Good observations. Personally, I am in a church community that is majority very different from what I believe so far as evolution, age of earth, climate change, politics etc, though we have some common ground on other things. As a result, sometimes I think of Biologos as being more “my tribe” and as a result have found myself worried more about being cast to outskirts here more than I do in our church community, where I am pretty comfortable living on the fringes, though seldom being a lot of attention to it. So the same dynamic is at work in a largely virtual community.
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Actually, you do, because the Old Testament writers make references to Egyptian, Chaldean, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Cananitic literature quite a bit, and unless you know that you have no clue what the particular writer meant.
Your claim is like saying you don’t need to understand the intent and diplomatic structure Otto von Bismarck had achieved in Europe or the attitudes of the nobility in order to understand why Word War I happened.
If scholars hadn’t studied what you set aside, we wouldn’t have decent translations to read in the first place!
In context, the promise in John 16 was to the apostles as a group, not to all believers. The parts of I Corinthians and 1 John are about spiritual life and growth, not about understanding the scriptures.
Even so, we can’t compare scripture with scripture unless we know what the parts mean, and we don’t know what the parts mean unless we understand the original worldview, the original literary type, and the rest of the ancient context. A great example is the opening Creation account: without having studied lots of ancient near eastern literature we wouldn’t know that (1) the writer used the Egyptian creation story as his framework (and used it to assert that all the Egyptian gods were made by YHWH-Elohim), (2) the writer adapted it to be a ‘royal chronicle’ (which is an account of a mighty accomplishment of a great king), or (3) that the writer also adapted it to be a temple inauguration account – and without knowing those we miss pretty much the whole point of the piece!
Paul references Greek thought and literature, most famously at Athens where he quotes Greek poets.
Jesus didn’t have to reference “non-believing culture” because the Jews of the day were so drenched in Old Testament scripture they didn’t need to be reminded of the links to the outer culture.
Define “true”. If by that you mean 100% scientifically and historically accurate, you’re not using a biblical definition. Ancient people had a different view.
Poor translation: the Greek is:
Ὁ δὲ ἀποκριθεὶς εἶπεν Οὐκ ἀνέγνωτε ὅτι ὁ κτίσας ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς Ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτοὺς
The word I put in bold is the important one: ἀπό, (“a-PAW”), apo. In the verse the ending o is elided due to the following word starting with a vowel. This preposition does not in any way mean “at”; it is generally far better rendered as “from”, and in terms of time is general unless specified. Thus the passage reads (my translation):
But answering he said, Do you not know that the Creator from beginning male and female made them.
Here “from” is general and should be linked to whenever it was that “them”, i.e. humans, had their beginning. So whether there were hundreds of years, thousands, millions, or billions cannot be inferred from the text.
Even if you take this literally this gives us no sense of time, as rabbis from long ago noticed, a fair number calling them “divine days” because only God was there to measure them – this is where one commentator suggests the age of the world should be considered to be “ten thousand times ten thousand” to match the dignity of the eternal Creator. I’ve never given much credence to things being “appropriate” or “matching the dignity”, but this shows that ancient scholars recognized that the first Creation account isn’t providing any temporal framework that we can count from.
Careful – it says “evening and morning”, which actually describes a night. This is important because the Egyptian creation story the Genesis writer took as his framework regarded night as a time when the gods, led by Ra, had to fight the powers of darkness and chaos to get the sun through the underworld so it might rise again; nighttime was thus the enemy of the gods. But the Genesis writer is essentially saying, “You Egyptians have it wrong: darkness isn’t an enemy, it’s something YHWH-Elohim created as part of the rhythm of the world”.
But the account was never meant to be taken literally; it is theological narrative, not historical. The writer was brilliant, managing to take the Egyptian creation story and adapt it to be two literary types at once, one declaring that “King YHWH-Elohim” defeated chaos and established His kingdom of the heavens and the earth, the other declaring that YHWH_Elohim is the builder and ‘decorator’ of His own temple, into which He put humans to serve as His image.
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That has been the great danger every decade of church history, starting with the proto-gnostics who tried to make scripture fit Greek philosophy (I always shake my head at people who claim that the church adopted Greek philosophy into its theology; the truth is that all the major heresies resulted from trying to fit the scriptures into Greek philosophy and the church rejected that approach).
We’re even warned when the Apostle wrote that no scripture is subject to private interpretation
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Nope – that’s the result of assuming that your modern worldview is the only correct one rather than asking what worldview the writer(s) had. The only thing that “must be considered true if one believes the Bible is the word of God” is the theology – and so long as you read it as though it was someone’s great-grandfather’s journal of events he observed written in English, your intersection with that theology is on thin ground.
Also not true – that’s a nice accusation to keep people in “battle mode”, but it doesn’t pass the simple test of asking why scientists reach the conclusions they do. None of my university science professors would have mentioned God as a motivation for anything they did, and it couldn’t be found in their work or teaching either.
I’m not a scientist, but I discount the possibility of a worldwide flood because the text doesn’t support it. In context, the Hebrew only speaks of a flood of the known world, the Greek slides towards a wider flood, and modern translations seem to tell of a worldwide flood but that is more because of tradition and not because of linguistics.
Though I did almost get a geology degree, so I know enough to plainly state that there is not one whit of evidence for a worldwide flood though there is for a flood of the world that Noah would have known. Oh – and I have yet to read very much from Answers in Genesis and similar sites about geology that doesn’t just flat out lie.
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And that’s critical to the temple inauguration aspect of the opening Creation account: the last thing to be put into a temple once it was built and filled/decorated was the image of the deity. Since we humans are God’s image, we had to come last.
Actually to match the Gospels better it would be, “from the beginning Apple made iPhones with touchscreens”. That it means “from the beginning of making iPhones” is inferred, and the structure isn’t referring to the beginning of Apple.
Absolutely.
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" the first fossil found, by Robert Plot (according to discovery.com) was in 1677" No; Discovery.com is claiming that was the first find of a dinosaur to get somewhat scientific recognition as an ancient bone. Fossils had been found since ancient times; it is likely that a variety of myths about giants and monsters were inspired by seeing fossil bones, for example. But it was in the 1600’s that the consensus was gradually established that fossils really were remains of ancient organisms and not stuff that somehow grew within the rock, as Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy tended to suggest. Then it was necessary to argue that the fossils might really be as old as the Flood, before eventual recognition that they were older than the Flood.
As Moses wrote Ps. 90, which gives strong caution against applying human standards of time to God, claiming to follow Moses by insisting that the best historical calculations of the early 1600’s are superior to all subsequent historical calculations is highly doubtful.
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The parallel account in Mark 10:6 says “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female”. So, we have it stated that the creation of man occurred at the beginning of the creation.
The parallel account in Mark 10:6 says “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female”. So, we have it stated that the creation of man occurred at the beginning of the creation; not the end of it.
Steve, welcome here. Your latest comments repeat what you said earlier without engaging with how some of us responded to that idea. You can select text from somebody’s post and choose the “Quote” option to more easily respond to what others have said. You can also use the pencil icon below your own posts to edit them or add more information.
It’s pretty clear from the below passage that the whole earth was covered and every creature died. Note the emphasis on “under the WHOLE HEAVEN”, “;high hills”, “mountains were covered”, “all flesh died THAT MOVED ON THE EARTH”, “AND EVERY MAN”, “ALL IN WHOSE NOSTRILS WAS THE BREATH OF LIFE”, and so on. God went to great length to emphasize “everything” died.
Gen 7:18 “And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. 19And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. [**20*Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. 21And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: 22All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land , died. 23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive , and they that were with him in the ark”.
This happens again in the book of Joshua. The writer goes to great length to emphasize that everyone died within Israel’s future tribal boundaries. After describing the attack on several cities in which “every person” is “utterly destroyed” and they “left no one remaining,” we get this summary:
So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon. Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time, because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel. (Joshua 10:40–42)
Yet later in Joshua and in Judges we discover that a plain reading of these words would be incorrect:
Now Joshua was old and advanced in years; and the Lord said to him, “You are old and advanced in years, and very much of the land still remains to be possessed. This is the land that still remains: all the regions of the Philistines, and all those of the Geshurites … all the land of the Canaanites … and the land of the Gebalites, and all Lebanon … all the inhabitants of the hill country from Lebanon to Misrephoth-maim, even all the Sidonians.” (Joshua 13:1–6; see also 15:63 and Judges 1:19)
And then we get an alternate version of events in which all the remaining Canaanites were intentionally left alive so later generations would have someone to fight:
Now these are the nations that the Lord left to test all those in Israel who had no experience of any war in Canaan (it was only that successive generations of Israelites might know war, to teach those who had no experience of it before): the five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon, from Mount Baal-hermon as far as Lebo-hamath. They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the Lord, which he commanded their ancestors by Moses. (Judges 3:1–4)
If not for these other voices, we’d get a very different picture of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. And similarly, even though the main narrative of the flood uses universal language, other voices in Genesis reveal that it was not quite so universal. Jabal and Jubal’s descendents survive to the time of the author (Genesis 4:20–21), and the Nephilim were around both before and after the flood (Genesis 6:4).
If we interpret Scripture by Scripture, we’re guarded against treating universal-sounding language as though it simply matches reality.
(This just came up at the peaceful place.)
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Having faith in our interpretations of the Bible is different than faith in a deity.
As Cardinal Bellarmine had to admit, he would have to abandon his interpretation of the Bible if demonstrable evidence showed it to be wrong.
“I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary; and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
If Biblical interpretations can not be challenged by what we observe in the Creation then you will have a situation where rejection of demonstrably true things is required in order to be Christian.
You seem to be ignoring your own epistemology. From all appearances, you have taken a dogmatic position on the age of the Earth and the history of life, one that is impervious to evidence, logic, and reason. You will actually throw out evidence if it contradicts this dogma. Your epistemology, from all appearances, is exactly backwards from what most people would consider to be a healthy epistemology.
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Joshua 10 doesn’t refer to all of the promised land; only specific areas most notably in southern Palestine. Joshua wiped out all the persons in those cities mentioned. The very next verses in Joshua 11 shows there were plenty of cities and areas yet to be conquered in the promised land, most notably northern Palestine. So, I don’t think Joshua 10:40-42 proves what you think it does.
I would agree that sometimes words like “all” and “world” and “none” and the such can be referring to a limited group. Such as when the Pharisees say of Jesus “the world has gone after him” John 12:19. However, when we have so many statements in Genesis 6-7 about the utter destruction of everything, I don’t think you can dispute it. We also have Peters comments that only 8 survived the flood in 1 Peter chapter 3. This matches what Genesis says. We also have Mt 24:38 " For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, 39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them ALL away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
To me, it seems beyond dispute that the Bible teaches a worldwide flood in which everything died that had the breath of life. Whether a person believes geology supports that or something different is another question.
I have focused on scholarship so heavily I really don’t know any other way to communicate; the closest I come to ordinary human discourse is rather Socratic.
Or they miss what you’re actually saying because everyone they know who supports some position ‘always’ says certain things and they have pre-programmed answers. This is evidenced here by all the times that YECists have claimed my position starts with evolution when I didn’t even mention evolution, only the text.
As I fall back on polemics because I see the danger of YECism and the extreme damage it has done to the church. For me it takes immense amounts of effort to climb out of viewing things as though I was still in grad school, and it too often is just easier to fall back into my pattern.
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People frequently quote the “thousand years as a day” part but I only recall ever hearing the “like a watch in the night” part. There were four watches per night, lasting roughly two to three hours, which would make a day total eight thousand to twelve thousand years, not just one thousand. Sadly many people would stop there and take the numbers literally, but that doesn’t fit the text for two reasons: the simplest is the variability in the “thousand years as a watch in the night” which indicates this is not straightforward arithmetic; the other is the difference between the “thousand years as a day” over against the “thousand years as a watch in the night” which makes the comparison even more widely variable. Both of these point to the comparison being a broadly flexible one and thus not something we can just do arithmetic on and get a number we can use. Then there’s the fact that one thousand has a numerical meaning of “whatever amount of time is suitable to complete X”, and all literal numerical notions are out the window.
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Okay, the Greek here is:
ἀπὸ δὲ ἀρχῆς κτίσεως Ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς
which can be rendered:
But from the creation-beginning he made them male and female.
I put it as “creation-beginning” because the word for “beginning”, ἀρχῆς (ar-CASE), lacks the definite article (just as it does in Matthew), and because in this construction the word pair “ἀρχῆς κτίσεως” (ar-CASE KTIh-seh-oce) can be rendered as “the beginning, creation” or “the beginning, namely creation”, or more simply “the beginning, which is creation”.
Why do this? Because as has been noted, we know that humans weren’t made at the beginning of Creation, they were made last – and thus
is not actually accurate as it reads in modern English. To match the text the statement should read, “So we have it stated that the creation of man occurred at the beginning, i.e. creation” and the rest left off.
I’m not going to post the Hebrew, just point out some issues because the translation you use is deceptive. For starters, “the earth” should read “the land” (i.e. the known world); then there’s the inconsistent translation saying “hills” at one place and “mountains” at another when both actually say “hills”; “under the heaven” can legitimately be rendered as “beneath the sky” here since the model of the world when this was written was a flat disk with a rigid dome above it; “Fifteen cubits upward” is best taken as the total rise of the floodwaters; in the phrase “only Noah remained alive” the word “alive” is inserted; then there is the issue of universalisms, which Marshall addressed quite well in post 50.
Why? It says “כָּל־הָאָ֡רֶץ” (kol-ha-aretz), “all the land”, and the rest is as full of universalisms as the Flood narrative. [Interestingly there’s a textual issue here: the text includes “Goshen” in its list of territories, but Goshen was in the east delta of the Nile. The LXX is little help; it has “Gosem”, but Greek has no “sh” sound, and replacing a final “n” with an "m was not uncommon.]
A universalism in one account is a single instance of universalism.
It should also be noted that the literary genre here is making use of hyperbole and probably numerological symbolism.
If you want to read literally, then what it teaches is a flood that piled up against the solid dome of the firmament and covered the flat earth-disk.
Reading today’s cosmology back into the ancient text is an abuse of the text that is pretty much guaranteed to get things wrong. As an illustration of this, discussions of whether people survived the Flood “outside the land” go back to before Christ, which shows that the Jews understood that there were parts of the world the Flood did not reach (this is one way the survival of giants from before the Flood is explained).
I think I’m having a reaction to some meds at this point; feels kind of like being stoned and it’s reducing my ability to concentrate, so I may have to come back to Peter.
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Or an honest one, which is the biggest problem: YEC requires dishonesty. As you put it:
That’s what so many university students recognized; they couldn’t stomach this:
and so, following the logic that there cannot be one error in the Bible abandoned their faith.
Fair enough, I did oversimplify. But note that Joshua 11 describes how these remaining enemies “joined their forces” and “camped together.” Then Israel “struck them down, until they had left no one remaining.” Those exceptions you noted are dealt with. Then comes the summary:
So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war. (Joshua 11:23)
This is a far more extreme description of the conquest than we find in other passages, including within Joshua. Whether we’re looking at the conquest or the flood, we should allow the less hyperbolic texts to temper our reading of the “utter destruction of everyone” texts.
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Dry land was called earth in Gen 1:10. Don’t think it makes any difference whether you call the dry land “earth” or “land”. The waters covered it. As for mountains and hills, the word is normally translated mountains. The ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. Sounds like mountains. Gen 8:5 “And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month , on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen”.
As for “under the whole heaven”, I would say that heaven or sky is above the land.
But it does: in context the term means the known world. Translating it as “earth” is misleading. Indeed the term gets defined for us in chapter 10 in what is often called “the Table of Nations”: these are not all the nations of the earth, they are just some, and they did not cover the globe, only a limited portion. So in context the word cannot mean the entire globe for several reasons.
Could just as well be translated as “the hill country of Ararat”, i.e. the foothills.
Yes – it’s above the flat earth-disk bounded by the firmament dome.
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Gen 1:10 - God called the dry land earth. God defined the dry land. Ark was lifted up above the dry land. I don’t seem to see anything about the “other” earth. Only “the earth”. I only read that 8 souls were saved. That means zero from anywhere else. The flood “took them all away”.
Gen 7:17 “And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And ALL flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of EVERY creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and EVERY man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of ALL that was in the DRY LAND , died. And EVERY living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah ONLY remained alive , and they that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days”. Lots of fossils.
You’re still trying to shove modern (scientific) understanding into an ancient text. And as already noted, to consider the Flood as covering the whole world is contrary to the context.
And I don’t know what you’re talking about with “‘other’ earth”.
No, it only means zero from the area of the flood. That ancient Hebrews/Jews discussed people from areas outside the area of the flood shows that your reading is on shaky ground at best.
It should also be noted that the depth of the flood is stated to have been fifteen cubits.
And none of them found the way they would be in an actual deluge, not even in the area that the writer would have regarded as being under the sky-dome around the flat earth-disk. Fossils all over the world testify to extremely long periods of time and are in deposits totally contrary to a world wide flood.
I repeat the part about the flat earth-disk to make the point that what the ancient Hebrews understood by the word אָֽרֶץ (ar-etz) is not what “earth” or “land” mean in modern English – they had an entirely different understanding of the universe, and their understanding is what the words mean – that’s just how language works.
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