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

See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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A man books the small chapel, the one they use when hardly anyone is expected, because his father was a fitter and turner who never ran anything and never won anything. Then people start arriving, and they keep arriving, until they're standing along the back wall and out into the corridor. A woman in her seventies takes his hand and tells him his father mowed her lawn every fortnight for eleven years after her husband died, and never mentioned it to anybody. That night he rings a friend and says, I had no idea who my father was.

In this episode, Graham explores manhood and the one question beneath all the noise on the subject: what a man's strength is for, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the biblical answer from the two verbs God gives the first man in Genesis, to serve and to guard, through Lamech turning strength into a threat and David sparing a sleeping king, to Jesus settling the question of his own power in the desert before performing a single miracle, to the towel and basin on the last night of his life, and to Peter restored beside a charcoal fire. He engages with voices like Augustine on the lust to dominate, Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the man for others, Aelred of Rievaulx on friendship between men, and the chivalric and futuwwa traditions, alongside the research of Richard Reeves on boys and men, Niobe Way on the friendships boys bury in adolescence, and Terrence Real on how male depression hides itself. He looks honestly at the numbers on male suicide, loneliness, and help-seeking, at the two stories on offer to young men and why both fail, and at practices from Men's Sheds to men's fellowships in African and Latin American churches. And he asks what your strength actually is, who it's currently pointed at, and what it would take to redirect it this week.

Book recommendations:

"Of Boys and Men" by Richard V. Reeves, "Letters and Papers from Prison" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and (forthcoming) "What Your Strength Is For" by Graham Joseph Hill.

If you're struggling, please reach out.

In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, MensLine Australia on 1300 78 99 78, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, and 13YARN on 13 92 76 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners. For alcohol or other drugs, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is 1800 250 015.

In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line, or call 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.

If your life is in immediate danger, call 000 in Australia or 911 in the United States. Wherever you're listening, please find your local service and talk to your doctor or someone you trust.

Podcast links:

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A Roman denarius is small and silver and warm from someone's pocket, and stamped on it is the face of Tiberius with an inscription calling him the son of the divine Augustus and the greatest high priest of the world. In Mark's Gospel, religious leaders and political operatives who ordinarily can't stand each other come together for one afternoon with a single goal: to destroy a carpenter's son with a question about taxes. Say yes and you've sold out your people to the occupying army. Say no, and there's a Roman soldier close enough to hear you. And Jesus says, bring me a coin, whose image is this?

In this episode, Graham explores church and state, political loyalty, and how Christians can be good citizens without handing their souls to a party, a president, or a flag, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the biblical argument from Israel demanding a king in 1 Samuel and the limits Deuteronomy placed on royal power, to Daniel serving an empire while refusing to bow and Jeremiah telling exiles to seek the good of Babylon, to Romans 13 and Revelation 13 sitting side by side with the state as God's servant and the state as a beast, to Jesus standing before Pilate and telling a governor where his authority came from. He engages with voices like Augustine, Thomas Helwys, Abraham Kuyper, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King Jr., alongside the research of Lilliana Mason on political identity, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry on Christian nationalism, and Robert Putnam on the hollowing out of civic life. He draws examples from Rome and Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa and the black church in the United States, Leipzig in 1989 and Manila in 1986, and from Nigeria, India, China, Brazil, Britain, and Australia today. And he asks what Caesar can rightly claim from us, where those claims stop, and what it costs a church when politics stops being a subject and starts being a religion.

Book recommendations: "A Public Faith" by Miroslav Volf, "Resident Aliens" by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, "Mission Between the Times" by C. René Padilla, and "Kingdom or Empire?" by Graham Joseph Hill.

See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800