My view is that the Greeks and really all the pagans are remembering an original story, and then they're perverting it for their own purposes. And it makes perfect sense because if Zeus is the god of the Greeks and then of the Romans, he's going to bill himself as the hero of the story, not as the villain of the story. So what would you do if you know that you actually are the villain of the story? I mean, goodness, we're seeing this play out every single day in politics, that people lie about literally what they are and what they're doing to our faces, you know? So what happens if Zeus is recasting himself almost as an Adam figure who's marrying the woman in the garden and eating the apple is a good thing. And there's that serpent over there and I have nothing to do with that. I'm just the good guy who's getting married here. Oh, and by the way, you know, a few thousand years from now, I'm gonna crush this whole rebellion that takes place with the Watchers, when I destroy my father, Kronos, and then I, as the Olympian, ascend to power and become the chief of the gods because I am benevolent Zeus. That makes a lot of sense to me all of a sudden. The history of our Earth is so different from what we can imagine. The Smithsonian, if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right, it busts the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen church. And the problem with the modern-day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop that's just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Hermon event. Welcome to the glory of the preacher. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. welcome back blurry creatures another round you know we're going to retire with our calculators to the nerdery because we are excited we got the we got the best brains in the house we're going down seven heads of the hydra with dr judd burton doug van doorn two legends in this space thanks guys for coming on again two heads the hydra look at that seven heads seven heads are better than one yeah seems like I just saw you guys yeah dude I'm proud of you Nate let me just say this because you started off the intro with a movie quote and it's not one of your go-to movies you quoted Tommy Boy yeah well done sir yeah wasn't Lord of the Rings yeah wasn't Bueller I'm growing up so I married an axe murderer I feel good I just spent an hour with no like just in shorts hauling crap to the curb for the garbage men so I had a good hour of sunning I feel great You look really good. You have a nice red tone to you. Well, gentlemen, many heads are better than one, but not always, right? Especially when a sea monster comes out of the abyss. Where do we start? Where do we start? Go for it, Judd. You know, I was thinking about this, guys, as I step on him after I say to go for it. It's great. I like to snipe Nate, too. I don't know how this happened, but I talk about myths all the time on your show, and I really never even used to really like mythology. It was only really once I discovered Heiser that, and I started kind of having to think through some of these supernatural things. And I started recognizing how important myth is to trying to understand the biblical storyline that I even started, you know, looking into any of these things. So it's kind of weird. I don't know how this ended up happening to me. Proud of you. Probably hanging out with Judd too much. It's a journey. Yeah, probably so. Myth is catchy. It's contagious. So where do we start this one out? Jesus talks about the fall of Satan, and I saw Satan fall like lightning. People ask me that question all the time that we've talked about before, that I think that that fall happened at the transfiguration and not at the beginning of time. And the way that I've used to describe it is actually the heads of a hydra. So you can cut off one head, but there's six more. It's just kind of an illustration of this figure that we talk about as Satan, Zeus, Baal, the dragon. It's like he shows up at the beginning of the Bible. He shows up at the end of the Bible. And when Judd made his post a couple of weeks ago that said like there's a tremor in the force and all these people responded to it. we were actually talking about this very topic of like, how can you have this character that is like so important in the new Testament? He's kind of the chief enemy of our faith. Yeah. But it seems like he doesn't show up at all on the old Testament. And then you realize that, well, what happens if he's actually bail and they're the same entity and you go, okay, well maybe he is there in the old Testament, but bail's not really called the serpent, but yet you have the serpent who's there in the garden of Eden. And then if you recognize that he's Zeus, then you start thinking about Greek myth and how Zeus doesn't really play a part in the stories of the myth very much until after he overthrows his father, Kronos. And in the parallel, I think Judd would agree with this, that the parallel with Kronos is that he's one of the watchers in the Bible. So he's Shemiyaza in the Enoch story. And so that would put kind of the fall of the Titan Kronos at the flood story. And here you have in the Bible, this serpent figure who we're identifying as Satan. And the New Testament does that, which we have lots of reasons to identify with Zeus. And so you go, how can that be? How can this figure be all these places in these stories And what happens if he shows up as Baal in the Ugaritic stories but what happens if they fighting the chaos monster in something like Ezekiel where he's prophesying against Egypt? And now all of a sudden you go, well, that's kind of the Amin-Ra figure. He's kind of the equivalent of Zeus down in Egypt. So how can this be? So that's kind of what we were talking about. We thought, well, it might make for an interesting discussion for blurry creatures and so joseph campbell wrote this book called the hero with a thousand faces where he proposed the something called the monomyth and i don't claim to be a devotee of campbell i just think that he he brings up some interesting ideas about comparative mythology but you could you could really kind of look at this the devil is kind of the zero with a thousand artifices because he shows up with all the flair and theatricality of somebody that can immediately change his facade and then even if he does if he shows up as a kind of anthropomorphic god in one place and then shows up as the dragon or the serpent in the other it still makes sense in a comparative mythological frame and certainly a biblical frame because you're looking at a sort of collage of attributes, a solar system of attributes, if you will, with this identity at the very center. So in the case of the Bales or Bell in the Old Testament is associated with, he's the storm god, right? He's the rider on the clouds. You know, he controls the storm and the weather. It's sort of like what I talked about in the WeatherMaker material that I did with you guys. All those attributes are associated historically and mythologically with dragons, the control of weather, the element of water that we'll likely get into in this discussion. And some pretty in-your-face confrontations, particularly in the New Testament, where Jesus is fulfilling these prophecies, particularly Genesis 3.15, about battling the serpent and defeating the serpent. um you know we talked about in one of the episodes about how jesus is is literally defeating the dragon the serpent with every every step he takes particularly in northern israel in galilee and upper galilee the go on and when he walks on the water too on the sea of galilee when he calms the storm all of those are part of those those attributes that solar system of attributes that I've referred to, that even if there's some slight trickery, which shouldn't, maybe not so slight trickery in some cases, but none of that should surprise us given the nature of the devil. And stepping into it, it's murky water, but the more you flesh these ideas out, the more it begins to make sense and you begin to see the connective tissue between Old Testament identities of Satan and the New Testament identities of Satan. I like it. So let me ask this then. We start with the oldest book in the Bible in Job. Yeah. You have Satan mentioned there. And one of the things that Mike said is that the idea of the accuser or the idea of Satan is a title, right? So how do we flesh out who is who, if you will, right? Because if there are many Satans, many accusers, how do we zero in on the arch-villain, if you will? Because Jug mentioned the Watchers, and we have these characters that are named in the Enochian tale. Of course, he's absent there, if we're to understand that. And then you get into the mythological stuff we talked about. we talked a bit on the last episode about talking about the bail cycle and all this but if we begin there do you believe we're talking about the same individual there that we will then track through mythology in the old testament into the new testament to the temptation of christ etc or what was funny that you bring that up luke we were just uh just talking about just talking about this an hour ago right kind of trying to figure out where we want to go with the show and And Judd brought up the two titles for Satan, and one of them being Diabolos, the devil. And then the other, of course, being Satan, which is the adversaries. Diabolos is the accuser. And I wondered, I said, does Diabolos ever show up in the Old Testament in the Septuagint? And we both said, I don't know. So went and looked it up and sure enough, the way they translate the Nahash there or the Satan, sorry, in Job 1 is with the Greek, Diabolos. So they actually give him that name that we identify in the New Testament with Satan. That's wild to me. I have never quite understood. Like I get that there's many Satans and that Satan is a, it's actually a function on the divine council. It's an accusatorial function, like a prosecuting attorney on the council. And so you could have different entities at different times that will fulfill that role. But I've never really understood why there's this aversion to saying that the figure that's in Job couldn't be the same figure that we find in the New Testament called Satan. I know that Mike didn't like that. And that really kind of comes from his discipline. The Old Testament scholarship. they don't really like to go there for whatever reason. But I'm a pastor and I like biblical theology and I like letting the New Testament interpret the Old Testament. And it seems to me that when you have so clearly in Revelation, John identifying our chief enemy with those four titles of the dragon and the serpent and Satan and the devil, Diabolos, it like it not just connecting us to the figure in the garden I think it necessarily does that It also connecting us to the dragon of Isaiah 27 one the Leviathan that we talked about It also seems to me though, it has to be connecting us to the figure in Job with the Diabolos. I don't know why that's such a problem for people. So in my opinion, yeah, I think that that is the same figure that we have, even if it is an office. And again, just building on what Doug said, the Hebrew Asetan is the adversary, accuser, and in the New Testament, Diabolos is accusatory, but it can also mean slander. Slander, yeah. We're making the case that it's the same entity, but the legal function changes a little bit, not in terms of the end, but perhaps the means. because in the old testament you've got satan as the accuser but in the new testament after the demonic realm is starting to realize what's happened they're almost they're kind of almost caught off guard in acting in desperation now not only is it you know prosecutorial or accusatorial function, but it's a slandering, it's still a legal issue in terms of divine politics, theopolitics, as Sharon Gilbert would put it, but now it's slander, defaming. So the nuances from the Old Testament to the New Testament are interesting because I think that they may illustrate kind of what's going on in the demonic realm and those two respective worlds. As the God of the nations, of the peoples, the one who's kind of over them, Christians are brought out of that kingdom of darkness, right? So that means that we were born slaves to that kingdom. So Satan kind of had a legal right to accuse us before heaven was thrown before we became believers. And that's what Peter and John are both doing is flipping that and saying that even though he is the accuser of the brothers, he doesn't have the legal authority to do that anymore. What does that practically mean? Well, it means that we need to listen to who we are as Christians. I was just talking about this in Romans yesterday with our church, that we are positionally something as believers that we don't necessarily think experientially is true because we still live in bodies of flesh and sin and we still break God's law and all this. But positionally, as people who are justified by faith in Christ, we are considered something that we're not because of Christ's death. we're considered as not guilty before the throne of heaven. That's a divine counsel kind of an idea. And so Satan, before we become believers and we're adopted as sons of God, we're in his kingdom. You can almost call it, well, Paul calls us sons of disobedience. That's what we were and what unbelievers are. And so he has a legal authority to accuse people, which they then, they believe it. And rightly so. and it leads to despair and all kinds of other things for them. For Christians, when he tries this, our solution to it is to say, you can accuse me all you want and I know that I'm a sinner, but God has forgiven me in the death of his son. And so you don't have that authority and hold on me that you used to, even though that's your very name. And the title that you, the function that you have on the divine council. I was just thinking about something. I don't think I've ever had this thought before, but it probably comes because I've been wondering, like, how do you get in the Bible a Garden of Eden with an entity that I identify as Satan in the New Testament that we call the serpent? but then if cross mythology cross-cultural mythology is is a help at all and i think it is to some degree although that gets into the subversion that we talked about in the other episode that that when pagans tell their stories they're subverting that they're retelling the story after their image if you look at the parallel with greeks they have a garden of hesperides where Zeus marries Hera in the garden and the golden apple is kind of their gift. And there's a serpent that's in that garden. So you've got kind of all the same furniture of our story, but it's told differently. And so it's like in their story, you have Zeus and the serpent as distinct entities. And that's just, it bothers me. Like how, why? So I want you to think about this. Just hit me as I'm thinking about Job. If we say for sake of argument that the character in Job, the Satan, is Satan, the one that we know in the New Testament as that entity. Well, you actually have at the very, very end of the book, the Leviathan, who is the serpent. So they seem to be distinct, don't they? But what if they're not? and what if the whole book is reaching to this great climax of this argument that God is going to give at the very end after all these guys have been giving their arguments and giving their rebuttals about how Job's not really, you know, he's innocent, he's not innocent, all these things. And then finally, God breaks in through the whirlwind and shuts Job's mouth by saying, as the very climax of the entire book, and have you considered Leviathan? That the end of the story Leviathan is the greatest thing God has made And then he says nobody can tame this creature I the only one that has authority over him Okay so what is Leviathan Well Leviathan is the serpent And what I saying is that the serpent is Satan So what happens if what is happening there is that the whole book starts with Satan, and then the book is ironically ending with Satan in a way that switches his identity away from this accusatorial person to chaos, which is really what Leviathan personifies. But God is saying, look, Job, you don't actually know what's behind any of what I've done to you. I'm the one who instigated this. I'm the one who said to the Satan, hey, have you considered my servant Job? And I haven't let you in on any of this. Now, at the very end of the story, I'm gonna tell you about the greatest creature that I have made, which is Leviathan, which, by the way, not that we are told this, but what I'm suggesting is, By the way, that's the guy who made you sick in the first place. And I want you to know that the only one who can control him is me. And then, so now you have, they're being discussed as separate entities, but it's really kind of a literary way of talking about the same entity in a different sort of capacity that basically shuts Job's mouth and he can't say anything. He repents in dust and ashes and God restores him at the end of the book. Then how does that play with what we're talking about with Zeus and Hera? Okay, so what happens if what the Greeks are trying to do is where we have one story. So my view is that the Greeks and really all the pagans are remembering an original story, and then they're perverting it for their own purposes. And it makes perfect sense, because if Zeus is the god of the Greeks and then of the Romans, he's going to bill himself as the hero of the story, not as the villain of the story. So what would you do if you know that you actually are the villain of the story? I mean, goodness, we're seeing this play out every single day in politics. People lie about literally what they are and what they're doing to our faces. So what happens if Zeus is recasting himself almost as an Adam figure who's marrying the woman in the garden and eating the apples is a good thing. And there's that serpent over there and I have nothing to do with that. I'm just the good guy who's getting married here. Oh, and by the way, you know, a few thousand years from now, I'm going to crush this whole rebellion that takes place with the Watchers when I destroy my father, Kronos. And then I, as the Olympian, ascend to power and become the chief of the gods because I am benevolent Zeus. That makes a lot of sense to me all of a sudden. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
