This steaming pile of paleobabble reads exactly like the classic “I had proof of aliens but the government came and took it away” stories that are ubiquitous on the web.  This is another Aaarrrgghhhh! Award nominee. (I’ll have to get around to judging those soon).

The “beauty” of this sort of story is that it is both completely unverifiable and completely unfalsifiable. No one except those who put out the story have names. What a piece of research!  What heroic whistleblowers! Proof, please.

I’m betting the Smithsonian moved Adam’s body to AREA 51.  Elvis is night security there.

Just remember: sanctified illogic and chicanery is still illogic and chicanery.

Technorati Tags: Adam's body, archaeology, conspiracy, Noah's ark, Smithsonian

Because the subject matter is sensitive and my dismissal so categorical, readers need to know where I’m coming from. I work as the Academic Editor for Bible Study Magazine and Logos Bible Software, the leader in producing databases for the study of the Bible in its original languages, as well as digital tools and books for studying the Bible. Before coming to Logos, I devoted nearly 20 years to the formal study of biblical Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, and a half dozen more ancient languages on the way to my PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies. I’m therefore sympathetic to people who want to read the Bible with more discernment and comprehension, and for those who are in vocational ministry. I’m also no fan of Barack Obama. While President Obama has made it clear in one of his biographical memoirs, Dreams of My Father, that he is an African colonialist Marxist, that doesn’t make him the antichrist. Neither does the Bible.

The first error on the part of the video’s speaker is trivial, but it shows the propensity of the speaker to inject details into the biblical text that are actually not there. The speaker presumes that Jesus originally spoke Luke 10:18 in Aramaic. We don’t actually know that. Yes, Aramaic was the common language among Jews of first century Palestine, but Jesus and the disciples were at least bilingual (speaking Greek as well, the common tongue of the eastern Mediterranean at the time, much like English is today.  Jesus was also trilingual (he knew Hebrew well enough to quote the Hebrew Masoretic text on occasion). But this mistaken assumption is the least of the speaker’s problems. The arguments that follow demonstrate that the speaker has no knowledge of the biblical languages at even a beginner’s level.

Amazingly, the speaker doesn’t realize that Hebrew and Aramaic are not the same language. In a textbook example of why YouTube enthusiasts should never assume it to be a source of academically reliable content, the speaker says Aramaic is “the most ancient form of Hebrew.” Aramaic is not Hebrew. It’s, well, Aramaic. Perhaps the speaker was thinking of the fact that Aramaic and Hebrew use the same script (letter style). If so, it should be self evident that just because two (or more) languages might use the same script (font, in our modern parlance) does not mean they are the same language! For example, Spanish and English use the same letters or script, but they are not the same language. Hebrew adopted the Aramaic script (the so-called “block” letter script still used today) after it went into exile in Babylon in the sixth century BC (after Aramaic had earlier displaced Akkadian / Assyrian as the dominant language of Mesopotamia). Aramaic and Hebrew are part of the same language class and sub-class. A quick use of Wikipedia (no graduate degree is required for this sort of fact-checking) would have informed the speaker of that.

Some readers might be thinking that this oversight is forgivable, and that perhaps the speaker still knows his Hebrew well enough to support his claims. That isn’t the case. In what follows he shows that he doesn’t have a capable grasp of even the Hebrew alphabet.

Using Strong’s Concordance and its dictionary, familiar tools for many readers, the speaker asserts that Jesus would have uttered the words of Luke 10:18 “in Hebrew” and then goes on to focus on the words for “lightning” and “heights”/”heavens”. The word for “lightning” in Hebrew, we are told, is “barawk,” sounding suspiciously like the president’s name (Barack). Here’s where knowledge of the alphabet and what Strong’s English letter spelling is for would have kept the speaker from embarrassment. The English spelling of Barack Obama’s first name ends with “ck”. This is the way English letters account for the foreign Semitic letter “k” (kaph in Hebrew; kaf in Arabic). This means that the consonants in “Barack” are b-r-k. Unfortunately, the word for “lightning” in Hebrew isn’t spelled with the consonants b-r-k (Hebrew originally had no vowels, so it’s the consonants that matter here). Rather, it is spelled b-r-q. In Hebrew (and Arabic) “k” and “q” are two entirely different letters, thought they sort of sound the same, just as in English. The root consonants b-r-k mean “blessing” as a noun, “blessed” as an adjective, and “to bless” when a verb form is in view. “Barack” in Arabic (or Hebrew) means “blessing,” not “lightning.”  This alone severs the connection the speaker in the video seeks to make.

By way of illustration, here are the two words and their respective dictionary entries from William Holladay’s Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon: It is crucial to take note that these words have different final letters (Hebrew is read right-to-left). I’ve noted the confused letters in respective colors, along with the meanings of the words to show that the speaker is giving his listeners misinformed nonsense. “Lightning” in Hebrew is b-r-q. The letter “q” is not the letter “k”, in English or Hebrew. They must not be treated as though they are.

That Barack Obama’s first name means “blessing” (and not “lightning”) in Arabic has been noted many times. Here’s one example. But why, then, is the Hebrew word for “lightning” spelled out in Strong’s dictionary as “barawk” with a “k” at the end? The reason is that Strong’s dictionary was not aiming to give users a correct transliteration of the word. Transliteration is the practice of matching letter-for-letter equivalents between a language that uses English letters and a language that uses characters, like Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese.  Strong was not giving a transliteration, but was instead aiming to give a rough approximation of what a Hebrew word sounds like, regardless of whether it reproduces the letter characters with precise accuracy (note that in “barawk” there is no “w” consonant; it’s just there for pronunciation help). Unfortunately, the speaker was using an old, outdated online version of Strong’s. In the new revised edition, the editors added correct transliteration of all the consonants alongside the older pronunciation help. Below is an image of the entry for b-r-q (“lightning”; Strong’s number 1299 as in the video) from the digital version of Strong’s we produce at Logos.

Some readers may still wonder if it is permissible to take the letters b-r-k from “Barack” and treat them as though they can still match b-r-q (“lightning”). After all, “k” and “q” do sound alike. They may sound alike to us, but native speakers of Hebrew and Arabic distinguish them with ease, mainly because they know their own vocabulary. For those who don’t have this kind of native facility in Hebrew or Arabic, there are lexicons, specialized dictionaries of a given collection of literature.  The industry-standard tool for all biblical Hebrew scholarship is the multi-volume Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT). Resources like HALOT, unlike English-based resources like Strong’s dictionary typically provide the user with the equivalent term in a range of Semitic languages. HALOT gives us the Arabic word that corresponds to Hebrew b-r-q (“lightning”), along with other languages like Old South Arabian, Egyptian Aramaic, Ugaritic, Jewish Aramaic, etc. Below are images from my electronic version of HALOT to show that the “q” and “k” distinction is secure and unimpeachable. There are entries for both the Hebrew word b-r-q (“lightning”) and b-r-k (“blessing”/”bless”). Arabic and Hebrew are consistent here:

According to the video, the antichrist’s last name can be derived from Isaiah 14:12-19. Isaiah 14 is a mocking taunt against the king of Babylon. The prophet uses an ancient story of cosmic rebellion to cast the king as unspeakably proud. The villain in that ancient story is considered by many to be Satan (though the word “satan” does not appear in Isaiah 14). This rebel sought to attain a status higher than God, desiring to ascend above the “heights” of the clouds and be like the Most High. The speaker on the video informs us that the word for “heights” here is bamah. The hearer is naturally supposed to think “Obama” at the sound of that word.

The speaker’s ignorance of Hebrew is again apparent in Isaiah 14 with respect to the Hebrew word bamah. He anticipates that viewers will want to know what happened to the “O” in “Obama” if bamah is part of the antichrist’s name. The speaker tells us that the conjunction “w” (the Hebrew consonant waw) is sometimes pronounced like our letter “o”. There are two problems here. First, the conjunction waw never gets the “o” sound at the beginning of a noun in Hebrew—not even once in the 23,213 verses of the Hebrew Bible. Second, when the “w” consonant in Hebrew serves to mark the vowel sound “o” it is never a conjunction; it only marks the “o” sound the end or in the middle of a word. Therefore the sound combination “O-bamah” never occurs in the Hebrew Bible. The same is true for the “o” sound following baraq. The “u” sound is possible at the beginning of a word. There is one occurrence in the entire Hebrew Bible of this conjunction before bamah in the Hebrew Bible, Ezekiel 36:2, but that verse has nothing to do with the devil or antichrist.

This kind of thinking is a textbook example of a notorious language fallacy: if a combination of sounds is the same between two languages, the words created by those sounds must mean the same thing. A couple of examples will show how ridiculous this is. Is the Greek word gune (pronounced “goonay”) the same as English “goony”? You’d better not say that around your wife or girlfriend, since gune means “woman”!  Or maybe the Hebrew word kar (“pasture”; Isa 30:23) is equivalent to English “car”! I wonder what make and model was the most popular in David’s time. There are literally hundreds of these sorts of false equivalences between any two languages. A sound or group of sounds in Hebrew (or any other language) does not have the same meaning as the same combination of sounds in English. This ought to be self-evident, but I guess it’s not.

I could list a number of other flaws in the argumentation, but the discussion would quickly morph into a conclave of language nerds. Consequently I’ll mention only that the speaker fundamentally misunderstands Luke 10:18.

Luke 10:18 actually points to an event in Jesus’ own lifetime, not an event in the distant future. When Jesus says that he saw Satan expelled from heaven like lightning, he is announcing that the kingdom of God has been inaugurated on earth now that his own ministry has begun; he is announcing Satan’s defeat, not the coming of the antichrist. Parallel passages in the gospels show this is the case (John 12:31; 16:11). This telegraphs the speaker’s most obvious blunder. It is difficult to see the coherence of linking a passage where Satan is cast down to the rise of the antichrist. The Bible clearly has the antichrist and Satan as distinct personalities. Revelation 20:10 makes this explicitly clear: “And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

The beast, of course, is the antichrist in the Bible, the one whose number is 666 (cf. Rev. 13:18). In Rev. 10:10 Satan and the antichrist are separate figures thrown into the lake of fire. This means that Luke 10:18 (and Isaiah 14 for that matter) have nothing to do with the antichrist. It is nonsense to have Jesus meaning something like “I saw the devil cast out like the antichrist (lightning/baraq)” in Luke 10:18. The result is simply incoherent.

Lest I be misunderstood, the last thing in the world I want to do is to discourage Bible study. It’s not just for scholars! In fact, my career is directed toward enabling the non-specialist to dig into the Bible in ways that, to this point in time, only scholars could. But that goal is no excuse for such a poor handling of the biblical text and its original languages.

Technorati Tags: antichrist, Obama

This is another nominee for the PaleoBabble Aaaargghhh! Award.  A spellbinding example of truly craptastic Bible interpretation (not to mention the old bromide about knowing enough to be dangerous).

In the real world of biblical knowledge, the aleph and tav spell what is known as the accusative marker (and scholars have known it for millennia – no mystery here).  It is not translated since it is a grammatical/syntactical pointer.  It is a two letter word that points to (in most instances) the direct object of a sentence (clause) in Hebrew.  Other ancient semitic languages have aleph-tav to mark the direct object (the accusative):  Ugaritic, Pheonician, Aramaic, etc.  I guess Jesus is in these pagan inscriptions too!

What an idiot . . . er, paleobabbler.

Technorati Tags: aleph, Bible, Genesis, Jesus, tav, taw

For those new to PaleoBabble, in an earlier post I directed readers to a real art historian who’s looked into this.

I feel dumber just having to write about this subject.

Technorati Tags: art, artwork, UFOs

Technorati Tags: ancient texts, Christianity, gabriel, hebrew, inscription, Judaism

I feel better now, so let’s get started.

Here’s the first choice quotation, from a scholar I really enjoy, Daniel Boyarin:

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

MSH: Jesus . . . can be understood . . . in light of Jewish history of his time . . . ?!  Uh . . . no kidding.  You don’t say?  I’ll give Boyarin a pass here, because this “revelation” is about as basic as it gets in biblical studies.

Some Christians will find it shocking” a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology” while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism, Mr. Boyarin said.

Boyarin is right if he’s talking about Christians who are more familiar with Joel Osteen’s “Your Best Life Now” board game than the Bible.  Christianity was part of Judaism?  You mean it arose from Jewish theology?  NO DUH — read the book of Acts!  That’s what the whole New Testament book is about! Trouble is, many Christians really are this biblically ignorant, and so Boyarin’s quotation has merit.  Aaarrgghhh!

Next quotation:

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

I actually read this article months ago (the “Israeli scholar” was Israel Knoll), but I didn’t do the math when OJA asked me about the new inscription.  When I read this, there was no stir about the inscription, so I thought OJA’s note was something new.  For those who’d like to read the article, you can download it HERE.

Here’s an extended quotation related to the inscription’s content:

In Mr. Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stone’s passages were probably Simon’s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice” and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words shloshet yamin, meaning in three days. The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is hayeh, or in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says Sar hasarin, or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

The last paragraph is simply erroneous. The book of Daniel does NOT identify the “prince of princes” as Gabriel. Most scholars believe it’s Michael. I don’t; I think it’s a deity-level figure (part of my dissertation), but I won’t digress, since this mistake isn’t important for the content of the scroll that’s making news.

Now we can move into the important stuff:  Knohl is Jewish, and so he has a different interpretation of certain prophecies (especially messianic) from the get-go. He also has a very Jewish view of the New Testament. In short, he has his own set of biases that play into what he says the rest of the way.  Here are some examples:

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

This presupposes that there is no hint of a suffering Messiah in the Old Testament.  This is silly.  What about Isaiah 53? you might ask.  Me, too.  Many (perhaps most) Jews (scholarly or otherwise) don’t believe that Isaiah 53 is speaking of a suffering PERSON / Messiah (they take it as referring to the nation of Israel), and so they a priori rule that out — hence Knohl acts like the suffering messiah of this inscription is put forth as big news.  It’s only big news if you follow Knohl’s presuppositions.  Otherwise, it’s a yawner. He continues:

This should shake our basic view of Christianity, he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.

No, Mr. Knohl, this would FIT Christianity — it’s only a surprise given your assumption about Isaiah 53. The second part of this is correct — most critical scholars think the “resurrection after three days” was added later. It’s not clear if Knohl agrees.  At any rate, these scholars ASSUME that resurrection from the dead after three days isn’t found in the New Testament.  Pardon me again, but . . . Aaarggghhhh!

Did we forget about the Old Testament story on which Matthew draws for the three day resurrection?  Matthew’s gospel notes (Matt. 12:39-40; the speaker is Jesus):

³⁹ But he answered them, An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. ⁴⁰ For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

You say, what the heck does Jonah in the belly of the fish have to do with resurrection and three days? What is Matthew thinking?  Well, first off, let’s observe that the Jonah story IS in the Jewish Scriptures (how this was missed by the scholar-skeptics I don’t know; I don’t expect anyone at the NYT to actually have read anything in the Bible, though). Second, let’s note that Matthew is a JEW, and one whose writing technique is widely regarded (by skeptic or otherwise) as the most akin to Jewish midrashic interpretation, ever so common in Jesus’ day.  For sake of simplicity (erring in precision here), midrash was like a system of allegorical or analogical interpretation, where the interpreter would see something in a text (of the OT here) and interpret it allegorically (not literally) or “symbolically.” Everyone in NT studies knows about Matthew and Midrash — even Jewish scholars (at least I thought so). Now for the resurrection and three days stuff.

What was it about the Jonah story that prompted Matthew to cite it as part of his record about Jesus–that he would spend three days dead and then rise again? He uses the three days of Jonah (Jonah 1:17) as an analogy, but why? The answer is in Jonah 2:2 (and I’m using the Jewish Publication Society translation here):

In my trouble I called to the Lord, And He answered me; From the belly of Sheol I cried out, And You heard my voice.

Did you catch the reference to “Sheol”? Sheol is a very common word for the grave in the OT. The writer of Jonah casts being in the belly of the fish three days as being in the grave three days.  Matthew picks up on this (better, he recalls it as something Jesus taught about himself). Here’s the point: The Jewish Scriptures cast Jonah as being “in the grave” three days and then getting out.  That much is right there in the text.  It IS a step forward (a midrashic step) for Jesus and Matthew to take this and make it messianic.  That part (the application) is new when it appears in Matthew — but the rising after three days IDEA is not.  Marrying it to the messiah was new.  And up until this new inscription surfaced, Matthew’s midrash on Jonah was the earliest connection of the two ideas.  The new inscription therefore doesn’t CHANGE anything Matthew taught (or that Jesus applied to himself).  Rather, we just have an earlier witness to the combination of ideas.

Now here’s a logic quiz for those who think this is shocking, or means we have to look at Christianity any differently because someone other than a New Testament writers applied an idea to the messiah prior to the New Testament:  Does this ever happen elsewhere?  That is, did Jews who lived and wrote earlier than the New Testament era and the gospel writers ever look at the OT and speculate about messiah?  Did they ever write about how this or that passage might relate to messiah?  Did later New Testament authors ever agree with some of those non-New Testament writers?  The answers are, in order, Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes – dozens of times!  The point: there is nothing shocking about having “New Testament like exegesis” of something prior to the New Testament?  Do we really think that all other Jewish theologians were too stupid to ever be right about any of their speculations or interpretations of messianic material in their Scriptures? Anyone who thinks this just hasn’t read the apocrypha or pseudepigrapha (Jewish writings between the biblical OT and NT) — the New Testament writers draw on this earlier literature on a number of occasions and weave it into their own accounts and arguments.  They are part of a JEWISH tradition. This is nothing new.

Knohl also notes:

Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus.

no kidding — and so what?  Why MUST it be unique (especially when it wasn’t)?

Knohl adds:

His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come, Mr. Knohl said. This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.

This is the worst part of the article. Uh . . . if we have a suffering messiah who needs to bring redemption to Israel, isn’t Israel composed of people?  Wasn’t the nation sent into exile because of the sins / idolatry of its PEOPLE?  Isn’t the servant of Isaiah both corporate and individual? Are redemption and forgiveness of sins incompatible concepts in the Old Testament (and other Jewish writings outside the OT)? The answers here would be (very obviously): Yes, Yes, Yes, and No.  For the record: Aaarrrggghhhhh!

Okay, I’m going to take a chill pill now.

Technorati Tags: archaeology, inscription, Jesus, Judaism