Hey, this is John at Bible Project, and today Tim and I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. John Walton.

He's an Old Testament scholar and professor who has written extensively on ancient near eastern backgrounds of the creation accounts in the Bible.

And that's what we've been talking about in this cosmology series, and Tim has referenced Dr. Walton's work extensively throughout these discussions.

I was introduced to John Walton with his popular level book, The Lost World of Genesis 1.

It's a really accessible and helpful book for framing up the Genesis 1 creation story.

We're really grateful that Dr. Walton spent some time with us to debrief all these ideas we've been walking through in this cosmology series.

To hear directly from him, to hear some of the new ways that he frames his ideas and some of the new things that he's working on.

Tim begins the interview and you'll hear me jump in a little bit later. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

All right, John Walton. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

It's really great to be in this conversation, Tim.

Yeah. So we're going to talk about the early narratives and Genesis concepts of creation and cosmology, cosmic stuff.

But first let's start with something very practical. But this is really important as we talk about your work.

Tell us some about you. So maybe where you came from, your family origins, your face community origins, and how does a human end up in a career of biblical scholarship, the wonderful world of biblical scholarship.

Well, I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, raised in a Christian home. And so I was introduced to the Bible, to church, to belief and faith from my earliest years.

It really was a fully Christian environment in which I grew up and lived. The result of that was that I was in a family that was very much interested in the Bible.

And as a result, I learned Bible early and thoroughly nothing to do with me. Just that's how I was raised. So even as a kidding grade school, I remember well, you know, the time we spent learning all of the trivia of the old testament, Bible quizzing and all of those things.

So I was immersed in all of that as I grew up in our those positive memories. They sound like they're really positive. Very much so.

And I think it's even because the old testament has so much more trivia than the new testament that that became an early interest of mine.

You know, a good thing for all the wrong reasons, maybe, but that idea of being fully immersed. So I always knew that I loved old testament, but I had no clue that there was a career connected to that.

I thought, you know, if you liked Bible, you would be a pastor or missionary, you know, and that didn't really fit with the things that I was thinking.

But as a result, when I went to college, I majored in economics and accounting. That's because basically the vocational tests told me you should major in economics and accounting and being a compliant child.

That's what I did because I didn't have any other options. And so I went through college with that kind of background. And it really wasn't until the end of my junior year, when you start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and you figure out, this is going to switch from being a major to being a career.

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