Within Reason - #65 Esoterica - The History of Yahweh

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

Justin Sledge is currently a part-time professor of philosophy and religion at several institutions in the Metro-Detroit area and a popular local educator. His YouTube channel is "Esoterica". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin Sledge, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Thank you for having me on. Am I right in thinking that we don't even know how Yahweh is supposed to be pronounced? No, we don't know. The last people to have a tradition of how to pronounce the name Yawai, again, Y'Awe is just an academic vocalization for the Israeli God. But the last time anyone had any sort of tradition about how that was actually pronounced was 2,000 years ago,

was the folks in the old Jerusalem temple. But with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the destruction of the priesthood that would have pronounced that name once a year, the tradition is totally amputated. So, no, it's been lost. So where did we get this Yahweh from? I mean, we know what some of the letters are, but why is it that although we have a, the sort of written name, we wouldn't know how it's pronounced? So it's basically we take the, we take Yalway, and the reason why we use that is because

that is typically how noun sequences like that would have been constructed in Hebrew with the A-E sound. And so it's just really typical for names to follow that vowel construction. And so we just shove those vowels in there because that seems to be the best

guess at a vocalization. Also, vocalizations change enormously over time. And the earliest attestation that we might have of something like the name Yalway is probably closer to Yahoo in an Egyptian and a specifically Egyptian inscription.

So we don't know. But there's been lots of attempts at, you know, vocalizing this name, Jehovah being the most famous, right? Where you take the vowels of Adonai and then shove them in German into this and sort of look at it sideways and you get Jehovah out of the deal. So there are lots of ways of trying to make this name pronounceable, but the original pronunciation is totally lost. In fact, we don't even know what the name means.

It seems to be connected to the Hebrew word Haya, which, means the one that is or to be. So it's probably connected to that. It might be connected to he who creates, although that would need to be in a verbal form called the Hifil in Hebrew, and that form is never found in the Hebrew Bible. So if it does mean he who creates or the one that creates that verbal attestation has ever found in the Hebrew Bible, so it means something like the one that is, I think that's the best guess on the street about what this name means. a pretty good name for a god, I suppose. You just straight out assert that you exist. Yeah, it is. And it's interesting as well, the way you say, an interesting name for a god, because I must say that

most of the time when I hear the word Yahweh employed, it's by critics of monotheism. I find sort of on the online space or in the debate sphere, what's happened is people have sort of discovered as they begin to deconstruct their faith, maybe they grew up as a Christian or something, they realized that there's actually a bunch of different gods, a bunch of different belief systems, and Christianity is just one among many. And so they tend to employ this term Yahweh almost as a nod to the fact that this is a god, rather than calling him God. They call him Yahweh in a sort of critical sense, if you see what I'm saying. But I think at the same time, there's a fascination about the fact that there's this God who kind of has a name, and that

that name Yahweh is more attached to the God of the Old Testament than it is to the God of the New Testament and certainly to Jesus. It seems at least in the way that the term is used, people don't refer to Jesus as Yahweh very often. Although I suppose, theoretically, that would make sense for some Christians. What I really wanted to dig into here was the origin of this, of this term, of this God. And there are, of course, two ways of looking at this. If you come from a confessional approach, well, what's the origin of Yahweh? There is no origin. He is just, the god of the universe, he's the creator with his begotten son, that's fine. But as you do on your channel, esoterica, you sort of try to check your religious convictions at the door, as you say,

put on a more scholarly cap and look at the anthropological history of what Yahweh is. So where can we start this conversation? Are there any sort of caveats you want to make before digging into it? And yeah, do you think that the question I'm asking even makes sense? I think it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you know, the idea that Y'allway is a god among other gods is patentedly obvious if we look at the actual historical circumstance in which the ancient Israelites existed. There are lots of gods there. We don't have to look far. You can look at the Hebrew Bible and see the prophets complaining constantly about the Israelites worshipping other gods.

You don't complain about what people aren't doing. And so they're clearly doing that. So, yeah, Y'Awe was one god among lots of gods that existed in what we might call the, the Israelite or Canaanite pantheon, as much as there's a distinction to be made between Israelites and Canaanites. So, yeah, you always, was one God among several, and not just that, but it's also pretty clear this God changed, that this being, this God was an importation into Israelite religion. It is not indigenous to, to the Canaanite God, the Canaanite pantheon, which we know a good bit about. So this God is interesting in that not only did it become

God, a God became God, but also it was an importation. And that's fascinating that it is not a god indigenous to that region, probably coming from the South. I guess the only caveat I would add is that I think when scholars are honest about what we know about Yahweh, the origins of Yahweh, at least, is that we don't know much. You can list the archaeological evidence on one hand. And when you really want to get into the Israelite narratives about Yahweh, what we get is a really complicated story about how this god is being imported into the area that we now think of Israelite territory. And this god is mutating, pretty rapidly mutating, which isn't unsurprising. That happens a lot when you see a god being removed from their geographical location imported into a different cultic site. That's pretty typical of those kinds of mutations.

something similar happens to Osiris. Osiris has moved from one location to another and goes from being an agricultural god to being a god of the dead. That's a really interesting kind of mutation. Something similar happens with the Yalway. But the only thing I would say is that we don't know much about the origins of this god. You know, it's one of the great ironies of history

that this relatively obscure God has become God, and yet we can probably say in 10 minutes, everything we know about the origins of this being. Which just goes to show you, you know, never doubt your, never doubt your origin. You might come from nowhere and really rise to prominence and there's no greater success story in the history of theology than Yahweh. Well, let's try and exhaust that 10 minutes if we can, on that relatively optimistic note. What can we know about the origins of Yahweh? I mean, do we have an idea of the oldest attestation? to this god, that are still extant? Do we have old depictions of this god?

Like, where can we sort of begin with the anthropological evidence? So the earliest attest attestation that we think we have of Yahweh is a mention of, and an Egyptian record of the 14th century BCE, where there is a group of people called the Shasu, and they're referred to as the Shasu of Yalway. Again, we don't know how it's pronounced, probably closer to Yahoo at that time. But the, again, And what's important to know is that in Semitic languages like Egyptian and also like Hebrew, Egyptian being Afro-Aziatic language, what really matters is the consonants. The consonants are doing most of the grammatical work for you and the vowels are often not written. They're pronounced, but they're not written. And those vowels and pronunciations change a great deal over time. So we think that the Shasu probably had as their god, this God, Yahoo or Yahweh. So that's our earliest mention, possible mention of this deity. The other definite earliest mention we have is the Moabite steli or the Mesha steli, and that is a victory steli where, interestingly enough, it's the Moabites who are historical rivals to the Israelites actually bragging about the fact that they looted some Israelite cultic objects, specifically some maybe some temple artifacts, and that they drug those before their god, Chemosh. And so there we see Yawai being spelled out for the first time in any inscription.

So that is probably the earliest. We see Israel, the term Israel showing up on the Merneptus steli in the 13th century BCE. Yawai is not mentioned there, but Israel is mentioned there. It's a great example of Egyptian propaganda. Mostly it's Mernepta bragging about having destroyed them, although they're definitely still there. So the destruction must not have been terribly complete. But that's it. I mean, in some sense, if you want to talk about the earliest archaeological evidence,

we have this one mention in an Egyptian record, and we have another mention on the Mesha Steli, and that's it. After that, we have to get several hundred years into the Iron Age before we get another estestation of this being Yahweh. I mean, it's amazing that we have anything at all, given just the unimaginable length of time that we're talking about since the events described here. But you say that, you know, a few hundred years pass and we start to get a bit more information about this God. What kind of God are we dealing with at this time as well in the Iron Age? Like, what is Yahweh?

How much do we know about the kind of God that Yahweh was? So if we go from the archaeological evidence, we basically know nothing. We know that Y'allway was the god associated with the Shasu, who may have been Proto-Israelites. So we don't know who the Shasu were. There seemed to be a sort of semi-nomadic maybe kind of raiding culture, sort of nomadic raider people. The word Shasu in Semitic language ultimately becomes the word for to raid. So they were something like that, which is also maybe connects them to the Hyperu, the Hebrew, but what will become the Hebrews as we know them?

And then we know they were the national god of the Israelites. So we know that from the Mishatsteli. So that's it. That's what the archaeology gives us. The other side of it is that we could go to the surviving literature of the ancient Israelites, which is what we now know is the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament. But what's really important if we're going to do that, if we're going to make that move, we have to separate off what we think of as the earliest strata of Hebrew language text.

in the Bible. One of the things that people don't really realize when they're reading a Bible in translation is the Bible, sometimes, I'm talking about the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, the Hebrew of the text sometimes shifts. And we can see it shift in a way that we can tell like,

oh yeah, this language here is very, very archaic. This language is much more recent. And the same way that if you were reading along in a newspaper and it switched to Chaucer English, you would immediately know that something has happened. Like an English speaker would be like, I can hardly read that. And if it switched to Beowulf language,

you would absolutely not be able to read it at all without specialized training. We can't read. Most of us can't read Old English and a little bit of us can read Middle English. And obviously we saw Shakespeare in English. We clearly know that there's some stratification happening in the history of the language. The Hebrew Bible does that too. Now, you don't be it in the translation because the translations obliterate all that. So there are sections of the Hebrew Bible where the language is incredibly archaic,

maybe back to the very, very late Bronze Age, certainly by early iron. And if we want to learn about Y'allway, what we have to do, the early history of Y'allway, at least, is to go to those sections, because those sections represent the most archaic remnants of Israelite mythology,

and those sections are going to give us our best glimpse into how those very archaic, primitive Israelites, understood their God. And the two things that jump out from that literature, are this beings associated with storms, probably thunderstorms, and secondly, it's a war god. Almost all the literature we have from this early archaic period are war songs, two of which were attributed to women, by the way, which is interesting. There seemed to have been woman war band prophets that were associated with this god.

And so it's Devor's song and Miriam's song, both of which are songs about. successful conquest or successful warfare. So we're fairly confident this is a deity associated with warfare. And by warfare, we shouldn't think about, you know, Game of Thrones, you know, huge battles on a, we should think about skirmishes at a rating party level. You know, you're talking 50, 150 guys engaging in a, engaging in basically skirmishes or sort of raiding parties, much more like desert Vikings than, you know, Kings of England or something like that.

But yeah, what we can glimpse is... So where are these from? You're talking about the earliest and most archaic parts of the Hebrew Bible. What are we talking about here? So you can think about the section of the Song of the Sea. It's found in the Book of Exodus, Devorah, the Song of Devorah, which is found in the book of judges. Psalm 18 also is quite archaic. Psalm 29, Psalm 68.

68. These are some of the really archaic texts. They seem to largely have been composed somewhere in the area of like Shiloh, Shiloh, as people may know it in English. And that seems to be where the Yahweh cult originated, at least in that region. Now, and what region is that? Where is Shiloh? So you're thinking about, so Shiloh, you're thinking about sort of near Jerusalem, just a little bit north of Jerusalem in the hill country. And the backdrop of all this is sort of the Bronze Age collapse, right? for reasons that we don't fully understand, there were sort of widespread ecological shifts and climate shifts, and there was a sort of cascading system collapse that happened in the eastern Mediterranean at the very end of the Bronze Age. And what that meant was there was a refugee crisis among Aegean peoples that led to the rise of the sea peoples and what we now know as the Pellocet, the Philistines. But also Egyptian and Higemini somewhat collapsed in that region. Hittites totally collapsed.

Um, you know, other regions lost, urban centers, really disintegrated. And it's in that power vacuum that small groups of, um, small ethnic groups like the Israelites could actually get some political power because the big, you know, the big king, big kings at the time were having to deal with bigger problems. I mean, you can look at that giant image of Ramsey's the second having to deal with the sea people. Um, you know, sort of a mass, um, mass, mass movement of people he had to basically try to fend off from his territory. though they did get a territorial foothold. They did occupy the coastal regions down by the Shvaila. So at any rate, what we can tell or what we can see from these early asceticians of Yalway is that it seems like this God comes from the south. It's gods associated with Mount Sear, which is south of what is now Israel. So you can think about this as being the hill country, the sort of desert area, the Arava, in what is now the north section of what is now Saudi Arabia.

So far as we can tell, Yalway probably originated in that region, the region around Mount Sear, and eventually through caravan movement, is imported eventually into what is now Israel. And that caravan movement is actually described in some of these more archaic, these archaic poems that are found in the Hebrew Bible, especially the song of Devorah. So I would tell people, if you want to glimpse into this, go take those sections of the Bible and just read those.

And just like forget about everything else, the Ten Commandments and all the other. And just focus on those sections and you'll get a pretty good glimpse of what Yahweh was, at least to the earliest Israelites. That is just the most archaic parts of the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament. Thinking about the big questions in life can take a heavy toll on our mental health. I've definitely experienced existential anxiety in the past, and these kinds of topics are intimately tied to our psychological well-being. When we're experiencing these kinds of issues, therapy can be an invaluable resource for helping to get our heads in order. That's why I'm teaming up in a paid partnership with BetterHelp for this video. BetterHelp connects you with a credentialed therapist to give you helpful, unbiased advice.

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Doing so will help support the channel and also get you 10% sent off your first month with better help. Now back to Justin Sledge. There's so much to say about translation and the way that it works. It's one of the things that I've that's most interested me as I've begun to develop an interest in, I guess, the study of the Bible is just the extent to which translation can completely destroy your interpretation, not just of the content of the text, but of the text itself and what it is and what it's doing.

It's amazing. Yeah. And not just translation, but to know that the text is the result of a redactional history that's incredibly complex. I tell people that we should not think of the Hebrew Bible as a book. We should think about it as a library of Israelite literature. And it's a pretty haphazardly put together library. It's like a quilt. And often when you look at a quilt, there are patches sewn all over the quilt. And if you look close enough, you can see the stitching where something has been added. And imagine a quilt being composed over the course of, you know, 1500 years. That's the Hebrew Bible. And it is incredibly complex. And we do get some sense of the seams of this thing. And what's interesting is it's clear that some of these really archaic sections, when they were added to the Bible, as we know it, the editors didn't fully understand them. The Hebrew was archaic to them. It's the equivalent of you or I trying to add a quotation from Beowulf into a paper or writing. And we only kind of understand old English. it's something it's something like that so these texts were were archaic even to the

writers of the Bible so much so that they didn't even know fully what they meant which is again it shows you that this text is incredibly complex and and often when we think we understand it especially outside of really understanding it from a historical point of view and a linguistic point of view you're not really understanding it. There's so much to ask. There's so much to ask. I mean, one one question I have, I suppose, is how much we can identify. Maybe we should begin with this. Okay, we've got the the sort of possibly desert gods localized, maybe worshipped amongst other gods. I don't know if that's the case with these sort of early small communities that you're talking about, whether

it's one god among many. I'm not sure. But there's some kind of development that we get from this localized war god desert storm god to eventually being considered as god with a capital g how does that happen and when does that happen so we can tell that the by iron one yawai has been imported into the area that we think of as judea so think of the area around jerusalem mostly slightly to the north of their up in the hill country and that matters because that's where that's so good rugged hill country anyone's ever been to Israel-Palestine, they'll know that that's incredibly difficult country. And it's very difficult if you want to try to conquer it. So you think about the Egyptians have lost territorial hegemony at that time.

The idea of getting chariots up into those islands, it's very difficult. And the highlands are very difficult militarily to seize. And so they're able to carve out some degree of political autonomy. And with that political autonomy comes theological autonomy. They're going to, you know, those two things are completely united at this time. And in and around the area of Shiloh, which we know that there was a Y'alway shrine there, it's never been found. And trust me, they've been looking for it. There's nothing more than the settlers and Shiloh would love more than to find the Y'alway shrine there. We have found other

Y'allway shrines. We've not found the original one at Shiloh. But it seems like around there, that's where the Y'alway cult is centered. And what begins to happen is there's a northern evolution and a southern evolution of the cult. And what in a general way we can talk about is that Yahweh is assimilated into the Canaanite pantheon. And so there are aspects of the two big gods that really matter for the Canaanites, which are El and Baal. So L is a kind of grandfatherly, kind, wise. You know, this is a god that people imagine. You know, the god was sitting on the big throne with a big white beard. If you've ever imagined that, you've imagined l that's how successful that assimilation went that when we imagine yaway we don't

imagine a raiding god killing a bunch of people although that's what the earliest text you know you imagine sort of like a you know buff bearded young guy murdering people uh viking style that would be the all way of the early the very early primitive yawism but when we imagine god and even on the sistine chapel right it's old guy with the beard that's l So that god is assimilated pretty easily to Yalway. That gets assimilated pretty easily. Where things are more complicated is Ba'al, because Yahweh and Ba'al share almost a similar sort of theophoric profile. They're both storm gods, although Ba'al is a god of the storms of sort of coastal storms, the big coastal storms that come in over Lebanon, what is now Lebanon, and sweep over into what is now Israel, Palestine.

Yawai probably was a thunderstorm god. And if you've ever been into southern Jordan and the areas around the sort of Petra, thunderstorms still kill people because they still generate flash floods and they're still quite terrifying. You can see images of flash floods from that region. And also Baal is a warrior god. And so the problem is going to be, you know, town's not big enough for two warrior storm gods. And if you've read the Hebrew Bible, you know that one of the big beefs, theological beefs, is between Baal and Yahweh, because they're competing over the same people and they have very similar, you know, for the average guy on the street, they're the same God in some ways. And so what's going to happen is elements of Baal and elements of L are assimilated to Yalway.

And what's going to happen is largely Yalwe and Baal are going to be put at each other's throat. in sort of theological duels, in fact, literally theological duels. And what's going to emerge is a degree of assimilation between these gods. So much so that there are Psalms in the Hebrew Bible where scholars think, and there's one psalm specifically, where scholars think that it was originally a song for Ba'al, and they just cut and pasted Y'allway's name him. A bit like my country, Tis of thee. and the British National Anthem

sort of changed the words and it suddenly becomes an American patriotic tune. Yeah, I mean, and even more dramatic than that, just imagine like, God save the president as opposed to God save the king. Yeah. So it's even more, you know, even more developed than that.

To be clear here, we're talking about the Canaanite gods. The L and Baal are the indigenous gods of the Canaanite people who are living in, well, where about? They're sort of living in the, in, where is the Cana generally? Sort of sort of thinking about Syria, Lebanon, that area all the way south into, you know,

basically into what turns into desert down in the Arava and sort of the Sinai Peninsula. So that entire region would have been sort of Kanan, and in Kanan, there would have been lots of ethnic groups, and those ethnic groups would have had later shared a pantheon, but they probably would have prioritized a god. What ends up emerging is that the Israelites, as one of those, has imported a god. And that imported God, Yalway, is going to be set over and against the indigenous god, Ba'al. And again, the word Ba'al just means Lord. In fact, if you get married in Judaism, you're referred to as Ba'al and Batula, Lord and Virgin for the day.

Now, how many are lords and how many are versions is up for debate. But the word Ba'al still just means husband in modern and use in Hebrew. So the word just means Lord or master. And, you know, Adonai actually means something similar as a taboo replacement for using the word Yawai and Jewish prayer life. But this is where things are going to get dicey because the Israelite monolators, the people who want to be either Yalway is the best God, even though the other gods exist. It's a position called Hino Theism. Although in the South and Judea, they tend to want to draw. drift toward monoletry. They tend to only want to worship Yahweh. Even if they acknowledge the other

gods are real, they only want to have Yahweh worship. And so what's going to happen, what's going to happen is that Yawai is going to have to beat Ba'al. And you see this play out over and over again in stories of the Elijah Elisha cycle and other prophets. They're constantly condemning people for worshiping Ba'al. Because frankly, I think that for most common Israelite people, they didn't know a difference. They're like, this is a God that makes it rain. They're just different names of the same God. I think the average Israelite on the street, the average came out on the street would

have been like, I don't really care what you call this God as long as the rain comes. That's what matters. And again, I should point this out that ancient Canaan and modern Israel, Israel, Palestine, they have a wet season, a dry season. And without those thunderstorms and without that, without those like winter rains, you have full blown famine. And so it's unsurprising that, uh, a storm god is going to be very popular because you want to be on the right side of those storms.

And, you know, Yahweh is going to transition from being a thunderstorm god to being associated with these big coastal storms. And you can see this as the Psalms develop. Now, I want to talk about this assimilation of the gods, this great clashing of Baal and Yahweh. When we look at our anthropological evidence, our writings, engravings, our pictorial representations of gods, what evidence do we have of this theological assimilation? Archaeologically nothing. I mean, we have some statues of L, we have some statues of Baal, almost always raising sort of a spear, lightning bolt. We have very little representations of Yahweh, maybe two. one at Khrbeth Kham and one at Kuntilat Arjud. So those are cultic sites, one in Samaria, what is now Palestine, and one down in the Sinai.

And those seem to depict, they seem to depict Yahweh, and they seem to depict Yahweh with a consort. Although the grammar in that whole sequence is very strange. There's a bunch of debate about exactly what the Hebrew grammar is supposed to do there. But what ends up happening is that we see in those depictions, Y'always depicted something like a bull, which is, again, more assimilation. L is associated with bulls, and it seems like in the north, in Israel, they were pretty okay with this. The northern temples actually have bull imagery, whereas the southern temples are very, we call them anachonic. They don't like to represent Yalway. But we do have two

pictures of Yalway. One, the most famous one at Kuntlid are Jude, depicting Yalway is a bull-looking figure with a consort, a Sherah, which we know from Israelite literature was sort of another goddess that existed in the Israelite Canaan. We know that she was hated by at least the writers of the Israelite Bible or the Israelite literature as we have it, but she was really popular because, again, they're constantly saying don't worship her. And so that gives us a good indication that people were. So again, this is another example of assimilation. We know that had a consort, Atherat, probably when it ends up happening is, a Yawai comes in. You don't really want a bachelor god. And so what do you do? You pair your God with the most popular, I don't know, Taylor Swift of the day. And that's Asherah. And Asherah becomes the divine consort of Yalway. Again, the northern Israelites were more comfortable with this, theologically. The southerners never seem to have been comfortable with it. And there seemed to have been, um, in general, a tendency toward anaconism for one, not representing Yahweh at all, but also

to get rid of this whole consort business. And so in the south, between the south and the north, there's economic tension, but also theological tension, political tension. I mean, we can never separate these in the ancient world. There is no separation between the political and the theological, you know, they're all knitted together in a very, very tight way. So we've got now from Yahweh, the local storm god, to Yahweh being sort of assimilated to Baal and the god of the gods of the Canaanites, but still it seems to me we're a way off God as not just the supreme god among gods, but just the only god that exists and not just the god of the desert storms, not just the god of the coastal storms, but but like I say God with a capital G so there's there's got to be more to this story where next how does this development

continue? So it seems like what ends up happening next is there's a movement in the direction of Hino Theism which is to say that there are lots of gods but our God is the best God you know there's a lot of dads and my dad can beat up your dad so it's something like that that Hinotheism seems to develop both in the north and the

south not not homogenously and and not totally, but the key thing that seems to happen is that in 722, the Assyrians attack and destroy the Northern Kingdom, Israel. And when that destruction happens, there's a refugee crisis. There's a great deal of Israelites coming down from the north into the south, into Judea and its capital in Jerusalem. And remember, the Northerners are much more comfortable with representing Yahweh, with the bull imagery, even with some degree of syncretism between

the local religion, that's to say the Ba'a worship and other things like that, the story of Jezebel being a great example. You can hear the word Baal in her name. Her name means woman of Baal. And once Israel is destroyed in 722, this refugee crisis means it's a bunch of people coming from the north to the south. The Southerners, it seems, are never comfortable with of bull imagery, never comfortable totally with representing Yahweh. And there had been a tendency among the Southerners not only to attack non-Yalway worship, but also to be interested in consolidating Yahweh worship only in the Jerusalem temple. So these are people like Hezekiah and especially the king Josiah. Josiah, we know led something like an inquisition where not only were non-Yalway

sites destroyed, but even Yahweh sites that weren't in the Jerusalem Temple were also knocked down. Tell Arad is probably one of our better preserved Yahweh worship sites in the south. Tell Don is the best

preserved in the north. Which is interesting to go to if you ever get the chance to go to these shrines where you're like, oh yeah, Yahweh was worshipped here. Like as a god among gods. It's a very when you walk up to the Telarad and you're like standing in

the room where this entity was worshipped as a god among gods. It's sort of an interesting historical mindset. I also mentioned that the Holy of Holies where the incense was burned for Yalway in the Telarad Shrine

was recently analyzed and cannabinoids were actually found in the incense. Really? So this is an interesting thing that it looks like. at least some part of whatever they were burning as incense at the Telarad Shrine did contain some degree of cannabinoids. Now, were they hotboxing inside of the Holy of Holies?

I don't know. I can't say that. But, you know, the archaeology is what the archaeology is, which is interesting to me that no one ever thought to test it. How could you possibly know? Like, how do you discover the cannabinoids in such a sort of ancient location? So one of the great things about religious violence is that it tends to be pretty total. When people are inspired by religion, they tend to go all the way. And so when the Tellerod shrine was destroyed, they literally pulled it down.

And when they pulled it down, they buried it. And by pulling it down and effectively burying, that's great for archaeologists, because it seals that entire shrine in time. Israel, as I'm sure folks know, especially down in the south, it's incredibly arid, it's incredibly dry. Tellerade's, you know, it's a very harsh terrain out there. We're getting where it's just south of Chavron here. When they tore it down, basically the altar came down this way and was faced down. They flipped it over, and it's now in the Israel Museum. You can go see the altar in the Israel Museum.

Well, you know, those, you know, those, the kind of oils that go into making incense, are pretty thick, pretty viscous oils, you know, think frankincense and mastic and mer and, you know, cannabis oil. And folks who've ever seen cannabis oil, it's, you know, oily stuff. Well, if you're burning incense on this altar continuously, you're going to get a pretty thick layer of these oil compounds building up, especially in the cracks and crevices of these stones. They scraped it out and tested it with, I'm sure, a mass spectrometer

or gas chromonograph or something like that. And you can see in this, you know, the spectrogram, you know, you check it against Mark manuals and stuff. And you're like, ah, those are cannabinoids and that's frankincense. So what they were burning in this temple of worship to Yahweh might have been getting them high. Or it at least could have had some degree of psychoactive, you know, effect on them. We don't know.

I mean, all we can say is, this is what the chemical compounds on the top of this rock are. and we know this room was this by this. And if you get some sense of how much incense they were burning, maybe. I mean, again, should we be very surprised, given what we know about the world, the anthropological world of religion, you know, religion and intoxication are deeply connected to each other, and that they would be intoxicatory aspects of Yahweh worship should not at all be surprising to us. Well, I suppose slight detour from the main thrust of the conversation, the connection between religion and intoxication. What are you talking about? I mean, most religions have some degree of negotiated relationships with various forms of alterations of consciousness, whether they be alterations of consciousness brought on through breathing techniques or alterations of consciousness brought on through the use of consciousness. brought on through the use of psychedelic drugs or alcohol or whatever, coffee.

You know, again, we should always imagine and know that the Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism and Sufism, Islam mysticism, those late-night vigils that gave rise to all of that kind of crazy mysticism stuff in the 17th century, those dovetail in the Ottoman Empire with the importation of coffee houses. So they're drinking coffee all night long. Yeah, there's a direct correlation, and I would say to some degree, causation, although it's overdetermined, that caffeine has played a huge role in the development of forms of Jewish and Islamic mysticism. So stimulants and other kinds of compounds that alter consciousness are just baked into most religions, either through prohibition or through management,

because you can't be altered all the time. And even in the Hebrew Bible, there's a, a moment where we get the first king of Israel, Saul, there are these roaming prophets who are singing and sort of become some kind of ecstatic state. And Saul goes and joins them. And he also goes into some kind of ecstasy. In fact, there's a phrase in Hebrew when someone kind of goes crazy and it's like, oh, Saul's among the prophets.

Because that phrase is found in the Hebrew Bible. So there's clearly some kind of ecstatic, Yawai worship that existed, which again, we should be unsurprised. I mean, you've got to be pretty hyped up to go into a battle, especially, you know, late Bronze Age or early Iron Age battles or, you know, you're fighting at this distance. You had to be pretty hyped up. And what better to hype you up than, you know, these sort of prophets and going into ecstasies and stuff like that. We see evidence of it in the book of judges. So, yeah, at any rate, the Telarod shrine, that gives us a good idea that at least

Josiah had torn that down in the interest of consolidating theological and political power. Again, the same thing, but consolidating that power in Jerusalem. And once those refugees come from Assyria in 722, they're bringing their scriptures and their religiosity south. And that's why when we look at the Hebrew Bible, we often see two stories sitting side by side. Probably one of those is a northern story and one of those is a southern story. And in the interest of basically serving both communities, the editors of those texts had to include both versions. And so they stitched them together basically as sort of like, you know, live and let live. Yeah, we have two different traditions of this story, but there's no way we're going to be

able to make this all work without including both. You have to bring both parties to the table. How would you best characterize the difference? I know we've talked about it a bit between the northern and the southern worship of Yahweh in relation to how it ends up in the text. So I think that one of the things that we see is that, you know, there's an emphasis, like the hard yawism that we see where Y'alli really was emphasized the yawist structure of the text is probably southern. The Elohim stuff that's more abstract and that may be more northern material. Again, we also see like the emphasis on like Ebola imagery is also coming from probably from the north. In fact, I think that the golden calf story is probably a big. shade on the northerners like you guys did this like you worship these bulls we see southerners complain about the bulls of the north and stuff like that so there is that's the that's the golden calf that Moses comes down from Sinai and discovers his people are worshipping and has to destroy just destroy it

and a plague comes among people I think that's a shade thrown the shade being thrown at the northerners in the way that they worship of Yahweh now what is up happening I think is that the northerners are in a you You know, they come from a place of prestige. The northern tribes and the northern kingdoms, the Omrides, always were politically stronger, richer, more powerful than the Southerners. When they're destroyed, they're not in a position of power anymore, but they probably had the better scribes. They probably had money. They probably had, you know, again, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a much more urban elite group of people coming down as refugees to, well, we're kind of bumpkins.

You know, Jerusalem was not the center of anything. It was a relatively small, walled city or semi-walled city, kind of on a mountain. It's not a great place to live. It's defensible, but it wasn't a, you know, again, when we think about Jerusalem, we shouldn't think of a city of tens of thousands. You should think of a city of 5,000, 6,000, maybe 10,000. It's relatively small. And, you know, Josiah and those guys have to figure out a way,

ultimately of accommodating theologically these different groups of people. And one of the interesting moments we have in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps one of the strangest, is that Josiah is doing renovations on the temple. And doing renovations in the temple, they knock a wall down, and inside they find a scroll.

The Torah Moshe, the laws of Moses. And they take this scroll they found in a wall, which this story is about as believable, whatever. It's very unlikely this really happened. But it's interesting because they take this text, which is probably most of Deuteronomy as we know it. And in order to vouchsafe that it should be followed, they take it to a northern priestess or northern prophetess. Her name is Holda. And she's one of these refugees. And so it's an interesting moment where the southerners are religiously innovating. I'm pretty sure Josiah's scribes are just

writing that scroll out. But in order to get the northern refugees on board, they take it to one of their prophetesses, Holda, and she basically says, yeah, it's from God. It's from Yahweh. And it becomes Deuteronomy as we know it. And so this is a great example where, you know, you have some theological and scriptural sort of accommodation between the northerners and the Southerners. But even at this time, Yawway is not the only God. There are definitely still people worshipping Yalway. There are definitely people still worshipping celestial objects. The Prophet Jeremiah complains about this, that there are people worshipping the stars.

The queen of heaven is a goddess that Jeremiah mentions that people shouldn't be worshipping. There's probably Asherah worship still happening. We have lots of Asherah idols around. Ball is probably still out there to some degree, but basically between 722 and 580s. B.C.E. when Jerusalem's destroyed by the Babylonians, what's probably happening here is that Yalway monoletry is beginning to take shape, that the exclusive worship of Yalway, especially in Jerusalem, and especially in shrines. Other shrines are going to be destroyed. And then this is all interrupted, of course, in 586 when the Babylonians come through and just trash everything. And so that inaugurates the exile, the Judean exile. And the argument that I make at least is that yawism went into exile and Judaism comes back. And it's in that exile period for which we have, you know, the data there is very meager and it's very confused and very, you know, we can talk a little bit more about it. But I think that it's in that exile period, that monotheism, as we know, it emerges.

And it's in those texts like Trito Isaiah, the very end of Isaiah, where we do get what appears to be radical. monotheism at the very end of the composition of what we know is the Hebrew Bible. So Trito Isaiah, that's the first time where we get clear articulations that Yalway is the only God at all. Every other God is false. Y'allway is the only God. And I guess what I would add to that is that there's a weird trade made that when Yawai becomes the only God, Y'allway sees.

is to be Yalway. All of the defining characteristics that we would have recognized in the primitive period of Yawism, Storm God, Rating God, you know, those kinds of elements. If you're going to make a God, God, God of everything, God can't be one thing. God can't be a raiding God or a storm God. God has to be God of everything. And so there's an interesting trade made, Theologically, where in Yahweh becomes the only God, Yahweh ceases to be Yahweh in any sense that we would recognize from the primitive literature associated with this being. So during the Babylonian exile, you think, is where monotheism, as we know it today, develops?

I think it has to, yeah, I think the literary evidence is pretty clear that it develops there and then in the period afterwards. And there's a pretty simple theological reason. for this. For most ancient peoples, gods literally dwelt in geographic regions. When the Bible says that Yahweh lived in

the house, when it calls the temple the Bayet Yahweh, the house of Yahweh, they're not, it's not a metaphor. God literally lives, Yahweh lived in that building, at least at some parts of the year, and literally that this God is a god for this region.

There's even a section in the Bible where L, or El Yon is parceling out areas and Y'allway is given a parcel of land. So geography and theology are completely linked. You know, when you're, if you worship a God, it's because your God lives in this town. And that's where the God is. Well, there's obviously a theological problem here. If your God lives in a house and that God gets destroyed, either you have to cease belief in that God. That house, that house gets destroyed. That house gets destroyed, right? When that house, that temple gets destroyed, your God is homeless or, you know, and then you're exiled. So you're no longer even

in the land where that God dwells. So you have one of two options. You can pick another God and worship those gods or you can theoretically do something very radical. And the Judeans did, I think, what is one of the most radical things, theologically and the history of that region is a maintained belief in their God. But to do that, they had to remove the geographic specific, specificity of that God and say, no, God's not God of this house in this region of Judea. God has to be God of everything. And therefore, no matter where we go, God is God. And so it's a theological innovation of Titanic importance.

I mean, it's a shift toward the generalization of theology. But it's pretty clear that some of these Judean theologians begin to make that move in the exile because they're forced to. They have to do something theologically. And what ends up emerging is, one, monotheism, and then two, apocalypticism. And this is where the, this is the birth of Jewish apocalypticism, and Jewish apocalypticism is born out of the theological failure of the old Deuteronistic theology, which was, if you follow God and do what you're supposed to do, I'll give you land and agricultural success. If you don't, I'll wipe you out. Well, neither happened. The temple was destroyed, and they weren't wiped out.

So what do you do? That theology doesn't make any sense anymore. What do you do? You know, you develop any theology. And that new theology is Jewish apocalypticism. And that theology would, of course, set the, that along with monotheism, what set the stage for Christianity and basically the religion, the Abrahamate religions, as we know it. But we really should give it to those theologians, those unnamed Jewish theologians, Judean theologians, like whoever wrote Trito Isaiah, they did something completely daring

theologically that I think would have been shocking to their theological contemporaries. They're like, hold on, there's just one God and that God is a god of the whole Olam, like the whole universe. Bizarre idea. Yeah. Absolutely bizarre idea. And they, and I would say that, that Trito Isaiah theologically pushed the envelope in a way that no monotheism has ever done before. They were more radical monotheism. monotheists than anyone else because they are willing to let God, because they were committed to

this idea of monotheism, they were willing to let God be the God of evil too. And there's a moment in Triedo Isaiah, where God is speaking, and it says, I am good and evil, I am the light and the dark. And that's a pretty radical theological move, so radical that even the apocalypticists weren't comfortable with it because they had to invent the devil to be sort of a bad guy. God could not be associated with evil. And so the theological innovation there was to invent the devil to do that work. And the rabbis, in fact, are so uncomfortable with that language that in the traditional Jewish prayer book, they quote that section of Isaiah and they say, Ani Tov, I'm the good,

et ha'ol, and everything else. they will not put an itova i am the good and the evil so even rabbinical judaism is uncomfortable with the radical monotheism of triteau isaiah and of course christianity it obviously is as well because they invent the devil to do all the dirty work yeah so really radical monotheism of trito isaiah before asking about that what is jewish apocalypticism it's a very complicated topic Jewish apocalypticism is a mode of religiosity that primarily has to do with the idea that God, often through mediaries, like angels typically, will reveal to people things about ultimate reality. The word apocalypticism is from the Greek apocalypseis, which means to unveil or to

part the veil. And so this literature has the idea that rather than Moses went up the mountain, and got the law and brought it down, and now you have to follow it, that there are these people for whom God reveals certain kinds of things, especially secrets. The most famous examples of this in the Hebrew Bible are going to be Ezekiel, where Ezekiel literally is lying there by the rivers of Babylon, and God sort of splits the heavens open, and he's given a vision and shown all kinds of things about the universe.

The literature that emerges out of Jewish apocalypticism typically has several different features. They typically are very interested in the origin of evil, which is obviously a thing that if you're living in exile, you'd be interested in why bad things happen to good people. They're interested in the end of the world. They're interested in the nature of the cosmos. They're hyper, usually pretty deterministic,

the idea that God's in control of everything. And they often try to describe at great lengths how God controls everything, how history is part of a divine plan, but even bad things that are happening are part of that plan, especially the bad things that happen are part of that plan. And typically they're very interested in the structure and function of the cosmos. So they're very interested in how the planets move and what angels are associated with what. They're typically associated with the punishments that bad people get. So Jewish apocalypticists often will shift Israelite eschatology. So as you probably know, there is no

afterlife in Israelite religion. There's just Sha'ul, and Sha'ul is just a dark place of basically nothing. Well, that's not great if you want to know what happens to the good and bad people, right? Because we're good people, and we got exiled by these bad people. What's going to happen to these bad people? Well, if we're all going to go to the same place, why in the world do anything? And so what happens? The apocalypticists, probably under the influence of some Zoroastrian religion,

begin to develop a more robust system of the, afterlife and where we get heaven and where we get hell. And that is born out of Jewish apocalypticism. Also, apocalypticism is very interested in salvation and the ultimate end of things. And typically messianic ideas are born in the apocalyptic mode of Judaism. So in many ways, like I think I said earlier, Israelite religion, y'allism goes into exile. What comes back is apocalyptic Judaism. Judaism is at the stage for rabbinical Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and things like that. Yes, one of the big, one of the important shifts here is this preacher from Nazareth who shows up and seems to change the story a little bit.

And I think that we're going to have to sort of get there at some point, right? we've got now to this idea of Yahweh as God. This idea is the one God that's worshipped, the God without location. It's interesting you say that actually because, I mean, my picture of the character of Jesus is someone who comes along and says, look, I know that you have this ritualistic religion. You have a way of doing things. You need to go to a particular place. You need to go to the temple.

You need to perform these sacrifices. Now that I'm here, I tear down the temple, I am the new temple, you know, you can worship me anywhere, you don't need to be there. It's just interesting to me hearing you describe the development of Yahweh before the appearance of Jesus in sort of similar terms, that in the Babylonian exile, you get something a bit like what Jesus seems to have been doing, this kind of, you don't need to worship there, you can worship anywhere. I suppose I was surprised to hear that that mode of thinking predated Jesus. Yeah, in the move toward theological

generalization, that a god that is everywhere, it can be worshipped anyhow, because that God is anywhere. You can see it as a stepping stone, right? Because it's still, you still keep that, that attachment to the temple, that attachment to ritual and to location that is only really fully undone by the time you get to get to Jesus. And I think mostly about Jesus' followers

Whereas not so much Jesus himself. I think that's really a Pauline move. Because Jesus clearly is religious, he's attending the temple. He's going to the temple, pilgrimage. So I think his followers certainly, once Jesus undergoes the process of becoming God or something like a godlike figure, I think that process is still going on in Paul's lifetime. But once Jesus becomes ephemorized or undergoes apotheosis, then, yeah, then you get the idea that Jesus was the temple and was the sacrifice and sort of the full.

the full picture. But I think that's happening mostly in the 40s and 50s, rather than it wasn't in Jesus' own lifetime. So why is it that if during the Babylonian exile, there's this decision made that no Yahweh is not connected to the temple, he can't be because, or he can't live in the temple, because the temple's destroyed, you know, like we can't have a localized God, we need to think of a God of the universe that we can worship anywhere. Why is it that even when you get to the time of Jesus, there still is this attachment to the Jewish temple to a God that seems to be, if not located himself, somehow connected to particular identifiable locations on Earth. Why does that stick around?

I think for lots of reasons. One, ritual and tradition die hard. It's just a case that these are the text you had, and there's some sense in which even if God is everywhere, there is a correct way of worshiping God. And I think that they had not totally given up on the idea that this is the correct way of worshiping God. And there's good reason to believe that if you believe that these texts were at some level divinely revealed. So God may be

the god of the whole world, but God still needs to be worshipped in this way, in this place. Now, not all Judean believe that. They were temples in other places. For instance, there was a temple down on the Elephantine Island in what is now Egypt. We know of a later temple that eventually was built

in Alexandria. So we knew and know of other non-Jurusalem temples that Judeans Jews use to worship, to worship Yahweh. Also, there's a split among the Jews at this time. There are Jews who are moving in the direction of a more radical generalization that typically represented by the Pharisees, and then the old guard, the Sadducees, who really hold on in some ways to the old Israelite religion. They reject the existence of the afterlife.

They reject the existence of angels and demons. They are insistent upon temple sacrifices. In fact, the rabbis of the time were already envisioning a kind of post-temple theology, not a post-temple worship, but a post-temple theology, where the home becomes the center of religious life, and the dinner table becomes the center of religious life in many ways. And I would argue that it's because there was already a kind of theological prefiguring of a post-temple theology. among the Pharisees, that when the temple was eventually destroyed by the Romans, they were able to pivot very quickly because theologically it was already intact. And so rabbinical Judaism emerges as a post-temple theology because they were kind of already doing post-temple theology.

And so once the temple's destroyed, the shift was, I won't say easy because, of course, it must have been terrifyingly traumatic for them. But they had already began thinking that way. Because, again, I think that once you get into it, it, especially when he began reading some rabbinical literature. And even in Isaiah, some of the later prophets, the prophets are also pretty skeptical about whether Yahweh needs this stuff. There's a section where Yahweh, where Isaiah is saying, he's mentioning, do you think I need burning grains and do you think I need incense? Do you think I need

any of these things? No, I'm the master of the whole world. You need to do this to worship. of me. I don't need it. Um, and is, is it, you know, Isaiah says, is this a fast that you should be doing? No, no, you should be fasting by helping the poor and, and things like that. So there's already a theological shift happening, even in the late prophets, away from the idea that Y'allway needs this. And that's carried on, I think, theologically in groups like the Pharisees, which, um, eventually prefigure Raminical Judaism where so much temple, ritual is still maintained. I mean, we still wash our hands before we eat dinner because that's what the priest did in the temple. We still sprinkle salt on bread because that's what they did in the temple.

We still pinch off apart and throw it in the oven because that's, it represents the sacrifice is done in the temple, but it's all shifted into the home as opposed to in this big building in Jerusalem. So already there's theological differentiation happening, even by the late prophets and into rabbinical Judaism in the second temple period about does you always need this stuff and the answer is does he always need us dumping out a bunch of beer you know on a bunch of ashthut like yeah this doesn't make any sense like he always doesn't need this we might need to do it but the god of the universe doesn't need libation offerings or whatever yeah okay so we've prefigured this a little bit or preempted this a little bit

our discussion, Jesus shows up. Jesus starts preaching morally. It's already an immediate debate exactly what it was he was claiming to be and claiming to do. But at some point, this man who went around sort of performing miracles and gaining followers, who then on some accounts is crucified and then seen by his followers has risen again, becomes identified. with Yahweh, with this Israelite God. How does that happen? So it's a great question. We're still very much in the midst of trying to sort out exactly how it is that the Jesus movement developed at all.

But it seems that Jesus was some kind of apocalyptic prophet, and he probably preached for about a year before he was executed, probably less than a year. I think most scholars now say probably less than a year. He entered Jerusalem caused a riot and was executed because he's probably one of, you know, a dozen Jewish rebels executed during that time period for causing a riot during Passover. So what happens? There's a lot of debate. I think what seems to make the most sense to me is that Paul has some kind of mystical vision. He's probably involved in the semi-official, quasi-official persecution of Christians,

or what we call followers of the Jesus movement. He has some kind of vision, I suspect. He was what we call a Merkava mystic. There's evidence from that from 2nd Corinthians that he's having sort of out-of-body experiences. He's going into the heavens. There's a form of mysticism called Merkava mysticism that was pretty typical among Jewish, not typical. It was one of the forms of Jewish mysticism, associated with apocalypticism.

And it seems that Paul goes into the heavens in a mystical experience, and he sees the ephemorized, apotheosized Jesus. And we know that Paul believed that physical bodies could be transformed into something like angelic bodies. And we think that Jesus managed to accomplish this. And Paul seems to believe that because Jesus has accomplished it, we can all accomplish. accomplish it, and we can all go live in glorified bodies forever after we die, and that Jesus sort of led the way. I think that's the earliest forms of the Pauline theology. Well, I think what ends up emerging in this is that already in Judaism at the time, there was an emergent theology, a heretical theology called what we now refer to as Jewish bitheism, or the so-called

two powers in heaven, where there was already the idea that there was some kind of deos absconditus, some kind of God beyond all knowing. But that God, in order to be knowable, made some other version of itself that people could know. In one version of the story, it's the angel Metatron. Sometimes in the literature, the apocalyptic literature, the angel Metatron is referred to as Yahweh Katan, the little Yahweh, which is just shocking. For a religion that had just recently adopted radical monotheism, now bi-theism emerges, where you have a greater yawl way and a lesser Yahweh. And this theology was around, and I think what happens is that Paul, having had

a mystical experience of the apotheosized Jesus, links it with this emerging, emergent Jewish Bitheism, and Jesus becomes that Yahweh Katan, where, and for other forms of Jewish bytheism, it was the angel metatron, it was the cavode, the divine glory has a, there is a, There's the reveal glory and the Kavodny star, the hidden glory. And so there are lots of versions of this Jewish bitheism around at that time. And I think that Paul, at some level, takes his mystical experience of the resurrected Jesus and then combines it with this nascent Jewish bitheism and Jesus basically becomes Yahweh Kataan. But Christians will listen to this and say, well, hold on, no, Paul, we know Paul.

We know Poole had an idea that Jesus was just God. I mean, are we saying that the Poole was not a monotheist? I mean, it seems also if you're reading this into the actual epistles of Poole, this isn't some secret discovery of a biography somewhere else. No, these are the epistles that made it into the New Testament canon. What's a Christian going to think listening to this? How should they respond to this idea that you're reading into that scripture, a completely different theological idea to the one that they're used to? I think it's less reading it into it, but more putting Paul into the world of his Jewish contemporaries. So if we take Paul out of his Jewish contemporaries and then read Christian

history back into him, then we can say, yeah, Paul always believed that Jesus was God or at some level God. Yeah, if you want to read Jesus back through the history of Christianity, I would suggest that the more historically accurate way of reading Paul is to put him among his Jewish contemporaries in the Jewish theologies of the time, and then we'll realize really quickly, oh, Paul looks a lot like the other Jews that we know of. The same thing is true of Jesus. If you take Jesus as an apocalyptic Galilean miracle worker, yeah, that story sounds a little weird if you've only heard the Christian story that he was a unique godlike God figure who was able to raise a dead until you read other Jewish literature where there's lots of these

Galilean miracle workers that are able to work miracles. We have at least three or four of them that we know of that were somewhat contemporaries of Jesus. So I would suggest that it's better to take Jesus and Paul for that matter and to put them into their historical theological context and then try to understand their life and writings in the case of Paul in that context. And it turns out he makes a great deal of sense in that context without having. having, without having to

without having to backload a bunch of of Christian theology that developed in the centuries afterwards. So we don't need to do that to make sense. They need to do that because Gentiles didn't know much about the Jewish world and therefore to make sense of

what it meant to say that Jesus was God and that the father was God and now you have to have something inner, you know, sort of in between the two and the form of the Holy Spirit. There's a lot of really amazing Greek philosophical heavy lifting to make all that makes sense. And you would need that to make all that makes sense. Another way of making it make sense is just to put these guys back in their Jewish context in the first century.

And it turns out they make sense in that context quite well, actually. So Paul has some kind of mystical experience of this Jesus fella. And this is the interesting thing about Paul, of course, is that unlike the other of the apostles, Paul never meets a fleshy Jesus. Paul has visions that, as you say, seem to be more aptly described as mystical experiences than sort of meeting a physical person and shaking his hand. And so, for whatever reason, after the death of Jesus, Paul is having these visions of Jesus. And at the same time, there is this developing Jewish theology that there are kind of two gods.

or at least like there's a god and then a sort of small god, almost a son of God, if you will. And Paul is the one who begins to identify this Jesus fella with the sort of little Yahweh. That implies to me that because of course Paul's letters, Paul's epistles are the earliest written sources of the New Testament. But chronologically in terms of the story, he's not the oldest or the earliest person to actually interact with Jesus. And so you have the disciples, for example, tradition assumes that two of those actually ended up going on to write Gospels. Was it not amongst this community that the idea first arose that Jesus was God? I mean, is it Paul, in other words, who's the first person, you think, to start identifying Jesus with God? I think so.

I don't think we look at the, assuming, let's say, James or something. is actually written by James, and it's hard to say if it really was. But there's no indication that in those texts that Jesus has become a divine figure, he's important. But this idea, I think, is really developing in the shadow of Paul's theological genius.

And I think Christianity, that Jewish Christianity, the idea that Jesus was the Messiah, had died and had risen to heaven to come back very shortly, and deliver on the messianic promises that were sort of typical of the time, I think that would have probably lasted. I think it did last until the Barcoq were rebellion. I think that distinctively Jewish way of being Moimalk Christian,

I think it did survive in Jerusalem. But I think that Paul's theological shifts, especially the shift away from the Jewish law, the necessity of the law, and the universalization of Jesus as God, as a sort of as a as a as a as a as a as a god character I think ensured its success but um I think again history is in history is is is not just on the side of the victors is also just sometimes on the side of the survivors the Jesus movement that was exclusively Jewish that

seems to have been focused among Peter and James and Jerusalem assuming it survived them which I'm sure it did they would have been wiped out in the Barcoqba rebellion so by 135, it's extinct. I mean, I think it was a memory. And Jesus, the Pauline version of Christianity, with its appeal to the Gentiles, it's not being localized in Jerusalem, it meant that it was going to succeed. And I think that that's part of the success can be very much thanked, can very much be thanked for, by the Bokokopal rebellion and eventually the destruction of the Jerusalem church, at least a Jerusalem church that still maintained some allegiance to the Jewish law. I must say it sounds to me a lot like, and this is all new to me, I've really,

really enjoyed talking to you so far because this is fascinating and just outside of my sort of general comfort zone, as it were, just far enough outside of it that I feel like I can have a meaningful conversation and yet be constantly sort of blown away by what I'm hearing. It sounds to me, as I'm hearing about this, the big God, the little God, Jesus identified with the little God, the mystical. It's all sounding a bit Gnostic. It sounds like this is sort of laying the groundwork for an idea of Jesus as a divine being, but separate from the God of the universe or there are sort of different gods all competing, sort of doing different things. One is a bit more material, one is a bit more mystical, and yet within practically no time,

Gnosticism is condemned as a heresy, and we end up with this idea that Jesus is Yahweh, not little Yahweh, not a different kind of Yahweh, not a friend of Yahweh or a different kind of God, but it's the same God. What happens there? Because, I mean, am I right in saying that this interpretation of the early pool is maybe a bit Gnostic? I suppose it depends on what you mean by by Gnostic. I guess I will say two things. The first thing is that Paul definitely thinks of Jesus as becoming something divine. Now, whether he's identified with numerically identical to use a philosophical language, right?

Is Yahweh numerically identical with Jesus? I think Paul never quite makes that move. And because he never quite makes that move, they're going to maintain their distinction. So Jewish bi-theism is maintained. Now, there's a theological and philosophical problem about what is the relationship between these two beings. And that's where you get the Holy Spirit is sort of a Trinity that links them together. And so they're of the same substance, homoousios, but they're distinct. The father, the son, and the spirit are God, but the father is not the son, is not the spirit.

You know, that sort of classic triune, Athanasia stuff that you get a few centuries later. but what made Christians Christians was that they all believed that Jesus had come to this world, had taught something unique, had died in a meaningful way, and had beaten death, had survived somehow, and that something salvific had happened. That's the sort of what unites the members of the Jesus movement and ultimately unites early Christians. Now, that he died and that He did something salvific. Everyone agreed on. What that was in the details, no one agreed on. Not even Paul. It's fantastic to see this, but even Paul is still figuring out what it meant for Jesus to have saved people. Did it mean that he opened the door to people to be transformed into these sort of glorified bodies after they die? Is that it? Or is it some other thing? And then you get this sort of theology of sacrifice where Jesus has become the last sacrifice. freeing everyone from the necessity of the Jewish law. Even exactly how Jesus saved people is interesting because the early theory seems to

been what's called the ransom theory, where Jesus literally went into hell and tricked the devil and then was able to extract all the souls from hell as a kind of double agent going into hell and tricking the devil. That seemed to have been the earlier theology. That eventually was abandoned for the sacrifice theology that Jesus had become the final sacrifice. and it freed everyone from death that way. So not even in the New Testament is the theology of what any of this even means totally worked out. And as you can imagine, if it's not worked out in the New Testament, and it certainly isn't, by the time that various communities begin to accept the salvific event of the Jesus movement,

you have a thousand stories about what exactly has happened. And some of those stories are the Pauline story. Some of those stories become the Orthodox story. some of those stories become the Gnostic story of which there are several different versions of that. And so to Bart Ehrman's point, we shouldn't think about there being a Christianity. We should think about there were Christianity and there still are Christianities. And those Christianities tend to differ on what exactly it meant for Jesus to save us by dying and rising again. And lots of communities came up with a wide range of answers for that.

One answer for that was Marcion's answer. Marcion's answer was, yeah, Jesus came as the true God to basically show that the creator, Marcion never calls the creator a God. That's a mistake. But the creator of this world is bad. That's the Old Testament God. And Jesus is the actual God. And Jesus came here to liberate us from that creator God, creator. Again, even I made the mistake.

And so Marcion sets the stage for that sort of. of what we now call gnostic interpretation of what it meant for. And of course, Marcion also develops the first canon as we have it. He's the first person to give us a list of texts or authoritative and all that kind of jazz that we would now think of as very important to the history of Christianity. Marcion's eventually condemned. So it's important to just to point out that the what Jesus is in terms of his apotheosis is contested theologically what his death and resurrection meant and what salvation meant was by no means agreed upon by early Christians and it wasn't even agreed upon even in

the New Testament there's no coherent theory of any of that even in the New Testament and obviously there's no coherent theory in the text that will become authoritative as a New Testament you can imagine a hundred years later, 50 years later, you have very widely divergent theologies operating in the Eastern Mediterranean. But if you ask a Christian today, who is Yahweh? They might just say to you, oh, Yahweh is Jesus. They're one and the same.

When does that happen? Because I agree with you. I mean, it sounds like in early Christianity, it's all over the place. Who knows who this Jesus guy is? Who knows what his connection is to the God or creator of the Old Testament? But now, it's, as you say, a sort of a numerical identity. When does that emerge? So, at least in Orthodox circles, it never does, right?

So, Y'allway becomes the Father. Jesus is the Son. And, right, so when does the Trinity in that kind of language begin to emerge? I mean, as early as, like, origin. In some sense, it's already being packed into the New Testament. There's a great, I think it's in the Gospel of John. I can't remember where it says, Father and the Son, and then they eventually add back in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't

occur in the earliest manuscripts. So already the manuscript tradition itself is being theologically manipulated to build some of these ideas back in. But I don't think you get a really rigorous sense of the Trinity, or what we might, I'd rather not say the Trinity, but sort of a divine economics. Economics and sort of like there are entities that are the Godhead and those entities relate to one another in some kind of dynamical way, whether that's a Trinity or a bi-theist position or modalism or whatever kind of, you know, version you want to pick, there are a thousand Trinitarian theologies, supersessionism, whatever. I don't think you really begin to see that really in a coherent way until some of the apostolic fathers and some of the

epistles of like maybe Barnabas and then you begin to pick it up in some of the really early apostolic teachings of, you know, people like Uranus and stuff. But I think the most systematic, first real systematic attempt at getting a coherent theory of how all this is supposed to work is going to be origin on first principles. Now, origin is a tragic character in the history of Christianity because in many ways, he's the first real theologian to systematically use Jewish scripture. and Greek philosophy to make sense of what all this meant. But ultimately, he's thrown under the bus.

Originism is ultimately condemned as his heresy. Origin is kept at arm's length and never condemned, but originism is ultimately condemned in the rise of the sort of Athanasius version of the Trinity. But I would say it's not until a couple centuries later that we get a real, theological, philosophically, coherent idea of this. And I would say, you know, I could teach a whole class, and I would teach a whole class if I would ever have the chance, where one could take the concept of the Trinity and the debates around the Trinity,

and you could teach all of Greek philosophy through those. Because the great genius of making the Trinity work is that you had to bring to bear Aristotelian logic, stoic metaphysics, platonic forms, all of the machinery of what we would, would recognize as middle, middle platonism, or at least the philosophy, the philosophy of the Hellenistic world, all that had to be brought to bear to make the Trinity work. And in many ways, the Trinity is the crowning achievement of Greek philosophy. And I would say that if people want to, you know, all the people who really want to tout their Greek philosophy, you know, Greek philosophy duds or whatever, go read Athanasius as a book on the Trinity. It's a tour de force of bringing to bear, like I said, Stoicism and Aristotelian philosophy and Platonism, Middle Platonism specifically, to make that system work. And then on top of that, to have mastered the Hebrew Bible in such a way to make it hermeneutically all work, it's a real work of genius.

I mean, now, it being an work of genius doesn't make it not crazy or true, but genius, it still is. I still, all, when I read the works of someone like Athanasius, still mind-bogglingly amazing. I think it's all nonsense, but ingenious nonsense. Ingenious nonsense. It's funny, I had this idea of starting to ask podcast guests for book recommendations, and not so much, I could never tell whether I should ask sort of something relevant to the conversation or just the, if you're you could have people read one book, what would it be? And I keep forgetting to do it. So I'm quite glad that you've mentioned that in other words. Just before we go, I wanted to ask you about the concept of the demiurge, because a lot of what we've been talking about so far, the idea of

there being this mysterious creator who's separate from this God of Jesus. I've heard this kind of conversation before, and I've heard this creator described as a demiurge. And that term sounds like it's sort of something out of dungeons and dragons or something. I wouldn't know. I've never played that game. What is the Demiurge? So the Demiurge is an entity that emerges first in Plato's Temaeus. It just means craft person, craft person, craftman. So the Demiurge is in Plato's Temaeus, the entity that created the world. And so you can think about the world of the forms, you can think about the Demiurge, and you can think about the world of matter. And what the Demiurge does is take the world of the forms and impress them into matter

creating our world. And our world, because our world is material and not infinite and unchanging and perfect, it can only imperfectly take those forms, and therefore our world is, the material world is a world of change and imperfection. That's Plato in the, in the, in the, in the, in the Temaeus. Well, when you take Hellenistic philosophy that basically accepted the idea of the demiurge, and they stoicize it a little bit and it becomes a logos and it becomes a bit more, like I said stoicized by by the time of Christianity. But you take this platonic, stoic idea of the demiurge and then you try to hammer it together with the Hebrew Bible. Well, you get an interesting kind of sparks that fly. And one of the sparks that fly out of all of that is, well,

one answer is philo. Well, the demiurge just is Yahweh, right? And the Genesis is just a story of the Yalway's making of the world. That's one story. Another story is that if you take a good look around, the world's pretty hellish. It's bad. The third century was especially bad. And if you look around,

we live in these cages of clay. The world seems to be a place of intense suffering. Good people die and are persecuted for no good reason and bad people flourish. The world's pretty bad. bad. And so what if the God that made this world were evil? And that Jesus not being the son of that God, in fact, there's a great hermeneutical move made in the gospel of John, where Jesus even says to the rabbis, like, oh, your God is not, you know, like my God is not your God.

Your God is the father of Satan is what the text says, depending on how you read the Greek. And there's something really weird that happens, where it seems like for very complicated reasons that we make, we could talk about another time, the God of the Hebrew Bible, for some Christians, becomes identified with the demiurge, but is now made malevolent. And these are what are called malevolent demiurgical traditions, or sometimes we refer to them as Gnosticism. And you can see this most famously in the Apocryphon of John, where the God that makes this world, is a, is a result of a kind of primordial mistake. And that primordial mistake gives rise to an idiot, violent, rapacious God. And that God creates this world as a kind of prison. And we are spiritual beings imprisoned in this world, specifically imprisoned in physical bodies.

And Jesus came as a spiritual being. He took on the prison to show that you could escape it. And he teaches the means by which to, escape this world, escape the world of fate, escape the world of the demiurge, and then go back to our true home, which is the world of the spirit and the world of pure divine goodness or whatever. And that becomes a variant of Christianity we typically refer to as Gnosticism. Now, to be very clear about this, if you were to go to those Christians and ask them, are you a Gnostic? They would say, what's that? They're like, I'm a Christian.

So they didn't think of themselves as we only know them as Gnostics or Scythians or Valentinians or Marcianites because their enemies named them that. They typically name them after their so-called founder and then polemicized against them. And those polemical works are what survived. And that version of Christianity represented by that group is the one that survived is what we now call Orthodox Christianity. but they would have just called themselves Christians simplification. Yeah, and for the longest time, the writings of their enemies were essentially the only knowledge that we had of these Gnostics and their traditions. It was, what, in like the 1940s that we really start to discover at Nakamadi, the Gnostic texts themselves. I mean, it always stuns me to really reflect on how recently it is that we've discovered these Gnostic texts.

And, I mean, 1945 seems like a long time ago, you know, but in the scheme of scriptural tradition, if you're talking about a text that's written 100 years after events, that's considered to be nothing, or if you're looking at the commentary of early Christians who are writing 100, 200, 300, 300 years after the death of Christ, we think, wow, how close to the source. And that's sort of how close we are to the discovery of these texts. So there's still so much more to discover and so much more scholarly research to be done. The one question I have as regards all of this is that in that Christian Gnostic tradition, now that we have access to their actual texts, and we can hear it in their own words, do you think that this demiurge figure in the Gnostic tradition is identified with Yahweh, the creator of the Old Testament? Oh, definitely.

Definitely, no doubt. they say as much. And in fact, there's already an Egyptian precedent for this. The Egyptians had already begun, even prior to the rise of Christianity, to associate Yalway with the god Seth, their sort of demonic chaos, foreigner God. And so already the Egyptians in their own theological bulimics with Judaism had already set the stage for this transition. So we already have some Egyptian identifications, like I said, of Yalwe with Seth. And so already making Y'allway evil is something the Egyptians already done. And then when Egyptian Christianity adopts this demuregical tradition,

they fuse all that together. And what emerges is of Gnosticism as represented by texts like the Apocryphon of John or the Gospel of Truth. Although Valentinus is a bit more moderated in his dualism than the Apocryphon of John. But, yeah, the development of what we call Gnosticism and the demonization of Yalway had already begun to happen by, you know, second and third centuries BCE, and then by the second century of the common era, we could begin to see these malevolent or evil demiurge traditions emerging in the theology of what appeared to have been largely Egyptian Christians, and those became the Gnostics as we know them.

In early Christianity, you sort of have this concept of Yahweh, this God of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, and some Christians say, well, this is the God of the Old Testament, this is the creator and thus, if Jesus is in some way divine, they must be in some way the same figure. Yahweh morphs into the father, Jesus morphs into the sun and they're both God. In the other sort of strand of this tradition, well yes, Yahweh is the creator of the Old Testament, but clearly Jesus is a totally different entity and therefore evolves this concept of the demiurge that is not the God that we should be worshipping and is actually a totally separate entity to Jesus, Jesus is the real God, and Yahweh becomes the Demiard. So in one case,

Yahweh becomes the Father, in one case, Yahweh becomes the Demiurge. And what, it's essentially a case of historical contingency that the Demiurge is condemned and heretical, and Yahweh the Father is the Christianity that we've inherited today. One can wonder, to what degree, it's surely a matter of historical contingency and why one camp won and the other camp didn't win or to what camp, to what degree both camps kind of won. I mean, people still say things like, oh, the God of the Old Testament is mean and about rules and justice and the God of the New Testament's

like hippie-dippy Jesus. It's still kind of there. And you still kind of hear people in sort of an amateur theological way recapitulate this sort of quasi-nostic, quasi-Marcionite position. So, But yeah, these represent pretty divergent Christianity. Theologically divergent Christianity. And again, we know that Valentinianism survived in the East until

6th century, at least. We even have warnings in the 6th century of a Orthodox priest telling people, hey, when you go into a new city, don't ask to go to the Christian church. Make sure you ask to go to the Catholic church because you'll likely end up in a Valentinian one. So they survived for for quite for quite some time. And I think that, you know, it's the game of thrones.

I mean, who got the throne? Well, the orthodoxy, what became the orthodoxy ultimately became the official religion of the Roman Empire. That's the recipe for success. When you become the imperial cult, well, I mean, the minority religions aren't going to do so well or the minority variants, especially when there's already two and a half centuries of beef. I will say one thing about the apostolic fathers and the early church.

fathers, to their credit, when we did discover the Nagamati Library, and we were now able to read some of the major texts in the actual language and words of the so-called Gnostics, it's amazing how close Ironaeus and Hippolytus and Epiphanius were. They did not misrepresent their enemies. They did, you know, stretch things. But in many cases, it's often shocking to realize is that Irenaeus, I'm thinking of specifically, was pretty accurate. He really tried to not straw man them. He really did, and this is an important lesson we can all learn in debate culture, where steel manning your enemy is a far better,

and being sympathetic to your opponent is a far better tact historically to actually winning the debate than straw manning them and winning the debate. I will say that I really did do his due diligence, And we can see that when we compare the texts that we've recovered, which are some of the same text he was looking at when he was composing his book, which, again, I feel like it's, you know, it's important to give credit where credits do. And that, that to me is an interesting historical moment. I suppose that given the popularity of Nosticism at the time, it would have also just made strategic sense for Ironaeus to not sort of, to not straw man, in part because people would know that he is sort of bending. the truth and also, presumably, he also wants to reach some of these Gnostics or some of the people who are tempted by the Gnostic philosophy. And that's never going to be successful

if you straw man your opponent. Another lesson to learn, I suppose, is that even just strategically, I think, if I'm trying to convince people to join my side on a political or theological dispute, if I just quite obviously either don't understand or misrepresent the other side, it's not only like unethical or whatever it's also just going to turn people off to my criticism because I end up criticizing to me that they don't even believe in so I think you're quite right

there's a lot to learn from that tradition I must say that the more I learn about Gnosticism and it's always been like adjacent to the stuff that I've been doing but I've never really done a deep dive but I've been trying to learn as much as I can recently about it the more I hear about not only these

and you know my friend recently said to me that a lot of this is interesting for the same reason, the Da Vinci Code was so popular. There's this sort of secret, you know, knowledge, and you sort of have to resist a little bit against that because it is a bit, it is a bit fun, it is a bit sort of radical and interesting. But I must say that also realizing

that there were some significant Christian communities who believed this, this wasn't some kind of crazy heretic who gets condemned. These are like communities of people who really think this is the way to interpret the existence of God, Jesus, I must say that, like, it seems to me a much more attractive prospect than the Christianity that we've, that we've inherited. I mean, a lot of my criticisms of Christianity

and a lot of the reasons why I would say that it doesn't make sense to me as a worldview have to do with things like the problem of evil and divine hiddenness and pointing to Old Testament atrocities. I talk about this kind of stuff all the time, and all of that kind of melts away if you can just attribute all of that to a creator demiurge and say that Jesus cuts through. I think that's a it's well it's it's it's fascinating and troubling and really interesting and hopefully to those listening who have been interested in this little bit at the end here it's something that we'll be diving into a lot more in the in the coming weeks and months it's an it's an it's an it's an attractive not you know so gnostic dualism dualism in

general is an attractive solution at first I think it creates more problems and it solves or it creates another set of problems where now the world is evil and human bodies are bad and, you know, that's, you know, can you have an ecologically positive idea about, you know, saving the planet or taking care of your body if all matters fundamentally evil? It generates another set of problems. And in fact, even other pagans didn't like narcissism. Plotinich wrote a whole book against them because he thought they really missed the mark. But yeah, it does solve at least a problem of evil. provided an elegant solution to the problem of evil in a way that feels much more tactile than Augustine's solution, that evil is just a privation. It's not really real. That doesn't, you know,

go tell someone that, you know, who've been violently attacked that what they're experiencing as a privation, it's not going to really land. But a Gnostic solution does give some better chops to it. And, you know, to your point earlier, these are big communities. I mean, Irenaeus wrote his book because Valentinus nearly became the bishop of Rome. Yeah, Valentinus, that is the sort of the Gnostic, the sort of classic Gnostic writer and thinker. Yeah, he nearly, you know, Marcion also tried to kind of bribe his way to becoming high up in the church, ultimately took his toys and went home, but Valentinus, and again, we should not overstate what it means to be Bishop of Rome in the second century.

It's not like the Pope in the same way that the Pope is the Pope now, but it wasn't nothing. And the fact that Valentinus had a real shot at becoming the Bishop of Rome in the second century and the 140s, I think, that should tell us that these are not one-off, weirdo, people, you know, secretly scribbling crazy stuff and by themselves and in their houses. No, these are whole communities of people for whom these stories were theologically important and meaningful. and, yeah, it's a form of Christianity that, and again, I don't have a dog in the fight of which Christianity I'm rooting for because I'm not rooting for any of them particularly. But I do think that a history that leaves out the mess isn't really a history. History is messy.

And we should be unsurprised that the history of Christianity is actually quite messy. And when we sort of impose upon it a teleology that it was always going to go a certain kind of way, then we totally distort what it is that we're studying. This is the same true of Judaism. Rabbinical Judaism was just one Judaism. There were lots of competing Judaism that existed at that time. And so the accident of history that one managed to become the hegemonic, normative form of Judaism, or Islam, or Christianity, is no indicator of its correctness or philosophical goodness or theological correctness or theological correctness or any of that.

The accident of history is much better a guide to why we are in the boat that we are than some, you know, cunning of history a la Hegel or something. Well, we've mentioned one already. Of all the stuff we've spoken about today, if people are interested and want to learn more, of course, apart from going to your YouTube channel, Esoterica, which I will link in the show notes and description, a great channel. It's one of those YouTube channels that while I was preparing to speak to you, I'm listening to your videos while I'm walking around or cleaning up. up, whatever, and I just have to go back and listen to it again. I have to focus. It's one of those channels that really gives you the information. But yeah, you know, you've got to focus. It's real, it's the real stuff, you know, so I would recommend anybody go and check that out. But outside of that, what kind of books could you point people to, if they were interested in any of the

material we've been talking about? So I think if particularly the Yawway stuff, if folks are really interested in the Yaway stuff, the best, the best books are going to be able to, one by Mark Smith, who has the most boring name, but it's the most important scholar in this field. The early history of God by Mark Smith is going to be very important. And the origins of biblical monotheism are going to be the two big books that you're going to want to, you're going to want to read them. I will be honest, they're pretty specialized. He's going to go quote stuff in Hebrew, and it's just going to be in Hebrew. And so sometimes it'll get translated and sometimes it won't. So you're going to have to do that kind of, it's going to take some heavy lifting

the gods and gods of Canaan is also a really important text for situating Yalway and the development of Yalway in the larger theological landscape of sort of late Bronze Age, early Iron Age, early age Israel. Canaanite myth and epic are really great because they, that's more Cross's book. It's great because it situates the Hebrew Bible in the larger literary landscape. of the myths of that of that world and the sort of theological and mythical landscape of that world as well um folks are interested in in archaeology like where we are archaeologically vis-a-vis all this material i would say that um i don't know has archaeology buried the bible it's probably the best go-to it's sort of the most diplomatic analysis of what we know about the relationship of archaeology to the biblical text.

I don't always agree with it. I tend to be a bit more of a minimalist, but I will say that he represents both minimalist and reasonable maximalist positions. There are a lot of unreasonable maximalism that everything in the Bible happened or something like that. But he represents the minimalist and the maximalist position diplomatically.

And beyond the texts is also by Deva. Also really good, but that's really specialized. That's a tone. So these are the kind of books you want to get into. They're not easy, but they are the standard, again, they are the sort of the standard kind of consensus of the community of people who are thinking about these questions. If you're interested in the Gnosticism stuff, the best text there is, what's a, von Bladdles, I would say.

Gnosticism and myth and religion I have to look it up but yeah I'm happy to send you a link to some of the books on the best books of Gnostic scriptures or the yeah or the best

collection of those books and links we'll just put them down down below so people are interested they can go and check in the description or the show notes if they're listening yeah and okay so they're you know heavy lifting

and difficult to read but that's why we're so glad to have people like you making the information accessible. It's been a wonderful, wonderful two hours that we've spent together today. I'm really excited to see what people make of this. I've learned a lot and I hope that our listeners have to, Justin Sledge. Thank you for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you, Alex. A wonderful conversation and I appreciate you having me on.