Roland

The Bible appears to be filled with names of people and places that carry symbolic meaning. Does that help to make the case that much of the Bible is actually fictitious in nature?

Here are just a few of them off the top of my head:

Sodom = scorched

Ai = ruin

Barabbas = son of the father (as Jesus is the son of the Father)

Peter = rock (as in "foundation of the church")

Judas = Judah (Jewish nation)

Jesus = salvation

One or two of these occurring in the course of the Bible might be a coincidence, but such an abundance of them tends to imply that the authors were actually writing carefully crafted fiction. Are there other examples I haven't included?

Malachi151

Adam = earth (from which he was made)
Eve = life giver
Abraham = exalted father
Moses = to bring out (sort of)

And yes, these are indications of fiction, though by themselves they can't prove fiction. They are certainly pieces of evidence however, that, combined with other evidence if appropriate, can make such a case.

Huon

Roland :
"hrod" means glorious, and "land" means country.
A man who is glorious in his country.

The Song of Roland (French: La Chanson de Roland) is the oldest remaining major work of French literature.

Smullyan-esque

I think you'd have to be very careful, because it is certainly possible that the symbolic meaning of the name came AFTER the events described. For example: Isn't it strange that they named that hotel the "Watergate"? It is almost as if they expected something politically nefarious to happen there!

You'd have to make sure the symbolic meaning existed before the document was written.

Tammuz

Doesn't "Adam" mean "human" or "humanity"? And "Moses" "son of"? Many Egyptian Pharaohs had -moses in the names, such as Tutmoses (son of Thoth).

Btw, doesn't Lazarius means "he who will be awaked" or something like that?

Anat

adama=earth, adam=human, adom=red, dam=blood. I don't know how old the belief about an earthly origin of humanity is, whether it arose from beliefs in an earth mother goddess, a reversal of burial or the like leading to the similarity between the words for earth and human or that somehow the causality is in reverse, but the former seems more believable. (At least one Greek myth has humans growing out of stones 'planted' in the earth. Which other ancient cultures believed humans arose from the earth or a component of the earth?)

hawa is explained in Genesis as related to hai=living, but her name may also have been related to hiwia=snake (in Aramaic and Arabic, at least)

hevel=breath, vapor - relating to his short life.

It's harder to tell regarding Jesus (Helenized form of Yeshua) and Judas (Helenized form of Judah) because those names were rather common around that time, but then, of the available names I suppose those do serve the purpose of the narrative rather well.

Lazarus is the Helenized form of Elazar=God helped. Again a common name for those times.

Malachi151

In Mesopotamian creation stories, which the Adam and Eve story is modeled on, people are mad from red clay by the gods. The idea that people would be made from clay makes sense because at the time all kinds of figures were made form clay.

Roland

That might be the case for, say, Sodom, since the story is set so far in the past that the name might indeed have come to mean "scorched" later on. However, I don't think that's a possibility for Barabbas, Peter, Judas etc. since these stories are set in a time long after the meanings of those words had already been established (in fact, we're even told directly that the name Peter means "rock").

mountainman

Have you looked at the symbolic names called nomina sacra?
From WIKI:
This dispute involves the shift in the sacred meaning of the abbreviations (the nomina sacra) since - for example - the sacred name for jesus and joshua are the same.

Best wishes,

Pete

gstafleu

The Sumerians, for one. Here humans were created from earth (mud, like you use for bricks), mixed with the blood of a god specifically slaughtered for the occasion, and with spittle from other gods. Notice the idea here that humans contain something divine, a concept missing in the Hebrew/Christian version, where humans are ungodly and bad, bad, bad (and of course especially the women).

Gerard Stafleu