Dragons in Genesis

Special Announcement

The Hebrew Bible is now complete, so what's next?

099_Daniel

In the mid second century BCE, the people of Judea did the impossible… the ended centuries of foreign rule by expelling the Seleucids and reviving the divine Judean kingship. To celebrate their victory, they wrote stories which pretended to predict this achievement and cast a legendary hero from Canaanite mythology as their prophet. The result included angels, foreign gods, dragon-slaying, and great beasts that would reappear in Revelation.

098_Lamentations

In the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem the population was lost, bereft of king and temple. Their prosperity and security had been taken from them and family members had been carted away to a distant land. But perhaps worst of all, their own deity seemed to have turned his back on them. But when he finally took notice he didn’t offer comfort, but wrath.

097_Zechariah

Perhaps no other single book of the Hebrew Bible is as important to the New Testament authors as Zechariah. From it we find the idea of a suffering servant figure, a Davidic savior, one who is pierced through, who enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey and will remove the sins of the people before being elevated to the throne of heaven to sit beside God.

096_Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, & Malachai

Could Yahweh be a dying-and-rising god? Does Malachi speak to the worship of Asherah in the Jerusalem Temple? Was Yahweh originally an angel who served his father, El Elyon? All these questions and more are raised by the minor prophets who saw the restoration of Judah as a parallel with the restoration of nature and linked it with annual sacrifices.