Re: [asa] Seely's Response to Hill re: Accommodation in PSCF; ANE Motifs

What is history? A serious question.

Are these both historical?

1. In 1812 the Royal Marines gave Uncle Sam a bloody nose.
2 On 29 June 1812 a small group of British Marines attacked the White House and burnt it down. (My dates are invented)

(The first exhibits a certain British jingoism!)

or what about ;

In 1812 and 1942 the Russians deployed their secret weapon against invaders.

or
In 1812 and 1942 the invading armies of the French then the Germans stopped in their incredible advance into Russia due to the cold of the Russian winter. They were forced to retreat but were it not for the extreme cold they would have defeated the Russians

We could give other examples.

Historical events which are mentioned in the bible are often not given historical accounts as we consider them today but interpretations based on those events.

Another example are the extant accounts of the First Crusade of 1096. It clearly happened but we only have highly coloured accounts of dubious worth - except that it happened. There was an Italian crusade but that has disappeared from all extant records.

These are some of the reasons why I cannot accept the simple presentation of "Genesis history" by YECs or Dick Fischer or Morton as the accounts are too stylised to make clear one to one correlations with contemporary events

Michael

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Douglas Hayworth
  To: AmericanScientificAffiliation
  Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 10:33 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Seely's Response to Hill re: Accommodation in PSCF; ANE Motifs

  On 2/28/08, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
    Doug said: They OT writers probably did consider the ANE cosmology to be factual, and the histories they tell were probably based on what they believed or experienced as events.

    This is the assumption I want to in some sense challenge: how do we know what the OT writers, and just as importantly their ANE predecessors and contemporaries, understood as "factual" within their own cosmologies / cosmogonies?

  I think I agree with you. Perhaps I should have inserted the word "roughly" before the words factual and believed in my sentence. I think they worked from that basic worldview, but perhaps because they were prescientific did not view "facts" about the physical world and history as strictly as we do today. In any case, my point was that the OT is a mixture of fact and storytelling, and it's probably not reasonable to constrain everything into one or the other (i.e., "sensu" Seely or Hill).

  Doug

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Received on Fri Feb 29 05:20:40 2008