It's November 1872, in a back room of the British Museum. A man named George Smith, who left school at fourteen and taught himself cuneiform in his lunch breaks, is bent over a clay tablet dug out of the ruins of Nineveh. He starts to read a story about a man told to build a boat, who loads it with his family and living creatures of every kind, who survives a flood, and who sends out birds to see whether the waters have gone down. The story goes that he leapt up, ran about the room, and started tearing off his clothes. A flood story older than Genesis.

In this episode, Graham takes the first eleven chapters of Genesis and asks what kind of book this is and what it's actually telling us. He walks the whole shape of the primeval history, from the seven days and the image of God, through the garden and the first murder, to the flood, the Table of Nations, and Babel, and shows how each act of judgement in these chapters comes with a token of mercy attached. He sets Genesis beside the Babylonian texts it shares a world with, Enuma Elish and Atrahasis, where the world is made from a dead goddess and humans exist as the gods' labour force, and lets the differences make the argument. He engages with voices like Origen, Augustine, Ephrem the Syrian, Rashi, Gordon Wenham, and John Walton, alongside the disputes that actually divide readers today, on authorship and the documentary hypothesis, the genre of the seven days, the historical Adam, and the extent of the flood, with the strongest form of each position given fairly. He faces the hardest material directly, including the flood itself and the curse of Canaan, a passage used for four centuries to justify slavery and apartheid. And he gives a four-week plan for reading these eleven chapters yourself, and asks what it means that every person you'll ever meet carries the image of God.

This is the first in a monthly series on the podcast taking a whole book of the Bible at a time. Once a month I set the headlines aside and we read one book properly, from its own world outward. If you'd like to go through Scripture this way day by day, the companion devotional series, Dwelling in God's Word, walks book by book from Genesis to Revelation, and you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHWR9FRX

Book recommendations:

"Genesis" by Tremper Longman III, "Genesis 1-15" by Gordon J. Wenham, and "The Lost World of Genesis One" by John H. Walton.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

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