Cultural Rivers, Order, and Covenant: Tools For Reading Scripture Well (John Walton) Ep. #222

Dru (00:00)
Okay, so you have famously said in several books, ⁓ something I assume that you teach in your undergraduate classes and graduate classes as well, this idea of streams, like cultures as streams and that the, yes, cultural rivers, sorry, yeah, and the rivers ⁓ don’t.

John Walton (00:13)
cultural rivers,

Dru (00:19)
don’t cross at any point that’s easy for us to just stand in the cross streams and figure out. So what do you mean by this analogy, just for people who don’t know, because we have a lot of lay listeners here, ⁓ of these cultural rivers, and why is that important for your work?

John Walton (00:35)
So I talk about a cultural river as just a ⁓ metaphor to understand all of the different aspects of any given culture that we live in. So our modern United States culture is characterized by certain ways of thinking, whether it’s religion or politics or economics or values or priorities or whatever it might be. And those are all part of our cultural river. So.

know, capitalism, democracy, that is all part of our cultural river. And it sort of gives the shape to the culture. And any given person or group within that culture may like some of those things or may dislike them deeply. But there we are, we’re in the middle of that cultural river. And most of our conversations and our interactions take place with that cultural river as the default backdrop, whether we are opposing it or agreeing with it.

Dru (01:32)
Mm.

John Walton (01:32)
Sometimes

we don’t even realize there are other ways to think in our cultural river. So then when we talk about any other culture, either contemporary or talk about cultures of the past, it’s beneficial for us to try to understand their cultural river. So when we look at ancient Israel or the ancient Near East in general, we can observe that nothing in our cultural river would make any sense to them at all. They wouldn’t understand the words, they wouldn’t understand the concepts.

Dru (01:35)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Walton (02:01)
And so in that sense, we can’t assume that they’re just kind of talking about our cultural river. But likewise, we need to understand their cultural river if we’re going to understand their literature, because all literature is relevant within the cultural river. So cultural river is a good metaphor for trying to understand how cultures differ from one another, whether in a contemporary setting or kind of looking through time.

Dru (02:07)
Right.

Yeah, so when you look at ⁓ something like Genesis, which you’ve written quite a bit about, at least for lay folks, you’ve helped them understand various views on Genesis. Which cultural river do you think it swims mostly in? Is it floating in an Egyptian, an Egypto-Syrian cultural river, a Neo-Babylonian? Which one is the one you think is the most prominent?

John Walton (02:54)
Well, as I look at the larger aspects of cultural river, which, I mean, we can look either on very minor issues or we can look at the big picture. I usually deal with more of big picture. And in that regard, there aren’t huge differences in many areas between Egyptians or Babylonians or Israelites or Hittites or second millennium or first millennium. Certainly, Hammurabi’s Babylon is different from Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon in important ways, but they still share the same larger framework.

Dru (03:18)
Hmm.

John Walton (03:23)
And so in that sense, sure, Egyptians think differently about certain things than Babylonians do, but they’re still working on the same basic paradigm of what the world is and how it works. They might have different views of afterlife, and those are where we can zoom in on smaller issues, and we would want to chart out those differences. Because of course, in a contemporary world of the Ancient Near East,

Every culture is going to have its differences, but still there are lots of ways that they think the same. So when I talk about the Cultural River in the ancient Near East, I’m generally content to talk about that general Cultural River and then make distinctions as we look at more specifics. And that’s pertinent for Israel especially because they were supposed to be different in numerous important ways.

But they still thought about the world in lots of the same ways. For instance, they think in terms of ⁓ corporate community identity rather than individualism. Those are kind of the big things I’m talking about.

Dru (04:26)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

And things like, ⁓ I mean, I’m of the persuasion, I’m not sure where you stand on these things, but I just put out a book on this so you can critique it. ⁓ The idea that Israel followed the way law functions in the ancient Near East more generally, especially in Mesopotamia, they essentially followed the functioning of common law rather than later Roman statutory law. But they also have distinguishing features in their law that look nothing like Mesopotamian law, right? Or they’re doing something very different. Yeah.

John Walton (04:55)
Sure. That’s a great example.

So my book on Lost Word of the Torah does similar things. Their concept of what law is is very similar. The specifics of law may show the differences.

Dru (05:11)
Right. Yeah,

that’s a good way to put it. And later I want to come back to Genesis, ⁓ some of the updates you’ve had in your thinking, I think it’s really telling when scholars kind of ⁓ update or nuance their thinking, their previous written works. But let’s just begin with ⁓ Genesis 1 through 11. ⁓ Genesis, think, is even for later, when I have undergrads read Genesis, and I say, hey,

break up the book however you outline it and break it up however you want. It’s not unusual for students to break it up into three parts or two parts at least Genesis 1 through 11 and the rest or Genesis 1 through 11, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and then Joseph as the third part. ⁓ So I’m interested in how you think Genesis 1 through 11 functions within Genesis. Like how do you see continuity there? Do you see it as a clean break, new start? How do you see that?

John Walton (06:09)
I see some very important continuity, certainly they are of a different quality, but one leads into the other. On this I follow a lot of the research that my son did in his doctoral dissertation. As he talked about the idea that in Genesis 1 through 11 we have God establishing order, that’s the seven day creation account, but then in 2 through 11 we have all of the various ways that people seek order.

seek to establish it, seek to find it, seek to understand it, in all of various ways that are very well known in the ancient Near East. And so they’re looking for scenarios that are order-bringing, such as being like God or dwelling in the divine realm. They’re looking for strategies like agriculture or community. They understand that

They are image bearers and therefore order bringers. But chapter three tells us how they sort of go out on their own to bring their own order for their own agendas and purposes. So I see one through 11 hanging together very well in that pursuit of order, just like Ecclesiastes talks about the pursuit of how to resolve evil. Genesis one through 11 talks about the pursuit of order. And that very, very

Helpfully then dumps into chapter 12 where we find out God’s understanding of what establishes order in the human realm and that’s the covenant and eventually with the Torah but the covenant itself as a relationship between God and people as Offering divine presence eventually with the building of the temple. Those are the order bringing aspects that sort of have God’s stamp of approval on them

And so in that way, one through 11, even though it’s a different literary quality than 12 through 50, its topics move very easily from one section to the other.

Dru (08:17)
Yeah, very different quality. That bringing order sounds superficially very Egyptian, conceptually. The idea that order is paramount for humans.

John Walton (08:27)
Well,

certainly that’s represented in Ma’at, but you also can find it in the Mesopotamian literature very easily. Lots of the serologists now are talking about that sort of thing when they look at big synthesis kinds of pictures. And it carries out in some of the terminology in Akkadian literature as well. We even have the Sumerian piece, Enkeian World Order, that show these elements. And again, in my son’s dissertation, he tracked the

⁓ the terminology all through Egyptian and Hebrew and Akkadian and Sumerian to show that this is sort of on everybody’s minds. That’s one of those issues in the Cultural River. The idea that ⁓ order is sort of of the highest value and therefore the greatest interest whether they’re dealing with the cosmos or dealing with society.

Dru (09:09)
Hmm.

Yeah, and given the, especially for Israel, ⁓ the agrarian subsistence situation, ⁓ order plays a very special role, as it does in the ancient Near East more broadly, but they don’t have wide rivers to feed them water, ⁓ to water their crops with, right? ⁓ Okay, so you see this ⁓ theme of order that can take different linguistic and literary shapes in various cultures and civilizations in the ancient Near East.

Do you see anything specifically in the language that’s used in Genesis 1 through 11 and how that gets used in the rest of the Torah? I mean Genesis 1 through 11 is unique for so many different reasons, but linguistically or literally do you see connections there?

John Walton (10:03)
Well, some of the basic terms that we encounter in Genesis 1 through 11 continue to be important terms as you work through the rest of the Torah, through the rest of the Hebrew Bible. So these are terms that, as English readers, we don’t necessarily identify with order. But once you see order as sort of the ⁓ prime value, you can start to see it. So whether it’s the absence of it with Tohu Vavohu in Genesis 1-2,

It’s the presence of order, tov, it was good, it was good, which has to do with order, not morality or design, and even things that are not good. It’s not good for humans to be alone. That’s an order issue. But also words like shalom and rest, menucha, these are terms in the order spectrum. Even terms like rah, which is often translated evil as

as you know, is less connected with ⁓ morality and more connected with order, because God can do Ra. And so we have terminology like that that helps us to see these issues being carried through. But again, if we’ve not understood them as terms in the order spectrum, we can miss the connections.

Dru (11:09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I often will translate Ra in certain contexts as unraveling, ⁓ where God just lets the consequences flow quite naturally. Yeah. Yeah.

John Walton (11:37)
Yeah, it’s disruptive. It disrupts order

as someone’s trying to do it.

Dru (11:43)
But even something like Ra, which has a very rich, it’s used in many different ways and has a wide spectrum. And unfortunately, for reasons I would probably trace to medieval Europe, we flatten it out and something is either good or evil and twixed in twain, it cannot be in between, ⁓ which is not helpful at all in understanding the text, which then means you have to kind of hide evil in the translations and say, you know, I’ll commit disaster or something like that.

John Walton (12:12)
And that’s because our Western way of thinking maybe goes back to medieval, don’t know, tends to view things through lenses that are connected to a moral spectrum. We always want to sort out good and evil. And in my work and my son John’s as well, we talk about the order spectrum as the basic framework, which is tripartite because it’s non-order, which is just the absence of order, tohu va vohu, and then order, which is an accomplished

Dru (12:21)
Mm-hmm.

John Walton (12:42)
state, and then disorder, which is disruptive of order that already exists. So, and that tripartite spectrum helps considerably in dealing with interpretation of the Bible and ancient New Eastern documents.

Dru (12:46)
Hmm.

Yeah. Do you fear the critique that would obviously go with something like this is when you’re carrying a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if you got the order hammer, you just start seeing it everywhere. How do you differentiate that?

John Walton (13:08)
Well,

again, you just have to be careful to try to make sure you’re not just reading it in. So we want to see how those terms are being used. The same fault flaw is possible with any lenses you use. If you use the moral spectrum, you see everything in moral senses. So there are dominant ways of thinking and terminology often reflects them.

But we try to locate that in the ways that the terms are used contextually. So even things like ch’atat, you know, to say sin, that puts it in the moral spectrum. But we know that the ch’atat offering is for impurity as well, which is not a moral issue. It’s an order issue. So it falls into place pretty easily. It doesn’t have a forced feeling to it, though I’m sure it can be overstated as well.

Dru (13:55)
Great. Right.

Yeah.

Well, and we’re all guilty of thesis-sizing our ideas in places. But ⁓ yeah, and I think the, what I’m always interested is where there’s a lexical and a conceptual overlap, where the language and the concept meet. And then with Hebrew, you always have to make room for the places where there’s the language, but not the concept or vice versa. So, okay, so that’s Genesis one through 11, and that gives you…

John Walton (14:12)
Yeah.

Dru (14:35)
⁓ So let’s walk that out a little bit. So in the patriarchs, what does order look like? Just roughly.

John Walton (14:43)
Well, again, the covenant is now the framework. So that’s God bringing order through initiating a covenant, which is a relationship. And it’s a relationship with prospects connected to it. Those prospects, some of them are worked out in Genesis 12 through 50, others are not so much. Again, presence eventually becomes part of it, but that’s not till the building of the tabernacle, constructing of the tabernacle. So, but we can see that

Dru (14:46)
Okay.

John Walton (15:13)
the covenant is put in place and then as we go through all of the narratives in Genesis 12 through 50, we see that covenant and its prospects as the elements that drive the narratives. Every narrative has to do with covenant. It has to do with either land or family or blessing. It has to do with either those things being established and ⁓ set up in

Dru (15:29)
Hmm.

John Walton (15:42)
against obstacles, or we see obstacles put in place, whether it’s the character of Jacob and Esau, or whether it’s the favoritism, or whether it’s the ⁓ barrenness. These are obstacles to the Covenant, and they are things that work contrary to order. Yet the Covenant marches forward, and order is brought as those obstacles are overcome and the problem is resolved.

Dru (16:10)
⁓ Yeah, so it’s interesting because I think someone could very easily hear the order thesis and think, ⁓ deistic, cold, calculating, something more like Ma’at, but it sounds very relational the way that you’re working it out here. Yeah.

John Walton (16:22)
It is. And

that also differentiates it from how order is sometimes discussed in our modern times. ⁓ Voices like Jordan Peterson, who see order as very destructive and imperialistic and controlling and those sorts of things. That’s not how they’re viewing it. It’s a desirable state in the ancient world. And we carried over that way, too, when we talk about law and order. Yes, we want those things.

Dru (16:49)
Bye.

John Walton (16:52)
We’re not thinking of it in imperialistic terms or those kinds of scenarios.

Dru (16:59)
Now you made a move there that I want to highlight as you went from biblical sense of relational order and then you went straight to Jordan Peterson, which I love because ⁓ he needs as much celebration as critique. ⁓ So do you think there is like a theologically appropriate use of what you see in order in the Torah and turning to today and saying, okay, so these should be some guiding principles or maybe some fences that we put around the field.

⁓ that keep us restrained with thinking about order and life and law and liberty and those things.

John Walton (17:33)
Now, most of the Torah, as we talked about in my Lost Word of Torah, I see as descriptive. That is, it’s showing how order was set up for Israel in their time. It is contingent on the presence of Yahweh because lots of the things have to do with maintaining that presence. It has to do with the ancient world and things that were considered order-bringing in the ancient world. And so in that sense, it’s also contingent on the covenant relationship.

Dru (17:51)
Mm-hmm.

John Walton (18:03)
between Israel and God, which was something unique to them. Nothing else like it that we know in the ancient world, and of course that doesn’t carry over to us. We’re now part of that covenant. So to that extent, we can view the Torah descriptively as showing what order would look like in an Israelite covenant, ancient Near East context. How much that has to do with what order looks like today is another topic entirely and needs to be taken very carefully.

We do not tend to just extract principles and then carry them over as if this principle now carries authority for us because we got it from the Bible. Principles you can make up on your own just as easily.

Dru (18:47)
Right. So when you see Jesus making these moves, which I would take to be not ham-fisted moves, where he takes the Torah, he reaffirms the Torah because he’s part of Israel and he believes it’s meant for him as well. But then ⁓ with the divorce, he doesn’t go back to Moses’ legislation on divorce. He goes back to creation and says, hey, it wasn’t so from the beginning. So like you’re thinking in terms of Moses and what I can do and what I can’t, but

John Walton (18:59)
Mm-hmm.

Dru (19:16)
actually you’re not thinking of this bigger motif. ⁓ Do you see that as him moving, I mean, in some ways it’s an intra-Jewish debate, but he seems to be recontextualizing the Torah even for his own people who have the same covenant. Does that make sense?

John Walton (19:34)
Yes, and I agree, that’s what he’s doing, redeploying, recontextualizing, bringing application. And of course, when he identifies a principle, I’m good with it. Just there’s a question about how much we can do that. Yeah, but also when he extends, he says, you’ve heard it said, don’t murder, but there’s a lot more going on here that you need to be aware of.

Dru (19:44)
Okay, pay attention. Right.

Right, ⁓ yeah, and in some ways he’s just digging back into the Torah more deeply and saying, you’re not putting all the pieces together here. And then the question for Christians is how prescriptive is what Jesus is doing there, right, or what Paul is doing where they’re digging back into the Torah and finding these principles and pushing them forward.

John Walton (20:18)
Well, certainly I would consider Jesus and Paul to be prescriptive in what they’re affirming. Again, Jesus isn’t saying the Torah is for everybody, but he’s drawing teaching from it that we consider very important and authoritative and prescriptive. Still, some of it is within their cultural context, and we have to parse that out as well.

Dru (20:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I always say the the worst theology I’ve ever heard is when people say, well, the scriptures say X, so therefore I believe Y. I’m like, well, it’s never it’s never that simple, right? ⁓

John Walton (20:51)
All right.

Dru (20:53)
Okay, so ⁓ maybe, and again, you can feel free to punt, Josh Berman did on one or two of these, ⁓ but what do you make of the paralleling, and not only just the paralleling, some of the reuse of the exact same language in Judges 19 and Gibeah from Sodom and Gomorrah, what do you think the authors there are trying to accomplish? And of course, it depends on which one you think is written first, Genesis or Judges, but what do you make of that?

John Walton (21:19)
⁓

And of course, I don’t try to sort out what got written when. The book that I did with The Lost World of Scripture, we talked about the importance of oral traditions and how these things were passed down orally and when they finally got written down. To me, late writing, late compilation, should say, late compilation doesn’t suggest late ideas. It’s maybe a later processing of ideas that have been there for centuries.

Dru (21:24)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

John Walton (21:49)
So I’m very, very comfortable with that idea, but that means I can’t really say which one was written first. There’s clearly some intertextuality going on. Again, whichever one is relating to the other, there’s clearly intertextuality. But if we don’t know the order in which they were written, then all we can say is these are ways that they’re trying to draw these two things together, paradigmatically, ⁓ conceptually.

Dru (21:55)
Mm-hmm.

John Walton (22:19)
And we can see those similarities and see those differences without really having to judge on which one came first.

Dru (22:29)
Yeah, it does seem if you don’t have the priority of the text, ⁓ the similarities and differences then make less of a, there’s less you can do with the differences, I guess, because you’re not quite sure why the difference is there or what they’re doing with it rhetorically.

John Walton (22:45)
But again, intertextuality is a very ⁓ complex process and we all engage in some level of intertextuality all the time. Sometimes we don’t even know it. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that the literary producers in ancient Israel should seek patterns and connections. That’s what literature does.

So it’s not surprising. ⁓ That doesn’t suggest that either of the accounts is artificial. It just says they saw some similarities between the scenarios and the situations. And they draw that out as they tell their stories.

Dru (23:29)
There is a phrase used today that actually I use now to explain intertextuality, which is just the illusion or echoing or borrowing or quotation of some other text and connecting them together. ⁓ Have you heard this? If you know, you know. Have you seen this?

John Walton (23:43)
No, I don’t think so. If you know, you know?

Dru (23:45)
okay. Well, it’s a it’s basically you

you say something suggestive and people who know that other thing that you’re talking about, you don’t have to say anything more. ⁓ Like if we say, you know, yeah, as SBL late night dinners or whatever, if you know, you know, like, if you’ve been there, you know exactly what we’re talking about. Yeah. So there’s all kinds of hooks, linguistic hooks, and conceptual hooks where you can grab other texts and pull them in.

John Walton (23:57)
Right, right, absolutely.

Dru (24:14)
But again, if you don’t, because people have very strong beliefs about which one was written first, it becomes problematic to say which one is pulling the other one in and for what reason.

But if there is a more ancient tradition, an aural or an oral tradition, then they’re clearly pulling on something that people would have been known in their time. That’s the idea, right?

John Walton (24:35)
Right,

the literature doesn’t have to be in its final form for those intertextual, oral intertextual connections to be made.

Dru (24:47)
Right, right.

⁓ OK, so one that I’m interested in is what do you do with the paralleling, a similar issue of Joseph and Daniel, where I don’t think you would know better than I do. I don’t think the linguistic connections are as tight between Joseph and Daniel, but the conceptual connection is unmissable. yeah, so what do do with that passage in Daniel?

John Walton (25:07)
yes. Well, of course,

I’ve done a commentary on Genesis and now have finished up a commentary on Daniel, so I’ve worked with it from both ends. We did more with it in the Daniel commentary than I did in the Genesis commentary, because here I think we more clearly have a situation where Daniel comes after the Joseph story whenever Genesis came into its final form. So the idea that the

The compilers of Daniel have shaped this account to bring to mind some of the aspects of the Joseph story. Again, that’s just good storytelling. It relates to things that people know and says, look, these are similar sorts of things. There are a few linguistic connections, if I recall. I don’t have the details right at my fingertips. But you’re right. It’s mostly conceptual. And not just conceptual, but circumstantial.

Dru (25:45)
Hmm.

John Walton (26:04)
the circumstances that they were in and that idea of how they are interacting with the courtiers, interacting with dreams of the ruler, those kinds of ideas. So there’s plenty of conceptual things and of course there have been books written on this, so no surprises there.

Dru (26:23)
Yeah.

OK. Real quick, I’m interested to, and again, you can pass if you want. What do you make of Exodus 1 through 4, which is, you know, we have to do the traditional, it’s set in a patriarchal world where men are in charge supposedly. And then you have this book that opens up with the rescue of Israel begins with all of these women who act heroically. And as we know, there are almost no men involved ⁓ until you get ⁓

past the rescue of Moses. So what do you think is going on with all these women front loaded in the Exodus story?

John Walton (26:57)
You know, I’m not sure that I’m comfortable making a lot out of that distinction because it feels to me like we’re imposing our own cultural ⁓ interests on that. We’re interested in, are men primary place or are women primary in place? And if we see this, then that means that. But that’s sort of our own cultural river as we are attuned to those emphases. ⁓

Dru (27:21)
Great.

John Walton (27:27)
And I’m not sure that we can just push that into the ancient world literature to say that they were similarly aware. It’s clear that there was respect for some of the things that women did, but maybe they wouldn’t have doubted that in the ancient world. It’s only because we seem to have this thing going on of misogyny that becomes more significant in our minds.

Dru (27:47)
Right.

John Walton (27:57)
So, one of the categories I’ve talked about recently is what I call situated readings. That is, when we read the Bible especially from our own vantage point of our own identity. And there’s good reasons to do that, there’s good ways to do that, there’s benefit in doing that. But when we adopt a situated reading, we may, without thinking, impose certain categories or perspectives on the text that they wouldn’t have had.

So I guess in the situation you raise in Exodus 1 through 4, I’m just alert, sensitive to whether we might be guilty of doing that.

Dru (28:40)
Yeah, agreed. ⁓ So let me reframe the question. In light of the rest of the Book of Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, where women do not play that prominent of a role, except for Miriam and a few other instances, the daughters of Zalophahad, ⁓ but you don’t have this many women in a row. So it does seem just statistically anomalous when compared to the rest of the literature of the Torah.

John Walton (29:08)
Well, you know, from a particular standpoint, you could say truth is stranger than fiction. This is just the reality. Certainly when they’re talking about some of the major things that happened, yes, men were the moving pieces, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when women couldn’t be. And for the text just to present those ideas, I don’t think is…

Dru (29:18)
Yeah.

John Walton (29:38)
I don’t think they’re trying to leave women out in the other parts of the text. It’s just these are things that pertained to men and what men were doing, which is not a surprise in the ancient world.

Dru (29:49)
Yeah, and even Genesis, when people call Genesis patriarchal in the kind of social way, and even Carol Meyer has pointed this out. ⁓

that, it’s really the women who are calling the shots in almost the entire book of Genesis, at least in the major movements of the book of Genesis. And that’s not always a good thing either, right? So sometimes they’re calling fouls and strikes. So ⁓ it’s not like when you enter the book of Exodus or leave it that women have no voice and women aren’t doing anything of significance, I should say. ⁓ Yeah, and maybe that’s just how the story went.

John Walton (30:29)
Well, I mean, economically and politically, it’s certainly a man’s world. There were exceptions, of course, but that’s how the world was. That doesn’t necessarily mean the culture was patriarchal. Carol Myers has done a lot of work with this and tried to bring some nuance to our conversation. And it’s just reflecting the world as it was.

Dru (30:35)
Right.

John Walton (30:56)
and there were standard roles for men and women, and those roles are part of what felt like it was ordered. I I love Fiddler on the Roof, that introducing song “Tradition,” which explains how they understood order in their social world. Everyone with their roles and their places, not necessarily making one role more important than the other, but they’re all important and everybody does their bit for what

Dru (31:05)
Hmm.

Yeah.

John Walton (31:25)
And that brought order. And of course, the whole musical is about how that order was dissolving, both social order and political order, hand in hand as they go through the musical. It’s a great example of how we think about that. But they had a different concept of social order than we do in the United States today. And even the political order had aspects that we don’t experience. But order is from the perspective of the culture.

Dru (31:50)
Yeah, so speaking of musicals, Exodus 14 and 15, this passage where you have the story of the crossing of the Red Sea, and then you have a song. I actually, I have never seen Fiddler on the roof, and I often admit to my, when I was in New York, I had all these students who were musical theater students, and I would say I’m actually just not a big fan of musicals in general. There’s some that I like, but in general, I’m gonna be averse to a musical.

And they would always try to figure out why, as if it were a moral problem. Like you said, they read it through a moral lens. Like something’s wrong with Dr. Johnson he doesn’t like musicals. And I was like, no, it’s just people have different tastes. And then I said, I just don’t like it when people, know, like it’s normal and then people break out the song. And one kid goes, you mean like in the Old Testament? I was like, oh, touche, good point. So in Exodus 15, we get this.

John Walton (32:22)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dru (32:41)
almost retelling of an account that we just saw from a very different perspective. And I wonder, do you see Exodus 15, the poetry that’s embedded in the narrative, do you see it as necessary or illustrative or just kind of a puffy example of the firm, the facts of the case or something else entirely?

John Walton (33:01)
I guess I see it as reflecting the, maybe you say, holistic way that people thought about, I mean, it was song and poetry that often ⁓ continued their oral traditions. That made it easy to remember. I I’m still always amazed at myself when I’m sitting in a diner and I hear a song from the 60s and I know all the words.

Dru (33:31)
Mm-hmm.

John Walton (33:32)
Music does that, even though I haven’t heard that song for decades. Music does that. so poetry does the same. They have built in elements that connect to our memory. So communal, community memory, collective memory is best embodied and preserved in poetic and musical terms. So I’m not surprised that

Dru (33:36)
Mm-hmm.

John Walton (34:00)
as they craft the narratives in the final compilation, whenever that took place, whoever did it, that they included these well-known ancient songs which had preserved the tradition all these generations.