Comments by "Roger Dodger" (@rogerdodger8415) on "The Newsmakers"
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@cxarhomell5867 People "feeding off of other peoples work, that's how we sustain our necessities".. That exactly right. You act as a thief. One that takes the reward of others labors, for yourself while you claim to "serve God". Not only don't you serve God, you don't serve man either, only yourself. Now, for someone that studies so hard as an excuse for hard work, you should be well familiar with Genesis 3:19, as I've pointed out to you. As God's chosen people, he sure has stood by watching the pogroms, suffering, and near annihilation in the holocaust as reward for all your dutiful study and worship. It appears that you are in perpetual study yet caught in immobilized practice. Is it any surprise then, that the punishment has continued for well over two thousand years, while you continue to believe that you are the sheep and the rest of God's creation, mere goats.
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@cxarhomell5867 In November 1872, a self-taught historian named George Smith toiled away in the archives of the British Museum sorting through fragments of clay tablets recovered from ancient Mesopotamian archeological sites in modern-day Iraq. The tablets were written in cuneiform — a language that had only recently been recovered and translated after 1,000 years of obscurity — and most of the fragments contained humdrum accounting records or opaque prophecies from palace priests.
But then Smith found something remarkable. As he translated the cuneiform word by word, a familiar story unfolded. There was a god punishing humanity with a catastrophic flood, one man who was chosen to survive using a specially constructed boat filled with animals and seeds, and after the flood, birds being released to find dry land.
This wasn't the story of Noah and the ark, though, and this wasn't the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament). What Smith had discovered was only one chapter in a sprawling Mesopotamian tale now known as the Epic of Gilgamesh, first written in 1,800 B.C.E., around 1,000 years before the Hebrew Bible.
"The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest tragic epic for which we have evidence," says Louise Pryke, an honorary research associate at the University of Sydney and author of "Gilgamesh," a deep analysis of the text and its influences on later works, from the Bible to Homer's "Odyssey." "It's something that's come to represent ancient Mesopotamia in modern culture."
When Smith first made the connection between the two flood stories in Gilgamesh and Genesis, legend says that he became so excited that he danced around the room removing his clothes. Smith's discovery shook the foundations of biblical scholarship by proposing that some, if not all, of the Hebrew Bible was borrowed from neighboring civilizations.
Pryke says that while the flood narrative in Genesis is clearly inspired by the tale in Gilgamesh, the similarities and differences in the ancient accounts can teach us important things about what these two cultures valued and their cosmic worldviews.
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@cxarhomell5867 Sargon the Great, was the King of Akkadian around 2,300 BCE and had a similar basket beginning to the Jewish Moses.
Sargon was born as the illegitimate son of a priestess or low-class woman. In shame she secretly hid her child and then placed in a basket of reeds and floated him down a river where baby Sargon was found by a man and raised as his own son — only later to become a great King and leader. The similarities to the Moses story are uncanny.
But which story came first? The earliest copy of the Sargon story we have is from the 600s BCE found in the Library of Ashurbanipal. But the original story is much earlier, of course, passed on in oral tradition. Likewise, the oldest Hebrew Bible we have are the Dead Sea Scrolls with texts dated from 150 BCE to 70 CE but the stories were likely also written in the 600s. Due to all these stories being passed on orally for most likely centuries before their recording, and not knowing when the original recording took place, dating these events is very difficult. So, did they borrow from each other, or just use an obvious literary technique or, and this is unlikely, all just tell the truth about their founders. See my post illustrating models for how Greeks and Jews shared similar stories here.
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