I’m in the course of reading the book “The Christ Conspiracy” by Acharya S (a mystical designation for the person named D.M. Murdock – ‘acharya’ is defined as ‘divine personality’ in Hindu, ‘monk’ in Jainism and ‘teacher’ in Buddhism). I was originally made aware of her work during my research of the internet movie “Zeitgeist” and found that her work was cited for many of the claims that I debunked on my page concerning Zeitgeist Astronomy.

On the rear of this book, the author is called “archaeologist, historian, mythologist and linguist”. Her book however better reflects her as a librarian or researcher, as ponderous amount of the text consists of citations of other authors’ works. It is not with these cited authors that I can take issue, as I currently have no access to the original texts.

What I’ve noticed however is that in the passages where she “goes it on her own”, the inaccuracies fly from the page. I’ve come across many of these so far in my reading, having reached page 246 of this 400+ page book.

Last night I read page 238 of the book, where our author is trying to propose that the names of so-called “patriarchs” of the Hebrew Bible are merely borrowed from gods of the people with whom the ancient Hebrews had some association. The portion related to Noach and the Ark was being discussed by our author in relation to ancient Egypt. The passage that particularly resulted in this post was as follows (page 238 of “The Christ Conspiracy” by Acharya S):

“In Hebrew, the word for ‘ark’ is THB, as in Thebes, such that the Ark of Noah is equivalent to the Thebes of Menes, the legendary first king of the Egyptians, from whose ‘history’ the biblical account also borrowed.”

There are two problems here with Acharya S’s reasoning which go to the heart of my questioning her true credentials and motives:

First, the Hebrew word for “ark” is not “THB”. The word is “tevat” , or “TVT” (tav-vet-tav) as represented by Acharya S – often Hebrew words are represented only by their consonants since originally there were no vowels in written Hebrew. The word for “ark” is also rendered “TVH” as a definite article (ie. ‘the ark’) – see Genesis 6:14 where both ‘an ark’ (TVT) and ‘the ark’ (TVH) appear in the same passage. Even if we were to give Acharya S the benefit of the doubt of rendering the “vet” as “bet”, which is fair since without vowel marks they both look the same, we still must question why she changed the order of the the letters from “TBH” to “THB”.

Incidentally, Acharya S’s word “THB”, or “tav-he-bet” never appears in the Hebrew Bible. Anywhere.

The second issue is regarding the city of Thebes. Archarya S’s implication is that the “THB” word was borrowed by the Hebrew authors from “Thebes” in Egypt. The problem is that any archaeologist would know that Egyptians didn’t call the city “Thebes”, they called it “Waset”. At some point later the Egyptian people did begin to call Waset “Niwt-Imn” which means “City of Amun”, as is reflected in the Hebrew Bible as “No Amon” in the book of Nahum (3:8). The name of the city was not called “Thebes” until the Greek people named it “Thebai” much later.

Is this the scholarship of a ‘Linguist’, that messes up the letters of the Hebrew Bible when a listing of Hebrew consonants is readily available? Would an ‘Archaeologist’ base an argument on an anachronistic name for a city?

Come on folks, let’s have a little honesty when we argue polemics…

For references on Waset, see the Wikipedia page.

Update: originally I had cited Genesis 9:14 above, which was a typographical error. The correct passage has been updated as Genesis 6:14.