Some time in the late 1980s, a man in Turin taught himself to write the\nBook of Genesis by hand. One line of Hebrew, a line of pronunciation\nbeneath it, a line of literal translation beneath that — four hundred\npages in pencil, evenings and weekends, a private exercise by a lover of\nancient languages who was, at the time, waiting for a Chinese course to\nbegin. Checking his work against the interlinear Bible[1]\n\npublished by Edizioni San Paolo[2]\n, the Catholic house\nwhose editions furnish Italy's seminaries, he found something that should\nnot have been there: a wrong word in the Hebrew of Exodus 33:16, elai\nwhere jiwwada belonged, a typo carried over from the previous verse.\n\"So I decided to write to the publisher, obviously with a lot of\napprehension and humility,\" he recalled decades later. \"I told myself\nthey'd never answer me!\"
\nThey answered quickly. The director of the interlinear series, Don\nPiergiorgio Beretta, thanked him for the \"precious error report\" and\nconfessed he could not imagine how the mistake had been made. Letters\nfollowed; then a request — might they see some of his translations? He\nphotocopied four sheets of the pencil-written Genesis and mailed them\nwith, in his words, his heart pounding in his chest. The reply: \"The\nliteral translation you executed corresponds almost exactly to ours.\nWhere do you live? … A more personal meeting could be useful.\" The\nmeeting led to a contract for the Five Megillot[3]\n;\nthe Megillot led to the Book of the Twelve; the Twelve led to Joshua and\nJudges. Mauro Biglino, autodidact, would spend the better part of two\ndecades as a credited translator of the Hebrew Bible for one of the most\nestablished Catholic publishers in Europe.
\nThe arrangement ended the way the reader has already guessed. In 2010\nBiglino published a book of his own — Il libro che cambierà per sempre\nle nostre idee sulla Bibbia, \"the book that will forever change our\nideas about the Bible\" — and said in public what the interlinear work\nhad led him to think in private. His own accounting of the cost is a\nmodel of fairness:
\n\n\nNeedless to say, once I started voicing my doubts concerning the\nmeaning of specific passages of the Bible, San Paolo Edizioni\n(legitimately) decided not to avail themselves of my expertise in this\nfield anymore; the last two books I translated for them went\nunpublished because our collaboration was halted. In total, I have\ntranslated nineteen books of the Old Testament, of which seventeen\nwere published with San Paolo Edizioni.
\n— Gods of the Bible, Introduction
\n
There is no bitterness anywhere in the record. \"They were unfailingly\nfair to the end,\" he says of the publisher that shelved his Joshua and\nJudges while paying him for both; of Don Beretta he speaks with plain\naffection. The books that followed — more than a dozen in Italian, with\ntranslations now in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch,\nCzech, Serbo-Croatian, and Latvian — made him what his interviewer\nGiorgio Cattaneo calls a publishing phenomenon: hundreds of thousands of\ncopies sold, millions of views, theaters and lecture halls filled by \"a\nshy, reserved, somber man and a lover of the silences of his mountains.\"\nWith the former archdeacon Paul Wallis — whose Eden Series this project\nhas read closely in a sibling\nExplainer — Biglino is one of\nthe two most consequential living voices of the tradition this project\ncalls \nneo-euhemerism\n, and the\ncorpus already carries a full methodological entry under his name: the\n\nBiglino method\n.
\nThirty-six years before Il libro che cambierà, a French motor-racing\njournalist named Claude Vorilhon — \nRaël\n —\npublished The Book Which Tells the\nTruth, reporting that the\nmeaning of the same Hebrew passages had been explained to him directly by\none of the beings they describe. When this project compared Wallis with\nthe canon, the independence of the two witnesses was total: six books,\n393,000 words, and not one mention of Raël. Biglino's case is more\ninteresting, and this article will handle it with the care it deserves —\nbecause in the bibliographies of his early books, sitting quietly between\nthe Sumerologists, there is an entry the Wallis comparison could not\noffer. First, the method; then the lexicon; then the audit the method\ninvites.
\nBiglino's method has a name in Italian that he has repeated in dozens of\nconferences: facciamo finta che — let us pretend that. Its mature\nstatement opens the first chapter of Gods of the Bible:
\n\n\nBecause of the insurmountable contradictions presented above, we are\nconvinced that the only intellectually honest and coherent way to deal\nwith the Old Testament is to \"pretend\" that what we read is true in\nthe literal sense. We do not claim that it is true in the theological\nsense or the sense of absolute truth. We only pretend that it is true\nas we read it. We believe that when the biblical authors wrote certain\nthings, they meant to say them, not something else.
\n— Gods of the Bible, ch. 1
\n
The commitments are then spelled out as four workmanlike bullets: pretend\nthe Bible we read is the one originally written; pretend the authors\nmeant to tell us exactly what they wrote; pretend the writings preserve\nthe memory of actual events; pretend, in essence, that these books can be\ntreated as history books. The wager is Pascal's inverted: stake nothing\non belief, everything on reading, and see whether the text pays out in\ncoherence. He is scrupulous about what the payout proves:
\n\n\nIf we \"pretend\" that this story is authentic, we are faced with the\npossibility of coming to understand many things that, once pieced\ntogether, form a coherent picture. To be clear, we have no proof.\nConsistency is not in itself synonymous with authenticity. But in the\nmeantime, it is a fact, suggesting the seriousness of a hypothesis,\none that is theoretically illuminating.
\n— The Naked Bible, \"All Those Undead\"
\n
Readers of this project will recognize the ancestry. Heinrich Schliemann\nread the Iliad this way and found a city under Hisarlık; Jean Sendy\nproposed in 1969 that the Bible be read \"as Schliemann read Homer\" and\nstated, four decades before Biglino, both the method and its first\nresult — the plural Elohim. The corpus treats coherence-under-literal-\nreading as a formal criterion, catalogued under\n\nSendy's conditions of\ncoherence\n. Biglino reached the same method from the opposite\nshore: not from the ancient-astronaut library toward the Hebrew, but from\nseventeen published books of interlinear Hebrew toward conclusions he\nvisibly did not go looking for. He guards the method's honesty at the\nlevel of the single word, and his statement of that discipline is worth\nquoting because it is the closest thing his corpus has to a creed:
\n\n\nI've said many times in recent years that there are terms that, in my\nopinion, should not be translated. It's a question of integrity, since\nwe do not know exactly what they mean. So honesty requires leaving\nthem just as they are written.
\n— The Naked Bible, \"The Beginnings\"
\n
His deepest professional satisfaction, he says, is that in the San Paolo\ninterlinear volumes \"'Elohim' always stayed 'Elohim'\" — the scholarly\nedition never rendered the word as \"God.\" The observation grows teeth in\nGods of the Bible: \"Where people read 'God' and were led to believe\nthat the biblical authors had written the word 'God,' scholars read the\nuntranslated term 'Elohim'… Whatever 'Elohim' means, why provide\ndifferent translations for different readerships? Who is afraid of people\nrealizing that there is so much uncertainty around the very term on which\nmonotheism is founded?\" And he is careful, always, to claim for the\nliteral reading equality rather than monopoly: \"I have never said that a\nliteral reading is the only one possible. But I have to note that it is\nthe only one that is regularly avoided.\" Behind him he has Rashi of\nTroyes, who allowed the words of the Torah seventy meanings and one they\n\"cannot not have\" — the literal one — and Yahweh himself, who declares\nat Numbers 12:8, in a verse Biglino relishes: I speak clearly and not in\nriddles.
\nWhat the wager yields, across thirteen years of books, is less a theory\nthan a lexicon — a small set of Hebrew terms read for their concrete\nsense, each one a load-bearing wall of the theological building. The\ncorpus maintains its own\n\ncatalogue of etymological\nreadings\n; what follows is Biglino's, quoted at the length it\ndeserves.
\nElohim. The grammatically plural noun\n(אֱלֹהִים) that conventional Bibles render as\na singular \"God\" is, for Biglino, the whole scandal in one word. His\nconclusion after a chapter spent simply counting referents — he finds at\nleast twenty-three distinct Elohim even granting the exegetes their\nrules — is stated as a list of findings:
\n\n\nThe biblical term \"Elohim\" did not refer to one spiritual,\ntranscendent, omniscient, and omnipotent \"God\" but to many\nflesh-and-blood individuals. (We call them \"individuals\" because, as\nwe have just seen, they are not Adamites either, so they are not men.)\nThe Elohim lived long enough to be considered immortal, even though\nthey were not. They were individuals who traveled on flying machines\ncalled ruach, kavod, merkavah, and cherubim… The Elohim had the same\nprivileges and attributes as Yahweh in terms of functions and powers\nexercised because they belonged to the same group. Yahweh was only one\nof them.
\n— Gods of the Bible, ch. 2
\n
The Italian books carry the domestic version of the argument, which has\nthe advantage of being funny: \"Lui era dunque 'un' Elohim (plurale) così\ncome noi diremmo che Lorenzo il Magnifico era 'un' de' Medici (plurale)\"\n— he was \"an\" Elohim the way Lorenzo the Magnificent was \"a\" Medici. On\nthe plurality itself, as the corpus's\n\nplurality of gods\n entry\nrecords, mainstream scholarship's divine-council literature[9]\n\nis closer to Biglino than casual readers assume; he cites Michael Heiser\napprovingly on exactly this point, and the alliance of convenience\nbetween the evangelical Hebraist and the Italian literalist is one of the\nquiet comedies of the field.
\nYahweh. One member of that group, and on the textual evidence not a\nsenior one. Biglino's load-bearing passage is the song of Moses:\nElyon — literally \"the one above\"[10]\n — divides the\nnations among the sons of the Elohim, and Jacob's family falls to Yahweh\n(Deuteronomy\n32:8–9\n).
\n\n\nIt must also be emphasized that Israel was not \"chosen by,\" but rather\n\"assigned to\" Yahweh… It is clear that the matching of Jacob's family\nwith Yahweh has no particular universal significance, nor does it\nconvey a global message for all humanity. Israel was a tiny nation,\nassigned to one of the many Elohim who participated with varying\ndegrees of satisfaction in dividing the available lands.
\n— Gods of the Bible, ch. 9
\n
The figure who emerges from the assignment is described by the text\nitself as ish milchamah, \"man of war\"\n(Exodus 15:3\n),\njealous of rivals, paid in tribute — Biglino never tires of the inventory\nat Numbers 31\n,\nwith its 675 sheep, 72 cattle, 61 donkeys, and thirty-two persons\nreserved \"for Yahweh himself, that is, for him personally. One only\nwonders what a spiritual and transcendental 'God' needed 32 virgins\nfor.\" The demotion is completed by Jephthah, who tells the Ammonites,\nin the plain words of\nJudges 11:24\n,\nto keep what their Elohim Chemosh gives them as Israel keeps what Yahweh\ngives:
\n\n\nWhat happens to thousands of pages of theology in the face of this\nperfect biblical equivalence between Yahweh and Chemosh? Thousands of\npages, written to invent a monotheism that does not exist in the\nBible, making the Bible say what it does not say, and hiding what it\nexplicitly says.
\n— The Naked Bible, \"Yahweh and His Colleagues\"
\n
As for the name itself, Biglino's proposal is the most disarming in the\nliterature: YHWH is a foreign proper noun, the phonetic residue of a\nsound, exactly as the Melanesian cargo cults[11]\n\npreserved \"John Frum\" from \"John from America.\" \"The tetragrammaton\nmeant nothing in Hebrew. Most likely… it was the simple rendering of\nsounds forming a proper name belonging to another language.\"
\nKavod. The word conventionally translated \"glory\"\n(כָּבוֹד) is built on the root kbd, \"to be\nheavy\"[4]\n — and Biglino follows the weight:
\n\n\nTo summarize, the term kavod, which is always translated as \"glory\" in\nthe Bible, actually has the meaning of \"something heavy.\" It was, in\nfact, a heavy flying chariot on which the Elohim traveled, something\nthat produced loud noise, fire, and strong wind and was often\ndescribed as a cloud. If a human came near it, he was inevitably\nkilled because \"God\" could not control its effects. Since we cannot\nchoose an adequate translation of this term — other than the word\nUAP — we will use the name by which the Bible defines it: kavod.
\n— Gods of the Bible, ch. 14
\n
The Italian statement of the same argument has a forensic dryness worth\npreserving: \"la cosiddetta 'Gloria di Dio' poteva essere vista su\nprenotazione; uccideva chi le stava di fronte; uccideva chi si trovava\nnei pressi quando passava… ci si poteva comunque salvare dai suoi effetti\nmortali semplicemente nascondendosi dietro normalissime rocce\" — the\nso-called Glory of God could be viewed by appointment; it killed whoever\nstood in front of it; it killed whoever was nearby when it passed; and\none could nonetheless be saved from its lethal effects simply by hiding\nbehind perfectly ordinary rocks\n(Exodus 33\n).\nEzekiel supplies the flight log: the kavod rises from the ground, moves,\nlands, and makes a great noise doing it. Moses comes down from his\nencounter with burned skin.
\nRuach. The term rendered \"spirit\"\n(רוּחַ) means wind, breath, air in\nmotion[5]\n — \"in the extreme concreteness of the\nancient Hebrew language anything that flew swiftly through the air could\nonly be referred to as a kind of 'wind'\" — and in the narratives it\nbehaves like a vehicle: it hovers over the waters of Genesis 1:2 the way\na bird hovers over its nest, it lifts Ezekiel bodily and carries him to\nChaldea, and it is what Elijah's colleagues assume has picked their\nmaster up and set him down on some mountain, which is why they search\nthree days for the body. \"One does not spend three days laboriously\nsearching mountains and valleys to find a missing person who has only\nbeen 'abducted' in a vision or a dream.\"
\nTselem. The reading Biglino himself treats as his deepest cut. Man\nis made be-tselem Elohim — and tselem\n(צֶלֶם), he argues from the standard\nlexica[6]\n, is not an abstract resemblance:
\n\n\nThe word tselem not only denotes something concrete and material but\nalso contains, in the original meaning of the Semitic word root, the\nconcept of being \"cut off from.\" In the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and\nEnglish Lexicon, the entry reads \"something cut out of.\" When reading\nthis passage with an open mind, we ask ourselves: what is it that\ncontains the image of a human being and can be \"cut off, cut out,\npulled out?\" DNA immediately comes to mind.
\n— Gods of the Bible, ch. 4
\n
The preposition seals his version of the verse: be- means \"with, by\nmeans of,\" so the Adam is fabricated not in the image of the Elohim but\nwith it — with the material something that carries their likeness. The\ncompanion piece is Eve. The tsela taken from the sleeping Adam is not\na rib but a \"side part,\" the word used elsewhere for the flanks of the\nTemple and its furniture, and the scene reads to Biglino like a\nprocedure:
\n\n\nIf we could forget for a moment that that sentence is written in the\nBible and put it in a scientific journal, the whole world would say\nthat what is described here is the collection of stem cells from the\nlateral part of a human body… If it were written in a scientific\njournal, no one would have any doubts. But all this is in the Bible,\nso it is not true?
\n— The Naked Bible, \"Why Would Genesis Be Lying about Methuselah's Age?\"
\n
Olam. The word translated \"eternity\"\n(עוֹלָם) means remotest time, long\nduration[8]\n — \"'Eternity' in itself is a concept\nalien to the Bible… Not in one instance does the word olam mean\n'eternity' in the Bible, and yet it is translated with 'eternity' all the\ntime.\" From the same drawer: the Torah never speaks of an immortal\nsoul; Qohelet gives men and beasts one breath and one destination; and\nthe tree of life guards long duration, never endlessness. The\ntheological infinite, on Biglino's reading, is a later tenant in a\nvocabulary built for time.
\nPsalm 82. The keystone. In the assembly of the Elohim, the presiding\nEl passes sentence on his colleagues:
\n\n\nI said, \"You are Elohim; you are all sons of Elyon. But you will die\nlike Adam; you will fall like every other ruler.\"
\n— Psalm 82:6–7\n
\n
\"In short, we should recognize without a shadow of a doubt that it is\nwritten in the Old Testament that the 'God' of the theologians dies like\nall other people,\" Biglino concludes — \"unless the theologians tell us\nthat the term Elohim in the Bible sometimes means 'God' and sometimes\nmeans something else… but in that case every form of certainty collapses\nand everyone is free to make the text say whatever they want.\" The\nElohim of his reading are therefore exactly what the antediluvian\nlifespans suggest: beings who live long enough to be mistaken for\nimmortal by short-lived observers, and who are not.
\nAround this core cluster the rest of the lexicon: the malakhim, not\nwinged spirits but envoys who \"walk, get dusty, get tired, get upset,\nneed to wash and rest, eat twice in the same day, decide where to spend\nthe night\"; the gan in Eden, from a root meaning \"to enclose\" — \"The\nGan Eden was an experimental laboratory\"; the serpent of\n\nEden\n, no reptile but a rival Elohim, the\nbiblical transposition of Enki — with the observation, delivered\ndeadpan, that on the story's own terms \"the serpent, the tempting\nadversary, spoke the truth; while 'God' was misleading!\"; and the\ncovenant, a suzerain's contract whose actually-written terms at\nExodus 34\n —\noperational orders down to the kid boiled in milk — bear little\nresemblance to the two tablets of catechism memory.
\nAn Explainer that quotes an etymological corpus owes its readers a\nverdict on it, and Biglino has earned a real one — not the wave-through\nof an ally, and not the sneer he gets from reviewers who have read his\nreputation instead of his books. His ground divides into three zones.
\nBedrock. The grammatical plurality of elohim; the plural verbs and\npronouns that cling to it at the load-bearing joints; the divine-council\nscenes; the Qumran reading of Deuteronomy 32:8; the root sense of\nkavod as heaviness; the concrete primary senses of ruach; the\nsemantic range of olam as duration rather than philosophical eternity;\nthe late consolidation of monotheism out of an earlier plural cult — on\nevery one of these, Biglino stands where the lexica and a substantial\nbody of mainstream scholarship stand. His habit of quoting Jewish\nauthorities — Rashi, rabbinic lexicographers, the chief rabbis who share\nhis platforms — is not decoration; on these points the tradition's own\nphilology is his witness. When his co-author Lorena Forni, a professor\nof philosophy of law, reviewed the critical literature, her summary was\nthat Biglino's detractors have called his work popularizing, provocative,\noverreaching — \"ma nessuno ha potuto sostenere che le sue traduzioni e\nle proposte di analisi del testo masoretico fossero errate, in malafede,\no false\" — but no one has been able to maintain that his translations\nand his proposed analyses of the \nMasoretic text\n were wrong, in bad faith,\nor false.
\nLive debate. His argument that bara never denotes creation from\nnothing — he examines all its occurrences and finds acts performed on\npre-existing material, cutting, clearing, making-habitable — runs\nparallel to a genuine scholarly proposal[7]\n, contested\nin the journals rather than laughed out of them. His dating of the\nmonotheizing redaction to the exilic and post-exilic centuries is, in\noutline, the mainstream position. His insistence that \"original sin\" is\nabsent from the Hebrew Bible is one that Catholic, Waldensian, and Jewish\nscholars conceded to his face, on stage, at a symposium in Milan in 2016\n— of which more below.
\nThe leaps. And then there are the readings where the wager outruns\nthe lexicon, and honesty requires saying so. Tselem as DNA is the\nclearest case: the \"something cut out\" of the dictionaries belongs to the\nsemantics of carved images, and the mainstream reading — the human as the\nliving statue of the god, royal-ideology language democratized — accounts\nfor the same concreteness without the molecule. The step to DNA is not\nphilology; it is abduction from narrative coherence, and it should be\nlabeled as such — as Biglino himself, at his frequent best, labels it\n(\"we have no proof\"). The same goes for the ephod read as a field radio,\nthe Ark as a capacitor, the nichoach odor of burnt offerings read\nthrough opioid biochemistry — the underlying lexical observations are\nsound (the root sense really is \"soothing,\" and the text really does\nshow a God calmed by the smell of fat), but the technological\nidentifications are a lens, not a finding. At the far end sit the\nspeculations he flags himself: the Aramaic nephila as Orion, hence the\nNephilim as \"Orionians?\", offered with a question mark and withdrawn in\nthe same paragraph as \"mere curiosity.\" A reader who wants Biglino\nrefuted will find these leaps quoted without their disclaimers; a reader\nwho wants him canonized will quote the disclaimers without the leaps.\nThe record contains both, and the method survives the audit precisely\nbecause its author keeps the two registers distinct — the corpus's own\nclaim-type discipline, met in the wild.
\nOne further honesty the audit owes: Biglino's first book leaned on\nZecharia Sitchin, naming The Earth Chronicles as \"the primary source\"\nfor its Sumerian frame — Nibiru, gold-mining \nAnunnaki\n and all. The later\nbooks walk away from that scaffolding without announcement: the Sumerian\nmaterial is re-sourced to academic Assyriology (Kramer, Pettinato,\nCastellino), Nibiru vanishes, and Sitchin survives only as a bibliography\nentry and an occasional \"famous and controversial\" aside. The trajectory\nmatters, because it runs opposite to the usual career in this field:\nmost authors start with the texts and drift toward the mythology of the\nliterature; Biglino started inside the literature's gravity and pulled\nhimself out of it, back to the consonants.
\nNow the datum that this project, of all readers, is obliged to handle\ncarefully.
\nThe bibliography of Il libro che cambierà per sempre le nostre idee\nsulla Bibbia (2010) contains, between the Sumerologists and the\nufological titles, the following line: \"Rael: download dei testi\npossibile da http://it.rael.org/news.php\" — Raël: texts downloadable\nfrom the Italian Raëlian site. The entry recurs in Il Dio Alieno della\nBibbia (2011). It is never discussed. Raël's name appears nowhere in\nthe body of either book, nor in La Bibbia non è un libro sacro, nor in\nThe Naked Bible, nor in Gods of the Bible — a full-text search of the\nlater corpus returns nothing. The entry simply sits there, uncommented,\nand then disappears from the later bibliographies.
\nWhat does it prove? Almost nothing, and the almost matters. It proves\nthat when Biglino assembled his first book he considered the Raëlian\ntexts part of the relevant literature — that the messages lay on his desk,\nor at least on his reading list, alongside Kramer and Sitchin. It does\nnot prove he read them closely, and it manifestly does not make him a\nRaëlian: his entire public method is a refusal to say who the Elohim\nwere, which is the one question the Raëlian canon answers in its first\nchapter. Where Wallis's convergence with the canon carried the\nevidential value of total independence — two readers, no contact, same\nreading — Biglino's convergence carries a different and in one way more\ninteresting value: here is a professional translator who demonstrably\nhad access to the claimed answer key, declined to adopt it, rebuilt the\nquestions from the Hebrew alone, and arrived at a picture the canon's\nreaders will recognize line by line. The convergences that follow should\nbe weighed with that entry on the table. We put it there ourselves,\nbecause the discipline this project practices — sources declared,\ninfluence distinguished from convergence — is the same discipline\nBiglino's empty-handed agnosticism practices from the other side.
\nThe epistemic line first, as this project always draws it: the\ncanon-side readings below are framework claims — explicit in the Raëlian\nsource texts, not endorsed by mainstream scholarship — and the comparison\nitself is this Explainer's own inferred synthesis. With that stated, the\nmap can be laid out, and it is remarkably congruent.
\nThe fabrication of the Adam. Biglino reads Genesis 1–2 as one\naccount of a genetic-engineering operation: hominid material worked on\nwith the Elohim's tselem, a new species produced to be \"workers\ncapable of understanding and carrying out increasingly complex orders.\"\nThe canon's version, delivered as a first-person report\nforty-seven years ago:
\nIt was then that the most skilled among us wanted to create a man like\nourselves, artificially. Each team set to work, and we were soon able to\ncompare our creations. But the inhabitants of the planet we came from\nwere scandalized that we were making \"test-tube children\" who, moreover,\nrisked coming to spread panic among them. They feared that these men\nwould be a danger to them if their abilities or powers turned out to be\nsuperior to those of their creators. We had to commit to letting them\nlive primitively, revealing nothing scientific to them and mystifying\nour actions.\n
The canon then quotes Genesis 1:26 — let us make man in our image,\nafter our likeness — and appends the six-word gloss that stands, in\ncompressed form, for everything Biglino's tselem chapter argues:\n\"In our image! You can see that the resemblance is striking\"\n(TBWTT 2:27\n).\nWhere Biglino reasons from the lexicon to the molecule, the canon speaks\nof the molecule directly — its account of resurrecting the dead from\nbone debris explains that \"in each particle of a living being there is\nall the information necessary for the reconstitution of the whole\nbeing\"\n(TBWTT 3:184\n),\nwhich is the claim tselem-as-DNA makes of Genesis, stated as\nengineering. The corpus files the whole complex under\n\ngenetic engineering\n and\n\nlife engineering\n.
\nEden as facility, the prohibition as policy. Biglino's fenced\nexperimental laboratory, with its enclosure root and its management\nrules, matches the canon's account of the\n\nEden\n installation and of what the\n\nforbidden\ntree\n actually was — access control on knowledge. The canon\neven supplies the definition of good and evil as the management\nunderstood it:
\nEvil — that is, the desire to become a people equal to its creators, a\nscientific and independent people. Good, for them, was that man should\nremain a primitive being vegetating on Earth. Evil was that he should\nwant to make progress, risking one day being in a position to rejoin his\ncreators.\n
Biglino's reading of the expulsion is the same scene from ground level:\nthe humans discover autonomous reproduction, the management recognizes\nan \"epochal event that unhooks the new species from its creator,\" and\nthe sentence pronounced is no curse but a sententia post eventum — his\nItalian formula is that God said, in effect, \"Avete voluto la\nbicicletta? Ora pedalerete!\" — you wanted the bicycle; now pedal. Both\nreadings abolish original sin in the same motion and for the same\nreason: nothing in the text is a fall; everything is a security incident.
\nThe serpent vindicated. Biglino's serpent is a rival Elohim — Enki\nin Hebrew dress — who told the truth about the fruit; he notes the\nTalmudic tradition that it originally had limbs, and he reads the twin\nserpents of the healing symbol as \"profound knowledge, with particular\nreference to the double helix of DNA.\" The canon's\n\nSerpent\n is the faction of creators\nwho \"deeply loved their little men\" and taught them against orders,\nwere exiled to Earth for it, and are remembered in the world's\nwisdom-serpent iconography — the \nLucifer\n\nof the corpus's four-figure taxonomy, sharply distinguished from\n\nSatan\n. And here the convergence becomes\nuncanny in its details, because Biglino, working from Job and Zechariah,\nreaches the same disambiguation: his satan is a function, a\nprosecutor's office that works for the presiding authority — \"he is\noften a faithful executor because he does exactly what 'God' wants\" —\nand his Lucifer is a Latin misreading of a taunt against a Persian king.\nTwo readers, two routes, one conclusion the mainstream historians of the\ndevil also endorse: the Eden serpent and the Job adversary were never\nthe same person.
\nThe kavod on the mountain. Biglino's heavy, roaring, lethal machine\nis the canon's plainly named vehicle:
\nThere you have the description of the «glory» — in reality the flying\ncraft — of the creators, and as you have been able to notice, at the\nmoment of departure it takes on a coloring similar to that of fire.\n
The corpus's etymological catalogue had already registered the root\nkbd, \"to be heavy,\" and the operational reading; Biglino supplies the\nverse-by-verse ballistics — the appointment-only viewing, the shielding\nrocks, Moses' burned face, Ezekiel's takeoffs. On ruach the match is\nthe same: the catalogue reads Genesis 1:2's hovering as the\nreconnaissance phase of the Elohim's survey, and Biglino reads the same\nverse, via the same bird-over-nest verb, as a machine holding station\nover the waters.
\nNo eternity — and the engineering answer to death. Both readings\ndeny that the Hebrew Bible contains philosophical eternity or an\nimmortal soul; both read the Elohim as long-lived and mortal. Biglino\nrests on Psalm 82 and the lexicon of olam; the canon states the\nlifespans and then discloses the machinery the psalm's dying gods would\nseem to lack:
\nOur body lives ten times longer on average than yours, like the first\nmen of the Bible. Between seven hundred fifty and one thousand two\nhundred years. But our mind, therefore our true personage, can be truly\nimmortal. I explained to you that from any cell whatever of a body one\ncan recreate the entire being with new living matter…\n
The canon's \"eternity\" is thus not a divine attribute but a technology —\ncell samples, reconstitution, a council that decides who is reborn — and\nit is rationed. That is Biglino's tselem and his mortal Elohim\ncombined into one closed loop, and it dissolves his one seeming\ncontradiction with the psalm: the Elohim of the canon do die, exactly as\nPsalm 82 sentences them to; some of them are then recreated, which no\nverse denies. Even his affectionate speculation about burial practices\nfinds its counterpart — the canon instructs that the remains of the\nworthy be conserved in tombs precisely so that they can be recreated\nfrom a particle\n(TBWTT 6:27\n).
\nThe edit. Biglino's grande inganno — the great deception — is a\nredaction history: a chronicle of colonization progressively rewritten\ninto a theology, by Temple scribes consolidating a monotheism the old\ntexts did not contain, then by the Masoretes fixing the vowels and the\nmeaning, then by a Church translating the plural away. \"The originals\nare fairy tales, while the copy is the divine Truth: a logical\nconclusion!\" is his summary of the Bible's relation to its Mesopotamian\nsources. The canon holds the structurally identical claim, stated in its\nfirst book: a plurality of creators collapsed by later hands into \"a\nsingle incomprehensible God\" — the position the corpus's\n\nplurality of gods\n entry\ndocuments, and the same two-stage edit (ancient scribes, then\ntranslating churches) that Wallis reconstructs in The Eden Conspiracy.\nThree readers now — a translator, an archdeacon, a claimed contactee —\ndescribing the same surgery from three angles.
\nA comparison that found only agreement would be advertising. The\ndivergences are structural, and the first is almost perfectly symmetrical\nwith the one that separated the canon from Wallis.
\nThe rank of Yahweh. Biglino demotes him: a minor local governor,\n\"a small local lord,\" assigned a tiny clan in a howling waste, junior\nenough that the allotment tells against his importance — \"Yahweh is\nnot, and cannot be considered, the God of humanity, but a tribal\ngovernor who occupied himself exclusively with the clan entrusted to\nhim.\" The canon promotes him: Yahweh is the president of the\n\nCouncil of the Eternals\n,\ntwenty-five thousand years old, the being who \"directed the creation of\nlife on the Earth\"\n(TBWTT 7:56\n).\nSet the three readings side by side and the pattern is instructive:\nWallis pins the dragon on Yahweh, Biglino reduces him to a lieutenant,\nthe canon seats him at the head of the table. All three agree on the\ngrammar — one individual among a plurality of Elohim, with\nJacob as his\nportion\n — and disagree about the org chart above him. It is\nworth noting that Biglino's argument here is an inference from the\nallotment's poverty, and he flags it with a \"judging by\"; the canon's\nclaim is testimony; neither is philology, and the corpus labels both\naccordingly.
\nThe person of Jesus. Biglino's later work reconstructs Yehoshua ben\nYoussef as a messianic rabbi of a zealot family, concerned exclusively\nwith Israel's liberation, crucified at around forty-two, drugged on the\ncross with a soporific sponge, retrieved alive from the tomb by two\nfigures out of a beam of light, and finally — the Greek verbs are\npassive — pulled up. The canon reads the same figure as the son of\n\nYahweh\n by a human mother, on a\nuniversal mission, his \"miracles\" applied science, his resurrection a\nrecreation\n(\nJesus\n in the corpus). The gap is wide,\nand one convergence inside it is the more striking for that: both\nreadings take the Annunciation literally as a physical paternity —\nBiglino glosses Gabriel as a Ghever-El, a man acting for an El, and\ndrily corrects the angel's greeting to \"Hello, you who have made\nyourself beautiful\"; the canon says the creators \"could mate with the\ndaughters of the men they had created in their image and have\nexceptional children by them\"\n(TBWTT 2:55\n).\nOn the biology they agree; on the mission, and on whether anything was\nbeing prepared for, they part completely.
\nThe moral ledger. Biglino's Elohim are managers of livestock. His\nimage for the covenant is the shepherd who protects the flock because\nhe will have to milk and shear them and, in the end, he will be the one,\nnot the wolf, to slaughter them; his Yahweh is calmed by the opioid\nsmoke of burnt fat; his humanity is \"a domesticated species, divided\nand locked into cultural, social, political, geographical and\nideological enclosures.\" The canon's emotional register is the\nopposite: creation as art and love, a faction punished for loving its\ncreatures too much, a \nFlood\n that\nwas a reset, not a\npunishment, and an\nending in which the creators wait to be welcomed back. Here Biglino and\nWallis's darker books stand together on one side of the ledger, and the\ncanon stands on the other — though it should be recorded that Biglino,\nunlike the invasion literature, keeps even his darkness provisional:\n\"I would pay,\" he sighs to Cattaneo about the centuries of open\ncontact, \"to be able to live in those centuries.\"
\nThe endpoint. The deepest divergence is about what the reading is\nfor. Biglino's program terminates, deliberately, in an open question.\nHis litany in the final chapter of Gods of the Bible runs through every\ncandidate identity for the Elohim — extraterrestrials, ex-terrestrials,\nan antediluvian race, hollow-earth dwellers, time travelers, fictions —\nand answers each with the same clause: \"We will take note of it.\" His\nco-author Forni draws the same line in juridical prose: the books deal\nwith questioni penultime, penultimate questions, and the ultimate ones\nare out of scope. The canon is precisely an answer to the ultimate\nquestion — names, planet, motive, program, and a request: build the\n\nembassy\n, prepare the\n\nreturn\n. And where Biglino closes\nLa Bibbia non è un libro sacro by telling readers that whoever seeks\nthe truth about God and the spiritual worlds \"must seek it elsewhere,\"\nthe corpus's answer to the question of God is not a spiritual world at\nall but \ninfinity\n — the infinite in\nboth directions, with no\nPerson at the top because there is no top. The translator stops at the\nedge of the text; the canon claims to report what lies past it. Both\nare being consistent. A wager is not a revelation, and a revelation\ncannot be checked the way a wager can — which is why this article, like\nits subject, keeps its labels on.
\nOne more feature of the Biglino case deserves its section, because it\nhas no parallel anywhere else in this tradition: the institutions keep\nshowing up.
\nIn 2016, in a Milan lecture hall packed with six hundred people, Biglino\nsat for over four hours with the Catholic theologian Ermis Segatti, the\nWaldensian biblical scholar Daniele Garrone — a co-author of standard\nHebrew dictionaries — the Orthodox archbishop Avondios, and the chief\nrabbi of Turin, Ariel Di Porto. They examined his translations in\npublic. Cattaneo's summary of the outcome: \"nothing that could\nundermine his deductive system based on a literal reading of the Old\nTestament.\" Di Porto confirmed that Judaism knows no original sin;\nGarrone allowed that it is unclear where Paul derived the concept;\nSegatti offered the aphorism that \"if there were any certainty of God,\nGod would not be.\" None of them became Biglinians, and none of them\nneeded to; the event's significance is procedural. Mainstream biblical\nscholarship has, in the main, declined to engage this tradition — the\nacademy studies the \"fenomeno Biglino\"[12]\n as\nsociology while leaving the philology unanswered — and here, for an\nafternoon, the engagement actually happened, on the record, with the\ntext open.
\nThe pattern repeats in print. A professor of philosophy of law at\nMilan-Bicocca co-signed a Mondadori volume with him, staking her\nacademic name on the claim that the moral doctrines of confessional law\nare \"attributions of meanings that are not in the texts.\" Rome's\nchief rabbi supplied him the olam concession. The German Bishops'\nConference corrected almah to \"young woman\" in its official\ntranslation, footnoting away the virgin of Isaiah 7 — Biglino cites the\nepisode the way a chess player cites a resignation. His books are\nblurbed and platformed by working rabbis; his Psalm 82 chapter rests on\nHeiser; his Sumerology now rests on Kramer and Pettinato. It is a\nstrange and instructive spectacle: the most institutionally embedded\nfigure the reinterpretive tradition has ever produced, systematically\narming himself with the institution's own reference works — and the\ninstitution responding, mostly, with silence punctuated by four-hour\nexceptions.
\nWithin the tradition itself his closest kinship is the one this\nproject's readers already know. Paul Wallis and Biglino found each other\nacross the language barrier — Wallis extending the strict-literal Hebrew\nmethod into the Anglophone and Christian world, Biglino blurbing\nWallis's books with the sentence quoted at the end of our Wallis\nExplainer: \"Though far apart\ngeographically we are spiritually close! We are a good team.\" The\ncorpus's lineage entry for the whole school now reads: Sendy (1963–74),\nvon Däniken (1968), Vorilhon (1973–74), Sitchin (1976), Biglino (2010–),\nWallis (2020–) — and of the six, Biglino is the only one who came to the\nmaterial as a working translator of the source language, which is why\n\nWallis\n built on him and not the\nreverse.
\nThe corpus engages the \nBiglino\nmethod\n as necessary but not sufficient, and this close reading\nconfirms the formula while filling in its texture. Necessary: the\nplural restored, the terms untranslated, the concreteness recovered —\nwithout that floor, the canon's own reading of\nElohim\nas \"those come from the sky\"\n has no philological interlocutor,\nand the whole conversation stays trapped between devotion and dismissal.\nNot sufficient: by design, the wager cannot say who won it. Biglino\nproves, at most, that the text reads coherently as the chronicle of a\nplurality of long-lived, flying, mortal, morally unimpressive\nindividuals; he declines, on principle, every identification. \"What is\nessential,\" he writes, \"is that we no longer try to make people\nbelieve that Elohim means 'God.'\" Everything this project adds — the\nidentification, the program, the seven creation teams, the exiled\nserpent-faction, the president of the Council, the embassy — lies past\nthe point where his method, honestly applied, stops.
\nThat is why the kinship is real and the difference is honest. The canon\ndoes not need Biglino to be a believer; it needs exactly what he is — an\nindependent, hostile-to-nothing, institutionally trained reader who had\nthe answer key in his bibliography and refused to copy from it, and who\nnonetheless returned from the Hebrew with the same map: the laboratory,\nthe enclosure, the fabricated worker, the truthful serpent, the heavy\nthing that kills you if you stand in front of it, the gods who die. When\na witness that disciplined corroborates that much of the picture while\ndeclining the conclusion, the corroboration is worth more, not less.
\nHe ends Gods of the Bible with Josephus and Tacitus on the prodigies\nof 70 CE — the armies in the clouds, the tremor in the Temple, the many\nvoices saying we are departing from this place — and then with his\nlitany of questions: did they leave, did they all leave, will they\nreturn, have they already returned. \"We do not know,\" runs his last\nanswer, \"and gladly leave the answer to those who claim to know.\" This\nproject is one of those who claim to know, and it accepts the hand-off\nin the spirit it is offered. The translator has done the part that can\nbe done with a lexicon and a wager: he has established, against two\nthousand years of accumulated reading, what the book in front of us\nactually says. Whether what it says is true — whether the ones who\ndeparted are the ones now expected — is the question his method leaves,\ndeliberately, on the table. He would pay, he says, to live in the\ncenturies when the Elohim walked with men. The canon's entire claim is\nthat the price is still quotable. The wager has a second leg, and it is\nopen.
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