The Warped Lens of Now - How We Misread History and Why it Matters

Which image is correct?

I'm not just a fan of the speculative future—I'm a student of the ancient past. Because it is the past that teaches us… if we have the courage and patience to let it.

This stands in stark contrast to the arrogance of youth, which struggles to grasp its own existence in the vastness of the present. To the child-like mind, it is the center of the world—one that will bend to its will.

Most of us grow up when we realize the world is as unyielding as it is uncaring. The more willing we are to learn from the past, the smoother that transition into adulthood becomes. But even with courage and patience, learning from history is hard. It demands more than uncovering the what—we must also understand the why. And to do that, we can’t cherry-pick the parts that support our theories or reinforce our assumptions.

Unfortunately—and especially today—that practice has become the norm. It has a name: Presentism—the tendency to judge history by modern sensibilities rather than through the context of its own time.

But it doesn’t stop with history. In fact, it doesn’t stop anywhere.

Call it confirmation bias, if you like.

Our brains seek consistency. (Cognitive dissonance reduction.)

• The ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates emotion and decision-making.

• The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex helps us rationalize or suppress conflicting information.

• When we’re confronted with contradiction, the amygdala—our fear center—fires up, making us defensive.

• The anterior cingulate cortex and parietal cortex filter what we focus on—often skewing attention toward the familiar.

• And the nucleus accumbens, part of our dopamine pathway, lights up when we’re told we’re right.

  
  

Confirmation feels good. Literally.

But this blog isn’t about biology.Or even the nature of knowing.

It’s about how the same drive for sameness shapes how we read—and often misread—ancient texts.

American English is a fascinating language—born of a melting pot, shaped by centuries of assimilation. French, Greek, German, Italian, Spanish—who knows how many tongues have left their mark?

This linguistic fusion gave us an abundance of words, allowing us to communicate with scalpel-like precision, and we’ve grown so accustomed to this level of specificity that we assume ancient languages worked the same way—prescriptive, nuanced, exact.

But they didn’t.

Modern American English is a language obsessed with clarity.We rely on strict word order, a massive vocabulary, and grammatical markers to lock down meaning. Every sentence is a contract. Every verb tagged to a tense. Every noun labeled and sorted.

Old Testament Hebrew couldn’t be more different.

It’s compact, fluid, and imagistic—built on root words that bloom into layers of meaning depending on context. Word order is flexible. Tense isn’t linear—it’s aspectual. It’s not about when something happened, but whether it’s complete.

And the original texts?

No vowels. No punctuation. No spaces between words.

Reading it wasn’t decoding syntax.It was wrestling meaning from metaphor, rhythm, and communal memory.

Take a sentence like “The cow walked into the field.”In English, it’s clear and direct. In biblical Hebrew, a similar phrase might instead evoke:

• A sacrificial journey

• A metaphor for Israel entering a place of testing or provision

• An echo of Eden, or a foreshadowing of exile

This matters.

The Bible—and many other ancient texts—is full of encounters with beings of immense size, power, and mystery. They appear and disappear in smoke, fire, and flashing metal.

Ever read Ezekiel? It’s not subtle.

Today, most people would call such beings aliens.But for an ancient Hebrew—living in a culture steeped in metaphor and bound to a language that was imagistic, contextual, and deeply communal—what word would you choose?

In English, we read “angels” and imagine glowing messengers in robes and halos—divine UPS drivers delivering God’s will.But the Hebrew term bene elohim—literally sons of God—is far murkier. It might refer to divine beings, ancient kings, or enigmatic watchers. The text doesn’t spell it out—because the original audience already knew what it meant.

That’s why translation and interpretation are hard. Because to get to the truth of an ancient text, we have to leave the comfort of our present. We have to resist the pull of our built-in—and often overwhelming—drive for confirmation, and instead join the ancient past in all its perfect imperfections.

Maybe we’ll learn something new along the way.

Something that enriches our lives.

Something that broadens our understanding.

And just maybe…Aliens and angels are one and the same.

That question is just one of a hundred floating in my mind.

The answer to each?

Maybe a new question.

And that question might just be the idea around which my next story is written.

Or it could just be a murmur among the madness.

I guess we’ll find out.