Just Genesis

Osiris and Dionysus Foreshadow Christ

2012-02-13T10:00:00.004-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

C.S. Lewis accepted that the pagan myths of Osiris and Dionysus (even foreshadowed Christianity and spoke of spiritual realities. J.R.R. Tolkien expected Christ-figures to appear in myths, because from the beginning, the human has longed for a great ruler with the power to defeat death. Both understood the lasting power of myth compared to historical accounts. Were I to interview random persons, most if not all, would be able to tell me about Adam and Eve. However, few if any, would be able to recount key events of 1520 or 1880.

All myths about a dying deity who returns from the grave are really the same myth with variations on the theme. As Joseph Campbell noted this myth has a wide global dispersion, indicating that it is very old. The Greeks, who were much infatuated with ancient Egyptian religion, borrowed Osiris for their Dionysian cult. To understand how this myth is about Jesus Christ, we must investigate the religion of Abraham's Horite people. The expectation of a Righteous Ruler who would destroy death originated among them.

The Horites were devotees of the high God (Ra) whose emblem was the Sun. Ra's son was Hor (Horus in Greek) whose embem was the falcon. Hor is sometimes shown flying above the Sun on Ra's solar boat. This is important because it is Hor who dies and rises, not Osiris. Osiris was murdered and his body dismembered and scattered. The pieces of his body were rejoined and he became the lord of the dead. Osiris did not rise from the grave. He descended to the shadowland of Sheol.

The ancient Egyptian priests taught that the dead person continues as a shadow and they considered the blessed dead “the living ones.” [1] The word Sheol is derived from the Egyptian word Sheut (šwt), meaning shadow. Statues or ancestor figurines of deified rulers were painted black to convey their continued existence as shadows. On the final day, some in shadowland will be granted eternal life and others will die the second death.

Genesis 25:8 says, “Then Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered to his people.” The phrase “gathered to his people” or “gathered to his fathers” applies to the Horite ruler-priest caste to which Abraham, Job, Moses, Aaron and David belonged, and from whom Jesus Christ came as a direct descendant. Abraham, Job, Moses Aaron and David all died and remained in the grave, but Jesus Christ rose. As Hebrews attests, He is our great High Priest, after the order of Melchizedek.

This phrase "gathered to his people" should not be generalized. It does not apply to all people, but is specific to the unbroken line from Abraham to Christ our Lord. This is why I believe the phrase relates specifically to the Horites or Horim who were a priestly caste. This is evidenced again in Numbers 20:26: “Remove Aaron's garments and put them on his son Eleazar, for Aaron will be gathered to his people; he will die there.”

In Predynastic times, the whole people was embodied by the ruler who was expected to intercede in life and death for his people. Great pains were taken to bury the ruler so that he would rise from the grave. Likely, Abraham's beliefs about resurrection would have corresponded to those of his Horite ancestors.

The rulers of Egypt were associated with Osiris in death. Osiris controlled the shadowlands and rose daily from the deep as the Sun rises. His death is symbolized by the setting of the sun in the west. There his son, Hor/Horus reigned for him as his heir. The Egyptian word hr (her, hor, har) means "the one on high." The Turin Canon, which provides important information on Egypt's early history, describes the Predynastic rulers of Egypt as "Followers of Horus" and Horus as the "Ruler of the Two Horizons."

Horus was identified with ruler-priests in ancient Egypt. His identification with the king was shown on early decorated monuments from Nekhen (Hierakonpolis). The Horites believed that heavenly recognition of a people depended on the righteousness of their ruler-priest. If God turned His face away from the ruler, the people suffered from want and war. If the ruler found favor with God, the people experienced abundance and peace. The ruler's resurrection meant that he could lead his people beyond the grave to new life. This is why great pains were taken to insure that the ruler not come into contact with dead bodies, avoid sexual impurity, and be properly preserved after death. The ruler's burial was attended by prayers, sacrifices and a grand procession to the royal tomb.

Heavenly recognition for the Horites was never an individual prospect. Heavenly recognition came to the people through the righteousness of their ruler-priest. This is the context for the Christian understanding of Jesus as the risen ruler who leads his people from the grave to the throne of heaven.

Horite rulers hoped to rise from the grave in union with Osiris and inherit eternal life. They were a caste of ruler-priests whose origins are veiled in great antiquity. They were honored in 4400 B.C. at Nekhen, the oldest known center of worship of Horus of Nekhen. His totem was the falcon.

As the priests became more ambitious, the idea that heavenly recognition depended upon the Righteous Ruler who could defeat death shifted. The cult of Osirus became very powerful and very profitable for the priests. This shift began around 1550 BC (about 500 years after Abraham) when people sought to be initiated into an emerging Osiris cult. [2] They hoped that association with Osiris’ death and resurrection would enable them to inherit eternal life. They no longer awaited a Righteous Ruler who would rise from the dead. The costly initiation rites were encouraged by priests who were willing to change the tradition of their Horim to line their pockets.

Expectation of life beyond the grave came to depend, not on the appearance of a Righteous Ruler, but on the agency of priests and sacrifice. This happened among the Vedic and Pagan priests who encouraged animal sacrifice to such extreme proportions that blood flowed from their altars. A Vedic proverb states that "Sacrifice is the navel of the world." The priests taught that the merit of the sacrifice depended on its costliness. Sacrifices of twelve and three victims (trittues) were the most common, but hundreds of animals might be sacrificed at a time.

The priests of Israel distanced themselves from the Pagan and Vedic priests. They taught that sacrifice was for the atonement of sin, but they also looked for the coming of the Righteous Ruler. Many had hoped that David would be that ruler, but he too died and was gathered to his fathers. He did not rise from the grave. In all of history, there is but one Righteous Ruler who rose from the dead, even Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

1. Conceptions of God In Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many", Erik Hornung (translated by John Baines), p. 233, Cornell University Press, 1996, ISBN 10-8014-8384-0

2. “Man, Myth and Magic", Osiris, vol. 5, p. 2087-2088, S.G.F. Brandon, BPC Publishing, 1971.

Migrations Out of Africa

2012-02-11T16:07:00.005-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

There have been multiple migrations out of Africa over many thousands of years. Genesis 10 speaks of the migration of the Kushites into Mesopotamia. This is one of the later migrations.

Evolutionists maintain that "modern" humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago. However, this evolutionary language is misleading because Neanderthals and Denisovans were equally human.

DNA studies are helping to piece together a clearer picture of archaic populations, their migrations and the mixing of archaic peoples. Of particular interest is the migration of Haplogroup C, which traces lineage by the Y-chromosome.

Onges of Andaman and Nicobar Islands
The Onges and Jarawas belong almost exclusively to Haplotype D, a subtype of Haplogroup C.

The negrito Andaman and Nicobar Islanders belong to M130 (Haplogroup C) designated by Spencer Wells, who leads the Genographic Project. This lineage of Nilotic peoples migrated between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago from Africa and Arabia, traveling along the coastlines and eventually crossing the sea. They moved eastwards to India, Japan and Australia. The 20,000 year old human skeletons found at Lake Mungo in New South Wales are likely descendants of the early Nilotic peoples. Both groups buried their rulers in red ochre, derived from hematite, Fe2O3. The earliest known use of red ochre (300,000 years) is at the site of GnJh-03 in the Kapthurin Formation of East Africa, and at Twin Rivers in Zambia.

Haplogroup C migration

The Onges and Jarawas belong to Haplotype D, a subtype of Haplogroup C, which is also common in Tibet and Japan. The Ainu aboriginal people of Japan are in haplotype D (Y-chromosome) and haplogroup X (mitochondrial chromosome). The Ainu have a red skin tone similar to Abraham's Horite (Edom = red) people. This explains why the Hebrew and Japanese alphabets are similar.

The Ainu/Annu also migrated westward and settled in Greenland, Labrador and the eastern coastline of Canada. The Ainu share a common female ancestors and are classified in mtDNA haplogroup X. The heaviest concentration of mtDNA haplogroup X is found among the descendants of the Annu living in Eastern Canada. They say that their ancestors crossed to the New World from Wales (which explains the absence of haplo X in Siberia). This is supported by the discovery of red ochre burial in the Upper Paleolithic in Wales.

The genetic sequences of haplogroup X diverged from haplogroup N which originated in the Nile. Haplogroup X diverged further about 30,000 years ago with two sub-groups X1 and X2 now identified. Overall haplogroup X accounts for about 2% of the population of Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.

Sub-group X1 is restricted to North and East Africa, and also the Near East. Sub-group X2 appears to have undergone population expansion and dispersal after the last glacial maximum, between 21,000 and 15,000 years ago. Sub-group X1 is more strongly present in the Near East, the Caucasus, and Mediterranean Europe. There are concentrations of sub-group X2 in Georgia (8%), the Orkney Islands (7%) and amongst the Druze (27%), most of whom live in Galilee and have a red skin tone.

Related reading: Mining Blood; A Kindling of Ancient Memory; Abraham's Annu Ancestors; Sub-Saharan DNA of Modern Jews; 58,000 Year South African Color and Glue Factory

Denisovan Population

2012-02-10T12:22:00.015-05:00

Who were the Denisovans? That is the focus of a fascinating Science Magazine feature and the buzz among molecular geneticists.

An ice-age population lived in Asia, according to a genome sequence recovered from a finger bone of a female in southern Siberia. The growth plates were not fused, indicating that this was a young child. She lived between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. A comparative analysis of the genome with those of modern humans indicates that this lineage survives in the genes of some inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia. These small populations share one-twentieth of their DNA with the Denisovan population.

The Denisova mtDNA studied indicates a common female ancestor for Neanderthal humans and modern humans.

Biological anthropologist Maria Mednikova of the Russian Academy of Science has said, “It remains unknown what the Denisovan looked like or how he behaved.”

However, the new discovery of a Denisovan toe bone suggests that African, Asian and European populations were interbreeding. This is likely the genetic seedbed of the later Afro-Asiatics.

A finger bone of a young child (found in 2008) and a tooth (2000) were discovered in the Denisova Cave in Siberia.

The molar tooth and the finger bone mtDNA sequences were very similar, indicating that both individuals belonged to the same population.

The DNA analysis further indicates that the Denisovan population was the result of an early migration out of Africa. The ancestors of some Papuans and the Denisovans migrated, probably from the Nile region, between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago.

Related reading: Complete Denisovan genome offers glimpse of ancient variation; Fossil genome reveals ancestral link

Terah's Territory and Legacy

2012-02-07T05:00:00.065-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

Abraham's father was Terah, a great Kushite ruler and a descendant of Nimrod (Sargon the Great). His kingdom extended the length of the Euphrates River.

This kingdom was called Aram-Naharaim. In Old Syrian/Aramean aram means "high ground" and naharaim means "between the rivers." Genesis 24:10 says that Abraham's servant Eliezar took gifts and set out for the city of Terah in Aram-Naharain. This may refer to Damascus, and who better to send than his own son by his concubine Masek who was Syrian?

Other regions are designated as aram in the Bible. For example, the ruler of Aram Soba (Zobah) was defeated by Saul, according to 1 Samuel 14:47, and Joshua confiscated the land of the ruler of Aram Maaka, according to Joshua 12:16. It was typical for rulers to built their cities on high ground near sources of water. The Jebusites were especially famous for this and according to Joshua 15:63, the Israelites were never able to uproot the Jebusites from Jerusalem.

The rulers of Genesis controlled vast territories along the ancient rivers. The extreme boundaries of their territories were marked by the cities or settlements of their two wives. As the rivers were oriented more or less on a north-south axis, so were their wives. The ruler traveled between his wives on a north-south axis, as the sun travels between the horizons from east to west. Knowing the marriage custom helps us to identify the extent of Terah's territory. One wife lived in Ur to the south and the other wife lived in Haran to the north.

Abraham also set his wives on a north-south axis, with Sarah in Hebron and Keturah in Beersheba.

There is another explanation in Genesis for why the ruler's two wives were placed on a north-south axis rather than on an east-west axis. The explanation involves Lamech who bragged to his two wives Adah and Zillah (Gen. 4). Theodor H. Gaster noted that the names Adah and Zillah seem to have a relationship to words for dawn and dusk, suggesting a celestial or sacred marriage motif. However, it was not unusual for archaic rulers to brag about their greatness by claiming to control all the land from the sunrise to the sunset.

For the author of Genesis, Lamech the Elder is portrayed as a braggart and a murderer. As such, he set himself above God's law. In other words, he posed himself as God by placing his wives on an east-west axis, for this is the territory of the Creator, whose solar emblem moves daily from east to west.

Lamech the Younger is the firstborn son of Methuselah by his cousin wife Naamah. He is the great great grandfather of Nimrod/Sargon the Great who apparently shared his ancestor's hubris because he claimed to rule from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean or "from sunrise to sunset."

It is likely that the final redactor of Genesis was a priest living during the reign of David. He would have known that the name Naamah was associated with David's dynasty. The mother of Rehoboam, David's grandson, was a princess by that name. If so, he would have mentally connected Lamech and David, both of whom shed innocent blood. David was repentant and almost inconsolable. Lamech, as far as we know from the Bible, was not repentant. On the other hand, the redactor may have intended a comparison rather than a contrast. This is the view of St. John Chrysostom who believed that by confessing his sins to his wives, Lamech brought to light what Cain tried to hide from God, and “by comparing what he has done to the crimes committed by Cain he limited the punishment coming to Him.” (St. John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Genesis, Vol. 74, p.39. The Catholic University Press of America, 1999.)

Philip Ochieng: Kushite Flight from Canaan

2012-02-05T06:00:00.011-05:00

Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan contemporary of President Obama's father, relates how the Kalenjin, a Kushite people, once resided in Egypt and Canaan and fled before their oppressors. They claim to have fled oppression in Egyptian held lands and wandered for 40 years in the wildernesses of Sudan and northwestern Kenya where they encountered God at the sacred mountain El-gon. There is linguistic evidence to support this. For example, the Kalenjin capital is Kericho which is Jericho.

The Kalenjin were a warrior caste in ancient Egypt. They have been identified with the Midianites. Midian is a Kalenjin clan of Baringo district of Kenya. Kalenjin were identified by clan divisions, namely Sebei, Sabaot, Miot and Midian until modern times. Here we have a suggestion of a Sheba-Midian-Egyptian confederation. This may explain the confusion in Genesis 37 where we are told that Joseph was sold to a caravan of Ishmaelite/Egyptian merchants (verse 25) and Midianite merchants (verse 28).

The linguistic connection between ancient Egypt and the Kalenjin is evidenced in the correspondance of many common words. The ancient Egyptian word for country was kmt, which corresponds to the Kalenjin word kemet. In both languages ntr designates divinity. The Kalenjin were a hill country people who dwelt in the region of their sacred mountain "El-gon" in the Tororo (n-trr) Hills of eastern Uganda. From there they migrated to Egypt, where they stayed for thousands of years. Some migrated back to Kenya and Uganda. Others moved into Canaan and Mesopotamia.

The Kalenjin, like the Egyptians, regarded the sun as the emblem of the Creator. Their word Asiis refers to both God and the sun. This is also an ancient Egyptian name for the Creator and is found among other African tribes who originated in the Nile Valley. The Asante of Ghana are the people (nte) of As.

The Kalenjin appear to be one of many groups that moved from the Nile Valley into Canaan and Mesopotamia. This Kushite migration is referenced in Genesis 10 and confirmed by historical records of Sargon the Great, who is likely Nimrod, the son of Kush.

Today, it is estimated that 44% of the Kalinjin are Christians.

Read more of Ochieng's take on the Kalenjin here.

Related reading: The Migration of Abraham's Ancestors; Abraham's Kushite Ancestors; Sacred Mountains

Documentary Hypothesis Not Compatible With Modern Research

2012-02-03T18:37:00.003-05:00

The Graf-Wellhausen theory or Documentary Hypothesis has been shown to be a defective device for interpreting the different theological perspectives found in Genesis. Although incompatible with anthropological and archaeological studies, the Documentary Hypothesis continues to obscure the cultural uniformity of Abraham's ancestors and his descendants up to the time of the Babylonian captivity.

Genesis: An Authorship Study in Computer-Assisted Statistical Linguistics (Analecta Biblica No. 903, Vol. 20) by Yehuda T. Radday and Heim Shore (Sept 1, 1985) is yet another rebuttal of the Documentary Hypothesis. Radday explains:

Biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, and until quite recently, concentrated either on Lower Criticism, i.e. reconstructing an allegedly corrupt Massoretic text, or on Higher Criticism, i.e. differentiating the sources from which the Massoretic text was thought to be composed. Lower Criticism, as it would be, finds little need to attend to matters of structure, while Higher Criticism, which takes any repetition in the flow of a narrative as evidence of separate source materials, is by definition bound to overlook the very essence of chiasm, namely the fact that such repetitions may have been employed in a given composition as an intentional stylistic device. The result, in the final analysis, is that both approaches, and indeed the somewhat myopic scholarly fixation on detailed and minute analysis generally, can combine to preclude even the most dedicated scholar from perceiving the overall structure of many compositions which reveals the presence of chiasm in longer passages and entire books.

But scholarly attitudes are changing. The general attitude toward biblical exegesis has become less text-critical, especially as the discoveries of Ugaritic and Essene literatures frequently sustain the Massoretic text against its major detractors. Furthermore, disillusionment with the crass rationalism of the last century has brought about a more cautious posture vis-î-vis ancient literatures than the confident attitudes which spawned much of Higher Criticism. These changes in the intellectual climate have slowly enabled scholars to agree that several techniques other than the naturalistic manner of telling a tale may exist in the Bible.

From here.

Radday designed a statistical study of the Documentary Hypothesis. Using computer-assisted statistical linguistics, his research team produced an interpretation of the authorship of Genesis. The team did not find statistical validity for the attribution of the book to J, E, and P. Instead, the evidence calls for a division of the book into three categories: divine speech, human speech, and the narrator. The book provides much of the mathematical material on which the conclusions are based.

Apparently the King Lists were not part of the analysis. In my opinion, this necessarily skews the results.

Related reading: The Documentary Hypothesis; Should Genesis Be Taught in the Public Schools?

Analysis of the Flood Story

2012-02-01T14:49:00.005-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

There are two flood traditions in Genesis, expressing different perspectives on that event. In the chart that follows we see how the traditions are crafted into a chiastic narrative. The narrative reflects a Nilotic perspective and a Mesopotamian or Akkadian perspective. Both are very old, and the narrative is the work of an author who was familiar with both traditions. (Genesis 4 has a ABBAABB…ABBA chiastic structure.)

The Nilotic perspective is evident in the water and mountain archetypes, and in the use of the number 40. The Nile flooded for 40 days and it took 40 days for the waters to abate. The Mesopotamian perspective is evident in the covenant language and in the use of the number 7.

The two different birds may represent the different traditions concerning ravens and doves. However, both birds would have been native to East Africa, Arabia and Mesopotamia.

In Africa, the dove represents prophetic discernment, so sending out a dove was Noah’s way of seeking guidance. The most common dove in the region of the flood is the Pink-bellied Dove. This species is abundant near water and would have been associated with river shrines such as those along the Nile. The pink belly is suggestive of blood sacrifice which made peace between the penitent and God. This peace is symbolized by the olive branch which the dove brought to Noah.

The raven or crow was a trickster in Annu tradition. While the dove returns with a message, the trickster does not. Annu means "those of royal blood" (See Gwendolyn Leick, A Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology, 1998, p. 7.) and Abraham had Annu ancestors. Abraham's father was Terah, a royal name among the Nilotic Annu.

The analysis is from here. The lines form the image of a bird in flight, perhaps representing Horus? Horus was shown with the body of a man and the head of a falcon. The falcon was his totem and a symbol of divine kingship. Horus or Hr is "the lord of the sky or "the one on high." The Horites spread their religious practices and beliefs from ancient Kush to Mesopotamia and beyond. The oldest fire altars were falcon shaped. This is why the Shulba Sutras state that "he who desires heaven is to construct a fire-altar in the form of a falcon."

Horite stone altar

In both the Nilotic and Mespotamian traditions we find water and mountains archetypes. The pyramids of the Nile and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia are stylized mountains or the meeting place of God and the divinely appointed or chosen ruler. The ziggurat had 7 terraces.

The sacred center of the flood story (P in the chart above) casts us back to the beginning of creation when the Spirit moved over the waters (Gen. 1:2). "And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind/spirit (ruach) to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged..."

The temporal sacred center is when the Sun rests at the peak of the day, when there are no shadows (James 1:17). In terms of the solar day, this is the temporal sacred center.

The spatial sacred center is between heaven and earth, on the mountain top where God meets with the chosen leader. Abraham, Moses, and Elijah encountered God on mountains. The spatial sacred center is the mountain, prefiguring the Christ's crucifixion and tranfiguration. The center of the Genesis 6 flood narrative is bracketed by the covering/veiling and revealing/unveiling of mountains. Here we have a sign pointing to God's self-revealing in the Person of Jesus Christ.

The sacred center in ancient Canaan was Shechem (modern Nablus). It was located between the mountains of Ebal on the northern side of the valley and Mount Gerizim on the southern side. Mount Ebal rises 3084 feet above sea level, some 194 feet (59 meters) higher than Mount Gerizim. From Mount Gerizim the priests declared the blessings and from Mount Ebal the curses (Deut. 11:29). This was part of the covenant at Shechem, but curiously only the curses are recorded in Scripture (Deut. 27).

The mountain as celestial archetype is very old. The mountain is the safest place when the waters become the chaotic deep (tehom in Hebrew: תְּהוֹם‎). Noah's ark came to rest on the "mountain of vehemence" (ararat in Arabic). The binary opposite of tehom is tehut, divine order/wisdom. The oldest known moral code is the Egyptian "Law of Tehut" which dates to about 5,000 B.C. When God spoke the creation into being He fixed boundaries which those who honor the Creator are not trespass. Trespassing established boundaries invites chaos (tehom) to return like a great flood to the world. Tehom and tehut are binary opposites, and typical of the binary worldview of Abraham's people, there is a hierarchy, with tehut being greater because it preserves order and life.

The binary conception is evident also in the relationship of dry land and waters, which God separated in the beginning. The victory of tehut (order) over tehom (chaos) relates to the annual inundation of the Nile and helps us to understand the Egyptian concept of creation. One of the oldest creation myths envisioned the first place in the world as a mound emerging from the waters of a universal ocean. Here the first life form, a lily, grew on the peak of the primeval mound. The ancient Egyptians called the mound Tatjenen, meaning "the emerging land."

The map above shows the natural habitat of both the Fan-Tailed Raven (crow) and the Pink-bellied Dove, the birds that Noah may have released from the ark. It is also the Afro-Asiatic Dominion, with the Nile at the center. This vast area was controlled by the ruler-priests named in the king lists of Genesis 4, 5, 10, 22:20-24 and 36. According to the flood account and Genesis 10, Shem, Ham and Japheth are the royal ancestors of the rulers of Mesopotamia and the Horite territory of Edom.

Feminine Imagery

The association of the waters with the origins of life is a distinctly feminine image which may explain the emergence of the goddess Tiamat, who along with Lillith, pertains to a later period of Babylonian mythology. Among the Yoruba, living descendants of the ancient Nilotic peoples, the association of waters with the feminine principle is evident in the symbolism of the calabash and the rainbow. The calabash symbolizes the waters below and the womb, and the rainbow symbolizes the waters above. Together these represent the entire cosmos.

The mountain image for the Virgin Mary and the Nativity of Christ follows verses such as Habakkuk 3.3 - "God came from Mount Paran" and the portrayal of Mary as "Holy mountain" rests on ancient cosmology. The Virgin Mary, whose womb swelled with the Son of God, is sometimes portrayed in icons as the mountain of God. The Prophet Daniel saw a mountain, from which a stone was cut by the hand of God (Dan. 2:34, 45). This is the stone which the builders rejected and which has become a stumbling block, even Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Related reading: The Extent of Noah's Flood; Noah's Descendants; Mount Mary and the Origins of Life; The Victory of Tehut Over Tehom

Enns Casts Evangelicals as Anti-Evolution

2012-01-30T12:20:00.004-05:00

I recently read this article by Peter Enns and, while I agree with much that he says, his premise - "If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn't." - is false and misleading. Enns needs to learn the facts about human origins.

One wonders what Enns means by the terms "evolution" and "Evangelical" and does he recognize that Evangelicals who hold an evolutionary view of human origins are equally guilty of imposing a foreign notion on the ancient text? The Biologos crowd, with which he is associated, is characteristic of that position.

Then there is the evidence of molecular genealogy which supports the biblical assertion that humans appeared suddenly and unheralded in East Africa (the point of origin of Abraham's ancestors) many thousands of years ago. When Enns speaks of Adam and Eve as first humans he should clarify that this story comes from Abraham's Nilotic ancestors and is about their first parents who they believed to have a red skin tone (adam, edom, dam - red).

Peter Enns

Evangelicals have been butting heads with evolution for 150 years. A lot is at stake.

If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn't. If you believe, as evangelicals do, that God himself is responsible for what's in the Bible, you have a problem on your hands. Once you open the door to the possibility that God's version of human origins isn't what actually happened -- well, the dominoes start unraveling down the slippery slope. The next step is uncertainty, chaos and despair about one's personal faith.

That, more or less, is the evangelical log flume of fear, and I have seen it played out again and again.
In recent years, the matter has gotten far worse. Popular figures like Richard Dawkins have done an in-your-face-break-the-backboard-slam-dunk over the heads of defenders of the biblical story. They've taken great delight in making sure Main Street knows evolution is true, and therefore the Bible is "God's big book of bad ideas" (Bill Maher) and Christians are morons for taking it seriously.

Evangelicals have been on high alert damage control mode.

Then you have the mapping of the human genome. It's a done deal: humans and primates are 90-something percent related genetically. The best explanation for it, geneticists tell us, is that humans evolved from primates. Since my greatest scientific achievement is doing puppet shows with dissected feral cats in high school biology, I feel I have no right to contest -- and I likely speak for many other evangelicals in that regard (sans puppet show). And it doesn't help things that an evangelical, Francis Collins, was the one who pointed all this out, got the Presidential Medal of Honor for it, and talked about it (twice) on "The Colbert Report."

If that wasn't enough, evolution is being used nowadays to explain all sorts of things about us humans -- including why we believe in God. If God is a product of evolution, like bipedalism and tool making, well, the jig's up (and not just for evangelicals).

Evolution is a threat, and many evangelicals are fighting to keep Adam in the family photo album. But in their rush to save Christianity, some evangelicals have been guilty of all sorts of strained, idiosyncratic or obscurantist tactics: massaging or distorting the data, manipulating the legal system, scaring their constituencies and strong-arming those of their own camp who raise questions.

These sorts of tactics get a lot of press, but behind them is a deeper problem -- a problem that gets close to the heart of evangelicalism itself and hampers any true dialogue.

It has to do with what evangelicals expect from the Bible.

Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, "What does the Bible say about that?" And then informed by "what the Bible says," they are ready to make a "biblical" judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about "human origins." It isn't. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch -- an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about "the beginning," however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question "Where do humans come from?" They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious -- and often political -- beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

Likewise, Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel's monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.

Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver.

These kinds of conversations are already happening, though too often quietly and behind closed doors. Evangelicals owe it to their children and their children's children to bring the discussion out into the open.

From here.

Related reading: Q and A on Creation and Evolution; Christians Debate Genesis and Evolution; Is Genesis Really About Human Origins?; Genesis and Genetics; Parsing Genesis 1:1-2; A.S. Haley Series: Did Adam and Eve Exist?; Science Teachers and Creationism; Brief Overview of Human Origins

Genesis as Ecological Ethics

2012-01-28T18:03:00.001-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

A friend recently asked my opinion of a course on Genesis being offered at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary by Professor Jerome Creach. It is a lecture series on "Genesis and the Moral Imagination" and the recommended text is Terence Fretheim's God and World in the OT: A Relational Theology of Creation, Abindgon, 2005.

Before I offer my opinion, I should preface it with a note to those who don't know me very well.

I am an old curmudgeon and care less what people say, especially when they make unsubstantiable claims such as "women make better priests" or "Abraham was the first Jew." I either leave them to their nonsense or I ask them to substantiate their claims. I'm not interested in arguing with them.

Leon Kass wrote a rather comprehensive book from the Jewish perspective on Genesis and ethics. If that is the angle one wishes to take, I recommend his book, The Beginnings of Wisdom. Kass sees the overarching theme of Genesis as God's effort to create a human society that will practice justice and mercy. It is no surprise that Christ is not found anywhere in the book and Messianic expectation is of little concern.

Professor Creach, on the other hand, is a Christian (Prebyterian). Surely in his class students will find Christ at the heart of Genesis. One would hope! However, his take is not distinctly Christian, as far as I can tell. Here is the course description:

"This study of the book of Genesis will explore some of the Bible's most popular stories..."

I take this to mean that the class will not look at the latest anthropolgical research confirming the historicity of Genesis. The focus will be on narrative and meaning. If one wishes to take this approach, Robert Alter's Genesis and his The Art of Biblical Narrative are unsurpassed.

The course will focus on "moral and ethical concerns" such as "care for the natural world and the maintenance of justice." In other words, Creach will play it safe with the politically correct reading of Genesis which entirely misses the point of the book as a narrative about the origins of Messianic expectation among Abraham's ancestors.

Personally, I wouldn't be the least interested in this course. It would annoy me, but as I said, I'm an old curmudgeon.

Related reading: Jesus Christ's Resurrection in Genesis; Jesus Christ, The Son of God; Jesus Christ in Genesis; The Kingdom of God in Genesis; Tracing Christ's Kushite Ancestors; The Christ in Nilotic Mythology; Genesis and the True Meaning of Christmas

The Amorites: a caste of royal scribes?

2012-01-26T15:20:00.006-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Assyriologist Archibald Sayce believed that the Amorites (Amurru) were white, with blue eyes and fair hair. According to Sayce (The Hittites, 1889):

The Amorites… were a tall, handsome people, with white skins, blue eyes and reddish hair, all the characteristics, in fact, of the white race.

The Amorites lived in ancient Egypt. According to Sayce, tomb No. 34 at Thebes, belonging to the Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1550-c. 1292), illustrates a bearded Amorite chief with white skin and red-brown hair. This is long after the earliest evidence of Amorites in Genesis 10:16, but corresponds to the earliest known written communications.

Henry George Tomkins (1897), a member of the Royal Archaeological Institute wrote that the Amorites were blue eyed and fair haired.

Easton’s Bible Dictionary states the Amorites are “represented on the Egyptian monuments with fair skins, light hair, blue eyes, aquiline noses, and pointed beards.”

My guess is that the Amorites were Am-Ar, meaning the people/tribe/caste of Ar. Today we call them Aryans. Their name appears in the titles of many of their rulers. Some variations include Ar-Shem, Arsames, Artix, and Araxes, and all of these are named in historical texts.

Clearly, Aryans lived in the Nile region well before Abraham’s time. DNA studies indicate that the Nile Valley of East Africa had a population with greater genetic diversity than anywhere on earth. Genesis 10 does not tell us about all the human populations before and after Noah. There were many peoples and significant migrations of peoples 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, long before Noah. However, the name Ar doesn't appear in the Genesis king lists until four generations after Noah. Consider the following:

B.C. 2490-2415 – Noah, lived when the Sahara experienced a wet period (Butzer 1966)
B.C. 2438-2363 – Ham, son of Noah by his cousin-wife
B.C. 2417-2342 – Kush/Cush, son of Ham by his half-sister (?) and the father of Nimrod and Raamah
B.C. 2290-2215 - Nimrod, probably “Sargon the Great”
B.C. 2238-2163 - Arpacshad, son by Asshur's daughter. (Shad means happy.)
B.C. 2217-2042 - Salah, likely Arpacshad's son by his sister-wife
B.C. 2196-2121 - Eber, likely Salah's son by his sister-wife
B.C. 2175-2100 - Peleg, likely Eber's son by his sister-wife. Peleg's brother was Joktan the Elder.

Arpachshad, Salah, Eber, Peleg and Joktan would have lived during the 9th and 10th Dynasties between 2445–2160 B.C. The name Ar is found in the names of biblical places, such as Wadi Arnon. Ar-non (originally Ar-nxn) means the Ar of Onn/Heliopolis. Here we find a connection between Abraham's Annu ancestors of Onn and the Amorites.

The Amorites: Aryan Canaanites?

Genesis 10:16 and 1 Chronicles 1:13-14 mention the Amorites in connection with the Canaanites. The Arvadites (residents of Arvad) and Arkites (Gen. 10:15-18) appear to be related to the Amorites. They are peoples of Sidon and also classified as Canaanites.

During Abraham's time, the Amorites were centered in Engedi, a large oasis on the western shore of the Dead Sea bounded on the south by the Wadi Arnon. They apparently considered the Arnon a natural boundary because they eventually forced the Moabites south across the river.

Genesis 10 maintains that the Amorites are descendants of Noah by his great grandson Nimrod who, though himself a Kushite, lived in Mesopotamia. Clearly the Amorites had been living among and marrying Abraham’s Kushite ancestors.

The Amorites: a caste of ruler-scribes?

There are linguistic clues as to the Am-Ar’s identity as a scribal caste. Arsh means “throne” in Arabic, suggesting a connection to the royal house. Among the Igbo, the scribe clans are called Ar or Aro. It appears that the Am-Ar were a caste of ruler-scribes, just as the Horites were a caste of ruler-priests. This is further evidence that the archaic world had a caste structure and marriage within the ruling castes was endogamous.

Israelites associated by their names with the Am-Ar include Aroch (1 Chr 7:39, Ezra 2:5, Neh 6:18, Neh 7:10) and Ariel (Ezr 8:16, Isa 29:1, Isa 29:1, Isa 29:2, Isa 29:2, Isa 29:7). Ariel means “scribe/messenger of God.” So it appears that the Am-Ar were scribes and royal messengers. This is further suggested by the name Ar-vad. Vad means “to speak” in Sanskrit.

The association of the name Ar with the scribal caste is further demonstrated by the discovery of Aramaic scrolls from the satrap Arsames to his Egyptian administrator Psamshek and to an Egyptian ruler named Nekht-hor. (A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, Chicago, 1948, pp.116-117)

The alphabetic inscriptions from the Wadi El-Hol in Egypt date between 1800 and 2000 B.C. and provide some of the earliest evidence for the development of the alphabet that would have been known to the Am-Ar. Concerning this find, Dr. John Coleman Darnell (Yale University) has stated, “These are the earliest alphabetic inscriptions, considerably earlier than anyone had thought likely."

The inscriptions were found at Mount Tjauti, where caravan routes converge about 25 miles northwest of Luxor and about 250 miles south of Cairo. The Farshut Road, or the “Road of Horses,” departs Thebes north of the Valley of the Kings, crosses the high plateau between Mount Antef and Mount Roma and descends at the Wadi el-Hol. This is a very ancient commerce route, possibly established by King Menes who was the first to unite into a single empire the regions of the Upper and Lower Nile. Menes was called Ahauiti and Mount Tjauti was likely named for him. His territory was called Tjenu. The earliest evidence of Tjenu as a ruled territory dates to 4000 B.C. Royal scribes and messengers would have traveled this route.

We find further association between Ar and the royal name Auti in the region of Arachosia, which corresponds to the Aryan land of Har-auti. Har refers to Horus.

Parsing Genesis 1:1-2

2012-01-24T13:46:00.009-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

"Fee al-badi' khalaqa Allahu as-Samaawaat wa al-Ard . . . "

Genesis 1:1 - Arabic Bible

Genesis 1 should be considered in the context of Abraham's African ancestors from whom we received this amazing account. The elements of Genesis 1 align very closely with the creation accounts of African peoples who live in the Nile region or who migrated away from the Nile. The correlation of theme, language and device is much closer to the African than to the Babylonian stories. The theology expressed is also distinctly African, as will be demonstrated in this parsing of Genesis 1:1-2.

In the beginning God ....
God was at the beginning. The Creator pre-existed eternally and is not constrained by time and space, as are creatures.

The phrase "In the beginning God" is common in African creation stories and songs, such as this song of the Mbuti Pygmies:

In the beginning was God

Today is God,

Tomorrow will be God.

Who can make an image of God?

He has no body.

God created the heavens and the earth ...
Both the heavens and the earth are created entities which owe their existence to God, the Creator. No other gods shared in the act of creation.

"I cast a spell with my own heart to lay a foundation in Maat. I made everything . I was alone. I had not yet breathed the divine one Shu, and I had not yet spit up the divine one Tefnut. I worked alone." (Egyptian)

Maat is the principle or platform whereby God orders the universe. In the Psalms the principle is often called "wisdom" by which God orders all things. The principle of Maat includes equilibrium and harmony between constituent parts, the cycle of the seasons, celestial and planetary movements, honesty in social and business interactions and justice. There appears to be a relationship between Maat and Tehut, just as there is a relationship between the watery chaos and Tehom.

The victory of Tehut (order) over Tehom (watery chaos) relates to the annual inundation of the Nile and helps us to understand the Egyptian concept of creation as a mound emerging from a primal ocean (mer). The first life form was a lily, growing on the peak of the emerging dry land called Tatjenen. This is symbolized by the rising pyramid along the Nile.

Compare this theology to the Babylonian "Epic of Creation" in which Marduk is created to defend the divine ones from attack by the sea goddess Tiamat. Marduk offers to save them on the condition that he be appointed their permanent ruler. The gods agree to Marduk's terms. Marduk kills Tiamat and from her corpse, which he cuts into two parts, he fashions the earth and the skies.

The earth was formless (tohu) and void/empty (bohu) ...
The formlessness of the earth could have more than one meaning. It may simply mean that God had not yet created the material world. However, the ancient Nilotic peoples may have been thinking metaphysically, that is to say, that God had not yet created the Forms or archetypes of which created forms are the shadow or reflection. Whatever is meant by formless, there was nothing on earth. This is conveyed in this account:

At the beginning of Things, when there was nothing, neither man, nor animals, nor plants, nor heaven, nor earth, nothing, nothing, God was and He was called Nzame. (Fan / Congo)
Boshongo

Darkness was over the surface of the deep ...

Darkness and chaotic waters are commonly associated with the beginning of creation. This is expressed in the following African creation stories.

"In the beginning there was only darkness, water, and the great god Bumba." (Bantu / Central Africa)

"There was no sunlight... the whole land was in darkness." (Gikuyu / Kenya)

"In the beginning there was only the swirling watery chaos." (Egyptian)

The Spirit of God was moving over the waters (mə·ra·ḥe·peṯ, Egyptian origin) ...
The Spirit (ruach) of God moved over the dark waters. The ruach of God is the breath of life. This concept is found in Genesis 2:7: "the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostril the breath of life and the man became a living being."

In the image above a dead Egyptian receives the breath of life flowing over a sail. The sail was associated with Ra's solar boat which rises after dying at the end of the day. By the wind/breath/spirit of the Creator, the deceased may enjoy life beyond the grave and avoid the second death. The Egyptians believed in the resurrection of the body and prayed for, offered sacrifice for and prepared the bodies of their dead in this hope. The African bishop Saint Augustine wrote "that the Egyptians alone believe in the resurrection, as they carefully preserved their dead bodies." ("Death, burial, and rebirth in the religions of antiquity", Jon Davies, Routledge, 1999, p. 27)

Related reading: Genesis One Sets the Scene; The Christ in Nilotic Mythology

Genesis and Molecular Genealogy

2012-01-18T20:15:00.004-05:00

There are five scenarios to explain the current distribution of human populations. They can be seen in the figures below.

Source: http://arslanmb.org/ArmenianDNAProject/screenshot-38.jpg

Explanation of Molecular Genealogy Models

1. Recent out of Africa: Single Origin Population model
In this model, humans are a young species that underwent a bottleneck, and Eurasians are descended from a group of Africans that migrated out of Africa. This model has been criticized for its inability to explain deep divergence in autosomal DNA (atDNA). Autosomal DNA is a term used in genetic genealogy to describe DNA which is inherited from the autosomal chromosomes. Each set of autosome is received from your mother and your father. Their atDNA was received from their parents and their grandparents, these becoming more disjointed with each generation since most people no longer marry close kin. Within endogamous groups such as Abraham's Horite people, the disjunction is considerably less, and depending on the mating structure, may be preserved quite well.

In this model, the African Eve, traced by mitochondrial DNA, lived 170,000 years ago while the African Adam, traced by Y-chromosome DNA, is believed to have lived 100,000 years ago.

The Y-chromosone determines gender and is passed virtually unchanged from father to son. The mutation rate is very slow so the Y-chromosone can be used to trace lineage back many generations.

Mitochrondrial DNA (mtDNA) passes from mother to daughter from generation to generation with very little change and is therefore a rich source of information for those studying deep ancestry. The Horites married only Horite women, so Horite ancestry can be traced by mitochondrial DNA. As Horite rulers married half-sisters and patrilineal cousins or nieces, there would be considerabe genetic stability. This stability was valued because the Horites expected God's Son to be born of their ruler-priest caste which practiced endogamy.

Mitochondrial Eve’s line will not die out because mitochondrial DNA is passed down to both male and female offspring. On the other hand, Y-Chromosomal Adam's line will not be the same at any point in history due to the fact that male lines can die out. When this occurs, a more recent ancestor becomes the new “Adam.” The most recent common male ancestor is believed to have lived 100,000 year ago.

2. Recent out of Africa: Multiple Archaic Populations model
This model is advocated by those who believe that modern humans evolved from ancestors common to modern humans and other archaic humans (hominins), some of whom became extinct.

Dienekes Pontikos holds this view but mainains that the mating structure of the African population indicates isolated long-standing subpopulations. In this view, Eurasians are Afro-Asiatics who descend from one of these African subpopulations. The variants that have deep origins are presumed to have evolved separately in different African subpopulations and entered the modern gene pool after unstructured mating (panmictic) became more common.

Anthropological and archaeological discoveries support the recent Out-of-Africa view for modern humans, but don't support the view of separated archaic humans who became extinct. This view lacks physical evidence that the theorized extinct hominids were unlike modern humans. This has been shown to be false by paleontologist Jeremy DeSilva and others.

DeSilva compared the ankle joint, the tibia and the talus fossils of human ancestors between 4.12 million to 1.53 million years old, he discovered that all of the ankle joints resembled those of modern humans rather than those of apes. Chimpanzees flex their ankles 45 degrees from normal resting position. This makes it possible for apes to climb trees with great ease. While walking, humans flex their ankles a maximum of 20 degrees. The human ankle bones are quite distinct from those of apes. Read about DeSilva’s research here.

Further, the discovery of a complete fourth metatarsal of A. afarensis at Hadar that shows the deep, flat base and tarsal facets that "imply that its midfoot had no ape-like midtarsal break. These features show that the A. afarensis foot was functionally like that of modern humans." (Carol Ward, William H. Kimbel, Donald C. Johanson, Feb. 2011) Read the report here.

Multi-Regional: Recent Admixture model
This view agrees on the recent African origin of modern humans, but maintains a place for long isolated pre-existing Eurasian populations who contributed some of their mtDNA to modern humans. Multiregionalism posits that the descendants of H. erectus evolved into Neandertals, Denisovans, and modern humans in different regions. Populations coming from Africa mingled with the other groups and modern humans emerged.

This model presumes two variants with deep common ancestry stemming from the separated Eurasian and African strains. This model has found support by analysis of the Neandertal genome. However, recent studies have revealed that only 2–3% of the genome of non-Africans might come from Neanderthals. Further, some believe that Neandertal introgression into Eurasians can be explained by the Multiple Archaic Populations in Africa model.

Multi-Regional: Long Standing Admixture model

In this view Africa is the point of origin of human Y chromosomes and mtDNA and separation took place about 150,000 years ago. Modern humans are descended from populations from around the world between which there has been gene flow. This model explains divergence, but does not offer an explanation for the African origin of the uniparental markers, the evidence for the appearance of anatomical modernity in East Africa and the evidence for less genetic variation in Eurasia with increasing distance from East Africa.

Ancestral Bottleneck model
This view is proposed by Blum and Jakobsson, who speculate a bottleneck 150,000 years ago in an ancestral structured population. This model combines elements of the Single Origin Population model and the Multiple Archaic Populations model. It hypothesizes a single origin model for extant humans and allows for the possibility of structure in Africa prior to the bottleneck. The breakdown of structured mating is set before the bottleneck.

Blum and Jakobsson write, "Through the analysis of a public DNA sequence database, we find, similar to previous estimates, that the common ancestors of autosomal and X-linked genes are indeed very old, living, on average, respectively 1,500,000 and 1,000,000 years ago. However, contrary to previous conclusions, we find that these deep gene genealogies are consistent with the Out-of-Africa scenario provided that the ancestral effective population size was approximately 14,000 individuals. We show that an ancient bottleneck in the Middle Pleistocene, possibly arising from an ancestral structured population, can reconcile the contradictory findings from the mitochondrion on the one hand, with the autosomes and the X-chromosome on the other hand."

In other words, they support the view that the earliest human populations were in Africa and had a mating structure that preserved a genetic identity until about 130,000 years ago. The hand axe is the most common artefact of these early East African and "Old World" peoples.

Which of these views aligns with Genesis or does Genesis suggest yet another possible model?

What do you think?

Abraham, Descendant of Both Shem and Ham

2012-01-17T11:58:00.018-05:00

A reader has asked this question: "Alice, I read your post about Horites. Fascinating and very helpful. In my reading, I understand that Abraham is a descendant of Shem (Genesis 11). Can you explain how he is a descendant of Ham? Thanks!

Francien

Francien asks a question which is often posed to me, usually through email contacts. He has read Genesis 11 and concluded that Abraham is a descendant of Shem only. This is a common error. All the genealogical data in Genesis is related so we must look at all of it, not simply one section.

Abraham's ancestors and descendants were related by both blood and marriage. The clans intermarried (endogamy) and the rulers of the clans married according to a structure which is made evident in analysis of the Genesis King Lists found in chapters 4, 5, 11 and 36 with additional information in Genesis 10 and 22:20-24. Analysis of all the data makes it clear that Abraham was a descendant of both Shem and Ham.

Before Ham and Shem, the lines of Cain and Seth intermarried also. These were ruler-priest lines, so the Genesis King lists speak of the marriage and ascendency structure of the Horites.

The marriage structure of the Horite rulers involved two wives living in separate households. One wife was a half-sister (as was Sarah to Abraham) and the other wife was a patrilineal cousin or niece (as was Keturah to Abraham).

The brides were the daughters of ruler-priests. They contributed the mtDNA and their ruler husbands contributed the Y chromosome since males who share a common patrilineal ancestor also share a Y chromosome, diverging only with respect to accumulated mutations. The distinctive Kohan DNA or "priest marker" is identifiable because Horite priests married daughters of priests exclusively.

In 1995, Canadian nephrologist Karl Skorecki designed an experiment to find out whether the descendants of the ancient Jewish ruler-priest - kohamim - could be verified by genetics. Skorecki reasoned that Jewish males who claim to be kohanim should have an identical set of marker mutations that trace back to biblical times. So the researchers gathered saliva from 200 Jewish males, a third of whom identified themselves as kohanim, at the Western Wall during the High Holidays. No matter whether they were Sephardic, Ashkenazic, or Oriental Jews, 98.5% of those who said they were kohanim shared a genetic marker for a common male ancestor.

Were the same sort of study done of Arabs who descend from Abraham's Horite line by his firstborn son Joktan, it is likely that this same genetic signature would be found in at least 3% of the Joktanite population of Arabia.

In 1996, a more extensive study found a set of marker mutations common to approximately 60% of self-proclaimed kohanim. Using complex mathematical calculations the research team identified the Cohan Modal Haplotype (CMH), a series of six genetic markers common to the kohanim which originated more than 3,000 years ago.

It is evident from Genesis that the ruler-priests (Horim/Horites) originated well before 3000 years ago. Aaron and his half-brother Korah were not the first ruler priests. Their father Amram was a ruler-priest and the descendant of a long line of ruler-priests who can be traced to at least 6000 years ago (4000 B.C.).

DNA studies confirm that the Horite ancestors of the priests of ancient Israel did marry exclusively within the priestly divisions/lines, which is what analysis of the Genesis genealogical material shows. This is the ancestry of Jesus Christ who was born to Mary, the wife of Joseph, both in the ruler-priest lines.

Related reading: The Daughters of Horite Priests; Moses' Wives and Brothers

A Kindling of Ancient Memory

2012-01-12T20:31:00.013-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

I've been corresponding with a descendant of the Annu (Ainu) people who migrated thousands of years ago to Newfoundland and Labrador and to the eastern coast of Canada. My correspondant's native name is Sea’Key (the ’ is a little click made with the tongue.) His name means White Salmon with a Heart of Gold. He has been very generous with his time, sharing many accounts of his people's history.

He writes, "We are called MicMac now but early we were called the Beothique by the French and Beothuck by the English. Our people are said to be extinct, but we just left when the shooting started. A few 100 French did not wipe out 10,000’s of natives. It is said we migrated in 2 waves to Nova Scotia and Labrador."

MicMac means friend. The early name of the territory of Sea'Key's people was Khan O Dan, or Can a dan, which became "Canadian" to the French. Sea'Kay reports that according to the oral tradition of his people, they came in two waves from the Middle East to Scandanavia, then to Greenland and to the Hudson Bay area of Eastern Canada.

His people are in mtDNA haplogroup X. The dispersion of haplogroup X is shown below. The greatest concentrations are indicated by the darker shade. MtDNA traces lineage by the mitochondria, received from the mothers.

The heaviest concentration of mtDNA haplogroup X is in Eastern Canada which is where Sea’Kay lives. The estimate is upwards of 55% in some tribes and averages at around 25%. The next highest concentration, about 40%, is found in the Druze population.

Only 7% of the Dene (Navajo) are in haplogroup X. Their language has been connected to Ket, a Yeniseic language spoken by a very small Siberian population. However, haplogroup X is virtually non-existent in Siberia, the land route to North America proposed by some anthropologists.

The genetic sequences of haplogroup X diverged from haplogroup N which originated in the region of the Lower Nile. Haplogroup X diverged further about 30,000 years ago with two sub-groups X1 and X2 now identified. Overall haplogroup X accounts for about 2% of the population of Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.

Sub-group X1 is restricted to North and East Africa, and also the Near East. Sub-group X2 appears to have undergone population expansion and dispersal after the last glacial maximum, between 21,000 and 18,000 years ago. Sub-group X1 is more strongly present in the Near East, the Caucasus, and Mediterranean Europe. There are concentrations of sub-group X2 in Georgia (8%), the Orkney Islands (7%) and amongst the Israeli Druze (27%), most of whom live in Galilee.

According to the Greenland Saga, Sea'Kay's ancestors used bows and arrows. These weapons characterized the Anu of the Nile whose land was called Ta-Seti which means "land of the bow." The name of the biblical ruler Seth is related. (This migration is not shown on the Bradshaw Foundation maps of migration out of East Africa.)

Nyland (2001) found that many names of places and common objects in Hebrew are closely related to the Saharan proto-languages, the languages spoken by Abraham's Kushite ancestors.

If the mating structure of the Ainu rulers is the same as the structure of the Horites - which it appears to be, as Terah, Abraham's father, is associated with the Nilotic Annu and he was a Horite - then the expansion and dispersion of Haplogroup X can be explained in part by their marriage and ascendency pattern whereby younger sons were sent away to establish territories for themselves.

The Kushites were great explorers and kingdom builders. Their migration out of the Nile region has been confirmed through DNA and migration studies. Though we first meet Abraham in Mesopotamia (Gen. 12), he is a descendant of Nimrod, the son of Kush (Gen. 10:8), who built a kingdom the length of the Euphrates.

Among the Kushites there was a caste of ruler-priests known as Horites. They are called "Horites" because they were devotees of Hor (Horus in Greek). The oldest temples dedicated to Horus have been located in modern-day Sudan at Nekhen. From here the Horites spread their religion across the ancient Afro-Asiatic Dominion. This Dominion extended from present-day Benin to India, China and Cambodia. There is little doubt that ancient Nilotic peoples, including the Annu, were masterful seamen and traveled widely. It is also evident that they didn't all migrate the same direction or at the same time.

The Horites named in Genesis 36 called their land Edom, which means red. David, one of their descendants, is said to have had a red skin tone. The red skin tone was enhanced by exposure to the sun. The red tone represented the ruler as the servant of Ra, whose emblem was the sun. The queen made herself white to represent the moon.

Predynastic Egyptians varied in appearance. Eye colors included blue, gray, green and brown, and some men wore full beards while others were beardless. The typical Egyptian had a reddish skin tone.

Ancient Egyptians reflect a greater genetic diversity than is found outside the Nile Valley.

As Sea'Key recently called to my attention, there is a close correlation between the Hebrew alphabet and the Japanese alphabet. Likely this is because both are based on the older writing system of the Annu.

This is how Sea’Key describes his people: "We have beards and green eyes and we are very tall, between 6’ and 6’6”. " Here is an image of one of his ancestors (shown left).

The Annu were the first settlers of Japan. They were said to appear more Caucasian than Asian.

Below is an image of an Annu elder from Hokkaido Japan. Compare to the photo (left) of one of Sea'Kay's ancestors. Note the similar robe designs and headdresses.

Note the reddish skin tone of the Annu elder.

No Kingdom by Deception

2012-01-10T15:28:00.000-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

According to Genesis 25, Esau sold his birthright because he did not value it as much as he valued his stomach. This preaches well as an object lesson for those who aspire to be children of God, but is this a proper application of this passage?

Let's look closely at the text.

²⁹ Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished. ³⁰ He said to Jacob, “Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!” (That is why he was also called Edom.)

³¹ Jacob replied, “First sell me your birthright.”

³² “Look, I am about to die,” Esau said. “What good is the birthright to me?”

³³ But Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob.

³⁴ Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank, and then got up and left.
So Esau despised his birthright.

What did Esau exchange for a pot of red porridge? What is meant by the term birthright?

The word rendered "birthright" in English is b'khora in Hebrew. It is composed of the words barak and khora. Barak means "blessing" in Hebrew, Arabic and Ancient Egyptian and khora refers to the Horite priesthood.

One of Moses' brothers was named Korah, meaning shaved one. Horite priests shaved their bodies. So the birthright pertained to the Horite ruler-priests which was passed from father to the firstborn son of the ruler's half-sister wife and from maternal grandfather to the firstborn son of the ruler's cousin/niece wife. Korah was a direct descendant of the Horite ruler Seir.

As the twin sons of Isaac's cousin wife, neither Esau nor Jacob were in line to inherit Isaac's territory. By Horite custom, the firsborn son of the cousin wife was heir to the territory of his maternal grandfather. So the birthright from Isaac was not Esau's to sell to Jacob. There are some serious textual difficulties here.

As the firstborn of Isaac's cousin bride, Esau would be heir to the territory belonging to Rebecca's father. Part of the terrriotry was Padan-Aram. Padan-Aram is where Jacob was sent by his parents after the first deception failed. There Jacob married two wives. His wife Rachel stole the teraphim in an attempt to claim her father's inheritance for Jacob according to Horite law. This is the second attempt at deception in the story of Jacob. His mother attempted to make Jacob Issac's heir, but this failed. His wife attempted to make Jacob the heir to her father's kingdom, but this failed also.

Jacob would not succeed in becoming a ruler by deception; only by God's grace, as was true also for his grandfather Abraham and for his descendants Moses and David.

Esau and Jacob are introduced as struggling (vayitrotzetzu) with each other from the womb (Genesis 25:22). The text tells us that "two nations" (goiim) and "two peoples" (leumim) will emerge. Note that this explanation does not explicitly say from Rebecca's womb, leaving the possibility that these peoples come from Isaac by two different wives. It seems highly unlikely that Isaac did not maintain the marriage and ascendency pattern of the Horites.

Jacob later struggles with the angel of the Lord and gains the name Israel. He is claimed as the founder of the Jewish people, which is problematic since the priesthood of Israel remained Horite in Moses' time.

Esau is not spoken of as one who struggled. Things seem to have come easier for him as the older brother. He married a high ranking Horite woman - Oholibamah. Her importance is suggested by the fact that she is mentioned 7 times in Genesis 36.

Esau is a name associated with the Horites of Edom. There are two named Esau in Genesis 36. Esau the elder married Adah. Their son Eliphaz married Timna, the daughter of the Horite ruler-priest Seir.

Exquisite Nok Figurine Discovered

2012-01-07T10:57:00.002-05:00

2000 year Nok figurine of female ruler

This terracotta head, at around 2000 years old, is a rare exception. Excavated from a village in Nigeria, this is one of the best-preserved examples of its kind ever discovered. It is a product of the Nok culture that flourished from about 1000 BC to AD 500, when it mysteriously died out, and provides examples of the earliest figurative art in sub-Saharan Africa.

Archaeologists Peter Breunig and Nicole Rupp of the Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany uncovered the head during the 2010 field season. It was found in Kushe, a small village about 150 kilometres north of the capital Abuja. Amazingly, this specimen was very close to the surface - only 60 centimetres down.

The Nok terracottas are a mystery. No one knows for sure what they were used for. They may represent dead members of the Nok community and could have been a votive offering at a shrine. Alternatively, the figurines may have been grave goods.

Africa has seen a resurgence of archaeological activity to investigate Nok culture. Part of this has to do with interest in Iron Age societies in Africa, which is surging as anthropologists consider how technologies - especially those based on iron - spread. The Nok are considered to be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, people to smelt iron on the African continent.

However, the research is under threat. Over the past half-century countless Nok terracotta specimens have been looted from hundreds of sites in central Nigeria. The booty has found its way onto the international art and antiquities market, ending up in the hands of private art collectors.

From here.

Many similarly excellent figurines have been found within the sphere of Nok culture. Here is one of a male ruler:

The Nok are not extinct. Today they are called Yoruba. In Abraham's time, they were called Kushites. They migrated from the Nile along the great river basins that feed into the Benue Trough.

The Nilotic origin of the Yoruba is evident in the correspondance between Yoruba words and ancient Egyptian words.

Nok is likely related to the Igbo word anochi which refers to rulers. Only rulers had metal workers and scribes in their service.

The hairstyle of the recently discovered figurine is almost identical to this Nok figurine:

This is similar to the style worn by Igbo women today. The Igbo appear also to have Nilotic origins.

Of Dung Beetles and Red Herrings

2012-01-02T13:36:00.004-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

In Ugaritic texts the liver and the heart are often correlated. This correlation came into Hebrew poetry, reflecting the influence of Babylonian culture on post-exilic Jews. The Ugaritic kbd (liver) stands in poetic parallelism with lb (heart). This is demonstrated in the Babylonian libbaki linuhkabittaki lipsab, meaning “May thy heart be at rest, thy liver be pacified.” (American Journal of Theology, Vol 2, p. 136. University of Chicago Divinity School

This parallelism from Babylonian culture led Bible translators to translate heart as liver in many Bible passages. Lamentations 2:11 is an example. "Mine eyes fail with tears, my heart is troubled; My liver is poured upon the earth..." (American Standard Version)

Allen P. Ross (Beeson Divinity School) has said that a Jew in ancient times would not say, "I love you with my whole heart" but rather “I love you with my whole liver." However, this parallelism is not found among Abraham’s Kushite ancestors for whom the heart was the single organ that was not extracted from the mummified body. All the other organs were removed and stored in canopic jars. Further, in ancient Egyptian medical texts the liver and the heart are not correlated. Egyptian physicians were well aware of the different functions of these organs.

Babylonian clay sheep liver dated between 2000 and 1500 BC (British Museum) Babylonian priests used the livers of sacred sheep to investigate the cause of illness, to divine the future and to determine the will of the gods.

It is clear that the parallelism of liver and heart in Old Testament poetry does not come from the Hebrew ancestors (Horim), but from the Babylonians. This post-exilic influence is a red herring when it comes to the Horite understanding of the heart and its importance for the resurrection of the dead.

Abraham’s Horite people viewed the heart as the mind and the seat of decision-making. The heart was the essential organ when it came to resurrection of the body, as it would be weighed in the afterlife. The body of the pure hearted would rise from the dead, as the sun rise in the morning. This is the significance of the dung beetle scarab, placed over the mummy's heart.

This beetle rolls balls of dung along the ground and deposits them in its burrows. The female lays her eggs in the dung ball and when they hatch, the larvae feed off the dung until they emerge from the earth. The orb of the lowly beetle replicated on earth the solar orb of the Creator. Both were seen to sink below the earth and were believed to give life to those buried in the earth.

Among Abraham’s ancestors the heart was believed to be the seat of the will. It was weighed in the afterlife and only the pure heart would receive resurrection from the dead. David, a direct descendant of the Horite Abraham confessed his sin to God, and prayed, "Create in me a pure heart, O God." (Ps. 51:10) None have been so foolish as to translate this “Create in me a pure liver…” It is the pure heart that hopes for resurrection.

For the Horites the heart was the seat of the inner being. This is expressed in these words: "Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart." (Ps. 51:6)

The heart among Abraham’s Nilotic people was associated with the mind and decision-making. "I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." (Ps. 119:11) Again, no Bible translator has thought to translate this “I have stored up your word in my liver..." To do so would be to impose a foreign notion on Horite theology.

Related reading: Solar Imagery of the Proto-Gospel

May Your New Year be Blessed

2011-12-31T23:35:00.000-05:00

The Aaronic Blessing (Numbers 6:24–26, NIV)

The Lord bless you

and keep you;

the Lord make His face shine upon you

and be gracious to you;

the Lord turn His face toward you

and give you peace.

Purity Seal from Herod's Temple

2011-12-31T16:31:00.006-05:00

Israeli archaeologists recently reported the discovery of a 2,000-year-old clay seal near Jerusalem's Western Wall. The Western Wall is part of the compound revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, where Islam's al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock are situated.

The archaeologists decided that all of the soil removed from the site would be meticulously sifted. This is being done with the help of thousands of students and is underwritten by the Ir David Association.

During the sieving process a button-shaped seal of fired clay was discovered. The seal is stamped with an Aramaic inscription consisting of two lines. Archaeologists Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa said, “The meaning of the inscription is “Pure for G-d”.

The upper line דכא and below it ליה

Following the preposition “ל” in the word “ליה” is the shortened form for the name of G-D.

The Priesthood and Purity

The priesthood was defined in the ancient Afro-Asiatic world by Horite priests. This is reflected in the linguistic connections between the Hebrew root thr = to be pure, the Hausa/Hahm toro = clean, and to the Tamil tiru = holy. All are related to the proto-Dravidian word tor, meaning blood.

The Horite priest was purified before entering the temple. His purification involved fasting and an intense period of prayer. The purification ritual involved bathing and shaving the head. Korah, Moses' half-brother, was a priest. His name means "shaved head" and according to Numbers 16:17-18, he carried the censor to offer incense before God.

Horite priests served in the temple, probably on a rotating schedule. It is from the Horite priesthood that the priesthood of Israel developed. Moses' brothers, Korah and Aaron, were both Horite priests before there was a nation known as Israel.

77,000 year old mattresses

2011-12-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

The world's oldest known mattress has been unearthed in South Africa, archaeologists have announced.

The mattress—which consists of layers of reeds and rushes—was discovered at the bottom of a pile of bedding made from compacted grasses and leafy plants. The bedding had accumulated at the Sibudu Cave site in KwaZulu-Natal (map) over a period of 39,000 years, with the oldest mats dating to 77,000 years ago.

"What we have is evidence of plant bedding that is 50,000 years older than any previous site anywhere in the world," said study leader Lyn Wadley of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

The compacted layers of fossil plants—excavated from sediments 9.8 feet (3 meters) deep—show that the bedding was periodically burned, possibly to limit pests and garbage.

Read it all here.

Related reading: Mining Blood; 70,000 Python Stone; African Religion Predates Hinduism; Humans Originated in Africa

The Virgin Birth and the Manger too!

2011-12-26T13:37:00.001-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

"Must one believe in the Virgin Birth to be a Christian? This is not a hard question to answer. It is conceivable that someone might come to Christ and trust Christ as Savior without yet learning that the Bible teaches that Jesus was born of a virgin. A new believer is not yet aware of the full structure of Christian truth. The real question is this: Can a Christian, once aware of the Bible’s teaching, reject the Virgin Birth? The answer must be no." -- The Rev Dr. Albert Mohler (From here.)

I agree with Dr. Mohler, and I would go farther to say that all the details of the Nativity account are to be believed. The Mother of God was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, her virginity was preserved, she gave birth in a manger, and the witnesses to the Incarnation were Bethlehem shepherds and Jewish Wise Men living in the East.

These are the exact details concerning the expectation of the Seed of the Woman (Gen. 3:15) that were anticipated by Abraham's Horite people and echoed in the Psalms, in Isaiah and in Micah.

Ancient rulers attempted to claim that they were the King of Kings by fabricating stories of their birth that corresponded to these details. Kushite and Egyptian rulers did not name their biological fathers in their king lists. The Pharaoh was called "son of Re" and Egyptian texts never mention an earthly father. Kingship was a manifestation of the solar deity's overshadowing of noble women. Sargon the Great (2300 B.C.) proclaimed that he didn't know his father because his mother was overshadowed by the sun (the emblem of the Creator) while in the palace temple. Here is a fragment of Sargon's legend from Akkad:

Sargon, the mighty king, king of Akkadê am I,

My mother was lowly; my father I did not know;
The brother of my father dwelt in the mountain.
My city is Azu-piranu, which is situated on the bank of the Purattu [Euphrates],
My lowly mother conceived me, in secret she brought me forth.
(From here.)

Sargon was a Kushite ruler. In the ancient world, the east-facing temples were considered the mansion (hâît) or the house (pirû) of the deity. They were O-piru, meaning “Sun House” or “House of the Sun.” The priests who served at the temples were called Hapiru and they were devotees of Horus.

Sargon I (Nimrod) is said to have been born to a lowly virgin queen who was overshadowed by the High God. He was born in an O-piru. His home city was called Azu-piranu, meaning House of God . Azu was an ancient name for the Creator. It is Azu in Akkadian, Asa in Chadic, Asha in Kushitic, and Ashai in Hebrew. Nehemiah 11:13 mentions a Jerusalem priest named Am-ashai.

In the oldest known Messianic tradition the Son of God is born as a calf to his mother Hathor whose is portrayed as a sacred cow, and the birth took place in a stable with the Babe sleeping in a crib.

The shepherd-priest motif first found with Abel continues with Abraham who kept flocks and dug wells to support them. Jethro, the Priest of Midian, also kept flocks and offered sacrifices to God. Jethro was Moses' father-in-law. The shepherd-priest motif continues with David who tended his father's flocks and offered sacrifices that were accepted at the threshing floor of Araunah, the Jebusite. The motif culminates in Joachim, the Virgin Mary's father, also a shepherd-priest. Even those who disclaimed Jesus as Messiah recognised that his mother Mary was the daughter of a ruler priest. Sanhedrin 106a says: “She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters.” It is said that she was so despised that some Jews tried to prevent the Apostles from burying her body.

Mary is "Miriam Daughter of Joachim Son of Pntjr (Panther) Priest of Nathan of Bethlehem." From the earliest predynastic times among the Egyptian Horites, ntjr designated the king. The name Panther or p-ntjr meant "God is King."

Here is the celestial archetype whereby Abraham's descendants would recognize the identity of Jesus, the only begotten Son of God who was born of the Virgin Mary.

Re, Hathor and Horus represent the Egyptian Triad in which Horus and his father were said to be “one.” Jesus makes this claim concerning Himself, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). The Creator Re is associated with the temple in Heliopolis (City of the Sun) on the east side of the Delta. Hathor, the virgin mother of Horus, had her principal temples in Dendera and Memphis to the south of Heliopolis and on the west side of the Nile. The principal temples of Horus were further south in Nekhen and Edfu, and on the west side of the Upper Nile.

When Jesus claims to be "one" with his Father it is as a shepherd-priest. He says, "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them and they follow me." (John 10:27)

Horite priests kept flocks and sacrificed animals from these flocks. This is why their shrines were located near sources of water.

Bethlehem was an ancient Horite settlement according to 1 Chronicles 4:4. The shepherds living there were descendants of the Horites who anticipated the coming of the Son of God in the flesh. When they beheld the angels and came in wonder to the manger to behold the Christ child, they must have been in wonder, even as we are, that the ancient prophecy was fulfilled in every detail.

That being the case, Christians embrace the Nativity narrative as a whole. We are not free to pick only details that appeal to us and reject those that may offend us.

Related reading: Genesis and the True Meaning of Christmas; Horite Expectation and the Star of Bethlehem

Genesis and the True Meaning of Christmas

2011-12-24T21:00:00.007-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

In Genesis 22 we read of the "binding of Isaac" in which Abraham demonstrates his conviction that the resurrection of the body is a reality. Abraham's beliefs about resurrection would have corresponded to those of his Nilotic ancestors. He lived long before the rabbis began speculating about existence after death. By Jesus' time, a faction had arisen among the Jews that rejected faith in the resurrection of the dead. These had broken faith with their Nilotic ancestors who believed in the resurrection, and carefully preserved the bodies of their dead.

The Genesis 22 story is not about child sacrifice because that practice developed about 1200 years after Abraham. We find it condemned in the Prophets of the 8th and 7th centuries before Christ. Here are examples:

"They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind." (Jeremiah 7:31)

"I also gave them (the Israelites) over to statutes that were not good and laws they could not live by; I let them become defiled through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn —that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the LORD." (Ezekiel 20:25,26)

Micah asks this, "With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" (Micah 6:6-7).

Jeremiah was influenced by the Deuteronomists who sought to strengthen Israel's land claim. This influence can be seen in the parallel use of language found in both Deuteronomy and Jeremiah.

"There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire,… all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you." (Deut.18:10-12) Here child sacrifice is made a provocation for driving out the peoples living in the land.

Child Sacrifice as Appeasement

If Abraham didn't practice human sacrifice, from whom did this come? Human sacrifices were performed among the Aryans and the Greeks whose idea it was that the gods must be appeased to gain their favor. This is contrary to the Horite conception of God. In their view, God could never be appeased. Man is guilty of every offense against the Creator so every human deserves to die. Life was redeemed by the shedding of the blood of an animal. Animal sacrifice originated in the Nile Valley among Abraham's ancestors.

If Abraham's Horite people didn't practice human sacrifice, what is the point of this story? The usual explanation is that God was “testing” Abraham. If so what is the nature of the test? Is this a test of Abraham’s devotion to God as the rabbis teach, or a test of Abraham's belief in the resurrection of the promised son? Why would the sacrifice of Abraham's promised son (Gen. 15:6) be made the test unless it speaks of the sacrifice of God’s promised Son?

Isaac was the promised son and Abraham believed God's promise that Isaac would be his heir. That is why Abraham confidently declared to his servants: "Wait here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you." (Gen. 22:5)

Reflecting on Abraham's justifying trust in God's promise, the Apostle Paul reminds the Christians in Rome that "Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness." (Rom. 4:3)

Again we are told that Abraham believed God when he saw the ram caught in the thicket by its horns. Abraham believed and called that place "The Lord Will Provide" (Gen. 22:14). Here we find a clue as to what Abraham believed. He believed that God provides the Ram. Horus was sometimes shown with a ram's head, signifying his maturity, having grown in strength from lamb to ram. This image is found at the Temple of Horus at Edfu, 70 miles south of Luxor.

Horus shown with falcon head (left) and with ram's head (right)

Abraham’s Horite people believed that a woman of their ruler-priest lines would bring forth the son of God. They called the promised Son Hor (Horus in Greek). The Horites were a caste of ruler-priests who were devotees of Hor. He was said to rise with the morning sun as a lamb and to set in the evening as a ram, mature and of full strength.

Isaac asked his father, "Here is the wood for the fire, but where is the lamb?" Abraham responded that God Himself would provide the lamb, but as the story goes, God provided a ram. The sacrifice of Isaac looked forward to a greater sacrifice, and is a prophetic foreshadowing of the eschatological event of Christ, an event that Abraham anticipated. This is why Jesus said to the rulers of Israel, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.”

What did the Ram’s appearing mean to Abraham the Horite? As the west is the direction of the future, he would have recognized this as a message about a future event. He would have understood that his son, though miraculously born and of the Horite lines, was not the one who’s appearing the Horites anticipated. He was not the one who would rise from the dead on the third day.

The Horites believed in the resurrection, but this fact has been surpressed by rabbinic teaching which reflects the dominance of the Sadducees who rejected the faith of their Horim (Horite ancestors).

In God's economy, which always gets the order of things right, the shepherds of Bethlehem were the first to receive the news of the birth of the Son of God. The Horite ruler-priests were also shepherds and Bethlehem was a Horite town, according to I Chronicles 4:4.

The faith of Abraham and the faith of the Apostles are one and the same. They stand on opposite sides of the event when the veil was torn asunder from top to bottom. Aristides wrote to the Emperor Antonius Pius (A.D. 138-161) what seems to have been an apology for the Faith of Christ: "He Himself is called the Son of God; and they teach of Him that He as God came down from heaven and took and put on Flesh of a Hebrew virgin" (see "Theol. Quartalschrift", Tübingen, 1892, p. 535).

Here is the true meaning of Christmas. The Christ was born that through Him we might receive the resurrection unto eternal life.

Related reading: Did Abraham Intend to Sacrifice Isaac?; Horite Expectation and the Star of Bethlehem;
Egypt in the Christmas Narrative; Jesus Christ's Resurrection in Genesis

Bunk from BAR

2011-12-22T10:00:00.014-05:00

Astonishing news! The Magi's gifts were for medicinal purposes because baby Jesus had arthritis.

BAR must be hurting for real Christmas features since that journal consistently disclaims the Nativity of Jesus Messiah, the Son of God.

Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales studied uses of frankincense and found that this aromatic resin can relieve arthritis by inhibiting the inflammation that causes arthritis pain. This confirms the traditional use of frankincense to treat arthrtiis. The trees that produce frankincense grow in Africa and Arabia and the trade in frankincense began there. The Afro-Arabian Dedanites were early to traders in frankincense according to Isaiah 21:13 and Ezekiel 27:20. They traded in spice, ivory, incense, and textiles with lands as distant as India, Cambodia and China. They probably also traded in horses which were bred in Sheba. They traded in copper from the 4000 B.C. mines in the Air region of Niger.

Too bad BAR didn't dig a little deeper on this. In ancient Egypt there the cippus were used for rites of healing. It always shows the infant god Horus. Priests devoted to Horus (Horites) were known for their healing arts.

Water poured over the cippi of Horus was said to have curative power. The vertical texts on either side of the central image of Horus suggest that this cippi was used to transform water into a curative libation.

BAR asks here, "Did the Magi “from the East” know of frankincense’s healing properties when they presented it to young Jesus?"

Why not? Those Magi were lector priests who could read the ancient books kept in temples and palaces. They were descendants of the Horite ruler-priests who anticipated the coming of Horus in the flesh and who once ruled across the Afro-Asiatic Dominion. In ancient Egypt, they were called hekau, which is related to the Egyptian word akhet, meaning horizon. They were sky watchers and experts in sidereal astronomy. Strabo (XI, ix, 3) says that the Magian priests formed one of the two councils of the Parthian Empire. They knew that the Bethlehem star signaled the birth of the "King of the Jews" and they came to worship him. Now that's the story BAR ought be telling us!

Related reading: Horite Expectation and the Star of Bethlehem; Abraham's Kushite Ancestors; What Language did Abraham Speak?; Thamudic Scripts

Worship the Promise Keeping God

2011-12-20T09:22:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Dr. Rick Lobs

Generally speaking, we humans view historical events as isolated proceedings. In fact all in space and time is connected, and is graciously superintended by the Creator God. This management is called "Providence."

In 2 Samuel we read about David. Behind the passage are these facts about David: he was a shepherd, catapulted into prominence by his killing of Goliath, was a court musician for (crazy) King Saul, became an outlaw and guerrilla warrior, became king of Judah and later King of all Israel, captured Jerusalem from indigenous inhabitants, brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, built himself a very nice house of cedar in Jerusalem.

Having all that in his curriculum vitae he desired to build a house for the Lord - which is to say a Temple in which to house the Ark of the Covenant. Nathan the court prophet first approved the building of the house for the Lord - but later reversed his approval at God's prompting.

Nathan then says something quite cryptic to King David. "The LORD declares to you that the LORD himself will establish a house for you ... Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever." 2 Samuel 7:11, 16.

David will not be the one to build a house for God. But God would build a house for David, that is a dynasty. As if that is not enough, the Lord God promised David that David's kingdom and throne will be eternally established. Wow!

In times of adversity Israel would prayerfully remind God of His promise. For example we read this in Psalm 132:11: "The LORD swore an oath to David, a sure oath he will not revoke: "One of your own descendants I will place on your throne."

The notion of the messiah being in the lineage of David was deeply, very deeply, ingrained in the consciousness of Israel.

Now let's jump about one thousand years. By any measure, that's a long time. We read in Luke 1, that a messenger, Gabriel, is sent from God to a girl in the backwater town of Nazareth - her name is Mary. Gabriel communicated a disturbing and yet, amazing word. Consider.

"...the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob's descendants forever; his kingdom will never end."

The promise Mary had heard all her life about David and the messiah was going to be fulfilled through her. How amazing is that?

Mary answered. "May your word to me be fulfilled."

We learn much from the juxtaposition of these inspired texts.

We learn that prayer is sometimes answered in a different time reference than we might wish. In this case one thousand years. Let that be an example and comfort to you if you have been praying for someone or a situation for a long long time.

We learn that events are not accidental but are guided by God's gracious providence.

The passages remind us of the importance of the "house", lineage or dynasty, God built for David. Was it not Jesus in the book of Revelation that said of Himself, "I am the root and offspring of David." (NIV) "I am both the source of David and the heir to his throne." (TLT) Revelation 22:16. All this through Mary, the blessed mother.

The important truth, the overarching truth to note is that we worship a promise keeping God.

Horite Expectation and the Star of Bethlehem

2011-12-18T13:52:00.006-05:00

Attorney Rick Larson spent many years researching the Star of Bethlehem and discovered that sidereal astronomy is real science, based on observation of the arrangement and movement of the fixed stars and planets. Watch Rick Larson's Star of Bethlehem as a Christmas treat to you and your family.

The ancient Egyptians were masters of sidereal astronomy (not astrology). The stars in the constellation of Leo were especially important to the Nilotic peoples because the Nile rose when the Sun passed through the constellation of Leo. Therefore, they associated the arousal of the Lion with the arousal of the waters. The lion was the totem of the tribe of Judah. In Genesis 1, we read that the Spirit of God hovered over the watery deep at the beginning. In John's Gospel we are reminded that the Son was with the Father and the Spirit before the world was made and that all things were made through Him.

The Magi were sidereal astronomers who lived east of Israel, likely in Babylon or Persia. They were heirs of the same astronomical knowledge as the ancient Egyptians because they were from Judah, like Daniel and the other Judahites (Jews) who served as advisors to King Nebuchadnezzar. The people of Judah knew of the ancient Horite prophecy concerning a Woman of their people who would bring forth Messiah in Bethlehem. When the Magi appeared before Herod they were told that the King of the Jews was to be born in Bethlehem. I Chronicles 4:4 claims that Bethlehem was a Horite town. Abraham and David were of the Horite ruler-priest lines. Joseph, a descendant of Abraham and David (Luke 1:26) , went there to register for the census.

The Magi were aware of God's promise concerning a King whose kingdom would endure through all the ages because reference to the Messianic promise of Psalm 145:13 is found repeatedly in Daniel. It punctuates the rise and fall of kingdoms and proclaims the coming of an eternal kingdom. As astrononers, the Magi recognized the singular event of Jupiter's triple spiral that brought it in close proximity to Regulus. The Babylonians called Regulus Sharu, which means king. In the Persian language Shir means lion.

Using Starry Night, a software program that tracks celestial events at any time in history, Larson discovered that Jupiter, the King Planet met Regulus, the King Star at the beginning of the Jewish New Year in 3 BC. The conjunction of the King Planet and the King Star produced the appearance of an extraordinarily bright star. Larson believes this is when Gabriel announced to Mary that she was chosen to bear the Son of God. When Mary asked how this could be, she was told that she would be "overshadowed"; the very expression used by the Horites to speak of the virgin conception of Hor. Hathor, Horus' virgin mother, was believed to conceive by the overshadowing of God and she brought forth her son in a stable.

The Horites commemorated the death and resurrection of Horus in a 5-day festival. As Plutarch noted in Isis and Osiris, 69, the first 3 days were marked by solemnity and mourning for the death of Horus. His death was commemorated by the planting of seeds of grain. On the third day, the 19th of Athyr, there was a joyful celebration of Horus’ rising to life.

Skeptics claim that Christians based the story of Jesus on the ancient myth of Horus. Christians have done a poor job of answering this ridiculous claim. It takes more faith to believe that Christianity is the Horus myth reworked than to accept that Abraham's ancestors were Horites. This is why the Jews call their ancestors "Horim" and this is what is revealed by analysis of the Genesis King Lists. The Horites believed the promise made to their Edenic ancestors (Gen. 3:15) that a woman of their ruler-priest lines would bring forth the Son of God. This is the origin of Messianic expectation.

Related reading: Mary's Ruler-Priest Lineage; Joseph's Relationship to Mary; The Christ in Nilotic Mythology; Frank Moore Cross: Israel's God is the God of the Horites

Did Abraham Intend to Sacrifice Isaac?

2011-12-17T09:38:00.002-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

Jews speak of the sacrifice of Isaac as the "binding of Isaac" (Akeidat Yitzchak) because their rabbis do not agree on what this story means. Most do not believe that Abraham intended to sacrifice his son.

In The Binding of Isaac, Religious Murders & Kabbalah, Lippman Bodoff argues that Abraham never intended to sacrifice his son. Rather, he had faith that God had no intention that he should do so.

Genesis Rabbah holds that God "never considered telling Abraham to slaughter Isaac. Rabbi Yona Ibn Janach wrote that this story is about a symbolic sacrifice. Rabbi Yosef Ibn Caspi maintained that Abraham's "imagination" led him astray. Ibn Caspi wrote, "How could God command such a revolting thing?"

Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz (Chief Rabbi of the British Empire), maintains that child sacrifice was "rife among the Semitic peoples," and finds it "astounding that Abraham's God should have interposed to prevent the sacrifice, not that He should have asked for it."

Hertz' interpretation of Genesis 22 is that God was correctiong the practice of human sacrifice among Abraham’s people. Unfortunately, there is little anthropological and archaeological support for this view. The is no evidence that the Horites practiced human sacrifice.

Jacques Kinnaer reports, "The earliest known example of human sacrifice may perhaps be found in Predynastic burials in the south of Egypt, dated to the Naqada II Period. One of the discovered bodies showed marks on the throat from having been cut before having been decapitated."-- Human Sacrifice, Jacques Kinnaer

Kinnaer also provides two definitions of human sacrifice:

"The ritual killing of human beings as part of the offerings presented to the gods on a regular basis, or on special occasions."

"Retainer sacrifice, or the killing of domestic servants to bury them along with their master."

For the first definition there is no evidence among Abraham's ancestors, and regarding the second definition, there is dispute among Egyptologists. Caroline Seawright has written, "Human sacrifice is not generally connected with ancient Egypt. There is little evidence of human sacrifice during most of the dynastic period of ancient Egypt... but there is some evidence that it may have been practiced in the Nile Valley during the 1st Dynasty and possibly also Predynastic Egypt.

Seawright is referring to subsidiary graves at Abydos, the burial place for the first kings of a unified Egypt. These were Kushite rulers. However, these were the graves of domestics and officials who probably died naturally, not the graves of servants who were sacrificed to serve the ruler in the afterlife. Even the most provocative National Geographic report has to admit that this is probable, lacking hard evidence that the ancient Nilotic peoples sacrificed humans.

Conclusion

The Jews call their ancestors "Horim" because they recognize the Horite identity of Abraham and his ancestors. The Horites originated in the Nile Valley. The rabbis do not agree on the meaning of this story. One thing is fairly certain; since the Horites did not practice human sacrifice, it is doubtful that Genesis 22 is about blood sacrifice. The biblical evidence indicates that child sacrifice among the Semites developed well after Abraham's time because God condems it between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, about 1200 years after Abraham.

So what is this story about? How are we to interpret this event? That is the focus of this essay. Stay tuned!

Related reading: Did Abraham Believe Isaac to be Messiah?; Jesus: From Lamb to Ram

Genesis Myth or History?

2011-12-15T17:27:00.001-05:00

David Miller Ph.D.

What do we mean by “myth”? German theologian Rudolf Bultmann popularized the notion that the New Testament must be stripped of its mythical elements, specifically, its supernatural features (e.g., Jesus Christ and Mythology, 1958). “Myth,” therefore, in theological circles refers to a traditional, non-literal story in a particular culture that manifests that culture’s world view. The story serves as a vehicle to convey a truth, without necessarily being historically true. The Bible’s depictions of heaven, hell, demons, evil spirits, and Satan are viewed as symbols for deeper meanings rather than being literally existent. Many theologians, and now many Americans, insist that the Bible is a pre-scientific document that is riddled with the errors that accompanied early man’s quest for knowledge.

Along with the onset of modern scientific discovery and understanding has come a widespread tendency to compromise the biblical text of Genesis 1-11. Otherwise conservative thinking Christians have not been immune to this deadly cancer that ultimately undermines the entire Bible and one’s ability to arrive at the truth. In the 1980s, it was discovered that evolution was being taught by two Abilene Christian University professors. One of the biology professors provided his class with a handout that included a photocopy of the first page of Genesis. In the margin he scrawled the words, “Hymn, myth” (Thompson, 1986, p. 16). The university mobilized in an attempt to discredit the charge and sweep it under the proverbial carpet, but the evidence was decisive, as acknowledged even by objective outsiders (see Morris, 1987, 16[5]:4). The fact is that evolution has been taught on other Christian college campuses as well. The lack of outcry testifies to the fact that even Christians and their children have been adversely influenced by secular education.

It is amazing, even shocking, to see the extent to which the authority of the biblical text in general, and the book of Genesis in particular, has been undermined in the minds of the average American, especially in the last half century. In virtually every corner of our country, relaxed and compromised views of the Bible prevail—even among otherwise conservative Americans and those who profess to be Christian. Before leaving office, President Bush (“W”) was interviewed by Cynthia McFadden on ABC’s “Nightline.” When asked if he believed the Bible to be literally true, he responded: “You know. Probably not.… No, I’m not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it, but I do think that the New Testament for example is…has got… You know, the important lesson is ‘God sent a son’” (“Bush Says…,” 2008). When asked about creation and evolution, Bush said:

I think you can have both. I think evolution can—you’re getting me way out of my lane here. I’m just a simple president. But it’s, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an Almighty and I don’t think it’s incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution (“Bush Says…”).

Myriad instances could be cited in which Americans manifest the degrading effects of skepticism, atheism, evolution, and liberal theology.

What a far cry from most of America’s history. It is hard to believe that—up until the 1960s—American education was thoroughly saturated with the biblical account of Creation (e.g., New England Primer, 1805, pp. 31-32; Webster’s The Elementary Spelling Book, 1857, p. 29). The book of Genesis was taken as a straight-forward account of the formation of the Universe and the beginning of human history. People took God at His word. Though liberal theology swept through Europe in the late 19th century, which included attacks on the verbal, inerrant inspiration of the Scriptures, and though the Creation account began to be openly challenged at the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, still, the majority of Americans continued to accept the biblical account right on up to World War II. Since then, however, sinister forces have been chipping away at belief in the inspiration and integrity of the Bible. They have succeeded in eroding confidence in its trustworthiness and authority.

But there are no excuses. The evidence is available, and it is overwhelming. No one can stand before God at the end of time and justify themselves for their rejection of Genesis as a straightforward record of literal history. Failure to take Genesis at face value can easily result in acceptance of views and/or practices that will jeopardize one’s standing with God.

Source: Apologetics Press Click to read the full essay. Leave a comment here at Just Genesis.

Related reading: Getting the Facts about Human Origins; Genesis and Genetics

False Correlations

2011-12-13T14:47:00.003-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

There is a connection between Hinduism and the religion of Abraham's Kushite ancestors. This is because Noah's Kushite descendants established territories in India and took their languages, culture and religious practices with them. In this sense, African religion predates Hinduism.

There certainly are linguistic connections between Africa and India due to the Kushite expansion into India, Nepal, Siam and even China. The Aryans of India, on the other hand, did not built territories in the Nile Valley. Indians moving into Africa is a more recent development, although Dravidian-speaking peoples mined gold in Southern Africa in 1000 B.C.

Unfortunately, there is a good deal of mis-information about the connections between principal figures of Hinduism and principal characters of Genesis. Here are four examples:

Brahma is another name for Abraham

In Hinduism, Brahma and his wife Saraswati are considered the founders of the worlds. In Genesis, Abraham is said to be the father of many nations. This is historically accurate since Abraham had many children, among them nine sons. Such a claim in not made in Genesis for Sara, however, since she gave birth to only one child, Isaac.

There is evidence of a common conception about ancestors who found nations, but an etymological connection between Abraham and Brahma, and between Sarai and Saraswati has never been demonstrated. It is speculation based on a superficial understanding of the proto languages.

Brahma is derived from the Proto-Dravidian root brih, which means to swell or enlarge. It is a reference to the Creator God whose emblem, the sun, swells as it rises in the morning. There may be a connection to the ancient Egyptian root bn, meaning to swell, but there is not an evident connection to the name Abraham which is an Afro-Arabian name.

The Old Arabic word for the swelling of the sun is yakburu, meaning “he is getting big” and with the intensive active prefix: yukabbiru, it means "he is enlarging." This has little connection to the name Abraham. However, it is rleated to the Proto-Dravidian word for a Sun temple, which is O-piru. Dravidian temples typically face east. The morning ritual of the priests was to greet the rising sun and watch as it expanded or swelled on the horizon.

The Saraswati is another name for Sara

Sara is a Nilotic name. It means laughter. Genesis 18:13 reports that Sara laughed when she heard that she would bring forth a son in her old age. The association of laughter with the name Sara is suggested by several Afro-Asiatic languages. The verb to laugh in Hausa, a Chadic language, is dara. Dara and Sara may be regarded as cognates since the letters d and s are interchangeable in Dravidian and many African languages.

The largest population group in Chad is the Sara. Sara society is organized by patrilineal descent from a common male ancestor. There is a 3-clan confederation such as characterizes Abraham's people. The qir ka are the eastern Sara, the qin ka are those living in central Chad, and the qel ka are the western groups. The Sara make up to 30% of Chad's population. About one-sixth of them are Christians and live in southern Chad.

Sarah is also a title, meaning queen. It is related to the Akkadian word for king which is Šarru.

Gayatri is another name for Keturah

In Hinduism, Brahma's second wife is Gayatri. Attempts have been made to connect Gayatri with Abraham's second wife, Keturah. This assertion has no linguistic support. Ketu-ra means the Ketu people/tribe of Ra (God). The Ketu are Jebusites.

Hagar is another name for the Ghaggar River

Ghaggar is not Hagar. It is comprised of the words ghag-gar. The word ghag (also spelled khag) means reed, and gar means hidden. This is a description of how this tributary of the Sarasvati dries up seasonally. It flows only during the Monsoon season.

Related reading: The Afro-Asiatic Dominion; Who Were the Kushites?; The Cultural Unity of Dravidian and African Peoples by Dr. Clyde A. Winters

Enoch's Rapture

2011-12-11T16:38:00.001-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

A reader recently made this comment:

What are your thoughts about Enoch's "removal". I've been perusing your site and I don't see it as having been covered before - not to say it hasn't (I just don't find it if it has).

Gen. 5:24 "and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him."

I realize you deal with data, facts and research, extrapolating from there, but this would certainly seem to be an intriguing passage, yes?

The common interpretation is that Enoch was translated into heaven/paradise like Elijah. Certainly, in the genealogical listings of early Genesis, Enoch's life stands out.

Sure, they're pointing out his strong faith and relationship with God, but his "death" or "end of life" is put differently than the other ancestors. Is this because his faith and walk with God was that set apart, or do you accept the interpretation that he was indeed "translated" in some fashion and this was the early author's way of trying to grasp/understand it and relate it for posterity?

Thanks.

I appreciate this question and the reader's understanding of my interest in facts. This is a topic I have avoided because it necessarily involves speculation. That is not to say that I haven't given this some thought. I have considered three possible explanations.

1. Enoch was a deified ruler whose death was never recorded. I don't see much biblical support for this view. The days of Enoch are said to be 365 years (Gen. 5:23). Whether he died or was translated to heaven, the time of his leaving was noted.

2. Enoch was a sent-away son and his death was never reported to his people back home. Most of the heroes of the Old Testament were sent-away sons: Cain, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David are examples. These biblical figures point to Jesus, God's sent-away Son, who came to conquer and establish and eternal kingdom.

3. Enoch was a hermit ruler who lived in the wilderness and disappeared. His ermitic life began after his son Methuselah was born. Having secured an heir to his throne, Enoch withdrew to the wilderness. This is suggested by Gen. 5:22: "And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methusaleh."

Probably Enoch was "raptured" as was Elijah. This is said to happen to some hysechasts. It is called "stepping into the Light" and is something akin to the transfiguration of Jesus, or the glorified Jesus in the individual becoming all in all. This speaks of transcending this world.

I am not attached to one of these possible explanations. However, I believe that Enoch's righteousness and his disappearance should be taken literally.

The phrase "walked with God" is reminiscent of Genesis 3:8 where we are told that God walked in the garden to commune with the Man and the Woman. To walk with God suggests the simpliest life, where the main thing - perfect communion with God - is kept the main thing.

St. Ephrem the Syrian expressed how Christ makes transcendence possible in a Hymn on the Nativity (VIII.4). He wrote:

Blessed be the Merciful One
who saw the sword beside Paradise,
barring the way to the Tree of Life;
He came and took to Himself a body
which was wounded so that,
by the opening of His side,
He might open up the way to Paradise.

At the end of his Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. John Climacus speaks of this as "ascending to Jerusalem, the vision of the perfect peace of souls" and encourages the monks to fix "your eye upon Heaven, you have set your foot upon its base and run, and gone up, and been exalted, and mounted the cherubim of the virtues; you have taken wing and ascended in jubilation, vanquishing the enemy. You have gone before us on the road and led the way, or rather, even now you lead us, and go on before us all, ascending with a light step to the very pinnacle of the holy Ladder, uniting yourself to love; and love is God, to Whom be glory unto the ages. Amen."

The Ruler Seth

2011-12-08T08:00:00.543-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

TIMELINE

Late Neolithic period (ca. 4000-3000 B.C.)
          - Nilotic pastoralists who were sedentary for part of the year
          - Dead buried with their faces toward the rising sun
          - Hierakonpolis, the most ancient Nilotic temple; dedicated to Horus. Here a 4000 B.C. tomb painting of two red ochre men. They carry crooked staffs and flails, suggesting that they are pre-dynastic ruler-priests.
          - Wine making equipment found in the tomb of the Scorpion I (c. 3150 B.C.)

Noah was drunk with wine on at least one occasion and the outcome wasn't good. Likewise, Lot's drunken stupor led to unfortunate events. Genesis is critical of excessive wine consumption.

The Saharan Wet Period (c. 4000-2000 B.C.)
          - Noah (ca. 2490-2415 B.C.) Saharan Late Holocene (Karl W. Butzer 1966)
          - The Great Pyramid, aligned to the Dragon Star on the Vernal Equinox in 2141 B.C.
          - Lake Chad was much deeper and covered an much larger area
          - The Nile waters flooded more widely, with drainage channels extending west into the desert
          - Stronger monsoonal circulation throughout sub-tropical regions increased rain in Sudan

Analysis of deposited sediments in the Nile delta shows this period had a higher proportion of sediments coming from the Blue Nile, due to higher rainfall also in the Ethiopian Highlands.

Kingdom of Kush (ca. 2000-1500 B.C.)
          - Kushite rulers built pyramids for elite burials and ruled Egypt as its 25th Dynasty
          - Pan Grave burials of Nubia and Egypt of the Medjay/Beja people, about 1700 B.C
          - King Nebhepetre Mentuhotep (c. 2043-1992 BC) married Ashait, a Medjay princess

The Napatan Period (ca. 1575-525 B.C.)
          - King Kasta ("the Kushite")
          - King Piye named his firstborn son Hor (Horus)
          - King Sheba-qo

Origin of the Name Seth

Seti was a royal name among the Nilotic peoples. The name is associated with the territory of Ta-Seti, meaning the "Land of Set." Set and the biblical word Seth are cognates. Ta-Seti is also translated as "Land of the Bow" and attests to the skill of the Nubian archers, a skill for which the later Kushites were also famous.

I Chronicles 1:50 mentions an important Horite bride - Matred. Her name is related to Menmaatre, the throne name of Seti I. Seti is a name associated with Piye, which is identified with the "city of Pai" in I Chronicles 1:50. Queen Piye was a Nubian queen.

The great Nubian king Piye (780 B.C.) installed a black granite falcon head image of Horus in Napata, his capital. Piye's brother and successor, Sheba-qo, moved the royal residence to Memphis. Sheba-qo (716-702 B.C.) and his successors Shebit-qo (702-690 B.C.) and Tahar-qo (690-664 B.C.) thought of themselves as God's earthly representatives and it was probably during their time that the rulers came to wear the double crown of Horus.

The biblical Seth lived before the emergence of the Kushite Kingdom, probably around 3000 B.C. He was an ancestor of Noah and Noah's son Kush. Director of museum of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, Geoff Emberling reports that excavations at Kerma and the Fourth Cataract, "suggest that the early Kingdom of Kush was larger than previously believed, and that its raids into Egypt in about 1650 B.C. were a serious threat to the capital at Thebes. Compared with other civilizations of the region, such as Mesopotamia, early Kush controlled a vast area and was able to amass significant military power."

Thirty Palaeolithic sites were discovered in the region by a team of archaeologists led by Henryk Paner between 1996-2003. At seven Mesolithic site shards of wavy line and dotted wavy line pottery were found. Paner believes that these reflect an older decorative tradition. He reports, "The Neolithic witnessed a boom in settlement evidence. Of the total number of 711 sites recorded over 240 yielded ceramic, stone and flint artefacts dating from this period. Some Neolithic settlements tended to be located on higher terrain within natural hollows. Oval and circular stone structures up to 1.5m in diameter probably represent hearths. Larger concentrations of stones (also circular in plan but with larger diameters) may possibly mark the remains of dwellings which were made from organic materials.Querns and grinders were also found at these sites. Agate was among the raw materials used for making tools, with white quartz becoming increasingly popular on late Neolithic sites." (From here.)

At Hosh el-Guruf in Sudan, Emberling's team found a Kushite gold-processing center along the middle Nile. Gold was processed here between 2000 and 1500 B.C. This may be the biblical land of Havilah (Gen. 2:11), known for gold. The Gihon wound through the entire land of Kush (Gen. 2:13) and was connected to the Pishon which wound through the entire land of Havilah. The identification of this area with the Nile is further supported by the claim that aromatic resin (amber) is found there (Gen. 2:12). The Gihon and Pishon appear to be sections of the Nile, probably between the 4th and 6th cataracts. As Northern Sudan is tectonically active, the Nubian Swell has diverted the Nile's course to the west, making it difficult to definitively locate these waterways of Eden.

The Biblical Seth

Having established that the name Seth comes from the Nile region of ancient Nubia and Kush,we must now explore the biblical information that sheds light on this royal person.

Genesis tells us that Seth was Cain's younger brother. (Cain is also spelled Kenan, Qayan, Canaan). According to Genesis 5:6, Seth's firstborn son was Enosh. There has been some debate as to whether Enosh is equivalent to Enoch, the name of Cain's firstborn son (Gen. 4:17). I believe that both names are derived from the Nilotic or Proto-Saharan word anochie, meaning "one who is to follow" as heir to the throne. The word anochie is found among peoples who migrated westward from the Nile, such as the Ashante. Among the Igbo, anochie means “a replacer” or “to replace.” A Nigerian biblical anthropologist reports that "Anochie also means 'direct heir to a throne'." The biblical word Enoch is clearly a royal name or title, as is the name Seth.

Genesis provides more detailed information about Cain's line (Gen. 4) than about Seth's line (Gen. 5). Likely this is because the Canaanites, Cain's descendants, were the dominant people in the land where Abraham became established as a ruler. It is possible that the majority of Seth's descendants remained in the area of Nubia, though the lines of Cain and Seth continued to intermarry, as is common among royalty. The women of these royal lines married their patrilineal cousins or uncles and named their firstborn sons after their fathers. Naamah, the daughter of Lamech, is an example.

Another royal title of Nubian origin is Terah, the name of Abraham's father. It means "devotee" and is found on the Tera-neter tile, shown below.

Tera-ntr was a ruler of the Anu people, pre-dynastic inhabitants of Egypt. Abraham’s father, Terah, is named after this line that comes out of the Nile Valley. They are the earliest known to worship Horus, the prefigurement of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The original name for Heliopolis is "Annu" (called "Onn" in Gen. 41:50). Joseph married a daughter of the high priest of Onn.

Why Eliezar was Abraham's Heir

2011-12-06T16:08:00.001-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

A reader has raised this probing question in reference to this essay on Eliezar of Damascus:

Granted that biblical events are not always listed in strict chronological order, but one aspect of the original question you refer to does not seem to be addressed at all. The writer stated that Ishmael had already been born. But this concern Abraham expressed about a possible future heir occurs before the birth of Ishmael, who does not come on the scene until later in the narrative.

Isaac was both born after the conversation Abraham had with God about Eliezer being the heir to Abraham's throne in Genesis 15. Likely Ishmael had already been born, but the firstborn son of a concubine would not be an heir to the throne of his father if their were a fristborn son by a half-sister wife. Ishmael would have been Abraham's heir by adoption according to Horite/Hurrian law. According to this practice, the concubine gave birth on the lap of the half-sister wife, as was the case with Hagar's delivery of Ishmael, whereby Sarah built a family through Hagar (Gen. 16:2).

By this time Abraham was well-established as a "mighty prince" (Gen. 23:6) among the Canaanites. That is inferred from Abraham's defeat of the kings who had attacked his Horite people (Gen. 14:6) and the status of being served by Melchizedek, the ruler-priest of Salem (Gen. 14:18), who with wine and bread, came to make atonement for Abraham's blood guilt and to give thanks for the victory.

Remember that Abraham had two wives, as was the pattern for all Horite rulers. His father Terah had two wives. Sarah was Terah's daughter by one wife and Abraham was Terah's son by the other wife. This pattern of two wives meant that there were always two firstborn sons; one by the half-sister wife and the other by the cousin/niece wife. The firstborn son of the cousin/niece wife ascended to the throne of his maternal grandfather, after whom he was titled/named. So Esau the Younger ascended to the throne of Esau the Elder (Gen. 36).

The firstborn of the half-sister wife ascended to the throne of his biological father, so Isaac was Abraham's heir. However, he was not Abraham's firstborn. Neither was Ishmael. Ishmael was conceived late in Abraham's life, after Abraham had married Keturah. Keturah's firstborn son was Joktan (Yaqtan), the head of the Joktanite Tribes of Arabia. As Keturah was Abraham's cousin wife, Joktan ascended to the throne of his maternal grandfather. As Sarah was barren, Abraham was still desperate for an heir. This is when he prayed about having an heir and received the promise (Gen. 15:4) that a son would come from his own "loins" (meaning blood descent from him and his half-sister).

Eliezar, as the firstborn of Masek, one of Abraham's concubines, was Abraham's only natural heir. Clearly before Isaac arrived, Eliezar was considered Abraham's rightful heir according to the Horite marriage and ascendency pattern.

Related reading: Who Were the Horites?; The Marriage and Ascendency Pattern of Abraham's People; Abraham's Cousin Wife; Abraham's Concubines

An Apology

2011-12-05T21:07:00.004-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

It has been close to 35 years since I first began to study the book of Genesis. I realize that this is not a typical hobby, especially for women. I no longer try to explain my obsession. I've come to accept that there is a reason for it and I pray that my research might be helpful.

There is a good deal of misundertanding about what I write. An anthropological approach to the Bible often renders an unfamiliar picture and people are suspicious of the unfamiliar. Some accuse me of fabricating lies. Today I received two hateful missives in which I was threatened for perpetuating "the lie" that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I considered allowing the comments to appear, but this blog is intended to edify and such anti-Christ venom is not edifying.

If I have offended, I ask your forgiveness. Better not to read what I write than to become disturbed in your spirit or shaken in your faith. Better to do as C.S. Lewis advises, "Remember this is only one more picture. Do not mistake it for the real thing itself; and if it does not help you, drop it." (last line of "The Perfect Penitent")

I've never earned a cent for this on-going research so it is amusing that some claim that I am writing for financial gain. I've sought venues where I might share what I've learned, but Asbury Seminary, Asbury University, The Lexington Theological Seminary, Georgetown College, Midway College and others have remained closed doors.

My work on Genesis may even cost me the job I have.

On Friday the principal of the school where I teach asked me to respond to allegations made by a parent that I don't measure up to the school's statement of faith. I'm not sure what this parent meant, but I suspect she was refering to this: "We acknowledge absolute truth, as revealed in God's Word, and its relevance to our lives. Our teachers and staff are committed to helping students discover the truth, to think critically in the classroom and in real life." I am committed to the absolute truth revealed in God's Word.

That said, I am not committed to inaccurate interpretations of the Bible. I am not committed to dogmatic ideologies that don't align with the whole of the Bible. I am against shoving apparent discrepancies under the carpet when they may exist for the very purpose of provoking us to investigate a mystery. I am not committed to the preservation of interpretations that have been passed along in commentaries on Genesis, many of which were taken uncritically from rabbis who rejected Jesus as the Son of God.

I am more of a literalist than people realize because I believe that Genesis is about real people who really lived and whose beliefs can be verified.

I believe that Genesis, indeed the whole Bible, is about a real promise that God made to Abraham's ancestors concerning the Son of God who would come into the world to save repentant sinners. He is called the "Seed" in Genesis 3:15 and Jesus identified Himself as that Seed when he told his disciples that He was going to Jerusalem to die. He said, "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." (John 12:24)

If this research is of God, it will bear fruit one day. I am confident of that. If it isn't of God, there is nothing to fear. It will be forgotten.

Related reading: Reactions to my Research; Alice C. Linsley's Research on Genesis

Kushite Kings and the Kingdom of God

2011-12-05T06:00:00.007-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

The origin of the words Kain/Kenan/Canaan/Kenite is originally Nilotic and the name is found among extant African tribes. Related are the words "kente" (cloth worn by Akan /Ashante rulers), kenten (cloth basket); Kenya (the country); and the Kenem, Kanembu and Kenton tribes of Nigeria, and the Kana-kuru and Kanuri who live in Adam-awa and Bor-no (Land of Noah). There are many other peoples in west central Africa with names related to Kenan. Many of these peoples originated in the Nile Valley and migrated westward. Some migrated eastward into Arabia and as far as India, Siam and Nepal.

In Nepal, approximately 30,000 Sarki live in a province called Seti. Sarki and seti are both Kushite words. The original name of Kush was Ta-Seti. A Kushite tribe of Central Asia was called Kushana. The Kushan of China were called Ta-Yuehti.

Among Kushitic peoples sarki means ruler. Among Chadic peoples gon mean ruler. Thus the Akkadian Sar-gon represents a double royal title. In Nigeria the Kano Kings are called sarki. Kano is another word related to Kain/Kenan/Kenite/Canaanite.

Another interesting connection is the Kandahar dialect of Pakistan/Afghanistan, which has Tir-hari as a principal dialect. Tir is a form of the name Tiras, mentioned in Genesis 10 and hari is a form of hor/horite/horim. The Sarki of Nepal belong to a larger ethnic group called Pa-hari.

The words Khan and Kandake (Candace in English Bibles) are also related and refer to rulers. The name Khan, meaning ruler/chief, is a common surname among many who speak languages of Central Asia, specifically Pashto, Urdu, Farsi, and Hindi. The Kushites who built kingdoms across the Afro-Asiatic Dominion left the world a legacy of great rulers, including Nimrod (Sargon the Great) and Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan’s name is more accurately spelled Činggis Qaγan and Qayan is the Arabic spelling of Kain.

Genghis Khan's first-born son was named Jochi which is the equivalent of Joktan, the name of Abraham's first-born son. Genghis Khan married a woman of the Olkut’Hun, meaning the Hun tribe. Ogur Hun means the Hun clan or the Hun community of Og. The word ogur means clan, community or tribe and appears to be equivalent to the Pashto, orkut, meaning community. So, the words ogur, orkut and olkut seem to be cognates and probably Indo-Pakistani. The word Og is found in Genesis also. Og was one of the three clans in the Og, Magog, Gog Horite confederation.

It is easy to see how the Altaic Mongolian-Korean connection came to be once we make the connection between the Nilotic Horites of the ancient world and Genghis Khan's people. The Kushite marriage and ascendency pattern drove Kushite expansion out of the Nile Valley.

My research into the genealogical material in Genesis involves analysis of the Horite kinship pattern whereby the rulers had two wives and at least two concubines. The first wife was a half-sister and the second wife was a patrilineal cousin or niece. The marriages of firstborn sons contributed to the diffusion of Horite religion. The firstborn son of the half-sister wife ascended to the throne of his biological father. The firstborn son of the patrilineal cousin or niece bride ascended to the throne of his maternal grandfather. All other sons were given gifts of camels, jewelry, flocks, herds and servants and sent away. Sent-away sons moved away from the territories of their fathers and established new territories.

The importance of this marriage pattern as a driving factor in Kushite expansion should not be overlooked. It is important also in understanding the divine Son, Jesus Christ. He who had the power and the right to live immortally in communion with the Father, set aside His power and right (kenosis) and became mortal that He might redeem a people for Himself and establish an eternal kingdom.

Related reading: The Afro-Asiatic Dominion; The Peoples of Canaan; Genghis Khan: Last Afro-Asiatic Kingdom Builder; Kushite Kingdom Building; The Migration of Abraham's Ancestors; Binary Distinctions and Kenosis

Morkot's Book Might Have Been Stronger

2011-12-03T13:00:00.003-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

Mizraim (Egypt) and Kush (Upper Nile/Sudan/Ethiopia) are classed together by the prophets because the Lower and Upper Nile regions were first unified by the Kushite King Meni/Menes around 3000 BC. The first rulers of a unified Nile Valley were Kushites. Robert G. Morkot has written about these early rulers in his book The Black Pharaohs. Their territory was called Ta-Seti, which is the origin of the royal title Set/Seti and Seth.

Unfortunately, Morkot did not investigate the Nilotic connections thoroughly. As an historian, he probably didn't wish to venture far from his area of expertize. However, his book would have been stronger had he explored the anthropological and linguistic evidence. He missed many clues that would have made his work more compelling. For example, he might have explored the linguistic connections between Nilotic peoples today and the ancient Kushite rulers. Consider Nefertitti, someone to whom he directs a good deal of attention in a later chapter.

Her name Nefer-itti contains a typical suffix of the Kushite rulers. As E.A. Speiser noted in his Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis, the suffix is found in the biblical name for Cain, which is Qan-itti. As is evident from the Akkadian, -itti pertains to the king, as in itti šarrim which means "with the king" or "against the king." Akkadian was the language of the empire during Nimrod's time (BC 2290-2215). Genesis 10 tells us that Nimrod was a Kushite, so it is not surprising to find that Akkadian shares many words with Nilotic languages. Among the Kushite Oromo of Ethiopia and Somalia, itti is attached to names of high ranking individuals. Examples include Kaartuumitti, Finfinneetti and Dimashqitti.

Morkot's book focuses mainly on the 25th Dynasty. He would have done well to explore earlier dynasties more deeply. For example, consideration of the 18th Dynasty would have made a stronger case for the long duration of Kushitic dominance in the Nile Valley. Amenhotep III ruled Nubia, Libya, Gaza and Syria in the 18th Dynasty. His 42-foot tall statue was recently excavated in Thebes (modern Luxor) on the west bank of the Nile.

Amenhotep III ruled between about 1382 and 1350 B.C. (roughly 600 years after Abraham's firstborn son, Joktan). His name means "peace of Amen" and indicates a period when the divine name Amen was used in Nubia instead of the name Set/Seti/Seth, which was favored in the Delta. It was during the 18th dynasty that the title 'King's Son of Cush' was first used.

Finally, Morkot would have done well to reference biblical data when doing his research. He dedicates a good deal of his book to the late Kushite rulers Sheba-qo (or Shaba-qo), Tahar-qo and Shebit-qo, but he never makes the linguistic connection to the Meroitic honorary suffix - qo . Once we remove the suffix, we are left with the name Sheba. The Kushite ruler Sheba-qo ruled about 716-702 BC. Earlier Kushite rulers held the royal name Sheba before him. Genesis 10 lists Sheba as an ancestor of Abraham and his cousin-wife Keturah. He was a descendant of Ham and Shem, as the lines of Ham and Shem intermarried exclusively. Sheba-qo’s double crown is shown on the Sheba-qo Stone with parts of his Horus name. Here we have archaeological evidence linking the royal house of Sheba and Abraham’s Horite people.

Related reading: Enoch: a Royal Title; Cain's Father; Who Were the Kushites?; Kushite Kings and the Kingdom of God

Sheol and the Second Death

2011-12-02T18:43:00.005-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

A reader has asked for clarification on the difference between the Nilotic and Hellenistic views of the dead and their existence. The Greek understanding is Hades, often translated "hell" in the Bible. Hades is the land of the dead, the underworld beyond the river Styx. It takes its name from the deity "Hades" who was believed to rule there.

In the Septuagint, the Greek term "ᾅδης" (Hades) is used for the Hebrew "שׁאול" (Sheol), but the concepts represent different cultural contexts. This contributes to the difficulty of translation, as demonstrated in these renderings of Isaiah 38:18.

New International Version
For the grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise; those who go down to the pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.

Here the word "grave" doesn't convey a state of existence beyond the grave.

Douay-Rheims Version
For hell shall not confess to thee, neither shall death praise thee: nor shall they that go down into the pit, look for thy truth.

The word "hell" is laden with Hellenistic notions about the underworld and evokes mental images from Dante's Inferno. Dante's hell represents beliefs typical of the Middle Ages, but his works do not align closely with biblical teaching on existence after death.

New American Standard
For Sheol cannot thank You, Death cannot praise You; Those who go down to the pit cannot hope for Your faithfulness.

Here the word "sheol" is preserved and the meaning aligns more closely with what Jesus taught about the dead in the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Lazarus rested in "the bosom of Abraham" and between Lazarus and the Rich Man there was a great fixed gulf which none could overcome (Matthew 5:29, 30; 18:9; Mark 9:42). Therefore, Sheol has two regions: the bosom of Abraham were the righteous dead rest in peace, and the region of fire (gehenna) were there is no peace.

The word "hell" appeared 77 times in Jerome's Vulgate Old Testament and 24 times in his New Testament. The commission that worked on the Authorized Bible (King James Version) recognized a cultural difference between the Semitic Sheol and the Hellenistic Hades. This is evident in the way that the King James Version uses the word "hell" in the Old Testament only 31 times, compared to Jerome's 77 times.

Etymology of Sheol

The word Sheol is likely derived from the ancient Egyptian word Sheut (šwt), meaning shadow. This is the origin of the idea that the underworld is a place of shadows. The Egyptians believed that something of the dead person continues as a shadow beyond the grave. Small statues or figurines of ancestors and deified rulers were painted black to portray their continued existence as shadows.

In Pre-dynastic times, rulers were buried in the sand in circular pan graves which were marked with decorated skulls of bulls, gazelles and goats. These have been found in cemeteries of Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia beginning in the Second Intermediate Period. (Source: Sudan, 2000–1000 B.C., Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art). The sand leached the moisture from the body in a natural process of mummification.

Because the desert was a place of burial, people feared to be there after dark when the shadows of the dead were believed to roam.

Kushite, Egyptian and Horite rulers were never cremated, though this practice would prevail in some of the territories over which they came to rule. Later, the priests mummified the corpses of their rulers and placed them in elaborate tombs.

In Pre-dynastic times, the whole clan or tribe was embodied by the ruler, so great pains were taken to bury the ruler so that he would rise with the Sun, the emblem of the Creator. Being raised to life was reserved for royal persons who were expected to make intercessions for their people. The deified ancestors were venerated, not worshiped, an important distinction. The kings listed in the "begats" (Gen. 4 and 5) were venerated rulers.

Abraham's beliefs about resurrection would have corresponded to those of his ancestors. He lived long before the rabbis began speculating about the existence of the dead. By Jesus' time, a faction had arisen among the Jews that rejected belief in the resurrection of the dead, but according to St. Augustine "the Egyptians alone believe in the resurrection, as they carefully preserved their dead bodies." ("Death, burial, and rebirth in the religions of antiquity", Jon Davies, Routledge, 1999, p. 27)

The Egyptians were not alone in this belief. It was also the belief of the ancient Kushites, from whom Abraham descended. So it is that the Sadducees were far from the belief system of their Horite father Abraham because the Horites expected one of their rulers to rise from the dead. This belief is central to Messianic expectation and was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus Christ, who died and rose from the dead on the third day. He is the Sun that rises with healing in His wings. Here we have a very ancient allusion to Horus as a falcon flying above the Sun, the emblem of his Father, as it makes its westward journey.

Horus (top right) flying above Ra's solar boat
Relief found at Anghor Wat (ancient Siam)

The Apostle Paul expalins that those who die with Christ in baptism will rise in Him on the Last Day. These will not die the "second death" of which John speaks in Revelation 2:11 - "Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death."

Related reading: The Bosom of Abraham; Did Abraham Believe Isaac to be Messiah?; Solar Imagery of the Proto-Gospel; When the Church Speaks of Death

Scholarly Prejudice?

2011-11-29T12:38:00.012-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

The Danish linguist Holger Pedersen (1867-1953) explained in The Discovery of Language that “Hebrew, Aramaic and Accadian languages had all undergone significant linguistic degeneration. Only Old Arabic, due to its relative isolation in the Arabian peninsula, remained closer to the old stratum of the ‘Semitic’ form of the language.”

The degeneraton of which Pedersen speaks is also due to a prevalent prejudice against exploration the Afro-Arabian roots of many Hebrew words. Consider the word Dedan, as an example. Most commentaries explain that the terms Dedan/Dedanite are from ded'-a-nim/dedhan/dedhanim, meaning "low." This is an odd connection since the region of Dedan had a relatively high elevation and the Dedanites were known to dwell in caves at the top of ridges.

Genesis 10:7 provides the more accurate explanation that Dedan and the Dedanites are related to the Kushite ruler Dedan. The original context is Kushitic or Nilotic where the word Dedan means "red" and is a cognate to the Egyptian didi (red fruit) and the Yoruba diden (red).

Pedersen is correct also that old Arabic texts can provide the closest cognates to the older stratum, which is really Afro-Arabian, such as the language spoken by the people of Dedan, where the oldest Arabic texts have been found. It also has been noted that the oldest mosques triangulate to a point in the region of Dedan.

Dedan was the son of Raamah, the brother of Sheba and the grandson of Kush. This means that the peoples of the regions of Raamah, Dedan and Sheba were kin and Kushites. They spoke a North Arabian dialect which is sometimes referred to as Dedanite or Dedanitic. It has been grouped with Canaanite and Aramaic (Faber 1997).

The Dedanite alphabet consisted of 28 letters and resembled other dialects spoken on the Arabian Peninsula, though Dedanite is also distinctive. It is distinct from Southern Arabian in its use of the definite article h- or zero (a sun symbol) whereas Southern Arabic and the Arabic spoken today uses al-. (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of World’s Ancient Languages, Roger D. Woodard, Ed., p. 488). The frequency of the definite article h- or the zero in the words used by Abraham’s people indicates a Northern Arabian setting.

Since Dedanite is the language of the Arabian Kushites we would expect to find significant parallels to the Kushitic/Nilotic languages. This is evident in the Dedanite and ancient Egyptian use of the root MR. The Egyptian word for love is mer which is related to the word for mother ‘m in Egyptian and in Dedanite. In both languages the word for woman is mr’t. Mer is also the root of the name Meri/Mary.

Not surprisingly, Dedanite shares some features with Hebrew. For example, the final /a/ was represented by –h, as in Hebrew. So the bi-consonantal word Rama (RM) would be becomes a tri-consonantal word Ramah (RMH). In both Dedanite and Hebrew the final /u/ is replaced by –w.

More surprising is the evidence of a common Proto-language for the Nilotic, Dedanite, and Dravidian languages, further evidence of the Kushite expansion. This is seen in correspondence between Dedanite, the Nilotic Manding and the Dravidian first person singular pronouns. The first person singular pronoun in Dedanite is ‘n which corresponds to the first person singular in Dravidian an and to the Manding na.

To see a Family Tree of Ancient Semitic Scripts, go here, to page 8 and note that only one African language is included whereas many should be included. This area requires considerable future effort on the part of linguists and the work is long overdue. It appears that prejudice has contributed to the failure of scholars to correct mis-interpretations of many biblical words.

Related reading: The Afro-Arabian Dedanites; Thamudic Scripts; Ancient African Writing Systems; The Afro-Asiatic Dominion; What Language Did Abraham Speak?

The Jerusalem that David Knew

2011-11-23T15:53:00.010-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

The Jerusalem that David knew is the oldest part of the city, a 12-acre ridge south of the Temple Mount, known as the "city of David" (II Samuel 5:9). It extended south of the Old City walls. This area was inhabited continuously for 2000 years before David. In David's time, there was a fortified citadel under control of the Jebusites. Jerusalem, which was called "Urusalim" in Akkadian, was an important shrine city in David's time, exhibiting typical characteristics of ancient shrine cities. It had flowing water from a perennial spring and was built on a precipice, as was the shrine city Nekhen at El-Kab on the eastern bank of the Nile in Sudan. The region around Amman in Jordan (Gen. 36:35) was likewise famed for its springs and high citadel.

The name Urusalim in Akkadian cuneiform

Excavations of the City of David have uncovered remains from the Early Bronze Age through the Muslim Period. Bronze ancestor figurines (teraphim) were found which have perforations around the top of the head. Human hair from the dead ancestor was woven through these perforations. This was common practice and observed among extant biblical tribes.

Bust (Ife) showing perforations for hair

In Area E, the Iron Age rampart reused the Bronze Age city wall. In Area G, the Iron Age remains are on top of the stepped-stone structure. This is a system of foundation walls erected below the summit of the southeastern slope. The system is comprised of boxes filled with stone and the construction protrudes beyond the natural contour, providing an additonal 2691 square feet. The yellow courses of stone are believed to have served as the base for the Jebusite citadel, and David would have been familiar with this area.

Dame Kathleen Kenyon's partial excavation of the southeastern hill uncovered a fragment of a pilaster capital with the palmette design typical of that which originated in ancient Egypt with subsequent development into various forms throughout Eurasia.

Jerusalem's Importance in Abraham's Time

The first biblical evidence of the city's importance is Melchizedek. He was the ruler-priest of Salem who came to Abraham after the battle of the kings (Gen. 14). It was the custom among Abraham's Kushite people to make atonement for the shedding of blood after battle and likely this is the service that Melchizedek performed for Abraham. Melchizedek, the king of Salem, is called "the priest of the most high God" in Genesis 14:18. His name mean "righteous king."

Three centuries before David ruled in Jerusalem, the city was ruled by Abdi-hepa. He received his training in Egypt, as was proper for sons of the ruling Kushite caste. The Egyptians regarded him as a warrior and Adbi-hepa claimed to rule by the authority of Pharaoh. The name hepa may be a variant of heqaib, a common name among men of the ruler-priest caste, according to the Egyptologist Labib Habachi. Another ancient water shrine was that of Prince Heqaib on the island of Elephantine. On that same island was found the biography of Pepi-nakht-Heqaib, an official and military commander under Pepi II (BC 2278-2184). As a ruler, Pepi-nakht-Heqaib was known for upholding the rights of firstborn sons.

David himself appears to have been kin to the Kushite rulers of Jerusalem which might explain why he is described as ruddy or red (1Samuel 17:42). This is the same Hebrew word used to describe Esau, one of David's ancestors. Kushite rulers had a red-brown skin color. The Sudanese Kushites were the first to domesticate wild sorghum and millet. These became staple grains in Egypt and were taken to Pakistan and India between 3000 and 1000 BC. David's kingdom, with its center in Jerusalem, would have been at the crossroads of such commerce and would have enjoyed the benefits of trade between Africa and Eurasia.

Had David's claim to the throne been accepted by his kinsmen in Jerusalem, which it apparently was, this would explain why there is no archaeological evidence of David's "conquest" involving destruction of property. Further support for the theory that David was related to the Jebusites is found in II Samuel 24, where we are told that David built a fire altar at the threshing floor of Araunah, the Jebusite. David was of the ruler-priest caste and therefore qualified to offer sacrifice. He was also a shepherd. All the Horite ruler-priests were shepherds. These are very roles that characterize the Horite ruler-priests whose patrilineal lines intermarried, bringing us to the Joachim, Mary's father, a descendant of David's prophet Nathan. The Virgin Mary was Miriam Daughter of Joachim Son of Pntjr (Panther) Priests of Nathan of Beth Lehem. From the earliest predynastic times in Egypt, ntjr designated the king among the Kushites. The name Panther or p-ntjr meant "God is King." It is certain that Mary was of the ruler-priest class because even those who hated her admit this. Sanhedrin 106a says: “She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters.”

Jebusite Builders
The Jebusites were a Kushite people and the Kushites were known as great builders. Nimrod, the son of Kush, is an example. He built cities in the Tigris River Valley, though his people originated in the Nile Valley. From the Nile, the Jebusites migrated both east and west. The western boundary of the Jebu is marked by a 1000-year old rampart that is 70 feet high and 100 miles long. The British archaeologist Patrick Darling is credited with drawing world attention to the discovery of the Eredo system of walls. He reports, "We are not linking what we found to a city, but to a vast kingdom boundary rampart."

Eredo rampart

The Eredo walls and ditches are located to the south-west of the Jebu town of Ijebu-Ode in Ogun state in southwest Nigeria. This is the largest single pre-colonial monument in Africa. Local people link the Eredo boundary walls to Bilikisu Sungbo, another name for Sheba, according to Dr Patrick Darling. This discovery confirms the biblical genealogical data that links the clans of Jebu and Sheba (in ancient Yemen).

German archaeologists working in the Ethiopian highlands have identified the remains of settlements from the the time of David that reveal strong cultural and religious connections to biblical Sheba. The clans of Sheba were close relatives of the Jokanite clans of South Arabia. The territory of Sheba is referred to 24 times in the Hebrew Bible. Beersheba, Keturah's home, was at the northern end of the territory of Sheba. Keturah was Abraham's cousin wife. See diagram below.

The Genesis Kings and the Fall

2011-11-20T15:52:00.001-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

The men listed in Genesis 4-6 (Cain to Noah) were rulers over territories. They had a complex and unique marriage and ascendency pattern, involving two wives. The first wife of the ruler-to-be was a half-sister (as was Sarah to Abraham) and this marriage took place at a young age. The firstborn son of this union ascended to the throne of his biological father (as did Isaac). The second wife was either a patrilineal cousin or a niece (as was Keturah to Abraham) and was married close to the time of ascent. This is why Abraham expressed urgency concerning Isaac's marriage to Rebecca. The firstborn son of the second wife ascended to the throne of his maternal grandfather (as did Joktan, Keturah's son). By the time of Cain, the marriage and ascendeny pattern was well established, suggesting that this had been the pattern for more than a few generations of rulers. The "begats" speak of archaic rulers and establish a pattern whereby Abraham's descendants would recognize the Jesus as the promised Son of God.

Analysis of the king lists in Genesis 4 and 5 reveals that this was the pattern for Abraham's royal ancestors and I believe that this is an authentic pattern. Further, this pattern is older than the Genesis 1-3 narratives and is useful in understanding those narratives. For one thing, we can't use the regnal years to determine the age of the earth, as was tried by Bishop Ussher. By his calculations, the earth is only 6000 years old. What are we to make of the mining operations in the Lebombo Mountains 60,000 years ago?

The span between the rulers in Genesis 4 and 5 and Noah may be 950 years, but all these men were rulers over territories that were well established and which had neolithic technologies. In other words, these rulers lived long after the first created humans. Clearly, there is a much greater span between Adam and Cain. Adam represents either the historical or ahistorical first man created by God, fully human and in the divine image. As such, he would have lived around 3.4 million years ago, since the oldest human fossils are at least that old.

Must Adam have been historical to believe that the Fall happened? We only have to look around for evidence that we live as sinners in a sinful world. In the Eastern Church, the Fall doesn't mean that each of us inherited Adam's guilt. The prophets teach that each of us will receive that which our own lives deserve. Instead, the Fall means that we all are subject to death since by Adam's sin, death entered the world.

Related reading: The Marriage and Ascendency Pattern of Abraham's People; Cain's Father; Getting the Facts About Human Origins

Thamudic Scripts

2011-11-18T14:13:00.053-05:00

In the following article, connections are made between the ancient Thamudic scripts found from Syria to Yemen and the ancient Afro-Asiatic languages. Approximately 11000 Thalmudic inscriptions have been found scattered from Syria to Yemen. Similar inscriptions have been identified along the Nile in Sudan. These are accompanied by petroglyphs of humans and oxen with circles and spirals.

The Thamudic scripts are found on ancient rock etchings and paintings. These often show a human-ox head bucranium with or without horns, and sometimes associated with a symbol such as circles with internal radial lines. Such images also have been found in Sudan. Only Thamudic D uses the image of the Sun.

3000 BC rock carving in Sudan along the Nile
Credit: Tim Karberg/Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

The article that follows is found here.

______________________________

Ahmed Achrati "Thamudic traces: some remarks on 'Regarding the "thamoud"' by G. Lombry".

G. E. Lombry's comments are a welcome reminder of the importance of the pre-Islamic Arabian archaeological heritage and the need to improve the focus and orientation of our research in this area. He re marks that' The "Thamoudian style" is a common but indistinct term to refer to a badly defined period of time; some of the petroglyphs attributed to it belong to different cultures, even to the Neolithic or the Islamic Middle Age'. These remarks capture the essence of the problem involved in the study of the Arabian inscriptions, including publication, interpretation and chronology. The following note is intended to amplify some of the ideas in these remarks, albeit within the broad ethno-linguistic framework of what is often referred to as the Near East.

1. Ethno-linguistic framework

A. Thamudic script
The names used for the designation of ancient scripts are sometimes purely taxonomic inventions, with no known connection to the referent ethnic group. The vexing question of identifying the people who used a given script is further complicated by the fact that people who use a script do not necessarily speak the language of that script. As a classificatory device, the term 'Thamudic' was coined by Mark Lidzbarski (Van den Branden 1966: 16), but what is comforting about it, as A. F. L. Beeston has indicated, is that it enjoys an internal structure resting on a large and diverse quantity of inscriptions and a wide spatial distribution.

Thamudic also benefits from considerable external validation (Beeston 1984). S. Jamme and van den Branden even argue for the unity of the Thamudic script (van den Branden 1966), although this is resisted by J. Ryckmans (1984: 74-75) and MacDonald (2000: 32).

What is referred to in the literature as Thamudic consists of approximately 11000 inscriptions found scattered all around the Arabian Peninsula from Syria to Yemen (MacDonald 2000: 44). The bulk of the Thamudic texts, about 9000 of the inscriptions, were collected by the Philby-Ryckmans-Lippens expedition in central Arabia. The remaining Thamudic inscriptions come from north-west Arabia. These have been divided by Winnett into three groups: Thamudic B, C, and D. A fourth group E has been added by G. King.

B. Thamud
Within the corpus of the Thamudic inscriptions, the narre tmd occurs four, possibly six, times (in Thamudic B and D). Two more instances occur in Safaitic (MacDonald 2000:66, n. 39; also Dhayyeb 2000: 3). A variation of this tenn is also thought to exist in South Arabic texts (Dhayyeb 2000: 5).

Not much is known about the Thamud, but, as Lombray said, tribes by that name are referred to in the Assyrian records of Sargon II (722-705 B.C.E.). Arab tribes and people are also referred to in the Assyrian records, but in one of a set of letters coming from southern Mesopotomia and dating back to about the sixth century B.C.E., a person is called te-mu-da-a arba-a-a, which has been translated as the 'Tamudean', the 'Arab' (Retso 2003:190-1). The letter also mentions Tayma, an oasis in central Arabia. Thamud is also found in Classical sources. In Diodorus and Strabo, for example, we find the Thamud referred to as Tamoudenoi, and in Expositio Totius Mundi (c. 357 C.E., author unknown), they are called Thamudeni. In the Qur'an, 'Thamud' is mentioned twenty-six times, and Muslim exegetes and historians have commented on them extensively (e.g. Ibn Hisham, al-Tabari and al-Tha'alibi).

C. Chronology
Some of the Thamudic texts are dated or datable, but most of them are chronologically indeterminate. While dating the Thamudic script is important, the issue of chronology is not particular to this script. In fact, as G. Mendenhall (1984) has indicated, what is needed is a chronological framework that encompasses all the Arabian scripts, which raises the question of the development of alphabetic writing itself, and also calls for a greater integration of parietal, epigraphic and linguistic knowledge in the archaeological research.

The chronology and development of the pre-Islamic Arabian scripts is yet to be firmly established but we know that the Arabian and the North-West Semitic (Phoenecian, Canaanite) alphabetic traditions are the two great alphabetic systems of the ancient Near East. Each with its own alphabetic order, the Phoenecian 'bgd and the Arabian hlhm, these two alphabetic traditions are thought to have originated from a common source in the Syro-Palestinian region and separated sometimes in the Bronze Age (Mendenhall 1984; MacDonald 2000). Features of these two alphabetic traditions are found in the older (cuneiform alphabet) of Ugarit texts and also in the much older syllabic texts of Ebla (2500) and Byblos. This indicates that 'both letter orders were in use before the beginning of the twelfth century B.C.' (MacDonald 2000: 32). What is remarkable, though, is that whereas the North-West Semitic lost some of the old phonetic features, many of these are retained only in the Arabian, including most of the Ugarit 30 consonants system, in contrast to only 22 Phoenician letters, as well as a set of differentiated emphatic consonants (Owens 1998: 53; MacDonald 2000: 32; Mendenhall 1984: 98; also Lipinski 1997: 150; and Gordon 1997: 102). Moreover, although sources of Classical Arabic go only to the seventh century C.E., this relatively young language still contains most of the older inventory of Semitic phonological, morphological and lexical elements (e.g. the independent personal pronouns of Ugarit, and also the personal pronoun suffixes; see Moscati 1964: 106; Rabin 1984: 291). In fact, as J. Owens has pointed out, so much of the older Semitic phonological inventory is presenved in Arabic, that in relation to the old Akkadian, 'one can say that Arabic is "older" ' (Owens 1998: 53). Lexically, Al Yasin also thinks that the Arabic of the seventh century C.E. contains more of the Ugaritic cognates of 1400 B.C.E. than does the Hebrew Old Testament (in Hayes 1991: 610).

What all this means is that 'a thorough re-examination of the history and relationship of the Semitic languages is now in order', as Mendenhall (1984: 95) has pointed out. 'The basis of this re-examination', he added,' cannot be a mere evolutionary theory, but the much more solid foundation of historical linguistic evidence on the one hand, and archaeological evidence of population centres of diffusion, on the other'. This leads to a broader question of socio-cultural origin.

D. Afroasiatic roots
Ancient speech may be impossible to excavate but language is an important indicator of ancestry and population movement (Ruhlen 1994a: 149 and passim, 1994b: 18). In Africa, the linguistic affinities among Berber, Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Chadic, Semitic and Cushitic (Befa) have been understood to imply a single origin, leading to their inclusion in a single family, called Afroasiatic, instead of the racially-tainted 'Hamitic'. For a long time, it was thought that the origin of Afroasiatic was in the Levant. Accordingly, groups of Eurasian populations are believed to have 'backtracked to Africa, giving rise to the Afroasiatic family' (Ruhlen 1994a: 193). This view, however, has been rejected by many linguists, including C. Ehret (1995), Allan R. Bomhard (1988, 1996), Daniel F. McCall (1998). These linguists distance themselves from the traditional views that favour Semitism (Ehret 1995: 5). Thus, for example, Ehret believes that pre-Proto-Semitic roots are closer to the Proto-Afroasiatic, making consideration of the Semitic etymology secondary rather than a prerequisite for reconstructive work (ibid. 3). And A. R. Bomhard decries the fact that'many Semiticists stubbornly cling to the reconstructivn' of Proto-Semitic alone without taking into account phonological data from other Afroasiatic phyla (Bomhard 1988:113).

2. Rock art
There is an imbalance in the archaeological research and publication in favour of the monumental, the literal, and the settled coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. Nomadic life is often brought in only for the purpose of filling the archaeological gaps between urban/ settled agricultural periods. Sometimes they are even presented as the agent of urban decline/destruction. For example, espousing Dostal's theory of camel domestication, P J. Parr thinks 'it is hard to resist the temptation to speculate on the possible connection between this breakdown of urban conditions and the rise of camel nomadism' (Parr 1984: 47). But Parr's idea of periods of 'archaeological blanks' in the east and the centre of the Peninsula does not account for rock art, and the lasting record of the most perennial phenomenon of Arabia, nomadism.

3.'Idolatress', scripts and scriptuae
In his comments, Lombry refers to a statement by M. Abu Murwah al Qahtani that 'the term thamoud [sic] should be considered as meaning "idolatress", Le. "unknown to Islam-. It has been difficult to check this source, but leading aside the possible religious (even misogynist) tenor of the term 'idolatress', it is clear that such a scriptural or exegetic reference is merely a confirmation of antiquity of the Thamud, not the endorsement of an established religious/theological view of history, a sin that has particularly afflicted the Near-Eastern archaeology for a long time. Indeed, as pointed out by D. Potts, archaeology has been driven by a need to find Biblical parallels, leading to an excessive focus on Mesopotamian religious and literary aspects of the Near East (see Potts 1997: 303).

Perhaps the best approach to the Islamic texts as they relate to Thamud is to recognise their theological and historiographic nature and to limit their impact on empirical research, which Dhuyayb (2003) tries to do in his study of the Thamudic script. The best yet, regarding scriptural and exegetic references to Thamud, is J. Stetkevych's approach. In his brilliant study of the Thamudean legend of the Golden Bough, Stetckovysh combines literary, mythological, philosophical and archaeological information to read this Thamudic narrative as a mythopoeia, but one that is 'integrated into the decline and fall of sendentism and the growth of nomadism in Arabia' (Stetkevych 1996: 61).

REFERENCES

ACHRATI, A. 2006. The story of the Arabian rock art: a Thamudic 'informant'. Rock Art Research 23: 153-164. [WP]

AGHALI-ZAKARA, M. 2003. Messages graphiques et gravures rupestres. La Lettre du RILB 9: 3-4. [WP]

AGHALI-ZAKARA, M. 2005. Retour sur l'association des gravures et inscriptions rupestres. La Lettre de l'AARS 28: 11-14. [LQ]

AGHALI-ZAKARA, M. and J. DROUIN 2007. Inscriptions rupestres libyco-berberes. Sahel nigero-malien. Sites d'Iwelen et d'Adar-en-Bukar. Moyen et Proche-Orient 3, Droz, Geneva. [LQ]

ARNAIZ VILLANA, A. and J. ALONSO GARCIA 2000. Egipcios, Bereberes, Guanches y Vascos. Editorial Complutense, Madrid. [WP]

LIFINSKI, E. 1997. Semitic languages. Outline of a grammar. Peeters Publishers and Department of Oriental Studies, Leuven. [AA]

MACDONALD, M. C. A. 1998. Kilroy in the desert. A database of Bedouin graffiti. CSAD Newsletter 6: 3-4. [WP]

MACDONALD, M. C. A. 2000. Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia. Arab Archaeology 11: 28-79. [AA]

MCCALL, D. F. 1998. The Afroasiatic language phylum: African in origin or Asian? Current Anthropology 39: 139-140. [AA]

MENDENHALL, G. E. 1984. The Bronze Age roots of pre-Islamic Arabic. In A. M. Abdella, S. Al-Sakkar and R. Mortel (eds), Pre-Islamic Arabia. Studies in the history of Arabia, pp. 95-102. King Saud University Press, Riyadh. [AA]

MOSCATI, S. (ed.) 1964. An introduction to the comparative grammar of the Semitic languages, phonology and morphology. Otto Harrassowitz-Wiesbaden, Wurzburg. [AA]

OWENS, J. 1998. Case and froto-Arabic, Part I. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61: 51-73. [AA]

PARR, P. J. 1984. The present state of archaeological research in the Arabian Peninsula: achievements of the past, and problems for the future. In A. M. Abdella, S. Al-Sakkar and R. Mortel (eds), Pre-Islamic Arabia. Studies in the history of Arabia, pp. 43-53. King Saud University Press, Riyadh. [AA]

PICHLER, W. 1996. Libysch-berberische Inschriften auf Fuerteventura. Almogaren 27: 7-83. [WP]

PICHLER, W. 2005a. The Libyco-Berber inscriptions of the Canary Islands--misused as a playground for specialists and amateurs. La Lettre de l'AARS 28: 4-5. [WP]

Other related reading: Enigmatic Petroglyphs of Saudi Arabia's High Plateau; The Afro-Asiatic Dominion; Who Were the Kushites?; Nimrod (Sargon) was a Kushite Kingdom Builder

Swelling of Sun and River Speak of God

2011-11-16T14:00:00.084-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

In Genesis 1 the creation begins when God’s speaks order (tehut) into the chaos (tehom) and says, “Let there be light.” This is not the light of the Sun, but the uncreated light of God’s presence which counters the chaotic deep. Psalm 29:10 describes “Yahweh who sat as king upon the flood; He is king forever.”

God spoke, saying "Let there be light," and light flooded the vast darkness. There is a parallel between flooding by light and flooding by water. Both the sun and the river swell and in the ancient Nilotic cosmology both speak of God.

A central experience of Abraham’s Kushite ancestors was the annual flooding of the Nile. As spring rains fell in the Ethiopian headlands the river rose above its banks, flooding the Nile Valley between June and October. The flooding lasted for forty days and turned the valley into shallow lakes and deposited fertile silt which renewed the earth. As the waters receded, only the highest mounds of earth would been seen at first. These mounds seems to swell up from the water. When the waters began to recede, families waited another forty days before returning to their homes. This is the origin of the biblical phrase “forty days and forty nights.” It is distinctly Nilotic (which explains why the number forty doesn't appear in Daniel, a book rich in number symbolism).

The Nile flooding brought disorder and was likened to the primordial waters of tehom, the watery and disordered deep which God put in order by His Word, tehut. The victory of tehut over tehom helps us to understand one of the oldest creation myths in which the ancient Egyptians envisioned the world as a mound emerging from the waters of a universal ocean. Here the first life form was a lily growing on the peak of the primeval mound. The mound itself was named Tatjenen, meaning "the emerging land."

The Kushites carried this notion to Asia where it is found today in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. The emerging mound is called Mount Meru. It emerges from the center of the cosmic ocean, and is encircled by the Sun and the seven visible planets. Mount Meru in Hinduism is a mythological mountain. However, it relates to a real Mount Meru in East Africa known to Abraham’s Kushite ancestors. The names meru, meri (Egyptian) and Mary are cognates. The Virgin Mary, whose womb swelled with the Son of God, is sometimes portrayed in icons as a mountain. The Prophet Daniel saw a mountain, from which a stone was cut by the hand of God (Dan. 2:34, 45).

At the Annunciation, the Angel's greeting to Mary was ave, perhaps related to the Hebrew vav צבה meaning "to swell.” Ave also means bird. In many icons and paintings of the Annunciation a dove appears in the background or hovers over the Virgin. There is a relationship between ave and vav if you consider that the dove eats seeds (never worms) and their stomachs swell as the seed expands. Jesus is called the "Seed" of the Woman in Gen. 3:15. He identified himself as the fulfillment of this first biblical promise in John 12:23: "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernal of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."

The grain rising from the earth, the heads of wheat swelling parallel the stone pillars by which the ancients established boundaries and covenants. In the Lower Nile small pyramids were carved from single blocks of stone. These were known as bnbn (benben), from the root, bn, meaning to "swell forth." This relates to the sun's rising or swelling. The Egyptian word for the rising sun is wbn. Tombs of officials from the 4th Dynasty (2613 to 2494 BC) were surmounted by conical mounds or benben. These tombs, along with the east-facing royal tombs at Giza, indicate that the ancient Kushite and Egyptian rulers hoped to rise from death, even as the Sun rises. Doubtless this is what the Prophet alluded to when he wrote, “But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise [swell/be magnified] with healing in its wings.” (Mal. 4:2).

Many of the practices of the ancient Israelites originate in the Nile Valley. It is not far fetched then to suspect an ancient Nilotic background for the Tetragrammaton: Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh. In Aramaic and Hebrew the hey הא means "behold." The vav pertains to the tribal ruler and deity. So the meaning is something like “Behold our God. Behold he is magnified.”

Related reading: Etymology of the Vav; Mount Mary and the Origins of Life; Cosmology and Ethics; Tehut's Victory over Tehom

The Question of Patriarchy

2011-11-15T03:50:00.004-05:00

While some feminists consider the Bible too outdated, chauvinistic and oppressive to be redeemed, many, like Bible scholar Jane Schaberg of the University of Detroit Mercy, find the Bible to be a source of valuable information about the role and experience of women during biblical times.

Feminist scholarship, writes Schaberg in her Biblical Views column for the November/December issue of BAR, aims to turn the old, male-dominated understanding of the Bible on its head and thereby reveal new insights into the lives of often-marginalized women in the ancient world.

Likewise, while feminist scholarship on the Bible does not necessarily aim for complete objectivity, which Schaberg calls an "impossible ideal," it does aim for fairness in assessing the scriptural texts. Feminists also focus attention on issues that have often been sidelined in biblical studies, like slavery, gender equality and sexuality.

_________________________

The feminist worldview and the biblical worldview are contradictory. This is especially evident when addressing the question of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the universal norm. Feminists will argue that this isn't true by pointing to soft patriarchal societies where line of descent or rights of inheritance are traced through females. A true matriarchy is characterized by the following conditions:

* line of descent must be traced through the mothers
* rights of inheritance must be figured through the mothers
* political power must be vested with ruling females
* females must have the final say in deciding matters for the community

It is a matter of fact that, after eighty-five years of ethnographic studies, no matriarchal society has ever been identified by cultural anthropologists.

Feminists argue that patriarchy is the result of universal oppression of women. In the biblical worldview patriarchy came as the result of fear (Gen. 3:10) entering the male-female relationship after disobedience. Because of fear the woman's desire will be for her husband and he shall rule over her. (Gen. 3:16) In her seminal book, In a Different Voice, Harvard professor Carol Gilligan demonstrated through her research how this is so.

Related reading: The Paradox of Feminism; The Bible as the Woman's Story

Is it Possible to Speak of the Proto-Gospel?

2011-11-12T05:38:00.003-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

Just Genesis presents an "anthropological sleuthing of pre-Abrahamic origins." The significance of my research is that I have identified the marriage and ascendency pattern of Abraham's Horite caste and have demonstrated that this pattern drove Kushite expansion and the diffusion of the expectation of the coming of the Son of God. This expectation can be traced back to the first promise and prophecy of Scripture - Genesis 3:15 - given to Abraham's Nilotic ancestors.

I want to thank the faithful readers of Just Genesis. You have been an excellent sounding board as I have pursued the research on Abraham and the Horim. I appreciate that you have come to recognize the unique nature of this blog. Among all the blogs on creation and evolution, Just Genesis

takes an anthropological approach to the study of Genesis
acknowledges the great age of the earth and of human existence
rejects Darwinian theory on the basis that the material evidence isn't there
asserts that Genesis interprets itself on questions of origins
shows that the first verifiably historical persons in Genesis are kings listed in Genesis 4 and 5
examines the material in its original cultural context, that of ancient Nilotic peoples
argues that Genesis isn't about human origins as much as it is about the origin of Messianic expectation among Abraham's ancestors

About one-quarter of Genesis is the story of God’s dealings with Abraham and his ancestors (chapter 1-12). The other chapters deal with Abraham's descendants before the establishment of Israel. Because this is so, we must recognize that the promise concerning the coming of the Seed of God by the Woman (Gen. 3:15) does not originate with the Jews. It is much older. The expectation was preserved by Abraham's ancestors to whom the promise was first made in Eden, a well-watered region that extended from the Nile to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.

The bulk of my research focuses on the first quarter of the book, material that is often dismissed as non-historical or simply ignored. Using the tools of cultural anthropology, I'm working to uncover antecedents of the religious life of Abraham's people. This involves looking for patterns and analysis of the genealogical data. The oldest culture traits or patterns are those that are the most widely diffused geographically.

All the articles at Just Genesis are listed by topic and alphabetically arranged in the INDEX. Articles on Biblical Anthropology can be found at my other blog by that name.

Patterns observed through the lens of Anthropology

To understand the Bible's overarching theme and trajectory, we must look for patterns that first appear in Genesis. In this sense, Genesis is foundational to a proper understanding of the whole Bible. Often the patterns are more evident when we focus on the women because blood lines were traced through the mothers, as is true today in Judaism. In the ancient Afro-Asiatic world, one's social status (caste) came from one's father, but one's ethnicity came from one's mother. So it is peculiar that Abraham's mother is not mentioned in the Bible. When we exlpore her identity, we find the suggestion that Abraham was the son of a hign-ranking woman whose father was a Horite priest. According to the Babylonian Talmud, Abraham's maternal grandfather's name was Karnevo, a name associated with the Horus temple at Karnak.

The Genesis king lists help us to understand the Bible's purpose and what we might call the "proto-Gospel" or the pattern upon which the prophets reflected and whereby Jesus would be identified as the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15. From beginning to end, the Bible is about the royal ancestry of Jesus Christ. It is possible to trace His ancestry because of the cousin bride's naming prerogative, whereby the cousin or niece bride named her first-born son after her father. This is why there are multiple rulers with the same name. There is Lamech the Elder, who bragged to his two wives, and there is his grandson, Lamech the Younger, the first-born of Methuselah by Lamech's daughter, Naamah. There is Esau the Elder and his grandson, Esau, the brother of Jacob. Esau the Elder was a contemporary of Seir the Horite and their lines intermarried. Esau the Younger, Jacob's brother, married Seir's great-great granddaughter, Oholibamah.

The cousin-bride's naming prerogative is found from Genesis 4 to Numbers and beyond, so it is not coincidental, but characteristic of the unique marriage pattern of the rulers of Abraham's people. Scholars like Noth, Albright, Speiser, etc. concluded that Genesis 4 and Genesis 5 represent different oral or textual traditions of the same ruling line. This is NOT what the Bible claims, however, and I take the Bible's claims very seriously. Genesis claims that the rulers listed in Genesis 4 are the descendants of Cain and those listed in Genesis 5 are the descendants of Seth. The correspondence of names (Enoch/Enosh, Kain/Kenan, Irad/Jared, Lamech/Lamech, etc) between the two lists has to do with the cousin-bride's naming prerogative, something that I discovered about 20 years ago.

All of the men listed in Genesis 4 and 5 are rulers who had two wives. One wife was a half-sister (as Sarah was to Abraham) and the other was either a patrilineal cousin or a niece (As Keturah was to Abraham). The cousin bride named her first-born son after her father because this son would ascend to the thorne of his maternal grandfather. So Lamech's daughter, Naamah married Methuselah, her patrilineal cousin or uncle and named their first born son Lamech, because this son of Methuselah would rule over Lamech the elder's territory, not over Methuselah's territory. This is what Claude Lévi-Strauss discovered in his studies of primitive peoples (1949). He noted that in a patrilineal system, mother and son do not belong to the same clan.

This is only part of the picture, however. Since the marriage and ascendency pattern of Abraham's people involved two wives and two firstborn sons, their is an element which Lévi-Strauss did not address: the maternal line of the cosuin or niece wife. Her firstborn son ascended to the throne of her father, as whom she named her son.

The cultural patterns of the ancient Afro-Asiatics in general, and the Horite priest caste in particular, are reflected in Genesis, one of their many lasting contributions to the world. In my 33+ years of research on Genesis, I've discovered many traits of the ancient Afro-Asiatic worldview, established the binary nature of their cosmology, clarified the relationship between the Horites, the Jebusites, and the Dedanites, demonstrated the historical accuracy of the Kushite migration and kingdom-building, and identified the kinship pattern of Abraham and his ancestors, a pattern that continued until the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Having fulfilled its purpose, the pattern ceased soon after the time of Jesus. The rulers of the Sanhedrin, for example, lost control with the destruction of the Temple and the double ascent pattern of two firstborn sons by two wives disappeared among the Jews.

The Genesis "Begats" Speak of Archaic Rulers, Jesus Christ

2011-11-10T15:22:00.025-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

The “begats” of Genesis list ruler-priests of a vast territory that extended from Nigeria to India between10,000-3000 years ago when this part of the world was wet. The point of origin of these rulers and their people is biblical Eden, a well-watered region that extended from the Nile Valley to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.

Waterways seen from space (NASA photo)

In Noah’s time (about 2,500 BC) this region was much wetter. Lake Mega-Chad had an area of 249,000 miles and connected several lakes and rivers. Lake Mega Chad was about 600 feet deep.

The water systems controlled by the rulers included the Nile, the Red Sea, the Jordan River and the part of the Sahara that was wet in the late Holocene.

This 8000 year old dugout (shown right) was discovered 16 feet below the Saharan clays and sands in the Upper Yobe valley along the Komadugu Guna River in Northern Nigeria. (The oldest Egyptian boats are only about 4000 years.)

The rulers of this region expanded their territories and established new territories. One such ruler was Nimrod, known as Sargon the Great. He moved into the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and built great cities there. An earlier city builder was Kain (Cain) who lived at the western edge of Eden.
The great water systems were interconnected then, making movement between the land masses easier. The movement of Abraham’s Kushite people out of Africa has been confirmed by DNA studies, linguistics, archaeology and biblical anthropology.

The symbol of the ruler and his territory was the tent peg, represented by the vav in modern Hebrew (waw in ancient Hebrew and in Arabic).

The waw/vav orignally symbolized the crook/hook of the ruler or the tent peg of the ruler's tent. As a glyph this represented a cluster of related ideas including:

the ruler himself
the ruler's authority
the ruler's territory
the ruler's clan or tribe
the ruler's resources such as his flocks and water sources

The waw/vav speaks of an ancient world in which settlements near water were ruled by elders and a chief. Travelers moved from settlement to settlement and the ancient water laws were generally generous to those who wa-ndered. Wells were neutral ground for waring parties or enemies, but were fought over, as in the story of Moses driving away the intruder shepherds at the well of the Midianite ruler-priest Reu-el. (Exodus 2:16-19). It was common for the river, lake, oasis or well to have a shrine over which their was a priest. So it is not surprising to read that Moses' future father-in-law was a "priest of Midian." As such, he was a direct descendant of Abraham by Abraham's cousin bride, Keturah.

Many words in various languages today still reflect this ancient world. Consider these examples: wa-ter, wa-gon, va-gabond, va-grant, va-gar meaning "to wander" (Spanish), wa-kdar meaning "ruler" (Pashto), and ya-raki meaning "power" (Persian).

Those who needed water went from Y to Y, which is to say "from water settlement to water settlement."

The great chiefs of the biblical world were designated as such by the initial Y in their names. This is more evident in Hebrew than in English. Consider the following:

Yishmael - Ishmael (Abraham's son by Hagar)
Yitzak - Issac (Abraham's son by Sarah)
Yaqtan - Joktan (Abraham's firstborn son by Keturah)
Yishbak - Yishbak (another of Abraham's sons by Keturah)
Yacob - Jacob
Yeshua - Joshua/Jesus

Consider the importance of wells in the lives of these biblical figures. Ishmael's life was saved when an angel revealed a well or spring to his mother. Abraham's servant found Isaac a wife at a well. Moses met Zipporah at a well. Jesus met the Samaritan woman (Photini) at Jacob's Well.

Related reading: Egyptian Shrines on the Horus Way; Water Systems Connected the Nile and Central Africa; The Jordan River; Wells and Brides; The Migration of Abraham's Kushite Ancestors; A Woman at a Well; Susan Burns on Hadhramaut of Arabia

Why Zipporah Used a Flint Knife

2011-11-06T11:03:00.000-05:00

Alice C. Linsley

A reader has raised an interesting question. He asked, "Why did Zipporah use a flint knife to circumcise her son when she could have used metal? Didn't she live during the Bronze Age?"

It is true that Moses and Zipporah lived in the late Bronze Age (1550-1150 BC). The ruler of Og (Numbers 21) slept in an iron bed, so Abraham's ruling descendants used iron, bronze and flint. An iron bed was an innovation, but the Horim didn't encourage innovation when it came to sacred rituals such as animal sacrifice, the coronation of rulers, and circumcision.

The use of flint for circumcision followed the ancient tradition for this ritual received from the ancestors. Abraham's people valued these tradtions and regarded it as disrespectful to abandon the ways of the Horim.

The tradition of their ruler ancestors included maintaining their marriage and ascendency pattern, as Moses did by having two wives: one a half-sister and the other a patrilineal cousin. Zipporah was his cousin bride. His half-sister bride is not named in the text, but we are told that she was Kushite. All the Horite rulers had two wives.

For further information, read Zipporah's Flint Knife; Circumcision Among Abraham's People; The Origins of Circumcision, Circumcision and Binary Distinctions

Cain's Father

2011-11-05T17:44:00.006-04:00

Alice C. Linsley

Genesis appears to present contradictory views about Cain's father. In one view, Cain is Adam's son, born of Eve. Genesis 4:1 says, "Adam knew/lay (yadah) with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain."

It should be noted that the Hebrew and the Greek versions do not explicitly name Adam in this verse. Instead they read, "The man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain."

Contrast this with Genesis 4:25 which says "Adam knew his wife again, and she gave birth to a son whom she named Seth."

Why is Adam not named as Cain's father in Genesis 4:1 while Adam is explicitly named as Seth's father in Genesis 4:25?

It is likely that the biblical writers were aware of another tradition which suggests that Cain lived long after the first created Man and Woman. This tradition is supported by the kinship data in Genesis, the etiology of Cain's name, and the technology attributed to him. We will consider each of these separately.

The Kinship Data

Analysis of the Genesis 4 and 5 King Lists reveals that Cain married a woman who named their first-born son Enoch. No etymological etiology is given for the name Enoch since such explanations are offered for the names Cain (Gen. 4: 2) and Seth (Gen. 4:25). This seems strange since the name Enoch appears in both the Genesis 4 and 5 king lists, so the name pertains to both Cain's clan and Seth's clan. Enoch appears to be a Semitic form of the African name Nok. The Nok civilization extended from northern Nigeria into Niger, Chad and the Sudan. Here we find the ancient settlements of Nok and Kano. Kano is likely the African version of the name Kayan/Qayin.

This is also the region where we must look for the meaning of the name Enoch. It is likely derived from anochi which means "one who replaces." Enoch is then a royal title.

What is the significance of Cain's wife naming their first-born son Enoch or Nok? If she named her son after her father, as did Naaman, a later descendant of Cain, we may conclude that she was Cain's cousin or niece wife. It was the cousin of niece wives who named their first-born sons after their fathers. This would mean that Cain's father-in-law was called Enoch. Enoch the Elder would have been Cain's father's brother. This could not be Adam, since the Bible insists that Adam represents the first human created. As such, Adam would have lived millions of years ago. The oldest human fossils are about 3.4 million years.

So according to the information in Genesis, Cain was either the son of Adam and Eve and lived millions of years ago, or he was the son of Enoch's brother and lived around 3400 BC, about 400 years before the Kushite ruler Meni/Menes united the Nile Valley.

How are we to resolve this apparent contradiction? One approach is to investigate the meaning of the name Cain and its related cognates.

Etiology of the name Cain

As E.A. Speiser noted that the name Cain - Qany(ty) or Qan itti - shows close affinity to the Akkadian itti (as in itti šarrim which means "with the king" or possibly "against the king.") Akkadian was the language of the empire during Nimrod's time (BC 2290-2215). There is evidence that biblical Nimrod is the historical Sargon the Great. Genesis 10 tells us that Nimrod was a Kushite, so it is not surprising to find that Akkadian shares many words with Nilotic languages. Among the Oromo of Ethiopia and Somalia, itti is attached to names. Examples include Kaartuumitti, Finfinneetti and Dimashqitti. That itti is associated with Nilotic rulers is evident in the name Nefertitti.

The Oromo, a Kushitic people

Cain as warrior and metal worker

Shalom E. Holtz (Yeshiva University, New York) has demonstrated, itti can mean "against" as is evidenced from its appearance in numerous cases of adversarial relationships in the Old Testament. Since the meaning of Cain is "spear" and he is associated with metal work, we might take Cain to be a metalworking warrior. Genesis 4:22 indicates that his clan forged various implements of copper and iron, although the iron mentioned here was beja (bja), the ancient Egyptian word for meteroric iron (metal from heaven). Beja corresponds to the Sanskrit word bija, meaning semen or seed. Meteoritic iron was used in the fabrication of iron beads in Nubia 6000 years ago. These beads were likely perceived as seeds from heaven which brought divine power to the wearer.

This certainly places Cain in history before the bronze age and long after the first humans tread the verdant hills of Eden. This resolves the problem of dating Adam and Eve and Cain. The first are ahistorical representations of the first humans created by God, made fully human and in the divine image. These would have lived at least 3.4 million years ago. Cain and Seth, on the other hand, can be placed in history between 4000 and 3000 B.C. This corresponds to the Copper Age (3500 -2300 B.C.) During the Copper Age the warriors were of high social rank. Copper mining and the fabrication of copper tools and weapons gave rise to new a social hierarchy. At the top, were the warriors who protected their communities.

Conclusion

So who was Cain's father? Clearly not Adam. If Adam was the first man created by God - and the Bible permits no other explanation - then he cannot have been Cain's father. Cain married a cousin and analysis of the King Lists of Genesis 4 and 5 shows that there was an established pattern of marriage and ascendency among the lines of Cain and Seth. In other words, royal lines, established territories, metal technologies and law codes existed in Cain and Seth's time. These did not exist in Adam and Eve's original small community 3.4 million years ago.

Given the period in which Cain lived, his social rank as a ruler, and his place in the ancestry of Abraham, we must assume that he was a Kushite. His father was likely the brother of Enoch the Elder, Cain's father-in-law. This would explain why Cain's wife named their first-born son after her father, as was the pattern for cousin wives among Abraham's Kushite ancestors.

Related reading: Afro-Asiatic Metal Workers; Who Were the Kushites?; Cain as Ruler; Was the Land of Nod Enoch's Territory?; Sub-Saharan DNA of Jews

The MSNBC Spin on Jesus

2011-11-01T09:48:00.008-04:00

An estimated 2 billion Christians around the world celebrate the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. While those believers take the stories of Jesus as told in the New Testament on faith, archaeologists have scoured the Holy Land and beyond in search of clues about the real life of Jesus and his followers. — John Roach, msnbc.com contributor (From here.)

I find it fascinating that educated journalists know so little about Christianity and assume that our Faith has no basis in historical realities.

Note that Mr. Roach neglects the central doctrine of Christianity; that Jesus is the Son of God whose coming into the world fulfilled a divine promise made to Abraham's Nilotic ancestors that the Woman (Mary) would bring forth the "Seed" (Jesus Christ) who would crush the serpent's head and restore paradise (Gen. 3:15). Jesus claimed to fulfill the Edenic Promise when He told his disciples that He was going to Jerusalem to die. When they protested, He explained, "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." (John 12:24)

The ancient Horites observed the death and resurrection of HR (Horus) in a five day festival in which they planted grain on the third day, signifying the resurrection of HR, who they called "Son of God."

People think of Christianity as an off-shoot of Judaism. However, the core of Christianity can be traced back to Abraham and his Nilotic ancestors long before Judaism. In this sense, Christianity isn't original. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in antiquity and herein rests its authority.

The origins of Christianity came to Abraham, not as special revelation, but as a tradition received from his forefathers (horim). The distinctive traits of this tradition align remarkable well with the key features of catholic faith and practice and have been confirmed by archaeological finds, anthropology and linguistics:

All-male ruler-priests
Blood sacrifice at altars
Expectation of the appearing of a Divine Son
Belief in an eternal and undivided Kingdom
As in heaven, so on earth - reflected in the Lord's Prayer
Circumcision

Because of God's promise in Eden (Gen. 3:15) Abraham and his ancestors lived in expectation of the Son of God and taught their children to do so. Their priestly lines intermarried exclusively (endogamy) in expectation that the Seed of the Woman would come of their priestly lines. In other words, the Edenic tradition is a family-tribal tradition. This is evident when one studies the genealogies and discovers that the ruler-priest lines of Abraham's people intermarried and shared common beliefs and practices. Using the genealogical data of the Bible, specifically the king lists, it is possible to trace Mary and her cousin Joseph back to the earliest rulers of the Bible in Genesis 4 and 5. It is possible because the Horite ruler-priest lines (some of whom were later called "Levites") practiced endogamy.

Since the Bible contains 66 books written by many different authors over about 1300 years, it is not possible that this scheme was imposed at a late date. In other words, analysis of the marriage and ascendency pattern of the Horim shows that Jesus is the direct descendant of Abraham's ancestors to whom God made the promise concerning the coming of the Son of God. There is a reason why Jews call their ancestors horim.

John wrote, "This is the revelation of God's love for us, that God sent his only Son into the world that we might have life through him." (1 John 4:9) This sounds like foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who know that God's promises are sure, it is the hope and assurance of life eternal.

Related reading: The Marriage and Ascendency Pattern of Abraham's People; Eden: A Well-Watered Region; Extant Biblical Clans and Tribes; Nilotic Celestial Archetypes; Challenge to Shaye Cohen's Portrayal of Abraham; The Ethnicity of Abraham and David

The Origins of Animal Sacrifice

2011-10-30T02:30:00.008-04:00

Alice C. Linsley

What are the origins of animal sacrifice? In "The Origin of Israelite Sacrifice" in the November/December 2011 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, William W. Hallo, former Yale professor, attempts to answer that question.

Hallo insists that the practice comes from the much older Mesopotamian civilization. However, Hallo fails to clarify that this Akkadian civilization was essentially Kushite and the Kushites originated in the Nile Valley, which is where the sacrifice of rams, bulls, and sheep originated.

Horite priest sacrificing ram

Horite priests had shaved heads such as shown (above) in this third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamian mosaic. Moses' half-brother Korah was a Horite priest. His name means 'shaved one." Compare this image to the one below of an Egyptian priest or harwa. Har-wa means Hor/Horus rules.

The Horites spread their religious practices and beliefs from ancient Kush to Mesopotamia and beyond. The oldest fire altars were falcon shaped (shown below). The falcon was the totem of Hor/Horus, who was called "Son of God." This is why the Shulba Sutras state that "he who desires heaven is to construct a fire-altar in the form of a falcon."

Figurine of Harappan girl shows Kushite features

At the Harappan water shrines of Kalibangan and Lothal, numerous fire altars have been discovered. The Dravidian word Har-appa means "Hor is father." Here is further evidence of the spread of Horite religion from ancient Kush to Pakistan and India.

The Nilotic or Kushitic religious practices diffused through the agency of Horite ruler-priests who controlled water systems at a time when the Sahara, Mesopotamia, southern Pakistan and southern India were wetter. These ruler-priests are called Horites because they were devotees of Horus, the divine son by whose pattern Abraham's descendants would recognize Jesus' true identity. The Horites are called Hapiru in Akkadian and Habiru in Kushitic languages. These words appear to be related to the Arabic yakburu, meaning “he is getting big” and to the intensive active prefix: yukabbiru, meaning "he is enlarging." Likely, this is a reference to the morning ritual of Horite priests who greeted the rising sun with prayers and watched as it expanded across the horizon. This is the origin of the morning ritual whereby the sun is blessed daily in every devout Hindu home and the Jewish Sun Blessing ritual (Birkat Hachama) that is performed every 28 years.

The oldest known center of Horite worship is Nekhen (Hierakonpolis) in Sudan. Votive offerings at the Nekhen temple were ten times larger than the normal mace heads and bowls found elsewhere, suggesting that this was a very prestigious shrine. Horite priests placed invocations to Horus at the summit of the fortress as the sun rose.

In the ancient world, a temple was considered the mansion (hâît) or the house (pirû) of the deity. The Creator Re is associated with the temple in Heliopolis (City of the Sun) on the east side of the Delta. Hat-Hor, the virgin mother of Horus, had her principal temples in Dendera and Memphis to the south of Heliopolis and on the west side of the Nile. The principal temples of Horus were further south in Nekhen and Edfu, and on the west side of the Upper Nile.

Related reading: The Kushite Marriage Pattern Drove Kushite Expansion; Nimrod Was a Kushite Ruler; The African Origin of the Dravidians

Frank Moore Cross: Israel's God is the God of the Horites

2011-10-29T04:30:00.005-04:00

Frank Moore Cross believes the origins of Israel's conception of God is to be found in the region of Midian in northwestern Arabia. Cross argues that archaic biblical poetry locates Yahweh's movements in Edom/Seir/Teman/Midian and that these "are our most reliable evidence for locating Sinai/Horeb, the mountain of God."

My research concerning the Horites of Seir and Edom (Gen 36) certainly points in that direction. Midian was one of Abraham's nine sons and Tema was a Horite chief. Seir is explicitly designated a "Horite" in Genesis 36 and he was a contemporary of Esau the Elder who was a ruler of the Edo people.

According to Cross, Israel's earliest religious traditions about Yahweh, reflected in both the story of Exodus and archaic Biblical poetry like the Song of Deborah (Judges 5), indicate Yahweh came from Midian, a mountainous desert land in what is today southern Jordan and northwestern Saudi Arabia. This theory of Yahweh's Arabian origins, known by earlier scholars as the "Midianite hypothesis," has been augmented by recent archaeological discoveries that suggest a sophisticated urban culture thrived in this region at the end of the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 B.C.E.), the period when most scholars place Moses and the Exodus tradition.

Given this evidence, Cross believes the biblical writers understood Mt. Horeb, the mountain of Yahweh, to be in Arabia, not Sinai.

Cross notes that the belief that the 'mountain of God' was located in the Sinai Peninsula "has no older tradition supporting it than Byzantine times."

Order Cross' e-book here.

Related reading: Abraham and Job: Horite Rulers; Moses' Horite Family; Kushite Wives; Abraham's Sons, Nephews and Niece; Edom and the Horites

Medical Care in Ancient Egypt

2011-10-28T09:53:00.028-04:00

The Edwin Smith papyrus is the world's oldest known surgical document (c. 1600 BC). It is written in the hieratic script of ancient Egypt and Kush and reveals a high level of sophistication in medical care. It gives detailed descriptions of anatomy, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of forty-eight types of medical problems. It describes closing wounds with sutures, preventing and curing infection with honey and moldy bread (both known to contain antibiotics), application of raw meat to stop bleeding, and treatment of head and spinal cord injuries.

"Every month, for three successive days, they purged the system by means of emetics or clysters. The study of medicine with them was divided between specialists; each physician attending to one kind of illness only. Every place possessed several doctors; some for diseases of the eyes, others for the head, or the teeth, or the stomach, or for internal diseases." (Diodorus Siculus, i. 91)

This is the level of medical care known among the priestly caste when the children of Jacob were in Egypt. Hieratic script was used by the ruler-priests. Healing was the work of the priests who were especially concerned with purity or life.

The priesthood can be traced back to around 7000 BC. The relationship between animal sacrifice and healing is evidence in the relationship of the following words: Hebrew root thr = to be pure, Hausa/Hahm toro = clean, Tamil tiru = holy, early Dravidian tor = blood.

Related reading: Nubians Used Antibiotics; Ebers Papyrus

Humans Originated in Africa

2011-10-26T09:20:00.007-04:00

That is what Genesis claims and that is what scientists are saying. Here is an example concerning Australopithecus sediba.

Evolutionists maintain that "modern" humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago. However, this evolutionary language is misleading because Neanderthals and Denisovans were equally human. They are not a different species, nor ar some of the older populations whose fossil remains have been studied.

When British anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva compared the ankle joint, the tibia and the talus fossils of human ancestors ("hominins") between 4.12 million to 1.53 million years old, he discovered that all of the ankle joints resembled those of modern humans rather than those of apes. Chimpanzees flex their ankles 45 degrees from normal resting position. This makes it possible for apes to climb trees with great ease. While walking, humans flex their ankles a maximum of 20 degrees. The human ankle bones are quite distinct from those of apes. (Read about DeSilva’s research here.)

The discovery of a complete fourth metatarsal of A. afarensis at Hadar shows the deep, flat base and tarsal facets that "imply that its midfoot had no ape-like midtarsal break. These features show that the A. afarensis foot was functionally like that of modern humans." (Carol Ward, William H. Kimbel, Donald C. Johanson, Feb. 2011) Read the report here.

In other words, what evolutionists call "ancestors" of modern humans often appear to be well within the range of anatomical modernity. The picture of human evolution that is commonly presented is not supported by the evidence. However, there is general agreement that humans originated in Africa.

Genesis traces Abraham's ancestors to the Nile region of Africa where his people understood themselves as the direct descendants of the first created people. Their ancestral parents are called Adam and Eve. The context for understanding Adam and Eve is African. Confusion as to how we are to interpret these biblical figures will persist until people accept what the Bible says about Abraham's ancestors coming from Africa. Only then can we put this material in its proper cultural context.

Adam is derived from the root DM which refers to blood (dam in Hebrew) and the color red. The Hebrew is related to the Yoruba edom and the Hausa odom which mean red or reddish-brown. The word "adam" is therefore a reference to the color of the soil where Abraham's Kushite ancestors lived. This is likely the red soil that washed down from the Ethiopian Highlands. These soils have a cambic B horizon. Chromic Cambisols have a strong brown or red color.

Genesis is first and foremost about Christ, the fulfillment of the Edenic Promise (Gen. 3:15). The rulers listed in the Genesis genealogies are Jesus Christ's historical ancestors, the people to whom God gave the promise that the Woman's Seed would crush the head of the serpent and restore paradise.

The migration out of Africa is shown here. Abraham's ancestors were kingdom builders. They were the founders of the Afro-Asiatic Dominion.

Related reading: Getting the Facts About Human Origins; A.S. Haley Series: Did Adam and Eve Exist?; African Religion Predates Hinduism; Abraham's African Ancestors; Terah's Nubian Ancestors

Ancient Egyptians Were Seafaring

2011-10-23T02:35:00.005-04:00

Archaeologists from Italy, the United States, and Egypt excavating a dried-up lagoon known as Mersa Gawasis have unearthed traces of an ancient harbor that once launched early voyages like Hatshepsut’s onto the open ocean. Some of the site’s most evocative evidence for the ancient Egyptians’ seafaring prowess is concealed behind a modern steel door set into a cliff just 700 feet or so from the Red Sea shore. Inside is a man-made cave about 70 feet deep. Lightbulbs powered by a gas generator thrumming just outside illuminate pockets of work: Here, an excavator carefully brushes sand and debris away from a 3,800-year-old reed mat; there, conservation experts photograph wood planks, chemically preserve them, and wrap them for storage.

4000 year Egyptian ship plank

Toward the back, a padlocked plywood door seals off an adjacent cave. As soon as the door is unlocked, a sweet, heavy, grassy smell like that of old hay wafts out, filling the area with the scent of thousands of years of decay. In the thin beam of a headlamp, one can make out stacked coils of rope the color of dark chocolate receding into the darkness of the long, narrow cave. Some of the bundles are as thick as a man’s chest, and the largest may hold up to 100 feet of rope.

4000 year Egyptian rope coils

The rope is woven from papyrus, a clue that it may have come from the Nile Valley, where the paperlike material was common. Archaeologists found it neatly, professionally coiled and stacked, presumably by ancient mariners just before they left the shelter of the cave for the last time.

Boston University archaeologist Kathryn Bard and an international team have uncovered six other caves at Mersa Gawasis. The evidence they have found, including the remains of the oldest seagoing ships ever discovered, offers hard proof of the Egyptians’ nautical roots and important clues to the location of Punt. “These new finds remove all doubt that you reach Punt by sea,” Baines says. “The Egyptians must have had considerable seagoing experience.”

1400 B.C. Egyptian merchant ship

The Egyptian ships were also unique in that they were held together with mortise-and-tenon joints, tab-and-slot fittings that needed no metal fasteners and could be taken apart and put back together again. For added strength, the individual timbers were carved with curves that nested into adjacent parts, a little like puzzle pieces. “From the very beginning, the Egyptians were building boats that could be disassembled, and that makes them different from anyone else,” Ward says. “They were using the shapes of the planks to lock each of the pieces into place.”

Read the full article here.

Questions Asked by Primitive Man

2011-10-19T15:44:00.012-04:00

Readers of Just Genesis will find this conversation about Archaic Man interesting. You will note the faulty assumptions made as to what anthropology has demonstrated to be factual.

"To the primitive men all experiences were supernatural. It appeared in different forms and manifestations in accordance with the different civilizations of the clime and climate of the respective country.

According to the scientific research and the knowledge of anthropology the conversion of animals to human beings took about 30 hundred thousands years through evolutionary process ; there are two important periods in the primitive history of mankind. The first period is called Stone Age, when man used tools made of stone to get his food and other necessities of life to sustain his existence. It was the period when man began to conceive and feel the environment, and the conversion from animal to man had been complete. Initiation of awareness of the surroundings began to grow. With the introduction of the use of Iron, man became more sophisticated and he started to think about the manifestations of nature in different forms. He could not understand the nature and function of the objects of nature, and therefore surrendered to them . Questions in his mind were :

[a] What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live?

[b] Is there permanent element in the constitution of the universe?

[c] How are we related to it?

[d] What place do we occupy in it.

[e] What is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy?

These questions occurred in the mind of the primitive man. When he could not find any satisfactory answers, he created gods, and goddesses to satisfy his passion of curiosity. It is very interesting that in Neolithic Period of his evolution he had more interest with Mother Earth because it provided him the necessities of life." [Extract from Tasavaray Khudha, translated by Muhammad Asghar Butt]

Responses:

"Anthropology has not demonstrated that humans emerged from lower animals. In fact, absolutely no physical evidence has been recovered that supports this assumption."--Alice C. Linsley

"Scientific outlook gives the objective outlook which totally discard bias and prejudice. On the other hand, religious activities are concerned with the idiosyncrasies, whims and caprices of the mind. Moreover, it is directly related to human emotions, passions, sentiments. A religious spirit does not inculcate the scientific bent of mind. It is based upon the personal whims of the believer. Thus, if we take these two spirits apparently, there are poles asunder.

The essentials of religion are blind faith and supernaturalism for its support to live in a illiterate society."-- Muhammad Asghar Butt

"The fundamental questions that Primitive Man asked are also asked by scientists and ethicists today. Primitive Man's conclusions constituted the beginnings of science. For example, the ancient Afro-Asiatics noted a fixed order in creation. The Sun appears to rise in the East and set in the West. We are able to greet it only as we face East. The Sun's light is greater than moonlight as the Moon merely reflects the Sun's light. Humans are either Male or Female, and the male is larger and stronger than the female. Primitive Man grasped the binary nature of this fixed order and recognized that one entity in the binary set is greater. This guided the decision making process of archaic man. The binary pattern observed in Nature led ancient Nilotic peoples to hypothesize about binary stars such as Siruis A and B long before Sirius B was discovered using high-power telescopes.

The binary worldview of the Horim who originated in ancient Kush was diffused by their kingdom-building rulers across a vast expanse from the Nile to Nepal. There is substantial linguistic, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to demonstrate that this is so. These rulers were the patrons of the earliest stone and metal working technologies."-- Alice C. Linsley

"How did God come about? Imagine yourself with no ceiling, no walls, and no shelter. No beds, no pillows, and no quilts. No clothes, no shoes, no caps—not even a shawl. No factories, no industries, and not even Gandhi’s spinning wheel. No electricity, no air conditioners, and no heaters. Fire has not been discovered yet. No farms, no agriculture, no grocery stores; no food except from the trees and plants and from the animals weaker than you, whom you can kill. No doctors, no surgeons, no quacks, no hospitals, no clinics, no pharmacies—and not even turmeric.

No transportation of any sort, not even a bike or a cart. The wheel, the mother of all transportation, has not yet been invented. No telephones, no faxes, and no computers. No technology of any type — period. You have no idea about the world or its vastness; forget about its flatness or roundness. And you have zero understanding of the natural phenomenas. You have wild and gentle animals, birds, and insects as your neighbors.

Furthermore, it is extremely cold and raining with thunderstorms and lightning. Or it’s hot and humid. Your whole being is enveloped in fear and fear of the unknown.

This then is the most fertile time of your life. You are in the ovulation period. Then comes pregnancy — not of a child, but a concept. And so during the labor pains and the fear, you give birth. What to? The God Almighty, of course, the Supreme Being.

He is not the Father God. You are the mother of God. You gave birth to God. She, he, I, they, we all are mothers of God. We gave, and give, birth to God in time of our needs." --B. R. Gowani (brgowani@hotmail.com)

"And like all other religious people from all other religions, you are making an attempt to mix science with the imaginations of men who existed hundreds and thousands of years ago and created religions." --Shazia Nawaz MD (shazianawazsays@gmail.com)

"These questions did indeed occupy the mind of primitive Man. However the archaeological, linguistic and anthropological evidence doesn't support the conclusions that Man created gods and goddesses, or that Neolithic Man was more concerned with Mother Earth than with the Creator and his heavenly domain. Within the Afro-Asiatic Dominion there was a remarkable uniformity of religious doctrine concerning a Supreme Creator whose lesser assisting spirits (henotheism) were associated with natural elements such as rivers, trees, and mountains. Archaic man is often portrayed as an ignorant idol worshiper, but as an acute observer of the fixed patterns in nature, he knew the material world had a Fixer who alone was worthy of adoration.

Further, there is not a single ancient text that speaks of 'Mother Earth.' In ancient Egypt we find exactly the opposite. The fluid canopy of sky was associated with the feminine principle of Nut. Likewise, firmness such as displayed by stone pillars, was associated with the masculine principle.

The goddess figurines of antiquity were fertility fetishes similar to the fertility paddles worn by young Ashante women today. These are not worshiped by the Asha-nte, whose name means "People of God." -- Alice C. Linsley (aproeditor@gmail.com)

Related reading: Getting the Facts about Human Origins; Binary Sets in the Ancient World; Solar Imagery of the Proto-Gospel; The Sun and the Moon in Genesis

Scott Hahn on the Foundational Nature of Genesis

2011-10-18T14:00:00.003-04:00

Scott Hahn's CD series on Genesis
Genesis 1-22: The Covenant as a Family Affair

Dr. Scott Hahn understands the foundational nature of Genesis. He has said, “If you understand what is written in Genesis, you will have a firmer grasp of the Christian message than many contemporary theologians!”

A renowned Catholic theologian and biblical scholar, Dr. Hahn guides you through the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis, uncovering the covenantal pattern of Abraham's people.

The series is digitally re-mastered on seven CDs and available with a comprehensive 53 page Study Guide prepared by Dr. Carol Younger, EdD.

This is a fine resource for adult education classes. The series and Study Guide will take the class verse-by-verse, with explanations of key Hebrew words, and background on how passages are interpreted by both Catholics and Protestants.

Scott received his Bachelor of Arts degree with a triple-major in Theology, Philosophy and Economics from Grove City College, PA, his Masters of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in Biblical Theology from Marquette University.

Recommended related reading is Dr. Hahn's Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God's Saving Promises. His books can be ordered here: http://www.scotthahn.com/

Extant Biblical Tribes and Clans

2011-10-17T12:13:00.006-04:00

Alice C. Linsley

The clans and tribes of the Bible represent governmental units based on family and marriage ties. The clan is often desginated by the head tent (oholibamah), and the Egyptian hierogylph was the symbol of a tent peg.

Tent peg represented by the ancient Hebrew and Arabic letter Waw.

The high tent was the residence of the chief or ruler of the clan. The clan or tribe and the locale were often named for this person. That is why there are so many place names that correspond to rulers in the Bible. Clans and tribes of the ancient world moved farther than is generally recognized. The Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin originated in ancient Kush. This makes the work of tracing biblical peoples more challenging, but often clans, marriage ties, and lineage can be identified by their totems.

The ruling tribe is designated by the sceptre which in Hebrew is שבט. According to Genesis 49:10, "The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be." Here Judah is designated as the ruling tribe and as Jerome correctly interprets, Shiloh refers to the Christ who is to be sent. This prefigures the Son of God who will rule over peoples from every tribe, nation and tongue (Rev. 5:9), and of His kingdom there shall be no end.

The sceptre belongs to the high king who rules over the confederation of clans. The scepter is sometimes called "the rod" and is a version of the Pharaonic crook. The crook and flail were symbols of the power of ancient Kush and Egypt, from whence came Abraham's ancestors.

The crook and flail were carried by the high king and represented his deification as a son of God.

Family based units are extremely resilient and usually adapt well to changing circumstances. This allows for the succession of rule through many centuries, even millenium. Though it is assumed that the clans and tribes named in Genesis are extinct, it is more likely that many are extant and can be studied to gain better understanding of the cultural context of the peoples of Genesis. Certainly this is the case with the Jebusites (Ijebu), a Yoruba people who migrated to Nigeria from the Nile region.

Study of the living Jebusites enables us to trace their Nilotic origins. The supreme ruler of the Ijebu is called "Awujali” and his coronation ceremony involves palm branches (just as Jesus was greeted as one to be enthroned in Jerusalem, formerly a Jebusite city). The present Awajali has described how the Ijebus are descended from ancient Nubians and Egyptians (Kushites). He pointed to the correspondences between coronation rituals, scarification, circumcision and linguistics. Over 100 Yoruba words are virtually identical to ancient Egyptian words. Here are some examples:

EGYPTIAN                   YORUBA
wu (rise)                         wu (rise)
Asa (Osiris)                    Ausa (father)
eere or ar (serpent)         Ere (python/serpent)
Horise (great god)          Orise (great god)
sen (worshippers)          sen ( to worship)
ged (to chant)                 igede (a chant)
ta (sell/offer)                  ta (sell/offer)
sueg (a fool)                  suegbe (a fool)
on (living person)           one ( living person)
kum (a club)                   vkumo (a club)
enru (fear/terrible)          eru (fear/terrible)
kun/qun (brave man)      ekun (title of a brave man)
win (to be)                      wino (to be)
odonit (festival)               odon (festival)
ma or mi (to breath)        mi (to breathe)
tebu (town)                     tebu (town)
khu (to kill)                     ku (die)
tan (complete)                 tan (complete)
em (smell)                       emi (smell)
kot (build)                      ko (build)
kot (boat)                        oko (boat)
omi (water)                     omi (water)
ra or osa (time)               ira or osa (time)
Horuw (head)                 Oruwo (head)                  Jesus (HR) is the Head of the Church.
min (deity)                       emin (spirit)
ash (invocation)               ashe (invocation)
do (river)                        odo (river)
ma (to know)                 ma (to know)
hir (praise)                      yiri (praise)
hoo (rejoice)                    yo (rejoice)
osa (tide)                         osa ( tide)

Read the full list here.

An ancient name for God as Father is Ausa and is sometimes spelled Asa. The Asante tribe bears this name. Asa-nte means "the people of Asa." The Egyptian Asa refers to God as father. Nilotic peoples living today still worship As, as is the case with the Kushitic Kalenjin, whose territory is in the Great Rift Valley. Traditional Kalenjin call the Creator Asis. Most Kalenjin are Christian. Akkadian records attest to the antiquity of this name for God. Sar-gon the Great was born at the shrine city of Azu-piranu, which means Sun House of Azu. God was called Azu in Akkadian, Asa in Chadic, Asha in Kushitic, and the name appears in Hebrew also. A Jerusalem priest named Am-ashai is named in Nehemiah 11:13.

Muhammad Bello, Ruler of Sokoto Caliphate, narrated the organization of the Yoruba. He explained:

"West of Katsina and Gobir there are seven separate countries called 'Banza Bakwai'. These are Zamfara and Kebbi, Yauri, Nufi [Nupe], Yoruba, Borgu and Gurma. Each of these has a Sarki [king] who is equal to the others.

The country of Yoruba is extensive and has streams and forests and rocks and hills. There are many curious and beautiful things in it. The ships of the Christians come there.

The people of Yoruba are descended from the Kanaana [Canaanites] and the kindred of Nimrud.

Now the reason of their having settled in the west according to what we are told is that Yaarubu [son]of Kahtan [great man] drove them out of Irak to westwards and they travelled between Masar [Misr, i.e. Egypt] and Habash [Ethiopia] until they reached Yoruba. It happened that they left a portion of their people in every country they passed. It is said that the Sudanese who live up on the hills [the Nigerian Plateau] are all their kindred; so also the people of Yauri are their kindred. The people of Yoruba resemble those of Nufi in appearance." (From here.)

Yemitom connects the Yoruba word for God - Ela - with the oldest known biblical word for God - El. He writes, "Yoruba tradition has it that Ela is derived from the name Orunmila which has been said to be a contraction of Orun lo mo atila, meaning “only Heaven knows who will be saved.”

The Yoruba Baale means "father of the land." Hence the word Baale must be a contraction of Baba Ilẹ since baba and ilẹ are translated as father and earth/land/ground respectively."

The Clans of Ar

The Arabs represent numerous extant clans and tribes that are named in Genesis. These include the Ar clans of the Red Sea, Trye, and Arvad which constitued a scribal caste. This is supported by the name Ar-vad. Vad means “to speak” in Sanskrit. The word Ar-ab can mean “father is scribe.” The earliest known written communications originated along the coast lines of the Nile, the Red Sea and Phoenicia.

The Igbo of Nigeria call their scribes the Ar or Aro. The Arabic word for throne is aarsh and likely related to the scribal function attached to rulers.

One of the great Ar ruler was Noah's grandson Arpachshad. The peoples living in Arvad, Tyre and Sidon employed serpent imagery in their temples. Moses lifted a serpent on a rod in the wilderness and those who looked upon it were saved from the vipers. (Numbers 21:8,9) Here the Serpent is a symbol of Christ our God. The Egyptians spoke of Asa-ar, the Serpent of God. John 3:14-16 makes this connection: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."

Israelites associated by their names with the Ar patrimony include Aroch (1 Chr 7:39, Ezr 2:5, Neh 6:18, Neh 7:10) and Ariel (Ezr 8:16, Isa 29:1, Isa 29:1, Isa 29:2, Isa 29:2, Isa 29:7). Ariel means “Scribe/Messenger of God.” The association of the name Ar with the scribal caste is further demonstrated by the discovery of Aramaic scrolls from Arsames, the satrap, to his Egyptian administrator Psamshek and to an Egyptian ruler named Nekht-hor. (A.T.Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, Chicago, 1948, pp.116-117) Some variations of the name Ar include Ar-Shem, Arsames, Artix, and Araxes, and all of these are figures named in historical texts.

More research must be done to trace biblical tribes to their living descendants, but as can be seen from this brief investigation, it is possible. Clan-based units are resilient and survive through the millenium. It is highly likely that many other biblical clans are extant. They should be identified and studied in their natural contexts. Such anthropological investigation promises to be a treasure trove of information for Bible enthusiasts.

Related reading: The Marriage and Ascendency Pattern of Abraham's People

Using Arab Math to Uncover Authors of the Torah

2011-10-14T07:37:00.003-04:00

It is interesting when the contributions of Afro-Arabians are used to better understand the oldest sources of information about the ancient Afro-Asiatics, sources found in the oldest layers of the Bible, especially in Genesis. Such is the case with the application of algorithm to the biblical texts.

The Arabs introduced the decimal system to Europe and the Zero, which originally was a solar hieroglyph. From the Arabs came the works of Al-Khwarizmi who is known in English as Alghorismus, from whom the term "algorism" was derived. His work laid the foundation for algebra and complex mathematical problems, such as square roots and complex fractions. Many of his books were translated into European languages. Now researchers hope to use his thought to uncover the authors and authorial threads of the Torah. This may prove helpful in the case of Genesis if the kinship, marriage and ascendency pattern is factored in. However, from reading the article, it appears that the genealogical data is not part of the equation. This means that the results will be flawed.

Algorithm could untangle authors of Torah

October 11, 2011

In both Jewish and Christian traditions, Moses is considered the author of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Scholars have furnished evidence that multiple writers had a hand in composing the text of the Torah. Other books of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament are also thought to be composites. However, delineating these multiple sources has been a laborious task.

Now researchers have developed an algorithm that could help to unravel the different sources that contributed to individual books of the Bible. Prof. Nachum Dershowitz of Tel Aviv University’s Blavatnik School of Computer Science, who worked in collaboration with his son, Bible scholar Idan Dershowitz of Hebrew University, and Prof. Moshe Koppel and Ph.D. student Navot Akiva of Bar-Ilan University, says that their computer algorithm recognizes linguistic cues, such as word preference, to divide texts into probable author groupings.

By focusing exclusively on writing style instead of subject or genre, Prof. Dershowitz and his colleagues sidestepped several methodological hurdles that hamper conventional Bible scholarship. These issues include a potential lack of objectivity in content-based analysis and complications caused by the multiple genres and literary forms found in the Bible — including poetry, narrative, law, and parable. Their research was presented at the 49th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland.

A keen eye for detail

According to Prof. Dershowitz, the software searches for and compares details that human scholars might have difficulty detecting, such as the frequency of the use of “function” words and synonyms. Such details have little bearing on the meaning of the text itself, but each author or source often has his own style. This could be as innocuous as an author’s preference for using the word “said” versus “spoke.”

To test the validity of their method, the researchers randomly mixed passages from the two Hebrew books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and asked the computer to separate them. By searching for and categorizing chapters by synonym preference, and then looking at usage of common words, the computer program was able to separate the passages with 99 percent accuracy. The software was also able to distinguish between “priestly” materials — those dealing with issues such as religious ritual — and “non-priestly” material in the Torah, a categorization that is widely used by Bible scholars.

While the algorithm is not yet advanced enough to give the researchers a precise number of probable authors involved in the writing of the individual books of the Bible, Prof. Dershowitz says that it can help to identify transition points within the text where a source changes, potentially shedding new light on age-old debates.

Categorizing the unknown

Part of a new field called “digital humanities,” computer software like Prof. Dershowitz’s is being developed to give more insight into historical sources than ever before. Programs already exist to help attribute previously anonymous texts to well-known authors by writing style, or uncover the gender of a text’s author. But the Bible presents a new challenge, says Prof. Dershowitz, as there are no independently attributed works to which to compare the Biblical books.

The Torah algorithm may also provide new information about other enigmatic source material, such as the many pamphlets and treatises of unknown composition that are scattered throughout history. And because the software can identify subtle linguistic cues, it is able to uncover differences within mere percentage points, a feat that has never before been possible. “If the computer can find features that Bible scholars haven’t noticed before, it adds new dimensions to their scholarship. That would be gratifying in and of itself,” says Prof. Dershowitz.

Source: Scienceblog

Related reading: Who Wrote Genesis?; The Documentary Hypothesis; The Possibility of Davidic Authorship

Are Genealogies the "Inspired" Word?

2011-10-11T05:00:00.002-04:00

Alice C. Linsley

A visitor from Portland, Oregon has asked whether the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 are inspired. It is an interesting question to consider.

This visitor hasn't included the line of descent in Genesis 4, probably because he has been taught, contrary to the biblical evidence, that Cain's descendants died in the flood. Genesis 4 and 5 are to be kept together as these two lines intermarried exclusively, as did the lines of Ham and Shem later.

In what way might be speak of ancestry as being the "inspired" word of God? We can say that the rulers of Genesis 4, 5 and 11 represent flesh and blood aspects of God's plan whereby the Incarnate Word came into the world to save repentant sinners.

Asking whether the genealogies are inspired is like asking whether one's ancestry is inspired. People live and have offspring that carry on after them. In the case of the Genesis genealogies, we have something different. These are king lists, not family trees. The ancestors of these kings received a divine promise in Eden concerning a "Woman" of their people (Gen. 3:15). From their ruling lines came Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word. Could God have used other rulers? Probably. Why these rulers and their descendants? Well, that's like asking why Israel? Why Abraham? There isn't any sense in asking why these rulers in particular.

Are they part of the inspired plan of God? Certainly. Genesis is their story and they tell us that God made a promise to them concerning the "Seed" of the Woman (not Eve, as she isn't named until verse 20). They apparently believed that promise because they intermarried exclusively and their wives were their own kin, half-sisters, cousins and nieces. Mary is the Woman and Jesus is the Seed. He even speaks of his death using this metaphor in John 12:24: "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest."

The test of a true prophet is whether his words come true. The test of the inspiration of the Bible is that the Edenic Promise was fulfilled, because from beginning to end the Bible is about God's great Gift to the world, His only Begotten Son.

Related reading: The Marriage and Ascendency Pattern of Abraham's People; Kushite Wives; Chronology of the Genesis Rulers; Who Were the Kushites?

Christ as the Point of Reference

2011-10-10T08:54:00.005-04:00

Alice C. Linsley

A few readers have asked why I don't use B.C.E. instead of B.C. The use of B.C.E. and C.E. is common in academia, but not a single reader of Just Genesis has expressed offense at my use of B.C and A.D., even those who are Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist.

Last week the BBC announced that it would use the politically correct B.C.E and C.E. The only surprise here is that it took the BBC so long to make that decision. I suppose the British tend to preserve tradition more than the Americans.

I agree with Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali who said, “These changes are unnecessary... Whether you use Common Era or Anno Domini, the date is still the same and the reference point is still the birth of Jesus Christ.”

Read about the BBC's decision here.

Political correctness is motivated by concern for diversity and by fear that someone might be offended and sue. Linguistically, it is a nightmare because it layers our discourse with unnecessary verbage. Almost always, PC talk makes Man the point of reference.

EgyptSearch Forums Discovers Just Genesis

2011-10-06T20:55:00.001-04:00

I often visit EgyptSearch Forums because good information is shared there about the ancient Egyptians and their language. I especially appreciate what Dr. Clyde A. Winters has to say. He is generous with his time and his information, and he has done the research necessary to qualify as an expert on the subject.

Dr. Winters was the subject of conversation this summer on Hood Canal (Washington) when I visited with my friend and fellow biblical anthropologist Susan Burns. She follows his research also.

Today, someone at EgyptSearch Forums discovered Just Genesis and I'm glad that they are finding the material interesting and helpful.

Read the conversation here.

The Problem with Dispensationalism

2011-10-04T14:13:00.014-04:00

Alice C. Linsley

The Scofield Bible, which has greatly influenced conservative American Protestants, defines a dispensation in the subhead to Genesis 1:28: “A dispensation is a period of time during which man is tested in respect to obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.” Scofield is not speaking here of the testing of individuals such as Cain, Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Joseph. He is speaking of the general failure of mankind to love and serve God. Each of his seven dispensations ends with God punishing evildoers. As one reader of Just Genesis remarked here: "their theology creates a kind of finger-wagging Creator who can't wait to consign his creation to periodic perdition."

Further, Dispensationalism gives the false impression that God has made no progress with humanity. It misses the obvious contrast between the beginning of Genesis and the end of Genesis. The book of Genesis ends with the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation in the story of Joseph and his brothers. It is the antithesis to the story of Cain killing his brother at the beginning of Genesis. Cain was jealous of God's blessings of Abel. It appeared to him that God favored his brother. Likewise, Joseph's brothers resented that their father favored Joseph. If we read Genesis as a story of conflict between brothers, we see spiritual progress from resentment and murder to forgiveness and reconciliation. Christians are to embody this higher ethic of forgiveness and reconciliation shown in Joseph. In this sense, Christianity represents progress. This is the message God would have us hear, but it is distorted by dispensationalists who stress the continued spiritual degeneration of humanity.

Here is an example of the distortion of Dispensationalists: "The primary responsibility of man in the Noahic Covenant was to "be fruitful and multiply and REPLENISH THE EARTH," but in this also he miserably failed. The earth's population did rapidly increase after the flood, but all the people stayed near an area later known as Babel. God wanted man to scatter and repopulate the whole earth, not remain in one area. The failure of man to do this brought upon him another judgment." (From here.)

The Tower of Babel story explains the linguistic division that occurred among the Afro-Asiatics before Abraham's time. It does not concern all the peoples of the earth. It also presents a criticism of Asiatic dualism, and it speaks of the contagion of sin, a problem not limited to the Afro-Asiatics.

The overarching theme of Scripture is the promise of a savior by whom the curse is reversed and Adam and Eve are set free. This is redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ. There can be no remission without the shedding of His blood. The blood can be traced through the Bible as the unbroken scarlet cord that ties all things together. In other words, all is restored to wholeness (oneness) in Jesus Christ and this is testimony of the Three Witnesses of I John 5.

Dispensationalism asks us to focus on various covenants and their signs: the rainbow, circumcision, the tower of Babel, etc. It teaches that God changes the way He rules at different stages of history. Focusing on the signs and mutibility of God rather than on the eternal immutable One to whom the signs point is a terrible distraction.

Instead of dispensations, let us speak of an historical continuum: those who lived and died in expectation of the appearing of the Son of God (BC saints) and those who live and die having trusted Jesus as the Son of God (AD saints). Together these saints are unified in Christ. That is the meaning of the "communion of saints."

On this continuum, the fulfillment of the promise of Genesis 3:15 is attested by three persons: Simeon the Priest (blood), Anna the Prophetess (Spirit) and John the Baptist (water). In the ancient way of thinking, heavenly realities are observed as a reflection on earth, so that what is attested in heaven is also attested on earth. Simeon, Anna and John the Forerunner are the earthly witnesses of whom John speaks: "Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. This is the one who came by water and blood - Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement." (I John 5:5-8)

The three witnesses stand at the nexus of the two covenants and testify to Jesus, the promised Son of God, who came into the world to save repentant sinners and to restore Paradise. The central problem with Dispensationalism is that it tears this one seamless work of God into many pieces. Even the soldiers at the Cross had the sense to cast lots for Jesus' seamless robe rather than divide it between them.

Related reading: God Has Made Progress with Us!

Evidence that Yaqtan was Abraham's Firstborn Son

2011-10-01T20:24:00.004-04:00

Alice C. Linsley

Abraham had at least eight sons, probably nine, since the Septuagint states that Eliezar was Abraham's son by a concubine named Masek.

Jews insist that Isaac was Abraham's firstborn son while Muslims insist that Ishmael was Abraham's firstborn son. However, the evidence of Scripture indicates that Yaqtan (Joktan) was the first in the birth order of Abraham's nine sons. He was likely born before Sarah conceived Isaac and it may have been his birth to Abraham's second wife, Keturah, that prompted Sarah's attempt to gain a son by Hagar as a surrogate.

Hagar and Masek are to Abraham's household what the concubines Zilpah and Bilhah are to Jacob's household. If the biblical pattern is to be trusted, we may reasonably suspect that Hagar and Masek were the servants of Sarah and Keturah, just as Zilpah and Bilhah were the servants of Leah and Rachel (Gen. 30). That Masek was Keturah's servant is supported by the fact that the name Masek is still found among the south Arabian Mahra who dwell in Yemen, Oman and southern Saudi Arabia.

The Elder Yaqtan is the founder of the Yaqtanite (Jokanite) Tribes of Arabia. His name is a version of the name Jonathan, meaning "God gives." He would have been a contemporary of Terah who lived about 2091-2016 BC. Abraham's son Yaqtan would have lived about 1987-1912 BC.

Yaqtan is the son that ascended to the throne of his maternal grandfather, after whom he was named. This means that four of Abraham's ruling sons had names beginning with the letter Y: Yitzak (Isaac), Yishmael (Ishmael), Yaqtan, and Yishbak (another son by Keturah). In the Hebrew system, the letter Y represents a tent peg, a symbol for a settlement or a clan. Each ruler had two main settlements, one ruled by this first wife, his half-sister, and the other ruled by his second wife, his cousin or niece. These were positioned on a north-south axis. The Sun passed over both at the same time.

Before Hebrew emerged, the Y represented the sound of the letter H. This was true for most of the older North Arabian scripts: Taymanitic, Thamudic B and D, Hismaic, Safaitic and Hasaitic. In modern Hebrew the letter Y represents the sounds v,o,u. In biblical Hebrew the Y represents the sounds w,o,u, but the older North Arabian scripts had only the w sound and it was represented by a solar image, usually a sphere with one line or and X inside. This indicates that names beginning with the image of the Sun were given to high rulers who were regarded as deified sons.

Here is a diagram of the Genesis Horim whose lines intermarried. The diagram shows Yaqtan, Keturah's father, after whom she named Abraham's firstborn son. While Isaac ruled Abraham's territory between Hebron (Sarah's settlement) and Beersheba (Keturah's settlement), Yaqtan the Younger would have ruled over the territory of his maternal grandfather. Genesis 10:30 says that this territory stretched from Mesha, on the Gulf of Aqaba, all the way to the eastern mountain range of the Arabian Peninsula.