Bib Lit

>The date of the Crucifixion can now be fixed as April 7, 30 A.D.

> Jehovah, the God of Moses, was not the God of Abraham. Isaac and Jacob.

>The word "debts" probably appears in the Lord's Prayer through a mistranslation of the Aramaic word Christ used--a word which can also mean "sins." > The parable of the Prodigal Son parallels ancient Sumerian and Nuzi inheritance laws.

> Solomon built the first blast furnace, utilizing smelting principles that were not rediscovered until within memory of man.

These were typical pronouncements last week at the 76th meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, at the Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. Familiarly known as Bib Lit, it includes America's foremost Protestant, Jewish and Catholic authorities on the Bible, and gives them what the American Association for the Advancement of Science (see p. 44) gives scientists: an annual opportunity to forgather and exchange notes on progress in Biblical research.

Most controversial paper at the meeting was read by Dr. Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead, professor of Oriental history at the University of Chicago. A decade ago he began writing a history of the Near East, found such disagreement among scholars over the origins of Christianity that he "was compelled to devote precious years to the investigation of the New Testament for myself." Historian Olmstead's findings made most of his Bib Lit colleagues sputter. They think the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) give the truest picture of Christ's life, assign a much later date to St. John's Gospel. Dr. Olmstead said roundly that it was the earliest, written only a few years after the Crucifixion, and by far the most reliable of the four. It is the only one with a coherent chronology, he declared, and the only one which reveals a sound legal understanding of the various trials of Christ.

Biblical criticism is indeed in for overhauling if Dr. Olmstead's thesis is accepted. He has worked out a schedule of exact dates for all Christ's ministry, based on the recent discovery of astronomical tablets for the Babylonian calendar (which the Jews used after their return from their Babylonian captivity). Most authorities say Jesus was 33 when He died; Dr. Olmstead thinks He was nearly 50. He cuts down the accepted period between Baptism and Crucifixion from nearly four years to less than two, fixing the former date late in 28 A.D. and the latter on April 7, 30 A.D., the only day about that time when Passover came late in the week.

Highlight of a colloquium on The Idea of God in the Ancient Near East was the assertion by Herbert Gordon May of Oberlin that the religion of the Hebrew patriarchs differed widely from that of Moses, and that Moses himself probably changed Gods during the Children of Israel's 40 years of wandering in the wilderness during the Exodus. In Genesis the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is regularly referred to as El, and Professor May thinks he was akin to the Canaanite Ba'al. With Moses the Hebrew Bible begins referring to God as Yahweh (Jehovah) more often than as El, and when the Jews invaded Palestine with Yahweh as their God they undertook to exterminate the Canaanites among whom Abraham, worshipping El, had spent his life in peace.

"We must reckon with the possibility," said Dr. May, "that the exodus from Egypt was under the aegis of the snake deity of the Levite tribe, Nehushtan." Moses' rod turned into a serpent when God told him to cast it down (a miracle later performed by Aaron before Pharaoh) and the snake rod was later used by Moses to bring the ten plagues on Egypt.

"The people led by Moses from Egypt were led directly to Kadesh Barnea, where under Moses' instigation a union of tribes under Yahweh, the deity of the Judean tribes, was consummated. . . . Yahwism was made the sole official cultus. . . .

Nowhere is it affirmed that Moses maintained that Yahweh alone existed." Professor Shalom Spiegel of Manhattan's Jewish Institute of Religion reported the discovery of a seal inscribed to Ge-daliah, the puppet Hebrew regent whom Nebuchadnezzar set up after he conquered Jerusalem in 589 B.C. to rule over the few Judeans he did not take back to Babylon.

This seal makes it seem that Gedaliah's appointment had the support of the prophet Jeremiah. Dr. Spiegel suggested that Jeremiah may even have played Laval to Gedaliah's Petain.

Excavations at Ezion-geber ("Solomon's Singapore") at the head of the eastern spur of the Red Sea have revealed "architectural, engineering and metallurgical skills which, in some respects, have hardly been excelled today." reported Archeologist Nelson Glueck. director of the American School of Oriental Research at Jerusalem. Important as a naval base and port. Ezion-geber was still more important as the greatest copper and iron smelting town of antiquity. The diggings have shown that "it was the largest single armament centre of the day, and played an exceedingly important role in furnishing arms for the tremendous na tional defense scheme which Solomon planned and completed in record-breaking time" (I Kings 9:15-26).

Ezion-geber's site shows Solomon at his wisest. He had it put at the one place where strong, steady winds from the north could fan the flames in its furnaces (whose flue-holes and air-channels utilized the principle of the blast furnace nearly 3,000 years before Bessemer), blow the smoke and fumes on out to sea.

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