Topic: WorldNetDaily
A July 30 WorldNetDaily article by Joe Kovacs touts an anonymous YouTube video claiming that the Bible depicts Barack Obama as the Antichrist:
"When I started doing a little research, I found the Greek word for 'lightning' is 'astrape', and the Hebrew equivalent is 'Baraq,'" said YouTube contributor "ppsimmons," a self-described Christian with a theological education and many years in the ministry, who spoke to WND under condition of anonymity. "I thought that was fascinating."
As he continued looking into the rest of the words in the phrase, he focused on "heaven," and found that it can refer not just to God's dwelling place, but also "the heights" or "high places."
He then recalled Isaiah 14:14, where Lucifer, another name for Satan, is quoted as saying, "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High."
"I wondered what the word 'heights' is," said ppsimmons, "and I looked it up in the dictionary, and it's 'Bamah.'"
Thus, on the video, the announcer notes, "If spoken by a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by the poetry of Isaiah, He (Jesus) would say these words in Hebrew ... 'I saw Satan as Baraq Ubamah.'"
"Gosh, was Jesus giving us a clue or was this just a freak coincidence?" thought the filmmaker at the time of his research.
Here's the video:
Kovacs goes on to quote the poster: "I'm not proclaiming he is the antichrist, or that I'm some kind of a Hebrew expert, but the word associations are indisputable. The Hebrew word for lightning is 'Baraq' and the word for heights or high places is 'Bamah.'"
Yeah, sure.
As might be expected, this anonymous person's claim has some problems. As Richard Bartholomew writes:
The “U” slips in as a Hebrew “vav” construction, supposedly to link “lightning” and “heaven” to together.
Of course, this is yet another farrago of nonsense; as with Walid Shoebat’s crackpot exegesis of the Book of Revelation, this kind of re-interpretation is not warranted by any problem in the text, and it does violence to the context – Jesus in Luke 10:17-20 is clearly celebrating Satan’s fall in response to his disciples’ reports of their successes as exorcists.
In fact, the Greek word used in the verse from Luke translated as ”Heaven” is “ouranos” (or “ouranou”, to keep the correct case ending). If one wanted to render this into Hebrew or Aramaic (which is not, by the way, “the most ancient form of Hebrew”), it would be more appropriate to use “shamayim” than “bamah”, notwithstanding Isaiah 14:14 (where the context has Satan rising to somewhere beyond the “bamah”, anyway). Another difficulty is that the verb “fall” has been dropped from ppsimmon’s final version: it’s obvious that Satan is being compared metaphorically to the physical phenomenon of lightning, as Satan supposedly falls from the sky. Or did Jesus mean to say “I saw Satan fall like Barack Obama”? What would that mean? As for the “vav” construction, those are attached to certain verbs rather than nouns, and they are not used to indicate the preposition “from”.
Kovacs, who purports to be a Bible expert to the point where he has written a book claiming to reveal "The Most Astonishing Facts You've Never Been Told" were in the Bible, makes no effort to challenge the YouTube poster's claims -- even though, as Bartholomew demonstrates, a Bible scholar like Kovacs purports to be would presumably know where the person went wrong.
This, by the way, is just the latest report in which WND has granted anonymity to a person attacking Obama. As with most previous reports, Kovacs does not disclose why he granted the video's creator anonymity.
WND editor Joseph Farah has previously dismissed anomymous sources as providing "quotes made up out of whole cloth to help make the story read better."
WND's increased use of anonymous sources to attack Obama can be seen as a sign that it's willing to throw anything and everything -- no matter how specious -- at the president.
