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  • From: James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>
  • To: Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] theories and standards
  • Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 18:22:13 +0100

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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