Apikorus

arbaim is the number forty. You haven't addressed a single point I made. You seem to be illiterate in Hebrew.

Incidentally, using precisely the same inventive approach that you apply to the Bible, I can prove that the Qur'an is inerrant. Can you find a single error in the entire Qur'an?

Mr. beast asks rhetorically, what kind of person would believe in a flying horse? What kind, indeed?! Perhaps the kind that believes in talking snakes (Gen 3) and talking donkeys (Num 22)?

Talking snakes and donkeys and resurrected Jesuses are for the biblically credulous.

spurly

Hawkingfan, I am not the beast, but I will try to clear up some of the instances you mentioned. Please note, that my thoughts are just that, my thoughts. Other Christians may differ. But here goes:


Perhaps Stephens speech was not an exact historical survey, but instead Stephen was referring to a common idea in his day advanced by Philo. Philo stated that Abraham was 75 when he left Ur of Chaldeas, but that was actually when he left Haran. Philo also stated that this was after Terah had died. So perhaps Stephen was just stating Philo's thoughts because many in the Sanhedrin listening to him bought in to what Philo had to say.


Joseph was given two shares, Manasseh and Ephraim. Later in OT times, it was hardly ever referred to as the tribe of Joseph. But that appears again in this list in Revelation, though both Dan and Ephraim are left out. (By the way, there are about 20 different renderings of the tribes of Israel, sometimes containting 10 tribes, sometimes 11 (leaving out Levi), and sometimes 13, including both of Joseph's sons, but omitting Joseph). It is possible that John left Dan and Ephraim out of this list because those two tribes were known for the sin of idolatry, the very thing that would keep one from being part of the 144,000 around the throne. John was encouraging his readers not to worship the beast. Again, this is just a possibility.


Why does the Greek text say that 23,000 died while the Hebrew text of the LXX says that 24,000 died? One possible solution could be that Paul was talking about those who died in the one day, and the account in Numbers includes those leaders who were put to death as punishment for helping to bring on the sin of Peor. Again, this is just an option, but it could explain the alleged discrepancy.


There is a possibility, and this is totally conjecture, that one of the sons died, and was not included in the later list. That could explain the alleged discrepancy.


The best solution that I have ever read for this suggests that the number in 1 Chronicles includes the 288,000 thousand men in the standing army (which was rounded to 300,000). Note that the number in 1 Chronicles is preceded by "all Israel", while that in 2 Samuel is not.

As for the difference in the numbering of Judah, Samuels number may simply be rounded up, or may not include Benjamin. Either one of these might explain the difference.


This one could quite easily be reconciled in the following manner. Perhaps the number in 2 Samuel is the price David paid for the threshing floor itself, while the number in 1 Chronicles is the price he paid for the entire site (1 Chronicles 21:25).

It is very possible that this could be a scribal error. That would solve this discrepancy.


Again, this is just a guess, but it is possible that the number in 1 Kings simply lists the foreign labor with foreign supervisors, while the number in 2 Chronicles 2 adds in the Israelite foremen supervising the project.


I will let a better expert than I address this one. Here is what I found in the Expositors Bible Commentary:

Some have suggested that the thirty-five cubits in Chronicles might approximate the sum of the length of both pillars. Keil (KD, Kings, p. 97) objects, "But this mode of reconciling the discrepancy is improbable and is hardly in harmony with the words of Chronicles." He suggests instead: "The number 35 evidently arose from confounding the numerical letters yodh-heth= 18 with lamedh-he (= 35)." Such a confusion would have been even more likely in the early, cursive Phoenician script than in the later, Aramaic square character (Payne, "Validity," pp. 121-22).


Again, I will let a better expert than I address this discrepancy. Again, from the expositors bible commentary:

Yet before accusing the Bible of deliberate and unconcealable falsification, one should consider the likelihood of accidental corruption by a later scribe (see Appendix A). Chronicles' larger number could have arisen either through a mistaken reading of the dual alpayim ("two thousand") in Kings as plural alapin, "thousands") and then through supplying a "three" (which occurs four times in the preceding verse), or through an unclear reading of the numerical symbols--the use of which is demonstrable archaeologically, from the eighth-century Samaritan ostraca down to the fourth-century Elephantine papyri--i.e., reading three short vertical strokes for an original two (cf. Payne, "Validity," p. 122).

It's a possibility, though it is in no way a conclusive answer.


From what I read this could be due to a scribal error, and we have no way of knowing which one of the two is correct. But does it really matter? Not.


Two possibilities.
1. Asa removed the high places at the beginning of his reign, but by later in his reign the people went back to using them or
2. He removed the high places for the foreign gods, but not the ones where Jehovah was worshipped in inappropriate ways.

I lean toward the first option.


I have no idea. All I can say is that a scribal error could have taken place.


If you look back to verse 22 there were four years when both Omri and Tibni were battling for control. Add this four years to the eight years he reigned alone and you get the total. One verse could refer to one timespan, and one verse to another. This seems fairly straightforward.

This could be a copyists error that got included into the text. Again, it is not big deal, though the proper number is probably 22.

Again I defer to the Expositors Bible Commentary. Here is what they have written, which makes sense to me:

"The final movements of Ahaziah are difficult to trace but may perhaps be reconstructed as follows: he fled south from Jezreel so as to hide "in Samaria. He was brought to Jehu," who fatally wounded him near Ibleam (between Jezreel and Samaria); he fled by chariot northwest to Megiddo, where he died (2 Kings 9:27); and his body was carried by Ahaziah's servants to Jerusalem (9:28), where they buried him (cf. KD, Kings, pp. 343-44)."

These two verses seem to harmonize well together. For a while Ahaz did fall into their hands, though after appealing to Tiglath-Peleser (sp?) he regained the upperhand. You can tell this by reading both the Kings account and the Chroniclers account.

Again, this could just be a copyists error that was later embedded into the manuscript. The question I have again is does this really amount to a hill of beans. By the way - he was probalby 18, not eight.


One of the authors rounded to the month, the other did not. Seems very plausible to me.

I don't have my Hebrew Bible handy, but both of the passages you listed, at least in the NIV, say he was his uncle. Neither say brother. However, it is late, so I might of missed something. Correct me if I am wrong.

Ahaziah and Uzziah were the same guy. Also, it was common to leave out certain generations when listing your lineage. This was not considered "doctoring the record".

By the way, you mean 1 Ch 3:19, not 2 Ch 3:19. But see the explanation above. Leaving someone out of a geneology was an accepted practice of the time. It was no problem to say that someone was the son of their grandfather and skip the father.
Again I defer to the Expositors Bible Commentary:

To account for the difference of about twelve thousand between the given total and the actual total presents problems. Were these unspecified twelve thousand women and/or children? (1 Esdras 5:41 explicitly states that its given total included "all those of Israel, twelve or more years of age.") If there were relatively few women among the returnees, the pressures for intermarriage would have been considerable.
Other scholars suggest that the numbers explicitly enumerated represent returnees from Judah and Benjamin, while the remainder were from other tribes. This seems preferable to the view of S. Mowinckel (Studien zu dem Buche Ezra-Nehemiah I: Die Listen [Olso: Universitetsforlaget, 1964], p. 69) that the given total represented only the heads of families, which would mean that the total number of returnees would have been an improbable 100,000 to 130,000.

Again, the Jews did not do geneologies like we do. They had no problem leaving people out and skipping generations.

I have spent quite abit of space answering your alleged discrepancies. But the thought just occurred to me that these are all aobut minor things that can be accounted for quite easily. None of these affect a major doctrine of Christianity. So what difference do these make in the overall scheme of things for the Christian - really none at all.

Kevin

Ronin

Spurly ~ there sure does seem to be an awful lot of 'scribal' and/or 'copyist' errors in this holy book of yours.

How can you really be sure of any of the parts you find important now?

Perhaps, they were copyist errors also ~ just reworked over time, removing any truth at all from it.

This does not seem to be a very sound doctrine to follow and is rather a flimsy work by an omnipotent deity.

With all of your free surmising ~ just what exactly keeps you from perceiving that the entire thing might just be made up by assorted desert tribal nomads.

With all of the obvious errors, would not this seem even more likely?

Why would a divinely inspired doctrine require the 'Expositors Bible Commentary' to clarify the 'word' of a God?

Who wrote the Expositors Bible Commentary anyhow?

Please be specific as to exactly what you perceive this major doctrine to be.

Quite true ~ for the Christian mindsnare requires that if two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, you must think that somewhere, hidden, is a third thing that connects them.

That, spurly, is sheer credulity.

Just out of curiousity ~ do you believe in talking snakes and donkeys, wizards walking on water, winged guardians with flaming swords, obstinate fig trees and freaky zombies?

Asha'man

Answer: Credibility

If the bible is full of errors on simple things that can be verified, how can we possibly trust it on things that apparently defy verification?

The two genealogies of Joseph are a perfect example: to me, at least one of these is clearly a fabrication. That means that the authors of the Gospels are trying to pass fiction as fact! I no longer trust any part of this book, since it is appears to be a complex lie, not the inspired word of God.

Apikorus

This is ludicrous. I happen to read palaeo-Hebrew script and at no time in the evolution of the script was there any lamedh-yod confusion. Of course, virtually all Hebrew Bible scholars conclude that Chronicles is a postexilic text which harmonizes the Deuteronomistic History from a later priestly point of view. But even if we grant for the purposes of argument that it was preexilic, we have sufficient palaeographic evidence from Iron Age ostraca regarding the script itself. The backbone stroke of the palaeo-lamedh runs like / (NE to SW), while that for palaeo-yod runs like \ (NW to SE). The two letters look nothing alike. Worse yet for Mr. Payne is that palaeo-chet is more distinct from palaeo-he than is square script chet from he.

Check out the table at this site to see what I am talking about.

P.S. Happy New Year, infidels!

Butters

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MT 1:17 There were twenty-eight generations from David to Jesus.
LK 3:23-38 There were forty-three.
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Just enough time for a quick one. These are both counting from David, luke lists 75 back to Adam.

jayh

on and on and on.

I point this out, Kevin, not to be a pain, but to make a point. Sure for every one of these things someone somewhere conjectured a whole range of details (not suggested at all by the 'inspired' account) that MIGHT, POSSIBLY, MAYBE, IF YOU DON'T LOOK TOO CLOSELY, USING BIZARRE DEFINITIONS OF THE WORDS ("depends on what the meaning of is is") explain it.

That simply is a bit much. A history book that had so many direct contradictions that could only be explained by the readers surmising additional undocumented material would be laughed out of print.

We seem to have two different conclusions to draw from this:

1) The book is inspired and flawless, but like our hypothetical history book author, the supreme intellect of the universe couldn't remember to put in the salient points and left us to guess at what possibly was meant (of course we are to assume at the same time that all the other stuff we read in there about good and bad, heaven and hell, etc, is not as misleading as the visible historical stuff, that it really means plainly what it says)

2) The book is, like many other ancient cultural histories a treasure trove of information, but not to be taken seriously at every detail.

Objectively, which makes more sense?

As someone pointed out, this poses problems only for literalist Christians. Many others have a more liberal belief system that understands the Bible as a concept document, complete with historical and ethical issues.

j

Butters

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Originally posted by Hawkingfan
GE 11:26 Terah was 70 years old when his son Abram was born.
GE 11:32 Terah was 205 years old when he died (making Abram 135 at the time).
GE 12:4, AC 7:4 Abram was 75 when he left Haran. This was after Terah died. Thus, Terah could have been no more than 145 when he died; or Abram was only 75 years old after he had lived 135 years.
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Well, I would have to give you partial credit on this one.
Although it does not state that Abram left after his father died, it also does not "seem clear" that he left his father alive in Haran. In fact the text as we have it, "seems" to indicate the opposite. The last sentence of GE 11 has the death of Terah. The story picks up with GE 12, and Abram leaving. The only reason we would suppose that Terah was still alive when Abram left, is if we want to assume that the Bible has no contradictions, and would rather settle for the fact that it is only badly written.

Of course, since the Hebrew was not divided up into chapter and verse, this could help lead to the misunderstanding, however, this only points out the problem of interpreting the text, and undermines interpratations of other passages based on chapter seperation.

Which only points out again that the Bible cannot be the word of God because it is insufficent to the task. No one, Christians included, can agree on what it really says.

jayh

on and on and on.

I point this out, Kevin, not to be a pain, but to make a point. Sure for every one of these things someone somewhere conjectured a whole range of details (not suggested at all by the 'inspired' account) that MIGHT, POSSIBLY, MAYBE, IF YOU DON'T LOOK TOO CLOSELY, USING BIZARRE DEFINITIONS OF THE WORDS ("depends on what the meaning of is is") explain it.

That simply is a bit much. A history book that had so many direct contradictions that could only be explained by the readers surmising additional undocumented material would be laughed out of print.

We seem to have two different conclusions to draw from this:

1) The book is inspired and flawless, but like our hypothetical history book author, the supreme intellect of the universe couldn't remember to put in the salient points and left us to guess at what possibly was meant (of course we are to assume at the same time that all the other stuff we read in there about good and bad, heaven and hell, etc, is not as misleading as the visible historical stuff, that it really means plainly what it says)

2) The book is, like many other ancient cultural histories a treasure trove of information, but not to be taken seriously at every detail.

Objectively, which makes more sense?

As someone pointed out, this poses problems only for literalist Christians. Many others have a more liberal belief system that understands the Bible as a concept document, complete with historical and ethical issues.

j

Hawkingfan

Thanks. I'll add this to my list. I'm glad you have admitted that there are "errors" in the bible. At least we can call them "copying" errors made by the scribe. And that is all my point was and what I wanted you to admit. You can still believe in the bible. But maybe you should just change your statement from, "The bible is accurate, and anyone who says different is a bald-faced liar," to "The bible is MOSTLY accurate. If you want to base your disbelief on the innaccurate passages, then so be it."

I don't need inaccuracies to disbelieve the bible, anyway. That was not my point as I said above. The history of the church, the absurdities in the bible, the atrocities in the bible, the warped sense of ethics and justice in the bible, the behavior of modern-day christians, and the truth of science prevent me from believing in the bible.