Your Host: Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld y de la Torre, M.A. Ed. e-mail contact “If you would subject all things to yourself, subject yourself to reason.” –Seneca “Only knowledge, then, is power and freedom; and the only permanent happiness is the pursuit of knowledge and the joy of understanding.” –Will Durant (1885-1981) “Happy the man who has […]
Ben Carson, Joseph in Egypt, and the Attack on Rational Thought – Gary Leupp
Joseph in Egypt: A Myth I confess: I don’t believe in the biblical story of Joseph. Quite aside from the fanciful notion that Joseph built the pyramids for grain storage (as alleged by Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson), I don’t believe in the Bible character himself—any more than I believe in Prometheus, Rama or the Yellow […]
Lies We Were Taught in Hebrew School, or why 613 is a Meaningless Number
Dear Readers, Jews, as you may have gathered, often have opinions. And it is my opinion that certain ideas in circulation have gotten so warped through vapid repetition that they have entered the domain of lies. Yes, you heard me. LIES. We, as a people, value education and text. So, in the coming weeks, I […]
Index of Egyptian History (Timeline)
Egyptian history constitutes an awesome period of time. Including the Ptolemies, it covers at least three thousand years (c.3100-30 BC). By contrast, the Roman Emperor Augustus The Archaic or Early Dynastic Period I Dynasty II Dynasty The Old Kingdom III Dynasty IV Dynasty V Dynasty VI Dynasty The First Intermediate Period VII Dynasty VIII […]
Russell Gmirkin – author and lecturer
Chapter Summaries Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible London-New York: Routledge, 2016 (Available now in hardcover or Kindle at Routledge or Amazon.com) This book compares the ancient law collections of the Ancient Near East, the Greeks and the Pentateuch to determine the legal antecedents for the biblical laws. A striking number of legal parallels are […]
What Happens to the Documentary Hypothesis if the Pentateuch was written 270 BCE? Neil Godfrey*
What happens to the Documentary Hypothesis (DH) if, as outlined in recent posts, the Pentateuch was first written in the third century BCE? That’s the first question that comes to most of us when first hearing a thesis like this. This post outlines Russell Gmirkin’s chapter on the DH, and is thus a continuation […]
Historicity of the Bible, Notes from Thomas L. Thompson – pdf
God against the Gods: Monotheism versus Polytheism – Dr. Madan Lal Goel – pdf
Gods To God Excerpt – pdf
Castration of Ouranos and the Drunkenness of Noah
This post complements my previous one about the Ham “seeing his father’s nakedness” story developing in three stages: Originally the story was an adaption of the myths of the youngest son castrating his father (the motive: to maintain an inheritance) Then it was more delicately shifted to a story of illicit sex And finally […]