BibleProject

Did God create disorder and chaos? What does it actually mean to be evil? And how do you tell your kids that in the Bible dragons are actually the “bad guys”? In this episode, Tim and Jon respond to your questions from the first half of the Chaos Dra...

The theme of the chaos dragon raises some challenging questions. For instance, if God created a perfect world and humans messed it up, why did the dragon and the chaos waters exist at the beginning of the universe? Why would God allow the potential f...

The story of Jonah employs all the major motifs of the theme of the chaos dragon: chaotic waters, a servant of God who rebels against him, and a great sea monster. But the story doesn't call it a sea monster—the story calls it a great fish! Join Tim...

When Israel chooses to act like the chaos monster instead of living like the people of God, God brings judgment on them. How? He sends other bigger monsters after them, namely, Babylon and Egypt. In this episode, Tim and Jon discuss the scrolls of Je...

What happens when the entire nation of Israel consistently aligns themselves with the dragon? They themselves become a chaos monster Yahweh has to deal with. In this episode, Tim and Jon explore the scroll of Isaiah and the prophet’s indictment of Is...

So often the symbol of the chaos monster shows up embodied by a human bent on oppressing other people. Goliath, one of the Bible’s most well-known bad guys, is depicted as having scaly armor like a snake and defying not just Israel, but Yahweh. In th...

In today’s episode, we once again encounter a theme that’s becoming all too familiar: humans becoming chaos monsters. Jabin, king of Canaan, and Sisera, the commander of his army, are depicted as serpents in Judges 4, and the humans who overcome thes...

Was Cain’s city a good thing initially? If Israel was just as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah, why didn’t God destroy it too? And how will God redeem the city in the new creation? In this episode, Tim and Jon respond to your questions from the second half...

God created humans to bear his image, but sometimes we choose our own destruction and start to look a lot more like chaos monsters instead. In this episode, Tim and Jon discuss a human who the prophets frequently called a sea dragon: the Pharaoh who...

Genesis 3 is probably the most famous serpent-featuring story in the Bible—the moment we get to see humans and the nahash interact for the first time. Because the serpent lures the humans into choosing their own demise, it’s also the moment Yahweh an...

Dragons show up on page one of the Bible, named among the beings that feature in the seven-day creation narrative in Genesis 1. God creates dragons to inhabit the chaos waters, and we meet one early on that tries (and succeeds) to get the first human...

When we read the word “myth,” often what comes to mind is a fictional story. However, a myth is a way of exploring universal concerns of human existence, using symbols for things we may or may not have words to describe. The dragon is one such myth—a...

 Nahash, tanin, leviathan––the Bible is full of strange words describing a creature many modern readers can’t quite categorize. All these words are ways of referring to a monster of the deep, a dragon. In this episode, Tim and Jon kick off a brand ne...

How could Abraham have anticipated a coming City of God, like the author of Hebrews said? What’s the connection between the shame of Adam and Eve and that of their son Cain? Was Genesis first an oral tradition, and how did it become a written account...

In the Bible, cities have a bad reputation as centers of immorality and unrighteous living. First-century followers of Jesus continued to live in cities, but they lived by an other-worldly ethic set by Jesus. Their way of living was so different that...