Mysteries

Biblical: Garden of Eden

My limited forays into the realm of Biblical mythology arise from the tremendous amount of attention and scholarship it already receives and has for thousands of years.  There is perhaps nothing that can be said in terms of Biblical theory that someone hasn’t already supposed before.  Nevertheless, the first part of the “Book of Genesis” is an interesting collection of mythological material, beginning with the Creation story and ending with the Tower of Babel.  Here all quotations come from the RSV Holy Bible, with YHWH replacing the “LORD God”.   The creation myth from chapter 2 of Genesis, of a different tradition than chapter 1, is full of etiological detail.  Here YHWH is mentioned both as being responsible for the rain and breathing air in the creation of life.  These are the attributes of a sky or thunder god in other mythologies, most notably that of Odin of Norse mythology.  The location of land established is Eden, appears that the garden is in the eastern of Eden, within another translation saying “And YHWH God planted a garden in Eden at the east” (Friedman 2003: 36).   These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that YHWH made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for YHWH had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—then YHWH formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.  And YHWH planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.  And out of the ground YHWH made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.   Here location and geographic detail makes it clear that a single river flowed from Eden into the garden, and at this point became four, however could be interpreted as becoming four before or after it entered the garden.  Another translation says “And a river was going out from Eden to water the garden, and it was dispersed from there and became four heads.” (Friedman 2003: 36) which implies that they split into four before reaching their sources (heads).  While the garden story itself is symbolic, it might harken back to a time and location relevant in early human history.  There are currently two competing excellent locations for the garden, one located in Turkey south of mount Ararat and north of Mesopotamia.  In this case the Pishon is equated with the Uizhun <Pizhun> and the Gihon with the Aras (formerly the Gaihun), shown in Figure 1.  The river names show a convincing linguistic correlation and are associated with the land, while accepting the identification of Ararat as the mountain in Noah story.  The very identification of mount Ararat is curious and suggests an attempt to identify mythical locations within a landscape, but to ones in Asia Minor.  The second location for the garden is at the confluence of four rivers: Tigris, Euphrates, Wadi Batin (Pishon), and Karun (Gihon) as shown in Figure 2, in a region now under the waters of the Persian Gulf.  This matches the geographical description better.  The choice of various names to associate the story with real locations might have been due to later modifications, which means given the two the geographic correspondence is more important.  There is for example no reason to believe that Noah’s mountain was originally Ararat, since every flood myth indicates a different location.  It could be an attempt to reconcile different versions, one that might have originated or been adapted in Asia Minor before being brought into Mesopotamia, perhaps by descendants of Semites that had been captured by the Assyrians.   Figure 1. One postulated location of Eden (source: http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/System/8870/memory/judaic.html)     A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.  The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.  The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Cush.  And the name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.  YHWH took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.      And YHWH commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”   Figure 2. Most likely location of Eden, the garden now beneath the Persian Gulf (source: http://ldolphin.org/eden/)     Here as through the main part of the narrative, the man and woman are not referred to as Adam and Eve, it rather appears that Adam was from ‘adom’ and merely referred to his origin from the ground.  The woman is created from his rib and the flesh that is enclosed therein must be the heart, which beats and causes yearning (falling in love) for the woman, stating “On account of this a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his woman, and they become one flesh.” (Friedman 2003: 37).  Now Josephus writes that God waits until Woman has been made before stating his rules that the tree of knowledge was forbidden.  Woman is currently free from the domination of her husband and Man as yet free from the labors and hardships of agriculture.   Then YHWH said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”  So out of the ground YHWH formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.  The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.  So YHWH caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which YHWH had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.      Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”      Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.  And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.   The snake here should not be equated at all with Satan, it is merely one of the animals among all those created on earth.  Unlike the first creation myth of chapter 1, in this one Man is given an easy life without labor and explains why mankind suffers a life of work and toil.  It also reveals the origin of the human conscience, whereby a man becomes guilty of his deeds or is pleased by them, his knowledge of good and evil.   Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that YHWH had made.      He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?”      And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”      But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die.  For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”      So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.  Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.   Here establishes etiologically explanations for why the snake slithers on the ground and has no speech and the animosity between snakes and humankind.  Josephus adds that God also placed poison beneath the snakes tongue to make it a vile creature as punishment.  It also explains why women suffer pain in childbirth and are required to live in obedience to their husbands.  The assumption being that everything arises from a cause, as the garden of Eden ultimately does: humans are mortal because they were banished from access to the Tree of Life.   And they heard the sound of YHWH walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of YHWH among the trees of the garden.      But YHWH called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”      And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”      He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”      The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”      Then YHWH said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?”      The woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.”      YHWH said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.  I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”      To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”      And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.  In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”   This now is the first mention of the woman being named Eve, the first sentence following is liable to be a later addition.  It does indicate that early human clothing was taken to be made of skins rather than cloth.  Here too YHWH is addressing the other gods, as he had in chapter 1, indicating that the tale never anticipated YHWH to be the only god as was later asserted.   The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.  And YHWH made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.      Then YHWH said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”—therefore YHWH sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Biblical: Exodus of Israel

Just in preparation for the reader, that research relating to the Biblical Exodus can be a life-long pursuit, while what has been presented here was assembled rather quickly and hasn’t taken account of all possible angles, even those I am aware of, and is perhaps not entirely free from errors or repetitions, which is purely due to the brevity with which I have to address such complex and erudite subjects as this, as well as the weedy nature of my references.   When assessing the Exodus story one must be prepared to acknowledge that it need not either be entirely fact or entirely fiction, but that given how the Biblical writers approached the topic, relying upon what knowledge they had available and forming this into a complete narrative of the birth of the Israel nation, the writers were merely working from the material they had at their disposal: accumulated stories that they had to fit together to tell the story they wished to tell. This means that isolated details or events from the Exodus story could be proven but it must be certain that even archaeological or geological or textual proof does not verify the Exodus ever took place, even if it apparently matches in every detail.  For example, a story of pharaoh’s chariots being washed into the sea would be seen as or used as a sign of YHWH’s power, whether or not it had anything to do with the Hebrews sojourn in Egypt.  Any natural event would have been considered as due to the action of a god, usually with purpose.  They might recognize this in the favorable acts of a god against their enemies or an act of god against them, which would be interpreted as a sign that god was unhappy with the people.  For the same reason many flood stories are explained as arising out of a god acting in such a way to punish the people for their sins: the action presupposes a motive.  Anything that might be against the Egyptians could later be held up by the Israelites as proof that their god was showing his power against Egypt.  It could also be that it was merely a story known to them and to others at that time, and that it was of value later to explain its cause and effect as relating directly to their own story.       So here relating to the Exodus story, several would seem to think that if they could archaeologically excavate an Egyptian army from over 3,000 years ago at the bottom of the Red Sea (or Reed Sea), that this would prove the Exodus story happened.  Since the Hebrew books were not written even as an attempt at history it is liable to be something far less inspirational.  If Egyptian chariots were found it would only prove that those who wrote the story knew that pharaoh had lost an army through some event or accident, only later was this worked into the story while also providing a reason for it occurring within the context of the story.  This sounds like an attempt to nullify the use of archaeology to prove the Bible as history, but it is based upon recognition of how and why the Biblical books were written and the purpose they served at the time.  This same approach also applies to the  plagues of Egypt that occur before the Exodus occurs; merely because they can be linked to a natural sequence of events does not mean it had anything to do with the Biblical Exodus; several stories known to those who composed the story would have been linked together, even if they took place decades apart.       What is certain is that Semitic people had lived within the lands of Egypt around the delta, and also the Hebrews known as the Apiru.  It is also clear that during times when Egypt was experiencing a disaster or catastrophe of some sort, that there would have been an undoubted preference to preserve the people of Egypt when the bounty of the land was weakened by periodically forcing all visiting people to pack up and leave, which is likely to have occurred more than once through the eons.  Migrations due to war and famine must have been a common enough occurrence, it is only the resolution and simplicity of the Biblical text that fools us into believing that collections of unrelated events are all kindled out of the same divine purpose.   Exactly who is being spoken of is usually based upon the assumptions as to what is meant by Hebrews.  It has often been taken to mean the Israelites, but it is a more general designation of people that could be compared crudely to vagrants or rather people without a homeland.  This does not mean that the Israelites adopted the term Hebrew to describe themselves, the Hebrews could well include a far broader collection of tribes than the Israelites.  Again here it is important to reinforce that the identity of the Israelites as a people is largely produced by the formation of that identity within the Bible, which serves the very purpose to create a national identity and common history.       With this as background how can the Biblical Exodus be taken when it is clear that Hebrews were coming and going from Egypt from time to time, and that those who resided in Canaan were a collection of people drawn from one place or another?  Without going too far into speculation about their origins, the first historical reference to their occupation of that land comes from the famous Mernaptah Stele, which is dated to 1207 BC.  That these wandering tribes made their place of residence in what appears to be a rather forsaken land, not particularly prized by the more powerful nations that sent their armies through these territories.  All of this taken together would cause us to presume that the Israelites were one tribe that had sojourned in Egypt and for whatever reason were forced to relocate on the outskirts of the better habitable lands in the Near East.  However it is not at all clear that any purity of the tribe was maintained, but rather that there appeared to be other groups experiencing the same circumstances, and of course there were the people who already resided in those territories, called the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites The origins of the Isrealites were not even certain to the historian Tacitus, who writes in book 5 of his Histories:   Some say that the Jews were fugitives from the island of Crete, who settled on the nearest coast of Africa about the time when Saturn was driven from his throne by the power of Jupiter.  Evidence of this is sought in the name.  There is a famous mountain in Crete called Ida; the neighboring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei by a barbarous lengthening of the national name.  Others assert that in the reign of Isis the overflowing population of Egypt, led by Hierosolymus and Judas, discharged itself into the neighboring countries.  Many, again, say that they were a race of Ethiopian origin, who in the time of king Cepheus were driven by fear and hatred of their neighbors to seek a new dwelling-place.  Others describe them as an Assyrian horde who, not having sufficient territory, took possession of part of Egypt, and founded cities of their own in what is called the Hebrew country, lying on the borders of Syria.  Others, again, assign a very distinguished origin to the Jews, alleging that they were the Solymi, a nation celebrated in the poems of Homer, who called the city which they founded Hierosolyma after their own name.  Here we find the name Heirosolymus (Holy Solym) probably equivalent to the King Solomon of the Bible (although it might have been, like Judas, a legendary or mythical founder of the nation rather than a real king).  But here too are several plausible means by which people ended up in the hill lands of Caanan.  Tacitus even refers to an Assyrian horde who might have been known to the Egyptians as the Hyksos, who were expelled from Egypt around 1470 BC, although Jewish historian Josephus equated the Hyksos with the Israelites.  Tribes who resided in Egypt for a time and were forced to leave during a disaster might have been left with only a few places to go; some might well have gone off to Ethiopia and others up into Canaan, the caveat being that they could only move into territory that was not already being occupied by anyone else, or rather that those present there could put up little resistance to their settling there.       Archaeologist John Romer has put it forward that the god of the Israelites was rather like an Egyptian god, and further that as the single power in the world was used as the focal point for the unification of the tribes of Israel, which might merely indicate that the tribes themselves were the diverse groups who often were termed the Hebrews by the civilizations of the Near East and required a coalition army to preserve themselves. Within this context the story of the Exodus would not have applied to 600,000 people, which is in all likelihood a numbers from a later census of the people in that region, who would have no appreciation for the mathematical concept of exponential growth.  However, this does not mean that thousands of people were not journeying in and out of Egypt in large waves of migration within a given time frame, with Egyptian armies there to assure that they had completely evacuated the land.       So here we have a somewhat prosaic but perhaps memorable event when several groups were moving out of Egypt at the same time, causing a rather long procession that was well remembered.  However, it speaks nothing of Moses, nothing of the law being brought down from the mountain of God.  Tacitus continues his history with this story of the Jews origins:   Most writers, however, agree in stating that once a disease, which horribly disfigured the body, broke out over Egypt; that king Bocchoris, seeking a remedy, consulted the oracle of Hammon, and was bidden to cleanse his realm, and to convey into some foreign land this race detested by the gods. The people, who had been collected after diligent search, finding themselves left in a desert, sat for the most part in a stupor of grief, till one of the exiles, Moyses by name, warned them not to look for any relief from God or man, forsaken as they were of both, but to trust to themselves, taking for their heaven-sent leader that man who should first help them to be quit of their present misery. They agreed, and in utter ignorance began to advance at random. Nothing, however, distressed them so much as the scarcity of water, and they had sunk ready to perish in all directions over the plain, when a herd of wild asses was seen to retire from their pasture to a rock shaded by trees. Moyses followed them, and, guided by the appearance of a grassy spot, discovered an abundant spring of water. This furnished relief. After a continuous journey for six days, on the seventh they possessed themselves of a country, from which they expelled the inhabitants, and in which they founded a city and a temple. This is what appears to be the more realistic and less mystical account of what is turned into a grand scale within the Book of Exodus.  Here it is set at the time of Bocchoris in the 8th century BC, which would mean that the duration between the Exodus from Egypt and the Babylonian Captivity, Judah's entire history, was a mere 130 years.[1]  (But again it is likely that the people of the region never were unified in history as closely as they are portrayed within the pages of the Bible.)  Even so, there is no reason to believe that this itself should be taken as historic.  It could very well be that this Moyses was a rather different figure, even a mythical figure, who was responsible for finding and establishing the divine law before they even descended into Egypt.  That is, the story of Moses performing miracles and speaking with God on his mountain and such was already known to the emigrants as part of their mythological tradition.  There is good evidence for this that will be spoken of later. This would also support the very simple interpretation that John Romer has put forward, that the entire Exodus story is a creation myth about the birth of the nation of Israel.  That the name Moses itself is the Egyptian word for “birth”, and thus the attempt to make a story would have relied upon motifs and recollections that were known to those who wrote the books, had myths and legends to go by, but otherwise were writing in a manner to create what it must have been like.  This does not preclude the notion that the Exodus was based upon memories of tribes coming out of Egypt, an “event” that defined the relationship between YHWH and his people, their traditions, their covenant, and their sacred laws.  Tacitus continues the story of Moyses with the following paragraph: Moyses, wishing to secure for the future his authority over the nation, gave them a novel form of worship, opposed to all that is practiced by other men. Things sacred with us, with them have no sanctity, while they allow what with us is forbidden. In their holy place they have consecrated an image of the animal by whose guidance they found deliverance from their long and thirsty wanderings. They slay the ram, seemingly in derision of Hammon, and they sacrifice the ox, because the Egyptians worship it as Apis. They abstain from swine's flesh, in consideration of what they suffered when they were infected by the leprosy to which this animal is liable. By their frequent fasts they still bear witness to the long hunger of former days, and the Jewish bread, made without leaven, is retained as a memorial of their hurried seizure of corn. We are told that the rest of the seventh day was adopted, because this day brought with it a termination of their toils; after a while the charm of indolence beguiled them into giving up the seventh year also to inaction. But others say that it is an observance in honor of Saturn, either from the primitive elements of their faith having been transmitted from the Idaei, who are said to have shared the flight of that God, and to have founded the race, or from the circumstance that of the seven stars which rule the destinies of men Saturn moves in the highest orbit and with the mightiest power, and that many of the heavenly bodies complete their revolutions and courses in multiples of seven.   So now moving on from Tacitus, what else comes out of history itself that hasn’t already been mentioned?  Nothing it seems of reliable substance, which makes some a bit too inclined to look at the only source that fills in this gaping historical hole: what does the Bible have to say?  The true and recognizable form of Judea that existed at the time of the Roman Empire arose out of what remnant of priests and nobles returned from Babylon to their former land, finding what people were there and any who had returned there and attempting to reestablish themselves into an Israelite nation.  These are the events and persons that are most responsible for creating the Bible books in the form we know of them today, where the primary endeavor was to unify the people politically under the re-established priesthood of YHWH.   So to continue, the telling here consists of the story of the Exodus taken from the J (Judah version) Book of Exodus with some passages retained from the Book of Numbers as determined by Richard Friedman in The Bible with Sources Revealed.  These passages are from the RSV version with designating chapter and line numbers removed and with the original tetragrammaton YHWH replacing LORD.       The first passage links the preceding Joseph story to the Moses story, while there is every reason to believe that they were not related in any manner.  The following account in no way reclaims an original version of the Exodus story, but it is liable to be closest to the initial telling.  Here even in this version it appears to be a combination of two separate events, the story of the Hebrew Moses who brought YHWH’s law down from his mountain, and the story of the Israelite emigration out of Egypt, which might well have been based on a living memory among the tribes.  It is only within this first section that the term Hebrew is used, afterwards it is always Israel.   Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation.  Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.”  Now a man from the house of Levi went and took to wife a daughter of Levi.  The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.  And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river’s brink.  And his sister stood at a distance, to know what would be done to him.  Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, and her maidens walked beside the river; she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to fetch it.  When she opened it she saw the child; and lo, the babe was crying.  She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.”  Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?”  And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.”  So the girl went and called the child’s mother.  And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away, and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.”  So the woman took the child and nursed him.  And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son; and she named him Moses, for she said, “Because I drew him out of the water.” One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people.  He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.  When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together; and he said to the man that did the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow?”  He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?  Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”  Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.”  When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh, and stayed in the land of Mid’ian; and he sat down by a well.  Now the priest of Mid’ian had seven daughters; and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock.  The shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock.  When they came to their father Reu’el, he said, “How is it that you have come so soon today?”  They said, “An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and even drew water for us and watered the flock.”  He said to his daughters, “And where is he?  Why have you left the man?  Call him, that he may eat bread.”  And Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zippo’rah.  She bore a son, and he called his name Gershom; for he said, “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.”  In the course of those many days the king of Egypt died.   What follows then recounts Moses first meeting with YHWH in the wilderness, although the remaining J text does not reveal how he arrived there, which is supplemented with a modified passage from chapter 3 of E (Israel version).  Here too is where YHWH promises the land he is giving to Israel.  The burning bush has been variously scientifically explained, but it only need be a folk memory of how a god might manifest himself, which would be counted as a miracle or wonder that would clearly be applicable to their own god YHWH.   [Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Reu’el; and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to the mountain of YHWH.]  And the angel of YHWH appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.  And Moses said, “I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.”  When YHWH saw that he turned aside to see. Then he said, “Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”  Then YHWH said, “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Per’izzites, the Hivites, and the Jeb’usites. I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand.  So I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt with all the wonders which I will do in it; after that he will let you go.  And I will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and when you go, you shall not go empty, but each woman shall ask of her neighbor, and of her who sojourns in her house, jewelry of silver and of gold, and clothing, and you shall put them on your sons and on your daughters; thus you shall despoil the Egyptians.”    Here there follows the single reference to Aaron, which implies that it is not an original part of J, although it is included as part of J by Friedman.  All of the miracles are absent here, but some that are present in E merely define Israelite traditions, which includes the Passover meal and the sacrifice of the first-born to YHWH.  This also relates back to the original telling of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in chapter 22 of “Genesis” in E, where he actually performs the sacrifice: “And they came to the place that God had said to him.  And Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and he bound Isaac, his son, and put him on the altar on top of the wood.  And Abraham put his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son.  And He said, “I swear by me that because you did this thing and didn’t withhold your son, your only one, that I’ll bless you and multiply your seed lie the stars of the skies and lie the sand that’s on the seashore, and your seed will possess its enemies’ gate.  And all the nations of the earth will be blessed through your see because you listened to my voice.” (Freidman 2003, 64-65)  The other miracles have been variously explained and will be addressed later.   And YHWH said to Moses in Mid’ian, “Go back to Egypt; for all the men who were seeking your life are dead.”  So Moses took his wife and his sons and set them on an ass, and went back to the land of Egypt.  At a lodging place on the way YHWH met him and sought to kill him.  Then Zippo’rah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it, and said, “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!”  So he let him alone.  Then it was that she said, “You are a bridegroom of blood,” because of the circumcision. Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “Thus says YHWH, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’”  But Pharaoh said, “Who is YHWH, that I should heed his voice and let Israel go?  I do not know YHWH, and moreover I will not let Israel go.”   So what follows is the people of Israel leaving without pharaoh’s knowledge.  The miracle of the Red Sea in this early version is a pushing back of the sea as a result of a strong east wind.  This suggests that within the story the chariots were driven into the sea as a result of the fear and confusion they felt.  It could very well reflect an actual episode where chariots were swept into the sea at some time through some circumstance, but it wouldn’t have to be.  Another translation says: “And the sea went back to its strong flow toward morning, and Egypt was fleeing toward it.  And YHWH tossed the Egyptians into the sea.” (Friedman 2003:144)  Just as the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night could again be merely a godlike manifestation appropriate to YHWH as well.   And YHWH went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night; the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people. When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, he made ready his chariot and took his army with him.  The Egyptians pursued them, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were in great fear.  And Moses said to the people, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of YHWH, which he will work for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again.  YHWH will fight for you, and you have only to be still.”  And the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them.  And there was the cloud and the darkness; and the night passed without one coming near the other all night.  And YHWH drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land.  And in the morning watch YHWH in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians, and discomfited the host of the Egyptians; and the Egyptians said, “Let us flee from before Israel; for YHWH fights for them against the Egyptians.”  And the sea returned to its wonted flow when the morning appeared; and the Egyptians fled into it, and YHWH routed the Egyptians in the midst of the sea.   A most significant piece of evidence that Moses was the only one menaced by the Egyptians arises out of the “Song of the Sea”, which is contained in “Exodus” chapter 15, considered to be the most ancient text preserved within the Hebrew Bible.  It is also likely how this poem was interpreted that created the story of the Israelite passage through the Red Sea told above. Here we see that the original singer of the song is Moses, who is portraying the event from a personal perspective saying YHWH “has become my salvation”, it is a singular expression indicating that in the initial story it was only about the chariots and Moses, with no Exodus from Israel.  Later he refers to YHWH leading the people to god’s holy abode.  It is only because it is interpreted within the context of the Exodus that it appears to be descriptive of the events being portrayed.      That Moses speaks of YHWH’s right hand, or the powerful hand is often used by other cultures as being descriptive of an earthquake, which is indicative of the powerful force used by the thunder god upon the earth to create cataclysms.  YHWH here as god of the wind and earthquake, and by extension the thunder storm, appears to indicate that the events arose out of some form of natural event that was already a myth before it was combined in to the Exodus story.   Thus YHWH saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore.  And Israel saw the great work which YHWH did against the Egyptians, and the people feared YHWH; and they believed in YHWH and in his servant Moses.  Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to YHWH, saying, “I will sing to YHWH, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.  YHWH is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.  YHWH is a man of war; YHWH is his name. “Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea; and his picked officers are sunk in the Red Sea.  The floods cover them; they went down into the depths like a stone.  Thy right hand, YHWH, glorious in power, thy right hand, YHWH, shatters the enemy.  In the greatness of thy majesty thou overthrowest thy adversaries; thou sendest forth thy fury, it consumes them like stubble.  At the blast of thy nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.  The enemy said, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.  I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.’ Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the mighty waters. “Who is like thee, YHWH, among the gods?  Who is like thee, majestic in holiness, terrible in glorious deeds, doing wonders?  Thou didst stretch out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them. “Thou hast led in thy steadfast love the people whom thou hast redeemed, thou hast guided them by thy strength to thy holy abode.  The peoples have heard, they tremble; pangs have seized on the inhabitants of Philistia.  Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed; the leaders of Moab, trembling seizes them; all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.  Terror and dread fall upon them; because of the greatness of thy arm, they are as still as a stone, till thy people, YHWH, pass by, till the people pass by whom thou hast purchased.  Thou wilt bring them in, and plant them on thy own mountain, the place, YHWH, which thou hast made for thy abode, the sanctuary, YHWH, which thy hands have established.  YHWH will reign for ever and ever.”   Now that they have come out of Egypt they assemble at the mountain of YHWH, here is named Sinai, but otherwise not located, would have been a holy mountain because of its peculiar properties.  Also here is included an explanation for how Marah received its name, which is a typical construct of mythology.   They went three days in the wilderness and found no water.  When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter; therefore it was named Marah.  And the people murmured against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?”  And he cried to YHWH; and YHWH showed him a tree, and he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.  Then YHWH said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law or not.  On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily.”  They ate the manna, till they came to the border of the land of Canaan. And YHWH said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments, and be ready by the third day; for on the third day YHWH will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.  And you shall set bounds for the people round about, saying, ‘Take heed that you do not go up into the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death; no hand shall touch him, but he shall be stoned or shot; whether beast or man, he shall not live.’ When the trumpet sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.”  So Moses went down from the mountain to the people, and consecrated the people; and they washed their garments.  And he said to the people, “Be ready by the third day; do not go near a woman.”   This next section speaks of the action of YHWH descending to the mountain, and his establishment of the religious law, the original Ten Commandments, which are specifically the law relating to YHWH rather than encompassing practical, civil, or criminal law.   On the morning of the third day Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because YHWH descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.  And YHWH came down upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain; and YHWH called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up.  And YHWH said to Moses, “Go down and warn the people, lest they break through to YHWH to gaze and many of them perish.  And also let the priests who come near to YHWH consecrate themselves, lest YHWH break out upon them.”  And Moses said to YHWH, “The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai; for thou thyself didst charge us, saying, ‘Set bounds about the mountain, and consecrate it.’”  And YHWH said to him, “Go down, and come up; but do not let the priests and the people break through to come up to YHWH, lest he break out against them.”  So Moses went down to the people and told them.   And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.  YHWH said to Moses, “Cut two tables of stone.  Be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain.  No man shall come up with you, and let no man be seen throughout all the mountain; let no flocks or herds feed before that mountain.”  So Moses cut two tables of stone; and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as YHWH had commanded him, and took in his hand two tables of stone.  And YHWH descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of YHWH.  YHWH passed before him, and proclaimed, “YHWH, YHWH, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”  And Moses made haste to bow his head toward the earth, and worshiped.  And he said, “If now I have found favor in thy sight, O Lord, let YHWH, I pray thee, go in the midst of us, although it is a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thy inheritance.” And he said, “Behold, I make a covenant.  Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been wrought in all the earth or in any nation; and all the people among whom you are shall see the work of YHWH; for it is a terrible thing that I will do with you.  Observe what I command you this day.  Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Per’izzites, the Hivites, and the Jeb’usites.  Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither you go, lest it become a snare in the midst of you.  You shall tear down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their Ashe’rim (for you shall worship no other god, for YHWH, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods. “You shall make for yourself no molten gods. “The feast of unleavened bread you shall keep.  Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month Abib; for in the month Abib you came out from Egypt.  All that opens the womb is mine, all your male cattle, the firstlings of cow and sheep.  The firstling of an ass you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck.  All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem.  And none shall appear before me empty. “Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; in plowing time and in harvest you shall rest.  And you shall observe the feast of weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year’s end.  Three times in the year shall all your males appear before YHWH God, the God of Israel.  For I will cast out nations before you, and enlarge your borders; neither shall any man desire your land, when you go up to appear before YHWH your God three times in the year. “You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left until the morning.  The first of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of YHWH your God.  You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” And YHWH said to Moses, “Write these words; in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.”  And he was there with YHWH forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water.  And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.   Now they have the commandments and in the following section the appearance of the ark that housed them.  There is every reason to believe that this was an artifact, however that it was introduced here as originating with the law rather than being used to house law tablets at a later date.  There is a scientific theory that the ark was a specially made box that held a charge like a capacitor, holding a potential difference between two metal plates.  The knowledge that such boxes produced an electric charge might well have indicated to people that the god inhabited the box, which would make it an ideal keeping place.  YHWH’s home was supposed to lie between the two cherubs.   And Moses said to Hobab the son of Reuel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law, “We are setting out for the place of which YHWH said, ‘I will give it to you’; come with us, and we will do you good; for YHWH has promised good to Israel.”  But he said to him, “I will not go; I will depart to my own land and to my kindred.”  And he said, “Do not leave us, I pray you, for you know how we are to encamp in the wilderness, and you will serve as eyes for us.  And if you go with us, whatever good YHWH will do to us, the same will we do to you.” So they set out from the mount of YHWH three days’ journey; and the ark of the covenant of YHWH went before them three days’ journey, to seek out a resting place for them.  And the cloud of YHWH was over them by day, whenever they set out from the camp.  And whenever the ark set out, Moses said, “Arise, YHWH, and let thy enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee.”  And when it rested, he said, “Return, YHWH, to the ten thousand thousands of Israel.”   Now having arrived at their land they are interested in coming down into the land, the reappearance of the Nephilim who are mentioned before the Noah story are here still to dwell in Canaan.  What follows after this is the commencement of the story of Joshua and the Israelites, which continues the narrative of E rather than J.  The J version completes the Exodus with the following paragraphs.   And [he] said to them, “Go up into the Negeb yonder, and go up into the hill country, and see what the land is, and whether the people who dwell in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many, and whether the land that they dwell in is good or bad, and whether the cities that they dwell in are camps or strongholds, and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there is wood in it or not.  Be of good courage, and bring some of the fruit of the land.”  Now the time was the season of the first ripe grapes. So they went up and spied out the land from the wilderness of Zin to Rehob, near the entrance of Hamath.  They went up into the Negeb, and came to Hebron; and Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak, were there.  (Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.) And they came to the Valley of Eshcol, and cut down from there a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and they carried it on a pole between two of them; they brought also some pomegranates and figs.  That place was called the Valley of Eshcol, because of the cluster which the men of Israel cut down from there. And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us; it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.  Yet the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large; and besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there.  The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb; the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country; and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.”  But Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once, and occupy it; for we are well able to overcome it.”  Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we.  And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim); and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”   And they said to one another, “Let us choose a captain, and go back to Egypt.”  And YHWH said to Moses, “How long will this people despise me?  And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs which I have wrought among them?  I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they.” But Moses said to YHWH, “Then the Egyptians will hear of it, for thou didst bring up this people in thy might from among them, and they will tell the inhabitants of this land.  They have heard that thou, YHWH, art in the midst of this people; for thou, YHWH, art seen face to face, and thy cloud stands over them and thou goest before them, in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night.  Now if thou dost kill this people as one man, then the nations who have heard thy fame will say, `Because YHWH was not able to bring this people into the land which he swore to give to them, therefore he has slain them in the wilderness.’ And now, I pray thee, let the power of YHWH be great as thou hast promised, saying, `YHWH is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation.’ Pardon the iniquity of this people, I pray thee, according to the greatness of thy steadfast love, and according as thou hast forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.” Then YHWH said, “I have pardoned, according to your word; but truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of YHWH, none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs which I wrought in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the proof these ten times and have not hearkened to my voice, shall see the land which I swore to give to their fathers; and none of those who despised me shall see it.  But my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me fully, I will bring into the land into which he went, and his descendants shall possess it.  Now, since the Amalekites and the Canaanites dwell in the valleys, turn tomorrow and set out for the wilderness by the way to the Red Sea.” And Moses told these words to all the people of Israel, and the people mourned greatly.  And they rose early in the morning, and went up to the heights of the hill country, saying, “See, we are here, we will go up to the place which YHWH has promised; for we have sinned.”  But Moses said, “Why now are you transgressing the command of YHWH, for that will not succeed?  Do not go up lest you be struck down before your enemies, for YHWH is not among you.  For there the Amalekites and the Canaanites are before you, and you shall fall by the sword; because you have turned back from following YHWH, YHWH will not be with you.”  But they presumed to go up to the heights of the hill country, although neither the ark of the covenant of YHWH, nor Moses, departed out of the camp.  Then the Amalekites and the Canaanites who dwelt in that hill country came down, and defeated them and pursued them, even to Hormah.   When were the events of the Exodus to have taken place and can it be fixed in time to an event?  If one wished one could place it at the time of the Hyksos Expulsion, but is there any way that this could be proven? Perhaps the discussion can proceed by investigating what others have said about the Exodus story, two of which were the documentaries Exodus Decoded and Exodus Revealed, the former presents in a highly visual manner the theories of Simcha Jacobovici, the other a collection of other explanations for singular events.  Jacabovici relies heavily upon the Tempest Stele from Egypt from the reign of Ahmose in the early 18th Dynasty and then relates these events to the Hyksos Expulsion. Although Jacabovici is attempting to relate events in Egyptian history and natural occurrences to the narrative account of the Exodus, it is essential to his theory that they all occurred coincidentally.  In speaking of the ark of the covenant, he relates the Jewish tribe of Dan to the Danaoi who lived in Mycenae in the Bronze Age.  The grave marker stones from somewhat before 1500 BC that he uses to show the story of the Exodus only reveal a solitary figure holding a staff being pursued by a chariot.  While he is inclined to see the depictions as leaving out the masses of Israelites, this is an assumption that cannot be substantiated.  It might be possible to locate the source of the cataclysm of pharaoh’s consumed chariots by relating it back to an earlier event, as Jacobovici does to the eruption of Thera, which is held to have occurred about 1500 BC by archaeologists but has been located precisely to 1628 BC based upon other evidence.  An Egyptian scribe wrote:   For nine days, no one could see the face of his fellow.  The sun is covered and does not shine in the sight of men.  If only it would shine only for one hour.  No one knows when it is midday.  One’s shadow is not discernable.  The sun in the heavens resembles the moon. (Lost Civilizations 1995: Aegean)   And in Chinese records comes this reference from the same year:   In the 29th year of King Chieh the sun was dimmed.  Ice formed in the summer mornings, and frost in the sixth month.  Heavy rain toppled buildings and temples.  The five cereal crops withered and died. (Lost Civilizations 1995: Aegean)   The rings of a 5,000 year old bristlecone pine from California indicates the same year as a dark ring indicating the darkness of cold, and the Greenland glacier also contains the Thera ash within 7 years of this same date. (Lost Civilizations 1995: Aegean) So this puts the time of the Thera explosion over 100 years before the time of the Hyksos expulsion and the grave markers at Mycenae.  It is possible that at the time of Thera’s eruption, or perhaps due to some other occurrence, that charioteers training near the Red Sea were overcome by a tidal wave, an exhibit of a god’s power or punishment and a column of smoke and fire, which were known in Egypt and later incorporated into the story of Moses receiving the law from the mountain of YHWH.  It still doesn’t prove that Moses is a historical personage, but far less can be assumed about him that is portrayed within the pages of the Bible, not least of which any of the Torah being his own composition. Jacabovici compares the Tempest stele telling of a great storm and darkness as being equitable to the circumstances of the Exodus, equates the stele statement that statues of the gods of Egypt had crashed down to the Bible statement that the “God of Israel passed judgement on the gods of Egypt”.  Then he relates this to the Hyksos explusion from Egyptian histories, corresponding to about 1500 BC.  There is no reason to think that whatever catastrophe might have inspired the stele did not also provoke the removal of foreigners from Egyptian soil, but there is nothing here that proves any connection to the Exodus, unless one is limited to Biblical instances of storms and darkness for comparison.  It is rather similar to taking any sunken buildings discovered as being the inspiration for the Atlantis story.  There must be several instances where horrendous storms and cataclysms manifested themselves within the past 10,000 years, but finding evidence of one of them does not act as confirmation of a textual reference to one of them.  For the numerous events we have come to know there are many times more than have not been passed along to us, so specific evidence needs to substantiate any connection far more than looking for general or vague similarities.   What has been said thus far substantiates only that Moses was a mythical figure who held a role in the creation of the Israelite nation that came out of Egypt; he was also a figure who brought the law down from the mountain of YHWH, which is equivalent to how Egyptian laws were attained upon holy mountains.  Thus there is nothing exceptional in the ancient world about the events portrayed about a foundation myth where some legendary content had survived, but not enough to be able to substantiate the existence of any historical personages, even the pharaoh of the Exodus is left unnamed.      Is there anything aside from belief that could bring anything about the Exodus story into a historical time period.  Concerning the 10 miracles that are presented outside of the J version, in E and P (Priestly version) they are given in Figure 1.   Figure 1.   miracle E P 1 Staff into snake Staff into serpent 2 Nile water turned to blood Nile water turned to blood 3 Infestation of frogs   4 Insect swarm Lice 5 Livestock epidemic   6 Plagues Boils and sores 7 Heavy hail and lightning   8 Locust swarm   9 Three days of darkness   10 Death of the first born Death of the first born   Figure 2 reveals how each of the two accounts from Exodus Decoded and Exodus Revealed explain each of these phenomena.  The former links these together as arising from the volcanic activity that caused or was the result of the Thera explosion, the latter does not attempt to tie them all together.   Figure 2.   miracle Exodus Decoded Exodus Revealed 1 none none 2 Iron hydroxide turns water red Pfiesteria turns water red 3 Frogs leave deoxygenated water Fish death causes explosion in frog population 4 Dead frogs attract insects Culicoides 5 Epidemics follow insects Biting midge 6 Carbon dioxide mixed with air Plagues 7 Volcanic hail Hail 8 Locusts descend due to cold temperatures Locust swarm 9 Ash cloud Sandstorm 10 Carbon dioxide moving close to ground, first born sleep close to the floor Moldy grain, first born received double portion   While there seems to be good reason the accumulating miracles could be the outcome of the single event of a volcanic eruption, there is no reason to think that they need to be associated either.  It would seem that somewhere there might have been remembrance of individual plagues or a series of plagues that befell Egypt that were thus used here when incorporated into the Exodus story, but still fails to lend any support to the notion that the events are historical, even if the plagues themselves were the result of the Thera eruption.       As for Jacabovici’s association of the Mycenae grave stones, it remains unconvincing given that they are not only investigated in isolation but also do not portray the events described without heavy interpretation.  It is difficult to assess the validity of his claim to finding a depiction of the Ark of the Covenant amongst the golden jewelry, but this might prove the only shining light out of his whole investigation, although critics have shown a distinct mismatch between its representation and the descriptions of if from the Bible. The myth of the Exodus could incorporate real events, because the compilers of the Hebrew myths now contained within the Bible might have relied upon sources that had some basis in history.  This is why even if archaeological evidence is uncovered it would not prove the Bible true, it would only prove the sources the Hebrew authors had knowledge of these events and used them to tell the story they wanted to tell.  The only way it could be otherwise would be to assume the Bible as an initial and sole source for historical documentation, which of course is the very assumption the evidence is being used to prove (the proof itself is based upon the assumption being proven).  In addition, merely because Biblical sources derive from real events does not make the sources themselves historically accurate either.       Someone could argue that all this has done is to put forth an unattainable requirement for proof, yet it is significant if one wishes to claim something is historically valid that a case needs to be tested against counterclaims.  Just because an explanation gathers evidence and is plausible is not sufficient to then claim it is close enough to be deemed historically valid.  So then what would be required in order to prove that the Biblical Exodus actually took place at all, perhaps separated from the miracles involved.  Even if one might equate it with the Hyksos expulsion, this event was hardly the Biblical Exodus.  As for Moses being a historical figure: in the same way, if Jesus were just a man living in Roman Palestine and never performed miracles or rose from the dead, then why pay any attention to him at all?  Once the miracles are removed then the figure lacks its most salient features and is no longer worth mentioning.  Which is why in the case of Moses, as in the case of Jesus, they exist to act as mythical founding figures and fulfill all the requisite functions that they must: from being a leader of the people, to being a speaker of the law, establisher of traditions and rituals, to being a miracle maker, and a direct prophet from God.  Their existence only arises or remains valuable because of these things not in spite of them.  So this being said there is no reason to imagine that physical evidence exists for a mythical episode.  It only remains the compelling nature of the story, which was the reason it was conveyed in the first place, that permits it to enlarge the imagination into belief.       Thus the only conclusion that comes out of this is that what is being conveyed in Exodus is a very well-collected and articulated myth of the birth of the nation of Israel, that Moses was a mythical figure in this regard, and that the people of Israel never undertook an Exodus into Canaan in any way like the Bible portrays, which is not the conclusion I expected when starting this investigation.     [1] The first independent reference to the Kingdom of Judah is around 750 BC, which is precariously close to Tacitus' date of the Exodus as occurring c. 720 BC.  This is quite distinct from references to the People of Israel or the Kingdom of Israel, and recent theories presented by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman suggest there was no unified Kingdom, which also appears to be corroborated by Tacitus’ account.

Life on Earth: Origin

Our hopes for life in the universe and our familiarity with it here on Earth can create a sense that there must be thousands of worlds with life like on our planet and several of those more advanced than we are must be capable of interstellar travel, of a sort we could only dream about today.  No evidence has been found or produced to support the existence of visits from extraterrestrial alien life to Earth.  In fact, there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life at all, anywhere. Certainly science fiction has filled the cosmos with life-forms of varying humanoid forms and other imaginable forms, but this is surely deceptive.  Even as short as 50-100 year ago people used to believe that there must be life on the cloudy “tropical world” of Venus and upon the inimical and hard world of Mars, crisscrossed with “canals”, while now we know from probe and satellite investigations that these imaginations were entirely misplaced. Despite the stories and documentaries and movies about aliens from other planets, there is no known planet apart from the Earth that supports life, and there is very good reason to believe that despite our own perspective from a life-abundant planet, that life and such diversity of life is not only uncommon but it is very likely unknown in the rest of the galaxy and just as rare in other galaxies.  This is more clear as it becomes more known to us exactly how many favorable characteristics of our system are required in order to produce a planet that is able to support life to the extent we are familiar with.  Even if life does exist elsewhere, there is no question that life on Earth today is itself unique. What follows then is an attempt to accumulate a sense of what is understood about the unique or rare circumstances that have permitted the arising, growth and continuation of life on the Earth.   First, the Earth is relatively free from cosmic disaster such as bombardment from asteroids, comets or other planets, although it is well known that both at the time of its earliest formation and even into recent time’s impacts have caused localized and global disruptions and extinctions. Beyond the existence and requirements for the universe, which is a matter still of untold reserve and mystery, the way matter congregates is into bodies we call suns which are amassed into galaxies.  Galaxies have a center that has been recently found to be the source of a great amount of radiation.  This appears to be the reason why our own life-imbued system lies quite far out on the furthest tendrils of the spiral galaxy, far from this dangerous galactic radiation that would otherwise be inimical to life.  Within the Sun system itself, radiation from the sun, cosmic rays, and heavy particles from various sources are also of danger. Life as we know it exists within a certain range of temperatures, and is known to have adapted to the wild extremes upon this planet, but other forms of radiation are inimical to life, which requires chemical bonds in complex molecules that are thus damaged.[1]  The major circumstances that benefit life on Earth are what the Earth and Sun system provide in relation to preventing the intrusion of radiation and creating an environment that permits the complex molecules required for life within an environment suited to it within suitable ranges of pressure and temperature, regardless of what molecule it prefers as its basic building blocks.[2]   Stable temperature requires a relatively circular orbit, so that the planet is not so elliptical that it either comes too close or goes too far from the sun.  Or, that it increases the possibility of orbital change or collision with other planets.  This is also so in relation to dual-sun systems, which would create wild fluctuations in temperature and gravity that would also be detrimental even with circular orbits.      By comparisons with the other inner planets of the Solar System, the reason the Earth supports life, in addition to its fairly good relative distance from the Sun, is that the inner core of the planet also produces its own thermal radiation that keeps it at a more-or-less stable temperature.  It is known that the proto-Earth in the early solar system collided with another planet, perhaps similar to Mercury, which caused the other body to impart most of its own iron core into the Earth, thus producing an iron core twice as large as that of its sister planet Venus.  This iron core is what produces the strong magnetic field of the Earth, which deflects most of the harmful cosmic and solar radiation it receives.  (In addition there is protection provided from UV radiation by the ozone layer and the Van-Allen belts.)  From the resultant bodies of this collision, the Moon has continued to play a vital role in relation to the story of Earth, to pull upon it and thus through friction to keep the inner temperature of the Earth hotter.  Thus the Earth continues to generate heat beyond what the Sun provides, and likewise encourages the release of gasses and vapors through the Earth from resultant volcanic activities to replenish the atmosphere.  This is due to the impact of the dynamics of gravitation between the Moon and Earth that make the Earth a dynamic rather than stagnant world.[3] One could imagine that other configurations might produce conditions suitable to life, but these taken together are quite remarkable.  The large oceans upon the earth also play a role in the stable temperatures across the planet, but it also seems that water is vital to life.  Life developed on Earth under these favorable conditions only shortly after the initial inner temperature of the planet had cooled sufficiently, and while process and generation of the first and original spark of life is not specifically known, it is not hard to imagine how it might have arisen, although the reality is not likely to match even the best thought-out models and theories. We are speaking here only of planets that are able to generate life versus those that might be able to accommodate life that has already been generated.  There are perhaps systems that could sustain some form of life, but that are not favorable enough to permit the start of life upon them, so would still remain desolate.  Until the specific mechanism for the birth of life is known, whether it need be a burst of energy from lightning or volcanic action, the thorough extent of the possibilities will remain unknown.  But it appears that an active planet is required to sustain life: one with water and currents and volcanic activity and storms. So finally, what would be the calculation of how many planets in the galaxy would possess the characteristics that create a planet suited to life like the Earth.  This is impossible to know fully well at the present, since our knowledge of other systems is limited, so statistical evaluations are impossible.  Yet it seems that the likelihood of life is limited, that we might go on assuming that such and such a planet might support life, but then find that one of the requisite factors just wasn’t present, another desolate and uninhabited landscape.  Perhaps this sort of knowledge is critical to our own appreciation of Earth.   There are approximately 200,000,000,000 (200 billion) stars in the galaxy.  Many presume that with all these stars alone there surely must be life elsewhere.  However, more than half are removed immediately due to galactic radiation emanating from its center.  Thus we are left with perhaps only ¼ remaining, 50 billion that escape this radiation. It would seem that every sun has some sort of planets around it, due to accretion and accumulation and proven by the recent discovery of planets around other stars.  How many of these systems’ planets will have fairly circular orbits?  This seems to be even rarer, based upon our knowledge of other systems.  It is impossible to place a specific number upon this, but relatively circular elliptical orbits are apparently a rarity (of the 50 or so systems we know of they have planets with highly elliptical orbits).  But here every order of magnitude has drastic impacts upon the final outcome.  It is clearly rare enough to say that 1/100 is a liberal estimate, it could be 1/1000 or fewer. For the number of planets in each system, this will be taken to be 8 (an estimate from our own system). Of these systems how many will have planets close enough to the sun to be warm enough?  About half, so 3 out of the 8 in each system, as in our system it is possible that Venus, proto-Earth and Mars could all have been potentially capable of sustaining life. Of these how many of these planets are able to deflect harmful stellar radiation from their own sun and cosmic radiation and maintain an atmosphere?  There were apparently other bodies available for collision in our own system, they would exist elsewhere, but the possibility for collision must be rare, or else collisions would occur too often, and this might require a large planet like Jupiter to pull planets into orbit to prevent collisions.  Just the right impact with the right sort of body would occur, but in our system it only occurred with the Earth, so let us take this to be 1 out of a million. But the initial planet would be required to have a mass large enough to sustain a moving molten core from the collision, and this would mean the planet would need to be about the size of Earth.  So from our system 2 out of 3 (the proto-Earth and Venus) could. Of those that have an iron core, they would also likely have a moon, and thus should be able to maintain an atmosphere, as long as the moon is not too close to draw it away. One would imagine that water would need to exist in liquid form on the planet, and thus the temperature range would need to be, at least somewhere, at a reasonably warm temperature.  On one planet, like Earth, this would occur everywhere except the poles, on another planet it might be warmer and thus liquid water might only exist on the poles.  But the water would need to never be too highly contaminated with salinity or anything else that would be toxic to life.  It would appear that the water accumulation on the Earth was not a fluke, but it was only that the conditions on Earth permitted the preservation of liquid water, unlike on Mars, where water only existed relatively briefly it seems.  But it could also be that only enough water is needed to reduce salinity and thus water must also exist in abundance, and thus this restricts us to 1 out of 2, in effect, only a planet with the temperature range of Earth’s would permit enough water to exist to assure greater uncontaminated seas to exist. Of those that are thus able to achieve this, how many would life form on?  It would seem that all of them would, that it is not life that is rare but the environment that is required for life, as a plausible assumption. Every system is assumed to have roving asteroids and comets, and so this exists in our system as a threat to some life, but as has happened previously, impacts cause fundamental changes in the course of life evolution, other systems would have similar impacts at certain intervals.  This does not thus factor into our calculation, as it is presumed that no impact entirely wipes out life on a favorable planet. According to these numbers there would then be 250 planets in the galaxy that were capable of supporting life.  However, this is based upon a rather optimistic outlook, and there might be other factors that have not been included here. Of these planets, most would perhaps only support bacteria, since most of Earth’s history was limited to bacteria only, some planets here are perhaps a bit too close or a bit too far from the sun to develop life as abundantly as the Earth.  So those that might develop life beyond bacteria would be only some number of these, but here we could imagine some might be more and some less capable, thus within this, half might be beneficial to more complex life, so a planet favorable to life, not just capable of generating life, is 50% of those with life.  So this leaves about 100 planets.       If one factors in what is unknown, the number of planets in any galaxy that are capable of supporting life, by calculation but not based upon any sort of proof, is anything from 250 to 0, it is likely to tend towards the low end rather than the high end of this range, and the Earth could then be the only planet in our galaxy with any life on it at all.  With this number (100) of planets, though, if one begins to take this to calculate intelligent life it quickly drops to nothing, based upon the fact that life on Earth has only produced one prolifically intelligent species, among the millions that have lived or gone extinct, ourselves.  However we thus do have one instance of a galaxy that supports one planet with intelligent life during the present era, our own Earth.       But how many of these planets actually support life currently, and how many do not, more planets are eliminated and again, some might develop higher life quicker or slower than ours, and thus half or about 50 planets have something beyond bacteria in our galaxy during our own time, right now.       Any time another factor is added in, this will reduce the number of planets that have life, and the more we learn about the other planets in our system and others, the more we recognize what limits of those planets from having life, and thus makes us more aware of how rare the circumstances are here on Earth.  Even though there might be 50 planets out there with life beyond bacteria, there would more likely be fewer than more.  Of course the only way to know for sure is to learn more about other planets and systems, but we might be surprised to find that even within a solar system like ours, the planet that is about Earth’s distance from the Sun is not at all Earth-like and lacks life too.  Within our neighborhood of stars, we would then be the only planet with life, and the chances for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy are low, the chances for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe might be a bit more optimistic, but even if there is such life in other galaxies, it is far too far from us to be meaningful to us. [1] This stellar and interstellar radiation is what currently limits the possibility of exploration of the solar system by humans. [2] Life on Earth uses Carbon. [3] Jupiter’s inner moon Io is also volcanic due to its proximity to that planet.

Life on Earth: Evolution

When discussions arise about evolution it is often publicly within the context of a comparison between evolution on the one hand and creationism on the other.  This is to some extent supported through the Market appealing to what people wish to see, but creationists, who themselves believe or profess to believe that something generated and built the universe according to a cognitive plan, frame their arguments against what they call the “theory of evolution”.  This presumes that evolution is open to question, although they are not likely to term their alternative as the “theory of creationism” because it seems there can be no doubt that it is true, although they might if it grants a kind of equal status. This debate between evolution and creationism arises only out of the peculiarities of modern society, evolution is in fact a law of nature, it is Darwin’s mechanism of Natural Selection that is a theory pertaining to how evolution occurs.  While the specific biological mechanism is not understood to any far degree, it is certainly valid to question how the mechanism of evolution could arise out of a purely random process of mutation.  This is certainly out of keeping with the realities of how life operates in manners different from purely physical interactions of matter and energy.  Random is largely applied when the specifics of an event or process are not knowable, and thus appear random, but this is not at issue here, rather that the mechanism of evolution actually operates along a specific pattern of adaptation, but not as a planned process.  While the conception is that an organism (a population of organisms) changes by gaining advantages for survival, there is nothing that assures what leads to an ultimate advantage is anything more than a hindrance in the meantime, or to say that if a species is already surviving well enough, then what is the advantage of the change unless it arises out of the inevitable “cat and mouse” manner of progression, or that there is either subtle or drastic environmental change. While adaptations themselves imply advantages, mutations do not.  The misinterpreted concept of “survival of the fittest” tends to be valued through visualizing it as a competition between individuals against one another, rather than the gains to the entire population.  Any genetic and developmental changes are propagated not merely because they offer an advantage for survival but also because they do not create a disadvantage.  This is specifically why, for example, animals that adapt to life within caves lose their pigmentation and their eyes; it is because the lack creates no disadvantage, gets propagated throughout the population and eventually leads to an entirely new equilibrium and eventually an entirely new species.  Likewise, one can imagine the blow hole on a dolphin is a sure advantage, but a slightly higher nose on a proto-dolphin might not provide any advantage.  It is certainly true that when the function of a thing changes (when a nose remains valuable for breathing but is not needed for smelling) it can dispense with one or another function to thereby favor the one that is still valuable (i.e. the higher nose is no longer a disadvantage).      A few years ago someone I was working with at an archaeological dig suggested that hairs may have evolved onto mammals because it gave them an advantage to make them slippery permitting them to better escape predators.  While this rather gets one into the morass of rationalized speculations, as one could imagine all sorts of plausible reasons, without knowing which animal and under what environment our vague approach to explain things simply seems never to be anything than convenient filler in our immense ignorance on the matter.  To try to explain evolution of birds for instance, and the bird paradox: what value can wings and feathers provide before they become valuable for flight?  The “scientific” explanation always seems to provide a generalized concept without much to base it upon: that we construct a simple timeline, with an animal near a tree, an animal with feathers in a tree, and an animal with wings flying from trees.  What though does this tell us about the real course of evolution and past life on Earth? The value of a mammal’s hairs is essentially that it provides for the regulation of body temperature, which is necessary within warm-blooded animals.  But if an animal has no hairs then can warm-bloodedness develop at all?  In the case of birds and mammals, it would rather seem that the hairs and feathers developed, such as defensive spikes as an advantage, boader scales to provide for insulation, or “soft” scales not providing a disadvantage, which then permitted the development of warm-bloodedness.  It might never be known the specific species or environment in which these changes occurred; it only needed to be one, but it could well have even been a few species evolving independently. Feathers might have been essential to provide insulation for reptiles who took shelter in trees, subject to greater air circulation and wind away from the ground.  Once feathers developed it becomes easier to see how they might also provide advantages to permit nests to be placed upon higher ground or in bushes or trees, that feathered wings were used in gliding to draw predators from the nest (just as bright colored male birds have done) while still dependent upon legs and claws to climb back up.  In considering evolution one cannot presume that the thought-experiment somehow explains how evolution occurred in the past, this can only come with more direct evidence in fossilized bones, limestone impressions, and other traces left of past life.

Life on Earth: Extinction

There are several threats to life on Earth, those of which in the past have apparently been caused by cosmic disasters, but which has now been created by human societies.  Discussions pertaining to life on the Earth often pertains to human life, however when it pertains to non-human life it falls into various forms, sometimes people believe in absolute dominion, wherein conservation of species is justified on the basis of their usefulness to human needs or desires, other times it is reduced to matters of property rights which sometimes considers the owner of the land own the animals that habitate upon the land, or the state as owners of the animals who live within that state, but the survival of life on Earth cannot be based upon recourse to any basic human principles.  It only derives from the exertion of power, the same that has been used of human against human for millennia.  The severity of our destruction or potential for destruction has become so great as to change most people’s minds about the course of the planet’s future.      There have been threats that simply arise from abuses, to attain something rare and expensive that others cannot possess, as a show of their wealth to others.  Rare woods such as mahogany are imported illegally to feed the appetite for the spoils of privilege, tiger skins, ivory, shark fins, bush meat, sometimes ingredients in traditional but unproven medicines, trade in rare species, or importation of invasive species.  All of these things speak to an overall problem when people act out without guidance and principle, the fundamental flaw perhaps of a modern world that still is guided by misplaced orientations and beliefs that might have made sense in the past, but of which we are unwise to follow with strict faith today.      In addition to the usage of life forms or direct human action in relation to them, there are other threats such as habitat loss due to the use of land for human purposes, from farmland, housing, to use of natural resources and mining operations.  Some things are approached by those who wish to become wealthy from the use of these resources, but also argued to feed the market demands for more wood, more paper, more housing, more oil, more coal, and so on.  This has recently encouraged ideas relating to renewable resources and sustainable usages.  Whether or not global climate change is caused by human activity or not, we have based nearly all of our decisions on the assumption that the Earth’s temperature would not change.  Species, endangered or otherwise, are often restricted to preserves and park wildlife ranges that do not lend to easy migrations as temperatures change.  Restricting wild animals to strict ranges has essentially made them residents of large delimited zoos, where they live in pockets of isolation and are widely restricted from their former ranges.  This perhaps is showing no form of abating, but it is unclear at this point whether democracy is sufficient to permit the restriction not only of development but of consumption when it is required, when market choices are taken to imply all sorts of assumptions, that if price and quality are the only factors determining market choices, and profit is the sole goal of business, people are fooled into believing that everything else is being taken care of, assuming that their purchases do not lead to the eradication of wildlife, the extinction of life, and exploitation of labor, and then no one seems to be responsible for how it all works.      We are so surrounded by life-forms that we are liable to think they can be squandered, one single species extinction seems so trivial against the course of human encroachments by real estate developers or energy companies or paper pulp producers, or to somehow argue that mass extinctions are a natural part of the Earth’s natural history, lacking the awareness that nothing like the spread of a single species and the transformation of the landscape to the extent that we have has even occurred before, which might produce renewed considerations.  Certainly as some animals are better represented within captivity than in the wild, there is a growing danger that people will become complaisant enough to accept the fate of animals surviving purely within captive environments or might even to passively accept extinction as a price for our way of life and the goods we desire.  This would also reveal a failure of humans to moderate themselves and learn to coexist with other species, rather than thinking that all land is not useful if not owned and used for human purposes. There is no inherent human right to destroy other species, as rights only arise from within human society; it is only our power over them that permit this.  However, no one would question that in an instance that an individual is able to, and without retribution, kill a wild animal ordinarily, but no person or state or country possesses any right to eradicate a species, even if they are not acting differently than any others who preceded them.  Those who were shooting the last of the passenger pigeons were not doing anything different than anyone before them, and held no greater responsibility for their demise than any who came before, but the nature of the circumstances required the restriction of their actions when such actions were deemed permissible before. There has been growing recognition and popular support for species preservation within many countries and yet there are areas of the world where there have been dangerous declines within species populations in the past 20 to 30 years.  The underlying natures of humanity regarding unrestricted actions, illegal trade, and resignation of responsibility have all played their part in this outcome.  Some would have us dismiss these concerns merely because they might hinder the growth of wealth or other human pursuits, job creation, markets, political ambitions, and consuming rare delicacies.      What must underlie our approach to the notion of species depletion and the threat of extinction is that we still perceive that the pot is full, so dispensing it one ladle at a time hardly seems to make much of a difference.  As anyone knows who starts on a jar of mayonnaise, seems to be so full when we first open it, and each time we take such a small amount, but that eventually we realize, we have run out and need to buy more.  If each species was represented by a jar on a shelf we would begin to recognize certainly well enough that we were in threat of running completely out of some, but our “the Market will provide” mentality, which largely relies upon natural resources from coal to fish, themselves the underlying basis for our consumption are not produced by industry nor by any magical process nor created by God; that if circumstances of availability change then our basic principles of and assumptions about human society must change as well.

Columbus's Landfall

It was an article in National Geographic about Columbus’s first voyage that took him to the Bahamas and culminated in his landing on modern Cuba that encouraged me to look into the question of his party’s initial landfall.  This also means looking for consistency within the subsequent voyage from his initial landfall to his arrival in Cuba days later.      This was performed not by tracing his path out on a map, but building a map based upon his journal entries and then comparing this to a map of the Bahamas.  There are a couple problems with this method: problems with the journal and problems with the map.  Of the three variants I have that translate Columbus’s journal of his first voyage there is some difference in what they say.  (Actually, it is not the original journal of Columbus but a redaction made by Las Casas; the whereabouts of the original and second copy of his journal remain unknown.)  The trouble with the map is that it is a modern rendering, not reflecting the way the Bahamas looked 500 years ago during that time.  There can be differences for various reasons, but the most important (even before the age of Global Warming) is the rise in sea level from that time.  The Earth was in a cold cycle around the year 1500 AD, just as it had been in a warmer cycle 500 years earlier than that.  During a colder cycle sea levels would be quite a few feet lower.  This is significant because with the topography of the Bahaman islands which are flat and might only lie a few feet beneath the surface of the water, so a group of islands that Columbus saw would not be visible today.  Locating a map that recreates the area as Columbus would have seen it is essential to doing the task properly. The article argued, persuasively it seemed, that it was not modern San Salvador (the probable site of his landing) but instead Samana Cay, which lies to the south.  The various arguments can be found in that NG issue for the curious, but my own analysis indicated that he might not have been careful enough in studying the question of first landfall.  Thus said, I have myself not had the chance to study the Bahamas first hand, so all the work I have done thus far relies upon the two bases mentioned above, with some care given to the possible limitations of either.   When Columbus first landed on the island he called “San Salvador”[1], they said that there was land to the south, southwest and northwest.  This could either have been the surrounding islands or might have meant Cuba, Haiti and Florida (as he would have learned from the Indians around there).  In either case, they said he would have to go around the island before he could head south.  Then he writes that he wanted to see the eastern part of the island and sailed NNE.  From here he then heads out, and I assume here he is heading southeast from the island’s eastern side.  The main problems with the San Salvador landing spot are that he writes when he leaves “San Salvador” he says he sees numerous islands.  If he were on this route, he would have been able to see only four, including Conception Island, Crooked Island and Samana Cay.  He then said he headed for the largest, Santa Maria, which we assume to be Rum Cay. The fundamental argument in favor of the Samana Cay landing site was based upon the fact that there are many more islands visible (today!) when one goes south from this island.  There are a couple flaws with this: one returns to that of sea levels, since one cannot make such statements based upon the modern Bahamas, and the second arises from the assumption of what Columbus means in his journal.  One can thus see that the log implies that Columbus sailed some distance before deciding to head for Rum Cay.  He does not say he saw a bunch of islands immediately upon leaving “San Salvador”, but that he saw many islands while sailing.  Then when he decided to head for the largest, says he was about 7 leagues from it, whereas if he had simply seen it and headed straight for it, it would have only been 5 leagues from one island to the next. Although he appears to overestimate the size of the island, he says it is around 5 leagues on the NS side and more than 10 on the EW side, but it also seems that Columbus has trouble when he wishes to go west, so there seems to have been a current that facilitated his movements east but resisted him when he tried to head west.  So if his method of determining length was by how fast he thought they were going, he might have overestimated its length on this account, since after he reaches Long Island he has no trouble travelling its length to the SE end in just one night.  That this is a 60 mile coast from end to end, it could easily have been done in a single night had he been travelling at only 10 miles an hour. On the 18th he is still trying to circumvent the island, then aborts this in favor of sailing SE, and in doing so finds Crooked Island.  As he says that once he arrived here he came west, he must have arrived between the two islands and then travelled to the cape he saw to the west, then came down the coast and then determined that he could sail to the SE of the island and then to the NE, but instead decided to go back the way he had come to get there.  And from here, where he said there were lagoons, he found no gold mine, then decided to head out to Cuba, and in doing so passed by the cape he had seen previously, then went to the Ragged Islands and down to Cuba. In the case of the Samana Cay path, there is a significant problem.  Although it seems more obviously to describe that once leaving the island he would have perceived many more.  He made his way along Crooked Island until he saw Long Island and then went to it, travelled up and back down.  But then when he supposedly returns to Isabella, which is Fortune Island, he would have been nearly precisely where he had been when he was at the SW end of Crooked Island, yet no mention is made either that he had returned to the same spot, or that his original landing place was so close.  Also Fortune Island doesn’t match the description given for Isabella.  It is for these reasons that the Samana Cay explanation doesn’t fit as well.  Also, if he were so close to where he was trying to go, that is Samoset, why did they take such an out of the way path.  It is more reasonable that he was all the time making his way south.  Also, each new island he describes as if it were entirely new, not one he had passed earlier without taking note of this. I also found when reading about the second voyage that this account also mentions the presence of six islands that are apparently not there, so this again suggests either a water level change, or the loss of some islands due to some sort of seismic activity.  From this analysis I drew a map of the path of the first voyage from San Salvador.  This shows that Columbus’s “San Salvador” and modern San Salvador are the same island.  This is what is commonly accepted and my map (and all mapped routes will vary to some degree) matches well with the one in the Libreria Dello Stato edition, which I used as the most reliable translation. [1] Columbus called the island of his landfall San Salvador, but there is also a modern island of San Salvador (which adopted the name within the last 100 years).  Though the theory to be tested is whether the modern San Salvador is Columbus’s San Salvador.  For Columbus’s island I will put it in quotations.

Dream Dots

The past five years have provided time for study of an interesting component in the mechanism of dreaming that has not been known before.  While the specific brain functions seem to be related to the visual system, it answers what actually creates the images that are seen while sleeping. There is no doubt that dreams occur in color, that they create associations of the mind where what is experienced as external is controlled by what is thought.  There is a center of consciousness that directs one through a dream just as the conscious mind does normally for us. The answer is found by close awareness while transitioning from dreaming to waking.  Dreaming can occur under deep sleep but also under light sleep, when one can still hear, for example, music playing in the room one is sleeping in.  And while dreaming is impossible when the conscious mind is in control, if one realizes one is dreaming one can direct the course of the dream, and it also seems that passive consciousness (or semi-consciousness) that one can even gain control over the specific images that one sees.   So back to answering how these images are created.  There is little doubt left to me now, after this number of years in the experience of coming out of dreams that the visual system is actually seeing images.  That there is something going on in the brain that does not already go on when normal viewing takes place, but only that the content of what is seen is also being controlled by the mind, so that, in effect, the center of consciousness only has to think of something in order for it to make it appear.  The actual images are created out of dots of color seen by the eye, the exact source or character of which I am unsure.  (Of course, I have never had a chance to learn about them except from my own experiences.) These dots of color can be seen normally when the eyes are closed, they are usually small, dark, and difficult to discern, but appear as a sort of background noise (so that we never see completely black) and are also often rotating quickly about the center, one way or the other, which also makes them difficult to see.  These dots have three primary colors, one that is close to yellow, one reddish-orange, the other a sky blue.  These are set against an off-white background and each is surrounded by a thin dark outline.  It is the positioning of these and their increasing or reduction in size before the eyes that is interpreted by the brain as an image.  I have tried to represent the colors as closely as I can in the figure shown. It is my supposition that REM sleep or something else helps to encourage the brightness of these dots by stimulating the eyes in some way.  But even when one is under some conscious control they are still visible, but it seems only when conditions of dreaming are still in effect, but the mind has slipped out of sleeping.  Then one can actually control what one sees, thinking red produces red, for example.  However, despite the three primary color dots, it seems that other colors such as green or purple arise also, although not clearly by the same mechanism as with the circles.  But in the same way, thinking green produces green splotches of color amongst the rest, and so on. The size and quick motion of the dots appears to be quite broad.  It is possible to recognize when one awakens how the image one sees as the dream melts into a collection of moving colored circles, where the appropriate color matches that of the dream.  So that if one saw a yellow house then one sees yellow dots there, and elsewhere the other circles to create the effect.   While strange and unknown to everyone, it is something that can be tested if one is aware and knows what to look for.  Simply closing the eyes and paying attention can cause one to see the color circles, and if one can gain some control over their dreaming they can even know to pay attention during the transition as one awakens but before one stops dreaming entirely.

Olympic Rings

Sometimes I asked people what the Olympic rings represented, because I had heard at some point that they were to have represented the five continents or the five races.  While it is easy to find this out currently by searching on the internet, the official answer can be found on the Olympic Movement site’s answers to FAQ on their page:   http://www.olympic.org/uk/utilities/faq_detail_uk.asp?rdo_cat=10_39_0&faq=81   What is the meaning of the Olympic Rings?   The Olympic symbol consists of five interlaced rings of equal dimensions, used alone, in one or in five different colours, which are, from left to right, blue, yellow, black, green and red. The Olympic symbol (the Olympic rings) expresses the activity of the Olympic Movement and represents the union of the five continents and the meeting of athletes from throughout the world at the Olympic Games.   But watch out!  It is wrong, therefore, to say that each of the colours corresponds to a certain continent!   The continents represented are Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceanus (Australia), and America (North and South).  (Unlike what my father says, there is no sixth white ring for Antarctica that you can’t see against the white field.)  All fine and good, but there is an interesting question as to why it was designed this way by Pierre de Coubertin.   The hint arises from the association between the rings and the continents, because if one places them over an inverted map of the world, one finds that the rings match with the continents.  So although the official Olympic Committee claim is against the association of any given ring with any given continent, the rings do immediately correspond to the continents they overlay.  This also to some extent associates the rings with the races, since the red ring lies over the Americas, the yellow ring over Asia, and the black ring over Africa.  The remaining two gives blue to Oceanus–which seems appropriate–and that leaves green for Europe (perhaps for green fields).      Although the actual origins of the ring design were never made publicly known, it clearly was lost and were never intended to retain their meaning within the Olympic Games.

Gulf Crater

When the proof for an impact crater near the Yucatan peninsula, created by a meteor that most now believe pushed the dinosaurs into extinction, it had become curious to me whether the open circular shape of the Gulf of Mexico itself might be the impact crater.  That is the one formed from the curvature along Mexico and the southern states along Florida, through Cuba and back to the Yucatan peninsula.  Although it is interesting to suppose, it could certainly be proved, at least through the study of tectonic plate movements over the past 65 million years, whether they would have produced the compressed crater shape that is visible now.  If this is true then it would appear that the Yucatan peninsula is pushing upwards from the south, into what was once the center of the crater, and sheering forces have turned Cuba (another presumed edge of the crater) around over 90 degrees from its initial crater position. There might be genuine geological reasons that are already known that would eliminate the possibility.  If such discussions have gone on I am unaware of it, but if I were looking for a crater in the Western Hemisphere, wouldn’t the Gulf of Mexico appear to be the most circular and largest cauldron one would find? The diagrams here attempt to give an idea of the tectonic forces that would push the initial crater into its current position, so that the upper layers have shifted over the deeper layers wherein the magnetic information resides.  Thus the impact center appears under the edge of the peninsula, which pushed northward over it from its initial position on the crater’s edge. The diagram map shows the suggested original diameter of the crater and the compressed crater that remains today, the impact center is located and the tectonic vectors are crudely approximated. Not surprisingly others have come to the same conclusion and now there are more explanations about this impact crater, one is attached here.   Is The Gulf's Origin Heaven Sent?

Sperm Whale

When first hearing the question as to why the sperm whale possessed such a strange and high forehead, it seemed there was only one obvious answer to this.  That the shape of the head actually arises out of the social behavior of the whales, that the males ram one another just as sheep and goats and other horned animals, that the large permits the collision to occur without damage to either whale.  This also explains why the sperm whale is especially notorious for ramming ships, not out of a sense of threat from man but as part of it normal behavior towards rivals; it is already known that males often show scarring from contests with one another.  It also relates to the unusual size difference between males and females of the species, called sexual dimorphism.  However, although others have come to the same conclusion and so years ago, it is unusual that whales ramming one another beneath the sea has never been witnessed by man.

Insects and Arachnids

So we all know that arachnids possess 8 legs and insects possess 6 legs–and some are aware that spiders have two body segments while insects have three–but what is the reason for this difference?  Simply, it appears as though they both evolved from a form of 8-legged creature, the reason insects only have 6 legs then is that back a billion years ago they started to use their front two legs as feelers.  These would have grown increasingly important to the insect and their value as feelers became more critical than their value as legs, and eventually evolved onto the head as what we term antennae.  Spiders, the arachnids, do not possess antennae as insects do, they do have what are called pedipalps, which are analogous to the mandibles in insects and crustaceans.  What is interesting is that genetic engineering permits the replacement of a gene that creates a circumstance where legs grow upon a fruit fly’s head instead of antenna, which speaks to the slight mutation required to create the atavistic condition.

Black or White Skin

So what is the answer as to why some races on the Earth have darker skin and others have lighter skin.  This is a question that still seems to be regarded from a political or ideological standpoint, where skin color is deemed to be the determining factor, when even in the United States there is a general recognition that skin color is not itself an isolated characteristic, but is often viewed, quite correctly, as being a distinction more based upon culture than upon skin color.  These cultural and character differences seem to be underplayed by the fixation upon skin color and external appearances as the basis of difference, so putting them aside there are a couple of reasons why skin color would either adjust lighter or darker. It seems that for some reason there has been prior discussion based upon the simple idea that the color white reflects more and black absorbs more, and equivalently that people in climates with more sunlight would benefit from black skin that does not absorb more, but radiates more in the shade.  While this is so, it is probably based upon someone thinking to themselves about the color black and white and why they are different, but it appears that this cannot be the first-order explanation; there must be a more significant cause than this.  Recently I had seen that the most recent or only remaining explanation for skin color differences was sexual selection, but this goes hand-in-hand with adaptive necessity, at least it does even if things are viewed as a matter of personal choice as they are in our culture.  This also appears to be the “last theory standing” configuration rather than a truly meaningful one. The best explanation for coloration of eyes, skin and hair could be a couple things, that might be consistent with one another: first that in the northern climates that pigmented skin is merely no longer a necessity and so that it is lost merely because it is no longer required.  There could be, as some have suggested, that it is actually necessary to do so for the sake of absorbing sunlight for the production of vitamin D.  This could be an added benefit, but it still does not explain the value of dark skin, unless someone were to try to argue that dark skin prevents vitamin D toxicity, which begs the question: why then doesn't the body just produce less vitamin D?      While all these could be relevant the first-order explanation appears to be a simple one: that the pigmentation is not as relevant for absorption or reflection of light but for protection from ultra-violet (UV) light.  White skin is essentially transparent and permits light to penetrate deeper.  If you have a high Sun you have greater UV, which is to a power of 4 greater than a low Sun.  To illustrate, taking an arbitrary number 2, 4 times 2 would be 8, but the power of 4 is 2x2x2x2 which is 16.  This is why during the summer one is prone to sunburn, from May through August in the Northern Hemisphere, from about 11 to 4 (DST) is the time when the Sun is at its most dangerous for UV.  The pigment on the surface of the skin prevents the sunlight from penetrating the skin and thus providing protection of the body from harmful sun radiation.  If there is an added detriment caused by dark absorbing more light, this is clearly being offset by the tremendous benefit to protecting the body from UV.

Whose Lie is it Anyway?

Eight years ago a conversation started about improvisation, which is a very difficult thing to pull off.  Everything typically needs to be planned out so that people aren’t talking over one another, so what appears to be ad-libbing is really planned ahead of time.  The idea that people in the entertainment business are ad-libbing all the time is ridiculous, the professional actor has to do his job straight and well and not waste production time, which is why any suggestions from the actors are made before shooting starts and only among certain directors.  The Marx Brothers, who are sometimes believed to have ad-libbed were always speaking lines, there is only one ad-lib in all their movies, a rather trivial one Groucho pulls off in "Animal Crackers" when an actor screws up his lines and they go on to cover it up, but with no brilliant one-liners.  (The Marx brothers were used to dealing with live theater situations.)  This is not so on television talk shows, which are rehearsed but rely upon spontaneous conversations with both planned and unplanned jokes thrown in, hosts like David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Johnny Carson truly throw in ad-libs during their conversations with the audience and guests, some fail but a few are priceless.  In entertainment, they have always tried to convince you it is spontaneous because people will like it more if it is.  You can also find people doing improvisation on limericks and rapping, so it does occur sometimes.       In this particular instance the television show “Whose Line is it Anyway?” came up as an example of people doing improvisation, as a way of proving that it was possible for people to do it with ease.  Watching the show for the first time it was instantly apparent that despite the appearance of spontaneous generation, it was clearly planned and rehearsed.  The show did not rely upon witty repartee but the construction of entirely “spontaneous” songs, skits, and vignettes, even with instant musical accompaniment.  Seeing it and being aware of how ad-libbing occurs and how easy or difficult it is to pull off, and knowing this is compounded when it requires accurate timing and coordination with others and the production crew, I was not only doubtful, it was clearly being faked (in the best possible sense).  (If improvisation were this easy, it would be done all the time and no one would bother paying for writers.)       The show got away with it by making it seem as though the audience are shouting out suggestions, when prodded by Drew, but those visible on the screen were never the ones doing the shouting as far as I could see.  In addition, although purporting to be a game show of sorts, no money was accumulated, which avoids the oversight that came after the game show scandals of the 1950’s, so this left no restrictions on intentions towards rigging the outcome.  Piece after piece was introduced and immediately performed to perfection.  This could not be improvised, not matter what people watching the show think they are seeing, it might truly have been their intention to convince the audience they were doing improvisation. Regardless of all of this, what I realized, however, was that if the show wasn’t really improvised, that a list of writers must appear in the credits.  Given the tight union rules in the entertainment industry there is no way they could avoid this.  What I was looking for was a list of about six names who would have been the ones who truly wrote this “unwritten” show, and as the credits flashed past almost too quickly to read, there the writers were credited, under the proxy title of “Creative Consultants”, just the number of names one would expect, a list of about six people.  Later I watched the show again and saw the same thing, only on this show they were credited as “Production Assistants” as a way to hide their contribution.  The show is a fully written and rehearsed show, not improvisation at all, and Hat Trick got away with it!