Dick pointed out that I had not sent this to the list.
Hi Dick,
At 11:58 PM 3/1/00 -0500, Dick Fischer wrote:
>>The Bible doesn't say Eden was in the east, it says, "The LORD God planted
>>a garden eastward in Eden,"
>
>If you and I were in Los Angeles, I might say I came from back east in
Kansas >City. If you and I were in New York, I might say my home town was
out west in >Kansas City. Kansas City doesn't move, my language is colored
by my location. >Wherever the narrator was setting down the information,
Eden was east, or you >might say the writer was west of the garden of Eden.
This tends to eiminate >the Mediterranean basin as only the Atlantic Ocean
lies west.
You miss the point of what I see in that verse. I see it saying "eastward
in eden" kinda like "eastward in California."
>
>Also, edin is an Accadian-Sumerian word which means plain, prairie or
desert. >Again, this makes sense. God planted a garden east of the
writer's location >in or near a desert. The ancient city of Eridu fits
every word of the Genesis >narrative Including the rivers, all four of
which can be tied with varying >degrees of certainty to that region.
First, the abyssal Mediterranean was a plain. Second, not all understanding
of the account can come from the Sumerians. Edin in Hebrew means pleasure.
Which religion do you think is inspired--Sumerian or Hebrew? If all
arguments must give way to the Sumerian version of the account, as you seem
to argue for, then I would suggest we are members of the wrong religion.
>It doesn't strike you as a "reach" that the Euphrates and Tigris have to
flow >90 degrees from their present course, have to form a junction just as
they do >now, have to be joined by two other rivers, one that can be
associated with >Persia, the other with Saudia Arabia, and there is no
trace of any ancient >river beds to substantiate your theory?
It is no more odd for the Tigris and Euphrates several million years ago to
have flowed at 90 degrees to their present courses than it was for the Nile
to have done so (it did you know) or for the Colorado River of the Grand
Canyon several million years ago to have flowed straight west and emptied
along the California coast rather than Baja as it does now. Consider this:
"Upper Paleocene to Middle Miocene fluvial-deltaic rocks in the Los
Angeles and Ventura basins were deposited by a Colorado paleoriver prior to
300 km of dextral displacement on the San Andreas fault. During the late
Miocene, movement on the fault and associated rifting in the Salton trough
rerouted the paleoriver into the proto-Gulf of California." ~ Jeffrey L.
Howard, "Paleocene to Holocene Paleodeltas of Ancestral Colorado River
Offset by the San Andreas Fault System, Southern California," Geology,
24:9(Sept. 1996):783-786, p. 783
And the Yellow River in the last 1000 years has altered its course to have
emptied south of Shan Dong Province and then back into the Bohai Bay.
Consider this for the Yellow River.
"In the last 3,500 years, there have been 26 significant changes in the
Yellow River's course. BEtween 602 B.C.--the year of the first recorded
course change--and 1288, the river eptied into the sea between Tientsin and
the Shantung peninsula, although in osme floods the stream split into two
channels one on each side of the peninsula. Throughout those 19 centuries,
the location of its mouth varied by only about 100 miles. THen in 1288, ag
reat flood sent the Yellow charging across country, First it emptied into
the Huai, nearly 200 miles to the southeast, then carved a channel across
to the Yangtze and wound up emptying into the East China Sea almost 600
miles south of its original porition."
"During the next 567 years--a period of improvement in civil engineering
and of more or less stable government--the Chinese managed to keep a
relatively tight rein on their wild river. But in 1855, the Yellow tore
open the dike on its left bank at Tungwa Hsiang, about 30 miles east of
Kaifeng. During the next six years, while engineers tried repeatedly to
repair the shattered dikes, the uncontrolled river wandered northeastward
to the sea in many channels. Finally, in 1961, the river settled into its
present channel about 500 miles to the north of its 1288 course, emptying
into the Po Sea instead of the Yellow Sea." Champ Clark, _Flood_ Time Life
Books, 1982, p. 42
It was there that I saw the mouth of this mighty mile wide river.
Dick, you really need to incorporate more geology into your objections.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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