Why the Bible Makes More Sense in Its Original World with Dr. Richard Averbeck

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova. Today we have a very special guest, Dr. Richard Averbeck. Dr. Averbeck, thank you so much for your time and for joining us today.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: I'm looking forward to this.

Johnny Ova: For someone who has spent a career inside the Sumerian and Akkadian texts, what first convinced you that you can't fully understand the Old Testament without understanding the world it came out of?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: When I came to know the Lord in college, I came to realize after a couple of weeks that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek. So I assumed Christians learned Greek and Hebrew. I found a school that taught Greek and Hebrew and I went there. That's where I met my wife, and life went forward from there.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: As I kept working in the original text of the Bible, I was fully aware, and this is obvious to everybody, that this is an ancient world, a different cultural context, a different area of the world, the ancient Middle East, and that it would help me if I could understand that world better as a background for reading what the Bible says and how it says it. That was really the kickoff point for me wanting to get deeper and deeper into the biblical text, the original Hebrew and Greek, but also into the foundations of the world in which it was written. I've always been interested in foundations. That's just the way my mind works. I want to know what's behind this, why this is true, and so on. So as I went forward in time in my life, I went backward in history, and I ended up doing my PhD work in Sumerian, the oldest language and the oldest culture, and the origins of writing in the ancient Near East and the cuneiform world that developed out of all of that. That's really where it came from for me.

Johnny Ova: Wow. I think it's an often overlooked topic for Christians in general. Our audience is a lot of first-time Christians and pastors, because there's more of an intrigue into this topic. What gets overlooked is that words were different. We're reading a translation, so you need a translator to try to get the depth of these languages so that we can understand them. Their cultures were different. What was acceptable was different. Reading it through today's lens, in 2026 as we're recording this, the depth of what they're talking about often gets overlooked when we try to define things by today's vocabulary and understanding.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: Yes, very much. It's really too easy to just impose our culture on the Bible and therefore come at it from directions that it was never intended to deal with.

Johnny Ova: When you say the Bible makes more sense in its original world, what is the modern reader actually missing when they open Genesis or Exodus and read it like a twenty-first-century book?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: They're missing a lot of cultural things. For example, in Genesis 1, on day four God makes the great light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. It's interesting that in that cultural world, for most people the sun and the moon were deities. That was one of the things that had to be dealt with. So what the text does is deal with them as the big light and the little light. It doesn't even name them, because the names could well be interpreted as deities. There were a lot of possible misunderstandings among the people, because they had just come out of Egypt, and Ra was the sun god and the chief god of the pantheon. So what's happening is that the Lord is saying, no, there's one God. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and these other things are created things. They are not deities, and we need to keep that in mind as we read. That was a big issue for the ancient Israelites in their world context, whereas people today in our culture don't think of the sun and the moon as deities. So we can lose track of what might have been really important in that day compared to ours.

Johnny Ova: Correct me if I'm wrong. In those ancient times, I don't picture many ancient Israelites walking around as atheists. I picture them walking around with some type of belief that there may be more than one God, a polytheistic view. Is that accurate?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: Yes, that would be the normal cultural context in which they lived. The ancient Israelites were ancient Near Eastern people, so they're going to take on a lot of the cultural thoughts, just like we take on the cultural thoughts of our day.

Johnny Ova: Most people picture the biblical authors writing in a vacuum. What did the ancient Near East around Israel actually look like, and how aware were the biblical writers of the culture and the thought processes around them?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: One of the things we've found is that Sumerian began to be written as a language around 3000 BC. There were precursors to that. When we get down to 2000 BC, around Abraham's time, we come to a point where the writing system, the cuneiform wedges written on clay tablets, the tablets we dig up now and study, was taken up by Akkadian, the Semitic language of Mesopotamia, of Iraq. Akkadian became the lingua franca of the ancient Near East for about 1,500 years. It was the language of administration, economics, trade and all these things across the ancient Near East. The cuneiform culture spread a common cultural understanding of things across the ancient Near East, all the way down into Egypt and through Canaan. That was an important part of how the common cultural world developed, and we see that common cultural world reflected in the Hebrew Bible.

Johnny Ova: That's fascinating. I can't stress it enough. People have the mindset that the thoughts we have today are the thoughts everybody always had and always will have. Breaking that barrier and understanding that's not the case is very fascinating.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: One thing I should add is that the common issues of life have always been the same for everybody. We all have to eat, we all have to live with others. There are always political things going on, family things going on. So there's a common human thread in it as well, but culturally it's going to be talked about differently, and there are going to be different attitudes toward different things across cultures.

Johnny Ova: Let's go to Genesis for a second. People hear that Babylon had its own creation story, the Enuma Elish, long before the seventh century BC. Where does Genesis genuinely overlap with these accounts, and where does it break away completely?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: Maybe the best place to start is the beginning of the Enuma Elish, where it talks about a deep, dark, watery abyss and the various deities that were part of that world. In the earliest times there's a deep, dark, watery abyss. In Genesis 1, verse 2, it says the earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. You have this deep, dark, watery abyss again. Then progressively, the days of Genesis 1 eliminate those conditions of darkness. So we have a common cultural place to start a creation story. You couldn't talk to them about where the first molecules came from. They weren't into that. So God started in a place that would have made sense as the start of a creation story, in order to explain that he is the creator, the only creator. That's a similarity that's there in the text.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: However, in the Enuma Elish, in the following portion, before we even get to the creation of the earth and the cosmos, you have a theogony, a creation of the gods. That's how they had to talk about how things began: how the gods got born. The Bible is completely against that kind of background, with only one God. So you have the comparison with the watery abyss, but you also have the contrast with the creation of the gods, which comes next in the Enuma Elish.

Johnny Ova: Do you think the Bible leaves that out because of its belief, or is it something they've borrowed? Why is it out of the Hebrew Bible, in your opinion?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: No theogony. Why is that out of the Bible? Because it's got only one God. It's the monotheism. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and what gets unpacked in that chapter is the things of the heavens and the earth. It's not about any other gods. In fact, it's against the notion that various things they could make idols of would be gods. It's polemically against that in a way that would have made sense to the ancient Israelites.

Johnny Ova: You've pointed out a pretty interesting difference. In the Babylonian story, creation comes out of conflict and cosmic battle. In Genesis there's no battle at all. Why does that single difference matter so much?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: It matters because some scholars have tried to find this cosmic battle in Genesis 1, verse 2. The darkness over the surface of the deep is some kind of evil darkness, they say. The problem is that God does not eliminate night. He doesn't eliminate darkness as a physical phenomenon. He alternates it with light, which eliminates the total darkness progressively through the chapter. In the biblical world there is a progress of revelation that tells us there is only this one God, and he's the one who made the light. That becomes the beginning of the story of creation. In the Enuma Elish, before the creation happens, you have to have this great cosmic battle of the gods.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: One of the things I've written on is this issue of the cosmic battle. There doesn't appear to be any battle going on in Genesis 1, and many scholars would agree with that. But I think there's been a transformation of that motif, so that in the creation and fall context, Genesis 3 is the cosmic battle. The serpent attacks the image of God, which means he's attacking God. The result is the engagement of the cosmic battle between God and the great evil one. That gets talked about in many places in the Old Testament, with Leviathan the evil serpent and so on, and God is doing battle against that great evil one. The territory under dispute in the cosmic battle is us, because we're the image and likeness of God. If you damage his statue, you end up attacking him.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: There's all sorts of parallel material for this in the statues of kings and gods. One of the things that shows up is curses on anyone who damages the statue. That's a common motif from very early in the ancient Near East on down. So there are lots of parallels that say the cosmic battle has been moved from creation to corruption. And that's where the battle is, and that's the battle in which we live. That's why Ephesians 6 talks about needing to put on the armor, and the battle in the heavenlies. It shows up heavily in Revelation 12 as well, where we read about the serpent, the one who deceived the whole world. So there's a lot of background for a cosmic battle, but God doesn't have to fight something in order to create the world. The battle is engaged when there is an attack on him through an attack on his image.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting. Before we get into the flood, it seems the Bible starts out very monotheistic. Following the thought process of these ancient Hebrews, it seems they get into a lot of trouble when they move from monotheism to monolatry and even polytheism. It's almost like a continual course correction from God: no, I am the one, I am the only true God that exists. Stop worshiping these gods that mean nothing and aren't there. Is that accurate?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: That's really true. Sometimes he doesn't even fight the idea of other gods. He just says, this is the only God for you, me. But there are other places where it says there are no other gods. So they keep pushing back, and he keeps pushing back against them on this whole thing, because there was a tendency toward idolatry and toward seeing different gods in charge of different things. If you wanted help in this area, you'd go to this god. If you wanted help in another area, you'd go to another god. That was a very common way of thinking, and they could easily be influenced in that direction.

Johnny Ova: Man, influence. That could preach. Our surrounding influences can really pull us off course.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: We do it all the time. We just don't know it.

Johnny Ova: Very true. We see the same pattern with the flood. The ancient world had its own flood traditions. What is Genesis doing differently with that material, and what is it telling its first audience that the other stories never could?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: This is a really interesting discussion, because there are lots of parallels between the biblical flood story and, for example, Gilgamesh Tablet 11. The Gilgamesh epic, twelve tablets, was well known across the ancient Near East. We have copies of it in all sorts of places, even in Israel, on cuneiform tablets. So we know it was a widespread story, and they would have known about the flood as a historical reality. When the writer of the primeval narratives engaged with that discussion, he picked up on a lot of the same things, because a flood is a flood. There's going to be a lot of commonality, but also a lot of differences. He works it into an understanding of why the flood came, why it stopped and what its purpose was. All of this comes into play in writing the truth about what God did when he brought the flood and why he did it. It really comes back to the same thing: the fallenness of humanity and the corruption and violence that developed before the flood.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: God came to a point where he said, we need to start over, and he started over. Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord, so he was preserved through it with his family. Animals were preserved. But God laid a different foundation after the flood. It's interesting that in Mesopotamian accounts like the Sumerian King List, we have a pre-flood, a flood and a post-flood history. That's the proto-historical background of the world. In Genesis 12 we start with the patriarchs, which is the beginning of the history of the Jewish people. But they pushed that history back into the primeval narratives before Abraham in order to anchor ancient Israel in world history. That's really how this was done.

Johnny Ova: Wow. So much of this lives in the actual Hebrew. What are some places where the original language carries a meaning that doesn't survive its English translation when it comes to this?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: There are a lot of different arguments about how the flood story in the Bible works. Scholars often argue there are two different flood stories that have been combined. What really happened is that there was a background story the Israelites would have believed, and God is teaching them how this really happened, why it happened and where it goes from there. Some of the similarities, like the different birds sent out to find out whether the land had dried up, are a common motif. Even sailors know you don't see birds unless you're close to land. So that motif comes across.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: But there are other things. God brought the rain, it rained for a period of time, and then God sent the wind to cause the waters to recede. In the biblical story there's the period when the waters come, then God sends this wind, and then there's the period of the receding of the waters. Some people try to argue that this means the Bible has contradictory views of the length of the flood. It doesn't. It just has different periods during the flood. That's a helpful thing to learn about what's going on in the Hebrew text.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: There are other things, like the coming of the flood and the end of the flood, which again have similarities to the Mesopotamian flood stories. God is pleased when the sacrifices are given, but the result is not just the stopping of the flood. He establishes another covenant that takes them forward beyond the flood, and God promises he's not going to send another flood. Instead of sending a flood again, he develops a redemptive program, and that leads into the time of Abraham. He bases that program on his work through Abraham, and through him all the nations of the earth will find blessing. That's a really important part of the creation, flood and post-flood time. God develops his redemptive program out of reestablishing the people after the flood.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting. You have also argued that the ancient writers thought with the heart and spoke of the sun rising, and that these were not just figures of speech to them. How does recovering what they actually thought change the way we read the text? I'm asking because this is a passion of mine. To me this is a lot of the journey of understanding the Bible. How did the writers think? What were they experiencing? What was their intention when they were writing this or living it out?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: What's interesting is that the creation story is written from the perspective of the naked eye. Somebody could see this. On day one there's light, and God says, I made it. On day two there's the atmosphere, dividing waters from waters, and you could see that, and God says, I made it. On day three the dry land comes up out of the water. There's a whole progression that builds up to show us the nature of the world, a world you could just observe with the naked eye. They could talk about the sun rising, and even today people talk about the sun rising. We know it's not really rising or setting, but that's what it looks like, and we still talk about it that way. That doesn't mean they believed the sun rose. They just knew it came around again.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: There's a lot of misunderstanding imposed on the text by people who criticize what it says, but it often talks from this very human world. We all live in a world with three levels to it: what's above us, what's below us, and where we live in between. That's how the story is told, to help them understand how this came together and how it fits together. It's not just a cosmogony, a creation of the cosmos, but a cosmology, how the cosmos works. God made something that works.

Johnny Ova: That's a great point. Even today we don't talk with a one hundred percent literal dialect about everything. We exaggerate, we use metaphors. Why that's so hard for some to grasp, that the biblical writers wrote and spoke and lived that way too, is interesting. When you read Genesis 1 against that ancient backdrop, I know you've described a three-tiered cosmos and a literary structure to the days. Can you walk us through what the original audience would have seen in that opening chapter?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: From studies of ancient cosmic geography, looking at texts that talk about how the world fits together, we know they basically had three tiers. Sometimes it would be six, but it was multiples. It's the common human experience, and it shows up in these ancient texts: above, below and where we live in between. I think that's very important. What I think has happened in Genesis 1 is that the first three days give us the above, the below and the in between, and the second set of three days fills that in. What's above is the sun, the moon and the stars, on day four, to shed light. Day five is what's in the waters and in the sky. Day six is what's on the land, on the earth, the microcosm of the world in which we live.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: So we get two sets of three days, and they deal with these three levels of the cosmos. This is not new. The parallels between days one through three and four through six have been seen for a long time. It's done in terms of naked eye observation so that people could see it. What science has done is increase our powers of observation, with the microscope, the telescope, chemistry and all sorts of things that help us see at a different level, not just the level of the naked eye. I think that's an important discussion today among people who struggle with the relationship between the Bible and science.

Johnny Ova: There's almost a fear among a lot of Christians that bringing in ancient context or science somehow weakens the Bible or makes it more of a myth. Why do you believe the opposite is true, that the context makes the case for Scripture stronger?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: I think it's because of how consistent and coherent it is with how the world really works. We can experience that, and that can be really helpful to us. When it comes right down to it, the question is, do you know the Lord? God is giving us revelation about who we are, how we got here, what the world is like and what that means for us. He's given us this revelation that engages with all the things we experience in the world and gives us what we call a metanarrative, the narrative that explains all the other narratives people live. The metanarrative of the Bible explains my story, how I experience life as a fallen person in a fallen world among other fallen people, in the groaning of the world that Romans 8 refers to, and how we groan within it. It's a big story that really does explain our stories.

Johnny Ova: You've also spent years in the law and the world of Sinai. How does seeing the legal and covenant practices of the surrounding nations sharpen what God was doing with Israel?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: I wrote a book in 2022 on the Old Testament law for the life of the church. One of the real issues is that when people talk about the law for the church, they often haven't studied the law itself: how it was put together and what it did in ancient Israel. One of my main concerns early in the book was to understand the law first, and then look forward to the New Testament from there. Then you can go to the New Testament and see what it says about the law from the perspective of the foundations in the Old Testament. You can go back and forth, and it really helps you understand that the law is what Jesus says it is. It's suspended on the two great commandments, love God and love your neighbor, in Matthew 22 and parallel passages.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: That's what the law was about from the start. Jesus said so. People who don't see the law that way are, by their very nature, misunderstanding it. They're not seeing that it was intended to help ancient Israel live in relationship with God and one another in the ancient Near Eastern world. Their context was different, but the basic issues have always been the same for everybody. Abraham was the father of a family, and the covenant with Abraham was given to a family. When we come to Moses in Exodus, that family has grown into a nation, so now it needs the kind of regulations that will help them live well as a nation devoted to God and one another. That's what the law does. It's about how to practice God's presence among us and live well with one another. That's really the whole point, and it comes through in the New Testament, which uses the law from the Old Testament to tell us how to live the Christian life.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: So we have this Old Testament law. Now what do we do with it? That became one of the first big problems in the church, with the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. They assumed the church was Jewish, because it started Jewish, and when Gentiles started coming in, they had to work out how to handle this. Acts 15 was one place, but it keeps showing up as an issue. How do we handle the law? We're not under the law, the law cannot condemn us, and it's not the power by which we live. That's the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit uses the law he inspired for ancient Israel and brings it to bear on us in ways that correspond to the nature of our covenant. Our covenant is different. It's with people throughout the world, not just one nation. Jesus has already come. The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost. These are shifts that take place going from the old covenant to the new covenant. As Jeremiah 31 says, in the new covenant the law is written on the heart. The law is not left behind. The question is how it comes through, and we need to observe that as we read Old and New Testament together.

Johnny Ova: I'm going to link that book in the description on YouTube, Apple and Spotify, so if anybody wants to check it out, click the link below. Just a few more for Dr. Averbeck today, and again, I very much appreciate this time. This conversation is fascinating. For the pastor or everyday believer who will never learn Hebrew or read a cuneiform tablet, what is the most important shift in mindset they can make when they open the Old Testament?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: I think just be aware that yes, this Bible is written for us, but originally it was written to these ancient people. Everybody knows that if you go to a different culture today, there's a different context and different ways people will understand things. Try telling our jokes in China. It just doesn't work. I've found that out. So you have to learn the culture to understand a lot of what goes on. Not everything, but a lot is culturally dependent, and that's true in the Bible too. That's just common sense. I don't see this as removing the Bible from the common person who doesn't know Hebrew or cuneiform. I find people fascinated by it. I've done tours of museums and countries, and the fascination is a natural thing, because it is different. That's okay. You expect it to be different. It doesn't take the Bible out of the hands of the English Bible reader. It just helps them be aware of this, and they can learn as they go. There are a lot of good tools for that today, study Bibles and all sorts of things that can really help us.

Johnny Ova: I need you to play a game with me before we go. A skeptic sits across from you and says, the Bible is just borrowed Mesopotamian mythology. How would you answer that, based on everything you've studied?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: That really started at the beginning of the twentieth century, around 1900, with Friedrich Delitzsch's Babel and Bible lectures in Germany. That was all wrong from the beginning. These cultures are very different. What the Bible says is very different from the ancient Near East, but it's within an ancient Near Eastern context. We always have to talk about how we compare the Bible to the ancient Near East and how we contrast the Bible with the ancient Near East. The issue is methodology, how you do this. We have lots written now about how they're similar and how they're different. And there have been very important translation projects that make this material available to people who can only read English, or German or French. So there's a lot of material available if you want to look into it, and it gets referred to in good resources.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: But there are still those who want to come at the Bible as just borrowing. No, there was a common cultural foundation across the ancient Near East, largely because Akkadian was the lingua franca and cuneiform spread across the region. But there's a lot of difference between cultures in the ancient Near East too, and you need to understand that. Anybody who reads the texts honestly will see there are similarities and there are contrasts, and sometimes they just switch things, like this cosmic battle. I think it's not in Genesis 1, it's in Genesis 3. The ancient Israelites would have seen that right from the beginning, because they knew the story of the evil serpent that would seek to destroy humanity and attack God. They would have seen right away that this is the cosmic battle being engaged in Genesis 3.

Johnny Ova: Last one for you today, and thank you for being so gracious with your time. After a lifetime in these texts, what is the one thing the ancient world taught you about the Bible that you wish every Christian could see for themselves?

Dr. Richard Averbeck: There are quite a number of them. One is this cosmic battle we've been talking about. But going back to the book I wrote on the law for the church, it has really helped me understand a problem that's been there since the beginning of the church: what do we do with the Old Testament law in the church? It has opened up a whole world of understanding how God does his work, how he reveals himself, and how it runs through the Bible. There are connections back and forth that can really open your eyes to what we're called to be.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: For example, Leviticus 19:18: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That comes out of the holiness code. The chapter begins with "be holy, for I am holy," God says, and it works through different regulations and comes to the conclusion, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. It's so interesting that in 1 Peter 1, Peter cites "be holy, for I am holy" from Leviticus 19, and as he goes down the passage he comes to the point: now that your souls have been purified, love one another fervently from the heart. It's the same pattern as Leviticus 19. You start with be holy for I am holy, and you end up with love one another. Really holiness is about how well you love. That has really enlightened me about what it looks like to be holy.

Johnny Ova: Amazing. Dr. Richard Averbeck, thank you so much. This has been awesome. I really appreciate your time today. So enlightening, so full of wisdom. Thank you so much.

Dr. Richard Averbeck: I've enjoyed this very much with you.