The Memories of the Nations

Why do cultures around the world preserve stories of a great flood, divine beings, giant heroes, and a forgotten age before history? In this episode of The Two Trees Podcast, we explore the ancient world behind Genesis and the shared cultural memory that flowed through the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. Drawing on the concept of the "cultural river," we'll examine how Genesis engages the myths and traditions of the ancient world—not by borrowing from them, but by correcting them. Rather than celebrating the mighty figures of old as heroes, Scripture exposes a story of rebellion, spiritual corruption, and God's judgment. Join us as we consider a biblical alternative to modern theories of Atlantis, ancient aliens, and lost civilizations, and discover how Genesis reveals what was really happening behind the stories the nations remembered.

Transcript

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Hey guys, it's Rose. If the Two Trees has been a blessing to you, please leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast or visit our website, www.the two trees podcast.org, and click the yellow buy me a coffee icon to leave a donation. And now let's join the conversation. I'm John Dillon, and I'm here with Rosemary Moller. Hello, hello. And Martin Listener. Hey y'all. Welcome, and we're excited to be here. Last week I told you guys that there was sickness going around and I wasn't gonna get it. That was a lie. Literally two hours after you left my house. It was horrible. Yeah. Oh my goodness. So if you're out there and you're sick, may God spare you, my friend. I I had forgotten it'd been so long since I'd really been sick. Oh my goodness. But I am on the mend. Thank you guys locally who knew I was sick and been praying for me. I I didn't even preach on Sunday. I had Martin's dad preached for me. And he did a good job. And and Martin took notes from the from the floor. But he was on he was on uh on the rotation. If if if someone was going to be up there, Martin was on standby. If they got to the bottom of the barrel. Not true. You were top shelf, buddy. We were ready to go. But I don't often miss being in the pulpit, and so it was weird to me to be home on a Sunday. The timing was bad though. It was like a day before. Yeah, it couldn't have been worse. I sent a message out to the deacons and was like, so guys, uh dust off your Bible. Not gonna be there. Uh Rose, how's your Bible doing? It is currently being held hostage by you. By me, that's correct. So I left it at Bible study. Like that's an odd question. I know, I know. Well, just wait. Rose leaves it places, she abandons it the whole time. I just oh one time. Anyway, so I left it at the coffee shop and they called me and said, Hey, we have your Bible. And I was like, Oh, okay, thanks. So the next morning at like 6 a.m., I went through the drive-thru. They opened the windows, like, can I have my Bible? They said, Well, it's not where we left it. I believe past we we called Pastor John and he came and got it. And I thought, no, there's no way I'm gonna see this Bible without some kind of like a ransom note. It's gonna be a ransom note. Sure enough. But the coffee shop and I are tight like spandex, okay? We are buddies. You're fighting upstream there. Those people, they love me almost as much as I love them. So they called me immediately. If they knew that you were holding my Bible hostage for a, and I quote, diabetic friendly pie. I don't think that's outrageous. I I think that's a good idea. Well, the thing is, is all I have in my home is stevia, and you hate stevia. So until you can either make peace with stevia or wait till I can go buy, like, I don't know, swerve. Oh, listen, I'm willing to wait. Swerve? Yeah, I'm just gonna do it. I don't know what that means, but that sounds good. It's a it's a for the record, Rose is welcome to get her pie at any time. It's in the front seat of the van. You can just go pick it up. Embedding Bible, but that's okay. What did I say? Oh, you can't pick up the pie. There is no pie. I'm trying to get a pie. And if the may maybe I'll share with the coffee shop people. They would do not want a diabetic friendly pie. Nobody does. Yeah, that doesn't mean I can't offer it though. Then they'll love me more. They have unlimited like donuts and all that. Yeah, that's true. They got the pie. I mean, I've never had them because sugar, but they look good. Anyway, we're back. Have you got a sponsor for us today, Mark? I do have a sponsor for today, although maybe we should just have the coffee shop sponsor us, like legitimately sponsor us. Listen, if you're living in the Covington Pleasant Hill, Troy Picqua area, you need to get yourself over to Glacier View Coffee. Not a real sponsor of the show, but they have all my money because I am there every day giving them my money for their coffee. It's really, really good. Sweet people, awesomeness. It's also my office. I work there more than I work anywhere else. So if you're looking for me, that's probably where I'm at. But anyway, today's sponsor, of course, is Paul's Optometry. Paul's optometry. Life-changing eye surgeries for all walks of life. I thought we were doing the other one. Get it all walks of life. Oh, you gotta listen to the whole thing. I'm picking up what you're thinking about. But thanks to Paul's Optometry for sponsoring today's episode. Love it. Love it. Rose, we're glad to have you back. I know that this life has been moving super fast for you, but uh, it's always more fun when you're here. And Martin and I behave better. No, this is good. I'm glad to be here tonight. I did listen to your episode. Oh, wait, I don't didn't finish it. The one that you guys just did. And now something about names. The one that you made me read all those names. Yes, that one. Uh yeah, that was. So good job. Actually, I had it playing in the car when I picked up my son from work and he said, uh, proud much of your podcast. And I was like, Well, I'm not on this one. I'm allowed to listen to it because I'm not on it. And he's like, whatever. He's just jealous. That's such a kip thing. Uh, it is a kip thing. Teenagers, uh, go figure. But anyway, names are important. I know that uh really what we're talking about. Listen, today's episode, if you feel like John, you're rambling a lot. This whole episode is going to be rambling uh because there is a cultural disconnect between us and the book of Genesis, and a lot of what I want to say in the upcoming chapters of Genesis that we're going to be looking at is going to require this conversation. Sooner or later, it has to happen. And so when we talked last week about how um genealogies or lists of names to ancient people are much more than a list of names. We talked about how there's a language gap, and uh we talked about how there's names actually mean things in those contexts, and that sometimes you can legitimately show the trajectory of human history by using people's names. You know, I was kind of thinking about that a little bit because I asked the question to you of was the name given as an expectation of how the person was going to act, or was the name proactive or retroactively given to the person because of how they lived their life? And I was thinking of the statement like go and make a name for yourself. And that kind of makes me lean towards the fact that the name was given after the life was lived of the individual because they're making a name of themselves, making something of their lives, and then they're going to apply a name to it later. I just wanted to add that from last week because it's a very good thing. This was really, really common for kings uh or princes or warlords of the time to give themselves a new name. Uh today, even like when someone becomes the Pope, right, they they're given a new name. Uh or if someone is baptized later on in life, they may be given a Christian name. And so this still exists in a lot of cultures. Uh the the truth of the matter, though, is that we don't know. We are dealing with the origins of human history. And we're reading a book that predates the Jewish people way. I mean, Adam. Like that's as far back as you can get. So what language was Adam speaking? Uh is it Hebrew? Most likely not. Hebrew is a Semitic language, and there are lots of Semitic languages that exist after the flood. Uh, and so we have cultures who are telling stories of the ancient world using names. Now, this comes up with the question do those names did they influence the languages that came later, or is this just what those cultures later were calling those people? In the end, I don't know how to know that. What I do know is that the text, which I believe is inspired by God, tells us call them this. And so we do have the idea of living up to uh your name or making a name for yourself, but we also have the idea of living up to your name. Uh, and so you can you could take this either way, it just depends. We don't know. What we do know is that the Bible is telling us a story that has compressed thousands of years of human history into a chapter or the tail end of a chapter. This feels really difficult for me to to um grasp because of the time amount of time that has lapsed between when the story is told and when the story is written down. Um, for instance, I'm I think I was talking about this today. I'm rereading Beowulf right now, and I believe it happened in around the 500s. Was maybe recorded around the eight hundreds, but wasn't actually written down until like a thousand, and I might be off a little bit there, but that's the point is this, I mean, how would you even remember? I don't know something that happened 500 years ago to the detail and to the name. So, how was all of the information like encapsulated and kept safe until it was time for it to be written? In the case of Beowulf, this is really I think interesting. It was a song, you sang it, and it was intended to be uh rhythmic, it moved people, like as you rode the oars, you could sing the ballad of Beowulf or the story of Beowulf. Same thing with like the Iliad or the Odyssey. There's there's a definite meter. But they would have had written language at that time. Well, yeah. But way, way, way back with Adam, well, we don't know that for sure. We don't find that ancient Angles and Saxons were writing things down. They may have carved things on stones, but at the time that Beowulf is composed, they're predominantly an oral culture. And we don't know exactly what Noah took on the Ark with him. Did he take any books? If if God told me the world is ending, get on the boat, one of the first things I'd be building is the library, because I'm never gonna buy another book and I have a problem. I love books. And so I don't know. There's there's a question that comes up because there is information that these cultures post-flood have about the pre-world flood, and it's different than what the book of Genesis talks about. And that's gonna be what we're talking about today. Where did this come from? How is there um conflict in these stories, and which one uh is driving the conversation? And so the question becomes what did people think they were holding in their hands when they were putting Genesis together? Because if you read uh just the beginning part of chapter five, it it reads like a new book. These are the generations of you know, the this new part of the family. This is like a new scroll that's being unrolled out in front of us. And so it seems as though whoever compiled Genesis, people tradition says Moses, it could have been multiple people, we don't know. It's not signed by anybody, that this could have been and most likely was a collection of the stories that people were telling about the ancient world, but is inspired by God in how it is put together. And so I'm not saying it's not inspired, I'm saying that there wasn't one single moment when these all flowed out of a pen. This kind of like later on when you have books like Joel and Amos and Obadiah, you have that prophet's entire ministry put down in like a best of hits album that's kind of sitting there. There wasn't a day when they just said all those things. It's the compiling of an entire life's ministry into a few pages. So the first four chapters, let's see, you guys left off with Lamex's terrible, terrible song, right? Okay. And then five opens with a genealogy. It does, and it's looking at a different section of the family. So does the genealogy sometimes act as a transition? It uh well, in this case, it's probably a different scroll. What you're looking at there is a new uh story. It kind of retells a little bit of what's going on. This is a different uh, not a different version, but another verse, if you want to think of it that way. And they're put together in the book of Genesis by God to lay out this is what was happening. But we look at genealogies as a function that tells me who I am, and it's about getting cool stories about, well, I'm related to Daniel Boone or Princess, whoever. Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln, two Ds, because she was fancy. Uh, and so you look at these things, you're like, okay, that's what they're for. But ancient peoples used them for much more. They didn't really care if generations got skipped. They didn't really care if the names are spelled an exact way. They have an agenda going into the genealogy that is more than just telling who's related to who. And we don't do that, especially as a Western reader. I don't really care who Methuselah is related to. They're all really old people and they're all related to Noah in some way because the flood wipes out everybody. And if you skip Noah, you can just go back to Adam. I mean, how hard was it to figure out who's related to who? And so we look at this and we're like, let's push on to the narrative. Ancient cultures, though, saw names as a way of storytelling. You could show the curve or the uh trajectory of a civilization, what they valued, how they were living, the titles that go along with a person by the names and titles that are used to describe a person. And so Genesis, excuse me, is one of humanity's oldest stories, and it's captivated imaginations and storytellers of the ancient world no less than it does ours today. And as such, it's important that we treat it as an ancient book and not a modern one. If it was a modern book and I'm writing a book and I'm like, I'm John Dylan, the son of Tim, the son of Gene, the son of Odie, the son of Wright, then you don't have to know anybody. Matthew Timothy. I do not think. Lovely man, love him bunches. Uh, but it's not really part of what we do. Ancient people did different things with this. And so if I'm going to read the Bible, I want to have in my mind not a modern context, but an ancient one. What did an ancient audience think when they read these words? And so this is not a science book, which is what most people today want Genesis to be, to reveal hidden scientific insights. It's a religious book. It's telling you the story of our exile from the presence of God. Tradition says it's written by Moses, and whether or not that's true, the stories it contains no doubt existed in oral history, if not in previous written form. And so it shares similarities and motifs with the rest of the ancient world. People who got off of Noah's Ark were related to each other. They interacted with each other. As those cultures spread out, they had similarities with each other. Even way later, when you get to like Moses' life, the people, like the Pharaoh of Egypt, had a lot in common with the way he saw the world with the rulers of someone in Babylon or way up in the Hittite Empire. There were certain things that everybody took for granted as part of their worldview. There's a scholar who I don't always agree with about everything, but I I love his writing and how organized he is. Martin, you would really like this guy because he is he is A to B driven. Like this guy is you would like him. Yeah, his name's Dr. John Walton. Again, I don't agree with everything that he says, but I like him. Uh and he talks about this idea of this shared world that everyone's swimming around in like a cultural river. That's how he describes it. Like in our world, words like individualism, uh, or even in like rural America, like that idea of uh hard work and family farm, like those things are powerful images that have that stir up emotions. We think of things like freedom and liberty. Uh, those are buzzwords for us that get you all patriotic, regardless probably of whatever country you happen to belong to. Ancient people, though, didn't necessarily think that way. They were more than happy to be part of kingdoms where they were part of this big gigantic mechanism that was rolling along. And they didn't really think of themselves as individuals so much as they thought of themselves as part of a whole. To the extent that you get guys like Socrates, right? Socrates is condemned to death, or he can move out of Athens and move to another city. Like if somebody said, John, you either have to commit suicide or move out of Covington, I'd be looking for houses in P. Hill or Bradford or Covington or one of the other towns around me because I'm not gonna die for my identity as a Covingtonian. I not that our village isn't awesome, Martin, but um, it's it's not the same thing. I'm moving to it. But uh Socrates said, you know, I'd rather die. This is an idea that I have a hard time coming to terms with because of the value system of the ancient world. And so even in our time, cultural differences can cause misunderstandings or embarrassment. If you're talking to even people um with a generational gap, there are words that you're not supposed to say that were bad words two generations ago that don't really matter anymore. No one thinks of them in the same way. Uh you think of like tattoos and things like that that were a huge deal for my grandparents and nowadays don't really mean much of anything. If I see someone with a tattoo and they were my grandpa's generation, they were probably in the Navy or the Marines. Now they may just really like Tweety Bird or something like that. It's it's almost it's it's become almost a nothing. So, what do you think would be the difference between an ancient cultural river and our modern global village? A modern global village centers around the idea of me, the individual. An ancient person saw themselves as part of an ongoing story that is greater than themselves. This I think is the biggest difference between the two. And so an Egyptian would have felt very differently about Egypt and his role in Egypt than I feel about my role as an American or even as an Ohian living in the fruited plains of Ohio. It's just a difference in culture. And so when I read Genesis and I look at these things and it's laying out a story arc that's different from what I'm wanting to see, I don't always pick it up. I push past it or I trivialize things that are in the text that are intended to go off like little red flags, but they don't stop me because I don't know there's anything in them. I have a kind of a thought process along that. Like you're talking about just being, you know, the Kog and the greater machine, like the ancient idea was, but in the United States, there is a huge push about like making sure that you go and vote and how we're a republic and that the power is with the people, and this idea of like you are a part of a much larger whole. Oh yeah. And so it's just I'm trying to uh weigh that part compared to the individualism because that is a huge push, especially in the States, as far as like being your own self and making sure that you get what's right for you and that kind of stuff, and less of like laying it down for the greater good, especially in today's world. But I I'm just you were relying on the patriotism and stuff as being an example of that. Well, that's just low-hanging fruit. But I'm just curious as to like how our culture can be so based upon, you know, being a part of a greater whole as the United States and making sure that your voice is represented as the you know conglomerate of everyone, but still the culture is very heavily pushed towards individualism as well. Yeah. And that's just going to be a good thing. We aren't totally different from them. I'm not saying that we are, I'm saying that the way we talk is different. The things that would slow us down aren't necessarily things that would slow down an ancient audience. Gotcha. We're looking for scientific things. For instance, like you're reading these genealogies, and you are much like more likely to forget the name and focus on the number. They are way more likely to say, okay, big number, who cares? Let's focus on the name. That's a difference in culture because we're trying to answer the question, how old is the earth? Was this Darwin guy on to something, or is this something that is opposed to scripture? To be fair, they lived a really, really long time. And so we're gonna just stare at the number and be like, there's no way. Well, I got things to say about this too. Draws our attention. It's funny because I was just reading through it a little bit as you were talking, and all I remember is 930, 800, and 912. But also because the names are mush to us. We don't have a meaning that goes with that name. There's no story connected to it, there's no place for it in our minds. And since you don't have a folder for it, it kind of just goes in the the trash pile that's over here. Major side note. Um, well, after we named our daughter, her name is Sydney. And I think you guys would like her. Shout out to my daughter, she's amazing. But she's been on the podcast before. Oh, yeah, she has. Stay focused. Yeah. Okay, anyway. So, well, this is gonna derail it even more. So we named her, and I named her from Huckleberry Finn. But anyway, there was um this moment where I got more spiritual, and I was like, I wonder what her name means. And so I was looking it up, and it doesn't mean it looks like It means from the city of St. Denis. And I was like, that's disappointing. But it's actually pronounced Son Denis. And so there's much more fancy. It is. So that that, yeah, but there's nothing about God's gracious gift or you know, lovely rose or anything like that. So lovely rose. You know what I mean. Like what's your name? Oh well. What does John Jonathan mean or something? Uh gift from God. Yeah. Doesn't kind of everything mean gift from God? Let's focus on me. Okay. Yeah. Except Sydney. Yeah. So the story, the story of Genesis, it's more than just the stories of ancient peoples, but it isn't less than that. Moses and his family, like Abraham and his people, they come not from the dirt. God doesn't remake a new man. He makes a nation by calling him out of an existing culture. In this case, it's the Sumerians and the Akkadians. The Sumerians are weird, all right? They have a language that exists. We call it cuneiform, but there is no language that's related to Sumerian. It existed forever and never had any linguistic babies. That's very odd. It's an isolated language. Akkadian, though, has lots of them. The Semitic languages, there's loads of these things. And so we find that there are stories in the Akkadian world and in the Sumerian world and in the Egyptian world and everywhere in between that everyone seems to be tracking along a similar flow of thought that's different from ours. And so when the Bible is written and the stories of Genesis are laid out the way that they are, it isn't to answer modern questions. It's to engage with that older world and the discussions that they were having. And so it's not, I'm not saying that the Bible isn't true. It's absolutely true. I'm saying that we struggle to read it at times in the way that it's intended to be read. Sumerian gave us cuneiform, and cuneiform was a workable alphabet in multiple languages. Just because something is written in cuneiform doesn't mean it's written in Sumerian. It's a working language for thousands of years. And imagine being able to read something that was thousands of years old. You have access to it in a way that, like today, the internet gives you translation abilities. This was almost like a global uh network that pulled the lives of multiple cultures together into the same story. Is it a little bit like Hellenism did later in the New Testament? So this cultural river that we're reading in the story isn't a modern Western one, it's an ancient Middle Eastern one. They had stories and worldviews that were ubiquitous in their world. And if we're going to dig deeper into these chapters of Genesis, a bit of background will help. Now here I want to stop. You don't need it to understand Genesis. You can understand the flow of Genesis without the cultural background. Cain bad. God judges bad guys. Lots of water, bad guys drown. Noah safe on arc. You can dumb this down and just get the uh the classic kids' stories and understand what's happening in the text. But if you want to discover everything that's in the text and you really want to dig into some of these things, then archaeology and literature are in history are going to help you to do that. You don't need them to understand the basic flow of the meaning. But what we're doing on this podcast is this exists for me to ramble about weird things. Things that are going this may not ever pop up in a sermon, but it's in the Bible. And so what we're doing is we're trying to dig deeper and understand why the text is talking this way? Why does it tell me this guy's name? Why does it tell me how old he is? I don't really need to know that. You could just give me a line at the beginning that says, and they all lived a really long time. Here's the list of the people that you don't really need to know, but here it is anyway. So these people, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians, all these guys, they did not forget the events of Genesis, but they changed them. The gods that they worshipped are not the true God, they're not the Lord Most High. They're these rebel fallen creatures of the darkness, and they retold the events of Genesis with themselves as the heroes. Genesis is written to a people who assumed that they knew a lot about the world before the flood. The Sumerians have this thing called the king list. We find multiple examples of this, and many of them have a list of kings from before the flood. Also, this is where the kingship was, and it was in this city, and this was going. So they have all of this stuff that is part of their stories, part of who they are as a people, how they view themselves, that kind of looks at the flood as an inconvenient event, but it's okay, we fixed it. And so they have taken these events because remember, these are all descendants of Noah and his children. They didn't just forget that it happened. Instead, what they did is these cultures began to retell the stories, to rework them in a way which lifts themselves up higher and their civilization as the best. Question. So the king list, the kings of the ancient pre-flood world, would they have been in some some kind of similar position to a king today or throughout history? Or is there a difference between a king being a king then and a king being a king any other time? Yeah, so when we think of a king today, we think of, oh, you are related to a royal family. No one ever asks why they're the royal family. It's just kind of an accident of history. When the new king or queen comes into line, they're not there's not like a test that everyone's taking, it's just a hereditary thing. And for most places, kings or queens don't even have that much to do with the running of their countries. It's not true everywhere, but for the vast majority of places that still have a king or a queen, it's not what it was then. The ancient world did not make a distinction between physical reality and supernatural reality. They intentionally blur the lines. And so if you are the king, for instance, the pharaoh of Egypt, people didn't just see you as a guy who's in charge, they saw you as a divine being, someone who has a family connection, not just to important people, but to supernatural powers. If you jump way across the deserts and you end up in Babylon, same thing. If you go all the way over to Greece, you're going to find how many of the city-states have demigods as their founding story. You think of like uh the Spartans, and they're all descendants of Hercules, if you believe their own propaganda about themselves. All of them do this. Even up into you were mentioning before Beowulf, like it was really common for chieftains of the Germanic peoples, uh, and even of the English and the Saxons to claim descent from Woden or somebody like that. They were claiming, I'm not just your run-of-the-mill guy. I am, and we have this word demigod, part human, part divine. And so when you read a book like Gilgamesh, he's the king, but he's also a giant and he's two-thirds deity. He's not just a human, he is part human and part god, and this idea is all over the place. And a question you might ask is why? So we're looking at this and we're saying, Man, if all of these stories are talking about this, and the Bible is written about this time, does it have something that talks about this as well? And the answer is yes. These peoples, whether it's Babylonians or it's Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, Egyptians, Greek, all of them, and all the other isms and schisms that exist out there, they believe that their civilization was the heir to a more ancient one that existed before the flood. Okay, so they don't see themselves as this new thing, but as a continuation of what was happening before the flood. Are you with me so far? Wouldn't that be a bad thing? It depends. But I mean, like the the flood happens because God says, like, okay, enough's enough. Like unless you flip the story and the gods are kind of goofballs who, like in the Sumerian story, kill off all the humans because humans were being too loud, and then the gods were kind of sorry about it because they weren't getting enough sacrifices, and all of a sudden they repent and they just kind of trivialize this thing. But humanity was so brilliant, we overcame it, and the gods are back with us, and they've blessed us, and look how amazing our civilization is. So the idea of the flood in and of itself isn't the same as Noah's. No, and this is what Genesis does is it takes, and I believe this to be real history. All right, this makes me different from a lot of people. I don't think this is just a way of downing Babylon. I think this is defining what really happened. And so what I see is happening here is Genesis ensures that the story, there is a witness against the propaganda that is being peddled by Babylon and Egypt and all these different places. So instead of seeing the flood as a judgment, they reframed it as like an interrupter? An interruption, yeah. And so even when you read like the Sumerian king list, you get these amazingly long, like thousands of years, these kings are on the throne. And then all of a sudden it says, and then the flood came and killed everybody except Utnapishtum, and everything goes on. By the way, here's the next king. And it just picks up the story as though there's not a disconnect. They believed that their information that they were getting, their civilization, was survived the cataclysm. What the Bible tells us is something very, very different, but there are many similarities. And so we have to wonder here, is the Bible copying these ancient stories, or is it possible that there really was an event and the Bible is written to ensure there is a correct witness of what happened? And that's what I believe. I believe God's word is true, and that this is a telling of what happened. This makes me weird, and if you don't like it, you can tune back in later. But this is going to affect the way that we talk about the rest of the book of Genesis. So whether you're uh Akkadian or Sumerian or Egyptian, they all believed that before the great flood, mankind received wisdom from the gods. And their culture is not just an expression of how brilliant they are, but it's an example of how in tune they are with the supernatural world. This is why the Babylonians are tracking the stars across the heavens. This is why they are naming themselves after gods. This is why ziggurats are pride of place in these places. Pharaoh's whole job is to maintain a good relationship between the divine world and the human world. It's called Ma'at. This is ubiquitous across all of the cultures. And they all believed that the rulers of the ancient world were children of these gods and human women. They were giant-like. Even after the flood, their civilizations, they believed, were ruled by kings who had divine ancestry. This isn't, I can't, I can't stress this. This is not just a Sumerian thing. You're not got like one culture at one time. You're talking about a massive, massive chunk of human history where this is the story. And this is the story where Genesis comes from. This is what's being asked. Genesis doesn't ignore these beliefs, and it doesn't accept them either. It's going to say what you're telling is based on truth, because remember, the best truth or the best lie is based in truth. They didn't just make things up wholesale. The Bible tells us the sons of God saw the daughters of men, and behold, they were fair, and they see and they take, and they have children who are not normal. They are giants in a lamb. Nephilim is the word that we use to describe this. We're going to get into these later, but they're incredibly violent, and the Bible calls them men of renown, and it explains to you how you get a Nephilim, and it talks about them before the flood and also after. This is because all of these cultures are talking about demigods that are ruling their societies. And the Bible talks about supernatural beings like real things, not just spiritual ideas, but these demigods, these supernatural human figures, they're not the heroes, they're the villains. The gods behind them are twisted servants of the rightful king of the universe. And God brought justice and gave humanity another chance to be with him. And so what you're looking at here is Genesis is not celebrating this, it's condemning it. Babylon, Egypt, Greece, they do the opposite. Look how great our civilization is because we've got guys like Gilgamesh. We do this with sport teams, right? This team is the best because we had players like X, Y, or Z. It doesn't matter that that guy got traded and played for this other team, and he was great over there. He was only great when he was with us. We just lost uh a great Brown recently, and I'm I'm still in mourning, but I can't talk about it. Maybe. My heart is nervous. I've been burned so many times. But but Genesis isn't saying, no, no, no, no, this never happened. Let's talk science. Instead, what it's saying is there is a supernatural war going on, but what you're saying isn't so. Genesis doesn't spend a lot of time explaining because it was part of the cultural river. Everyone was thinking this, it's present in the text, but this pushes hard against our materialistic cultural river. But I think it's a very important idea. I mean, you've talked about gaining the puzzle piece needed to really move the pieces around in your mind to understand this. And I think this is really one of the major key factors for myself as well, is this idea of the interaction between the supernatural and the physical world. And the fact that the Bible is so nonchalant by just saying it in like one verse in Genesis 6, and then it moves on as if just everybody knows what's going on. And and you read it today, you're just like, okay, that's kind of weird, but I don't even know what it means. Let's just keep going on. Yeah, just push on. But then if you like actually think about it for a second, you're like, does that really mean that like these spiritual beings came down and then you know, with the women, and then they had babies, and then like what? That's like opening up a whole can of worms for everything. Oh, yeah. And the Bible's just like one line and keep moving. And it does that because no one was asking questions about this. Right. It was it was the story that everyone was interacting with. It was the expected like today, for instance, apologetics is an incredibly important field because our culture struggles with the idea of the existence of the supernatural at all. But there is no book of the Bible that is apologetics in its nature. There is no book that's like how to prove the existence of God. It just is kind of laid out there and assumed. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That's because it was not written to our culture. We have it and it's for our culture, but it has its own original audience. And so Genesis is not written to combat Charles Darwin. Genesis is written to show you mankind's relationship with God. There probably isn't a book of the Bible, I'm thinking while I'm talking, that doesn't deal with the supernatural on some level. It makes no explanations for it. It makes no preface, no nothing. Like it's just they're dropped in there and no explanation. None at all, because the Bible is supernatural in its worldview. And Christians are supposed to be as well. But in our cultural river, our natural stance is materialism. You have to really convince somebody when you start talking about supernatural anything. They seem to have no problem believing that the miracles of the Bible happened, but neither you, me nor anyone else. I mean, that's it. And they're not really gonna explain why or how. God can do anything he wants to do whenever he wants to do it, however he wants to do it. What that's the whole point of praying. Like we're going to God and we're asking for your help. And so I read a book, it's called The Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser, and it messed me up. I was so sure he was wrong that I read it again to prove him wrong and had to repent and say, I think there is more here than what I'm accustomed to thinking about. I just remembered I have your copy of The Unseen Realm, and I will do a prisoner exchange for my Bible. I have bought a new edition of the Unseen Realm, Rose, and it has a cool cover, and uh I'm holding up for the pie. You know how I treat books. I do. So there's I will send you pictures of your book until you relent and give me back to feed us. But it's interesting with the the uh unavailability to the supernatural that people have today, because the same people will believe in a guardian angel that is watching over them as they drive down the road, but think that it's preposterous that there are other spiritual beings other than you know, even just God. The Bible doesn't give us a whole lot of information about the supernatural world. It gives us a lot about the physical world, but not a ton about the supernatural world. And they have to assume that God was just as creative on the other half of creation as he was on this side of things. But the part that gets me is how limited people will give access to the supernatural. Like I don't really believe any of, you know, that happened in the Bible, but in today it doesn't really work that way because it's just whatever, it's different, whatever. But then at some point in your life you believe in some form of supernatural, like an angel bringing a message to you, or some kind of, you know, spiritual being that you saw in the night, or something like there are glimpses in just about everybody's life where they somehow believe in some spirit supernatural state of being other than the physical, but in their mind's eye, they are completely against opening up the idea of the same thing. So I have as part of my job, I I spend a lot of time talking with people, uh, and especially as people's lives are ending. I I'm sitting in hospice or I'll read to them. Uh, and there have been so many times where people have told me things that they're like, I never told anybody this, but this happened to me and I have no explanation for it. I don't know what to do with that. They have no reason to tell me this in the first place, and no reason to be lying. They're they're on death's door. They just decided to invent some fantastic story so that I think they're cool. I just don't believe that. And so what I've stopped doing is trying to explain everything. It doesn't mean I believe everything, but I just have to then say, Wow, that's wild, and move along with my life because the Bible does talk about a real supernatural world in Genesis. Some angels show up to eat with Abraham, and they're not really sure how much to feed them. And so Abraham like orders Sarah, like, make all the flour we got, and like, how much does an angel eat? And they're eating it, they are able to interact with the physical world, but the Bible doesn't give you this is how it works, which is what a westerner wants, because we're used to thinking of spirits and we have a very narrow category that we've lumped things into, and if things break that mold, we get real uncomfortable real fast. What I'm suggesting we do is that we look at what the Bible says and believe it. That it says this, this happened. I don't need to know how, I have questions, but I'm not really sure. And if the Bible wanted me to know how, it would tell me how. I need to trust though that the story it's telling is real, that Satan isn't just the personification of our evil impulses, that there really is a creature in rebellion against God, that Jesus isn't just a concept, that he really was God in the flesh, come to bear our sins on the cross. And so when we look at the cultures around Abraham, they all look back at these kings, these semi-divine beings, children of spiritual beings and human women, and they call them heroes, kings, culture bringers, mighty men. Genesis looks back and says, No, this is not humanity's golden age, this is like the pits, and it got so bad that the heart of humanity was only evil continually, and what they did is they dragged all of humanity down to a point where it all stopped, where the judgment of God is going to flow across the world. So a modern reader looks at these passages and the driving Question in their mind is, How old is the earth? So I better count these numbers. An ancient audience looked at this text and they asked questions like, Why, if God is king, do evil people prosper? Why does Babylon have such power? Is God helpless before the gods of the nations? Those are the questions that they're asking. Those aren't even uh scratching most people's minds when they read through Genesis because we're so locked in on modern questions that we don't ask ourselves what would it have looked like for Abraham to see all of these massive ziggurats and buildings and all of these places? There is the proof in the pudding. This civilization has gone off like a firecracker. It is booming. But this God is the real deal. And he's calling you to go where? Just wander. Why? Why should I trust you? And so there's this constant question of is God enough? Is this the true king of all that is? And the Bible is the unfolding of this truth that even though the peoples of Mesopotamia looked back before the flood and they imagined an age of God kings and mighty warriors and divine heroes, the Bible, Genesis doesn't deny that something extraordinary happened. It just tells the story differently. The sons of God do descend. Spiritual beings did rebel, mighty men did arise. But Genesis says they're not heroes, they're the bad guys. What Babylon is celebrating, Genesis is condemning. What the nations remember as greatness, Scripture remembers as rebellion. These ancient stories, they do preserve a memory of a past event, but Genesis reveals what was really happening behind the curtain. Go ahead and tell me what you were thinking. So the way you were talking about Abraham and seeing the civilizations around him being so prosperous and yet following God to the point where he just walks around. I I think about all the time, like, how did Abraham make it into the hall of faith in Hebrews 11? And just this idea of like, I mean, he just like walked around, like, what's a big deal, and what else did he have to do anyway? And you know, this, and he was really not even that good of a guy, like, you know, with his wife and his the way he treated people and all this stuff. Like, why how did he make it into the hall of faith that it was such a big deal? But the way you're uh showing Abraham's life and just what you're talking about with the cultural river that he was floating down at the time, the idea of the prosperity around him and and all of this stuff, it reminds me of the two uh measuring sticks that I always say that God has, the one that the world views uh things by and the way God views things. Yeah. And the measuring stick around Abraham is showing everybody being prosperous by following these other stories and these other gods and all this other stuff. And Abraham deliberately chose to follow God's measuring stick for his life and for humanity, and that's why he's in the hall of faith, because he he he understood that even though everything around him looked like Eden, it wasn't the way that he was supposed to be heading towards the garden, it was God's way, and that that's something that's even more difficult to understand because we don't realize what the culture that Abraham was living in was like. Yeah, he would have looked at a place like Ur or the other cities of the uh of the Mesopotamian world and gone, wow, like this has to be a place blessed by the gods. Look at it. Look at all the water that's here, look at all the food that's here, look at the power and the wealth and all of these things. It was obvious to them. And if you're thinking you're you're much closer to Eden than we are now. So the idea of abundant life and God-driven life was Eden. He's trying to go back to it, and he's looking at Ur and he's like, Water, food, abundance? Sounds pretty much like Eden, right? That's what cities were supposed to be. They're little anti-Eden. It's got all the stuff and it's missing the soul. It is by its nature devouring other things and other people. And Abraham is told, I want you to go out there and be a blessing. In you, all the world will be blessed. It's it's the opposite. And so what you're seeing as people are reading Genesis, they're asking these questions Should I judge success based on the way of Babylon? Or is there something missing from these empires? Daniel's gonna give a really great example of this. He describes the empires like uh hybrid monstrous beasts that rise up out of the ocean. Not a one of them is majestic. They're all creepy, creepy, creepy, because it's revealing this heart and soul of the thing. What Genesis is doing is it's interacting with this story that these ancient peoples and cultures have a gospel, but it's the gospel of hell. It's darkness, it's a it's demonic propaganda. The Bible in the New Testament says they're preaching doctrines of demons. It's the same idea that there really is a supernatural evil, an intelligent being, beings, who were there, who are still interacting with the world today. And I still think it's worth saying again the the imitation factor of how they tried to make what they were producing similar to the garden. They tried everything they could to recreate the garden, but you could definitely tell that the the core or the center of what makes Eden Eden was not there and what they were doing. Even though they they made it as pretty as they could, they put as much lipstick on the pig as they can, they can't change the core of what it is because God is not behind it. That's right. And so what I'm trying to say is that Genesis isn't always doing what you think it's doing. When you get a a list of names, and you get okay, there's like a descent going on here. This is plunging down. Uh, you're going to get another one with the the line of Seth, and all of a sudden you get people's names that mean things like the man of the spear, and he's a descendant of Seth. And you're like, well, wait a minute, why? You got another guy whose name means the descent. The descent of what? Of who? What's going on? And then all of a sudden you hit Genesis six and you're like, holy cow, the wheels are flying off this thing. This moved real fast. To us, it feels like it drops out of nowhere. And ancient culture, though, was picking up on it in the chapters with the genealogies. It's kind of setting the golf ball up on the T. It's prepping you for what's coming. This conversation reminds me of one that we had or that I had where I was telling you that um, okay, we had the conversation, but I was talking. I don't want to attach your name to my thoughts. Um, that if you if you approach Genesis as a problem to be solved, you know, like with linear things and ideas and numbers and names and things like that. I mean, what's the chances you're gonna crack the code? Like what do you where are you gonna go with that at the at the end of your reasoning? But if you struggle to understand it as part of the mystery of what's been given to us, the ongoing story that is still not finished, but we know how it ends. I think that that is the the stance where you will start to allow God to work in your life and your heart and see these things that He's put there for us as modern Western people to look back on and marvel at, you know, with our our ancestors essentially. I think so. And it shows me my place in what's going on, that I am still wrestling not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, the powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, the spiritual wickedness in the high places. I don't think those are imaginary beings. Slightly fun fact back to Beowulf. Did you know that Grendel is a descendant of Cain? I did. Yeah, a descendant of Cain, and like the he's the father of all the monsters on the earth. That makes total sense. Yes. Cool thing about Beowulf's total sidebar. This is really wrecking it. I'm sorry. It's okay, but you can see kind of like little windows of cultures through Beowulf. You can tell this is a very pagan story that priests have written down. I was just gonna say, it's almost like it's a pagan story that the Christians got a hold of. That's exactly what it is. It is, it's so they were like, okay, I always imagine like some really religious bishop walking around behind the guy writing it down, and he's like, Is there any Jesus in the story? And he's like, There is now. Let me just drop some Bible stuff in here to make sure it gets preserved. Uh, but they they were totally doing these kinds of things in cultures all over the world. You go to Japan, you go to China. People believed that their leaders were divine in South America. The same kind of idea was in it. Why? And so there are a lot of theories about this, and this is where I very rarely do this, but we are going to do a little bit of conspiracy theories uh here. There is a conspiracy theory that believes that lost, uh, advanced civilization like Atlantis or something was moving all over the world, teaching people these ideas. Uh, and you got guys like Graham Hancock, who's very famous for this, and some really cool Netflix specials have been put out about this. And it comes up pretty often in my discussions about Genesis with people, because people are interested in the beginnings of things, how these ancient cultures worked. I'm not saying that there definitely weren't advanced cultures out there, and I have zero opinions about Atlantis, but I am a biblical supernaturalist, and I think there's a much more simple explanation that scripture assumes the spiritual world is real. From Genesis to Revelation, God is interacting with humanity. There are beings you can talk to. The Bible doesn't say not to do witchcraft and divination because it's stupid, it says don't do it because it's dangerous. There are rebellious spiritual beings with interintelligence that are interacting with humanity. All of these nations after the flood seem to run right back to the darkness. And so, whether you're in America or whether you're in Asia or you're down in Africa, all of these people are worshiping the same beings who were present when this was going on. And so idolatry is often, in my mind, it's connected to real supernatural entities, not just to the imagination. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's how the Bible talks about these things. Are you going to talk about Serpent Mound? No, but it's the same idea. And so you've got this idea, like there are similarities between these cultures. And people are like, well, why does everyone have a flood story? Well, how about because there was one? That's what I think. Like, I know that people are going to poo-poo that and kind of brush it away. But even if they had forgotten it, if they are reaching out into the darkness and praying and worshiping and sacrificing whatever God they've imagined, what makes you think that nothing talked back? When we read the story of Moses, right, the the magicians are standing there with Pharaoh and they throw their staffs down on the ground. It doesn't say that they pretended they became sea monsters. The word there is Tananim, uh, or snakes. It says they did become snakes. We find that the magicians of Egypt are replicating the miracles that Moses is doing. So if there is similarities between these ancient traditions, is that evidence of aliens or Atlantis? I I think that a better explanation is that all of humanity is interacting with supernatural beings who are fallen from the court of the Lord. And what's interesting is the geographical location of these things is what throws people off. But like, to me, how is that a problem? Like, if you yourself were to fly from wherever you are now to the opposite side of the world and say the same prayer to God, would he hear it just the same? Just the same. And so if you were in South America or in China or whatever, and you were praying or communicating or seancing or however you want to say it to the fallen creatures, or maybe just one, the same one that they're all reaching out to with a different name, the one that's in rebellion against God, would he not give a similar, if not identical, answer to you if you're on one side of the world or the other? Yeah, the thing is we don't know how the supernatural world works. We don't. We like it makes sense to me that these beings would follow humanity wherever they went. They seem to have. One of the other questions you get is, well, which one was Thor and which one was Bale and which one was this? What makes you think you can trust what they're saying? That there really is a being called this. Their whole goal is to enslave you into the lies that they're peddling. You can't trust information that comes from the darkness into this world. And so a lot of the idea of the occult is really simply this. They're saying, I trust the information I'm getting from the other side, and I don't. I'm going to trust the word of God, and I'm going to say, I don't really care what they say. Your stories may be interesting, but I don't recognize them as truth. I'm reading Genesis and saying, I know what happened. God has laid it out here. This wasn't your victory, this was your defeat. This wasn't a moment where you triumphed. This was a moment where you were left wrecked. And so Genesis is not one myth among many, it's God's correction of the overarching story of the ancient world, revealing what was actually happening behind the traditions that the nate that the nations were preserving. That's what I think. It's going to come up because we're going to hit these chapters, and people are going to be like, John, why do you think this guy's name matters? Or why are you assuming that it's this? And it has to do with everything we just talked about. That I'm not going to read Genesis from a modern perspective. I'm not interested, honestly, in the vast majority of things that get brought up on the internet social media poster boards because they're not talking about what the text is talking about. Before we go, I have a quick question. Do you think that it would be easier to write history after it's happened and you're looking back like Genesis would have been written, or as it's unfolding without the perspective that you would gain from a very large gap in time? Oh, I don't know. What do you think? Um I don't know, because if I was if I was challenged to write a world history book or curriculum, that would be a very big task, but you can see how a lot of it's played out. I wonder if that would affect how you write it, you know, because you wouldn't be impartial because you would have feelings about the good and the bad and the ugly, everything that happened throughout throughout time. So if you're like putting in a genealogy, even though an ancient culture would have understood this as it was being written, you actually have the privilege of already knowing everything that happened to each of those people. Like Martin was asking, is that their original name or the name that was like, you know, retroactively given to them? You were you're presenting a complete story that's already written to a people. Right. So I just I just wonder if that would almost in a way be easier, even though you know it's a thousand plus years later after a yeah. And so the the truth of the matter here, Rose, is I don't know. I I think it would be easier afterwards, but I know I think the word easier is not the word I'm looking for, even though I said it, it would be something more complete. It would be more so here's what I think, and and you you can call this cheating if you want, but this has to do with my view of scriptures. Is I believe that humans wrote the Bible within the context of what they knew, but that God moved them to write what they did. I agree. I agree. And so for me looking at this, I want not just to chase the rabbit trails, and brother, there are so many awesome rabbit trails here. I encourage you to chase them all. But after you have laid out what the text is actually saying, when you then try to take the text and push it into a modern mold, you end up in weird places. You make assumptions about ancient genealogies that just weren't present in how they were doing things. Look at like Jesus' genealogy in Matthew. There are multiple women who are in the genealogy and multiple kings who got booted so that these women could be part of it. That is a power statement. You're this is highlighting something about the nature of Jesus. It is the lower, elevated above the highest. That tells me something, and an ancient audience who is familiar with their king list would have known that. In the same way that kids are memorizing the list of presidents, if you snuck in someone who wasn't the president, they'd probably notice because it doesn't fit the song. Um, that for those of you overseas, all American children learn a song so that we can learn who all the presidents are. I don't know this song. You don't know the song? Washington, Adams, Jefferson? No. No, I just hardcore make my kids just learn them. Wow. That's sad. Come be in my class. They could have a tune, a little catchy ditty to bounce around to. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I don't know exactly how things shook out. And I don't know all of the things that Genesis is laying out, and I don't know the answer to all of the rabbit trails, but I'm incredibly interested in them. The one thing that I want to highlight as we push forward is why does the text say what it says? It's not going to capture all of your questions, it's going to be hyper-focused on the questions that they were having. Why does evil prosper? Why is Babylon so powerful? Is God able to defend us against the darkness? Can the kingdom of God come to who and where we are? Is it possible for the meek to inherit the earth? And I believe it is, because Jesus is the God of gods, the Lord of Lords, mighty and awesome.