The Bible says he walked “day and night.” Prophets can do this without food or sleep. So 80 km/day would not be impossible.
Yes. But, perhaps, that is why I was born… I believe in doing my best.
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[quote=“Bill_II, post:450, topic:49111”]
So the earth is only 6,000 years old?
The Bible does not say 6000 years. That is Bishop Ushher’s genealogical chronology. Nothing to do with the creation of earth.
//Assuming you mean the 4 rivers that flowed from Eden, all of them didn’t exist during NT times. However, when you remember that the Persian Gulf was not always there, there are several rivers that are currently under water that would place Eden in the normally accepted location.//
I have made a comparative study of the possibility of location of Eden at Lake Van, Qurnah and India. I would be very happy to share with you but cannot do so in public because it is submitted for publication. Pl send your email to me at bharatjj@gmail.com. I find that the geographical info in the Bible matches (-)14 and 7 percent at Lake Van and Qurnah as compared to 89 percent at Pushkar in India.
//And the flooding of the Gulf provides the source for the flood story.//
Two critical differences are that the Jewish tradition says the Flood took place in October while floods in Iraq take place in April. Secondly, Iraq floods have a clear passage to the Persian Gulf and do not stay for 150 days as told in the Bible.
//For the simple reason there were Hebrews living next to Jacob’s well for the duration of the exile. I can understand the exact location of Jacob’s well might be lost to those in exile but not for those still living there. You want to invoke a mass cultural amnesia to make your theory fit. Sorry but Occam’s Razor says your are wrong.//
We need to distinguish between living traditions and geographical info. For example, “Eden” is claimed to be located at at least 7 locations. So, it is possible that there is a Jacob’s well in Indus Valley as well as Israel. Geographical info, on the other hand, is like rivers and mountains and deserts that do not change much in a few millennia and leave a footprint if they do. We truly do not know where the original Jacob’s well was located. The antiquity of the “Jacob’s well” at Shechem is uncertain. The earliest reference to this well by the name “Jacob’s well” is available only from 333 CE (Alliata, Eugenio, Mount Ephraim and Benjamin, Here is Jacob’s well, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem, 2000, http://198.62.75.1/www1/ofm/mad/sources/sources041.html, Retrieved November 23, 2010).
Entirely agree. But what the words mean is subject to our interpretation. There would be no case for exegesis if everything was crystal clear.
Thx
Bill, Bill, Bill. You’re being rational. Now stop it.
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Pope Benedict: The issue is the primacy of God. The issue is acknowledging that he is a reality, that he is the reality without which nothing else can be good. History cannot be detached from God and then run smoothly on purely material lines.
https://studentsoul.intervarsity.org/pope-book
Klax. Let us carry history and faith together.
We do not know how many remained. We do not know whether those that remained were aware of the history. I think the possibility cannot be ruled out. The argument in favor of their forgetting their original places is that geography does not match with the places that are identified as on date.
Historicity of the Bible cannot be established without providing archaeological evidences at the relevant time at the relevant places. Of course, faith can stand on its own. But faith will only be deepened if there is supporting archaeological evidence.
It does when you take Genesis literally, as you said you do.
Did you include the rivers currently under the Persian Gulf? A comparative study when it doesn’t include the actual location that is in question is meaningless. I believe this is a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
Don’t see how Jewish tradition is a problem given we can’t date the Persian Gulf flood to the month. It may well have happened in October.
So mountains contain large signs identifying them so there is no way people could be confused?
In an earthquake prone region rivers also change their course, often over night. I believe if you go back far enough in time there is geological proof that the Euphrates river emptied into the Mediterranean.
And so far I have seen no indication that you have actually studied the geology of the region. You base your theory on word meaning with no way to prove the meaning changed except that it matches your theory.
Again with the cultural amnesia. And the people that remained had some access to the Torah, unless you want to argue it was all written after the exile. In which case that makes it a forgery and should be thrown out.
Which Biblical Archaeology does. May not be perfect but there are mounds of evidence that there was no change in the location of Canaan to thousands of miles away.
So you agree with yourself. Good to know.
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Show me please.
There is no water course footprint below the gulf. Pure speculation. No biblical archaeologist takes this seriously to my knowledge.
Please share the evidence on four rivers, 150 day flood, two nahar of Abraham, parting of the sea and volcano to begin with. Glad we are coming back to the subject of this thread.
What rivers are they? With sources under the Persian Gulf?
Or the nearest myriad years.
I can’t find it. That must have been a 9. When was that?
And the Minoan cult of the Bull in Crete? [cf. and the legend of the Minotaur)
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Add up the ages in the genealogies. It is all Bishop Ussher did.
Sorry but the geology says otherwise. And there is also archaeological evidence to support this.
Watch this video. It contains academic sources. And no, he is not arguing for a global flood.
You ever read anything by gbob here? He provided the geological data that supported it.
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Yeah I did. Got the measure of him pretty quick. Loved the guy. Sadly missed. But away with the fairies. There is no disinterested academic claim of a Richter 9 temblor diverting the Western Euphrates from the Mediterranean at any time. There is no old river bed to the Med from E. Turkey.
The Persian Gulf formed between 24 and 10 thousand years ago, but not 14 to 12! The oasis was fed in to by four rivers which still, of course, exist. That would have been orally transmitted and been used for the four rivers of Eden, as mythical as Atlantis.
What does the video disinterestedly claim about a Noachian flood? When? Where? The only candidate is the 2900+/-100 BCE Indian Ocean Burckle Crater formation, a thousand years before the setting of the Abraham story, roughly coinciding with the Noah story.
Geological data relating to the Flood is a bit off from the original topic, but here’s a quick summary. Glenn Morton developed a model of the Flood as the end-Miocene re-flooding of the Mediterranean. A few people have proposed what is now the north end of the Persian Gulf as the site of Eden and the Flood. Both of these posit that the four rivers of Eden converged rather than diverged.
Although I do not know of a specific earthquake rearranging the Tigris and Euphrates drainages (I am a geologist but not a seismologist), the region certainly has plenty of sizeable earthquakes, besides the effects of ordinary erosion and more gradual uplift and subsidence. Any of those may produce shifts in drainages. One could look for wind gaps (old river valleys, now riverless) in the regional mountain chains. Whether anyone has looked carefully, I don’t know.
The Mediterranean refilling would certainly have been an impressive flood. But that was five million years ago, which would be quite a stretch of the genealogies, and the only hominids that we know of did not have brains particularly larger than chimps’.
The Persian Gulf region has experienced a variety of sea level fluctuations. During peak glacial episodes, the entire area would be above sea level, and the climate would be somewhat cooler and wetter. The rivers plausibly refer to the Tigris and Euphrates, a now usually dry channel flowing east across northern Arabia, and a river from southeastern Iran. There also exist ancient traditions about Bahrain escaping the Flood, though I do not know more details (not from a source promoting a particular view on the Flood, but not with detail.) Did that region ever flood rapidly enough to matter? I don’t know of good data to address that question.
Although the Black Sea is quite deep, its connection to the Mediterranean is shallow. Thus, it would have become a giant lake from time to time with sea level fluctuations, followed by re-flooding. Although it was popularized a few years back as inspiration for Flood traditions, there isn’t good evidence that those floods ever passed the “looks like time to move the tent” rate of change. Although current events make investigation of the north edge of the Black Sea difficult, the difficulties have not been as persistent as for the Persian Gulf, so there are more data.
As another complication, a flood does not have to be rapid to cause problems. If people are trapped, a slow rise will drown them just as effectively. If the relevant individuals were on a region of higher but not high enough ground, they could have been cut off gradually before the problem was obviously serious.
Ussher did not just add up genealogies. Like many of his contemporaries, he used all of the available data (which, at the time, would be Greek and Roman sources along with the Bible) to try to come up with the best possible date. Keeping in mind that modern methods of expressing uncertainty in a value had not been developed, it’s not surprising that the dates for creation calculated in the 1500’s and 1600’s ranged from the 5000’s to the 3000’s BC. (Isaac Newton came up with one of the lower dates.) Note also that creation in 4004 BC is exactly 4000 years older than the generally accepted date of Jesus’ birth. This is no coincidence. Starting in the 2nd century AD, it was quite popular to interpret Ps. 90 and II Peter 3:8 “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years” to imply that the total history of Earth would span 6 intervals of 1000 years each, corresponding to the days of Genesis 1. Thus, the choice of 4004 was influenced by this approach (called chiliasm). Of course, that would also imply that the end of the world was in 1997. Apparently we’re all left behind.
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Yep. Got all that. Had it prior. The Med, the Black Sea. Apart frommm… raising… gradual flooding as a cause of sparse regional lowland populations being gradually cut off and drowned? Don’t buy it. Boats. Rafts.
Burckle, 3,000 BCE, would have been catastrophic up the Gulf. Whence Utnapishtim.
They all, all ANE cultures, including late historical, highly literate and documented ones like the Jewish Exile, used what they had. Prehistoric folk tales.
Unlike the Exodus, which is pure fantasy.
The difficulty here is that there is no archaeological evidence of human habitation. Also where would be Ararat?
In comparison, the rivers emptying into the Indian Ocean from India have had major flood events beginning about 5000 BCE which matches exactly with the approx time of Noah. You may like to see: “About seven flood units have been identified and the lowest unit has been dated
to 5170±135 years BP indicating that half-a-dozen large floods have occurred on the Choral River during the last 5 ka (e-Journal Earth Science India, Vol. I (I), 2008,pp. 21-29 http://www.earthscienceindia.info/, Fluvial Palaeohydrological Studies in Western India: A Synthesis, Alpa Sridhar).”
I give a picture of the rain waters staying put after 2 months in Southern Rajasthan. The area is like a bowl with no channel to drain out the rain waters. This situation would match with flood waters staying for 150 days.
The Jewish “tradition” is not the same as the Bible. The latter is an inspired text and unless there is a major contradiction, I consider it to be true. The Bible does not say that the world was created when Adam lived. The word for “day” yowm <[03117] has multiple meanings among which are “time, year, a division of time, lifetime (pl.), time, period (general), temporal references.” The Lord did indeed make the world in seven time periods. There is no 6000 BCE.
Fantasies do not arise in vacuum. (See Joseph Campbell, “Masks of God”). So there must be some prior historical event. In any event, nothing is lost and much is gained if we are able to find geographical and archaeological evidences in support of the Exodus. The problem has been that we are looking at the wrong place.