Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

Hi,

Quoting 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.

This line of reasoning raises many issues. It was once thought that  
there were clearly defined periods in history and prehistory like the  
stone age and the bronze age.

Relatively recent archaeological finds have shown that there are no  
such clearly defined ages and there is considerable overlap between  
them.

Intrinsic to the issue of the so-called ages is the issue of dating  
which, I am sure you are already aware, is far from an exact science.  
The most that any dating method can tell you with any degree of  
certainty is what is older than something else and even this will not  
be infallible.

Where man spread from is another can of worms entirely. There are  
generally as many different plausible theories about this as there are  
people who posite them.

The proliferation of cataclysmic stories of different versions gives  
credence to the theory that at some point in the history of mankind a  
small group of people survived a cataclysmic event and spread to the  
furthest reaches of the earth. Whether a person chooses to believe  
that the Torah version of the story is the correct one is a matter of  
personal choice and faith.

All we can say with certainty about mankind is that a few thousand  
years ago writing appeared spontaneously and simultaneously in  
different parts of the world and in different languages. Furthermore  
we have a few shards of ancient tools and other archaeological gems  
that we cannot date with certainty and the interpretation of all of  
this is by no means an exact science.

James Christian



> Gabe Eisenstein
>
>
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