Originally Posted by sotto voce

This number represented and therefore represents completeness ...

Originally Posted by TedM

Genesis 10 is one of the most fascinating chapters in the Bible, as it allegedly traces the various nations of the world through the descendants of Noah through his 3 sons--a total of 70 grandsons who 'repopulated' the earth.

I"m sure most here believe the chapter to be an entire fabrication--all the names were made up, and so then were the claims to nation-forming.

I'd be interested to know of the evidence against the primary claims of these people.

Originally Posted by Bingo the Clown-O

One complication I see with that idea is that in Deuteronomy 32:7-9 El and his 70 sons are portrayed as legacy gods. And in Psalm 82 it gets worse: the 70 sons of El are portrayed as incompetent evil clowns (not that being a clown in-and-of-itself is a bad thing).

Originally Posted by Bingo the Clown-O

This clown believes (deep in his heart / he just ‘knows’ it) that the Babel story is a combination of two earlier stories that have been combined together. In one story, the ‘project’ was building a city to keep everyone together in one place; in the other the ‘project’ was building a tower in order to ascend to heaven and bring fame to themselves.

Lookie:

The City Recension (Gen. 11:1, 4a, b, 6a, b, 7, 8, 9)
And it happened the whole world had one language and one vocabulary. And they said, “Come, let us build a city, lest we be scattered over the face of the earth.” And Yahweh said, “See, they are one people and they have all one language. Come, we will go down and confuse their language there, so that no one understands the language of his neighbor!” And so Yahweh scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth, and they left off building the city. For this reason its name is called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole world, and from there Yahweh scattered them over the whole earth.

The Tower Recension (Gen. 11:2, 4c, b, 3a, b, 5, 6a, c)
And as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: “Come, let us make a name for ourselves and build a tower with its summit touching the heavens. Let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly!” And so they used brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then Yahweh came down to look at the tower that the sons of men had built. And Yahweh said: “This is only the beginning of what they will do. Henceforth nothing will be impossible for them in what they propose to do.” And so Yahweh sent a wind against the tower and threw it to the ground. That is why the land is called Shinar because it was there the tower was overthrown.

See?

The stories actually make much more sense this way.

Don’t they?

Originally Posted by Bingo the Clown-O

One complication I see with that idea is that in Deuteronomy 32:7-9 El and his 70 sons are portrayed as legacy gods.

Originally Posted by stephan huller

Ted,

I recommended Ibn Ezra to you because he was both a religious sage and someone who thought that Genesis could not be used as a historical text. The passage that Ibn Ezra was famously interested in was Genesis 12:6:

Ibn Ezra recognized that this was proof enough that the narrative was not written at the time of Moses but many centuries later. The 13th century Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoah (known as the Hizkuni) noticed the same textual anomalies that Ibn Ezra had noted and similarly concluded that this section "is written from the perspective of the future". In other words, it was written centuries later. Again in the 15th century, Rabbi Yosef Bonfils, while discussing the comments of Ibn Ezra, noted: "Thus it would seem that Moses did not write this word here, but Joshua or some other prophet wrote it. Since we believe in the prophetic tradition, what possible difference can it make whether Moses wrote this or some other prophet did, since the words of all of them are true and prophetic?"

Of course this is how Jews put on a public face in discussing these 'problems.' Ibn Ezra for his part would only say that "it has a secret, and the one who comprehends it will fall silent." It is well known that Ibn Ezra's 'secret' is that the Torah was written not by Moses but by Ezra many centuries later. This idea already appears in the rabbinic literature and was also shared by Spinoza and Richard Simon.

The idea was also known to Jerome (and undoubtedly the rabbis he conversed with). "Whether you choose to name Moses the author of the Pentateuch, or Ezra its restorer, I do not object." ("Sive Moysen dicere volue- ris auctorem Pentateuchi, sive Esram instauratorem, non recuso.") Jerome is referring to the expression " to this day," as found in two places of the Pentateuch, which he specifies (Gen. 35. 4, where, however, the words are not now extant in the Hebrew, and Deut 34. 6). The words "this day," he says, in the period preceding that quoted above, must refer to the time, when the narrative in which they are found was arranged.

Irenaeus makes the same point. The list goes on and on. If the average person is stupid enough to actually believe that Genesis was written in deepest remotest antiquity that's their business. You should be aware that the actual account of 'history' was written so far removed from Noah's flood that there could be no possible way that any of its information was accurate.