My religous upbringing was in a Southern Baptist church. As a child, I did what Baptists do and memorized the books of the Bible. The Old Testament books were difficult to remember because of all those weird sounding Old Testament names.
Names like Ezekiel, Hosea, Obadiah, Zephaniah, and all those dudes start sounding alike. This leaves the door open for someone to be creative with the situation. You can make things up.
To practice our Biblical skills, we were put to the test with “sword drills”, an exercise whereby we were given a book with chapter and verse to find. The first student to find the verse would win that round of competition. It was actually fun.
Then there was the time that the Sunday school teacher challenged the sword drill kids to find a verse in the book of Hezekiah. Nobody won. There is no book called Hezekiah, although Hezekiah was a real person and king. With that joke comes a lesson. Don’t assume that anybody knows what they are doing, expert or not.
A professor of Old Testament, Claude Mariottini has found a way to capitalize on the non-existent book of Hezekiah. Whenever you want to win an argument, just throw out a Biblical quotation. If you don’t know were it comes from, use Hezekiah. It sounds legit, and you just might win the argument.
I can just hear Donald Trump defending his Wall. Quoting Hezekiah, “Build a wall and they shall not come.” Or, how about, “To keep the wolf out, you shut the gate”. Hezekiah 8: 3 – 6. Now, that sounds Biblical.
Winding things up for The Donald. “The rich man conquers, and sends the witch to prison”. Hezekiah 10:11
Note: Work by Dr. Claude Mariottini, Professor of Old Testament, Northern Baptist Seminary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
