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Genesis: Where It All Went Wrong, Transcript

T&MP Genesis: Where It All Went Wrong Mindshift

  1. Genesis: Where It All Went Wrong | Secular Bible Study (Episode 1) - MindShift

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEepnIHilaA

Transcript:

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T&MP Genesis: Where It All Went Wrong Mindshift

Genesis: Where It All Went Wrong | Secular Bible Study (Episode 1) - MindShift

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEepnIHilaA

Transcript:

Welcome to MindShift. I'm Brandon, and today is episode one of a brand new series, an Unholy Bible Study. Now, it's not meant to be blasphemous or sacrilegious in nature, but it is meant to look at each of the 66 books of the Protestant canon from an unbiased and non-faith-based perspective. We will focus on one book per episode, and each episode will be on Thursday at 9 am Central Time. To help keep us on track during each episode, we'll be going through these 10 points. Overall, my desire throughout the course of this is to give

you information that is historically accurate, unbiased, and fair, and to help you learn your Bible better, whether you are doubting or just want to firm up your understanding of what you are arguing for or against. I hope that this provides a little bit of clarification for you. Now, here's the caveat: we could spend a ton of time, go way deeper, talk about more contradictions, give more historical perspective, and analyze this to death. That is not the goal of this. Maybe in the future, we'll

pick a book and go very deep, verse by verse. But for now, I want to give you the 10 points we talked about earlier and just keep it a bit higher level. I think this will aid us in conversation in our future videos, where we talk about different themes or points of doctrine, or where the Christian is getting this concept, etc. Just have a really good layout, a really good foundation of what this Bible is and how the books within it add up. So let's start with point one here, which is book overview. Now, there's

really two ways to separate Genesis. The first 11 chapters are this primeval history, the history of people on a larger scale, and then starting from chapters 12 through the end of the book, we get a patriarchal history focused on individual peoples and families. So first, the primeval history. These first 11 chapters in the first book of the Bible set the stage. It is so foundational for what the believer believes and what the Christian doctrine becomes. We get the creation story, however literal or figurative you want

to take that story, introducing the fall, the introduction of sin, the banning from the garden, etc. We move into Cain and Abel, showing the further pervasiveness of sin generationally speaking, all the way down through the proliferation of the wickedness of man's nature with God's need to flood the entire Earth and start over again. This happens so quickly; people don't understand. Like, here's our whole Bible, and bam, we're starting over right here. So the story of Noah and his ark is God's justice and wrath but also

mercy in saving Noah and one family to start over again. Yet the same thing happens all over again, and we get man trying to reach past heaven in the Tower of Babel to become God, to become greater than God, to meet God, however you interpret that story. God is so threatened by this that he confuses their languages. This is an excellent point to understand that this book is an explanation of natural phenomena. The people in the ancient world simply did not know how to explain how we got all of these languages. Let's fill

that gap with God, and we make up a story about man's own sinfulness and wickedness, which is par for the course in all of these stories that brought about the confusion and separation of man. That's it; that's the first section of Genesis. So much happens here, and what I think is fascinating, what we're going to get into a little bit here as we go through Genesis, is that there are two huge reactions to this. We have the literal interpretation, which people are going to classify as the fundamentalist

view, that Earth was really created in six days and everything in it, that each of these people existed, there was an actual Adam and Eve, that there is no evolution, that this is where it all started. Then there's the progressive camp, and there are so many iterations in between, so I'm painting with a broad brush. But this progressive group is going to say that obviously, this is how a narration is told. This is a story just explaining God's divinity, his ability to create, him setting things in motion that evolution would then

carry out, etc. There's so much infighting here, but what's amazing is that however you want to justify these different groups, they have to agree on certain things. They have to agree on this God, on this concept of sin that is introduced to the world, on some version of original sin that means we yet today are still in need of a savior. What I'm going to show here in the second part as we get into the patriarchs is that they have to believe at some point these individuals were true because it becomes the lineage down to David, the

lineage down to Jesus. So at what point do you get to pick and choose what is literal and what is metaphorical? Because there's just as much reason to say that Abraham is a metaphorical figure pointing to God's ability to befriend man and create a covenant with him as it is to say that he was a literal person who really existed by that name within that family and that those miracles really happened to him. Why not then apply that to Adam? Why is Adam a figurehead to represent man's beginning, and Abraham is meant to be so literal?

It's just absolutely insane to me, the cherry-picking that has to go on throughout the course of the Old Testament, and we're going to see that book by book by book. So getting into the patriarchal history within Genesis 12 through the end of the book, it's a few generations here. We start with Abraham, and obviously, this is the birth of God's covenant with man. We see that Abraham is justified by his faith and then enters into the specific literal contract with God for him and all of his descendants until that contract is rearranged, broken,

or renewed through Jesus, however you want to view what happens in the gospel narratives. From Abraham, we go down to Isaac and Jacob. An important part here is Jacob getting his name changed after wrestling with God to Israel, thus signifying the origin of the nation of Israel. We end with the story of Joseph, who becomes a prominent figure in Egypt and is supposed to show God's forgiveness, mercy, and reconciliation to the sinful nature of a family torn apart. So those are our two narratives for Genesis, and they introduce a

fundamental theological and thematic thread that will course through the entire rest of the Bible's narrative: creation and Creator, human disobedience and sin, covenant with God, faith and obedience, and the chosen people and the blessing of the nation of Israel. So that was our short overview of the Book of Genesis. I'm not sure if that was as short as I needed it to be to get through this in a timely fashion, so let's quickly move on to point two: authorship and date. Genesis, and really the Pentateuch, the first five books

of the Bible or the Torah, are all going to be relatively the same in this regard. So I'm going to be more detailed here, and then I'll be a little bit more brief in the following four books as we get into them. The traditional Jewish and Christian perspective originally is that Moses wrote these books, which is problematic for many reasons. One, because in some of these first five books, we hear about the death of Moses from the author, which you can see the issue there. But even more so, speaking specifically about the book of Genesis, we are writing

about things that only God can know. So a lot of progressive Christians that are trying to hold on to some idea of these being written down by witnesses and accounts and a collaboration of information material from where? The only place that, if Moses is our author here, he could have gotten the information is divine revelation, which is a problem for many Christian sects that don't want to hand that much over to the spiritual. Many fundamentalists have no problem with this: God met with Moses on a mountaintop, told him about everything, he

wrote it all down, great, maybe even foretold his own death, not a problem. The scholarly debate, though, is wide, and there are many iterations, but I'm going to share with you the most popular scholastic theory, which happens to be the documentary hypothesis, which is just to say it is a compilation of sources, specifically four sources: J, the Yahweh source, based on the use of Yahweh or more commonly Lord, is going to be our oldest source; then the Elohist source, where we use the word Elohim for God; then P, the Priestly source, where we get the

Priestly concerns about ritual and divine understanding; and then our D source, which just reflects the themes found in that fifth book of the Pentateuch. So according to the documentary hypothesis, these sources were put together and crafted and edited and organized over a significant amount of time, with the main process of compilation happening during the 6th century BCE during the Babylonian exile or shortly thereafter. So this is probably how we got Genesis. Again, there are other belief systems, even by scholars, who say, well, it could have been

this, or what about the introduction from this people group here? It didn't really get totally compiled until later here, but this is the one that is most agreed upon at this time. On to point three, which is historical background. Now, this one is a bit hard with a book like Genesis because we're just going to kind of leave the literal translation behind at this point and focus on the mythology of it. Genesis has theological implications that are more important than being consistent with time and place, not to mention that combining and

compiling that we just mentioned from the previous section has a lot to do with why there are different accounts that don't necessarily match up. We'll get into this more in our future point about contradictions, but we're going to have messy timelines and incorrect places here. Now, there are some parts that are representative of real places and real people groups. Let's start with ancient Mesopotamia. Genesis draws on cultural and literary traditions that were very common in the ancient Near East, specifically that of

Sumer and Babylonia, where we see the borrowing, if not straight-up stealing, of things like creation myths, flood myths, genealogies, etc. By incorporating elements of this cultural milieu of the time, Genesis provides, though a theological reinterpretation, still a reinterpretation or interpretation of what was common and happening in ancient Mesopotamia around this time period. For example, the flood myth found in Genesis is a direct copy of what happens in the Epic of Gilgamesh and is a perfect example of Genesis taking something that

was just an epic myth. It's the same story: you have an individual who is chosen to save humanity from a great flood, who also needs to take the animals, and even the kinds of birds that are sent out to see if there's dry land, etc. Go read the Epic of Gilgamesh, which we know predates Genesis. Genesis takes it and adds in the theological and moral message gene of God's judgment and wrath and mercy, etc. This is what happens with so much of the Jewish tradition in scriptures: they are just taking well-known myths that they have

incorporated into their own culture and civilization and are adding on their morality. Still talking about historical background, we can learn something about the time and place when we look at just the patriarchal practice. This patriarchal age is an era that constitutes somewhere in the second millennium BCE and is associated with pastoral tribal communities and nomadic lifestyles. This was common practice and custom and social structure at the time. The focus on things like lineage and kinship ties and the inheritance of the

firstborn male reflects the social and legal norms that were prevalent in the ancient Near East during this time frame. For that, we can still see that historical background and context come through. The last iteration I would show you of this is the Canaanite context. We can learn about Canaanite society, which was a real society that lived in Canaan before it was taken over, before the promised land that would be handed to God's people. We see interactions between the patriarchs and the Canaanites that shed

light on the social practices, norms, and customs of those people. An excellent example of this is when Abraham meets with the priest-king of Salem, Melchizedek. This is a biblical story that represents a meeting with an individual who is representative of a Canaanite tribe, and we see their customs and practices as described within that interaction. I'd like to point out here that none of this is to point to the validity of the Bible as being any kind of divine truth material. It is simply to say that, of course, the writers who

are writing of this time and about these people, in addition to their exaggerated mythologies, still were able to document some historical facts. Let's move on to point four. So four is literary analysis, which is something that's near and dear to my heart. If you know, my first channel was Brandon's Bookshelf. That's where I started talking every once in a while about a book that had something atheistic in nature and slowly led to this channel being formed. So I do love to talk about these different concepts, and for literary analysis, we're

going to focus on four different things: literary genres, narrative structure, themes and motifs, and literary technique. For genres, we really see three things here: myth and legend, genealogy, and historic narrative. Then for narrative structure, we have, of course, the two camps we already mentioned: primeval and patriarchal. But the narrative structure is really actually well done in Genesis. It's laid out very simply, either by theme, by event, or by person. Even though it's conflicting and even though it gets some things wrong, it goes

through this lineage that is meant to show unity. You can tie everything back together; you can walk straight up the genealogy, or you can look at the succession of events that one led to another that led to another. Genesis is very fast-moving. Again, the amount of time that it's actually supposed to cover, if you were able to take it literally, is pretty impressive to squeeze it in and pack it in with so much meaning, tying these events that used to be just epic in nature to theological and meaningful in a divine

sense. As for themes and motifs, I mean, good Lord, you could draw a billion things out. This reminds me of Jordan Peterson. Have you ever heard Jordan Peterson talk about just Cain and Abel? Like him, hate him, or love him, the amount of meaning that he's able to extrapolate. I've read his book Maps of Meaning back from 1995, and this is what he does. He takes these Old Testament stories, these archetypical characters and plot lines, and he just pulls them apart for everything they're worth. It's actually pretty impressive, and it's

what you can do with a story that is told so simply with these higher levels of theme and motif. Think about how many countless stories you know are further extrapolations of these themes that are believed to be first found in Genesis but are not. Again, the Sumerian myths that predate all of this, the gods that predate Yahweh, or when Yahweh was a different god, El, who was a son of a different god and who was married, etc. The pantheon of gods that Yahweh once existed in before being plucked by Jewish tradition to become the creator

monotheistic god that he is to us today is just amazing when you really understand the scope of it. I'm not saying that Genesis is the birth of these things, but Genesis is indeed carrying on with these particular themes: divine order, wrath, judgment, forgiveness, faith, obedience, family dynamics, divine intervention, packed with meaning. One of the books that is this way most of the entire collection of 66. Then fourth was literary techniques, and we see really three techniques at play. Repetition is first. The

easiest example I'll give you of this is the repetition told throughout the creation myth. God did X, and it was good. God did X, and it was good. We see this all the way through. He could have just created everything and then said it was good. He could have created the first thing and said it was good, and then it would be assumed for the rest. But Genesis uses, and a lot of the Bible writers use, this technique of repetition to create importance, to amass the influence. Second would be parallelism. This is kind of a sub-technique of

repetition, where you are still repeating but you are doing so in new ways. This is very common in Hebrew poetry and also in Genesis. Last would be chiasmic structure or chiastic structure. I've heard it pronounced both ways. This is a mirroring or an inverting of the central concept. We see it in the flood story in Genesis 9:18-29. This is a very common way of really getting you to see the middle part. Okay, point five was supposed to be historical accuracy, which for some reason in my head I thought would be different than historical

context, which was point three. I think I ended up, through talking about the historical context of Genesis, also covering the historical accuracy. So I think we're going to go down to nine points, and those two will be grouped together in future videos. So let's move right on through to point six. Six is going to be main themes, which we covered a little bit since theme and motif are such a literary element in Genesis, but I want to dive in a little bit deeper. Again, it's so packed with meaning, and if you wanted to, I think you could pick out

almost any theme that applies to human nature, and I think that's where you have to give Genesis some credit. You want to focus on jealousy and betrayal? No problem. Let's look at Cain and Abel. You want to talk about forgiveness and try to make a story there? Look at how Joseph treats his family when they come to him in need after the betrayal that he went through. He still blesses them because of his status in Egypt. Again, you can go wherever you want, but I think the main themes of Genesis are this: one, the nature of good and evil. If you look at

Genesis as more of a mythology, as more as an explanation of human nature, this nature of good and evil, this yin and yang, this dichotomy within us, this is ever-present. This is something all generations, all religions, all cultures have always had to deal with. The very fact that the tree that is in the Garden of Eden that is not to be eaten is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil shows the significance of this theme within this story. Now, it's so crazy for so many reasons because we're getting that evil came into the world because

man, who didn't yet know about evil, committed an evil by eating the fruit that introduces the idea of evil to the individual. It's so messed up and incoherent. Just because it has these themes doesn't mean that it did so well or coherently or with any amount of consistency. When you bring into effect that involved in this story is a creator god who is passing judgment on his creation for that morality, for that display of good and evil, you get the problematic issues that I've shared in so many videos with the injustice and

immorality of that god to do so. This is again where the Bible takes a leap from a common theme that man deals with and adds that theology into it. Now we're talking about the nature of good and evil passed down generationally, generational sin, original sin, and other concepts that take this morality to another level of punishment and justice. A second main theme that I would point out from the Genesis account would be that of righteousness. If we have good and evil in the world and we have a god that is supposedly perfect and

benevolent, then righteousness needs to exist as a major concept, and we need to be able to define that god as being righteous. Why is he righteous? Why do we consider him righteous? From what properties do we determine that righteousness? If God is righteousness and we are fallen from God because of our nature for good and evil, then how do we become righteous? Which again is what they say the Old Testament is setting up for the New Testament, for Jesus to be able to justify us, or in other words, to make us righteous before God again, to

reconnect the bridge that was separated here in the Old Testament with the fall of man. From a historical perspective, I think it's wonderful to be able to look at the Bible in this unbiased, non-faith-filled lens and see it for what it is in the ways that it's been, yes, manipulated and rewritten. I mean, the New Testament is not like it was part of the plan. It's not like the screenwriter sat down and said, let's do Genesis so we can do this. Genesis was fine in and of itself. It did what it needed to do for the people at the time.

It incorporated their mythology and their traditions and imposed their theology into their people group, and it was fine. It just wasn't fine for the concept of what would later get grouped together with it in the Old Testament that would need to be established with something else happening, prophecies fulfilled, saviors coming, reconnection, etc., that then the New Testament writers decided to tie things back to, and in many ways, very unethically. But it is still amazing to look at the cohesive structure of these 66 books, no

matter how man-made or designed it had to become to do so. A third theme I might point out here, and we won't spend as much time talking about, would be of the divine, the divine intervention, the divine sense of justice, divine guidance from God. We see God really in his divine nature acting out here in Genesis. We see him physically walking with Adam in the garden pre-fall. We see him physically talking with Abraham. This first book of the mythology of God shows a very different God than the invisible best friend we're supposed to have faith in

in later understandings. This is a completely corporeal god with hands and feet, with a voice that speaks, with still divine properties, but who leaves actual physical footsteps as he's traveling to and fro. So reconciling that divinity as it interacts with the non-divine, with man, with creation, is a large part of the Genesis accounting. So many themes, again, you could pull out, but I think that those three are pretty well represented and also just showing the, again, meaning that is packed into this first book of the Bible and all that you can do with

it. So let's move on to seven contradictions and errors, and it is going to be very hard for me not to make an hour-long video right now pointing out verse by verse, issue by issue, every single contradiction that we have, let alone the errors. The errors come in more so if you're taking this literally. It's hard to poke errors into something that is supposed to be figurative or poetic or used as an analogy or metaphor, etc., which is why I think progressive Christianity has latched on so hard to that. But again, we get the issues of when

should it be metaphor, when should it be analogy, and when should it be literal. But I digress. Let's get into some of the more foundational things we can say about contradictions and errors. Let's just start with contradictory accounts, and we'll use two examples for this: we'll use the order of creation and we'll use the genealogies. A very simple example of the order of creation is just looking at Genesis 1. We'll only use one of the many issues here, which is that here we have an order where it goes plants and then people, but in Genesis 2

we get people and then plants. This is like one very small thing, but you can't have it both ways. Now, I understand as a non-believer who doesn't need this to be exactly true that we were combining different narrative accounts, and thus we got these two iterations, and they were put in there to represent what had been told in the mythology of this people group. So I think that it can be incorrect to say that Genesis was written to literally be believed line by line for the individual. Now, I think it's given an accounting, but that is a

problem if you're trying to take this as some kind of divine truth. If we're saying that God in any way inspired this text and in any way that this text is real and that God created everything, then he can't have done it in both of these fashions. We could talk about how certain things got created that couldn't have existed without what would come after them. I mean, it wasn't until the fourth day that God created the stars. Without stars, we don't get any of the elements we need to be able to create the other things that happen the first

few days. Where was light coming from without stars, and why on day four did he create the sun, the moon, and the stars? The sun is a star. It's just that the people writing back then didn't know that. We know better now because of science that even if you're taking that somehow allegorically or in an analogy or a metaphor, it makes absolutely no sense. It's something that a divine god who actually created these things would not have gotten incorrect. Again, I could literally spend maybe 10 hours pointing out everything that's wrong with Genesis.

So whatever examples are coming to my head are the ones you're getting, but just know that there are examples upon examples upon examples upon examples of how we can absolutely know that Genesis fundamentally, because of its errors and contradictions, does not work. My second point was going to be just on genealogies, and it's just simple: the genealogies simply don't match up. Throughout Genesis alone, we have multiple iterations of genealogies that are supposed to be of the shared same line that don't include the same people.

That doesn't work. We also see issues with this in the New Testament when we get to where Jesus's genealogy came from. The Bible just has a real problem keeping track of the family tree, which makes sense when man's doing it. It doesn't make sense when a divine being is saying this. Also, we can see purposeful manipulation in genealogies in both the Old Testament and New Testament to get them to arrive at certain numbers of individuals or generations between Adam and David or between David and Jesus, etc., which is why they oftentimes don't match

up with some other accounting given that didn't try to manipulate the data. Point two is going to be chronological and historical details. Genesis contains chronological details such as age and time that simply are almost impossible, if not impossible, to reconcile. Other historical details, let's just take the easiest one, the flood, just don't work with what we know about the history of our planet or how speciesization works. The iteration of species that we have after taking just two of each kind doesn't work on the time scale that has

been provided since the flood narrative would have happened. It makes sense if we allow for evolution and the billions of years that it has been going on to produce all of these different species and iterations of kind, but it does not work when simply starting over. I mean, if we're talking about detail issues just within Genesis, just within the flood account, you could sit here and literally list out hundreds, if not thousands. We have different details in the age of Methuselah, for example, varied versions and names of the exact same

people. I mean, the inconsistency in the portrayal of God's character in Genesis alone is revolutionarily different. We have conflating descriptions of the Tower of Babel, contradictions regarding the circumstances of Joseph's rise and reign in Egypt. It just goes on and on and on. Maybe I'll list out a longer list in the description below. Alright, so let's move on to reception and influence. I mean, if we're talking about reception and influence, the Bible, let alone Genesis, is incredibly dynamic in those regards. How many stories and tropes and

archetypes and ethics and moral systems and religions have come from this Abrahamic God in the beginning of how he established us as creatures on this planet? I mean, the major reigning religious systems between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all stem from this account. It all starts right here. Think about how different our world would be if the Abrahamic God and thus Genesis and the storytelling of that God never happened. I can't even begin to imagine, for better or worse, because we can't know. It's easy to say as an

atheist, like, oh, the world would be so much better if this God had just never existed. I say existed as in the minds of the individuals who created him. That's not necessary. It could have been replaced with something far worse. It could have been replaced with something so much better, though, too. We just don't know. What we do know is that everything would look very different. How many wars would not have happened or would have happened instead? I mean, the way that you can just play with what history would look like without this is fascinating. It's

exciting and fascinating and impossible to articulate just how much influence has happened from these three religions, good, bad, and neutral. This says nothing to mention the scholarly influence, the influence on art, literature, and culture. I mean, we've talked a little bit about culture, but art and literature, holy cow, can you imagine not having the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost? Can you imagine all of the philosophy and theological philosophy and fiction representing Christian themes and belief systems that have been handed down ever since? All of

the music, all of the genres of art. Again, these things would have happened in their own iteration under different religious beliefs and practices, but we do have a plethora of influence that came down when so much of the West, during so much of its creative processing, like the Renaissance and everything that has come after, was by such a predominantly Abrahamic God-believing society. I could just go on and on and on about this as much as we could go on and on and on about errors and contradictions in the Bible, but I

think we'll just have to let some of this rest. Let's talk quickly about some common misconceptions, and then we'll wrap this up. One common misconception is, of course, by one side, that Genesis is meant to be taken literally and as some kind of scientific text. The problem is that Genesis does make some scientific claims that we know are not true. So is it an error or is it a misconception? Well, from one side, it's a misconception. From another side, it's proof that it's not correct. These are hard things to be able to negotiate when talking about so many different groups here. We're talking about people that don't believe in it at all, people that believe in it but only to a certain extent or through a certain lens, and people that believe in it wholeheartedly as absolutely divine and literal. This is a really big melting pot of trying to understand the realities and what I'm going to term contradiction there, a misconception that will apply to some people but not to others. But the reality is that we do know 100% that people take this as science. People reject modern science because the Bible says so, and God, being the greatest scientist, must know the truth. We make horrible excuses. I talked about this in the comments the other day with a few people. How many times, if you were from a fundamentalist level, did you hear that the devil planted dinosaur bones to deceive us or that God allowed him to do so to test our faith, instead of the obvious fact that they're there as part of a record of evolution and is an indication that the Earth is indeed older than the Bible says that it is? We have a hard-known fact of what science has been able to indicate, repeat, and show that the world as it is in reality versus the world as described in Genesis are not working together. There's a misconception by certain Christians that Genesis gives a full accounting of what we need to know from a historical perspective about the places that existed and the people that existed, and that that was all. We know that so much of the world was happening before what was happening there as described in Genesis in the ancient Near East, let alone what was happening in the Americas and what was happening in places like China, etc. It is a very small worldview, and the misconception is that it is the entire worldview. Again, I can hear the progressives saying, "We don't believe that." That's great. A large portion of people who believe in the same God you do because of the same Bible you do, do, and that's something that needs to be dealt with. I've said it a little bit, but I'll restate it one more time here during the misconceptions. I think the biggest one we need to address is, is it literal, metaphorical, allegorical, and if so, to what degree and in what weighting? Either way, I think Genesis needs to be approached with nuance. It means a lot of things to a lot of people and has meant a lot of things to a lot of people at different times and in different ways. So for any one particular group to claim some kind of authority over what Genesis actually is, is to speak for God himself. I have no problem with that because I don't believe there's a God to speak for. I see this as something that is incredibly man-made, that had a claim of something divine, and that claim of something divine is trying to be worked out amidst those that do believe in the divine and that are trying to figure out to what degree they can accept this. I'm going to back off this point completely because it's not the point of this episode. The point of this episode is to give you this understanding of Genesis, which does include the problems, the arguing, and the issues that arise, and I think they arise here in Genesis maybe more than anywhere else in the Bible just because of what Genesis claims versus what we know to be true. I'll end by just saying that Genesis is profound. Profound not in its understanding of the world around us, not in its accuracy with the science and history, but profound in the impact that it has had on a large portion of human existence for a pretty decent chunk of the time that we've been consciously aware of to develop religion and things like this. It is a contender for one of the most important and influential books in the entire Bible, especially in the Old Testament. If you can appreciate it as the historical myth and collection of cultural references that it is, and you can separate yourself from the dogma that has been attached to it like I have been able to, you can appreciate it for the work of fiction and historical representation that it is. I think that it's amazing. I think that it's beautiful in that regard. I hate the atrocities that have come from the belief that is associated with it, but in and of itself, as an accounting for a people group that were trying to make sense of the world around them, I think it is phenomenal. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you learned something. Please subscribe if you like this, and until the next one, keep thinking.

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