Dominic Graham (Author of Mothers Swam)

Dominic Graham rated a book liked it The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Article Review: There is a view of ancient history and texts – really a claim to modern culture and truth itself - that is prejudiced against the Bible and Christianity. It can be seen in the so-called ‘Renaissance’, and more so in the so-called ‘Enli ...more
Sep 02, 2025 07:13AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Ark Before Noah by Irving Finkel. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Ark Before Noah by Irving Finkel <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Dominic Graham rated a book really liked it Great Expectations by Charles Dickens	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Quite an entertaining read about the coming of age of young Pip, and the mystery of his 'Great Expectations'. Dickens has a characteristic consistently ironic tone, which can begin to grate, but he can also move into quite beautiful and touching mome ...more
Aug 23, 2024 02:33AM · like · see review
Dominic Graham rated a book really liked it Taliesin (The Pendragon Cycle #1) by Stephen R. Lawhead	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I enjoyed this novel and didn't until later learn that Taliesin and other characters were taken from different Welsh sources and woven into this new story. (Some spoilers ahead.) The drawback is the way that druid religion and stone circles are segued ...more
Jun 14, 2024 10:00PM · like · see review
Dominic Graham rated a book really liked it Merlin (The Pendragon Cycle, #2) by Stephen R. Lawhead	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is for the most part an engrossing tale of Merlin, which constructs a new imagining of his story, set in post-Roman Britain, as Saxons invade and Christian truth is proclaimed. I found the first-person narrative a bit dark and slow to get into at ...more
Jun 14, 2024 09:47PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Merlin by Stephen R. Lawhead. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Merlin by Stephen R. Lawhead <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Dominic Graham and 1 other person liked TJ Grant's review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning: "This book was a stunning work of scholarship and an incredibly erudite navigation of the moral hazards of assessing colonial history. This work takes a detailed look at the history of the British colonies. Prof. Biggar did us a great service by taking" Read more of this review »
May 08, 2024 08:09PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Colonialism by Nigel Biggar. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Colonialism by Nigel Biggar <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Dominic Graham and 3 other people liked Timothy Dragan's review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning: "Excellent and balanced book! Should be compulsory reading in schools. Nigel explores some of the anti-colonial arguments that are most commonly thrown around––proving that many times that they are historically out of context, fabricated, fallacious or" Read more of this review »
May 08, 2024 08:08PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Colonialism by Nigel Biggar. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Colonialism by Nigel Biggar <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Dominic Graham and 42 other people liked Mr.'s review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning: "Don’t think I have read a book like this before. It is a repudiation of the idea that the British Empire was a force for evil and that it had no virtues whatsoever. This book is a curious hybrid of a straight up history book and dissection of a cultur" Read more of this review »
May 08, 2024 08:08PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Colonialism by Nigel Biggar. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Colonialism by Nigel Biggar <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Dominic Graham rated a book it was amazing Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is an exemplary account of the complexities of the British Empire, a weighing of the moral standards and actions thought, permitted, and committed by those within it, and simply good, honest historical writing. I thoroughly recommend it. Colonial ...more
May 08, 2024 07:46PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Colonialism by Nigel Biggar. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Colonialism by Nigel Biggar <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Dominic Graham has read The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Dec 29, 2023 08:01PM · like
Dominic Graham is currently reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Dec 29, 2023 08:00PM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Dominic Graham rated a book liked it

The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood
by Irving Finkel

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Article Review:

There is a view of ancient history and texts – really a claim to modern culture and truth itself - that is prejudiced against the Bible and Christianity. It can be seen in the so-called ‘Renaissance’, and more so in the so-called ‘Enli Article Review:

There is a view of ancient history and texts – really a claim to modern culture and truth itself - that is prejudiced against the Bible and Christianity. It can be seen in the so-called ‘Renaissance’, and more so in the so-called ‘Enlightenment;’ from the Italian poet Petrarch naming the whole medieval period and its soaring cathedrals, ‘the Dark Ages’, to the Romantic poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, with its obvious obsession toward ancient Greece and Rome – unrelenting nostalgia for the past they have never visited and reconfigure into halcyon days. It is there in the liberal ‘theology’ of nineteenth century Germany, disparaging and dispensing with biblical truth, and casually dismissing its historicity. Their claims and theories turned out to be – and ever more so by the year – utterly unfounded, as the archaeologists dug up the very cities that didn’t exist, and read of the mythical Israelite kings, their battles, and decisions, in very substantial clay tablets and stone stele from under the sands. And yet, there exists still, a desire to disprove the Bible, to render it at least less-historical than other historical sources, to weigh it as less foundational a text, as construction and composite more than as source and inspiration.

Some of this bias can be found in Irving Finkle’s book on a recently discovered cuneiform ‘ark’ tablet, which does in many ways give a quite fascinating tour of ancient Mesopotamian writing. He introduces the reader to the tablets and the method of pressing the stylus into the unbaked clay, to the various surviving near-Eastern accounts of the flood and ark, animals to be saved ‘two by two’ and birds sent to find dry land – as the book of Genesis also details –and round coracles, taking onboard treasure, and one of the pantheon, Enki warning of the flood through a reed wall - as Genesis does not. Finkle then gives his theory of how the Bible took shape under the pressures of Babylonian exile.

It is in in this latter section that the worldview in which the whole book is couched is fully unveiled. Finkle, an expert reader of cuneiform tablets from the vast collections of the British Museum, prejudices the Babylonian origins of the ark and flood story, over the Hebraic. He imagines how the Judeans taken into exile in the 6th century BC would have assembled the Bible from their own and also Babylonian cuneiform texts, desperate to preserve and make sense of their identity and their history, painfully dislocated as they were in a foreign land. In this situation, he envisages the flood stories of Babylon influencing the story of Noah in Genesis. He even suggests that increasingly monotheistic interpretations of Marduk and the Babylonian pantheon of gods may have seemed, generations hence, somewhat synonymous with Jewish monotheism.

Such theories are not uncommon, and other writers have gone much further – even claiming Jewish monotheism as only formed in Babylonian captivity. These kinds of ideas display the tendency to belittle the Bible – the unparalleled historical source of the period – and to render Babylon with something of the prestige of ‘Babylon the Great’ that the biblical writers wrote explicitly against. In all such rehistoricisation lies a great deal of circular reasoning, of missing biblical evidence when it contradicts. The Old Testament prophets, writing in both the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and both before and at the start of their exiles, all undeniably and steadfastly share the same monotheistic faith in Yahweh, with other nations’ gods deemed idols. To claim that this Hebrew monotheism developed during Babylonian captivity requires book after biblical book to be cast aside and branded false. It is surely more plausible that the already established monotheism of Israel and Judea arrived and shook the pantheism of Babylon into some hasty but unsatisfactory amendments. This would not be a one-off occurrence: the sudden pivot to sun-god ‘monotheism’ of ancient Egypt occurs around the same era the Israelites would have been there as slaves; the adoption of a kind of deism by ‘neo’-Platonism occurs when Christianity spreads in the Roman Empire. The same thing keeps happening – when unsatisfactory and inferior belief systems meet the Jewish and Christian God, they embark on a mad scramble to stay relevant and cover over their inadequacies. The Hebrew texts tell of a people who betrayed their God and suffered the consequences; they emphasise his holiness and his call to purity upon them. To believe that these very same texts were designed by a bunch of liars and forgers is frankly absurd.

As Jesus later says in Luke 6:43-45 “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

The flood story and the Hebrew Bible, and its cuneiform roots, need no Babylonian genesis, not even the partial direction that Finkle suggests plausible. Abraham, the man to whom the promise of being made into a nation was first given, started off a Sumerian. He hailed from the city of Ur, where the moon god Sin was worshipped – and still was in Babylonia in the exilic era – and where the cuneiform script of Akkadian was used. When he left on his journey through Caanan with his father, and perhaps with a wealth of herds and servants, tents and possessions, it would be sensible to think that cuneiform went with him – tablets recording the already ancient past, the flood, his antecedents, and unfired tablets ready for legal documents and fresh record keeping. Hebrew was a script that later developed beyond cuneiform roots, but it would be natural to assume that by it the Kingdom of Israel maintained knowledge from the clay-tablet past. What flood story did Abraham carry with him from Ur? What did God reveal further to him of these events, and what to Moses, traditionally the writer of the first biblical books? As Finkle details, recovered Mesopotamian flood tablets reveal significant changed story details over time within their locally succeeding cultures. But it would be assumption, and against Israel’s scribal traditions, to think that comparable changes occurred in that kingdom.

To favour the later experience of exile as the source for similarities between the flood stories found on Babylonian clay tablets and in the Hebrew text, is to negate the many centuries of Israelite life in Palestine, and their Sumerian ancestry. It is to belittle Israel and their literary culture, which existed in a near-East of well-known tales and retellings of ancient events, about which they surely had their own ancient records. It would seem logical that the Jews arrived in exile, carrying fully formed flood and other narratives, with no need to adopt or adapt from the obviously related, but distinctly different Babylonian tales they encountered, which did not honour Yahweh as the one true God.

Perhaps, for those secularists for whom the Bible has felt culturally familiar, there is indulgence in the hint of the extraordinary that a tablet pulled from the dust can evoke. Perhaps, as evident in poetic writings since the Renaissance, the vague spirituality of a long gone past seems preferential and amenable to the moral and spiritual call of the biblical text, which is alive, which speaks of sin, the need of a saviour, and asks of us our response. Biblical scripture in fact breathes of cuneiform, and further, of the Word beyond time and dust; and for those who can see them, the now translated marks still evoke as miraculously as their first scratches pressed in clay.

http://dominicgraham.net/2025/09/02/r... ...more

Dominic Graham rated a book really liked it

Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens

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Quite an entertaining read about the coming of age of young Pip, and the mystery of his 'Great Expectations'.

Dickens has a characteristic consistently ironic tone, which can begin to grate, but he can also move into quite beautiful and touching mome ...more

Dominic Graham rated a book really liked it

Taliesin (The Pendragon Cycle #1)
by Stephen R. Lawhead

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I enjoyed this novel and didn't until later learn that Taliesin and other characters were taken from different Welsh sources and woven into this new story. (Some spoilers ahead.)

The drawback is the way that druid religion and stone circles are segued ...more

Dominic Graham rated a book really liked it

Merlin (The Pendragon Cycle, #2)
by Stephen R. Lawhead

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This is for the most part an engrossing tale of Merlin, which constructs a new imagining of his story, set in post-Roman Britain, as Saxons invade and Christian truth is proclaimed.

I found the first-person narrative a bit dark and slow to get into at ...more

Dominic Graham and 1 other person liked TJ Grant's review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning:

"This book was a stunning work of scholarship and an incredibly erudite navigation of the moral hazards of assessing colonial history. This work takes a detailed look at the history of the British colonies.

Prof. Biggar did us a great service by taking" Read more of this review »

Dominic Graham and 3 other people liked Timothy Dragan's review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning:

"Excellent and balanced book! Should be compulsory reading in schools.

Nigel explores some of the anti-colonial arguments that are most commonly thrown around––proving that many times that they are historically out of context, fabricated, fallacious or" Read more of this review »

Dominic Graham and 42 other people liked Mr.'s review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning:

"Don’t think I have read a book like this before. It is a repudiation of the idea that the British Empire was a force for evil and that it had no virtues whatsoever.

This book is a curious hybrid of a straight up history book and dissection of a cultur" Read more of this review »

Dominic Graham rated a book it was amazing

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
by Nigel Biggar

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This is an exemplary account of the complexities of the British Empire, a weighing of the moral standards and actions thought, permitted, and committed by those within it, and simply good, honest historical writing.

I thoroughly recommend it. Colonial ...more

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The Waste Land
by T.S. Eliot

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Dominic Graham is currently reading

Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey

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