The Old Testament Myths AREN'T Original? 📖 

If you want to dig deeper into the myths borrowed by the Old Testament, do please consider checking out Dr Josh's 7 part lecture series using my affiliate link: emmathorne1--pursuit4knowledge.thrivecart.com/ot-myths/ Thank you lovely people!

I have NEVER gotten an apology from an apologist!

I took a mandatory class on world religions at university and the whole first part of the semester was about this stuff. Completely forgot about it until now, that was such an interesting class.

So refreshing to hear the bible discussed as one ancient text among many, with its own context, intertextuality and intentionality. As a mythographer raised atheist, this is what I hoped "religious education" classes in school would be. I never understood the exceptionalism related to the Abrahamic texts, nor the arbitrary distinctions made between miracles and magic, prayer and spells etc. I also love to hear ancient texts and myths discussed in a post-structuralist context - the differences matter!

My first exposure to this was when my son took a mythology class in high school. I found out that the virgin birth story was an old mythological standby way before the Jesus story. I was already an atheist, but I found this to be eye opening.

Emma, I very much admire the fact that you took a moment to recognise the brilliance that is the Doctor’s tie. May I say your butterfly blouse is likewise noteworthy! I appreciate appreciation in the community!

My absolute favorite meme is a single panel, and it says (paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact wording since I haven’t seen it in a while), “Telling someone that they have to live their lives based on your beliefs, is like telling someone that they can’t eat a donut because you’re on a diet.” I keep trying to find the image again, but I can’t find the exact one, and I’m not very good with computers, so I can’t recreate it myself.

I love hearing Dr Bowens list of areas of study because it sounds like you're introducing a Stargate character

Greetings from Germany. Two of the English speaking persons I most enjoy listen to have a conversation. This day couldn't get any better.

Nice. Woke up, sat down, BOOM, new Emma. Perfect.

Wow! I discovered this on my own the very hard way as a Syrian Teenager 15 years ago! ... The proverbs used 5,000 years old or more, are still used into modern day colloquial Syrian Arabic. The same examples and proverbs, and same exact metaphors.

This interview works as a gentle primer to comparative mythology and textual analysis. As a former English major, it's oddly exciting to hear someone use the term "intertextuality" on youtube. Since most people aren't English or literature majors, I'm glad there are resources like this. Also, the timing is fortuitous in that I recently read both Gilgamesh and the Descent of Inanna for the first time. These texts may sound daunting but Gilgamesh, despite being known as an "epic", is not even particularly long. The trickiest part is choosing which translation to use--well, that and the fact that there are little gaps in the story since clay tablets tend to be recovered in fragments.

We need to see Dr. Josh do his Kent Hovind impression.

Irving Finkel's "The Ark before Noah" is an interesting read covering the way the flood myths evolved through the different cultures, taken from all of those Cuneiform tablets that they left scattered all around Mesopotamia.

I was NOT expecting Dr Josh to say someone was sponge worthy. The bowtie makes him seem like a nice boy.

I’m an analogy person, so I love Dr. Josh’s use of analogies.

What an absolute delight. I am definitely eye-balling that course. Being a comic book nerd going way back, I have long come to regard ancient religious texts and their antecedents like Superhero comics. Two thousand years from now, (presumably human) archeologists might uncover my comic collection and believe Batman was a real person, otherwise why would there be SO many published works of his capers, not to mention telling and retelling Bruce Wayne's origin story with very little variation. What if Yahweh is simply the Punisher, Moses is Moon Knight and Jesus is Dr. Strange?

As someone that is a treasure trove of pop culture references, I appreciate so much his references to put things into perspective.

This is a fun way to find out Eminem sampled a Joan Jett song

Since I first encountered Digital Hammurabi a couple years ago, I have been fascinated by the depth of knowledge Josh and Meagan are willing to share with those seeking better explanations. I enjoyed every minute of this discussion. It always occurs to me when considering how basic story themes seem to reappear in the foundational myths of successive generations, that in the ancient world there was no standard set of historical and/or scientific facts (?) that had been recorded in libraries that were accessible to the general populace. The only narratives they had to piece together what may have happened in the eras that preceded theirs were the myths about gods. epic heroes, devastating natural disasters etc. that had been handed down orally or by early script. Today we have a historical, an archaeological and a geological timeline from which to draw understandings of the ancient world. In the days of Umma and Lagash the people who wrote down what would become the "history" of their lineage had no Encyclopedia Britanica to consult. The literate elite of the Israelites who were held captive in Mesopotamia had access to a rich tradition of origin myths and legends. Aside from the Canaanite myths from their homeland, this was what they had to work with.

I love this conversation, and your butterfly blouse. I thought the thumb nail (when i blur scrolled first thing in the morning ) was Bill Nye talking to some adorable little cowboy.

Great conversation! And it's always a treat to hear Dr. Bowen. Thanks for inviting him. 13:00 re. a "shared flood" - Something that gets overlooked here is that there is simply no physical evidence that such a flood ever occurred, and if one had occurred, the evidence would have been plentiful. We don't need to make historical/literary arguments against a "shared memory". We _know_ it didn't happen because of the hard physical evidence against it. Sometimes people who work in the historical/literary/philosophical fields tend to lose sight of the fundamental importance of the archeological record.

"Make them make sense!" I can say, as an American who was raised Mormon, this is absolute heresy. Heresy! Once I sort out what the Bible says, exactly, about that then I'll do... something! Something!

Regarding Ban'na as 'built' in Hebrew, in Farsi a Ban'na is a noun for a builder, often specifically a bricklayer. It's a term still used to this day

I thought the butterfly blouse was a huge bowtie on a regular white blouse at first. I love it!

The analogy of the oncoming train is one of the best, if not the best, description of the evangelical mindset Thank you.

An *EXCELLENT* vid Emmush. ❤️👍🏻 As for the flood - it *obviously* preserves the old memories from the trauma of the end of the Ice Age, approximately 11,500 years ago. Having been passed only orally for hundreds of generations, it was _eventually_ written in Mesopotamia and, of course, adapted later to other cultures... And - well, I am not familiar with the examples he gave for cultural borrowing, however, some of the Greatest Creations of our times, are those based upon earlier versions - many TNG Episodes, as well as "Charmed", "Sliders", "The Orville" and "Andromeda", are based on TOS Episodes, or - lots of times - on the very root of things: the Original "Twilight Zone" Episodes, and, of course, no one would dream calling that _"stealing"..._ on the contrary - _"If The Stars Should Appear",_ for example, is an *obvious* homage to _"For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky". "I Dream of Phoebe",_ for example, or _"This Slide of Paradise",_ even use their names to make the Historical connection clear. 🌞 And a large part of the Fun is identifying these Historical connotations and connections. And, talking "Trek" stuff - I really Hope to see lots more of *Laura Reed?* 😍😍

I love when we get amazing guests on channels like this one

Dr Josh and Emma. I cannot ask for more !

I had a Priest from my Catholic church once tell me that most Old Testament stories are nothing but that, just stories, and they are meant to teach us and not to be taken literally and I completely agree.

Do MORE of this Emma. I wish my brain worked as well as both of you!! BUT, I totally believe in what was said here.

My catholic highschool, freshman year, had a required course in the Old Testament and it was the first time a religion teacher had ever said directly that the creation myth and a lot of the old testament was entirely made up. We spent a lot of time reading the creation myths from other religions and cultures and comparing them to the one in the Old Testament.

Oh yeah. An entry essay for my Theology Degree was 'The Flood Epic in Religion'. It was a lot of fun!

Ancient cultures borrowing and building on older myths is something that I can believe

Love Dr. Josh & Emma!!!!❤

great conversation Emma, thx

I've wasted a whole decade not learning Sumerian.

41:50 The "eye opening experience" Dr. Bowen gave those evangelical Christians would have, at certain times in the past, gotten him burnt at the stake. This is why this stuff matters.

i love love love your interview videos like these. i hardly have the means to dedicate to the full courses and books, usually, but these are so informative and point me right towards resources if i want them. thank you!

What a lovely discussion, Dr Bowen is a treat ☺

the parallels from most of the bible and the actually history of mesopotamia to the genocide today in palestine is just - it’s horrifying that thousands of years have past and humans are still doing the same horrific shit in the name of a God that they claim loves everyone.

Rainbow Baphy and I are loving this video! I LOVE his books, too!

It's awesome you're posting more often. You're my favorite commentary to watch on the tube. Keep up the awesome stuff!

Regarding _"all goes back to the tower of Babel"_ - including the Inca, the Aztecs, the Polynesians, the Japanese and the original inhabitants of Australia??? 😂

You made my Saturday! I've been looking for more... diplomatic ways to make this point.

Really appreciated this interview. Highly recommended his books

Great show. I love dr josh Bowen ! He has RU-vid lessons on how to read Sumerian!

thank you Emma for bringing such a fascinating guest on board!

When I was a kid and my mum was a devout Catholic, one of the many pamphlets she had accumulated was called "Spirit of Truth/Spirit of Error". In it was a short list of various religions and other Christian denominations, with reasons why they were wrong (citing specific differences to Catholic beliefs). At the time - mostly because I was a kid born into Catholicism - this viewpoint seemed completely reasonable; we're right and everyone else is wrong. I'm glad to say that, when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I'm an atheist and was raised by atheists, but this is the kind of thing that I'm really interested in when it comes to religion. I liked studying this kind of history, culture and mythology around religion when I was in university.

I read Gilgamesh when I was in college and was surprised to see that there was another great flood story. By that time I had already deconverted but it was still interesting to see that the Bible isn't the only text that tells a story of a great flood.

Using the Bible as a guide to understanding how the world works is ridiculous 😂

This was a great intro do the subject! It's what we learned in late antiquity classes at the university. It was fascinating. I'm so glad people are showing interest in these themes. What I don't understand is the apologetics.

Having both Josh and Emma in the same video is an unexpected but welcome convergence of my RU-vid viewing habits.

As a child who believed in Jesus I was very upset with the flood story. If people were evil; why kill all the animals? Why kill all the trees? Why kill babies?

31:17 - and it’s not even that one person’s interpretation most of the time; it’s their interpretation of what someone else’s interpretation of what another person decided was yet another person’s interpretation is. (And that before we factor in translations, editing, etc into this chain).

Omg I had been looking for a good resource covering this because I can’t find where I first read up on this topic, and up pops this video! THANK YOU!

Josh Bowen is an excellent scholar. Thanks Emma!

Bible literalists are like Constitution originalist: The text clearly states what they want it to say. And the are using their holy text as a shield against criticism.

There is an individual at my work that I have conversations/debates about different items in the Bible. One item they will NEVER drop is that they say all rules we have today about not killing/harming others and how we should treat others is from the Bible. They make it out to be that no one would have ever figured that it's wrong to harm others if it wasn't in the commandments first....WoW.

The whole web of what Hebrew mythology evolved from (including the pillager origins of Yahweh) and where they stole various story elements from is always an intriguing rabbit hole to go down.

Enjoyed this interview very much. ☺

Fantastic interview, and very eye opening. Thank you, Emma.

Loved this convo. Thanks, Emma 😊

In an hour you pulled nearly 2,000 viewers. I love your channel, but this is freaking amazing!!

Thank you for this summary. As a church leader I have just this last month given our folk a handout talking about Genesis being written or edited in Exilic time and introduced to alternative views of the early chapters. I find so much more depth in exploring what the writer/editor is trying to tell us, and what that might mean to the early readers beyond the surface story. Jesus is recorded to have said 'you heard it said, but I say...' I think of the writers taking stories already around and effectively saying the same thing as they add a new spin to talk of their God.

thank you so much for hosting this discussion... i haven't heard this sort of dialogue for decades

Is that Emma crushing on Dr Josh?? So entertaining and educational, many thanks.

The Umma story made me think of the way Putin is gaslighting the Russians, and the world, as to why he had to invade Ukraine. “They are wicked, I had no choice but to invade them.”

'Goddamnit Connla..' perfect ending for this video..

I recall a philosophy class in early college where we touched on the similarities to Jesus and other religious figures. At the time I had already considered myself non religious, but those kinds of studies very quickly made any belief in christianity plummet.

Great video. I think Emma and her guest gave a great very understandable presentation

Holy shit i can't believe i wasn't subscribed to emma, I've been watching her stuff for months!

When I found put how many mythological figures died, rose 3 days later, then ascended into heaven. I was stunned to see that the bible version was basically crappy fan fiction

Thank you Emma, and Dr. Bowen for doing this. It was wonderful, and just what I needed this afternoon ❤

Your visual reads well on the camera. I dig it. The knowledge and personally is the winner.

You say this about Eminem, but remember when Vanilla Ice tried to argue he didn't? Maybe Tiamat's blood evaporates quickly and thus could visibly blow around? I am still glad that during a church 'question period' I asked about different religions having the same flood myth and wasn't run out of town, but the pastor handled the question well (that you'd have to expect commonalities with the Bible all over the place, even the weirdest of places, because the Bible is truth was kinda the core of the argument, I think I was 8, so maybe imperfect memory?), so I was comforted.

Thank you, thank you. I find that the older I get, the shorter my attention span gets. This was perfect.

Fantastic conversation. More along this vein please.

Wow I really enjoyed this. I wasn’t expecting to find Dr. Josh so likable- informed, reasonable, having well thought through arguments, yes. But likable? That’s something different. I lost it when he said “Miss me with that shit!” So down to earth!

And he does a pretty good impression of kent hovind.

Bow Ties and Fez's are cool, just ask the Doctor!

great conversation, thank you!

Thank you Emma for exposing us to the brilliant Dr. Brown.

I always thought Genesis sounded like other mythology.

Dr. Josh knows what's up. Bowties are cool.

Wonderful interview! Like a dummy though I was halfway through it before I realized that Dr. Josh was Megan's Dr. Josh!😲😂🥰

Josh is great, isn't he? I have seen him quite a bit in the last decade. He's a very well respected scholar and author. He really knows his shit, and never shows bias to emotions or presuppositions... He doesn't only know how to read and write at least one (I think more than one though) ancient languages, but also understands their relations to adjacent languages, and how they developed and merged and also grew apart, which involves geology and all sorts too, as well as how words were and were not used for the sheer vast amount of literature he has studied, and so can spot a bad or nefarious translation with ease, and many an apologist has been caught by him using interpretations that are way off, but serve their agenda. Those exist in the bible too, when scribes used words that fit one of two definitions of a word in another language, but used the wrong one of the two definitions and similar, and with each translation to another language or other version via some interpreter, all with their own personal belief based agenda and lack of understanding the language in enough detail, and now you got many different versions of the bible, some with quite large differences, all proclaiming to be, and believed to be true! It doesn't work like that! Nothing works like that!! The apologist rarely if ever cares what's true, but only about that which serves their agenda: LYING FOR GOD!!

It is never too late to learn things

Love Emma’s shirt

I would be interested in a debate between Dr. Josh and Dr. Gavin Ortlund. He is a very educated Christian apologist. It would be cool if we can make that happen

Excellent interview! Going to check out Dr. Josh.

I teach about this in my History 5A class.

Love you and your videos Emma, I am not in this head space right now. Comment for the ALGORITHM! and more jak 2

This is SUCH a great discussion and watch Emma! Dr Josh is so well spoken and had so many great analogies to aid his concepts and honestly, I was just blown away. Your questions were also very well thought out and the pacing was great. Would love love love to see you have him on again for similar topics

Think about this, please. In addition to many species which are housed in the Farlow Herbarium, located at the Harvard University Herbaria, Wolfe spent months tracking rare species in far-flung locations like London and Hawaii. After extracting DNA from the samples, Wolfe used the genetic codes of four different genes to determine how the various species are related to one another. He then used a process called ancestral state reconstruction to show that the mushrooms have switched from being decomposers to being symbiotic with trees only once in their evolutionary history. Once the mushrooms switched to this new symbiotic lifestyle, they didn't go back to their free-living past. Ultimately, Pringle said, the paper highlights one reason she finds such symbiotic partnerships "intrinsically interesting" -- for all their apparent benefits, the cost can be high. "I think the really interesting thing is this idea that once you become symbiotic, some of your machinery is lost," she said. "It seems like a dead end in some ways -- you have to make this change to enter this niche, but once you're there, you can't go back -- you've lost the capacity to be free-living." Arguably the most widely-recognized group of mushrooms in the world, Amanita mushrooms have appeared in popular culture ranging from Fantasia to the Super Mario Brothers video games. Though it includes a number of edible species, such as the Amanita caesarea, the group is probably best known for its many toxic species, including the death-cap mushroom. Armed with their family tree, Pringle and Wolfe were able to determine that Amanita evolution has largely been away from species that help decompose organic material and toward those that live symbiotically on trees and their roots. More interestingly, they found that the transition came at a steep price -- the loss of the genes associated with breaking down cellulose. "There had been earlier suggestions that this type of gene loss might be taking place, but our study is the first precise test of that hypothesis," Pringle said. "The idea makes sense -- if you're going to actively form a cooperative relationship with a tree, you probably shouldn't simultaneously be trying to break it apart and eat it. But it's a very tricky dance to form these kinds of tight, cooperative interactions, and I think this work shows there is a cost associated with that. You have to change, you have to commit, and it can become a sort of gilded cage -- these mushrooms are very successful, but they're stuck where they are." Harvard researchers are unlocking the evolutionary secrets of one of the world's most recognizable groups of mushrooms, and to do it, they're using one of the most comprehensive fungal "family trees" ever created. As reported in paper published July 18 in PLoS ONE, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Anne Pringle and Ben Wolfe, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in FAS Center for Systems Biology, studied the genetics of more 100 species of Amanita mushrooms -- about one-sixth of the genus' total diversity -- to create an elaborate phylogeny showing how each species is related to one another. New research finds that Amanita mushrooms' evolution has largely been away from species that help decompose organic material and toward those that live symbiotically on trees and their roots. More interestingly, scientists found that the transition came at a steep price -- the loss of the genes associated with breaking down cellulose.

Emma you made my Saturday not allowed to share at church so ! You go girl !!😊😊

Yay Josh Bowen.

Loved it! You are a most intellectual and precious 🦆! ❤

Thank you, Josh is great. 1. I don't remember the word Apologetist being used until on YT three years ago. 2. It sounds more like a connation, negative. The root is apology, trying to make things better after a wrong. 3. I was raised Catholic and went to 12 years of Catholics. 4. Catholicism is not obsessed with proving and disproving doctrine. 5. I was taught that the OT are just stories. One's main goals should be being moral and caring for others. 6. Christianity is not the only way to be in union with God. It's the better and easier way. Catholicism is better still. 7. We were taught about Evolution and the Big Bang. 8. I never heard shunning or excommunicate in a religious context, either, before on YT three years ago. 9. I sure do now. The ex followers of all faiths together should start a church for tax purposes. Your convictions are just as valid. To me, your convictions are the only logical ones. 10. I still call myself, Catholic. Catholicism doesn't have faith police. One's faith is personal and they are not required to avow it publically to anyone.