Freethought & Rationalism Archive

12-03-2003, 06:09 PM

Dear rlogan,

I have studied the details of Athrahasis in Accadian and portions of Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh as well, and the similarities with Genesis are so striking that the "law of probability" forbids that the parallels are coincidental. Either Genesis adopts material from the Accadian/Sumerian sources vice verca, or both are based on the same source.

This being said, I would like to add that I am in no way impressed by the "evidence" that Genesis used the Mesopotamian sources. But the case reminds me of the situation where a man was charged for murder and the prosecutor called three witnesses who had seen him kill the victim. However, the man insisted that he must be aquitted because he called 20 witnesses who had not seen the murder; and twenty outrules three.

The Mesopotamian clay tablets are older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts by 500 to 1000 years, and these tablets are evidently copies ("copy" is even sometimes written on the tablet). But how much weight should we give the opinion of all those researchers who never have seen older Hebrew manuscripts than 225-250 BCE and strongly doubt that *much* older manuscripts ever existed?

Frankly speaking, we know nothing about the origin of Hebrew Bible autographs, and I see no compelling reason to reject the possibility that such manuscripts existed before the time of the oldest copies of Athrahasis, Enuma Elish, and Gilgamesh. In this post I am not arguing for any view regarding this, just pointing out our ignorance. And we should all be willing to admit that the basis for our own view and our *selection* of evidence is our personal "horizon of understanding", the crucial point being whether we believe in God and in the inspiration of the Bible, or whether we reject this. R. Bultmann has shown that theological research without presuppositions is impossible, and the same is true regarding historical research. I do not say that we should not interpret archaeological finds and old ducuments and try to find patterns, and use all kinds of arguments to bolster our theories. But as researchers we should allways have a humble attitude toward our material and keep in mind that the past cannot be proven.

Kosh · 12-03-2003, 06:14 PM

YHWHTruth - is your entire defense going to center around "could have", "probably", and other such hypothetical conjuring? Or can you actually argue against the evidence with better evidence?

BTW - agreed, that there is no wiggle room on the Flood date information in Genesis.

judge · 12-03-2003, 07:08 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by YHWHtruth
Judge,

The first step we have to take when we are going to evaluate the flood information of the Bible, is to find out what the Bible really says and what is does not say. It seems to me that the information given in Genesis 5:1-29;7:6; 11:10-12:4 is quite unambiguous. It gives a little more than 1650 years from Adam to the flood and a little more than 350 years from the flood and to Abraham. I am not able to see there is any room for "gaps" here, so my question is: Do you agree that these verses do not allow for any gaps? In that case, are you aware of any other Biblical expressions which suggest or directly say there were such gaps? I am only speaking about the biblical expressions, and am not comparing them with the accounts of other old nations or with the view of the natural sciences.

Actually one thing that we can be sure about is that the early chapters of Genesis were corrupted , particularly in relation to these dates.

Josephus seems to be aware of more than one timeline.

We may draw several conclusions at this point regarding Josephus. 1) It seems fairly certain that Josephus was familiar with long and short chronologies. 2) He did not attempt to harmonize them. 3) He may be an indirect witness to both LXX and to the Hebrew text with its shorter chronology. 4) He has contradictory chronological information as regards the time from Adam to his own time. He can speak of a "little short of three thousand years" (Against Apion I.8), whereas he has given the time from Adam to the building of the Temple in one place as 2,102 years (Ant. VIII.3.1); which was about 1,000 years before his day, and in another place as 3,043 years (Ant. X.8.4-5). In short, Josephus does not seem to be of much help in answering the question of the time element in the chronogenealogies of Genesis 5 and 11:10-26.

from...Professor Gerald Hasel

http://www.grisda.org/origins/07023.htm

rlogan · 12-03-2003, 07:23 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by YHWHtruth

the similarities with Genesis are so striking that the "law of probability" forbids that the parallels are coincidental.

how much weight should we give the opinion of all those researchers who never have seen older Hebrew manuscripts than 225-250 BCE and strongly doubt that *much* older manuscripts ever existed?

Frankly speaking, we know nothing about the origin of Hebrew Bible autographs, and I see no compelling reason to reject the possibility that such manuscripts existed before the time of the oldest copies of Athrahasis, Enuma Elish, and Gilgamesh.

Agree with point 1.

How much weight to give? Well, I would not be advancing the proposition that the Hebrew story came first when the only evidence we have is the opposite. Before you said the quality of the story was the argument, and two of us asked what that meant.

Question that follows:

Last comment: One of the things we know is that the OT uses language and refers to events that occurred much later than the supposed authorship dates for various books. (maybe as much as 700 years for the pentateuch) I don't want to hijack the thread, as the point is the flood. But there is a whole literature on authorship of the OT and it weakens any argument that the Hebrew story came first.

Jayhawker Soule · 12-03-2003, 08:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by DaveDonally

I've already mentioned the different king lists also, each of which was compiled in a different reign (Tiglath-Pileser II, Ashur-nirari V, Shalmaneser V), showing that the chronological information provided in the latter parts of these lists are contemporary information and need to contain relatively controllable information for the period they were updated in.

The passage back to 1158 BCE is reasonably well supported, yet we are now back to the time when the Assyrian information receives support from numerous sources. For example the climatic change which is noted in Assyrian literature matches the stratigraphic information from Ugarit and Cyprus, where the stratum covering those archaeological sites is much lighter in colour than those above or below. This layer caused by the climatic change is dated by the references in the Assyrian literature to that change, which is also reflected in numerous other areas around the near east and Europe. (See the Parpola & Neumann article on the subject, JNES 1988 -- from memory. If exact reference is needed I can get it for you.) The importance of this climatic change is that it provides an ad quem date for the destruction of Ugarit, forcing the dating of the Hittite empire to be constrained by it as well, given the numerous synchronisms between these two cultures.

The relationship between Ugarit and Hatti provides a strong synchronism with Egypt as well, supported both by the treaties between Ramses II and Hattusilis III and by the Amarna letters which provide a further synchronism between Egypt and those countries as well as Mitanni, Babylon and Assyria. Thus, returning again to the Assyrian King Lists, we have a further strong support of the veracity of the lists. This list itself considering only back to Shamshi-Adad I, we reach back to 1810 BCE.

We also have the record of Mursili I's raid on Babylon which both brought an end to the dynasty of Hammurabi and the arrival of the Kassites in Babylon. It was under Hammurabi that Mari was annexed by Babylon. The last king of Mari was Zimri-Lim, who was the successor of Yashmakh-Addu, the son of Shamshi-Adad I, a further demonstration of the validity of the Assyrian King Lists.

Interestingly ...

Quote:

On Sun Oct 1 06:18:25 EDT 2000, an Ian Hutchesson wrote

I've already mentioned the different king lists also, each of which was compiled in a different reign (Tiglath-Pileser II, Ashur-nirari V,
Shalmaneser V), showing that the chronological information provided in the latter parts of these lists are contemporary information and need to contain relatively controllable information for the period they were updated in.

The passage back to 1158 BCE is reasonably well supported, yet we are now back to the time when the Assyrian information receives support from numerous sources. For example the climatic change which is noted in Assyrian literature matches the stratigraphic information from Ugarit and Cyprus, where the stratum covering those archaeological sites is much lighter in colour than those above or below. This layer caused by the
climatic change is dated by the references in the Assyrian literature to that change, which is also reflected in numerous other areas around the near east and Europe. (See the Parpola & Neumann article on the subject, JNES 1988 -- from memory. If exact reference is needed I can get it for you.) The importance of this climatic change is that it provides an ad quem date for the destruction of Ugarit, forcing the dating of the Hittite empire to be constrained by it as well, given the numerous synchronisms between these two cultures.

The relationship between Ugarit and Hatti provides a strong synchronism with Egypt as well, supported both by the treaties between Ramses II and Hattusilis III and by the Amarna letters which provide a further synchronism between Egypt and those countries as well as Mitanni, Babylon and Assyria. Thus, returning again to the Assyrian King Lists, we have a further strong support of the veracity of the lists. This list itself considering only back to Shamshi-Adad I, we reach back to 1810 BCE.

We also have the record of Mursili I's raid on Babylon which both brought an end to the dynasty of Hammurabi and the arrival of the Kassites in Babylon. It was under Hammurabi that Mari was annexed by Babylon. The last king of Mari was Zimri-Lim, who was the successor of Yashmakh-Addu, the son of Shamshi-Adad I, a further demonstration of the validity of the Assyrian King Lists.

- see The Flood

Celsus · 12-03-2003, 08:26 PM

Thanks, CA, for pointing this out.

DaveDonally: Plagiarism is a serious offense. If you are not the same person as Ian Hutchesson, then please stop this sham immediately. If you do not reply to this message, it is assumed you are a plagiarist. I will be emailing Hutchesson to check.

Joel

Doctor X · 12-04-2003, 02:43 PM

Celsus:

Maybe they were both inspired?

Anyways, what is The Point?

Do we want to know the date the authors of the OT texts thought was the Flood? Whatever it is it will be "wrong" unless someone demonstrates that such a flood happened . . . and I have not seen evidence for that.

--J.D.

_Naturalist_ · 12-05-2003, 03:33 AM

The story of the global flood is a myth, which is quite clear if one actually reads it. So the question isn't whether it could have happened or not, or if it actually did happen. The real question is why people still believe in it after the age of four.

12-03-2003, 08:26 PM	#26
Celsus Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Singapore Posts: 2,875	Will the real Ian please stand up? Thanks, CA, for pointing this out. DaveDonally: Plagiarism is a serious offense. If you are not the same person as Ian Hutchesson, then please stop this sham immediately. If you do not reply to this message, it is assumed you are a plagiarist. I will be emailing Hutchesson to check. Joel

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12-03-2003, 06:09 PM	#21
YHWHtruth Guest Posts: n/a	Dear rlogan, I have studied the details of Athrahasis in Accadian and portions of Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh as well, and the similarities with Genesis are so striking that the "law of probability" forbids that the parallels are coincidental. Either Genesis adopts material from the Accadian/Sumerian sources vice verca, or both are based on the same source. This being said, I would like to add that I am in no way impressed by the "evidence" that Genesis used the Mesopotamian sources. But the case reminds me of the situation where a man was charged for murder and the prosecutor called three witnesses who had seen him kill the victim. However, the man insisted that he must be aquitted because he called 20 witnesses who had not seen the murder; and twenty outrules three. The Mesopotamian clay tablets are older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts by 500 to 1000 years, and these tablets are evidently copies ("copy" is even sometimes written on the tablet). But how much weight should we give the opinion of all those researchers who never have seen older Hebrew manuscripts than 225-250 BCE and strongly doubt that much older manuscripts ever existed? Frankly speaking, we know nothing about the origin of Hebrew Bible autographs, and I see no compelling reason to reject the possibility that such manuscripts existed before the time of the oldest copies of Athrahasis, Enuma Elish, and Gilgamesh. In this post I am not arguing for any view regarding this, just pointing out our ignorance. And we should all be willing to admit that the basis for our own view and our selection of evidence is our personal "horizon of understanding", the crucial point being whether we believe in God and in the inspiration of the Bible, or whether we reject this. R. Bultmann has shown that theological research without presuppositions is impossible, and the same is true regarding historical research. I do not say that we should not interpret archaeological finds and old ducuments and try to find patterns, and use all kinds of arguments to bolster our theories. But as researchers we should allways have a humble attitude toward our material and keep in mind that the past cannot be proven.

12-03-2003, 06:14 PM	#22
Kosh Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: Orions Belt Posts: 3,911	YHWHTruth - is your entire defense going to center around "could have", "probably", and other such hypothetical conjuring? Or can you actually argue against the evidence with better evidence? BTW - agreed, that there is no wiggle room on the Flood date information in Genesis.

12-04-2003, 02:43 PM	#27
Doctor X Banned Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: USA Posts: 3,794	Celsus: Maybe they were both inspired? Anyways, what is The Point? Do we want to know the date the authors of the OT texts thought was the Flood? Whatever it is it will be "wrong" unless someone demonstrates that such a flood happened . . . and I have not seen evidence for that. --J.D.

12-05-2003, 03:33 AM	#28
_Naturalist_ Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Sweden Posts: 5,914	The story of the global flood is a myth, which is quite clear if one actually reads it. So the question isn't whether it could have happened or not, or if it actually did happen. The real question is why people still believe in it after the age of four.

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