Radio: Voice of the Lost Tribes

Radio’s most theatrically baleful voice —that of short, redheaded, 43-year-old Commentator Harold Thomas Henry (“Boake”) Carter—may, it appears, have arisen out of the state of its owner’s psyche. For last week Commentator Carter expounded his conversion to a new Old Testament religion.

Once a member of the Church of England, once a Christian Scientist, Boake Carter declared that he had been converted to a special brand of “Biblical Hebrew” faith, different from both Orthodox and Reformed Judaism. He also announced forthcoming publication of the first 2,000-odd-page volume of a new translation of the Bible called The Bible in the Hands of Its Creator. Its purpose: to explain for the first time the world’s current ills, dispose of the Bible’s apparent inconsistencies, in so doing, spell the doom of Hitler.

Thus Commentator Carter afforded at least a partial clue to his increasingly oblique Biblical allusions to the war (calling Hitler “Satan” and the Germans “Assyrians,” calling the United Nations the “Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Judaic peoples” and the “Lost Tribes”).

The Carter Bible will “do to the world what Mein Kampf did to Germany.” This claim is put forth by a Biblical student from Worcester, Mass., named David Horowitz, who believes that “it was the word of God that brought Mr. Carter and myself together.” The two met after Horowitz’ return from the Holy Land, where he became a disciple of Moses Guibbory, who settled down as a hermit in a cave near Jerusalem and claimed discovery of a “secret code” to the Bible’s original meaning. Carter contributed to the hermit’s expenses, took up Hebrew.

Disclaiming some Jewish ritual, notably Rosh Hashanah (New Year), Boake Carter observes Saturday as the Sabbath and celebrates the Passover. He eats nothing that is not kosher, though he prefers to call it “Biblically cooked.” When he was studying the rules that govern his diet, he made a trip to Manhattan’s aquarium and “checked on the habits of forbidden lobsters, crabs and oysters.”