Dear Marshall,
thank you for your thoughts, it is appreciated!
As I guess you would be aware, it appears to me that I see the Biblical text quite differently to you.
I do not know why you presume I make an assumption “that God could only inspire a chronological and historical account.”
God can do anything He wishes, He is not limited by what you or I believe He could only do!
I certainly don’t know how God inspired the author of Genesis to faithfully and accurately write the creation account, or any of Genesis for that matter, the text is silent on the ‘how’.
All I was saying in that text you have quoted is the creation event occurred prior to humans existing, that is, only God was present, therefore from that it is not difficult to see that the detailed information about what was created on each of the days was communicated to the author by God.
There simply is no alternative, at least as far as I can see.
The method of inspiration is not stated, it may have been a vision, it may have been direct revelation, it may have been some other mechanism, the salient point here is that whatever mode of transmission of scriptural information from God to author transpired, there was no-one else in existence at that point in time “In the Beginning”, until God created the Federal head of ALL of humanity, whom God named Adam.
Sorry, but it’s obvious in the original Hebrew that there are two different Creation stories. The whole structure and “flavor” of the text shifts – the order of events is different, the point of view is different, the setting is different.
The idea that they are one is human tradition; it dos not come from the text.
That’s an assumption that cannot be supported by the text. From the text, there are already humans on Day Six, and the Garden is an addition after Day Six.
And don’t bother copying and pasting translations; I can recite the first Creation story in Hebrew from memory (I can even do it sounding like a Southern Baptist preacher . . . or a British peer).
Because I refuse to add to the text or interpret it according to tradition. In the Hebrew the two are very distinct stories’ combining them requires a few mental gymnastics. And though you don’t care about the actual use of language, it is a fact that the two stories are very different kinds of literature – the first is the kind of thing that could have been written for a royal court with its conceptual rhythm and balance, its poetic aspects, and the majesty of the literary construction; the second is the sort of thing one would expect to be told around a campfire or after a casual social gathering. Both are story, but they are very different kinds of story.
Why do you insist on adding to the text? Absolutely nothing in the text indicates that they are parts of the same story – that is a human tradition, not something the scriptures tell us.
Oh, BTW: I doubt anyone is impressed by your copying and pasting Hebrew text; we know you can’t read it, and we also know that your view of it is not based on that text due to the fact that you can’t read it; we also all know that your approach is to impose a modern worldview onto the text instead of honoring the text by dealing with it as it is. Posting Hebrew text when you can’t read it is pretentious at best and probably constitutes a form of false testimony since the purpose is to make others think you are some sort of Hebrew scholar.
That’s my question for you, though I would ask it slightly differently: Why are you constantly adding to the text what isn’t there?
No, you just claimed to know why God had that included. Unfortunately for you, He didn’t have His motivations written down, so what you are doing is presuming to know the mind of God . . . without any basis except your own guesswork.
A “modicum of genetic knowledge” is not a basis for interpreting the text. The text never claims to speak about scientific knowledge of any kind, yet here again you insist on forcing it into the text.
Yay. But that has no bearing on the text unless you are engaging in the idolatry of setting (your view of) science above the text handed down to us.
Give me a break – you do it all the time. It’s the whole program of very single “creation science” “ministry” out there, notably the ones you cite.
I made no such claim – I only made observations about the text. In response to my observations, you are the one who claimed to “know what the text is really saying”.
It takes a lot of effort to escape reading your modern worldview into the text, but it is the only way to actually understand it – well, it’s a beginning, but an absolutely essential one.
That you think that refusing to add to the text is “evil” says a lot. With Luther and many others, I refuse to budge from the text, and you will never convince me to change that.
But you did, right here:
You’re basically expressing the desire that God had to write things to make you happy with it when you assume that the text is about “how He created” etc. You;re demanding that God have spoken in a modern way for a modern worldview rather than actually communicating well with His peope at the time.
No, you’re insisting that God had to follow a form that makes sense to modern humans, and in English translation at that. God ensured that the audience at the time got His message clearly, which means that He selected a writer who used their language, their forms of literature, their ways of theological messaging, their culture, their worldview. Failing to at least try to grasp that language, literary types, theological messaging, culture, and worldview insults the Holy Spirit, His chosen writer, and the original audience by denigrating the importance of communicating well to them.
Sure. But it also occurred to me that like any human literature, the point is to get across a message to the audience it was aimed at, so that the humble thing to do is to try to read it the way they heard it. That’s how human literature works.
Your view of the creation stories wouldn’t be comprehensible to the original audience, which rules it out as a view “that … is comprehensible to ALL peoples at ALL times in history”, so I’ll stick with the grammatical-historical method of studying it in its original language and context instead of importing my worldview and human traditions.
There’s that assumption again, that what it looks like to you in an English translation from a modern worldview is what the text means. Its really a pretty arrogant assumption, if you think about it.
There you go with assumptions again. Nowhere does the text say that it has any intention of doing that.
I have to ask: do you believe that God revealed just some of the truth to the Egyptians and that the least important part? Because the fact is that the first Genesis Creation account follows the framework and order of the Egyptian version of Creation, so if it is “what actually occurred” then somehow the Egyptians got a great deal right!
Assuming again, and again it’s an effort to force the scriptures to fit a modern scientific worldview. Where does the text claim to be anything about what anyone witnessed? It doesn’t, and the type(s) of literature it is strongly suggests that wasn’t the point. Oh, I suppose that Moses used the temple inauguration form because YHWH-Elohim did it that way, but since he used the ‘royal chronicle’ form at the same time, while relying on the Egyptian creation story for his framework, it seems far more likely that he chose that literary type because his audience would recognize it and see the message thus conveyed.
You didn’t have to, you just relied on it without knowing that;s what you were doing. It’s only a modern worldview that would think that the Creation accounts are like entries in some friend’s grandfather’s diary of events he witnessed and wrote about in English; the worldview prevalent at the time would have no idea why you would think that. And it’s worth noting in this connection that the genre of historical narrative isn’t found on this earth until somewhere in the late Middle Ages (unless China had it earlier; that’s possible).
If you want people to stop pointing out that you’re imposing a modern scientific worldview onto the text, stop treating it like it was meant to give scientific truth. Every time you say “global flood” you reveal that you’re forcing a modern worldview on the text, because the text says absolutely nothing about a globe, it only talks about “the land”, which is either (1) the known world, or (2) the flat earth-disk under the solid sky-dome. Reading a glob into it is adding to the text.
I am being honest: I stick with the text and refuse to add tradition, and I observe that you are imposing a modern worldview on the scriptures.
What you actually wrote is YEC standard material – it sounds like you’re parroting AIG. Since they do exactly what I wrote, it is reasonable to presume that you are doing the same. But I don’t have to presume: every time you write about a “global flood” you show that you’re forcing a modern scientific worldview onto the text.
No, it;s not a ridiculous question, it’s a critical one – the answer will reveal whether the respondent is actually engaging with the text in its worldview or is imposing his/her own.
Well, that’s progress. Now if you’ll actually learn to sift out the aspects of a modern scientific worldview, you’ll get me to cheer.
There are none – it is only a modern scientific worldview that expects there to be historical narrative millennia before there ever was historical narrative.
The closest thing in the OT to historical narrative doesn’t actually show up until Maccabees, which is deuteroncanonical anyway, and it still veers to theological narrative which is whaat is actually written in the primary OT canon.
Those are why it has to be read as the ancient literature it is, not as we think it is from reading in translation expecting it to be a type of modern literature. It’s also why we mustn’t add to the text, that either leads to inventing one’s own religion (not all that uncommon these days, though not here) or following human tradition.
Sure, if it is read as the ancient literature it is. If it’s read as though it’s modern literature, the text will still be honest but the reading of it won’t be.
No, all you do is claim that and then throw the text out. You do no Hebrew analysis, including analysis of the vocabulary, phrasing, and literary structure or genre, and just posting the Hebrew with some translations is meaningless. I read it in Hebrew, and the division is obvious. The only time I considered that they might be (as AiG claims) just the same story told in different ways was when someone pointed that it has “always been read that way” (which turned out to not be true) and thus I should read it that way, too. But I have too much respect for the actual text to interpret it according to someone’s tradition; I will not budge from the text, especially when one of the primary principals for understanding any literary text is to avoid adding to it things that aren’t there.
The intriguing thing is that either way it doesn’t change any theology; both could be what we would call “fiction” (another category they didn’t have back then) and that still wouldn’t change any theology because the authority of the text doesn’t rest on it being “real”, it rests on coming from an authoritative source (which gets interesting once one recognizes the plain evidence of editing in many texts).
Nope – what you say is there, isn’t. You’re reading it through eyes of human tradition, which is the same mistake that leads to thinking of a global flood – I’ve given a brief summation of how the change from Hebrew to Greek to Latin, with the accompanying worldviews, changed the meaning of the text from “land” to “entire world” somewhere on this forum; in brief the big step was the change from the Hebrew “land” which is limited in scope [especially in that context] to the Greek “Earth”, which did by the time of the Septuagint translation refer to an entire globe, thus bringing in meaning that wasn’t in the original; the other tradition is the modern scientific worldview that arose starting about the seventeenth century. Either reading is tradition, though, and not text.
It’s qualified by the context. As an example, if a text talking about hot air balloons says things got inflated, you don’t assume it’s referring to party balloons, soccer balls, and basketballs, you assume it’s referring to hot air balloons until something suggests otherwise. Since the context in every case is a discussion of humans, there is no reason to think it refers to anything else. On top of that is that the text is talking about spiritual death since they are not said to have dropped dead physically on the spot (I know there are a lot of rationalizations around that, but that’s all they really are, rationalizations).
That’s not in the text – nowhere is it written that death came to all creatures, though it is written thaat death came to all humans.
What has any of this got to do with TE? I’m talking about the text, no matter how much any YECers or TEers may try to drag science in.
I thin about the text, and it doesn’t say any of that – nor does the scripture anywhere define being vegetarians as “good”; that and the idea that animal death is bad are human notions particular to some cultures.
Claim what you want, but that isn’t in the text – it just isn’t. The only reason people think they see it in the text is because they’ve adopted a human tradition.
Where did anyone say there were “two separate creations”? There’s only one Creation, but the events of the two different stories are separate. Heck, just the wording of the start of the second story shows they’re different –
The first three as far as I know. I’ve only read their conclusions, and I probably wouldn’t be able to follow their Hebrew arguments anyway. When someone grows up with the language and goes into scholarship about it, they easily go beyond even doctoral student level, and I didn’t (to my present regret) go for the doctorate. I do know that they followed the ancient tradition that the letters also have meaning, not just the words, so I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the letter bēt, ב, means “house” (though I recall from a rabbi in grad school that it also means “growth”, which may be involved). It’s not a very Western approach to things, but it is definitely within the worldview of the Old Testament scriptures (related trivia: there were ancient words used as curses because the original letters initially read as pictograph equivalents and the words were sentences that were curses)(secondary trivia: I don’t remember where to find the material, but I read a paper once that broke the first word, בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית (b’rey-sheet) into the letters and showed how they actually formed a coherent sentence that related to the chapter!).
To be quite blunt, this is an idiotic statement: one does not learn about manuscripts by reading scripture! That is a huge blind spot in YEC thinking that drives most people here crazy; it’s like expecting a recipe book to tell you about the chemistry of baking.
Where do you get your definition of “errant”? Where do you find scripture making that claim about itself?
A biblical definition of inerrant would be that the message conveys what is intended, because when the scriptures talk about words they mean complete statements – in Hebrew there are no “Ten Commandments”, there are “Ten Words”, which is enough by itself to show how the term “word” is used in scripture. But only rarely do I find people who use the biblical definition; most employ a modern definition which comes from a scientific worldview.
In the modern scientific approach, God has allowed a lot to “become errant”, and a lot to have started out that way – because God spoke to ancient people in their own terms, and “errant” meant something entirely different, much more like “missing the target”, which in terms of language would have meant failing to get the point across.
To the ancient folks to whom the opening Creation account was written, treating that account the way you and other YECers do would count as errant. That, BTW, indicates what a worldview actually is; a worldview has its own definition of things like “time”, “life”, “world”, and yes, “truth” – and the ancient Hebrew concept of truth has little to nothing to do with the view from a modern scientific worldview.
Fascinating list! One thing struck me quickly: assuming the Samuel and Kings texts are older, the differences in Chronicles are quit frequently a change to numbers with symbolic meaning.
Just BTW, #25 is a false contradiction: Joshua 10 doesn’t say Joshua conquered Jerusalem, only that he defeated the city’s king. It was not a given that if you captured a city’s king they would surrender the city, especially when you put their king to death publicly! (as Joshua had done, possibly within view of the city’s walls; the location is uncertain)
Also, #35 rests on a misunderstanding of the Hebrew.
Oh – #47 is incorrect, though the verses cited do pose a bit of a problem; the list just gets the problem wrong.
Also, # 49 is totally bogus; Matthew does not say what it claims. As in other passages, Matthew is assuming the reader has knowledge that no one today but scholars are familiar with; in this case he’s assuming that they knew how crucifixion went.
There might be other errors, but the list is a decent resource otherwise.
Paul stands in good rabbinic tradition with that; there were several strains of theology about what would happen to the Law, or the entire Torah, once Messiah had come. One was that all the Law would be wiped away because with Messiah present there would be no need for law; another held that with Messiah present all days would be the Sabbath because Messiah would bring God’s rest, in which case no day can be treated above anyone else.
I vaguely recall a paper that discussed some (rather rare) views on that. Apparently some ancient rabbis had views that in Genesis 1 there were multiples of each sex created, and had different arguments for their different numbers. I kind of liked two of those, one that was confident that God made seven of each because (1) that is a holy number and (2) humans belong in community, not just in family (and another insisted that no, it was eight of each because that is the number of completeness), the other was that God made a thousand of each because that number indicates a job perfectly done.
Psalm 8 is interesting; literally it asks “What is the male that You are mindful of him, and the son of mankind, that You care for him?” (though I should note that by the time of the prophets it had come to be used for all mankind, so depending on when the Psalm was written I may be totally off base).
Genesis 2:4 starts a new section with the same language. The significance of that shift has been argued in many publications including full books.
From the point of view of Jewish philosophy in second-Temple times it’s the other way around; the logos was the divine order that was contained/held in God Himself that defined all of existence and indeed was the source of existence. An educated Jew at the time may have disagreed to one extent or another with John’s opening that defined the logos as actually being God, but he would have dropped his drink at verse 14 in a “Wait, what? Huh?” moment because the idea of the divine order-concept that defined existence stepping into material existence was a bit wild. Indeed vv. 9-11 may have served to link the logos to the “YHWH who walks on earth as a man” as a bridge to the assertion that this time YHWH didn’t just show up as a man but actually became a man.
BTW, consider John 3:16 in light of vv. 12 and 13!
Jewish thought would have agreed fully that the logos was “present from the beginning” and was in some way divine; the radical step was connecting the logos to the YHWH who walked on earth as a man, and the even more radical step was to say He, the Logos-YHWH, actually became a man.
Maybe. All my sources on this are in storage (something I really need to do something about!) (and may be out of date by now anyway).
Or a very creative writer!
An interesting name, given that as a noun it means “buttocks” or “foundation” (put those two concepts together!).
Excellent example!
In other words, human frailties and failings are part of the message.
And that fits with the type(s) of literature we know that account is.
There have been impressive and substantial papers written on the concept of “rest” in the OT writings as well as in the ancient near east in general. One conclusion is that the term does not mean “cessation from labor to recover energy” but always carries the idea of enjoying the fruits of one’s labors. I wish I had the paper I wrote on the topic when I drew that word for a word study to be presented to the class; I’d love to mine the bibliography for references.
Dear Roymond,
thank you for your thoughts, they are interesting and informative, though as I have previously stated many times, we will have to agree to disagree, I see no way forward here.
It is clear to me that you truly believe what you are claiming, and I wish you well, whether you are correct and I am wrong or not is ultimately a matter between you and God, and for me the same, He knows our hearts and He knows what He had written in the Bible for all of humanity to receive the good news of the Gospel of our Gracious Lords atoning work on the cross through His unfathomable love for us all.
If I am wrong then please accept my profound apologies. I can only do what I think is right.
I do object though,quite strenuously to the repeated claim you make that you believe that I am imposing ‘a modern scientific worldview’ on the scriptures simply because I state in a slightly different manner what the text clearly tells us:
But that is clearly nonsense, isn’t it a fact that the Bible tells us that the flood covered ALL the Earth.
17 Then the flood came upon the earth for forty days, and the water increased and lifted up the ark, so that it rose above the earth. 18 The water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 And the water prevailed more and more upon the Earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. 20 The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered. 21 So all creatures that moved on the earth perished: birds, livestock, animals, and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; 22 of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died. 23 So He wiped out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from mankind to animals, to crawling things, and the birds of the sky, and they were wiped out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark. 24 The water prevailed upon the Earth for 150 days.Genesis 7:17-24
Now whether we say as the scripture states, ALL the Earth and all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. 20 The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered.
OR in this present day and age knowing what we know now about the Earth we say Global flood, I see absolutely no difference to the meaning of the text regarding the clearly explained fact that ALL life on land was wiped out on the land, as ALL the land was covered, the inference is that every land dwelling animal and mankind was drowned, except for those on the ark.
If you believe that the flood was only a localised flood, why would God have Noah spend the best part of terrifically laborious work for I expect it would likely have been the best part of a century to cut the trees down, shape the timbers and build such an enormous sea going vessel if all He and the animals had to do was travel for a few weeks out of the local area where the flood was to occur.
IT JUST MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.
From reading the scriptural text it is very clear to me and I expect most people that the flood covered the ENTIRE EARTH, whether you view that as a dome or whether you view that as a globe, makes no difference, the entire dwelling place of ALL mankind and of ALL animals was flooded everywhere under heaven, AND ALL THAT WERE NOT IN THE ARK DIED rapidly by water, i.e., they all drowned in a catastrophic GLOBAL event!
And what do we find ALL over the Earth?
We find massive sheets of sedimentary rock that were clearly laid down very rapidly, as there are virtually zero, soil horizons or evidence of erosional weathering in the strata that contain billions of beautifully preserved fossils that were laid down ‘rapidly’ by water.
We know the strata with fossils was laid down rapidly because of the complete absence of bioturbation in the sedimentary strata and the fossils, that is, the fossils were not attacked by predatory creatures and torn apart, nor were they destroyed by bacterial and fungal action that would normally leave little trace if they were laid down over millions or billions of years.
The flood was clearly a catastrophic event that obliterated ALL life on Earth except the inhabitants of the ark. Using the term GLOBAL is NOT forcing anything onto the text, it is stating what actually happened, the fact we understand today that the Earth is a globe doesn’t have to be excluded because it impinges on your dogmatic approach to the Bible.
The flood covered the WHOLE EARTH, in today’s parlance when speaking to today’s people who also know the Earth is a GLOBE, it is CORRECT to use the word, GLOBAL, and the meaning is exactly the same as saying ALL the Earth and all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered.
Why do you appear unable to understand this very straightforward fact?
Dear Ron,
I would be grateful if you would substantiate what you mean. I have my facts straight!
There certainly is a situation here, that we will have to agree to disagree!
As you disagree, the onus is on you to demonstrate with evidence why you believe the majority of sedimentary strata on Earth do display bioturbation and ancient soil horizons, (paleosols).
In the text you have accused me of ignorance or that I am lying
.
To be absolutely clear,I was talking about the massively vast formations of sediments that have hardened to sedimentary rock all over the planet that are thousands of feet thick and in some places well over twenty thousand feet thick and in parts of Canada are almost thirty thousand feet thick (over 5 miles straight down). The extent of the sediments in many places is on a continental scale. These are not small sedimentary deposits that have turned to rock. I am talking about the vast majority of sedimentary rock on planet Earth!
Nowhere on Earth in the last four thousand years do we see sediments being laid down at the scale of what is evident all over the Earth. What we do see is consistent with God’s judgement, and it demonstrates the awesome power and majesty of the Lord God.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Of course there are some places where there is some bioturbation and soil horizons that I suggest likely indicate either the deposition was post the global flood of Noah’s day, or they were laid down during brief exposures of land during the inundatory stage of the global flood, but by and large almost all of the large formations of sedimentary strata that I have seen here in Australia, have sharp boundaries between each layer, in many, many cases, they are so sharp that the boundary between adjoining layers is considerably less than 1/32 of an inch wide!
Therefore, if you believe that these strata were laid down over many millions or billions of years, WHY isn’t there any evident bioturbation and why aren’t there evident soil horizons?
You may learn something about the geology of Australia and in particular that of the Sydney Basin, that consists almost entirely of very clean sedimentary sandstone, with very sharp delineation between each layer and no evident soil horizons or bioturbation at:
To illustrate the reality, in the following photos, where are the soil horizons and/or bioturbation?
If you care to do a search of images of sedimentary strata all over the Earth you will predominantly see the same thing, to a greater or lesser degree, depending mainly upon the amount of visually blocking vegetation that covers the sedimentary rock strata. But if you hard enough it is certainly there! Dry desert type environments are thus the easiest locations to observe the sedimentary strata and then to further observe that clearly in the vast majority of cases there is no erosion or bioturbation as you would expect from a cataclysmic global event such as Noah’s flood.
The vast majority of cores that I have seen from exploratory drill holes also have the same characteristic,
which is a sharp line between layers, again no bioturbation and no soil horizon, or evidence of ancient soil horizons.
You don’t need a degree in Geology to see what is plainly evident for ALL to see.
Such clear delineation of individual layers in the sedimentary rocks is the norm across the Earth, including Antarctica which is beautifully consistent with what we would expect to find from a global flood that laid down all the strata in less than one year.
The Grand Canyon displays the same lack of bioturbation and virtually no evidence of ancient soil horizons as far as I am aware.
You do not know what you are talking about. You do not even understand the picture you yourself posted which shows layers that could not have be made in a single high energy event.
Read ex-creationist, oil geologist the late Glenn Morton who posted on this forum. Burrows are common throughout sedimentary formations.
Do you also hold to that same view a few chapters later in Genesis 41 when famine spread over the whole earth? and when the people came from all the earth to buy grain from Joseph? Quite a trek from South America and Australia.
Yes, as I said there is some bioturbation in some sediments in places, generally in some marine sediments but I’m talking about the vast majority of sedimentary rock all over the planetwith enormous lateral extents across continents and vertical extents that are often many thousands of feet deep.
In the vast majority of those sedimentary rocks there is no bioturbation, nor is there any evidence of weathering, I know firsthand as I have looked myself at many sedimentary strata.
The physical evidence of what we see all over the globe is entirely consistent with what we would expect to see after the catastrophic GLOBAL FLOOD in Noah’s day, when the 'fountains of the great deep burst forth.
In the above photo of many sedimentary layers, where are the soil layers, where is the bioturbation?
Yes, that’s correct, it does not exist, it isn’t there!
The slow and gradual deposition of sediments over millions upon millions of years is a myth.
The Bible can be trusted to mean what is plainly says.
It is not I that needs to get his facts straight.
Please look for yourself, get out in the field and check it out for yourself, it’s plain enough for anyone to see once you remove the evolution - deep time blinkers.
Dear Phil,
as you would undoubtedly know, water will always find its own level around the globe without any trouble whatsoever, it obeys the physical laws set by God.
The global flood that according to the Holy Scriptures covered ALL the high mountains under heaven to a depth of fifteen cubits over the highest mountains obviously means everywhere on Earth was inundated, that FACT is positively clear from reading the Bible, however when it comes to people, that is a whole different matter for obvious reasons.
Back then it was only about 1,500 years after creation, we don’t know how far people had spread out, but Genesis 41 suggests that it was at least the general Middle East region including Egypt, the Scriptures state that famine was over all the Earth, thus the famine is relating to lack of food for humans, (it may well also include the animals all over the Earth, but the text is silent about that, so we just don’t know one way or the other).
But we do know from Genesis 41 that all countries traveled to Egypt to purchase food thus it appears quite reasonable that the populated Earth at that time was only in the vicinity of the Middle East and Egypt and thus not an impossibility to travel there for food.
God bless,
jon
I wonder whether historical records of India and the Far East would validate this let alone Native North or South American or even Australasia. I was told elsewhere that the migration to these areas was when there was still a physical land link. That would precede Joseph by several thousand years, I would think.
@St.Roymond, I hope you don’t mind if I continue our somewhat nerdy side-discussion. I appreciate the chance to discuss this with someone with your background.
I put more weight on the wider tradition that day six speaks of God’s creation of human beings in general, through all time. That doesn’t depend on strange Rabbinic exegesis, just recognizing that adam is what that the Hebrew word means: humanity. That’s the longstanding church tradition Augustine echoes when he preaches that “Adam was one man, and is yet the whole human race.”
And much earlier, it is how Jesus used both the creation week and Eden accounts. He pointed to the day six event to say “from the beginning God created them male and female,” establishing that every human being from the beginning of time to now is created by God. Then he pointed to the Eden account, quoting the one comment that translates the first couple into every couple: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Jesus saw both stories as authoritative, but not of how God created the first couple and brought together the first couple. These stories reveal how God created everyone and establishes every marriage. That’s how his quotations lead to his conclusion, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
The one time Jesus referred to Adam and Eve, he universalized their story. Sure, he may have taken it historically as well – that isn’t stated. But what is evident is that he took it as prophetic truth about every human and every marriage.
I don’t know Hebrew and can only use tools, but translating enosh as “male” seems peculiar. HALOT doesn’t give “male” as an option; it means “human beings” or “a human being” (or “man” as a synonym for humanity or a human, not in its gendered sense). Its 40+ biblical uses naturally read as referring to a human or humans generically. My understanding is that enosh is a somewhat parallel term to adam that tends to be common in older, poetic texts.
Both adam and enosh seem to be terms for a kind – humankind – and not a sex; this can be seen in how neither has a feminine counterpart (unlike ish and ishah). Incidentally, this further suggests the Genesis genealogy weaves together many traditions about where humanity came from. The first three generations are Adam, Seth, Enosh.
As for ben’adam, as you know the “son of” prefix is idiomatic for a member of a group, regardless of sex. A son of the poor is a poor person, not necessarily a poor man. It’s fair to say the Hebrew language uses masculine terms as the defaults, but that just means we have to be more careful when translating to our language where masculine terms are no longer generally understood as serving that purpose.
Yes, similar language (the addition of “book” is peculiar to the toledot in Genesis 5:1). The start of Genesis 5 ties those previous two sections together. They’re still distinct accounts, but it’s all the same adam. This is somewhat similar to how the Genesis flood account weaves together at least two originally distinct stories into one flood.
You’re right, I shouldn’t have put it that way. I meant to focus on a potential translator who wanted to downplay the divine claims in John, but that’s not what I said.
Yes, and my point is that in order for him to drop his drink, logos would need to be translated similarly in those earlier verses and verse 14. If the earlier verses spoke of “the message was God” and such while verse 14 said “the Logos became flesh,” then Logos can just be another name or title for a man that has no connection to what was spoken of earlier. It’s the consistent translation of logos as “the Word” that allows the shocking point to come through.
That’s why the standard translations of Genesis 5:1–5 are so problematic. They use “Adam” for statements compatible with one man but “humans” or “humanity” when it evidently means more than that. If instead adam was consistently translated as “Humanity” in that passage (uncapitalized when it’s not a name), it might cause a few more people to spill their drink at verse 3.
Edit: It’s similar to how Isaiah’s use of “daughter Zion”/“daughter Jerusalem” language is sometimes consistent with a woman and other times consistent with a city, the people of that city, or the whole nation that has that city as its capital (Isaiah 1:8; 37:22; 66:7–13). By seeing how it’s all one evocative character, rather than needing to be separated into an actual historical woman and a people, we can better read the story of daughter Zion. There’s even history in her story, if we can see how the woman is not really a woman.
Let’s actually do the math for this–If we assume that the layers off the coast near where I live are reasonably complete for 80 million years (not very realistic, so our estimate will be low), then the deposition rate has been about 6 cm/millenium over that time. As this is within an order of magnitude or so of most of the modern deposition rate values that I have seen, this is suggestive of reasonably consistent deposition rates across time.
That model is completely incompatible with every Cenozoic shallow marine layer I have ever read a paper about. There is no way to get large endolithic bivalve holes in a rock in less than a few years of exposure to clean seawater. Let’s take an example of the strata at one mine in Horry County, South Carolina: the bottom of the pit hits a clayy limestone that has occasional dinosaur bones in other places and some bioturbation of its surface, above this there is a thick, hard limestone with lots of endolithic bivalve burrows in its upper surface that then got eroded down, then a non-leached shell marl with multiple transgressive-regressive pulses within it. This indicates the following sequence of events:
1 The clayy limestone is deposited.
2 It is colonized by various animals at its surface (takes a few years at an unrealistic minimum).
[a bunch of other layers get deposited and eroded away, based on other sites]
3 The animals whose skeletons compose the limestone live and die (a few centuries at an unrealistic minimum, given the known lifespans of some of the animals in it).
4 The sediment later to become limestone is exposed to fresh groundwater for a few decades at an unrealistic minimum (fastest way for limestone to form).
5 The limestone goes back under the ocean, is excavated from topsoil by water motion, and is then colonized by (among other things) lithophagiform mussels. These mussels live for a decade or more to get to their final sizes.
6 Sea level goes back down and the surface of the limestone is eroded down such that some burrows are only a few mm deep.
[a couple more layers come and go based on other sites]
7 Sea level rises again, and a new marine fauna colonizes the top of the limestone.
8 Sea level then drops and rises about three more times (over at least a few centuries, again based solely on measured lifespans).
9 Sea level drops a final time, a river erodes through the site, and leaves a sand layer at the top outside of its channel (at least a few decades more).
10 The river moves elsewhere.
11 People arrive in the area, as the sea level and river courses have not changed significantly since human habitation.
This means that the layers here took more than 500 years to be deposited, with sea level going up and down by intervals of over 30 meters during that time (which adds at least 2000 years more to allow for deposition of clay-sized grains in the layers). If that was during the flood, then the flood took centuries. If it was after, then we would have records of sea level changes of that size range in archeological deposits. The only other option is a pointless, deceptive miracle.
If the layer is from more than about 550 MYA, then there was nothing doing bioturbation, seemingly. More recently, the obvious possibilities for why there is an absence of bioturbation are: the top of the layer got eroded down (pretty common), the layer was deposited in a relatively hostile environment (e.g., hypersaline or anoxic), or the traces of bioturbation were ephemeral enough not to be preserved.
Let me once again quote Michael Tuomey’s 1848 Geology of South Carolina:
I have, and what is absolutely plain, has been suspected for 330 years, and known for 250 is that the geologic column is not compatible in any way, shape, or form with an age for the earth of less than hundreds of thousands of years. Again, quoting Michael Tuomey “It was usual, at one time to refer the phenomenon of the distribution of organic remains in these rocks to the Deluge; but no one, who has ever examined a fossiliferous deposit for five minutes can hold such an opinion.”
Okay, in that case, be the first person to give me a detailed explanation for how a fossiliferous shallow marine deposit came to be that does not require thousands to hundreds of thousands of years and is compatible with the ones that I have visited or seen photographed. The same challenge applies to sequence biostratigraphy and global planktonic foraminiferal dating.
Are you aware that there’s a contradiction in what you wrote?
And again –
You are still saying that God could only have inspired a sort of police report version of things.
That’s not surprising given that you view the scriptures from a modern viewpoint and insist that they conform to that viewpoint. You could try asking what viewpoint the writer and his audience had.
Only if you define “earth” as the flat land-disk under the solid sky-dome. See, one principle of understanding literature is that you don’t get to stuff your own definitions into someone else’s words, and that’s what you’re doing here, you’re stuffing a modern scientific definition into an ancient Hebrew word.
But you’re not stating “what the text clearly tells us”, you’re forcing a modern scientific understanding onto the text and claiming that’s what it says. I keep saying that because you keep doing it!
Let me take the modern science out of this–
“Land” in Hebrew does not mean a planet, indeed not even a continent, it meant a flat disk under a solid dome and surrounded by a world-sea that encircled the planet. That’s what it means in Genesis 1, and the meaning hadn’t changed by Genesis 6 or 7.
That’s because you’re imposing a modern scientific worldview onto the text. The Hebrew just doesn’t support a “global flood”.
As to the use of the word rendered as “all”–
The word “all” (kōl) means nothing in and of itself, for it produces the question: “all” of what? If I say, “that vacuum sucked up all the dirt,” do I mean that there isn’t a single speck of dirt (every molecule of dust, e.g.) left anywhere? Of course not. In Gen 41:57 we read: “All (כֹל; kōl) the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain.” Are we to conclude that every last human being on the globe came to Egypt? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. We know this not only because it’s ridiculous, but because we know from the biblical story that Jacob and his sons and their families had not gone down to Egypt at the time of the statement (see ch. 42ff.).
and “land”–
In regard to ʾerets, as noted above, the term often means a point of piece of land. Gen 41:56, the verse before the one cited above, is an example: “So when the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe in the land (ʾerets) of Egypt.” The “land” (ʾerets) of Egypt isn’t the whole world. Some global flood theorists like to argue that “land” + a qualifier (like “Egypt”) is necessarily limited, but “land” (ʾerets) without such a qualifier must mean the totality of the globe. Gen 41:57 contradicts that, and it isn’t the only such instance where ʾerets by itself cannot mean exhaustive totality (see Gen 10:11 – Shinar is the referent; Gen 12:7, 10; 13:7, 17; 15:18; 23:15; etc. etc.).
then “mountain”–
The word for “mountain” in the flood account (har) is used elsewhere of a hill or, in general terms, something quite smaller than Everest (Gen 22:14; 36:8 [Edom]; Josh 13:19; 2 Kings 1:9; 23:13; Jer 3:6; Hagg 1:8 [trees don’t grow on very high mountains]). Even “high” doesn’t help much as a qualifier, as it begs the question, “How high is high?”
(quotes from Dr. Michael Heiser [because he’s better at the references])
Then you have to ask what the writer considered to be the “whole earth” to begin with, since that will help with the definitions. Happily, we have an answer right at hand in Genesis 10, the so-called “Table of Nations” – and it doesn’t include North or South America, India, China, Australia, or most of Africa. Getting those other places in there requires putting them into the text from a modern scientific viewpoint.
And for what it’s worth, the list of nations in Acts on Pentecost matches the Table of Nations, which tells us that the definition of “the whole land” hadn’t changed.
It’s worth considering that in a structure as Noah is recorded as having been ordered to build, from the top deck with the Ark in the immediate Tigris-Euphrates valley, there has been at least on flood that would have left nothing visible but water (there are two others that possibly qualify), and if the Ark drifted with the current it would have stayed in that middle of the great Mesopotamian plain until it got windblown up to the mountains of Urartu – “Ararat” in Hebrew (note that this is a large region, not a specific place, just as the text tells us, “the mountains of Ararat”.
To be faithful to the text, we have to conclude that the Flood wiped out the known world (whether known to Noah or to the writer; there was little difference [unless you put a really late date on Genesis, which in my judgment just doesn’t hold up; it may have been edited somewhat during the Exile – there is decent evidence for that – but the book itself comes from no later than the time of Solomon, and I see no reason to think the core of it was not written by Moses][I had a professor who maintained that Moses wrote it during his time in Midian as something to do while watching sheep all day]) since it took Alexander’s conquests to bring knowledge of a wider world to the Hebrews.
Assuming it involved trees; the Hebrew isn’t at all clear. One word can mean anything from reed stalks to hewn beams, while “gopher” most likely means pitch, so the Ark may have been of “pitched reeds” (which would actually help on the reality/engineering side; such a vessel would have been flexible enough to handle the storm waters and not sink even if it got half-filled with rainwater).
And there’s a problem with the use of lumber: lumber cut at the start of even a fifty-year process would not likely be structurally sound by the time the last was cut. Since cutting reeds could be done much faster, that wouldn’t be a problem; reeds from that river basin, once dried, were amazingly durable as is attested by how many different things that had to have been intended to last a long time were made from them (trivia: I once saw a journal article that provided a minimum durability of reed boats and baskets based on what portion of the population would have to be employed to keep a city such as Eridu supplied given different durations. I forget at what point it would have required half the population just to keep reed items replaced; I do remember that a reed basket capable of floating would have most likely lasted a dozen years, and I recall laughing at the image of half the population doing nothing but gathering and drying reeds then fashioning them into replacement items [it was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek article, though ultimately useful – and indicative of the lengths ANE scholars will go to try to figure out things about daily life back then).
I was fascinated by an article about a paper where some scholar used fluid dynamics and the topography of Mesopotamia to assess what would have happened with a large floating vessel in that one huge flood I mentioned. Estimating the conditions that would have been required for such a flood, between the winds and currents the Ark would most likely have drifted in circles out in the middle of the (vast) flood zone for however long the storms lasted, until something happened to knock it out of the region with the river currents (which could have just been the storms finally ending). Once out of the river currents, the wind would have blown the Ark right where the Genesis account says it ended up, in the foothills of Ararat (Urartu). A striking aspect of the article (and paper) was that the author expected the river currents would have taken a floating craft right out into the gulf, not kept it in the middle of Mesopotamia.
So “a few weeks” doesn’t fit; the conditions necessary to produce that known flood would have included record monsoon followed by record monsoon for weeks on end.
Nope – 99% of all water-formed sedimentary layers had to have been deposited slowly, and there’s a lot of wind-formed sedimentary rock (which didn’t involve water at all). We know of several formations where there are fossil raindrops, something that could not be preserved in a global cataclysm.
Sorry, but there are soil horizons and evidence of erosional (and other) weathering in a lot of formations. I even got to examine one where there were run-off rivulets in a layer of Mazama ash that got filled in by later ashfall. Note that Mazama erupted its final time about 7500 years ago, measured by dendochronology; the story of that eruption was told by the descendants of those who survived (some entire tribes vanished under the incandescent pumice and ash falls and flows), and those stories roughly corroborate the dating.
Nope – most were laid down quite peacefully. There are a number of evidences that establish this that I don’t recall well enough to describe.
This is a misconception: no individual fossils were “laid down over millions and billions of years”; most were laid down in one season and covered by annual sediments, many were laid down during very local catastrophes.
It most certainly is! Nothing in the text indicates a global event.
Ah, now we’re into crystal ball territory! There is no geological evidence for such a flood, no scientific evidence of any kind, and nothing in the text, so just where are you getting your assertion? Since it doesn’t come from science, and can be shown to have arisen in the church through the phenomenon of meaning change in translation, there’s no reason to believe it but human tradition based on an error due to translation – not that the translators made a bad decision in their word choice, but because Greek didn’t have a word that meant what the Hebrew word did, and thus the meaning got changed.
There is no “straightforward fact”, there’s an accumulation of errors. You’re not going to use tradition to drag me away from the text, and the text doesn’t actually support a global view – and what it does support solves several problems that various scientists put forward.
Yes, we do. I see it all the time in lakes and ponds due to the slow build-up of sediments.
Because you don’t get soil horizons underwater.
And bioturbation isn’t likely unless you’re dealing with shallow seas or lakes, and even then it doesn’t preserve well; depths where living creatures can disturb sediments can also easily be affected by wave action that smooths the surface.
There are no such formations on Earth. The only deposits from cataclysmic events are well-noted and well-defined, and they are also not common; they come from underwater landslides often on the slopes of volcanic island less than a million years old.
Awesome read, including all the details. It makes YEC look like a paranoid delusion!
And once again it leaves my geological knowledge looking meagre.
Those “fountains” are springs that flow from cracks in the ground, and “the great deep” is the one from the opening of Genesis, so the phrase indicates that this is water from the dark realm of chaos coming up from below the earth’s foundations. It isn’t talking about geology, it’s saying that God unleashed the primeval chaos waters that have always been below (and around, and above) the earth-disk.
What it plainly says is that God cracked open the ground so instead of just a trickle of the water from the great deep, the t’hom, the dark chaos-waters, broke through so instead of springs they were like the flow from a fire hydrant. What it also plainly says is that the flood covered the known world, nothing more.
Stop trying to make the text conform to a modern scientific worldview; that’s insulting to Moses, to the Israelites he was writing to, and to the Holy Spirit who moved Moses to write.
That’s an assumption – my only “blinkers” is the text, and it doesn’t say anything of what you’re writing.
Please set aside your modern worldview and ask what the text actually says – not what it seems like to you in a modern English translation with its accumulation of linguistic drift and human tradition, but what it struck the original audience as.
