The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 119: Walking the Edge

Episode Date: June 4, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with historian and religious scholar Bracy V. Hill, along with Michelle Jorgensen and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: The intersection of religion and the history of hunting in America; the evolution of America's hunting culture; a two-part history of Paul/Saul; the connection between the creation story and blue laws; radical religious groups; masculinity and the symbol of life and death; the saga of Jacob and Esau; hunters walking the edge; feast and famine; what's up with Nimrod?; God is a hunter; a religious critique of hunting; rock concerts and religious experiences; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Bracey V. Hill II.

We're going to role-play for a minute. You're at a party, and you're up you're at a party and you're you're up at the punch bowl and someone comes up and they say now what do you what do you do for a living i get and you tell them what i say i'm a history professor kind of okay no i'll tell you how to continue role play then i'll then i'll say i'm uh i'm your interlocutor at this uh party i say well like what and i go you know i did my dissertation on british rational religion in the late 17th century and early 18th century but i teach american hunting history and particularly how it intersects with religion.

I'm tracking. Well, most people don't at that point in time. So they've gone, so my character has now left. The question I get also is they go, hunting? Uh-huh. And I say, yeah.

And they go, hunting? Yeah, there's a lot to study there. And I started going off into my spiel about how that hunting culture, particularly in America, has transformed over centuries, adapted itself to various peoples and animals that have been present on the continent, and that it continues to change even to today. And so what I do is I look at how American culture of hunting, really cultures of hunting, have changed throughout the years. And I actually teach classes at my university on the history of hunting. What is the class called? Well, I teach two. I teach a senior level course that is nominally called the history of hunting in north america really and then i teach you just get just get right to it you know i've got you know this great subtitle

that no one ever prints uh and you know it says something about con from basically from survival to controversy okay and then i teach a freshman only version uh which is it's a they walk in the door it's called a freshman academic seminar, and they get me. And I don't even get to pitch the class to them. They sign up for it during orientation, so I don't know who's selling it. But they walk in and we do a freshman version of it. So it kind of teaches them how to write, et cetera,

but they engage the idea of that there's a history of this cultural phenomena in America. They get credit for their american history for it but this is great right um and you know if i get a chance to tell them for a second you know yes we're gonna watch bambi all right and we're gonna watch a little ted nugent because i have to i'll roll some doug dynasty and that's my you know way of trying to bring them in something that they may have seen before i said but this is real history we're gonna look at primary sources we're gonna look people's experiences.

And in particular, because of my focus, we're going to at least look at how religion plays into this. From Paleo-Indians, Native American tribes, the arrival of Puritans. Don't forget the Spanish are already here too, right? The French as well. And how that plays out as particularly Anglo-Americans sweep westward across the continent

and encounter new peoples, new animals, economics, and how it all plays together. Now, I'm not sure that I actually fulfill that in the course of the semester, but that's my grand goal. That's the ambitious grand goal. That's the ambitious grand goal. Would you mind, there's a lot, I'm already backed up in my mind. Real quick, can you tell people, I don't think we've ever talked about this before, can you explain to people the difference between a primary and secondary resource that's a great question um so a primary source is material now it used to be just texts but historians are now opening their minds to looking at things more than just text we talk about like a material culture

so we'll look at things but an an artifact, something that humans have modified, they've created from a particular time period. And that's the time period that we're investigating. That's a primary source. So a primary source can be a diary entry from 1899, and I'm studying 1899 a primary source could be a computer if i were studying a particular period where that computer was relevant so primary sources are in some ways limitless but not really because primary sources have a tendency to disappear so paper has a tendency to rot mold disappear wood if you're studying paleo indian cultures you don't find their their their homes that are constricted of wood what you find at best is the hollow that was left by the ghost right that's filled in with a different type of sediment

we perceive it as a history that's written in rock exactly because everything else is gone and so most of what we find then are our blade technology right so your clovis technology etc of awesome stuff like that and that stuff has a tendency to last so that's a primary resource but so is uh patagonia coats um or textbooks if i'm studying a period and those are resources that tell me something about that culture, that time period, etc. That's a primary source. So primary sources can be stories that were told and recorded, whether they were written down or recorded literally on various types of technology.

So someday this conversation could be a primary source about primary sources. It's exactly right. Lewis and Clark Journals, primary source. Und's exactly right. Lewis and Clark journals, primary source. Undaunted Courage, secondary source, right? Well, secondary source is a, let me talk about secondary source as a secondary history,

secondary source for history. So what happens is it's where the historian, intentionally or unintentionally, analyzes material that's in front of them. And so she has these various types of data in front of her that are primary sources. And she analyzes them, determines their importance, and in most cases weaves them into a narrative. Now, many times the historian then will not just use primary sources, but she'll also use secondary sources. So if I were writing a history of hunting,

which I'm supposed to be doing right now for an undisclosed university press, I hope to finish it, a history of hunting of culture in Texas, then I would look to histories of Texas. That's a secondary source, but that's useful to me as I construct my narrative of hunting cultures in the state of Texas,

in the region of Texas. But I also would turn them to primary sources as I write my secondary source. So the secondary source is this analysis and report, because this is what historians do. Historians have to communicate. That's what we do. We communicate by speaking, we communicate by writing. And if we fail in that venture course, then we fail as a historian. But the historian distills, places importance on certain data, ignores others. It's science and art. The art is the idea that I have to communicate to you, whatever my audience is that I perceive, I communicate to you what I think is important about this period. And I take many times in all this various data that doesn't seem to fit together.

And I make a coherent, I hope, story for you to understand the past. But of course, I ignore other stuff too. And that's where scientifically, I have to be very careful. I go into archives. I look at paintings. I look at guns. Although last summer, I spent time in a museum on a fellowship, just basically messing around with knives and guns, particularly from Texas in the

19th century. It was fun. It was great. But I've got to give meaning to that thing. So we tell the story. And that's that secondary source, whether I'm telling you about it myself or I'm writing it and presenting it to you as an audience. Okay can you humor for me me for a minute like while i have you here yeah sure there's there's three trying to think there's a few areas that in past episodes we've touched on matters of a biblical nature i didn't have the expertise okay so we should say that right so my expertise is right this is where i like pull up my union card please so i am a historian but i have a master's degree in theology and i have a phd in religion so for the audience who's going so why are they asking a historian about the bible i'm still not the best source but in theory someone educated me

on these things to a degree in the past. So, all right. I'm going to ask you some low, I'm going to ask, trust me. Are these multiple choice questions? I'm going to ask you some low level. Softball.

Softball. Yeah, this is just cleaning up some messes we've made in past episodes and I want as a way to introduce you. Okay. And just to bring a thing up because we got a lot of feedback

from this recently. Okay, we have a friend that we work with, Mark introduce you. Okay. And just to bring a thing up, because we got a lot of feedback from this recently. Okay, we have a friend that we work with, Mark Kenyon. Okay. And Mark Kenyon has been trying to kill the same deer for years. Okay. And I was explaining to him one day that he was going to have a saw on the way to Damascus moment. Yeah.

Where he saw the light and decided to not shoot this deer after all oh i was predicting that this would happen yeah and i said i can't remember if it's if the dude's name was paul or saul and a lot of people wrote in to say what yes it's a tricky question uh it's the same guy okay it's the same guy so if you look at the so the story takes place in the book of acts which is it's it's a history by the way it's a two-part history so the book of luke which you may have heard of the gospel luke and the book of acts are one book it's just in two parts so you can tell because the intro it says dear theophilus and the beginning of luke that's the

guy's name like lover of god and we don't know if that's really a guy or if it's just this you know this character he's writing out there for the audience because he says basically luke the writer of luke says so you know that there's been these other histories written about our faith but i'm paraphrasing they these they this they're a said, so what I've done is I've tried to put together for you an orderly history. So that's his intro at the beginning of Luke. And then you get to Acts. And Acts chapter one says, dear Theophilus, part two.

All right, now I'm gonna tell you about what happens after Jesus goes. Now he starts with the resurrected Jesus in Acts number one. And then of course, Jesus goes, zip, he's gone. Angels go, what are you doing here? And he lays out, they lay out the thesis. They say, basically, why are you still standing here? Basically, go tell the message from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.

It gives a lot of other place names in there. And so he lays this thesis out. Number one, I'm going to tell you about Jesus. And we're going to do it in an orderly fashion. This is the basis of your faith. Luke chapter one. Acts chapter one. You say, but why aren't they next to each other? Don't ask me about the canon. All right, but the canon's a

mess. But anyhow, they separated and stuck all the little biographies about Jesus together and they separated these two books. So the second chapter, if you will, the second part of this history by this writer, which is historically, or I say traditionally called luke describes the story of really kind of two major characters in the formation of the early christian church the first is peter so peter gets like the first couple chapters and then they shifted this guy named soul yep all right who is it a great persecutor he's a great persecutor he's he's he's born in Southern Asia Minor, Turkey, Tarsus. He comes to get educated in Judea. So he's a Pharisee. He's a bright guy, trained at the best school, if you will.

All right. So he's a persecutor of the early Christians, famously oversees. Oh, man, you're making me pull this stuff at the back of my head. He oversees the martyrdom of Stephen. All right. Okay. That's my name. There you go.

If it wasn't for him him i wouldn't be named me there you go yeah so in route to damascus which is the capital of syria sol has this experience the resurrected christ somehow speaks to him and calls him sol sol why do you persecute me blinds him basically knocks him off his ass. Or blinds him for the rest of his life. No, no, no, no, no. It's gotta be a miracle. Alright, so I don't know if he's on an ass or a horse. Anyhow, knocks him. Alright, so he's

blinded and he goes in and there's a fellow who's part of the Christian community who basically prays for him and he's blind for a little bit and then his sight is regained. So there's a miracle. So he gets this divine, this theophany, Christophany, whatever you want to call it, this vision of the Christ

or the voice of the Christ's appearance. And this is how Paul, later on, we'll talk about his name. This is how he validates he was an apostle because while the other guys, there were 12, right? They were close. One of them apparently got it wrong, right?

So there's 11 that were the close associates of Jesus. They're the apostles they're called. They're commissioned to go out there. And there's a lot of others who were as well. But Paul says, hey, Jesus called me himself. All right. If you go through the book of Acts, as the writer, Luke, let's just call him,

is working through his thesis of showing how the Christians take the message from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth, he picks it up with Paul, who goes by Saul. But Saul uses the name Saul and Paul back and forth. Actually, at the end of Acts, he still calls himself Saul. He tells the story that Jesus appears to him and calls him Saul. It's Luke as he tells the story that shifts to Paul. In fact, once Paul leaves the area of Jerusalem, Luke subtly shifts from Saul to Paul. Now here's my theory on why. Saul is a Hebrew name. It's the first king of Israel, the United Kingdom there of Israel. And it's a good Hebrew name. But he was born in Asia Minor in a Roman city. And that's why he has Roman citizenship. Now he comes to Judea, all that kind

of stuff, but he has a Roman name. So Paul or Paulus is his Latin name. And so he goes by Paul, just like you would go by Saul, just like the other characters in the New Testament, like this guy named Thomas, who's also known as Didymus the twin. So there's people who have multiple names. So what you see is the shift from Saul to Paul in the book of Acts to fit the historian's thesis. So as he leaves the center of Judaism and moves into the Gentile, the world of the goyim, the Greco-Roman world,

he shifts to Paul to show how Paul is taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. Got you. That's a long answer. That was good. I liked it. I love it.

Can I move on to the next part? My next question blue laws just real quick to touch on this yeah with your expertise oh yeah a guy was pointing out that we had something terribly wrong he says one okay all right let me let me get this right here he says here in North Carolina, as Giannis might be able to tell you, we have recently modified the laws for Sunday hunting to be much less restrictive.

And to the listener, there are states in the American South and elsewhere where you're not allowed to go hunting on a Sunday. Although there are still certain prohibitions, especially during normal Sunday morning church service hours. One minor correction to Steve's point about the Sabbath is that Sunday isn't really considered to be the Sabbath. I was saying the Sabbath for Sunday.

Sabbath is just the Hebrew word for seventh and corresponds to the Christian account when God rested on the seventh day. It is always Sunday. Christians worship corporately on Sunday in remembrance of Jesus' resurrection. Now, there are plenty of Christians that confuse the two, but nowhere does the Bible talk about Sabbath laws, rest from work, short distance of travel, et cetera,

applying to Christians on Sunday. This guy says, I don't see it why it should be mandated as free from all activity. I don't hunt on Sunday because that's because I'm at church. Does this resonate with you at all? All right, so a little bit of, a number of things going on here. All right, first off, there are a number of states that do have blue laws.

My best friend, his name's Josh, he grew in pennsylvania a little place called enon valley and opening of deer season it was like a holiday like a holy day but from what i gather from the stories he's told me it was a monday because in pennsylvania you can't hunt deer on sunday so there are a number of states for For religious reasons. Yes, okay, which is interesting because this whole William Penn's experiment, if you're familiar, he was a Quaker, right? And so Pennsylvania was supposed to be a place where freedom of religion took place

in a unique and brand new way. Yeah, you know what? William Penn once, describing that state, talked about how grouse would walk into his house. Really? Yeah. He had observations about wildlife. So did Benjamin Franklinlin we should talk

about him he's got some weird views snakes anyhow uh blue laws then ironically show up in places and i believe rhode island which is as well which is also established on religious freedom i could be wrong on rhode island someone will write in and tell me all right but the point is ironically that as we see the establishment and sometimes in places you would expect to see religious freedom and not expect to see religious ideas pervade secular life, for lack of a better way of saying it, that's where you find it. So there are a number of states that don't allow hunting on Sunday. Why? Well, there was generally this assumption for hundreds of years among Christians that the Sabbath was Sunday.

But the Sabbath isn't Sunday. The Sabbath is actually Friday night is when it starts. Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. You got it right. And that's why there's that's like when like like Jews. Yeah, absolutely. You go to synagogue with Orthodox Jews. That's when they do their they honor the Sabbath from sundown Friday, sundown Sunday.

Not just Orthodox, but Reformed Jews as well. It's not infrequent. We go to synagogue. There's a number of synagogues actually even in the town where I live, but where I've grown up. And it starts on Friday night. It's your Shabbat service. So that was the day of rest. And where does this come from?

There's a couple of different hints about it in in particularly the Pentateuch the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament if you want to use that if you're a Christian perspective but probably the most interesting one is of course the first chapter Genesis 1 which lays out this creation story and it rolls into the early part of Genesis 2 and you you have these days in which God creates through various means the world. That is, he separates water from land. Then he puts vegetation. And then he creates, he has light and darkness.

And he has the stellar formations. And then he has the birds and the four-legged critters, and eventually on the sixth day, he creates humans, right? Along with other things, but humans. And all these creations are basically good, but the ones with human, it's very good. And then it says on the seventh day, he rests. Now, again, I'm gonna pull this back a minute,

but I believe it's in the book of Exodus. You have a retelling of this, and it's etiological, which is a fancy way of saying, it's a story that has an explanation for why we do what we do. And there it's explicit because God rested on the seventh day, so we rest as well. And there's two different etiologies going on there in the two books. But so it's established in the Hebrew culture that you rested on the seventh day. It was a way of essentially, I hate to say it, but mimicking God, but in a positive fashion. And so on the seventh day you rested, and there were certain behaviors you didn't do. And the rabbis, Jewish rabbis, years afterwards continued to comment on this.

There's certain things you shouldn't be doing, like probably hunting uh off the top of my head cutting wood you can have sex by the way on on the sabbath that's not work that's okay uh that's what i remember hearing in class that caught my attention i remember that in class uh but so certain and fishing fishing is okay fishing's okay i don't know i don't know to be honest i don't remember but no state has outlawed sunday fishing or sunday sex i guess but the point is you do have this intriguing extension then of and the christian you say why christians on sunday here's a shift it go back to the book of acts uh these were jews that came to believe them that this jesus was the messiah the awaited one um and they continue to do Jewish things. They still went to the temple.

It was there. It hadn't been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 by the guy named Titus. So it's still there. And they continue to do. They have to figure out who they are though, right? So they're Jews, but they believe that the Messiah has come. They seemingly still are doing sacrifices in the temple. They're still gathering but you see

in the early in the book of acts increasing tension then between these jews who are followers of jesus and jews that didn't buy into that he was the messiah till eventually they're kicked out of the out of the synagogues where they would gather and they're essentially pushed out of the temple region and so they pick a new day to worship on sunday that's how that all came about there you go yeah and so christians have turned to the sabbath a sunday not to as again as christianity some christians yeah yeah right no so you have seventh day adventists for instance you drive by them they follow more of a hebraic code it's a little picky choosy, to certain things. There, for instance, most Seventh-day Adventists I know are vegetarian, right?

Yep. And they have very strict diets. And so they keep many of the— I dated a Seventh-day Adventist one time for a few days. I was going to say, how did it go? Well, she didn't date Friday night to Saturday night. Yeah? Yeah. And as a meat-eater?

Can't remember. Yeah, right, okay. So it's going to be a problem, possibly. But Seventh-day Adventists, so there's groups of what you might consider radical Christianity. You know what? She't remember. Yeah, right. Okay. So it's going to be a problem, possibly. But Seventh-day Adventists, so there's groups of what you might consider radical Christianity. You know what? She was vegetarian. Yeah.

You're right. We didn't really date. I was interested in trying to date her. Yeah. Yeah. We'll go on. All right. So that's where you begin to see.

You still see remnants of that, particularly in the 19th century, where you see kind of utopian movements and more radical types of christianity and even in america go back going back to the old ways yep exactly but whoever it was that said hey man we're going to do some semblance of i'm going to like exclude by law the most egregious things right heavy drinking hunting those people were sunday people yeah or sunday people which i mean again a lot of states you can't buy hard liquor on sundays it's the same principle and then we call those blue laws as well oh they do yeah but there's like i guess

it's around a dozen or so states that still have blue laws for hunting okay. Can you now tell me, give me the quick wrap on your book. All right. All right. Can I still call it a newish book? Yeah. It came out in November of 2017. Real newish.

Yeah. I can say that fairly new. All right. So real quick, the book's called God, Nimrod, and the World, Exploring Christian Perspectives on Sport Hunting. It's published by Mercer University Press, which has a sports and religion series.

Oh. Yeah. Sports and religion? Sports and religion. Or like sports and religion? Like, well, yeah, okay. So it's a copulative verb. It pulls the two together. So it's sports and religion together.

All right. I don't know how to do it. Yeah. And so they've got books on baseball, football, NASCAR. there's nothing to write i don't know i didn't write the book yeah but as you as we learn in this book there's all kinds of ways that hunting plays into the bible there's not a lot of baseball plays into the bible that's a ridiculous idea i didn't write that book i did write this if you did i'd have you step out long and short is what is there to be said yeah i don't know i didn't read the book i didn't realize i knew that there was a lot of hunting in the bible

yeah i didn't realize how much and so i started looking at this book yeah yeah i mean there's a lot going on there um so real quick the story of the book was i was writing a dissertation and my dissertation was looking at radical groups in England and Britain. I started out with the Lawlords, which is a group in the 14th century in England. I ended up losing my director from a dissertation. Radical religious groups. Radical religious. I like radical minority religious groups.

Okay. All right? I just do. And so then I ended up, for various reasons, things got shifted around. I ended up working with a fellow from the University of Stirling in Scotland. He was visiting in the United States as a distinguished scholar. And we found a topic that I could study with him that fit within his purview. So I started studying late 17th century, early 18th century radical religion

that we call rational religion. This is a proto-unitarian. People who grew up within the Orthodox Christian movement actually were defending it against the anglicans in britain and then suddenly came to the conclusion in particular things like the trinity were problematic one plus one plus one did not equal one and so they were applying reason in the british enlightenment to the religion of their tradition as you can well imagine they were soon ostracized by everyone and so i particularly worked on a guy by the name of james pierce so i'm working with people on the edge um in 2007 of course i'm always

looking for diversion because i'm a procrastinator i suddenly i'm walking with this guy across campus and he's so cool he's got the voice of god right with this british accent with the cambridge his name's david bevington and uh david be David Bevington is just fantastic. And we're walking across campus. And he mentions he's going to go to this guy's house for dinner. I said, I know him. Actually, my wife and I have been hunting white-winged doves there. And he stops, just stops in the middle of campus on the sidewalk. And he looks at me, and it's like he doesn't know what to say. We just had Thai food. He just invited me to do my dissertation with him. And he looks at me and goes, that's so French.

French? French. He's British. He's like, what the heck? So he doesn't even know about America. Yeah. And we just kept walking along. And I started thinking, all right, here I am.

I'm committed to doing Christian history to a degree on the edges, but also within Christian community on the edges, I thought hunting was okay. I mean, I knew that a lot of people didn't hunt, but I guess this is a big question. And so I started bouncing it around, came up with the topic, found a guy to kind of work with me who does sports and leisure studies. I proposed it in particular to a number of presses and their responses was sexy, but that ain't going to sell. And so it didn't go anywhere. I finished my dissertation. I didn't want to work on my dissertation anymore. I still owe it seven years later to the publisher. But I started looking

for a diversion and I was in San Francisco and I had this idea about hunting. It's been bouncing back in my head to look at it from all kinds of different perspectives, from history, from religious, theological, ethical perspectives, and clearly I couldn't do them all. So I needed other voices. I wanted other people to participate in this, but no one's really doing this. And the idea was, it was nascent, shall we say.

But I went to this session with this series editor, the sports and religion series of Mercer was there. I heard him talking, went up after him and said, I've got this idea for this book. He listened to me, he said, send me an email. I sent him an email. He said, send me a proposal. And he said, I'll take it.

So I started creating this book. And that is, I wanted to write some essays myself. And there were people that I had talked to over the last several years that were interested in writing about the ethics of hunting, the history of hunting, about why it was good, why it was bad, how to do it better than other ways. But with a particular attention to religion, not just the ethics. There's a lot of discussion of ethics out there. But with a particular attention to history of religion and the current situation of religion, particularly Christianity, and I began assembling this group of more than two dozen people. I eventually brought on a co-editor to talk a

little bit about sports, and he wasn't for hunting, if you will. And he brought in his friend, Sean Graves, to do a kind of anti-hunting piece, the main central anti-hunting piece. Like a religious-based anti-hunting piece. And philosophy. It's a composite. So if you look at the book, it's in two parts. The first 11 chapters are descriptive. They're historically descriptive.

They talk about hunting communities today, closely associated with religion. They go all the way back to the Hebraic tradition. There's an essay by a guy named Bas, Kenneth Bas, a hunting buddy of mine, and also a scripture scholar. And we work our way through the Middle Ages. We work our way to the early modern period. And then we work our way to the present. And I end that section with doing oral history. So recording primary sources from people who've hunted over the last century, analyzing it, making a report, and then allowing hunters from all types and walks of life,

athletes in particular, because it's sports and religion, musicians, artists, teachers, academics, soldiers, all kind of talk about their story, but just tell a story, have them write their essay if possible. There's a few celebrity hunters that you would see on things like the Outdoor Channel, like Ralph Censolaro, I always mispronounce his name, from Archer's Choice. Jace Robertson, I did an essay with him from Duck Dynasty. And so letting them speak. And then the last half

is from the Ivory Tower. So if you will, the last half is from the ivory tower. So if you will, the first half is about the field, the people who are in it. And the last half is people who live in the ivory tower, academics who want to tell you that hunting is right, wrong, or this is a better way to do it. And then there's a conclusion. So the book is a composite of perspectives.

And one would argue from about 2,500 years years of experience what first got me interested in the idea um that there was something to think about here is i was reading year many years ago in barry lopez's arctic dreams and in the epilogue to the book he's hunting walrus with alaskan natives though he's actually in russian waters and they're slaughtering walrus on the ice and the smell of blood and gun powder are still lingering in the air and And Lopez doesn't get into it, but he alludes to the reconciliation or the need to reconcile Jacob and Esau or this reconciliation that occurs.

And I remember thinking like, what's that? So I go and look at the story of Jacob and Esau, which I interpreted, I've been told by people that it's not. I interpreted it to be a story about hunters and non-hunters. I'm going to tell you my understanding of it. And I want to touch on Nimrod too,

who I wasn't even aware of. But Jacob and Esau, here's this mother. She's pregnant with twins. And the first baby passes out and it's hairy, covered in hair and clinging to his ankle is a fair baby. The hair covered baby that comes out first is Esau. And the fair non-hairy baby that comes out clinging to his ankle is Jacob. Esau becomes a hunter. He's a savage, and he hunts with his bow. And Esau, the hairless one, is an agrarian. Oh, I'm sorry, Jacob, the hairless one, becomes a farmer. Their father likes wild game and often sends Esau with his bow to go scrounge him up some wild game.

And Esau being the eldest is entitled to the birthright. The old man grows old and blind and sends Esau off with his bow to kill him some wild meat. Jacob goes and kills one of his lambs, drapes it over his shoulder, cooks some lamb for the old man.

The old man eats it, likes it, touches, feels the fur, thinks it's Esau, and bestows upon him his birthright. I took it to mean that this was the moment when God gave favor to the agricultural peoples and shunned the hunters through trickery. And it's telling because Jacob is second born, but is clinging to the ankle of the hunter. So I couldn't see it any other way than it was sort of a way of pointing out that the Christians were agrarians, they were pasturists, they weren't wild savages, they weren't out hunting.

And here's a story to sort of account for how God's favoritism was granted to the agricultural peoples and not to the wild savages. But I've been told that that's not how you should look at it. Well, the great thing about it is, a lot of this is up for interpretation, right? So the story you're looking at is in Genesis chapter 25. Okay.

And so Jacob and Esau are born, and Esau is described then as being, he comes out red and he's hairy, right? And it says he's hairy like a garment, like a mohair suit. I don't know. Yeah. And then there's Jacob. Our body dirt looks like this.

Even the reddish tint. Oh, yeah? So you've got two stories. One, of course, is that Esau's been out hunting, and he comes in, he's fam he's famished and you know what that's like right he's just going to eat anything and he comes in and jacob says basically i i'm cooking no interesting thing is you think about cooking in some cultures of course he's cooking lentils well so cooking is interesting. We cook in American culture, and I know things are shifting. Gender roles are malleable. But I would say in the 20th century, if I said, oh, look, he's cooking stew,

you would go, hmm, because the image we have post-Victorian era is of the woman cooking in the home. Now, we play with that because if it's something large and muscular, translation meat, men have taken this over. And by the way, men, I think, have always done this. If they can make it difficult, they will, right? So we get smokers and we slap slabs of a hog and all kinds of other things or sausages on a smoker. And the masculine right we allow that to come in yeah you know this is funny bring it up because like an interesting thing with in our home thanksgiving my mom right would take the turkey do all the work on the turkey

okay cook the giblets roast the whole damn thing make the stuffing stuff and all that kind of stuff but my old man who had nothing to do with this all day all day he just do whatever you wanted right out hunting usually would come home at night and be like i will carve the church yeah exactly right because like clearly you'd be incapable woman of now slicing it right you've done all this but your skill set ends somewhere and we've found the moment we've got that we've got the tool that this the the symbol of if you will of life and death the not the blade right whether it's electric knife or it's this big chef's knife and the masculine takes over yeah and jacob's cooking so he's cooking he's not hunting and so you get this idea of esau who's on on he's a liminal character liminal not like you know like the thing that's sour but

l-i-m-e-n on the lemons on the edge hunters are always there they have to be there on the edge of on the edge right i mean even if it's on the edge of suburbia you're bow hunting you're still on the edge so hunters are always a marginalized group because as we see uh the domestication of the earth by way of the neolithic agricultural revolution and continuing uh agriculture we always are pushing wildlife to the edges now i know some do well right so white-tailed deer have done exceptionally well with some of this type of edge if you will kind of environment others don right? Migratory animals generally don't. Whether we're building a road or doing something else, we're disrupting their patterns of migration. So hunters are always liminal. Esau's a liminal character and he's on the edge. Jacob's at home.

Jacob's hanging out with the women, right? That's what Genesis says says he's a mama's boy he's breaking some gender roles of sorts is that right okay he's breaking some gender roles here and isaac the dad has a taste for venison esau his firstborn provides him with this so what you get is almost kind of like a hunter-gatherer myth in conflict with this movement toward agrarianism and the domestication of animals. And so Esau comes up, and he ends up selling his birthright to Jacob for this porridge, for this... Because he's so hungry.

He's famished, right? And Jacob, it says, and Jacob gave Esau bread and stew of lentils. Think about it. Both those things are products of agriculture. Lentils, you're growing from the earth and bread's a product, of course, growing grains and cereal, milling, producing bread. So Esau brings meat. Jacob brings Neolithic agriculture. Here it is.

But there's also a comment here too, where a criticism, when you do have hunter-gatherer cultures up against agrarian cultures from the agrarian perspective a criticism of the hunter-gatherer culture is the feast and famine yep the highs and lows exactly so the fact that he's coming back he's coming back starving from an unsuccessful hunt he's this guy like right here bro yeah bull lentils small price so you get the second story that shows up when you alluded to and it's like a second story about how he loses his birthright i didn't catch this though or i didn't i forgot it yeah he already bought it fair and square from his brother he bought the birth

right fair and square all right so one of the great things about looking at the hebrew bible in particular is it's woven together over centuries so a lot of times we get these stories that seem to to be redundant. And many times, there's all kinds of arguments among biblical scholars, and they know they're right, and they get in their little schools of thought. But you likely have here two different myths, two different oral traditions that were floating around.

One which explained then how Esau is marginalized and Jacob becomes the one who inherits not just the birthright, but the covenant that's made with Abraham and passed down to Isaac and then to Jacob. And so you've got these, you shouldn't see them as competing stories. It's like the story of Noah, right? How many animals did Noah take into the ark? Well, one account says two, the other says seven. Well, what it is is probably stories woven together. Is the Genesis 1 account different than the Genesis 2 account? Two creation stories. So what we probably have here are two myths, two stories.

And by myth, I don't mean... One that he bought it, one that he got tricked out of. You got it, right. So again, when I say myth, I should say that's not to say a story about something that didn't happen. It's a story that a culture tells over time. And that story encapsulates what it means to be us. It's what ties us together. Hunters do this really well, right? We tell stories, we tell stories, and we tell the next generation how not to act and how to act by way of the stories. Sometimes we laugh at them. Sometimes we mock characters in the story.

But you know then the cultural values. So these are stories that were told. That's a myth. Mythology has that two elements. Logos, that reason, rational kind of coherence. And the myth is the good story. They used to hold well over a fire. And so we had two stories.

So the second story, so you've got Isaac and he likes his innocent he likes his his his uh cerebids essentially right his ungulates whatever um and he sends esau out and esau is his favorite but then the mother of jacob uses deception she takes fur she places on his arms oh the ma yeah it's mama's in there too he's a mama's boy so she's the one that favors the the egg guy you got it exactly the big egg guy and so you get then this story about how she dresses him up in the to make him seem like the hairy hunter yep so what you get then is this story about the hunter literally being carved out of the covenant the trickster jacob ends up getting the covenant blessing now i gotta i gotta warn you here i think the stories of the patriarchs

abraham isaac and jacob should not be as, and this is how you should act. Because they all do things not so great. But the story from the Hebraic tradition is not to emphasize the behavior of the patriarchs, but emphasize the faithfulness of God still dealing with these miscreants and still continuing to promise. That's the lesson. There's the lesson.

But embedded in there sure sounds like a little hunter and gathering, passing away, and putting forward the idea of these pastoralists that eventually become urbanites. And that's the story that wins. After all, think about it, Christianity is an inheritor or a descendant of Judaismaism and judaism is a story written by domesticators and it's a domesticating story god wants you to be domesticated and that i don't mean that in a bad way yeah but to submit yourself it's a story that comes out of the agricultural revolution it's a story written by pastoralists and urbanites it's written by agricultural

interests and it's not surprising that you don't see hunting lionized put forward as a model well but in your okay hold that thought yeah i'm only gonna i'm only gonna counter it with what i learned from the book go for it but first i got another thing i got like the coming from judy are you familiar with the hobad no the orthodox there's like a there's a thing called hobad house right and it's like some strain or sect of ultra orthodox jews okay who have a sort of ministry where they a sort of ministry to wayward or what they would regard as wayward or reform jews so anyways i used to go to these habad lectures because it's really interesting yeah okay no background no not you know go back as far as you want my family's history is not a

jewish character in it but i one day said to him considering the dietary laws like if you look in the old testament what it says like you do and don't eat. I'm like, seems to me that it rules out wild game. Like if you look in the old Testament, you can't go near wild game because it wasn't killed in the way that they say animals should be killed, which is to have them be totally healthy and have their throat cut. And in fact, it says in the old Testament, you can't eat carrion, which is taken to mean you can't eat crippled up animals. To the point where they would take the lungs out of the animal to make sure that it hadn't had any lesions from having been sick in the past and recovered from it. It's taken that literally. So you have to have a super healthy animal that you kill with a special knife and you cut its throat.

So I said, so how could a person eat wild game at all and he said i guess you have to catch in the net catch in the net and then have and then do the the sacramental like the ritualistic ritualistic slaughter of the animal is what he explained and the net thing caught me because this is the thing that that surprised me about your book and i'll explain what surprised me about this and then you can speak on it. But one of the writers in the book early on goes on to establish, he's like, listen, the intended audience of this book was intimately familiar with hunting. Because when you're writing something, you take for granted what your audience knows. And he goes

into looking at metaphor and simile in the Bible. And just to explain the metaphor, like his metaphor, he chooses as the metaphor, time is money. Okay. Now this is like the metaphor. Time is money is a, is a way of explaining time. You're like saying time. I'm going to try to define and help explain time to explain time. I'm going to use to define and help explain time to explain time. I'm going to use something we all know about and we all understand money. So here you're using like using this thing we all agree on the parameters of it to explain something that we don't that we might not. Or he's assuming is is a little bit our understanding is a little more flaccid. So then he goes on to say how many times explain how many times in the bible there are

metaphors that are like you know like when you're out netting birds or you know when you get like a bad hit on something with your bow again and again and again the way most people wouldn't even like see that this is going on and so you kind of make this assumption that they were speaking to people who they like knew would get all this hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Exactly. So this is the essay by Kenneth Bass. And again, Bass is a scripture scholar.

He's a professor at Central Texas College. And so it was just an idea he had. So we kind of developed as almost all these essays that kind of worked with the authors trying to find something they could do. So he thought he'd just kind of go back and explore. Where's hunting in the Old Testament? Because, I mean, you think about it, the hunters that are named in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible by name are a guy named Nimrod. Yeah, I forgot that. We'll get to him.

Okay, please, because I forgot to have you talk about the name of the book, Nimrod. Esau. God, Nimrod, and the world. Esau. And then the hunter who appears the most, who is named, is Yahweh. God is the most prominent hunter in the entire hebrew god as hunter god

is hunter so the question is how is god hunting and how are these people hunting so what he uses is this audience response criticism where you expect then your your audience to get the metaphor and simile and when he began to explore it he began to to track pardon the pun, things that really he'd never found in print before. That is that there is this continual, well, frequent reference to hunting culture. Now it's almost always negatively spun. And most of the time it's spun from the perspective of the prey.

So the metaphor and the simile that show up in the Hebrew Bible expects you to understand the whole idea of hunting and that you understand both sides the hunter and the hunted and it's used many times to pull out the poignancy of that relationship and to project in particular the the the the plight of the prey not so much the strength of the predator yeah and in this process he begins to look at how did they hunt in the ancient near east and yes they do use the bow which is most commonly used think about it when when god yahweh places the the the rainbow in the

sky at the noah uh covenant in genesis and he says by the way among other things i'm going to judge you how you treat each other as humans and also animals as animals treat each other but then gives permission to eat animals this is in the storyline it's the shift away from vegetarianism presumed vegetarianism he puts a weapon in the sky it's a bow in the Hebrew. It's the same word. Bow, weapon. He places a weapon. Yeah, there it is. Rainbow. Yeah, and what he doesn't say is, ain't going to be no death.

What he says is, I'm just not going to kill anybody anymore this way. But it's a bow. So what Bass does is he works his way through it. What he finds is that the Hebrew people, while they didn't hunt, they were familiar with it. And there's no cable TV. So how did they know about hunting how did they get all these metaphors the stories are still being told people on the edges must have still been hunting and as he looked in particular at the laws levitical laws

in the hebrew bible those first five books there's this book called leviticus that has all the things you should and shouldn't do as part of the cultic practice. What he finds is there's a lot of animals that are permitted for you to eat. You could only get by hunting. They're not domesticated animals. Ibis and the like, these gazelle types, these were all viable foods, but you had to, of course, hunt them. So what he recognizes is that Hebrew scriptures seem to be anti-hunting because they give you these metaphors and similes that play at the poignancy then of the prey being captured or sometimes, of course, bad people falling into their own traps, et cetera. And what he recognizes is not the weapons of hunting as we would generally think of them,

just a bow and arrow, spear, javelin, but their nets, their pits. These are the things that they could use. There would be walls where they drive animals into them, into the pit or into a region called a kite that they could capture them and net them. These were actually quite frequently referenced in the Hebrew Bible.

The Hebrew people may not have hunted that much, but they knew about hunting culture. And that whole relationship then between the hunter and the prey the hunter and the hunted was pivotal to understanding who they were who they were in relationship to each other and most importantly how humans related to their god because god was a hunter but when you say that it's it's negative. But doesn't the author explain that, well, he's not, they don't really, they don't like then go and condone agriculture either.

They sort of use it in a similar way. Like it's not like hunting's bad relative to other stuff. Think about the most, if you've read the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, probably the most poignant symbol is one tied to an animal. Now, it's not a wild animal. It's a lamb. It's a lamb led to the slaughter. It's

a sacrificed lamb. If you get to the final end of the story where the Christians win, yay, revelation, right? It's a sacrificed lamb that appears that is triumphant. So in the Hebrew Bible, there's also this focus on the killing of domesticated animals for cultic practice or for food. So hunting and animals dying and being captured, animals being led to a slaughter, ignorance of their, what he calls the target, that emotion, that relationship, that idea that was hard for them to teach, so they did it by way of this analogous language. So yeah, it's not explicitly anti-hunting, but the problem is what the writers turned to

was that point in the hunt, the trap, the capture, the animal caught in the net. At that point, I'm no longer able to flee that's what they turn to most often and that comes across as being negative what's interesting about that is it gives this idea that there was that level of sympathy and regret and empathy about animal life even then yeah exactly or can i, what did that lamb... Can you introduce yourself, Michelle? Yeah, hey, this is Michelle. You might have heard some giggles in the background. But what did that lamb represent, like symbolically?

Well, at various times, it represented a number of things. It depended upon the symbol, right, or the simile. And sometimes it represented those who were ignorant, who were going into trouble. In many cases, of course, the innocent lamb, the one that had no blemish, no spot, represented something that willingly went. And of course, most famously, it's going to be used by the Christians to represent Christ, who knowingly in some ways went to slaughter, right? Willingly gave itself up for the redemption of the accomplishment of something, a blood sacrifice. Then I'm perceiving it not so much as what Steve said, where like you're thinking about the plight of the prey. I'm seeing it as

like, this is what's at stake. And a lot of times, again, even in the hunting metaphors, there's a what's at stake as well. So you get people who dig pits to trap their neighbor. That's not literally, right? It's not like you don't want your neighbor to fall into a pit. My neighbors are pretty decent. I wouldn't want that to happen to them. You know what I mean? But this is what happens. Or most famously, of course, there's this saying that Jesus has. He's got his disciples around him.

He says, you see the sparrows? No sparrow falls without God seeing it. Now you think, what's a sparrow falling for? I always wondered about that as a kid and I heard it in church. Well, as Bass points it out, the sparrow is the cheapest animal that would be eaten you could get a sparrow for a penny yeah it even spells out what what sparrows what dead sparrows cost exactly so you could even get it like in bulk right it's like going to costco or sam's or something you get your sparrows they were cheap food notice that god doesn't stop the killing of the sparrow, the netting of the sparrow,

but he's observant of it. He sees it. He's aware of it. So what many times you get by with the assemblies is an awareness of- It's like how no turkey dies without Giannis hearing about it and where it happened. But God doesn't not empower the hunter. But think about it.

In the story of Esau and his father Isaac, it's made very clear that you don't always get game. And if you do get game, it's made clear, it's by the blessing of God. God blesses the hunter and empowers him, allows him then to find prey for his own food. So God's mixed in all. That's the God, the Nimrod in the world.

It's the idea of looking to the divine and looking in this faith or multiple faith traditions. The idea of the hunter, who's this character Nimrod. So if you will, the divine. Yes, you're gonna hit me with Nimrod now, right? Yeah, well, and then the world, an environmental approach, which I gotta say most Christians

don't pay any attention to. To the environmental approach. And most hunters, I gotta tell you. Which is so interesting that they don't. Go to a church or synagogue and find a recycled bin at the back but but you're not this counters um this counter something that was in an email i just got no it's not in this one well if you think about like the the creation story in the garden and being tenders of the garden yeah and like stewards like it seems like how are they missing that big point and this is the the huge issue uh and that's the question

of dominion and the question and this is the one that gets bounced around with multiple interpretations then you'll talk about nimrod and there's a connection i got a ton of questions about what you're talking about because you talked about Aldo Leopold. Yeah. Okay. Oh, here's the thing. The guy wrote in. This is the guy that wrote in about Paul and Saul.

All right. Goes on to say, a lot of Christians, myself included, have a passion for caring for our world and are very grateful. He goes on to say some nice stuff. All right. There's one.

Yeah. So one of the things i particularly look at my own studies um and look at in my classes but it shows up in this book not just in my essays but in some of the the latter half from the academy uh where you begin to see people who embrace an idea of hunting but they want to do it in particular way way. So for instance, you have the Roman Catholic priest. You're not hitting me with Nimrod right now. I'm weaving it back, I promise. And they're going to turn to Aldo Leopold. And so Ted Vitale, he's at St. Louis University.

You've got, we've got a pacifist from Chicago and he's going to write in particular uh he hunts uh and he hunts with a bow and the question is you know how can he as a pacifist embrace this and so he his name's greg clark he turns to aldo leopold so a number of christian writers from the academy are very much acquainted with leopold particularly sand county almanac if you've read that yeah and you know the story it's the story of the wolf right the green eyes right as as they they just kill the wolf for the sake of supposedly increasing numbers of deer and it begins to realize you can't look at hunting and at game management uh and managing resources with the idea of immediate gratification of increased populations,

you have to see it like the mountain sees it. You got to think long term. So many Christian ethicists have turned to this. But what they're encountering is the challenge of the question of dominion. So one of the problems for people who want to be positive about hunting and they're looking for role models in the bible is there's not that many okay one of the interesting characters the guy named nimrod there we go here we go i promise you follow that rabbit nice segue thank you nimrod's an interesting character he shows it just for a

few verses in genesis oh he's he's early on. He's early on. So he's after Noah, after the flood story, and he's from a descendants of Ham. Now, there's a whole story. Noah, they all get the promise, yee-haw. He starts growing grapes. He gets drunk off his ass. He gets naked.

You remember this story? I don't. Unfortunately, no. You gotta read the Hebrew Bible. Well, no, no no no no that's a lot that gets that's incest grows grapes ferments them gets drunk gets drunk and naked gets drunk and naked and his his son shows up and sees his nakedness right sees his nakedness this is good stuff in the bible there There's adultery, there's murder, there's nakedness, there's just all kinds of great stuff. They're myths.

They're stories that had, I mean, they had traction around the fireplace and the hearth. So anyhow, he gets drunk. He has a son named Ham who sees his nakedness, goes back and tells his brothers, dude, dad's naked and drunk. The other two brothers, and we don't know exactly what that means. There's all kinds of different interpretations that he saw his father.

The two other sons come in and cover the nakedness of their father. They show their respect. And for this, then, Noah curses his son Ham. Now, it gets tricky because suddenly it goes from cursing. Who did nothing to help. Who did nothing to help. It ends up shifting to cursing a descendant of his, a guy named Canaan. And then it gets ideological. And then Canaan Abel. canaan okay canaan okay so all this is nimrod is the

descendant of this cursed lineage and then light shows up just nimrod is a descendant of the cursed lineage of the guy that saw noah yeah drunk and just ran off to squeal on him. Right, right. So it's a short section. So it goes real quick. It's in Genesis chapter 10. It says, Cush, hey, great names back there. Cush begat Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one on the earth.

He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, like Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Akkad, Calna, and the land of Shinar. And from that land, he went to Assyria and built Nineveh. And it goes on. So what you get is this interesting character

who was a mighty hunter before the Lord. God saw him and seemingly empowered him. And notice it's proverbial. It's like- Before the Lord means in view of. In view of in view of lord and again interpretations vary but many scholars will say that actually he was empowered and successful because of the the the gifts from yahweh but what he does is intriguing he's a

mighty hunter before the lord but he begins civilization he starts founding cities so you have a liminal character who's powerful and at the same time then goes and establishes these major kingdoms that you become aware of in ancient Near Eastern history, most famously, of course, Assyria. So there's not much there. So Nimrod becomes an intriguing touchstone

for both people who are positive or negative about hunting and culture. If I... Dude, this is not much to go off. It's not, but... Unless you really start digging. If you read my entire chapter, you'll find there's tons. And what happens is the rabbis talk about it, and they

have their own commentary. So there's this kind of extra-biblical commentary that floats around as well. But if I were to turn to Giannis and say, dude, you're a Nimrod, I don't think it's going to be perceived as a positive evaluation definitely not no but isn't that like uh like i think if you look in the urban dictionary it talks about like elmer fudd like right because the blundering hunter right but if you were to look at a a journal a sporting journal in the early 1800s

early hunters and early hunters i should say hunters in the british and american traditions were calling themselves nimrods based on that little dinky messengers because how was that more important than esau because he was a mighty hunter before the before the lord so what you get is nimrod where there's so little there becomes either this wonderful argument against hunting. Look, he's- Twist it into the negative and then twist it into the positive.

I don't understand. Historically, what it was used is it was interpreted that he was one who was a hunter and not a hunter of animals, but a hunter of men. Okay. That he subjugated men and peoples and thus became a founder of empires. Empires, by the way, that were not democratic republics.

All right? These were tyrannical empires. Empires, by the way, that were not democratic republics, right? These were tyrannical empires. And so it's perceived then that Nimrod becomes then this symbol of oppression. And so that's what he was. And they don't give that power to him by God. They simply say that God observed him or saw him.

The positive view- Okay. Yeah. Would the Bible have let that happen that they meant hunter of man? Is there a precedent for using hunter to mean hunter of man? Well, what happens is you begin to get these commentaries. And then among other people, there's a guy by the name of Augustine. You may have heard of him. Augustine's a theologian.

In the late 300s, I think he's born in 354, and he dies in 430 AD. And he lives in North Africa. He's from a place called Hippo. Pretty cool. Carthage. And he ends up writing some really important books and commentaries. He writes an autobiography called Confessions. And he also writes a way of trying to figure out what's going on with Rome because Rome is sacked by the Visigoths in 410. And he

writes a book called basically Two Cities. So Augustine's really, really important. He also gives the West its clear view kind of about sin, original sin. They're all born busted. Thank Augustine for this. It's an Augustine worldview. But Augustine spins Nimrod as well in this perspective. And so you get this tradition that builds on other, you can say builds on other ignorances, but essentially begins to expand it. And you have the Nimrod just interpreted in many different ways. And this idea of posts, or I should say, extra biblical commentary that's floating around that many of these early Christian scholars tap into have him being in this empire founder, not necessarily a hunter. And so, I mean, you just got to scrape away at the layers going through all those primary sources, right?

And you begin to see how you work your way to this. Now, what happens is in the 1800s, while early sportsmen who are moving then towards idea of sports hunting and developing it into something that we begin to write about. So in Europe or in the US? Both. It starts in Britain in particular,

but a lot of Brits come over in the 1840s and 1850s and they bring with them hunting sporting culture. They begin to create journals like the spirit of the times is probably one of the most famous ones it's coming out from the east coast but the major writers are actually british sporting writers couldn't make it in britain to come to america and they began to push america uh sportsmen into a new perception of hunting because up to that point in time hunters were basically what we might call pot hunters they were there to hunt for meat etc the the daniel boone's who's the hero right yeah the davey crockett's even right uh sorry about the alamo but he nonetheless was a

guy on the edge so you see them moving forward yeah the kind of kind of point out real quick yeah like the difference is there because boone and crockett are often like discussed together but they're very different people they are they are really are uh boone was a market hunter so talk about a guy on the edge right right he spent his whole life chasing the edge on the edge of civilization right but he was a market hunter hunted bear meat to sell the meat hunted deer skins to sell the highs that's how he made his income crockett was attached to military campaigns and would hunt to feed people out in punitive expeditions against the indians but you got to eat right and so crockett would hire on to go and shoot meat for these

expeditions both are associated with the frontier oh yeah absolutely and this is this isn't this isn't like trying to take apart what you're saying i'm just pointing out to people like what sort of hunting they were up to to be like they were commercial individuals pot hunters meat hunters market hunters well what you get here is just basically hunters um and you don't get the whole idea of pot hunters until you have sport hunters so what sport hunters began to do they invite the distinction exactly so rather than so it's like we were talking about earlier there's you can be a hunter but there's a better way to be a hunter right so and so today we have the same distinctions we have things like meat hunters and we have

trophy hunters right and then how does that work out that's another ethical thing we can show that off to the side but we come back to it by the way it's a great book uh came out around the year 2000 2001 it's out of print now but uh i encourage anyone to read it's called hunting in the american imagination it's by a guy named daniel justin herman he's a professor i quote him often do you good yeah all right so he develops this distinction i've quoted him now and then yeah i don't want to oversell it um i mean there's some things i don't agree with but he really does something pivotal in the discussion of hunting cultures in america it's his dissertation but he wasn't a hunter someone basically said oh you

don't have a topic here right on this and it worked and i'm so thankful he did this he laid the groundwork but he describes how these british hunters come over they develop a sporting culture by way of particularly periodicals and americans as we continue to push the frontier further and further west take up this sport hunting. Can I add another thing in here, man? Go for it. Boone's people were from, his family was British. Not at all hunters when they came.

Well, they discovered hunting in a very practical way. So these people that you're talking about are upper, like Boone's people were working people. These British sport hunters are the genteel. It's 1840, 1850, particularly when they come to America. So 100 years after Boone's people. But these are wealthy individuals. They've been doing this for centuries in Britain.

But in America, we see this cultural shift towards sport hunting. They're embracing, even if they're not wealthy they embrace this idea uh so for instance there's this is this poem i found in spirit of the uh spirit of the world uh spirit of the times uh from i think it's from 1852 and of course i do texas history as well and uh it's it's scattering the morning dew and it's by an anonymous author and it's from 1852 so think about it's just like it's about eight years before the civil war it's scattering the morning dew, and it's by an anonymous author. And it's from 1852, so think about it. It's like eight years before the Civil War. It's written along the mouth of the Brazos, if I remember correctly, so at the Gulf Coast there in Texas.

And it's a bunch of guys talking about getting drunk, and tomorrow they're going to go hunt. But it's sport hunting. Now, 1852, Texas has only been a state for seven years it's only been a republic and then a state for 20 some odd they haven't even vanquished the comanche comanches are are fixed the gang territory during the civil war they're going to push in back into central texas so texas is just really east texas in the coastal region but they're already distinguishing themselves as sport hunters and And they're writing poetry and getting it published in New York

for the journals there, the periodicals that are coming out. So we have this birth of sport hunting and they turn to Nimrod as their hero. He's a gifted hunter. It's funny. Why not Esau? Because he's hairy and red.

Think about that one for a minute. You're talking about racism and things that are. But no, yeah, so they. You're talking about racism and things that are going on with Native Americans, et cetera. You can see why they wouldn't. No, we're not Esau. We're Nimrod. We're mighty hunters. It's a mighty hunter.

Mighty hunter. And that's all going to look at that one adjective. That is it. And that's how Nimrod. Now, Nimrod then becomes a reaction. again, a pejorative, an insult, because it begins to be seen, particularly in Britain, but it comes over to America in the 20th century. People would be called Nimrods, but they were being seen then as a bunch of country gentlemen

who wanted to be like the wealthy of previous centuries, who rode the hounds, chased the fox, and they were these new gentry. They're a bunch of rednecks rubes country folk who basically are trying to act like gentlemen and so they would be mocked then as oh you nimrods and you begin to have just as you have the use of the name as this positive uh gnomon if you will taken on by characters you also have this pejorative that the critics on the outside are using also economically yeah becomes like the term fake news where you take something and just turn it around on itself yeah and so of course elmer fudd right thank you let's

personify hunters as idiots as rubes as people who can't actually get the rabbit and so you get the fud kind of approach um the nimrod yeah man nimrod gets a lot of traction the thing is and if you read my essay in the book he's bit he gets traction not just recently he gets traction for centuries yeah there's not much there but you know what if you're trying to make an argument it helps if there's not a lot of evidence you know i mean yeah you can make it what an argument, it helps if there's not a lot of evidence. You know what I mean? Yeah. You can make it what you want to make it.

It's kind of like what you're always saying about Laramie and who's like the great Western... Oh, the mountain man Laramie? Yeah, he got everything named after him. Shows up out West, promptly gets killed and stuffed down through a hole in the ice in a beaver pond and winds up with half the damn state named after him. No one knows like no one knows

where this dude came from nothing's known about him it's just that somewhere someone's like oh and some dude named laramie couldn't find him sure enough found him dead in the beaver pond yep the less you know the more you know it just winds up it just gives you a lot of room to run it does it does see now there's a question i wanted to ask you toward the end i almost want to ask it to you now but it's like it's too big of a question tell me, now, there's a question I wanted to ask you toward the end, but I almost want to ask it to you now, but it's like, it's too big of a question. Tell me if this is too big of a question. All right.

Because there's a lot of other stuff from the book that I want to get into, but I need to ask this. In your world, in the world of biblical scholarship, see, this is a hard question to ask because it's like, you need to have it be this way or else there wouldn't be biblical scholarship. Is it discussed how the Bible is too open to individual interpretation? Meaning, there are those who look at the Bible and the main thing they see is, by God, I should persecute gay people. Some people look at the Bible and they see I should do everything in my power to alleviate suffering like how right how is it so big and so open to interpretation so what you're asking me

right now is you see this landmine would you like to step on it okay no okay let me find let me send it okay how could it be yeah okay let's not even go big let's go small yeah nimrod's good how could it be like what do you see when you begin to see that that some people in some time because let's let's bring it even more narrow. I'm sure that when that was being told around the campfire as a story to explain who we are, what we believe, what we ought to do, there probably was not a lack of clarity around how you're supposed to feel about Nimrod.

Okay, so let me touch it and we'll see. I don't want to go too far with it. This is a huge question. Yes, probably the biggest question. It is the big question. And it's a question. Yeah, okay, it's a big question. Let's see what go too far with it. This is a huge question. Yes, probably the biggest question. It is the big question. And it's a question. Yeah, okay, it's a big question. Let's see what I can do with it.

In my American history courses. Can I re-ask my question real quick? Yeah. I'm going to read it. I want to make sure it's clear because I've muddied the waters. When it was a narrative, when it was a narrative that people were telling in real time

to explain who we are, what we believe, what our traditions are, and it was being impactful in the intended way, do you feel that it was confusing then or is that not answerable? I think it's unanswerable. Not answerable. I think it's unanswerable. I mean, the Bible itself is a composite composed for centuries. And at least this is the perspective of historians and biblical scholars today.

And as a result of that, many times the beginning, the origins have been lost. We don't know how it started now historical criticism many times tries to work its way back to figure out where this came from how it originated what its import was then and why it finds its way into the stories in the hebrew bible what there's a guy named Velhausen in the 19th century. He puts forward something called the documentary thesis. And what he argues is if you look, for instance, just at the Pentateuch, the first five books we've been talking about. What's the word? Pentateuch?

Pentateuch. Five books. Genesis. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Okay. Is that the Old Testament? No, you got like a ton more. A ton more books in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible. Now, in those first five books in particular, what you see then are various layers of sources being brought together. The sources themselves many times were composites of oral traditions, maybe written traditions that

were being brought together. Now he defines them. He particularly looks and he's saying, I think that these patterns are there and that these sources can be looked at chronologically. So famously, if I can do this right, it's J-E-P-D. I think that's right, or it's P-D. I have to look it up. So what he has is he has the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly Source, and the Deuteronomist. So what he looks at is he looks at the scriptures and he looks like, for instance, what name is used for God. So in Genesis 1, you see one name for God.

In Genesis 2, you see a different name for God. Well, what does that hint? You have two different creation stories what this hints to the scholar who looks at it from a critical point of view is you have two different stories from two different sources they even call god two different names one's elohim plural of l or god the other is yahweh this particular personal name that the hebrew people had for God. So these seem to be two different traditions that existed, that were pulled together by an editor at various times, maybe multiple editors. And they're brought together because they're seemingly

tight enough to communicate the story, a salvation story perhaps, right? But at the same time, what you get then many times are where these stories originated and how they started and what their original meaning was. One argument is, if you read the story of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is that really these actually weren't father, son, and grandson. They were three different stories about founders of tribes

that as the Israelites came together, Hebrews came together, they said, well, let's put them together. And somebody began to, the stories began to grow and meld. And surely then Abraham had a son whose name was Isaac, and Isaac had a son whose name was Jacob.

And the stories get melded together. Well, when you meld all that together, assuming you don't have divine inspiration, it gets complicated and meaning gets lost. But the assumption is that there was divine inspiration. And that's what you get, is the argument of these faith communities that brought these texts together.

The Hebrew people who brought their texts together and then the Christian community that took centuries. By the way, the Bible that we have that is the New Testament today was not really kind of brought together in the arrangement we have today to almost 400. It takes basically 350 years for the New Testament to get there. There are books that Christians in the early centuries held as being inspired and guiding that are not in your Bible.

Books like the book of James was troublesome because the books associated, the letters associated with Paul seemed to be in juxtaposition to the themes that were found in the book of James. Revelation. Revelation almost didn't make the cut because if you've read the book of Revelation, who knows what it means? That was written by a guy in prison on the island, right? Right, John on Patmos. But the point is, it's so out there that many christians like this sounds like good stuff but i'm not sure what it means it could be interpreted a lot of different ways i'm not sure we want to keep it in the canon so the canon takes forever for it to be

formed well basically 350 years the hebrew canon it depends on the interpreter but 1200 years for the hebrew canon to be finalized so So your question is excellent. How can you have different interpretations? And the answer is huge, and that is you're going to. So let me do it this way. I'll give you a short example to show how complex this issue is. I teach American history. Yeah, I know I have degrees in theology, but I made my way over to history. And the historians kind of take me in. They slap cultural historian tab on me and they're like, hey, you're good. Stay over in your corner. All right. So I teach American history and I focus in particular on the various interpretations of freedom in the years leading up to the Civil War in particular.

But you look at slavery. The issue is, and it's a thesis that was put out there by a number of historians, and I think it's got a lot of value, is that what you see is that in America, the interpretation of slavery as America is, and I'm going to put quotes around this because please hear the quotes, Christian nation. That is, the myth that ties America together is that of Christianity. Ooh, I don't think that wrong. But the point is, that story of Christian story, even people who would never go to a church

were still familiar with the biblical stories. I mean, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, if you look like, the founding of the Euro-American tradition was guided. They knew the stories. Yeah. And the morality was defined many times by the stories that they heard or at least it was interpreted what you find is that christianity particularly the bible i should say the bible loses its traction in american culture as a document that is an authority for making policy and determining

the most important issues in the 1850s. And it's not Darwin's Origin of Species that kills it, which comes out in 1858. It's the problem that the Bible failed to properly answer with one answer only, is slavery right or wrong? And what you get then are very, I would argue argue good arguments that say slavery is a biblical institution that god allowed it to be formulated and created in the israelite communities and that god even set rules on it it looked in leviticus etc and that the new testament provided no caveats regarding the extension of slavery forward. In fact, there's a little book that no one ever uses.

It's called the Book of Philemon or Philemon. Get bored in church, go read it. You can do it. It just takes a minute. And it's written to a guy who's lost a slave, a fugitive slave. He ran away, became a Christian, came to Paul. Paul sends him back.

My buddy Paul? Yes, be your buddy Paul. Paul sends him back. My buddy Paul? Yes, be your buddy Paul. Paul sends him back to his owner, who's Philemon. The slave is a guy named Onesimus. And says, basically, look, Philemon, you treat him like a Christian brother. And if you can't, you send him back to me. But Paul never says don't. Well, Paul never says free him.

Keep him as your slave, but treat him like a Christian. If you can't do that, send him back. So what many of the Southern theologians argued was, and they were politicians as well, is that slavery had a biblical foundation. Northern, increasingly, rabbis and Christian ministers began to argue that the, particularly the New Testament, offered critiques, notably that Jesus came to set

the captives free, give sight to the blind, and that the golden rule was this ultimate challenge to slavery. Why would you enslave another man or woman when you wouldn't want that done to you? So the spirit of the New Testament was against slavery.

So by the time we get to the 1850s, the nation is ripping itself apart the compromisers like henry clay john c calhoun's not a compromiser but he's dying a whole generation of men that had held the nation together over this issue we had the missouri compromise of 1820 where we keep compromising the compromise of 1850 brings california in and all those southwest territories there's nobody there. And no longer does the Bible give a valid or acceptable answer to the huge question, because there's multiple interpretations about the most critical thing.

If you want to put it this way, the country's facing is a black man, a man as in all men are created equal. And if it can't answer that simple question, is the black man a man and is slavery a valid institution or invalid institution? What good is it for making public policy? And so that example demonstrates how our nation itself, which was at least to some historians, 40% evangelical at the time and turned to the Bible as its main authority, couldn't find an answer

or better way of saying it, found multiple answers. And then they go out and kill more of each other than we lost in all of our other wars combined. Somewhere between 600 and 640,000 men. Now there's a great historian. He's just retired his name is mark noel he was at uh wheaton and then at notre dame he uses a line and i'm going to

paraphrase i'm gonna do a horrible job he says basically the matter is decided by the great theologians william tecumseh sherman and philip sheridan if you know those names your buffalo stories you know those names they're not theologians. What they are is they're men of war. And so the decision about how to interpret the Bible was decided on the battlefield. God, if God is a God of time and history and providence, determined what was the right interpretation. Yeah.

Yeah. He did it through a proxy. He did it through a proxy. Which is not surprising because he does a lot of things through proxy. Yeah, so it seems. So, yeah, so scripture has been interpreted in many different ways. And for our own nation, it points then to a major, major issue. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX x club y'all man okay can we back up now sorry what's that okay you talk about perceptions of hunters or when i say you talk about i mean people yeah like

your book is structured and people you have talk about i mean people yeah like your book is structured and people you have you know people that are contributing to your book this idea the perceptions of hunters comes up but do you feel that there's a religious perception of hunters that categorically differs from a secular perception of hunters meaning attack okay our attack attack hunting from a religious perspective that's probably a better way to get what i'm getting at because i could do it very well i could attack hunting from a secular perspective because i'll just go borrow all the secular arguments i know that are out there about right suffering of any form and sentient beings and on and on and on.

Implications of wildlife management, how hunting has been unregulated. Hunting caused all these catastrophic losses in the wildlife world, on and on. I could do it all day long. I understand all the arguments. Don't agree with them all. There's a lot of caveats but i get them so hit for me what a religious critique of hunting would look like okay so let me answer let me answer a question you didn't ask and then try and get at it okay so why is it even a valid question why should we be

asking do christian hunters have or why did why do we even want to talk about them did they have a different worldview well i think it's i think it's important are you asking me or no i'm saying have or why did why do we even want to talk about them did they have a different world view well i think it's i think it's important are you asking me no i'm saying that's i'm going to answer that's rhetorical sorry so sorry in one of the chapters uh it's called hunters of the past and present all right i look at some sociological instruments so in other words they went out and did questionnaires but all kinds of things but one of the things that they point out is if you go through and i analyze the data is that hunters in America, not surprising, of course, we just had the new report that came out then. Hunters in America are just – we're just losing numbers.

We're losing not only percentages, but we're losing – we're losing hunters just in the last two years, dramatic loss. And so the question is why is this a culture we need to save? How can we encourage the identity or formation of an identity of this culture? And this, by the way, this is one of the underlying objectives of my book, is I want hunters to realize they have an identity. They need to figure it out. But there's no way for this culture to survive if they don't have a common identity. They don't identify who they are, what they are, what they're doing, and in relationship both to the rest of the world and the natural world as well. So you've got to formulate. But by looking at the data that came out and analyzing it, one of the fascinating things i discovered was that according to the questionnaires

while hunters are dropping in number hunters that remain are increasingly religious now that doesn't mean they go to church all the time and they're the questionnaires address this many of them are just what i would call religious. And that is that they identify themselves as being religious, believe in a God, go to service occasionally, maybe once a year, et cetera. So what you get then is this very large number of hunters every year in a decreasing minority that are overtly religious.

So if we're gonna talk about hunters in America, we need to recognize that more and more hunters as the numbers we're going to talk about hunters in america we need to recognize that more and more hunters as the numbers drop are going to be religious who continue now the question is if there's going to be a debate about hunting whether it's a valid enterprise or not then there's going to have to be not only philosophical or ethical kind of secular arguments but if there are people who see themselves as doing something that is religiously approved divinely appropriated you're going to have to argue against that as well and a secular argument may not cut to the roots of what they see as maybe their prerogative or even their

responsibility okay all right so why do hunters see the world differently? The answer I think is complex. The problem I find with the Christian hunter is to still align from Mark Knoll as well from a different book he wrote called Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, where he said, the problem with the evangelical mind is there is no evangelical mind. What I would argue is the problem with the evangelical mind is there is no evangelical mind what i would argue is the problem with the christian hunter is the christian hunter doesn't think what do you mean i mean just that they don't think in other words what i found when i interviewed christian hunters is they didn't think about being christian and a hunter only a minority did

so while they identify tying the two things together no so they're not. So while they identify as being... You're not tying the two things together. No, so they're not. So while they supposedly have a worldview that should be dominated by their identity as a Christian in particular, they don't actually take that Christianity and think about it in an enterprise that many of them choose as being, yeah, their father,

perhaps their wife, their spouse, their mother, whatever they happen to be. But the next thing they're going to put on there is, and I'm a hunter. But their Christian probably was before that, but they don't think about it. And so should they? And so I'm going to give you a quote here from a book just came out. It's called Knowing Creation, Perspectives in Theology, Philosophy, and Science by a guy named Andrew Torrance. He's the editor. And Thomas McCall. I like to think this is spectacular

because I actually taught Andrew Torrance when he was in his ninth grade. And so everything he says that's brilliant belongs to me. He's a lecturer in Scotland at, I think where he's at. He's at St. Andrews University. Okay, so, but he makes this quote

and he's talking about science, but it's applicable to the Christian hunter. The Christian, he writes, believes that the natural world is created, ordered, and maintained by God who acts in its history in special ways. As I've been arguing, there's no reason for the Christian scientist, nothing from an answer, but in her capacity as a scientist to think that maintaining those beliefs would get in the way of the scientific task. She should, and now I'm summarizing, do her job as a scientist, but she still needs to do it as a Christian

because, now skipping a page, furthermore, the Christian believes that God is actively involved in history, creating a faith that can serve as a witness to God's creative, providential, and redemptive activity. For this reason, there should be a difference between the way in which the Christian scientist, insert historian, pardon me, hunter here, and the naturalistic scientist approach and interpret the structure behavior in history in the natural world. If a Christian is truly a Christian and believes that there is a world that has been created, shaped, has a narrative that's

tied to a God that is whatever they see in scripture, then they should act accordingly. So for the critic who turns to the Christian hunter and wants to argue ethics, they should, if they're arguing with an intelligent and reflective Christian hunter, turn then to ethical questions, arguments that challenge them, the basis of that Christian interpretation. What I discovered is Christians see hunting a lot of different ways. And actually from critics, they would see it many times just like kind of slavery. And that is what you get are people who say, I look at the story of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2,

and what I see is that humans are empowered to have dominion to be not just simply, if you will, cultivators of the earth, but to subdue it. And therefore, I can do with it as I will. I find these people don't recycle. All right. Now, not all of them do so without thinking.

Perhaps one of the best arguments I've seen is by a theologian and a biologist by the name of Stephen Van Tassel. And he's extraordinarily erudite. He teaches at a school in Britain, but also works in the West here in America, dealing with rodents, by the way. He deals with, his shtick is how do you kill things or a pest? So he does it from a very erudite approach, but it's rare.

The problem is when you begin to question how then humans should relate to the natural world if you believe in the Christian view that somehow the incarnation of Jesus Christ as the divine now within the human, somehow giving both approval to the divine creation that we know, however that happened, but also that the sacrifice of that lamb on the cross somehow brings about a new reality, does that new reality of the crucifixion

and the resurrection change how we should relate to the natural world? Does it bring about a new covenant? Does it bring about a new relationship to animals, to the flora and fauna of the earth? If it does, and particularly many times, critics of hunting turn to the book of Isaiah and they see this kind of messianic

where the lamb lies down with a lion, that this is the way it was and this is the way it should be, they're gonna argue that you are a new creation in Christ. So the world also participates in that covenant, just like the world participated with the covenant in Noah's covenant with God. So it wasn't just Noah who was going to be protected from the flood, but the earth was, and the animals are going to be protected from that kind of flood and destruction. So that covenant extends then to

the entire world, natural world, animals, et cetera. So stop killing animals. Now that's a horribly simplified view, but if you're a creation, you're creation in Christ, quit sinning, live properly and appropriately with your fellow humans and live appropriately in a nonviolent way with the flora and fauna around you. But the problem is, the reality is, a number of things. One is, does that mean then that I have to make large cats?

Vegetarians? Is the natural world a view, a window through which I can see the divine plan? That's been a long-held claim of Christianity. It's called natural theology, that I can look at the world and I can see in its magnificence and its complexity and its diversity the hand of a divine and providential divine hand working in this world. That even if I don't know or can't see a God, the magnificence, the beauty that I see when I see a waterfall or a mountain when I'm sitting out there not having seen any game animals moves me to what we might call a religious experience.

The idea that there's something greater than me, a greater than human reality. So while I may not know that there's three in one trinity, I know that there's this thing, this greater than thing, greater than me thing that has provided, that has created me, brought me into being in some fashion, whether an evolutionary theory or whatever you have. So if there's a new creation, is therefore the predatory world that is the reality, that all things consume all things. We die and if they can get to the steel, they're gonna end up worms are gonna get me, et cetera.

We all get eaten. Is that not really God's plan? And if that's so, isn't this world then something that's not really the creator gods? Isn't this, and it's agnostic if you read, for instance, the essay by Nathan. And the question is, where do we go from here? Is the argument that we're supposed to be a new creation and that we're supposed to see the world, the natural world, a new way, live with humans and animals

and a new covenant of peace, tranquility, and of love, most importantly, does that deny the world we know? What's the answer? I don't know. I just write about this stuff. No, for me, it's a difficult question because i think about this and i look around and i see i see that the world does consume it just does and i as a hunter feel i'll admit, euphoria when I am, if you want to call it successful, when I kill.

And at the same moment, I feel absolute guilt and loss when I look at that which was once beautiful, no longer moving. I feel pride when I feed friends and family with the meat that I've taken. I even have pride when I look at the furs on my floor or the, I don't have any great trophies, but the taxidermy mounts on my wall. I tell the stories about those things. And for that moment, I mean, it's kind of sacramental. That animal lives again when I tell that story. It's why to me, taxidermy mounts, by the way,

mean nothing if you find them in a junk store because there's no story attached to them. There's no reality that's no longer being associated with them. It's just a plastic form with fur stretched on it. But for me, all these things are going on. And as I read the scriptures, they don't answer, to be honest, a lot of great questions. There's challenges, but there's a multiplicity of responses for me. What I take away from it is I look to the natural world. I look to what moves me as a hunter who

sees himself as one of his, you know, I hope when they put my gravestone, it'll be something like, hopefully, you know, faithful husband, good friend, teacher, hopefully good teacher, and hunter. Those four things would encapsulate who I am in so many different ways. I've hunted for grades. I've hunted for all kinds of facts and data in history, and I've hunted for animals. But with that moment of gain, there comes loss. And I think that I can find an argument for hunting in the Bible, but it requires a hunting that is responsible, that is reflective, that looks then to the health of the entire, go Leopold on you, biotic community. And that my failure to be responsible in both the kill, the hunt, and for simply trying to find the good of this earth.

If I fail to do that, that's a sin. Because that's a crime against what I know to be true and the God who gave this beauty in this world. So in the act of killing, consuming, I hope that I'm bringing life. And there's an article or a chapter in it by a guy named Jim Tantalo. And Jim argues that even in the tragedy of death, I'm transformed if I'm reflective as a hunter. I'm transformed because in the moment of death of killing something, I live more than I lived before because I recognize the reality

of death for me to come. For him to come. Yeah, for the hunter. Because just as I kill and just as I consume with joy, with poignancy, with sorrow, so I too will be consumed, whether by aberrant cells, clogged arteries, or something more violent. It's our end. For the Christian, the hope is that there's something more. Because the covenant that embraced humanity in the very beginning of Genesis 1, that embraces humanity in the one with Noah in Genesis, then is also the covenant that is going to embrace Christians in, if you will, in the sacrifice of Christ and resurrection, but also in revelation.

All those covenants also embrace the entire creative world. It's extended to the earth, to the soil, to the animals, to the vegetation. There's a redemptive process that goes on. And right now, this is what we have. If I fail to be responsible, reflexive, serious. When you say this, you mean this earth is what we have. This earth right now.

There's something that should also be going on. So that leads me to diatribes in class about other things. But yeah. I want to make sure I'm getting your last point. That you say right now, this is what we have. Meaning that you would feel it's not that that one can't just trash this knowing that you have the afterlife to fall back on when i was a kid in church we sing this song this world is not my home i'm just passing through my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels

beckon me from heaven's open door, and I can't feel at home in this world anymore. It's a great moving song. And I sang it for, you know, when I was in church as a kid. But now I think about it, that's not right. This is a created world for me. It is a window to the divine plan. Yes, it's predatory, but at the same time, out of death comes new life, whether it be Christ's story or what we see in the world around us. And so this is my home. I'm not just passing through. If this is where I have my beginning, whatever is beyond this life has to be built on this experience right here, right now.

This is where I'm being formed. This is where I'm finding truth. There may be truth beyond, but this is what I've got. And it can't just simply be a waste of time. So this world is my home. I'm not passing through. my treasures are here and beyond have you ever heard anyone talk about extinction meaning that through human actions we would drive species to extinction have you ever heard anyone talk about that and talk about Noah's Ark?

Oh, yeah. The pains that people went through to make sure that we were not losing animals. Oh, whoa. That's interesting. Oh, I see what you're saying. No, I never have. It's like, no, we will save two of everything. Yes.

And if it's Mr. Roosevelt, I'll shoot it and I'll put it in a museum the elk are disappearing but dadgummit i saw when i shot it we'll put it in the bronx zoo that's not an idea you've ever heard anyone bring i haven't actually now it could be because i just don't read widely enough but i haven't um i got another one for you yeah here's knowing this is from this is from your own um this is like an idea that comes up in your own book yeah how can a christian reconcile the tension of embracing the bloody wild i think that's your words while finding salvation in a domesticating religion found by pastures it's a hard question and if you notice i don't answer it oh you don't i don't not me personally um is there even attention there

like do you be like i love the wild i look like the fecundity and blood of it all right um does that mean you're turning your back on this pastoral history of the early Christians, right? Or pastoralists. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminism reached into theology and women began to want to look for their place in Christianity. The problem is Christianity is a patriarchal religion and it had been in patriarchal societies.

So what they had to do is they had to go look and they went back and they found women as best they could who were influential in their own realms, who thought amazing things. And there was this kind of revisionist history. As a hunter, and I read a religion that's based upon agriculture, domestication, and urbanite, one could argue, at least since the end of the medieval period.

And even then, prior to that, the only people who got to hunt, officially, of course, were royalty and the nobility. So that brief period, I have to look for those answers to the question, is there a tension between my religion or not and i try and find those examples where there's not tension because in in the book there's a guy that comments an american observer goes out to the edge okay the land of boone and points out that man

guys that get out on the edge morally, like in a religious sense, they fall apart. Yeah, that was always... These guys that flirt with the wilderness. Puritans didn't like that. Puritans were agricultural. Let's destroy the forest, right? Burn the trees so we can have great agricultural land. Hunters were always problematic.

They weren't in church on Sunday. They hung out with the Native Americans. They were always on the edge they didn't come uh confine themselves to behavior that society approved of does does that mean that they could be not christian it depends how christian was interpreted at the time it meant being on church on sunday well little house on the prairie they're damn sure christian there's a there's a thing i mentioned i feel like i talked about this in my buffalo book but i can't remember and it's a letter when so when the conquistadors are in the american southwest yeah and they're you know subjugating native americans and trying to introduce them to like how you're

supposed to be someone writes back a letter to spain complaining about the hunters saying like i don't get it we've given them livestock we've given them home we taught them how to farm they have all the stuff here like all the components are in place but these people get wind of a herd of buffalo somewhere and they are gone and it doesn't make any sense it's almost like they want to be doing this right i we've eliminated the need yeah so why if you could go buy beef at your corner store or at your big box they're like what was what is the allure what exactly is the problem with you people and again i think that most anyone who's hunted and is again reflective they're looking at things

would argue that there's so much more than the acquisition of meat and hunting and i think some would argue that it's a religious experience. Now, by religious, I don't mean like you, you know, it's like going to church and getting a homily. But in that moment of, again, the pursuit, the shot, the death, and it may not be a prompt death, but it hopefully was short and humane, that there is a sense of something greater than you, a power that's something greater than you, a power that's more powerful than you, a greater than human reality.

And if you encounter that, you wanna encounter it again. I was at St. Paul's Cathedral in London one time and we were visiting and there was gonna be a service that evening and a choir was practicing as adults and children. And the place was fairly empty and they were practicing and it was a religious experience. I was moved out of myself. What took place, the sounds. It was intoxicating. It was goose-bumply.

I don't know what to call it. It was something truly magnificent. And I wanted to recapture that every single time. That's a religious experience. It's a sense of something greater than us. It's a sign, I would argue, that there's a divine. And I think hunters, if they are reflective and not just simply pumping fists and slapping

hands when they have success, or even when they fail, when they simply surrender themselves to nature, will begin to hopefully access that religious experience. So for me, that's addictive. If I went to a concert and i thought man that was the greatest high not from you know contact high but high wouldn't i want to go to another concert yeah if i get a sense of the divine wouldn't i want to do that again in a reality that you can't access by eating burgers here or even going to church because doesn't church essentially just try and grab that experience from many different types of denominations and like, let's reproduce it. Let's have this music. Let's have this choral

arrangement. Let's have this sermon. Let's have the great vaults right above us with a magnificent building that tries to make you feel that religious experience. You can't be religious all the time. You just can't be. You can't always live in it, but hunting to me is a religious experience. Do some people, sorry to interrupt, do some people have religious experiences at rock concerts? I'm not going to... That's a whole different book.

No, no, but again, but not from the high, but I feel like live music can... Transport you. Sure, it can give you what you just described. Exactly. What I might get when I'm out there on a successful or successful turkey hunt. Yeah. What's that, Michelle?

I was listening to Rogan's podcast the other day, and he had on Howard Bloom, who's this fascinating, just certifiable genius. And he has taught- Harold Bloom? No, he's dead. Howard Bloom. Howard Bloom, okay. and he has talked no he's dead um howard bloom um specifically has researched these experiences that you are speaking of this religious experience this greater than you moment and like this cohesion um that can happen in mass groups also such as concerts uh rock concerts and how they

just grab hold of you and create this moment you'd like to replicate. You saw that in certain speeches, like he brought up Hitler and talking about how the fervor of grabbing that audience and people just get addicted to that experience. So absolutely. Yeah. And the question is- In that case, the experience of scapegoating. Is the experience then something that is a valid experience? All right, so that's where you begin to be reflective. Is what I'm doing something that is appropriate,

is right, is redeeming, is fulfilling, is making me and the world, this is a utilitarian approach of sorts, but making us better, making us happy. I think the Christian hunter and the hunter in general can make arguments like that, but they have to be careful. I think when you mentioned

how you have to be that reflective, I almost see it as achieving like a sense of purity to the moment. So I think there is like validity in that. Yeah, I mean, you see that in some of the, David Peterson's famous for doing this, right? So there's like hunters. The hunter and writer, David Peterson.

Yes, exactly. So there's a hunter and then there's the right hunter who is reflective. He draws a lot of lines. Oh, he does. And there's a lot of hunters who aren't hunters, right? Might just be one. It may be him only, but that kind of of approach and so you begin to draw those lines because

you begin to say there is a better way because there's a better way that makes you better the world better whether that be a traditional hunter with a bow whether you keep seeking the greater challenge where you always allow of course fair right? You always allow the animal out. You only hunt public land. For many people don't have that option. So you find the other challenge, that pursuit of, again, the experience, but also something that you think makes you better,

transforms you into the better version of you and hopefully extends that then to the world around you. Yeah, that's important. Yeah. That makes you better than you. Than right now. Yeah, not you better than you. Than I right now. Yeah. Not you better than everyone else.

No, no, no. It makes you a better person relative to your own experience. Right. Although Leopold would argue, are you making the biotic community better? Are you making it healthy? Because then, by the way, that's going to have repercussions for you down the line. Yeah. Ethically, are you being, again, are you following fair chase?

Are you seeking the good of the population, whether it be trimming down the numbers or allowing those numbers to recuperate? As a Christian, are you doing something that seems to be within the divine framework set up? Are you showing appreciation for the life that was there? You couldn't make that life, but you just took it. Are you showing appreciation for the life that was there you couldn't make that life but you just took it are you showing appreciation for the creator for the founder if you will are you

recognizing the gift that was that animal do you continue to give sharing i think so very important game dinners i think are really pivotal in sacramental events for christian yeah that's an interesting thing that i had never thought of you talk it up was like that there's a sacramental quality to hunting well there's nothing like cooking your own food but there's nothing like cooking it for someone else yeah and if you do it in the context of this is a gift from the creator how much more so and respect the life that was there i know i got guys who won't do taxidermy, right? They won't have a mount. I disagree with that because I think I continue to give life

to that experience by telling the story, but I understand and respect that because they do it out of respect for this beautiful creature. They choose not to have mounts. They choose not to have mounts. Out of respect. Right, out of respect.

Yeah, there are, it's silly to me, it's silly to me when someone's like oh i leave the antlers in the woods because i'm like but why not appreciate the whole thing exactly right here's this thing that you could always have right but i'd be like but you know like i'm open i don't agree with it but i think that people arrive at these decisions in a way that that come from meaning and come from someplace honest. So whether I look at some of these things that people do in order to acknowledge the importance of what happened,

that it's not light, right? And people come up with these personal ceremonies. A lot of them, I look, I'm like, not for me, but I'm glad you did something and I'm glad you arrived somewhere. Because what we both see is that something important is happening here. So I understand the motivation. All right, man.

Michelle, we're going to get around and make sure everyone knows what the book is. But Michelle, do you got any wrap-up-ers, concludersers concluders goals and thoughts oh my gosh this has been super interesting um more questions than answers and really just i would like to just conclude by saying that i can't wait to read your book and you know really kind of try to wrap my head around you know my motivations and i've thought a lot about that aspect um my motivations for hunting and um just what's going to keep me getting out there and i do see a lot of alignment with kind of what the message you've shared here today so thank you great my turn yeah or i can say a couple things uh but i found what stuck and it was early on there's a lot to take in today but the uh the fact that we've always been marginalized a marginal group

and you saw dude yeah so like it's kind of like we've been hanging on for two thousand how many years ten thousand ten thousand years well it'd be like yeah like a secular understanding would be the agriculture the advent of the agriculture so 4000 bce that's when we began having neolithic agriculture since then hunters have always been on the edge you've been yeah so for six thousand i didn't know that for that. For however long you define human history, it was strictly hunter-gatherer cultures. And then all of a sudden, some guy's like, man,

you know that grass that we're always bringing home and then we like eat the grass and then we go defecate down in the creek bed and now that grass is growing. Dude, I'm telling you, look, there's a lot more there

than there is everywhere else. The minute someone made that connection, it was the beginning of the end man or you know that deer i found and brought home well check it out he's still here and had a baby and he still is hanging around but i just feel like it's relevant to today because we have this conversation and it seems like there's this these fanning of the flames is like it's the end because we're pushed to the but it's true it's there right i think people have been saying that for so long but sure right

but what i'm what i'm saying is they've been saying it for so long because it's the truth and maybe that's just because that's where we're this group is supposed to be and as always has been yeah oh yeah sure so it's fine there's nothing to worry about because we've been to ten percent for ten thousand years yeah i think like the story of i've said where i thought that the story of western civilization could be interpreted as a story of the gradual depersonal the the gradual depersonalization of your food um but yeah i don't know what you're saying right they had it was it's been yeah it's it's a slow seemingly never-ending death but yeah but it's maybe it's not that maybe it's just like that's the our place this was

just yeah it seems like it seems to be always dying but But that means hunting is going to adapt. We adapted to the life of a frontier by 1890. Frontier is gone in America. Alistair Duray, he died, unfortunately, just after the book came out. He was from Scotland, and he would go shooting a professor at Sterling. But his type of hunting, as he'd send me pictures of him and the guys, was radically different than my type of hunting when I sent him pictures from me from Texas.

But he was still hunting, even with the restrictions in Britain and all that regarding firearms. They still found a way for his dogs, for shooting birds, et cetera. Definitely on the edge, at least of society, if not physically on the edge. Yeah, I think that the salvation or the path forward was clearly articulated as long ago as it began to be articulated by leopold of what um of what role this this discipline will have in the future i just don't know that hunting will be as democratic as it is so in britain wild pigs but who gets onto professional hunters the hunt for cities etc hunt at night suppressors night vision so still be hunters but the question is what will be the population of those hunters yeah that's a battle

of the war yeah that's a portion of the war that will need to be fought i don't mean to get too martial and start using a bunch of martial okay here's my concluder you are you good on concluding thank you uh i understand i feel that there should be a law that academics write two books simultaneously okay okay while you were writing this book working on this book i feel that you should have simultaneously written a popular book now my friend dan flores spent his whole life writing academic books right then he retired and now he's taking all of that wonderful information that he learned through his discipline and he's now saying to the guy in the bar, hey, buddy, here's what I've been talking about. Here's all of these ideas I've been wrestling with,

and I'm just going to lay it out for you like a guy talking to an interested party. Right. So do you envision taking this and these ideas and just putting them out in a way that's, and this is not a criticism, but in a way that's more accessible to the layman? Or can't you because of your profession? No, it's possible. I teach in a position where I am a professional teacher.

So I teach four classes at least a semester. So it's hard to do research at all. You do all kinds of research. Yeah, but no one supported me. My institution doesn't support me. So I do this on my own. So it's hard to do that. Right now I'm working on a book for Texas A&M Press,

A History of Hunting in texas that's going to be an academic book but i do want to try and make it i just want to like so people understand the distinction here yeah and when you're writing an academic book you have to be very forthright oh absolutely absolutely transparent about where this information is from and being very transparent about biases and just absolutely very open to both sides looking at everything right right and in a popular book you can be like okay bro i'm gonna cut the chase here and just give you kind of like here's here's my view of stuff right here's my view of how this is going i'd love to do that i i'm not there right now maybe okay but maybe in 10 years and i

don't even know like so i wasn't saying that you should want to do that i'm asking like do you want to do that do you think you will someday do that and i'm totally cool if you just say no i don't yeah i think i'd like to yeah uh this is not I intend to do. This is not, in theory, my academic discipline. This was just a harebrained idea that took 10 years to finally develop, get all these people on board, write essays. Many of them didn't write about history, pardon me, about hunting, but get them to think about this. It took so much energy.

Would it have been easier just for me to write it myself? Yeah. But I wouldn't have all these voices yeah lord i don't know if i'll ever edit another book um it is it's hard for me though because i haven't fully formulated my ideas essentially what i need to do is mature i need to mature another 10 years or so i need to figure out again who i am And just like we see hunters mature themselves, you've seen these studies, how they mature to the age of, basically, give me a gun, I'll kill anything that moves.

If it's brown, it's down. To the trophy hunter, perhaps, the one who seeks the ever-increasing challenges, to find the one who's really only looking to just be with others, to hang out at camp. We met the other day. We spent some time with one of those guys who passed through yeah hey the other side and he was a hunter who does not hunt but celebrate yeah if you ask him what he is he's honored only later do you realize well i don't actually hunt anymore

but yeah i can tell you what i think about from time i wake up to the time i go to bed exactly i think i need to mature a little bit. I need to come to grips with who I am and what I actually think before I write that book. That's going to be more of an apology, not like, excuse me, but this is what I believe. An argument, but maybe not from an academic perspective, but from the heart. Instead of saying to the reader, hey, man, here's a whole bunch of things you could believe exactly here's some questions uh that you should answer but i'm not gonna answer for you yeah yeah so give me a decade okay now you go

to me my goal for writing this book was to simply encourage people to think and to create a conversation. Because the conversation has essentially been so far people who said hunting is bad and leave me alone. Hunting is just fine. God said it's okay. If they thought about it. As I see the decline of hunting, at least least in participation it bothers me because i think it's so important it's who i am perhaps too much but it's who i am and for me it's my tribe but my tribe doesn't have an identity and i want the tribe to come to formulate an identity.

Now, not everybody's a Christian hunter or a religious hunter, but I think that we all could experience a kind of religious element to hunting. I think it's there. I'm not going to ask you to believe what I believe. I'm not sure what I do. But my goal is and my hope is the hunters will simply begin to think, who am I? What am I doing? What am I doing?

Why am I doing it? And in the process of thinking and reflecting, they'll tell their stories with greater honesty and with greater enthusiasm. That next generation will be fired up. That will create new generations of hunters who tap into the wonder and all its splendor and frustration that is hunting and that out of all of that will come another

generation of hunters who think who celebrate um and i think that we've been missing that for various reasons partially because hunters haven't had to explain themselves, and now they do. So a reflective generation of hunters, people who recognize the beauty and the magnificence that we still get to play in, and that in the process of play, we find out something about ourselves, about the world around us, and even perhaps about our God. Okay, God, Nimrod, and the world. Exploring Christian perspectives on sport hunting. Bracey V. Hill II. And if you wanna check this out,

what's the best way to find it? What's most beneficial to you? I'm probably gonna get very few royalties out of this so you can get it on amazon books uh barnes and noble most any type of so it's widely available yeah mostly online uh i haven't actually gone it's barnes and noble to see if it's on the shelf uh but i do see that they occasionally lose you know like nine nine left three left two left we're back that's good so somebody's buying it yeah that's great man thank you uh thank you for coming on thank you for this opportunity i really enjoyed it hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada you might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of

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