Jedi Mind Trick

I came acros this site recently:
http://www.flood-myth.com/
Scroll down on the left side to where it talks about how old Noah was. The author says the extravagant ages are due to a mistranslation from Cuneiform texts.

Toto

Fascinating.

It is a website for this book:

(Amazon link) Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth

But if you want to buy the book, it looks like ordering from Eisenbrauns is a better deal.

A reviewer on Amazon writes:

Chief594

I find this thread topic to be most interesting. However, I feel I take a different point of view than the rest. In our day and age we have a tendency to expect a 70 year lifespan to be biologically appropriate and automatically dismiss the long ages as recorded in the Bible, simply because we don't see them today. Although I am not a scientist, my understanding is that scientists are more baffled by human aging and death, than they are longevity. In my research I have yet to come across a scientist that can prove it is impossible for someone to live that long. The statement the Bible is making is simply recording what happened, not stating that man MUST live that long. I will also add that the Bible is not the only ancient source that records long ages. There are many Greek and Egyptian documents that have recorded humans as living for hundreds of years. Although it may not be the norm in our society today I don't think we can dismiss the Biblical records as fables on those grounds.

Vorkosigan

No archaeological evidence from the thousands of known skeletons and skeletal materials supports the idea that humans lived longer in the past. Work in cultures at similar levels of material technology, and with similar toolkits, shows that they do not live as long as we do. You can, as a matter of faith, imagine that so-and-so lived for 900 years. But all evidence indicates that it is an impossibility.

Vorkosigan

Zeda

I once heard the argument for the long ages in the OT, that these ages refer not to the age of a particular individual, but to the ascendency of a family. In other words, not that Adam lived 930 years, but that his family was the notable family for a time of 930 years.

However, the age at the birth of some of the children of the early figures does not seem to support this argument.

Chief594

How would archaeological evidence be able to support humans living longer??? What would this evidence look like? How would it be measured? Does this mean that other cultures documents with long life spans must be taken on faith also? What is this evidence that indicates it is an impossibility? Even Doctors can't prove it would be an impossibility yet you seem certain. Do you have any evidence to support your statement or should I just take it on faith?

DougP

To me this is just another simple reason of why the the bible is a work of fiction.

Asha'man

Anthropologists are pretty good at determining the age of a human at time of death, looking only at how the bone has grown and perhaps how the teeth have worn. If we find nothing but skeletons of people that have died at ages younger than 50 or so, then the odds of people living into the 900s is extremely low. No anthropologist has ever reported finding a skeleton with an estimated age over 100, as far as I know, and the overwhelming majority show evidence of much younger ages at death.

Mordy

This assumes that how people age is universally equivalent, say we take a "slow ager", we compare a man's bones who died at 50 with one at say 100 and we have evidence that would not tell us their true ages if we had not known from experience (i.e. legal birth certificates), if the aging process can be slowed/modified or work in such a way to produce 'false positives', wouldn't someone who died at 900 look like someone who died today at 90/100? Because I think we are assuming that biological aging processes that can change can not give false positives... consider if we had direct evidence of

Skeletons from a dead man at 20, 40, 60, 100, 140

Then compared them to 'known' long agers: 100, 200,400,600,800 and they came out the same? Just an interesting thought I think. Considering aging is different across life forms in general (consider my king's holly example, a ~40,000 year old pant still alive today)

spin

What's the use in saying this, other than an indirect statement that the people who are purveying the bible shouldn't?

The bible is an extremely interesting window into a past thought life. It contains some wonderful literature as well, and all some people can do is rubbish the text out of ignorance and out of disgust for the people who think it is relevant for an age it was not written for.

WTF is the point of saying that the bible is a work of fiction? Such a term didn't exist in bible times and it is irrelevant to the text types found in it. It is a modern dichotomy of history (=real) and fiction (=not real) and all the shades in between, or off the scale, are not even perceived. How can a book which illuminates the way people thought be described as fiction? Only by pure reductionism.

Give me a break: shoot at the right target, ie the people who want to foist an ancient book onto a modern era as a guide for living, not at the book itself, which is full of material which is interesting to many fields of interest from aetiology to anthropology.

-o-o-o-

The ages of people in the story are important as they show the loss of immortality. People get shorter and shorter lives until it's three score and ten, though after that period the anthropological evidence shows that people's lives in western society became even shorter due to the side effects of cultural developments, a problem not fully recovered from until the middle of the 19th c.


spin