IS THE BIBLE AN ACCURATE RECORD OF HISTORY?
There has been much debate amongst scholars regarding the accuracy of the Bible. There are those who take it literally, those who see it as an embellished historical record and those who are uncertain. Yet, research has validated many of its writings. Of course, people recorded events as they best understood them with their limited knowledge of the natural world. One incredible story relates to the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar II, the King of Babylon who destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC, for which he was condemned to live with the beasts and eat grass like the oxen for seven years. Professor Tom Meyer of the Shasta Bible College and Graduate School in California, says that the story may be true. The King may have suffered from a now described psychiatric condition called boanthropy, in which a person has the delusion that he or she is a cow or an ox. These people eat grass and drink from puddles, as described by Dr Raymond Harrison in 1946. [Illustration: William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar, from Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793]