Dean Anderson

Ha! I bet you all thought this would be yet another thread about Matthew vs Luke...

Well, it's not. It is about Genesis.

In Genesis 4-5, there are two geneaologies from Adam to Lamech. The first, in Genesis 4, is from the 'J' source. The second, in Genesis 5, is from the "Book of Records".

These geneaologies are very similar, as a quick comparison shows:

'J' Geneaology
Adam
Cain
Enoch
Irad
Mehujael
Methusael
Lamech

Book of Records Geneaology
Adam
Seth
Enos
Cainan
Mahalaleel
Jared
Enoch
Methuselah
Lamech

When put side by side, the similarity of these two lists is so striking that they obviously both come from a single tradition:

When rendered into English like this, there are obvious differences in the names, for example Methusael and Methuselah are - whilst clearly related - not exactly the same.

Just how close are these lists of names in Hebrew, both in meaning and in spelling? How much of what little variation there is is a result of translation?

Johnny Skeptic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealo...s_Different.3F

http://www.answers.com/topic/genealogies-of-genesis

Dean Anderson

Hmm... those two links (which are actually both different copies of the same page) seem to have been written with a strong Judaeo-Christian bias.

Not only do they arrange the names in the lists in order to minimise any correspondence between the two, they also start talking about how there may have been intermarriage between the two lineages.

In fact, that whole Wikipedia page is just poor quality apologetics, for example trying to harmonise the ridiculous ages given for people in Genesis by claiming that there is an implied decimal point in the Hebrew that has been lost in the English translation!

spin

Reverse the order of the three names listed and they become the same list except for the added names Seth and Enosh (="man").

The differences are easily explainable as diversified forms of the one tradition.


spin

Dean Anderson

Doh!

That gave me one of those forehead-slapping "Why didn't I think of that!" moments...

Thanks, Spin!

Huon

"Missing decimal points" is ridiculous. These guys do not know anything about the history of arithmetics !

Abu'l Hasan Ahmad ibn Ibrahim Al-Uqlidisi (920-980) was an Arab mathematician, possibly from Damascus. He wrote the earliest surviving book on the Hindu place-value system, known in the west as Arabic numerals, around 952. It is especially notable for its treatment of decimal fractions.
Title of his book :
Kitab al-fusul fi al-hisab al-Hindi y Kitab al-hajari fi al-hisab.

spin

We do a lot of that.


spin

Dean Anderson

Hey! It's on the Wikipedia, so it must be true...

Seriously, though - does anyone know how the ancient Hebrews denoted fractional amounts? They obviously had cause to at times.

Benni72

In the opinion of A. Nemirovskii, the first version is Canaanite (he even derives the name Canaan from Cain), while the second is Mesopotamian. Both must have had a common earlier source (probably oral).

Huon

From a book in french :
Histoire universelle des chiffres (or via: amazon.co.uk), by Georges Ifrah (Seghers 1981) :

The ancient Israelites could mention numbers, either in their full letter denomination, or with veritable numeration signs. These signs are exactly the same signs that the Egyptians used in cursive "hieratic" script, at the time of the New Empire.

These writings in ancient hebrew were found on "ostraca" (shards of pottery) at Lakish in 1935, and at Arad. These ostraca contain messages sent to a military chief by his subordinates, approximately in 587 BCE, when Nabuchodonosor II took Lakish.

I conclude that the ancient Israelites knew the Egyptian fractions : all of them were in the form 1/X, except 1/2 (written "half"), 2/3 and 3/4. The egyptian sign "mouth" '(two lips) meant here "fraction", and was completed by the denominator : mouth III was 1/3.

[mod note: Ifrah's book has been translated as The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer (or via: amazon.co.uk) and is searchable on Amazon.]