Jerome Corsi – now apparently recovered from his terrifying ordeal in Kenya – gets overexcited in a report for WorldNetDaily:
NEW YORK – A huge deep-water natural gas find off the coast of Israel promises to be a boon to the Jewish state’s economy as well as a stimulus to other developers searching for offshore oil and natural gas in the Mediterranean.
…The find is significant for those who believe the Bible indicates Israel is sitting on a massive oil reserve that would reshape the geopolitical structure of the Middle East.
The find also lends support to the abiotic theory of the origin of oil that holds oil is created naturally within the mantle of the earth, not by biological origins.
How the find does either of these things is unexplained by Corsi; I’ll leave others to ponder the “abiotic” question, but the Biblical claim is obviously absurd. The Bible “indicates” nothing about “a massive oil reserve” in Israel; the only mention of flammable “muddy water” appears in 2 Maccabees, in a Zoroastrian-influenced legend about a flame being preserved from the First Temple into the Second Temple Period. All other references to oil are to olive oil, despite shameless attempts by (as I’ve blogged) Hal Lindsey, Rev Stephen Swisher and Rabbi Nasanya Zakon to twist the plain meaning of the Bible in order to promote the sale of shares in a so-far profitless company called Zion Oil & Gas. Of course, that doesn’t mean there is no crude oil under Israel somewhere (and some small deposits have been found), but the subject was of no interest to any of the Biblical authors.
Corsi continues:
…”We are witnessing an historic moment in Israel’s energy market,” Israel’s National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer told Reuters. “If it turns out in a few weeks that the indicators received in recent days are true, then we are talking about the biggest find in Israel’s history.”
The biggest, but not the first, so the discovery is hardly a bolt from the blue. And it appears the deposit may have to be shared with Lebanon.
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