Mildew

My bathroom ceiling has got a touch of the mildew, so naturally I'll be turning to the Book of Leviticus. A small number of Christians and a large number of atheists would have you believe the Book of Leviticus is about homosexuality, but really it is hardly concerned with that at all, and mainly concerned with the proper treatment of mildew. Mildew was a serious business. The Hebrew original uses the word tzaraas, whose semantic field includes leprosy, amongst other types of infectious disfigurement. English translations (at least up to and including KJV) carried on talking about leprosy in buildings, leather and linen until they realised their syllogistic slip and brought in "mildew". That's far too nice a word for it. OED's first citation is the Old English mele-deawe: mele as in honey, deawe as in dew.

But this has got me to think about how to deal with biblical events in the history spreadsheet. Once the Israelites have established themselves in Israel, many of the historical events like changes of ruler and battles can be tallied against the records of the Assyria, Egypt and the like, although they sometimes veer out of line by a king or two. I don't see much of a problem putting things in the Middle East geographical column when they can be plausibly dated, especially as they are often more geopolitical than they are religious. There's a similar situation for the Gospels with respect to the Roman world.

As for events that are somewhat less historically convincing (Daniel in the lion's den? Elisha and the two bears?), I'd like to include them somewhere: for colour, and so that they bear comparison with what ever else was going on in the world when they are supposed to have happened. But it will be under a "religion" column, and people can be free to pick and choose which bits of that column they want to believe, or just use the "hide column" function.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet