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[Music] well welcome everyone to digital Hammurabi oops hidden Megan sorry I am still getting used to nice I was like why are there only two people here 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 and it is dr. Francesca Rock abbulu she is professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion and in the theology and religion department at the University of Exeter in the South of England and Megan isn't that that's where your dad's from right doesn't

my dad lives in Buffy Tracy oh well she is very well known not only for her work in Israelite religion but also for from the BBC series the Bible's buried secrets and so we're just 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 I loved it it was it was it's an original work by brock Binet

who is a big fan of the shows and he donated to us for free plated on a what is it Megan uh-huh yeah his own set oh yes yeah he came on and did it he's up and he's an Orthodox Jew and he came on live one time and played it live for the 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 Levant EIN and other ancient South West Asian and cultures make primarily of the Iron Age and but I got into it because I did a theology degree at Oxford University that was my undergraduate degree so at school so and what guys what you guys in the states call high

school so secondary school I think religious studies where we did stuff and that's my first kind of exposure to the study of the Bible and I didn't grow up in a religious family at all I mean I just I've never been religious at all I've always been really interested in ancient mythology so ticky was my Greek heritage I've always been interested in the Greek myths so I was really into and 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 is this Jesus dude kind of why does he get with the attention still and then when I was about 11 I discovered that Jesus was Jewish and rather than Christian cuz obviously that's you know quite a big discovery to make and and so yeah I got very interested so ended up doing a theology degree as my first degree at Oxford University which was great it was very kind of convention it was primarily and based on Christianity and its

kind of biblical and students and then wider Western Christianity and although I did as much Bible in there as I could but 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 West Christianized model of understanding the past and so you know when I was doing like medieval Christian philosophy in my undergrad degree I didn't realize just quite how important that kind of stuff would become and 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 and these people carried their baggage with them do you know what I mean they really carry that sexual cultural baggage so after my theology degree I then did my mother I stayed Oxford and did my masters specializing in Hebrew Bible and then I continued on Oxford where I did my doctorate and and that was working on King Manasseh and Tom sacrificed 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 char sacrifices 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 by word distorts what were the likely historical realities of the past so we know that King Manasseh existed for example unit we have neo-assyrian records that record his name you know alongside other vessels in the southern Levant but um you know apart from that all we know about this guy is

what's written in biblical texts and the biblical texts abayas so I was looking at using history and archaeology to kind of draw a comparison between the biblical account of Charles sacrifice and King Manasseh and and you know the kind of try to work out what the actual historical landscape was then to compare that's the biblical portrayals which are both varied and then to argued why are these particular or Isis character and this practice why is it's so vilified and then 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 and I've been here for too many years and it would just be like one of those jobs you know you get you get your first kind of permanent job and you think I'll be here for a few years and I'll go I'll move on to some yeah but that turns out my my colleagues new testament massive shoutouts David hora and Louise Lawrence they aren't the most incredible people I've ever met and 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 won't do I won't basic I'm not addicted as I might be in other universities and so it's been great and and so I've kind of progressed and now I've got a chair and Hebrew Bible and 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 man that is there's definitely something to say for you know being in a

place that you can kind of you can kind of branch out as you like and set things up in a way you're not you're not restricted a lot of responsibilities but you know that kind of freedom is it's a good feeling so well I want to ask you and Megan you know I don't I don't I will have a tendency in this 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 to the end and we will get through as many as we can and we have had two super chats already so thank you all very much one from DT TV science answers 440 pounds who says they love Bibles buried secrets this guest is fantastic I think that is an overwhelming agreement from everyone else and JB cents to buy two dollars and says hit that like button so thank you very much JB sorry did you say 40 pounds

was there oh yes I did I think that might be the biggest super Chad we've ever received Wow thank you very very much I'm telling you you're incredibly popular and this is going on but let's make you know for for me as I was telling you before we went live you know I grew up in a list evangelical Christian household and you know so you know I've got my my English Bible here and and if you flip to the Old Testament you know you don't have to worry about things like archaeology or you know getting

into historical sources at all you know you mentioned the new Assyrians like who cares what they say because we we know what happened right and that's 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 look at Daniel and he said well he's talking about one of the historical problems and he says well Daniel is not just another person that we you know figure

in he is the standard by which we judge all other historical sources okay so for those of us that came from that kind of a background and maybe that are listening in the audience when you say you know that the the Hebrew Bible has a bias and maybe it's 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 she has an awful lot to answer for and in all sorts of ways and but

one of the things that early Christianity did was to and I'm talking about Christianity in the first you know three four centuries and of his existence one of the things that it really did was to cast the Jewish Scriptures because obviously Christian as he was a Jewish movement and and it was to cast the Jewish the Hebrew Scriptures as proof texts for the things that Christ's followers were saying and about this figure and that historicized a lot of religious literature Jewish literature that hadn't been historic eyes in quite the same way before so almost kind

of like I'm not saying that froze it kind of you know froze it in plastic you know kind of like Han Solo and Star Wars and guests and textual traditions within in much the ancient world but in Judaism up to the time of Christianity and into the early centuries Christianity it was it was in credit these texts were incredibly fluid they were burying on stage we just look at something like the Dead Sea Scrolls as examples of how unstable traditions were you know huge differences in stories about characters like Enoch who gets barely a mention

in the Hebrew Bible he pops up in in Genesis but then you know the literature that was being produced around before the time of Jesus but you know because massive and vast things like you know even different says you know in the books of Samuels that we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that we know from the Greek versions that we know from the Masoretic the Hebrew versions are massively different so we know that that was huge has diversity in these textual traditions but what Christianity did embrace successfully was to cast a its Messiah its

hero as a historical figure somebody who was going to change history and not just kind of earthly world to history but cosmic history and so things that was a very clear sense of the past and then the present and then this apocalyptic future cuz I see all the Christians are waiting for Jesus to come back and for the heavens to crash into the earth here and obviously it didn't happen but you know that was 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 cannon ions in some ways a lot of Jewish text and that's the sense in which Christianity in the Western world in particular and has developed over 2,000 years so it gives us this sense that we look at these ancient texts that Christians call the Old Testament in Judaism Odyssey astana scholars tries to be a little bit more user and less lowly term by relating to the Hebrew Bible rather than the Old Testament and or tannic but but what it did was that it kind of we look at these texts now and we

think that these texts were written to be a historical record of the past but of course they weren't and most of the texts that we have were written a long time after the events that they seek to describe whether on those events are real not like you know creation in six days or whatever not real things like the fall of Jerusalem yet real but it was the biblical writers are telling it from a very from their own bias perspective and a lot of these texts were put together as they slowly began to become more authoritative

and I'm talking about you know a few hundred years before Christ as these religious texts came to more authority particularly Toras so the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and they came to be understood as a way of trying to tell a version of the past that accounted for the present and Kurds therefore give some kind of instruction 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 and so what I try

and do in my research and in my teaching is to emphasize that there's a difference between the biblical pattern the cost and the likely historical reality of that past and that likely historical reality we can best piece it together and obviously it's always going to be fragmentary but we can best piece it together by using things like archaeology anthropology other social scientific methods and kind of cultural comparisons with what we know of other other southern Levant EIN and ancient Southwest Asian cultures including Mesopotamian cultures including ancient Egyptian but that's how you build a more plausible

portrait of a past Society and then you use the material remains that we have to make sense of what that means to ancient Israel and ancient Judah and then obviously then turns the Hebrew Bible and say okay so how is this deviating why is it deviating what can we tell from about the time that we thick's think these texts were being composed or redacted and compiled you know what can we tell about why certain by C's 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 and to kind of develop one little thing have you develop it just a little bit right at the end you were talking about the archaeology you know getting at about as much as we can a complete picture or at least a more complete picture and then taking that picture to the Hebrew Bible yeah one of the things that one of the things that I'm sure you deal with on 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 you say okay now let me go either find archaeological evidence that supports this picture or when you find something that you know stands against this picture trying to reconcile it and say well I know that this this stance that I have is understanding this picture that I've that the Hebrew Bible is presented must be correct so how do we get how do we get it so that you know Nebuchadnezzar can actually be with what we know yeah we know nabonidus as Belshazzar's followed but how do we get it so

that Nebuchadnezzar is well you know now we go linguistic arguments anyway so you know can you just talk about that for a second and maybe a way to safeguard perhaps for because I think a lot of people in our audience do this sort of thing had like an amateur level which is there with some very intelligent people that watch and they do this at an amateur level how can they guard against doing this you know taking a conclusion and trying to then incorporate the archeological evidence or you know external evidence primary sources as opposed to

building from the primary sources and then challenging picture presented I mean I think one of the most important things to do is to read widely in scholarship if possible and I always say to my students don't read anything on the Internet I know if you don't talk about anything in Sector slice tell me the link because there's so much out you know course because you know as we were talking to support we came on there anything biblical is is it attracts people are very invested in the Bible and and of course they are culturally it

remains a huge icon whether we believe in its kind of logical programs or not we its it remains a cultural icon and there's a sense in which we have we kind of think that somehow it must be reliable but you know I would say the same thing you know imagine that this is you know you're trying to reconstruct the past using the Odyssey and you know would you really try to to prove certain things like you know interpret certain are 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 or icing I mean I'm I'm no expert on your to see but there are some class assassination historians who like to think that it reflects Late Bronze Age social practices and religious practices and maybe there are echoes of that in there but you know this this in terms of what we have in 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 I think to think about what

assumptions are you bringing to attend and I none of us over that bias I I'm aware that I of course I have my own bias and I realized that one of the things I've done through my research career in my my research my publications is I'm trying to give a voice I realized to those groups who appear to be vilified and marginalized in the Bible's telling of the past so things like you know my lovely King Manasseh and all you know oh you know tal sacrifice wasn't that bad yeah but but the way in which

the Hebrew Bible writers vilify and and and deliberately caricature the indigenous inhabitants of the Langmuir the Canaanites as somehow sex-crazed unsophisticated sort of superstitious yeah and pagan worshippers you know obviously that's just ridiculous that's not the case at all and actually ancient Israelite religion was was Canaanites you know 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 and the southern event you know so the things that

we might call Canaanite and so I think one things I've tried to do is to kind of give them a voice and say actually a this tradition was really really TP these it was deeply sophisticated ISM but I personally feel it's a much better system than what it fits them and monotheism now doesn't really exist anyway I mean you know look at my business today and not entirely convincing as monotheistic systems so I think one of the things it's a be aware of your bias and then try to check that bias against the ways in

which you're kind of reading text 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 you know 7 3 2 BCE you know and so contextualization is important I'm always very suspicious of scholars who they talk about our archaeological findings and sites and immediately say well this must be the site of biblical you know so insane and this particular biblical town or this must be an example of the sort of implement that we find described in you know Jeremiah 22

or ever and and yet maybe but that shouldn't be the first port of call you need to look at the cultural backstory of artifacts and sites like that you know see what what's the back stories that you know if you dig back further where you know where do you get to who to get you and so the bible shouldn't be a primary resource in that sense yeah i mean i think that when you as you say it may be the case but when you start with that it's difficult for the brain to then look past

often something that you know 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 every you know supporting piece of evidence i pay really close attention to the ones that don't it's harder for me to really focus in on those and so it's it's difficult to do that and I think it's really important to you

know to be and I think listen as well when when you do find things that kind of bump up against what you know you've been kind of working on this theory and you know the material evidence seems to be pointing in direction and then you come up against something that does bump against that and you think it's important to listen to that and to think well how it you know it's not necessarily a corrective but diversity in material and social and evidence is just as important as diversity that we have in literary and textual evidence

and I think it's important to hear it you know I I think about the Canaanites we're having next Saturday we're having dr. Brendan Benson who you know worked pretty extensively on the on the Canaanite so now I'm really excited a he's a super nice guy but you know coming in and just trying to talk about things like we're gonna talk about today with Israelite religion and talking about how is it that the Hebrew Bible what is the Hebrew Bible doing and I feel like that's something that we say a lot about texts on this channel

what is the text doing not you don't just come to it as a source of information you know it's it to write down all right so this must be how it was it's look behind it and see the motive behind that text so in in light of that I so everybody tune in next Saturday as well for that but in light of that what is the Hebrew so if we're if we're looking at the Hebrew Bible as a as a tool and not as our you know as our final authority we're 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 you know if we went back boots on the ground at a camcorder or something you know 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 domain in obviously these

texts are all you know that the Hebrew Bible is man ecology is a compilation that's been put together much much later but even so made up of different were originally different scrolls and stuff and but even within those individual squirrels or books like Isaiah or even you know the Torah or whatever they 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 they lots 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 ends of GT honoré because they remained authoritative and important culturally religiously they remained important it's like kind of happening like an heirloom like passed out to be 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 and so the texts were where they're 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 so with the caveat important caveat that the Hebrew Bible is a compilation and a very kind of varied compilation over several centuries and lots of different groups subscriber groups that have worked on these texts with that proviso in mind you can see that there has been a move and probably starting sometime around the sixth century to the fifth century BCE when the agenda religious agenda was very much to present the religious past as having always been properly monotheistic so in other

words Yahweh was always only the ever true God so not that there weren't other gods biblical writers are very comfortable about you know acknowledging that there were other gods but that you know Yahweh is the only God that monotheism is as very as has a pedigree that goes right back to before creation and the in the story of course Yara's relationship with his people that israelites who are sea salt offers Mesopotamians because of Abraham and you know so that says who comes out of Mesopotamia so there's this sense that the always relationship with him with

them has always been his he's insisted that I will be your dirty I will you know look after you our grimy fertility and protection I will fight for you on the condition that you worship me and me alone and so the biblical story as we read particularly through the Torah and that the so called historical books so the books of you know joshua judges samuel kings and that that once the people got into the land into the promised land they were their religion was corrupted by the indigenous Canaanite polytheism and that this is the thing

that caused all the problems or so this is why yahweh keeps kicking off and shouting at his people and then eventually decides to punish them by bringing in first year syrians and then the Babylonians and then you know later on then obviously the greeks and yeah the greeks so yeah in which there's an ideology that's working throughout a very careful redaction on layers if you like in certain biblical texts that's trying to assist the yahweh worship is shooting a yahweh is the only one she got no other deities and he's the crazy God he's the

God responsible for animal and human and agricultural fertility he's the God whose though 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 and that we find in the Hebrew Bible the reality was different in that we know the ancient Israelite religion was polytheistic was normatively traditionally polytheistic and that this sense of Yahweh alone wasn't widely shared you know didn't emerge until some scholars say eighth century BCE I think that's pushing him I think that's being fought to be positive

because they're kind of phrase you know they link it around King Hezekiah he's opposing heard through some temporal cult and some sort of scholars say no no a seventh century and you know it's time of King Josiah who is the warming King now again ridiculous I think personally and so it looks like the period when the Jerusalem Temple is first destroyed you know so why is you know and when a temple was destroyed it it was all about unit you had worshipers had various different responses to this you could see a logically how do you

deal with this so quite normatively and as we see in Sumerian texts and the Syrian texts that 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 abandon the temple and they're not going to help you so that if the deity abandons the temple the temple will fall and so 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 it's a punishment for our sins well what were our sins oh maybe it's cuz 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 Mike that was very common anyway you find that in all over ancient Southwest Asia that deities demand exclusivity but there was it it didn't quite function in that way you know you can talk about own it's not monotheism in in the

censor all deities demanded certain exclusivity but they they knew they're working they knew like they existed but you know the day T's knew they were working in a they were bound into a social network of gods just as they're humans were bound into their own social networks so in a way the biblical response to the destruction of 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 but because the biblical texts are the work not they're not

representative of the religious land the whole religious landscape they're the work of urban scribal elites primarily coming out of places like Jerusalem and then because they released their taken off to Babylon in exile so they're not representative of what most people were doing and the way they were worshipping and all the different deities they were worshipping and but the result is the we have this very bias very slanted view the Yahweh was a God who always demanded exclusive worship and that this is the way that he ought to be worshiped but the reality was massively

different the reality was polytheism quite sensibly yeah you know III wrote my dissertation on actually those types of temple laments in Sumerian you know so you know you know oh you know and so if anything's gonna be done if it's a statue of a deity is gonna be taken out in procession or if they're gonna rebuild the wall you know a mud brick wall or something at the temple the gala priests you know the one that's responsible - for appeasing the heart of the deity he he recites these laments these MS all Sumerian prayers and

they're they what they do and I know you know this but I mean like they 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 and it's just it's terrible the things that happen so yeah this idea of you know looking back and going well he's gone you know and I think of Ezekiel yeah that's the first see the Prophet that comes to mind when I think about that and you know him being picked up by the hair and taken

back and he digs through the wall you know and he looks and he sees all the horrible things that are going on the worship of Tom booze and the Sun whatever so in light of that what I asked a really broad question the last night but I want to do it again but I really want you to just I want you to have the freedom to because like this is your thing like I know go wherever you want to go with it but to you what was what was religion like I'm thinking the thing that

always comes to mind is that abus Eatery I think from concealer dodge road with you know that the drawing there of Yahweh in his Asher so like what what was religion like what you know I don't want to say like the average person but I mean you said that Yahweh wasn't always this you know God that demanded exclusivity what was it like sort of whatever you want to talk about with respect to that right given that most of what we know comes from biblical texts and that's that you know most of the detail of stuff

that were some detail coheres in the Hebrew Bible and Asherah is the name of a goddess but but it's vilified you know but there's lots of references to a statue of Astra being in the Jerusalem Temple and we know externally you know from external evidence like the inscription from construed and which talks about Yahweh and his Asherah and we know that Yahweh and Asherah were paired together Yahweh was the state deity and but state deity doesn't necessarily mean and doesn't necessarily mean kind of the official deity it just simply means politically you know that the

patron deity of of the King Jerusalem for example so Yahweh was the 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 Judah height religion was a subset of broader Northwest Semitic religions and we know from aggressive texts though from the Late Bronze Age we know that the Asherah was the wife of the head gods their Egret was a city-state with this incredibly brilliant I mean it was a very wealthy prosperous city and for a long time but it's its

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'sshe's cool in in Ygritte but then he had like a second tier of deity so these are the active course ale and his wife or kind of semi-retired you know and kind of like just letting the younger generation do their thing so the younger generation with gods like Baal and a storm golden a warrior garden and that his sister who's amazing like totally kick-ass and

we she was worshipped by Yahweh worshipers because we've you know we found are critically sort of arrow heads with her name written on them insult Israelite science and she her name appears weirdly only a couple of times in the Hebrew Bible but a lot of the her kind of her signature moves if you like kind of slashing skulls and trampling corpses and that kind of stuff a lot of her signature moves are applied to Yahweh in the Bible so it looks like he inherited those sort of things you know from his older what's basically as

old a cultural cousin so and a kickass deity as well you had other cause I'm gonna say it's like you know yet moat to the underworld day a team you know of death you know is he 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's been a that seems to played a big part in the development of Yahweh worship but

by the time we get to the Hebrew Bible Yahweh has kind of taken on a 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 the Iron Age historically speaking so we know that it was far more pluralistic and polytheistic and then then the Bible would have us believe so when the Bible saying oh you know you terrible Israelites you keep setting up the high places you know the bar mounts the high places out you know this is references to other temples

and archaeologically we know that there were lots of other temples all over the place not just Jerusalem not just Samaria and so when we find bits of of archaeology that attests are this much richer much more textured mythological and religious landscape then you know we prioritize that and say well actually that makes better sense of text that we read in the Hebrew Bible so for example in the Book of Jeremiah this is really weird a couple of chapters and chapters seven and chapters 44 which in which Jeremiah who's supposedly a 6th century prophet so the

Babylonians of invade is the first sort of beliefs have been exiled some of to babble on something I've gone off to Egypt and you know Jeremiah still like you know wandering around Jerusalem shouting at people and like prophets Pendleton and he's writing letters back and forth to people in Egypt and he saying to the Egyptians you know why you worshiping the Queen of Heaven and they and they're cheating you know they've come true system they're elites in Jerusalem and they say we worship the Queen of Heaven because when we were introduced to them and we

worship the Queen of Heaven we had everything you know we should they they say we had food security we have prosperity we had no threat of the sword and 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 he perhaps was a Shura most probably if she's the Queen of Heaven you kind of think she would be the partner to look away the king of heaven and so you do get little glimpses but they're like refractions like distorted reflections rather

than direct kind of 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 a surah from concerta Jews what we have we have inscriptions that say the same thing from other sites including tombs high status tunes you know these were kind of wealthy political Jerusalem elites living in and around the capital city and they had kind of landed estates would like vineyards and olive groves and stuff these are like

wealthy people and then leaving you know they're 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 and a hugely important deity and yet if you're just to rely on the Hebrew Bible you'd think she was some awful foreign and deity that you know some kind of awful superstition but actually she was you know really important and her role was probably to act as the main mediator between worshipers 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 worshipers and and Yahweh when they were trying to appeal to him cool I keep going off on tangents but you 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 remember how long ago he wrote it but

talking about glimpses of you know big Riddick mythology and these these types of chaos battle scenes of course that we see it jugar it 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 see it a little bit in job but could you talk about that and then maybe its appearance maybe in a DeMuth ology eyes form and if you could say all that in a much more understandable way for everybody that would be great in in

Genesis this one in particular yeah and what you're referring to is kind of astrology known as the kind of the chaos camp series this idea that one of the common features in the mythological landscape across ancient Southwest Asia and was this idea of a battle between a warrior deity or a group of warriors eighties and and some kind of monstrous sea deity so seeing animal leash its Tomatsu weirdly you know who is obviously one of the oldest goddesses um and kind of goes through this interesting shape-shifting throughout and new man leash and you know in

which like one minute she's like this kind of scaly sea sir in 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 and but so yeah we've got examples of it in a narrow niche but also obviously that's a later example in terms of Mesopotamian history yeah we've got much earlier examples such well hints in some of the earliest his height mythology and obviously we find it at

Agora in which the battle between the warrior deity and and the the see the kind of chaotic forces of the sea sometimes it's told in the battle between burl and yam but we also have an apse yams sister you know who says that she's the one that smokes the twisting serpent you know NC she's the one that that bound the many headed in circuses seven headed sea monster basically and that in a new Greek mythology and that's exactly what we find in texts that we find in Isaiah and in jobe and in the Psalms and

people tend to think that you know what's this myth doing that 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 but ancient mythological ways of thinking was so differently 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 that's what kind of keeps the gods alive in a way so that you

can have a god-like bowl and be killed by the god moat deck 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 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 this monster we find echoes of that same mythic trope in the Hebrew Bible and we tend to think that this is you know this was probably and 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 Genesis which is that God plants a garden and then makes the man and then pause you know then make several animals as a sexual partner threatened before items like you seriously this is not good and then he thinks and then he makes the woman but we only think that that's the gen thats the kind of

ancient is like 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 Dave and Psalms my sire that probably was the much more powerful creation myth associated with Yahweh at least and then some of those myths it's a really physical you know is there's a real sense of a physical fight in Psalms it talks about smashing Yahweh smashing the heads plural the seven-headed creators smashing

the heads of the Dragons and then by the time you get to the book of Job Yahweh's like much more hands-off the writer of that particular poetic cyclin job is really keen to to try and distance your away from the sense that he's got any kind of direct competitor you know in terms of sheer physical strengths and so so in the poetic cycle enjoy when he's talking about you always fight with the CEO who is cool Leviathan and in that text another biblical text yeah you're always like yeah well you know can you trap it

you know can you catch it on a hook so the way that you alway defeats the the track and there it's like he's just gone fishing Rosen arms he's like smashing his heads and he's having to physically fight so Joby's like all night 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 my Genesis one which has been so stripped of this kind of mythological meat you're kind of just get the sense oh yeah and Yahweh created the gray sea dragons

that are in the water you know that's in Chapter one so it's like they become creatures and then the rabbi's themselves they play on this idea that only rabbis so in Psalms it talks about Yahweh created Leviathan to kind of to play in the sea and then rabbi start to talk about the fact that you know what how did God spend his days and they divide up God's day into life's different parts and morning and then afternoon and what y'all realized in the evening is to spend time playing with the sea dragon it's his path

so there's like incredible sense in which the idea of this this chaos monster was so it's 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 has come about it doesn't just disappear so it gets reshaped and and kind of re handles so you start with this massive seven headed dragon his home and Yahweh's having to like punch it in the face and 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 like with the rabbi's saying that you know the device and was Yahweh's pet and that he likes to play with and then they start talking about the fact that you know that he captured Leviathan and he kind of kept it in a watery store cupboard and at the end of days he's going to kind of open up the watery store cupboard bring out the wife and kill it and serve it up as this kind of apocalyptic feast

ashes at the end so they this sea dragon you know you kind of think what dragons in the Bible but like that it's one of the most important kind of parts of your waist story if you like but for hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of years so that know of how light you know Canaanite mythology ends up in the Bible it's really interesting that kind of development you know you see it also in you know Mesopotamian mythology so you know you know menorah earlier on in the second millennium you know he fights against the on

zoo bird who has the tablet of destinies and he loses and then he's got to get advice and then he goes back again and he's able to trick the person that has the new the on zoo bird who has the tablet of destinies to win but it's not like by sheer mite that he wins its buying you know cunning by the time you get to the end of a leash you know Marduk as he's approaching I mean well even before like as he's approaching kingu who's holding the tablet of destinies he's just defeated by his

approach you know the this idea of development of might and of power borrowing from this tradition I you know it's fascinating just nothing about it to you is that you see it exactly the same kind of in biblical and Mesopotamia ecology is that if you look at saying that in the mail each the way that Marduk diffused Yama I mean obviously there's a lot of physical grappling you know and he's like God all he's got they used and these Pinos firing arrows and stuff but it's also with words you know she is it's it's the

only magic speech that ultimately in defeat Yama's 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 being you know 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 bigger for the written word and so the sense in which somehow the more the more emphasis you have on a kind of written and a kind of an utter delicious

or ritual or magical spell or whatever it is then the more hands off the deities themselves become they become less willing in mythology kind of mythology to kind of get their hands dirty just as a little plug this is written about it's quite a lot in a book that's coming out my first book for non-academic audiences for some of non-specialists is coming out next year and it's an anatomy of God in which I kind of talked about how Yahweh changes from this bodied deity into the kind of the 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 bodies deity that you can see some similar tendencies in other ancient South West 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 I that would be a phenomenal I don't know if

it we have 200 people watching which is quite quite a bit people watching so because of that I'm gonna break in and say we've had nearly 40 questions minutes so maybe we turn it over to 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 going I say thank you for joining us and 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 hail the Canaanite God and was then conflated with the RA in the Hebrew Bible mmm possibly their traditions I mean what's what's being referred to as stuff that we find in Genesis and in the Psalms so an old of you particularly one that was kind of supported by that older generation of us scholars like Franklin cross them 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 cities base to ale it's possible but we just don't know enough and we don't wind up we don't even know enough about the way in which Yahweh and ale relate though some scholars think that the name Yahweh itself came out of an epithet of ale you know hail who brings into being or some such um obviously hail was thieves have been the original God of Israel if we look at the theophoric omen and name it

look at some names of some ancient sanctuaries that given in the Bible way he talks about ale the God of Israel um you know an altar is built to a law we've got of this kind of straightforward and but but even you know we've got some traditions like in Deuteronomy 32 that seems to imply that Yahweh was originally one of the sons of ale and so could he have been kind of written into that mythology that way we don't know as a Melchizedek it looks like a very ancient tradition but it's been so there's so

little of it in the Hebrew Bible and even what is there looks to be quite overworked anyway and 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 and one of the you know to what the twinned eighties dawn and dusk so we can't we can't really know but in Inquisition those deities might have been daughters of Baal or ale I mean we we just don't know so I think it's a really great question but

I just don't we don't know it possible 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 monolith monolatry well I don't know what that word is perhaps as ever to evidence in the old testament texts mm-hmm yeah that's one theory that people quite like so the idea of a modern actress theological system is that there's a good knowledge meant that there were other gods but you only worship one and and it may be scholars more sort

of old-fashioned and Hebrew Bible scholars like to think that that's the way things probably went and so you went from a kind of polytheism in which she had most the deities were kind of stripped of their agency in power anyway so they became you know mainly one among a number of the sons of gods or the sons of ale so that kind of a business become the counselors if you like o of Yahweh and that gradually as Yahweh gets more and more important so they fall away I I find the term one of actually difficult

the idea a bit difficult because any priest or any prophet for example would in a cultic role in their ritual life beam on lattice they would be offering and we see this in Mesopotamia as well so you certain prophets or priestesses devoted you know they are that the main code is specific individual of deity yeah but that's just in occult in that container only that particular religion a ritual doesn't mean to say that they don't worship any of the other gods of course they do and so I think one of that she's quite a difficult

category so I do think that what we have instead is rather than a shift of from polytheism to monotheism what we see is more a prioritization of Yahweh with ana paula theistic context originally by which he becomes he gradually takes on more and more of the roles of the other day tease including roles of like a Shura you know because Yahweh becomes as kind of divine Midwife in lots of Hebrew Bible text and there's the kind of role that a Shura and and her other goddesses associated with her would have 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 continues to be worshiped 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 is son inappropriate terms yesterday of Christianity and some forms of Judaism so yeah thank you that's very interesting um

hi clef centers $5 thank you very much and said I just wanted to say it's been a pleasure watching you go toe-to-toe with Dogma tests 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 Asher ah 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 so some scholars so basically in some of the

Hebrew inscriptions and we have talked about Yahweh and it's a Shura some people think is this 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 nights on and so 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 and so yeah I got the debate about what does it what does what does the term a schwa or a sirata in these inscriptions means the debate about it has gone on and unknown but most scholars come down on the soil of saying this is a proper name of a deity and kind of attempt to sort of try and diminish it by say and even if it does refer to a cult object the fact is that deities were identified with their cult objects mm-hmm Ark of the Covenant

for example in the Hebrew Bible and that's addressed as Yahweh quite often and because it functioned as his footstool and just as we've items of furniture in Mesopotamian religions could be identified with their deities so in some ways it's it's not really an argument lovely thank you RAF for 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 were rising and dying God's older than the New Testament yes to kind of different questions there and 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 on real deities that were worshiped and realized in religiously real not real as in and what was the other bit all about barn rising gods yeah there's some debate about

the like even you referring to dying and rising gods that's quite problematic label to use now and so deities like Thomas and bomb you know to do they dime rise in quite that way but in terms of the notion that a deity can die and then quite you know come back up from the younger realm and up into the heavenly realm akane that's like well old much my predates Hebrew Bible and by hunters and hunters and hundreds and hundreds hundreds he is so yeah there's nothing original to be honest in terms of religion there really

is very little Thank You Ann Scott Duke since $9.99 and said 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 highly wieck's sends five pounds and asks did the Old Testament authors wants 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're discussing earlier about you know what is the purpose of these texts and the biblical writers weren't intending them something like Genesis you know the idea of the world being made in seven

days or the 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 of the ancestors I mean again we see this in other Mesopotamian literature partly it reflects that they're almost that they're living in a in that kind of that 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

more they were closer to the divine than they were to the mortal and so that partly accounts for their long ages but also in particularly these long ages are also seen as like a blessing from from God and the longer you live the great your lifespan lasts you you are by exactly so in that sense no one would have understood them to be actually I don't think they would have thought male because of that course literally you know whatever but you know it's it's difficult 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 is your said I'm a I'm a modern Westerner and plus on 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 and all of that I know is that my baggage that I carry and so that shapes the way that I few texts and but just very fact of being from a different time in a place than the biblical writers means that I'm needs viewing it differently anyway yeah but yeah the the time was seen as 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 of course pinned down at the moment given public am so it was scheduled for march next year but it's looking like that might have to be pushed back to September just because 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 to there's a very good gap between talking about documentary and actually seeing it on telly but I will be doing hopefully you know enough if we're allowed to kind of travel again and coming out to the States to do and book tours and I'll be doing book tours in the UK and in Europe as well so gran whether or not that that will actually happen in the covert nineteen world edits you know maybe if you are if you are yeah if you are over here maybe we can convince you to come into our amazing

studio and do enough come on we'll make it happen I would though we could we could do that it would be hilarious that'd be dogs and children running all over the place Julian Bruckner sends $5 thank you very much and says speaking of underworld what was the Canaanites / Israelite view of death moat et cetera and did they have an afterlife yeah and it was very similar to Hebrew Bible and 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 and 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 in the debt it just changed the nature of that relationship and in terms of an afterlife you only exist for as long as you're remembered so things like invoking the name of your dead paranor dead cousin or dead great-great-great grandparents was incredibly important but also important was maintained in the material integrity of your bones and your tomb and which is why you don't even stay in our own

cultures no we find it very difficult when graves are desecrated or you know 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 and so yeah the underwear was a good place and everybody went there you could have a good time the underworld or a bad time depending on how good your living relatives where I wrote kind of like looking after you and 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 and what we cannot know anything for sure and we just have to work in terms of probably one of the joys of history yeah I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to step away for twenty seconds because I hear Oliver up walking around upstairs I know we're probably you know most of us are pretty you know we could say with some probability that a Shura was this incredible and she was a key part of

ancient Israelite religion in terms of new discoveries and there haven't been any new inscriptions recently but then there are very few inscriptions i mean surprisingly few inscriptions from pre acidic Israel and Judah and which I think speaks to the social and economic and political context of ancient Israel and Judah they're not quite they're not quite writing in the same way they were tends 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 and

but yeah nothing new in terms of inscriptions but there are always things things that bits of fact fragments of figurines that scholars used to dismiss as being Canaanites and are very quickly being really and fine actually clearly sort of Israelite all know though of that kind of culture and so they may well some that have been misidentified as kind of canine 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 and yeah that is I mean the Hebrew Bible was very explicit about God commanding people to sacrifice their children and obviously there's a story in Genesis but some of the material in Exodus says has Yahweh's saying you know you shall offer up the first one not just of your of your lambs of your sheep and your oxen but also your children but there's written into it a kind of redemption clause you know you can don't have to actually sacrifice the baby what you can do is circumcise your son on the eighth

day of life rather than sacrifice it or you can pay money to the local sanctuary and but then there are other texts like in Ezekiel and chapter 20 which very clearly says you know Yahweh you gave them instruction that was not good you commanded them for up their children so there's clearly a lot of debate going on among people scholars about you know what's this commanded by Yahweh or not clearly some people thought it was excellent thank you very much essential apologetics again sends us $2 thank you very much our Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32

8 relators oh good question am mythologically possibly in the sense that they both in they're both ancient poems that have been very reworked problematic me and for us but they seem to exhibit a similar kind of image of a polytheistic divine council and one who seems to have you know as I'm sure he knows a tale in Psalm 82 who's the head of a divine council or is it yard way in Psalm in Deuteronomy 32 it's clearly a Liz the top dog la Lyon um but whether they're lit sort of inter textually related are they

literary relations and that we can't really know it's it's possible the fact is is that these were both clearly very important and again is examples of really important literary traditions that despite the way that they shut up against the kind of the monotheistic ecology of biblical rataxes the vampires the fact is they're still in the collections that was deemed to be important enough you know to keep and rework so there's probably a relationship between them they probably you know if I was really pushed I say they probably do speak to some kind of ritual mythological

context associated with the cults of the human King and probably in Jerusalem but that that's me just sort saying if I was really crushed if I to imagine away mad yeah well thank you Kota mark says regarding name changes was it possible that names like Jeroboam and Rehoboam had the bottle identity in them originally yeah and I mean we see it you know with some names that have been given the and distortion in the my Surete acceso which means shame and but were originally probably ball like fishbowl is you know associated so Saul son was

probably called ishbal first before he became a bishop so yeah the ancient scribes love about with heaven but yeah I think there's been a lot of deliberate and a bastardizing oh and other deities names in Hebrew Bible texts Thank You patty mcdougal asks did the ten tribes of Israel get disseminated into Assyria see I'm one of those people and that says can we really talk about tribes historically I mean is that I really like century BCE yeah we on these territories according to the Bible and names you know after these tribal nascent coming really talk

I don't think we can really talk about it I do think that the idea that the whole of you know the Hebrew Bible would have it that when Munir Assyrians you know defeated Samaria in about 71 but that they kind of die if the export is the entire population off and now Morgan obviously everyone's gone yeah empty empty so yeah I mean obviously they stayed I'm very interested as a little sideline not like written much pilot at all but in look at modern Samaritan claims and they came to be the direct descendants of there is

like people who were who were defeated by by the Assyrians in the 8th century and that's all um so yeah I I think some of them some of those groups of people yeah they were I mean politically and geographically they territory they were assimilated into a Syria because of serious that was what the Syrians doing Empire it was what it was exactly and so yeah I think they were I mean you look at what we know I mean there was a temple to Yahweh on Mount Gerizim in the 4th century BCE that was probably on

the site of much older temples anyway to Yahweh so read the Hebrew Bible you never get a sense that there's another temple that you're I mean but archaeologically we've got lots of proof that it was there and we've got inscriptions to Yahweh and dedications and prayers written by Yahweh worshippers pretty early Russia first talking about the sacrifice they've made to Yahweh so yeah no they didn't disappear into Assyria most people stayed exactly where they were just as they did in in and around Jerusalem you know it was only the elites that were taken off to

exile in the 6th century most Judah hi it's normal y'all age post they carried on just doing their thing but they've been listed a modern nice by the writers who are the the descendants if you like or the elites you were taken away well and therefore the most important people of course probably we probably have time for maybe one more question three more Super chats oh good grief okay we do those and then I think Ben Lamoreaux sends $5 and says are alien and Yahweh meant to be two separate beings in Deuteronomy 32 I've heard

others argue that they're meant to be one with Elly on keeping Judah as his own yes this is the little poem into astronomy I was talking about where it looks to be that Yahweh is a divine son of a young so he was ale there and we've basically got differences between the master etic version of so the hebrew version of this poem and then what we find in the Greek translation and so if you look any most English translations today and like a bog-standard Bible you read it and the word own has been inserted into

English translations so there says when Le onde divided the nations according to the number of the gods Israel was his you-know-whats his own portion Jacob has allotted share makes it sound like le ohm is Yahweh the God whose who has taken us or the Israel's people but actually the ancient versions of this don't have this kind of much more clear it's that a Lyon is the one that divides up and Jacob is a portion Aliona portions and Jacob to Yahweh basically yeah there too in the in the oldest tradition textual traditions of that poem and

your own and your way are two separate deities and your weight is subordinate to a own 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 and says vibrantly Brantley for $2 asks because that is how Brandt'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 out between 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 and even took my ethnicity in ancient world and is very difficult but there is a sense of there are lots of different other ring strategies and uttering in the Hebrew Bible tends

not to happen tends not to be indexed in terms of things like skin tone or sexuality even 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 on the world stage it you know it was hugely declined its empire by the time you've got the biblical writers who are talking about you know ancient Israel but even so culturally it was

still massively influential and so Egypt and the Hebrew Bible stories is often presented as a place of where you go either to escape famine or you go when your own 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 I mean foreigners you know tend to be like the Babylonians and a kind of caricatured so it's not so much racism as an other ring of people who are in a position of power Oh being generally that's very nicely know 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 thank you for having me no this has been great yeah yeah I'd love to I'd love to have you back obviously um 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 I 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 and it we graphic and I've loved writing it but it's been the hardest thing I think I've ever written barbar them writing scholarship cuz I you know you don't have to explain stuff in some ways to to a scholarly audience but this this has been a challenge but I've loved writing

it and you can find me on Twitter what am i a cross Francesca there 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 well 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] you [Music]