekiel, Yahweh basically got upset with Israel and added to his laws a requirement to sacrifice the firstborn as a way to show the disobedient nation of Israel who’s boss. We might imagine Yahweh saying, “You want something to sacrifice? I’ll give you something to sacrifice!”

IT WASN’T ME†

The exilic prophet Jeremiah, on the other hand, just offers straight-up denial. In Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, and 32:35, the prophet has Yahweh explain that the Judahites built high places of Tophet in the Hinnom Valley (see chapter 19) where they “passed their sons and daughters over.” Yahweh continues, “which thing I didn’t command, and didn’t even occur to me.”⁶ According to Jeremiah, Yahweh just says, “It wasn’t me.” That’s a bold strategy, Cotton, but it kinda undermines all the other passages that directly affirm a requirement that firstborn children be sacrificed, even if they also immediately require they not do that.

Of particular interest to me is something additional that we find in the denial in Jeremiah 32:35. In that passage, according to the NRSVue, Yahweh explicitly says the Judahites offered “their sons and daughters to Molech.” Beyond just denying that the commandment came from him, Yahweh also seems to be insisting the child sacrifices were directed to someone named Molech. This is supposed to be a deity identified several times in the Hebrew Bible as the recipient of child sacrifice. There are references to sacrificing children to Molech in Leviticus 18:21; 20:2, 3, 4, and 5, in 2 Kings 23:10, and here in Jeremiah. According to 1 Kings 11:7, Molech is the “abomination of the children of Ammon.” If these sacrifices were made to Molech, then obviously they weren’t made to Yahweh. Molech is thus a convenient means of passing the buck. Like Yahweh said, “It wasn’t me.”

But this excuse doesn’t really add up. To begin, the patron deity of the Ammonites wasn’t Molech; it was Milcom. In fact, two verses earlier, in 1 Kings 11:5, we have the phrase “Milcom, the abomination of the children of Ammon.” In Hebrew, Milcom is spelled with the consonants m-l-k-m. Molech is spelled with the consonants m-l-k. They’re just one letter off. It looks like the final mem of the name Milcom just fell out at some point in the text’s transmission. The medieval scribes responsible for the Masoretic Text added vowels to the consonants to give us Molech, but that reading isn’t found in ancient witnesses to this passage. The ancient Greek translation, for instance, seems to have understood m-l-k as the plural noun “kings.” At least in this verse, the identification of Molech as a deity falls apart.

Scholars have also been trying for a long time to find evidence somewhere outside the Bible for the existence of this deity, but no one has ever been able to turn up a plausible candidate. The closest anyone has come is a deity named either Milku or Malik who may appear in some very early Mesopotamian and Ugaritic texts and personal names. However, in addition to the fact that this deity long predates the rather late biblical texts that refer to Molech, there are absolutely no data that connect any deity named Milku or Malik with child sacrifice. Molech seems to be unique to a handful of late biblical texts.

The plot thickens when we consider a bunch of ancient Phoenician inscriptions that were discovered about a century ago in Carthage in connection with the remains of cremated infants.⁷ Such remains had been found elsewhere in the Mediterranean since the nineteenth century CE, but these were the first found with texts that seemed to explain them. Several of these inscriptions, which date to the seventh through second centuries BCE, referred to offerings “to the Lord Baal Hamon” as a “mlk of a person” or a “mlk of a lamb.” Sometimes they also identified them as offerings that had been given in fulfillment of a vow made by a named individual. The cremated infants were likely sacrificed as some kind of burnt offering.

These inscriptions were written in a language very closely related to Hebrew during the same time that the word Molech begins to pop up in the biblical texts. They seem to suggest that the word mlk was not the name of a deity but instead was a type of sacrifice that could include children, animals, or sometimes money.⁸ The word could have come from verbal roots meaning either “to offer” or “to promise.” More and more scholars today argue that occurrences of the word Molech in the Hebrew Bible should be reinterpreted in light of these inscriptions. It was probably always a reference to a type of offering and never the name of a deity. So, for instance, Jeremiah 32:35 shouldn’t be translated to say the Judahites “passed their sons and daughters over to Molech;” it should be translated to say they “passed their sons and daughters over as a mlk-offering.”⁹

If this new understanding is accurate—and I think it probably is—then the question remains who the intended recipient of the sacrifices was. The storm god Baal was overwhelmingly the recipient of these sacrifices where they occur elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and Yahweh had successfully supplanted Baal as the storm god of the Israelites, so it may be that Yahweh was the intended recipient of the mlk-offerings mentioned in the Bible. Exodus 22:29 seems to be an early command for Israelites to sacrifice their firstborn, which is probably not the same type of sacrifice as a mlk-offering, but it suggests that Yahweh was in the business of child sacrifice. And business may have been booming.

DON’T CALL ME DAUGHTER*

The book of Judges has a lot of uncomfortable stories in it, but the story of one of those judges, Jephthah, may be the most uncomfortable. In fact, a lot of people just can’t bring themselves to accept what the story is about. It begins in Judges 11 by describing Jephthah as the son of a sex worker and a man name Gilead. His illegitimacy results in his expulsion from his father’s household by his legitimate half brothers. Jephthah is a “mighty warrior,” though, so he soon finds gainful employment leading a band of brigands. When an ethnic group to the east called the Ammonites started causing trouble in the neighborhood,† the elders of Gilead plead with Jephthah to lead them. Jephthah decides that if Yahweh gives him victory over the Ammonites, he’ll agree to become their chieftain.

In Judges 11:29, the spirit of Yahweh comes over Jephthah and he travels to confront the Ammonites. Before the battle, Jephthah makes a vow to Yahweh: “If you deliver the sons of Ammon into my hand, then it will be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the sons of Ammon, I will offer as a burnt offering to Yahweh” (verses 30–31). Verse 32 explains that Yahweh delivers the Ammonites into his hand, and with prejudice. Yahweh meets his end of the deal. But when Jephthah gets home, it’s his daughter who comes through the doors to greet him, dancing to tambourine music.

Jephthah tears his clothes in grief and complains that she has brought him to ruin because he had made a vow to Yahweh that he cannot violate. The story never mentions Jephthah’s explanation to his daughter of his vow, but she immediately seems to accept the consequences, saying to him, “do to me according to what came out of your mouth” (verse 36). She then asks for two months to wander the mountains with her friends mourning her death as a virgin. Jephthah grants her request. When she returns, according to verse 39, Jephthah “did to her according to the vow he vowed.” He sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering. The story ends by explaining that she never had sex with a man, and so an annual tradition developed among Israelite women of mourning Jephthah’s daughter.

This story leaves us with a question: Did Yahweh accept Jephthah’s sacrifice of his child? We’re never explicitly told, but the data that are available point pretty consistently in that direction. For instance, Yahweh immediately accepts Jephthah’s vow and delivers the Ammonites into his hand. Ancient as well as modern readers would have understood Yahweh to have known what was coming. Additionally, as with Genesis 22, neither the narrator nor any character in the story seems to have any problem whatsoever with the successful fulfilment of this vow. The inviolability of such a vow was more important within the narrative than any objection to human sacrifice. Jephthah is represented as faithful to Yahweh and to his vow, and this is absolutely nowhere suggested to be a bad thing. There is no rejection of the sacrifice on the part of Yahweh, or any indication that Jephthah experiences any negative consequences because of it. In fact, Jephthah continues to have military success.

Folks who want to interpret this story as a cautionary tale will highlight that the book of Judges frequently points out that there was no king in the land, and everyone did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. That statement isn’t used anywhere in the story of Jephthah, though. In fact, the context seems to suggest that Jephthah’s tenure as judge was divinely orchestrated as a blessing from Yahweh. In Judges 10, Yahweh is upset with Israel for worshipping other gods, but in verses 15–16, the Israelites repent and get rid of their foreign gods. The text then explains that Yahweh’s soul “grew tired of the suffering of Israel.” The chapter ends with the Ammonites threatening Israel and the question of who would be able to lead the Gileadites against them.

Enter Jephthah, who successfully delivers Israel and punishes the faithless. His death is described in Judges 12:7, and the rest of Judges 12 rattles off a list of minor judges before chapter 13 begins with the statement that “the sons of Israel once again did evil in Yahweh’s eyes.” This is setting the stage for Samson’s birth, but Judges 11–12 represent Jephthah as a judge provided by Yahweh to deliver the people of Israel following their repentance and prior to their return to wickedness. The only other occurrence of Jephthah’s name in the Hebrew Bible is in 1 Samuel 12:11, where the prophet Samuel explains to Israel that “Yahweh sent Jerubbaal and Barak, and Jephthah, and Samson, and delivered y’all from the hand of your enemies.” While these stories have long been interpreted as cautionary tales, there is no judgment passed on Jephthah within the narrative itself, least of all for carrying through with the vow he made that secured his victory over the Ammonites and delivered Israel according to Yahweh’s will.

CONCLUSION

The data suggest there was a period in ancient Israel when child sacrifice was not viewed negatively. At least some of the texts that have survived down to us treat it neutrally, if not positively. Exodus 22:29 probably preserves an early commandment to sacrifice firstborn children. Whether or not that commandment was ever actually enforced is not clear. We have no archaeological evidence for the practice of child sacrifice in the lands of Israel and Judah, and as has been discussed elsewhere, a lot of the legislation in the Hebrew Bible is better understood as propaganda than as actual on-the-ground jurisprudence.

That commandment was quickly renegotiated, however, either by explaining it as a punishment from God (as in Ezekiel) or by overlaying it with an additional commandment to redeem all firstborn children (as in Exodus 13 and 34). Others leveraged the priesthood service of Levites as a substitute for offering the firstborn. Jeremiah took Shaggy’s advice and had Yahweh just say, “It wasn’t me.” Postbiblical readers concocted a foreign deity named Molech to outsource responsibility. The story of Abraham and Isaac as it’s currently found in Genesis 22 may have represented another attempt to supplement the commandment with a story set before its issuance. The Israelites had the same commandment given to them, but Abraham was stopped and was instead given an animal to sacrifice. Perhaps the editors wanted to reinforce in the minds of hearers or readers of the Aqedah the expectation that firstborn children be redeemed through the sacrifice of an animal as a substitute.

The concept of child sacrifice played a formative role in the development of Jewish and Christian tradition. Both God and Abraham are represented as willing to sacrifice children that had some kind of unique status to them. The former went through with it so that the rest of humanity could be redeemed, while the latter made use of a spontaneously available ram to redeem his own child. Rather than directly confront and deal with the implications of these data, however, many authors, editors, hearers, and readers from the ancient world down to today have simply renegotiated them away.

12 The Bible Says You Should Beat Your Kids

Most of us have probably heard the saying “spare the rod and spoil the child.” I know I heard it from time to time when I was a kid, but I never understood where it came from or what it meant. It sounds very biblical, but it’s actually not a quote from the Bible—or at least it’s not an exact quote. It’s from a poem called “Hudibras,” which was written by Samuel Butler in the seventeenth century CE. It was probably loosely based on Proverbs 13:24, though, which says, “The one withholding his rod hates his son, but the one who loves him seeks out discipline.” In other words, if you love your kids, you should beat them. This has long been a proof text for the corporal punishment of children, as we see with Christian leaders like John Piper, who posted Proverbs 13:24 on Twitter (X) several years ago and commented, “Spanking is not abuse. It is love.”¹ Piper is flatly wrong, of course. Spanking is abuse, and the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that it has significantly harmful effects on the emotional health and well-being of children.²

Because more and more people are becoming aware of this, though, many readers of the Bible are trying to negotiate a less harmful reading with this passage. You’ll see a lot of people on social media today insisting that the traditional reading is a misinterpretation, and that the passage is actually talking about a shepherd’s staff, which wasn’t used to punish but to gently guide. One example of this argument on TikTok comes from a creator who goes by @thymeandtenderness. In a video from July 2023, she refers to the passage and asserts, “the rod that that scripture is referring to is a shepherd’s rod. Shepherds don’t beat their sheep. They use the rod to guide them.”³ As I’ve said many times in response to content creators working to negotiate the Bible toward a more productive and helpful reading, I appreciate and support this creator’s rhetorical goals. However, the data don’t support the notion that the author of this passage in Proverbs had a shepherd’s staff in mind.

THIS IS GOING TO HURT YOU A LOT MORE THAN IT DOES ME*

The word translated “rod” in Proverbs 13:24 is shevet, and it occurs around 190 times in the Hebrew Bible. It refers basically to a stick or a rod, and it is used in a variety of ways. It can refer to a scepter that a king would hold (Genesis 49:10); a stick for threshing (Isaiah 28:27); a staff that a shepherd would use to guide sheep (Psalm 23:4); a spear that could be used as a weapon in battle (2 Samuel 18:14); and a cane used for corporal punishment by a slave master (Exodus 21:20), a parent (2 Samuel 7:14), or even God (Isaiah 11:4).

Within the book of Proverbs, the word shevet occurs seven other times beyond our passage, and in every instance, it refers to a cane used for corporal punishment. The earliest occurrence is Proverbs 10:13, which states, “On the lips of one who understands will be found wisdom, but a shevet is for the back of one who lacks sense.”⁴ We have two occurrences of shevet in chapter 22. Verse 8 says, “The sower of iniquity will reap disaster, and the shevet of his anger will come to an end.” Verse 15 says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, a shevet of discipline will drive it far from him.” Proverbs 26:3 says, “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the donkey, and a shevet for the backs of fools.” Proverbs 29:15 is somewhat parallel to 13:24: “A shevet and reproof grant wisdom, but an unrestrained child shames his mother.” There are two other occurrences in Proverbs, and both of them in chapter 23. These two passages represent the most explicit endorsement of beating children in the book. Verses 13 and 14 read, “Do not withhold from a child discipline, for if you beat him with a shevet, he won’t die. If you beat him with a shevet, you deliver his soul from Sheol.”

There are a number of related texts from the ancient world that share very similar rhetoric. A fifth-century BCE Aramaic text called the Story and Proverbs of Ahiqar instructs (according to this old-timey translation), “Withhold not thy son from the rod, else thou wilt not be able to save [him from wickedness]. If I smite thee, my son, thou wilt not die, but if I leave thee to thine own heart [thou wilt not live].”⁵ This text was discovered within a Jewish community that occupied the Egyptian city of Elephantine, but it may go back to an original composed in Mesopotamia. The apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus (aka Sirach), which was written around the middle of the second century BCE, enthusiastically expands on this ideal in the first verse of chapter 30: “He who loves his son will whip him often, so that he may rejoice at the way he turns out” (NRSVue). An Egyptian papyrus from around the same time period counsels that “A son does not die from punishment at the hand of his father. He who loves his spoiled son will spoil himself with him. The stick and shame protect his son from the fiend.”⁶

CONCLUSION

The book of Proverbs clearly and repeatedly praises the use of corporal punishment to discipline and raise children. This was just a widespread bit of the conventional wisdom of the ancient world, but it is a harmful ideology that most people rightly reject today. I don’t think insisting the authors actually meant something else entirely is a productive way to try to rehabilitate this passage, though. Nor do I think it’s consistent to dismiss the harmful ideology as the product of the authors’ own time while simultaneously maintaining the inerrancy, inspiration, and authority of the words themselves. The words are simply wrong.

It causes far more problems than it solves to try to deny the problems, reinterpret them away, or ignore them. In this example, for instance, the argument that the authors intended to refer to a shepherd’s staff used to gently guide sheep and not to beat them is easily refuted, which can raise doubts about the competence as well as the intentions of those claiming to offer better interpretations of biblical passages. Ignoring the harm of these passages while trying to assert their inerrancy, inspiration, and authority just preserves the harm under the surface. If we want to prevent these passages from harming people in the future, I think the best way to do that is to call them out for what they are.

13 The Bible Says There Is Only One God

I can still remember the first time I saw my dad cry. It was in 1998, when we watched the Denver Broncos win their first Super Bowl from our living room in Longmont, Colorado. We’d been Broncos fans for as long as I can remember, but we didn’t live in Colorado until we moved from Gaithersburg, Maryland (just outside of Washington, D.C.), to Longmont in the summer of 1993. The anguish in 1987 of watching the Broncos lose 42–10 to the Washington football team was only made more sour by being surrounded by friends and neighbors (and my crush!) who were huge Washington fans. Two years later we’d set the record for the largest point differential in Super Bowl history by losing 55–10 to the San Francisco 49ers. My dad—who, by the way, bears a striking resemblance to John Elway—seemed to take these losses especially personally. The Broncos’ talent for losing big in the Super Bowl hung like a millstone around our necks.

The Broncos weren’t supposed to be contenders in Super Bowl XXXII, played on January 25, 1998. But thanks to John Elway, Shannon Sharpe, Ed McCaffrey, and Terrell Davis, we were in the game. Late in the third quarter, Elway scrambled on a critical third-and-six and leapt headfirst into a collision with three Green Bay Packers defenders that spun him across the first-down line like a rusty thirty-seven-year-old helicopter. This set up a one-yard touchdown run by Terrell Davis two plays later, which put the Broncos ahead going into the fourth quarter and dialed up the emotions in the McClellan household to a rolling boil. When the final whistle blew with the score at 31–24 in Denver’s favor, my dad openly wept.

It was a foregone conclusion that the Broncos would defeat the Atlanta Falcons in the following year’s Super Bowl XXXIII, giving us back-to-back Super Bowl wins. The Simpsons’ potshot against the Broncos at the end of one of the greatest episodes of situation comedy in the history of television (“You Only Move Twice”) was a distant memory. The Broncos were the greatest football team on earth—nay, the only real football team on earth. The Oakland Raiders certainly didn’t qualify as a professional football team. They were nothing. They were less than nothing. Who else could compare? No one. There were the Denver Broncos, and there were no others.

Now, you realize I’m not actually saying I think the Denver Broncos are literally the only NFL team that exists. I’m just using rhetoric to emphasize how committed I am to the Broncos and how much their superiority over other teams means to me. So, when biblical authors say the same exact thing about the God of Israel compared to other gods, why wouldn’t we interpret their rhetoric the same way?

THE MANY GODS OF THE HEBREW BIBLE

If you start carefully reading the Bible from Genesis 1:1, you might run into something a little confusing before you clear the first chapter. Verse 26 says, “And God said, ‘Let us make humanity in our image, after our likeness.’” Wait. Who’s “us”?! Who is God speaking to? A very similar statement is found in Genesis 11:7, where God sees the people building a tower and says, “Let us go down and confuse their language.” Again, God seems to be speaking to others. Christians like to read these passages as references to the Trinity, but no one ever interpreted them that way until the invention of the concept of the Trinity began more than six hundred years later in the second century CE (see chapter 17). Others suggest God is talking to angels, but the broader context doesn’t really support that—at least, not in a way that protects the notion that there’s only one God.

In Genesis 3:5, the serpent tells Eve that eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will open her eyes, making her “like gods, knowing good and evil.”¹ The serpent is just lying, though, right? Nope. The serpent’s statement is verified in verse 22, where God states, “the human has become like one of us, to know good and evil” (see chapter 4). The “us” that God keeps referring to is other gods. The consensus view among scholars is that these were the other gods of the divine council—the deliberative body of gods that made decisions about the oversight and functioning of the universe.

These gods are referred to again in Genesis 6:2–4, where we find this odd story of the “sons of God(s).” The Hebrew here is bene elohim, which could mean a couple of different things. If elohim is understood as a reference to the God of Israel, then the bene elohim are God’s own divine offspring, likely born of God’s consort or wife, Asherah (see chapter 6). If the word elohim is understood generically to refer to plural “gods,” then the phrase is similar to saying “daughters of humanity” or “sons of the prophets.” It’s a Hebrew turn of phrase that refers to a member of a group by calling them a son or daughter of that group. Although it’s in Aramaic, this is precisely how Nebuchadnezzar refers to the fourth entity he sees in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: “a son of gods” (Daniel 3:25). In other words, a god. It’s not a reference to Jesus. Remember, this is a Babylonian king living more than five hundred years before Jesus was born.

According to either understanding, the bene elohim of Genesis 6 were other gods. Later traditions would reinterpret these “sons of God(s)” as angels and later even as humans.² According to the authors/editors of Genesis 6, though, a group of gods decided to come down to earth and sire demigod children with the humans. This represented a gross violation of the boundary that separated the human and the divine, and this odd little story seems to have been placed where it was to make it sound like God had sufficient motivation to destroy his creation with the flood.³

The bene elohim pop up in another place that some scholars think may be among the oldest portions of the entire Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy 32:8–9 read as follows:

8  When Elyon apportioned the nations,

      When he separated the children of humanity,

He set up the boundaries of the peoples

      According to the number of the children of God.

9  And Yahweh’s portion was his people,

      Jacob was his share of the inheritance.

In the King James Version and other more traditional translations, verse 8 refers to the “children of Israel,” not the “children of God.” This is how the traditional Medieval Hebrew Bible manuscript known as the Masoretic Text reads, but the Septuagint reads “the number of the angels of God.” Because scholars have long known that the Septuagint translators liked to translate the phrase “children of God” as “angels of God” (as in Job 1:6 and 2:1), they suggested the Hebrew source text of the Septuagint probably referred to the children of God. A fragment of a manuscript of Deuteronomy discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, 4QDeuteronomyj, preserves exactly this reading, confirming that hypothesis.⁴

This passage indicates the nations of the earth were divided up according to the number of the children of God. On the surface, the text seems to be identifying Yahweh as one of those children of God. After all, you “inherit” property from someone else, not from yourself. There are some other clues within this idea of “the number of the children of God.” The text doesn’t tell us precisely what that number was, but for a few different reasons, scholars are pretty confident it was seventy. To begin, this makes sense of the traditional text’s variant reading, “children of Israel,” since Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5 state that Jacob (Israel) fathered seventy children.⁵ Also, Genesis 10, often referred to as the “Table of Nations,” lists seventy descendants of Noah, and these descendants are the eponymous ancestors of the nations that were understood to exist at the time of the text’s initial circulation.

This highlights an interesting parallel to the Ugaritic literature, written in Syria, north of Israel, between 1400 and 1200 BCE. A text called the “Baal Cycle” refers to the second-tier deities of their pantheon as the “seventy children of Athirat.” In the Ugaritic literature, Athirat (equivalent to the Hebrew Asherah) is the consort or partner of the high god El, who is also repeatedly referred to as the father of those same deities. In other words, El and Athirat were the high deities who procreated the traditionally numbered seventy deities of the pantheon. It seems Deuteronomy 32:8–9 are identifying the patron deities over the seventy nations of the earth as the children of Elyon, the “Most High.”

Deuteronomy 4:19 is also a reference to this tradition, but it was written much later than Deuteronomy 32:8–9, and the roles are changed a bit. In Deuteronomy 4, it’s not Elyon dividing up the nations to the gods but Yahweh dividing up the gods to the nations. The gods in Deuteronomy 4 are also referred to as astral bodies: “the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven.” These passages are explaining why each nation has their own patron deity who was responsible for overseeing and defending their nation. The patron deities would later be demoted to the status of guardian angels, referred to in the Enochic literature as “Watchers.” We see this tradition of each nation having a guardian angel to fight its battles for it in places like Daniel 10:13–21 and 12:1, where Michael, Israel’s “prince,” fights against “the prince of Persia” and the “prince of Greece.”⁶

There’s a fascinating story about other gods in 2 Kings 3 that relies on this framework of patron deities having sovereignty over their own nations. Verse 4 tells us the king of Moab had been paying an annual tribute to Jehoram, the wicked king of Israel. Mesha decided to throw off their vassalage, though, and refused to pay the tribute. Jehoram formed a coalition with the Judahite King Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom to invade Moab as punishment. Their first attempt failed miserably, and then they regrouped and sought guidance from Elisha, a prophet of Yahweh. Elisha wasn’t happy about helping Jehoram but agreed to seek Yahweh’s direction only because of his respect for Jehoshaphat. According to Elisha’s prophetic guidance, the coalition was to run a very Assyrian-like scorched earth campaign that would ruin the land, stop up the wells, and destroy every fortified city. Elisha declared that Yahweh would provide the necessary resources and would “deliver Moab into your hands”—an unmistakable promise that the coalition would be successful in crippling the nation and extracting compensation from it to cover the lost tribute and the cost of the campaign itself.

This time the coalition’s invasion initially went according to plan, and they successfully carried out their prophetic instructions until they arrived at the Moabite city of Kir-Hareseth. The coalition surrounded and attacked the city, and the battle looked like it was going their way. 2 Kings 3:26–27 describe what happened next: “When the king saw that the battle was too strong for him, he took seven hundred swordsmen with him to break through to the king of Edom, but they could not. Then he took his firstborn son who would rule in his place, and he offered him as a burnt offering upon the city wall. Then there was great fury against Israel, and they withdrew from against him and returned to the land.”

The word for “fury” used in this passage is qetsef, which refers to divine fury everywhere it occurs in the Hebrew Bible except for two later Persian-period prose couplets (which are unrelated to the usage in 2 Kings). The author seems to be suggesting some kind of divine fury drove the coalition out of Moab, but what deity could be the source of it? Elsewhere the word refers to Yahweh’s fury, but it just doesn’t make sense for Yahweh to suddenly become enraged at Israel as a result of the Moabite king’s human sacrifice. Some scholars have argued that Israel must have somehow participated in the sacrifice, thus angering Yahweh. Others suggest Israel must have been so repulsed by the sacrifice that Moab was allowed to gain the upper hand, thus angering Yahweh. Still others suggest the “great fury” must have referred to Israel’s horror at the sacrifice, which led them to declare they were leaving because “this place is dead anyway.”*

Devotional and academic readers alike have ginned up all kinds of scenarios to help interpret this passage in a way that skirts the plain meaning of the text. But the simplest explanation—the only one that does not require conjuring up details that are not in evidence—is that the sacrifice successfully catalyzed the intervention of the Moabite patron deity Chemosh. He drove the coalition out, frustrating the Yahwistic prophecy. I would agree with the rhetorical question posed by the influential Protestant theologian Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on 1 and 2 Kings: “The only conclusion to draw, is it not, is that the Moabite god, Chemosh, is motivated by the sacrifice and is activated on home ground against the invader?”⁷ By presenting the story this way, the author can offer a terse yet plausible excuse for the historical fact they can neither ignore nor misrepresent: Israel lost. It turns out the other gods not only exist, but without home court advantage, Yahweh might even lose to them in battle.

Psalm 82 is frequently held up as another very early recognition of the gods of the nations. The first verse is pretty explicit: “God took his place in the divine council. Among the gods he judged.” (Despite what many people think, the Hebrew word elohim, which I’ve translated “gods,” is not used in the Bible to refer to human judges.) The psalm goes on to represent Yahweh condemning the other gods of the divine council to mortality for their neglect of cosmic order and social justice. Some scholars have argued this psalm is incredibly early and, like Deuteronomy 32, represents an original distinction between Yahweh and the Most High. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, though. In 2018, I published a paper in the Journal of Biblical Literature arguing that this psalm is actually pretty late and is attempting to restructure the Judahite understanding of the divine council and the patron deities.⁸ Here’s what I think is going on.

Psalm 82 makes the most sense as a reaction to the Babylonian exile. Babylon’s invasion of Israel and the forced migration of the people of Judah represents a failure of cosmic order and social justice, which has come about because of the negligence of the gods of the nations. This is the basis of Yahweh’s accusations, and verse 5 describes the outcome of this negligence for the nations of the earth: “They do not know, and they do not understand! In darkness they wander! Shaken are all the foundations of the earth!” In verses 6–7, Yahweh passes judgment on the gods of the nations, condemning them to mortality and effectively deposing them from their seats on the divine council. This leaves a vacuum in the divine patronage over the nations of the earth, and this is where the psalmist comes in to cry out in verse 8, “Rise up, O God! Judge the earth! You inherit all nations!”

Calling on Yahweh to inherit all nations responds to the crisis of the people of Israel being outside the land of Israel (Yahweh’s inheritance) and not being able to worship him. This notion that you can’t worship God outside the nation of Israel is reflected in a number of preexilic texts. The Syrian general Naaman, for instance, wants to worship Yahweh when he’s back in Syria, but because Yahweh can only be worshipped on Israelite soil, Naaman takes two cartloads of Israelite soil home with him (2 Kings 5:17). When Saul is pursuing David near the borders of Israel, David complains that Saul’s men have “driven me out today from Yahweh’s inheritance, saying, ‘Go worship other gods’” (1 Samuel 26:19). The exiled Judahites in Babylon couldn’t worship God unless something changed. In light of Yahweh’s general restriction to the land of Israel, it seems to me that Psalm 82 was an attempt to rearrange the divine council and renegotiate divine patronage over the nations to extend Yahweh’s sovereignty to all the nations of the earth. This was the universalization of Yahweh. The gods were thus deposed and dismissed, but because they remained an integral part of Israel’s scriptural heritage, they didn’t simply disappear.

NOTHING COMPARES TO YOU*

When most devotional readers of the Bible hear that scholars believe the Bible recognizes the existence of other gods, the first and frequently only stop on their “Nu-uh!” tour is Deutero-Isaiah, which is a fancy way to refer to Isaiah 40–55 (widely believed to be a post-exilic addition to Isaiah). These chapters are quite emphatic about the impotence and irrelevance of the gods of the nations, and they use a few different pieces of rhetoric to get this across. The most common has Yahweh asserting that he is God, or Yahweh, or “I am he,” and then that, crucially, “there is no other” or “there is no one besides me” (Isaiah 44:6; 45:5, 6, 18, 22; 46:9). According to the traditional reading, this means there are no other gods apart from or besides Yahweh. There are multiple problems with this reading, though.⁹

To begin, while it’s subtle, the author of Deutero-Isaiah does refer to the gods of the divine council. Isaiah 40:25–26 tells the audience to look up to the sky and rhetorically asks who it is who marshals the celestial bodies to their ranks. The unspoken answer is obviously Yahweh. This evokes the imagery of the gods as Yahweh’s celestial “host” or “army.” In perhaps one of the oldest passages in the Hebrew Bible—Judges 5:20—the stars are gods who fight against Sisera from their courses in the heavens. Isaiah 45:12 similarly identifies Yahweh as the one who stretched out the heavens and “commands their host.” Deuteronomy 4:19, discussed above, similarly refers to the sun, moon, stars, and “all the host of heaven” as the gods of the nations that the hearer looks up to the heavens to see.

Next, the author of Deutero-Isaiah puts very similar rhetoric in the mouth of the personified Babylon. In Isaiah 47:8 and 10, Babylon declares, “I am, and there is no one besides me.” The personified Nineveh says the same in Zephaniah 2:15. It really doesn’t make sense to interpret this as the cities claiming to be the only cities in existence. The rhetoric only really lands if we understand the authors to have these cities declaring themselves to be the only cities that matter to their people. In other words, the Hebrew phrases translated “besides me” don’t mean “anywhere in all the universe apart from me,” but something more like “next to me here within the rhetorical scope that has been established by the context.” In the case of the cities, the context would be the extent of their geographic and demographic sovereignty.

The context of these statements in Deutero-Isaiah is Yahweh’s deliverance of Israel. This is why the terms “redeemer” and “savior” are used in such close connection. Yahweh is basically telling Israel they better not give credit for their deliverance to any other god but him, and this is precisely what we read in Isaiah 43:12: “I am the one who decreed and delivered and declared, not some stranger among you.” Most translations render the Hebrew word for “stranger” as “strange god.” The point is not to say that no other gods exist; it’s to say that no other gods matter.

There’s an additional dimension of Deutero-Isaiah’s rhetoric that confirms this. Deutero-Isaiah repeatedly uses the rhetoric of incomparability. Nobody compares to Yahweh. Isaiah 46:9 makes this pretty clear with some poetic parallelism: “I am God, and there is no other / I am God, and there is no one like me.” Saying “there is no other” doesn’t deny other gods exist; it just asserts that Yahweh is so far above all of the other gods. Similar rhetoric is found in several other places, like Exodus 15:11, which rhetorically asks, “Who is like you, Yahweh, among the gods?” Psalm 29 calls on the “children of gods” (benei elim) to ascribe glory and strength to Yahweh. Yahweh is the “God of gods” in Psalm 84:7 and “a great king over all gods” in Psalm 95:3. Yahweh is said to be “exalted over all gods” in Psalm 97:9 and “revered over all gods” in Psalm 96:4 and 1 Chronicles 16:25. Psalm 89:6 rhetorically asks, “who can be compared to Yahweh among the children of gods (benei elim)?”

Repeatedly crowing that Yahweh is exalted as a god and a king over all the other gods isn’t that big a flex if your audience thinks the other gods are nonexistent figments of pagan imaginations. The reason this rhetoric is effective is precisely because the audience understood the other gods to exist, and because it actually means something to insist Yahweh towers so far above the patron deities of the gigantic empires next door that they can be dismissed as powerless and inconsequential. The more exalted the power and significance of the denigrated deities, the more powerful the rhetoric of incomparability. Boasting about being exalted as king and god over figments of other people’s imaginations is utterly impotent rhetoric. The rhetoric of incomparability was increasingly critical, though, as Judahites/Judeans found themselves on the business end of larger empires whose deities had an awful lot more capital in the marketplace of worship. If their ethnic identity was to survive, they needed to represent their deity not just as competitive, but as incontestable. They didn’t just need pros on the field; they needed an Elway, Davis, McCaffrey, Sharpe lineup with a Schlereth and an Elam thrown in and a Shanahan stalkin’ the sidelines.

While some scholars might draw a sharp line between exclusivity and incomparability, I would suggest they’re just different flavors of the same rhetoric. Both of these senses are also found in the much older literature of proudly polytheistic ancient Southwest Asian societies. For instance, the Great Cairo Hymn of Praise to Amun-Re, composed between 2000 and 1500 BCE, says to Amun-Re, “You are the Sole One, who made [all] that exists, One, alone, who made that which is.” It also praises Amun-Re as “Unique one, like whom among the gods?”, “Unique king, like whom among the gods?”, and “Creator and Maker of all that exists.”¹⁰ A hymn to the Mesopotamian moon deity Sin begins, “O Lord, chief of the gods, who alone is exalted on earth and in heaven.”¹¹ It later continues, “King of kings, exalted, whose decrees none rival, no god is like unto thy divinity.”¹² Even though Baal was defeated in battle multiple times and was subordinate to the high god El, the rhetoric of incomparability is used in Ugaritic literature to praise him: “Our king is Mightiest Baal, our ruler, with none above him.”¹³ The rhetoric of exclusivity and of incomparability is just rhetoric, and it’s pretty common rhetoric.

Finally, while Deutero-Isaiah is frequently held up as the threshold of a strict philosophical monotheism, it’s not the only place where this rhetoric is found. We see it in the book of Deuteronomy as well, but scholars tend not to point to that book as the threshold of monotheism. Why not? Because the texts that use that rhetoric also explicitly acknowledge the other gods. For instance, Deuteronomy 32:39 has Yahweh declare, “See now that I—I am he, and there is no other god with me.” That sounds just as definitive as Deutero-Isaiah, but in addition to what we have in verses 8–9 (see page 158), verse 43 goes on to say, “Worship him, all you gods!”¹⁴ So this “there is no other” rhetoric can be used in close connection with the explicit acknowledgment of other gods. It’s just rhetoric.

I BELIEVE THERE ARE ANGELS AMONG US*

During the Hellenistic period, a large-scale renegotiation of the heavens got underway among the authors and audiences of the Bible and related literature. As I mentioned above, the exile incentivized authors to universalize Yahweh so he could be accessed beyond the borders of Israel. Psalm 82 deposed the divine council to achieve this, but the scriptural heritage of Judeans and later Jewish communities continued to talk about God’s heavenly council and host (army), so further renegotiations were necessary. Another step was to reinterpret the gods of Genesis 6 as angels. We see this in the Enochic literature and in the Septuagint, which liked to translate the Hebrew for “gods” into Greek as “angels.” Now, angels were still considered a type of deity, but a lower-ranked one, so it aided in the rhetorical exaltation of Yahweh. The gods of the nations got squished down into the bottom tier of the pantheon. The main ones were identified as angels, but there were also spirits and demons and other divine forces that occupied the same space. There was now Yahweh all the way at the top and everybody else all the way down at the bottom.

Identifying gods as angels seems to have normalized this understanding that an enormous gulf separated the God of Israel from the motley crew of other divine characters mentioned in the scriptures, which made acknowledgment of other gods less discomforting for some authors. This may be why Dead Sea Scrolls texts like the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice repeatedly refer to holy ones, angels, and spirits as elim, “gods.”¹⁵ Another rather fragmentary Dead Sea Scrolls manuscript, 11Q13 (also known as 11QMelchizedek) insists that the word elohim, “God,” in Psalm 82:1 is not referring to Yahweh, but to Melchizedek: “as it is written about him in the songs of David, which says, ‘A god takes his stand in the council of El. In the midst of gods, he judges.’”

The New Testament isn’t nearly as liberal as the Dead Sea Scrolls with its references to other gods, but the gods are still acknowledged in a variety of ways. The divinity of angels is recognized, although they’re represented as more clearly subordinated to and contingent upon God. Malevolent divine beings are almost unilaterally described as demons, but even these are acknowledged as gods in the scriptures of the earliest Christians. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 10:19–20, Paul quotes Deuteronomy 32:17 to demonstrate that while idols are nothing, to offer them sacrifices is to offer sacrifices to demons: “So what am I saying? That food offered to idols amounts to anything? That idols amount to anything? No. That what they sacrifice, ‘they sacrifice to demons and not to God.’ I don’t want you to become partners with demons.” Whether Paul was translating from the Hebrew or quoting the Septuagint, the very next clause in Deuteronomy identifies the recipient of the sacrifices a second time: “to gods that they didn’t know.” Paul was quoting scripture that explicitly identifies demons as gods.

1 Corinthians 8:4–6 is a critical passage for understanding Paul’s position. The rhetorical context is whether or not Corinthian followers of Jesus should be participating in feasts involving food sacrificed to idols. Paul is going to argue that there’s nothing inherently wrong with food that has been offered to idols, but that not everyone knows this. If those who know better eat such food in the presence of followers of Jesus who don’t have that knowledge, it can cause problems. Paul states,

Regarding the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol is nothing in the world,” and that “there is no God but one.” While there are so-called gods in heaven and on earth—as indeed there are many gods and lords—for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are, and for whom we are, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and through whom we exist. (1 Corinthians 8:4–6)

Now, many people understand Paul to be denying the existence of other gods and to be affirming the philosophical monotheism they associated with the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4), which Paul is modifying. But I and many other scholars would suggest the argument is quite a bit more nuanced.¹⁶ We’ve already seen in 1 Corinthians 10 that while Paul agrees that idols are nothing in this world, they’re still linked to demons. Paul acknowledges the reality of demons, which are explicitly identified as gods in the very same verse from which he partially quotes. As a result, I would suggest that “for us there is one God” doesn’t mean “we believe that only one God exists.” It means “only one God matters to us.”

These demonic powers are likely to be identified with “every ruler and every authority and power” mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:24. These are forces Jesus must destroy before handing over the kingdom to God the Father.¹⁷ Several other passages in the New Testament make similar references to “powers” in connection with divine forces. For instance, Romans 8:38–39 lists “angels,” “rulers,” and “powers” as things that won’t be able to separate Jesus’s followers from God’s love manifested through Jesus. Ephesians 6:12—which probably wasn’t actually written by Paul—denies that the Christian struggle is against flesh and blood. Instead, it’s against “rulers,” “powers,” “cosmic rulers,” and “spiritual forces in heavenly places.” 1 Peter 3:22—definitely not written by Peter—says that Jesus has gone into heaven to be on the right hand of God, with “angels and authorities and powers subjected to him.”

For Paul and several other New Testament authors, the universe is replete with divine forces, both benevolent and malevolent. Sure, they’re “gods,” if you want to call them that, but the New Testament authors preferred to refer to them in other ways. The angels are subordinate to Jesus and have their divine role to play, but those that are opposed to God and his kingdom will ultimately be defeated and destroyed in the end-times. This cosmology represents only an incremental elaboration on the notions that came before of guardian angels over the nations and, before that, patron gods.

CONCLUSION

Early Israelite, Jewish, and Christian concepts of the gods were informed by the interaction of their received tradition, their scriptural heritage, and the needs, circumstances, and goals of their time and place. In the earliest periods, there was a lot less sunlight between Israel’s pantheon and those of surrounding nations, but as they had to fight for their identity and for their survival, it was continually renegotiated to curate increasingly strong and meaningful boundaries between themselves and those around them. This was particularly the case as they began to be oppressed by larger empires that offered powerful deities as worship alternatives and in some case sought to annihilate their ethnic identity.

Continually exalting Yahweh and continually debasing the gods around them became the go-to rhetorical tactic. But even as their understanding of Yahweh and their titles for the divine forces around them changed, their identification as gods was preserved in the scriptures they passed down from earlier generations. That identification wouldn’t be explained away until well after the texts of the Bible had all been composed and their authors had all passed on to some variation of divine status themselves. From beginning to end, the Bible refers to and recognizes the existence of other gods.

14 The Bible Says Homosexuality Is an Abomination

Back in 2023 I started hearing buzz about a new documentary film called 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture. It hadn’t yet been publicly released, but it was gaining attention at film festivals. The film followed researchers as they traced the origins and influence of the choice to translate the Greek word arsenokoitai (1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10) as “homosexuals” in the first edition of the Revised Standard Version (published in 1946). The film’s thesis is that this rendering is a mistranslation that has long caused significant harm to members of the LGBTQ+ community. They provide a few different scholarly perspectives on what’s actually going on in those passages. Pastors who disagreed with the film’s thesis (including the director’s own father) were also given an opportunity to respond in the film. The goal of the film seems to be more to invite discussion rather than to cut it off.

The film was obviously controversial on social media, where many young evangelical Christians often cut their performative teeth on condemning homosexuality as an abomination in the most compassionate and loving tones they can simulate. None of the people responding had actually seen the film, but they were all condemning it while belligerently defending the translation “homosexuals” as if their afterlife depended on it.

There’s simply no defending the translation choice, though. It is a mistranslation, pure and simple.

See, the Greek word arsenokoitai is a masculine plural noun that Paul created based on the Greek translations of the Hebrew words for “man” and “bed” used in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. It’s clearly intended to refer to those passages from the Hebrew Bible, and as far as I can tell, the scholarly consensus is that the precise referent is men who take the insertive role in an act of same-sex anal intercourse.¹ This is supported by the use in 1 Corinthians 6:9 of the plural noun malakoi (“soft ones”) alongside arsenokoitai. This is actually a more common Greek word that can be used figuratively to refer to men who are effeminate, submissive, or who take the receptive role in an act of same-sex anal intercourse. While there have been many different interpretations offered by scholars, I think most would agree the latter sense is intended in our passage. The most straightforward reading of 1 Corinthians 6:9 has Paul condemn first bottoms and then tops.

So, what this means is that the word arsenokoitai is referring specifically to men who take the insertive role in an act of same-sex anal intercourse. It’s not referring to all people who identify as homosexuals. It’s not referring to all men who identify as homosexuals. It’s not referring to all men who engage in same-sex intercourse. It’s not even referring to all men who engage in same-sex anal intercourse. It has a very narrow and specific referent. This means translating arsenokoitai as “homosexual” is a rank mistranslation for at least two reasons. First, if the word “homosexuals” is understood as a reference to anyone who engages in homosexual activity, irrespective of their sexual orientation, “homosexuals” expands the scope of the Greek word wildly beyond what was intended. It would also make the reference to the malakoi in 1 Corinthians 6:9 redundant.

The problems are even bigger if the English word “homosexuals” is understood according to the word’s primary sense as a reference to people who identify as having a homosexual orientation. That would expand the scope even further, roping in people who may identify as homosexual who have only ever had heterosexual intercourse, or who have never had any type of sexual intercourse at all. That’s clearly not what Paul is saying. He couldn’t have been saying that. The concept of a sexual orientation as we understand it today has only developed since the nineteenth century CE. In the ancient world, they organized their understanding of human sexuality far differently, so the notion that Paul was referring to people with a homosexual orientation is a flagrantly anachronistic category error. Rendering “homosexuals” in this passage is pure and utter nonsense.

So, we already have part of the answer to the question in the title of this chapter. The Bible cannot possibly be saying homosexuality as a reference to sexual orientation is an abomination because the concept of sexual orientations didn’t exist at the time in any way that remotely resembles the way we think about them today. But the Bible does have things to say about same-sex intercourse. Does it say that’s an abomination? That’s a longer discussion.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX, BABY*

To understand what’s going on in the Bible, we’re first going to have to understand sexuality in ancient Southwest Asia a little bit better. A good jumping-off point is the observation that anciently sex was not understood as an activity engaged in by two equal and consenting partners. It’s frequently not even seen that way today, but anciently it was overwhelmingly viewed as an act that an active sexual agent did to a passive sexual object. In this one-way act, the agency and consent of the sexual object just wasn’t relevant. Agent and object were embedded in a far more rigid social hierarchy of domination than they are today (though that hierarchy still bubbles to the surface in a lot of ways). Sex wasn’t just something that happened in private. There was a lot of social significance attached to sex.

A good illustration of this is the social stigma that was widely associated with a man being on the bottom during sexual intercourse with his own wife. One Mesopotamian sex omen—yes, sex omen—from the first millennium BCE states that “If a man, a woman mounts him, that woman will take his vigor; for one month he will not have a personal god.”² The phrase “personal god” here refers to his vitality or vigor. For a man to take a submissive position during otherwise perfectly cromulent intercourse was to violate that gendered hierarchy of domination. Even the physical position someone occupied during intercourse could be understood to violate social roles to the degree that there would be actual physical consequences.

We see similar ideas continuing to bubble to the surface in Jewish literature even a thousand years later. A text from the Babylonian Talmud called Gittin, which was written around 500 CE, states in its characteristically abbreviated fashion, “She above and he below—afflicted with dalarya” (scholars think dalarya refers to diarrhea).³ A Hebrew text from between 700 and 1000 CE known as the Alphabet of Ben Sira builds narrative tension on this hierarchy in one of its chapters. It begins with the traditional Jewish idea that Genesis 1:27 describes the first human as a single being of two different sexes who was then divided into two separate beings when Eve was created from Adam’s side.⁴ Prior to that division and the creation of Eve, God created a first woman from the dust of the ground who didn’t turn out to be suitable for Adam. That woman is identified as Lilith in chapter 78 of the Alphabet of Ben Sira. According to the text, Adam and Lilith immediately began to argue because she did not want to “lie below.” Adam explains that she is the one who is “fit for being below,” while he is only fit for “being above.” Lilith insists that they are equal and ends up storming out of the garden of Eden.

Taking a submissive position violates that social hierarchy because it emasculates and feminizes the man—it renders them, socially, a woman. A sexual position is not just a neutral way to physically occupy space; it’s a reflection and manifestation of social role and position—even when it’s happening in the privacy of one’s own home (toxic masculinity today relies on similar ideas). For a man to take the receptive role in sexual intercourse with another man would have been perceived as significantly more emasculating, feminizing, and transgressive of that hierarchy.

It was considered so transgressive that ancient authorities seem to have had a hard time accounting for how it could happen. A man seeking out the insertive role wasn’t incredibly difficult to account for. Men were understood to be driven to want to sexually penetrate soft bodies, and scope creep happens. If you’re walking around with a hammer, lots of things look like nails. Men who took the receptive role, however, were thought to be victims of sexual assault or to be afflicted with some kind of feminizing pathology. Men who engaged in same-sex intercourse were either one or the other, depending on the role they sought out. These two roles were thought to be motivated by entirely different impulses, and there was no concept of a versatile role in ancient Southwest Asia. Women, on the other hand, were passive sexual objects that had no relevant agency anyway. Female same-sex intercourse also didn’t even involve a penis—the primary agent of sexual activity—so they were largely ignored.

This raises another important consideration about the transgressive nature of same-sex relationships. To the degree biblical authors considered these as relationships at all, they would have been thought of as cultic, exploitative, abusive, or deviant one-off sexual encounters. In other words, the notion of loving, committed, romantic, monogamous, and long-term same-sex relationships just wouldn’t have computed for Paul or for the authors of Leviticus. Certainly, the Greek world knew of such relationships, but they still reduced them to the hierarchies and roles mentioned earlier, and they were the exception rather than the rule. If Paul was aware of such relationships, he would have dismissed them as aberrations—not an alternative orientation of the exact same internal motivations and impulses that were responsible for heterosexual relationships. Homosexual relationships as they exist today would have been utterly alien and incomprehensible to the people writing the texts I’m interrogating in this chapter. The notion they should still have authority over or even any insight into relationships and circumstances they simply never could have contemplated is pure and utter nonsense.

A final point to make here comes from the cognitive sciences, which indicate evolution and conditioning have made our minds very sensitive to things they perceive to be contaminating, harmful, or otherwise icky. Cognitive scientists refer to this as “disgust sensitivity,” and they generally talk about three different categories of disgust: pathogen, moral, and sexual. Moral and sexual disgust sensitivities seem to arise from a kind of “behavioral immune system” that can place heightened value on perceptions of purity and sanctity. Without getting too deep in the weeds here, opposition to homosexuality is overwhelmingly rooted in a heightened sense of sexual disgust and its social rationalization and reinforcement.⁵ With more exposure to and experience with homosexual individuals, people grow to realize there’s nothing wrong with them, that it is harmful to represent them as “abominations,” and that intuitive disgust can be reduced and eliminated. Without that exposure and experience, though, rationalization and reinforcement can embed that disgust within social hierarchies, making it a lot more difficult to overcome. This is more common in smaller, vulnerable, and less diverse social groups—like ancient Israel and early Christianity—since clearer identity markers and firmer boundaries are more important to their survival.

The point I’m trying to make here is that homosexual disgust—wherever and whenever it exists—is fundamentally a by-product of the interaction of evolved intuitive predispositions and social circumstances. It’s contingent, not transcendent. That disgust can be overcome through experience and education, or it can be rationalized, reinforced, and weaponized by attributing divine origins to it and turning it into an identity marker. What we’re going to see in the Bible is people without adequate information carelessly and inconsistently doing the latter.

DON’T DO WHAT TO WHO NOW?

There are only two passages in the Hebrew Bible that directly address same-sex intercourse. One is Leviticus 18:22 and the other is Leviticus 20:13. There have been well-meaning attempts by different scholars to interpret them as references to pederasty, to sexual assault, and to ritual sex. I don’t find these arguments particularly compelling. But it’s worth digging into what precisely each of these passages seems to be prohibiting.

Leviticus 18:22 says, “and with a male, you shall not lie the lyings of a woman—it is an abomination.” The exact phrase “lie the lyings of a woman” is not found anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible apart from our two passages in Leviticus, but it’s widely agreed to derive from the more common (and singular) phrase “lying of a male,” as we see in places like Numbers 31:17 and Judges 21:11. This describes the woman’s role in an act of sexual intercourse. To be more explicit, it describes a woman being vaginally penetrated by a penis. To refer to a man engaging in the “lyings of a woman” most likely refers to a man engaging in sexual intercourse with another man as if with a woman. More explicitly, it refers to a man taking the insertive role in anal intercourse with another man. It doesn’t seem to be addressing non-penetrative acts, like oral, intercrural (between the legs), or manual sex. The man who takes the receptive role is not addressed at all in this chapter, since he was not the active sexual agent and probably would have been seen as victimized by the act.

This chapter in Leviticus is part of the Holiness Legislation, which is a comparatively late Pentateuchal layer composed by members of the priestly class who were concerned with maintaining a high degree of holiness. These authors could be the poster children for moral and sexual disgust sensitivity, and they’ve even included a rationalization when it comes to their sexual disgust. Leviticus 18:24–30 explain that the chapter’s regulations are intended to ensure the land is not defiled and the people of Israel are not “vomited out” by it. The authors seemed to think that some kind of metaphysical pollutant was generated by sexual acts that violated these socially conventionalized hierarchies and roles. The prohibitions are therefore intended to prevent that from happening. The explanation for the prohibitions ends in verse 29 with a single blanket penalty: Anyone who commits these “abominations” will be “cut off from their people.” This penalty could be understood to refer to social ostracism, prohibition from temple worship, execution, or perhaps even a divinely orchestrated end to their progeny.

Leviticus 20 was likely written by a later author or group of authors. What this chapter seems to be doing is repeating the regulations in chapter 18 but also editing them to impose specific individual penalties that were viewed as necessary to purge that metaphysical contaminant from the land. Verse 13 reads, “and a man that lies with a male the lyings of a woman—the two of them have done an abominable thing. They will surely be put to death. Their blood is upon them.” Like other verses in this chapter, the singular subject awkwardly switches to the plural as the punishment is expanded to include all participants. The idea seems to be that the contaminant can’t be purged unless both participants are executed, irrespective of the agency or consent of the submissive partner.

One of the indications that the detestability of these acts was based on a rigid social hierarchy of domination is that every prohibition in this chapter except for one addresses an inappropriate sexual partner that a man might choose. The only passage that expressly prohibits a woman from a certain sexual partner is the prohibition on bestiality, which is the only type of intercourse in which the woman occupied a higher position on that hierarchy. That prohibition also demands death for the woman as well as the animal, whose consent was obviously irrelevant.

What we have in Leviticus are two passages from different literary layers within the rather late Holiness Code. These passages prohibit a man from taking the insertive role in an act of same-sex anal intercourse. The origins of this prohibition are certainly to be identified in intuitive sexual disgust, but these chapters seem to me to be rationalizing that disgust based on a desire to avoid violations of the social hierarchy of domination and to keep the land from becoming too contaminated. Scholars have also argued that the waste of semen would have been seen as undermining the ever-present need for reproduction. One possible objection to that idea, though, is the fact that male masturbation doesn’t seem to be addressed anywhere in the Hebrew Bible at all.⁶

So, these passages do condemn male same-sex anal intercourse as an abomination, although the man taking the insertive role is the only one assigned any agency in the act. There is no knowledge of or concern for sexual orientation or consent expressed anywhere in or near these passages. The authors of these passages had an unscientific and a prejudiced concept of the nature, origins, and outcomes of same-sex intercourse that doesn’t remotely resemble how we understand it today.

PAUL ENTERS THE CHAT

The only other passages in the Bible that plausibly address the morality of same-sex intercourse are found in the letters of Paul, and specifically in Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1 (although 1 Timothy wasn’t written by Paul and is just repeating rhetoric drawn from 1 Corinthians 6—see chapter 2). Before we dive in, though, I want to talk about Paul’s sexual ethic. It’s important to note that ideas about sex had changed significantly since the composition of the passages in Leviticus. Paul’s sexual ethic was heavily influenced by streams of tradition within Greco-Roman Period Judaism that viewed sexual desire according to Greek philosophical traditions as one of the baser urges of the flesh that should largely be suppressed except for the sake of procreation.⁷ Sex during menstruation was already outlawed within the Hebrew Bible, and while some writers suggested it was permissible during pregnancy or after a woman was no longer able to conceive children, others said it was not. Some even insisted it was wrong to enjoy sex—even sex for the purposes of procreation.

Paul adopted an even more strict stance, though. He was a celibate man and wished everyone could emulate him. He also thought Jesus was going to be returning at any moment, and so there wasn’t time for big life changes like kids. The rule for all his congregations was that they remain in whatever circumstances they were in when they were “called” by God (1 Corinthians 7:17–24). Procreation wasn’t even on the table for Paul. So, did he think sex was ever permissible?

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul responds to the Corinthians’ statement that it’s “good for a man not to touch a woman.” Paul says that it’s certainly good for the unmarried to remain unmarried, unless they can’t hack celibacy, in which case “it’s better to marry than to burn [with sexual desire]” (verse 9). The married, however, should satisfy each other’s needs, since otherwise they might be lured by Satan into sexual immorality. The idea here seems to be that sex within marriage is an appropriate relief valve that ensures sexual desire didn’t build up to the degree that one might be driven to “fornication” (which mainly just refers to any sexual activity considered inappropriate). When sex did happen, passion was not supposed to be the driving motivation.⁸ According to 1 Thessalonians 4:4, followers of God are supposed to “possess their vessel”—likely a reference to sexual behavior—“in holiness and honor, and not with the passion of desire, like the Gentiles who don’t know God.” Though he wasn’t a partaker himself, Paul seems to have thought of the utility of sporadic sex similar to the way Ned Flanders thought of cornstarch: “It’s good for keeping down the urges.”⁹

What were the Gentiles doing that was so bad? Well, that brings us to Romans.¹⁰ In chapters 1 through 3, Paul develops an argument that culminates in the statement that both Jewish folks and Greeks are under the power of sin. The point is to argue that both Greeks as well as Jewish folks need the “good news.” Paul starts off in chapter 1 condemning the Greeks for their depravity, just to get Jewish listeners stoked so he can turn the tables on them in chapter 2 by pointing out the law leaves them no better off, particularly if they’re so excited about passing judgment on the Greeks.

Paul’s condemnation of Greek depravity builds on the idea of “natural theology”—the idea that one can gather enough data just from observing nature to understand the true God and how God expects to be worshipped. Being keen observers of nature, the Greeks have been exposed to God, but instead of appropriately worshipping him, the Greeks worship images of humans and animals, putting the created over the creator. Paul thinks they should know better, and so they’re “without excuse.” As a result, he says in verse 26, “God handed them over to dishonorable passions.” The idea here seems to be that there is normally a kind of ceiling or limit on the passion that God allowed humans to experience. Because the Greeks rejected him, God decided to remove that ceiling and let their passions run wild.

Paul’s leading example of the detestable results of this rebellion is the only reference to female same-sex intercourse anywhere in the Bible. He says, “their women exchanged their natural usefulness for what is unnatural.” Many translations here will render “natural relations” or “natural intercourse,” but the word is “usefulness,” and here the idea seems to be their usefulness as sexually penetrable bodies. Because female same-sex intercourse can only involve a kind of “counterfeit” penetration (and because Paul doesn’t sound very creative), the genitals are not being used for their “natural” or “intended” purpose. This actually reflects a pretty widespread prejudice in this time period. Across the Greco-Roman world, female same-sex intercourse was more widely condemned than male same-sex intercourse. Women who engaged in same-sex intercourse were referred to with a pejorative term that was based on the verbal root “to rub.”¹¹

But Paul’s not really in a position to dictate what is and isn’t being done according to “nature.” When he talks about nature, he’s really talking about social conventions that get rationalized as “natural.” It’s kinda like when people insist their intuitions about something are just “common sense.” The late professor Robert Jewett, in his Hermeneia commentary on Romans, notes, “Paul is raising a cultural norm to the level of a ‘natural’ and thus biological principle.”¹² The same confusion of social convention for what “nature” dictates is going on in 1 Corinthians 11:13, where Paul rhetorically asks, “Doesn’t even nature itself teach that if a man wears long hair, it is dishonorable to him?” No, Paul. It doesn’t.

Satisfied that his readers will agree with his rhetoric to this point, Paul turns his attention to the men, arguing in verse 27 that “in the same way,” Greek men give up the “natural usefulness” of women, and burn in their lust for one another. Again, the point is that the seemingly “natural” function of genitals is being set aside as the dishonorable passions of the Greeks are given free rein. Paul refers to men engaging in “shameless acts,” which results, in Paul’s imagination, in them receiving “in themselves the necessary recompense.” It’s not entirely clear what “recompense”—frequently translated “penalty”—Paul is referring to, but it likely has to do with the notion of some kind of unusual soreness that attends male same-sex intercourse. Others have argued it refers to the disease of “feminization” (Philo was big on this) or some kind of addiction or other pathology. Maybe he thought it made you go blind or caused hairy palms.

In short, Paul suggests that homosexual behavior is something that didn’t occur among Jewish folks, but only among misguided Greeks unrestrained by God. Paul would also prefer people just didn’t engage in sex at all but is happy to make exceptions for those whose desire might bubble over and drive them to fornication. In those exceptions, it seems that Paul insisted sex be holy and honorable and without the passion of desire. He also suggests it should be sporadic and motivated by a desire to keep a tight lid on sexual desire. Paul’s sexual ethic is obviously based on outdated social frameworks and inaccurate concepts of human sexuality. So, is it even relevant today?

I’M BRINGIN’ SEXYBACK*

When people today insist Paul’s sexual ethic must remain relevant, they’re almost always referring to the condemnation of same-sex intercourse. They’re almost never talking about celibacy, avoiding having kids, or passionless sex meant to keep the urges at bay. But they still need to come up with a rationalization for preserving his disgust at same-sex intercourse, and they primarily do that by arguing Paul’s position derives from his ideas about the “natural order.” Paul’s ideas about what is natural and why are profoundly misguided, but today’s readers of the Bible who insist it condemns homosexuals aren’t going to give up just because the Bible doesn’t actually do that. Professor Robert Gagnon, for instance, argues that Paul is right on target because “the primary sex organs fit male to female, not female to female or male to male.” By this he doesn’t only mean the “glove-like physical fit of the penis and vagina,” but also “clues to complementarity provided by procreative capacity and the capacity for mutual and pleasurable stimulation.”¹³

So, for Gagnon, the Bible indirectly insists that men and women are designed a specific way, and acceptable sexual behavior exists only within that design. Anything operating outside those boundaries is inappropriate. None of this is actually explained by Paul, of course, but Gagnon is positive that’s the logic that ties it all together.

However, I see two other problems with this approach as well. The first is that everything Gagnon identifies has specifically to do with procreation. So, sex for pleasure or for strengthening intimate relationships, or anything other than vaginal sex—missionary position only, of course—would fall outside the boundaries of that design. According to his line of argumentation, then, we ought to be following the strictest of Hellenistic Jewish writers who insisted sex for anything other than procreation—or in any circumstances where procreation isn’t possible—is prohibited.

The other problem is that homosexual orientations have to be part of that design. There aren’t many folks left who are willing to argue that same-sex attraction is something people just choose to adopt. While a spectrum naturally has fuzzy boundaries, we know that sexual orientation is not a choice. Paul had no idea that non-heterosexual orientations are just as innate and overwhelmingly immutable as heterosexual orientations. We know better today. Gagnon tries subtly to dodge this by insisting Paul is referring only—or at least “primarily”—to external anatomy and not to internal desires. He argues,

The power of Paul’s argument lies precisely in its simplicity: if one disregards the book of Leviticus and asks oneself what clues existing in nature might aid in discerning the Creator’s will for sexual expression, then human anatomy and procreative function comprise the most unambiguous indications of divine intent. One can debate the “naturalness” of homosexual urges. Many human emotions (for example, lust, anger, jealousy, covetousness) obviously run counter to God’s intended design for nature and cannot be pronounced good simply because they are felt. Paul attributes such sinful impulses to the fall of Adam (Rom 5:12–21). However, anatomy is not quite as skillful a deceiver and for that reason is a more effective mediator of the truth.¹⁴

Gagnon’s argument here relies on Paul’s distinction of same-sex desire as a secondary mutation of the natural sexual desire that is “felt” by humanity. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul insists sexual desire should be satisfied if one is incapable of a life of celibacy, since it’s better to marry than to burn with sexual desire. What about those who burn with same-sex desire? I mean, it comes from the exact same origins. If that desire is just as innate, immutable, and natural as heterosexual desire, then it can’t just be dismissed as a violation of the natural order. Gagnon’s argument for contemporary relevance only works if we accept that these two types of attraction are distinct species. I think he recognizes this, which is why he tries to make Paul’s argument entirely and exclusively about observable anatomy, but Paul’s argument is clearly rooted in conventional and conservative Greco-Roman Jewish wisdom about sexual desire.

Gagnon can’t even acknowledge this issue, much less engage it. Instead, he dismisses any degree of “naturalness” that might be assigned to same-sex desire as no different from any of the other “sinful impulses” that result from the fall of humanity (including polyamory and pedophilia). Neither Paul nor Gagnon would lump heterosexual desire in with these “urges,” and as we’ve already seen, Paul insists we can and should make room for those who need to have those desires met. The reality is that same-sex attraction is equally as innate, immutable, and foundational to an individual’s sexuality as any person’s heterosexual attraction. It is just as much a part of the natural order. Paul was just wrong. (Again.) The assertion of the modern relevance of Paul’s argument against same-sex intercourse is based on modern dogmas and identity markers, not on an honest and critical attempt to understand Paul on his own terms.

WHAT ABOUT SODOM AND GOMORRAH?

Folks who trot out the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as an example of God’s judgment for homosexuality have wildly misunderstood and misrepresented the story. It’s not a story about same-sex attraction; it’s a story about inhospitality toward outsiders.¹⁵ See, the men of Sodom who surrounded the house and demanded the visitors be brought out so that they could have sex with them were actually threatening them with gang rape. Rape can involve a complex relationship between power and sex, but in light of the fact that no concept of a homosexual orientation was known anciently, this story about every last man in a city threatening visiting men with rape should be understood to be focused entirely on the power dynamic. To force a man into the receptive role in an act of same-sex anal intercourse would have been seen as violating his social standing and shaming and debasing him by socially emasculating and feminizing him. This kind of sexual violence against men as a means of debasement or punishment and not as a fulfillment of sexual desire is still known in many parts of the world today.¹⁶

We can see that this is the point of the threat by comparison with the parallel story in Judges 19, which tells of a Levite and his runaway concubine (she’s given no name) returning from Bethlehem to the hill country of Ephraim. They have to spend the night somewhere on the way, and rather than stay in a foreign Jebusite city, the man presses on to Gibeah so he can stay among fellow Israelites. They find a man who welcomes them in, but soon the house is surrounded by the town troublemakers who threaten him with gang rape. Similar to the story in Genesis 19, rather than allow this “disgraceful thing” to be done to the visitor, the homeowner offers his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine. The men won’t listen, but the Levite then shoves his concubine out the door and the men sexually assault her throughout the night.

These men are not driven by homosexual lust. They are there to assert their dominance, and they are going to do so by whatever means they are able. When the Levite opens the door to leave in the morning, he finds his concubine sprawled in front of the door with her hands on the threshold. He tells her they have to go, but there is no response. The story never explains exactly how she died, but the Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends the pieces to the twelve tribes of Israel as an illustration of how degenerate things had become in Israel.

This story is directly parallel to what we see in Genesis 19. In both stories, male outsiders seeking a place to stay for the night are threatened with sexual assault. In Genesis 19, the potential victims are the two angels who seem to be there to verify the presence of any righteous people before destroying the city. In Genesis 18:21, God says he’ll go down to Sodom to see if they’ve been acting according to “the outcry that has come to me.” The angels explain in Genesis 19:13 that they’re about to destroy Sodom because of “their outcry.” So, twice the text mentions that there was some kind of outcry coming from Sodom that God needed to verify. If Sodom’s main crime is all of the men of the city mutually engaging in same-sex intercourse, one wonders from where the outcry is coming. All the women of the city are destroyed along with the men, so they aren’t the victims crying out for God’s help.

When the men of Sodom demand the angels be sent out to be sexually assaulted, Lot offers his two virgin daughters as a substitute. This horrific dehumanization of his daughters is supposed to be a hyperbolic demonstration of Lot’s commitment to the ancient value of fiercely protecting guests who have come under one’s roof. A similar substitution is offered in Judges 19, but whereas the men in that story take up the offer to sexually abuse the concubine who is shoved out the door to them, the men of Sodom are offended at the offer and immediately threaten to abuse Lot even worse than they intend to abuse the angels. Some argue that this demonstrates they have no sexual attraction to women, but this is a bad reading. Sexual assault isn’t about attraction, and anciently they had no concept of a homosexual orientation that at all resembled our modern understanding. Men who were understood to seek out the insertive role in same-sex intercourse were not thought to be averse to sex with women (as the story in Judges 19 demonstrates). The reason the story spares Lot’s two daughters is because the author needs them for the story in Genesis 19:30–38 about the incestuous origins of the people of Moab and Ammon.

None of the other references to the sin of Sodom from the canonical texts of the Bible indicate that they understood the issue to be homosexuality. Ezekiel 16:49–50 prioritize issues related to social justice in explaining what went wrong at Sodom: “Look, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous tranquility was in her and in her daughters, but she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy. And they were haughty and did abominations before me.” Some folks will argue that the idea of homosexuality is being smuggled in at the end with the word “abominations.” Even if Leviticus 18 and 20 were in mind for Ezekiel when he wrote that word, it’s a vague final comment that clearly isn’t the heart of the issue, and it doesn’t even identify same-sex attraction as a concern, much less the concern.

Remember, consent and sexual orientation are nowhere in view in those passages in Leviticus. Men threatening other men with rape as an instrument of domination and shame would actually fit more comfortably with what Leviticus 18 and 22 were condemning. This story is about the gross inhospitality of threatening men with sexual assault. In this sense, the chapter stands in stark contrast to the exemplary hospitality shown the same visitors by Abraham in the chapter before.

Many readers point to Jude 1:7 as an indication that same-sex attraction was the main sin of Sodom. In the NRSVue, the passage reads, “Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which, in the same manner as they, indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.” According to this argument, the phrase “unnatural lust” refers to homosexual lust, and therefore a homosexual orientation. But this is not a great translation. The Greek there is sarkos heteras, which literally means “other flesh.” This is a peculiar phrase that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Bible. To what does it refer? Also, who is the “they” who sought after “other flesh” in the “same manner” as Sodom and Gomorrah?

Answers to both these questions can be found in the previous verse. There the author refers to angels who “did not keep to their own domain but left their own dwelling.” The author goes on to say God has kept them in eternal chains in the deepest darkness in anticipation of their coming day of judgment. These are references to imagery and stories from the book of 1 Enoch, which is basically fan fiction about Genesis 6:2–4.

According to 1 Enoch, a group of angels decided to descend to earth to mate with human women. Chapter 6 describes their descent to earth and names their leaders, and then chapter 7 begins: “These and all the others with them took for themselves wives from among them such as they chose. And they began to go in to them, and to defile themselves through them, and to teach them sorcery and charms, and to reveal to them the cutting of roots and plants.”¹⁷ For these and other evil deeds, the angels Raphael and Michael were commanded to bind and imprison the angels. In 1 Enoch 10:4, Raphael is commanded to “bind Asael hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness.” In verses 11–12, Michael is commanded to take Shemihazah and the others who mated with human women and “bind them for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, until the day of their judgment and consummation, until the everlasting judgment is consummated.”

Scholars agree that Jude is referring to Enochic traditions about angels who sinned by having sex with humans (2 Peter 2:4 also refers to this tradition). In light of this, “other flesh” makes the most sense as a reference to intercourse between humans and angels. This fits the story in Genesis 19, since it was two angels who had come under Lot’s roof. Some folks will retort that the men of Sodom didn’t know they were angels, but this isn’t clear from the narrative. The men of Sodom referring to the angels as “men” doesn’t mean they didn’t understand them to be angels. The narrative refers to the angels as “men” in Genesis 19:10. The author of Jude also would have interpreted the story through the lens of the Enochic tradition, which does not hide the identity of the angels.

In reality, Genesis 19 is a literary creation that had been reinterpreted multiple times over by the time of the New Testament. The author of Jude wasn’t looking at the story through modern interpretive lenses, nor were they considering the text of Genesis 19 in isolation from any and all other versions of it. They were looking at it through the lenses of the debates that were ongoing at the time regarding the sexual compatibility of humans and angels. Jude 1:7 says Sodom and Gomorrah’s seeking after “other flesh” was “in the same manner” as the sin of the angels. Scholars agree this makes the most sense as a reference to human/angelic intercourse.

CONCLUSION

The Bible nowhere addresses, much less condemns, homosexuality as a sexual orientation. The story is different regarding homosexuality as a reference to same-sex intercourse. There is direct condemnation of male same-sex intercourse as an “abomination” in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. It is also condemned in Romans 1:27 and in the vice lists in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and in 1 Timothy 1:10. There is direct condemnation of female same-sex intercourse in Romans 1:26. However, the exact targets of these condemnations, the forms they take, and their rationales are all different. They represent different ancient spins on the conventional wisdom of their different social contexts and circumstances.

To reiterate the argument from the beginning of this chapter, the condemnation of homosexuality is usually rooted in an intuitive aversion that is then rationalized and reinforced by social conventions and institutions. If that condemnation is resisted or challenged, it can become embedded as an identity marker, at which point it can take on new significance and function. We defend and assert such identity markers to signal to those around us who are part of our in-group that we’re willing to incur social, physical, and other costs to signal our faithfulness to the group. This advances the interests of the in-group as well as our standing within it.

The main reason so many conservative Christians today so publicly and so belligerently condemn homosexuality and wave their Bible around as their authorization (even as they reject and abandon other elements of the Bible’s sexual ethics) is precisely because that condemnation has become a central identity marker. This is particularly true for conservative Christians seeking to structure power, values, and boundaries in favor of their right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.¹⁸ The utility of this identity marker to conservative Christian identity politics is what is driving the belligerent defense of this particular feature of the Bible’s sexual ethic. We can see this in the numerous attempts to try to read condemnation of homosexuality into the words of Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus never addressed the issue at all, but since his words are the most authoritative, it would really help their case if he said something about it.

As I write, news has just come out about a forthcoming book titled The Widening of God’s Mercy, coauthored by Richard Hays and his son, the Hebrew Bible scholar Christopher Hays (I recommend a book of his in chapter 19). In 1996, Richard Hays published a book called The Moral Vision of the New Testament, which included a chapter that condemned homosexuality. The book would go on to become an influential defense of evangelical opposition to homosexuality and an incredibly effective weapon against the mental health and well-being of members, especially younger members of the LGBTQ+ community. I have adult friends who are haunted to this day by recurring nightmares of burning for eternity in hell, fed in no small part by homophobic rhetoric reinforced by Hays’s work.

But the elder Hays has now evidently changed his tune and is arguing alongside his son for embracing LGBTQ+ inclusion. While many take this to be a wonderful development, unknown numbers of bodies remain adrift in the wake of Hays’s earlier work, and an awful lot of people—many of whom are still personally grappling with the harm and the abuse that Hays’s rhetoric has caused—aren’t ready to sidestep accountability and just move directly on to forgiving and forgetting.

By the time my book is released, the state of this particular discussion will have developed well beyond my capacity to prognosticate, but there are two things I can predict with 100 percent accuracy. The first is that the mental, emotional, and even physical harm that results from the increasingly obdurate brandishing of this particular identity marker will continue to devastate and even end lives within the LGBTQ+ community, all in the name of structuring power, values, and boundaries in ways that serve the interests of evangelical and other conservative Christian individuals, groups, and institutions. The second is that members of those groups and institutions who manage to lower the shields of their identity politics and think critically about these issues—whether because of close personal relationships with affected people or for other reasons—will continue to come to the realization that this “biblical” position is just as socially contingent and therefore just as negotiable as was slavery, polygamy, and numerous other rejected “biblical” positions.

I believe there will come a day when conservative Christians will have grown out of such callous and harmful identity politics, but what I cannot predict—and what has kept me awake late into many nights—is how many bodies will be heaved onto the altar of those conservative Christian identity politics in the meantime, and how many of their faces I will have known and loved.

15 The Bible Says Women Need to Cover Up

In December 2023, a company somehow named “Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer” released their “Real Women of America 2024 Calendar,” which featured pinup photos of well-known conservative women like Dana Loesch, Kim Klacik, Josie Glabach (“The Redheaded Libertarian”), and others. With their well-worn fainting couches at the ready, Christians who were even more conservative immediately took to social media to decry the calendar’s sexualization of conservative women as “demonic,” “pseudo-soft porn,” and, most devastatingly, “not conservative.”¹ For several days, Twitter was saturated with blue checkmarks braying about these Jezebels who dressed in ways that forced alpha males to leer at their bodies (and probably do things to their own bodies). It was all Twitter could do to contain the roil of self-righteous indignation from men—and women who carried water for them—who until that time had been content to just spend their time on social media belligerently dehumanizing the LGBTQ+ community.

Much of the discussion was men commiserating with each other about how perilously mine-filled the “not harassing women” landscape was. One self-styled “Failed Church Planter” named Joshua Haymes shared a harrowing tale of “having to address a woman for regularly not wearing a bra to church on Sunday.”² Joshua painted himself as the victim of an accusation of body shaming, reminding Twitter “it is incredibly unloving to allow a fellow sister in Christ to continue causing brothers to stumble without addressing it.” After counseling his audience to “lovingly confront” women they chose to leer at, Joshua concluded, “And remember, modest is hottest,” because at the end of the day, the primary value of women in many Christian circles is still as sexual objects.

Others sought their proverbial relief in scripture. A Christian nationalist named Ben Zeisloft quoted Proverbs 11:22 from the proudly complementarian English Standard Version: “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.” He then commented, “There are some ‘conservative’ women right now who are covered in swine snot.”³ The fact that Ben understood women who posed for a calendar in bikinis or Daisy Dukes to be “without discretion” suggests he understood the passage to be referring to women who don’t adequately cover themselves up. I guess this makes decent enough sense of the modern use of the word “discretion,” but it reveals Ben’s ignorance of the Hebrew source text and his rather cursory approach to understanding the Bible before he wields it as a rhetorical bludgeon.

The Hebrew word rendered “discretion” by the ESV in this verse is taam, and it can refer to a variety of things, including the taste of food, a decree, or discernment and good judgment. It doesn’t refer to how much clothing you have on. We can see the sense that the Proverbs author intended by looking at their usage of the same word elsewhere. In Proverbs 26:16, for instance, the author wrote, “The lazy person is wiser in their own eyes than seven people who can respond with taam.” (We can’t prove that the author didn’t have Ben prophetically in mind.) In 1 Samuel 25:33, David got some advice from Abigail that he really appreciated, so he declared in verse 33, “blessed be your taam.” The author clearly used this word to mean something associated with discernment. Ben misunderstood and misused this passage because he wasn’t really concerned for what the biblical authors were trying to say. He was concerned with deploying the Bible as a rhetorical tool for engaging in a credibility enhancing display and some boundary maintenance against folks of whose behavior he disapproved. So, does the Bible actually say women need to cover up so that they don’t cause men to stumble?

COVER ME UP*

There are plenty of passages across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that comment on the way women dress and adorn themselves, but the data don’t indicate any of them are demanding women cover or restrain certain parts of their body so that men aren’t compelled to lust after them. Dress conventions would have been pretty conservative among ancient Israelites and early Jewish and Christian communities, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone felt inadequate coverage of the female body was an issue that needed to be commented on. The only passage that says anything at all about women covering any specific part of their body is Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 11:4–16 for women to veil their heads while praying or prophesying, which is situational and doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with protecting fragile men from lusting. Paul seems to find some kind of value in preserving this broader ritual convention associated with women, and so is coming up with a rationalization for how it fits a Christian worldview. But that’s it.

So why are so many Christians today convinced God demands bras (as of the 1970s, anyway) but also hates yoga pants and Daisy Dukes? Let’s take a look.

DEUTERONOMY 22:5

While it’s not directly relevant to modesty, Deuteronomy 22:5 helps paint a fuller picture of biblical positions on women’s clothing. The passage famously prohibits cross-dressing, referring to it as an abomination, but it’s actually quite a bit more complicated. Most translations overlook what’s most likely going on. Contrary to popular ideas spreading on social media—and found within the Targumim, rabbinic literature, and to some degree even within Josephus⁴—the prohibition is unlikely to have to do specifically with women donning armor or engaging in warfare. Here’s as close a translation as I think we can get to the sense the author intended: “An item of a man shall not be upon a woman, and a man shall not wear an article of a woman.” Now, this is worded in a strange way, but it could still come across as a pretty generic prohibition on wearing the clothing of the other sex. But it’s not that. The author took great care here with their word choice and their grammar.

To begin, the use of “item” (keli) in reference to what pertains to the male sex is different from the word “article” (simlah) used in reference to what pertains to the female sex. The category of “item” can extend beyond mere clothing to include instruments and specialized gear associated anciently with work and with industries that were limited to men (including priesthood activity). The word “article” is more restrictive, referring to a mantle, cloak, wrap, piece of material, or some other related garment that could be worn by a woman.

So, this isn’t just a reference to clothing, but to the different kinds of items and articles that had become socially linked with the male and female sexes, respectively. Those items associated with the male sex seemed to have represented a quite broad category, while those associated with the female sex seem to have represented a narrower category. Whatever these items may have been, boundaries had become conventionalized. Violating those boundaries undermined the social order, which would have been thought to threaten social cohesion and stability. Among those groups focused on holiness, it could also be thought to generate a kind of metaphysical impurity or contamination that accumulated in the temple or on the land itself, threatening Israel’s presence in the land and God’s presence among them. Part of the point of creating these laws was to present a systematic and divinely ordained means of maintaining the social order and mitigating impurities.

But wait, there’s more!

Contrary to the rendering of the NRSVue (and countless other translations), the first clause does not say, “A woman shall not wear…” That would make women the subject and would prohibit a woman from taking certain actions. But the author specifically avoids that. The subject of the clause is “the item of a man,” and what it prohibits is that item from being upon a woman. The author prohibits the item from acting. It’s only when we get to the man that the author prohibits the person from wearing things. It’s not saying both men and women share the same responsibility to not wear the clothing of the other sex. It only attributes agency to what pertains to the male sex, and the concern is for keeping articles confined to their designated sexes.⁵ The prohibition is only being applied to actors on one side of the male/female division.

Why would the authors write it this way? Well, it has to do with the importance of social roles and their associated hierarchies. In ancient Southwest Asian societies, including those of the Hebrew Bible, free men were the only fully active social and sexual agents. They sat at the pinnacle of a social hierarchy of domination (and when it came to sex, penetration), and the agents beneath them on that hierarchy—women, children, foreigners, enslaved people—were there not to act independently, but to be acted upon by agents higher up on the hierarchy. Agency flowed downstream, not up. It’s only the agency of men that was relevant to this anxiety about the crossing of boundaries related to clothing and other items that had become socially entangled with a specific sex. The agency of women wasn’t even in the picture. Just something to think about as we consider the Bible’s concern for how women dress.

PROVERBS 7:10

In Proverbs 7, the author tells his son a story of seeing an ignorant young man seduced by a married woman wearing the “garment of a sex worker (zonah).” In the ESV, the woman is “dressed as a prostitute.” It’s not hard for most folks today to imagine a dad disapprovingly sneering, “You’re dressed like a prostitute,” at a teenage daughter heading to a party, and so this can make modern readers assume this passage must have to do with wearing revealing clothing. But this just imports our modern conventions and intuitions into ancient texts. We have absolutely no indication that sex workers in the ancient world dressed in revealing clothing, much less that revealing clothing was a signal of someone’s status as a sex worker.⁶ The phrase a “garment of a sex worker” points in the direction of some kind of unique garment that functioned as just such a signal. What could this have been? We don’t have archaeological or literary data from the ancient world that indicates precisely what such a garment might be, but one or maybe two passages from the Bible may give us a hint, and the first of these merits a closer reading.

Genesis 38 tells the famous story of God killing Onan for ejaculating onto the ground whenever he had sex with his wife, Tamar. The point of the story isn’t that coitus interruptus is evil—it’s a story about how important fulfilling the duties of levirate marriage is to God. According to this practice, if a man died before he was able to impregnate his wife, his closest male relative had the responsibility to marry her (in addition to any other wives he might have) and raise their children in the name of the deceased relative. Onan’s brother, Er, was Tamar’s first husband, but he was wicked and so God killed him. Onan didn’t want to have to raise a child who wouldn’t be considered his, though, so he prevented Tamar from becoming pregnant and God killed him, too. To make matters worse, her father-in-law, Judah, wouldn’t give her to the next son in line, Shelah.

So, Tamar had to take matters into her own hands. When Judah left for a work trip to Timnah, Tamar changed out of her widow’s garments and into other clothes, put on a veil, and sat by the roadside where she knew she’d run into Judah. Genesis 38:15 says, “When Judah saw her, he thought she was a sex worker (zonah), since she covered her face.” Don’t threaten me with a good time, he evidently thought. He offered a young goat as payment for her services, but he didn’t have it on him, so he offered his signet ring, some bracelets, and his staff as collateral. Judah didn’t figure out who Tamar was, but thanks to his patronization, she conceived. Later, when the mysterious pregnancy was discovered, Judah threatened her with execution, at which point she produced his collateral, drawing out a reluctant “well played” from her father-in-law.

The point here is that the text indicates something about Tamar’s veil was suggestive of her status as a sex worker. Some scholars suggest it might have been heavier than the kind of veil a married woman might wear in public (perhaps that explains Judah’s obliviousness).

Another passage that may point in a similar direction is Hosea 2:2 (verse 4 in Hebrew), which has God metaphorically confronting his adulterous wife, pleading for her to “turn her sex workings away from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts.” The Hebrew words I’ve translated “sex workings” and “adulteries” are the plural words zenunim and naafufim, which are likely abstract plurals that could refer to the status or more likely the physical indicators of being a sex worker and an adulterer. As professors Francis Andersen and David Noel Freedman stated in their commentary way back in 1980, “she is to set aside the badges of her profession, something on her face, something between her breasts.”⁷ This could plausibly be a garment like a veil, but if texts like Jeremiah 4:30 and Ezekiel 23:40 are any indication (see the next section), it could instead refer to makeup, jewelry, or some other adornment.

The one conclusion about this “garment” that isn’t supported anywhere in the Bible is that it refers to wearing revealing clothing. There could certainly have been some degree of bodily exposure that would have been considered inappropriate for the social groups in the orbit of the authors and editors of Proverbs, but we have no idea what degree that would have been. And it doesn’t seem ever to have been salient enough to be addressed by any of them.

JEREMIAH 4:30 AND EZEKIEL 23:40

In Jeremiah 4, Yahweh tells Jeremiah to announce a future judgment on Judah and Jerusalem. As frequently happens in prophetic literature, the city of Jerusalem is personified as a woman, and specifically an unfaithful one. In verse 30, the author refers to the personified Zion as the “desolate one” and viciously demeans her: “though you dress in scarlet, though you adorn yourself with ornaments of gold, though you stretch out your eyes with paint, you beautify yourself for nothing. Your lovers hate you. They want to kill you.”

In Ezekiel 23, Yahweh tells Ezekiel a story about two young sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, who respectively represent Samaria (the capital of Israel) and Jerusalem (the capital of Judah). These sisters went down to Egypt as sex workers, and verse 3 graphically shares that there the Egyptians “groped their breasts and fondled their virgin nipples.” Oholah would then become Yahweh’s wife but would continue to engage in sex work with Assyrians, resulting in judgment being brought down upon her. Her sister, Oholibah, would do the same with the Assyrians, but would also lust after the Babylonians, bringing upon herself even more violent judgment. Verse 40 says, “For them you bathed yourself, painted your eyes, and adorned yourself with ornaments.”

Fine clothing and jewelry were commonly used as symbols of wealth and status in the Hebrew Bible, but here their purpose also seems to be to enhance appearances to attract adulterous suitors. Eye makeup may have carried similar baggage. According to 1 Enoch 8:1, among the many evils the fallen angels introduced to humanity, Asael taught people to work different kinds of metals for different purposes, such as iron for instruments of war, gold and silver for bracelets and ornaments, and antimony for eye makeup. That’s right, according to 1 Enoch, makeup is evil. It certainly seems like Jeremiah and Ezekiel are treating fine clothing, jewelry, and makeup as (situationally?) inappropriate adornments of a woman’s body. There seems to be a stigma associated with dress that is intended to attract attention. We might imagine both these authors sneering about women who get themselves “tarted up” to go out into public. Revealing clothing never seems to bubble to the surface of this kind of rhetoric.

1 TIMOTHY 2:9

The main New Testament passage that gets trotted out by men insisting it’s their prerogative to decide how women should dress is 1 Timothy 2:9 (but note that 1 Peter 3:3–4 say almost the exact same thing). 1 Timothy 2:8 tells men they should pray in all places without anger or argument, and then verse 9 instructs, “similarly that women adorn themselves in appropriate dress, with modesty and self-control, and not with braided hair and gold or pearls or expensive clothing.” The terms I’ve translated “modesty” and “self-control” could be rendered a few different ways, but the basic ideas are respectability and good judgment or moderation. Many folks today understand “modesty” and “self-control” to be referring to restrictions on the amount of skin that is exposed, or on the contours of the body underneath the clothes that are discernible. As this passage makes clear, that’s not what is intended. The end of the verse explains the offending styles: braided hair, gold, pearls, and expensive clothing.

Modesty for the author of 1 Timothy—who, you’ll recall, wasn’t Paul—is about avoiding displays of wealth and status, as well as entanglement with too many social relationships beyond the home. This reflects the more conservative end of the ideals and the roles of the Greco-Roman household, which is the foundation of the author’s ethos. The point is that women’s dress should signal their submissiveness and domestication. Their place is in the home, and they should show that they know it. However, this position seems to contradict the praise for the “woman of strength” (eshet-hayil) in Proverbs 31:22–25. There the woman dresses in fine linen and purple (signs of wealth and status) and engages in public commerce with goods she has produced herself.

1 Timothy 2:10 goes on to explain that women should instead be adorning themselves with good works, which is proper for women who profess to be godly. According to the author of 1 Timothy, although they participate in the congregations—certainly unusually inclusive at the time—women have a distinct and subordinate role within good Christian society. As if to punctuate the misogyny, the author goes on in verse 11 to insist women are to “learn in silence and all submissiveness.” Then they double down: “For I do not allow a woman to teach or to tell a man what to do, but just to be silent.” (We could again find conflict here with the “woman of strength” of Proverbs 31:26, who “opens her mouth with wisdom” and who has the “teaching of kindness on her tongue.” That may refer to instruction within her own household, but the text makes no such qualification.)

There have been well-meaning attempts to try to reinterpret these passages to refer to some special circumstances that existed and are being addressed by these proscriptions. While that’s possible, it’s entirely speculative, and ultimately, I think it’s reading into the text what we want to find. The same is true of attempts to suggest verse 9 is consciously prohibiting revealing clothing. Given the conservative nature of the Christianized ideals of the Greco-Roman household, clothing of a provocatively revealing nature would probably have been seen as inappropriate, but no such concern is articulated anywhere, and we don’t know precisely where or why they would have identified the threshold of appropriate exposure.

What we can know for sure is that any such threshold would be based on first-century CE social values, which differed significantly from our own today. Those values were socially constructed and contingent, and the simple fact is that we live in a phenomenally different society. We have no access to those values in a way that allows us to better understand their origins, rationales, and applicability today. We’re also in no position to arbitrarily arrogate the authority of the Bible to our own socially constructed values.

In the end, appropriate dress is going to be dependent on the values of the social group. Unfortunately, most Christian social groups give the balance of power to men to dictate things like appropriate dress. This means the agency of women regarding how they should dress themselves is overwhelmingly going to be subordinated to that of men, and not at all because the Bible says so. It never does. In fact, the closest we get to a position on the question points in the opposite direction. In Matthew 5:28–29, the author puts a pretty clear position into Jesus’s mouth: “But I say to you that any man who’s looking at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away. It’s better for you to lose a body part than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

CONCLUSION

The hypersexualization of the female body today is socially determined. It’s not a transcultural or transhistorical constant. Nudity in the Bible didn’t carry near the same social significance that it does today. We’ve overwhelmingly coded nudity as a sexual event, but anciently it was a far more common public event that could be associated with work (John 21:7) and even with public prophecy (Isaiah 20:2–3, Micah 1:8, 1 Samuel 19:24). In contexts where genitals were not expected to be exposed, that exposure was overwhelmingly associated with shame, not lust. When Adam and Eve became conscious of their nakedness, the result wasn’t a Blue Lagoon or even a Top Secret! scenario; it was just the quick production of loincloths from fig leaves. Nudity could also be shameful because it reflected a low social status or forced subjugation. It was linked with poverty, with defeat in battle (Isaiah 20:4, 2 Chronicles 28:14–15), and with public humiliation.

An example is Jeremiah 13:26, where Yahweh abusively threatens the personified Jerusalem: “I will pull your skirt up over your face so your shame will be exposed.” The idea isn’t that she would suddenly be exposed to lustful ogling but that she would be shamed and humiliated by having her most private of spaces exposed to public disgust. In Isaiah 47:2–3, Yahweh threatens the personified Babylon: “Take the millstones and grind flour. Remove your veil. Strip off your robe. Uncover your thigh. Cross the rivers. Your nakedness will be exposed, and your shame will be seen.” This isn’t sexual; it’s about shame and disgrace.

And I have to underline: The representation of Yahweh as the abusive husband is deeply troubling, since the rhetorical value here depends on the normativity and even acceptability of this behavior.⁸

I think there’s more to say about the relationship of nudity to disgust. David lusted after Bathsheba because his vantage point allowed him to look down into her home to see her engaging in her ritual cleansing. 2 Samuel 11:2 tells us that “the woman’s appearance was very nice.” (Yes, it’s giving Borat.) Many people—well, men—try in a variety of different tortured ways to pin the blame on Bathsheba for not having the courage to sacrifice her life by refusing her king’s command, or for daring to be nude in the privacy of her own home, given her attractiveness. But what if David didn’t think her nude appearance was “very nice”? What if her body was exactly the same, but David just didn’t happen to find her attractive? The story wouldn’t exist, since her attractiveness is a MacGuffin in the story, but would it change anything about how we think about Bathsheba or her behavior if David didn’t find her attractive? After all, sexual attraction itself is subjective and socially constructed.

The question easily transfers to today. Let’s consider the conservative Christian Twitterati. If two of them saw a woman wearing yoga pants, and one felt lust while the other felt disgust, what would be the woman’s precise indiscretion? One would likely say that she’s a stumbling block because she’s causing him to lust after her, while the other would likely suggest there’s something inappropriate about publicly displaying a body that he finds unattractive (something many men bitch about incessantly no matter how clothed the women are).

They could harmonize their concerns by saying she’s being “distracting,” but people’s bodies and clothing can be perceived as distracting in so many different ways that aren’t considered inappropriate or that may be entirely out of their control. Being “distracting” isn’t a sin, and people choose to focus their attention on distractions. It doesn’t take much discipline to move one’s attention elsewhere. The proximate cause is the agency of the observer. Being distracting is a question of perception, and to most other women and even men, a woman in yoga pants would likely be perceived to be doing absolutely nothing at all wrong.

Individual preferences and social conditioning determine what degree of skin exposure or of contour hugging may or may not spark lust or disgust in a given viewer. Some people will be disgusted by or feel lust for certain bodies no matter how many layers of clothing are being used to try to hide them. Even a heavy burqa could inadvertently manifest a contour that might fill someone with lust or revulsion. The objections are subjective and are pure and utter nonsense. They reduce women from people to objects, and despite its frequent misogyny, the Bible absolutely nowhere authorizes or curates the terms of any such policing of women’s dress. The people engaging in this misogynistic rhetoric just need to grow up and learn to be functioning members of our society.

16 The Bible Says the Messiah Would Be Born of a Virgin

In April 2023, a TikTok creator who goes by @ryan.l.madden posted a video that began with a rather bold intro: “Here’s mathematical proof that Jesus is the Messiah.”¹ I obviously couldn’t resist the challenge. As I do for so many of my videos, I responded with, “Alright, let’s see it.”

The creator went on to explain that Jesus had to fulfill more than three hundred prophecies from the Old Testament to be the Messiah, and according to a math and astronomy professor named Peter W. Stoner, the odds of just eight of those prophecies being fulfilled is 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000.² Those are pretty muscular odds, but there are several problems with Stoner’s methodology.³ One is that many of the things identified in the New Testament and by later Christians as prophecies about the Messiah were likely not written as such but were only later reinterpreted that way. Another is that the authors of the Gospels were at liberty to write the fulfillment of prophecy right into the stories they were crafting about Jesus. Still another is that Stoner established the odds of each given prophecy being fulfilled by just asking his students to guess what the odds might be and then consolidating all their guesses. There’s a reason almost nobody has heard of this “mathematical proof.”

One of the passages that this creator highlighted as an apparent prophecy that was fulfilled by Jesus was Isaiah 7:14, which this creator insisted prophesied that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. In the King James Version, that passage reads, “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” That seems pretty straightforward, but there’s an awful lot going on in this passage. Let’s take a look at what the data indicate regarding this “prophecy” about the virgin birth.⁴

LIKE A VIRGIN?*

Isaiah 7 is set in the mid-eighth-century BCE, during the reign of the Judahite King Ahaz. The chapter starts with the kings of Aram and Israel allying to attacking Jerusalem but failing to conquer it. Isaiah is sent by Yahweh to comfort Ahaz by letting him know that the alliance won’t be successful and it will soon be destroyed anyway. Yahweh tells Ahaz to ask for a sign, but Ahaz refuses to demand a sign of Yahweh. Yahweh gives him one anyway, saying through Isaiah in verse 14, “Therefore, the Lord, he will give you all a sign: Look, the young woman is pregnant, and she will bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel.”

My translation of this verse differs from the KJV in a couple of significant ways. To begin, where the KJV has “virgin,” I have translated “young woman.” The word in Hebrew is almah, which just means “young woman.” It refers to a woman who is of a marriageable age, but it has no reference in and of itself to her marriage status or to her sexual experience. It’s just a way to refer to women around a certain age. There is nothing supernatural or prophetic about acknowledging that a young woman has become pregnant.

The second main difference is that my translation says the young woman “is pregnant,” while the KJV says she “shall conceive.” In Hebrew, there’s no verb connected with the word for “young woman;” there’s just an adjective that means “pregnant.” So it could be “the young woman is pregnant” or “the young woman will become pregnant.” In Hebrew, you don’t have to use a “to be” verb. You can just have a subject and put some kind of predication next to it and the “to be” verb is just assumed. With this particular adjective, it almost always refers to a pregnancy that is already underway from the perspective of the speaker. It can sometimes be used to refer to an imminent pregnancy that is just about to take place, but the context here doesn’t indicate we should interpret it that way. In any case, it definitely is not referring to a woman becoming pregnant in the neighborhood of seven hundred years later.

Verse 16 says that before this unnamed young woman’s child is old enough to know the difference between good and evil, the two kings who have allied against Ahaz will be gone. Aram and Israel would be destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. This passage isn’t a prophecy about something that’s going to happen centuries in the future; it’s a sign that Yahweh is providing to King Ahaz to put him at ease regarding the threat represented by the alliance. His kingdom can look forward to unprecedented peace and prosperity following the destruction of the two nations to the north. There is a prophetic element to verse 14 in the statement that the woman will name the child Immanuel, but this, too, has reference to this peace and prosperity that will follow the fall of Israel. The name Immanuel means “God is with us,” and if Ahaz had become aware of a child being born in his kingdom named Immanuel, that would have represented the initial fulfillment of the prophecy.

So where on earth does the KJV get off translating it the way it does? Well, as with so many things related to Christian understanding of the Hebrew Bible, it goes back to the Septuagint—the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah’s sign wouldn’t really have any relevance to anyone living after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, so when it was translated into Greek in the third or second century BCE, there seems to have been a desire to make it feel a bit more relevant. So, the translators put the conception of this child off into the future, rendering the Greek to say the young woman “will become pregnant.” Now it’s something that could plausibly be meaningful to their own day.

The Septuagint translators also rendered the Hebrew almah into Greek as parthenos, which is a Greek word that more directly refers to what we think of as virginity. This doesn’t necessarily mean the translators had conception without sex in mind, though. To begin, a lot of women throughout history have been virgins up until the moment they conceive a child. To say someone who is a virgin right now will conceive a child in the future shouldn’t blow anybody’s hair back. But the Septuagint also uses the Greek word parthenos to translate the Hebrew word naar (“young woman”) in Genesis 34:3 where it describes Dinah a single verse after she had been raped by Shechem. So, there doesn’t seem to be anything too out of the ordinary here.

The Septuagint’s translation has another difference from mine that isn’t picked up by the translators of the KJV. The Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 uses a third-person feminine form of the verb “to name” to indicate that the young woman is the one who will name the child Immanuel, but it could also be interpreted as a second-person singular verb, which is what we find in the Septuagint: “and you will call his name Immanuel.” Maybe this sounds a little more prophetic, but it isn’t a big change, and the KJV doesn’t adopt it. But this raises the question of why the KJV prefers the Septuagint’s translation of the rest of the verse. The Hebrew isn’t difficult, and there’s not really a strong case to make that the Septuagint preserves a more original form of the verse.

The answer is that the author of Matthew 1:23 quotes a version of the Septuagint’s translation of this passage in describing Mary’s parthenogenetic conception of Jesus as a fulfillment of “what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet.” The KJV translators seemed to have fudged a little in their translation of Isaiah 7:14 to maintain a more plausible relationship to the prophetic version of this passage that is quoted in Matthew.

There’s an additional difference in the way the author of Matthew quotes the verse, too. The author renders, “Look, the virgin will become pregnant and will bear a son, and they will call his name Immanuel.” It’s no longer the king or the mother who will call the child Immanuel, but some unnamed “they.” According to verse 25, Joseph names the child Jesus, not Immanuel, so who is this “they”? Most likely Matthew is trying to make the prophecy work a little better, and so subtly suggests that Jesus’s followers will be the ones to call him “God with us” when they recognize that he bears the divine presence, and so manifests God among them.

To summarize up to this point, the Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 has nothing to do with any virgin birth. The text was referring to an otherwise normal pregnancy that was likely already underway, and the prophetic part of the sign—which doesn’t even occur until verse 16—was that the alliance that had threatened Jerusalem would fall apart by the time this unborn child would be old enough to know right from wrong. The translators of the Septuagint seem to have interpreted the passage so as to make it sound more relevant to their own day, and then this was picked up and further altered by the author of Matthew to press it into service as a prophecy of Jesus’s virgin birth. This raises the question of where this idea of Jesus being born of a virgin comes from.

AND THE HOLY DOVE SHE WAS MOVING TOO*

The Septuagint’s rendering of Isaiah 7:14 likely provided some of the impetus for Matthew’s representation of Jesus’s virgin birth, but it certainly wasn’t the only factor. Concern probably emerged over time for accounting for Jesus’s background in a way that supported developing ideas about his relationship to God. Paul never mentions a virgin birth. The first Gospel to be written was Mark’s, and it also doesn’t mention any virgin birth. In fact, the story begins in Jesus’s adulthood. This is likely because the Jesus tradition in circulation at the time was focused on Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection. Mark seems to treat Jesus as a human who was adopted as God’s son and Messiah at his baptism.⁵ His genealogy didn’t really matter. We refer to this as an “exaltation Christology.” Jesus was exalted to his divine position.

As questions arose about Jesus’s origins, a need to amplify his closeness to divinity led to new ideas about Jesus’s birth, which began to be represented as a miracle orchestrated by God, similar to the way Greco-Roman traditions at that time represented the births of divine humans.⁶

But wait, there’s more!

Under the influence of Greek philosophical traditions, some Jewish folks in this time period saw sex as a product of the baser flesh that was diametrically opposed to the sanctity of the divine (see chapter 14). Sex was an unseemly act that was reserved only for procreation, and there were even some Jewish authors who suggested you weren’t supposed to enjoy it under any circumstances. Insisting Jesus was born of a virgin would be a convenient way to deny the role of sex in his conception and thereby ratchet up his holiness and divinity.⁷ This probably fit right in with the sexual ethic of the author of Matthew, who had Jesus saying that heaven would be asexual (Matthew 22:30) and that the most pious would make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:12).⁸

The account of Jesus’s virgin birth is even more explicit and developed in Luke 1 than in Matthew, although Isaiah 7:14 isn’t directly quoted. We have both Mary’s and Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancies announced by angels and celebrated by the women with songs of praise. We even have the one and only account of Jesus’s childhood in Luke 2:41–52. The fact that it’s more developed may indicate that Luke’s nativity account builds on Matthew’s. Or it might even be later than the rest of the Gospel of Luke. Some scholars think the Gospel of Luke originally began in chapter 3, with the first two chapters being added by some other author in the second century CE, perhaps to counter Marcion’s denial of Jesus’s physical birth, death, and resurrection.⁹

There are a few different reasons these scholars think Luke 1–2 (apart from the prologue of Luke 1:1–4) don’t really fit. To begin, the style of the Greek of Luke 1:5–2:52 is different from the style of the Greek in Luke 3–24. Luke 3 also begins the way we would expect a historical narrative to begin. It identifies the time and place for the events it’s about to narrate, going so far as to list the political leaders of the regions discussed. Chapter 3 also gets underway with the baptism of Jesus—just like Mark—and then rattles off Jesus’s genealogy, which would make sense if the author of Luke began his narrative with some guy getting baptized and then basically said, “So you’re probably asking where this guy came from. Well, I’ll tell you…” On the other hand, it’s a weird thing to do after spending two chapters discussing where Jesus came from and then moving on to his adulthood only to suddenly leapfrog backward to where he came from. Finally, major details of Luke 1–2, such as the virgin birth in Bethlehem or other miraculous events that were associated with it, aren’t referenced anywhere else in the Gospel.

CONCLUSION

Isaiah 7:14 was not written as a prophecy about a virgin birth, and it wouldn’t be understood that way until after its translation into Greek sometime around the third or second century BCE. So, no, the Bible doesn’t say the Messiah would be born of a virgin. The data indicate that the tradition of Jesus’s virgin birth likely developed in the late first century CE in response to growing concern for the nature of Jesus’s origins. An innovate reading of the Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14 was probably a factor in the way the tradition developed, but the more determinative factors were likely related to moving the threshold of Jesus’s divinity back to his birth and accounting for it in a way that sidestepped moral concerns that more philosophically oriented Christians had with sexual reproduction.

17 The Bible Says Jesus Is God

You can find a lot of videos on social media showing Cliffe Knechtle, pastor at Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Connecticut, holding court on college campuses. One scene that has received millions of views across the different accounts that have posted it features a young woman wearing a hijab asking, “Did Jesus ever claim to be God?”¹ Pastor Knechtle responds, “Yeah, he sure did. John 8:58—Jesus says, ‘before Abraham was born, I am.’ In John 10:30, Jesus says, ‘I and the Father are one.’ In John 14:9, Jesus says, ‘he who has seen me has seen the Father.’ Clearly Jesus claimed to be God.” You’ll notice all these passages come from the Gospel of John—and there’s a reason for that—but there’s nothing I can say on social media that gets me dragged in the comments anywhere near as much as when I point out that these passages are not actually identifying Jesus as God. In fact, there is no passage anywhere in the Bible that identifies Jesus as God … at least, not in the trinitarian sense.

What’s the trinitarian sense, you ask? Well, it’s the notion that Jesus is one of three persons who make up the one being that is God. This is a philosophical framework that developed slowly over multiple centuries as Christians argued over how to understand Jesus’s relationship with God. This debate arose because it wasn’t clear how to unify the New Testament’s different representations of Jesus’s relationship with God. Those scriptures overwhelmingly treat Jesus as not only separate and distinct from God, but also inferior and subordinate to God. At the same time, however, there are a minority of passages that seem to identify Jesus with God. If we understand the scriptures as a single collection of texts that are all inspired and so all must share the same perspective on Jesus’s relationship with God, we’re left with the question, how can Jesus simultaneously be God and also not be God?

To answer this question, Christians had to distinguish the concept of an individual’s “essence” or “substance”—Greek ousia—from their “person”—Greek hypostasis. For the earliest generations of Christians, though, these two Greek words were used interchangeably. They had to be split into two separate categories so that the “person” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit could be distinguished from each other while also equally sharing the single “essence” of God.

Christianity wouldn’t arrive at this consensus until it could leverage the weight of empire to enforce it. The Council of Nicea was convened in 325 CE by the emperor Constantine to settle a theological dispute regarding Jesus’s relationship to God. Attending bishops were required under threat of exile and excommunication to sign on to a creed that was written up to express the consensus view of the council. This didn’t resolve the controversy, though, and in 381 CE, the Council of Constantinople was convened to reaffirm and expand the creed in light of additional controversies. This process would be repeated again at councils at Ephesus (431 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE). The main conceptual foundations of the Trinity as it has been understood ever since were laid at these councils. Prior to these councils, however, Christians and their literature (including the New Testament) promoted a variety of different ways of thinking about Jesus’s relationship to God.

Rather than get deep into the weeds of that literature, though, this chapter is going to try to allow the authors of the New Testament to present Jesus’s relationship to God on their own terms. While I’m not going to force the authors to agree on how they represent Jesus, I am going to suggest that there was one underlying cognitive predisposition that made the idea that Jesus could be God and not God at the same time feel pretty natural to early followers of Jesus. This underlying predisposition is the same one that accounted for divine images, or idols. Divine images were also considered to both be the god and not be the god, and just like the earliest beliefs about Jesus’s divinity, there wasn’t a standardized or systematized explanation of how that could be. It was just something that was intuitive and natural enough that people didn’t feel the need to question or explain it.

I’m going to go into more detail about this later, but I just want to make clear at the outset that the seeming paradox that the Trinity was developed to resolve was not new. It had been in circulation in the Jewish scriptures and around ancient Southwest Asia for many centuries. In fact, the Jewish scriptures had already provided a resolution. What changed to make the Trinity necessary? Initially, the traditions about Jesus’s mission and identity were transmitted by whoever happened to be speaking or writing about them. There was room for variety and difference in how Jesus was understood. When the written traditions came together into a single set of texts and got into the hands of more philosophically sophisticated writers who were trying to make the gospel palatable to the Greco-Roman intelligentsia, there was a growing desire for unity and consistency. This was particularly true as this increasingly large and complex social group developed a centralized hierarchy of authority. The institution of Christianity needed a single, unified perspective.

A final clarification: All of the passages I quote from the New Testament in this chapter will be from the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version, which is widely considered the most scholarly and authoritative translation of the Bible available today. I’m doing this mainly because I don’t want readers to think I’m manipulating the way passages are translated to make them seem more helpful to my argument. In a couple of instances, though, I will explain why I disagree with the NRSVue’s translation.

PHILIPPIANS 2:5–11

I think the passage that most clearly demonstrates Paul’s Christology is the famous hymn in Philippians 2, which describes Jesus in verse 6 as being in “the form of God,” but in verse 7, “emptying himself” and taking upon himself “the form of a slave” adopting “the likeness of humans.” Verses 8–9 explain that, because Jesus was obedient even to the point of dying on a cross, God “even more highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every other name.” According to verses 10–11, at this name, “every knee will bend—in heaven and on earth and under the earth,” and “every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

What is meant by Jesus being in “the form of God”? According to the traditional Christian reading, it indicates he possesses the essence or substance of God. In other words, Christians understand Paul to be asserting a trinitarian Christology by insisting that Jesus shared a single essence with the Father. That reading isn’t widely accepted by scholars, though. While there is disagreement about how to reconstruct all the details of this hymn, commentators are in pretty widespread agreement that the phrase “form of God” didn’t have to do with the divine essence or substance, but with outward appearance and the status it could signify.

In his 2017 Hermeneia commentary on Philippians, professor Paul Holloway reviews the concept of God’s “form” in Jewish literature and then concludes the phrase just means that “prior to his self-humbling metamorphosis, Christ enjoyed a luminous appearance of the sort a powerful angel might possess.”² In a 2020 essay on “high Christology,” professor Paula Fredriksen understands “form of God” to refer to Jesus’s having a “pneumatic [spiritual] body … before his descent into a human modality.”³ In his 2021 book, Messianic High Christology, Ruben Bühner points out this word refers to physical appearance. According to Bühner, the “essence” reading doesn’t quite get us there, since “it is hard to find evidence that such an understanding of μορφή was common before the Christological debates of the third and fourth centuries.”⁴ Andrew Perriman committed an entire chapter of his 2022 book, In the Form of a God, to this phrase, ultimately rejecting the “essence” reading on the grounds that “There is no evidence even in the more esoteric literature that morphē was ever used in such an abstract sense. The thought is consistently of the outward appearance of an object or being, not of some inner quality.”⁵

Holloway’s commentary on Philippians strikes me as making the most sense of the hymn’s narrative structure, particularly in light of the centrality of Jesus’s reception of “the name that is above every other name”—a reference to the divine name Yahweh. Holloway sees Jesus’s taking on the “form of a slave” and the “likeness of humans” to reflect the popular literary motif of the metamorphosis—think Ovid, not Kafka—in which a deity sheds their divine status and takes on human form to accomplish some mission. For Holloway, Jesus’s higher exaltation and ultimate worship after his successful mission resonates with a concept developing with Greco-Roman Jewish apocalypticism. This concept was related to a high-ranking angel that exercised God’s own power and authority because they bore or possessed God’s name. We’ll return to this in more detail later, but for now, let’s move on from Paul to the earliest of the Gospels: Mark.

MARK 2:10

Oddly enough, a lot of Christians insist the story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man in Mark 2 demonstrates that he is God. After all, they reason, after Jesus said in verse 5, “Son, your sins are forgiven,” verses 6–7 explained that some of the scribes in the crowd thought he was blaspheming, rhetorically asking (to themselves), “who can forgive sins but God alone?” If we assume that the author of Mark shares the scribes’ statement because they endorse it and agree that only God is allowed to forgive sins, surely it means that for Jesus to successfully forgive the man’s sins, he must be God.

There are a couple reasons this doesn’t work. The first is that it requires we just arbitrarily agree with the perspective of Jesus’s critics. In addition, though, it makes Jesus’s response a bit confusing. See, Jesus perceived their thoughts and responded by asking which is easier to say: “your sins are forgiven” or “stand up, take your mat, and walk” (verse 9). Jesus then said the latter to the paralyzed man, healing him. But before he did, he explained in verse 10 why he was doing this: “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” This can only mean one thing: The scribes were wrong.

Jesus’s correction of the scribes’ misunderstanding clearly distinguishes Jesus from God. They didn’t realize that the Son of Man could forgive sins, so Jesus had to drop that knowledge on them. If the point were to demonstrate that Jesus was indeed God, then Jesus’s response shoots that point and that belief right in the foot. If that were the point, we’d expect a response to the scribes’ thoughts more along the lines of “Well, I can forgive sins, so guess what that makes me. Can you guess? Huh?”

Mark seems to be endorsing an exaltation Christology that saw Jesus as elevated to his divine position at his baptism, which occurs at the very beginning of the Gospel. The conceptual framework around which this understanding of Jesus’s exaltation seems to be organized is that of adoptionism. In other words, God “adopted” Jesus at his baptism, pronouncing him “my Son” in verse 11. This likely combines ideas about messianism with Roman ideas about divine and royal adoption, which was considered to create a stronger and a more significant relationship than being naturally born into the divine/royal family.⁶

JOHN 1:1

One of the most explicit identifications of Jesus as God comes at the end of the very first verse of the Gospel of John, and in most translations reads, “and the Word was God.” “Word” in John clearly refers to Jesus. So, does John 1:1 mean Jesus is the God of Israel, or is there something else going on here? The current academic consensus is that the second use of the word theos in John 1:1 is qualitative.⁷ This means the word isn’t answering the question “who is this?” but answering the question “what is it?” The clause is not identifying Jesus as the very God of Israel. Instead, the clause is attributing the qualities of deity to Jesus.

So, what does that mean?

According to this reading, “the Word was deity,” or “the word was divine,” would be perfectly acceptable translations, but most evangelical scholars bristle at such suggestions. Daniel Wallace, author of Greek Grammar: Beyond the Basics, comments, “‘divine’ is acceptable only if it is a term that can be applied only to true deity.”⁸ For most people, “true deity” would mean something that is literally and not only figuratively “divine.” But Wallace actually has much more in mind. See, he’s presupposing the Trinity—that idea that the God of Israel exists as the one and only truly divine being who also happens to comprise three distinct persons who all share the exact same “substance” or “essence.”

In other words, for Wallace, the only “true deity” that exists is the God of Israel. So, the author actually is saying the Word is God, but in a slightly roundabout way. “The God of Israel” has traditionally been understood as a title that refers to God the Father. By referring qualitatively to the Word as “divine,” the author is saying the Word is to be identified with the being of God but is to be distinguished from the person of the Father. Wallace continues:

The idea of a qualitative θεός here is that the Word had all the attributes and qualities ‘the God’ (of 1:1b) had. In other words, he shared the essence of the Father, though they differed in person. The construction the evangelist chose to express this idea was the most concise way he could have stated that the Word was God and yet was distinct from the Father.⁹

The problem with Wallace’s presupposition here is that the philosophical framework of three consubstantial persons occupying one divine being who exhausted the entire category of deity didn’t exist when the Gospel of John was written. The Jesus of the Gospel of John held to no such notion, and he even explicitly distinguishes himself from the being of God when he says in John 17:3 that the Father is “the only true God” and that Jesus was sent by him.

John 1:1 is saying Jesus was deity (or divine). The author is probably adopting and adapting an existing Jewish/Stoic/Middle Platonic idea of the Word as some kind of semi-autonomous agent that emanates from or originates with God. This notion was probably related to Philo of Alexandria’s notion of the Word as God’s mediatory angel who bridges the gap between eternal, incorruptible spirit and changing, corruptible flesh.¹⁰ This Word could even be spoken of as a different God.

In his explanation for why Genesis 9:6 says, “in the image of God he created humanity,” instead of “in his own image he created humanity,” Philo refers to the Word as the “second God.”¹¹ For a good Platonist, humanity couldn’t possibly be created in the image of immaterial spirit, so that passage’s reference to “God” doesn’t refer to the God of Israel, but to “his Word,” who is understood as a distinct “God.” The Gospel of John is similarly representing a Word that is divine and is in some sense associated with God, but in some sense distinct. Just how that works for the authors and editors is not made clear in John 1, but to read the Trinity into this verse is a flagrant anachronism.

JOHN 10

A lot of readers see Jesus’s confrontation with “the Jews” on the porch of the temple in John 10 as another clear identification of Jesus as God. After these Jewish folks ask him to be straight with them about whether or not he’s the Messiah, Jesus concludes a rather evasive response by saying “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). This causes the Jewish folks in the story to pick up stones to stone him, at which point Jesus asks why. They respond that they’re stoning him for blasphemy, since “you, though only a human, are making yourself God” (verse 33). It certainly sounds like Jesus’s accusers think he is claiming to be God. The translation is a problem, though. It’s how most translations render the passage today, but it’s a rather dogmatic rendering. A better translation would be “you, being a human, make yourself a god,” or “you, being human, make yourself divine.” There are three reasons I think these renderings make better sense of the grammar and context.

First, the Greek word for “god,” theos, does not have the definite article, which is usually used to indicate the word is referring to a specific god, namely the God of Israel. Without the definite article, it could just be “a god,” or it could be qualitative and mean “deity” or even “divine.” That alone doesn’t prove anything, though—the author of John can be coy with their definite articles. That brings up the second reason I think my translations make better sense. A contrast is being drawn between Jesus’s humanity and his claim to divinity, and this contrast draws on a bit of parallelism. Jesus is anthropos (without a definite article), and yet is making himself theos (without a definite article). We seem to be dealing with two distinct natures: human and divine. They’re not contrasting being a human with being the very God of Israel, they’re contrasting being human (or “a human”) with being divine (or “a god”). This makes the prose of the passage nice and symmetrical, but it also doesn’t prove anything in and of itself.

The clearest evidence that the Jewish people in this story are accusing Jesus only of claiming to be “a god” or “deity” is Jesus’s response. If the accusation is that he is claiming to be the very God of Israel, his response is a straight-up straw man, because that’s not the accusation he responds to. Jesus answers in verse 34 by quoting the Greek translation of Psalm 82:6 as part of a rhetorical question: “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” In verses 35–36, he explains the significance of his quotation: “If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled—can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?” Jesus’s defense of his claim is not addressing an accusation of claiming to be God but of claiming to be God’s son—of claiming to be divine, or to be “a god.”

But what’s going on with his quotation of Psalm 82:6? When it was written, the goal of Psalm 82 was to condemn the gods of the nation to mortality so Yahweh could take over rule of all the nations (see chapter 12), but by the time of the Rabbis, it was pretty consistently understood to be a reference to the Israelites at Sinai.¹² Upon receiving the law of Moses, they were freed from the power of the angel of death and rendered immortal—effectively divine—thus the statement in verse 6: “I said, you are gods.” Then Aaron created the golden calf, though, and their sin resulted in being condemned to mortality, thus the statement in verse 7: “but you will die like men and fall like any prince.” This is most likely how the authors of John understood the psalm.

So why would Jesus be quoting this passage? Well, these were humans and the very scriptures call them “gods.” Obviously, then, referring to a human as a god or as divine is not in and of itself blasphemous. Additionally, if the Israelites were called “gods” because they were “those to whom the word of God came,” how much more of a claim to divinity and to the title “Son of God” does the incarnated manifestation of that very Word itself have? Jesus’s response makes absolutely no sense as a defense of a claim to be the very God of Israel. It would represent a flagrant fallacy. It only makes sense as a defense of his claim to—by virtue of being God’s son—being divine, or being “a god.”

But there’s more!

Jesus wraps up his response by saying they should believe his works so that they might know and understand “that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.” This brings us back around to verse 30’s statement, “The Father and I are one.” Does this mean Jesus is claiming again to be God? Well, not if the authors of John have any say in the matter. See, the authors of John use this concept of being “one” with the Father and of being “in the Father” elsewhere in their gospel, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus being the second consubstantial person of the one being of God.

When Philip asks Jesus in John 14:8 to show him the Father, Jesus responds in verse 9 that those who have seen Jesus have seen the Father. Huh? He continues in verse 10: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.” Somehow, Jesus is “in” the Father and the Father is “dwelling in” Jesus, and this in-dwelling manifests the Father’s presence. According to verse 17, God’s Spirit will “dwell with” and “in” Jesus’s followers if they keep his commandments. Then, in verse 20, Jesus expands his statement: “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” It seems that in some way, Jesus’s unique relationship with God will at some point be extended to include Jesus’s followers.

John 17 and the Intercessory Prayer elaborate on this. In that prayer, Jesus repeatedly prays that his followers become one with each other and with him just as he is one with the Father. Verse 11 has Jesus praying, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” Note it is by the name that God has given Jesus that his followers are to be safeguarded and are to achieve this oneness. We’ll come back to that. In verse 21, Jesus prays that those who believe the preaching of his followers “may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” In verses 22 and 23, Jesus continues, “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”

If we understand the statement “the Father and I are one” to mean “I am God,” then the author of John has Jesus repeatedly praying in chapter 17 that his followers will become assimilated into the Trinity and become God as well—not plural “gods” but millions and millions of additional coequal, coeternal, and consubstantial persons unified (hypostatically?) within the one being of God. I’ve never seen anyone attempt to pick up and run with that particular theological football, but if Jesus is identifying himself as the very God of Israel in John 10, then that’s precisely what Jesus is praying for in John 17. That just doesn’t make much sense. The data don’t support the conclusion that Jesus is claiming to be God in John 10. Jesus is claiming to be united in some way with God that has something to do with God’s name and God’s glory, but that unity is represented by the author as communicable and as ultimately intended for Jesus’s followers. So, let’s consider another passage in John that is relevant to God’s name.

JOHN 8:58

The end of John 8 features a confrontation between Jesus and some Jewish people who are defending their piety through their ancestry. Jesus says their father isn’t Abraham but is the devil. In verse 51, Jesus says “whoever keeps my word will never see death,” which draws out the response that even Abraham died, so Jesus must be claiming to be greater than Abraham. At the end of Jesus’s response in verse 56, he claims, “Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.” His Jewish antagonists incredulously ask, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus responds, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.”

The NRSVue’s translation accurately renders the syntax a bit awkwardly. It’s supposed to sound a little weird because the author seems to be signaling to the hearer that there’s something special about the phrase “I am,” which in Greek is ego eimi. Now, this phrase can just mean “I am,” but that can be communicated in simpler ways, and the author of John seems to be using it in a special way. For instance, John put seven significant “I am” statements in Jesus’s mouth: “I am the bread of life” (6:35); “I am the light of the world” (8:12); “I am the door” (10:7); “I am the good shepherd” (10:11); “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25); “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6); “I am the true vine” (15:1). Some people identify John 8:58 as an eighth statement, but that statement is doing something different here.

An educated Greek-speaking Jewish person in the first century CE likely would have understood Jesus’s concluding and emphatic ego eimi as a subtle allusion to specific passages from the Jewish scriptures. Ego eimi is used in the Septuagint to render two of God’s Hebrew statements of self-identification. The first comes from Exodus 3:14, where God responds to Moses’s question about what name he should give the Israelites. God provides the name “I Am What I Am,” which is ehyeh asher ehyeh in Hebrew. The word ehyeh, “I am,” likely comes from the same root as the divine name Yahweh, but Yahweh does not mean “I am.” The author is suggesting the divine name is connected to the verb “to be.” The Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh is translated into Greek as ego eimi ho on, which would mean something like “I am the Being One.” God’s follow-up in the Greek is more or less, “Tell ’em ‘the Being One’ sent ya.”

Then we have another Hebrew phrase, ani hu (“I am he”), which occurs once in Deuteronomy 32:39 and then six times in Deutero-Isaiah. In the Deuteronomy passage, God says, “Now see that I—I am he, and there is no god with me.” One of the occurrences from Deutero-Isaiah is Isaiah 43:10: “So that you will know, and will believe me, and will understand that I am he.” This is God’s way of saying “I am the Main Character,” and in Greek it also gets translated as ego eimi. Jesus’s use of the phrase echoes this rhetoric from the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures and so represents some kind of identification with God. Again, Jesus’s relationship with God seems to have something to do with the divine name.

While ego eimi doesn’t actually translate the divine name Yahweh, it does seem like a coded reference to the divine name. Upon hearing Jesus’s statement, the Jewish folks in John 8 immediately prepare to stone him, which probably means they understood him as making a claim to a special relationship to God and to the divine name. Claiming to have been alive since before Abraham was born in and of itself doesn’t seem very blasphemous, though it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they understood it as claiming some kind of superhuman or divine status. It’s more likely they understood Jesus’s coded reference to the divine name as some kind of assertion of God’s power and authority.

Many Christians insist that verse represents Jesus clearly identifying himself as the very God of Israel. This is a possible reading, but I don’t think it’s the best reading. John consistently represents Jesus as an agent sent by God who subordinates himself to God. Thus, for instance, Jesus prays at the beginning of John 17, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Jesus is distinct from the only true God, rather than the second person of that only true God. Jesus’s relationship to God is framed as a matter of some kind of delegated agency that empowers Jesus and allows him to enact God’s will and manifest God’s presence. It’s not so much a divine identity Christology as it is a divine agency Christology.¹³

I and others have argued that the divine name plays a central role in this delegated agency, and I have further argued that the divine name represents a kind of communicable vehicle of that agency.¹⁴ The authorized bearer or possessor of that divine name can exercise God’s unique power and authority and can even manifest God’s presence. Thus, Jesus can say in John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” This is not something the Gospel of John invented, though. This actually goes back to the book of Exodus and was then elaborated on within Greco-Roman Jewish literature.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE THAT NAME’S BEEN!

Yahweh is the one who brought Israel up out of Egypt, right? Well, mostly, but there’s a passage in Exodus 23 that says something slightly different. Verses 20–21 say, “Look, I’m sending an angel before you, to look out for you along the way, and to bring you to the place I’ve prepared. Pay attention to him and listen to him. Don’t give him any grief, because he won’t forgive your transgressions, because my name is in him.” What does it mean that the angel having God’s name “in him” means he won’t forgive their transgressions? The Hebrew phrase translated “he won’t forgive your transgressions” is lo yisa lefishakem, and this exact phrase appears in only one other place in all the Hebrew Bible. In Joshua 24:19, Joshua tells the people, “You can’t serve Yahweh, because he’s a holy God. He’s a jealous God. He won’t forgive your transgressions.” The idea here is that God is the one who has the prerogative to choose whether or not to forgive sins.

Exodus 23:21 seems to be insisting that the angel will exercise the same authority over transgressions that is attributed in Joshua 24 to the jealous God of Israel. The text then goes on to explain how it is the angel can exercise God’s prerogatives: “because my name is in him.” So, because the angel possesses God’s name, he can exercise God’s power. It goes beyond that, though. This passage in Exodus was written fairly late in the composition of the Pentateuch. It also seems to be trying to explain other passages that conflate the identity of the angel with that of Yahweh and that even have the angel of Yahweh explicitly identifying as God. For instance, Exodus 3:2 says, “the angel of Yahweh appeared to [Moses] in a flame of fire out of a bush.” Verse 4 says Yahweh saw that Moses turned aside to check out the bush and that “God called to him from out of the bush.” Unless God and the angel are for some reason cuddling in this burning bush, the God that calls to Moses from the bush is to be identified as the angel that appeared to Moses from that very same bush. In verse 6, the entity in the midst of the bush says, “I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Other stories that similarly conflate the angel with God are found in Genesis 16:7–13; 21:17–19; 22:11–18; 31:11–13; Numbers 22:22–35; Judges 2:1–5; 6:11–24; and 13:2–22.

I and other scholars think these passages originally narrated stories about God himself directly interacting with humanity, but because of growing theological sensitivities related to God’s anthropomorphism and accessibility, the Hebrew word malak, “angel,” was added in some places before the word “God” or the name “Yahweh” to obscure the identity of the entity interacting with these people. This resulted in a new biblical character: “the angel of God,” or “the angel of Yahweh,” who could exercise God’s authority and even identify as God.¹⁵ Exodus 23 explains how this works by suggesting the divine name—the Tetragrammaton—dwells within the angel. The divine name here is functioning as a kind of vehicle of divine agency, authority, and presence. The authorized bearer of that name can do what only God is supposed to be able to do and can even use the name to identify themselves.

We can see evidence of this interpretation of Exodus 23 in some Greco-Roman Jewish and Rabbinic texts where a divine mediator of some kind gets to do things only God is supposed to do because they have God’s name “in” them. For instance, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, which was written around the same time as the New Testament, an angel named Yahoel is referred to by God as “the namesake of the mediation of my ineffable name.”¹⁶ Shortly after this, Yahoel explains to Abraham, “I am Yahoel named by him who shakes those which are with me on the seventh vault, on the firmament. I am a power in the midst of the Ineffable who put together his names in me.”¹⁷

Now, Yahoel’s name is made from the combination of Yaho and El, two names for God, but the notion of God putting multiple names together in this name-bearing angel resonates with a text from around the fifth century CE known as 3 Enoch, which has an angel named Metatron explain, “I have seventy names, corresponding to the seventy nations of the world, and all of them are based on the name of the King of the kings of kings” (3 Enoch 3.2). In 3 Enoch 12.5, Metatron says God bestowed the divine name on him and then he quotes Exodus 23:21: “he called me ‘the lesser Yahweh’ in the presence of his whole household in the height, as it is written, ‘My name is in him.’”¹⁸

This relates to a rabbinic story from around the same time period that also quotes Exodus 23:21. Sanhedrin 38b discusses some confusion related to Exodus 24:1, where Yahweh said to Moses, “Come up to Yahweh.” A “certain heretic” found Yahweh’s third-person reference to himself a bit awkward and suggested to Rav Idit that it should have read, “Come up to me.” Rav Idit responded that the name “Yahweh” there was actually referring to the angel Metatron, “whose name is like the name of his Master, as it is written, ‘for my name is in him.’” The heretic then suggests this means the angel should be worshipped, but that idea is condemned. Some folks think this is a cheeky swipe at those who worship Jesus, but whether it is or isn’t, it cites Exodus 23:21 as a rationalization of how an angel who is not Yahweh could be referred to in the scriptures as Yahweh.

The New Testament also indicates that Jesus’s special relationship with God is at least in part a result of his possession of the divine name. The anonymous letter to the Hebrews says Jesus “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” and is superior to the angels because “the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” As we saw earlier, the Gospel of John describes Jesus’s oneness with God as having something to do with the fact that Jesus was given God’s name. The famous hymn in Philippians 2, discussed earlier, suggests the same. The author of Jude 5 identifies Jesus as the one who “saved the people out of Egypt,” which likely reflects the author’s identification of Jesus with the angel of Yahweh who appeared to Moses in Exodus 3:2 and then led Israel out of Egypt in Exodus 23.

The authors of the New Testament who present Jesus in the most explicitly divine terms likely understood his relationship to God primarily according to the conceptual template provided by the angel of Yahweh, who had God’s name in him, and so was authorized to exercise God’s power and authority, and even to identify in some sense with God. Other exaltation and incarnation models, like adoptionism or emanation, influenced the shape Jesus’s relationship to God took depending on the particular author, but I think the underlying logic is that of the name-bearing mediator, which is basically the logic of divine images. Just like a divine image or an idol in the ancient world, God’s name-bearing mediator transmits God’s power, authority, and presence, allowing it to be manifested where it is needed. This is why, according to Jesus in John 14:9, “he who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus is saying he manifests God’s presence, and so to see Jesus is to see the Father.

This also accounts for Thomas’s famous confession in John 20:28, where after seeing and touching Jesus’s wounds, he says, “My Lord and my God!” This is perhaps an allusion to the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4 (“Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God—Yahweh is one”). In the Greek, as in most modern English translations, the name Yahweh is substituted with the word “Lord.” In 1 Corinthians 8:6, Paul seems to read Jesus into a division of the Shema, claiming, “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” Thomas may be doing something similar. The repetition of the definite article and the possessive pronoun with each title suggests there is some distinction to be maintained between “Lord” and “God,” but at the same time, Jesus seems to be the addressee of both exclamations.

The authors of John are not trying to subtly sneak a trinitarian concept that wouldn’t exist for centuries into the text; they’re resolving the tension Jesus addressed in John 14:9 when he lamented, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” At least Thomas finally gets it. Jesus manifests the Father. Not because he is the Father—even trinitarians reject that—but because he is the authorized possessor of the divine name, and just like a divine image, he bears and transmits the Father’s power, authority, and even his very presence.

A TRINITARIAN GRAB BAG

There are a handful of other passages from the later epistles that are frequently appealed to as identifying Jesus as God. One of the most famous is 1 John 5:7, known as the Johannine Comma (“comma” here means “phrase” or “clause”). In the KJV it reads, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” This would seem to be an open-and-shut case of a trinitarian view of Jesus’s relationship with God. But there’s just one critical problem: The author of 1 John didn’t write it. It’s a forgery. It doesn’t exist in any of our earliest manuscripts; it’s not quoted by any of the patristic authors. It first pops up in Latin texts, and not as a quotation of a passage from the New Testament. The first time anyone ever quotes it as part of the epistle is in a late fourth-century Latin book called the Liber Apologeticus. In the next century it would start showing up in Latin manuscripts of 1 John, but it doesn’t occur in any Greek manuscripts until more than a thousand years after it was written.

So why on earth is it in the KJV? Well, it was a popular part of some versions of the Latin Vulgate, which had been the official translation of the Catholic Church for more than a thousand years when the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus set his hand to producing the first ever printed edition of the Greek New Testament (what we now know as the Textus Receptus).¹⁹ To create this edition, Erasmus consulted seven Greek manuscripts dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE that were available to him at his library in Basel, Switzerland. None of these manuscripts had the Johannine Comma in them, so his first and second editions, published in 1516 and 1519, didn’t have it. This upset some folks, and he was urged by powerful people to include it in his next edition, but he had no Greek manuscript that gave him confidence in the reading.

Lo and behold, before he published his third edition, someone turned up with a Greek manuscript called Codex Montfortianus that contained the Johannine Comma. This manuscript is usually dated to the early sixteenth century CE, and it was a copy of a slightly earlier manuscript that didn’t have the Comma. Additionally, the version of the Comma that appears in Codex Montfortianus shows signs of having been translated from Latin. Erasmus included it in his third edition, although he expressed doubts about its authenticity in his notes. It’s not unlikely the manuscript was prepared precisely to compel him to include the passage. That third edition became the primary source text for English translations of the New Testament from Tyndale’s in 1526 through to the King James Version in 1611, and so these translations all include this trinitarian forgery.²⁰

The anonymous letter to the Hebrews also has a passage that is frequently read to identify Jesus as God. The first chapter of this letter is aimed primarily at asserting that the Son of God is superior to the angels. For instance, verse 5 rhetorically asks, “to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you’?” This is a quotation of Psalm 2:7, which represents God speaking to the human king at his coronation. Verses 8 and 9 report that God says the following to the Son: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and the scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” The passage refers to the Son as God, but also refers to God’s own God. Right off the bat, it seems to be referring to another God that is distinct from and superior to God the Son, so it wouldn’t really support a trinitarian view of Jesus as the second person of the one and only God.

These are direct quotations, however, from Psalm 45 (Psalm 44 in the Greek translation), and that psalm is explicitly directed at the Davidic king. The first verse (the second in Hebrew) states, “I’m saying my piece regarding the king.” The psalm is directly referring to the Davidic king as elohim, “God.” This is based on an ancient Southwest Asian notion of the human king as an agent of the patron deity, and therefore a divinized human able to be referred to as a god. The author of Hebrews would have been aware of this rhetorical divinization and deployed it to represent the Son not as the second person of the one being of God, but as one who is endowed with the title “God” because of their station.

Two other New Testament texts commonly appealed to as identifying Jesus as God are Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1:

TITUS 2:13

… while we wait on the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

2 PETER 1:1

… those who have obtained just as precious a faith through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.

These two texts were likely written in the second century CE. The consensus view is that neither was actually written by the identified author. They’re pseudonymous, which means “using a false name.” They were written decades after the deaths of Paul and Peter. By the second century CE, Christians were likely already contemplating Jesus as God. Precisely how these authors would have understood Jesus’s status as God is not clear, but a trinitarian view definitely isn’t it.

CONCLUSION

So, does the Bible say Jesus is God? Yes and no, but never in the way most Christians today understand Jesus to be God. It’s a complex issue. Any attempt to explain exactly how the New Testament authors understood Jesus’s relationship to God must import concepts from outside the texts, because the authors never explain why they’re talking about Jesus the way they are. The texts don’t tell us, and so anyone who says it’s clearly one way or another is just arguing by assertion. There are enough gaps in the way the authors talk about Jesus’s divinity to fit all kinds of different interpretations. The best we can hope for is to identify what concepts and frameworks would have been available to the authors and then make a case for which ones make the most sense of the available data. This comes down to a judgment call, really, and because of the centrality of this question to so many people’s identities as Christians, the overwhelming majority of us are going to be intuitively nudged in the direction of interpretations that validate and reinforce our dogmas.

I’ve argued in this chapter that the earliest concepts of Jesus’s relationship to God were most likely adapting Hellenistic Jewish traditions of mediatory figures who had been endowed with God’s name—a vehicle for God’s power and presence—and so could do what only God was supposed to do, could carry God’s titles, and in certain circumstances could be referred to by God’s own name. This understanding itself built on similar ideas about the angel of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, who had God’s name “in him,” and so could do what God could do and could even say, “I am the God of your father” (Exodus 3:6). These ideas were perfectly natural at the time because they built on the logic of divine images, which was widespread throughout ancient Southwest Asia.

The New Testament authors used different frameworks for talking about Jesus’s relationship to God. Paul seems to understand Jesus, at least in part, according to the conceptual template provided by the angel of Yahweh. The author of the Gospel of Mark treats Jesus as adopted by God at his baptism, which turned him into a divine agent. The authors of the Gospel of John seem to be adopting a more philosophically oriented notion of the Word as a divine expression and extension of God’s nature and agency, though not quite yet in the same sense achieved at Nicea. By the time of the final texts included in the New Testament, explicitly referring to Jesus as God had rhetorical value, even if the nature of that identification hadn’t yet been fully fleshed out.

It would take centuries for Christianity’s leading thinkers to develop a defensible case for how Jesus can both be God and not be God. But even after developing the necessary conceptual scaffolding, unity on this issue wouldn’t be achieved until a central institutional hierarchy developed and the full force of the Roman Empire could be leveraged to enforce agreement and punish those who disagreed.

18 The Bible Says to Beware the Mark of the Beast

You probably don’t know who Christine Weick is, but you may have seen her face and heard her voice. In November 2014, a video began circulating on the internet that featured Weick holding up a chart showing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet alongside images of a can of Monster Energy and the Monster logo. In the video, she explains that the Hebrew letter vav has a numerical value of six, and that the Monster Energy logo looks an awful lot like three vavs in a row. That would be 666, according to Weick, making the Monster Energy logo the number of the beast.

Of course, when you’re using Hebrew letters to indicate numbers, you add up the numerical values of the letters. So vav-vav-vav would actually be 18, not 666.¹ Incidentally, 18 is also the value of the Hebrew word for “life,” so, you know, jot that down.

I don’t know how many thousands of times I’ve been tagged in that damn video, but it’s just one of countless different examples of (mostly) conservative Christians trying to use Revelation’s warnings about the mark and number of the beast to characterize whomever or whatever they don’t like as Antichrists or as possessed by demons. There’s no limit to what these folks will dredge up as a manifestation of the mark or the number of the beast.

Another example of this is rooted in a religious movement that wants to return to the “correct” pronunciation of Jesus’s name as Yeshua (a finance bro named Brad Lea says it’s Yeshua, but he pronounces it like Joshua with a Y).² According to this movement, the abbreviation that is used in our ancient Greek manuscripts to indicate the number 666—specifically χξϛ, or chi-xi-stigma—would have been pronounced ch-z-s. This specific combination of consonants, they argue, would have been John the Revelator’s attempt to spell out in ancient Greek our modern pronunciation of … Jesus. Folks who support this movement believe that referring to the Anointed One as “Jesus” represents the most egregious of party fouls.³

Now, the ch-z-s theory about the number of the beast has a litany of flaws, but the first is that it requires one entirely misunderstand the pronunciation of the Greek letter Chi. This letter isn’t pronounced with the ch sound we have in “church;” it’s pronounced with a hard h, like at the beginning of Chanukah. The theory also confuses the second letter for a Zeta when it’s actually a Xi (pronounced ksi). This entire theory is pure and utter nonsense made up by someone with more creativity than understanding.

As you can see, a lot of this demonization is comically misguided, but sometimes it’s more targeted, devious, or dangerous. Some Christian preachers have tried to tie the number of the beast to Islam, arguing the Bismillah (an Arabic phrase meaning “in the name of God”) reminds them of the Greek abbreviation used in early manuscripts to indicate 666 (χξϛ). Others have tried to insist the number of the beast refers to the addresses of certain United Nations buildings.

Similarly, a great many people have been mightily concerned with identifying the mark of the beast. For many years, these people have interpreted microchip implants and even bar codes as the mark of the beast, particularly if they have anything to do with any kind of global currency. When COVID-19 vaccines started to be approved, some pastors and Christian influencers around the world claimed they were the mark of the beast. The mark of the beast is overwhelmingly associated with “the Antichrist,” even though that word is never used anywhere in the Book of Revelation, and in the only places it does occur (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7) it’s being used as an adjective to refer to anyone who denies Jesus. Is the Bible really telling us to be on the lookout for an Antichrist bearing the mark of the beast, and to demonize the people associated with whatever practices and behaviors we identify with the mark?

THE NUMBER AND NAME OF THE BEAST

The beast, with its number, name, and mark, is a theme entirely confined to the second half of the book of Revelation. It first comes up in the discussion of the two beasts of the dragon (Satan) in chapter 13. The first beast has seven heads and ten diadem crowns, and it rises from the sea to be given authority by the dragon (13:1–2). The second beast rises from the earth and has two horns like a lamb (13:11). This beast causes the people of the earth to make a divine image for the first beast, which it enlivens and requires the people of the earth to worship under penalty of death (13:14–15). The second beast also causes everyone on earth to be marked in the right hand or the forehead with his mark, which is explained as “the number of his name” (13:16–17).

What on earth does this mean? Well, in Revelation 13:18, the author states, “Here is wisdom: Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.” So 666 somehow seems to represent “the number of his name.” What’s going on here?

We find the number 666 (written χξϛ) in our earliest manuscript of Revelation 13:18, Papyrus 47, which dates to the second half of the third century. Our next earliest manuscript containing this verse is Papyrus 115, which probably comes just shortly after P47, but it gives the number as χιϛ, or 616 (600 [χ] + 10 [ι] + 6 [ϛ]). This is also the reading of a fifth-century CE uncial manuscript (a manuscript written entirely with capital letters) known as Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus.⁴ Which number is original? Irenaeus of Lyons was an early Christian bishop who wrote in the second half of the second century CE and spoke at some length about both numbers. For Irenaeus, 666 was far more significant in light of symbolism he found within the scriptures. In addition to claiming the earliest and most reliable manuscripts have 666, he also insisted people who spoke to John the Revelator “face to face” testified that it was 666.⁵ Most scholars today would probably side with Irenaeus, but not for the reasons Irenaeus cites. For the purposes of this chapter, though, it doesn’t really matter, since they’re probably just two different ways to refer to the same person.

The references to the “number of his name” and “the number of a man” are clues that we’re dealing with a name that was encoded using something called gematria. Some ancient languages do not have a different set of symbols to indicate numerical values. Instead, numerical value is assigned to the letters of the alphabet. Because every letter had numerical value, you could convert any word or name into a number.⁶ So, for example, my name is Daniel, which means “God is my judge” in Hebrew and is spelled daleth-nun-yod-aleph-lamed (דניאל). The letter daleth has a numerical value of 4, nun has a value of 50, yod is 10, aleph is 1, and lamed is 30, which all adds up to 95. So, my name has a value of 95 using gematria. Now, there are different words and names that could have the same value, so saying there’s some Bible scholar on TikTok whose number is 95 may not be enough to lead someone directly to my account (especially because I go by Dan there), but the point isn’t to make things crystal clear. Part of the point is to obscure who you’re talking about while still giving a little IYKYK wink to the already initiated.

The majority of scholars agree that 666 and 616 both primarily refer to Nero Caesar, the first-century CE Roman emperor.⁷ They’re different numbers because one seems to be converting the name into Hebrew from Greek, and the other seems to be converting it from Latin. The Greek spelling would be Neron Kaisar, which would be transliterated into Hebrew as nron qsr, or 50 (nun) + 200 (resh) + 6 (vav) + 50 (nun) + 100 (qoph) + 60 (samekh) + 200 (resh) = 666.⁸ The Latin spelling would be Nero Caesar, which would be transliterated into Hebrew as nro qsr, or 50 (nun) + 200 (resh) + 6 (vav) + 100 (qoph) + 60 (samekh) + 200 (resh) = 616. Coins from Nero’s reign struck in Greek as well as in Latin carry each of these spellings.

Now, some of you may be thinking, “Wait a minute, Dan! Most scholars believe Revelation was written in the 90s CE! Nero died well before that in 68 CE. Why would the author be using a coded reference to a long-dead emperor as a prophecy about a future threat to Christians?” You’d be right, but only because we haven’t discussed Nero Redivivus. Nero Redivivus is the name of a legend that was in circulation in Rome between the first and fifth centuries CE that held that Nero would someday return to the throne to make Rome great again. Nero was one of the most infamous persecutors of early Christians. According to a Roman historian named Tacitus, Nero burned the bodies of Christians as a means of providing light during the nighttime. Nero died in 68 CE, but some thought he would return from the dead. Others thought he had never really died and had just escaped into Parthia to bide his time. Between 69 CE and about 90 CE, at least three different individuals seem to have claimed to be—or were identified by others as—the returned Nero. One of them even had the support of the Parthians, which may have informed the way the beast’s allies are represented in Revelation 16 and 17.

The number of the beast in Revelation seems to be just a coded reference to Nero and to this fear that he would return to rule and bring the entire weight of the Roman Empire (which was viewed as the first beast) down on Christianity. It’s a fear that really only had relevance to the Roman Empire and to the Christians of the author’s own day. The villains in Revelation are all linked with features of first-century CE Rome. The text is an exhortation to Christians from the 90s CE to remain faithful and unspotted from the wickedness of the Roman Empire. The author doesn’t seem to be warning anyone any further in the future than the shelf life of the Nero Redivivus fear (which was admittedly unusually long).

But what about this mark? What’s that all about?

THE MARK OF THE BEAST

Revelation 13:16–18 says, “and he causes all—small and great, rich and poor, free and slave—to get a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, so that no one can buy or sell if he does not have the mark—that is, the name of the beast or the number of his name.” According to this passage, the mark of the beast will be the name Nero or the number 666 (or maybe 616), and it will go on a person’s right hand or on their forehead. That certainly doesn’t sound like a microchip implant or a can of Monster Energy, but it also doesn’t really match up perfectly with anything we know from the ancient world. Scholars today suggest it sounds like the merging of different concepts from the first century.

The first thing to note is that the concept of having the beast’s name on one’s forehead matches the imagery from Revelation 17:5 of the “great whore” having a name written on her forehead, as well as the imagery from Revelation 14:1 and 22:4 (and maybe also 3:12) of the faithful having God’s and Jesus’s names written on their foreheads. In Revelation 7:3 and 9:4, the faithful will have a “seal” put on their foreheads, which seems like it’s related. And then we have Ezekiel 9:4, where the prophet watches as God commands that a “mark” (Hebrew tav) be put on the foreheads of all those in Jerusalem who are appropriately upset about the abominations being practiced. Then God commands six executioners to go through the city and slaughter—without pity—anyone who doesn’t have the mark, including old men, virgin women, and little children. The mark acts as protection, and we see something similar in Revelation 9:3–5, when locusts are given power to torture those on earth who don’t have God’s seal on their foreheads. In the context of Revelation 7 and 9, the seal likely represents loyalty and belonging to God’s community, as well as protection as a member of that community. Having God’s name written on one’s forehead probably evokes the same ideas but adds the imagery of the priestly class, whose headdresses had the divine name written on them.

The mark of the beast seems to represent a kind of satanic counterpart to the mark used to identify the followers of God and the Lamb. According to this sense, it would identify those who are loyal to the beast and fall under his ownership and protection. The mark is a counterfeit, though, since the beast can’t ultimately protect his followers from God’s punishment. When we consider the mark in relation to the forehead and the hand, an additional type of counterfeit comes into view. Four passages in the Hebrew Bible (Exodus 13:9, 16; Deuteronomy 6:8; 11:18) instruct the faithful to keep God’s commandments on their hands and their foreheads as a sign and a reminder.⁹ In later generations, these passages would lead to the practice of wearing phylacteries on the forehead that would be connected by leather straps to the left hand. The mark of the beast on the right hand and the forehead suggests a kind of counterfeit ritual practice signaling loyalty to the beast. It suggests the beast’s counterfeiting would extend to worship practices.

Finally, the text states the mark of the beast is required for people to buy and sell, which suggests some association with commerce, and most likely with coinage. The exchange of coins would mostly involve people’s right hands, and at that time, Roman coinage carried an impression of the emperor and his name, which could be referred to as a “mark” and an “image.” In this sense, people could be thought of as carrying around mini divine images.¹⁰ Now, this is not necessarily to say John thinks anyone who possessed or used Roman coins was guilty of taking the mark, but as professor Craig R. Koester has stated, the imagery was “among the reminders of the pervasiveness of the imperial commercial network.”¹¹ The association of the mark with Roman coinage would serve as a constant signal to Christians of their proximity to the evil empire. The book’s rhetoric about the mark signaling loyalty to the beast over and against God would also serve to firm up the boundaries that the author wanted to see established between that evil empire and the people of God.

CONCLUSION

The author of Revelation was not composing a prophecy about the distant future when they wrote about the name, number, and mark of the beast. They were using apocalyptic imagery and themes associated with the literary conventions and the fears of their own day in a way that they hoped would incentivize first-century CE Jesus followers to remain faithful and to keep themselves unspotted from the moral stains of Roman society and its imperial trappings. Folks who use it today as a kind of literary Ouija board for trying to expose the satanic influences underlying social, economic, and political movements and groups are not excavating divine secrets that have been vouchsafed to them by the author; they’re just leveraging the text’s divinity and inspiration to authorize their own identity politics. There is no forthcoming beast with an accompanying name and mark. The book of Revelation is not a prediction or prophecy about our day.

So why is it treated that way? Apocalyptic imagery is often intentionally vague and imprecise, which means it can become interpretively flexible, allowing for application to all kinds of circumstances. And the more time passes and the further away from the original contexts the text gets, the more it can merge with the prophetic genre and give license to all kinds of renegotiations and rhetorical deployments.¹² The influence the Bible has had on the world may have been drastically different had the book of Revelation not wriggled its way into the canon right at the tail end of the process of canonization. One thing that would be different would be the absence of asinine conspiracy theories about the satanic origins of this or that social group or technological improvement couched in disingenuous concern for some prophesied “mark of the beast.”

19 The Bible Says Sinners Will Be Punished Forever in Hell

Like the majority of Americans (I assume), I thought David Archuleta got robbed in the seventh season of American Idol, which took place in 2008. I really did enjoy David Cook’s beat-boxing cover of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” but Archuleta was the superior singer. He was also a Mormon, so I felt duty-bound to support my coreligionist (there’s the identity politics coming through). I heard a few years later that he was serving a two-year proselytizing mission for the Church, but that was all the news until he announced on Twitter in June 2021 that he was bisexual. I don’t remember being terribly surprised by this, but I immediately knew his sexuality was going to result in a lot of hate from mainstream Christians and from other Mormons. And sure enough, David immediately became a target for every twentysomething blue check on Twitter with something to prove about how creatively they could merge the performance of compassion with threats of damnation and hellfire.

Just a few days before I sat down to write this chapter, David released a new single called “Hell Together.” He explained that the title refers to something his mom told him after he let her know he was leaving the LDS Church. His coming out initially made her uncomfortable, but she soon came around and told David on behalf of the whole family, “if you’re going to hell, we’re all going to hell with you.”¹ The sentiment is an understandable one, and for many Mormons it may even resonate with something Brigham Young once said: “I see no faults in the Church, and therefore let me be resurrected with the Saints, whether I ascend to heaven or descend to hell, or go to any other place. And if we go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it.”²

Predictably, though, folks on social media responded in condescending and condemnatory ways, and many Mormons also seemed oddly offended. For instance, the Utah Gay-Straight Coalition commented, “please go live your life as a gay man without mocking God and religion. It’s not that difficult!”³ Another person lectured David on the Latter-day Saint concept of hell: “You know what hell is, right? No fire. No brimstone. No torture. It’ll be beautiful. Far more beautiful than anything you can have now no matter how much money you have. You’ll be there with your friends in the lowest kingdom knowing that you could have had so much more.”⁴ Ouch. Discourse within Mormonism frequently toggles back and forth between a more classically Christian concept of eternal hellfire—which is found in different places in the Book of Mormon—and the notion that would later develop within Mormonism that pretty much all people born on earth would achieve one or another “kingdom of glory,” even the lowest of which would far outstrip any bliss we could ever enjoy in this life.

Many Christians mock the modern Latter-day Saint concept of “hell,” and particularly because of the apparent conflict with the more classical conceptualization repeatedly asserted in the Book of Mormon, but they’re not really any better off when it comes to the Bible’s representation of hell. There’s no one consistent concept of hell in the Bible. For the majority of the Bible, in fact, there’s no concept of hell at all. Notions of postmortem divine punishment can differ wildly from author to author and even within individual books, and nothing like the modern conceptual package that is hell is articulated anywhere. Many content creators on social media will even assert that “Hell is not in the Bible.”⁵ So what do the data indicate? Does the Bible threaten sinners with eternal punishment in hell?

IS THIS BURNING AN ETERNAL FLAME?*

The word “hell” occurs thirty-one times in the King James Version’s translation of the Old Testament, and every time it is translating the Hebrew word sheol. This doesn’t mean “hell” as we understand the word, though, and it could just as accurately—or inaccurately—be translated “heaven.” We’re not really sure where the word sheol comes from, but it is used in a way that indicates it was intended to evoke concepts of a pit, a grave, or an underworld. Sheol is just a reference to the abode of all the dead—the good, the bad, and everyone in between. During the composition of the majority of the Hebrew Bible, there was no distinction between the afterlife of the righteous and the afterlife of the wicked. Everyone ended up in the same dreary and poorly defined afterlife that was thought to be located somewhere under the surface of the earth.

Frequently, sheol was used as a synonym for death or the grave (Genesis 37:35; Psalm 89:48), but elsewhere it’s described as the underground abode of the dead, and it is characterized by darkness, dryness, and sometimes even shady inhabitants like the Rephaim (Job 17:13; Proverbs 30:16; Isaiah 14:9). We can make additional inferences about this dreary afterlife by looking at ancient Israelite and Judahite mortuary inscriptions and grave goods. These remains indicate the deceased needed things like food, drink, clothing, and illumination, and also that they wanted their names to be invoked and their remains to be left alone. Kerry Sonia’s 2020 book, Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel, is a wonderful discussion of the cult of the dead and what it tells us about ancient Israel’s concept of the afterlife.⁶

The picture began to change in two important ways after Alexander the Great conquered the region and then in some way or another managed in 323 BCE to drink himself to death. One of the consequences of these events is that the people of Judah suffered greatly under oppressive regimes that fought over control of the region during the lengthy succession crises. By the second century BCE, a division had developed among Judeans between those who sought to advance their standing by embracing the onslaught of Hellenism and those who were willing to die to oppose it. Each side thought of the other as a mortal enemy, and the apocalyptic literature produced by those who opposed Hellenism explored the origins of this wickedness and the eternal fates of those on each side of the equation. The wisdom literature of previous centuries had seemed to settle on just accepting that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, but in the Hellenistic period they seem to have grown more convinced that a just God wouldn’t or shouldn’t allow such violent despots to entirely escape punishment, much less allow those faithful followers who suffered and died at their hands to go down to Sheol without justice.⁷ In short, circumstances incentivized the development of some kind of account of postmortem punishment and reward.

The other relevant outcome of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the region was the introduction of Greek mythology and philosophy, which provided more detailed and developed conceptual templates for thinking about the afterlife. Some Greek traditions included a judgment event that would result either in appointment to the blessed and happy fields of Elysium or to the dreary abyss of Tartarus. In earlier periods, only heroes or descendants of the gods were eligible for either, but this afterlife became more democratized over time. In a poetic twist, Jewish apocalyptic literature would adopt these Greek ideas of reward and punishment in the afterlife to do two things. First, to provide compensation that could motivate people to remain faithful in the face of violent persecution. Second, to demonize and condemn the oppressive imposition of Greek culture on the people of Judah. These texts would also initially condemn the elite evildoers of the world before democratizing divine punishment in the afterlife to all who were thought to deserve it.

Perhaps the most influential of these apocalyptic texts is 1 Enoch.⁸ As previously noted, this text retells a story from Genesis 6:2–4 about the gods descending to earth and having children with human women. In 1 Enoch’s rather repetitive telling, the gods are disobedient angels. In chapters 8 and 9, they teach humanity all kinds of wickedness, like how to make weapons of war, magical charms, jewelry, and eyeshadow.⁹ The children born to them by the human women are giants who begin to kill and devour humans and even themselves. These are the violent circumstances that cause God to send the flood to destroy the earth.

According to 1 Enoch 10:4, Raphael was sent to bind one of the head angels, Asael, hand and foot, and cast him into darkness. Verse 5 instructs Raphael to “lay beneath him sharp and jagged stones. And cover him with darkness, and let him dwell there for an exceedingly long time. Cover up his face, and let him not see the light.” In verses 11–12, the angel Michael is sent to bind another head angel, Shemihazah, and those who came down with him, “for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth,” until the consummation of the judgment, at which point, according to verse 13, they will be “led away to the fiery abyss, and to the torture, and to the prison where they will be confined forever.” Chapter 10 presents the darkness as a period of waiting on judgment, while the fiery torture is represented as the infliction of the actual punishment.

Much of 1 Enoch is a travelogue, where Enoch is led through apocalyptic landscapes by a guiding angel that scholars would call a psychopomp. In chapter 21, Enoch sees the place of punishment for the disobedient angels. It’s described as “neither heaven above, nor firmly founded earth, but a chaotic and terrible place” (verse 1). Seven of the disobedient angels were “bound and thrown in it together, like great mountains, and burning in fire” (v. 3). Enoch then sees another place, even worse than the previous. “I saw terrible things,” Enoch says, “a great fire burning and flaming there. And the place had a narrow cleft (extending) to the abyss, full of great pillars of fire, borne downward. Neither the measure nor the size was I able to see or to estimate” (v. 7). We’re starting to get a sense for something approximating a modern concept of hell, but at this point it’s still reserved for the disobedient angels.

DARKNESS IMPRISONING ME*

The postmortem divine punishment of human sinners is even less consistent within 1 Enoch. In some places, the text seems to suggest annihilationism—that the wicked will just cease to exist. 1 Enoch 1:9 describes God coming to execute judgment on all, “and to destroy all the wicked.” Other imagery has sinners experiencing eternal darkness. In 1 Enoch 61:6, the wicked kings and mighty people will be punished by being cut off from God’s light. “Darkness is our dwelling forever and ever,” they moan. Still elsewhere, the imagery is mixed. In 1 Enoch 103:7–8, the sinners who go down to Sheol will be “in great distress, and in darkness and in a snare and in a flaming fire.”

The most developed representation of the afterlife of the wicked begins in chapter 22, where Enoch sees three deep and smooth hollow places in a gigantic stone mountain. Enoch’s guide explains that they are for the gathering and separating of the spirits of the dead while they await the final judgment. One place is for the spirits of the righteous, and there is a bright fountain of water. Another place is for the spirits of the sinners who have not had judgment exercised upon them in life. They are tormented in that place until their judgment, after which they will go to another place to be eternally bound, experiencing the “scourges and tortures of the cursed forever.” The purpose of the third hollow place is not very clear from the text, but because verse 13 says their spirits will not be punished on the day of judgment, some scholars suggest these were sinners who did have judgment exercised on them in life.¹⁰

After journeying on and seeing the mountain of God, the tree of life, and the center of the earth, Enoch sees a cursed valley, which is described as the place intended for “those who are cursed forever” (1 Enoch 27:2), which may be a reference to the ultimate fate of the sinners who were being gathered to the second smooth hollow place from chapter 22. Many scholars think this cursed valley is identifiable as the Valley of Ben Hinnom, or the Hinnom Valley, which runs from the west around the south side of the city of Jerusalem. Support for this interpretation can be found in a later literary layer, 1 Enoch 90:24, where the wicked are thrown into a “fiery abyss” that is opened in the earth to the south of a “house” that would soon be replaced with a new house. According to 1 Enoch 89:36, this was a “house of the Lord,” which should be identified with the Jerusalem temple. The abyss to the south is probably a reference to the Hinnom Valley, and here the imagery of a fiery abyss overlaps with the punishment of the wicked angels in 1 Enoch 10:13.

According to passages like 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 7:21–32, preexilic kings in Judah sacrificed children as burnt offerings at a location referred to as the Tophet, which is in the Valley of Ben Hinnom (see chapter 11). The word “Tophet” is also found in Isaiah 30:33 as a reference to a mortuary pyre that has abundant fuel. Isaiah 66:24—the final verse of the book—seems to refer to the same cursed location when it says that after worshipping Yahweh, the righteous will go out and look upon the corpses of those who rebelled against God. It says their fire will not be quenched, and their worm will not die. While this would soon be interpreted to mean each corpse would be eternally tormented by the worm and the fire, it likely originally meant that new corpses would continuously be added to the pile so that the worms would eternally have food and the fire would eternally have fuel. In Hebrew, the Valley of Hinnom is Ge-Hinnom, which becomes Gehenna when transliterated into Greek. Within Hellenistic Judaism, Gehenna took on significance as a symbolic and apocalyptic location for the fiery punishment of the wicked.

Centuries after the composition of the Bible, this imagery would give rise to the idea that the Valley of Hinnom was a landfill where perpetual fires were burning and where the bodies of criminals would be disposed of. There are absolutely no data from the ancient world that support this idea, though. Somebody long ago just made that up.

HIGHWAY TO HELL*

In the texts of the New Testament and in others written around the same time as the New Testament, ideas about postmortem divine punishment seem to have concentrated around three general concepts, all of which were influenced by the Enochic and other Hellenistic Jewish traditions.¹¹ One concept was annihilationism, or the notion that the wicked would just cease to exist. This is suggested by a number of early Jewish and Christian texts that are content to describe the fate of the wicked without elaboration as simple destruction. One document from the Dead Sea Scrolls known as the Damascus Document (CD), explains that God arranged for people who were called by his own name to inhabit the earth forever. The wicked, however, will have “strength, and might, and great wrath with flames of fire in the hands of all the angels of destruction” come against them until “they are without a remnant or a survivor” (CD 2:5–7). In the famous story of the mother and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees 7, the fourth son tells the wicked King Antiochus IV Epiphanes, “One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life” (NRSVue). The main concern in the text just seems to be whether you do or do not have life.

Paul’s view seems to overlap most consistently with annihilationism. For instance, 1 Corinthians 15:22–24 suggests that “all will be made alive in Christ,” but when Paul explains the order in which people will be resurrected, he only mentions Jesus as the “first fruits” and then “those who belong to Christ, then comes the end.” There doesn’t seem to be a resurrection for those who don’t follow Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17 seems to say something similar, suggesting that when Jesus descends from heaven, “the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who live, who remain, will be caught up together with them in the clouds.” The strongest reference to postmortem divine punishment in Paul is from 2 Thessalonians 1:9, which many scholars don’t even think was written by Paul. All it says there is that the wicked will be punished with everlasting destruction, which could plausibly refer to some kind of conscious experience of destruction that never ends, or perhaps just to an event of destruction that is permanent. They’re gone forever.

Another concept was temporary torment followed by either salvation or destruction. This concept most clearly appears in Christian literature that didn’t make it into the New Testament canon. According to a passage in the pseudepigraphic Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah that was added by Christians (4:14–18), Beliar and his armies (see chapter 9) will be dragged to Gehenna to give rest to the righteous. Later a judgment will occur, following which fire will go forth from God to consume the godless, and they will be as if they had never existed. The notion of punishment that leads to salvation is first found in some gnostic texts, such as the Apocryphon of John, which insists that those without adequate knowledge would be bound and cast into prison until they’re liberated from their ignorance and are saved by the acquisition of knowledge. Origen of Alexandria also argued for a kind of universal salvation that has become known as apokatastasis. This word comes from a Greek word used in Acts 3:21 that is usually translated as a restoration of all things. According to this perspective, all people will ultimately be saved, even Satan and those punished in hell. Important early Christians like Gregory of Nyssa and Eusebius of Caesarea endorsed a form of apokatastasis.¹²

The last of the three concepts of divine punishment, eternal conscious torment, is linked with the three New Testament Greek words that have traditionally been translated “hell.” The most common of these terms is “Gehenna.” It occurs twelve times in the New Testament, with seven occurrences in Matthew, three in Mark, one in Luke, and one in the letter of James.¹³ Mark 9 uses Gehenna three times in its repetitive reference to the location first mentioned in Isaiah 66:24 where the fire would not be quenched and where the worm would not die. According to Matthew, one should fear “him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matthew 10:28). Luke uses the term in reference to a fiery place that is to be feared because one could be sent there even after death (Luke 12:5). By this time, the notion of eternal conscious torment seems to accompany the symbolism of Gehenna in most usage.

The next most common word is “Hades,” which is borrowed from the Greek notion of the abode of all the dead. Hades was probably originally more closely related to the Hebrew Bible notion of Sheol than to our modern concept of hell, and it’s the Greek word most commonly used in the Septuagint to translate Sheol. It occurs ten times in the New Testament, with two occurrences in Matthew (11:23; 16:18), two occurrences in Luke (10:15; 16:23), two occurrences in Acts (2:27, 31), and four occurrences in Revelation (1:18; 6:8; 20:13–14). Luke 16 and Revelation 20 provide the most detail about their notions of Hades.

Luke 16:19–31 tells a parable (perhaps inspired by a Ptolemaic Egyptian tale) about Lazarus, a poor man who dies and is carried into Abraham’s bosom. The rich man has also died and is described as lifting up his eyes from Hades to see Abraham and Lazarus in some far off but still visible location. The rich man pleads with Abraham to allow Lazarus to come drip water on his tongue because he’s being tormented by fire. Abraham responds by saying the rich man had enjoyed nothing but good in life, while Lazarus experienced nothing but evil. This is another indication that the concept of heaven and hell initially developed as a means of squaring the accounts for good people who had bad things happen to them throughout their lives, and bad people who never experienced consequences for their wickedness during their lives. Abraham also explains that there’s an uncrossable gulf separating the two locations. The parable doesn’t make explicit the duration of the torment that was thought to be suffered in Hades.

Revelation 20 begins with the binding and imprisoning of the great dragon (Satan) for a thousand years, which echoes the Enochic notion of the malevolent angels being bound to await judgment. Satan will then be freed to deceive the nations into gathering for battle against God’s people. According to verse 9, though, fire would descend from heaven to consume the nations and everyone with them. Satan would then be cast into a lake of fire to be tormented forever with the apocalyptic beast and the false prophet. The peculiar part, though, is that verses 13–14 then describe Death and Hades giving up the dead who were in them, and then they themselves being cast into the lake of fire. If Death and Hades are being personified, then the lake of fire must torment them as well. The lake of fire is distinct from Hades, though, which doesn’t fit conveniently in the way we understand hell today.

The last Greek word from the New Testament that is traditionally translated “hell” is tartaros, or “Tartarus,” which is another borrowing from Greek mythology and only occurs once (2 Peter 2:4). The passage describes the malevolent angels being cast into Tartarus and delivered to chains of darkness to be held for judgment. Again, the New Testament concept of hell derives from the Enochic tradition. It’s unclear here if Tartarus is also intended to be the location of the eternal torment of the angels, or if it’s just a temporary holding location for the angels, similar to the pit in Revelation that only holds Satan until he’s set free.

CONCLUSION

The overwhelming majority of the Hebrew Bible has no concept of a postmortem realm where the wicked are punished. Notion of divine reward and punishment after this life begin to develop between the Persian and Hellenistic periods as Judeans began to seek a more satisfactory response to the problem of evil. The Enochic traditions were the primary seedbeds for the development of these concepts, particularly as they related to the punishment of the disobedient angels and the agents of oppression in the nations around Judea that inflicted so much death and suffering on the people of Israel. These developing concepts don’t begin to influence the Hebrew Bible texts until the very latest literary layers, but they became slightly more focused in the New Testament. There was still no single, systematic notion of hell by the time the last words of the New Testament were penned. That wouldn’t come until the centuries after, and particularly as the institution of Christianity turned a careful philosophical eye on the rhetoric it was using to defend itself against threats from beyond its boundaries. Medieval tradition and literature would further accentuate the conceptual package of hell with which most Christians have been raised today.

From an early period within Christianity, the threat of hell has been effectively deployed as a means of incentivizing fidelity to the Christian identity and obedience to its social mores. The concept has persevered mostly because of its utility to concerns of boundary maintenance. The image of hell that is used to accomplish this is not a fully biblical one, though. It certainly draws from different parts of the Bible, but new ideas are developed to complete the edifice, others are left behind, and the mortar that holds it all together is its utility to the modern Christian structuring of power, values, and boundaries. In short, hell—at least, the notion of hell that is most commonly used today to threaten and intimidate people into obedience—is not only harmful, it’s unbiblical.

CONCLUSION

One of the main things I’ve tried to do in this book is demonstrate how we create meaning with the Bible, rather than just withdraw meaning from the Bible. As a better scholar than myself (John J. Collins) has said, “Strictly speaking, the Bible does not mean anything until it is interpreted. Appeal to textual agency (‘but the Bible says’) is far too simple an evasion of the reader’s responsibility.”¹ We can claim to be sharing what the Bible “says” if we’re just quoting it verbatim, but the instant we paraphrase those words or try to explain what they mean to modern events, circumstances, relationships, or identities, or how they should be applied, the Bible is no longer “saying” anything at all; we’re just using the Bible as a bullhorn to authorize, validate, and amplify what we’re saying.

Even scholars like me who choose a historical-critical approach and presume to speak more authoritatively about what the Bible “actually says” are not really excavating meaning. We’re reconstructing it just like everyone else. The difference is that we take an awful lot of time to gather data, to see what other scholars have done, and then to go about reconstructing that meaning in a way that tries to minimize the role of our own needs and interests and tries to maximize what we think the earliest authors, editors, and audiences most likely understood by these texts.

The results can never be perfect, and this book isn’t remotely an exception. Some experts will disagree with my judgment on certain issues. Others will feel I’ve misrepresented the majority opinion. Others will consider the majority opinion misguided. Others will think I’m being influenced by one bias or another, either in the direction of or against a given identity. To some degree or another, each one of these criticisms is unquestionably true. This isn’t remotely an inerrant book, I’m not remotely an inerrant scholar, and the scholarly consensus is not remotely inerrant.

At some point, I’ll almost certainly change my mind about an issue here or there. But what I’m sure of is that even though I’m no doubt wrong about some of these things, a better argument is going to be made in the direction of more nuance and complexity, not less. A better argument is going to move the consensus further away from—not closer to—rhetorical utility for privileged and powerful groups seeking to weaponize the Bible to serve their own interests.

And this is another main thing I’d like readers to take away from this book. We can’t condition ourselves to avoid intuitive biases when it comes to reading the Bible. Those biases are always going to be there, and if we’re not even looking out for them, then they’re going to be sitting in the driver’s seat, and they’re going to be orienting our preferences toward readings that are going to serve our own interests. Our cognitive default is in the direction of dogma over data. The best we can hope for is to constantly reevaluate our approaches and our interpretations so that we can identify and weed out, where we are able, the influence of our dogmas. Keeping data over dogma ain’t easy. It’s work, dammit. It’s work.^

I think it’s important to work at this because the Bible as we know it today is not the Bible as its individual texts were known to their authors, editors, and earliest audiences. The readings of the biblical texts that are going to best serve our interests today are usually going to be entirely alien to the social groups and the worldviews that produced them. As we’ve seen, some passages in the Bible were written in a time when God was thought to have a wife. Some were written in a time when other gods were not only thought to rule over the other nations of the earth but also thought in some circumstances to be more powerful than Yahweh. Some were written in a time when God was thought to deceive to bring about his purposes. Some were written in a time when polygamy was normative. Some were written in a time when child sacrifice wasn’t considered wrong. Some of them were written in a time when sexual desire was considered a problematic feature of the human experience that was best avoided altogether. All of them were written in a time when the institution of slavery was considered normal and unobjectionable. All of them were written in a time when the sexual agency of women was subordinate to that of men. All of them were written in a time when God was thought to have a body.

To render the Bible as its authors, editors, and earliest audiences understood it palatable to today’s sensibilities, these things mostly or entirely need to be negotiated away. Three dogmas that I identified in the introduction have historically been critical to this project of renegotiation: inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality. None of these dogmas are supported by data, but they’re widespread and fiercely defended because they’re useful. With these three presuppositions, the texts can be treated as a single, unified whole that can be configured and hierarchized in ways that allow us to center and give priority to the texts that say the things we like, and to marginalize, reinterpret, or outright ignore the texts that say the things we don’t. Biblical worldviews and ethics can thus be ignored so the Bible can be weaponized for use in whatever culture wars we’re fighting today. Too often that means preserving some of the outdated and harmful worldviews of the Bible because they’re useful, with the Bible’s authority being leveraged to validate them. This is particularly true of contemporary prejudices against women and the LGBTQ+ community.²

These prejudices are maintained not because people’s interests are subordinated to the Bible’s authority and thus leave them no choice, but precisely because they serve the interests of people in positions of power. Nobody in a position of influence over a community of Bible believers subordinates their needs and interests entirely to the Bible. There is no such thing as a biblical literalist. There are ideological literalists, sure, but the Bible is secondary for those folks. No one derives their doctrines, their ethics, or their worldviews exclusively or even primarily from the Bible. Those things are derived from negotiations that take place between a group’s past, its needs in the present, its goals for the future, and its interpretations of the Bible. This last item primarily serves as the proof text for whatever priorities derive from the other items. It is the stamp of authority, not the source or even the content. The folks who wield the authority of the Bible most vehemently and belligerently are just as willing to negotiate with the Bible as anyone else. Individuals within the group are conditioned to think of the group’s mores as derived from the Bible and to treat doubts about those motivations as expressions of a lack of faith or of commitment. As long as such groups and their thought leaders refuse to think critically about their own interests and positionality, this misguided appropriation of biblical authority will continue.

Social circumstances, needs, desires, and goals have priority in our negotiations with the Bible and with what it is allowed to say. The same was true anciently for the folks responsible for writing, editing, compiling, and transmitting the biblical texts. Biblical ethics did not fall ex nihilo from the heavens; they were developed within the same processes of negotiation between the sacred past, the needs of the present, the goals for the future, and any received traditions or texts that had authority. This is why the Bible’s approach to things like slavery and sexual ethics reflect broader ancient Southwest Asian social conventions and mores. The authority for biblical worldviews has always been confined to the societies that generated, curated, and transmitted them.

As the modern curators of those worldviews, it is from our collective consensus that the Bible draws its authority. It has no inherent authority. Just think about the abolishment of slavery (most of it, anyway). Every syllable of the Bible condones and approves of slavery. God is even represented as endorsing it, and biblical authors across the Hebrew Bible and New Testament suggest our ideal relationship with God is one of enslaved person and master. Over time, advocacy from enslaved peoples within the intellectual climates of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment gave rise to new ideas about natural rights that would be taken up by thought leaders within and beyond eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christianity, including by missionaries engaging directly with enslaved and other minoritized communities. The inherent dignity and rights of every person became increasingly difficult to ignore or gloss over. With time, the consensus view shifted, and although it took war and significant loss of life in some places to eclipse the embedded systems of power, we changed our collective mind.³ Now, we collectively overrule the Bible’s approval of slavery. Similar shifts have taken place to different degrees over the centuries related to things like polygamy, celibacy, eating blood, and so on. The Bible only has authority to the degree we grant it authority by way of consensus.

And here’s where I’m going to suggest that Bible believers lean into negotiating with the Bible. I don’t agree with trying to argue that all of our moral standards today can already be found in the Bible as it tumbled from the minds of its authors. It’s quite often not an ally to marginalized, minoritized, and oppressed groups today, and I think it can be harmful to ignore that fact. But if the Bible is going to remain an authority—and all indications are that it will—then I think a more productive and transparent approach for those who hold it up as an authority would be to acknowledge and criticize its harmful ideologies, and then to openly advocate for renegotiation. That renegotiating is going to happen one way or another. All I’m suggesting is that we be transparent about it rather than negotiate with the text while trying to fool ourselves and others into thinking that’s not what we’re doing.

I am not remotely the first person to ever suggest this. Many Christians today frame a similar approach as the progressive unfolding of God’s revealed will. If we can arrive at a consensus view about the God of the Bible opposing slavery (as we saw Frank Turek argue in chapter 5), then we’ve already been through this. We have already negotiated with the Bible. We already have all the tools, resources, and experiences we need to continue that negotiation. In light of the significant harm that has been done to women, to immigrants, to members of the LGBTQ+ community, and to many others over the centuries as a result of the preservation of outdated and harmful identity markers, I suggest Bible believers focus their negotiations on the interpretations responsible for that harm.

Again, I’m not remotely the first person to think of this. As I noted in chapter 14, Richard Hays is one influential evangelical scholar who is reportedly publishing an argument for the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals within the church. By the time this book is published, that argument will be public, but according to available reporting, Hays will argue that “God has already gone ahead of our debates and expanded his grace to people of different sexualities.”⁴ But Hays is also not the first person to think of this. It’s been going on for generations. For example, around fifteen years ago, Luke Timothy Johnson also argued for expanding God’s grace to the LGBTQ+ community. He acknowledged that this went against the Bible and suggested that “we must state our grounds for standing in tension with the clear commands of Scripture.” After all, he argued, this is what happened with slavery. He went on to argue that experience was the authority to which he would appeal, and that there is scriptural precedence for the authority of experience. He went on: “Implicit in an appeal to experience is also an appeal to the living God whose creative work never ceases, who continues to shape humans in his image every day, in ways that can surprise and even shock us.”⁵

The fact that the Bible only speaks to the degree that we speak through it is not just some triviality or academic exercise. For many different people in many different circumstances around the world and through the centuries, it can be and has been a matter of life or death. For far too long, folks who wield the Bible to structure power, values, and boundaries over and against the interests of marginalized, minoritized, and oppressed groups have been allowed to operate relatively unchecked. That needs to stop, and it’s up to us, collectively, to decide when that happens. All it takes is enough folks who are willing to prioritize the mental health, the well-being, and the very lives of women, immigrants, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and many, many others over and against the utility of those identity markers to structures of power.

The Bible says a lot of things. Well, we think it does, anyway. It doesn’t really speak for itself. We speak with and through it, and we already reject so much of what its authors were most likely trying to say. We already create its message in our own image and likeness in so many different ways. We’re going to negotiate with the Bible whether we acknowledge it or not. That’s simply an inevitability. The only thing we have to lose by extending that process of renegotiation to those identity markers that have been stumbling blocks to so many for so long is the stumbling blocks themselves. Getting rid of them might help more people engage and come to understand the Bible on its own terms. They might be surprised by it, challenged by it, or even fascinated by it. They might come to love it, maybe even as much as I do. That’s up to all of us, though. So now it’s my turn to say it: Alright, let’s see it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Before anyone else, I must acknowledge the love and support of my sweetheart, Aleen, without whom I’d be able to do none of this. I love you, sweetie.

I wouldn’t be in a position to be able to write this book without Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who not only supervised my doctoral dissertation but made it possible for me to pursue a doctorate after it seemed that academic door had been closed to me. (She also kindly offered an endorsement of this book.) The proximate causes of The Bible Says So are Mark Tauber, my agent, and Elisabeth Dyssegaard, my editor at St. Martin’s Press. Jamilah Lewis-Horton, Michelle Cashman, John Karle, Joel Fotinos, Anne Marie Tallberg, and others at St. Martin’s have also been patient and helpful throughout this book’s production process.

I am very grateful to Liz Bucar, Karla Kamstra, Joel McHale, Rob Paulsen, and Jerry Saltz, who all offered very generous endorsements. Thank you, as well, to everyone on social media who has supported and encouraged me, and particularly Jason Stevens, Joshua Bowen, Kipp Davis, Jennifer Bird, Matthew Monger, David McDonald, Trevor Betts, Vishanti, hayden tank, SimoneBatYochai, Rabbi Chana, Dani English, and Kevin Jablonski, who offered feedback on early drafts.

Finally, my mom (Sue), my dad (Tom), and my siblings (Dave, Buffy, Donny, and Emily) have always been my biggest supporters. Donny is also a lawyer and very kindly reviewed my contract for me.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Some will identify my recognition of widespread systemic power asymmetries as a dogma in and of itself. They usually insist it’s rooted in the “Marxist,” “Hegelian,” and otherwise “postmodern” presuppositions that they believe plague all critical scholarship, but the fact that systemic power asymmetries exist and are curated by those who benefit from them has been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated by countless studies across numerous disciplines and fields of study over many years. Just one recent example related to racially based systemic power asymmetries is Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017). That’s not to say this framework is above scrutiny, however. That would make it a dogma. If you think these systems of power don’t exist, or aren’t as influential as scholars say, show us the data.

2. Phelps, Wendell (@wendelltalks). “The Bible takes precedence over our own feelings. If God’s word says it, then that settles it.” X, December 28, 2023, https://twitter.com/wendelltalks/status/1740391476042101056.

3. Phelps, Wendell (@wendelltalks). “Yes, I fully believe the Bible is perfect and is without any errors or contradictions. Do you?” X, December 4, 2023, https://twitter.com/wendelltalks/status/1731763949605941370.

4. National Association of Christian Lawmakers, https://christianlawmakers.com/. Accessed December 4, 2023.

5. “Speaker Mike Johnson Defends Stance on Social Issues: ‘Go Pick Up a Bible, That’s My Stance.’” Fox News, October 27, 2023, www.foxnews.com/media/speaker-mike-johnson-defends-stance-social-issues-pick-bible-worldview.

6. If you’re a golfer who enjoys movies about golf, you might have adequate experience to realize I’m paraphrasing a quote from the 1996 movie Tin Cup. Without those experiences you might not realize that’s a quote at all. They didn’t have movies when the Bible was being written, but they did make frequent allusion to other literature, people, and historical events that are phenomenally difficult for us to perceive. There’s not a lot at stake in my paraphrase, but there is certainly a lot of important information we’re missing in the Bible because we’re not adequately informed.

7. “The Living Christ: The Testimony of the Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Ensign, March 2008, 43.

8. McClellan, Daniel O. YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2022). The PDF of this book is freely available here: www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9781628374407.pdf.

Chapter 1: How Did We Get the Bible?

1. For the best and most accessible discussions of the composition and canonization of the Bible, I would start with John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Book & Its Faiths (New York: Viking, 2019). Introductions to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament will also discuss compositional history to some degree. Two great examples are John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Third Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018); and Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Méndez, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Eighth Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). From there, more focused discussions include William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Timothy H. Lim, The Formation of the Jewish Canon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Michael L. Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Eva Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, 2 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024). For the individual books of the Bible, Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha, I’d recommend looking for critical commentaries. My favorites are Hermeneia, the Old/New Testament Libraries, Anchor Yale Bible, and the International Critical Commentaries.

2. For a wonderful introduction to the Apocrypha, see Lawrence M. Wills, Introduction to the Apocrypha: Jewish Books in Christian Bibles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

3. This argument has been most recently made in Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).

4. No, the Council of Nicea didn’t have anything at all to do with establishing the biblical canon. You can thank Dan Brown for popularizing that nonsense.

Chapter 2: The Bible Says the Bible Is Inspired

1. Words and phrases mean whatever people use them to mean, but the phrase “begging the question” comes directly from this fallacy, and it didn’t originally refer to a question that might be raised within a discussion. Pedantic people (like me) will sometimes jump down your throat if you use that phrase that way.

2. Lyons, Michael (@bibletalk2). “Why do you believe in a book written by people?” TikTok, September 16, 2020, www.tiktok.com/@bibletalk2/video/6872963955451546885.

3. According to F. F. Bruce (The Canon of Scripture [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988], 214), John Chrysostom’s reference to “the books” in Homilies on Matthew 47.3 is the first known use of ta biblia in reference to the Old and New Testaments together.

4. For a thorough and measured discussion, see Stanley E. Porter and Gregory P. Fewster, eds., Paul and Pseudepigraphy (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2013).

5. This is how Tertullian characterizes Marcion’s omission in Against Marcion 3.473–75.

6. This is found in the preface to Jerome’s Commentary on Titus. See Thomas P. Scheck, St. Jerome’s Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2010), 277–79.

7. Collins, Raymond F. 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus: A Commentary. The New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 2–3.

8. Collins, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, 2.

9. Bray, Gerald L. The Pastoral Epistles. The International Theological Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 11.

10. Towner, Philip H. The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 25–26. This is Towner’s description of the theory outlined in I. Howard Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (London: T&T Clark, 1999).

11. Keener, Craig S. “Greek Versus Jewish Conceptions of Inspiration and 2 Timothy 3:16,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 63.2 (2020): 217–31.

12. Keener, “Greek Versus Jewish Conceptions of Inspiration and 2 Timothy 3:16,” 218, n. 7.

13. The closest thing to an exception was a footnote simply pointing out that the Sibylline Oracles refer to Israel as theopneuston without addressing what it might mean (Keener, “Greek Versus Jewish Conceptions of Inspiration and 2 Timothy 3:16,” 222, n. 42).

14. Poirier, John C. The Invention of the Inspired Text: Philological Windows on the Theopneustia of Scripture (London: T&T Clark, 2021).

15. Poirier, The Invention of the Inspired Text, 40.

16. Have you ever seen someone speak to a headstone in a cemetery as if their deceased loved one’s spirit or soul was inhabiting it? I talk about the ancient and modern notions of a “spirit,” a “soul,” or some other separable vehicle for a person’s agency hanging around a mortuary setting and even inhabiting material media so they can be consulted in YHWH’s Divine Images, 29–34.

17. Poirier, The Invention of the Inspired Text, 129–41.

18. See Table 1.1 in Poirier, The Invention of the Inspired Text, 22.

19. Origen, On First Principles, 4.1.6, as translated in Poirier, The Invention of the Inspired Text, 136.

20. See the discussion in Lewis R. Donelson, I & II Peter and Jude: A Commentary. New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 208–09.

21. For example, Justin Martyr, First Apology 66.3, 67.3–4; Dialogue with Trypho 103.8, 106.4.

Chapter 3: The Bible Says God Created the Universe Out of Nothing

1. Bankston, Mylee (@myleebankston), “Tell me something that is not in the Bible.” TikTok, August 25, 2021, www.tiktok.com/@myleebankston/video/7000496569472601349.

2. The original response came from a creator who goes by @bridgefarmer72, but their account is now private. You can still see the response at tiktok.com/@themoneyplug.co/video/7002718238618471685.

3. CaptainDadPool (@captaindadpool86), “Tell me something that is not in the Bible: Punctuation.” TikTok, September 1, 2021, www.tiktok.com/@captaindadpool86/video/7002948820103433477.

4. Maguire, Austin (@austin_maguire), “Tell me something that is not in the Bible: The truth.” TikTok, September 5, 2021, www.tiktok.com/@austin_maguire/video/7004555369708096773.

5. M_Hostilis (@m_hostilis), “Tell me something that is not in the Bible: I have waited so fucking long for this day.” TikTok, September 6, 2021, www.tiktok.com/@m_hostilis/video/7004985906079796485.

6. Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Prayers for Sabbath and Rashi’s Commentary, trans. M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann (London: Shapiro, Vallentine and Co., 1929), 1.1.

7. This is my own translation, but I have adopted “mire and murk” from Liane M. Feldman, The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source, from Creation to the Promised Land (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023), 53. Dan Beecher and I interviewed Liane regarding the Priestly source in episode 22 of the Data Over Dogma podcast, which aired on September 4, 2023. The episode is available here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1oMK4pqOOR2LQgC7ZKOqfG.

8. This translation is adapted from Nogah Ayali-Darshan, The Storm-God and the Sea: The Origins, Versions, and Diffusion of a Myth Throughout the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2020), 109.

9. This translation comes from Robert Doran, 2 Maccabees: A Critical Commentary (Hermeneia Commentary Series; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 147.

10. For instance, Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 95–100.

11. This seems to be rather reluctantly acknowledged in Markus Bockmuehl, “Creatio ex nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 65.3 (2012): 253–70; and Gary Anderson, “Creatio ex nihilo and the Bible,” in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, eds. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 15–35.

12. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 2.741b.22–23 (my translation).

13. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.2.3 (my translation).

14. Copan and Craig, Creation out of Nothing, 84.

15. For the most thorough discussions of the development of creation out of nothing, see Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (London: T&T Clark, 1994); J. Noel Hubler, “Creatio Ex Nihilo: Matter, Creation, and the Body in Classical and Christian Philosophy through Aquinas,” PhD diss. (University of Pennsylvania, 1995).

16. Origen, Against Celsus 5.14 (quoted in Hubler, “Creatio Ex Nihilo,” 115).

17. This problem is what led some Christians like the third century CE Origen of Alexandria to argue that the resurrected body would be a spiritual one. This would be one of the main charges leveled against him in the years following his death when he was dismissed as a heretic.

18. Tatian, Address to the Greeks 5–6 (quoted in Hubler, “Creatio Ex Nihilo,” 118–19).

19. Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.4 (quoted in Hubler, “Creatio Ex Nihilo,” 122).

20. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.2.

21. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.10.4.

Chapter 4: The Bible Says God Lies

1. For example: tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7356273200713501995, tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7275806773876067630, tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7355537159715032362.

2. A very influential biblical philologist named James Barr published a book in 1992 arguing God didn’t seem to go through with his threat in Genesis 2:17 (James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality [London: SCM, 1992]). Following a 1994 review of his book in which that influential biblical theologian Walter Moberly suggested Barr was accusing God of lying (Walter Moberly, “Review of The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality,” Journal of Theological Studies 45.1 [1994]: 172–77), Barr published a response shortly before his death in 2006 insisting that he didn’t think God was lying, but simply changed his mind because “he wants the man and woman to live” (James Barr, “Is God a Liar? [Genesis 2–3]—and Related Matters,” Journal of Theological Studies 57.1 [2006]: 1–22).

3. This translation is from James C. VanderKam, Jubilees: The Hermeneia Translation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2020), 24.

4. Another argument that presupposes univocality insists that “day” is being used in these chapters to refer to broader periods of time because Genesis 2:4 refers to “the day” on which God created heaven and earth, even though Genesis 1 describes this creation taking seven days. The reality is that these were originally distinct creation accounts (see chapter 3). One describes creation taking six days and the other describes it occurring in one day.

5. For the best—though quite technical—discussion of the paronomastic infinitive, see Scott N. Callaham, Modality and the Biblical Hebrew Infinitive Absolute (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), especially page 78.

6. Zevit, Ziony. What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

7. Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, 124.

8. This is a line from the 2006 Adult Swim TV show Metalocalypse.

9. Anderson, John E. Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and YHWH’s Fidelity to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011).

10. This is discussed in chapter 3 of Jacob and the Divine Trickster, 87–129.

11. Anderson, Jacob and the Divine Trickster, 188.

Chapter 5: The Bible Says Slavery Is Wrong

1. Cross Examined (@CrossExamined). “Is Morality Better Explained by God or Science? (Frank Turek vs. Michael Shermer).” April 16, 2015. Video debate, 2:06. https://youtu.be/HKKofNwvt1k?si=yE0XSuG-_Pz4bTde&t=4148.

2. I responded to it myself on June 28, 2023, here: www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7249743037302066474.

3. On this history, see Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016); Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

4. Wright, David P. Inventing God’s Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

5. Joshua Bowen has already done most of the legwork of comparing biblical approaches to slavery with those of broader ancient Southwest Asia, and I’m just going to summarize some things here. If you’d like a deeper dive, I’d highly recommend Joshua Bowen, Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery? Updated and Expanded Second Edition (Mechanicsville, MD: Digital Hammurabi Press, 2023), 219–66.

6. On this, see Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 175–76.

7. If your translation of the Bible suggests there is no punishment if the enslaved victim of the beating recovers after a day or two, that’s a more apologetic interpretation that is trying to make the authors of this chapter sound a lot more concerned for the life of an enslaved person than they actually were.

8. See Bowen, Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery?, 507–08.

9. In his commentary on Deuteronomy, Jeffrey Tigay states, “Virtually all commentators hold that this law refers to slaves who flee from foreign countries to Israel” (Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy. The JPS Torah Commentary [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996], 215). Richard Nelson states, “The phrase ‘settle among you’ almost certainly means that this law in its present form refers to slaves from foreign countries” (Richard D. Nelson, Deuteronomy. A Commentary [The Old Testament Library; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002], 280), but he also raises the possibility that the first verse originally existed independently from the second and was understood as a general prohibition on returning runaway slaves.

10. Chariton, Callirhoe 2.1.8 (Goold, LCL).

11. In the Mesopotamian societies from which the Hebrew Bible adopted portions of its creation account, humanity was thought to have been created precisely to serve the gods as slaves. Tablet 6 of the Neo-Babylonian creation account known as Enuma Elish represents Marduk creating humanity from the blood of the rebellious god Qingu to serve the gods so they could relax. Line 34 states that Marduk “imposed the service of the gods” on humanity “and set the gods free” (W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013], 113).

12. Baltzer, Klaus. Deutero-Isaiah: A Commentary on Isaiah 40–55. Hermeneia (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 104.

13. On slavery within early Christianity, I’d highly recommend Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity. Expanded Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2024). Another wonderful treatment is Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). On the use of the Bible to rationalize slavery, see David M. Goldenberg, Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017).

Chapter 6: The Bible Says God Has a Wife

1. Viegas, Jennifer. “God’s Wife Edited Out of the Bible—Almost,” NBCNews, March 18, 2011, www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42147912.

2. McClellan, Dan. (@maklelan). “God’s wife edited out of the Bible—almost.” TikTok November 2, 2021, www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7026006176638700847.

3. See Ze’ev Meshel, ed., Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Horvat Teman): An Iron Age II Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2012).

4. The earliest artistic representation of the drawing mistook dirt on the pottery for a penis between the legs of the figure on the right, so you might see drawings where both figures appear male-presenting.

5. For a very thorough discussion of the identities of these figures, see Ryan Thomas, “The Identity of the Standing Figures on Pithos A from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud: A Reassessment,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 16 (2016): 121–91.

6. For all these inscriptions, see Meshel, Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Horvat Teman), 87–100.

7. Hess, Richard S. “Asherah or Asherata?” Orientalia 65.3 (1996): 209–19.

8. For scholarly discussion of this passage, see Mark S. Smith and Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Judges 1: A Commentary. Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2021), 205–07.

9. Another very thorough discussion is Ryan Thomas, “The Meaning of asherah in Hebrew Inscriptions,” Semitica 59 (2017): 157–218.

10. See Richard J. Pettey, Asherah: Goddess of Israel (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 161–66, and Steve Wiggins, A Reassessment of Asherah: With Further Considerations of the Goddess (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2007), 145–48.

11. For a good discussion of the Deuteronomistic History and its background, see Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2005).

12. See Lester L. Grabbe, Like a Bird in a Cage: The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).

13. The Judahite temple discovered at the site of Arad, for instance, has long been interpreted by archaeologists as one of the “high places” that fell victim to Hezekiah’s purge (Yohanan Aharoni, “Arad: Its Inscriptions and Temple,” The Biblical Archaeologist 31.1 [1968]: 26–27). Others have noted that the standing stone and the incense altars weren’t destroyed, though; they were just laid on their sides in or next to the holy of holies and then buried in several feet of soil. This isn’t how cult sites were usually destroyed. It’s as if the site was simply decommissioned and hidden in anticipation of Sennacherib’s siege (Lisbeth S. Fried, “The High Places [bāmôt] and the Reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah: An Archaeological Investigation,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122.3 [2002]: 447. Still another possibility is that the site was decommissioned by an invading force (such as Sennacherib’s).

14. Worthington, Richard. “The Hebrew Goddess Asherah in the Greek Septuagint,” Feminist Theology 27.1 (2018): 46–47.

15. Worthington, “The Hebrew Goddess Asherah in the Greek Septuagint,” 48–51. Worthington refers to an earlier argument for this conclusion in Margaret Barker, The Mother of the Lord. Volume 1: The Lady in the Temple (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 240.

16. A friend of mine gives me a hard time about my position on this in Ryan Thomas, “אלקנהארץ: Creator, Begetter, or Owner of the Earth?” Ugarit-Forschungen 48 (2018): 451–521.;)

17. Rahmouni, Aicha. Divine Epithets in the Ugaritic Alphabetic Texts (trans., J. N. Ford; Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2008), 275–77.

18. Eichler, Raanan. “The Priestly Asherah,” Vetus Testamentum 69.1 (2019): 33–45.

19. For discussion of this drawing, see Pirhiya Beck, “The Drawings and Decorative Designs,” in Meshel, ed., Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Horvat Teman), 152–56.

20. See Joan E. Taylor, “The Asherah, the Menorah and the Sacred Tree,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 66.1 (1995): 29–54. Another piece of art discovered at Lachish also depicts caprids feeding on either side of a symbol scholars refer to as a “pubic triangle.” This symbol was used in a variety of cultic objects to represent the fertility features of different goddesses, including Asherah.

21. For example, Minert Dijkstra, “El, the God of Israel—Israel, the People of YHWH: On the Origins of Ancient Israelite Yahwism,” in Only One God? Monotheism in Ancient Israel and the Veneration of the Goddess Asherah, ed. Bob Becking et al. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 115.

Chapter 7: The Bible Says Abortion Is Murder

1. A draft decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was even leaked weeks early.

2. For the most comprehensive discussion, see Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America. An Evangelical’s Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006), but a condensed discussion is available at Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Politico Magazine, May 27, 2014, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/.

3. Balmer recalls attending a 1990 conference held by the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center where Paul Weyrich reminded the audience what the roots of the religious right were: “Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies” (Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, 13–14).

4. The image was posted by an Instagram user who goes by @liesthechurchtoldme.

5. Jones, David Albert. The Soul of the Embryo: An Enquiry into the Status of the Human Embryo in the Christian Tradition (London: Continuum, 2004), 10.

6. This translation is adapted from Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 177.

7. Mishnah Oholot 7:6, The Oxford Annotated Mishnah: A New Translation of the Mishnah with Introductions and Notes, 2 vols, ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen, Robert Goldenberg, and Hayim Lapin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 2.563.

8. Chung, Frank. “Heavily pregnant woman writes ‘not yet a human’ across her belly to protest Supreme Court’s abortion decision,” The New Zealand Herald, June 28, 2022, www.nzherald.co.nz/world/heavily-pregnant-woman-writes-not-yet-a-human-across-her-belly-to-protest-supreme-courts-abortion-decision/TM5PI-ARFC7GFTLIEJXGS34PVXM/.

9. Philo, The Special Laws 3.117 (Colson, LCL).

10. For a wonderful discussion of the influence of the Septuagint on early Christianity, see Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

11. Schiff, Daniel. Abortion in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 40.

12. A shift in public attitudes about abortion occurred in the nineteenth century as a result of the convergence of a few different social movements, including resistance to the growing women’s rights movement. Growing medical knowledge also led to the observation among many physicians that there was nothing particularly momentous about the quickening. Conception was the start of a continuous process of development, and influential (male) physicians like John Burns, John Beck, and others argued that if it was wrong after the quickening, it was just as wrong before. In 1854, Pope Pius IX declared that Mary was free from sin, “in the first instant of her conception,” which became the first official declaration on the part of the Catholic Church that personhood began at conception. On this period, see John T. Noonan, Jr., ed., The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

Chapter 8: The Bible Says Rape Victims Must Marry Their Rapists

1. The Beat by Allen Parr. “Atheist Says ‘Your Bible Says a Woman Must Marry Her Rapist?!’” 15:57, December 19, 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1d6sfC0f8o.

2. If you’re not familiar with this GIF, check out https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tim-robinson-asking-are-you-sure-about-that.

3. On this topic, I would highly recommend Carolyn Pressler, “Sexual Violence and Deuteronomic Law,” in The Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 102–12.

4. Pressler, “Sexual Violence and Deuteronomic Law,” in The Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy, 102–12.

5. Sarna, Nahum M. Exodus. The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 135.

6. Hiebert, Robert J. “Deuteronomy 22:28–29 and Its Premishnaic Interpretations,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 56.2 (1994): 203–20.

7. This is briefly discussed in Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), 5–6. As Roth explains, the closest we have to an exception is an Old Babylonian letter that refers to a stele that dictates wages. Within the Laws of Hammurabi, laws 273–74 establish daily wages, but the letter calls for three times the wages mentioned on the Hammurabi stele.

8. See Adler, The Origins of Judaism.

Chapter 9: The Bible Says Satan Is God’s Enemy

1. The creator has since taken down this video, but you can see clips of it in my response here: www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7227473283296267563.

2. Strong, James. The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1890).

3. For the best and most accessible recent discussions of the origin and development of the figure of Satan, I’d recommend Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House, 1995); Ryan E. Stokes, The Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019); Archie T. Wright, Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2022); Esther J. Hamori, God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023).

4. Hamori, God’s Monsters, 95–100.

5. Archie Wright doesn’t think Beelzebul is being identified as Satan (Wright, Satan and the Problem of Evil, 151–52).

6. For a comprehensive argument for this reading, see Jason M. Zurawski, “Separating the Devil from the Diabolos: A Fresh Reading of Wisdom of Solomon 2.24,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 21.4 (2012): 366–99.

7. See, for instance, Richard Bauckham, Jude–2 Peter (Word Biblical Commentary 50; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983), 226.

Chapter 10: The Bible Says God Has a Body

  1. Jolly, Nathaniel (@NathanielJolly). “If the Bible says ‘X’ is true and you disagree with ‘X,’ you are wrong, period.” X, April 9, 2024, https://twitter.com/5Solas2/status/1777645376322814310/photo/1.

  2. McClellan, Dan (@maklelan). “The Bible says YHWH was defeated by the god of another nation, can’t compete against chariots, has a penis, commands child sacrifice, changes his mind & endorses spousal abuse, chattel slavery & genocide.” X, April 9, 2024, https://twitter.com/maklelan/status/1777684368913252609.

  3. For the best recent discussions of God’s body in the Bible, I’d recommend Esther J. Hamori, “When Gods Were Men”: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008); Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Andreas Wagner, God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament (trans. Marion Salzmann; London: T&T Clark, 2019); Christoph Markschies, God’s Body: Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Images of God (trans. Alexander Johannes Edmonds; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019); Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (London: Picador, 2021); Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

  4. A good discussion of this is R. Renehan, “On the Greek Origins of the Concepts of Incorporeality and Immateriality,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 21.2 (1980): 105–38.

  5. McClellan, YHWH’s Divine Images, 95.

  6. See Hamori, “When Gods Were Men.”

  7. As I stated in the introduction, a historical-critical approach is not the only valid one, nor is God’s gender as simple and binary as represented here across all the genres and rhetoric within the Hebrew Bible, much less across all methodological approaches to it. For a helpful discussion of the limits of a literal and historical-critical approach to God and gender, see Hanne Løland Levinson, “Still Invisible after All These Years? Female God-Language in the Hebrew Bible: A Response to David J. A. Clines,” Journal of Biblical Literature 141.2 (2022): 199–217.

  8. The identification of these threats as metaphorical should in no way be understood to be excusing the harm caused by such threats. If readers of the Bible understand God to be incapable of sin, then God’s actions are always good, meaning when God threatens or uses sexual violence, that violence is good. This can cause untold harm to living and breathing women, children, and even men. For recent discussions of this problem as it relates to the New Testament and other texts, see Christy Cobb and Eric Vanden Eykel, Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022).

  9. Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy, 103–04.

10. On this, see David H. Aaron, Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics and Divine Imagery (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2001), 53–59.

11. It’s plausible to interpret the story as representing Moses’s face as “horned,” but that’s frequently dismissed as a mistranslation. Both light and horns are symbols of deity, though, and it’s not unlikely that the author wanted to evoke both images in the minds of hearers and readers. On this, see Seth L. Sanders, “Old Light on Moses’ Shining Face,” Vetus Testamentum 52.3 (2002): 400–06.

12. A thorough discussion of the different implications is W. Randall Garr, In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity, and Monotheism (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2003).

13. I discuss this in McClellan, YHWH’s Divine Images, but see also Stephen L. Herring, Divine Substitution: Humanity as the Manifestation of Deity in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Catherine L. McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5–3:24 in light of mīs pî pīt pî and wpt-r Rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015).

14. Origen, On First Principles, preface 9 (ANF 4:426).

15. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus (trans. Ronald E. Heine; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 89.

16. I’m basing much of this discussion on Shamma Friedman, “Anthropomorphism and Its Eradication,” in Iconoclasm and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity, ed. Willem van Asselt et al. (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2007), 157–78.

17. Gaon, Saadia. The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (trans. Samuel Rosenblatt; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), 118 (quoted in David Stern, “Imitatio Hominis: Anthropomorphism and the Character(s) of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Prooftexts 12.2 [1992]: 153).

18. Friedman, “Anthropomorphism and Its Eradication,” 158.

19. Maimonides, Moses. Guide for the Perplexed (trans. M. Friedländer; New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1942), 1.35 (quoted in Friedman, “Anthropomorphism and Its Eradication,” 161).

20. Brettler, Marc Zvi. God Is King: Understanding an Israelite Metaphor (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), 159.

21. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, 63.

22. We find this more in ancient Akkadian literature, but for a discussion of the biblical and later Jewish representation of God as gigantic, see Stephen D. Moore, “Gigantic God: Yahweh’s Body,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 70.1 (1996): 87–115.

23. This is basically the underlying thesis of my book, YHWH’s Divine Images.

Chapter 11: The Bible Says to Sacrifice Your Firstborn Child

1. McEnany, Kayleigh (@kayleighmcenany). “In an absolutely jaw-dropping moment, Gavin Newsom declines to say there should be any restrictions on abortion in the 7th, 8th, & 9th (!) MONTH of pregnancy.” X, November 30, 2023, https://x.com/kayleighmcenany/status/1730424284151975990.

2. Lee, Mike (@BasedMikeLee). “Gavin Newsom: willing to sacrifice full-term babies to Moloch.” X, November 30, 2023, https://x.com/BasedMikeLee/status/1730445709264994771.

3. For some of the best scholarly discussions of this complicated relationship, check out Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Francesca Stavrakopoulou, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004); Karin Finsterbusch, Armin Lange, and K. F. Diethard Römheld, eds., Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2007); Heath D. Dewrell, Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2017).

4. Such traditions were quite widespread, and for a discussion of them, check out Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah (trans. Judah Goldin; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1967).

5. These are verses 28 and 29 in the Hebrew.

6. The clause I’ve rendered “didn’t even occur to me” in Hebrew is literally “didn’t even arise upon my heart.”

7. For detailed discussions, see Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “The Jerusalem Tophet: Ideological Dispute and Religious Transformation,” Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici 29–30 (2012–2013): 137–58; Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo and José Ángel Zamora López, “The Epigraphy of the Tophet,” Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici 29–30 (2012–2013): 159–92; Paolo Xella, “‘Tophet’: An Overall Impression,” Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici 29–30 (2012–2013): 259–81.

8. For what I think is the best discussion of the evidence—which can get quite technical—check out Dewrell, Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel.

9. The preposition that is translated “to” in the phrase “to Molech” can also mean “as.”

Chapter 12: The Bible Says You Should Beat Your Kids

1. Piper, John (@JohnPiper). “’Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.’” X, August 20, 2018, https://twitter.com/JohnPiper/status/1031677404895485953.

2. See, for instance, Elizabeth T. Gershoff and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, “Spanking and Child Outcomes: Old Controversies and New Meta-Analyses,” Journal of Family Psychology 30.4 (2016): 453–69; Jorge Cuartas et al., “Corporal Punishment and Elevated Neural Response to Threat in Children,” Child Development 92.3 (2021): 821–32; Anja Heilmann et al., “Physical Punishment and Child Outcomes: A Narrative Review of Prospective Studies,” The Lancet 398.10297 (2021): 355–64.

3. Yost, Victoria (@thymeandtenderness). TikTok, “The rod that that scripture is referring to is a shepherd’s rod.” July 7, 2023, www.tiktok.com/@thymeandtenderness/video/7253177481988001066.

4. The word I’ve translated “sense” is literally “heart.” In this period, the heart was considered the seat of both emotion and cognition. I discuss this in McClellan, YHWH’s Divine Images, 34–35.

5. Pritchard, James B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Third Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 428.

6. This is from Papyrus Insinger, and specifically the translation provided in Miriam Lichtheim, Late Egyptian Wisdom Literature in the International Context: A Study of Demotic Instructions (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 159. In his commentary on Proverbs, Roger Whybray quotes from a text that Egyptian schoolboys were evidently required to learn and copy out: “Boys have ears on their backsides: they listen when they are beaten” (Roger N. Whybray, The Book of Proverbs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972], 80).

Chapter 13: The Bible Says There Is Only One God

  1. Here I’ve translated the Hebrew word elohim in the plural as “gods,” in light of the fact that the participial phrase that follows, “ones knowing good and evil,” is plural, but it’s plausible that that participle is plural because it’s referring back to Eve and Adam, rather than to the word elohim. In other words, instead of meaning “you will become like the gods, who are knowing good and evil,” it could mean “you will be like God, in that you will be knowing good and evil.” Either reading is plausible, but in light of the fact that verse 22 has God explicitly acknowledge that the human has become “like one of us,” I think it’s most likely that elohim in verse 5 is intended to be understood in the plural.

  2. On the early Jewish readings of this passage, see Archie T. Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6.1–4 in Early Jewish Literature (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). On later reinterpretations, see Philip S. Alexander, “The Targumim and Early Exegesis of ‘Sons of God’ in Genesis 6,” Journal of Jewish Studies 23.1 (1972): 60–71.

  3. For a discussion of the background of this story, see Helge S. Kvanvig, “Gen 6, 1–4 as an Antediluvian Event,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 16.1 (2002): 79–112; David M. Carr, The Formation of Genesis 1–11: Biblical and Other Precursors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 129–36. Dan Beecher and I interviewed David Carr regarding this and other stories from Genesis 1–11 in episode 56 of the Data Over Dogma podcast, which aired on April 29, 2024. You can find the episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/601mwTNzBHvlzQNOTbcdU4.

  4. Though he no longer thinks the text originally distinguished Elyon from Yahweh, there’s a great discussion of this passage and its interpretation in Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 195–212.

  5. The Septuagint and some Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts put the number at seventy-five, but few scholars think this is original.

  6. See Darrell D. Hannah, “Guardian Angels and Angelic National Patrons in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Angels: The Concept of Celestial Beings—Origins, Development and Reception, eds. Friedrich V. Reiterer, Tobias Nicklas, and Karin Schöpflin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 413–35.

  7. Brueggemann, Walter. 1 & 2 Kings. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing Inc., 2000), 315.

  8. McClellan, Daniel. “The Gods-Complaint: Psalm 82 as a Psalm of Complaint,” Journal of Biblical Literature 137.4 (2018): 833–51. The paper is available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:30470/datastreams/CONTENT/content.

  9. For more thorough discussions about these problems, see Michael S. Heiser, “Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 18.1 (2008): 1–30 (https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1276&context=lts_fac_pubs); Nathan MacDonald, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism. 2nd corrected edition (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 78–96; Saul M. Olyan, “Is Isaiah 40–55 Really Monotheistic?,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012): 190–201.

10. All of these quotes come from “The Great Cairo Hymn of Praise to Amun-Re,” trans. Robert K. Ritner (COS 1.25:37–40).

11. Rogers, Robert Williams. Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1912), 141.

12. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament, 146.

13. KTU 1.3.v:32–33. Translation is from Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, 327.

14. Again, the Septuagint indicates the traditional reading from the Masoretic Text is inaccurate, and the discovery of a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls—here 4QDeuteronomyq—reveals a more original reading, which may be the source for the exact same statement (“Worship him, all you gods!”) in Psalm 97:7.

15. Michael Heiser insists that gods and angels remained distinguished at Qumran. For that discussion, see Michael S. Heiser, “The Divine Council in Late Canonical and Non-Canonical Second Temple Jewish Literature” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2004), 183–224.

16. See, for instance, MacDonald, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of Monotheism, 95–96; David A. Burnett, “A Neglected Deuteronomic Scriptural Matrix for the Nature of the Resurrection Body in 1 Corinthians 15:39–42,” in Scripture, Texts, and Tracings in 1 Corinthians, ed. Linda L. Belleville and B. J. Oropeza (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 196–98; Paula Fredriksen, “Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish ‘Monotheism,’” Harvard Theological Review 115.1 (2022), 37–38.

17. See Emma Wasserman, “Gentiles Gods at the Eschaton: A Reconsideration of Paul’s ‘Principalities and Powers’ in 1 Corinthians,” Journal of Biblical Literature 136.3 (2017): 727–46.

Chapter 14: The Bible Says Homosexuality Is an Abomination

  1. For what I think is the best discussion of these passages in Leviticus, see Saul M. Olyan, “‘And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman’: On the Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.2 (1994): 179–206. For a more recent review of the scholarly perspectives on these passages, see Mark Preston Stone, “Don’t Do What to Whom? A Survey of Historical-Critical Scholarship on Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13,” Currents in Biblical Research 20.3 (2022): 207–37.

  2. The translation is from Ann Kessler Guinan, “Auguries of Hegemony: The Sex Omens of Mesopotamia,” Gender & History 9.3 (1997): 465.

  3. Gittin 70a.

  4. Many folks have pointed out the resonances of this story with Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, which describes primeval humans as having three different sexes: man, woman, and man-woman. Each individual was made up of double the body parts (including genitals) we have now. Zeus divided these primeval humans in half, leaving each half to seek reunion with their other half. The primeval men and women each sought out partners of the same sex, but the primeval men-women were divided into individuals of different sexes who then sought each other out (accounting for heterosexual attraction).

  5. See, for instance, Yoel Inbar et al., “Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Intuitive Disapproval of Gays,” Emotion 9.3 (2009): 435–39; Ruile Wang et al., “The Association Between Disgust Sensitivity and Negative Attitudes Toward Homosexuality: The Mediating Role of Moral Foundations,” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 1–8; Travis N. Ray and Michele R. Parkhill, “Heteronormativity, Disgust Sensitivity, and Hostile Attitudes Toward Gay Men: Potential Mechanisms to Maintain Social Hierarchies,” Sex Roles 84 (2021): 49–60.

  6. Some folks interpret the story of God killing Onan in Genesis 38 to be a condemnation of masturbation, but this is a misreading of the story. God didn’t kill Onan for wasting semen or for ejaculating outside of a vagina. God killed Onan for refusing to honor the duties of levirate marriage. These duties are described in Deuteronomy 25:5–10. In short, if a man is married but dies before he is able to have children, his closest male relatives have the duty to take his widow as a wife and have children with her. Those children would be raised as the children of the deceased man so as to carry on his line. This was seen as a sacrifice because a portion of the living relative’s property would go to the child in the name of the deceased. Thus, Genesis 38:9 explains that “Onan knew the offspring wouldn’t be his.” The story is a way to emphasize how important levirate marriage and the perpetuation of lines of kinship were.

  7. On these developments in the Greco-Roman world, see Marilyn B. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture. Second Edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

  8. The most forceful argument for this is David E. Fredrickson, “Passionless Sex in 1 Thessalonians 4:4–5,” Word & World 23.1 (2003): 23–30. For a more careful discussion, see William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 152–60.

  9. From The Simpsons episode “A Millhouse Divided” (1996).

10. See William Loader, “Reading Romans 1 on Homosexuality in the Light of Biblical/Jewish and Greco-Roman Perspectives of its Time,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 108.1 (2017): 119–49.

11. See Bernadette J. Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

12. Jewett, Robert. Romans: A Commentary. Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 177.

13. Gagnon, Robert A. J. The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001), 254.

14. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, 264.

15. The SBL Study Bible ([New York: HarperCollins, 2023], 66) offers the following commentary: “The wickedness of Sodom is seen in the shameful behavior of the men toward strangers. Rather than exhibiting hospitality and protection, as does Lot, the men of the city seek to sexually assault them.… [Lot’s] response shows that the men’s wickedness is not homosexuality as such, since the daughters are offered as suitable surrogates; their wickedness is sexual violence (gang rape) as the inverse of hospitality and protection.” The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Michael D. Coogan, ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018], 37) notes, “As in the case of 18.1–8, the main issue here is hospitality to secretly divine visitors. Here, however, the sanctity of hospitality is threatened by the men of the city who wish to rape (know) the guests.”

16. See, for instance, Sandesh Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence Against Men in Armed Conflict,” The European Journal of International Law 18.2 (2007): 253–76; Heleen Touquet et al., “From ‘It Rarely Happens’ to ‘It’s Worse for Men’: Dispelling Misconceptions about Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Conflict and Displacement,” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 2.3 (2020): 25–34. I have a friend who spent quite a bit of time in Iraq who told me he had worked there with individuals who boasted about village justice sometimes involving gang raping thieves and other criminals.

17. All the translations from 1 Enoch are from George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012).

18. On right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, see Lennart Nacke and Rainer Riemann, “Two Sides of the Same Coin? On the Common Etiology of Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation,” Personality and Individual Differences 207.1 (2023): 112160; Thomas Harrklau Kleppesto et al., “The Genetic Underpinnings of Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation Explain Political Attitudes Beyond Big Five Personality,” Journal of Personality, February 22, 2024, doi: 10.1111/jopy.12921.

Chapter 15: The Bible Says Women Need to Cover Up

1. Fung, Katherine. “Conservative Women’s Swimsuit Calendar Angers Christians: ‘Demonic.’” Newsweek, December 27, 2023, www.newsweek.com/conservative-womens-swimsuit-calendar-angers-christians-demonic-1855774.

2. Haymes, Joshua (@haymes_joshua). “I was once put into the position of having to address a woman for regularly not wearing a bra to church on Sunday.” X, December 26, 2023, https://x.com/haymes_joshua/status/1739753704687894586.

3. Zeisloft, Ben (@BenZeisloft). “‘Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.’ Proverbs 11:22.” X, December 26, 2023, https://x.com/BenZeisloft/status/1739755836954611747.

4. This is discussed in more detail in Hilary Lipka, “The Prohibition of Cross-Dressing,” TheTorah.com, www.thetorah.com/article/the-prohibition-of-cross-dressing. Accessed October 3, 2024.

5. See the discussion in Athalya Brenner, The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and ‘Sexuality’ in the Hebrew Bible (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1998), 144–45.

6. In his commentary on Proverbs, the medieval French rabbi Rashi linked the Hebrew word for “garment” (sheet) with the very different word shet, which can mean “base,” “foundation,” or “buttock.” Because of this etymological play on words, Rashi understands Proverbs 7:10 to refer to the “nakedness of a harlot.”

7. Andersen, Francis I., and Freedman, David Noel. Hosea: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980), 224.

8. See Renita J. Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995) and also Stephen Young, “Revelation Naturalizes Sexual Violence and Readers Erase It: Unveiling the Son of God’s Rape of Jezebel,” in Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts, ed. Christy Cobb and Eric Vanden Eykel (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), 239–59.

Chapter 16: The Bible Says the Messiah Would Be Born of a Virgin

1. This creator’s account is still around, but I couldn’t find the video I responded to on his account. My response is here, though: www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7219329192972848427.

2. This claim comes from chapter 3 of Peter W. Stoner, Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of Prophecy and the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1952), which is a seventy-year-old apologetic attempt to reconcile science and the Bible. You can find this chapter online here: https://sciencespeaks.dstoner.net/Christ_of_Prophecy.html#c9.

3. Check out my response linked to in chapter 1 for more methodological problems.

4. For a wonderful discussion of the differences between Jewish and Christian approaches to this passage, check out chapter 8 of Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (New York: HarperOne, 2020).

5. A good discussion of this is Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

6. See Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 236–44.

7. Just to clear up a common misunderstanding, the “immaculate conception” has to do with the conception of Mary, not the conception of Jesus. This doctrine was developed to account for how Mary could give birth to Jesus without passing on original sin to Jesus. Mary had to be conceived without original sin so that Jesus could also be born free of it.

8. On these notions of sexuality, see William Loader, Philo, Josephus, and the Testaments on Sexuality: Attitudes Towards Sexuality in the Writings of Philo and Josephus and in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011) and William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012).

9. See, for instance, Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 119–20; Bart D. Ehrman, Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2006), 351–53.

Chapter 17: The Bible Says Jesus Is God

  1. For example: Christlike Life (@christlikelife). “Did Jesus ever claim to be God?” TikTok, May 21, 2023, www.tiktok.com/@christlikelife/video/7235604736735546666.

  2. Holloway, Paul A. Philippians: A Commentary. Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 118.

  3. Fredriksen, Paula. “How High Can Early High Christology Be?” in Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity, ed. Matthew V. Novenson (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2020), 314.

  4. Bühner, Ruben A. Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variants of Second Temple Judaism (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021), 27.

  5. Perriman, Andrew. In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022), 91 (emphasis in original).

  6. For a wonderful discussion of adoptionism in Mark and in the Greco-Roman world, see Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World.

  7. For the most authoritative discussion, see Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar: Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 266–69. See also Ernst Haenchen, John 1. A Commentary. Hermeneia (trans. Robert W. Funk; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 110–11; Lidija Novakovic, John 1–10: A Handbook on the Greek Text (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020), 2–3; Alexander Smarius, “Another God in the Gospel of John? A Linguistic Analysis of John 1:1 and 1:18,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 44 (2022): 141–71.

  8. Wallace, Greek Grammar, 269 (emphasis in original).

  9. Wallace, Greek Grammar, 269 (emphasis in original).

10. For a very detailed discussion of the Logos within Judaism, Philo, and John (that still leans into trinitarianism), see Michael F. Bird, Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2022), 128–70.

11. Philo, Questions and Answers in Genesis 2.62.

12. Several texts from the Rabbinic period endorse understanding Psalm 82 as a reference to the events of Sinai, including Exodus Rabbah 32:7, Pirqei DeRabbi Eliezer 47, Avodah Zarah 5a, and others. For a scholarly discussion, see Jerome H. Neyrey, “‘I Said: You Are Gods’: Psalm 82:6 and John 10,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108.4 (1989): 647–63.

13. The most popular articulation of divine identity Christology is Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2008).

14. McClellan, Daniel. “Cognitive Perspectives on Early Christology,” Biblical Interpretation 25 (2017): 647–62. The paper is available here: https://danielomcclellan.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/mcclellan-2017-cognitive-perspectives-on-early-christology.pdf.

15. For a full discussion of the evidence for the textual alteration of these stories, see McClellan, YHWH’s Divine Images, 157–63.

16. Apocalypse of Abraham 10.3. The translation is from Andrei A. Orlov, Yahoel and Metatron: Aural Apocalypticism and the Origins of Early Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 73.

17. Apocalypse of Abraham 10.8. The translation is from Orlov, Yahoel and Metatron, 73.

18. The translation is from James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1983), 265.

19. For a helpful discussion of this background, see William W. Combs, “Erasmus and the Textus Receptus,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1.1 (1996): 35–53.

20. On Erasmus and the Johannine Comma, see Joseph M. Levine, “Erasmus and the Problem of the Johannine Comma,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58.4 (1997): 573–96.

Chapter 18: The Bible Says to Beware the Mark of the Beast

  1. McClellan, Dan (@maklelan). “You could have here in Hebrew 666.” TikTok, January 31, 2023, www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7194846509018418474.

  2. Turner, Brandon. “Jesus is Yeshua: Brad Lea on BetterLife Podcast with Brandon Turner.” 0:58, September 22, 2023, https://youtu.be/dqdv_JQWi2k?si=qWhxOttKu0KZwr2y&t=25.

  3. Here’s a response of mine: www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7269776869556276523.

  4. This codex is a palimpsest, which means the biblical text was actually scraped off the surface of the pages, then they were rotated 90 degrees, and then another text was written over it. This is why it’s called Rescriptus (“rewritten”).

  5. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.29.2, 5.30.1.

  6. In the earliest periods, Hebrew seems to have borrowed Egyptian numbers or to have written out the numbers in full. In the second century BCE, the practice of using individual alphabetic characters became common within Hebrew.

  7. Although Shushma Malik argues in The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) that Nero did not become identifiable with the number 666 until after the book of Revelation had been written.

  8. Scholars used to doubt this transliteration, suggesting there would have been a yod added between the qoph and the samekh in the title Caesar to account for the long vowel, but an Aramaic letter was discovered just west of the Dead Sea in the mid-twentieth century that refers to “the second year of Nero Caesar,” and it transliterates the title Caesar without a vowel between the qoph and the samekh.

  9. In a similar vein, Isaiah 49:16 has God say, “I have inscribed you on the palms of my hand, and your walls are constantly before me.”

10. For a technical discussion of the relationship of money to divine images in early Judaism, see Joachim Schaper, Media and Monotheism: Presence, Representation, and Abstraction in Ancient Judah (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2019).

11. Koester, Craig R. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 595.

12. For two good discussions of historical interpretations of Revelation, see Timothy Beal, The Book of Revelation: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023). Dan Beecher and I interviewed Bart regarding Armageddon in episode 4 of the Data Over Dogma podcast, which aired on May 1, 2023. The episode is available here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iD9vJYBICCIJuxgedpNX6.

Chapter 19: The Bible Says Sinners Will Be Punished Forever in Hell

  1. Archuleta, David. “New Music,” https://davidarchuleta.com/. Accessed March 11, 2024.

  2. Roberts, B. H., ed., History of the Church (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News, 1909), 5.517.

  3. Utah Gay-Straight Coalition (@UtahGSC). “@DavidArchie please go live your life as a gay man without mocking God and religion.” X, March 9, 2024, https://twitter.com/UtahGSC/status/1766619387010875691.

  4. CowJoshBebop (@BebopJosh). “You know what hell is, right?” X, March 9, 2024, https://twitter.com/BebopJosh/status/1766647490441511204.

  5. For example, Rev. Brandan Robertson (@revbrandanrobertson). “Hell isn’t in the Bible,” TikTok, September 1, 2021, www.tiktok.com/@revbrandanrobertson/video/7003117994901523717.

  6. Sonia, Kerry M. Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2020). Also check out Christopher B. Hays, A Covenant with Death: Death in the Iron Age II and Its Rhetorical Uses in Proto-Isaiah (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015).

  7. For some of the best discussions of these developments, see Mark T. Finney, Resurrection, Hell and the Afterlife: Body and Soul in Antiquity, Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2016); Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). Candida Moss also has a wonderful twelve-lecture class titled “Resurrection and the Afterlife in the New Testament” that addresses a good deal of these developments. The Audible or CD versions of the class are available here: www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Afterlife-Testament-Prof-Candida/dp/1666503894.

  8. We primarily know this text from medieval manuscripts preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church—which still includes it in its canon—but fragments were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, too.

  9. Yeah, it really says this. In 1 Enoch 8:1 it says the angel Asael “showed them concerning antimony and eye paint and all manner of precious stones and dyes.”

10. For instance, George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1. A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 308–09.

11. I’m drawing most of the data for this discussion from Heikki Räisänen, “Jesus and Hell,” in Jesus in Continuum, ed. Tom Holmén (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 355–83.

12. For a good discussion, see Ilaria Ramelli, “Origen, Eusebius, the Doctrine of Apokatastasis, and Its Relation to Christology,” in Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations, eds. Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013), 325–50. The paper is available here: https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/15-origen-eusebius-the-doctrine-of-apokatastasis-and-its-relation-to-christology-ilaria-ramelli/.

13. Matthew 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6.

Conclusion

1. Collins, What Are Biblical Values, 212.

2. Immigrants are also vilified today in a way that contradicts a repeated and consistent ethical standard in the Bible. Unfortunately, time and space didn’t allow for a full treatment in this book. Where’s a Tardis when you need one?

3. Some folks argue that it was the Bible and Christianity that is primarily or even exclusively responsible for the abolition of slavery, but for an insightful argument against that view, see Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2013).

4. This is from the publisher’s description of the book, which is available here: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300273427/the-widening-of-gods-mercy/. Accessed May 13, 2024.

5. Johnson, Luke Timothy. “Homosexuality & the Church: Scripture & Experience,” Commonweal, June 11, 2007, www.commonwealmagazine.org/homosexuality-church-0.

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Scripture

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Genesis

1

1

1:1

1:1

1:4

1:6

1:7

1:10

1:12

1:18

1:26

1:27

2

2:4

2:5

2:7

2:17

2:18

3

3:4

3:5

3:7

3:8

3:13

3:15

3:22

4:1

4:16

6

6:2

7:22

9:6

10

11

11:4

11:7

12

12:1

13:4

15:13

16:7

18:1

18:2

18:21

18:22, 33

19

19:10

19:13

20

20:7

21:8

21:17

22

22:5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 19

22:11

25:19:29

29

29:32:24

30:25

30:35

30:37

31

31:8, 9

31:11

31:16

32:24

32:25

34:1

34:3

37:35

38

38:15

46:27

Genesis

49

49:10

Exodus

1:5

1:13

3:2

3:4

3:6

3:14

13

13:9, 16

13:12

13:15

15

15:11

20:3

20:22

21

21:2

21:12

21:16

21:20

21:20

21:21

21:22

21:28

22

22:15

22:16

22:29

23

23:19

23:20

23:21

24:1

24:10

33

33:8

33:20

34

34:19

34:30

Leviticus

17

18

18:21

18:22

18:24

18:29

20

20:2, 3, 4, 5

20:13

24:16

25

25:39

25:39

25:40

25:44

25:46

Numbers

3

3:12

5:11

5:21

8

8:17

12:12

13:22

17

17:8

18

22:22

22:22

23:19

31:7

31:17

Deuteronomy

4

4:12, 36

4:19

6:4

6:8

11:18

15

15:12

15:12

15:13

16:16

16:21

20:10

22

22:5

22:22

22:22

22:23

23

23:15

24:7

32

32:6

32:8

32:17

32:39, 43

33:2

Joshua

24:19

Judges

2:1

3:7

5

5:20

6:11

10:15

11:29

11:36, 39

11

12:7

13

13:2

19

21:11

Ruth

1 Samuel

12:11

14:39, 44

19:24

25:33

29:4

2 Samuel

5:23

7:10

7:14

11:2

18:14

22:7

22:39

24:1

104:2

1 Kings

11:5, 7

15:13

22

22:17

22:19

22:24

2 Kings

1:2, 3, 6, 16

1:4, 6, 16

3:4

3:26

4:1

5:17

21:3

21:7

21:20

22

23:4

23:10

1 Chronicles

16:25

21:1

2 Chronicles

28:14

Ezra

Nehemiah

Job

1

1:1:13

1:6

2

2:1

3:11

17:13

26:7

38:4

42:7

Psalms

2:7

18:7

23:4

45

68

74:14

77:17

82

82:1

82:6

82:6

84:7

89:6

89:48

90:4

95:3

96:4

97:9

139

139:13

144:14

Proverbs

7:10

8

8:22

8:27

10:13

11:22

13:24

22:8, 15

23:13

26:3

29:15

30:16

31:22

31:26

Ecclesiastes

11:5

Song of Songs

Isaiah

1:12

6:1

7:14

7:16

11:4

14:4, 12

14:9

20:2, 4

27:1

27:9

28:27

30:33

31:3

40

40:25

43:10

43:12

44:6

45:5, 6, 18, 22

45:7

45:12

46:9

47:2

47:8, 10

48:20

49:1

49:16

66:24

Jeremiah

1:5

4:30

7:12

7:21

7:31

13:22, 26

13:26

18:17

19:5

32:35

Lamentations

Ezekiel

1

1:26

3:18

8:3

9:4

14:9

16:49

20:21

23:3

23:40

33:8, 14

Daniel

3:25

10:13

12:1

Hosea

2:2

Amos

3:8

Jonah

1:3

Micah

1:8

5:13

Nahum

3:5

Habakkuk

3:8

Zephaniah

2:15

Zechariah

3

Malachi

New Testament

Matthew

1:23

1:25

5:22

5:28

5:29

6:25

10:21

10:28

11:23

12:24

16:18

17:11

18:9

18:23

19:12

22:30

23:15, 33

25:14

25:41

Mark

2:5

2:9

2:10

9

9:43, 45, 47

12:2

13:23

13:34

Luke

1

1:1

1:5:52

1:15

1:41

2:41

3

3

10:15

10:18

12:5

12:6

12:37

16:19

16:23

John

1:1

3:6

4:24

4:29

6:35

8

8:12

8:51, 56

8:58

10

10:7

10:11

10:30, 33

10:34

11:25

14:6

14:8

14:9

14:17, 20

15:1

17

17:3

17:11

17:21

20:28

21:7

Acts of the Apostles

2:27, 31

3:21

28

Romans

1

1:1

1:26

1:27

4:17

5:12

6:22

8:38

10:30

11:36

14:9

16

16:20

1 Corinthians

6:9

7

7:9

7:17

7:22

8:4

8:6

10:19

11:4

11:13

15:22

15:24

2 Corinthians

6:15

Galatians

1:5

Ephesians

6:9

6:12

Philippians

1:1

2

2:5

Colossians

1:16

4:1

4:12

1 Thessalonians

4:4

4:16

2 Thessalonians

1:9

1 Timothy

1:10

2:8

2:9

2:10

2 Timothy

2:8

3:16

6:1

Titus

2:13

Hebrews

1:3

1:5

11:3

11:35

James

3:6

1 Peter

3:3

3:22

2 Peter

1:1

1:19

2:4

3:8

3:16

1 John

2:18, 22

4:3

5:7

2 John

7

3 John

Jude

1:5

1:7

1:14

1:22

Revelation

1:18

3:12

6:8

7:3

9:3

9:4

9:21

12

12:3

12:9

13:1

13:16

14:1

17:5

20:2

22:4

20:13

22:16

Apocrypha

Tobit

Judith

Additions to Esther

Wisdom of Solomon

1:14

2:24

Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus)

1:30

Baruch

Epistle of Jeremiah

Song of the Three Children

Story of Susanna

Bel and the Dragon

1 Maccabees

2 Maccabees

7

7:14

7:28

4 Maccabees

Psalm 151

1 Esdras

2 Esdras

3 Esdras

4 Esdras

Prayer of Manasseh

Dead Sea Scrolls

4QDeuteronomyj

4QDeuteronomyq

11QMelchizedek

Damascus Document

2:5

Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice

Greco-Roman Jewish Texts

Apocalypse of Abraham

10:3, 8

Jubilees

4:29

10:11

Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah

4:14

Philo

The Special Laws

3.117

Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs

Testament of Abraham

20:11

Testament of Levi

18:12

Ethiopian Texts

1 Enoch

1:8

1:9

6

8

8:1

9

10:4

10:5

10:11

10:13

21:1, 3, 7

22:13

27:2

40:7

53:3

54:6

61:6

65:6

86:1, 3

89:36

90:24

103:7

1 Ethiopic Maccabees

2 Ethiopic Maccabees

3 Ethiopic Maccabees

Ethiopic Pseudo-Josephus

Ethiopic Lamentations

4 Baruch

Early Christian Texts

Letter of Barnabas

19:5$$

Didache

2:2

Shepherd of Hermas

26:1

Irenaeus

Against Heresies

2.10.4

4.20.2

5.29.2.30.1

Jerome

Commentary on Titus

John Chrysostom

Homilies on Matthew

47.3

Origen

Against Celsus

5.14

Homilies on Genesis

On First Principles

1.1

4.1.6

Tatian

Address to the Greeks

5.6

Tertullian

Against Marcion

3:473

Theophilus of Antioch

To Autolycus

2.4

Athanasius

Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter

Other Jewish Texts

3 Enoch

3.2.5

Alphabet of Ben Sira

78

Avot d’Rabbi Nathan

A 2

Bachodesh

4

Genesis Rabbah

8:11

11:6

Gittin

70a

Midrash Psalms

9:7

Mishnah Oholot

7:6

Sanhedrin

38b

Zevachim

62a

Northwest Semitic Texts

KTU

1.3.v.32

1.5.i.1

Khirbet el-Qôm

Kuntillet ‘Ajrud

Inscription 3.1

Inscription 3.6

Inscription 3.9

Inscription 4.1.1

Story and Proverbs of Ahiqar

Classical Texts

Aristotle

On the Generation of Animals

2.741b.22

Chariton

Callirhoe

Harpocration

Lexicon of the Ten Orators

Xenophon

Memorabilia

2.2.3

Sumerian and Akkadian Texts

Enuma Elish

6.34

Hittite Laws

17

Hymn to the Moon God

Laws of Hammurabi

14

“87”

116

117

118

209

252

Laws of Lipit-Ishtar

P rev. iii 2–6

Laws of Ur-Nammu

4–6

Middle-Assyrian Laws

A 50

Mesopotamian Sex Omens

Egyptian Sources

Great Cairo Hymn of Praise to Amun-Re

INDEX

Subject

abomination(s)

Molech as

worship of Asherah as

See also homosexuals/homosexuality

abortion as murder

biblical case against

breath of life

debates about morality of

degree of personhood

difference in interpretations on miscarriage

in Greco-Roman and Christian world

imposition of fine for premature birth

injury to pregnant woman

interpretations of fetus

penalties/punishment for

shift in public attitudes about

Sotah ritual

“talionic justice”

Abrahamic promise

Adam’s song

Adonai

adulteries

“all things” (panta)

andrapodistes

annihilationism

anthropomorphism

rejection within Judaism

Apocrypha

Baalzebub

Babylonian exile

baptism of Jesus

beast

mark of

number and name of

“begging the question” phrase

bestiality, prohibition on

“Bible is inspired” argument

“begging the question”

“God-breathed” concept

Pastoral Epistles

scriptures before existence of Bible

bitter waters

Carthage, Council of

Catholic Church

charter myths

chattel slavery

chi-xi-stigma theory (ch-z-s theory)

child sacrifice

Abrahamic promise

book of Judges

Covenant Code

firstborn children

Judahites

Levitical priesthood service

Phoenician inscriptions

practice

rationalizations

sacrificial offering

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

cognitive science of religion

conception

citizenship

ensoulment and

Jewish conception

personified Wisdom

Pythagorean Greek view

conceptualization

of marriage

of woman’s sexuality

consent

conspiracy theories

Constantinople, Council of

corporal punishment

COVID-19 vaccines

creation. See universe creation, Bible’s approach to

creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo)

“creatress of the gods”

darkness

“the day” in Genesisn4

debt servitude

debt slavery

deception, theology of

democratization of Pentateuch

demonic powers

demonization

demons, reality of

descendants

of gods

of Noah

Deutero-Isaiah

diabolos

discretion

disgust sensitivity

divine punishment

eternal conscious torment

postmortem

temporary torment

See also penalties/punishment

Documentary Hypothesis

dogmas

big problem with

of inspiration

domination, social hierarchy of

dress conventions

Eastern Orthodox traditions, canon of

El

ensoulment

eternal hellfire

Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

“evidence” of virginity

exclusivity

“eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life” principle. See “talionic justice”

female body

dress conventions among ancient Israelites

hypersexualization of

See also women

female same-sex intercourse

condemnation of

female sexuality

“feminization,” disease of

fiery law

Florence, Council of

fornication

gang rape

Gehenna

gematria

Gittin

goddess

God’s wife

drawings

goddess

ibexes

Josiah

stylized tree

Yahweh

Gomorrah

Greco-Roman

abortion in Greco-Roman world

period Judaism

social mores

Greek traditions

Green Bay Packers defenders

Hades

heavens

Hebrew letters/manuscripts

hell

Hellenism

historical-critical approach/perspective

homosexuals/homosexuality

abominations

behavior

detestability of acts

natural order

orientations

Paul’s sexual ethic

relationships

Sodom and Gomorrah

hypersexualization of female body

ideological literalists

idols

immaculate conception

immigrant’s status in Bible

incomparability

incrementalism

inerrancy

intuitive biases

Israel/Israelites

debt slaves

as theopneuston

Judahites

Judaism

about abortion

earliest non-biblical legal texts

Greco-Roman period

Jewish apocalyptic literature

Jewish canon

Jewish scriptures

Jewish studies

Khirbet el-Qom

“kidnapper” (NET)

Koine Greek

Kuntillet ’Ajrud

legality of abortion

LGBTQ+ community

God’s grace to

lives of women, immigrants, members of

life

“life for life” principle

Lord, house of the

Lucifer. See also Satan

“making a difference” phrase

male same-sex anal intercourse

mark of beast

marriage, conceptualization of

material body

menstruation, sex during

Messiah

exaltation Christology

Greek philosophical traditions

virgin birth

Micaiah’s song

miscarriage

“modesty”

Monster Energy

Monster logo

morality

of abortion

moral disgust sensitivity

of slavery

Mormons/Mormonism

apologetics

doctrine

Moses

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL)

natural death

natural order

natural theology

Nicea, Council of

“non-being”

non-heterosexual orientations

nothing comes from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit)

nudity in Bible

omniscient deity

Ordeal of Bitter Waters. See Sotah ritual

parochial anthropomorphism

paronomastic infinitive

Passover

pathogen disgust sensitivity

Paul’s sexual ethic

penalties/punishment

corporal

or abortion

punishment of human sinners

for slavery

See also divine punishment

Pentateuch

Pentateuchal layer

Pentateuch codification

“personal god”

personhood, Christian concepts of

platonic philosophy, interpretive lenses of

prejudices

presupposition of univocality

Primeval History

primordial matter

procreation

Protestant Bibles

Protestant Christianity

Protestant Reformation

Pseudepigrapha

“pubic triangle”

rape victims

lack of implementation of laws

laws related to sex

life sentence

rationalizations

redeemer

redemption

“righteousness” (dikaiosynē)

Roe v. Wade case

Roman Catholic Church

Rome, Council of

sacrifice. See child sacrifice

same-sex intercourse

samekh

Satan

Baalzebub

Enochic tradition

finding devil

Garden of Eden

in New Testament

Ugaritic Baal Cycle

scribal groups

“self-control”

serpent, interpretations of

“settle among you” phrase

sex during menstruation

sexual disgust sensitivity

sexual violence

against cities

gang rape

against men

See also rape victims

sex workings

“shameless acts,” men engaging in

sinners

annihilationism

darkness

Greek mythology and philosophy

Hades

post-mortem divine punishment of

sheol

Tartarus

temporary torment

slavery

biblical approaches to

biblical enslavement

chattel

claims

in Hebrew Bible

history of

incrementalism

penalties/punishment for

regulations on

slave trade deadline

slave trading

in United States

social hierarchy of domination

social stigma

Sodom

Sotah ritual

soul

human as living soul

of Yahweh

spirit

Spirit of Yahweh

Stoicism

Synod of Hippo

systemic power asymmetries

“talionic justice”

TaNaKh

Tartarus

temporary torment

Tetragrammaton

theology of deception

Tophet

Trent, Council of

trinitarian grab bag

Trinity

twisting serpent

universe creation, Bible’s approach to

implications

interpretation of serpent

out of nothing

primordial matter

univocality

unnatural lust

white supremacy

women

conceptualization of sexuality

in Deuteronomy

dress conventions

in Jeremiah and Ezekiel

in Timothy

in Proverbs

See also female body

worship

wriggling serpent

Yahweh of Hebrew Bible

Ammonites

archaeological data

archaic tradition

in Habakkuk and Psalm

incomparability of sovereignty

possession

INDEX

Modern Authors

Aaron, David H.

Adler, Yonatan

Aharoni, Yohanan

Alexander, Philip S.

Andersen, Francis I.

Anderson, Gary

Anderson, John E.

Aquinas, Thomas

Avalos, Hector

Ayali-Darshan, Nogah

Balmer, Randall

Baltzer, Klaus

Barker, Margaret

Barr, James

Barton, John

Bauckham, Richard

Beal, Timothy

Beck, Pirhiya

Bethencourt, Francisco

Bird, Michael F.

Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth

Bockmuehl, Markus

Bowen, Joshua

Bray, Gerald L.

Brenner, Athalya

Brettler, Marc Zvi

Brooten, Bernadette J.

Brown, Dan

Bruce, F. F.

Brueggemann, Walter

Bühner, Ruben A.

Burnett, David A.

Callaham, Scott N.

Carr, David M.

Charlesworth, James H.

Chung, Frank

Cobb, Christy

Collins, John J.

Collins, Raymond F.

Combs, William W.

Copan, Paul

Craig, William Lane

Cuartas, Jorge

Darrell D. Hannah

Dewrell, Heath D.

Dijkstra, Minert

Donelson, Lewis R.

Doran, Robert

Ehrman, Bart D.

Eichler, Raanan

Eykel, Eric Vanden

Feldman, Liane M.

Fewster, Gregory P.

Finney, Mark T.

Finsterbusch, Karin

Fredrickson, David E.

Fredriksen, Paula

Freedman, David Noel

Fried, Lisbeth S.

Friedman, Shamma

Fung, Katherine

Gagnon, Robert A. J.

Gaon, Saadia

Garr, W. Randall

Gershoff, Elizabeth T.

Glancy, Jennifer A.

Goldenberg, David M.

Grabbe, Lester L.

Grogan-Kaylor, Andrew

Guinan, Ann Kessler

Guzzo, Maria Giulia Amadasi

Haenchen, Ernst

Hamori, Esther J.

Hannah, Darrell D.

Hays, Christopher B.

Heilmann, Anja

Heiser, Michael S.

Heng, Geraldine

Herring, Stephen L.

Hess, Richard S.

Heys, Richard S

Hiebert, Robert J.

Holloway, Paul A.

Howard, Marshall, I.

Hubler, J. Noel

Inbar, Yoel

Jewett, Robert

Johnson, Luke Timothy

Jones, David Albert

Keener, Craig S.

Kendi, Ibram X.

Kleppesto, Thomas Harrklau

Koester, Craig R.

Kvanvig, Helge S.

Lambert, W. G.

Lange, Armin

Law, Timothy Michael

Levenson, Jon D.

Levine, Amy-Jill

Levine, Joseph M.

Levinson, Hanne Loland

Lichtheim, Miriam

Lim, Timothy H.

Lipka, Hilary

Loader, William

Lopez, Jose Angel Zamora

Luther, Martin

MacDonald, Nathan

Maimonides, Moses

Malik, Shushma

Markschies, Christoph

May, Gerhard

McClellan, Daniel O.

McDonald, Lee Martin

McDowell, Catherine L.

Mendez, Hugo

Meshel, Ze’ev

Moberly, Walter

Moore, Stephen D.

Moss, Candida

Mroczek, Eva

Nacke, Lennart

Nelson, Richard

Newsom, Gavin

Neyrey, Jerome H.

Nickelsburg, George W. E.

Nongbri, Brent

Noonan, John T.

Novakovic, Lidija

Olyan, Saul M.

Pagels, Elaine

Parkhill, Michele R.

Parr, Allen

Peppard, Michael

Perriman, Andrew

Pettey, Richard J.

Poirier, John C.

Porter, Stanley E.

Pressler, Carolyn

Pritchard, James B.

Rahmouni, Aicha

Raisanen, Heikki

Ramelli, Ilaria

Ray, Travis N.

Reagan, Leslie J.

Renehan, R.

Riemann, Rainer

Roberts, B. H.

Rogers, Robert Williams

Romer, Thomas

Romheld, K. F. Diethard

Roth, Martha T.

Rothstein, Richard

Sanders, Seth L.

Sarna, Nahum M.

Satlow, Michael L.

Schaper, Joachim

Scheck, Thomas P.

Schiff, Daniel

Schniedewind, William M.

Sivakumaran, Sandesh

Skinner, Marilyn B.

Smarius, Alexander

Smith, Mark S.

Sommer, Benjamin D.

Sonia, Kerry M.

Spiegel, Shalom

Stavrakopoulou, Francesca

Stern, David

Stokes, Ryan E.

Stone, Mark Preston

Stoner, Peter W.

Strong, James

Taylor, Joan E.

Thomas, Ryan

Tigay, Jeffrey

Touquet, Heleen

Towner, Philip H.

Turner, Brandon

Tyson, Joseph B.

VanderKam, James C.

Viegas, Jennifer

Wagner, Andreas

Wallace, Daniel B.

Walsh, Robyn Faith

Wang, Ruile

Wasserman, Emma

Weems, Renita J.

Whybray, Roger N.

Wills, Lawrence M.

Wilson, Brittany E.

Worthington, Richard

Wright, Archie T.

Wright, David P.

Wright, Jacob L.

Xella, Paolo

Young, Stephen

Zevit, Ziony

Zurawski, Jason M.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAN MCCLELLAN is an award-winning public scholar of the Bible. He has more than one million followers on social media, and tens of thousands more tune in to his online classes and his Data Over Dogma podcast. Dan received his PhD from the University of Exeter. He previously worked as a scripture translation supervisor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is currently an honorary fellow at Birmingham University’s Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion. You can sign up for email updates here.

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First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Essentials, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group

THE BIBLE SAYS SO. Copyright © 2025 by Dan McClellan. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.

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First Edition: 2025

* See what I did there?

† Oops, I did it again (with apologies to Britney Spears).

* With apologies to Pearl Jam.

* Last time, I promise.

* With apologies to the creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

* With apologies to the creators of the Law & Order television franchise.

* With apologies to Blink-182.

* With partial apologies to Blink-182, Bob Dylan, John Denver, and Carrie Underwood.

* With apologies to the creators of The Monster Squad (1987).

* With apologies to Judith Viorst.

* With apologies to White Zombie.

* With apologies to Epicure.

* With apologies to the creators of The Waterboy (1998).

* With apologies to Roger A. Graham, but especially Mel Brooks and the creators of Young Frankenstein (1974).

* With apologies to Elton John.

* With apologies to The Offspring.

* With apologies to “Weird” Al Yankovic.

† With apologies to Shaggy.

* With apologies to Pearl Jam.

† With apologies to Will Smith.

* With apologies to the creators of Batman #427.

* With apologies to the creators of Swingers (1996).

* With apologies to the artist formerly known as Prince, Sinéad O’Connor, and Chris Cornell.

* With apologies to Alabama.

* With apologies to Salt-N-Pepa.

* With apologies to Justin Timberlake.

* With apologies to Jason Isbell.

* With apologies to Madonna.

* With apologies to Leonard Cohen.

* With apologies to the Bangles.

* With apologies to Metallica.

* With apologies to AC/DC.

* With apologies to Tracy Morgan and the creators of 30 Rock.