Enuma Elish (The Babylonian Epic of Creation) Tablet I 1 When the heavens above did not exist, 2 And earth beneath had not come into being — 3 There was Apsû, the first in order, their begetter, 4 And demiurge Tia-mat, who gave birth to...
WE HAVE already established by this point that, when it comes to the Hebrew Masoretic Text, the Greek Septuagint is an entire millennia its elder. But here is what we have not yet covered: so is the Targum. If you are unfamiliar with the Targum, and most probably are,...
THERE ARE no street signs among the floating villages of the Tonle Sap. You’ll find them on the road to Angkor Watt—a several hour journey by boat. At twenty years of age, I was barely a man and already disoriented by it all. In Phenom Penh, crocodile tastes like...
THE WATCHERS STOOD BACK and observed their loved ones, the giants whom they had begotten with the daughters of men, kill each other off in a war of the Titans, and then Yahuah bound them under the hills and the valleys of the earth, where they were to remain in total...
MANY TO MOST CONSUMERS MAKE THE HONEST mistake of confusing the STARBUCKS logo for a mermaid. And to a degree I guess that's slightly true. I saw a mermaid, or perhaps she's a siren, for years. Actually, I seem to recall my twenty year-old self, straining my eyes at...
THE ANSWER TO ISRAEL’S PROBLEM RELIES ON THE SIMPLE FACT that Jesus Christ, Yeshua HaMashiach, is the good shepherd whom King David and the Prophets spoke of. He is the angel of Yahweh who stood before Moses in the burning bush—the pillar of cloud who led Israel by...
BY CLAIMING THAT HE HAD KILLED A LION and a bear, the shepherd boy David was making an astonishing connection. The giant Goliath, he told King Saul, might as well have been a wolf, a bear, a lion, a desert jackal, tiger, a Congolese ape, or an east African...
THE BOOKS OF MOSES ENDED WITH A CURSE. If the children of Abraham did not hearken unto the voice of Yahweh, if they did not observe His commandments, then curses would be their lot. Moses writes: But it shall come about, if you do not obey the Lord [Yahweh] your God...
TO SAY “KANSAS IS AS FLAT AS A PANCAKE” would be to speak an inaccuracy, for Kansas, you see, is flatter than a pancake. Actually, according to the meticulous research and findings of Dr. Dobson and Campbell, it’s only the ninth flattest state in the continental...
ONE CANNOT HELP BUT WONDER, IN THE MIDST of his desperation, if the honorable captain of the kings host in Syria had already gashed himself with knives, perhaps even commissioning others to perform the sacred rites, only to be told by the high-priest that Baal was...
THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR TRANSLATING the bulk of Hebrew Scripture into the Latin text we know today as the Vulgate never could erase the guilt of his lifelong love affair with Virgil, Plato, Cicero, and Homer. Like the sarcophagus of Heine’s dream some fifteen-hundred...
HEINRICH HEINE WAS NOT WELL. In May of 1848, the German-Jewish writer, known for his lyric poetry set to music by such composers as Schumann and Schubert, suddenly fell paralyzed. Heine would not recover. Further musings were confined to bed, a sickly pulpit for the...
THE KILLING OF THE PHILISTINE GIANT GOLIATH by the shepherd boy David did not go over nearly as well as one might expect. The initial twist to the plot is that the King of Israel wanted the child whom the Prophet Samuel had anointed dead. There were of course other...
THE EDENIC VISION HAD FAILED, AND THAT IS PUTTING IT lightly. Yahweh’s created image and the sons of God who had copulated with the daughters of men had failed so miserably in their commissioned tasks that “it repented the LORD that He had made man on the earth, and...
MY READER IS LIKELY WELL INFORMED REGARDING my desire to honor the Textus Receptus, the Greek New Testament by which both the King James Bible stands upon and the Reformation took flight—though I am not beholden to it. The bad blood pitted against the Codex...
A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO KING SAUL took his own life and now the wicked King Ahab of Israel has asked Jehoshaphat king of Judah if he would agree to join him at Ramoth-gilead for battle. Jehoshaphat is legally related through the marriage of his son to Ahab and...
“THEN SAMUEL TOOK THE HORN OF OIL, and anointed David in the midst of his brethren, and the Spirit of Yahweh came upon him from that day forward (1 Samuel 16:13).” Though we are not intimately told about the judicial sessions going on behind the scene in heaven, the...
ASKING SUCH INCONSEQUENTIAL QUESTIONS as “How many angels dance on the head of a pin” has long been accredited to the sort of arguments of absurdity, or reductio ad absurdum in Latin, which aided and abetted in the crippling of medieval scholasticism while the Turks...
THE HEBREWS WERE STILL HOPELESSLY CAPTIVE in Babylon when the Prophet Daniel had a rather hopeful vision. “As I continued looking,” he wrote of heaven, “a multitude of thrones were set up and the Ancient of Days took His seat amongst them.” Much earlier on, the Bibles...
LONG AGO TWO HUNDRED ANGELS DESCENDED upon Mount Hermon in order that humanity might learn the mysteries of heaven, and then one day, while Azazel, Semjaza, and the lot of their fellow transgressors were sitting around weeping, the Prophet Enoch met them. He had been...