Some of you may have noticed that there has been recent discussion on this thread on the PaleoBabble site. Apparently someone who desperately wants to say the serpent and Eve had sex to (not sure) defend Zecharia Sitchin or some sort of sexual activity between reptilian aliens and Eve has been trying to defend this idea (not well — see the comments). I think my position is clear on this (!) so I’m not going to keep answering comments. I thought this might be more useful.
As I see it, this fellow’s view is based on:
1) ignoring what I presented in the original thread — that Gen 4:1 provides no evidence that Eve and the serpent had sex, producing a reptilian / serpent seed.
2) insisting that the verb “beguile” used in Eve’s self defense (“the serpent beguiled me”) means “to have sex with.” We are supposed to accept this and then, Eve’s discovery that she was naked AFTER she sinned (read the narrative in Genesis 3 — wouldn’t she have had to be naked for her tryst with the serpent – how did she miss that?) meant that she was pregnant (I know, nakedness doesn’t mean pregnant, but play along with this guy here).
In attempt to inject some sanity into this, I offer this PDF. It is a list of all the other occurrences in the Hebrew Bible of the verb translated “to beguile” (it is Hebrew, nasa’ — for those who know Hebrew, this is not the common nasa’ that means “to lift or carry” – it is a homonym). Anyway, you can read the results. Just substitute “have sex with” or “impregnate” for all the green highlighted English terms (I do these searches in a reverse interlinear, which allows a Hebrew word search with results displayed in English for those who don’t read Hebrew). You’ll have fun with the exercise, trust me. Some real howlers here.
3) Insisting that the phrase about Eve’s eyes being opened also indicates something about having sex or pregnancy. Hmmm. Genesis 3:7 says “the eyes of both of them [i.e., Adam and Eve] were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” I wonder if the serpent also had sex with Adam. Or maybe eyes aren’t really eyes…but some sort of esoteric code word for “womb” or “vagina.” Bummer neither works with Adam.
And they pay me for this. No . . . wait . . . they don’t. But it’s still fun.
This, dear readers, must surely be the holy grail of paleobabble. This tops anything I’ve had on this site since its inception. Don’t believe me? Watch the video below–but first lock up all the sharp objects in the house and hand someone else the key.
Someone kindly brought this piece of paleobabble to my attention recently. The site argues that certain Arabic letters/symbols visually resemble the Greek text of “666″ in the book of Revelation. More accurately, the Arabic allegedly resembles the common Greek New Testament manuscript abbreviation for “666″ (the number is abbreviated to correspond to the numbers “six hundred” – “sixty” – and “six”). Here’s a picture that explains the claim (Maybe it’s just me, but I only see a visual similarity for ONE (the blue line) of the three letters):
Some observations:
1. Arabic as we know it (and as this claim presents it) wasn’t a language until somewhere around the 4th century A.D. — 300 years after Revelation was written.
2. Literary Arabic of the kind this visual represents was even later – around the 7th century A.D.
3. The third letter (the numeral “6″) in the “Codex Vaticanus” manuscript image would likely not have been written that way originally. In earlier manuscripts, such as the papyri, the shape is different. Below is a picture of one of the few papyri of a portion of the book of Revelation that has survived. It is P115 and dates to 225-275 A.D. It has the passage that gives the number of the beast — except this is the famous example that has “616″ instead of “666″ (the red arrow points to the number). That difference doesn’t matter for us, since the last number/letter is “6″:
Below is also a closeup with the Vaticanus “6″ inserted for comparison:
Sorry boys and girls. Just more nonsense . . . er, paleobabble. Believing that the number of the beast points to a Muslim antichrist because of these Arabic letter/symbol shapes requires (among other things) believing that the writer of Revelation, writing in Greek, to be thinking the meaning of his Greek letters was to be found in letter shapes of a literary language that didn’t yet exist. Ridiculous. But fun.
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.
For all the ancient astronaut “researchers” out there – a wonderful illustration of why peer-review of your material is important (otherwise known as the nuttiness filter).
I discovered this morning that there is a new blog online that takes on the “King James Only” nonsense). For those of you who don’t know what that is, the KJV-only idea is that the KJV itself is the result of a 17th century act of divine inspiration–it is God’s own translation of the original manuscripts of the Bible for English readers. All other English translations are either inferior or products of satanic activity (since they are based on “Alexandrian” manuscripts from that pagan hell-hole, Egypt). Many who hold to KJV-only also believe that the manuscript traditions upon which the English KJV is based are complete and inerrant representations of the original documents of the Bible. PaleoBabble readers got a little taste of this silliness with the “666 in the NIV” post I did a little while back.
This is paleobabble, of course, to anyone who knows anything about the transmission of the biblical texts or who cares about logic. It’s an interesting idea to devote a whole blog to this subject, and the contirbutors are apparently former KJV-only adherents.
Just when you think preaching can’t get any more insipid, you find yet another logic-defying sermon out there on the web. “Thanks” to the person who sent this to me.
Some surface observations on the problems with this “Bible lesson”:
1. Since the NIV *printed* the longer ending of Mark, isn’t it true that there are in fact 678 verses in Mark? Didn’t he just count them for us?
2. As educated students of the textual history of the Bible (any Bible) know (guess that excludes this pastor), verses were not original to the text of either testament. That means that versification is artificial from the get-go, so any numerical “truth” derived from counting them is, well, paleobabble. Chapter divisions were added in the 13th century. During that century, Stephen Langton (ca. 1227), a professor at the University of Paris, and Cardinal Hugo de Sancta Cara (ca. 1244-1248) pioneered the chapter divisions. (One wonders how this preacher might react to catholics being the source of the chapter divisions). Much earlier than this, the NT was divided into sections ca. the Council of Nicea, and before that the Hebrew Masoretes divided their canonical texts into section, paragraph, and phrasal divisions using accenting traditions. These divisions (oh, horror!) do not coincide with the KJV divisions or those used by other modern English translations. It is not known exactly when versification was added, but the oldest such scheme seems to be Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santi Pagnini (1470–1541; another catholic!), though his system was not popularly adopted. As Christopher Smith notes in an article produced for a magazine I edit, “Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament.”1The first English New Testament to use the verse divisions was a 1557 translation by William Whittingham (c. 1524-1579).
None of this probably matters to the speaker, though, since he appears to be a King James only adherent. That brings me to the next problem.
My point here is that this view is completely on the fringe — and there are real reasons why it is. Frankly, the KJV debate is really a debate about the NT. None of its arguments work with respect to the Hebrew Bible (they don’t work on the NT, either, but applying them to the Hebrew text is where it really gets laughable).
4. My King James Bible says that 666 is “the number of a man” (Rev. 13:18) not the number of a manuscript tradition or publisher or versification scheme.
5. Jesus (I assume that’s who he means by the video title – the greatest preacher) didn’t assign verses to the Bible, nor does he ever reference them. Nor did he write Mark (or any other NT book). If the preacher is talking about himself, then substitute his name for Jesus accordingly.
I’ll fly my flag at half mast again tonight, not for Ted Kennedy, but for the state of the American pulpit.
A recent World Net Daily Exclusive brought attention to a viral video that attempts to persuade viewers that there is a cryptic reference to President Barack Obama’s name in Luke 10:18 and Isaiah 14:12. The creator of the video understands these passages to refer to the antichrist, and so viewers are left to connect the dots between Barack Obama and the great satanic enemy of the biblical end times. Do the arguments of the video have any merit? The short answer is no, and anyone with an interest in handling the biblical text responsibly should dismiss the video’s claims without hesitation. The arguments of this video would be laughed aside by anyone with competence in the ancient biblical languages. Anyone with a solid grasp of the English Bible would see other logical problems pretty quickly.
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.
I recently had a request from a user of our software (Logos/Libronix) for the search I created as part of the video Imade on elohim in the Hebrew Bible–which shows point-blank that Zecharia Sitchin is completely wrong with respect to what he says about elohim. Alas, I deleted my search and can’t reproduce it exactly since the video cuts off a few lines of it. But not to worry for anyone out there who would like the searches (and who have the software, obviously).
Below are two new searches. I’ve simplified the parameters a bit, and so the result numbers aren’t exactly what the video shows. I don’t feel like redoing the video (the site is what needs my attention). Just click on the links and you’ll be able to donwload the files in Libronix. Put them at My Documents/Libronix DLS/SyntaxQueries. If you don’t have the syntax query folder, it’s because you never saved one of your own (you’ll have to go to Search>Syntax Search in Libronix and make one up and save it to first create that folder).
Search 1: Elohim as a noun and the subject of a third masculine singular finite verb (367 occurrences). Download the file HERE by right clicking and choosing “Save Link As”. Make sure you put it in the folder described above AND that the extension of the file is *.lbxstq (downloading it off the blog and saving may change it to a text file, which is no good in Libronix).
Search 2: same as above but I added ha-elohim as a subject (elohim + definite article; 465 occurrences). Download the file HERE by right clicking and choosing “Save Link As”. Make sure you put it in the folder described above AND that the extension of the file is *.lbxstq (downloading it off the blog and saving may change it to a text file, which is no good in Libronix).
In case you haven’t heard of the “Pantera/Panthera” tradition of Jesus’ lineage, here’s a moderately lengthy but readable discussion of it on Ben Witherington’s blog. The post is a couple years old and was originally posted in response to James Tabor’s book, The Jesus Dynasty. As Prof. Witherington details, there ain’t much evidence for this.
