Unknown

[Music] Well, welcome everyone to Digital Hammurabi! Oops, hidden Megan. Sorry, I am still getting used to this. I was like, "Why are there only two people here? This is strange." Hi, I'm Dr. Josh Ravi. This is Megan, and with us today is a very, very special guest that we're very excited to have with us: Dr. Francesca Rochabbulu. She is a professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion in the Theology and Religion Department at the University of Exeter in the south of England. And Megan, isn't that where your dad's from? Doesn’t my dad live in

Buffy Trace? Oh, well! She is very well known not only for her work in Israelite religion but also for the BBC series "The Bible's Buried Secrets." So, we're just tremendously excited to have you with us today. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me! No, honestly, I'm really chuffed to be doing this. So yay! And I love your title music, by the way. I've been studying that for ages. It's fantastic! I just loved it! It was an original work by Brock Binet, who is a big fan of the shows, and he donated it

to us for free. Played on a... what is it, Megan? Uh-huh. Yeah, his own set. Oh yes, yeah! He came on and did it! He’s an Orthodox Jew, and he came on live one time and played it live for the opening, so it was really neat! Well, you know, we always like to let our guests kind of take a couple of minutes and give a bit of their background. You can go as personal as you like, you know, with how you got into the field, maybe your educational background, just so that everybody kind of gets

a feel for who you are and what you're all about. Yeah, okay. So, obviously, I now specialize in Hebrew Bible and ancient religion, particularly the material realities and social realities of Southern Levantine and other ancient Southwest Asian cultures, primarily of the Iron Age. But I got into it because I did a theology degree at Oxford University; that was my undergraduate degree. So at school—what you guys in the States call high school—secondary school, I think, I did religious studies, where we did stuff, and that's my first kind of exposure to the study of the Bible. I

didn’t grow up in a religious family at all. I mean, I've never been religious at all. I've always been really interested in ancient mythology, so particularly with my Greek heritage; I've always been interested in the Greek myths. I was really into trying to work out why the hell everyone was treating Jesus so differently when clearly, in Greek myth, it was perfectly normal for someone to have a deity as their father and a human as their mother. So I was just like, "Why? Why does this Jesus dude kind of get all the attention still?" And then,

when I was about 11, I discovered that Jesus was Jewish rather than Christian, because obviously that's quite a big discovery to make. And so, yeah, I got very interested. I ended up doing a theology degree as my first degree at Oxford University, which was great. It was very conventional. It was primarily based on Christianity and its biblical roots and then wider Western Christianity. Although I did as much Bible in there as I could, that grounding in the Western intellectual religious tradition has been so important and valuable in my career since. Because you realize just how

framed intellectual paradigms are by this very Western Christianized model of understanding the past. And so, you know, when I was doing medieval Christian philosophy in my undergrad degree, I didn't realize just quite how important that kind of stuff would become in thinking about the way in which, you know, the past was understood by some of the earliest sort of modern scientific archaeologists and some of the modern biblical commentators. These people carried their baggage with them. Do you know what I mean? They really carried that sexual cultural baggage. So after my theology degree, I then did

my... I stayed in Oxford and did my master's specializing in Hebrew Bible, and then I continued on at Oxford, where I did my doctorate. And that was working on King Manasseh and child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible. So King Manasseh is like the biggest villain, the baddie of the Hebrew Bible. You know, there's nobody as bad as him, and child sacrifice is the worst practice, the worst religious thing that you could possibly do. And he's accused of performing child sacrifice. I was really interested in that book and looking at the way in which the Hebrew

Bible distorts what were the likely historical realities of the past. We know that King Manasseh existed, for example. We have Neo-Assyrian records that record his name, you know, alongside other vessels in the southern Levant, but apart from that, all we know about this guy is what's written in biblical texts, and the biblical texts abate. So I was looking at using history and archaeology to kind of draw a comparison between the biblical account of child sacrifice and King Manasseh and, you know, try to work out what the actual historical landscape was, then compare that to the

biblical portrayals, which are both varied. And then I argued: why are these particular religious characters and this practice vilified? And that got me into, you know, just more ancient Israelite religion, and I ended up doing... Postdocs at Oxford and teaching there for a few years, and then I moved to Exeter University, where I am now. I've been here for too many years, and it would just be like one of those jobs, you know? You get your first kind of permanent job, and you think, "I'll be here for a few years, and then I'll move on

to some other place." But it turns out my colleagues, New Testament massive shoutouts to David Hora and Louise Lawrence, they are not just the most incredible people I've ever met, but it turned out to be such a brilliant environment for me. I'm the only Hebrew Bible person now, but it means I can teach what I want. I can say what I want. I'm not restricted like I might be in other universities, and so it's been great. I've kind of progressed, and now I've got a chair in Hebrew Bible; I can't quite believe that I'm this

old. Please don't say things like that—we're very close to the same age! There is definitely something to say for being in a place where you can kind of branch out as you like and set things up in a way that you're not restricted. There are a lot of responsibilities, but you know, that kind of freedom is a good feeling. So, I want to ask you and Megan—I don't want to monopolize this as the interviewer, and I don't want to do that. Megan has far more fascinating questions than I do in general, but if I need

to, before we get going, if anyone has questions, please put them in the side chat and tag me at Digital Hammurabi. I will save them until the end, and we will get through as many as we can. We have had two super chats already, so thank you all very much: one from DT TV Science Answers for £40, who says they love "Bibles Buried Secrets" and that this guest is fantastic. I think that is an overwhelming agreement from everyone else! JB sent $2 and says, "Hit that like button." Thank you very much, JB. Sorry, did you

say £40? Oh yes, I did! I think that might be the biggest super chat we've ever received—wow! Thank you very, very much. I'm telling you, you're incredibly popular. As I was telling you before we went live, I grew up in a list evangelical Christian household, and you know, I've got my English Bible here. If you flip to the Old Testament, you don't have to worry about things like archaeology or getting into historical sources at all. You mentioned the Neo-Assyrians—like, who cares what they say? Because we know what happened, right? That's sort of the mentality—certainly the

mentality that I had. In fact, the recent publication of a dissertation from Dallas Theological Seminary—a good friend of mine who comes from the same sort of background that I do—is writing about Daniel. He said, “Well, he’s talking about one of the historical problems, and he says, ‘Well, Daniel is not just another person we figure in; he is the standard by which we judge all other historical sources.’” For those of us that came from that kind of background, and maybe who are listening in the audience, when you say that the Hebrew Bible has a bias and

maybe it’s not presenting history as it actually was, can you develop that just a little bit for us? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Firstly, the Hebrew Bible—you know, we have this Christian tradition that has an awful lot to answer for in all sorts of ways. One of the things that early Christianity did was to, and I'm talking about Christianity in the first three or four centuries of its existence, cast the Jewish Scriptures—because obviously Christianity was a Jewish movement—as proof texts for the things that Christ's followers were saying about this figure. That historicized a lot of religious

literature, Jewish literature, that hadn't been historicized in quite the same way before. So it almost kind of—I'm not saying it froze it, but it kind of put it on display, you know, kind of like Han Solo in Star Wars. Textual traditions within the ancient world, but in Judaism up to the time of Christianity and into the early centuries of Christianity, were incredibly fluid. If we just look at something like the Dead Sea Scrolls, they are examples of how unstable traditions were. There were huge differences in stories about characters like Enoch, who gets barely a mention

in the Hebrew Bible. He pops up in Genesis, but then the literature that was being produced around the time of Jesus became massive and vast. There are even differences in the books of Samuel that we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls and we know from the Greek versions and we know from the Masoretic, the Hebrew versions—those are massively different. So we know that there was huge diversity in these textual traditions. What Christianity did embrace successfully was to cast its Messiah… Hero, as a historical figure, is somebody who was going to change history, and not just

kind of earthly world history but cosmic history. So, there was a very clear sense of the past, then the present, and then this apocalyptic future. I see all the Christians are waiting for Jesus to come back and for the heavens to crash into the earth here. Obviously, it didn't happen, but you know, that was a major driving force for a lot of early Christian groups. But the other thing that they did was to kind of almost canonize, in some ways, a lot of Jewish texts. That's the sense in which Christianity, in the Western world in

particular, has developed over 2,000 years. This development gives us the sense that we look at these ancient texts that Christians call the Old Testament; in Judaism, scholars try to be a little bit more user-friendly and less loaded by relating to it as the Hebrew Bible rather than the Old Testament and the Tanakh. What it did was to affect how we view these texts now. We think that these texts were written to be a historical record of the past, but of course, they weren't. Most of the texts that we have were written a long time after

the events they seek to describe, whether those events are real or not—like, you know, creation in six days or whatever—not real things like the fall of Jerusalem—yet real. The biblical writers are telling the narrative from their own biased perspective, and a lot of these texts were put together as they slowly began to become more authoritative. I'm talking about, you know, a few hundred years before Christ, as these religious texts came to hold more authority, particularly the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. They came to be understood as a way of trying to

tell a version of the past that accounted for the present and, therefore, gave some kind of religious instruction for the future. So, the Hebrew Bible is inherently unreliable because it's not a primary source of evidence. You know, primary sources of evidence in the past are things like archaeology. What I try to do in my research and in my teaching is to emphasize that there's a difference between the biblical narrative and the likely historical reality of that past. We can best piece together that likely historical reality—obviously, it's always going to be fragmentary—by using things like archaeology,

anthropology, other social scientific methods, and cultural comparisons with what we know of other southern Levantine and ancient Southwest Asian cultures, including Mesopotamian cultures and ancient Egyptian culture. That’s how you build a more plausible portrait of a past society. Then, you use the material remains that we have to make sense of what that means for ancient Israel and ancient Judah. Then, obviously, we turn to the Hebrew Bible and ask, “Okay, so how is this deviating? Why is it deviating? What can we tell about the time that we think these texts were being composed, redacted, and compiled?

What can we tell about why certain biases might be inherent in this writing?” That was a very long answer to your question. That was a beautiful answer. No, and I thank you. To develop one little thing: you were talking about archaeology, looking for a more complete picture, and then taking that picture to the Hebrew Bible. One of the things I'm sure you deal with on Twitter—and probably just in everyday life—is a movement in the opposite direction, where you start with the biblical text, you start with the Hebrew Bible, and say, “Okay, now let me go

either find archaeological evidence that supports this picture,” or when you find something that stands against this picture, trying to reconcile it and saying, “Well, I know that this stance I have, this understanding of the picture that the Hebrew Bible is presenting, must be correct.” So, how do we get it so that, you know, Nebuchadnezzar can actually be reconciled with what we know? We know Nabonidus as Belshazzar's father, but how do we make sense of that? Now we go linguistic arguments. Can you talk about that for a second? Maybe in a way to safeguard those who

might do this at an amateur level, considering there are very intelligent people watching. How can they guard against such an approach—taking a conclusion and then trying to incorporate archaeological evidence or external evidence, primary sources—versus building from the primary sources and then challenging the picture presented? I think one of the most important things to do is to read widely in scholarship, if possible. I always say to my students, “Don’t read anything on the internet.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about in terms of a specific source, just tell me the link because there’s so much

out there. You know, as we were talking before we came on, anything biblical attracts people who are very invested in the Bible, and of course they are culturally... remains a huge icon; whether we believe in its kind of logical programs or not, it remains a cultural icon. There's a sense in which we kind of think that somehow it must be reliable. But, you know, I would say the same thing: imagine that you're trying to reconstruct the past using the Odyssey. Would you really try to prove certain things or interpret critical sites or artifacts on the

basis of the Odyssey? Of course, you wouldn't, because you recognize that this isn't just straightforward; the Odyssey isn't about straightforward history. I mean, I'm no expert on the Odyssey, but there are some classic assassination historians who like to think that it reflects Late Bronze Age social practices and religious practices. Maybe there are echoes of that in there, but, you know, in terms of what we have as literary evidence, we have to be really careful with what we call evidence. So the best thing to do is to read scholarship widely but also to think about what

assumptions you are bringing to the text. None of us are free of that bias; I'm aware that I, of course, have my own bias. I realize that one of the things I've done through my research career and my publications is trying to give a voice to those groups who appear to be vilified and marginalized in the Bible's telling of the past—things like my lovely King Manasseh and the notion that, oh, child sacrifice wasn't that bad. Yeah, but the way in which the Hebrew Bible writers vilify and deliberately caricature the indigenous inhabitants of the land, the

Canaanites, as somehow sex-crazed, unsophisticated, superstitious pagan worshippers—obviously that's just ridiculous; that's not the case at all. In fact, ancient Israelite religion was Canaanite. It was probably, and I mean the label "Canaan" is deeply problematic anyway because, you know, what does it mean? Ancient Israelite religion and Yahweh worship itself emerged out of traditional Northwest Semitic religions that we find across southern areas. So, the things that we might call Canaanite—one of the things I've tried to do is to kind of give them a voice and say, actually, this tradition was really, really sophisticated. But I personally feel

it's a much better system than what fits them. Monotheism now doesn't really exist anyway. I mean, look at modern religions today; they are not entirely convincing as monotheistic systems. So I think one of the things is to be aware of your bias and then try to check that bias against the ways in which you're reading texts and artifacts. And the thing about artifacts as well—you know, archaeologically speaking, very little comes out of the ground with a label on it saying, "732 BCE." Contextualization is important. I'm always very suspicious of scholars who talk about archaeological findings

and sites and immediately say, "Well, this must be the site of biblical such-and-such" or "this must be an example of the sort of implement that we find described in Jeremiah 22" or whatever. And maybe that could be the case, but that shouldn't be the first port of call. You need to look at the cultural backstory of artifacts and sites—see what the backstories are. If you dig back further, where do you get to? Who do you get to? The Bible shouldn't be a primary resource in that sense. When you start with that, it's difficult for the

brain to then look past something that is your initial point of comparison. So obviously, this must be... I'm writing a book now on the ritual use of phonetically written texts in Sumerian, and I have an idea of why they were used. The problem is that it's difficult; now that I have this idea of what they're doing, I pay really close attention to the ones that don't support that idea. It's harder for me to really focus in on those. It’s difficult to do that, and I think it's really important to listen as well when you find

things that bump up against what you've been working on. This theory—if the material evidence seems to be pointing in one direction, and then you come up against something that bumps against that, it’s important to listen to that and to think, "Well, how is it?" It's not necessarily a corrective, but diversity in material and social evidence is just as important as the diversity we have in literary and textual evidence. I think about the Canaanites: next Saturday we're having Dr. Brendan Benson, who worked pretty extensively on the Canaanites, and I'm really excited. He's a super nice guy,

and he's coming in to talk about things like the discussions we're having today regarding Israelite religion and the role of the Hebrew Bible. What is the Hebrew Bible doing? I feel like that's something that we say a lot about texts on this channel. What is the text doing? You don't just come to it as a source of information; you know, it's there to write down. All right, so this must be how it was. Look behind it and see the motive behind that text. So, in light of that, everybody tune in next Saturday as well for

that. But in light of that, what is the Hebrew? If we're looking at the Hebrew Bible as a tool and not as our final authority—using it as one tool in our toolkit—what is it that we understand the Hebrew Bible to be doing when it talks about Israelite religion in the first millennium? And how does that differ from what was actually, you know, if we went back boots on the ground with a camcorder or something? How does what the Hebrew Bible—the system that the Hebrew Bible puts forward, the Old Testament puts forward—how does that differ from

what was actually going on? And why does the Hebrew Bible... yeah, say the easy question? Go ahead. Obviously, these texts are all... you know, the Hebrew Bible is a compilation that's been put together much, much later, but even so, it is made up of different—originally different—scrolls and stuff. And even within those individual scrolls or books, like Isaiah or even, you know, the Torah or whatever, there were individual textual traditions, as well as different sorts of legends and stories and poems and all sorts of things. I mean, just look at the book of Deuteronomy. You can

see that you've got these poems stuck on the end, and they do look... you know, a lot of bits of them do look very old. Some of that might be the oldest material that we have, but they've clearly been appended to the end of Deuteronomy because they remained authoritative and important culturally—religiously, they remained important. It's like kind of happening like an heirloom passed down to the family that you don't get rid of, but you don't exactly want to use it every day. No, but it has to go somewhere. So the texts were very composite, and

I've forgotten the question. Oh no, we were just talking about that. Oh, go ahead. You got it. I think they say, with the important caveat that the Hebrew Bible is a compilation—a very varied compilation—over several centuries and lots of different subscriber groups that have worked on these texts. With that proviso in mind, you can see that there has been a move, probably starting sometime around the sixth century to the fifth century BCE, when the religious agenda was very much to present the religious past as having always been properly monotheistic. In other words, Yahweh was always

the true God. Not that there weren't other gods; biblical writers are very comfortable about, you know, acknowledging that there were other gods, but that Yahweh is the only God—that monotheism has a pedigree that goes right back to before creation. In the story, of course, Yahweh's relationship with His people—the Israelites—who are in some sense the salt of the earth, offers Mesopotamians the story of Abraham, you know, who comes out of Mesopotamia. So there's this sense that Yahweh's relationship with them has always been His. He's insisted that, "I will be your God; I will look after you,

provide fertility and protection; I will fight for you on the condition that you worship me and me alone." The biblical story, as we read it—particularly through the Torah and the so-called historical books, the books of, you know, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—depicts that once the people got into the land, into the Promised Land, their religion was corrupted by the indigenous Canaanite polytheism. And this is the thing that caused all the problems. This is why Yahweh keeps kicking off and shouting at His people and then eventually decides to punish them by bringing in first the Assyrians,

and then the Babylonians, and then, you know, later on, then obviously the Greeks. So, yeah, there's an ideology that's working throughout—a very careful redaction of layers, if you like, in certain biblical texts—that's trying to insist that Yahweh worship is unique, that Yahweh is the only God, and that you should have no other deities. He's the creator God; He's the one responsible for animal, human, and agricultural fertility. He's the God, the warrior deity. But the reality is massively different, you know, archaeologically and even from some of those very ancient bits of poetry and other traditions that

we find in the Hebrew Bible. The reality was different in that we know the ancient Israelite religion was normatively and traditionally polytheistic, and that this sense of "Yahweh alone" wasn't widely shared. You know, it didn't emerge until some scholars say the eighth century BCE; I think that's pushing it. I think that's being far too positive because they're kind of... you know, they link it around King Hezekiah opposing some temporal cult, and some scholars say, "No, no, it's the seventh century," you know, the time of King Josiah, who is the reforming king. Now, again, I think

that’s ridiculous personally. And so it looks like the period when the Jerusalem Temple was first destroyed... you know, so why is it that when a temple was destroyed, worshipers had various different responses to this? You could see archaeologically how to... Deal with this so quite normatively, and as we see in Sumerian texts and the Syrian texts, it would be simply well: the deity has abandoned his or her temple. They're pissed off, like, "Cause I’m something wrong, they're pissed off." So they've abandoned the temple, and they're not going to help you. So, if the deity abandons

the temple, the temple will fall. That's the most common theological response to the fall of the Jerusalem Temple in about 587 BCE at the hands of the Babylonians. I say we find that a lot of the biblical numbers— the Hebrew scribes are saying it's we always abandon Jerusalem because it's a punishment for our sins. Well, what were our sins? Oh, maybe it's 'cause we worshipped all those other gods, because we weren't being committed enough to Him. This is a deity who demands exclusive worship, and that's the kind of play that was very common. Anyway, you

find that all over ancient Southwest Asia: deities demand exclusivity. But it didn’t quite function in that way; you know, you can talk about it. It's not monotheism in the center; all deities demanded certain exclusivity, but they knew they existed. The deities knew they were working in a—they were bound into a social network of gods, just as their humans were bound into their own social networks. So, in a way, the biblical response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple is, you know, "You always pissed off; we can't worship any other gods, so we should just worship

Him." But that was quite a traditional response anyway. The biblical texts are the work—not representative of the whole religious landscape. They're the work of urban scribal elites, primarily coming out of places like Jerusalem, and then, because they were exiled in Babylon, they're not representative of what most people were doing and the way they were worshipping—all the different deities they were worshipping. But the result is we have this very biased, very slanted view: that Yahweh was a God who always demanded exclusive worship, and that this is the way that He ought to be worshipped. But the

reality was massively different; the reality was polytheism, quite sensibly. Yeah, you know, I wrote my dissertation on those types of temple laments in Sumerian. So, you know, if anything's going to be done—if it's a statue of a deity that's going to be taken out in procession, or if they're going to rebuild the wall, a mud-brick wall or something at the temple—the gala priests, you know, the ones responsible for appeasing the heart of the deity, he recites these laments, these Sumerian prayers. What they do, and I know you know this, but I want to describe this

for the audience: they describe all the horrible things that will happen, ostensibly, if the deity gets pissed off and leaves and abandons them. It's just terrible—the things that happen. So, yeah, this idea of looking back and going, "Well, He's gone." I think of Ezekiel; that's the first prophet that comes to mind when I think about that. You know, him being picked up by the hair and taken back. He digs through the wall, and he sees all the horrible things that are going on—worship of Tammuz and the sun, whatever. So, in light of that, I asked

a really broad question last night, but I want to do it again. I want you to have the freedom to go wherever you want with it, but to you, what was religion like? The thing that always comes to mind is that Abus Eatery I think from Conchubor Road, with the drawing there of Yahweh and His Asherah. So, what was religion like? I don't want to say like the average person, but I mean, you said that Yahweh wasn't always this God that demanded exclusivity. What was it like? You can talk about whatever you want with respect

to that, given that most of what we know comes from biblical texts. You know, most of the detail coheres in the Hebrew Bible, and Asherah is the name of a goddess, but it's vilified, you know, yet there are lots of references to a statue of Asherah being in the Jerusalem Temple. We know from external evidence, like the inscription from Kuntillet Ajrud, which talks about Yahweh and his Asherah. We know that Yahweh and Asherah were paired together. Yahweh was the state deity, but "state deity" doesn't necessarily mean kind of the official deity; it just simply means,

politically, that the patron deity of the King of Jerusalem, for example. So Yahweh was the kind of the head deity, and it looks like He had a partner deity, Asherah, which is completely normal because, as I said, Israelite and Judean religion was a subset of broader Northwest Semitic religions. We know from aggressive texts, though from the Late Bronze Age, that Asherah was the wife of the head god. Their Egret was a city-state with this incredibly brilliant— I mean, it was a very wealthy, prosperous city for a long time. Pantheon looks very similar to the source

of flashes you get of Pantheon in the Hebrew Bible. So, rather, Great Ale was the High God, and Asherah was his wife. Ferret, as she's cool in Ygritte, but then he had like a second tier of deity. So these are the active gods: Ale and his wife, who are kind of semi-retired, you know, and kind of just letting the younger generation do their thing. So the younger generation with gods like Baal and a storm god, El, a warrior garden, and his sister, who’s amazing—like totally kick-ass—and she was worshipped by Yahweh worshipers because we found critically

sort of arrowheads with her name written on them in Israelite sites. Her name appears, weirdly, only a couple of times in the Hebrew Bible, but a lot of her signature moves, if you like—kind of slashing skulls and trampling corpses and that kind of stuff—are applied to Yahweh in the Bible. So it looks like he inherited those sorts of things, you know, from his older what’s basically an old cultural cousin, so—an kickass deity as well. You had other gods—I’m gonna say it's like, you know, you had Mot, the underworld deity, you know, of death; is he

a god or is he not? He kind of looks to be. You had Yam, who’s the god of the sea. You find these similar sorts of personalities in the Hebrew Bible. You find glimpses of what looks to be disinherited religious tradition that seems to have played a big part in the development of Yahweh worship. But by the time we get to the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh has taken on lots of roles and functions, and even the name of Ale—he's taken his wife, Asherah, it would seem, by the time it gets to the Iron Age, historically speaking.

So we know that it was far more pluralistic and polytheistic than the Bible would have us believe. So when the Bible says, "Oh, you know, you terrible Israelites, you keep setting up the high places," you know, the bar mounts, the high places—it references other temples. Archaeologically, we know that there were lots of other temples all over the place, not just Jerusalem, not just Samaria. So when we find bits of archaeology that attest to this much richer, much more textured mythological and religious landscape, then we prioritize that and say, "Well, actually, that makes better sense of

the texts that we read in the Hebrew Bible." So, for example, in the Book of Jeremiah—this is really weird—a couple of chapters, in chapters seven and forty-four, in which Jeremiah, who’s supposedly a sixth-century prophet, so the Babylonians have invaded, and the first sort of group have been exiled—some to Babylon, some have gone off to Egypt—and, you know, Jeremiah is still wandering around Jerusalem, shouting at people, and like prophets’ Pendleton, and he’s writing letters back and forth to people in Egypt. He’s saying to the Egyptians, “You know, why are you worshipping the Queen of Heaven?” And

they’re cheating, you know, they’ve come true to the system, they’re elites in Jerusalem, and they say, “We worship the Queen of Heaven because when we were introduced to her, and we worshipped the Queen of Heaven, we had everything.” You know, we should—they say, “We had food security, we had prosperity, we had no threat of the sword.” So this kind of goddess figure—you kind of get a glimpse of the tradition in which there was a very powerful goddess in Jerusalem. So it perhaps was Asherah, most probably. If she’s the Queen of Heaven, you kind of think

she would be the partner to Yahweh, the King of Heaven. And so you do get little glimpses, but they’re like refractions—like distorted reflections rather than direct mirroring of the past. So you get that stuff, but things like that, like the goddess Asherah—I mean, she was incredibly important. And the very fact that we have not just this reference to Yahweh and Asherah from concerted Jews, what we have—we have inscriptions that say the same thing from other sites, including tombs—high-status tombs. You know, these were kind of wealthy political Jerusalem elites living in and around the capital city,

and they had landed estates with vineyards and olive groves and stuff. These are like wealthy people, and then leaving, you know, they’re having inscriptions written in their tombs that are asking for Yahweh and Asherah to look after them in the afterlife. I mean, she was clearly a hugely important deity, and yet if you were just to rely on the Hebrew Bible, you’d think she was some awful foreign deity, that, you know, some kind of awful superstition. But actually, she was really important, and her role was probably to act as the main mediator between worshippers and

Yahweh himself. You know, her job was to kind of mediate between, mythologically, between gods in the polytheistic system, but also in terms of ritual, to mediate between worshippers and Yahweh when they were trying to appeal to him. Cool! I keep going off on tangents, but you know—it’s wonderful! Like, yes, my students are like that. Well, let’s—so let me ask. Sure’s tend to take off slightly odd directions; they're always the most interesting ones. Oh, well, so one of the other places that it’d be interesting to hear your perspective, one I think Richard A. Verbeck read an

article—I remember how long ago he wrote it, but… Talking about glimpses of, you know, big Riddick mythology and these types of chaos battle scenes, of course, that we see in Ugarit, we see them, you know, in the Ælis, in, you know, Mesopotamia. But you see some of these things in the Psalms, you know, sort of reflections of that. We see it a little bit in Job. But could you talk about that and then maybe its appearance in, maybe, a de-mythologized form? If you could say all that in a much more understandable way for everybody, that

would be great. In Genesis, this one in particular, yeah, and what you're referring to is kind of astrology known as the chaoskampf series. This idea that one of the common features in the mythological landscape across ancient Southwest Asia was this idea of a battle between a warrior deity or a group of warrior deities and some kind of monstrous sea deity. Seeing animal-leish, Tiamat, weirdly, you know, who is obviously one of the oldest goddesses, and kind of goes through this interesting shape-shifting throughout. In Tiamat, you know, one minute she's like this kind of scaly sea serpent,

and the next minute she's like this amniotic sac of kind of primeval fluid, and the next minute she's like this ferocious woman. I mean, that mythological text itself is hugely misogynistic in all sorts of ways, as we know. But so, yeah, we've got examples of it in Tiamat, but also obviously that's a later example in terms of Mesopotamian history. We've got much earlier examples, such as hints in some of the earliest Hittite mythology, and obviously we find it at Ugarit in which the battle between the warrior deity and the chaotic forces of the sea is

sometimes told in the battle between Baal and Yam. But we also have Anath, Yam's sister, you know, who says that she's the one that smote the twisting serpent. You know, she's the one that bound the many-headed, or seven-headed, sea monster. Basically, in Neo-Babylonian mythology, and that's exactly what we find in texts that we find in Isaiah and in Job and in the Psalms. People tend to think that, you know, "What's this myth doing?" It seems to be playing a part in a creation tradition. And creation was never a one-off event in ancient mythology. You know,

people think that like, "You create, and then you've done, and it's fine." But ancient mythological ways of thinking were so different. They weren't linear, and they weren't even cyclical; they kind of like fold in and twist around on each other, and that's kind of the point of mythology. That's what kind of keeps the gods alive in a way. So that you can have a god like Baal, be killed by the god Mot, and be buried in his tomb, and then, wow, three days later, he comes back to life and resurrects. We can talk about that

another time if you like; it's quite important in the grand scheme of art history. And yes, so like in that aquatic myth in which you have this kind of fight against this monster, we find echoes of that same mythic trope in the Hebrew Bible. We tend to think that this was probably another way of talking about creation. As I said, creation wasn't just a one-off event, but we always think, "Oh, in a creation in the Bible," oh right, Genesis: "The world was created in six days," and then, you know, bang! Or there's another story next

door in Genesis, which is that God plants a garden and then makes the man, and then pauses, you know, then makes several animals as a sexual partner, then before Adam's like, "Seriously, this is not good," and then he thinks, and then he makes the woman. But we only think that that's the kind of ancient creation myth because it's at the beginning of Genesis and because that ended up in the beginning of our canonical Bibles. So it looks like these myths about God having a massive fight with a sea dragon, and that we see in David

and Psalms, might have probably been the much more powerful creation myth associated with Yahweh at least. And then some of those myths, it's a really physical, you know, there's a real sense of a physical fight in the Psalms. It talks about smashing Yahweh smashing the heads—plural—of the seven-headed creature, smashing the heads of the dragons. And then by the time you get to the book of Job, Yahweh's much more hands-off. The writer of that particular poetic cycle in Job is really keen to try and distance Yahweh from the sense that he's got any kind of direct

competitor, you know, in terms of sheer physical strength. So, in the poetic cycle in Job, when he's talking about Yahweh's fight with the sea creature, who is called Leviathan, in that text, another biblical text, Yahweh's like, "Yeah, well, you know, can you trap it? Can you catch it on a hook?" So the way that Yahweh defeats the dragon there is like he's just gone fishing! Rosen arms, he's like smashing its heads, and he's having to physically fight. So, Job's like, "All right, you know, Yahweh just threw a fishing net over you, just like caught him

on a hook!" And there, by the time you get something in Genesis 1, which has been so stripped of this kind of mythological meat, you're kind of left with the sense, oh yeah, and Yahweh created the great sea dragons. That are in the water, you know, that's in Chapter One. So it's like they become creatures, and then the rabbis themselves play on this idea that only rabbis... So in Psalms, it talks about Yahweh creating Leviathan to kind of play in the sea. Then rabbis start to talk about the fact that, you know, how did God

spend His days? They divide up God's day into life's different parts: morning, afternoon, and what y'all realize in the evening is that He spends time playing with the sea dragon—it's His pet. So there's an incredible sense in which the idea of this chaos monster was so deeply rooted in the cultural and religious DNA of Yahweh worship that you can't just get rid of it. Evil and monotheism supposedly have come about; it doesn't just disappear. So it gets reshaped and kind of rehandled. You start with this massive, seven-headed dragon; Yahweh's having to punch it in the

face, which is a great image I could never get out of my head. That seven-headed dragon reappears in the book of Revelation, you know, towards yet another big fight with dragons and stuff. But then you end up with the rabbis saying that, you know, Leviathan was Yahweh's pet, and that He likes to play with. Then they start talking about the fact that He captured Leviathan and kind of kept it in a watery store cupboard. At the end of days, He's going to kind of open up the watery store cupboard, bring out Leviathan, and kill it,

serving it up as this kind of apocalyptic feast—ashes at the end. So this sea dragon, you know, you kind of think, what dragons in the Bible? But like that, it's one of the most important parts of Yahweh's story, if you like, for hundreds and hundreds of years. So that of how, like, Canaanite mythology ends up in the Bible is really interesting; that kind of development. You see it also in Mesopotamian mythology. You know, Menor earlier on in the second millennium, you know, he fights against the Anzu bird, who has the Tablet of Destinies, and he

loses. Then he's got to get advice, and he goes back again, and he's able to trick the person that has the Anzu bird, who has the Tablet of Destinies, to win. But it's not like by sheer might that he wins; it's by cunning. By the time you get to the end of Enuma Elish, you know, Marduk, as he's approaching, I mean, well, even before, as he's approaching Kingu, who's holding the Tablet of Destinies, he's just defeated by his approach. This idea of the development of might and of power borrowing from this tradition is fascinating. Just

think about it: you see it exactly the same kind of in biblical and Mesopotamian theology. If you look at how, in the narrative, the way that Marduk diffuses Yama, I mean, obviously there's a lot of physical grappling, you know, and he's like God; all he's got, they use, and these pinions firing arrows and stuff. But it's also with words, you know? It's the only magic speech that ultimately defeats Yama. It just is, in the same way that, you know, Yahweh is so powerful that all He has to do in Genesis is to speak creation into

being. And it's that sense in which somehow words become, you know, because partly because they're magic, but also because these are scribes that are producing this stuff—it's in their interest to venerate the written word. The more emphasis you have on a kind of written and a kind of an uttered, ritual, or magical spell, or whatever it is, then the more hands-off the deities themselves become. They become less willing in mythology to kind of get their hands dirty. Just as a little plug, this is written about quite a lot in a book that's coming out—my first

book for non-academic audiences, for some non-specialists, is coming out next year. It's an anatomy of God in which I kind of talk about how Yahweh changes from this bodied deity into the kind of weird idea of God that we have today. But I deal with some of that, the way in which there's a deliberate kind of reduction of this very material-bodied deity. You can see some similar tendencies in other ancient Southwest Asian visions as well. So, but that's just a little plug. Yeah, please, yeah, thank you! Like a pre-order place or something—send it to us;

we'll put it in the video description! Come on, say to Josh, you've realized we have to invite her back on to talk about the new book. Oh, that would be phenomenal! I don't know if we have 200 people watching, which is quite a bit—people watching. So, because of that, I'm going to break in and say we've had nearly 40 questions in minutes, so maybe we turn it over to the audience if that's okay with you? Yeah, perfect! Wonderful! Yes, so we have currently 204 people watching, and given our live streams normally top out at around

50 or 60—thank you for joining us! The live chat has been fantastic; everyone has been very civil and respectful, which I always appreciate. And we will be starting... With some super chat questions that we have, so first of all, Skeptics Propaganda for $9.99, thank you, says: "Do you think that the king of Salem, Melchizedek, in Genesis, was originally a priest of El, the Canaanite God, and was then conflated with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible?" Hmm, possibly. There are traditions—I mean, what's being referred to is stuff that we find in Genesis and in the Psalms. So

an old view, particularly one that was kind of supported by that older generation of U.S. scholars like Frank Cross, was that Melchizedek, that tradition in the Hebrew Bible, seems to reflect the idea of a high priest of Jerusalem and that Jerusalem was originally a city devoted to El. It's possible, but we just don't know enough, and we don't even know enough about the way in which Yahweh and El relate. Though some scholars think that the name Yahweh itself came out of an epithet of El, you know, El who brings into being or some such. Obviously,

El has been the original God of Israel. If we look at the theophoric omen in names and look at some names of ancient sanctuaries that are given in the Bible, he talks about El, the God of Israel. An altar is built to El, we've got this kind of straightforward framework. But even, you know, we've got some traditions like in Deuteronomy 32 that seem to imply that Yahweh was originally one of the sons of El. So could he have been kind of woven into that mythology? That way, we don't know. Melchizedek looks like a very ancient

tradition, but there's so little of it in the Hebrew Bible, and even what is there looks to be quite overworked anyway. In terms of what it's trying to say about Salem, I mean, if you think about Jerusalem, the name itself suggests that it was originally a city devoted to a deity, one of the twin deities of dawn and dusk. So we can't really know, but inquisition, those deities might have been daughters of Baal or El. I mean, we just don't know. So I think it's a really great question, but we just don't know enough to

be definitive. Well, okay, thank you. So what I think—anyway, for five pounds: "Do you have anything to say about the shift from polytheism to monotheism via monolatry?" Well, I don't know what that word is, perhaps as evidence in the Old Testament texts. Hmm, yeah, that's one theory that people quite like. The idea of a monolatrous theological system is that there's acknowledgment that there were other gods, but you only worship one. And it may be that scholars, more sort of old-fashioned and Hebrew Bible scholars, like to think that that's the way things probably went. So you

went from a kind of polytheism in which most of the deities were kind of stripped of their agency and power anyway, so they became mainly one among a number of the sons of gods or the sons of El. So that kind of situation becomes the counselors, if you like, of Yahweh. And gradually, as Yahweh gets more and more important, they fall away. I find the term "monolatry" quite a difficult concept because any priest or any prophet, for example, would in a cultic role in their ritual life be monolatrous; they would be offering—and we see this

in Mesopotamia as well. So certain prophets or priestesses devoted to the main cult, a specific individual deity, would be there. But that’s just in that cult, in that container; only that particular religion ritual doesn’t mean to say that they don’t worship any of the other gods. Of course, they do. So I think "monolatry" is quite a difficult category. So I do think that what we have instead, rather than a shift from polytheism to monotheism, is more a prioritization of Yahweh within a polytheistic context originally, by which he gradually takes on more and more of the

roles of the other deities, including roles like Asherah, you know, because Yahweh becomes a kind of divine midwife in lots of Hebrew Bible texts. That’s the kind of role that Asherah and her other goddesses associated with her would have performed. So it’s more a prioritization. But then we don't know because that's what's going on, the way in which, you know, what we can glean by reading critically the Hebrew Bible texts. I mean, in historical reality, we know that goddesses and various other deities continued to be worshipped for loads longer, and think, I mean, to what

extent can we even talk about monotheism in ancient Judaism and earliest Christianity? I think it's a completely inappropriate term to use, and arguably, it's some inappropriate terms in regard to Christianity and some forms of Judaism. So, yeah, thank you, that's very interesting. Um, hi Clef Center! $5, thank you very much, and said: "I just wanted to say it's been a pleasure watching you go toe-to-toe with dogmatists and crackpots on the BBC's Big Questions." Thank you! It sounds like it must be a very enjoyable watch, but possibly a little stressful to film. Sentinel Apologetics for $5

says: "In regards to Asherah, the problem is the final letter hey would need to be read as a masculine suffix rather than a feminine ending." Yeah, there are lots of arguments about this. Some scholars—so basically, in some of the... Hebrew inscriptions, and we have talked about Yahweh, and it's a shura. Some people think this is a possessive pronoun on the end that means "his Astro." Does that suggest that it's not an actual deity but an object of some kind? Other scholars have argued that you can't read, then, that's a Biblical Hebrew kind of construct rather

than a paleographic Hebrew cross. Right? So, to what extent can we assume that paleographic Hebrew works, and say knights on? We also need to take into account a new idea of different dialects, almost in terms of pronunciation. There's so little that we don't really know. So, yeah, I got the debate about what does the term "a schwa" or "a sirata" in these inscriptions mean. The debate about it has gone on and on, but most scholars come down on the side of saying this is a proper name of a deity, and kind of attempt to sort

of try and diminish it by saying that even if it does refer to a cult object, the fact is that deities were identified with their cult objects. Mm-hmm. The Ark of the Covenant, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, is addressed as Yahweh quite often because it functioned as his footstool. Just as items of furniture in Mesopotamian religions could be identified with their deities, in some ways it's not really an argument. Lovely, thank you. RAF says tangents are not only appreciated but encouraged, and that came with $5, so thank you very much! I enjoy a good

tangent. I wasn't there. Thomas Paine sends $5 and says, "The role—I think I may need to rephrase this—can you speak on the role of her Nana or Sophia in the ancient world? Was rising and dying gods older than the New Testament?" Yes, two kind of different questions there. We see, I mean, Sophia is wisdom, and that's the term that's often used for a character known as "hokhmah" in Hebrew tradition. She seems to be personified as a female deity, and I think those characters are probably drawn on real deities that were worshiped and realized in a

religiously real way—not real as in... And what was the other bit? All about dying and rising gods? Yeah, there's some debate about the... like, even referring to dying and rising gods; that's quite a problematic label to use now. Deities like Tammuz and Baal, you know, do they die and rise in quite that way? But in terms of the notion that a deity can die and then come back from the underworld and up into the heavenly realm? Akané, that's well old. Much predates the Hebrew Bible by hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of years. So, yeah, there's nothing

original, to be honest, in terms of religion. There really is very little. Thank you. Ann Scott Duke sends $9.99 and says, "This is one of the best channels on the internet," which I personally appreciate very much. Thank you so much! Thank you, Sentinel Apologetics, again with five dollars. I've been leading a study group on Revelation with a focus on ivory tower scholarship, and I've shown the Leviathan barbecue at the marriage supper—not so much a question as a statement. Thank you very much, Central Apologetics! Thomas Paine sends five dollars and says, "Dr. Fran is greater than

both Lara Croft and Indiana Jones," which I definitely agree with for many, many reasons, which she doesn't. And Hailey Wicks sends five pounds and asks, "Did the Old Testament authors want the Genesis creation stories to be read literally? What about the centuries-old ages of the Genesis characters?" Mmm. And the idea that, you know, were these texts, in particular in Genesis, written to be read literally? Kind of links to the other idea we were discussing earlier about, you know, what is the purpose of these texts. The biblical writers weren't intending them, something like Genesis... you know,

the idea of the world being made in seven days or the great ages of the ancestors—they weren't intended to be read literally in the way that modern people might understand literal reading today. And that's just not how that ancient mythological, religious mind works in that sense. The huge ages of the ancestors... I mean, again, we see this in other Mesopotamian literature. Partly, it reflects that they’re almost living in that kind of dusky bit between mythological reality and human reality, so it shows that there's something not quite mortal about them, that these were extraordinary characters. They

were closer to the divine than they were to the mortal, and so that partly accounts for their long ages. But also, particularly, these long ages are also seen as a blessing from God. The longer you live, the greater your lifespan lasts—you are, by exactly. So, in that sense, no one would have understood them to be... I don't think they would have thought them literally, you know, whatever. But, you know, it's difficult to say. But yeah, they weren't read literally in the way that we might assume literal time spans today. I mean, I feel like, just

to a degree, it's imposing a very modern and... the framework mindset on this that we think this way. And so, you know, I think it’s not like we need to allow for a different, you know, way of thinking about texts in general. Yeah, and completely. And that's one of those things, though I carry into my research. You know, you think about what are your assumptions. I'm a modern Westerner, and plus I'm European, plus I'm British, plus I'm a... woman and all things play into, you know, plus I'm not from a posh kind of background like

a lot of academics in my field in atheist and all of that. I know that my baggage shapes the way that I view texts. The very fact of being from a different time and place than the biblical writers means that I need to view it differently. Anyway, yeah, the time was seen very differently than we see it today. Thank you, David. Connor sent ten dollars. Thank you very much and says, "Is there a specific date I can put into my calendar for the release of your much-anticipated book, and will there be an awesome documentary to

accompany it?" Um, well, thanks to coronavirus, "specific" is quite hard to pin down at the moment, given the public domain. So it was scheduled for March next year, but it's looking like that might have to be pushed back to September just because of modules and that kind of stuff. And as for documentaries, I don't know; I've had some offers, but you know these things are always very difficult. There's a huge gap between talking about a documentary and actually seeing it on TV. But I will be doing, hopefully, enough—if we're allowed to kind of travel again—and

coming out to the States to do book tours. I’ll be doing book tours in the UK and in Europe as well. So, whether or not that will actually happen in the COVID-19 world remains to be seen. You know, maybe if you are over here, we can convince you to come into our amazing studio and do enough. Come on, we'll make it happen! I would love that; we could do that. It would be hilarious; there'd be dogs and children running all over the place. Julian Bruckner sends five dollars. Thank you very much and says, "Speaking of

the underworld, what was the Canaanite/Israelite view of death, and did they have an afterlife?" Yeah, and it was very similar to the Hebrew Bible view. So, death was not the end; the underworld was not a bad place. Everybody went into the underworld, and well, everyone went into the ground when they died. It was up to your living descendants to maintain your existence. So the idea was that death didn't break the social relationships between the living and the dead; it just changed the nature of that relationship. In terms of an afterlife, you only exist for as

long as you're remembered. So things like invoking the name of your dead parent, dead cousin, or dead great-great-great-grandparents was incredibly important. But also important was maintaining the material integrity of your bones and your tomb, which is why you note even in our own cultures, we find it very difficult when graves are desecrated or if people go missing and we never find their bodies. You know, the material reality of death was incredibly important to maintaining some kind of post-mortem existence. So yeah, the underworld was a good place, and everybody went there. You could have a good

time in the underworld or a bad time, depending on how good your living relatives were at looking after you—not going to heaven until a bit later on. Lovely, thank you. Angelo Natal says, "Are there any new discoveries about Ashura and her cult in pre-exilic Israel, and what do we know about it for sure?" Hmm, what we cannot know anything for sure! We just have to work in terms of probably one of the joys of history. Yeah, I'm gonna have to step away for twenty seconds because I hear Oliver walking around upstairs. I know we're probably,

you know, we could say with some probability that Ashura was incredible, and she was a key part of ancient Israelite religion. In terms of new discoveries, there haven't been any new inscriptions recently, but then there are very few inscriptions—surprisingly few inscriptions—from pre-exilic Israel and Judah, which I think speaks to the social, economic, and political context of ancient Israel and Judah. They're not quite writing in the same way; they tend to be writing on scrolls perhaps rather than inscriptions. But even so, it's surprising the lack of inscriptions that we have given that it's such an over-excavated

part of the world today. So yeah, nothing new in terms of inscriptions, but there are always bits of fact, fragments of figurines that scholars used to dismiss as being Canaanite and are quickly being identified as clearly part of Israelite culture. Some that have been misidentified as Canaanite qualities may well be Israelite qualities. Wonderful, thank you. Carlos Rodriguez says, "Does the Hebrew Bible contain evidence that early worshipers of Yahweh not only practiced child sacrifice but were explicitly commanded to do so by Yahweh as a punishment?" Yeah, that is, I mean, the Hebrew Bible is very explicit

about God commanding people to sacrifice their children. Obviously, there's a story in Genesis, but some of the material in Exodus has Yahweh saying, "You shall offer up the first one—not just of your lambs, or your sheep, and your oxen, but also your children." But there's written into it a kind of redemption clause. You know, you don't have to actually sacrifice the baby; what you can do is circumcise your son on the eighth day. the text. In Deuteronomy 32, it's been a topic of much debate. On one hand, some scholars argue that Elyon and Yahweh should

be perceived as two distinct entities within this context. Others contend that they refer to the same divine figure, with Elyon representing a higher status. The text suggests a hierarchy among gods and makes distinctions between them, which can be confusing. It's a rich area for exploration, as the intertextual relationships and variations between Hebrew and Greek translations create layers of meaning and interpretation over the centuries. Overall, this discussion highlights how ancient texts can exhibit complexities, reflecting the beliefs and practices of the societies that produced them. Thank you for your thoughtful questions! English translations say, "When Le Onde

divided the nations according to the number of the gods, Israel was His, you-know-what's His own portion. Jacob's allotted share makes it sound like Le Ohm is Yahweh, the God who has taken us or the Israelite people. But actually, the ancient versions of this don't have this kind of clarity; it's much more clear that A Lyon is the one that divides up, and Jacob is a portion. Aliona portions Jacob to Yahweh, basically. Yeah, there too, in the oldest textual traditions of that poem, A Lyon and Yahweh are two separate deities, and Yahweh is subordinate to A

Lyon. Wonderful, thank you. Oliver Wilson, since $9.99, thank you very much, and he says thank you for hosting Dr. Francesca. Knowledge Overload of Vibrantly Brantley, since $2, asks—because that is how Brant's sense of humor works—so thank you for that very confusing question. We've got five minutes; can we do one more question? Yes. Okay, sorry, that wasn't a question for me, was it? It's gonna meet again? Yeah, that's not for me. Shad Horner says, "It seems like there's a lot of xenophobia and racism in the Bible, especially towards the Egyptians and Hebrews. I wonder if you

could please comment on this?" Many thanks. Yeah, it's very difficult. I mean, the notion of race as a category is a modern construct. There is a sense in which to even talk about ethnicity in the ancient world is very difficult, but there is a sense that there are lots of different othering strategies. Othering in the Hebrew Bible tends not to happen, tends not to be indexed in terms of things like skin tone or sexuality, or sometimes language—sometimes the way you speak, you know, you've got a funny accent, you know, we all hear that. But it

tends to be done in terms of power relationships, and Egypt was always a place of extreme power, even though when we look at the world stage, it was in huge decline in its empire by the time the biblical writers were talking about ancient Israel. But even so, culturally, it was still massively influential. So Egypt in the Hebrew Bible stories is often presented as a place where you go either to escape famine or you go when your homeland is inhospitable, and so it's seen as a place of huge anxiety. So there is quite— I mean, it's

not just the Egyptians; foreigners, you know, tend to be like the Babylonians, and are kind of caricatured. So it's not so much racism as an othering of people who are in a position of power. Oh, being generally. That's very nicely said! That was wonderful, thank you! And everyone, I'm very sorry we had just so many questions. I think if we went through them all, we would be here for another hour and a half. So I'm sorry! Thank you all for your interest, and thank you for having me! No, this has been great. Yeah, I'd love

to have you back! Obviously, do you want to take a second and just kind of tell people where they can find you and, you know, anything else that you don't want them to look at? Well, no, I'm just—this has been nice because I've been locked out for so long. It's just really nice to talk. We'll see you tomorrow then; this will be great! Well, I don't look out for the book next year. It's called *God and Anatomy* and it's even got pictures—it's graphic! And I've loved writing it, but it's been the hardest thing I think

I've ever written. Other than writing scholarship, because you know, you don't have to explain stuff in some ways to a scholarly audience, but this has been a challenge. But I've loved writing it, and you can find me on Twitter—what am I? A cross between Francesca—there, the Twitter link is in the description of the video if anyone wants to just click on it—it's right now! And there's all sorts of my stuff out there on YouTube. So yeah, but thank you very much! All the questions, they're great questions; really cool! Yeah, well I have thoroughly enjoyed this

probably more than anyone should enjoy an interview, so thank you very much for coming on and engaging with us on this. So we look forward to having you back! And thank you everybody for watching! And until next time, resist poor scholarship. Always ask, "How do you know that?" Thank you, guys! [Music]