This website was started in a hospital room on Google Classic Sites on the night of 5/7/14. My daughter was born the next day.
Early on I had a hypothesis called the Three-Level Flood that had the Flood as the last jump of post-glacial sea level rise combined with unique conditions of freshwater runoff. The pinching effect of the Karun/Karkheh and Wadi Al Batin alluvial fans creates a natural dam for the top layer. The Persian Gulf filling if the Strait of Hormuz were substantially blocked off would make the middle level. The last bit of post-ice age sea-level rise would be the bottom level. I intended to make a quantitative model that would explore if the entire Persian Gulf basin could have been filled to the brim with different blockage scenarios of the Strait of Hormuz.
Although the exercise gave me a deeper understanding of how Middle East geography and climate have changed over time, I have abandoned the middle-level flood that could have filled up the Persian Gulf basin. The Mesopotamian texts - and the Biblical text if read in the light of them - clearly point to a regional flood of Mesopotamia that took place around 3000 BC ±300 years. Even apart from texts, flooding is so common and Mesopotamia is so flat that a regional flood inundating southern Mesopotamia was a foreseeable event.
After the last ice age, flooding did happen along coastlines all around Earth due to some 400 feet of sea rise over 6000 years with several melt-water pulses evident in the data. Data from the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf show the water levels rose faster than in the Atlantic peaking some 2 meters above current sea levels about 6000 years ago. This is likely due to the greater effect of thermal expansion in the Indian Ocean.
So the story has changed for me: Noah's flood was the last superlarge regional flood to impact humanity. It was not an unlikely event and was preceded by some very rapid shoreline changes in the Persian Gulf as it filled up with seawater. Even apart from being told to do so by God, Noah's building of the ark could have been a wise rational response to known conditions. Furthermore, as shown by the construction techniques of past and present-day Marsh Arabs, the marshy conditions that existed near the edge of several Mesopotamian cities in antiquity make the particular form of the ark not all that much of a special case.
2019-2020 - Introduction, Genesis: Previously I had the opinion that the creation account did not directly reference the Trinity despite having all three components - the Trinity being a later Christian development. After reading Sumerian literature and history, it became clear that once upon a time, before the advent of writing, the triad of An, Enlil, and Enki/Ea was the creative Trinity. It is only the idolatry and imagery that followed born of urban civilization and writing that muddied this up. This coupled with the Sumerian literature's reliance on some fixed points that are a close parallel to early Genesis has led me to rework the Genesis commentary from the beginning.
The Sumerian literature is an example of the expansion of the gods from what was originally a prehistoric triune monotheism. This is similar to the expansion of angelology and Kabbalistic literature that has been built up and persisted to the present day. The literature is built in the same way. A canonical theology has provided certain fixed points that are often explicitly mentioned in the literature. The stories constructed must navigate and use these fixed points. The result is a bunch of speculative stories that individually may disagree with each other but collectively agree on the points. If you take away the unnecessary gods and angels, the remaining fixed points on which Sumerian and Hebrew stories are built are essentially the same.
As a consequence of this, the lesser gods from Sumerian literature are functionally equivalent to Judeo-Christian speculative views of angels and patron saints. One could compare the Sumerian/Akkadian/Assyrian god Ninurta (Ningirsu) to the archangel Michael for instance or the man-turned-god Dummuzi (Tammuz) with St. Peter in the way they are promoted, imaged, given responsibilities, and worshiped/reverenced/venerated. This includes such things as prayers before statues, votive offerings beseeching the lesser gods, angels, or saints to intercede with greater gods or God etc.
Interacting with some well-educated Christians with an impoverished view of the Bible, it became more clear that I needed to dig deeper and be more scholarly in my approach even though I am a layman. I committed to citing and linking my work more frequently and tuning arguments and information so the speculative jumps are shorter.
2020-2023 - Introduction, Genesis: After a broad study of the Sumerian language that started with simple page searches of the ePSD2, I have found in the first 10 chapters of Genesis many words, concepts, and puns that make more sense in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Old Babylonian cuneiform than they do Hebrew. It has become rather obvious that the material from the first nine chapters at least are translations of texts originating in Mesopotamia before the time of Moses. The religious foundation of Mesopotamian religion is the Sumerian triad of creator gods fashioning and forming on the surface of the earth (ie. Ninhursag). Moses is at most the compiler, translator, and editor of the Genesis anthology. If his words are found in Genesis at all, they are only found in parenthetical additions and transitional material between the anthologized texts.
My understanding of the word Elohim as Godhead when used as a singular has become more secure. The Sumerian me - "divine word" - is the equivalent of the NT Logos and the Hebrew equivalents. The savior character Enki/Ea who mediates between man and god is known as the "me of destiny", thus comporting specifically with John chapter 1. Enlil - "Lord Spirit/Wind/Breath" - is known as the "great mountain" which directly correlates with the Hebrew El Shaddai in meaning and concept. An comports directly as "God the Father" in both meaning and concept. There are differences, but these differences are the specific concern of the Pentateuch's critique of the surrounding nations such as their rampant idolatry and diffusion of worship to lesser gods.
2023-2024 - Correlations in Sumerian Literature: I have found again and again that the multi-valent readings of Sumerian logograms and use within Sumerian and Akkadian grammar can give very different meanings than the most popular translations of those texts. Therefore, any responsible use of a translation needs to be bracketed and commented on to uncover additional and alternative meanings.
By far the most popular translations are the easily accessible ETCSL translations which helpfully come with transcriptions of the cuneiform signs the translators used. These translations were made completely independent of and possibly even against the parallel language in the Bible. After analyzing several of the "In the day..." texts, I have found the language to be even closer to the first 9 chapters of Genesis than the translations already show. That is to say, favorable translations of the prologues of "In the day..." literature have little dissonance to the first 9 chapters of Genesis.