Queries & Comments - The BAS Library

Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 1983

Moses’s Staff Becomes a Snake—Trick or Miracle?

To the Editor:

We are enjoying BAR immensely. I would like to comment on Leon Shalit’s article, “How Moses Turned a Staff Into a Snake and Back Again,” BAR 09:03.

Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Endnotes

For a more detailed examination of this problem see “Dates, Discrepancies, and Dead Sea Scrolls,” The New Christian Advocate, July 1958, pp. 50–54.

W. M. Ramsay, Was Christ Born in Bethlehem? (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905).

Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XV.ii.1; VS.x.4; XVII.ii.4. The film, “Jesus of Nazareth,” erroneously followed Ramsay’s weak argument in an at tempt to harmonize the Gospels, because it showed the Romans taking a census in Herod the Great’s reign.

Didache, XIV, 1.

Richardson, op. cit., p. 163.

Magnesians IX, 1.

Note that the word for fire in Ugaritic is always isût, and that the regular form in Akkadian is isûatu.

Life of Hadrian 5.2 (Historia Augusta)

Ecclesiastical History 4.2.

10.

68.32.

11.

68.32.

12.

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.2.

13.

For further details on this revolt, see Tcherikover’s Prolegomena in his Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, Vol. I, pp. 85–93.

14.

For the inscriptions, see Werner Eck, “Die Eroberung von Masada und eine neue Inschrift des L. Flavius Silva Nonius Bassus,” Zeitschrift fü;r die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 60 (1969) pp. 282–289.