This is the follow on from the post about Heliocentrism, Sadducees and Sabbateans. To recap, briefly, (for people who can’t read more than two sentences before the brain fuzz descends – i.e. everyone….), in the last post we learnt that: Zadok was the first Kohen Gadol, appointed to Solomon’s Temple. His descendants, the ‘Bnei Zadok‘, […]
This is probably going to be one of those wild posts. So buckle in, grab a cup of tea, and let’s begin. == The story begins when one of my readers sent me an email exchange he’d had with a friend who is both a historian and a mathematician (amongst many other things.) This is […]
Over Shabbat, I re-read a book called ‘New Heavens and a New Earth’. I first read it a couple of years ago, but each time I go through all this stuff again, I glean more useful insights. While the author, Jeremy Brown, clearly believes ‘Copernicus was right’, I give him very high marks for actually […]
I will pick up heliocentrism and Jewish heretics next week, BH. I am exploring some new avenues of information linking both together, which is already proving extremely interesting – but needs quite a bit of spade work before I can ‘lay it out nicely’ to share with you, so you can come to your own […]
It’s interesting to me, how many of us are worried that believing in a ‘flat earth’ may somehow go against the Torah view of the world. In this post, I’m going to try and bring as many of the sources I can find (easily!) together, so we can see ‘what is Torah thinking’ and ‘what […]
I’ve been having some interesting email exchanges around this whole subject of ‘flat earth’. The first things to stress, absolutely, is that each of us has to think for ourselves, and to come to our own conclusions. My job in all this is just to keep pulling information together, and pointing out some avenues to […]
I spent yesterday watching more than three hours (!) of explanations from Matan Gorodish, explaining a bunch of stuff about ‘flat earth vs spherical earth’. If you understand spoken Hebrew, I highly recommend it as an introduction, as he covers a lot of ground from a ‘believing Jew’ perspective, including some of the Torah sources […]
Here’s a detailed English translation of some of the passages from the Zohar, talking about whether the earth is a ‘circle’ or ‘ball.’ ***Reposted from 2021*** I can’t take any credit for this, it was sent to me by two of my friends, who spent half a day painstakingly doing it. Thanks, C and C! […]
After all my Torah books, Rabbenu books and Rav books, my next most referenced book is… an atlas. It’s the Collins Atlas of the World, and it dates to 1983. And as well as maps, it’s just chock-full of the sort of pseudo-scientific propaganda they’ve been shoving down our throats for decades. I like it, […]
I had a very interesting discussion about whether water can ‘bend’ over Shabbat. Specifically, whether a body of water as big as the Great Lakes in Michigan (around 250 miles long, and 60 miles across….) can be observed ‘bending’ by 167 feet from it’s top to the bottom, as it curves down towards the equator. […]