Again, can you be specific please? Which arguments have I made that fall short of level DH6, exactly which level do they reach, and why?
What biblical reasons are there to accept the scientific view of the earth as billions of years old?
I do not have time to digress into what is likely to be a protracted disagreement about communication style. Just chalk it up to my shortcomings and let’s call it a day.
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What is it about this which you’re finding hard to understand? I’ll reword it if necessary.
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In the first sentence, I do not understand what you mean by “vision of creation.” This interpretation of Gen 1-2 is new to me, or, if it’s not, I don’t recognize it as a published view I have seen (Gap Theory? Literary Framework? Some variation thereof?). Since I don’t recognize the view you are presenting, I don’t know how to research it to understand it better. (I don’t know whether the infographics you’ve used are from another source of if you prepared them yourself.)
In any case, if Gen 1-2 is a vision, to whom did God give it? And why is it not labeled as such? And how did you arrive at the conclusion that it was describing a vision and not reality?
Since I don’t know exactly what you mean by “a vision of creation; He was seen to create, in a vision,” I don’t how to correlate your second and third sentences with the first. Nor do I know how to correlate the second and third sentences with each other.
Moreover, since Ex 20:8-11 and Ex 31:12-17 make no mention of a vision but rather speak of God creating in six days and resting on the seventh in straightforward, seemingly factual, terms, I don’t know why we’re back to talking about Gen 1-2. As I’ve suggested, these two Exodus passages are problematic for a progressive creation even if the book of Genesis weren’t in the Bible.
Let me emphasize: These are questions of curiosity, not polemics.
In the next few paragraphs you show me that you understand it perfectly well. It’s a vision of God’s creative activity, which God gave to an inspired writer to show the inspired writer the historical events of creation which happened long before any human lived. I see you understand this, which is a great start.
It’s one of the oldest interpretations of Genesis 1. It pre-dates the Christian era. It was held by some early Jews, and some early Christians. It isn’t Gap or Literary Framework or any variation. It is about God showing a vision of the historical events of creation, to an inspired writer.
The infographic provided more detail (yes all the infographics I post are my own work), and cited a couple of books which also describe it. But it’s clear you understand it, so that’s good.
God gave it to a human observer, as my infographic said. The observer was most likely Daniel, as I said previously (and as you quoted me saying, so I don’t know why you asked this question). It’s not labeled as a vision, just like many visions in the Bible are not labeled as visions. For the other questions, see here and follow the link.
Yep you do. You already described it well.
Because you need to understand that Genesis 1 was written at around the same time as those passages of Exodus, and since they are citing Genesis 1 we need to start by understanding what Genesis 1 is saying. Those passages are not explicating Genesis 1, they assume we already know what Genesis 1 means. So we need to start by determining what Genesis 1 means. There’s no need for those passages to talk about a vision, we can read them in a perfectly straightforward way as referring to historical activity which was observed by a divine writer (in a vision).
If you think that anything referred to in poetry can’t be history, or anything in a vision cannot be history, or anything in a song can’t be history, then you’re going to have to pull a lot of history out of the Bible. So do you agree with me that poetry, vision, and song can refer to actual historical events, and that God can reveal or record historical events through poetry, vision, and song?
As I’ve pointed out, they aren’t problematic at all. There were early Jewish and Christian commentators who took these passages perfectly seriously and still didn’t believe in a literal six day creation of the entire universe… And if the book of Genesis wasn’t in the Bible these passages would not be in the Bible either.
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Let’s return to the original question.
What biblical reasons are there to accept the scientific view of the earth as billions of years old?
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The Bible says nothing about the age of the earth, and provides us with no information for determining the age of the earth. None of the passages which modern exegetes use to try and determine the age of the earth or the date of creation, are used that way in the Bible. Trying to use the Bible to date the earth or the creation is necessarily unbibical; you need to abandon the way the Bible interprets itself. This is a huge red flag.
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The Bible tells us that the natural creation is a reliable witness to God and His work. That means we can look at the natural creation to understand what He has done, and science is the correct tool for that task since God has written a record of His work into the earth itself. This is the concept of the two books, Scripture and the natural creation (not Scripture and science, or nature and science).
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The Bible tells us that God created animals out of the earth itself, not out of thin air, and not out of His imagination. In fact the Bible goes one step further and tells us that the way God created animals out of the earth was actually to command the earth to bring them forth, making the actual creation a second order event; God is the initiator, the ultimate cause, but not the proximate cause. The popular idea that God spent an afternoon hand making clay snakes, is simply not supported by the Bible. The Bible tells us that God told the creation itself to bring forth life, and to multiply. This is far closer to the history of life on earth as revealed in the fossil record than it is to the views of Young Earth Creationism, and is in harmony with geology and evolution.
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The Bible provides internal evidence that other humans already existed at the time of Adam and Eve, who were unrelated to them. Cain’s wife and the people Cain feared (whom he knew were already abroad on the earth), are clear indicators of such people, in the Bible itself, that humans already existed, and that the earth had a history with more detail than we read in Genesis 1. Numerous commentators have wrestled unsuccessfully with these texts, attempting to explain them away or just avoid them, arguing that God wanted His chosen people to indulge in incest for centuries, and that God later changed His mind and decided incest was an abomination after all. Such arguments scarcely deserve comment.
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The passages which speak of God creating the heavens and the earth in seven days have long been understood in ways which do not require the entire universe to be less than six thousand years old, and which do not require everything in the universe to have been created in only six days, even when interpreting the days as literal 24 hour days (as I do). Such interpretations pre-date the modern era, and were not invented to try and harmonize with science.
Consequently, it is unsurprising to find that as geologists discovered the earth and creation were countless years older than anyone had expected, most Christian commentators (even those of a conservative nature), had virtually no difficulty accepting the fact, and Young Earth Creationism was a fringe view by the end of the nineteenth century.
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I don’t understand your proposal nearly as well as you say I do. I do understand it better after I read your responses than I did before. I would say that I see it hazily. I’m going to try to clarify further with some questions.
So your position (proposal, view) is that (please confirm or correct where wrong):
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Moses delivered the fourth commandment as specified in Ex 20:8-10, but that Ex 20:11 was added by an inspired writer who lived in the time of Daniel (c. 606-530 BC), and may have been Daniel himself.
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Similarly, Moses delivered Ex 31:12-16, but Ex 31:17 added by the inspired writer who lived in the time of Daniel.
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Gen 1-2 was a vision God gave to the inspired writer who lived in the time of Daniel. The six days were the six days of the vision of creation, not of the creation itself which took much longer.
To sum up the dating, Ex 20:8-10 and Ex 31:12-16 were written by Moses c. 1400-1500 BC, while Ex 20:11, Ex 31:17, and Gen 1-2 were written c. 606-530.
I saw citation of some sources in your Academia.edu paper, but did not see any books cited in the infographics. Are they at the base or edge of the infographic such that I can’t easily view them?
In all that I read, I don’t recall reading your being more specific about this view pre-dating the Christian era. With whom did it originate? I’m not interested in rabbinic sources after the 1st century AD.
Again, to be sure, you’re saying the inspired writer is describing what he saw each day, not what occurred each day?
I don’t want to spend more time on your proposal until I’m sure I see it more clearly.
If you had left the word “vision” out of the paragraph, I could have agreed with you. It is a foreign idea to me that God reveals history in visions - unless you’re talking about future history (i.e. prophecy).
Sure you do, you just summarized it perfectly well.
Yes.
At the end of the infographic, but very high up from the bottom, there’s the title “Early Jewish & Christian commentators who understood Genesis 1 as a series of visions to Moses over 6 days”. Two sources are cited, well before the bottom of the infographic; Margaret Baker, ‘Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment’ (2010), and Margaret Baker, ‘Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy’ (2003). Baker is a leading scholar in this area. These two citations are easily read in the infographic; they are not on the edge at all, and all you need to do is scroll down.
Apart from the specific pre-Christian sources I cited?
The Jews. We don’t know which specific Jew, because the writings in which we find this view are anonymous, like so many of the Old Testament books. In contrast, the 7,000 year plan idea was borrowed by early Jews from the Greeks.
Why do you think it’s impossible to show history in a vision? You see history on TV. Do you think it can’t be history if it’s on TV? In the Bible people had visions of past (such as Zechariah, Ezekiel, Daniel, especially in Daniel 7 in which he receives a vision which includes some events which had already taken pass), present (such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Micaiah), , or future (such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and John).
Thanks for sending the source citations, for I still cannot see them on the infographic. I never claimed to be the sharpest knife in the Internet drawer, but the ease with which you think I can these citations on your infographic does not square with my reality. If anyone else is reading this and has been able to find and read these citations on the infographic, please tell me how. I can find some very small print which looks like it is one or more of the citations in question, but when I try to zoom in the infographic reverts to the upper part. I’ve spent a great deal of time on this - trying to read it in the browser as well as trying to download it and view it as a png or jpg.
Are you saying Margaret Baker is all you’ve got?
You’re being very cryptic here. If you do not know the identity of the Jewish originator, can you at least specify the location and date of the writing?
Who are you calling “early Jews”? And please give a dating for this borrowing.
I don’t say impossible; I just say contrary to its normal purpose. Visions are usually about revealing and explaining the present and future - about prophecy, not history.
I don’t think “TV” is the best analog for “vision.”
I’m not aware of which parts of Zechariah and Ezekiel to which you refer. I just went back and re-read Daniel and don’t see what you’re talking about there either.
When I said, “I don’t understand your proposal nearly as well as you say I do,” you replied:
If that’s the case, then your proposal suggests that Ex 20:8-11 and Ex 31:12-17 as they are currently rendered in our Bible are falsehoods, for they attribute the references to the Lord creating in six days and resting on the seventh to Moses when, on your view, these references came from “an inspired writer” almost a millennium later. Is this really what your view holds?
No they don’t. If you read the document of mine to which I linked you previously, and the Sabbath post of mine to which I linked you previously, you’ll see that they are presented as parenthetical statements which are not attributed to Moses. As I mentioned previously, such parenthetical explanatory statements are found repeatedly in the Old Testament. You can find them in the New Testament as well.
Why is it that none of the 22 English translations I’ve checked render Ex 20:11 or Ex 31:17 parenthetically? It’s not as if translators are afraid to use parentheses when they think it’s appropriate.
For the same reason most of them don’t render other such passages parenthetically, either in the Old or New Testament, even when they provide a footnote telling the reader that a particular section is parenthetical, as indicated by the Hebrew grammar or other features of the text.
I have not followed all of the exchange between @Jonathan_Burke and you, so this is not meant to enter the debate - I do not think parenthesis is correct, but I do note that, for example, Deuteronomy presents the Sabbath in a different manner to Exodus 20 - there can be no doubt that the ten commandments were given by God to Moses, but there is a lot going on, including Moses breaking the original tablets and writing the commandments a second time. I do not add anything else - the Sabbath is ordained, sanctified, by God, and Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath (which has been created for mankind’s benefit).
@Mike_Gantt (& @Jonathan_Burke):
What is the Best Biblical evidence that the Israelite or Jewish scribes had read a work they thought was by Moses?
Of those same 22 English translations, over half render Numbers 12:3 in parentheses.
If you download it as a .png you can zoom in and look anywhere you want. I have attached here a 100% crop of the relevant section. This is the same size as you see it when you download it. You should be able to read it perfectly legibly.
No. When I said “Apart from the specific pre-Christian sources I cited?” I was asking if you wanted any other sources in addition to the specific pre-Christian sources I cited. If you want additional modern sources, then you can read the document of mine to which I have already linked twice; it contains quotations from other modern scholars in addition to Baker.
I am not being cryptic. If you read the document of mine to which I have already linked twice, you will find me make specific reference to a specific pre-Christian Jewish text, and I gave a specific date. That isn’t cryptic, and it’s the kind of information which you’re asking for despite the fact that I’ve provided it twice. The author of the document is unknown, and the work is probably a composite. The original location of the work is also unknown, though we know the work was circulated widely since it turns up in the Qumran texts as well as in Alexandria in Egypt… But I gave you the name of the text and the date of the text.
Pre-Christian Jews. A precise date for the borrowing is not known, but we do know that the idea started to emerge in Jewish literature during or shortly after the period of Greek occupation of Israel, so it was likely picked up during the Antiochid or Hasmonean era, between 170 and 35 BCE. As you are no doubt aware, the idea that the history of the world is divided into separate ages of time started with the Greeks, and as you are probably also aware, during the Greek occupation of Israel a lot of the Jews became Hellenized and started mixing Greek myth and legend with their interpretation of the Bible; some of the products of this were the immortal soul, a belief in demons, and of course the “7,000 year” history of the world.
Probably the earliest Jewish precursor to the 7,000 year plan was the allegorical work of Aristobulus (second century BCE), who combined the Greek ideas of the ages of the world, with the Jewish idea of the sabbath, to come up with some kind of seven-fold plan for the earth
“Fragment 5 of the work of Aristobulus (ca. middle of 2d century B.C.) explains the sabbath in relationship to cosmic orders, also linking the sabbath to wisdom (Frag. 5.9–10) and the sevenfold structures of all things (Frag. 5.12). This work is an attempt to bring the sabbath into relationship with Hellenistic thought similar to that of Philo.”, Gerhard F. Hasel, “Sabbath,” ed. David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 854.
This allegorical, non-literal interpretation of Genesis, was combined with other pagan Greek ideas, such as the calculations of the mathematician Pythagoras.
“Fragment 5 provides important evidence for Jewish use of Pythagorean ideas in the second century B.C. Both Aristobulus and Philo (SpecLeg 2.15(59)) seem to presuppose a traditional, allegorical interpretation of the biblical account of creation. This interpretation made use of Pythagorean reflections on the number seven as a prime number.”, A. Yarbro Collins, “Aristobulus: A New Translation and Introduction,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament: Expansions of the “Old Testament” and Legends, Wisdom, and Philosophical Literature, Prayers, Psalms and Odes, Fragments of Lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works (vol. 2; New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1985), 2834.
This is the origin of the 7.000 year plan; a hazy combination of Jewish speculation with pagan Greek thought. We find the 7,000 year plan emerging in its complete form, in pseudepigraphal works such as the Book(s) of Enoch. Of course it was not based on the Bible; it was not based on anything in the Bible. It was certainly not based on the genealogies (which were not used for this purpose). It was based on the Greek historian Hesiod’s idea of the ages of man, which was combined with the idea of a super-sabbath. This view is marginal in pre-Christian Judaism, and didn’t start being picked up more widely in Judaism until much later, in Christian era books such as 4 Ezra, and in the later Talmudic collection of rabbinical writings and sayings.
Of course we don’t find anything like this described in the Old or New Testament. However, some early Christians adopted the idea (either from the Jews or Hellenized Jews), and popularized it for a while. Apart from 4 Ezra (some time near the end of the first century), the idea appears in Christian literature in the pseudepigraphal Epistle of Barnabas (second century). The Christian commentators who did this, did not base their calculations on the genealogies, but on an allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1 (which they interpreted both literally and allegorically), an interpretation completely absent from the Bible.
You mean different, surely? Contrary would mean incompatible with.
But so what? Where’s the evidence that God never uses vision to depict the past? How do you imagine that God revealed past events to the inspired writers? Do you think He wrote it all out, or dictated it word by word, or what?
You’re saying that"television" isn’t the best analog for something you which you see in a vision? Of course it is. When you see a history documentary on television, you can’t claim it’s just fiction because you happen to be seeing it on television. So why would you say this about a divine vision?
Wow.
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The vision of Daniel 7 was given in the reign of Belteshazzar, and starts with events in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, very obviously in the past.
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The visions of Ezekiel start while Ezekiel is in exile, but the first whole section is taken up with Ezekiel describing events in the past, when God came to him in a vision, revealed Himself, declared Ezekiel’s mission, gave him commandments, showed him the abominations of Israel which had been committed (in the past), and showed him God’s glory departing from the temple (in the past), to explain the coming judgment.
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The very first vision of Zechariah consists of him seeing the horsemen who talk about the past; virtually every sentence by the horsemen and God Himself is in the past tense.
And? How many of them render all parenthetical passages (recognized as parenthetical by scholars and translators), in parentheses? None. How many of them even format the text correctly to identify every passage which is written in poetry, or song? None. The New English Translation, for example, contains footnoes which inform the reader that a particular passage is parenthetical (as indicated by the grammar), but doesn’t actually place the passage in parentheses.
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I checked the New English Translation to see if its footnotes for Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 inform the reader that either passage is parenthetical. They do not.