BibleProject - The Dragon-Like Behavior of Three Nations – Chaos Dragon E9

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

When Israel chooses to act like the chaos monster instead of living like the people of God, God brings judgment on them. How? He sends other bigger monsters after them, namely, Babylon and Egypt. In this episode, Tim and Jon discuss the scrolls of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and their focus on the dragon-like behavior of these three nations––as well as God’s promise to bring about justice for each and every dragon in the end.View more resources on our website →Timestamps Part one (00:00-12:26)Part two (12:26-26:07)Part three (26:07-38:12)Part four (38:12-47:19)Referenced ResourcesThe Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations: An Old Testament Myth, Its Origins, and Its Afterlives, Robert D. Miller IIInterested 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 from Leche Demos by Matthew Halbert-HowenShow 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 episode.

The Chaos Dragon is a symbol repeatedly employed by the authors of the Bible to talk about the spiritual evil that corrupts God's good creation. The dragon features in all three of the big prophetic scrolls that is Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Last week, we looked at the dragon in Isaiah, and this week, we turned to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. For both, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the same basic idea that we saw in Isaiah as a play.

The Yahweh is going to hand his covenant people over to the consequences of their centuries of faithfulness and hand them over to the power of Babylon. But God will hold Babylon itself accountable for its evils, even if it allowed Babylon's evil to be an agent of divine judgment. Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel lived through the Babylonian captivity, and at that point in history the only other nation powerful enough to rival Babylon was Egypt. So you can imagine that both Babylon and Egypt featured prominently in Jeremiah and Ezekiel's writings, and perhaps unsurprisingly at this, the prophets called them Chaos Dragons. Both the rise to power and their fall from power is just gonna bring disorder death and chaos.

Biblical authors use cosmic imagery to describe that. For modern readers, it feels strange to talk about a nation in such cosmic terms. And it also feels strange to talk about the collapse of a nation as the end of the world. So why do Biblical authors think this way? Well, they have this view of reality that there are forces at work, animating behind these human power structures that are also agents of death and chaos alongside these humans.

Today, Tim McE and I talk about the chaos dragon and the squirrels of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. I'm John Collins and you're listening to Bible Project Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Okay. Tim. John, hello.

Hello. Yeah. Man, this has been hard for me for some reason. This will theme the dragon, but very interesting. And we're just going to keep plowing forward through some of the ambiguity and discomfort and just kind of keep reading texts. And we're going to encounter the dragon in the Bible. But as we encountered the dragon or the sea serpent, it's also associated with other, I think the term we're just using is chaos creatures. And one other very important chaos creature in the Bible is the rebellious

host of heaven. Right? Yeah, the star is above. The rulers above. Yeah, we're the sons of Elohim's, how they're described in Genesis 6, verse 1. What I want to understand is the relationship between Leviathan and the realm of the Chaotic Sea, and the rebellious, most of heaven's, the creature of the sky. Are they just two ways of talking about the same thing? Or are they complementary ways of talking about a deep nuance that we need to really appreciate. Yeah, man, that's a great question, John. I think what you're asking that makes me realize, I have seen these two images of the de Deant Star rulers above and then the chaos creature in the waters below as associated and paired as they are in Genesis 1 in the literary design.

And therefore, it's kind of equated with each other in different ways of thinking about the same thing. Because the darkness is not God's creation. It's the opposite of creation. It's a pre-creation state. And so are the chaos waters. So I had to also merge those as two ways of thinking about the same thing. So you just have the chaotic nothingness. And then when God begins to separate out realms and orders,

there are creatures on the land, there are creatures in the sea, there are creatures on the land and creatures up in the sky. Yeah, okay. And the creatures up in the sky are not bad. And the creatures in the sea are not bad. But then, as you read on to the story of the Bible, there are deviant stars and there's deviant sea creatures. And their story lines begin to overlap more and more and be described in analogous ways. We saw that in our last conversation in Isaiah,

where a rebel king over the nations who wreaked like unimaginable violence in the ancient world is described as a rebel star. And then the downfall of all human empires that wreak havoc in the land is described as God's laying the dragon. And swallowing up death. And swallowing up death itself. Yeah.

Okay. So it's a true merging. I think maybe what's helpful is for me to think of it this way. And we talked at length about this in the God series. When I look up at the stars, I don't think of them as creatures. I just think of them as class maples. But that's a very modern literal way to think about them. A more ancient, what we might call mythic way of thinking about them is symbolic way. Symbolic way is of spiritual beings. And that doesn't mean that spiritual beings aren't real because those aren't really spiritual

beings. It's to say that it's a way for us to think about something that is very real. But with something symbolic that we can wrap our minds around and see, and that's the stars above. So you've got the modern conception of heaven, which is, you know, we're in a galaxy, a spiral galaxy with plasma balls. One of billions of these. Yeah.

Spinning at different scales, at unimaginable speeds. We're spinning like 100,000 miles an hour around the arms of this galaxy. Yeah, and the planet itself is moving. What, six miles? Around the sun, around the sun. Yeah.

Yeah, it's something really fast. It's so terrifying. Flowing space. We are it's something really fast. That's so terrifying. I'm really fast. Flying space. We are just cruising through empty space. At the same way, there's a modern way to think of the ocean, right? Which is like, I have a globe, we've named them, we haven't explored all the depths of the ocean.

I mean, it's pretty radical, but we have a way to understand it. But then there's the symbolic or mythic way to think of the ocean, which is it's about chaos and death and the nothingness that wants to come and take over the land. Yeah. The only modern equivalent I can think of is not even empty space beyond the earth, but rather the edges of the known universe into which it is expanding. Like what's beyond, you know, my son,

and his question, the universe is expanding. Oh, what's expanding into? Right, into nothingness. And whatever that is. Whatever that is. Would be our mental equivalent of what the chaos waters is. The chaos waters are. But what's brilliant about the chaos waters

is the nothingness is coming and crashing up into the land. Yeah, it's constantly threatening us. It's threatening us. Which speaks to our reality. That's right. Our felt reality. Yeah.

Of the dangers of death constantly threatening us. Okay. So chaos creatures, there is something very real, a force, an authority, a power that's cosmic, and these are two different ways to think about it. Stars above, the serpent and the sea. They get merged together, and then other images are employed to get us to think about it too, whether it be snakes or scorpions.

Yep, lions. Lions. And then eventually this all gets to, and the revelation, some like the great red dragon, if the sky with seven heads. That's paired up with another beast that somehow represents a human empire. Okay, we'll get there. Sorry, don't skip ahead. Yeah, so I think more and more I'm just appreciating this is a theme about the chaos creatures We can highlight the serpent. Yeah, but you can't stop there because it's not as simple as that

It's not the only one. It's you could say the most primary image Yeah, is it the most primary? Yeah, okay In other words, there aren't nearly as many biblical passages about a rebel star. Okay. You have Isaiah 13, and then star imagery is just more subtly related. You have the rebel powers of heaven that appear in Daniel and other Jewish apocalyptic literature. But somehow the dragon imagery just really took hold. And maybe it just speaks to the fact that it was just a

really popular symbolic story in the ancient world. It's a cool image. Way more widespread. And it's, yeah, it's vivid, vivid image. Again, I just referenced in our first conversation, or maybe no, maybe our second, the work of the scholar, Medaud Richie, who's done work on how many visual representations of the dragon slaying myth were around in the ancient world. And her surveys. The myth theme is out here. The myth theme. Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's Robert Miller's phrase. And it's very likely that people encountered a picture on letter seals, on decorative wall pictures, like many times in the course of their life.

It was a well-known story, whereas it seems like the rebel star story was way. And maybe that's because to really sit and study the patterns of the stars requires a lot of leisure time, very few people at the leisure to map it out. It's not as sticky of an image too. That's what I mean. As like a dragon. Yeah, that's where I'm going.

Okay. Yeah. Alright, well let's look at more dragon texts. Yeah. So the dragon features in all three of the big profits. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We talked about Isaiah in the last conversation. What I want to do is just look at some dragon imagery in Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Jeremiah and Ezekiel were contemporaries. They both lived in Jerusalem during its like last days as a city in terms of an independent kingdom. So this is in the late 600s and early 500s. Both of them lived through the Babylonian siege and invasion of Jerusalem, and they suffered different fates, though. Ezekiel was taken captive in the first invasion, Ezekiel was taken captive in the first invasion, taken off into exile in Babylon in 596, and then 10 years later, the Babylon came back and destroyed the city. And Jeremiah was there through all those invasions and then was actually kidnapped and taken to Egypt by a bunch of rebel Israelites who didn't want to live under Babylonian occupation.

So they both have very strong views of Babylon, as you might imagine. Also significant was that when Babylon was doing its thing, the only regional player that even had the possibility of standing up to Babylon was Egypt in the South. And so Egypt and Babylon like loom large in their poetry and in their writings. So what I want to look at is actually look at a poem from the end of Jeremiah that takes all of our seed dragon imagery in an interesting direction. And then I want to look at a Zekiel's depiction of Farrow King V-Jup, which also develops our C-dragon imagery in an interesting, kind of new way. So, for both, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the same basic idea that we saw in Isaiah is at play.

Yahweh is going to hand his covenant people over to the consequences of their centuries of faithfulness and hand them over to the power of Babylon. But God will hold Babylon itself accountable for its evils, even if it allowed Babylon's evil to be an agent of divine judgment on human evil. So the culmination of Jeremiah after announcing that Babylon is my servant that I'm going to use to bring judgment on the nations and Israel around them. The last poem is about the downfall of Babylon itself. So Jeremiah 50 and 51 are these really long poems about the downfall of Babylon. We don't have time to read them all.

I'm just going to pick up in chapter 51, verse 33. This is what Yahweh Almighty, the God of Israel, says, Dr. Babylon is like a threshing floor at the time when it is trampled. The time of her harvest will soon come. Threshing floor, trampling, anybody? I haven't done it. Yeah. This is where they bring in the wheat. Yeah, you could bring in wheat, in which case you would probably stumping on it might work, having your ox step all over it might work better. Having an ox grind it in a circular millstone

be like the most. And that's thrashing it. Yep, that's thrashing it. Trampoline is what you would do to grapes. Okay. Yeah. So, and it doesn't describe which is happening here. If it's a wheat harvest or a grape harvest,

the point is, is that it's getting thrashed and trampled. But why is it called the thrashing floor? It's the thing being thrashed. Oh, yeah, it's going to be a place where thrashing takes place. Babylon will be the place of the thrashing. Yep, okay. Time, yep. All right. Verse 34, the threshing. Yep, and time. Yep.

Verse 34, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, has devoured us. Yeah, he came to come out. He threw us into confusion. He made us like an empty jar. Like a dragon.

He swallowed us. He filled his stomach with our delicacies and then spewed us out. What's the word there for dragon? Toneen. That's Toneen. And NIVs just says dragon. Actually, I think that's my translation.

Okay. I think it might have said serpent. Let's say NIVs says like a serpent, he swallowed us. A serpent. So there's serpent meaning C dragon. Yeah. The Tannin. Yeah. Lexi-Menglish Bible has C monster.

New American standard has just monster. Swallowed me like a monster. Yeah. Yeah. But Tannin. So here it's he devoured us, swallowed us, ingested us, and then vomited us out. Is it like he didn't like us? Or is it like he got all the nutrients and then I don't know how the image works?

Or is that talking about capturing them and then sending them an exile? Yeah, yep, something like that. Therefore, this is what Yahweh says, I will defend your cause. I will avenge you, speaking to Jeremiah, representing the Israelites. I will dry up her sea. I will make her springs dry. So like the home of the sea dragon, yeah, itself will be dried up. Yeah. So we're tapping in here to the imagery of Yahweh, overcoming the waters, splitting them and drying them up to make the dry land. And as we're going to see, God's going to about to create a desert. This is interesting. Think about our chaos realms. This image is an interesting study in how those images relate. So Babylon will become a heap of ruins,

a haunt for jackals, object of horror and score and a place where nobody lives. Her people will roar like lions, they will growl like lion cubs. So now you're like, okay, so the sea is going to become a wilderness. A wilderness. The city will become a ruined heap where jackals live and no one lives, but then there are people there because they're roaring like lions. But while they are aroused,

I'll send a feast and make them drunk so that they shout with laughter and then sleep forever and never wake up. Okay. It's a meal of feast that makes them drunk and makes them all happy and party. And then they die. And then death. Then they die. Okay, that's what we're talking about. So the sea gets dried up

Okay, the city becomes a heap of ruins that feels like now a desert wasteland Jackals they're out there. Oh man. I was snow-showing with my kids up in Mount Hood national wilderness over the weekend And we were trying to make a little fire and it was winter here. Turns out it's very difficult to sustain a fire in the snow. And we're having a snowball fight. And then we just hear this sound, this unearthly sound. It sounded like dozens of little girls screaming at each other. And it happened in one, like from about 10 seconds. And then it stopped stopped and we were all

Jessica was there too. We're all staring each other like what? What was that? We weren't that far from like a ski area and then it happened again a closer and Roman's like are those wolves? And then just gonna be like oh Coyotes. Oh, they're coyotes. Coyotes, yeah. But there was, there was like a solid 10 seconds

where I was like, what is happening? It was so terrifying. Now, we weren't in a desert, but they're wilderness creatures. And so whenever jackals or hyenas are mentioned in the Bible, that's creatures of the night, or you probably don't see them if ever, but you hear them as these ghastly screaming creatures of the wilderness. That's what it means to become a haunt of jackals.

Objects of horror. Yeah. Anyhow. Also, lions. You have desert creatures, jackals and lions, because lions are a chaos creature, inhabitant of the night and the wilderness. Yeah, and then you have this imagery of like a feast and a party, but really you're just drinking yourself to death, to never wake up. Okay.

So all of a sudden, the dragon has become a desert. Yeah. And we have to remember, I think you talked about this, particularly in the song of songs, like biblical imagery. Hmm. It's important to onboard it, understand its essence, but if you're trying to create a complete picture. Oh, yeah, mental picture.

A mental picture. Yeah. I'm going from like a sea to a wilderness, they're a jackal, they're lions. Oh wait, now they're feasting. Yeah, totally. Like, yeah. And I'm trying to create a narrative that all works.

Yeah, yes. A visual storyline. A visual storyline? I want to think turns into an... And I need to just give that up and just think about, okay, how do all of these ideas, how do they compound on each other more? And I like symbolic.

Yeah, the symbolic meaning of each one and how do those meanings overlap? And all of a sudden, lions and jackals live in the wilderness, which is what the sea dries up and turns into. It's the opposite of a garden where you have great vines to drink wine and be happy. Instead, it's like an anti-garden where you have a party all right, but then you sleep in the dust of death and never wake up. That's good reminder. It's about how the

meaning of the symbols connect, not about how the visual symbols connect. Otherwise, it'll be chaos in your mind. You keep going. The sea will rise up over Babylon. The roaring raives will cover her. You're like, wait, I thought the sea just went away. But now it's back. It has a flood. Oh, it's a flood.

Yeah. Her towns will be desolate, a dry and desert land. This is such a good example. In the first sentence of the Bible, now the land was wild and waste, and darkness covered the surface of the deep waters. So which is it? Is it desert or is it? Desert wilderness?

Is it a fissimal waters? Yeah. Jeremiah 51, verse 42 and 43, describes Babylon as getting drowned in a flood and turning into a desert in the same moment, like in the same parallel lines. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Verse 44, I will punish Bell in Babylon. Bell is the Acadian version of the Hebrew word Bale. So it's the Babylonian way of referring to their storm god. So I'm going to punish Bael and Babylon and make him spew out what he has swallowed. Wait, wait, wait, wait, I thought Nebuchadnezzar swallowed us up.

No, it's actually the chief deity, the god of Babylon swallowed you up. So we're merging the rulers above and the rulers below. The nations will no longer stream to him. The wall of Babylon will fall. You get the idea. We could read on, but it's just the same imagery of merging rulers above and below, merging wilderness and the sea and desert creatures and sea monsters. They're coordinated.

I guess this is all the way of meditating on your question you asked earlier. How do these images relate of a rebel star or a sea dragon? Ruler's above and below. Another way to say that is the monster in the realm of the chaotic sea becoming the monster within us, right? Ah, I see. Thank you. What I meant a minute ago is that earlier in this poem, it said that Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon swallowed us up. Yeah. He's the dragon. But then later in this poem, God says, I'm going to punish Bell, the God of Babylon, and make him spew

out what he swallowed. And you're like, wait, who swallowed us, the God of Babylon, and make him spew out what he swallowed. And you're like, wait, who swallowed us, the God of Babylon, Bell, or Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon? Right. I guess what I'm, yeah, so what I'm saying is you can ask the same question, who swallowed us up, Nebuchadnezzar, or the C serpent? Exactly. Yep, that's right.

It's the same question. Mm-hmm. A is the same as B, and A is the same as C. A Nebuchadnezzar is both the dragon, and he is depicted, identified with the god of Babylon in some way. He did make a big statue to be bowed down to after all. Yeah. It would be bowed down to you after all. Yeah, so maybe this is it. The focus is on empathetically cultivating symbolic imagination that can use what feel to us like contradictory images to prefer to the same reality.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay, here's another. So let's get in a helicopter and fly over to Tel Aviv in Babylon not the modern Tel Aviv in Israel. Oh, the first Tel Aviv which was a Israelite refugee camp Mm-hmm outside of Babylon. Yep, that's where Ezekiel lived. That's where we meet Ezekiel in chapter one sitting by a irrigation canal at a refugee camp in Babylon. So Ezekiel writes a lot of poetry about Babylon, about the same people and the same time frame. And specifically, he really has it out for

Egypt. Because again, Egypt tried to pose itself as a rival power to Babylon. And so in two poems in particular, he's gonna... He's in Babylon, but he's all bent out of shape about Egypt. Yeah. Shouldn't he be more frustrated with Babylon? Yeah, interesting. There's less of an anti-Babalone emphasis than Ezekiel. It's pretty strong in Jeremiah, especially near the end,

but less so in Ezekiel. Ezekiel is more betting out of shape throughout Egypt. But Jeremiah is too. Because Egypt was trying to lure Israelites into alliance with them to rebel against Babylon. So what I want to focus on, we've already read a couple times in the series from Ezekiel 29, where Ezekiel describes Pharaoh as the sea monster. So I just want to read it quickly.

What I want to read more is thezekiel 29. Verse 3 reads, Thus says the Lord, Look, I am against you, Pharaoh, King of Egypt, The Great Seamonster, the Tannin. The one lying down in the midst of his Nile streams. So what's interesting here, the twist, is that the Chaos Waters are the Nile River, which were viewed as a God in Egyptian religion, the River Nile, because it's a divine source of life from the gods.

And here, some people think that Ezekiel has a mind like crocodiles, which is possible. And they figured in the Egyptian imagination in a big way, because they were big monstrous creatures, you know, down by the river. But the Tannin that we know from the larger Hebrew Bible is like Waymore. It's like crocodile on mutant version. Because look at what this crocodile says, the so-called crocodile. He lies down in the midst of the Nile streams,

and who says to me, that is to me, God, The Nile is mine. I made it for myself. Listen, I'm going to put hooks in your jawbones and make the fish of the Nile stick to your scales, as I bring you up from the Nile, and I fling you into the desert, where the fish of the Nile will stick. Oh, yeah, you and the fish of your Nile streams. On the surface, you'll fall, you'll not be gathered, you won't be assembled into the animals of the field and the birds of the skies. I will give you as food." Well, interestingly, that is exactly what David said to Goliath. I will give your body and the dead bodies of the army of the Philistines to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the land.

So that's Ezekiel 29. He compares Farrell King of Egypt to the Simons' Star. The book of Exodus did that. Back in the Exodus story, this is a new Farrell, but much later on. Okay. But in Ezekiel 32, a few chapters later, he takes, wow, that's so interesting. All this is read at verse two of chapter 32. God says, Ezekiel, raise a lament over Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and say to him,

with a fierce and strong lion among the nations, you have compared yourself. That's a Yoda way of talking. You have compared yourself with a fierce strong lion among the nations. You think you're a lion. But what you really are is like a monster, a tannine in the seas, thrashing about in your rivers, making the water muddy with your feet, making the rivers turbid, stirred up, silty. So wait, you're like, wait, is this a lion? Where is this a dragon? It's really fascinating.

So what is unclear in the poem to follow is whether this is describing the capture of a lion or the capture of the sea dragon. So I will spread my net over you. It would be a really effective way to catch a lion because you don't have to go near it. If you want to like thrust it through as a spear, you got to get close to the thing. In the assembly of all the peoples, and I will bring you up in my now the Lexum English Bible has my dragnet. This is like a fishing net. Which is a fishing net.

Yeah. So here, let's look up this Hebrew word here. Because there are lots of different words for net, at least a few different words for net, and whether or not it means an actual fisherman's net may not be totally clear. In Ezekiel 26, it's a C net, and it's a Habakkuk, it's a C net, mm, but in Ezekleciastes, it's not necessarily a C net.

In Proverbs chapter one, oh, it's a net that catches birds. And in Micah, it's a net that catches people. What's the word? Cherem. Cherem. So the first net in verse 3 is a rachet, and then the next net is in different English translations, it's not translated dragnet, fishnet. So again, I'm kind of posing this as playing with the images.

Are we catching a lion or are we catching a sea creature? So we have a net catching here. Depending on your translation, it might make you think that it's a fishnet, but both words can be used to describe catching lots of different kinds of creatures. Verse four, I will leave you on the land and cast you out into the field. That is the wilderness. And I will call the birds of heaven to dwell on you and satisfy the beasts of the land

with you. I'll lay your flesh on the mountains and fill the valleys with your refuse. I guess like after cleaning it or something like that. The land will drink your blood as far as the mountains, the ravines will be full of you. Think about the cane and able story. So what cane did the able? Billing is blood. Billing is blood. But now here's Yahweh confronting the chaos creature and bringing life to the land with its blood. When I extinguish you, I will cover the skies and darken their stars. I'll cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon will not give its light.

All the lights in the skies all darken and set darkness on your land. Well, that took a turn. What a bomb. Yeah. How you doing? I feel really lost. So, okay, he's a Egypt is a lion. You thought you were a lion. You thought you were a lion. You say you're like a lion. but you're just like a seam monster You're thrashing about in your rivers Okay, so I'm gonna catch you with a net I'm gonna throw you on the ground And this is a common image now of like his body becoming the feast for the animals This is a very common motif in the dragon's Lang

This is what David said of Goliath too That's what David said of Goliath, yep and It's the way David said of Goliath too. That's what David said of Goliath. Yep. And then there's this imagery of like it's body being thrown on the mountain while it's like inside being thrown into the valley and it's blood like filling the land which is connecting us this idea of the violence of cane.

Yeah. What you did to others is filling's billing their blood in the land. Through your Egyptian armies, storming around doing their thing. Now, what you've done to others will be done to you. Okay. So that's a lot. But then all of a sudden we shift, and now we're going to talk about the stars. Yeah.

Exactly. And here we are again. Here we are again. So I thought I was talking about some chaos creature that's being destroyed. That's enough for me to try to wrap my mind around and meditate on. And that somehow Egypt is the king of Egypt is this chaos serpent being flayed out onto the land and as a feast. But now all of a sudden I need to start thinking about the stars.

And what's happening in the sky, when then he says, I will cover you at the extinguishing of your heavens. So now it's the stars. It's the sky. It's the Egypt is. Yeah, let's see. The capturing of the Sea Dragon, Pharaoh's going to meet his doom. That's on the literal level. He's anticipating, Hey, you Pharaoh, you're, you're revealing its Babylon and you're trying to get God's covenant people to get on your side. No, man, you're headed for a downfall.

You think you're like a strong lion in reality. Here's what you are. You're an agent of death and chaos in the land. You're like cane. You've been murdering your brothers. In the name of whatever deity or cause that you think you need to kill other people for. And so I'm going to treat you the way you've been treating others.

I'm going to catch you in that toss you into the field. And your body, like translating the ruins of Egypt will become plunder and benefit for the nations. So I'm trying to translate the image here. Cool. So now we get to verse seven. Yeah. This sentence doesn't, it's hard to understand. I will cover you at, this is your translation. I will cover you at extinguishing

your heavens. Yeah, let's go to verse seven. When I extinguish you, when I put out you, yeah, I mean, you're like a light. Yeah, you're like a light. Metaphor shift. When I extinguish you, I will cover the heavens and darken the stars. So I'm putting you out to rest. We just saw experience that. Let's think of that as like taking your light out. Mm-hmm. And at the same time, I'm covering the heavens and darkening the stars.

Yeah, which is a cosmic de-creation image. Mm-hmm. And the sun is gonna get covered, the moon's gonna be covered. And we talked about this already. The lights represent the power and authority of the heavenly creatures being able to display God's rule and God's light. And so for them to go out is it's a reversal of the creation order.

Because they represent God's order of seasons and time. That's right. Yeah, so biblical poets and the prophets used symbolic, de-creation imagery to talk about the cosmic significance of what today we would read a newspaper headlines of like the downfall of a some leader or governor and both their rise to power and their fall from power is just gonna bring disorder death in chaos and the biblical

authors use cosmic imagery to describe that. Why? What do they do that? Well, they have this view of reality that there are forces at work animating behind these human power structures that are also agents of death and chaos alongside these humans. And that's just how they see the world. And so they use this imagery of what we would think of as the end of the world, to describe the end of Pharaoh's world. And the downfall of another agent of the dragon.

Why is darkening the stars the end of the world? Oh, because the stars, the sun and the moon are all programmed to run in their courses to separate day from night, which is one of the fundamental structures of order in the world. So the biblical author is imagining it. So if you put the lights out, then there's no more lights coming on. It's just darkness.

Hmm. I will darken over you. Hmm. That's what, okay. All the shining lights in the skies, I will darken over you. That's what, okay. All the shining lights in the skies, I will darken over you. I will set darkness in your land. We're going back to day one of creation and just saying... That let there be light is gone.

Yeah, day one and four of creation. We're God's light and then setting the lights in the sky. Okay. We're just peeling all that back. So, in one sense, it's de-creation. And in other sense, we are talking about this alliance between human evil and the rebellious heavenly evil. Yep. Right?

Yes, that's right. And that is, it's implicit here in describing these human rulers in the language of these cosmic chaos creatures. And over time, in the Hebrew Bible, those cosmic chaos creatures will begin to be described in other ways that when we meet it in the New Testament, we'll be like Paul in Ephesians 2. We'll say, hey, you all, non-Israelites, discreaks and Romans, live in an Ephesus, you used to be dead in your transgressions and your sins, in which you formally walked according to the course

of this age, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit. Power of the air. Yeah. The prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is working in those who are disobedient. And listen, we were all formally living that way. A power and a spirit.

Yep. Spirit and a spirit. Yep. Spirit and a power that's the prince of the air. So, that language from Paul is the result of lots of meditation on the meaning of these chaos creature images in the Hebrew Bible. And by spirits, you kind of went out of your way to talk about these, their creatures. They have bodies, but they're different, fundamentally different bodies. And so when I think of spirit, I think of disembodied.

Yeah. No, that's a, that's a hang up we have. Okay. That spirit and whatever we think of spirit is the opposite of embodied, but that's the opposite of how most people in the ancient world imagined it. They imagined spirit as just a different body. Different type of body.

And that body is actually more real than our bodies. Because we just have bodies made of dirt. They have bodies made of like God stuff, divine stuff. Light. Yeah. Okay. We. Mm-hmm. Okay. We're not there yet. We're not there yet. That's okay.

It's all right. But we're at another stopping point. Yeah. The Bible is, okay, it's hard to read. Mm-hmm. Guess it is, John. It's not easy to read. Because we're wrestling with not just trying to

sympathetically think about chaos creatures and chaos realms, but we're talking about also how the Bible uses apocalyptic, like symbolism of the stars going out, de-creation, which isn't merely like the end of the world as we might think of it, but also is the end of just a king's reign. Yes, that's right. Yeah. And it all hurts my brain. Yeah, maybe it's cross-cultural communication.

This is cross-cultural communication. Yeah, this hurts my brain. Yeah, and the similar way is like trying to reach Shakespeare in junior high. It's like, I don't, it's too hard. Yeah. It's just this is such a different way of seeing the world than what I'm accustomed to. I'm, yeah, I'm with you.

It takes a lot of work. Communication takes a lot of work in that is essentially what works. I'm just trying to understand the communication of people from a long, long time ago. Yeah. But if I'm a disciple of Jesus, I believe that what, those people communicated is something that God wants His people of all times to hear.

And so that it's worth the work, apparently. Mm-hmm. Because there's dragons out there, and they want us. Well, that is the thing that I think we are comfortable in, I think this comes across in our horror movies. Oh, yes. Yes, like they are our cultural equivalent of telling the dragon's language.

And we get it. Yeah. You watch it and you're just horrified, but kind the dragon slings. Yeah. And we get it. Yeah. You watch it and you're just like, just horrified, but kind of like captivated, but then disgusted, and it's putting you in contact with something. Yeah, it's really primal. Primal and stuff to the human experience. And a poem about taking a dragon up and

Flaying its body and flinging it and filling ravines with blood. It's the ancient equivalent of like Yeah, yeah, yeah Okay, but it's all pointing to something. This is not an exercise of Something to something is not an exercise of pure poetry, pure imagination. The Bible wants us to encounter something very real and meditate on and make us wise. Yeah. Wisdom literature. Wisdom.

So that when we look out and we see individuals, communities, or nations with a flagrant disregard for human life, swallowing up people, resulting in disorder, de-creation of communities, they want us to see that it's not just stupid humans, that there's something even more sinister that would drive somebody to think that doing that is good in the name of some bigger cause. And they want us to trust that that force that seems to drive every generation of human family into self-ruin.

The power of the air, the prince of the power of the air, that it's real, that it has destructive agency and that it's real, that it has destructive agency, and that it's day is our number. And that's what it means also, to live in the biblical story and to have that as your imagination. And that's a different way of viewing reality than the ancient Israelites' neighbors had. And it's the seedbed of hope. Or in Isaiah and the New Testament,

we call the hope of new creation. Okay, well let's stop here. We're gonna look at one more. Yeah, Jonah. Jonah, we're gonna look at Jonah. Yeah, he gets swallowed. He gets swallowed by a seed beast. By a whale.

By a huge fish. Okay. That changes genders in the story. Oh, what? Okay. Yeah. Oh, that's a good little hook. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Thanks for listening to this episode of Bible Project Podcast. Next week, we move on to the scroll of Jonah, a rebellious prophet who gets swallowed up by a sea monster. If the sea dragon represents the disorder of creation itself, then even the undoing of creation can become a place where God's purposes are carried through to their next step. The sea dragon fish belly becomes a womb out of which is born a whole new Jonah who then

goes on to do the will of God. This episode was brought to you by our podcast team, producer Cooper Peltz, associate producer Lindsay Ponder, lead editor Dan Gummel, Tyler Bailey also mixed this episode, Grace Vang edited the transcripts for this episode, and Hannah Wu provided the annotations for our annotated podcast in our app. All of the music breaks for this series were written and composed by Bible Project staff. Bible Project is a crowdfunded nonprofit and we exist to experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. And everything that we make is free because of the generous support of thousands of people

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My favorite thing about Bible Project is their dedication to spreading the word of God through their free resources. The podcasts have really taught me the importance of grounding scripture passages firmly into the context in which they were written before trying to analyze what the passage means to me in the 21st century, and I am really enjoying it. We believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. We're a crowdfunded project by people like me. Find free videos, study notes, podcasts, classes, and more at BibleProject.com. you