Red Thread Podcast Episode 2: Mesopotamian Soil

City Life Church Luton

If you want to understand a culture you have to understand its stories. What culture and what stories stand behind the text of Scripture as we have it? When we watch a film or read a book there will often be nods and references to other films or books. Getting these nods helps us/can be essential to get what’s going on. The same is true with the Bible. This episode, Neil talks to Roxanna about some of the older Mesopotamian myths we can hear the echoes of in our reading of the Hebrew Bible. Talking about the myths and stories of ancient Mesopotamia and a few other places where the biblical writers drew their stories from, they show a few places where the echoes are very clear, and what the Hebrew theologians do with them.

Things we mentioned that you might want to look up:

• Mesopotamia - Modern-day Iraq

• The Epic of Gilgamesh - A poem from ancient Mesopotamia, about a king called Gilgamesh. He and his friend Enkidu go on adventures, and when Enkidu dies Gilgamesh goes out to seek the secret of eternal life. This leads him to travel to meet Utnapishtim (spelled various ways) who tells him the story of when he survived the great flood. The poem is available in Penguin Classics and in other places (if you read it you’ll get the details better than from my telling).

• Cuneiform - the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. Written on clay tablets.

• Rob Bell - writer and speaker on biblical and theological themes.

• Greco-Roman myth - the myths and stories coming out of ancient Greece and Rome.

• Norse myth - the myths and stories coming out of Scandinavia. We have records of them going back to the middle ages but they are definitely older than that.

• Metanarrative - a big picture story we fit our lives into. For example, that the society is constantly progressing.

• The Exile - when the Israelites were forcibly removed from the land of Israel/Palestine and taken to Babylon

• Canaanites - the people who lived in Palestine before the Israelites, or the people from whom the Israelites are descended (people differ on this point). They had their own culture and religion, we have recently found some of their written works (available here for instance)

• Deuteronomistic History - the books of the Bible from Judges to 2 Kings. Many now see this sequence as the work of one master editor who put them all together, though using earlier materials.

• Martin Noth - German biblical scholar who, among many other things, came up with the idea that the Deuteronomistic History was one continuous work.

• Frozen - a Disney movie, children quite like it.