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  • From: Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] theories and standards
  • Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 10:04:46 -0700

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






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