shijing
The Living Force
This is an interesting book to read in conjunction with Laura’s recently published books, The Noah Syndrome and Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes. The author is Christian and a biblical literalist, but he’s also a geologist and archaeologist – his focus on the place of cometary phenomena in the Bible is what makes his book relevant.
The book is divided between two main chronological themes (past and future). Regarding the former, he connects the Noachian flood with the recently postulated Burckle Crater, and the Tower of Babel story with the Amarah Crater, where he argues that, based on comparison with other Sumerian and Akkadian texts, this story is actually an account of the destruction by cometary impact of the first major empire under Sargon (Nimrod) who enforced the worship of the cometary goddess (“Queen of Heaven”) Inanna (Ishtar). He also identifies Gog with Gugu, king of Lydia, and Magog with Lydia itself – Assyrian Ma-Gugu (Hebrew Magog) being literally the ‘land of Gugu (Gog)’.
Goodman argues for multiple biblical references to the Oort Cloud (where he interprets “heaven” as referring to the solar system proper, but “heaven of heavens” as that which lies outside of the solar system, i.e. the Oort Cloud with its “host” of comets). He also speculates that the terms “sign of the Son of Man in heaven” and “Star out of Jacob” may refer to a slow-moving red or brown dwarf which regularly perturbs the Oort cloud, and is seen only sporadically throughout history because it is a flare star, invisible for the majority of the time but visible when it undergoes sporadic increases in brightness.
Goodman’s discussion of the seven trumpets and bowls of Revelation is particularly interesting. He argues that these are in fact descriptions of a series of seven cometary impacts on Earth – four initial impacts followed by three major impacts (the “three woes”). While he doesn’t directly relate these to the seven seals, this seems to be a possibility, since the bowls are embedded within the trumpets, which are in turn embedded within the seals in the narrative of Revelation. Traditional biblical scholarship holds that these are three separate series of linear events, but it can also be argued that they are three different perspectives on a single series of events. Interestingly, he interprets the ‘locusts’ of the fifth trumpet as comet-originating bacteria described as if seen at the microscopic level.
The first four events are given below for comparison (I omit the final three because they involve much longer text describing apparent geopolitical and transdensity activity along with impact phenomena). In general, the term “horse” can be replaced by “comet”, and it’s interesting (following the general analysis in The Noah Syndrome) when reading through all seven events to substitute “America” for “wild beast” and “Israel” for “false prophet" (the second wild beast):
Although its important to remember that this is a book aimed at a conventional fundamentalist Christian audience, the specific analyses make it worth the read.
