outhouse
Atheistically
Saying "it is in this book" doesnt cut it.
Stop being vague.
Saying its in the university doesnt cut it. :slap:
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Can a literal Genesis creation story really hold up?
- Thread starter CG Didymus
- Start date
Saying "it is in this book" doesnt cut it.
Stop being vague.
Saying its in the university doesnt cut it. :slap:
greentwiga
Active Member
I find that there is a lot of history in the Genesis. The Bible remembers the spot and time of the first domestication of wheat. It even remembers the historical milieu. The story of Noah remembers that he built a giant reed boat. It also describes a flood plain flood, which is what you would have in Sumer. The events before and after the flood reflect the known history of Sumer. The Story of Sodom is being confirmed in some cities north of the dead Sea.
FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
Which is well in Good, I don't necessarily doubt the historicity of the events, what I usually question is the other attached parts. Like in the flood the bringing of all living things two of every kind and the parts regarding the nephilim as well I find those to be mythical. I also would not say that everyone actually perished too in the flood, but there are other issues that come along with it.
Managing waste, managing food, I'm not that clear on boating but would a ship to the components that Noah was given be adequate enough to survive at sea for that long?
I know that may make me seem as a Disbeliever in Gods word but I tend to question everything.
Apparently giving you links to the material doesn't cut it either.
Maybe you need a remedial course in reading? Or perhaps you just don't know that you can use your mouse to click on the funny words in that different color and your computer will magically take you where you want to go?
You would find them much less mythical (and much more commonplace) if you read the story from the Sumerian point of view, or from the writer's point of view.
When God told Noah to bring in "all" the animals in pairs, from the Sumerian point of view we're possibly talking about 40 species. Those are the animals attested to in Sumerian writings.
"Nephilim" means giants, tall people. We still have them up to 8 feet tall.
The managing of waste is only a problem if you try to imagine the world's 7,000,000 species all represented on the ark. How can you be sure your problem is with the story itself or with obvious exaggerations of the story?
As for surviving "at sea", I've spent many months in the Persian Gulf and can speak to that. The waves get to a max height of 2 feet, the bottom of the "sea" is in no spot deeper than 700 feet, and the peninsula of Arabia with Iran protect the "sea" from ocean turbulence. In addition, we know that at the time of the flood (3500 BC by the best geological evidence), Sumer was already engaging in international trade from Egypt to the mouth of the Indus River. The lands they traded with are all named in the preamble to "Enki and Ninhursanga".
Context is everything. It goes a very long way in explaining the story.
outhouse
Atheistically
Thats not how it works here.
If you make a absolute statement you need to back it with a page and paragraph number with a link to said page.
Other then that, your only posting unsubstantiated apologetic biased opinions with a passion to argue inanely
FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
That is generally how I take it, but this topic is talking about a literal point of view that is held by those who may be on the more fringe end of fundamentalism. To them it happened exactly as it is written, not in the perspective of the writers.
You're talking about me.
I believe the Genesis account exactly as written, but I certainly do not take it literally as written in English.
When you study history, it's inevitable that you're looking at events through an unknown number of filters (such as language translation). In other words, you're seeing in English a story originally written in Sumerian pictographs or logograms. That's two filters: Sumerian to Hebrew to English.
You're also so far out of context that you have no hope of understanding the period in question. The differences between 3500 BC and 2000 AD are fairly vast, and we're just not conditioned to understand the differences.
In addition to that, ancient Sumer was not a land-based culture (they were an island based culture). The normal mode of transportation was not on foot but by boat. This is just another substantial influence on how they thought (and wrote) that we have to contend with.
Here's what Sumer looked like:
World Heritage Status Sought for Restored Marshlands of Iraq
As you can see, boats were their middle name. Ark? Pshaw! No problem.
****************
This is where the rubber meets the road, folks.
You can argue the origin of Genesis until you're blue in the face, but what do you do when you meet someone like me who can explain to you why Genesis clearly states that Babel was built with "bitumen" for mortar?
Any guesses?
No?
Bitumen was tar. In southern Iraq, it bubbles up to the surface. Today, of course, we call it oil.
The reason why Sumerians used it was because it was a waterproofing agent. They built their homes on islands, and so waterproofing was necessary, especially in the annual flooding of the river.
So, why would you waterproof Babel? The city was built in the middle of a frikking desert where the rivers did not overflow their banks?
Answer: bitumen was part of the culture of the people who built the city: the Sumerians, not the Babylonians. This obscure little detail is the kind you're looking for. These are the details that expose Genesis 11 for what it is. It most certainly is not Babylonian or Hebrew in origin. Hebrews lived in tents--no need, and possibly no knowledge of bitumen.
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CG Didymus
Veteran Member
You're not your average Fundy. The ones I know tell that God created everything in six literal days about 6000 years ago. The serpent was really the devil and the flood covered the whole Earth. Some even say it had never rained on Earth until the flood. Those Christians start with Jesus as being God, the devil and hell being a reality, that because of Adam's "sin" we need a savior to pay the penalty for that sin that we inherited. I believe they actually work backwards from their interpretation of the NT and make the Jewish Bible fit to their beliefs.
But I do have a couple of questions for you. If people, other than Noah, had boats, why didn't they survive the flood? And, if it wasn't a worldwide flood, why worry about saving wild animals? Oh, and somebody said something about the Nephilim and mentioned 8ft, some fundy's believe there has been bones found of people as big as 39ft tall. Have you looked into any of those claims?
greentwiga
Active Member
I find that I have a lot in common with Clarity.
1) We know that Sumerians built ziggurats with mud bricks and tar as mortar, as the Bible describes.
2) wood boats, though, need tar to caulk the seams to keep it waterproof. Reed boats, though tarred their boats all over. We have found their tar chips with reed grooves on one side and barnacles on the other. Reed boats, unlike wood boats, can be made 450 feet long.
3) a local flood would only have needed to rescue the local animals, about 40 as Clarity said (including the wild animals of the swamp that they needed and breathed air). The Bible describes exactly the mechanisms of a flood plain flood, but one more drastic than any experienced. The next year even seems to be unusually dry, as is common in the Sumerian flood plain and unusual for other flood plains.
4) The waves may have been rarely higher than 2 feet, but we are talking about an unusual storm, possibly a hurricane that wandered up the gulf. Sailors on smaller arks may have been washed off.
5) To see pictures of reed houses, Mosques, and a boat, I recommend the book, Tigris, by Thor Heyerdahl. The Sumerian account of the flood described tearing down a reed hut to build the Ark.
6) The size of giants, nephilim, is given in cubits. I am 6 foot tall. The length of my forearm, one cubit, is 1.5 feet. Cubits over the mid east were in that neighborhood, usually based on the kings forearm. Our measurement of Goliath was probably based on the heights of the Israelites who were more commonly 5 foot tall. A 1.25 foot cubit would have made Goliath 7.5 feet tall.
7) Ancient people such as the Greeks were known to have found dinosaur and mammoth bones. The leg bones are similar enough to human style that they were mistaken (or scammed the gullible) and thought giants used to live. They could do the math. A thigh bone 7 times longer than human would have been a 42 foot tall giant.
8) Hidden in the story of the is a description that fits the Sumerian use of temple prostitutes. The temple prostitute was the heirodule. The king went to her once a year to ensure fertility of the land. This involved prayers by each to be inhabited by the god or goddess, an act that we Christians would call demon possession.
FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
It mentions the nephilims as hereos of old.
None of these beliefs are far from mine. I go for 8000 years rather than 6000. And there are many Christians like me who try to interpret the NT through an OT lens since that's what Jesus and the disciples would have done.
(RE Genesis 2's "mist": I've been to the Persian Gulf and have seen the faint mist that constantly rises from the waters. It's usually 90% or more humidity and damn hot, and the Gulf smells like mildew.)
The reason why people with boats didn't survive is because their boats were actually rafts made of reeds and waterproofed with a mix of tar and cow dung (houses were built the same way). They're useful for getting from one island to the next for trading, and they never need to be water-worthy for any length of time since they can just make another one in a matter of minutes or hours. No reason to think they were anything more than disposable.
The "ark" built by Noah would have been made of wood, not reeds (Genesis says "gopher wood", but nobody knows what that was. In 3500 BC, Sumer imported about a dozen different kinds of wood for building from Iran (Aratta) and at times made treks into the Atlas Mountains for cedar (see the Sumerian version of "Gilgamesh and Huwawa" linked below). Another reason they would not have survived is because the flood lasted 370+ days, and those little river boats couldn't carry supplies for that period of time.
http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.5#
The size of Noah's boat would have required structural strength of wood; reeds wouldn't have lasted the day.
Genesis says nothing about saving wild animals. Be careful not to read modern ideas into the text. He was to save "all" the animals, and from his point of view, "all" was a very, very small number. He wasn't a National Geo explorer or a zoologist. You can safely interpret that as meaning "all known to Noah".
RE: 39' people: I won't research something that looks, smells and sounds stupid until someone shows me a femur taller than me.
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FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
And where can you get that interpretation that all known got Noah when translations give you this:
17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the arkyou and your sons and your wife and your sons wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.
It says "every kind of bird, every kind of animal, and every kind of creature that moves along the ground"
Not to mention it says destroy all life under the heavens. Can you provide a translation that would fit under your notion that it is only those known to Noah?
Rule #1: NEVER read your culture into the text. It's called "projecting". Every word you just quoted has to be read from their point of view, not yours.
Rule #2: All translations must include a word-by-word rendering and draw heavily from context for meaning. Where you see the words "all the earth", remember that you're reading in Hebrew "the land", and for them the known world was the size of Texas. For projecting your knowledge of the world into the text, see rule #1.
These are difficult disciplines, we all project ourselves into the stories. Until you learn to stop doing that, you'll always misunderstand the original intent.
Genesis 10 also mentions Nimrod as "the first mighty man". From the Sumerian point of view, the linguistic equivalent would be "Lugal", great man (more accurately rendered "emperor"). The Lugals were the kings that ruled over all other petty kings. The description in Genesis 10 of the cities of Nimrod's rule spread from the Persian Gulf almost to the Caspian Sea. For them, that was one of the largest empires they would have known (Sargon's being slightly larger).
FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
I'm not the one who translated it. People who make claims to being translators are the ones who did. So either they are correct in their translations or they are not. Hence why we have many translations and all english translations that I have seen say Earth. But you are saying that God saw that only the people in that piece of land were evil and decided to just wipe them out correct?
FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
Jewish Midrash's have the Nephilim as creatures who did great harm to the world. Why call them heroes?
The English rendering "all life under the heavens" means something very different to us.
Whether you translated it or not, you're allowing yourself to be confused by your own projection. The original writer very well could have said "all life under the heavens" and intended it to mean "all life in Iraq" if that's all he was aware of. Same words, different point of view.
You also seem to be saying that God wrote Genesis. I disagree but I'd like to hear your theory on that.
FranklinMichaelV.3
Well-Known Member
The traditional belief is that God had Moses write down the first five books is that not correct?
No projection, just if you know that the term earth is supposed to mean something else, be a lot easier to add an annotation that does such.
God would have had to teach Moses how to read Sumerian cuneiform (and he would have had to tell Moses where to dig for them, seeing as how Sumer was already 500 years gone).
It's more reasonable to say that Moses compiled Genesis and wrote the other four.
Having said that, it's very possible that Moses wrote Genesis 36. It contains the names of Edomite rulers that existed in Moses' own lifetime. (Interestingly, the chapter can also be used to crudely trace the invasion of the Hyksos into Egypt. They would have had to pass through Midian, Edom and the Sinai first, and the chapter mentions the names of rulers of Edom who were born in Syria.)
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