Over the years, legends have arisen to describe and discuss the history of Moses in order to fill in gaps in the Biblical narrative. Modern cable TV parasites routinely link him to the pharaoh Akhenaten or to space aliens. But the stories go back much farther, and are much weirder. Jewish legends claimed he was a giant who battled other giants in superhuman feats of strength. Contrary to what Forbidden History claims in this episode, there is a long historiographic tradition in Greco-Roman literature of discussing Moses as a historical figure (though they were undoubtedly reporting Jewish claims), and there is even bizarre figure, Osarseph, in Manetho’s famous Egyptian history who was a renegade Egyptian priest who led all the lepers out of Egypt and changed his name to Moses—and that story, more than Moses’s, was likely inspired in part by Akhenaten, according to Jan Assmann. Naturally, Forbidden History knows nothing of this and devotes its time to the same tired old arguments we’ve heard a hundred times before on countless bottom-scraping cable shows.

Since I was able to obtain episodes of the current season of Forbidden History, which airs on a channel not included in my cable package, I am going to devote some of this week to picking up on reviews of episodes I haven’t seen yet. Today I plan to review the May 3 episode investigating Noah’s Ark. The search for the Ark that saved life from the Flood is older than the Abrahamic faiths. According to the most ancient authorities, the peoples of Mesopotamia believed that the Ark used by the Mesopotamian flood-hero (variously Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Xisuthros, Utnapishtim, etc.) had come to rest on a mountain and could still be seen in historic times. They wrote that there had been an active trade in wood from the Ark, which was collected to be used in magical amulets. This belief carried over into Jewish and Christian practice, and it inspired the hunt for Noah’s Ark. Forbidden History sees it a bit differently.

On Tuesday, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch aired its second episode, and it should surprise no one that it immediately degenerated into the “hurry up and wait” style of The Curse of Oak Island, even to the point of introducing Oak Island narrator Robert Clotworthy into the show to narrate its title sequence. Last week, the pilot episode ended on a cliffhanger in which ranch owner Brandon Fugal created false drama by forbidding Ancient Alien talking head Travis Taylor from digging on Skinwalker Ranch due to the contents of a mystery briefcase. The result was… disappointing.

This week, the History Channel moved Ancient Aliens forward an hour to accommodate the return of William Shatner’s The UnXplained in the 10 PM spot Ancient Aliens had formerly occupied. This week’s topic is at least something of a return to form to the show’s traditional subject matter. The show attempts to look for evidence of a lost civilization buried deep in prehistory. It’s an interesting subject, but not for the reason the show thinks. The subject of these ancient civilizations emerged from a logic puzzle created by another story. The myth of the Great Flood necessitated a question: What came before the Flood? The earliest surviving accounts, from Mesopotamia, speak of a civilization much like what came after, when culture was restored from hidden tablets of knowledge. Even Atlantis was not significantly more advanced than the Greek civilization that imagined it. Only later, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, did the pre-Flood world become associated with a super-civilization far exceeding, often through evil teachings of the fallen angels, the world that followed. All of this debate about the pre-Flood world of the Nephilim giants eventually became conflated with Islamic speculation about pre-Adamite races—separate creations before Adam—yielding Theosophical speculation in the Victorian era about advanced civilizations hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.