Dr. Dylan Johnson

And we actually have plenty of parallels from the ancient areas.

And we can just start from the very beginning with the formation of man, from the dust and the breath of life being breathed into him.

We have texts from ancient Mesopotamia dating back to the early second millennium and even older ones.

that talk about the creation of humanity from clay.

So in the same kind of idea, a potter fashioning some kind of a ceramic figurine.

And there we don't have the breath of life.

There we have the killing of a god and using the blood of that slain god to animate the human body.

This is in the story called Atrahasis.

This is a very old creation myth from Babylon dating probably around 1800 BCE.

So it would have been known, retold, incorporated to other creation myths like the Enuma Elish, which is about a thousand years later.

So that story there has so many parallels to what's going on in the Eden narrative.

First off, we have two generations of gods.

one older generation who's in charge, and these other gods who have to toil.

They have to do the work.

And in fact, the story begins when gods were men.

And what did they do?

They dug canals because they're Mesopotamians.

They dig canals.

And the canals they dug, though, are much bigger.

And their canals were the river Euphrates and the river Tigris.