Mosessss... just killed a man.
Put a rock upside his head.
Buried in the sand and now he's dead.

If you want to build a Jewish lawgiver, you'll need one part Akkadian king, a Babylonian conqueror, a pinch of Egyptian miracles, two pounds of Semitic invaders, and a touch of Egyptian monotheism. Mix well and bake for several centuries until golden-calf brown... or until people believe it's true. Let cool and serve on two stone tablets.

A variety of pre-biblical texts are drawn upon to craft the tale of Joseph as the patriarch continues his adventures in Egypt. His life is filled with deception, intrigue, and brutality, and his methods of divination come not from Israel, but from Egypt and will later be banned by the priests of Jerusalem.

Genesis concludes with a novella about Joseph, a young man who is sold into slavery by his brothers only to rise above the adversity to rule over a pair of nations and save the world from starvation. Only the story is much deeper than that. It's a tale about theological clashes and staggering anachronisms and subtle literature. It's a tale of triumph and betrayal and redemption. But mostly it's about Egyptian and Canaanite gods and how those gods influenced the stories in the Hebrew Bible.

There's a scene borrowed directly from the Epic of Gilgamesh and we find some strange genetic experiments involving goats. Gods are abducted, another is defeated in a wrestling match, and a hilltop shrine is established multiple times and a sacred grave keeps moving about. We cover all this and more in the story of Jacob.

Despite being regarded as one of the most important figures in the Old Testament, Isaac is virtually a non-entity. He isn't an active character in a single story that's original to him. Why is that? Could it stem from his origins as a pagan god whose worship fell out of favor within the Second Temple community?

Concluding the story of Israel's first patriarch, we follow Abraham into the land of Gerar where he again sells his wife into the harem of a foreign king and then we climb Mount Moriah to witness the attempted sacrifice of his son. We find multiple layers as the Isaac story is meant to overwrite the older story of Ishmael.

Abraham gets a name change, has a personal visitation from multiple gods, Sarah uses magical curses against a slave girl before sleeping with a deity, and two cities are destroyed. But somehow these strange tales come together to form an interesting parallel to the story of Noah's flood.

We begin our coverage of the first patriarch and the covenant between him and Yahweh, or El Elyon, with the father of Judaism selling his half-sister, who is also his wife, into the pharaoh's harem.

The Tower of Babel has long been recognized as a cautionary tale warning against climbing too high and upsetting the gods... but is it more than that? And where did this story come from? While examining this brief tale we trace its origins back thousands of years to characters like Adapa, Erra, Ziusudra, Nimrod, and a giant who was the ancestor of Abraham.