 Our guest this morning is a great honor. It's Dr. John J. Collins. Dr. Collins is the Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School. He has published widely on the subjects of Hellenistic Judaism, Wisdom, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and as a foremost expert on the topic of today's discussion, apocalypticism. He is the author of What Are Biblical Values between Athens and Jerusalem, Sears, Sibles and Sages, and the topic of our discussion today, the Apocalyptic Imagination. So Dr. Collins, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. As I was saying backstage, it's an honor to meet you again after 20 years, even though that time was brief. I apologize as a college student that wasn't as familiar with your work as I am now, and I didn't appreciate the opportunity as much then as I do now. So Dr. Collins, we're talking about a topic that has a very rich history, both in the precedents that came before it and the legacy it has today. So could you define what apocalypticism is? The word comes from the book of Revelation, which begins, say, this is the Revelation to John, and it's the Greek word for Revelation, apocalypsis. But it's not just any Revelation, it's roughly speaking the kind of Revelation you get in the book of Revelation. And it has a distinctive view of the world. And I would say the defining characteristics of it are that you can take a synoptic view of history. You can see history whole and the world whole and the world is largely guided by superhuman forces. And then there is a judgment coming. Now, in many cases and especially in the book of Revelation, the judgment will include the destruction of this world. And that's why a lot of people equate apocalypse with the end of the world. But that's really just taking out one important motif out of it. It's really more of a comprehensive view. And it's really a philosophy of life actually in itself. It's one where this world is passing away and where that which we can see is actually much more important than that which we can. You really emphasize that in the modern days we tend to look at the material world that we see every day and that we exist in as the truth. Whereas in the antique world, it was the exact opposite. The world is kind of a reflection of the divine world. We really have a kind of switch. In the modern world, we tend to think that if we talk about angels and demons, we're projecting. Whereas in the ancient world, they thought that was the real stuff. We're the reflection. Apocalyptic literature and the genre is a mix of different motifs, not only from Hebrew Bible, like wisdom traditions but also from the Near East. It emerges oftentimes in the scribal context. What were some of the reasons when we create this kind of literature? You touched upon some of them, like the unity and the way of looking at the world. But why such an emphasis on mythological language and motifs within the literature itself? That was really, I think, one of the things that shaped the modern understanding of apocalypticism was that in the 19th century, there were two sets of discoveries that had enormous impact. One of them was the recovery of the ancient Near Eastern myths, like the Babylonian myth, the Enuma Elish. And then in the early 20th century, they found myths from Eugarat, Canaanite myths. And in those Near Eastern myths, you typically get conflict between a creator God and forces of chaos, if we may call them that. And that stuff comes up very prominently in the apocalyptic literature. There was another set of discoveries, which we'll get to a bit later, I'm sure, of books like the Book of Enoch, books that had been largely lost to the Western world. And when people saw them, they realized that what you have in the Book of Revelation isn't really so exceptional. There was a whole genre of literature like this, which we weren't really aware of before the 19th century, or at least not in the modern West. The main point that you get from the mythology is the sense that we're not in control of this world. That there are bigger forces at work. But this was an idea that the modernity generally rejected. We like to think we are in control of this world. You might well argue that with everything that's been happening this summer, it's becoming, we're not actually in control. There are bigger forces out there. We may not understand them. These myths gave people a language to describe that. Now, why would people have recourse to those? I should say the myths originally were meant to describe how the world came to be. And in describing how the world came to be, you're also describing how you think the world works. The way people in the Middle East thought the world works was that nature is turbulent. The world is turbulent. There are all sorts of forces that are trying to cause chaos in the coastal area. They have this figure of shill yet of the seven heads, a seven-headed sea monster. And you can imagine how they would imagine that from the waves beating in against the coast. And then you have the thunder god come down at the mountain with his lightning bolt and in the myth, he kills the sea. He sets limits to the sea, drives it back. And in the candidate myth, the other great adversary is death. But then in the material we're talking about, this is all projected into the future. It's still saying that in the present, these forces are at work. Now, whether you call chaos the sea or you call it Tiamat in the Babylonian myth or you have the name Rahab or Leviathan, these are all kind of sea monsters. But the world is a turbulent place and you need divine help to contain that. Now, that kind of view of the world, I think, became especially appealing in situations where you obviously didn't have any control, especially in times of conquest. You get an upsurge of that kind of mythical material after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. You get another wave of it in more properly apocalyptic literature after the persecution of the Jews in Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes in the time of the Maccabees. And again, you get a wave of it when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. In each of these cases, you had a loss of control. By the people who then turned to the myths to explain what was going on. Now, that again, isn't all of what you have in apocalyptic literature, but it's one important ingredient in it. And it's that sense of not being in control, the sense that there were greater forces at work here. I really think that it's important to emphasize the colonial aspect, the empire critical aspect that Karen King brought out in her book, Secret Revelation of John. She was, of course, talking about Sethian literature, but in the non-commodie texts, but these are subjugated, colonized people. And like you said, this isn't just Judaism that's doing this, this is native Egyptians. This is people who are being colonized, whether it be Persians, whether that be Macedonians, and they're kind of trying to make sense of the world. And like something like Enoch, with Enoch you have, of course, that cosmological speculation used to create a worldview, but also I like how they combine the cosmological speculations in the apocalyptic literature with the eschatological and mythological elements because it adds, as you say in your book, the sense that this has all been taken care of. God is in control, right? You know, whatever God you're talking about, right? Certainly something like first Enoch would be more speculative about the cosmos, the worldview, and then you find, of course, later with Daniel, and we were just talking about the mythological motifs, like with Daniel, it's very interesting because those all come into play. Daniel himself is a composite kind of mythological character. I kind of look at it as he's like Daniel 2.0. He's like Dan L. 2.0. It's like, you know, Percy Jackson in the Olympians, it's like you have these concepts that are old, super important and embedded in culture, but they're just updated for that time. Mentioned empire, and I think a huge factor in the development of Raika, the apocalyptic worldview, was the conquest of Alexander. Now, to some degree, you know, what of the motifs you get in the book of Daniel, for example, is the four world empires? And people were very much aware of this, that certain powers extended their rule to degrees that had not been seen before. The Assyrians were the first to do it. The Medes usually get credited as the second, but the Persians did a lot more, that is a much bigger empire, and then Alexander more again. And I think it was really in the wake of Alexander's conquest, that you get a kind of globalization in the ancient world. You know, you get the sense, the world is much bigger than Israel or Egypt or Babylon or wherever you happen to live. There is something much bigger going on here. You get that sense on the one hand that makes you interested in what we'll call the cosmos. That is the way the whole thing is structured and set up. And also you get a strong streak of resistance in the apocalyptic literature. What we call the apocalyptic literature usually comes from the underclass, although that may not be necessarily the case. In the Middle Ages, I think you get a kind of imperial apocalypticism, but you don't really get that in antiquity. It's largely reactive and largely resistance. Also, just by virtue of the fact that this is coming from a scribal kind of milieu, these people are very learned and lore. I think a good example, much later, third, maybe fourth century common era, is the Latinus Clepius. Latinus Clepius has a lot of apocalyptic native Egyptian skeletological elements that you see there. They talk about the closing of the temples. And I think that likewise, how those texts reflect the concerns of the Egyptian ritual specialist class, these apocalyptic texts, they reflect resistance, but also coming from a very learned perspective. These people know the scriptures. They know who they're talking to. They know who their audience is. Their audience is the people that they're there to guide. Often you see in the apocalyptic texts, the visionary is somebody who is also guiding the people along, ascribed. But I wanted to ask you if you could kind of go over what some of the precursors and contemporaries to the apocalyptic genre are. The most important one, probably, is one that's very difficult to talk about, and that's the Persian. And I started in this business about 50 years ago when people talked about apocalyptic in an Old Testament context. They typically thought of early post-exilic prophecy. Paul Hanson, who was one of my teachers and who just died earlier this year, had a book called The Dawn of Apocalyptic, in which he argued that it was people who not only had suffered the Babylonian exile, but then were disenfranchised when they came back, who then called on God to render the heavens and come down and hope for a new heaven and a new earth. And it's probably somewhere in that period that you get Isaiah, chapters 24 to 27, often called the Apocalypse of Isaiah, although it's just prophecy, really, which talks about the earth being rent asunder and then about a time when God will destroy death forever and slay the dragon that is in the sea. Now, that those are certainly motifs you will get again in the book of Revelation and to some degree, even in Daniel, but it's just that aspect of it. Now, you do not yet, I think, have the whole kind of view of history and of the physical cosmos that you will get, for example, in the Enoch literature. But it's one of the precursors of it, as you say. It comes again from this sense of powerlessness and looking to something bigger for superhuman powers to break in, thinking that you're already being subject to superhuman powers and feeling that you need superhuman power to counteract that. So you get that from the ancient myths. Now, do we have anything like that, strictly speaking, in Babylonian literature? Well, you know, you have, out of sometimes been called Akkadian apocalypses, but what they have typically is a prediction of long periods of history, which is one of the motifs that you'll get in apocalypses, but you don't get in the Babylonian material, the idea of God intervening to judge the world. And I don't think you get that really in the Egyptian material either. You get some relevant literature. You will get it in the Egyptian stuff more when the Egyptians had been conquered, first by the Persians and then later on by the Greeks. And you will get the hope for the restoration of national monarchy. There's a text called the Potter's Oracle from Egypt. But, you know, that's as far as it goes. It doesn't have a new creation. It doesn't have the resurrection of the dead. It's more a restoration. Whereas what you get in the really apocalyptic literature is total replacement and a new creation. Now, the one ancient people who may have had such a conception of the world were the Persians. And the problem here is that our Persian literature is preserved in Pallavi and dates from the early Middle Ages. Now, this, you see, isn't so different from the way things used to be with Hebrew before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Even to this day, we talk about ancient Israel, but we don't have any texts from ancient Israel. You know, the texts we have are typically from the Middle Ages. That's where we get most of our texts of the Hebrew Bible. Now, with the Dead Sea Scrolls, we can check some of that earlier, but we don't have Dead Sea Scrolls for the Persians. And that's why a lot of people are hesitant to speak about the Persians. And also it's a language that most of us never learned. So you won't usually find biblical scholars who know Pallavi and then, you know, can speak with any authority on it. And so people tend to push that off to the side. But what you get, at least like in the medieval Persian literature, what you get is something very similar to the full blown apocalyptic view of the world. That is to say, a long stretch of history divided into periods, and then at the end of it some convulsions, destruction of this world and resurrection of the dead. Now, how early that develops in Persia is a little hard to say. We have Greek authors who describe some of it and attribute it to the Persians. People are skeptical as to how much they knew about the Persians, but at least, you know, they had the idea that the Persians taught this. And so I think there's a pretty good chance that there was Persian influence, but it's very hard to document it. And for that reason, we usually tend to back away from it. It's hard to say, since evidence is so fragmentary and late, but like you say, it would make sense. And the whole point of the show is that I don't tend to put anything above the other. I tend to put all the literature from the ancient world together because I believe that everybody is kind of living together and learning from each other, whether that be unconsciously or not, just by virtue of the fact that you're being exposed to these different cultures. So you have a culture shock and you're like, okay, these people think this way about things. So let's use this kind of mythology. It's kind of like getting back to the mythological motifs for a second. People make a big deal and kind of misappropriate these concepts. Like when we talk about the mythological views, like ball taming the serpent versus Yahweh, and they tend to go, okay, well, this is stolen from one. But what if it's just not that? What if it's just these people have a cultural milieu and a matrix that they see the world through? It's just in the air at this point. If I say something like I have a very Sisyphean beast, or I'm like a Prometheus springing fire, I'm not stealing from Prometheus or the myth of Sisyphus. I'm just using concepts that are in the air that we can understand. You know, to do that, if I then ask, you know, tell me the story of Sisyphus, you might not necessarily come up with it right away. People don't need to know the whole ancient stories. This stuff is still kind of controversial. If you take, in the book of Daniel, you have a vision of beasts coming up out of the sea, and then one like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven and an ancient of days with venerable white hair presiding over it all. Now, you know, this looks an awful lot like the Eugiritic myths. In Eugarrat also, you have the white-headed ancient god, Ayle, Baal is the rider of the clouds, and you have Yam, the sea, and sometimes she'll yet have the seven heads or Leviathan as a monster coming up out of the sea. That seems to be the configuration. Daniel isn't trying to reproduce that. Daniel is trying to describe his own time. So did he know how this story actually went in ancient Canaan? Probably not. You know, he didn't need to know a whole lot of it. He didn't care. He wasn't interested in ancient Canaan. He was interested in getting some usable symbols. Now, the sea, you see, you get also all over the place of the Hebrew Bible. You get a rider of the clouds all over the place of the Hebrew Bible, but it's always Yahweh. And it doesn't seem to be Yahweh in this case. Now, in that particular case, though, I think there was a reason for Daniel to go to Canaanite symbolism. You see, the Eugarrat, where these texts were found, was in northern Syria. Now, the people who were attacking Jerusalem when the book of Daniel was written were Syrians. You know, it was the Greeks from Syria and Antiochus Epiphanes. And by all accounts in the book of Maccabees and also in Daniel, they introduced into Jerusalem the cult of Baal Shemem, Baal of the heavens. So it doesn't seem to me to be a huge stretch to think that the author of Daniel knew some of the imagery associated with Baal of the heavens. And what he's doing it then is kind of reversing it. You know, if you've read any post-colonialism, this is a typical strategy that, you know, you borrow something from the ruling power and you subvert it. Here, the rider on the clouds isn't going to be Baal for Daniel. It's probably as I read it, it's the Archangel Michael. But in any case, it's going to be the God of Israel who is going to prevail. But he will use that imagery nonetheless and use it to subvert it. And this, I think, just makes an awful lot of sense. I would agree, especially with your assertion that it's Michael. I know Daryl Hannah has a book, Michael and Christ, that really made that great. Yeah, that's right. I really love. Let's talk about Enoch for a second. Everybody's here for Enoch, right? Enoch appears in the Bible, seventh from Adam, before the flood. And it said of him famously that he walked with God and then he was not for God took him. This was taken to mean that when he walked with Elohim, it was, he walked with the angels. And in at least by the Hellenistic period, this was understood to mean that he had laid around trip. He used to commute to heaven, who opened down. And then he was not for God, took him at some point, God said to him, why don't you stay up here? And so, he didn't die a normal death. And in this way, actually becomes kind of paradigmatic for what people might hope for. Because one of the big shifts in the paralyptical literature of the Hellenistic period, and you don't get this now in the early post-exilic prophetic literature, but you get it in Enoch and Daniel, the goal of life is to go to heaven when you die. This, I think, was one of the big shifts in Western culture. The Greeks had their own version of it, but over against the Hebrew Bible, this was huge. Because in the Hebrew Bible, your hope is to live a long life on earth, see your children and your children's children have fertile crops and animals and all that. You get to Enoch and indeed Daniel too. The hope is to shine like the stars, to get up there with the angels. That's a whole different ball game. Back to Enoch. The story then, if you go back to your Bible, after you have just dispensed with Enoch and he was not, then you read about the sons of God who look down and see the daughters of men, and you know what happens after that. So they come down, they engage in all sorts of mischief, some of which indeed is fornication, as you might expect, but it doesn't stop with that. Now Matt Goff will tell you a lot more about the giants. Development taken over from Mesopotamian mythology. But in Enoch, then these giants, not only corrupt people on earth, but they also teach them things. And the things that they teach them are very interesting. You know, they teach them about astronomy. They teach them how to make weapons. They teach them the art of making up the eyes. Cosmetics. And the world was changed. Now, it seems to me that this is all an allegory for what happened in the ancient Erest when the Greeks came after Alexander the Great. You had a new culture, which was very different from the traditional Erestrian culture. You know, not unlike the kind of culture shock you have had in modern times with the spread of Western culture in the Arab world. Where you have, you know, the new Erestrian world traditionally had a kind of fear of nudity. You get this very much in the Hebrew Bible. You know, the body is something to be covered up. And then here come the Greeks with statues of Aphrodite and the like. And you know, it kind of blows their mind. And, you know, from the viewpoint of Enoch, this is not good. You mentioned Prometheus. Well, you know, Prometheus also brought down all sorts of skills to people. Some people think that the first Enoch is influenced by the story of Prometheus. But usually we think of Prometheus as a good guy who is bringing civilization to people. But Enoch saw this as the corruption of the world. And it's really the novelty of it. It's culture change. So the book of the watchers, the first part of a first Enoch isn't written in response to persecution. It's written in response to culture shock. To this eruption from the outside of the way it's told in first Enoch, if these are figures who come down from heaven, which, you know, the Greeks might as well have. They were coming from another world into the new East. And then the shock and then the earth cries out to God to deliver it and to purify it. That's how Enoch gets started. Interestingly enough then, it's the watchers who ask Enoch to go up to heaven and intercede for them. Now, some people like Martha Hemelfar but Princeton have always said that Enoch was to be the priest. But I don't think so. I think in fact that the whole point is that he isn't a priest and that this comes from people who felt the priest weren't getting the job done. And so what Enoch is as a scribe, which is to say, a lawyer. You know that he is somebody that they hire to go up and plead their case. And it doesn't work, but it leads to further interesting adventures for Enoch. So Enoch then becomes the mediator. And part of what comes out of that is, what do you need to succeed in this world? Well, you need a mediator who can go up to heaven and can come down and tell you what's really going on up there. Because that's what you need to know to survive in this world. I'm just getting back to what you were saying about the colonization of the East with the Macedonians and Alexander the Great. We tend to kind of romanticize this a lot. People who don't really read too much into it. When they hear the concept colonization, everything's being, Judaism is being colonized or Egypt is being colonized. Sometimes we give it an overly romantic concept that it doesn't really have. These are people who are of the ruling class like these Macedonians and Greeks who are imposing their culture on native populations. And it's culture shock for everybody, not just Jews for native Egyptians, Demotic. Enoch is for me like the very first like scribe fan fiction because the scribes, just apocalypticism being like from the scribal culture. You kind of see this in the second Sophistic later. The scribes and people who are learned, they like to show off what they know, no matter what it is. Yeah, so like I can imagine like guys like Lucian, if he lived maybe 300 years before would be like writing these texts just because he'd find it interesting, to show off what he knew and also kind of subvert because that's what Lucian does in his own day. And we see that in Daniel, right? Daniel as a text, like you mentioned, Daniel has a very interesting transmission history since it's kind of two separate distinct parts. And the first part kind of presents Daniel as integrated into this kind of society. And then the next part is like the complete opposite with Antiochus Epiphanes, of course. One of the things that occurred to be there as you were speaking is, you know, when you get like in the modern world, you get the spread of Western culture in the Near East, you get two kinds of reaction to it. There were plenty of people who love it, who think this is the best thing that ever happened to us. Even if they may not want to say that publicly, they want to Westernize themselves. This also happened in antiquity. There were people who saw this as great opportunity. And this is actually what led to the upheavals in Jerusalem. Now, in the book of Daniel, interestingly enough, you see, which is fiction, no doubt, it starts out with these people who are deported from Jerusalem. Okay, how bad is it to be deported from Jerusalem? Well, for some of these people, it isn't so bad at all because they are then taken into the royal service. They're looking for bright young men and they learn the language and literature of the Caledians. And they don't have a problem learning that. And what Daniel then is able to do is beat the Caledians at their own game. Now, that's very typical diaspora literature. Every diasporic people, you know, including the Irish, have had that aspiration, you know, to master the arts and skills of the ruling class and beat them at their own game. And that's what Daniel is doing. And you see, the first half of the book of Daniel does not give you at all a bad impression, really, of the pagan rulers. Now, you know, okay, Nebuchadnezzar is arrogant, Belshaasar is arrogant, a Syros actually comes off very well. But then everything changes when you get to the second half of the book. And that changes because history had changed. You know, it was quite possible for upwardly mobile Jews to prosper under the Persians. And for a long time, say under the Ptolemies, and it was when Antiochus Epiphanes came in, then the things went sour. And the reason things went sour really was that he got into trouble with the Romans, or his father did. And they had to pay a huge tribute to the Romans. And that meant they were short of funds. They had the idea that there were funds to be had in various temples around the Near East, including the temple in Jerusalem. And that's what leads to all the trouble. And at that point then, certainly the imperial power isn't so benign at all. And that's a huge difference. Daniel two and Daniel seven, both have a similar outline of history. They have a sequence of kingdoms to be followed by the kingdom of God. But in Daniel, they're not so bad. They may be of decreasing value, but they're not really evil. Whereas in Daniel seven, they are. The fourth beast in Daniel, you know, the tramples with its feet. This was the Syrian war elephant. That's what's being reflected there. These mythological symbols and the language of apocalypticism seems to be really adaptable to different situations. Like a Daniel two versus a Daniel seven. They're similar kind of visions, but they're being interpreted different ways. Maybe Daniel two is a bit more Joseph and Aseneth in terms of Daniel's getting one over on everybody versus seven. It's how I guess the epiphanies is evil. So I want to talk about dreams because I always love this point you mentioned in your book. And I'm a big fan of Artemis Doris and his on Eurocritica by virtue of the fact that the cell kids and the Ptolemies were very, not only patronizing of the sciences and cosmology, right? But they're also hugely into dreams and dream interpretation. So what is the significance of Daniel being an interpreter of dreams? When we kind of think of these visions, we're thinking, oh, it's kind of like Paul was taking up, but no, these people are more often than not when you read these pseudographical and apocalyptic texts, they're having these experiences and dreams. They're being interpreted by an angel or in the case of the kings, by somebody like Daniel who's an expert in dreams who's kind of like the Artemis Doris of his day, I guess. So what is that significance? In ancient Israel, the prophets typically had visions and they usually wanted to deny that there were dreams. They said dreams are untrustworthy. Now, in Mesopotamia, on the other hand, dreams were good. Dreams are in fact where you are likely to have visions and come in contact with the higher world. And I think they pick up the valuation of dreams changes with the Jews in Babylon. And they adopt the Babylonian attitude. Also, divination gets a very bad reputation in Deuteronomy, but now Daniel doesn't have any hangups about it. But the dreams are really the only kind of divination that the Jews embraced. And I think it was because they were close enough to the prophetic visions that's understandable enough in a dream, things come to you. They're not products of rational thought. And you may skip from one thing to another, which is what they tend to do in these apocalyptic texts. People have spilled a lot of ink trying to find unity in the book of Revelation. Well, if you think of it as dream literature, that's the way dreams go. You're going along on one thing and suddenly you find yourself in the middle of something else. So I think that they came to appreciate dreams that way. Now, of course, it's a question then when you read an account of a dream in the book of Daniel, does that mean somebody actually did have a dream? There's no way to check it. It's an interesting fact that several of the apocalyptic texts describe techniques of disposing yourself to get dreams or visions. Enoch goes and sits down by the waters of Dan and recites something over and over until he falls asleep. Now, you can try it. Daniel fasts. You can try that too, I guess, if you like. My favorite of them is Forth Ezra, who has given a fiery liquid to drink at one point. Also at another point, he goes out and takes some of the flower of the field. This too is interesting. Now, of course, obviously fiery liquids can lead you to have wild imaginations and so can the flower of the field. So the people who wrote these texts evidently knew that, but I don't think we have any way of controlling when they were reporting a vision or a dream that they had and when it's literary composition. And also, I think it's hard to make a distinction even between the two, because if you have a literary author who has a fantastic imagination, in a way that person has to envision things. Is that a vision? Where do you draw the line between vision and reality, so to speak? I think there's a continuum there. That's a great point. Lucian didn't need to imbibe substances or take the flowers of the elder fast for seven days to write a true story, right? He just kind of wrote a really great kaleidoscopic, insane carnival. You see this concept. They're always doing these preparations with fasting, with visions. You even see this kind of carried over into the non-commodi text. If you look at something like Allogenes or Zostrianos, those guys are doing the same exact things. They're going out to the desert. They're fasting. And even Joseph and Asineth, right? Asineth has the conversion experience and she puts on the dark robe and stuff and she has the fasting and then she has the vision of the mouth with the honeycomb, right? So, yeah, same kind of thing there. As noted earlier, there are a multitude of reasons for creating this literature. I wanted to get into a very tumultuous time in the history of Judaism. Post-70 Common Era in the Fall of the Temple. This gives birth to perhaps two of the most intertwined and two of my favorite of the pseudepigraphical texts, 4th Ezra and 2nd Baruch. So can we discuss how 4th Ezra and 2nd Baruch react to the fall of the temple and use the mythological motifs? They're kind of giving two similar but at the same time different answers. Yeah, in fact, I am inclined to think that 2nd Baruch in a way was an answer to 4th Ezra. And 4th Ezra is the the job of the apocalypses. The glory of 4th Ezra is the way it questions the justice of God at the outset. It says, why did these things happen to us? Maybe we didn't keep your law, but were the Romans keeping it? Come on, you know, at least we kept some of the laws and some of the time nobody else was keeping it at all. In other words, it undermines the kind of answer that you typically got in Deuteronomic theology that the suffering is punishment for sin, for not keeping the law. And it says that just doesn't work. Then you have these long dialogues with an angel in which the angel is able to silence Ezra but not condense him. There were like three waves of this, but the angel does I think is distract Ezra by telling him the wonderful things that are going to happen. But then at the beginning of the next chapter, Ezra will go back to square one and read the same questions again. The turning point of the book is in chapter 10 when he sees a woman who is lamenting and he tries to console her, although it's not very consoling and says, why are you so concerned with yourself when we think of what's happening to Zion? Take the bigger picture. And then she's transformed and she becomes Zion transformed. And after that, Ezra doesn't raise any more questions. Now, I think that then what you get in the last few chapters is visions of what will happen at the end of history. And there are different ways of imagining it. And when it ends up in chapter 13 with one very much like Daniel seven, with the man coming up out of the sea and then taking a stand on Mount Zion, the idea is, things are going to be all right. Does that really answer Ezra's questions? I would say no. But for Ezra really does is say, you can't understand it. So since you can't understand it, just enjoy it. Look at the great things that are going to happen. Second Baruch, on the other hand, I think wants to defend the law. In fourth Ezra, if you like the bottom line is, oh Adam, what have you done? For even though the sin was yours alone, it affected all of us. And then second Baruch says, each of us is the Adam to his own life, to his own soul. Adam was responsible for himself alone. And we have nothing now, but the Almighty and his law. But second Baruch never raises a question about the law. It says, no, the law is wholly just and good. And that's what you've got to stick with. What Ezra does effectively at the end is he rewrites the law. The books are gone. He has to rewrite them. And the beauty is second Baruch, the guy's like, no, no, no, no, no. But he rewrites it, he gets 70 extra ones. And unfortunately he doesn't give us a list, but I think it's safe to assume that he's thinking of things like fourth Ezra. Like a lot of these apocalypses, but the point in fourth Ezra is, you need more than the law. And I think in a way that's why he has Ezra do this. Ezra was the great champion of the law. For the historical Ezra, there was no question of needing more than the law. For fourth Ezra, there is. And you know, even second Baruch, while the second Baruch doesn't admit that you need more than the law, he's still trying to provide more because you still need these visions of what will happen at the end of history. To compliment us. What I loved about fourth Ezra is, my favorite books in the Hebrew Bible are things like Joe, like Ecclesiastes. I like the wisdom literature. I like the fact that Ezra is having a conversation with God, with, it's not just like, this is what I'm, God's saying, this is what's gonna happen, shut up. But like Ezra's still like, I have some questions. And I'm still gonna keep asking these questions. So he's really wrestling with God. You kind of in a way like look at him as like a Jacob kind of figure. He's really wrestling with these issues. And he's really trying to figure out like, well, this happened. And I don't see any big difference between how we act in the Roman Empire Acts. So maybe there's something more that needs to be happening here, like you said. And the end, the books are gone. He writes, rewrites the books. He has the secret books. We see this again, like in the Nag Kamadi texts as well. They're always writing secret books and they're putting them up on some mountain on the third heaven or heaven for people to find later. So yeah, it's just a really beautiful existential text. It takes this question that I'm sure a lot of people, whether you're a Jesus follower or an Orthodox Jew, very seriously, he's kind of giving an answer that I really like, don't get me wrong. I still love my mark. I still love some of the Pauline texts. I really think that 4th Ezra is really just like on another level in terms of that answer. It's really, it's saying, I think it's giving you the opportunity to say, things are under control, but you can still have questions. You can keep calm and carry on, but you can still like question these. If the Canon of the Old Testament were really inspired, they'd have included 4th Ezra and left out chronicles. I think all these examples, just really show the malleability, the adaptability of these visions and this literature to really not only sometimes, like as you said in the medieval period, prop up the status quo. This millennial kind of idea, this was ordained to be versus, the more questioning post-colonial aspects of something like a 4th Ezra. I think we've covered a good deal. It's been an enjoyable conversation. I love that I could talk to Dr. John Collins about our Temodorus solution and the same topic as 4th Ezra. That doesn't happen every day, but Dr. Collins, this has been an absolute honor. I wanna thank you for all your scholarship. I wanna thank you for taking the time to talk to me, to talk to the audience, to share your knowledge. The show and the canon that I'm creating here is richer because you have taken the time. And I wanna say I appreciate it. And I appreciate each and every one of you watching. Thank you, Jason.