Malevolent Designer News - How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

Malevolent Designer News

How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

The toilet seat from the estate at Armon ha-Natziv. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century.

Credit: Ya’akov Billig

Early toilets reveal dysentery in Old Testament Jerusalem | University of Cambridge

Giardia duodenalis

Any caring, omni-benevolent, omniscient god would have warned his chosen people about the need for good hygiene in the form of sanitation and the importance of hand-washing, because it would have told them about germ theory and how to avoid catching the parasites it had designed to cause, amongst other things, debilitating diarrhoea.

But not so the god of the Old Testament.

The evidence just discovered by scientists working at Cambridge University, in collaboration with colleagues at Tel Aviv University, with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority, is that a particularly nasty parasite, Giardia duodenalis, which causes an intractable form of dysentery, was rife in Iron Age Judah.

There is, of course, no mention of this in the Bible, not any hint about how to avoid it with good hygiene and sanitation. It's just like the authors of the Bible were as ignorant as the Late Bronze age/Early Iron age people who lived in Judea at the time. There are extra-biblical Babylonian references to diarrhoea affecting the populations of what is now the Near and Middle East. One example reads: “If a person eats bread and drinks beer and subsequently his stomach is colicky, he has cramps and has a flowing of the bowels, setu has gotten him". The cuneiform word often used in these texts to describe diarrhoea was sà si-sá.

Some texts also included recommended incantations to increase the chances of recovery, showing that they believed magic spells would help control the cause.

But if we listen to the childish fantasies of creationists, we should conclude that this was deliberate, because an omniscient creator would know precisely what the microorganisms it designs will do and creates them for that purpose. Leaving humans ignorant was all part of the plan to allow the parasites to make them suffer, apparently.

How did the Cambridge-led scientists make this discovery? A press release gives the details:

Study of 2,500-year-old latrines from the biblical Kingdom of Judah shows the ancient faeces within contain Giardia – a parasite that can cause dysentery.

The fact that these parasites were present in sediment from two Iron Age Jerusalem cesspits suggests that dysentery was endemic in the Kingdom of Judah.

Dysentery is a term that describes intestinal infectious diseases caused by parasites and bacteria that trigger diarrhoea, abdominal cramps, fever and dehydration. It can be fatal, particularly for young children.

Dysentery is spread by faeces contaminating drinking water or food, and we suspected it could have been a big problem in early cities of the ancient Near East due to over-crowding, heat and flies, and limited water available in the summer.

These early written sources do not provide causes of diarrhoea, but they encourage us to apply modern techniques to investigate which pathogens might have been involved. We know for sure that Giardia was one of those infections responsible

Toilets with cesspits from this time are relatively rare and were usually made only for the elite.

Dr Piers Mitchell Lead author, Department of Archaeology.
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, USA

A new analysis of ancient faeces taken from two Jerusalem latrines dating back to the biblical Kingdom of Judah has uncovered traces of a single-celled microorganism Giardia duodenalis – a common cause of debilitating diarrhoea in humans.

A research team led by the University of Cambridge say it is the oldest example we have of this diarrhoea-causing parasite infecting humans anywhere on the planet. The study is published in the journal Parasitology.

The faecal samples came from the sediment underneath toilets found in two building complexes excavated to the south of the Old City, which date back to the 7th century BCE when Jerusalem was a capital of Judah.


During this time, Judah was a vassal state under the control of the Assyrian Empire, which at its height stretched from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, incorporating much of modern-day Iran and Iraq. Jerusalem would have been a flourishing political and religious hub estimated to have had between 8,000 and 25,000 residents.

Both toilets had carved stone seats almost identical in design: a shallow curved surface for sitting, with a large central hole for defecation and an adjacent hole at the front for male urination. “,” said Mitchell.

One was from a lavishly decorated estate at Armon ha-Natziv, surrounded by an ornamental garden. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century.

The site of the other toilet, known as the House of Ahiel, was a domestic building made up of seven rooms, housing an upper-class family at the time. Date of construction is hard to pin down, with some placing it around the 8th century BCE.

However, its destruction is safely dated to 586 BCE, when Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II brutally sacked Jerusalem for a second time after its citizens refused to pay their agreed tribute, bringing to an end the Kingdom of Judah.

Ancient medical texts from Mesopotamia during the first and second millennium BCE describe diarrhoea affecting the populations of what is now the Near and Middle East. One example reads: “If a person eats bread and drinks beer and subsequently his stomach is colicky, he has cramps and has a flowing of the bowels, setu has gotten him”.

The cuneiform word often used in these texts to describe diarrhoea was sà si-sá. Some texts also included recommended incantations for reciting to increase the chances of recovery.

Unlike the eggs of other intestinal parasites, the protozoa that cause dysentery are fragile and extremely hard to detect in ancient samples through microscopes without using antibodies.

Tianyi Wang, co-author
Department of Archaeology
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

The team investigated the two-and-a-half-thousand year-old decomposed biblical period faeces by applying a bio-molecular technique called “ELISA”, in which antibodies bind onto the proteins uniquely produced by particular species of single-celled organisms.

The researchers tested for Entamoeba, Giardia and Cryptosporidium: three parasitic microorganisms that are among the most common causes of diarrhoea in humans, and behind outbreaks of dysentery. Tests for Entamoeba and Cryptosporidium were negative, but those for Giardia were repeatedly positive.

Previous research has dated traces of the Entamoeba parasite, which also causes dysentery, as far back as Neolithic Greece over 4,000 years ago. Previous work has also shown that users of ancient Judean toilets were infected by other intestinal parasites including whipworm, tapeworm and pinworm.

More information is given in the abstract to the team's paper in Parasitology:

Graphical Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine if the protozoa that cause dysentery might have been present in Jerusalem, the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, during the Iron Age. Sediments from 2 latrines pertaining to this time period were obtained, 1 dating from the 7th century BCE and another from the 7th to early 6th century BCE. Microscopic investigations have previously shown that the users were infected by whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), Taenia sp. tapeworm and pinworm (Enterobius vermicularis). However, the protozoa that cause dysentery are fragile and do not survive well in ancient samples in a form recognizable using light microscopy. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kits designed to detect the antigens of Entamoeba histolytica, Cryptosporidium sp. and Giardia duodenalis were used. Results for Entamoeba and Cryptosporidium were negative, while Giardia was positive for both latrine sediments when the analysis was repeated three times. This provides our first microbiological evidence for infective diarrhoeal illnesses that would have affected the populations of the ancient near east. When we integrate descriptions from 2nd and 1st millennium BCE Mesopotamian medical texts, it seems likely that outbreaks of dysentery due to giardiasis may have caused ill health throughout early towns across the region.

In those days, people were as ignorant of germ theory and microbiology as they were about evolution, cosmology, electricity, geology and meteorology, so filled the gaps in their knowledge with stories and magic, so, not surprisingly, their origin myths and campfire tales they wrote down for their children reflected that ignorance and low-level understanding of the world about them.

The amazing thing is that there are adults alive today who believe these simple people knew more than the best scientists working today. The same fools would have us believe that a magic malevolence made parasites like Giardia duodenalis and kept us ignorant of them and how to reduce the suffering they cause because it loves us.

If the Bible were discovered for the first time today, we could date its origins accurately by the scientific ignorance in it.

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