 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 211, Wisconsin, The Seed of the Serpent. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. How you doing, sir? Well, I would be doing better if I wouldn't have had to wade through all this crazy stuff about Cain this week, but here we are. Did you actually learn anything new? No, I didn't learn anything new. I was just reminded that there's no, there's no sort of antidote to prevent people from believing crazy things and making up stuff about scripture. So you just have to more or less deal with it. Yeah, this is one of them. I'm ready for it if you are. Yeah, you know, I get this question too often in email, which is why it went on my list of topics, but here we are. So, yeah, Cain as the seed of the serpent or the seed of Satan. And if you've never heard of this before, I apologize for putting it into your head. But there are a lot of people who have heard of this before. And it's at least as old as the seventh or eighth century AD. And that's going to be important because when you talk about the Old Testament, even at the very latest, when it comes to the composition or the editing of the Torah, or specifically the book of Genesis, that's 1200 years later. So for 1200 years, nobody had an inkling of this sort of weirdness. But somebody did, seventh or eighth century, in a targum, which is an Aramaic translation of the Old Testament. And when we get to this particular targum, you'll see that this is a whole lot more than a translation. It's actually has a lot of just extra stuff thrown into there. So the translation is kind of a misnomer. But for 1200 years, we weren't plagued with this. And since then, we've had one person come up with the idea. And then there are people in the modern world, both contemporary to us and centuries preceding, that are doing theology by anomaly. So they'll take this one item in the whole history of scholarship and again, ignoring this 1200 year gap and say, that's the truth. So that's what you get. Again, it's nonsense, but we need to go through the topic again, because I get asked about it. It's good to do episodes like this, because then I can refer people to the episode and say, Hey, you know, we talked about that on the podcast. And listeners, you know, get a little exposure to this kind of thing, because they, you know, if they're out there on the web, they may get exposed to this too. So let's just start with a New Testament passage and get into what we're even talking about here. So in 1st John 3, 11 and 12, we read this, for this is the message that you have heard from the beginning that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous. So that's 1st John 3, 11 and 12. So Cain is quote of the evil one. Now, if you go back to the birth of Cain, okay, this is Genesis 4, 1. Here's what you read in the Old Testament. Okay, Hebrew Bible. Now, Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And that's the ESV. That's the whole verse. You say what? I don't see anything in there about Cain being fathered by the serpent or Satan. It's pretty clear Adam knew Eve, his wife, she conceived and bare Cain. It's correct, it is straightforward. But as we're going to see, again, in one particular Aramaic Targum, this gets really, really muddied. It essentially gets changed. The Aramaic, quote unquote translator, injects theology, injects ideas into his Targum, and then the rest, as they say, is history. So again, the issue before us is this notion that Cain was fathered by Satan, fathered by the serpent. And after, again, reading those two passages, you might ask the logical question, well, why would anybody think that of the evil one? That's kind of ambiguous. I mean, could be easily metaphorical. I mean, where's the literalness going on here? Nothing in Genesis 4, 1 really says this. Again, then that suggests very strongly that 1 John 3 should be taken metaphorically. I mean, if it's not taught in Genesis, and John has obviously read his Old Testament before, and he knows about Cain, since the idea of Cain being fathered by the serpent or Satan is not in the Old Testament, then we can't read John's statements as though it was written in the Old Testament. So why does anybody think this? I mean, this is just really odd. Well, this view that Cain was the offspring of Satan focuses on some unusual things in the Hebrew text of Genesis 4, 1, and the statement in Genesis 5, 3. Let me read Genesis 5, 3. It says, when Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth. Okay, Seth, of course, replaces Abel who was murdered by Cain. Now, here's how the reasoning goes. Well, here in Genesis 5, 3, Adam fathers a son in his own likeness after his image. Those phrases were not used of Cain in Genesis 4, 1. Therefore, Cain is not really the son of Adam. Now, if you're thinking, boy, that's like a textbook non sequitur. You would be correct. Okay, it is a non sequitur. It's a conclusion which does not follow. But again, we're getting into why does, you know, why is this view even out there? So let's sort of start with what we find in Genesis 4, 1. And again, I'm going to try to make this digestible. We're going to be doing some Hebrew talk here. And hopefully I can convey what the problem areas are and how, again, those problem areas get handled in things like the Targums and leading up to this one particular Targum that sort of pardon the pun is the Genesis for this whole, you know, nutty idea. So you have a couple issues in Genesis 4, 1. You have the Hebrew verb kanah. That's the one translated, I have gotten a man. Okay, Eve says, I have gotten a man. Kanah is an unusual verb to describe birthing. We can put it that way. Kanah and the ESV actually reflects this is usually translated in English to get or acquire or possess or something like that. The noun that's formed from kanah is makna, which means possession, like cattle and herds and stuff like that, things you own. So it's a little bit of an odd verb to describe the bringing forth of a child. Now, there are places, though, where kanah can mean create. One of them is in Deuteronomy 32, verse 6. Let me just go to that passage quickly. Deuteronomy 32, verse 6. Do you think, boy, here we go back to Deuteronomy 32 again? Well, you know, kind of sort of. It's not divine counsel stuff necessarily, but there are issues here. So Deuteronomy 32, 6, that verse says, do you thus repay the Lord, you foolish and senseless people. Again, the writer is going after the Israelites. Do you thus repay the Lord, you foolish and senseless people? Is not he, the Lord, your Father, who created you, who made and established you? Now, the verb translated created there is, in fact, this lemma, kanah. So here's an instance where kanah can clearly mean create, a reference to Yahweh raising up Israel, creating them out of nothing as it were with Abraham and Sarah. That translation is actually strengthened by noting, and this is getting real technical. If people wanted to read more about this, they could. I'll just tell you where the reference is. But verses 6 and 7 of Deuteronomy 32, again before the more famous verses 8 and 9, which we talk about a lot, but verses 6 and 7 have a number of words and descriptions, epithets about the deity El in Canaanite and Ugaritic. And that's important when discussing Deuteronomy 32 verses 6 and 7, because there are a lot of people out there that think verses 8 and 9 that the most high, when he distributes the nations, and then verse 9, Yahweh's portion is Israel, his people. There are a number of scholars who say, well, El Yon, the most high, and Yahweh are separate deities. They're distinct deities. Well, the problem is you have, if you look back in verses 6 and 7, you have El epithets there used ultimately of Yahweh. You have the Lord. Do you thus repay Yahweh? It's not he, your father who created you. El is described as the creator, the QNY. It's the same word in Ugaritic as in Hebrew, Qanaah. So this is an El epithet, and El, again, is technically the most high. It gets into all sorts of really technical things with Israelite religion, but we have a phrase here used in Deuteronomy 32-6 to describe Yahweh as the creator in sort of classic El language. And there's two or three other El elements in verses 6 and 7. I'm not going to bother with that. If you wanted to read about this, you could just Google my last name, Hyzer, and then something like El and Yahweh, distinct deities. And I did an online article. There's actually two online articles that get into this issue that I wrote for academic journals. We're just going to set that aside. So for our purposes here, Deuteronomy 32-6 shows us that Qanaah could very well be translated as create. So if we take that back to Genesis 4, we have Eve saying, I have created a man with the help of the Lord or with the Lord. The rest of the verse is an issue. The lemma is an issue, and the rest of the verse is an issue because literally in Hebrew, here's what you have. Eve says, khaniti, okay, I have created, and then a man, and then it has the little two-letter particle, aleftav, which usually marks a direct object. If you've heard my little thing on the aleftav or read it on my blog, you know that. It's not Jesus, folks. It's just two letters. It's an accusative marker or a preposition. In this case, here it is nestled in Genesis 4-1. So translators are like, how should we translate this? I have created a man, and then the direct object is Yahweh. It doesn't make any sense. First of all, Yahweh isn't a man, and even if we're talking about the angel of the Lord here, Eve didn't create him. It's just weird. So scholars look at this, okay, we have to take the alef and tav here as a preposition. But even that sounds weird. I have created, okay, I have either gotten or created or whatever, a man with Yahweh. So the ESV has with the help of the Lord, with the help of Yahweh. Well, the English word help there has no Hebrew equivalent in the verse. It's just, I have created a man with Yahweh. That's literally what you have in Genesis 4-1. You say, well, who cares? You're like, how does that relate in any way to Satan? Because Satan isn't Yahweh. I mean, what does it matter? And again, you're thinking well there to ask questions like that. You're going to see why it matters in a moment. Because people who are translating the scriptures into Aramaic, they obviously come across this, and they don't quite know what to do with it because it's just sort of awkward. How do we understand this? I've already hinted that you could sort of look at this and say, well, I've gotten a man with the Lord or I have gotten a man Yahweh. Okay, just considering it as a direct object marker. And if you're thinking that thought, then you're going to be thinking about the Angel of the Lord. And there are translators as we're going to see in the Targums that put the Angel of the Lord in the passage. And you say, well, that's still not Satan. Yeah, I know. I know. But there's going to be one guy as we're going to see that thinks, oh, we've got a divine being there. And we're just going to pretend I'm being a little pejorative here, but it really gets down to this. We're just going to think of not that divine being not as Yahweh or not as the Angel, but we're going to think of that divine being as Satan in my translation. And it literally just gets invented. So again, what we have here is we have a few oddities, a few difficulties, a few kind of awkward things in the Hebrew of Genesis 4 where we don't quite know what to do with or at least present something of a translation challenge. And then we've got this statement over in Genesis 5.3 about, well, when Seth's born, the Hebrew text refers to Seth as being in the image of Adam or in Adam's likeness. And it doesn't say that of Cain. So Cain can't be from Adam. Again, we have this non-sequitur logic operating. So between the difficulties of Genesis 4.1, how to translate that, and then Genesis 5.3, again, really an argument by omission, again, a non-secular argument at that, that becomes, again, the basis for this idea. And then people will go to 1 John 3, aha, Cain is of the evil one. And then you could ask them, well, there's still no evil one back in Genesis 4.1, even with these difficulties. And you'd be right. And they would basically say, oh, we've got this one Targum in the 7th or 8th century that has the devil in there that wins the day. All the other stuff can be ignored. That's contrary, including the Hebrew text itself. We can ignore all that. We're just going to go with what popped into this one guy's head. And then we're going to build our belief on that. That's literally what we have going on here. Again, it's just, it's really odd. Now I'm going to be referencing a couple of sources here. And one is an article by Scarlata, last name Scarlata. And I'll put this in the folder for newsletter subscribers. You can read the article if you want. It's pretty technical because it's really getting into Aramaic translation here. And there's a section on the Septuagint, one on the Vulgate. What do they do with Genesis 4.1? And the article is really about how this idea evolved, just essentially came into being about Cain being fathered by the devil. So it's a technical article, but I'll put it in there in case people are interested in it. Now, let me just pull a few things out of this. For Scarlata, it makes the comment about our little two particle word. It's pronounced et. So it's aleftav, et. So when I say et from this point forward, I'm talking about this two letter particle. Usually it just marks the direct object. It can also be a preposition. They're two different things, but they're spelled the same way. So we have a homograph issue there. Hebrew is just like any other language. It has homographs. So there's a, there's a difficulty of knowing how do we take this or not. Scarlata says this, if et is taken as a predicative accusative. Again, grammar speak here by the translator. The sentence would be translated, I have acquired or created a man, Yahweh. In other words, a man who is Yahweh, which again on the surface, it doesn't make any sense. But Scarlata says it could signify that Eve believed she had given birth to the promised seed of Genesis 315. Now that was actually Martin Luther's view. We'll stop there with Scarlata. Luther was seeing in this issue, this grammatical issue, a reference to Genesis 315, the promised seed, because Luther's already thinking that the promised seed is God as man. And so Luther sort of reading, he's reading actually a lot into Genesis 315. And again, I'm not saying that it can't go that direction, but again, it's kind of difficult to look at Genesis 4.1 and think to yourself, the writer is trying to cryptically telegraph the promised seed of Genesis 315. That's pretty much a leap to get that from the awkward grammar here. But that's what Luther did. So Luther said, hey, we're just going to take this as an accusative marker. And Eve says, I have acquired or gotten or created a man, Yahweh, who is Yahweh. In other words, I've given birth to the promised seed, which will be God as man. Again, it's quite a leap, but for you Lutherans out there, I mean, this is what Luther, how he took it back to Scarlata. He writes that Dilman, who's a famous Semitic grammarian, takes et, and then he gives a few cross references as a synonym for another preposition, im, which means with, and he argues that they are interchangeable. And then Scarlata notes, but as Westerman notes, he's citing Westerman, and all the passages Dilman cites with is always used of God, helping man, never the reverse. Now I'm going to break in here. I don't think this criticism that Scarlata issues here makes any sense, because in Genesis 4-1, you don't have the reverse, you don't have man helping God, you don't have Eve helping God. So I don't think his criticism works here. I think I'm with Dilman here. These could be interchangeable in terms of their semantics, you could have with the help of Yahweh. And Scarlata, to be fair to him, he adds this thought. He says, despite the fact that we have no other occurrences of et plus Yahweh, meaning, quote, with the help of Yahweh, unquote, most commentators agree that this is the sense of the passage. Many cites, Daelich, Spicer, Von Rod, Wenham, Sarna, you know, famous Genesis commentators. So again, you can look at it that way and say, we've got a preposition here, and Eve is saying, I've gotten a man, you know, with the help of the Lord, you know, with the Lord, with the Lord's assistance. There's no sense of cohabitation here, you know, like with Genesis 6. It never says that Yahweh went into Eve, you know, Yahweh had sex with Eve. In fact, it actually says the opposite. The verse begins clarifying that, quote, now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cam. I mean, there's no ambiguity here. So the preposition with has to be, you know, it could refer to some divine assistance that Eve believes, you know, is taking place here, Yahweh enabling her to have a child, because this is her first child, okay? So it's a new experience. So that, again, is very likely what it means, but it doesn't have any sense of cohabitation here. Now, there's one ancient Near Eastern parallel that I want to throw in here before I kind of tell you what I'm thinking about this where I land and scar a lot of brings this up in his discussion. He notes that at Yahweh at, I don't know, at Yahweh, we have preposition at and then a divine name. There's, there's a notable parallel in the ancient Near Eastern literature to this. He says, others have turned to ancient Near Eastern parallels to find a possible solution. Skinner argues that the Babylonian account of a Ruru creating the seed of humankind, quote, together with, unquote, Marduk demonstrates that a Ruru, the mother goddess of the Babylonians, is a likely parallel to Eve, who represents, quote, he's, you know, he's, he's quoting Skinner now, not a mortal wife and mother, but a creative deity taking part with the supreme God in the production of man, unquote. A closer correspondence may be found in the Atrahasis epic where the goddess Mami, M-A-M-I, Mami, is commanded by Anlil to create humankind. She responds to this command, quote, it is, you know, it is not possible for me to make things. Skill lies with Anki. So she's like, hey, this is a little bit beyond my job description. So Scarlotta adds, if we understand Genesis 4-1 in the light of the Atrahasis epic, the difficulty of et Yahweh is resolved with the parallel iti en kimah, okay, with Enki. Remember that Mami had said, it is not possible for me to make things. Skill lies with Anki. Skill lies iti en kimah, that's the Akkadian equivalent of et with a divine name, iti with a divine name, in this case Anki. So Scarlotta says this potentially clarifies Eve's declaration as a celebratory pronouncement of her ability to bring forth life with the help of Yahweh. Now that's the end of Scarlotta's, quote, just this is me talking now. I think the parallel does have some significance because it aligns well with a biblical pattern, a biblical idea. Think of it this way. There are many other births in the Old Testament that are credited to supernatural help or intervention. You have Sarah, okay, Sarah giving birth to Isaac. Sarah was, she couldn't have kids, she's too old. It took divine help to do that. You have Hannah, again with the birth of Samuel, she was barren, you know, she cries out to God and says the Lord remembered Hannah and then Samuel was born. So there's something going on there where God enables the woman and the woman acknowledges it. God enables the woman to have a baby, have children. So there are other examples of this where you have supernatural help or intervention being credited to the birth of a child without direct intercourse, divine intercourse, which we've already seen Genesis 4-1 actually rules out. So as a result, the door is open to Eve, quote, you know, crediting God for the procreation of the child. Again, it's a very normal Old Testament idea. Basically, you know, this notion of procreation, you know, Eve, I have, I have procreated a man with the help of the Lord. I have created a man with the help of the Lord. This idea again comes down to whether we think Eve presumed divine intervention of some sort in the birth of her child. We know who the father is. It's Adam. The text is very clear. So in that sense, you know, Kana might actually make sense here as a verb of choice to convey the creation idea. And our, you know, weird preposition there is just there to make the point that Eve is crediting Yahweh with helping. It's that simple. And again, I think it is that simple. But again, people aren't content in many cases with simplicity and clarity. They would just want to make stuff up. I would also ask again, or point out again, in verse 25, you go down to chapter four, verse 25, it's very clear again that Adam is the child, or not the child, Adam is the father. Because in 4 1, Adam knew his wife, you know, even she conceived. You get down to verse 25, which a lot of people skip. And it says, and Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth. That's not interesting. See, remember back at the beginning of our episode here, we read Genesis 5 3 when Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth. And then the people who want to have this cane comes from Satan idea will say, well, that was never said of cane, you know, being fathered by Adam and Adam's own likeness and after his image. And so Cain can't be Adam's son. Well, that's just blown to bits by verse 25. Adam knew his wife again. Okay, she bore a son and called his name Seth. Okay, for she said, God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel. So it's very clear that Adam is indeed the father of Seth. And we don't have this image language in Genesis 4 25. We don't need it. And verse 25 connects back to verse one. So Adam is the father of both Cain and Seth. And this language of Genesis 5 3 doesn't telegraph anything different. It is in concert with Adam being the father of both. But again, let's not let the clarity of the text muddy the theology that we want to angle for. So now we get into the Targams. I mean, this is this is really where the rubber meets the road. What we've talked about to this point is essentially how people try to basically baptize this view, going back to Genesis 4 1 and essentially monkeying with it or I'll be so bold when it comes to the people who are doing theology on the internet, they basically just bungle it, they misunderstand what's going on in the text and I'll be beyond. They don't care. They have a view they want to argue for. And anything that is sort of a little out of the ordinary in terms of an expression, they're not going to do research as to how it makes sense in the context of Old Testament theology. They have found the little anomaly thing that they're looking for, and they're going to ride it to the end. That's how it's done. So let's get into the Targams though, you know, we can actually get into some ancient material here. Now Targams again, ostensibly are Aramaic translations of the Old Testament. I say ostensibly because, again, that's what's meant by the term, but some of them, where we're going to end up in our episode here, some of them go way, way beyond translating the words of the Hebrew text to inserting whole sentences, several sentences into the material. And that is not a translation. That's like in the course of making a translation, you also are writing a commentary, you know, you're editorializing in the work and then you're passing off the results as though it's a translation, it's well beyond a translation. But let's start with one that's not, you know, so wacky, a Targham called, these are all Targams of Genesis. Can Aramaic forms of Genesis. Targum Ankylos. Now the date of this, and I'm going to refer consistently to the series, there's an edited, essentially a whole commentary series on the Aramaic Targams edited by McNamara, that's M-C-N-A-M-A-R-A. In this particular volume on Targum Ankylos, the editors are Cathcart, Mahar, M-A-H-E-R, and McNamara. And Targum Ankylos, they date very firmly to the second and third centuries AD. They actually say, quote, that the final redaction of Targum Ankylos occurred in the third century AD. So this is late material. This is after the New Testament period. This is, again, an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, you know, Old Testament material, but it's actually pretty late. So, you know, keep that in mind as we discuss this. This is not like you have people putting things in Aramaic right when the scriptures are getting written. That is not the case. A Targum Ankylos reads this in Genesis 4-1. This is a literal rendering. Again, this is going to be from McNamara's volumes. And Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. And she said, I have acquired a man from before the Lord. So it's pretty literal until you get to that little et particle. That little, is it a direct object marker? Is it a preposition? So Targum Ankylos has Eve saying, I have acquired a man from before the Lord, not from the Lord or not with the Lord. It's from before the Lord, which is a little odd. Scarletta comments here about this translation. He writes, there's a widespread Targumic tendency to eliminate anthropomorphic and anthropopathic phrases, descriptive of God. And this sometimes involves the use of the word Kedem, which is the word translated before, as a device to put a distance between God and human beings. The preposition thus helps create a buffer between the human and the divine. Other scholars don't agree with that estimation. They don't think that there's any real pattern here. But here's the idea. The idea is that the Targum translator, whoever translated Targum Ankylos, he's translating along, I have acquired a man. And then it's like, okay, I have acquired a man at Yahweh. Well, she can't be acquiring Yahweh or creating Yahweh. And we don't want it to really sound too much like Yahweh is a man, the product of a birth process. That's just kind of weird. So he takes the little two particle at doesn't translate it as with the Lord, like with the help of the Lord. He wants to even remove God from sort of being too close to the birth process. So instead, the translator opts for, I have acquired a man from before the Lord, like in the Lord's honor or something like that. So it distances Yahweh from the birth process a little bit. That's Scarletta's point. And I think in this verse that works, whether that's a wholesale pattern in the Targums is what scholars object to. But it's a fairly literal translation, little interpretive, again, there at the end, but not too bad. Let's go to the next Targum. This is also, again, a Targum of Genesis, Targum Neophyte. This is a Palestinian Targum. In other words, a Targum that originated in that region of the world. Neophyte is the name of the codex. And the date, again, from Cathcart, Mahler and McNamara, they write this quote, we have very strong evidence from rabbinic sources that written texts of the Targums of the Pentateuch, Palestinian Targums existed in at least the late third and early fourth centuries of our era, in other words, AD, the common ear. And there are indications that they were known there in Palestine earlier still. And that's the ambiguous part, you know, how early, century or two, who knows. But it's still on the AD side of things. It's still centuries removed from the actual, you know, composition and final, you know, form of the Old Testament. So that's the end of their quote. So again, it's first few centuries AD. Now here's what Targum Neophyte does. Genesis 4-1. And the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. And she said, behold, a son will be given to me from before the Lord. So now we have another idea inserted here. It's odd because it ignores, this translation ignores the word play between Cain, that's Qain, Q-A-Y-I-N in Hebrew. And the verb used for the birth, kana, Q-N-H is the lemma, the lemma consonants. Personally, I think that's why, that's another big reason why kana was chosen as the verb here. It's a little odd to describe, to use kana for bringing forth children. But I think the writer deliberately chose this because it looks like the name. It has basically the same consonants as the name. We call that assonance. It's an auditory similarity. I think that's why, that's what's going on here. But the translator here in any case of Targum Neophyte ignored all that. They ignored kana as a verb lemma and ignored its similarity to Cain. And instead of translating kana as create or acquire, the translator actually sort of presumed through, he presumed the idea of being given the child, not acquiring the child or not creating the child, but being given. It's a passive idea. The Aramaic here substitutes instead of kana, it substitutes a different verb. That's Y-T-B, it's in transliteration. Yathab, it means to give. So this is just a translator decision. And the form is actually in passive reflexive. It's in the ith pa'el if you're into Aramaic. But that's the rendering. Behold, a son will be given to me from before the Lord. So this, you have that distancing language of Yahweh. And in this case, Eve doesn't even get to really get the credit for burying the kid. The son is being given. Now, of course, she's the mother. We're not, no one's denying that translator didn't deny it. And you could argue that by wording it this way, more credit is given to God. A son will be given to me from before the Lord, and less credit is given to Eve. Something like that. So it's not, again, it's not awful, but it just shows you that, again, they're trying to express a certain idea in the way they translate things. Now, here we finally get to the Targum that just throws a stick of dynamite into all this. This is Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. That's its name. And the earliest known text, this is this reading in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan for Genesis 4-1 is the earliest known text that has Cain being fathered by Satan. As for its date, again, Cathcart, Mahler, and McNamara write this. They write that various studies, quote, allow us to accept with confidence the view that this Targum in its final form cannot be dated before the seventh or eighth century, unquote. Now, if you read their commentary in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, there, you know, some will argue that you could move this particular Targum back to, you know, an era similar to the other ones, you know, second, third, fourth century AD. But with confidence, they say, in its final form, you can't date it before the seventh or eighth century. And there are different reasons for that. It actually has some things in it that are only, or that questions, let me put it this way. It actually has some things in it that draw on the activity of Islam. You know, this is fifth, sixth century stuff and beyond, you know, so it's very evident that somebody was working on this thing after the point at which Muhammad, you know, was around and Islam became an issue. So that's what really pushes it well into the AD period as far as what we have today. But again, there are parts of it that could be, you know, earlier. So enough about the dating. Even if we, again, you know, accept the early, you know, the earliest, you know, second, third, fourth century, something like that. If 500 BC will use, if 500 BC is sort of your cutoff point, you know, for the final form of the Torah, that's still 800 years. It's still 800 years after the fact. 500 BC, let's just call it 300 AD for round numbers, 800 years, almost a millennium before this idea pops into anybody's head. 800 years at best, 1200 years, again, going by the final form of the text. Now, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is known to us primarily in two editions. I'm going to make comments about both of them. The first one is Clark's edition and that was published in 1985. I'll just read Genesis 4, 1 and 2 from Clark's edition. You're going to think, boy, what was this guy smoking? You know, when he did this, but here's what it says. Adam knew his wife Eve, who had conceived from Samael, the angel of the Lord. Then from Adam, her husband, she bore his twin sister and Abel. Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain was a man telling the earth. That's Genesis 4, 1 and 2 in Clark's edition of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. It's overtly and bizarrely interpreted. Think about what's in and what's not in. It's not in Eve's exclamation. You know, like, I have gotten a man from Eve's exclamation isn't even in the verses. It's like, they're just gone. The Targum dismisses, the translator actually dismisses Eve's own words and inserts his own idea. You know, what her exclamation is just absent. The Scarletta writes here, we are left with no explanation as to why Eve's declaration is omitted, apart from the possibility that the translator wanted to diminish her prominence or authority in the naming of Cain. The inclusion of Samael. Samael is a Satan figure known from pseudopagraphical texts, like the ascension of Isaiah, ascension or martyrdom of Isaiah, you know, that goes by both titles. Back to Scarletta. Scarletta says, the inclusion of Samael may be linked to Genesis 3-6 in the same Targum, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, where Eve sees, well this is while Eve's in Eden, she sees that quote, angel of death. Again, if you look back in your Old Testament, this is nowhere present. Whoever produced Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is just literally inserting the material. Eve sees the angel of death in Genesis 3-6 and back to Scarletta, and she fears before she eats the fruit of the tree. You know, she gets scared by the angel of death while she's reaching for the fruit of the tree. The effect of her sexual encounter, this is Scarletta, the effect of her sexual encounter with the angel as it is revealed in Genesis 4-1, signifies her moral deterioration, which is marked by the birth of Cain the murderer, unquote. So Scarletta is trying to, he's trying to get inside the head of this guy, whoever produced this Targum, and he says, well, you know, we see Samael here, the Satan figure in Genesis 4-1, because he inserted him back in Genesis 3-6. Well, that's nice, you know. Look, look, look at what else we get. We get a twin sister. We get a twin sister to whoever was, quote, from Samael. You notice, let me go back and read it again. Adam knew his wife Eve, who had conceived from Samael the angel of the Lord. Then from Adam, her husband, she bore his twin sister. Well, you'd wonder, how can they be twins if they have different dads, but let's just move on from that. Then from Adam, her husband, she bore his twin sister, and Abel. Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a man. We don't even get Cain referred to. We don't know that Cain is the product of this presumed union between Eve and Samael, until verse two, when Cain gets mentioned. Verse one doesn't even say, and Cain is Samael's kid, you know. We have to assume that. We have to assume that since Abel is from Adam, remember, let me read it again, from Adam her husband, she bore his twin sister and Abel. We have to assume that, okay, we've got Adam producing Abel and a twin sister, and then Cain is just injected into verse two, into the narrative. We have to assume that Cain, therefore, was from Samael, and that's what the writer wants us to do. So we've got a twin sister, and again, how could she be twins if they have different dads? And where's any of this in the Hebrew text, Genesis answer, it's not there. Samael's not there. He's not there in Genesis three, six either. Not there in Genesis four, one. I mean, what in the world is going on here? Again, Samael is a Satan figure, and he is just literally, literally, I can't put it any other way. He is literally inserted into the text. You know, Scarlet and others, you know, will say, well, maybe, you know, maybe the translator here thought that that was appropriate because of Genesis five, three, you know, because of this talk about how, you know, Adam gives birth to Seth and Seth was in Adam's own image and likeness, you know, and that's not set of Cain. Again, ignoring Genesis four, 25, where Adam knew his wife again, she bore a son called Seth. Okay, ignoring that, let's just pretend that doesn't exist. So Scarlet, again, trying to get inside his head like, well, maybe this, maybe it's Genesis five, three, that's got, you know, is influencing him here. Again, and that's probably the case because here's Genesis five, three in Targum pseudo Jonathan. You ready? As if Genesis four, one and two weren't enough as if Genesis three, six weren't enough where we get the angel of the Lord who to this guy is Samael, the devil. Here's Genesis five, three, the first part of it, because it's actually long. He throws a lot of stuff in the verse. But here we go. When Adam had lived 130 years, he begot Seth, who resembled his image and likeness, so far so good, kind of normal. For before that, Eve had borne Cain, who was not from him, i.e. not from Adam, and who did not resemble him. So this tells you that the translator, and that's I'm using that term loosely, the interpretive translator, the interpreter, the translator interject or looked at Genesis five, three, and very evidently thought, okay, we have the language here about Seth being in Adam's image and likeness and we didn't read that back in Genesis four, one with Cain. So that must mean that Cain was not from Adam. So I'm going to make that point here in my quote unquote translation. I'm going to make that point here. I'm going to extrapolate on it here in Genesis five, three, and I'm going to insert it back in Genesis four, one. And for a candidate for the father, I'm going to put Samael in Genesis three, six. Tada. There we go. How to invent a doctrine. That's literally what's going on here. He is inventing something. Again, you look at this and you go, well, how in the world, you know, what we'll get to the larger, why do people even bother with this? It's just so obvious. Okay, we'll get there. What we have here, again, is an interpretive paraphrase. It's like a hybrid between a translation and a commentary. But that was just one edition. That was Clark's edition that we were discussing there. The second edition of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is the Editeo prinkeps, which is a Latin term for the first printed edition of any particular work. And this was actually produced much earlier than Clark's. This was produced in 1598. And that one has this. It doesn't have, well, I'll just read it to you. Here's what the very first printed edition of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan had. Adam knew Eve, his wife, who desired the angel. And she conceived and bore Cain. And she said, I have acquired a man, the angel of the Lord. That's the end. Now, again, that's bad enough. But you could see how Clark, again, or not Clark, but it's not Clark's fault. He's just assembling manuscript data. You could see how somebody added the elements, again, in what wound up as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan for us, would look at that, if this is what they began with, this statement, Adam knew Eve, his wife, who desired the angel. And she could see it and bore Cain. Then he just, he just drops names in there. You could see how this sort of could have developed or devolved, probably a better term. Oh, well, the angel, who? Oh, Samael. How to be Samael? How to be a bad guy? Why? Because they want to establish the point that Cain did not come from Adam. Because that's how they, that's what they believe. That's how they believe Genesis 5.3 should be read. Didn't come from Adam. Didn't come from Adam, had to be a bad guy, had to be an intervening angel. And that would be against God's will. So we're going to make him Samael, the devil, the Satan figure. Again, you see how these theological ideas concatenate together and are transmitted in this case in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan through the hand of a translator who's doing a lot more than translating, literally just inserting the content, literally thinking thoughts and inserting those thoughts into the text. It's classic isegesis, again, presented to the world as a translation in Aramaic. That's what you have. And again, it's just, it's sad to be honest with you. Again, but, but you could see how they could get there. You know, okay, well, if you look at Genesis 5.3 that way again, let's ignore Genesis 4.25 about Seth being from Adam. Let's ignore that. If we interpret Genesis 5.3 because of the imaging language there to exclude Cain, if that's what we're thinking out of the gate that Cain cannot be from Adam because of Genesis 5.3, then we've got to have another actor in the play. We've got to have someone else on the scene. Can't be another human because these verses, you know, Genesis 4.1, Eve says, I've gotten a man at Yahweh. Okay, we've got to have a divine being, you know, that we can use to explain this and must be an angel who look like a man, angel of the Lord. He looks like a man in the Old Testament. So, well, we're calling the angel of the Lord or an unangel of the Lord and we'll postulate that Eve met another divine being in human form. Like, forget the serpent stuff. Okay, Eve met another divine being in human form who was evil. She got attracted to him. She got turned on. They had sex and the product of that was Cain. Again, it's a concatenation of ideas that is literally, literally burst forth in somebody's head and then gets inserted into the text. Minimally 800 years after the text was produced and maybe even more than a millennium. But yet that, and this is the only target like this, you know, this blatant as far as Satan, yet that, that's the truth. That's going to be our source of theology. Who cares about the actual Old Testament? We would rather speculate about the Old Testament and then insert our speculations into the Old Testament and call it teaching, call it doctrine, call it truth. Now, you might be thinking what I'm thinking right at this point. Well, you know, Mike, we got people today who do that too. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. And those same people love to come across stuff like this because it sort of validates their method, their speculation, calling the fruit of their own imagination teaching. And I don't want to drift off into a diatribe about Christian Middle-earth here, just Middle Earth in general. But it's ground zero for this kind of stuff. And there were people doing it in antiquity as well. And we are living with the results of it. You know, even more bizarre. You think, well, how can it get more bizarre than this, Mike? Oh, it can. Let's leave the Targums and go to rabbinic tradition. Well, and I love to point out things like this when people say, Mike, you know, we should be interpreting the Bible like the rabbis did. Really? Sure. Well, I'm going to be referring here to Perkei de Rabbi Eleazar. Again, this is agotic material, A-G-G-A-D-I-C. Agadah is an Aramaic term that means tales or lore, stories, you know, that kind of stuff that, you know, gets their expansions. It's like Talmud and Mishnah, excuse me, Talmud and Midrash in this respect. You know, you get rabbis that pull a few lines out of a biblical story and then they just expound on it. They just make up interpretations of it. And then that gets written down. That becomes sort of part of, it becomes oral Torah. I mean, that's what Talmud and Midrash, you know, and all these things are. And there's plenty of this stuff going on with Genesis 4. And one of these sources is this source I just mentioned Perkei de Rabbi Eleazar. You can look him up on Wikipedia, but his own material is second or third century, again. You know, so it's kind of right in this period, you know, same period. And you can look this up in the Babylonian Talmud in Shabbat 146a, 738, Yebabot 103b, 711, Avodah, Zorah, 22b, 114. Those sources say this, that the serpent copulated with Eve, had sex with Eve, and it and or infused her with lust. But they don't actually say that he fathered Cain. And that's going to be Targim Pseudo-Jonathan. Remember Targim Pseudo-Jonathan is the oldest piece of writing that makes that connection. But there are these other rabbinic sources that have the serpent having sex with Eve and, you know, filling her with lust, okay? But they don't make the connection to Cain. Again, that's the province of Targim Pseudo-Jonathan. And then there's more. Now Rabbi Eleazar goes on, you know, again, that material, the Talmudic material, you know, doesn't really make the connection with Cain. But Rabbi Eleazar says this. He says that he, Sama El, in his particular storytelling here, came to Eve riding on the serpent. And then somehow she conceived. Like, what does that mean? Again, we're just, we're not told what it means. Sama El, this angel, this divine being, the devil figure, okay, comes to Eve riding on the serpent and she gets pregnant. And it's just bizarre. It's just bizarre. You think, where in the world are they getting this stuff? They're getting it from their own heads, their own imagination. And again, we, a few minutes ago, we just walked through, again, the set of ideas that people might have been thinking, again, to fill in gaps that they imagine, you know, like, but, you know, let's imagine how this could have happened. Again, that's one thing and lots of people do it in antiquity and they do it today. But here in this situation in antiquity, it becomes oral Torah and it becomes part of a targum. I mean, it takes on like an inscripturated status. And that's really the danger. That's really the sinister thing. Now you could say, well, it's not real dangerous, Mike. Only one targum did it. And you got a rabbi or two that are just kind of nutty. You know, people in the Jewish community would say, look, the rabbi say all sorts of weird stuff. And, you know, we ignore them or, you know, we gravitate toward one that had a good reputation and the other ones we just say, whatever, you know, I get that. I understand that because we do the same thing with commentators today. And scholars, I understand that. But for the community, this material has inscripturated status, you know, oral Torah, that the targums purport to be translations of the inspired text. I mean, that's a little more serious than the way we sort of can either dismiss or embrace a commentator today. Because commentators today, unless they live in Middle Earth, are not saying, hey, you know, I have a corner on the truth, or God spoke to me, or God directed me to do X, Y or Z. I mean, real scholars, real commentators aren't doing that. And, you know, what they write can be really kind of nutty. But they're not saying that this should be at the inscripturated level for the believing community. But that's what happens, again, in antiquity, with this kind of stuff. So again, I like stuff like this, because I just roll my eyes when you get people who never run into this because they don't read rabbinics. They never run into this crazy stuff that rabbis do with the text. And they can, oh, well, they're rabbis, they should know what's going on in the Hebrew Bible. It's Hebrew. We should listen to them. Not really. Okay, not really. What we should be doing is what we try to do here on the podcast. We try to take scripture in its own context, not a rabbinic context that comes 800 years later. Because honestly, what the rabbis are is they're looking back, they're commentators, they're looking back on a text that could be a millennium old. And they are filtering that text through their own tradition, just like Christian denominations do. They filter the biblical text through their own context, their own set of traditions. Just because they're Jewish doesn't mean they do it any better. They don't. It can be downright bizarre and completely miss the boat. What we should be doing is trying to take scripture in its own context. Contemporary context, the context of the writer and his original audience. That is the goal. And again, we're not saying that nobody later ever has any insight. That isn't the point. If you're thinking that, then you just want to think that because that's not what I'm suggesting. It's not an all or nothing proposition, but it's an overwhelming proposition to say it's better to understand scripture in its own context, not a later one, especially something a thousand years later. That should be self-evident, honestly. That should be so obvious that there would be no argument about it, but it's not. Because people in the Christian community, again, they're used to their denominations filtering the text to them. And they also have this mystique about Hebrew and about Jews and about Judaism. Oh, we got to listen to rabbis because it's their language. Look, I can take you to Israel today within a six-year-old, can cite, read the text. Do you want him to be your interpreter? Is that your commentator now? Because they can cite, read Hebrew? Again, let's think about the assumptions that we're making. Some of them are just not very sound. And this is a good case in point. Now, let's go back to 1 John 3 to wrap up the episode here, or at least try to navigate toward the end here. What about 1 John 3, 11, and 12? I'm going to quote from Scarlet again. He has a little section on this. He writes, Another New Testament text that may imply that Cain was born of unnatural means is 1 John 3, 12. Since the entire epistle of 1 John deals with the theme of brotherly love, the figure of Cain, the murderer provides the perfect antithesis to Christ, the one who laid down his life for others. The author exhorts the believers not to be, quote, like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous, unquote. The question of Cain's origins arises from the phrase, quote, who was of the evil one, unquote, which may be considered a reference to his satanic descent. Following the lesson of Cain, however, verse 15 states in more general terms that, quote, everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, unquote. The word for murderer, anthropokhtanas, is employed only here and in John 844, when Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees, children of the devil, who was a murderer from the beginning. Now, again, well, let me just have one more sentence from Scarlet. He writes, in verses one to nine, there's a sharp contrast delineated between the children of God as those who no longer sin or keep sinning practice sin and those of the devil who continue to sin. This polemic is summed up in verse 10. I would say verse 10 is, in fact, the key to understanding 1 John. Okay, let me read it to you. By this, it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God nor is the one who does not love his brother. The contrast in this verse, verse 10, is between the children of God and the children of the devil. Cain being the archetype, you know, figure of the children of the devil because they don't do righteousness and they don't love the brethren. Think about verse 10. It is evident who are the children of God, who are the children of the devil. And then it's delineated by references to conduct, to behavior. The point is verse 10 makes it clear that we are not physically spawned by God. We're not physically spawned by God. We were physically spawned by our parents. Okay, we are not physically spawned by God. And so that contextually dictates that the oppositional group, the Cain group, are not physically spawned by the evil one either. What delineates, what describes, what, you know, the point of both groups, children of God, children of the devil, is laid out in verse 10. Children of the devil are those who don't practice righteousness. It doesn't say that they're the ones that respond by Satan or that are that genealogically are in the line of Cain. It doesn't say that at all. It's the one who doesn't practice righteousness. It's the one who doesn't love his brother. Those are the children of the devil. So it's behavioral. It's a characteristic. It refers to the language is metaphorical. It's about a spiritual state, not a physical point of origin. And we know that again, because we are not physically spawned by God, believers are not physically spawned by God. They are born again. They are born from above. They are made new internally, spiritually. Okay. And as John, you know, is describing in his letter, these are the ones who love the brothers. They're the ones, you know, who are going to be righteous and follow the Lord, be disciple, all this kind of stuff. That's the point. The point is not physical origin. And honestly, everything I just said there is supported by Genesis 4-1. There's a complete absence in Genesis 4-1 or any other passage that Cain was fathered, physically spawned by Satan. It is not present in the Bible. It is inserted there in one target and then exploited. So why do people promote this idea today? To be blunt, it's because they want the Bible to endorse their anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic conspiracy nonsense. They want the Bible to teach that 1 John 3, 11 and 12 should be taken literally so they can look back to the bizarre Targum tradition about Cain being fathered by Satan and not being Adam's son, so they can drive a wedge between the Adamic line, the Adamic race, and a Satanic race. And you say, well, Mike, you know, wouldn't it make sense to have like the Jews be the Adamic line? Because look at those genealogies, you know, in the old, yeah, it would, but that isn't where the anti-Semites go. This is part of the tradition to lump Jews and, you know, blacks in certain contexts as well in a less than Adamic racial status. Well, surely Adam's race is the master race, is the best race, because it's closest to God. And those other races aren't. And again, they will take Adam's line, which produces, you know, Jesus ultimately, again, because of the New Testament genealogies, they will drive a wedge beginning back in Genesis and then argue that Jesus wasn't a Jew. I mean, the 17th, 18th, 19th, and frankly, 20th and 21st, you know, people are still doing this. This is how people try to baptize anti-Semitic conspiracy nonsense and racial nonsense as well. They love stuff like this. They don't care. I mean, honestly, their hearts are hard. I mean, they don't care whether they can justify it from Scripture or not. They don't care if you go to Genesis 425, it sort of wipes out the Genesis 5-3 argument that is the basis for Genesis 4-1's argument. They don't care about any of that. They want to believe what they want to believe, and they are just looking for ways to make it sound like it's Bible. They want to baptize it in some way and then foist it on their unsuspecting or equally willing followers. That's what they want to do. That's why people promote this idea today. They haven't discovered any lost knowledge. What they're doing is adopting and absorbing made-up stuff and calling it truth. That's what they're doing. Again, this topic is a bit off the beaten path, but I think it's an important one. You run across this on the Internet, you should know what is behind it. What is behind it in terms of text is a misunderstanding of the actual biblical text and a gravitation toward one particular targum that goes leaps and bounds beyond translating a parrot Hebrew text. It goes leaps and bounds beyond translation to the insertion of ideas that popped into the translator's head. And they become inscripturated and they take on the character for some, again willfully, who desperately want their idea to attach somewhere to some text in antiquity, like this one text born 800 to 1200 years after the Old Testament was done. This one aberration now captures the truth. They believe it because they want to, not because it makes any sense, not because it's exegetically defensible. They believe it because they want to. Mike, we could have saved our listeners a whole bunch of time and just simply wrapped up this with one coin phrase, and that is fake targum. Yep, fake targum, fake translation, fake news, fake targum. There you go, plain and simple. All right, Mike. Well, next week, can you let us know what we're going to be talking about as far as Joshua one through eight? Yeah, several months ago, a listener asked my opinion on the stories of Joshua, again, part of the Conquest Narratives, specifically Joshua one through eight, and the Ugaritic Carat Epic. This is a Carat was a king in Ugaritic literature, and so that's going to be our topic. How should we think about the fact that Joshua one to eight has some pretty clear similarities to this Ugaritic text? So we'll get into that next week. All right, Mike. Well, with that, I just want to remind everybody to, if you haven't done so, please go rate and review us wherever you consume our podcast. We appreciate the over 500 people that has given us a review on iTunes. I know that's the most popular, but it really does help wherever you listen to the podcast, even if you're on social media, Twitter, Facebook, you name it. If you wouldn't mind giving us a shout out if you like our show to help other people that might find our podcast useful, we would appreciate it. And with that, Mike, I just want to thank everybody 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.