People get confused by God not doing anything on day seven, but resting.

And as it turns out, resting is the most important part of creation because if creation

in Genesis 1 is not about physical construction or physical organization, but rather God

creating by distinguishing and naming and assigning functions, that is why deities in the ancient Near East, they only rest in temples.

And they only rest in temples when things are going well.

Yeah.

Ezekiel has a vision of God leaving the Israelite temple.

And that is why destruction happens and creation reverts.

So there is all this stuff under the surface that is really, really different than what

we tend to think that I find fascinating and useful and it's really good for undermining science-religion

conflict.

Hello. Hello and welcome back to Fairs Come Follow Me Old Testament Year.

I am Jennifer Roach-Lease and I am so excited today to have Dr. Ben Spackman joining us.

Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.

And we are going to talk about Genesis 1 and 2.

Yes. Ben, I was talking with you earlier and asking like, what is your, what is actually your title? What is it that you do? And I think you gave me historian of science, religion, and biblical interpretation. Yeah, I work at the intersection of those three things. I started off doing pre-med and linguistics with Greek and Hebrew,

but I graduated in Near Eastern Studies, did not go to medical school,

did six years at the University of Chicago in essentially Old Testament languages and literature,

plus four years of Arabic.

They didn't think I could cite read Babylonian well enough,

so I left with my master's degree after six years. Slacker. And I'd been teaching a lot of

institute, and I was very interested in the early chapters of Genesis and how they had come to

...