That is actually a reference to the underrated Mark Belanger, who has the second highest dWAR ever behind Ozzie Smith, and a few percentage points ahead of teammate Brooks Robinson: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/belanma01.shtml

that he has a .228 lifetime batting average makes him more endearing, although shortstops couldn't really hit then

also i thought there was an LBA before an LBAC, but the more important thing is literacy regarding the entire concept

hepped could also just be "hopped" as in "hopped up on X" which is a relatively common phrase for being on some drugs or medication, but using kawaii speak which often softens vowel sounds, turning the open "ah" sound of the 'o' in hopped into a pronunciation of 'eh'. They couldve taken it further and said "hipped up" for no change in meaning. this may not have all been consciously decided, as many chronically online social circles use forms of this speech routinely and linguistics is a funny thing like that where the brain can adopt and make up things to fit it. May also be more of a 'fedora' speech pattern that younger online generation uses ironically in a nerdy voice (general ex. "m'lady"), hence the addition of trivial details like the version number and having early access to a new build of the game

always hard to tell exactly whats influencing the speech of the chronically online folk, but the mention of discord and well everything else about the post seem to strongly indicate it. all this to say, i doubt they were looking to be understood as much as they were just talking to talk and sending some in-group signaling

I don't think that's "another meaning" but rather assume their name is a reference. Caturday is a widespread and long standing online meme event (20+ years) to post pictures of cats on saturdays. I have no idea what community it originated in or even when.

I personally think that the conquest of Jericho depicts, allegorically, a conquest of the Moon itself. That there is more than one OT story that describes journeys to outer space (the highest heavens, of course). That the Promised Land really was an unfathomable location in outer space that was only reached by the most faithful and holiest of warriors.

But I like to start with Jericho because there's a lot of evidence that the actual city-state of Jericho was dedicated to a Moon god, and the Moon god was worshipped there. But if you think about how Jericho and its conquest is described...

> modern day scholars

Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth.

I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.

And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.

I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)

That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.

I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.

Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).

Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).

The problem is, we don't just have an absence of evidence, we have evidence of absence. The area has been widely excavated, and there is a clear continuity of settlement with the same pottery, culture, and religion. There is simply no trace of any large-scale population movement. As far as we can tell, the same people continued living in the area in the same way, worshipping the same gods (still plural for way longer) with the only large change being the yoke of the nearby great powers going away with the collapse.

This of course doesn't mean that there cannot be a trace of truth in the story! It just has to have been morphed substantially over time. For example, it was common in the time to kidnap and move foreign nobility and artisans, while no-one much cared about the identity of the average farmer or goatsherd. It could well be that "the people of Israel" who were kidnapped meant the people who actually mattered, ie, a fairly small upper class group, who could move from the Nile valley to the levant without leaving much trace in either society.

I'm still personally partial to the observation that the story seems to originate during the Babylonian captivity, and the situation of the story greatly mirrors the conditions they were living under, but while complaining about their Babylonian overlords was probably not allowed, writing stories about the plucky underdogs outwitting the horrible Egyptian overlords with divine assistance was fine, even if it contained themes of returning home and of liberation from foreign rule. (Note that Egypt was the main rival of Babylon in this period, and the Kingdom of Judah was on-again off-again vassal of the Egyptians. The captivity was party imposed to prevent this relationship from continuing.)

I'd encourage you to re-read my comment and consider that you may have jumped to conclusions about what I'm trying to say.

> Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."

I wouldn't go so far as to say this. We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.

If we had a time machine, could we go back in time and meet them? If there were two guys named that who generally did the things the Romans thought, were they actually raised by wolves? No idea with the former. The latter sounds unusual.

My point is that there are more interesting questions to ask than these. The book I recommended does a good job of this. It's a good read if you're interested in the cultural backdrop of the ancient near east.

Denying the possible, even likely, historicity of Romulus and Remus is silly, yes.

>The destruction of pharaoh's army

Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.

>Records of ancient hebrew slaves

Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.

>They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation

Israel being one of them!

> There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories.

There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account."

I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.

Try applying the same criteria to say the battle of Thermopylae. What does the Persian sources say?

>We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.

I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.

The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happening.

There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves. There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration, and there is evidence of a shift in religious practices along the migration path. So there is some evidence of an event similar to the Exodus occurring.

We're talking about something that occurred over 3000 years ago. Most events back then weren't recorded, and even then it was still so difficult and time consuming that Egypt and Ancient Greece generally left out the embarrassing parts, most of which we only know about because their contemporaries wrote about it to disgrace them (and most historians now suspect that the vast majority of negative accounts of other civilizations were wholly made up, especially those written by the Ancient Greeks).

Very few nomadic migrations left evidence on the way. There is more evidence of the some sort of exodus having occurred than of the human migration from Asia into South America (note: an increasing number of historians claim the first migration was by sea from Africa, not over land from Asia).

> We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened

I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. IIRC, that stuff is in the actual Bible. Like, a significant chunk of the Old Testament is about "Israelites [not] worship[ing] Yahweh alone as the only God."

Flood legends are very common among ancient Eurasian cultures.

As the last Ice Age melted away (20k–8k years ago), there were very likely several major floods in the region.

But all of these are indeed historical. Y’all moderns have simply redefined the term to not include these types of history. That’s extremely problematic.

> We know the Exodus didn't happen because the supernatural elements described cannot have happened, ...

Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:

- matter exists (i.e., physicalism or dualism is the correct metaphysical worldview)

- the universe is strictly a physics simulation

- there's no God who's capable of fiddling with human affairs (or interested in doing so)

Okay, so maybe the family doesn't but others do. There's the Davidic throne concept people believe that does claim that lineage exists. These are usually religious types though.

The link from Odin to Noah and Adam is only made by explicitly Christian writers. From what we know, the Germanic gods far predate Christianity and even Judaism.

Noah's Ark may well be derived from the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In both stories the God(s) assert that the flood is a one-time event and promise to never repeat it. Many of the stories are probably amalgamations of different myths and legends of the near east.

>We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).

The Exodus narrative explicitly describes the early Israelites flocking to worship idols like that.

> Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it.

We knew Troy existed long before that because it remained as a city at least into the 3rd century CE. We just didn't know which ruins it was.

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It could be just that almost all ancient civilizations were near water bodies that could flood. Any big flood would seem apocalyptic for the population size of the time.

No, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm contextualizing for why that framing of the book is eyebrow raising.

Filed corn is harvested at a different time resulting in a dryer product.

But yes if people get hungry enough, field corn easily qualifies as actual food.

Aren't there different varieties of corn?

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).

> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?

I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

What isn't the result of politics? This is a bad explanation—how is there so little will to act in rational self interest?

   > Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as geography and migration