Why I Bother to Study the Bible

When I am not even Christian

Oftentimes people ask me why I bother studying and writing about the Bible.

For instance, one Medium writer, Allan Milne Lees, wrote (not to me, but in reply to an article by Lisa Swain, PhD):

“The implicit assumption that the tribal myths of a small group of profoundly ignorant goat-herders who lived 3,000 years ago can be in any way relevant to any aspect whatsoever of modern life is, to be polite, rather optimistic. In fact there is zero value in debating conflicting interpretations of any myth because they are all the products of limited intellect and even more limited knowledge of reality.”

I agree completely with the sentiment. Evangelicals are interpreting the text in a manner that is totally illogical and inappropriate given the age and the world in which we live.

However, I disagree with the premise of this argument. I don’t accept that the core of the text was created by ignorant goat herders living around 3,000 years ago. I believe that Genesis and the core texts were created during the post-exilic period after the Persian empire had conquered Babylon.

Two apparently unrelated cultural artifacts with major staying power were created in Babylonia in the 6th century BC: astrology and the opening books of the Old Testament.

Before that point in history, there was a form of mundane astrology in use for predicting the future health of the Babylonian king and kingdom, but it was very primitive. It included weather conditions, eclipses, comets, and the colors of the moon. Still, at least the planets were recognized as planets, and their motions were beginning to be charted and calculated.

However, there was, for example, no zodiac wheel with twelve signs of thirty degrees each. Instead, everything was based on omens, rhymes, and the histories of what had occurred in the kingdom the last time this heavenly configuration was recorded. Astrology was basically at the same level as haruspicy, which is a form of divination that requires the inspection of the entrails of a sheep.

Then, after the Persian invasion, a new form of astrology, not of Persian origin, appeared virtually overnight, eclipsing the mundane astrology that had previously reigned unchallenged. This new natal astrology was incredibly well-developed when the details of the system were finally written down by Ptolemy in his 2nd century AD classic on the philosophy and practice of astrology, the Tetrabiblos.

That gives the system a good six hundred years for development, so it is possible that the system attained the documented level of complexity through the gradual growth and progression of the tradition.

However, when I compare the days of the week, which were being adopted within the Roman empire from the 1st to the 3rd century AD, to the opening text of Genesis written in the 6th century BC, the correspondences are obvious. The authors of Genesis not only possessed detailed information about astrology but they also apparently knew how the days of the week would eventually be ordered.

What I suspect is that a scientifically advanced society was engaged in a very long-term project. I will call this group the Watchers to simplify the narrative. The Watchers were on the lookout for the first empire to accurately calculate planetary motion. The Watchers then targeted that empire and conquered it with one that the Watchers controlled.

Instead of allowing whatever form of astrology might have emerged from the incipient Babylonian theology, the Watchers inserted their own form, which had been refined and perfected over countless iterations.

At the same time, the Watchers possessed an epic narrative specifically designed to protect and conceal an ark of ancient knowledge, suspended in a matrix using interlocking systems of encryption. I suspect that once completely unlocked, we will find that it contains a history of the Watchers, and as well as the schematics of, and instructions to, our role in the Grand Design, the Divine Plan.

And so a group of people was found and promised freedom and autonomy. But first, these people must produce a book recording their history and defining their laws. The Watchers tell these people not to worry, they will assign scholars and editors to assist them in this project. After all, they are the chosen people of the Adonai Elohim.

And so the books of the Bible are written and those people become Judaeans. Their history becomes merged with the narrative designed and fine-tuned by the Watchers to keep the wheels turning even if there are no Watchers around to maintain the mechanism.

Just as the Watchers had introduced an advanced and evolved form of astrology to supersede any primitive developing forms, so too with the religion they bequeathed to the Judaeans. It was engineered and refined so as to leapfrog over hundreds of years of piecemeal theological evolution. There was no time to waste with historical variations.

Then, when the astrological age of Aries ended and the age of the fish began, the Watchers released their next series of pre-engineered texts. And now here we are at the beginning of the final age of the ascension, and a ‘new’ collection of ancient texts has been discovered. Certain of these texts apparently demonstrate how to decrypt the previous two layers of text, the Christian and the Judaean.

As I see it, the Biblical texts were designed so that at the proper time they would be recognized as containing information encrypted by means of various ancient systems of divination. These divinatory systems had themselves been engineered by the Watchers before being inserted into sufficiently advanced host cultures.

Sitting alone in my library, after I choke down the last bite of darnel toast, I like to tell myself that I have only scratched the surface of what the Watchers assembled to help us as the Divine Plan enters its Eleventh Hour.

That’s why I bother to study the Bible when I am not a Christian. Because I’m fairly certain it contains a solution to the situation the Watchers understood we would be facing right about now.