Purple Dye and Child Sacrifice
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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, and we’re talking about Phoenicia today, ancient empires old and new – well, they’re ancient so they’re all old.
A couple high-level reminders about how we think about the ancients before we dive into specifics. Phoenician is kind of an umbrella term, kind of historically imposed. They didn’t think of themselves as a people group except insofar as they shared ancestry. So in the same way that we wouldn’t think of the ancient Greeks as having an allegiance to a place called Greece, we would think of them in their individual cities – same thing. We’ve got city-states here and these city-states are similar to what we’ve seen in other ancient realms.
We’ve talked about ancient city-states a lot. They’re religiously organized around ancestor worship, and I think we’ll probably get into the specifics of Canaanite worship a little bit later, but that is what we’re talking about. These are Canaanite peoples.
Which is the term that they used for themselves versus the Greek term of Phoenician and the Roman term of Punic.
It’s hard to get information about the Phoenicians, except from the Bible, interestingly enough. There is some information later about Carthage, mainly from Polybius and Livy, the Roman historians, but other than that they haven’t left much for us to find.
I guess there are some theories that it’s because of a lot of trade secrets. They didn’t want people to know where they got their good stuff, but the most notable trait of the Phoenicians is their trade and their trade routes. Should we start there? Is that a good place to start?
Let’s go back to the beginning and we’ll move quickly to there and we’ll let Rachel talk about trade and trade routes at length, as far as she wants to. You said that the name Phoenician was imposed upon them. When I was a kid I was told that it means either “blood-red people” or “land of palm trees.” Who knows? The Greeks made it up. The Greeks misnamed everybody. They didn’t call themselves Phoenicians. As far as they called themselves anything, it was after their ancestor Canaan. They were Canaanites. For those who know the Bible, suddenly bells are going off. “Wait, weren’t those the bad guys?” Yeah, they were.
The story begins after the flood. Noah’s son Ham has had a child who he named Canaan, and Ham commits an offensive grave disrespect against his father. We won’t talk about all the details, but in consequence Noah utters a prophecy that shapes the future of the ancient world and on into the new covenant. He promises that Messiah will come through Shem, one of Noah’s sons. Japheth, the elder, will share in that blessing and be greatly expanded. That would be Europe and on down into India.
When he gets to Ham he doesn’t put a prophecy on Ham specifically. That would be one-third of the human family. So he picks out the one son, Canaan, and since Ham had committed a sin against his own father he’s being judged in his own son, but the form of the judgement is interesting. God through Noah says –
Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant.
It starts with “a servant of servants” and it all depends on what in the world that means, and it also depends upon one’s understanding of biblical judgement. Christians today don’t like to think of God as a God who judges in history. We’ll give him the end of the world and judgement day, barely, but a God who judges in history is a little too personal, and it’s actually like God gets mad at sin or something.
There’s truth in all of that, but there’s another truth as well, that if we survive a judgement, that judgement can become discipline. It can point us to a better way of living, to turn from our rebellion, to seek the face of God. For instance, Jacob after a fashion cursed his sons, Simeon and Levi, and said, “God will divide you in Israel” – scatter you.
Whoa, that doesn’t sound good and yet each of them, because of later faithfulness and obedience, because they kissed the rod and submitted to God’s judgement, gained great blessings. The Levites were scattered as teachers of the law throughout Israel and they inherited the priesthood. Simeon was scattered within the borders of Judah, which meant that when the northern tribes went apostate, Simeon to some extent was preserved from that. So as we look at this, a servant of servants can mean two things. It can mean the lowest of the lowest, or it can mean the very best servants there are.
I’ll just throw this out in case we forget to come back to it later. As we move forward we know that when Israel invaded the Promised Land they displaced, and in some cases killed, a great many Canaanites, but one tribe, the tribe of Gibeon, Hivites, came and through subterfuge managed to make nice-nice with Israel and became servants to the tabernacle.
All the way through the monarchy, through the captivity, to the other end of things at the restoration, they still remained faithful to God and to his service, and God counted them as worthy of being the best of servants, the servants of his own tabernacle, because they clung to the promise when there seemed no hope at all.
So that’s the background here. As we pass through the Table of Nations in chapter 10 we come across Canaan and we are told –
And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn, and Heth, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite, and the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, and the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad. And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.
So Canaan had a lot of sons. There’s no fulfillment of this prophecy, as far as we know. That’s off in the future. He had a lot of sons. The first one listed is Sidon. Notice that Tyre is not listed, because Tyre is not the first of the cities. It comes along much later in history. Sidon was one of the first Canaanite patriarchs and he obviously founded a city he named after himself. A lot of these other families also moved into what the Bible knows as Canaan, what we call Palestine today, and settled there and became tribes that later Joshua would have to deal with. So that’s the beginning of these people that today we call Phoenicians.
As one of you said earlier, they honored the memory of their ancestors, as did the Egyptians, so they look back to Ham and to Canaan and to the other men in that line – Nimrod and Cush – and these became their deified leaders. We’ll talk more about their religion later, but they settled in the land of Palestine. Palestine refers to the Philistines, who were to the south. The Canaanites took up the main area and their two most important cities are Tyre and Sidon, which are on the seacoast, which gave them that wonderful opportunity to engage in coastal trade, and trade throughout the Mediterranean.
Where we start is the somewhat interesting historical overlap of the point where they see in archeology a lot of Canaanite cities and people being destroyed in a short period of time, which we would say is obviously the conquest. There were a lot of people that were killed, although not all the way up, because the Bible also tells us they did not drive out everybody, so that’s why there is still a Phoenician-Canaanite people left.
Around that time is where we first start to see outposts for their trade around the Mediterranean particularly. Many of those outposts will eventually turn into colonies. I would say probably the best-known of those is Carthage. But even as their home area is less secure, they begin to spread out.
What’s interesting is that they are a trade empire. They never really become a military empire, although at times they will offer military support as a way of keeping up trade relations. But overall their focus is always just on being the #1 trade.
Yes. My point is more that that comes a lot later. For many of the years, as I was trying to look up their history and looking for wars and big military guys, there aren’t really any until you get basically to the later period because when we’re talking about their trade empire, we’re talking about over 1,000 years. In that time period there aren’t many big battles and such.
That actually makes sense if you’re primarily focused on trade. They managed to keep the corner on many markets, so they’re not fighting. They’re instead making deals or keeping their relationships going through satisfying the desires of different people in different areas. What’s interesting is how far they go.
Their boats are flat-bottom boats with a single sail, so at least as much as we can tell from the outposts and the colonies they tended to like to stay within sight of the coast. You can see their influence all the way around the edge of the Mediterranean going as far as Spain, out a little way to the Canary Islands, and also up to the north in the British Isles.
From each place they tended to be good at figuring out what was a key item that different places had that other places would want, so they both traded their goods out and carried other people’s goods to those places, and then brought those goods back. They established their relationships typically through governments, through the State, and had fixed pricing and such things.
They would say, “We’re going to bring you this, and this is what item we’re going to trade for,” because they didn’t use coinage and that sort of medium of exchange. Instead they were working more item-for-item, and often they were moving far enough away that when they were taking stuff from say the British and they were going to take the tin say back over to the Egyptians, those in the British Isles did not know how valuable it was to the people on the other end. They were very good at buying low and selling high as they moved around the Mediterranean, and they were very good at moving goods to the places from where they came to the people that would want them.
They did have their own supply of goods. Of course, they’re best known for their wood, their timber particularly, their cedar, which they still have to this day. It’s on the Lebanese flag, the little tree.
Yes. That would be the corresponding place, the cedars of Lebanon. From the Bible we see those used in Solomon’s temple. They’re even used later in Zerubbabel’s temple that will become Herod’s temple. They’re also in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which is considered one of the great wonders of the ancient world, and I believe even over in Mesopotamia in one of the major structures there.
They were a sought-after commodity because the trees are very thick trees, so they produce nice solid wood. Also they smell really nice – a nice benefit in a world where you don’t necessarily have as much good-smelling things or good-smelling people, so you want some form of good aromatic scent for your air.
One of the other interesting things I found out is that they were early innovators in glass production. We learn in Europe through the 1500, 1600 and 1700s it was a process that they went through of learning to make clearer and clearer glass, until you finally get actually eyeglasses made by Benjamin Franklin and others. But they actually produced clear glass back then and would make various art pieces or things that people wanted, although they actually preferred colored glass. The artifacts they’ve found that the Phoenicians made were more often colored, sometimes painted, but that tends to be some of the more artistic things that they did, in addition to their famous textiles.
They would use their trade connections to get many different fibers from different places, and they were the ones that actually brought those together in clothing. They basically could sell it back to the people that they had bought the fibers from, but now in a much nicer form. Their best-known item was the purple dye that they created.
Funny enough, the dye came from – some sources call it a sea snail, others a shellfish. Basically, there was a certain variety of shellfish that they had off their coast that they would collect and they could get this color from it. They’ve found mounds and mounds of shells in the area to this day, although at this point that species is extinct because they used it all up on all their purple.
I’m very curious. What is this purple sea snail shellfish item that they could use? So basically they were using what was there, but purple in general was a rare color, especially in the version they could get there, so they were able to supply the needs of all the wealthy.
Often if they wanted to get a different market going, they would gift some of the items when they first brought them there.
Yes. They would free-sample luxury items for the first time, determine that they definitely had buyers, and then basically create a contract and establish trade.
That’s so cool. I feel like this is a really interesting character study. They’ve got the cedars. That’s one thing they’ve got going for them. As far as natural resources go they don’t have a lot else, but boy, did they claw their way to the top. They’re like, “We will refine anything you have. We will make it a luxury item and then you will pay us for it.” That’s just cool.
Yes. They even went the other direction, to the east, not using boats. They used land caravans into Mesopotamia and as far as India, so they were early innovators also in bringing lots of spices and such back, again for the people that needed a little more in their boring food or good smells or whatever they wanted them for.
We know for certain they at least went as far as the British Isles and over to India, although there’s speculation that they may have gone much farther. But we can see evidence of them for sure all around the Mediterranean – the northern Mediterranean in Europe, in Greece, Asia Minor, and then all along the north African coast.
They were good at getting to all the different places and finding whatever the people on the other end would want, whether it was food, metals of all kinds, gold, copper, or tin. They were really the middlemen that got everything to everybody that wanted it.
It’s funny. As you were describing them I had a flashback to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, because that’s the second phase. You were describing it exactly. Once it goes to, “We have religious dominance. We can do magic,” it shifts to, “We don’t want your magic because we know where that goes.” “How about a free sample, though?” They start off with free technological samples that will work just a little while.
Okay, let me tell you. We listened to Foundations on audiobook, which was an absolute mistake, particularly because science fiction is not my genre. I fell asleep so many times, but I woke up after the traders had been introduced. In the way it was being read, in my head it was spelled ‘traitors’ and I was like, “Why is there a union? If they’re traitors, why are they sanctioned by the government?” and it was just very confusing.
I always felt the need as I was teaching students to clarify when I used that word – “trade-er, not a trait-or.”
Yes, so I don’t have to recommend Foundation later. But Asimov, of course, was a student of history and he was trying to demonstrate how various cultures at various times have tried to impose themselves or advance themselves – depending on whose perspective you’re looking at it from – on their neighbors. Looking back I thought he did it very well. At the time I read it I didn’t care about such things like, “Can we get to more fun stuff?”
Before I cut you off, Rachel, was there anything else there that you wanted to talk about?
Okay, then let me bring the biblical record up to where you are, because you just spanned 1,000 years. We run into the Canaanites again when Abraham comes into their land. God says, “I’m calling you to a land that you don’t know anything about it,” and lo and behold it’s the land of the Canaanites. Abraham has some dealings with them, but not much. He’s mostly out in the wastelands running his cattle.
Sodom and Gomorrah are Canaanite cities and we know about them. But when Abraham’s faith is being tested God gives him a vision where he says, “You don’t get to inherit this land right now because the iniquity of the Amorites is not full.”
The Amorites were one of the larger Canaanite tribes he had to deal with. In other words, “God is going to give you and your seed the land of Canaan, but not now. It’s going to be another 400 years. Your people are going to serve another nation, Egypt, and after the fourth generation in Egypt they’re going to come back again and then this will be yours.”
So we see occasional interactions in scripture, but by and large Abraham is told, “Not yet,” so most of his interactions there are peaceful and there are no problems. His sons have a couple interesting interactions that don’t go so well, but still by and large the children of Israel are content to bide their time.
Then of course in the days of Jacob and his son Joseph, they end up going down to Egypt, so for a good period of time we again don’t hear a whole lot about what’s going on in Canaan until God brings his people back out of Egypt through the exodus. We’ve talked about the exodus a good deal. We’ve talked about Mount Sinai and the giving of the law.
At that point the children of Israel had been told, “You’re going to go to Canaan. This is your inheritance. I promised it to Abraham and to his seed.” The seed is Christ. “For now you’ll be the caretakers of it, but you have to be faithful. You have to trust God.”
They sent spies in and the spies looked at the land and it was scary, so they decided they didn’t want to, and God said, “Fine, then you don’t get it. You get to wander around the wilderness for 40 years. Your children will inherit it.” So after 40 years and after Moses’ death, Joshua leads the children of Israel into Canaan and conquers the land.
I think at this point we do have to say something along the issue of genocide. This is where some people will perk up their ears and say, “Wait a minute, I’ve been told that that was a horrible thing and this was genocide. We all know that genocide is horrible and wrong!”
We did a whole episode on this, by the way, in the previous series of Halting Toward Zion, so see all of that but we’ll also recap here.
We’ll recap a little bit of it. The first thing, of course, that we have to understand – and this is really hard for modern man and post-modern man – is that God owns the planet. God owns the people in it, and when God says, “I want my people to have this land,” he can do that and it’s not wrong. We’re not making right wrong, because God owns it.
Furthermore, it was hardly a surprise attack. The children of Canaan had known ever since the exodus that Israel was coming, and God gave them an extra 40 years while Israel wandered in the wilderness. When Joshua sends in the spies and they talk to the harlot Rahab, she says, “We have been trembling in our boots since you came out of Egypt.” That was 40 years ago. “We’ve heard how God has given you this land.” Okay, so what might be the smart thing to do at this point?
You can yield or you can run. Probably the one thing you don’t want to do is stay there and hope you can beat God, because they had seen the miracles or they knew of them. God had built Egypt up into the greatest nation on earth then smashed it the ground. There was nothing left of it to speak of.
So we have Rahab, who switched sides and was received, though she was a Canaanite. We have the Gibeonites I mentioned earlier, who came to Joshua and pretended they had come from far away and cut a deal, and they were accepted, although they became slaves to the tabernacle. That turned out to be a really good deal for them, and we can trace their story on through Samuel and the prophets and find out that God continued to bless those people.
So there are ways out, and of course there was the simple one of leaving, and one group, the Hittites, did. They went north and founded an empire, and for decades and decades archeologists and historians said, “There was no Hittite empire. There’s no evidence of it.” They looked where it was supposed to be and it wasn’t there.
They left! Later artifacts began turning up elsewhere and they said, “Oh wait, here’s where it was.” Yes, they were smart. They left. They got out.
As we look at the text in Joshua you actually see most of the kingdoms provoking the Israelites to war. They actually get themselves together and they start the majority of the wars, which is the most foolish thing they could have done. And yet in many ways therefore they’re bringing their own demise by their own foolish pride, which is part of the reason they’re being judged to begin with.
Right, because remember that thing about the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full? They were not nice people. They were not spending this time planting their gardens and playing Stardew Valley.
That’s another thing we have to grapple with in our modern age, that sin does provoke judgement in this world, not just in the world to come. That means when we sin we provoke God to do that, and he is fully just and righteous and all of that.
And yet at the same time is very merciful to those who moved, got out of the way of judgement, to those who repented and switched sides. And for a lot of people who continued in their rebellion and sin, judgement never came upon them because Israel sinned and Israel fell into disobedience, and God dealt more harshly with his own people in many ways than he did with the remaining Canaanites, so there’s a lot going on there.
This might be a good time to look at Baal worship, the Canaanite religion, and see what there was about it that did provoke God to anger. We run into Baal and the female counterpart, Ashtaroth or Astarte, in the beginning of Judges.
The children of Israel, once they began to settle down, had not driven out all the Canaanites. The emphasis there is not that they hadn’t killed them all, but they hadn’t driven them out, so they began to make alliances. They began to make marriages and, as God had warned them, once you start marrying unbelievers you start worshiping their gods, and there were some things that the flesh found very appealing in these gods.
First of all, Baal was not the name of a god. It’s a title, like God or Lord. It actually means Lord. Every city had its own Baal because, as you’ve already said, every city was founded in terms of its own favorite ancestor. They worshipped the dead. In fact, at one point when God is condemning Baal worship at Baal-Peor he says that Israel ate the sacrifices of the dead. It’s pretty clear as to what was going on there.
These Baals or Baalim became identified with nature. Baal is the masculine side – the storms, the sunshine, the lightning, that which is violent and rough and rugged, that which permeates and impregnates Mother Earth.
Ashtaroth or Astarte, on the other hand, is Mother Earth, the fertility of the land that needs male action to get going. However, Mother Earth was not nice and is portrayed in what tales we have, the myths of that time, as wading through the blood of her enemies as she slashed and hacked them, so these were not nice gods.
In order to get nature to do your bidding, the priest of Baal had to come up with that which was anti-natural. So as we read say about Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, we see them first of all yelling and screaming, no big surprise. Nature is kind of deaf and hard to hear, apparently. But then they start cutting and slashing themselves and bringing forth blood to try to get the attention of Baal.
With the idea that self-harm is completely contrary to every impulse that humanity should have.
And therefore the gods will look at this and be impressed by it. And of course the greatest thing you can give is the fruit of your own body, so sacrificing your children – either passing them through a baptismal fire or simply burning them on the arms of a searing idol – was considered to be the way to really get the gods’ attention. It was considered great piety.
Exactly. This brings us in passing to Carthage. In his book The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton tries to draw a contrast between the gods of Rome and the gods of Carthage. Carthage was a Phoenician Punic outpost and they practiced child sacrifice. The Roman gods mostly didn’t. There’s been kind of a historical blackout on that one, too. They certainly didn’t do it as regularly, but they were still, as far as the Bible is concerned, demonic beings.
So we have the Roman gods, who eventually will be in the background of the persecution of the church, and we have the Carthaginian gods who want to massacre their own children. This is all demonic and there comes a point where you say, “Will the real anti-Christ stand up, please?”
Chesterton in his book is trying to defend Rome, because Rome had the nicer gods and Rome saved the world from worldwide Baalism by destroying Carthage, and thus we owe it a debt and thus it makes sense that God would plant the capital of his church in what had been pagan Rome and now make it papal. It’s an interesting chapter.
A less unpalatable pagan city. Chesterton was not listening to Augustine on this. Even if that argument held water, that the Roman gods were more civilized and nice, it kind of reminds me of Screwtape, C.S. Lewis’s characterization of Satan or of a demon. He says, “The devil likes to cure us of our great sins by giving us a dozen smaller ones.”
It’s like the Roman gods are so trivial. It’s like, “Oh, it’s the doorjamb, but not the hinges. The hinges are a different god.” They’ve got so many little ones. They’re just not as monstrous in some ways as the Canaanite gods.
I mentioned Asimov, and one of the reasons he came to mind is that he wrote a little short story called “The Dead Past.” The protagonist in that story is a scientist, and there’s more detailed characterization and plot going on than I’m going to tell you, but he wants permission from the government to build a time viewer because he wants to look at Carthage and show in real time, as it were, that they didn’t really offer their children as sacrifices. That’s all Roman propaganda, and that is a common thought today. Rachel, would you tell me what you found when you were looking at Carthaginian religion and such?
Yes. As I was looking to try to find more of the details of their religion, for one thing it’s challenging because it is localized in that it’s by each city-state, so there’s slight variation. Also it seems like all the modern sources are very slow to reveal anything about it. Everything I read was very vague, very generic, using words that we would think of like, “They had festivals for prayer and for celebrations,” just keeping it at this high level.
It talked about how they were so tolerant because they would allow those coming to trade and such to set up their own little idols in their temples, so they were just the most tolerant religion and all of this. If they did mention the child sacrifice issue, they often said, “They may have sacrificed children, but there’s no real evidence for that.” Another source said, “According to the exaggerated biblical and Roman accounts, they did these things.”
Meaning the two most reliable and well-documented sources available about the ancient world.
Generally the reason given was, “We’re sure there must be sources out there that will contradict this because we’re just so sure this can’t possibly be.” And yet as you research they have found, particularly in Carthage but even back over in the Tyre and Sidon area, they have started to find remnants of burnt very small little corpses.
They say, “Well, these could have maybe possibly been children that were sacrificed,” but there seems to be an extreme unwillingness to admit that, because we have a sense that that’s very evil and wrong, even though in our culture people sacrifice their children, but still. In that form it horrifies us and so nobody wants to give this wonderful tolerant religion that horrible practice.
I think only one of the sources I read also mentioned the requirement of women to prostitute themselves for Astarte as part of their religious duty. Most of them don’t even mention any of those elements of the worship.
Going back to the short story I was mentioning, just to tie that up, the protagonist in the story is convinced again that this is Roman exaggeration, and that if you go back and look at it he would be able to prove it. The government keeps on denying, denying, denying, and won’t give him the permits.
It turns out that they won’t let him build a chronoscope with a time-viewer, not because they’re afraid of what he’ll see in the distant past, but what he’ll see in the past two seconds ago, because at that point if you can build a machine that shows you the past, the past was just now, which means you can now use it to look into your neighbors’ homes and their private lives, because by the time you see it it’s the past, and people will become voyeurs and addicted to it and there will be no way to stop it. It's a nice interesting story, starting with the wickedness of the Carthaginians.
It's interesting, Rachel, that you say you can’t find accurate details now. Eighty or a hundred years ago if you opened a Bible history or even a secular history that wanted to discuss the religion of Canaan, what they would tell you is that the religion was so perverse that they cannot print the details. Then of course we became more open-minded and everyone started printing the details.
Or now they don’t print them and they just claim they’re a tolerant religion.
You kind of wonder if those scruples in not telling about such things contributed to, “Oh, nobody’s ever told us that there were such things.”
Yes. Sometimes not telling is a mistake. If you’re writing for small children, maybe, except when you’re discussing the biblical narrative. There’s a danger. I think most Sunday School children don’t know what Baal worship was. We do our children a grave disservice if we don’t at least bring it down to their level where they can understand that this was not only profane and lascivious, it was extremely violent, and it was done in the name of their God. There was nothing tolerant about this.
Perhaps we should talk about that next time if we can remember, this idea that the Phoenicians and Baal worshipers were tolerant. Well, let’s talk about Jezebel.
It’s one thing if traders come into your town. Yes, you let them do their little thing because they’re not trying to stake any claims. Their gods are real enough for them elsewhere, and they want to bring them into town? Okay, but they’re going to leave with them. If they want to put them in our temple under the service of our god, that might be acceptable. But do we recognize it as a valid religion here for us? No. That’s why Jezebel had to get rid of the prophets of Yahweh. We can come back to that next time.
Yes, we’ve got a lot to cover next time. We should have known that we could never cover all of 1,000 years and all those empires in the world.
We will get to that, but let’s wrap up with some recommendations for tonight.
I’m going to recommend a book that I haven’t read in ages and I forgot how good it is. It’s called They All Discovered America by Charles Michael Boland. It’s an older book but should be easily available in old bookstores. It’s from 1961. It’s an account of the claims of various people to have been discoverers of America long before Columbus. In fact, I think Columbus may be the last chapter. It does have an excellent chapter on the Phoenicians with far more material than I thought it had.
Recommendation: They All Discovered AmericaI will not say it’s the final word or that it’s infallible. I won’t even say it’s true, but it raises a lot of questions that can’t simply be brushed off by, “Oh, that’s not orthodox archeology. You don’t need to pay attention to that.” There are too many concrete things that do need to be answered, and maybe some future Christian historian will take the time to make that a life’s work and find out what really happened in the ancient world. We’ll talk more about that next time.
I’m going to recommend Sleeping Beauty, the Disney movie. Gretchen calls it “ballerina nap.”
Recommendation: Sleeping BeautyThat’s not really another reason. What I would like to do, in order to appreciate it yet more, is watch the ballet with all the music as Tchaikovsky intended, and then come back and watch the Disney movie as an adaptation of that original artform. I think that would be a really cool exercise sometime.
One thing that I think I remember is that the presence of the witch turning into a dragon and the knight having to slay the dragon…
Yes, is a Disney addition. Basically they grabbed it from the Bible and Western tradition and put it in to make it better, and they scored high.
I don’t think I’ve recommended this so far, but I mentioned it in the last podcast, which is the Nancy Pearcey book called Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. It deals a lot in the religious background on abortion and such things that we’ve been talking about to some degree today with child sacrifice and the ways that we create our own value for things and therefore devalue and kill others, either by abortion or euthanasia.
Recommendation: Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and SexualityIt's a very insightful book. She has lots of excellent research and statistics for a lot of good thought about what’s going on in our world today.
Thanks. And thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. We really appreciate you. And thank you as always, Listener, for tuning in.
If you’d like to get hold of us you can send us an email at [email protected]. I think we’re on all the socials now. I’m not involved in that process but I’m sure you can follow us on Facebook at least. Leave us a message there or comment on the dank memes that I think are going up.
This is a production of the Diecast Media Group. That’s kind of a new thing for this podcast. The work of marketing and such got distributed a little bit so that David and I are not the only ones making it, which should make it better because we were spread pretty thin there. So thank you to Diecast Media Group for helping us out with this.