Transcription
Hey everybody. It's come to my attention that an awful lot of you don't know that I have a podcast called the Data Overdogma Podcast that I co-host with my friend Dan Beecher. And you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. But we also have a YouTube channel. And to raise awareness of that channel, I thought I would share an episode or two from our back catalog. And to kick things off, I want to share one of my favorite episodes ever. Our second episode ever from just over three years ago where we're talking about God's Wife with my good friend and former dissertation supervisor, Dr. Francesca Stabriapulu. Hope you enjoy this episode and the fit for this video has been the Flash.
>> I think that's kind of like one of the common misconceptions is that goddesses were all about fertility. They weren't. They were about warfare as much as they were about nurturing.
>> Well, Dan, we are very fortunate today to have uh a a renowned guest on the show. Uh someone with whom you, Dan, are pretty familiar. Why don't you introduce our guest and tell our friends uh listening and viewing what uh who she is and and what she's all about?
>> Of course. So today I'm very happy to have my former dissertation supervisor Francesca Stra Capulu, professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at Exador University uh former head of the department of theology and religion which is the still the uh the name uh on my uh doctoral dissertation. Welcome to the show Francesca or Professor Stra Capulu, pardon me. Uh how has your day been? And I hear it's a little hectic over there right now in the academic world.
>> Yeah. Um, hi. It's uh it's really nice to be talking to two friendly people. It's been things are kind of chaotic in the academic world and we've been having various strikes and whatnot. So, yeah, but it's very nice to to talk to you today.
>> Yeah, it's wonderful to have you.
>> I know that one of your uh priorities is the the welfare the well-being of your students. uh and I had I think I've I've met one or two of your students in the past as well as some colleagues of yours there uh in exit. I hope everybody is hopeful about the outcome of uh the discussions there but it sounds like there's a lot of work left to do.
>> Yeah, I I absolutely think so. I think you know one of the things about academia particularly in the UK is that a lot of government funding has gone towards what we call STEM subjects you know so science and technology and engineering um and it it makes things harder for those of us in the humanities particularly those of us who focus on ancient cultures to kind of justify our existence sometimes but you know as we know things like the Bible um remain hugely relevant culturally I mean whether we believe it or not Um the Bible is a cultural icon um and remains this incredibly important um collection of texts to which various people refer and they you know they also use these texts to beat other people over the head with. Um so yeah, it's uh it's kind of hard sometimes you know when you're trying to explain to your pay masters just quite how important your this work can be.
>> Yeah. Yeah. We have similar concerns here with the corporatization of higher education and ironically the Bible is frequently embedded in the very ideological foundations of those movements towards that corporatization
>> uh which seeks to try to invalidate some of the research that you and I and others are doing.
>> Yeah, that's an interesting point, Francesca. You you you briefly mentioned that, you know, you said the Bible's important whether whether you're a believer or not. You're not a believer. Is that right?
>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm never have been and uh you know I I never will be
>> that does it do you find uh push back in the world of biblical scholarship because of your atheism?
>> That's a really interesting question because I mean I would say that most scholars in my field are religious in some way or another. you know, we have a lot of Jewish colleagues, a lot of Christian colleagues, and every kind of flavor therein, people that are studying these ancient texts and cultures and archaeological sites. Um, but more often than not, people tend not to, well, I say that there's no reason why somebody who has um a religious commitment or investment in these texts can't produce good scholarship. They absolutely can and they absolutely do. On the other hand, sometimes um I think some people have found me unsettling or are a bit uncomfortable with me because I am quite outspoken about my atheism, but primarily because I'm on a I'm often on a public stage or, you know, I've been found myself on this public platform and people always assume, oh, you study the Bible, you must be religious. And when they realize that I'm not, they just can't understand it. So people think, oh, did you were you religious and you lost your faith through the academic study of the Bible, which is not the case at all. I never have been religious. I was just really interested in these texts. Um, or other people kind of feel that somehow the Bible doesn't belong to me. How dare I kind of ask these questions of these texts or interrogate these these particular traditions? You know, what right have I got? But we all have a right to these texts. You know, as I said, the the Bible is a cultural icon whether we like it or not, and it shapes and continues to shape so many of our cultural preferences and assumptions and our sort of ticks and twitches about the world. Um, and so we absolutely, I think it's our responsibility to to engage with these texts, particularly if you're coming from a personal perspective that may be non-religious or secular.
>> Yeah. All you have to do is look at the fact that uh the two hosts of this podcast are both of of of European origin with Hebrew names uh two Daniels, you know what I mean, to know how impactful the Bible has been uh across society. So, it seems it's definitely it's definitely worthy, I suppose, of of study whether you whether you're a believer or not. But I do imagine that this the the concept of theology because that's a different study than what you do, right? your your study is not theological in nature.
>> No, I mean it intersects with a lot of theological ideas. So you know theology is basically talk about God ultimately but within academia if you're described as a theologian that generally means that you are interested in sort of kind of theories about the nature of God and the ways in which that impacts your understanding of why and how the world is um and our relationships with the divine. It assumes the reality if you like of the divine. So you know for a lot of us you know like you know scholars of religion you know if you call them a theologian a lot of us would like to bristle it's kind of
>> it's an insult.
>> Um yeah to to be frank. Yeah I I find it kind of insulting. Um but that's not to say that equally the you know theologians are doing incredibly important work as well you know particularly when it comes to setting certain doctrinal positions say within Christianity within their kind of cultural historical context that's really important you know things like you know notions of the trinity emerged within a very particular um cultural dynamic and time and and we can understand why those particular theories came about um because of the the cultural context in which they were debated. But yeah, like I am definitely not a theologian, but I do engage with theological ideas because those are ideas that are so often retrojected back into these ancient texts or retrojected back onto archaeological artifacts. Um, and so I quite often find myself sort of trying to argue that that we need to disentangle these later confessional interpretations of this material from their likely original historical contexts and and framings if you like.
>> I know I am I'm frequently called a theologian as well. Um, and part of it is because that degree that I got says theology and religion and I have to remind people that's just the name of the department. Yeah,
>> you're in the and religion part, not the theology part.
>> Exactly. And but you know, that's a really good example. It's a hangover from particularly within European academia, the ways in which the only time you really got to study these these texts, these biblical texts was, you know, if you were doing theology and you were doing theology because you were probably a priest. And so, you know, it's kind of reflects that that much older heritage and legacy of of what the kind of scholarly inquiry into the Bible was all about. It was primarily performed by religious people, whether they were rabbis or priests or whatever. Um, and they were usually men, obviously.
>> Yeah. Obviously.
>> Well, and that's an interesting point, too. Sorry, I Dan, I don't mean to cut you off, but I do want you, Francesca, to talk a little bit about the uh
>> how what it's like being a woman in biblical uh uh scholarship because it seems like that too is probably unusual
>> or at very very at very least could be treated differently.
>> Yeah.
>> Have you found that that's the case?
>> Have you seen the internet? Um Uh yeah, of course I have. I mean, it's it's something that has um being otherred in various ways has followed me around my career ever since I did my doctorate. Um and I think it's not just because I'm a woman. You know, there are lots of women in academia now, but like in every other aspect of academia, women are still like people of color, like people of a certain sort of socioeconomic class. There are all sorts of ways in which people are otherred and marginalized within our disciplines and within academic structures themselves. So for example, the gender pay gap is is is still, you know, live and kicking. Um when you look at academic pay structures, women effectively stop being paid for doing the same job as men in early November in any given year. I mean that's the kind of way it works out. So yeah, being a woman is is still um different. you're still treated differently, I think, in some ways. Um, but being a woman in biblical studies, yeah, absolutely, that is hard. And I think it's harder than being an atheist in biblical studies. Personally, I found it to be harder um because I mean, I've spoken and written about this um in the past, but I think women are judged far more in terms of what they look like and how they present themselves than men are. And rather than people paying attention to a woman's scholarship and her teaching and her publications, people automatically quite often, and they're normally men, not always, but normally men, um, they tend to judge these scholars in terms of how they look or how they dress. Um, and that pisses me off because it's and it's been the case ever since. Well, yeah, but it's been the case ever, you know, ever since. I think there's a sense in which you know a colleague of mine commented on something the other day um you know and she pointed out yeah and it was relation to to somebody being unpleasant about me publicly and she said you know you never hear it said about a male scholar oh he only got that job because you know he wears my suits or he only got that job because he's good-looking. You you never hear that ever about male scholars but you often hear
>> often hear it about women. Um, so yeah, it's not easy.
>> I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Speaking of your scholarship and judging you on your scholarship, however, I think we should dive into a few of the things uh that you've that you've worked on that you've written about, Dan, you've you've you've studied up. You know the stuff.
>> You know me.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I I know you. and and I wanted to to um use the discussion of of gender and contemporary academia as a as a springboard uh into you've done a lot of research on sex and gender in the ancient world um as well as in ancient concepts of the divine um and I'm particularly interested in uh in a lot of that research. Can you tell us what is unique interesting about the divine profiles of the goddesses in ancient southwest Asia and and even in ancient Israel?
>> Wow. Um if the question is what's unique about their divine profiles, that's a really difficult question because I it's very hard to see um what's unique about say ancient Israelite or Judahite constructs of goddesses or whatever because you know these these you know goddesses were worshiped all over ancient Southwest Asia and quite often they're performing particular sorts of roles in common with other goddesses in in neighboring societies and cultures. Um but one of the most important
>> Can I just stop you right here? I I do want to point out it's it's obvious uh I think everyone knows that obviously
>> no Israelites were ever worshiped any goddesses like obviously there's no female gods in in in in sort of biblical history that couldn't be the case right
>> surely we know that much right
>> yeah you mean no Israelites apart from all the ones that the biblical writers are telling off for worshiping goddesses and and yeah apart from the goddess who's named alongside inside Yahweh in inscriptions. But yeah, yeah, um I mean yeah, goddesses were absolutely part and parcel of ancient um Yahweh religion. And so, you know, we we know we have inscriptions from the 8th century BC um Hebrew inscriptions that refer to Yahweh and Asher together. Most scholars are now agreed that this seems to index um particular religious assumptions that Yahweh and Asher were kind of like a divine pair and Asher played a role in mediating in particular divine blessings um from Yahweh onto certain individuals and back again. So she was kind of like you know she wasn't like the first lady I don't you know I don't want to give that impression. She wasn't like the first lady of the divine kind of white house. um she was an important goddess in her own right and we know that from other examples other ancient texts older texts that talk about the same goddess. So texts from Ugarit so a late bronze age um citystate on the coast of what is now the Mediterranean coast of what is now Syria. Um and there she's known as Atiratu or Atheras and she is the wife of the high god Ale. Um and she has a really important role in a lot of these mythological texts. I mean she really is a power broker between ale and different deities like Bal and Anat. Um but she also seems to have played an important role for for certain sort of high status elite worshippers as well. We get some great stories in these myths about um high status women sort of almost kind of mimicking this goddess in certain sorts of ways. Um so yeah this this was an important goddess and she seems to have been a really ancient goddess. you find her under various names, worshiped all over ancient southwest Asia, particularly the Levant area. Um, so yeah, goddesses were important. But the main I think the main kind of assumption that people often make about these goddesses, which I think is completely wrong-headed, is the idea that somehow these were fertility goddesses. you know, what you know they were all concerned about child birth and sort of sexual um kind of allure and attraction and ficcundity and agricultural fertility that that wasn't the case in most of these texts that we have including biblical texts fertility is very much um it's very frequently cast as a masculine male attribute of the divine as opposed to a female. So quite often you get female deities who are responsible for kind of shaping new life in the womb or kind of overlooking not always but overlooking sort of breastfeeding and lactation and sort of child care and nurturing. And those sorts of roles are then expanded to adult worshippers if you like. But more often than not, it's the kind of it's the the male or masculine deities that are particularly associated with conception, even opening and closing wombs, both animal and human, um, and with kind of, you know, with being these fertile deities who are particularly responsible often for sexual allure as well. So, I think that's kind of like one of the common misconceptions is that goddesses were all about fertility. They weren't. They were about warfare as much as they were about nurturing. And the symbol of the bull is something that is associated with male deities that frequently has to do with ferocity but just as frequently if not more so with fukundity with uh this idea of uh of being fertile. So we have kind of intersecting but different roles that some of the male and female deities uh are playing and and it seems to me that there are indications in the Hebrew Bible that the God of Israel has appropriated some of those roles. Some of the imagery that is used in referencing the God of Israel seems like it would fit more comfortably within an ancient uh goddess role. Is that
>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So in some of the prophetic texts, you know, we find texts like in Hosea and Isaiah where God is kind of kind of describing himself, Yahweh is describing himself as as a midwife. Um, you know, this is a God who kind of helps to birth, if you like, even the chaos monster in the book of Job and kind of wraps him in swaddling bands, which is a a really um fabulous text towards the end of the book of Job. In some of the prophetic books, as I said, Hosea and and Isaiah, um Jeremiah, this is a God who is who acts as a midwife, you know, he takes the kind of newborn Israel from the womb and places the the child on this kind of anonymous mother's breast and he oversees the kind of breastfeeding. He acts as a midwife and so he takes on a lot of these roles that probably were originally particularly associated with divine um feminine divine beings. Um, and it's a part of that kind of gradual appropriation of these other deities roles as the what was originally a pantheon, an ancient Israelite and Judahite pantheon is gradually reduced and reduced and reduced so that Yahweh is prioritized over and above all these other divine beings within the broader heavenly household and to the point where he eventually kind of either takes on all of these portfolios if you like of care for himself um and you know some of the some of these other divine beings are either kind of ex exised from the heavenly household or they're kind of relegated and they become what's later known as angels or divine messengers. So, um it's it's a really interesting shift. Um but it's not necessarily representative of reality. I mean we know that there seems to have been a shift within Jerusalem and perhaps in Babylon as well among Yahweh worshiping communities there in the sixth to fifth century towards this kind of prioritization of Yahweh. But you know equinim we know that in the fifth century BCE on the island of Elephantini in the Nile in Egypt there was a a Yahweh temple was being refurbished and this Yahweh was being worshiped alongside you know at least one other goddess. Um, so you know, it's it's not the Hebrew Bible and the information that that we can kind of glean from it isn't necessarily representative of a broader trend within Yahweh worship. It's it's quite particular.
>> Yeah. And we have uh I think the name of the deity there, there's a compound name anatyahu is is the goddess there. And now there's another compound name that some people associate with the divine feminine and that's El Shadai uh based on the argument that Shadai comes from the word for breasts. And in Genesis 49, we've got this idea of of El Shadai associated with the blessings of uh the womb and the the blessings of of breasts. Where where do you land on the uh the origins of the Shai title?
>> Yeah, I mean it's always really hard trying to kind of grasp anything meaningful from possible ethmologies I think and kind of um trying to dissect the word that way. Yes. So one theory is that the word comes from um a root meaning breasts um equally that maps onto roots that could mean mountains and so you know scholars have have produced some interesting interesting imaginative work on the shapes of mountains as that look like breasts. Um, but I'm more persuaded.
>> Yeah, I know.
>> Um, I'm more
>> We have a mountain range. There's the Tetons. Uh, is a mountain range that is is based on the same. So, it wouldn't be unheard of.
>> It's not unheard of. And it makes a lot of sense because quite often, you know, the kind of the earthly realm is often personified as this kind of primeval feminine, you know, and kind of the idea that the the the earth is this kind of birthing female body. It makes sense. But in the case of that title, El Shadai, um I'm more inclined to go with the other kind of interpretation of that name. I think it probably means something like ale of the wilderness or the step region. Um there seems to be more more kind of evidence for that usage of the term. But even so, you're absolutely right. In Genesis 49, we have got this kind of series of divine blessings where you have an appeal to El Shadai. You have an appeal to either my ancestral god or you know my divine ancestor. You have an appeal to um the divine rock which seems to have been a really important very early um title of a probably a masculine deity. And you also have an appeal to um this kind of divine being you know for blessings on breast and womb which some people argue that word pair is a you know are titles or epithets for for go a goddess. Um Mark Smith argues that this is a title of Asher. So yeah, we have traces of um
>> we have traces of these goddesses in our texts which is exciting. And I think you um I know the one of the very first Tik Tok videos that I ever made that got over a million views uh was responding to somebody who was expressing frustration with a uh a headline from an article that was an interview with you over a decade ago about God's wife being edited out of the Bible. And so these are some of the potential uh vestigial references to the divine feminine and and other scholars argue maybe Deuteronomy 33:2 where it says a fiery law in many translations now, but it could be very easily reconstructed to say that Adonai came forth with Asher at his right hand.
>> Yeah. Which is a which is a a translation that I that I I really like. I think it's got an awful lot to be said for it. I mean, it's interesting that people get do get upset sometimes about the idea that God could have once had a wife. Um, and I think, you know, that says a lot more about our own cultural anxieties about the nature of the divine and divine sexuality, um, divine sort of gender than it does anything else. I mean, there's a big debate going on at the moment in the mainstream press here because the Church of England has said that it's going to consider having a debate about whether it should change God's pronouns in prayers and various other things. So, God will become they rather than he, will become parent rather than father. Um, and people are getting really worked up about this. But I mean you know people these these ancient texts that we have in the Bible you know they are always being overturned reinterpreted overwritten in ancient context as well as in contemporary context. And so
>> I mean I don't have a problem with it particularly but um but yeah I mean very much you know this is a God who is very much gendered in masculine terms within the Hebrew Bible. Um and I think we need to recognize that.
>> Yeah. And I know that something that I'm fond of saying is that everybody is negotiating with the text in one way or another. And this is just another example of ways that we try to make the text more meaningful or more useful to us. Whether and we've got folks who are out there who are upset about the idea of God having a wife, but will uh vehemently insist that God is male,
>> which means something. Uh and so yeah there but there are other ways that we can upset uh people in the the audience as well. You wrote your dissertation under under the supervision of the inimitable John Barton uh at Oxford and uh this had a lot to do with the question of uh human sacrifice, child sacrifice in uh the Hebrew Bible. It seems like there's quite a bit of discussion going on these days around that question of child sacrifice. There seems to be a a shift in the scholarship, including the meaning of the word moolok and whether this is a reference to a deity who received child sacrifice or if this is just a generic noun that refers to a specific type of sacrifice. Can you tell us where where you see the scholarship heading, where you where you land on some of those discussions?
>> Yeah, it's really interesting because I mean I you know I I don't want to kind of give away too much about about my age because I feel about 100 today. But yeah, I mean when I wrote when I wrote my dissertation I mean it was back in the early 2000s and child sacrifice had it was starting you know it had be kind of become a more a more sort of provocative topic in in scholarship you know sort of in the mid80s and then no one had really talked about it since then but in the mid 80s these two important works were published. one by uh a scholar called John Day and the other by a scholar called George Haida. And they are both arguing that the term Molech in the Hebrew Bible absolutely refers to um is the name of a deity. And they both claimed independently and I think incorrectly that this god Molech could be found in some of these texts from this place that I mentioned before from Ugarit. Um their arguments in my opinion and as I argued in my thesis don't stack up at all. Um, but there's a the reason why a lot of these scholars in particular were keen to defend the biblical portrayal of a character called Molech is I think because it distances Yahweh from the suggestion, the implication in these texts that these children were being sacrificed to him and not to a a foreign abominable deity. that somehow child sacrifice is a kind of a a foreign import a kind of a corruption of a much purer form of of religion. Um now whether or not child sacrifice happened is really difficult to assess. I mean archaeologically, you know, we have no evidence for the sorts of ritualized um burning of very young babies, children and young animals that we have from comparative sites across the Phoenician and Punic worlds. So that's quite difficult. Um we don't have direct, you know, clear archaeological evidence. Now those sites in these Phoenician and Punic areas. So basically um this is where the argument about what really who is Molech really this is where it comes from because some of these sites where you have huge precincts that are clearly set apart from other sorts of mortary sites and burial places they seem to be very different. Um they've got all sorts of things going on within within these particular precincts. But what they do have are the charred remains of babies and very young animals interred in little earns and then buried. And quite often you have a stone memorial marker um erected over the top of it. And sometimes these things have inscriptions. So Carthage is one of our best tested sites. We've got hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of these burnt baby remains. Um not a that's not a sentence I say every day. Um and then but but these inscriptions occasionally refer to seem to suggest that this particular practice is a type of offering. So, and the term milk, so from the roots mlk, um, seems to refer seems to be a technical term for a particular type of offering perhaps to, and quite often these babies in Carthage were were being kind of dedicated or um offered up in honor of the of the god Bal Hammon and his consort. Um so in 1935 a brilliant scholar called Otto Idfelt published a thesis in a dissertation in which he argued that this term MLK in the Carthaginian inscriptions meaning a type of sacrifice is cognate with the term MLK that we find in Hebrew Bible texts which within Greek ancient Greek translations of the text have tended to be pronounced moolok um in the maseretic text it's often pronounced Molech. Um, but Isa argued that no, it's the same term. Um, and so this is really a type of sacrifice, not the name of a foreign monstrous god to whom the children are being sacrificed. And if that's the case, well, then which deity is associated with with the burning of babies in these biblical texts?
>> It's Yahweh.
>> Yeah.
>> So, yeah, people kind of get upset about that. But we see we see even Ezekiel seeming to acknowledge this in chapter 20 saying speaking on behalf of God saying I gave you commandments that were not good that decimated you uh compelled you to um cross your children over the fire or something like that which is is one attempt to account for what's going on in likely Exodus 22. It's verse 29 in the English and verse 28 in the Hebrew where God says uh and the firstborn of you children you will give to me uh and you'll do the same for your oxen and your sheep.
>> Yeah. And there's a really nice interesting when you look at the language there that kind of switch from singular to plural where it's kind of like you know on the eighth day you shall give him to me. It's this real sense that this is about the child and the child is to be treated in exactly the same way as the oxen and the sheep which is to be sacrificed. Um but you know but then we have you know that's a regulation concerning the firstborn and the extent to which you know the relationship between this mulch practice and the firstborn sacrifice the extent to which those are related is interesting. I I think probably the mulch sacrifice I argued in my in my first book that this was a a specialization um of the firstborn
>> um a royal specialization of the of the firstborn sacrifice. But you know we have a lot of other biblical traditions in which it's no problem at all to for Yahweh to command you know the sacrifice of your children. I mean Abraham and Isaac is in Genesis 22 is a perfect example. And there you know yeah the sacrifice is halted but Abraham is not blessed for refusing to sacrifice Isaac. He's blessed for his willingness to do so. Equally the story of um Jeff's daughter in Judges 11 where you have a Yahwistic warrior who um basically offers up a vow and says you know Yahweh if you let me win this war I will offer up to you the first thing that runs out of the house to greet me. And lo and behold it's his beloved daughter. the same term that's used of Isaac um beloved and the same term that's used of Jesus who also is in some interpretations sacrificed uh by his father and and you know Jets's daughter comes running out the house and Jets offers him up no comment at all from Yahweh that this is a bad thing or that you've misunderstood or you know how could you do this it's just like yeah it happens so you know we've got these kinds of very
>> positive kind of portrayals of the the efficacy of child sacrifice that this is something that brings blessing within a yowistic context. Um so it's a really interesting topic because it it unsettles as well our own cultural preferences, our own ideas of what a child is. Um but obviously it also this notion of child sacrifice also underlies very early Christian interpretations of the execution of Jesus. Um he is the beloved son who is killed. Um John Levenson wrote a fantastic book back in the '9s um about about the kind of these links between child sacrifice um within ancient Jewish tradition and early Christian traditions. Um so there's something very disturbing though about the notion of a father, a divine father who um will willingly sacrifice his child.
>> Yeah.
>> What does that say about parenthood? It it makes the the lamb of God metaphor within Christianity more interesting. I think a lot of people are are enjoy that metaphor and make a lot of use of it without thinking hard about what that says about about
>> yeah Jesus how Jesus is functioning
>> and things like yeah some of the psalms you might you know the Lord is my shepherd that's a horrific image I mean because this is about the cultivation um and almost the commodification if you like of of a living being in order for it to be destroyed for you know its various products um
>> yeah personhood parentage, these these things, the frameworks were much different anciently than they are today, but we still feel compelled to to retroject our own thinking onto the ancient world and think they had to have felt the same way about these things anciently than that we do today.
>> Yeah. I I'm fascinated by the fact that uh I mean I know Francesca uh in your work you've you've often uh cited the Bible as an as an imperfect um uh uh historical text as a text that we can't rely on as being uh u reliable for histo for historical um
>> facts. But I love that. I love that you're pointing out also that even though the Bible itself talks plenty about child sacrifice,
>> we don't have the archae archaeological evidence for it, at least in that context. I think that's fascinating. I think it it could be wrong about itself in a good way. Like maybe they didn't do the awful thing that the Bible says that they did do.
>> Yeah. I mean and but that's the thing about archaeology is that I mean you know so on the child sacrifice thing we you know there are things that there are archaeological excavations that have found similar sorts of urns with burnt remains and sort of steel erected over them in what is now the modern day um you know in what is today the the state of Israel. So that that that is interesting. So you know date to the right kind of time. So it it does suggest that this kind of cremation or ritual burning of of um what wasn't it wasn't alien to to to the biblical writers if you imagine that they're kind of working in Jerusalem say in the fifth century or whatever but archaeologically speaking it's really hard because you know we can't go and dig up Jerusalem some with the Molech text you know there's this very much this insistence that this is happening in the Kitone Valley in Jerusalem um and you know these valleys were were natural you This is where this was an entryway into the underworld. That's the way in which these values were understood outside of Jerusalem. And so, you know, you do get, you know, we've got loads of burial grounds, very ancient burial grounds there. Now, um, but you can't go digging up Jerusalem. I mean, equally, you know, you can't go digging up Temple Mount to find the remains of the first temple, you know, Solomon's temple. I mean, you can't because it's just I mean, a it's a modern thriving city and b it's also one of those cities that is hugely contested um in terms of ownership, authority, access, you know, within lots of different communities. Um so, politically and socially and culturally, it would just be awful to try and excavate obviously, but but that's the thing. So archaeologically, we only have access to the places we're able to dig legally and ethically. And I have to say that, you know, quite often a lot of digs um in those territories that we understand as um modern day Israel and and in the Palestinian occupied territories, you know, sometimes those digs aren't ethical to a certain degree. Um but, you know, we only have access to sites in physical ways and in sort of politically mandated ways. Um so who knows what's there and you know you can only really dig when you know what you're looking for as well. Um so things like you know archaeologists particularly those of us who work on the Bible you know archaeologists always used to focus on urban centers like the big cities you know who are these people building these great cities and they completely overlooked the majority of the ancient iron age population who lived out in the countryside and so it wasn't it's only been the last kind of 30 years or so that people have actually been paying attention to the majority of these ancient populations and their material circumstances and lives um by digging in places that that you know that weren't necessarily these major urban centers at all. So yeah, archaeologically speaking, it's it's hard. It's it's not a perfect science archaeology.
>> Yeah, the the accident of uh of preservation has a lot to do with with what we can find when we can go dig because we're looking for something. And I I think it's been such a fascinating turn towards looking at more domestic contexts and trying to reconstruct the materiality of the everyday life
>> anciently. I I think that tells us so much more about lived religion, if we can refer to religion anciently, than it does just looking at what men were in charge, uh, in the ancient world.
>> Yeah.
>> Now, you recently published your first trade book for a popular audience, uh, God and anatomy, and I have, uh, one of the UK versions, which, um, I I know you understand has the much better cover. and and your your book won the uh Penn Hessel Tiltman Prize for best non-fiction book on a historical subject. So, congratulations uh for that and I know it was in the running for some other prizes as well. Um
>> can you tell us what uh questions you were seeking to address when you wrote this book? uh what what drove you to to write on God's body and corporate reality and how that influenced the conceptualization of the divine and and how people lived their uh their ideologies anciently.
>> Yeah, I mean I think the question the the question I had I mean the reason why I went to university in the first place to study I mean I did what was known as a theology degree at Oxford. Um and the question you know I I was really interested in religion because you know when I was a kid I was given a picture book bible and you know and I was looking at you know like this illustration of Abraham just about to sacrifice Isaac and I remember thinking this is a weird thing you know like I remember being very struck by how strange and frightening that was. So even though I wasn't brought up religious at all, I I was really interested in in ancient religions. And then, you know, I'm Greek, um, I'm half Greek and so my Greek heritage was was important to me. And so the myths of gods and goddesses from Greeks, um, from Greek culture was always really interesting. And I couldn't understand why, you know, initially, you know, the God of the Bible and Jesus in particular was treated as different from the great heroes of ancient Greek myth, you know, who often had, you know, one parent, you know, they they had a divine father and a human mother. So why was this Jesus guy different? But when I went to university and studied theology, I was reading, it was the first time I studied the Hebrew Bible, so what Christians called the Old Testament and obviously what Jewish people call Tanakh. And I just couldn't get over like there was this like this kind of vivid images of this human shaped very masculine deity kind of striding around trampling people and shouting and sitting on a throne in his temple. And I was really interested in this kind of bodily portrayal of the deity. And yet when I would ask my lecturers and professors about it, they would always kind of dismiss it as kind of poetry or metaphor or you know it's it's metaphor I mean everything is metaphorical to a certain degree particularly forgive me damn but particularly when we're talking about an imaginary being you know everything is ultimately kind of metaphorical but that was where I kind of really got like interested in the the body of God and I wanted to write this book because a I wanted to show people that this isn't just metaphor that actually in the ancient in God's kind of original ancient his natural cultural habitat if you like he was very much understood to to be a corporeal deity with a human-shaped body and with male and masculine features um just like every other god and goddess you know was in the ancient world. It was really normal. Um, so I wanted kind of to put God back in his ancient cultural habitat in that sense, but I also wanted um people to understand that we navigate our we imagine the other worldly and we often imagine the other worldly in terms of our own bodies. Um, you know, we we navigate our way around this world because of our bodies. I mean, I don't subscribe to this very Cartesian kind of dichotomy between you that we have that our bodies are simply the vessels or shells in which our mind or our intellect or our soul or spirit is housed. Um, and that's certainly not the way that ancient people understood what it was to be a person. Um, and so our bodies, you know, we are our bodies. And I think how these ancient societies understood interpreted certain aspects of their bodies very much framed and shaped the ways in which they imagined their gods and their god's bodies. And so from things like um you know certain sorts of the heart being a cognitive organ um an intellectual organ rather than you know we tend to think of it as an emotional organ if we kind of apply any kind of cultural meaning to it. um the way that the belly was understood to be the seat of certain sorts of emotions, the nose is the place of anger, the territoriality of the feet. Um all of these sorts of things have shaped the way in which God's portrayed in not just the Hebrew Bible, but in in New Testament texts as well. And I kind of wanted to take the reader on a journey through the early history of God by kind of stripping the deity and kind of showing what this God's body was understood to to be like. Um, and yeah, and it was fun to write.
>> It sounds like it. I I listened to the the audio version that you narrated and I can tell when you're kind of giggling in the background a little bit. But, uh,
>> it was it was so hard not to do accents as well, not to do voices, of course, because I do that in my lecture. And I I think you you do kind of strip the deity in in a somewhat literal non-metaphoric sense in in some of the discussions, but you've got a whole section on on divine genitals, which I think uh is going to strike some people as as a little off-putting, but it's such a fascinating discussion. And I think one of the things that that I've heard come up the most in in people talking about this book is your discussion of Isaiah 6
>> and Isaiah's uh throne theophony that he sees uh in the temple? You have a different reading of what traditionally we understand to be uh the the hem of a robe or the skirts.
>> Um could you tell us about uh this reading and and what's in the background of this reading of uh of God filling the temple? It's really interesting that that particular part of my book has caused such um debate. I mean, particularly because I spend a lot more time in the book talking about a very similar image of the deity in Ezekiel 1. Um, which I think is is is far more interesting. Um, and I say far more about that than I do about what's happening in Isaiah 6. But in Isaiah 6, we have the prophet having this encounter. you know, he sees Yahweh enthroned in the Jerusalem temple and Yahweh is surrounded by, you know, saraphim, which are these kind of um monstrous um noisy flying, burning serpent like creatures. Um, and we're told, you know, so the Hebrew goes something like um the Lord, he saw Yahweh high and lofty. Um, and it's normally translated as the hem of his robe filled the temple. And the term that's used there for, you know, there's there's no word for robe in the Hebrew. It's literally his lower extremities. That's what the word literally means. And it's often used to talk about the edges
of garments. And, you know, sure enough, iconographically, we've got lots of images from across ancient Southwest Asia of gods and kings wearing very, you know, double-hemmed long ankle-length robes, you know. So, that's completely fine.
But in my book, I sort of say there's an illusion going on here as well. So, I'm not, you know, and I use the word illusion very deliberately. There's because quite often when this term is used, particularly when it's used in prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible, it often alludes to the genitals, um, more usually of female characters, and these are sometimes it seems to be like a goddess-like character, um, as we find in Ezekiel 16 and Ezekiel 23. Um, and it's used in a very, it's kind of used in a very derogatory way. It's about when you have a reference to the shawl of these female characters, it's because they're being stripped and generously exposed. So, there's all of this kind of stuff that's clustering around this image.
So, it's a very interesting image, um, that the his sh his lower extremities fill the temple. And I think within the context of ancient Judahite constructs of the masculinity of God, the idea of God having genitals that would are so big would fill the temple is not weird at all. Particularly, I think because I'm I think this is probably what Ezekiel 1 is riffing off because in Ezekiel 1 again, a prophet has this image of Yahweh enthroned on a temple. And this time, you know, and and like in Ezekiel 6, the the the prophet doesn't quite say everything he sees. He doesn't say, "Oh, I looked at his face and it looked like this and his arms were like this." Um, it's always very >> Yeah.
And what he said, what he says, you know, he's very much says this was a human-shaped being sitting on the throne. And this deity's um upper body is covered by this kind of flashes of fire and flames and bright light, as is the lower half of his body. And the one body part that Ezekiel mentions is his mut naim. And he kind of navigates his kind of description of this deity's body by means of the mutnaim. And it's almost as if the mnaim are exposed. And this is a term that's normally and politely rendered, um, loins, but, you know, more appropriately refers to the front part of the body that is at the bottom of your waist and at the top of your legs. In fact, it's the genital area. Um, and yet Ezekiel leaves this part exposed, which is really interesting. Um, so I think those two texts, I think I suspect Ezekiel 1 is riffing, you know, if if Isaiah 6 is older, which most scholars would probably argue maybe, but I think there's some kind of intertextual relationship going on between those two. And I think that one has informed the other. And so what perhaps Ezekiel 6 is alluding to is what Isaiah 6 is alluding to, I think Ezekiel 1 is rendering more explicit, but in this incredible way that kind of by revealing that part of God's body, he's almost concealing more of the body. It's it's a really clever, clever text. I really like >> as it masks at the same >> Yeah, exactly.
If so, if I'm understanding correctly, what you're saying is that the Tik Tok generation did not invent the concept of big dick energy. Is that is that what >> Yeah. And my my goodness. I mean, yeah. I mean, and I'm certainly not the Tik Tok generation, but it was definitely around when I was when I was in >> Well, and even you mentioned the Yuguritic text earlier. We've got things about uh El's hand growing uh large as the sea uh when he sees some uh some women, >> beautiful young goddesses. Yeah. >> Yes. And then we and this is not something that ancient even Jewish writers were particularly uh uncomfortable with. We have discussions in rabbinic literature about God's genitals, including saying Adam must have been circumcised because Adam was made in the image of God. >> Yeah. Yeah. So their argument is very much that Yeah. If Adam's made in the image of God, they worried, you know, was Adam made circumcised or was he, you know, was he created with a foreskin? And they worried about it. And then they finally decided that absolutely Adam was created with a foreskin, he was made perfectly because he was made in the image of God and because God is circumcised and therefore then therefore Adam must have been circumcised too. So yeah, this idea that somehow God couldn't possibly have a penis, um, is extraordinary. It's a modern hang-up. It's not well, it's a kind of a postbiblical hang-up, um, rather than a rather than an ancient one. >> Yeah.
Well, and and our Victorian kind of sensitivities are are governing how people feel comfortable talking about that in public and and unfortunately that comes out in a lot of the boundary maintenance that a lot of people think it's their prerogative to um to engage in regarding the Bible and who's allowed to talk about what in the Bible. So, >> yeah. >> All right. Well, thank you for your time. I know you've got to get going. I uh appreciate uh you joining us and uh offering your thoughts on this and congratulations on the book again. Um, can you I'm sure we have more listeners in the US than in the UK, but uh they can find your book wherever quality books are sold, I'm sure. Um, any uh anything else you'd like to to share? Anything you didn't get to say that uh that you wish I would have asked you?
No, I've I've really enjoyed having the conversation. Um, and it was nice to revisit child sacrifice. I've I need to start, I know that sounds weird. I need to start, I've been asked to write a piece on child sacrifice, um, and for something that's coming out, um, I need to get it done later this year, and so it's been nice to kind of get my brain thinking about it again. It's been a long time. I've missed child sacrifice. What a weird thing to say, but I have. >> Who doesn't, who doesn't miss it every now and then?
Is there is there anything that you want to uh where can people go to find more of your work to find uh to find you if if they're interested? >> Um, gosh. Well, I'm all over YouTube in various ways. I think you can find my BBC documentaries on YouTube in um certain places. Um, I'm on Twitter, so if you want to see what I talk about on Twitter, um, I'm Profanesca. Um, yeah, and you can find a lot of my academic publications on my university web page. So just Google me. Just put my name in Google. It will, it will come up. >> Yeah. And you've And you've got some stuff on um academia.edu as well, don't you? >> Yeah. But I keep forgetting that I have that thing. Yeah. So it's it's quite, yeah. There's nothing, there's nothing new. If people want to access some of the scholarship, uh that's one way uh to do it uh conveniently.
So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Hope you have a wonderful evening. I hope things uh conditions improve for the university there uh in the UK and I look forward to uh visiting with you again out there in exit at some point soon. >> Definitely. Thank you so much for having me. >> Thank you.