Okay, let me try this again. The Bible is not precise with numbers all the time, the simplest being the imprecise value given for ‘pi’ as in 1 Kings 7:23-26 or 2 Chronicles 4:2-5. So many thing arbitrarily took 40 days or have 12 people (amongst other numbers) involved it either shows that God miraculously kept intervening or the Biblical writers felt liberty to round their numbers to make a point. It is most likely that the Biblical writer(s) were also rounding in Genesis (or they were choosing a happy medium between reality and the mythical ages of Babylonian Kings) as the numbers follow certain mathematical patterns. How about that the names of the genealogies make up a story that matches that of the coming Messiah fairly well? Real names or good storytelling to make a point? I imagine it was the latter. Just imagine a story in English that you are being told for the first time:
The first person, his name is ‘man.’ He gives birth to a son named ‘appointed,’ who gives birth to ‘mortal’ who gives birth to ‘sorrow’ who gives birth to ‘the blessed God’ who gives birth to ‘shall come down’ who gives birth to ‘teaching’ who gives birth to ‘his death shall bring’ who gives birth to ‘the despairing’ who gives birth to ‘rest.’ In other words, one such version of this clever bit of storytelling can say ‘Man appointed mortal sorrow, the blessed God shall come down teaching - His death shall bring the despairing rest.’
And if you heard a story like that, would you even imagine those were really their names, especially when their ages follow certain patterns of choosing numbers in Babylonian numerology?
I’ve hinted at this before, but nobody today affirms (not even likely @Mike_Gantt) that Ecclesiastes 1:5 for example teaches the sun revolves around the Earth. Yet, that’s a pretty plain teaching for me and easy to understand. The Bible contains ancient science as I gave a few examples from above…
Some more could be that:
- There are four corners of the Earth (Isa 11:12, Ezek 7:2, Rev 7:1)
- The ends of the Earth are mentioned over 50 times (i.e. Isa 41:9, Jer 16:19, Ps 65:5, Job 28:24, 37:3, 38:13; Dan 4:11, Acts 13:47, Matt 12:42, etc.)
- The Pillars of the Earth (Ps 75:3, 104:5, Job 9:6, 1 Sam 2:8)
- The Foundation of the Earth which ensures its stability (1 Sam 2:8, 2 Sam 22:16, Ps 75:3, Zech 12:1)
- The Biblical Earth was fixed and immovable (Ps 93:1, Ps 96:10, Isa 45:18, 1 Chr 16:30)
- The Earth was flat (Dan 4:10-11, Matt 4:8, Rev 1:7)
- The epic battles over creation where Jehovah prevails over other gods (Job 26:11-12, Ps 89:9-10, Ps 18:10-16, Ps 74:12-15)
- That God opened up the sky-dome (a literal belief above the clouds) to begin Noah’s flood (Gen 7:11)
Instead of apologizing for the texts as I used to in the past, even pretending that they predicted amazing science like a spherical Earth (Prov 8:27-28, Job 26:10, Isa 40:21-22) or that the Earth is a globe located in space (Job 26:5-7) but the actual move away from the flat Earth wasn’t due to a few obscure verses like this that ultimately fall flat in light of the 3 tiered cosmos idea, but the work of ancient Greek philosophers and ultimately 3rd century BC astronomy. But that is too much science for this thread so I digress.
I suppose I’ll add this quote to finish:
The creation of the sun, moon, and stars on day four is meant to be a theological point, rather than a scientific one. As other cultures worshiped the sun and moon and divined by the stars (astrology), the Hebrew authors are making the point that none of them is the source of the light, but rather merely reflectors of the light (as lamps) whose ultimate origin is in their God. The creation myth also uses poetic parallelism to narrate the story: Day 1 and Day 4 are paired (light; sun, moon, stars), Day 2 and Day 5 (seas and dry land; fish and fowl), Day 3 and Day 6 (plants of the earth; beasts of the earth and humanity). Furthermore, given the similarity of this narrative to the creation myth of the Babylonians, whose god Marduk creates the cosmos by slaying his sea-serpent mother Tiamat, the Hebrew presentation of God creating over the deep (Hebrew: “tehom”) by means other than violence and declaring the creation to be “good” is a rebuke to the Babylonian myth. The abundance of literary and theological devices in the narrative make it clear that the text is not attempting to be a scientific account of the origin of the world, but a theological declaration of the goodness of the creation as against competing religious systems (Canaanite, Babylonian, etc.).