Dale offers the prompt “autumn color” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Prompt.
These are photos of the forest preserve in northern Illinois when we used to live there a few years ago.
Where I am now in the Carolinas, the trees haven’t started changing yet.
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An important chronological study is Douglas Petrovich’s Origins of the Hebrews published 2021. He traced biblical events from Joseph’s being sold into slavery to the Exodus aligning them with Egyptian history.
Before finishing that study Petrovich realized that he had evidence from Egypt and Sinai that the first alphabet was created by Joseph’s eldest son, Manasseh, after the Israelites arrived in Egypt in 1876 BC. Manasseh knew how to write the Egyptian language and provided a way for the Israelites to now write their own language without having to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics. Those findings led to Petrovich’s first book, The World’s Oldest Alphabet, published in 2016, where he provided evidence that the letters of our alphabet came from the Hebrews.
Not everyone agrees with this idea. For the last few centuries there has been way too much theorizing assuming that little to nothing of what was written in the Bible could have actually happened. These skeptics demanded corroborating evidence outside of the Bible before they would take the Bible seriously as history.
Those promoting such beliefs justified them using arguments from silence. Since they knew of no evidence (except what was in the Bible which they refused to accept), they assumed the Bible must be false. They reasoned: How could some guy named “Moses” – if he ever existed – in the 15th century BC write the Torah without having a script to write it in?
But theories based solely on reason quickly lose touch with reality, because they are grounded not on evidence but assumption. Petrovich brings us back to reality. By the time Moses was writing the Torah after the Exodus in 1446 BC the Israelites already had a script that they had used for hundreds of years since nearly the beginning of their 430 years of sojourn in Egypt.
This evidence of Hebraic writing is also evidence to skeptics that the Israelites did indeed spend centuries in Egypt just as the Bible said they did.
In the video below Petrovich provides an overview of the evidence for these claims.
Petrovich concludes at the end of this video:
So all of this demonstrates that it’s the Israelites who are the inventors of the alphabet and there are amazing inscriptions that attest to this. 58:51
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For those seeking more information, the Associates for Biblical Research provides articles on Douglas Petrovich, reviews of his books, interviews with him and even articles by him. As archeologists they also provide chronological information linking events in the Bible with the history of the Ancient Near East validating the historical reliability of the Bible for those who refuse to take the Bible seriously without such corroborating evidence.
Joe was a mathematician.
Among his many skills he could tell you which infinity was bigger than the other. If you told him that you doubted such a skill had much value, he’d entertain you for a longer period of time than your patience could tolerate with a sequence of axioms, lemmas and theorems that justified the value of his results.
However, as Joe approached the end of his life the infinite number of infinities, lined up like idols starving for sacrifices, that used to spice his life gave way to an unexpected and undeserved heart of flesh that seemed as if it had just begun to beat out of nowhere. He laughed at all the arguments he used to drill into unwilling ears hoping they might forgive (knowing they had already forgotten) all that he told them.
But, whether they forgave or not, Joe wished that all of them could find the heartfelt joy he now felt, a joy worth far more than any number of dubious infinities.
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Denise offers the word “spice” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Dale offers the prompt “from an unusual perspective” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.
The unusual perspective I used is getting so close to the object that I tend to forget just what it was originally.
When the Lord told Jonah to tell the Ninevites to repent so He wouldn’t need to destroy them, Jonah got on a boat and fled in the opposite direction. An horrendous storm refused to calm until Jonah was tossed overboard to his death and burial in the belly of a whale.
The cost of disobedience is death.
However, after three days and three nights – after three sunsets and three sunrises – the fish vomited Jonah onto the shore and back to life so the Lord could tell Jonah once again to tell the Ninevites to repent so He wouldn’t need to destroy them. The sight of Jonah – who looked (and likely smelled) like the walking dead – and the reluctant words coming from his mouth freaked out the inhabitants of Nineveh to such an extent that they all repented and were spared against Jonah’s wishes.
It gets you nowhere fleeing from God.
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Denise offers the prompt word “need” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Dale offers the prompt, “scenes from an autumn garden”, for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.
These photos are from a few years ago when we lived in Northbrook, Illinois. The flowers were in a public park or forest preserve.
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While trying to fill a six sentence story with words Greg realized he hadn’t a clue what to write that made any sense. A few blocks away neither could Bethany make any progress on her story.
Later that afternoon they found themselves sitting next to each other in a coffee shop in the last two available chairs complaining about their fruitless attempts to come up with decent stories. They whined and laughed while drinking their coffees.
That afternoon in the coffeeshop was how it all started. Over the years came the children, the grandchildren and even stories that made sense.
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Denise offers “fill” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 