William Durand-Poor

The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God.

When the sun rises, they withdraw and lie down in their dens.

So quite a lot of, especially the stuff about lions.

Which, of course, makes sense in any culture, any period of time.

You have influence of different things coming in, different people carrying their texts.

We know about that.

We've compared them to Riveta biscuits, or rather our wonderful producer Anushka came up with this analogy, which has now spawned a million memes on the internet.

But anyway.

what you might call the common culture compost of the region.

It's the area that's giving sustenance to the writers of the Bible when they're beginning to put the stuff together and edit what they've already got in the oral tradition.

Exactly.

Influenced by everyone.

So what's left of poor old Sigmund Freud dying in Hampstead, fleeing the Nazis, sitting in London, the Second World War about to break out, all this sort of stuff.

What's left of his thesis?

A little bit.

A little bit.

A direction of travel.

You've got a picture of them in your wonderful book.

The Book of Numbers in the Old Testament.

With a kind of weird face, yeah.