Dr. Dylan Johnson

But they talk a lot about wisdom.

which ironically doesn't make them wisdom literature, at least in the traditional definition of those categories.

What it is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is cosmologies, cosmogonies, stories of creation.

And we kind of set those into a category unto themselves.

And not all creation stories deal with wisdom.

I think that's actually a fairly unique feature of this biblical, of this particular creation story.

But the themes and ideas, these genres are not completely siloed.

There's a lot of overlap.

And so from my perspective, the wisdom theme has more to do with the concept and less to do with a generic category of literature.

Yeah.

Unique, but not without precedent as I'm going to go into.

So

There's quite a few stories, and I think it's good to open the discussion up to just creation stories in general across the ancient Near East, because ultimately that's what this text is.

It's a creation story, and it's a creation story 100% at home in the Near East from its beginning to its end.

And it's a story that really, at its core, I think, tries to define the

the relationship and the difference between humanity and the gods.

Plural is intentional there because the biblical text goes plural.

And the question that it seeks to answer is, what is the difference?

What's the difference between humanity and the gods?

And was there ever a chance that humans could be gods?