Transcription
This looks very human-like. That deity isn't real. The deity is as real as the perception of the person, and that's it. The figment of the imagination of the human.
The earliest written mention of Yahweh is in a Moabitete text in the Mesa Deli. And there, Yahweh is a warrior, but a defeated warrior.
If I were to paint it another way, is how many times did all get defeated? How many times did they, until they finally, somehow, through whatever means?
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Myth Vision Podcast. I'm your host, Derek Lambert. I am sitting here, privileged. I found this scraggly-bearded academic. At first, I'm like, "I don't have a five on me, sir." And then he said, "Uh, look, it's me, Justin, Dr. Sledge from Esoterica." And I said, "Oh, well, then, if you don't mind paying me some of that knowledge, I'd like to know more about Yahweh." And so, welcome in person, in the flesh, to Myth Vision.
Thank you, Derek. Yeah, it was, it was, it was hilarious. I actually was just like, we, my wife was coming down with the kids, and I was like, in Orlando, I think, Derek. So I just texted you. I jumped out of the shower. Now, while I was thinking about you, while I was in the shower, was a whole different story.
Yeah, that's a whole another, they got to pay for that.
That's the OnlyFans. Um, yeah, but yeah, I was like, this works out. So I'm glad we're able to like, literally just like, throw things together and make it happen, just in a couple hours. So I really appreciate it.
I was shocked. He knew, he knew I was going to get in trouble with Neil, too, if I go knock on his door and wake him up. He was, his hours are off. And, um, you know, I said, "Look, this is the opportunity we've been looking for. You and I have been talking about possibly meeting in person and doing some interviews, and we at least get a short one here right now until the future." Um, but why not? First of all, what's your YouTube? Tell people, in case they don't know who you are, this is your first time, before we dive into the God of the Bible and Yahweh, who is this deity? Can we understand more about him and diving deep into him?
So, sure. Yeah. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge. I run a channel called Esoterica. And, uh, I guess it should be clear, I'm not a scholar of the Bible. I'm actually, my scholarship is on, uh, the topic of Western Esotericism. But it just so happens that that has led me into the world, of course, of Gnosticism, Hermeticism. You can't do Western Esotericism without studying that. And of course, the further you, you know, kick that can down the road, eventually you get to the question of, "Who is this god?" This god that seems to be the center of all this gravitational power. And this, uh, deity, Yahweh, has just, I don't know, it's, it's, it fascinates people. And you, I think one of the couple highest-performing videos on my channel have been on this deity. And on the one hand, I, I get it. I get why people are so fascinated because, in some sense, the, the three big religions stand and fall on the nature of this, this deity.
Right.
Yahweh. But on the other hand, there's another part of me that says, "Why would anyone care about a relatively obscure Middle Eastern god?" And so, it, it always strikes me as interesting that people, that this, that discussions around this deity are polarizing, uh, in a way that, um, you know, no one's getting their hackles up about the exact nature of Oen or Aoki, I don't know, in the same way that Yahweh seems to just electrify people.
Yeah. What, what makes this god successful? What made him win, in terms of the majority vote, so to speak, to people's minds? And we go back in time, and we're looking for his origins, which still ultimately is a mystery to knowing where this deity was spawned from, if you will. Uh, I have my questions in my mind that I, I wonder, what, how much does Egypt play a role? Is it possible it comes from somewhere north? I mean, I know we have models, but like, there are scholars that are entertaining these various, is he actually even potentially native to Ugarit? There are some who are looking at certain words and thinking maybe he's actually in the pantheon, and we just haven't recognized him. And so I wanted to ask you, um, the only correct answers are, "You go to hell forever." And so you have to get the right one first. And that is, who's Yahweh and where does he come from?
I, like you said, we don't know. Um, there's, there's recent stuff coming out of, uh, maybe Ugaritic and Hittite documents that seem, maybe there's some Yahweh theonyms there. There's this mysterious Shassu group that's maybe had Yahweh as their god. Um, and, and then if we look at the Hebrew Bible, the, the earliest memories of the Hebrew Bible, at least, seem to locate this god somewhere to the south, um, associated with Mount Seir. And if we look, and what I tell people is that the one way of reading the Hebrew Bible, and there's debates about exactly dating things by linguistics. There's debate about that. Yeah.
But the, the overall consensus of scholars is that we can tell, to some degree, archaic sections of the Hebrew Bible. And if you take some of those sections out, um, what kind of God do we see there? And, and not what kind of God do we get in Isaiah or Deuteronomy? That's much, much later. But what we look at these sections of, of the Song of Deborah or some really early Psalms, and the God that emerges there seems to be associated with Mount Seir, which is down in southern Jordan. Um, and it seems to be associated primarily with thunderstorms. Um, that'll matter later when we have to deal with Baal and how Yahweh and Baal are going to have to, the neighborhood's too small for both of them, right?
And so they're going to have to duke it out, and they do duke it out, and eventually Yahweh does win, at least in that region. Baal continues to function well out in Phoenicia, just fine.
I think the Romans ultimately get rid of him. And, um, I mean, it seems like this youthful warrior storm god, uh, eventually makes his way into the highlands of Judea, probably at Shiloh. And although we've not found a Yahweh shrine there, right, it's really important to note that we, that we do know of three Yahweh shrines: the Jerusalem one, which is now buried beneath the Dome of the Rock; the Tel Dan shrine, which is way up at the north; and the Tel El-Qudeirat shrine down in the, in the south, at the very beginning of the Arava. But we've never found the Shiloh shrine, uh, despite the fact that there are a lot of people who desperately want to find that shrine for political reasons. Um, but it seems like it, it gets carried into the area of Shiloh and becomes the, the dominant god of an, basically a sort of upstart, basically warlord.
Right.
In the form of the Israelites and their ultimate warlord leader, David. And I don't say king because I think king gives a really, you can think of King Arthur, the king of the realm. I mean, David, if he, if he existed, and I think he probably did, you're talking about a king of thousands at the most. Uh, so I think it's much more likely that you think of him as sort of a, a young, youthful warlord. And if you read the sections about King David, there's a great study of him that basically diagnoses King David as a psychopath. And I think it's, if you read, read the stories about him.
Right.
He looks like a serial killer. Um, and what kind of god, you look at, at least a psychopath.
Right.
Um, and what kind of god would you, would you want to adopt better than a god that you sort of think of yourself? Militant storm warrior god. It's a perfect fit for that kind of, that kind of ethnic group and that kind of, uh, king. We, we typically model our gods after us.
Right. Right. And that's, you know, I come from that kind of angle, like, how do we understand why the, the deity is perceived this way? And I think most people, when we talk to him today, the perception of God they have actually runs in the face of much of the textual evidence we see about this God. Which leads us into a different territory of Yahweh within the Bible. I almost wanted to pull a Jordan Peterson and be like, "So the God of the Bible, can you tell us about this one God that is in the Bible?" And it's like, first of all, what do you mean by Bible? Second of all, what do you mean by God? There's many. And what do you mean by that? How do you understand Yahweh?
So, what do you mean by the?
The, like the, there's only the God of the Bible. Hold on. There's a lot of.
There's a lot of question marks almost at every letter there.
Yeah. And we know that Jordan does this, but he does this under like, "What do you mean, wash the dishes?" Like, okay, we know that's a dumb example, but when you're talking on this, in every case, Bible, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's later. And what do you mean by this? As far as I imagine canon gets brought in, that's a different question. God, there's different Yahwehs. And I remember reading, uh, a work about whether or not Yahweh exists coming from a philosopher, but also a biblical scholar, and it's, uh, Greek, um, Yako, Greek, who wrote like his dissertation on this, and it was very controversial because he's philosophically jabbing over that this god can't exist, or which Yahweh. Can you give us some, uh, contradictory voices of Yahweh in the Bible that you could think of off the top of your head?
I mean, you definitely get, so you, you get this God that on the one hand is compassionate and loving and, you know, this God is a God who, uh, you know, was generous to the third and fourth generation, or whatever. And then you get God, the same God, who is like, "Kill all of the people in this town, murder them all, men, women, and children." And typically, don't think of it going both ways. A God that loves the world and, and, you know, that kind of thing. Then right next door to that, those verses, you get a, a genocidal psychopath. And, uh, it's because we have, like you said, it's, it's a composite deity. We have different gods operating at different times. And I don't mean different gods in the sense of numerically non-identical. What I mean is that there are different groups of people with different theological interests, and they're either emphasizing other aspects of that god because they need that god to, to be murderous in this case, or they, or they have a genocidal fantasy that never really played itself out in history, and now they're writing it. You know, the guy, you know, the guy that gets turned down by the girl and writes the real mean things about her on the internet. Uh, it didn't really happen that way, and so now he has to write mean stuff. I think that the Israelites are, are, you know, they're falsely remembering these stories of destroying all these towns, and there's, with the exception, maybe there's not much evidence of, of an Israelite invasion. I don't think it happened.
Yeah.
Um, but they wanted it to, they wanted it to have happened, and they relished in the idea of going town to town, murdering everyone. This is like a paranoid fantasy, at some level, and that god, the, the god of that text represents that kind of paranoid fantasy. But I think that when you get the deity, when the Israelites, or maybe the, particularly the Amides, or something, or even the Judean kingship is much more stable, you don't need a psycho god killing people. You can have a god that's sort of regal and distant and kind and elderly and loving, because you don't need that god to be on the warpath anymore.
Right. And so it just represents a different, uh, again, I don't know if it's a different god or what it even means they call it a different god, but they're characterizing that god differently, given very material historical circumstances, and I think that's true now. I mean, the, the Jesus that is, the, the Jesus of, um, I don't know, the liberation theology, where he's sort of basically a kind of quasi-socialist, "love your neighbor," Jesus was homeless too. Um, the, the Knights Templar didn't need that Jesus. Right? They needed the Jesus of, you know, "If you don't believe in me, we'll bundle you up like sticks and burn you." Uh, the Inquisition did not need Kumbaya Jesus. They needed militant, "I am the way, the truth, and the light, and none come from the Father except through me." And so the Jesus you get, the Yahweh you get, the Thor you get, I'm sure it has everything to do with the people needing that deity. What deity do they need?
If I may press in, like, I'm going to try and jab in here, not to interrupt, but to kind of allow the dialogue to continue to flow, because there's so many questions that come up as you're saying, brilliant, brilliant thinking here. And that is, for me, when I go back and I'm looking backwards, and I see that, that the deity is experiencing a perception from its author, because I remember interviewing John Collins, and I was like, "God is God here is telling him." He goes, "No, no, no, stop. God's not telling nobody anything." And I'm like, "Well, it says that God's." "No, no, no, you don't. God didn't say anything." And I'm like, "Hold on, aren't you a Catholic?" And he's like, "Yeah, but God didn't say anything." Which is super radically different from what I'm used to, right? But he's like, "No, no, no. The author of that text said God said." So fundamentally, we already have like, "Whoa, we need to question what we're reading and not just accept at face value what it's saying." And even I today have this habit occasionally where I'm reading, and "God said," and it's like, actually, the author of that text said that God said that. And, okay, so now we're dealing with an issue. But as far as you're describing God and these different perceptions, experiences that are usually reflections of how the, the author and the community, whatever, is actually viewing this deity through, it makes me think just like Jesus, just like anything, the text may say something, and usually it's easy to interpret in different ways because language is flexible like that, to some degree, and we can cherry-pick. But also, to me, it looks so human. And when I say human, you could, you could go the Spinoza route, in a way, and say, well, all nature and just existence itself, in some way, is deity. Um, but for me, being a naturalist to some degree, I'm looking at it going, uh, this looks very human-like. That deity isn't real. The deity is as real as the perception of the person, and that's it. The figment of the imagination of the human. And to that end, that's its purpose and its significance. It's like an avatar. It's like the myth of being a patriot in America. Or look at ancient Homer, right? You're reading Homer, and he talks about, you know, Troy, her, the mother Troy, city of Troy, that we must fight for her and defend her. Well, that's a myth that we have that is only as real as we want to conceive it to be. But ontologically, you get where I'm going with that.
Yeah. Or I think that the choice example is interesting because whatever the Hittite city, Watusa, or whatever, it probably was real. And there may have been a battle there. It may have been the Achaeans during the so-called Bronze Age collapse were actually waging war against the Hittites in order to get a, a chunk of the, the shoreline there. In the same way they were fighting with the Egyptians and they, the Pelasgians and the Philistines. It may be a historical memory, but you, those historical memories by the time they get down to Homer, God knows how much they've been changed and altered or whatever. And it did it with the Israelites. But yeah, I think when we think about a god like about Yahweh, I think we should be asking ourselves, what do we know about the material historical circumstances in which this god was conceived? And I think we're going to learn a lot more about the people in that time than we are going to learn about a theology. And that theology, to me, is almost always reflective of those, of those kinds of interests and those kinds of things. And so, um, so I don't know that we have to talk about there not being a Yahweh in the Bible or something like that. That seems to be a, to me, I don't have to go that far. But I think that what we do have to admit is that the Israelite literature that survives, and we should include in that not just Israelite literature, the Moabitete literature, because we do get a mention of the earliest written mention of Yahweh is in a Moabitete text in the Mesha Stele, and there Yahweh is a warrior, but a defeated warrior. And I think that that, like, that tells me that not only did the Israelites conceive of their god as a warrior god, so did other people around them. And it, because you wouldn't brag about the, the, the king of the Moabites is not going to brag about beating up just any random god. It has to be a big badass storm god or what, or something. Right.
Right.
And the fact that, and many people make say this, "Oh, the first time he always shows up in history, he always being defeated." And that's true. But that proves the point that when the Israelites conceived of their god as a warrior god, it seems to underwrite that point from the Moabitete perspective, because of course they would only brag about their god who's also a warrior god beating out the other warrior god. "My dad can beat up your dad." It's that kind of theology. So I think that when we take the totality of that, we do get a composite vision of this deity. But that's because we have a composite society. We have composite authors. We have composite interests. The Israelites in the north and Judah are not going to generate the same kind of deity. And we can see that in the literature because they're condemning each other's religious practice. Mostly the south condemning the north. We don't have a lot of northern literature about the south because the north was prosperous and rich and didn't really care about what the, the poor, backwards Judeans were doing, right? Um, even though the Judeans ultimately went out because they weren't destroyed by, um, they were.
Not as significant, it seems.
They definitely were not. They were a backwater. Um, and, um, and it's not until they're destroyed by the, by the Assyrians, the northerners are destroyed by the Assyrians, that the Judeans rise to the prominence and ultimately carry the day historically, at least. Um, well, we can tell that the Judeans have a chip on their shoulder about the way the northerners are conceiving of Yahweh. The Judeans seem to have this more aniconic kind of, you know, "At least you're depicting your God, Yahweh, wrong." Maybe they thought they were depicting their God correctly. And it seems like there is a difference, a theological difference, which isn't surprising. I mean, I walk into an African-American church and I walk into an Ethiopian church, and I walk into a Catholic church, and I walk into a Protestant church. Look at Jesus's skin tone. It's like xenophanes is the ancient Greek, you know, the Ethiopians make their gods with the curly hair and woolly hair, and the make their god redheaded. And yeah, we, we're, we're drawing our god based on us. And to think that the Israelites were doing something different than that, uh, it's just, you would have to have some other prior dogmatic belief to not, for that not to just be obvious. You, you may want to steer this into the underdog winning the war. And, and now that we're talking about a warrior deity, we need to talk about other attributes that come along the way as we go. So, I'm hoping I can flow, uh, the path that we need to go, and saying he starts off as a defeated warrior in another text. So, of course, they're going to flex and say, "We beat this tribe up, therefore we beat their god up," because that was the ancient way. If your kingdom lost, it's because your god lost. It's pretty simple. What I find ironic is how, I mean, I guess if I were to paint it in another way, is how many times did Baal get defeated? How many times did they, until they finally, somehow, through whatever means, finally lose their grip on their worshippers? And what I really think is interesting about Yahweh is how, and we should discuss this and to kind of flesh this out, how no matter how many defeats, no matter how many shortcomings and setbacks that the Judeans and Israel had, whatever the conquering country was that kept beating them, they held on. "Dear God, don't let go of Yahweh." Rationalized through the trauma, through the, "How do we explain God not helping us this time?" And then internalized it. Why do you think Yahweh stayed alive? Is it because his people and their tradition stayed alive? I'm asking questions. I imagine some of this is true, and there's more to this, but the story, and I say singular in a way, I know there's many, but like how it coalesced into a narrative. What a hell of a punch this entire mythos has. And I think that is what solidified him into the like, hall of fame of deities to be reckoned with. What do, how do you go from not even agreeing with the next-door neighbor Yahweh version to he rules the universe? And we still have our disputes and stuff, but like, he has become so successful. How would you explain that rise from defeat in the earliest source?
Yeah. How did Yahweh become God? Um, that's a, it's a fascinating question. I don't, I don't think we totally know the answer because, partially because of the, the theological move that got made. We don't, we're not seeing them in their totality. But one of the things that seems to have happened is that one, your competitors lose. The Israelites just got destroyed by the Assyrians in 722. So like, a whole chunk of Yahwists are just annihilated. So in some sense, like the most successful thing for Protestantism could be the destruction of the Catholics, or something that would help, like, you're the only teen left. Uh, so that was certainly not a totally, um, a totally bad thing for them. Uh, and also we should say that there are other Israelites that did survive. The Samaritans survived. They were another Israelites that are, are still out there. Um, I think the other thing that survived was that among the Judean priesthood, there seems to have been, um, an increased idea that God was, or Yahweh was, more than just a, a singular tribal God. That this God was perhaps more powerful. Where things beginning to shift from monotheistic rhetoric, which we see all throughout the ancient world. We see that in the prayer to Ra. Akhenaten seems to have engaged in some monotheistic rhetoric. But there's not metaphysics, and, and Dan has strong and I think really good intuitions and thoughts about this. Um, but I think that where perhaps where Dan and I would, would disagree perhaps a little bit, is that I do think that by Deuteronomistic Isaiah, there is a moment where the temple's destroyed, and the, and this classic Deuteronomistic, Deuteronomistic theology, there was, "God has punished us because we broke this covenant. We have this vassal contract with Yahweh, and we broke it for whatever reason, by engaging in whatever." And "God's destroyed us." But the vassal contract seems to stipulate that God's going to kill everybody. Well, they didn't. They didn't all die. The, the weirder thing happened. The Babylonians decided to do not to kill the ball, but to drag their leadership into Babylon. So I think the Judahite theologians had a weird problem on their hands. They had a traditional theology that said we should all be wiped out, and yet we're not all wiped out. Something must have saved us. There's only one option. And I think that Yahweh was sort of like, "There must be something going on here." And I think that in that moment of, of despair and desperation, and in exile, the biggest flex you can do without actually being able to do anything, you're powerless. You're, you're, you're exiled people, is to say, "You know what? Not only," and this you see this in, in, in Deuteronomistic Isaiah, um, "not only are your gods not really gods, they're just not real. Your idols are like made of, they're just wood, there's actually no God there at all."
And you, you see the, the theological machinery going there in, in Deuteronomistic, this explosion in that text where, "I am the God, there's just me. I am the maker of good and evil. I form light and dark. I form light, form the light and the dark." And I think it's at that moment, at the, the moment of ultimate despair, where the Israelites have basically no other options. The Israelites have no other option. They either go big or go home, and they go big, like Yahweh is just the only gods. Your gods are not real. And then we get the, I think then the conversion from monotheistic rhetoric to a kind of monotheism, a, an early proto-monotheism that still is not fully formed, and it's not where, not the fully formed radical monotheism will get when they grew, and when they, when those same Judahites will get the machinery of Greek philosophy to really articulate those ideas in a more radical way, and, um, and you come in contact with Platonism and stuff like that, and Pho, and such, right? Yeah. But I do think there's a shift in those texts in Deuteronomistic Isaiah, and Mark Smith makes this point, that the monotheistic rhetoric is now shifting over to monotheistic, monotheistic theology, at least among some members of, like, the elite, the authors technically pinning this, and the group that might be associated.
So, so does this explain why when I read about King Cyrus from their sources, they say Marduk, but when you're reading biblical, it's always Yahweh who's the reason? And so, again, like we talked about those ancient examples, but in this example, if they weren't doing that, wouldn't you have imagined these authors, if they were pinning something that supposedly happened, would have said, "Yeah, Marduk took us out of our land and defeated Yahweh." But instead, they literally give the credit of what happened to them, or whatever, for their reason of still existing, to Yahweh. But when you read the other source, which we still have the inscriptions today, it is the Persians, in particular, that I'm talking about with Cyrus. So I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but I think Deuteronomistic predicts something in there, which gives scholars an indication this is a little later. Um, but they give the credit to Yahweh. And this is just before that syncretic kind of Hellenistic blending in the, in the blender, and all these other attributes, like you said, the Platonic deity concept gets merged into Yahweh and Yahwism, and Zeus, and various forms of God getting the new, you know, different names.
Like in Zoroastrianism also coming in contact with the rise of state religion, and we see that at that point, there's a transition theologically from the Deuteronomistic theology, which does survive in its own weird way, and survives down to this day. There's still orthodox Jews that will tell you that the Holocaust happened because of reformed Judaism. Um, which is a nasty and horrifying thing to say, but it, that Deuteronomistic theology is still there. But the big shift then is to the apocalyptic mode of Judaism, where you get God really in control of everything.
Yeah. And, and again, I think from a psychological point of view, this makes a, a great deal of sense because, if it's the case that these things are chaotically happening, that's the worst possible situation. I'd rather there be an evil God than chaos. Because at least with an evil God, I, at least I know someone's in control.
Yeah. Yeah.
And even if God is treating you badly, you know, you're the, the whipping boy because you broke the rules or whatever, at least you got a dad. It's a weird way of thinking. It's a weird way of thinking.
But, but it's still like, it's better to know you got a dad, even because you're getting a lashing.
To give another. This is horrible, but I always come back to this because it's so traumatic to think about. How many times have you and I watched on the news where they find this out of nowhere? It's like they're interviewing this regular everyday Joe, and he's like, "Yeah, I went over there at Bob's house to get a cookout. I heard a scream and went and cracked the door, and this girl comes out, and we found Sally who's been lost for 12 years. She birthed four kids by this guy in a basement dungeon where he like kept her there." And you think to yourself, what did she do psychologically with herself under this absolute lack of control of the situation? How does she rationalize to come out and go, "Actually," and this makes me think of the slave mentality Nietzsche talks about within Christianity, but this idea of like, "My weakness is my strength." This is a blessing. How do I turn the cursiest curse of all bad into good?
Yeah, it's Stockholm syndrome.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like Stockholm syndrome. I, I think of, you know, the relationship, um, there's a theologian, a couple theologians after the Holocaust that developed what are called the abuse of God theology, where they make, uh, the argument that the Jewish relationship to their God is like the relationship to an abusive partner.
Right.
And that, uh, and some of this literature is quite difficult to read, but I think quite powerful. But yeah, I think there's a kind of Stockholm syndrome happening where you come to identify with your captor. But because it's better to have a captor than to just be chaos.
Yeah.
At some level. And so I think this is part of what's operating there and, and the, in Deuteronomistic and other texts. But then again, there's this shift to like, this apocalypticism, right?
And that shift to apocalypticism, I think, is where we get really mature monotheism. Our God is in control of the whole universe. Our God is preparing. The whole thing has a, there's a plan. We're going to suffer immensely before the plan is realized. Everything's going to be terrible, and then God's going to interject into history, and everything will be fixed. And I think that that, born out of the trauma of the exile, you get this idea that, yeah, things might be going bad, but God's in control. Our God is in control. And even how bad it is, is still part of the plan.
Right. And I think that that kind of apocalypticism that emerges in, in the, in the Persian period and really takes hold in Judea, and texts like Daniel and the books of Enoch, and, uh, even in the book of Revelation, um, which I would have argued that the book of Revelation is, to me, if I were living as a Jew in the first century, uh, and I read all of the Christian literature that was floating around at that time, the letters of Paul and some Gospels, and man, whatever, the Apocalypse of John would have been the most recognizably Jewish text, right? Clearly, you know, like, "Oh, yeah, a Jew wrote that." Um, yeah, there's some Greek stuff in there, but a Jew wrote that.
He literally says in there, too. I mean, I know Jews enough, they'll be like, "Yeah, and they call themselves Jews, but they are not Jews." Well, a Jew would say something like that. Like, clearly all. Yeah. Exactly. All that stuff. Yeah. And so, I, I think that that's where this, where the big shift goes. And that, and it's at that point, and I think I've made this point in other cases, that Israelite religion, Israelites went into Babylon, and Jews came out of it.
There's a fundamental shift in the theology, the fundamental shift in the identity. Israelites go in, Jews come out. Yahweh goes in, God comes out. And the, the price that the Israelites paid with the universalizing of Yahweh into the God of the entire Olam, the entire world, is that now we no longer have Yahweh, the storm god, the warrior god, the, the kingly defender of, of Israel and Judea, because the price you pay in universalizing it is you lose the particularities.
Right.
And the particulars were ultimately forgotten until scholars in basically the 20th century were like, "Who is this God again?" And we began to look at those texts again and go, "Oh yeah, Mount Seir, like these warrior texts, that seems warband prophets, these women prophets seem to be associated with this deity." So I think it's interesting that Yahweh as a deity, I, I don't think anyone worships Yahweh as a deity. I don't think anyone's worshiped Yahweh as a deity since the 6th century BC. I think people have worshiped Yahweh prior to that. I think people have started worshiping El Shaddai or Adonai, and then people started worshiping Jesus or Hashem or the Kadosh, or whatever the rabbis want to call it. But there's a mythological continuity, but under the hood of that has been extreme dynamism. And I think Yahweh has not been worshipped. Um, because how would you worship Yahweh at a, at a, a shrine of unhewn stone that's, you know, a meter by a meter, and you burn animals and incense to this deity, and then go fight combat against the other?
Yeah. That doesn't exist anymore. Hasn't existed in, since almost the middle of the Iron Age. So I, I think Yahweh is a, is Yahweh as the deity that, that, uh, originated has been long since forgotten. Hasn't been worshiped by anybody in quite some time.
Isn't it fascinating how humans have like evolved these ideas, these gods to where they no longer are what they are? I want to shift topic to his body, this idea of the body. And I've read, uh, a few different books. There was like four or five different books when I was going back to do a little touch-up because I did a documentary where I was talking about Francesca Stabraulu's, uh, book God Anatomy, and it's more popular level, though there is a lot of footnotes if you go and actually check those footnotes and then evaluate her sources, you'll see there's some really good stuff.
She's a fantastic scholar.
Absolutely. Um, love reading her.
And Benjamin Smer, and others who've written on this, showing, yes, you could almost say God has bodies. Because again, we were talking about the Bible and Yahweh. Well, it's not a single deity. There are variations of this god. And what are we talking about? If we're using, you know, various sources, too. Some priestly, and then you have other sources. And I'll just leave it priestly and others, cuz I know that there's disputes over that. That's a whole another, whole another ball of wax.
Yeah. Don't even want to get lost in there. Um, again, would we view this through the same lens of suggesting God not having a body? Thank you, Plato. Thank you, those philosophers. Clearly, as a body, even before the exile. Um, and it takes a long time for the body to disappear because you reminded me when you said people haven't been worshiping Yahweh since the 6th century BC. I love the way you put that in the most rigorous sense of what that entailed. But her final chapter, the eulogy, is like, "The God is dead," and she goes to explain, "And you buried him." She almost like does this, uh, you know, is in it.
Yeah. The madman.
Yeah. She says that, you know, "You have buried him. You have taken away his body. You've taken away his functions as an actual deity in the mind of the ancient worshipper." And, uh, "You've made him so abstract, he no longer is even important."
I think that's probably true for some really highly cerebrally inclined theologians. But I think that Christians who worship Yahweh indirectly through the person of Jesus focus intensely on the body of Christ. I mean, it's no way to walk into a Catholic church and just a dude nailed up there at the front of the building, and you know, the, the idea of being crucified with Christ. I mean, medieval Christians took that very seriously. I mean, they, they really suffered immensely and really contemplated the fleshy reality of Christ. So in the one sense, I think that the disembodiment was quickly, that vacuum of that was quickly filled with the very embodied reality of, of Jesus for, for especially for medieval people and Catholics. Um, it also for Jews never went anywhere. The, the, the Jews right after all this stuff with Merkavah mysticism clearly imagines God sitting on a throne, and you can sit there too. And part of what you achieve in the Merkavah mysticism is that you are able to literally see the body of God, and then measure God like a tailor, where you're measuring the exact dimensions of God's 11,450 paras beard, and his long weird fingers, and giant head, and toes, and things. And some of this was popular enough that Maimonides made the argument that Maimonides wrote the God that reflected precisely to argue against this idea, because God that Maimonides, being this hardcore Aristotelian, hated the idea of God having a body.
Right. But clearly, there were lots of Jews who were literally having mystical experience where they're measuring the divine body. Uh, literally measuring it down to the, down to a unit of measurement, and the paras. Um, and then of course, we can go to the Kabbalah in the 13th century, where Maimonideanism was all the rage, and people were, you know, being these hardcore Aristotelian Jewish philosophers, and these Spanish and French mystics were like, "No, God has a body, and here it is. It's this spir, these 10 Sefirot, and this is God's phallus, and this is God's vagina, and this is God's arms and face, and here's the part of God's brain that's connected, this part of God's beard," and they go on and on for this for hundreds of pages in the Zohar. And that text becomes canon in Judaism. It's canon. Orthodox Jews accept it all over the world. Zohar is Zohar, it's holy Zohar, you read it, read it, people memorize it, even if they can't understand it. And so I think, um, that on the one hand, yes, for some intellectuals, God lost God's body. But on the other hand, I think for lots of other mystics, and I think for the, but common normal people, scholars are abnormal, like, but for normal people, the vacuum of God's body, if we just read, if we're just reading, I don't know, Tertullian or Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, we get some abstracted thing. But I think that those guys are not representative of the population because when we look at the population, the adoration of the physical body of Jesus becomes a huge thing in the Middle Ages, and depicting his suffering, and I mean, in such vivid detail that I've had YouTube tell me that I cannot show images of the crucified Christ from the Middle Ages because it's too violent depiction of torture, and they've like demonetized videos. So I'm like, it's so graphic and it's bodily horror. Jesus is like green and bleeding everywhere. Very graphic. So I think that that human beings rightly have an allergy to the abstract. Certain smart people who are very abnormal are very at home with it, like me. I'm a very abnormal person in this regard. But normal people, they want their god fleshy and touchy, and they want to feel him. It's why I think the Marian cult is such a big deal in Catholicism. I think that's why the depictions of Jesus are so fleshy. I think it's why Shiyur Koma mysticism emerged in Judaism and and flourished in the, and the Kabbalah. Um, because I don't think that we've gotten past God's body. Um, I think we, we still crave to cuddle with Christ, cuddle with good God. And if you, I mean, God, my goodness, if you read the poetry of the Middle Ages, like people like Hadewijch, I mean, they describe like Christ coming into their beds at night and like entering into their body like in like erotically like.
You're like, like, "Hey lady, like I know you're celibate, but I got to get me some of that celibacy. Some like that's some hot celibacy."
Because I don't think the embodiment, I don't think embodiment is fundamentally going anywhere. I think it only goes somewhere for, for abnormal, uh, abstract theologians, uh, and philosophers. I think normal people.
I don't think it's going anywhere either because I think humans again are the ones modeling, not like they're intentionally modeling it. It's like, God feels like a mirror that every move you make and adjusting yourself, you think you're moving God, but it's really you, and you're, it's almost like unconsciously aware of how you're viewing your day.
It's like a fun house mirror. Yeah. It's like a fun house mirror. I think.
It's literally a fun house mirror. And like, it's always going to be a reflection of you. And every group is going to constantly evolve. And it's ironic to see how the brain works when they see clear text that seem to say certain things, and then certain groups will just double down. Yeah, well, that God has a right to do that, or whatever horrific thing is described. And then in other cases, you'll get, and we saw this in history, when the Cynics or Stoics and others were interpreting their myths as they got philosophized over the centuries leading to the time of Christ and past the time of Jesus, you find them take Heracles, who had his fun during his days, according to the stories, with plenty of women and the whole nine, um, become the chief example of a Cynic and the most morally like astute person you should follow after. And you're like, "Hold on, dude, if you not read the stories?" In fact, that's what the early Christians were saying often, like Justin Martyr, when he's describing Jesus and compares him, clearly describes, "We believe like," and he tells you all the four sons of Zeus. And then he goes, um, on to say, "But those are demonic imitations." And he, why? Because they weren't as good. Good became the chief of what was true. So it's not about ontological or even historical arguments. They probably believed ontologically. I'm not saying that. I'm saying like, they weren't making this historiographical claim and case. They were making, "My guy was more Platonically good," which is the attribute you want in order to have the best god, and yours weren't. And they could point to text to point that out. This makes me wonder how they felt when the Gnostics pointed to the evil creator. And what kind of irritated soft spot would that bring into an Orthodox, when you go and point to the genocidal maniac who's telling you to do these bad things? And then they go, "But hold on, we don't understand him that way. We have interpreted this differently." Well, so did they with the Heracles, and so did they with, they were, yes, of course. It's the case that everyone else is like interpreting things wrongly. We have it correct. Those, those, those Melchites, they had what was coming to them. They were evil sinners. They were demonic people. They, they just, you know, of course, there's always a mental gymnastics you can play to make sure that your, your hermeneutics justify what you want to do. But again, I always say like, look, if you don't have a dogmatic filter on your glasses, what would you see?
Yeah. And you would see like, you know, Marcel's not far off the point. Uh, if you look at it from a purely, like, again, a Platonizing idea that God should be good in a, in a justice-driven kind of way. And that was a big Axial Age shift, where there's a, a shift away from the gods being arbiters of chaos to order, to being arbiters of evil to good. That's also part of the apocalyptic shift. There's a, a huge emphasis in the apocalyptic on good versus evil, right? Prior to the, the emphasis, you know, if you look at, uh, Hebrew Bible and other texts, it's much God is God that orders things. You know, when Job goes to God and says, "Hey, why did you all this bad stuff to me? What's that fair, bro?" And Yahweh's answer is, "I ordered the world. Where were you when I put up the pillars of the world?" Or whatever. It doesn't say it was right.
Right. Because God doesn't care about what's the Israelite God of the writer.
of that doesn't care what's right and wrong. God's powerful. He could do what he wants and he does what he wants, and the, and the doing it is the thing that is like, I am the arbiter of whatever. Like, you can't complain to me. You go file a letter with the complaints office. Like, can't get thrown in the trash. It's later that you get this sort of more plaguing idea that God has to be good and just.
Um, I'm going to go back for a second and talk about the, I think one of my, but one of the funniest moments in like popular theology that I've seen recently is in the movie Talladega Nights. Where, have you seen this movie? Yeah. You remember the scene where they're all singing at the table and, uh, they're all talking about they're doing the prayer to Jesus and he's like, "And I want to pray to baby Jesus." He's like, "He's so cuddly." He's like, "You can't talk about Jesus like that." He was, he was like, "But he was a man." Like, yeah, like the baby Jesus. Like, baby. I'm like, that's theology. Yeah. Like, that's the, like, if we, you know, we want that cuddly baby Jesus, you know, we just got done with Christmas.
>> Yeah, I love it. You know, and I'm like, yeah, of course. There's no way that you're, you're going to get some abstract, Aristotelian thought, thinking itself, Platonic flight of the alone to the alone. No one cares about that, right? They, they want cuddle Jesus. And I think that again, that's a psychological impulse that we have that we, we want the Virgin Mary, want the, we want whatever. So I think again, I think that the divine, the question of divine embodiment, uh, yeah, this to go back to that. I, to me, that's a very instructive. That scene in that movie is like, again, it's silly, but also, you know, Freud says that jokes are very serious things where in that joke is revealed a very important theological point that, um, that some abstract bro Jesus, risen from, you know, shining body. Yeah, that's cool in a way, but we want baby Jesus.
>> Yeah, yeah. I like that. Five pounds, six ounces. So I want you, the final question I have is to have you dissect me for a second or kind of, I want to internalize the critique and, and just to tell you my struggle. I was a fundamentalist, radically, like delusional, if I'm being absolutely honest in my own self-awareness. Believed I, I really, really thought in the world Jesus is coming back. I need to be as good as I can. I could only be as good as I could. I prayed. I tried to stop, you know, with the lust of the flesh. I tried to fight, like the best I knew how with all the mechanics. And it was so futile and honestly draining and extremely traumatic, the way I treated myself with my religion.
Myth vision is birthed. It's birthed through a theistic worldview of God is bigger. It becomes the universal concept. Except I went beyond just my named deity. It was God was all. And it really, these other religions are kind of like the six wise men of Hindustan, to learning much inclined. And they went to see the elephant, though all of them were blind. And all religions are really telling you somewhat of the truth. They are kind of giving you also their own little cultural tastes and flavors and appearances. But then from there, I started learning more about science, learning more about the natural world, and I started to evaluate that and go, "Okay, hold on. This comes back to philosophy in the way, in the sense of how do I make sense of this? What makes the most sense? Which position?" So a chip becomes on my shoulder and recognizing like, this God that you guys are believing in, the one that I used to believe in, there's no way that that makes the most sense. So I go on this mission and I combat with apologists and I've gone back and forth to this day. And I feel like I'm kind of doing to myself what I did to myself as a fundamentalist, and that is get so caught up in combating bad ideas and trying to help people find freedom and being able to enjoy these things without the dogma. But I'm throwing out the five pound, six ounce baby Jesus. And I can't just enjoy that. And I'm,
>> I, I want to just enjoy myth for myth, but I feel like I have to fight this fight in a way to try and bring betterment to people online who are trapped where I was.
>> Sure.
>> What the hell do I do, Dr. Sledge? I mean, like, this is, I mean, I guess, I mean, again, I'm not, I'm not going to pull Jordan Peterson or anything, but you know, I, I wonder like, when you're beating those apologists up, are you beating yourself up, too?
>> Like I'm kind of,
>> Two things. I think I'm lowering myself to this, to, to entering the ring and getting dirty with them on this mud fight, this poop-flinging, flat-fight. But number two is I'm also opening myself up for trolls to just bring, honestly, nothing but poop. It's, it's really more stress, I think, for myself at the end of the day than it is me carrying on just bringing great scholarship and enjoying the depths that can be explored in the world. Like, I think looking back when I'm old, I'm like, talking myself through this with you, right? Like, this is therapy. But like, seriously, I'm going to look back when I'm 60 and I'm going to go, "I wasted 10 years talking to people who did not want to know. They weren't really, they, they had a conclusion. They drove for that conclusion. That was their entire thing." Whereas they don't really want to like live and explore the nuances of the world and what there is in the ancient material, the myths, the stories, the legends, the depth in the story of Joseph, the depth in the story of Jesus and appreciate it, but not with the "you must believe or go to hell" dogma that comes along with it. I love this, this stuff. You see what I'm saying? You know?
>> Yeah. I feel the same way. And I am a religious person, you know, and so I, I do the same thing. It's funny because I don't get asked by apologists, Christian or otherwise, to like debate with them. I, I don't, what are the reasons? They don't seem to really care about what I do. Um, or they don't tell me they do. Um, I guess I'll say a couple things. The first thing is, I think there are ways of appreciating the myths as myths. And I, I often say that I take my religion very seriously because I don't take it literally. Right? All right. If I took this literally, then that couldn't take it seriously. It's just, that's not a, you know, another way of putting it is like, it's one thing to play Dungeons and Dragons. It's another thing to think you're an elf. You know, like, I like playing Dungeons and Dragons, but if you think you're an elf and you're like, "Now you're at war with the Morgoth or something." I, I'm like, "Oh, you crossed the line."
>> Yeah. Like you cross the line into something else. And so that's the other thing I, I don't do. Um, like,
>> I want to know more about Morgoth. But go ahead.
>> Yes. I,
>> And, and, and I guess the other thing is that, that for me as an educator, when I put a video out about Yahweh or or Baal, and I put the Yahweh, put the Yahweh videos out there, this episode of Jerusalem on Baal, and I put them out there not to argue with anyone, but just to say, "This is where the consensus of scholarship generally is." Yeah, it's going to change. It's going to move. That's a moving target. Fine. But if, and I, and I do that by saying, "Look, let's say that I, you know, take this off in, you know, physically, not physically, but intellectually, and I say, if I were an alien and I came to Earth and looked at the data, what would the data tell me about Baal, Yahweh, or whatever?" That's what we have. Or the other question is, "If you took these dogmatic glasses off, what would you see?" And if you were looking at Thor, what would you see? Yeah, because they're totally fine doing that with Thor. They're totally fine doing that with Shinto gods or with Quetzalcoatl or whatever. And my point is always, everyone's great about doing historiography of the gods until it's their god.
>> Yeah.
>> And then it's pearl-clutching time and underwear in a wad and "How dare you historicize this?" and "How dare you think that Jesus was thrown into a mass grave or was always just some storm god from the southern Jordan?" "How dare I?" The same way you dare to say it about Thor and Quetzalcoatl and whatever, because that's actually what the historical data tells us. You're just being intellectually dishonest with a double standard because you have this dogmatic underlying sub-belief that, of course, Jesus couldn't have been done to a mass grave.
>> Yeah.
>> I'm like, "Sure he could have. That's the horror of imperial executions." Like, of course he could have. And that seems to be what we get from a lot of other historical sources about what happened to people who were crucified. Uh, do I think Moses, do I think some guy like Moses went up from a mountain and got a bunch of rules about what I can and can't eat? No. But does that tradition and do those things symbolically structure a life that makes sense to me and provides me with values that are important to me? Sure. Does it also allow for other people to engage in, uh, in in horrifying politics in in the Middle East? It does that, too.
>> Yeah. Yeah. And, and the, the two things are, I'm only going to be really to stop the other if I am speaking their language at some level, too.
>> Right?
>> And so like, you need to be on the inside, in a way, sometimes. And that's why I feel like I'm doing a service, but,
>> Sometimes I feel like, you know, like when Derek, "Will you just enjoy the myths?" I feel like we're trying to get there. Me and Neil are both kind of doing the same thing where we have chips on our shoulders, but we're also like,
>> Yeah. And I think that if you shouldn't have to try, if it just doesn't, like, if I went to Shaw. Of course, if I go to Shaw and I have to complain about being at Shaw, not when my wife is being the rabbi, but if I go to Shaw, it's just like the guy can't dab in Torah. You know, it's just like, you have to complain. But underneath the complaints, yeah, is that I'm there and I'm there because there's something about this that means something to me. And I don't, I don't have to do anything. It just does. And I think that we can't really force it or induce it. And I don't think it's the classic sort of, uh, sensus divinitatis, sensitive divine, or something like that. I don't think it's that. I think there's something aesthetic about it. I think there's something about the tradition. There's something about the psychological comfort involved. There's something about the way that in perhaps in a Jungian sense, that symbols structure reality for human beings. And they happen to structure it in a way that makes sense to me. And I can't say that that's going to be true for you or true for anyone else, or even that two Jews have the same sets of symbols, even though they seem to be talking about the same sort of things. So for me, the question of how I navigate the relationship of scholarship and religion is that they're functioning in totally different ways. And because I don't take the myth seriously, or I don't take the myth literally, right?
>> I don't need the data, the historical data to back up some position that, oh, these seven cities were definitely destroyed by Joshua during this time period. I'm like, I don't need that.
>> Play a completely different role in your life. And I feel like that's what's happening to me. Look, I didn't know much about Dionysus, for example. And the more I started exploring this God, which we think is only for drunkenness and revelry, there's a lot more complexity. I see a lot of Christ in Dionysus. I see a lot of Jesusy stuff in Dionysus. And I think to myself, "Damn, who else has some of that?" And there's other people who have these kinds of things. And I can appreciate the lessons. You know, it sucks that the people who are trying to monopolize the narrative or monopolize the stories want to have this kind of rhetoric where it's attack and it's being used in a very political way, but also social way, beyond just politics. It affects people and it was traumatizing to me, even in my own mind. The bite model applied to me just from the Bible itself. I didn't need a guy shoving it down my throat. Just reading it and taking it so literal was enough to traumatize me and to be in my own little brain cult where I was stuck in this trying to understand it. So, um, but I feel like I'm still processing and still kind of coming out of all of it and trying to figure out how to work it into my own life today, right?
>> I think it's because people don't know this stuff. I mean, how many people have read deeply into the cult of Dionysus? How many people have even read the little gold, you know, tablets that got you to the keys to the underworld? I bet you can count on very few hands the amount of people in the world that even know those exist. The work that, you know, it's just, and this is why the work you do is very important. I swear, I hope the reason the work that I do is important. Yeah. It's because it's not a question of, of why does someone believe the things they do. It's often the case that I think they believe things not because they've actually gone to the buffet of what is actually available into scholarship or in religious diversity and then chosen to be a fundamentalist. It's because they actually don't even know that there is an outside. But there is. Like, "Oh, there's this whole interesting thing about Bacchus and Dionysus." "Oh, there's this whole Merkavah mysticism and stuff." "Oh, there's this, there's this whole world of like, you know, of of Hermetic Gnostic people over there, or that we now can read the Bible and see that there's stratigraphy in the linguistics." Um, it's not because they've, they've done it's not because they've gone to the buffet and picked the thing they want to eat. It's because the thing that they think exists is this zero thing and and they've been spoon-fed just this one thing.
>> Right?
>> And so my task is not to disabuse someone of their faith. I don't want to do that. When I make a Yahweh video, I want to at least let people know, know who do worship this deity, at least in some respect, that you've been told this story, but there's this story.
>> Right.
>> And this story is not meant to, I'm not there to try to deconvert you or disrupt your faith, but you should know this is the story is a lot bigger than you think it is. And if you want to keep believing in this, you need to have a reason why all of this is wrong because it's conspicuous, man. When you see Baal being worshiped the same way they always worshiped. You're like, "Oh, you've been told a story about this god was a god of child sacrifice and how evil this god was." When you actually go look at the Ugaritic stories, Baal defeats death and lets the earth be agriculturally rich. Yeah. My god, they're sacrificing kids, too. They did sacrifice kids to Yahweh, though. We do know that. Yeah. I mean, they did sacrifice kids to some version of Baal and certainly Phoenicia, uh, Carthage and stuff. But yeah, it's just to me, it's the educational question is this one of taking what is often a very narrow scope. And you and I both know the level of religious literacy in this country is appallingly low, very bad, appallingly low. And so in so far as the work that you do and the work that I do, it's just about putting more stuff on the buffet. And hopefully people will make decisions that are intellectually rich, intellectually, you know, intellectually sharp, intellectually honest. And I think that at the end of that process, you're you've you're left bereft of meaning. You're left bereft of symbol, symbolism that matters. You're left bereft of a spirituality. Um, but it doesn't mean you're going to have to earn it. And I do think that, uh, that's a thing that everyone should have. People who take their religion seriously should have to earn it. And I think part of earning it is working through all of that material. And if I met someone who's, you know, think of, let's say, Bligh John Collins, he's a pious Catholic. You know, he knows the material backwards and forwards. He knows the pocket. He knows all this stuff. And he's like, "Yeah, I'm a Catholic. I'm a complicated Catholic." And I can respect that to to no end. So, I'm a complicated Jew, you know? I think other people who are very complicated Christians, but, uh, I think they've, I look at those guys as role models for me and I'm like, "You earned it." Like the, it's difficult for you to get to there and take the, you know, take communion, take the Eucharist. But that difficulty is actually to me a sense of deep spiritual piety underwritten by a deep intellectual honesty. And my god, what's more respectful than that?
Ladies and gentlemen, become like us, if you will, and try and take this exploration. I mean, be more like him than me. Uh, but I really do appreciate this conversation. This has been fantastic. We got to, we got to do this again. I'm sure there's a million and one things we could talk about, but my time is up. And next up is Neil from Gnostic Informant. So, uh, be sure to support, uh, Esoterica. You can join the Patreon. You can join our Patreon if you like what you're hearing and you want to see more exploration on ancient ideas. I just think ancient, they affect us today. But you can support these kind of channels and the work that we're doing. So, I thank you so much for your time and, uh, any final words from you?
Yeah, the thing you said about the past, uh, William Faulkner, a fellow Mississippian, uh, famously said that the, uh, the past isn't dead. It's not even passed. And we're, we're living in the past whether we like it or not. And educating ourselves, it's just, it's like living in a house that you choose to not know anything about.
It's just a bad idea. You're going to fall down the stairs. Um, you're living in the past whether you like it or not. Got to get that education. And the work you do and work that I do, folks, got to support it because it's not, uh, we're, we're working hard and we can't work for free. Yep. And so support, support this work. I think it's, we're doing the work that the university system is failing to do, which is provide basic religious literacy to to the to the American population and to the English population. And I really commend the work you do, Derek.
Thank you.
Thank you, brother. Yeah. Never forget, we are myth vision.