The Chosen Doubles Down

An Epilogue to the “Anointing the Passover Lamb” Saga

Photo by Chelsea shapouri on Unsplash

I have been lurking like an ambush predator waiting for The Chosen to release their Season Four, Episode 8 Bible Roundtable. And boy, did they… disappoint? Not disappoint? 

Well, it was disappointing, but I got proven pretty damn right and that felt good. 

Anyway, for those of you who aren’t complete psychos, The Chosen roundtables are extra content produced by Come and See when the historical consultants of the show – Dr. Doug Huffman, Father David Guffey, and Rabbi Jason Sobel – sit down and talk about the history behind the show with Dallas Jenkins. This season was filmed at the Museum of the Bible, but in the past it’s been filmed… I guess in Hell, I can’t really tell what this is.

Seriously, what is this “lit from the chin” campfire lighting? Is the light coming from the table?

 I’ve already gone over some of the dynamics I’ve noticed in the past in these clips, but I have been waiting – somewhat uncomfortably! – for weeks for this particular episode.

Basically, I wanted to see how they would handle the image in the show of the Passover lamb. According to the show, six days before Passover, Jews would anoint the lamb on its feet, which is why Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus’s feet six days before Passover in John 12. In the aftershow of the episode, Dallas Jenkins credits this, uh, insight to Jalein Abania, who argued for this in a TikTok video she made that credits the tradition to Exodus 12. (Where you will not find this tradition).

Now, after extensive digging, I was as sure as a person could reasonably be that this story was the likely invention of a South Carolina pastor named Shane Willard, which had become mainstream owing to some bad sourcing at the website Bible Reference. What I wanted to know is if the historical consultants for The Chosen would accept, through Jenkins, that this was not a real historical tradition and sidestep the issue, or if they would correct it, or if they would not discuss it at all.

So I pulled up the roundtable on the day that it dropped and…

Hm. 

Well, in the bottom right, you see that the clipped shot from the episode is David anointing a lamb’s feet. 

So I have to admit: at this moment, I was sweating. I figured if they were foregrounding this art so hard, that they must have had some rock-solid source for this tradition that made it older than fifteen years that I completely missed in my research. I was more than prepared to pull my post, issue a correction, say I was wrong, and move on with my life with my tail between my legs. 

So I watched the roundtable and… well, let’s just say any corrections on my part remain forthcoming. 

Let’s roll the tape.

The Tape

The first mention of a connection between lambs, feet, oil, and Jesus is right out of the gate at  0:11. The discussion opens with a conversation about the first scene of the episode, which shows David riding triumphantly into Jerusalem. (Credit where credit is due: the cinematography is terrific here, and the shots really do look great).

We’re told that the goal of this sequence (1:08 in the roundtable) is to show that Jesus is fulfilling prophecies about the messiah. Rabbi Sobel will go on to talk about the three hundred prophecies that couldn’t have been fulfilled by chance, which is a classic Josh McDowellism that’s never really made sense to me (and I’m a Christian!). But these keys us up for our discussion of anointing the Passover lamb, which starts at 1:30.

At 1:30, Jenkins recites the line that before Passover, oil was rubbed on the hooves of the sacrificial lamb, as we see David do in the show, and this, quote, “might” be a connection to Mary of Bethany, who anoints Jesus’s feet. Jenkins also discusses the bridle from the time of the Exodus which has been a recurring, and self-acknowledged fictional, prop in the show.  Jenkins snipes at Guffey again about relics and that this bridle is “the one relic the Catholic church doesn’t have,” which is a thing he’s done now more than once on the show. (Someone tell Father Guffey he doesn’t have to take this, please.)

At around 3:00, Sobel says that the Jews would take the Passover lamb into their houses  “at least four days before Passover,” Jenkins agrees “more than four,” but also says they present it as an exact number on the show - five or six days, he doesn’t remember which. (It’s six, because of John 12:1, and this is the claim Abania originally made.)

Sobel agrees, “usually more than four days.”

I have to point out here that Sobel is probably provably wrong here when he says that at some point on or before the tenth of Nissan, early Jews would take the lambs into their houses. The practice of bringing the lamb into the house before the fourteenth is, according to the Mishnah, one of the traditions that did not happen after the first Exodus in Egypt. This is why this intermediate period doesn’t show up in later rabbinic literature. According to m.Pes. 9.5.2, the early separation of the lamb was only observed on the first Passover (the slaughter itself is on the fourteenth of Nisan). Thus, since the rabbis of the Mishnaic period agreed that the lamb was not separated early after the first Passover, it is not plausible that later rabbis would have developed a tradition that the four-day interstitial period was a minimum, not a maximum. The interstitial period is otherwise not attested outside Exod 12:3, as near as I can find. 

The place where the tenth of Nissan is mentioned is Exodus 12:3, which commands the Israelites to take a lamb on the tenth and hold onto it until the fourteenth (12:6).

The word for "on the tenth" is בֶּעָשֹׂר. That’s (badly transliterated) bashor, or “on the ten days” of “this month.” That “ba” prefix means “in,” “with,” or “on.” It doesn’t mean “before,” it doesn’t mean “by,” it means “on.” On the tenth day, you get the lamb. Laws in the Pentateuch regarding cult rituals and sacrifices aren’t generally known for their flexibility. If Exodus says “on,” it probably means “on.” So I don’t think we can get from this text that the tenth is a suggested minimum. I think Sobel is probably trying to play ball with the show here and not point out the obvious discrepancy (you can’t anoint a lamb you don’t have yet).

Jenkins then asks Guffey if he had heard about anointing the lamb’s feet before the show (start at 5:13), and Jenkins says he had only “learned” this a year and a half ago. This comports with previous evidence that the source for this claim on the show is Jalein Abania. Guffey says he hadn’t heard this tradition before. He then segues into a conversation about the Eucharist. 

At 5:45 Huffman takes over and talks about the teaching element, which is central to Passover. Parents teach their children at Passover, just as David teaches his son how to anoint the lamb. 

Sobel then transitions into a conversation about the ram and Isaac, the king has to be anointed with oil, the irony is that he is the sacrificed king who is also anointed with oil. Sobel also says that the irony is that Jesus is anointed on the feet, not the head.  This continues through minute seven as Sobel talks about the connection between anointing Jesus’s feet like a lamb rather than on his head like a king.

I feel like I pick on Sobel a lot because he’s the most vocal in the roundtables, and I’ve made a point of acknowledging when he does good work, but I have to point out here that Sobel is again mistaken. First, there’s the fact that we still don’t have a source for anointing a lamb on the feet, and second, Jesus absolutely is anointed on his head in Mark (14:3) and Matthew (26:7). This is the ritual by which you anoint a king – you put the oil on his head. Jesus flips the script by saying he’s being anointed for his burial (Mark 14:8; Matt 26:12), but Jesus is anointed on his head in two Gospels. 

But, more to the point: everyone in the roundtable acts like this is a real historical tradition. But no one in the roundtable says it’s a real historical tradition, or contradicts it. So what exactly is going on here?

Takeaway 1: No One Will Explicitly Agree With Jenkins This is a Real Historical Tradition 

All three consultants move the conversation to areas they’re more familiar with that have sturdier ground – Sobel to the lamb selection, Guffey to the Eucharist, and Huffman to early pedagogy. Huffman seems to assume the accuracy of the tradition in his talking points – or at least he is assuming it for the sake of the show, which I suspect is more the case. Sobel gets the closest to outright affirming it, but no one says “this is a real thing that used to happen.” Sobel sounds as though he assumes the accuracy of the tradition in his discussion of sacrifice, irony, rams, lambs, and kings which goes on for some time. But no one actually expounds on the tradition or says where it comes from.

Takeaway 2: No One Will Explicitly Deny That This Is A Real Historical Tradition 

In the film and in correspondence, two of the three historical consultants confirm that they first heard this story from The Chosen. Guffey is directly prompted to speak on the subject of anointing a lamb’s feet, which he doesn’t, except to say that he’d never heard it before. Guffey does not expound upon never hearing it, and never takes it on board in his talking points, but this is characteristic of Guffey’s usual posture on the show – he’s quite taciturn. 

It’s odd that while the three men besides Jenkins are there to consult with Jenkins on history, that they seem to rather be taking their historical cues from Jenkins himself, rather than the other way around. The fact that none of them seem to have ever heard this before Jenkins, who heard it from his social media consultant, does not seem to inspire any investigation into whether or not this is true. 

This seems to reaffirm some things I was already suspecting after watching a number of these: that the consultants are more there to provide authority for the show rather than accountability. In Jenkins’s description of the scriptwriting process, he says that their standard for including something in the show is “is it plausible?” The practice of anointing a lamb six days before sacrifice is not plausible, because the lamb isn’t acquired until four days before the sacrifice in the only text that mentions the subject and predates Jesus. Likewise, the presumed standard for the non-fiction, historical bonus content should be “is it accurate?,” not “is it plausible?” Here, it seems as though the historical consultants are using the show to think about the Bible and history, not the other way around. Jenkins’s own ideas seem to be even controlling the historical discussion. 

Takeaway 3: There’s No Source

I kept wondering if there was going to be some rabbinic source I missed for this tradition and I think I can now safely say that I did not. Huffman and Guffey got it from Jenkins, and Jenkins got it from Abania. There’s no secondary stream of sources here I hadn’t previously uncovered – Abania’s source is probably still one of the many blogs or Bible Reference that all converge at Willard.

Conclusion: I Was Right About Everything

I continue to root for The Chosen because I think it’s a well made show in a world where Christian media regularly falls flat, but watching the show develop and propagate a demonstrable Bible turkey in real time is extremely frustrating. The advice I gave for how to improve the roundtables stands. I get the impression Jenkins might not like being told he is wrong, but if the show is going to make non-fiction, educational content, this is something that has to happen. Right now it seems like the consultants don’t really want to correct Jenkins even in a nonfiction setting – either because they don’t have better information (which is a serious problem), or they do and don’t want to say so. Either way, that’s a problem.