Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Jack:

This is one of the subjects that we disagree on, where there is no 
possibility of resolution to where we can come to an agreement.

First of all, there is as much _scientific_ evidence for evolution as there 
is that a UFO crashed in Roswell in the late 40s. By “scientific”, I use the 
definition given by the anti-Christian, pro-evolution biology professor I had 
in college, and in the textbook he had us buy, written by Dr. George Gaylord 
Simpson who was possibly the top expert in evolution at that time. Their 
definition of science rules out science as the proper tool for the study of 
past events. In other words, by their definitions of both science and 
evolution, evolution, the study of past development, cannot be a scientific 
theory. Neither can creationism be a scientific theory, and for the same 
reasons. Both are religious beliefs, and I don’t want to argue religion on 
this forum.

(I thought it was interesting that your site, 
http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm , has an ancient Egyptian picture of a 
sauropod included.)

Seeing as this is a subject where there is no possibility of resolution, I 
see no use in arguing it on this forum, nor of censorship of those ideas with 
which one disagrees.

Now back to topic.

How do we know which was the earliest written language? The evidence from 
literary styles indicates that Moses redacted earlier documents, purportedly 
going back to Adam. That is if he redacted them at all. He may have just 
concatenated them. That is evidence, not proof, that Adam spoke Hebrew in the 
Garden of Eden.

A legitimate question then arises, why are there no Hebrew inscriptions that 
predate the tokens that you picture? A possible answer is that almost all 
Hebrew, at least from the time of Noah to Moses, was written on perishable 
materials, such as leather or wood, thus modern researchers are left with not 
the oldest writing, but the oldest surviving writing. The documents that 
Moses wrote were not monumental inscriptions, but portable documents to be 
carried by nomads. Similarly, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would have carried 
portable documents, not inscriptions. But this is an argument from silence, 
which proves nothing either way.

A modern example of nomads carrying a small library is the prospectors of the 
American West in the late 1800s. I was surprised to learn that most had two 
or three books, usually consisting of the Bible, complete works of 
Shakespeare, and maybe another book or two (which would put their literacy 
rate above the average high school graduate today). Yet today, there is no 
evidence of their libraries at their abandoned mines. Historical records 
(lacking for the time of Abraham) fill in for the missing information. There 
is no physical reason that would have prevented Abraham, a rich nomad, from 
having a library as part of his baggage, as long as it was portable.

Karl W. Randolph.

> I don't want to be anything less than collegial, Karl, but I find
> this all very...uh....silly.  There were a number of languages in
> existence before Hebrew emerged from the NW Semitic arena.  God
> does not have a "language" but if you really want to be literal and
> fundamental, the only language God is reported to have written is
> Aramaic on a wall to tell a king that his butt was in a crack. 
> But, of course, many would make the argument that God was around a
> long, long time (about 14 billion years) before Aramaic came about.
>   Since the last common ancestor of all humans alive today lived in
> Africa about 200,000 years ago, most would see the "Garden of Eden"
> and Adam as metaphors.  Metaphors do not author scripture.
>
> Jack Kilmon
> San Marcos, Texas
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