You're mimicking the homes of the gods.
This is ubiquitous in the ancient world.
Okay, I'm sorry.
It's not just because Ancient Aliens like triangles,
okay?
It really isn't.
Eden is in Ezekiel, a garden.
Well, there's no surprise, we get that Genesis.
Down in verse 14,
okay, we have the description of the holy mountain.
So how in the world can Eden be
a garden and a mountain?
Like, what? What's that?
And of course, we can sort of conceive.
If we want to literalize things,
well, there's probably this mountain there, you know,
had a garden somewhere on it,
because, you know, mountains have gardens periodically,
you know, what's wrong with that?
And, you know, it doesn't bother us that if we go back to Genesis,
we don't get the mountain there, but that's okay.
You know, we get it somewhere else.
You know, we try to literalize and put these things in our mind,
because we're not thinking of the metaphor.
Because the metaphor is not clear to us.
To an ancient person
it's very normal to think that the gods
(and this was the reading you did for tonight),
that the gods or God in the in the case of Israelite thinking,
biblical thinking, it's very normal to conceive of
deities living in gardens and mountains.
Because this is where you see them all over the place,
just across the board.
Why? Because if you're living in the Ancient Near East
or Canaan or whatever,
where not everybody gets to live in a garden
or not everybody gets to live
in a place where they have enough to eat.
You are living in a subsistence economy.
Every day your big concern when you get up in the morning is;
will I have enough to eat?
Will I have enough water?
Will my cattle, my livestock
if I'm lucky enough to own them,
will they be able to say the same thing at the end of the day?
And then the next day comes and it just repeats.
Okay, this is why civilizations formed around rivers
because there's water there.
Water grows, helps things grow.
It helps keep animals alive.
Helps keep humans alive.
Not everybody, you know, could do that.
So the idea was that, you know,
we can scratch out a living here
and boy, we're blessed if we live near a good water supply
and it doesn't dry up,
cuz then we're in a world of hurt,
but the gods, the gods never have to worry about this
because they live in paradise.
They live where there's always enough water,
and more than enough,
it's just gushing everywhere.
It's well watered.
There's a mist that covered the ground,
you know, sprayed the ground,
kind of like in the grocery store.
You go to the produce, and there's a little mist there.
You know, that's what I think of anyway,
whenever I see that thing.
But it's like...
They never have to worry about want.
They're always going to have enough to eat.
They're always going to have this paradise.
And they live on mountains as well because they're remote.
The gods don't really like to mingle with people.
They're special.
They don't like to, you know, mingle with the unwashed masses
and all that kind of stuff.
So, there is this sense that
because of remoteness and paradise,
this is where the gods live.
And so these became metaphors to describe sacred space.
Now, how do you transmit that
when you are building structures and temples?
Because you want the gods,
you know, good grief, you spent all week making this idol
and you want the god to show up and like it,
so you want it to look like home.
To remind the deity of home. So what do you do?
You decorate it like a garden.
You might put it on or near water.
Or you might build an artificial mountain;
like a pyramid or a ziggurat.
Okay, that's what's going on up here.
You're mimicking the homes of the gods.
This is ubiquitous in the ancient world.
Okay, I'm sorry. It's not just because Ancient Aliens like triangles,
okay? It really isn't.
There's something more going on here upstairs.
You're making a nice place to live for the deity
that you hope will come here and favor you.
That's why you're doing it.
So these are common metaphors that
are part of the Israelite, you know, world too.
Now, what goes on in sacred space
to an Israelite is a whole lot different
than what goes on for an Egyptian,
and a Mesopotamian, and a Canaanite or Assyrian.
Okay, but the trappings, the condo as it were,
okay, is going to look a lot the same.
It communicates the same idea.
It would be really dumb of the biblical writer
to sit there at his desk one day and think,
"I want to describe where Yahweh lives,
but I'm going to do it in such a different way
that nobody who reads this is going to be able to pick up on it."
Why would you do that?
You want people to pick up on it.
Because once they're drawn into the scene,
and they know what you're talking about,
then you're going to hit them between the eyes with theology.
They're going to be a captive audience.
They're gonna know what you're trying to communicate
and how it's different from what they are thinking.
That's the whole point.
You use sameness to get them to the place
where they can entertain difference
in terms of content, your theology.