Tommy

Do you folks think the following details are anachronistic?

1) According to Gen 4:22 Tubalcain (who shared a father with Noah) was working iron a mere eight generations after creation. In older and more literal translations he is described as "an instructor in every artificer...in iron" and thus the source of all iron-working knowledge. However, archeological evidence indicates that the iron age didn't begin in the Near East until 1300 BCE. This seems to place the writing of Genesis to at least a millenium after the events it purports to record.

2) Genesis 2:5-6 tells us that it hadn't yet rained and a mist/stream from the earth watered the ground. A few verses later - with no mention of rain in the interim - we are told that a river flew out of Eden and split into four, one of which was the Euphrates. The modern Euphrates which flows from the Turkish highlands couldn't possibly follow the same course as a river fed from the ground. Even if it had rained by then surely the tectonic and topographic upheaval associated with the fountains of the deep breaking up would have meant that rivers pre- and post-deluge couldn't have followed the same courses and thus be known by the same name.

3) Genesis 3:24 tells us the Lord God placed Cherubims to bar the way to the Tree of Life. Cherubims guard doors in Babylonian and Assyrian mythology - mythologies that do not specify Adam, Eve or Eden. Either the Babylonians were privy to one detail of the creation of the world or the authors of Genesis borrowed the concept from the Babylonians.

Points 2 and 3 would make you think that the composition of Genesis occurred during the Babylonian captivity. Are there any other likely anachronisms in Genesis? Seem to recall something about camels.

arnoldo

I dunno about camels but I've seen stuff on the net about the price of slaves in Genesis 39:28 reflecting the circa 1500 B.C. rate.

J-D

Some people take the view that the composition of Genesis took place over a short period of time, so that all (or nearly all) components of the text can be assigned the same date without being seriously misleading. Other people take the view that the composition of Genesis took place in stages over a long period of time, so that an adequate historical understanding requires assigning different dates to different components of the text.

outhouse

Which none would have any credibility outside a Sunday church school.

J-D

I'm not advocating for that point of view. It would be dishonest to pretend it doesn't exist.

However, if that view is rejected in favour of the alternative, it follows that one can't look at individual quotations from Genesis to tell you when the whole book was composed; they might only tell you when that particular component of the text was composed.

outhouse

So true.

It is so fragmented, dating it would almost have to be done by sentence and paragraphs.

Private collections that were gathered for centuries before compilation and multiple redactions.

James Brown

Tubal-Cain also worked with tools of bronze.

So one man single-handedly ushered in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Impressive.

fossilman

And yet he didn't have the ability to make a boat to float alongside his brother, Noah.

Tommy

To be fair we're not told the total of his years. Perhaps he died before Noah reached his 600th year. If he wasn't close to Noah and died before Noah was 500 and had triplets then perhaps no one on the arc knew about his iron work. This would explain the delay to the Iron Age yet render Tubalcain's pioneering handicrafts fairly pointless.

Tommy

So are the verses in the OP proper anachronisms?

Another thought: Noah was told to differentiate between clean and unclean. Would he have known what this meant? I can't see any prior reference to this in Genesis. If people pre-flood knew why about food cleanliness why wasn't this recorded? If Noah didn't know surely God would have explained it to him - the lack of clarification by the Genesis author seems to be anachronistic and projecting back the knowledge of later generations.