Dr. Dylan Johnson

The only story we have is Utnapishtim from Gilgamesh, the one human being who gains immortality.

But there it's a problem again, because the problem was the God had prescribed all humanity must die.

And either he's a liar or he makes the only living human into a God.

And therefore he wasn't wrong.

So again, I think a lot of these stories have to do with these boundaries between mortality and immortality, between being human and being divine.

And you'll notice sin has not factored into any of the discussion up to this point, because I don't think it's about that.

Yeah, I think one thing, and this is what I try to emphasize in a book I've recently written on law giving, so it has nothing to do with divinity.

Well, it has a little bit to do with Adam and Eve.

I talk about the Eden story.

It has to do with the fact that when we think about divinity, we often think really in terms of this binary, either you're divine, i.e.

immortal, or you're not divine and then mortal.

But in the ancient Near East, including ancient Israel and Judah, divinity was a spectrum.

So you could exist kind of along the lines of the spectrum between mortal and between a god, especially when we talk about kings and

Kings, we have actually several creation stories from Mesopotamia where humanity is created to toil, to dig the canals.

Kings are created separately.

So in certain respects, they're not gods because the gods create them, but they're not human beings.

And usually they're created either to provision the temples or to render justice.

That's what my book was about, rendering justice.

So not only is divinity more of a spectrum, it also can be somewhat ephemeral.

You can move in and out of divinity.