I contend that ancient people, before the philosophers, did NOT imagine a time continuum, some underlying, invisible, measurable reality that flows. They used a water clock to divide a day into parts. However, this was not measuring time. It was simply dividing up the day into arbitrary parts. Egyptian stone water clocks have survived. They have a small hole in the bottom for dripping out the water. On the insides of the pot, we find columns of scribe marks. They used different amounts of water for different seasons. A daylight watch in summer used more water than a daylight watch in winter just like the Babylonian water clock table explains.
Monitoring nature changes (or dividing its changes into periods) is not like measuring time. The ancients had no concept of an underlying time continuum. Ancient languages had no words for time nor could they use verb tenses to describe events as happening “in time.” A contemporary of Solomon’s would not imagine Ecclesiastes 3 as a “time chapter.” He talks about how events cycle, not time cycles. He also explains why we can never understand Earth history. God made everything functional and beautiful in it event period. Yet he put olam in our minds so that we cannot understand all that God has done. We cannot understand Earth history because we naturally try to understand ancient eras with what we see today.
Change and time are diametrically opposite ways of understanding the same world. All ancient societies looked back on the early generations as those who lived for eons. Isaiah calls them the eon generations of long ago who saw the nearby planet break up.
Isaiah 51:9 Awake, awake put on strength, O arm of the LORD; Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not You who cut rah’av in pieces, Who pierced the sea serpent.
The Canaanites used the imagery of a multi headed sea serpent for the shattered planet. Isaiah calls the shattered Rah’av a sea serpent. If a watery planet were shattered, each piece would be followed by a vapor tail, a coma. The shattered planet is not spelled the same as the woman Rahab in Hebrew (rakhav). All ancient societies told stories of a battle when a planet was shattered. The Bible mentions this event four times, twice in Job. Why is it so hard for Christians to accept this? Changing planet orbits does not fit our philosophical concept of linear “time”.
By the way, Dr Cuozzo made X-ray studies on Neanderthal child skulls. He has an excellent section in the appendix of his book on how our skulls thicken as we age. If we lived for geological eons, we would end up with Neanderthal features, just like Job describes in chapter 14.
Westerners find it difficult to to believe what Jacob said in Genesis 47:9 (that the days and years of the son are shorter and worse than the days and years of the fathers). What could cause days and years to continue to accelerate, while still keeping approximately the same ratios between days and years?
The Sun’s gravity has an aberration as experiments show during eclipses. Its effects propagate at light speed. This MUST pull more on the dawn than the sunset, accelerating days and years together throughout Earth history. This tangential effect of gravity also has another effect. It forces all orbits to propagate outwards into logarithmic spacings as we find in the solar system and in exoplanet systems. No wonder the optical parallax to the Sun has continued to decrease for over 2,000 years even in the last 50 years. You might answer that orbits are clock-like. Indeed, we see in the visible history of how the spiral galaxies formed that the clocks accelerate along with the accelerating orbits. Spiral galaxies have logarithmic spacings, just like planet orbits. Evidently gravity is what emerges as the atoms keep changing their clock rates.
You might think, we would freeze if our orbit opens outwards. The Egyptians painted the Sun red and the sky brown as they worked their fields without hats or shirts. Homer said the sky was bronze. No one seems to have noticed a blue sky until classical times.
Change and time are diametrically opposite worldviews. The Bible is about change, not time. A God who can manage all the changes (as he tells us in Job 38-40) is much greater that Augustine’s God who merely created time and sees the future. Change and time are diametrically opposite worldviews.
Victor, Changing Earth Creationist