Another life that wasn't wasted

 “Wally” Funk wanted to be an astronaut. But in the 1950's, when boys hoping to get a toy space helmet for Christmas were building imaginary spaceships out of cardboard boxes, girls weren't expected to have any such ambitions. It didn't matter that she was already a pilot, having taken her first lessons at the age of nine. Or that President Eisenhower himself had written her a letter congratulating her on her expert marksmanship; she was a girl, and girls couldn't march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, OR fly o'er the enemy. And only military officers were being considered for the space program, so it just wasn't to be.

But Wally Funk had a secret weapon: longevity. Having been trained as a backup for the Mercury mission, and then turned away when there turned out to be seven men with the Right Stuff, she lived through the entire US space program, observing the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle Missions from afar, while racking up an impressive series of “firsts”: first in her class at Stephens College (graduating at age 19), first female Flight Instructor at a US military base, first female Field Examiner for the FAA, first female Air Safety Investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. And first place finisher, in a field of 80, of the Pacific Air Race. By the time the Shuttle program finally opened up to women, she was no doubt qualified in every way except one: she was now too old! She was turned down three times. And it's a good thing, by the way, that Christa McAuliffe, rather than Wally, got the nod to be the first civilian in space: she never made it, as the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all aboard.

As for Wally, she lived on. And she kept flying, serving as the Chief Pilot for five different aviation schools. But she never gave up her dream. When the first Shuttle flight to be commanded by a woman took off, she was an honored guest at the launch. Finally, as the 21st century dawned, it looked as if civilian space travel might finally become a possibility. Wally took the money she'd inherited from her art collector parents, and royalties from her books, to make a down payment of the first Virgin Galactic space tourism flight. By this time she was in her seventies, and space tourism was still a decade off. But when the first flight finally took off with paying passengers, it was competitor Blue Orbit rather than Virgin Galactic. Their maiden flight set two records: 18-year old Oliver Daemen became the youngest person in space, and Wally, at 82, the oldest by half a decade (and it was a good thing for the record books that she was on that first flight, as the second, just a few months later, carried 90-year-old William Shatner). She had somehow managed to outlast the entire span of the male-only U.S. space program, AND to outlive the age restriction. In that way she was reminiscent of the first woman in space, who was sent along on an early robotic flight purely as a token, but kept on training long enough to see the Soviet space program open up to women, and became a fully qualified cosmonaut.

I was inspired to write this post when I noticed that, like Linus Pauling, Mary Wallace Funk got tired of not being allowed to study what she wanted to in high school, so dropped out and entered college at age 16. With all the progress they have made in so many other areas, in this way America have regressed: it's no longer possible for a frustrated genius to get into college without first ticking off the box of a secondary school education. At the very most, he or she can take limited college classes concurrently while completing secondary school, or complete it early by correspondence; just dropping out is no longer an option for bright young students like Linus and Wally.

I imagine there are a few exceptions in subsequent generations, but I suspect none from the 21st century.

A review of David Instone-Brewer's Bible Contexts Series - Chapter 20: Cain's "wife"

Dr. David Instone-Brewer is an eminent Bible Scholar in England, one of the experts responsible for the last tranche of changes to the NIV. He knows a lot more than I do about a lot of things, and since he makes it easy to access most of what he writes, I follow him to my advantage--especially in the area of Old Testament Studies, which is his specialty. What I've learned from him, however, are generally facts and insights I hadn't been exposed to before. I don't sit at his feet for much of what he weaves into his teaching, which are just standard tenets of atheism (although I admit, some of them are new to me as well). For although he identifies as an evangelical, he nonetheless looks to atheist scholars and their disciples to inform his interpretation of the Scriptures--and is thus oft led astray.

Dr. D is greatly hampered in his ability to gain insights from the book of Genesis, believing as he does that it was composed as a sort of religious fiction during the Babylonian captivity to inspire Jews not to lose hope in their present situation, or something along those lines. He doesn't believe that it is even intended to be a serious historical record, and certainly not that it was compiled from written eyewitness accounts. There is therefore no apparent limit to the imaginations his mind can supply from a reading of this section of the Scriptures, guided by the speculations of the atheists which lie behind much of his theology. And since he drinks deeply at the font of those who have no access to absolute truth, he all but admits that what he sincerely believes to be true today may be ridiculed a decade or a century from now, as atheist philosophers discard old and unworkable alternative explanations for how the world works, and imagine new ones yet to be disproven. This approach leads him far astray from orthodox understanding. 

Take, for example, his chapter on Cain's Wife. He already reinterprets the first two chapters of Genesis in an atheistic framework, starting with a random humanoid whose ancestral line went back to stardust. He then departs from the atheist narrative just a bit to give God credit for taking this human-looking animal, the pinnacle of billions of years of random evolution, miraculously granting him a human spirit, and then--in a most unusual departure from his involvement of the previous billions of years, and in a biological process we can hardly imagine, much less explain scientifically--splitting off a half-clone which became the first human woman. He then set the newly enlightened couple in special walled enclosure he called Eden and commanded them not to eat a certain fruit. They did so regardless, and as a result they were cast out of Eden to resume their evolutionary progress without any life-sustaining access to the fruit of the tree that conveyed some sort of immortality. And here enters Cain's Wife, who he proposes was a non-human, implying along the way that the host of present mankind must be descended from her.

I hesitate to critique Dr. D in any area of actual OT Studies, as he is an acknowledged expert in both the Hebrew language and rabbinical literature. But here he has left far behind anything directly related to the Hebrew Scriptures to dabble in Evolutionary Biology, in which he is no expert--leaving me on much firmer ground to dispute him. [Edit: he does claim biological expertise based on his undergraduate studies, but then, so could I, having sat for General Science in Bible College.]

I will be interacting in this post with Chapter 20 of his book Bible Contexts which, at least for now, can be found at his website http://www.biblecontexts.com/. He introduces the chapter as follows:

If Cain married someone living outside Eden, this would explain some strange details in Genesis. It would also explain how our gene pool contains so much variation.

---

His book is all about explaining strange details in Genesis with even stranger speculations. He sees a problem with God selecting just two humanoids--really, only one--to begin the human family tree. Although his God is capable of many amazing feats, Dr. D seems constrained by his acceptance of atheist teaching to place the Laws of Nature at a higher tier on the hierarchy than that occupied by Nature's God. The God who could split the first man in half at the sub-cellular level to produce the first woman was nonetheless stumped at providing this pair's descendants with enough genetic variety to produce the four blood types, so He needed to pull in some genes from the neighboring humanoids to pull it off. Thus, Cain's Wife. 

Now Mrs. Cain was not a Neanderthal, mind you--Cain had already inherited those genes from his long-dead humanoid ancestors. What she provided instead was access to the "rich gene pool" that had resulted from millions of years of primate evolution. Dr. D uses a modern analogy to explain why this was not only sufficient, but necessary, if humanity were to survive The Fall:

 Cain could, of course, have married his sister – though the Bible doesn’t say this happened. It is difficult to imagine her wanting to marry a brother (especially the nasty brother who murdered the nice one). Presumably this incest wouldn’t be dangerous like it is today because God could have made sure there weren’t any dangerous recessive genes in Adam’s chromosomes. However, our human race would be very weak if the entire gene pool had been limited to just Adam’s chromosomes. Restricted gene pools often cause problems in overrefined agricultural animals or crop lines because this makes them vulnerable to pests and changes in the environment. This is solved by interbreeding with wild species to reinvigorate the gene pool by introducing more variety.

Here he makes a mistake commonly perpetuated by pseudoscientists, assuming that a genetic bottleneck always results in a dangerously depleted gene pool. The reason modern agricultural crops and animals have depleted gene pools, and wild varieties don't, is precisely the result of human intervention to breed out unwanted variation. Absent that unnatural selection, a fairly robust set of genes will continue to be passed on, even in a small population. But racism is a powerful and primordial urge, such that organisms resist hybridisation and generally seek to mate with creatures most like themselves, resulting in further speciation, as any organisms that depart from the standard in the same direction tend to seek out each other for breeding, leaving an even more depleted genome to their descendants. Were it not for the balancing act of another primordial urge--that of men, having gone forth to conquer, seeking and finding sexual release amongst the females of the conquered races--humans would be much more genetically depleted than we are. 

If I were to hypothesize myself, I would say that God created Adam with two completely different sets of chromosomes, with each of the millions of gene pairs consisting of different alleles. Thus Eve was far more distant from Adam, genetically, than any two humans are today; at the time she was split off from him, she only shared 50 per cent of his genetic material. And if God were powerful enough to pull off forming yet another haploid set for the rest of Eve, then he only shared half of her genome--providing far more diversity than Cain could have brought into the young race by impregnating a distant descendant of the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Adam could well have carried one haploid gene for Type A blood, and one for Type B. We don't even have to split that in half again to get all three of the blood types just among their children, provided that Eve possessed the same. And if, post-Fall, any two of their children ended up with an allele that lacked the information for producing either the A or B antigen, Type O could emerge as early as their grandchildren's generation. It's a stupendous pity that Dr. D, with all his learning, didn't see how God could accomplish this without having Cain interbreed with a non-human. 

       Mutations occur very rarely, unless there are carcinogens present. This is good, because most mutations are dangerous – as seen by the effects of carcinogens. Reproductive cells are protected from mutations by DNA repair mechanisms, which make sure that accidental mutations are rarely passed on to our children. A few do get through – on average sixty-four mutations – though this is tiny compared to the three billion base pairs that are copied perfectly.⁴ However, some of these are so harmful that they result in miscarriage – about 10 percent of pregnancies end this way. So even a small increase in mutation rate would result in a lot more miscarriages.

Dr. D goes on at length to describe just how humanly impossible it would have been for God to actually get the human race going with just two people. Okay, and where does the book of Genesis imply that God can't do anything humanly impossible? This cognitive dissonance would be laughable, did he not with such sincerity lend credence to the atheist hypotheses. Of course, the way heredity works now, in our currently depleted human population, where any two humans on the planet share at least 99.9 per cent of the same genome, does not necessarily speak to how things would have worked back when they shared barely half of that. We don't really have any idea what a genuinely rich gene pool looks like, as the nature of genetic recombination means that some genes go missing with each successive generation, and after several thousands of years, every genome has become depleted to one extent or another--unnatural selection greatly accelerating the process. And since this goes against the collective wisdom of Evolution--which imagines, contrary to all evidence, the gene pool at large becoming progressively richer over time--Dr. D. just isn't going to hear this from his atheist mentors or their disciples.

So whom DID Cain marry? Well, as all scholars have noted, Genesis doesn't say. And why should it? If humanity began with only one man and one woman, and no ape-men to "enrich the gene pool," then of course he married his sister. Anyone with even half a human brain could figure that out with just a little help; there's no need to state the obvious. All we need is the succinct statement of the compiler of Genesis 3 that Eve was "the mother of all living." That leaves no room for any previous races to insert their alleles into the human genome, period. 

Dr. D should have stuck with interpreting and explaining the Bible, and left fairy-tale speculations to those who reject the Genesis account out of theological necessity. 

A Petition from the Church to Donald Trump--or is it?

Here is the stunning transcript of a video available on Youtube. I provide the relevant part:

Hello everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts at Sattler College. We're with Dean Taylor. You're the president of the college here. We're in your office, and you did a lecture on this earlier this year that really caught our attention, and we wanted to talk to you about that and and see if we can hit some of those high points. So, during that lecture you said—and it was obviously rhetorical just kind of make a point—you read a petition to our president Donald Trump. Can you just read that and then explain kind of what you're getting at there and then how that all ties in with with parts of our Mennonite history.

 Alright. Well excellent. OK. I'll start with a letter, and then I'll explain what I was thinking. Sure. OK. The idea was, it was bringing out that, you know, there's been a lot of, you know, negative things against the president, and, you know, we know we're supposed to pray for our president and pray and the government, and so the idea, you know, that all these attacks on the president that we should say something. But, in that, I wanted to make a point though because I was... what I was feeling was that too many of our people are imbibing—they're taking on this whole way of thinking of the current presidency, and that's very scary. So I wrote this petition. Here it goes.

To the president, Donald Trump:

We, the conference of Anabaptists, assembled today in Shipshewana and the free state

of Indiana, feel deep gratitude for the powerful revival that God has given our

nation's through your energy and promises joyful cooperation and the

upbuilding of our fatherland through the power of the Gospel, faithful to the

motto of our forefathers, "No other foundation can anyone lay than that

which is laid which is Jesus Christ." With greatest excitement, we are following the

events of our beloved country and experienced in spirit the national

revolution of the American people. We are happy that, in America, after a long time,

a government that freely and openly professes God as creator stands at the

head of the nation. With special sympathy, we hear that the

government takes seriously the realization of Christian principles in

social, economic, and cultural life, and especially emphasizes the protection of the family.

And signed the conference that I was with]. 

So, the point that I was

making is that, with just a couple words changed, that was a telegram—

that was sent from the Mennonites of Germany to Adolf Hitler. 

Why there's no such thing as a Stone Age Tribe

This post has been percolating for many months, so I decided to go ahead and give it a go now, but subject it to revision as I continue to ponder the question.
Two videos have brought about this rush to print: one a series actually, to which I will get shortly; the other being this National Geographic Special about the Waorani tribe of Ecuador. In a documentary like this, the narrator typically gushes that they live as they did 20,000 years ago, and are just now finally emerging from the Stone Age.
These claims not only have no historical basis; they defy logic. The lifestyle of the Waorani is totally incompatible with the evolutionist's claim that they are descended from people who crossed the Bering Straight tens of thousands of years ago. They make their living by using darts (made from one palm) dipped in poison (scraped from the bark of a certain vine, and only deadly if injected) shot through a blowgun (made from another palm). That, for their meat supply; their vegetable staple is manioc, a domesticated crop that only grows in the tropics. Granted, they have been doing this from time immemorial, but only since their ancestors took up residence in the rain forest of the Amazon. It's impossible that their ancestors could have lived any such way before arriving there--and the forensic evidence from this video series (especially beginning with video #10) indicates that their ancestors only arrived there a few centuries earlier than the conquistadors--and that the people whom they displaced were accomplished agrarians.
Just one of the bits that jumped out at me from the movie was that the "uncontacted" Waorani no longer use stone axes or earthen pots--they trade for steel versions of the same. Only the oldest man in the community can even remember how to use a stone axe, and he made a startling revelation---the tribe had no knowledge of where stone axe heads even came from!  They found the heads abandoned in the jungle by a previous civilisation--just as my sons like to comb newly plowed fields every spring for stone arrowheads--and assumed that they fell from heaven or something. A "stone age" tribe equally dependent on outside civilisation for their axe heads, whether they be of stone or steel--incredible!
Elisabeth Elliot, half of the first team of outsiders to live among the Waorani and record their culture, reported that the Waorani told her their ancestors also had worn clothes, but had eventually abandoned all clothing but for a single string around their loins, and perhaps--to dress up--one around each arm. Obviously their ancestors would have needed quite a bit more than that to make the trek to North America!
The native ability of evolutionists to suspend the use of logic continues to astound me.
Another bit that jumped out to me: an anthropologist, who learned the language from the Waoroni civilised by their contact with Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint, led the documentary team eastward to contact their downriver relatives. His research indicated that 70% of the males in the past five generations had died of homicide (oral history traces this murderous tendency back to a falling out over a tribal celebration about ten generations back). Clearly outsiders who bring in diseases that kill off a quarter, a third, or even half of the population are not the major threat to their continued existence. And those who do survive modern diseases will tend to pass their resistance to the following generations.
Again, a wee bit of logic would be helpful. How could a tribe that has lived on this land, disease-free for centuries, still only number in the hundreds--while the descendants of just a couple dozen men on the Mayflower now number in the tens of millions? Obviously murder, from conception onward, is a serious threat to population growth--in the case of "uncontacted tribes" still numbering only a few hundred individuals, clearly the greatest threat. It is notable that, the documentary reports, word filtered back to the uncontacted members of the tribe--along with the steel pots and axes--that there's no need to kill each other any more; so they've stopped the carnage (else, obviously the team would have never made it back out alive with their footage). Note: Mincaye, who had been one of, if not the oldest man in the tribe for over sixty years, has finally died of old age in his 90's. He manged to live long enough to give up his murderous lifestyle shortly before his life expectancy ran out, and "walk Waogongi's path" for the next two-thirds of his life, and on into the hereafter.
Everything in the documentary trumpets the same thing: this is not an ancient tribe peacefully perpetuating the lifestyle of their ancestors--a way of life under threat only by outside intrusion--but instead, a degenerate community in serious danger of completing the process of self-extinction if they are NOT contacted by outsiders.

Wine and the Bible

So goes the title of an undated and unattributed article I found online. There's not much of the Bible in it, though; it's mostly extracts of centuries-old anecdotes about wine being preserved without the benefit of fermentation. All this is well and good, but there's one problem: we live in the present, and if we are going to enjoy the biblical blessing of unfermented wine, somebody needs to show us how to make it; some of us, like the ancients, don't have refridgerators. There's not a shred of scientific rigour in this article: assertion after assertion is made without any attempts to repeat the experiment and see if it actually works. Here is the article:

Did Jesus turn water into intoxicating wine? Did He serve alcoholic wine at the last supper? What does the evidence tell us? The Bible speaks plainly on this subject. Historical records regarding the preparation, preservation and use of wine are also clear.

Consider this report (1820) by William Patton. The term “alcoholic” is not used. He uses the Bible term, “drunkard.” The Bible does not recognize drunkenness as a sickness, but as sin. The drunkard is listed in scripture with thieves, liars, extortioners, murderers, etc., as being in danger of God’s judgment in hell unless he repents. Gal. 5:19-21; 1 Cor. 6:9-10. God will never consign a person to hell for being sick. Therefore the matter of drunkenness, and that which leads to drunkenness, becomes a very serious matter. Here is his report:

I found that all Bible passages where wine or drinking is mentioned, fall under three headings: a) where wine is merely mentioned, b) where it is spoken of as a cause of misery and the emblem of eternal wrath, c) where it is a blessing along with grain.

I began to wonder if the Bible makes reference to two kinds of wine. Such is indeed the case. I shared my findings with Professor Seixas, an eminent Hebrew teacher. He took my manuscript, and a few days later returned it with the statement, “Your discriminations are just. They denote that there indeed are two kinds of wine.” I have since learned much from others who have come to the same conclusion. I ran into much opposition from those who believe that all mention of wine in the Bible is to intoxicating wine, but here are a few counter-statements:

Dr. Ure, in his Dictionary of Arts, says: “Juice when newly pressed from grapes, and before it has begun to ferment is called must, and in common language new wine.”

Rees’ Cyclopedia: “Sweet wine is that which has not yet worked or fermented.”

Noah Webster: “Wine, the fermented juice of grapes…Must, wine, pressed from the grape, but not fermented.”

Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible “The wine was sometimes preserved in its unfermented state and drunk as must…Very likely new wine was preserved in the state of must by placing it in jars or bottles, and then burying it in the earth.”

These authorities make it clear that there were, indeed, among the ancients, two kinds of wine, the fermented and the unfermented.

Fermentation

The laws of fermentation are fixed laws, always operating in the same way, and always and everywhere requiring the same conditions. Lardner’s Cyclopedia says:

“1. There must be saccharine (sugar) matter and gluten (yeast).

“2. The temperature should not be below 50 degrees nor above 70 or 75 degrees.

“3. The juice must be of a certain consistency. Thick syrup will not undergo vinous fermentation. Too much sugar is not favorable for the process, and on the other hand too little sugar, or, which is the same thing, too much water, will be deficient in the necessary quantity of saccharine matter to produce a liquor that will keep, and for want of more spirit the vinous fermentation will almost surely turn to vinegar.

“4. The quantity of yeast or ferment must also be well regulated. Too much or too little will impede and prevent fermentation.”

Others confirm these statements. The indispensable conditions for vinous fermentation are the right proportions of sugar, of yeast, and of water, with the temperature of the air ranging between 50 and 75 degrees.

We see therefore that the process of fermentation is not a natural one. Chaptal, the eminent French chemist, says, “Nature never forms spirituous liquors; she rots the grape upon the branch; but it is art which converts the juice into (alcoholic) wine.”

Fruits Preserved

[Before there was refrigeration]

As grapes and other fruits were such an important part of the food of the ancients, they would, by necessity, invent methods for preserving them fresh. Josephus, the first century historian, in his Jewish Wars, book VII, ch. VIII, s. 4, makes mention of Herod’s fortress in Israel, called Masada, “For here was laid up grain in large quantities, enough to enable an army to survive for a long time: here was also wine and oil in abundance, with all kinds of herbs, vegetables and dates heaped up together. These products were also fresh and full ripe, and in no way inferior to such fruits newly laid in, although they had been there almost 100 years.”

In a footnote William Whiston, the translator, says: “Pliny (AD 27-79) and others confirm this strange paradox, that provisions laid up against sieges will continue good for 104 years, as Spanheim also notes upon this place.” Such facts regarding long preservation of fruit and other food are confirmed by many other historians.

Swinburn says, “In Spain they also have the secret for preserving grapes sound and juicy from one season to another.”

E. C. Delevon states that when he was in Florence, Italy, “Signor Pippine, one of the largest wine manufacturers, told me that he at that time had in his lofts, for the use of his own table, until the next harvest, a quantity of grapes sufficient to make 100 gallons of wine; that grapes could always be had, at any time of the year, to make any desirable quantity; and that there was nothing in the way of obtaining the fruit of the vine free from fermentation in wine countries at any period. A large basket of grapes was sent to my lodgings, which were as delicious, and looked as fresh, as if recently taken from the vines, though they had been picked for months.”

Fermentation Prevented

Professor Donovan, in his writing on domestic economy, mentions three methods by which all fermentation can be prevented:

“1. Grape juice will not ferment when the air is completely excluded from it.

“2. The juice may be boiled, thereby evaporating the water. The substance thus becomes a syrup, which if very thick will not ferment.

“3. If the juice is filtered and deprived of its gluten; or yeast, the production of alcohol will be impossible.” —Anti-Bacchus, p. 162.

Also, if the juice is kept below 45 degrees (in water or underground) it will not ferment.

Four methods were used by the ancients to keep their new wine from fermenting:

Boiling and Thickening

By this process the water is evaporated, thus leaving so large a portion of sugar that fermentation is prevented. “By boiling, the juice of the richest grape loses all of its aptitude for fermentation, and may afterwards be preserved for years without undergoing any further change.” —Elements of Chemistry, Herman Boerhave.

Liebig says, “The natural law causing organic substances to pass into a state of decay is annihilated in all cases by heating to the boiling point.” The grape juice boils at 212 degrees; but alcohol evaporates at 170 degrees, which is 42 degrees below the boiling point. So then, if any possible portion of alcohol was in the juice, this process would expel it. All yeast, which would cause fermentation, is also destroyed by boiling. The obvious object of boiling the juice was to preserve it sweet and fit for use during the year. The boiling continued for several hours until ¼ to ½ of the water had boiled away. Water was later added to the syrup when the host desired to serve new wine.

Some of the celebrated Opimian wine, mentioned by Pliny had, two centuries after its production, the consistency of honey. Professor Donovan says, “In order to preserve their wines to these ages, the Romans concentrated the must or grape juice, of which they were made, by evaporation, either spontaneous in the air or over a fire, and so much so as to render them thick and syrupy.”

Horace, born 65 BC, says, “There is no wine sweeter to drink than Lesopian. It is like nectar, and resembles ambrosia more than wine. It is perfectly harmless, and will not produce intoxication.” —Anti-Bacchus p. 220.

“The Mishna states that the Jews were in the habit of using boiled wine.” —Kitto, Volume II, p. 477.

W. C. Brown, who traveled extensively in Africa, Egypt, and Syria from AD 1792 to 1798, states, “Most of the wines of Syria are prepared by boiling immediately after they are pressed from the grape, until they are considerably reduced in quantity, when they are put into jars or large bottles and preserved for use.” He adds, “There is reason to believe that this mode of boiling was a general practice among the ancients.”

“It is observable that when sweet juices are boiled down to a thick consistency, they not only do not ferment in that state, but are not easily brought into fermentation even when diluted with as much water as they had lost in the evaporation.” —Caspar Neuman, MD, professor of chemistry.

Filtration

By filtration, the gluten or yeast is separated from the juice of the grape. While the juice will pass through the filtering implements, the gluten will not, and, being thus separated, the necessary conditions of fermentation are destroyed. The ancient writers, when speaking of the removal of the vim, vi, vires, that is, the potency or fermentable power of the wine, use the following strong words: eunuchrum, castratum, effaeminatum–thus expressing the thoroughness of the process by which all fermentation was destroyed. Plutarch, born AD 60, in his Symposium, says: “Wine is rendered old or feeble in strength when it is frequently filtered. The strength or spirit being thus excluded, the wine neither inflames the brain nor infests the mind and the passions, and is much more pleasant to drink.”

Again, Pliny said, “Wines were rendered old and castrated or deprived of all their vigor by filtering.”

Captain Treat, in 1845, wrote, “When on the south coast of Italy, I inquired particularly about the wines in common use, and found that those esteemed the best were sweet and unintoxicating. The boiled juice of the grape is in common use in Sicily. The Calabrians keep their intoxicating and unintoxicating wines in separate compartments. From inquiries, I found that unfermented wines were esteemed the most. These wines were drunk mixed with water. Great pains were taken in the vintage season to have a good stock of them laid by. The grape juice was filtered two or three times, and then bottled, and some put in casks and buried in the earth–some kept in water (to prevent fermentation).” Dr. Lees’ Works, Vol. II, p. 144.

Subsidence

[Meaning, to sink or fall to the bottom; settle]

The gluten may be so effectually separated from the juice by subsidence as to prevent fermentation. The gluten, being heavier than the juice, will settle to the bottom by its own weight if the must can be kept from fermentation for a limited period. If the juice is kept at a temperature below 45 degrees, it will not ferment. The juice being kept cool, the gluten will settle to the bottom, and the juice when siphoned off, and thus deprived of the gluten, cannot ferment.

“They plunge the casks, immediately after they are filled from the vat, into water, until winter has passed away and the wine has acquired the habit of being cold.” Kitto, II, 955; A.-B. 217; Smith’s Antiquities. Being kept below 45 degrees, the gluten settled to the bottom, and thus fermentation was prevented.

Columella gives a recipe: “That your must may always be as sweet as when it is new, proceed in this way: Before you apply the press to the fruit, take the must that has already flowed from the grapes, put into a new amphora [jar], bung it up, and cover it very carefully with pitch, lest any water should enter; then immerse it in a cistern or pond of pure cold water, and allow no part of the amphora to remain above the surface. After 40 days, take it out, and it will remain sweet for a year.” He no doubt inferred that the pure wine was to be poured off from the gluten that had settled to the bottom. This wine would again be sealed airtight and kept cool in the ground or water until used. These ancients had underground cellars where their wines and other foods were preserved.

Fumigation

Dr. Ure states that fermentation may be stopped by the application or admixture of substances containing sulphur. Adams, in his Roman Antiquities, on the authority of Pliny and others, says, “The Romans fumigated their wines with the fumes of sulphur; they also mixed with the mustum (the newly pressed juice) yokes of eggs and other articles containing sulphur.”

In all these extracts, the writers call the grape juice wine, whether boiled, filtered, subsided or fumigated.

Wine With Water

There is abundance of evidence that the ancients mixed their wines with water. Not because they were so strong with alcohol as to require dilution, but because, being rich syrups, they needed water to prepare them for drinking.

According to Lightfoot, the Passover was celebrated with nonalcoholic wine mixed with water. Each person, man, woman and child drank four cups. After celebrating the Passover with His disciples, Christ took the bread and wine that remained and instituted the Lord’s supper. The wine was, we believe, the rich syrup diluted with water. This kind of wine met all the requirements of the law concerning leaven. The true rendering of matsah, according to Dr. F.R. Lees, means unfermented things. It therefore refers not only to bread.

Classification Of Wines

The careful reader of the Bible will notice that in a number of cases wine is simply mentioned without anything in the context to determine its character. He will notice another class, which unmistakably denotes the bad character of the beverage. There is also a third class, whose character is clearly designated as good.

Bad Wine

This class of texts refers to wine:

1. As the cause of intoxication. This is not disputed.

2. As the cause of violence and woe. Prov. 4:17; 23:29-30.

3. As the cause of self-security and irreligion. Isa. 28:7; 56:12; Hab. 2:5.

4. As poisonous and destructive. Prov. 23:31.

5. As condemning those who are devoted to drink. Isa. 5:22; 1 Cor. 6:10.

6. As the emblem of punishment and of eternal ruin. Psa. 60:3; 75:8; Is 51:17; Jer. 25:15; Rev. 14:10; 16:19.

Good Wine

I turn now to another class of texts which speak with approval of a wine whose character is good, and which is commended as a blessing.

1. To be presented at the altar as an offering to God. Num. 18:12; Neh. 10:37, 39; 13:5, 12.

2. Is classed among the blessings, the comforts, the necessities of life. Gen. 27:28; Deut. 7:13; 11:14; Isa. 65:8; Joel 3:18.

3. Is the emblem of spiritual blessings. Isa. 55:1; Psa. 104:15.

4. Is the emblem of the blood of the atonement, by which we receive forgiveness of sins and eternal blessedness. Matt. 26:26-28; 1 Cor. 10:16.

In all the passages where good wine is named, there is no indication of warning, nor intimation of danger, no hint of disapproval, but always of decided approval.

How bold and strong is the contrast: The one the cause of intoxication, of violence, and of woes. The other the occasion of comfort and peace. The one the cause of irreligion and of self-destruction. The other the devout offering of piety on the altar of God. The one the symbol of the divine wrath. The other the symbol of spiritual blessings. The one the emblem of eternal damnation. The other the emblem of eternal salvation.

“The distinction in quality between the good and the bad wine is as clear as between good and bad men, or good and bad spirits; for one is the constant subject of warning, designated poison, both literally and figuratively, while the other is commended as refreshing and innocent, which no alcoholic wine is.” Lees’ Appendix, p. 232.

Can it be that these blessings and curses refer to the same beverage, and that an intoxicating liquor? Dr. Nott says: “Can the same thing, in the same state, be both good and bad; a symbol of wrath, and a symbol of mercy; a thing to be sought after, and a thing to be avoided? Certainly not. And is the Bible, then, inconsistent with itself? Again, certainly not!”

Professor M. Stuart says: “My final conclusion is this: Whenever the scriptures speak of wine as a comfort, a blessing, or a libation to God, and rank it with such articles as grain and oil, they mean, and they can only mean the wines that contained no alcohol that could have a harmful effect; that wherever they denounce it, and connect it with drunkenness and revelling, they can mean only alcoholic or intoxicating wine.”

The Brimstone that fell on The Cities of the Plain

As I Bible scholar, I continue to look for groundbreaking research on topics that help us understand the Bible better. YouTube is a great resource in this area, and recently I spent a lot of time watching videos about the destruction of the Cities of the Plain (b`iri hakikar). The problem is, no one can agree just what the Plain was, or where the cities were, other than that they were all in the vicinity of the Dead Sea: either to the north, the south, the east, or the west. This website makes a strong case for Tel el Hammam, north of the Sea. Strong, that is, until you actually examine the biblical record. The ONLY correlation between the ruins of this unidentified city and those of the Cities of the Plain, is summed up in the closing paragraph of the website:

That the most productive agricultural land in the region, which had supported flourishing civilizations continuously for at least 3,000 years, should suddenly relinquish, then resist, human habitation for such a long period of time has begged investigation. Research results concerning the "3.7KYrBP Kikkar Event" are presently being compiled for publication and presentation.

There are many things to keep in mind here. Perhaps we could list some of them.
1. The destruction of the Cities (basically Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, and Zoar) was complete. The word used (mahpekah) refers to utter desolation. The Cities were never conquered by enemies, or even destroyed by natural disasters; their unique obliteration was accomplished directly by the Hand of God: burning sulphur from the sky. The ruins of Tel el Hammam simply don't fit this description.
But other ruins do. Beginning with Ron Hyatt, amateur archaeologists have identified at least four discrete sites along the west shore of the Dead Sea by three or four unique characteristics they all share: the outline of the city is a distinct ashy colour; all that is left are layers of ash, interspersed with carbonized wood and underlaid by layers of calcium sulphate, scattered throughout with colourless balls of sulphur that is purer than any naturally occurring deposits anywhere in the world.

2. The destruction was accomplished by intense heat accompanied by sulphur, which reacted chemically to destroy stone structures, replacing them with layers of sulphate ash. Even crops were wiped out in this way. Sulphur residue rendered the soil toxic to plant life. The area of the Dead Sea is proverbial for nothing being able to grow there. So, not only were the cities destroyed, but the entire area, which had a population density comparable to the Nile Delta, became uninhabitable--as it is to this day; no cities have ever been built there, and the main industry is mining the harsh chemicals that render it so hostile to life.

3. The cities, and their surrounding lush farm and pasture land, were so utterly desolated that no one would ever live in them again. It is no wonder that even now, 4000 years later, one can walk through the region picking up balls of brimstone from off the ground; no one has ever even attempted to mine it, despite its amazing purity. The very desolation that resulted from God's judgement has protected these ruins from exploitation to this very day.

A Nigger in which woodpile?

"There's a Nigger in the Woodpile"--a phrase the White Man has only just become aware of, ironically, from reading an article recommended by the venerable Mennonite historian Peter Hoover, whose Pennsylvania Dutch idiom has taken in the expression as a calque, "Do steckt eiats en Neger im Holzhauffe."

Now, it is very much to Peter's discredit that he used this phrase so cavalierly without translating it literally. Interestingly, I had heard the expression "skunk in the woodpile" which, having lived around both skunks and woodpiles, I took to be a literal-based metaphor, but scholars are agreed that it is actually a northern euphemism for the Southern original. The Pennsylvania Dutch, however, kept the original expression when taking it into their language, using it idiomatically for "There's something suspicious here behind the scenes." I won't go into the full usage of the phrase, as it can be looked up online (although some internet filters will restrict such research as regarding a "mature topic.")
I'll have a further critique of Peter Hoover in my next post, regarding his rejection of Premillennialism; this post will focus on the Holocaust denial in the linked article, which Peter introduced in a recent mass email as follows:

Probably about the strangest thing that has ever happened between my Jewish friends and me, is what appears at an Orthodox Jewish website on-line: 

http://nccg.org/ning/groups/judaism/questions-by-a-mennonite-about.htm

Do you see who wrote the article?  [he did]

I wrote it years ago after I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D. C. At first when I discovered it on-line (without my permission, but that is just fine) I was a bit alarmed. But then, the more I learned about it, the more surprising it became. This Orthodox Jewish group that published it, and that has kept it on-line for years, agreed with my conclusions, and shared all the same questions. 

When I got my first Kindle, I decided to make it a habit to download and read all the memoirs of Holocaust survivors that came available for $1.99 or less, but I soon had to give up the hobby as it became too overwhelming; there was literally about one every week. It is incredible that someone as deeply learned and widely traveled as Peter Hoover could even consider that the Holocaust Story is a Jewish fabrication, in the face of the thousands upon thousands of eyewitness testimonies to it. To me, that's the skunk in the woodpile! This willing suspension of belief is all the more incredible, with Peter being a respected historian not only of his Mennonite forefathers but also of the Russian Old Believers, concerning whom he wrote the book "The Russians' Secret."

While I continue to puzzle this out, the only theory that makes any sense is one that actually explains the situation perfectly. Peter Hoover has rejected God's chosen people, considering himself and his ilk to have fully replaced them as the apple of God's eye. Thus he not only turns away from the implication of the Scriptures that say otherwise, but even turns a blind eye to the historical fact that the Jews remain a special people--the only people, in fact, to survive intact from antiquity (although he also--no surprise--buys into the Khazar Hypothesis).

This all serves to remind us that every historian is biased, and no work of history can be taken as gospel--except the incredibly accurate Gospel Story itself.

How many metres in a cubit? The answer may astound you.

Dear Readers,
I know it's only been a day since I edited my last post (if you haven't read it yet, I highly advise it), but I just have to share what I learned today about the Egyptian cubit. If you watch the relevant minute of the referenced video, you will see that the most ancient Egyptian cubit is a function of the ratio of pi and phi in metres, out to four or five digits (.52356) over the precise 230,366½-millimetre width of each of the Great Pyramid's four sides.
This would indicate that the most ancient Egyptians were aware of the relationship of geometry to base ten out to five digits--a metre is the distance from the equator to the pole, divided by ten thousand--as well as the irrational numbers of higher mathematics. As later generations of Egyptians lost this knowledge, it stands to reason that their cubits became less and less precise--ranging as much as a centimetre off the ancient standard (and even more so by the time we get to the TNIV).
If the Egyptians at the dawn of history were capable of manipulating such abstract numbers to such precision, it lends credence to the idea that the numbers in Genesis chapter five--even more ancient--are the result of equally complex calculations. Note that in each of the nine generations enumerated, the age at which the son was begotten always ends in zero, two, five, or seven--as do the lifespans of the first seven generations. This is regardless of whether one follows the Hebrew, Greek, or Samaritan numbers. And as it turns out, two and five are among the factors of phi squared; it appears that some complicated mathematical formula was at work in producing ages that always ended in one of these two factors of phi squared, or the sum of them. And it appears that we are only now finally coming to the point in our understanding of ancient mathematics to be able to transcribe these numbers into something more useful to our purposes, which is establishing the time span between Creation and the Flood.

Added on August 19:
This video shows a tablet from ancient Babylon now understood to contain formulas of higher mathematics used to construct triangles from an entirely different perspective than has been used for the past 2500 years. Clearly Ancient Man was much more intelligent than materialist paradigm has been willing to accept. Perhaps more on that, in a later post.

The most embarrassing article in National Geographic--and a nice poem

In a past post, I mentioned that the National Geographic Magazine had become a propaganda arm of the US Military by 1943. Today I discovered that only about five years earlier, in what National Geographic is now calling "among the most embarrassing [article] in National Geographic’s history," NGM had served as a mouthpiece for Hitler. Free-lance American correspondent and photographer Douglas Chandler provided for the February 1937 issue a 9000-word article entitled "Changing Berlin," with "47 pages of dramatic images showing swastika-draped buildings and reverential descriptions of a city under Nazi rule."

But note, his submission was fully in conformance to NGM editorial standards: to include only stories “of a kindly nature” and strictly apolitical. One wonders where those standards had gone only five years later, and if perhaps a misplaced sense of guilt was behind the change.

During the War in Europe, Chandler became a literal mouthpiece for Hitler, railing against Jews and Bolsheviks on short-wave broadcasts aimed at America. After the war ended, he was hunted down and brought back to the US to stand trial for treason. Convicted, he served a fifteen-year "life sentence" before being released to return to Europe.

The editors at the National Geographic Society had a lot of explaining to do when irate letters began to pour in from listeners who had heard Mr. Chandler repeatedly mention his connection to the National Geographic Society during his propaganda broadcasts. Apparently no such apologies were ever made in defense of their pro-USA propaganda articles.

Now, while I am at making this month's post, I want to share with my readers a poem published over half a century ago (perhaps written a quarter-century before that), and apparently never yet posted to the Internet. I say apparently, because in recent years search engines have become so sure of what their customers are looking for that simply entering in a character string no longer ensures that any or all online sources containing that string will come up in the results. But here it is:

In the solemn stillness of an early dawn is heard
The crystal-throated reveille of a waking bird.
Donning golden slippers arises then the Day
And flings across the morning sky her crimson negligee.

Enchanting now, she saunters forth to spread abroad her charm
And shakes perfume from every flower to smooth upon her arm.
She paints the children's bodies brown, their faces rosy fair,
And with soft fluting of the wind breathes kisses through their hair.

Shrill piccolo of the cricket warns that night at last has come!
She gathers up her flowing skirts and hastens quickly home.
But looking up into the sky, a wary child might find--
She left her veil of mauve chiffon trailing far behind.

--Helen Wessel, Natural Childbirth and the Christian Family. pp. 3-4. Fourth Revised Edition, (c) 1983, Harper & Row Publishers

P.S. Sure enough, this poem in the same form can be found online in the original 1963 edition--IF one knows where, and how, to look. The book was contemporaneously published under a similar title, Natural Childbirth and the Family, as well as under the later and even more innocuous title The Joy of Childbirth. All likewise online, but apparently now out of print.

P.P.S. I just noticed, in proofreading this prior to publication, that, in addition to omitting the final letter of 'early', resulting in the nonsense reading of "earl dawn," I had committed the scribal error of homeoteleuton, skipping from 'up' in the antepenultimate line, to 'into' in the penultimate, with the resultant loss of the end of one line and the beginning of the next. Note that this was probably influenced by the plausibility of the new reading, "gathers up into the sky."