The ancient world had its own creation story. Its own flood. Its own gods at war before the world was ever made. And when Genesis was written, every person who read it knew those stories by heart. So what happens when you put the Bible back into the world it actually came from? Dr. Richard Averbeck has spent more than forty years finding out, working directly in Sumerian, Akkadian, and the Hebrew of the Pentateuch, reading the cuneiform tablets most people have never heard of. What he has found does not weaken Scripture. It sharpens it.
In this conversation, Averbeck takes us inside the world of Enuma Elish, Gilgamesh, and the Sumerian King List, and shows exactly where Genesis overlaps with them and where it breaks away completely. He explains why the sun and the moon are never named in Genesis 1, why there is no cosmic battle in the creation account, and where that battle actually shows up instead. His answer to that last question reframes the entire book of Genesis, runs straight through Ephesians 6 and Revelation 12, and explains why the fight we are in is over us. This is one of the most clarifying conversations we have had on this show.
In this episode you will learn:
– Why the biblical writers never wrote in a vacuum, and how Akkadian became the common language of the ancient world for fifteen hundred years
– What Genesis 1 is doing when it calls the sun and moon the greater light and the lesser light instead of naming them
– Where Genesis genuinely parallels the Babylonian creation account, and where it stands completely against it
– Why there is no cosmic battle in Genesis 1, and why Averbeck argues it was moved to Genesis 3
– How the ancient practice of cursing anyone who damaged a king’s statue explains the serpent’s attack on the image of God
– What Gilgamesh Tablet 11 shares with the biblical flood, and what Genesis does that no other flood story could
– Why reading Genesis with naked eye observation resolves so many arguments about the Bible and science
– How the three tiered ancient cosmos shapes the literary structure of the six days of creation
– What the Old Testament law was actually designed to do, and how it comes through into the new covenant
– Why holiness, from Leviticus 19 to 1 Peter 1, has always been about how well you love
– How to answer the skeptic who says the Bible is simply borrowed Mesopotamian mythology
Guest:
Dr. Richard E. Averbeck
Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
The Old Testament Law for the Life of the Church: Reading the Torah in the Light of Christ- https://www.amazon.com/Old-Testament-Law-Life-Church/dp/0830841008
Faculty page
https://www.tiu.edu/divinity/faculty/richard-averbeck/
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