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Old 04-24-2007, 07:21 PM   #21
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Originally Posted by Nuwanda View Post
Before I give what info I have let's be clear about ancient records: people did not necessarily record every event that was important or spectacular. Take the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. Though there were most likely upwards of 250,000 or more eyewitnesses of the event how many eyewitness accounts do we have in written form? One. Pliny's account (as far as I'm aware) and it was only written some 30 years after the fact and at the request of Tactius for his "Histories" publication. This event that rocked the Roman empire has only one surviving eyewitness account. Thats just a note to keep in perspective what we are expecting as far as written histories of a "long day" are concerned.

Starting first with Egypt (China, and the Americas will be brought in if need be later), one piece of evidence is the claim made by Herodotus (Greek historian) that on a visit to Egypt he was shown an ancient manuscript by priests detailing a story of a day which lasted about twice as long as a normal day.

Then, Fernand Crombette, French classical scholar, translated ancient hieroglyphics which supposedly said the following:
"The sun, thrown into confusion, had remained low on the horizon, and by not rising had spread terror amongst the great doctors. Two days had been rolled into one. The morning was lengthened to one-and-a-half times the normal period of effective daylight. A certain time after this divine phenomenon, the master had an image built to keep further misfortune from the country.

Hephaistos...grant protection to your worshipers. Prevent the words of these foreign travelers from having any effect. They are impostors. Let these enemies of the sacrifices to the images be destroyed in the temples of the great gods by the people of all classes. Make life harder for these cursed worshipers of the Eternal. Punish them. Increase the hardships of these shepherds. Reduce the size of their herds. Burn their dwellings.

Rameses, our celestial ancestral chief; you who forced these wretched people to work, who ill-treated them, who gave them no help when they were in need: cast them into the sea. They made the moon stop in a small angle at the edge of the horizon. In a small angle on the edge of the horizon, the sun itself, which had just risen at the spot where the moon was going, instead of crossing the sky stayed where it was. Whilst the moon, following a narrow path, reduced its speed and climbed slowly, the sun stopped moving and its intensity of light was reduced to the brightness at daybreak. The waves formed a wall of water against the boats that were in the harbor and those that had left it. Those fishermen that had ventured onto the deck to watch the waves were washed into the sea.

The tide, which had risen high, overflowed into the plains where the herds were grazing. The cattle drowned represented half the herds of Lower Egypt. The remains of abandoned boats broken against the sides of the canals were piled up in places. Their anchors, which should have protected them, had been ground into them. Quite out of control, the sea had penetrated deep into the country. The expanding waters reached the fortified walls constructed by Rameses, the celestial ancestral chief. The sea swept around both sides of the region behind, sterilizing the gar dens as it went and causing openings in the dikes. A great country had been turned into a wilderness and brought into poverty. All the crops that had been planted had been destroyed and heaps of cereal shoots lay scattered on the ground."
Are these "hard evidence" of an extended delay of one day some 3400 years ago? No. But, the claim was that no ancient evidence existed to substantiate or coincide with the Joshua 10 claim. This should not give one reason to throw up his hands and declare the Bible divinely inspired, but it is reason for a believer to not give up his/her trust in the Biblical record without further investigating. Should we move to China?
That's swell, you have a claim that Herodotus supposedly was shown by Egyptians a document about a long day. Got citations?

Then a classical French historian known as an eccentric extreme Bible literalist (his best know work centers on the claim Jerusalem is at the center of the earth and development of a crude flower shaped Pangaea) claims he's translated some Egyptian hieroglyphics which describe a day the sun didn't come up fully. Hmmmm. Got citations?

Frankly you best move on, this is pretty much crap unless you can produce the original records. This is the problem with almost all biblical 'evidence' - a copy of a copy of someone else saying they saw a book which said this happened. Frankly, for this kind of claim, I am expecting the kind of evidence one can hang on. None of this hearsay about an account of somebody retelling an old anecdote. Get real.
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Old 04-24-2007, 07:32 PM   #22
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This is the problem with almost all biblical 'evidence' - a copy of a copy of someone else saying they saw a book which said this happened. Frankly, for this kind of claim, I am expecting the kind of evidence one can hang on. None of this hearsay about an account of somebody retelling an old anecdote. Get real.
Sounds like Larsguy47's bullshit about Socrates and Aristotle getting it on.

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Old 04-24-2007, 07:37 PM   #23
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Ah, found Nuwanda's source:

http://www.mbowden.surf3.net/joshld.htm

What a load of elastic banding, hopes and maybes.

Going to have to do a lot better than this Nuwanda. There isn't a single citation to back any of this up, other than the book they took it out of and a reference to a Flood page. Sad.
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Old 04-25-2007, 07:46 AM   #24
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Originally Posted by Nuwanda View Post
Before I give what info I have let's be clear about ancient records: people did not necessarily record every event that was important or spectacular. Take the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. Though there were most likely upwards of 250,000 or more eyewitnesses of the event how many eyewitness accounts do we have in written form? One. Pliny's account (as far as I'm aware) and it was only written some 30 years after the fact and at the request of Tactius for his "Histories" publication. This event that rocked the Roman empire has only one surviving eyewitness account. Thats just a note to keep in perspective what we are expecting as far as written histories of a "long day" are concerned.
Yet Pompeii did get one writing that survived, it wasn't filtered thru a True Believer, and we know something about the people related to the document. And this would have only been an event for the upper Med. We are talking the world. And why wouldn't God want the strength of his message to survive?

Quote:
Are these "hard evidence" of an extended delay of one day some 3400 years ago? No. But, the claim was that no ancient evidence existed to substantiate or coincide with the Joshua 10 claim. This should not give one reason to throw up his hands and declare the Bible divinely inspired, but it is reason for a believer to not give up his/her trust in the Biblical record without further investigating.
If this is your idea of "demonstrating", then maybe you should read The Twelfth Planet by Zecharia Sitchin. He provided some interesting evidence that the Sumerian Cuneiform language was not read with full comprehension, and that that aliens visited the planet some 5,000 years ago. It's real interesting evidence.

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Should we move to China?
Sigh, I don’t see any need to head to China with what you perceive in the above to demonstrate plausibility and probability of such an event happening. Besides, while shuffling thru the sources of your fancy, I see that the Chinese stories also happen to have gone missing, with only the single author's claim of such a document to support it. Sure the above is "evidence", but evidence of what? A Greek guy who lived almost a thousand years after said events, says he saw a manuscript. Though no manuscript ever survived. A French dude with no formal education claims to have translated an Egyptian document, that no one else gets to see. You probably don't see the pattern here, do you?

Hey, you left off the funnier Fernand Crombette quotes. You know, I don't think it would be wise to bet the farm on this…cough…author:
http://www.eurotrib.com/comments/2006/8/28/125158/878/9
Quote:
The Exodus was indeed a fact of Egyptian history and it took place at the same time as the sinking of Atlantis mentioned by Plato in his Critias and as the voyage of the Argonauts told by Orpheus.
<snip>
In astronomy Fernand Crombette, basing his work on his translation of Genesis from ancient Coptic, questioned heliocentrism, and proposed a geocentric world system. Although such a hypothesis may make our contemporaries smile (ever since Galileo this business is settled, isn't it?), it can't be swept aside easily, because we do not know the true position of the Earth in the universe.
An interesting formal RC opinion on Crombette:
http://www.catholicintl.com/qa/2006/...#Question%2027
Quote:
The last of these suppositions, namely, that Scripture must be read in Coptic versions to get to the real truth of these issues is a serious breech of ecclesiastical and Scriptural protocol. Crombette’s based many of his interpretations on his translations of Coptic manuscripts and it seems to be the principle reason he went so seriously off the track in regard to understanding the cosmological order. We are somewhat chagrined at his approach and The Three Witnesses were a group of three early leaders of the Latter Day Saint movement who signed a statement in 1830 that an angel had shown them the Golden Plates from which Joseph Smith, Jr. reportedly translated the Book of Mormon and that they had heard God's voice testifying that the book had been translated by the power of God.
The Three Witnesses were Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer, whose joint testimony, in conjunction with a separate statement by Eight Witnesses, has been printed with nearly every edition of the Book of Mormon since its first publication in 1830.conclusions since no one in all of Christian history has advocated, even remotely, the cosmologican views that Crombette espoused, and there was good reason: there was simply no evidence for it.
<snip>
It is surprising that Crombette would base his somewhat fanciful interpretations on these Coptic texts; claim to arrive at them based on his own private translation; and yet fail to provide his reqder with other manuscript evidence against his thesis. The worst part of Crombette’s unsubstantiated methodology is that it is foisted upon some of the most important passages in Scripture – those dealing with the beginning of creation.
I guess I would ask if you think all evidence is equal? Why not become LDS, Smith had 11 witnesses that signed the book of Mormon? Why is the Da Vinci Code not valid, certainly there is evidence within the book? Why do you think the above quotes and authors are quality sources to make an argument from?
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Old 04-25-2007, 08:18 AM   #25
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If Nuwanda seriously wants to argue that there is credible evidence that the sun stopped in the sky, based on some folk legends and disputed hieroglyphs, please start another thread which I will move to a more appropriate forum.
No Toto, I made it very plain that what I was presenting was not hard evidence, but the insistence that historical records must exist of this event around the world to make Joshua's claim credible, yet at the same time restricting that evidence to anything outside of local folk legend, regardless of the fact that folk legend was a prime method of documenting historical facts (not withstanding obvious embelishments along the way) is to ask an unreasonable demand of most ancient cultures. Even advanced ancient cultures like the Egyptians are riddled with a constant blending of folklore and history. If the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, tibes of the ancient Americas, etc, have stories of a long day or a long night, respectively, most will no doubt be folklore, but whether or not the folklore is based on actual events is a matter of belief. The fact that the ancient stories exist will not pacify the skeptic is fine, but the stories exist. That's my only point. Ad hominem attacks on my sources are welcomed.
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