Kipp Davis interviews a Dead Sea Scrolls expert who rejects religion after decoding ancient texts, revealing the scrolls date from 200 BC to 70 AD and push Hebrew manuscript timelines back a millennium. The scholar exposes market forgeries, debunking the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" as a 9th-century fake, while arguing early Israelites were Canaanite polytheists rather than monotheistic exiles. Through linguistic analysis of the Book of Daniel's Aramaic sections and carbon dating evidence, the discussion concludes that biblical narratives reflect human political agendas, fundamentally challenging traditional religious histories. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Biblical Manuscripts and Forgeries00:05:09
Kip, thanks for coming on the show, dude.
I'm excited to talk to you today.
It's my pleasure, me too.
We were just talking off camera about the Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and Da Vinci Code.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
What were you explaining that basically they're based off of something that was forged?
So, as I understand, and I'm not, I'm the medieval manuscripts and stuff, that's not my expertise, but as I understand it, so the Da Vinci Code.
Is a novel by Dan Brown based on a popular book that was published called Holy Blood and Holy Grail.
And that particular book is based on a collection of manuscripts called The Protocols of Zion, which is a medieval forgery, basically.
And it's like an anti Semitic forgery.
An anti Semitic forgery.
And again, I don't know a lot about this, but what I do know is that it's bullcrap.
Like it's bullshit.
It's, there's, you know, there is nothing that we can see from legitimate history, from the actual documents that we know as authentic, which reflect a reality about the church in the medieval period that aligns with what's in these other forged manuscripts.
So, does he know about this now?
Did he, the author of that book, Dan Brown, or whoever his name is?
Well, I don't think Dan Brown cares because he's writing a novel, right?
But the other guys, I assume so.
And they might not care either because for some of these guys, it's just about selling books.
So who knows?
And all sorts of stuff, all sorts of crap gets published and gets discredited, and authors will oftentimes just not care.
Right.
So who knows?
So for people listening, what is your background and what is your expertise?
Right.
So I am a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar.
I did my terminal work, my PhD work.
On the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are early Jewish manuscripts.
There's a lot of the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are our earliest biblical manuscripts.
So these are our earliest copies of things that became part of the Bible.
So I do all of my work in early Jewish manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And I call myself also a Hebrew Bible scholar because I'm basically, you know, I do a lot of my work in the text.
Of the Bible.
So I hope that was clear.
So, when can you give people basically a history of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
They were discovered in like the early 1900s.
Is that right?
So, the scrolls were discovered in 1946.
Oh, 1946.
The first ones were discovered in 1946.
So, sometime in February, and this is a famous story, sometime in February 1946, a couple of shepherds, shepherd boys were looking along the western shore of the Dead Sea.
In the caves, there.
Anyone who's been to Israel or to the Dead Sea will know that along the cliffs, they're literally honeycombed with thousands and thousands of caves.
And so these boys are looking for a lost sheep among these caves.
One of them throws a rock into one of the caves and hears the breaking of pottery.
They muster the courage to go in and they find these linen.
These linen wraps that have scrolls in them.
Scrolls are made of leather.
They take them back with them to camp.
Some of the stories at this point, yeah, here we have a number of pictures of some of the manuscripts in situ.
But some of the stories at this point get kind of interesting because what you're dealing with is the recollections of these Bedouin sheepherders and when they discovered things and what happened to them.
Some of the things that we have heard is that when the first of these manuscripts were discovered, They set them on a tent peg and they just sat there in the wind and the rain for several months before anyone ever decided to do anything with them.
Over the course of a number of months, eventually they took these things that they found into the markets in Bethlehem and tried to find someone who would be interested in buying them, not very successfully.
People weren't interested in them until they encountered a Syrian Orthodox Palestinian by the name of Khalil Iskander Shahin.
Discovering Ancient Scrolls00:09:09
His nickname is Kando.
I don't know why he's called that, but that's how he's widely known.
He was a cobbler, fixed shoes, but he also was starting to deal in antiquities and he recognized that on these leather rolls, they have writing on them.
So he thought, well, maybe this is something interesting.
Maybe this is something valuable.
So he took two of them and contacted his metropolitan, so the leader of his church, thinking they were Syriac manuscripts.
Syriac is a form of Aramaic.
This is the language of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Old Orthodox Church.
So.
Thinking it was Syriac, he took them to his, the metropolitan, like the priest, to look at them.
And he recognized right away, no, it's not Syriac, it's Hebrew.
And it looks like it's really old.
So, you know, over the course of about a year, they determined that these are probably really old.
They got in contact with experts at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to take a look at the manuscripts that they had.
And the one gentleman that they got in contact with, his name is Eliezer Sukhenek.
He was a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University.
And he came out to the church where these things were being held.
And he looked at the manuscripts and he got really excited because these, based on his just visual examination, looked like.
Potentially the oldest Hebrew manuscripts ever discovered.
And importantly, the one manuscript was a large copy of the book of Isaiah, which is a book in the Bible.
And this would be one of the earliest biblical manuscripts discovered.
Prior to discovering these, what was the earliest Hebrew manuscript ever discovered?
The Leningrad Codex, which dates to about the 10th century.
So the Dead Sea Scrolls date between the second.
It's like you're pushing the clock back a thousand years, which is why scholars got really, really excited about this discovery.
So it's a, and it's kind of a, it sounds like sort of a providential moment too.
This is certainly the way that Sukhenek paints it because at the time, the squirrels were discovered in 1946.
He didn't actually see them until November 1947.
Sorry, no, it was November 1946.
Yeah, that's right.
But at the time, the British mandate in Palestine was just coming to an end.
This is, you know, at the end of the Second World War.
Tensions in Jerusalem and in the region were very high.
And in order for him to get, he had to get from Jerusalem to go see the stuff in Bethlehem.
And in order for him to get from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, he had to get passes to travel through military checkpoints.
Wow.
And ended up seeing the manuscripts.
There were three of them that he saw.
One was a copy of the book of Isaiah.
Excuse me.
We'll cut that stuff out.
Sorry.
No, you're good.
So one was a copy of the book of Isaiah.
There was another.
Manuscript that is now called the Chodayot, which is a Hebrew word that just means Thanksgiving songs.
And it's like a collection of prayers and songs.
And then the third manuscript that he had is called the War Scroll, which is a, it's like this wild telling of the last days when the angels of God are going to meet with the demons and the forces of evil in this final climactic battle.
So these are, but these last two are texts that are not in the Bible.
These are texts nobody had seen before this time.
So they found, you know, he knew, he saw these three manuscripts, got really excited about them, convinced his university, the Hebrew University, that these are, they needed to buy them.
So he got the funding to go back and purchase them, made the journey once again, this harrowing journey through military checkpoints, taking his life into his own hands to go and purchase these three manuscripts and got them back home.
Securely on the evening of the 29th of November, which was the same day that the United Nations had voted for the proposal of the independent state of Israel.
So he's reading the text of the oldest copy of Isaiah known to man at this point, and he's listening on the radio.
To the United Nations, make the announcement of the founding of the state of Israel.
And in his own private diary, Sukhanek wrote about this.
He said, This moment of tremendous significance I celebrated in my own home, one was political and the other was cultural.
So it felt like destiny, right?
And since that moment, the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls, their discovery and their significance has been wrapped up in the history of the State of Israel.
So, you know, in the original discoveries, the scrolls were featured in museum displays and discussed by the earliest prime ministers and presidents as.
Almost guarantors of their legitimacy as a nation.
Right.
So, and this, you know, it's something that, I mean, there's a lot more to say here in terms of just the ways in which the scrolls were collected by scholars and how they were published, and then how scholars and politicians.
Really, kind of use this material as a means to forward their own ideas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and you actually, so before we get into that, yeah, there's, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's like over a dozen caves, right?
And there's like hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that were found right there in that area?
Not quite.
So, there is 12 caves.
12 caves.
There's 11 caves that were part of the original discoveries between 1947 and 1953.
And they are numbered.
In terms of when they were discovered, cave one through cave 11.
Right, right.
Only 10 of those caves they found manuscripts in.
The other two, they had some pieces of fragments of pottery and linen.
The 12th cave is one that was discovered fairly recently.
Scholars think there was possibly manuscripts in this cave, but were unable to find any.
We think there's possibly manuscripts just based on the fact that some of the linen that was found there.
Matches the linen in which a number of the manuscripts in the other caves were wrapped in, as well as some of the pottery.
A number of the manuscripts were actually stored in jars, which really helped with their preservation.
Yeah, 2,000 years?
Yeah.
Wait, how long would it have been in the 1900s?
Yeah, it was like 2,000 years.
At least 2,000 years.
If you think these manuscripts date from as early as maybe even the late third century BC.
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Wow.
So up to 200 BC.
Or when some of the oldest ones are all the way up to about 70.
And then there have been other, that's just the Qumran caves.
There have been a couple of other important discoveries in the Judean desert at a place called Nachal Hever.
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Reworked Pentateuch Fragments00:12:49
They discovered manuscripts at a place called Murabat.
They discovered manuscripts at Masada, which is the famous place where the Jewish rebels at the end of the The first revolt in the year 70 AD, where they had their final stand against the Romans.
They found manuscripts.
It's called Masada.
Masada is where they got the name Masada from, from their spy agency.
I don't think so, but that's a good thought.
I've never really thought about that.
It's a site, Masada is right on the southern end of the Dead Sea.
It's on a big outcropping of the cliffs.
It's where Herod the Great built his winter palace.
It's kind of a he went to go spend his winters at this fabulous site.
It's pretty cool.
How many total manuscripts are there?
So, in the 11 caves, there is now it gets a bit difficult in terms of actually counting the individual manuscripts because what we have are fragments and fragments of a wide range of varying sizes.
So, but estimates are that there are somewhere between 800 and 900 complete manuscripts.
And these are reconstructed from tens of thousands of individual fragments.
Ah, right.
And they're not evenly distributed in the 11 caves, too.
You know, there were 70 manuscripts that came out of cave one.
There were just a handful of manuscripts that came out of cave two and cave three.
But we can talk about cave three in a bit because it's really important.
Cave three is where they discovered the copper scroll, which is just as it sounds.
I'll talk about that in a few minutes.
Perhaps the most important cave that was discovered was Cave 4.
It had over 500 manuscripts in it.
And it looks like it might have been something like a library.
500 fragments or manuscripts.
Manuscripts.
Manuscripts.
So this and Cave 4 is very close to the actual site, it's literally a stone's throw away from the actual site where the people who lived, where the people who collected and wrote this material.
Probably lived.
So the current theory is that this was actually like a library for them, K4.
There's evidence that they had shelves built into the walls.
It's a man made cave.
So it's something that they actually dug out of the excavated.
Yeah, it was excavated.
And they stored, it seems like they stored their precious manuscripts in this cave.
So yeah.
And that's where I tend to think, like when I'm working on the scrolls myself, understanding the relationship between the individual manuscripts.
And their findsight, the actual caves, is pretty important.
Because Cave 4, I tend to think of as an active place where they were storing manuscripts that they used on a regular basis.
I tend to look there first when I'm working on the material.
Cave 1 looks like it might have been a depository for manuscripts that had worn out and were no longer being used.
So, you know, you have to think about the function.
Of these things as you're appraising, you know, what they're about, why they're significant, why they're important.
So, out of those 800 or 900 manuscripts that were discovered, the thing that got scholars really, really excited at the outset was that 200 to 300 of these were copies of texts from the Bible.
So, and again, you know, we're pushing the clock back here copies of texts from the Bible.
Yes.
From what Bible?
Well, I guess it would be the Hebrew Bible, if you're Jewish, the Christian Old Testament.
When was the Hebrew Bible written?
So that's a complicated question.
I thought it was written way later.
No, no.
So, I mean, now I guess there requires some clarification here.
It's a bit of an anachronistic term to talk about the Hebrew Bible.
At this period, because the Hebrew Bible is a collection of these ancient texts.
So, at the time that it got put together, at the time that somebody said, let's put these things together and turn them into a book, that's later.
A thousand years ago.
But the individual, probably before that.
Before a thousand years ago.
Yeah.
And actually, we have some evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls that they were already starting to put a number of these texts together.
I like to think of what one of the things that were discovered in Cape 4 is something called the reworked Pentateuch.
Which is a version of the Torah.
One of the other exciting things discovered was that there's different versions of the same books.
So it looks like they had some sense of variety for saying the same things.
Some of the manuscripts preserve this text called the Reworked Pentateuch, which looks like maybe the earliest attempt to put together.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, all in the same scroll.
And this dates to about the mid second century.
So, how are the Dead Sea Scrolls copies of something if that was the Dead Sea Scrolls were the earliest Hebrew texts we have?
Well, they were copied from something, right?
And because we have multiple copies of many of the same texts, like for example, I mentioned, you know, some of the first manuscripts that were discovered were copies of Isaiah.
A book from the Bible.
We have multiple copies.
So we actually have 22 copies of Isaiah, different manuscripts that they had of the same book.
So, they're clearly copying it from earlier sources.
Earlier sources that we don't have.
We don't have.
We think that they exist.
Yes.
We just don't have any evidence for that.
And scholars usually date manuscripts or date texts on a variety of features of those texts.
You know, language changes over time.
So, based on some of the smattering of epigraphic evidence, evidence that we have of writing, Hebrew writing from.
You know, the Iron Age, which is what you know, from like 900 BC up to 600 BC, which is when most scholars tend to think a lot of these texts were written.
You look at the language that's used there as a way to say, well, you know, the language forms seem to come from this earlier period, and then just the social economic situation that's presented.
You know, many of the, for example, many of the texts from the Hebrew Bible talk about this.
Terrible war that took place between, or this terrible invasion by the Assyrians into Samaria, which happened in 722 BCE.
The way a lot of the texts talk about this event sounds like a current event.
So it seems likely that that was probably when some of these things were written.
Of course, this gets.
We're talking like 6,000 years ago?
No, not quite that many.
Uh, so what is that?
Uh, 722 BC.
So that's yeah, so it's like on less than 3,000 years ago.
Okay, so but uh, this also gets really complicated though, too.
It's so complicated.
This is one of the most complicated topics I've ever really gotten into.
It really is, and one of the reasons for that is because so much of our material for this comes later, and we know we recognize from the material too that people are already um editing.
And rewriting stuff that's older.
They're adding to it.
They're supplementing it.
We have signs within the Dead Sea Scroll of texts that are actively being reworked and rewritten.
Today?
No, at the time that they were being composed.
So it's a complicated picture.
Fake Dead Sea Scrolls?
Yes.
Now, I assume that without knowing anything about it, that there was an antiquities market and people were just trying to profit off of this.
Yes.
Or was it likely somebody had some sort of narrative to push with some.
I think probably more the former.
Okay.
Although, some of the agendas do play a role here, and we can talk a little bit about that.
Yeah.
So I'll just talk a little bit about my story.
Okay.
In 2011, I got a position, a fellowship to work on Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in a private collection in Norway.
These manuscripts belonged to a collector by the name of Martin Skoyen, who collected all sorts of things.
He collected artifacts from ancient Babylon.
He has a fine collection of Buddhist manuscripts.
He's got folios that he bought that come out of the Vatican.
He's even got some modern stuff.
He had an early draft copy of the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling.
He is a consummate collector.
He collects everything.
One of the things that he collects are these Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.
He has over 30 of them.
I was hired to help with the publication of his small collection of fragments.
In the time that I was working there, I and other members of my team started seeing suspicious things on these small fragments themselves that looked like they looked quite different from what we know of the.
The actual authentic collection of Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts.
So, in the course of a couple of years, we developed a system of criteria for testing whether manuscripts on a cursory examination were likely authentic or forged.
Some of the things that I think are fairly easy to spot if you can imagine.
You know, a small fragment of material.
It comes from a larger manuscript, and the idea is that it's broken away and the rest of it's worn off.
It's got lines of text on it.
On some of the fragments, you would notice that the lines would follow the edges of the fragment and not just go straight across, which is weird.
A lot of the letters looked misshapen as if, you know, they were the fragment was already damaged.
At the time that it was being written.
And it's a.
Could you carbon date them to see what they're doing?
They're too small because you require quite a bit of material.
Especially with private collectors who have these tiny little things, convincing them to carbon date some of their already tiny little fragments because it requires a certain amount of material to destroy, right?
You have to destroy the material to carbon date it.
Carbon Dating Tiny Pieces00:13:42
So.
You know, they're extremely reluctant to do that.
Most of the dating actually occurs through something called paleography, where we look at handwriting styles.
Before, you know, typeset printing, everything was written by hand, and people's handwriting styles developed and evolved over time.
So, in particular, in these earlier periods when everything was handwritten, Writing itself was a much more controlled discipline in terms of learning it.
There were very specific ways you learned to write.
So it becomes more, I guess, consistent, especially when working on formal manuscripts as opposed to like little documents or letters that you're just writing to your friends.
So we date all of them.
Most of this stuff through handwriting styles.
It's called paleography.
Interesting.
It's accurate to within about 50 to 100 years, depending on who you're talking to.
Some have said that we can paleographically date stuff to within 20 years.
I'm skeptical about that.
And a number of the manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon dated.
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Now back to the show.
How many would you say?
So, the Dead Sea Scrolls have actually been carbon dated three times.
How many of them?
In fact, at this point now, over 100.
Over 100.
Yes.
So, and what the carbon dating has done for us is it's actually helped to show that the paleography, the paleographic systems that scholars are using to date the text are actually pretty good.
So, you know, when your paleographical dates match the carbon dates, it shows that you're doing something right.
So, the and the scrolls were the they were first carbon dated back in the late 1940s, early 1950s.
Excuse me, I think it was eight or ten of these.
Interestingly, the Dead Sea Scrolls were some of the first items ever to have been carbon dated.
So it was a new science.
Yeah, back in the 40s.
It was a big deal when you could finally use this new science, and some of the scrolls were a guinea pig.
Many of them were recarbon dated in the 1980s.
And now there's another project.
Sorry, I got a cough here.
No, you're good.
It's okay.
We just went through a category four Hurricane Helena.
Yeah, right.
You got an excuse.
So there's a new project that's been underway for the last.
Five or six years where they've been re carbon dating.
I believe it's up to 100 manuscripts.
So, and we're still waiting for some of the results of that.
But yeah, so when it came to the material that this private collector had, he didn't want to let it go to be carbon dated.
Like I said, you have to destroy things.
In order to, in order to digest it.
But he wanted, he, but he did let you guys analyze the writing stuff.
Yeah.
So, and what did he say to you guys when you were like, eh, this seems like it's bullshit?
Well, it was tough, right?
Because he's paid a lot of money for these fragments.
How much do they go for, you know?
Well, I mean, he wouldn't tell me, but I, you know, in the time that I've been doing this, some of the figures that I've seen, you know, range.
These are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For like a tiny little fragment?
A tiny little fragment.
Like, how big are we talking?
Size of a quarter?
Yeah.
There you go.
Thank you very much.
So, you know, something from.
Ranging from the size of a quarter up to maybe a credit card.
Wow.
So I'll tell you a story here.
The source of most of the fragments for sale, excuse me for a sec.
I mentioned Cando, the antiquities dealer, that.
That saw and handled the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Right.
He actually managed to, he worked closely with the first scholars and with the Bedouin who were finding most of this material.
He was kind of like the go between.
And so we're told that probably 90% or more of the material actually passed through him.
His son, William Cando, is the one who.
Every now and then after the 1990s, he would have, you know, Dead Sea Scrolls fragments to sell.
When some of these started hitting the markets in the 1990s, he introduced or people knew of this rather large fragment.
It's probably, you know, it's the size of a page.
Why?
It's called the butterfly fragment because it looks like this.
The butterfly fragment looks like this.
Yeah.
And it looks like a butterfly.
Okay.
Oh, I think I've seen that.
Maybe.
How much is that thing?
I think it's like a million bucks.
So he had listed it for sale originally in, I think it was 2006 or 2007 for $2 million.
Now, between then and when I was working on the fragments, which would have been after 2011, the last I heard, the price had gone up to over $40 million.
God damn.
But as far as I know, He didn't.
If he sold it in the time since 2016 or 2017, I don't know.
Six million.
Man, inflation.
Many millions of dollars.
Yeah.
And that one specifically had been carbon dated?
No.
In fact, we don't know a lot about that particular fragment just because we know it's a copy of.
Well, yeah.
That's sort of the nest egg, right?
He's kind of sitting on it.
What if he did secretly carbon date it and he found out that it was way newer?
He doesn't want to ruin the narrative.
I don't know.
I'm not, I'm, I won't, I won't, I guess it's possible, but what do I know?
So, yeah, the, so, yeah, what was I, right?
We were talking about the, what were we talking about?
You were talking about the value of some of the big, you saw the big butterfly one.
Right.
And I can't store that candle.
I can't own 90% of them.
Yeah.
So, Skojan, though, and his 30 fragments, when we started to have suspicions about these being forgeries, and we finally approached him, what he wanted from us was more certainty about whether these were fake or whether they were authentic.
So, we worked with a physicist in Berlin, and she developed some tests.
Uh and non just physicists.
Yes, non destructive tests.
So uh, checking uh chemical composition of uh of the ink uh, checking you, you can.
You can test uh the fragments for the types of of chemicals that were used in the in the uh preparation process for them, um and uh a variety of of of uh different, different ways.
I don't understand all the science of it so, Which is why I wasn't doing that kind of work.
Right.
But she, so we sent, he agreed to send a handful of his fragments to Berlin for testing to check and see whether they were likely authentic or forgeries.
It's very difficult to prove one way or the other after the fact, right?
We can have very strong, well founded reasons.
For thinking that something is a forgery or thinking that something is authentic.
But unless you've actually dug it out of the ground in a controlled archaeological excavation, who knows, right?
So, and that's the problem with a lot of these.
And you have a lot of people who want them to be real too.
Yeah, you do.
I mean, how badly does the owner of these fragments want them?
Not only that, but the religious types who want them to support their religious ideas.
Yeah, them too.
So, I mean, it essentially, Like it's a scaffolding for Judaism and the history of Abraham and Noah.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff.
In fact, it is.
Because without the Dead Sea Scrolls, you could say that Judaism is way newer than we.
That's true, right?
Yeah.
It's interesting you bring that up because so, like, after Skoyan, a bunch of different, and they tend to be Christian institutions, started buying these tiny little fragments on the antiquities market between the 1990s and 2010.
One of them, Is Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I think it's just outside of Dallas.
Yeah.
So they bought a bunch of fragments and they had an exhibition where they put them on display.
You know, people could come and look at them.
The press, you know, wrote articles about them.
In one of the articles written at the beginning of the exhibition, the director of the exhibit was quoted.
As saying, they so they have one of the fragments they have is of a text from a book in the Bible called Leviticus.
Um, and the text on this fragment is from a passage in the book of Leviticus that most Christians interpret to mean that if you're a homosexual, you need to be executed.
So they had a fragment which had you know this text on it, and in an interview, the uh, the director said that.
The seminary actually paid a lot more money for this particular fragment because he said in the article, he says this attests to an eternal truth from God's word.
So, yeah, there's absolutely religious implications to this.
But that, and again, I think that particular fragment is probably a forgery.
But it's, I mean, I haven't looked, I haven't had a close look at it.
And that one has not been carbon dated that we know of?
No.
So the results of the tests that were conducted in Berlin were that most likely the fragments that Scoyne had were forgeries.
Some of them, just to give you an idea.
Sorry, what did you say?
How many?
Couriering Priceless Fragments00:03:20
So he sent nine fragments to Berlin for testing.
Neil really wants me to tell this story.
We have a meal behind the curtain over there.
I was asked to courier the fragments from Oslo to Berlin.
So I was nervous about it because, you know, in my mind, these are priceless artifacts.
So I went to pick them up from Mr. Skoyen's house and he had them all packaged for me.
And I asked him, I'm like, do you have, is there some kind of special documentation or anything that I need when I go through customs?
I mean, it looks kind of weird, right?
I don't know.
Yeah.
What is that in your bag there?
I don't know.
I've never done that before.
That's right.
So he said it would be fine.
And I was like, okay.
And then, you know, it was a small enough package.
I just had it in my carry on.
Flew into Berlin, got through customs okay.
Checked at the place to buy bus tickets.
And the bus was coming in like four minutes.
So I went out to the stand to catch my bus.
I got on the bus and I sat down.
Have you ever had that feeling when you sit down and you know that something's amiss, like something's not right, but you can't quite put your finger on it?
So it takes me, you know, three or four minutes to realize that I don't have my bag, which has all these.
Priceless fragments in it.
So I'm freaking out, and the bus is driving away from the airport.
I run to the front of the bus, and I say to the bus driver, and I don't speak German.
My German is really, really bad.
So I say to the bus driver in English, I said, please stop.
I says, I have to get off the bus.
And the guy just ignored me, he just wouldn't even look at me.
So I like to yell at him.
I'm like, I got, I have, you stopped the bus.
I have to get off the bus.
And he still wouldn't.
And people, you know, other people on the bus could see I was getting agitated.
So someone actually came up and started yelling at him in German for me.
And he stops the bus and I had to hoof it back to the airport.
It's like a mile, you know.
So I'm like running back to the airport, thinking about ways of, you know, concealing my identity and maybe having to go into hiding.
Just in case I lost Mr. Strange's priceless manuscripts.
But yeah, I was right.
I was freaking out about this.
So, but yeah, and I didn't, I walked into the airport and I saw like my suitcase was like literally, it was just sitting right there in the, like right at the place where you buy busted because there's people like wandering around.
Unreal.
It was nuts.
So, so you eventually got them there.
I got them there.
Thank God.
Or whoever.
Salt Particles on Texts00:10:57
How many, what percentage of them were fake?
So, we of the nine that were tested, we were we had a high confidence that all of them were all of them were and some of the features of them that that that tipped us off on this.
I'll give you some examples.
This was a major one.
So, most of them are animal skin, which is vellum.
It's like a really, really thin, finely prepared leather.
Cow hide is it cow skin?
The Dead Sea Scrolls are cow and goat hide.
Okay.
There's a handful that are actually papyrus, which is papyrus made from drying and sticking together like these special papyrus leaves.
And they'll put them together, you know, one on top of the other and use a special resin to keep them stuck together.
Over time, these materials start to delaminate.
So the top layers start to peel away a little bit.
It's papyrus.
Yes.
Okay.
Also on vellum.
Oh, okay.
You will get places where the top layers.
Of the vellum will peel away or flake off.
Vellum is the animal heart?
That's the animal skin, yes.
I actually think vellum is technically deer, but I don't know.
I call it vellum.
Tomato, tomato.
That's right.
So one of the things that we did notice that we had confirmed by the physicist was that on some of Skoyan's fragments where there's writing, the writing.
Would slip into places where the top layer has already flaked away, right?
So, so it was already damaged, yeah, written on damaged material by the time that the writing is added to it.
So, you know, but it did like we're looking at photographs and then we're looking under a microscope.
Um, but it's still, you know, it's still not perfectly clear.
So, the physicist that we worked with had this.
Incredibly high powered special microscope that basically makes like a 3D topography of the fragment and is able, you're able to see then all the layers and you can see very clearly.
Yeah, there's ink that literally falls off this layer and drops into this giant valley here, right?
So that's one of the things that we were able to see, but maybe one of the craziest clues about the forgeries.
Was on this one manuscript, there were salt particles.
What kind of particles?
Salt.
Salt.
So, and I think, you know, which wouldn't be unusual because the Dead Sea Scrolls come from the Dead Sea region, which has, you know, lots of them will have, you know, salt deposits on them.
The Dead Sea is like a super salty sea.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It's a very salty region.
Yeah.
So, um, On the fragments that I've looked at that are authentic, where you can see some of these salt crystals, they look different, right?
Like they have sort of a, it's not a uniform composition to them.
They look kind of like these weird crystals, right?
Under the microscope.
The salt granules that were on this particular fragment were cubical, like little salt crystals.
And in the testing, it was discovered that these were actually table salt.
Table salt wasn't invented until the 15th or 16th century.
So it's amazing that they can discern the difference.
I mean, I guess it's not amazing just to like a layman like me, the fact that they could figure out the difference between table salt and sea salt.
I know, right?
Natural sea salt.
You do, yeah.
Table salt has a specific chemical composition because it's processed, right?
So you know the things that go into processing table salt.
And that's one of the ways in which you can identify it and distinguish it from like a natural.
Uh, a natural salt, and I don't know whether I mean it's still a mystery.
It looks like somebody literally took a salt shaker and just sprinkled salt on it.
Was that an attempt to try and convince someone that oh, look, there's salt on it, it came from the Dead Sea, or was it just an accident?
Even somebody was having lunch.
Have you ever heard of any other ancient scrolls on antiquity markets that have been forged?
Oh, sure, really?
Yeah, so like there's a famous one that's fairly recent, actually.
There was big news that was made, I think around 2000, it was probably sometime between 2010 and 2013, of a fragment written in Coptic.
Coptic is like, I don't know, the best way to describe it, it's like it's in a language that was used in Egypt, but the letters are Greek.
But there's a Coptic church, an ancient Coptic church.
So there's a lot of ancient Coptic Christian literature.
So There was a fragment that was discovered and published by a very prominent New Testament scholar at Harvard.
And she called it the Gospel of Jesus' Wife because in it, it seems to tell this story about how Jesus was potentially married and had a woman that he.
There it is.
Wow.
That's it, huh?
And it's about the size of a credit card.
Can you punch in on that?
Oh, there.
Thanks, Steve.
Yeah.
So, what is this?
This is Coptic?
That's Coptic.
I don't read Coptic, by the way.
That looks like English.
But I see an N, a T, an M. You probably actually see an I, an I.
Well, not English, but like English letters.
Yeah.
So, RCR alphabet.
That's actually an Ada and a Tav and an N, a T, and a T.
Okay.
So, this was Jesus' evidence that Jesus had a wife?
Yeah.
How so?
Well, it talks about, I don't remember what exactly the text says.
And like I said, I don't read Coptic.
But it makes reference to a woman that Jesus seems to be married to.
It was very exciting when this was published.
Now, over the course of a few years of investigation, this is a fragment that was, I believe, carbon dated.
Mm hmm.
And it came up really late.
So, like, how late?
I think it was.
It was maybe 9th, 10th century AD.
And paleographers, the people who analyze the script, were suggesting that it was much, much older than that, like 3rd, 2nd, 3rd, 4th century.
But this one made big headlines.
And the scholar who published it at Harvard ended up kind of having her.
It was, it's these are the sorts of career ending things that happen, but uh, she was a scholar at Harvard, yeah.
What kind of scholar do you know?
She's a New Testament scholar, a New Testament scholar.
So that's all that's so funny to me.
I talked about this on so many podcasts, but like to be a New Testament scholar seems so weird, odd, yeah, odd that you just want to study this one thing, like to have this narrow folk.
I mean, I guess it's not that weird if you think about it.
I mean, just like the nature of the topic, it's weird, yeah, like it's understandable to have a narrow field of.
Of research.
Specializations are getting narrower and narrower too, right?
Just as knowledge expands.
And maybe to give a sense of how this works, I know one of my professors in grad school talked about when he was a student, the entire bibliography of everything that had been published in every language, like in terms of scholarship.
On a topic like the Gospel of John, which is one of the Gospels in the New Testament, you know, that would, he said, that is something that somebody could actually read in their lifetime.
Like it was only 40, 50, 60 pages of sources.
By the time I was a student, you're talking about the bibliography exploding to thousands and thousands of pages.
Like there's just, there's so much.
And because the knowledge base grows, It becomes more difficult to do things very broadly, which is why people start to specialize.
Specializations become much more narrow as a result of that, right?
Which isn't great, but it's kind of the situation we're in now.
Well, how many of these New Testament scholars are actually Christians?
Sure.
Like, this is an important question, or even biblical scholars generally, because not all biblical scholars are New Testament scholars.
No, I've had a few on here that I've had actually one biblical scholar on here, I think, that is not.
A Christian or a practicing Christian.
I think two now.
Oh, two.
Wow.
Awesome.
You're number two.
So I'm number two.
So the majority, I would say, are Christians or Jewish.
And I mean, this stands to reason because the people who would have the most interest in these texts, in this literature, would subscribe to the beliefs.
And that's where I started too.
Really?
Right.
Yeah.
I started, I was originally planning to be a pastor.
Oh, wow.
At a church, didn't particularly like it very much, had an affinity for the languages and the history.
And over time, just kind of switched tracks.
Questioning Younger Beliefs00:04:17
And then over more time, I, you know, I just stopped believing the things that I believed when I was younger.
What do you think made you stop believing in it?
That's a complicated question.
And it's, I mean, it's a variety of things.
One of the things, certainly, is the fact that when you go into the scholarship of the Bible, you quickly discover that it's a very different type of book than you thought it was, and that all the literature in there is quite different than you thought it was.
How so?
Well, you grow up thinking, or at least I grew up thinking, that Moses was a guy who actually led a group of people out of Egypt.
Into Israel, and then he crossed the Red Sea, and all this stuff actually happened.
You learn things like this, right?
Or that Daniel was actually a guy who was living in Babylon, and King Nebuchadnezzar actually put him in a den full of lions.
These are the sorts of things that lots of people are taught as having actually happened.
You discover that's all not what happened.
So there probably was no Moses.
The Israelites probably did not.
Come out of Egypt.
In fact, what we know now is that the Israelites, the people from whom the Old Testament, the text of the Hebrew Bible came, were Canaanites.
There were people who were always there.
And it's, you know, the religions as it's presented in the Bible is you get this impression that this was the way people worshiped God all the time.
But then when you encounter the archaeological record and when you compare these texts, To other ancient Near Eastern texts, you say, well, no.
You know, the people who wrote these biblical texts probably came out of a world that looked very much like all of their neighbors.
So, one of the things you think lots of people think when they encounter the Old Testament is that everyone was a monotheist.
They all believe there's just one God and all the other gods are fake monists.
So, yeah, it's, and that's just not true.
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Prophets and Assyrian Threats00:15:38
It's linked below.
Now back to the show.
You know, the original writers of the Bible were polytheists.
They believed in many gods.
But the way the texts have been written, the way they present the situation, they're deeply biased.
They propagandize a lot of this material.
A lot of the texts were written by people who were.
Had their own political religious agendas that they're trying to forward.
And you start to see all this sort of stuff.
And it starts to, I guess, raise questions.
It started to raise questions for me about how much, I mean, how much can I trust these texts, this Bible?
What do I, you know, in terms of it being something divine?
No, it's not that.
It's a very human book.
So I think that's, you know, kind of where it started.
For me, it also makes, I mean, in my mind now, it makes the text actually quite a bit more interesting and exciting because you're dealing with real people, right?
In real situations.
But yeah, I don't know.
It was that, that was a contributing factor.
But there were, you know, there's other things too.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that seems so crazy to me, what our buddy Neil over there explained to me, was that I think it's like 900 or 1,000 years.
After Moses' death, until we get actual writing about him, yeah, which was what the Septuagint.
Uh, well, there's there's uh, there's Greek writings that mention his name, and we actually were actually just talking about this yesterday.
Uh, I personally think that you can see some reflections of this Moses figure a little earlier than that, not a thousand years before that, but I think you can you can see some mention of him as early as maybe the eighth.
Or the seventh century BC, which is still 500 years after he supposedly.
What is that?
What are you referring to?
So there's a text, it's in the Bible.
There's a text in the book of Hosea.
This is a prophet who wrote probably in the eighth century BCE.
And I can probably actually just bring it up here.
Yeah, give Kip the wheel.
There you go.
Okay.
So we'll go to Amos 12.
So this is a prophecy that scholars tend to date to the 8th century.
And here he's, I'll just get to stuff where.
This is from what text specifically?
So this is the book of Amos, which is in the Bible.
Which was written when?
Sorry, not Amos, Hosea.
Hosea.
And when was this text written?
Most scholars think 8th century.
And the reason we think that is because all of what.
All of what Hosea is talking about is the end of the kingdom of Israel in the north in 722 BCE.
But he's writing before that has happened.
Like he's writing to the people who are there and telling them, you know, you're in great danger because the Assyrians are coming to kill you.
You need to make all these dramatic changes because God is angry at you.
And if you don't, then the Assyrians.
Are going to come and destroy you, and that's something that eventually happened, right?
But this is all written prior, you know, beforehand.
Um, so in this text, though, he does talk a little bit about, um, can you zoom in a little bit?
I probably can.
Uh, let me get to the right.
Oh, no, that's why I'm an Amos.
This is my own translation.
Okay.
Of the text.
Let's go there.
Nice and big.
All right.
So here.
That's gorgeous.
Yeah.
So now where it says Ephraim here.
So Ephraim has said, this is speaking to the people who live in the city of Samaria.
Okay.
Sometime before 722 BCE.
So this is before the Assyrians are coming to kill them all, right?
Right.
So.
And Hosea, the prophet, is speaking to them and telling them, You know, you have fucked up.
And because of that, the Assyrians are coming to kill you.
You need to fix this.
You need to change your ways.
Otherwise, you're all going to be dead.
And here, this is what he says.
He says, So Ephraim has said, Yes, I am rich.
I have sought power for myself.
All of my property they cannot hold against me for wrongdoing, which is sin.
Now, Hosea is speaking as if he's God.
I, Yahweh, am your God.
Ever since the land of Egypt, I will settle you once again in tents, as in the days of old, when I spoke to prophets, when I increased visions, parables by the hands of prophets.
But in Gilead is iniquity, and they are utterly worthless.
So you have here, you have mention of this exit from Egypt.
These people came out of Egypt ever since the land of Egypt.
They were settling, they were living in tents ever since the days of old when I spoke to prophets, when I increased visions.
Let me just look here.
Do I have another?
There's another part of this.
So here we go.
So this is basically what academia or the consensus is that this is, he's talking about something that's happening in like 3000 BC.
No, no, no, 8th century BC.
8th century.
Okay, 800.
Got it.
Sometime before 722 BC.
So much closer to the death of Moses.
Closer.
And again, importantly, scholars by and large don't think that there was a Moses.
They think that this guy was certainly.
Really?
Yeah.
Even religious scholars?
Well, a number of religious scholars, yes.
People who subscribe to it.
Not all of them.
Okay.
And, you know, religious people will have complicated ways of, I guess, compartmentalizing and even aligning.
Various things that they believe.
One of the really interesting things, yeah, here, this, I can just scrolling down towards the end, he goes on to say, I think this part is quite interesting.
By a prophet, Yahweh brought Israel up from Egypt.
By a prophet, he was kept.
So scholars look at that and think, well, that's probably an early reference to this Moses figure.
But I think it's really interesting because he's not named, it doesn't call him Moses.
Right.
So when I look at this, I think, you know, this Moses tradition, wherever it came from, he probably didn't have the name Moses to start.
And it probably looked quite a bit different than the story that ended up surviving and being told in, you know, the book of Exodus.
So it, you know, it's, I would say that it's something that you can trace maybe as far, I would say the earliest you can trace it far.
As far back as probably like the 8th century.
Okay, but biologically, how early can we trace it?
Biologically, you're the actual text.
The actual manuscripts, the actual artifacts themselves.
No, not until the third century BCE.
So, and, you know, it's in what language?
That would be in Greek, I believe.
But we do have Hebrew manuscripts from the same period of time as we do, which is where you will find the name Moses.
Yeah.
Hebrew manuscripts, and that's Dead Sea Scrolls?
Yep.
Okay.
Within the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Wow.
So, yeah.
And this is, it's frustrating on the one hand because you can't get all your, you can't get, The actual artifacts themselves, right?
Like you can't get the physical evidence for the stuff that's being reported.
But by the same token, a lot of this stuff didn't just appear out of thin air.
These were traditions that people kept and transmitted over longer periods of time and I think changed and were reshaped.
So the idea is this was probably, you believe, found.
Whenever it was found, it was dated back to 300 BC, probably.
Yeah.
And it was a rewriting or a retelling of a story that happened around 800.
Yeah, probably.
So, and some of this too, like the way scholars, we do have, now I'll mention a couple of other things.
The very oldest biblical texts that we have are these tiny little silver amulets called the Ketif Hinom amulets.
They contain.
Text on them written in Hebrew of a priestly blessing that appears in the biblical book of Numbers, chapter 23.
And these date to the sixth century BCE.
So, now what are they made of?
Silver.
So, somebody had written out this little blessing on these little amulets, probably rolled them up, carried them, you know, maybe on a necklace or put them in a pocket as like a charm to protect your, to protect someone from the language?
Hebrew.
Wow.
So, and the old Hebrew, like the actual Hebrew.
When you see stuff like this, right, like this is Hebrew that we're most familiar with, this particular script here is actually Aramaic.
Hebrew script looks quite different from this.
And what happened was the Jews or the people who came out.
Out of Israel, uh, so sorry, I have to go back here.
Um, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 or 587 BC, and he took people who lived in Jerusalem and shipped them all back to Babylon.
Right.
Um, Aramaic was the lingua franca of Babylon at the time this happened.
That's the language that they spoke in and that they wrote.
It's very closely related to Hebrew.
They have the same letters, they just look different.
So, what happened was the people who left Jerusalem and went to Babylon started collecting their Hebrew texts in this new script, which is why it looks like this.
But the Ketif Hinnom amulets are written on this old form of what we know as actual Hebrew.
An interesting language, like the original language, because it survives in what looks like a couple of different dialects.
You have things like the Moabite inscription, which dates to the 9th century BCE, which was written by a Moabite king named Misha.
He was not an Israelite, but he was using the same language or something very close to the same language as Hebrew.
But scholars identify it as Moabite.
We also have a couple of texts written in another language like Ammonite.
And the reason.
These are all coming from where?
All from this tiny little area.
This is all the same as the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Well, it's the same area.
Same area.
Same area.
But this is way earlier, right?
Okay.
So these languages are all very closely related to the point where it's difficult even to tell the differences between them.
Okay.
But it looks like there's these languages are starting to develop in this region of Israel, Palestine, modern day Israel, Palestine, but as far back as the 9th century BC.
And then the only surviving language out of that group is Hebrew, which, you know, the Jews were using to write their literature at the time that they were writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And they wrote all sorts of stuff.
In Hebrew, because I mentioned we found anywhere from 200 to 300 copies of texts that we know from, you know, the Bible.
They had all sorts of other stuff too.
Like, what other kind of stuff were they writing about?
So they were, they had, you know, they had texts that contained stories in them.
Lots of these are really fragmentary, unfortunately, but they were telling stories of famous people from the Bible.
Like I did all my.
This is biblical still.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, but it's, it's, they're, they're, They're really different, right?
Was there any like political stuff or medical stuff?
No medical stuff or legal stuff?
Lots of legal stuff.
Really?
Yes.
So, one of the most interesting manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls is something called the Temple Scroll.
And this manuscript was discovered in Cave 11.
So, it was the last cave.
It was discovered in 1953.
It is the largest of all the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Measuring well, I think it's well over 30 feet.
I'm not sure.
There it is.
Now, if you click on that image there, just it should pull the whole thing up, or does it?
No.
This thing's 30 feet.
Yeah, actually, you can see he can go back to the other page for a second.
You can get a hit the X or hit the X.
Yeah.
You can get a.
Oh, no, not there.
Let me actually.
Can I pull it up?
Sure.
I'll pull it up.
It's probably easier if I do this.
Okay, let me pull this up and I'll show you.
So, the temple, as I'm bringing this up, I'll talk a little bit about this.
Right, right.
It's not that one.
So, it's this very, very long manuscript.
Let's see.
Dead Sea Scrolls.
Is it.
I have galleries map.
Actually, it's better if I.
I hate using Safari, but I have like my.
My bookmarks on Safari.
Temple Scroll Mysteries00:14:46
All of these Hebrew texts date to about the same time, about between 1 to 200 BC.
Yeah.
So here, I can show you the Temple Scroll.
Oh, wow.
So actually, let's just go down here and do this.
There you go.
Wow.
It's gigantic.
So let me ask you this out of all of, we talked earlier about a lot of fakes.
Yeah.
Out of all of the texts that we know came from those caves, are all of those real?
We're really confident that they are.
And there's a variety of reasons for this.
First of all, it's the carbon dating.
Secondly, there have been DNA testing done on a number of the manuscripts as well, which has helped.
One of the so I had mentioned that Bedouin sheepherders from the Ta'amida tribe had discovered a lot of the material from.
The caves in the desert.
Scholars have actually gone and excavated the caves themselves and also found fragments that they've been able to physically match with stuff that the Bedouin was bringing in as well.
So, this is an example of where, with a high degree of confidence, we know this stuff came from where it's supposed to have come from.
It was found in the dirt.
At the site.
So, but the temple scroll itself is a legal text.
It is a collection of rules and instructions for the readers in terms of how they're supposed to worship God in the last days when God comes back.
And was everything based on God?
Pretty much.
These people were deeply.
And this, we're talking like mono religious.
At this point, yeah.
But in a, you know, they still believed in other like spiritual beings, lesser beings.
They believed in angels and demons and things like that.
So, although there's a variety of different stuff, stories, legal stuff, it's all based on the Bible.
It's all based on, yeah.
Yeah.
It's all centered on that.
Okay.
So, and that's, I'm, you know, that's just what people wrote about.
Is there anything that's not about the Bible?
In the, in various other caves, yeah.
So, we, I mean, scholars have found like, Stuff that most people would consider pretty boring, but are really interesting to historians and anthropologists.
We find lots of documentary texts.
So these are letters, these are bills of sale, these are lists, these are contracts.
You know, and they would be written on a lot of them appear on papyrus, but most of them appear on what are called ostraca.
Which are fragments of pottery, right?
Because these writing materials, animal skins, papyrus, it's really expensive.
It's really hard to make.
So, what was absolutely plentiful to people in the area were fragments of pottery.
So, they would write on those contracts, letters that's what they would use.
And we literally have thousands and thousands and thousands of these things.
And it's using these that scholars tend to get a strong sense of who these people were, how they interacted with one another, their culture, their ideas, their familiarity with language and with reading and writing, even.
And, you know, most of these are written in Aramaic, which is the language that people were speaking in the area, but lots were also written in Hebrew, and a handful were written in Greek.
So, yeah, it's.
But it was this particular part of the world, though, was a religiously saturated world where most, I mean, as near as we can tell, based on the stuff that we have at our disposal, people believed that the gods or their god affected every part of their lives.
The people who wrote and collected the Dead Sea Scrolls have.
Texts where they seem to have believed that they would commute, they believed that the temple in Jerusalem was totally corrupt and you know was just no longer functional, it was just terrible, couldn't use the temple anymore.
So they can't go and do the rituals that they used to do or participate in the ceremonies that they used to at the temple.
So, uh, they believed.
That they could actually access the celestial temple, the temple of God Himself, and that they would commune with the angels on a regular basis.
In the war scroll that I mentioned, where they talked about this battle that they were going to fight with the forces of evil in the last days, the beginning part of this text talks about how you're supposed to organize yourself as an army.
You know, things that you're supposed to do in order to prepare yourself for this final battle.
And in this text, they were very, very concerned.
Well, generally, they were very, very concerned about being ritually pure, making sure that you were clean basically, because you were constantly in the presence of divine beings.
In these military camps, camped alongside of angels, right?
You know, getting ready for the final battle.
So, and that's the kind of stuff that we read about in the Temple Scroll.
Do people like you take John Marco Allegro seriously?
Oh, that's a.
So, on some things, yes.
On every, not all things, though.
So, he dedicated like 30 years of his life, right?
Something like that.
A large portion of his life to deciphering and translating these Dead Sea Scrolls.
Yes.
And his idea is that it was based on ancient fertility rituals.
Right.
And the mushrooms, his idea of the mushroom was like, and correct me if I'm wrong here, because I'm sure you're way more familiar with him than I am.
But the way mushrooms grow are very different from plants.
Right.
So things aren't fertilized.
There's no seed, right?
There's some mycelium comes out of the ground.
Rain comes from the sky and these mushrooms appear.
So they're kind of like he equates that to the Virgin Mary and Jesus being born.
Yeah.
So his idea is Jesus was a psychedelic mushroom, right?
Yeah.
You like that, Steve?
That's a good summary.
But yeah, that's basically his idea.
And that's a particular idea that most scholars, I mean, all scholars have basically suggested.
Which is not surprising they don't agree with that.
No, that's true.
However, the reasons, you know, many of them dismissed Allegro because it conflicted with religious institutions.
But that's not the only problem.
Like, from an academic perspective, his work is sloppy.
So, yeah.
How so?
Well, one of the things that Allegro's theory is based on is his reading of ancient Sumerian.
Yes, yes, yes.
And this was actually in the first chapter of his book.
I was even getting red flags popping up to me because I didn't know.
I mean, I had no idea that you could actually take roots from Hebrew and link them to Sumerian.
You can't.
You can't.
Okay.
That's the foundation of everything.
It is.
That's the foundation of his entire book.
Yes.
And that's the major, major problem with it.
As far as I can tell, I'm not sure he knew Sumerian.
But did it?
Karl Ruck endorsed his book, though.
And Karl Ruck's like one of the most legendary classicists out there.
He doesn't know Sumerian either.
I don't know.
But don't classicists know about this, like the links between languages and the roots?
It depends on the scholar, and not every scholar is able to recognize.
Like, one of the things Allegro makes some interesting connections, but when you actually sit down and talk to a Sumerian specialist, and I know a few.
Oh, are you right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I should actually put you in touch with one or two.
I'd love to.
Yeah.
But they'll tell you it's nonsense.
Basically, what Allegro was doing.
Was he looked at the way some Sumerian words seem to sound when you put them together in a compound?
Like if you use this particular verb and this noun, it makes this particular sound that sounds a little bit like this Hebrew word.
So it must mean that, when in actual fact, it doesn't.
And it's complicated further by the fact that in Sumerian, the cuneiform script, this is what the script that the Sumerian language is written in.
The cuneiform script that's used for Sumerian is composed of these signs that are made with a triangular wedge by pressing it into soft clay.
So you use this wedge to make these different, in different combinations, to make these signs.
Talking about like a tool, like a little tool.
Yeah, it's like a little.
Chopstick, but in a triangular wedge shape, and you press it down.
That's how you make the cuneiform signs.
In Sumerian, one sign can have like seven, eight, nine different meanings based on how it's used in context.
Wow.
Right?
So, I mean, it's not all that out there.
If you think about it in English, you have words like there.
which could mean that place over there or their house referring to, you know, Neil's family and where they live.
So, you know, it's not all that out there.
It is a little bit more complicated.
But I think what Allegra was doing was looking at these signs out of context and, you know, mixing up meanings that they might have with meanings he thought they could have.
And then the other problem, and this is something actually that his daughter, Judith Brown, wrote a nice biography.
About John Allegro, and she pointed this out actually as well that when Allegro had like hundreds of footnotes in his book documenting the usage of these Sumerian words and what they mean,
he would put an asterisk beside a lot of these Sumerian words where he had this inkling like.
It sounds like it could mean this, but there's no examples in actual Sumerian of this particular word being used.
So he's basically hypothesizing.
He's thinking maybe there could be a word in Sumerian, even though we don't have any evidence for it.
So he was basically making up these roots as a way to forward his idea.
So this was the scholarly critique.
Of his work, you know, people who know the language pick it up and look at it, and they'll tell you, Yeah, this just does not work.
And it's true, it's problematic as well, I think, from an historical perspective, because by the time of the first century, when, um, you know, the New Testament document, well, you by the time when the Christians first emerge, um, you know, none of them are reading Sumerian.
Sumerian is basically a dead language by this point, nobody speaks it.
Or reads it.
And then another final problem with Allegro's work is he wrote this book back in the 1970s.
And there's a pile more published Sumerian literature since then, which has dramatically expanded what scholars actually know about the language.
So more was found?
Yeah.
There's actually, and there are literally thousands and thousands of Sumerian texts that nobody has even translated.
So, yeah, there's piles and piles.
Where did they find those?
Are they tablets?
They're all tablets?
Yeah, these are mostly out in modern day Iraq, is where a lot of this stuff comes from.
Are these also found in caves?
I think maybe.
Most of them, though, are just excavated out of buildings that have been buried.
And there's like emerald tablets and shit like that.
I don't know about any of that.
You ever heard of Billy Carson?
Ancient Advanced Human Beings00:03:54
Yeah.
He's been on here.
He talks about all the tablets that he's read.
How's Billy Carson's Sumerian?
Uh, according to him, it's pretty good, really.
Yeah, no, I wouldn't believe him honestly.
No, uh, I mean, having I love all the ancient, I know, yeah, you know, aliens and it's super fun, but you should honestly take it from people who actually know this stuff because I don't think I mean, in the stuff that I've listened to from Billy Carson, he doesn't, I don't think he actually knows.
Well, that I mean, that stuff originally came from uh, Zachariah Sitchin, that's right, yeah, exactly.
I think there's They're pulling a lot of the ideas from Akira Sitchin, the Anunnaki, came from Nibiru and came here to create humans.
I should put you in touch with my friend because he's.
Yeah, I will.
So, if you know, it would be a bittersweet moment, but we like to, I mean, you like to play in the sandbox, but in the end, you want to believe things that are true, right?
I mean, yeah, what is true nowadays?
Right.
You know, it's the truth.
Truth is a very slippery thing.
That's true.
Especially in the age of the internet.
Indeed.
It is the, it's a wonderful tool, but it's the bane.
Of my existence.
Have you ever heard of these?
These are, these are, these are granite.
This is a 3D print of a granite, very cool, of a dynastic Egyptian vase.
And they were found, and most of them are found in the Bent Pyramid in Egypt.
And they had them scanned and measured with light scanning machines.
Yeah, right.
And they found out they were perfectly symmetrical within, oh, that's fun.
Within the variation, like the most.
Unsymmetrical, they are is like less than the width of a human hair.
That's wild, and it's made out of most of them are made out of like red granite, which is one of the hardest stones on earth.
So it goes against like the copper chisel pounding stones that the consensus is the Egyptians were using in the dynastic period, which is like wild, which really props up our alien idea.
Or I don't know, maybe just human beings are pretty clever.
And I, I don't know how crazy is it that we can't figure out how they did it back then.
Like, like a one plus two doesn't equal three.
I know, yeah.
So, as someone who studies the ancient world, one element of the ancient world, um, you know, I have come to realize that every time I have uh posited, well, there's no way an ancient person could have done this or known this, oftentimes.
You know, it's, they were much more on top of things than we give them credit for.
So, and I don't know.
I know.
I like the idea that, I mean, I don't know if I like the idea, but there's a lot of people who have the idea that way back in history, human beings were more advanced than we are today.
Yeah.
And that maybe like a cataclysm reset us back to the Stone Age.
Yeah.
I don't, yeah.
Or maybe humanity.
Maybe human beings, we atrophy like cells do.
We get less and less intelligent.
Well, I think that that's certainly a theory that, on the basis of the way things seem to be going over the last 20, 30, 40 years, that's something that you could forward.
But yeah, I don't know.
I like to, I just like to see more evidence.
Yeah, me too, man.
Septuagint Word Variations00:15:02
So it's definitely a mystery.
It is definitely a mystery.
But I don't, yeah, I don't know anything about aliens.
Yeah.
The Allegro, I think Allegro was onto something with the mushrooms too, because there's a lot of, I really, I read recently, actually, again, was Road to Eleusis by Karl Ruck, where he talks about the mystery cults.
Yeah.
And all of the drug rituals they were doing with the psychedelic ergot and stuff like that.
And I think my very, Terribly formed idea of what God is.
I think it makes the most sense that these people were finding God through psychedelics and they were seeing God through experiences.
I absolutely think that happened.
But I don't think that's all that happened.
So, and even in terms of, you know, developing altered states of consciousness as a way of accessing the divine, you don't always need psychedelics.
No, you do that, right?
That's true.
And this is something that, and you can go to, you know, the Pentecostal church down the street and see people engage in this same kind of stuff today without the usage of drugs, where just.
The usage of, you know, high emotion, highly emotional music, the repetition of, yeah, the repetition of words and songs, breathing, all these things can produce these ecstatic states by which we think we have these psychedelic experiences.
Sure.
So, and I, you know, I think oftentimes I think our brains, They will produce images and thoughts and ideas in our heads that can seem so real just on their own without the usage of drugs, right?
From an economic standpoint, it makes sense to me that this is a significant.
I'm not denying that psychedelics were used in antiquity, I think they absolutely were.
And that they were connected to religious experiences.
But in terms of religious experience generally, you know, it was way cheaper to just produce altered states of consciousness through ways in which we affect our own bodies through some of these, you know, other rituals.
And It's difficult to.
This is really the big challenge, right?
Is reading texts and trying to gauge the usage of chemicals through the literature that we have.
It's probably easier in some contexts, but not all contexts.
Like in the text that I read, you know, there is not much of any discussion at all.
About substances.
And I know, you know, in the Hebrew texts.
Yeah.
In the Hebrew texts.
And I would say that the Greek texts, the Greek religious texts of the Christians, the New Testament, the early Christians, even there, I just don't see it.
So, sorry.
Have you read a lot of it?
The New Testament?
A lot of the Greek texts?
Not a ton.
That's not really my thing.
So, but.
Yeah.
What is the, when it comes to the period of time we're looking at when the Dead Sea Scrolls came from?
Yeah.
What is the percentage of texts, like out of all the texts that we have, how many of them are in this ancient Hebrew language compared to other languages that we have?
I wouldn't even know.
Just because I'm, and depending on the time period, and I mean, we have a lot of ancient literature in a variety of other languages, but you're right in thinking that it's a small number compared to texts that you have in a variety of other languages.
And one of the reasons why the Dead Sea Scrolls have received the amount of attention they have is because of.
The religious because it props up religion, it does, and and this is this has been a problem.
Is this why this consensus among scholars is that the Septuagint was a translation from Hebrew into Greek?
This is getting back to the thing that you and Amon sure had the debate on Neil's channel about.
So, the reason, no, I don't think that I don't think it has anything to do with that.
Okay, so the reasons why scholars Think that the Septuagint was translated from Hebrew texts is because when you investigate the two texts side by side,
the Hebrew next to the Greek, you see things taking place within the Greek texts that indicate there is a Hebrew syntactical feature that they are.
Grappling with that, they're dealing with.
Like they're not, so Greek and Hebrew are not related.
Like they're distantly related languages, right?
Greek is Indo European, Hebrew is Northwest Semitic.
The languages function differently.
So, you know, there are clues within the Greek text, and it's like any translation, right?
You encounter colloquialisms or idioms or turns of phrase in one language that don't translate well.
Into another language.
And when someone encounters a feature like that of the text, not quite knowing what to do with it, they'll develop various strategies.
And there are things that we can actually point to in the Greek text where we see that happening.
I mean, I know you talked to Dan McClellan about a few of these, right?
He mentioned the.
I just don't understand how we have this.
Septuagint, which is in Greek.
Yeah.
And why they came up with, oh no, it's, well, it's in Greek, but we're going to just hypothesize that this was originally Hebrew.
Well, but there's no evidence that it was originally Hebrew.
There is lots of evidence.
Well, first of all, let's talk about the manuscripts.
Okay.
How many Septuagint manuscripts are there?
I have no idea.
There are, so we have Septuagint manuscripts.
I don't know anything about any of this stuff.
I'm coming in, like I told you, my education on this whole topic is Amun and Neil.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So, in terms of Septuagint manuscripts, we have a whole bunch.
From like the third, fourth, fifth century AD.
Okay.
The farther back you go, you know, first century AD.
Written in Greek.
Written in Greek, first century BC, second century BC, there's very few.
Okay.
We have tiny, tiny little fragments, little bits and pieces.
I think our oldest Septuagint manuscripts date to around the mid second century BCE.
Just in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we literally have.
Thousands and thousands of fragments, Hebrew fragments, that are from the second century, first century BC.
Now, one of the things that we also see in the Hebrew fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as I mentioned before, you know, we have multiple copies of individual books of the Bible, you know, multiple copies of the book of Isaiah, multiple copies of the book of Daniel, Genesis, Exodus, all these different books.
In different versions.
One of the things about the Septuagint that we have, which is, you know, I believe that the Septuagint, this Greek text of the Bible that we have, is mostly drawn from a particular manuscript called the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates to the fourth century BCE, or fourth century CE, fourth century AD.
AD.
Right?
So, one of the things that you see when you compare that text to the Hebrew text is in a lot of places, It's pretty dramatically different.
For example, the book of Jeremiah is the largest book by word count in Hebrew in the Old Testament.
And the Septuagint version of it is shorter by, I think it's 15%.
So it's a much shorter text and it's in a dramatically different order.
It's clearly way different.
There's other texts from the Bible that are like this.
The book of Exodus is like this.
The book of 1 Samuel is like this.
So you're saying, and I'm just trying to make sure I understand this correctly, you're saying that the Greek is using less words and the Hebrew is using more words?
What I'm saying is that in certain places, it looks like if we think that the, let's, for the sake of this part of the discussion, let's say that there's a Hebrew original to the Greek.
Okay.
What it looks like is that the Septuagint is using a different Hebrew text than the Hebrew text that we have preserved.
So it's very different.
Now, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have discovered Hebrew copies that look like the text of the Septuagint in terms of the differences.
Compared to the Hebrew text that we have inherited.
So, I know this gets complicated.
Yeah.
But within the Dead Sea Scrolls, you've got different versions of the same text.
They're not all exactly the same.
So, there's copies.
Yes, copies, and some of them really, really different.
For example, as I was talking about the book of Jeremiah, in the Septuagint, their version, the Septuagint version, the Greek version, ends in Jeremiah chapter 44.
Uh, in the Hebrew version ends in chapter 52, so there's a whole bunch of extra material, right?
And again, like I said, it's all rearranged, and yet we have a Hebrew copy, uh, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, so written in Hebrew, that also ends in chapter 44.
Looks just like this Greek text.
Uh, no, I'm good, I'm okay, stay awake.
Yeah, yeah, sorry, 30 minutes of sleep last night.
It's brutal.
Oh, that hurricane just knocked everything out of you, okay, everyone.
So, so that's on.
I'm just saying.
On the one side of this, we have this manuscript question.
There's not a lot from the period.
We have actually a lot more copies of Hebrew biblical manuscripts from an early period than we do these Greek Septuagint manuscripts.
But there's also the language problems.
And I mean, we could talk a little bit about that if you wanted.
So, my understanding of the language is that the Greek is a much more deep and complex language than the Hebrew.
That's true.
And the Greek has like over a million unique words.
I don't.
And the Hebrew has like 6,000.
I think that the way you make those, the way that Amun comes up with those numbers.
Is that not true?
It depends on how you count them.
I've never heard anyone but him say that there's a million.
He's the only person I've heard suggest that.
I think it's probably more accurate to say closer to 250,000.
I mean, and Neil, can you corroborate this for us?
There's 1.5 unique word forms, but that's counting all of the paradigms of verbs.
Oh, well, see, I mean, you do the same thing.
1.5 million unique word forms.
But what does that mean?
I mean, it.
For example, luo can be luo men, luo seen, luo thin.
So it could be different versions of the word to.
In English, well, I'll try and explain this in English, okay?
So we have a verb, run.
Right, uh, a form of the verb, uh, using the subject and the object.
Uh, if we're speaking about um, you personally running to the store, you could say, I ran to the store, I ran, uh, is a verb form, you ran is another verb form, he ran.
Is another verb form.
In Greek, as well as in Hebrew, that form is represented by a word that looks a little different each time.
So, different ways the same word is used, he's counting that as unique word forms.
So, when you say there are 8,000 unique words in Hebrew, are you doing the same thing?
No.
So, I think he's probably only just counting the roots there.
It's Lomata, it's 20.
250,000.
What'd you say?
250,000 lamata, 1.5 unique word forms in Greek.
That's the number of up to date leptons.
Greek Origins of Aramaic00:15:25
Now, I think importantly, I'm happy to agree that Greek is definitely a more developed language in terms of some of the complexity.
And there's a lot more literature.
So, to my untrained brain on linguistics and history, All this stuff.
I don't know anything about translating.
I've never translated anything in my life.
But the way my layman brain thinks about this is if I found a flying saucer in the desert, and I am a, it came from some advanced civilization, and I'm some primitive ape trying to figure out what it is and recreate it, I would create probably something closer to like a horse and buggy compared to that flying saucer.
So if the Septuagint is this incredibly deep, sophisticated language with many more words being used, How are you coming up with something that is less advanced and less developed out of that?
How do I answer that question?
Just because that's not really how translators, people working with the ancient languages, think through these things.
So, sorry, I framed that backwards.
I think you did.
I framed it backwards.
So, The idea, so if it was originally Hebrew, it was the horse and buggy, and they came up with the flying saucer as the translation, right?
Because it was translated into Greek, which was the much more complex language.
That makes sense.
That's how it's believed by scholars.
And that's universal.
To me, that doesn't make sense.
That was the way it's described to me and the way I understand it.
And to me, it doesn't make sense.
Well, I mean, you can translate anything into any other language, though.
Regardless of the complexity, I mean, we still do this all the time, right?
Like, not all layers, and this I think this depends on how you're measuring complexity, too.
Are we just counting numbers of words for different things?
Um, you know, complexity could mean different things, I think.
You guys showed on your talk that you did on Neil's Gnostic Conformant channel, there was a word called uh.
Theosabase, which was one word in Greek.
Oh, yeah, right.
And you guys translated it to Hebrew and it was two words, we're Elohim.
Yeah, Elohim, yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, what I took from that is like Greek has 250,000 at its worst unique words.
Okay.
Hebrew has 6,000.
Yet, Greek took two words from Hebrew and made it into one.
Yeah.
But, you know, that's how their language works.
And it works different from Hebrew.
Right.
So it just doesn't make sense to me how they would take two words in Hebrew and combine it into one word in Greek, right?
Well, they don't all.
I mean, they.
Because I guess the.
Because you would want to break it down to make it more simple, to make it understand.
Not always.
Okay.
It depends on how you understand what the text is trying to do.
Like.
In Hebrew, there is no single word, or at least there's, I mean, there's various ways you could do it in Hebrew to say, actually, no, you couldn't.
There is no single word which means God-fearer, right?
You have to do that through using a participle and a noun in Hebrew, but you have this adjective in Greek which does the same thing.
But that doesn't mean that just because.
This particular language is able to do this differently and do it in one word as opposed to two, that it came first.
Because the, you know, we don't, it's, I'm honestly, I don't know on terms of this is, and this is honestly the, I, to my way of thinking as someone who works with other,
like with ancient languages, the complexity argument is one that just doesn't make much sense to me because we see ways in which you can measure complexity in different languages.
In different ways, but it doesn't necessarily indicate anything about which text was first.
So, and I'm not sure.
And this can be confusing for people that are listening too.
I suggest people who want to understand this better go to, and I can link it below.
So, watch the one on Neil's channel where you guys actually break down the words and you guys show them and all that.
One of the things that I would, one of the ways that I push back on this as well is that.
Ammon doesn't tell you this, but the Hebrew text is not all Hebrew.
Like within the Hebrew Bible, there's actually Hebrew text and there's Aramaic as well.
So, and the way that the Aramaic works in some of the biblical texts is not straightforward.
So, it's not just Hebrew literature, it's Hebrew and bits of Aramaic.
So, for example, in the book of Daniel, most scholars will tell you that the book of Daniel was written in two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic.
The Aramaic stuff was written first, and then the Hebrew stuff was added on to it, and they just kind of combined it all together.
And one of the reasons why scholars know this or think this, I'll just actually pull up the text here to give you the example.
This happens in In Daniel chapter 2, so in Daniel chapter 2, it tells this story about the king Nebuchadnezzar having a dream, and he gets very anxious because of this dream.
And then you'll see here in the English text, I'll just read at the number three here.
Well, let's go back a little bit.
So the king ordered his magicians, exorcists, sorcerers, and the Chaldeans to be summoned in order to tell the king what he had dreamed.
They came and stood before the king, and the king said to them, I have had a dream and am full of.
Of anxiety to know what I have dreamed.
The Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic.
Now, up to that point where it says the Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic, that's written in Hebrew.
Now, at this point where they're actually speaking to the king, O king, live forever, the language changes.
Like it's a quote.
Yes, it's a quote.
Now it's Aramaic.
So they say, O king, live forever, relate the dream to your servants and we will tell you its meaning.
That's the end of the quote.
So at this point, we would expect the text to return to Hebrew.
But it doesn't.
It just continues in Aramaic and it continues in Aramaic all the way to the end of this story.
And then it tells another story, all in Aramaic.
And then it tells another story, all in Aramaic.
And it goes like this all the way to the end of chapter seven before then switching back to Hebrew in chapter eight.
So when scholars look at that, they go, well, it's obvious what's happening here.
What happened here was they originally had this collection of stories that was originally written in Aramaic.
And then they also had this collection of things that were written in Hebrew.
And they put them together.
And then they did some editing and added this Hebrew introduction onto that.
So it's not just Hebrew, it's Hebrew as well as Aramaic.
And there's other examples of this throughout the biblical text.
But something like this is difficult to me.
It's difficult to know.
The explanation for this just doesn't work.
If this was originally a Greek text and now someone is translating that back into Hebrew, why would they include this one section in Aramaic and then switch to Aramaic but then just keep writing in Aramaic and then decide, oh, I'm going to switch back to Hebrew again?
Kip, did you ever get a chance to look at that letter from Julius Africanus to Origen?
I haven't looked at that.
No, what is that?
It's a letter from Africanus to Origen about the end of Daniel.
And he's speaking about the apocryphal, not Bell and the Dragon, Susanna.
Okay.
And he's basically pointing out that the way it flows in the Greek looks like an original text.
Right.
He thinks that.
But he also does say at the end of the letter, the rest of it's Hebrew.
Right.
I just want to know what your thoughts are.
Julius Africanus?
Yeah.
That's one of the.
And the reason why I bring it up.
When was he writing?
It was the early third century.
See, that's pretty late.
200.
That's.
But so there's, you know, there are.
There are elements within the text which look very clearly to be a Semitic text.
And you can still see those in the Greek translation of that text.
There are certain mechanical features of the Greek language which the Greek translator clearly doesn't know how to handle.
And he messes it up.
And, you know, we'll.
Translate it in a way that doesn't work really well in Greek because it's a feature that works in Hebrew.
But I don't know how else to put it.
But like you can detect, you can see the same thing in the Gospels.
Like a lot of times, New Testament scholars will look at text pieces of bits and pieces in the Gospels and say, oh, this looks like.
What we call a Semiticism, which is a feature of the text that looks like it might have been translated out of Aramaic or out of Hebrew or has been written by someone whose first language is Hebrew or Aramaic and they don't know Greek as well.
So, and I would also challenge this idea that the Septuagint is this incredibly magisterial text.
It's written in Koine Greek, which was the common spoken Greek language of the people.
This is not the same Greek that was used by Plato and Aristotle and the great philosophers.
Were there any, aren't there some quotes from Jesus in Greek?
Oh, probably.
But I mean, and what are we talking about here?
Like Jesus.
So the New Testament Gospels, and this is something that biblical scholars will tell you.
Are stories about Jesus, right?
But, you know, how much of that stuff we can even trace back to the actual Jesus?
It's, I mean, maybe, you know, it's very speculative.
A lot of scholars will tell you within the Gospels, you can't really even trace any of this stuff back to Jesus.
These are people who are telling stories about Jesus in Greek.
So, you know, of course, they've got Jesus saying things in Greek.
But they also knew that he knew Aramaic.
So there are small occasions where they'll have him.
Saying something in Aramaic.
But Susanna is not in the Jewish Tanakh.
So, and importantly, like the one, the book of Susanna is at the end of Daniel?
Yeah.
Okay.
And that's a particular text.
Like one of the things that we see in the Greek Bible as well, in the Septuagint, are added pieces of literature which don't appear to have a Hebrew counterpart.
And some of these look like they might have been originally composed in Greek.
I think Susanna is possibly a text that was originally composed in Greek by Jewish people, Jewish people who wrote in Greek, but maybe didn't have a Hebrew original to it.
And importantly, it was never translated into Hebrew.
How much Hebrew literature do we have from outside the Bible that dates before 300 BC?
Not a ton.
But we do have a collection of inscriptions from places like Kintulat Ashrud.
Which is in the southern, close to the Sinai.
There are a handful of inscriptions in Hebrew from there that survive on clay jars and on some plaster parts of the walls.
There are inscriptions that were left by a couple of different kings in the region.
I've already mentioned one.
The Moabite stone was written by the king Misha in.
A form of the language that very, very closely resembles Hebrew.
Then you've got a tunnel inscription in Jerusalem that's written in Hebrew.
We have.
About what?
Is it biblical or no?
No, actually, this is a really interesting text because this is a.
You know, there's a story.
There is a story in the Bible about the king Hezekiah in Jerusalem in the 8th century who's preparing for.
Remember, I mentioned the Assyrians came and destroyed the city of Samaria in 722.
They then came down to the city of Jerusalem in the south and threatened Hezekiah.
And as he saw them coming, he was preparing his, you know, his defenses and getting things ready for this invasion by the Assyrians.
And in the Bible, it says that he basically built a tunnel to get water from the pool, from the Gihon Springs outside the city into the city.
You know, that's in order to get ready for a siege or something.
So, Scott.
Hellenistic Literary Influence00:12:12
Archaeologists have excavated this tunnel, which goes between the Gihon Spring and the pool inside of Jerusalem.
And there's an inscription inside the tunnel, but it's a really interesting inscription because the gist of it basically goes that it says, This is about the tunnel, is how it begins.
And then it says, This is the account of the tunnel.
The workers started on one end and dug for, you know, 300 meters or whatever it is.
It doesn't say 300 meters, but it dug for a long time.
And then there were workers that started on the other end and were digging in the same direction.
And then at this point, one tunnel workers' pick broke through the stone and we were able to hear the tunnel workers on the other side and we met in the middle.
And that's the whole inscription.
It's just this story about building this tunnel.
It doesn't mention any names, it doesn't mention a king.
It just seems to be this tribute that was left by the workers who were building this tunnel.
So, and it's written in Hebrew.
But, yeah, it's kind of interesting.
So, what about the Library of Alexandria?
What was the out of all of the books that were in that library?
What is the percentage of them that were Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic?
No, I don't know about percentages.
I mean, what we know.
How much Hebrew can we know?
It probably wouldn't have been a lot of literature, I don't think, that they had.
I mean, at the time.
That's the thing to me that seems so perplexing about this time because it seems like there was so much Greek literature for every aspect of life.
Yeah, from poetry to comedy to everything.
I agree.
But then when you just go to the Hebrew, it seems to be all biblical.
Yep.
And that's true.
And even the stuff that we have from things like the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect back.
On this biblical literature.
Like there were other things, you know, that I mentioned the scrolls preserve other texts written in Hebrew that weren't in the Bible, but they're all generally focused on God and religion, you know.
And we have some other, there's a text called the Book of Ben Sira, which was written in about 180 BCE by a Jewish man.
Named Sirach.
And it was originally written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek.
And it opens, the preface of it is from Sirach's grandson, who actually says, I translated this from Hebrew into Greek.
Jesus, by the way.
Yeah.
Jesus Ben Sirach.
Thank you.
So he, and we actually have a, you know, fragmentary copy of this text in Hebrew from one of the, not in the, In the Dead Sea Scrolls, probably like not in the Qumran caves, but in one of the caves from the Judean desert.
So, yeah, and it's basically a text of, you know, like philosophy, but very religious, you know, reflecting back on how to conduct yourself and how to be a good God-fearer.
So, there is Hebrew literature, and there's probably a lot of stuff that we've just lost.
However, I think it's also true.
Now, the people who were writing in Hebrew at this particular time did not have nearly as much literature as the Greeks.
They just didn't.
And one of the reasons for this has to do with the way their culture developed after the end of the exile.
I mean, just to kind of give you a sense of hold on, my phone's ringing here.
That's weird.
Sorry.
No, you're good.
Hello.
Hanging.
Rock and roll, brother.
There we go.
Okay.
I should actually turn my ringer off if I can.
So, I mentioned the people who wrote these Hebrew traditions, these Hebrew texts, lived in Israel up to the invasion by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.
And he exiled, he took a whole bunch of them with him back to Babylon.
And then.
A number of these people returned 50, 60, 70 years later to Jerusalem.
They rebuilt the temple.
And at some point, and our knowledge of this period is really fuzzy at this point.
This is like the fifth century, fifth, fourth century BC.
There's a lot we don't know about this time period.
So at this point, they seem to have rebuilt the temple.
And they seem to have started practicing their religion again.
They probably had just, you know, a smattering, a handful, the little bits of literature that they were able to take with them from Jerusalem out to Babylon and then back to Jerusalem.
Probably wasn't a lot.
And I would say, too, I mean, it doesn't look like the kingdoms that were in this area, and this isn't just the, the, the, The kingdom of Israel or the kingdom of Judah, but it seems to be the same for some of these other smaller kingdoms in the area, like the kingdom of Moab or the kingdom of Edom or the kingdom of Philistia.
They didn't seem to have written a lot.
So they didn't have lots and lots of great epic works of literature that they were committing to writing.
It was a different kind of a culture and it was a different kind of time.
But these are the people who came out.
Of Jerusalem went to Babylon and then came back with this tiny little bit of literature that they had by the fourth, third century, which by that time, you know, the Greeks had already been, you know, collecting piles and piles and piles of literature beyond them.
Right.
So it's, I mean, there's no question, I don't think, that from a literary perspective, they were not in terms of volume, they just didn't have the kind of volume.
That was being produced in the Greek language.
At least we don't have evidence for it.
We certainly don't.
Yeah, we don't have evidence for it.
And we don't have.
Some people might believe that, though.
Right.
That's true.
Well, I mean, some people believe that Hebrew was the first language.
Right.
So, but, you know, the fact, and I tend to think too, like we don't have a lot of the epigraphic remains like stones and seals and.
And texts from the region from this early period, largely because they weren't writing nearly as much.
So, but by the same token, you know, that's not just the only reason why we should look at something.
That's not our only measure for looking at the Septuagint and comparing that to the Hebrew and going, well, there's a lot more words in Greek, therefore, this must have been original, right?
So it's much more complicated than that.
And I would say, too, as far as I know, Amon Hillman is the only person who is forwarding this idea of Greek priority when it comes to the Bible.
He doesn't know Hebrew, certainly doesn't, if he knows it, he knows it just a little bit.
He doesn't know it.
Let me ask you this as a thought experiment.
Yeah.
Could you steel man his argument for the Greek being the original?
Um, I think maybe.
I mean, based on what I've heard, he depends quite a bit on this idea that uh, that Greek is a much more complex language and that the text of the Septuagint as he reads it is much richer, but then compared to the Hebrew, he thinks it looks primitive, yeah.
Right?
I think that's where he gets a lot of uh, of his ideas about this, um.
And I just think one of the reasons for that is because he doesn't understand the Hebrew.
I mean, there's a lot of, and he just doesn't understand how the language works.
Because in Hebrew, you don't need nearly as many words, maybe, to say the same thing.
Well, you mean you need more words in Hebrew, right?
No.
Because it's Elohim, we're a, or it was, it was, well, that's Theosabase, we're a Elohim.
So one to two.
So that's one example.
Okay.
There's other instances where the Greek will take several words to say the same thing in Hebrew.
I wonder if I can find an example just off the top of my head.
I'm, you know, I'm, yeah, off the top of my head, I don't know, but there's certainly plenty of instances within the text where you can see.
Sorry.
Yeah, no, go ahead.
I was just going to say, there are places within the text where.
You know, the Greek does require more words to say the same thing in Hebrew.
What does it mean to say that the Septuagint is Hellenistic?
Is that just.
Yeah.
So, one of the things that you do see in the text of the Septuagint, the Greek text, is that it reflects elements of Greek culture.
So, and this is also maybe one of the reasons.
Why a lot of scholars would say that it's a translation of the Hebrew original because it's taking some aspects and turning those into, I guess, a more, well, more Hellenistic.
Hellenistic just basically means culturally Greek.
Okay.
Right.
So there's a stronger Greek flavor in some places of the Septuagint compared to the Hebrew.
So, and I tend to think that we probably have some because it's still the biblical texts themselves, the literature that eventually ends up in the Bible is still being reworked and rewritten and edited in the Hellenistic period.
And some of this is actually reflecting some Greek influence as well.
So, you know, some of the later texts.
Hurricane Reflections on Faith00:03:46
What would this mean?
Let's just hypothetically say it.
Scholars were had, we had some sort of crazy evidence.
We figured out backward time travel, and we did figure out that it was originally Greek.
What would be the implications on religion or the implications on any of the scholarship?
Well, I mean, the implications would be big in terms of how we'd have to reevaluate the individual texts and how they developed.
But I don't think it would make a big deal to a lot of scholars.
What about religious types?
In terms of religion?
Yeah.
You know, that's a good question.
And I'm not even.
Like Judaism, like the original.
Oh, that would be a challenge.
For uh, for Judaism, just because of of how deeply tied uh Jewish religion is to Jewish culture, right?
So um, and how much that is that is closely connected to, to the language the, the Hebrew language.
So I I think that would probably be a challenge.
I'm not sure how that would uh, that would affect it but yeah, I could see that, I could see that having an effect but uh, It's a Hebrew text.
So.
Right.
It's, yeah.
It's interesting shit, man.
It is.
It is.
Wild and confusing.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I probably just confused you.
No, you did a great journey.
No, it's just confusing for me.
And I'm really new to this stuff.
So I'm just kind of like figuring out as I go.
Yeah, of course.
But.
No, we all start somewhere, right?
Yeah.
Thank you.
It's a journey.
Thank you for coming down here in the middle of a freaking hurricane.
All the way through.
From beautiful Canada, from cold Canada to this tropic heat.
That's right.
You risked your life to come on this podcast, man.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I certainly did.
It was my first category four hurricane.
We popped your cherry, man.
Was it first category four or first hurricane?
My first hurricane.
Your first hurricane was a category four.
Wow.
But my mom was like freaking out when she was like texting me all last night while it was bearing down.
This is one of the worst hurricanes I've been through here.
I've been through.
Dozens of hurricanes in Florida growing up here.
And wow, like I was showing you the videos earlier, this is like the worst flooding I've ever seen.
Yeah.
My buddies, all my friends' houses on the beach that are one story, the water was like five feet up to their neck in water.
Their houses are destroyed.
I still don't have power.
The whole, this is like the only building around here that has power right now because we got a crazy diesel generator out back powering the building.
Oh, is that how?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
See, I thought I was ready to start believing in God again.
But wow, that's, That's wild.
Yeah, I'm glad we made this happen though, man.
So, here you like, you guys were like, we're like, like, like holding on for dear life.
And I was, I was in my bedroom looking out the window going, When's it gonna stop?
It was nothing.
It was like nothing.
No, it wasn't that bad.
The winds weren't that crazy.
The winds got up to like 60 miles per hour here at the worst, which is like there's tons of trees knocked over everywhere and fences if you drive up and down the streets here.
But like, yeah, the worst part about these hurricanes is the flooding and the storm surge that comes in, which Basically, just devastates people.
If you're old, if you're like a lot of old people in Florida and lots of people that depend on technology to stay alive, you know, like people that are diabetic and all this stuff, when you lose power, that can really fuck you up.
Yeah, I could be real bad.
You got to be prepared, man.
I could see that.
No joke down here.
But thank you again, man.
Online Concert and Patreon00:01:08
Tell people that are listening where they can find more of your work online, social media, all that stuff.
Sure.
So, my YouTube channel is just my name, Kip Davis.
And I do stuff about the Bible, I do stuff about the Dead Sea Scrolls, early Judaism.
Yeah, I'm currently working on a book which is actually all about Israelite religion and politics and history in the period.
Oh, there you go.
There's a YouTube channel.
Look at that.
There it is leading up to Iron Maiden.
Hell yeah.
Yeah, they're the best.
So I wore that shirt out, unfortunately.
And I haven't been back to an Iron Maiden concert to get a new one.
I'm a bit of a purist, I don't believe in buying the merch online.
Oh, really?
You have to get it from the concert.
Try to get it from the concert.
Yeah.
So, yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
But cool, man.
Yeah.
All right.
We're going to do a quick 10 minute Patreon QA because we got some people that got some questions for you.
So, we're going to end the podcast for YouTube now and we're going to jump over to Patreon.
I have a lot of classes for this.
And the Patreon link is below if you want to check that out.