No, I am not saying that proof of God’s existence is found in the tendentious quote-mining of scientists by entertainers to sell a reductionist, sensationalist narrative product to gullible yokels rendered nearly helpless by years of substandard science education and the polarizing media invention of false equivalencies.

I am saying that it is found in this: when I wrote the web URL of the Telegraph article into a Facebook comment addressed to a colleague, the “captcha”^[footnote] presented to me was this:

by weasels

Top that, Anselm and Aquinas, if you can.

Notes:
BACK TO POST A “captcha” is when you have to read and copy some scribbly text in order to prove to a web site that you are not a spam robot. You sometimes have to do that when you write a comment on web sites, especially if your comment includes a web link.

[Finally: Proof of God's Existence was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/03/29. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Yesterday, I called attention to an infelicitous phrase in King and Stager’s Life in Biblical Israel (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001). Writing about a Pre-Pottery Neolithic olive processing site on the sea floor off modern ʿAtlit (that’s south of Haifa, or south of Mount Carmel), King and Stager had written that the site was

…inundated in the mid-sixth millennium, probably by a world-wide flood.

The paragraph referenced Ehud Galili, “Prehistoric Site on the Sea Floor,” New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, 1:120-122. There, I find this ’graph (emphasis mine):

About twenty thousand years ago, the last Ice Age reached its peak. Soon afterward, the melting ice caused a rise in sea level that resulted in a significant reduction of coastal plains throughout the world. By the beginning of the Holocene, however, in about 8000 BCE, the Mediterranean was about 30 m lower than its present self.

In other words:

1. About 20,000 years ago, the most recent glaciation event (not an “ice age,” which are longer, such that we may well still be between glaciation events in a single Ice Age) peaked, with sea levels rising between then and now (on average, that is, with relatively short term accelerations and decelerations set aside).
2. By 10,000 years ago (around 8,000 BCE), waters had risen nearly, but not yet, to a then-coastal site settled by folks who press olives.
3. By about 7500 years ago (ca. 5500 BCE), waters had risen enough that the increasingly-sodden coastal site was abandoned, though not necessarily precipitously (King and Stager will note that no olives are left unprocessed at the site). Today, it is under water.

In King and Stager, this 15,000+ year rising of sea levels, with coastal sites gradually shifting landward, is collapsed into a “world-wide flood” that “inundates” the site “in the mid-sixth millennium.”

This choice of words obviously, and unfortunately, evokes the biblical story of an instantaneous and cataclysmic global flood (Gen 6–8). This evocation is equally damaging for biblical studies, whether the audience is those who read Gen 1–11 as history, or those who suspect with dismay that all biblical historians will do so.

This confusion, about whether the biblical narrative is being uncritically accepted, is compounded by a habit that King and Stager share with other biblical historians, whereby biblical narrative episodes are presented in language that presupposes their historicity. For just one example, (page 109),

The terebinth…gave its name to the Valley of Elah, where David slew Goliath (1 Sam. 17:19).

Not, “where David is said to have slain Goliath,” but “where David slew Goliath.” It is as if a writer on ancient Greece were to say, “Troy archaeological level VIIa is topped with a destruction layer, including burn marks to the walls outside of which Achilles slew Hector.”

This writerly habit could be explored further in another post. Here, I simply offer it as the kind of thing that makes it hard to know what to do with a cursory reference to “a world wide flood” in an academic, peer-reviewed work on the history of ancient Israel.

What would you say, reader? Do I make too big a deal over nothing? Or, in the context of larger conversations about isolating the fideistic from the evidentiary in biblical studies, does every molehill deserve scrutiny?

[Mysteries of the Global Flood Revealed! was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/03/10. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Evidence for a wild olive processing site from the [Pre-Pottery Neolithic period] has been found on the sea floor at Maritime ʿAtlit south of Haifa, inundated in the mid-sixth millennium [B.C.], probably by a world-wide flood, after the olives had been processed.

“…probably by a world-wide flood…”?

The sentence concludes with a footnote (Ehud Galili, “Prehistoric Site on the Sea Floor,” New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, 1:120-122), but is not a block quote. We have this resource in our library, so I will check it out, but by their formatting, King and Stager seem to be at least taking ownership of the claim, if not outright producing it.

Did somebody go and demonstrate a mid-sixth-millennium global inundation without telling me? Or is there some other reading of the text that eludes me?

(Perhaps this is a case for the Lenzi Files.)

[Later: See also the follow-up post on this topic.]

(*) Why would Westminster/John Knox choose not to have persistent links to their own books on their web site, instead of out-linking to Cokesbury? Even if sales are through Cokesbury, why not at least keep information about the book in the publisher’s site? Talk about rushing customers out the door.

[A Pious Scribal Addition? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/03/09. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

The “-ism” is important, the suffix implying that this perspective is not a matter of reasoned argument but of dogmatic adherence. For this reason, James’s comparison to Creationsm is apt: James means to say that reasoned argument fails both creationists and mythicists, and that they appeal instead to fallacious lines of argument. Notice, in this regard, the epithet that creationists use for the theory of natural selection as the main vehicle for the fact of evolution: “darwinism.” In this way, creationists seek to suggest that there are two equally valid “isms” from which to choose, when in fact the one arises from public reasoned argument, demonstrates extraordinary explanatory power, finds support from evidence in virtually every field of science, and (most importantly) is inherently provisional pending new discoveries…while the other is held not provisionally but absolutely, resting not on an evidentiary foundation but rather the privileging a particular interpretation of a limited number of biblical proof-texts.

Tomorrow is Darwin Day. Celebrate with a trip over to Exploring Our Matrix.

Which means I’ll have to create my summer courses after all, I guess.

See the background at the original post, but the idea is: What Google search term produces your blog as its first/highest hit? The search term cannot be your name or the name of your blog, and the search term cannot use quotation marks.

What am I #1 in?

• phlebotinum Bible
• Bible woo

What are you #1 in?

[Update, 2011/01/18: the original poster has removed the video. You can still find a version of it here, with some attempts at bolstering the video’s claims.]

“I will report the facts.” Nearly of these “facts” are false:

“Jesus spoke these words originally in Aramaic…” This is not known. It may be that Jesus preached both in Aramaic and in the Greek of the New Testament. If he did preach in Aramaic, there is no reason to be optimistic about our ability to retrovert the Greek of the gospels into that alleged Aramaic original. Imagine giving an English translation of Don Qixote to twelve English-speaking scholars who had never heard Spanish spoken by a native, and having them all retrovert the English translation to the original Spanish. Know how many completely different “originals” you’d get? That’s right: twelve.

“…which is the oldest form of Hebrew.” No, it isn’t. Aramaic doesn’t precede Hebrew. They are sibling languages, with significant differences in vocabulary, morphology, and grammar. So, speaking in Hebrew is not “much the same way” as the way Jesus would have spoken Aramaic.

“…from the heights, or from the heavens.” Nice try: the speaker has substituted “heights” (in order to get to bamah, the word he wants to use) for “heavens” (shamayim, a word he wants to get away from because shamayim sounds nothing like “Barack Obama”). The argument from this point is not based on Jesus’ words (in any language), but on a paraphrase that the speaker finds convenient.

(We could stop here: Now that we see that the groundwork comprises crippling falsehoods, it is clear that anything built on it is pointless. We’ll continue anyway, just for the exercise.)

“…from Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary.” As Bryan mentioned on Facebook, When someone grounds their argument in the use of Strong’s concordance/dictionary, they are saying, “I do not know any Hebrew. Do not trust anything I say on the topic.” Strong’s is a tool designed for people who do not know Hebrew.

Baraq is the Hebrew word for lightning: this is a fact. It has nothing to do with the name of our President, but baraq does mean “lightning.” Barack, our President’s name, is Swahili, and related to Hebrew Berekh, “to bless.” (Think of the better known form, Barukh, “blessed.”) In other words, why would a speaker of Hebrew (or Aramaic, or Greek) would use the word “lightning” to evoke the Swahili (or Arabic) name, Barak = “blessed/blessing”?

Isaiah 14: No mention of Satan here: Isaiah is plainly talking about the king of Babylon, whom he compares to the mythic “Daystar, son of Dawn.” He says so [ref. added: Isa 14:4]. But, the Jesus of the gospel Luke may be evoking Isaiah when he says that he “saw Satan falling as lightning from the heavens,” so I’ll give this a pass.

Isa 14:14: “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.” That’s right: the word “heights” (which, you’ll recall, Jesus does not use anyway) is not associated with the falling of the Daystar, but with his (planned but not certainly achieved) ascent. Also, the “heights” are plural: the phrase is bamotê-ʿab, “the heights of the cloud.” Hear it? Not bamah, but bamotê.

“Some scholars use the O [to transliterate the conjunction waw].” No, they don’t, because it is never, never pronounced “O.” The prefixed conjunction we- or wa- becomes u- in biblical Hebrew when it precedes a bilabial consonant (b, m, p) or any consonant followed by the shewa, or half vowel (Cĕ-; think of the first vowel in a casual pronunciation of “America” or “aloof”). It is never o-. Sorry, but never.

“…or, ‘lightning from the heights.’” Okay, in the second place, the conjunction never means “from.” Hebrew (or Aramaic) has a preposition for that. The phrase baraq u-bamah (not o-bamah) will mean, “lightning and a height” (whatever the heck that is; also remember that baraq has nothing to do with “Barack”). The phrase will never, never mean “lightning from the heights.” Sorry, but never. (And in the first place, remember, Jesus never even said, “lightning from the heights.” He said, “lightning from the heavens,” which is why all this stuff about “heights” is pointless.)

Conclusion: if a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by Isaiah, were to say the words of Jesus in Luke 10:18 (seriously: why would our rabbi do this?), he would not say, “Barakh Obama.” He would not even say, baraq u-bama. Or baraq u-bamoth (lightning and heights). If he means to use Jesus’ words, he would not even say, baraq min-habbamoth (lightning from the heights). I suppose he might (might) say, baraq min-hashamayim (lightning from the heavens). So now you know why our secret Muslim president’s Arabic Kenyan birth certificate remains hidden in a clandestine madrassah in the Lincoln Bedroom: because on it, you will indeed find the true name of the antichrist…

(oh, wait, neither Isaiah, Luke, or even Revelation [or Daniel, if you care] use the word “antichrist”: it is used in the letters of John as a generic term for “unbelievers”)

…Baraq Min-Hashamayim.

If you want to see some other debunking, go see Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math Bad Math, Michael Heiser at PaleoBabble, Bryan at Hevel, and James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix. Each of them adds some additional arguments that I don’t make here.

Every now and then, in order to keep a post under a thousand words or so, I’ve thrown out a promise to flesh some idea out more fully in the future. Here, I’m going back to try to list some of those outstanding promises.

• “Being a Student” series: I offered suggestions for students planning to ask for letters of reference, and said I would occasionally offer similar posts on “being a student.” I’ve done a bit, and may step up that series as we get into the academic year.
• I have…several…times…used…the…term “woo,” a term used by science bloggers and atheist bloggers to describe instances of pseudoscientific claims and arguments. At least once, I have promised to devote a post to justifying the term “Bible woo.” I keep deferring the post, because it calls for some fairly serious platform-building, including 1) distinguishing evidentiary “biblical studies” from devotional “Bible study”; 2) establishing how historical studies and literary criticism sit among the sciences; 3) figuring out how not to have to bring in an explanation of modernism and post-modernism if it can be avoided by any means; 4) distinguishing unsuccessful but methodologically sound “biblical studies” from fraudulently-conceived, pseudoscientific “Bible woo.”
• In a related vein, I once suggested that the dichotomy “science v. religion” might profitably be swapped out for the distinction between “literal speech and figurative speech.” That is, if religious speech would try to be more clear about whether it means to be literal (and therefore falsifiable) or figurative (and therefore subject to the different critical canons of literary art), then much of the “science v. religion” conflict is sidestepped. My one post on the topic addressed a particular news item (Obama’s nomination of Francis Collins as Director of National Institutes of Health). I would like to write a follow-up post that fills in the argument that I started there.
• These two are promises I’ve made to myself in the form of drafts or outlines: I would like to write a post about how we users decide what new technologies or platforms are for (“What is Twitter For?”); and I would like to further promote awareness of iTunes U and YouTube/Edu by featuring particular items from time to time.
• As SBL gets closer and my fall teaching progresses, I will be testing out ideas about my paper topic: How strategies in distance learning contribute to the brick-and-mortar classroom.

By writing this post, I don’t mean that I’m going to drop everything until every item is neatly scratched off with a fine point pen. In fact, August (with class preparation amping up into high gear) might not even be the most fruitful time for the careful thinking that these plans ask for. But, it puts my loose ends of yarn into one basket here at my elbow.

What of these plans, if anything, would you like to see taking shape first? What other kinds of posts would you like to see more of?

Use the comments to play! Find as many problems as you can with the claims made by the video. Go for the details. Find more than your friends and taunt them with your bragging rights. Have fun!

Think broadly: not just about the Hebrew, but logic and fallacy, scientific inquiry, and so on.

Without further ado:

This morning, I had a cup of coffee, pet the dog, and chatted with my wife. If you properly want to understand these figures in my life, you have to attend to the pictographs from which these words derive.

The c in coffee is derived from the Semitic alphabetic character gimel. Now, the gimel is a pictograph of a throwing stick. The o comes from Semitic ayin, which represents an eye. The f is derived from the waw, a hook or a nail. Finally, the e comes from Semitic he, whose pictograph represents some dude waving his arms (“hey!”). Put them together, and you see that “coffee” means “better than a stick in the eye, on which I am totally hooked, and which makes me say Hey, Hey!”

I pause for you to collect yourself.

As for my dog: The d comes from dalet, which represents a door (or a fish, but anyone can see that my dog is not a fish, even though Hebrew dag means “fish”; stay with me here). Then there’s that o from ayin (eye) again. And g, like c, comes from gimel (stick). That is, my dog keeps an eye on the door, for which service I throw him a stick.

Finally, my wife: The i is from Semitic yod (hand, or forearm). Both the w and the f come from that waw (nail, or hook, but my wife is not a hooker, so nail, please). Recall that the e is from he (hey!). So, my wife is the one with two nails in the forearm ZOMG!! MY WIFE IS JESUS!! Which totally makes me say, “Hey!”

It should be clear to you by now that an understanding of the deeper meaning of our English characters opens a window on the plans that God has for our relationships with one another and with our coffee. And that…

What? You say that language ≠ script, that the former precedes the latter, and that no speakers of English ever sat around and said, “So what shall we call this stuff over here? I don’t know, but it’s like a stick in the eye so let’s be sure to use c and o?”

I guess somebody should tell that to all those frauds who teach Hebrew like this guy does (“It’s easy! And happens to support the patriarchy!”):