#2562 - Dan McClellan

The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Alright, what's up?

I am? Good to meet you man. Good to meet you too. Thank you so much for having me up.

It's always weird when you watch a bunch of guys' content and then you meet them. It's very odd. There's a pair of social relationships there that's a little off-putting at first. I remember I had a long time ago, I got a notification, I was being followed on Instagram by Joel McHale and I was like, sweetie, I texted my family.

And then a couple weeks later I got a message from him. He was like, hey man big fan, love your stuff, we gotta hang out sometime. He's a really nice guy. He's incredible.

He's a really cool guy. I got a lovely family. And he was coming out to Salt Lake City to do Fan X a couple years ago which is our version of Comic Con. And I was like, hey let's do dinner.

Yeah, you're a giant comic freak. I am. Yeah. And he was like, let's do dinner.

He's like, it's a date but I'm a, what did he call himself? An arrogant foodie. So he was like, so I gotta pick the restaurant. But he's like, let's get on the phone and chat for a minute.

And I called him. He picked up the phone. He's like, Dan McClellan. Joel McHale.

He's like, this is so weird talking to you. I was like, Joel, I promise you it's a lot weirder for me. I know exactly what that's like. It's very odd.

I try to give people as much grace as possible when they meet me because I've probably been in their head. More than headphones and shit for thousands of, it's odd. It's odd for me. So I'm sure it's odd for other people.

Yeah. And I'm kind of like, I don't even recall if I'm proud of everything I've ever said. So I don't know what kind of impressions somebody has of me. I'm a great impression of you.

Well, I appreciate that. Because I'm certainly not proud of everything I've said. We're all good. We're all good.

Because I don't really watch my stuff back. I don't even remember. Oh, that's a real problem with me. There's people that I forget I talk to.

And then we bring them up on the podcast. I'm like, oh, she had that guy on. And Jamie's like, we actually had him on three years ago. It happens.

It happens once every six months. We deal with that when we're like, what should we talk about today? I don't know. We talk about this.

And they're like two weeks ago, we talked about that. Yeah, that is an issue with you, I would imagine, more. Because you're dealing with very specific structure and texts. And it's also something that you have this incredible deep knowledge of.

So there's probably no way you can remember the specific instances in which you talked about it. Yeah, definitely it's an issue. But it's also I think something that's kind of baked into the reason my channel is so beneficial to a lot of people because I can repeat stuff over and over again. Because as my audience grows, there are always new people who haven't been exposed to a lot of things.

So they're actually a handful of things that kind of not programmatically. But every six months or so, I'll be like, yeah, it's probably time to talk about this again. And then I already have the foundation there. I can recall most of what I said.

But yeah, I do have to go refresh my memory. What was that? Was that manuscript called? I got to figure out, you know, translate that again, something like that.

So it is both the blessing and the curse because it means I can, if I'm having a slow day, I can't think of something to talk about. Maybe I just recycled something I did six months ago. And there are going to be thousands of people who hadn't seen it before. Around 4,000.

Which is I see people who put out that many podcast episodes. Yeah, we're at 2,600. I think we're at 2,600. Almost 2,900.

Almost 2,900 plus. Oh, it's including all the other ones. Oh, is that including all of them? Yeah.

Almost 3,000 including fight companions, MMA podcasts, things like that. Yeah, that's two to three hours or more. Yeah, cooks the brain, damn. I don't know if it's good.

My memory is so weird. It's very good sometimes and also terrible other times. And I think my hard drive is overwhelmed. I'm the same way, particularly when I'm on the spot.

I lose names. Yeah. Like crazy. I went to my kids and tried for Jeopardy.

And I went through the first phase and then they were like this. Not an in-person thing, but a live online thing. And I just froze up. Everything I can see is face.

I know the dude inside. I can't remember the name. I freeze up a lot. Do you do anything to enhance your memory?

In terms of vitamins or neutropics? Or neutropics? I don't know how to pronounce it. There is some research suggesting creatine might be a little more helpful for brain function.

So I do 10 grams of creatine every day. So I'm definitely, that's a choice. I try to minimize all the different stuff I'm putting in my body. But I have a slew of vitamins and things like that that I'm taking in addition to.

I get fiber because I'm of a certain age. That's debatable. Oddly enough. I don't know where I stand, honestly, because I take in fiber.

Mostly in the form of fermented vegetables. I'm a big kimchi fan. But there's quite a few people that have zero fiber and that exist on a carnivore diet. And I think a lot of these people are people with autoimmune issues that tend to have problems with plant-based chemicals, like chemicals that are in plants.

And then there's a real problem with the American diet, which is glyphosate and herbicides. There's a lot of different herbicides and chemicals used in industrial fertilizer that get into your food. And a lot of people have extreme sensitivities to those things. Perhaps due to prolonged exposure, it's very difficult to parse out.

You have to talk to a bunch of different people. And a bunch of different people have different takes on it. But I know quite a few very healthy people that don't eat any fiber. They just eat eggs and chicken and meat and fish and that's it.

Well for me, it was definitely, I noticed when I took it, things were easier for me in the morning. And that was where I was like, okay, then done. That's what I'm going to do here. There's a transition area period.

I've never done it for more than that. But for 30 days when I did it, the first four or five, the diarrhea, my friend Tom Sager described it as remarkable. Breathing, it's just derping. It's like, what is happening to me?

But that settles down after a while. And then your bowel movements are not as frequent, but very easy. It's just like, whoop, it's like not much. And that's it because there's no fiber.

So it's like what is left after you chew all the meat and swallow it. It's like that stuff comes out in the wash and that's around. I'm not an expert in health and nutrition. I'm not either.

I've absorbed a lot of information, but some of it's contradicts. It's very hard to know who's right and who's wrong. And I think it's also, it varies biologically. It varies genetically.

It varies depending upon where your ancestors are from. There's a lot of people that I know that have real problems with red meat and real problems with certain, I got friends that are vegan that exist healthy. They have no problem with that diet. And then I know friends who've tried it for ethical reasons and their health fell apart.

And they're like, well, fuck, I can't do this. Yeah, I've got the thing I try to pay attention to is some called FODMAPs. I'm certain. Have you heard of FODMAP?

No. I mean, I'm not sure if you're interested in the acronym, but basically it's, there are certain kinds of substances and foods the acronym is FODMAP, but they occur a lot in breads and a lot of things with a lot of carbohydrates in them. But they... This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats.

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And to price, we're here for it. Oh, there we go. Short term three step eating plan to temporarily restrict specific poorly absorbed sugars to help manage digestive distress like bloating gas and abdominal pain. Okay.

So, I started noticing if I was eating certain things throughout the day, I was a lot more bloated and uncomfortable by the time night came around and I did all kinds of investigating and I figured out when I was avoiding things that are high in FOD maps, I felt better. And what was the word again, Jamie, when FODs broken down? It is a, the word is fermentable boy, oligosaccharides, disaccharides and monosaccharides and polys, polyols, polyols, short chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols that small intestines absorb poorly. What's in that category of those things?

Does it say? I guess there's low and high. Yeah. Or something to have higher in those things.

Yeah. Yeah. Sootable on a low FOD map diet, fruit, obviously vegetables, cereals, milk, tofu, and then the bad ones, excessive fructose, lactose, fructose, fructose, fructose, galactans, legumes. Oh, why?

Can you beans? How weird. Well, I think I think there, that's the category and then there are certain members of that category that are high and certain members of that category. Yeah, that's your baked beans, chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils, soy beans.

And what I really noticed, there was one day I had, we got a watermelon and I had like half of it. My wife's like chill out, man. And I like, within a couple hours, I was really, really gassy and bloated. Really?

And I was like, yeah. And I was like, that has to be the watermelon doing it because I haven't had anything else out of the, out of the ordinary. And, and so I started looking at that. And so I'm sensitive to that kind of stuff.

But that's just my own biological makeup. Some people are genetically gifted in other ways. Well, it also depends on what you've done that day. Like if you've gone along hike through the mountains and you're exhausted, like high carbohydrates and high sugar diet or something, a meal is actually good for you.

I, there are times when I'm definitely craving it and I'm like, I've got to listen to my body. I think there's a reason. Yeah. Yeah.

So, like, you know, you think about it. You're at altitude and you do like a three or four mile hike and you're climbing. That's the end of it. You're fucking spent.

You have no sugar in your body. You're, you're, you have a real issue and your body needs something to replenish your muscles. Yeah. I got plenty of fat stores.

So that when I go out for my run, I can, I can last a little longer. But I, I run at, at altitude and by salt lakes. Um, so whenever I come, whenever I travel elsewhere, like I go to San Diego a couple of times a year or I'm on the east coast or here, what the altitude here is not very high. No.

I don't think it's a thousand feet. And it's, I can run 10 times as far. Yeah. It's so nice.

It's like a little bit of an hypoxia chamber in the studio. So, yeah, we have a gym that's connected to the studio and the gym is this thing called a hypoxia. It's called, uh, I forget the name of it. Exalt exalt XB is the company.

I forget the name of this, but this thing brings you to, you could vary the altitude and I put it at 14,000 feet. Oh, wow. So I do these cardio workouts at 14,000 feet. They're very specific depending upon what you're trying to.

Like there's a veal, I kill myself yesterday because I do it, this veal to max one where you're doing four minutes of hard cardio at 14,000 feet above sea level. And then you have like a two minute recovery period and then you go back on it again and you do it again and you do a cycle for those and it's fucking hell. Yeah, that's pretty intense. I do the HIEN intensity interval training from time to time, but I don't have the discipline to do it at 14,000 feet.

It's not fun, but it has a giant impact though. So if you do go somewhere, like if I head, go to Utah and I'm in the mountains, it's a giant benefit. Yeah. Yeah.

I know I think people, they'll wear the masks that are supposed to kind of reduce the oxygen. So it's a similar training. It's probably not as effective. Yeah, the mask thing is controversial.

I don't know about that. Yeah. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to strengthen the diaphragm muscles and you breathe through them and you do breathing exercises, but those restrictive masks, I don't know about those. I would imagine they would do the same, they would have the same similar function or reduce the amount of oxygen you got.

But they were a thing, the training mask, it was a thing among MMA fighters for awhile. They've all banded it. At least most of them that I know. I don't know.

Maybe they got tired of it. Maybe it's too hard already. Yeah. What was that thing you brought in, that big piece of pottery?

Yeah. So I brought in a couple of things. I went down. Well, I busted out.

So this is a gift for you and this is a replica of my favorite artifact from the ancient world, mine named Robert Algot runs this website called relics3d.com and he makes these and this is what's called the Contillator of the Lord. And so I think the majority of scholars agree this is probably intended to reflect the interpretation of these two deities as the God of Israel and God's wife, Ashera. Very weird. Yeah.

Well, they're kind of like almost bovine and this is probably because they're appealing to some iconographic motifs associated with deities and best set, which are Egyptian deities that are the most important. And so I think the majority of scholars agree this is probably intended to reflect the interpretation of these two deities as the God of Israel and God's wife, Ashera. That's what deities best and best set, which are Egyptian deities that that appears bovine to you. Just the face a little bit like the bodies are more anthropomorphism.

Do you put an image of that on the screen, Jamie? So we could maybe perhaps do a follow up to spell out the website and then I can spell it for you. K-U-N-T. Same at the bottom.

That's K-U-N-Pause. I-L-L-E-T. I-L-L-E-T. And then the next word.

All right. I got it now. A-A-A-J-J-J-R-E-D and then like relic. Inscription.

Yeah, they're actually a bunch of interesting. Oh, I see the bovine now. I'm looking at it. And there's the actual...

Yeah. Yeah. So this is... Now, it's hard to look at that thing.

It looked almost like the... Go back to the other image. Yeah. Get me?

Yeah. I thought the lines... I thought the head was where the mouth or the nose is. I thought that's where the eyes and the other thing was like a crown he was wearing.

Yeah. Well, you've got the headdresses on top that are supposed to indicate their deities. Oh, fucking weird. It's all the old ancient depictions of deities.

You're like, what were they doing? This to me is the most fascinating thing about pretty much all religious texts. It's like, what was the original thing that they were trying to document? Yeah.

Whether it was through oral tradition, then eventually written down like, what was the original event? That fascinates me the most about the Bible. It fascinates me the most about the ancient Sumerian writings. I'm just...

I don't think all of it is fiction, but I don't think all of it is literal. I think you're also dealing with an enormous amount of time between these events and then the writing down. And then you highlighted this very much in some of your videos. There's a lot of weirdness when you compare some of these stories like the story of Moses and Sargon of Akad.

They seem incredibly similar. Yeah. Like almost too similar. All right.

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That's drinkagone.com.com.com. Yeah. I think there's definitely some kind of genetic relationship between the two. And specifically, it's the story of him as a baby being placed into a container and set adrift in a river.

That is Sargon the Great, who dates too long before historical Moses. But that tradition, I think the earliest version of it we've found in the Acadian literature dates to maybe 9th or 8th century BCE, which is around the time that scholars think that's the tradition of Moses and the narrative of the Exodus was beginning to come together. So it makes sense that they would draw from that tradition. And I think there are a couple of different reasons for it.

One of the reasons is because that already has some purchase in the zeitgeist, and so if you kind of reflect something that people already are aware of, it kind of makes it a little easier to incorporate into their worldview. And then also it can also be kind of a challenge to the other tradition. It's like, well, you got your guy, we got ours. Our guy did it better.

And so, and this is a lot of what's going on with the representation of Jesus in the New Testament because there are certain turns of phrase, there are certain things that Jesus does in the New Testament that reflect what the Greco-Roman world expected from their emperors and their God-men. And so in the New Testament, it's kind of a way to do both of those things, to say we got one of those two only ours did it better. Oh, interesting. So I think one of the key things to keep in mind is every text, whether it's a text that's inscribed on on a piece of pottery or something that wound up in the Bible, every author wrote it down because they wanted to achieve something.

We tend to think of languages just about communicating information, but nothing happens in a vacuum. It's all happening in circumstances, in context where they're trying to achieve something. And so scholars go to great lengths to try to figure out what precisely would have been achieved by writing this down or by writing any of the text in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. And the best way to figure that out is to try to situate the composition within whatever historical period makes the most sense, whatever we can make the best case for and figure out how it would have worked in that period, which is why there are some texts that we think were intended as propaganda, there are texts that we think were intended to kind of place one person struggling for power over another person struggling for power.

There's a lot of political propaganda going on. And then there are other texts that are intended to try to make people feel better about why things aren't going well for them, why bad things are happening to good people and good things aren't happening to bad people. So there are tons of different reasons that people are writing texts, but a good illustration of this is genre. So all texts have a genre of some kind.

And that's basically just a conventionalized set of things that are in the text that help cue people to what kind of texts they're looking at. So if I start a story once upon a time, you already know it's going to be a specific type of text. So without even knowing that you're aware of genre, you're aware of the genre of the text. And if you found a piece of paper in a parking lot, and it said, does an egg's, pound of ground beef, you know, prophylaxis, stuff like that, prophylactics actually would be the plural.

You know you found a grocery list, a shopping list. And so that's a genre of text as well. So just by being aware of these conventions, we can say, oh, well, I know exactly what this text was trying to do because it has all these markers of a given genre. And that's a big cue to helping us figure out what texts are trying to do.

And when people wrote on pottery, generally this was a little more ritual. This was something that was intended to be like a votive offering, which might be an offering to a deity so that the deity will then bless you, or it might be something that people are intended to come in and read out loud so that they invoke the presence of the deity in the space. And then the drawing of the deity would also be a way of doing that. So there are a lot of different reasons for what's going on.

And that's the big mystery is what were they trying to accomplish. And then cattle worship was very common. It was Choctal Heuk. It was like the Hindus.

There's a lot of cattle worship. Yeah, there's worship of a lot of different animals or the synchronization of a lot of different animals in a lot of different places. And this is probably drawing from Egyptian iconography. So yeah, the Sinai Peninsula is right in between Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.

And there was an awful lot of Egyptian influence on things. So even if you look at, for instance, Hezekiah, there's a bull that was discovered, which is something that was left from an impression, a signet ring or something like that has the name Hezekiah on it. And there's an Egyptian drawing of a winged, I think it's a wing scarab or something like that, which is directly from Egypt because Israel was under Egyptian hegemony for a long, long time. So next door.

Yeah. Yeah. You were talking about Jesus and the New Testament and that some of it seems to have been like the way it was done to appease the people that lived in the same era. Yeah.

Some of it was a way to, I think, make people feel better about themselves, for instance. So the text were written long after Jesus was dead. The Gospels, Mark was probably written 69, 70, 71-ish CE. Matthew's probably five, 10 years after that, Luke's probably five, 10 years or more after that, John's a little after that.

And at this time period, there's already a following that is developing. And so the people who are writing these texts are writing them for a literary audience, but they also want them to speak to the experiences of the people who are followers of Jesus. So for instance, there's a part where Jesus says, I did not come to bring peace but a sword. And I will set father against son and mother against daughter and all this kind of stuff.

And people wonder, well, what on earth is going on here? And there are scholars who suggest that the point of that would have been to make it sound like to people who are struggling with inner family relationships. I'm a follower of Jesus now and I kick out of my house or I'm a follower of Jesus now and I constantly fight with my wife or with my brother or something like that. Am I doing something wrong?

And this text says, Jesus saying, no, no, I came to cause that. So that means things are working. And that's a way to make people feel, okay, well, then I'm okay because I got kicked out of my parents' house or something like that. But it's not crazy.

Someone putting words into Jesus' mouth just so that people of the time feel okay. I think that's probably an awful lot of what's going on. So either to make them feel okay or to try to push them to agree with living a certain way or something like that or try to make them feel like this is what's coming up for us. Which is a problem with taking everything literally and people deciding that all of it is the word of God.

When some of it is just like, okay, would God really tell you to do that? Like, why? Why is God telling you to rape? Why is God telling you to kill women and children?

Yeah, that's something that commanding you to. Yeah. And people have been struggling with that for the entire history of the circulation of this text. And I think the word of God thing is interesting because that phrase is never used anywhere in the Bible to refer to text specifically as the texts that are in circulation.

So word of God is always a reference to just the message, however it's circulating, whether it's oral or whatever, or to Jesus in the New Testament, Jesus is the word. But it's never used to refer to a specific textual manifestation of the message. And so there's not really a case to make that any author of any text in the Bible use that phrase to refer to the scriptures or the Bible. And so even in verse Corinthians in a couple of places in Paul, he says, this is not coming from the Lord, this is just coming from me.

And then we take it and say, okay, wink, wink, we know what you mean. Paul's a weird one. Paul's a weird one. The more I get into Paul, the more I'm like, this guy.

First of all, killed a bunch of Christians, right? Lit churches on fire at least ordered the death of Christians. Yeah, according to him. The king said, yeah.

And then says he met Jesus in a vision. And then all this stuff written down, he also says that a lot of it is coming from him, but we attribute it to Jesus. It gets super squirrely when you start reading Paul. You're like, who, what?

Well, here's... He ever even met him? Hey, 20 years later, you read all this? And there are a couple of different stories about how exactly he did meet him.

And then, but an interesting... What are the different ones? Is the road to Damascus? Well, yeah, it's the vision, but it's told in a couple of different ways, you've got a couple of tellings of the story, an accident in the Pauline literature.

And it really has to do with who heard of Oyster or something or anything like that. There are minor differences, but there are still some differences. But I think it's really interesting. A lot of people treat all the Pauline texts as equally one inspired and two from Paul, but scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that there are several of those texts that weren't written by Paul.

They were written decades after he was dead. Really? Yeah. And then, they are called the pastoral epistles and they are widely agreed to have been written toward the end of the first century, beginning of the second century, maybe 30 years after Paul was dead or more.

Oh, how complicated. And then you've got Colossians, 2 Thessalonians and Ephesians are a little more debated, but there is a good solid core of scholars who would argue that they were not written by Paul. And one of the interesting things that happens when you divide up the letters between the genuine Pauline epistles and then what are called the disputed and the spurious Pauline epistles is Paul's message in the genuine Pauline epistles is different from the message in the others. And for instance, in the genuine Pauline epistles, Paul was like, you know, Jesus is coming back any day now, so don't change your situation in life.

Don't get married if you're not married. If you're married, don't get divorced. And he suggests that everybody should be celibate and unless you just can't hack celibacy, in which case- But even while married? Because you're waiting for Jesus to return.

No, because in this time period, I think Paul fancied himself with a philosopher, but he's kind of cobbling together a bunch of different philosophical movements. Where have we heard that before? Where have we heard that before? Somebody fancied themselves with a philosopher.

Well, cobbling together things from- Oh, yeah, that's the guy who grew up today. But at the time, sexual desire was thought of as something that was part of the baser urges of the flesh. And if you could overcome that, then you obviously were a real one. Which is why Roman statues have little penises.

I'm sure that's the main reason. Yeah, that's probably what it was. Really? Yeah, I had a wonderful guide when I did a tour of the Vatican.

This guy who was a university professor who he moonlights, you know, makes extra money in the summertime as a guide. And he took us on this tour and this guy was fantastic. And he loved that I was so into it. So we had this great conversation.

And eventually I had to get to Little Dicks. Like, why these guys have these incredible bodies? But they have these tiny penises. I explained that it was like, it was it was goate.

Like, you didn't want to have a big giant dick. A big giant dick was like a symbol of like a brutish barbarian type person that was better to depict these gods with tiny penises. And then eventually they start covering them with leaves. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and the early Greek and Roman gods, you know, they kind of went to town with the sexual stuff. Well, it seems like they were getting their freak on quite a bit, those people in a lot of different ways and with a lot of different species. But anyway, Paul was he suggests that. Yeah, even married folks should just avoid it.

And we see this in Matthew as well. There's part in Matthew in 19 when he's talking about divorce. And then his followers are like, it would be better for somebody not to get married. And then he goes, hey, man, there are those who are born unix.

Those who are made unix by men. And then there are those who make themselves unix for the kingdom of heaven. And he says, that's a difficult saying. But for those who can accept it, they should accept it.

Basically saying, you know, the higher law is to be celibate because they thought Jesus was coming back so soon that having a kid would be a waste of time. And so there was no other reason for intercourse, really. And so the idea was, OK, be celibate. And Paul says, if you can't hack it, then go ahead and have occasional sex with your spouse.

But it should be basically for keeping down the urges. Because if trying to remain celibate is just driving you nuts, the risk that you might engage in some kind of sexual immorality is so great that you need to have that little valve to keep down the urge. Imagine if you're on death door and you listen to him and you decide to stay celibate. And you're like, Jesus, didn't even come back.

Yeah. What all the sex I missed? Well, and you kind of see, yeah, that would certainly be on a list of regrets. This is the problem with not just, you know, biblical but contemporary people that claim to know what's happening.

This is what we're all lost in this weird world that we're living in where there's so much uncertainty and there's so many different versions of truth in terms of like the origin of mankind in the universe. And we want someone to come along and say, I know, I know. And it's so compelling when someone does. When they say it with authority, when they say it with confidence, it's like, oh, finally, a guy who knows.

And this is how all cults get started. This is how everything, you know, I mean, this is how a lot of political leaders wind up taking control. It's like someone who pretends to know and has this like deep understanding of that's far beyond anything you're ever going to have. Trust me, you guys stay celibate.

Jesus is on the way. Yeah. And that didn't really work out. It never works out.

They're never right, which is so crazy that people keep listening to them. And this is one of the things that scholars see when they separate out the genuine polygon epistles from the later ones because in the later ones you have a Paul Sand stuff like, oh, there's going to be a delay. Jesus is stuck in traffic. Yeah, yeah.

And this is because it's written by folks who are, you know, they're decades down the road. Now it's like, if we don't have kids, our movement is dying out. So we kind of got to have kids. And so you've got one of these spurious polygon epistles that say women will be saved in child bearing.

So now it's like your salvation is dependent on you having kids, even though the real Paul was like, put it away. Now we're live and celibate lives now. And so you have, and this pops up in Matthew as well, where elsewhere where we've got this what they call delay of the perusea or the second coming, we expected it any day now turns out it might be a little longer traffic's bad. And you know, you have this man of sin that's supposed to show up or they're supposed to be just falling away or there's supposed to be something that gets in the way and that causes a delay in Jesus's return.

And 2000 years down the road, we're still wondering when that delay is going to happen. So we get to the oldest stuff. We get to like the Old Testament, like if we get to Genesis, what are the oldest versions of that story? Is it the Anuma Leish?

So there are a bunch of different versions of Anuma Leish, but we probably go back to Sumerian stuff because you actually have a, we have these King lists from long, long ago in written in Sumerian. There's no flood story yet in these King lists, but they talk about these kings that range for 10,000 years at a time. What's your take on all that? My take on all that?

These are traditions. You see a lot of different traditions that develop in the ancient world to account for how creation happened. The weirdest one, there's an Egyptian one where the head god masturbated all of existence. So that's a great one for some bedtime reading.

It's pretty short, but there are just, these texts are intended to serve purposes for these authors long, long ago. And this is when writing is just starting to come to be. And so it hadn't been around for a very long time. You don't have a lot of mythical narratives and things like that, but you have these poems that tell stories and that talk about the reign of kings.

And that's political propaganda. But the kings list, the weird thing about the kings list is the older ones are the ones that live forever. Enormous life spans. And then when it gets too, not closer to contemporary times.

There are rules become less and less until they're the more human. And the same thing is in Genesis. And it happens in the later versions of the story. They go from 10,000 years to just a few thousand years.

But in one of the secondary versions of the King list, suddenly there's a flood that happens. And then secondary versions. So it's something that's added to the King list. It's not in our oldest King list.

Do we know when that was added? Roughly. I probably have a rough estimate of the date. I don't remember off the top of my head.

It's probably somewhere in the early third millennium BCE. So maybe somewhere mid 2000s BCE. I don't remember that. So it's probably contemporary to the oral traditions of Genesis?

So I think the oral traditions of Genesis actually are much later than that. Really? Yeah. Because Genesis was probably written between around the 8th century BCE down to the 5th century BCE.

And a lot of it is riffing on the literature that's circulating within Babylon during the exile. Or it's literature that's circulating within Assyria when Assyria is beaten up on Israel. And so for instance, the Tower of Babel. That's famous story from Genesis.

There's a tower called the Tower of Etemanonki that is just outside of Babylon. That was famous because it was built by, I want to say old Babylonian. Don't quote me on that though. But it was later destroyed when the Assyrians came in to take over.

They kind of decommissioned it and destroyed it partly. And then for like 80 years, another Assyrian emperor had a restoration project. It was trying to rebuild the tower. But it took forever.

It took like 80 years. And that was right in the 8th century. And so there are a lot of scholars who suggest that. The story of this tower that was supposed to be built to heaven that was left unfinished is a reflection of the unfinished tower of Etemanonki.

And so that would put it in the right date. And there's also this problem when we look at historical narratives in the Hebrew Bible. They're written in ancient Hebrew. And a somewhat developed form of ancient Hebrew.

And we can chart the developments of the Semitic languages fairly well. And there's no historical narrative prose in any alphabetic script, any language that was written in an alphabetic script until the middle of the 9th century BCE. And that first happens in like Moabites and Aramaic and some other languages like that. And so most likely our ancient narrative prose in Biblical Hebrew was written around that time or shortly after.

And the stuff that's older than that is written in poetry. And so the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible are not the creation of Counting Genesis. There are some poems that we find in like Judges 5. So this is a fascinating story about Deborah, the general who goes and defeats Cicera.

And we have stories in Exodus 15, the song of the C, some scholars think that's a very, very old poem, which is basically a shortened version of the Exodus story. And then Genesis 49 has some blessings that Jacob gives to his children. That might be really, really old and Psalm 68. They're a handful of poems that may go back to around 1000 BC.

So when Genesis is talking about the things that we think are related to Anumelish, the closest connections are actually two versions of that story that were in circulation in Babylon around 600 BCE. So that's probably where Genesis is getting that from, not directly from Sumerian tablets, not directly from oral traditions that are 1000 years older. The scholars who are looking at that, I think, have made a good case that the closest connections are 8th to 6th century BCE. That's probably where the traditions that were recorded in Genesis were mainly borrowed or mainly adopted and adapted to serve the interests of the Judeans who were around in that time period.

So what is the oldest creation story that we're aware of? I think it's probably got to be an Egyptian one. Or it's either Sumerian or Egyptian. That's the two places where writing was invented.

And I would have to go back and look. There's a wonderful set of texts called the Context of Scripture, a three-volume set published by this very expensive publisher called Brill. They have translations of all of the texts that we have from ancient Egypt, from ancient Anatolia, from ancient Assyria, Babylon, from the cultures of ancient Canaan that are not in the Bible. And so they have one of the volumes, the first third of it is creation accounts.

And so it may be the masturbation one. I can't say for sure. I don't remember off the top of my head. But you know, that's not the OG.

It could be. It could be. The ancient ancient language by itself is very bizarre. It kind of emerges out of nowhere.

Like hieroglyphs emerge sort of fully formed. There's a development in the way hieroglyphs are used. But we first start seeing inscriptions popping up, like monumental inscriptions. Most of the early writing probably took place on materials that deteriorated really quickly.

And so what we have is the stuff that was written in stone, which is where the language has got to be a little more developed for us to start taking all day to inscribe something in stone. So I think there's a good case to make that. It just popped out of nowhere. Like the ancient alien stuff is fun, but we don't have a lot of evidence that gets us to that being really even a plausible solution to the problem.

There is definitely a mystery about why in similar time periods people in different parts of the world came up with very similar ideas all at the same time. That might have something to do with the evolution of the brain or something like that. That's also we're probably under estimating amount of travel. People were capable of doing back then.

Yeah, I think so. I think so. But the writing seems to develop from receipts or from counting. You counted up stuff and this is your receipt for how many goats you bought or whatever.

And so as your needs develop in your economy is growing, I think you begin to develop labels for things, you begin to develop characters for things and then it goes from there. There are a bunch of really good academic discussions about the origins of language and the origins of the alphabet. And even the stuff that we see, ancient Hebrews is ultimately derives from Egyptian. Really?

Yeah, in the Sinai. That is where you have some inscriptions from around 1700 to 1900 BCE where they look like Egyptian hieroglyphs but they're not doing what Egyptian hieroglyphs do because they are either syllabic or ideographic or logographic where one sign represents a syllable, so consonant and a vowel or one sign represents a word or one sign represents an idea. And they change them so that each sign represents just a single sound. And the sound is whatever sound is at the start of the word that the symbol represents.

So for instance, the word for house bait and that starts with a bah. And so if you drew a house, that meant the bah sound. And this is the development of the alphabets because to learn ancient Egyptian, you had to memorize hundreds and hundreds of signs and to learn Sumerian or Akkadian or something like that, hundreds of signs. But an alphabet is 22 to 30 letters.

So it's a lot easier to memorize. And then that gets taken to Phoenicia and from Phoenicia gets spread all over the place. And so apart from Hangul, which is the Korean script, I think virtually every other alphabet on Earth is descended from the Phoenician. Well, the Korean script is fairly recent, right?

Yeah, fairly recent. And they take a few different symbols and they group them together to create syllables. But each symbol on its own represents a sound very similar to the way our alphabet works. I don't know much about Korean, but I've heard it described as the most complete language.

Like it's the most structurally logical language. There are ways that I think it is. There are other ways that a language like Russian might be more systematic or even ways like ancient Latin might be more systematic. So when you started learning religion, we started studying religion, did you start studying languages concurrently?

How did you do it? I was, so I joined the LDS Church when I was 20 years old. And a year later, I went to serve a two-year proselytizing mission in Uruguay. And I fell in love with studying the Bible when I was doing that.

I love the stories. I love learning about the history, the culture. And I wanted to better understand the languages so I could try to engage the texts as they were originally written. So I tried to start teaching myself Hebrew when I was down there.

I didn't have a ton of time. I wasn't very good at it. But when I task, yeah, it's a tall order. And when I came home, I found out that you could get a degree in biblical studies and be a Bible scholar.

And I was like, that would be about the coolest career in the world for me. And so I went to school to do that. I wanted to learn ancient Hebrew. I wanted to learn ancient Greek.

I wanted to learn about the literature. I wanted to learn about the history. I wanted to learn about the archaeology. And so I started off not really having a narrow focus, but just I want to try to get as much of it in as I could.

And over the course of getting these degrees, you know, you kind of have to narrow your focus on stuff. And so as I progressed, I decided I wanted to learn what was not only what was going on with the languages, but I wanted to focus on how people thought about God and gods. And so my PhD is actually is using biblical studies and something called the cognitive science of religion to put those two together to try to figure out what we can know about how the authors of the Hebrew Bible would have thought about and interacted with gods as they understood them. And that's using a lot of experimental research on living informants, so interviews and experiments and things like that to figure out how the brain works and how we come up with ideas about deities, ideas about rituals, ideas about religious identity and stuff like that.

So I find that fascinating. So I would say my main focus is now on conceptualizations of deity of scripture and religious identity and cognitive science of religion is one of the main tools that I use. But yeah, I'd all started with having to learn the languages. What's such an enormous field of study?

Yeah, there is so much to learn, especially when you're talking about these different translations and different languages, which is what I've always felt like is the weirdest part about all this. It's very difficult to translate languages to something that makes sense in whatever language you're currently using. Like there are certain concepts that we use that if you try to use them, you know, and you've tried to, I'm sure you've seen Russian translated to English and you're like, what are they doing? What are they saying?

It gets weird because it's not, it's not direct. It's not like, oh, this is their word for cow. This is their word for drive. This is their word for truck.

Oh, the cow drove truck. It's not that simple. It's dependent. Like the way they talk about things is very different.

The way to describe time is very different. Yeah. Yeah. And when you get into more minority languages, languages that are spoken and tiny little islands like Yap or Kiti Boss or something like that, it can get very, very alien to someone who has only spoken English their entire life because learning Spanish, like there are ways it's difficult, learning any language is difficult.

And there are a lot of ways that it's very, very close to English, including even some of the words sound very similar, but there are other languages that you learn that are just, yeah, you have to restructure how you are thinking about things and how you communicate things. And it's not just like in German, oh, you got to put all the verbs at the end. There are very, very different ways to go about. So how complicated is that when you're reading an English translation of the Bible?

Like, that's when things must get very strange if you're especially Old Testament, right? Yeah. Or even crazier, Dead Sea Scrolls, right? So you go in Aramaic to English.

Yeah. It's a lot of people think that it's a simple matter translating from ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek into English. And they imagine that because they have an English translation, they have all the insights they need. And this is why a lot of people go out and know get an interlinear or they'll go on a website that provides the Hebrew to English or something like that.

And imagine that they now understand. And the reality is that there is a lot more under the hood of that relationship between the Hebrew and the English translation that they don't have any idea about. And so there's a saying that somebody who goes online and uses an interlinear or something like that, they know just enough Greek to be dangerous. Really, they imagine that they know a lot more than they do.

And when they go out and try to use that knowledge to try to go make videos on social media or something like that, they end up stepping in it because they really don't know what they're talking about. Or the main reason I'm on social media, the main thing I'm trying to combat, it will spread misinformation. Right. False hoods that other people are going to eat up because they might have a platform with millions of followers.

That sounds like me. I won't say too much about the misinformation. But yeah, no, there's a lot of it out there. I try not to be someone who does that because I can't be a...

No, you're really good at it. You're very good at breaking down where things go wrong with translations as well. Well, I appreciate that. I'm not going to be a specialist in all things, which is why I rely on the consensus of the academic world so much.

Do you speak ancient Hebrew? Do you really... Nobody speaks ancient Hebrew? It's not a spoken language.

Obviously, modern Hebrew is spoken. But it's not a language that anyone would ever grow up learning by speaking with their mother. This episode is brought to you by Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 is coming and they're going all in on this one. The kind of missions that make you go, dude, did they really just do that?

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Is there a way to learn how to speak? Or is it open interpretation? Yeah, you have to reconstruct some stuff. And so there are absolutely, like, speakers of modern Hebrew can look at a text and read it perfectly fluently.

They, to understand it, they have to have a knowledge of the difference between modern Hebrew and ancient Hebrew. But they're saying it the correct way? Mostly. There are some differences in the way they pronounce things, anciently, from the way they pronounce things today.

But most scholars who are looking at the biblical Hebrew, ancient Hebrew, are going to adopt a modern pronunciation system. So there are absolutely scholars out there who advocate for or have a reconstructed way of pronouncing ancient Hebrew. But for the most part, if I go to a conference and I read a text in Hebrew, I'm going to use something approximating a modern Hebrew pronunciation. And I'm not awesome at it.

But, you know, someone who speaks modern Hebrew should understand what I'm saying. But I read it fairly well. It's been a while since I've been, I've got a translation of the Hebrew Bible. I'm working on them.

I haven't been able to touch it for almost two years now. So my Hebrew ebbs and flows, depending on how frequently I'm in the text, working on translation and stuff like that. But yeah, I've got, I'm better at Hebrew than I am at Greek. But there are a handful of languages.

We have to get some competency in to do this Aramaic. One of them, another fun one is called Yuguritic, which is considered somewhat of a precursor to Hebrew. It was spoken a little further north on the Syrian coast. You've never heard of Yuguritic?

No. It was a fascinating story. 1929, a guy is plowing a field along the coast of Syria. And he hits a big rock that he can't move.

And he digs it up and basically discovers an entire ancient city, calls out the archaeologists, they all come descend on this field. And they discover the ancient city of Yuguritic, which we knew from some text that referred to the city called Yuguritic. And they found around a thousand or so texts, but nobody recognized the language because it was written in cuneiform, but there were only 30 cuneiform signs. So that means it's got to be alphabetic and not the other way they use cuneiform signs.

And they decided, okay, the most common Semitic consonant is mem, the equivalent of our m. And they said, so let's take the most common sign that we see and let's designate that mem. And then let's look at all the two letter words. And there are only a handful of words that can be two letters and have the mem in one position or another.

And let's try to decode from there this language. And now we have we've decoded Yuguritic. And now we a lot of people who go and learn biblical Hebrew and Aramaic will also learn Yuguritic because some of these mythical texts mention things that are in the Bible. And so they talk about deities like El and Baal and Asherah.

So Asherah, the one right there. So, and there are some things that are in there that help us better understand biblical Hebrew. There are some things that are in there that help us understand some of the cultic rituals that would go on in relation to El and Baal and Asherah. And there's even, there's one text that's almost directly quoted in the Bible.

And the thing is, Yuguritic was destroyed around 1200 BCE. So with the what's called the Late Bronze Age Collapse. And there's a wonderful book by Eric Klein, 1177 BC. Have you ever heard that book title?

Phenomenal book on how the Late Bronze Age Collapse happened. But so the destruction of Yuguritic happens before the invention of Hebrew. So Hebrew didn't even exist in this time period. But this helps us recover what the languages that were being spoken in that region were like as Hebrew began to develop.

But there's a passage. There's a reference to Baal is fighting a deity named Mote. And Mote means death. So this is the God of death that's fighting Baal who's the storm god.

And Mote is like, I know you're, you want some battles in the past. You're going to lose this one. But he says, I know you, you slew Loton, which is a Yuguritic version of Leviathan. The wriggling serpent, the twisting serpent, the dragon with seven heads.