Misquoting Moses with Joel Baden

Moses ascends the mountain to commune with God. With their leader gone, the people of Israel awaiting his return in the desert panic, so his brother does what anyone would in that situation. He fashions a golden idol shaped like a calf out of everyone's molten jewelry. They throw a party complete with food, drink, and dancing, and when Moses returns, he's pretty miffed that he wasn't invited - and at the whole calf thing. You already know what happens next. It's not good. Broken tablets, divine wrath, and a sudden outbreak of plague. Aaron gets off remarkably easy. And the story quickly moves on. But perhaps you, as a reader, didn't. There are just so many details about this story that don't make sense. Why did Aaron make a calf in the first place? What did the Israelites exactly do wrong that angered Moses and their deity so? And why does Aaron say "THESE are your GODS, O Israel" when he only makes one calf, and Israel only worships one God? Today on Misquoting Moses, we're unpacking the polemical battleground that is the golden calf incident.

Generation after generation, begat after begat, lists of names stretching on for what feels like endless chapters. I'm not talking about the The Silmarillion or even The Iliad. If you have ever tried to read the Bible straight through from cover to cover, chances are your eyes glazed over right around Genesis 4-5. And 11. And 25. And 36. And Exodus 1. And many, many more times. Every time, you quietly skipped ahead to the good stuff. Ever read Chronicles? Like all the way through? No you haven't. I get it. Genealogies don't really preach, and they're not particularly great reading either. Until you finally give them a chance… and find a guy who lives to be 969 years old, another guy who doesn't die and instead seemingly ascends straight to heaven, the names of cities disguised as people, family drama that begins in the womb, and the age-old verbal assault of accusing your neighbors of being the product of incest. Get ready to scratch those genealogies off your DNF list.

You've seen the multi-season television drama where every single episode follows the exact same formula. The main characters abandon their core values, face a massive crisis, get invaded by a foreign power, cry out for mercy, and get rescued by a heroic judge or king, only to repeat the whole cycle over again. No, sorry, I'm thinking of the books of Joshua through Kings! But this repetitive loop isn't lazy writing. It's a carefully crafted ideological framework built by a desperate group of thinkers trying to make sense of national catastrophe. Today, we're diving into the Deuteronomistic History to uncover the editorial engine driving the historical books of the Bible, and why its authors rewrote Israel's history to save their future.

Abraham prayed to El Shaddai. Moses encountered a burning bush revealing the personal name YHWH. Solomon built a temple for a national God who allegedly lived in a cloud of thick darkness. If you line up every description of God in the early books of the Hebrew Bible, you don't get a single, consistent character. The God of the patriarchs looks and acts like a local Canaanite mountain deity, while the God of the Exodus is a fiery desert warrior who leads armies into battle. Today, we're tracking the dramatic evolution of Israel's God from a localized tribal storm deity sharing a crowded pantheon into the universal, singular creator of the universe.

The Bible offers two different accounts of how the ancient Israelites took possession of the Promised Land. In the last part of Numbers and in the book of Joshua, the Israelites sweep the land in a lightning military campaign, completely destroying all the Canaanites, then apportioning the land among the Israelite tribes. But in the book of Judges, the allotment of land comes first, and it is only afterward that they attempt to take possession of it - each tribe its own land, in a much slower and less systematic process than what we just witnessed in Joshua. Also according to Judges, some of the most significant cities, including Jerusalem remained under Canaanite control.

But scholars don't think that either of these stories actually happened. So, why would Israel tell these stories about their own origins? And what can we actually know about the origins of the society who would later produce the most influential set of texts in the world? Today, we're asking all those questions.

For three years, the prophet Isaiah wandered naked around Jerusalem. Ezekiel lay on his left side for three hundred and ninety days, then flipped over, and lay on his right for another forty. After this stunt was over, he went on a new diet of barley cakes - cooked over cook manure. Hosea marries a prostitute and names their child "unloved". Elijah calls down fire from heaven, and Elisha makes an axe head float.

We often think of prophets as predicting the future, but this picture is of something much stranger. Today, we're investigating the role of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, and above all, why it's so weird.

The creation of the world out of primordial chaos. A catastrophic global flood that ends when birds confirm the re-emergence of dry land. A baby cast into the river in a basket sealed with bitumen, who would be rescued and one day become a great leader. Sound familiar? Today, we're talking about the myths even more ancient than the biblical texts, that will be suspiciously familiar to any reader of the Bible, to ask how the biblical authors adapted, borrowed from, and subverted the great myths of Mesopotamia.

"Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one." Thus begins the most important prayer in Judaism, taken directly from Deuteronomy 6:4. Rendered this way, it appears to encapsulate the monotheistic essence of Judaism. One god, one creator of the heavens and the earth, one deity to worship - that's how most readers encounter the Bible. But in antiquity, the picture was a lot more crowded. The authors of the Bible not only acknowledged the existence of other deities, but that their own communities worshipped them. Today, we're talking about the polytheism hidden in the Hebrew Bible, and how ancient Israelite religion evolved from a word of many gods into the strict monotheism we recognize today.

There is a scene in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus walks into a synagogue in Nazareth, stands up to read, and someone hands him the scroll of Isaiah. He finds his place and begins… "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor," and so on. I'm sure you've read it… but there's a question here that almost nobody asks: what exactly was he holding? ... Because there was no printed and bound Bible in Jesus' time. Today we are talking about how the Hebrew Bible actually became the Hebrew Bible… and what version of that Bible Jesus would have had access to.

If you open a Bible, the oldest thing in it should be on page one. Right? In the beginning? That is where it starts. Except the oldest words ever written in the entire Hebrew Bible are not in Genesis. In fact, one of the undisputed oldest texts is buried in the middle of a book most people skip, in a victory song about a woman who drives a tent peg through a general's skull. Today we are talking about the oldest texts in the Bible… not the oldest manuscripts or the oldest events recorded, but the oldest actual writing, some of it centuries older than the stories wrapped around it. How do scholars figure out which parts came first, and what does the oldest layer of the Bible tell us about ancient Israel's history and beliefs?