Tag: Bible

Shall We Pray?

Another Sunday, another day of rest away from the keyboard and research…..and since it is a Sunday I thought why not do something along the religious line?

First, let me say….Happy Easter….if you are the religious type…..

Historians have found an old Bible that has notes in it and it calls into questions some of the beliefs we have about the Reformation…..

The scribbles sat hidden for nearly 500 years. Then, while perusing one of seven surviving copies of England’s first printed Bible, historian Eyal Poleg of Queen Mary University made a surprising discovery. “At empty spaces at the end of prologues and sections, or at blank margins, a very thick paper was carefully pasted,” Poleg writes in a blog post. With the help of 3D X-rays, researchers found that the paper was hiding annotations in the 1535 book. The notes were written in English, but they were “apparently there to point readers to Latin texts of Bible readings to use in services, indicating one way parishes were attempting to get around King Henry VIII’s ban on Latin in the liturgy,” reports Christian Today. And that suggests a new insight about the Protestant Reformation—that it did not upend Europe “in one fell swoop” as has long been thought, notes RedOrbit.

“Until recently, it was widely assumed that the Reformation caused a complete break, a Rubicon moment when people stopped being Catholics and accepted Protestantism, rejected saints, and replaced Latin with English,” Poleg says. “This Bible is a unique witness to a time when the conservative Latin and the reformist English were used together, showing that the Reformation was a slow, complex, and gradual process.” The notes, obscured in 1600, were written during the “murky period” between 1539 and 1549 when Henry VIII was moving away from the Church of Rome but people apparently hadn’t fully accepted the shift, according to a release. Just a few years later, “Latin liturgy was irrelevant,” Poleg adds, and the Bible became a “recorder of thievery.” Hidden on a back page was a transaction between a man and a pickpocket who was hanged in 1552. (This “Wicked Bible” came a century later.)

May I have an AMEN?

Now go and enjoy the rest of your weekend….do something FUN!

Biblical Is As Biblical Does

It is the weekend and continuing along the Biblical line of posting for the day…….Remember raiders Of The Lost Ark?  Everyone was in hot pursuit of the Ark of the Covenant, that special place for the storage of the 10 commandments…..and it was found in the desert sands of the Sahara…..well that was entertainment……some have said the the Ark is long gone and others say that it was a metaphor or something like that…..but it seems someone has found something that might be a God send (pun not intended)…….

A Hebrew text fully translated into English for the first time adds to the story of the Ark of the Covenant, but—we’ll spare you the suspense—it doesn’t say where it is. The closest the “Treatise of the Vessels” comes to disclosing the location of the chest said to contain the Ten Commandments is to say that the locale “shall not be revealed until the day of the coming of the Messiah son of David,” LiveScience reports. The treatise, which the Daily Mail notes dates to at least the 1400s, describes the treasures in Solomon’s Temple, which the Hebrew Bible says was burned in the sixth century BC. There were, for instance, “seventy-seven tables of gold, and their gold was from the walls of the Garden of Eden that was revealed to Solomon,” and “the number of stones was forty-six thousands and the number of pearls was the same.” The treatise asserts that some treasures “were hidden in various locations in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia, while others were delivered into the hands of the angels,” notes James Davila, the translator. But the piece shouldn’t be taken as factual, Davila says; instead, “I think the writer was approaching the story as a piece of entertaining fiction.” He adds to the Mail: “The text tells us no more about where the Ark and other treasures might be than if you watched the film” Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Just my thought on the whereabouts of the Ark……..the first temple of Solomon was destroyed when Babylon conquered the region….my thought is that it was a prized possession of the Hebrews and for that reason it was taken when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem…..it was taken back to Babylon along with all the Hebrews and that will be where we find it if ever it is uncovered….like I said….just my thoughts on the whereabouts…….

Do you have any?

Let’s Get Biblical

You heard it right…the old professor is going biblical……surprise!

I do not normally post much on religion and such…..I have on occasion broken my pledge of not doing so….just so you know…I do not write on religion because it is a personal choice…..I have my beliefs and I do not wish to share those and open myself open to debate and insults….religion is between the person and his/her god….and the rest of us need to just move on……

This one is about Solomon…the son of the great king David……first they say the Bible…but if I am not mistaken the Old Testament is basically the Torah……that would make it Jewish…..but I nitpick…..

An ancient pottery shard seems to support the Biblical story of King Solomon and shows he was running a pretty complex operation 3,000 years ago—at least according to one Israeli scholar. “We are dealing here with real kings, and the kingdom of David and Solomon was a real fact,” Gershon Galil tells Fox News. He bases this on the “Ophel inscription,” the oldest alphabetical writing ever found in Israel. Galil translates the 8 letters on a clay-jug fragment as yah-yin chah-lak, or “inferior wine.” This, he says, was the cheap stuff given to laborers who built the young city of Jerusalem. Galil says this indicates an advanced bureaucratic system that could label wine, note where it came from, store it, and so on, reports the Archaeology News Network. Galil dates the shard to the middle of the 10th century BCE, which places the Jews in Jerusalem earlier than scholars have believed, to a time when the Bible says King Solomon ruled. Galil takes this as proof that Solomon ordered the building of the First Temple. Others have said Judean King Hezekiah had it built in Solomon’s name, a notion Galil dismisses.

Now we can have a spirited debate on the Solomon thingy……

So is written so shall it be……

A set of bones—and not human ones, at that—is “challenging the Bible’s historicity,” say two Tel-Aviv University researchers. Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen have carbon-dated the oldest known domesticated camel bones found in the southern Levant, where Israel sits, and what they discovered is that the creatures were likely introduced to the region around the 9th century BC. And that doesn’t sync with the timing of the Bible, which features the pack animals as being present centuries earlier, in the Patriarch-era of Abraham, Joseph, and Jacob, which ran from roughly 2000 to 1500 BC. “This anachronism is direct proof that the text was compiled well after the events it describes,” per a press release on the study. And the dating is much more precise than what was previously calculated, explains Ben-Yosef: “By analyzing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries.” What they found was that copper sites active in the region in the 9th century BC contained camel bones, but none of the ones active earlier did; the earliest archaeological layer to contain them dated to the last third of the 10th century BC. The Times of Israel notes that domesticated camels didn’t originate in that region, however; that honor goes to the Arabian peninsula, which is believed to have used them as pack animals since 2000 BC. Egyptians probably introduced them to Israel.

Now that I have that piece of history outta the way…..go back to watching the Olympics….and I will be back tomorrow……