You're listening to the ancient tradition.

A Wonk Media production.

Music provided by Joseph McDade.

Here's your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

Welcome to the ancient tradition. I'm your host, Jack Logan.

Welcome to the program. It's great to be with you today. I'm going to just jump right in. You know,

for the last couple of episodes, we've been asking the big question. Where did human beings come from? How did we human beings get here on planet Earth? And to this point, the ancients have

given us a rather consistent account of who created us and the route by which we human beings came into this world.

So we're going to continue our discussion.

In our last episode, we turned to arguably the most well-known account of human origins,

the account found in the Judeo-Christian tradition in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Genesis,

the account of Adam and Eve. I argued in the first part of this series that in order to

properly interpret what's written in Genesis about the origin of human beings that we kind of

needed to go into the weeds. First, we have to understand what's going on in the world when Israelite scribes sat down

and compiled the Book of Genesis as we have it today.

We learned in our last episode that biblical scholars widely agree that the Book of Genesis

was written and compiled during the time of the Babylonian exile,

which dates to around 600 BC. For our purposes, the historical context is important for a couple of

reasons. First, as we demonstrated in part one, the time of the Babylonian exile was a time of great apostasy

among the Israelites, apostasy that was heavily marked by idolatry, the worship of carved

images or statues, idols of foreign gods. And second, this context matters because it was Israelite elites, royal officials, members of the Davidic

royal line, priests serving in the Jerusalem temple, the literate elites, like religious scholars

...