The Complex Origins Of The Bible | Testament | Parable

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] foreign [Music] a lot when I was a kid I don't go to church anymore though I still read the Bible got this beautiful family bible I'm a lot of proud of it it's got lists of my ancestors going back over hundreds of years they've written their name look at this Samuel Thomas one of them was called this book in the year of 1746 my mother gave me this Bible in fact Samuel Thomas and His ancestors all listed in the front of the book going right back to 1690 when they were married when their children were born when they were baptized when their children died too A lot of the time it's the whole history of my family putting their most important book the Bible was actually printed in the same Century as the great English Bible the King James Bible the Bible that God is called Jehovah that's this Bible think of that family they've been reading and listening to this Bible for hundreds and hundreds of years Smith's moral message is very words must have seeped into them as they seek right through the English language and of course centuries before King James's Bible Europe was using this book almost as it sanctioned as the thing that gave order to the world and power to Kings is the book of Christendom the single single book of Christendom and it goes much further than that it's not just a history of my family and what Europe's done with it but this book reaches right back to the beginning of civilization to the ancient near East where the oldest Bible stories took place so that's the Bible story then it goes from the most ancient world right up to modern Europe let's start like you would with most good books let's start at the beginning first great lines of the Bible Genesis chapter 1 verse 1. in the beginning God created a heaven in the Earth and the Earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep in the next seven days Jehovah we are told creates that Earth and everything in it well is that literally true I mean was there somebody who knew that and then wrote that down in the Bible is it history how do we take that well when my ancestors were writing their names in this Bible in the 17th century they had absolutely no doubt that that word was literally true and the word of God there was an Archbishop of that time who worked out by chasing back the generations from Jesus right back to Adam that the world had actually started in the year 4004 BC on the 30th of July on a Sunday night actually that made chaos starting on a Saturday evening before so that seemed pretty good in the 17th century and I don't think really it seems very good to us anymore I mean even Bible scholars would point out that there's gaps in the generation from Jesus back to Adam whether you believe in him or not so we actually have to look at the Genesis in a slightly different way to see what's going on to see where those Bible Beginnings are now think of the landscape the Jehovah's creating in Genesis it's creating a landscape where there are Shepherds in like Abraham where there are sheep and rivers and cities and you go on great long Journeys and you're a nomad and all this sort of thing it's creating the world of the ancient theories just like the Book of Genesis tells us that's the world in which the Bible was born [Music] and Terra took Abraham his son and Sarah his daughter-in-law his son Abraham's wife and they went forth with them from Ur of the chaldees to go into the land of Canaan and they came unto Haram and dwelt there and the days of Terror were 205 years [Music] Abraham's travels were a key to understanding the beginnings of the Bible just as the Book of Genesis takes you on a grand tour of the ancient east from the Garden of Eden past the Tower of Babel down into Pharaoh's Egypt so Abraham's wanderings follow exactly the same route past all the Wonder and wisdom of the ancient world the Book of Genesis is filled with Clues to tell us where and when this all took place Abraham it tells us lived at Heron before he started his long track South today Haron is a well-known archaeological site in southeast turkey with a village lived in by Nomads who settle down farmers in fact a bit like Abraham's the name Harem means Crossroads Harrison said if you like the heart of the ancient world a Piccadilly Circus look A Thousand Miles over there two Great Rivers the Tigris and Euphrates are dried into it run up there somewhere and end up not too far away over there now of course all down the sides of those rivers are the greatest cities in the ancient world the cities of Mesopotamia the land of Suma the Bible calls it the land of shinar over there where Abraham's going to next Kanan Syria and then down into Egypt rough little places though Syria and Canaan at this time a little sort of mountain towns get most of their culture from massive attacker Egypt of course is a land on its own do its own thing quite happily so you can see that when Abraham and his family and his herds were traveling we weren't just wandering around aimlessly in the desert talking to God he was going down the ancient M1 he was traveling the whole Arc of the Fertile Crescent and it was a great trading room you see you went in boats mostly but sometimes with donkeys along the rivers and then you came round here and you went down into Canaan with your donkeys you didn't go through the middle because there was a desert and you and your donkeys would have died of thirst now this is an interesting thing camels which could cross that desert because they can go without water for about three days came in about 600 BC so those stories describe Abraham riding a camel must have been made about that time the phrase era the cowardlys too it's an interesting phrase because the word caldea is a word for Mesopotamia over there and that didn't come in until about 600 BC either so it looks like those stories at least in Abraham date from around that time but there are many other stories to do with Abraham which show that that sort of lifestyle is thousands of years older than that archaeologists have been coming up with evidence of Abraham for years but you can't always trust them just because you dig up a place called Harem doesn't mean you dug up Abraham's house and there's still no real evidence that the people in the Book of Genesis ever lived at all what archaeologists have given us though is an amazing amount of evidence about Abraham's ancient world of ancient Egypt an ancient Mesopotamia and all the rest you can find sites like Aaron boundary for this we know an incredible amount about Mesopotamian civilization largely because we've been digging it up for 150 years but you know the end of the day when you found all the splendid palaces and the heaps of gold and the great statues and all the rest of it the thing that really tells you is the writing especially with Mesopotamia because they lived in mud houses and they've all gone their writing survives they invented writing they wrote on cabinets of clay like this one polished up the surface with a beautiful shine they got little wedge-shaped stick and with that pressed little patterns now these patterns have started off as pictures they ended up as completely abstract science all their little words in rows in such a successful system that it went straight around the Fertile Crescent it went from deep in Mesopotamia right through here through Heron right down you can find in estate archives of Egypt and of course if you invent a system of writing even though it's taken up by dozens of languages the style of your writing stays with you so the Mesopotamian legal system the legal contract became the legal Norm for the whole of the ancient world so Mesopotamian science and dating and all that Mesopotamian culture came out of Mesopotamia just like Abraham on tablets like this this actually is quite an interesting one it's actually a land grant it's a business contract it tells you that Joe now owns his plot of land and he's probably been afraid for so much money well that's rather interesting because there's a passage in the Book of Genesis where Abraham is buying a plot of land now archaeologists dig those land grant have this up by the city Gates usually because that's where the documents were made out and the announcements the public announcements of the change of property took place and that's exactly what you find in the Book of Genesis about how Vivid it is in Genesis it tells you about Abraham the man buying the land in which he's going to bury his wife and it's a lovely little story this of course the Mesopotamian version is a very dry legal document but they amount to the same thing and if you look in those tablets you'll find dozens of biblical Customs that lovely custom that Abraham and his family had of swearing owns by putting their hand under their thigh that's on these tablets too just as Isaac's dying words are taken as a written will in the Bible so a man's dying words are taken as a written will in these Mesopotamian tablets when you read about the Law Courts and things like that this is actually a list of Mesopotamian laws made about 1760 BC and they're written out in just the same way as the list of Jehovah's laws in the Old Testament and there's a Mesopotamian King receiving his laws from a god at the top of a mountain in just the same way that Moses received the Ten Commandments from his God on top of his holy mountain in the wilderness of Sinai you know great numbers of those Mesopotamian tablets are actually dated the scholars have had many many years trying to fix Abraham and all his family into our modern history well at present those tablets there's old Mesopotamian tablets the deal with Abraham and his sort of Lifestyle day between 2 500 BC and 500 BC you can't really get much tighter than that and perhaps they're older knows but why is there this terrific Obsession to put people like Abraham into our history remember Biblical history isn't like that that deals in Generations you go from Adam to Jesus and it's to do with a family but we want dates why do we want dates I think some people think that if I could March up here and tell you Abraham lived in such and such a year that they would actually prove the existence of God you think so or perhaps there are other people who actually think that it would be nice to believe that there was really a Time on earth when there were people like Abraham people that founded Nations and talked to God when the world was a purer place of course in most other religions Abraham would himself have been a God the founder father of a Nation a man of Mythic Deeds well what does Jehovah say he says in the Bible you shall have no other God but me and those Bible scribes have to make damn sure that Abraham is never allowed any of the attributes of any sort of a god at all so he appears as Mr heavy normal Mr heavy normal Shepherd Mr banality and that's what give Genesis is extraordinary tension it's a tensions between Nick on one side and the most ordinary thing on the Arrow I'll tell you something else too you try and fix Abraham down in history and in his family will pick up their tents and they'll steal away over Horizons that go on for thousands and thousands of years that's about as far as you'll get looking for Abraham as spade and a man work for very long and used the age of Motorcars and televisions without feeling close to people seem to be just be just Out Of Reach the air and the Dust it might not ride high on an archaeological list of candidates [Music] quite close to ancient Harrow there's a lot of Abram's World in it something too that's more important than bricks and stones Muslims who live here believe that their city is the city of Aura for which Abraham started his travels they say that Abraham was born here in a cave which is now a holy place the holy spring of water Abraham is counted as a prophet in Islam the first man to Proclaim that there has been one God whoever they saying he attacked the statues of the Gods of the sun and the moon but a wicked King imprisoned him and tried to burn him on a fire but then miraculously the Flaming logs of wood all turned to fine fat fish the descendants of these fish still swim on an offer in these great ponds fed By the Waters of Abraham's holy spring [Music] foreign s are the Heart of the City everyone walks here in the evenings admiring the fine fish God help you if you should kill one these fish are still sacred just as they have been for thousands upon thousands of years before the Muslims there were the Christians here at Earth before the Christians Greeks when the fish's fins were decorated with golden jewelry before the Greeks they were the ancient Mesopotamians when the fish swum about in honor of the Moon God so think about it for a minute what you've got here you've got this pool of sacredness and the religions that have come and gone through the ages they're sort of decorations to something much deeper it's a sort of human awareness of sacredness that is here and the theology is just you know different expressions of that basic idea that is Abraham's world that feeling that underneath everything in the world there is a sacredness it's not a stupid world it's not a Darth world it's not what idiots believe in it's what the human race has made it's one of the things that makes it different from the animals it's a very important aspect if you don't understand that you will not understand the Bible and its Beginnings look before you had Orthodox religion as we know it today I think the most ancient religions you might say were invented really by Poets and artists people came to places like Earth and felt there was something sacred here artists made statues of gods poets wrote hymns for them and the priests organized the cult if everybody felt that those statues those hymns or even these fish embodied something of the Sacred the god became a success and he didn't it just died out and that was the end of it now our Bible is a continuation of that because what that is is a definition of the Sacred itself you make a statue of a God you're trying to define something of the quality of these fish in this marvelous Bond and our Bible is the world's most elaborate conception of a definition of the understanding of God himself in ancient Mesopotamia the world and all its Gods was explained in sacred stories these stories of course were myths knits that is not in the modern meaning of the word there's lies or false ones but in the sense of a story The told of the underlying order of the world myths could explain the beauty of a spring or a fish the mystery of a cave they can explain your good fortune and your Misfortune to help you feel secure part of a sacred family a universal order like all ancient people Abraham would have seen his life in terms of myth the people who made the Genesis creation story knew these old stories were and they used some of them in their description at the beginning of the world like Abraham the Bible story of creation was born in ancient Mesopotamia Mesopotamia was very fertile Bountiful even also held random violence in it for the Mesopotamians life was precarious crops and cities were often parched or washed away by floods and violent storms [Music] raiding down the Mesopotamian myth of the creation gave order to uncertainty [Music] went on high the heavens were not yet named each terrifying story of a Family Feud [Music] how one day the great mother God has declared war on all six Generations [Music] foreign [Music] as for the mother goddess push the wild wind into her mouth bloated her stomach shot arrows into it the Mesopotamia was born foreign with a butcher's knife Marduk split the carcass of the mother goddess in half and made the sky and the Earth and from the arch of her thighs he made the Vault of Heaven her head buried under the northern mountains pierced her eyes so the mesopotamia's two great Rivers would flow down her shoes [Music] yes it's extraordinary to think of that terrible Mesopotamia Mayhem a terrifying story of creation is the same story that underlies that solitary Majestic creation of Jehovah in the Book of Genesis in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth it's the same story as that Mesopotamian murder and that's important in a way it's important not because you say oh well fancy name on The Book of Genesis is a rip-off of some Mesopotamian folk story that's not the thing it's important because what Through the Bible that old Mesopotamian story is given the West is given the West a very particular model of the universe of a certain sort of structure of a single unit with stresses and strains in it just like a family now how these things work how is it that the Mesopotamian story is buried in this first page of the Book of Genesis well you're not going to find some Mesopotamia girl called Joe it winds up being Jehovah who goes off and does a similar thing in Mesopotamia the concordance between the two stories is one of structure and number there are six generations of Mesopotamian Gods just as Jehovah takes six days to make the universe and at each stage Jehovah makes a part of the universe he makes the Sun the Stars the silk the animals the plants the birds the Mesopotamian gods of each of those six Generations are the gods of the exactly the same things that Jehovah is making of each of his six days of creation so underneath this text if you like there live the Mesopotamian gods no just take to start on the first day God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the feminine the waters the low ground and above ground salt water and fresh water the waters incidentally rivers of Mesopotamia going into the Persian gold Mesopotamia going on here but that that's the the gods of the first generation the great mother goddess was the god of the salt water her husband was the god of the fresh water they're the first generation Gods that's what he's making on the first day and you can go like that second generation second day third generation Third Day fourth generation and God made two great lives the greater light to Rule the Day and the Lesser light to rule the night is making the sun and the mood what are the gods of the fourth generation of Mesopotamian Gods they're the gods of the heavens the Sun the moon and the stars and he made the Stars also in the Book of Genesis tells us on the fourth day and that correspondence goes right down through the list until you come to the sixth day now what happens on the sixth day maoduk of the sixth generation of gods makes man so that the other gods can rest the other gods are building a temple to become so splendiferous they're going to build the guide Temple so might it tastes pity on them and all and says right I'll make your man a slave so that you can all rest what does Jehovah do he makes man on the sixth day and then Jehovah takes the rest the difference is with the sort of man that's being made Marduk makes man to be a Slave Jehovah though makes man in his own image man is given responsibility it's as if the people who wrote Genesis are saying yes we understand your world Mesopotamia we absolutely believe in the way you priests have divided up the whole order of the universe a good scientist but your lousy moralists we want a different role for men that means too they wanted a different role for God so the god of Genesis isn't a Mesopotamian God where did he come from think of Abraham again he's going on his intellectual Journey he's starting in Mesopotamia and he's going to Egypt [Music] and the Jehovah of Genesis is not so much like the gods of Mesopotamian but far more like the gods of Egypt if you want to go down to Egypt to look for Abraham and all his family to continue the intellectual journey of the Book of Genesis then leave the cinema behind you its vision of ancient Egypt based on Victorian paintings like this one is correct in all this detail but mistaken in its broad assumptions foreign slaves this tells you a lot about the 19th century and almost nothing in ancient Egypt let's start at the beginning the Genesis tells us that the generations of Abraham Joseph Jacob and Moses all went down into Egypt but is there any scientific evidence and such foreigners ever living in Pharaoh's Kingdom at all but the archaeological site at teledaba in the Egyptian Delta they've dug up the very town and such Travelers would have seen when they'd first crossed the deserts to go down into Egypt you know it's not very often these days you can actually suddenly come across something completely new which really verifies the truth of ancient history most of the ancient history we've got is built on a framework of ancient books themselves and of course the Bible and it's very seldom you can come across something which actually seems to corroborate things that are going on in the Bible major events that took place over hundreds of years so this in the Egyptian Delta this strange little field is one of the most important digs in the Middle East since the second world war here look just like ordinary Fields right but just down in front of me that is real history it's a sort of the thing that the ancient authors and the Bible itself was talking about it doesn't look much does it these few walls are going to be filled in again next year and they'll be growing onions on here and the archaeologists will be moving into the next field at the moment you can see the remains of a grain bin there from 1500 BC down there a bit further there's a wall from a house of 2000 BC that's the same time as that wonderful painting from Egypt which shows a family of foreigners arriving from Syria from Canaan in their wonderful robes so reminiscent of the Patriarchs and the descriptions of them in the Bible the reports of the Austrian archaeologists showed what modern science could make of what at first would seemed to be one of the most unpromising sites in Egypt under the little houses of ordinary people in small Graves they found Family Treasures and the Very bones of the foreigners people like Abraham and Joseph who had come down into Egypt under the dead men's feet they even found the bones of the little horses that had carried them on their travels foreign [Applause] did the ancient Egyptians think of all these foreigners that came down into Egypt the same Egypt in which the Bible says Abraham and all his family should be included the evidence is surprising and rather different from the attitudes you find in the Old Testament the facts the best scene in Egypt's famous tomb paintings like those in the three and a half thousand year old toon Chapel of the vizier rachmere at Thebes look at the amazing care and interest in the Egyptian artists sober and they looked at foreigners how intrigued they were by them all here are black people from the South and they're bringing tribute to the man who owned this tomb what are they bringing logs of Ebony wild cheaters from the desert white desert foxes baboons jumped up and down when the sun came elephant tusks ostriches ostrich feathers more monkeys and look at this Marvel but few Egyptians had ever seen a giraffe especially one with a monkey on his neck and look here the change of place now not animals and people from the South but fair skinned people syrians Palestinians from the north elegant men in long white robes with a baby elephant and a bear from the mountains and horses too syrians brought horses into Egypt and with them The Chariot the great Egyptian War Machine the interesting thing about these scenes is that the artist isn't looking down on the people he's intrigued race it could be Egyptian whether your skin was Syrian white Nubian black Libyan blonde hair anything it didn't matter we had to do was to live in the Nile Valley in the right way put the right clothes on and change your name in your Egyptian for the most part then harshness and Prejudice that the Egyptians show in the Old Testament is not reflected in the reality of the ancient records nonetheless there's a great deal of evidence in the Book of Genesis to show that whoever wrote it knew pharaohs Egypt and knew it at first hand once again to see evidence of that he must go into the great tombs of Thebes some of these Egyptian tombs you have to go right down into the ground into the burial chamber itself to find the finest paintings this is the Tomb of the mayor of themes there he is Celica and his wife but here in the Underworld they're dead and it's their son who is giving him the offerings and things like this are full of detail the sort of detail you find in the Bible stories the eldest son it is who communes with his dead parents the eldest son in fact communicates with all the ancestors of Egypt so for example when Jehovah smites the oldest son he's not just killing off a member of the family he's breaking Egypt's connection with the dead and that's the sort of link that you find with the Bible stories with these tombs you can also find quite interesting direct details of Bible stories like many other of these wonderful tombs seneffa's fine paintings they're just filled up with little tiny references to Bible stories and Bible things look at these figures here you can see Cinema himself the grand mayor higher public dignitary with his wife and she's offering him a beautiful necklace on a basket now remember the incident in the story of Joseph and Pharaoh Joseph who comes is a Hebrew and he comes into Egypt and because of his wonderful telling of Dreams gets to be made the highest official in the land and Pharaoh says to Joseph I will give you authority over all the land of Egypt and what does he give Joseph he gives him exactly what Seneca another high official is wearing he gives him the Seal of the king it gives them a collar of gold which you can even find still on mummies you can see it in x-rays under their bandages very common these great golden collars of the high officials and he gives him fine Linens now this tells you something interesting else interesting about the Bible it tells you that the Bible is not only giving you a lot of Egyptian detail but it's doing that typical biblical thing it's turning something which is actually a state ceremony something quite formal like a nighting or a coronation into something quite personal and that in that way the Bible is unique in the ancient world but there's another thing this beautiful tomb can suggest to us perhaps it's more important than all those little details you can read from the tomb to the Bible and that's something to do with the vision of the people who made the place the sheer Joy of it the grapevines the carpets the lovely Lively painting it's the work of people who know what Paradise is who live in beautiful circumstances the sort of thing that you didn't get in the rest of the ancient world in fact it's a vision of a land of milk and honey and perhaps it's the first and original example of that land of milk and honey Israelite so desperately wanted for their eyes [Music] foreign [Music] pharaohs Egypt upon the Book of Genesis it's to do with the basic notion of what a nation is of what a state is and of what a God can be ancient Egypt remember First Nations state in all the world in Egypt 2 was a supreme example of the fruitful Unison of men and gods [Music] [Applause] the effect of this colossal Kingdom upon foreigners must have been completely overwhelming the sheer power the size the skill of it all the Pharaoh above him the gods the heavens beneath him the people and then underneath them the foreigners everything it has an order and a shape here and that single shape must have just projected itself upon everybody who came here with its Supreme's confidence and ability but there's something more than that here too because these palaces and the temples of the gods were private shut off dark secret mysterious places foreigners most Egyptians wouldn't have got past the Gateway here our visitor wouldn't merely have received an impression of this open structured state but of something mysterious but at its Center a Oneness of mystery and sacredness which you would never have seen Behind These Great Walls would have been a power sort of throbbing away like a nuclear reactor this would have been ancient Egypt's greatest gift to Abraham but certainly Egypt's greatest gift of the Old Testament vision of a calm and Universal holiness part of the Egyptian temples stood the gods their Vitality controlled the universe and made Egypt prosper and though ancient Egypt had a thousand gods in it it also held a notion of an underlying Holiness that ran deep beneath every for thousands upon thousands of years Egyptian priests studied and defined this sacred order and developed the ceremonials the rituals by which Egypt had become a partner of the Gods in a single Universal scheme foreign just as it gave to so much of the ancient world a special sense of right and ritual Holiness and deity [Music] three thousand three hundred years ago one of the greatest cities in the world to just over these fields here it's where that road is there's a little canal in ancient times it was one of the main branches of the Nile and down it came ships on Cyprus from Syria and Crete all over all over the Mediterranean bringing Goods foreign rare wonderful things into the courts of the Pharaohs who stood here of course by the canals stood the warehouses behind the warehouses the office of administration and then the Royal palaces and then the temples clouds of incense going up into the air like this town's gone straight up into the air look at this and they're extraordinary it's a very old pair of feet left in a field they're about eight or ten times bigger than our feet so the statue must have stood 50 60 feet high then of course on top of that you have a great crown and the pedestal underneath it must have been a massive statue dragged here from the Limestone Cliffs of region down here in front it's the name of the man whose honor the statue was brought here maryaman Ramesses II beloved of the Gods he called his City Ramesses after him this city the Bible tells us then is the city of The Exodus [Music] my Lord [Music] [Music] that I never home Exodus simply the Greek word for going out and of course the Exodus is the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt to wander in the wilderness for 40 years and then come into their promised land in Israel the Israelites now Egyptian records tell us that they were already Israelites in their promised land in a particular date a precious record the only one from ancient Egypt but there it is and the date is 1207. at that time the children of Israel were already in their Promised Land according to the ancient Egyptian texts so they wandered as the Bible tells us for 40 years in the wilderness they must have started from here from Ramesses not later than 1247 BC that's a pretty precise date because that is exactly the time when Ramesses was on the throne and if we take back history a little further we can see there's a about a 30-year period when The Exodus could have occurred and in the time of Ramesses sounds amazingly precise doesn't it but it's one problem unlike Taylor Dabber it's the old city under his Ash unlike the palace is here unlike Ramesses statue you can't actually find any archaeological evidence that the Exodus ever took place in a country where thousands upon thousands of documents have survived that is very extraordinary there's not a hint of Israel in Egypt in the ancient texts nor of the biblical Exodus in fact The Exodus never took place in history as the Bible describes it but then of course the truth of The Exodus story like all truths in the ancient world is not the sort of Truth you'll find in history books in the 19th century lots of English Vickers used to come to the Sinai desert to escape the English winter and to look for Moses and the traces of The Exodus most of them are only here a few days of course before they discovered there was just no way that 600 000 people could survive in this wilderness there are other problems too in a place where you can find traces are better winning cameras just two or three people let's stay one night thousands of years ago there was no trace of these six hundred thousand people and that's the biggest number of people I've ever been here apart from the two armies in the recent Wars then there's another problem the ancient Egyptian records there's no record of the quarter of the population the country will be getting up and leaving either oh well I say the experts that's because ancient people generally get the numbers wrong let's find it down instead of six hundred thousand let's call it five thousand then let's say that the miraculous part in the Red Sea was actually caused by a volcanic explosion that somehow created this enormous tidal wave and on and on you go with his explanations what you end up doing of course is translating a marvelous miraculous event into a banal battering Trot through the desert with a few guys wandering around because the story is not about a documentary about people leaving Egypt the story is about the birth of a new God and the birth of a new nation but strangely enough is told in the old old ways of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia that is of The Great Wave of a myth [Music] The Exodus story is a remake of some of the east's most ancient Tales that is how the Book of Genesis tells us all its most important things ancient Israel knew nothing about science or history books but it did know the old creation stories of what therefore the creation of ancient Israel must be mine that's exactly what the Exodus story is a creationist the very name Moses is the Egyptian word for birth see Israel was born again just as the world had been made at the time of the creation that is the truth of this extraordinary song you know if you want to can explain the whole beautiful story of The Exodus in terms of a volcanic explosion you can say for example that The Parting of the Red Sea was due to the after effects of a tidal wave you can say the Jehovah appearing in a column of Fire the glowing Ash of the volcano in the night sky it was a volcanic explosion like that too about 1450 BC but the miraculous thing about that is that not one ancient scribe of that time ever saw fit to write about it it's not that surprising actually because ancient scribes in that time didn't write about things like that they didn't think they were important enough so if that story really is behind the Exodus what you can say is then that only Moses himself saw God in that cloud and that explosion and that perception of God that new understanding that new awareness of what a God was far more thunderous than any volcanic explosion about this new god let's think about Jehovah for a moment Jehovah traveled with Moses and his people from Egypt to the promised land he wandered with them for 40 years in the wilderness this Jehovah then is a God that moves through space and Through Time and that makes him the most revolutionary God that there ever was that anybody ever saw look if God took Egypt and Mesopotamia were usually God's a place they usually stayed in one place they were gods that are washing on the fields or the rivers or the skies or the mountains of the towns or something like that they were gods of place and they're often in families and as far as time went they were usually God Cycles they were gods of the Sun going over every day or gods of the river flooding every year or the moon or things like that and Men moved in those rhythms Jehovah's not like that though he moves through time with time time is now a linear thing like a river and Jehovah and his people are moving along together that makes it not only a new idea for God but a new idea for men and what man can be that's the Fantastic thing about this gun it actually gives man a new potential now he can develop not over the course of a year and through a one Harvest but through centuries and he can do a deal with God this amazing moral abstract theological thing that if he does the right thing he will get better and better and better as the Millennia go by what an extraordinary new God then so think of the Bible now think of the gods of Mesopotamia that are given the Book of Genesis it's Universe it's order it's stage on which all the rest of the Bible has said the gods of Egypt who gave really I suppose they gave Jehovah something of his power and Majesty something of that secret quality but it's only this new God this new God of space and time which is in Israel and that's the god that is still with us and our civilization today

Channel: Parable - Religious History Documentaries

Views: 32,033

Keywords: parable, parable channel, parable documentary, religious history, religious history documentary, bible documentary, bible documentary bbc, jesus documentary

Id: BrvjDf_5asM

Length: 50min 15sec (3015 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2023