From: PASAlist@aol.com
Date: Wed Jul 02 2003 - 02:59:12 EDT
Dick wrote,
> From our vantage point being 7,000 to 4,000 years removed from the events,
> naturally you and I can see the sheer local nature of Genesis 1-11. But why
> do you think the Bible writers were so stupid they didn't see that for
> themselves? You seem to put all the errors on the source, and infer that the
> translation is impeccable. How do you justify that position?
>
As your first statement infers, the issue is one of knowledge, not stupidity.
The Bible writers were scientifically ignorant of a great deal that we take
for granted, and there is no indication that God revealed modern scientific
truth to them.
I do not know why you think the translations are so divorceable from the
source. Most modern translations are done by competent scholars who are seeking to
render the source in modern languages. Except for a few doctrinal "fixes" in
some translations, the translations represent the source quite accurately. So,
if there is an error in the translation, it most probably is in the source.
<<The Accadians were the early Adamites and Semites. They knew very well
that the Sumerians living in the vicinity spoke an unrelated language. The oral
tradition of Genesis had to stem from this source just as the Hebrew language
derived from the Accadian language. Yet you think the writer of Genesis was
ignorant of this simple fact of multiple languages spoken in southern
Mesopotamia both before and after the flood. Even though you and I are so clever we
figured it all out. You give the Bible writers too little credit, Paul.>>
You are assuming that the Akkadians were the early Adamites. But the earliest
records in Akkadian are polytheistic but without any knowledge of a god named
Jahweh, so their literature dissociates them from the early Adamites.
The oral tradition in Genesis did not need to stem directly from the
Akkadians. It could have come from the Babylonians via Abraham, and it is in fact the
Babylonian accounts of creation and the flood which are closest to the OT
accounts. Nor is Hebrew derived from Akkadian. Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic
language related to but not derived from the North east Semitic language of
Akkadian. They are cousins, not father and son.
In spite of concordist wishful thinking, the OT clearly represents the Flood
as a cosmic event that destroyed all mankind (as almost all modern OT scholars
agree); therefore after the flood so far as the biblical writer is concerned
only the _one_ language of Noah would have been spoken until the Tower of
Babel event (again as virtually all OT scholars agree is the meaning of the
account). Further, in the opinion of WG Lambert, whose knowledge of the ANE
languages dwarfs the both of us put together, the OT knows nothing of the Sumerian
era.
Paul
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