Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012

Before we get into taking a look at the Egyptian culture, just a couple of quickies. One is we've, about two weeks ago, and I pulled this up last week as well, we talked about the ideal area for science to deal in is in present processes and events at a scale where we can control the inputs and outputs and do thorough measurement. That's the ideal realm for science. But even at that, a lot of times it gets put out there in our culture that you got science and they got religion and they're two different things. Science, however, has in addition to the assumptions that when you go back into the past and can't verify things, science is based on assumptions that are faith-based in nature. One of those is that science is based on assumptions of reliability and consistency of the human senses.

For example, I'm showing you a slide. I'm assuming that you're seeing something even close to what I'm seeing, right? Do I know that? Can I check it? Well, sort of. In other words, there is an assumption that we have some similarity and consistency in what we're sensing. The next one, the laws of logic and the principles of mathematics. Here's an interesting thing.

If I asked you, could you please tell me why we use logic? What are you going to do? You can use logic to try to tell me why we use logic. I think that's called circular reasoning, right? We use logic because it's logical. Oh, boy. It is, in fact, a faith-based assumption that science and mathematics are usable and appropriate. And any attempt on our part to try to justify that belief is going to use circular reasoning. You can't get down to the foundation. We actually have to make a faith-based assumption regarding law. Another one is the existence of an objective reality outside of ourselves.

That there is something out there that we are sensing, feeling, etc. Yeah, Tom? Science is thinking God's thoughts after. Yes. And I think that by itself is a good statement. It's a faith-based statement. Yes. And also the arguments that are given against religion in the universe. That's right. And what I have not included here is the assumptions, the Christian assumptions, which is what Stan's referring to, the Christian assumptions that are the basis for science.

Okay, now let's move on here. We're going to start in this series on culture. Egyptian culture is the first one. We will go on to the cultures of the sequential empires that impacted people in the Bible. Okay, so Egyptian culture. The Bible describes multiple contacts with the Egyptian culture starting with Abraham and then Jacob to the time of the Exodus. So here's when Jacob and Jacob's sons are in Egypt there. For centuries they are in Egypt until the time of the Exodus. about the 15th century BC. The kings of both the United and Divided Kingdoms had contact with Egypt, and oftentimes they turned to Egypt for horses, chariots, sometimes wives and concubines, and they turned to Egypt sometimes for military assistance when they were attacked from other Middle Eastern countries.

We read of Egypt again as Joseph and Mary escape from Herod by going there with the infant Jesus. We don't know where they went in Egypt. There are a few different possibilities. One of those is Alexandria, right on the Mediterranean coast. The eastern part of Alexandria had and has a large Jewish quarter. Acts, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation mention Egypt as well. So if you think of it, here's Egypt. We first hear of it in Genesis, it goes all the way into Revelation. It's a significant culture and civilization, biblically. So here's Tutankhamen, the way it looks on the front, that looks really nice, doesn't it? This is the way it looks on the inside, not quite so nice. Looks kind of like a zombie. Okay.

Until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, this was Napoleon's claim to fame here, much of Egypt's early history and culture had been lost. This Rosetta Stone had three different cultures, excuse me, languages on the stone. One was hieroglyphics, and that was the one that was really lost to us. This is hieroglyphics. How do you read this hieroglyphics? And we're going to get some insights into it. You can actually be able to, at an elementary level, read it yourself here shortly. But hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek. And the way it works is the top part here is hieroglyphics, and then this middle part on the stone was the same message written in Demotic. and then in Greek down here. So they had the same content in three different languages and with that a French professor broke the key, so to speak, so that he was able, yeah. Demotic is simply the more common written and spoken language of the Egyptians.

In other words, the hieroglyphics was really for the priests and royalty. And so when you lost the priests and royalty of Egypt, you lost anybody who knew how to understand it until the code was broken by the French professor that got hold of Rosetta Stone. Here is a close-up of some of the hieroglyphics. So as you can see, other than maybe being hard to understand, it was fairly clear And we'll talk about how one could read that. This is the Demotic that you were asking about. And it's simply the common language written and spoken in Egypt. And this is the Greek. And the Greek was all apparently in uppercase in this particular stone.

Hieroglyphics were written in all directions, and that's part of what confused them. It's written in all directions. You can write it up, down, left, right. You know, we read from left to right, right? Hebrew is read from right to left. Hieroglyphics, you can make it any way you want.

Here's the key. The direction in which the figures were faced pointed to the beginning of the specific writing. See this bird? What direction is the bird facing? Right. That's the beginning of the writing. So the animals all face towards the beginning. If you face the animals the other way, that's the beginning. So that's what was confusing. What is this crazy language one place that's the animals are faced one way and one But that's that was the key is that the animals are facing towards the beginning of the sentence So for example this one. This is a close-up of that Rosetta stone which which direction is does it start from? This is more like what we would read, but we only know that because that's where the bird is pointed towards.

So that was the key to making the breakthrough in hieroglyphics. Now here, and you have this on the top of the last page of your handout, you have a special color handout that has this, and this is basically the alphabet in hieroglyphics. And as you see, it's not too crazy different from our own alphabet in terms of all the different symbols. So actually, it would be fairly easy using this for you to write something in hieroglyphics. Isn't that strange? Yes, Dean?

Like is the case in some other languages, depending on certain circumstances, like in Greek, that you can make an S sound two different ways, depending on whether it's in the middle of the word or at the end of the word. So they have different places where there are two ends, and you'll have that. Yes, yes. And so once they were able to say, ah, this compares to this in Greek, and this compares to this in other languages, then they were able to break the code. Yes. Is it possible that that would be one might be the TH sound, and the other might be like a T, but the TH fell out of favor like a Hebrew. That may be the case. I don't know.

Okay, Egypt maintained some level of continuity of culture for over 3,000 years. The invasion of the Persians began in 525 BC, so still within the biblical era, and began a period of substantial intermixture of Persian, Greek, and then Roman culture. So they were able to maintain kind of their own identity up until the time of the Persian invasion, and then the Persians, the Greeks, and then the Romans impacted the culture as each new empire came. So then, and we've been using this historical timeline of the Bible, Abraham, Moses, David, etc. From the time of Abraham in Genesis 12 to the book of Revelation, a period of over 2,000 years, Egypt is mentioned in the Bible well over 650 times. So what we learned today is one of those things that can continue to have, you know, now I understand something more here, and here, and here, and here, because Egypt shows up in the Bible in so many different places. Okay, this you have as a half page on your handout, and this is a quick outline of the Egyptian historical timeline. Now, we've got all these dates, even down to the year, up on the top part.

One of the key points is those dates are less certain. Here is one reason why some of those earlier dates would be less certain. An Egyptian ruler would come in, and if they didn't like this ruler or rulers, they would go scratch things out and have things chipped out and change it. And so you find something and, well, this is strange. Now, I thought this was going on, but that's how they tried to deal with somebody that they didn't care for that was a predecessor, is they would go and have things chipped out and things erased and rewritten. So it makes it difficult to be certain in those instances. of the exact circumstance in the earlier era. By the later period of time, we have other historians from other cultures to be able to cross-check things.

From this first period up in here, the first intermediate period in the Middle Kingdom, that was the time of Abraham to Joseph. Here you had the time of the Jews under slavery in the Second Intermediate Period in the New Kingdom to the time of the Exodus. And then the next one, Third Intermediate Period into the Late Period, Egypt was a military ally and then Jeremiah himself went into Egypt in the latter part of there. And then finally in here, A Jewish colony was established during this Macedonian and Ptolemaic period, and that's in Alexandria. By New Testament times, because of the Jews having moved to Babylon, many of them remaining behind, because of the Jews having been moved over to the area around Ephesus, and now because of Jews having moved into the area of Alexander, by New Testament times, two-thirds of the Jews lived outside of Israel. And then finally in the Roman period, Egypt was a place of escape for Mary and Joseph.

So you have biblical interactions all during that roughly 2000 plus period of time. There were lots of changes, however... How you doing Tristan? You're holding up okay, alright. There are lots of changes in Egypt over the centuries with their contact with the people in the Bible. There are some common facts and principles that we can keep in mind that will be useful as we examine and we find Egypt and the interaction with Egypt in the Bible.

Egypt had a system of power that placed the Pharaoh as a ruler and a deity and everybody else sacrificed for the sake of the Pharaoh. You would work your whole lifetime so the Pharaoh could have a good eternity, even if you would not. That was the way Egypt worked. Their religion had about 700 gods and one's eternity was determined by how one interacted with those gods.

The Egyptians viewed eternity as spent in whatever earthly accommodations were provided for the dead. You see, as Christians, do we hope to spend eternity here? No. When Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you, did he go to prepare it here? See, for the Egyptians, you're going to live in whatever eternal accommodations you have.

And so the idea, for example, here's this pyramid at Giza. idea was that the pharaoh, Khufu, the pharaoh would live in that pyramid, spend eternity in that, and whatever accommodations were there would be and what he would have. So that's why you find inside a lot of these Egyptian burial places, you'll find nice artwork and all kinds of jewelry and things like that because you want to make things nice for the afterlife of this pharaoh or whatever the royalty was.

Greg? Question. Yeah. Let's go back a little bit. Early dynastic period of the Egyptians. Doesn't that make Greek life Yes, and that's where you start running into questions of, you know, what are the real dates for things? So this is the conventional dating, but you have a good question because, and in fact, there are some people who think that's pre-flood. I personally don't, but yeah, I mean, you do come into an issue there. Okay.

And by the way, this pyramid, This is the one you see pictures of, and we'll see more pictures of. This pyramid was there and built before Abraham came in to Egypt. So a lot of times you'll hear people say, well, the Jews helped build the pyramids. No, they didn't. The Jews made mud bricks with straw, but they didn't build the pyramids. Those were already there before Abraham came in. So Abraham saw these. Abraham saw these when Jacob and Joseph and all the other parts of that family came in.

These had already been here for centuries. So the Pharaoh was provided with the very best in eternal accommodations, at least that was the thought and intent. Here it is up close. In fact, this was originally built with smooth sides, but the smooth siding has come off of most of it. So what you're seeing is actually the understructure with the close up of the pyramids there. Here they are from a little bit more of a distance. And here with the sun rising at night. The Sphinx nearby.

The slaves, who were typically great in number, were put to work substantially on public projects, including facilities for the immortal pharaoh and his supposed assistants in the afterlife. They had lots and lots of slaves, not just to do things around the house and around the farm, although there was some of that, but in great part, the slaves were there to build these monumental structures for the pharaohs. That was their work in great part. Here's the temple at Karnak. Here is inside there with some of the pictures as well as hieroglyphics. Okay, the famous mummies. Having one's body mummified was a major part of the Egyptian religion.

Now, there were some things the Egyptians did not have figured out well. What they would do is they'd take out various, you know, internal body parts and put them in jars. And the brains they didn't care about because they didn't know what the brains were for thinking. So they'd pull those out through the sinus cavities and, you know, just get rid of it. So there was no way that the pharaoh was going to resurrect and, you know, have any kind of life if his current body is going to be the thing he does it in.

But nonetheless, that was a big part of their religion. The priests had documentation and people trained as specialists for that. One would be expected to use his or her preserved and resurrected body for eternity. So they took great care in this. Yeah, Stan? We thought, as they said, that this whole process was basically, in large part, very Yeah, it was big.

Even with other things, they would go in and, for example, mummify other things besides people, animals even. In one case, they had an entire crocodile graveyard. And the crocodile graveyard was stuffed with a bunch of papyrus. The crocodile was stuffed with papyrus documents by the thousands. They'd just take old documents and stuff them in these crocodile graveyards.

Yeah, well, it was stuffing. Yeah. It's like a teddy bear, you know, only this was a teddy bear stuffing when it was crocodile stuffing. So anyway, here's a picture of them going through the processes, and all done very, very carefully. Very carefully.

Once having established its territory, Egypt's military was postured and designed for defense of the established land and for slave capture. Now this is big. A lot of the other empires were there to try to expand their territory and expand their power.

Egypt didn't particularly care to keep on expanding. They just wanted to have some buffer zone. They wanted to be left alone. And they wanted to go out and be able to capture some slaves, but their idea of expanding and expanding and expanding an empire, like some of the other empires did, that was not there. They wanted to maintain their power, keep their culture going, keep their religion that kept the pharaoh at the top.

Yes? Yes, in other words, what you look at is even at something like that, it wasn't to gain territory. It's I'm going to stop this guy here instead of waiting until he gets on my doorstep. So when you see Egypt striking out like that, it's basically a preemptive kind of military strategy. But ultimately, they weren't interested in, you know, gaining more territory. They just want to have a good buffer zone and be left alone. and they would go into other places enough to capture slaves, but they weren't interested particularly in having more and more territory.

Here's, for example, Tutankhamen's gold buckle there with a chariot. They were big on the chariots, but of course a lot of these chariots in the earlier era were bronze, not iron. Sarah, Abraham went in and out of Egypt. Sarah was added to the pharaoh's harem, the Genesis 12, which is supported in general by the Egyptian writings. The pharaohs often practiced polygyny and incest. So they had various kinds of family relationships within the pharaoh's family. They would also go and add to their harem and keep that well stocked.

Now, here's something interesting. This obelisk is the one remaining structure from the time of the city of On, later called Heliopolis. What does Heliopolis mean? Yeah, Sun City, right? That's all it is. Heliopolis was a Greek-based name, but On was the earlier name.

It was the home city of Joseph's wife, Joseph, the son of Jacob. So, this quote here from the 41st chapter of Genesis, Then Pharaoh named Joseph Zaphonath-Paneah, and he gave him Asanath, the daughter of Potipharah, priest of On. So, the descendants of Joseph were half what? Half Egyptian. Very interesting.

But this is the only substantial thing remaining. from that old city of Awn. They found a few other like, you know, walls and that kind of thing. Most of the old city of Awn is way underneath the ground and buried with city on top of it. So that's one reason why this is the only substantial old city.

Yes. Yes, this isn't, yeah, different. Yeah, you're right. The Jews were made into brick-making slaves after the time of Joseph. And one of the things you'll notice is different colored slaves. You notice that? You've got the Nubians, who were the darker ones, and the Asiatics, and the Jews would be considered among the Asiatics, would be the lighter colored slaves.

So you see both of them there. And this is from the time of the Exodus, or right before the Exodus. So that was painted there. So this may well have represented a Jew. Well, I think there's other things too. Real common in Egypt for people to shave heads. Why? Yeah, avoid the head lice problem by shaving it, and then many would compensate for that, you know, shaving the head by wearing a wig. So you'd shave the head to keep the lice down, then you wear a wig that you take out and wash and, you know, check it out.

Okay, so typical of the Ancient Near East, the bricks were stamped with the mark of the current ruler. So you have Pharaoh's mark in a brick made with straw. So you can imagine the Jews, you know, they're making bricks and making bricks, and every one of them had to have the stamp of the current ruler. And then what happens when you change rulers? you change stamp. So you find these different bricks. So if the archaeologists are in there and they're wanting to know when was this brick made, they don't necessarily have an exact date, but they've got a mark from the current ruler, right?

So that gives them some sort of a dating technique. Here's an Egyptian brick mold from the 12th dynasty. It's about the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so here's a wooden brick mold. So they'd go in there and put that down, put a bunch of mud and straw in there, stamp it, pull it up, do another one.

All day, all week, all year, whole lifetime. Yes? Oh, I'm not sure, but my guess is they had people overlooking it and as long as it got the right stamp, I don't think they cared too much. I imagine someone would get in trouble if they use the wrong stamp. You have this on page two of your handout.

The staff of Associates for Biblical Research has identified Hatshepsut as the most likely daughter of Pharaoh who drew the infant Moses out of the water. So anyway, they have an entire issue focused on that. identification and some of the details. Good to see you, Ben.

Here is Hatshepsut's temple. And this is some of the inside area. Again, what the Egyptians would do is to make a nice place for the pharaoh. And Hatshepsut was uniquely a woman pharaoh. That was not unheard of, but it was unusual. And that's the inside to the ideas. You have nice colored, you know, murals and things like that to make a pleasant eternity for Hatshepsut.

And this is an artist rendering of what it would have been like. Hatshepsut, according to the timing of things, would have been a young girl when Moses was found. And it's very interesting that the names of the pharaohs around that time had the name Moses in their name. Not too much later and earlier, the name Moses wasn't in there. But for example, Thutmose would be one of the names from that period of time.

Okay, now this is a biggie. We're going to keep revisiting this. You have this on page 3 of your handout. We're going to keep revisiting this because we're going to go through each one of these empires sequentially. What this contains is a philosophy of empire summed up regarding conquered peoples, and it impacted the Jews every time. And one of the reasons for looking at that is that explains why the Jews were treated the way they were by each of the sequential empires.

Egypt had the idea of capture as needed for slaves and defense. Their position was to get slaves and military for defensive purpose, not for going out and trying to expand and expand and expand the empire as far as they can. So that was their philosophy. We'll be looking in the subsequent weeks at the philosophy of empire of the subsequent empires. Each of them did something different and the Jews were impacted by the philosophy of empire of each one of those empires in a big way. So anyway, we'll be taking a look at more of that. So the Jews were held captive as part of the slave ownership here in Egypt for 430 years.

Now, you have this also in the color handout, I believe it's on the bottom. It's from the Egyptian empire that God delivered the people of Israel from slavery in 1446 BC into the land which God had promised to Abraham. Now let's explain something here. You have on the map this shown up here. And of course, if you look at that, you say, well, wait a minute. I thought the Israelites left Egypt. Why were they going back into an area that's run by Egypt? I need to explain what this little, what looks like a peninsula of Egyptian territory is about. The Egyptians were not interested in holding the land.

They had a line up the coast. They had a line of military forts to defend against the other Middle Eastern enemies. That's all. They didn't go and capture the people in that area. They didn't go in and try to hold the territory or extract taxes from them or anything like that. They had a line of military forts that went up along the coast and it was there just to make sure that they weren't attacked by the other Middle Eastern enemies that would come from that direction. That's all it was. So, in a way, this is what they were interested in holding, and this was just a line of military forts there for defensive purposes. You have this on page 3, I believe.

This is 10 plagues on Egypt against their gods, Exodus 12, 12, and Numbers 33, 4. And what we have here is each of the 10 plagues is against, and we have listed actually the primary Egyptian god. The reality is that all of the plagues were against several gods in each case. because the Egyptians had a very complex system of 700 gods.

A lot of them had some similarities and overlap in their supposed responsibilities. So each one of the, like water and the blood, it was not just some arbitrary thing. You know, in the invasion of the frogs, they were all directly against Egyptian gods. And that's what these passages up here say. Oh, yeah, turn the water into blood. What was the, yeah, Steve? Oh, okay, all right. You look at it, what did the Egyptians do?

They worshipped the Nile, right? Because they figured, boy, everything that they get comes out of this Nile River. By the way, the water comes through Uganda. But anyway, so they worship the Nile. So now what are they going to do when the water turns to blood? I mean, their god, the Nile River, now turns against them. OK? And yes, this was the power of the Nile River here.

So that would be an instance. they would even have, Hecht was the god of frogs, and so okay, you want to worship Hecht? I'm going to give you so many frogs, you'll just hate it, you know? So what God did was to take the thing that they would worship, and he'd say, okay, you're just going to get, it's going to either come in a bad form, or you're going to get lots and lots and lots of it to the point where you just loathe it. and it would show them the gods of Egypt to be powerless and undermine belief in their gods. Now, so here is the subsequent, and I don't have the map. Yeah, Steve?

Well, I think it must have been pretty convincing that the agency doesn't work. Once you establish a force, you're saying, were going to be conquering. So they had to convince them that they weren't trying to conquer. Yeah, they were just, we just want a fort here, and actually it was the adjacent people who lived near the fort, they didn't feel threatened by it, because the Egyptians said, we don't care about you, you're not trying to invade us, but those guys might. So they actually had a fairly cooperative relationship with the other cultures up and down the coast there. You don't have this map. We're going to go through a series of maps here. We will give them to you in subsequent times.

But here's Assyria, which had its own fairly large empire. Judah paid tribute, but was self-ruled. So it shows that in the Assyrian Empire, Judah was different in that it was self-ruled. In other words, they still had the line of kings under Assyria. but they paid off the Assyrians in order to maintain their self-rule.

The hold on Egypt was brief and tenuous, and as they came in, you know, grabbed it and then lost it. So, although those parts of the Assyrian Empire are shown, it wasn't the same kind of dominance and under a continuous and dominating government of the Assyrians. The Babylonians came up to the edge of the Egyptian Empire, but did not ultimately take it.

But the Jews there were carried off to Babylon, exiled to Babylon. We'll take a look when we look at the Babylonian culture. That was a part of the Babylonians' philosophy of empire, is take everybody and bring them right under your nose, move everybody to Babylon.

Yes, Sam? They did go in there numerous battles. They didn't end up taking it over and holding it is the difference. And also this shows it at the time of 550 BC. So, but yeah, they did battle Egyptians, but they never did take it over in quite the same way.

And then the Persian empires were the first time where they actually did come in and did dominate the Egyptian people and hold that for a period of time. That's one of the reasons why we mentioned there was Persian, Greek, and then Roman influence on the Egyptian culture because the Persians came in and actually did hold the Egyptian people subject to their government and their governmental structure. So, here's Egypt.

Then, so about 525 B.C. is when they went in there. The military progression and empire of Alexander the Great. He also went into Egypt. As a matter of fact, he convinced a number of Jews to move to Alexandria. And then, so that's Egypt there. 331 B.C. is when he went in there. And then Alexander's generals broke up the different parts of the empire that Alexander had established. So here's Egypt here.

Now, it shows that the Ptolemaic kingdom, there was the one centered out of Egypt, has control of Israel. But what the map doesn't show is control of Israel went back and forth between this Egyptian-based portion of the empire and this Persian-based portion of the empire 12 times. And the Jews were sick of it. Back and forth and back and forth. And so all that changing back and forth, finally they said that's enough and they rebelled and were able to hold some independence. Yes. Which one of those is back as a victory? It's this one over here. Yeah.

Now, so 323 to 30 BC. Then with the Roman Empire, initially the Roman Empire had taken over other areas, but not Egypt. But finally, this area of Egypt was taken over about 30 BC. And that was the end of having any Egyptian royalty or anything of that sort. The Romans basically crushed that whole system. That was the end of the era of Cleopatra.

The Egyptians relied on their own works and works of priests and slaves to make nice places for themselves in the afterlife, especially the pharaoh. Other higher court officials could sometimes have a pretty nice afterlife as they had planned it, but most of the effort went for the pharaoh.

In contrast to that, here's John 14, 2-4, Jesus says, In my father's house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, I would have told you. For I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself. That where I am, you may be also."

So under the Egyptian system, you make everybody, whether they want to or not, work really hard to build a place mostly for the pharaoh, here on earth, where the Pharaoh was expected to spend eternity here. Yes, back. Yeah, in other words, what they would frequently do is have various kinds of, you know, it would be the pharaoh and the pharaoh's wife and the servants and various people would also be there.

That's one I'm not sure of. Some of the Middle Eastern countries did that, but they would actually kill the people who were supposed to spend eternity with them. Whether the pharaohs did that, I'm not sure. Actually, what happens is, you know, we're aware of the pyramids because they're big and they're right there. But there are other places up and down the Nile where they had very large areas where it's royal tomb after royal tomb after royal tomb. And some of those are still being discovered. But yeah, I mean, during a Pharaoh's lifetime, they would spend a goodly portion of that lifetime working on, here's where you're going to spend forever.

So yeah. So here's Jesus. Jesus says, I'm going to make a place for you, and he does the work, and he does the preparation, and it's not here, and he says, I'm going to give you a new body. And it isn't just for the Pharaoh, it's for who? All who believe, yes. And that's a key thing.

So there's a stark contrast between the Christian teaching and the viewpoint that the Egyptians had. One of the things that the Egyptians had for common people, they also had priests and religion for the common people. And so one of the things in order to assure a safer continuity into the afterlife, you could, let's say you had a relative or a friend that died and you wanted to, you know, make sure things were better for this friend or relative in the afterlife, you would pay some money to the priest and then that would help assure a better time in the afterlife. And then that got carried over in the Roman Catholic Church as indulgences, right? That's where it came from.

Okay, so in John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave. Now, see in Egypt, it's you're going to give and we're going to force you. In Christianity, it's God so loved the world that he gives.

This is very different. He gives, and the Son that is given for us goes and prepares a place for us. Very different. Sharp contrast. That whosoever believes in Him, it's not that, oh, this guy gets special treatment because he's the Pharaoh. It's whosoever believes. Right? Radical difference.

Radical difference between the Egyptian system And the teachings of Christianity is found in the Bible. That is Ankh, the symbol of life. So I have this. It's either the Egyptian Ankh, or you have crucified, buried, raised, ascended, and seated, right?

So a radical contrast between the Egyptian religion and Christianity. And by the way, the Egyptian religion, there were Egyptian temples in a lot of the Roman Empire, including in Philippi as one of the places where they're particularly apparent. So they'd have Egyptian religion that had spread to other parts of the Roman Empire.

All right, so next we'll be taking a look at the Assyrian culture, then the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman culture, because each of those, we've got that philosophy of empire, you know, that one chart. We're going to be repeating that and then putting a little more focus on it. How did they carry out the philosophy of empire? Each one of the empires did something a little differently, carrying out their philosophy. And in each case, the Jews were impacted by it, including you know, getting moved to Babylon and all that. That's a philosophy of empire that they carried out.

Then we'll take a look at the Jewish culture itself and other miscellaneous biblical cultures. There were other cultures that at different times had impacts on the Jews. So we'll take a look at that. And then we'll go into some kind of case studies about different passages in the Bible and different parts of of culture. Boy, we got through early. Yes.

What it looks like is that after the time of the Tower of Babel, the Egyptian culture was begun very shortly thereafter. And the Tower of Babel was made of like mud bricks which doesn't hold up as well over time, right? So, here you have the Egyptians and what do they do earlier in their time is they construct these pyramids. Well, that's probably based on the Tower of Babel model where let's build a tall structure. The thing is the pyramids because they're made of stone remained. As a matter of fact, for 3,800 years, almost 4,000 years, the Great Pyramid in Egypt was the tallest man-made structure in existence for almost 4,000 years, about 3,800 years.

So that's not a numerical answer to your question. I think we've got some question marks about how dates are arrived at. Additionally, remember that the earlier part of the Egyptian history is also less certain because of the habit of Egyptian rulers chiseling out names on inscriptions and rewriting things and having things destroyed. So, some of the evidence is just gone. Yes. Oh, from one plague to the next. Hmm. That's a good question. And I don't know. I have to take a look at it and see if there's any evidence. It seems to me that they were fairly, you know, tight in sequence.

And you can imagine, you know, here's these plagues and all right, we worship the Nile River and now it's all turned to blood and it's just stinky and smelly and a mess and then you got the next thing with the frogs, you know. Having them in some kind of a fairly close sequence would seem to make more sense in terms of getting the Egyptians' attention. You would want the people to have have a growing mistrust of their gods. So you would think that would be the way that the Lord would likely carry it out.

Interestingly, a lot of those plagues have similarities to what will take place in the coming tribulation period. And for most of those, we don't have a duration. We just have sequence. as well. The only one where we have a specific duration I'm aware of is the five months of the attack of the scorpion-like creatures.

Yeah, Tom? Yeah. Yes, yeah. You think about the continuity of culture for thousands of years, To get that shaken to the point where they're losing trust in their gods, that's big. That's really big. And so, yeah, it is significant. As a matter of fact, even though they continued after that, there was certain points of rise of the Egyptian culture, but ultimately decline.

Other questions? Comments? Inspirations? Aspirations? OK. Let's pray. Lord, we do thank you. As we look at this, we can see how we actually see why you would include Egypt from Genesis to Revelation and why Egypt would end up being such a major theme And Lord, as we go to your word, we can have a better understanding of the place that Egypt held and in fact still has influence in our culture today. And so we just thank you for what you've revealed in your word because you love us. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.