Out of Nothing

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Dan McClellan (0:59)

He says, sir, I have never seen Babylon, and I know nothing about the den. Then the angel of the Lord took him by the crown of his head and carried him by his hair. The angel was just like, you stupid little. He's like, ow, ow, ow.

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:25)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:27)

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

Dan Beecher (1:40)

Good, good. Just having a lovely time. You and I are recording this well before it's going to be coming out, because we're all going on trips and we're going to be having fun times. So we only have things to look forward to now.

Dan McClellan (1:58)

By the time this comes out, I will probably be, I might be in San Diego for the San Diego Comic Con. I don't know when this is going to come out.

Dan Beecher (2:05)

Or it will have already happened. And who knows? Who knows? We'll both be tan. You never know.

Dan McClellan (2:13)

I will probably be just as white as now, just because I'm so susceptible that I just drench myself in sunscreen whenever I remember. Because the last thing I need is another sunburn. I grew up like perpetually peeling dead skin off of old sunburns.

So yeah, that's lovely.

Dan Beecher (2:36)

That's always fun. That's always fun. I did see a thing just... This is not relevant to our show, but I just saw a thing that there's a new vaccine for skin cancer that they've been working on. Really? Yeah, an mRNA thing that has been very effective for stopping melanomas and stuff. So maybe it'll save you. Who knows?

Dan McClellan (3:00)

Man, wish I would have known about that in the 80s and 90s. Right? Good night. Yeah.

Dan Beecher (3:06)

I don't know anything more about it than that, but I'm sure there will be conspiracy theories about it soon. Coming up on today's show, we are going to be looking at a couple of really interesting things. first of all, we are going to be diving into the creation of the universe, you guys. So that's pretty fancy.

Dan McClellan (3:28)

Yeah.

Dan Beecher (3:28)

I don't know if you know this, but it was us. It was me and Dan. We built it. And then after that, one of the lesser known but fascinating books of the Apocrypha.

We're going to get, I always want to say Bel and Sebastian, but we're doing Bel and the Dragon.

Dan McClellan (3:49)

Bel and the Dragon. And not technically its own book, but one of the additions to the Book of Daniel. So we'll talk about that when we get there.

Dan Beecher (3:57)

How dare you, sir? How dare you deny it its book status? But yes, it's a fun one. You're going to want to stick around.

Dan McClellan (4:07)

Yeah.

Dan Beecher (4:08)

But first, let's, let's launch into creation stories.

Dan McClellan (4:16)

Creation X Nehalo, to be more specific. We've talked about some creation accounts before, and we've talked about, in fact, I think our very first episode of this podcast, we talked about Genesis 1.1, and one of the things that we pointed out is that, correctly interpreted, there's no creation X Nehalo going on there, that everything seems to have been created from the chaotic, murky waters of creation that probably had some kind of unformed earth submerged beneath them. And creation was a process of separating things out, light and dark, water from water, dry land from water, and so on and so forth, and thus and so. But when we get a little closer to the New Testament, we get some passages that people who are willing to give a little on creation X Nehalo and Genesis 1.1, these passages people are a little more strict about, they're a little more insistent.