In the Beginnings: Was Genesis 1:1 Translated to Fit a Doctrine?

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. You've heard that line a thousand times, but that's not actually the first sentence of the Bible. That's a translation choice. And Genesis actually tells the story of creation twice in two different ways that don't quite agree with each other. Today, we're talking about translation issues in Genesis and how its sources can account for some pretty interesting differences in the text. I'm joined by Hebrew Bible scholar Dr. Joel Baden. Welcome to Ms. Quoting Moses, everyone, and welcome Joel. Hi there. Okay, so elephant in the room. If you're a fan of Bart Airman, so you are probably wondering what the heck we're doing on Bart's channel. We've actually got Bart here to answer that. Here is Bart. It's been very gratifying to see my podcast, Ms. Quoting Jesus, grow over the past few years. It clearly is meeting a wide and deep interest among listeners who want to know more about unexpected and widely unknown views of devoted experts to the New Testament and early Christianity. We decided a couple of months ago to expand our coverage into Hebrew Bible where there is at least as much public hunger for solid scholarly information presented in interesting and understandable terms for non-scholars. This podcast, Ms. Quoting Moses, has been designed to meet that need. Joel Baden, professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University, along with his co-host, Megan Craig, will be discussing all sorts of intriguing and important issues that have been debated among Hebrew Bible scholars for many years in some cases for centuries. Why is the Hebrew Bible such a big book with so many authors who are writing at so many different times and so many different places and with so many perspectives? How many of these perspectives appear to be at odds with each other? And can they be reconciled? Do we actually know who wrote these books? When were they writing? And how do they know what they knew? Or did they know? What difficulties are they're translating the original Hebrew of these books into English? And why do scholars often disagree even on the most basic issues of what the words mean? Do we even know what these words originally were? And on and on and on. The answers to these issues will be surprising to many and the intriguing pieces of evidence that help resolve them are known to very few outside the realm of scholarship. Joel Baden is the ideal scholar to discuss and explain these issues. He's vastly knowledgeable about every aspect of the Hebrew Bible. He has taught students at the PhD level this for many years. He is a prolific author, a clear thinker, and an engaging communicator. His co-host and interlocutor, Megan Craig, is the community organizer for the online organization called the Biblical Studies Academy. And she's one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic non-scholars of the Bible I know and a great interviewer. This is going to be a fantastic podcast. I hope you enjoy it. I'm Megan Craig on the Bart Airman team. And again, this is Miss Clothing Moses, a new series exploring the Hebrew Bible. It's history, it's formation, and the world of ancient Israel that produced it. So since we're starting a new podcast about the Hebrew Bible, I think I have to ask you, Joel, what is the Hebrew Bible? Yeah, you'd think that would be an easy question to answer. The term Hebrew Bible is like a modern scholarly term that is really short-hand for a much longer way of describing these texts. So you're probably used to the Old Testament. That's how most people know this stuff. But of course, once we say the Old Testament, we're assuming that there's a New Testament. Old Testament is a thing that Christians say because they've got a New Testament. But no Jew, for example, would say Old Testament because it's the only Testament. We would just say Testament, but we don't say that either. So Jews historically have called this by a bunch of different names in Hebrew. It was called Mikra, which is like the reading, the text, the thing. And in more modern times, Judy, as I'm just starting calling it, like the Tanakh, which is this acronym for the Torah and the prophets and the writings in Hebrew. Hebrew Bible is a scholarly term that's meant to not be the Christian Old Testament and not be the Jewish Tanakh, but be a way of talking about these books that became the Tanakh or the Old Testament, but that we're not framing in sort of confessional religious terms. Like I think I've said before that if we were to take the most accurate description of what we're talking about here is like the books or the writings of ancient Israel literature that became eventually part of what we now call the Bible, but that weren't part of the Bible back when they were first written because there was no Bible. Anyway, that's what we call Hebrew Bible to say. So Hebrew Bible is just, you know, it's shorthand. That's some important stage setting because you're us use these terms as we talk through Genesis. And Genesis specifically isn't just part of what we're going to call the Hebrew Bible. It's part of the Torah. Can you help break down some other ways to refer to the Torah? What are we talking about? When we talk about the Torah, I think this word is going to come up today too. Cool. We're going to do it all. Okay, so Genesis, Genesis is the Greek name of an ancient Israelite text that had no name because none of the biblical books of either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament had like titles attached to them. Those are all later developments. The Torah is the traditional Jewish name for the first five books of everyone's Bible that is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Torah is the Jewish name in the Greek name for it is the Pentateuch, which is how lots of people describe it today. That's sort of the more common scholarly term somewhat weirdly. But again, you know, Torah has a particularly Jewish connotation of like it's the central interpretive text. And Pentateuch really just means like the five books, which is also misleading. I don't know if we want to get to like why that's misleading yet. No, I'm going to do it. It's misleading because Genesis, like nobody wrote or even ever created a book called Genesis that was separate from the story that comes after it, like in Exodus, and Leviticus, and Numbers and Deuteronomy. That is like the literary work here is this five volume thing called the Torah or the Pentateuch. That's the literary work that was actually produced in antiquity. And Genesis is just the first volume of it. So, you know, we can talk about stuff going on in Genesis, but you know that it's like talking about stuff that happened in just like the first volume of a multi-volume set. Different, it's just earlier, not chronologically earlier, like literally earlier. Even though we've totally pulled the rug out from under the concept of Genesis even being a book, we are still going to jump right into the beginning of Genesis, which starts in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, except not really. So, this is just a translation thing, which is to say this is true. You could take literally, you could have taken any verse and been like, it says this, but not really, if the thing you said was English. Because of course, none of it was written in English. And so, every version of every biblical text that you get in English is somebody's translation choice. This one happens to be like a particularly fraught one in part because it's the first and sometimes, you know, for many people like the most famous, right? If you ask people to say like, give me one verse from the Bible, lots of people would probably come up within the beginning, God created the heaven, the earth is just like it's super famous. That translation in the beginning, God created the heavens, the earth comes directly out of the King James translation, right? Which is like not the first English translation, but definitely the most important and the most influential. It's translation, you know, it's 500 years old now, but like you could go back, you could trace it down to translations in the present, even very scholarly translations like, you know, the NRSV. Right? That's like the N is new, the R is revised and the SV standard version, that's the King James, right? So it's like, it's got a whole lineage of translations. and it has absolutely affected the way that everybody reads the Bible in English. In fact, as I'm sure you know, I know you know Megan. Like the King James translation has affected just English as a whole. Lots of what we think is normal English language now is actually comes right out of the King James. The issue you're getting at, I know, is that the Hebrew of Genesis 1-1, is like not super clear. It's actually a really complicated Hebrew construction, just the first few words. You know, the first word in Hebrew is beret sheet, which really means like in a beginning or in the beginning of something. It doesn't just say in the beginning, that would be slightly different in the Hebrew. But in the beginning of what, the next thing is God created. So in the beginning of God created is weird in English. But in Hebrew, it does happen sometimes. It would be like, it's an equivalent of saying like when at the beginning God did a thing. So the King James took this as like in the beginning, full beginning of absolutely everything. But Jewish sort of translators and interpreters have been saying for like a thousand plus years. Actually what this means is like when God began to create the heavens and the earth. So like, okay, what's the difference between those two things? Well, if you say in the beginning, God created, right, in the beginning makes it sound like in the absolute beginning of all things. This is the beginning of time, essentially. And that's totally great. But if you say when God began to create the heaven and the earth, it doesn't have that same implication, right? It allows for the possibility of stuff existing before that. I mean, we're talking about when God began to create this heaven and earth, the one that we're talking about, what if there are others, right? That's totally possible. You know, what if like there was other stuff that existed in the world or the universe, cosmos, whatever creation before this, this world? Like either one is like a possible in the Hebrew. It's not like a very clear, it must mean one of these things. And actually this is a great example of the way that people's like prior theological convictions actually shaped the way that they then translate the Bible, right? So King James says in the beginning, God created because the people who translated the King James already believed that that Genesis 1, 1 talks about essentially creation out of nothing, ex nihilo, as they used to say back when Latin was the way that they said things. So creation out of nothing, and lots of people still believe this in, you know, because of the King James or, you know, along with the King James. But those translators believed that there was creation out of nothing, and that's what we're talking about in Genesis 1. And Jews have never believed that, or at least, you know, like not in sort of traditional forms. The people in the Jews in the 1,000 years ago who said, no, it's when God began to create, they didn't believe in creation out of nothing. They had all these traditions about all the stuff that existed before God began to create the world. And you can find this all over like ancient Jewish writings from the first millennium, not BCE, from the first millennium CE, all of this stuff, oh, you know, the Sabbath and, you know, Jerusalem and like all this stuff that existed prior to the beginning of Genesis 1. So of course they wouldn't have thought about this as in the absolute beginning because they didn't believe that. Which translation is better or right? You know, like I don't know, I don't think that's the point, right? The point is to simply be aware that translations aren't true. Like in that, we're like, like accurate, all translations, like every translation is shaped by the people who are doing the translating. And when we come across our texts in English, it's probably good to know that what you're reading, if you're reading English translation, you're reading someone's interpretation, not like the text of the Bible. Now that we've completely problematized reading Genesis as a book, reading the Bible in Hebrew whatsoever, I'm going to further problematize what it is that we're talking about at all. When we talk about Genesis 1, this first chapter of Genesis 1st off, where did these chapters come from in the Bible? When you open, let's say you're using your NRSV and you see Genesis 1 and then it moves to Genesis 2 and it's got all of these little verse numbers. Did the author insert those? Oh yeah. Yes, just as, no. I think I like doing of late is beginning courses and conversations by like asking people to pick up the Bible that happens to be nearest to them, like any translation would do. And ask like, what on the page that you're looking at just open the first page of Genesis? What are you looking at and what of that is like original to the text? It's like, obviously the fact that it's in English, none of that's original. And what about the fact, like if it's got notes in the margins that explain stuff, obviously that's not original. And if it says Genesis at the top, that's not original because it never had a title. And if it, like, if it, you know, is one of these that has like subheadings like creation or whatever, which are lots of NRSVs, for example, do, obviously those aren't original. And where it says, it says chapter 1, that's not original. And when it says verse 1, that's not original. So chapters and verses all came much, much later in the process. The division of the text into verses is quite ancient, right? That's like 2000 years old, like early rabbinic Jewish texts from really like very early on. You can see they're dealing with verses in units and the like the biblical text that we have, especially even, I mean, from 1000 years ago, have, you know, I don't know, talk about this. Like in the Hebrew text, the verses have what we call like chanting notations, right? Here's how you like liturgically recite this text. And those are divided into verses. So like that's old news, verse divisions, verse numbering though comes much, much later. We're talking in like the like the 1400s, 1500s, like that's when verses and chapters come in. And it was English clergy who put those who put those in, you know, just as it makes it useful, God knows. But definitely not original to the text at all. And I wanted to bring those up because we are going to have to use them to refer to our texts so that everyone knows where we should feel bad about ourselves every time. And we will. We will. We will always say verse, right? In verse one one. Yeah. No, like that's the verse thing is an interesting development because like, I don't know, this is too tangential, but like it goes, I think, to the way that people encounter the text, right? Verses are a way of referring to the text sort of in, you know, in this like abstractie kind of way. For most of the history of the Bible's interpretation, people were doing this from memory, right? So they would like, they would like click in and be like, Oh, the verse where it says, and then they'd quote it, right? Saying like, oh, verse one one sort of gets us over the, like you don't have to know exactly what it says. I don't know, it's a very different way. Here's my teacher who is Israeli Orthodox, modern Orthodox Jew. Knows the Torah basically by memory, incredibly frustrating. And when, but like, if I say, Oh, you know that place where it says that place where that happens and what he does is he recites the verse out loud. And if I ask him which verse it is, he's always close, but like it's always off by one or two because he doesn't think in verse numbers, he thinks in words and like the memorized text. It's just, it becomes a very different way of like engaging with the material. This is a great way to start off because we're already putting ourselves in the mindset of how ancient people interacted with these texts, which is pretty different than how modern people interact with these texts. And something else that occurs to me is if we're talking about Genesis 1, if we may call it that for the sake of convenience. Genesis 1 is a creation story. Almost everyone knows that. But that's an easy phrase to take for granted. What is a creation story? I haven't read a lot of other books that start off ostensibly with the creation of the entire universe. Right, which basically feels to me like you don't read enough sci-fi. Which maybe like I don't read any sci-fi so like I don't even know if that's a thing it feels like world creation anyway, it doesn't matter Yeah, so It's true. We don't do this a lot In part to maybe because it just feels so obviously biblical but like you know What these like cosmogenes or cosmologies right these like stories about the creation of or like the you know the setup of the of the universe Is certainly an ancient thing We have it in the Bible more than once and we have You know, we obviously have examples from Greek mythology right lots of people who are familiar with Greek mythology No stories about like Chronos and Zeus and like you know Gaia and like the you know these like sort of world Building you know in the very beginning of time. What was it like? It's in Greek mythology Egyptian mythology Mesopotamian mythology right the ancient world. This was In part, you know part of it is like they told more more god stories And we tell fewer god stories in part because like we're supposed to have have our god story and like that's the end of it Anyway, yeah, so creation stories are Do a bunch of things right they they they sort of tell us what these people thought about how the world began Because in like a pretty simple sense, but obviously they are also always about sort of shaping our you know our understanding or their understanding of like What the world is and what human humanity's relationship to God or the gods is or you know establishing very kind various kinds of values or structures or you know understanding hierarchies and systems and so these these stories all do that kind of work also We keep using this word create creation What does this word mean in the context of the story? What does it mean that God is creating the universe by what mechanism is God actually doing this creating so creating We're gonna stick to Genesis 1 for right now You know The word that's used in Genesis 1 for creating most of the time is actually Like a word that is almost unique to that chapter in story the Hebrew word is Barra And it is only ever used with God as its subject Right, this is like some divine act of creation One of the things that people say a lot about Genesis 1 is that the creation here is really more accurately more commonly separation Right, that is it is the right God God doesn't like Very often be like I just out of nothing. I'm gonna be like poof Begins right the story begins with like there's already this watery ball of Right chaos or whatever it is that's this like exists and then it's about like you know like God great creates Like a space a bubble in in the middle of that water and that okay, that's like that's like this vertical Separation that's going on and then God takes like that the stuff in between and like okay And they separate the water from like the land and like the water gets moved to the size so that the land can come come out Which also sort of suggest the land was there originally also just underneath the water Lots of you know day and night is a separating time There's obviously some stuff that gets created out of like that wasn't there before like plants and animals and People and creepy crawlies and whatever the sun the moon the stars But you know this like What is God doing here? Again, it's a lot of It's a lot of dividing things and categorize it Genesis 1 is very is a very systematic categorization right there's day and night there's earth there's land and water There's like sky and and and water is beneath in the space in between There's like different divisions of animals, right? There's land animals and sea animals and air animals and creepy crawlies and people and those are all different And there's plants we had to rely on the convenient shorthand of Saying things like Genesis 1 for the sake of the discussion and God is also one of those convenient shorthands We also keep using this word God But who is the God in Genesis 1 that is doing this creating? Megan How many these are the like these are very big questions to begin a thing with But I guess this is about getting stuff out of the way. Okay In the world of ancient Israel They understood their God To be that is the national God of Israel Who they are saying like is the one that did all this creating stuff? Is it God that we call and they called With apologies to anybody who is offended by or does not feel comfortable using like the name of God Yahweh Which may or may not be how the name was pronounced we actually have no idea But I haven't seen that name appear in Genesis 1. No, that name's not in Genesis 1 very clever No, that that name doesn't appear in Genesis 1 that it appears in Genesis 2 and it appears you know Like the vast majority of the time in the Bible as a whole But in Genesis 1 it just uses this like generic word the Hebrew word is Elohim Which is just like the title of God deity It's not a name. It's a it's a title So the same way that in English we like talk about what God does and doesn't do You know that's that's sort of the same thing that that they're doing here. So it's God Without a name But I know that they knew that when they said God they meant Yahweh And like I know this because later in the story like that becomes very very clear But you know here at the beginning they're using this like broad kind of title term rather than the The name Yahweh itself You want you want to you want to push more on that? I bet you want to push more on that somewhere. I do Joel But you've dropped a few very tempting hints about the fact that There's another creation story that may be a little bit different than the one we're talking about so far And I want to get into that Genesis 1 isn't the only creation story not just in the Hebrew Bible But in Genesis So where does our first creation story end and where does our second creation story pick up and how does scholars know that This is a transition Okay, so We talked about Genesis 1 we really should be talking about To be annoying and go back to our verse issue Genesis 1 1 through Genesis 2 4 a which is to say the first half We sometimes you'll I can't imagine how often but occasionally you'll hear me talk about like verse whatever Something verse Genesis 2 4 a versus Genesis 2 4 b Right, this is a common scholarly way like every verse in the Hebrew Bible basically is divided in half Like from like a thousand years ago with Mark with a marking and so that's the way we do like first half second half a b That's what I'm talking about so the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis Neither of which is an actual like anyone ever knew an antiquity fine That right in between there you get a transition from this first story to the second story How do I know that? Because if I have read from Genesis 1 1 through the middle of Genesis 2 4 I think I got a pretty good idea of like what creation was and how it went and if I then start in the second half of 2 4 and keep going on Into the story that follows I would be deeply confused Because it doesn't make any sense I suspect that someone has gone through that confusion before and that's how this realization all came about right who first notice this Okay, so Everyone has always noticed this right so but I wonder this is important I want to make a distinction between noticing what's going on the text and the kind of Like conclusions that we draw from what we're noticing so From antiquity like as long far back really as we have evidence for people reading this material people have been like There's something screwy going on here These two things don't really don't flow together naturally. There seem to be contradictions and confusions between these first two chapters But in antiquity and I mean for all from antiquity up through like the Enlightenment in like the 17th century CE people Saw these things, but their assumption about the Bible was that it was of course like it had to be it was sacred and it was divine and it was perfect and it was like You know like in our int in not the contemporary way we mean in our in C But like that it was it couldn't possibly Actually have a contradiction in it. Therefore, right our task as readers was to make sense of those contradictions and essentially to smooth them out to understand what the text is trying to tell us in what appears on the surface to be something that doesn't work, but must actually work because that's what the Bible is. It's a thing that works. In the Enlightenment, people didn't suddenly notice stuff that was never noticed before. They saw the same stuff and went, "I think there's probably a better answer." Or a different answer, right? Because a different answer coming from a different set of assumptions. Instead of assuming that the Bible is perfect and true and good and like right and couldn't possibly have problems, they looked at it and said, "If I were reading this like it were any other text, what would I assume is actually going on here?" What would we think when we came across this chapter, followed by this chapter? We wouldn't be like, "Ah!" Somebody wrote two completely contradictory creation stories and put them at the beginning of their work in order for me to figure out some theological principles. They'd say, as they started to say, in the 17th, 18th even earlier, like I think actually maybe this is just two different stories written probably by two different people. When we read the second creation story that picks up in Genesis 2.4b with fresh eyes, having presumably just read Genesis 1 and with the understanding that this is indeed the beginning of a different story, what stands out about being different from our first creation ago? If you've read the first one, I already said this, that creation story starts with a ball of water. It's about the dryland emerging, but everything starts with this watery chaos. Right, at the beginning of the second creation account, you don't have a watery chaos, you get a dry, dusty, empty world. That's already somewhat weird. And then, what happens in terms of the order of creation is where it really gets confusing. Because in the second story, there's this dusty world, and God is like, "All right, I'm going to plant a garden, and I'm going to make a dude to be my gardener." And that's confusing in part because in the first creation story, all the creation of the sun and the earth and the light and whatever, there's none of that here. And in the first creation story in Genesis 1, the plants are created first, and then the animals are created, and then the humans. In the second creation story, the guy is actually made first, and then the garden is planted, and trees and stuff grow in it. And as far as I know, outside the garden, there's still nothing. And then, as you, like, the famous parts of that story, like then in that story, God's like, "Oh, that guy is all like, all by his loansome. I'll make some animals and see if he likes any of them, you know, likes them." And that's, like, the animals come after the human, and then, of course, in the second story, then the woman comes after the animals, but in the first creation story, the woman comes at the same time as the man after the animals. I could keep going. This is big news because it sounds like these two stories have completely different perspectives on the role of humanity, on the earth. The order of creation in these stories really matters. What are we learning about these two different authors of these two different stories based on the way they frame their accounts? Yeah, you know, you've got, like, as you said, very different perspectives here on, like, the centrality and, like, role of humanity, its relationship to the rest of the world. In Genesis 1, in that creation story, everything builds up to the creation of humans on day six. Everything else is set up, and actually, it's all lovely. God looks at all the things, and he's like, "Oh, that's good. This is pretty good. I'm doing really well." God says all the way through, including, "God creates birds and fish and says to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth," which is like, "we think of the thing that God says to humanity," because that's the animals first. They have their own wonderful existence. But God gets to humanity in day six, and says, "This is pretty good," and then says, "You should be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and rule over it. Subdo it." And so, there's a culminating in humanity there. But also a valuing of the animals of their own accord. They've already been blessed before humans are blessed. And also, perhaps, a bit of a gender hierarchy. In our second creation story, we have the woman being created after the man, and from the man, whereas in our first creation story, man and woman were seemingly created at the same time. Was this intentional on the part of these authors? What were they trying to say about the role of men and women? Yeah. So, what I don't want to say, because I think it would be anachronistic, is like, "Oh, yes, the prothra of Genesis 1 was a very gender egalitarian." Like, probably not because that's not a thing we really see in the ancient world, or anywhere in the Bible. But, partly, I want to say that we make too much of this in both directions, which is to say, "Genesis 1 says, "Men and male and female are created simultaneously." That's not actually a bold egalitarian statement, though it does say something interesting and useful. It does say that they are created at the same time, and they are blessed simultaneously. Be fruitful and multiply, set to both of them, and subdue the earth. They set to both of them. And actually, if I'm going to be really honest, it's not both of them. It's all of them. Because in the Genesis 1 story, if you just read it by itself, don't think about the story in Genesis 2. Just the one in Genesis 1. God creates birds and fish and animals and creepy crawlies and all these things. And when we imagine that, we're not like, "Oh, God created one of each of them." And then, like, made them, had them multiply. Like, God's creating the species. And that's the same thing that's happening actually with humanity in Genesis 1. God is not creating two individuals, a male and a female. It's God created humanity. And it creates them, male and female, right? Because there's two different kinds. But like, God's creating, I think, all of the whole species, Genesis 2. In that creation story, as you just said, there's just one dude who's made first. And then, like, the woman is made subsequently as a, you know, a partner. But here, where I think we go too far here is to be like, "Oh, therefore, subordinate to the wonderful scholar, Carol Myers, makes a really nice case that actually the Hebrew language for like, the creation of the woman there." This is the phrase that comes out in the King James as a "help meat," which is not a word. But like, you know, like, as like an assistant, right? Like a second tier, whatever, that really is very much language of equality as a partner, not as a subordinate. So I think, like, we might, we have a tendency to maybe push too hard in both directions, but there's definitely a difference as you just pointed out. Now, we've got these two creation stories that have differences. What are we, as readers, left to do? Do contradictions render these stories meaningless? I mean, I fear for our next couple of episodes if we've already got contradictions in the first episode. Next, you're going to tell me the flood story has contradictions. Oh, Megan. I sure am. Wait, so, like, as I sort of said earlier, the notion that these issues exist in the text is something people have recognized forever. And if you find yourself thinking like, "No, actually, like, these aren't even issues that we need to worry about. This is all perfectly fine." That's actually a very modern, like, reading. That's actually a modern response to, like, the, like, the critical enlightenment, the sort of take on this. In antiquity, for most of the people reading the Bible's history, people were reading this and being like, "Yeah, no, there's definitely something weird here, but because I read it this way, like, it doesn't bother me, right? I just make it into something else." And so, with that sort of history of interpretation in mind, I would say that we shouldn't actually be super worried about the fact that there are contradictions here. It's just a question of the mindset we approach it with. If you are coming to these as, like, a person of faith who thinks that the Bible, like, outside of the Bible's own evidence, like, thinks, part of my belief system that the Bible is, like, scripture and sacred and divine and good and true and, like, unproblematic, you don't have to be, like, there aren't contradictions. You can simply say, yeah, there's definitely some. weird there. And since I think that the Bible is like all of those things, my task is to figure out how to read the text in a way that's still meaningful despite the fact that there are these things. How do I turn it into something? How do I make it, you know, positively meaningful for me? And if you don't come in with that assumption, which is say like the academic perspective, right, the like secular academic take on this would be, okay, well, I'm like what people do with this is whatever. I'm interested not in like what do we do with the text once we see that it's this way? I'm interested in the question of like how did it get this way? And that becomes a much, much bigger exciting conversation that I've spent my entire academic life thinking. And that's exactly what we hope to do on this show. Now give us just a little bit of a sneak peek for something that I think will become really important in this series. We've got what seemed to be two introductions to two separate stories. We have started after all in the beginning or perhaps in the beginnings, just what are these two stories, the beginnings of? If we continue to chase these threads, what are we going to find? Yeah, so it's important to recognize as you already have that like these creation stories, like it's not like you get to the end of Genesis 2 for A. And you're like, well, that was the entire thing I'm done. That story, that creation story sets up, right, like all kinds of stuff that is going to happen afterward. And Genesis, this orange Genesis 2 sets up all sorts of stuff that's going to happen after like the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 is like not separable from the story of like the eating of the fruit from the tree in Genesis 3. That's clearly a continuous story. Similarly, the story in Genesis 1 that talks about like be fruitful and multiply as this blessing, well, you know, like that language comes back again multiple times, just take one example, multiple times throughout Genesis and even into Exodus. So like these aren't isolated stand-alone creation stories. It's not like the a Mesopotamian creation story that like begins with nothing and ends with like, you know, the creation of the world. And they're like, and that's our story about the creation of the world. Like this is it's like, what if you took that and then it kept telling the story, right? So these are the beginnings of much longer narratives that, you know, like if just if we think of these creation stories, not just as stories about the like creation of the world, but as as stories that are beginning world building within their like narrative settings, right? I'm like, the world is being created for like a literary world is being created. Then what's going to happen in that world? That's that will like follow out across the next chapters and in fact books and all the way through the entirety of the Pentateuch. And hopefully over the next many episodes of the show. Let's take a quick break and get into our first bonus segment. For our first bonus segment, I just want to get to know Joel. It's great to be here doing this show with you. You and I have actually hosted some courses before on paths and biblical studies. This is not our first time talking about the Hebrew Bible, but it is the first time talking about the Hebrew Bible like this. Joel, I want to ask you, how did you get interested in the Hebrew Bible, specifically from an academic perspective? Yeah. So, you know, I'm sure there's like some very like lengthy, like Freudian explanation for this. The quick like kind of like silly way I talk about this is like as like when I was a little kid, Megan when I was a little kid, I was like I was one of the like Greek mythology kids. I was like super loved my Greek mythology and like I had the Dalaiers book and like I'd ever loved it. And then as I got older, I became really interested in my own sort of Judaism and like that became an interest of mine. And as I sort of got into even late high school and into college, I was like, you know what? Like actually what I, I could totally be an English major. I love literature and just thinking about how literature works. And when I got, okay, like Jewish myth literature, I was like, oh, it's the Bible. Like it was like there is like, it is the literature of Jewish mythology. And so like it was the thing that tied all of my interests together. There was, I mean, I will admit, there was very little to know like religious or faith aspect to it for me. I was raised essentially secular, although secular Jewish. But like this, you know, what I discovered was I was like, I found the thing endlessly interesting. And this is it. I mean, I think this is a lot of what we're going to end up talking about over the course of this podcast. It's like, there's so much stuff that we actually don't really know because we have so little like literature from ancient Israel. And we know so little about its history and our quality. Like it's, you know, for all the stuff, all the study, like we actually know so little. So there's constantly like, it's like a mystery novel. And I find that just like, I interesting beyond belief. Like I truly, I every day, I'm like, I get to think about this stuff. That's so fun. That's similar, but different to how I became interested in this. I actually did grow up completely secular and I did not touch a Bible until I was probably 18 years old just starting college. And I finally got curious about what's actually in the book. And so I did what anyone who's been in a similar situation has done, which is go find one and pick it up and start reading it. And I thought, this is a book. Surely, it will make sense if I just start from the beginning. And it did not. And you listened to this episode at all that will probably make sense as to why. And I did also probably what most people in that situation do and make it about as far as Genesis 11, Genesis 12 and kind of give up. And it took a little while for me to be willing to revisit it again. But I had so much curiosity because of the way that I had encountered hearing about the Bible in the world, but feeling like, I don't think I can actually understand it until and unless I read it for myself. And I thought, okay, I'll just get over a few initial hurdles here. I'll get my questions answered and I'll be able to move on with my life. And I'm hosting a podcast called "Misquoting Moses" right now. Spoiler alert, dear listener, that never happened. One thing led to another. And I ended up on the Bart Airman team. I host this podcast. I host many of our courses for paths in biblical studies. And I manage the community for the biblical studies academy where we have all of those courses and a wonderful community of people like me who discuss these things because they're interested in them for all sorts of reasons. I decided never to pursue a degree or to go into the field professionally, but just to be sort of a happy history nerd digging into this sort of thing myself. But that was not your path, Joel. You are a professor of biblical studies at Yale. Can you tell us a little bit about your education and your career? Yeah. So I went to college to do Jewish studies. And this is actually funny. I went to college to do Jewish studies because I was like, I thought I was going to study rabbinics, right? Like the early Jewish interpretive texts. Because I was like, I was reading that stuff and I was like, oh my god, they're like, they do such interesting play with the Bible. They're taking these biblical texts and doing all this like amazing interpretive stuff with them. I find that so fascinating. And I was like, that's what I want to study. And I got to college and I discovered that like the study of rabbinic texts was actually much more boring than that. Ironically, it was more about like how are these texts put together? Which now I'd be interested in. But at the time, I was like, no, that's not the thing that I care about. Like I actually, like it turned out I didn't want to study the rabbis. I just wanted to like do what they were doing. I wanted to play around with the biblical text. So I moved from studying rabbinic interpretation to studying like the Bible itself. I said to I looked around and I was like, the best place in the country right now to do biblical scholarship. It seemed at the time, I think it was true at the time, was Harvard. And so I went and I talked to one of the faculty there and I was like, how do I get into Harvard? And they said, the best way thing to do is to go get all your ancient languages first. That makes it so much easier to then like work with them at a doctoral level. So okay. So I went from I went from an undergrad to do a master's in Semitic languages. I'm in spent two years doing like Hebrew and Aramaic and Phoenician and Eucharitic and Decadian and probably some other stuff, Pugnic. Like, yeah, depressing. I know that's all I could do in two years. Anyway, so I did all the language stuff in a couple of years and then I went to Harvard. And there I did my PhD in Hebrew Bible. And now you teach at Yale. And now I teach at Yale. And what has been now for just about 20 years? And what is teaching there like? Teaching here is fascinating because the Bible faculty here is all located at the Divinity School, which is, which is say that I serve two audiences here. One is that the academics like me, right? Like there's plenty of people here who are like, I want to go into a PhD in Bible. Just, you know, I want to do what you do. So they come here and like that part's like straightforward and easiest exactly like what I went through and, you know, it's like just scholarly fun. The bigger audience is the large percentage of this school that is training for ministry for other sort of faith-based kind of work. And what has been fascinating for me about that is like, I can tell them many of the same things that I'm talking about with like the more academically tracked students, but they care about it for different reasons and in different ways. And actually it is, I've become, I've been much more shaped by the, you know, in terms of how I think about things by teaching the like the Divinity, like the MDiv, ministerial students, then I have by the like the the MA PhD track students. It's, you know, I suddenly, I remember the moment I was like, oh, you all don't care about the same things I care about or at least not for the same reason. So like, you know, the question of like, and this is useful for the, I mean, this, I could never have done this sort of thing like 20 years ago when I started because I don't think I understood like how people understood this text or why they cared about it or why any of the stuff that I was talking about mattered. So like, you know, we talked about like these two creation stories. Like, who cares? And why should someone care? And how much does somebody need to know about them in order to care and to care about what? And, you know, I can do like, like a minutia of like, oh, I think that like that letter is wrong, but like nobody, you know, nobody who's reading the Bible in English cares about that particularly. But thinking in terms of like, why does it matter that the text actually probably has multiple authors? Why does it matter that translations aren't all the same that translation? You know, that kind of the way that that affects the way how we encounter this text and the assumptions we make about it. That's the kind of stuff that I learned from being here for 20 years teaching like Divinity students. That's what has become increasingly fascinating to me as I have gotten the privilege of learning about what other people's interest in this test are. Because Megan, you started and remain like you're a Near Eastern nerd. I am. Does my Lamasu necklace give it away? That and multiple other pieces of jewelry that I believe that I have seen. Including my Q&A of form your eggs. There you go. And I hope that we can get into some more of the history of the ancient Near East in the show. In fact, I know that we will. But for now, what are we talking about next week? Right. Next week, we're going to be talking about who wrote the 10 commandments. They're going from like one of the most famous passages in the Hebrew Bible to probably the other most famous passages in the Hebrew Bible. We're excited to hear why the Hebrew Bible matters to you. So please let us know in the comments. Let us know what other topics you'd like to see us discuss in a future episode. Be sure to subscribe so you get notified. We promise to be back next week with another episode of Miss Quoting Mozist. This has been an episode of Miss Quoting Mozist with Joel Baton. I'm your host, Megan Craig, and we're excited to bring you more episodes of silliness, snark, and scholarship on Fridays. So be sure to subscribe to Bart Airman's YouTube channel so you don't miss them. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music)