Divinity Atlas
The Oldest Open Question Is Older Than the Church That Asks It
One question in the atlas has stood open since before the Common Era. One answer, from an entirely different investigation, has stood unchallenged since 1784. Set beside each other, they show two very different ways an inquiry can end.
A Question Left Where the Translators Left It
Leshem is named exactly twice in the Hebrew Bible, both times in the same list, the ninth stone of the High Priest's breastplate. That gives translators no second passage to check their guess against. Greek translators of the Septuagint, working more than two thousand years ago, rendered it with a term whose own meaning is not fully settled, and every later choice, ligure, jacinth, amber, tourmaline, opal, argues from word roots and neighbouring stone lists rather than from anything newly discovered. No new class of evidence has entered the argument since the modern candidates were proposed, so the question sits exactly where those early translators left it.
A Verdict That Has Never Been Reopened
At the other extreme sits a verdict that has never been reopened. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier and colleagues from the French Academy of Sciences tested Mesmer's claimed magnetic fluid by hiding from subjects whether they were actually being touched with it. A woman told she was being magnetised through a closed door, with nobody behind it, responded anyway; magnetised without her knowledge, she felt nothing. Their finding on the fluid has not been overturned in two and a half centuries.
A newer inquiry has fared differently. In the 1890s the Society for Psychical Research put one question to roughly seventeen thousand people, asking whether they had ever had a waking hallucination. The result has never been repeated on a comparable scale, so it stands today exactly as it was left, tested once and never again.