What the Bible Doesn’t Mention: Part One

We all know what the Bible mentions. Books featuring ‘stories from the Bible’ are a dime a dozen in bookstores. What doesn’t the Bible mention is way more interesting and amounts to just about most of life, the universe and everything. What the Bible omits tells heaps about the bona-fides of God the alleged deity, and ultimate author!

What the Bible* doesn’t contain is perhaps of far greater importance than what it does say when one comes to examining the relative importance of the document and it’s proper place in the world’s literature. Because of fairly major omissions, I conclude that the Bible is just a fairly minor piece of site-specific pseudo-historical literature (to be kind) or a potpourri anthology of fairly mundane science fantasy short stories because most of the historical context is unverifiable. 

In the beginning, the Bible states…

Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Now that presumably means God created all of the heavens, the entire universe and all it contains, which of course includes the earth and all of the geography therein. Yet only a tiny fraction of ‘heaven and earth’ get a mention in the Good Book! Let’s start with the ‘heavens’ and see what the Bible positively mentions, as well as the negative, what isn’t mentioned.

Heaven’s Positive Mentions: Constellation, Moon, Planets, Stars, Sun – in other words, the basics that you’d expect of any ancient society that had a reason to observe the heavens and chart the pathway of the stars and planets.

Heaven’s Negative Mentions: Asteroid(s), Astronomy, Aurora, Black Holes, Calendar, Comet(s), Cosmology, Cosmos, Eclipse, Equinox, Gaia, Galaxy, Jupiter (the planet), Luna, Lunar, Mars, Mercury, Meteors (and variations), Nebula, Neptune, Outer Space, Planetoid, Pluto, Satellite, Saturn, Solar, Solstice, Terra, Universe, Uranus, Venus, Aliens (as in extraterrestrials), Extraterrestrials – well okay, you get the idea that there’s an awful lot contained in and of the heavens that’s not acknowledged in the Bible.

Discussion: One very interesting question immediately comes to mind. Where did God live before creating heaven by the way? What was his previous address and did he leave ‘heaven’ as his forwarding address? That aside, you’d of thought that a God who created the universe would have had a bit more to say on the subject. Bragging rights perhaps?

Despite God creating the universe (a synonym for heaven?) and all that it contains, there’s no Biblical mention of extraterrestrials. Surely an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-creator God wouldn’t waste all that heavenly space. Surely he’d like more than just human earthlings to worship him. Then too God might be egotistical enough to put humanity in its disgraced state, in its proper place, by rubbing it in that other higher [extraterrestrial] life forms without sin graced the cosmos and were, of course, his creations and they at least paid attention to his instructions! So there!

Well actually God does acknowledge aliens in a roundabout way. It’s contained in statements akin to “Thou shall have no other gods before me”. Those ‘other gods’ are IMHO extraterrestrials. It’s either that or else you’ve got to accept the reality of polytheism and literally thousands upon thousands of supernatural deities.

Earth’s Positive Mentions: Arabia, Armenia, Asia, Assyria, Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Persia, Red Sea, Spain and probably other geographical locations and places surrounding Biblical terrain.

Earth’s Negative Mentions: Afghanistan, Africa, America, Anatolia, Antarctica, Arctic, Argentina, Armenia, Asia Minor, Atlantic, Australia, Black Sea, Brazil, Britain, Brittany, Canada, Caribbean, Chile, China, Cuba, Dead Sea, Denmark, Easter Island, Europe, Fiji, France, Germany, Greenland, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Malta, Mediterranean, Mesoamerica, Mexico, Middle East, Near East, Netherlands, New Zealand, New World, Nile, Norway, Pacific, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Scandinavia, Scotland, Sicily, Sumer, Sweden, Switzerland, Tahiti, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, Wales – well again, you should have gotten the impression by now that there’s an awful lot of terrestrial geography that God totally ignores in his magnum opus. There are also some surprising omissions like the Nile and the Mediterranean Sea. 

Discussion: Well of course not all of those place names were in existence back in Biblical times so you’d argue that their omission is hardly surprising. But since the Bible is God’s holy word, and since God is all-knowing, what better way to show-off and demonstrate his absolute knowledge and be impressive, then and into the future, than through parlour games by predicting with 100% accuracy those eventual undiscovered countries that would eventually be named, for example, United States or Australia? Alas no such thing has come to pass for not even God prophesied such names and places in his holy text – the Bible. He missed a golden opportunity there. 

To be continued…

*King James Version