On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Freeman, Louise Margaret wrote:
> Are you also offended when your child is taught that bats are not birds, that rabbits don't chew
> cuds, or that pi equals 3.14, not 3?
When an English translation of the Bible has a statement that contradicts
what should have been obvious to almost all the author's contemporaries,
why should the first reaction be that the author must have been an idiot?
It seems more reasonable to assume that he might not have been an idiot
and that we should try to determine the correct interpretation of what he
said. An important tool in deducing the true meaning of words and phrases
in ancient languages is to find the contexts in which they are used. It
shouldn't seem surprising that the ancients constructed their taxonomies
based on different criteria from those that are used in 21st century
science.
As for I Kings 7:23-26 and II Chron. 4:2-5, shouldn't we consider that the
diameter and circumference given there might be of two different circles?
The sea had a lip protruding from the top, under which there were figures
of gourds, presumably fixed to the outside of the sea. A tangential
observation about these passages is that it can be noted that there is a
copyist's error in either I Kings 7:23 or II Chron. 4:5.
Another comment: Children should be taught that 3.14 is an approximation
to pi, not equal to pi.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
Received on Sat Oct 22 16:28:22 2005
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