Re: OT: Racial superiority / Intelligent design was Re: OT:Thanksgiving

Alistair wrote:

What about the chronologies of the pharoahs (names are wrong) and the
genealogies mentioned in this thread that differ from the texts that
you would say corroborate the bible?


It's getting worked out. One of the more interesting endeavors was a British
Serving Officer in India who, as an amateur, puzzled over the contradictions
in the geneologies of the Hebrew Kings. Until he worked it out, scholars had
dismissed the chronologies as scribal error or mistake.

Here's what this officer (whose name escapes me) figured out:
1. The beginnings of the year were different in the kingdoms of Judea and
Israel. One group started their year on Rosh Hashannah, the other on
Passover.
2. Some kingships started their reign with a year zero, others started
numbering at one, some didn't start either number until the new year
(whichever calendar was in use).
3. Sometimes there was a co-regency - a son and father ruled concurrently,
so the twelfth year of the father may have been the third year of the son.

Anyway, applying all these fudge-factors (almost all with sufficient
justification), the linage of the Hebrew Kings made sense.

Here's another story you might find interesting.

In the late 1920s, a chap (call him "Smith" because I forgot his name)
graduates from Oxford with a degree in linguistics. In time, he was
conscripted by the British War Ministry and sent to code-breaking school. He
then spent the war years involved in de-cyphering enemy messages. After the
war, Smith went on to become a reader in Norse mythology and ancient
languages at Cambridge.

Shift gears

In the early 1970s, a farmer in Minnesota dug up a small boulder with Runic
inscriptions. He loaded it into his truck and carried it to a history
teacher at the local community college. The instructor, had no idea, but
took some Polaroids and sent them to a professor he knew at CCNY.

Professor Brown (?) immediately mailed back: "Whatever you do, don't give
Olaf Svenson any money! These are runes, but they don't make any sense.
Somebody just copied random letters from an encyclopedia." When Svenson (or
whatever his name was) was told, he took the rock back home and dumped it
behind the barn and said "*** 'em all" (probably in Swedish).

Time passes.

In the early '80's, an annual convention of Norse scolars was held in New
York (there are not a LOT of Norse scholars in the world). Professor Brown
was the host, and invited a few (all? both?) of the attendees to his home
for cocktails. Sufficiently lubricated, Brown pulls out his bull*** file
and passes around the Polaroids from several years before.

Smith looks. Click-click-click! IT'S IN CODE! A simple substitution code
that translated into something like: "Here, on the 214th day of the voyage
of Bundy the Long Knife, I, Faustine the Brave, claim all this land in the
name of our king...."

Serendipity. What are the chances of an English scholar trained in ancient
Norse languages AND cryptography coming across a Runic surveyor's mark from
Minnesota while visiting in New York?

Anyway, Smith hies himself back to England and founds a new science:
Archeological Cryptology, perhaps a sub-discipline of deciphering ancient
texts (hieroglyphs, Minoan B, etc.).

Also know the British Museum never throws anything away. Over the centuries,
the museum has accumulated a lot of "junk" manuscripts, mainly from folks
wanting money. Smith began studying these, and, sure enough, many were in
code.

(Aside: I may have a few details wrong: The names, the sequence, the dates,
places, and times. The facts may be fuzzy, but the narrative is correct. I
make no apologies; I suffer from Some-heimers)

One of the more interesting decodings, to bring this all back to the
discussion at hand, is a confusing verse in 2 Kings. Right in the middle of
a geneology, there's a verse which says "Bananas are cheaper by the dozen,"
or somesuch. Religious scholars, both Jewish and Christian, have, for two
thousand years, tried to deduce the holy substance and divine message behind
this puzzling verse. Turns out this verse, too, is a simple substitution
code. It translates as "This King is a fink."

Point is, discoveries are being made all the time, and not always from
digging stuff up.


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