Connecting With Source

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Hello, everyone, Staku here.

Liane Feldman (0:02)

And I'm Gabby.

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

And we are the hosts of History of Everything, a podcast which you can probably guess by the name is, well, I mean, it's about everything. Do you want to know why people thought potatoes were evil and would give you syphilis? Are you curious about all the stories of the terrible and stupid ways that people have kicked the bucket over the years?

Do you want to hear tales about all of the different badasses of history and the lives that they had brought to life?

Well, if so, then look no further. History of Everything is just the right podcast for you. It's available on Spotify, Pandora, and anywhere else that you get your podcast from. Join us for some fun and just see how weird and wacky history can be.

Liane Feldman (0:39)

That's where you get the ritual Leviticus 16, the famous Day of Atonement ritual, where the priest has to sort of lay his hands on the head of that scapegoat and confess all of the sins of the Israelites over it and then banish that goat into the wilderness.

It's only the rabbis who say it has to get driven over a cliff. That's not actually in Leviticus. Love that addition. But it's not actually in Leviticus. It just gets driven into the wilderness in Leviticus.

Dan Beecher (1:08)

Also, I've seen goats on cliffs. They're actually very sure-footed. I don't know.

Liane Feldman (1:14)

You know, those are, they are quite good climbers, I have to say.

Dan McClellan (1:17)

We need a David Attenborough special following the scapegoat into the desert. Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:27)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:29)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:42)

Man, I'm excited.

We're going to increase some public, whatever you just said. Access.

Dan McClellan (1:49)

Access.

Dan Beecher (1:50)

We're going to do that thing.

Dan McClellan (1:51)

We've got work to do.

Dan Beecher (1:52)

We've got double the scholars on today's show. So I think that's always a good thing.

Dan McClellan (1:56)

Speaking of which, we have a guest today. This is Liane Feldman, Assistant Professor of Religion at Princeton University, newly minted Assistant Professor of Religion there. How are things today, Liane?

Liane Feldman (2:10)

Things are great. It's finally starting to feel like fall, so I'm excited.

Dan McClellan (2:14)

I'm not as excited. I have a, I now, my oldest daughter started high school a couple of weeks ago. And so I'm having a whole new type of existential crisis.

Liane Feldman (2:23)

You're an old man.

Dan McClellan (2:25)

Yeah. And it's also still in the nineties in Utah. So yeah, it does not. Liane is the author of the recent The Consuming Fire, the complete priestly source from creation to the promised land, which is a wonderful, not incredibly thick book, very accessible translation of what scholars so lovingly refer to as P, the priestly source.

And I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to discuss a little bit about penitential composition, the theories that are out there and the nature and function of the priestly source for our audience. And thus we have Liane here with us today.

Just to start, I read through the preface and the translator's note and everything else. But would you mind telling our audience where the idea for this book came from and why you think why this is an important book for the public to have?

Liane Feldman (3:23)

Sure. So the idea for this book initially came from, honestly, a lot of my colleagues.

I realized as I was working on my first book, revising the dissertation, turning it into a book, that I had a good sense of what P was and what the scope of the story looked like and all of its ins and outs.

But that a lot of my colleagues who aren't Pentateuchal specialists had no idea. Or they would know some basics like, we all know Leviticus is part of P, but I would get these requests from colleagues of mine, like, could you send me, you know, the P story of the plagues? Or could you send me the P story of the flood? And so I was making these one-off word documents using sort of NRSV or JPS translations, just putting it together and then adjusting where necessary for a lot of my colleagues who are asking for these things. And I realized pretty quickly, gosh, it would be really useful if I could just take this knowledge that's in my head that I've been working on for a decade, that a lot of us specialists, and I say a lot of us, probably like 20 of us in the world have in our head. But for me, that sounds like a lot. And make it a little bit more accessible. And then the pandemic hit, and the project that I was supposed to be working on, I didn't have access to libraries. So I was like, you know what? I have everything I need to do this at home, mostly. And so it was an opportunity for me to take time during COVID and just dive into this project since I couldn't work on what I had planned to work on.