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Welcome to Day 2386 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom \u2013 Theology Thursday \u2013 The Abandoned Child and the Basket Case \u2013 I Dare You Not To Bore Me With The Bible Wisdom-Trek Podcast Script - Day 2386 Welcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! I am Guthrie Chamberlain, and we are on Day 2386 of our Trek. The Purpose of Wisdom-Trek is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. \xa0 Today is the fourth lesson in our segment, Theology Thursday. Utilizing excerpts from a book titled: I Dare You Not To Bore Me With The Bible written by Hebrew Bible scholar and professor the late Dr. Michael S Heiser, we will invest a couple of years going through the entire Bible, exploring short Biblical lessons that you may not have received in Bible classes or Church. The Bible is a wonderful book. Its pages reveal the epic story of God\u2019s redemption of humankind and the long, bitter conflict against evil. Yet it\u2019s also a book that seems strange to us. While God\u2019s Word was written for us, it wasn\u2019t written to us. Today, our lesson is The Abandoned Child and the Basket Case. In modern stories, people destined for greatness rarely start as privileged. They are dropped off at the doorstep of an orphanage or abandoned in the rain. This literary motif goes back to ancient stories, where writers use the abandoned child theme to identify a character that rises from obscurity to privileged hero status. It\u2019s a motif found in the biblical account of Moses\u2019 birth. But is that really the whole story? Moses\u2019 story begins when Pharaoh feels threatened by the growing Hebrew population in Egypt and commands that all Hebrew male infants be killed (Exod 1:16-22). Moses\u2019 mother hides her newborn son for three months and then devises a risky but calculated plan: She sets him adrift on the Nile in a small basket made of bulrushes, waterproofed with bitumen and pitch (2:1- 3). Moses\u2019 older sister, Miriam, watches as the basket floats to where the daughter of Pharaoh bathes. God uses these circumstances to bring Moses under the protection of Egypt\u2019s ruler (2:4-10). Ancient literature outside the Bible attests to several stories in which a child, perceived as a threat by an enemy, is abandoned and later spared by divine intervention or otherworldly circumstances. Roughly 30 stories like this survive in ancient Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, Egypt, Rome, and India literature. The Mesopotamian work known as the Sargon Birth Legend offers the most striking parallels to the biblical story. It relates the birth story of Sargon the Great, an Akkadian emperor who ruled several Sumerian city-states around 2000 BC, centuries before the time of Moses. The infant boy is born into great peril: His mother is a high priestess, and he is illegitimate. Consequently, his mother sets him adrift in a reed basket on a river. The boy is rescued and raised by a gardener named Akki in the town of Kish. He becomes a humble gardener in Akki\u2019s service until the goddess Ishtar takes an interest in him, setting him on the path to kingship. Some assume that the biblical story of Moses\u2019 birth was based on the Sargon Birth Legend, but this is unlikely. Although ancient Sumerian accounts of Sargon the Great date back to his lifetime, the legendary account of his birth is known from only four fragmentary tablets\u2014three from the Neo-Assyrian period (934-605 bc) and one from the Neo-Babylonian