https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=F2L6XptMwr4
Which was the book where the guy called upon the she-bear to kill the children who were mocking his baldness? Do you know about that one? No. My favorite, especially as a bald guy. In that story, Elisha, with Elijah who is his master, there are two prophets, and Elijah is going to go away. In order to go away, they cross this river, the Jordan River, and then Elijah is taken up into heaven. As Elijah is taken up into heaven, Elisha receives these garments of Elisha, and receives a double portion of the spirit of Elijah. These garments are these wooly garments, these hairy garments that the prophets wore. Let’s call them these garments of skin. Elisha gets these garments, and with the garments, he hits the Jordan. The Jordan separates into two, and then Elisha crosses over. On the other side, as he’s moving about, I think it’s the second story. There’s a story just before that, but the second story after that is this story where a bunch of Jews come up to him, and they start to mock him. They call him Baldy, and they’re saying, hey Baldy, get out of here, Baldy, get out of here. Because of that, Elisha turns to them, gets angry, curses them. Then these two mother bears come out, and they devour all these young men. It says, devour 42 of them. I can understand, Joe and Douglas, if you ever listen to this, I can understand why you find that story strange. But I would say you have to be very careful, and I hope that, you know, I think this podcast was a bit old, and I think now that you’ve been listening to Jordan Peterson a little bit more, hopefully you’ll have a little bit more reserve when you start making fun of these stories. And so, I am going to explain the story to you. Now, to understand the story, just like most stories in the Bible, you have to understand the patterns. You have to understand that this story of Elisha and the she bears is a repetition of patterns which were there before. They’re repetition of, I will show you one of the examples of this pattern. Now, Noah, he comes to the end of a world, you know, and Enoch is taken up into heaven, just like Elijah. And after that, Noah has to cross an expanse of water, just like Elisha had to cross the Jordan. Noah doesn’t use the garments of skin, of animal skins, but he has a boat full of animals, which is symbolically very similar. And so, Elisha uses these garments of animal skins to cross over the water. And so, what he’s doing is he’s actually in this moment of transition. He’s crossing over to a new world, a new beginning, you could call it. But in the new beginning, in this transitional space, a lot of things can happen. A lot of crazy things can happen. And when Noah crosses over, after that, there’s a story where just after he crosses the flood, Noah takes his clothes off, gets drunk. And then he’s lying there naked, you know, in his tent, and his son comes in and sees that he is naked. And then he goes to tell his brothers. Now, what’s implied in the story is that he’s making fun of his father, or he’s criticizing his father for being naked in the tent. And then, because of that, the son of Noah, who saw him, is cursed. And he becomes like a cursed people in the world. And you think, huh, well, that’s strange. Well, you can see, first of all, you first of all have to see the pattern. Now, notice the pattern. Elisha crosses the waters with these garments of animal skins. Then, when he’s on the other side, he is criticized for something that he lacks. He’s criticized for his nakedness. In this case, the fact that he’s bald, the fact that you can see his head. And so, this notion of criticizing, the notion of exposing the nakedness of someone, of this is an important theme in the Bible. The idea that when you do something, certain things that you can do will expose someone’s nakedness, will expose their vulnerability, will expose their weakness. And the danger in doing that is there’s a process, there’s a pattern by which that will then turn against you. And that will create something like a curse against you. The curse of the mother bear that comes out and eats them. You can really imagine it as this kind of grumbling, feminine energy that comes up and then devours you like a sea monster coming out and eating Jonah. Or this idea of this chaos kind of pulling you down, let’s say. And so, that’s what it refers to. Now, the reason why it’s she bears, the reason why it’s animals has to do with this idea of covering and this idea of the animal skins, the idea of the animals in the ark. This idea that we cover ourselves with, let’s say, these animal desires that we have around us. They act as a way to protect ourselves in the world. Everybody understands that. So, you’re hungry, you have sexual desire. All these things are there to help you survive in a difficult world. But they’re also the thing that can pull you down. So, if you let yourself go too much to your hunger, then you become fat, you’re taken over by that passion. If you let yourself get taken over by your sexual desires, then you become obsessed with that and you lose your focus. You can get a disease. Everything about letting yourselves go to these passions that kind of eat you up and drag you. And so, the danger of exposing someone else’s nakedness, of exposing someone else’s lack, is that then you will become, you will be eaten by the thing that you are criticizing them for lacking. And so, you see that the children criticize the nakedness of Elisha, and then they’re eaten by these animal passions. You can imagine that they’re eaten by Elisha’s garments of skin, those skins that he used to cross over, those skins that he used to survive in the world. Still, I know a lot of you will think, what does it mean? What are you talking about? What does this have to do with anything? Well, we are going through that right now. We are experiencing exactly this story of Elisha and the 42U’s are being eaten right now. It’s called the Me Too Movement. Some people in Hollywood, some actors, took it on themselves, and Hollywood in general, to criticize certain behaviors, to poke at the nakedness, at the weaknesses of others in high power. And then what happened? Those very people who accused others of that weakness, then all these women appeared and started to say, yeah, you too. You are guilty of the thing that you’re accusing me of. And those people got devoured by their own weaknesses. And so, that which we hide, we have these sins, we have these passions that we hide for a reason. There are many reasons why we hide our passions. One is so that society can continue. One is that because we’re ashamed of them. One is that because we’re trying to, hopefully, trying to get away from these passions. But when you expose someone else’s passions, then you run into the danger that those passions will then devour the person who’s criticizing. And you see it, it’s so funny because it’s a trope that everybody understands. We’ve seen it, we’ve seen even people, for example, we’ve seen the gay lobby use that exact structure. They’ll say things like, if you criticize homosexuality, if you’re openly critical to people who are gay, it probably means that you secretly have that desire in you and that you will give in and be eaten up by that desire. And then they can point to different conservative pastors or priests or whatever who are found in some gay orgy or something. And so, that is the structure of this story. And I think it’s something that once you understand the pattern, you can see, first of all, the pattern itself repeats itself in the Bible. There are other places where this same pattern repeats itself. But then, once you understand what it means, then you can understand that knowing this pattern can avoid a lot of problems in your life. And so, I would say to all of you, just before you casually mock a story in the Bible, be very careful because there’s probably, actually, certainly more there than what you thought at the outset.