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you like to get 50% off your car's oil change? All you have to do at the
Kwik Kar Lube & Service in Plano, Texas, is recite a Bible verse.
Store owner Charlie Whittington is standing by what he asking customers to do for a deal. “If I’m standing for what I believe, so be it,” he said. “Bring it on.”
The verse is popular for containing the central beliefs of traditional Christianity:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (NIV)
Whittington said he did it as a conversation starter in an effort to talk to people about what he believes.
“It’s one thing about America,” he said. “You can go and do what you want. I’m not making you do anything and I’m tired of people making me do something.”
Is it a righteous bargain or religious discrimination? Would you recite a biblical verse even if you're an atheist simply to get the deal?
The Philistines may have gotten the short end of the Biblical stick, but an archaeological dig at the City of Gath may paint a more nuanced portrait of Goliath’s people.
Diggers at Gath have also found shards preserving names similar to Goliath — an Indo-European name, not a Semitic one of the kind that would have been used by the local Canaanites or Israelites. These finds show the Philistines indeed used such names and suggest that this detail, too, might be drawn from an accurate picture of their society.
The findings at the site support the idea that the Goliath story faithfully reflects something of the geopolitical reality of the period, Maeir said — the often violent interaction of the powerful Philistines of Gath with the kings of Jerusalem in the frontier zone between them.
"It doesn’t mean that we’re one day going to find a skull with a hole in its head from the stone that David slung at him, but it nevertheless tells that this reflects a cultural milieu that was actually there at the time," Maeir said.
Matti Friedman has the full story: Link
At first glance this website may appear to be a hoax or a joke, but then again there are people like Harold Camping out there predicting doomsday. The Flat Earth Society which claims to support the theory that the Earth is flat and have gathered together literature to support their views. After some research it appears that The Flat Earth Society is a real group.
The modern age of the Flat Earth Society dates back to the early 1800s, when it was founded by Samuel Birley Rowbotham, an English inventor. Samuel Rowbotham’s Flat Earth views were based largely on literal interpretation of Bible passages. His system, called Zetetic Astronomy, held that the earth is a flat disk centered at the North Pole and bounded along its southern edge by a wall of ice, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth.
Nowhere in the world is archaeology as tied to politics as it is in Israel. Different factions have a stake in determining where the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel were ruled from, and how powerful its leaders were. At the heart of the matter is King David.
He has persisted for three millennia—an omnipresence in art, folklore, churches, and census rolls. To Muslims, he is Daoud, the venerated emperor and servant of Allah. To Christians, he is the natural and spiritual ancestor of Jesus, who thereby inherits David’s messianic mantle. To the Jews, he is the father of Israel—the shepherd king anointed by God—and they in turn are his descendants and God’s Chosen People. That he might be something lesser, or a myth altogether, is to many unthinkable.
“Our claim to being one of the senior nations in the world, to being a real player in civilization’s realm of ideas, is that we wrote this book of books, the Bible,” says Daniel Polisar, president of the Shalem Center, the Israeli research institute that helped fund Eilat Mazar’s excavation work. “You take David and his kingdom out of the book, and you have a different book. The narrative is no longer a historical work, but a work of fiction. And then the rest of the Bible is just a propagandistic effort to create something that never was. And if you can’t find the evidence for it, then it probably didn’t happen. That’s why the stakes are so high.”
National Geographic looks at competing theories about the archaeological finds in Israel and the few hard facts that we have about them. Link
(Image credit: Greg Girard)
By A.J. Jacobs
For my book, The Year of Living Biblically, I spent 12 months trying to follow every rule in the Old Testament. Even the obscure one-like stoning adulterers (I used pebbles) and never shaving your beard (I did a lot of itching). My challenge: to reconcile the Bible’s easy-to-grasp wisdom with some of its seemingly baffling laws. The following are a few of the more arcane rules I found along the way, with possible reasons behind them.
1. THE RULE: “…she shall put the rainment of her capitivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month; and after that thou shalt go in unto her and be her husband…” (from Deuteronomy 21:10-14)
THE TRANSLATION: If you capture a beautiful woman during war, and you want to marry her, you must first have her shave her head and trim her nails. Then you must live with her for a month without touching her. After that, she’s all yours.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: Think of it like gun control-it’s a mandatory waiting period. If you still want to marry a bald, short-nailed woman after a month of no sex, then maybe it truly is love.
(Image credit: Flickr user Willam Cho)
2. THE RULE: “Even these of them ye may eat: the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind. / But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you.” (Leviticus 11:22-23)
THE TRANSLATION: You can’t eat bugs. Well, except for locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers-those you can eat all you want.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: A ban on eating bugs isn’t all that hard to argue with, but why the loophole for locusts et al.? It’s believed that this is actually an example of the Bible’s pragmatism. If locusts swarmed and devoured all the crops, the Israelites would have nothing left to eat-except the locusts themselves.
3. THE RULE: “…thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed; neither shall a garment of mingled linen and woolen come upon thee.” (Leviticus 19:19)
THE TRANSLATION: Don’t wear clothes made of mixed fibers. Wool-and-linen blends are particularly bad. Polycotton is probably OK.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: The Old Testament was obsessed with separating things. (Don’t wear mixed fibers; don’t mix milk and meat.) According to many biblical scholars, the idea was to drill the notion of separation into the ancient Israelite mind. This way, they would remain separate from the pagans and not intermarry-a sin even worse than mixing wool and linen.
4. THE RULE: “And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days; and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even.” (Leviticus 15: 19)
THE TRANSLATION: Stay away from a woman if she’s menstruating. She’s impure, and if you touch her, you’ll become impure, too.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: While many people say this rule is misogynistic (kind of like the theological equivalent of cooties), some scholars and devout Jews defend the practice. They say it has to do with reverence for life. When a woman has her period, it’s like a small death. A potential life has vanished, and this is a way of paying your respects.
5. THE RULE: “A naughty person, a wicked man, walketh with a froward mouth. He winketh with his eyes…” (Proverbs 6: 12-13)
THE TRANSLATION: No winking. This is just one example, but the Bible contains no less than four anti-winking passages.
POSSIBLE EXPLANATION: Many believe that the Bible’s “wink” referred to a tacit approval of evil. As in “I saw what you did, but I won’t tell.” But let’s face it; the wink is a creepy gesture, no matter how you cut it.
[Editor's note:] All Old testament verses are taken from the King James translation of the Bible. They are presented here solely for the purpose of historic investigation and in no way reflect the religious views of the magazine.
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The above article was written by A.J. Jacobs. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Your knowledge of the Old Testament will be sorely tested in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. For each question, you’ll be given the names of two Biblical figures. You must decide which one is also the name of book from the Old Testament. I scored 100% on this one. Link
The British Library has just put Codex Sinaiticus online. The world’s oldest bible, handwritten over 1,600 years ago, is now available for the general public to peruse. Just don’t expect to find the familiar biblical stories you learned at Sunday school:
Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.
The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections — some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.
And some familiar — very important — passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, they said.
Richard Allen Greene of CNN has more: Link | Codex Sinaiticus [wikipedia]
