Dr. Dylan Johnson

So there, exactly as you see in the Eden narrative too,

This connection between wisdom is a characteristic shared by the divine and humanity, and it's that immortality, that missing out on immortality that keeps us distinct.

So again, all of these ideas are in circulation.

These are why I really think this text is pre-exilic, because all of the texts I'm talking about are second millennium and continue to be copied into the first.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And it's not that all the themes map onto one single text.

So it's not that we can just say, oh, they read Adapa in the south wind and then they wrote Genesis.

No, no.

They're aware of these themes in Gilgamesh, in Atrahasis, in

Adapa and the South Wind, and probably thought of all of them as their own stories because there were Israelite creation myths.

Plural, probably.

I mean, we have two.

So again, it's a natural tendency when we see these parallels to assume direct relationships, but just think in terms of more, these are the kinds of themes and knowledges that would have been circulating for centuries in the area.

This is a matter of considerable debate.

And it comes down to the two expressions of God and the snake.

Because in the onset of the story, what God tells the man and the woman is that if you take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die.

You will die.

Tamut in Hebrew, which is actually the way that you express the death sentence in biblical legal texts.

usually in the third person, he will surely be killed or he will surely die.