Rhaedas

I believe that they were close to exploring the whole world. They already had large fleets of ships in the oceans, and had begun to branch out, although I don't know how far. A change of ruler, a more centric and maybe paranoid emperor, caused them to draw back. A hundred more years, China would have met the Europeans at their own docks, having maybe even discovered the New World already.

chieftain

CC, not only are your scientific claims totally wrong, but you seem not to have even read the bible.
The first verse actually reads:

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

or, transliterated, "Bereishit bara elohim et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz".

No word "shamayimeretz" there at all. You seem to have made it up.

The Evil One

To be fair, I suppose that if you'd never seen the Hebrew of G1:1, and you'd looked up "heavens" and "earth" as independent words, and found "shamayim" and "'aretz", and then you rammed them together without any thought to the grammar, you could get "shamayimeretz".

Of course, you'd have to know nothing whatsoever about Hebrew - or indeed general scholarly practice - to do that.

Actually scratch that "nothing whatsoever". I know nothing whatsoever about Hebrew, and to come up with "shamayimeretz" you'd have to know less than I do.

Jet Black

Gesundheit

figuer

Probably? That book you mention is a pseudo historical abomination from beginning to end.

Vicious Love

Well, it does seem like a passable translation. Tenses aside, I've a few minor quibbles with it, but nothing egregious.

Nevertheless, recognizing a progressive verb in Hebrew is easy. There's no past progressive tense in neither Biblical nor modern Hebrew, but the temporal flow of a past verb is clearly signified by:
1) Its aspect, either perfect or imperfect. In modern Hebrew, the imperfect aspect is the simple future tense. In Biblical Hebrew, it denotes progression.
2) Adverbs ("progressively", for instance)
3) Expressions such as "made as if to"
4) Unmistakable context. The most common past progressives in contemporary Hebrew are wholly implicit ("I <did/was doing>* something or other, when this really weird bird interrupted me").

None of the above are present in beReshit bara Elohim et all that jazz. The bara is a simple, perfect-aspect, 3rd person masculine singular verb, and I've yet to hear of any native speakers, religious or otherwise, scholarly or otherwise, interpreting it as anything else. I phoned up a linguist friend of mine (not a Biblical scholar, but she's pretty intimately acquainted with the nuances of ancient Hebrew), and she promptly dismissed the idea of the verb being anything other than what it appears to be.

Hmm. Seems to me that it can just as easily be interpreted to mean that God began creating the Earth, and in the course of this creation "the earth was waste and void".

As noted above, he does seem fairly competent. Odd choice of vocabulary, and he modifies adjectives to preserve the ordering of words, but nothing outright wrong, with the exception of the tenses.

* In modern Hebrew, a gerund may substitute for the past perfect verb, but I know of no such instances anywhere in the Bible

Sauron

Actually, that is not why God sent the flood. Genesis is pretty clear:

Your twisted interpretation - that they were destroyed for not spreading out and populating the earth - has a couple of rather obvious flaws:

1. Since Noah and his family were the only righteous people spared, that must mean that they were the only ones who spread out to populate the earth. Apparently the way to achieve righteousness in the eyes of God is to throw everything into a U-Haul and move out -- as opposed to the usual understanding of righteousness;

2. If the flood was sent to make people spread out, then it failed. God had to confuse the languages at Babel anyhow, in order to make people separate. IF confusion of languages was enough to do that, then why was the Flood necessary?

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that you don't have a clue what you're talking about, and your previous claim:
This, coupled with the fact that despite serious inquiry, I have not unconvered anything in genesis that cannot be true,

was merely another creationist trying to prep his audience into thinking that he had solved all the hard problems. Your biblical interpretation isn't even airtight, much less your geology.

Sauron

Oh really? Enlighten us.

Except that genesis is not accurate, nowhere near 100%

Looks like someone has just got their first Hugh Ross tract and read it cover to cover.

Genesis does not date from 3000 BCE.

I think you misunderstand the physics surrounding the origin of the universe.

Every so often a christian pops on here with a claim "I've investigated the claims and found them to be true". They try to tell us that they've done some impartial and informed investigation of genesis or the science of the bible. Then I think to myself, Well, maybe this one has something interesting to read.

But what never seems to fail is exactly what we're seeing now: by the 2nd or 3rd post, the 'impartial christian' has already started repeating claims that have been shot down a thousand times.

Sauron

Incorrect.

On the contrary. Few things have been more of an obstruction to science than Genesis 1 has been.

Nonsense. Our argument is that relying upon *any* holy book to understand the physical world is the wrong-headed way to conduct science. As far as the comparison of the bible to other holy books - we're perfectly comfortable with the idea that all the holy books are generally wrong on this topic.

Except that the bible is *not* always correct, in spite of readers and translators striving mightly to iron out the difficulties.

The ark would could never have been built, nor would it have floated. When you get through reading this, get back to us.

And the Hebrews borrowed their myth from the Babylonians, who got theirs from the Sumerians. Looks like the impossible dimensions were retained all the way down to the Hebrew version of the flood myth.

Constant Mews

And again we see the highly selective response. Does anyone know if this is a consistent creationist pattern?