BibleProject - Does the Bible Borrow from Other Creation Stories? – Ancient Cosmology E2

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

What is existence? What existed before humans did? Ancient people groups asked the same questions we do today, with totally different answers. In this episode, Tim and Jon survey the cosmologies of Israel’s neighbors, ancient Egypt, Canaan, and Babylon––people groups the biblical authors shared more in common with than modern readers––to shed light on the Bible’s creation account.View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one (0-6:30)Part two (6:30-19:00)Part three (19:00-39:30)Part four (39:30-50:45)Part five (50:45-end)Referenced ResourcesInterested in more? Check out Tim’s library here.Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the EschatonBernard Batto, In the Beginning: Essays on Creation Motifs in the Ancient Near East and the BibleShow Music “Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTSEvil Needle by Sound EscapesLightness by AnonymousShow produced by Dan Gummel, Zack McKinley, and Cooper Peltz. Show notes by Lindsey Ponder. Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

Hey, this is John at Bible Project, and welcome to our second episode in a new series on Ancient Cosmology. How the creation stories in Genesis are in conversation with other ancient Near Eastern creation stories. Genesis 1 begins with the image of what we call nothingness, but Genesis calls a dark abyss. In other words, a deep, unruly chaotic ocean. And while we don't think of nothingness like a chaotic ocean, it turns out this was a very common image of the pre-creation state in the ancient Near East. So this is an inscription written on the coffin of a royal Egyptian official. It's a creation narrative. There's two voices that speak. So first, a voice

speaks, who says, I am the waters you need without second. Creation begins with waters. The waters personified and speaking. Another voice speaks up. That is where I evolved or developed. So the waters spoke and then another voice speaks that says, Hey, I evolved out of the waters. On the great occasion of my floating that happened to me.

I atumed the creator, M, the one who once evolved. The chaotic waters are also in the Babylonian creation story called Enuma Elis. Enuma Elis is important because it honors the most ancient cosmologies of everything emerging out of the waters to establish a first world order. But then it's about chaos descending on our world and who rescued us from the chaos, Marduk defeats the dragon and establishes the new world order. In Anuma Alish, the god Marduk has to tame the water dragon, the goddess Tiamat, the queen of chaos, and he does so in an epic battle. Marduk takes a mace in his right hand, going for the queen of chaos. He covers his body with fire, and he has a net, he's going to catch Tiamat.

So he deploys the four winds. He brings four winds, and the four points of the compass, kind of trap, TMI. He starts making the whirlwind cyclone. He mounts his terrible chariot, which is a storm. Creation emerges from a violent, bloody, intense standoff. But in Genesis, God's Spirit simply hovers over the dark abyss and creates with His Word.

In the scary Sea Dragon and Genesis 1, it's simply one of God's creatures who listens to God's Word and obeys like all of creation. So on today's show, we invite you to take a tour of some ancient cosmologies in order to see how the biblical accounts was aware of and in some sense in debate with these other ancient Near Eastern creation stories. Thanks for joining us, here we go. We're doing a whole series on Genesis 1 and 2. So buckle up. There's going to be a lot of conversations about Genesis 1 and 2. We're setting stage for the entire series, really, right now. And then eventually we're going to start talking about... Honing in on specific themes, the literary, emphasis, points, and design of the opening chapters of the Bible.

In the last hour conversation, you made basically two points. One is the Bibles in Ancient Text written by the first human civilizations. You're written in the context... In the context of... Some of the human civilizations. You're written in the context. In the context of some of the earliest civilizations. And it has an ancient cosmology. It's a word I kind of twinge when I use because I still don't fully appreciate it,

but you are understanding of how the world is ordered. Yeah, an account of the ordering of the universe. So those two things, you have to remember that there are modern ways that we use words, and there's modern ways we think about how the universe is ordered, and there's also ancient ways that people use words. Described in ancient languages, our first attempt to understand something shouldn't be to translate it all into English, and then assume that their words mean what they mean in light of our modern context. Okay, if somebody had never read the Bible at all,

and so what you first do is teach them ancient Hebrew, and then you introduce them to the Bible. That's, will never work. But I think you could really get somewhere. Somebody could really get some traction. They just read Genesis 1 and 1 through 11 over and over and over again. You know, it's not that hard to make this paradigm switch

and how you read, because I've read these texts a lot, and it can happen. You know, it's not that hard to make this paradigm switch and how you read, because I've read these texts a lot and it can happen. You can make the shift. Yeah. That's right. It's just using your imagination to imagine yourself into another culture. So that would be the first step, adapting to an Israelite Hebrew, understanding of what these words mean and so on. Which is impossible. But you can love your neighbor. You can love the ancient authors enough to check your cosmology at the door and learn another culture's language and cosmology. Another helpful way to do this and to help place Genesis 1 and 2 on the map of ancient cosmologies is to learn something about the cosmologies of Israel's neighbors that formed the context in which they wrote. And so in this first video, I want to make the points we just made.

Then I want to introduce people to a quick survey of ancient Egyptian cosmology, a quick survey of ancient Babylonian cosmology, and then see how Genesis 1 is participating in a dialogue with those cosmologies, making its own unique claims. Because it shares some things in common with them, some things that takes for granted. Like we would take for granted in a modern cosmology that we live in a solar system with plants orbiting around the sun. I'm not borrowing that idea.

And you're not innovating that idea. Not innovating it, and I'm not borrowing it from somebody at MIT. So there are some things like that in Genesis 1 and 2. It's taken for granted. And that's how the Egyptians talk about it. That's how the It's taken for granted and that's how the Egyptians talk about it That's how the Babylonians talk about it. That's how the Israelites thought about it. There are other things where They disagree and they do it precisely in contrast to their neighbors and we'll see both of those dynamics cool What we're going to do in this conversation is do a little bit of discovery about how

the ancient cosmology is we're going to do in this conversation is do a little bit of discovery about how the ancient cosmologies were discovered. We're not even 200 years into having access to these ancient cosmologies, because they were dug up from the ground. Where the Hebrew Bible never disappeared. Never disappeared, that's right. But its context did. And so the farther we get from the original context, I think the more helpful these ancient socials are. Thank you, archaeologists. Thank you,chaeologists. Thank you Archaeologists. So in 1847 a guy named

Austin Henry Leyard, he was performing an excavation near Mosul in Iraq and he discovered in this mound ruins of an ancient building that he eventually discovered was the library of one of the emperors of the ancient Assyrian kingdom. It's good find. It's sweet find. And he discovered thousands of little tablets. I mean, we're talking like five inches by seven inches, these tablets with a little vertical, horizontal,

diagonal marking. It's like the size of a Kindle. But the size of an Amazon Kindle. Yeah, don't worry. Yeah. I mean, it's barely 1850. Okay, so this is still in the era where the Ottoman Empire is over which one's that at least? Well, the Ottoman's Turkish Empire. This is the Empire that was around until World War II, right? World War I.

World War I, I mean. World War I, and then Britain inherited... I see. Oh, his discovery was during that. His discovery of these texts was during that period. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So here's a Brit. Yes.

Uh, over there. Yeah. Indiana Jones style. Yeah. So, anyway, these things are being found. This was a really important find. So, these thousands of pieces are being studied. And it was in 1872.

So, 30 years later, you've got a library and nerds are piecing together. Oh, this piece belonged to that piece. Oh, this one got broken in half. I see. These two have together. It's a huge jigsaw puzzle now. Huge jigsaw puzzle was no cover. And so, there's all these texts. There's ancient spells, there's divorce certificates, there's land purchase agreements, there's royal archive notes, there's battle accounts. Wow. It's all here because it was a library.

It was a library, yeah. That's right. So where you put them all? So where you put them all. A scholar named George Smith, he published an essay, presented his research to a society of Old Testament studies, and the essay was called the Caldien account of the deluge. Deluge means flood, and here's his account.

A short time back, I discovered among the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum an account of the flood. I had divided the collection of tablets into sections, according to subject matter, and I've recently been examining the division, comprising the mythological tablets, and from this section there was a copy of the story of the flood. On discovering these documents, I searched all over the collection of fragments, consisting of several thousand pieces, and I recovered 80 fragments of these legends, by the aid of which I was able to restore nearly all of the text of the description of the flood and portions of other legends as well, of the inscriptions scribing the flood, there are fragments of three copies containing the exact same text.

So what's great is he had three copies of the same thing. There's a broken section in one, and so he was able to piece together from those three copies. What he says is almost a complete account. This isn't the same guy that found him. Nope. This is another guy, 30 some years later. He's in a library.

Today, he would use some artificial intelligence and get it done in like an hour. Yeah, totally. But it probably took them like a whole whole time. Years. So he says all these accounts, together with considerable portions of other mythologies, other stuff about Babylonian gods

and the origins of their kingdoms. I believe have a common origin in the plains of Caldere. I thought we were talking about one flood narrative at this point. Oh yes, three copies that have an inscription describing the flood, but there's many other accounts. They have considerable portions of other mythologies. These tablets do. Yep. They all have a common origin here in the plains of Caldere. This country, the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of the arts and sciences for 2000 years has been in ruins. Its literature, containing the most precious records from antiquity, is scarcely known to

us except from the texts of the Assyrians. But beneath mounds and ruined cities, now awaiting exploration, lay together with the older copies of the flood, other legends and histories of the earliest civilizations of the world. Just imagine, to be in that room. Hearing this guy give this address, it was just electric. So this late 1800s was a exciting time in biblical studies. So two years later, he brought it all together in a volume called the Babylonian Genesis. And this introduced to the world two accounts. One is the epic of Gilgamesh or Anum-e-Aliish,

which is the opening words of it in Akkadian, and then the Atrahasus epic. And so the Babylonian Genesis of volume in 1800s, I think it went through like 13 printings I mean the thing was going hotcakes in Europe in the late 1800s No one had ever known about this stuff before right and so this is just reshaping how everybody's thinking about Genesis one and two it's like finding your grandma's diary or something. Yeah totally. Yeah So there's another scholar named Hermann Gunkel. I like his name Gunkel, I like his name, Gunkel. He wrote, synthesized all this for a popular audience

in a book called Creation and Chaos in the beginning and end. And his point was to show that Genesis 1 to 11 was an extensive dialogue and interconnection with Babylonian cosmologies, from creation from water, the chaos dragon, humans from dust, the flood stories, the ancient kings before the flood who lived for thousands of years.

All this is hitting the modern world, barely 140 years ago. It's not very long ago. No, it's yesterday in human history. Yeah, no. Yeah, my point is many people might be familiar with this ancient Near Eastern connection of Genesis 1 to 11.

And so it's just, to me, it's fun to learn about the modern discovery and to think about what that was like when these brand new ideas. Yes, so basically, what they're finding is all of these creation accounts and other stories that were written in the same time period as the creation account in Genesis. Same part of the world.

Same part of the world. Roughly. I mean, these cultures, these empires are a view of time in the modern era, so short. Right. It's not like the same decade. Yeah, America's been around for 200 years, 200 plus years. I mean, the Assyrian Empire 200 years, 200 plus years. I mean, a Syrian empire itself lasted half a millennium. And these texts circulated, so things moved a little

slower. Yeah. Yeah. The general, general time. Yeah. And what they found was there was all this overlap. I remember first being introduced to these saying, in way if someone's saying, you see, oh, like for example, with the flood. Oh, everyone, there was a lot of flood mythologies. Right. And it was a way to kind of dismiss the Bible. Oh, right, right, right. Because I was just one of a bunch of ancient flood ones.

Yeah. So it's not that. It wasn't like novel or anything. Yeah. Right. But your point is, yeah, there's certain things in these cancer art novel that are just normal. Everyone thought about the world this way.

Yeah, that's right. And that actually should help us understand how it's being used. Correct. And when it deviates, when they change the way that, when they do say something novel, then we can know that's a really important thing that they're doing. What's novel is not that there's a flood narrative

in the Bible. Other cultures had ways of accounting for the cosmos in terms of before and after a great flood. What is novel is the interpretation of the flood that the biblical authors give, which is radically different than how anybody else talked about it in the ancient world. So if you believe Genesis 1 to 11 exists just to tell me its ancient video footage of things that happened, then discovering these other accounts is a way of saying, oh look

the Bible is just a part of the ancient world. But of course, any work of literature isn't just trying to tell you about something interesting to happen. It's trying to help you discover the meaning of what happened. And that's where the Bible pops into significance. So that's in the Babylonian front, on the Egyptian front, when Napoleon storms the ancient world. So we're in the early 1800s and Napoleon set on world domination.

Yeah, as many before him have been. That's right. Yeah, but so it was when Napoleon annexed Egypt, there's those famous paintings of like Napoleon in front of the Pyram the case in Cairo. That opened up Egypt to the colonial powers of Europe and income all the nerds. Seriously, that becomes the political gateway for the nerds to come. It starts studying and digging around. Egyptian history. So early 1800s in Egypt,

so you got Austin Leard over in Mosul. And you've got Jean François Champoyon down in Cairo. And he's got teams down there. That's the famous guy who deciphered the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone. What's that? A big statue, an Egyptian statue that had hieroglyphics. And two other ancient languages. It was the same

inscription with three written in three languages. One of them was hieroglyphics. And so I forget what the other two are. I think one was demonic or here. This was cracking of hieroglyphics. Oh, that's how it figured out how it would admit. Yeah, that's right. Reseta. I never knew that. I only know Reseta from the software that helps you learn language. You know the Rosetta? Yeah, yeah. The language software. The language software.

Rosetta Stone. Yeah. It's a three versions of a decree from King, told me the fifth in 196 BC. The top and middle text use hieroglyphic and then demotic, which is a late form of Egyptian, while the bottom is in ancient Greek. And so he was able to reconstruct from demonic and Greek what the hieroglyphics were.

That's good fun. And that was the first cracking of the code. So yeah, this got cracked the hieroglyphics. Because you know, hieroglyphics is not a syllable system. It's a word picture system. So even the modern Egyptians didn't know hieroglyphics is not a syllable system. It's a word picture system. So even the modern Egyptians didn't know hieroglyphics? Correct. It just lost its meaning.

Totally. It's not that similar to if you sit modern English readers down with 12th century English. Yeah. It's really difficult. And imagine 12th century English was just a bunch of pictures, not an alphabet. Yeah, but less pictures, yeah, totally.

OK, so on the Egyptian front, there you go. And so now you've got, they've got about a 50-year start over the Babylonians. This is in the early 1800s, so they've got a few decades ahead of the Babylonian scholars. And so you have all these texts coming out, the book of the dead, some of these famous, the coffin texts, the period of the texts.

Oh, I'm talking about these like, I should know about the text. Oh, no, no, there's the fame. I have the book of the dead, some of these famous, the coffin texts, the queer texts. I don't know these. I was talking about these, like, I should know about this. Oh, that, well, I don't know, there's the fame. I had the book of the dead, spiritly. That sounds very familiar. Popular, yeah. So here's what there's discovered here. Also cosmologies, where they talk about the cosmos

in language that you're just like, wow, that sounds like Genesis one, but also different from Genesis 1. So here's what I'm gonna do. Quick tour of Egyptian cosmology, quick tour of... Babylonian cosmology, then we'll go read Genesis 1 and some things will pop in cool ways. Sweet. Sweet. Let's go to Egypt. 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh

1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh Okay, let's just read a text here.

This is from what's called the coffin texts. So this is an inscription written on the coffin of a royal Egyptian official. That's called the coffin text. That's the coffin text, yeah. It's a creation narrative. Spoken of, there's two voices that speak. It's written in hieroglyphics? Ah, correct. So first, a voice speaks who says, I am the waters unique and without second. Hm.

So creation begins with the waters. So just reality. The story of the cosmos begins. The waters personified. Yeah, as the waters personified and speaking. Yeah. So in other words, their concept of nothing is water. Is just waters. Or the beginning. Yeah, or the beginning is just waters. Yep. That's right.

Another voice speaks up that is where I Evolved or developed so the water spoke and then another voice speaks that says hey, I evolved out of the waters Mm-hmm on the great occasion of my floating that happened to me. I at whom the creator, M, the one who once evolved, circulate, who is in his egg. Okay. This is hard. So, nothing is waters.

The concept of nothing, where the beginning state of all things is just waters. The concept of nothing, where the beginning state of all things is just waters. Yeah. And then there's someone there in the waters. Someone there in the waters named Atum. Atum. Atum. And he's like,

Hey, I floated up out of these waters. In my egg. See that in my egg. He's an egg. He's an egg. What is circulate? Ah, just the boundaries of the egg. It's the shape of the egg.

Oh, okay. Circulate. Okay. Here I am. I popped up out of the primordial waters. Yep. And in my egg. Yeah.

See, I am the one who began there in the waters. See, the flood is subtracted from me. The waters recede and I am the remainder. I made my body evolve through my own power. I am the one who made me. I built myself as I wished according to my heart. Oh, so it's this picture of the just water. Yeah.

It's all there is. Yeah, yeah. It's just water. I think in Egypt. Imagine you're just in the middle of the ocean. Yeah. It's all you can see everywhere. Yeah. But again, think in Egypt, Northern Africa. Yeah. It's extremely arid. Arid dry. Dry. Arid dry desert. Yeah. But there's one life. But the now river. The lifeline. Yeah. From Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River.

The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River.

The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River. The Nile River.

The Nile River. The Nile River. imagined this being coming up out of the waters. The waters kind of like coming out from him in a way. Like doesn't it? Receiving from him. The flood is subtracted from me. It's extracted from the recedes from me. Almost picture this like person raising up from like baptism or something. Just kind of just like coming up out of the waters, all the waters are going away and then he's the one that remains.

And you find out like he is, I mean, what is he combed off? The remainder. And I'm the one who made me. Yeah. First mover. Yeah, totally. I can think very basic.

If you live in that environment, water is the most basic thing connected to life. And order. Water is necessary for life. Without it, it'll be desert. But also it's the northern coast of Africa. They go to the edge of them and they look out on the Mediterranean. A whole lot of water out there. So water is the most basic. The dry land emerged out of the water. The dry land emerged out of the water and then the water is what gives life to everything else. So everything's contingent on the water, but in this way of living. And that's very intuitive. Without the water, there's nothing. And there seems to be a lot more water than there is land.

The land comes out of the water. Just go to the coast and you'll watch, you can see it. What do you mean? Oh, if I go to the beach, it's clear that the land is sloping up out of the waters. We call them beaches. Right? The land comes out of. If you're just trying to just use your eyesight, what you see and intuit a cosmology, the land emerges out of the waters.

It's elevation that creates that boundary line. But this isn't an account of the land coming out of the waters. This isn't an account of Atum, the creator coming out of the waters. Yes, we're going to go on, but Atum evolves and he becomes the primeval mound of dirt from the waters and then everything else self-develops out of him. Okay. So, we're abstracting the dry land coming into existence as a being, as an organism, identified organism. You know, imagine as a god emerging out of the waters. Which in some ways is it too far from the way the water and think of the land? Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was going to make that point eventually.

But it's totally different symbol set in our mind. But we see it as a living organism. That's right. Life emerging from the waters. Land emerging from the waters, we call them volcanoes. Volcanic or tectonic plates that get pushed up of the waters. But yeah, not only that, but we more and more realize that the way the land works, it's not just this dead barren, it's full of life, all the life is interconnected

into this like mega organism. Organism. Yeah, super-organism. Super-organism. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so autumn is the chief, like, primeval deity. And he's the land. He's everything.

He's the circuit. He's the egg. Emerging out of the primeval waters. So here, let's go down here. Oh, let me show you. When they drew pictures to correspond to all of this. Oh, huh. Here's the picture you get.

Multiple pictures. So this will be hard for people listening to the podcast. But there's a classic world picture that gets developed in almost all Egyptian drawings of the cosmos. It has one figure, it's always a woman who's arching like in a yoga pose. Yeah, downward dog. Downward dog with toes touching the ground and fingers touching the ground and then the body in a big arch. Yeah. So.

Is this something you can Google? Or would you Google the finest? Let's see, here I'll just do it right now. Oh yeah, if you just Google Egypt cosmology, a picture will come up with a figure of a woman in an arch. I mean, this is like one of the most prolific pictures in ancient Egypt. It's their picture of the universe.

OK, from Atum, emerged a number of deities. You have the dry land who's called Gave, and then arched above Gave is the sky goddess Nute. What the Hebrew authors will call aetherits and shimayem, the land in the sky. And Egyptian cosmology is called Gabe and Nute. Often Nute's body is filled with stars. She's the Skydum. She's the Skydum.

Yep. In the space in between Gabe, who's lying like the ground, and Nute who's arched above as the Skydum, there's often all these other assisting deities for mountains or weather. That's what these other characters are. Yeah, they go in between the land and the sky down. That's right.

And so you get all these developed pictures in this one on the right. Oftentimes you'll see figures in a boat who are riding above the riding on newt on the arch. Oh, they're like on a boat on the Skydome. Then the writing, yeah, and that's the Sun God. Raw, we're rat. Oh, okay, right.

Yep, and so you have this concept here of the Skydome as a solid thing up there, and the Sun rides on it. Sometimes raw is depicted as being given birth. He emerges out of Newt, and then New noot swallows him and then gives birth to him again every day for the sunrise and sunset. Then you have stars and noots body. Then you have all these deities who account for different parts of the cosmos.

And all of these are manifestations that evolved out of Atum who is an egg, the potentiality of all life and order. All of these deities came from Atum, who is an egg, the potentiality of all life and order. All of these deities came from Atum. They all evolved and developed out of Atum, the egg. Or did they picture, like, they probably pictured Atum giving birth to all these deities, or... There's different accounts. One of them has Atum swallowing his own reproductive fluids, use your imagination.

And it's pretty vivid. And so he keeps doing this, self-reproducing, and then each time a new cosmic deity emerges out of him. But the whole point is, the cosmos is self-generating. The cosmos is itself, the divine, and it spontaneously generates itself. So just stop and think, put this in language of philosophy. All reality, every reality that I see in touch is like contingent.

Its existence depends on some other previous cause. Me, for my parents, this table from a tree. Everything depends on the thing that can be read. The seed. That's right. The seed from the tree. The seed from the tree before it, from the tree before it and the ground and all this. And so when the Greeks developed the idea of the uncaused cause, there has to be a cause back there

that's like the first cause. So in the Egyptian imagination is the universe itself just infinitely its own cause all the way back. And whatever is before the first cause is just conceived of in their imagination as the waters. Yeah, so cosmology. So just try to imagine. Water's always existing. Yeah, but the waters are not existence. The waters are actually non-existence.

Well, because what existence is in this cosmology is ordered reality. Existence is autumn and the universe emerging out of him that brings order and life. So there isn't a ton. There's two different ways to think about waters. One is thinking of water as anti-existence. Correct.

And the other way you talked about it as the source of life. Yes, that's right. Those seem contradictory. Well, yeah, the Egyptians don't have a chaos thing going on with the waters. That the waters are like an enemy. They have to be defeated. Okay. Here in this imagination, nothingness is just the potential of existence. And that's the nothingness state is imagined as waters.

Waters is nothing. In the Egyptian imagination. But also waters is life in the Egyptian imagination. But life, there's potential for something to emerge out of nothing. And that's something. Potential comes out of water. Potential, that's right. Got it. Yeah, nothing has the possibility of something. I have a feeling if you sat down with an ancient Egyptian

and you said, is the water nothing. I don't think they would agree with you. They would be like, water is potential or water is, I don't know. Okay, actually, here's the problem. Is that our English word nothing refers to a cosmological idea that didn't exist in their time. Oh, nothing. What is nothing? What is nothing? You know what I mean?

You have to have a view of the universe that what the universe is is matter, physical matter. That's what the universe is. And so before the universe, there was no thing. And you have to have a very, I think, pretty modern, sophisticated, even have those categories. View of the material universe to have a concept of nothing. But their concept was, where did this all come from?

Well, we know that all potential, all life, the potential of life comes from water. We live in this arid, dry place. Water's the most basic. Water lets us get food and all the potential for life. And so when they think back to how did anything come to existence, it all came from water and it all came in this egg which is the God mood. Atum. Atum. Yeah. Who spontaneously just emerges.

He just emerges. A cause emerges out of nothingness. Yeah. Yeah. He caused himself to emerge. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then all reality in their worldview is just later developments of that first original cause that just caused itself. Yeah.

So there might be an analogy here with older cosmologies, I think in the middle 20th century of the eternal universe. You know, maybe the multiverse theory might fit into this category of like we're just in an infinite loop of universes exploding and then contracting again. And really what reality is is just this. This spontaneous, emergency. This spontaneously, infinitely.

But logically, what you're saying is universe is just generate itself. Yeah. Okay. The universe generated itself. Yep. Out of nothingness. Yeah.

Yeah. That's very similar to Egyptian cosmology. Because this atoom didn't say, let me create everything, atoom came from from the nothingness he emerged from the nothingness Yeah, here's another one. This is from what's called papyrus Brenner Must be the guy who named after the guy who discovered it this atoom speaking again He calls himself the lord of the limit speaking after he evolved I am the one who evolved as Evolver. When I evolved, evolution evolved. All evolution evolved after I

evolved. Evolution's becoming many in emerging from my mouth, without the sky having evolved, without the land having evolved, without the ground or snakes, having then created in that place, I became tied together in them out of the waters, out of inertness, without having found a place in which I could stand. So here's a poet reflecting on the first self-evolving cause. Ha-ha-ha.

Ha-ha-ha-ha. So lost. We're imagining ourselves in the mindset of Atum, what is Atum, the first self-cars cause. And so, every, it's a form of pantheism, that all reality is just a manifestation of the divine self-cars cause. I don't know. It's a whole worldview. Totally. I don't know. It's a whole world view. Totally.

That's very ancient. They're using the word evolved and they don't mean evolution in the way that maybe. Yeah, not in the modern sense, but in terms of develop, life develops. So we can read this as just develop or emerge or... Yeah, that's right. And you can intuit there's development from the life cycles birth and death from the seasons From plants dying and passing on and but passing their seed to go on So when he says when I evolved evolution evolved what does it mean?

Ah, what was the first development of anything towards order and life? Okay, when he came to be, being and itself came to be. Came to be, that's right, self-cost. Okay, totally. This is actually just about as difficult sometimes as me trying to really understand my wife. No, I'm quite serious. And not because she's hard to understand.

It's like communicating with another human to truly understand how they see the world. It takes work. It does take a see the world. It takes work. It does take a lot of work. It takes work. That's what we're experiencing. And what you want to do is just be like, I think I get it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, here's things that are connection points. What caused it all? Well, it's a deity, but the deity has no origin or cause, but notice in this, what's most primary is the nothingness in the chaos. Yeah, that comes with four words of the deity. Correct.

Yeah. Yeah, that's standing out to me. Because we'll find that's reversed in the deity. Yeah, that's reversed in Genesis 1. That's one. Yeah, correct. Yeah, that's right. In other words, in Genesis 1, what pre-exists everything is a personal being.

Yeah, in the beginning. Yeah, God. That's right. And the beginning state of creation, the nothingness out of which this being that pre-exists makes everything is water's. The same waters, but it's precisely the order is reversed. And that's the point to be made here. Yeah. Another, I just thought this was cool. If you focus in on Ra, the Sun God who rides... The boat. The back of Nute. Yeah, on the sky God.

Yeah, the sky God every day. So the sky God, he gets developed and stories about him and his significance. Excuse me, the Sun God. Yeah, the sky God is Nute. She's the dome. She's the Sun God. Ra, or Ra God is new. She's the dome. And then Ray or Ra is the Sun God who rides his boat. Anyhow, there are lots of depictions about how the

Sun rise dispels the night. Night time is the realm where the nothingness threatens to take us all over again. So when the Sun rises, it's deliverance from being reduced into nothingness. That's an intense way to live. Well, I think perpetual darkness can't build a kingdom on that. You can't have parks and neighborhoods, and certainly can't grow anything. Yeah, but just to imagine every night, like, all right, let's hope, let's hope Roshos up again. Yeah, don't know as we're just descending into chaos.

Yeah, that's right, yeah. So, there's depictions and stories about just descending in the case. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, there's depictions and stories about every morning when Ra shows up, he's dispelling dark powers of nothingness and chaos. And in this picture that I've included, I think it's a, I forget where it came from. It's some sort of wall carving. It's of the Sun God Rey in the Sunrise. He's being pulled by a row of cobras and of jackals, but he has a spear and he's piercing the head of a sea serpent.

So in other words, at sunrise, every morning at sunrise, the sun god is defeating the powers of darkness, and he does it by striking the head of us of a serpent. Oh, wow. I mean, come on. We're so in the neighborhood of the biblical authors here. Yeah. Now, what the snake means in the biblical story is very different than the meaning of the snake, but there's also overlap. Yeah. And that's how it always is.

There's overlap, but and difference. Anyhow, crushing snake heads is the really key motif in Egyptian stories of the gods overcoming forces of evil and chaos. To overcome evil and chaos, a common symbol is to crush a snakehead. To crush the snake. And it'll come back. And Rod does it every morning. And Rod does it every morning. Can you imagine every morning crush a snakehead and make yourself some coffee. Laughter Laughter Oh, I love it. Okay. That's the Egyptians. Let's go over to what moderns call the rock. Okay. 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

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1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc So you've got the Tigris up north. It's where the Assyrians kind of more up in that region, in Lendelow bit, and then South is the Euphrates. So in this area where these two rivers flow into the ocean is Mesopotamia. It's where the first civilizations, human civilizations, emerged. And it's just huge river delta at the mouth of an ocean. Civilizations. Correct. Human civilizations. Yeah. Emerge. Yeah. And it's just, it's a huge river delta at the mouth of a notion.

Yeah. And it's flat, muddy. And it was, yeah, it's where the first large scale agriculture, where humans develop large scale agriculture. Where we learn how to farm. Yeah, that's right. So, and then after thousands and thousands of years of humans being there and doing that, emerge the first writing systems. And and therefore the first historical records.

And this is the culture of the Sumerians. The earliest written traditions we have from them go to like the mid-early 2000s BC, or where the first written texts come from. It's like pictograph, symbol writing systems. Light hierarchical graphics. Yeah, yep, different. Yep, symbol writing system. Light hierarchical, grifix. Yeah, yep, different. Yep, that's right.

So one of the foremost nerds scholars on Mesopotamian cosmologies, who's how he introduces it. His name's Bernard Bato. He says, despite the great variety of Sumerian cosmological narratives, nearly all reflect the worldview of their authors who live on the seasonally-watered river deltas

of the Tigris-Nufreides that have on their fringes the wide Syrian desert of northern Saudi Arabia. So big river delta, these rivers seasonally flood, providing the water that gets irrigated. Have you seen those like planet earth ones where they show the area? Totally. All the animals flock there. That's right.

Now it's in like sub-Saharan Africa. Yeah, with these huge deserts get flooded. They just all of a sudden they're under 12 feet of water. Yeah. For, you know, 60 days or something. Right. And then it happens every year and yeah the animals migrate thousands of miles to get to get some yeah water and feed on

whatever else is going to more yeah totally so human civilizations emerged from yeah the flood plains of Mesopotamia fed by the Tigers and Euphrates and on their border to the east is the northern edge of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula desert. So he goes on, he says, any stories that describe a pre-existent or pre-creation state portray a desert wasteland. So in other words, non-creation is a desert. It makes sense.

In Egypt, it's the waters. In Sum Samarian Babylonian, it's either the waters or also the desert, or the two features of non-existence. Yeah, you got the desert, there's no life. Yeah, that's right. Yep. I mean, that you're aware of. That's right. It's also a planet Earth from that.

Yeah. So Bernard continues, he says, creation, therefore, is a process by which water is added to a barren desert Turning it into a fertile field Which is what it would have felt like to live in a delta? Correct. Yeah, that's right. So at the center of such stories is Enky the god of fresh underground water who makes the land fertile through the Tigris, New Freddy's rivers groundwater, who makes the land fertile through the Tigris-Nufraeus rivers. Ninhersog is the goddess of dry land, who receives the waters, gives birth to plants, animals, and civilizations.

Related to this are texts that depict animals and humans as emerging from the ground like plants. So it's very similar. Again, if not environment, the fundamental realities are land and the waters, and everything emerges out of that. And muddy land would be wonderful. A wonderful thing when land gets muddy. Gross stuff.

Gross some stuff. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So, there's a cosmological text. There's multiple ones. Oh yes, this one's called the sheep and the wheat. And so just pay attention to, in this cosmology, what the assumptions are about the nature of the wheat. And so just pay attention to in this cosmology what the assumptions are about

the nature of the world. Okay. It begins saying when upon the hill of heaven, the hill of heaven and earth, cosmic mountain, where heaven meets earth, okay. And heaven is a deity named on who's the prime, like the father of all the other guy, like Atum is the Egypt, An is in Sumerian cosmology. But he is very God. But the beginning of everything is up on Hill where heaven and earth meet. That's interesting. So there, up on that hill, An, the deity, spawned the divine godlings. Since he neither spawned nor created grain with them, and since in the land he neither fashioned the yarn of Utu, the goddess of weaving, nor pegged out of the loom for Utu.

No sheep appearing, no numerous lambs, no goats, no numerous kids, the sheep did not give birth with twin lambs, the goat didn't give birth. No grain from the mountains, no grain from holy habitations, no cloth to wear. The divine weaver had not been born. No royal turban was born. No precious lord, no kings had been born. The wild animals had not gone out into barren lands. People in those days didn't know about eating bread. They didn't know about clothes. They went about naked in the land. Like sheep, they ate grass

with their mouths. They drank water from the ditches. This is, we're remembering the pre-creation state. This is ancient humans during when civilization had been a new phenomena. Yes. Thinking back, what was before human civilization? Yes. And naked humans. Naked humans eating like animals.

Yeah. They're remembering. They have a recollection of, so for them, creation is about order being brought to civilization. The ability to know how to bake bread. The ability to. Yes, exactly. No bread, clothing, there's no weaver. So before there's any weaving, before there's any domestication of animals, before there's

any kings, before there's any bread. So before all this, he's just, and this is all to create the setting of when the gods came to be. In other words, this is a long paragraph about the pre-creation state. Yeah. But it's really just a pre-human civilization state. Right, but that's the point. That's the point.

Is that their concept of creation isn't focused on the material origins, it's focused on the origins of order in the cosmos. Which creates human civilization. Yes. Order comes from the gods, and the pre-ordered state is the pre-creation state. So again, in our modern cosmology, we think of existence as the material, the existence of matter. Yeah, and where did that come from? Exactly. In these cosmologies, existence is ordered reality, in ordered cosmos, with humans as a

part of it in civilized order. And that's what's being created by the gods, the ordering of the universe. But the gods themselves kind of represent all the matter. You know, like the sky god, the lake god. And they self generate. And they self generate. I mean, here's just, here's on. He's just there on the hill of heaven and earth. And he's spawning, divide godlings.

When the prime deity is back there spawning all the other deities, when did that happen? Well, before there is any order. And then those gods are going to go on to become all the features that are responsible for the order around us. So, to me, what's interesting about this example is it's a good example of how their concept of creation is about the ordering of reality, not the coming into physical existence of matter. Now, that makes sense, except for in the Egyptian one, it does seem like they're also talking about everything, like emerging out of water. And this egg of everything. Yes.

And then that starts dividing into all matter. Yeah. My point bringing this one up is actually, this is more like how Genesis 2 works. Genesis 2 just begins with dried desert wasteland. And it says, but there was no agriculture. And there were no humans to work the ground. Oh, I see. And it was just springs coming up out of the ground, water the land.

This is how Genesis 2 begins. And it's the same type of mindset as what we just read, pre-order. Yeah, it was a desert. It was a desert. Yeah. And so creation is about God creating ordered human civilization to create order and take it somewhere. So this Sumerian text is like Genesis 2. The Egyptian text we read earlier

is like more like Genesis 1. Oh, interesting, yeah, you're right. Now this is taking for granted the fact that there are two creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2. We haven't talked about yet. Yeah, no, we'll get there. We'll get there. But I mean, if someone's listening to this conversation...

That's right. Well, there are two narratives that make up Genesis 1 and 2. Yes. That's all I'm saying. Nobody disagrees about that. Right. The first one goes from day one to day seven, the Sabbath. And then the second story begins in Genesis 2 vs 4 with,

back when there was no agriculture, and there were no humans. It's kind of a reboot, like, hey, let's do that again. Let's talk about how good it is. But it assumes the dry land, whereas Genesis 1 is even reaching back. It's reaching for dry. It's back further.

Yeah, correct. Okay, last stop on our tour. Okay, so Sumerian. Those Sumerian, a Sumerian is the culture That's right. Yeah, correct. Okay. Last stop on our tour. Okay. So Sumerian. Those Sumerian. Sumerian is the culture that existed in the delta of Mesopotamia. The re-revelled of the Mesopotamia. Yep, the Tigris-Refradis Mesopotamia.

After Sumerian culture passed from the scene, what took its place and overshadowed it was the ancient Babylon came into existence. So talking after homorabi, homorabi is a key figure in the early founding stories of Babylon. So we're somewhere in the 1700s BC, but in the same era. And these were the texts that George Smith presented, the Babylonian Genesis. Oh right, this is the Gilgamesh and stuff. Yep, exactly. So here's one.

It came to be called the after-hassus epic. So you have a tier of just pre-existent deities. They just exist. But they exist in a really clear social order. You have Enlil, a guy named Enlil, who's kind of like Atum or On in these other ones. He's just there before everything else, the chief deity. And he's got two co-deities that he's made. One's called Anu, the sky ruler,

and one's called Enki, got a fresh water. Under them are the upper-class deities, called the Anunaki, and then under them are the lower-class deities who are called Igiigi. I like them. Igiigi. You like them as a lower class deities who are called the Igi-gi. I like them. Igi-gi. You like them as a crew of deities? Both I like their name, the Igi-gi.

Yeah. But notice, this is a concept of the deities existing in a class order. In a class order that mirrors precisely onto how Babylonian culture was ordered. Right. Very small number of people at the top. You've got a couple rulers, and then you got the upper class,

and then you got the lower class. Then you got the lower class. And so the Igigee are the ones who actually make the Cosmos run. Yeah, they're the workforce. Yeah, they're slaves. Well, actually, no, they're not slaves. They don't have slaves yet. They just have the lower class.

So the story begins with the Iggeegi being tired of feeding Providing food and clothing for all the gods above them. So they stage the first labor union walkout They have this walkout and they grumble they go to Enlil and they protest and they say all we'd ever do is work for you guys We get no benefit out of it. Enlil and the Anunnaki, they send out these negotiators. And what they agree on is, hey, let's make some robots, some automatons who will serve all of our needs for all of us. So what?

What's that? I can use word robot. Well, because that's how they're conceived of them just like menial Work machines. Okay. Well, we need is our work machines that will just do everything for us Yeah, and so what they do is they get a junior deity from the upper class And they slid his throat sacrifice him And they pour out his blood on the clay with the clay and they make humans and they pour out his blood on the clay with the clay and they make humans.

So wait, the Igigee, the lower class, the tired of feeding all the gods, they're like, we can probably outsource this to some even lower class. Yeah, that doesn't exist yet. Doesn't exist yet. And then that's a great idea. Yeah. How are we gonna do it?

They take one of the higher class guys, but one of the kind of lower of the higher class guys. Yeah, the sacrifice here. They kill him. Kill him. Slay his throat, mix the blood with clay and produce human. This is the origin of humans.

So imagine in a culture, this is the founding story. So if I said, hey, if I lived as a ancient Babylonian, I was like, hey, mom, where did this all come from? Yeah. And she would say, well, one of the gods slipped through of another god mixed with some dirt. Yeah. That's where we are.

Yeah. Well, that's how we got here. Why we're here is to be slaves to the gods. And then, yeah, and then our purpose. And guess what? Our king says he's the physical embodiment of these gods, of these different, the upper class, the priests and the kings, claim to be the physical embodiments of these deities. That's convenient. Yeah. Which means I'm their slave. They're really

telling a story about that we are to feed them. Yeah, they're giving divine legitimation to We are to feed them. Yeah, they're giving divine legitimation to... Even though they were also produced from the same blood clay, sacrifice, they're connected to these other gods in a way that we're not. Correct. So that's your founding story for the origin of humans. It's the blood of the gods plus clay makes humans to be slaves for the gods. It was imagining like telling the story to a class of kindergartners. Yeah, kiddos, you know why you're here? Oh my gosh.

So as the story goes on, by the way, you can all public demand. You can just go and read translations of it. It's really fascinating. After not very long of the humans doing all the work, the problem is they smell. Mm-hmm. That does happen.

Because they're fleshy. They poop. And they make noise, and they multiply like rabbits. They love to have sex. And so, all of a sudden, the gods regret having made all these humans. And so, the Anunnaki make a plan, and they appeal to Enlil to send a flood to annihilate them. But Enki, who is one of the chief gods along Enlil, he thinks this is wrong. Yeah.

And so he goes to Warren, the hero of the epic Atrahasis, and he tells him to build about for a flood that's going to last seven days. He tells him to take the animals to get on the boat. And there's this massive cataclysmic flood that comes, wipes out all the humans, except otter hussis, and his family and the animals on the boat. And then as the waters recede,

he sends out birds to go back and forth to see if the ground is dry and so on. And it's an analog to the biblical flood story. Yeah. But also really different from the flood story, as you can tell. Right, the flood was because of the gods flood story. But also really different from the flood story as you can tell. Right, the flood was because of the gods got annoyed at the smelly, noisy humans that were supposed to just feed them. And so now I just get rid of them.

But one god was like, yeah, let's not completely get rid of them. Correct. And he hooks up one family. Yeah, that's right. Where the flood story, or we don't talk about flood stories. Yeah, totally. Yeah, the point is, is that the flood stories were a dominant, they were already a dominant trend, a way of talking about who we are, where we come from. And this is in a civilization that once a year gets flooded. It gets flooded. And that occasionally was cataclysmically flooded.

Yeah, it's so much water that it just ruins it. The same gods that provide us the annual floods to survive. Sometimes are so angry. They send too much. That three generations ago, our ancestor told us that almost everybody was wiped out. Why'd they do that? Well, we're smelly, noisy, messy, and sometimes they don't like us, and we exist at their whim. And this kind of thing. You can see how a story like

that would develop. And you can see what a story like that would do to your psyche. Yeah, totally. Yeah. It's not too different from like the matrix type of, we're slaves to whatever beings are I think of the matrix true. Yeah, yeah, whatever those were things are that put humans in those weird Incubators and are milking them for my Consciousness and then they put us in a story their batteries are batteries are yeah, we're basically batteries Yeah, that's right. Yeah, but what are we gonna do with our mind? I'll put them in the matrix. Yeah, yeah. It's not too different. So that's one.

Okay, I've left the crown jewel for the last. How you doing? This is a lot to keep straight. Yeah, and I'm not asking you to keep all the details, of course. It's more just a big picture. Each one of these cosmologies, I'm bringing out because it anchors into one real noticeable feature. We've gone through three different civilizations.

Yes. Ancient cosmologies. And all of them have certain connections to genesis one and two. Correct. Yep. And we're like dropping hints at what those are. We're not going into details. Not yet.

We're imagining ourselves into the cultural environment of an ancient Israelites. Like let me tell you four stories that are now going to inform this next story, which I really want you to care about the most. That's what I'm doing. Problem is, these stories are crazy. They have strange words, they have just all these strange ideas. It's hard to keep straight and do my best. It's okay that's but I know that this is not reading ancient Near Eastern cosmologies here. It's not like taking a walk.

Okay so the Babylonian Empire developed in such a way that it both recognized that it owed its existence to the Sumerian Empire that came before it, but also claimed that it was a new from Sumerian about the waters or the desert. But in Hamrabi's age, the patron god of Babylon was named Mardu. And Hamrabi's age, when you say that, what do you mean? Oh, in Hamrabi's, Hamrabi is connected with the period of the rise of Babylon as a political economic power. And therefore they told stories about why and how this kingdom came to power. And Marduk was the sponsor god of this Babylon. And so what they often did is... Is he an upper elite? Was he an Anunakai?

And Nune Kai? Well, as we're going to see, he's the son of the chief god. Oh, he's the son of Inlal. There's a whole story. It's called Inuma Aliish, where the Babylonian Genesis, it's the story of how Marduk, who was second-comer, came to be appointed by all as the chief of all.

And it's a political mythology that has its analog with the rise of Babylon in the place of ancient Sumeria. Got it. So think of Sumeria as the chief god. Babylon is the upstart. And this is a mythology about the rise of Mardu. In Lola's the chief god, but he has a kid, Marduke and Marduke's gonna take over.

You got it. And Marduke represents Babylon. Correct. So Enuma Elish, it begins with the Akkadian words Enuma Elish, which means this begins with the uncreated state. When on high, no name was given to heaven, nor below was the underworld called by name. Primeval, upsu, upsu is the deity, but it means the deep abyss, the deep ocean waters. So the Primeval ocean waters was their progenitor, the one who gave them birth.

Gave birth to the sky and to the world. Yeah, so there's, and then last line of opening statement, and creator, Tiamat, which is the salt water, was the one who gave birth to the water. It's a difference between the deep abyss and salt water. Okay, so, Opsu is freshwater. Oh. It's the freshwater below the land.

Below the land? It's the abyss under the land. And then, Tiamat is the salty water. And this is before heaven or the earth exist. Are they procreating together, Opsu and Tiamat? Oh, okay. In other words, the assumption is freshwater and salt water. Yeah, get together, have a baby. Get together and they are they are the uncreated state. Yeah. The uncreated state is

salt and fresh water just mixing and mingling. And notice how it's this is before heaven and earth. Okay. So it's just waters. Yeah. So similar to Egypt. Yes. Also, notice that the creation of the heavens and earth Is just is said when the heaven had no name right and when the underworld was not called by a name So it existed, but just wasn't named well to be named is to have existence Think Genesis one got we got naming things. Yeah, He called it this, he named it this. Yeah. So did they just not have, and we talked about this, there was no category of no thing.

That's right. So here, what exists is the waters, the different kinds of waters mingling together. And this is before heaven and earth, the sky and the land, before they were named. Before they were named. And so the question is, yeah, for them, to be named means to exist in a meaningful way within a functioning ordering system. So existed maybe in some sense, but not any system mattered.

Not that mattered to them, that's right. So it goes on. The waters mingling together, no gods had been brought forth. The Opsu, the freshwater, Tiamat, the salty water. Those are gods. They're deities, but they're deities in a different way. Because they're like primeval states. They're non, exist, they're non-being.

But they are potential. They have a potential for, it's kind of like the waters in the Egyptian cosmology. None were called by names, no destinies or dand. Then the gods were formed within these two. So I have under this a picture from, let's see, this is from a stone cylinder found in ancient Mesopotamia. Oh, and it depicts the fresh water god there seated on a throne. You see him in the middle of that little picture.

And these surrounded by those lines. Those lines are the waters proceeding out from him. So the God sitting in the middle is the first God who's gonna be born to emerge to give order to it all. And then the two types of waters surrounding him on those two streams are the two, the fresh and the sea water.

Oh, okay. And so the idea is you have the waters and then the first deity emerges from the water and he brings order. And so now the waters exist in nice ordered shape and then they flow out from the deity out into the world. So the very common way that they thought about it, the first deity emerges. So the first god emerges his name is Enky or Aya, he's the chief God, and he orders them so that land can emerge and everything can emerge out of it. So Enky establishes order, so he brings order to the waters, but here's something new that we haven't had yet, is that Tiamat, after order and the gods emerge, and this is almost, it's as if Sumeria emerges out of the pre-existence, the gods of Sumeria. But then Tiamat shows up, and she has formed an army of chaotic, dark, underworld enemies.

Tiamat is the salty ocean that bashes at the shoreline. Okay. So now we've got dry land, we've got a civilization, we've got order, the waters come in an ordered way to water the land, that's a gift of the gods. Okay, so now it's all set up. So it's all set up. I've skipped that section of a new melee.

So I'll get set up. We know that story already. Yeah. What's interesting now is there's a new threat crashing on the beach. It's the chaos waters, right. Think of the tide and the waves occasional tsunami. The oceans are dangerous and they're kept at bay down there. So they imagine, even though the old gods were there in the established order, the forces of chaos came knocking at our door and those forces are in the

form of Teamat, who's a great water dragon. So Teamat forms an army that's gonna threaten to overtake the order of the old world. So I'm quoting again. Ranked, drew up at Teamat's side, angry and scheming, never lying down at night or day. It's like the sleepless zombie army. Making warfare, rumbling, raging, convening, and assembly that they might start hostility. Invincible weapons, giving birth to monster serpents, pointy fangs, merciless incisors, she filled their bodies with venom for blood, fierce dragons that she clad with glories. Whoever sees the army will collapse from weakness. Serpent, dragons, hairy hero men, the warriors.

Ancient warriors of old lion monsters, scorpion men. Sculpeon men. Sculpeon men. Mighty demons, fish men, bull men. I was just like the whole, yeah. So Babylon comes in, comes to a rise of power in and after collapse. The Sumerian Empire collapses.

Babylon emerges. Right. So this is a whole story that's gonna be saying, listen, the whole ancient world that we all knew about from the Sumerian past collapsed. Chaos threatened war, famine. Who emerged to rescue the world from the dark powers of Tiamat and Chaos.

Marduk, Marduk, chief god about it. Tiamat is all the chaos that came out of the collapse of the Samarion. Correct. She came with this just horde of... That's right. That's right. So a modern historian might write about the collapse of the Samaritan Empire or five main factors.

Right. There was the famine. Yeah, sure. There were three bad kings. They would leave out the scorpion men. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So, we would tell it that way.

But for them, that civilization in the order, all of it, the weather producing the harvest, that allowed them to make the financial resources. Yeah, that's how they did history. That was all a gift, the weather producing the harvest that allowed them to make the financial resources. Is that how they did history? That was all a gift of the gods. And so that collapses. That means either our gods are weak or somebody is attacking us, the forces of chaos are closing in.

And so the whole story of Enumae Leish is about how Marduke, the son of Anki, arises to fight the chaos dragon. Now the chaos dragon. Now the chaos dragon. Well, sorry, it's Tiamat, who's the ocean waters. Yeah, she brings a whole army of crazy mutant beasts. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. But on the page that follows, we don't have to read it.

It's a poetic description of the battle. Uh-huh. And Marduke just goes straight for Tiamat. Oh. I'll just excerpt. Marduke takes a mace in his right hand. Is Marduke taking on this whole army of crazy things all by himself?

Yes, but he's bypassing the army and going for Tiamat. You have to imagine that he can do that, I guess. Yeah, totally. I'm imagining it. He's like, yeah, he's spinning and dodging the bullman and he's sliding under scorpion man and he's going straight for the queen. Yeah, it's going for the queen. Queen of chaos. So, you know, it's vivid poetry here. He's got a mace in one hand, thunderbolts before his face. A mace is like a big staff with a metal spikey ball on the end. Yeah, amace. He covers his body with fire

And he has a net. He's gonna catch Tiamat. So he deploys the four wins He brings all the four wins from the four points of the compass. Yeah, and he's gonna trap Tiamat He starts making a whirlwind cyclone He mounts his terrible chariot, which is a storm. Then he encircles her in a net. He catches a big net, cast a net around Tiamat. Up to this point, I've been thinking of Tiamat as water. The waters, yes.

But she's in the form of a dragon. So you can catch a dragon in a net. That's a catch a dragon in a net. Yeah. Who's a symbol of the chaos waters? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. In the poem, he brings her clothes. He draws her near so that she thinks she can get a dragon. Yep, she's got a dragon in a net. You trick it, you make it think it can swallow you by bringing it near. That's his strategy. Okay. I want to get this thing to open its mouth.

So he brings it near to him, then Timot opened her mouth to swallow, and he thrust in the winds so she couldn't close her mouth. So he sends all the winds now to blow down her throat. It's like a few sat in front of a really powerful fan that blows your cheeks open. Right.

But this blows the esophagus open too. I mean, just dragon. Yeah. It's like a pathway to the heart. To the heart. Now, I see I'm gonna hung up on this in the head because it's a net that's powerful enough to capture the dragon, but it's not powerful enough

that the dragon can't swallow, marduk through it. Oh, I see. I'm a poetry, I guess. Yeah, I just imagine a really angry dragon just being like, I'm gonna like growl at you and try to eat you anyways. I see. Well, somehow it's head can get out of the neck. Maybe it's heads out of the neck.

Yeah, it's got a long neck. It's like a skinny neck. Got it. Gets through one of the holes. I don't know. Oh, okay. I can picture that. Somehow, I think that's okay.

Yeah, there you go. Picture that. And then it's like going to swallow Marduk. Yep. And at that moment, remember he's writing, he's writing a storm chariot. So he sends the wind. And he sends the winds, pull, opens up her bullet. Rousseff, I guess, all the way down. He sent an ill wind that he released in her face. Tiamat opened her mouth. He thrust in the ill wind. Raging winds bloated her belly. For raging wind, it bloated her belly.

He shot the arrow, it broke, opened her belly, cut to her innards. We shot an arrow through her. Down her throat. Yep. Into her belly. In her belly. Pierce the heart. He subdued her, snuffed out her life,

flinging down her carcass, he took his stand upon it. Marduk, patron god of Babylon saves the world from the chaos dragon. And so he's not battling ancient Samaria, he's battling the chaos that subdued after Samaria fell. Yeah, that's right. So a modern historian would craft a narrative that say the fall of ancient Samaria,

there were five main factors. Well, here's what of ancient Samaria there were five main factors. Well, here's what caused the ancient Samaria to fall, but then here's what happened because the order of Samaria fell. Now there isn't enough order, there's famine, there's all this stuff, this chaos. Yeah, think of how this is like in the poetry of the prophets when they depict the fall of Assyria, the stars fall from the sky, the earthquakes, no humans, no animals, it's cosmic poetry to describe the significance of these historical events. That's what's happening here, here too.

And so it's a battle of our gods to bring about a new world order. And so, Martin, patron, God of Babylon, is the one who saved us all, with the rise of the Babylonian kingdom. So, what he does is he's now standing on top of Timot, and so, you know, heaven and earth already existed from the old guard, but what he does is he takes her body, he splits her into like a fish for drying.

He flays her. He flays her. He flays her. Half of her, he set up and made as a cover of heaven. So half of the like, one of the like, and remember she's the waters, she's the chaos waters. So no, but the sky dome already existed. I see. But now Marduke is, is this, he's reestablishing the cosmos. He's, he's remaking.

Yeah, he's recreating order. It was threatened on collapse. He's recreating order. And so now Mardu, even though he's not the originator, like Enke, his father, but now he's the one responsible for the current world order. And so he's now responsible for the heaven. He's a laser in hand. He's a taff.

She is the saltwater dragon. Yeah, don't. Pataf above, which really is the freshwater in the sky. Yeah. And then Pataf below. Yep. And it goes on and then says, and then Marduk ascended to the top of the dome

and built his great temple. Then he went up above. And built the heavenly temple. Yeah. Which, if you go to the capital city of Babylon, you're going to go see a huge ziggurat. That's the tallest thing going up into the heavens. And it's the great temple of Marduk. It's the Tower of Babylon.

That's built to reach up to the Skydome and to touch and connect with the heavenly temple that Marduk built above the Skydome. It's the heavenly version of the earthly temple. So this is all connected in their worldview. Marduk is responsible for the current world order. He dwells in his temple above the Skydome Tiamat that he conquered. And our earthly temple is like the portal up into his heavenly temple. So there you go man, there's much more that we could read here. But this is the Babylon's foundation story. If you just Google, Marduk and Tiamat, you'll get some of the most famous images. And the battles depicted sometimes Tiamat's a seven-headed, hydrodragon, sometimes Tiamat

is a bowl, lion, winged monstrosity. Lots of versions of this that float throughout. And then this basic, the scholars call this the combat myth, but this appears in Canaanite literature as well, except it's not Marduk, it's Bale, who's the patron god of ancient Syria, to the north of Israel. Bale also conquered a dragon? Well, basically, they think they're the most powerful kingdom. And so they're like, oh, not Babylon.

Our God is the real one who reestablished order. So you get different cultures putting their God in the slot of Marduk. Oh, because that became the most famous. That became the story that you tell to talk about your empire. Your God is the most powerful, and your empire is the most powerful So it's both a cosmology Bales the God of the God of the Canaanites north of Israel They're called by different titles

Serians is how they appear in the Old Testament. Okay, so the new mehlicious Important because it honors the most ancient cosmologies of everything emerging out of the waters to establish a first world order. But then it's about chaos descending on our world and who rescued us from the chaos, Marduk, who defeats the dragon and establishes the new world order out of the waters. And so, okay, in this world is another group of people. Yes, who? Yeah. Know all these stories. Yes. And they have their own identity. That's right. Their story is that their God rescued them out of Egypt. And these are the the the Hebrews. These relights. Yes.

And so we're going to read their ancient creation stories. Yeah. And what we're gonna read their ancient creation stories. And what we're gonna see is how it really is in a dialogue with these other ones. And the same way that Marduk is in dialogue to the Samarion, the way that it explains. The ancient Israelites knew about all of this. And the vocabulary and the mental models and all that stuff is shared, but they want to explain why they are particularly important, but then also their God as being. Ultimate.

All the truth. Chief God. Yeah. Yep. And that's the Genesis creation. Yes, we call this Genesis chapter one. That was a long one. that's the Genesis creation. That's what we call this Genesis chapter one.

That was a long one. Thanks for listening to this episode of Bible Project Podcast. If you have some questions concerning the series on ancient cosmology, we would love to hear them and record a question and response episode with them. So send us your questions by June 18th. Record yourself asking your question, try to keep it to 30 seconds or so and let us know your name and where you're from. Next week we're gonna dig in deeper. In contrast to the Babylonian conception where TMAT has to be slain and annihilated before the cosmos is

created, the biblical picture doesn't portray the destruction of the waters or the abyss, rather they're control and ordering by Yahweh within the created cosmos. So the portrait is that God can make the unproductive state of disorder work into his purpose to bring about ultimate order. Today's episode was produced by Dan Gummel and Zach McKinley. Our show notes by Lindsay Ponder and the theme music by The Band Tents. Bible project is a nonprofit organization. We exist to experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. So we use all sorts of media to that end and we are increasingly building technology products to that end. And everything that we make is free because of the generous support of thousands of people just like you, all over the world pitching in and paying for it, which is an incredible honor.

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