My patient's plea echoed in my ears as anguish and panic reverberated throughout the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a modern plague that, at that time, felt almost Biblical in scale. Her question also brought me back to a discussion about the book of Job that took place in my study group of psychoanalysts, who met monthly for over a decade examining Biblical texts through a psychoanalytic lens.
The Book of Genesis describes Eden as a paradise watered by a single river that split into four: Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates. While the Tigris and Euphrates are well-known rivers in modern-day Iraq, the Pishon and Gihon have long been lost to history, until now. The dry riverbed, called Wadi al-Batin, stretches from the western highlands of Hejaz near Medina northeast to the northern Persian Gulf near Kuwait.
An ancient Egyptian papyrus held by the British Museum has been cited as possible evidence supporting some of the Bible's most controversial claims about giants. The 3,300-year-old document, known as Anastasi I, has been in the museum's collection since 1839 and has recently resurfaced on the Associates for Biblical Research, renewing interest in its possible links to biblical accounts. The papyrus describes encounters with the Shosu people, said to stand 'four cubits or five cubits' tall, up to eight feet in height.
Mathematician Peter W Stoner tackled this question in his 1960 book Science Speaks, calculating the odds of a single first-century individual fulfilling just 48 of these prophecies by chance. The result was staggering: one in 10 followed by 157 zeros, a number so vast it far exceeds the total number of electrons in the observable universe. To make the math easier to grasp, Stoner began with eight key prophecies, including being born in Bethlehem, descending from David, and performing miracles.