Hey guys. I was browsing YouTube yesterday for interesting opinions on the Bible, and I found one short video particularly interesting: Hidden Message in Genesis WOW - YouTube
This is a very intriguing possible interpretation of the genealogy in Genesis 5, and I think there is definitely something to be said for it, but I am skeptical. I checked the meanings of the Hebrew words used for these names, and the meanings he gives in the video certainly seem to be accurate. So for you people who have lived longer than me and are wiser than me (which is quite possibly all of you), what do you think about this? Is it right for us to draw this prophetic understanding (it seems to be an eisegetical interpretation) out of Genesis? Even further, would the Jews that Moses was writing to have understood it this way?
Blessings to you all!
Generally Iâve learned to very carefully approach any video that ends with âSHOCKING,â âAMAZED,â âREVEALED,â etc. I canât speak with much authority about this particular topic and perhaps this is a cool little thing that God hid in the text. However, I doubt it.
a) Jesus is never recorded as having pointed to this passage. As He is establishing his kingdom and getting everything in order, this would be a pretty easy prophecy to point out. But he doesnât, which begs the question what was its purpose then? Okay, so perhaps there were other passages that Jesus didnât point to which perhaps obviously do point to Him, which brings me to my 2nd point.
b) Translation is REALLY tricky. I randomly picked Methuselah and you can also translate that name as âMan with a Javelin.â Of course, this doesnât fit very neatly with the preacherâs message.
c) Finally, and Iâve referenced this elsewhere so I apologize for the repetition, but is âbringing comfortâ the point of Jesus life and death? At the moment Iâd say that I wasnât so sure. Once again, see N.T. Wright.
In short, it looks cool but worth the same skepticism you would bring to a person predicting the end times based on a similar approach to scripture.
Iâve watched this same video several months ago and was blown away. However, Iâve recently become skeptical of it. Michael Heiser gave the following point: "There is no New Testament passage, anywhere, that would used this Genesis 5 interpretation as giving a prophecy for the Messiah. While Chuck Missler, most certainly wouldnât claim that heâs inspired by God, the logical conclusion would be that he is⊠Because Paul and Jesus make no mention of this phenomenal âprophecy hidden in the genealogyâ.
I believe Carol Hill from ASA (american Scientific Affiliation) wrote a great article about interpreting the Bible, which she calls âThe Worldview Approachâ. She reads the early chapters of Genesis as actual history, but filtered through the lens of the Ancient Hebrews who are writing it. Like one might suggest that the people in Genesis 5 were real flesh-n-blood people, but that their ages were exaggerated (possibly following a tradition of their neighbors that make their ancestors have really long lifespans). Perhaps itâs also true that their are generation skips between the patriarchs (as can be clearly seen in Matthewâs Genealogy). Perhaps the flood miraculously took place, but it didnât incase the whole planet.
Maybe Adam and Eve are true people, but there were other people living at the time too (for instance, Leviticus condemns incest as wicked, but if Adam and Eve are the sole original pair that means God brought about humanity through incest⊠Which has an inkling of inconsistent morals).
The problem with over-allegorizing people in Genesis 1-11 is that one has now real basis for when the mythological people end and the historical people begin (the book of Chronicles and Lukeâs genealogy makes no such distinction).
The advantage of Worldview approach is that sees the Bible as being Truth, while also taking into account we are dealing with very ancient documents: whatâs contradictory or false in how we write things is not the same sorta of contradiction as would be perceived by Ancient Hebrews.
I view Genesis 1 as poetry that describes history. All of it literally happened. But the chronological order, and timeframe were not the sole focus. In the same sense that the poem In Flanders Field describes events about World War I, we read like it is⊠A poem. But we DONâT discount the historical events itâs discussing. Much like Exodus 14 describes the historical event of the Exodus through the Red Sea, Exodus 15 immediately follows a song/poem describing that same event. But using language like âGodâs right handâ and âthe blowing of his nostrilsâ⊠It does not mean we disregard the Exodus as myth.
It is in this I believe people make too big of a distinction between history and poetry. As if one describes objective fact and the other describes âabstracts not rooted in realityâ.
I do like your statement above. I believe Genesis 1-11 are literal. This does not mean that God has revealed to us the whole book of life there, however. The ages do not disturb me, and I feel they are true as well. Perhaps there werenât all the sicknesses then that later generations experienced. I still say that the Deluge of Noah was a local flood in Mesopotamia. If it were not, where did Noahâs descendants find their mates. We would have the Cain problem again if there were only eight people in the world. I saw an old book put out by Christian theologians by Readerâs Digest when I was an undergraduate at Old Dominion in the 1970âs. It stated that they believed the flood was in Mesopotamia and showed the layers of flood strata there. Perhaps God destroyed one civilization on earth due to evil much as he did in Sodom. It is not impossible scientifically or theologically. God bless.
BThanks for your response, Christy. I would agree that the tectonic plate theory is the reason, however, likely disagree about what caused said plate movement. When one considers that theory, there are many questions which are not answered when a slow, gradual movement is assumed. However, when one considers the possibility of a worldwide flood which would have caused catastrophic, accelerated movement in the plates, those questions are more adequately answered. I have attached a link to an article that explains it better than I can. Thanks and have a great day! Here is the article link referenced above. Can Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Explain Flood Geology? | Answers in Genesis
Honestly, I donât trust anything Answers in Genesis publishes. They have a long history of misrepresenting science. if you find it satisfactory, more power to you.
There is a much simpler biblical answer than plate tectonics. The Bible repeatedly states that the Earth (and the plural heavens) spread out in unbroken continuity. We confirm that galaxies spread out from tiny, naked globs in visible cosmic history (at many ranges). Also, the continents fit together on a minuscule planet.
On the second day, God continues to command a spreading atmosphere (raqiya shamayim) to continue to spread out between the waters above the spreading atmosphere and the waters below the spreading atmosphere. Day two uses the noun of the verb to spread out (the thing that spreads out) five times. Proverbs 8:28 explains that the water above was a solid cloud like structure. It also tells us how it got there: when the geysers of the deep were powerful. Day two is the only day that God did not say what happened that day was good. When the ice came down, it was not a good day.
On day three, the surface of the ground appeared for the first time. Notice that the word seas is plural yet they are all gathered into one place. The only way you can do that is for the water to seep underground (one place). The Hebrew for land is singular, a single continent. Indeed the continents fit together on a minuscule planet without any of the modern surface oceans which continue to spread out along a global, active, volcanic expansion seam.
Genesis 2 plainly tells why why there were no dessert plants in the garden era. Water came up out of the ground to water the entire face of the Earth. Indeed, we find thick layers of chalk, limestone made of marine fossils only on the continents. During the global cataclysm, the sub crustal seas broke up causing the waters to rise for 150 days after the rain stopped. Where did the water go that covered the highest hills by 15 cubits? Wide valleys opened up to accept the water as the mountain concurrently arose (see Psalm 104). Indeed, two different geologies exist. The dense volcanic modern seas are entirely unlike the continents that are covered with billions of tons of marine fossils.
The oceans continue to spread out between the rooted continents as the Earth continues to grow. What causes this? The Biblical God claims to continue in unbroken continuity to lay the foundation of the Earth (Zech 12:1). The last continents to separate were North and South America from Europe and Africa. This did not happen until the days of Peleg, one of Noahâs great, great grandsons.
Ancient people lived for vast geological ages. Job 14 lists the geological changes that corresponded to a human lifetime during the dinosaur era. The mountains wore down. The Mediterranean dried (Hebrew word for West). Water wore down stones and washed away the dust of the Earth were Jobâs markers for a lifetime. Drill cores from the Nile show that it wore down a channel into granite 1.5 miles deep as it rushed down to the dried Mediterranean. Drill cores from the Med show that it did indeed dry. We find thick layers of plankton sandwiched between layers of salt and gypsum. the Nile since filled up with silt and formed a great delta, exactly as Job describes. Job ended his poem on the brevity of life by claiming their faces intensely changed in unbroken continuity before they died. If we lived to watch the ocean dry, we would grow thick Neanderthal brows from vast age. Neanderthal children had skulls like modern children, yet with striations and wear on primary teeth as though they were old in few days.
How could that be? Everything is changing as we observe in the visible history of the universe. Ancient people understood change, since it was the heart of their worldview. Science was founded on the medieval, scholastic notion that matter is not changing as it ages. Change and science are opposite worldviews. The foundational assumption upon which Western science was founded is visibly false.
Ah, good old catastrophic plate tectonics. One of the more esoteric proposals by our young-earth friends.
The problem with catastrophic plate tectonics is that it would generate massive amounts of heat â certainly enough to boil the flood waters into oblivion. Even if it didnât, it would generate some pretty extreme weather conditions â hypercanes, tornadoes, massive waves â easily enough to batter the Ark to pieces.
Itâs also contradicted by radiometric evidence. For example, the ages of the Hawaiian islands increase linearly with distance at the same rate as is measured by GPS satellites. To account for this, youâd have to propose that nuclear decay rates and continental drift were both accelerated by exactly the same amount in perfect sync with each other at all times. Even if accelerated nuclear decay were plausible (it isnât), youâre still looking at extremely convoluted and contrived processes that serve no purpose other than to make the earth look older than it really is â the old omphalos hypothesis again.
i will take a stab at it.
How would a local flood cover all yhe high hills under the whome heaven. Have risi h water for 100 + days, require such a wait period after the water was gone. They stayed in the boat for 2 months.
Hawaii is explained by the hydro plate theory By Walt Brown.
How does a cooling molten earth produce granite anyway? That is not possible and cam not be maintained as an igneous rock. How did water penetrate into the earth so deep given water comet bombardment being source of earths water after its formation. There cant exist water deeper than 10 miles unless it formed with water, as Peter states in scripture.
Radioactive particles were created during the flood event. And are only some 5000 years old. See Z pinch theory.
Look at the 19.5 degrees on alm the planets along with earth and the big vokcano at Hawaii. There is aomething interesting which causes energetic anomalies at that place on a pmanetary scale. Mars Oly.pus Mans, Jupiters storm, Neptunes white cloud etc.
Actually, the Bible is ambiguous about that point. See the footnote in the NIV on Genesis 7:20, which gives âor rose twenty feet, and the mountains were covered.â The Flood was more likely a local manifestation of a global event that affected different parts of the Earth differently in different hemispheres, probably at the end of the last Ice Age. Thereâs some evidence for an asteroid impact in northern Greenland that could have been as recently as 12,000 BC.
Are you referring to the claims made by the RATE project here? It was supposed to be a young-earth research project that would debunk radiometric dating once and for all. Instead, they ended up having to admit that trying to squeeze the radiometric evidence into just 6,000 years would have raised the Earthâs temperature to 22,000°C. In other words, it was a complete and utter failure. They just didnât want to admit it (not least because to do so would have upset their donors).
Oh, and Z pinch theory is about what happens in plasmas in strong magnetic fields. Think particle accelerators or tokamak fusion reactors. That has nothing to do with the conditions that could have prevailed on Earth during the Flood.
i appreciate the included articles abd sorry for the bad grammar and spelling.
My point about the Z Pinch was to suggest the method in which, during the flood, radioactive heavy elements could have been fused into existence. There is some evidence that they are only actually present near the surface of earth. Do you have a proposal for deep water below the depth of possible seepage from the surface, The standard modwl says water bearing asteroids bombarded the earth in.late time after cooling down from a molten beginning/conglomoration.
If thats the case the compression of the mantle ay and below 10 miles does not allow for water to penetrate, yet there is evidence of water deeper than that from specific radar peneteation and I believe even the KOLA mining project in Russia which reached approx. 14 mi and found signs of water.
Ever since they gound a world war 2 plane buries in ice much deeper than yearly layers theories suggested I am skeptical of ice core dating methids and assumptions.
And the little I know of RATE it did suggest so.e findings consistent with both models, but the evidence found for young earth seem harder to pvercome than the other things consistent with an old earth. Lime the presence of helium in the zircon. Or palonium or paladium? halos in granite.
One of my recent favorites is pointing out that with uniformatarian principles in view. if we take the slowest erosion on earth today, 1 mm per 1000 years, and consider dwposition and uplift, how is it that the geologic column could be intact? The fossils should not at exist, especially high in the mountains.
its as if there was no erosion for 100s of millions of years. And where did the material come from to cause only deposition without any erosion? if uplift is compensated by erosion the geologic column, at the slowest measurwd rates today on hard rock material, the column should be eroded away and reaced 10 times since precambrian.
It isnât. Not in the sense of there being any one place where the entire column is represented from beginning to end in pristine form - and wouldnât be, for all the very reasons you mention.
I remember a young-earth creationist text making much of this - that the âcolumnâ didnât physically exist anywhere in whole form and is merely an âimaginaryâ construct. They were partially right - except in thinking it was all made up. Earthâs long history has to be pieced together like a puzzle, but it isnât haphazard and the pieces are interlocking! So even though we canât expect to find the complete record all in one place, overlapping pieces of it are found in various places. Science [fortunately] does not depend on one âknock-downâ solution or source to deliver everything about a given subject to us. We do have to piece things together using evidence from multiple sources.
Exactly. I live in the waaaay northeast corner of the US, and my state has no dinosaur fossils because over 300 million years of our fossil record is gone.
Dear Connor,
Thanks for sharing one of the many hidden Gems in the Bible. Moses of course did not write the books of Moses, but they were written by the the wisest man ever to live or ever will live - Solomon. (Salomo - die Königsquelle) Much of this wisdom was lost when the Jews rewrote the works of Solomon after returning from the city of the devil where they learned about blood offerings, for example. It is only through brilliant imagery that some of his wisdom survived the heavy hands of the scribes and priests.
Actually, the RATE projectâs claims of evidence for a young Earth arenât at all hard to overcome. The helium diffusion in zircons claim is just a variation on the theme of tiny samples with huge error bars being paraded as âoverwhelmingâ evidence that hundreds of thousands of other, high-precision, rigorously cross-checked measurements are consistently out by factors of up to a million. To give just one of many examples, they didnât take pressure into account. There are studies e.g. Dunai & Roselieb (1996) that show that pressure alone could account for the apparent discrepancy. Yet pressure is dismissed as a ârescuing device.â
Just about every other example of âevidenceâ for a young earth that Iâve seen suffers from the same problem. Hereâs a general overview of the differences between old-earth evidence and young-earth claims:
Old earth
Young earth
Extent of data
Hundreds of thousands of measurements
A few hundred measurements
Sample sizes
Significant sample sizes
Tiny sample sizes
Precision
High precision (error bars in the ±0.01-5% range)
Low precision (error bars several orders of magnitude)
Rates of change
Rates that have a strong theoretical and experimental basis for assuming that they were constant (e.g. radioactive decay, the speed of light)
Rates that nobody expects to have been anywhere near constant (e.g. the amount of salt in the sea, Earthâs magnetic field, changes in the Earthâs population)
Predictions
Precise and specific
So broad as to be effectively meaningless
Cross-checking
Extensive cross-checking between different methods
Ad-hoc, frequently mutually contradictory explanations with little or no cross-checking
Standards of peer review
Peer review looks for rigour, factual accuracy, precision, mathematical correctness, and adherence to proven best practices
Peer review carried out by subject matter specialists
Peer review carried out by people whose area of expertise lies elsewhere
Reproducibility
Common
Rare if not nonexistent
Response to falsification
Findings are discarded if further studies contradict them
Studies that contradict the claims are dismissed as ârescuing devicesâ or âuniformitarian presuppositionsâ
I hope you understand what Iâm getting at here. The fact is that there are basic standards of honesty, factual accuracy, methodological rigour, quality control, mathematical coherence and peer review that evidence has to meet before it can credibly be considered scientific, and young-earth claims simply do not come anywhere close to meeting those standards.
Do you even consider the role that presumptions play? Is it possible that the data you believe is so much proof is not actually the evidence. But the interpretation has been preset by those who came before? I think that this point should be more regularly considered.
It is easy to presume superiority with a majority of experts reinforcing a perspective and not actually really grasping which ideas are fully grounded in fact and how much of ones understanding is an off shoot of unacknowledged assumptions or prescribed framework given by the institution that bestowed ones doctrate.
Yes I did consider the role that presumptions play, and Iâm sorry but it simply doesnât work that way. You donât need to be an expert or to have a doctorate to see this either â these are the most basic rules and principles of mathematics and measurement that you learn in the very first half hour of the first practical class in the first year of any undergraduate physics degree. It simply isnât realistic to claim that geochronology is so unreliable, and so vulnerable to presuppositions, that it is unable to distinguish between thousands and billions. Especially not when some geological ages can be pinned down with an accuracy better than ±0.02%.
Young-earth organisations like to teach their followers to glibly throw out words such as âpresumptionsâ or âinterpretationâ or âwere you there?â as if they were some kind of magic shibboleth that let them hand-wave away any and every scientific result that they donât like. It sounds very convincing to arts and humanities students who quit compulsory science education at age sixteen because they couldnât handle the maths and havenât set foot in a laboratory since, but once you actually learn how to apply the scientific method in real-world situations, and once you drill down into the details of what is supposedly being âpresumedâ or âinterpreted,â it very, very quickly becomes painfully obvious that these magic shibboleths do not have a shred of merit.
The fact of the matter is that there are strict rules that interpretations have to obey. Rules that are concerned only with honest and accurate weights and measures, and that have nothing whatsoever to do with âpresumptionsâ or worldview or anything like that. Conventional old-earth science for the most part obeys those rules. Young-earth arguments donât even acknowledge their existence.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Evolution has given us overactive agency detectors.
