Old Testament God Bad, New Testament God Good?

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Dan McClellan (1:02)

The authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible didn't want to use the word God, so they replaced Elohim with some kind of pejorative. Gilulim is the fun one because it probably comes from a word that means feces. And so you're approximating the word God, but really what you're calling these things are shit gods.

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:31)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:32)

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same, because what a fool believes is... I don't have anywhere to go with that, but we were...

Dan Beecher (1:50)

We were just singing that song.

Dan McClellan (1:51)

We were harmonizing.

Dan Beecher (1:53)

We got Michael McDonald ringing in our ears, and sometimes that just happens. There's not much you can do about that.

Dan McClellan (2:01)

The musicals are right on that. Every now and then, you just break in the song. The dance routines are not as well choreographed in real life as in La La Land, but what can you do?

Dan Beecher (2:12)

You do what you can. I've been known to do a dance routine both on stage and in my life, so there you go.

Dan McClellan (2:21)

A very famous jig that Bruce Willis danced at the end of The Last Boy Scout that everybody hearing this show definitely recalls.

Dan Beecher (2:35)

Even I don't know that one.

Today we are going to do a show. Did we even say our names? I'm Dan Beecher, you're Dan McClellan. I don't know what we did. We did say that.

Dan McClellan (2:47)

Yes, we did get that far.

Dan Beecher (2:49)

OK. I wasn't sure how early we interrupted our standard.

Dan McClellan (2:53)

Yeah, our brains are pudding right now.

Dan Beecher (2:57)

We did just get back from a fun but tiring thing, a trip to Los Angeles where we rubbed shoulders with famous folk and whatever. Anywho, today we're going to be doing a couple of cool things. We're going to be talking about, first, we're going to do a watch your language. And the language we're going to be watching is the language of deity in the Bible, how it's referred to, what it all means. And then in keeping with the theme of deity in the Bible, we're going to do a taking issue. And what we're taking issue with is, is it cool? Is it okay to say that New Testament, New Testament God is better than Old Testament God, or vice versa?

Is that a valid, valuable thing to say? Or is it maybe anti-Semitic? All right, so we will be covering that later in the program. But let's dive in with, watch your language.

All right, so here we are with the Bible. It's interesting because as I read the Bible in English, in English translations, I tend to see like two words, God and Lord, maybe. It doesn't seem like there's that many ways of referring to deity in the Bible. But you and I have done this show long enough that I know there's way more than that. That just gets sort of compressed into Lord God, God of hosts sometimes, or whatever.

But I think that there's a lot more to it. So walk me in. Help me out with the words for gods.

SPEAKER_5 (5:13)

God and gods.

Dan McClellan (5:14)

God, in the New Testament, the Greek is pretty easy. We can talk a little bit about the Greek later on. But I think the Hebrew is much more fascinating, because we've actually got three different words that can be translated, and really should be translated, God, G-O-D.