Literature and history

history. come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 18, the 613 Commandments.

You've heard thou shalt not kill? You've heard thou shalt have no other gods before me.

You've heard thou shalt not steal. But have you heard that you can't come to church if your testicles are crushed or that

it is a sin to eat vultures? Were you aware of the fact that anyone who works on Saturday, even if he's just picking up sticks, must

be murdered immediately.

Do you know the correct means of selling your daughter into slavery?

Do you know whether or not it's okay to eat an eagle? What about a seagull?

This is important stuff, important enough to have been printed and bound in a billion

books. And we're going to explore all of it today.

Last time we covered the entire narrative portion of the first five books of the Bible

or the Pentecuke. And after hearing the great story of

Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel, and Joseph, we discussed the Mesopotamian and ancient

Egyptian religious traditions that may have influenced the writing of the pentatuke.

After taking these traditions and the biblical names of God into careful consideration,

we considered how the notoriously fickle God of God of the

of the old testament may have been a fusion of sleepy old L, a patriarchal

deity indigenous to Canaan, and Bellicose young Yahwe, a thunder god possibly from

the trans-jordan desert, a fusion worked out by generations of oral legends and scribes who

sat down, rearranged, and fine tuned the Bible's first

...