New VG App, Paleo House of David Stone, Project Status

This blog introduces our next new Greek related app, the VG. Then it covers an important ancient Paleo exhibit coming to Oklahoma. Then ancient commentary on the LXX. Then it goes deep into Textual Criticism. Finally, comments on Musk's scheduled plan for Mars.

VG (vg.paleo.in)

The link here is to our new VG app. Like our other apps it is linked off the front of paleo.in if you want to find it in the future.

The name is a contraction of Verse Reader Greek. It uses the same code as the VR app already available on the front of paleo.in. The earlier VR app uses English versification and a Protestant book order. There are serious enough differences in the Greek OT that we could not add Greek related OT texts into the VR and still do justice to the Greek related OT manuscripts. Thus a serious need for a new app.

This is a problem only for the OT, the NT is mostly the same across all texts. We are still working on checking verse alignments via the coverage map. The app itself is functionally complete.

This app holds ~15 manuscripts that are interesting to us as we look at the problems of recovery from Greek. Most are Greek texts, some are English translations. There are 3 LXX specific OT Greek texts. In the NT there is a wider selection of Greek texts. These come from the various ways the Greek text of the NT has been reconstructed. More on that below.

This new VG app gives us a way to carefully and easily look at verse level, word level, and letter level variations in the Greek as passed to us by history.

House of David Stone

Exhibit Website

Daily Mail (Best Photo)

The links here are dealing with an artifact from Israel known as the House of David Stone. It will be on public display in Edmond Oklahoma. The exhibit is scheduled from September 22, 2024, through November 25, 2024.

The top link explains the key artifact. The second link is to the website for the exhibit hall where this will be on display. The third link is to a Daily Mail article which has the best clear photo of the artifact itself.

This stone was discovered in 1993 during digs in Jerusalem. It is said to be from the 9th century BC. The stone is carved in the Paleo alphabet current in that era. It is a reasonably well done stone carving. Readers here who are familiar with the Paleo alphabet should be able to make out most of the letters.

It was the first artifact to demonstrate David as a historical character and not just a work of ancient fiction. The stone helped Israel assert their historical claim to Jerusalem.

Most of the letters are well formed, they are slightly pitched and are written right to left. The Du letter has already taken on the Delta shape seen in upper case Greek, the rest are mostly correct.

There are carved dots between all words, as the Paleo system wants to see. These were first seen by us in Paleo Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those dots were lost in the transition to the modern Hebrew letter forms. These dots are not as easy to make out, but they are present between all words on the stone.

Someone rubbed a little chalk in the carving for the key phrase, Ba-Yo-Ta. Du-Ve-Du. Look for that slightly lighter writing on the lower right side.

Let me decode... Ba-Yo-Ta. This is Paleo Hebrew for House. Du-Ve-Du is Paleo Hebrew for David.

Edmond Oklahoma straddles I-35 north of where I-44 joins from Tulsa. So anyone in Oklahoma should be able to visit this exhibit.

How Is David Spelled?

In the House of David stone the name David is spelled as normal, Du-Ve-Du. Most places, even in Greek, this is still the root of the that name and likely the correct spelling. But, even that ancient spelling of David is disputable. This is something that our recovery software must now riddle out.

For an example of this, use the new VG app and turn to Matthew 1:1. The Strongs Number for David is G1138. You can see David in that Matthew verse. If you don't know Greek, then look for the G1138. In all versions except the TR, the name David is the 6th word with G1138 immediately below.

Names are usually transliterated when moving between languages, as here. Du-Ve-Du is the paleo root for David, seen in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. There are also added vowels in Greek, which software should easily remove following the audit.

There are several different Greek NT manuscripts listed on that page. At the top, the TR, Textus Receptus, has the name David at the same 6th word position. But there is no G1138 below because the word there is a strangely spelled version of the name David.

In this case David is spelled with a Ba not a Ve as the middle letter. So in Paleo, it turns out across the entire NT, only in the TR, David is spelled with a root of Du-Ba-Du. Why?

The TR was published in 1633, using a voting system between a set of known Greek manuscripts. David was spelled Da-Ba-Du in those texts.

There is a known, ancient, sound system mix up between Ba and Ve. In modern Hebrew the Ba with an added dot is spoken as a Ve. So Ba and Ve are mixed up in history.

This is known, but what is strange here is figuring out how did the TR compilers get a Ba in this case? We don't yet know.

I expect another few weeks before we have software trustworthy enough to give real answers. But, this is 1 of dozens of word spelling mysteries found in the text that we are yet to unravel.

All the known ancient sound system transformations, indicated by the set of modern Hebrew Vowel marks, may need to be checked in the audit software. We were taught these were added going forward across history. Maybe that history is not so simple.

We don't like seeing anomalies like Du-Ba-Du. We want proof that they are not hinting at some truth. Did modern scribes create the Du-Ba-Du in the TR? Or did other ancient scribes create the ancient Du-Ve-Du on that stone?

Obviously Du-Ve-Du has the weight of the crowds. But voting is always dangerous to this sort of work. The artifact in the exhibit linked above may be using the Jebusite spelling of that ancient name.

Septuagint History

2 weeks ago I laid out a rough history of how the inspired text may have arrived in Greek instead of Aramaic or Hebrew.

I skimmed over the earliest part of that story, from Moses' day towards our more modern Greek. This would suggest the spoken language of Moses was closer to ancient Greek than it was to Hebrew. In this view, Hebrew is a Jebusite derived tongue.

Getting from Moses to Greek is thus a leap. The OT in Greek appears to have begun with the Septuagint. This is at least what we are taught in school, and part of the line of belief involving Hebrew Primacy.

Not so fast.

There is an ancient letter that describes the creation of the Septuagint. It tells a different story. Let me explain.

The Letter of Aristeas was written to Philocrates, his brother. In the letter Aristeas retells the events surrounding the creation of the Septuagint. Aristeas is the man who arranged for the creation of what we know now as the Septuagint.

Aristeas retells how he petitioned the king who funded the library at Alexandria. That was a Greek language library. This was a public library, funded by the king. Big scrolls usually received grants from the king for their translation into Greek. The Septuagint was one such project. Not only did it need funding, but diplomatic relations with Jerusalem in order to get the scribes needed for the project.

That letter explains that the Great Alexandria library ALREADY CONTAINED an earlier but imperfect copy of the OT in Greek. Because the current copy was apparently incomplete, the king was asked to fund the new work.

This is an ancient historical reference that says the Greek OT already existed in some sort of earlier form. But which was itself not matching the then known Hebrew OT.

Translators of the letter itself have debated what was meant in Aristeas' letter, likely they know, or fear, the letter itself disputes or refutes Hebrew Primacy for the OT. See vs. 30 of the letter if you have a copy of that letter in your library. See the book, The Old Testament Pseudopigrapha, Volume Two, page 14.

The letter is long, and the last page of the letter discusses curses surrounding the manuscript. Those curses appear to have been active around those who were messing with the OLDER copy of the text as it existed in the library before the Septuagint was commissioned.

The letter itself is also disputed as perhaps not authentic. Instead, the letter is claimed to be a later invention. This sort of dispute would make sense as it contradicts a basic tenant of western thought, Hebrew OT Primacy.

Down To Egypt?

Thinking about an ancient textual transmission path of inspired text via the library at Alexandria begs yet more questions.

Most of the stories in the Bible are dealing with some aspect of the history of the book itself. The real content appears locked behind the cipher system. The content we read now may be a preface to a bigger work.

So think about the story of Joshua being taken to Egypt for fear of when Herod killed the babies. What is the manuscript aspect of that story?

So far, there is no meaning. But if Egypt contains a public copy of the inspired text, then going to Egypt becomes at least interesting enough to entertain.

Where would Joshua's family go when they moved to Egypt? Did they sail there instead of carrying an infant and nursing mother over land? The library was very near the docks at Alexandria.

This is currently pure speculation, but maybe it was so Joshua could use the world famous library as soon as he was old enough to read.

We may find that his later age 12 visit to the experts is based on what he learned in the Egyptian library starting when he was, say, 5?

In any case, the story of going to Egypt may be a NT tell about the scribal significance of the place and language of that library.

Current Work

We have been getting our bearings from our switch to the Greek Text here 3 weeks ago. In this blog I need to cover what has been going on so far. Many of the things we are dealing with are new to us, it is taking time to adapt. Virtually ever time we touch something we learn more. Let me review for those following this work closely.

Greek Manuscripts

In the Aramaic side of the work we were lucky to find any computerized manuscripts of the Bible at all. That work itself also appears to be going on outside of the English language, so it is hard to track manuscript history and the modern scribes who may care about those texts.

On the Greek side things are very, very different. There is a well developed history of the study and the collation of the Greek texts. This study is based on the fact that the oldest known manuscripts are usually found in fragments.

There are many printed resources that deal with the Greek, both for the OT/AP and for the NT. The amount of written material about this work is abundant, and there are many, many articles online in English that explain different aspects of the problems of collating and bringing those texts back into usable forms.

While I have been busy with code, Ryan has been doing more reading. He has sent me a few links to articles that he found helpful. The following article is one he recommended. It gives an exhaustive introduction to the history, processes and key vocabulary terms involved in constructing modern editions of ancient (usually Greek) texts.

Textual Criticism 101

Ultimately, the computer files available to us for our own recovery work are the work output of people practicing a modern discipline called "Textual Criticism." This is a well known, but controversial, craft of taking fragments of ancient texts and recreating the likely original letter string written on some now lost ancient source document.

The term Textual Criticism applies to the letter strings themselves, and not particularly to what those strings are saying nor how they might be applied in any sort of personal way. This is not a study normally covered in church. Church people normally take this work for granted.

Textual Criticism is done for both the Greek NT and for the Greek OT, but mostly by Protestants who care about the divine inspiration of the Greek NT.

When I say OT, I also include the Apocrypha. The Greek OT always includes the Greek Apocrypha. Protestants have a split in our modern Bibles, leaving out the Apocrypha, because of the belief in Hebrew Primacy for the OT.

The Hebrew tradition does not include some Greek language Apocryphal books, so the logical deduction is that they cannot be inspired. If Hebrew Primacy is false, then so are many related deductions, like thinking there is no inspired text hidden within the Apocrypha.

As with all things in this space there are also some dirty little secrets dealing with the Greek NT that began showing up around 1880. Our work needs to mostly stay clear of most Greek texts that have been compiled since that time.

The long form title of the article linked above is The Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus. Across that article's 18,000 words it goes deep into these 3 things.

Because all ancient texts are written on material that degrades with time, the Aramaic and Hebrew texts must have been through similar ancient manuscript degradation processes. So their manuscript transmission processes must have also been coping with these problems in some way.

For the Hebrew OT the process is much worse. The Septuagint testifies the current Hebrew OT was still unfinished 2300 years ago. It was still being written by the Jews in roughly the same historical time as the NT was being written by the Apostles. So pristine Hebrew OT texts are evidence of a crime... I digress.

Source Materials

Actual, real, ancient, Greek manuscript fragments exist in partial form. There is a group run out of Dallas Theological Seminary that is attempting to photograph and catalog all known fragments. That work is very recent, over the past 20 years. So the catalog of available Greek fragments is now growing rapidly. There is an enormous number of fragments, but they are often quite small. Some only preserve a few words.

The oldest known fragments are from the 2nd century, so the 100s. Those earliest 2nd century fragments are on papyrus, which is thought to be the original material for writing the text. This material is fragile and does not last long. The other ancient material is called vellum, which is a processed form of animal skin. This is much more enduring, but it too degrades over time.

The moist climate of Europe is not conducive to preserving manuscripts over centuries. The oldest copies are usually found in very dry climates, like Egypt and Canaan.

Since the second century, there are generations of manuscript copies that are also in fragments, but often longer because they have had less time to degrade. Dating manuscripts, say by carbon 14, is not done because it damages the fragments which are extremely valuable antiques. So age on fragments must be estimated.

Manuscripts have also been moving around the historically Christian world for about 1900 years. So a copy originally created in some place may have moved a great distance to some other place in the world. So geographic location of fragments is a complex variable on top of the fragments themselves.

So the problem of a Textual Critic is to piece back the original complete letter perfect original master manuscript given comparisons of all the known fragments.

Our Assumptions

Textual Critics must assume the text began as a single copy penned by the original authors. So they are attempting to estimate what letter string made up that original text. We agree with that goal. But...

We look at this problem through the lens of Acts 15 and the editors. So we would add that the original text of the NT was likely edited during the life times of the original inspired authors themselves. It was mostly done being edited by the time Paul arrived in Rome.

So the Textual Critic's sense of a master copy is not the inspired writer's sense of master copy. The Textual Critics think they are looking for a copy produced by the NT writers. But, by the rules of Acts 15, they are really only looking for the copy created by Ananias and his helpers. Those same villains likely first published many copies of the NT we know today.

By the rules of propaganda, they would have tried to flood out the shorter inspired forms by publishing their own version in quantity. Just like today, the Jews of that time would have controlled all the major scroll copying operations in Rome. They would have had an army of slaves to do their work.

This process is how we expect the master copy sought by Textual Critics to have begun.

It is possible that small textual fragments from the 100s might be of the shorter inspired form. But fragments from that era are just small fragments and would not witness well to the crime. Nobody working this problem on the conventional Textual Criticism side would know to look for this sort of trouble in the oldest fragments.

The burning of Rome, in the 60s, may have been done in part to rid the city of fragments of an inspired text brought there, or published there, by Paul.

These assumptions are what we are out to prove using software

Copyist Mistakes

Imagine sitting down and writing your own copy of the Greek NT. What type of mistakes are you likely to have made? If you did this for a living, how many copies are you likely to have made that themselves had mistakes?

Realistically, every copy is going to have mistakes somewhere. Indeed, many manuscripts indicate that they were proof read and corrected by hand. Those corrections leave a mess in the ink. So some minor errors, those that do not change meaning, would be left alone. But, in general, this is how real manuscripts were made.

Mistakes by scribes are the nature of the problem of transmission of the text across the centuries. Communications theory demands we know the source of errors in order to know how to recover from those errors. Textual Critics have a model for those errors and work to correct for those errors.

Given a bunch of copies, copied by real scribes, could you reconstruct the original letter perfect text?

In history, could a commercial scribe, making many copies, create for themselves a letter perfect text for use in making their own future copies?

If creating a perfect master copy is ever possible, how is this done?

Majority Text

Given a collection of different copies of the text it is theoretically possible to reconstruct the original. The reason is because copies are not likely to have the same mistake in the same place. The errors we are discussing here are random. They are spread around. So even in a low-tech world these are correctable errors.

The majority of hand copied texts are likely to be correct in the majority of the words in a text. This idea gives rise to the best technique for recovery, we want the majority witness, or the Majority Text.

Since the invention of the printing press, printers, especially, have wanted a modern reconstruction of Greek that is built by comparing a bunch of ancient copies and finding the string of letters across the text that has many witnesses to the original string.

For our Paleo recovery work, we would want an inbound manuscript based on this sort of recovered text.

For those that may care, the Textus Receptus (TR), famous as the base Greek NT for the KJV, was created in this way. That text itself is also particularly strange because there are several different versions of that TR Greek text. The final form of the TR was printed in 1633, ~20 years after the KJV itself was first published. So the common modern references to the TR as why the KJV is trustworthy are basically a marketing gimmick for the KJV.

OK, majority witness, so Majority Text is a good thing. There are 2 more important twists. Seems ancient publishers were not always attempting to copy the base text. And, it seems, modern scholarship does not want the rest of us to use this sort of manuscript reconstruction. Let me explain these key points.

Alexandrian Text Type

In modern publishing we have scenarios where someone's fictional story is retold in various ways. For example, a long form book may be abridged and sold in a short form. This is especially true for very long, or very technical, books. The customers for this work are often young students, or travelers.

The Greek NT went through something similar. There are off-bible ancient witnesses to suggest the scribes at Alexandria, Egypt, were producing copies of the Greek texts without concern to be accurately copying their source document.

They had probably learned to do this so they could sell short form texts copied from longer scrolls found in their famous library. Their customers would have been wealthy parents buying copies for the education of their children.

But, this copying style is not good for long term preservation of the letter perfect text.

All Greek manuscript fragments must be checked to see if they are of this type. If so, then they are said to be of the Alexandrian Text type. These texts cannot be used for a Majority Text analysis, since they diverge from the original flow of the story, often in dramatic ways.

Byzantine Text Type

The alternative name, a text where the scribe appears to want to be faithful to the original, is called the Byzantine Text type. The Textus Receptus was created from a set of texts known to be of this type. Because so many new examples of ancient Greek texts have been found since 1600, the TR is now a narrow example of the broader Byzantine Text type.

This text type is getting its name from the Byzantine Empire, but the places that exactly matter for these texts are Antioch and then more generally Syria which were part of the ancient Byzantine empire.

Text fragments of the Byzantine Text type are thus the most interesting for Majority Text analysis. The hope, of course, is that the majority of the text fragments across the majority of the letters, will witness to the original story.

This will normally be correct from a mathematical, statistical, perspective. But, it is a voting system, and these are known to fail in various ways. The long form article linked above goes into these. Turns out, the number of known Greek manuscript fragments keeps going up. Those fragments still agree with this strategy as being correct.

The Majority Text strategy using texts of the Byzantine Text type for recovering the Greek NT was used until the 1880s. At this point another strategy was used to create a different type of modern Greek NT text. The new strategy creates what is called a Critical Edition. Let me introduce the problems there.

Critical Editions

Critical Editions are also recovered forms of the Greek NT. The strategy used to create them involves study of the narrative of the text. Passages that modern critics think might not be inspired are dropped from the text.

There are 2 well known Greek NT texts that were constructed in this way. This in part because of disputes between the teams over the rules that should be used to consider material to be inspired, or not. Their covers are blue and red respectively, and known to students as the Red and Blue versions of the Greek NT.

This process sounds a lot like our Acts 15 rules of additions studies that show up as filter tags in the BRB. But this 1880s era analysis was different. They generally impute strange motives as to why various unknown editors would have added phrases that should now be dropped. And those passages were dropped from their published Greek NT manuscripts.

This is very strange, because, in effect, those modern editors were effectively acting like the ancient editors, adjusting the modern Greek NT text to their own secret agenda.

This is not at all the same as how we mark up the BRB. In the BRB discussion about editors we use an apparatus that marks up suspect passages so our readers can see and dispute the issue.

In the Greek NT Critical Edition work, the disputable passages disappear from the discussion of all future readers.

This 1880s era editing of the Greek NT gets much worse.

Essentially all modern academic study of the Greek NT is based on critical editions. Essentially all modern English translations, from the 1901 ASV forward, are also based on these critical editions of the Greek NT.

The ASV 1901 was said to be in the KJV tradition, but they swapped out the TR text of the NT for a Critical Edition. Oops. They were no longer in that KJV tradition. Nor are any of the other major modern English translations from Majority Text reconstructions of the Byzantine Text type of the Greek NT.

So our modern Church world is mostly based on English translations unknown across the 1800s. This explains much about the process of discovery that churches in that era had compared to now. They had a slightly longer and more controversial NT text.

The biggest complaint against these Critical Edition Greek NT texts is that they create versions of the Greek NT with no ancient witness.

Turns out ancient church leaders who were writing about the Bible often quoted the Bible itself. Those writers covered the entire Greek NT several times over. It is possible to reconstruct the Greek NT just from their off Bible writing.

Critical editions do not match these secondary ancient witnesses. The logic that they were using in their own writing often cannot be seen by modern readers of the NT built on Critical Editions of the Greek NT. Those critical editions of the Greek NT broke with Christian tradition.

Leaving Critical Editions Behind

In the past 15 years, or so, there have been various efforts to bring Greek and related modern English up to match the best Byzantine Text type of the Greek NT.

There are now enough newly discovered ancient Greek fragments to rework the entire Greek NT from first principles. The TR work from the 1600s can be redone with more witnesses from the library of known fragments.

The F35GNT and F35ENT texts seen in the VG app are perhaps the most promoted examples of this recent rework using the Majority Text strategy against fragments of the Byzantine Text type.

From the perspective of software recovery, we see the various texts as being a family where every version must be evaluated using the audit pattern. We don't really need to strongly pick sides. The computer will do that. But, we need to allow for correct answers to be hidden in plain sight. The texts in the VG, along with the Aramaic and probably Hebrew will all go through the same recovery code.

Aramaic Primacy

When we switched to an English translation of the Aramaic NT about 20 years ago, we actually jumped back to an English based on Aramaic, which is in agreement with the Byzantine Text type. English translations of the Aramaic did not go through the 1880s Critical Edition process as has most of the English texts that we know from Church.

This shift allowed us to be looking at passages that could not be seen nor understood using English translated from Critical Edition Greek. This was super important for Ryan's side of this Paleo project over the past 20 years.

At this point I would bet money the usual modern villains are behind that 1880s Critical Edition NT editing pass. They used all possible tools to edit the Greek NT about like their earlier ancestors edited the OT and NT itself. They are still likely dropping funding from any Christian College professor who would dare use the TR Greek NT or even worse the Greek OT. Such a game.

Brute Force Solve

I have started on the manuscript side of the problem by looking at rebuilding the Aramaic tools to work with Greek. I put the first draft of the GPI app up online a couple weeks ago to show what was going on. The daunting part of that problem is the Greek parsing step.

I started a review of a Greek language textbook. With that I had flashbacks to Hebrew class and the lessons of the devolution of that language. It gained added vowels and then added vowel points.

I can now see the same happened to Greek. Recovery from Greek will need to undo the same layers added to Hebrew. This will leave a manuscript which resembles Greek, but is not the Greek we know from school. Indeed, even lower case Greek seen in the VG app is a modern invention and will need to be undone.

After thinking about this, I realized that I do not need to have an accurate parse in order to attempt what is called a "Brute Force" solve of the manuscript recovery problem.

I am currently working on the tooling to simply solve the Greek text for the inspired form directly from the Greek texts in our files. Until patterns start to emerge, like how to correctly spell names, the computer must check every possible letter string for every possible word and verse. Lots of computer work, but not conceptually very hard to code.

The same trick can be done with the Aramaic text, so Aramaic does not need a finished parse either.

Expected Outcomes

I expect the solve to work in Greek, and I expect the Aramaic to become an experimental control over the entire process. If we are correct, the Aramaic sourced Paleo will not solve, while the Greek sourced Paleo will solve.

To get this to work requires very technical and tedious code. It will be modeled on the Bible In Genome work from the past. The computer will simply be tasked to take whole verses and check every single possible letter string looking for variations that fit the audit pattern.

When I was in school this type of code was taught under the umbrella of Numerical Methods. It was one of the most challenging courses I ever took. This was strange since every assignment was required to print out on 1 page. The difficultly with this type of program is that it is very, very, easy to make minor mistakes that mess up the whole program.

Real life examples of Numerical Methods problems include flight control software for rockets and airplanes. Code like this typically involves the main program and then a bunch of side programs that check for the correct operation of the core code. So this is slow and tedious programming work. More when I have something to share.

Musk To Mars

Musk recently revealed his current plans for SpaceX rockets to Mars. The link here is to a Zero Hedge summary of several related X posts.

Reaching Mars requires departing in what are called Mars Transfer Windows, when Earth and Mars are correctly arranged in their orbits for a short flight. We are in one of those windows now. They happen in roughly 2 year cycles. Musk is planning a test flight in the next window, so 2 years from now. This to check landing of SpaceX rockets on the surface of Mars. If that works, then he is planning a crewed mission 2 years after that. He is also estimating 20 years to build a colony on Mars.

Musk is famous for making the impossible late, so his optimistic world view may be going on here too. We will see. Let me be optimistic with him and play out the possible prophetic timing.

Should Musk actually get a crewed flight to Mars 4 years from now, he will be doing so basically on the 7000th anniversary of Noah's flood. This would be returning to the place from which Noah arrived, on a schedule indicated within the Noah story.

Noah was given a 7 day warning, importantly in divine voice, which must be interpreted prophetically using 2 Peter 3:8, 1 day in divine voice is as 1000 years in earth history. So Noah's story is indicating it would take 7000 years to return. Even a test flight 4 years from now, say by early 2029, would be a fine match. Humans actually returning to Mars in 2029 is what the story really wants to see as a complete fulfillment.

The rest of the Noah story is in narrator's voice, so without the long time frame. Using 1 day in the story as 1 year now, we can see the rest of the schedule. For that, we still use a prophetic ratio, but just 1 day to the year.

Noah's 7 days of warning would back up 7 years to early 2022. Note the first fit-check stacking at Starbase in Texas was August 21, 2021. This is a pretty good match. Something may have happened that is more interesting in the offices of SpaceX in early 2022. We don't have visibility to that. Of course the launch for Mars might happen in August of 2028, so on an exact 7 year interval, we will see. For reference, the first actual test flight of the Mars grade rockets from the new launch tower in Texas was in April of 2023.

Going forward from 2029, the 40 days of rain in the Noah story would suggest a 40 year interval will follow. Presumably this is bringing water, so people, to Mars.

Musk sees this as a 20 year period. He is underestimating what the prophetic story suggests will be 40 years of actual building time. The Noah story then suggests 150 days when the water covers the ground. So 150 years, say of spreading out and exploring and repopulating the overall surface? We'll see. The Noah story continues with other future prophetic dates, presumably rebuilding a full society on Mars.

The 500 year building cycles that I reviewed in the last blog might continue still. It would be no surprise if the next such structure was built on Mars in or near 2510. The best such place? The top of Olympus Mons, as per the great high mountain at the end of Revelation.

Dirty Tricks

Of course Biden's federal government appears to be playing dirty tricks against SpaceX, attempting to derail the schedule. The link here explains.

More Later,

Phil