Show Notes
The great flood of Noah. The walls of Jericho tumbling down. The ten plagues striking Egypt. The Red Sea splitting in two. These are some of the most famous biblical stories ever told — but did any of them actually happen the way the Bible describes? In this episode of Misquoting Moses, as Dr. Joel Baden and Megan Kraege talk about how historians and archaeologists actually evaluate the Hebrew Bible as a historical source, they uncover what holds up... and what doesn't.
More from Misquoting Moses with Joel Baden
Abraham prayed to El Shaddai. Moses encountered a burning bush revealing the personal name YHWH. Solomon built a temple for a national God who allegedly lived in a cloud of thick darkness. If you line up every description of God in the early books of the Hebrew Bible, you don't get a single, consistent character. The God of the patriarchs looks and acts like a local Canaanite mountain deity, while the God of the Exodus is a fiery desert warrior who leads armies into battle. Today, we're tracking the dramatic evolution of Israel's God from a localized tribal storm deity sharing a crowded pantheon into the universal, singular creator of the universe.
The Bible offers two different accounts of how the ancient Israelites took possession of the Promised Land. In the last part of Numbers and in the book of Joshua, the Israelites sweep the land in a lightning military campaign, completely destroying all the Canaanites, then apportioning the land among the Israelite tribes. But in the book of Judges, the allotment of land comes first, and it is only afterward that they attempt to take possession of it - each tribe its own land, in a much slower and less systematic process than what we just witnessed in Joshua. Also according to Judges, some of the most significant cities, including Jerusalem remained under Canaanite control. But scholars don't think that either of these stories actually happened. So, why would Israel tell these stories about their own origins? And what can we actually know about the origins of the society who would later produce the most influential set of texts in the world? Today, we're asking all those questions.
For three years, the prophet Isaiah wandered naked around Jerusalem. Ezekiel lay on his left side for three hundred and ninety days, then flipped over, and lay on his right for another forty. After this stunt was over, he went on a new diet of barley cakes - cooked over cook manure. Hosea marries a prostitute and names their child "unloved". Elijah calls down fire from heaven, and Elisha makes an axe head float. We often think of prophets as predicting the future, but this picture is of something much stranger. Today, we're investigating the role of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, and above all, why it's so weird.
The creation of the world out of primordial chaos. A catastrophic global flood that ends when birds confirm the re-emergence of dry land. A baby cast into the river in a basket sealed with bitumen, who would be rescued and one day become a great leader. Sound familiar? Today, we're talking about the myths even more ancient than the biblical texts, that will be suspiciously familiar to any reader of the Bible, to ask how the biblical authors adapted, borrowed from, and subverted the great myths of Mesopotamia.
"Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one." Thus begins the most important prayer in Judaism, taken directly from Deuteronomy 6:4. Rendered this way, it appears to encapsulate the monotheistic essence of Judaism. One god, one creator of the heavens and the earth, one deity to worship - that's how most readers encounter the Bible. But in antiquity, the picture was a lot more crowded. The authors of the Bible not only acknowledged the existence of other deities, but that their own communities worshipped them. Today, we're talking about the polytheism hidden in the Hebrew Bible, and how ancient Israelite religion evolved from a word of many gods into the strict monotheism we recognize today.