Babylon Before the Bible: What Mesopotamia Reveals About the Old Testament with Dr. Joshua Bowen

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, with Sound of Heaven, and today we have a very special guest. It's going to be an enlightening conversation for sure: Dr. Joshua Bowen. Dr. Bowen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Johnny Ova: Let's jump right into our conversation, Dr. Bowen. Before we get into the specifics, I want to set the stage. When we talk about the ancient Near East and Mesopotamia, what world are we actually talking about, and why should someone who loves the Bible care deeply about it?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: That's a good question. Generally, when we talk about the ancient Near East, we're talking about ancient Iraq and Syria, running from roughly 3000 BCE down to around the time of Alexander the Great. Johnny, hang on just a second. I don't know if you can hear that. I'm so sorry, I'll be right back.

Johnny Ova: That's all right. It's all good.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Sorry, you said no editing, and then I immediately made it necessary to edit. I'll pick up from your question. Scholars generally talk about the ancient Near East with respect to ancient Iraq and Syria, and the time span is normally from about 3000 BCE down to the time of Alexander the Great. That's the general bracketing scholars use. If you think about where Iraq and Syria are in relation to the southern Levant, where the events of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament took place, it's very much within that range. And certainly Abraham in Genesis is said to have come from Ur of the Chaldeans, which is down in southern Mesopotamia. So just on its face, it's a pretty important culture to understand if you're interested in the Bible. But there's a lot more behind that. There's a lot of interaction between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and Mesopotamia. Think about the Assyrians in the Neo-Assyrian period. They conquer Samaria in 722 BCE. Then the Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar, the very famous Nebuchadnezzar from the book of Daniel and elsewhere, conquers Judah in the south. Captivity, deportation, these things all center on Mesopotamia. So it's an important thing to understand.

Johnny Ova: Definitely. It's one of the reasons we have the show. I'm trying to open everybody's minds to more information instead of being so tunnel-visioned on everything, and it's been quite a journey. That's why drawing on your expertise is going to be invaluable. Moving to the next topic: most Christians read Genesis as a document that stands alone, but you work in the cuneiform record every day. How does that record reframe the opening chapters of the Bible, before we even get to chapter 3?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: I think the first thing people need to recognize is that the biblical texts weren't written in a cultural vacuum. That's a paradigm shift for a lot of people. I was an evangelical Christian for 26 years. I grew up in the church, and the first time I heard that, it was pretty jarring for me. In scholarship we talk about the mythological genre of Genesis 1 through 11, but however one classifies it, whatever faith tradition one holds and however they parse it out, it is in conversation, intentionally or unintentionally, with the cultures around it. It's no different today. If somebody is writing music, they're consciously or unconsciously affected by trends and popular culture. These things are in the water, in the air. So at a basic level, anything you read from the ancient world, just like what you read today, is going to be affected by what surrounds it. More precisely, most scholars would say the first 11 chapters of Genesis are in conversation with at least Babylonian traditions and ideologies.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: So understanding that background matters. In Mesopotamian culture, the city was the pinnacle of being a real human. A real human, a good human, is going to be in the city. That's where they're striving to get. You have lots of texts that talk about those people who live out in the mountains, outside the city, and say they're all dumb, while the city is where it's at. The Epic of Gilgamesh is certainly framed that way. But in early Genesis it's quite the opposite. There's movement toward the city, culminating in the city and tower of Babel story in Genesis 11, but that's bad movement. You don't want to be going toward the city, so God has to keep spreading them back out. Look, rule the world, multiply. You're not doing that, so I've got to get you out of here. Understanding that back and forth, the conversation Genesis is having with Mesopotamian culture, is really important to understanding more broadly what it's saying.

Johnny Ova: I think we all have a lens we read through. Our surroundings and how we're brought up frame things. I see it a lot in Christianity in general, with the subheadings and titles in the Scriptures you're constantly brought up on. You read Matthew 24, for example, and there's a big title that says The Second Coming of Jesus Christ. So now you're reading it and saying, look, that earthquake in Texas, that's connected to this. You already have a lens and a framework. And from what I'm gathering, you're saying these writers were also being impacted by the surrounding areas, and that set the frame for what they were doing.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Absolutely. The example I always like to give is somebody like Eminem. When Eminem writes music, he's very intentionally trying to start a new genre or tweak the genre he's been working in. But he's always in conversation with this artist or that song, sometimes very distant in the past, sometimes very close to him. He engages with it in such a way that if you don't know he's in a back and forth with R. Kelly, the song isn't going to make a lot of sense. It could still be fun and enjoyable to listen to, but you won't really get the line where he says, you already know who the F you are, Kelly. That wouldn't make sense unless you understand the background. I think the same is true of the Genesis narrative in different ways. Understanding that backdrop really helps fill it out.

Johnny Ova: So the Enuma Elish. I think that's pronounced right. I was looking up names, and there are ten pronunciations for these things. The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation account, predates Genesis. When you put those two texts side by side, what jumps out at you, and what does it tell us about how Israel understood God and creation?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: People say it both ways. Big question. To give everybody a short background, the Enuma Elish is a mythological text about the god Marduk, the Babylonian deity who gains preeminence, particularly in the latter part of the second millennium and into the first millennium. In the story he faces what all the other gods consider an insurmountable hurdle, the goddess Tiamat. All the other gods are too afraid to go out and fight, and he bravely volunteers. When he does, he defeats her, and that gives him his preeminent place at the head of the pantheon. This text was part of the annual New Year's festival, called the Akitu festival. Every year it was an incredibly important part of the festival. So much so that the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus, sorry, the cat wants to come up and say hello.

Johnny Ova: Bring the cats on. Cats are welcome.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Nabonidus leaves Babylon for roughly a decade, and while he's gone they can't celebrate the Akitu festival, which is a really big deal. So it's an important part of the culture. There was a video Wes Huff was a part of, if you're familiar with Wes Huff, where he pushed back on Billy Carson. There was so much turmoil around that conversation. Much of it was because the way Billy was framing it, probably unintentionally, was that it's a mirror image: if you read the Enuma Elish and then Genesis 1, you'd say, my gosh, they ripped that off. That's not really how conversation between texts, what we call intertextuality, normally appears. There are cases where it does. The flood story is one. But with the Enuma Elish it's far more subtle. If you read Genesis 2 and the Garden of Eden narrative, the one most people could lay out in broad strokes, you get a picture of a deity who is very human. There's some trial and error. Let me try this. That didn't work. Let me try something else. He has characteristics we resonate with. Genesis 1 is a different story. The deity is far more transcendent. He's speaking things into existence. It's a very ordered, poetic text, where the first three days align with days four through six. It has a completely different feel.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: What scholars have talked about for years is that the interaction between these two is probably an attempt to say our God, Yahweh, is even more powerful than Marduk, the god of the land where we were taken captive for 70 years. You can see hints of that. For example, tehom in Hebrew is the word for the deep, and it's a cognate. It's related to Tiamat, the sea goddess of the Enuma Elish. Some of it is a little detailed and would probably bore the listener, and it's not going to jump out at the reader, in my opinion. It's far more subtle than that. Yet the connections are very difficult to dismiss. One very subtle one: in the Enuma Elish, after Tiamat is killed by Marduk, he splits her in half. Half of her he stretches out to make the heavens, the dome overhead, and he places guards to hold back the water from coming back down. That's really the same cosmological image we get in Genesis 1. The raqia, the hammered-out thing, is essentially a plate, a dome that separates the waters above from the waters beneath. So with little things like that, I think Wes was right when he said it's not a one-for-one correspondence. Obviously it isn't. But that doesn't mean there isn't intertextuality between these texts.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. I want to flip the conversation over to the Gilgamesh epic, which contains a flood story older than Noah. Walk us through that parallel. How close is it, and how do we put this together and read it?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: In broad strokes, the Mesopotamian flood tradition arguably goes back to just after 2000 BCE, a time called the Old Babylonian period. Springing up roughly at the same time, you get an account in Sumerian and a couple in Akkadian. The two famous ones that I think directly affect the biblical text are the story of Atrahasis, where the flood story is part of a broader narrative about the creation of humanity and its multiplying on earth, and then Gilgamesh tablet 11, which, as you pointed out, uses Atrahasis in its telling of the flood. Atrahasis is the base, I think, of both. The senior gods create lesser deities to do the work of caring for the gods, feeding them, clothing them and so forth. The lesser gods rebel. They don't like it, it's too hard. So a compromise is struck. They kill the leader of the rebellion and use that spark of life to create humanity, and humanity multiplies. The story talks about how they multiply and multiply until they become so numerous they make it hard for one of the senior deities, Enlil, to sleep. So he says, nah, fam, we're getting rid of them. He sends a plague, he sends drought, several different things to try to bring humanity's numbers way down.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: The god Enki, or Ea, consistently helps humanity survive through subterfuge and trickery, and it makes Enlil so angry that in the end he says, that's it, I'm sending a flood, I'm going to wipe them all out. Enlil swears all the major deities to an oath: somebody's been telling humanity, somebody's been helping them, so put your hands up and swear you won't help them. And they swear. So what does Ea do? The flood survivor is named Atrahasis in Atrahasis and Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh. Ea goes down, and this man is standing by a reed fence. Ea says, reed fence, reed fence, there's a flood coming. You probably ought to build a boat. So he doesn't break his oath, because he didn't tell humanity about the coming storm. He told a fence. So it's fine. Of course the flood comes, and animals are taken onto the ark beforehand. And at the end, as the flood starts to recede, we have tablets as early as the 14th century BCE that talk about birds being released by the flood survivor to fly around and see whether the land has dried. As I tell that story, if you're familiar with the biblical flood story, you can hear the overlaps.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: This is where I think Christians often balk unnecessarily. I get it. When atheists and skeptics come at Christian apologists and say, look, it's plagiarizing the story, it's just ripping it off, that's a really unfair look at what's actually going on. One thing we see in the ancient Near East is using an earlier text or storyline, reworking it, and emphasizing the differences, because the differences are usually what's theologically important. That's what's happening in the flood story. The big thing I like to point out is this. If you were a Judean taken into captivity in ancient Mesopotamia, or maybe someone who had gone back under Persian rule, and you heard the flood story, you'd recognize it: that sounds a lot like Gilgamesh. But there would be differences that would stand out. One thing really prominent in Atrahasis and Gilgamesh is that the god Enlil is very rash, and he's even said to have done a wicked or evil thing in sending this flood. So the god who sends the flood does something wrong, and the god who rescues humanity does something right. When you come to the biblical story, you only have one deity.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: And this is the genius, and why it frustrates me so much when I hear people say, those Bronze Age goat herders. No. These are very brilliant people writing these stories. What they do is bring both roles together into the same deity. Now the deity who sends the flood and the deity who rescues humanity are one and the same. But that left the scribe, or the scribal guild, with a problem: how do we get this flood sent without God being evil in doing it? You have the little story in Genesis 6:1 to 4 about the Nephilim and the sons of God coming down. Then Genesis 6:5 says every intent of the thoughts of the hearts of mankind was only evil continually. The Hebrew there is super emphatic. Humanity was really, really bad, and God is remorseful about it. So the picture of the deity is not a capricious one, a god saying, I can't sleep, I've got to get rid of them all. He's brokenhearted at having to get rid of humanity, but it's their fault. They're so wicked God has to start over. Those are things I think are really important to recognize when you read the biblical texts in general, and here specifically.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: The question to ask is not, is this dependent on an earlier story? I just don't think that matters for theological reasons. To go back to Eminem, nobody thinks Eminem is not creative or that Eminem is doing something wrong by using a Joan Jett song. No, he's being very creative and he's doing it for his own purposes. And the biblical writers fall into that same category. Very often they're saying, you have heard this story attributed to these deities, but it's not them. It's our God. And look, our God is not like your god. Our God had to do this because mankind was terribly wicked.

Johnny Ova: It's a great point. When I talked earlier about opening people's eyes, one thing I personally believe as a Christian, and this sounds like heresy, is that Christians have an unhealthy relationship with the Bible in general. My stance is that Christians worship the Bible more than they worship Christ, who in my opinion is the one the Bible points to. When people say, I'm a biblical Christian, I don't think they understand what they're saying. Which biblical Christian? A Genesis Christian? An Exodus Christian? A follower of Christ? Are you a Mosaic? A Biblian? What are we getting at? That's why I think these things are important. I think Christians major on the minors, and they buck against things they don't have an answer for. Here's how I look at it: if faith is real, and God is real, and Christianity is real, then as Christians we should not be afraid to have any conversation at all when new information is added. That's why your personal story intrigued me. You mentioned you were an evangelical Christian for 20-something years, and I believe I have your tweet over here that says, I think I'm an atheist.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: I think that's absolutely right.

Johnny Ova: I think that was the only thing you said in the tweet: I think I'm an atheist now. Actually, I have a question about that. You're married, you have kids. When you got married, were you both Christians, or did you get married after that? I'm curious because my wife and I pastor a church here. I don't even know how the dynamic of our relationship would change if I just went to my wife and said, you know what, I don't believe in God anymore. I wonder what that transition was like for you and your family.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: I deconverted when I was still married to my ex-wife. We got married because we were both fundamentalist evangelical Christians. It was like, look, here's a guy, he's a Christian, I can stand to be in the same room with him for a while, we should just get married. That really was what it was like. God will take care of the rest. Not really thought through. But it's interesting, because my wife, Megan Lewis, is an Anglican. She identifies as a Christian, and it's not an issue, because I think there are other ways of looking at the Bible besides fundamentalist evangelicalism. Fundamentalism is not necessary in order to be a Christian. I obviously have very good friends who are still fundamentalists, and much of my family is still very fundamentalist. But I just don't think that type of biblical literalism is necessary to maintain one's faith. But yes, it was a very difficult time for me when I deconverted. Interestingly, I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Michael Brown.

Johnny Ova: I am familiar with Dr. Michael Brown.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: He and I are certainly friends. We text each other periodically. I've been on his Line of Fire radio show, and I went on one time specifically because he said, I want to take two ancient Near Eastern scholars, him and me. He went to New York University, I think, which is a phenomenal school, and he got trained in the languages. We have very similar educational backgrounds. And yet his biblical training strengthened his faith, and mine led to my deconversion. So we talked about that, and I think it was a really good conversation. I don't know if it's still up online.

Johnny Ova: That's wild. I want to check that out. I appreciate you sharing that. It just popped into my head during our conversation. All right, back to my questions. Israel didn't invent the idea of law codes: the Laws of Hammurabi, Ur-Namma, Eshnunna. These names are going to be hard. How do these collections relate to the legal material in the Torah? That's where I want to focus. And what does that relationship tell us about how God worked through a real ancient culture?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Good question. To give the audience a brief background, starting at the end of the third millennium BCE we have what early on were called law codes, like you said. They're very often formulated as, if this happens, then this will be the judgment. Scholars call that casuistic law, if this, then that. We have them in Sumerian, and later in Akkadian. The famous one you mentioned, the Laws of Hammurabi, is the longest and best-preserved example we have. It's a two-meter-high diorite stela with 282 laws inscribed on it. The Hittites have a law collection as well. Scholars are still debating how these actually functioned. There's no real agreement yet about how the Laws of Hammurabi worked. But they inform how we can come to the biblical text. In the book of Exodus you have what scholars call the Covenant Code. It starts at the end of chapter 20 and goes through part of 23, including the infamous chapter 21 where all the slave laws are. That's arguably the oldest law collection preserved in the Hebrew Bible. Then you have the law collection in Deuteronomy, and most scholars would agree the laws in Leviticus, in the Holiness Code, are the latest, the youngest.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: If we understand how laws were structured in collections like Hammurabi, they're probably not normative law. The picture I always paint is this. Scholars don't think people were coming to the city gate and saying, come here, Frank stole my sheep, and I want to know what you're going to do about it, Mr. Judge. And the judge says, hang on a second, let me see what Hammurabi says. OK, according to law number 17, you're going to pay 30 shekels of silver. Boom. I don't think that's how it was happening. There was a way of thinking about law in the ancient world, and it's seen through all these law collections and all the legal documents preserved in cuneiform. Raymond Westbrook, a legal specialist at Johns Hopkins who unfortunately died the year I got there, had a wonderful saying. He said law today changes at a frenetic pace, which is now a word I love to use, but only in that sentence. Whereas in the ancient Near East it changed very slowly. Technology was different, and life didn't move at the same rate, so jurisprudence didn't have to develop to keep up with it. So you'll see things in the Laws of Ur-Namma, the Laws of Eshnunna and the Laws of Hammurabi that show up in very similar form in the Hebrew Bible.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: The most famous example, I think, is the goring ox laws. Look at Exodus 21:28 to 32. The owner of an ox has been told, hey, your ox has been trying to gore people as they walk by. The owner says, nah, and does nothing to keep it penned in or tied up, and it gores someone. The owner is held responsible. If it gores a free person, the head of the household, a wife, a daughter, a son, the life of the owner is forfeit, though if the family allows it, he can pay a ransom. And if it gores a slave, he has to pay the slave's owner 30 shekels of silver. That law is found in at least two, if not three, other law collections, I'd have to go back and look, with very little difference between them. Bruce Wells, down at the University of Texas at Austin, is a specialist in law in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East. He has an article looking at how ancient legal specialists thought about law: the kinds of cases they considered, how they would adjudicate them, the punishments they would give. There's just consistency when you do comparative analysis. I'll stop after this. In my book, Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery?, I have a lot of comparative material comparing all the slavery laws in the ancient world.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: In Appendix 2, I compared all the laws about battery. It's fascinating to see that, like the slavery laws, they stay fairly consistent across the board because they're dealing with the same problems. Their conceptions of harm, what's the most severe thing to hit someone on, what costs the perpetrator the most as a fine, are all very consistent. So, to land my plane here, sorry about that.

Johnny Ova: No, it's all good. It's interesting.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: The usefulness of understanding the ancient Near Eastern law collections is that when you get to the biblical text, it works much like it does with mythological texts. You don't camp on the things that are the same. You see what's the same, but you look at what they change. What do they tweak? What are the differences? Two places stand out to me, and I'll end here. You can see it in the slavery laws. In Exodus 21, there's a law that says if a male debt slave comes in, you can only make him work for six years, and you have to release him in the seventh. He just goes out free by himself. In Deuteronomy 15, which is chronologically a later collection, when that same Israelite slave works his six years, you don't just release him with nothing. You have to provide for him liberally, it says, from your vineyard, from your threshing floor. You have to give him a bunch of stuff, which on its face sounds totally backwards. This guy just worked for me for six years to pay off his debt, and now that he has, I'm going to give him a bunch of stuff? What in the world? But the law has the divine voice behind it. God says, I will bless you so much. Don't count it a hardship, because I will essentially intervene supernaturally to make sure this isn't economically damaging to you.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: You see the same thing in Leviticus 25 with the laws about the Sabbath year. God says, every seventh year let the land lie fallow. And the text anticipates the objection: wait a minute, God. He says, don't be concerned about what you'll eat during the seventh year, because I'm going to bless you so much in the sixth year that it will carry you through to the eighth year. Those are the things that are different, because they bring in this theological aspect: the deity is going to step in and intervene directly in a situation that would otherwise be economically harmful.

Johnny Ova: It's interesting to think about law like that, not the way we think of law today, line by line, but more as a concept. Let's talk about the gods a little. Mesopotamia was saturated with a massive pantheon, Marduk, Ishtar. How did Israel's encounter with those gods shape the development of Yahwism? Do you think the Old Testament is in some ways a direct theological argument against Mesopotamian religion?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: It's interesting to watch that development take place. To be clear to the audience, there are people in Hebrew Bible who specialize in the divine realm. My old advisor, Ted Lewis, wrote a tome of over a thousand pages called The Origin and Character of God. This is what he does. Mark Smith is another big name who looks at the development of the divine. What I'll say probably falls pretty well in line with the consensus. There are places in the Hebrew Bible where you catch a glimpse of an older tradition they're bringing with them and wrestling through. For all intents and purposes, the Israelites were a Canaanite group. Look back at the ancient city of Ugarit, where we found a whole lot of Ugaritic tablets that talk about the divine pantheon. That's where Baal, the Baal we see in the biblical text, is worshiped, among other places. When you read passages like Deuteronomy 32, where El Elyon divides up the inheritance among his sons, the sons of God, that's very much in line with the Ugaritic pantheon, the way Canaanite culture thought about the divine realm.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: But look at how Deuteronomy 32 engages with it. It almost seems like the writers or scribes are saying, all right, we have this tradition. We can't just throw it out, but we need to turn it so that it moves toward the monotheistic view we're in the process of espousing. Scholars would argue that in the final, canonical form of that passage, Yahweh and El Elyon are starting to line up as the same deity, different names for one God. You see the same thing in Psalm 82. There again you have the divine council, and Yahweh inherits all the nations from the other members of the council because they haven't done justice for the poor, the vulnerable, the orphan and the widow. So those traditions are there. Again, this isn't my area of specialization, and I would defer to the people who work in it. But as time goes by, this view develops, I think probably because of being in Babylonian captivity and being confronted daily with a multiplicity of divine beings. Take Psalm 68, I think it is, where Yahweh is the rider on the clouds. That's an epithet of Baal. But I think it's very reasonable to conclude the psalmist is saying, it's not Baal who does that. Baal is not the rider on the clouds. It's Yahweh.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Isaiah 27:1 is another really good example. You have the deity with the twisting serpent and the fleeing serpent, almost a direct quote from the Baal Cycle in Ugaritic. But it's clear what the Hebrew Bible is doing. It's almost like Jesus' words come to mind: you have heard it said that this deity did that, but I say to you, it's Yahweh who did it. So, circling back to Genesis 1 through 11 for a moment, I think that divine polemic against Babylonian culture includes a reaction to its polytheistic view of the divine. You see all these traditions playing out in the Hebrew Bible in different ways, but they're moving toward that monotheistic view.

Johnny Ova: Was that just a thing in ancient times, turning things monotheistic? I almost see a pattern where it's, I'm going to grab this belief and say, no, this is Yahweh doing it. I feel like I even see it a bit in the New Testament, where Hades is mentioned. Hades is a Greek concept, and yet Jesus interacts with it almost as if it's real. It's like he's relating to the audience: I know you have this idea of what Hades is, but I'm going to take those keys, walk right in there and set everybody free. Is that a common thing, where monotheism takes everything and pushes it into itself? No, this is the proof that this is the God who exists?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: I'm not sure. Here's what I can say. Certainly in Mesopotamia in the second millennium, every city has its own deity, sometimes more than one. By the time you move into the first millennium, you've moved, I wouldn't even say necessarily to monolatry, but you certainly have a single deity becoming far more prominent. In southern Mesopotamia, that's Marduk, the god of the Enuma Elish. In the north, the Assyrians have Ashur, their national deity. That doesn't mean other deities weren't worshiped. They were. But there seems to be a movable hierarchy where you see a single deity moving up. And as time goes by, you even see that process shift. There's a very violent text called Erra and Ishum, where Marduk, who was so powerful, has become like an old man, and the younger bucks are vying for that position one way or another. So I don't think there's any single voice or single trajectory in Mesopotamia, but there's movement there we can track that maybe sheds light, particularly in the Persian period, on what's going on in the worship of God in the Hebrew Bible.

Johnny Ova: Scholars talk about the exile in Babylon as a defining moment for Israel's identity and for the Hebrew Bible itself. How much of what we call the Old Testament was shaped by Israel sitting in the middle of Mesopotamian civilization? I feel like we could lean on a lot of Scriptures here. If I think about it logically, if you're a slave in a specific culture for a hundred years and God sets you free, it's not like everything you believe is now pure, holy, mighty and righteous because you're free. You take what you think is good and say, well, I'll just do this for Yahweh now instead of for these pagan gods.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: It's interesting. There's a lot of work in trauma studies in the field now. I won't pretend to be up on it, but I have friends who work a lot in trauma studies, and in the Hebrew Bible the exile is certainly an incredibly traumatic experience. Think about the book of Lamentations. It's a huge city lament. They've gone into exile, the streets are empty, nobody goes up to Jerusalem to worship anymore. It's a horrific time for them, and trauma does things to the human psyche. One thing you can see, even toward the beginning of the exile, is in the book of Ezekiel. The mindset in the ancient Near East and in the Hebrew Bible is that if you're winning, it's because your god is winning, or allowing you to win, or fighting for you. Very briefly, there's a famous set of Sumerian texts from the third millennium about a border conflict between two city-states, Umma and Lagash. Umma has the god Shara over it, and Lagash has Ningirsu, a mighty warrior. We have iconography showing the battle between the armies of Umma and Lagash and between their deities. On one side the god is winning, and on the other side that leads to his city winning. That kind of correspondence is very common.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: So in Ezekiel, that really wild part in chapter 1 with the wheels and the faces moving around is Yahweh's throne, his mobile throne, and he's leaving. When gods leave, bad things happen. The city or the country is left vulnerable. That's how they reconcile it. Why are we struggling? Why are we being dominated? Because God has left. This factors in even more in the book of Daniel. For anybody listening, before you read Daniel 9, read Leviticus 25 and 26 and then Jeremiah 25. If you read those three chapters, Daniel 9 will make all the sense in the world. Leviticus 25 says to let the land lie fallow every seventh year, and after seven sevens, 49 years, the 50th year is the year of Jubilee. In Jeremiah 25 you see them getting booted off the land, and the reason is that they didn't let the land rest, so God removes them. Leviticus 26 says repeatedly, if you don't obey my commands and heed my voice, I will punish you seven times more for your sins. So with all that in mind, the writer of Daniel looks from the perspective of Daniel in Babylon and says, I understood from the prophet Jeremiah that 70 years are supposed to come upon us.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: But then toward the end of the chapter, verses 24 to 27, you learn it's not going to be just 70 years. It's going to be 70 times seven, a direct callback to Leviticus 26. So even inside the text itself you have intertextuality, and they're trying to explain why they're still in the underdog position. Why are they still living in turmoil? Deuteronomy said they were supposed to be the head and not the tail. They were supposed to be winning. What's going on? In the collective mind of the people, I think the cultural understanding is, it's not God's fault. We've been sinful. We've been bad. God is just giving us what we deserve.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Bowen, this has been great. Do you have time for a few more questions? Awesome. Genesis 1. I want to get a little more specific. The seven-day structure, the cosmic waters, the darkness before creation. How do ancient Near Eastern texts clarify what the biblical author was actually trying to communicate, and does it change what we think the text is about?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: That'll work. There are several cosmogonic stories, stories about the creation of the world, in Mesopotamia and in other ancient Near Eastern cultures. I don't have expertise in Egypt, so I won't speak to that, but certainly in Mesopotamia we have these cosmogonies, and there are different ways the world is pictured in its pre-creation state. One is water. Another is that the land is super dry, and the god has to come and emit certain fluids from his body to create the Tigris and Euphrates. I'm not kidding. What we see in Mesopotamia is not creation ex nihilo. It's not the god speaking things into existence from nothing. He's working with existing material, and I suspect that's also what's happening in Genesis 1. Of course there's the debate about Genesis 1:1. Is it a dependent clause or an independent clause? Is it saying, when God began to create, this was the situation? I tend to go that direction. I think it matches up well with the beginning of Genesis 2. Either way, it looks like you have this mass of water in existence, the chaos God has to bring order to.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Just as an aside, move forward to the priestly version of the flood account. The priestly source is what we see in Genesis 1, and in Genesis 6 through 9 God is re-creating that primordial waters scenario. Think about how Genesis 1 does it. You have the raqia, the hammered-out thing that pulls water up above the sky, leaving a gap in between, then the land, and the waters below. In Genesis 7, the lattice, the sluice gates, whatever you want to call them, of the dome are opened, letting the water come back down, and the great fountains of the deep burst open, letting all that water come back up and re-creating the Genesis 1 situation. That's not my idea, by the way. Scholars have known it for a while. Joseph Blenkinsopp has a great book called Creation, Un-Creation, Re-Creation that looks at this pattern. If I were giving advice to people who hold the biblical text to be sacred, the Word of God, I'd say the thing to do here is recognize the genius of what the writers of Genesis were doing. I don't think anybody should lose their faith because the flood story depends on earlier Mesopotamian flood stories. I don't think that should end anybody's faith.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Instead there should be tremendous appreciation for the brilliance of what these scribes were doing in bringing their theological positions to bear in text form. Once I let go of fundamentalism and that overly literalistic view of the text, it opened the door for me to see all these interesting nuances and connections between texts. That's what I think is going on in Genesis 1, in a very subtle way. Sneaky might not be the right word. And let me say this, because something just popped into my head, and it's probably what you were asking. Very quickly, the Anzu myth is an older story about Ninurta, the major warrior god, who has to fight the Anzu bird. The Anzu bird holds the Tablet of Destinies, which, like Thanos, lets him control reality. Ninurta can't beat him directly. He has to beat him through trickery. The Enuma Elish uses the Anzu myth. It builds on the same basic structure. But Marduk, the god of the Enuma Elish, is so powerful that just at his approach, the god holding the Tablet of Destinies is defeated. He doesn't even have to fight him.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: What I think most scholars would see in Genesis 1 is that there isn't even a fight to be had. There's no approach. There's no battle. Yahweh just speaks and it's done. Tehom, the thing that would connect in the mind of the listener or reader to Tiamat, isn't an entity to be conquered. It's been completely demythologized, and God just speaks and acts on it. Genesis 1 also refers to the tanninim, the sea monsters. I can't remember, it might have been Blenkinsopp who said this, but they're like his playthings. In other chaos texts, texts about fighting to bring chaos under control, these are major things to be defeated. For Yahweh, it's another day at the office. Speak and it's done. So again, I keep saying it, but that's the genius of how they structured these things. The transcendence of the deity in Genesis 1 is so high relative to his depictions in other parts of the biblical text.

Johnny Ova: To your point about borrowed stories not needing to break a Christian's faith, it goes back to what I said before about an unhealthy view of Scripture. It's a big fundamental flaw. The Bible is the Word of God as if God is up there writing in his notebook, folding a paper airplane and throwing it down, and people catch it, and now we have word-for-word instructions for everything. And if one part seems incorrect, then the whole thing is incorrect, and that starts to wear at people's faith. That isn't even how the early church fathers handled Scripture. We've formulated this over time. Now, you work in the primary sources, the actual clay tablets, which is so cool. Has there been a discovery or a text in the cuneiform record that genuinely stopped you in your tracks because of what it revealed about the biblical or ancient world?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: That's a good question. I don't know if anything stopped me in my tracks, because of the timing of my deconversion. Well, no, OK, the Amarna letters. I take it all back. There was. And it's actually part of why I deconverted, because the person you just described, if one thing is wrong then it's all wrong, that was me, 100 percent. My first semester at Hopkins I was taking a bunch of classes, and one was the history of Syria-Palestine. In the 14th century you have all the great kings: the king of Egypt, the king of the Hittites, Mitanni. Sorry, one of my twins just decided to come up. Say hi real quick, and then back to bed. I love you.

Johnny Ova: That's all right. Hi, nice to see you.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: So in the 14th century you have all these great kings: Babylonia, Assyria, the Hittites, Mitanni, the pharaoh. They're all writing letters to each other. It's one of the earliest examples of international correspondence and diplomacy. They call each other my brother. They write things like, how come you didn't come see me when I was sick? even though it's three months' travel. They exchange gifts and complain about the gifts: you only sent me this much gold, and when I sent my gift I sent you ten times that. These are called the Amarna letters, the Amarna archive, because they were found at Amarna in Egypt. Those letters are one part of the archive. The other part is, I want to say, about 382 letters between the pharaoh and rulers in the land of Canaan, and we learn so much from them. Think about the timeframe, the 14th century. From a traditional view, which I don't think many scholars hold anymore, this is when Israel would have entered the land of Canaan and taken it. But here we have all these petty kings writing letters to the pharaoh, and there's nothing in there that alludes to Israel being in the land.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: The other thing that came from that archive, and from work that developed around it a little later, was the Philistines. For people who read the Hebrew Bible, the Philistines are the perennial enemy of Israel. I remember sitting in class one day learning that the Philistines didn't arrive until around the 12th century, and thinking, wait, that can't be, because here in Genesis we have the Philistines. This can't work. Because I had that very fundamentalist view of the text, I remember having conversations with Kyle McCarter, the professor of that class, and saying, is it possible it's just referring to this, and maybe that? He would very gently say, well, I suppose anything's possible, but probably not. It was so jarring to me that it set me down that path.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. The way I teach the Scriptures, the best descriptive phrase I've heard, from Pastor Shane Willard, and I use it all the time now, is an arc of redemption. Being honest in our conversation today, where Christians as a whole get it wrong with that kind of viewpoint is believing that everything in Scripture is a prescription, God prescribing you to do this. I think that's a fatal flaw: prescription versus description. When I read the Scriptures, I see people, stories, parables, metaphors and nuggets of wisdom, but through very flawed human beings. When David sets up his friend to die so he can sleep with his wife, God isn't saying, hey, I've got an idea, I know you like this guy's wife, kill your friend and sleep with his wife. This is a story about what somebody is going through. So the way we teach it is the Garden of Eden: you have this environment, and there's a fall. I can relate to almost every person in the Old Testament. And then there's an arc of redemption that culminates in Jesus. And Jesus isn't a magic genie in a bottle. He teaches a way of life that is contrary in many ways to carnality: loving your enemies, turning the other cheek. My belief is that if people actually lived by that, this world would be better.

Johnny Ova: But we use the name of God and the name of Christianity to do a lot of damage in this world. For far too long I've seen a lot more people hurt than not. Teaching it like this has really opened people's eyes. I'm on Long Island, New York, and I get crucified, metaphorically, for teaching the Bible like that. I asked a simple question in one of our foundations classes: you live your whole life off this collection of books, the Bible. Do you even know how it was put together? They had no idea. I said, so you've committed 20 years of your life to something and you have no idea how it's even organized. So we start breaking that down and opening their eyes to other books, and I think it's really started to bring a healthy relationship to God, the Bible, Jesus and Christianity as a whole.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: That's great.

Johnny Ova: My final question, Dr. Bowen. You've been so gracious with your time tonight, and I appreciate it. There's a version of this conversation that ends with people walking away feeling like the Bible has been reduced to one more ancient document, and I don't think that's the right conclusion. How does understanding the ancient Near Eastern context actually deepen, rather than diminish, the significance of what we call Scripture?

Dr. Joshua Bowen: At a very basic level, nobody can understand what a Hebrew word means unless they see it used elsewhere. So even something as basic as what the text actually says is really hard to get at without its ancient Near Eastern context. Hebrew is a Semitic language, and we have many, many more texts in Akkadian, another Semitic language, so a lot of lexicography can be done to explain what's going on. At that foundational level, even knowing what the texts say requires scholars to understand the ancient Near East. But more than that: I have a friend at Tyndale, Caleb Howard, who was my best friend going through Hopkins. He used to teach Genesis at Moody Bible Institute before he came to Hopkins. I asked him once, how did you do that? What was your class like? He said, I just had them read all the Mesopotamian flood stories in full, and then we read Genesis 6 through 9. My first thought was, oh my God, isn't that kind of dangerous? And he said, no. The Hebrew Bible is an ancient Near Eastern text. It's written by humans. However one thinks they were inspired, there's still the vessel God is using to write the text. It's no different from Paul saying, hey Timothy, when you come, make sure you bring that cloak and the parchments. There's no way Paul thought, this is going to be a great part of Scripture, they're going to read this on Sunday mornings.

Johnny Ova: I know.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: Bring the parchments and my cloak. He's a human being writing these things. So I think God using humans is no different from God using ancient genres. Say God decided to use Animal Farm to get a theological point across. Nobody would balk at that. Nobody would say, well, that's not a true historical story. That's not the point. Nobody has problems with Jesus telling parables. They didn't really happen. They're parables. So I think giving God the right to use humans as he sees fit to get his message across is a very smart way to approach the text. If I ever did go back to Christianity, that would absolutely be how I'd view the text: God is using flawed human beings to get his message across, and it's our job, through sensitivity to the Holy Spirit, through prayer, reading the text and really thinking on these things, to work out what the message is. But under that view, I don't think it results in God laying out a super easy step-by-step, like you said, throwing the paper airplane down with the laws. It results in reading the book of Judges and saying, man, this is some messed-up stuff. Surely this isn't what God wants us to be doing. What's the message? The message is there's no king, and everybody is doing what's right in their own eyes. That's what I would say about it.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Bowen, this has been an amazing conversation. Honestly, I think more conversations like this need to take place. I'm so appreciative of your time, and you spoke so clearly. It was a wonderful conversation, and I really believe our audience is going to be blessed by it.

Dr. Joshua Bowen: I appreciate you having me on. It was a lot of fun.