ferdi

Hello to everyone,

I posted this on apologetics.org with some more comments and no one there seemed to be able to find an explanation. Maybe some christians who claim the inerrancy of the bible can riddle this here. If you read 1.Chr.22,14 you find that David has managed to have a great treasure for the construction of the temple.

The weight in modern metric standards is:

9,100 tons of gold
45,000 tons of silver and at least (so much no one can weigh it)
45,000 tons of iron
45,000 tons of copper.

In 2. Chr 1 you can find even more gold and silver and iron added and precious stones too. Also in 2. Chr you can find the statement that Jerusalem was so rich that where was as much gold and silver as stones.

But alone the figures above are high, very high, indeed they are too high.

A roman soldier under Augustus earnd some hundred grams of silver in a year. The whole sum of silver and gold would have been enough to pay the whole roman army under Augustus for about 550 years. A superbattleship in greece at about 500BC cost about 30-40 kilos of silver. The above mentioned sums represented by far more than all human beings in the world together have owned at 800BC.

There are no silver or gold or iron mines in Israel and the metal was so valuable that gaining it by trade was impossible. Additionally the metal must have been vanished without any trace.

But the sheer amount of metal alone would be enough to show the impossibility of these figures. 145,000 tons is as much as the dome in cologne, 13 times as much as the eifelltower and more than a modern aircraftcarrier. Anyone care to riddle that?

Ferdi

cloudyphiz

hi ferdi
any idea what happened to apologetics.org? the site has been down for days. great work over there, i might add. it goes to show how quickly xians will change their definition of innerancy when presented with obvious errancy in their 'holy book'...
-gary

Bede

I'm afraid there are few inerrantists here and this kind of exaggeration is very common in ancient writings. In common with most other Christians who post here, it does not bother me. Have a read of Meta on the 'Stupidity of all or Nothing' thread.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

GunnerJ

"Exagerations," like, say, someone dying and coming abck to life? Or feeding thousands of people when you only have a few anchovies and a loaf of bread? Or an exageration like walking on water?

What standard do you use to determine what parts of the Bible are exagerations and what aren't?

cloudyphiz

exactly. without inerrancy, the best you can do is come up with a sort of watered-down form of theism. when you accept the fact that you must personally discriminate the errant human elements from the divinely inspired elements, then the whole work loses its authority. at this point hardcore, fundamentalist evangelical xianity is pretty much out the window and that's really what most of us are looking for.

SingleDad

Theistic biblical errantism necessarily accepts the reality of personal divine inspiration. One cannot say that the bible is the word of god because it is true, one must be divinely inspired to find the true statements in the bible.

ferdi

Hello,

to resolve any misunderstandings I changed my name here from payer to believers to ferdi.

I did not want this to come to an "All or nothing" question. This came up on apologetics with some people defending every word of the bible (and of course incl. Moses, the flood, 6 days of creation and so on). The christians may sort out between each other wether one can belief in god without believing in the inerrancy of the bible (which surely leaves the question open which part you believe and which not) or if one is a hellbound devildeceived sinner if he does so.

If all persons here agree that the amounts of metal are wild exagerations it is fine, but I am still waiting for some apologetics to defend. If you could all be so kind not ot change the topic in the meantime I´d really appreciate this. Tanks in advance.

Ferdi

SingleDad

There aren't very many biblical inerrantists on Infidels; they tend to lose heart quickly and leave.

cloudyphiz

hi ferdi-

sorry to drag the thread off-topic a bit. SingleDad is right though; there aren't many innerantists here. it's quite different from the apologetics board in that sense. you probably aren't going to find many here who would argue that a woman should be fed poison as a litmus test to determine if she'd been unfaithful, or who would argue that breeding in front of strips of white wood can cause spotted offspring...

-gary