PETERSON: Introduction To The Idea Of God

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now listen to or watch the lecture series on DailyWire+.

VIDEO TIME: 1:33:00

The Conceptual Framework of the Bible

Let’s take a look at the structure of the book itself. The first thing about the Bible is that it’s a comedy. And a comedy has a happy ending. That’s a strange thing because the Greek gods’ stories were almost always tragic. Now, the Bible is a comedy. It has a happy ending. Everyone lives. There’s a heaven. What you think about that is a completely different issue. I’m just telling you the structure of the story. It’s something like: There was Paradise at the beginning of time, and then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history, and history is limitation and mortality and suffering and self-consciousness. But there’s a mode of being — or potentially the establishment of the state — that will transcend that, and that’s what time is aiming at. That’s the idea of the story. 

It’s a funny thing that the Bible has a story because it wasn’t written as a book. It was assembled from a whole bunch of different books. The fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable. The question is then: What is that story about? And how did it come up as a story? And then, I suppose as well, is there anything to it? It constitutes a dramatic record of self-realization or abstraction. The idea, for example, of the formulation of the image of God is an abstraction. That’s how we’re going to handle it to begin with. 

I want to say, though — because I said that I wasn’t going to be any more reductionist than necessary — I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it’s not explicable. So I don’t want to explain it away. I want to just leave it, as a fact, and then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well, we’ll leave that as a fact — and the mystery. But we’re going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to extract out the ideal and consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. That’s good enough. That’s an amazing thing, if it’s true. But I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

It’s a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors. Well, what does that mean? Many people wrote it. There’s many different books. And they’re interwoven together, especially in the first five books, by people who, I suspect, took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization and tried to make their accounts coherent. So they took a little of this, and they took a little of that, and they took a little of this. And they tried not to lose anything because it seemed valuable. It was certainly valuable to the people who had collected the stories. They weren’t going to tolerate too much editing. But they also wanted it to make sense to some degree, so it wasn’t completely logically contradictory and completely absurd.

So, many people wrote it and many people edited it and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time. We have very few documents like that. And because we have a document like that is sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena and try to understand what it is that it’s trying to communicate. It’s also the world’s first hyper-linked text, which is very much worth thinking about for quite a long time. 

Watch the lecture in its entirety here.

There’s four sources in the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible) — four stories that we know came together. One was called the Priestly, and it used the name Elohim or El Shaddai for God. I believe el is the root word for Allah as well, and that’s usually translated as God or the gods because Elohim is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible. And it’s newer than the Jahwist version. Now, the reason I’m telling you that is because Genesis 1, which is the first story, isn’t as old as Genesis 2. Genesis 2, the Jahwist version, contains the story, for example, of Adam and Eve, and that’s older than the very first book in the Bible. But they decided to put the newer version first, and I think it’s because it deals with more fundamental abstractions. It deals with the most basic of abstractions, how the universe was created, and then segues into what the human environment is

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases