You're Speaking My Language!

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Dan Beecher (1:00)

They place so much importance on the different languages, and how much that just destroyed everything. I mean, it takes humanity from literally the precipice of godhood to, oh, now you're all just screwed, sorry. You're all just dumb now.

Dan McClellan (1:17)

Now you're Bronze Age goat herders.

Dan Beecher (1:19)

Yeah, suck it, ha!

Dan McClellan (1:25)

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 increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. And we're going to be doing some combating today.

Dan Beecher (1:43)

There might be a little misinformation out there.

Dan McClellan (1:46)

Yep, there's some.

Dan Beecher (1:47)

It's kind of fun. I'm looking forward to it. But astute listeners will need to sort of really carefully parse out this entire episode, because we've hidden messages in, if you know how to truly discern the words that we're saying. So go back and re-listen a whole bunch of times, and listen to the ads while you're at it, and it'll be good for you.

Yeah, so what we're breaking down today, we're going to do two, obviously, as we normally do two different segments. One is going to be a chapter and verse, just a little Genesis for you, a little fun origin story, and etiology, if you will, Dan. I don't know if you've ever heard that word before, but I'm glad to teach you it.

Dan McClellan (2:38)

Well, I appreciate that.

Dan Beecher (2:40)

And then, and I'm excited about this, you guys are going to want to wait around for the last segment, because we're going to be talking about it. We're calling it Watch Your Language, because we're going to be talking about the idea of, did the ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek have mystical sort of magical words sprinkled in that have extra meaning or extra power? And I'll bet you can figure out what our answer is going to be on that. But don't jump ahead. Don't get ahead of us. We're going to talk about all of that. But first, let's just jump in with our chapter and verse.

All right. So, Dan, we're in Genesis, chapter 11, right at the beginning. And we have a really weird story. It's weird in like a whole bunch. Considering it's only, what, nine verses? They pack in a lot of weird in these nine verses.

Dan McClellan (3:49)

Yeah. And this is the end of what's called the primeval history, Genesis 1 through 11, right before we get to Abraham.

And one thing I think it's good to note about the primeval history is we've got three main narrative arcs. We've got the creation in the Garden of Eden, we've got Noah in the flood, and then we've got our story at the beginning of Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel. And then interspersed between them are these genealogies. So this is kind of the way they did things anciently when they're trying to tell these origin stories and they want to get from as far back as they can imagine all the way up to when the story of their people begins.

Dan Beecher (4:33)

And there's nothing spurious at all about those origin stories. Don't worry about the fact that everybody lived 400 or 700 years. Yeah, yeah.

Dan McClellan (4:42)

And we've got we've got etiologies kind of in the same vein as Aesop's fables. It's like, oh, how did snakes, how did they lose their feet? Oh, well, the snakes tricked Eve into eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And God was like, bam, no legs. That's right. You're Slytherin now. The sorting hat has put you in Slytherin. And and we've got a bunch of different ways that the way society and civilization in the world is when these people are writing, they got to get from point A to point B. And so we've got a bunch of stories to do it. And one of those things is the fact that all the nations of the earth speak different languages.