In the Beginning*

Daniel Beecher (0:00)

They hear God tromping around in the garden, and they hide from him, and they sheepishly go, we're not here, come back another time.

Daniel McClellan (0:12)

Dave's not here, man. Hey, everybody.

Daniel Beecher (0:19)

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast.

Daniel McClellan (0:23)

Where we bring you the latest in biblical scholarship.

Daniel Beecher (0:26)

And do our best to combat the spread of misinformation.

With me is Dr. Dan McClellan, biblical scholar and TikTok star. Hi, Dan. And I'm non scholar and TikTok nobody, Dan Beecher. Well, Dan, here we are.

Daniel McClellan (0:40)

Here we are.

Daniel Beecher (0:41)

It is our first episode.

Daniel McClellan (0:44)

Congratulations.

Daniel Beecher (0:46)

And congratulations to you, and congratulations to all of the listeners and viewers watching us on YouTube and wherever.

Daniel McClellan (0:53)

We're very happy for you.

Daniel Beecher (0:55)

Yes, indeed. So, coming up on the show today, we're going to do, we're gonna discuss Genesis. We're gonna dive right into the very front end of the Bible.

And Dan, you're gonna introduce us to the Holy Name, to the deity, the name of the God of the Bible. Is that right?

Daniel McClellan (1:13)

Yeah, our second segment, we're gonna talk about, well, we're gonna call it, What Does That Mean? And we're gonna talk about different principles, different ideas within biblical scholarship that are in circulation right now. So I'm gonna talk about the Divine Name.

Daniel Beecher (1:30)

Let's start, though, with our segment, Chapter and Verse. We're gonna dive into the very first part of the very first book of the Bible, which is Genesis.

And the way we're working this, I decided that I would dive in, I would read the first, I think we're gonna do the first three chapters of Genesis. And I'm going to bring my confusions, my things that I don't understand to you, Dan, and you're going to sort of help us understand what we're looking at here.

Daniel McClellan (2:01)

All right, let's give it a shot.

Daniel Beecher (2:02)

The first thing we should do is sort of situate this within the Bible. Like, what do we have here? We've got a story, well, possibly multiple stories of the creation.

Where does this come from?

Daniel McClellan (2:20)

So most scholars would agree that we've got two different creation stories in the first three chapters of Genesis. One that's running from Genesis 1.1 up through the first half of Genesis 2.4. And the second one runs from the second half of Genesis 2.4 through to the end of Chapter 3 And that second one, most scholars would say is probably the earlier one.

And this is a story with a very anthropomorphic deity that makes noise as they walk through the garden of Eden. This is a deity that creates manually by manipulating the soil. This is a deity that interacts directly with their creation. And this is also a deity who seems to be trying to kind of recalibrate or fix their creation as they go on.

And what many scholars believe is centuries later, the priestly authors, so these would have been cultic authorities, people who had authority over the temple or worship, who would have been associated with the state, with the king, with important leaders within Israel.

They came through and kind of updated things and said, you know what, we need a cleaner account. We're gonna make some corrections here. And this was probably written when Israel was in exile. And so in the absence of the temple, and we see an account that envisions a more transcendent deity. They create by divine fiat, by speaking things into existence. And the account is kind of interacting with creation accounts that are known from the region of Babylon. And they're kind of combating, responding to those creation accounts from Babylon, while also updating what's going on in the earlier creation accounts. So whereas the deity from Genesis 2 creates with their hands, the deity from Genesis 1 does not. Whereas the deity from Genesis 2 has to kind of update their creation. They create the human, then they go, hmm, needs something else. So we're gonna create some animals. No, that's not quite right. It needs something else. And then we create the woman. Genesis 1, everything is created and God saw that it was good. So it's all right. It's all correct right from the beginning.

And we also have the account divided into multiple days of creation, rather than just one single creative period. We've got six days and then a day of rest, which many scholars would suggest, one is borrowing from the sevenfold division of days that was common in Mesopotamia around that time period. But two may be an attempt to kind of demarcate some sacred time in the absence of a temple, which is a demarcation of sacred space. So a way to kind of set apart this time and say, we don't have a temple in which we can worship, but let's separate off a day and let's use that for worship. So it is responding to some of the circumstances that the people for whom these authors are writing are facing in exile. That's probably what most scholars would say about this. So the first creation account, probably eighth, seventh century BCE, somewhere around there.