* 3/18/20 Update Hydroxychloroquine: On the phone today with renowned scientist Temple Grandin we were talking about the Nature report just out, Hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic derivative of chloroquine, is effective in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro. Grandin wants everyone to know about this! See more in the NY Times and in this paper in the Nature journal Cell Discovery.
* Review of Patterns III: Red Sea Miracle: Real Science Radio hosets Bob Enyart and Fred Williams review Tim Mahoney's third installment in his Patterns of Evidence series, The Red Sea Miracle. The guys begin with audience favorite, CSU professor autism spokesperson and author of 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers on animal behavior Temple Grandin, who answers Mahoney's question about whether sheep could travel twenty miles a day for days on end. "If the people can do it the sheep can do it" she answered bluntly. Thus this woman, named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, swiped away in a simple sentence a century of objection to the "Hebrew approach" on crossing the desert to the sea. That was one of various objections, both scholarly (like the location of yam suph) and colloquial (like sandals would wear out), addressed by the film's evaluation of the "Egyptian approach" of a nearby, smaller, and less miraculous crossing as compared to what Mahoney calls a "Hebrew approach" to a far greater and more miraculous Red Sea Crossing. (This RSR episode was recorded the day after the nationwide fathom event screening. And consider visiting the rsr.org/exodus landing page for our list of evidence!)
* Mahoney's Patterns:
Patterns of Evidence -- The Exodus: Arrival; Multiplication; Slavery; Judgment; Exodus; Conquest.
Patterns of Evidence -- Moses Controversy: Match the Look; Readable; Match the History.
Patterns of Evidence -- The Red Sea Miracle: Departure Point; Direction; Desert; Detour to a Dead End; Deep Sea; Destination to Mt. Sinai.
* The Reversal of Egyptologist Manfred Bietak: In the early 2000s after years leading Egyptian excavations Egyptologist Manfred Bietak on camera answers Mahoney's question about evidence for the Israelites in Egypt, bluntly stating, "So far, not." That wasn't the "so far" of a hopeful investigator but rather as a mainstream scholar he did not recognize the historicity of the Hebrew sojourn and added, "To connect this with the Israelites is a very weak affair." Fast forward more than a decade later and Mahoney again interviews him, asking about any knowledge gained in the intervening years, "Do you [now] see a place where the Israelites could have lived?" And in a dramatic reversal, "A very exciting evidence comes from the region of the Wadi Tumilat" Bietak says pointing to the Goshen region on a map. "I was able to prove that the western half of Wadi Tumilat was an enormous overflow lake, because it was a kind of enormous basin, fed by a branch of the Nile, eighteen kilometers long, 1.8 kilometers wide. What is most interesting, Sarah Groll [the late linquist Egyptologist toponyms expert] pointed it out, there is a lake in one of the Ramesside texts called Geshem, Gesem." This is one of the semitic place names Groll identified. "And indeed in the Septuagint version," Bietak continued, "Goshen is written as Gesem. … Gesem is a semitic lake tied to a big lake, and it can only be this lake" he says tapping on the map at Goshen. So Mahoney askms why semitic place names would appear in Egypt and Bietak answered. "Why did Egyptian scribes for heavens sake use semitic toponyms for an area that belongs to Egypt? It could only mean that the people living there, the majority, spoke a semitic language. Here we have the name Pithom tied to a Ramasside document" pointing again to the map. "I think that one should not mistrust the story of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. I think there is packed inside, a story which may have an historic background." See also rsr.org/exodus#goshen.
* On Yam Suph / The Red Sea: BEL DRAFT NOTES. The last thing that the world needs is a new idea on the Red Sea. But, what if Yam Suph did not exist as a toponym (a geographic name) prior to the sea crossing, but rather, as Moses was saved in the suph of the Nile's waters, the water crossed took on that idiomatic name precisely because the Israelites were saved through its waters? Watching Tim Mahoney's Red Sea Miracle prompted the following idea. Scholars in the film state what has long been known, that the Hebrew yam means sea, and that suph does not mean red, but rather, reeds. Consider that the "names" of the pagan gods were not so much personal names as titles of (false) deity such as Baal, and likewise the words Abimelech, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes may not be names of individuals but titles of royalty. Similarly, what if yam suph was not the pre-existing name of a specific body of water but rather referred to a watery saving? Consider also that dramatic events often give rise to new figures of speech. The creation week led to the number seven meaning completion and likewise the flood's days of rain led to forty meaning a fully sufficient amount of time. After Moses was saved through the Nile's waters when his mother hid him in the suph, that is, in the reeds (twice stated in Exodus 2), perhaps an idiomatic expression arose regarding a saving involving water which became a suph saving?
Pondering that, consider the 28 uses of suph in the Bible:
- The suph of the Nile where Moses was saved (Ex. 2:3, 5)
- The suph sea where the wind blew the locusts (Ex. 10:19)
- The suph sea referencing where Israel was saved (22 times; though a couple of these need to be examined further)
- The suph sea of Solomon's ships (at the Gulf of Aqaba 1 Ki 9:26)
- Though the suph wrapped around his head Jonah was saved (2:5)
As the antithesis, Isaiah 49 provides the final reference stating that Egypt's "waters will fail from the sea and the river will be wasted... reeds and suph will wither" (Isa. 49:6) so that whereas God's people were saved, those arrayed against Him can expect no watery suph saving. If this idea is valid, then the Jonah reference would be an instance of a typical use of a word with a particular connotation used as a subtle figure of speech. So how might this relate to study of the Exodus route? First, there would be no need to search for a body of water previously identified as yam suph. When Israel was saved through the sea, it became the suph sea, such that the most significant use of the figure for a time actually conferred a new name onto that body of water. Second, a lack of reeds would not mitigate against the "Hebrew approach", as Tim Mahoney calls it, to locating the Red Sea miracle at the Gulf of Aqaba.
* A Place in the History of Molecular Biology: At Cambridge University, anti-Darwinist Douglas Axe worked for some of the world's leading molecular biologists in the laboratory established by four Nobel laureates including the guys who discovered DNA's double-helix. Decades after Watson and Crick broke the field of molecular biology wide open, evolutionists at Cambridge were still publishing the claim that the recipe for building proteins had just a couple of rudimentary requirements. Doug's groundbreaking research showed that the "simple model" of protein construction was false. Further, shocking to evolutionists, Axe showed that the very particular order of hundreds of various amino acids was a very specific sequence needed for standard protein function (with a specific, different sequence needed for each kind of protein). Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart is honored to interview Dr. Axe!
