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A Great New YouTube Documentary on the Creation Museum

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I wanted to alert people about a new documentary on the Creation Museum by a Primatologist named Erika who runs the YouTube channel Gutsick Gibbon. It basically rocks out on electric guitars while making science look cool. In other words, it accomplishes in reality what Neil DeGrasse Tyson thinks he is in his head. Erika grew up reading those same Young Earth picture books I had at my bedside as a kid that depict hadrosaurs spewing fire out of their pie holes into the faces of previously vegetarian T-Rexes like a Wehrmacht Flammenwerfer. Don't ask me to explain, I don't have time here to unpack Young Earth deep lore. Anyways, Erika visited the Creation Museum in her childhood and probably knows its literature better than Ken Ham himself (ʿalayhi as-salām). Now, as a budding scientist and adult, we get to watch her revisit the Museum and Ark Encounter and laugh with and at her as the process of scientifically dismantling all their major claims slowly unravels her sanity over the

Semitic Scholarship Confirms Animal Death Before the Fall in Genesis 1

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Digital painting by the author. The most sophisticated academic study on the Fall and animal death to date  In my recent book critiquing Answers in Genesis’ Bible interpretation , I summarized a 2013 doctoral dissertation by J. J. Van Ee entitled, “Death and the Garden: An Examination of Original Immortality, Vegetarianism, and Animal Peace in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia.” The PDF of the full dissertation is available free here . As someone who has dumped months of research into the topic, I’m convinced Van Ee’s thesis is by far the most comprehensive and sophisticated exegetical treatment that exists on the issue of death before the Fall in the Hebrew Bible. (Disclaimer: I've never spoken with Van Ee, and my views in this article are my own.) My friend Mike Jones at Inspiring Philosophy was also so impressed with Van Ee’s dissertation that he included a summary of some of its contents in a video entitled: “ TOP TEN Biblical Problems for Young Earth Creationism ” which has cur

Behemoth's tail isn't about his tail. It's about his penis (part 2)

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In my last post , I argued that the monster Behemoth in the biblical book of Job was a mythic Semitic chaos deity. We can infer this because we can be certain his literary ‘twin’ Leviathan was. Leviathan breathes fire, has multiple heads, and is openly related to the chaos dragon god in Mesopotamian and West Semitic Baal mythology by the biblical authors themselves.  This post continues my response to an article from Creation.com by Paul Price that attempts to argue Behemoth was a sauropod dinosaur. Price argues this mainly on the basis that the book of Job compares Behemoth’s tail to a cedar. Contrary to Price, I believe Behemoth was most likely a mythological super-ox based on features of the Hebrew texts and comparative ancient mythology. What about his cedar-like “tail”? I think there is firm evidence that the Hebrew term for “tail” here is actually a euphemism for the creature’s penis—a view shared by scads of Jobian specialists.  Only a liberal evolutionist would claim Behemoth

Creation.com disagrees with me about Behemoth’s penis

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Creation.com has published this piece attempting to debunk my research on the biblical monster Behemoth. Those of you devastatingly attractive loose-cannon rock stars that have read my book on the Creation Museum (Why haven’t you? The reviews melt faces.) know that I argue Behemoth was not a real animal, but a west Semitic chaos deity. Along with many Semitists from backwards, rinky-dink institutions you’ve probably never heard of like the Hebrew University of Jerusalem or Oxford, I believe Behemoth was probably a mythological creature based around the attributes of a bull--a view going back to early Judaism.  Additionally, examining features of the Hebrew texts, I agree with many translators like Rob Alter at Berkley or Edward Greenstein at Bar-Ilan University that the infamous verse about Behemoth’s tail being “like a cedar” is likely a reference to the creature’s penis. That last sentence is what we call foreshadowing in the writing biz and is designed to hold everyone's int