Crop circles, pyramids, the Ark and the Bible

There is a phenomenon going on on earth that only very few people recognize, and that by itself it highly remarkable. 

Most of us have heard of crop circles, which are intricate works of art that are formed in grain fields, usually by bending areas of grain into patterns, and usually anonymous.



Enthusiasts ascribe these wonderful formations to the handiwork of extraterrestrials, and some go as far as to forward elaborate schemes involving mother-ships, distant galaxies and interstellar councils, or else the moaning and groaning of mother earth, glowing ley lines and vibrating energies that combined produce instances of higher math (with which the observer has to resonate in order ascend into the fifth dimension, and so on).

Take me to your dealer

Mainstream commentators, however, are sure that all of them are man-made. Some feel confident that all these formations can be reproduced by regular humans with regular human skills, while others derive their confidence from reduction and elimination, being equally sure that any movement towards the alternative would constitute the narrow end of the wedge that will separate humanity from its most practical beliefs, which in turn would lead to collective psychosis, anarchy and ultimately collapse and annihilation.

Some farmers are eager to know the perpetrators so that they can sue them for the damage, while others note with hardly suppressed glee that the affected grain was not at all destroyed but remained alive and in a far better condition than the grain that wasn't touched (longer stems, fuller heads; all that).

More to the point, however

But crop circles is not the phenomenon I want to talk about. Imagine that it was you who one day woke up with the idea of placing the whopping double triskelion in a field near Milk Hill in England.

This perfectly executed Catherine Wheel consists of 409 circles of varying sizes, laid out in a pattern that is 240 meters across (yes, that's people in the central circle below).

The whopping Milk Hill Catherine Wheel

How do you get from waking up that one morning to sitting atop Milk Hill at sunrise on 14 August 2001, undiscovered and gloating over you creation?

You would first have to be rather fanatic, that goes without saying. Then you would have to have considerable mathematical skills in addition to knowing that the Celts had a thing for triskelions, and then, for some reason, come up with the desire to make it even more difficult for everybody and create a double one.

You would have to engineer a way to print your design onto the grain, and that would take a trick or two. The greater form would have to be created at once because stamping out the circles consecutively would certainly result in misalignment. The smaller ones might be added later, but still, not a single error is permitted. I've been an engineer for three decades, and I would have to think very long and very hard for a way to pull this off. It takes a rare set of highly developed skills, and I humbly submit that I can't even think of a way to replicate this, let alone come up with it in the first place.

The colossal Oregon Sri Yantra geoglyph and the Nazca Monkey are anonymous. So is the portrait of John Williams that appeared in August 2014, just off the Old Town side of the Branko Bridge in Belgrade, Serbia.

You would probably realize right soon that you would not be able to design the whole process by yourself, let alone execute it. So you would have to recruit others, and that would take yet another trick or two.

Covert operations are nothing new in our world, but to set one up out of the blue without the benefit of an existing organization (such as the military or some secret club that is really secret) or without a formidable incentive (believable threats or lots of money) is nearly undoable. Trying to get your band together would inevitably lead to someone spilling the beans either before or after the operation.

And there's the rub, there is the phenomenon I wanted to talk about. If you were the one who designed the Milk Hill Catherine Wheel, produced it overnight AND kept everything secret, even after all the media coverage, please contact the Abarim Publications Recruitment Center because we would like to hire you.

Mum's the word

Certain companies actually have realized the commercial appeal of crop formations and their monetary injection has produced certain formations that are obviously not extraterrestrial in origin, but why are there groups of people (or aliens) who go to great lengths to anonymously produce great work of art, which won't last beyond the day of the harvest? Or, to expand the scope of the question: what explains the phenomenon of anonymous art in which the anonymity of the artist(s) is part of the final work?

Artists sign their work to be recognized and to be reckoned (and paid) for the entire body of their work. And in case the artist is working on a medium that isn't his or hers (say, graffiti artists who spray paint trains or buildings), they will often sign their work anyway with a signature that is recognizable by the scene but not by the cops. If an artist knows he's doing a one time thing, he might use anonymity as a means to publicity.

Georgia Guide Stones -- anonymous

Take the Georgia Guide Stones for instance, which, had they been commissioned by Ed Koch and erected on Time Square, would have been surely recognized for the pseudo-portentous crap they are. But now that the makers and funders are incisively anonymous, the media was and still is all over them and a disproportional percentage of people have heard of them. 

But most of the crop circles are made by people who don't claim them as their productions, and history has shown that their mere appearance serve the sole purpose of fueling the greater discussion on who were are, where we're going and whether we are alone in the universe.

Sure, some of us find that whole discussion a waste of time, but would those people engineer elaborate pranks just to watch hapless others go alien-crazy over that? There's no good reason to exclude this from the whole pallet of reasons of why people make crop circles, but I'd like to propose that the creating of crop circles ties not into humanity's inherent desire to deceive, but rather in our inherent desire to make wise.

Whichever ancient wisdom tradition we look at, they all consist of several separate exercises or disciplines. Most traditions value scientific examinations of the observable world and subsequent data retention and transmission, but most also value prayer or meditation and periods of rest. The Semitic wisdom traditions additionally utilized a technique that probably also had an entertainment value, namely the posing of riddles, and a Hebrew riddle was not a silly question the audience had to guess the answer of but a problem of which the answer had to be worked out by means of logic and reason (Judges 14, 1 Kings 10:1). The Hebrew word for riddle is hida, which is possibly related to the verb hadad, which means to be sharp, keen or swift. 

The various religions of our earth have managed to whittle the ancient wisdom traditions down to a skeleton, like a rock band that slipped further and further away from its original purpose and kept losing its founding members to the wish to go solo. Science has always been a major part of theology, but when religion began to dictate what's true or not, science broke away and pursued its whopping solo-career. Mystery, on the other hand, broke away from religion but never made it much further than silly game shows and TV quizzes. Some writers speak of a "God-shaped hole" in people who don't believe, but I'm sure it's not that simple. I'm guessing that mankind has a natural need for mystery; to be in awe of the unimaginable or to be flabbergasted by the inexplicable.

I bet that religion's failure to provide mankind with proper mystery is the reason that groups of people go out into fields and painstakingly create phenomenally mysterious images without damaging a farmer's crop.

The ear-deafening silence

Everybody knows that the Ark of the Covenant has gone missing some time after king Solomon placed it in the Temple, and over the years a generous plethora of theories have been proposed to explain its disappearance. But what theorists rarely recognize is the distinctive silence of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the fate of the Ark. This silence is so loud even, that observant readers of the Bible recognize it as an actual character of the story.

In other words: the very fact that no Hebrew author (save for perhaps the author of 2 Maccabees) spends a single word discussing the fate of the Ark, which was the reason why the Temple was built and the very item that kept Israel together, very strongly suggests that the disappearance of the Ark was part of its proper function. Nothing unexpected happened to the Ark, and it's not "lost" at all. 

And what about the great pyramids of Giza? Their origin and ultimate purpose is much debated, but why does no ancient Egyptian text talk about the actual building of them or purpose they might have? The Egyptians were great masons, but why is there not a single carving anywhere on these mysterious monuments that would make them a little less mysterious? The only answer, again, is that their mystery is part of their function. Whatever they might have been for in the ancient past, their function now is that we ponder them and subsequently doubt whatever theory is presently peddled as truth. It's almost as if these monuments are monuments to the gift of doubt, because doubt leads to renewal and renewal leads to truth. 

In recent years, a slowly growing body of scholars is advocating the idea that the Bible isn't what we always thought it was. It doesn't work they way we figured, nor does it tell the story we shoehorned into it. The familiar titles of the Books of the Bible aren't part of them and were mostly added later, and only recently have scholars mustered up the courage to admit that we have no idea who wrote the Bible, or even when or where. This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the Bible came to pass via a hugely complex process that probably involved hundreds (thousands?) of poets, scientists, scribes, compilers, editors, redactors and proof readers. This is highly remarkable by itself, but what is even more so is that this process is nowhere referred to in the Bible, and its complexity has only in recent times been recognized.

So who wrote the Bible, built the pyramids, hid the Ark and created the crop circles? Well, here at Abarim Publications we believe that humans did all of it, but we also believe that these humans were either specifically or else generally inspired by greater forces than the usual selfish claim to fame.

And whether these greater forces are mother-ships, fifth dimensions or the angels of the Most High God, well as the prophet formerly known as Isaiah says: "Come now, and let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18).

Come now, and let us reason together" -- Isaiah 1:18

The pyramids, the Ark and the case for cold fusion

Perhaps I've been an engineer too long, or perhaps not long enough, but when I look at the description of the Temple of YHWH built by Solomon and the Phoenicians, I see a device of some sort (and read our article on the Menorah for a look at the Menorah as machine).

It is of course miraculously daft to forward the idea that the ancient Hebrews had high technology, if it weren't for guys like Christopher Dunn who proposed the same about the pyramids of Giza. More specifically, Dunn proposes that the pyramids are simple too accurately built to have served solely as burial tombs.



Accuracy such as employed at Giza is only required when volatile processes need to be contained and controlled. The pyramids would have looked indistinguishably similar if they had been built with far less precision, and hence during far less man hours of labor and planning, and hence for a fraction of the cost.

Had the pyramids been tombs or even any other kind of monument, they would have been riddled with texts and recognizable imagery. But now that they are sterile and barren, it seems warranted to conclude that they were not monuments at all:



Dunn proposes that the pyramids were meant to be power plants, but stops there. As an engineer, he feels that he should only take measurements and discuss possible applications, but refrain from guessing how the pyramids would fit into Egypt's society at large, and how they would have served this society. Here at Abarim Publications we're engineers too, but in stead of looking at the pyramids, we look at the Bible, and as such have a lot more to go on.

Engineering the Bible

A defining characteristic of the Bible that is often swept under the rug of formal religion is that the Bible speaks of one God for everybody, which can not be represented by anything stationary, and which desires to be known by men. The God of Israel is not to be approached via esoteric rituals and stubborn entreaty but via respectful curiosity and inquisition; not through blind obedience but through learning. The Lord is to be worshiped in truth, and His works and therefore His character can be learned about by studying nature (Romans 1:20). In other words: Yahwism is much more like science in the modern sense of the word than like religion.

The burning of the library at Alexandria in 391 AD

Most people agree that thanks largely to the Romans, the culminated knowledge of the ancient world was destroyed, but when people think of ancient knowledge, they mostly think of flowery philosophies and artsy fartsy stuff. But no, over the last few decades, archeology has unearthed enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the ancients had developped technologies that we simply can't imagine.

We obviously should diligently guard our natural tendency to couple our enthusiasm with our own ability to imagine things, and come up with far-fetched fiction that the ancients might have been able to make reality: time-travel, interstellar travel, you name it, or rather: please don't. That same approach has damaged the field of theology at large almost beyond reasonable repair, and it serves no purpose other than to distort and destroy.

Humanity has lost knowledge; Graham Hancock even calls us a species with amnesia, but perhaps our amnesia is not total. Throughout time there has been a tradition of believing that somehow certain elements could be turned into other elements. That process (or technology) was called Alchemy, and had to do with a device known as the Philosopher's Stone. The wisest people of modern times up until Isaac Newton have been searching for it. Where did we get that belief? Did we really make it up, or do we somehow collectively "remember" that it's bloody well doable; we've just forgotten how!

Alchemy and Fusion

Good news: modern scientists have figured out how to do it, and now it's called Fusion (in stead of Alchemy). You witness fusion every day because sunlight is a result of fusion. In the core of the sun, every four hydrogen atoms are mushed together to make one helium atom, and this is how:

A hydrogen atom consists of (1) one proton (that's the atom's nucleus), (2) one electron zipping around the nucleus, and (3) a force field that holds the electron tied to the nucleus.

The Alchemist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone
Joseph Wright

During fusion, of two hydrogen atoms, the electron gets hammered into the proton, to produce two neutrons, which then get hammered together with the other two hydrogen atoms.

The result is one helium atom which consists of (1) two protons and two neutrons, forming the atom's core, (2) two free electrons zipping around the nucleus, and (3) two force fields to hold the two electrons tied to the nucleus.

The difference between four hydrogen atoms and one helium atom is two force fields. You needed four force fields to keep four hydrogen atoms together, but you only need two for one helium atom.

The two force fields that are no longer needed, wiggle their way out of the sun and become the sunlight that we see.

The bad news: this kind of fusion goes against the laws of thermodynamics, and it takes colossal amounts of energy to get it going in the first place. Hydrogen atoms don't want to get mushed together to form neutrons, and they certainly don't want to huddle up with two more to form one helium atom. In order to perform atomic fusion, you need a monstrous amount of energy and no scruples against doing something to atoms that they themselves don't want to do.

Once you got four hydrogen atoms hammered together, they won't be able to break loose again, unless they somehow acquire energy equal to two little force fields they lost. You can even continue hammering atoms together to form heavier atoms (1 hydrogen atom + one helium atom = one lithium atom + 1 free force field) and distract more and more energy. When you reach iron (26 protons, neutrons, electrons and force fields), the game is up because in order to make heavier elements (like copper, which is number 27) you would have to insert energy in stead of getting it out of the deal.

Elements heavier than iron are produced in events called super novae, and if you can manage to break these heavier elements apart into lighter elements, you would win energy. That process is called Fission, and it's the operating principle of atomic bombs and nuclear power plants.

In other words: alchemy is perfectly possible, but the way we have it today it requires an initial investment of energy that makes the whole thing expensive, cumbersome and dangerous. The Philosopher's Stone we managed to build is too large to be of any use. There's barely enough food in the world to feed the beast.

Stone cold fusion

The original Philosopher's Stone was the size of a poodle. It's working principle was a mysterious process that in our day and age is colloquially known as Cold Fusion, which is a process which the scientific world generally deems impossible. But is it?

In 1989, Fleischmann and Pons famously reported excess energy emanating from an installation that involved so-called "heavy water". Their findings caused an enormous riot, not because it might have worked but because if it had worked it would have engaged a hitherto unknown natural principle. And much worse: this principle promised unlimited and freely available energy for all.

Fleischmann and Pons' nifty Cold Fusion wasn't disproved (beyond the observation that our presently know laws of physics don't support it), it was yelled off the table by hysteric, and may we add: heavily funded, Hot Fusion researchers and their oily backers.

Here at Abarim Publications we are neither physicists nor heavily funded, so our scope grows misty in that direction. But in the direction we are skilled to look (namely Biblical Scriptures), things look suspiciously bright for the cold fusion camp.

On the font-page of our main website, we've already suggested that under specific circumstances, atoms can be persuaded to cluster together to form molecules the size and complexity of DNA. Now we'd like to postulate that cold fusion is possible when atoms are somehow "persuaded" to huddle together into heavier elements and voluntarily release their energy. We don't have complicated mathematics to back all this up, but we do have compelling textual evidence.

The pyramids of Giza are mysterious for more than one reason, and one of these is that no mention exists anywhere in the substantial Egyptian records about them being built. It appears therefore that the pyramids outdate Egypt's recorded history (several other hypothesis point at the same conclusions, but these escape the scope of this article).

If we deem the obsession of our own recent ancestors with alchemy, a mere interest in something that would be nice if it worked is simply not potent enough to explain it. Something similar could be said about the obsession of the ancient Egyptians with the sun. What was it about the sun that was so compelling that it outshone all other elements and tributaries of life and being alive, and became the prime object of national obsession? The usual explanations of religious fervor simply don't cut it (and never have, if you ask me), and I'm sure that both the obsession with the sun and that with transmutation of elements came from the same source: the lost knowledge of cold fusion.

Water, water everywhere

One of the reasons why some researchers believe that at least the sphinx of Giza is a lot older than is generally supposed comes from the patterns of erosion on the statue itself and the basin it sits in.

Robert M. Schock, a geologist at Boston University concluded that these patterns came from centuries of accumulative water damage. Rainfall substantial enough to have caused this did not occur in Egypt after about 4000 BC, and we know that from archaeological and geological examinations of the environment there.

 But what is the water that damaged the sphinx and made the dessert bloom wasn't caused by rainfall in the conventional sense?

These days it's common knowledge that the designs and functions of the tabernacle, which Moses built from heavenly patterns that he was shown on the mountain (Exodus 25:9, 25:40, Numbers 8:4, Hebrews 8:5), and the Ark of the Covenant were to some extend also known in Egypt.

The function of the Ark was (1) to be a receptacle for the Law, and (2) to be a seat for the Lord and a place where man could meet Him. What strikes about the Ark is that it somehow was associated with a pillar of smoke and fire, known as the Shekinah. Perhaps I've been an engineer too long, or not long enough, but when I hear of fire and smoke I automatically think in terms of energy and fuel.

I don't want to sound disrespectful or un-spiritual, but if the Lord forms a column of smoke and fire, He essentially brings things together that produce the effect. Better yet: if the Lord wants us to observe creation in order to know Him better, He would stay very far away from so-called super-natural events, that is: events brought about by reasons other than natural laws, known or not.

In still other words: if the Lord wants to be known by the things He's made, He wants us to think about the Shekinah in terms of physics and chemistry, and not stay away from investigating it because it would be too holy. The pillar was observable, so the principles that brought it about are observable too.

An artist's rendering of the Shekinah

The pillar of smoke and fire represented the presence of the Lord, and showed up directly after Israel's departure from Egypt (Exodus 13). This happened before the Law was received (Exodus 19), which happened before the Ark was constructed (Exodus 25). The Ark was deposited in the tabernacle and the tabernacle became the temple. When the Ark was placed into the temple's Holy of Holies, the glory of the Lord returned and the place was filled with so much smoke that the priests had to get out of the building (2 Chronicles 5:13-14). To me that looks like someone pushed the on-button.

A natural process always consists of things going in, things being done, and things coming out. We know that the "things going in" consisted of enormous amounts of animals and vegetation, but it's not clear if these were actual organisms or rather another way of saying "food for humans" (1 Kings 8:63-64). What the "things being done" were precisely isn't clear, but it had to do with fire coming from heaven (2 Chronicles 7:1). What the "things coming out" were is even more obscure. Apart from it being a great blessing, we have no idea what the temple did apart from being spectacular.

Another instance of fire coming down from heaven and consuming a bull, happened when the prophet Elijah taunted the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18). Now note that the Giza complex was a lot larger than Solomon's temple complex, and that Elijah's altar was a lot smaller than the temple. It is as if these accounts also indicate that whatever it was, we were already forgetting about it. Another key to what was going on, however, is that Elijah battled the Baal priests in the middle of a period of drought (1 Kings 17:1). Immediately after Elijah's victory over the Baal priests, which consisted of the Lord sending fire from heaven, the rains came (1 Kings 18:41-46).

Streams of Living Water

The temple was destroyed by the Babylonians but several visionaries saw a time in which it would be built again, and in a way that would exceed its former glory. The prophet Ezekiel saw a vision of the new temple, and noted among other things that water flowed from it (Ezekiel 47:8).


Likewise the prophet Zechariah foresaw a time at which "living" water would flow from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:8). John the Revelator even went so far as to speak of the River of Life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, with the Tree of Life on its either shore, yielding fruits of every kind and leaves to heal the nations (Revelation 22:1-2).

But in John's world there are no temples in the conventional sense (Revelation 21:22). The River of Life comes from a Living Temple, namely from a collective of people that are united into one mind and without being coerced (John 7:38, 1 Peter 2:5; the "things going in" being the blood and body of the Lamb).

Throughout the ages, political leaders have tried to pummel their realms into shape by force, and the sun has spectacularly persisted as preferred emblem to those endeavors. The Romans worshiped Sol Invictus, the invisible sun, and modern Christianity is unfortunately much more based on the Solar cult than on the Bible (read for more details our article on the name Nazarene).

Obedience to God is perpendicularly opposite to obedience to formal doctrine and clerical structures. Obedience to God equals freedom of the individual (of course within certain restrictions such as don't kill, don't steel, et cetera), and freedom of the individual is a nightmare to any totalitarian leader. Josephus wrote that during any of the three week-long Judaic feasts, three million people would converge onto Jerusalem. Then realize that the entire Roman empire contained 300 million people -- meaning that three times a year, one percent of the population would abandon positions of servitude and production to go party in the homeland -- and you can figure out why Rome's battle with the Jews was about more than religious bickering.

The final conclusion of all this (and where's my drum roll?) is that totalitarian coercion is the social equivalent of Hot Fusion -- and don't delude yourself into believing that we're presently living in a democracy, because we're not. The social equivalent of Cold Fusion is, well, whatever it is that makes the Body of Christ tick -- and don't delude yourself again; most churches today are wholly similar to the congregations devoted to Baal in Elijah's days. Enthusiasm, fervor and even certainty and faith are no signs of being right, see 1 Kings 18:28-29. Instead, no effect is a sure sign of being wrong.

The Body of Christ consists of people that are measurably different from the majority of humans, and can certainly be found not only within Christianity. From what we can learn from nuclear physics, these people are typically not focused on personal gain of any kind. That means that most of them are neither rich nor famous, and probably not very popular either. They are not organized in any formal way, there are no symbols or emblems nor mailing lists or membership cards and there are no leaders and bosses. They probably don't have many friends, but they are connected to humanity in a way that defies further explanation. You'll know it when you are one, and you won't ever be able to comprehend it when you are not.

But, don't be dismayed. In stead watch this riveting little documentary on cold fusion:




Or this one, which is more up to date but slightly more technical and a bit more angry:

Hebrew story telling: the miracle of the Bible

Vilna Gaon  1720 - 1797

The Bible, though pure and simple in its basic tenets, is vastly complex -- so complex even that Hebrew sages are known to have sighed that the Torah contains the whole universe (Vilna Gaon), and the Ten Commandments the laws that describe it (Shneur Zalman).

Shneur Zalman 1745 - 1812

Later commentators have often scooted these sayings to the realm of zealous hyperbole, apparently forgetting that the Hebrew culture was organized in such a way that surplus of wealth and energy was habitually invested in literary art.


Or in the words of the mathematician and modern (secular Jewish) sage David Berlinski (in the 42nd minute of the first Hoover Institute interview):

"The Old Testament is the greatest repository of human knowledge and wisdom in the history of civilization, any culture, any time, any place. And that really should be the first point of discussion. Because every attitude today -- from Richard Dawkins to me to Christopher Hitchens to lonely pastors in the Bible belt on Sunday morning ranting from a particular text -- is discussed in the Bible. There's a character in the Bible who expresses that point of view, and there's sympathy expressed  for that point of view, and reservations expressed by that sympathy. It's an enormously rich, dramatic piece of work."

Hebrew authors were super authors; arguably the most skilled text-masters the world has ever seen, arguably as bright and well-equipped as the smartest professors today, or Leonardo da Vinci five centuries ago, or the very best masons of Egypt.

Christopher Dunn

The masons of Egypt expressed Egypt's wisdom in stone, but some of Egypt's statues were created with far greater accuracy than traditional tools could ever verify, let alone produce (see the studies of master-machinist Christopher Dunn), so it's a baffling mystery how they did it, or why.

Any observer with any sense at all can only stare awestruck at these buildings realizing that in scope and function these buildings far exceed anything we build today, and obviously came to pass via knowledge we're oblivious of.

In Egypt, wisdoms were expressed in publicly viewable stone when an initiated few made myriads of slaves do want they wanted. In Israel, wisdoms were expressed in publicly viewable texts when myriads of initiated poured over and discussed previously published works.

Ramesses II 1303 - 1213 BC

The wisdom of People Of The Book evolves much faster than that of People Of Stone and the Hebrew authors were far better writers than Egypt's best masons were masons. In other words: the Bible is a far more mysterious thing than the Giza plateau or the extremely precise and symmetrical statues of Ramesses II.

We moderns like to congratulate ourselves with our hard drives and operating systems but information technology didn't start with IBM. All writing is information technology, and was designed to store data, but some technology is more sophisticated than others.

The texts of the ancient Hebrews go so far beyond any other text on earth that the word "text" do them justice as much as the word "animal" does a human justice. The Hebrew Bible achieves data compression by using natural principles, which indeed allows a finite book to contain the whole world (John 21:25).

These texts use techniques that are quite plainly beyond the grasp of the common moderner, and besides tell stories, they "operate" on code the way DNA "operates" on code, using the principles of nature: fractals, broken symmetries and even a built-in copying process that inevitably led to nature's signature variety and diversity.

To the Hebrews, text was life and as sacred as life.

De next two weeks we'll have a look at the complexity of the Bible.

How Beer ties into the Promise of Salvation

For eons mainstream historians have tried to make us believe that humanity made the transition from being hunter-gatherers to living in agricultural and urban societies, because of such mundane considerations as religion or people's desire to huddle up and be safe. A recent revolution has changed all that. Now we know the real reason for the agricultural revolution: beer!

Yes folks, people domesticated barley and brew beer millennia before they baked bread, and beer has saved humanity more than once since (watch the riveting and wonderfully entertaining documentary below if you don't believe it).

But if beer was such an important catalyst in human development, why is beer not mentioned in the Bible? It's generally accepted that the agricultural revolution is described in the late Patriarchal cycle, specifically when Jacob began to build booths for his cattle (Genesis 33:17). But where's the beer (not counting the names He-Brew and Beer-sheba for argument sake)?

The answer may very well lie in the word nazid, which comes from the verb zud, meaning to boil. Our word occurs six times in the Bible, divided over a mere three scenes:

(1) The prophet Haggai describes a complete meal in Haggai 2:12, which contains our word but no beer (which in antiquity would be a part of any well balanced meal).

(2) The prophet Elisha was called to the rescue when during a famine some prophets had concocted a brew (nazid) from unknown ingredients, and it was awful. Elisha ordered the men to add some qemah, and what that is we don't know but it has to do with a grain product, usually translated with meal or flour but that's just a guess. And the brew was fine! Could qemah have been hop?

(3) But most revealing is the use of our word nazid in the story of Esau (the hunter and man of the field) and Jacob (the home boy). One day Esau came home from hunting and found Jacob stirring some nazid (Genesis 25:27-34). Esau famously traded his birth right for some of it, and when father Isaac was about to dispense his blessings, he blessed Jacob who brought him a dish made from domesticated goat-kid and had little blessing left for Esau and his fresh kill (Genesis 27).

And as a footnote: it's generally assumed that Jacob tricked Isaac into blessing him, but that's patently untrue. Isaac was blind and Jacob's visual disguise would hardly have made much difference to Isaac. In his letter to the Hebrews, Paul wrote that Isaac knew very well what he was doing, and blessed his sons according to his understanding of the things to come (Hebrews 11:20).

And beer? Besides securing Jacob's blessing and Israel's future, beer brought people together and caused society.

Beer kept the ancients healthy by producing the 20th century wonder of antibiotics naturally. Beer caused the American Revolution and was responsible for a pre-computer Internet.

Because of beer, people invented refrigeration and machines that replaced child labor.

So next time you pop a cold one, proclaim of the immortal words of John Nash: I have respect for beer!

Cheers!

Oh, and watch this cheerful and most excellent documentary on How Beer Saved The World:

Martin Luther - Reluctant Revolutionary

It's the 31st of October; half a millennium after Martin Luther hammered his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg and sparked the Reformation. And as a big-F5 for your memory, watch this wonderful PBS production on the life and works of Martin Luther - Reluctant Revolutionary.