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May 10, 2001 - Art Bell
01:09:39
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Michael Heiser - The Watchers
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Good morning, everybody.
I had originally scheduled Mike Heiser shortly after my return to the air, and I promptly caught the devil's flu and turned Mike over to Ian Punnett, who is eminently more qualified than I am, certainly, to interview Mike Heiser on this subject.
Mike Heiser is currently writing his PhD dissertation entitled Divine Beings in Jewish Literature Written Between the Old and New Testament Periods.
He is an expert on angels and divine beings in ancient Semitic texts.
Besides his formal academic training, Mike has had a lifelong interest in the paranormal, particularly the UFO phenomena.
He's uniquely qualified to write on the intersection of ufology with ancient texts and mainstream Western religions.
And he's also going to do something tonight that you don't know anything about yet, but he's got a book coming.
On the Bible Code.
That's been a subject of great interest to me for a long time.
Coming up in a moment, Mike Heiser.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, here is Mike Heiser.
Mike, welcome to the program.
Art, thank you for having me on.
What a thrill.
Well, it's a thrill to have you.
I'm sorry I missed you the first time around, but the devil flu got me.
I came back from a Super Bowl game that, by the way, could have been better.
And after taking a flu shot, why, a long game of flu.
And so you spent some time with Ian Punnett and the show got rave reviews.
Well, it was a lot of fun.
What area did the two of you concentrate for the most part on?
Well, we pretty much discussed the book, The Facade.
We kind of danced around and touched on some of the things that are featured in the book.
It's one of those things where it's sort of a true Art Bell novel.
By the way, I kind of purposed in my I own heart that if I ever got on the Art Bell Show with Art Bell, I would just tell you that I just think your show is just wonderful.
You don't know how many hundreds, literally hundreds of hours of grad school you got me through.
Thanks.
And really, it really influenced my thinking in a lot of ways, so I just wanted you to know that.
Thank you.
Why the name The Facade?
Well, The Facade, of course, speaks of cover artificiality, deception. The initial thesis of the
book, the initial question that the book seeks to answer is, what would the impact be if
there was a genuine unveiling of intelligent extraterrestrial life? How would the impact
be on, specifically, mainstream Western religious communities like Christianity and Judaism?
Yes. And what do you conclude?
Well, the character in the story is basically confronted with this.
He has a religious studies background.
And, on the one hand, there is, at the top, a singular God.
An Israelite religion.
That always was.
And that's an interesting concept all by itself.
Always was.
Right.
Now, think of it in these terms.
We've all heard stories, especially when you get into the Christian era.
We're Christians, of course, and Jews today both profess to be monotheists.
Mm-hmm.
Okay?
Isn't it odd?
Doesn't it strike you as odd that when you get to the Christian era, the Christians, you know, they developed out of Judaism.
The Christians would accept the God of Israel as being the true God, but then they would worship Christ as God.
Yes.
Okay, so people are running around, you know, in this era.
They don't know what to think of the Christians yet.
You know, what are you guys?
Are you a polytheist?
Are you a monotheist?
The Christians were willing to be put to death by the Romans.
This is actually part of where my dissertation is.
They were willing to be put to death to remain a monotheist despite the fact that they worship the God of Israel and Christ as God.
To them it was no contradiction.
What we have done in Western religion is we have articulated a It's a concept of monotheism that is not on Semitic terms.
You have a high God.
Of course, out of this comes binatarianism.
You have two beings at the same level.
That is in the Old Testament.
It's very easy to show.
I actually did this one time without knowing it.
I was teaching a group of Jewish people.
We went through some angelic passages in the Old Testament and showing them binatarianism in the Old Testament.
It kind of freaked them out.
It took me by surprise, too, when I found out who they were.
What I've said about Brookings is that I think it's as true today as it was the day it was written.
Now... I'd have to agree, unfortunately.
Yeah, so apparently you do agree while you're cringing a little bit, but you're suggesting to yourself that it ought not be so.
Yeah, what I'm suggesting is it doesn't have to be.
Now, in the book, the character gets drawn to a more negative assessment of extraterrestrials through a whole set of other texts, but just in general, just, you know, general principle, I could embrace very easily, in terms of my theology, in terms of my textual studies, an extraterrestrial reality, if, if they were not, they were not evil, they were benign, and they were not connected to ancient texts that describe, like Genesis 6, the sons of God who came down and had sexual relations with human women,
If they're not those guys, wonderful.
I think it would be cool.
I'm curious about something.
Maybe you can help me out here.
I did not hear the show you did with Ian because I was shivering, you know, in a rolled up ball.
So I didn't hear that.
But I have heard Ian speak very carefully about extraterrestrials in the past.
And when people ask him about it, he's very tolerant of the discussion, engages the discussion full on.
However, you can sort of tell that at the end of the day, he probably thinks That they are not extraterrestrials at all, but rather some sort of lower entity of the types that you were talking about a moment ago, that wouldn't be from another place at all, but... Well, that's where I'm at.
I think they're interdimensional or extradimensional, whichever term is best, beings that can come in our presence, interact with us, and when they do that, Sure, but why exclude the possibility of real extraterrestrials?
I mean, if you just simply go out and gaze at the night sky, those are all suns you see, those little dots.
More than you could possibly count.
With, we now know, the likelihood of planets revolving around them.
So, the probability of life is rather high, mathematically.
That is, that it's out there somewhere.
Do you disagree with that?
No.
No, I mean, again, I think it would be the neatest thing if, you know, one of them landed on the White House lawn and, here we go, or, you know, we had a conference like Dr. Greer had yesterday and something really stupendous, you know, would have come out of that if, again, here's my caveat, and the two of these can coexist.
I think you're on the right track.
We could have these bad guys and we could actually have the good guys out there somewhere, too.
So I don't exclude that.
I don't think it's a theological problem, but I can tell you from personal experience that there are many people of faith who just, because of bad theology, just really have a difficult time with this.
That was part of my motivation with the facade to try to put this out here and try to reduce scholarship to very readable, just a great story.
But get it into their heads that, hey, take a look at this.
This is not something that should just make you go nuts.
Well, since you were researching this so painstakingly and actually doing translations, what made you decide to present this in a novel form?
Basically, it was the package.
It was a delivery system that I thought, you know, I could write a book like this and it would get too technical.
So I had to come up, and just too dry, that sort of thing.
So I thought, hey, I'll distill it to the point where people can still get it.
I know I can write a great story with this, and I know it's going to come.
My first bad review is going to come someday, but I haven't gotten it yet.
So the story works.
Then I thought, hey, anything more technical I can put on a website, I can follow it up.
you know, do something like that or I've published some articles already at least
at least one of them I've gotten permission to post on the website
about the divine counsel but I could do that but for the populace the most
people I wanted to have a good delivery system. All right, uh, Michael, hold on we're at the bottom of the hour right
now and so, um, really if you read carefully you can have it
both ways.
Now, that is not going to convince a lot of fundamentalists out there, and I think Mike knows that, and I know that.
Which means that were they to land in a very apparent, immediate way, we'd have a big problem.
I've said the little green guy coming down the ramp would be full of so much lead before he got to the bottom of the
ramp, but you get the idea.
Well, gee, is it possible we've got it all wrong?
That's what Mike Heiser basically is saying politely in the facade.
We've got it all wrong.
That, uh, actually there's a hierarchy.
There is a one, a singular god, but then there's a hierarchy of many below.
Other gods, angels, all sorts of, uh, levels of, uh, heavenly authority, I guess would be one way to put it.
And that a lot of what we see here on Earth as UFOs or aliens, or perceive in that way, actually is some part of this hierarchy being seen.
I think that's the gist of it, and it's supported by the translations that he's done.
As Mr. Sitchin would have you believe, his work is supported by similar translations, with a word here or there perhaps a bit different.
It would be interesting, would it not, to hear the two of them In a debate.
We can arrange that, I guess, after September.
Mike Heiser is here and this is, it's an extremely interesting topic and...
As he pointed out, yesterday, Stephen Greer, Dr. Greer, did what he said he would do on this program that he outlined.
He lined up witnesses at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and put on An incredible, I don't want to say show, an incredible string of individual testimonies of military people, people with a lot to lose, FAA officials, these kinds of people who have seen and described in great detail craft and have photographed craft.
Well, I really have a lot of respect for the work of Jacques Vallée in this regard.
Really, Mike, you're saying they're probably not.
Well, I really have a lot of respect for the work of Jacques Valée in this regard.
I'm not denying the physicality of what is seen, even to the point of the craft and the
beings and all that sort of thing.
For your listeners, if they've ever read Passport to Megonium, there's really nothing new in
what we're seeing here, what we've seen for centuries.
On the one hand, this is where Christians and Jewish people get mad at me, too, because they tend to think, I'm going to go back on something I said.
Back away from your phone just a little bit for me and we'll see if we're not popping peas.
Okay.
I don't deny the physicality of it at all just because I prefer the trans-dimensional, inter-dimensional view that he's articulated for these things does not rule out physicality.
Dr. Greer's conference for somebody like me was kind of just like you, that, oh, this is interesting and fascinating.
It's wonderful to hear these people say what they do, so on and so forth, but there's nothing of what they said that can't be fit into what I call the watcher paradigm that the facade articulates.
That is, yeah, we've seen these things.
We've seen beings.
We've seen craft.
But the key question is, what are they?
Yeah, they could be from some other planet, and you might actually have physical propulsion systems and so on and so forth that go over great distances.
But you can also, a la Jacques Vallée, have manifestations of something that are inter-dimensional or extra-dimensional.
I agree.
That aren't planetary at all.
Sure.
It could be either one or both.
Or both, yeah.
I couldn't agree more.
It could be either one or both, and I think a lot of people, particularly ones familiar with so many guests on my program, suspect both.
Yeah, and again, having listened to your show for so long, none of what you're saying is unfamiliar.
But the facade would seem to suggest that you think it's really more one than the other.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I definitely prefer the inner Again, the issue isn't how they get here so much in the facade, although that's part of it, because I think if you go back and look at the ancient text, you don't get what Sitchin and others have articulated.
Well, Sitchin talks about the Anunnaki, that there's a planet that comes by every now and then that had the Anunnaki on it, that we were all created to go mine gold.
Sure.
That accounts for our lust for gold these days.
There are some huge logic problems with that.
You're telling me that deep space travel is accomplished by combustion rockets?
You mean people of the fiery rockets?
That's how he translates nephilim, the word, which is Boy, you know, I don't want to be harsh, but... No, be harsh if you wish.
Zachariah will be harsh, too, so don't worry about it.
That's a ridiculous translation.
Again, if you want to, I can go through some specific examples.
I don't want people to say, oh, he's just saying that.
No, go ahead.
I can show you specifically.
Do it.
Okay.
If your listeners do go to the website, Let's just take... No, no.
As we do this, please, Mike, remember that only a percentage, maybe a lesser percentage of listeners have the ability to go to a website right now, so bear everybody in mind when you do this.
Okay.
Well, let's take... Let's back up just a little bit, and I'll give you two... We'll go through two examples of errors that Sitchin makes.
Sitchin is kind of a conundrum to me, because as I read his material, it's evident that he knows something about the languages.
I haven't really figured out what that is yet, because he makes errors that a first-year student would make that are just, wow.
I mean, I can't believe that he actually says this.
The first example I'll give you is about this Genesis 1, 26 and 27, the plural, Elohim.
On the website, if you scroll down and you come to the, everything is laid out there nicely, if you go to the PDF file that has Elohim in it, what I have on that site is Verses from the Hebrew Bible, and I also have this stuff in Akkadian and Sumerian, where Elohim is used as a singular.
It points to one individual.
Genesis 1-1 is probably the easiest example.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
We know it's singular because the verb is singular.
You have a subject and a verb.
This is just basic grammar.
It's singular.
There are other verses that I have up here where it's obviously plural.
We just went through Psalm 82-1, which is the The best case, because the word shows up twice in there, and it's singular and plural, that's the best place to go to tell.
On the Akkadian side, I'm just wondering as I'm going through these verses, why does Hitchin say it has to be plural?
I mean, isn't he aware of the grammar here?
Apparently not.
In the Genesis 1 passage, you go back there, and there are, let me just list them for you.
Let's see.
Back in Genesis 1, okay, God said, let us make man in our image.
Okay, God is the subject, said is the verb, the verb is singular.
So God created man in his own image.
God, subject, Elohim, verb is singular, grammatically.
I even have gone so far on the website, I scanned a photocopy of a parsing guide for Hebrew to show people, and I marked it up, the image is available on the website, that I'm not making it up.
It is grammar.
It is there.
Grammar is important.
There are four or five singulars there.
Let's go over to the Akkadian stuff.
Again, your listeners can flip over there sometime.
What I look for here is, okay, the Akkadian and Sumerian, their word for God, plural, is that ever used as a singular?
And guess what?
It is.
It is.
It is lots of times.
The best example are the Amarna letters.
Some of your listeners have probably heard of the Tel El Amarna letters with Akhenaten, the pharaoh that's usually associated with that city.
I'll give you one example.
In the Amarna letters, which is Akkadian cuneiform, there are over a hundred instances, just in those letters, where the plural for gods in Akkadian, ilanu, is used to refer to one person.
In this case, the pharaoh.
These are correspondence letters from Pharaoh to his, you know, sub-governors in Palestine and back and forth and so on and so forth.
But I have it right here on the website.
My King, My Lord, My Sun Guide, My Elania, My Elania.
It's the verb, or the noun, elanu, plural, used as a singular to point to one being.
Now again, my question is, why is Sitchin unaware of this data?
I mean, I didn't have to hunt long for this stuff.
I have several examples up there.
Let's go to Nephilim.
This is the one that just really cranks me up.
I just can't believe what he does with this.
Nephilim is spelled, in Hebrew, N-P-I-L-I-M.
The I is the Y. He originally had all consonants.
The key to knowing what this word means is the middle Y.
Now, this is something that doesn't really translate great to radio, so people would have to go up there, but I think I can get it across here.
The whole point of this is that Hebrew is originally spelled without vowels.
They use certain consonants to denote vowel sounds, you know, to preserve the correct pronunciations.
And Nephilim is spelled at times, at times it's not, because that's what we call in grammar defective spelling, but the middle Y is important.
If you translate it as Sitchin does, here's the point.
He says it translated as, those who came down from above, or those who were cast down, or the worst one is people of the fiery rockets.
If you do those translations, those who came down, that denotes coming, you know, directional, coming from some other place, the word that he says undergirds nephilim, the verb nephal, never has a meaning of going in some direction.
If you say cast down in Hebrew, That's what's called a causative stem.
Someone causes somebody else to get thrown out.
Okay?
If you get thrown out of a bar, somebody's got to throw you out.
Okay?
So, that would mean the word would have to be spelled with an M or an H on the front.
And obviously it does.
It's not.
It starts with an N. Mark in Columbus, Mississippi says, uh, you're making a huge leap of faith that the ancient texts are literal.
Would not ancient man have a spiritual explanation for the technology of visiting ETs?
If ancient man recorded that explanation in text, how would you understand it unless you read them literally?
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Well, I don't know what the point there is.
In other words, are you absolutely certain, can you be absolutely certain, that it all is literal, that all of it has been specifically recorded, perfectly recorded?
Or are there some plurals that are singular and some singular that ended up plural in the original recording?
Well, I'm operating with the same database that Sitchin is, or at least he should be.
And so, we're operating from the same database.
You'll look at the words, you'll look how they're spelled, you'll look at the grammar, and if you're going to go with any of Sitchin's meanings, you cannot spell the word the way it shows up in the text.
You'd have to have nophilim or nephulim in Hebrew grammar.
There's no way that you can get any of his meanings and spell the word the way it is.
What it really points to is there's actually two possibilities that the word actually comes from.
In The Twelfth Planet, in the very introduction, he has this little anecdote about how his teacher said this means giants, and he said, well, how can it mean giants?
It means those who came down from above, which it doesn't.
That's a whole other different verb, and again, if you You took those three consonants, that root verb, and changed it to say what Sitchin wants to say.
You couldn't spell it the way it shows up.
Alright, listen, I'm... He just makes up the... I'm going to appear to be giving you trouble, but just take it as a challenge.
Rockets entering Earth's atmosphere would appear to be fiery rockets.
Have you ever seen the shuttle re-enter?
That would appear to those observing on the ground to be It would appear to be a fiery rocket.
But in fact, no rockets are firing.
Right.
Had you thought of that?
Oh, sure.
He doesn't use naphthalene to illustrate the visible manifestation of fire.
He gets the fiery rockets from some other place.
What Sitchin does is he, again, in the 12th planet, He takes the Hebrew word shem, which he says means, you know, something constructed, solid construction that's upright.
He calls it a rocket, okay?
And he gets that, supposedly, from the Akkadian shamu.
You notice the sh and the m, the same consonants in the language there.
And then he says, well, that comes from the Sumerian shumu, like a mu.
That which is a mu is the way Sitchin translates it to the twelfth planet.
Now the Mu, for those who have read Sitchin, the Mu is supposedly this vehicle that the gods fly around in.
So he says, Aha!
Shu Mu, that which is a Mu.
That means Shamu in Akkadian.
That means Shem in Hebrew.
And here we have the Tower of Babel incident.
They're building a rocket.
Well, guess what?
If you actually go back to Sumerian, Shu Mu, that which is a Mu, the phrase that which is, in grammar, is called a relative pronoun.
We have words like which and who and that.
Why would we not imagine the plural, Mike, to mean the Trinity?
knows this. Relative pronoun, well guess what? Sumerian is one of the few languages that
doesn't have relative pronouns. He makes up the word.
Why would we not imagine the plural, Mike, to mean the Trinity? Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Here's why that doesn't work. Again, this makes me real popular with Christians. You
know, I'm kind of viewed as the equal opportunity irritant.
That's all right.
Which is okay.
I don't want to be an equal opportunity offender.
Irritant's okay, but I don't want to go too far on either side here.
The reason it doesn't work is you have passages, one of them would be Exodus 15, 11, for example, where the text of the Hebrew Bible says, Who is like you, Yahweh, among the gods?
Among the Elohim, the Elim, they're actually, it's a different plural.
Who is like you among the gods?
Now, if we say that gods, plural there, means Trinity, what you have then is actually a destruction of the whole doctrine of the Trinity, because the Trinity is supposedly, again, three whos in a what?
Three beings that share equally, absolutely equally, the same essence.
Now, if you're comparing the Father And saying, essentially, that, hey, there's nobody like the Father.
Even these two other guys, the Son and the Spirit, they're a little bit less.
They're a little bit inferior to the Father.
Who is like the Father?
Who is like you, Yahweh, among the Trinity?
What you've just done is destroyed the doctrine of the Trinity.
Now, Christians usually don't realize that.
They don't think that far into it.
But if you say that the plural there is Trinitarian, You have just committed the error, not necessarily the error of Arianism at the Council of Lycia, but you have just undermined the whole doctrine of the Trinity, which is fundamental to Christianity.
So it just doesn't work because of the comparative language.
If you compare something, one has to be better than the other.
Okay, and so there's a big guy, is what you're getting down to, really, and that's what this whole argument is about, right?
Right.
What Sitchin does, to simplify, what he does is he... I guess I'll just do the Art Bell thing and just say it.
There are times he just makes it up.
He makes up words that don't exist.
His translations are just sometimes wacky.
He never gives you references.
It's just an amazing feat to read Sitchin and find what he's quoting.
I've been pulling my hair out this week trying to find the passage because his translations are so idiosyncratic, I can't find them.
Again, I know he knows something about the languages, and I know he's poured his life into his books, and he does wonderful comparative work, tracing these themes, divine beings cohabiting with women, all through different cultures.
I mean, that is great stuff.
And it just takes dedication.
I know, but it rolls it all off the side of a hill if he's making it up as he goes.
Well, he does that on occasion.
I mean, I don't know any other way to say it.
You know, if you're going to translate Nephilim as he does, you've got to change the word.
But isn't that like for a Christian saying the Bible is Well, it's accurate.
Um, every single word is accurate, except for some occasions where it's sort of made up, right?
Oh, yeah.
Hold on, Mike.
Essentially, yeah.
Yeah.
It's like being a little pregnant.
I think.
Anyway, Mike Heiser is here, and, uh, the discussion is obvious.
What's not obvious is what's coming.
And that is the Bible Code.
Mike thinks the Bible Code Is essentially so much gibberish.
We're about to cover it.
Mike Heiser is here.
He's the author of The Facade and now a brand new book called The Bible Code Myth.
Do you have questions?
Well, I know you do.
So we're going to open up the phone lines and we're going to pepper Mike with all kinds of questions.
Sort of a rapid-fire fashion, I think, over the next hour.
That's what's coming.
Don't go away.
Once again, here is Mike Heiser, author of two very controversial books.
Very controversial.
One called A Fassad, and now The Bible Code Myth.
The only way you could have done better with that is to have said The Exploded Bible Code Myth.
Let's go to the phones and see what awaits.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
Good morning.
Yes.
Hello?
Yes, hello.
Yes, sir.
This is Mike and Crowley.
Crowley?
Crowley what?
Crowley, Louisiana.
Pardon me.
Okay, thank you.
It's a rice capital of America.
It's a little hick town, but it produces all the rice for a fourth of the world.
Okay.
Very good.
Okay.
Mike, I read the Bible Code, Michael Drossner's book.
Right.
And I went through the codes, and I came to the conclusion of the book, as I recall, and I want you to agree with me, because he read the book several times, I'm sure.
Correct?
Correct, you did.
Read the book several times, okay?
The thesis on that book, that the main code, the main code that was explained through their research, was the phrase, the Bible code will save, correct?
Yeah, yeah, they mentioned that.
It'll save humanity from destruction.
Right?
Right.
Okay?
And so, so fear, and what that, can you interpret what that would mean to me?
I mean, I can tell you what I believe in my heart, what that meant to me.
If the Bible Code will save, because, I mean, if you just give me a moment to explain.
Go ahead.
Other than the fact that it's self-evident, you mean?
Well, if it says the Bible Code will save, and it came out of the book of Daniel, and it is there for us to read, that means it's going to save us from fearing anything but God.
See, if we have to fear man, and atrocity, and Satan, and all this stuff, we're falling into a big pilge pot here.
You know, and that's what that amounts to.
Because if we fear Him, we'll believe what His book says, and we won't go whoring after other gods.
Why would you need the Bible code to tell you that?
Yeah.
Why would you need that?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there's probably hundreds of verses that say that.
Wasn't there something about all these golden idols being destroyed to send you that little message not to go whoring after other gods?
Right, the Jews are going to be deceived by Antichrist when he comes by an idol.
And some of us are in the way of the God of money and lust and all this.
You know, I mean, God's trying to get... He says, I am the Lord your God of Israel and Isaac and Jacob.
And you don't think the New Testament is sufficient for that?
No, I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sins.
I've had enough run-ins with evil just for believing in Him.
Yeah, but you're saying, why do you need what you just quoted from the Bible code?
What did you learn from the Bible code?
The Bible code itself, I mean, you read that, it's impossible for that to be a coincidence.
And, you know, evidently it came from God's law.
It has to be revealed.
All right, let's deal with that question, or that statement.
Is it impossible for it to be a coincidence?
Well, in the appendix to the book, the material there is very clear that, yeah, it is possible for that to be a coincidence.
Brendan McKay is probably the mathematician who's put the most time into analyzing the Bible Code.
And, again, since I'm not a mathematician, I'll let him speak for himself, but he took Uh, books such as Moby Dick, and, you know, in English and in Hebrew, and I have this again in the appendix, and did this, reproduced the experiment, the original experiment that was the foundation of the Bible Code, and he found the same kinds of phrases in Moby Dick.
Now, is Moby Dick the signature of God?
I mean, statistically, it can happen with a book of any length, same statistical regularity, Even the same phrases.
My favorite one is he found in the Hebrew text of Moby Dick the phrase, No Bible Code.
McKay's website, and I have it in the appendix, he's serious, but there are some really funny examples in there.
I guess to the caller I would say that what you're telling me about You know, your faith I'm certainly sympathetic with, but
you can get the exact same thing from the New Testament or the Old Testament.
What did you learn from the Bible code that you couldn't get from the Bible?
All right, fair enough.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Michael Heiser.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes, speak.
Yes, sir.
I've just got a question.
I wonder, where did your thoughts and patterns and, you know, how you base this book, where
did that originate from?
Which book are you referring to?
The Bible Code.
The Bible Code myth?
Yes.
Do you mean how did I come up with the idea for it?
Yes.
Well, basically it was having to spend hundreds of hours doing textual criticism in graduate school.
When I came across the Bible Code book, the initial book, and read the thesis of what was going on, I've done textual criticism.
I know that the every letter sequence that is required for the Bible code is a demonstrable myth.
Because we're not omniscient, I'm just not convinced of my own omniscience that I could look at all the manuscripts in the world and all the varying spellings and the fact that the letters have changed their shape and scribes make mistakes.
There are places, I have this on the website, where the scribes put little dots above letters.
And the dots were to signify the fact, and the rabbis talk about this, that these letters should be erased.
And all the examples I have in here are from the Torah, the most sacred portion of the Hebrew Bible.
By the way, if you add all the letters up that they put dots on in the Torah, it's 42 letters.
You're over halfway to the magic 77.
It just doesn't account for this.
I mean, these are the scribes.
These are the ones who gave their lives, generation after generation, and they did a phenomenal job.
The scribes had the entire text of the Hebrew Bible, the whole thing, memorized.
And we know that because they didn't have concordances like we do today.
They left us notes that tell us, by virtue of how their notes were supposed to be used and what they said of them, that they had the entire thing memorized.
I mean, these guys were good, but every once in a while they'd come across a letter that they said, you know, the guy who copied this thing that I'm sitting down here, you know, looking at now, he made a mistake.
We're all, we're human.
A fly got in his way.
He got distracted.
Maybe he had an itch or something.
You know, he got something in his eye and he made a mistake.
And so they put a little dot over it.
We don't want to remove it because it might be sacred.
There is some chance, I guess.
So I'm going to put a little dot over it, but I'm telling you that this should probably be erased.
You count those up, you get 42 of them.
Just in the Torah.
The Bible code does not account for this, and I'm aware of this kind of thing because I've had to do textual criticism.
So that's what birthed the book.
Okay, there you are.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Michael Heiser.
Hi.
Hello.
Michael, I heard a preacher on the radio who talks a lot about chemtrails say that there were no dinosaurs.
What do the two of those have to do with each other?
Pardon me?
What do the two have to do with each other?
Yes, chemtrails and dinosaurs.
The one will identify the preacher to those who know him, and I don't want to say his name.
Well, anyway, the very first sentence in the book of Genesis, Bible scholars have debated over it.
I wonder how you come out on it.
And my second question has to do with your hierarchy of God, and I want to ask you about an analogy to Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company.
What?
Let me go back to the first one now.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and some scholars say that it should be translated, and the earth became formless A formless wasteland.
In other words, at some event, perhaps millions of years, or even billions after its original creation, caused something to happen to the Earth that wasn't originally there.
Do you join the side of those translators?
What you're articulating there is basically the gist of what's called the Gap Theory.
That Genesis 1.1 does not describe the initial, well it could describe the initial creation, but something happened between 1.1 and 1.2 that caused the earth to become this wasteland.
And then of course in between those two verses you can put all the millions of years and God comes back and finishes the job.
I personally don't like the gap theory, although grammatically From a translation perspective, that translation is possible.
I actually do not prefer, although I think that the text certainly could say this, I actually don't prefer the literal 24-hour creationist view.
Art, you've had Hugh Ross on your show before.
Oh, yes.
And I'm actually closer to him.
I think that Genesis 1-1 doesn't actually articulate the initial creative event.
I do think that God did create all matter, but I think you have to go elsewhere in the Bible for that.
The reason I say that is because the first word in the Hebrew Bible, Bereshit, the Be sound, lacks in grammar what we call the article, the word the.
So what you should try to do is translate the verse without using the word the.
And what you get is in beginning or to begin with or something like that.
So it's not, if it was in the beginning, the word would actually be Ba-Rashid.
So the way that it's actually pointed, the vowels that were put in, I think suggests, or I think to be fair I should say could suggest, that what you have going on in Genesis 1-1 is a second series of creative activity on God's part and the initial creation happened elsewhere.
That's different than the gap theory.
But as far as the millions and millions of years thing, it sort of would accomplish the same thing.
And I think that view is viable.
I think the traditional 24-hour day view is viable from the text.
The text allows either option.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
Hi.
All right.
I'm really glad that you didn't fluff this off on Ian.
I like the way you're handling this, too.
I have a couple of questions, three of them.
First of all, I really recognize, just by the way he's talking, that Mike Kaiser is a scholar in Hebrew.
I was dying. I had a near-death experience with it. I want to keep that straight.
First of all, I really recognize, just by the way he's talking, that Mike Kaiser is a scholar in Hebrew.
I just started learning Hebrew myself.
But the first question is, why do you think that the Trinity is a foundational belief for Christianity?
Okay.
You're going to go one at a time?
Oh, yeah, I'll give them to you all at once, I guess.
Well, it's up to you.
One of the other ones is, Hebrew, I'm just at a very beginning level, but Hebrew, from the rabbi I'm learning from, says that Hebrew has at least four different I don't know what he's talking about in terms of interpretations.
I mean, you're looking at letters and words and sentences.
Yeah, there's four different levels of what it can say, and as many as ten different levels of what it can say.
I got you.
So you're really talking about methods of interpretation.
And the last question really is the big question.
I want to know if any of your books have any more that talks about the Greys and the 666 connection and that sort of thing.
Okay, well let's take the last one first because that's the quickest.
The only thing you're going to get there is the little bit that's alluded to in the facade.
There's a little bit more on the website.
You'd have to go up to the website Facadenovel.com and then hit position papers and then look for the mention of the possible Antichrist thing and Irenaeus.
So that's really what you're going to get there.
Back to the second one, the interpretations.
It isn't just Jewish interpreters, but throughout history people have, I guess, tried, it would be a good way to put it, they've tried different methods of interpretation.
There's no requirement that you go beyond what we would call a face value or an authorial intention or literal.
To someone who's in hermeneutics, they know I'm using these imprecisely and that's okay, but the short answer is yeah.
You can have different approaches to the text.
The only thing I don't like about approaches that are not linked to grammar and linked to the language itself is that there's an inherent subjectivity to them.
In other words, let's just say the allegorical method of interpretation.
Okay, we know what the text would mean if we just take the words at face value, but now let's look for some deeper hidden symbolic meaning or allegorical meaning.
I'm not denying that there could be some of that.
Okay, I think the way the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, that that is something that needs to be considered.
The problem with it is that Where's the litmus test?
I mean, where are the limits?
I mean, I could go there and say, well, allegorically, I think this verse means that pigs fly.
I mean, there are no rules, you know, once you get out of the text and just start using your imagination.
I think if you're going to do that, you need to link your allegorical interpretation to something else that's in the text, in the Bible, somewhere else.
And that gives you some kind of mooring for it.
The first question, why is the Trinity foundational?
I would answer that by saying that basically, in church history terms, the Trinity was articulated and of course defended and chosen as the correct theological position all the way back at the Council of Nicaea in 325.
Of course, that gives rise to the question, well, didn't they just invent the doctrine there?
The answer is no.
It was a textual debate.
Both Arius on the one hand that thought that Jesus was created, the highest creation, but of course was not pre-existent.
And of course Trinitarianism said that he was pre-existent because of John 1 and other passages.
What they were doing was they were trying to come to grips with what the apostles wrote.
So it was a textual debate.
And I believe that the correct side won out textually.
I have a lot of sympathy, you know, not theologically for the other side.
I have sympathy because the problem is so difficult.
What Arius was doing is he was looking back, you know, you have Jewish people doing this in between the Testaments, which is my dissertation area, trying to figure out, okay, here you have Daniel 7.
There's the Ancient of Days sitting on the throne.
We know who that is.
That's God.
But the passage says there's more than one throne there.
And then there's somebody that's called the Son of Man that comes along and God hands him everlasting dominion and all power.
Who's that?
Well, you know, I would say here you have a divine council scene and the individual that this is handed to is the second person in the Trinity, Christ.
Why?
Because in the New Testament the Son of Man connection is made.
Now, I can do that because I have the New Testament and I have a Semitic background, but you know, some of these people who were trying to hammer this out just didn't have You know, either manuscripts hadn't been discovered, they hadn't looked at things again as a Semite would look at them.
This was a struggle.
And so I think all the way back to the text, the apostolic text, that the Trinitarian doctrine is there, even though it was only hashed out in 325.
That's why I say it's foundational.
Alright.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
Hi.
Hi Mike, hi Art, Doug in Miami listening on 610 WIOD.
Yes sir.
I'd like to ask Mike if he thinks there might be a message hidden in the genealogy of the names from Adam to Noah.
If you take the ten names, I might want to list these vertically and put a translation to the side.
Adam, Seth, Enoch, Kenan, Mahalalal, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah.
That Adam translates to man, Seth to appointed, Enoch, teaching.
Methuselah, his death shall bring.
Lamech, the despairing.
And Noah, rest or comfort.
Put all together would be a message in the earliest chapters of Genesis that God had already laid out his plan for the redemption of mankind in saying that man is appointed mortal sorrow But the blessed God shall come down teaching, that his
death shall bring the despairing rest.
Alright, I appreciate your call sir, but I think basically you're suggesting that you could do basically the same
thing with a Harry Potter book, right?
Well, I think I can take this after the break.
I hear the music.
Yeah, it's musicking.
That's right.
But you could take any text, string all the letters together, put them vertical if you wish, and come up with meaningful phrases.
He's saying taking the names, not just the letters.
So we can take that after.
They're still made up of letters though, right?
Correct.
But they're not sequential in this case.
All right.
we'll be right back the
the the
the the
the top of the morning everybody
My guest is Mike Heiser.
We're talking about the facade early on and now the Bible code myth and kind of mixing both If you will, a little bit, and we'll continue with one more segment in a moment.
Michael, did you know that one of the greatest men that we've had sit in the highest seat of authority in this greatest new world nation, Ronald Wilson Reagan, If you take and count the letters of each name, you know what you get.
So go ahead and deal with the names if you wish, but I'm just convinced, as I am with the Bible Code in general, that if you take any mixture of anything and you work on it long enough, you'll come up with something.
I don't know.
Yeah, you know, with the use of the names, It is a little bit different from the Bible Code because you're not dealing with letter sequence.
The names are in a series of verses and they're not consecutive.
They're not up against each other.
There could be some authorial literary artistry here.
Some of the translations he gave for the names are a little stretched, but most of them aren't.
I guess I would say I'm skeptical but open to this because I don't believe that the names in the genealogies are chronologically consecutive.
Even if you did, would it be profound for you at that point?
Probably not.
I would say probably not.
If you compare the accepted text, the Masoretic text of Genesis 5, the genealogies, and you put that up against another version, the Septuagint, there are variations in the names.
There are some gaps.
In other words, I think they're deliberately chosen, for sure, to list because we're not dealing with a strict chronology.
But what if that means something prophetic?
I would think if you're going to do a prophecy in the Old Testament, if you're God and you want to tell people that the Messiah is coming, you do something like Isaiah 53, where nobody's going to miss it.
You don't need to encode that.
The Messiah is coming.
Will do.
Yeah, that'll do.
On the international line, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
Hi.
Where are you?
I'm in Melbourne, Australia.
Good evening, gentlemen.
How are you?
Just fine.
I'm enjoying your show on the internet.
Thank you.
As far as the Bible Code is concerned, we tried that on the Maltese language, which you may or may not know is about 60% Arabic.
Now, we did a part of it ourselves, and then we used the Bible Code on it.
Now, what we put down was basically a boy going down the street.
The Bible Code came out telling us that it was fishing the sea.
So, basically, the Bible code is a bit hooey.
We don't believe in it.
Well, I agree with that, and Mike obviously agrees with that as well.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
Hi.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
I'm Colin from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Yes, sir.
I have two questions.
First of all, I really appreciate Mike's tone and attitude, obviously very Well studied, but also with a very understanding and patient spirit with those of us who aren't as well studied.
I'd like to ask two questions.
The first, obviously you have a lot of respect for the scriptures and the accuracy of the scriptures.
I'm wondering if you have had a chance to argue with or write anything about people such as Timothy Freakeys, I believe you pronounce his name that way, the Jesus Mysteries.
Not familiar with it?
He basically says that the entire Jesus story is a mythology based on Orpheus and Dionysus from ancient mythologies going back to very ancient times and that basically the entire story is plagiarized from other stories and other settings from Plato to fill in the blank.
And I'm wondering if you haven't looked into that, if at some point you could just jot the name down.
There's a whole user group out there in the net, the Jesus Mysteries.
If you might post something on your website after looking at that, because they have some pretty compelling things that they have to say.
Regarding that, I won't waste a lot of time.
Art, have you heard anything about that?
Not a word.
No, I haven't either.
I'd have to go look at it.
All right.
Well, I guess that's what he's suggesting you do when you get time.
Walk Hardline, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
Hi.
Good morning, gentlemen.
How's it going?
Okay.
Well, okay.
I wanted to thank your guest, first of all, because he's the first one I've ever heard on the radio or such discussing that there are multiple texts out there and there are differences between them, usually when you Get a scholar, like with the Bible Code and such, to lock on to one version of the text, and that's all there ever has been, and all there ever will be.
Right.
Now one thing that he has not done, though, and I've never again heard anyone discuss this, is what about the use of colloquialisms in the Bible and in other things?
I mean, we have these phrases that are just, it's a coined expression that we just use in a generic fashion, and today it makes sense, where it won't make sense a hundred or a thousand years from now.
You know, we called on the television show M.A.S.H.
Frank Burns was called Ferret Face.
That doesn't mean he was a six foot tall walking ferret, that just means he had a very strange looking face.
It's a good point.
And it goes back to where he said, you know, the Watcher was fearsome like a serpent.
That doesn't necessarily mean he looks like a six foot tall walking snake, but maybe he just has a serpentine pointy beak face.
You know?
Alright, yes, a very good point actually.
But the text there in 4QM actually says his appearance was like a serpent, so to me that suggests an invisible appearance.
Suggests?
Suggests.
You know, Art, I'm very curious where you would disagree with me on the facade.
I think you do favor the interdimensional view, I think.
I share its possibility with you.
I don't favor it over... Truly interplanetary?
That's right.
And nor do I favor one over the other.
I think both equally possible.
In fact, they may both be occurring simultaneously.
The only problem I have is I think you've done a wonderful job on the Bible Code myth, and that is only said because obviously I agree with you.
I just think that all the points that you make there reflect back, or should reflect back, and get somebody thinking a little bit about the facade, since we're dealing with such small changes, blowing the whole thing up.
Well, again, there's nothing to hide in the text.
I'm using the facade because sometimes the Hebrew Bible is Elohim plural and most times it's not.
Sometimes it is.
What I'm saying is you take all of them, put them together, and ask yourself, what is the picture that emerges?
It wouldn't matter to me one bit whether one verse, oh I thought that was a singular and sure enough here's a manuscript problem and it's a plural.
So what?
I'm acknowledging fully that there are singulars and plurals and that the texts are pretty clear.
Now, I haven't come across any textual problems except for the one in Ezekiel 28.
That really is a passage that deals with a Satan figure.
I guess I can leave it at that.
And so that doesn't really deal with the Divine Council.
It deals with a certain member of it.
But other than that, there really are no textual issues.
Something like Psalm 82, 1, that would dictate it one way or the other.
It's not like every verse has these horrendous textual problems.
I understand, but as you point out, the Bible code myth that only takes one.
But you would only know, think of it like if you were a lawyer.
Let's say that Art Bell is on trial, and you're being tried for murder, and your whole defense rests on phone records.
You say, hey, I made that call.
Right.
And that gives me an alibi, and the prosecution says, no, you didn't.
And you say, well, no, wait a minute.
I know I made that call, and somebody deleted this reference to this call, or somebody changed a few numbers, and it looks like I was calling from somewhere else.
Now, how would you be able to back up your claim?
You would have to come across an earlier copy of that phone record That preserved the reading that you want your lawyer to enforce.
And it's the same thing with the tax.
Mike, I have been fighting with my phone company for the last four months.
And the reason I've been fighting with them is because they've been putting other people's calls on my bill.
Oh, that's great.
From telephone numbers that I had years ago, Mike.
We won't hire them as scribes.
So let's hope they're not scribing anything.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Mike Heiser.
Hi, this is Raymond from Texas.
Yes, Raymond.
I wanted to ask you, Mike, who has the most authority in the Trinity, according to all the scribes and stuff that you've read?
I would have to say that the text would make it clear that the Father has ultimate authority.
I think Jesus, in the New Testament, while he was on earth, defers The authority of the Father, and we know from the writings of Paul that when it's all said and done that Christ will turn around and glorify the Father.
These functional terms in regard to the Trinity are what really gave rise to the debates about the Trinity in the first place.
And the way theologians have handled that is that they'll look at the text and say, well, here you have Jesus saying, I and the Father are one.
And you have John 1-1 that says, you know, Christ pre-existed before there was anything, and only those things are said about God the Father.
So, you know, we have that on one hand, and on the other hand we have, you know, language like, you know, Father, Son, Jesus praying and saying, God sent me here, and I have to do the will of the Father, and so on and so forth.
And so what theologians have done is they've looked at that, and the way that the Trinity gets articulated theologically is that there is There is what we call an ontological trinity, that is, there's a oneness in essence between all the persons that is absolutely equal.
But, and Jonathan Edwards, I think, came up with this term, there's also an economic trinity or a functional trinity, that each person in the trinity has certain tasks and certain jobs to do.
And so it doesn't take away from the essence of who they are, Their tasks don't take away from the essence, but nevertheless, they do have particular tasks and particular ministries.
West of the Rockies, you're on air with Mike Heiser.
Hi.
Yes, hello.
Getting back to Elohim, when God inspired the Bible, He meant for it to be understood by the common man, just by reading it over and over.
Hebrew is a perfectly clear language.
When every noun forms its plural by adding I am, That would go for Elohim as well.
And then the interesting thing is that Moses chose, as you pointed out,
that Elohim is followed by a singular predicate.
Elohim being a plural noun followed by a singular predicate.
I don't think that was an accident.
Uh, which makes Elohim one God.
Three persons and one God.
Right.
And then Jesus said, you've seen me, you've seen the Father.
That makes the Trinity three persons, three personalities, but one God who always move in unison.
So we do have one God.
They are one Godhead.
So far I haven't heard anything I disagree with.
Right, but you thought that Elohim was singular.
And I wanted to bring this all out.
By the way, do you know what?
I really think you're brilliant.
You're too easily impressed.
Listen, not too many people have figured out that Daniel is the key to understanding Revelation.
You've got it when you said, you know, the man with the white hair, that's God the Father.
Jesus is in the sanctuary as well.
He's sitting on a judgment throne.
I thought that was brilliant.
Not too many people have figured that one out.
You know, the key to what you said is the predication.
Elohim, with the singular verb, grammatically, you know, it's singular.
Let's just take God the Father, or the God of Israel, out of the picture.
In 1 Kings 33, let me give you another example, there's a list of foreign pagan gods, and it says, Kamosh, the Elohim of the Moabites.
Okay?
There's only one name listed there.
Elohim clearly is singular.
So that's a contextual clue.
You were bringing up the predicate clue.
Except that the Moabites were pagan.
They had multiple gods.
Right, and this is discussing one of their gods in particular.
But Elohim is singular.
So really, no matter how many gods the pagans have, there's still only one God.
True God.
you know big G God and little g God belongs to the Moabites.
Capital G is the real God of the Bible that we're talking about as somebody who sits above everybody.
Right. You know we didn't get to this but in the facade this is articulated that what happened in Deuteronomy 32
verses 8 and 9 and there's a textual issue there. That would be a good one
you know in light of Art's prior question.
If you go with the Septuagint there it says that God when God separated the peoples of the earth
which was the Tower of Babel incident in Genesis 10 and 11.
He arranged the nations according to the number of and the accepted text says the number of the sons of Israel.
Well, Israel didn't even exist yet until past chapter 12 and on in the other chapters of Genesis.
Well, wait a minute.
Moses was the son of Israel and Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
Most people believe.
So Moses is saying that, you know, he knows already that the sons of Israel are the Israelites.
Right, looking back on it, but if you take the event for when it's happening in Biblical history, I think the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls are better there.
It actually says that God numbered the nations according to the number of the sons of God.
If you count the nations, curiously enough, in Genesis 10 and 11, there are 70.
And the number of the sons of God, not in Israelite religion, there's not a specific number given, but they're next door neighbors.
The people at Ugarit, they believe that there were 70 sons of God.
What I think is going on here is I think that when the nations get divided up, we have what I call the Romans 1 event of the Old Testament.
For those who are familiar with the New Testament, You would know what I'm talking about here, but God more or less says, hey, if you want to follow these other flunkies, these other inferior small G.O.D.s, fine.
You know, I'll divide you up into the nations.
Each nation gets its own, you know, small G.O.D.
and whatever henchmen they want to take with them.
And now I'm going to start from scratch, all together new, which is why in the very next chapter in Genesis, God does what?
He calls Abraham and says, I'm going to make of this guy my own people.
The only thing I brought up about the Moabites there was they used the word Elohim to name one of the gods of the Moabites in that list.
It's another example of context and not the predicate in this case.
You have to look at it.
You have to look at the word as a noun.
Is there a singular verb?
Is there a plural verb?
Is there something else in the context that helps us know whether we're talking about You know, the God of Israel, or a singular God just in conversation, or are we talking about plurals here?
Many.
You'll have to look at context.
All right, caller.
Thank you, and take care.
You know, it sounds like I ought not only have you on with Mr. Sitchin, but I probably ought to have you on with a Bible... Who would you like to be on with, with regard to the Bible code?
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
I don't really have a preference one way or the other.
Drazen is just the writer, so I think that wouldn't be a very good conversation.
He actually doesn't know much about the text.
He put the things together with the experiment to produce the book, so I don't know.
I'll tell you what, you work on a name, and we'll get you into debates with both of these people.
How would that be?
Sure, that'd be fine.
Alright, good.
Done deal.
Mike, thank you for being here.
Two books, both of them available nationwide, through my website, through your website, The Facade and the new one, The Bible Code Myth.
I'm sure it has been a pleasure having you here, and we will do this again, and when we do, it's going to be a wild one indeed, because I'm going to get Zachariah here.
Thank you.
Get me another name, all right?
All right.
Have a good night.
You too.
Good night.
All right, coming up, we've got an hour of open lines directly ahead.
Anything you want to talk about.
Nights in white satin
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