Irving Finkel

So I think that what happened was...

It's a complex thing, but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew, but they also spoke Aramaic, right?

The two languages, their sister languages.

And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic.

And they all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin.

And when all these refugees from Jerusalem were milling around in Babylonia,

they would have intermarried and disappeared within no time at all.

And the authorities who were there prevented this by drawing up a kind of charter of their history, explaining things from the beginning of time up until now, how it happened and what happened, and it was all intentional.

So that is, in my opinion, the driving force behind the Hebrew text.

And the thing about it is that they didn't have, in Jewish philosophical tradition, stuff about creation and the beginning of the world.

And they took Babylonian ideas, which they learned when they were there, and they recycled them.

So whereas the Babylonians decided that the gods were going to wipe out the noisy persons, when the Jewish philosophers got this narrative to recycle about the vengeful almighty, he was, in the Old Testament, a very unpleasant and vengeful person.

It was because of sin.

It wasn't because of racket and playing the radio.

It was sin.

So they took one narrative and they recycled it for their own purposes.

That's exactly right.

And something else is this.

Something else is this, right?

You have five days to build the ark or whatever it is.