The Essence of Genesis 1

[Roy]

@Bill_II

@graft2vine

I think the kangaroo is represented by the name Shelah.

Silly, everyone knows kangaroo means “I don’t know.”

It could have been worse. He could have spelt it ‘Sheila’.

[Roy]

Creationists quote-mine so often it’s to be expected that any quote they produce will be mined.

For example:

@graft2vine

@Roy

And now you’re not only implicitly assuming that Hebrew vocabulary was limited to the words used in the Bible - which is where that 9,000 figure comes from

Hebrew - The Society for Old Testament Study

In the older Hebrew dictionaries, the Classical Hebrew vocabulary was reckoned at ca. 8,400 different words (lemmas). The discovery in the 20th century of new Classical Hebrew texts has added some ca. 1,400 words to the dictionary, and a proliferation of scholarly proposals to find in our texts Hebrew words not hitherto recognized has produced another ca. 4,000 (though many of these proposals are by no means accepted by all scholars). Classical Hebrew is now attested by ca. 14,000 words or potential words. However, many of these are proper names.

Here’s part of that article that @graft2vine didn’t quote:

Until the beginning of the 20th century, almost all the Classical Hebrew known was in the Hebrew Bible. Since then, the discovery of various inscriptions like the Siloam inscription and of literary texts, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hebrew book of Sirach Ecclesiasticus, have expanded the quantity of material in Classical Hebrew by about one third.

@graft2vine’s source confirms that his ~9,000 word count for ancient Hebrew vocabulary is indeed based on the number of words used in the Bible, so he was comparing the number of Hebrew words in the Bible with the number of English words in use, as if there wasn’t any Hebrew vocabulary not used in the bible.

Comparing the number of Hebrew words in the bible (~9,000) with the number of English words in the KJV (~12,000) completely demolishes the claim that “Hebrew has a much more limited vocabulary and so the words have a wider range of meaning.”