Again, in our day and age, the people who sort of have an axe to grind
against the Bible will take the bucket that most efficiently
lets them attack this thing that they just don't like.
You know, it seems one of the narratives or maybe even criticisms
of the Old Testament is, is it a fair saying that the Old Testament
is similar to or emulative of other
similar religious narratives or texts at the time?
I feel like I've heard that that's one of the critiques of the Old Testament
is that it's similar to all these other similar religions in the area.
There are some conceptual overlaps and there are some really acute differences.
For instance, you have overlaps with things like
cosmological beliefs and perceptions, the creation language, that sort of thing.
But you have a concept like the gods choosing humans because they love them
and making covenants with them. That is utterly foreign
to anything else other than the Hebrew Bible.
You go to Mesopotamia, the gods make humans to be slaves.
Now they're going to do the jobs we don't like to do.
You know, you never get that sense in the Old Testament.
In ancient Near Eastern thought, broader than Mesopotamia, just generally,
the idea of humans being divine imagers is something said only of kings.
Okay, the Old Testament democratizes this, it's every human is a divine imager.
I mean, so there you have a, let's just use that one, you have a concept that humans
are somehow like God or the gods.
But what gets packed into that in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible
is quite different than what you're going to read elsewhere.
So the Old Testament is kind of a combination of these things.
You're going to have commonalities because ultimately the material
is going to be written by people who share regional space.
I mean, they're basically, geographically close in proximity.
So we would expect cross fertilization of the way things get talked about.
And the things that get talked about are just common to human experience.
Why are we here? How did we get here? There's a sense, immediately
of a greater intelligence beyond us that, by the way, moderns
still love to retreat to as well when they can't explain things.
And so the, you know, these are things that everybody talks about
and there's this, you know, what we would call a spiritual world
that enters into the discussion.
And the vocabulary that's used for where the gods live
and what they do and what they're interested in.
I mean, there's a lot of commonality there, but when you really drill down
into the theology, sort of the storyline that's presented in the Hebrew Bible,
there are some really significant differences.
So it's a little bit of sameness and significant difference as well.
And some of the sameness is polemic as well, because the biblical writers
are trying to respond to other ideas.
And ancient Near Eastern literature does that too.
But the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible writers
honestly make more of a point of it.
It seems to be on their mind a lot more to say something drawing on language
that their audience will know because they know Babylonian religion,
or they know Egyptian religion, or they know Canaanite religion.
And so they'll use that language to poke the other ideas n the eye, so to speak.
iAnd there's probably more of that in the Hebrew Bible than you're going to find
elsewhere, even though it's not totally absent elsewhere.
But that's another reason for the sameness.
So rather than kind of, you know, the village atheist thing of,
"oh, you know, the stuff in the Old Testament, it just comes from, fill in the blank,"
like the Israelites never had an independent thought, okay, which is an absurd notion.
But rather than keeping it at that simplistic level, people should ask the questions of,
well, why do we see the similarities? And why do we see the differences?
But typically when you're when you're doing internet stuff,
and you're watching the XYZ YouTube channel, where you have someone who
probably knows more than the average Christian in church,
but in terms of academic exposure, doesn't know a whole lot,
or really isn't thinking too deeply.
The discussion just is a little too simplistic. And you tend to sort of
overstate the case and not really explore it the way it needs to be probed.
Look at the simplistic but understandable thinking:
"These two things are similar. Therefore, this one came from that one."
Really? Two things can be similar, and one not be the cause of the other.
But again, in these typical discussions that you get online,
nobody even asked that question, or pushes back on that assumption.
And it really needs to be pushed back.
There could be many reasons why two things are similar,
rather than some kind of, "this is the cause of that."
Correlation does not mean causation.
I mean, I'm not a guy that spends a whole lot of time
online and social media and stuff like that.
But I've spent enough to know that that's sort of the normal way of doing things.
Well, it seems like you're saying it ignores, too, the fact that, yeah,
you can say on the surface, sure, they might have a similar flood narrative.
They might have similar gods that have different roles. But at the end of the day,
if I'm hearing you, is that the Old Testament and just the doctrines, theology,
relationship with God to man put forth in the Old Testament
is radically unprecedented.
There are quite unprecedented ideas in the Old Testament amid the similarities.
And then again, if you were sort of making buckets, you'd have, well,
some similarities are there because it's the ancient Near East.
Okay, there's a regional proximity.
They have the same kind of lifestyle, so they're going to have the same kind of problems,
or they just have general problems like, you know, male and female, married,
husband, wife, you know, you're going to just have similarities for that reason.
Then there's a similarity because
they're using the similarity to go some other direction, religiously or theologically.
You can have five, six, seven, eight buckets, for why you have similarities.
But again, in our day and age, the people who sort of have an axe to grind
against the Bible will take the bucket that most efficiently
lets them attack this thing that they just don't like.
So, that's just kind of the way it works.
But in the academic world, you really...
you don't get away with that. You just don't.