by jimwalton » Thu Jul 04, 2013 7:09 pm
Thanks for the reply. Wow, long post. Tough to deal with it all at once. I didn't "glaze over" the Nephilim part; I ignored it. ; ) It's a preface to the Noah story, but not really part of it. I'll admit that no one understands Gn. 6.1-4. It's a very weird section, and until more archaeological discoveries are made, it won't be understood. The text does say, despite your objection, that Noah was a righteous man (6.9), and that the flood was sent because of corruption and violence (6.10). Now, the word "corruption" in v. 10 and the word "destroy" in v. 13 are the same Hebrew word, showing intent that the punishment fit the crime. God is not acting arbitrarily or like a spoiled deity, but more like a judge in a courtroom. He is moved to action by injustices: "only evil all the time" (6.5). The text says God was grieved (6.6), not angry. Other parts of the Bible say that people had been warned (Jude 1.14-15; 2 Pet. 2.5), and steps had been taken to make things right, but it was beyond hope or help. Is God both cruel and immoral in choosing to completely destroy these people? I would contend that any governing entity recognizes its role as to reward the good, punish the bad, protect the innocent, and to function for the general well-being of its people. It is within its scope and right to use necessary but righteous force to subdue elements in its population contrary to its raison d’etre. Therefore, God is acting in accordance with both and human estimations of justice in pursuing this course of action. To me it's much like WWII. Hitler was crushing country after country, subjugating people, and exterminating people groups. The United States had a right and responsibility to act with violence to stop the violence, to save humankind. God's act, as the US per my example, is acting with just retribution for crimes committed.
As to what I said about the "whole earth" and Akkadian texts, in the Epic of Etana, the hero is carried up to heaven on the back on an eagle, where he can look down and see the whole earth. According the Akkadian understanding (the context of the Noah story), the sea is described as encircling the land, and the land described is a disk of of roughly 3,000 miles in diameter, as I explained. That's what they called, "The Whole Earth." Also, in the same sense that sailors before Columbus only knew of the land mass on which they lived, so also in this story the context speaks to the cultural understanding of the participant, Noah. (He knows nothing of America or Australia, or even of China for that matter). The words spoken to him are spoken to his mentality, not to ours. We know what an "earth" is; it would be anachronistic to insist that's what it meant to him.
Mountains, in both the Akkadian and Egyptian view, were at the edge of the world and were viewed as intersecting the sky, perhaps even supporting it, and having roots in the netherworld. Sometimes they were also viewed as a boundary to the cosmic waters. One Sargon inscription says of Mt. Simirria: "...Above, its peak leans on the heavens, below, its roots reach the netherworld." The Egyptians also thought of the mountains as holding up the sky. They were not considered part of the geography as were the local mountains.
As I mentioned, there is no archaeological evidence for this event, leading us to believe it was before 7,000 BC, when humans started leaving behind what archaeologists are now digging up.
Regarding space for species, according to what the Bible says, there were 3 floors, and we are told the rough dimensions of the ark, so people have worked to calculate roughly how many species, given certain amounts of space for each, and come up with 7,000. No matter. It's a guess. But this tells us the flood could not have been global, because there's no way a barge that size could accommodate all of the abundant animal population on the planet at the time. So it was a limited diameter of land mass. Also, there's absolutely no explaining how the specific animal groups that now inhabit places like Australia could have gotten back to an island after the flood, so it doesn't even make sense that it's a global event. Providing food for so many would have been a colossal task, but reduced at least to some extent by their general inactivity and the hibernation periods of some.
I should get on to your major concern, though, that of the universal language: whole earth, all people, every living thing, all the mountains, etc. First of all, there is culture embedded in their words. We must understand their words in the context of their culture. We must see the text the way they saw the text. The words mean what they meant to that audience and to that author. We can’t give new meaning to his words and bring new authority to the picture. We can’t assign our authority to the author’s words.
"40 days and 40 nights." Certainly you're familiar with numerology, and that numbers have symbolic meaning. It could have been a literal 40 days, but not necessarily. We do the same thing, when we say, "Well, there must have been a thousand people there!" when in actuality, if someone had bothered to count, there may have been 712. When they wanted to express God's judgment, they would use the number 40. I'm not playing loose with the text; they used numbers in symbolic ways, and we need to understand that. So it's pretty difficult for us to tell if they meant it literally or figuratively, because it could honestly be either.
Let's talk about the "every" and "all" stuff. In Deuteronomy 2.25 (traditionally written by the same author), the Lord says, "I will put the terror and fear of you on al the nations under heaven." Few, if anyone, would argue that this refers to anything other than the nations of Canaan and perhaps a few others. I don't think the Native Americans were trembling. That's not what it means, nor what was expressed by it. In Genesis 41.57, Joseph opens the storehouses of Egypt, and "all the countries came to Egypt to buy grain... because the famine was severe in all the world." I do not know of anyone who contends that therefore the Eskimos must have been included. We need to understand words the way they intended them, not what seem to us on a shallow reading. Words have nuances and contexts that must be taken into consideration.
What about "covering the mountains"? Well, Numbers 22.11 says "a people so vast they covered the land." Prov. 24.31 speaks of weeds covering the land. 1 Ki. 1.1 talks about clothing covering someone, and something can even be covered in the sense of being overshadowed (2 Chr. 5.8). So covered can certainly be used with different nuances and senses. But what about covering with water? In Job. 38.34, Jer. 46.8, and Mal. 2.13, covering with water is used figuratively. If we were to take this in the the same way, it suggests that the mountains were drenched with water or coursing with flash floods, but it does not demand that they were totally submerged under water. One can certainly argue that the context does not favor this latter usage, and I am not inclined to adopt it. The point is that it is not as easy as sometimes imagined to claim that the Bible demands that all the mountains were submerged.
But in Gn. 7.20 in says the waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than 20'. But remember that "covered" can mean different things. It can mean "above"; it can mean "upward" or "upstream." If this were the case in Genesis, it could suggest that the water reached 15 cubits upward from the plain, covering at least some part of the mountains.
In 8.5 it says "the waters continued to recede until ... the tops of the mountains became visible." But remember, the Mesopotamians didn't consider the mountains at the fringes of the world to be part of their geography. These mountains were the places of the gods and would be impervious to floodwaters sent by the gods. The local mountains are what are inundated, and the ark drifts to rest against the foothills of Ararat.
I hope you understand. Linguistic, archaeological, and scientific discoveries have motivated a far more realistic understanding of what happened there, hopefully setting aside drastic and ridiculous notions of a global flood. I'm not twisting reality to fit; I'm adjusting perspective to fit reality. It's a good scientific mindset. The scope of the flood is the scope of Noah's worldview. The words are to be interpreted in his cultural and linguistic understanding. As you can see, it becomes a real problem as it comes into English, because people just read it shallowly and simple verbatim rather than in nuance and perspective. I'm not "running around and jumping through hoops." It's an understanding of a matter of speaking. In Romans 1.8, Paul said that the faith of the Roman Christians "is being reported all over the world." This isn't rocket science. He's talking about "the whole world" as "the Roman Empire." It's not a twist; it's a reasonable understanding. I understand this is a radical paradigm shift for you; it certainly was for me. But a person of reason shifts their understanding to the weight of evidence, which is what I feel I have done.
Whatever the flood was, it wasn't global. I could give you about 20 scientific reasons off the top of my head as to how that's impossible. Being scientifically and linguistically minded, then, I search for better answers and a deeper understanding. I consider that to be responsible, not absurd. Maybe it was something like the Straight of Gibraltar giving way, and the Atlantic Ocean submerging massive amounts of land. Maybe it was something akin to the Black Sea deluge that submerged thousands of square miles of land. Whatever it was, it accomplished its goal. Justice was served, Noah and the animals of the region were spared, and civilization continued on.
There are two others matters I need to touch on, lest you accuse me of avoiding them. What's up with Noah being 600 years old? Dude, that's a lot of candles. Two things to say. Interestingly, there are Sumerian lists of kings who purportedly reigned before the flood with reigns recorded as long as 43,200 years. The Sumerians used the sexagesimal number system (a combination of base 6 and base 10), and when the numbers of the Sumerian king list are converted to decimal they are very much in the range of the age spans of the pre-flood genealogies of Genesis. The Hebrews, like most other Semitic peoples, used a base ten decimal system as far back as writing extends. So that's a curiosity that has nothing to do with the biblical record, but exists alongside it. I'm still wondering what to do with that.
My other observation is the cultural use of numbers, which I wonder comes into play. In certain parts of Indonesia today, people identify ages based on how much experience or wisdom the person was accorded by the community. At age 35, a man could be introduced as being fifty because that number identified his status as a wise person who should be listened to and heeded. It had nothing to do with his actual age. In another similar story, a woman reported that she was forty, and two years later said she was fifty. She explained that this was a measure of her status and respect in the community. The numbers has rhetorical value, not quantification value.
For another example, this one from Ethiopia. They told my brother they were going to leave for the airport at 8:00 for his flight to Kenya. He said no, we have to leave at 2:00, my flight is at 5:00. They said, that is what we meant—8:00 local time. He said, my watch is on local time, and my schedule is on local time. They said, no it isn’t, there is no watch for local time. Ok, he said, you will have to explain this to me. In local time, they explained, “2:00” means somewhere around lunchtime; “8:00” means middle of the afternoon. Just another example about how numbers mean different things in different cultures and often are used more in culturally rhetorical ways than as rigid quantifications. This should warn us about being overconfident as we try to understand the numbers in the Bible.
Let's see, last comment to a long post. How did this story pass down through so much time? All I can say is all I know: In oral cultures, the transmission of stories is a value, a pastime, and an art. The story has an awful lot of specifics in it to have wandered from actuality, as in the children's games of passing a whisper down the row. It has specific dimensions, accurate dates (though no universal calendar), and even words spoken. I understand that these things are perfectly normal in oral cultures, but I'm not an anthropologist or a sociologist, so I have to rely on the words of others.
Sorry so long, but we bit off a lot. I'll look forward to your reply.
Thanks for the reply. Wow, long post. Tough to deal with it all at once. I didn't "glaze over" the Nephilim part; I ignored it. ; ) It's a preface to the Noah story, but not really part of it. I'll admit that no one understands Gn. 6.1-4. It's a very weird section, and until more archaeological discoveries are made, it won't be understood. The text does say, despite your objection, that Noah was a righteous man (6.9), and that the flood was sent because of corruption and violence (6.10). Now, the word "corruption" in v. 10 and the word "destroy" in v. 13 are the same Hebrew word, showing intent that the punishment fit the crime. God is not acting arbitrarily or like a spoiled deity, but more like a judge in a courtroom. He is moved to action by injustices: "only evil all the time" (6.5). The text says God was grieved (6.6), not angry. Other parts of the Bible say that people had been warned (Jude 1.14-15; 2 Pet. 2.5), and steps had been taken to make things right, but it was beyond hope or help. Is God both cruel and immoral in choosing to completely destroy these people? I would contend that any governing entity recognizes its role as to reward the good, punish the bad, protect the innocent, and to function for the general well-being of its people. It is within its scope and right to use necessary but righteous force to subdue elements in its population contrary to its raison d’etre. Therefore, God is acting in accordance with both and human estimations of justice in pursuing this course of action. To me it's much like WWII. Hitler was crushing country after country, subjugating people, and exterminating people groups. The United States had a right and responsibility to act with violence to stop the violence, to save humankind. God's act, as the US per my example, is acting with just retribution for crimes committed.
As to what I said about the "whole earth" and Akkadian texts, in the Epic of Etana, the hero is carried up to heaven on the back on an eagle, where he can look down and see the whole earth. According the Akkadian understanding (the context of the Noah story), the sea is described as encircling the land, and the land described is a disk of of roughly 3,000 miles in diameter, as I explained. That's what they called, "The Whole Earth." Also, in the same sense that sailors before Columbus only knew of the land mass on which they lived, so also in this story the context speaks to the cultural understanding of the participant, Noah. (He knows nothing of America or Australia, or even of China for that matter). The words spoken to him are spoken to his mentality, not to ours. We know what an "earth" is; it would be anachronistic to insist that's what it meant to him.
Mountains, in both the Akkadian and Egyptian view, were at the edge of the world and were viewed as intersecting the sky, perhaps even supporting it, and having roots in the netherworld. Sometimes they were also viewed as a boundary to the cosmic waters. One Sargon inscription says of Mt. Simirria: "...Above, its peak leans on the heavens, below, its roots reach the netherworld." The Egyptians also thought of the mountains as holding up the sky. They were not considered part of the geography as were the local mountains.
As I mentioned, there is no archaeological evidence for this event, leading us to believe it was before 7,000 BC, when humans started leaving behind what archaeologists are now digging up.
Regarding space for species, according to what the Bible says, there were 3 floors, and we are told the rough dimensions of the ark, so people have worked to calculate roughly how many species, given certain amounts of space for each, and come up with 7,000. No matter. It's a guess. But this tells us the flood could not have been global, because there's no way a barge that size could accommodate all of the abundant animal population on the planet at the time. So it was a limited diameter of land mass. Also, there's absolutely no explaining how the specific animal groups that now inhabit places like Australia could have gotten back to an island after the flood, so it doesn't even make sense that it's a global event. Providing food for so many would have been a colossal task, but reduced at least to some extent by their general inactivity and the hibernation periods of some.
I should get on to your major concern, though, that of the universal language: whole earth, all people, every living thing, all the mountains, etc. First of all, there is culture embedded in their words. We must understand their words in the context of their culture. We must see the text the way they saw the text. The words mean what they meant to that audience and to that author. We can’t give new meaning to his words and bring new authority to the picture. We can’t assign our authority to the author’s words.
"40 days and 40 nights." Certainly you're familiar with numerology, and that numbers have symbolic meaning. It could have been a literal 40 days, but not necessarily. We do the same thing, when we say, "Well, there must have been a thousand people there!" when in actuality, if someone had bothered to count, there may have been 712. When they wanted to express God's judgment, they would use the number 40. I'm not playing loose with the text; they used numbers in symbolic ways, and we need to understand that. So it's pretty difficult for us to tell if they meant it literally or figuratively, because it could honestly be either.
Let's talk about the "every" and "all" stuff. In Deuteronomy 2.25 (traditionally written by the same author), the Lord says, "I will put the terror and fear of you on al the nations under heaven." Few, if anyone, would argue that this refers to anything other than the nations of Canaan and perhaps a few others. I don't think the Native Americans were trembling. That's not what it means, nor what was expressed by it. In Genesis 41.57, Joseph opens the storehouses of Egypt, and "all the countries came to Egypt to buy grain... because the famine was severe in all the world." I do not know of anyone who contends that therefore the Eskimos must have been included. We need to understand words the way they intended them, not what seem to us on a shallow reading. Words have nuances and contexts that must be taken into consideration.
What about "covering the mountains"? Well, Numbers 22.11 says "a people so vast they covered the land." Prov. 24.31 speaks of weeds covering the land. 1 Ki. 1.1 talks about clothing covering someone, and something can even be covered in the sense of being overshadowed (2 Chr. 5.8). So covered can certainly be used with different nuances and senses. But what about covering with water? In Job. 38.34, Jer. 46.8, and Mal. 2.13, covering with water is used figuratively. If we were to take this in the the same way, it suggests that the mountains were drenched with water or coursing with flash floods, but it does not demand that they were totally submerged under water. One can certainly argue that the context does not favor this latter usage, and I am not inclined to adopt it. The point is that it is not as easy as sometimes imagined to claim that the Bible demands that all the mountains were submerged.
But in Gn. 7.20 in says the waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than 20'. But remember that "covered" can mean different things. It can mean "above"; it can mean "upward" or "upstream." If this were the case in Genesis, it could suggest that the water reached 15 cubits upward from the plain, covering at least some part of the mountains.
In 8.5 it says "the waters continued to recede until ... the tops of the mountains became visible." But remember, the Mesopotamians didn't consider the mountains at the fringes of the world to be part of their geography. These mountains were the places of the gods and would be impervious to floodwaters sent by the gods. The local mountains are what are inundated, and the ark drifts to rest against the foothills of Ararat.
I hope you understand. Linguistic, archaeological, and scientific discoveries have motivated a far more realistic understanding of what happened there, hopefully setting aside drastic and ridiculous notions of a global flood. I'm not twisting reality to fit; I'm adjusting perspective to fit reality. It's a good scientific mindset. The scope of the flood is the scope of Noah's worldview. The words are to be interpreted in his cultural and linguistic understanding. As you can see, it becomes a real problem as it comes into English, because people just read it shallowly and simple verbatim rather than in nuance and perspective. I'm not "running around and jumping through hoops." It's an understanding of a matter of speaking. In Romans 1.8, Paul said that the faith of the Roman Christians "is being reported all over the world." This isn't rocket science. He's talking about "the whole world" as "the Roman Empire." It's not a twist; it's a reasonable understanding. I understand this is a radical paradigm shift for you; it certainly was for me. But a person of reason shifts their understanding to the weight of evidence, which is what I feel I have done.
Whatever the flood was, it wasn't global. I could give you about 20 scientific reasons off the top of my head as to how that's impossible. Being scientifically and linguistically minded, then, I search for better answers and a deeper understanding. I consider that to be responsible, not absurd. Maybe it was something like the Straight of Gibraltar giving way, and the Atlantic Ocean submerging massive amounts of land. Maybe it was something akin to the Black Sea deluge that submerged thousands of square miles of land. Whatever it was, it accomplished its goal. Justice was served, Noah and the animals of the region were spared, and civilization continued on.
There are two others matters I need to touch on, lest you accuse me of avoiding them. What's up with Noah being 600 years old? Dude, that's a lot of candles. Two things to say. Interestingly, there are Sumerian lists of kings who purportedly reigned before the flood with reigns recorded as long as 43,200 years. The Sumerians used the sexagesimal number system (a combination of base 6 and base 10), and when the numbers of the Sumerian king list are converted to decimal they are very much in the range of the age spans of the pre-flood genealogies of Genesis. The Hebrews, like most other Semitic peoples, used a base ten decimal system as far back as writing extends. So that's a curiosity that has nothing to do with the biblical record, but exists alongside it. I'm still wondering what to do with that.
My other observation is the cultural use of numbers, which I wonder comes into play. In certain parts of Indonesia today, people identify ages based on how much experience or wisdom the person was accorded by the community. At age 35, a man could be introduced as being fifty because that number identified his status as a wise person who should be listened to and heeded. It had nothing to do with his actual age. In another similar story, a woman reported that she was forty, and two years later said she was fifty. She explained that this was a measure of her status and respect in the community. The numbers has rhetorical value, not quantification value.
For another example, this one from Ethiopia. They told my brother they were going to leave for the airport at 8:00 for his flight to Kenya. He said no, we have to leave at 2:00, my flight is at 5:00. They said, that is what we meant—8:00 local time. He said, my watch is on local time, and my schedule is on local time. They said, no it isn’t, there is no watch for local time. Ok, he said, you will have to explain this to me. In local time, they explained, “2:00” means somewhere around lunchtime; “8:00” means middle of the afternoon. Just another example about how numbers mean different things in different cultures and often are used more in culturally rhetorical ways than as rigid quantifications. This should warn us about being overconfident as we try to understand the numbers in the Bible.
Let's see, last comment to a long post. How did this story pass down through so much time? All I can say is all I know: In oral cultures, the transmission of stories is a value, a pastime, and an art. The story has an awful lot of specifics in it to have wandered from actuality, as in the children's games of passing a whisper down the row. It has specific dimensions, accurate dates (though no universal calendar), and even words spoken. I understand that these things are perfectly normal in oral cultures, but I'm not an anthropologist or a sociologist, so I have to rely on the words of others.
Sorry so long, but we bit off a lot. I'll look forward to your reply.