The Holy Bible is the most-read book in the world. In the past 50 years, the Bible has sold over 3.9 billion copies.
It’s a collection of religious texts or scriptures, some, all, or a variant of which, are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, Baha’i’ism, and many other religions.
The Bible is not a single book; it is a collection of books whose complex development is not completely understood.
The oldest books began as songs and stories orally transmitted from generation to generation.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the caves of Qumran in 1947, are copies that can be dated to between 250 BCE. They are the oldest existing copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible of any length that are not fragments.
Elohim and YHWH Elohim
God, or Sons of God or Lord of God is the English translation for the Hebrew word Elohim or YHWH Elohim.
Elohim in Hebrew is plural, and that is kind of inconvenient since all religions for whom the Bible is sacred are mono-theism. We come back to that later.
Mauro Biglino, an expert in ancient languages and translator for Edizioni San Paolo, gained public attention starting in 2010 for his literal reinterpretation of the Bible. His work involved translating 19 books of the Old Testament. Biglino’s best-selling essays guide readers through a journey of biblical verses, analyzed in their original ancient Hebrew form, unencumbered by any preconceived notions or theological biases.
Mauro stated the word God is the same word for:
- Elohiym (in Hebrew)
- Anunna or Anunnaki (in Sumerian)
- Theō (in Greek)
- Aessir (in Old Norse)
This blew my mind. Because we can start to link the myths of the Nordic religions with the translations of the Sumerian Clay Tablets. And the good thing is that thousands of clay tablets have been found in Iraq and their translations are key to understanding the most important part of our history.
The Old Testament contains the stories of Genesis, which you are probably familiar with. Later on, you’ll learn what the Garden of Eden is, and we dive deeper into the significance of Noah and the flood.
