The Chaos Dragon is a symbol repeatedly employed by the authors of the Bible to talk about the

spiritual evil that corrupts God's good creation. The dragon features in all three of the

big prophetic scrolls, that is Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Last week, we looked at the dragon

in Isaiah, and this week, we turned to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. For both, Jeremiah and Ezekiel,

the same basic idea that we saw in Isaiah as a play, that Yahweh is going to hand his

covenant people over to the consequences of their centuries of faithlessness and hand them over

to the power of Babylon. But God will hold Babylon itself accountable for its evils,

even if it allowed Babylon's evil to be an agent of divine judgment.

Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel lived through the Babylonian captivity, and at that point in history,

the only other nation powerful enough to rival Babylon was Egypt. So you can imagine that both

Babylon and Egypt featured prominently in Jeremiah and Ezekiel's writings, and perhaps unsurprisingly

at this point, the prophets called them Chaos Dragons. Both their rise to power and their fall

from power is just going to bring disorder death in chaos. Biblical authors use cosmic imagery

to describe that. For modern readers, it feels strange to talk about a nation in such cosmic terms.

And it also feels strange to talk about the collapse of a nation as the end of the world.

So why do Biblical authors think this way? Well, they have this view of reality that there are

forces at work animating behind these human power structures that are also agents of death and chaos

alongside these humans. Today, Tim McE and I talk about the Chaos Dragon and the scrolls of Jeremiah

and Ezekiel. I'm John Collins and you're listening to Bible Project Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Here we go.

Okay, Tim. John, hello. Hello. Yeah. Man, this has been hard for me for some reason. This will theme

of the dragon, but very interesting. And we're just going to keep plowing forward

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