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[The Hague]

Why are there different ethnicities? But the world is only 6000 yrs?

Maybe I just don’t have a strong concept of the timeline of the Bible but it seems like ethnicities couldn’t develop as fast as 6,000 yrs according to the Bible. Pardon my ignorance.

[jimwalton]

The Bible doesn't state, claim, or imply the earth is only 6000 year old. Science tells us the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and there's nothing in the Bible that would make that incorrect or ask us to doubt or disregard that.

As far as the origins of race/ethnicity, the Bible doesn't explain it or make any claims about it, and science itself doesn't even know the origins of race/ethnicity. The Bible only ever speaks of one race—the human race—though it often mentions tribal or ethnic labels for people. It's my understanding that science has yet to come up with any kind of reasoned explanation except, "Well, it must have somehow evolved that way given environmental conditions," which is probably true but still lacks an explanation.

[Shake and Bake]

The Bible does include the tower of Babel which tells of how the different languages originated and how God scattered the people abroad.

[jimwalton]

Thanks, but the question was about ethnicities, not about linguistics.

Second, the Tower of Babel is not about how different languages originated. The common language of the people of that region (Sumer, the then known world to the author) is expressed to represent the collective power of humanity to band together. It was their cultural understanding in Sumer that all humanity spoke one language. In the Sumerian epic "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta," it says, "The whole universe in unison spoke to Enlil in one tongue."

The event of the tower of Babel is the invasion of Sumer by the Babylonians (Semitic language group). The Sumerians were "dispersed, heightening an existing clash of languages, creating a disintegration and mixing of language as the Sumerian civilization collapsed and people groups were mixed by the permeation of foreign languages" (Paul Penley). This happened in the latter part of the 2nd millennium BC.

So the text really doesn't help us answer the question about why there are different ethnicities.

[Gauge]

Respectfully, this first sentence is 100% incorrect. The Bible does indeed account, from the beginning of time, to the time of Christ's arrival on this earth, a rough approximation of only thousands of years, not millions. You can form a calendar with the ages of certain people in the Bible such as Adam, then look at how old he was when his sons were born, then look at their ages and compare them to the ages of their sons, etc... let me just let this image give you an example here of the Bible's inspired timeline.

https://www.conformingtojesus.com/charts-maps/en/chronology_adam-abraham.htm

This just an example of many different timelines you can find out there which look all kinds of different ways depending on their organization, but it all comes from the same numbers we are told in the Bible; from the time Adam and Eve were created until the time Christ came to this earth, we have plenty of inspired Bible records of the timeline of things. The Bible, when taken literally in the places where it is meant to, only supports the idea of a world roughly 8000 or fewer years old.

[jimwalton]

> Respectfully, this first sentence is 100% incorrect. The Bible does indeed account, from the beginning of time, to the time of Christ's arrival on this earth, a rough approximation of only thousands of years, not millions.

Archaeology has taught us that genealogies in the ancient world were not complete. Their perspective on genealogical records was not to record every generation, but to justify a line of descent (often for kingly or priestly purposes). Genealogies often skipped generations (contrast 1 Chr. 56.3-14 and Ezra 7.1-5, for instance). Matthew (ch. 1) also skipped generations. Doing the math and adding up the years of the biblical genealogies is to look at them wrongly. There was no intent to include every generation. The genealogies imply historical interests, but cannot be used to determine chronology.In the same sense that Jesus could be considered a "son of David," even though there was 1000 years between them, the ancient genealogies could also be telescoping thousands of years between names. We are better to understand a genealogy like Genesis 5 as referring to remote ancestors. In other words, ancestor A had a child that initiated the historical process leading to B’s birth. Thus, when ancestor A was X years old, he brought forth the son from whom eventually sprang descendant B, creating a gap of unknown and unknowable length. That's the way ancient genealogies worked. You can't just do the math, add up the numbers, and bingo!