BibleProject - Isaiah and the Dragon – Chaos Dragon E8

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

What happens when the entire nation of Israel consistently aligns themselves with the dragon? They themselves become a chaos monster Yahweh has to deal with. In this episode, Tim and Jon explore the scroll of Isaiah and the prophet’s indictment of Israel for choices that betray the image and blessing of God they were meant to bring to the world. View more resources on our website →Timestamps Part one (00:00-12:52)Part two (12:52-23:50)Part three (23:50-36:22)Part four (36:22-56:54)Referenced ResourcesInterested in more? Check out Tim’s library here.You can experience our entire library of resources in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show Music “Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTSAll music breaks by Patrick Murphy and Tyler BaileyShow produced by Cooper Peltz with Associate Producer Lindsey Ponder, Lead Editor Dan Gummel, and Editors Tyler Bailey and Frank Garza. Mixed by Tyler Bailey. Podcast annotations for the BibleProject app by Hannah Woo.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Tyler at Bible Project. I record and edit the podcast. We're currently exploring the theme called the Chaos Dragon, which is a huge theme. And so, we decided to do two separate question and response episodes about it. Right now, we're taking questions for the second Q&R and would love to hear from you. Just record your question by November 1st, 2023, and send it into us at infoabiboproject.com.

Let us know your name and where you're from. Try to keep the question to about 20 seconds, and Let us know your name and where you're from. Try to keep the question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a really big help to our team. We're so looking forward to hearing from you. Here's the Bible. From the opening pages of scripture,

we encounter a destructive force that the authors of the Bible depict as a serpent bent on deceiving humanity. Again and again, we see that God's human image bears choose to side with chaos instead of what's God. And so become themselves Chaos Monsters as well. Today we open up the scroll of Isaiah, and we see the Prophet Isaiah warning Israel

that they have become the Chaos Monster, aligning with death and destruction instead of partnering with Yahweh. And so God has to deal with the Chaos that Israel has brought. The fire is coming, and the fire is Babylon. Here's the surprising thing. The nation of Babylon is also a chaos monster. And so God's gonna use a bigger, better chaos monster to judge Israel.

And if that's the case, then who's gonna deal with Babylon? Even the monster that God summons to bring that fiery purification, even that monster that is Babylon will be itself held accountable to divine justice. In today's episode we'll also examine a question that's been on my mind from the beginning of this series, which is what do we mean when we talk about the sea serpent, the chaos monster? If we want to sympathetically enter the imagination of these authors, they really

want us to entertain that there's another dimension of reality with creatures that are intelligent like us that are being described by these images. While the modern reader can think of chaos as an impersonal force, the ancients think of it in a more nuanced way as creatures with influence over human reality. This is a picture of a cosmic battle, and in Isaiah, we get a vision of how that battle ends. The new creation is depicted as a huge feast on top of a mountain, and Yahweh will swallow up the monster. Today Tim McE and I talk about the theme of the Chaos Monster and the scroll of Isaiah. I'm John Collins and you're listening to Bible Project Podcast.

Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Hey Tim. Hi John. Hello. Hello. All right. We're at it.

Yes. Dragons. Dragons. Yeah, we're trying to work out the meaning and importance of the dragon theme throughout the storyline of the Bible. Yeah, there's dragons in the Bible. There's dragons in the Bible, and maybe what gives this particular theme in the biblical story a little bit of difference? All of biblical literature is rooted in its historical time and context, all of biblical literature is rooted in its historical time and context. And the biblical authors were shaped, used by God, spirit, but also shaped by their culture and upbringing.

And so when they wrote, they wrote in the language set in a time and a place and so on. So we're always, that's a big value for us to honor that historical context of the biblical writings. But there's something about this theme in particular, because the dragons laying story was so widespread among Israel's neighbors going way, and even like predating Israel in the neighboring cultures. And the way biblical authors use specific images, words, and phrases that are very popular in this widespread

tradition, but they tweak them. And that's just something, as I'm immersing myself in both the biblical texts about the dragon and the other ancient narration texts. That's just something that strikes me. All the biblical literature is connected to it's cultural context, but there's something about the dragon that feels like it especially is. And to be clear, when we talk about slaying the dragon, we're not talking about some young knight encountering a dragon in a cave.

Yeah, not the medieval European. Not the medieval kind of. And that's the most common dragon myth of my childhood. Okay, same. Yeah, same for me. That's right. This is about the storm god versus the sea serpent, the chaos sea monster. Yeah, that's right.

And yeah, this isn't a story. I mean, the closest thing we have maybe is like Moby Dick or something. Yeah, exactly. And even there, that's a very modern version of the sea monster. Yeah. So in the, all the cultures around Israel up in the north, out in the east, south, in Egypt, in Syria, and Tyres, all these stories of the chaotic waters represented by a monster, a serpentine monster of some sort that was chaos herself.

Yeah. And needed to be dealt with or life itself would unend. Yeah, and the story is chaos and disorder is a symbol of the danger, disorder and death that is just we're all on the verge of in any moment. Any city, any society, any human is on the verge of no longer existing. Yeah, you can feel that sometimes. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. So that universal human experience of these polar opposites of life and death and beauty and tragedy of order and disorder, and you can just pivot from one of the next. It's like we're all of history and the reality is on a knife's edge. That's what these symbols are expressing and exploring. It's who's symbol. Yeah, and picture. And the knife's edge is a battle between the God of the sky and the creature of the sea, the God of the sea, and it's an epic battle. And it's like, who's going to win? And it's close. And then life will prevail, but then usually it has to happen again. There's a cycling, and almost with the seasons of like winter brings death again and the battle has to happen.

Yeah, that's right. So in the two versions of the story that are closest to the biblical authors and by closest, actually, Isaiah. We're looking at the Isaiah scroll and how Isaiah picks up the dragon imagery in his book. There's a cana knight version of the story that we have evidence through their neighbors to the north up entire in finisha in a town called Ugarit and it's a story about Bale or Baal who was a canonite storm god against the serpent called Lothan and against the sea called Yam and there Baal has to undergo this defeat of the dragon in victory,

and then he'd actually dies after the battle, and then he gets resurrected again, brought up from the dead, and it happens every year. And it's a whole agricultural cycle imagery. Over in Babylon, which is the other version, the biblical authors know the most because they lived there. In Babylonian exile is the version about Marduk that we know through a text called Inuma Elish. And there, Marduk's victory over the sea, Tiamat and her monster army, which includes lions and dragons and hairy beastmen. And there, the story is ritually reenacted every year at the new year, in the fall, the fall new year. So it's cyclical. And the biblical authors have a different view of reality.

Yeah, Israel had its own cyclical feasts and stories. Yes, it did. And the kind of central one being the Passover, right? Well, they had two new years. They had a new year celebration in spring, and that was the first day of the first month. And then that lasted for six months, and then the second half of the year, a six month cycle, also begins in the seventh month. With the new years, the day of atonement and Sukkot, these are tabernacles. All in the seventh month, with the New Year's, the Day of Atonement, and Sukkot,

these are tabernacles all in that seventh month. And they both are starts to different ways of thinking about the cycle of a year. Oh, interesting. But the point is, is that whether it's Passover, which celebrates God's victory over the monster Pharaoh, who enslaved them unto death, and was defeated at the sea. Yeah. And then the fall, New Year celebration kicks off the month at its center, the day of attunement, which is also about the exiling of a sin monster out into the wilderness

through the form of a goat. But that's a whole other set of symbolism. Okay, but your point, sorry, was that there is a cyclical nature to Israel's calendar as well. Yeah, but it isn't about who's going to win this time. No, you're celebrating a victory that is certain, and it's a victory rooted in the past, celebrated throughout human history pointing to an ultimate victory. But the point is that the God of Israel for the biblical authors is not locked in mortal combat with a dragon. I love that you said mortal combat. So the other thing, I guess, is important to remember, and I'm saying this for myself too, is that by the biblical authors using this creature,

is they're not whole cloth adopting this story. They're like, I don't know how you would say it, they're taking the character and the idea, but then they're employing it for their own purpose. Yes. And in the biblical story, the Leviathan, the tannine is not a rival of God, but just one of God's creatures that he made in his wisdom,

that he put in the sea on day five, that it plays there, it can praise God. And that's a pretty stark difference. Yeah, that's right. It would really stand out amongst all of these other stories being like, oh, yeah, yeah, we know about that creature too. Yep, that's right. These are the variety of dragon-taming strategies, so to speak, in the Hebrew Bible. And so one of them is to acknowledge that the C dragon, whatever being that image refers to, is a part of God's creation and is good, at least in its beginning or its essence. However, the fact that it becomes an agent of bad

in God's world implies some sort of choice on its part, to not participate in the flourishing of God's good creation, but rather trying to drag it back into the nothingness and disorder from which it emerged. And the figure that's doing that is described primarily with reptilian sea monster or ground snake imagery. Yes, and at the same time, it's, I mean, in all of these neighboring stories, it's a God. Yes, it's a deity. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not merely a creature. Yeah. It's a cosmic force. Yes. And that's also at play in the story of the Bible. Yeah, very much though, that this creature is connected to the idea of spiritual beings in some way, which I don't fully

appreciate, and maybe we'll get into a little bit today. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's certainly one of those things that emerges over the course of the Hebrew Bible as you read through it. And then once you get into second temple literature, which includes the New Testament, it's very clear to them what all these images refer to. Isaiah is one of the books in Hebrew Bible where these images really come into sharp focus. Maybe, I guess we'll see if we experience them that way. So what I want to focus on is the imagery

of the dragon and the rebel star being. The rebel star being in Isaiah's oracles against the nations. In Isaiah chapter 13 to 27, we're just going to read a few of Isaiah's poems, but watch how they're going to pick up the imagery from where we've been so far in this conversation, but also kind of provide some new focus. So just real quick, we're looking at one literary unit in Isaiah scroll, chapter 13 to 27. There are seven kind of large literary blocks in Isaiah, no surprise there I suppose. And 13 to 27 is the second large literary block. Just as a kind of refresher to set, the narrative setting of the book, and the figure attached to the book, Isaiah of Jerusalem, he lived in Jerusalem in the mid-to-late 700s BC.

He's connected to the reign of four kings, but specifically his, like, the narratives about him, have him overlapping with the king named Ahaz, and then a king named Hezekiah, his son Hezekiah. So the Assyrian Empire was on the rise, and actually invaded Jerusalem, surrounded it, and decimated the towns around Jerusalem, but didn't actually conquer Jerusalem. But they did conquer the North. But they took out the Northern tribes. And then, in order to ensure Jerusalem's safety, Hasakaya made an alliance with the Sprouting Babylonian Empire. And that really made Isaiah mad.

Cause he thought that as a guy, it was trusting in these alliances and not in God. And so Isaiah forecast that Babylon's actually gonna come and stab you in the back and take the city captive and take all your children and allies. And it's in Babylon we have the story of T-Math. Yep, that's right. In Assyria they also have...

The same. A Syrian Babylon or Mesopotamian neighbors, they're just like, you know, 100 miles apart, less. And they share the same language, same cultural mythologies. Okay. But the point is that Babylon is on the horizon,

and Isaiah can see that Babylon's gonna come swallow up a Syria, swallow up everything everything and ruin everything and everyone. So that's kind of the context. A series on the near horizon, Babylon's on the far horizon. So Isaiah 1 through 12 begins with Isaiah's announcement that Jerusalem is headed for ruin because Israel has been faithless to the covenant. God is going to allow these imperial monsters to come eat up Jerusalem, but as a fire of testing to purify Jerusalem so that after that attack a new Jerusalem can emerge out the other side.

So we have read many times over the years, the important poems in Isaiah chapter 2 and Isaiah 11, that both depict the ultimate future of a cosmic new Jerusalem that the nations will all gather into. There'll be no more war. There'll be a royal priestly leader from the line of David who will bring about a new Eden, hooray, and amen. So that's, we just finished that Isaiah 1 through 12 with those kind of framing images in Isaiah 2 and 11. When you walk into Isaiah chapter 13 to 27, this is a whole collection of what's called oracles against the nations. And essentially Isaiah is looking at all of the neighbors around Jerusalem and including

Jerusalem and saying, the fire is coming. And what he's going to describe, even more detail, is the fire itself. And the fire is Babylon. And he's going to describe Babylon. Babylon is the fire. Babylon is the fire that God is Babylon. And he's gonna describe Babylon. Babylon is the fire. Babylon is the fire that God is bringing. Yep. And then what he's also going to anticipate

is even the monster that God summons to bring that fiery purification on the nations. That is Babylon. Even that monster that is Babylon will be itself held accountable to divine justice in the end. And that's actually how the whole collection begins with an oracle against Babylon itself. I mean, this seems important. That is important.

Actually, it's really important. And I just want to make sure I really do understand this. So, we've talked before about how there's this cosmic kind of firey flood that's going to, as you said, test the pure fire, and so that like new creation can come out of it, or the new Jerusalem come out. And one way to think about that is just God himself as his wrath, the fire. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coming. Yeah, that's right.

Directly. The fire of God. Whatever that means. But here what you're saying is, no God sends out Babylon to be the fire. Yeah. And actually, he calls Assyria and Babylon the rod of my anger. So God's anger against human evil is expressed through putting the dragon on a leash. And now we're calling Babylon the dragon because that's what we're going to find,

right? We're going to find that. Yes. How God depicts Babylon is that of the dragon. Correct. So this idea of the sea dragon becomes manifest in this. These empires. This empire, this warring, conquering, bloodthirsty empire. Yep. So, but it's like God's pet. Like, you said, put on a leash, like it's God's. Yeah. Yeah, God sends it out and says, yeah, do your thing. I am going to bring justice through.

He allows it. He allows it. I mean, it's important to note that when you actually get into Isaiah, the person that said in motion the events for Babylon to come destroy Israel was the king of Israel. Yeah. So, we're more to the theme. This goes back years to our character of God podcast series where the language of God's anger consistently through the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament is depicting

about God handing people over to the consequences of their decisions, to not live by his word and wisdom. And that is described as God unleashing the dragon to do its work, but then God will hold even the dragon accountable for its evil. And that's the interesting move, because we could go down the rabbit hole of God's anger. It's not go there. It's another conversation. But I think I just really need to understand and appreciate the importance of God's anger

doesn't come with him riding down on the clouds, like destroying or holding accountable somehow directly. Like there's this move of going, I'm going to allow this creature of chaos to do that work. And then I'm going to hold the creature of chaos accountable as well. And that's, I mean, that's a very unique story compared to the neighboring stories of saying, yes. This creature of chaos is in a battle against God, the God of the sky. And they got to duke it out,

and the God of the sky is going to win. This is like, God of the sky is like, no, that thing, it will just do what I want it to do. Like, I'm more powerful. And I'm going to let its destructive nature just kind of have its way. And that's kind of weird. That's not weird. It's just unique.

Yeah. Yeah. I think here's what's happening. So funny. We haven't read any of the text yet. But what the biblical author's deepest conviction is the Yahweh. The creator of heaven and earth, is ultimate reality.

There is no reality more transcendent above and beyond than Yahweh, Elohim. So whatever chaos and death is, it's down the chain of causation, of importance and significance for sovereignty and power and authority. So sometimes the biblical authors want to highlight that Yahweh, Elohim, is the ultimate cause in the source of all reality. And so they'll depict scenes of divine judgment or God bringing justice on human evil as God doing it himself. There are other times when they'll depict God using agents to do it on his behalf.

And that's what we find, like here in Isaiah, but there are also images in Isaiah where we'll just talk about God sending the fire on Jerusalem. And so I think it's more the biblical authors actually have a more nuanced way of thinking about cause and effect and God's relationship to cause and effect. And sometimes they just take the causes all the way up to the ultimate source. And other times they focus on secondary or third agents. And the dragon, I think, falls into that category. All right. Let's read some.

Okay. So the important thing about the literary design of Isaiah 13 to 27 is it begins with two chapters about Babylon, Isaiah 13 to 14. Then there's a poem about Babylon in the exact center of the collection, that's chapter 21, and then there's a poem about the fall of this cosmic city of arrogance and violence that's depicted as a huge city on the hill, but that's like a terrible city, and it's depicted as a dragon that God is going to hack up with a sword. But it's never described as Babylon, and I think it's on purpose. Oh, so okay, so this whole collection, 13 through 27, it begins with a story of Babylon falling, what you're saying it doesn't reference Babylon?

It does, it's about the Babylon and the King of Babylon. And then in the middle of the collection, Chapter 21, again, it's about Babylon falling. In the very end, it's about this cosmic city of chaos, not called Babylon, but it's the Stragon. Correct. And it's about a cosmic city mountain that God is going to elevate above all nations and make a feast and swallow up death, then there's no more crying and pain, and that is called

Jerusalem, or Mount Zion. Okay. So I think because the way this pattern works is Babylon is just the current manifestation of the dragon. They'll be more. And however many more there are, ultimately the energy behind it, God will bring that down. So, to the star god and to the dragon. Okay. As A13 opens up, like this, a prophecy against Babylon that Isaiah sent of Amosah.

Raise up a banner on a bare hilltop and shout to them, beckon them to enter in through the gates of the nobles. It's up close to get their own gates. So every word in here is hyperlinked to things from Isaiah 1 through 12. Yeah. So this is a scene where a herald is up on the hilltop that's going to be the foundation of the New Jerusalem. It's the safe refuge.

And he's calling everybody to come on up into this city, because it's safe up here. Come to the mountain. Come to the mountain. Yep. Why? Because down in the valley, it's about to get bloody. I have commanded those that I've prepared for battle. I've summoned my warriors to carry out my anger. Those who rejoice in my triumph. Listen, a noise on the mountains, like that of a huge multitude. Listen, an uproar. These are all words used to describe the sea. The sea.

Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. So, nations massing together. So, you have armies that you're always gathering described in the language of the Chaotic Sea. Yeah, this is very common, very common in the prophets. You always mustering an army for war, they come from faraway lands, Yahweh, oh here, it's the weapons of his anger.

Meaning he's going to let human armies do what human armies do, because that's what humans want. He's gonna let them battle it out. Yeah, let humans just destroy each other and everything to destroy all the land. Whale for the day of Yahweh is near destruction from the Almighty. Yahweh hands humans and creation and their kingdoms over to what they want, which is to rule the world

through violence, which means let us kill each other. Or you can flee to the mountain. Or you can flee to the mountain. Verse 9. The day of Yahweh is coming, a cruel day with wrath and anger to make the land desolate, to destroy sinners within it. So you get that image, she hands people over to their sinful decisions. Verse 10, The stars of heaven and their constellations will no longer show

their light. The rising sun will be dark. The moon will not give its light. I'll punish the world for its evil, the wicked for its sins, I'll put an end to the arrogance of the Hathi. I'll humble the pride of the ruthless. Hmm, so we have to use our Genesis one way of viewing reality to make sense of this. Genesis one, God puts the lights in the sky as creatures that can display God's own light. So they're imaging God's own to rule. So for them to not have any light anymore is God taking away their

vocation to rule? Yeah and their rule is to mediate God's order because they order light and dark. But they've rebelled in some way. Well, it's more that this ruin of human order by the human rulers is mirrored up above by cosmic disorder even affecting the rulers above. Okay. Is there some war above to shut down the lights? Presumably. Let's keep reading. All right. So verse 17, what does this all refer to?

Verse 17, look, the still God speaking, I'm going to stir up the Meads. Persians. The Mead, Media, and Persia were neighboring cultures. Okay. And they eventually merged into what was just called the Persian Empire, but there were distinctions. Kind of like Babylon in a Syria. Okay. We're both distinct, but also similar. So I'm going to stir up against Babylon, the Meads.

They don't care about money. They have no mercy on children. They're going to destroy. Verse 19. Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians will be overthrown like Sodom and Gomorrah. So that's what this poem is actually about. About the current world empire getting overthrown by the Meads and Persians. And somehow that earthly conflict between empires is of cosmic significance. So where Isaiah goes in chapter 14 is then to say, you know, on the day that the king of Babylon gets put into prison, because of the coup, the political coup.

What political coup? Oh, well, the Babylonian kingdom fell actually without a huge civil war in Babylon. It was almost all a political and military coup that happened with a lot of details that I probably should learn more about. But it's referenced in the book of Daniel. So, I say, imagines that just like a king gets enthroned and people write poems to celebrate his enthronement. So he writes this inverted dethronement poem about how he's taken down from the throne. He calls it a taunt. It's actually a mockery poem. Okay. This would be really popular on TikTok. If he found a way to do this today. Oh, how the oppressor has ceased.

His insolence is no more. Yahweh has broken the staff of the wicked, the sceptre of rulers that struck the people in wrath, blows without ceasing. You ruled the nations in anger and unrestrained persecution. Bad dude. The grave below, sure get excited about you. To meet you when you come, it's rousing up all of the Refaim. Oh, this is the Refaim. The Refaim. These are the spirits of dead warrior kings. We also know them as the Nephilim.

It's raising up all the kings of the nations from their throne. This is a little seen in the underworld. It's like the underworld kings. Underworld kings, who, you know, they're not really important, they're all dead. But they all get up and they say, oh, you yourself are now weak like us. You've become the same as all of us. You know, you put us all down here

when you executed us. So how does it feel? Verse 11, your pride is now brought down to the grave and the sound of your harps, yeah, don't hear those anymore. You know what you're gonna have is a bed now, just a spread of maggots and a covering of worms. That's your blanket. Oh, how you fallen from heaven. Oh, morning star sun of the sunrise. you are cut down to the ground, O conqueror of nations. You said in your heart, I will ascend up to heaven, raise my throne above the stars of God,

I will sit on the mountain of assembly, that assembly of God's divine counsel, on the summit of Zafon that is the mountain referred to in the dragon slaying myth specifically in the Hittite version. It's a mountain called Chaziz upon the coast where let's see Syria Lebanon and Syria meets Turkey down on the coast. It's huge 6,000foot mountain right on the coast. And it's where the... Oh, in the hit-type version of the dragon slaying myth, the dragon is born on the mountain and crawls down into the sea. Oh, well. Yeah. So, the king of Babylon goes on, all ascend up to the high places of the clouds and make myself like the most high, but in reality, the kings say, you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.

Okay. All right, and so this sentence here, you've fallen from Heaven Morning Star. This is, I mean, in context, it's clearly talking about the King of Babylon. Correct. And it calls him a fallen star, specifically the morning star. And if I remember correctly, this is one of the planets

that like Venus. Is it Venus? It's the last star you see surviving the sunlight right before the sun rises. It's the brightest star. But it also doesn't follow along with the constellations. It's got its own pattern. Because we call it a planet,

which comes from the Greek word planet, oh, to wander. Yeah. It has a different pattern. Yeah. Deviates. It's a deviant sky ruler. Deviant sky ruler that holds on as long as possible when the sun comes out. Yeah.

And so we need to re-import what we were talking about, which is these aren't really stars in biblical imagination. These are creatures, which are spiritual rulers. There's two rulers above. Heavenly rulers, God's counsel. Okay. So there's something going on here, which is we're talking about the King of Babylon,

and the biblical author is very comfortable calling the King of Babylon, what we would call. Yeah, a heavenly ruler. A heavenly being. Heavenly being. A deviant heavenly being. A deviant heavenly being. A rebellious heavenly being. Now remember, however, we have categories for this because the Cain story, in Genesis 4,

taught us that humans can become agents of the dragon, and you can talk about the dragon as its own agent, like in the Garden of Eden story. It's the snake whispering and talking But then in the cane story were taught that there's just a voice in cane's ear called sin Wants him wants to consume him an animal But he's called to rule it like the animals and he doesn't and so after that then we saw with Lemek and then Nimrod and then Pharaoh and then Sheishward we go after that, Sisra. And then Goliath.

And what was Goliath except one of these like champion warriors, right, who's making fun of the king of Babylon now. So humans can become agents of this cosmic chaos monster. That can be depicted as a sea monster, but also now here depicted in the language of a rebel star. And this brings us all the way back to membering in Genesis 1, the bonus creatures. Yeah, in the darkness, in Genesis 1 of the stars,

and the bonus creature in the seas of day 5 are the dragons. And as we're going to see right here in Isaiah, this is the star image, and then matching on the precise opposite end of this literary collection is the image of the dragon as well. So we start with the star. Okay. And once again, Isaiah is also drawing on a well-known set of mythological motifs at work about this actually the word Isaiah uses morning star son of the dawn. It's the phrase helel ben-shachar

morning stars helel son is ben and then shachar is Don. The word Don is an actual deity in Canaanite literature and mythology, the Sunrise. So that's how this collection begins, depicting the downfall of a rebel star. Let's turn to the opposite end of this collection in Isaiah at 24 through 27. Sometimes this collection is called the Isaiah apocalypse. It's a wild. It's such a cool literary unit. And it is riddled like packed, packed, packed with hyperlinks to Genesis 1 through 11. So it begins like Isaiah 13 talking about the first line. Look, the Lord is going to lay waste to the land and devastate it. He's going to ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants. Like Babylon.

Yeah. Verse 19, the earth or the land is broken up. The land is split, a thunder, just like in the flood. The land is shaken. The land reels like a drunk man. It sways like a hut in the wind because heavy upon it is the guilt of its rebellion so that it will fall never to rise again. Whoa. In that day, Yahweh will punish the powers in the heavens above, and the kings on the earth below.

You're like, oh yeah, I knew that. That's what Isaiah 13 and 14 was talking about. And it's connected. And their mirrors of each other. They will be herded together like prisoners bound in a dungeon. Shut in a prison, now we're talking about the underworld. Okay. The grave. But then punished after many days, the moon will be dismayed, the sun ashamed because Yahweh will reign as king on Mount Zion and Jerusalem.

And before its elders with great glory. And the moon and the sun are just two of the lights. Yeah, they won't be necessary anymore. So the glory of Yahweh is going to come, take up residence on the New Jerusalem mountain, and it will be so bright that the moon and the sun will just be outshown. Oh, is that what it means by dismay in ashamed?

Yeah, yeah. These images are picked up later in Isaiah. So in Isaiah 13, they were going dark just because of the great storm and collapse of the cosmos. Whereas here, they're just not necessary. But before we get to that, the rebel powers in the heavens above, any lights that don't want to participate, sort of powers in the heavens above, any lights that don't want to participate, sort of like the lights become unnecessary, and any lights that don't want to yield their

role to Yahweh, the ultimate light. Well, here Yahweh is going to put him in prison, as well as any kings who don't want to yield their power to the Cosmic King. So that scene is followed by another poem that's awesome. It's about how on this mountain, Yahweh is going to make this rich feast for all the peoples. A banquet of aged wine, the best meats, the finest wines. And on this mountain, he will destroy the shroud

that's unfolding all the peoples like a sheet covering all the nations. He will swallow up death forever. He will wipe away tears from all faces and remove his peoples' disgrace from the land. Death is thought of as some sort of covering. Yeah, like a sheet that's just blanketing all of us, blocking out the light, blocking out. Covered in death.

Yeah, yeah. God will destroy that. He'll swallow it. Swallow up death. Swallow it? Oh, he swallowed it. Yeah, yeah. It's reversing a common motif, because usually the grave is depicted as swallowing up everything. Oh, yeah. Whereas now it's...

Where the sea monster swallows up. Yeah, it's like the death of death. Yes, swallowing is a sea monster image. Yes, absolutely. So we have the land is going to be de-created, the rulers above and below that don't want to participate in the new creation will be dealt with, and then the new creation is depicted as a huge feast on top of a mountain, and Yahweh will swallow up the monster. Isaiah is taking all the stock imagery of the dragon's length myth, because normally it's the dragon that's threatening to swallow. But here, Yahweh is depicted as coming out to deal with the monster, talked about in the form of rebel stars and rebel human kings. And then usually in the dragon's length myth, the victor storm god ascends a great mountain

and throws a huge feast and builds palace to rule over the cosmos again. And here Yalway is doing that, but his victory over the snake in this poem is just called swallowing up death. So death is the monster. And if we have any doubts about what this all means, Isaiah 27 1 just comes along and puts a pin in it. In that day Yahweh will punish with his sword, his fierce great and powerful sword, the Leviathan, the gliding serpent, Leviathan, the coiling serpent, The gliding serpent, Leviathan, the coiling serpent, he'll slay the monster of the sea. It's a kaleidoscope of image. It is.

It is. And I still feel uncomfortable with all this shifting between, okay, we're talking about death. Oh no, we're talking about Leviathan. Oh, we're talking about rebel stars. Oh, we're talking about kings. Yeah, totally. Like, it's really disorienting for me. Yeah.

Because every shift, it's like, I feel like, okay, I want to understand why, what do we mean by servant? Oh, oh no, actually, we're talking about kings. Well, I know what that means, like a corrupt king. Okay, but now we're talking about rebel stars. I think I know what that means. And it's just like, I don't know. Yeah.

And then that feast where you always swallow up death is followed up later in the poem with this line as a 26 19, but your dead will live, their bodies will rise, those who dwell in the dust will wake up and shout for joy. Oh wow. So basically, let's just separate them in the opposites. You have the land that's full of armies that are rowing like a slud. Yeah. And they're all going to kill each other.

Yeah. And then the ruler of all rulers on earth, the king of Babylon, is going to descend to the grave and meet all of these other earthly rulers. But then you also learn later that that earthly set of kings, and especially the big bad one, is mapped on to a rebel heavenly being, who also presumed a greater status and role for themselves, and not just as an image of God, but as Elohim, I'll send up to the mountains. So they're also cast down. And in that realm of death, both the rebel heavenly beings and the rebel earthly beings are handed over to the ruin that they've unleashed

on God's world. Opposite of that is the high place, the mountain of Yahweh's glory and victory and reign, and there's a huge feast where the monster, the swallowed everybody that is death, is swallowed up in life and resurrection from the dead in a great feast forever and ever. And so all of these kaleidoscopes, images, but there's really just, there's a binary where you can see where all the things match with each other. You have Yahweh, His people, life on a mountain with a feast in the new creation and resurrection. We have the underworld and the sea and the dragon and the deviant star and the rebel kings who spread death and end up dying themselves. Yeah. But you're looking for what's the more precise relationship on? Well, not just the relationship. I think I get the relationship. I think what I'm wrestling with is what are we actually talking about?

So back to that question. Yeah. So, and let me pose it this way. Okay. I know death is real. Death is a very real thing. I'm kind of confident of that. I know that war and like kings of the earth

that use pride and arrogance and oppression and they can cause death. Yeah. A corporate form of death in ruin. Yeah. What happens to my body and mind on an individual level? It can happen to a whole culture, it can happen to civilization. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, okay.

So those are very real things. Now what you could say is now every other image after that is just a way to describe how the reality of human death, human corruption, human violence. So talking about either the dragon or the spiritual heavenly beings, they're not real, they're just a way to talk about. Oh, I see. Like something that is real, which is death and death. That's one possibility. That's one possibility. Yeah, would be. This is all what we would just call mythic language. Yeah, totally. And it's just helping us understand how to deal reality of human experience. That's right. It's just and all the imagery is a mental projection up into the heavens of just stuff that

we got to deal with. Yeah. That's one way. That's one way to think about it. However, it's not that simple, and at least in the way that the Bible thinks it actually thinks about a reality that's deeper or above or beneath. However, you want to think about it, that is actually very real. Yeah. In other words, if we want to sympathetically enter the imagination of these authors to see the world in their eyes, not just assimilate their way of talking to my way of seeing the world. Okay.

Or our cultural's way. If we want to sympathetically enter, they really want us to entertain that there's another dimension dimension of reality with creatures that are intelligent like us and that are being described in some way by these images. So, when we get into this category of then what's the powers underneath? The creatures underneath. We're saying it's real, but then when we encounter images of fallen stars or sea serpents or talking snakes or talking snakes or like a voice in his ear as it were. That these are ways for us to represent and try to understand real creatures using what we would

call mythic. Simbolic, yeah. And it's the word mythic is a hang up. Just remember myth means a symbolic narrative to talk about real realities in human experience. And because it's not trying to tell you exactly what it is, like it's the sea serpent, or it's not, that's the point isn't, that's what the creature exactly is. Oh, I understand.

In terms of reference, literal reference. Literal reference. It's more of a symbolic representation. Yeah. Because of that, these images become very flexible. And that's why you can be talking about the fallen star and then suddenly just be talking about death and then be talking about a C dragon.

Yeah. Because I start to get hung up and like, well, like, yeah, that's right. Yeah, we have here in the modern West, we have severely underdeveloped symbolic imaginations. In some ways, yes, in some ways, no. Like, we actually really do get it. But we have this hang up between, well, is it symbol or is it real? And I'm not sure that most humans for most of human history had that particular hang-up. At least as I, the longer I sit with this sample of ancient literature that is the Bible,

for them, the symbol is just a fine way of talking about the real thing. I don't need more than that. Okay. But I share, I say that empathetically with you because I share that distinct of like, but what's the real thing? Well, and I still care about what's the real thing in terms of what are all of these symbols meant for me to try to understand. And it's not that like if I go out into the Pacific Ocean here, I might encounter Leviathan.

Right, that's right. And I can actual thing. You would meet a creature as eventually. That would likely destroy you. Yeah, totally. And that would be sad. A whale might actually swallow me up. That's a possibility.

Yeah. So, but it's not preparing me for that. But it is preparing me for the fact that I will encounter chaos and destruction in such a way. In the moment, it might just look like the death of a friend. Or it might look like a tragic homicide down my street.

It might look like a warring nation against another warring nation. And. War north quick. War north quick. Oh man. Yeah, that's happening right now. And what I am, when I experience that, one way to think about that is the dragon.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the fact that we live outside of Eden, that is in a realm where we're constantly on the knife edge between life and death, chaos and order, and it's a live battle conflict as it were. And the biblical authors have no doubt about the ultimate outcome of the conflict that you're always going to hack the dragon's heads off. And that's different than how their ancient neighbors thought about that story.

But at the same time, it recognizes we are outside of Eden and we're dying out here. And it's actually a lot, we're a lot worse off than most of us think we are. And that's what these images are trying to name and help us begin to wrap our minds around, not to reconcile with it, but to understand there's a deeper dimension of reality at work than just what we see and experience. I think another thing that I'm realizing is my picture of what we would call cosmic evil or, you know, of fchaos and death, I think is too neat and simple. And even after we did that whole God series, you know, that like really went in deep into that topic, Dilph to me feels like I have maybe a caricature of like God and Satan or angels and demons and I don't have a rich enough kind of maybe perspective about spiritual evil or heavenly evil or whatever you want to call it to be able to then come in and think about the Sea Dragon, or think about capital D death

that God has to like destroy, swallow up. And yeah, I don't know, does that make any sense? Well, yeah, is it similar? Good, when I hear that, I'm thinking back to the comma, I made a few minutes ago to say I think most of us in the modern West have a really underdeveloped symbolic imagination for evil and death and chaos. And I think these symbols gave the biblical authors, and as we'll see in later conversations,

Jesus himself. These images provided a whole way of handling and thinking about how they encountered death and sickness and disease and evil and murder and greed. It was all like a bundle, bundled together for them. Whereas for us, we tend to separate natural evil and moral evil, sickness and mental illness and spiritual evil. These are all separated for many of us, and they weren't in this way viewing the world. They were all manifestations of something deeply wrong in an interconnected way.

And I think that's what the dragon's slang story provides. We're just going to keep working in different dragon tax in the Hebrew Bible. And my hope is that clarity about the interconnectedness of these images will emerge for both of us. Because we do have to, our job is to write an explainer video that explains this. So I'm eager for the clarity to emerge for myself as well. So, it's Dan Gummel, and I'm back with another employee introduction. And do you still want to introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Mike McDonald, and I have the privilege of working on a Bob Project team and get to do stuff with strategic relationships.

Yeah. So, what does that look like on a daily basis for you? Yeah, so this is basically all the relationships that we have with folks outside of our office that want to use or experience our content inside their ecosystem often. So it's people like you, version, and alpha, and crew, and young life, and great folks that are doing

really cool things that find our content helpful. And so I've built a lot of these relationships with these different organizations, with these different individuals, and find ways that we can serve them really well. So I was thinking about this morning, I was like, Mike is proof that people's skills is a real thing.

And I wanted to just ask you like how that awareness came about? Man, I don't know if it was caught, taught. Some of it, I got into the restaurant industry when I was 18 years old as a server, which is a great place to learn people skills. Being in the restaurant for me was where I learned so much of it, because there's problems every day.

There's conflict every day, internal, external. But I mean, you're just dealing with all different types of people. But then I just had really good mentors along the way that have brought me under their wing and they were all really good with people, too. I just want to ask one last thing. What would you want to say to our listeners? I mean, the first is just thank you.

It's first off, when you listen and you're a patron and you're a part of this whole thing, which is why we're allowed to do any of this stuff. The impact around the world, I was just in London, but there were folks from China, Uganda, Kenya, and all of them experiencing Bible project content where they didn't get to learn this stuff in school. It's changing their lives. And I always am so humbled when I'm listening to this going, like, hey, it's not, because I was like,

thank you, thank you, thank you, that I'm like, dude, but it is such an honor to get to travel and experience that. And as a team here, it is not lost on us that we get to do this. Like, this doesn't feel like a job in so many ways. So it's incredible. Dude, well, thanks for doing this. We read our credits.

That's the stuff in the bowl there. All right. Are you, will you weave this together if I don't get it? No, there's no editing. This is all wrong. This is all live. You're just gonna. All right. You've got 10,000 streaming right now. No big deal. Today's show came from our podcast team, including producer propelts and associate producer Lindsey Ponder.

Our lead team editor is Dan Gummel. Additional editors are Tyler Bailey and Frank Garza. Garza. Tyler Bailey also mixed this episode. And Hannah Wu did our annotations for the Bible Project app. Annotations, I don't use that word often. Bible Project is a crowd-funded, non-profit.

Everything we make is free because of your generous support. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us. We should go on the road with that one. Yeah. Thank you.