Literally Not Literal!

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Rated T for Teen.

SPEAKER_2 (0:01)

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SPEAKER_3 (0:30)

One sweet, melty bite of a Hershey's bar, and suddenly I'm right back sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon. She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a nine-year-old wants to say, and she replies with a low, shh, listen. So we sat there, listening. That was the first time I learned that quiet can feel full.

SPEAKER_4 (0:57)

Hershey's, it's your happy place.

Dan McClellan (1:01)

You know, you go to the Song of Songs and it's like, why is this erotic poetry in scripture? And it's like, oh, this is Jesus in the church, you know. Jesus is just like, I love your breasts, church. They look like some deer. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:22)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:23)

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public 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 (1:35)

Things are good. We actually got snow in the Salt Lake Valley for the first time in this year, basically.

Dan McClellan (1:43)

I heard Davis County got dumped on. I was hoping for a little bit more just for fun because I didn't have to just scrape a tiny layer of ice off my car. But no such luck here in Harriman. We did not get much snow at all.

Dan Beecher (1:58)

Yeah, alas. Well, we've got a fun show coming up. Today, we're going to be talking about two very interesting things. And you know what, Dan? We didn't even come up with segment titles for these. Because there's not going to be a chapter and verse this week, which is unusual, and I kind of like it. This week, we're going to be talking about biblical literalism.

It's something that we have talked about quite a bit in the sense that we've like pointed out a whole bunch of reasons why the Bible cannot be taken literally. But let's talk about like what literalism actually is, where it comes from, all that sort of thing. That'll be our first segment. And then later on in the show, Dan, I've seen some videos that you have pointed out that are about the Hebrew alphabet. And how, if you take the letters, each of the letters means a thing and that does a thing and da, da, da, da, da, and it...

Dan McClellan (2:58)

We're gonna be taking issue, I think.

Dan Beecher (3:01)

Yes, we'll take issue with that.

Dan McClellan (3:03)

Primarily, we'll be discussing where the Hebrew alphabet came from and how it functions in the Hebrew Bible.

Dan Beecher (3:10)

And it's really cool. It's also where our alphabet kind of came from.

Dan McClellan (3:14)

It is.

Dan Beecher (3:17)

So there's a lot of really cool stuff to delve into in that.

Dan McClellan (3:22)

Absolutely.

Dan Beecher (3:23)

So let's get on with it and do our first... We'll call it a What's That.

Dan McClellan (3:28)

I think that works.

Dan Beecher (3:29)

We'll dive into What's That.

All right. So biblical literalism, the taking of the Bible literally, I guess, is what we're talking about. The idea that everything that we read is prima facia, what it says it is or what it is or something, what King James decided it would be, I don't know. What are we talking about here?

Dan McClellan (3:57)

Well, yeah, first off, my hot take, if this is a Metro or subway hot takes, I don't think there's such a thing as a biblical literalist.

Dan Beecher (4:08)

Oh, snap!

Dan McClellan (4:11)

Right off the top rope, I'm just gonna say it, there's no such thing.

Dan Beecher (4:15)

Coming in hot.

Dan McClellan (4:16)

Yes, biblical literalism is a fiction that is used to try to curate the authority of the Bible and to assert authority over what the Bible actually says. But I think that is how we'll circle back and round off this discussion, because what I want to talk about, I want to start way back in the early church with what's going on as soon as the Bible is complete, and we begin to have readers of the Bible, because while everybody always had some notion that these as-inspired texts, these things are true, but what precisely that meant was not really hammered down. And it could mean a lot of things. There could be literal applications. There could be moral applications. There could be all kinds of different applications. So the main representatives of a more thoughtful and a more insightful approach to what exactly are these things we call scriptures, I think are represented best by folks like Origen and Augustine. So Origen is 3rd century CE, Augustine is end of the 4th, beginning of the 5th century CE. And these are authorities who swung a lot of weight in their day. And also what they had to say about a number of doctrines influenced how Christianity would develop for basically down to today in certain segments of Christendom.