David McCallum (1) (1933–2023)

Spending time watching DVDs of Sapphire and Steel while slightly out of it on antibiotics and a solid chest infection is an interesting way to break your brain. 6 Seasons of Sapphire and Steel over 2 days will do that, the episodes are short, the number of episodes per season vary between 4 and 8 episodes and each story is self-contained.

Sapphire and Steel are two time-travellers who investigate where time has broken in our world and try to fix it with the least damage. Season 1 is where the parents have disappearaed and it's apparently a nursery rhyme to blame, they get some help from the cheerful Lead. season 2 is set in a disused railway station where some ghosts deal with drustration at not having had a full life (and was probably my favourite, except for how they had to fix things). Season 3 has historical researchers from the future whose situation has broken down (and my least favourite); also features Silver. Four is where photographs take on a sinister life (probably my second favourite along with Season 1); Season (or often titled Assignment) 5 involves a 1930s themed party where past and present become intertwined. The final season, 6, also features Silver; and it's a motorway service station where time is standing still and where a trap is being laid. It's a complex and messy story and things end in an interesting way.

That end though... wow.

There's a leaflet with viewing notes that's quite useful in the box set I viewed.… (mehr)

Zecharia Sitchin is certainly wrong in his pseudo-translations of Sumerian cuneiform. For more information exposing the error of Stichin, see https://www.sitchiniswrong.com . This rejection of Stitchin's conclusions is not a denial of all of the information presented in this video.

Prior to the widespread publication of the written mockery of Christianity by the 2nd-century pagan philosopher Celsus, the earlier Church Fathers speak of the "sons of God" in Genesis 6 as angels who did not maintain their original condition of chastity like the other angels who remained holy, but abandoned their chasteness to engage in interspecial relations with human females. In fact, the Alexandrian text of the Septuagint, translates the Hebrew term "בני האלהים" (beni Elohim, literally "sons of God") as "angels." Pre-Christian Jewish literature also understands the "sons of God" in Genesis 6 to be "angels" just as they are identified with angels in the book of Job 1:6, 2:1, and 38:7. In order to interpret the "sons of God" as the children of Seth, one must ignore the passages in Job referring to angels and do a fair amount of "reading into" the text in Genesis.

The new interpretation of the "sons of God" as "descendants of Seth" or "godly men," which became the popular "orthodox view" is not without its exegetical problems. For instance, we must ask ourselves why the intermarriage of Seth's male offspring with Cain's female offspring results in giant offspring? Such giants actually appear more frequently in the Greek Septuagint than they do in the modern, Masoretic Hebrew text. Origen's 3rd-century polemic against Celsus seems to have triggered a re-interpretation of the Genesis-6 passage because Celsus ridiculed the earlier understanding evidenced in Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, and the early Church Fathers. Consequently, in reaction to such scathing mockery, the church historian Sextus Julius Africanus, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Augustine of Hippo and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai all repudiate the seemingly older view in favor of the newer view which has no pre-3rd-century-A.D. witness.

We have the following witnesses to the older view that the "sons of God" in Genesis chapter 6 are angels who fell from their original condition of chastity:… (mehr)