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

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

Dan McClellan is an American biblical scholar and author of The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. Timestamps: 0:00 Why Does God Say “We���?14:36 Does God Create the Universe From Nothing?28:43 Is This Explained By The Trinity?34:32 Is There Only One God?47:39 Fake Idols or Gods?1:02:50 How English Translations Mislead Us Into Monotheism01:11:02 The Elevation of YHWH to God of the Universe1:20:36 Polytheism in the New Testament01:24:14 The Strongest Case For Monotheism in the Old Testament Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I kind of want to begin by asking you about whether there is one God in the Bible. Because one of the most important Christian positions is that there is one God. In three persons, sure, but there is only one God. And if we turn to the very first book of the Old Testament, the book of Genesis, and we open it up and we read, we immediately run into something that's a little bit strange and suspicious. And anybody that I've told to read the Bible who has never really approached the text before, If they start with Genesis, one of the first questions they'll text me and ask me is, why does God say us instead of me? And that's, you don't even get through the first chapter before suddenly you're challenged by this, who's us question?

And there are a lot of Christians would say, oh, that's the Trinity. And I don't think there's really good case to make for that since the Trinity develops hundreds of years later. So what passage are we talking about here? Genesis. Genesis 1, verse 26, where you have what's called a cohortative, so a first-person plural imperative, where the text states, and God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. And the majority of scholars out there are in pretty widespread agreement that this seems to be a reference to the divine counsel, the deliberative body of gods that oversees the functioning of the universe and maintains cosmic and social stability and order and all that kind of stuff.

And so it sounds like we're having God announced to the other members of the council, here's what we're going to do. Let's make humanity and we're going to make humanity to look like us. But then when it comes down to the actual process, the text just has one agent involved in that. So he made, God made a man, male and female, he made them. So there's no plural verbs associated with the actual process of creation. There's one entity doing the creating. But these other gods of the divine counsel pop up a handful of times in what we know as the primeval history, Genesis 1 through 11. So it's not just in Genesis 1.

You can then go to Genesis 6. We have the Benet Elohim, the children of God, who come down and have children with, with human women. And Benea Elohim, Children of God, is a phrase that we find in other Northwest Semitic literature that refers to the other members of the Divine Council, the second tier of the Pantheon, which is generally considered to comprise the offspring of the high deity and the high deity's consort. And so they're mentioned in a handful of places the sons of God are mentioned in Job. They're mentioned in Job 1, in Job 2, and then in I think Job 36. Somewhere around there, we have them mentioned in Deuteronomy 32.8, where it says El Yon, the Most High, distributed the nations according to the number of the Benelahim, the children of God.

And then it says that Adonai's portion, the God of Israel's inheritance, share of the inheritance was the nation of Israel. And so the, we even have in Genesis, we have another cohortative, another first person plural command in Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel, God is like, what's going on? They're doing something. They're like little ants doing something. And then so God says, let us go down and see what they're doing down there. So there are a variety of ways that the early Israelite notion of the higher, hierarchy in the heavens, the pantheon kind of shines through. And in the Greco-Roman period,

it gets renegotiated where the gods become angels. And so the notion that every nation has a guardian angel is part of that renegotiated divine counsel. So in Daniel, when Michael, the archangel shows up and he's like, sorry, I'm late, I've been fighting with the prince of Persia and the Prince of Greece. This is a kind of a euphemistic way to refer to these angels that are the kind of angelic patrons over the different nations of the earth. And in the earlier periods, Adonai is the patron deity over Israel and every other nation has its own patron deity. And these patron deities don't really go away. They just get renegotiated. They get kind of rhetorically squished down into angelic status using eugenic literature, Mesopotamian literature, other literature that we can

analyze comparatively. We can kind of reconstruct an idea that in the earliest period, Israel had a pantheon that was much like those of surrounding nations where there was a high deity and that deity's consort or a partner at the top. Their children comprised the second tier of deities. And then the bottom tier would have been the servile deities, primarily messengers. but other types of deities and then some scholars posit a tier between the second and the third of craftsperson deities where people who are in charge of building palaces and creating weapons and all that kind of stuff so you have either a three or a four tier pantheon and in the Hebrew Bible you see some of these other members of this pantheon like Ashera

as the consort of the high deity and then the second tier deities the B'nai Elohim they bubble to the surface in a variety of different places. But then Benet Elohim, by the way, meaning sons of God, literally sons of God, yeah, or children of God, offspring of God. And you have reference to the divine counsel, for instance, in Psalm 82.1, it starts off saying God took his place, took his stand in the council, edatel, a council of L or counsel of God. or it could also be used adjectively divine counsel. And this is where God is haranguing the other gods of the divine counsel because they have been negligent in their duty to uphold social and cosmic justice and order. And so the result of that is all the foundations of the earth are shaken,

and then God condemns them to mortality. You are gods and children of the most high, but you will die like a man. you will fall like any prince. And I've argued before that the idea here is probably a rhetorical deposing of the divine counsel saying, you're all mortal now, you're done, we're getting rid of you, and then the psalmist in the very last verse stands up and says, rise up, oh God, and judge the earth for you inherit all nations, where the idea is, while Israel is called the inheritance of Adam throughout the Hebrew Bible. Let's expand that inheritance to include all nations. The patron deity

slots sit empty now that the gods have been deposed. And so Adonai, the God of Israel, takes over personally the rule of all the nations. And I argue this is the rhetorical universalization of Adonai's rule that probably took place following the exile. Okay, there is lots to unpack there. I'm conscious of people listening who, it might sound like, there's a lot, and a lot might sort of be going over their head. So I want to break some of this down and make it as accessible as possible. So we started with this strange fact that in the book of Genesis and elsewhere, we seem to have God talking in the plural about himself or, you know, his, his crew, you know, let us make man in our own image. So when God is planning to create mankind in his own image, it's really in our image, who is the hour, right? And the suggestion that you're making here is that there is a divine counsel. as you say, this is a council that crops up throughout the Hebrew Bible, and we're envisioning a council of beings who are gods or godlike, and then Yahweh presiding over it somehow. And in Psalm 82, which I've always found incredibly fascinating, like you say, it opens by saying,

God has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. interestingly the NIV puts gods in scare quotes oh does it yeah the gods sometimes they do like godlike beings or something like that yeah so the NIV just just puts the scare quotes which is quite funny um because it's quite unusual to say you know he's god is sitting among the council of the gods I think part of the problem of this is that like monotheism as it has developed in the west kind of has this strict distinction between God and everything that's not God. It's like you can either be God or you cannot be God. The idea that there are gods that are kind of God and they're more divine than other gods and a hierarchy of gods is a little bit hard to wrap your head around for someone

who grows up in a monotheistic culture. But this is an idea that exists in other religious traditions. It's an idea which exists today and throughout the history of various forms of Christianity. And I suppose your suggestion here is that it also existed in the earliest forms of like biblical Judaism here. Yeah, I think the concepts of God and the gods and divinity have constantly been changing with changing times and circumstances. And so I don't think there's one static concept of God and God's relationship to divinity throughout the Bible.

The word monotheism first pops up in the 17th century. And that's when we begin to speak about this concept. and it has always been used primarily as an identity marker and a value judgment. Monotheistic people are good people, non-monotheistic people are bad people, is an approach that has been kind of central to a lot of the discourse for a long time. But when we look at the way monotheism has been used, one of the things, you said earlier there's God and then there's not God. And that's kind of central to the concept of monotheism,

that God alone is truly in an uncreated way divine, and then everything else is created. And so even if it is divine, even if it's a god or gods, it's contingent, it's created, it's subordinate to the one God. And one of the kind of paradigm shifts that is necessary for this perspective is the idea of creation ex-Neilo or creation out of nothing. because that's one of, that's the foundation of this notion that there exists God and then all other reality. And only God is truly eternal and uncreated in all these things. And so usually

I see monotheism defined as this notion that, yeah, there are all kinds of other gods, but they're all contingent and created beings. And the God of Israel is species unique, according to Michael Heiser's framework, or ontologically distinct or unique or something like that. And again, that kind of rests on a foundation of creation X-Nihilo, because if the matter that was used to create the universe has always existed eternally, as eternally as God has existed, then there is something apart from God that is just as uncreated and just as eternal. So that kind of compromises that's that interpretation of what monotheism is. And the problem is Creation X. Nehalo is a philosophical and a theological innovation of the late second

century CE. It is Christians engaging in debate with Gnostics and with other Greek thinkers who first articulate around 170C.E. We first get the articulation of what we would recognize as Creation X. Nehilo. And it's precisely because these debates are about the morality of eternally existent matter and the rationality of the resurrection. You've got a lot of Greek philosophers who were like, why would you want this disgusting body back

after it has died and decomposed or passed through the digestive system of an animal or something like that? Why would you want that back? That's gross. And Christians initially were like, well, you know, a whole human being can be created from just a little bit of semen.

And so, you know, God can create out of very little and at some point they made the leap to just say, you know what, God created the universe out of nothing. God can reconstitute a body out of nothing. Matter is all contingent upon God. And then we're off to the races regarding God's unique existence. But because you don't get that until the second century CE, the idea of other gods all being created over and against the uncreated God of Israel, that's not really clearly expressed anywhere. So I don't think you have that in the Bible. I think you have places where you can read it in with less resistance than in other places.

But I don't think there's any part of the Bible that clearly indicates that the other gods are created contingent beings. Because even if you have the idea that God created the other gods, you have that in Mesopotamia. You have that in Egypt. The great Cairo hymn of praise to Amun Ray praises Amun as the creation. of all that exists, the creator of all the gods and all existence bows down to Amun Ray, who's the Lord of Eternity. And like, that's the, that's even more emphatically monotheistic rhetoric than what we find in the Bible, if we're going to call that monotheistic rhetoric. So I think once everything's situated historically, we don't see what people understand today to be

monotheism in the Bible. And so I think it's not a helpful analytical framework to impose upon the Bible. If saying, okay, we're going to look through the lens of monotheism at the Bible, if that helped us better understand things that were going on, that's one thing, but I don't think it does. I think it is primarily an attempt on the part of people today to try to presuppose a kind of ideological continuity with the Bible. We get our beliefs from the Bible. Monotheism is one of those beliefs, so obviously it must be in the Bible. Otherwise, where are we getting our beliefs from. So I've got a few questions. One is about this creation ex-Nehalo thing. You say that the idea of God creating everything out of nothing only emerges in the common era,

although I'm not as allergic saying AD as most atheists. It's a little bit, a little bit prettier. Is creation ex-Neillow not in the Bible? Is it not in Genesis? Does Genesis not open that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, which must encompass everything. What is there apart from the heavens and the earth? Is God not creating all of that out of nothing in Genesis 1? No, no. The academic consensus these days, one, even if we translate Bereshid Barah Elohim at Shama'amabahe at Ha'Arts, even if we translated that, according to the traditional now, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, doesn't necessarily demand creation next knee, hello, because the word created doesn't necessarily mean out of nothing. It could just

be a fashioning of a kind of material substrate. However, like how you create a car, you know, Steve X creates an iPhone, but he doesn't sort of pop new material into existence. Yeah, yeah. And even the verbal root barra in Hebrew, which is only ever used with God as the subject, it still does not mean out of, out of nothing because parents create children or God creates children when when couples get pregnant and stuff like that. Right. But you, I think the majority of scholars today would say that that's not a great translation of Genesis 1-1 because the word Bereshit, which is traditionally understood to mean in the

beginning, occurs, I think seven other times throughout the Hebrew Bible. And in every single occurrence, it is in the construct. And what that means is that in Hebrew, it doesn't just mean in the beginning. It means in the beginning of something. And so the of is whatever follows. And so you are seeing more translations of the Bible today that begin, well, the Hebrew literally would be in the beginning of God creating the heavens and the earth. So it's a temporal clause and more idiomatically in English, what you see in a lot more Bible translations today is when God began to create the heavens and the earth. earth and then verse two actually explains what already existed when god began to create the heavens

and the earth the earth was without form and void and the darkness was upon the face of the deep in other words god's like all right i'm ready to create here's my stuff that's already here we got the darkness we got the deep we got the earth and then what's the first creative act let there be light so my my friend has once joked to me that God is a myriological nihilist. I think it's a pretty hot philosophical take. My listeners will be familiar with it. I don't know if you've come across the idea of myriological nihilism. It doesn't sound familiar. It's sort of the view that so myriology is the study of parts. And so myriological nihilism is nihilism about parts. So for example, you know, a chair is made up of a seat and some legs.

But the designation, the distinction between those parts is basically all mental. It's not like a real substantive distinction. It's just something that our brains do. In the same way that if I say does the left-hand side of a chair exist, it does, because the thing I'm referring to exists, it's right here, but clearly that as distinct from the right-hand side is like a mental distinction. And so just as the distinction between the left and right-hand side of the chair is purely mental, the distinction between the chair and its legs is also just purely mental. And then the Miriological nihilist says, so is the distinction between the chair and the table and the bird in the sky and the camera on the tripod, right? And so what you've essentially just got is a bunch of matter

that gets arranged and humans put labels on it. Yeah. And my friend was like, God is the Miriological nihilist. Because if you look at Genesis, the sort of process that he undergoes is one of organization and labeling. You have an earth which is without form and void. And God starts sort of dictating. Having said that, I do think the creation of light probably doesn't lean into that very well, but I do find it interesting that when Adam is created, what's the first thing that he is asked to do? What, what's his first task? It's to name the animals, it's to taxonomize. And so this idea that this creative process is really one of like organization and labeling, more so than popping into existence, I think is an interesting undertone, perhaps, to read

into Janice is here. And there's, within cognitive linguistics, there's this idea of frame semantics and, um, which is, uh, and there are a lot of different variations on it, but, but basically the idea is everything is prospectival. It depends on who's doing the looking, who's doing the perceiving, the describing. And so whether or not a bike is in front of the house depends on where you're standing. Uh, and we're just kind of imposing, um, organization on the, the input that we're receiving. But there's a scholar named Ellen Van Wold, who's a cognitive linguist who talks about Genesis 1-1. And her argument is that barra, the verbal root barra, doesn't necessarily mean to create, but to separate. And so what's happening here, because when God does create the light,

it must be separated from the dark. And so it's a process of basically drawing lines down the middle of things to create two separate categories and then further and then distinguishing in the heavens above from the heavens below the waters above from the waters below um separating out i suppose different animals and breathing life into them it's a little it's it's it's not like straightforward i think but certainly this theme of division occurring is is quite interesting you know what's just crossed my mind and this is sorry this is like completely And I'm about to do the sort of Alex O'Connor bingo of ticking off everything that I always mentioned, because I've already done myriological nihilism. And I'm about to mention the Gnostic Gospels. When I read like the Gospel of Thomas, one of the things that jumps out at me is the emphasis on unity. Like Jesus is constantly talking about things coming together. People interpret that weird last verse about men becoming women as like unity. And the whole thing is about bringing stuff together. And of course, a lot of Gnostic Christians believe. that the material creator of the world,

Yahweh in the Old Testament, is the evil demiurge. So thinking about the creation process in Genesis as one of separation, like separating everything out and distinguishing and labeling, the Gnostic understanding of Jesus, who comes down to, say,

to hell literally with the, with the demiurgic creator and tries to unify everything altogether again with the spiritual realm, that's quite an interesting, cool and response there going on, I think. Not to say that the Gnostic interpretation of Christianity is the correct one, but I've, that's just crossed my mind.

Yeah. And there's, and I think even within a lot of linguistic and, and even like, you know, legal and other types of analysis, a lot of what you're trying to do is reify or firm up lines of distinction between different things. Where does this end and the other thing begin, whether it's rights or whether it's the dry land and the waters or whatever. So, yeah, I can see the Gnostics toying with that kind of philosophical approach to things by trying to overturn it and say, no, it's all about bringing things back together to

this unity, the singularity or whatever that they believe represented God and everything was about becoming one with the pleroma and reuniting with the unity. but so what we have in Genesis 1 is an indication that there's already stuff there and so it's not really a question of creation out of nothing at least in Genesis 1 and I don't know if you had plans to bring it up but there are other passages that are commonly identified as as asserting Creation X and E hello and these are the comments I always get on my videos when I say this they the biggest one is Second Maccabees 728 that's that's one of of the ones they'll go to, and then like Romans and Colossians and Hebrews, where we get this idea that God created out of what is not. And so, for instance, in Second Maccabees 728, the Antiochus, the Fourth Epiphanes is one by one killing the seven sons of this mother, and she's exhorting each of them to have faith. And I think it's the last son. She says, I, you know, I exhorts you to look at the heavens and the earth and know that they were created.

out of what is not. And in Greek, it's either Ekmi-Onton or Ekuk-Onton. But, and this is a very similar phrase to what we find in the passages in Romans and Colossians and Hebrews. But the idea there is something that's pretty common to, it's kind of the conventional Greek philosophical wisdom of the time that what exists has form and function and is created from matter that lacked form and function. And so you matter either existed in a state of being or non-being. If it was in a state of non-being, that's that material substrate that is unformed. And that is the raw materials that are given form and function to become matter that is in a state of being. And so we still don't. It may seem that that's like a bit convoluted to people. They might listen to

that and go, well, come on. If you're talking about creating something that is out of what is not, to say oh what is not just means like matter that hasn't been formed yet that can't be what it means I would ask people to just consider what they mean when they casually use the word like created or brought about like when when you say yeah you know you you you built a PC or your your dad built the house that you made that you live in if your dad built your house you you might think like well what what like where did it come from he's like no no like he just he just built it out there was no house there and he just he just created this house or you know he maybe somebody created a car or whatever what you mean is that whatever the house was before all of the all the materials that

were in the bricks and the ceramics and stuff still was in the world it just wasn't anything it just sort of sat there and now you've created something out of what was not not by creating new material literally but just by activating you know the material by putting it into a particular form yeah and And you can even see this if you read on in Second Maccabees 728 because the mother says, just like people are made. And we don't create people out of non-existence. And you see Xenophon and talks about the same thing, how parents will get together and they will create a child, ecti, or it might be the neuter onta or something like that. But in short, they use this language, and the words for create pre-existed the notion of creation ex and e-hill. Even within, you know, non-Christian, non-Jewish writings, everybody talked about things being created.

But yeah, none of them talked about it as creation out of nothing. Is it possible, though, because I think that's the second time now you've used this analogy with the usage of creating children and saying, well, we don't create children out of nothing? Is there not an argument to say that we kind of do? Because of course, like, biologically, homo sapiens creates another homo sapiens. But within Christianity, the thing that makes someone a person is the breath of life. You know, you're not just your biological mechanism, but you've got this soul within you. And although, you know, sperm and egg creates the biological casing that you live in, your soul, the real you, the breath of life, that's not something that you just like grab from somewhere else and like put into a baby.

Right? That could that be the thing that's created out of nothing? I think there could be a case to make for that in certain periods because around the first century C.E. You actually see the idea that the soul or the spirit that is infused within the body exist, preexisted and was somewhere else. Like in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have where somebody talks about, may I be assigned a good spirit. there's there's spirits out there and one of them's going to be assigned to uh to my body when i'm when i'm born uh and origin of alexandria talks about um kind of drills down to the bedrock of this notion and and promoted an idea of some kind of preexistence and was later posthumously

condemned as a heretic for it but um i think you you do see the notion that god is kind of the possessor of these spirits or the or these spirits are kind of emanated from God in Ecclesiastes talks about the spirit after death going back to the God who gave it so I think it would be it would be an interesting argument to make I would like to see what kind of I would like to see what kind of data what passages what rhetoric could be adduced for both sides of it because I think you see I don't think those questions specifically were asked

And so I don't think you have clear answers, which is why I think you probably see quite a bit of ambiguity. People kind of talking about things as if both X and not X were true at the same time. Sure. Okay. Let's talk about then the Christian interpretation of the plural God. We've still got the divine counsel to deal with. There are a few things to say here, right? I'm going to put on my Christian cap and say, this is really interesting, Dan McClellan.

However, I'm a Christian, and my view is that, of course, God says, let us create him in our image, because God is a Trinity, and he's talking about the three persons of the Trinity. And it's usually the father that does the creative stuff like through the sun. You know, he creates the world through the sun. So that makes perfect sense of the fact that he says, let us create man in our own image. But then it's the one singular father who does the creative act in the end. You know what I mean? Because it switches from the plural to the singular. Yeah. And yes, there is like this idea of the divine counsel that it might be referring to. But like in the book of Job, there's a divine counsel. And like Satan is one of the people on the divine counsel. So we're clearly not talking about, you know, divine emanations and beings like Yahweh. We're clearly talking about Yahweh having some kind of angelic counsel, given that Satan is a fallen angel. And the plural is because God is a trinity. So normally what I start with is the argument that there's not really any evidence that the Trinity pre-existed. Well, even like I would say the second century is the first time you get any idea of a Trinity in any way related to what we see from Nicaea. But certainly there's no evidence that is in the Hebrew Bible. And I get people talking about, you know, binitarianism and how certain scholars have talked about binitarianism. And there I think we have an idea of divine mediation, whether it's the son of man from Daniel or whether it's the angel, the Malac of Adonai.

Binitarianism being two, as opposed to Trinitarianism being being. Right, that there was a second power in heaven, something like that, which is something that we see in Greco-Roman period Judaism. And then within rabbinic literature, there's actually not really a debate so much as a condemnation. of it, a discussion and a condemnation of this idea that God shares their throne with somebody else. But we also see things like Metatron, the Adonai Cotone, the little Adonai who sits in a throne alongside God. And so I would say that that that requires reading into the passage things that are not there. And again, if we go back to the primeval history, the Trinity

holds that there's one deity. And yes, three persons, but one. divine being, one God, one entity. But you have in Genesis 3, when the serpent is talking to Eve, says you will be like the gods, ha Elohim, knowing good and evil, and the participle for knowing is in the plural. And you might say, well, that's referring to Adam and Eve. You will be like God in that you two will be knowing good and evil. But then in verse 22, 32, God goes, the human has become like one of us. Yeah. And so we've got the plural again. And then when we get to Genesis 6

the B'nai al-Heem, the plural again. And so there are definitely plural gods that have salience in the primeval history. And so saying well, Genesis 1-26 is about the Trinity doesn't make the problem go away. It just... Do you think it's... Because I understand what you're saying that there's no evidence that, let's say the people who put Genesis onto paper or whatever the hell

they wrote it on, um, like didn't have a Trinity in mind. But as a Christian, there might not be evidence separately, like just looking at Genesis that there's a Trinity there, but is it inconsistent for me as a Christian to say, look, I believe in the Trinity. And when I'm confronted with this mysterious passage in Genesis, like, it's at the least consistent for me to just say, well, that's, that's the Trinity. There's, there's no problem there. for me. Well, I would wonder when you, how you're making the decision that, well, let me start over. The, every other time God talks about themselves, it's in the singular. Why would it, even when it would have, if the Trinity were there, God would have to be talking to, given the concept

of perichoresis, this idea that, that the multiple different persons, converse with each other, even though they're supposed to share the same mind. But why do we have the plural in this passage and not in every other passage where God is conversing with themselves when they're saying, you know, I plan to do this or I'm going to do this. I change my mind. You don't see the plural in any other places. And so part of the concern I have with that is that it seems pretty arbitrary. It goes around saying, oh, well, it's singular here, because whatever of you know you make up an explanation it's plural here because because i believe in one god but it's plural here because god is a trinacy and you can you can just pick which you

want whichever fits i mean it is interesting that you know it's not like thou shalt have no other gods before us like that would be kind of interesting and it's not and the christian will look at that and say well of course he's he's only speaking in the singular there because there's one god but then there is this mystery of why it seems to sort of swap and change as a sort of historical or a textual critic, you're going to look at this and think, well, it's because these texts represent a different kind of belief of the people who wrote the text. One thing that's important to specify here is that we've talked about the idea of like God evolving over time. People might be under the misapprehension that like Genesis is the earliest Jewish source than Exodus and so on. But

that's not the way that the Old Testament actually works, right? Like there are debates about it, but we have some idea of which texts and which verses within which texts are older and newer. And so if you want to reconstruct this journey that Yahweh takes as like who he is and whether he's the only God, you kind of got to have an idea of which texts come first and which texts come last. So maybe you can give us an indication of some of the earliest like Old Testament passages and what they tell us about the like multiplicity of gods. Yeah. So when we look at like Genesis 1 and then Genesis 2 and 3, those come from different time periods. Genesis 1 is a later creation account. Genesis 2 and 3 represent an earlier creation account. But the earliest passages in the Hebrew Bible are pieces of poetry because narrative developed well after poetry.

And so, in fact, we think we can date the beginning of historical. narrative prose in alphabetic scripts, of which Hebrew would have been one, to around the middle of the 9th century BC. That's the first time we see historical narrative prose in alphabetic scripts. And so when we see narrative in Hebrew, that's probably middle of the 9th century BC or later. We think there's some poetry and specifically little fragments embedded within larger poetic compositions that are earlier than that. So, for instance, the song of Deborah probably has some very early fragments. And there we have this Canaanite general Cicera, and it says that the stars fought in their courses against Cicero, which reflects the idea that the stars are an army.

They are an army of gods. And so when it talks about the host of heaven in the Hebrew Bible, that would be the divine counsel. That would be the military arm of the divine counsel, the host of heaven. And so we see that perhaps in an early part of poetry in Judges 5. We look at Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9, which I've already mentioned. This is within the larger song of Moses, which is probably a fairly late composition. But if we look in verses 6 and 7 of Deuteronomy 32, the singer says, ask your forefathers, and they will tell you, ask your parents, and they will say, and then we get quote, verses 8 and 9, when the Most High divided up the nations when he separated the peoples, he fixed the number of the nations according to the children of God. And so here we have

what is probably a much earlier poetic fragment that has been embedded within a later composition that seems to be distinguishing Adonai from El Yon. So the Most High is a different God from Adonai. And Adonai is receiving their inheritance, the nation of Israel, from the Most High as part of this idea that the nations were distributed to the second-tier deities by the High Deity.

Some other... I want to look at this because this jumps off the page at me in this context. This is Deuteronomy Chapter 32. And I suppose we can read from verse 8. When the Most High

gave the nations their inheritance when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Elohim, right? Because of course, like I'm reading the NIV here, and it says, he set up boundaries for the people according to the number of the sons of Israel. Now, for the Christian, they're going to prefer this interpretation

because there are multiple sons of Israel, and that is how God divvies up the nations and the people. people. Talk to me about where like that comes from. Because just to be clear here, when I read this passage, if you read the NIV, it says that God divides up the nations and the people according to the number of the sons of Israel. But as far as I'm aware, a better textual understanding is that God divides up the nations according to the sons of God. Yes. So the The Sons of Israel reading comes from the Masoretic text. That's the authoritative ancient-ish around 1,000 C.E manuscript. And in the Septuagint, which dates to about 1,000 years earlier,

we have a different reading. It says according to, well, in the majority reading of the Septuagint, it says according to the number of the angels of God. But we also have some manuscripts. And there's a scholar named Chris Hansen. She has identified a bunch of not only Septuagint, but even later Latin manuscripts, where the reading is Sons of God. And a lot of scholars recognize, hey, the translators of the Septuagint really like to take the Hebrew Elohim and translated as angels. And so angels of God in those Septuagint manuscripts probably reflects a four-Lago source text that in the Hebrew said, sons of God. And then in the 1960s, we discovered a fragment of Deuteronomy among the Dead Sea Scroll.

Dead Sea Scrolls. That preserves precisely that reading. That it's sons of God. So to be clear here, the Masoretic text, which actually most of my views will probably know what that is now, thanks to some discussion on the Isaiah Scroll. But, you know, our sort of standard source for the Hebrew Bible, which dates around the Middle Ages, says in this particular passage that God divides up the nations according to the number of the sons of Israel. The Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Old Testament that's earlier than the Masoretic text, says angels of God, but we know that the Septuagint liked to translate what was originally Sons of God into angels of God, giving us an indication that the Septuagint was using a Hebrew source, which would have been really early, which said Sons of God. and then we discover a fragment in the Dead Sea Scrolls of an actual Hebrew ancient section

which preserves the reading Sons of God. So textually speaking, the original was Sons of God. Yeah, that's about as close as you can get to a slam dunk when it comes to a textual reconstruction. And there are other places in this poem in Deuteronomy 32 where that happens. Verse 43, for instance. A lot of people will throw at me, you know,

the passages say, I am and there is no other, is monotheistic. They'll insist, that means there are no other gods. And you see that in Deuteronomy 32-39. I think the exact statement is, I am he, there is no God besides me. But then when you get to Deuteronomy 32-43, and if you're reading the King James Version, you're not going to see this. But again, we have something odd going on in the Septuagint, and then we found a fragment, a manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls that shows us what it originally read. So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it says, worship him all you gods. And this is actually probably being quoted in Psalm 977. But if you look in the King James Version, you have rejoice, O ye nations with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants

and will render vengeance to his adversaries and will be merciful under his land and to his people. That doesn't really have anything to do with gods. But if you go look in the Septuagint, you have strengthened him all you angels of God. And again, Septuagint likes to translate Elohim as angels. But the Septuagint seems to double up the passage. It has two different takes on it. It has closer to the original take, and then it has something a little closer to the Masoretic text. So it was probably preserving two different variations on this tradition.

And then the Masoretic text went one way, but we've recovered the Dead Sea Scroll fragment. And so already you can see, even anciently, there are folks who are uncomfortable with all these references to gods going on and are trying to edit them to try to mitigate the, not just the presence and the existence, but the function of these other gods. Okay, so we've got this fascinating passage in Deuteronomy where nations seem to be being assigned by the Most High. So whoever the most high is seems to be divvying up like the world and its nations according to the number of the sons of God, meaning that like there are these sort of minor deities underneath the most high and the nations are split up amongst those deities. And so Yahweh presumably is one of these deities and Yahweh gets Israel. But other nations go to other gods. So the idea that we end up with here is that Yahweh, at least in this passage, is sort of given the land of Israel, but nothing else.

So Yahweh is a local god. Christians again, I'm going to listen to that and go, no, Yahweh is the singular god of all people. So the first piece of evidence they might give to say that is you've already mentioned it, God says there are no other gods beside me. In the same passage in Deuteronomy, he says, like, I am. I am he or whatever. I am God. There is no other. He doesn't say I'm the best. He doesn't say I'm better than anyone else. He says, I am the only one. Yes. And this is, and I can talk about two things. One, there are data elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible that are supportive of this interpretation of Adonai as a territorial deity. And we can get to that in a second. But there are no other is also kind of territorial. rhetoric. And Nathan McDonald is a scholar out of Cambridge who's written a wonderful book called Deuteronomy

and the meaning of monotheism where he goes into a very close reading of all these texts as they exist in Deuteronomy to talk about what seems to be going on here. And the language of there is no other or there's none besides me, he shows

that in other places where this is used, it is limited by the rhetorical scope. Like, it always has to do with whatever the context is. Like there's somebody who's in a tent and the question is, do you have a sword? And he says, there is none. And that does not mean universally swords do not exist. It means within the scope of relevance of this circumstance, there's not one here. And he shows that when you see this, I am and there is no other rhetoric, it's always in the context of

telling Israel, I'm the one who saves you. I'm the one who delivers you. It's me. There is no other. And what he suggests is that a close interrogation of this language leads to the conclusion that this language is saying, I'm the only one for you. Don't look anywhere else. I am the only one that matters. It's about an exclusive relationship, not any kind of ontological exclusivity and one of the reasons that we think this is that particularly in Deuteronomy but we see it as well in Deutero Isaiah there are references to other gods and so why would they be saying there are no other gods exist and but also there are these gods over here that rhetoric doesn't make much sense unless this is about an exclusive relationship and there's a really good

comparison in the song of Solomon or the song of songs chapter six versus is eight and nine, you've got the lover is singing about their dove and their perfect one. And in verse eight, the lover says, you know, there are all these concubines, there are all these maidens all over the place. And then he says, but my dove is one, which is pretty much the exact same thing that we find in the Shema, hero Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord, is one. And in the song of songs, the statement is very clearly not to say that, my dove is the only woman who exists. It's to say, as far as I'm concerned, this is the only one for me.

This is about an exclusive relationship. And again, the problem with this, with all of this, is we began by talking about bias, right? And anybody is capable of reading in an interpretation to a text. And I understand that people are going to listen to this. And God is going to say, there is no one besides me. I am God. I am God alone. There is no one beside me.

And here are we saying, well, What he really meant was like he was sort of using hyperbole and he didn't actually think they didn't exist. He just thought he was the best. And they're going to say, you're just reading all of this into the text. Two things I kind of want to note here. One is that we know that this hyperbolic language sort of does exist and is used. You've given the example of the Song of Solomon, but also most interesting to me is an Isaiah 47. So in Isaiah 47, God is speaking and he's speaking to Babylon.

Yeah. And he says to Babylon. you said in your heart you you have said to yourselves yeah i am and there is none besides me so he's sort of he's chastising babylon for having said there is none beside me now yeah Babylon doesn't believe it is literally the only nation on the planet right but god is telling them off as saying that there is none beside me if if that is just Babylon being egotistical and saying we're the best and they've worded it by saying there is none besides me then we know that sometimes this is how it's used.

You know, when Ed Sheeran sings, you are the only one. But he's doing so in a stadium of thousands of people. I don't think he's confused about the non-existence of other women. I think it's quite clear that he's speaking poetically. And it seems like a similar kind of thing. Again, I want to stress this, at least might be happening here. Because Christians are going to say, no, no, like sometimes it's used like that. Sometimes it's not.

But at the very, very least, it opens up the door to, to, to, the idea that there are multiple gods. So what I'm trying to say here is that this verse, where God says there are none beside me, we're not trying to say here that this proves like polytheism in the Old Testament. Instead, at least what I'm interpreting this as is if we think for other reasons that there are multiple gods in the Old Testament and you point to this verse where God says I'm the only one as a rebuttal, that rebuttal doesn't work because we've shown that that language is used elsewhere to not mean the same thing, right? I think I just want to just basically make that

clear to people listening. Yeah, and that's not the only place that occurs. You have it in Zephaniah as well. It's either Nineve or Moab, where they say the same thing. You have said in your heart, I am and there is no other, which is, and the nation is not saying nobody else exists. They're saying, I'm the only one that matters for my constituency, for my people. And you also have very similar rhetoric. And this is the rhetoric of incomparability. That's what scholars. refer to this as, because you have a very similar rhetoric going on in other literature, but you also have in Dutero, Isaiah, the idea that the gods are nothing and less than nothing. But if you look in other parts of Dutero, Isaiah, it talks about how the other nations before me

are nothing and are less than nothing, or the manufacturers of idols are nothing and are less than nothing. And so the rhetoric that gets appealed to regularly as indicating God is, asserting soul existence is used in reference to other entities where it is very clearly not asserting soul existence. So again, there's, as you're saying, there's not really a good case to make that we should be interpreting these passages as asserting the non-existence of the other gods. As I say, I'm, this lays squarely outside of my expertise, and I would quite like to have someone on the show to, I guess, defend monotheism in the Bible. I know you've had a back and forth with Gavin Aortland about this recently. Yeah. In fact, I owe him a response, I think,

but I would be open to sort of going back and forth. Or maybe the two of, I don't, again, I don't know if you like, like debates in the sense of being together. Maybe I should talk to conversation. I think a conversation of discussion is, I'm perfectly happy to do that, even if it gets a little debatee, but the idea of a, yeah, a formal debate, that's what I'm kind of allergic to. But yeah, I would love to talk with Gavin about this because he's brought up some stuff that I need to respond to. But yeah, I think he makes a thoughtful and a sincere case for his position. But yeah, I still think it is motivated by protecting the dogmatism, the monotheistic belief. Well, one thing that Gavin points out is that like in Second Kings, for example, in Second Kings chapter 19, verse 18 onwards, we have truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste to the nations and to the lands and have cast their gods into the fire.

So he's referring to the other gods of these other nations and then says, for they were not gods but the work of men's hands, wood and stone, therefore they were destroyed. So it's talking about idols here, wood and stones. Like, yeah. These gods of other nations, they were not gods. They were just idols. And Gavin points to this and says, like, clearly the gods of other nations that we've just been discussing here are not real gods. And the point is that they think they're gods.

But here we have an indication that they're not gods. It specifically says they're not gods. Now, I know what you've said in response, which is essentially that this passage is saying that the eye it's sort of talking about the idols themselves but just before you pretend that response i want to point out that at the very end of this passage it says now lord our god deliver us from his hand so that all the kingdoms of earth may know that you alone lord are god so this whole passage to recap is we've sort of laid waste to the to these other nations we've thrown their gods into the fire because they were not gods but just idols

and every kingdom on earth will know that you alone, Yahweh, are God. Is this not monotheism? Still not monotheism for a couple of different reasons, but one of the things I pointed out in my initial response to Gavin was, as you said, you can use the word gods to refer to the idol or to the deity itself. And Gavin uses this pericopy, this story, to kind of indicate they seem to be limiting the god to the idol. And I think this is a part of the idol polemic.

And one demonstration of the fact that even the narrator of the Bible represents people talking about idols as if they were gods while also recognizing that the actual deities elsewhere, the story of Laban and Jacob departing from each other. One of the things that happens in the story as Jacob has taken off as Rachel takes the terrafeme, steals Laban's tariffeme. And they take off and Laban comes after him angrily. You've taken my gods.

And this is the tariffine, which are probably, I think they're probably representative of ancestral deities. But at the end, when Jacob says, oh, well, whoever took anything, they're going to pay. And Rachel doesn't get caught. But at the end, they then swear, they have this oath that they swear and Laban has them swear by

the God of Jacob and the God of Nahor which would be Laban's deity and they're not the same deity some people interpret it as the same deity is it not like in the way that Jesus would say your God and my God and something like that's and they're talking about the same God the verbs in the plural

when it talks about and let me I'm trying to remember exactly what patterns passage it's in Genesis in the 30s somewhere. But he says, let them judge between us. So the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor are discussed in the plural. And so we've got, we've got Laban talking about his gods in reference to these idols. But then we've also got in the very next scene, Laban talking about the god of Nahor that he's swearing by, which is obviously not the idol that he no

longer possesses. He's got to be swearing by the actual separate entity that the, that the idol only indexes. Now, when we get into the idol polemics, I was pointing that out and Gavin responds by pointing to this passage where they seem to be suggesting that these, the other nations are limited to idols as their gods. And I think this is still part of the same rhetoric. The idea is we're denigrating the other gods, whether we're saying they're nothing and less than nothing, or whether we're calling them

Gilulim, which would mean shit gods, we're just denigrating them. And so if, you know, Sennacherib comes through and destroys all these other nations and their gods were not able to save them, it kind of fits the rhetoric

to just be like, well, I guess their gods were just those pieces of wood and stone. They were impotent. They were unable to do anything. And so it fits the rhetoric without necessarily reflecting this sincere belief that those idols were not intended to index deities that actually existed elsewhere. And something else I point out is that even Paul says, Paul says an idol is nothing in the world. And Paul denigrates the idols.

But then there's another part where Paul says when they worship idols, they're actually worshipping demons, gods that they did not know. So the idols are nothing, but the thing that the idols represent are still something. Yeah. And so we see that earlier in the Hebrew Bible. We see it later when we get down to the New Testament. It doesn't make sense to me that suddenly and for just temporarily, they would decide, okay, we're actually for a couple of centuries, we're just going to think that the idols are all there are and there are no other gods. so I think in if we're trying to take seriously that this is rhetoric this is I think too many people try to think of the biblical text as somebody's like manifesto of what I believe it's not it's rhetoric intended to achieve a certain purpose it's not necessarily a reflection of what these folks believe down at the bedrock and so it's I think it's a it's a thoughtful argument I think it's clever.

I don't think it demonstrates that they thought the other nations had no gods. I think it demonstrates that they wanted to mock and deride the other nations by saying, ha ha, ha, all your gods all got chopped into pieces and burnt. Ha, ha. And this is also a later text. This is probably a post-exylic text. So the idea that Adonai has got over all the earth, I think, is. reflecting this universalization that probably took place after the exile so but yeah that's that's

something i'd like to converse a little more with gavin about i've just looked up this passage which i think is the one you were referencing about uh like your god and my god and the different gods and i'm looking at genesis 31 37 and i'm not sure if this is the right passage genesis chapter 31 uh from 30 from verse 36 onwards. Jacob was angry and took Leban. Is it Leban or Laban? How would you say that? Laban. Laban. To task. What is my crime? He asked, Leban. What did you say? Laban. Laban, yeah. He asked Laban. How have I wronged you that you hunt me down? Now that you have found and searched through all of my goods, what have you found that belongs to your household? Put it here in front of your relatives and mine and let them judge between the two of us. I'm seeing the word relatives here,

and I don't know if I've just got the wrong passage. Are you in the NIV still? I'm in the NIV, but I'm having to look at a comparative study, and I also just looked at the Hebrew interlinear, and word there seems to be, like, before your brothers and my brothers? Yeah, that's not the word for God. So, do-do-do-do. Hang on, let me.

Something not. I think you've got to go back to verse 32. It starts in... But if you find anyone who has your... Who has your gods, that person shall not live. In the presence of our relative, see for yourself whether there is anything of yours here with me. If so, take it. Now, Jacob did not know what Rachel had stolen the gods.

What is going on here? Yeah. So Rachel has stolen her Jacob's like Okay, I worked my 14 years for your two daughters We're bouncing And Jacob takes Rachel and Leah And they leave and Rachel on the way out the door

snakes some of these terrafim Which are household gods Which I think probably were intended to index ancestral deities But other people have different arguments about that Even David has a tariffam In his palace But so and then Laban comes

after Jacob and says in verse 30 and let me the N-R-S-V-U-E even though you had to go because you long greatly for your father's house why did you steal my gods and in Hebrew that's at Elohi or Elohim with the first person possessive suffix and so there's the back and forth between Jacob and layman and he's like I didn't take anything I don't know what you're talking about

and then says you know whoever is found with them you know, they're going to get what's coming to them. And then in verse 42, go ahead. I was just going to say, Jacob down in verse 42 says, well, no, not 42, God save me, and then they, where do they swear the oath? Do do, do do. So verse 53. So Jacob has said, we've got this pillar of mispah,

the, you know, Adonai watch between you and me, And then in 53, Jacob says, May the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor judge between us. And the verb there is in the plural, Yishpah too. So that's may they judge between us. And so we've got Laban referring to the Teraphim as his gods, but then we've also got him swearing to a separate God that is very clearly the God to which he is devoted.

there's there's also a really interesting passage in the book of exodus which again my listeners will be quite familiar with the discourse around slavery in the old testament and in the context of talking about slaves in exodus 21 uh there is this idea that if uh if you so if you buy a hebrew service or slave, then you let him go free in the seventh year. If he comes alone, he goes alone. If he has a wife when he comes to you, then she goes as well. But if you give your slave a wife while he's your slave, then he goes free and the wife doesn't. And if there are children of that marriage, then the woman and the children still belong to the master.

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

He shall take him to the door or doorpost and pierce his ear with an owl. Then he will be his servant for life. So there's this weird ritual where he's taken and has his ear pierced like his cattle. And if he wants to stay a slave for life, then he's taken before the judges. So who are the judges? The yeah the word there in Hebrew is Elohim ha Elohim and we have the same thing going on in the next chapter in chapter 22 and this is another ritual if you go to verse 8 if the thief is not caught the owner of the house shall be brought before ha Elohim to determine whether or not the owner had laid hands on the neighbor's goods so this is a situation where you don't have evidence you don't know and so you've got to bring the the accused to a place where they're going to swear an oath, basically. And then it says, this is mine, the case of both parties, shall come before Ha Elohim,

and the one whom Ha Elohim condemn, again, in the plural, shall pay double to the other. And so I imagine, if you're in the NIV still, it probably says judges there as well. Yeah, it has a footnote and says, or before God, or who God declares. It's God singular, of course. So the LIV can't decide whether it's talking about the plural judges of like humans who would determine what happens to the slave or the singular God who's determining what happens to the slave. So you said the word is Elohim. We know that the word Elohim means God, but doesn't the word Elohim just also mean judges in a human context? Because the NIV is translating the word Elohim here as judges.

Yeah. No, that's a misreading. Elohim never means judges. But because of these two passages, that reading has developed. And it's plural in 216 because it's very clearly plural here in 22, 8, and 9, and so they've got to let this reading influence the reading in 216. The best reading of both would be the gods in the plural, because the idea here is that they're going to the household gods

because they index the presence of a deity or other deities. It should be the plural gods. And interestingly, are you familiar with the NET, the new English translation? I don't know what it says about this. What is the NET? I mean, I've read the NET, but I don't know what it's like translation philosophy is. It's the main thing that it offers is an awful lot of explanatory notes. So if you want to get a sense for where the debates are, where the discussions are, they've got tons and tons of notes.

And the note here is funny because it's like, oh, this should be God, but, you know, this would have been overseen by human judges. And then at the end of the note, it says, and others have made a stronger case that Elohim refers to human judges. And then it quotes Cyrus Gordon and Anne Draftcorn. And these two papers where Cyrus and Anne, in their own papers separated by decades, argue strenuously that it does not mean judges. It means gods. And so whoever edited that note was either just straight up lying or wildly misunderstood those papers or did not read them at all. But the idea here is in the, in Greco-Roman period Judaism, I mentioned that the gods get squished down into angelic status. They're all angels.

And that becomes kind of the conventional wisdom that gets handed down from generation to generation. But then somebody raises issue with Genesis 6 with the story that is, You know, you get the fan fiction and first Enoch of this, where it's the angels who come down and they have children with the human women. And then toward the end of the Greco-Roman period, you have some Jewish thinkers saying, wait a minute, angels can't be disobedient. Angels aren't sexually compatible with humans. What's going on here? And so you have a human reading of Genesis 6 that pops up. And they say, well, no, these are humans.

B'nai Elohim is a reference to the line of Seth. So these have to be humans. And so now a human reading of Elohim becomes a possibility. And this, I think, kind of cascades down through the generations as the interpretive lens that we're then going to turn on Psalm 82. We're then going to turn on to Exodus 22. And this idea develops that Elohim is based etymologically on a verbal root that means to be mighty or to be strong or to be powerful. And so Elohim must mean powerful ones or it must be used honorifically to refer to judges. And the only way they can make sense of this ritual where the person, whether it's the accused thief or it's the slave who wants to stay on in their master's house, they've got to come before ha Elohim. They're like, well,

let's pick the judges reading. Maybe that one will work out. But yeah, the idea here is that they go before the gods. And the gods, go ahead, just more, just more indications of a multitude of gods sort of splattered throughout the Old Testament. Yeah, although here I think the, the reference to the gods is a reference specifically to divine images as deities. Just like in Exodus 20, verse three, you shall have no other gods before me. That is, most scholars agree in the earliest circulation of that text, the idea was probably referring to no other divine images, no other gods, qua, idols or divine images in my presence in the temple or something like that. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, one of the surface level indications of what they call

Hino-theism, which is the view that there are multiple gods but one main god. So the other gods do exist, but they're not the ones to be worshipped, is the idea of God saying, not I'm the only God, but you shall have no other gods before me. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. Yeah. Who are you jealous of if these other people don't exist? It seems like jealousy doesn't have something to attach itself to. Now, again, of course, Christians just interpret this verse differently. But it's worth noting that we have these indications, which are worth exploring. And as I say, you know, I want to hear the other side and maybe we can set up a discussion with someone like Gavin or maybe someone else, I'm not sure. But a couple more little things

to iron out, I think, before we sort of wrap up this idea is like this story, right? Because we've got, we've talked about how in the Old Testament we've got the divine counsel and it seems like we've kind of got gods, but the gods are kind of subordinate to Yahweh, but it's not entirely clear. Firstly, it's this idea that Yahweh, if we do, if we do, we do, we do. We do, have a divine counsel and Yahweh is at the top of it, then this verse where we talked about the mighty one divvying up the lands and giving Israel to Yahweh wouldn't make much sense, right? So who is the mighty one as opposed to Yahweh in this context? So, so that, so Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9, the most high, El Yon. That is a much earlier

passage. And so Adonai is not identified with El Yon, but there's a point at which L. El Yon, Adon, I, they become conflict. and they're a single deity, at which point Adonai kind of exceeds to the top of the divine council. And so... When you say Adonai, you're talking about Yahweh. Yes, that's my... That's the substitute I use out of as an accommodation to Jewish members of my audience who've asked me to use that. And that's a pretty common thing in scholarship.

Because they don't pronounce or write the tetragrammatian. Divine name, yeah. yeah yeah which is why if you read the old testament in english you'll see the word lord in all caps which in the hebrew text will say yahway um but if the hebrew itself says i suppose adenai then that is just the word for lord so it can be a bit confusing when you're reading an old testament translation because there'll be lord in all caps and there'll be lord in the lower case when you see lord in all caps the original text specifies yahway and when you see lord in all caps the the original text specifies Yahweh, and when you see Lord in lower caps, it does just mean

Lord. Yeah. Although the word Adonai is a specific form. It's actually the plural with the first common singular possessive suffix. So it's literally my lords is what Adonai is. Adoni would be my lord. Adonai would be my lords. But yeah, that's the substitution that begins in like the first century B.C.E.

And then I actually have an entire episode with Justin. sledge from esoterica on the history of Yahweh, which weirdly, it feels like we're kind of doing a history of Yahweh here as well, but like, it's gone in a completely different direction, but there is still this, this trajectory that happens, because we start with Yahweh being like, potentially subordinate to the most high, and then somehow this changes to either Yahweh, like, swapping places and being the, the, the, the, sort of main God above the council, and then eventually the idea develops that Yahweh is like the only God in Christianity. So how can we like trace this trajectory? That's actually,

that might be the topic of the next book that I write. Because the, in fact, the first book that I proposed as a trade book that became, the Bible says so, was a book tracing the development of the concept of God from the earliest recoverable layers down to the Trinity. And so, yeah, tracing it would require, one, chronologically ordering the literary layers of the Hebrew Bible, figuring out what's early, what's late, and then accounting for diachronic and synchronic difference, how does the things change from time to time as well as from place to place, and developing an account for why it is that these things are changing. And a lot of it has to do with responding to crises.

You know, the exile was a significant crisis. And the way that God was understood changed an awful lot following that. In fact, I think you're talking about the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian exile, yeah. When does that happen and what happens? So that's 587 BCE to about 539 BCE. And that is where Jerusalem is conquered by the Babylonians. and the main, the majority of folks, at least the majority of the elite, are forcibly exiles to Babylon, scattered around Babylon.

But then when the Persian Empire conquers Babylon in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great, then allows the Judah heights who want to to return to Jerusalem. And then we get the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the rededication of the temple. and Second Temple Judaism begins there. But this crisis of exile results in a lot of renegotiation of who God is and what God's relationship is. Because remember if in a pre-exilic setting, God is limited to the nation of Israel, if you get exiled to another nation, you can't worship God. What are you going to do? And so this is why we have like Daniel as praying in the direction of Jerusalem.

This is why you have in the Psalms, the Babylonians asked them to sing one of the songs of their land, and they say, who can sing the song of Adonai in a foreign land? We've got a bunch of indications that Adonai is not accessible outside of Israel until you get folks like Ezekiel. What is his vision of? God suddenly has wheels. God's going around in their Dragula with their wheels and their wheels and their platform and everything. We've mobilized the divine throne. Whereas in Psalm 82, the idea is all the gods of the nations get sued and get deposed.

And now God is going to take over their seats on the divine counsel. So you've got to – Yeah, that's a crucial part of the development, right? Because we referenced this earlier, and I was hoping this is where we would land, is that, like, we've got kind of divine counsel going on. Yahweh is somewhere mixed up in there. And then Psalm 82 has the divine counsel, and the divine counsel is condemned, right? something has like something has gone wrong uh and he renders so god presides in the great

assembly rendering judgment among the gods and he says of these gods they walk in nothing they understand nothing uh sorry that yeah they know nothing they understand nothing they walk about in darkness all the foundations of the earth is shaken uh i said you are gods you are all sons of the most high so again there's like most high and then the sons of the most high being this like these these other gods, but you will die like mere mortals. You will fall like every other ruler. And then it ends, rise up, oh God, and judge the earth. For all the nations are your inheritance.

All the nations are your inheritance. Like, how does this all come together? It seems like Psalm 82 is describing a transition. Remember earlier, it's like the nations are all divvied up according to the different sons of God. And now he's saying, I've called you sons of God, but you will now die like mere mortals. rise up God and all of the nations are your inheritance, as if to say that inheritance of those nations is no longer split up amongst those gods, those gods have been demoted, one God elevated,

and all the nations are now yours. Yeah. Tracking this trajectory in the Babylonian exile from Jews believing that Yahweh is like a localized Israel god to being the god of all nations, which is probably a response, as you say, to the fact that They've literally been exiled. I mean, you've got to understand the importance of the location of Jerusalem to Jews, the location of the temple, the religious rituals that have to be performed in the temple. When Jesus speaks to the woman at the well in John's gospel, she says, you Jews say we have to worship at the temple. The temple is incredibly important.

And so if you get kicked out, then what are you going to do? So this episode I did with Esoterica, his assessment is that the Jews were exiled as, like, I think he calls them like Yawists, essentially, and they come back as monotheists. That's kind of the conventional wisdom. It has been for decades now that the exile is what provides the catalyst for monotheism, that God is the only God that exists. but there are cracks forming in that foundation because not only within Deutero-Isaiah, which is supposed to be the quintessential monotheistic assertion in the Hebrew Bible,

but in the later literature, the Greco-Roman period literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls text, even in the New Testament, we kind of go back to talking about all these gods, only they're angels now, but they're still considered divine beings, they're still considered sons of God and sons of Elion, and there are even some humans who are exalted to divine status.

So if the Judahites return as monotheists, they did not stay monotheus very long because they go right back to talking about the other gods. And I tend to think that there's a better reading of Deutero, Isaiah 40 through 55, which understands this as the rhetoric of incomprehensible. ability and is just saying, like the same rhetoric that is used in Deuteronomy, I'm the only one that matters to you, speaking to the judahites. And so I would suggest that monotheism, as the word historically has been understood, requires creation ex nihilo. And so we can't really talk about monotheism existing in the way we have used the term until the end of the second century C.E. at the earliest because you still have gods, even down into the New Testament, you have references to other gods. And so that was the convention quickly. What are you referring to

there when you say the New Testament refers to other gods? So they are, remember, the angels and the demons are gods. So for instance, when Paul says, talks about how when they worship the idols, they're worshipping demons, he quotes Deuteronomy 3217, which is in our song of Moses. And it's a reference to, and it talks about how they worshiped Shadim, which doesn't mean demons, but was translated that way in the Septuagint. And the very next clause, which is in apposition to the demons, it says, gods they did not know. So they worship Shadim and not God. gods they did not know, newly arrived, and all that kind of stuff.

So Paul says, Paul is referring to this passage in Deuteronomy 3217 when he refers to the subject of idols as demons. And in the Septuagint, they are also referred to as dei as gods. And so Paul seems to recognize that these demons are gods. That would be how everyone around them would have understood gods. That would be, that's how the Dead Sea Scrolls and other. Greco-Roman period literature refers to gods and demons. And then you also have references to other principalities and powers and thrones and things like this, which is usually understood to mean either angels and or demons. And then Paul also talks about in 1st Corinthians, he says,

if there be many gods or so-called gods and lords and then interjects, for there are many gods and lords. But then he says, but for us, there is one God. And while you could choose to interpret this to mean, as far as we know, we believe only one God exists, I think in the context, a much better interpretation would be, as far as we're concerned, only one God matters. We have this exclusive relationship. There's all those other angels and demons and what have you, but as far as we're concerned, only one God matters. And there's a wonderful scholar named Paula Friedrichson who recently wrote a paper on Herod and Philo and Paul and the many gods of Jewish monotheism. So it goes into more detail about how the everything, all the data about this time period is just chock full of other gods that are just kind of being denigrated and referred to as demons and things like that. It's interesting.

I think, I mean, it's not like, it's certainly not clear to me. Like, I think that at the very least, what you're doing here for me is opening this door, like I say, to saying, like, there is some weird stuff going on. There are some weird passages that seem to indicate the multiplicity of gods. And at the very least, the arguments for strict monotheism in the Old Testament maybe don't work. I still remain, of course, as I'm going to be after speaking a warm podcast with you about this agnostic on it. but I think it is fascinating. What I want to do to close, if you don't mind, is just to ask if you had to say what the strongest indication in the opposite direction was.

Like if you had like a couple of minutes and your life depended on it and you had to defend the idea that monotheism is definitely in the Old Testament, what would you point to as the strongest case? I would probably try to point to in the Old Testament, I think I would start. struggle a bit. But I think I would probably use what folks like Gavin use, the notion that the God of Israel is being exalted so far above the other gods, that they are treated as some kind of, it's a qualitative, or it's a qualitative, not just a quantitative distinction. And I think I would point to, in like, Greco-Roman period, Judaism into the New Testament,

the fact that Judaism is characterized by non-Jewish and non-Christian, Christian authors as odd because they only recognize one God. There is certainly one God rhetoric that we find in the other literature of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. And I think that's where the best case is going to be made in the notion that Judaism and Christianity are distinct and are distinguished by the other groups because of the fact that they refuse to acknowledge or worship the other gods. And I have a paper that's going to be coming out in an edited volume soon that we'll talk about what exactly is going on with this one god rhetoric. But I would probably try to prioritize that if I needed to convince folks that monotheism is found in the Hebrew Bible and in the New

Testament. It seems like one of Gavin's strategies was to look at, I mean, he lists on screen a bunch of quotes from the book of Isaiah, I'm the Lord or God besides me. There is no savior. besides me there is no god is there a god beside me there is no other there is no other like listing all of these out we've already talked about why we think that this language might not indicate monotheism but that seems to be his strategy all i'll say to people is uh i think this all got kicked off because you made one of your standard sort of vertical videos about monotheism it's cool it'll be called something like you know monotheism is in the in the hebrew bible type in Dan McClellan, like, monotheism.

Gavin's response, you're then, like, hour-long-ish response to Gavin, and then Gavin's final response to you. Go and check it out, guys. Like, I'll put the links in the description. Go and have a look. See what you think. I think it's an interesting conversation, if nothing else.

And, of course, it's one of the chapters in your book. The Bible says so, which is out now. It's linked in the description. And as should be obvious to anybody, any one of these chapters just has an endless pitch. of biblical scholarship to dig into, but also interesting and problematic verses to explore. So lots more to do here. And hopefully at some point in the future we can set up a conversation, maybe with Gavin, or at the very least, I can have someone on my show to defend

the alternate hypothesis. But I hope people have found this interesting. And Christians found it challenging without being super frustrating because they're looking at me going, why are you not bringing this up? Or how have you missed that? That's not what the Hebrew means. Sorry, everybody. I'm doing my best but we'll try to be fair over the long run by giving everyone a voice here so thanks for uh it's the second time you come on the show so you've and not not uh least also considering the contributions you made to my discussion on the isaiah scroll you've given a lot to this channel so i appreciate your time and i hope people go and buy the book and all of that good stuff but thanks again for for coming on thank you i appreciate your time