 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 162, The Evil Eye. I'm DeLayman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Am I? How are you doing this week? Pretty good. We had a busy week. We did. Yeah, what did we do? We did all sorts of strange stuff. Yeah, I think for those who haven't seen it, I posted a picture of me and Mike on our Facebook podcast page. So if you want to go take a look of... Evil Eye in the chair? Evil Eye in the suit? Oh, the one in the suit. Okay. All right. My wife has been posting stuff on my Instagram account, too. We had the one with you and me in the chair. Yeah. But I know what you're talking about. Go ahead and tell them what you're talking about. Well, Bigfoot. I got to play Bigfoot in one of the episodes. That was fun. Yeah, we were filming for Fringe Pop, and if you're a newsletter subscriber, you know what that is. I think I scared Mike on how much of a good interpretation of Bigfoot I do. Yeah, kind of like interpretive dance, right? You're just... Hey, I make a really good Bigfoot. Yeah. It's a second nature. I was just hoping he'd fit in the suit, you know? Yeah. He's a big guy. I managed to do it, and it fit perfectly. It was a lot of fun. So yeah, it was. Mike, when are we going to get to see those episodes, or just tell us more about the Fringe Pop. Yeah, if you're a newsletter subscriber, you know what this is. If you're not, I'll give you the basics of it. Fringe Pop will be a TV show. It'll have a Roku channel, of course, YouTube, some other outlets, but it's basically a response video show to all sorts of fringy topics. I blog on Paleo Babel, weird stuff that people believe about the ancient world, then UFO religions, again, help people make that into their faith or alternative belief system. So Fringe Pop sort of combines that. So we're trying to make short episodes, video episodes, on helping people to just parse a subject, one of these fringe topics a little bit better. And some of them will be a series. We're going to do other episodes on Bigfoot. We did Bigfoot DNA, and that was the one Trey was in, his starring role. He was born to play the role of Bigfoot in that one. But we did, I think we got eight or nine, something like that, episodes filmed. But this was the studio that we've been putting together in McKinney, Texas, so near Dallas. So we went back there, and thanks to everybody that helped out, especially Pat. Of course, our videographer, Brian, my wife, she had fun putting makeup on my face. She said that would be the perfect Father's Day gift, by the way, getting me makeup. So. But anyway, it was fun. You'll see more about it. If you want to know more about it, see more pictures. You got to subscribe to the newsletter. Or you can go to our Facebook page. I did a Facebook live video of the studio. Mike gave us a quick video, a tour of the video of the studio. So go check that out if you want. Mike, can I wear that Bigfoot costume to Roswell? You know, you'd fit right in there. Seriously. Of course, it'll be 110 degrees out. So I'm not sure that you're going to enjoy that. Everybody's going to be going UFOs. I'm going to go against the grain and go Bigfoot. And I don't know what that's going to do. But chances are, if you put it on at night, you just sort of wander into the parade. You know, nobody's going to say anything. They'll just figure you belong there. There you go. So what's going on in Roswell? Oh, yeah. Roswell is going to be, let's see, June 28. I don't know what it was, 2930 and July 1 and 2. So that's the four day conference event. I'm part of a conference at the Roswell UFO Festival, which I have done three previous times. I don't think I've been in Roswell for probably, boy, seven, eight years. It's something like that. It feels kind of long, but yeah, we'll be back there this year. It's the 70th anniversary. Natalie is going to be there. You know, Tray is going to be there. We're just going to have a try to get get something together for a paranormal episode as well. I have a one person in particular I especially like to interview. But it'll be a fun trip. We'll try to do some stuff for the podcast, that that particular podcast. And then again, try to inject some sanity into the Roswell stuff. But it's always fun. You know, if anybody's interested in this kind of thing, even peripherally, and you have kids, especially, I'd say it's not a bad vacation. They have they have stuff for kids to do. It's kind of like a street fair atmosphere. And hey, it's Roswell, you know, there's lots of funny things, kind of crazy things to see. I feel like it would be going back to my roots, because that's where I first discovered you, Mike. Shout out to Guy for putting on that conference in 2003, Ancient of Days or whatever it was called back then. But that's where I first learned of you. Were you there? No, I was not there. But you got like the DVDs or something. Yeah, on the Internet, got the DVDs, all that stuff. So thanks to Guy Malone. Yeah. And Guy's the one behind. Yeah, he's the one behind our event. I mean, there's always two or three conference events that are kind of going on simultaneously. They overlap a little bit, but, you know, it's it's four days and it's all day long. So people usually get to see what they want to see and go here, this or that person. All right, well, good deal. Well, before we get started, you've got one more thing you want to tell us about about your book, Reverse and Hermon. Oh, yeah, it's it's available now on Kindle. And for those of you who are a Logos Bible Software users, they I got an email, I posted it. Well, it's probably a day or two old now, something like that. But it's available for Logos Bible Software users in the Logos format on preorder so that the product itself, you know, isn't ready for immediate drop. Those of you who are Logos users, you know, sort of know what I'm talking about here, but you can get it on preorder. And like I said, when I posted it, make it part of your data mining experience, lots of good verse references, cross references, references to other literature in there. It's it's a great kind of book to have in a fully searchable format. So, yeah, I'd recommend it if you're a Logos user. All right, Mike, can you tell what I'm doing? No, I'm looking at you. Yeah, the evil lie. Right. Well, yeah. Can you feel it? No, I really can't. Oh, I need to work on it. That must be what I ate this morning. You know, I don't think it's the evil one. Well, maybe you're going to tell me what I'm doing wrong in this episode here. So yeah, this is this is kind of an odd one. This is an interesting topic. You know, I don't know how many it was several months ago that I got an email and I've gotten more than one, interestingly enough about, you know, hey, can you do something on the evil eye? Or, you know, do you have anything on the evil idea? So, you know, when when we finished Ezekiel looking for topics, we thought, hey, you know, why not why not throw this one in here? I'm I'm relatively new to the to the ancient Near Eastern biblical connections to it. I mean, the the concept I was familiar with. But in terms of the specific overlaps, that was a bit new, but it's really interesting. So I'm glad we're doing an episode on it by way of just, you know, getting into it here. I'm going to read a little selection from the dictionary of biblical imagery because it actually has some some information on this. And it's it's basic. It's a good place to start. We're going to get into a lot more detail. But that's the source dictionary of biblical imagery edited by Leland Reichen. And it's the entry says the notion of the evil eye that is common throughout most religious traditions is notably absent from the Bible, though Galatians three one may be a veiled reference, unquote. Now, I'm going to I'm going to not really go out on too much of a limb to say that is a dramatic understatement and to some extent misinformed, you know, what what they're really getting at here is in this entry. And I'll read a little bit more just so that you get a flavor for what we're talking about here it because it after saying, oh, it's not there in the Bible. They have a whole bunch of first references. It's a different things and some of them will hit. But the entry continues and says, nowhere is this view of the magical power inherent in the observer's eye more evident than in the almost universal ancient belief in the power of the evil eye. I'll just stop with that sentence. Well, if it's universal, you know, we might want to think that, you know, there's also something here in the biblical framework about it rather than just say it's not present. So again, that that first part of the of the entry is is pretty dramatically understated, really under informed, but continuing. Some people it was thought could bring about calamity by casting a spell with an evil eye. The expression of jealous sentiments or even compliments were viewed as harboring vengeful spirits that would subsequently destroy what had been admired. In accordance with this outlook, the phrase evil eye in scripture is usually rendered conceptually as jealousy. Wait a minute. Let's stop there. Stop the presses. You mean the phrase evil eye does occur in scripture? In fact, it does. And again, that might sound odd because, again, as the entry, so this isn't in the Bible anywhere. What they're really talking about is this magical view of it. The phrase evil eye does occur in scripture. We're going to go through those passages in this episode. The notion that somehow there's some sort of supernatural or spooky power in it that is, you know, sort of emitted or transferred on to the person, either from the person doing it or to the person being looked at. That's what the entry is really sort of being cautious, maybe even overly cautious about. But the phrase actually does show up. So back to the quotation. In accordance with this outlook, the phrase evil eye in scripture is usually rendered conceptually as jealousy. The literal phrase is thine eye evil because I am good. Matthew 20, 15 AV. Well, that's nice. That's kind of an awkward literal rendering of one verse. But as we see with the phrase shows up in other places, the evil eye or the eye betrays the inner spirit and maybe selfish and hoarding or bountiful and generous. Eyes can be sharpened like weapons, Job 16, 9, and narrowed to a threatening squint. Few verse references there. The eyes communicate the whole range of human emotions. Suspicion, haughtiness, arrogance, humility, pity, so on and so forth. And the rest of the entry is sort of like that. What is, you know, references to the eye and scripture, you know, just a person's eyes generally. But what we want to focus on is this actual idea. And then again, the phrase where it shows up in either the Old or the New Testament. Now, there's a context for this, and I think it's important that we say something about the context before we try to jump into the into the Bible. And I'm quoting here a referencing anyway, the an article called The Evil Eye in Mesopotamia. This is Marie Louise Thompson, who was a who I think still is a Sumerian scholar. And her this this article was in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1992. So she writes just a few excerpts from this. It's a it's a fairly lengthy article, but just lift a few quotations out of it. She says that someone just by looking through a kind of witchcraft or power of the eyes may cause harm to another person, animal or object, seems to be an almost universal belief known as the Evil Eye. Unquote. Now, Thompson goes on to go through a number of instances where there are specific incantations in Mesopotamian literature against the Evil Eye, basically to protect someone from it. And she writes about those incantations. Quote, these incantations all indicate that the Evil Eye was associated with witchcraft and sorcery and other evils caused by malevolent human beings. But whereas witchcraft most often resulted in conflicts with family and neighbors, serious illness or even death, the effects of the Evil Eye seem to be somewhat different. In one collection, the Ceneiform Texts from the Louvre, number 1689, that they are described as accidents. You know, in other words, the evil eye can cause these things, accidents, situations which might happen to anyone at any time, like it raining too little or the cheese making goes wrong or a tool breaks or clothes get torn and so on and so forth. So what she's saying here is that the Evil Eye in Mesopotamian thinking didn't have to be this awful malevolent, disastrous catastrophic kind of thing. The Evil Eye in their thinking was something they could blame for almost anything that went wrong, you know, everyday occurrences. Now, let me go down here. I want to include one other thing here. She says, in the Near East today, eye imitations made of glass are worn as amulets against the Evil Eye. So even in modern times, beads resembling an eye or a pair of eyes are known from ancient Mesopotamia and are often understood as such amulets. The texts, however, prescribe other remedies, means to protect against the Evil Eye are described in various incantations. Unquote. Now, Yama Uchi, who is I think he's retired now, but Yama Uchi is an evangelical scholar or wasn't evangelical scholar. He taught at the University of Miami in Ohio in Tyndale Bulletin. He has an article called Magic in the Biblical World, and this one, I believe, is publicly accessible online. And he talks about the Evil Eye there. So again, we're just setting some context here before we jump into some passages. Yama Uchi writes, a widespread superstition, both in antiquity and at present, is the fear of the Evil Eye. That is the concept that someone can cause harm by his baleful glance. The usual motive for this form of black magic is envy. Now, that's an important statement, as we'll note as we go on. The usual motive is envy. Occasions of gaiety and unusual success are especially thought to excite the resentment of those less fortunate. Any unnatural or diseased eye, as well, was especially considered an Evil Eye. So if you had some kind of problem with your eye, people would look at you. Now, that guy has an Evil Eye. Yama Uchi continues, the black magic of the Evil Eye and the defensive white magic against it are already attested in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. From Arsalan Tash in Syria, an amulet against the Evil Eye was published in 1971. I actually had to translate this thing in graduate school. Again, he's correct. You know, there's some in this particular inscription, there's something about, you know, warding off the Evil Eye. He continues and says, we have rabbinical references to the Evil Eye. Rabbi Areka, and I'm assuming that is not a typo for Akiva, but we'll just go with what Yama Uchi's article has here. Rabbi Areka went so far as to aver that 99 of 100 people died because of the Evil Eye. An exception to the ban on work on the Sabbath was the uttering of a spell against the Evil Eye. You could do that. That wasn't too much work. A man could take his right thumb in the left hand and vice versa and say for protection, I, person, son of another person, come from the seat of Joseph against whom the Evil Eye has no power, unquote. The belief persisted among Jews in the Middle Ages. Rashi reported that a man could call his handsome son Ethiopia, that's E-T-H-I-O-P, which was the equivalent of the N word in antiquity. He could a man could call his handsome son that name to avoid the envious Evil Eye, which is kind of weird. Yama Uchi adds, it is quite clear that fear of the Evil Eye continued to the Christian era as evidenced by numerous amulets, paintings and mosaics. A mosaic from Antioch, for example, shows the Evil Eye being attacked by various animals and weapons. One aspect of the hostile relations between Christians and Jews was the suspicion that Jews had this malevolent magical power. The canon of Elvira, number 49, dated to 305 A.B., forbade Jews from standing and ripening grain lest they cause the crops to wither by their gaze, unquote. That's the end of Yama Uchi's section. So Yama Uchi talks about this rabbinical, you know, the rabbinical belief in this and then the Christian belief and the Christians are, you know, in 305, in this edict, forbade Jews from standing and ripening grain lest they look at it and it die, you know, because they had the Evil Eye. So it's kind of apparent, you know, that you had Jews and Christians, they bought into this idea, which was a wider, you know, cultural idea. One last source, and I'll bring this one up again. Fianci, that's F-I-E-N-S-Y in his article, which will reference on the episode page says, Greek literature is also full of references to the Evil Eye and a lengthy discussion in Momita. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, M-O-M-I-T-A. Plutarch tries to give a rationalistic explanation for why the Evil Eye is effective. He says there are emanations of particles he maintains from all bodies, especially living bodies. The eye gives off these particles most abundantly. And here is the passage. Indeed, I said you yourself are on the right track of the cause of the effectiveness of the Evil Eye. When you come to the emanations of the bodies and by far living things are more likely to give out such things because of their warmth and movement. And probably these emanations are especially given out through the eyes, unquote. So it's a passage where you have Plutarch essentially buying into this notion that bodies, living bodies, living organisms give off something, emanations, he calls them. And the eyes are especially good at this. And so that's his attempted scientific explanation for the efficacy, the effectiveness of the Evil Eye. Now, the question that this raises, of course, is is there anything in the Bible that really draws on these ideas? And curiously enough, there are a few things that, you know, again, seem to, I don't know if draw on is the right word, but seem to reflect the same sort of notions. Again, minus the emanations, you know, this like energy being projected from the eye, good or evil and that kind of stuff, minus that sort of talk. And minus, you know, the notion that there was some sort of spiritual power or spiritual energy being emitted against someone else. So minus that sort of idea, you do have references in Scripture that sort of, again, reflect the general idea of someone giving someone else the Evil Eye and having it actually sort of mean something or effect something in some way. Now, I will have this article as well referenced on the episode page, and I will include it in the protected folder for newsletter subscribers, but Nicole Telford, or Telford, excuse me, wrote a really interesting article in this called The Affective, that's spelled with an A-F-F-E-C-T-I-V-E, the Affective Eye colon reexamining a biblical idiom, that's the end of the title, and the source is biblical interpretation volume 23, 2015. Her article, The Affective Eye, reexamining a biblical idiom, she goes through in both testaments, you know, the passages in a decent amount of detail for this belief, again, how certain passages in Scripture reflect this notion that someone could look at you or look a certain way at you, and it affected you in some way. Now, of course, again, we don't have this sort of, you know, kind of paganistic idea that we're, again, emitting energy particles or bolts or emanations or whatever that you can actually, it's not like your eye is weaponized, okay? But nevertheless, there are passages that reflect this idea that the way a person looks at you can and does affect you and others in certain ways. And that, again, reflects the broader notion that harm to someone else can be caused by the way someone looks at them or the way you would look at them, that they can actually be affected, you know, in this process, in this way. So, Tilford sort of begins her treatment this way. She says, throughout the 20th century, scholars were quite comfortable asserting that the ancient Israelites believed in the existence of the evil eye. Anthropological studies have proven that pre-industrial cultures around the world share a nearly universal belief that, quote, certain individuals, animals, demons or gods had the power of casting a spell or causing some damaging effect upon every object inanimate or animate upon which their glance fell, unquote. That ancient Ariesian cultures were among the earliest examples of this belief and the Hebrew Bible specifically mentions an evil eye. For example, Proverbs 23, 6, Proverbs 28, 22 and also mentions to do bad with the eye. That's Deuteronomy 15, 9 and also verse 28 or excuse me, Deuteronomy 59, Deuteronomy 28, 54 and 56 that we have these instances, Tilford writes, seemed to confirm that the belief was prevalent in ancient Israel. In the words of John Elliott, the evil eye was thought to be, quote, one of the most pervasive and enduring elements of ancient culture, unquote. And the ancient Israelites, quote, were no exception, unquote. Some scholars, however, have challenged this assertion finding little or no evidence for the existence of the evil eye belief in Israel. Those passages in the Hebrew Bible that seem to mention evil eye are according to those scholars, idioms for greed or stinginess, not references to magical practice. I'm gonna suggest here, that's the end of Tilford's quote. I'm gonna suggest here that the biblical stuff is probably somewhere in between those two things. Idioms for greed and stinginess on one side and then references to magical practices on the other. I think we're gonna see that the biblical notion falls somewhere in the middle there. Now let's jump to the Old Testament. You have in First Samuel 18, nine and a number of studies of this and there actually are, there are book-length studies on the evil eye in antiquity, even some multi-volume studies. So you could find those on Amazon or any one of these references that we'll provide here are probably gonna note them. But a number of them start off in the Old Testament with First Samuel 18, nine, which I don't think is really a very good example, but I'm gonna give it here for the sake of being complete. We have in First Samuel 18, nine, Saul quote, set his eye. This is literally set his eye upon David unquote. Now, again, I don't really think this is a very good example because of really what we have in the Hebrew. You have a term here where as it is in the Maseridic text you could translate this. I'm just translating and looking at the Hebrew here just sort of trying to make it somewhat literal, but understandable for our subject matter. You could translate verse nine as something like, and it came to pass or and it was that Saul, and then there's the word for iniquity or wickedness. And then we have the direct object in David. Like Saul did something wickedly, did something evil. He had some sort of evil intent toward David. Now, the word therefore wickedness or evil, that sort of thing, depending on how you would, you know, which manuscript essentially, which reading that you would go with, there is an alternative form for this particular word that could be a, not a noun like wickedness, but could be a participle. And then it would refer to looking with evil intent or something like that that it's the idea really for lack of a better term, it's the idea of having a malicious eye towards someone. And that's the way most of these articles are gonna take it. They're gonna go with that manuscript reading. And I don't really think this is a very good one because you do have a textual issue here. And also it could just mean that he looked at David and he just, the anger in him just festered. You know, he just didn't like David. He determined in his heart to do something evil toward David, that doesn't mean that his very gaze somehow affected David negatively. Okay, so I think this one's a little bit overstated. I think a better example is Balaam, which again, kind of interesting language here. If you go to Numbers 2313, and I'm just going, I'm gonna go there just so that we can read the passage. Numbers 2313, we know the story of Balaam, okay? That Balaak wants the prophet Balaam to curse Israel. And he keeps trying to get the prophet to do this. And Balaam says, hey, I'm only gonna say it what the Lord puts in my mouth. And then every time he opens his mouth and he can't curse Israel, but he has to bless them. And Balaak gets mad and all this sort of stuff. Well, here at Numbers 23, we read this. Balaak said to him, and he's speaking to Balaam, please come with me to another place from which you may see them. Or you can translate that, that you may look upon them. You shall see only a fraction of them and shall not see them all, then curse them for me over there. So the feeling you get from that passage is that Balaak at least, and we're gonna look at another passage that it goes, I think Balaam would have thought of it this way as well, but that Balaak thinks that the gaze of the prophet will help him curse Israel. In other words, it has something to do with effecting an evil outcome against the thing, in this case, the nation of Israel, the people of Israel that he's looking at. So you actually have this language that Balaam needs to look at them. If you go to Numbers 24, the very next chapter, I'll just start at the beginning because we're gonna hit verse three here. But in beginning of verse one here, we're in chapter 24, Numbers 24, we read, when Balaam saw that it pleased the Lord to bless Israel, he did not go as it other times to look for omens, but set his face toward the wilderness and Balaam lifted up his eyes and saw Israel camping tribe by tribe. And the Spirit of God came upon him and he took up his discourse and said, and I'll catch the phrase here, the Oracle of Balaam, the son of Beor, the Oracle of the man whose eye is opened. Okay, that's verse three. If you go down to verse 15, we read this, Balaam's first Oracle, and he took up his discourse and said, the Oracle of Balaam, the son of Beor, the Oracle of the man whose eye is opened. So you have twice this notion that Balaam is described as this man, this person whose eye is opened. Well, what does that mean? It has to mean more than he's not blind or something like that, because there's no indication here that this would be any special status. Hey, we found a prophet here, one that's not blind. Look at that. Now, there's nothing unusual about that, but this description is unusual with respect to other places in the Old Testament, talking about prophets, good or evil. So the supposition is that Balaam's practice or his ability or his power or his technique, whatever word that you wanna really apply to it had something to do with gazing upon the subject that he was going to prophesy against. Like he had to look at them, again, he had to cast his eye on them, he had to see them. And so some have looked at this passage and thought, well, we may not have the phrase evil eye here, but there could be something here where we're looking at an object to curse it matters. And so perhaps this is akin to the way the evil eye behaves in other ancient Near Eastern cultures where a prophet or a deity or some other spirit would send their eye out toward a thing that was cursed. In other words, either symbolically or metaphorically, the idea of sending the eye out is that they fall within your gaze. If you think of the Lord of the Rings here, the eye of Sauron, that kind of thing. When it detected you, that mattered, you were affected. So that would be sort of the idea here, to fall under the gaze of this prophet person or the deity or whatever in the ancient Near East was not something you wanted to happen because that gave them the ability then to curse you and to affect you in some way. And so scholars, again, looking at numbers 23 and 24 here have wondered in what they've written about this, thinking, well, this sort of sounds like that idea when it's associated here with Baal. I'm not a Tilford comments on this briefly, this whole idea. She writes, God's watchful gaze could bring aid to the one who sought it, Psalm 25, 18 through 20, or harm to the one who had the misfortune of falling under it, Job 40, verses 11 and 12, or Habakkuk 3, 6. Now, let me just read you Job 40, 11 through 12. Pour out the overflowing of your anger and look on everyone who is proud and abase him. Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand. So Tilford is making the point that sometimes God is describing this way where God's mere look is going to affect someone either positively or negatively and that would be consistent with the evil eye idea in the ancient Near East. So in her discussion here, is this why Baalum is described the way he is? Like do certain prophets kind of imbibe in this or mimic this kind of idea? Where the deity in this case, in the case of Job 40, it's the God of Israel here, that he can look at someone and that results in a judgment, okay, that idea. So is the talk about Baal the same sort of thing? Now, she continues, Job specifically asked God to look away from him so that he can have a brief respite from his troubles. The implication being that God's sight itself brings harm. That's Job 719. Sight also had the power to affect the perceiver. Sight could also transfer physical properties between entities apparently. Thus in 2 Kings 2, 9 through 15, Elisha absorbs the prophetic power of Elijah by seeing him ascend. And in Numbers 21, 9, a person who is bitten by a snake could be healed by looking at the serpent staff of Moses. Now, that's the end of Tilfred's quote on this part. Now, obviously we could read those passages differently, but the point is, if we're thinking about this notion that either God or a prophet, someone who is ostensibly empowered by God or God is working through them in a given episode, which Balaam would sort of fit because God does intervene there and prevents him from cursing Israel. In other words, when Balaam looks at the people of Israel, they turn out to be blessed. Maybe his usual procedure was to gaze upon something, to curse it, but God is intervening to sort of reverse that process. Is that what we're looking at? I think the best we can say here is that these sorts of passages and these sorts of statements, whether they be about God or about Balaam are similar to, they're consistent with, might be a better way to put it. They're consistent with the evil eye idea. That doesn't necessarily mean that the writer was thinking about what he was writing the same way as maybe some guy over in Mesopotamia or over in Egypt, but the language is, there is an overlap here. There is some consistency to it. And as we keep going, you'll see that this kind of works itself out in some other places too. Now there are more specific biblical references to the evil eye than these, the ones we've talked about already, where you actually have the phrase in Hebrew, evil eye, if the word for eye and the adjective for evil. So Proverbs 23.6, now you're not gonna hear this in the translation, because the translation is basically going to obscure this kind of language because it's not gonna be rendering it literally, it's gonna be rendering the phrase interpretively. Just on a recent podcast episode, we talked about translation and how difficult that is and how the translators can influence the way people think about a certain passage. Here you go, this is a good example. So Proverbs 23.6, do not eat the bread of a man who is stingy. Literally, that verse actually says, do not eat the bread of or with the evil eye. Do not eat bread with the evil eye. Do not eat the bread of the evil eye. You could translate it either way. You say, well, how in the world does somebody take that? Do not eat the bread of the evil eye or with an evil eye? And how do you get, do not eat the bread of a man who is stingy? No, just hold on. We'll see how translators sort of drift over into that sort of direction. Proverbs 28.22, a stingy man hastens after wealth. The text literally says, a man with an evil eye hastens after wealth. Deuteronomy 15.9, take care lest there be an unworthy thought in your heart. And you say, the seventh year, the year of release is near and your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother and you give him nothing. And he cries it to the Lord against you and you'd be guilty of sin. Now literally it says, instead of your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother, it's your eye does evil on your poor brother. Again, that language is very reflective, similar to the kind of language you would see in other literature about someone's gaze affecting someone else negatively. This evil idea, again, without the magical incantations, idea, that stuff. That phrasing is actually pretty similar. Deuteronomy 28.54, the man who is the most tender and refined among you will begrudge food to his brother. To the wife he embraces and to the last of the children whom he has left. It's describing some desperate circumstances here and basically people are gonna act poorly, badly, selfishly. And in this case, instead of the man who is the most tender and refined among you will begrudge food to his brother, it's he will do evil with his eye against his brother and to the wife, against the wife he embraces and against the last the children whom he has left. So you have four references here that, again, the phrasing is really interesting because it does sound similar to or at least consistent with this concept. Again, that's pretty much ubiquitous in the ancient world in all eras, frankly. And even in what we would consider today, the biblical lands, even in modern times, people are still thinking this way and thinking about the evil eye. And here you have four references, again, that are kind of consistent with that. Now, Tilford, back to her article, here's what she notes, a few things that she notes about these passages. She writes, the mention of the evil eye in Proverbs is an idiom, denoting a person who is stingy. Again, this is sort of the standard view she's getting into. Unlike a person who has a good eye, that is a person who is generous. Proverbs 22, verse nine, sort of gives us the reverse. Here's what the verse says. Whoever has a bountiful eye will be blessed for he shares his bread with the poor, okay? So that's a good eye, you're a sharing person, an evil eye is, you're not, you're greedy. So a person with a bad eye refrains from helping his or her neighbor. He offers food and drink but does not wish his guests to enjoy them, Proverbs 23, 6, and 7. He strives to obtain goods but does not share them, Proverbs 28, 22. The references in Deuteronomy are probably also idiomatic when disaster comes, the one who, quote, does bad with the eye, unquote, withholds food from his neighbor, wife, and children in order to preserve his own life. Now, neither phrase refers to the physical harm caused to another by means of the eye. They refer to the individual's moral character. But Tilford is gonna transition on and say, that's all true, but it's only part of the picture. It's only part of the story. These idioms do, however, derive from the affective nature of physical sight, either the ability of sight to affect its object or its perceiver, the one who sees the eye, okay? Presuming that the eye can affect the object of its gaze, the Deuteronomic passage map passages, map the effects property onto the abstract experience of selfishness. Let me read that again. Presuming that the eye can affect the object of its gaze, the Deuteronomic passages map the effects, the property, I'm just gonna take, I'm gonna improve on her wording here a little bit. The Deuteronomic passages map over the properties, okay, the properties of the gaze onto the abstract experience of selfishness. Withholding food from another, even if due to dire straits becomes a visual activity, a doing bad with the eye. A similar sentiment is found in Proverbs 10-10. There it is noted that whoever, quote, literally, bites with the eye gives injury. Although often translated as wink, the Hebrew verb here, Karatz, literally means to bite or sting again with the eye. Thus, as other scholars, she quotes Katze, Zechariah's Katze, argue, the action of the eye described here is like to that of a devouring animal or stinging insect. It goes forth and bites its object causing injury. To bite with the eye then reflects the hostile intent of the individual, a desire to negatively affect the person upon whom the glance falls. She has a cross-reference here. See also the sharpened eyes in Job 16-9. I'll read you the passage. He has torn me in his wrath and hated me. He has gnashed his teeth at me. My adversary sharpens his eyes against me, unquote. So, you know, Tilford's point here in all this is that, look, we can read these passages and sure, they reflect stinginess. They reflect greed. They reflect selfishness. There's no doubt about that. And so translators, when they don't render these things literally, that's the flavor they're looking for. And it's legitimate. But her argument is that, you know, some of the language just goes a little bit further than that, where apparently the person who is doing the stingy act or being greedy is actually, according to a literal reading of the text, looking at a person with hostile intent, you know, I'm gonna withhold this to get you or to get even or to hurt you or harm you. And so she says, it's not really sort of this passive thing that people do without thinking because they're just inherently selfish. She's arguing that there's just something a little more active, a little more intentional, a little more deliberative to it. And the fact that this is conveyed with the language of the eye or the eyes in her view reflects this idea. It reflects very generally the notion of the evil eye that the look of a person can cause harm or that a person looks at another person a certain way to affect them negatively. Again, the evil eye idea. Now the New Testament, we get some of this as well in some surprising places. In Matthew 6, 22 through 23, this is what we read. The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness? Parallel passage to this, again, Jesus is the speaker obviously, Luke 11, 34 through 36 says this. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad or getting evil, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. It's an odd phrase. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright as when a lamp with its rays gives you light. That's the end of the passage. Now, the vast majority of commentators here, at least the ones I've looked at, would say something like, the eyes are like a window letting light in, but that's a modern view of the eye. That's an interpretation of the language of these passages based on modern knowledge of how the eye works. They didn't have that modern knowledge, okay? This is a modern view of the eye. Ancient Jewish texts, again operating from a pre-scientific perspective here about how an eye actually works, you know, mechanically, ancient Jewish texts have a different view. If there is light within, light will show from the eye. Consider the consistency of this idea when juxtaposed with the lamp idea in the same passage. A lamp doesn't transmit light from another source. A lamp is its own light source. So in other words, you know, the modern understanding of the eye, you know, light comes into the eye, it passes through, you know, the hole there and it hits this and that and it, you know, it sets off, you know, this or that, you know, part of the eye and you're able to see, you know. Okay, that isn't what the passages are talking about because again, that pre-supposes a modern knowledge of how the eye works. Rather, the eye is the one giving off the light, okay? You know, if there's light within the light will show from the eye. The light comes from the eye. Again, it sounds a little bit like that energy stuff, you know, that Plutarch was talking about, but again, that would be an overstatement as well, I think, we'll get to why in a moment. But if you juxtaposed the talk about the eye with the lamp, it's kind of obvious. A lamp doesn't receive energy, you know, the light from another source and then cast it out to illumin the room. The light is the source. Okay, the lamp is the source of the light. So the eye is the source of the light. Again, to keep the comparison consistent. Now, I'm gonna read something here from, or reference something anyway from the international critical commentary here that I think goes along with this, just a brief comment. It says, there are several Jewish texts, roughly half a dozen of them, which liken the eye to a lamp, namely in Daniel 10.6 and in Zechariah 4. Daniel 10.6, I'll just read that one. His body is the, again, reflecting a divine being here or describing a divine being. His body was like barrel, his face like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like flaming torches. Again, the idea of, you know, the eye emitting light. Zechariah 4 is another, the Testament of Job, 2nd Enoch 42, 30 Enoch 35. Again, this idea is contained in Old Testament and Second Temple Jewish texts and even a little bit beyond the Second Temple period. That's his point. Now, the writer says the comparison, you know, this light, the eye and the lamp, the comparison in these passages never has to do with the eye conveying light to the inward parts, like letting light in, again, the modern view of the eye. On the contrary, in all six instances, it is used to create the picture of light coming forth from the eye. Again, it's just an interesting observation. The idea then is that the eye emits, okay, what is within already. So in these passages in the Gospels, Jesus is contrasting the, in Greek, the aplous, the haplous eye, single, sound or generous eye, that you can translate haplous in any number of those ways. He's contrasting that eye with the paneras eye, the evil eye. Paneras is just a standard word for evil. They are contrasted. Hence their meanings need to make contrastive sense. We saw in the Old Testament that the evil eye has something to do with stinginess or hostile intent, disregard for the person being gazed at. The way one looks at someone else affects them. It can cause them harm because they suffer as a result of the disdain or the hostility. Now, they're obviously gonna suffer if you withhold something from them or if you act, do you do something after you're gazed or the way you look at them? But let's think of it this way. People can actually be harmed by the way you look at them. And that's not the standard evil eye thing in the pagan world where we're talking about spells and all this kind of stuff. But we know from experience that we can be affected by the way people look at us. And so that's kind of what's in play here. We don't wanna forget about that. Now, there's another aspect to this that several of the authors bring up. I think Feinzi's article is the one that does the most with this, even though several of them mention it. And that is, this is also part of the larger cultural picture that anthropologists and biblical scholars, who take a look at this sort of thing, who do what in academia is called a social scientific approach to, you know, reading scripture. And that is the shame on our culture, which is pretty important. You know, a lot of cultures today operate based on shame on our systems in Middle East, especially, but you have Asian cultures that are gonna do this as well, Asian and South Asian. Let me just read a little bit from Feinzi's article, so you get the idea. The evil eye grows out of the core Mediterranean values of honor and shame and something called the limited good. Honor is the greatest value in this society. I always think of the Japanese when I think of an honor culture, shame honor culture, but anyway, back to the quote. Honor is the greatest value in this society and the worst horror is shame. Likewise, in a peasant culture, there is a sense of limited good. Food is limited, space is limited, even honor is limited. Thus, if someone has too much wealth, too much food or too much honor, then he's taking away from you. There's only a limited amount of these things, you know? You can get yours taken from you. This causes envy and envy leads to the evil eye, the pudding of a curse or spell on the one who has too much or flots too much of what he has. Today, Mediterranean people do not, for example, like their children to be praised too much in public as beautiful or intelligent because that might provoke the evil eye from someone else and cause a curse to be put on their children. Not everyone casts the evil eye on others, only envious people would do that, but there are plenty of envious people to go around in any culture. Jesus saying now takes on a different meaning, again, in this context. It is not the light coming into the eye that is the issue, but what goes out from it. The hop-loose person or good person, sound person is a person who has no double motives, such a person is single-minded, no envy lurks in the shadows. What appears to be actually is this person's gaze, again, the hop-loose eye, the sound eye, the good eye, this person's gaze causes genuine good to others. However, the one with the evil eye causes evil. This one is envious of another's success or possessions or family and either quietly or audibly cast a spell on him or her. This is a dangerous person whose whole body is in darkness or evil. In other words, when they cast the evil eye against a person, what they're casting is what's inside them. What's inside them is darkness. Now, another article by Bridges picks up on this idea and I wanna include a little bit of what this one says. Recent scholarship has documented the aspect of the ancient Mediterranean worldview, which some call the idea of limited good. In a world where people believe the good things of life existed in short supply, one person's prosperity meant another person's poverty, one person's honor meant another's dishonor. The pie, to use a modern metaphor, contained only so many slices. And if one person got a bigger slice, someone else necessarily got a smaller one. In such a world, the vice of envy ran rampant and envious people might cast the evil eye on neighbors who made them jealous by prospering at their expense or as they thought. Hence, the evil eye becomes associated with envy. In other words, this is why it's associated with envy in Middle Eastern culture. You look bad at a person, you give them the evil eye because if they have something, it was taken from you. If they are something that you're not, okay, that was something that they took from you. Like he says, it's an inherently envious sort of system. If you think that things are in limited supply and the person who has wealth or who has honor, we can't be happy for them because the more honor they have, the more wealth they have, the more whatever they have, that was something taken from you. And in that cultural system, you would look at them with envy. You would look at them wanting their downfall. You would look at them in such a way that you want to take from them. And this is where the evil eye mindset comes from and why it's linked in an ancient document like the Bible with envy and greed and so on and so forth. And again, what Jesus is saying, the person with the hop-loose eye, what comes out of their eye tells us who they really are, tells us what's really inside them. And the person with the evil eye, well, it tells us the same thing, doesn't it? Tells us what's inside them. One who envies, this is back to Bridges, one who envied a neighbor's prosperity might cast a withering look in the neighbor's direction in an attempt to undo the neighbor's success. In such a social context, the evil eye became an idiom for the kind of greedy, grudging, self-serving attitude. Jesus contrasts with the generous eye, the hop-loose eye. To take evil eye as an idiom in Matthew 6.22 through 23 does not mean to deny that people of Jesus time believed in the harmful effects of a baleful look, just on its own. Both people who believed in the evil eye and people who did not could use the expression as an idiom for greed. To make a modern comparison, both people who believe in ghosts and those who do not can use the expression. You look like you've seen a ghost. Belief or disbelief in ghosts does not change the figurative nature of the language. So let's move to Galatians 3. This is, I think in all the sources again that I've looked at is probably the example that most scholars consider the best one as far as the one that gets closest to evil eye thinking in non-biblical culture. Okay, non-biblical civilizations, non-biblical peoples. In other words, the pagans, that kind of idea. This passage gets the closest to it. So Galatians 3.1, and remember, you know, what's, this is Paul, Paul's letter to the Galatians. What's the context? The context is Paul's opposition to converts, people that he's one of the Lord or somebody else is one of the Lord. Being enslaved by the idea that either obedience to the rules of a pagan faith, you know, mean salvation, or if there are Jews in the mixed, the belief that obedience to the law brings salvation. He doesn't want people enslaved by these ideas. Again, this is the sort of work salvation sort of thing. On either side. So he writes in Galatians 3.1, Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? The verb there is buskino. Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this. Did you receive the spirit by the works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Just as Abraham believed God and it was kind of to him as righteousness. So he turns again to the typical, the fundamental Jewish example there. But the key phrase is here, who has bewitched you? The term, the verb here, buskino is rare. This is its only use in the New Testament. It shows up twice in the Septuagint. One of those is a non-canonical book, Serac 14.6, at least non-canonical, again for Protestants, Serac 14.6. And it's kind of vague. It doesn't really tell us much about what's going on here. There's no one more evil than him who begrudges himself. And this is the repayment of his evil. Okay, that doesn't really tell us much. That's Serac 14.6. However, the second one is really interesting and it's a passage we've actually run into already. Studeronomy 28, 54, and I'm gonna read 54 and 55 here. The tender one who is among you and the very delicate one will be grudge with his eye, his brother and the wife and his bosom and the remaining young children who were left behind. And this is a different translation. ESV, let me read it again. The tender one who is among you and the very delicate one will be grudge with his eye, his brother and the wife and his bosom and the remaining young children who were left behind. The term begrudge there is the one translated in the Septuagint with Boschino, the bewitching verb. Okay, which really, you know, think about that. Tender one who is among you and the very delicate one will bewitch with his eye, his brother and the wife and his, you get the flavor here of this being an evil eye, like for real, you know, kind of thing going on here. Verse 55 though, so the one who begrudges or bewitches with his eye, you know, his brother, his wife, the remaining children. Verse 55, so as to give one of them from the flesh of his young children, whom he may be devouring, because there's nothing left behind for him in your distress and in your oppression that your enemies afflicted you in all your cities. This is a reference again to judgment for apostasy and things get so bad that we have cannibalism. And you say, what in the world is going on here? Why would Paul use this really rare term? Okay, it's the only time it's used in the New Testament, twice in the Septuagint, one is kind of neutral, but the Deuteronomy 2854 one is kind of really gross, okay, kind of, it's in a pretty terrible context. Why would Paul use this term in Galatians 3.1? Now, some scholars think Deuteronomy 28 is the answer to that question. And yet another article by Eastman entitled The Evil Eye and the Curse of the Law, Galatians 3.1, revisited. This is the journal for the study of the New Testament. In 2001, Eastman writes this, Paul's use of the verb bascino here is unique in his letters. As in all of the New Testament, the verb's rarity makes its occurrence at such a critical juncture striking. Is it possible that Paul's peculiar description of his Galatian converts here in Galatians 3.1 might contribute in a particular way to his argument in chapters three and four at large of his letter. My argument, Eastman's, will be that the verb bascino does indeed function within Paul's appeal to his Galatian converts, but as an intertextual echo, which evokes the Deuteronomic Curse in which it occurs in Deuteronomy 28. Whether through the preaching of the law inscribing teachers who have come into the Galatian churches or through Paul himself, the Gentile converts have learned about the blessings of obedience. And the curses for disobedience to the law of Moses set forth in Deuteronomy 27 and 28. Among those curses is one in which starving parents in a besieged city, quote, cast the evil eye on their next of kin. Deuteronomy 28, 53 through 57, describes the cannibalistic actions of such parents. And again, just to, we're gonna quote it again, but this is more reflected in the Septuagint here. You will eat the offspring of your body, the flesh of your sons and your daughters whom the Lord your God gave you in your distress and the affliction with which your enemies afflict you. And here's the verse 54, the one we've read a couple of times now. The tender and very delicate man among you will cast the evil eye. Again, the verb is bascino. And with the word off thalmo, get a eye, will be which with the eye or cast to be witching eye or something like that. Cast the evil eye on his brother and on the wife and his bosom and the remaining children which may be left with him so as not to give one of them any of the flesh of his children which he is eating. And the tender and very delicate woman among you continues in Deuteronomy 28, whose foot never ventured to tread the ground because of her delicacy and tenderness will cast the evil eye again bascino on her husband in her bosom and on her son and her daughter. And the afterbirth which comes out between her thighs and the child which she bore for she will eat them secretly in her need of all things, in your distress and your affliction with which your enemies will afflict you in all your cities. That's the end of the passage. Now, Eastman says, if indeed Paul's use of bascino in Galatians 3.1 echoes the horrifying curse, the horrifying curse described in Deuteronomy 28, 53 to 57, how would such an association contribute to Paul's argument against those who preach works, against those who preach law observance? I propose that it operates on two levels. First, in the immediate argument about blessing and curse in Galatians 3.1 through 14. And second, in the larger development of the complex imagery of parents and children, slaves and heirs woven throughout chapters 3 and 4. That is, Paul appropriates the vivid context of bascino for his own argument and uses it to introduce both the theme of blessing and curse which he develops in Galatians 3.8 through 14. And a horrifying image of the consequences of the curse of the law. On the first level as an echo of Deuteronomy 28, Galatians 3.1 might be translated like this, you foolish Galatians. Who has put you under a curse? In other words, that's the idea of bewitching. Who has put you under a spell, under a curse? You before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. This anticipates the theme of the curse in Galatians 3.10 to 14 and Christ crucified as the cursed one who is the antidote to the curse in the same passage. The translation of bascino simply as bewitched in the sense of a harmful sinister or jealous gaze would imply that Paul holds up the cross of Christ as an antidote to the evil eye similar to the protection afforded by amulets, incantations and gestures. I'm gonna stop there. You see what he's saying here. He's saying Paul uses this really rare verb drawn from this horrific passage in Deuteronomy 28 for a couple of reasons. He wants the Galatians to think of the people telling them that they need to observe the law to be saved as casting a spell on them like it's witchcraft, okay? And he draws on the idea of the evil eye as part of a witchcraft tradition like in ancient Mesopotamia to do that. In other words, there was Israelites, people, Jews who knew where the evil eye came from. They knew it was associated with witchcraft and sorcery. In their thinking, yeah, it was associated with greed and selfishness and whatnot. And if you look at someone as scant or you look at someone with evil intent, it's because you think they stole from you. It's the shame on our thing. All that social stuff is relevant. But the argument here is that Paul, when Paul uses this verb and especially drawn in this horrific passage about cannibalism, it's as though he's trying to say, you know, for people to do this kind of thing described in Deuteronomy 28, I mean, you gotta be so desperate or really you have to be controlled by evil. You have to be like under a spell or something to behave this way. And so that's why he uses it. He wants the Galatians to think of the Judaizers. You know, dare I say the Hebrew roots people as though they're casting spells. They're putting people under some spell to convince them to turn away from the gospel and trust in works. And so Paul kind of wants to shake them up. He wants to shake up his readers with this reference and creep them out by doing it. And you look at that, I would say this, put it this way, if Paul's doing this, it's pretty clever. It's pretty shocking what he's trying to, the image he's trying to plant in their mind about what's being done to them. And then in Galatians three, he's gonna present Christ as the one who breaks the spell. He's the antidote for this. He is the one, you wanna avoid the evil eye. You wanna get out from under the spell. Well, the answer to that is Jesus. He's the antidote to it. He's immune from the evil eye and you belong to him. You know, it's just this sort of idea where Paul tries to use this image, you know, in its horrific sense to make this point. Now, for our purposes here, again, we're not... I'll just give you one more paragraph from Eastman. I think he makes another really interesting point and I'll kind of summarize it here. He says, on the second level, in Echo of Deuteronomy 28, in Galatians three, one would identify Paul's missionary competitors, get his opponents in Galatia, not only as bewitchers in an insulting rhetorical sense, nor simply as misers, but as those who themselves are acting under the curse of the law. They're the ones who are actually bewitched. They're under the curse of the law and they're by inflicting it on their children, their own children, their spiritual children, the people they're supposedly trying to spiritually nurture. They're putting them under a curse. And that includes the Galatians themselves. The verb basquino itself evokes images of helpless children who according to popular evil I believe were especially susceptible to the evil I. The implication is that the Galatians are acting like children. By evoking Deuteronomy 28, Paul has set the stage for this contrast. Not only are the Galatians acting like children susceptible to the evil I, victims of it, but their very susceptibility is evidence that they are going under the curse and abandoning the blessing of the spirit. So Paul's point is again, he wants the Galatians to think of the Judaizers a certain way and Paul draws on evil I traditions to do it. And the evil I tradition again is part in Deuteronomy. Again, it's not just that the guy in Deuteronomy 28 who's in trouble because the Israel's apostatized and look, our city's surrounded now by conquerors and God said we would be punished. He could destroy the nations and drive us from our land. And boy, we're desperate. And I'm gonna like, hoard my resources here and just kind of stick it out as long as I can. I'm gonna take from people I would otherwise give to. He's saying, no, it's actually worse than that. It's so desperate that you would resort to something as unthinkable as cannibalism. And people again, who do that sort of thing, the degree of desperation is like they're not themselves anymore, like they're under a spell. They are, you know, they're like zombified or something like that. I mean, it's something else has, something wicked has overtaken their senses and they become like animals. You know, they don't behave in a rational sort of way. And so Paul wants them to think about all these things. But again, to make the point, he has to draw on this notion, you know, about the evil eye that it's something that is more than just, you know, stinginess in certain contexts. It is malicious. It's evil. It's designed, you know, to make people helpless. It's designed, you know, to cause them harm. And again, it's not that, you know, it's not spell casting. You know, none of these passages are promoting the evil eye idea like the pagans would where, you know, there are spells and amulets and all this other, you know, voodoo kind of stuff, you know, that goes with it. You don't see that in any of these passages. It's really about, again, someone that is so wicked or mesmerized or desperate or brainwashed or whatever term helps you here, you know, to think about it, that what's inside them is so dark that, you know, if they could kill somebody by looking at them, they'd do it, you know, like our common expression. So that's the idea that the evil eye passages in the Old New Testament convey it. It tells you about what's inside of a person and what they're slaves to. They are imprisoned by darkness. That's what a person is, you know, who thinks this way and who tries to harm people. And again, it does look at them, you know, in such a way to pit themselves against them, you know, to be malicious to them. And when it comes to spiritual stuff, like doctrine, like Paul here in Galatians three, he's using it to make a theological point that you Galatians, you're fools, you are fools. If you turn, you know, from the gospel to a system of works now, it's like you're under a spell. And you know what's gonna happen to you when, if that's the road you go down, you're gonna die. You're gonna die like the helpless children in Deuteronomy 28. You're going to be, again, metaphorically here consumed. You're done. Yeah, you're done. And again, he's trying to get them to think those thoughts by appealing to that passage with its rare language and its connection to the evil eye idea. So that's, again, a pretty, I would say, a basic survey of the evil eye thinking. I think that's probably the best way to cast this episode. Kind of like how does scripture reflect, and maybe we can add a word here, repurpose, reflect and repurpose, demonstrate a sensibility to the fact that evil eye thinking was a big part of the biblical world, a big part of the ancient world in which the biblical events take place. Biblical writers do their thing. The evil eye idea was a big part of that. It was part of the culture. It was very deeply embedded in the culture. And as, again, some of the sources we began the episode with pointed out that it's ubiquitous. It's just all over the, not only the Middle East, not only the ancient Near East, but even today it's all over the world. And there are different reasons why it's all over the world. There's different points to it. In antiquity, it was associated with magic. It was associated with casting spells and whatnot. Later on, it's gonna be, again, this idea of looking at a person to cause malicious intent. And you get flavors of both. You get a little sprinkle of both in the Bible. You get the references to Balaam, how he had to gaze at someone to do his thing, apparently he had to lock on to them, so to speak. But there's some sort of, perhaps witchcraft element in that and it's Balaam. I mean, look, he's not like the best example of a biblical prophet, to be sure. The traditions associated with Balaam, of course, in the Moabite issue, it certainly doesn't improve his profile. So you get some of that in it, but again, you get this sense of bewitching darkness in a spiritual sense. And in Paul's case, in a theological sense, you are in the grip of something that's just gonna bring about your death. And to try to wake the Galatians up, he appeals to this passage as awful as it is. There's this passage back in Deuteronomy 28 to try to get them to see his point. But all of that, again, draws on the evil eye idea in the ancient world. All right, Michael, that was kind of fun to go off the rails there a little bit and talk about something. It isn't off the rails topic. Yeah, yeah, we normally wouldn't do, so that's kind of neat. I enjoyed it. Yeah, we could do, I was gonna say, if you're gonna get into like, magic and divination and all that stuff, there are plenty of places to park in all that material. So maybe at some point we'll pick another one out. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, Michael, next week, we've got another interview coming up, Dr. McDermott, you wanna tell us about what we're talking about? Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. Gerald McDermott is the guy that I've mentioned in several episodes before. He wrote God's Rivals, which in simplistic terms is, focuses on the discussion among the church fathers of why God allowed the other nations to worship other gods, okay? So it gets into the sort of, the mix of perspectives in the early church in regard to what we would call on this podcast, what I have called in Unseen Realm, the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. In other words, what was God thinking? How would this help? Did God like plant truth into these foreign religions and their gods and whatnot that would sort of plant the seeds for them to come around and recognize who the true God was? Or is it like a total apostasy thing here? In other words, how would it work? How would this system somehow work itself together for good to God, working with the nations, reclaiming them, so on and so forth? How should we understand this? And I get questions like this in Q&As and different events. And this book actually tells us, at least it gives us a glimpse of how the post-apostolic generation and the early church fathers and beyond, we're gonna get into middle ages, guys, theologians and whatnot, how they try to think about this topic. And we're also gonna get into some other stuff that Dr. McDermott has written about, the nature of Israel, how do we define Israel and all that sort of stuff. So he's written a couple of books on things that we've talked about on this podcast before. And God's rivals is really interesting because you wonder, and I get again, emails like this all the time, well, why? It's just like new, the church fathers, and they never said anything about this stuff. And well, actually they did. They didn't recognize it as well as we can today because they didn't have the primary sources, they didn't have those languages deciphered and all that stuff. So we actually do have more material where we can pick up on a lot of things better than they could. But they did pick up on certain things and they did have discussions. And so I think a little foray into church history stuff would be worth it. All right, Mike, that will be good. And this episode was fun, so we appreciate it. And I just wanna thank everybody else for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.