From the Mailbag: Why would God allow scientific errors in the Bible?

Faith & Science Conversation
143

This is actually the question of discussion and declaring something about it without dealing with the evidence is insufficient. I have shown that an awful lot takes place in it for it to be solid. The raqia is the shamayim and a lot of stuff takes place “in” it.

I noticed your “word study” above. Strong’s is not a good place to be doing this kind of study. If you are going to do it, then you need something a little more advanced then Strong’s. That’s why I asked the questions. Given your previous answers, I suspected your Hebrew was a little weak and I suspected you had not given much theological consideration to the issues here.

Going back briefly to the questions, I hope you will answer them.

1 Like
144

This is a good example, and if the discussion took this route, we would obtain further insights on how language is used and how meaning is conveyed without resort to specialised medical or scientific terminology. I would state that we can have a conversation with anyone and when we use the phrase “man planting his seed” into a woman, the meaning would be equivalent with “the woman became pregnant from that male”. Additional discussion may deal with “barren” for woman, or perhaps “lack of seed” in the male.

My point is this - is there a need to correct anyone in such a discussion, when it is understood by the people involved? If a medical person came and said, you are discussing how a woman may become pregnant! The response would be, “Ha, what else could we be discussing?”

Now drawing inferences about reproduction may be appropriate if we attended a seminar in which medical experts dealt with the details, and they may also note that much of their detail was not available to anyone a thousand (or more) years ago. So, the correction would be the lack of understanding from medical people 1,000 years ago - not the meaning discussed by the non-experts - although these non-expert may be better informed by the seminar.

145

The issue overall, to me, is why in an issue that is not easy to resolve definitively on the evidence, there is such a strong apparent desire amongs ECs to decide that the Bible definitely contains an obsolete scientific cosmology (resting primarily on two modern sources, viz Seely and Enns).

I leave the thread with another academic response to (mostly) Seely’s far from watertight assumptions, which ought to prompt questions in ones mind about the core issues… or may not. Here.

146

Isn’t that a goddess? Are goddesses solid and metallic? Is it like a mirror? Is there any relationship to the Hebrew creation whatsoever? Or to the Enuma Elish cosmogeny, in which heaven was the split skin of Tiamat the salt water deity? (And did I not deal with this picture in my own post back in 2014?)

147

If we examine the various translations of the verse that I systematically list in my prior posting… highlighting the competing versions that pose “in the sky” vs. “across the sky” and the like…

the word “in the firmament” appears to be an artifact of the English language. Both the Greek and the Latin versions do not attempt to put living thing in the firmament. The firmament is labeled, one time (or is it twice?) “heaven” in English, but in Hebrew it is “lofty thing” or “high thing”.

The firmament defines the sky … or, if you insist, the heavens. But the only things that appears to be in the firmament are the windows that allow the waters above to rain down to the earth, and the stars affixed to it.

While Dr. Strong’s study of Hebrew in general didn’t get everything correctly , I don’t believe you will find any convincing treatments of the Hebrew that definitively make “the Firmament” something that is not firm!

148

Nope. That was sort of the point of the original post.

1 Like
149

When you say “a strong apparent desire amongs ECs to decide that the Bible definitely contains an obsolete scientific cosmology”, do you include Second Temple texts such as the LXX, 1 Enoch, 3 Enoch, Apocalypse of Baruch, and Josephus rabbinical texts such as the Talmuds and Genesis Rabbah, early Christian commentators such as Origen, Augustine, Theophilus, Ambrose, medieval rabbis such as Nachmanides and Maimonides, and later pre-modern Christian commentators such as Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther?

Sorry, but the conclusion that Genesis is referring to a solid firmament is not a modern invention aimed at deliberately attributing to Scripture “an obsolete scientific cosmology”. It was the dominant interpretation of the text from the Second Temple Period to the modern era.

And when you say “resting primarily on two modern sources, viz Seely and Enns”, that’s breathtakingly evasive. The conclusion manifestly does not rest primarily on two modern sources. It rests on the massive bulk of ANE socio-historical context, along with the historical interpretation of the text. And why cite only Seely and Enns, when this understanding is mainstream among professionals with specifically relevant ANE expertise, such as Alexander Heidel, Samuel Noah Kramer, and Wilfred Lambert?

Goalposts, where are you going? GOALPOSTS, STOP!

Yes. It’s a solid structure holding back the chaos waters from the earth, and the stars are stuck on it. As in the Akkadia, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew cosmology.

No, you just did a bunch of handwaving. You didn’t even mention the fact that the stars are on Nut’s body. You certainly didn’t mention the fact that the Genesis firmament has the stars on it, just as Nut’s body has the stars on it.

2 Likes
150

This is extraordinary - you are stating that Hebrews adopted idolatry from Egyptian sources to describe God’s creative acts, based on a simile such as “spreading the firmament like molten bronze, etc,”. This is so, so, wrong - I am astonished.

151

No I’m not stating that at all.

152

Your own statements:

“… with a host of other scholars, that ANE cosmologies shared a number of features, one of which was the widespread concept of a solid firmament.”

and

… Lambert’s argument is that the Hebrew raqia is solid, just like the Babylonian firmaments, and like the solid firmaments of other ANE cultures. A skin is a solid object, just like a mirror is a solid object and a tent is a solid object."

and. “behold”, images of all Egyptian idols, including one that provides a cover with stars, and some others outside it and others underneath, with:

“… You didn’t even mention the fact that the stars are on Nut’s body. You certainly didn’t mention the fact that the Genesis firmament has the stars on it, just as Nut’s body has the stars on it.”

I again express my utter astonishment that you see a connection with Egyptian idols, and phrases that use similes and literary devices, to praise God and His handiwork. It is beyond comprehension.

153

None of which say that the Hebrews adopted idolatry from Egyptian sources to describe God’s creative acts, because I don’t believe that. Please read what I wrote; it’s nothing more than what people like John Walton and Peter Enns have said for years.

You’re utterly astonished that I can see a connection between the idea that there’s a hard thing above the earth with stars in it, and the idea that there’s a hard thing above the earth with stars in it? You don’t see the connection here?

1 Like
154

Well, it seems that handwaving is in the eye of the beholder. The issue is mapping Egyptian cosmogony (or strictly, that of Heliopolis - even Egyptian mythology was not consistent) to the physical world - on the big assumption that the Egyptians saw the world in physical terms, rather than divine.

My not mentioning the stars in my article is scarcely relevant unless one determines what stars are - amongst the various Egyptian stories they represent the souls of Nut’s children. Divine beings, again… but it was believed that the stars also inhabited the afterlife in the underworld - the five-pointed stars on Nut were used to represent the afterlife, Duat - which is the very reason why most of such representations are from coffins. The picture is more about life after death than physics: getting it to correspond to some purely physical model is tricky.

If we start from the visual representation itself , the conclusion that the sky goddess, Nut, is necessarily representing a solid vault cannot be made. For we see in the picture she is supported by her father Shu, the air (understood primarily in spatial, not material, terms - and certainly not solid). Indeed Nut’s mother was Tefnut, moisture. And her brother, above whom she was lifted primarily to stop them having constant incestuous intercourse and lots of children, is Geb, the earth. Clearly the gods’ “constituents” reflect their roles. Nut is whatever the sky is - except that primarily, to the Egyptians, she is divinity.

Ra the sun god in some versions sails up her legs and over her back - but in others, enters her body each day and emerges from the other end. Nut is often represented graphically by the ladder by which her son Osiris escaped to safety within her body - which therefore appears to be porous, at least. To say she’s the direct equivalemnt as a supposed metallic solid vault “like a mirror” is stretching analogies, at least.

The main imagery of Nut in the mythology is sexual, an image of desire and fertility in relation to the earth: it’s more important that she’s separated from the earth than that she’s holding up anything else. Now, it’s true that one (small) element of Shu’s holding her up is that, should earth and sky meet again, chaos would return. But it’s another thing simply to resolve the complex mythology of Nut into a physical barrier against physical water - and then say it’s directly equivalent to the Hebrew raqia, whatever that may be, or Enuma Elish’s goddess-skin. All they have in common is representing “sky”. The Heliopolis myth itself shows that.

In the Heliopolis cosmogony, the primaeval situation was Nu, the endless waters. One should remember, though, that this concept is believed to have arisen out of Egypt’s annual inundation by the Nile, and the experience of land re-emerging afterwards. For this primaeval water (like that of Genesis 1) has a surface, from which the primaeval mound, and/or Ra emerging from a floating blue lotus, appeared. As I have written regarding Genesis, our modern interpretation of “boundless” as extending infinitely in all three dimensions matches neither the ancient descriptions, nor the concepts available to the ancients. This is not handwaving, but addressing the text as it is - if a surface is mentioned, as it is both in Genesis and Egypt - and in Enuma Elish too, actually - the “water in all directions” scenario is in trouble, and therefore the idea that it was thought that there was an enless mass of water above the sky to keep out…

At this point, visualising the theogony in terms of our “ANE/Genesis standard” picture gets difficult (and easily involves handwaving rationalisation to modern worldviews), because Ra, doing his various procreative acts, is operating in the world above the surface of Nu, the waters, not in some bubble within it.

Likewise, the waters themselves embody a richer concept of “chaos” than simply that of physical inundation by a massive body of water above the sky. For chaos is contrasted with order, Ma’at, which all Egyption religion sought to preserve and which was not primarily a material concept, but “the ancient Egyptian concept of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice.”

Now I’ve cited all this stuff, that’s pretty alien to our view of the world but was the Egyptian view of the world, to show once again that it is not “handwaving” to urge caution in trying to reduce disparate ANE cosmologies either to some generic picture, nor yet to some supposed “ancient science” comparable to “modern science”.

On another point, it’s also irrelevant to use 2nd temple Jewish and early Christian authors to interpret Genesis cosmology. In the first place, we’re apt to see even those sources in modern materialistic terms. More relevantly, they all all date from millennia after the ANE source, and were all influenced by the Hellenistic worldview broadly, if anachronistically, describable as “Ptolemaic”.

But since I see we are coming from completely different directions, I simply leave this to other readers to take into consideration. But I’d be happy to comment on some of the many other visual representations of non-Heliopolitan cosmologies that you mentioned way back in this thread (and whose existence others seem to take somewhat for granted).

1 Like
155

It is astonishing because, for the obvious reason, it is not a thing, but a pagan deity that is clearly presented. The only connection any reasonable person can make is that of the deity and what he/she means within this religious outlook - and that is anathema to the Hebrew faith.

156

Of course it’s a thing. A pagan deity is a thing.

No, the connection we can make (as made by people like John Walton and Peter Enns), is that the Hebrews and Egyptians both believed that there was a solid thing above the earth with stars in it, just as the Hittites did and the Babylonians did and the later Greeks did. This has nothing to do with people sharing pagan gods or religious outlook; the religious outlook in Genesis 1 is patently completely different to all of Israel’s ANE neighbours. Please read some Walton or Enns for a good introduction to the topic.

157

For the last time in this odd exchange, the Egyptians did not depict a brass dome, nor a crystal dome, nor any artifact, but instead presented their idols as making up their notion of their world. Your own material blatantly depicts this… (content deleted by moderator)

158

But so what? That isn’t in dispute. Have you read Walton and Enns?

159

This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.