Steve,
I was listening to your 9/2/08 Israel National Radio broadcast with Tamar and my mind started thinking of some questions that I hope you will have the time to answer.
Because I was taught that during Christopher Columbus’ time, people believed the world was flat, how is it they didn’t know about all the travels of these ancient tribes? It was suggested that Christopher Columbus was Jewish, that also would be news to me as I thought he was Christian. From where did this knowledge come?
This is so fascinating that Solomon probably sent ships to the other side of the world for copper, etc. and that they made return voyages with their ships loaded. Why is this not taught? Or am I so old that the history books have been updated since I was in school.
God bless you for your work.
Sincerely,
Pegi
MYREPLY
Pegi,
The modern teaching of history in the modern western world is horribly flawed. It may be true that Europeans in the Dark Ages/Middle Ages thought the world was flat, but that belief was based on Greco-Roman ignorance of the real size and shape of our planet. The Phoenician/Israelites and the Carthaginians (who inherited the Phoenician/Israelite “knowledge of the sea” mentioned in I Kings 9:26-27) knew very well that the world was a round globe as their fleets sailed all over the earth. Biblical records preserve references to the advanced scientific/maritime knowledge of the Israelite civilization. Job 26:7 records that the earth was “hung upon nothing” in outer space and that the “north” part of the planet was an “empty space.” Job 38:29-30 clearly shows the ancient Israelites knew about the polar ice caps as it mentions a location where “the face of the deep is frozen” (i.e. where the surface of the ocean was solid ice). Isaiah 40:22 states the earth had a “circular” shape so the ancient Israelites had to know the world was a sphere. Ezekiel 27:26 mentions the sailors of Tyre went into “the great waters” (the oceans). King David wrote that his fleets did “business in the great waters” (the oceans) and that people went to the “uttermost parts of the sea” (Psalm 139:9).
The Phoenician/Israelites had a world maritime/naval monopoly due to their possession of Gibraltar (“the pillars of Hercules”). Their possession of this famous chokepoint allowed them to prevent Greek and Roman vessels from sailing into the Atlantic Ocean. My books cite Aristotle and other Greek writers who knew that Carthage had a secret land westward in the Atlantic which contributed to Phoenician/Israelite/Carthaginian wealth. The Greek descriptions of this ancient land describe North America very well. When one Greek sailor in the 4th century BC, Pytheas, managed to sneak into the Atlantic and sail northward, he was amazed the star constellations changed positions and he deduced that the earth was a sphere. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians had already known for at least a millennium that the world was round before the Greek world “got a clue” to this fact. However, the Greek and Roman myths about a flat earth generally persisted into more recent times.
Modern historians are afflicted with a false belief that no one in the entire ancient world could possibly have learned anything scientific before it was learned by someone in the Greek or Roman civilizations. They hold to this erroneous view even though the Bible has many obvious references to scientific knowledge far more advanced than Europeans had in the Dark Ages/ Middle Ages. When the Romans burned the great library of Carthage, they undoubtedly destroyed the extensive maps and sea charts of the entire globe which the Phoenicians/Israelites and Carthaginians had painstakingly developed in the previous 10-14 centuries.
Columbus may have been a “Christian” due to forced conversion. In order to be funded by Ferdinand and Isabella for his famous voyages, he would have had to at least be a nominal Christian. I’ve also seen reports that Columbus’ ancestry included Jews, but I have not researched this subject in detail. I have seen reliable reports that Columbus brought Hebrew translators with him on his voyage as he thought he might find Hebrew speakers when he sailed west across the Atlantic. Spain was part of both the Phoenician/Israelite and Carthaginian Empires. It was anciently called “Iberia,” named after “Eber,” the namesake of the Hebrews. Since Spain was for a very long time in the Phoenician/Israelite and Carthaginian Empires, Some ancient sea charts and records likely still survived in ancient Spain for Columbus to consult before he began his voyages of “rediscovering” the New World.
You ask why this information is not taught in schools. The answer is simple. The fanciful dogma of evolution is now force-fed to students throughout the western world. If the truths of the ancient world were known, it would affirm the Bible and destroy evolutionary myths. Revelation 12:9 foretold the world would be massively deceived in the latter days, and the theory of evolution has been a primary tool in this work of deception.
Steve
