Doamurder, West Virginia (Transcript)

Chris Sims: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The Book of Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 1.

[Music]

C: Hello, friends and neighbors, and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two nonbelievers sit down and read the Bible, and we try not to be jerks about it. We are your heavenly hosts, the Sons of Thunder. My name is Chris Sims. With me as always is Benito Cereno. Benito, how are you on this fine afternoon?

Benito Cereno: Oh, pretty good. Very good, Chris. How are you doing, man?

C: I'm doing well. I'm very confused, but I'm doing well.

B: Yeah, so we've got another big project in front of us. We're hitting one of the big ones, both in terms of length and importance. We're doing the Book of Genesis this week, and then for a couple more weeks after that, decided to go ahead and break this one up.

C: Yeah, God willing, this will be a three-part series on the Book of Genesis.

B: And not more. And then technically an epilogue episode as well, where we're finally going to get a guest on the show. It's really a four-part series on Genesis, but only three of it will be actually looking at specific bits of the book. But yeah, so pretty big one. A lot of stuff to cover. Fortunately, we kind of broke it down into hopefully easily digestible chunks. Although, yeah, Chris, you seem to have some confusion, so maybe we can clear some of that up in case any of the listeners have the same kind of confusion. Do you have anything else you need to talk about before we get started? Because I do.

C: I would love to get some of this cleared up. But yes, we are going to be doing the first eleven chapters of Genesis. So basically, today we're doing Adam and Noah, right? We're doing everything up to Abraham.

B: Right. This section of the book is known as the Primeval History section, and the remainder is known as the Patriarchal History, because it focuses on the patriarchs. So we'll be looking at those in two chunks in the next episodes. But yeah, today we're looking at the part that's called the Primeval History, the first eleven chapters.

C: But before we do that, it's time for us to step in. We're going to close the door, we're going to sit down, and we are going to enter the Correctional Confessional. Bless us, listeners, for we have sinned.

B: It's true. So we had a bit of fun with our little birthday episode, our little special episode. We dipped into the Middle Ages a little bit, Jacobus, our boy, and we read about a werewolf, we read about a zombie killer. Then on Monday morning, I put in my monocle, took a big old sip of water, and I said, I sure hope there's not a million corrections in my email, DMs, Tumblr inbox, and texts. And wouldn't you know what happened to my monocle and that mouthful of water. It was bad. So we've got a few things we need to address from last week's episode. The first one is one I knew was going to come, because it's a correction to me making an intentionally broad, sweeping, generalized statement that I knew was not true. So this is the easy one to confess to. It's no problem, because it was a joke. But in case we need to clarify it, yes, of course, in the United States, there are some churches called Saint something Baptist Church. Someone even found me one in St. Augustine. It was the St. Mary's Baptist Church in St. Augustine. So that was-

C: But it was not called St. Augustine Baptist Church. I do want to point that out.

B: To be fair, to us, that's true. But man, the thing is, there are so many churches just in America, just in the American South, just in Florida, just in Northeast Florida. There are so many churches that, of course, you're going to find a Saint something Baptist Church. There are so many different branches of the Baptist denomination. There's not even just one type of Baptist church you're going to get that someone would be more open to the idea of a Saint something than something else. So that one was an intentionally broad statement that I was making. But of course, someone's going to go like, hmm, according to this spectral analysis of your voice from episode 15, I find that there's no hint of joke when you say that, but I'll take that risk. Anyway, because there's so many churches, if you look, someone's going to find a "Doamurder Church of Christ" somewhere. It's out there.

C: We've also said that none of the churches translate Calvary and refer to themselves as Skull Mountain Baptist Church. Nobody's found that one yet.

B: Yeah. Let us know when you-

C: I've even brightened up my day considerably.

B: Yeah. Let us know when you find Skull Mountain Baptist Church. Anyway, so that one, not a big deal, but I did want to clarify. Yes, of course, I know that there must be Saint something Baptist Church somewhere. I was making a general statement to get an idea across whatever. It's fine. But yeah, let me know if you find Skull Mountain. Let me know if you find "Doamurder Church of Christ." It's probably the, it's the main church on Main Street in "Doamurder, West Virginia," I guess, probably.

But a second one, number two, the one I got the most notes on incorrectly. So, although I didn't think it was correct at first was people writing and concerning our talk about St. Christopher. A lot of people came to me and said, St. Christopher was never decanonized. He was never made, not a Saint. He was just removed from the universal calendar. He's still venerated locally. And my response to that was, are those not literally the exact words that I said on the show? Like I thought I said exactly that thing. And then somebody, thank you, typed up a transcript of the episode, which is very solid dedication to an "um, actually." So I'm, I'm actually very impressed and I can see it's very unclear. Also, I can see how often I say the word, "um," so thank you for that. Um...

C: Brother, brother, you know, I cut out 80% of them.

B: I know. Thanks for blowing up that spot anyway. Yes. So to be clear, St. Christopher was never unsainted. He's just not on the universal calendar. He is still venerated locally. I want to be just dead clear about that. And in a related thing, because someone asked about that, Wilgefortis was never on the official universal calendar. She was, however, very broadly venerated locally across very much of Europe under names such as Wilgefortis, Uncumber, Kümmernis, Liberata and others. She had her own feast day and all that kind of stuff. But my point of bringing her up was that her cult was actively suppressed by the church in the same reformatory wave that led to the removal of St. Christopher from the universal calendar. That was the point there.

C: I feel like I should take partial responsibility for this because I am the one who said decanonized.

B: Right.

C: But also I'm the one who doesn't know things.

B: Yeah. You're the clown. I'm the Bible school guy. So it's my responsibility to make those corrections. So in terms of like quantity of people sending me notes, that was the biggest one. But the one in terms of like quality of wrongness, like the one I was absolutely the most wrong about. Yeah...

So I was completely wrong about Goths being Arians. And I mean, like, Ostrogoths and Visigoths being followers of Arianism, not the fact that Mall Goths are primarily white, which is also true. But I only got this one from a couple of people. But let me just let me just read what I got from friend of the show, Ben Rowe, co-host of Scream Scene Podcast. Go check it out. We're getting close to Halloween times. You should go. He's getting back into the 1940s revival of horror movies. So if you want to hear about Son of Frankenstein and the Wolfman coming up pretty soon, go check out that show. Let me just read you what he sent me.

So: "I would argue it's not so out of line that an Ostrogoths would be an Arian. Odoacer was Arian in the 490s. The Lombards were Arians until the 600s and the Visigoths were Arians until like 581. The Ostrogoths in the story may not have understood the theological underpinnings of Arianism, but then how many modern Christians understand the distinction between, say, Lutherans and Calvinists or Episcopalians and Anglicans or Catholics and Orthodoxes, etc.?" If you do know those differences, don't tell us. That is a rhetorical question.

OK, continuing: "The Goths being a Germanic people, it wasn't totally out of line for you to assume they were pagans, but they were mostly all converted to Arianism in the fourth century at the height of the Arian controversy. The Cappadocian missionary who converted the Goths did so by translating the Bible into the Gothic tongue, and that missionary was an Arian, so there went the whole society more or less when it converted. It was a pretty easy heresy to fall into since 'did the father create the son,' is practically the epitome of a trick question. So you can see why for a time, Arianism was actually the majority belief, which comes back to my theme of official doctrine versus local practice." So there's a smart thing I said. Thank goodness.

"The Goths wanted to be seen as the Roman successor state, and they associated Roman society with Christian belief. So conversion happened pretty easily because the Gothic kings were eager to portray themselves as civilized once they conquered Europe. In Italy, Arian Christianity was even more commonly referred to as Gothic Christianity because most Arians that an Italian would meet would be Goths. The Gothic kingdom switched over to Nicene belief after the Third Council of Toledo in 489, and so approximately 30 years after Benedict and Totilla. But what finally got rid of Arianism wasn't so much edicts and councils as it was brutal religious warfare among the Gothic kingdoms and Roman splinter states during the early Dark Ages that basically lasted until all the major Arian populations were converted or dead." There we go.

So I was completely wrong about that one, 100% wrong, and that one feels really bad because that is a geographical space and a historical time that allegedly I know some things about. And so that was a heck of a goofin' goof heck right there on my part. So uh...

C: You hecked up that one, buddy.

B: I hecked it to goofenstein. So yeah, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, pater noster qui est in caelis sanctificator, nomentuum adveniat regnum tuum, ave Maria, gratia plena benedicta tuum, benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus, amen, amen, amen. My bad.

C: Really wish I knew what any of that meant. I do know, however, that as we have learned from Paul's letter to the Romans, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

B: It's true. Also, this is just a podcast of two goofs doing goofs. So keep that in mind.

C: Yeah. I mean, look, look, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, and we do try.

B: No, we absolutely have a responsibility because religion is a very important thing to some people and in fact is the most important thing to a lot of people. And so it is actually very important for us to do our best not to make mistakes. And that's why I feel a great deal of anxiety about doing this show sometimes, including when we do say, oh, I don't know, the foundational text of at least three major world religions. Thank goodness we're not doing that today. Right, Chris? What are we doing today? Answer as I take a big sip of water.

C: We're going to be doing the book of Genesis.

B: What? Okay. That was my very good spit take.

C: The one that more people are going to know front to back than knew about the gospels, which we also got yelled at about. But we're here and we're going to have some fun with it, which is good because I have a lot of questions. Before we get into Genesis, though, I have a question for you, Benito.

B: Yeah. Okay.

C: What is your favorite non Genesis creation story?

B: Ooh, well, gosh, there's so many. Obviously my training is in Greco Roman stuff. So, you know, the Greco Roman version of creation from the Theogony by Hesiod is a good one that I always hold on to. I've got, it's fresh in my mind because Joel Pretty, who is an excellent cartoonist that I did a comic called The Mummy Sabbatical with. You can find that online rocketmummy.com, by the way. I'm going to check that out. It's incomplete, but you can check it out. He's actually doing a graphic novel based on the works of Hesiod and he did an absolutely stunningly beautiful job adapting the creation of the world and the generations therein and the birth of the gods so well that that's one that always sticks in my mind. And of course, that's biased because that's what my training is. And what about you, Chris?

C: Mine, absolutely: Norse mythology where there's a cow that licks some gods into being and then Bor son of Buri kills a giant and makes clouds out of its brains and the oceans out of its blood.

B: Sure. I should have seen that coming actually in retrospect.

C: Because, because there is never an explanation of where the cow comes from. It's just, there's a big old cow licking at some ice and the ice turns into dudes.

B: Yeah. I think that's, that's an issue with a lot of creation stories is like the premise is there wasn't anything. And then there was this thing that things came from and that this particular creation story is not an exception to that. And I'm sure we'll get into some of those bits in a second.

Do we want to do an introduction? The good, good book of Genesis. Okay. So Genesis of course is the Greek name. We get it from the Septuagint is the traditional origin of that name. The word Genesis means basically what it means in English, which is a creation, the beginning, of anything because this is a root that exists in both Latin and Greek. If you see an English word that's got a G E N in there, very good chance that it has something to do with being born or coming into being. So generate generations, regenerate, Genesis, of course, genus, genetics, gene, even the G N in the word pregnant, right? If you're pregnant, you are pre-gnats, you are pre-giving birth. So, if you see that G E N, there's a good chance that it has something to do with creation or giving birth or coming into being. And, Genesis is no exception. And that's what that means. Of course the original name for it is not Greek. The original name for it is Hebrew. And the Hebrew name is Bereshit, which just means "in the beginning" — it's the first word of the book. And so it's the name of the book.

And Genesis is of course the first book of what in Hebrew is known as the Torah or the books of law. Or if we want to use the Greek term, it's the first of the Pentateuch, which means the five volumes, the five scrolls, the five books. However you want to think about it, it's actually probably a little bit more accurate, not to think of the Torah as being a five books, but rather five fifths of one document. Because it's a continuing story starting with the creation of the world and ending, well, not with the fulfillment of God's covenant and the arrival of the people into the promised land, like you might expect, but it does end with the death of Moses. So we've got the creation of the world through the death of Moses with the people on the brink of going into the promised land.

And so yeah, the Torah, as we talked about, just means the law because the books of law — it's where Moses and Mosaic law, that is the law of Moses — where that all comes from. So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus numbers and Deuteronomy are the five fifths of the Torah. And you know, if you're following the traditional view that's held by many Jewish people, many Christians, it's very easy to answer the question, who wrote the Torah? 'Cause the answer is: Moses. You just say Moses wrote the Torah. God dictated it to him on the mountain. He wrote it down. Except of course, some people say the bit about Moses dying is not by Moses. The traditional answer to that is usually that Moses's successor, Joshua, was the one to write the end of Deuteronomy with the death of Moses in it. So...

C: That would be a bit of a bummer to be up there on the mountain getting that from God.

B: And God is like, okay, now this is not going to be the easiest thing to hear Moses, but this chapter is the one where you die. Also, I'm going to get real mad at you about some water in a minute, but don't worry about that and also do it anyway or else the book won't be true. So yeah, anyway, the traditional view, very simple. Moses wrote the Torah. Moses also wrote the book of Job according to tradition. We'll get to that later.

The historical answer to this question is somewhat more difficult. And so if you guys enjoyed our discussion of the synoptic problem, buckle in, 'cause here comes the documentary hypothesis. So the documentary hypothesis is the primarily accepted understanding of the composition of the Torah. Certainly through the 20th century, it's a little bit less universally accepted than it was up until, you know, the eighties or nineties, but it's still the main one. It's the one we're going to talk about 'cause we don't have time to dip into all the different theories, just like we didn't have time to dip into all the theories of the synoptic problem. But the documentary hypothesis is called that because the idea is the Torah is actually composed. It's not one composed work where someone like Moses sat down and wrote it from front to back, but rather it's composed of disparate, discrete documents that were brought together by either an editor or a series of editors that are usually known as redactors. And if you're talking about them in an academic context. So you've either have a redactor or multiple redactors who basically sewed these different traditions together.

The two main oppositional ideas to the documentary hypothesis are called the supplementary hypothesis and the fragmentary hypothesis, which are still basically the same idea, just a matter of degrees. The idea of the supplementary hypothesis is that there's one main text that was supplemented by other documents. And then the fragmentary one is that it's just a bunch of fragments that were all sewn together by a redactor. So there's still basically no academic person, no biblical scholar believes that the Torah is a single work of a single person. And so it's just a matter of degrees. The question is how many sources are there? How are they put together? When were they put together?

The general idea on the timing again, since these are multiple documents, they are going to originate in different times, but roughly the idea is they would have been assembled, put together during the Achaemenid empire. That's the first Persian empire. That's our boy Cyrus the Great, right? So during the, basically the second temple era or leading up to it, the point where the Jewish people were brought back from Babylon and restored to Jerusalem, they rebuilt the temple. And so that begins second temple Judaism. That era is roughly the time in which much of the Torah would have been composed. Although Deuteronomy — although we consider it to be the fifth or the last book of the Torah — was probably the earliest composed reaching back as far as the Assyrian exile of the Northern kingdom, which came a couple of centuries earlier. We talked about that in our Isaiah episode.

Why why was the Torah composed? One of the more interesting theories right now is the idea that once the Persians reinstated the people of Judah into their home, they said, you guys can be self-sufficient and relatively autonomous, but we need to see that you have a set of laws and we need to see what those are. And so they go, "you need a book of law, you say, well, let's put one together." And so that's the main theory right now as to why the Torah was either composed of oral traditions, preexisting documents or whatever. Basically, why was the Torah redacted, put together into the work that we more or less have now. That's the theory. Why is that? It was a proof of concept of Jewish law for the Persians who were both their benefactors, but also their overlords in a way. Right? So in the most commonly accepted and the longest running version of the documentary hypothesis, again, not universal, just like the two source theory is not universal for the gospels — the synoptic gospels. This version is not the universal understood, but it is one of the main ones. And it is, if you do look up documentary hypothesis, this is likely what you're going to read about.

And the main version of the documentary hypothesis, there are four sources that are called by different names and also they get abbreviations because of course they do. So, the abbreviations are J, E, P and D. The J stands for the Yahwist source, which in English, of course we spell that with a Y but this as with much theological scholarship originated in Germany and they spell Yahweh with a J. So the Yahwist source is called J. If you want to think about this way, think of it as the Jehovist source, right? Jehovah is just another understanding of the name Yahweh anyway. So if you want to think of it as the Jehovist source, and that's why it's J, that works. E is the Elohist source, E L O H I S T the Elohist source. P is the priestly source and D is the Deuteronomic source or the Deuteronomist. How did we come up with this idea? Well, Chris, probably while you were reading, one of the things you might have noticed even in these first 11 chapters is the tendency of these stories to repeat themselves.

C: Yeah.

B: And often when they repeat themselves, they're different the second time. Some, some detail is different.

C: Uh, yeah. Like for instance, Adam's name.

B: Sure. But yeah, when you do that, you can start to find seams. The obvious one is looking for what we call doublets. And we talked about doublets when we did the gospel, right? Going from the feeding of the 5,000 to the feeding of the 4,000. That's a doublet. It's a repetition of a, of a theme or a concept with minor differences. So it seems clear that the redactor of the Torah was pulling from these different sources and was very interested in preserving as much as possible. And so didn't want to cut things. And so as a result, we get repeating stories of the creation. We get repeating stories of Noah and the Ark. We get two versions of the lineage of Seth. We get two versions of the lineage of Shem. Those are just a couple of ones that we're going to get in the first 11 chapters.

And so by doing verse by verse analysis, they're able to find the seams, not just in repetition, but also in terms of themes and vocabulary, writing style, and those kinds of things help them to figure out where the seams are. And I think even just as, as casual readers, I think some of you might be able to find some of these seams. And that's one of the things we're going to kind of be looking at in today's episode.

But when you do that and you look at the different bits that seem to be from different sources, you start to realize that reading the Torah from front to back does not create a solid, consistent, cohesive story that makes sense, that doesn't have plot holes or continuity gaps. However, if you've arranged them into four separate documents from four separate sources, suddenly the individual pieces start to make a lot more sense because you had individual documents from different communities who had different goals and different themes and different ideas of theology. And those are going to start to be a lot more consistent when you break them down that way.

And so some of the things we can find among these four sources, and again, not everybody accepts there's four sources. Some people think there's three, some people think there's two, commonly held idea is that there's four. And so let's look at them one by one. The first one is J, that's the Yahwist source. That is our main boy for Genesis. Much of the backbone and most of the plot of Genesis comes from J.

Part of the reason it's called the Yahwist source is because within the bits from J, Yahweh is the name used for God. And if you're reading in English, as I assume most of our, our listeners are, the way you can tell when the name Yahweh is being used in the Bible, in most English translations, the name Yahweh, which is God's personal name and also by the way, not actually his name, right? It's our best guess. It's our best understanding of the Tetragrammaton, right? That's a term you guys might have heard. You might know before Tetragrammaton is just a fancy Greek word that means four letter word. It's the Y H W H right? It's the personal name of God. Nobody really knows what it is or how to pronounce it because Hebrew — classical Hebrew — is written without any kind of indication of what the vowels are. So we know the consonants, but not the vowels. And so Yahweh is one of our best guesses. Jehovah is another guess.

Also of course, if you knew the real name, you're absolutely not supposed to say it. It's the ineffable name of God. It's absolutely a thing you're not supposed to say. If you are, if you are Jewish, certainly don't say it. If you get to a Bible verse and you're reading a Bible verse out loud that has that name, you can say Adonai, which means a Lord. But outside of reading Bible, you're not even supposed to say that. And so you say Hashem, the name, right? So this is the ineffable name of God. You're not supposed to say it. You're not supposed to think it. You're not. And if you write it, it can't be erased and all that kind of stuff.

It's a very important thing, but following the practice that you're not supposed to say it or write it, the name Yahweh is replaced in most English translations with the word Lord spelled with a capital L and then small caps for O R D. So it's still all caps, but the O R and D are smaller. You can see that in, for example chapter two, verse four, right? That the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. When you see that you can feel 98% confident that the word being translated, translated there is the personal name of God which we call Yahweh. Okay. That's within the continuity of the story. That's not going to be revealed in Genesis. It doesn't get revealed until God says it to Moses in Exodus, but it is used in the narration of this book. And that is the name that the J source uses. And within the J source, you've got a very anthropomorphic God, one who actually comes down and just chills with people or like he walks through the garden.

C: I had a lot of questions about that.

B: He walks with Enoch. He has more human-like emotions. He gets jealous. He feels regret. He can have his mind changed by humans. This kind of anthropomorphic God is indicative of the J source. Another thing that's indicative of J, not so much in this book, but as we get in, when we later do the other books of the, of the Torah, there's a focus on the Southern kingdom on Judah and the Southern tribes. There's kind of a preference for them. Frequently they're critical of the Northern kingdom of Israel. So those are all signs that as you're reading, if you're reading along, that's a good sign that you're looking at something composed by the J source. And again, that's going to be the majority of Genesis.

The E source, the Elohist, you can probably guess that since the J source is the Yahweh because they use the name Yahweh for God, the Elohist is so-called because they use the name Elohim for God. Elohim. Well, it actually literally means the gods, which does raise the question that we'll get to in a second, literally just a minute. But they use the name Elohim to mean God. They're not exclusively, it's not only the Elohist uses that name, but it's the general name that just means God, right? Whereas Yahweh is the personal name of God. Elohim is the word that just means God. Right? So the E source is going to use that.

And then in contrast to the J source, they're going to have a focus on the Northern kingdoms and the Northern tribes, and they're going to be critical of the South. Additionally, the E source tends to be anti-Aaron. They do not care for Moses's brother, Aaron, who is the, basically the foundation, the founder of the line of Levi priests. And so the line of priests comes from Aaron. They might... presumably the E source has something against the priestly caste. And so they do not care for Aaron very much. And they're going to focus on Moses more when we get into the other books of the Torah.

Also, their God is not an anthropomorphic God who comes down and does stuff himself, right? The God of the E source is not one who will just walk down into the garden himself. Instead, he uses his heavenly messengers. He uses angels. And so a God who's more likely to communicate via angels is more likely to be from the E source. So let's take a brief interlude here in the middle of our sources, because I feel like we're going to have to address this eventually, but after, after talking about Yahweh versus Elohim, it seems like a good time. So Chris, you remember in our Isaiah episode, and I said that prior to the second temple period, following the restoration after the Babylonian exile the Israelites were not monotheists, but actually monolatrists. Do you remember that?

C: I do remember that.

B: Yeah. So we talked about how the idea was not that they believed that there was only one God, but rather that there were many gods, but only one of them was worthy of worship. That was the idea. I think that was a new idea for some people. We did get a little bit of pushback, which is fair. 'Cause again, we're just kind of presenting different ideas and you're absolutely free to believe whatever you want. Like if you want to, if you want to ignore all this stuff I'm saying about documentary and you just want to go, obviously Moses wrote that, that is cool, fine and cherry wine. That's good. We're just talking about different ideas at this point.

But yeah, we did get a hair of pushback on that, but I've got a new idea that I have to present that I've been holding on to. The Israelites in this idea are monolatrists up to the return from Babylonian exile or even into the, some period during the exile. Here's the new idea: before the monarchic period, before the period of the Kings of Israel and Judah, the Israelites were not even monolatrists. They were just straight up polytheistic is the new idea that I'm introducing here. And that eventually all these different names that come to be understood as different names of God are actually originally different names for different gods, right? Elohim being plural is not a great piece of evidence for this because Elohim meaning the gods is just a Canaanite word that's basically borrowed into Hebrew. It's used grammatically singularly, right? So even though it's technically a plural noun, it's used with a singular verb, similar to us in English saying something like politics is a terrible thing to talk about. Right?

But Elohim is a name. It means "the gods," but that's not a great example, but Yahweh as a personal name of God versus names that we're going to see elsewhere in the Torah, like El Shaddai, which is frequently translated as God Almighty. And then El Elyon, which is normally translated as the most high God. Those are probably not originally the same person as they are conceived of as being now, right? Conceivably, we think of El Shaddai and Elyon and Yahweh and Elohim. Those are all the same to an ancient-Hebrew-speaking person prior to the creation of the kingdom of Israel. That's probably not the case. In fact, it seems very likely that El Elyon, the most high God was the father of Yahweh, who would have been the national God of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And it's only later that they come to say, not only is Yahweh the only God worth worshiping, he's also the only God there is. And all these other names are the same because Yahweh would have originally probably been a war God who incorporated elements of the Canaanite storm God, Baal, and so on. We'll get into that stuff later.

But I think if you hold this idea in your mind, when we read this and other early New Testament books, I think some things will start to make a little bit more sense if you realize that they said, this is our God, but it's because he's the God of Israel. And he has brothers who are the national gods of other nations. I think that'll make some things make a little bit more sense. So that brief interlude, we might get some pushback on that and that's fine. Again, these are just some ideas that I'm presenting that I think will be revelatory for some people and other people, they'll be distasteful and that's okay. Again, it's just ideas.

Anyway, let's get back to the sources. The other main source we're going to see in Genesis is the P source, the priestly source, which as you can guess from the name is primarily a source concerned with priestly matters. They're concerned with holiness. Their writing is formal and repetitive. Like you might expect someone concerned with scholarly priestly teaching might be. They are of course pro-Aaron because they're in favor of the priestly caste. Their God is a majestic, transcendent God. And if you want to know more about the documentary hypothesis, I recommend you go and listen to the episode of the podcast we talked about on the show before, the Bible for normal people. They have an episode about the documentary hypothesis. I think it's called, "Who Wrote the Torah" or "Who Wrote the Pentateuch?" One of those. You can go and find it. And they have a guest on who's an expert at this stuff. I am not. I'm not remotely an expert on this, but the illustration that he uses to explain the priestly God, the God of the priestly source, is that he's like a kid who builds the perfect Lego set just like it's on the box, follows the instructions to the T, puts it up on the shelf and just goes, I made a kickin' rad Lego set and that, and just leaves it alone. That's very much the God of the priestly source.

C: So it's a God that I can relate to.

B: Yeah, it's well, he's a majestic, transcendent God. He's it's more, it's closer to that. The clockmaker God of the deists, right? That he, that he makes the thing and then he leaves it alone, except that that's not entirely true because that, because if we continue with the priestly sources, as we read through the Torah, we're going to see the priestly God goes, build me a house. I'm going to come live in it. Feed me food there. And that's what sacrifices are, is feeding food to the priestly God who literally lives in the house. But that's later.

C: If I can get a Lego set, 'cause first of all, you're not gonna, you're not gonna build a better Lego set than the people at Lego. They do that all day.

B: I've had so many people I've talked to who have been like, why do you build the one in the instructions? Why do you build the one on the box? And I was like, 'cause that's the one I bought the set for. 'Cause I wanted to build the one that was on the box.

C: Yeah- I'm not going to build a better Batcave. I'm not going to build a better Hogwarts than a person who goes to work at the Lego corporation. And all they do all day is think about how to make Hogwarts. You're not gonna, you're not gonna out-Batman me and I'm not going to out Lego them.

B: Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, that was a very good Lego aside. Let's talk about the Deuteronomist. Who's the final source. Good news, at least for today, is that the D source not going to show up in... Oh, actually I didn't finish the Priestly.

So the other sign of the Priestly source is that there are no sacrifices in the Priestly document until the establishment of the sanctuary for God. And at which point God says, here I am feed me. And that's when you start making sacrifices. So keep that in mind. 'Cause that'll help us identify one of these bits later, I think.

Anyway, so the D source is the Deuteronomist, so-called because he's the primary, he or she, or they actually it's a community, probably just like we talked about the Johannine communities and the Matthaean communities and so on. So the Deuteronomic community is so-called because they're the primary composers of the book of Deuteronomy. Which just literally means the second law, because obviously you've got laws and Exodus and numbers and Leviticus, whatever. So the second, the later law is Deuteronomy. So the Deuteronomist, as you might expect is legalistic and theocratic, cares very much about a centralization of worship and also has a sizable concern for the poor, which is always good to find out about.

And so the D source is considered to have their fingers in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Kings, Samuel, and possibly parts of Jeremiah. So we're not going to be seeing the D source today. We're primarily going to be in the bits we're looking at today. We're primarily going to see, according to the theory, stuff from J and stuff from P, not a lot of E today, but J and P is what we should be looking for. So we want to look for the name Yahweh. We want to look for an anthropomorphic God. Those are signs of J. We want to look for a majestic transcendent God. We want to look for a God who does not want sacrifices yet. Those are things that we're going to see from P. So keep those in mind.

All right. That's what I got on the documentary hypothesis. We'll probably get more into it when we do the other books, but also even when we have David Wolkin on as a guest, 'cause I know that is a topic that is near and dear to his heart. So we'll see what his thoughts are and he'll be able to tell me what I got wrong. Hopefully that's a significant, good enough introduction for you guys to understand some of the stuff we're about to get into and these 11 chapters. Any questions about that? Chris?

C: Several.

B: Okay.

C: We'll see if they come up as we get...

B: Sure. Yeah. Let's get into the text. Let's talk Genesis 1.1.

C: This is quite possibly, these are the most well-known stories of the Bible, right? Like Noah's Ark is foundational, Adam and Eve in the garden foundational. This is a super well-known section of the Bible. It's also weirder than you remember by a lot. If you're anything like me and you're going back to this stuff and actually reading it for the first time in a while, right? But we start off chapter one, the creation as it is headlined in the HCSB. A quick note, if you do not know why we are reading the Holman Christian standard Bible, go back and listen to the zero episode. Can't skip that zero. We talk about pizza parties.

B: Can't skip that zero. It's foundational. Build your house upon the rock.

C: We all, we all know this stuff, right? Can I just run down the calendar real quick?

B: Yeah, man, do it.

C: All right. Day one, Fiat Lux. We got it. Knocked out. How'd I do on that pronunciation, by the way?

B: Very good.

C: Okay, cool. Day two: day two is where it gets a little weird because God separates the water from the water.

B: Right.

C: And so he creates the ocean and also I'm assuming clouds.

B: The atmosphere. Yeah. That's the idea, right? The creation story doesn't work great if you have a modern scientific understanding of how the world is. However, if you look at an ancient perspective of cosmology, it makes a lot more sense, right? We know you can't create light before you create the sun. That doesn't make any sense. But if sun's not where light comes from, maybe not. Why would there be a dome around the earth separating the water from the water? Well, if you believe that space is just a giant dome around the disc of the earth that makes a lot more sense. But yeah, the idea is separating the oceans from the atmosphere. You've got the sky which is the dome that separates the earth from the ether from the heavens, which would be both like space, but also physically the place where God lives.

C: Right. So what kind of cosmology are we dealing with here on day two? This is, is this, is this the firmament?

B: Yeah. The firmament. Yeah. That's the other term I should have thought of. Yeah. The ether, the firmament. Yeah. That's it.

C: Are we into some crystal spheres and some spell jammer stuff right now?

B: Not that I'm aware of, not that I'm aware of, but this should, this should be more similar to what we were discussing in Matthew. When we talked about the outer darkness, right? If you think about it, there's an outer limit to the stuff that is earth stuff. And then once you get past that, this is much more similar to that. So you should be thinking of like, yeah, like a, like a, like a flat disc with a dome over it and, and printed on the inside of the dome are the stars and that's the firmament.

C: Okay. So day two, I'm going to put some sky in between the ocean and the clouds.

B: Right.

C: Day three, land — always good to have plants.

B: Yep.

C: Day three is the origin of Lex Luthor's plot in Superman: The Movie (1978), because that's as much as there's going to be. God made all the land on day three.

B: Yep.

C: Day four is a good one. Sun, moon, and stars — loving day four.

B: Yeah. And you know why they're there? So we know when holidays are. Very dope, God. Good looking out.

C: Oh, it's almost Halloween by the way.

B: We're almost there, baby.

C: And you know what that means?

B: It's almost Christmas.

C: It's almost Christmas. Day five: animals, but not all animals. Specifically birds and fish.

B: Birds and fish. Yep.

C: 'Cause we got a sky and we got the oceans. So we got to fill those up. Day six starts off pretty strong: livestock.

B: Yep.

C: Land animals.

B: Yep.

C: And then to cap that off, what's the best land animal that's right. The tiger. But second best land animal is humans.

B: A distant second, a distant second.

C: The only land animal capable of painting a tiger on the side of a van.

B: True. I think I might've seen an elephant do that, but the point will stand here. We can see in verse 26, another bit where God definitely uses the plural, right? Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. So how do we interpret God using we, well, a couple of different choices. One, the idea that God's not alone up there, that there is a court of celestial beings that are lesser than him, but they're up there. That's the kind of setup we're going to see when we read Job at the beginning. It's very much that God has a court full of people, including Satan, who is one of the dudes who has a job in God's court, or it could be if you're a Christian, it's the Trinity. So that's easy. Good for you Christians. Or it could just be a Royal we, and he's just talking to himself. He's just Queen Victoria up there. Like we are not abused until we put some humans on this earth. So a couple of different choices you got there, polytheistic or it's a Trinity or it's a Royal we, or it means the angels got in the angels could be that too. So however you want to look at it, you decide babies, it's for you.

C: Verse 26, let us make man in our image. According to our likeness, they will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth. Verse 27. So God created man in his own image. He created him in the image of God. He created the male and female. There's a lot in the, in these two verses, there's a lot.

B: Yeah.

C: If we are to take in God's image, literally, we now know what God looks like.

B: Sure. And that would imply an anthropomorphic God, which is what most other cultures are going to have at this time. They don't conceive of God as an amorphous spirit, but rather God's just a dude, just bigger. Right.

C: He's just a real big dude.

B: That's what Zeus is. That's what, you know, most of the other gods of Mesopotamia are going to be. The Egyptian gods are mostly dudes with animal heads, but they're still dudes or, you know, lady dudes, you know what I mean?

C: Then we, we specifically get that God creates men and women, which this, it will not surprise you to be reminded that the book of Genesis is very into the gender binary.

B: Right. And of course, some people will take this, you know, you could say that, you know, God is not human and thus contains both male and female elements, or, you know, that what God means by making man in his own image doesn't mean his physical shape, but rather in terms of his ability to reason and have a soul, right. The animals don't have that. Or if you want to look at the fact that he says, let us make them male and female. Maybe God's got a wife, which again, if you go with the ancient Hebrew polytheistic idea God did have a wife, her name was Asherah. So maybe that's what's going on here. But again, multiple choice, you decide on your, your preferred interpretation.

C: But if we look right specifically and, and isolate verse 27.

B: Yeah.

C: If we remove verse 27 from the later context of the creation of men that we're going to get, and by which of course we mean the creation of humans, but creation of man is how it was referred to for a thousand years. Then we, we know that God can encompasses everything that humans are because he created them in the image of God and he created them male and female. So God encompasses all of this. That's right up front. God's all of it, which I find very interesting because then we're going to get something completely different, literally in chapter two.

B: It's true. So would you say Chris, that you've identified the first seam here?

C: I think I have.

B: Yeah. Yeah. So the, probably the first really super noticeable seam in Genesis is the fact that there's a creation story. And then there's another creation story that is slightly different. The order of things is a little bit different. The creation of man and woman is a little bit different. Well, while we're on the topic, might as well talk about it.

C: By the way, day, Sunday, chill time, day seven, seventh day, chill time.

B: That's the origin of the Sabbath, right? The day of rest. That's why you rest on the seventh day is because God did it. And then there's seven again, right? That's our number of perfection. I can't, I think we talked about this on the show before. Why would you have seven days in the week? It's because there's seven visible, prominent heavenly bodies, right? The sun, the moon, five planets would have been visible to the naked eye. That's why. And then, and the days that we have even today, the names that we use reflect those, those seven heavenly bodies. I know we talked about that in a previous episode. I do not remember which one.

C: This, the beginning of, of chapter two, right? Which by the way, we only get the first six days in chapter one, right? Chapter two starts with day seven.

B: Yeah. The chapter breaks and things. Those are all applied in the middle ages. I don't know the reasoning for it.

C: Oh yeah. This absolutely should be the end of chapter one because chapter two verse four starts a whole different thing.

B: Right. Yeah. That's where the actual, that's where the actual break is, is at verse four.

C: But before we move out, like since we're still in the first seven day week, there is an implication that creating the world is something that God needs to rest up after.

B: Right.

C: So from the beginning, the end of week one, if you want to, if you want to get out your calendars and chart out the next 930 years that we're going to be getting through over the course of this episode, God's exhausted on day seven, God needs to rest. He rests because he needs to. Ergo, God's power is not infinite in this.

B: It does seem to imply that, doesn't it? Yeah.

C: Yes. Or that is what, that is the way I am reading the text.

B: I think that's a fair interpretation, Chris. And again, I think the conception of God is not in stone, set in stone from the beginning. It develops over time. And that's, again, something I'm trying to get at in these episodes that we're looking at, like the idea of God as the son of a different God, who's just one of many sons to the most powerful God to the only God to an eternal, immortal, invincible, everywhere God that develops over time. And we don't get that latter conception that we have today until, you know, relatively late, getting close to the time of the time the gospels would have been written a little earlier, but certainly after the Babylonian exile.

C: Yeah. And this, I found this very interesting because again, it's been a while since I've gone back and read Genesis. It's been probably decades, honestly, since I've sat down with Genesis. And in the same way that we saw Jesus as a figure evolve over the course of the chronological order of the four gospels, we see God evolving as a figure over the course of just these 11 chapters and chapter one and the first three verses of chapter two are very much more like what we would refer to as mythology today rather than religion. Whereas there are other parts of this that distinctly feel like capital R religion, you know, does that make sense? We have drawn the distinction between folk tales and, and mythology and religion in the past based on what we've seen in the Apocrypha. And it's really interesting to me that we see that here.

B: And again, I mean, part of that comes from the fact that different bits are coming from different traditions that would have been written by different communities, whether a priest or a noble family that has a connection to a particular figure that they want to emphasize. Right. So, yeah.

Do we want to look at our take two here on creation? We get to the beginning here of what chapter four, these are the records of the heaven and the earth. One of the recurring motifs of the book of Genesis has to do with the idea of, and some translations, they call them the generations, but really what we're talking about are like familial historical records. And so this is a phrase that's going to come up again and again, like, these are the records of the family of Adam. These are the records of Seth and so on. Like it's a recurring motif. It's the framework on which the entire book is built. And so we're seeing it here. I think it's used, I want to say 11 times. The Hebrew word is toledot, toledot. And here in the HCSB, they use records, but a lot of places they'll say generations. So I just wanted to point that out because that's a phrase that's going to come up a lot. And it is kind of the skeleton on which the rest of everything else hangs.

But yeah, we get a different account of creation. And more importantly, we get a different expanded account of the creation of man and woman. And this is where you get the famous story of man being created from the dust. God says, it's not good for man to be alone. He puts man in charge of all the animals and he goes, that's still not enough. And so he makes woman from Adam's rib.

C: From man's rib.

B: From man's rib. Yes. Okay. So I know that's a question you have, right? Where does the name Adam come from?

C: Yeah. I literally wrote it in my margins because we get as near as I can tell. I went back and read it, but there's a lot of texts on these pages. Chapter three, verse 17, Adam 3, 17. We get the first reference to Adam, right?

B: Yeah. So here's the thing. Adam's not really a name. It just is the word that means the man. And so it's not his name. He's never really given a name. We just call him the man because he's the first man. And there is a bit of a pun. The book of Genesis is replete with puns and I'm going to try and hit as many as I can. But I know I'm not going to hit them all, but I'm going to do my best. Here's one because he talks about, he's called Adam because he comes from Adamah, the dust. And so that's the pun there, the relation between the dust and the earth and the name, the man. And so yeah, Adam's not really a name. Eve is a name. Eve gets a name, but Adam really just means the man, but we act as if that's his name. That's the explanation there. So there's never a point where God is like, by the way, dude, let's go with Adam. And it's just, he's the man.

C: I do quite like the image that we get here in chapter two of God makes all the animals. That's so many animals. Think of every animal. That's the, that's them. And then Adam's got to name them all. And I feel like that is where we get things like blue bird and black bird.

B: Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, I don't know. Sounds like a dog, but he's in the Prairie, Prairie dog nailed it. Nailed it.

C: What's this one, Adam? That's a cow. What's this one? I don't know. Sea cow. It's in the water. I don't know. Poor Adam. He's gotta name all those animals on like day one. That's his job.

B: Yeah. He like, he started with Tyrannosaurus Rex and he kind of went down from there. It was just like first one named Tyrannosaurus Rex. That's my boy. By the end of the day, he's just like, I don't know, butterfly. I got, I don't know. I don't know. And, but we also see, you know, if you're going to the creation museum, which don't, or if you're going to the arc encounter, which also don't, they're going to present you a vision of the garden of Eden in which all the animals are vegetarians. And of course the sharp dinosaur teeth are specifically for opening thick rinded fruits like watermelons and pineapples. But we don't see that it's okay to eat meat at this point. God gives the fruit of the earth for animals to eat. So Ken Ham and his boys at the creation museum of the arc encounter, they say in the garden of Eden, every animal was vegetarian.

But anyway, we got a second creation of woman because in the second version is where we get the bit from the rib, right? And there's the pun there as well. This one at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. This one will be called woman for she was taken from man. And that works in English because woman and man look similar. The Hebrew word for man is ish and the woman is isha. Those words may not actually be etymologically related, but it works as a pun. So there it is. She's called she's isha because she came from ish. But yeah, but the first time, the first time we see man and woman created to create at the same time, man and woman both created from the image of man and God says, go multiply, right? That's not the same story. We have a plot hole. We have something that needs a continuity patch.

And so one of our most famous continuity patches — and the Jewish people are very, very good at these continuity patches. We talked about the Talmud, which is teachings and lessons. There's also a phrase I don't know if we've used. Midrash, midrashim is the plural. Midrash are collections of commentaries on different bits of scripture and other things. They are explanations, expansions, corrections and continuity patches for the bits that maybe don't make sense. And one of the most famous bits introduced in both the Talmud and in the midrashim is a character I promise you guys have heard of Lilith, not Fraser Crane's wife, but Lilith, Adam's first wife. And why is she created?

Well, because we've got two creations of woman in the Bible. So God makes a woman just like Adam, but then later he's got to make another one out of his rib. Why would that be? Because the first one didn't work out. Right? And that's where Lilith comes in. The idea of a earlier wife for Adam would have appeared in a midrash called the Genesis Rabbah, which would have been from 300 to 500 CE somewhere in there. But the idea of something called a Lilith would have been developed in the Babylonian Talmud influenced by Mesopotamian demons, right? The original idea of a Lilith is not Adam's wife, but rather kind of a female demon with bird wings and a scary nighttime monster. Those two concepts, that name and Adam's first wife get combined in a book that came somewhere between 700 and 1000 CE called the Alphabet of Sirach, also sometimes called the Alphabet of Bensirach, the same thing, in which we get the story of Lilith, Adam's first wife. Would you like to hear it, Chris?

C: Please, because there were things that I was kind of expecting to catch mentions of here that I did not.

B: Right. So here's where the story of Lilith comes from, not from the Bible itself, but rather from a text. This isn't actually even a Midrash. This is the separate text. It's a satirical alphabet from the Middle Ages called the Alphabet of Sirach that's based on a deuterocanonical book called the Wisdom of Sirach that we'll probably be looking at at some point. But from the Alphabet of Sirach, here we go.

"So after God created Adam, who was alone, he said, it is not good for man to be alone. He then created a woman for Adam from the earth as he had created Adam himself and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said," get ready. "She said, 'I will not lie below.' And he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top for you are fit to be only in the bottom position while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other in as much as we are both created from the earth,' but they would not listen to one another.

"When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the ineffable name," which we talked about, "and flew away into the air. Adam stood in prayer before his creator, 'Sovereign of the universe,' he said, 'the woman you gave me has run away.' At once the Holy One, blessed be He, sent these three angels, Sinoi, Sansinoi, and Simangoloph to bring her back. Said the Holy One to Adam, 'If she agrees to come back, what is made is good. If not, she must permit 100 of her children to die every day.'" Yumpin' Yiminy.

"The angels left God and pursued Lilith, whom they overtook in the midst of the sea and the mighty waters wherein the Egyptians were destined to drown. They told her God's word, but she did not wish to return. The angel said, 'We shall drown you in the sea.' 'Leave me,' she said, 'I was created only to cause sickness to infants. If the infant is male, I have dominion over him for eight days after his birth, and if female, for 20 days.' When the angels heard Lilith's words, they insisted she go back, but she swore to them by the name of the living and eternal God, 'Whenever I see you or your names or your forms in an amulet, I will have no power over that infant.' She also agreed to have 100 of her children die every day. Accordingly, every day, 100 demons perish, and for the same reason, we write the angels' names on the amulets of young children. When Lilith sees their names, she remembers her oath and the child recovers." And that was a real thing, to have an amulet with the names of those angels engraved on it, and you put it on a child to protect them from the child-consuming demon Lilith, the first wife of Adam.

C: Can I say it is amazing that the most buckwild thing about that story is not that Lilith can fly?

B: Yeah, she's cursed because, like Tyra Banks, she wanted to be on top.

C: I don't know how deep we can get into that discussion on this show, where we have a clean lyrics tag.

B: Yeah, where we are trying desperately not to get an explicit tag. Yeah, so yeah, that's why. So if you're wondering, hey, where'd the mother of all demons come from? Well, it's because she wanted to do Cowgirl, and Adam wasn't cool with that, and so now 100 of her children die every day.

C: Where did the children come from?

B: I don't know, they're demon children. They're demon children, and now we consider her children to be vampires. She's the mother of all vampires. So that's a development. But Chris, I have a secret that I've been withholding from you for a while, that I've been waiting for this episode to disclose.

C: Okay.

B: The name of Lilith appears exactly one time in the canonical bible. We have already read the book.

C: Wha- okay, okay.

B: It is not translated as the mother of demons or Adam's first wife. Obviously, those ideas came during the Middle Ages. It is translated in a phrase that has been a favorite of both us, and fans of the show. You want to take a stab at it? Think about it. A flying night demon.

C: Night demon?

B: If I were trying to make it, in my modern translation, not a literal demon flying around, what might I think of that would be a bad thing that I might, for example, curse someone's house with?

C: No!

B: Yeah.

C: She's a screech owl?

B: She's a screech owl. So technically, screech owl, in some translations, is translated as the Lilith, as a flying Babylonian night demon, the mother of all vampires. Yeah.

C: Wait a second, wait a second. You're telling me that Lilith is a screech owl flying around at night?

B: [MUSIC: "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins] Yep.

C: Wow.

B: So there's my screech owl secret I've been holding onto for...

C: I cannot believe you kept that from me.

B: Yeah.

C: Hey y'all, the Bible's wild.

B: Yeah, yeah it is.

C: By the way, you actually said this like 20 minutes ago, because guess what? This is a long episode. But I did in fact highlight chapter 2, verse 23, and the man said, this one at last is bone of my bone. I thought that was very funny.

B: All right, yeah. So anyway-

C: We gotta get into more Lilith stuff later on. That's a perfect guest episode.

B: Yeah, we'll definitely find some opportunities to talk more about Lilith later.

C: So chapter 3, the temptation and the fall.

B: Yeah.

C: The snake rolls up, the serpent.

B: Right.

C: This chapter, by the way, is just- who is this? Is this J or is this P or is this E?

B: This is almost certainly J.

C: Okay, J doesn't like snakes.

B: True, yeah.

C: J just hates snakes, because the snake rolls up and can talk, which is again, not the wildest thing about this story. And the snake's like, hey, you know if you eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden, which is commonly depicted as an apple in modern times, but is not going to be depicted as an apple in this conversation that I, the serpent, am having with you, Eve, you will not die. God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And that is not a lie.

B: Yep.

C: That is exactly what happens.

B: Yep.

C: First of all, I have always had a hard time understanding why this was a bad thing.

B: Sure.

C: It seems like a very arbitrary rule. It seems like the first of a couple of very arbitrary rules that God has that he doesn't tell anybody about that do not seem to have inherent negative qualities.

B: He tells Adam specifically, don't eat from this tree.

C: But why? Which I know is like, is often explained to questioning Christians, as I was at one time, as being like, yeah, your mom doesn't need to tell you why you can't touch the stove, but you can't.

B: Right. Well, I mean, I think the idea is, it's the knowledge of good and evil. It's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the idea is that prior to this, they don't have any conception of evil. They're completely innocent and they're thus incapable of sin, of straying from God's purpose. But once-

C: But they clearly are.

B: Well, yeah.

C: They clearly are because Eve does it.

B: Right. Sure.

C: As does Adam.

B: And that's original sin. There it is. And then suddenly man is cursed and whatever. But yeah, this-

C: That is such a mild, like I listened to, like the snake told me it was okay to eat this fruit. And so I did. And that's why we have wars and death.

B: Yeah. And that's why I get having babies hurt so bad. And that's why food doesn't just pop out of the ground anymore. Yeah.

C: Yeah. So here's the even weirder thing to me.

B: Yeah.

C: And again, I'm not saying this to be like, oh, the book of Genesis is so, you know, so silly, but it is genuinely, I have so many questions about why these things are here. Eve eats the fruit. Adam eats the fruit. They get knowledge of good and evil. How is evil represented in this story?

B: By nakedness.

C: Yeah. Nakedness. Why, A, why is nakedness evil? B, why does God have the concept of shame? C, why did Adam and Eve have the concept of shame when there are literally two people on the planet who have already seen each other naked?

B: Yeah. Well, yes, these are really questions for a theologian or maybe let's, let's save these for David Wolkin. So prepare these, prepare, prepare answers to these questions because, because Chris has got them.

C: I mean, look, I assume, I assume that this is a this is a retcon, right? Like this is, this is, I'm trying to say this without being a jerk. My assumption would be that this was not a documentary style chronicle of the first days of the human race.

B: Right. And I think that's fair to say. I mean, there are certainly are of course, people who believe the entirety of the Bible is the inerrant word of God and that everything in here happened exactly as printed. But I think most people would say, you know, even people who do think books like the Gospels or even, you know, I don't know, Second Samuel are correct, accurate historical documents. Many of those people would even say, well, okay, the primeval history portion of this is a metaphor, right? It's not an actual representation of what really happened. So, I mean, but, but obviously there are people and I, I don't know how- that doesn't seem super easy to defend, but it is a position that a lot of people, many of whom I'm related to would hold.

C: So my assumption is that this, the metaphor at work here is that Adam and Eve are children, right? Kids run around naked all the time. They don't care. Adults, we prefer to have pants on, generally speaking. I feel like making shame an inherent part of the knowledge that we get, that makes us like unto God is very weird. Like if you really get into it. So then the next thing that happens is that God's just walking around. This is that personified God that we have who's just hanging out.

B: Yep. Just, he's just taking a stroll through the garden. Yep.

C: So here's my question. Is God naked? Surely not.

B: Boy, that's, that's a real, that's a real question. I mean...,

C: 'Cause, 'cause if he's not, then Adam and Eve have seen clothes, right? Because they, they speak to God. He, he's there. He is boots on the ground. God. And then he gives them clothes later. I know I'm getting hung up on the nudity and the clothes, but it's a very important thing if you read chapter three. So yeah. We get God showing up. Adam immediately narcs. Adam's a snitch. Adam rats Eve out immediately. He is, he is not ride or die.

B: Certainly not.

C: Boo on Adam. Boo on Adam.

B: And of course we see the reflection of woman being responsible for all the evil in the world in a Greek myth as well. Of course, Pandora opening her jar up. This is a similar kind of a trope here.

C: Yeah. And the way that we talked about the antisemitism that we get developing throughout the gospels and kind of climaxing in John, chapter two of Genesis really starts in on women are bad.

B: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. We see, and then we get a trio of curses. The serpent is cursed to crawl on its belly and be the most despised of all animals. In a lot of versions when I was a kid growing up, including the one from what was the Hanna Barbera cartoon, the greatest adventure where the kids travel back in time and experience Bible adventures. And there, in that version, the serpent has legs before this, and then God curses the snake and that's where the snakes legs go. 'Cause he's cursed to crawl on his belly.

And then we get 3:15, which is an important one. This is God saying to the serpent, "I will put hostility between you and the woman between your seed and her seed. He will strike your head and you will strike his heel." This is an incredibly important verse for Christians. In fact, it's called the protevangelium, which is a term that's also applied to the infancy gospel of James. But, this is a different thing. Protevangelium just means the first gospel. This is the proto-gospel according to Christians. And of course, all our Jewish listeners rolled their eyes audibly, probably at the idea that Christians are trying to appropriate this first as being about Jesus. But we've got...

C: So we've got the first gospel in Genesis. We've got the fifth gospel in Isaiah.

B: That's right.

C: Just, it's all, it's all gospels. Everything's a gospel. It's all gospel. It's all Christian.

B: It's all gospel, baby. But, yeah. So the idea here is of course, your— later, the serpent will be associated with Satan. That is not here at all. It's just, it's just the snake is bad. Right. But it's hundreds of years later that someone goes, Hey, what's that snake was Satan though. And that's where that's going to come. But, and so, but for Christians, the idea is your seed, the seed of the snake, Satan and demons and her seed, the seed of Eve is of course, Jesus, right? Because we saw the whole line that goes all the way from Adam and Eve to Jesus, he will crush Satan's head. And so, yeah, for some Christians, this is the earliest statement of the mission of Christ in the Bible.

C: So yeah, then we get, this is why it hurts to have babies and this is... and then, hey, it's going to hurt to have babies. The continued existence of your species is going to be defined by pain. Also farming is hard.

B: Yep. Farming is hard. There's thorns on the ground, thistles. Eve gets her, her name here because she's the mother of all the living. And so Eve comes from Hebrew word that means living or life. So that's the pun there. God gives them better clothes now made it out of animal skins. Previously, they would not have killed animals at all, but I guess God gets dispensation here to do so. And yeah, they get kicked out of the garden because the idea is now that they're, now that they are capable of sin, it would be terrible for them to continue to be immortal and sin forever. And so cherubim, which are the animal face ones, and they have some flaming swords. They whirl them around and they block them out of the garden. So there, there's our first mention of cherubim. We've seen seraphim before. Here's our first mention on the show. And of course, in the order of the Bible as a different type of angel.

C: Yeah. Now for chapter four, by the way, if you want to know where Eden is, we were talking about this yesterday, that there were a lot of people trying to find the garden of Eden for a really long time. Like as, as we explored most of the surface of the planet, it says right where it is.

B: Yeah. Except we don't know where some of those lands and rivers would be like, obviously we know where the tigers and Euphrates are, but the other ones that were just like, ah, we don't know. And also it's important to know that for many Christians, especially ones that are, you know, young earth creationists and that kind of thing, and an understanding of the book of Genesis, how they understand it, you have to realize that they fundamentally believe that the earth was different prior to the flood and that the flood literally changed the shape of the earth. And that's part of the reason why we can't find these things is because they're not where they used to be anymore because the flood changed, not just, not just like the water levels, but like literally where things are on the earth.

C: But we know where this story takes place. This is Cain and Abel and it happens in Doamurder West Virginia.

B: Yeah. Yeah, it does.

C: And again, someone mentioned to us before we started recording that in their opinion, God is the villain of the first 11 chapters of the Bible.

B: Yeah. Um...

C: And I find that very difficult to dispute, particularly with regards to the story of Cain and Abel.

B: Sure. Yeah, this is a problematic passage because you have to figure out why, why does God do what he does? Right. Because Cain, Cain is the older brother, Abel's the younger brother. So here's the pun Cain comes from the word that means had because she had a child. Right. And then Abel comes from the word that means breath. Because breath is the idea of like the animating essence, the life, the soul, but Cain becomes a farmer. Abel becomes a shepherd. Cain goes to make the very first sacrifice that we see documented in the Bible. "He presents some of the land's produce as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also presented an offering. Some of the first born of his flock and their fat portions, the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but he did not have regard for Cain and his offering. Cain was furious and he looked despondent." We of course know what happens next.

C: Everybody knows that at this point, Kane burns down the funeral home and is whisked away by Paul bearer, where he is raised as Glen Kane. And then several years later, circa WrestleMania 14, he will return because the undertaker always believed he was dead. But then Kane came back with the mask, believing that he was scarred, but the scars, the doctors told him that he had no scars, but they were wrong. But the scars are inside. And that is why Kane is going to face the undertaker in an Inferno match.

B: Counterpoint after this Cain leaves having been marked on his soul, he departs. Eventually he leads a clan of cavemen who discover magical radioactive meteorite. He becomes immortal, later adopts the name Vandal Savage and composes the crime Bible.

C: Counter counterpoint. It is at this point that the Jackal hides Kaine from Peter Parker. And so Ben Riley goes off and has the lost years, right? And then eventually returns as the Scarlet Spider. Whereas the third clone will come back as Kaine and the mark of Kaine is actually him using spider powers to stick his hand to your face and then pull your face off.

B: Oh wow. Yeah, that's true. Or it could be that shortly after this Cain moves to the house of mystery and Abel moves to the house of secrets. Their mother Eve goes to the Ssecrets of sinister house and then later Elvira shows up.

C: Yeah. And then they all go to the dreaming.

B: Yeah. And they go hang out with the Prince of Stories innit.

C: And Matthew the Raven.

B: Oh, and Jack Pumpkinhead.

C: Yeah, I think we're good. I guess what we're getting at is that a lot like- there- even Adam has not been used in popular culture as much as Cain.

B: Right.

C: In all its various spellings.s

B: Yeah, it's yeah, it's a lot. So yeah, but let's think about the problem of why does God accept Abel's sacrifice and not Cain. So now I'm going to do one of my favorite bits that I'm sure everyone loves the bit where I try to verbally explain a visual meme from internet. So here we go. Normal brain: God rejects Cain sacrifice because Abel's sacrifice was meat and Cain sacrifice was produce. That's normal brain. Expanding brain: God accepts Abel's because Abel brings the first and the best of his flock. Cain just brings some of the produce. This is the version that was taught to me in church. Galaxy brain: God refuses Cain's sacrifice because he has sin in his heart. Right. As it said, as it says here, sin is crouching at the door, its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. That's the, that's the version explained in the footnotes of the study Bible of HCSB. That's galaxy brain. Let me give you cosmic brain. This is a foundational myth by a nomadic shepherd culture who are distrustful and hateful of the surrounding agrarian cultures all around them.

C: That tracks. Yeah. That tracks, but it's, but again, that's one of those things that the fascinating expansion of the tradition that we see in Judaism to being the dominant worldwide religion, you still have all the stuff, right? Like you still have all the stuff that was there at the beginning. And it's very, it's tough to get your head around.

B: Yeah.

C: I do like that then, by the way, we didn't actually say it in case this is your first encounter with Bible: Cain kills Abel.

B: Right. Yeah.

C: Commonly depicted as bashing his head in with a rock, but that is not actually specifically stated.

B: Right. Right. And of course, this is where you get the, where's your brother. Am I my brother's keeper? This is the origin of that.

C: Then God shows up and Columbo's Cain.

B: Yeah.

C: God's like, "Uh, excuse me, Cain. Uh, just, I'm, I'm just looking for your brother, Abel." And Cain is like, "Uh, well, uh, if you'll excuse me, Lieutenant God, I must get to a meeting." And God's like, "Right, right, right. Just one more thing though. Uh, your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. So now you are cursed, alienated from the ground that opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood you have shed." This is a thing that I thought was going to be explained, but is not because I remember reading one of those... We have talked about the reason that we refer to ourselves as non-believers at the top of the show, instead of as atheists, which I think is an accurate description of me certainly, is that there is a certain kind of atheist that talks about the Bible on the internet and that's not what we want to be.

B: Yeah, we absolutely, there's a very popular meme lately that people have linked me to at least a lot, which is the picture of the cassette tape that says "The Bible read by a 14 year old atheist in a condescending voice." Yeah. We, we do not want that to be our show. Like, and I want to be super clear, like we are absolutely not trying to debunk the book of Genesis in this episode. Like that is not what we're about here or ever on the show.

C: Yeah. In no way. Yeah. But there's the earth three version of that, which is the smarmy Christian, the, "were you there?" Christian. And I remember I, it's gotta be a bad web comic that I saw where the smarmy Christian was arguing with the straw man, smarmy atheist. And the smart, the smarmy straw man, atheist asked the question, well, where did Cain's family come from?

B: Yeah.

C: And the smarmy Christian was interrupted while saying that we know exactly where they came from. So I was like, Oh sweet. I don't know that I'm going to find that out when I read Bible this week. It's not in here.

B: No, it's not.

C: It is not. Where is, where did the people in Nod come from? Because Cain, God tells Cain that he is going to alienate him from the land because his brother's blood cries out. And then Cain's like, that seems pretty harsh just for doing a murder. And God's like, yeah, I guess so. Just go live over there. And no one's going to hassle you about this murder that you did: the first murder.

B: Right. And that's the mark of Cain. If you guys know that phrase, right, that's God's mark on Cain that protects him from others from who, from who, right? Of course the explanation that I received as a kid is that we have no reason not to believe that God didn't populate the earth with other people, right? We hear about this one family, but God was like, well, that's not enough. And so we just make some more, right? That's the version I was taught is that, you know, God just made some more people so that the world can be populated. Of course, there's no evidence of that, but there it is. Other- otherwise it's just like, well, no, it's just a myth. And the tactical realism of it is not important, but yeah. Cain has a wife. He's intimate with her and you have a bunch of evil children.

C: Yep. Vampires, depending on how many white wolf books you read as a teen, either this is where we get vampires or Judas is where we get vampires. Take your pick.

B: Yeah. For me it was none, but anyway, we...

C: Lucky you.

B: Yeah. We eventually get to Lamech who is, um... he's bad. He's super bad. Like he's, he's like, well, Cain murdered a guy and got protection from God. I'm going to murder two guys and get double protection or not even double Cain has been... 11 times. I'm going to get that good, good 77 times protection.

C: which is the largest number yet recorded.

B: Yeah. Yeah. Adam and Eve are like, well let's try again on the baby thing. And so they have Seth who of course went on to be a very popular Canadian cartoonist, but also...

C: Not a fan.

B: Yeah. Also manages to be an incredibly important figure in Gnosticism. So this is not the last we're going to see of Seth. We get his line. Here we go again. Here are the family records of the descendants of Adam. And we get to see all these people living to incredibly large numbers.

C: Yeah. I want to run through this real quick. Adam lives 930 years. Seth lives 912 years. Enosh lives 905 years. Kenan lives 910 years. Mahalalel lives 895 years. Jared 962 years. Enoch, very tragic, dies so young, 365 years old gone too soon. Mourn ya til we join ya.

B: Well, he doesn't die. Enoch doesn't die.

C: Well, God takes him and then he goes and walks with God.

B: Right. And that's very important because Enoch, we keep penting at the book of Enoch. Why is it so weird? Oh, 'cause he was just a dude who hung out with God for 300 years until God was like, why don't we hang out at my place? And so he takes him up to heaven. And then suddenly you've got an alive dude walking around heaven and he's like, this place is wild. And that's what the book of Enoch is about.

C: This is the part of the Bible that I always kind of forget about. And it always trips me up because I am down with creation stories. I am, I am down with like interpreting them as metaphorical and kind of looking for what those metaphors mean. Like Adam and Eve are kids. You know, it's the youth of the human race at that point. I don't get the part... Okay. I am way more comfortable. It is way easier for me to accept immortality just straight up, never dying. That it is for me to accept dying at 930 years old. And I don't know why, but that trips me up because I feel like it's very difficult for someone to look around and be like, yeah, people probably live to be 900 or so.

B: Like that's not uncommon for Mesopotamian myth. Like even some places are going to have stories of ancestral Kings who lived for tens of thousands of years. Right. So the fact that our longest lived dude, of course, Methuselah, who's now the, he's the metaphor for an old person, right? 'Cause he lives the oldest: 969 years.

Both Nice.

C: Lamech, Lamech hits the jackpot. He lives to be 777.

B: Yeah. Noah is 950. So we do see a shift in that.

C: Noah has three kids at 500 years old.

B: Yeah. All of these guys start having kids at around the Hundo mark.

C: Which is somehow even weirder.

B: Yeah. It was like, well, you know, I've had a good century. Time to start sewing those wild oats.

C: The next thing that happens now that we're, now that we're at Noah, we are, we're about a thousand years after Adam at this point. 'Cause everybody waits until they're 130 years old to have kids.

B: Yeah. I'm sure someone's done the math on this and I'm sure that's how- I feel very certain that's how someone arrived at the number that they did about like, because people, there are people who are like, oh no, I know the exact day on which the earth was created.

C: You know what it's time for now.

B: I believe that I do.

C: Yeah. There were giants in the world in those days.

B: Yeah.

C: Let's talk about the Nephilim for a minute. 'Cause in the KJV, if you're familiar with the King James version, straight up Genesis 6:4: "there were giants in the earth in those days." And as a child, I saw that and I was like, Genesis chapter six is gonna be lit. It was not. That's the only mention of them. The HCSB actually puts in the word Nephilim.

B: Because we don't exactly know what the word, Nephilim means. And so they just transliterate it. It does not mean giants. The origin of that comes from the Septuagint 'cause they use the name Gigantes. They use the word Gigantes here. That seems to be influenced by the fact that the Nephilim are actually mentioned not in Genesis again.

But in the Book of Numbers, when they send spies into Canaan to scope out that's the promised land, right? They send spies into the promised land to scope out what it's like they come back and this is Numbers 13:33 for anyone who wants to look it up, and they go, yeah, that place is full of Nephilim and Anakim who are the descendants of Anak and, we are like grasshoppers to them and let's not go to there. And so probably under the influence of that version of the story, the fact that they're described as being to us, what we are to grasshoppers, that's where the idea of them as giants probably came from.

The word Nephilim probably is related to the word that means "the fall." So it might mean "the fallen ones." And there's a possibility then that the Nephilim are also referenced in the book of Ezekiel in chapter 32, verse 27, which talks about what might just be fallen warriors who are trapped in the underworld, who are trapped in Sheol, but it could mean Nephilim. It also uses the phrase Gibborim, which people who've read The Runaways probably recognize that name. They're the crazy weird gods that the Pride worship. The Nephilim, the name probably means fallen ones, but because we don't know exactly what they are and what that means, yeah, the HCSB decides to just transliterate it rather than translating it as giants, which is kind of a traditional thing.

It makes sense that that name would mean fallen ones because I have in various stories seen the Nephilim portrayed as both angels who have come to earth and as half angels. That to me seems the most obvious reading because we've got the sons of God, they come to the daughters of mankind and bear children to them. The most obvious reading there. And one of the most commonly accepted ones is that angels, fallen angels, fall in love with human women and they come and they have babies and those babies are the Nephilim. They have super human babies, right? They are powerful men of old, the famous men, which that makes sense. That tracks with, you know, for the ancient Greeks, the Heroes, you know, capital H heroes are all demigods. The people who do great and mighty things are children of divine beings. And so that's a similar idea that we would have here.

And so, yeah, if you have fallen angels who have children with human women, then their children could be called the fallen ones. That would make sense. There's plenty of mentions of the Nephilim throughout pseudepigrapha and in the deuterocanon. So we haven't seen the last of them. In some interpretations, some people like to take it, like to take some of the zazz out of it. And they just say that sons of God means descendants of Seth and the children, the daughters of man means descendants of Cain. And so they're just kids and cousins. And that seems way less interesting to me than giants born of fallen angels, but you know, different strokes.

C: So next up we have Noah. I feel like we can get through this pretty quickly because we've been here an hour and a half.

B: Everybody knows the; Lord said to Noah, there's going to be a floody, floody, get those children out of the muddy, muddy. Tthe Lord said, Noah's building an arky-arky, build it out of gopher bark-y, children of the Lord.

C: Yeah. Nice thing about the HCSB, we actually don't have to deal with cubits this time. We get: the ark is 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high. That is 1,518,750 cubic feet. If you're wondering how much animal there was at this point in Bible...

B: Or just go to Ark Encounter and you can see the real thing. Please do not go to Ark Encounter. This is the...

C: I... Okay. How are we... eventually we got to go, right? We got to go to Ark Encounter.

B: I've been, I've been to the creation museum.

C: Yeah, it's not far from you. That's in Kentucky.

B: So is the Ark Encounter. They both are.

C: I've driven past the Passion of the Christ park, which has a 40 foot steel Mary.

B: Yeah.

C: And it was about a half mile long. That's in Indiana.

B: Yeah. If I can name drop for a second, Sina Grace, the writer of ice man currently, he was out visiting Kentucky and he came to me and he said, Hey man, while I'm here, there's a couple of things I'd like to do. And I was like, okay, what are those things? He says, first, I want to eat at the Cracker Barrel. First of all, he thought there was only one Cracker Barrel, that very cute California, but...

C: One Cracker Barrel at every exit.

B: Yeah. Yeah. He said, I want to eat at the...

C: Wait, wait: sidebar to the sidebar. What was the last thing you bought at Cracker Barrel?

B: Last thing I bought a Cracker Barrel?

C: At the store.

B: At the store? I don't know. Last, I tried to buy a Woodsy the Owl shirt they had, but they didn't have it in my size. That's the last thing I can remember. Normally I just buy old fashioned candy at the country store, which is probably not a surprising fact for you, Chris Sims.

C: Yeah.

B: What about you? Why?

C: A magnet that says "all I need is a little bit of coffee and a whole lot of Jesus."

B: Hey, there you go. Yeah, there you go. Anyway, took Sina to the, to the Cracker Barrel, and while we were going North on 75, I was like, hey man, we're going to make a quick stop off the interstate. I took him to Big Bone Lick State Park, which is...

C: Get your picture in front of the sign.

B: Yeah, exactly. The birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology. It is very choice. Absolutely. It's got a hilarious name and it, yes, it is on a road called Big Beaverlick, which is also funny in its own way. But you want to go there because they have really super dope fiberglass recreations of a Pleistocene megafauna drowning and dying and stuff. It's actually very cool. If you want to see like a giant, like fiberglass mammoth or like ground sloth, it's super cool. And there's like a Buffalo farm right next to it that you can go see. That's very cool.

But while we were doing that, he was like, okay, but we're going to the creation museum. And Sarah and I said, here's the thing, Sina, we do not want to give those people our money. That's not a thing we want to do. And he goes, that's fine. I'll pay for your ticket. And we're like, well, that was not the principle we were trying to get across, but okay. And so, yeah, I have been there. I did go there.

I was wearing, this was a number of years ago. I was wearing a Scott Pilgrim t-shirt and there was somebody in the parking lot who apparently their job is to make sure nobody's wearing an offensive t-shirt because she very casually called me over and was just like, Hey, I like your shirt. What is it? What does it mean? Who's that guy? And I had to explain it. Like she did a very good job of making it seem casual, but I know she was just like, I hope that's not a Satan on your shirt.

And so we got in there and it was us and a bunch of Mennonites doing the tour through the creation museum. It's very weird. Don't go there, but it is in Northern Kentucky. It's very close to Sarah's hometown. So we did go, we did go with Sina Grace. I think he appreciated it. It's also 100% not a museum. It's just a, it's a thing where you go, you just walk through it and there's displays and stuff, but it does not meet the standards of what a museum actually is. Anyway, cool tangent.

C: Look, I feel like eventually when the show is popular enough that we go on tour and we're doing live shows and people are coming to the live show in cosplay as a dog yelling at Simon Magus or a screech owl and hopefully not Isaiah. Then when we are on that tour, I think these are places we need to go.

B: It's a possibility.

C: And maybe we can, maybe we can just be like, Hey, we have a Bible podcast and they'll let us in for free.

B: Maybe so. Maybe.

C: And hopefully they don't listen to this episode where I lay out the scam.

B: Yeah. We totally have monologued our way through our...

C: Are I wanted to get through Noah's art quickly and that did not happen.

B: That's not happening. Here's...

C: So Noah builds an Ark. He's 500 years old.

B: Right. Here's mya here's my one, one note I wanted to mention, because this is a thing I did not understand until like this week when I was reading the book, he built an ark out of gopher wood and no one knows what gopher wood is. And so I'm like, why do they call it that? What does it call? Why is it called that? Like, I didn't know. It only occurred to me this week, reading it that gopher wood has nothing to do with go for the animal. It's because they don't know what the name of the wood is. They just like Nephilim, they just literally transliterated the Hebrew word gopher into English. Nobody knows what it means. And so it has nothing to do with go for the animal. It's a complete coincidence that the word looks like an English word. So when you talk about the gopher bark-y that he built his arky-arky, nothing to do with gopher the animal.

C: Here's, here's my favorite weird part of the flood story. Well, chapter seven, this is chapter seven, verse four. God tells Noah, Hey, get all the animals. It's not, it's not two of each. It's seven of the clean ones and two of everything else.

B: Seven pairs of clean ones. Well, again, here's another doublet, right? Because he first says two of everything from the birds according to their kinds, livestocks according to their kind animals that crawl on the ground according to their kind. And then in verse seven, two of each unclean animals, seven pairs of each clean animal. Why does he need that? So that he can keep, so he can make sacrifices, right? So if one of those versions is from the P source and one is from the J source, which one is which, where are you paying attention to answer that question?

C: I was literally coloring in the title page of my Bible.

B: Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. So the J source is the one with the sacrifices.

C: I thought that was like three hours ago.

B: It was. Keep in mind, so the J source is the one with, with the seven pairs, because the J source will include sacrifices. The P source does not initiate sacrifices to God until the sanctuary is built later. So, so this version that we're reading right now, the main version of the story that's from J.

C: Then right after that, God just casually drops this one seven days from now, I will make it rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights. I'm sorry, this is happening next week.

B: Yeah.

C: That's that's that's short notice for destroying the world with flood big J, but okay.

B: Yep.

C: GGGG around for 150 days until he lets some birds go and the birds come back with an olive branch.

B: Yeah. Yeah. He sends a Raven that doesn't work out. He sends a dove. And then he sends another dove that comes back with an olive, olive leaf. And then later he sends another dove that doesn't come back. And that's how he knows that it's okay. Now that there's enough dry land, olives grow on very low lying land. And so the fact that the dove is able to bring an olive branch means that the waters must have receded almost the whole way. And so yeah, we know it's more than a year because Noah has two birthdays on the ark. His 601st birthday is when he comes out. And 57 days later, the earth is dry.

I've got to do just at least a quick shout-out to the recurrent trope of the flood narrative. A lot of you guys are already going to know this. Some of you might not. But the story of Noah and God flooding the earth and Noah being the only survivor with his family is not the only story of this kind. It's a very common trope and classical myth from all sorts of different ones. A couple notable examples from Greek myth is the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, which is a good one because it is werewolf related. God floods the earth, Zeus floods the earth because he's real mad at a werewolf. And Deucalion and Pyrrha are the only ones who survived. They repopulate the earth by throwing rocks over their shoulders. You can look that one up. It's a famous story. They survived by building a box. And guess what the Greek and Latin word for box is? It's ark. They build an ark and they survive.

Then of course, the next most famous one is the story of Utnapishtim from Gilgamesh, who also builds a box. His is cubic and that gets mocked actually in the footnotes of the HCSB version. They're like, obviously a cube would be rolling around and Utnapishtim would not be very comfortable in his giant cube. But anyway, that's from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The story of Manu in Hinduism, also warned by a god that the earth is going to be flooded by the other gods. So, he builds a boat to survive. And Bergelmir in Norse myth, who is a giant who survives the flood of the other giants' blood by building a boat and sailing off to safety.

So, those are just a handful. These are incredibly common. They're all throughout any kind of ancient society. You're going to find them. It's not even just old world stuff. You can find Native American versions of the story as well. And so, a lot of people, they say, oh, that must mean that maybe there really was a giant flood. Maybe there was. Or maybe these stories all have a common ancestor. It's up to you. But anyway, I needed to mention that. You guys can Goog those up if you're interested in them. Or just look for, just Google flood narrative or flood myth and you can find lots more information about it.

C: Alternately, and again, not to poke holes, floods are not exactly uncommon.

B: It's true. It's not just that these are flood stories. It's that the idea is God decides to destroy the world with flood. Only one family gets to survive and they do so by building a giant box that they sit in until the flood recedes. And so, those are the commonalities between these different stories. It's more than just there being a lot of water.

C: Fair. So, chapter nine, God makes a covenant with Noah.

B: Right.

C: I thought I knew about this.

B: Yeah.

C: It's the famous rainbow, right? It's virtually every depiction of Noah getting off the ark back on land involves the rainbow. And I thought, right, God makes the rainbow, that is his sign to Noah as an assurance that he will not flood the earth and destroy it again. Not the case, in fact. First of all, chapter nine, verse three, "the fear and terror of you will be in every living creature on the earth, every bird of the sky, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are placed under your authority. Every living creature will be food for you. As I gave the green plants, I have given you everything."

B: Right. So, this is the origin of meat-eating. And it also is the origin of a still very serious rule among Jewish people is you must drain the blood from the animal that you're going to eat. Do not eat blood.

C: Yeah, that's the next verse.

B: Yeah, that's a very important thing. So, yeah, we saw Adam was told he can eat any plant he wants. Now Noah is told he can eat any animal. And now we're not friends with animals anymore. So, apparently, everyone prior to Noah was just like a straight-up Dr. Dolittle, and that ended with the flood.

C: Yeah. Now, animals are a superstitious and cowardly lot, and we strike terror into their hearts because they are full of the fear and terror of us. The second thing is, the rainbow is not a sign for Noah.

B: Yeah.

C: God shows up, and he's like, look, I know I'm going to want to wreck this place again. But when I see the rainbow, I'm going to remember that I told you I wouldn't do that. So, the rainbow is for me, God. It blows my mind that the God of Genesis needs a reminder to not destroy the Earth.

B: Well, another thing that I like about this translation that I think puts things in a different context is, you know, it never uses the word rainbow here. He says, I've placed my bow in the clouds, right? We might not think about the fact that rainbow literally means a bow, like bow and arrow, because of the shape, right? The arc, arch, all those bow, elbow, have to do with the shape of a bow. That's the reason why arch and archer and archery, right, those are all related. They all have to do with the bow. So, he's placing his bow in the sky. Maybe it's just a metaphor, right? Like this shape is representative of my bow. But if you think about it in a more literal way, it makes more sense if you think, oh yeah, this God of war and storms, that's what his bow would be when he places it in the sky. He's actually putting his giant God weapon up there. But anyway, yeah, this is just the first of several covenants that we're going to see across the span of the Torah. The next most important one, of course, we're going to see with Abraham when we look at him next week.

C: You know how frustrated I was when we were doing the gospels and everybody had like six names and it kept being confusing. And when we had Herod, Herod, Herod, and Herod.

B: Yeah. Yeah.

C: I was so mad when I was a kid and the Ark of the Covenant was not the ark that led to a covenant.

B: Right. Yeah. Different covenant, different ark. It helps if you know that the word ark just means box, right? You know, it floated in a giant box. Then he had a box that they put the Ten Commandments in.

C: Okay. So the flood is not the only story about Noah.

B: Yeah. There's another notable one.

C: There's a buck wild story about Noah that you might not know about. I was actually told about this one not too long ago by my good friend, Kel McDonald, who is a fantastic comics creator whose work you should check out.

B: Yeah.

C: She told me about this one and I kind of didn't believe that it was going to play out exactly the way it does here at the end of chapter nine. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna read it.

B: Yeah. Do it. Go ahead.

C: Starting in chapter nine, verse 20, "Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine, became drunk and uncovered himself inside the tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a cloak and placed it over both their shoulders and walking backward, they covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned away and they did not see their father naked. When Noah awoke from his drinking and learned what his youngest son had done to him, he said, 'Canaan will be cursed. He will be the lowest of slaves to his brothers.'

B: Yeah. So it's a weird one because yeah, it's about a naked old man and his son looking at his dad's junk and then he gets cursed. The bad news is this is the verse that was used to justify slavery for a very long time.

C: Yeah. What a weird, weird sequence of events.

B: Yeah. So we see here that Canaan, which we see is the name of Ham's child, is cursed and he'll be the lowest of slaves. In chapter 10, we see the lineage of the sons of Noah and Ham, his sons are Cush, Egypt, Put, Canaan, and so on. Those are all names of places obviously. The idea is that his children went and founded those places and they're named after them. So Egypt doesn't mean anything else. Egypt is just the son of Ham. So if you were to look at a map and you see the way that the descendants of the three brothers spread out, Ham gets Canaan, which is the Levant. It includes Israel, Palestine, and much of the Middle East, but also a lot of Northern Africa, including Egypt and Cush, which we've mentioned before is Ethiopia, basically parts of Sudan. Shem, the oldest son and the best son, he gets most of the Arabian Peninsula and then Japheth gets Asia Minor and Europe, basically. But because Ham, who's the one who was cursed, his children go to Africa, terrible white people said, that's why we get slaves from Africa.

C: Wow.

B: Yeah.

C: That's quite bad.

B: Yep. Very bad. And it all starts with an old man letting it hang out. So bad.

C: What a weird chunk of Bible.

B: Yep.

C: So then we get chapter 10, where we get all that lineage. One notable thing here we get is that Cush fathered Nimrod, who was the first powerful man on earth.

B: Which implies he's the first builder of empires, right? He's the first one to really establish an empire. And so his kingdom started with Babylon, Erech, Akkad, and Calneh, the land of Shinar, Assyria, Nineveh. And so all these big areas that are going to be later important, significant empires come from Nimrod.

C: Which a lot of people may not realize, when Bugs Bunny calls Elmer Fudd Nimrod, he's being sarcastic. It's not just a funny word that means like idiot. It's actually him sarcastically comparing him to the first powerful man.

B: Yeah. And a great hunter, right? And so of course now people misunderstood. And so we think Nimrod just means idiot. Yeah.

C: Yeah. 'Cause Nimrod honestly sounds...

B: Exactly. Yeah. It sounds like your rod is real nim. And so, yeah.

C: Then we get, closing us out before we get to Abram, AKA Abraham, we get our last famous story of this section of the Bible. And it's a big one. It's the Tower of Babylon. It is also one in which God is kind of needlessly spiteful towards humanity, I guess is the way to put it.

B: And it's also another story that would kind of challenge our modern conception of cosmology. Right? The fact that these people are trying to build a tower to heaven and God feels threatened by that. Right? The idea that heaven is a physical place that you could reach on the other side of the dome of waters. That's not exactly how we think of heaven. Now we kind of think of it as it's a different dimension or something. Right.

C: But that is not actually made clear in the HCSB translation in the same way that when we did the story of Ahikar and the Pharaoh wanted a tower between heaven and earth. Right?

B: Yeah.

C: That just when we say, yeah, it's a tower between heaven and earth. That just sounds like, oh, he wants a tall tower. In the HCSB. It just says, come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. A tower with its top in the sky is just a tower.

B: Yeah. Right.

C: If it's top is not on the ground, it is in the sky. That's how buildings work. But the story of the Tower of Babel is always explained as building a tower to heaven.

B: Right.

C: A tower that will breach the walls of God's domain. Not exactly made clear. So the Lord comes down and says, if they have begun to do this as one people, all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. So God gets weirdly jealous and really needs to take us down a peg because we are doing things. Which is weird.

B: Sure. And yeah, the fact that everyone's able to cooperate is a strength and God's mad about that. And so, yeah, that's how he scatters the people. That's why people spread out across the earth. And he also confuses their language. And that's where all the lang- all the different languages come from. Obviously, the traditional name for the story is the Tower of Babel. The HCSB translates it as the Tower of Babylon because Babel is just the Hebrew word for Babylon. And so there's no reason to maintain the Hebrew name there. So yeah, it's just the Tower in Babylon. It is not related to the English word babble, meaning to babble on and on like we often do on the show, which is itself probably just an onomatopoeia for the sound of someone going babble, babble, babble. Right. Instead, the pun here is babble sounds like the Hebrew word that means to confuse. And so God confuses their language. And if we're looking for another comparative mythology tip, this has some similarities to the story of the giants, Otis and Ephialtes trying to stack mountains to get up to Mount Olympus and they're thrown down. So you could check that story out.

C: Then we get from Shem to Abram. And is there anything we need to talk about in that half of chapter 11?

B: Not really. Just that we see Abram and his father. We get Terah fathered Abram, Nahor and Haran and Haran fathered Lot. So Abram's nephew, Lot, who's also going to be a major character. He died in his native land in Ur of the Chaldeans during his father's lifetime. They go to Canaan. That's the important thing. They go and settle in the land of Canaan. And so Abram and his children are going to be sojourners in the land of Canaan for a while. And that's what we're going to be reading about next time.

C: So that brings us to the end of our first third of Genesis, which is actually our first fifth of Genesis. I'm thinking three parts might not be it, my man.

B: We'll see. We shall see.

C: Yeah. Boy, oh boy. Do you have a reading for the end of the show here?

B: I don't because I forgot, but I think you have two, so that'll make up for it.

C: Well, I've already done the one. It was about how we strike terror into the hearts of others.

B: Oh yeah, okay.

C: But this is one, I literally just wrote the word same in the margins of my Bible. This is chapter six, verse five. "When the Lord saw that man's wickedness was widespread on the earth and that every scheme his mind thought of was nothing but evil all the time, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and he was grieved in his heart.

B: Yeah.

C: Yep.

B: Same.

C: Same. So that's it. What a weird bunch of Bible.

B: Yeah, man.

C: Honestly. And again, I promise I don't mean that in a rude way, but going back and actually sitting down and reading it, there's a lot to take in, in just these 11 chapters.

B: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely there is.

C: So what are we going to be talking about next time, Benito?

B: Yeah. So next time we're going to do another chunk. So basically we did everything before Abraham. Now for next time, we're going to look at the life of Abraham and Isaac. And so we're going to be reading chapters 12 through 25, which will actually also get us into the very beginning of Jacob as well. But that's probably the best place to split it up. So 12 to 25 will get us Abraham and Isaac for next time, which yeah, it does mean our part three will leave us with the back half of the book to cover Jacob and Joseph, but we'll see. We'll see.

C: Yeah. Our part three and possibly our parts four and five.

B: Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it goes.

C: So until then, where can everyone find us online?

B: All right. So if you like the show, if you like the amount of work that we put in to show, if you have learned something on this show and you wanted to show appreciation, you can drop by ko-fi.com slash apocrypals. That's ko-fi.com slash apocrypals. And you can leave us a tip. It's not a recurring donation like a Patreon, but you can tip us in increments of $3, anywhere from three up to $3,333,333, whatever. Anything divisible by three is cool. You can leave us a comment, leave us a note. We love it. We really appreciate all of our donors so far. So yeah, if you like what we're doing, that does help us keep the show going and helps pay for hosting, helps pay for music samples and other clips that we use on the show. Also some of the different books that we use as sources and that kind of stuff, a hundred percent of this money is going back into the show. So your support is very helpful.

Also, if you want to get supplemental materials like readings, maps, images, sometimes links to the things we read if they're not in a traditional Bible. And also sometimes me accidentally reblogging vintage ads for mustard. You can find our Tumblr at apocrypals.tumblr.com. You can find us there, all sorts of material, including the curse of hot Dan. That was my mistake. Tumblr app is crazy sometimes. Yeah. And you can find me on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, all those, you'll find me just search for Benito Cereno. It's fine. You'll find it. What about you, Chris?

C: Everybody can find me by going to the-isb.com. That has links to everything that I write around the web, as well as all the other podcasts that I do and some comic books that you can get online or at your local comic book store. Hey, if you are listening to this, when it comes out, you can go to your local comic book store and tell them I would like to pre-order Army of Darkness: Halloween Special 2018. That has a story that I wrote with my writing partner, Chad Bowers and a story that Benito wrote - two stories in this Halloween special!

B: Yeah.

C: Nothing to do with Bible.

B: No, no Bible, but it is part of a series of one shots. If you also like Elvira or Vampirella or Betty page, or red Sonia, they also all have Halloween specials. They'll be on the same page in the catalog. You can find it. We had nothing to do with those, but they're there.

C: Yeah. You can also tell your local comics retailer that you would like Infinity Wars: Sleepwalker, which I'm also co-writing with Chad Bowers. That's going to be it for this week. Thank you for joining us. We will be back next week with more of Genesis. Stay tuned for the worst is yet to come. For Benito Cereno, I've been Chris Sims. Benito, peace be with you.

B: And also with you.