I mean i am sceptic as well and search my information.Unless it come from a proffesor who seems to know about the subject. Christ is risen!!!
lol, I have described my OT history prof who took great love of mocking anything that he didnât have an explanation for in the bible. Lotâs wife was one of those. I wish I knew then what I know now.
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The truth is they are Godâs people. That is not a lie. It is not a lie in the way they would view Scripture. That fact that you might consider it a lie doesnât matter. It wasnât written to you.
Hereâs some good evidence for the Exodus:
What is fascinating to me is that people are beginning to become ok with the Exodus being real rather than as painted erroneously and with bias by the archaeological community. The archaeological community right now is just like the geological community was in 1928 when they absolutely skewered Alfred Wegener for his continental drift idea. Academic fields do get stuck on an idea and kill everyone that disagrees with their 'concensus truth". Which consensus truth is later shown to be wrong.
Over in the thread âDid Noahâs flood kill all the humans except for Noahâs familyâ, I present a way for the flood and events of Eden to be real history. This was originally panned by one and all. Even had a guy here call it science fiction. Given that that guy IS a science fiction writer, I am sure he thought that was a complement. 
The problem for the science fiction idea is that my view of the flood is precisely that of the view that modern geology has for that particular region of the world, except for the addition of Adam and Eve.
I canât prove Adam and Eve was there but I can prove that there was a real flood matching the description which is in the Bible which occurred 5.3 myr ago and I can prove that the only time the rivers mentioned about Eden were in contact was at the time of that flood 5.3 myr ago, and I can prove that the hydrology described in Eden would only work in a deep basin with artesian flow, which occurred in the Mediterranean 5.3 myr ago. I can prove everything except Adam and Eve. Not bad.
Furthermore, I showed that the curses God gave Adam and Eve are only understandable physiologically if they are given to small brained people. That too can only happen at a time prior to 2.5 myr ago.
With the new data on the Exodus, new data on the airblast at Sodom, the discovery of Josephâs tomb, and with my views that make the flood a reality, maybe the time of ridicule for those of us who dared dream that the bible might actually be true, not accommodated, is finally coming to fruition! No longer do we have to hang our heads and remain in silence when people criticize the reality of Scripture.
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I think your region and dating of the flood may be wrong. Take a look at these two videos:
Nope, I watched, but those are both about Mesopotamia. the âfloodingâ starting at 13000 BC was due to sea level rise. There were no high mountains covered by that flood, just lowlands.
Unless one rewrites the Bible to say that the ark ended in the INdian ocean, such a flood wonât even begin to match what the bible describes.
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No widespread flooding in the geologic record of iraq. I am a geophysicist and have had access to oil company information on this issue.
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Water flow down the Euphrates and Tigris take floating objects out to the Indian Ocean in about a week. If one beleives this is where the flood happened, then well, the ark couldnât have landed on the mountains of Ararat which are in Turkey. Water flow is the wrong direction. Thus this theory requires the Bible be re-written about WHERE the ark landed
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No high mountains covered. that theory needs to rewrite that part of the Bible
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River flooding doesnât last a year. at most it lasts a few months.
5 concerning Eden, how does one get a river which encompasses Kush (the ancient name for Ethiopia) which means the Nile River, to flow into the Persian Gulf. So, your favored theory ignores or rewrites the bible on that point.
Given that this theory basically re-writes what the Bible says, in exactly what way to you consider it to actually confirm what the bible says, when you change what the Bible says?
Other issues that such a late flood brings. It requires that Swamidassâs view for the image of God be true because Adam and Eve could not be the parents of all living. But such a view requires that some living people not have the image of God.
Why did God give Neolithic Eve the curse of pain in childbirth when all of her ancestral mothers back at least to 2.4 myr ago all had pain in childbirth? It is our large heads which cause that pain, and giving a curse like that to people who already had large brains makes zero logical sense. Why did Adamâs curse also involve the effects of a larger brain? Why give Adam such a curse when all his ancestors back millions of years had sweated by their brows as well?
Mesopotamian flood ideas are accepted only by the desperate who canât figure a way to make the bible actually be true, so we change it to say it didnât really mean Mts. of Ararat, it didnât really mean that a river from actual Kush flowed into the Tigris and Euprhates, it didnât really mean that high mountans were covered (small hills will do). If the Bible is so flexible of meaning, why not just say it all happened in the Mississippi Valley? If Kush = Arabia and High mountains means mole hills and the Mtns of Ararat actually means some coast along the Indian Ocean, such a Mississipppi Valley interpretation is equally likely. That would be as true as saying it happened in Mesopotamia!
Before you try to debate with a geoscientist, take some time to look at some geological information about how much trouble it would be to have the Nile flow into the Persian Gulfâbtw, there is no evidence of that. And, Kush was NOT in Saudi Arabia no matter how much people try to make it be that way.
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The OP states
âAccording to biblical scripture the Hebrews led by the patriarch Moses took his formerly enslaved people out of Egypt during the reign of Rameses II.â
That is simply not true, nowhere does it say that!
It does however make certain statements that people interpret that way.
For instance, Exodus 1:11 says âSo they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.â Now if we assume that their âRamesesâ is the same as the Pi-Ramesses we know today, then yes that was built by Pharaoh Rameses II. There are two problems with that identification. The first is that Genesis 47:11 says that 400 years earlier âJoseph settled his father and his brothers in Egypt and gave them property in the best part of the land, the district of Rameses, as Pharaoh directed.â That seems inconsistent with Rameses being Pi-Ramesses. The second is that it refers to Rameses being a store city. Pi-Ramesses was built as a capital, not a store city. So I think Rameses=Pi-Ramesses is implausible.
Another clue to the time period is the description of the Israelites being pursued by large numbers of Egyptian chariots in exodus 14:6-7 " Pharaoh prepared his chariot and took his army with him. He took 600 of the best chariots, and all the other chariots of Egypt". AFAIK, the earliest records we have of Egyptian chariots is after the Hyksos occupation. (John Haywood, Chronicles of the ancient world, p58)
Now if I understand David Rohl correctly, he claims the Israelites were the mysterious 14th dynasty, and it was the events of the Exodus that left Egypt too weak to stop the subsequnt Hyksos invasion which established the 15th dynasty. He also seems to think some of the artifacts currently atributed to the Hyksos 15th dynasty actually belong to the canaanite 14th dynasty.
Now Iâve only recently heard about David Rohl but Iâm intrigued by what Iâve heard. I do wonder how the Egyptians could pursue the members of the 14th dynasty using chariot technology they obtained from the 15th dynasty? However Iâm not an expert and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so it may be there are records of earlier chariots that I donât know about or have not yet been discovered.
That is what I understand of Rohlâs views. The Hebrews were not actually part of the Hykos, just the cause of Egypt being so weakened that others took advantage of them.
He basically said that the Bible when it says the slaves left Rameses is using the readers knowledge of where that city is, but not necessarily saying that is what they built. The verse is
And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses toSuccoth Ex 12:37). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
He used an example, I am not sure I have exactly the city he used, but If I talk about events in Eboracum, no one would have a clue what I am talking about. He says it is likely the biblical writers faced the same problem. Avaris was a name no one knew anymore than they know of Eboracum today. But using the city of Rameses which was located atop Avaris made it clear where that city was, After the Hebrews left Rameses built atop their abandoned city. So this is just like me talking events in 50 BC in the city of York in England which used to be called Eboracum.
Nope, I watched, but those are both about Mesopotamia. the âfloodingâ starting at 13000 BC was due to sea level rise. There were no high mountains covered by that flood, just lowlands.
Thatâs addressed in the second video. The video also mentions nothing about the Indian Ocean, so Iâve on idea what youâre talking about there.
Other issues that such a late flood brings. It requires that Swamidassâs view for the image of God be true because Adam and Eve could not be the parents of all living. But such a view requires that some living people not have the image of God.
No, the video has that Adam and Eve are the MRCA of all humans today. Please rewatch it.
Mesopotamian flood ideas are accepted only by the desperate who canât figure a way to make the bible actually be true, so we change it to say it didnât really mean Mts. of Ararat
Your geophysics degree isnât going to save you on that one. Itâs not random people âchangingâ the Bible when it comes to Ararat. In reality, the video quotes professional Hebrew scholarship. Thereâs no reason as to why we should stick to modern mistranslations against the Hebrew subtext.
Before you try to debate with a geoscientist, take some time to look at some geological information about how much trouble it would be to have the Nile flow into the Persian Gulfâbtw, there is no evidence of that. And, Kush was NOT in Saudi Arabia no matter how much people try to make it be that way.
I have no idea what youâre talking about, but the video refers to an actual sudden deluge that occupied a good part of the ancient near east between 13,000 and 8,500 years ago.
You claim that this video is changing or denying anything the Bible says, which of course it doesnât, but if anything, it looks like your theory kind of does. Humans have only been around for a couple hundred thousand years, but you claim that the flood really happened 5.3mya. Really? Noah lived 5.3mya? The hominids that lived 5.3mya were constructing arks? Just look at Gen. 7:14, it has God telling Noah to bring livestock onto the ark. Call me crazy, but I donât think farming existed 5.3mya. Just look at Gen 8:20, it has God telling Noah to offer burnt sacrifices on an altar. Were altars being constructed 5.3mya? Forget about the altars, what about the burnt sacrifices? Iâm pretty sure that hominids harnessed fire no sooner than 1mya.
Ok, you are going to make me do it. I hate showing the fallacies of what my fellow beleivers hold to because such activity can and has caused crises of faith. I remember one YEC I showed a buried drainage pattern to and she went into a tailspin. I felt bad and didnât want to do that to her. Anyway letâs look at these two movies.
Eden.
The only thing I will say about this movie is that their use of Cush to mean Kassites seems quite arbitrary and ad hoc. Kassites are NEVER again mentioned in Scripture and the Hebrew word Cush is translated as Ethiopia throughout the rest of the bible. Indeed, Cush and Egypt are quite often mentioned together. At least the narrator does admit that the Kassite thing is a bit speculative. What we have here to obtain the goal of Eden in Mesopotamia is a special use of a word that everywhere else refers to Ethiopia rather than Kassites. That seems quite convenient to me. If one doesnât like what the Bible says then change what it means to fit oneâs theory.
The Flood
The flood video was sadly laughable geologically, and I would say, a bit dishonest. I started watching the video and when they came to the first paper by Mohammed El Bastawesy, I stopped to read it before continuing. I have lots of geological problems with what he says. Letâs first look at the geology of a real deluge which happened at the end of the last ice age when an ice dam broke and 500 cubic miles of water poured over the Columbian Plateau.
" 12. Scabland tracts invariably contain âchannels.â These are gorges or canyons or elongated basins eroded in the basalt. The channels are invariably elongate in parallelism with the tract as a whole and, in most cases, the channel pattern is anastomosing or braided." Harlan Bretz, The Channeled Scablands of the Columbia Plateau," The Journal of Geology, Nov. Dec. 1923, p. 619
This picture shows what he is talking about:
The is what the land should look like if there truly was a mega-flood. It should look like this east of the Tuwaiq escarpment. El Bastawesy, doesnât show any of this kind of geology on the Arabian plan. All he talks about is rivers cutting the Tuwaiq escarpment, and says:
This paper hypothesizes the occurrence of a deluge during the Holocene in Arabia, which has submerged most of the central and eastern areas through the interconnection of different drainage basins and the morphotectonic depressions via several deep canyons and wide overflow channels. Moreover, the wider implication of the rapid formation and desiccation of this Holocene megalake and the distribution of its overflow arms will be discussed. Mohammed El Bastawesy, The geomorphological and hydrological evidences for a Holocene deluge in Arabia, Arab Journal of Geoscience, p.2
But he never shows rapid erosion or even how it could occur. I looked it up the Tuwaiq escarpment is made of limestone and fresh water can only dissolve a tiny amount of limestone, which is why caves take 100s of thousands of years to form. If there were rocks beating the limestone then it would erode faster, but in the setting he is hypothesizing, that canât happen. Slow dissolution of the limestone of the Tuwaiq sill would take hundreds of thousands of years.
He claims that several cuts happening at once to a lake means rapid spill, but that doesnât have to be true. Many does not mean rapid!:
The formation of several wadi canyons and funnel cuts along the entire extent of Tuwaiq clearly suggests that the breaching of this conspicuous escarpment was sudden and rapid, as the northern outlet of this mega-lake was insufficient to discharge the water. Mohammed El Bastawesy, The geomorphological and hydrological evidences for a Holocene deluge in Arabia, Arab Journal of Geoscience, p 1
Right there is his enire evidence for ârapidâ, because many cuts happened. But he canât even be sure they are the same lake or at the same time.
Regionally, the extensive fields of sand dunes have masked most of wadis and lacustrine deposits, and thus, the palaeohydrological relationship between widely spaced areas has not been previously investigated. Mohammed El Bastawesy, The geomorphological and hydrological evidences for a Holocene deluge in Arabia, Arab Journal of Geoscience, p 6
And he admits his uncertainly about other stuff as well
Therefore, the regional palaeohydrology for the Sahara during the Quaternary remains of dubious accuracy due to lack of collected data and the interaction of fluvial and aeolian processes on the local and regional domain. Mohammed El Bastawesy, The geomorphological and hydrological evidences for a Holocene deluge in Arabia, Arab Journal of Geoscience, p 6
There is a great deal of discrepancies on the timing of Quaternary pluvials in the Arabian deserts. For examples, the radiocarbon 14 measurements of the shells of gastropods collected from a uniform and homogenous sequence (a 16-m thick terraces in Wadi Al Luhi and Wadi Hanifah to the west of Tuwaiq) of lacustrine silt disclosed an age of approximately 8,540 yearsBP (Hotzl et al. 1978), but Schulz and Whitney (1986) identified a longer time period and smaller magnitude for the Holocene palaeolake in Al Nufud depression (from 9500 to 5800BP), which was preceded by a more extensive palaeolake conditions during the Late Pleistocene (34000 to 24000BP). Mohammed El Bastawesy, The geomorphological and hydrological evidences for a Holocene deluge in Arabia, Arab Journal of Geoscience, p 6
El Bastawesy never exp
lains why the earlier Pleistocene paleolake couldnât have carved at least part of these breakthroughs. That is how geology works. When I went to Tibet I went to Namtsu lake which is a beautiful lake in a juvenile basin. By juvenile it is mean that there is no outlet for water to flow out of the basin. There are places where there has been some obvious cutting of the mountains, which would mean that at some time in the past the basin was a massive lake reaching those spill points and cutting the rock some. Over long periods of time, a path out of the basin is carved and the water will flow to the sea.
The little movie of course didnât explain any of El Bastawesyâs uncertainties of his flood. He canât prove that the cuts are from one lake, and he shows no channeling from the flood out on the Arabian plainâsomething that would have happened in a massive water flood event. The movie acted as if this âfloodâ was gospel, and then the movie became deceitful by twisting the data.
Below is a picture of the topgraphy of the Arabian peninsula. Everything dips to the east, the whitish area is the tallest and the green the lowest. G. Tuwaiq is the town for which the Tuwaiq escarpment is named. Behind that escarpment, may have been a lake. There is no evidence in this topography map of what is seen at the Channeled Scablands of Washingtonâand this âArabian floodâ happened much more recently and the evidence should still be there.
Below is a picture of what the Channeled Scablands, cut into the earth. We donât see this in the maps of Arabia.
Channeled Scablands - The Seven Wonders of Washington State
The website says that this river which causes the water fall is too small to have excavated such a big canyon.
In his article, he says the amount of water was 326 billion cubic meters, I converted that and it becomes 78 cubic miles. While if that were to come upon us, that would certainly kill us but it is not much of a flood compared to the Scablands.
Now we come to the unfortunate distorting of data that I find far too often in Christian stuff. It truly makes me sad. Below is a picture of what El Bastawesy says was flooded. I donât agree with it but here it is.
Now for comparison look at what the film does. They expand and distort what El Bastawesy was saying.
The red line marks the north shore of the Sinai. The present day Persian Gulf is south of that line. Several thousand years ago, the Gulf was probably right at the red line, from Archaeological information. The three screen shots from the movie show that they make the flood much bigger than El Bastawesy does, AND they ignore the hydrological fact that the Persian Gulf at that time was connected to the Indian Ocean. Water pouring into the Persian Gulf would not fill the vally up the the level of Mt. Judi, which they mention in the film as the landing place of the ark. The water would push out into the Indian ocean and sealevel would be achieved extremely rapidly. But these guys have a 1500 ft high hill of water in this area, going up to the elevation of Mt. Judi which is. Yet, the Persian Gulf was open for the water to flow out. 78 cubic miles of water would not flood up to Mt. Judi even in a tsunami. There is too much lower elevation acreage for the water to go to. No matter what elevation you want to pick you have at the very least a 1200 ft hill of water in Iraq in order for the visuals of the movie, above to be real! This is very deceptive on their part.
If you wish to say, God did a miracle and piled 1500 ft of water up in Iraq, go ahead. I wonât argue with you. God can do what God wants. But if one makes up miracles to solve every scientific problem one has, then likely one doesnât have the right theory.
Why is it that Christians seem incapable of dealing honestly with the data rather than twisting and distorting it? This happens both with old earth and young earth Christians.
I saw a silly distortion of the Zanclean flood for home schoolers a while back and chose not to mention it. They have the Zanclean flood not only filling up the Med but flushing out Mesopotamia. They donât seem to realize that all the water will go into the Persian Gulf and the Ark with it. The ark couldnât land on the mountains of Ararat. They donât seem to realize that there are mountains above sea level which would stop water from going to Mesopotamia, and they donât seem to realize that water doesnât climb up mountains above sea level. Yet that is the nonsense they are teaching their kids. And they seem not to mention that this flooding took place 5.3 million years ago. It is only a detail I know, but canât we at least be honest with the data?
Yes, and I stand by my statement that it is changing what the Bible says. They change the word kus, which is translated very definitely as Cush/Ethiopia everywhere else in the Bible but this one placeâsuddenly it means Kassite which is a people never mentioned in Scripture anywhere.
Yes, and I stand by my statement that it is changing what the Bible says. This âfloodâ could not have lasted a year longâthus, it changes what scripture says
Yes, and I stand by my statement that it is changing what the Bible says. No high mountains are covered by this flood.
Yes, and I stand by my statement that it is changing what the Bible says. This flood requires a violation of the laws of physics to pile up 1500 ft wall of water in order to get the ark up to Mt. Judi I would accept Mt. Judi as being in the Mts of Ararat, but I wonât accept this 1500 ft violation of the laws of hydrodynamics.
and now, I will stand by my statements that they distorted and enlarged the flood El Basawesy suggested. He never shows water up at Mt. Judi but the movie makers do. And the do not discuss the elevation problem of Mt. Judi. This issue is like believing the water in your bath tub will gather at one end and climb up the wall.
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Edited to add El Bastawesy and Movie comparisons so maybe they can be enlarged.
and trying to fix the other pictures so they can be enlarged.
I missed this. You might be sure but there are quite a number of anthropologists who would disagree. 1.6 myr ago H. erectus lived in Georgia SSR. The winters are very cold there and many think he couddnât have survived naked, hairless in those winters without fire.
But there is direct evidence as well.
âA couple of sites in Kenya, one at Koobi Fora and another at a place called Chesowanja, show areas of baked clay resembling what typically forms below campfires; both sites are about 1.5 myr old â as old as or older than the burned bones and cobbles from Swartkrans. However, it remains possible that the Kenya occurrences result simply from wildfires, and there is certainly no evidence of organized cooking hearths this early in the record.â ~ Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.209
The bones at Chesowango have been examined and found to be burned:
"At one site in the Koobi Fora area (called 20 East), dating to about 1.5 million years ago, there are reddened and apparently baked patches of sediment and discolored artifacts that seem to have been altered by heat. At Chesowanja in Kenya, dating to about 1.5 million years ago, chunks of reddened and apparently baked clay sediment were found in proximity to an archaeological site. And at the South African cave of Swartkrans, perhaps dating to about 1.5 million years ago, a few specimens of darkened bone were chemically and microscopically analyzed by C. K. Brain and Andrew Sillen and found to have been burned. In each case there is reasonable evidence that fire had thermally altered materials associated with early Stone Age horizons.Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.215-216
âIt may be no coincidence that the earliest human settlement of Europe and Asia-temperate latitudes outside Africa-occurred after Homo erectus could make, as well as tame, fire.â ~ Brian M. Fagan, The Journey From Eden, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), p. 18
âBoth A. robustus and Homo cf. habilis are known from Members 1 and 2. Only A. robustus remains, from nine individuals, have been recovered from Member 3, although Homo is assumed to have been present. Tools of the Developed Oldowan tradition are found throughout the sequence and no important faunal difference exists between Members 1, 2 and 3, suggesting that they are all within the time range 1.0-1.8 Myr BP. Moreover the environmental conditions prevailing during the accumulation of these Members seem to be similar.
"Burnt bones, apparently absent in Members 1 and 2, appear recurrently in Member 3: an average of six 10-cm-thick levels per m2 contain burnt bones. In one 1-m2 test pit (W3/S3) burnt fragments were found in 20 separate vertical levels. In W3/S3 there is a scatter of bone pieces, fractured stone, bone tools and remains of A. robustus throughout the depth of the profile. The recurrence of burnt fragments in this and other grid-square profiles suggests that fire was a regular event during the accumulation of Member 3 sediment, rather than an isolated phenomenon.â ~ C. K. Brain and A. Sillen, âEvidence from the Swartkrans cave for the earliest use of fire,â Nature, 336, Dece. 1, 1988, p. 464-465
Evidence for controlled fire comes from the cave hearths at Zhoukoudian and other H. erectus sites. The earliest known use of controlled fire is dated to almost 1 million years, although recent evidence from South Africa suggests a possible earlier date of up to 1.5 million years B.P.). There are older sites iwth evidence of fire, but it is not clear whether these represent the controlled use of fire. Because fires occur in nature, we cannot merely look for ash and charcoal. We must look for small areas of ash, usually less than a meter in diameter, as evidence of campfires." ~ John H. Relethford, Fundamentals of Biological Anthropology, (Toronto: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1994), p. 272
What is now China was inhabited by Homo erectus more than a million years ago.[2] Recent study shows that the stone tools found at Xiaochangliang site are magnetostratigraphically dated 1.36 million years ago.[3] The archaeological site of Xihoudu (???) in Shanxi Province is the earliest recorded of use of fire by Homo erectus, which is dated 1.27 million years ago.[2] The excavations at Yuanmou and later Lantian show early habitation. Perhaps the most famous specimen of Homo erectus found in China is the so-called Peking Man discovered in 1923.
Two pottery pieces were unearthed at Liyuzui Cave in Liuzhou, Guangxi Province dated 16,500 and 19,000 BC.[4]
Wiki seems sure that fire was mastered before 1 myr ago
Direct evidence of early fire in archaeology remains rare, but from 1.5 Ma onward surprising numbers of sites preserve some evidence of burnt material. By the Middle Pleistocene, recognizable hearths demonstrate a social and economic focus on many sites." J. A. J. Gowlett, The Discovery of Fire By HUmans, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 371: 2016, p.1 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164
Call you crazy because I also donât believe farming existed 5.3 myr ago. Maybe you should actually read some of what I have written before you say silly things about it. Was Noah A farmer? Cain and Abel were not what we normally think of as farmers either.
But then actually understanding another guyâs views before being critical is so much work.
I have put in about a whole dayâs worth of work in answering your questions, maybe you can return the favor and spend a couple of hours reading what is on my blogâsee links above.
In regards to the flood video - yep, the author admits that the Kassite thing is a bit speculative, but considering the fact that thereâs a lot of other evidence he mentions that all indicates the same area, this single point of speculation isnât all bad. As weâll see, I think there are bigger issues then a single uncertain term in your own theory.
When it comes to the geology, Iâm clearly out of my depth. Iâll forward this to the author and see what he has to say. I can agree, at the very least, that you demonstrated the author clearly exaggerated the extent of the flood compared to what the paper describes.
But there is direct evidence as well.
Alright, I mean, I suppose you corrected me that there was fire before 1mya, but this is a correction that isnât enough to repair your argument. 1mya or 1.5mya, that isnât nearly the 5.3mya that your theory requires, not to mention another point I made that you simply spoke not of, which is that there just werenât any of us humans alive 5.3mya. So neither of these points have been addressed. What about the problem that you think these hominids were constructing arks 5.3mya? How does that make any sense? When it comes to the farming thing, you post a link to a blog article of yours where you suggest Noah was ⌠planting for fun ⌠or something.
What about my point on Gen. 7.14 where God tells Noah to take his livestock onto the ark? No response from you there either. Instead, you refer to a blog you wrote on Gen. 9:20 - a verse I didnât notice but is also another obvious problem in your theory, i.e. that agriculture is already known at this point in Genesis. The blog does a weird thing trying to dismiss it as Noah could have just been ⌠planting for fun?? This is obviously far more speculative than any Kassite thing. But just keep reading from Gen 9:20 on. Noah becomes drunk and lays in his tent. His sons cover him with a garment. What are tents and garments doing 5.3mya? When Noah wakes up, he says âCursed be Canaan, the lowest of the slaves!â Did slavery really exist 5.3mya? And so on and so forth. A dating of 5.3mya is just impossible.
Thank you for this. It means a lot when someone acknowledges something like this. It is far too rare an occurence and thus places you in a special group of people.
Of Gen 7:14, the word is Behemah, It is translated :âtranslates as âbeastâ 136 times, and âcattleâ 53â Since beast is the prime meaning, one canât be sure if it was cattle or other animals.
If you have alcohol to ease the pain what is so odd about wanting grapes for that? I do thank you for taking a look, few want to.
Noah wasnât a vineyard farmer. Who would he have sold his wine to? There were too few people and when you look at the problem below, I think you will understand that planting a vine for âfunâ is about the only thing he would have time forâgrapes take many years to come to maturity. He canât wait around not eating for that long a period of time.
I donât know why there had to be control of fire that long ago. Is there something in the Bible I have missed that says there was? I certainly havenât said so.
No one really thinks about what life would be like if you and 8 of your friends or family were suddenly to be the sole surviving people on earth. How much technology could we transfer to that new world. I would say, almost nothing. So I am not bothered by lack of fire. Humanity would have been reduced to the most wretched conditions. But as I said no one thinks about this issue. No YEC raises it, and accommodationalists donât care about it cause the flood wasnât real. Below is a long write up on this from my book Foundation Fall and Flood.
One more thing to add, I am a hightly trained geoscientist and I would not be able to transfer technology from the old world to the new. And I have a lot of knowledge of ancient technology, but NOT practice at doing it. I, like every other human on earth would be in very bad shape if we were dumped on an unknown place with 7 other people. Hunger means you have to hunt for food now. If anyone thinks they can solve the problem and transfer modern tech to a new world with only 8 people, they are a better person than me.
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After the death of the former world, there were only eight people left on the planet. The question of what their life - life after the death of all others - would be like strangely seems to have been ignored in almost all books about the Flood. It is a question that is possibly significant for determining the place of fossil man in the chronology of the flood and for the question of when the Flood occurred.*
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A Tale of Tasmania*
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A minor example of the collapse of technology which happens to isolated societies can be seen in the Tasmanians. Josephine Flood relates,*
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"No other surviving human society has ever been isolated so long or so completely as were Tasmanian Aborigines over the last 8000 years. (The land bridge was gradually inundated between 12000 and 8000 BP âŚ)"61*
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Eight thousand years ago, the Tasmanians had all the technology found in Aboriginal societies of Australia. They fished, they made bone tools, they made capes of kangaroo skin. They attached stone tools to wooden handles to improve the toolsâ effectiveness. Then the rising sea cut off the island of Tasmania from Australia. *
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The island of Tasmania could only hold about 4000 people. This apparently is too few people to maintain, much less improve, the technology of a primitive society. Four thousand years ago, the Tasmanians ceased making bone tools, a skill possessed by every other society on earth. They ceased making handles for their tools and hand-held all stone tools. While there were fish all around Tasmania that would have been an excellent source of food, the Tasmanians gave up fishing and did not eat fish after 3500 years ago. When western men discovered them, they possessed exactly 24 primitive stone tools. In an infamous anthropological article their technology was compared with chimpanzee technology.62 Tasmanians are a smart people; they are human on our level. What they lacked was interpersonal stimulation. Technology requires a large population and lots of intellectual stimulation. Small populations have none of that and they lose their technology. This is something that would apply after Noahâs Flood.*
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Consider what you would do if you were told that only you and seven other people would survive a global catastrophe. Everything that you are familiar with would be destroyed and your little band of eight would be required to be self-sufficient. However, you will be allowed to take one item of technology with you. What would be the most important technology?*
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We will assume that you have landed in what once was Texas and will consider several questions. The most important of these questions is what would the implements of technology mean to you and your descendants in a few years? Also, how would you replace them when they wear out as all things do? We will follow the interdependence of each of our modern technologies with all the other technologies and show that eventually all chains of reasoning lead to one inescapable conclusion. Within a generation or two, your descendants would be living as people did before the Stone Age. As we go through each this list of question, remember that each question that you have to answer âNoâ to is an indication of how badly your life would be if you were in Noahâs shoes. It is amazing that 20th century people are so arrogant that even after saying ânoâ to most of the following questions, they still think that they can make it in the wild after a global catastrophe. What 20th century people donât remember is that when Europeans educated Native American children during the last century, the children returned to the tribes with none of the skills they needed to survive in the wild. Native Americans complained that our education made their children uselessâand they were correct.*
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As I look around the room I am in, the things most important to me, things that entertain me will be useless in such a situation. The computer, which I enjoy so much, would be a silent lump of silicon, plastic and metal in a world without electricity. The radio and TV, likewise, will sit silent and dark even if there were electricity, since there will be no transmissions. The hundreds of books that line the walls will be of little value. Without protection from the elements, they will deteriorate within a year. Obviously, objects of entertainment must be forgotten.*
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Letâs get practical. The nights will be cold. So how about a heater? But what fuel will you use? All heaters will be useless as soon as their energy source is depleted. How about kerosene? It is distilled from petroleum and there is petroleum in Texas. Maybe you can extract some of it from the ground. Now you have a plan! You can continue to remain warm as long as you find a supply of oil and the heater stays in working order. After all the Chinese had drilled holes in rocks up to 450 feet deep by 200 B. C. *
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Production of oil, in even the most primitive fashion, you will need several hundred feet of rope, pipe and at least one long iron rod. The cable is tied to the rod and the rod is dropped onto the rock to break it into little pieces. The pieces are then scooped out of the hole and the rod is again dropped into the hole. One needs a machine to lift and drop the rod, especially as the hole gets deeper, because the weight of the rod and cable quickly becomes greater than any 10 people can lift. The pipe is used to produce the oil and direct the flow to the proper location. However, there is no steel pipe since there is no iron industry. If you have the luck of the modern oil industry, you have a 1 in 8 chance of finding oil or gas after several months of drilling.*
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To produce the iron, you need iron ore and coal. Do you know what iron ore looks like and where to find it? Most people donât. One of the best iron ore deposits in the world was in Michigan in the Precambrian Mesabi formation. The ore is found in a siliceous rock with a concentrated level of iron oxide. So, now that you know where the iron ore is, you will have to travel nearly 1,000 miles to get it. There are two low-grade iron ore deposits in Texas, but recognizing them will be difficult. Assuming you make the trek to either of these deposits, how are you going to mine this very hard, siliceous rock? You have no dynamite, rock drills or saws. Maybe you could make dynamite? Probably not, and if you had a rock drill, you would use it to drill for oil rather than going through this silliness. What about gunpowder? It can be made from primitive materials and it might be usable to blast the iron ore out of the rock. But, unfortunately, you do not know the recipe. Gunpowder is made from saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur and charcoal. Do you know what saltpeter looks like? I do not.*
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Do you know where there is any coal, the other ingredient needed for iron and steel? From northern Michigan, you need to travel at least into southern Illinois, all on foot, somehow carting the heavy iron ore with you. After all there are no trains or trucks. In that region, you need to find an outcrop of coal, collect it, and build yourself a furnace. Assuming that you can do this, and have successfully started the coal-iron ore mixture burning, you sit back and wait for the molten iron ore to pour out. Unfortunately, nothing happens. After the fire goes out you look in the furnace and find that all you succeeded in doing was making iron ore hot, but no iron was produced. All this work for nothing! What you didnât know was that, in order to get the temperature high enough to separate the iron from the oxide and the silica, you needed a bellows to pump air into the furnace. This is quite a lot of work for you to do. Even assuming the miraculous and you achieve your goal of making iron, how do you then shape it into cable and pipe? No, you will not be making any iron products any time soon. And, as soon as the knowledge you have dies out, your children will be even less likely to attempt this task. After all, they will never have seen iron and will have little incentive to think that if they heat rocks, metals will pour out of them. Better find another way to keep warm.*
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Letâs forget kerosene and take a wind-powered turbine for generating electricity. All right, you can take two items of technology. A generator is of no value for warmth without an electric heater. What a good idea! Except that now you can only keep warm on cold nights that are also windy. No electricity - no heat. Eventually, the turbine or the heater will break. If something as small as a ball bearing were to break, the turbine, and then the heater, would be useless. Maybe you can repair the ball bearing. Fine, but that requires steel. There is none of that available, and after seeing what is necessary for iron production, you are not eager to try. Once again, even if you are able to manufacture iron, how do you mill it into a spherical shape of the proper size? Obviously, to repair the turbine is impossible. Better look for a lower tech solution to the problem. *
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Maybe a blanket will have to do. But after a few years, the blanket will have rotted and will need replacing. It will need replacing sooner if you allow it to get wet over and over again. Besides only one of your children can inherit the blanket. They all will need blankets, so maybe you need to take a loom to make cloth. This is a good idea since you and all your children will need clothes. A loom will be a very useful item. But where will you get the cotton? Maybe you can grow it. This takes time away from growing food. Take a loom, find some wild cotton, plant the seeds and you and all your descendants can keep warm. Sorry, cotton does not grow wild! It is so thoroughly domesticated that it will not live in the wild. Cotton is a product of mankindâs biotechnology, albeit a very old one.63 Since you are not allowed to take more than one modern technology, cotton, cotton blankets, clothes etc. are out. *
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Can you make a loom? Do you know how to construct a loom? Do you have the tools to chop the tree down? Do you have the tools to shape the wood? Do you know how to make stone tools with which to chop the trees? Are you aware that stone tool making is very dangerous and can cost you the use of your hands if it is not done properly? John Whittaker, a flintknapping expert, severed two tendons in his hand with one tiny cut, putting him out of action for almost two years.64*
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You forgot something. A loom is of no value without a spindle to spin the thread. So, instead of one technological item to produce a blanket, you need three. Actually, make that four, if you consider the need for a plow to plant the cotton seed; five if you consider the yoke with which to hook up the domesticated cow, which is going to pull the plow. But then again, domesticated animals are also a product of our technology and there are none of those in this new world you find yourself in. You will need to domesticate new ones. Remember that domesticating a wild animal is more than merely capturing it. Centuries of breeding the wild temperaments out are required to make the animals docile enough to use effectively. Take cattle, for instance. The effects of domestication on animals are impressive. Asimov states,*
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"We have clear notions of what constitutes an âimprovement of breedâ in domestic animals. If we want a cow that is a good milker, we interbreed bulls and cows that have descended from good milkers, and pick the best of the offspring (in that one respect) for future interbreeding. In the end we build up milk specialists that are scarcely anything more than living factories, designed to turn grass into butterfat.*
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"Fine! But what else have we bred into the cattle while we have been concentrating on the milk? We do not much care; we just want the milk. Our tame cattle are now too stupid and placid to protect their calves or even themselves against wild beasts. The thoroughbred race horse is a magnificent speed-machine, but is a highly neurotic creature that requires more and better care than a human baby."65*
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Well, if you canât clothe yourself with cotton cloth, what about using animal skins? Kill an animal and use the hide for clothing. Sounds reasonable until you realize that there is more to it than just killing the animal. Once the animal is dead, how do you remove the hide? How do you protect the carcass from scavengers until you can eat the meat and salvage the skin? You can hardly perform this task without a knife of some sort but you donât have one. Maybe you can make a stone knife, but what kind of rock will you use, and how will you shape it into a usable form? Do you know what kind of rock will make a good stone knife? How will you shape it into a usable form? Do you know what pressure flaking is and how to do it? Do you know the angle at which to hit a stone to make it produce flakes? Do you know how to protect yourself while making stone tools? Even if you can do this, unless you know how to preserve and tan the hide, it will quickly rot, leaving you little to wear. Wearing a rotting skin around your loins may make you a tempting morsel for scavengers such as wild dogs, wolves, lions, and bears. You and your descendants will soon be reduced to the most wretched form of existence.*
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Maybe you can solve this dilemma by bringing a metal plow with you on the ark. If you bring a metal plow, there are still problems. A metal plow will rust out within 50 years. What will your children replace it with? They will not have any better ability to make iron than you do. Is it really reasonable to take a metal plow when only one of your children can inherit it and the others must somehow do without it? Eventually, the metal plow becomes useless to your childrenâs survival because it is a rusted pile of junk. Somehow a loom and a plow donât quite seem as useful as they once did.*
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Maybe you had better forget about keeping warm and concentrate on something more basic - food. What are you going to eat? You could take a plow anyway and plant a few crops, but what will you grow? Wheat? Well, all varieties of wheat are a product of man-made technology, and since you have chosen a plow for your modern technology, you canât also take wheat. Bread and pasta-making varieties of wheat do not grow anywhere as a wild plant. It has been so thoroughly domesticated that, without mankindâs yearly intervention, wheat would be extinct. Wild wheat is a poor material for bread making. Feldman and Sears note that,*
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âSpikelets of wild wheat lie strewn on the ground following the fragmentation of the spikes at maturity. The main difference between the wild wheats and their cultivated derivatives is that on ripening the spikes of the wild species tend to break into their component spikelets and fall to the ground. Some of the spikelets seen in this photograph have partially buried themselves in the soil, through the action of their awns (their elongated bristlelike terminal processes) in response to wetting; the enclosed seeds are thereby ensured favorable conditions for germination and survival. Although shattering at maturity is essential to the wild wheat as its primary seed-dispersal mechanism, it must have been a major nuisance to the ancient harvesters of wheat. It is therefore not surprising that the early wheat growers selected nonshattering mutants when these appeared, thereby converting the wild wheat into a cultivated one no longer capable of surviving without manâs help.â 66*
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How about corn? Sorry, like wheat, corn also is a modern technology and since you chose to take a plow, corn is not an option. If you donât believe that corn is a man-made invention, consider this. It canât reproduce on its own. Mangelsdorf states,*
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"Corn as we know it is a thoroughly domesticated plant. It is the most efficient of all grasses at producing grain, but it is unable to survive without human help because it has no way of spreading its seed. The kernels on an ear of corn cling tightly to the rigid cob, and if the ear were simply allowed to drop to the ground, so many competing seedlings would emerge that in all likelihood none would grow to maturity. The ear in its hundreds of modern varieties was created by human beings for human purposes through centuries of selective breeding; it has no counterpart anywhere in the wild, or for that matter among other cultivated plants. Yet corn must originally have evolved from a wild plant. Which plant?"67*
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Rice is the only major grain plant that grows in the wild, but do you know what it looks like? I donât. And even if I did, I donât know how to cultivate it. How do I make the rice paddies? When do I plant the grain; when to I transplant it? When do I harvest it? Frankly, my first crop would be a disaster! If that first crop is a disaster, it is quite likely that my family will die.*
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Maybe you had better take wheat or corn seeds rather than a plow. That would be a better decision but still not a great one. Several obstacles stand in the way of making a crop from your planting. First, without a plow, planting the crop will be more time-consuming and the weeds will grow back more quickly, choking the young plants. Secondly, much time and effort must be extended to ward off insect pests and weeds. Like the domesticated cattle of today, the modern agricultural plants are too weak to survive without a lot of tender loving care. They require pesticides and fertilizers or they will die. Thus, the third obstacle is the amount of time necessary to care for the plants. Without pesticides, the insect pests will be extremely difficult to control unless you know how find the natural predators of the insect pests. Since you canât go to the store and buy âgood insectsâ, your crop is at serious risk. \Since it takes months for the plants to mature, you have two choices: starve before the crop can be harvested, or go hunting for food and let the crop take care of itself, which is to say that the crop will most likely die.
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Couldnât you divide the labor and have your wife care for the crop while you are hunting? That all depends upon how good a hunter you are. If you can make a bow and arrows, or a spear, and are a good enough shot, you might be able to bring home enough food for this division of labor to work out. But if you are unable to do that, then both you and your wife will have to scrounge through the region looking for edible fruits, vegetables, nuts and roots. The bushmen of the Kalahari Desert live a hunting and gathering type of existence.*
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"They travel together in bands, each consisting of 5 to 16 families united by bonds of kinship and friendship. Each band has a recognized territory of 300 to 400 square miles, selected for its resources of food plants (which contribute the main part of the diet), wet-season waterholes (for drinking water during the six to eight weeks when sufficient rainwater gathers in pools), trees (for shade, shelter, firewood, and wood for making artifacts), and areas of grazing to attract and sustain herds of game animals. Subsistence is based on 34 species of edible plants, of which eight are staples in their various seasons. This diet is supplemented by the meat of antelope and other herbivorous mammals, by tortoises and other reptiles, and by the flesh and eggs of all but raptorial and scavenging birds. Plant-gathering is mostly done by the women ranging within five miles of the camp, while men hunt over a much larger area of the territory. The main hunting weapon is a light bow shooting flimsy, unfletched, poisoned arrows. The range is only 25 yards, and great skill is needed to stalk the quarry within this distance."68*
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Are you that skilled of a craftsman that you can make a bow and arrows that actually work? How difficult can that be? Do you know what âunfletchedâ means? Are you aware that only certain types of wood make excellent bows? All other woods can be fashioned into a bow, but it will not be a very good one. The two best types of wood for making a bow are the osage orange, or Bois dâArc tree, and the yew.69 Are you aware that the wood must be dried for up to three years, or the bow will not work correctly as it ages?70 Jim Hamm states,*
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"With yew, the longbow makers of Great Britain aged a stave for
seven years. Old-time bowyers in this country maintained that a four year seasoning was adequate."71* -
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Assuming that you knew all of this, which would be extremely unlikely, how are you going to cut and shape the wood into the proper bow form? Remember that you have no saws, files, and maybe not even a knife. And even if you have a knife, eventually your children will need to be able to make bows and arrows without the modern knife since only one of them can inherit it and the others must make do on their own. What are you going to use for bowstring? Are you aware that it is sinew that is most often used for strings in primitive bows? Do you even know how to find the sinew in a dead animal? *
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More than this, do you know the techniques necessary to produce a usable arrow? There are several important aspects to the problem of making an arrow. A crooked arrow will not shoot straight. Do you know where to find and when to cut arrow shaft-wood? How do you straighten them? Today, in making an arrow, a piece of wood is turned into a straight, columnal shape. But primitive man had no lathe and had to use stone tools to make the arrow true. How do you keep the arrow tip pointed in the right direction during flight? How do you attach a stone tool to the shaft? More importantly, how do you make a stone arrowhead that is symmetrical? Do you know what pressure flaking is? If your answer to any of these questions is âI donât know,â, then it can safely be asserted that you are going to have problems hunting game. *
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Assuming you are able to make an arrow or a bow, are you able to stalk a wild animal to within a few feet of it? It is probable that your arrowâs accuracy will not initially be as good as the arrows of the bushmen, so you will have to be even closer to the game than 25 yards. Finally, are you able to shoot the homemade bow and arrow with enough skill to kill an animal? The bushmen use poisoned arrows, which increases the effectiveness of the strike. A wound will eventually kill the animal. But where are you going to get poison? *
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This whole question of feeding yourself is quite important. If you canât successfully feed yourself, you will die. If you are not a good enough hunter, then you will have to eat only vegetable matter. But that raises another problem which makes your chance for survival even less. While the hunter-gatherer may get 66% of calories from vegetables, the third they get from meat is very important. Vegetarian diets do not provide the concentrated energy necessary for the hard life that the hunter-gatherer is going to face. And, unless a person carefully chooses his vegetarian diet, he will not get the proper mix of amino acids and may die. The difference between a meat and a vegetarian diet is shown by a discussion of how horses would have to travel to get to the ark. Custance notes,*
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"One reads of the speed achieved by certain animals such as deer and antelope, etc., and imagines accordingly that they could easily make the trip [to the ark-GRM]. But this disregards one important fact, namely, that such creatures are herbivorous. The importance of this observation is that those animals must spend an enormous amount of time browsing in order to gain enough energy for ordinary living. In some cases this may even amount to 80% of their waking hours. Such a circumstance leaves them little time for making long journeys through unfamiliar territory, and it accounts for the fact that a man can outrun a horse - given time - as has been demonstrated on many occasions. In spite of its strength the horse must stop to eat far more frequently than the man who eats meat."72*
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The whole point of this section is that the technology requires specialists; without the specialists, civilization may sink to extremely low standards of living. The present technological knowledge has replaced the ancient knowledge and may be of little use to a stranded band of survivors. What good is knowledge of metalwork when there is not enough food to live another two weeks? The need for stone tools is quite obvious from the foregoing, yet in each culture, after the invention of metal smelting, the practical knowledge of stoneworking was lost. Metal makes superior arrowheads, harvesting implements and knives. Once mankind had the ability to work in metal, why would he continue to make stone tools? The history of civilization shows that stone tools disappeared as soon as the knowledge of metal work became widespread in the culture. *
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If the reader finds that hard to accept, then realize that people only 1000 years ago were regularly able to memorize thousands of verses of poetry and recite it. But after the invention of the printing press, people could look up facts in books up so they quit working so hard at memorizing. New technologies replaced old ways. Even today, we are seeing a revolution in the way society handles its technology. From the 1930âs to the 1970âs, phonograph records were the delivery system for music. But with the advent of cassette tapes, and now compact disks, the information encoded on the LPâs is quickly becoming inaccessible. Record players, on which to play a phonograph, are becoming rare. When I was being trained as a physicist, every student was required to know how to use a slide rule. There were at least two types of slide rules, the more common straight variety and the rarer circular style. Electronic calculators have eliminated the need to know how to use the old technology and now children, when seeing one, look at it with the awe due an artifact out of the Stone Age. Calculators are also eliminating the need to memorize the mathematical tables. Just 20 years ago, the most important qualification for a store clerk was the ability to accurately add and subtract, so that the correct change could be returned to the customer. Modern cash registers tell the clerk what the correct change should be. Clerks no longer need to be able to subtract accurately. As technology progresses, new skills are learned and old skills are dropped.* Glenn R. Morton, Foundation, Fall and Flood, 182-187.
It would be millions of years before technology developed again.
Did you ever work as a clerk? I did and all the clerks could make correct change without having to subtract.
So how long did it take to develop the technology in the first place? Who started this technology development?
Hereâs a challenge for you.
Layout your version of history. Just the high points and it has to fit on half of a sheet of paper. It would help to keep your ideas straight.
As a matter of fact, I did, and I now watch young people really having trouble figuring out how much change to give me back. I often have to tell them.
So how long did it take to develop the technology in the first place? Who started this technology development?
Anthropology says the first stone tools are about 2.6 myr ago. They are not sure if it is a member of our genus or a member of the australopithecines.
Hereâs a challenge for you.
Layout your version of history. Just the high points and it has to fit on half of a sheet of paper. It would help to keep your ideas straight.
Thank you for your condescension.
Thank you for this. It means a lot when someone acknowledges something like this. It is far too rare an occurence and thus places you in a special group of people.
Thank you good sir.
You canât smack a Hebrew word stripped from its sentence and chapter context into a lexicon and claim to have the more correct translation. Just like it would make little sense for me to pretend to be a geophysicist and argue with you on the points you made earlier, it seems to make little sense to me that you dismiss scholarly translation and interpretation based off of a two minute search with no understanding of the Hebrew. You may be convinced by this explanation, but Iâm not. Translation of a passage is based off of more than the lexical meaning of a single word by itself.
I donât know why there had to be control of fire that long ago. Is there something in the Bible I have missed that says there was? I certainly havenât said so.
They were offering burnt sacrifices. How would a non-human hominid have done this 5.3mya without fire? Is there any archaeology that could back you up there?
You do not address the other problems I named. There were no humans 5.3mya, there is no possible way they were constructing arks back then, thereâs no way that tents existed 5.3mya, and thereâs no way slavery existed 5.3mya. Yet all of these, along with burnt sacrifices, are mentioned in the account of Noah. I consider these issues far more significant than a single ambiguous word (Cush/Kassite) in the argument of the video I posted.
Korvexius, I thought I would point out one thing you might not have noticed because almost no one in theology knows anything about geology, and this information has only come to light as 3d seismic has been collected in the eastern Mediterranean in response to the discovery of massive gas fields there.
Genesis 2:8-14 describes 4 rivers, Gihon (which we have debated about whether or not it is the Nile), the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Pison. If one translates kus here as it is everywhere else in the Bible, as Cush, then the description of Eden exactly describes the situation of the 4 rivers when the Mediterranean was dry 5.3 myr ago. The Euphrates and Tigris and Nile all emptied into the dry desert basin that used to be the Mediterranean. There is a 4th big river at that time, which drained Arabia and created the Afiq canyon at that time as well (go look it up). It drained Arabia which is where the Bible says Havilah was. Just by believing the Bible, we actually match the geography of Eden without having to speculate about the kassites who otherwise are not mentioned in the Scriptures.
Is this just blind luck, or divine revelationâit is too long ago to have been passed down by oral tradition. I think it is evidence of divine inspiration, but some will tell me to write my ideas down on a piece of paper to keep my insanity from showing.
These depositional systems are derived by geologists working 3d seismic collected in the eastern Med. they are of the right age for when the Mediterranean was a dry desert just before the Zanclean flood (go look it up)
full details here
Iâd have to look more into it, but once again, the issues I see are significant. I donât see how the evidence for divine inspiration is any less on the scenario where the whole thing happened 10,000 years ago or so in an area buried under what is now some sea. In any case, I received a response from the author of the video to what you wrote and he asked me to post it here. Here it is:
âŚ
Eden: His only criticism seems to be that ×××Š× never can refer to anything but Cush, but there is no rule in Hebrew which forces this. For example the word Seraph typically refers to a snake (Numbers 21:8) but in Isaiah 6 it refers to angelic beings. So we have one word with two completely different bmeaings. I suspect gbob might reply that place names are different, but this is not true either, and one needs to look no further than the Table of Nations (Genesis 10). There are two nations of Havilah (son of Cush, son of Joktan), and two nations named Sheba (son of Cush, son of Joktan). Considering, that Genesis 2 refers to the garden in the east (v2.8) and Cush would have been south of Israel, it probably is referring to a different nation and the Kassites fit that bill. The fact that gbob is arguing from silence is not convincing. Remember, I relied on scholars for this.
Flood: This section is ironic to me because he accuses me of dishonesty when in fact the opposite might be true. However, I think he skimmed through El Bastawasyâs paper instead of reading it thoroughly which will explain the mistakes.
Before that I want to point out, I never said the ark landed on the top of Mount Judi. Genesis 8 only says the region of Urartu mountains. I suspect the ark came to rest in a low lying region since the dove found an olive leaf. I only brought up mount Judi to point out mount Ararat was not the consensus. If it came to rest at the foot of a mountain or just near the area of the mountain that mountain could still be considered the landing point. I also never said the flood had to be a full year long. I think the lengths of Genesis 6-8 could be symbolic.
As for the paper which he says I misrepresented, it seems he is conflating points made by El Bastawasy, namely the deluge path and the mega-lake that formed in the region. For example, gbob has the audicity to accuse me of dishonesty because he says, âBelow is a picture of what El Bastawesy says was flooded. I donât agree with it but here it isâ
He continues, âNow for comparison look at what the film does. They expand and distort what El Bastawesy was saying.â What gbob doesnât realize he has conflated the âdeluge pathâ with the âmega-lakeâ that would have formed. El Bastaswasy even says figure 7 is of the deluge path , âThe estimated extent of the deluge path and its overflow arms that breached the high topographic barriers in Arabia.â But we all know water flows to the lowest level, and if you look at a topographical map there is only one place it could have gone:
The water from the deluge would have poured in and filled in the region. El Bastawasy even says on page 4, âOn the other hand, the overflow of the SirhanâAzraq basins may have overflowed eastward into Middle Iraq and westward into the Dead Sea (Fig. 7).â Middle Iraq is far up as Bagdad, and given the topography that could have streched up into the region of the Urartu mountains. Also, give the topography of the region, the mega lake would have drained into the Indian ocean that fast, and this is covered in the paper. So the water would have overflowed into the region and would have been slow to drain, and the El Bastawasy says this could have reached into middle Iraq, given elevation levels.
The idea El Bastawasy didnât back up his research for a sudden and rapid flood is absurd. For example, he talks about, âformation of thick lacustrine deposits in the extinct trough of Wadi Al Sirhanâ and the âwide breachesâ of the overflow fans and channels, which are several kilometers in length and tens of meters in-depth and are no longer connected. He sits other examples of what gradual following of a lake would look like, âLake Kivu (2,220 km2, elevation 1,460 m) of the African Rift Valley empties into Lake Tanganyika (32,000 km2, elevation 773 m) via Ruzizi River.â The region of this ancient mega-lake doesnât match the gradual filling of these other lakes, given the overflow channels, and the topography suggests it all drained into the lowest regions which were insufficent to drain the whole region.
El Bastawasy also does respond to early research like Schulz and Whitney (1986) on pages 7 and 8 and explains why they came to their conclusuons and why new evidence shows a rapid flood, not a slow gradual change.
So it seems gbob left out several important points Bastawasy brought up and also misrepresented points made in the videos. That is all the time I have to respond to now, but if you go through the paper you can see El Bastawasy did a very good job of backing up his resrarch and responding to other theories of grafual flooding or rainfall.
I didnât mean it to be condescending. Your posts are usually very long to the point of being TLDNR. I thought it would help in the communication if you would just briefly lay out your take on history as it applies to Genesis. No justifications needed.
And here is an example why.
But your flood theory is based on the Messinian salinity crisis which is 5 million years ago and you appear to argue that technology was developed before then. Right?