lpetrich

Here are the only references I know of:

1 Kings 10:22

For the king had at sea the ships of Tarshish with the ships of Hiram; once every three years the ships of Tarshish came bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks/baboons.

2 Chronicles 9:21

For the king had ships which went to Tarshish with the servants of Huram; once every three years the ships of Tarshish came bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks/baboons.

(both NASB, except for the last word, which is ambiguous)

The "apes" are only mentioned as an exotic import from a distant land; there is no sign of any curiosity about these beasts.

Tarshish is probably Tartessus, a Phoenician colony in southern Spain, and the apes were likely Barbary Apes, a tailless species of macaque monkey (Macaca sylvanus).

[ July 20, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

Marduk

"The "apes" are only mentioned as an exotic import from a distant land; there is no sign of any curiosity about these beasts."

I'm not sure what you're getting at, do you mean they don't seeme surprised that they look like hairy humans? I'm not sure they would have thought in those terms in those days. they were furry so they were animals, end of story.

Though there are some curious Sumerian stories about wild hairy men (Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic) who were tamed to be civillized. Not to mention some of the others that imply the 'gods' made humans from the 'primitive' man they found on Earth, by giving them some of their 'essence'. They put their 'mark' on us. Used us for slave labor, to tend their gardens, build their cities etc.
The god Enki sacrificed one of the other gods, Kingu, to use his blood to mix with the clay of the Earth to make humans. It seems only bits and pieces of these same stories made it into the Bible and were not part of the much later Hebrew tradition.


Q: Are we not men?

lpetrich

My point is that they could have noticed that these beasts look like caricatures of human beings, as others have.

Quintus Ennius (239 BCE-169? BCE), Roman poet, once stated: "Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis" -- "The ape, how similar that most ugly beast is to us" or "How like us is that ugly brute, the ape!" (quoted in Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, bk. I, ch. 35)

And "I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections." - William Congreve, Letters upon Several Occasions (July 1695).

So why not the Bible? However, the writers of the Bible had not had much curiosity about biological matters, as is evident from some of the odder statements in Leviticus 11, which attempts to distinguish OK from non-OK animals to eat.

The Book of Leviticus also goes into gory detail about performing various animal sacrifices, which could conceivably yield great observational knowledge of anatomy; however, that knowledge is not put to work doing comparative anatomy.

The answer may be, as Dr. Isaac Asimov had once commented, that the Bible is the voice of the ancient nonscientist.

[ July 20, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

The Admiral

I only ask. Where do the Hairy Ainu of the Japanese islands fit in?

The Admiral

edited by me for spelling.

[ July 20, 2002: Message edited by: The Admiral ]</p>

lpetrich

That's very far off-topic; you ought to take that question to Evo/Cre or Sci & Skep. The Ainu people are no more hairy than many "white" people; they aren't genetically unusual by overall human standards.

Jayman

I'm assuming that Kings and Chronicles refer to the same historical event (since I'm too lazy to check for myself). That being said, why would we expect people who have encountered apes only once to comment on their similarities with humans? Furthermore, why would we expect them to comment on apes in a history book?