Philemon. Yeah. Philemon. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are working on breaking down the six flags over Colossae, which is the community to which the letter of Philemon was written in the New Testament. But they just weren't one thing. They were a lot of things. And they were a town by the time the letter of Philemon was written to them, they were a town with a 1600 plus year history with conquests and tragedies and great triumphs and legends and myths and probably some resentment built up toward their new overlords, the Romans. And we're trying to get a better sense of who they were and what they were made of in the same way that if you want to get a sense of what you or I were made of, and we had a long time to sit down over a nice meal or something and talk about it, we would just pick each other's brain about the history of our families and culture and all of that stuff. So that's what we're doing. Yesterday we talked about the first flag. Maybe it's a flag. I don't know. Are we counting that as a flag? Half flag? It's a very mysterious flag from a long time ago. So it's a hard flag to exactly label. But in the mythic age of Colossae and the larger people group that the town of Colossae is a part of, the Phrygian people group, back then somebody came from somewhere. Maybe Macedonia, maybe northern Iraq, maybe from the Mediterranean after a great big giant eruption happened or something. I don't know. They came from somewhere, but here's what I do know. These people got taste because they moved somewhere real, real pretty. Colossae is just lovely. And they set up shop there. Now there's some really interesting stories and legends that maybe even predate this. It's possible this first era of Colossian history is even older. Because I don't know if anybody can really pin down the legendary kings who might just be completely myth from this particular region. But two of these ancient Phrygian kings are somebody named Nanakus, sometimes called Annakus, I guess. And then a later successor of his called Manus. And somewhere in between these two kings, there is apparently the story is there was a giant flood that covered everything, maybe all of Turkey, and it kind of reset the building and the progress of the Phrygians. Or maybe some people interpret this as this is the great calamity that moved the Phrygians. Maybe some of you are like, wait a minute, isn't there a flood thing or something about a flood or something in the Bible as well? And I would say to you, great memory. Yeah, there's totally a thing about a flood in the Bible. That's very, very, very, very, very, very, very old. It's in the part of the Bible where you're getting into genres and time immemorial and stuff that it's kind of tough to wrap your brain around exactly how it all works. And we're all the way back to the very beginning of Genesis when we talk about the flood. And at that time, yeah, the flood time, things had existed for quite a while already. So humanity was pretty well developed at this point. I mean, it'd been around long enough to turn evil and stupid and destructive. And so by the time you get to Genesis six, we find out that there's going to be a flood. God is going to judge all this evil. He's going to save one family and that family's descendants. It's Noah. And so Noah builds this ark, and we get the dimensions of it and everything in chapter six. I mean, it's 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high. That is a very impressive boat. Uses it to preserve the lives of all these different species of animals and stuff. And then it just rains and rains and rains. 40 days, 40 nights. It takes just forever to the waters to recede, and humanity is punished and purged. And in the end, where does the boat come to rest? It comes to rest on Mount Arerat or Ararat. I've never known quite how to say it. But I always thought it was really noteworthy. Wild that in Genesis 8, toward the very end of the flood account, it specifically names that mountain. And on the 17th day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. And the waters continue to recede until the 10th month. And it goes on to talk about the rest of the recession, you know, because he's parked at the top of a great big giant super tall mountain in this story. And the water's got to come down a long ways before you can go and make life work well and everything. And then from there on out, the rest of the Bible, this is the post-flood era of the Bible. Well, I don't know. I guess if you line up the earliest primeval stuff from the Bible, I call that the primeval age of the Bible. This is this completely different era with very different categories. There's no law yet, there's no God's chosen people yet. All of those stories start after the flood. But if you go back to that primeval era of the flood and you line it up against the primeval era of Phrygian myth and history, looks like the stories kind of wrap up in the same place. So I don't know what you make of that. I think it's interesting. I don't like to over-theorize on things of that nature about the super, super, super ultra ancient world. I think when you get into the deepest stuff of the Old Testament, it's just an easy thing to get grumpy with other people about who are also trying to get it right. Because it's easy to be like, well, but this very small sample size of data that we get in these first few chapters of Genesis, I think the best way to read it is this, and the science works this way. And then other people look at it and be like, I don't, I don't know how the science would work on that. I don't see it the same way. And all of a sudden you're distracted and you're missing the point of the Old Testament, where all of those stories from the primeval era are held out as things that happened, but thematically, they're theologically very important. So, for example, the flood, this is one of the most important test cases for how to solve the human problem, which is what the whole Bible is about, right? I mean, one of the things you gotta try, in addition to very powerful government, like maybe a powerful government could make it so we don't do bad things anymore. Oh, that didn't work. Well, maybe a very weak government can do it, or maybe no government, like we tried in the era of the judges. Oh, that didn't work. We still have problems. You know, maybe we could try having a revolution and we could govern ourselves. Maybe we try all these different things, right, throughout the Bible. But surely one of the things that at some point you kind of got to try to just prove that that won't solve the human problem is well, what if we just purge all the bad people? And as scary and frightening and as horrible sounding as that is, that's kind of the test case that that flood runs. Like people were super wicked before it, like crazy wicked. I mean, think about it. God brought about this flood in response to their wickedness. And then we look at the world today and we're like, things are pretty screwed up. Yet there hasn't been a giant cataclysm that is the miraculous judgment of God. So it was worse than things that happen now. Do you have the internet? Do you know some of the things that are happening now? They must have been pretty screwed up, right? Well, one of the logical questions is what if you just uh, you know, hit a hard reset on all of that? I guess that's kind of what the flood does as a theological story. It's God preserving, but it's also the terrifying judgment of God. And what do you know? We get like one page after we're out of the ark, and people are already doing stupid, screwed-up stuff again. And we're supposed to come away from that as readers, being like, oh dang, I'm only a few pages into this book, but I'm seeing what they're saying. We have a really serious problem on our hands in terms of the heart of humanity. Something is broken in us. Dang, this is screwed up. How do you fix this? What is God going to do? In terms of timelines and science and all of that, and what one might make of what they read in the Bible in terms of the flood. I get along pretty well with people who read that a lot of different ways, I guess, but in terms of the theological implications, I think they're pretty direct and pretty overt. So you've got this super ancient era of the region of Phrygia, the Lycus Valley, and Colossae. You got these legendary ancient kings like Nanakus, who lived in Iconium. That came up in our last chapter, who lived for 300 years and navigated the foretold giant flood that covered the world. You got other legendary kings like Manis, who that's where we get the word manic from doing many great things and doing them frenetically. But it's all just in the mists of history. Well, it's about 1200-ish BC, after that great shakeup we were talking about yesterday in the Eastern Mediterranean world, when Phrygia and Colossae start to take shape. Now, there's still certainly a legendary element to this, but even our knowledge of history, as we get into the 1400s, 1300s, 1200s BC, it really does start to crystallize. We know more names, we have a better sense of the boundaries of kingdoms and cultures, we know more about the language. And this is true in Phrygia, which again, are you picturing this all right? Picture Turkey, not a Turkey, but like Turkey, the country, the big glob of horizontal land between the Middle East and Europe. And if you go to the far east end of that big glob of land, and you just draw a big circle kind of in the middle of the easternmost clump of Turkey, you're kind of getting into historic Phrygia right there. So it's around 1200-ish that we see Phrygia proper taking shape. And again, we've got a couple of legendary kings here. At this point, these kings are probably rooted in reality. There was a a simple man named Gordias. How are we doing on time? We're getting tight. I'm going to give you this one legend and then we'll do more on the Phrygian age of Phrygia next time around. There's this guy named Gordias. He was maybe a farmer or something like that. And apparently he came up with some clever trick of physics to tie a knot that could not be untied, that could not be broken. And I uh we talked about it in the last season. But maybe it was the kind of thing like it was tied to an ox cart or something like that. And it became part of the identity of the Phrygians and their stability and their cleverness. And this Gordius character is the namesake for the ancient capital of the Phrygian people, Gordium. Now, we talked about Gordium for a day or two at the end of our last season on the book of Galatians. Alexander the Great passed through Gordium, where he is purported to have cut the Gordian knot. And in doing so, you know, he's like almost claiming like deity status. And he, you know, the Alexander had a flair for the dramatic in this kind of way. But Phrygia proper can be traced to the establishment of Gordium by the legendary/slash real king Gordias. And tomorrow we'll talk more about this second flag over the Phrygians, the second flag over Colossae, which is the proper Phrygian era of Phrygia. Cool. That's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.