The War on the Word
––– Chapter 1 –––
Moses, the Alphabet, the Pentateuch,
and the “Original Sacred Languages”

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Topics covered: ►They said Adam & Eve were fictitious...until they dug up Tepe Gawra & Tell Halaf. ►Uncovering Gobekli Tepe won't be finished for another 100 years, but it has already turned evolution and the development of the human race on its head. ►They said Hezekiah & the Pool of Siloam never existed...until bulldozers began renovating Jerusalem's sewer system in 2004. ►Miscellaneous Topics: What we've learned about what the universe consists of; gravity is losing its hold on the universe; how entropy has made it so we no longer live for hundreds of years, how entropy makes the present state of the universe a calendar...& how all of this is causing people to question their belief in evolution. ►They said Moses' vocabulary in the Bible didn't exist until hundreds of years after he died. ►They said the alphabet wasn't invented until centuries after Moses, so he couldn't write. ►Then in 2012 ancient inscriptions engraved in stone turned out to be the world's first alphabet...and that Hebrew alphabet changed everything. ►When scholars talk about the "original" "sacred" languages, which languages are they talking about?

Existence of Adam & Eve

The Huge Gobekli Tepe Find

King Hezekiah's Pool

Miscellaneous Topics

Moses' Nonexistent Vocabulary

Yes, Moses Could Write

Amazing New Inscriptions

"Original" "Sacred" Languages

Chapter 1 (12 pages)

MOSES, THE PENTATEUCH,

AND THE “ORIGINAL SACRED LANGUAGES”

GOD HATH MADE FOOLISH THE WISDOM OF THIS WORLD

Moses is important: God used him to write the five foundational books of the Bible, and Moses’ writings in the Bible use three times more pages than those of the Apostle Paul. Indeed, Moses wrote so much of the Old Testament (OT) that the OT is sometimes referred to as “Moses and the prophets” rather than the “law and the prophets” (Lk 16:16,31). That’s why theologians and scholars over the centuries have unrelentingly attacked the credibility of Moses and the Pentateuch – especially Genesis.

Two of the most popular “facts” theologians have used to convince people to reject the word of God as it is literally written are the nonexistence of Adam and Eve (which they use to “disprove” the literal Creation) and the belief among liberal scholars that Moses could not have written anything in the Bible because he couldn’t even write. These two theories became such common knowledge among scholars over the centuries that in the 1800s AD they were emboldened enough to invent fictitious men who did write the books of the Pentateuch. It started in the 1600s when a Catholic priest-scholar, Richard Simon (1638-1712), and a famous Enlightened Dutch philosopher and Jewish theologian, Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), began speculating – since no evidence existed to prove their speculations were wrong – that Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch. By the mid-1700s these never-proven speculations began to take root when more and more scholars used Reason to “critically evaluate” the Bible. Then in the 1800s, even though archeological expeditions to the Holy Land had been digging up evidence that supported many of the historical places and events in the Bible, scholars said there was zero evidence that Adam and Eve existed, and some evidence that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch. Because of that, in the late 1800s scholars actually invented four men (four is the most-accepted number) – called ‘J’, ‘E’, ‘P’, and ‘D’ – who “may have” written the Pentateuch. Who were these “true authors” of the Pentateuch? Here’s a summary of what many scholars have generally-accepted…and you’ll see why these theorized “authors” are hotly contested by many scholars with intellectual integrity:

“How can we best explain the theory that Moses did not write the first five Books of the Bible in the 15th century BC? One possible explanation is the ‘Documentary Hypothesis’ in which there may be from four to as many as nine written sources that are probably derived from earlier oral sources [‘oral’ is a code word among scholars for ‘doubtful’] dating perhaps to the time of David, or possibly later. Or perhaps from the time of Ezra. The generally-accepted four sources are:

J, who may have been from the southern kingdom of Judah, dating perhaps to the time of David or Solomon around the 10th century BC.

E is thought to have been from the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BC – or possibly later.

P may have been a 7th-century priest during King Hezekiah’s reign.

D may have written his part during the time of King Josiah around the 7th century, or maybe Ezra or somebody else wrote it during the time of the return from the Babylonian Captivity about 450 BC.”

Let’s look at the Adam and Eve argument first, and then look at King Hezekiah and some miscellaneous topics before we get to Moses’ “inability to write.”

ADAM AND EVE

Moses and the Hebrews left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea in roughly 1500 BC, and then God had Moses pen the Pentateuch in the wilderness in order to preserve the histories of Creation and Adam and Eve. But there was no evidence showing that Adam and Eve were real, historical people. To scholars, therefore, Moses and Adam and Eve were fictitious characters invented by Hebrew sheep herders squatting around a fire during King David’s reign (about 1000 BC), or maybe by J, E, P, or D at about the same time…or maybe later. This faithless blasphemy was what young Christian men who went to schools to become preachers were taught for about 800 years (until the 1900s AD).

Tepe Gawra

Then in the 1930s AD, Tepe Gawra was discovered and excavated. Tepe Gawra means “Great Mound.” It is the site of an ancient city near the Tigris River in northern Iraq not far from Nineveh. The mound is made of a succession of city layers that were built on top of each other over many centuries. Tepe Gawra is thought to have been occupied from 5000 BC until 1500 BC. At the bottom of the mound (which is the oldest part – about 5000 BC – which is 3,500 years before Moses and 4,000 years before King David) a small stone seal was found. The seal has an engraved image that depicts a naked man and woman walking bent over in shame…with a serpent standing behind them. Because it appears to depict the Fall of Adam and Eve, it has been named the "Adam and Eve Seal," and it now resides in the museum at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tell Halaf

At about that same time (the early 1930s), Tell Halaf was discovered. Tell Halaf means “Old City Mound.” It is an ancient archeological site about 100 miles west of Tepe Gawra. A small ancient engraved stone cylinder that was worn around the neck and used as a seal was unearthed. It is believed to date back to at least 2200 BC (700 years before Moses). It depicts a man and woman sitting on either side of a tree. They each have a hand extended as if they are picking fruit from the tree. Behind each of them stands a serpent. Even though the seal has been named “The Adam and Eve Temptation Seal,” some scholars protest that the fruit “might not” have anything to do with temptation; it “might” be an ancient symbol of “fertility” …and scholars ignore the serpent. The seal today resides in the British Museum. The Tepe Gawra and Tell Halaf seals (along with other archeological finds) have shown that generations of unbelieving scholars were wrong when they confidently proclaimed that the Adam and Eve “story” was invented (along with the rest of the Pentateuch) by J, E, P, or D sometime between 1000 and 500 BC (from King David to Ezra) in order to be the foundation of the false religion they were making up. The fact that the Adam and Eve seals are thousands of years older than 1000 BC has forced scholars to admit these “scholarly proclamations” were really only biased guesses. Sadly, that loss of credibility hasn’t stopped these unbelievers from coming up with “new improved” guesswork, such as: The “tale” of Adam and Eve “might be” nothing but a widely-believed myth that “could” go all the way back to knuckle-dragging, grunting cavemen who were creative enough to dream up the tale when they lived way back then at Tepe Gawra or Tell Halaf.

Page 2 of 12

Gobekli Tepe

It means “Potbelly Mound.” It is about 100 miles northwest of Nineveh, which puts these three ancient cities in a roughly 100-mile equilateral triangle. It was only recently excavated (2000 AD), and so far, it has received little publicity because it embarrassingly reveals that highly-respected scholars have been hugely wrong about almost everything about human society, such as their teaching us about “knuckle-dragging cavemen,” about shepherds huddled in their tents inventing the Bible…and now we know they’ve always been very, very wrong about the historical development of human societies. They should have believed the Bible. (Yes, their dating system has been shown to have major flaws and inconsistencies – keep that in mind.)

Gobekli Tepe is very, very old; scholars think it goes back to 11000 BC. Once they determined it to be that ancient, they “knew” what they’d find as they continued unearthing it: All communities that old were way back in “prehistory” when “evolving” mankind was just beginning to walk more upright. “Prehistory man,” scholars said, had few skills, fewer tools, and very primitive weapons. He was mostly a roaming hunter who killed game and gathered any available food because he knew nothing about agriculture. He lived in very small groups because he was an unintelligent, aggressive, animalistic man whose life consisted of little more than eating, reproducing, fighting for survival, (and – between grunts – inventing intricate stories about God, Satan, and the Fall of Adam and Eve).

To put 11000 BC into perspective (according to scholars), let’s look at some things we “knew”: Back then man had not yet invented writing, was only barely familiar with the wheel, was still using a few crude stone tools and weapons (no metal), and had not yet learned to grow crops or herd livestock – which things would, when invented much later, give mankind the modern ability to build and live in large towns and cities. Therefore, when the excavation of Gobekli Tepe began, scholars and historians confidently agreed they would find it to be a tiny, primitive encampment with a few scattered stone implements.

The first thing that went wrong (from the perspective of scholars) was Gobekli Tepe turned out to be massive – way too huge for “prehistory man.” The second mind-boggling discovery in Gobekli Tepe was a vast building complex that included huge stone columns – columns ten feet wide and twenty feet tall that weighed 20 tons each! One particularly large stone column weighs 50 tons. Compare those weights with the fact that the stone blocks that make up Egypt’s largest pyramid only weigh 2.5 tons each. And the pyramids were built relatively recently (compared with Gobekli Tepe) in about 2500 BC when humans had long quit grunting and dragging their knuckles. The massive stone columns of Gobekli Tepe had been transported from a quarry a quarter of a mile away and then stood upright, and then had their bases inserted into precisely-fitting custom “sockets” carved in bedrock for stability.

This astonishing info all by itself makes Gobekli Tepe vastly important because it shows that scholars, the timetable of mankind’s development, and basically everything we’ve always “known” about human development were very, very wrong! Prehistory man way back in the beginning was not the ape-man that evolutionists said he was. Gobekli Tepe has details so sophisticated for that ancient era of prehistory it’s almost as if an advanced race from outer space landed and set up a colony. In fact, we now have enough proof that we don’t have a clue what we’re talking about that people are now daring to speak out about other amazing archeological finds in other places around the world that, like Gobekli Tepe, are proving scholars and scientists have either been completely inept or they’ve lied in efforts to discredit the Bible – or both.

One of the undeniable things about Gobekli Tepe is it required a huge prehistory population in order to supply the thousands of workers needed; it required a permanent, settled population (not wandering hunter-gatherers) because of the many years required to build it; and it had to have a stable social hierarchy that included rulers, people with a good knowledge of agricultural and animal husbandry, and men with advanced educations who could envision, plan, and supervise astonishing feats of construction on massive scales over long periods of time. Today we have some theories about how “primitive” Egyptians moved the 2.5-ton blocks for their pyramids back in 2500 BC, but we have no clue how men thousands of years before the pyramids could possibly move stone columns that were ten times larger and heavier.

A very minor mystery about the community at Gobekli Tepe is the fact that after being there for 2,000 years the buildings were all deliberately buried under hundreds of tons of earth, gravel, and debris that was somehow transported from other locations…and all of it was done (according to scholars) at least 8,800 years before mankind had even invented the simple wheelbarrow. Based on the layout of buildings and walls, it is believed Gobekli Tepe is so huge that only 5% of it has been excavated…and if we continue to dig for another 100 years, we still won’t uncover the remaining 95% of this astonishingly-huge complex. Gobekli Tepe is a good representation of the state of mankind’s knowledge ignorance – as in how little we know.

If Gobekli Tepe had been discovered 200 years ago instead of 20 years ago would scholars still have claimed Jerusalem during the reigns of kings David and Solomon was merely a tiny collection of tent-dwelling shepherds and goatherds who were so insignificant they were largely ignored by the mighty kingdoms around them? Would scholars have proclaimed that these Hebrew men, such as J, E, P, and D, huddled in their tents dreaming up Adam and Eve and the Hebrews’ fictitious-but-extremely-detailed religion…and who then recorded it in a book that turned out to be uniquely and miraculously inerrant? How were these humble Hebrew tent-dwelling “religion inventers” able to come up with so many detailed and “obviously-wrong” specifics that have consistently embarrassed scholars by being, over time, found to be correct? Why have educated Bible-rejecting scholars been so wrong about so much for so long? How did “squatting, grunting, uneducated men” turn out to be intellectual, knowledgeable men of character compared with the modern “scholarly” insignificant losers who talked down about them? We don’t know, but we do know scholars tend to ignore their old mistakes because they’re so busy making new mistakes. And we also know that the smarter a man is, and the more knowledge he acquires, the more likely pride is going to make him hate the very idea of humbly worshipping God Almighty and admitting His Bible has proven to be the only inerrant religious book in history.

The excavation of Gobekli Tepe in 2000 AD is an important, very revealing, and very embarrassing find. But another – and more recent – find in Israel in 2015 finally ended scholars’ doubts about some amazing events involving King Hezekiah.

Page 3 of 12

KING HEZEKIAH AND THE POOL OF SILOAM

The Bible says after Assyria took away the northern ten tribes of Samaria it began to focus on conquering the Kingdom of Judah. King Hezekiah realized Jerusalem could not survive a lengthy siege without a huge water supply. Jerusalem at that time sat on Mount Moriah. The east side of Moriah was a cliff overlooking the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives, and Jerusalem’s main water supply (the Gihon Spring, which is where Solomon had been anointed king over 200 years before – 1 Ki 1:33,34) was on the side of the cliff outside of the city’s east wall where it could be captured by Assyria. Hezekiah needed a reliable source of water inside Jerusalem’s walls, but the Gihon Spring was outside Jerusalem’s walls. He also needed a large storage tank to hold the water. 2 Ch 32:2-4,30 and 2 Ki 20:20 say Hezekiah made a “conduit” from Gihon outside the east side of the city, and “brought water into the city” to a “pool” on the “west side of the city.”

Theologians scoffed at the Biblical account for several reasons:

The Gihon Spring is over 100 feet down the side of the Moriah cliff.
Gravity wouldn’t allow water to flow uphill through any pipe or channel.
There was not enough space available in the crowded city of Jerusalem for a storage pool large enough to hold enough water to outlast a siege.
Even if a water tunnel was somehow constructed, the storage pool had to be close enough to the Gihon Spring to permit the making of a very short tunnel using the hand tools available in 700 BC through the solid rock of Mt. Moriah.
Scholars were as sure as the force of gravity that no evidence could be found proving this giant pool ever existed (which the Bible calls the pool of Siloam…a pool that was later “supposedly” connected with Christ’s miraculously giving a blind man sight in Jn 9:1-11) …therefore theologians laughed that no “miracle” ever happened at a pool that never existed.

For many seemingly rock-solid reasons, therefore, the Biblical account, when viewed with carnal Reason, was increasingly thought to be impossible and was therefore “known” to be the pure fiction of squatting, grunting knuckle-draggers. (Why do they always theorize the Bible was written by knuckle-draggers? Because it is by far the oldest detailed, verifiable history book, and the oldest religious book in the history of this God-created planet. For example, Hinduism dates back to 800 BC(it evolved from older non-religious poems written in Sanscrit); Buddism was invented in 500 BC; a theory of evolution goes back to 500 BC; Mormonism was invented in 1830; and the Jehovah’s Witness religion was invented in 1879. You could credibly say the early attacks on Christianity – such as the end of feudalism, education (that produced squatting, grunting atheistic scholars and theologians), the printing press, Greek philosophy and the Age of Reason, democracy and its freedom of religion all came together during the 1800s to produce the widespread (even among Christian denominations) rejection of God's guessed-to-be-incorrect but always proven-to-be-correct word.

History did know that in about 450 AD well-intentioned Christians had remodeled an existing small pool on the southwestern slope of Moriah in a location that would have been inside the old city walls, and the remodeled pool was used to commemorate the Biblical account. But everybody knew this little commemorative pool, for several reasons, didn’t fit the description of the Biblical pool of Siloam – not the least of which was the fact that it was much too far from the Gihon Spring (almost 600 yards) on the opposite side of Mt. Moriah from Gihon. (Geographically, Jerusalem was shaped like a loaf of bread situated north-south. Gihon Spring is 100 feet down the east side of the loaf, and the little commemorative pool is even further down the southwest side of the loaf…which means the spring would have to defy gravity and flow a hundred feet uphill on the east side of Jerusalem.) Scholars, therefore, scoffed at Hezekiah’s water-carrying conduit, they laughed at the nonexistent pool of Siloam, and they declared that Christ’s miracle never happened.

Then in 1838 and again in 1865 an underground water tunnel (that had been quietly written about – and largely ignored – back in 1625) was discovered…but only partially explored under Jerusalem. Even though this water tunnel did lead to the small pool on the southwest side, it was considered impossible for it to be connected with Hezekiah...until 1884 when an ancient inscription was discovered inside on the wall of the tunnel commemorating the spot where two Hebrew excavation crews, working from opposite directions, met. Therefore, some claimed it had to be Hezekiah’s tunnel, and that the pool that had been reworked in 450 AD had to be the pool of Siloam. This small pool, however, for reasons listed above (way too small), was not the Biblical pool...and had been neglected and fallen into disrepair...and very few people seriously thought the tunnel was Hezekiah’s. Indeed, many scholars were boldly declaring that the King Hezekiah described in the Bible never existed, as “proven” by the fact that nothing in history or archeology had ever been found that mentioned him.

Then in 2004, when bulldozers were uncovering and renovating Jerusalem’s drainage and sewer system, another pool was discovered that had to have been dug and constructed by Hezekiah in preparation for the coming siege. This pool was huge (the size of two football fields) and at least 15 feet deep with steps leading down into it. And it was found to be connected by a channel to the smaller pool, which is where the water from Hezekiah’s tunnel first empties. In other words, the smaller pool at the end of Hezekiah’s tunnel conveniently took advantage of an available, smaller storage space…and then that smaller pool overflowed into the huge pool of Siloam, which was the main storage pool.

Hezekiah’s tunnel is amazing. To this day it has knee-deep water flowing through its 1,750 foot length. It is about as wide as a man’s shoulders, is cut through solid rock, has a precise 0.6% downhill slope from Gihon Spring, is an average of 131 feet underground, and is now considered one of the greatest feats of water engineering of ancient times. The tunnel, instead of being straight, does some meandering, and is therefore 40% longer than a straight-line tunnel would be. The two construction crews did the best they could that far below the surface to hear – and be guided by – the earth-pounding noises made by men on the surface above. Eventually the two crews could hear each other’s excavating work, homed in on each other, and rejoiced with a commemorative inscription on the wall where their tunnels met.

Several findings have historically confirmed what the Bible says about events having to do with King Hezekiah, but nothing directly confirmed Hezekiah himself…until 2015. An impression of a royal seal was found. In ancient Hebrew it says, “Belonging to Hezekiah, son of Ahaz king of Judah.”

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MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS BRIEFLY ADDRESSED

The universal wave-force and intelligent energy of the living word of God

There is increasing evidence that the entire universe is not only made up of a sound-wave-like energy, but that this “energy” has characteristics that make it seem like a living intelligence…for example, if “something” happens way over on one side of the universe, there are indications that that “something” is instantaneously known on the other side of the universe…and this instantaneous transfer of knowledge or awareness across the vast universe cannot be said to be “rapid,” neither can it be equated with an incredibly-fast speed – such as multiple times the speed of light – because it is instantaneous – which makes distance irrelevant! This wave-like energy appears to be an intelligence that everything in the universe consists of. For example, we’ve never understood what and why gravity is, but it now looks like it is – like everything else in the universe – a product of this force of living intelligence. But that’s not all! Science taught us that the physical universe is made up of atoms, and atoms are supposed to be the simple building blocks of everything. For example, our physical brains are made of atoms, and those atoms somehow produce consciousness, thoughts, and memory – but we have no clue how lifeless atoms can do that. But modern experiments have caused us to conclude, to deduce, to guess that consciousness is not a result of atoms; consciousness is the foundation of atoms in a way that goes way beyond just thoughts in our physical brains. In other words, there are indirect – but consistent – indications that the behaviors of all atoms in the universe (in brains, in rocks, in everything) have a consciousness underlying their behaviors…because some form of consciousness or intelligence is a fundamental property or reality of the universe. Science thought atoms were the foundation of the universe, but it now looks like this consciousness is the foundation of the universe.

Heb 11:3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

This stuff is so far removed from anything we’ve ever believed about reality, that experts have said it’s “spooky.” Others are saying it appears that the spiritual realm, which is where true life exists, is a foundational part of – everything everywhere. If you substitute “God” for consciousness and its synonyms above, you’d end up saying God is the underlying foundation of atoms and the entire universe.

Col 1:15-17 Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

This all gives broader, deeper, richer meaning to our calling the Bible “the living word of the living God.” And it makes it look very foolish to think God’s word – as He defines it – no longer exists…and therefore exalt layman’s aids over God and what He has said.

Pride and our universal ignorance/stupidity

At first, we assumed gravity would hold the universe together, but it isn’t. Things like gravity and energy-carrying photons reveal that all the galaxies are flying apart at an increasing rate…order is slowly turning into chaotic randomness. Indeed, the only thing that seems to control the rate of decay is the universe’s “intelligent force” …as if He that letteth is slowly letting go. The more we learn about every facet of life and matter, the more we scare ourselves because we increasingly realize we haven’t just been appallingly ignorant, we’ve also been appallingly wrong about so very much that every now and then we get a glimpse at the horrifying abyss of our lack of knowledge and understanding. The Digital Age is allowing us to develop things like artificial intelligence (AI) that we hope will guide us into a brighter future. But the word artificial means not real, false, fake – and that doesn’t bode well for us if AI becomes our intelligence guru. It is said that at least 99% of all electricity generated on Earth will be required to power AI, and civilization will live on the remaining 1%. Does AI have anything to do with the rule of the Antichrist? When we look up at the power poles that carry electricity all over the world, they look like electrical wires hanging on crosses. Does that have anything to do with “the prince of the power of the air” mentioned in the Bible?

Eph 2:2,3 2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath…

Already there are reports of AI convincing today’s messed-up adults and children to commit suicide because AI knows everything psychiatrists and marketing agents know about how to use everything to manipulate and control people – just like Satan (and this is really scary) convinced Adam and Eve to do the opposite of God’s kindergarten-level thou-shalt-not commandment…and Adam and Eve weren’t messed up like so many people are today! Perhaps especially because most people are carnal, AI may quickly transform societal values and create a dystopian nightmare. Here’s an example of how messed up modern American Christians are: They believe they can impress God by using the Satanic methods, values, and principles of Greek philosophy embodied in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution to revive Christianity and social order! I have a church-going, openly-“Christian” neighbor whose church deliberately shuns Biblical doctrine and teaches only the Golden Rule. They say Christ in the gospels taught “love everybody” …and after He went up to heaven His disciples got way off course in their epistles by inventing doctrines that seemed right and good to them! No AI “intelligence guru” was needed by that church; the carnal mind was all it took! And Tepe Gawra, Tell Halaf, Gobekli Tepe, Hezekiah’s tunnel, and gravity have shown that we “modern,” “sophisticated” pagans have been and are living in Satan’s Yea, hath God said world of ignorance, deception, and lies about everything…and therefore we need to wake up and accept the repeatedly-demonstrated, repeatedly-proven fact that the only truth we can be sure of is God’s Holy Bible. On Christ the solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand!

Page 5 of 12

Entropy and the universe

This physical kingdom of Heaven we live in is the Devil’s kingdom. As you know, God represents authority and order; Satan represents equality (the opposite of authority) and chaos/disorder (the opposite of order). Because this universe is the Devil’s, it is not surprising that entropy exists. Entropy is the natural process by which everything breaks down from a state of order to a state of disorder in which everything becomes equal! Because of that fact, can entropy be used as an example that equality is the evil in Isaiah 45:7? Living things (humans, animals, plants) are subject to entropy – it’s called aging, and then death, and then decay. Mountains also suffer from the curse of entropy; over time they wear down. Scientists used to think gravity would hold the universe together, but it isn’t. Things like gravity and energy-carrying photons reveal that all the galaxies are flying apart at an increasing rate…order is slowly turning into chaotic randomness. Indeed, the only thing that seems to control the rate of decay is the universe’s “intelligent force” …as if He that letteth is slowly letting go. The more we learn about every facet of life and matter, the more we scare ourselves because we increasingly realize we haven’t just been appallingly ignorant, we’ve also been appallingly wrong about so very much that every now and then we get a glimpse at the horrifying abyss of our lack of knowledge and understanding. The universe, too, suffers from entropy: stars burn out, gravity slowly loses its power to hold things in the universe in place, and order slowly deteriorates into randomness. An interesting fact about entropy in the universe is: the current state/amount of entropy is an exact measure of time that has passed, and of the amount of time remaining. When the Devil and his bad angels won the initial war against God’s good angels, God’s KOH became the Devil’s kingdom…and the seven-thousand-year war began. God recreated the destroyed planet of Eden for Satan, and then He removed His authority/order from the universe and Earth – thus allowing entropy and decay to begin. You and I can tell time by the great sidereal movement (sun, moon, stars) by which we humans measure time. Good and bad angels, on the other hand, look at the amount of entropy that has occurred since the beginning of the 7-day war. When they do so, they can see how much time has passed since the war began, and they can see how much time remains before the war ends (Rev 12:12). In effect, this KOH/universe is a giant hourglass that shows the angels how much sand has drained, and how much sand remains. When the last grain of sand is dropping, God will be leading us through the Deep (type of Red Sea) into His kingdom of authority, order, peace, and eternity (no entropy, no time). As we are passing through the Deep, the Devil and the rest of the damned will be trapped in the fiery chaos of this universe/kingdom…and that fire will never die because there will be no more entropy because God is back in charge.

Biological decay and death

The cells in our bodies, including all of their parts (such as DNA) and the tasks performed by those parts, are incredibly complex and worthy of discussion in their own right. But we’re going to stick with the interesting and revealing topic of entropy. Our bodies age because of entropy, that is, all systems in our bodies experience something called “genetic entropy.” Genetic entropy is the natural aging process when all bodily systems mutate toward decay and disrepair, which is caused by genetic loss of the information that regulates bodily functions, and by genetic corruption of regulatory information. These tiny mutations happen all the time and inexorably lead to death. Nature attempts to stave off death by eating life-giving beings – but genetic entropy gradually overcomes all of life’s attempts at self-preservation. This genetic entropy means humanity as a whole is very slowly going further and further downhill from generation to generation. And this genetic entropy is right out of the Bible: Think of genetic entropy as leaven; it can’t be stopped; it will continue to spread until the whole lump is leavened. Our physical bodies are full of unstoppable corruption that leads to death. Our only hope is to rule over our dying bodies from our inner sanctums by walking in strict accordance with Thus saith the Lord. The entropy of our aging is a clock; we can look in the mirror and see how long ago we were born, and we can also see that we’re getting closer to our deaths. Why did people like Noah and Methuselah live for almost a thousand years? Perhaps it’s because they lived closer to the beginning of the war when, yes, God had already imposed entropy onto the universe, but it hadn’t “gotten completely up to speed” yet (see the underlined sentence above). During the Millennial Reign on this planet in these carnal bodies it looks like when time ends in Rev 10:6, that may end entropy and therefore aging. Genetic entropy is increasingly being used to prove mankind has not been evolving on Earth gradually getting better and better for millions of years. We humans are in fact biologically “evolving” backwards towards death and extinction because we inherit from our ancestors the mutations they accumulated, add to them throughout our lives, and then we pass them on to our children. That strongly suggests we’ve only been on this planet for a relatively brief time. Because of genetic entropy we now know evolutionists got “natural selection” backwards; over time things tend to roll down the hill, not up the hill; time is not our friend. Another point: In God’s creation, things are supposed to be different from each other because they have different jobs to do. Hot air and cold air, for example, react with each other to produce good things like wind and rain. But if the air temperature becomes lukewarm and is neither hot nor cold, that’s bad because all of the air being the same temperature doesn’t do any work (Rev 3:15,16). Doth not even nature show equality is bad? Minor point: there is evidence that this revealing info about cells, DNA, and entropy may be causing more people to abandon their pro-evolution stances than any of the other evolution-refuting topics.

MOSES' VOCABULARY, TELL MARDIKH, AND THE EBLA TABLETS

Many of the vocabulary words, places, and names used by Moses in the Pentateuch in 1500 BC were found in no other known writings older than several centuries before the Babylonian Captivity (c.590 BC when people such as Isaiah, King Hezekiah, Jeremiah, and King Josiah lived). Therefore – concluded “respectable Christian scholars” – the first five books of the Bible are fraudulent because they were not written by Moses in about 1500 BC, they were written sometime between 1000 to 500 BC by – you guessed it – the inventive liars, J, E, P, and D, who “probably” returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian Captivity. The theory had to be true, said scholars, because Moses couldn’t have written words and names that didn’t even exist until many centuries after his death.

Tell Mardikh and the Ebla Tablets

In the 1970s – after hundreds of years (!) of Christian scholars and theologians subverting the validity of the Pentateuch – Tell Mardikh, which was an ancient mound that covered an ancient Syrian city called Ebla, was found, and quietly excavated. Nobody had high expectations for this newly-found mound because historians confidently “knew” nothing of importance had ever been in that location; it was probably some minor, rural village of nomadic tent-dwellers. So, imagine their surprise when they uncovered close to 20,000 clay tablets, called the Ebla Tablets, written in cuneiform that dated back to about 2300 BC, which was 800 years before Moses lived. The number of tablets alone was startling because that meant it was a major treasure trove of records from a royal library that required a kingdom large enough to have at least a quarter of a million people, and important enough and educated enough to not only have so much to write about, but the wealth to record and store so many historical records. The tablets revealed that Ebla was a bustling major commercial transportation hub between Turkey and Cyprus to the west, and Mesopotamia, India, and China to the east…and scholars had had no idea this major city and kingdom ever existed…therefore it “didn’t exist” – just like Moses didn’t exist! (Oh! How many young Christians over the centuries have had their faith in God’s word destroyed by Bible-rejecting scholars!) Ebla, it was learned, even produced its own beer, called “Ebla Beer,” that was popular with the thousands of merchants who routinely stopped there. The ancient tablets cover events from 3300 to 1600 BC, which not only show Ebla had been a major city for over a thousand years, but also reveal that vocabulary words used by J, E, P, and D were, indeed, in use long before and during Moses’ lifetime. Alas and alack! the Pentateuch’s vocabulary could no longer be used as proofs that J, E, P, and D wrote the Pentateuch 500 to 1,000 years after Moses died. The tablets contain names of people, places, customs, and gods mentioned in the Bible – and the tablets prove words in the Bible had been widely used for at least 800 years before Moses was born.

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Before the Ebla tablets were found, scholars also said the Bible is wrong about when Abraham lived; they said he actually lived centuries later – about the time the Bible says Moses lived. But the Ebla tablets have forced scholars to put Abraham back where the Bible says he lived. In an effort to save face, however, scholars have resorted to saying vague things like, “Well, there still doesn’t seem to be a connection between the Ebla tablets and the Bible.” Of course there was no “connection;” Moses was a Christian and Ebla was pagan! For that reason, the Ebla tablets don’t record “The History of the Hebrews;” they quite understandably record mostly local matters of trade, diplomacy, royal letters, and economic matters. Even though the Ebla tablet discovery caused scholars to grudgingly concede that Moses’ vocabulary words were valid, many of them still claimed the Pentateuch itself is a fraud – for other reasons we’ll now investigate.

SCHOLARS: “MOSES WAS NEVER IN EGYPT...AND HE COULDN’T WRITE”

In about 3200 BC, cuneiform symbols were invented in the Mesopotamian region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (containing the areas we think of as Assyria, Babylon, and Persia), and at the same time hieroglyphic symbols were invented in Egypt. They both used a lot of picture-like symbols to represent objects, and they were accompanied by a few crude shapes to represent certain sounds or words. Since each picture-symbol represented a single word or object, these crude cuneiform and hieroglyphic writings required thousands of symbols, which meant only dedicated scribes who memorized the symbols could read and write anything. Also, because words and ideas that did not have specific symbols to represent them could not be recorded, both cuneiform and hieroglyphic writings were simplistic and relatively short – usually written on small clay tablets or stone monuments. Scholars pointed out that the crudeness of cuneiform and hieroglyphics meant the sophisticated, intricately-detailed, and lengthy things written in the Pentateuch could not have been recorded by anyone back then – even by hieroglyphics experts. Why was that? Because the five books of the Pentateuch required an actual alphabet in order to record sophisticated words and detailed descriptions that were not possible with crude, simplistic cuneiform or hieroglyphics. That correct-and-undeniable fact did seem to support (from the kind of humanistic viewpoint that proper Christian scholars and Bible believers should never have) the claim that the early books of the Bible were not written by Moses…and were invented by those rascals J, E, P, and D many centuries later, after the alphabet had replaced hieroglyphics.

During the 1100s BC, scholars say the world’s first alphabet was probably invented by Phoenicians (also called Canaanites). That was four centuries after Moses and Joshua were dead, which – according to scholars – is “proof” that verses like

Ex 24:4 And Moses wrote all the words of the LORD…

Josh 23:6 Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses…

are errors because those two men of God couldn’t have used a sophisticated alphabet to write their sophisticated books because the necessary alphabet didn’t exist until hundreds of years later. As “proof” that the alphabet was invented by Phoenicians, scholars point to Middle Eastern alphabetic inscriptions as old as 1000 BC (long after Moses died) that were written in an unknown early form of the Semitic language – which could have belonged to any of the Semitic races in the Middle East such as the Phoenicians, Hebrews, Midianites, Moabites, Aramaics, or Ammonites.

Why then, when scholars assigned the original alphabet to the Phoenicians, did they ignore three problems? First, those early archeological inscriptions using the Semitic alphabet were found in areas of Egypt – they were not found in Phoenicia. Second, there was some confusion about the so-called “Phoenician” inscriptions because certain supposedly “Phoenician” words from these inscriptions couldn’t be matched with any known Phoenician words, which caused some daring people to suggest the inscriptions might not be Phoenician at all. Third, there were unknown letters and words in the inscriptions that did not match any of the other “probable” Semitic alphabets, whether it was the Phoenician, Aramaic, Midianite, Moabite, or Ammonite languages. (Note the conspicuous, weird, and highly unscholarly absence of Hebrew in that list of Semitic languages.)

Over the years when people asked why scholars hadn’t tried to compare the troublesome Semitic inscriptions with Hebrew – because Hebrew is also a Semitic language, scholars responded by shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Well, there’s no sense comparing the inscriptions found in Egypt with Hebrew because historians have always said the Bible is wrong when it says the Hebrews were in Egypt.” And that’s the way all human beings – including scholars – tend to be…we’re all a bit insecure and don’t want to embarrass ourselves by being wrong in the opinion of the majority.

Confounding Historians with New Finds

In 1905 AD those anti-Bible theories that scholars had stubbornly clung to for centuries began to unravel. In an area of the Sinai near some ancient Egyptian turquoise mines that had been worked by hired crews and slaves of the Egyptians back in the long ago, more stone inscriptions were found that appeared to use an ancient Semitic alphabet. And the letters of that Semitic alphabet had similarities that made them appear to have been derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. The inscriptions were dated and found to have been much older than the “scholarly” 1000 BC origin of the “Phoenician” alphabet. In fact, the new alphabetic inscriptions found in Egypt were made about 1450 BC when the Hebrews were there according to the Bible. But at first everybody was afraid to question “accepted history,” so the finding was ignored. Then in the 1920s AD a scholar in Germany dared to say the alphabet appeared to be an ancient form of Hebrew…but he was laughed to scorn by the rest of academia because everybody knew history said the Hebrews were never in Egypt! In the 1920s there was a rapidly-rising tide of anti-Bible activism in Western civilization that attacked Creationism (via the Scopes Monkey Trial) and the validity of the King James Bible (via the commercially-unsuccessful publication of highly-touted modern mere Bible versions) …which was all it took to weaken the faith of many timid Christians. Scholarly derision also caused the matter of the mysterious alphabet inscriptions to go dormant again.

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Then, in 1999 AD (about 25 years after the Moses-affirming, confidence-inspiring Ebla tablets were discovered) more of these ancient Semitic inscriptions were discovered in Egypt, and these new inscriptions were even older – about 1850 BC – which was still within the 400-year period when the Hebrews were in Egypt. And, like the inscriptions found almost a century earlier in 1905 AD, this 1999 set of inscriptions used an early form of Semitic alphabet that had obviously been derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Emboldened by the growing amount of evidence, Christian scholars renewed the debate about the historical claim that the Bible was “wrong” about Hebrews in Egypt. In 2012 one of these intrepid scholars from Canada decided to go ahead and compare the Semitic alphabetic inscriptions with Hebrew because it sure did look like anti-Bible prejudice had been causing most scholars over the centuries to do everything they could to ignore and suppress even the possibility that the Hebrews actually were in Egypt like the Bible says. If it was even a remote possibility that Hebrews really did live in Egypt during that time it would mean centuries of erroneous textbooks teaching that the Bible is not historically accurate about God’s people being in Egypt, and that say the first five foundational books of the Bible were hoaxes that could not have been written by Moses, and that the hucksters J, E, P, and D “probably” invented the Bible between 1000 BC and 500 BC…would all have to be rewritten and corrected! Unbelieving scholars long to find errors in the Bible because the Bible’s text is boldly, uniquely, and confidently full of names of people and places, detailed descriptions of events, and minor-but-specific details that can be verified or disproven by history, archeology, and scientific and biological investigation. No other sacred books of other world religions, and no books claimed by Christian denominations to have equal or greater authority than the Bible have the amazing number of checkable details like the Bible does. It is well known that liars, hoping they won’t be caught, try to say as little as possible with as few details as possible…but the Bible, emboldened by the fact that it has nothing to hide because it is nothing but truth, has so many details it seems to invite verification. God’s Bible is unique in so many quietly-impressive ways that – the more you learn from and about it – the more amazed by it you become.

When the Canadian scholar compared the Semitic inscriptions engraved on 18 stone slabs with the Hebrew alphabet, he found that the ancient engraved letters and words were Hebrew words, not Phoenician. Among those words he found the names Joseph (who served under Pharaoh), Asenath (Joseph’s Egyptian wife – Ge 46:20), Bethel (Joseph’s home town), Ephraim and Manasseh (Joseph’s sons), and Moses! Some of these ancient, now-deciphered, etched-in-stone inscriptions from Moses’ time in Egypt are inspiring because they appear to have been written about some of the dramatic events with which we are so familiar in the book of Exodus. For example, when you read the following ancient Hebrew-language inscription, remember that Pharaoh had taken drastic measures to reduce the rapidly-growing population of the Hebrews:

“HE SOUGHT OCCASION TO CUT AWAY TO BARRENNESS OUR GREAT NUMBER, OUR SWELLING WITHOUT MEASURE.”

And then God performed a series of amazing miracles to show He was serious about freeing the Hebrew slaves:

“OUR BOND SERVITUDE HAD LINGERED. MOSES THEN PROVOKED ASTONISHMENT. IT IS A YEAR OF ASTONISHMENT.”

The dictionary says an archaic meaning of astonishment is dread; and the Bible sometimes uses it to mean trembling and carefulness (Ezek 12:18,19), and trouble (2 Chr 29:8). That “year of astonishment” must have filled God’s people with a combination of awe and fear. Just thinking about what our brethren in Egypt witnessed and lived through humbles me. Our Shepherd is truly great (He 13:20).

Based on all the new evidence, here’s the latest theory about the origin of the alphabet and the beginning of writing:

The invention of the alphabet is often ascribed to Joseph and his two sons when they were in Egypt, because – as adopted “Egyptian” royalty (Gen 41:37-46) – they were well-educated, knew both Hebrew and the Egyptian language, knew hieroglyphics, and lived in Egypt during the early part of the 400-year exile. Therefore, during the early part of the Hebrews’ 400 years in Egypt, it looks like God’s people invented an alphabet for their Hebrew language by forming letters similar in shape to selected Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols that were commonly used and recognized by most people and that began with certain widely-known phonetic sounds. This new phonetic alphabet – the first alphabet in the history of the world – contained only consonants, not vowels. Having only consonants made reading not as easy as it is when words have both consonants and vowels, but it was still comparatively easy – much easier than deciphering hieroglyphics. For example, if you and I are both English speakers and I sent you the following note using only consonants…

MST PPL CN WLK

…being an English speaker, you’d quickly figure out – by making the sounds represented by the existing letters – what the missing vowels are and correctly read it as most people can walk. Of course, having no spaces or markings between words and sentences – as in old Hebrew Bible manuscripts – such as MSTPPLCNWLK made it more difficult, which is why the Levitical priests were tasked with knowing what Scripture manuscripts (MSTPPLCNWLK) said…and then preaching the word to everybody.

The historical relationship of the modern world’s alphabets to this ancient Hebrew alphabet is interesting…and it shows that the world’s alphabets derived from the newly-invented Hebrew alphabet – not from the long-existing Egyptian hieroglyphics. When the Hebrews’ new alphabet was later adopted by Greece, the Greeks cleverly added vowels to the Hebrew consonant-only alphabet, thus making letter-based words easier to read and sound out.

Then from Greece, the Hebrew-based, Greek-modified alphabet spread and became the Latin alphabet widely used throughout Europe – as well as the Cyrillic alphabet widely used across Europe and Asia (such as the modern Russian alphabet). That’s how the world’s alphabets were patterned after the ancient Hebrew alphabet.

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Even though there is much more info than I’ve presented here about the world’s first alphabet engraved in Hebrew in stone in Egypt 800 years before scholars thought the “Phoenician alphabet” became the first alphabet, many scholars still reject the Hebrew-supporting facts discovered in Egypt and are doing the best they can to stick with the old version of history because it’s “official,” and it’s in all of the old textbooks. Despite that scholarly reluctance, books, film documentaries, and TV news outlets have been and are reporting about this very-interesting and written-in-stone evidence that is today convincing more and more scholars that the world’s alphabets do, in fact, go way back to the Hebrews while they were in Egypt – just like the Bible has been saying for 3,700 years.

But why are no scholars who admit the Phoenicians did not invent the alphabet, trying to stubbornly suggest that the Egyptians originated the alphabet? Because for over a thousand years after the Red Sea parted for the alphabet-using Hebrews, the Egyptians refused to have anything to do with the alphabet invented by the hated Hebrews – until forced by their Greek conquerors (Alexander the Great) at sword point to do so. Also, the only language for which all of the sounds represented by the hieroglyphs, and all of the sounds represented by letters, is Hebrew. Again: the letter sounds of the world’s various alphabets when they are matched with the hieroglyphs do not always agree…with a single exception – Hebrew. That’s one of the reasons when scholars forced the use of the Phoenician alphabet, it produced unknown, undecipherable words; Phoenician was not a perfect match…because the key was Hebrew; no other language worked.

400 years after God’s people (perhaps Joseph) invented the consonant-only Hebrew alphabet, Moses used it to record the Pentateuch, which was over 400 years before Bible-rejecting “scholars” thought alphabetic writing was invented by Phoenicians in 1000 BC. Indeed, by the time the Hebrews crossed the Jordan River, there were plenty of God’s people who could read and write – see Dt 27:2,3,8. Variations of that consonant-only alphabet lasted until about 800 AD when unsaved, Christ-rejecting Hebrew Masoretic scholar-scribes added vowel markings to simplify reading Hebrew manuscripts.

There are some interesting aspects about God’s people producing the very first alphabet…which then spread around the Mediterranean via trade to Greece, then to Italy…and then the world:

For many centuries before Moses, the Lord used His spoken words to communicate with His people so we could get to know Him, and by which we could pass that knowledge on to others. Spoken communications are the most personal, they are the most intimate; they are also “alive” or “living,” and therefore they have a greater, more-immediate sense of authority behind them.

God knew His people would lose faith in His spoken word as preached by His prophets and priests (such as 2 Ki 22:5-13 when King Josiah, when the temporarily-lost Bible was recovered, found out from the written word of God that the priests had not been speaking/teaching the truth; and such as when Hananiah rebelliously rejected Jeremiah’s oral word of God in Je 14:13-16; 28:10-17). God knew that apostasy was going to happen, and He knew He was going to distance Himself from His carnal people. But, as a good Shepherd, He prepared for that by helping His people develop the alphabet so we could eventually transition to the written word. In other words, He was reluctantly and sadly getting ready to partially withdraw/distance Himself from the church by “de-personalizing” Himself. Today, we are thankful for His written word in general, and for what the KJV in particular has accomplished (which we’ll get into) …but the fact that God is no longer using in-person communications by speaking to us either face-to-face or through prophets should be sobering.

When we believers read His words, we are going from letter to letter to reproduce the sounds that become not just words – but the words God gave us. “But in what language are His inspired, inerrant words?” I hear some people asking. We’ll get to that.

The fact that the alphabet God had His people invent became the foundation for all other alphabets around the world foreshadowed a similar fact: When His New Testament (NT) made the Gospel available to Gentiles, God’s word also spread all over the world. That meant God’s born-again believers, no matter where they lived, could quietly read His word (via alphabets derived from the original alphabet invented by His people in Egypt) and by faith witness the miraculous inner desire to die to the old man and walk in newness of life – a spiritual reality no less real than the miracles witnessed by our brethren while toiling in servitude back in Moses’ day. The fact that the written word has largely replaced the spoken word has no impact on faithful believers…because when we read His words, God discerns the thoughts and intents of our hearts, and the Comforter gives those words a living, life-affecting power and authority.

The “original alphabet” God gave His slaves in Egypt quickly multiplied into the myriad alphabets around the world by which we all feed on His word. “But in what language is the written word of God?” Let’s cover that now.

THE “ORIGINAL” “SACRED” LANGUAGES

Nobody has any idea what languages were spoken by Adam, Job, Abraham, or Moses. And no written Scriptures are known to have existed during this 2,500-year period between Adam and when God had Moses write the Pentateuch.

Having gone over the origin of the written alphabet, I’m now going to briefly cover what we know about the language God’s people spoke when they were learning from Him and recording His word. I think this will make it clear that there is no such thing as a “sacred” language, and that the word “original” (even though we all occasionally use the word) when applied to Hebrew (or any other language) has no relevance. But if the Hebrew language (or Greek, Latin, or English) isn’t important, what is important? Words! God communicates with us via words so we can know Him and His truths. Our relationships with the Word of God Himself are all guided by words – not this language or that language. For example, back in Ge 11:7, God created the many different languages of the world (about which we know nothing) …and He is the one who opened the New Testament to the whole different-language-speaking world. We’ll now review the “original” languages God’s people have used to record His word in “original-autograph manuscripts” throughout history. (I have invented my own informal names for the following versions of the Hebrews’ language, hoping my more-informative names will make it more obvious which time period I’m referring to when I make later references to them.) Before getting to the written Scriptures, a quick glance at the oral transmission of God’s word:

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Unknown Oral Languages from Adam to Moses (4000 to 1500 BC)

Nobody knows what language was spoken back in Adam’s day when everybody spoke the same language. Nobody knows what languages anybody spoke after God confounded human languages in Ge 11. Nobody thinks the Ge 11 languages God created were “inferior” to Adam’s “sacred original language.” Nobody knows what language the twelve tribes spoke before they moved to Egypt. By the time Moses was born in Egypt (about 1500 BC) God’s people had been living in Egypt for several centuries. That means over those centuries they probably lost whatever language they spoke, and adopted whatever language their pagan masters spoke. We say that because when the Jews later spent only 70 years (!) as captives in pagan Babylon, they lost so much of their own language in that relatively short time that several portions of the Bible were actually written in the pagan Babylonian/Chaldean form of Aramaic…and during that short captivity the Jews completely abandoned their own alphabet and permanently adopted that of their pagan masters! To emphasize how quickly the Jews’ language and alphabet changed in Babylon, think about the fact that when the Jews were carried off to Babylon, they had a long-established alphabet with which to record, phonetically stabilize, and preserve the language they spoke when they moved to Babylon…and they still began speaking Aramaic and switched to the Aramaic alphabet used by the pagan Babylonians and Persians!

#1: Egyptian Hebrew (1500 to 1400 BC)

When Moses was taken from the floating basket and adopted by Egyptian royalty, he was an infant who spoke zero languages. He grew up speaking the pagan language of the Egyptians and worshipping their pagan gods. Moses’ Hebrew brethren, who were all non-royal slaves, had been in Egypt for 350 years by the time Moses was born. When the Hebrews invented the world’s first alphabetic writing system based on Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols, it looks like they – like the Jews in Babylon after only 70 years – had begun speaking a modified version of whatever language the Egyptians were speaking, which I’ll call “Egyptian Hebrew.” Whatever this “Egyptian Hebrew” was, it was probably what Moses used when he recorded the very first “original autograph” Bible manuscript. The Hebrews’ new alphabet spread to Greece sometime before 900 BC, but Egypt continued to resist the hated Hebrew’s alphabet until Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and made it part of his empire 600 years later. Summary: Egyptian Hebrew was used by God’s people when He had them publish His inerrant written word in the language of His Egyptian-Hebrew speaking people.

#2: Judges to King David (1400 to 1000 BC)

When the “Egyptian-Hebrew”-speaking Hebrews crossed the Jordan River, they began interacting with the local language of that region, which is presumed to have been a Phoenician/Canaanite form of Aramaic. (The entire middle-eastern region back then spoke various local dialects of an old Aramaic.) It is reasonable to think the Hebrews’ language slowly morphed into a blend of their “Egyptian Hebrew” and the local Canaanite Aramaic. (“Slowly” because unlike when the Hebrews had been prisoners and slaves in Babylon and Egypt, they were now independent conquerors in Israel with less pressure to adapt to a different language.) I’ll call this evolving transitional language “pre-Davidic Hebrew.” We know nothing about this language or its alphabet. A few archeological finds have caused scholars to think the Hebrew language – during the period from crossing the Jordan River to the Babylonian Captivity – underwent at least four identifiable transformations, as did their new alphabet. No Bible manuscripts exist from this period. This “pre-Davidic Hebrew” stage spanned 400 years. Summary: Pre-Davidic Hebrew was used by God’s people when He had them publish His inerrant written word in the language of His Pre-Davidic-speaking people.

#3: King David to Babylonian Captivity (1000 to 600 BC)

From the time of King David until the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity the “pre-Davidic Hebrew” language went through a normal process of change and became “Davidic Hebrew” as a result of continued interaction and trade with a number of nations. We know very little about this “Davidic Hebrew” language other than to say it had a consonant-only alphabet; was spoken by famous Hebrews such as David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel; and is believed to have been used by King Hezekiah’s scribes (three centuries after David and Solomon died) when they made new “Davidic Hebrew”-language copies of old fragile Bible manuscripts (including translations of Moses’ “autographs” written in “Egyptian Hebrew”??) that had aged over the centuries (see Pv 25:1). We have no Bible manuscripts from this “Davidic Hebrew” period. Presumably they were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonians when they conquered Judah. This “Davidic Hebrew” stage lasted 400 years...until the Babylonian Captivity erased the Hebrew’s language, their alphabet, and their temple. Summary: Davidic Hebrew was used by God’s people when He had them publish His inerrant written word in the language of His Davidic-Hebrew-speaking people.

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#4 and #5: Babylonian Captivity to the Septuagint Greek (600 to 150 BC)

The alphabet used in Nebuchadnezzar’s pagan Babylon was originally derived (like all other alphabets) from the alphabet (or a derivative of it) invented by Hebrews in Egypt. A characteristic of this Babylonian alphabet was its heavy, bold, blocky letters. When the Jews were carried into captivity by the Babylonians, they quickly began losing their “Davidic Hebrew,” which morphed into what I’ll call “Babylonian OT Hebrew,” which was a blend of the Babylonian and Hebrew languages. In Babylon many of the captive Jews didn’t bother speaking the Babylonian/Hebrew combo language; a large portion took the easier route by adopting only the non-Hebrew language of their pagan captors, which was a Babylonian-Chaldean dialect of Aramaic. In fact, this is one reason Daniel, under the inspiration of God, wrote at least half of his book in this “original Aramaic.” Ezra, too, used this “pagan” Aramaic to record almost half of his “original-autograph” book. And small portions of the books of Jeremiah and Nehemiah were also written in this “100% pagan” Babylonian-Chaldean dialect of Aramaic. Modern Christians who pompously refer to “the original sacred Hebrew” ignore the fact that God had large portions of several “original autograph” books of His holy Scripture written in the “original pagan Aramaic language” of Babylon. The Jews so quickly adopted the Babylonian-Chaldean Aramaic language of their pagan masters that they even ditched their Davidic Hebrew alphabet and began using the pagan Aramaic block-letter alphabet for both the local Aramaic language and for their own evolving “Babylonian OT Hebrew” language. Most of God’s people didn’t care about “speaking Hebrew” – they cared about communicating. As the Greek language began its inexorable spread, more and more people throughout the region – including Hebrews – began reading and writing what is called “Septuagint Greek.” Therefore, Hebrew Old Testaments were beginning to be translated into widely-varying forms of Septuagint Greek by unknown “translators” of dubious ability. More about the Septuagint Greek later. Summary: Babylonian OT Hebrew and a Babylonian-Chaldean dialect of Aramaic were both used by God’s people when He had them publish His inerrant written word in the new languageS (plural) of His people using their newly-adopted pagan alphabet. That’s right: God presided over several of His famous big-name prophets when they used a “pagan” alphabet to record freshly-inspired “original-autograph” books of the Bible that also incorporated a “pagan” language…which made the resulting Bible manuscripts (that contained two languages and an alphabet that Moses, David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel couldn’t read or speak) official “original-language” and “original autograph” Bible manuscripts. To be clear: These sacred “original autograph” God-inspired books of the Bible are very important because we know exactly and specifically what languages and alphabets God had His prophets use to write them! And the fact that our Lord, whose name is The Word of God, used a mixture of 1) an outright “pagan” language, 2) a form of “Hebrew” that was different from the “Davidic Hebrew” used for centuries – and that was itself far removed and modified from the language and alphabet God had Moses use when recording the first books of the Bible in history – and 3) since the Bible teaches us that a little leaven leavens the whole lump, we submit to God’s perfection by accepting the obvious fact that the books of Daniel, Ezra, Jeremiah, and Nehemiah show that there is nothing “sacred” about this particular language, or “pagan” about that other language or alphabet.

#6: First part of New Testament Era (30 to 1611 AD)

God had His infallible, inerrant NT written in Koine Greek, which was the universal language of the world at that time. Summary: Greek was used by God’s Hebrew people when He had them publish His inerrant written word in the universal language of the world in order to reach His Great Commission people.

#7: Last part of New Testament Era (1611 to present)

God had His infallible, inerrant Bible (OT and NT) written in English in the Authorized 1611 King James Bible. Summary: English was used by God’s people when He had them publish His inerrant written word in the universal language of the world in order to reach His Great Commission people.

Note about the Masoretes’ OT text

The Masoretes were Christ-rejectors who rejected the validity of the quickly-spreading NT, and who tried to claim the error-containing OT books they published (called the “Masoretic Text”) represented God’s entire Bible. And, even though they lived in the NT era, they chose not to publish their work in the well-known universal language of Greek, and chose instead to publish it in an outdated OT dead language that – because nobody (including the Masoretes) was comfortable with it – they decided to add much-disputed little markings to make it more intelligible to other Christ-rejectors. It would have made more sense (sort of) for the pagan Masoretes to have published their OT in the dead-language Babylonian-Chaldean dialect of Aramaic (see #5 above), because at least God actually used it when He had His saints produce His inerrant word. But none of God’s saints, who used a number of different “versions” of Hebrew from 1500 BC to 400 BC, ever used the version of “Masoretic Hebrew” the Masoretes invented. (More about this in chapter 5.) Why didn’t the Masoretes learn from God’s word as recorded in the books of Daniel, Ezra, Jeremiah, and Nehemiah that languages and alphabets are merely tools of communication and as such are neither sacred nor pagan? Why did they instead attempt to resurrect a dead language even they didn’t speak it and had to invent an alphabet for it? And why do modern scholars and scholar wannabes try to assign some kind of contradictory “sacred authority” to this form of dead-language Greek and to that form of dead-language Hebrew by turning a blind/carnal eye to the lessons God taught us with the books of Daniel, Ezra, Jeremiah, and Nehemiah? Because they are casualties of Satan’s very effective war on the word; because his leaven will continue to spread; and because we live in dark times (when having faith in God, having faith in His word as He defines it, and having the faith to take His written word literally and apply it to everything in the world and in us) when Reason-based unbelief is causing us to be our own worst enemies who – like Adam and Eve – are stupidly trying to do what we think is right and good.

Note about the Greek-language Septuagint manuscripts

These Greek translations of the Hebrew OT and (sometimes) copies of the Greek NT were often error-filled, inconsistent, self-contradictory copies that were not made by God’s people; nobody knows who made them…but for a while they were inexpensive to get and fairly popular. Interestingly, it is not unusual for Septuagint Greek OTs to have accurate readings in places the Masoretic Hebrew OTs have errors.

Note about the Latin-language Vulgate of Jerome

This was a fine version written in Latin, and Latin, although widely and commonly spoken, never became the NT’s era’s universal language. Latin was used for two reasons: 1) in a successful attempt (as we’ll see in chapters 2 and 4) to end the confusing “manuscript mess” among the so-called “Old Latin” Bible manuscripts that predated the Latin Vulgate, and 2) centuries later to solidify the dominion of the Roman church when it was competing with the Greek-speaking church in Constantinople. However, the interesting fact that Latin – together with Greek and Hebrew – was used on the cross of Christ, may signify that God used the Vulgate’s thousand-year reign to alleviate the “manuscript mess” (that we’ll address in the next chapter) so His people could get down to the serious business of believing the Bible…just like God would use the KJV to end the “Bible version mess” so we could get down to the serious business of believing the Bible. (In chapter 8 we’ll get into why the KJV’s inerrancy is both important and necessary as a deterrent in this spiritual war on the word of God.)

Let’s review some facts about languages spoken by God’s people throughout history:

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Genesis 11: When God created the multiple languages of the world in Genesis 11, He had not yet divided the human race into saints and pagans. Therefore, every single one of those different languages became “the language of God’s people.” In other words, what specific language somebody speaks is irrelevant.

Egypt: When God’s Hebrews in Egypt began speaking the language of their pagan Egyptian masters, God never voiced concern or anger.

First alphabet: When God’s people in Egypt (probably) developed the world’s first alphabet by borrowing “pagan” hieroglyphic symbols that Egyptians considered “sacred” to their god, the Lord never got angry or complained that the Hebrews’ new “semi-pagan” alphabet would be used to write the Pentateuch…and then this alphabet would become the “semi-pagan” template for the alphabets of the multiple languages around the world that had developed since Genesis 11.

Babylonian Aramaic: When God’s Hebrew-speaking people began speaking the “pagan” Babylonian Aramaic language of their Babylonian captors, God not only didn’t complain, He inspired some of His faithful followers to write parts of several books of the Bible in that “pagan” language rather than in Hebrew.

Temple signs: When Alexander the Great conquered the world, the language of the pagan Greeks became the universal language of the world (as did Latin to a lesser extent when Rome conquered the world). Greek (and Latin to a lesser extent) became so widely spoken by Jews who lived in different parts of the globe that when those Jews traveled to Jerusalem for religious feasts (Jerusalem was overflowing with people during feasts) many of those visiting Jewish tourists had no idea how to speak or read Hebrew. When they wandered around the temple with their wives, friends, and servants – some of whom were Gentiles – those Hebrew visitors couldn’t read the posted signs that warned in large Hebrew letters things like “COURT OF GENTILES ENDS HERE – RESTRICTED AREA AHEAD;” and “COURT OF WOMEN ENDS HERE – RESTRICTED AREA AHEAD.” It was such a big problem that Aaronic priests realized they had to also post those Hebrew-language notices in “pagan” Greek and “pagan” Latin so visiting Hebrews who didn’t speak Hebrew would be able to read them. The Lord Jesus Christ is famous for angrily casting money changers and livestock sellers out of the restricted part of the temple into the unrestricted Court of the Gentiles (where those activities were permitted) …but He never went around angrily ripping down all the warning signs and notices written in “pagan” (falsely so-called) languages.

Cross superscription: When Christ was crucified, He was perfectly content to share His cross with a superscription written in “sacred” Hebrew and in “pagan” Latin and in “pagan” Greek…and to record that fact in Greek in His Book so it could go all around the world and be translated into the languages He created in Genesis 11 so all of His people could read words that conveyed His truth. The superscription on the cross indicates that no one language was considered sufficient to get the message across to passersby…whether they were saints or not.

Talitha cumi: Christ is recorded as saying in Mk 5:41, “Talitha cumi,” which is the local Syriac dialect of the Aramaic language spoken across the region, and which may have been the only language the young Jewish girl and her family were fluent in (see bold print in the next bullet point). Aramaic is one of the Semitic languages and has a number of similar and shared words with Hebrew. For example, abba, which means “father” is used in both Hebrew and Aramaic. Therefore, it looks like the “pagan” Aramaic language that was used when writing several “original autograph” OT books was also spoken by Christ.

Amen and Bethesda: Christ also spoke Hebrew. For example, He used the Hebrew word, amen, several times. (It means “truth,” and has been adopted by several modern languages.) Today an argument rages over whether or not Christ read in Hebrew or in Aramaic (and a few claim He might have read in Greek) in Lk 4:16-21. Some say it had to be “sacred Hebrew” because He called it “scripture;” others say He was probably reading Aramaic because we now know by the time of Christ the Hebrew OT had been translated into both Aramaic and Greek Bible manuscripts because so many Jews no longer spoke Hebrew. Another example of how little modern scholars know about old languages and how little they believe the word of God has ever existed: In Jn 5:2 all Bible versions for all of history said the name “Bethesda” was “in the Hebrew tongue.” That verse in Greek NT manuscripts has the Greek words, Hebraidi dialekto, which has always been translated as “Hebrew dialect,” “Hebrew tongue,” and “Hebrew language.” But in recent years some militant scholars have claimed – based on nothing – that since we think Aramaic was the most-spoken language (but not the only language spoken) among the Jews of Christ’s time, “Bethesda” was probably an Aramaic name. As a result, about 15 or 20 years ago half of the popular modern Bible versions changed the word Hebrew to Aramaic in Jn 5:2. The other half decided to actually look into the matter…and realized there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support the claim/guess that Hebraidi dialekto “probably” means Aramaic dialect…so they continued to use the word “Hebrew” just as all Christians have for almost 2,000 years…but many of those Bible version committees, in an attempt to appear “scholarly,” wimped out by adding a footnote that says the correct word could be “Aramaic” – so the debate itself (even though it’s a stupid one) would undermine our confidence in God and in the authoritative truth of His literal word. And some of the modern Bible versions that wrongly changed it to “Aramaic,” admit in a footnote that “Hebrew” might be correct – but they changed the verse anyway because it makes it look like all of our Bibles throughout history have been wrong, and (they think) it makes it look like they’re smarter than all previous Bible scholars.

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Guesswork-based arguments like these used by scholars have impacted other verses that claim Hebrew was spoken (such as Ac 26:14) in modern versions in the same way. The following three methods – all having to do with insecurity – are used by scholars who attack the KJV to get other scholars to go along with their guesswork:

1) They know how insecure scholars are because they are fully aware of how very little we really know about, well, everything. For example, we saw with relatively major discoveries like Gobekli Tepe, as well as a few other topics covered above, that our ignorance has been broad and far-reaching; and we saw with relatively minor discoveries (such as what we learned in the Ebla tablets concerning Moses’ “centuries-too-early” vocabulary words) that no matter how safe scholars thought it was to contradict the Bible…they have always ended up being wrong. Sadly, however, if these ever-losing “scholars” contradict the Bible with confident, strident voices, that will be enough to convince faithless wimps to surrender and become casualties.

2) Scholars know being a “scholar” fills people with false pride that makes them horrified at the very thought of being exposed as ignorant and wrong…because scholars aren’t supposed to be wrong – so they go with the sludge.

3) Scholars come up with questions about ancient vocabulary for which – because we know so very little – we have no answers. For example: “Since many or most Jews spoke Aramaic most of the time, why, they ask, would they give a gate like Bethesda a Hebrew name that they’d have trouble remembering or pronouncing because they didn’t speak Hebrew?” Then scholars quickly hit their listeners with a condescending follow-up question like, “You do know most of them spoke Aramaic, don’t you?” – as if it’s such an established fact that only idiots wouldn’t know it. Many scholars wimp out and go along with this kind of “unanswered-question-based ‘scholarship’” by parroting the party line about things like Moses actually didn’t write the Pentateuch, and Bethesda was actually an Aramaic name. Only a few scholars have the intellect and intestinal fortitude to remain calm in the face of bullying peer-pressure questions like these. If they did have intestinal fortitude, they’d respond by asking a few questions of their own, such as: “For the sake of argument, let’s presume that an indeterminate number of people in Israel 2,000 years ago didn’t speak Hebrew, and therefore Bethesda might be an Aramaic word so the Aramaic-speaking Hebrews could remember it and pronounce it correctly. Now let’s compare that presumption with the fact that today we know for certain most people in the United States don’t speak Spanish. 2,000 years from now will careless scholars look back at us and – based on “scientific-knowledge-falsely-so-called” decide that the city name “Los Angeles” wasn’t a Spanish name after all because we English-speaking Americans would have too much trouble remembering it and pronouncing it correctly?” And then our intrepid brother might follow that question with ones like these: “If Israelites during the time of Christ really knew as little Hebrew as some scholars claim, why is it that the Apostle Paul thought it a good idea to address the large angry mob of Jews in Jerusalem in the very language he thought most wouldn’t be able to understand? And why did the crowd, once it heard him speaking in Hebrew (Ac 22:2), treat him with more respect?” The “scholar” is trapped; he can’t claim Acts 22:2 should be changed to say “Aramaic” – because it would be contrary to the context: Paul’s impressive use of Greek rather than common Aramaic had just gotten him the respect of the Roman chief captain in Ac 21:37. Therefore, if Paul addressed the crowd of angry Jews in the language of commoners, Aramaic, it would not have caused them to respond with respectful silence. But when he impressed them by speaking Hebrew, the Jews in the crowd wondered if they were wrong in thinking Paul was merely a lightweight apostate; his use of Hebrew might indicate that he really was one of them, that he really was serious about their Hebrew religion. When Paul saw how surprised the crowd was that he was a Hebrew-speaker like them, and when he saw how respectful they became, his pride made him decide to continue impressing them with some of his other dubious credentials: he was not only educated in the law (unlike most of them), but was also (unlike most of them) in with the “big boys” such as Gamaliel, and the high priest, and “all the estate of the elders” (Ac 22:3-5). Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: We know the word “Hebrew” in Jn 5:2 – and everything else in the KJV – is correct because God’s Book gets its unique authority from the miraculous fact that it stands alone in its inerrancy. All other Bible versions and manuscripts in history that we know about have provable errors and contradictions in them.

Pentecost: My last example showing no language is sacred above others is the fact that on Pentecost when the Holy Ghost filled the saints and “gave them utterance” in “other tongues” (that were all “pagan” languages) “of every nation under heaven,” He disappointed modern Christians who think the Holy Spirit erred by not making them speak “sacred Hebrew.”

This chapter is intended to be an exhortive, abbreviated introduction to the fact that God knows what He’s doing. Let’s keep that in mind as we begin delving into some of the specifics of the “manuscript mess.”

Have ears that hear...

and endure to the end, comrades!

The War on the Word ––– Chapter 1 ––– Moses, the Alphabet, the Pentateuch, and the “Original Sacred Languages”

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