This page contains links to the ten episodes of his podcast that were devoted to the Tanakh, or Old Testament and lists of subsections in the episodes that I found particularly interesting and insightful.
- Episode 15: Canaan. This is the first of ten episodes of this podcast that will be devoted to the Tanakh, or Old Testament, and this program will focus on the history of territories within what is today Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, between about 900 and 500 BCE. Our goal in this program is to learn the basic geography and Ancient Near Eastern history necessary for understanding the earlier books of the Old Testament – the books that stretch from Genesis to Kings. The narrative portions of these earlier books tell two main stories.
- So this was Canaan in 1207 BCE, a beautiful, ecologically diverse strip of seacoast land, the balmy back end of the Mediterranean, a territory with many biomes and many peoples, and not, during the twilight of the Bronze Age, a place that seemed like it would play such a tremendous role in world history.
- Particularly interesting subsections:
- See The Bronze Age Collapse Comes to Canaan.
- See Samaria and the Jezreel Valley, 900-700 BCE. Excavations at northern and southern kingdoms, again, Israel and Judah, respectively, show that they developed on very different timeframes.
- See Northern Immigrants: A Windfall for Judah, 720-700 BCE
- Survey Archaeology and Historicist Scholarship: Newer Approaches to the Bible
- I finished reading on 12/28/2024.
- This podcast is called Literature and History. And our primary objective with the Old Testament, beyond reading its books, is to understand it in the context of Ancient Near Eastern cultural history, especially ancient Jewish history, during the final millennium BCE.
- Discusses the Four Main Parts of the Old Testament
- Particularly interesting subsections:
- See The Flowering of Biblical Archaeology and Scholarship, 1800-Present
- I finished reading on 1/2/2025.
- Part 3 of 10 – Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 17: The Roots of the Pentateuch. In this program, we’re going to cover the narrative, or story portion of the first five books of the Old Testament – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
- In the remainder of this episode, I’m first going to summarize the stories of the Pentateuch. Then, I’m going to talk about some of the literary and religious texts that were circulating around in the Ancient Near East in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages that demonstrate the Pentateuch as part of a greater textual environment, and in some cases, though we’ll never know for certain, might have influenced the Pentateuch.
- See Parallels: Ancient Near Eastern Creation Stories
- See El, Elyon, Elohim, Yahweh, El Shadday, Yahweh Elohim. [VERY INSIGHTFUL]
- You cannot read the Old Testament without noticing that its central figure – God, of course – exhibits many very diverse patterns of behavior. He has many names in Biblical Hebrew.
- The worship of the deity El was pervasive in ancient Canaan, but over the past hundred years, with the translation of what are call the Ugaritic texts, we now have some stories about El that are predate the earliest books of the Bible by centuries.
- El’s name is all over the Old Testament, both in its singular form, El, and its plural form, Elohim. When God reveals the name Yahweh to Moses, if we use the Ancient Hebrew words for God’s names, Exodus tells us, “Elohim spoke to Moses, and he said to him, ‘I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shadday, but by my name Yahweh I was not known to them.”16
- El Shadday means “El of the Mountain,” a reference to a “cosmic mountain” mentioned elsewhere in Ugaritic texts on which El lived and ruled over the other deities of Canaan.17
- The Old Testament is quite frank about God’s multiple names.
- And numerous moments of the Old Testament mention multiple Gods. God is depicted as presiding over assemblies of Gods in 1 Kings 22 and the first chapter of Job. One of the Psalms begins with the words “Elohim has taken his place in the / Assembly of El, / in the midst of the gods he / holds judgment” (Ps 82:1).
- What I’m telling you here is the tip of the iceberg, by the way – book length studies of most the parallels I’m mentioning exist, and footnotes to this episode transcription should get you started if you want to know more. Anyway, if Yahweh is an adapted version of the Canaanite deity El, it is no wonder that early practitioners of the Israelite religion still associated Asherah, El’s wife, with Yahweh.
- While Yahweh has much in common with the Canaanite deity El, he perhaps has even more in common with the Canaanite deity Baal. Let’s talk about Baal, about whom a whole narrative saga has been unearthed from the ancient city of Ugarit.
- See The Pentateuch and the Historical Rise of Monotheism very near the end of this episode.
- The Pentateuch, and Old Testament more generally, is a text that straddles the divide between polytheism and monotheism, between pantheons of diverse personified gods and a singular ascendant god. While its stories offer the narrative of Yahweh and his people, the idiosyncrasies of its text and the milieu out of which it came tell the story of the gradual development, or perhaps the genesis of monotheism itself.
- [Closing text to this subsection] His [God’s] alternations between gentle, sagely wisdom and militant braggadocio, between blessings and unspeakable curses, have puzzled readers for thousands of years. And again, one common answer to his temperamental inconsistencies, made possible by the archaeological discoveries of the past two centuries, has been that the being called El, Elohim, El Shadday, and Yahweh is an amalgamation of diverse theological traditions.
