THE BIBLE CEASED TO BE A SACRED BOOK

 The End of Biblical Religions ?

 The Bible ceased to be a sacred book

 

Mauro Biglino, translator of Biblical Hebrew, maintains that when the Bible is stripped bare, it loses its sacred character, and on the contrary, it is a great deception. He says:

 

Once stripped bare, the Bible is extremely different from how it was always told: it does not contain a spiritual God, omnipotent, and omniscient, it does not contain eternity. No apples, no wriggling tempting snakes. No winged angel. Not even the Red Sea: the people of the Exodus are limited to looking at a simple straw. (Bibbia Nuda, and La Bibbia is not a sacred book. Il Grande inganno) (A great deceit). Mauro Biglino, (2017).

 

Biglino is one of the many authors who have recently dedicated themselves to disarming the sacredness of the biblical text. With due reason, what he maintains is consistent with the archaeological discoveries.

 

My relationship with the Bible began during the 1960s. While I was studying and listening to the radio, I heard the news that Nobel laureate William Faulkner had been awarded another Pulitzer Prize in the United States. His central message, the radio said, was that the man would not only last, but would also prevail. The radio added that this idea came from the Bible. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” In other words, Faulkner believed that man would not only last, but would prevail.

 

I thought that if the Bible contained those ideas, it was a book that I should own. Within months I was able to buy it, at the cost of almost going to jail (the police suspected my insistent look around the window of a bookstore, there were so many editions!) A month later I bought one and tried to read it. It seemed incoherent to me, a series of brutalities and contradictions. Later, a colleague from the university told me that the Bible must be read with the spiritual depth of awareness, because the literal sense is often barbaric. Wars, deaths, incest, betrayals, murders, crucifixions, some blessings, etc. Searching for meaning beyond words had an appeal. With that search I was improving and expanding the reading. I used the text as something magical, something unique, often metaphorical, symbolic and metaphysical.

 

I learned to reiterate the words of the text, because they gave me authority and importance before others. I preached the book, I took it to prisons, I gave it away. I knew how to repeat the words of the text with passion, which I got to know very well; internally, I was proud of it. I wrote some inspired articles based on the Bible. Although I often found aspects of certain texts that did not “sound good to me” or did not make sense. For example: the duty to fulfill the commandments in one chapter and violate them in the next. When I read academic questions proposing the end of biblical studies, they were a wake-up call sowing rational doubts in me. Recently, when doing a piece of research, I discovered another way to read the text: through archaeological/geological investigations. The analysis of stones and soils through the carbon 14 system allows precise dating of events and times. That removes doubts and much vagueness. Indeed, the Bible is not a history book, it uses data from history to create historical fictions. Words are easily manipulated, and they often create their own reality, independent of truth. The Bible looks like a history book, but it is not. Most of the text takes the form of a historical account; even the psalms or prophecies seem like historical accounts. Many religions have established themselves by using the Bible as a true and sacred text, but the latest studies indicate that it is not.

 

Practically all books are copies of earlier Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, etc. texts. Hebrew specialists do not speak of plagiarism but of "shared literary traditions" in form and content. The story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife is the "Egyptian story of two brothers." Some proverbs (22-23) are true copies of the teachings of Amen-em-Opet. (The Bible as Literature), the Bible as a book of laws and precepts is poor compared to the legal systems of the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, let us only remember the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, (1750 BC).

 

 on biblical sites and their dating carried out by the archeology departments of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem University and those of Archaeological Institutes and Cultural Assets. They have produced relevant reports, especially archaeologist Israel Finkelstein with his colleague Neil A. Silberman. His videos can be seen on Internet. They tell us that there are no records of the Patriarchs, they are fictional characters, nor did they find evidence that the Exodus took place.

 

Something I had suspected for a long time. The reason? In more than three thousand years, a sword, pottery remains, bones, food remains, etc. had not been found. No trace of the passage of hundreds of thousands of people leaving Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, who spent forty years wandering in the desert, without water and without food. One or two miracles are believable, but thousands every day? Huummm… if every day they produced miracles they are no longer miracles they are the trivial routine. Science demands proof, verification, but: the dilemma for believers is that there is no proof of biblical claims.

 

So, to believe or not to believe? It was this fact that made the professor of history at the University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, affirm that the biblical writers were all fanciful/illusionary. Prof. Finkelstein, as director of the archeology department of the Tel Aviv University was more cautious. He said that these writers did not take into account the real situation of the times they described, neither the political nor the geographical conditions. In other words, they wrote without foundation. At the time of the Exodus all of Palestine was a province of Egypt. That being the case, the Jews could not escape Pharaoh's army and be safe on the other side, because all of Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula were part of the Egyptian empire. On the Sinai Peninsula was the mighty fortress of Ramses II with his soldiers. Could they escape into the hands of those soldiers of Pharaoh? Considering reality, it doesn't make any sense. The Egyptians kept careful records of the events of the kingdom. How is there no record of a group of hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing? Nor is the name of the pharaoh who oppressed them mentioned. The reason is that those writers did not know.

 

 The Dutch Sephardic philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) in the 17th century had already criticized aspects of the Bible, such as the fact that after Moses died, he ordered Joshua, upon entering the land promised to Abram to destroy all kingdoms, kill men, women, and children, take as just the treasures. Today this would be monstrous. Unfortunately, no destruction of fortresses or walls like that of Jericho has been found, nor cities reduced to zero, nor burned stones. Neither bones nor goods of the dead. They found no records in Moab, Edom, Ammon, and other kingdoms, being conquered by slaves fleeing from Egypt. There are no proofs of those conquests. At this point we must ask, is the Bible a collection of myths, allegories, and fantasy stories? That is the affirmation that emerges from Professor Harari, since the biblical writers were “fantasists”. Jorge Luis Borges argued that the Bible should be considered part of fantastic literature.

 

The way to save the text has been "allegorizing", that is, giving it an allegorical interpretation that the authors never thought of. For example, The Song of Songs, which is a love poem celebrating physical union, has been read as an allegory of the union not of a man and a woman, but of the church and The lover and the beloved also interpreted as the relationship between Yahweh and Israel. Is there an explanation?

 

Yes, a very reasonable one: many of the texts of the Old Testament (Hebraic Bible) were written in Babylon, during the slavery imposed by King Nebuchadnezzar. The Jews watched for decades, as the Babylonians keep records of the important events of the kingdom, floods, plagues, wars, etc. At that time there was no Internet or large bookstores that they had access to. Considering that their stories would be lost over time, they began to write the memories, but enlarging them for posterity. Exaggeration is an ancient literary weapon to impress readers.

 

Gabel, Wheeler, and York, the authors of “The Bible as Literature” An Introduction, say about Genesis: The object of the text is recognizable: a series of cosmic events, but that no human being witnessed or lived. It makes no sense to ask if the universe was created in seven days, or if light could exist without any objects emitting light, or that the sun is created after the earth. For the authors, the answers lead nowhere. But for the priests it was perfect in that way and in that the way it had to be accepted. In other words, it is a priestly imposition.

 

The Bible is an anthology that uses hyperbole, that is, exaggeration in order to impress readers. Also, poetry, story, history, etc. Of the patriarchs there are no records, it is not even known if they really existed. Some consider them to be fictional characters. Many accounts are taken from earlier writings, the universal flood is contained in a number of Mesopotamian texts (Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, and others). Some psalms are true copies of earlier Egyptian texts. The character "Moses" has many antecedents as a fictional character, but the real historical antecedent of the boy thrown in a basket over the Euphrates River was Sargon of Akkad, considered the first emperor in history, who conquered all the Sumerian kingdoms up to Ur, city ​​from which the Bible attributes the origin of Abram.

 

Why attribute to Ur, (of the Chaldeans?), the origin of the people of Israel? For a matter of prestige, say the archaeologists. In reality, it was the model to follow with the temple (ziggurat) as the center of society, and the Enzi (high priest) the highest religious, political and military authority. In Sumer the temple centralized its religious activity with its sacrifices, the registration of contracts and the filing of tablets, the teaching of cuneiform writing, and arts and crafts workshops. Additionally, they developed the wheel and irrigation canals, weapons manufacturing, large constructions, fortified cities, the social organization with the ziggurats as the center of worship, with the powerful priestly class. This system that was in place for thousands of years finally collapsed.

 

The book of Daniel was written 300 years after the events related. There never was a Daniel and his friends in the court of the king of Assyria. In this way we better understand what Jorge Luis Borges said, "the Bible is a text of fantastic literature." Others will say that they are “fake news”. Several philosophers denied the Bible, and therefore suffered the consequences: exile, persecution, etc. Mainly Spinoza and Leibniz, criticized the inconsistencies of the text. Luther himself made strong objections to the book, stating that the only valid parts were those that referred to the Spirit.

 

Since for centuries it was the only religious text, the possibility of other texts from the Middle East was not considered. This lasted until the middle of the 19th century. Mainly  because of  the ignorance of texts in other languages, when they began to discover how to interpret the other languages ​​of the Middle East, everything began to change. There are thousands of texts to translate, there are hundreds of thousands of tablets to transcribe, only the Egyptian texts are extremely numerous, and many of them were ignored considering that they were just drawings, until it was discovered that they are a language. For example, one of the psalms is considered to be a verbatim copy of an earlier Egyptian text.

 

The discovery of ignorance

During Napoleon's campaign in Egypt (1799) in a village called Rosetta, the expeditionary found a small stone that would be the key to the knowledge of ancient texts. This stone contained a text in three languages: the first was Egyptian hieroglyphics, the second was in Demotic Egyptian, which is the same language, but in italics, the third was in ancient Greek. Sure, linguists knew Greek, but they never thought hieroglyphs were a language. The mission of deciphering the texts fell to the French linguist Jean-François Champollion. All three texts were the same decree of King Ptolemy V, Epiphanes. That grain diorite stele was the key to my ignorance and possibly to many more. Ignorance of unawareness. The inscription was from 196 BC, the so-called inter-testamental period. The Egyptians considered language an invention of the god Thoth to allow them to communicate ideas, feelings and norms.

 

 The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of an ancient granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued in Memphis in 196 BC. C. in the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three different scripts: the upper text in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the middle part in demotic script and the lower part in ancient Greek. For almost two thousand years the only text in circulation (that spoke of antiquity) was the Bible. Nobody could think that it was a drop in an ocean of ignored texts. The investigations of Bible societies founded by Protestant groups in America and Europe were never intentional to discover other texts, but to search for those that ratify the Bible, the others were set aside or simply destroyed. They were German scholars who began with literary criticism of the Bible, questioning many mythological aspects.

 

The King James Version held that the age of the earth began 4004 years before Christ. When geological studies were published (Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology, 1830-33), taking the age of the earth to millions of years, to think that the creation of the world took place in a week beginning in 4004 before Christ, was meaningless. The myth of the universal deluge, with small variations, was part of various texts of Sumerian-Mesopotamian literature. Area that includes two large rivers that, with excess rain, then overflowing, produced extensive fields of water and for quite some time.

 

 The thesis by which Héctor Avalos proposes the elimination of biblical studies maintains:

Modern academic studies have shown that the Bible is the product of cultures whose values ​​and beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of our world are not held to be relevant, even by most Christians and Jews. (The End of Biblical Studies, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2007).

 

What value (moral or legal) does the story of Moses looking to the right and left and not seeing anyone kill an Egyptian who was punishing a Hebrew and buries him in the sand? (Exodus 2:11-12) Today it would be considered intentional murder, without extenuation, with a possible death penalty in the electric chair. Or the great King David who had Bathsheba brought to his rooms, whom he impregnates, and in order to cover the adultery, he had Uriah, her husband, killed (Samuel 11: 1 to 12: 25). What great moral example is it for our days? It was the strength of the prophets for or against the people that shaped the Jewish character in a certain way. The prophets represent a moral force to confront the powerful in the name of a higher principle.

 

Regarding the New Testament, the writer Corrado Augias asks the professor emeritus of the University of Torino, Giovanni Savorano:

 

“From the historical and material point of view of its writing, what are the Gospels? Who wrote them? When? He replied:

 

We are in Italy, if we were in another country the answer I am about to give you would be different. Italy is a Catholic country. Rome is the seat of the papacy, the Gospels are inevitably conditioned of this presence being texts that in a certain way were fixed by the Catholic Church as sacred texts, that is, divinely inspired!

 

A translation professor told me that if someone saw the original texts of the Bible they would be remarkably surprised, they are really crude. It was the successive translations through the centuries that embellished with new terms and alternative meanings, to make them acceptable to the expressions of the time, until today. Without forgetting that the biblical messages were exclusively for the tribes of Israel. It was necessary to transform them into a universal message applicable to peoples and completely different continents. It is a wonder that a group of tribes that almost all the time fought each other, has risen to such prominence in the world. Undoubtedly, the Hebrew Bible or the Torah was an anchor that kept them together and more than that, it was the attitude of reading, which gave rise to a culture, relating daily life to a book.

 

Many concepts are completely at odds with the established ideas today especially those related to human rights and care for the environment. They do not resonate in the present collective consciousness. Therefore, "multiplying" and “subduing the earth" (including plants and animals) are considered by many to be the cause of humanity's environmental problems. It is these aspects that for centuries were inspired, today they are miserable. The messages of prophets like Isaiah to do good, help the downtrodden, be fair to orphans, and help widows were rarely fully carried out Not even among the same tribes. Given the overwhelming amount of information disproving the Bible, those of us who believed in it, what choice do we have? The moment arrives when we must face the dilemma of continuing with our beliefs or the truth that science proposes to us. Each person must decide for himself or herself. In my case, I consider a new beginning is necessary. God was the product of the creative imagination, as it is for art and science. It was the attempt to give meaning to human existence and its mysteries, as the same reality that enveloped the sapiens transcended their life to "that" that transcended they called it God, although the Chinese Lao Tsè called it "Tao".

 

In each age not only religious but philosophers and scientists gave answers to the transcendent. At this time when science has given answers to many mysteries, we cannot return to the same. Let's say that the metaphysical answer to the transcendent never satisfied completely. That is why Judaism prohibited naming the sacred name of the deity, and in Islam representations of it cannot be made. This is to make it clear that the idea of ​​God escapes definitions or common material visions.

The second aspect of every text is when readers turns the work into something of their own, with their interpretation, with the anointing with which they read it and the emotion that it transmits. It is the reader who, with his/her intention, can turn the text into something profane or something sacred and inspiring. The Bible will remain an interesting book but no more sacred.

 

We return to the beginning, to the pre-religious period, but we cannot drift or return to animism, that is, to find the spirit in every stone, in every tree, or in the rivers, or in every wild animal. The spirit either we find in ourselves or we will not find it anywhere. We must find in our conscience the root of the essential, the sacredness of the vital spirit, the source of harmony and well-being. The beginning of existence on which to ground our experiences. Nor should we fall into the idea of ​​forming a religion with each experience, whether it is of an important character or not. Each being is his own religion with which he/she will fulfill his own destiny.

 

All of us at some point have had some sensation or experience of the ineffable, of a presence that we do not know what it is. In my case I had three. One of them was so beautiful that I experienced it for several days. And then the memory for months in a state of hallelujah, in subtle and profound ecstasy: it was feeling part of the whole universe and the whole universe was my being. I could touch every star tour every planet and its satellites. There was no part of the cosmos that was not part of me. Everything was beautiful and harmonious. I think that like many of the spiritual experiences it was non-transferable. How do you stop transferring the infinite, the eternal, the incommunicable that elevates and transforms us? The most accurate is the music of silence. Another experience was a healing of vitiligo which at that time (I worked at the Chrysler car factory) was incurable. In the face of adversity, I maintained the security of the omnipotent spirit in us that could transform me, if a circumstance had caused me an illness, the spirit (as the principle of my existence) could remake me again, because existence possesses regenerative love, the element that unites opposite parts to redeem and bless. Everything is in our being from the very origin, if something exists it is because it has the elements of harmony that make it exist. As I said: each being is its own religion of pure behavior, uncontaminated behavior, a clean soul, a healthy mind, with which each being will fulfill his own destiny. Nothing relevant is out there, everything is in our being, our infinite being here and now.

 

 ©Pietro Grieco / August 4/2022

 

 Bibliography:

 Karen Armstrong, A History of God, Ballantine Books, New York, 1994.

 

Avalos, Hector. The End of Biblical Studies, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2007.

 

Corrado Augias, Giovanni Filoramo, Il Grande Romanzo Dei Vangeli, Giulio Einaudi spa. Turin, 2021.

 

John B. Gaber, Charles B. Wheeler, Anthony D. York, “The Bible as Literature, An Introduction” Oxford University Press, New York, 2000.

 

La Bibbia di Gerusalemme, Centro Editoriale Dehoniano, Bologna/Trento, 2020.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------