RED DAVE

From RED DAVE: And now, you're waffling.[/QUOTE]From praxeus:
Okay. "4500 years" certainly qualifies as "general figures."

From praxeus:
Well, nor really. A few hundred years might qualify as somewhat more. But when you get up to a thousand years, you're getting into big numbers.

From RED DAVE:
From praxeus:
Waffling. Give us a figure. 4500 years ago and "somewhat more." How much is "somewhat more"?

From praxeus:
Nice dodge, but the left tackle gets you. We're talking about your belief, praxeus. I would like to discuss what you believe. I'm not asking you to be the standard bearer for creationism. Just the standard bearer for yourself.

From praxeus:
Just be yourself, dude, and answer for yourself.

From praxeus:
Indeed. Let's see if you can stick to that.

So, just for yourself, give us a date for the Biblical flood, that you can stand by, tht is accurate to, say, 100 years.

RED DAVE

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Since you add nothing new, just some more politics and additional precision-definition quibbling, I will await for your evidence that the creationary view claims a pre-flood Egyptian civilization, as you placed in this thread.

And if you falsely represented the creationary view then that should be clearly understood first and foremost. Please get straight on that first.

Shalom,
Steven

spin

Is the following correct, praxeus?
Working from the notion that the flood came in when Noah was 600 years old (Gen. 7:6), that Shem was born when Noah was 500 years old (Gen. 5:32), then Shem was 100 in the year of the flood and Arphaxad was born when Shem was 100, so we count from Arphaxad's birth. From that time till the building of the temple in the 4th year of Solomon's reign was 1490 years.

Now I could do the calculations from the reign of Solomon down, but if I can work on the status quo notion that Solomon started his reign in 967BCE, the 4th year, 963BCE, then the flood occurred in 2453BCE. This is of course a rough estimate going on biblical indications down to the building of the temple. I'd be happy for any correction, but is the basic era of the date correct according to you?


spin

Dean Anderson

I continued that list in both directions (here) and we discussed it in this recently resurrected thread.

Praxeus announced that "a major problem" in using such a straightforward method of reading the Bible was that "the chronologies could allow for gaps (such as "son of" at times includes descendent or grand-son)".

He did not, of course, give any indications where in the Genesis account this might have happened, or any explanation as to why it would matter if (for example) Nahor was Serug's great-grandson rather than son - since the Bible explicitly gives the age that Nahor was when Serug was born, so any "missing" generations between them do not change this.

jeffevnz

There actually are striking parallels between the Noah flood story and those of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, Berossus, and Ziusudra. The textual coincidences are hard to ignore. Especially note the dove, the raven, the sacrifice, the boat coming to rest on a hill... However, the best explanation for this is plagiarism, even if you don't see that the global flood is disproven by the arguments above. Note that Ziusudra, Gilgamesh (both Sumerian), Atrahasis, and Berossus (both Babylonian), were all from Mesopotamia. Also note that the Jews were captive in Babylon for most of the 6th century BC, and the Torah was put in it's final form shortly thereafter.

Now, the author of the linked webpage argues that the original story is Ziusudra and that it is loosely based on an actual flooding of the Euphrates River (not the entire world), and that Ziusudra (Noah) was an actual King of a Sumerian city-state. It's an interesting possibility, with some circumstantial evidence in support, but the argument is weak, and even if he was right, it would actually disprove that the flood happened according to the Biblical account.
I am not aware of any flood stories from outside the Middle East which bear a striking similarity to the Ziusudra cycle. So other cultures have stories about floods. Whoopty-doo. Floods happen, and they leave an impression on the survivors. Ancient myths obsess over natural disasters and floods are a common one.

spin

OK, the son/descendant discourse certainly doesn't enter into the issue in the data supplied. The form of the Hebrew is quite specific, for example:

Gen 11:12
W)RPK$D XY XM$ W$L$YM $NH WYWD )T-$LX
And Arphaxad lived 35 years and Shelah was born.

This is simply a duration plus an event. When chained together we have a series of events with a duration between each one. Genealogy or lineage is ultimately superfluous to the data derived from the information. The text basically allows the following sequence of durations between the birth events. There is no room for other generations intervening.
There is no chance of intervening generations in this sequence, given the structure of the textual explanations provided in Genesis.

Then of course, there is nothing about generations in the second part of the data provided:
Unless there is something radically missing this should mean that from the flood to the start of the construction of the temple there were 1490 years.

It would be good to get this part agreed to or rejected as fairly representing the biblical data.


spin

RED DAVE

From praxeus:
I have never claimed that "the creationary view claims a pre-flood Egyptian civilization." I challenge you to find a place where I did that. You are deliberately distorting what I wrote.

From praxeus:
It is straight. What we are dealing with is the dating of the Flood and its relationship to Ancient Egypt.[/QUOTE]And one more time, praxeus, we are questioning your view, not that of the creationists in general. My colleagues have just gone to a lot of trouble to fill in the blanks and do your homework for you. The date that they have come up with for the Flood, based on Biblical chronology, is reasonably close to the one you have used.

Now:

1) What is your date for the Flood (i.e. the one that you accept for purposes of arguement)?

2) If it's approximate (and there's no reason why it shouldn't be), what are the outside limits?

Once we've got the answers to these two explcit questions, we can proceed to compare it to Egyptian chronology (and perhaps Chinese, Sumerian, etc.).

RED DAVE

Steven Avery

So when did I ever claim that ..

"the entire Egyptian civilization (about 2 million people) was wiped out ...
reconstituted with the original language, religion, culture, economy, etc".

As you have written ?

Who claims this ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery

RED DAVE

From praxeus:
You never claimed, nor have I said you did. I said that.

All you ever claimed was, and all I have ever attributed to you was:
Now, let me repeat the questions from my previous post. Maybe you'll answer them now.

RED DAVE

Dave Reed

I was wondering just where there is a website
that could confirm contiguous Egyptian
civilizations from perhaps (9200 BC) to
around (2000 BC). After all, when the
archaologists examine sites, it's not like
they are looking for something like a
civilization time gap. Just what would this
look like? If water rose up, and removed only
carbon cycle life, how would one determine this
thousands of years later through archaological
investigations? Water, (less than a year's
worth), would probably leave most structures in
that particular region in tact. It also wouldn't
bother anything that didn't float. So then a
couple hundred years later, everything's totally
dry, and somebody stumbles on to a bunch of hewn
stones, temples? and whatever else was once there,
tells all his buddies, and they all move to that
spot, and pick it up from where it left off. They
may have some hardened mud removal chores, roof
restorations etc. Then 5000 years later, a group
of archaologists come along, check it out, and
say, "guess there aint no "time gap" here, let's
check the next site". So just what are we looking
for in a time gap?