All 18 nights · Session 7 of 18 · Jan 19
Term 2 — The Story: Eden to Exile
Creation, de-creation, and scattering as one arc. This is the wound the rest of the Bible is healing.
Ancient Near Eastern cosmology on its own terms: a three-tiered cosmos, waters above and below, the raqia. Temples built as models of the cosmos, and the cosmos described as a temple. Once you see that pattern, Genesis 1 reads differently — and so does the tabernacle, and so does Solomon's temple.
We will set Genesis 1 beside Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation account, and notice where it echoes and where it pointedly refuses to. The refusals are the argument.
The image of God as a royal and priestly vocation rather than a description of anatomy. And Adam called a son of God in Luke 3:38 — which is where the family thread starts, and it runs all the way to the last night.
The table of nations. Ziggurats, and what people actually thought they were for. The ambition to make a name. And the nations divided.
This is the wound the rest of the Bible is healing.
People in this room will hold several different views on Genesis 1 and origins, and faithful readers genuinely differ. Our question all night is a narrower and more interesting one: what did these words mean to the people who first heard them? That question does not require the room to settle anything it has not gathered to settle.
The wound opened tonight is healed on a specific later night, with the same list of nations, ten sessions from here. We will not telegraph it when we get there. If you would rather feel it than watch it coming, leave this closed.
Read: Genesis 11:1–9
Nine verses. Notice what the builders actually say they want, and notice what God says about why it matters.
Entirely optional. Come either way.
Sit with this week’s passage and see what the Spirit shows you in it — a connection, a question, something that will not leave you alone, something you think the rest of us need to hear. That is not an interruption of the night. That is the night.
The subject above is the field we are working, and it is a real boundary. The Spirit who inspired these texts is the one who lights them up, and he does not compete with himself. What he gives will open this material further, not change the channel.
Send it ahead if you can, by replying to the message that brought you here. We open by hearing what the week turned up, before anybody explains anything.