Hey, this is Dan Gummel, one of the editors of Bible Project.

And real quick, before we start today's episode, we wanted to let you know that at the beginning,

Tim John and Karissa have a quick and interesting conversation about Christopher Nolan's new film,

Tenant. They make some analogies to the way that that film works and how the Hebrew Bible works.

So if you're a film buff or you really enjoy Nolan's work, well, you'll probably enjoy this conversation.

At the same time, if you haven't seen the movie Tenant yet, and you want to,

well, I'm not saying that this is a spoiler alert, but I'm also not not saying that this is a spoiler alert.

The conversation is in the first part of the show and it will be over before the 15-minute mark.

Okay, here's our episode. Enjoy.

The Bible wants to explain the world to us. It wants to reveal to us the meaning of life.

It's doing theology. It's doing rigorous reflection on the ultimate questions about who God is,

who we are, what are the problems with humans? What are the possible solutions for our problems?

What's God doing about it, if anything? Like that's what it's about.

But the Bible doesn't do this like a reference book, like a theology dictionary.

It does it slowly with stories and poems that all taken together develop themes that invite us

into deep reflection. In fact, you might be reading the Bible and think, huh, this story is a lot

like that other story. Where these details, they seem really familiar. Like, did I read something

kind of like this before?

Biblical stories work in this way where later stories are modeled on, replay, and intensify

earlier stories, and it keeps building. A feature of biblical literature is that it's meant to be

meditated on. It asks of us to slow down. Compare, contrast, consider, and slowly, it reveals to you

its meaning. You would only get this when you're reading these texts backwards and forwards and

...