Bible Archives - Page 2 of 7 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Archaeologists Really Discover a Hebrew Curse Tablet from Mount Ebal Bearing the Name YHWH?

At a press conference at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, on 24 March 2022, Scott Stripling (the Director of Excavations for the Associates for Biblical Research, a fundamentalist Christian apologetics ministry), Pieter van der Veen (a professor of the Old Testament and Biblical archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz), and Gershon Galil (a professor of Biblical studies and ancient history at the University of Haifa) announced that they have (supposedly) discovered an inscription written in the Hebrew language using the Proto-Canaanite script inside of a 2 cm x 2 cm folded lead tablet that a team led by Stripling found in December 2019 while wet-sifting through the detritus of an earlier excavation that a team led by the late Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal conducted at Mount Ebal near the Palestinian city of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 1982 to 1986.

Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil claim that the inscription on the inside of the tablet is not visible to the naked eye and that they were only able to find it by examining thousands of tomographic scans made at the Czech Academy of Sciences. They claim that the inscription dates to between 1400 and 1200 BCE. They say that the text of the inscription reads as follows when translated into English: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.” Despite these claims, they still have not shown any of the scans they allegedly made, instead only showing photographs of the outside of the tablet and one drawing made by Galil of one supposed instance of the divine name.

If all the team’s claims are true, this would be the earliest known attestation of writing in the Hebrew language and the earliest known attestation of the divine name YHWH by hundreds of years. Naturally, dozens of news outlets have reported this supposed inscription as though it really were the most astounding discovery in Biblical archaeology of this century. There are, however, very good reasons to be very suspicious of Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s claims and it is highly irresponsible for news outlets to report these claims as though they were settled fact. The reasons I am about to highlight are already well known to scholars, but I thought I would share them here for members of the general public who may have read about the supposed Mount Ebal curse tablet in the news.

Proselytism in the Ancient Mediterranean Before Christianity

Today, in the twenty-first century, Judaism is usually thought of as an ethnic religion and Jewish people are not generally known for their proselytizing. At least in the second and first centuries BCE and the first century CE, though, Jewish people in the Mediterranean world were far from totally disinterested in trying to convert other people to their religious practices and way of life. In fact, among ancient Greek and Roman authors in this period, one of the main things Jewish people became known for was their supposed habit of aggressively proselytizing.

Early Christianity’s strong emphasis on proselytism is best understood not as a completely sudden new development or an example of early Christians doing something that no Jewish people had ever done before, but rather an example of Christians taking something that some Jewish people had already been doing and making it a major focus for their movement.

Does the Bible Really Say You Should Beat Your Children?

The Book of Proverbs, a work of wisdom literature that is included in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (i.e., what Christians call the “Old Testament”), contains several verses that explicitly tell parents that they should punish their children for their misbehavior by beating them with a wooden rod. Some amateur hermeneuticists have tried to explain away these verses by inventing some rather ingenious new interpretations for them, but, philologically speaking, these interpretations all fall flat. The Book of Proverbs very clearly supports beating children.

Just because these verses advise parents to beat their children, though, does not mean that Jewish and Christian parents today who regard the Book of Proverbs as scripture should beat their children. It is important to consider the historical and cultural context in which the Book of Proverbs was written and recognize that that context was very different from the context that exists in the world today.

No, “Xmas” Was Not Invented to Advance a Secularist Agenda

We are now well into the month of December. This obviously means that there are already people going around promoting nonsense assertions that twenty-first-century Anglophone Christmas traditions are of ancient “pagan” origin. (I already wrote an article back in December 2019, in which I thoroughly refute the most common “Christmas-is-secretly-pagan” arguments and I’ve addressed some of the other arguments in various other articles.) The time of year also, however, means that there are tons of conservative Christians promoting absurd conspiracy theories that evil leftists are staging some kind of “War on Christmas.”

One aspect of this whole conspiracy theory about the supposed “War on Christmas” is the misconception that the name Xmas was invented by atheists as part of a secularist attempt to remove Christ from Christmas and turn it into a secular holiday. The assumption is that the “X” represents an attempt to literally x-out the word “Christ.” Because of this misconception, some Christians regard the name “Xmas” as downright blasphemous. In reality, the name Xmas was not invented by atheists at all; it is, in fact, merely a harmless abbreviation that was originally invented by Christians and has been in continuous use in various forms for nearly five hundred years.

A History of the “Common Era” (BCE/CE) Dating System

I functionally stopped believing in the existence of God sometime around late 2018 or early 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly when it happened, since it was a gradual process of realizing that all the theological arguments to which I had clung to support my belief in the existence of God were fundamentally flawed. Long after I became an agnostic, though, I still clung to many of the cultural trappings of Christianity. One of these trappings was the BC/AD dating system, which numbers the years from the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, with “BC” standing for “before Christ” and “AD” standing for “anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord,” referring to Jesus.

For nearly two years after becoming an agnostic, I continued to use this dating system in all my articles. I felt that the alternative BCE/CE dating system (which uses the exact same numbers for the years, but with “BCE” standing for “before the Common Era” and “CE” standing for “Common Era”) was a relatively recent invention of atheists seeking to advance a secularist agenda by taking the Christian dating system and making it superficially “secular” by removing the explicit Christian references while retaining the years numbered from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth. I wondered why secularists didn’t just create a dating system that was actually secular and not based on the supposed date of Jesus’s birth.

Well, it turns out that the history of the “Common Era” dating notation is a lot more complicated and fascinating than I realized. In fact, it is not a recent invention of atheist secularists in any way; it is both quite old and originally Christian. Christians first began using the “Common Era” notation in the early seventeenth century and they have been using it continuously ever since. Jewish people widely adopted the notation in the nineteenth century so that they could use the Christian dating system that everyone around them was using while still upholding their religion by not applying the titles “Christ” and “Lord” to Jesus. The notation is now widely used among scholars and academics, primarily out of respect for followers of religions that don’t regard Jesus as Lord or Christ.

The Surprisingly Long History of the Conspiracy Theory that Ancient Rome Didn’t Exist

Despite the fact that I am currently twenty-two years old, I do not have an account on TikTok and I have no intention to create one. It often feels like I’m the only person my age who doesn’t have one, but I don’t mind because I’ve never really been one to follow the crowd. I have, however, over the past week or so, encountered a large number of classicists and ancient historians online discussing a conspiracy theorist named Donna Dickens who uses the TikTok handle “momllennial_” who is apparently attracting an enormous amount of attention on that platform by making absolutely ridiculous claims about ancient history. Their most recent such claim is that the ancient Romans never existed and they were totally invented as “a figment of the Spanish Inquisition’s imagination.”

Right now, all the historians, classicists, and archaeologists who are on TikTok seem to be busy debunking Dickens’s claims. I, however, am not going to try to debunk their claims, because other people are already doing it and, frankly, anyone who knows anything at all about Roman history and literature, the Latin language, archaeology, scientific dating methods, or historical methods in general can easily spot the patent ridiculousness of the things they are claiming.

Instead, I want to do something very different from what I have seen anyone else doing; I want to talk about the history of the conspiracy theory that ancient Rome didn’t exist. Believe it or not, Dickens is not the first person to promote these assertions. In fact, they are actually peddling a conspiracy theory that originated with a reactionary Catholic Jesuit in the seventeenth century CE.

Lucifer Is Not a Name for Satan!

Most people believe that Lucifer is the true name for Satan. This notion has been reinforced by over a thousand years of western Christian tradition and by the constant appearances of Lucifer as a name for Satan in popular culture. In reality, however, the name Lucifer does not occur anywhere in any of the Hebrew or Aramaic texts that make up the Hebrew Bible, nor any of the Koine Greek texts that make up the Christian New Testament.

In fact, although the name does occur in many English translations of the Bible, it only occurs in one verse—the Book of Isaiah 14:12—which actually has nothing to do with Satan in any way. The only reason why anyone associates this passage in Isaiah with Satan at all is because some early Christians, including the church fathers Ioustinos Martys, Tertullianus of Carthage, and Origenes of Alexandria, spuriously interpreted it as an allegory for the fall of Satan.

Here’s How We Know the Canonical Gospels Were Originally Anonymous

The four canonical gospels are traditionally attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew is said to have been a tax collector who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. Mark is a minor figure mentioned in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles who is said to have worked as a translator and secretary for the apostle Peter. Luke is said to have been a Greek physician who became a travelling companion of the apostle Paul. John is said to have been a fisherman who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles along with his brother James.

Despite how well known these attributions are, however, New Testament scholars have realized for well over a hundred years now that the four canonical gospels were, in fact, originally anonymous works. They only became attributed to the authors to whom they are so widely attributed today in the second half of the second century CE, around a hundred years after the first of these gospels was originally written. In this article, I intend to explain the evidence for how scholars know this.

“There Are No Pronouns in the Bible”?

I’m sure that most of my readers already know what a pronoun is, but, just in case you happened to skip (or forget) every grammar lesson in elementary, middle, and high school, a pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. Pronouns are considered a part of speech. They have also generated a lot of controversy in recent years, due to the fact that personal pronouns are sometimes gendered.

Some people with left-leaning or progressive political inclinations have started stating their pronouns in their social media profiles or (less frequently) when they introduce themselves in person, so that other people will know how to refer to them. They do this because, in some cases, a person’s gendered pronouns may not be obvious from their name or appearance. This is especially often true in the case of transgender people.

Naturally, many conservatives are outraged over this. In fact, the word pronouns has become such a buzzword among conservatives that some conservatives seem to have forgotten what the word itself actually means. Some conservatives, falsely assuming that pronouns are something that only transgender people have and seeking to undermine them, have made the assertion: “There are no pronouns in the Bible.” This claim, however, is false, regardless of whether you are reading the Bible in English or in the original languages.

Was Jesus a Communist?

People have been claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a communist or socialist for a very long time. Notably, Francis Bellamy (lived 1855 – 1931), who is best known today as the author of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, was a Baptist minister and self-proclaimed “Christian Socialist” who attracted a great deal of negative attention during his lifetime for frequently claiming that Jesus was a socialist. In more recent years, various pro-communist memes about Jesus being a communist have gone viral on the internet.

I’ve seen so many different expressions of the idea that Jesus was a communist over the years that I’ve decided to write an in-depth article examining whether this is an accurate characterization of Jesus’s teachings. There are indeed some genuine similarities between the views that are attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and communism. There are, however, a number of enormous differences between Jesus and contemporary revolutionary communists that make the claim that Jesus was a communist a profound mischaracterization of his teachings.