'Why shouldn't I be baptized?': A rich, castrated African meets an Apostle

The eunuch, a servant of the queen in Ethiopia, asks the Apostle Philip: "Why shouldn't I be baptized?" Philip baptizes him.

Image: The Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by the Deacon Philip (painted 1545-1550) by Lambert Sustris (1515-1591) © public domain Wikimedia Commons.

In Chapter 8 of the New Testament's Book of Acts, verses 26-40, a eunuch official of the Ethiopian queen has just completed a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem and is beginning his return journey south. The Apostle Philip overhears him reading aloud a passage from Isaiah 53:7-8 that laments unjust humiliation and lack of descendants. Philip takes the opportunity to accompany the eunuch for a short distance and tell him about Jesus, and the eunuch asks Philip to baptize him.

If indeed the eunuch was a real historical person, and not only a figure in a parable, it is not clear that his baptism would have represented his actual conversion to Christianity. The King James Version of the Bible published in 1611 includes a verse (Acts 8:37) in which the eunuch professes his new Christian faith immediately before being baptized. However, the Rev. Dr. Charles Francis Potter in "The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed" explained that this line "is not in our four oldest Greek manuscripts, Codexes Vaticanus and Sinaiticus of the fourth century and Codexes Alexandrinus and Ephraemi of the fifth.'" Modern translators of the Bible recognize that this line was added to the text perhaps a century later to deliver a certain theological teaching, and newer publications include the verse only as commentary in the margin.

We do not know the race or religion of this nameless eunuch. He may have been connected to the Essenes, a Jewish sect popular around Jesus's time, as suggested by Potter, since baptism was popular among the Essenes. Potter further speculated that the Ethiopian queen may have sent him on the thousand-mile journey to Jerusalem to retrieve religious writings such as the apocryphal Book of Enoch. This would explain why he was in possession of a scroll with Isaiah's text, and why he bothered traveling to Jerusalem when castrated men were explicitly forbidden from the Temple (Deut. 23:1).

Warren Gage, an Old Testament Professor at Knox Theological Seminary, wrote in "The Ethiopian Eunuch Finds Joy" that according to "tradition," the Ethiopian eunuch

"fathered the Coptic Church... It is the church that gave us Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Athanasius. Through the centuries, the millions of this church call this eunuch their father. He, a eunuch, was chosen in the good mercies of to be the father of faith in Africa!"

The word "eunuch" sometimes refers to a position typically held by castrated men rather than indicating whether a particular individual was actually castrated (a matter that would be impolite to verify in most social contexts). It is reasonable to question whether the individual described in Acts was castrated. Scholz questioned why none of the early Church Fathers who castrated themselves, such as Origen, mentioned this Biblical episode; had they recognized the Ethiopian eunuch as physically castrated, surely they would have seen him as a role model.

However, Mathew Kuefler pointed out in "The Manly Eunuch" that the late-fourth-century St. Jerome once expressed his preference to refer to the Ethiopian eunuch as a "man" because of "the vigor of his faith." (He also recommended a pilgrimage to the fountain at Bethsur near Hebron where the eunuch was thought to have been baptized.) Had Jerome not believed this individual was actually castrated, he would not have needed to explicitly dignify him as a man. Furthermore, Africa has a long history of castrating slave boys, so the idea of an Ethiopian eunuch is not far-fetched. For one more modern example, Britain's foreign office learned in November 1884 that the Ottoman Sultan had a ship bound for Zanzibar that contained eight slave children, half of whom were castrated boys from Ethiopia. (Britain opposed slavery but did not wish to offend Zanzibar; ultimately they did not search the ship, according to Ehud R. Toledano in "The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression: 1840-1890.") This is only one example representing countless such offenses throughout history going back to ancient times. It is thus quite plausible that the nameless Ethiopian eunuch in the Book of Acts - if he was a real person - indeed was castrated, and that the Biblical reference to him as a "eunuch" together with his interest in Isaiah's lament of lost descendants was an attempt to convey the fact of his castration.

Castrated men were considered damaged in a Jewish tradition that placed high value on descendants. In the ancient world overall, they were often loathed because of their association with servitude; many castrated men were slaves themselves and were compelled to participate in the slave system by guarding harems of kept women. Some, like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts, rose to positions of wealth and power in royal courts and were given servants to drive their horses on long journeys, yet still were not free according to our definition of the term today. 

Given his situation, the Ethiopian eunuch can be seen as a role model for self-respect and spiritual autonomy. Acts 8:36-38 (New International Version 1984) tells the story:

"As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, 'Look, here is water. Why shouldn’t I be baptized?' And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him."

The queen's official perceives that he is as entitled as any other human being to receive a sacrament from one of Jesus's twelve Apostles and he takes the initiative to perform the action without delay. The event is a popular subject in Christian art, for example, in this painting by Rembrandt Van Rijn. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch thus has an important place in Bible study and in religious history.

April 2017 update: Artsy's page on Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn provides Rembrandt's bio, images of over 200 of his works, exclusive articles, up-to-date Rembrandt exhibition listings, and related artists and other information. The Kunstmuseum Basel is scheduled to exhibit “Hola Prado! Two Collections in Dialogue” featuring the work of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn.

Learn more on the Wikipedia article for "Ethiopian eunuch."

You may be interested (I haven't yet gotten access to it): Sean D. Burke, Queering Early Christian Discourse: The Ethiopian Eunuch. It's a book chapter from Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship, ed. Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone, The Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. (pp. 175-190)

Article originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 15, 2011.

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Related to studying codices

The VisColl team "received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program to fund the VCEditor 2.0 Project" to "support work undertaken by staff in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and the Penn Libraries Digital Library Development team." (viscoll.org) The Trump regime 2025 terminated the project.

Consider the role of silence here:

"Unsure how to understand this, the eunuch asks ‘does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’ This is all Philip needs to speak – and starting with this scripture, to proclaim to him the good news of Jesus. (v.35). Luke’s choice of phrase, ‘opening his mouth’ (ESV) is interesting here, as it echoes the previous description of the suffering servant who ‘did not open his mouth’. It is well know that Jesus’ humiliating death came to be interpreted through the figure of the suffering servant. But as Diarmaid McCulloch notes in his book Silence: A Christian History, the only unusual feature about the Servant’s behaviour is his silence (Isaiah 53.7). I suggest that this motif of silence is significant here because it is by breaking through the silence of the eunuch’s exclusion from the Temple, that Philip opens the way for the eunuch to join the household of God." (Jonathan Halliwell, CofE Network of Distinctive Deacons, emphases mine)

Obituary: Amiri Baraka, American poet and playwright

Amiri Baraka, an accomplished poet and playwright, died on Jan. 9, 2014 in Newark, N.J. He was active with organizations devoted to Black empowerment. This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 10, 2014.

Amiri Baraka, 79, an accomplished poet and playwright, died on Jan. 9, 2014 at a hospital in Newark, N.J., the city of his birth. He was a passionate defender of the integrity and authenticity of African-American art.

His given name at birth was Everett Leroy Jones. He published many works, including the acclaimed play "Dutchman," under the name LeRoi Jones. 

One of his most influential essays, "The Myth of a 'Negro Literature,'" published in 1962, can be read today in "Home: Social Essays." In the essay, he argued that, as Kaluma ya Salaam paraphrased it,

"as long as the Negro writer was obsessed with being accepted, [and with being] middle class, he would never be able to 'tell it like it is,' and, thus, would always be a failure, because America made room only for white obfuscators, not black ones."

In the early 1960s, LeRoi Jones was developing as a beat poet in Greenwich Village in New York City. He and his wife, Hettie Cohen, worked on a literary magazine together. However, the murder of Malcolm X on Feb. 21, 1965 was a turning point in his consciousness. Leaving behind his children and his wife - their marriage had lasted from 1958-1965 - he and a group of committed artists moved to Harlem to form the Black Arts movement, related in spirit to the Black Power movement. in 1967, he married Sylvia Robinson. The next year, the couple converted to Islam, as Malcolm X had done, and changed their names. His wife became known as Amina Baraka; he chose "the Bantuized Arabic name Imamu Ameer Baraka, later changed to Amiri Baraka."

An article posted by the Academy of American Poets explains the widespread influence of the Black Arts movement:

"Sometimes criticized as misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racially exclusive, the Black Arts movement is also credited with motivating a new generation of poets, writers and artists. In recent years, however, many other writers - Native Americans, Latinos/as, gays and lesbians, and younger generations of African Americans, for instance - have acknowledged their debt to the Black Arts movement."

Among the familiar names whose poetry was part of this movement are Nikki Giovanni and Eldridge Cleaver.

In the 1970s, Amiri Baraka remained active with organizations devoted to Black empowerment; his work began to lean more toward Marxist and Leninist politics, drifting away from his former beliefs about Black nationalism. In 1984, he published his autobiography.

In 2002, he became the state poet laureate of New Jersey. He quickly lost the post after performing a poetic indictment of violence, "Somebody Blew Up America," which asked "Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / to stay home that day". The lines implied that there was conspiratorial foreknowledge among Jews regarding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 that destroyed the Twin Towers and killed nearly 3,000 people in their office buildings on a Tuesday morning, and that these Jews had only protected their own kind. (The claim is, of course, false. It was likely based on a reported Israeli government estimate that 4,000 Israelis were in the vicinity when the towers collapsed. Several hundred Jews died in the event.)

With Amiri Baraka's passing, poets count the loss of a literary star, in the sense that he wrote about stars in his poem "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note":

"And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave."

Photo: Amiri Baraka at the Malcolm X Festival in San Antonio Park, Oakland, Calif. Image by: David Sasaki from San Diego, Calif. © Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license Wikimedia Commons.

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Quobnah Ottobah Cugoano: An eighteenth-century Afro-Briton abolitionist

Quobnah Ottobah Cugoano grew up alongside the children of a king of Fantee in present-day Ghana. When he was 13, in the year 1770, he and the children were kidnapped in the woods by other Africans and sold to a European slave ship. He was unable to convince anyone to send word to his family. Finding that "death was more preferable than life," the captive women and children - while the men were chained beneath the deck - conspired to burn the ship and perish together, but one of the women betrayed their plan.

Cugoano was taken to the West Indies (that is, the Caribbean) before being sold to a master in England in 1772. Coincidentally, this was the same year that Lord Mansfield issued his famous ruling that prohibited slave-owners from pursuing their slaves who had escaped to other countries; this was commonly understood as the de facto abolition of slavery in England, 75 years after parliament had allowed private merchants to slave-trade on the west coast of Africa for a fee of ten pounds. It is not known how Cugoano eventually became a free man, but a decade after his arrival in England, he was working as a servant and was an abolitionist. Having been baptized with the name John Stewart, he came to accept Christianity as the one true religion.

His book, "Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery," was published in 1787, when he was about 30 years old. A revised version was published four years later.

In this book, Cugoano acknowledges that there were slaves in Africa, too, but says they were primarily prisoners of war or people who owed a debt and were treated relatively well. The same applies to slavery in ancient times. He thinks it may be possible to allow "a free, voluntary, and sociable servitude, which is the very basis of human society, either civil or religious, whereby we serve one another that we may be served, or do good that good may be done unto us, [which] is in all things requisite and agreeable to all law and justice." On his view, slavery may also be used as a punishment for lawbreakers.

He contrasts this ideal with the reality of slavery in the contemporary West Indies where "hard-hearted overseers have neither regard to the laws of God, nor the life of their fellow-men." Slaves are stripped and stared at, stowed like cattle in a stinking ship-hold, sold and separated from family forever. Cugoano personally witnessed a fellow slave in Grenada whipped for choosing to attend church rather than continue laboring in the field. He also refers to a well-known incident in 1780, where a captain threw over a hundred ailing slaves overboard because he preferred to attempt to recover their market value from his insurer.

He decries this modern type of slavery as "an evil of the first magnitude" that finds no justification in the Bible and is "contrary to all the genuine principles of Christianity." He lauded the writings of other abolitionists who describe how slavery is "to the great shame and disgrace of all Christian nations wherever it is admitted in any of their territories."

He proposes "days of mourning and fasting" for repentance, followed by "a total abolition of slavery" throughout Europe, to be enforced by warships sent to the African coast to ensure that emigrants are leaving voluntarily. During the transitional period, he recommends a lighter form of servitude for Afro-Britons: they should be freed, he says, after seven years of service which will compensate their keepers for the cost of their Christian education, and they should be released from their service only if they have become morally upright Christians, after which they should be compensated for their continued service or else they may elect to return to Africa to serve as Christian missionaries.

Cugoano explicitly rejects the European pro-slavery claims that African society is so terrible that its members consent to slavery as an improvement, and that slavery may be assumed to be harmless simply because other Europeans practice it. He also rejects the claim that dark skin is the curse from God known as the "mark of Cain" in the Bible. "The life of a black man is of as much regard in the sight of God, as the life of any other man," he writes.

Rather, violent imperialists and slave traders aren't truly Christian, but are part of the "synagogue of Satan" and the "Antichrist." He warns that breaking Biblical law by enslaving others will result in an eventual "awful visitation of the righteous judgment of God" which will be no less severe for its belatedness, perhaps manifesting in hurricanes, crop failures, national debt and individual poverty. As an economic strategy, freedom for all people would enable more national prosperity than would the keeping of a slave class.

He concludes:

"the voice of our complaint implies a vengeance ... and if it is not hearkened unto, it may yet arise with a louder voice, as the rolling thunder ... not only to shake the leaves of the most stout in heart, but to rend the mountains before them, and to cleave in pieces the rocks under them, and to go on with fury to smite the stoutest oaks in the forest"!

Image: Benkos Bioho statue © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license Wikimedia Commons.

Article originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 9, 2012.

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Building on research by historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, a study shows active participation in slavery crossed gender lines. From 1856 to 1861, white women engaged in nearly a third of sales and purchases of enslaved people in the nation’s largest slave market. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/u...

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— Carole V. Bell (@cvbell.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 2:04 PM

Related

In the US: Convicts are returning to farming – anti‑immigrant policies are the reason, Stian Rice, The Conversation, June 7, 2019

Zen and the art of flying: Planes and bikes in Saint-Exupéry and Pirsig

See the full story here (paywalled)

This continues:

Both writers argued that value is relative to the individual.

Saint-Exupéry: "If orange-trees are hardy and rich in fruit in this bit of soil and not that, then this bit of soil is what is truth for orange-trees."

Similarly, Pirsig: "One geometry [such as Euclidian or Riemann] can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous." Therefore, "quality" may be "just what you like." People tend to counterargue that you oughtn't do "just what you like" given that you oughtn't commit crimes, but these people, Pirsig comments wrily, are "making some remarkable presumptions as to what is likable."

Saint-Exupéry complains about the overreliance on logic to prove points. Any ideology can be defended logically; this performance does not help us choose what to believe and value. Ideologies contradict each other, and people fight each other to the death for them. "Truth," by contrast, "is the language that expresses universality…Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable," he writes. That which is unavoidable, unpreventable, fated.

People have "identical yearnings," he claims, and therefore "we must never set one man's truth against another's. All beliefs are demonstrably true. All men are demonstrably in the right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic." The important mission seems to be not proving the validity of a person's existential values, but respecting those values. Because of this, a man ought to "share with other men a common and disinterested ideal" and men must be "looking outward together in the same direction." It is only "methods" and "reasoning" that drive people apart, not their ultimate and deepest goals.

Similarly, Pirsig identified one of his central questions as whether a man "accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos...is 'insane.' To go outside the mythos is to become insane..." Mythos, here, refers to a cultural narrative architecture that defines one's place in the world. For an individual to declare that he sees the world differently than he has been taught to see it is always, by definition, to go against the current. He will have to use different stories, methods and reasoning to arrive at the same shared, universal human goals and values.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 25, 2013.

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Reading the quest for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in 'The Great Gatsby'

In May 2013, American cinemas headlined a new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel "The Great Gatsby". It is a deeply American tale about the hope in love against all odds. It is not a story about peace talks. But, then, myths tend to enlarge their scope. The world runs on politics as well as on love stories, and some common threads run through them.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 6, 2013.

A love story

The story is about a man called Gatsby who, in his youth, fell in love with Daisy. “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath,” Fitzgerald wrote, “his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” Unfortunately, because of Daisy’s social class and her expectations, she was unattainable. Gatsby left her and sought his fortune. Eventually, he became fabulously wealthy, but by then, Daisy had already married someone else and settled in a mansion in a place called East Egg. 

To attempt to reunite with her, undissuaded, Gatsby deliberately purchased his own mansion in West Egg. Their houses were separated by a bay. Gatsby would often gaze across the water at the green light that marked Daisy’s home. What would it be like to return to that moment in time when he had kissed Daisy? Could things have been different? To attract Daisy’s attention – for she did not yet know that her old flame was so near – Gatsby threw parties for the entire town, but Daisy never came. Finally, he enlisted his neighbor, Nick, to host a private meeting between the two of them.

It is a breath-catching moment in the film when Gatsby and Daisy are brought together in Nick’s house while a rainstorm surges outside. They are surrounded by an impossibly rich profusion of cut flowers. But then what? What will they do? Where can they go, with a third party watching, and the whole world waiting outside the door, with the rest of their lives hanging in the balance? Where do they want to go? Can they stretch out time and stay in the moment forever? They cannot. They have limited time to make their decision together.

The audience knows that Gatsby and Daisy must declare their true interests. They must begin to hammer out a solution to their predicament. They must decide whether past wounds can be healed, missed opportunities can be regained, past wrongs can be righted, and disappointing roads can be rerouted. In these respects, they are beginning a sort of peace talk. They will have to aim to reach a swift decision.

Peace talks

Later in the summer of 2013, a rather different kind of story began to play out in real life. On July 29, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hosted a dinner for Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams at the State Department building in Washington. It signaled the beginning of a new round of peace talks, a process that had been sidelined for three years. After the scintillating moment of the initial banquet is over – whether the participants find it uplifting or nerve-wracking – the emphasis can no longer be about the arrival in Washington. The emphasis must quickly shift to the inhabitants of east and west looking at each other and deciding whether their gulf can be bridged.

In one sense, this, too, is an American story. Of course, it is also a Middle Eastern story: the Israelis and Palestinians are the ones who already live with each other and will have to live with any new policies they agree upon. Yet, if the story were narrated by the mediator, John Kerry, it would be told from an American point of view, at once spectator and stakeholder. The future is inherently mysterious for everyone, but the mystery might look different for the direct participants and for the mediator. Different parties see different possibilities at different times. Prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace have long been a concern of American politicians. There is an American story within this saga.

“He did not know that it was already behind him,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning –“

So, love did not work out for Gatsby; he waited too long, and his life burned out too quickly. But a political solution might still be found in the Middle East. Past, present and future will all be discussed in the context of this new round of negotiations. People care in part because of their long memories, their "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Millennia are behind us, yet there is still tomorrow. There is still tomorrow especially because there are peace talks today. There is East Egg, and there is West Egg; there is everything between and beyond; and there are worldviews that are willing to accept that today’s social divisions may change. What is decided today will sail the boats into the future.

Painting by Jan Preisler (1872-1918). Preisler painted "Lovers" in 1905. © Public domain, due to the age of the artist. Wikimedia Commons.

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Ancient Assyrian obelisk shows King Jehu paying tribute to King Shalmaneser III

Shalmaneser III ruled Assyria from 858-824 BCE, expanding his empire through military campaigns. He ruled from the capital city Nimrud – once known as Calah or Kalhu, which was near Nineveh – in present-day Iraq. He is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible in 2 Kings 17:3 and 18:9. His name honors the god Shulmanu, a war god who was the Assyrian equivalent of the Mesopotamian god Ninurta.

What remains of Shalmaneser III's palatial grounds, the place where the old, wealthy, powerful king lived out his retirement, is today a valuable archaeological site. A fire-damaged underground complex made of glass-glazed brick on a sprawling 60-acre site was discovered by Austen Henry Layard in 1845. M. E. L. Mallowan discovered a nearby 18-acre military site in 1959. Known as "Fort Shalmaneser," it yielded carved ivories, plaques, and pottery, according to an article on the "Archaeology of Mesopotamia" in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.

Image: The black obelisk of Shalmaneser III. © Trustees of the British Museum. Used here for a non-commercial purpose according to the British Museum's Terms of Use. Image identification: ME 118885, AN32487001.

Shalmaneser III's famous obelisk, erected a year before his death during a civil war sparked by his feuding sons, is six-and-a-half feet tall and made of black limestone. Twenty reliefs and about 200 lines of cuneiform script depict five conquered kings paying tribute, for each of which there is a four-relief sequence that wraps around the sides of the obelisk, thereby totaling the twenty reliefs. As one author explained: "From top to bottom [the conquered kings] are: (1) Sua of Gilzanu (in north-west Iran), (2) Jehu of Bit Omri (ancient northern Israel), (3) an unnamed ruler of Musri (probably Egypt), (4) Marduk-apil-usur of Suhi (middle Euphrates, Syria and Iraq), and (5) Qalparunda of Patin (Antakya region of Turkey)."

The Black Obelisk was recovered by Layard from the ruins of Nimrud and is kept today at the British Museum. In late 1845, Layard, who had developed an archaeological curiosity about the mysterious mounds in the Iraqi desert, traveled to Iraq with the backing of Sir Stratford Canning. He lied to the fearsome governor of Mosul – the one-eyed, one-eared Mohammed Pasha, known as Keritli Oglu – that he had traveled to Mosul only to hunt boars. Layard's party then rafted on the Tigris River toward Nimrud where they began digging up a large mound strewn with pottery fragments. Mohammed Pasha was soon replaced by Hafiz Pasha and then by Tahyar Pasha who, while spending three days admiring Layard's site, referred to sphinx images as "the sacred emblem of which True Believers speak with reverence". After a year of excavation, one of Layard's workers made the most significant find, the Black Obelisk, which was shipped to England in December 1846. Although Layard had hired local protection, due to political instability in the fraying Ottoman Empire he left the area soon afterward.

In a lengthy account based on the writings of Layard himself, one of his contemporaries, an assistant at the British Museum, described the obelisk:

"The whole inscription was in excellent preservation; scarcely a single character was wanting, and the figures were sharp and well defined. The king is twice represented, followed by his attendants, a prisoner at his feet, and his vizir and eunuchs are introducing to him a procession consisting of various animals, and of figures carrying vases and other objects of tribute on their shoulders, or in their hands. The animals are the elephant, the rhinoceros, the Bactrian or two-humped camel, the wild bull, the lion, the stag, and various kinds of monkeys."

The inscription attributes the gift of the Asian elephant to the ruler of Musri, according to Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries.

Shalmaneser III's Black Obelisk is seen as significant by those interested in Biblical history since one of the kings paying him tribute, Jehu, is also mentioned by name in the Bible. Some people therefore take the Black Obelisk as evidence that "the Bible’s stories are true, they really happened, and the biblical record is accurate." According to Richard Rives' religiously motivated book Too Long in the Sun, the obelisk's inscription also mentions the names of many Assyrian gods including Assur, Anu, Bel, Ea, Sin, Adad, Shamash, Merodach, Adar, Nergal, Jusku, Beltis, Bel, and Ishtar.

Originally posted to Helium Network on April 14, 2011.

See also: Why modern witches are making pilgrimages to an ancient Turkish temple, Ali Halit Diker, CNN, May 7, 2026

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The Bible may be worth studying, but it doesn't contribute to science

Why can't the Bible be used as part of scientific literature?

The Bible is full of poetry and philosophy, story and song. It is not full of science. This can be demonstrated by examining the Bible as a work of literature, where its literary strengths are also its scientific shortcomings.

Natural phenomena in the Bible are usually assigned metaphoric meanings. The sun represents God's radiance, and plant and animal agriculture implies health, happiness, and prosperity. Lightning, earthquakes, floods, plague and disease were generally construed as punishments from God — for example, Miriam was said to have been stricken with skin problems in return for her racist taunts (Numbers 12:9-11)

Locations were not mapped, and when ancient villages and natural formations cannot be precisely identified, it is difficult to prove that they ever existed at all. They may have been inventions or embellishments, and the writers may have considered their roles in the story to be more important than their material reality.

Nor does Biblical writing always quantify precisely and in a literal manner. The recurring number 40 — as in the number of days it rained in the Great Flood, and the number of years that the Hebrew people were lost in the desert after leaving Egypt — appears to simply mean "a lot."

Famously, a numerical description of a "circular" cauldron in the Temple of Solomon must either be a rough estimate or else the cauldron was not a perfect circle.

Noah could not have single-handedly collected a male-female breeding pair of all species on the planet (there are as many as 7.7 million animal species, most of them as yet undiscovered, according to a recent scientific estimate), and the boat that he built could not have reasonably been large enough to hold them all (even excluding the ones that could swim, as Biblical literalists insist upon, as if that makes the proposition more reasonable).

Sometimes there are outright logical contradictions. In the first chapter of Genesis, plants are created before the first humans are created. In the second chapter, a male human is created before the first plants.

One New Testament scripture says that Judas hanged himself (Matthew 27:5), and another says that he suffered spontaneous disembowelment (Acts 1:18). These contradictions arise in part because the scriptures are narrated by different people, and there is no obvious scientific method by which to judge which narrator is most reliable. It is just a question of "he said, she said."

The best way to understand these references is as rough approximation or metaphor. Natural objects and events were considered important, but exactly recording their quantity, weight, dimensions, temperature, or other scientifically measurable properties was not considered important, at least not within the context of the story. Natural objects and events were considered important primarily because of their meaning in human life. Could the original authors, oral historians, and redactors hear this discussion today, they would likely be bewildered by the modern-day assumption that their artistic, spiritual storytelling was a mere literal recording of their observations about the desert. They might even be offended by that assumption, since the scientific method was probably not something that they understood, believed in, or used. They likely believed in magic and miracles, and they may have considered empirical knowledge less valuable than religious mastery.

Scientific literature documents the process of answering questions through observation, experimentation, and logic. The Bible does not even attempt to do this. It is a collection of stories focusing on human relationships and philosophies, and it makes relatively few references to the natural world Therefore, while the Bible provides valuable insight into life thousands of years ago — as well as addressing philosophical and religious questions about the meaning of life that are still relevant today — it is not scientific literature.

This article was originally published to Helium Network on July 27, 2006.

Image above of golden bowerbirds in Australia. Photographed circa 1900. © No known copyright restrictions. Powerhouse Museum Collection. Flickr.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

What you can learn about capital punishment from 'ExecutedToday.com'

'ExecutedToday.com' is a blog that provides thorough, detailed information about executions throughout history and all over the globe. This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 16, 2013.

The blog "ExecutedToday.com" features a daily post of an execution corresponding to "this day in history." Undeniably, this is a macabre approach to learning history, but for some readers, it will be absorbing and effective. The writing is highly literate and contains deliciously obscure vocabulary.

The executions are usefully organized by category. For example, Agnes Bernauer (executed Oct. 12, 1435 for witchcraft) can be found under the category "Wrongful execution," and Udilberto Vasquez Bautista (executed Sept. 11, 1970 for rape and murder) can be found under the category "Popular culture." The latter is famous as a "folk saint" in Peru among those who consider him innocent, and he is the subject of the film "Milagroso Udilberto Vasquez."

The executions are also searchable by location, method (e.g. "Blown from Cannon" or "Lingchi," the Chinese practice of slow dismemberment in public) or the date on which the stories were posted to the blog. A few of the featured executions, such as a 1942 photo of Nazis executing the resistance in Belarus, occurred on uncertain date; the author has included cases such as these to avoid focusing prejudicially only on famous, better documented cases where dates are known.

The blog's "About" page provides a lengthy description of intent. The author acknowledges that, while "this is not an all-purpose chronicle of human cruelty," the definition of an execution - a killing by the state - can be debated. Also, while the author admits to opposing the death penalty, the blog is not ideological and aims simply to illuminate "the perspective on humanity we gain through the window of this human institution."

There are a variety of reasons why someone might be interested in reading the blog: if not for the prurient interest in violence, then for a desire to learn about political, military and religious history or about judicial approaches to criminal cases. While not pornographic, neither is it quite "safe for work," unless one works in the sort of environment where it is normal to look at photos of naked victims huddled at the edge of mass graves. If an occasional visit to the website does not satiate one's appetite, the dedicated reader may subscribe by email, RSS or Twitter.

With well over 2,000 posts, this is an extremely thorough collection, as it seems to consist of daily posts that began in 2007 and are still accumulating as of 2013. There is certainly a niche readership for this, and it may be of use to scholars. Dirk C. Gibson cited the blog in his book "Legends, Monsters, or Serial Murderers?", as did William Webb in his book on Japanese serial killers, "Murder Under the Rising Sun." The library of Stetson University's College of Law posted a review in 2011 recommending the site, saying it was "written with great detail and care." 

The readers of "ExecutedToday.com" are permitted to leave public comments or to send a private message to the author. (It may come as no great surprise, given the visceral impact of the material and the controversial subject matter, that the author chooses to remain anonymous.) The blog has featured "guest posts" written by others, and the author of "ExecutedToday.com" has in turn guest-posted on other blogs, such as "Murder by Gaslight." The blog is a useful and growing contribution to the body of knowledge on the Internet.

Image: Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, v. 9, no. 211 (1859 Dec. 17) © Public domain Wikimedia Commons.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

Read: Death on Display: Louisiana’s travelling electric chair, and the shift from public to private executions. By Jacqui Shine, guest contributor. The Historic New Orleans Collection. December 3, 2025

In some good news, the Supreme Court did NOT make it easier to execute people with intellectual disabilities today. New from me at @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/criminal-jus...

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— Julia Métraux (@juliametraux.bsky.social) May 21, 2026 at 11:27 AM

Primo Levi’s insights into psychology at Auschwitz

This article has been moved to Books Are Our Superpower.

Understanding individualism and collectivism: Rick Perry on liberalism

Extreme individualism and extreme collectivism each pose their own problems. Common sense tells us to find a balance where we can work together collaboratively without succumbing either to selfish solipsism or to unthinking herd mentality.

Because political rhetoric often struggles to communicate nuance, politicians may appear to come down on one side or the other: either as individualists or collectivists. The lack of nuance may be even more pronounced in their characterization of their opponents.

William F. Buckley Jr. wrote of the Cold War in his book God and Man at Yale: "The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world...[and] the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level." (His biographer Carl Bogus said that these "may be his historically most important two sentences.")

Originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 13, 2011.

A case study is the recent campaign literature by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican candidate for U.S. president in 2012. In On My Honor (2008), Perry complained that "liberals value the preservation of self-esteem above all else" and called out "counterculture activists" for "imposing a culture of self and moral relativism upon the nation." This characterizes the Left as a bunch of individualists. Not long afterward, he published Fed Up! (2010) which Newt Gingrich introduced with this comment: "The Left believes that most people are not capable of pursuing happiness and that a strong centralized government is best able to provide for them." This characterizes the Left as a bunch of collectivists.

Perry seems to have changed his mind, or at least his offensive strategy, over a short period of time. Unlike On My Honor, Fed Up! doesn't mention the terms "moral relativism" or "secular humanism" anywhere, nor does it identify individualism as a threat to "traditional values." Instead, Perry now seems to identify collectivism as a threat against the admirable virtue of individualism. For example, he is bothered by the Supreme Court's "intrusion into personal matters of morality and conscience" as well as by attempts to solve problems on a federal level when the local level usually provides better solutions "tailor[ed]...to our own values and perspectives."

Fed Up! contains laundry lists of the sorts of choices that Perry thinks the federal government should bow out of regulating: food, housing, healthcare, fuel, cars, guns, prayer, holidays, speech, contraception and capital punishment and everything in between. An important question remains: are these private lifestyle choices or can they be regulated by state (if not federal) law? He seems to go back and forth on the answer.

The problem presents itself in this way: Perry says that liberty requires permitting behaviors that don't hurt anyone and restricting only harmful practices. He also says that, under the idea of federalism and the Tenth Amendment, states have the authority to make their own laws. Are we to understand that there is more than one correct interpretation of liberty and more than one possible version of laws that uphold liberty? Or are some state governments mistaken in what they choose to regulate, and if so, does the Tenth Amendment nevertheless give them the right to impose their immoral law upon their citizens? This is a question involving the appropriate balance between individualism and collectivism.

Here is the same problem from another perspective: What should you do if you don't like the way your state government is being run? What if you suffer from a bungled bureaucracy, or worse, are victimized by intolerance? Should you, as a constituent who elects representatives, find a way to participate in politics to attempt to change your neighborhood for the better? On the contrary. Gov. Perry tells you that you should leave the state and go somewhere that is more to your liking. He says this multiple times in Fed Up!. He calls it "voting with your feet." He says that "the people" should call the shots to define the culture and the laws of their particular state, but at the end of the day, if you, as a political minority, remain dissatisfied, you should leave. Ultimately he seems to be saying that individual differences somehow threaten community cohesion and that people need to band together in collectives of like-minded people so that they do not rock the boat.

This is distressing for several reasons. Significantly, it assumes that the plaintiff has the ability to leave. Ill people and poor people may find relocation a hardship. Additionally, many Americans have family ties to a particular state, and telling them to leave the state is telling them that they need to choose between their values and their family. It also assumes that an individual who is bothered by a political situation should find a resolution that meets their own self-interest – moving away so that, in effect, they blind themselves to the problem by no longer having to see it directly – rather than taking the moral high road of putting personal effort into solving the problem, not only for their own sake, but on behalf of those who do not have the ability to advocate for themselves.

Deciding when to adjust our goals toward a particular side of the spectrum between individualism and collectivism, and when to tolerate, expect, or encourage dissenting input from others, is never easy. A good start is to avoid overgeneralizations about our own intentions and about the attitudes of others.

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A Substack post by Rupert Cocke (30 April 2022) pointed out the incompatibility (emphasis mine):

"anarcho-capitalism (A). It takes ultra-liberalism into toxic territory by proposing a hedgehog-like vision of society based purely on individual freedom, with no room for solidarity for the weak or unfortunate. ... reactionary traditionalism (B). These people want to turn the clock back to a golden age, when hierarchies were unquestioned. This approach often resonates with deeply religious people, who feel that modern society is changing too fast. ... the worst element of the left (the revolutionary tradition) [combined] with the worst element of the right (nationalism) (C). Fascism is a good example of this approach. It appeals to people who feel that their lives are meaningless, as Eric Hoffer memorably taught us. A little reflection should show that A and C are basically incompatible. Believers in A see society as being made up of atomized individuals, while believers in C are much more interested in tribal identities. Believers in B can go either way. This gives us two basic combinations, AB and BC."

Emperor Penguins by Terri Stalons from Pixabay

"...this is the modern conservative project: shatter the very idea of a shared society. No community, no only individuals of various ranks in the weird Christian Nationalist hierarchy. The complete inversion of classical definitions of liberal and conservative, of course, but not like any of these muppets have a context for the Locke they keep quoting." — John Rogers, Bsky post1, post2, July 26, 2024

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.