# Blessed Baruch!  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: Blessed Baruch! - Show: Data Over Dogma - Owner / Host: Daniel McClellan and Daniel Beecher - Episode publish date: 2025-09-29 - Episode AI description: Dive into the intriguing world of Baruch, an enigmatic book linked to Jeremiah. Explore its historical context—was it really written during the exile? Discover the odd prayers urging support for Babylonian rulers, and unravel how the wisdom within connects to the Torah. Delve into its composition and the fascinating reasons behind its mixed reception across Jewish and Christian traditions. This episode is a whirlwind of scholarship, exploring how Baruch shaped identities and influenced canon choices. - Mentioned books: [The Bible Says So](https://share.snipd.com/book/a0b9a249-0904-4ce3-b0d7-6000458cd9b3) by [Dan McClellan](https://share.snipd.com/person/25209d25-3415-4657-89e2-eb3b0f8104cb), [When God Spoke Greek](https://share.snipd.com/book/e123f64b-dbde-4295-8720-395eb6ae56be) by [Timothy Michael Law](https://share.snipd.com/person/21588c39-e912-4a2b-a905-dae15417b50b) - Duration: 49:06 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/d05ac2e8-7a3b-4e14-aa04-7d9e9e15ec37) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/8153b1cc-d781-49fd-92d5-a4bef70d1be5) - Export date: 2026-02-17T23:34:52 ## Snips ### [Baruch's Claimed Origins Versus Scholarship](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c320873-6883-4345-a6d0-6a78218101b7) 🎧 03:00 - 06:12 (03:11) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/95d404d2-2f0e-450f-9fa1-6746ccd0e752" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baruch is presented as Baruch son of Neriah, Jeremiah's scribe, tied to Jeremiah's prophecies and exile-era events. - Scholars, however, date Baruch much later, likely 1st century BCE–CE, based on language and references. #### 💬 Quote > Baruch is the son of Neriah so Baruch ben Neriah and he is well known from the book of Jeremiah. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan on Baruch's traditional identity #### 📚 Transcript **Dan Beecher:** Will it canon? Will it blend? And you can too. And this week's Is It Canon is interest. So it's Baruch. Now, we've mentioned the book of Baruch. We have. Before in conjunction with the letter of Jeremiah, which is sometimes tacked on to the end of Baruch as just the final chapter of Baruch. **Dan McClellan:** Yeah, it is chapter six, just right on the end there, although most scholars agree this is definitely not written by the same crew, and it is included in other parts. **Dan Beecher:** And as I read it, when I got to chapter five of Baruch, was like wait this is the this is literally exactly the same thing as as the letter of jeremiah it is it's it like i mean it's not identical but it just does the same thing and it does and it's uh so like it's so weird it's weird to tack on yeah if i read if i were to read that as one book, I would be like, why are we doing this again? It's like someone was trying to remember what they just wrote and rewrote it again. **Dan McClellan:** That's a funny thing. If anybody out there ever ends up taking a course in Ugaritic or something like that. Who among us hasn't? Yes, I mean, that's the perennial question. When the leaves start changing and everybody wonders, is now the year that I take a course in Ugaritic? Are you **Dan Beecher:** in first **Dan McClellan:** year Ugaritic with me? Who do you have for Ugaritic? But you read these mythological texts and there's an awful lot of repetition. The same thing over and over again. I don't know how many letters I translated where I would skip over the first line because I knew it was going to say, so-and to so-and at the feet of my Lord I fall seven times, even eight times I fall at the feet of my Lord. Just this, the graveling at one's feet. It's grovel. It's grovel. Yes. You **Dan Beecher:** can gravel. I mean, you know, it depends on what the feet are standing on. **Dan McClellan:** Yeah, it depends where you are at the moment that you collapse at their feet. But yeah, there's a lot of repetition. And there's just so much of this kind of rhetoric in the text of Greco-Roman period Judaism. Yeah. It's just over and over again. Look, we got to stop with the idols. We got to stop with the worshiping the other deities. We've been over this and over this. It's kind of like being on Twitter right now where it's like, no, we've been through this. We've been through this. But yeah, today we're talking about the five chapters of Baruch. And Baruch is the uh son of uh niraya so baruch ben niraya --- ### [Mixed Linguistic Signals Reveal Composition Stages](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2fb3b7d3-72eb-4ebc-ba87-d9bb427ea6ee) 🎧 10:20 - 15:02 (04:42) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/033571b3-5bbb-4584-8a11-2ae12097f60a" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Scholars see Baruch as a composite text with possible Hebrew source for early sections and later Greek composition for others. - Linguistic features (Semiticisms) suggest translation from Hebrew for parts and later original Greek for others. #### 💬 Quote > All the manuscripts that we have of Baruch are in Greek. We don't have any existing Hebrew manuscripts. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan on Baruch's manuscript tradition and translation indicators #### 📚 Transcript **Dan McClellan:** yes. Now, the book of Jeremiah, portions of that are thought to be authentic, to come from the exilic period. Baruch, no. Okay. Baruch is definitely coming from well after that. There's an awful lot in Baruch that is quoting, alluding to, paraphrasing other parts of Scripture, including non-canonical texts and things that are written well after the 6th century BCE. And so most scholars would say Baruch was probably written 1st century BCE, 1st century CE. Oh, okay. So the century before the life of Jesus or the century of the life of Jesus, somewhere in there. And scholars suggest that it's divided into four kind of general pieces. And the first two pieces make up the first half. They go to Baruch 3, verse 8. And this, scholars suggest, may have an underlying Hebrew source text. So it might have been composed in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. All the manuscripts that we have of Baruch are in Greek. We don't have any existing Hebrew manuscripts. From 3.9 to 5.9, you have a wisdom poem, and then you have a poem about return from exile. And these are a little—there are fewer Semiticisms. So one of the ways that scholars can tell if something has been translated is if the Greek is using constructions and sayings and idioms and things like that that are not very Greek, but are very, very Hebrew. So for instance, the master's thesis I wrote at the University of Oxford, which was about textual criticism of the Septuagint and anti-anthropomorphism, that old chestnut. I was making the argument that there's this passage in the Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew, Exodus 2410, where Moses and the 70 elders go up Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, and it says, they saw the God of Israel. And under his feet, it was like a brickwork of sapphire and shininess and all this kind of stuff. And they broke bread, basically. In the Greek, it says, and they saw the place where the God of Israel stood. However, the Greek says it in a very weird way. It says they saw the place there the God of Israel stood. And that's not how you would normally say that in Greek. However, it is a perfectly normal way to say it in Hebrew. And so it's this resumptive adverb thing. And so the argument that I made was that this suggests that the Greek, the disappearance of God, the translating it so that they're not actually looking at God, my argument was that this was not the work of the translator saying, well, I don't like that, I'm going to change it, because what they changed it to is not natural Greek. My argument was that they were translating something they found in their Hebrew source text, and it was written that way in Hebrew, in a very natural Hebrew way, and then they woodenly translated it into unnatural Greek. So that was the argument I made. There's a very prominent Septuagint scholar who heartily disagrees with me and has published stuff on that. A ding dong about that. Maybe not a ding dong, but at least wrong about that. And since that was something I wrote as a recent graduate of my undergraduate degree, I've just kind of backed away slowly. So I have not taken up that cross recently. But that's an example of one way that scholars can say, this was probably written in Hebrew, is the Greek is a little weird, but works well if you back translate it into Hebrew. But you don't really get that for the second half Baruch, which maybe is an indication that the book came together in stages. Maybe is an indication that, you know, maybe the author translated the first half from a Hebrew source text and then was like, I'm going to roll. I'm going to keep pumping out text. --- ### [Thesis Tale About Unnatural Greek](https://share.snipd.com/snip/657a3264-439e-4823-8fc9-97a06e9dd8fb) 🎧 14:07 - 15:14 (01:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/6678d4ca-7083-4f5f-8f09-55a603b9416c" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Dan McClellan recounts his Oxford master's thesis on translating Hebrew phrases into awkward Greek. - He reflects on later scholarly disagreement and stepping back from the argument. #### 💬 Quote > My argument was that they were translating something they found in their Hebrew source text, and it was written that way in Hebrew, and then they very woodenly translated it into unnatural Greek. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan describing his past thesis on Septuagint translation features #### 📚 Transcript **Dan McClellan:** A ding dong about that. Maybe not a ding dong, but at least wrong about that. And since that was something I wrote as a recent graduate of my undergraduate degree, I've just kind of backed away slowly. So I have not taken up that cross recently. But that's an example of one way that scholars can say, this was probably written in Hebrew, is the Greek is a little weird, but works well if you back translate it into Hebrew. But you don't really get that for the second half Baruch, which maybe is an indication that the book came together in stages. Maybe is an indication that, you know, maybe the author translated the first half from a Hebrew source text and then was like, I'm going to roll. I'm going to keep pumping out text. Yeah. Why stop here? Yeah. So I don't know about you, Dan, but right now I am the busiest I've ever been. --- ### [Anachronisms Date Pseudo‑Historical Texts](https://share.snipd.com/snip/84bcb776-22ba-453c-a738-3d7e7918477c) 🎧 19:50 - 21:55 (02:04) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/877c87ca-b6bf-41ca-af6d-a854fa727159" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Internal anachronisms (e.g., returning temple vessels) indicate the author knew the Second Temple era, not the exile. - Such historical slips help date pseudo‑historical biblical works to later periods. #### 💬 Quote > Baruch took the vessels of the house of the Lord that had been carried away from the temple to return them to the land of Judah. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan noting timeline errors that betray later composition #### 📚 Transcript **Dan McClellan:** And one of the ways we know this is not actually written in 582 BCE is it starts with Baruch sending the words of this book to Jeconiah, or Jeconiah, son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and talks about passing the hat around basically to get a bunch of silver, send it to the priest in Jerusalem. And they basically want them to do these temple offerings. And it says Baruch took the vessels of the house of the Lord that had been carried away from the temple to return them to the land of Judah. But the temple was destroyed. It would not be rebuilt until like 519 BCE, so several more decades. And so this has probably been written by somebody who knows about the existence of the second temple and for whatever reason misunderstood the availability of the temple. Didn't **Dan Beecher:** get the timeline exactly right. Yeah. **Dan McClellan:** Got a **Dan Beecher:** lot of bagats correctly. Like, guys, Baruch, son of Nero, son of Masa, son of Shagadiah, son of Asa, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, the timeline got a little little wiggly there **Dan McClellan:** and yeah and this is kind of par for the course for greco-roman period judaism like the book of daniel does this as well we've talked about that in the past that daniel was like yeah and then there was this other guy uh and you know he did this and it's like oh no there was like darius the mead conquered Babylon. And then Cyrus the Great came in after Darius. And it's like, no, Cyrus conquered Babylon. And then there was a Darius, who was a Persian, who came after Cyrus. And so even the most popular text from that time period that made it into the canon, unlike Baruch, but Daniel made it into the canon, got a lot of the details wrong. --- ### [Collective Guilt And Performance Prayers](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c339680e-711a-4dd8-b764-282592d9ace9) 🎧 22:15 - 28:28 (06:12) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/5e26ba89-1890-48a3-8155-5a1f0ef4bb0d" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baruch frames exile as communal punishment requiring public confession and ritual petitioning for mercy. - The text leans heavily on repetitive penitential rhetoric to elicit divine compassion. #### 💬 Quote > We have sinned. We have been ungodly. We have done wrong. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan reading Baruch's penitential confessions #### 📚 Transcript **Dan McClellan:** Yeah. And so... **Dan Beecher:** Everybody, all of us. Yes. **Dan McClellan:** The entire **Dan Beecher:** people, we were all bad. And we need to now pray and admit that we were bad and say we're just so very sorry. **Dan McClellan:** Yes. **Dan Beecher:** And then one of the weird things, what do you make of verse 11 in chapter 1 that says, and pray for the life of King Nebuchadnezzar. This is the Babylonian king for the life of his son Belshazzar, so that their days on earth may be like the days of heaven. Oof. **Dan McClellan:** Yeah, and this is related to something that happens in the book of Jeremiah, where in Jeremiah you have a bunch of people who are saying, you know, let's get God to send us back home right away. Like, don't even unpack your bags. And God's going to send us right back. In Jeremiah 29, Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles in Babylon and basically says, get comfortable. Yeah. Y'all going to be there a while. And then in, I think it's verse 7. Is it 7? Yes, verse 7. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. And is something that has been appealed to by Christian nationalists. Christian nationalism, the idea that basically that your religion should be involved in statecraft and in ensuring the success of the government, even though really what's going on here is Jeremiah is telling them, get cozy. Buckle up. Yeah, because you're not going anywhere anytime soon. And so I imagine that Baruch here is kind of reflecting on that, where in order to try to lines of connection between what he's talking about and the scripture that already exists, that everybody knows about, he's just kind of going to touch those bases, hit those beats, so **Dan Beecher:** that they can be like, oh, yeah, this is the guy. This felt different from that, though. It just felt weird to pray for the conquering king. You know what I mean? Pray for the guy that's oppressing us, not just for us while we're here or for it to be a comfortable stay or whatever. But, **Dan McClellan:** yeah, it just seemed a little weird. Pray for them to feel like they're in heaven. And the next verse says, the Lord will give us strength and light to our eyes. We shall live under the protection of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and under the protection of his son, Belshazzar. And we shall serve them many days and find favor in their sight. And then, you know, a few years after that, what's 587, 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great comes in and conquers Babylon. And then suddenly everybody's like, oh, pray for that guy over there now. Yeah. He's even better. Great. And Isaiah 45.1. I don't know why I'm confusing 45 and 47. Yeah, it's 45 one. Begins with, says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of the road. So Cyrus is referred to as the Lord's Christ, the Lord's anointed, the Lord's Messiah in Isaiah 45. So you have some of that similar, this is our guy language, not just for Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, but also for the guy who conquered Nebuchadnezzar and **Dan Beecher:** Belshazzar, at least their kingdom. It just seems so weird to do that when you're writing so far after the fact. Yeah. **Dan McClellan:** And I think it really is just an attempt to try to draw points of contact. Right. To make it sound like **Dan Beecher:** the other texts that have come before. **Dan McClellan:** Yeah. And to make it seem like, oh, this is Baruch. This is, you know, Baruch wrote, Jeremiah wrote that letter and said the same thing. So now our guy is saying the same thing. And there is, according to, I don't remember if it's in the text of Jeremiah. If any Jeremiah scholars are listening to this, they're going to be yelling at me. But Jeremiah was supposed to have fled to Egypt with Baruch. So they weren't even supposed to be in exile. Oopsie. You don't even go here. Okay, so... Stop trying to make Baruch happen. So, yeah, we have, I think that's the origin of that rhetoric. And yeah, you've got the confession of sins. You've got prayers for deliverance that are supposed to be offered. Or you say, oh, now, oh, Lord God of Israel, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and with signs and wonders and with great power and outstretched arm and made yourself a name that continues to this day. We have sinned. We have been ungodly. We have done wrong. Oh, Lord, our God, against all your ordinances, let your anger turn away from us. **Dan Beecher:** And there's, I got to say, a lot of that stuff. It is repetitive. It is just, oh, we are not worthy. We are such pieces of crap. Please, please don't be **Dan McClellan:** mean to us. We of you we're we **Dan Beecher:** know that we're awful and it just keeps going and going and going yeah **Dan McClellan:** yeah it is um the uh the lady doth protest too much that that's not what that phrase means but um but yeah there is an an awful lot of that that's that's true it makes it sound like the author is trying to kind of, I don't know, the more heartfelt the performance of this, maybe the more effective it will be. I guess. If you just go, maybe, you know, God's like, and 45 minutes. --- ### [Praying For Conquerors Makes Political Sense](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0677eaea-9006-41ca-8d7c-2e275a886c7e) 🎧 22:36 - 25:26 (02:49) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/e870438f-d968-4730-8e12-da4df2451f08" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baruch instructs exiles to pray even for Babylonian rulers like Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar. - This mirrors Jeremiah's counsel to seek the welfare of their host city and its rulers. #### 💬 Quote > Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan linking Baruch's prayer for rulers to Jeremiah 29 #### 📚 Transcript **Dan Beecher:** you make of verse 11 in chapter 1 that says, and pray for the life of King Nebuchadnezzar. This is the Babylonian king for the life of his son Belshazzar, so that their days on earth may be like the days of heaven. Oof. **Dan McClellan:** Yeah, and this is related to something that happens in the book of Jeremiah, where in Jeremiah you have a bunch of people who are saying, you know, let's get God to send us back home right away. Like, don't even unpack your bags. And God's going to send us right back. In Jeremiah 29, Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles in Babylon and basically says, get comfortable. Yeah. Y'all going to be there a while. And then in, I think it's verse 7. Is it 7? Yes, verse 7. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. And is something that has been appealed to by Christian nationalists. Christian nationalism, the idea that basically that your religion should be involved in statecraft and in ensuring the success of the government, even though really what's going on here is Jeremiah is telling them, get cozy. Buckle up. Yeah, because you're not going anywhere anytime soon. And so I imagine that Baruch here is kind of reflecting on that, where in order to try to lines of connection between what he's talking about and the scripture that already exists, that everybody knows about, he's just kind of going to touch those bases, hit those beats, so **Dan Beecher:** that they can be like, oh, yeah, this is the guy. This felt different from that, though. It just felt weird to pray for the conquering king. You know what I mean? Pray for the guy that's oppressing us, not just for us while we're here or for it to be a comfortable stay or whatever. But, **Dan McClellan:** yeah, it just seemed a little weird. Pray for them to feel like they're in heaven. And the next verse says, the Lord will give us strength and light to our eyes. We shall live under the protection of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and under the protection of his son, Belshazzar. And we shall serve them many days and find favor in their sight. And then, you know, a few years after that, what's 587, 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great comes in and conquers Babylon. And then suddenly everybody's like, oh, pray for that guy over there now. Yeah. He's even better. --- ### [Wisdom Personified As Torah](https://share.snipd.com/snip/20e25a3e-458c-4b7d-b841-bb509b4889c2) 🎧 31:44 - 34:21 (02:37) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/f2bb87d7-12a9-4db5-87bb-4bf17938e2ae" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baruch personifies wisdom and equates it with Torah, echoing Proverbs 8 and Sirach 24. - The poem warns against seeking other philosophies and centers law as the source of wisdom. #### 💬 Quote > She is the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan summarizing Baruch's wisdom poetry and scriptural intertextuality #### 📚 Transcript **Dan Beecher:** And then I think as I read it and a couple of times I had to sort of shake myself out of the stupor that this kind of biblical poetry puts me in. Yeah. But as I read it, it seems like, like it's about quote unquote wisdom, but basically what it's about is you can't get wisdom in the big cities. You got to just follow the rules of the law and the end. That's all the wisdom there is. You don't get any more wisdom than that. And it's, yeah, so **Dan McClellan:** wisdom is personified. It's this divine gift, but it's really identified with Torah, with the law. And so basically it's like, you want wisdom? There's **Dan Beecher:** your wisdom right there. We already wrote it down. What more do you want? Stop looking for other wisdom. There's no more wisdom. We wrote down all the wisdom. **Dan McClellan:** For Latter-day Saints, wisdom, wisdom, we already have wisdom. We have no more need of wisdom. And this is riffing on Proverbs 8. That's where wisdom is personified and was like, I was engendered before the hills and I was birthed before God drew the circle of the earth. And then we also have Sirach chapter 24, I believe, is also related to this. contact with scripture that's already in circulation in order to increase the gravitas, the authority of our text. And Israel has forsaken wisdom, but then we have the promise of redemption from a figure who comes from on high. I think this is 329. Who has gone up into heaven and taken her and brought her down from the clouds? Who has gone over the sea and found her and will buy her for pure gold? No one knows the way to her or is concerned about the path to her, but the one who knows all things knows her. He found her by his understanding. The one who prepared the earth for all time filled it with four-footed creatures. Anything more or less than that is of the devil, evidently. He called them and they said, here we are. They shone with gladness for him who made them. This is our God. No other can be compared to him. And yeah, he found the whole way to knowledge and gave her to his servant Jacob and Israel, whom loved afterwards. She appeared earth and lived with humankind. --- ### [Transmission Shifted By Language And Religion](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8172a7ff-b7e7-416f-b01b-cc7d88884926) 🎧 39:07 - 41:24 (02:17) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/8d967fa4-0e57-49fb-a328-cddc8ea8397a" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Baruch was preserved chiefly in the Greek Septuagint and then in Christian transmission, not in rabbinic Hebrew canon. - The Christian adoption of Greek scriptures explains why Baruch survives mainly in Christian manuscripts. #### 💬 Quote > A lot of these Jewish texts that were either composed in or primarily transmitted in Greek exist and were transmitted and perpetuated because they were used by Christians. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan on why Baruch is preserved in Christian traditions #### 📚 Transcript **Dan McClellan:** So this is something that was included in the Septuagint. Now, Septuagint is a designation that is more closely connected with Christian transmission of the scriptures, but it comes from an ancient Jewish tale, the pseudo-Aristeus. And so it is part of the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was in circulation among Greco-Roman period Jewish folks, probably until, you know, second and third centuries CE, as you're having this division of Judaism and Christianity, where Judaism kind of rejects the Greek foundation of what's going on in Christianity. Judaism, the rise of rabbinic Judaism is kind of based on a rhetorical, not entirely historical, but at least the rhetorical rejection of the influence of the Greek world and a return to the more ancient, pristine, original Hebrew worldview. And so it takes a while, but ultimately their canon settles on things that were composed in Hebrew Aramaic. And so things that only existed in Greek were overwhelmingly rejected. And so they're preserved in the Greek Septuagint, which was the Old Testament of early Christianity. And there's a great book written by my thesis supervisor when I was at the University of Oxford, Timothy Michael Law, called When God Spoke Greek, The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible, which talks all about how basically Greco-Roman period Judaism brings the Jewish scriptures from Hebrew into Greek. Christianity develops and runs with the Greek scriptures, whereas Judaism goes, we changed our minds. We're going back to the Hebrew. And so a lot of these Jewish texts that were either composed in or primarily transmitted in Greek exist and were transmitted and perpetuated because they were used by Christians and not so much by Jewish folks. --- ### [Canonical Order Varied Across Traditions](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a1584a1d-6c9f-4a16-9fd8-a3b5af002dbf) 🎧 44:56 - 46:19 (01:22) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/848b3c21-d4e8-4805-b9c1-c92c372bcf52" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Different manuscript traditions placed Baruch variably with Jeremiah and Lamentations, reflecting fluid early canons. - The Septuagint order influenced early Christian Bibles while Jerome's Vulgate omitted Baruch. #### 💬 Quote > In ancient Septuagint manuscripts, you have the order goes Jeremiah Baruch Lamentations Letter of Jeremiah. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan describing differing placements of Baruch in early biblical collections #### 📚 Transcript **Dan McClellan:** So Baruch is basically the end of Jeremiah. And then Jerome's Vulgate has Jeremiah and Lamentations, but then omits Baruch and the letter of Jeremiah. So yeah, different people did different stuff with it and put it in different orders. But yeah, it's an interesting tradition. And if you want to understand how Christians would have engaged, at least for the first four centuries-ish of followers of Jesus, how they would have engaged these texts, you got to read Baruch. You got to see the lens through which they're looking at Jeremiah yeah and they weren't incredibly critical about where this came from uh and and why it feels so greek to them because everything they were dealing with was uh was some kind of greek yeah **Dan Beecher:** yeah i've never thought of uh the christian divide as being linguistic as well as sort of theological. But it does seem like that's as good a place to draw the line as any, almost. **Dan McClellan:** I think it was certainly a big factor because I think the use of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, became an identity marker for Christians. --- ### [Explain Translation Changes Proactively](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7998b7cd-bc32-4ddd-9ebf-6f62eb2472c8) 🎧 48:47 - 49:40 (00:53) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/1a7ccbd0-5719-4754-8502-2b08398a1894" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - When releasing new Bible translations, explain changes and reasoning transparently to avoid misinformation. - Provide clear documentation so critics can't easily weaponize partial readings for outrage. #### 💬 Quote > Don't just release the version. Don't just put it out into the world and hope that people read the footnotes. > — Dan McClellan Dan McClellan urging transparency around Bible translation revisions #### 📚 Transcript **Dan Beecher:** Here's why I'm doing it. I just want you to know, don't just release the version. Don't just put it out into the world and hope that people read the footnotes and **Dan McClellan:** i i'm sure that there's a degree to which they try to do that but it's never going to be enough because there are always people like as many times have i as i've made that video and i've said look matthew 17 21 wasn't in the earliest manuscripts that's why it's not there. There are going to be, until the sun expands and consumes the earth, there are going to be people who make videos going, I just discovered this. Well, **Dan Beecher:** there's good clicks in outrage. Oh, yeah. Oh, whew. And conspiracy theory. well --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts