Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Dave Washburn wrote:

"I'm not sure how you got to the idea that this theory requires all of 
these things, but it  doesn't.  There's nothing implicit in what 
language the earliest records were kept in, or even what was the "mother 
of all languages."  The age of the earth has nothing whatsoever to do 
with it.  We're talking about a literary theory related to structure and 
genre, nothing more."
[end Dave]

You're right, I was assuming that the theory took the words in Genesis 
to have been written by Adam, Noah, et.al. as is; I didn't consider that 
they might be translations. (Never mind that this alternative raises 
more problems than it solves.)

But if the theory isn't saying that Adam, the first man, wrote about his 
life, then I have misunderstood it completely. Maybe it's just saying 
that the fictional account was written in the Bronze Age. But then 
what's this talk about "the earliest records"? And why did Karl analyze 
the various sections according to the viewpoints of their "authors"? Is 
it only that the real author arranged the text so that it fit the 
viewpoints of the fictional narrators?

Karl seemed to me to be saying that Adam and Noah, real people, wrote 
true accounts (which, as we know from Karl's other writings, he thinks 
were edited by Moses, another real person). And the accounts imply that 
the first humans lived in what we call the Bronze Age. (They also seem 
to imply that the earth was created in the Bronze Age, but maybe you can 
get out of that with long primordial "days".) From this it seems to 
follow that language (and humans) spread from the Middle East to Europe, 
Asia and the Americas in a very short time -- or more generally, that no 
human cultures existed before the Bronze Age.

What struck me was that you can study history going back to the Stone 
Age, or you can read the Bible in isolation as a self-consistent true 
account, but you can't mix the two together without becoming incoherent.


Gabe Eisenstein