GPLindsey

By my rough calculation from Genesis, there appears to be about 367 years that separates the end of the Flood, when the population of the whole world was eight (of which only four were women) to God calling Abram out of the land of Ur to begin his wanderings, which eventually took him to Egypt and the Pharoh. Sometime between the Flood and Abraham came the Tower of Babel incident, although I can't sleuth out from Genesis how many years exactly that took place after the end of the Flood.

First question, anyone know of a fundie estimate of when the Tower of Babel story took place? I can make a guess based on the lineages given, but with everyone living hundreds of years it is hard to pin down. It's relevant, because if it took place only a 100 years or so after the Flood, I don't see how any fundie could come up with much of a population to divide up into different languages and peoples.

Second, just what sort of birth rate do fundies assign to the human race between the Flood and Abraham, to account for the appearance of kingdoms in Egypt and elsewhere around the globe? To have Abraham walk into an Egyptian kingdom, it follows that there must have been time for people to settle into the Nile valley, develop towns and a shared culture, and then through competition and war arrive at an Egyptian kingdom. That alone would have taken a few hundred years, if you are starting with an empty Nile valley, and constant immigration. There had to have been many thousands of people living there by the time Abraham arrived, and of course Abraham passed through other populated areas and kingdoms all along his journey (and of course there were kingdoms in China and elsewhere around the globe at this time). All this from 8 people only a few hundred years earlier?

If we are talking the real world and throw out the nonsensical ages the Bible gives, and you start with a population of eight adults in the primitive world of 4,000 years ago, the four women would have lived into their 40s or 50s (if lucky and they didn't die in child birth) and they may have had at most somewhere around 8 or 9 children, of which a good many would have died of some disease before they were 2. Throw in adult diseases, incidents of infertility, accidents, famines, natural predators, violent rivalries, etc., and you have a population that would have been on the brink of extinction for many decades before their population started to climb. After 367 years, the population would have been in the low hundreds to at most a few thousand. Not enough to populate the world with Egyptian kingdoms, Chinese dynasties, etc.

If we are talking the miracle world of the Bible, then I guess all the women lived hundreds of years, they produced large litters of children every 9 months like clockwork, and none of the children died in childbirth. When the girls were about 15 they started spitting out bundles of babies, and everyone traveled like mad around the globe to set up their kingdoms in time for Abraham to have somewhere to pass through. That must be the answer!

Godless Wonder

There's an interesting Talk Origins Post of The Month that talks about the repopulation after the flood. It contains a C program to simulate things with various parameters. What's interesting is if you crank up the birth rates to get anywhere near the sort of population growth, you find the world populated by mostly children, and a comparative handful of "adults" (over age 12 was considered "adult" in the simulation) and all of the adult women are pregnant. Hardly the sort of civilization that's going to be going around building monuments or spreading around the globe, they're going to way be too busy with all those kids.

andrewcriddle

FWIW your figures are based on the Hebrew (Masoretic) text of Genesis 11.

Using the Greek (Septuagint) figures the period is (very roughly) 1200 years rather than a little less than 400 years.

'Flood Geologists' and such seem to wish to date the Flood according to the Masoretic figures but it would at least slightly reduce their difficulties if they used the Septuagint figures instead.

Andrew Criddle

Strangeways

You're right, using the Septuagint would give them an extra 800 years, but that would also mean the fundies would have to adopt that Bible as well, which they would never do. The differences in the two Bibles are a huge point of contention between Catholics and Protestants, so no Protestant literalist would ever use the Septuagint for any reason ever no matter how much it might help his or her case.

Gotta love religion, don't ya?

Answerer

Thats why most of us believe Christian to be filled with myths. Of course, more moderate christians will enjoy telling you that the "years" as stated in bible is not similar to the years which we are currently using and that mythical characters like Abraham, Noah and their sons lived a very, very long life (few hundred years), long enough to create a vast population of human race on Earth.

Of course, their standard explanation (see above) can be refuted when you show them a verse from the Flood story that stated how God limited a human' lifespan to 120 years. But then again, the bible is filled with contradictions.