At the corner of Clark and Wellington in my former North Side neighborhood of Lakeview is a classic old used bookstore with a big wooden sign out front that reads, “RARE MEDIUM WELL-DONE.”

All through the ’90s I would visit this bookstore at least twice a month looking for hardbacks on military history to send my dad. Upon receiving each shipment, my dad would call from Ohio and order new requests.

“Don’t send any more on Charlemagne—I’ve had enough,” he’d say. “No more from the Napoleonic Wars either. I really liked that one on Caligula! Get something on Germanicus, if you can. Oh, that and more Nero.”

It got so I knew about every used bookstore in Chicago, and then all the ones in Manhattan before my dad’s death in 2001. The older he got the harder and harder it was to find titles and/or subject material he hadn’t already throughly exhausted.

As a voracious reader since childhood, he had long ago read everything he ever wanted to know on the Civil War, World War I and II, the American Revolution, on and on. Being Norwegian—with parents who came over from Norway just prior to his birth—he’d read enough on Viking and Scandinavian history to choke a sperm whale.

*****

The other week I stopped into the jammed-to-the-rafters bookstore for nostalgia’s sake and about started to cry when the same old short, pudgy, gray-haired owner in ’50s-era eyeglasses came out from behind his severely book-clogged desk and asked me to leave my book bag with him at the front counter.

He immediately recognized me and we shared one of those “Wow-what-a-blast-from-the- past!” moments. Because I’d never told him all those years who I was shopping for, I knew he always used to wonder, “What’s with this girl?! She comes in here like clockwork every other Saturday afternoon and picks out the most unlikely titles.”

This visit I headed straight for the Religion Section to see what I might find in the area of Christian or Jewish history—something my dad was also very interested in. Within minutes my eye spotted a never-before-seen book from 1975 entitled Deceptions and Myths of the Bible.

On the cover was the synopsis, “Lloyd M. Graham writes that the Bible is not ‘the word of God’ but a steal from pagan sources. Its Eden, including Adam and Eve, were taken from the Babylonian account; its Flood and Deluge is but an epitome of some four hundred flood accounts; its Ark and Ararat their equivalents in a score of Deluge myths; even the names of Noah’s sons are copies, so also were Isaac’s sacrifice, Solomon’s judgment, and Samson’s pillar act. Moses is fashioned after the Syrian Mises; the laws after Hammurabi’s code. These are but a few of the myths he discusses.”

The back cover had an equally provocative summary: “In Lloyd Graham’s study, he claims his uncovering these deceptions and myths will help everyone acquire sufficient enlightenment and knowledge to discover what is false. Mr. Graham believes it is time this scriptural tyranny was broken so that we may devote our time to man instead of God and to civilizing ourselves instead of saving our souls that were never lost.”

Reading this, I was reminded first of a similarly biblical-ignorant book comedic performer Steve Allen once wrote in the ’60s trying to debunk the Bible. Allen had related in his preface how he was killing time reading a Gideon Bible one night in a hotel room and couldn’t believe how loaded it was with mistakes, prompting him to detail them in a book.

Secondly, I was reminded of a series of Bible studies I attended this past fall at a weekend conference in which the teacher (Dan Gross of Wisconsin) warned that universities across the country were widely propagating “The Epic of Gilgamesh” (touted as “the oldest known literary work” and said to be composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago) as proof the Old Testament simply borrowed from ancient myth.

To give you an idea of how popular this line of thought has become today, look at this outtake from a recent article on Salon’s website:

The recovery of the “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was less dramatic, mostly because it was drawn out over decades, but the prize was even more fabulous than the treasures of King Tut's tomb: the oldest story ever told -- or, at least, the oldest one told in writing. It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It's the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark. If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories -- the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd's slaying of the dragon Fafnir -- it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years. Those stories come to us like the DNA of our ancestors, still present within us, but reshaped by generations of mutations and ultimately as familiar as our own faces.

Instead, "The Epic of Gilgamesh," preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization. When archaeologists dug it up again it was like one of those movies in which a caveman captured in permafrost gets thawed out to meet the modern world. True, some bits of the epic have embedded themselves in other stories -- most notably the Old Testament -- and then have been handed down from one storyteller to the next through the ages. But much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.

*****

Of course, any Bible student can tell you that before there was any written Scripture, God revealed His Word through revelation in the stars. Gilgamesh, in reality, is simply Nimrod, responsible for the Tower of Babel in Genesis 10-11.

As ancient Jewish scholar Josephus once wrote, “Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah -- a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny -- seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence upon his own power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach! and that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers.” (Ant. 1: iv: 2)

*****

Jordan says, “In the academic community that legend (of Gilgamesh) is a big famous thing, but it’s just a fabrication of a myth off of the Bible character Nimrod, who is really the source of most of mythological tales and stories. (Scholars) get all involved in the counterfeit and in the Scripture is the real thing.

“When you study mythology and you study the Scripture, and you begin to understand that in the Scripture, God first revealed Himself—before He started writing it down—in a way that when He laid out all that revelation in the stars and in the heavens, and then started writing it down, that revelation became corrupted. That’s the only explanation, folks, for why the same stories founded in the Bible have a presence in every culture of the ancient world.”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued . . .)