+++
title = "The Translator's Wager"
description = "Mauro Biglino translated nineteen books of the Hebrew Bible for a Vatican-approved publisher — then wagered his career on reading them literally."
template = "articles-page.html"
date = 2026-07-09
draft = false

[extra]
claim_type = "inferred"
editorial_pass = "2026-05"
article_type = "explainer"
category = "Comparative"
author = "Zara Zinsfuss"
author_slug = "zara-zinsfuss"
summary = "Mauro Biglino translated seventeen books of the Hebrew Bible for a major Catholic publisher before applying his deliberately literal method to Elohim, Yahweh, *kavod*, and *ruach*. This essay tests where his readings rest on accepted philology, where they remain debated, and where they leap beyond the lexicon. It also examines the otherwise silent appearance of Raël's texts in Biglino's early bibliographies."
keywords = ["Mauro Biglino", "Elohim", "Yahweh", "kavod", "ruach", "tselem", "olam", "Psalm 82", "Deuteronomy 32", "Edizioni San Paolo", "facciamo finta che", "Biglino method", "The Naked Bible", "Gods of the Bible", "Giorgio Cattaneo", "Lorena Forni", "Paul Wallis", "neo-euhemerism", "paleocontact"]
references = [
    # — The canon under comparison —
    { id = "the-book-which-tells-the-truth", locator = "Chapter 1, ¶53 ('We are men like you'); Chapter 2 (¶¶25–27: the artificial creation and the striking resemblance; ¶30: the scientific books; ¶¶35–39: the serpent faction; ¶55: the sons of the creators and the daughters of men; ¶57: good and evil defined; ¶58: the Flood decision); Chapter 3 (¶33: the 'glory' as flying craft; ¶184: recreation from a particle; ¶251: 'Elohim… those come from the sky'); Chapter 6, ¶27 (the conserved remains); Chapter 7 (¶¶30–31: the secret of eternity; ¶56: the president of the Council)" },
    { id = "extraterrestrials-took-me-to-their-planet", locator = "the second message; the account of scientific rebirth and the eternals' polity" },
    { id = "intelligent-design-message-from-the-designers", locator = "the consolidated English edition of the three messages" },

    # — The Biglino corpus (2010–2023) —
    { id = "biglino-il-libro", locator = "the foundational statement: tselem, tsela, kevod, the malakhim, Psalm 82; Sitchin declared 'the primary source' for the Sumerian frame; Raël's texts listed in the bibliography without comment" },
    { title = "Il Dio Alieno della Bibbia (the ruach chapter; the cargo-cult reading of the name YHWH; the serpent as Enki; the agnostic self-declaration; Raël's texts again in the bibliography)", author = "Mauro Biglino", date = "2011" },
    { title = "La Bibbia non è un libro sacro: Il grande inganno (the redaction history of the 'colossal deception'; Deuteronomy 32:8–9; the kavod 'viewable by appointment'; the fourteen 'non è vero che' negations)", author = "Mauro Biglino", date = "2013" },
    { id = "biglino-bibbia-non-parla", locator = "the Mondadori mainstream statement of the 'the Bible does not speak of God' thesis" },
    { title = "La Bibbia non l'ha mai detto (the collaboration with a philosopher of law: tselem and DNA, the twenty occurrences of bara, Yahweh as tribal governor, the secularist stakes)", author = "Lorena Forni & Mauro Biglino", date = "2017" },
    { id = "the-naked-bible", locator = "the autobiography: the pencil-written Genesis, the Exodus 33:16 letter, the nineteen books, the break; the method in his own voice; the 2016 Milan symposium" },
    { title = "Gods of the Bible: A New Interpretation of the Bible Reveals the Oldest Secret in History (the consolidated English statement: the four 'let us pretend' commitments, the counting of the Elohim, kavod, ruach, tselem, olam, Psalm 82, the 'we will take note of it' litany)", author = "Mauro Biglino, trans. Davide Bolognesi", date = "2023" },

    # — The antecedent and adjacent reinterpretive tradition —
    { id = "those-gods-who-made-heaven-and-earth", locator = "Sendy's 1969 statement of the Schliemann method and the plural Elohim, four decades before Biglino's independent articulation" },
    { id = "sendy-lune-cle-bible", locator = "the Bible-read-as-Schliemann-read-Homer program in its earliest form" },
    { id = "chariots-of-the-gods", locator = "the popular foundation of the ancient-astronaut tradition" },
    { id = "sitchin-12th-planet", locator = "the Mesopotamian frame Biglino's first book names as its 'primary source' and his later work quietly walks away from" },
    { id = "escaping-from-eden", locator = "the Anglophone extension of the Biglino method; Wallis's acknowledged debt" },
    { id = "the-eden-conspiracy", locator = "Wallis's redaction-history argument, the sibling of Biglino's 'grande inganno'" },

    # — Scriptural loci under discussion —
    { id = "genesis", locator = "Genesis 1:26–27 (tselem and demut); 2:7 (the forming of the Adam); 2:8 (gan be-Eden mi-qedem); 2:21–22 (the deep sleep and the tsela); 3 (the serpent's claim and its vindication); 6:1–4 (the sons of the Elohim)" },
    { id = "exodus", locator = "Exodus 3 (the seneh and the self-identification); 15:3 (ish milchamah); 19:18 and 24:17 (the descent on Sinai); 33:18–23 (the kavod seen from behind); 34:10–28 (the covenant terms actually written)" },
    { id = "deuteronomy", locator = "Deuteronomy 32:8–9 — Elyon divides the nations; Yahweh's allotment is Jacob" },
    { id = "joshua", locator = "Joshua 24 — the choice of Elohim set before the tribes at Shechem" },
    { id = "numbers", locator = "Numbers 12:8 ('I speak clearly and not in riddles'); Numbers 31:25–41 (the tribute inventory, including the thirty-two persons)" },
    { id = "psalms", locator = "Psalm 82 — the assembly of the Elohim and the sentence 'you will die like Adam'" },
    { id = "isaiah", locator = "Isaiah 45:7 — 'I make peace and create evil'" },
    { id = "ezekiel", locator = "Ezekiel 1, 10–11 (the kavod that rises, moves, and lands); Ezekiel 20:25–26 (the statutes that were not good)" },

    # — Mainstream scholarship engaged —
    { id = "smith-early-history-god", locator = "the emergence of Yahweh within the West Semitic pantheon — the mainstream account of the plurality Biglino reads operationally" },
    { title = "The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (the divine-council corpus Biglino himself cites on Psalm 82 — assembled by a scholar hostile to ancient-astronaut readings, which makes the agreement a control case)", author = "Michael S. Heiser", date = "2015" },
    { title = "Why the Verb bara Does Not Mean 'to Create' in Genesis 1.1–2.4a (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 34.1 — the mainstream proposal, contested but serious, that Biglino's bara argument runs parallel to)", author = "Ellen van Wolde", date = "2009" },
    { title = "The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (the mainstream literary-translation project that independently resists the smoothing tendencies of conventional English Bibles)", author = "Robert Alter", date = "2018" },
    { title = "Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed. (the standard reference entries 'Yahweh,' 'El,' 'Elyon')", author = "Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking & Pieter W. van der Horst (eds.)", date = "1999" },

    # — Comparative primary sources —
    { id = "enuma-elish", locator = "the Anunnaki frame Biglino's first book inherits from Sitchin and his later books re-source to academic Sumerology" },
    { id = "atrahasis", locator = "the fabrication of the worker and the flood decision — the Mesopotamian template" },
    { id = "book-of-enoch", locator = "the Watchers' descent at the days of Jared, which Biglino connects to the name Yared, 'descent'" },

    # — The critical voice —
    { title = "Tra paleoastronautica, secolarizzazione, individualizzazione religiosa e quasi-religione: il 'fenomeno Biglino' (Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 82/2, pp. 952–975 — the principal academic study of Biglino's reception, cited by Biglino's own co-author)", author = "Manuel Ceccarelli", date = "2016" }
]

# Explanatory footnotes — lettered notes keyed by 1-based index to the
# {{ footnote(id="N") }} markers in the prose. Distinct from the numbered
# bibliographic references above.
footnotes = [
    { content = "An interlinear Bible prints the original text with a translation set word under word, line by line, so the reader can see exactly which term renders which. The Hebrew text behind all of Biglino's work is the Masoretic text as printed in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which reproduces the Leningrad Codex (1008 CE) — the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The consonantal text is far older; the vowel points were added by the Masoretes between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries CE, which is why Biglino quotes the text consonants-only." },
    { content = "Edizioni San Paolo is the publishing house of the Society of Saint Paul, the Catholic religious congregation founded by Giacomo Alberione in 1914. It is one of Italy's principal religious publishers, and its scholarly editions circulate in Catholic academic settings. 'Vatican-approved' is Biglino's own shorthand and fair as shorthand: the point is not a formal imprimatur on every volume but that his employer sat squarely inside the institution whose reading he would later contest." },
    { content = "The Five Megillot ('scrolls') are Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes (Qohelet), Lamentations, and Esther — the five short books read liturgically at Jewish festivals. The Book of the Twelve is the Minor Prophets, counted in the Hebrew canon as a single book: Hosea through Malachi. With the Five Megillot, the Twelve, and the unpublished Joshua and Judges, Biglino's count reaches nineteen." },
    { content = "The etymology of *kavod* is not in dispute: the root *kbd* means 'to be heavy,' and the noun's semantic range runs from physical weight to wealth to honor to splendor — the same metaphorical path English 'gravity' and 'weighty' travel. What is in dispute is the referent in the theophany passages. Mainstream scholarship reads the kavod as the visible manifestation of the divine presence, described in storm and fire imagery; Biglino reads it as a machine. The etymology supports neither reading over the other; the argument is fought over the narrative details — the lethality, the shielding rocks, the noise, the described takeoffs and landings." },
    { content = "*Ruach* carries the primary senses 'wind, breath, moving air'; 'spirit' is a real but secondary semantic development, and every serious lexicon presents the concrete senses first. Genesis 1:2's *merachefet* ('hovering, fluttering') is used elsewhere of a bird over its nest (Deuteronomy 32:11). None of this is contested; what Biglino adds is the claim that in specific narrative contexts the moving-air term names a moving object." },
    { content = "Mainstream philology reads *tselem* as 'image' in the sense of a statue or cut figure — the word is used of idols and of molded images — and reads Genesis 1:26–27 through the ancient Near Eastern royal ideology in which the king is the living statue-image of the god, his representative on the ground. The Brown-Driver-Briggs entry 'something cut out' that Biglino leans on belongs to that statue semantics. The step from 'a cut-out material thing that carries a likeness' to 'DNA' is Biglino's own, and no lexicon takes it with him. What the mainstream reading and Biglino's reading share, against the devotional reading, is concreteness: on either account the word does not mean an immaterial spiritual resemblance." },
    { content = "In 2009 the Radboud University scholar Ellen van Wolde argued, in a peer-reviewed venue, that *bara* in Genesis 1 means 'to spatially separate' rather than 'to create.' The proposal was widely contested and remains a minority position, but it was contested as scholarship, not dismissed as fantasy — which is the point of citing it: the semantic ground Biglino's *bara* argument stands on is genuinely disputed territory inside the academy, not territory the academy has settled against him." },
    { content = "*Olam* denotes remotest time or unbounded duration — 'ancient days,' 'as long as,' 'in perpetuity' — and only in post-biblical Hebrew does it firm up toward the philosophical 'eternity' (and acquire the sense 'world'). The corpus's own catalogue of etymological readings records the same range. Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, quoted in *The Naked Bible*: 'Nowhere is it written that the word olam means eternity.'" },
    { content = "The 'divine council' is mainstream scholarship's own term for the assembly of divine beings the Hebrew Bible stages around its God — Psalm 82's 'El takes his stand in the divine assembly, among the elohim he gives judgment,' Job 1's sons of the Elohim, 1 Kings 22's deliberating spirits. Michael Heiser, the scholar who did most to press this corpus on conservative readers, was simultaneously one of the ancient-astronaut tradition's most energetic debunkers — and Biglino quotes him, correctly, for the observation that the elohim of Psalm 82 are divine beings, not human judges. The plurality is in the text on any reading; only the referent is in dispute." },
    { content = "At Deuteronomy 32:8–9 the Masoretic text says the Most High divided the nations 'according to the number of the sons of Israel'; the Qumran fragment 4QDeut(j) reads 'sons of elohim,' and the Septuagint 'angels of God.' Most scholars judge the Qumran reading original: the nations were allotted to divine beings, and 'Yahweh's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted share.' The verse is load-bearing for Biglino, for Wallis, for the canon, and for the mainstream divine-council literature alike." },
    { content = "Cargo cults arose in Melanesia around the Second World War, when islanders who had watched American logistics — airstrips, radios, cargo drops — built ritual replicas of the equipment to call the goods and their bringers back. The John Frum movement on Tanna (Vanuatu), plausibly from 'John from America,' still awaits its returning benefactor. Biglino's use of the analogy is double: the name YHWH as the phonetic residue of a foreign proper name, and religion itself as the ritualized memory of a technological contact — a reading the corpus shares at the structural level." },
    { content = "Manuel Ceccarelli's 2016 article in *Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni* — 'Between paleoastronautics, secularization, religious individualization and quasi-religion: the Biglino phenomenon' — is the principal academic treatment of Biglino's reception, and it studies him as a sociological datum rather than engaging his philology. Biglino's own co-author Lorena Forni cites it, which tells you the camp is aware of how the academy files them. The asymmetry is familiar from the whole tradition: the academy studies the phenomenon and declines the arguments; the phenomenon cites the academy's lexicons and declines its conclusions." }
]
+++

Some time in the late 1980s, a man in Turin taught himself to write the
Book of Genesis by hand. One line of Hebrew, a line of pronunciation
beneath it, a line of literal translation beneath that — four hundred
pages in pencil, evenings and weekends, a private exercise by a lover of
ancient languages who was, at the time, waiting for a Chinese course to
begin. Checking his work against the interlinear Bible{{ footnote(id="1") }}
published by Edizioni San Paolo{{ footnote(id="2") }}, the Catholic house
whose editions furnish Italy's seminaries, he found something that should
not have been there: a wrong word in the Hebrew of Exodus 33:16, *elai*
where *jiwwada* belonged, a typo carried over from the previous verse.
*"So I decided to write to the publisher, obviously with a lot of
apprehension and humility,"* he recalled decades later. *"I told myself
they'd never answer me!"*

They answered quickly. The director of the interlinear series, Don
Piergiorgio Beretta, thanked him for the *"precious error report"* and
confessed he could not imagine how the mistake had been made. Letters
followed; then a request — might they see some of his translations? He
photocopied four sheets of the pencil-written Genesis and mailed them
with, in his words, his heart pounding in his chest. The reply: *"The
literal translation you executed corresponds almost exactly to ours.
Where do you live? … A more personal meeting could be useful."* The
meeting led to a contract for the Five Megillot{{ footnote(id="3") }};
the Megillot led to the Book of the Twelve; the Twelve led to Joshua and
Judges. Mauro Biglino, autodidact, would spend the better part of two
decades as a credited translator of the Hebrew Bible for one of the most
established Catholic publishers in Europe.

The arrangement ended the way the reader has already guessed. In 2010
Biglino published a book of his own — *Il libro che cambierà per sempre
le nostre idee sulla Bibbia*, "the book that will forever change our
ideas about the Bible" — and said in public what the interlinear work
had led him to think in private. His own accounting of the cost is a
model of fairness:

> Needless to say, once I started voicing my doubts concerning the
> meaning of specific passages of the Bible, San Paolo Edizioni
> (legitimately) decided not to avail themselves of my expertise in this
> field anymore; the last two books I translated for them went
> unpublished because our collaboration was halted. In total, I have
> translated nineteen books of the Old Testament, of which seventeen
> were published with San Paolo Edizioni.
>
> — *Gods of the Bible*, Introduction

There is no bitterness anywhere in the record. *"They were unfailingly
fair to the end,"* he says of the publisher that shelved his Joshua and
Judges while paying him for both; of Don Beretta he speaks with plain
affection. The books that followed — more than a dozen in Italian, with
translations now in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch,
Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Latvian — made him what his interviewer
Giorgio Cattaneo calls a publishing phenomenon: hundreds of thousands of
copies sold, millions of views, theaters and lecture halls filled by *"a
shy, reserved, somber man and a lover of the silences of his mountains."*
With the former archdeacon Paul Wallis — whose Eden Series this project
has read closely in [a sibling
essay](/articles/the-archdeacon-and-the-dragon/) — Biglino is one of
the two most consequential living voices of the tradition this project
calls {% wiki(slug="neo-euhemerism") %}neo-euhemerism{% end %}, and the
corpus already carries a full methodological entry under his name: the
{% wiki(slug="biglino-method") %}Biglino method{% end %}.

Thirty-six years before *Il libro che cambierà*, a French motor-racing
journalist named Claude Vorilhon — {% wiki(slug="rael") %}Raël{% end %} —
published [*The Book Which Tells the
Truth*](/library/the-book-which-tells-the-truth/), reporting that the
meaning of the same Hebrew passages had been explained to him directly by
one of the beings they describe. When this project compared Wallis with
the canon, the independence of the two witnesses was total: six books,
393,000 words, and not one mention of Raël. Biglino's case is more
interesting, and this article will handle it with the care it deserves —
because in the bibliographies of his early books, sitting quietly between
the Sumerologists, there is an entry the Wallis comparison could not
offer. First, the method; then the lexicon; then the audit the method
invites.

## The wager

Biglino's method has a name in Italian that he has repeated in dozens of
conferences: *facciamo finta che* — let us pretend that. Its mature
statement opens the first chapter of *Gods of the Bible*:

> Because of the insurmountable contradictions presented above, we are
> convinced that the only intellectually honest and coherent way to deal
> with the Old Testament is to "pretend" that what we read is true in
> the literal sense. We do not claim that it is true in the theological
> sense or the sense of absolute truth. We only pretend that it is true
> as we read it. We believe that when the biblical authors wrote certain
> things, they meant to say them, not something else.
>
> — *Gods of the Bible*, ch. 1

The commitments are then spelled out as four workmanlike bullets: pretend
the Bible we read is the one originally written; pretend the authors
meant to tell us exactly what they wrote; pretend the writings preserve
the memory of actual events; pretend, in essence, that these books can be
treated as history books. The wager is Pascal's inverted: stake nothing
on belief, everything on reading, and see whether the text pays out in
coherence. He is scrupulous about what the payout proves:

> If we "pretend" that this story is authentic, we are faced with the
> possibility of coming to understand many things that, once pieced
> together, form a coherent picture. To be clear, we have no proof.
> Consistency is not in itself synonymous with authenticity. But in the
> meantime, it is a fact, suggesting the seriousness of a hypothesis,
> one that is theoretically illuminating.
>
> — *The Naked Bible*, "All Those Undead"

Readers of this project will recognize the ancestry. Heinrich Schliemann
read the *Iliad* this way and found a city under Hisarlık; Jean Sendy
proposed in 1969 that the Bible be read *"as Schliemann read Homer"* and
stated, four decades before Biglino, both the method and its first
result — the plural Elohim. The corpus treats coherence-under-literal-
reading as a formal criterion, catalogued under
{% wiki(slug="sendys-conditions-of-coherence") %}Sendy's conditions of
coherence{% end %}. Biglino reached the same method from the opposite
shore: not from the ancient-astronaut library toward the Hebrew, but from
seventeen published books of interlinear Hebrew toward conclusions he
visibly did not go looking for. He guards the method's honesty at the
level of the single word, and his statement of that discipline is worth
quoting because it is the closest thing his corpus has to a creed:

> I've said many times in recent years that there are terms that, in my
> opinion, should not be translated. It's a question of integrity, since
> we do not know exactly what they mean. So honesty requires leaving
> them just as they are written.
>
> — *The Naked Bible*, "The Beginnings"

His deepest professional satisfaction, he says, is that in the San Paolo
interlinear volumes *"'Elohim' always stayed 'Elohim'"* — the scholarly
edition never rendered the word as "God." The observation grows teeth in
*Gods of the Bible*: *"Where people read 'God' and were led to believe
that the biblical authors had written the word 'God,' scholars read the
untranslated term 'Elohim'… Whatever 'Elohim' means, why provide
different translations for different readerships? Who is afraid of people
realizing that there is so much uncertainty around the very term on which
monotheism is founded?"* And he is careful, always, to claim for the
literal reading equality rather than monopoly: *"I have never said that a
literal reading is the only one possible. But I have to note that it is
the only one that is regularly avoided."* Behind him he has Rashi of
Troyes, who allowed the words of the Torah seventy meanings and one they
*"cannot not have"* — the literal one — and Yahweh himself, who declares
at Numbers 12:8, in a verse Biglino relishes: *I speak clearly and not in
riddles.*

## A lexicon of the concrete

What the wager yields, across thirteen years of books, is less a theory
than a lexicon — a small set of Hebrew terms read for their concrete
sense, each one a load-bearing wall of the theological building. The
corpus maintains its own
{% wiki(slug="list-of-etymological-readings") %}catalogue of etymological
readings{% end %}; what follows is Biglino's, quoted at the length it
deserves.

**Elohim.** The grammatically plural noun
(<span class="hebrew">אֱלֹהִים</span>) that conventional Bibles render as
a singular "God" is, for Biglino, the whole scandal in one word. His
conclusion after a chapter spent simply counting referents — he finds at
least twenty-three distinct Elohim even granting the exegetes their
rules — is stated as a list of findings:

> The biblical term "Elohim" did not refer to one spiritual,
> transcendent, omniscient, and omnipotent "God" but to many
> flesh-and-blood individuals. (We call them "individuals" because, as
> we have just seen, they are not Adamites either, so they are not men.)
> The Elohim lived long enough to be considered immortal, even though
> they were not. They were individuals who traveled on flying machines
> called ruach, kavod, merkavah, and cherubim… The Elohim had the same
> privileges and attributes as Yahweh in terms of functions and powers
> exercised because they belonged to the same group. Yahweh was only one
> of them.
>
> — *Gods of the Bible*, ch. 2

The Italian books carry the domestic version of the argument, which has
the advantage of being funny: *"Lui era dunque 'un' Elohim (plurale) così
come noi diremmo che Lorenzo il Magnifico era 'un' de' Medici (plurale)"*
— he was "an" Elohim the way Lorenzo the Magnificent was "a" Medici. On
the plurality itself, as the corpus's
{% wiki(slug="plurality-of-gods") %}plurality of gods{% end %} entry
records, mainstream scholarship's divine-council literature{{ footnote(id="9") }}
is closer to Biglino than casual readers assume; he cites Michael Heiser
approvingly on exactly this point, and the alliance of convenience
between the evangelical Hebraist and the Italian literalist is one of the
quiet comedies of the field.

**Yahweh.** One member of that group, and on the textual evidence not a
senior one. Biglino's load-bearing passage is the song of Moses:
Elyon — literally "the one above"{{ footnote(id="10") }} — divides the
nations among the sons of the Elohim, and Jacob's family falls to Yahweh
({% libref(book="deuteronomy", chapter=32, verse=8) %}Deuteronomy
32:8–9{% end %}).

> It must also be emphasized that Israel was not "chosen by," but rather
> "assigned to" Yahweh… It is clear that the matching of Jacob's family
> with Yahweh has no particular universal significance, nor does it
> convey a global message for all humanity. Israel was a tiny nation,
> assigned to one of the many Elohim who participated with varying
> degrees of satisfaction in dividing the available lands.
>
> — *Gods of the Bible*, ch. 9

The figure who emerges from the assignment is described by the text
itself as *ish milchamah*, "man of war"
({% libref(book="exodus", chapter=15, verse=3) %}Exodus 15:3{% end %}),
jealous of rivals, paid in tribute — Biglino never tires of the inventory
at {% libref(book="numbers", chapter=31, verse=32) %}Numbers 31{% end %},
with its 675 sheep, 72 cattle, 61 donkeys, and thirty-two persons
reserved *"for Yahweh himself, that is, for him personally. One only
wonders what a spiritual and transcendental 'God' needed 32 virgins
for."* The demotion is completed by Jephthah, who tells the Ammonites,
in the plain words of
{% libref(book="judges", chapter=11, verse=24) %}Judges 11:24{% end %},
to keep what their Elohim Chemosh gives them as Israel keeps what Yahweh
gives:

> What happens to thousands of pages of theology in the face of this
> perfect biblical equivalence between Yahweh and Chemosh? Thousands of
> pages, written to invent a monotheism that does not exist in the
> Bible, making the Bible say what it does not say, and hiding what it
> explicitly says.
>
> — *The Naked Bible*, "Yahweh and His Colleagues"

As for the name itself, Biglino's proposal is the most disarming in the
literature: YHWH is a foreign proper noun, the phonetic residue of a
sound, exactly as the Melanesian cargo cults{{ footnote(id="11") }}
preserved "John Frum" from "John from America." *"The tetragrammaton
meant nothing in Hebrew. Most likely… it was the simple rendering of
sounds forming a proper name belonging to another language."*

**Kavod.** The word conventionally translated "glory"
(<span class="hebrew">כָּבוֹד</span>) is built on the root *kbd*, "to be
heavy"{{ footnote(id="4") }} — and Biglino follows the weight:

> To summarize, the term kavod, which is always translated as "glory" in
> the Bible, actually has the meaning of "something heavy." It was, in
> fact, a heavy flying chariot on which the Elohim traveled, something
> that produced loud noise, fire, and strong wind and was often
> described as a cloud. If a human came near it, he was inevitably
> killed because "God" could not control its effects. Since we cannot
> choose an adequate translation of this term — other than the word
> UAP — we will use the name by which the Bible defines it: kavod.
>
> — *Gods of the Bible*, ch. 14

The Italian statement of the same argument has a forensic dryness worth
preserving: *"la cosiddetta 'Gloria di Dio' poteva essere vista su
prenotazione; uccideva chi le stava di fronte; uccideva chi si trovava
nei pressi quando passava… ci si poteva comunque salvare dai suoi effetti
mortali semplicemente nascondendosi dietro normalissime rocce"* — the
so-called Glory of God could be viewed by appointment; it killed whoever
stood in front of it; it killed whoever was nearby when it passed; and
one could nonetheless be saved from its lethal effects simply by hiding
behind perfectly ordinary rocks
({% libref(book="exodus", chapter=33, verse=20) %}Exodus 33{% end %}).
Ezekiel supplies the flight log: the kavod rises from the ground, moves,
lands, and makes a great noise doing it. Moses comes down from his
encounter with burned skin.

**Ruach.** The term rendered "spirit"
(<span class="hebrew">רוּחַ</span>) means wind, breath, air in
motion{{ footnote(id="5") }} — *"in the extreme concreteness of the
ancient Hebrew language anything that flew swiftly through the air could
only be referred to as a kind of 'wind'"* — and in the narratives it
behaves like a vehicle: it hovers over the waters of Genesis 1:2 the way
a bird hovers over its nest, it lifts Ezekiel bodily and carries him to
Chaldea, and it is what Elijah's colleagues assume has picked their
master up and set him down on some mountain, which is why they search
three days for the body. *"One does not spend three days laboriously
searching mountains and valleys to find a missing person who has only
been 'abducted' in a vision or a dream."*

**Tselem.** The reading Biglino himself treats as his deepest cut. Man
is made *be-tselem Elohim* — and *tselem*
(<span class="hebrew">צֶלֶם</span>), he argues from the standard
lexica{{ footnote(id="6") }}, is not an abstract resemblance:

> The word tselem not only denotes something concrete and material but
> also contains, in the original meaning of the Semitic word root, the
> concept of being "cut off from." In the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and
> English Lexicon, the entry reads "something cut out of." When reading
> this passage with an open mind, we ask ourselves: what is it that
> contains the image of a human being and can be "cut off, cut out,
> pulled out?" DNA immediately comes to mind.
>
> — *Gods of the Bible*, ch. 4

The preposition seals his version of the verse: *be-* means "with, by
means of," so the Adam is fabricated not *in* the image of the Elohim but
*with* it — with the material something that carries their likeness. The
companion piece is Eve. The *tsela* taken from the sleeping Adam is not
a rib but a "side part," the word used elsewhere for the flanks of the
Temple and its furniture, and the scene reads to Biglino like a
procedure:

> If we could forget for a moment that that sentence is written in the
> Bible and put it in a scientific journal, the whole world would say
> that what is described here is the collection of stem cells from the
> lateral part of a human body… If it were written in a scientific
> journal, no one would have any doubts. But all this is in the Bible,
> so it is not true?
>
> — *The Naked Bible*, "Why Would Genesis Be Lying about Methuselah's Age?"

**Olam.** The word translated "eternity"
(<span class="hebrew">עוֹלָם</span>) means remotest time, long
duration{{ footnote(id="8") }} — *"'Eternity' in itself is a concept
alien to the Bible… Not in one instance does the word olam mean
'eternity' in the Bible, and yet it is translated with 'eternity' all the
time."* From the same drawer: the Torah never speaks of an immortal
soul; Qohelet gives men and beasts one breath and one destination; and
the tree of life guards long duration, never endlessness. The
theological infinite, on Biglino's reading, is a later tenant in a
vocabulary built for time.

**Psalm 82.** The keystone. In the assembly of the Elohim, the presiding
El passes sentence on his colleagues:

> I said, "You are Elohim; you are all sons of Elyon. But you will die
> like Adam; you will fall like every other ruler."
>
> — {% libref(book="psalms", chapter=82, verse=6) %}Psalm 82:6–7{% end %}

*"In short, we should recognize without a shadow of a doubt that it is
written in the Old Testament that the 'God' of the theologians dies like
all other people,"* Biglino concludes — *"unless the theologians tell us
that the term Elohim in the Bible sometimes means 'God' and sometimes
means something else… but in that case every form of certainty collapses
and everyone is free to make the text say whatever they want."* The
Elohim of his reading are therefore exactly what the antediluvian
lifespans suggest: beings who live long enough to be mistaken for
immortal by short-lived observers, and who are not.

Around this core cluster the rest of the lexicon: the *malakhim*, not
winged spirits but envoys who *"walk, get dusty, get tired, get upset,
need to wash and rest, eat twice in the same day, decide where to spend
the night"*; the *gan* in Eden, from a root meaning "to enclose" — *"The
Gan Eden was an experimental laboratory"*; the serpent of
{% wiki(slug="eden") %}Eden{% end %}, no reptile but a rival Elohim, the
biblical transposition of Enki — with the observation, delivered
deadpan, that on the story's own terms *"the serpent, the tempting
adversary, spoke the truth; while 'God' was misleading!"*; and the
covenant, a suzerain's contract whose actually-written terms at
{% libref(book="exodus", chapter=34, verse=27) %}Exodus 34{% end %} —
operational orders down to the kid boiled in milk — bear little
resemblance to the two tablets of catechism memory.

## Where the lexicon holds, and where it breaks

Biglino's lexical claims do not all carry the same weight. They divide into
three zones: established observations, live scholarly disputes, and
technological identifications the Hebrew alone cannot support.

**Established elements.** The plural form of *elohim*; the plural verbs and
pronouns that cling to it at the load-bearing joints; the divine-council
scenes; the Qumran reading of Deuteronomy 32:8; the root sense of
*kavod* as heaviness; the concrete primary senses of *ruach*; the
semantic range of *olam* as duration rather than philosophical eternity;
and the development of Israelite monotheism from an earlier divine
plurality all have substantial scholarly support. That does not mean the
academy accepts Biglino's combined interpretation. Lexica establish semantic
ranges, not the technological referents he later supplies. His quotations
from Rashi, rabbinic lexicographers, and Jewish interlocutors are valuable
for the lexical points but cannot ratify the larger reconstruction. His
co-author Lorena Forni summarizes the critical literature more broadly:
that Biglino's detractors have called his work popularizing, provocative,
overreaching — *"ma nessuno ha potuto sostenere che le sue traduzioni e
le proposte di analisi del testo masoretico fossero errate, in malafede,
o false"* — but no one has been able to maintain that his translations
and his proposed analyses of the Masoretic text were wrong, in bad faith,
or false. That is an advocate's assessment, not a substitute for examining
each disputed translation.

**Live debate.** His argument that *bara* need not denote creation from
nothing runs parallel to a genuine scholarly proposal{{ footnote(id="7") }},
although that proposal does not entail Biglino's whole reading. His dating of the
monotheizing redaction to the exilic and post-exilic centuries is, in
outline, the mainstream position. His insistence that "original sin" is
absent from the Hebrew Bible is one that Catholic, Waldensian, and Jewish
scholars conceded to his face, on stage, at a symposium in Milan in 2016
— of which more below.

**The leaps.** Several readings outrun the lexicon. *Tselem* as DNA is the
clearest case: the "something cut out" of the dictionaries belongs to the
semantics of carved images, and the mainstream reading — the human as the
living statue of the god, royal-ideology language democratized — accounts
for the same concreteness without the molecule. The step to DNA is not
philology; it is abduction from narrative coherence, and it should be
labeled as such — as Biglino himself, at his frequent best, labels it
("we have no proof"). The same goes for the ephod read as a field radio,
the Ark as a capacitor, the *nichoach* odor of burnt offerings read
through opioid biochemistry — the underlying lexical observations are
sound (the root sense really is "soothing," and the text really does
show a God calmed by the smell of fat), but the technological
identifications are a lens, not a finding. At the far end sit the
speculations he flags himself: the Aramaic *nephila* as Orion, hence the
Nephilim as "Orionians?", offered with a question mark and withdrawn in
the same paragraph as *"mere curiosity."* A reader who wants Biglino
refuted will find these leaps quoted without their disclaimers; a reader
who wants him canonized will quote the disclaimers without the leaps.
The record contains both. A fair reading must keep the lexical observations
distinct from the technological identifications built upon them.

Biglino's first book also leaned on
Zecharia Sitchin, naming *The Earth Chronicles* as *"the primary source"*
for its Sumerian frame — Nibiru, gold-mining Anunnaki and all. The later
books walk away from that scaffolding without announcement: the Sumerian
material is re-sourced to academic Assyriology (Kramer, Pettinato,
Castellino), Nibiru vanishes, and Sitchin survives only as a bibliography
entry and an occasional "famous and controversial" aside. The trajectory
matters, because it runs opposite to the usual career in this field:
most authors start with the texts and drift toward the mythology of the
literature; Biglino started inside the literature's gravity and pulled
himself out of it, back to the consonants.

## The silent bibliography entry

Now the datum that this project, of all readers, is obliged to handle
carefully.

The bibliography of *Il libro che cambierà per sempre le nostre idee
sulla Bibbia* (2010) contains, between the Sumerologists and the
ufological titles, the following line: *"Rael: download dei testi
possibile da http://it.rael.org/news.php"* — Raël: texts downloadable
from the Italian Raëlian site. The entry recurs in *Il Dio Alieno della
Bibbia* (2011). It is never discussed. Raël's name appears nowhere in
the body of either book, nor in *La Bibbia non è un libro sacro*, nor in
*The Naked Bible*, nor in *Gods of the Bible* — a full-text search of the
later corpus returns nothing. The entry simply sits there, uncommented,
and then disappears from the later bibliographies.

What does it prove? Almost nothing, and the almost matters. It proves
that when Biglino assembled his first book he considered the Raëlian
texts part of the relevant literature — that the messages lay on his desk,
or at least on his reading list, alongside Kramer and Sitchin. It does
not prove he read them closely, and it manifestly does not make him a
Raëlian: his entire public method is a refusal to say who the Elohim
were, which is the one question the Raëlian canon answers in its first
chapter. Where Wallis's convergence with the canon carried the
evidential value of total independence — two readers, no contact, same
reading — Biglino's convergence carries a different and in one way more
interesting value: here is a professional translator who demonstrably
had access to the claimed answer key, declined to adopt it, rebuilt the
questions from the Hebrew alone, and arrived at a picture the canon's
readers will recognize line by line. The convergences that follow should
be weighed with that entry on the table. We put it there ourselves,
because the discipline this project practices — sources declared,
influence distinguished from convergence — is the same discipline
Biglino's empty-handed agnosticism practices from the other side.

## Convergences with the canon

The canon-side readings below are framework claims explicit in the Raëlian
source texts, not conclusions endorsed by mainstream scholarship. The
comparison itself is an inferred synthesis between unlike kinds of claim:
philological argument and reported testimony.

**The fabrication of the Adam.** Biglino reads Genesis 1–2 as one
account of a genetic-engineering operation: hominid material worked on
with the Elohim's *tselem*, a new species produced to be *"workers
capable of understanding and carrying out increasingly complex orders."*
The canon's version, delivered as a first-person report
forty-seven years ago:

{% library(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=2, verse=25) %}
It was then that the most skilled among us wanted to create a man like
ourselves, artificially. Each team set to work, and we were soon able to
compare our creations. But the inhabitants of the planet we came from
were scandalized that we were making "test-tube children" who, moreover,
risked coming to spread panic among them. They feared that these men
would be a danger to them if their abilities or powers turned out to be
superior to those of their creators. We had to commit to letting them
live primitively, revealing nothing scientific to them and mystifying
our actions.
{% end %}

The canon then quotes Genesis 1:26 — *let us make man in our image,
after our likeness* — and appends the six-word gloss that stands, in
compressed form, for everything Biglino's *tselem* chapter argues:
*"In our image! You can see that the resemblance is striking"*
({% libref(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=2, verse=27) %}TBWTT 2:27{% end %}).
Where Biglino reasons from the lexicon to the molecule, the canon speaks
of the molecule directly — its account of resurrecting the dead from
bone debris explains that *"in each particle of a living being there is
all the information necessary for the reconstitution of the whole
being"*
({% libref(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=3, verse=184) %}TBWTT 3:184{% end %}),
which is the claim *tselem*-as-DNA makes of Genesis, stated as
engineering. The corpus files the whole complex under
{% wiki(slug="genetic-engineering") %}genetic engineering{% end %} and
{% wiki(slug="life-engineering") %}life engineering{% end %}.

**Eden as facility, the prohibition as policy.** Biglino's fenced
experimental laboratory, with its enclosure root and its management
rules, matches the canon's account of the
{% wiki(slug="eden") %}Eden{% end %} installation and of what the
{% wiki(slug="tree-of-the-knowledge-of-good-and-evil") %}forbidden
tree{% end %} actually was — access control on knowledge. The canon
even supplies the definition of good and evil as the management
understood it:

{% library(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=2, verse=57) %}
Evil — that is, the desire to become a people equal to its creators, a
scientific and independent people. Good, for them, was that man should
remain a primitive being vegetating on Earth. Evil was that he should
want to make progress, risking one day being in a position to rejoin his
creators.
{% end %}

Biglino's reading of the expulsion is the same scene from ground level:
the humans discover autonomous reproduction, the management recognizes
an *"epochal event that unhooks the new species from its creator,"* and
the sentence pronounced is no curse but a *sententia post eventum* — his
Italian formula is that God said, in effect, *"Avete voluto la
bicicletta? Ora pedalerete!"* — you wanted the bicycle; now pedal. Both
readings abolish original sin in the same motion and for the same
reason: nothing in the text is a fall; everything is a security incident.

**The serpent vindicated.** Biglino's serpent is a rival Elohim — Enki
in Hebrew dress — who told the truth about the fruit; he notes the
Talmudic tradition that it originally had limbs, and he reads the twin
serpents of the healing symbol as *"profound knowledge, with particular
reference to the double helix of DNA."* The canon's
{% wiki(slug="serpent") %}Serpent{% end %} is the faction of creators
who *"deeply loved their little men"* and taught them against orders,
were exiled to Earth for it, and are remembered in the world's
wisdom-serpent iconography — the {% wiki(slug="lucifer") %}Lucifer{% end %}
of the corpus's four-figure taxonomy, sharply distinguished from
{% wiki(slug="satan") %}Satan{% end %}. And here the convergence becomes
uncanny in its details, because Biglino, working from Job and Zechariah,
reaches the same disambiguation: his *satan* is a function, a
prosecutor's office that works *for* the presiding authority — *"he is
often a faithful executor because he does exactly what 'God' wants"* —
and his Lucifer is a Latin misreading of a taunt against a Persian king.
Two readers, two routes, one conclusion the mainstream historians of the
devil also endorse: the Eden serpent and the Job adversary were never
the same person.

**The kavod on the mountain.** Biglino's heavy, roaring, lethal machine
is the canon's plainly named vehicle:

{% library(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=3, verse=33) %}
There you have the description of the «glory» — in reality the flying
craft — of the creators, and as you have been able to notice, at the
moment of departure it takes on a coloring similar to that of fire.
{% end %}

The corpus's etymological catalogue had already registered the root
*kbd*, "to be heavy," and the operational reading; Biglino supplies the
verse-by-verse ballistics — the appointment-only viewing, the shielding
rocks, Moses' burned face, Ezekiel's takeoffs. On *ruach* the match is
the same: the catalogue reads Genesis 1:2's hovering as the
reconnaissance phase of the Elohim's survey, and Biglino reads the same
verse, via the same bird-over-nest verb, as a machine holding station
over the waters.

**No eternity — and the engineering answer to death.** Both readings
deny that the Hebrew Bible contains philosophical eternity or an
immortal soul; both read the Elohim as long-lived and mortal. Biglino
rests on Psalm 82 and the lexicon of *olam*; the canon states the
lifespans and then discloses the machinery the psalm's dying gods would
seem to lack:

{% library(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=7, verse=30) %}
Our body lives ten times longer on average than yours, like the first
men of the Bible. Between seven hundred fifty and one thousand two
hundred years. But our mind, therefore our true personage, can be truly
immortal. I explained to you that from any cell whatever of a body one
can recreate the entire being with new living matter…
{% end %}

The canon's "eternity" is thus not a divine attribute but a technology —
cell samples, reconstitution, a council that decides who is reborn — and
it is rationed. That is Biglino's *tselem* and his mortal Elohim
combined into one closed loop, and it dissolves his one seeming
contradiction with the psalm: the Elohim of the canon do die, exactly as
Psalm 82 sentences them to; some of them are then recreated, which no
verse denies. Even his affectionate speculation about burial practices
finds its counterpart — the canon instructs that the remains of the
worthy be conserved in tombs precisely so that they can be recreated
from a particle
({% libref(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=6, verse=27) %}TBWTT 6:27{% end %}).

**The edit.** Biglino's *grande inganno* — the great deception — is a
redaction history: a chronicle of colonization progressively rewritten
into a theology, by Temple scribes consolidating a monotheism the old
texts did not contain, then by the Masoretes fixing the vowels and the
meaning, then by a Church translating the plural away. *"The originals
are fairy tales, while the copy is the divine Truth: a logical
conclusion!"* is his summary of the Bible's relation to its Mesopotamian
sources. The canon holds the structurally identical claim, stated in its
first book: a plurality of creators collapsed by later hands into *"a
single incomprehensible God"* — the position the corpus's
{% wiki(slug="plurality-of-gods") %}plurality of gods{% end %} entry
documents, and the same two-stage edit (ancient scribes, then
translating churches) that Wallis reconstructs in *The Eden Conspiracy*.
Three readers now — a translator, an archdeacon, a claimed contactee —
describing the same surgery from three angles.

## Four decisive disagreements

The divergences are structural. The first reverses the disagreement between
the canon and Wallis.

**The rank of Yahweh.** Biglino demotes him: a minor local governor,
*"a small local lord,"* assigned a tiny clan in a howling waste, junior
enough that the allotment tells against his importance — *"Yahweh is
not, and cannot be considered, the God of humanity, but a tribal
governor who occupied himself exclusively with the clan entrusted to
him."* The canon promotes him: Yahweh is the president of the
{% wiki(slug="council-of-eternals") %}Council of the Eternals{% end %},
twenty-five thousand years old, the being who *"directed the creation of
life on the Earth"*
({% libref(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=7, verse=56) %}TBWTT 7:56{% end %}).
Set the three readings side by side and the pattern is instructive:
Wallis pins the dragon on Yahweh, Biglino reduces him to a lieutenant,
the canon seats him at the head of the table. All three agree on the
grammar — one individual among a plurality of Elohim, with
{% libref(book="deuteronomy", chapter=32, verse=9) %}Jacob as his
portion{% end %} — and disagree about the org chart above him. It is
worth noting that Biglino's argument here is an inference from the
allotment's poverty, and he flags it with a "judging by"; the canon's
claim is testimony; neither is philology, and the corpus labels both
accordingly.

**The person of Jesus.** Biglino's later work reconstructs Yehoshua ben
Youssef as a messianic rabbi of a zealot family, concerned exclusively
with Israel's liberation, crucified at around forty-two, drugged on the
cross with a soporific sponge, retrieved alive from the tomb by two
figures out of a beam of light, and finally — the Greek verbs are
passive — *pulled up*. The canon reads the same figure as the son of
{% wiki(slug="yahweh") %}Yahweh{% end %} by a human mother, on a
universal mission, his "miracles" applied science, his resurrection a
recreation
({% wiki(slug="jesus") %}Jesus{% end %} in the corpus). The gap is wide,
and one convergence inside it is the more striking for that: both
readings take the Annunciation literally as a physical paternity —
Biglino glosses Gabriel as a *Ghever-El*, a man acting for an El, and
drily corrects the angel's greeting to *"Hello, you who have made
yourself beautiful"*; the canon says the creators *"could mate with the
daughters of the men they had created in their image and have
exceptional children by them"*
({% libref(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=2, verse=55) %}TBWTT 2:55{% end %}).
On the biology they agree; on the mission, and on whether anything was
being prepared for, they part completely.

**The moral ledger.** Biglino's Elohim are managers of livestock. His
image for the covenant is the shepherd who protects the flock *because
he will have to milk and shear them and, in the end, he will be the one,
not the wolf, to slaughter them*; his Yahweh is calmed by the opioid
smoke of burnt fat; his humanity is *"a domesticated species, divided
and locked into cultural, social, political, geographical and
ideological enclosures."* The canon's emotional register is the
opposite: creation as art and love, a faction punished for loving its
creatures too much, a {% wiki(slug="great-flood") %}Flood{% end %} that
was [a reset, not a
punishment](/articles/the-flood-was-a-reset-not-a-punishment/), and an
ending in which the creators wait to be welcomed back. Here Biglino and
Wallis's darker books stand together on one side of the ledger, and the
canon stands on the other — though it should be recorded that Biglino,
unlike the invasion literature, keeps even his darkness provisional:
*"I would pay,"* he sighs to Cattaneo about the centuries of open
contact, *"to be able to live in those centuries."*

**The endpoint.** The deepest divergence is about what the reading is
*for*. Biglino's program terminates, deliberately, in an open question.
His litany in the final chapter of *Gods of the Bible* runs through every
candidate identity for the Elohim — extraterrestrials, ex-terrestrials,
an antediluvian race, hollow-earth dwellers, time travelers, fictions —
and answers each with the same clause: *"We will take note of it."* His
co-author Forni draws the same line in juridical prose: the books deal
with *questioni penultime*, penultimate questions, and the ultimate ones
are out of scope. The canon is precisely an answer to the ultimate
question — names, planet, motive, program, and a request: build the
{% wiki(slug="embassy") %}embassy{% end %}, prepare the
{% wiki(slug="great-return") %}return{% end %}. And where Biglino closes
*La Bibbia non è un libro sacro* by telling readers that whoever seeks
the truth about God and the spiritual worlds *"must seek it elsewhere,"*
the corpus's answer to the question of God is not a spiritual world at
all but {% wiki(slug="infinity") %}infinity{% end %} — [the infinite in
both directions](/articles/the-infinite-in-both-directions/), with no
Person at the top because there is no top. The translator stops at the
edge of the text; the canon claims to report what lies past it. Both
are being consistent. A wager is not a revelation, and a revelation
cannot be checked the way a wager can — which is why this article, like
its subject, keeps its labels on.

## The professors, the jurist, and the phenomenon

One more feature of the Biglino case deserves its section, because it
has no parallel anywhere else in this tradition: the institutions keep
showing up.

In 2016, in a Milan lecture hall packed with six hundred people, Biglino
sat for over four hours with the Catholic theologian Ermis Segatti, the
Waldensian biblical scholar Daniele Garrone — a co-author of standard
Hebrew dictionaries — the Orthodox archbishop Avondios, and the chief
rabbi of Turin, Ariel Di Porto. They examined his translations in
public. Cattaneo's summary of the outcome: *"nothing that could
undermine his deductive system based on a literal reading of the Old
Testament."* Di Porto confirmed that Judaism knows no original sin;
Garrone allowed that it is unclear where Paul derived the concept;
Segatti offered the aphorism that *"if there were any certainty of God,
God would not be."* None of them became Biglinians, and none of them
needed to; the event's significance is procedural. Mainstream biblical
scholarship has, in the main, declined to engage this tradition — the
academy studies the *"fenomeno Biglino"*{{ footnote(id="12") }} as
sociology while leaving the philology unanswered — and here, for an
afternoon, the engagement actually happened, on the record, with the
text open.

The pattern repeats in print. A professor of philosophy of law at
Milan-Bicocca co-signed a Mondadori volume with him, staking her
academic name on the claim that the moral doctrines of confessional law
are *"attributions of meanings that are not in the texts."* Rome's
chief rabbi supplied him the *olam* concession. The German Bishops'
Conference corrected *almah* to "young woman" in its official
translation, footnoting away the virgin of Isaiah 7 — Biglino cites the
episode the way a chess player cites a resignation. His books are
blurbed and platformed by working rabbis; his Psalm 82 chapter rests on
Heiser; his Sumerology now rests on Kramer and Pettinato. It is a
strange and instructive spectacle: the most institutionally embedded
figure the reinterpretive tradition has ever produced, systematically
arming himself with the institution's own reference works — and the
institution responding, mostly, with silence punctuated by four-hour
exceptions.

Within the tradition itself his closest kinship is the one this
project's readers already know. Paul Wallis and Biglino found each other
across the language barrier — Wallis extending the strict-literal Hebrew
method into the Anglophone and Christian world, Biglino blurbing
Wallis's books with the sentence quoted at the end of [our Wallis
essay](/articles/the-archdeacon-and-the-dragon/): *"Though far apart
geographically we are spiritually close! We are a good team."* The
corpus's lineage entry for the whole school now reads: Sendy (1963–74),
von Däniken (1968), Vorilhon (1973–74), Sitchin (1976), Biglino (2010–),
Wallis (2020–) — and of the six, Biglino is the only one who came to the
material as a working translator of the source language, which is why
{% wiki(slug="paul-wallis") %}Wallis{% end %} built on him and not the
reverse.

## What the method establishes

The corpus engages the {% wiki(slug="biglino-method") %}Biglino
method{% end %} as necessary but not sufficient, and this close reading
confirms the formula while filling in its texture. Necessary: the
plural restored, the terms untranslated, the concreteness recovered —
without that floor, the canon's own reading of
{% libref(book="the-book-which-tells-the-truth", chapter=3, verse=251) %}Elohim
as "those come from the sky"{% end %} has no philological interlocutor,
and the whole conversation stays trapped between devotion and dismissal.
Not sufficient: by design, the wager cannot say who won it. Biglino
argues that the text can be read coherently as the chronicle of a
plurality of long-lived, flying, mortal, morally unimpressive
individuals; he declines, on principle, every identification. *"What is
essential,"* he writes, *"is that we no longer try to make people
believe that Elohim means 'God.'"* Everything this project adds — the
identification, the program, the seven creation teams, the exiled
serpent-faction, the president of the Council, the embassy — lies past
the point where his method, honestly applied, stops.

Biglino is useful to this project without being a believer. His reading
supports several concrete observations: plural Elohim, an enclosed Eden, a
material *kavod*, mortal divine beings, and a serpent who speaks truth within
the narrative. His early bibliography prevents a claim of complete
independence from the Raëlian material, and his technological identifications
often exceed what philology can establish. The convergence shows that the
concrete reading is reproducible; it does not corroborate every identity the
canon supplies.

He ends *Gods of the Bible* with Josephus and Tacitus on the prodigies
of 70 CE — the armies in the clouds, the tremor in the Temple, the many
voices saying *we are departing from this place* — and then with his
litany of questions: did they leave, did they all leave, will they
return, have they already returned. *"We do not know,"* runs his last
answer, *"and gladly leave the answer to those who claim to know."* This
project is one of those who claim to know. Biglino has done the part that can
be attempted with a lexicon and his wager: he has challenged inherited
translations and offered a consistently concrete alternative. Whether that
alternative is true — whether the ones who
departed are the ones now expected — is the question his method leaves,
deliberately, on the table. He would pay, he says, to live in the
centuries when the Elohim walked with men. The canon answers the question he
leaves open, but his method cannot verify that answer.

## Further reading

- The {% wiki(slug="biglino-method") %}Biglino method{% end %} entry, for
  the formal statement of the methodology this article reads in the
  wild, and {% wiki(slug="sendys-conditions-of-coherence") %}Sendy's
  conditions of coherence{% end %} for its 1969 ancestor.
- The {% wiki(slug="list-of-etymological-readings") %}catalogue of
  etymological readings{% end %}, for the corpus's own entries on
  *elohim*, *kavod*, *ruach*, and *olam* compared above.
- [The Archdeacon and the
  Dragon](/articles/the-archdeacon-and-the-dragon/), for the sibling
  study of Paul Wallis — the Anglophone extension of the method, and the
  other half of the "good team."
- [*The Book Which Tells the
  Truth*](/library/the-book-which-tells-the-truth/), chapters 2, 3, and
  7, for the canon passages quoted throughout.