On Mon, 18 Sep 1995 09:30:18 -0500 you wrote:
[...]
JB>Consider:
>"He is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand
>generations of those who love him and keep his commands." Deut. 7:9b
[...]
JB>Now I ask, are these "thousand generations" to be taken literally?
>Or are they just a figure of speech? I would say that the number
>1000 is a figure of speech implying something much greater (like God
>owns the cattle on a 1000 hills - surely, He owns many more than
>that). Anyway, how can anyone say that the entire human history
>contains only a few hundred generations in light of this, and similar
>verses? I want to speculate that this verse has in mind the fact
>that God's original covenant with Adam and Eve is still in force at
>the time of Moses - thus placing at least, and probably many more
>than 1000 generations between Adam and Moses.
JB>This reasoning may not get me back to the millions of years Glenn
>wants for human history, but it does help get me over the 10,000 year
>hump.
Good point! The fact that the Biblical writers can say such
mathematically imprecise things (does God's covenant love cut out at
the 1,001st generation? :-)) indicates to me they had an entirely
different attitude to numbers that we modern Westerners have. That's
why I think all attempts to add up the Biblical genealogies are futile
- the original writers never intended them to be used for that
purpose.
Besides, Gould, as well as revealing "the trade secret of
paleontology" has revealed the trade secret of YEC genealogy adding:
"The textbook detractors assume that Ussher's effort involved little
more than adding up ages and dates given directly in the Old
Testament-thus implying that his work was only an accountant's act of
simple, thoughtless piety... But even a cursory look at the Bible
clearly shows that no such easy solution is available, even under the
assumption of inerrancy. You can add the early times, from creation
up to the reign of Solomon-for the requisite information is provided
by an unbroken male lineage supplying the key datum of father's age at
the birth of a first son. But this easy route cannot be carried
forward into the several hundred years of the kingdom, from Solomon's
reign to the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian
captivity-for here we are only given the lengths of rule for kings,
and several frustrating ambiguities (including overlaps or
co-regencies of a king and his successor) were widely acknowledged but
not easily resolved. Finally, how can you use the Old Testament to
reach the crucial birthday of Christ and thus connect the older
narrative to the present? For the Old Testament stops in the period
of Ezra and Nehemiah, the fifth century B.C. in Ussher's Chronology."
(Gould S.J., "Fall in the House of Ussher", "Eight Little Piggies",
1993, Jonathan Cape, London, pp187-188).
It is interesting that not one YEC book I have ever read (and I have
read many) has an explantion of how exactly the OT genealogies can be
totalled to give the age of the Earth.
Perhaps one of our YEC lurkers can clear up this mystery?
God bless.
Stephen