The Tower

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.

We left off last time right on the precipice before the Tower of Babel, so we’re going to pick up with the Tower of Babel. There is a specific shape to the Tower of Babel, and it is not unique to the Tower of Babel. The shape is called a ziggurat and they appear all over the world, which is weird if you’ve never built a ziggurat. It’s like why did everyone else get the memo, right?

It seems like they’re following a trend?

Right. It means something – something important.

I enjoyed the section of Rousas John Rushdoony’s book, The One and the Many, where he’s talking about ancient Mesopotamian religion and how the ziggurat or the pyramid in general, or even the mound – it doesn’t have to be super-fancy – it’s just this concept appears everywhere. Man is always trying to ascend out of chaos into order, and that order always means somebody’s deciding what happens, right?

There is an Orderer.

Someone at the top of the pyramid.

A specific will, and wouldn’t it be nice if that were me? That’s a common feature throughout ancient religions in general. I think it’s very odd to find any sort of exception to that rule, that the one person at the top is the manifestation not only of order but of deity, because the two go hand-in-hand, do they not?

Yes. The gods are reaching down and we’re reaching up, and where we meet – “It’s purely democratic and we’re all in this together” – no. Usually sooner or later someone asserts themselves in the name of the people, for the people, by the people, to be the spokesman for the people. And somehow, sooner or later he starts calling himself things like Son of God, priest, king, emperor of the world, things like that.

It’s so interesting though that in all of these things they’re an off-shoot of the truth, in the sense of the Lord using actual mountains. When you go up to the top of one of those structures, you are in a sense suspended between earth as heaven, as Christ was lifted up and suspended as the one true Son of God. It’s just so interesting to see all the things they take, but then of course we misuse them in our sin to try to get to God, rather than let God come to us.

Yes. God initially creates the garden of Eden on a mountaintop. We know that because there are rivers and water flows downhill. We can also think of Mount Sinai, but in each of these cases God has come down, in a sense. That’s a major theme as well. So this manmade mountain, this manmade ascension – it’s not that it’s completely made-up or wrong, it’s just a counterfeit.

It’s us trying to save ourselves.

Especially we see that with the artificial mountains.

Because they’re artificial.

It’s right there in the name.

And someone artificially steps in to help you the last little bit, which is again the person we were talking about who stands at the top and says, “I can help you span the little distance that’s still there, because you can’t quite do it yourself.”

Heaven and earth meet in this one person where there is a mixture of the human and divine. This may be something to save for much later down the line, but this is where Chalcedonian Christianity comes to bear. In Christ there is no mixture of the human/divine. He’s truly human, truly God, and yet the divine remains divine, the human remains human. In other worldview/philosophy/religion there’s a mixture at that point. There’s a continuity of being between what we think of as divine and what we think of as mundane, this world, us.

The goal is to climb and bypass the bottleneck and experience the fullness of divine presence, essence, and certainly power. And whether you’re Pharaoh or Alexander or Caesar or some Aztec emperor…

We might add in the pope, who stands at the top of that pyramid.

Yeah, there’s that one. I was going for Native American, indigenous peoples, whatever we call them today, and the great many American pyramids, ziggurats, and ritual mounds, as you said earlier.

There’s a line in Foucault’s Pendulum where two of the protagonists are debating the reality of occult conspiracy and such. One of them puts forward, “Well, there are all these pyramids everywhere. Why does everyone build pyramids?” and the female protagonist says, “Because when you’re in the desert, sand piles up in mountains, not in spheres.” Yes, however, you could also dig a ditch because the sand does that, too.

It’s important in the context of Genesis 11 to note the tail end of Genesis 10, which says –

These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations. These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations, and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

Tongues, languages.

Chapter 10 is the so-called Table of Nations that shows how humanity spread out across the planet, at least the first original 70 nations, and it nearly ends with, “Oh, and they were divided by their languages,” at which point our ears perk up and we say, “Languages? Where did those come from?”

The whole earth was of one language, so we have something that God introduced in Genesis 2 called the flashback, where we say, “Oh, here we go. Let’s find out where these language things came from,” and we find out that originally humanity spoke one language, some kind of proto-Hebrew, apparently, judging by the fact that the names in Genesis 4 and 5 do mean something in Hebrew and not any other language. So we wonder, “Why isn’t that still the thing?”

Evolutionists struggle with the whole idea of where human speech came from in the first place. Their answer to multiple languages, as far as I understand it, is “Spread people out and give them enough time, and language changed.” That’s true, but it’s also true that that’s not what the history of linguistics actually shows us.

There are limited numbers of original languages, and they all seem to more or less originate someplace in Mesopotamia or thereabouts, and only a few thousand years back, not millions of years back or hundreds of thousands of years back. So this is exactly the kind of thing we should expect, but of course evolutionists and secularists won’t accept it because it involves two things: 1) divine miracle, 2) divine judgment, and the last is worse than the first.

The problem with miracles is they invoke a personal God who judges in history, and that’s the danger. If God simply existed to poof in and out and do little nifties for us, we wouldn’t be nearly as concerned about things like this. But when we face a God who can, oh, destroy the world with a flood, and then we barely get up and running or apostatizing again and here he comes and smashes our languages and spreads us all across the planet, that’s just not the kind of God we want.

And miracles necessarily involve judgment, as you say, but also in the simple moral judgment sense, not even in a final end-of-days death kind of judgment, because there’s an intervention and there has to be a reason, a personal volition to intervene. Otherwise it’s magic, it’s manipulation, it’s push this, pull that lever, and you get said result.

In other words, covenant. God responds in terms of covenant. If we disobey his law, if we commit idolatry, if we invent gods, God is displeased and sooner or later God intervenes. Now God is incredibly patient and thus the whole thing in Romans of why does it take God so long to act. Well, the goodness of God leads you to repentance, or not. God gives man time to repent. He also gives us time to damn ourselves more thoroughly.

The second commandment says that God punishes idolatry to the third and fourth generation of those who continue in that sin. “When the sentence for a crime is not speedily executed, the hearts of men become fully set on doing evil.”

This is good for our whole study of history. It’s very easy, I find, even when Christians are writing the history books, to forget the personal/divine element. Sometimes we’re fairly good in the Old Testament because we have God there telling us that he’s bringing down Babylon, he’s bringing down Medo-Persia and all of that. But sometimes when we get past that and we come to the New Testament we forget that God still does that.

Again we were talking last time about common grace a bit. Often it’s just thrown to common grace. “Well, you know, there’s ebb and flow, give and take, up and down. God has plans, no doubt, but they’re too subtle for us to ever figure out. We can’t really say, for instance, that God flattened the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, because that’s far too personal and too…well, God tipping his hand.” Yeah, isn’t it. So as we continue our study of history we’re going to assert sometimes that “God did this.”

And he sure did it through means.

He uses means. Sometimes the means are other nations, and usually they are. Occasionally they’re asteroid strikes or fire from heaven.

Plague and pestilence.

Plague and pestilence are good.

Now drawing our attention back, so here’s humanity. We’re only a couple hundred years, give or take, I forget the number, into the new world. We have enough people to actually constitute a small city of some sort, and the democratic element is very strong. “Let us do this. Let us do that. Let us do that.”

From what scripture said back in chapter 10, there was this man named Nimrod. I believe you said, Rachel, that he’s listed as Nephilim, is that correct?

Not Nephilim, but it’s the other word used for the Nephilim, “a mighty man before the Lord,” gibor. They called him a gibor in Hebrew.

Which is a word that can mean hero or conqueror, great warrior.

This is like David’s mighty men later on?

Yes, so it can have a positive or a negative connotation, depending on how you use the mightiness. But the other side we will see here from the section on the Nephilim is that again they’re concerned about establishing a name for themselves.

So we’ve run into this Nimrod, who is the son of Cush, who is the son of Ham, so we’re not very far in, and we’re told that the beginning of his kingdom was Babylon, Babel. The traditions and legends seem to suggest they were ringleaders rather than actual tyrants who took over, because again the democratic element – “Let us…Let us…” – but just because there are people saying, “Let’s all do this,” there are still leaders. There are still people pulling strings. There are still charismatic people stirring up the crowds. And when it all falls apart, Nimrod is apparently the one who steps in and takes over.

The way that scripture mentions Nimrod suggests that everybody in the ancient world knew who he was. We’ll perhaps have time to talk about him later when we start talking about the deification of the dead, but he was a mighty hunter before the Lord, and that’s not meant as a good thing. Did he hunt men? Did he hunt dragons? Somehow he made himself a reputation and was remembered well enough that when Genesis mentions him the assumption is “and everybody knows who I’m talking about, so let’s move on.”

The association of him with Babel was not in his favor, nor in Babel’s favor. These were two headwaters of paganism that the writer here is bringing together for us, and to tell us “It started out as everybody had this great idea to build a community that would encompass the world and would be centered around this religious tower that would be a spiritual magical gateway to heaven, and out of it came this mighty man, this conqueror, who then proceeded to make the first post-flood empire.”

It's at that point that secular history begins to overlap, but it takes a little bit of creativity to say, “So secular history doesn’t know anybody by the name of Nimrod, but it does know some other people who sound an awful lot like him,” and probably that’s what they’re remembering. He’s the founder we’re told of Nineveh. Historically the name of that guy is called Ninus. He was the husband of the legendary Semiramis.

Also he’s the founder of Akkad. The first founder of Akkad was a man named Sargon, so these may all be the same person. It’s hard to tell because the ancient world was really rotten at leaving historically-accurate records of any sort. Largely what we have are, as the narrator in Our Town says, records of slave sales and grain sales, and conquerors boasting of who they conquered. But often these men were known by different names in different places. When we’re working this far back in history, the Bible is the one thing that’s actually a historical record, the only one that’s trustworthy. “You’re telling history. Why are we still in the Bible?”

It’s constructed in order to be a historical record, unlike what we have from the pagan world.

Exactly. So because of what these people did here, God did alter something in their brains and it was by families. It wasn’t that you woke up and couldn’t understand your wife. It was that you couldn’t understand your next-door neighbor perhaps. And when you can’t understand people and you don’t have Duolingo and time to process, you get to the point where…

Our world here is Sacramento, or has been. Rachel is now living elsewhere. But you can go to Winco, the supermarket, and you can hear all kinds of languages being spoken, depending what day of the week you go, and we’re used to that. We learn a few simple words, and the cashiers learn a few more, and some of them actually have some other language as their first language, and we get by because we’re used to it and we expect it and we make an effort for the sake, largely, of living in peace and trading with one another profitably to make this happen.

That happens to the world eventually, but the initial reaction is, “I don’t understand you. You are funny. You are speaking nonsense. I’m going over here and over there,” and further and further, and we begin to get the beginning of nation-states, people who speak the same language among themselves but don’t speak the same language as anybody else, although in some cases the language differences are much more severe than they are in others. So people began to move apart.

This is what God had told them initially, to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. They hadn’t wanted to. They wanted to stay together for the sake of self-protection against God, apparently, and God has his way. He spreads humanity out.

In terms of our future look at world history, some really practical things come of this that we need to consider. We’re now going to have people spread out into different parts of the world, but the flood has rearranged geography and natural resources. “This land will be a desert. This land will be high tundra. This land will be a forest. This land will be a rainforest. This land will be icy mountains. This land will be a beautiful warm seashore.”

They will all have their advantages and their assets. Some will have this mineral or that mineral. Some will have lumber. Some will have animals you can hunt. Some are great for crops. But nobody is going to have everything.

Even before the flood we’re told that one particular land had gold at the beginning.

Havilah – the gold of that land is good. So we’re creating this situation where my people group does not speak your language, but you are settled in the land that has something we want. Now there’s two ways to deal with this.

First, you walk in and take it. That’s the hard way.

This is called war and it’s the hard way, and eventually we learn that. It would be easier if there was something we have too much of and we find out you want it, and we want what you have, so let’s kind of meet in-between or just send one of our guys over there with samples. The funny thing is that businessmen and traders learn to get by the language barriers.

This is one of the questions I ask in our World History or Econ classes. “What makes world trade so difficult – A, B, C, or D?” and one of them is B – language. No, it doesn’t. You would think, but it doesn’t, because when people want stuff they find a way. They hold up fingers and count.

Gestures go far.

Yes, they do, and then you start creating pidgin languages – pidgin English or pidgin French or something. “Hey, looky what I havey over herey.” You start insulting the intelligence of the locals and new languages come up because they figure that’s how you talk, because you do, so trade develops.

On the right hand, maybe say to the east, I’m trading for this good, but on the left hand, to the west, I’m trading this, so I get your stuff but we’re trading so much that we’re getting more from you than we actually need. Oh, but the people on the other side want it and they have something we want. So one particular thing, like say silk from China, can make its way to the Roman Empire without any central planning or world government overseeing the process. This is the miracle of free trade, human greed.

Now it doesn’t have to be greed. It can simply be human desire, in which case we do all this nicely and with proper etiquette and respecting one another’s boundaries and customs and all that, but even so, without that we’re still sinners. We still want stuff. We want more stuff and we want more senseless stuff usually, and it just seems to work better most of the time if we trade rather than go to war for it. But humanity has been slow to learn that.

Sometimes we think, “But we want to be self-sufficient, so if we annex your country to ours then we’ll have ready access to all that stuff we’ve been trading for,” so here’s some of the economic background that goes into the next 4,000 years of human history.

It begins now with God deliberately creating the situation where on the one hand nations are coming into existence and posed to dislike each other, and yet because of scarcity are being forced to cooperate with each other. And as long as we’re busy trading and it’s successful, we’re not as inclined to fight wars, but we’re busy.

There’s a great line in The Mysterious Benedict Society very early on where it says “Greed sometimes helps people find reasons to do the right thing.”

Exactly. “The free market must always remain free” I believe is one of Haley’s quotes from that book.

“The free market must be controlled” is a quote from that book. It’s children’s dystopia, but so cheerful and wholesome. It’s the best thing.

It’s one of the better ones I’ve read.

I have to read it. Haley keeps trying to get me to read it and I keep putting it off.

I think you will enjoy it very much.

That might be a good place to insert here the fact of what you’re describing, Greg, is very decentralized and individual, whereas what they were attempting in the Tower of Babel was a grand unity to protect themselves and to get what they wanted and to ignore God. And God says, “No, actually, you know that you need me more when you can’t think that you depend on everybody else or some great system to catch up if something bad happens,” which of course applies to many things today where we attempt to systematize and bureaucratize so many things, because if we can just have a system, if we can just have the right insurance, we can be protected against all risk.

So that’s what we have at the dawn of the new start, the new human history, the new beginning. We have a new world order. Nothing new here, nothing to see, move on. And this will echo throughout the history of the world, throughout the Old Testament and on into our own time.

We’re seeing again almost in archetype or in picture form or simplified form what we still deal with, because we have very few humans, relatively speaking, and yet these same patterns keep emerging and they’re going to haunt the stage of history from here on out. So this is a good place to stop and look at them and say, “Ah, we’re going to see a lot more of this, I bet.” Yup, we are. We’re going to keep seeing ziggurats and stepped towers and pyramids, and next week or the week after we’ll probably get to Egypt.

There are still a couple more things we need to talk about to bridge the gap into what’s almost recorded history, because from Noah to Abraham there are 10 generations, so just some general thoughts about what’s happening there.

First, humanity is spreading out across the globe. The word globe here is important because although these 70 nations are all more or less within a stone’s throw of Israel, or where Israel will eventually be, they keep moving. They keep spreading. You know what? Family groups don’t get along much better than non-family groups do. There are violent ruptures in family groups, and this group goes this way and this group goes that way.

I was going to say earlier when you were like, “It’s not like man woke up one day and couldn’t understand his wife” – that doesn’t require a miracle. That happens every day.

You don’t need to speak different languages for that to still happen.

And I’m going to avoid so many jokes because I’m out-numbered here with two females to one male, so we’ll go on with this. We have humanity spreading out, so eventually humanity reaches Australia, crosses the Bering Straits into the Americas, and ships. You know, Noah had built a ship.

Yeah, it’s been done.

He was a pretty good shipwright.

Yes, so we can believe and assume that very early on we have people not only traveling by ice bridges and land bridges, but by ships of various sorts. We have entire Pacific Island groups that have to be populated for people to be where they are today, and you don’t get there by walking. The waters were never that low, so boats, ships of various sorts, and navigation.

This is perhaps a point to remember again that Noah and his family came out of a technologically-advanced world. How advanced? We can’t be sure, but they built a boat half the size of the Queen Mary, so not slackers. We do have Renaissance maps based on earlier maps, some of them apparently ancient maps, that show the Americas, that show Antarctica ice-free. Somebody someplace sometime charted a good piece of the globe, and this very well may have been the time, because if you’re about to spread out then it would be good to know what’s out there, so this is going on.

The somewhat naïve evolutionary idea of how humanity moved – Africa to Mesopotamia and across the land bridge into the Americas and so on – there is some truth in that. It didn’t start in Africa, it started in Mesopotamia because the ark set down in the mountains of Ararat, which is modern Armenia. But from there, Babel/Babylon is in Mesopotamia, the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which was probably a little bit different from where it is now because silt and the Persian Gulf growing and shrinking and all of that, but it was around there someplace.

Something else that happened that’s important and that evolutionists are aware of after a fashion is that the flood waters in receding left an imbalance of temperature. The Bible does not mention it directly, although there are hints of it here and there, but we have cold. The earth temperature-wise is imbalanced and the ice of the poles, the North Pole particularly, begin to grow and spread. Yes, there was this thing called an Ice Age. Was there more than one? We have ice ages on into the Middle Ages. They’re just not that drastic but more localized.

There was a time when there really was a Northwest Passage. You could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific by going above Canada and Alaska and around again. That’s not the way things are because, you know what? Global temperatures change, and humanity has survived every temperature readjustment we’ve had to experience, including an Ice Age, so there’s that. We acknowledge that it’s there.

The one book that it’s good to turn to at this point is, with regard to topic matter at least, is one of the oldest books of scripture and that’s the book of Job. There are three things here in the book of Job that I’d like to point out.

First, we’re in southern Palestine. This is the land of Uz, which is more or less where Edom will be. This is chapter 38 and God’s addressing Job and he says something along these lines. This is verse 28 –

Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.

There is a surprising amount of mention of snow and ice in a book that’s set in what today is desert. It wasn’t then. Canaan once upon a time was the like the garden of the Lord, like the garden of Eden. Climate has altered over the centuries. But it’s interesting that the deep is frozen? They’re not living near the North Pole. They’re living not far from the Mediterranean and yet they can talk of the sea freezing over, so the Bible acknowledges that something’s going on there.

When you start talking Ice Age though, then you start coming up to, “But wait, that’s when there were cavemen. We know about that because we’ve seen it in museums and children’s picture books. We know all about what cavemen looked like.” Well, probably not, but were there people who lived in caves? Yes, actually the Bible talks about that.

This is chapter 30 of Job. He’s just told us how good the old days were when he was respected and treated well and had prominence in the city and so on. Then in chapter 30 he says –

But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock. Yea, whereto might the strength of their hands profit me, in whom old age was perished? For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste. Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat.

They were driven forth from among men (they cried after them as after a thief) to dwell in the clifts of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea, children of base men. They were viler than the earth. And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword.

So the caveman life seems to be a regression, is the sense that I’m getting.

That’s exactly it. They fled into the wilderness. Where were they before? In cities.

Not in the wilderness, but in civilization.

And when famine came or war came, want and famine, lack of food either because of poor crops or because war burnt it all up, they fled into the wilderness and they ended up eating roots and berries. Hunter-gatherers – not even hunters, these were just people gathering mostly. And when they poked their nose back into civilization, people drove them out and sent them back into the wilderness. In time they came to live in clifts of the valleys, caves of the earth – see? Cavemen.

This is interesting – “Among the bushes they brayed.” That’s normally something an animal does, like a donkey. Their speech degenerated to the point that people couldn’t understand what they were saying. Possibly they simply didn’t understand amongst themselves very well because intelligent philosophical or theological language was not high on their priority list.

We of course don’t have cavemen today, but we have under-bridge dwellers and roadside dwellers and people in houses that otherwise seem closed dwellers. We have people like this. We call this homeless or whatever the proper politically correct term is these days. They had their homeless population. Their solution was to drive them out into the wilderness and they made due the best they could. I’m not recommending that that’s a good idea, I’m just saying that’s what happened.

So were there cavemen? Yes, there were cavemen, at the same time there were huge cities that were full of people and that preserved some level of technology. We’ve got both of these things going at the same time, and depending upon where you might live – if you’re living in the frozen Alps, that’s not a great place to live, but if you’re caught in-between you may end up having to stay there and find some caves to live in. Or if you’re in some of the valleys of France, maybe caves would be a good place to hang around, particularly while you are hunting and chasing bison and such.

So this is a real thing. It’s not a complete invention of evolutionists, but their mistake is to think that there’s a progression here. There’s a regression. Civilization got off the boat with Noah, and within a couple hundred years built a city and a tower that showed keen mathematical understanding, and yet now it’s falling apart.

It’s kind of the same mistake to make as is often made in the idea that people were shorter in recent past centuries, because the clothing we have that’s survived is smaller than people today, and because the doorways in their houses were not so tall.

The reason the clothes we have are smaller is because they were children’s clothes. They didn’t get used up. They didn’t wear out. The stuff that adults wore on a daily basis we don’t have such well-preserved copies of. The beds were shorter but that’s because people slept sitting up. They didn’t need the extra foot.

Or clinging around each other to stay warm. What do you do with the doorways?

The doorways are because you don’t have central heating.

So to minimize the amount of airflow out.

Right.

This was also reminding me of a misconception that as evolution comes on the scene in the 1800s, there’s a lot of development of the idea of the noble savage. There’s a certain element here where we see this as a bad thing, to be going into nature, and we see the way that it actually dehumanizes someone basically.

But evolution picks up the other side and says being in nature is our original and our purest state, and thereby says, “Oh yes, these cavemen are where we come from.” They see them as the beginning instead of as a regression from something good.

There’s a distinction between a garden and a wilderness. They’re both very nature-y places, but there’s one you want to be in.

Yes. This is not the nature you want to go back to. But I think there were probably people in the 1800s that thought living in a cave would be cool.

Climactically it would be.

That seems like a good pausing point before we go on to the deification of the dead. That’s a teaser for next time.

And dinosaurs.

That’s right. We will talk about that next time. But before we go, let’s sign off with some recommendations, which we forgot to do last week, so if you’ve sent us an angry email about it, we know.

I have one. There’s a bookstore in Reading – or at least there was; I haven’t been up there lately – called Cal’s, and I got this book for $1 back in 2008. You were quoting from Dr. Rushdoony’s The One and the Many. One of the books he quotes – and by the way in passing, breaking off one thought to pursue another, and another off of that – one good way to build a library is to look at the footnotes of the scholarly books you read and find those books. That’s what I did here.

I’ve done that a lot.

He quotes a book called Before Philosophy. It’s a very scholarly book, but if you’ve got a college education or even a good high school education you can read it easily enough. It’s by multiple authors – Henri Frankfort, his wife Mrs. H.A. Frankfort, John Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen.

Thorkild Jacobsen gets to write the chapter on Mesopotamia. It’s called Mesopotamia and the three sections are “The Cosmos as a State,” “The Function of the State,” and “The Good Life,” as Sumer/Mesopotamia/Babylon/Assyria perceived it.

I don’t know that the author of that section is a Christian, but he does get one thing right. He basically says that one thing that’s indisputable is that all the religions of the world assumed a continuity of being between the divine and the human, except for Judaism, except for Israel. In Israel, God stood over against nature as something not to be identified with nature, and he develops that thought in passing to a good extent. But most of it is how the varied people of Mesopotamia from Sumer through Assyria and Babylon conceived of the universe.

One of the things that you mentioned already is that this is one of the original scholarly studies of all that. So that’s my recommendation. Emily, you’re next.

I want to recommend a kitchen tool that I didn’t use until a couple of years ago, and that is a hand-held blender or emulsifier or immersion blender. Apparently, all of those are the same thing.

Really? I thought a hand-held blender was the mixer that you hold.

That’s a hand-held mixer.

My wife has both. She has the thing with the two little beaters, and she has an immersion blender.

I have both of those too. I just didn’t realize the difference in terminology.

Why are you recommending this?

Because it means you can make homemade mayonnaise, which is very very easy. You can make baby food. When Gretchen was little and couldn’t eat a lot of things, we used this all the time. It was the Happy Baby Food Grinder and the immersion blender. We didn’t buy any baby food ever. It was great.

What I did today with my immersion blender was make pesto pasta sauce with just a ton of basil and cashews, because I didn’t have walnuts or pine nuts, and it was super yummy.

Sounds great. Bring some to Bible study. Happy Baby Food Grinder – I can get behind that one. That’s what most of our girls were raised on.

I think your wife Kate was the first person to recommend that to us, and we were like, “That sounds really cool. We should get one.” Then we got one, a different brand, and as soon as we had it everybody would spontaneously bring it up into conversation. “Oh, when my kids were little I used the Happy Baby Food Grinder,” and we were like, “All right, I guess we’re onto a good thing,” especially with the price of baby food.

Rachel, what have you got?

My recommendation actually comes from something we talked about last week, which was the question of how civilization develops and the desire to create and all that. I’m recommending the book called God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades. It’s by Rodney Stark. Most of it is actually about the Crusades, and you should read his information there, but he has a couple of chapters dealing with the development of the populations under the Muslim rule, under the empires of Islam from the 600’s on.

One of the most important things I think he has is a chart that talks about how long it took for half the population to actually be converted to true Islam, and on average it was 200-250 years before 50% of the population actually embraced Islam in most of the main countries.

He then also spends some time on the development of culture and such. Even it was a Muslim, why did Muslims never use it? Why did it end up in Europe, like algebra and algorithms. They were created by a Muslim-Arab man but they didn’t ever use them, so we got them instead.

The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous.

And it’s pretty much that. It’s interesting to see that we assume, “Oh, Islam swept in and took over everything, so everything is theirs,” but it actually took a long time for people to truly embrace Islam. That’s why the time of the Crusades is a pivotal point, because it’s where the populations are really starting to flip towards Islam more so than they did before.

And I will add a general recommendation for Rodney Stark. He’s one of these guys we’re seeing a good deal of, who start studying Christianity as an outsider, and little by little become convinced that there’s something to all of this.

Something is going on here – Tom Holland, Jordan Peterson.

Rodney Stark is a sociologist and he’s written a number of valuable books, including an introduction to sociology, a college textbook. The more he studied the effects of Christianity, the more pro-Christian he became. I think he may have become a Christian, but I don’t know.

I believe that was the last thing I heard, but again I know when I was reading about him a lot of it was, “He loves Christianity. He thinks we’re so cool,” but I don’t know where he has landed so far.

We’ll leave that between him and the Lord.

Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.

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