Disappointed at Lack of Comment Options on Blog Posts

Faith & Science Conversation
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While I financially support Biologos, I rarely visit. However, I saw Walton’s post re Why People Lived So Long in my em and bit.

https://biologos.org/articles/why-did-people-in-the-bible-live-so-long

While reading, I perceived a need to respond due to some of his very “indoctrinating” comments. HOWEVER, there is not an option to comment.

What is the point of a post like Walton’s - with obvious dogmatic priorities - with no ability to respond??

Disappointing!

REQUEST TO BIOLOGOS - OPEN UP COMMENTS TO BLOG POSTS!!!

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So I found Walton’s post.

Walton on Long Ages in Genesis

What Does This Indicate About the Trustworthiness of the Bible?

The Bible’s trustworthiness is based on the claims it is making.

The nature of those claims, in turn, must be determined from the literary intentions and conventions of the ancient authors who wrote them. We cannot simply assume that they thought and wrote with the same purposes as we do.

If they were not claiming the long ages as actual, but were using the numbers rhetorically, then the Bible’s trustworthiness is not dependent on people having lived for hundreds of years.

This lesson can be applied broadly. When we recognize the rhetorical conventions of the numbers presented in these genealogies, we can conclude they also offer us no information for calculating the date of the Flood or the age of the Earth. We cannot simply “do the math.”

Walton makes a lot of good points here but to cut straight to the point, I feel this whole rhetorical defense suffers because why should we believe someone writing in say 600BC would not literally believe Adam lived to almost a thousand years? Can Walton quote any ancient sources indicating these were understood to be fictitious and honor the individual only? Or is this just harmonization and only something we would accept if we already believed in Biblical inerrancy? I’m okay with that as a Christian but can we do any better?

In Genesis 6:3,God literally alters the created order to reduce the timespan of human beings:

3 Then the Lordsaid, “My spirit shall not abide[a] in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”

I guess it could be a rhetorical connection to the present (when written) but on the simplest level it seems like an explanation for why people don’t actually live this long anymore. It simply may have been common knowledge that ancient people lived very long lives in the past that decreased over time.

Walton says this:

The Lifespans are Fanciful

The account is fanciful and not to be believed. This is not a ready option for those of us who hold the Bible in high esteem.

He then writes this:

Sin-leqi-unninni most likely lived during the Kassite period, the second half of the second millennium BCE.8 By the Seleucid era (roughly 850 years later), Sin-leqi-unninni had been relocated to the mid-third-millenium BCE and was counted among the primeval scholars by the lamentation priests operating in Hellenistic Uruk. These priests regarded him as their ancestor.

Such elevation of an ancestor to the position of the first scholar after the Flood illustrates how these priests used genealogies to legitimize their status in Uruk’s priestly hierarchy.9

The case of Sin-leqi-unninni demonstrates how genealogical information can be reshuffled and used for rhetorical purposes. Such fluidity is ideological; these genealogies were preserved more to communicate ranking than sequential chronology.

I suspect the conservative response might be just because the lamentation priests in Hellenistic Uruk can lie and falsify details to give credence to their own position, does not mean the Biblical authors need to.

I’m sympathetic to ancient literary genres because the Gospels as bios allows a lot of flexibility. So even if material is creative about Jesus, we tend to believe it captures the substance and gist of who Jesus was and things he said a did. For example, the Gospel of John reframes things around the divinity of Jesus but there is nothing he says in regards to this that is not found in the Synoptics.

What is the gist or substance of making ancient Jewish people to have super long life spans and for the text to say God curbed them when neither is true? I realize these aren’t ancient bios but I just think more needs to be done to establish the central point.

Walton writes:

Studies indicate that in such cases, the long ages are intended to make a point about the utopian nature of the primeval past, contrasted to the nature of the present.

I can jump on board but doesn’t this require a literal Adam and Eve? When was earth ever utopian without predators, sickness, disease, natural disasters, etc, outside a special sacred space God created for the first to ensouled individuals?

It not, it’s hard to see how this isn’t just fictional designed to bolster one’s own status that depends on other fictional stories that never happened. I say that still seeing no reason to believe ancient authors didn’t think these ages were literally true. That some people were shuffled by later authors hardly demonstrates anything close to this. This is a plan and simple harmonization—which again—is fine if our presuppositions lead us here. But I feel we should be more transparent and state this as what it is.

Vinnie

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I think what they do instead is keep blog posts closed, and allows people to make threads in the forums. Probably way easier to manage. Like your thread is now going to probably be a thread about the article.

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Vinnie,

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I perceive we are seeing the same defect. Here one of the texts that struck me re people who understand these dates to be simply fanciful -

Walton: This is not a ready option for those of us who hold the Bible in high esteem.

This is, generously, simply hogsnot. I hold the Bible in “high esteem” (whatever exactly that means…) but I fully recognize these dates as fanciful - and simply very human traditions that the author(s)/editors simply either bought or modified in accordance with their literary culture (which partially of reflects Walton’s final point) BUT just because the author may have been fine with these traditions makes them no less fanciful - they are fanciful - obviously - no different than so many narratives especially in Genesis - if not all of it. But NONE of this has to do with “esteem” of the literature.

Walton is pushing his own personal Bibliology as somehow meaningful and sacred - and he needs to be called out for lifting his opinion up as a promulgation from God…

Greg

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Greg, we have probably been lax about starting threads about blog posts. We used to do that a lot, but seems like have gotten lazy. Will try to do better. So often many of us just log onto the forum, bypassing the main page, and never look at it. Anyway, discuss away. I just scanned the article, but will re-read it with your comments in mind later today.

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There are no external sources demonstrating whether the ages in Genesis were numerical or numerological. What can be shown is that in at least one very old and central list of ancient rulers in Mesopotamia (Sumer or pre-Sumer), the ages/ruling periods seemed to be numerological rather than numeric. The figures were tens of thousands of years, which seems unrealistically long. If we interpret those ages numerologically, the very long periods become understandable. The basic and symbolically most important number in the system was 60. An even more important number was 60x60. All the ages in the oldest list of ancient rulers can be expressed as 60x60x[something], where the [something] is a number between 8-12 (IIRC).

That information is important for three reasons

  • Abram originated from Mesopotamia and it seems that what is told in Genesis is more closely related to the culture and stories of Mesopotamia, rather than Egypt or the cultures living by the Mediterranean Sea.
  • The oldest known list of ‘the first’ rulers in Mesopotamia, starting from the person who were claimed to get the kingship directly from god, used a numerological system. This demonstrates that the use of numerological ages for important characters was part of the ancient culture that predated Abram, close to the area where Abram lived.
  • the long ages in Genesis can be connected to numerologically important figures if we take into account that the counting system of Hebrews mainly used different basic/important numbers than the first known Mesopotamian cultures. This may be claimed to be too much a ‘I have a hammer and problems are nails’ type approach to the long ages in Genesis but it shows that a numerological interpretation is logically possible and makes the apparently unrealistically long ages understandable. I got this information from the writings of Carol Hill.

Did the persons mentioned in the ancient lists really live or were they invented characters?
Opinions differ. Many researchers think that the list of the first rulers in Sumer/pre-Sumer was invented by a later ruler who wanted to strengthen the imagined roots of his rulership. On the other hand, the list may have been based on ancient oral stories about influential persons that had lived hundreds of years earlier - the most convincing lies or fake stories include pieces of truth. The list may have been a politically useful version about the past but the persons mentioned in the list may have been real humans that had lived in the distant history.

If we think of the persons mentioned in Genesis, it is very possible that they were real humans from the distant past but the details may have been told in a way that reflected the current culture (there were no such genre as modern-type history writing in the most ancient era). My guess is that only the most influential characters would have been mentioned, which would mean that there were generations that were omitted from the lists. Opinions differ also in the case of the Genesis. At the moment, we do not have reliable external sources that could give strong support to any of the opinions.

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Greg, I wonder if you and Walton are really not far apart. It seems he goes on to support the premise that the ages are rhetorical. Perhaps what you are calling fanciful, he is calling rhetorical, both of which propose a a non-literal interpretation of the ages lived, but the latter used for a deeper meaning to argue a point, and the first just being meaningless fluff.

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What I am suggesting is Walton is working with a particular dogmatic priority - his notion of “esteem for the text”. He is trying to justify some coherent explanation why the author would, despite evidently knowing better, employ these literary devices - albeit with zero evidence - except is personal dogmatic priority.

I am suggesting there is no basis for that - further, I am suggesting that “esteem” for the literature does NOT demand we create a fanciful explanation - but we may fully “esteem” the text and realize the author is just passing on “fanciful fluff” because that is the fluff he received and essentially he bought it - the same way the authors bought most of Genesis - or the authors of the gospels bought the Jesus traditions - or the author Acts did the same - or Paul did the same in 1Cor 15 - but none of this has to do with with “esteem” for the text.

A focus on the actual understanding of the nature of the literature constitutes a genuine “esteem” not some ego-centric notions to full a dogmatic priority.

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Here’s a point worth considering: the only people in the Bible who are recorded as having exceptionally long lives are the direct line from Adam to Noah and then through to Abraham. Some YECs suggest that everyone lived longer before the Flood, but that goes beyond what the Bible actually says.

What I do notice is that the corresponding overview of Cain’s line is characterised by the exact opposite: murder and revenge. No ages are given for anyone in that lineage. It’s almost as if the whole point is to make a direct contrast here, between the line of Cain that is characterised by sin and death, as opposed to the line of Seth, that is characterised by walking with God and life.

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[Edited] I, unfortunately, had noticed this odd change in tone when I decided to look at the resources page recently. Usually, I thought that articles that analyzed topics like this were actually very neutral and were a breath of fresh air from the numerous online resources that try to explain away evidence. For example, when I first saw this article,

https://biologos.org/articles/does-the-bible-teach-that-the-earth-is-flat

I was afraid that it would end up being a list of excuses for “why the Bible actually doesn’t teach a Flat Earth” and “why the Bible clearly shows that the writers knew about a round Earth.” However, when I read that we should likely assume that they held this belief, and that we shouldn’t let that underlying view affect the Bible’s wider messages, I felt pretty relieved!

I really hope that an analysis that was this biased doesn’t become the norm. Biologos most probably saved my faith, and it would be a bloody shame if people like me came on this site and, instead of being welcomed with genuine reconciliation of our observations of the world with our hope in grace, they are met with a similar flavor of resources that they got everywhere else.

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[Edited] I hadn’t even thought of that but (now that I’m actually looking at the names and just the idea of long written lifespans) all of those given names were deeply intertwined with Genesis stories that are likely poetry rather than fact. I’m in the same boat with you that many of these Genesis stories hold great theological wisdom but not much resemblance to the world we can investigate today. Many Biologos resources even approach from this angle. Thus, I think it may be a bit of an exaggeration to call consider a fictional element being made to express theological significance “problematic,” as Walton claims. I can appreciate the angle he tries to look at and, indeed, it would make sense that if these stories were developed in an ANE context then we should expect to see such elements (like these extended ages) in the texts in some aspects. However, the way Walton seems to approach the question isn’t to explain why exactly the ages are the way they are, but to try and defend the people’s existence and demonstrate that just because their ages were listed as being very long, they still existed (Whether or not this was his intention to be read, I do not know).

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I think that what Walton is saying is that the Bible is a serious book, and the ages are there for a reason, not just made up out of thin air, and that as an Old Testament scholar, he feels it of some importance that we try to understand what that God was trying to convey through the words of the author. He states that the ages do not represent actual life spans, but then goes on to ask what then do they represent. I would agree that ultimately the scripture is focused on Jesus, but will also propose that if we make no effort to understand what God was saying in the OT, which was the totality of scripture to Jesus, then we risk getting it wrong, and go down the rabbit holes of YEC and others who insist on a literal, rather than literary, interpretation.
I will say the editing on that article was problematic with the insertion of other articles in the middle of the text, and a somewhat disjointed feel. You almost had to skip to the concluding remarks, and reread it to make a lot of sense of it.

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I apologize if I sounded like I didn’t think we shouldn’t try to understand the Old Testament. I genuinely would like to know more about the underlying meaning behind those stories myself. However, it think there was just something with the wording that made the article read more as a “defense” of the Old Testament than an interpretation. I would understand why one would want to try and defend the credibility of a document so central to the faith, but one thing that appealed to me was the interpretative nature of Biologos; it felt like trying to understand how to bring faith and science together, not trying to explain why one is better than the other. Of course, I doubt that Walton has malicious intentions in trying to word the article this was (as I mentioned above, his other article was very enlightening for mentions of the Earth’s shape in the Bible), I’m just worried about the slight change in tone.

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I also looked back at and edited my responses. I had a busy day yesterday and got home very tired and probably a bit grumpy. I just remember seeing this article and feeling a slight sense of discomfort from it, and I guess decided to take out my general fatigue on this article. I had no intention of trying to accuse Walton of anything, so I apologize if I did come off as hostile.

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I believe when the website was restructured a few iterations back, the comment boards were removed for logistical reasons that had more to do with integrating platforms and services and such, not hostility to readers. For a while, when Hillary was on staff, she was posting every article to the Forum so there would be a discussion thread link, but people rarely commented and the people who have held her position since she left have not continued to do it for whatever reason. You could request it come back. We do however, welcome people to start and share discussions about anything posted on the BioLogos website and that is still envisioned as the main reason they still pay for the Forum to exist, so please do share your comments and we will discuss.

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This is helpful feedback. As someone who has written articles for BioLogos in the past, I can assure you that by the time what you wrote has been edited by a number of people and run through the programs that bring down the reading level and make it suitable for scrollers, the final version is not as nuanced or scholarly as what you wanted to say. So I’d cut John some slack that he might not have personally chosen the wording here.

Also, Walton regulary presents to fairly conservative Evangelical audiences and I think he is probably targeting his message here to those kinds of readers, the kinds of people who don’t read or support BioLogos, are definitely very committed to inerrancy constructs and may have been forwarded the article by a friend who is hoping they will consider changing their mind about some things. So trying to build goodwill and common ground is important. It’s impossible to tailor communication to every possible audience and avoid everyone’s possible triggers.

Also, BioLogos is not a church. The organization does not presume to teach or validate doctrines. People who write for BioLogos come from a variety of backgrounds and positions on what the Bible is and does, and BioLogos is going to keep publishing articles about things we agree on. What we agree on here is that the ages shouldn’t be taken literally. Everyone is of course totally welcome to excuse themselves from Walton’s “we” if it doesn’t fit them in some detail.

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I think you might be interpreting fanciful differently than it was intended.

The way I interpreted it, Walton was trying to point out that Hebrew numerology was a meaningful system used for serious, sacred writing even if it wasn’t counting years like we might have assumed. It probably wasn’t the author’s intention to assign ages in an arbitrary or imaginative way like a modern fiction author. I think modern Americans have an unhelpful tendency to conflate “true” and “factual” and “historical” with “factually accurate” and that is what Walton is trying to counter. We can believe the authors were trying to communicate true and meaningful things, serious sacred things that matter to their concept of their history, even if they were using symbolic or literary constructs that do not communicate “factual” or “historically accurate” information. But I would say that doesn’t mean what they communicated was “fanciful.” It wasn’t intended to entertain or beguile an audience with a story. It was intended to ground a people’s identity in a history of interactions with God.

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Christy,

First, thanks for the thoughtful reply.

To clarify, Walton was pushing against the notion of fanciful whereas, in contrast, I am pushing for such a concept. A slightly more nuanced description would be that these are simply fanciful dates emerging out of the traditional ethos of the period - such dating being to somehow aggrandize the whole schtick…. as opposed to the authors willy-nilly just making them up on the fly.

The much larger issue is Walton’s waving around the flag of “we who esteem the writings” as if neither I nor others who did not buy his white-washing did not esteem the writings. In a follow up comment I asserted that truly esteeming the text is not by white-washing it with dogmatic priority - as Walton was doing - but simply being honest with it for what it actually is. There is no basis for thinking these authors in a vacuum had some grand numerological scheme created out of their literary genius…especially when we see long-lived figures of authority in the material evidence.

That being said, the whole Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a neat literary trope and evidently at present unknown outside of this text - in contrast to the Tree of Life which was standard Mesopotamian trope (who doesn’t want to live forever…:slightly_smiling_face:). So I give some kudos to that author at some level though have to wonder the source data - the snake thing was ubiquitous, etc.

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I know, I just think you are using fanciful to mean “not actually their ages” and he is pushing against the notion because in his mind fanciful is a pejorative that is used by those who do not “hold it in high esteem” to completely dismiss the text, which is a characterization the fundies make of anyone who doesn’t take everything literally. So again, I don’t think he is talking to you or necessarily disagreeing with you, or excluding you from the group of people who esteem the Bible, he is just signaling his own membership in the group of people who esteem the Bible to the people who suspect he might not be in that group.

I think that’s reading a lot into his intention, which I’m pretty sure was more about wanting to be included himself than wanting to exclude others.

There actually is a basis, it’s been well documented:
https://biologos.org/articles/long-life-spans-in-genesis-literal-or-symbolic

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My challenge is Walton’s waving around his “esteeming the book” flag seeming to demand a certain interpretative grid - which I suggest simple amounts to simply white-washing based on dogmatic priority.

One esteems the text by being honest with it…and finding such fanciful dates as just is, I am suggesting, a much greater esteeming of the text. My slight nuance as mentioned to Christy is note that the authors did not likely make them up willy-nilly on the spot but were motivated by the ethos of their age that assigns these greater dates to esteemed persons to increase the esteem - but none of this makes the content any less fanciful - and one might well suggest fairly political as another observed such dates were in the neat - and likely very fanciful genealogy that ended up in the court of some king of Judah…