The Boy-Related Eagle Plan (Transcript)

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Chris Sims: "Then he took two little lads, and spent every day sacrificing lambs and feeding the eagles and the boys, and making the boys ride on the backs of the eagles. And he bound them with a firm knot, and tied the cable to the feet of the eagles, and let them soar upwards little by little, every day, to a distance of ten cubits, till they grew accustomed and were educated to it, and they rose all the length of the rope, till they reached the sky, the boys being on their backs. Then he drew them to himself." The Book of Ahikar, Chapter 5, Verse 11.

C: [Music: "Where Eagles Dare" by Misfits] [Music]

C: Hello, friends and neighbors, and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two nonbelievers read through the Bible, and we try not to be jerks about it. My name is Chris Sims, and with me as always is the other set of footprints, Benito Cereno. Benito, how are the Sons of Thunder this fine morning?

Benito Cereno: Well, this Thunderson is feeling pretty good. How are you, Chris?

C: I'm doing all right. Just got a haircut, which is nice.

B: Nice, very nice. I need one myself.

C: Unlike certain biblical figures, I always feel stronger after a haircut.

B: True. That's a good feeling. You should feel refreshed, revived, and renewed.

C: It's like I've been in an angel jacuzzi.

B: Yeah.

C: And I was the first one there.

B: Very nice. Very good. Today, we are reading one a little bit off the beaten track, one that I feel like probably many of our listeners have not read before, unless they read it specifically for reading along with this podcast. We're doing— I would say definitely not.

B: Yeah. It's one that is referenced in our book from last week, Tobit. Last week, we did Tobit. This week, we are reading about Tobit's nephew that is according to Tobit, Ahikar. So we're reading the story of Ahikar, which would have been a very famous internationally known story or folktale that is counted among Jewish pseudepigrapha. We'll talk about that and what that means a little bit later. But we've got this very cool, very crazy story with a riddle contest at the heart of it, fake executions, all the kind of things that I think people tune into this show for. So I'm pretty excited about that.

C: A couple things before we get started. One, you mentioned that Ahikar is internationally known.

B: Yes. He's known to rock the microphone.

C: We're known to rock the microphones. And I get stupid—I mean, outrageous. Thing number two, point two, if you will. I feel like everybody who jumped on this show because we were talking about the gospels, the stories that everybody knows, getting into the life of Jesus Christ, now for the past two weeks, maybe they want to take back those donations that they were nice enough to send in. Because we're into some very obscure stuff right now.

B: I will counter and say, in my heart of hearts, I feel like people are here more for the weird obscure stuff they don't already know about. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're both right. Maybe we're equally right. And our audience is equally split between people who are demanding to know more about Exodus. And then there's people who are like, I really super need to know about the Odes of Solomon.

C: Well, where in America, where in modern culture are you going to hear about the canonical Bible, if not from us?

B: Exactly. There's nowhere. It's this—I'm pretty sure we're the only Bible podcast that there is. It's very strange. When I go to iTunes, and I look at the charts, if you click on religion and spirituality, we're number one, because we're the only one. It's us, and then no one. It's very strange.

C: Here's point three. For the first time on this show, we have encountered some scripture that I just don't understand. I have no idea what is going on for most of this story.

B: Great news. This is theoretically the premise of the show, that you don't understand the thing, and then I explain the thing. So we're going to see if we can make that— Do you think that's the premise of the show, that I don't understand it? Because I thought the premise of the show was that we had a conversation about it. I didn't realize.

B: Well, I mean, yes, we're obviously having a conversation, but remember the story, the whole thing started because you didn't know who the apostles were, right? That's what I'm getting at. The absolute bare bones is presumably I know the Bible thing, and then we talk about it, and maybe it's a thing you know, maybe you don't. So I don't know. It's fine.

C: I'm just saying, I pulled the ransom of Julius Caesar out of the top of the dome last week.

B: Yes, you did. It was awesome and good. Yes. I'm not doubting your historical bona fides. You have them.

C: That's the disrespect that I have to endure on this show.

B: Oh, Chris, I'm so sorry. And so close to your birthday.

C: And so close to—that's right. This, I believe, is coming out exactly one week from my birthday.

B: That's true. We'll talk about that a little bit more at the end of the show, because we've got a surprise. Not for you, Chris. Sorry, you already know what it is, because it's our show. But for the listeners—

C: Well, your birthday is coming up soon, too.

B: Yeah, mine is roughly a week after yours. So yeah, so those things combined. That's the end of the show talk. That's the top of the show talk. We missed another Jewish holiday. I should probably be doing a better job of like, talking about them before they happen.

C: Yeah, maybe you can do them in advance.

B: Yeah, that would be really good. Then people can prepare to like—

C: Since you're the smart one. Since you're the one who knows things.

B: Oh boy, that sure is not what I said.

C: I mean, just a suggestion from me, the idiot.

B: Yeah, the clown. Yeah, anyway.

C: I did just almost literally spit a mouthful of water on my microphone. Let's go ahead and call that accurate.

B: So last time we talked about Tisha B'Av, which is the saddest day of the year. That gets balanced out a little bit later by Tu B'Av. Tu B'Av, which means the 15th of Av, which this year was from sundown July 26th through July 27th. And it balances out the heavy of the low point of Tisha B'Av, the saddest day of the year, by having a pretty cool light day that is basically a Jewish Valentine's Day. So the day would have originally marked the beginning of the grape harvest, which would have lasted through Yom Kippur, which would have been at the end. And apparently on both of those days, it used to be that unmarried girls would put on white garments and then they would go and dance in the vineyards. Anyway, somehow that's transformed into modern times is basically Valentine's Day. So Mazel Tov to anybody who had Mazel Tov on Tu B'Av, good on you.

C: You mentioned something that I think I probably could have inferred given my very limited knowledge of Jewish holidays. Does the Jewish calendar start a day at sundown?

B: Yes. Yeah. They start counting their day. So like every week, the Sabbath or Shabbat starts Friday at sundown and then lasts through sundown the following day. So yeah, everything, they start the day at night, the previous day. So yeah, all of their holidays work that way. Shabbat is practiced that way.

C: I mean, honestly, that makes a lot more sense than just picking a fairly arbitrary time in the middle of the night.

B: That is true. I do have another thing, Chris, I feel like we should talk about that's unrelated to Bible, if that's okay, but it is related to you and to me.

C: It should probably be related to the Bible as you have my number if you just want to talk about stuff that relates to you and me. We do text pretty frequently.

B: It's a little bit of self-promotion, so I think you probably would be into it.

C: Okay. Yes. In that case, yes.

B: Yeah. So for our listeners who don't know, completely outside of our work related to Bible, Chris and I have another project together that's coming out in October. It's a comic book because that's the thing that we guys both do. We do comic books.

C: You realize you sound like a malfunctioning robot right now. That's the thing we guys both do.

B: My secret revealed. Yeah, we have a comic book coming out in October. It's a very special one. It's a Halloween special for Army of Darkness. It's a movie. Maybe you guys have heard of it.

C: Yeah, that's right. This is the third Army of Darkness comics project that I've worked on, but the first for you, I believe.

B: Yep, it is. It's true.

C: And it is Army of Darkness Halloween special 2018. My writing partner and I, Chad Bowers, we're doing the lead story in that book with artist Eoin Maron, who is fantastic. It is set in Charleston, South Carolina, because 2018 is the 300th anniversary of Blackbeard's blockade of Charleston, and I thought that would make for a fun story. So that's the lead. And then Benito, you've got the backup.

B: It's true. Yeah, I have a shorter secondary story that is Halloween themed. It's got art by Anthony Marques. And mine is set in a cemetery on Halloween where some troublemaking college kids make some bad decisions. So I think it's pretty fun. I think it'll be a nice little cap to Chris's very awesome sounding pirate ghost story.

C: And it does not feature the Bible. My story doesn't, at least, but it does feature a supernatural book of some fame.

B: Yeah. If you guys give equal weight to the Necronomicon that you do to Bible, first of all, don't probably. But if you do...

C: I would say I would put the nay-no on that one.

B: Yeah. But yeah, if you guys like Army of Darkness, which is a very fun, cool movie, if you like Ash, if you like that boy and his chainsaw hand, probably check it out. It's available. If you're listening to this podcast when it's new, it's in the previews catalog right now. If you guys don't know what that is, just go to a comic book store and tell them you want it. Don't worry about explaining the direct market. But yeah, it's available now. You can order it basically for the next four weeks or so. You can preorder it online. It should be available digitally when it comes out. So if you don't want to go walk into a comic book store, it'll be available that way too. We'll let you guys know when it's out.

B: But that's the thing we've got coming out. I know, sorry, it's unrelated to Bible. We can get back to Bible talk now. I just thought you guys might like to know.

C: And I will say preordering the book does help us out quite a bit because preorders hugely influence how many copies are ordered for the wall of a comic book store. And I know that because I worked in one for six years. Let's talk about Ahikar, buddy.

B: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, let's absolutely do it. Okay. So yeah, the story of Ahikar is a, it's an old story, not necessarily relative to all the stuff in the old Testament, but relatively old as these things go. The earliest version that we found, we found fragments of an Aramaic version from the fifth century BCE, which were found at Elephantine, which very fun sounding place. Elephantine would have been an Aramaic speaking Jewish colony in Egypt. It's a little island in the Nile. So there would have been a Jewish community there and they would have had their Aramaic literature.

So a version of the story of Ahikar would have been there. And that seems to be the earliest version, which seems to suggest that the earliest version of the story would have been Hebrew or Aramaic. However, there have been found cuneiform texts from Uruk, the city in Sumeria that features the name Aḫu’aqār, which seems to suggest that there maybe was a historical figure, a Caesar-real person named Aḫu’aqār from the seventh century BCE. But the story itself, yeah, probably originates in Aramaic from the late seventh, early sixth century.

The sayings portion of this, the wisdom literature portions of this, which are basically the second chapter and the last chapter of the book, were probably originally in a separate document that were then kind of spliced in partly because there's no reference to Ahikar or any of the characters in the rest of the book in those portions. So, similar to how that long speech from Tobit to Tobias was probably spliced-in proverbs that were kind of well-known around the Mideast at this time. It's a similar kind of thing.

There are references to the legend of Ahikar. I talked about this as a famous international story. There's versions of this story in Romanian, Slavonic, Armenian, Arabic, and Syriac literature. Obviously, we saw it referred to in the book of Tobit that we read last week, which would have been a Jewish book translated into Greek as part of the Septuagint. In the Greek text of Tobit, the name Ahikar is rendered as Achiacharos. So that would have been his name there.

But other references to the story of Ahikar, there's a very similar story that seems to be heavily modeled on this that appears in A Life of Aesop, the famous fabulist, the guy who wrote fables. Again, not an actual real person like Homer, but there are many fictional biographies of him. And one of them was written by a Byzantine Greek monk from the 13th century named Maximus Planudes. And his version of the life of Aesop seems to be heavily based on the story of Ahikar with Aesop getting falsely accused of a thing, and then he fakes his death, and then he solves a bunch of riddles. And some of the overlap with Ahikar and Aesop has to do with the fact that a lot of these sayings at the end of Ahikar are very close to what you would consider like a short fable in that they're allegorical, metaphorical statements that involve a lot of animals. We'll get to those. We'll get to that later.

The text of Ahikar exists in the original Aramaic fragments, but there's also full versions in Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Slavonic. The version that we read and that if you guys read from the link that we put up on Tumblr, or probably if you just Googled it, probably what you found would have been the Arabic version, which is what we read. It should have been a little bit obvious if you did read it that it was an Arabic version because there were references to things like viziers and sultans and people had names like Abu Samik. And there's a part where someone swears by Allah at one point. So those things should have all been clues that this was from an Arabic adaptation. Oh, and speaking of Arabic, there's even a version of the story of Ahikar in the supplemental materials to the Arabian Knights. So like I said, even though today maybe not so well known, this would have been at one point a hugely famous international story across the known world.

If we want to look at how it is categorized in terms of canon, it's not canon. It is typically grouped with Jewish pseudepigrapha, which is a term we haven't had in a while. I think the last bit of pseudepigrapha we looked at would have been the Ascension of Isaiah. And that's a term that literally means falsely inscribed, meaning that someone claims that it was written by someone that it wasn't written by. So like you're writing it and you say, "These are the memoirs of Jeremiah the prophet," and it's not by Jeremiah. It's falsely inscribed. And so that makes it pseudepigrapha. However, the term is frequently used much more broadly to mean Jewish religious writings, Jewish non-canonical religious writings from about the year 300 BCE to about 300 CE. And so that incorporates things like the martyrdom of Isaiah, but also Enoch and the letter of Aristeas and the Life of Adam and Eve and a lot of other things that we will get to eventually that are very cool and weird and interesting that I think you guys will be really into. So even though technically Ahikar being from the 5th century BCE falls outside of that window, it is nevertheless usually grouped with that.

But while we're on the topic of canonicity, I got called out a little bit by a friend of the show, Friends of the Show#Ben_Rowe Ben Rowe, as he does. And it's fine. I appreciate it because his comments are always on point. But he pointed out that I've been a little bit unclear in making the distinction with things like apocrypha and deuterocanon and that kind of stuff.

So like last week, Chris, we had a discussion about why Tobit was deuterocanon. And I said, because of the late date in which it's composed, which is true. That is true. But the bit that I was unclear about is deuterocanon, and I refer to it as secondary canon. I think that is the main source of confusion. Secondary canon in this case doesn't mean secondary in importance. It means secondary as in like later. It's later canon. The reason why the things that are considered deuterocanon by the Catholic and Orthodox churches is because they're not part of the canonical Hebrew text, and they're not part of the canonical Hebrew text because of their later composition, possibly among other reasons.

But for the Catholic and Orthodox churches, things that are in the deuterocanon, what Protestants call the capital A Apocrypha, books like Tobit, Judith, [The Book of the Dynasty of God's Resisters | First]] and Second Maccabees, [[One Weird Trick | Bel and the Dragon, Susanna,] all those books, even though they're Deuterocanon, they're fully canon. Tobit is as canonical to a Catholic as Genesis is or Matthew. So it's not of secondary canon. It's only called that because deuterocanon is the term that Catholics use to distinguish the books that Protestants refer to as Apocrypha. So books that are Apocryphal for Protestants because they're in the Septuagint but not the canonical Hebrew books, Catholics refer to those as deuterocanon just to distinguish them, but they are still canon. And to them, deutero, which literally means second, just means a later addition to the canon and not ones of secondary importance.

So I know it's confusing that we talk about pseudepigrapha, deuterocanon, apocrypha, lowercase-a apocrypha. Generally, the distinction is in very broad terms. Pseudepigrapha is going to refer to Jewish documents from this time. Apocrypha, lowercase-a apocrypha is going to refer to New Testament apocrypha usually. And then when we talk about capital-A Apocrypha, we're talking about books that Protestants consider apocryphal, but that Catholics and Orthodox consider later canon. Does that make sense?

C: So when I went to a Catholic church on Easter Sunday with my wife, and they walked out holding the big Bible like it was a title belt at a wrestling match, like holding it above their heads while the people were holding up signs, that I guess would probably, in this case, probably actually say John 3:16, not the other thing. You're telling me if I looked in that book, Tobit's in there, and Tobias and his dog, and his buddy Raphael who comes down to teach him how to cure blindness.

B: Yeah, absolutely. 100%. That's in there. The exploding dragon, the dragon that Daniel explodes, that is in there. Yeah. Anything that we've talked about being deuterocanon is going to be in a Catholic Bible. It's often in a separate section, sometimes in the middle between the Old and the New Testaments because it's considered to be from an intertestamental period. So it might be there. There's probably other books where they're kind of scattered throughout in the order, but usually they'll be kind of in the middle. Sometimes they'll be at the end. Sometimes Protestant Bibles will have them in the end in a section marked Apocrypha. But yeah, absolutely. In a Catholic Bible, if you go to a Catholic church and pick up a Bible off a pew, yeah, Tobit's going to be in there. Judith is going to be in there. The first two Maccabees will be in there.

C: To do what we do on this show and put it in terms that are related to "Laser Swords," the movie?

B: Yes.

C: The distinction between canon and deuterocanon is not the distinction between like the movie "Star Wars" and the Marvel "Star Wars" comic that has a six foot tall green rabbit in it named Jaxxon.

B: Right.

C: It's the distinction between the movie "Star Wars" and the movie "Rogue One, A Star Wars Story." That's right. For Catholics and Orthodox churches, it is. Yes. For Protestant churches, it's the other thing.

C: For Protestant churches, the book of Tobit is like a Timothy Zahn novel.

B: Yeah.

C: With Grand Admiral Thrawn.

B: Or even just straight up like fan fiction off of AO3 or something.

C: I mean, there was a two week post-wedding bone down party. So that tracks.

B: Yeah. But the cool thing, the cool thing about Ahikar is that it's in a pretty exclusive, but not as exclusive as you might think club of non-canonical or apocryphal or pseudepigraphical books that are referred to in canon. We saw that with "The Ascension of Isaiah," which got referred to when it talked about the martyrdom of Isaiah. And so here, obviously Ahikar is not just referenced, but integrated into the plot of Tobit where they make him into Tobit's nephew and then Ahikar takes care of Tobit for four years of his blindness. And then he shows up at the wedding party at the end, the third wedding party, if you count the first one as two, because it was double.

So yeah, like he's fully integrated there, but not just that, Second Peter, like there's no question for Christians of the canonicity of Second Peter that was written by Peter, number one apostle boy.

C: The Rock.

B: The Rock, Simon "the rock" Peter and his second epistle, Second Peter 2:22, lots of twos here. As many as two times. Yes. He says, "It has happened to them according to the true proverb: A dog returns to its own vomit, and, 'a sow, after washing itself, wallows in the mud.'" Where'd that proverb come from? Well, our boy, Ahikar, he says, "O my son! thou hast been to me like the pig who went into the hot bath with people of quality, and when it came out of the hot bath, it saw a filthy hole and it went down and, wallowed in it." And so, yeah, some people see that proverb as being the source of Peter saying, "you know, the old proverb about the pig in the hole." So there's that.

Also, some people see a parallel between the no-spoilers ending of this book and the no spoilers, except it is spoiled, 'cause if you listen to the show, you already know the beginning of another book that we've already covered, but I won't say what it is until we get there. Cause it's the end of this book.

C: Yeah. I mean, it's also the beginning of that book. So it's hard to, it's hard to spoil.

B: The end, the end of this book, some people see as having an influence on the beginning of another book that we've already covered, but we'll say what it is later. Cause no spoilers. If you guys didn't read Ahikar.

C: A very choice ending, by the way. That part I got.

B: Yeah. I think you guys are going to be very pleased with the ending of Ahikar.

C: So here's my question for you.

B: Yeah.

C: In the terms that we've been using, if you look at it from the traditional perspective, Tobin and Tobias are Caesar reel, right?

B: Yes. Right.

C: Okay. But even looking at it from the traditional perspective, it's sounding to me like Ahikar is Robin Hood reel at best.

B: Well, it does seem a little bit hard to justify it, but I mean, if you, if you do take Tobit as a history and you take him and you assume that it is an accurate first person version of his life, then yeah, you have, then you have to assume then that the story of Ahikar is also true because it's the version that Tobit relates. Right? So, I mean, even though it's never, the story of Ahikar has not been considered canon anywhere.

I don't know. Maybe I haven't been clear on this either, but I think, I think I would like people to understand from this show to take away from the show is that canon doesn't really matter. Like canon matters. Canon matters to like the dudes in charge, right. To the people who, to the members of the church.

C: I'm telling that Pontifex, you said canon doesn't matter by the way.

B: Canon matters to him. Right. But canon doesn't always matter to the person in the church. You know what I mean? Like, I personally am more interested in the authentic belief of people. And if, and people who listen to this, if you follow my work at all, which I assume is none of you, but if you have, you know that that's something I'm always interested in. I always, I'm going to give preference to the authentic folk belief over the official like canon literary version of a thing. And so that's why like to me in John, the bit about the pool at Bethesda, the bit of the angel coming down and healing people that often gets cut out because it feels like a folk story, that's much more interesting to me than some of the more canonical literary preaching. And the thing I've tried to really establish with some of the art that we post on our Tumblr is that the canonicity of a thing absolutely did not affect whether people believed that thing to be true or not.

And so regardless of the fact that the story of Ahikar is a kind of a folktale that gets passed around and has very many folktale kind of elements to it. Absolutely people are going to believe, yeah, he's a real person. Yes. He really trained Eagles. Yes. He really solved these riddles. The canonicity of it ultimately doesn't, doesn't matter to popular belief. If that makes sense.

C: I don't disagree with you on that point. And as we've said before, we are not here to like poke holes in anything. We are here to engage with the text as it is presented to us and, and not be jerks about it. But I'm really curious and really interested in the idea of constructing the stories as we have them and saying things like, "Oh, you know, Shakespeare, he knew Robin hood," you know, something like that. Yeah. So I'm curious about the idea of saying that Tobit was, was Ahikar's uncle. If Ahikar is a folk hero, it would be like having Teddy Roosevelt, who I know you're a fan of.

B: Yeah.

C: Like having Teddy Roosevelt, hang out with Paul Bunyan, you know, that's an interesting construction to me.

B: Yeah, it absolutely is. It's like, you're writing a biography of someone and you're like, "How can I zazz this up a little bit? Oh yeah. His, his uncle was Friar Tuck by the way." Yeah. It, it is definitely a little bit of that. It does feel like that. Right? So, I mean, it's a, it's a cool and interesting way to give your story.

C: I guess what I should have gone with was a Robin hood knowing King Richard. I forgot there was an extremely historically real person in the Robin Hood story.

B: Yeah. You start with King Richard and then you're like, "By the way, this arrow guy and his friend the giant and the drunk priest," and yeah. And so on. Much, the Miller's son, et cetera.

C: Billy Red's up in there.

B: Billy Red. But yeah, it is a lot like that. Yeah. It's, it's cool and interesting, but yeah, I like the story a lot. Story of Ahikar, you seem to have, I think some issues with it, which I can understand it's weird things happen in this book.

C: Yeah. My issues are mostly around the fact that none of this makes sense to me.

B: Cool. Let's go through it then.

C: Okay. By that, I mean that I texted you last night. One of the many sayings in this,I texted you. I think this is, this is a chapter 2, verse 25. If we can just jump ahead for a quick second.

B: Yeah, sure.

C: "O my son! get thee a fat ox with a foreskin, and an ass great with its hoofs, and get not an ox with large horns, nor make friends with a tricky man, nor get a quarrelsome slave, nor a thievish handmaid, for everything which thou committest to them they will ruin." And the thing that I said after that was "Advice that's still relevant today." Yeah.

C: About having to get that ox with a foreskin.

B: Yeah. I'm, I'm sure that absolutely meant something to people at one point. Why you want a donkey that's got big hooves, I don't know.

C: I also feel like when we started this project, you probably knew how much we would be saying the word "foreskin" and I did not.

B: It's true. We're not done. We are absolutely not done.

C: Oh, I know. We haven't even gotten to the book where I knew we were going to be talking about it.

B: Yeah. Yeah, it's true. You know about, you know about King David and, and all the foreskins, you know about that one?

C: Yeah, yeah, I know about that one.

B: Okay. All right.

C: We'll get to it.

B: We'll get there. Yeah. Some of the wisdom literature is a little bit harder to understand. Some of it really holds up and you can read it and like, "the removing of stones with a wise man is better than the drinking of wine with a sorry man." That's clear. Like we understand what that means.

C: Yeah. I copied down a couple of good ones, but there are a lot of ones that are weird.

B: Yeah. There are some that I don't understand. And I haven't found like, I didn't go searching for a commentary on every specific proverb throughout, but yeah, we'll get to that in a second. Let's, let's start with the frame of the story. Yeah, we've got Ahikar or Ha'ikar as he would be called in the, in the Arabic version, grand vizier of Assyria. So again, this is setting us, I mean, in this version, he just straight up is from Assyria, right? But in the context of Tobit, the idea is that this would be during the Israelite exile of the Northern kingdom into Assyria. There does not seem to be any evidence in this text that Ahikar is Jewish, except for the fact that he does praise the most high God. Right?

C: Do you have like the etymology of the word vizier? Because I feel like if I feel like I am a very casual reader of the word vizier in that I know that it means evil court wizard. And that's kind of about it.

B: It frequently does mean that, but no, it would just be like the actual meaning would be just a high ranking official or like a minister to a King in an Islamic government. So obviously, it's an anachronistic term, just like Sultan is that gets used later. And I mean, even using the name Allah, right, would be anachronistic by about 1500 years. So it's a Turkish word that means helper, aid, or minister, one who bears the burden of office. So, he's just a high ranking in this case, probably presumably the highest ranking advisor to Sennacherib.

C: Well, thank you. I appreciate you letting me know that. Cause I don't know what words are, I guess.

B: No one has said that. No one has said that anyway.

C: Ahikar, he's got 60 wives, which by any measure is a lot of wives.

B: Yeah. The 60 wives. Yeah. In Talmudic folklore, the Aramaic folklore of the Talmud, 60 is one of those numbers that's just used to mean "a lot." And so it turns, it turns up a lot whenever you want to.

C: So it's just over 7.

B: It's more than seven. Exactly. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 60, I guess. Yeah.

C: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - 7 is the perfect number.

B: Yeah.

C: Then 60, then 69.

B: Nice.

C: 316, 420 and 666.

B: Yeah. That's all the numbers.

C: Those are all the numbers, all the ones you need.

B: All the ones you need. So yeah, so he's got 60 wives. The point is he's got a lot of wives and from them he has no children. And so he wants to find out about this, like, "Am I going to have a child ever?" And so he goes to talk to the other wise men, the astrologers, the wizards, and they say, "Hey, go make a sacrifice to these idols and see what you find out." And he didn't get an answer from them. And so then he's like, "Oh, I should pray to God probably." And so he does that.

And then God is like, "Yeah, I have terrible news for you. You went to the idols first, dummy. So no, no children for you. And instead you should adopt your nephew Nadan," who is his sister's son. And this version, his name is Nadan, N-A-D-A-N. The version we saw in the NRSV from Tobit, he's called Nadab, N-A-D-A-B. But, the interesting thing about that is that in the original Greek, his name is actually Adam. And so they changed his name there to Nadab, whereas he's Nadan here. Some versions he's Nadin, N-A-D-I-N, but in this text and what seems to be probably one of the earliest versions would be Nadan, N-A-D-A-N, because that would be related to the Hebrew name, Nathan, which means a gift. So Nadan, as he's called here, but Nadab elsewhere. And yeah, Ahikar adopts his nephew when he was still a little suckling and he handed him over to 8 wet nurses, which seems like a lot.

C: Okay. So, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 60, 69, 316, 420.

B: Yeah. Yeah. A very thirsty boy, I guess.

C: Here's the first part where I get a little tripped up. God tells– God, straight up. No, I mean, presumably there was an angel who came down with a bunch of eyes on fire.

B: I think, well, he hears a voice. He hears a voice is what it says.

C: But this is God. This is a message from God, capital G.

B: Yeah.

C: Tells him, Hey, go adopt Nadan and raise him up and then he'll be your son and he'll bury you when you get old. So you don't have to worry about Tobit having to find your body in the street and then having to go bury it himself.

B: Right.

C: As was his deal. Yeah. God's wrong though is the thing.

B: Yeah. God seems to be giving some bad advice, except, I mean, it's gotta be one of those where you're like, either you go, "Well, God did it for the plot device." If you're looking at it from a literary standpoint, if you're looking at it from a theological standpoint, you might say, "Well, God knows that Ahikar needs to suffer in order to learn some kind of lesson." And then he's in his station is improved by the end of the story.

C: I mean, yes, his station is improved by the end of the story. He does live in a basement for four years.

B: Yeah. It's, it's not great for him.

C: Specifically because he did exactly what God told him to do.

B: Correct.

C: Which is already a punishment for going to the idols first.

B: Right. So is it double punishment where he's like, no, no children is that's just, that's just punishment A. Punishment B is you have to live in a cistern for a while until your fingernails grow out like eagles claws. So yeah. And also your nephew's going to be evil. So yeah, I don't know.

C: Yeah. Spoiler everybody. Nadan is evil. We get an entire chapter of about 67 verses that's just Ahikar teaching him what's what, and it does not take Nadan is mad evil. And as we learn in chapter 1, verse 25, "And he took Nadan his sister's son with him and seated him in a parlour and set about teaching him night and day till he had crammed him with wisdom and knowledge more than with bread and water." That might actually be the problem.

B: Yeah. That also does raise some questions about how Ahikar feeds children.

C: Yeah. Just crams it in there. Just takes a big old fistful of bread. It's like a, like a Kobayashi hot dog eating contest situation. He dunks the bread in the water and just shoves it in there.

B: He just grabs the whole kid cuisine in one hand and then mashes it up into a ball. Just shoves it in there.

C: While just screaming Proverbs at him.

B: Yeah.

C: This actually might be when Nadan turns out evil. This does not seem like a good childhood.

B: Maybe so. Or maybe he just, he just straight up didn't understand these proverbs. Chapter two is all the teachings of Ahikar. The editor of this version refers to it as a poor Richard's almanac of ancient days. And yeah, it's basically like those kind of like homey homespun sayings that probably made way more sense to a medieval Arabic person than to us today. But some of them hold up. Some of them make sense. If we want to look at some of these individually.

C: Yeah. I mean, I wrote down a couple of, you already mentioned verse 12, which is, "the removing of stones with a wise man is better than the drinking of wine with a sorry man.

B: Yeah.

C: Which I thought was fun. Verse 13: "pour out thy wine on the tombs of the just, and drink not with ignorant, contemptible people." So it's better to pour one out for your homies.

B: Yeah.

C: Than to then to hang out with people you don't like, which I like.

B: Yeah. That's a, that is a pretty good one. Yeah. "Cleave to wise men who fear God." Right? Like, so a lot of the advice is hang with good people, avoid bad influences.

C: I like verse 17 as well, which is, "O my son! if the rich man eat a snake, they say, 'It is by his wisdom,' and if a poor man eat it, the people say, 'From his hunger.'" That's so good. That's like one of my favorite ones I think, because that's absolutely true. Right?

C: 100% 100% true.

B: Even today, that one holds up completely. Or it's just like two people do the same thing, but based on their station, we question their motivations or we attribute positive motivations to a person we already view positively. It's nice. It's very, that's a very good one, Ahikar. Crushed it.

C: Also the idea of eating a snake is very, very good. Like that's a very good image. Verse 23, not so good. I think.

B: Yeah.

C: "O my son! spare not to beat thy son, for the drubbing of thy son is like manure to the garden, and like tying the mouth of a purse, and like the tethering of beasts, and like the bolting of the door." Yeah.

C: This is as bad as Tobin telling Tobias he needs to marry a cousin.

B: Yeah.

C: Possibly worse.

B: Yeah. Probably endorsing child abuse is. Yeah. Especially calling it drubbing. Like that's even worse.

C: I don't know if this came up in your translation. 'Cause you said it was the same one, but I'm not quite sure. The word drubbing comes up a lot.

B: Yeah. It does in mind too. We have the same translation. It's just mine has been revised a little bit. So I think some of the like thees and thous have been taken out of mine, but it is the same translation that I have that you're looking at.

C: Okay. I've only got one more and it's my favorite one.

B: All right.

C: Although I think this is probably meant in a different way than I'm taking it.

B: Okay.

C: "O my son! a living dog is better than a dead poor man."

B: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's again, not very nice to dogs here, but yeah, that follows up one that I want to look at later. 'Cause I don't want it to say it now. 'Cause it's favorite one, spoilers, I picked out for the end.

C: I just think a living dog is better than a dead man is a good general philosophy.

B: Yeah, it is. Yeah, no, that's a good one. I don't think we need to really go through all of them. I mean, most of them follow the same train of thought, which is associate with the good and avoid the bad and that. But also take advantage of the things that you have and don't waste your time wishing for things that you can't have, which is also a reasonable philosophy that we still tend to preach today. So, anyway, yeah.

C: A couple of them do go off the rails though.

B: Yeah. What do you got?

C: Verse 61: "Let the wise man beat thee with a rod, but let not the fool anoint thee with sweet salve." Yeah.

C: I would say maybe don't let the wise man beat you with a rod, but maybe let the fool treat you like a fellow human being.

B: Yeah. Yeah, that one's clearly a little bit more metaphorical, but yeah, still, still strange. Yeah.

C: Also there's some real, like just taking some pot shots at wives. Am I right, fellas?

B: Yeah. Yeah.

C: Yeah. It's about 50/50 good advice versus...

B: Yeah, I do. I do like this one, "Desire not a woman bedizened with dress and with ointments, who is despicable and silly in her soul." I like, I mean, I like it in an ironic way. 'Cause I like the word "bedizened" primarily, but. "Woe to thee if you bestow on her anything that is yours, or commit to her what is in your hand and she entice thee into sin, and God be angry with you." Yeah. Some not so good ones about wives and some ones about beating your children, that don't quite hold up, but there's some gems in there. There's some good ones. Yeah.

He wraps up basically saying, "There are four things in which neither the king nor his army can be secure: oppression by the vizier, and bad government, and perversion of the will, and tyranny over the subject; and four things which cannot be hidden: the prudent, and the foolish, and the rich, and the poor." So he wraps up there, you know, basically saying that like, no matter how much wealth and power you have, there are certain things that you can't protect against, you know, and he should have been watching his own advice here, right? He talks about the King can't protect against oppression by the vizier. And in this case, he's the vizier, but his own second in command is the one who he should be watching out for, but can't protect against. Because that's what happens next.

C: Yeah. Surprisingly, after Ahikar takes this child, puts him in a room and then spends every day and every night shoving wet bread into his mouth and screaming things like, "let the wise man beat you!" Nadan turns out bad. Nadan does not like Ahikar.

B: It doesn't go well.

C: Going back through this, I'm kind of on his side.

B: Oh no, no way. So Ahikar is getting old and the question is who's going to, who's going to take your place. And so he decides to deliver over to Nadan all of his goods and the slaves and the handmaidens and the horses and the cow. So he gives them all this stuff. So Ahikar is still alive. He's just, he's old. But he's like, well, "Nadan, you can go ahead and take over. It'll be fine. I'll kind of retire. You've been, we've been training for this our whole lives, your whole life." And then immediately it goes bad.

C: He gives him the stuff in verse 2, Verse 3 is like, "and then Ahikar kicked back." Verse 4: it goes bad.

B: Yeah. Yeah. "When Nadan perceived that the power of bidding and of forbidding was in his own hand, he despised the position of Ahikar and scoffed at him, and set about blaming him whenever he appeared, saying, 'My uncle Ahikar is in his dotage, and he knows nothing now." So he beats the slaves and the maidens. He sells the horses and the camels. He starts wasting all of his money. And then Ahikar is like, "what have I done? I've made a huge mistake."

C: These three things, by the way, are presented as being equally bad.

B: Yeah.

C: I would say it's probably not as bad to sell the camels and waste the money as it is to beat the handmaidens.

B: Sure.

C: That's probably number one bad. I am no longer on Nadan's side.

B: Yeah. It goes very bad. And so the king is like, "This Nadan guy is bad. So while Ahikar is still alive, let's make sure Nadan doesn't take over anything." And Ahikar is like, "I need a backup plan." And he's like, "Nadan has a brother who is not spoiled yet. So I guess that's going to be my plan B." And so he's going to raise up Nadan's brother, Benuzardan, to be his actual heir. Nadan doesn't care for that at all. And so he puts his plan in motion.

C: He cooks up a scheme.

B: It's quite a scheme. It's a surprisingly handwriting-based scheme.

C: Yeah. He forges some letters. Uh, first he forges a letter to the Pharaoh in Egypt. And it says, "Hey, come to Assyria on this day at this time and we'll make peace. I'll hand our kingdom over to you." And then he writes a letter to the king of Persia, says the same thing, but those letters he doesn't send. Instead, he writes a third letter in the King's handwriting telling Ahikar, "Hey, gather up my army. I'm putting you in charge of the army. You go here at a certain time. And then when you see the other forces show up, you know, just run out, I'm scaring them a little bit." Then he takes the two forged letters that are Ahikar's letters of trying to hand over the kingdom to these foreign powers and shows them to the king or to Sennacherib.

B: Yep.

C: Sennacherib, King of Assyria and Nineveh. And he is like, "Hey, sorry to break this to you. Ahikar's trying to sell us out to the Persians and the Egyptians. And I can prove it if we go here at this time."

B: Yep. And they do. They do go out there. And as in the forged letter from Sennacherib, Ahikar sees the king. And when the king motions to him, he charges towards him and it looks like it looks like an attack. And so Ahikar gets arrested and Sennacherib is like, "What has happened? How do we get into this, into this position?" And yeah, he's not just arrested. He's going to be executed for treason and they hand him over to a swordsman whose name is Abu Samik.

C: Through the course of his trial, by the way, Ahikar never goes, "You sent me a letter and asked me to do that. Can we compare this real quick?"

B: For a guy whose main attribute is supposed to be wisdom. It does seem like that might be a defense he would present at literally any time.

C: Yeah. Instead he's going to like, Br'er Fox his way out of this situation in a minute.

B: Yeah.

C: Br'er Rabbit his way out, I should say.

B: Yeah, it is a little bit that kind of position. So we got the swordsman Abu Samik and in some versions, his name is Nabu Samik and probably the original Hebrew name would have been Elisamock. I don't know, but he's, he's a swordsman and he's about to cut off Ahikar's head. But first Ahikar calls his wife. It says his wife, which one, Ahikar? You got 60 of them. But he calls his wife and he says, "Come out and meet me and let there be with you a thousand young virgins and dress them in gowns of purple and silk that they may weep for me before my death," which seems like a weird thing, but it's all part of the plan. And then when he's alone with the swordsman, he says, "Hey man, remember how I saved your life before when it was the old King here, he's called Sarhadum, but that would, that would be Sargon. Sargon II who was Sennacherib's father. "Do you not know that when Sarhadum the King, the father of Sennacherib wanted to kill you, I took you and hid you in a certain place. So the King's anger subsided and he asked for you. And when I brought you into his presence, he rejoiced in you. And now remember the kindness I did you." Right? So he's calling in a favor. I guess it's good to be friends with the King's executioner.

C: Did you mention what exactly his sentence is, by the way?

B: I did not.

C: The, the swordsman is supposed to take Ahikar to his house, cut his head off and then throw his head a hundred cubits, which, I checked, 50 yards. That's a solid head punt.

B: Yeah, that's, that's true. It is a, not an immaterial distance. Yeah.

C: But that is a, that is a narrative convenience.

B: Yeah, it is. It, that does turn out to be very convenient for Ahikar.

C: Cause what Ahikar says is, Hey, I know you're going to need to kill somebody. So I'm just going to go down and live in my basement for a little while. And I have this slave who deserves to die. So... Which, he glosses over that one, but good.

B: Yeah. Yeah.

C: "You know, Steve? Steve's a real jerk. So why don't you cut his head off and punt his head 50 yards and then dress him in my clothes and take the body back to Sennacherib and we'll be square."

B: And why will the servants of the executioner, why will they not notice that this is a different body? Cause they got drunk with a thousand virgins.

C: Yeah. Because Ahikar told his wife, "Hey, I need you to set up a party. I need the best wine. I need Doritos. I need regular tortilla chips with some of that good salsa and maybe some queso. If we could get some of that queso with the chorizo in it, that would be best. Also 1,000 virgins."

B: Yeah.

C: So I'm guessing this means between 9 and 20.

B: Could be. Yeah. Yeah. Ahikar's wife just swung by San Diego Comic-Con, rounded up as many as she could find.

C: That's rude.

B: That was low hanging fruit. I apologize. I apologize. So anyway, yeah, this condemned criminal, in this case, the slave, which makes it very uncomfortable for me, the modern reader, is executed in Ahikar's place. Abu Samik, yeah, punts his head a hundred cubits. So no one can check his face or his, you know, dental records for comparison. And then, yeah, Ahikar goes to live in a cellar for a while and Abu Samik just sneaks him food. Or maybe...

C: And his wife.

B: And his wife. Yeah. Yeah. And partially, it's because Abu Samik knows that the King's going to regret this and he's right. And he's immediately right because as soon as word gets out that Ahikar, the wise vizier is dead, the Pharaoh of Egypt goes, "The wisest man of Assyria is dead? This is a perfect time for a riddle contest."

C: Yeah. So, chapter 4, there's a little bit of "wherein"...

B: Yeah.

C: ...in this translation I'm reading and this is called "The Riddles of the Sphinx: What really happened to Ahikar?" And I got excited, especially when Sennacherib is like, "Oh man, I wish I hadn't killed Ahikar. He knew all the secrets and riddles."

B: Yeah.

C: There are no actual riddles asked in this section. Don't get excited.

B: Yeah, in this section, right.

C: Don't go looking at, at Ahikar when you're planning your next D&D adventure. Ain't no riddles in here.

B: The riddles are later. The riddles are later. Because here's the letter from Pharaoh. He says, "I've been desiring to build a castle between the heaven and the earth. And I want you to send me a wise clever man to build it for me and to answer me all my questions and that I may have the taxes and the custom duties of Assyria for three years." So basically what he's saying is, "I have a riddle contest. The prime riddle I want is I want someone to build me a castle in the sky. And if you can't do it and if you can't answer all my riddles, you have to pay me tribute for three years." That's the letter. And so, Sennacherib gets this and he freaks out cause he's like, "How do you build a flying castle? How do you do it?" And he shows it to the assembled old men and learned men and wise men and philosophers, diviners and astrologers and everyone in the country. They can't do it. And they're like, "Well this is Nadan's job, obviously hand it over to him. He's the new vizier. He's been trained by Ahikar." And Nadan just straight up says, "Who can build a sky castle? Peace out." That's like Nadan's reaction. And so things are going crazy in Assyria because Sennacherib is very worried that they're going to have to default on this riddle contest.

C: Here's another question for me though. Why doesn't Sennacherib just go, "Yeah, I don't want to do this real contest."

B: Yeah. Well, I mean, I presumably Egypt would then wage war demanding the tribute. I don't know. Is Egypt more powerful than Assyria at this time? That seems like, no, probably not. But someone who's better versed in this era of history might know, but I feel like the Assyrian empire would have been the big one at this time. It seems a little presumptuous of Pharaoh to just demand this tribute. But...

C: Also, I want to build a castle between heaven and earth. So build it or you lose the riddle contest. That ain't a riddle.

B: No, there are the other riddles are later you build the castle and to the other, the other riddles are riddles either.

C: The other riddles aren't riddles either. The other riddles aren't riddles either.

B: They are. Kinda.

C: Yeah, kinda.

B: They're cosplay-based riddles and challenges. Anyway, we'll get there in a second.

C: Asking someone to do something impossible is not a riddle. Anyway, that's my first point. If I was Sennacherib, I would have sent back a sternly worded refusal.

B: Right. Okay. It's not riddles in the like Bilbo Baggins sense. That's absolutely true. Yes. Basically...

C: It actually is like riddles in the Bilbo Baggins sense.

B: In that they're impossible and there's no actual answer or you'd have to ask...

C: That's a garbage riddle too.

B: Yeah. But anyway, so while Sennacherib is like literally crying for paragraphs, eventually the swordsman Abu Samik, he shows up and he's like, "Sennacherib, King Sennacherib, I have good news and bad news." And he's like, "Okay, what's the bad news?" He's like, "The bad news is I lied to you." And he's like, "Okay, that's bad. What's the good news?" He's like, "The good news is I lied to you and actually Ahikar is alive." And Sennacherib says, "First of all, you're lying and I'm going to kill you for that." And then Abu Samik says, "No, no, no, it's real. It's true. I promise." And then he goes, "Yeah, now I'm going to kill you, kill you with rewards and riches." "If your speech be true, I would feign enrich you and exalt your dignity above that of all your friends." And so, yeah, they go to Ahikar's house, they open up the cellar, they find him sitting there praising God. And he's a little, a little raggedy. Here he's described, "The King looked at him, he saw him in a state of want and that his hair had grown long like the wild beasts' and his nails like the claws of an eagle and that his body was dirty with dust and the color of his face had changed and faded and was now like ashes." Not looking his finest. But Sennacherib is very happy because now he's got a ringer to send to Egypt.

And so, yeah, so chapter five is about Ahikar preparing for the riddle contest. And it's nice because there's a little bit of suspense to it because you're just like, what is he doing? Because he reads the letter and he goes, "All right, Pharaoh wants me to build a castle in the sky. Someone bring me some baby eagles and two children, please.'

C: Yeah, "I need some little birds and some boys. I got a plan. It's an eagle boy plan."

B: "I have this boy related eagle plan, also ropes, please make me some very long ropes." And who could possibly suspect ill of this plan at this point? What he ends up doing is he raises these eagles from a young age. Apparently he does this, he says 40 days. So I don't know how fast eagles grow up, but whatever. He feeds the eagles and he feeds the boys. That was our reading here at the beginning. Eagles used to being tied to the rope. Also, by the way, the boys are riding on the eagles' backs.

C: The boys ride on the eagles' backs and they are described in this verse, as you heard at the top of the show as little lads, which I find very charming.

B: Yeah, little lads. And so with the rope, they do a little bit at a time, right? They start with them going up to 10 cubits, but ultimately the ropes are 2000 cubits long. So what did you say? The thousand yards? Is that what you would say probably?

C: Probably about a thousand. If a hundred cubits is 50 yards, then yeah, this is about 3000 feet.

B: Yeah. So he's-

C: Quite high in the air.

B: But little by little he's training these boys to ride on the eagles' back, a little bit higher, a little bit higher. And then he tells them that when they get to full height, what they need to do is call out, "bring us clay and stone." And so we read that and we go, "That's weird. I don't understand this plan." But, it's all going to be resolved, eventually, once Ahikar makes his way to Egypt.

And when he gets there, he introduces himself to the Pharaoh, he does not tell him he's Ahikar. Because Ahikar is supposed to be dead, right? And so he tells him that he is actually Abiqam, "a little ant of the ants of King Sennacherib." And he's like, "Why? Why this nobody?" The Pharaoh is like "Why did Sennacherib send this nobody? This is an insult." And Ahikar is just like, "No man, I just want God to fulfill your every want." But the cool thing is that Ahikar, in this cool disguise, flips it around a little bit. He flips the script and he says to Pharaoh, "Look, I understand that the penalty for defaulting on this challenge is that we have to pay you three years of tribute," and he says, "If I can do it, you have to pay us." And Pharaoh is like, "Uh, yeah. Okay." And so he accepts this challenge.

C: Is this like a triple dog dare situation where you just cannot turn down a riddle contest?

B: I feel like it, yeah.

C: Like, why doesn't the Pharaoh just go, "No, I don't think I'm going to be doing that. Thank you."

B: "This is my contest and I make the rules?" But no, I think the fact that this guy, yeah, it would be a matter of honor that this nobody, Abiqam, comes and returns the challenge. And so yeah, we get to the beginning of the riddle contest, which is, yeah, it's-

C: I hate this.

B: It's very strange parade. It's a parade of costumes.

C: This probably made a lot of sense in 500 BCE.

B: I think for the most part, it makes sense.

C: It doesn't, but go on.

B: The first day, he summons Ahikar into his throne room and Pharaoh is sitting on the throne and he's surrounded by his viziers and the other courtiers. Pharaoh is dressed in purple on the throne and all the viziers are in red. And he says to Ahikar, "Okay, who am I?" And so the idea is what does this visual thing represent? With Pharaoh in the middle, his courtiers all around, Pharaoh's in purple, courtiers are in red. But he goes, "Oh yeah, okay, well, no problem. You're Baal," which is the name we've seen a bunch of times now, and remember is not the actual name of any particular god, but it's actually a Canaanite term that means Lord. And so it's not the actual specific name of a god, but it was kind of the go-to boogeyman name for Jewish texts to refer to as the king of idolatrous gods. And so he goes, "Well, your Baal and all the nobles are his servants." Because the idol Baal would have been dressed in purple and the special sacramental robes of the priests of Baal would have been red. So that's what that is. That's the solution to the puzzle. "Who am I?" "Well, your Baal, these are the priests of Baal."

C: Look, I understand that this is like, if he was like, "Hey, I'm all in purple and these guys are all in red. Who are we?" I understand that makes as much sense for the intended audience of this book as like, "Oh, well, you're Hawkeye and all these dudes are Daredevil." I understand that. It's still bad. It's a bad riddle.

B: All right. Well, anyway, so the next day is the Pharaoh is in red and all the nobles are in white and the solution is Pharaoh is the sun and all the nobles are the rays of the sun.

C: Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. You know the sun? The famously red sun?

B: Look, man.

C: It's very red.

B: In the desert, in the desert wastes. That's the sun is, I don't know. Anyway, the next day Pharaoh's in white.

C: The red sun with its white rays. Yup.

B: Okay, man.

C: Sure is.

B: All right. And then Pharaoh's in white, the nobles in white. And so now he says, "You're the moon. They're the stars." Great. The next day...

C: First one that's made sense. First one that's made sense.

B: Pharaoh's in red velvet and then everyone else is in multi-colors. And so he says, "You're the month of April. The nobles are the flowers."

C: What does your dress is the month of April mean?

B: You're the springtime. You're the springtime.

C: Oh, yeah. Springtime. Red velvet. Got it. Perfect.

B: It's warm.

C: What are you talking about?

B: It's warm and sunny because the sun is red.

C: Right.

B: Okay.

C: Right, because the sun is red. And so April is the red month.

B: The sun is red like a pumpkin's head. It's shining so your nose won't freeze.

C: That's in the winter, my man.

B: Yeah. Anyway.

C: That is specifically a marshmallow world in the winter.

B: So anyway, here's the thing that I like about this. So I understand your quibbles with the color choices and the riddles. But what I like about this is that Pharaoh is very pleased that Ahikar got these right because he says, "You said it. You said, 'I'm like Baal and all my guys are like his priests. I'm like the sun. I'm like the moon. I'm the month of April. I'm the best.'" And he goes, "Now tell me, who is Sennacherib like?" And basically Ahikar goes, "Yeah."

C: I will say this is the one part of the whole riddle contest that I like because Pharaoh goes, "All right. Yeah. So I'm like all these things. So what's Sennacherib like?" And Ahikar goes, "You put some respect on his name when you say it. You stand up." Which is a bold move.

B: Because his response is, "Yeah, you're like Baal because you know what Baal is? He's a fake god for chumps. Sennacherib, my king, is like the real god from heaven and his followers are like the storm and the thunder that crush April and destroy the moon and all of these things. He commands the tempest. It blows and the rain falls and tramples out April and the flowers of the houses." And so he's just-

C: Hey Benito.

B: Yeah.

C: I know we haven't read a lot of Old Testament books.

B: Uh huh.

C: Are we going to get the one where God fights the month of April and destroys the moon?

B: Who knows? There's a lot of pseudepigrapha.

C: Is that Lamentations?

B: There's a lot of pseudepigrapha to get to. So you never know. But I have a question for you, Chris. Why is Pharaoh crying?

C: Because he just got dunked on.

B: That's right. That's right.

C: Which also, it is not adequately explained why Pharaoh does not immediately have Ahikar killed.

B: Yeah. Well, he's greatly perplexed and he's wroth with a great wrath. Which is, if you're going to be wroth with something, wrath I think is probably the number one thing. He's like, "Okay, who are you really?" And he goes, "I'm Ahikar!" And then he's like, "Oh, I have to believe it even though you're supposed to be dead. Because who else could have done this?"

C: Who else could have said, "Another person was better than I am." Who else?

B: Yeah.

C: What a bad riddle contest. Great ending to a bad riddle contest.

B: Yeah, riddle contest is not over because the main event, the main event is that castle in the sky. Who's going to build that sky castle? And so they go out and that's our next chapter. Next chapter is time to build the sky castle. And this is so good. I love it.

C: This is very, very good. This is a truly boss dunk that Ahikar is setting up here.

B: So yeah, he's like, "All right, how are you going to do it? How are you going to build me this floating sky castle, this Studio Ghibli production?" And he's like, "Bring out the boys!"

C: Here's my eagle boys.

B: And so his eagle boys come out. He opens the boxes. The eagles with the boys on their back fly out and they go up into the sky and they're circling around like a thousand cubits in the sky. And then they just shout down like, "All right, send up the bricks. We're ready to go." And all the Egyptians are like, "What are they talking about? How are we supposed to get bricks up there?" And Ahikar's like, "Look, man, I got the builders. They're up there. It's your responsibility to get the materials up there. If you can't do that, that's not my fault."

C: "Yeah, I'm not going to bring bricks all the way from Assyria, dude. Come on."

B: Yeah. And so they're like, "Well, I guess that one's on us. Score one for Assyria." And so that does seem like you would build up to that one, right? Like that's the showstopper.

C: Yeah. Then we get a really bananas bit of animal cruelty.

B: Yeah, yes.

C: This actually legit made me uncomfortable. So if you do not like to hear stories of full-on bonkers animal abuse, maybe skip ahead a little bit or we'll catch you next week.

B: Yeah, just skip just a little bit because Pharaoh's new claim is that Sennacherib has a stallion that neighs so loud that its voice carries into Egypt and is causing the mares of Egypt to miscarry.

C: Which is a fully bananas claim.

B: Yeah, yes, it is. I mean, it's not impossible. Like if an actual pregnant mayor does actually hear something that frightens it enough, it will miscarry. Like that's a thing. But yeah.

C: That's not the part I was taking issue with, but thank you.

B: No, you're right. But that's the part that Ahikar takes issue with. And to prove that, he does it in the worst way possible. He says, "Bring me a cat and I'm going to beat the crap out of the cat."

C: "And when Ahikar heard this speech he went and took a cat, and bound her and began to flog her with a violent flogging till the Egyptians heard it, and they went and told the king about it." Yeah, good call Egyptians.

B: Yeah. And so Pharaoh says, "Why did you do that?" And he goes, "Oh, well, because I have a fancy prize rooster that I got as a gift from the king. And this cat ran out there last night, killed my rooster and then came back." And then the Pharaoh says, "That's impossible, idiot, because Egypt and Nineveh are 68 parasangs apart." A parasang is basically the distance you can walk in an hour. And so he's saying this would be, there's a 68 hour walk from Egypt to Nineveh. How–

C: So close to the nice number.

B: Yeah, I know. I know, right? And he's like, "How did the cat go out last night and then kill the rooster and then come back?" And he goes, "Oh, well, you played yourself, Pharaoh. Because if a cat can't run that distance in one night, how are you going to hear a horse from that far?" And so Pharaoh has to concede that Ahikar is right. And so the next challenge comes, and he goes–

C: Well, wait, wait, wait, before we move on, real quick, I just want to point out, you said the word rooster, the text does not say the word rooster. It's very funny. I suggest you, if there's one good part of this section of the story, it is that. Do enjoy it.

B: Okay, yes. Sennacherib has given me a fine rooster. Anyway, so the next challenge, Pharaoh tells Ahikar to make ropes out of sand. So he basically, Ahikar solves this by basically drilling molds for ropes in the sand, and then he pours fresh sea sand in there.

C: Yeah, I did not understand this at all.

B: Yeah, well, I mean, basically he drills the mold in the shape of ropes, and then he puts fresh sea sand in there, and when the sun shines down on the sea sand, it dries and hardens like clay. And so that's how he manages to make ropes out of sea sand. That's the solution there.

C: That doesn't make any sense.

B: Yeah, it's a little bit, it's a folk story.

C: That absolutely does not make sense.

B: And then, basically the final challenge is, he's like, "All right, well if you can do all that, do me a favor, I got this cracked millstone, will you stitch it up for me?" And he basically solves this one in a smaller version of the castle in the sky problem. He goes, "Well, I came all this way, you didn't tell me to bring a needle and thread, so if your guys will cut some awls from stone, I'll sew that millstone up." Right, and of course since the Egyptians can't make a needle and awl out of stone, they have to forfeit their half of the challenge. And so, he wins.

And so Pharaoh says, "Blessed be the Most High God, who gave thee this wit and knowledge." He strips off his robes, puts them on Ahikar, go in peace, he gives him all the tribute and stuff to go back to Nineveh, and he goes back in great procession. The news reaches Sennacherib that Ahikar is coming. He went out to meet him, meets him with kisses and hugs. "Welcome, my kinsmen, my brother Ahikar, the strength of my kingdom and the pride of my realm." And he says, "I'll give you anything you want." And he goes, "I want you to give the rewards to Abu Samik, because if it weren't for him, none of this would have happened." Which is true. And so he makes the station of Abu Samik the Swordsman "higher than all my Privy Councillors and my favourites."

And then as a bonus gift, Sennacherib delivers to Ahikar, Nadan, bound in chains. "Chains of iron, heavy fetters on his feet, tied with a tight knot, binding him thus, cast him into a dark room beside the resting place, and appointed Nebuhal as sentinel over him, and commanded him to give him a loaf of bread and a little water every day."

C: Just cram it in there.

B: Just cram it in there.

C: And then, for about 55 verses, Ahikar tells Nadan how much he sucks.

B: He completely drags him for a very long time. You might say he Nadabs on him.

C: No one would say that.

B: You might say that. Someone might say that.

C: No one might say that.

B: Someone might say that. But yeah, and he makes all these comparisons to how he is like various terrible animals.

C: The thing that I like is that he says, "You're like a guy who tried to throw a rock at God, but you couldn't do it."

B: Yes. That one is really good.

C: 'Cause that's not even, like there's not even a metaphor. It's like, "Yeah, you came at the king, son."

B: Yep. And you missed. It's bad. I like this. "Know that if the tail of the dog or the pig were ten cubits long, it would not approach the worth of the horses, even if it were like silk." What a strange image. I mean, I get it because these people hate dogs and pigs, but like, even if a dog had a 20 foot tail, it wouldn't be as good as a horse, idiot.

C: There is about a six verse story about setting a trap for a lark that is a very confused metaphor.

B: "You've been to me like a trap which is set up on a dunghill." That seems like enough. Like you stop at the trap and the dunghill.

C: We also get, I hope I can get through this. We also get in verse 21, "Oh my boy, thou has been to me as a lion who made friends with an ass and the ass kept walking before the lion for a time. And one day the lion sprang upon the ass and ate it up." Is that the first reference to eating ass that we've gotten?

B: Yeah, he eats it like groceries.

C: Oh, that one was just for you and me, buddy. That one's getting cut out.

B: Oh no, it's so good. It's so, it's very good. Think about it. Think about it.

C: Point being, he ethers Nadan so hard for 55 verses that "And when Nadan heard that speech from his uncle Ahikar, he swelled up immediately and became like a blown-out bladder. And his limbs swelled and his legs and his feet and his side, and he was torn and his belly burst asunder and his entrails were scattered, and he perished, and died."

B: And he went to hell.

C: And then he went to hell.

B: So I know guys that old classic standard from this show, it's been a hot minute, but here we are, a guy got dragged so bad he exploded and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful description of a man just being- it's like that one Achewood where Todd's head explodes, but he's just like the most perfect thing to say ever and it just explodes.

C: Yeah, which of all the superpowers that we have seen in the Bible, that is the one I would want.

B: Like I do genuinely like the ultimate moral here that we get after Nadan goes to hell, we get the ultimate moral: "He who digs a pit for his brother shall fall into it; and he who sets up traps shall be caught in them." Yeah, it's a good one. And yeah, the "chronicle is finished with the help of God, may He be exalted: Amen, Amen, Amen." That's the story of Ahikar.

C: So that is it for Ahikar. Did you have a reading? Did you have a favorite verse?

B: Yeah, I had one that I picked out here that I liked because you know how like in English we have the saying, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Very commonly known saying meaning, you know, something you have is worth something that you might be able to get in the future. Ahikar was like, "That's not enough. Let's build on that a little." And he says, "O my child," this is in chapter two. "O my child! the thigh of a frog in thy hand is better than a goose in the pot of thy neighbour; and a sheep near thee is better than an ox far away; and a sparrow in thy hand is better than a thousand sparrows flying; and poverty which gathers is better than the scattering of much provision; and a living fox is better than a dead lion; and a pound of wool is better than a pound of wealth, I mean of gold and silver; for the gold and the silver are hidden and covered up in the earth, and are not seen; but the wool stays. in the markets and it is seen, and it is a beauty to him who wears it."

C: Ahikar really was losing the plot of that metaphor there at the end.

B: Yeah, you know wealth?

C: I feel like Ahikar messed up when he was like, "I'd rather have a pound of wool than a pound of gold. Wait a second. I mean a pound of gold that I don't actually have because I haven't dug it out of the earth yet. That's what I meant to say. Cause you know, wool is great."

B: Yeah. So yeah, I liked that one very much because that definitely, that one got out of hand a little bit. What do you have?

C: My favorite verse comes from the diss track in chapter seven. It's chapter seven, verse 43. "O my boy! I wished thee well, and thou didst reward me with evil and hatefulness, and now I would fain tear out thine eyes, and make thee food for dogs, and cut out thy tongue, and take off thy head with the edge of the sword, and recompense thee for thine abominable deeds." A thing we know about Ahikar is that he doesn't end a sentence where he should. He just keeps going for a little bit.

B: Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. That's a good one.

C: Weird book. Weird book, dude.

B: Yeah. I liked it. I enjoyed reading this very much.

C: There are parts of it that I like. The whole, like the riddle contest is very frustrating because the costume riddles are bad. And then like everything, you're right. It should have either built to or ended at, "I have trained these eagle boys."

B: Yeah. Yeah. But it does kind of keep going and ends on, it does end on that anticlimax of the "make me a needle and thread out of stone." Yeah.

C: Yeah. Then he dug some holes in the beach and was like, "Here's some beach holes." Like what are you talking about? Again, Ahikar and the person who wrote Ahikar don't know where to end the story.

B: Yeah. But we do because it's now.

C: Yeah. That's it. That's it for this week's show, everybody. Before we get out of here, Benito, where can everybody find us online?

B: Yeah. Well, first of all, if you'd like to get some of the supplementary material, including things like links to the readings, if we do something that's not contained in any kind of biblical canon, if we read something, a piece of like Jewish pseudepigrapha like this, if you want to find links to that, plus images of things like pictures of Tobit and Tobias chilling with their dog, which I haven't posted yet, but I will soon, hopefully by the time this goes up. If you want to see that kind of stuff, go to our Tumblr at apocrypals.tumblr.com where you can find all sorts of supplemental materials, including this past week, more information about Belphegor, the seventh prince of hell that we knew the least about, thanks to our friend Tracy Shepard, who posted that on her own very excellent blog that I recommend, The Compendium of Arcane Beasts and Critters. You should check that one out if you like monsters from around the world.

But also, with a piece of advice, a very good piece of advice from Ahikar, the wise vizier, he said, "O my son! I have eaten a colocynth, and swallowed aloes, and I have found nothing more bitter than poverty and scarcity." And I agree, that said, please go to ko-fi.com/apocrypals, where you can tip us if you like this show. You can make a donation in multiples of $3, so it could be anywhere from $3 to $3 million. I don't know, you really want to go wild. But if you want to help support the show, help us pay for things like hosting and for music drops, and help us buy additional books and texts that we use to read weirder and stranger things as the podcast keeps going. You can help us out there. We've had a number of very generous donors that we appreciate very much. Probably at some point we should read their names off. Eh, we'll do that. I'm going to say next week, we'll do it next week. We will read off the names of all our very generous donors.

C: Well, as we know from Paul's letter to the Romans, it is better to do those acts secretly and not make a show of it.

B: That's true, you make an excellent point. You make an excellent point.

C: If you do want us to read your name out, let us know, we will.

B: Yeah, absolutely. And if you want to find me, you can find me on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. I'm on Twitter and Instagram is Benito_Cereno. I'm on Tumblr @benito-cereno. So you can find me there on those places. What about you, Chris?

C: You can find links to everything that I do online at the-isb.com, including columns that I write here and there around the web at different places and comic books that you can buy either at your local comic book store or on amazon.com or on Comixology if you get your comics digitally. That's going to be it. Benito, what are we doing next week?

B: So next week, as we mentioned, is a very special week. The next episode will theoretically, barring any kind of natural disaster or whatever, land on Chris's actual birthday, August 12th. And so, and the fact that my birthday is then approximately a week after that, we're doing a special birthday episode for the two of us. And so while we have so far managed to basically confine our readings to antiquity, late antiquity, we're going to be dipping into the middle ages a little bit. We're finally going to break out the seminal work of the middle ages on the life of the saints, Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Legend. We're not reading the whole thing. It's very, very long. We will specifically be looking at the life of St. Christopher for Chris and the life of St. Benedict for me, Benito. And so you can find those online. I will definitely post links on the Tumblr if you guys want to follow along and read the life of St. Christopher, the very good werewolf boy, and the life of St. Benedict, who was a monk, which is slightly less interesting, but still going to find plenty of interesting, cool miracles to talk about next week on our very special birthday episode.

C: That's right. So join us for that. Until then, for Benito Cereno, I've been Chris Sims. Benito, peace be with you.

B: And also with you.

[Music: "Where Eagles Dare" by Misfits]