TromboneChat

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 11, 2015, 10:12AM1) The names of these descendants often seem to match later country names, e.g. Canaan. A cursory reading makes me wonder if one plots these names on a map, if one can see patterns of settlement. I'll come back to that when I'm not heading out.

Coming back to this, I see that this "Table of Nations" has in centuries past formed the basis for a lot of harmful theorising about subtypes of humanity. While I'd been aware that "Semitic" as a label simply means "of Shem", I hadn't been aware that there had once been in common linguistic currency the equivalent terms "Hamitic" and "Japhethic", used to refer to languages and peoples of Africa and Europe respectively. It is very straightforward to see how these simplistic (waaay oversimplistic) designations helped to legitimise a lot of the officially sanctioned racist thinking that went on even into living memory. To be honest, seeing the efforts of Nazi mapmakers on the subject has rather taken away my appetite for plotting these points on a map.

And as that one was a bit of a bust, here's the next...

Genesis 11 text

Highlights

 - The Tower of Babel
 - Shem begets down to Abram
 - Terah and his family travel from Ur to Haran, aiming for Canaan

Summary

Babel
 - The whole Earth has one language
 - Migrants from the East settle on the plain of Shinar
 - They build a big tower
 - God turns up and decides that they are now capable of all things, and should thus be thwarted
 - He "confuses" their speech and scatters them across the Earth
 - The tower is called "Babel", similar to the Hebrew word for "confused"
Generations of Shem and Terah
 - Shem - Arpachshad - Shelah - Eber - Peleg - Reu - Serug - Nahor - Terah
 - Terah - Abram, Nahor, Haran [NB now two Nahors]
    - Abram = Sarai. Sarai is barren.
    - Nahor = Milcah. Milcah is "the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah".
    - Haran - Lot.
 - Haran dies in Ur.
 - Terah, Abram, Sarai, Lot migrate together from Ur, aiming for Canaan, but only reach Haran [see also chapter 12 for continuation of this journey].
 - Terah dies in Haran.

Comments and questions

1) Seems like a fairly obvious "language creation" story.
2) "Migrants from the East" is a pretty unspecific term. In chapter 10 care was taken to lay out how the world descended from Noah, and the Bible is never shy of casting blame. It's odd that it isn't specified who these people were.
3) They supposedly wanted "to make a name", "lest they be dispersed over the [...] whole earth". Seems pretty prescient to have been worrying about that when it then came to pass in the story!
4) As with the flood, the sheer scale of the claimed actions creates an enormous logistic hole that we can drive a truck through - scattering the inhabitants of one city across the world is not going to confuse the world's languages.
5) Once again, God comes across as very petty. 'These people are doing well, so I'll create difficulties for them'. Genuinely not trying to be antagonistic here. But I cannot get away from a very strong impression that this God is not doing the 'right' things.
6) There seems little relation between the first and second parts of the chapter. The first part seems to be the insertion of a tale in between two slabs of continuous genealogical information.
7) The lifespans of Shem's descendants wind down towards normality. Rather than 900 years, we see 200 by the end of this list. This generation-by-generation change rather kiboshes any notion of making a consistent map from these numbers to numbers that seem realistic to modern eyes.
8) Some of the names of these patriarchs are strongly suggestive of John's idea from earlier in genealogical Genesis that these represent tribes rather than individuals. 'Peleg' = 'division'; 'Serug' = 'branch'.
9) The internet reports that "in Jewish tradition, Eber, the great-grandson of Shem, refused to help with the building of the Tower of Babel, so his language was not confused when it was abandoned. He and his family alone retained the original human language, Hebrew, a language named after Eber (Heber)". Interesting language origin story, and tells me for the first time why the Hebrew language is so venerated in Judaism.
10) There are a lot of things called "Haran" in the "Generations of Terah" section! Terah's son, the father of another of Terah's son's wife [maybe the same person, would an uncle-niece marriage have been acceptable?], and the city where they settle. I suspect some confusion of names here.
11) We see our first fairly concrete details of locations in the narrative here. Ur was a great city-state at the time, one of the principal cities of ancient Sumer.
12) The itinerary of Terah's party does not seem to make geographical sense at first. They depart from Ur, ending in Haran (which is in modern-day Turkey). They had intended to go to Canaan (which the Book of Numbers identifies fairly closely with modern-day Israel). I've plotted their potential route from Ur to Haran on Google maps, and you can see that, rather than Haran being en route to Canaan, it is in quite a different direction, and indeed somewhat further away (in fact, the on-foot distances are enormous - 1,092 km Ur-Haran). This seems a very strange route to have taken on the face of things, but a look at the physical geography makes this seemingly odd itinerary seem more sensible - deserts are untrustworthy places to traverse at the best of times, and to get to Haran from Ur is only a slight deviation from a walk up the bank of the mighty Euphrates. It would seem very natural to follow the river as far as could be managed, in order to get across to the coast safely - then one could follow the coast South to Canaan. Even today, the layout of the region clearly follows the fertile river valleys - as can be seen (in a rather grim reminder of the state of the area today) in this map of ISIL territory from June 2014.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 11, 2015, 09:58AMSome of my thoughts on the rest of the flood narrative...

 - "The mountains of Ararat" seems a clearly specified location. Wikipedia tells us that this in fact refers to the region of Urartu. This area contains the modern Mount Ararat, but there seems no sense in assuming that this refers to that mountain. Rather it seems to more easily specify the high ground of a whole country.
I don't think we know exactly where THE mountain was or exactly which area.  It doesn't really worry me.
Quote - Poor male dove! His consort disappears off somewhere. I hope he found her... This bothered me as a child!
I'm sure they were reunited.  Actually I have no idea.  I never thought of it to be honest.
Quote - The promise of God not to repeat the exercise is interesting. So often we are painted a picture of God as having the full knowledge of all that unfolds. But here he is clearly rethinking a rash impulse based on a faulty chain of reasoning that led him to lose his temper. This Genesis God is a very different creature to the New Testament and later God - a human-like interloper who interacts with humanity both as one of them and not as one of them.
Where do you get the idea that its a "rash impulse based on a faulty chain of reasoning that led him to lose his temper".  From what I know of you I'm sure its very logic based, but I think you also think of God differently to me.  So I'm curious to understand your reasoning.  I see God as having full knowledge as well as being loving and righteous.  So he punishes where he should, but shows mercy sometimes.  And he has a plan that he is working to see to completion, which doesn't always suit what we think should happen.
Quote - The new rules of the game are interesting:
    - 9:4 But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.
         I don't quite understand this. Is it saying not to eat from an animal before it has died? Is it outlawing black pudding?

I think this meant that you are not supposed to eat meat that hasn't had the blood drained out of it.  So Black Pudding is definitely not kosher.
Quote    - 9:6 sanctifies 'An eye for an eye'. This is not what Jesus wanted later on.
 That's right. I think that Jesus was pointing to the principles that the laws were based on were more important than the Letter.  He could do this cause he was God too and it was his law.
Quote- 9:13 - is this describing a rainbow? Is it saying that the first rainbow occurred after the flood? In which case, there were presumably no rainbows prior to the flood... Which strikes me as physically not likely - you can't change the refractive properties of light without some seriously weird stuff going on.
My thoughts exactly.  So because of this don't read it as saying it was the first rainbow, but that he he was going to see rainbows from then on as a mnemonic for himself.  I've got no idea whether this is allowed by the original Hebrew or not.  But I also think that God could have fiddled with the refractive index of water if he wanted.
Quote - The whole cursing episode is a ridiculously childish basis for later war. Noah got drunk, and lay around without his clothes on carelessly. More fool Noah. Ham looked and thought it was funny. He probably wasn't wrong, but it would have been tactless. Then Noah sows the seeds of division for it. Further fool Noah. What do the theologically minded amongst us make of this story? Is it simply a later justification for the mistreatment of the Canaanites?
Well we'll have to see if the Israelites mistreated the Canaanites later or not. 

And as I said there are a few theories on what might have happened to make Noahs reaction more rational.  I'd to know what really happened but it wasn't a concern of the author.

I think its there to mirror Cains curse and exile, after the flood undid and redid creation. 
QuoteThanks for that link. There's nothing here that doesn't plausibly tie in with the idea that the flood story found its origin in a much more ancient event, as talked about further upthread. The narrative being widespread over a number of neighbouring civilisations ties in. Intriguing to speculate about it, anyhow.
Yep

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 13, 2015, 03:42AMI'm sure they were reunited.  Actually I have no idea.  I never thought of it to be honest.
Well, if we choose to believe the narrative, then they must have found one another. Else we wouldn't have any doves now! Just have a mental picture of this poor bird poking his head out in lonely puzzlement as all the other animals parade off together in their couples to settle a new world, wondering where on earth Mrs. Dove has got to...

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 13, 2015, 03:42AM Where do you get the idea that its a "rash impulse based on a faulty chain of reasoning that led him to lose his temper".  From what I know of you I'm sure its very logic based, but I think you also think of God differently to me.  So I'm curious to understand your reasoning.  I see God as having full knowledge as well as being loving and righteous.  So he punishes where he should, but shows mercy sometimes.  And he has a plan that he is working to see to completion, which doesn't always suit what we think should happen.
More of an impression than a chain of logical deduction. Here's where I am on it:

Genesis 6:13 (pre-flood):
And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

Genesis 8:21 (post-flood):
And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.

He's rethinking his logic here, no? Previously he'd decided that the naughtiness of humans justified a total wipeout. But in the second quote he says that he went too far, and that he'd better get used to the way humans work. Perhaps also recognising that he had hypocritically responded to sins of violence with the most enormous sin of violence to end all sins of violence.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 13, 2015, 03:42AMI think this meant that you are not supposed to eat meat that hasn't had the blood drained out of it.  So Black Pudding is definitely not kosher.
Does this bear on slaughter methods (and hence animal rights, as I think I touched on somewhere upthread)?

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 13, 2015, 03:42AMWell we'll have to see if the Israelites mistreated the Canaanites later or not. 

And as I said there are a few theories on what might have happened to make Noahs reaction more rational.  I'd to know what really happened but it wasn't a concern of the author.

I think its there to mirror Cains curse and exile, after the flood undid and redid creation.

Okay, question shelved until we get to Joshua...

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 13, 2015, 12:17PMMore of an impression than a chain of logical deduction. Here's where I am on it:

Genesis 6:13 (pre-flood):
And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

Genesis 8:21 (post-flood):
And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.

He's rethinking his logic here, no? Previously he'd decided that the naughtiness of humans justified a total wipeout. But in the second quote he says that he went too far, and that he'd better get used to the way humans work. Perhaps also recognising that he had hypocritically responded to sins of violence with the most enormous sin of violence to end all sins of violence.
The way I see it would be significantly influenced by my seeing the situation in the light of the sin/forgiveness shtick to put it in Byronese .  The world was still sinful and deserved to the punished and fixed but God had mercy and withheld the punishment.  I also think that God was acting to protect the line of Seth from being corrupted by the Nephilim.  This was required because of Gods promise to Adam and Eve of a descendant that would defeat Satan.  So having removed the Nephilim and their progeny, it was safe to let humans continue in there sin.  I'm not sure how orthodox this idea is, but its just what I think.

QuoteDoes this bear on slaughter methods (and hence animal rights, as I think I touched on somewhere upthread)?

I don't think that animals get rights in the bible, instead I would derive our rights and responsibilities from God. God delegated rule over animals to man as his proxy so we are responsible to God for our treatment of animals, so it would seem to me to look after animals the way God would, ie what happens naturally.  So in nature, animals get freedom to live in their environment but are at risk of getting killed and eaten by predators.  So its ok for us to kill and eat them, but we should give them the same sort of life they would get in nature.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 12, 2015, 03:45AM
Genesis 11 text

Comments and questions

1) Seems like a fairly obvious "language creation" story.
2) "Migrants from the East" is a pretty unspecific term. In chapter 10 care was taken to lay out how the world descended from Noah, and the Bible is never shy of casting blame. It's odd that it isn't specified who these people were.
3) They supposedly wanted "to make a name", "lest they be dispersed over the [...] whole earth". Seems pretty prescient to have been worrying about that when it then came to pass in the story!
4) As with the flood, the sheer scale of the claimed actions creates an enormous logistic hole that we can drive a truck through - scattering the inhabitants of one city across the world is not going to confuse the world's languages.
5) Once again, God comes across as very petty. 'These people are doing well, so I'll create difficulties for them'. Genuinely not trying to be antagonistic here. But I cannot get away from a very strong impression that this God is not doing the 'right' things.
6) There seems little relation between the first and second parts of the chapter. The first part seems to be the insertion of a tale in between two slabs of continuous genealogical information.
7) The lifespans of Shem's descendants wind down towards normality. Rather than 900 years, we see 200 by the end of this list. This generation-by-generation change rather kiboshes any notion of making a consistent map from these numbers to numbers that seem realistic to modern eyes.
8) Some of the names of these patriarchs are strongly suggestive of John's idea from earlier in genealogical Genesis that these represent tribes rather than individuals. 'Peleg' = 'division'; 'Serug' = 'branch'.
9) The internet reports that "in Jewish tradition, Eber, the great-grandson of Shem, refused to help with the building of the Tower of Babel, so his language was not confused when it was abandoned. He and his family alone retained the original human language, Hebrew, a language named after Eber (Heber)". Interesting language origin story, and tells me for the first time why the Hebrew language is so venerated in Judaism.
10) There are a lot of things called "Haran" in the "Generations of Terah" section! Terah's son, the father of another of Terah's son's wife [maybe the same person, would an uncle-niece marriage have been acceptable?], and the city where they settle. I suspect some confusion of names here.
11) We see our first fairly concrete details of locations in the narrative here. Ur was a great city-state at the time, one of the principal cities of ancient Sumer.
12) The itinerary of Terah's party does not seem to make geographical sense at first. They depart from Ur, ending in Haran (which is in modern-day Turkey). They had intended to go to Canaan (which the Book of Numbers identifies fairly closely with modern-day Israel). I've plotted their potential route from Ur to Haran on Google maps, and you can see that, rather than Haran being en route to Canaan, it is in quite a different direction, and indeed somewhat further away (in fact, the on-foot distances are enormous - 1,092 km Ur-Haran). This seems a very strange route to have taken on the face of things, but a look at the physical geography makes this seemingly odd itinerary seem more sensible - deserts are untrustworthy places to traverse at the best of times, and to get to Haran from Ur is only a slight deviation from a walk up the bank of the mighty Euphrates. It would seem very natural to follow the river as far as could be managed, in order to get across to the coast safely - then one could follow the coast South to Canaan. Even today, the layout of the region clearly follows the fertile river valleys - as can be seen (in a rather grim reminder of the state of the area today) in this map of ISIL territory from June 2014.

1. Yep.  Although its interesting to see the overlap in chapters 10 and 11.  Chapter 10 tells us that each nation had its own language, chapter 11 tells us how that situation arose.  Cue Tim to tell us about the multiple authors of multiple stories.

2. Yep again. I guess the story is not about attributing blame to specific groups, but treating them as the whole.  Same as in 4.

3.  Prescient? Rather an indication that to the author the plans of men are nothing to God. 

4. Adopting the bible story at face value, there wouldn't have been too many people after the flood, so all or enough of them could have migrated from the East and thus their dispersion would have been sufficient to create all the languages.  I'm still trying to work out what I think might have happened to make sense of both the bible and archeology.

5. "The people are doing well..."  I've read that the tower was some sort of religious building/temple and would have been in opposition to following God; they wanted to make a name for themselves seems significant.  So its not a problem that the people were doing well, but rather that they are rebelling against God and doing their own thing without God.  But I'm reading a lot of other bible stuff into this and I can see you're point of view.

6.  We've got genealogies in ch 10 then in 11 the Babel story and then more genealogies, these focus on getting us to Abraham.  But I'm not sure how the Babel story is really needed.

7. The bible is quite inconvenient sometimes

11 and 12 ) Yep.  We used to do maps in Sunday School tracing the journeys.


By the way, have you noticed that the bible doesn't normally indulge in hagiography?

To all

So we've decided to free up the restriction on posting summaries in the name of getting more people involved, as it's just Martin and myself going to and fro at the moment, which, while enjoyable and educational for me at least (Hi Martin! Hope you're enjoying it too.), isn't quite what we'd envisaged at the start. So from now on simply post the next summary as you get to it - no need to sign up on the roster.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 14, 2015, 09:03PM1. Yep.  Although its interesting to see the overlap in chapters 10 and 11.  Chapter 10 tells us that each nation had its own language, chapter 11 tells us how that situation arose.  Cue Tim to tell us about the multiple authors of multiple stories.
Good spot, that had passed me by. Yes, this is a bit odd. Makes the Babel story look more than ever like a later interpolation to the text.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 14, 2015, 09:03PM3.  Prescient? Rather an indication that to the author the plans of men are nothing to God. 
What I meant was that they were worried that they were going to be scattered all over the world... And then, lo and behold, unlike almost every other group that worries about things that have no reason to look likely, their specific worry came true. Once again, it seems that there are a lot of details omitted from the story, too many to leave us doing anything but guessing at motivations.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 14, 2015, 09:03PM5. "The people are doing well..."  I've read that the tower was some sort of religious building/temple and would have been in opposition to following God; they wanted to make a name for themselves seems significant.  So its not a problem that the people were doing well, but rather that they are rebelling against God and doing their own thing without God.  But I'm reading a lot of other bible stuff into this and I can see you're point of view.
That would make some sense with the narrative. Such a shame more details of all this stuff aren't preserved.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 14, 2015, 09:03PM11 and 12 ) Yep.  We used to do maps in Sunday School tracing the journeys.
I don't ever remember doing that. I was quite pleased with that insight! So much so that I told Diane about it when she walked past... But of course it must be very well known.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 14, 2015, 09:03PMBy the way, have you noticed that the bible doesn't normally indulge in hagiography?

Too much large-scale info to get across for biographical detail of any but the most major figures to stick, I suppose... Is there more to it than that?

Genesis 12 text

Highlights

 - Abram continues on to Canaan, then on to the Negeb
 - His family is promised this land by God
 - A famine drives him further, to Egypt

Summary

 - God tells Abram to resume his journey
 - Abram, his wife Sarai, his orphaned nephew Lot, and a group of people with them make the journey on to Canaan (i.e. modern-day Israel)
 - When they get there, God tells Abram that this country is to be given to his offspring
 - They continue South, making camp near Bethel
 - And further South, heading towards the Negeb
 - A famine strikes their new location, and they push on further, to Egypt
 - Out of fear for his personal safety, Abram and Sarai create a deception on entering Egypt, presenting Sarai as Abram's sister rather than his wife
 - She is given a place in Pharoah's household (for which I think we may read 'became (one of?) Pharoah's wife/wives')
 - Their deceit motivates God to visit plagues on Pharoah's household
 - Pharoah finds out and is (not unreasonably) annoyed. He banishes Abram and Sarai together.

Comments and questions

1) The party that continues on is the same as the party that left Ur in Chapter 11, minus Abram's father Terah, who we were told in 11 died in Haran.
2) I missed it at the time, but I suppose the implication with Lot's close attendance to Abram and Sarai is that they raised him after his father Haran died. Perhaps this also suggests a reason why Abram's brother Nahor may have married Haran's daughter Milcah (assuming the two Harans were the same person) - to not leave her on her own.
3) They take "all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran" with them. Not sure whether the people reference implies slavery or simple servitude; not sure whether it matters much to our discussion though. But evidently Abram had become a very wealthy man in Haran by some means.
4) Martin's earlier point about the contrast between the treatment between God's favoured and unfavoured people is evident here. Canaan is to be given to Abram's children - I doubt that the existing Canaanites were in on that deal...
5) The locations named in Israel have been given extensive consideration by others in the past. Wikipedia tells us that their first stop in Shechem was near modern-day Nablus, in the Northern portion of the West Bank, their second stop, between Bethel and Ai was somewhat further South, and that the direction in which they continued (towards the Negeb) was South. This seems to match up pretty well with the modern Israeli Highway 60, which shares a lot of common route with The Way of the Patriarchs.
6) Once again, God's punishment does not seem to fit the crime. Abram and Sarai rustle up a deceit between them, and then he punishes Pharoah for falling for it.
7) Sarai's status with Pharoah is oddly specified - she is firstly simply "taken into Pharaoh's house", but then Pharoah says to Abram on discovering the deceit "Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife?".
8) Do we have any notion which of the many Pharoahs this might be supposed to be?

You beat me to the punch.  But that's good.

1. The text is organised strangely.  In 11 Abram (I keep writing Abraham) leaves for Canaan with his family, and get to Haran where his father dies. Then in 12 God tells him to go to Canaan but not to take his family, and then off he goes, his Dad having died in the previous chapter.
2. I agree that is why Lot was there.  I've also read that Sarai may also be Lot's sister or Abrams's half sister!  All of which would shock the good women in the local parish I'm sure.
6. Even if they were sister and brother they're not showing much faith that God will look after them so that his promises to Abram will be fulfilled - ie make a great nation and give the land to his seed.  This is ironic given that Abram is THE example of faith in the New Testament. 

NB I use "seed" to mean descendants.  Its a significant theme throughout Genesis and its taken up by Paul in Romans - where he plays on the fact that seed can be plural or singular, by stating that the promise to Abraham's seed was actually talking about Jesus.  These promises will come up in the next chapters so I thought I'd point it out for you.

NBB and you know that Abram is going to be renamed Abraham. and Sarai to Sarah.

7.  I think the bible is a bit prudish by modern standards.

8.  No idea. what does wikipedia say?  I don't think its significant.


Interest does seem to have dropped off.  I'm still keen to keep going.  I'll do the next chapter tomorrow.

I'm still interested, but time is not always available to do as much as I'd like.

One important theme in Genesis 12 is in verse 3 where Abram is promised that through him all the families of the earth will be blessed.  This is an important verse in Christian understandings of the text because it shows that the promise to A is more than just some sort of tribal favoritism on the part of God.  The whole world will ultimately be blessed through the descendants of Abram (Abraham).

Paul, in Galatians 2:8 says that this actual phrase was the Christian gospel proclaimed in the Old Testament.  In other words, as Paul develops the theme, it is the gospel in a nutshell that a seed of the woman as promised in Genesis 3:15 has now been narrowed to a seed of Abram who would become the ultimate source of blessing to humanity.  I, like Paul, believe that Jesus is that promised seed of the woman and Abram who blesses the whole human race.  That blessing is all of grace because, as noted, Abram, is not a perfect person by any means.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 15, 2015, 06:27AM8.  No idea. what does wikipedia say?  I don't think its significant.
It depends what one's perspective is. For me it's an interesting question; whatever it might be religiously thought to be, the Bible is a fantastic historical source document for all of us. How many other purportedly factual narratives have survived from those days? The number is not large... And because of its cultural importance, it has an inbuilt ability to connect to people. The Enuma Elish that John has referenced a couple of times is also fascinating, but as a proposition to read it seems remote and forbidding whereas the Bible seems familiar and inviting - solely because of its cultural position.
Then the question of how one may tie moments in the Bible to parallel historical narratives becomes a relevant one - almost every child in the Western world (and the Ummah too, for that matter) knows who Abraham was, and everyone knows that ancient Egypt sustained the premier civilisation of its day for a vast span of time. To see how these two streams of documentation might be tied together is to my mind one of the most interesting available lines of inquiry. But then I appreciate that treating it as a religious textbook suggests different modes of thought about it.

That said, the task of actually making these identifications does lie very much in the purview of the specialist, and lay historians such as us can't do much more than note what the professionals think. As suggested, Wikipedia has some info on these identifications, but while some much later Pharoahs are identified by name, the difficulties with the chronology and the in-passing nature of the reference here make certainty very distant.

A coincidence that I personally find intriguing is that the various estimates of Abraham's historical period are fairly similar to the period in Egyptian history known as the Second Intermediate Period, when Egyptian power became weak, and a Semitic grouping from the Canaan region, known to the Egyptians as the Hyksos took power in the Nile delta, forming the fifteenth Pharaonic dynasty. Abraham was evidently a person of great means - is it too fanciful to wonder if he was an important man in this society?

But concrete details about who the Hyksos were are hard to come by for now. We are left with tantalising snippets that suggest wild flights of fancy, such as the fact that someone who was possibly one of their early Pharoahs was named Jacob... And we are left to rue the excessive life lengths given by the Bible, which torpedo any ideas of chronological reliability to the secular mind. These had worked down a long way towards believability by the time of Abraham, but he is still listed as living 175 years. If this is one man, then we must assume exaggeration. If more than one man, then the elision makes interpretation very obscure.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 15, 2015, 06:27AM1. The text is organised strangely.  In 11 Abram (I keep writing Abraham) leaves for Canaan with his family, and get to Haran where his father dies. Then in 12 God tells him to go to Canaan but not to take his family, and then off he goes, his Dad having died in the previous chapter.
I remembered the in Acts7 Stephen says that God first told Abraham to go to Canaan in in Mesoptamia before he went Haran. So assuming that this is correct:
- God calls A in Mesoptamia
- Abrams's father, Terah, takes them to Haram where he dies
- God tells Abram again to go to Canaan without his family
- Abram goes to Canaan with his family

Genesis 13 text

Highlights

 - Abram and Lot leave Egypt and return Canaan
 - Abram decides that they should split up
 - Lot heads to a civilised fertile area and Abram in Canaan

Summary

 - Abram and Lot return to Canaan, the place where Abram sacrificed to God
 - They had too much livestock to live together, so Abram suggested that they separate
 - Lot chose the fertile Jordan Valley among some cities including Sodom, that was particularly wicked
 - Abram settled in Canaan
 - God restated his promise:
    - to give Abram and his seed all the land that he could see, ie Canaan
    - to give Abram many descendants,
 - Abram worshipped God

Comments and questions

1) Interesting to speculate on the intereaction between nomadic herdsmen and city dwellers and non-nomadic farmers.
2) Abram finally leaves his family like God originally told him to do, and it is then that God reiterates his promise to Abram and his seed.
3) I think these promises to Abram's seed is a reason why the genealogies are included in the previous chapters.  We see the text focussing on a specific families until it gets to Abram, where it now focusses on his family.

The particular size of Abram's entourage (and of course Lot's) hasn't really drawn any attention in the text. I have a growing impression that it may have been really quite sizeable relative to other bunchings of humans in the area at the time. Possibly mistakable in a particular light for an 'army'? Reading these passages, it is easy to come away with the impression that these are simple sheep farmers, living isolated lives on small movable farms. But I wonder if this may not be misleading. These people lived most of 4,000 years ago. The only other people from that remote antiquity that we are aware of are great kings, people who shaped the flow of history through sheer force. The long genealogical tables leading to Abraham are the kind of thing that rulers are always obsessed with (creating a sense of legitimacy through permanence). His dealings with the local ruler in Egypt suggest someone commanding high respect - after all, Pharoah's reaction to the rather unforgivable deceit with Sarai was not to order Abram executed or incarcerated, but to send them away. Why in that time and place would he have done that unless he felt that there would have been repercussions from taking Abram on? Large numbers of followers? Powerful allies?
Once again, we are left grasping at straws through the incompleteness of the narrative, but I think it is becoming clear that Abram had a status that at the very least made the local monarchs deal with him on near-equal terms.

Hebron is of course a well-known modern-day location, in the Southern portion of the West bank.

We are told that when Abram arrived "the Canaanites and the Perizzites were dwelling in the land". The internet does not seem very clear on who the Perizzites were. I note that not many generations on from Abraham in the descent to David, a Phares appears, also spelled on occasion in English Pharez, Perez, etc. Maybe some kind of connection, all a bit tentative. I also note that there are a lot more obscure tribal names coming up shortly...

I was thinking about the size of his entourage too and the sort of interaction between Abram and the locals and came to the same sorts of impressions. As you say, he seems to have been considered a relative equal.  But then in the next chapter we see him take on the armies of a couple of kings to rescue Lot.  He did this with only 380 of his family.  That cuts the size of the skirmishes down to a much smaller army than I thought was involved.

I'll see what I can find about the Perizzites.

Another point worth raising here is that this is where the narrative starts to tip over from evident mythos into historical retelling. It's not a clear on/off type progression, and, as we're noting, there are plenty of things surrounding this section that are very unclear, as well as elements that are evidently still not to be treated as fully real (e.g. Abram's lifespan), but there is now a definite feel (that was previously absent to me) that we are hearing the echoes of past events, however distorted they've become over the years. For me, Abraham is the start point of the main business of the narrative.

 What do you mean "not to be treated as fully real" 

It sounds more real than some of the exotic stuff you physicists come up with 

It does get less, um,  legendary might be the right word.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 16, 2015, 02:30PMGenesis 14 text

Highlights

 - Some City Kings have a war
 - Lot is captured: Abram rescues him
 - Abram is blessed by Melchizedek, the Priest-King of Salem

Summary

 - there is war between the kings of the city states where Lot is living
 - 4 kings against 5
 - Sodom and Gomorrah lose and Lot is taken prisoner
 - Abram hears about this, led his trained men (all 318 of them) after the victorious kings, defeats them and rescues Lot, the other prisoners and the goods that had been taken
 - Abram is met by the Kings of Sodom and Salem,
 - Melchizedek, the King of Salem is also a priest of the God Most High.
 - Melchizedek blesses Abram, and Abram gives him a tenth of everything.
 - the king of Sodom offers Abram all the loot, but Abram rejects it except for the food his men had eaten.

Comments and questions

- initially you get the idea that its large armies battling it out, a la the "Battle of the Ring"  but then Abram goes and spoils this by taking out the victors with 318 men.
- Melchizedek is enigmatic.  The only other references to him is in Psalm 110 and Hebrews 7.
- I think that Abrams gives him a tenth to acknowledge his debt to God.

So 318 is a solid number. A page here discusses the likelihood of the number being chosen to be numerologically significant, but concludes that this is not likely. So we may well be okay to trust it. So what does it imply?

The same page makes the point that the quantity that 318 refers to is a hapax legomenon - a phrase meaning a word that only occurs once in this linguistic context - thus making understanding of it a little tricky. In the ESV (also NIV, NRSV), we have "trained men"; KJV has "trained servants"; other variants include "them that were born and brought up in his house", "born servants", "fighting men". It discusses the original Hebrew word, which carries a meaning of dedication. Does it mean that Abram's full retinue numbered 318? That his full fighting retinue numbered 318? That (maybe) his fighting retinue numbered 318 trained men, that acted as officers over the rest?

It seems most reasonable to me to work on the assumption that 318 specifies the total size of his army (which would as the above link points out, imply a total retinue size of maybe 2,000). Given that he surprised the enemy with a night-attack (and that there seems no reason to suppose that they were expecting him to join in), he could well have overcome substantially superior numbers.

But how large a conglomeration of people would Abram's camp have been? Wikipedia tells us that Ur, his original departure point, was, at a fairly similar point in history the largest city in the world, boasting a population of around 65,000. In that context, a 'tent city' of 2,000 people would have been a major population centre. And with the word 'king' being used to seemingly denote the 'big man' in each and every valley, again we obtain a picture of a man of great means.

Genesis 15 text

Highlights

 - God promises Abram innumerable descendants
 - God describes some of the future actions of his descendants to Abram
 - God promises Abram the land between the Nile and the Euphrates for his descendants

Summary

 - Abram has a vision in which he asks God for reward
 - In this vision God tells him that he will not only have a son, but that his descendants will be as uncountable as the stars
 - Abram asks God how he can know the truth of this?
 - God has him build and guard a pile of mutilated dead animals
 - Abram falls asleep, and [presumably in a dream] God makes a prophesy to him, telling him that his descendants will act as an inferior social class in a foreign land for 400 years, but that at the end of this time their superiors will fall and they will come back with their wealth. The length of family time specified for this is four generations.
 - God promises Abram for his descendants the lands that currently belong to various other tribes.

Comments and questions

1a) Overall on this chapter - to the secular mind it is so obvious as hardly to be worth stating - this seems likely a later invention designed to lend the narrative historical legitimacy. The religious may believe in accurate prophecy, but proof for the world has not been supplied on the topic.
1b) Another possibility is that this prophecy was made and well-known at the time, and Abram's descendants later made sure to follow it in order to make sure that it came true. This wouldn't be entirely out of keeping - after all, weren't people in Roman times keen to find a Messiah as prophesied by Isaiah? And weren't people in successively numerologically 'significant' years convinced of end times narratives? As recently as 2,000 AD, in fact?
2) Either way, it's mighty convenient for Abram as the narrative is laid out here. He's a powerful figure with the command of a large group of people, and God comes to his eyes alone to tell him that his people are destined to overcome. If I were in Abram's shoes, I'd have been sorely tempted to invent this kind of battle-cry motivation to keep everyone enthused with the cause.
3) As Martin's pointed out before, Abram does not seem to interact with his God's promises in the best of faith. He asks for clarification and seems not to automatically believe what he is told. I rather applaud the stance in this case - always enquire and test for yourself, and all that jazz. But it does jar with how Christians are habitually told to think of their God - with head-bowed reverence and total acceptance.
4) The flavour of Abram's interaction with God is different from the flavour of God's interactions with earlier figures in the narrative, e.g. Noah, Cain, Adam. Here God seems almost subservient to Abram's interests, where previously he was a dictatorial figure. Does this reflect a change in the nature of the conception of God for the writers?
5) I do not understand the pile of mutilated dead animals. It feels like some kind of sacrificial offering. But Abram does not burn them, and they do not seem to result in anything in the narrative.
6) The prophecy about his descendants in a foreign land seems to obviously refer to Egypt and the events that led up to the Exodus.
7) Four generations does not seem long enough for 400 years to pass. But the text is a bit unclear. Is it actually saying what I've read it as saying, or is it saying something else? The quote is Genesis 15:13-16 - "Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."
8) What was the "iniquity of the Amorites" and how did it bear on this? I see from a bit of Googling that the theological consensus seems to be that it would take 400 years for the Canaanites (of which the Amorites were a part) to grow naughty enough to deserve the punishment of their land being taken away. Again, this strongly suggests to me a later writing of Abraham's vision, inserted to justify later warfare.
9) "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates" is a huge stretch of land, much more than the extent of modern-day Israel, covering Sinai, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, half of Syria, half of Iraq, and arguably much (all?) of the Arabian peninsula too. Given that there are plenty of people out there that think of the modern state of Israel as a fulfilment of these biblical promises, does that also mean that some of them consider this whole area as the right of the state of Israel?

I won't comment on all of Dave's notes, but a few quick observations on this important chapter.

1. A doesn't so much as God for a reward, but express puzzlement about what the reward God has promised in v.1.  This is in light of the earlier promise of being the progenitor of a great nation in chapter 12 combined with the childless status that he mentions in v. 2.

2. The answer is in the promise of his offspring, not his servant,  being the heir through whom this promise would be fulfilled.  Remember the promise of chapter 12 was that all of humanity would be blessed through Abraham's offspring.

3.  Yes, Abraham is clearly not portrayed as a "plaster saint" in these narratives, but ultimately he trusts God because he finds Him trustworthy-- that will be highlighted in chapter 22.

4. We can certainly speculate on this being an "invented prophecy," but there is nothing in the text that demands it all.

5.  The significance of the split animals is that this was part of the ancient covenant ceremonies.  When 2 leaders took covenant oaths, they would walk between the animals to signify that if either of them broke the covenant, what had happened to the animals would be their own punishment.  In other words the covenant was to be taken, literally, with deadly seriousness.

6.  In the case of Abraham, he was put to sleep and only the smoking pot-- a visible symbol of God-- passed through.  This was a dramatic way of saying that only God was ultimately going to be faithful to the covenant promises and humans would be the recipients of that very grace-- favor to those who only deserved judgment, which the human failures to keep covenant with God would highlight.

7.  This is why the rest of the Bible, including the New Testament, so often points to the gracious nature of God's covenant relationships with humanity.  All Abraham, like all of humans, could ever expect to be is to fail to uphold our sides of the relationship with God and if he hadn't declared that he would uphold his side in spite of our failures, all would be hopeless.

8.  This is an example of the OT giving us the kind of glimpses of the Christian gospel that the New Testament would flesh out.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 18, 2015, 03:08AMGenesis 15 text

Comments and questions

1a) Overall on this chapter - to the secular mind it is so obvious as hardly to be worth stating - this seems likely a later invention designed to lend the narrative historical legitimacy. The religious may believe in accurate prophecy, but proof for the world has not been supplied on the topic.
1b) Another possibility is that this prophecy was made and well-known at the time, and Abram's descendants later made sure to follow it in order to make sure that it came true. This wouldn't be entirely out of keeping - after all, weren't people in Roman times keen to find a Messiah as prophesied by Isaiah? And weren't people in successively numerologically 'significant' years convinced of end times narratives? As recently as 2,000 AD, in fact?
Most of the time history that is made up tends to brush aside the imperfections of its heroes, especially where they are significant.  So I think that the portrayal of flaws in Abraham and Israel would be indicative that the history is reliable.  But I'm not claiming that its proof.

Quote2) Either way, it's mighty convenient for Abram as the narrative is laid out here. He's a powerful figure with the command of a large group of people, and God comes to his eyes alone to tell him that his people are destined to overcome. If I were in Abram's shoes, I'd have been sorely tempted to invent this kind of battle-cry motivation to keep everyone enthused with the cause.
Actually if I was making up a battle cry to inspire my tribe I wouldn't have thought that saying that the tribe would have to spend 400 years serving and being afflicted in another country would have been very effective.
Quote3) As Martin's pointed out before, Abram does not seem to interact with his God's promises in the best of faith. He asks for clarification and seems not to automatically believe what he is told. I rather applaud the stance in this case - always enquire and test for yourself, and all that jazz. But it does jar with how Christians are habitually told to think of their God - with head-bowed reverence and total acceptance.
I'm not sure whether you're speaking from experience or anecdote, but I can assure you that not all Christians get treated that way.
Quote4) The flavour of Abram's interaction with God is different from the flavour of God's interactions with earlier figures in the narrative, e.g. Noah, Cain, Adam. Here God seems almost subservient to Abram's interests, where previously he was a dictatorial figure. Does this reflect a change in the nature of the conception of God for the writers?
where do you see this?  Like John I don't see v2 as having Abram demanding a reward, just asking for clarification about the reward that was promised
Quote5) I do not understand the pile of mutilated dead animals. It feels like some kind of sacrificial offering. But Abram does not burn them, and they do not seem to result in anything in the narrative.
what John said.
Quote6) The prophecy about his descendants in a foreign land seems to obviously refer to Egypt and the events that led up to the Exodus.
Not exactly.  See next answer

Quote7) Four generations does not seem long enough for 400 years to pass. But the text is a bit unclear. Is it actually saying what I've read it as saying, or is it saying something else? The quote is Genesis 15:13-16 - "Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."

I don't think its saying that Israel (the Hebrews) were in Egypt for 400 or 430 (Ex 12:40) years, it was just saying that they would not have their own land for that long. They didn't even spend the whole time of their time in Egypt in bondage. Abraham's son was Isaac whose sone was Jacob.  It was Jacob in relatively old age who went down to Egypt with his descendants after his son Joseph had risen to a high position at the court of Pharaoh. The time before this, approximately half of the 430 years, the Hebrews lived as sojourners in the land of Canaan. The first part of their time in Egypt they spend there in freedom and under the protection of Pharaoh. Only some time after Joseph's death when a foreign dynasty took over the rule in Egypt the servitude of Israel in Egypt started (cp. Exodus 1).

But Levi, Jacobs son went with Jacob into Egypt, the next generation after Levi was his son Kehat, after that came Amram, and the fourth generation then was Moses under whose leadership Israel then left Egypt.

Quote8) What was the "iniquity of the Amorites" and how did it bear on this? I see from a bit of Googling that the theological consensus seems to be that it would take 400 years for the Canaanites (of which the Amorites were a part) to grow naughty enough to deserve the punishment of their land being taken away. Again, this strongly suggests to me a later writing of Abraham's vision, inserted to justify later warfare.
That's a logical conclusion when you have a secular viewpoint.
Quote9) "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates" is a huge stretch of land, much more than the extent of modern-day Israel, covering Sinai, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, half of Syria, half of Iraq, and arguably much (all?) of the Arabian peninsula too. Given that there are plenty of people out there that think of the modern state of Israel as a fulfilment of these biblical promises, does that also mean that some of them consider this whole area as the right of the state of Israel?
Probably

There are later promises that seem to indicate a smaller portion of land that is more in line with the size of modern day Israel which I think is what is normally called "The Promised Land".  We'll get to this promise shortly and can compare them then.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 17, 2015, 08:59AMSo 318 is a solid number. A page here discusses the likelihood of the number being chosen to be numerologically significant, but concludes that this is not likely. So we may well be okay to trust it. So what does it imply?

Abraham was from Ur.  Did they use base 10?  I seem to remember that the Babylonians used base 12.  What that make a difference to what were solid numbers or not?
QuoteThe same page makes the point that the quantity that 318 refers to is a hapax legomenon - a phrase meaning a word that only occurs once in this linguistic context - thus making understanding of it a little tricky. In the ESV (also NIV, NRSV), we have "trained men"; KJV has "trained servants"; other variants include "them that were born and brought up in his house", "born servants", "fighting men". It discusses the original Hebrew word, which carries a meaning of dedication. Does it mean that Abram's full retinue numbered 318? That his full fighting retinue numbered 318? That (maybe) his fighting retinue numbered 318 trained men, that acted as officers over the rest?

Its the Hebrew for "fighting men" that is the Hapax legomenon rather than 318, isn't it.

I think that there were 318 fighting men which implies that there were other in his group that weren't.  I've never wondered about the total number, but I've thought that he had a significantly sized household.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 18, 2015, 03:08AM]
8) What was the "iniquity of the Amorites" and how did it bear on this? I see from a bit of Googling that the theological consensus seems to be that it would take 400 years for the Canaanites (of which the Amorites were a part) to grow naughty enough to deserve the punishment of their land being taken away. Again, this strongly suggests to me a later writing of Abraham's vision, inserted to justify later warfare.


It's general consensus among biblical scholars that the iniquity of the Amorites that is being referred to is the fertility cults with its attendant sacred prostitution and child sacrifice-- the latter has been documented by archeology.  The 400 years, from a biblical perspective, is actually a sign of divine mercy, since such actions should have demanded immediate repentance, but God grants 400 years for the Amorites to repent, but they don't.

Genesis 16 text

Highlights

 - Sarai decides she is barren so tells Abram to make a baby with Hagar her servant.
 - God makes promises to Hagar and her son Ishmael

Summary

 - Sarah decides that she is too old to have kids so tells Abram to try with her servant Hagar.
 - Which he does and Hagar falls pregnant
 - Hagar is no longer just the slave but a wife, the wife with the baby. So she holds Sarai in contempt.
 - Sarai blames Abrams for the situation and tells him to fix it. Abram tells Sarai to fix it.
 - Sarai mistreats Hagar, who runs away.
 - The Lord / an Angel appears to Hagar, reminds her of her proper place and tells her to return to Sarai and submit to her.
 - He promises Hagar that she will have a multitude of offspring.
 - And that her son who she is to call Ishmael, will be a wild donkey of a man and "dwell over against his kinsmen"

Comments and questions

 1. Abram and Sarai are still not willing to trust God and wait for him to fulfill his promise, so they attempt a human solution. 
 1a. Doing this pretty well always turns out the wrong choice and is a significant theme in the bible.
 2. Who are Ishmael's descendants and what does "dwell over against his kinsmen" mean?
   - there are traditions in both Judaism and Musilm that the Arabs descended from Ishmael
   - also Arabs consider that the promises that God made to Abraham referring to "his son, his only son" were referring to Ishmael not Isaac.  Hence we have two peoples claiming religious right to "The Promised Land".

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 20, 2015, 11:33PMGenesis 16 text
<snip>
 2. Who are Ishmael's descendants and what does "dwell over against his kinsmen" mean?
   - there are traditions in both Judaism and Musilm that the Arabs descended from Ishmael
   - also Arabs consider that the promises that God made to Abraham referring to "his son, his only son" were referring to Ishmael not Isaac.  Hence we have two peoples claiming religious right to "The Promised Land".

...and one hell of a lot of sibling rivalry going on.

The prophecy regarding Ishmael again to my mind seems like a later insertion, added to fix a different grouping as 'other', in this case the Arabs.

I should lay out that it is rather ridiculous to maintain the simple line "Jews descend from Isaac; Arabs from Ishmael". It goes wrong straight away, in fact, in disregarding the wives of both men. But more fundamentally, the idea that two groups living alongside each other for a long period of time would somehow genetically not intermingle so much that telling them apart genetically is possible is not supported. It's a bit like drawing a rigid line between USAians and Canadians...

And, as Martin notes, the taking of these promises literally coupled with the way oversimplified population dynamics above has led to all sorts of needless bloodshed, and the kind of situation that makes you wonder if the best thing might not be for the Middle East to be swallowed up by the Earth whole, so politically intractable has it been for so long.

Genesis 17 text

Highlights

 - God promises Abram more stuff for his descendants, in return demanding circumcision
 - He is renamed Abraham and Sarai Sarah.
 - Sarah is to bear a son, called Isaac.

Summary

 - Abram is to be the father of nations.
 - Rather than Abram ('exalted father'), he is now to be called Abraham ('father of a multitude').
 - His offspring are to hold the land of Canaan for ever.
 - In return they must all identify themselves by circumcision.
 - Rather than Sarai ('princess'), she is now to be called Sarah (also 'princess').
 - God tells Abraham that Sarah will bear a child, name of Isaac, who will produce a mighty lineage...
 - ...and similar for Ishmael.
 - But the covenant is specifically with Isaac, not Ishmael.
 - However, all the men of Abraham's household are circumcised, including Ishmael.

Comments and questions

 1) Again Abraham pulls out the jackpot, in terms of what he is promised. It's getting a little boring for me to keep saying it, but all this feels like an after-the-fact writing-up, slanted to make later actions look approved of.
 2) Abraham's offspring are to hold the land of Canaan "for an everlasting possession". How does this square with the world eventually coming to an end in Jewish and Christian theology?
 3) Circumcision is a weird thing. I can imagine that it might have conferred some advantage of hygiene in unsanitary and dusty conditions. But mutilating the genitals of baby boys for no medical reason is to my mind frankly barbaric. It is also reported that it desensitises the area, making sex less fulfilling in later life.
 4) Is there any reason of meaning behind Sarai's renaming?
 5) As Martin pointed out, Islam takes a different view of who these promises were made to. Do these traditions date to earlier than Mohamed? If not, it's hard to see this as anything but a naked attempt to rewrite the dominant narrative out of self-interest.


Apologies for being a little bit absent in the last few days; I've been busy getting various matters in hand ahead of a two week holiday, which will make me even more absent from next Monday until Thursday 8th October

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 22, 2015, 03:16PMThe prophecy regarding Ishmael again to my mind seems like a later insertion, added to fix a different grouping as 'other', in this case the Arabs.

I should lay out that it is rather ridiculous to maintain the simple line "Jews descend from Isaac; Arabs from Ishmael". It goes wrong straight away, in fact, in disregarding the wives of both men. But more fundamentally, the idea that two groups living alongside each other for a long period of time would somehow genetically not intermingle so much that telling them apart genetically is possible is not supported. It's a bit like drawing a rigid line between USAians and Canadians...
"USAians"? The correct term is "Yanks" isn't it?

And it was all about genealogies, not genetics, which were easy to keep tabs on, but I don't think that's the point:
1. I'm not sure that the Arabs were an issue until well after the Canon was settled.  Muhammed was born around 500AD.  I'll see if I can find any interactions between the descendants of Ishmael and Isaac and how they went.
2. The biblical point to me is that God chooses who he wants and not man.
QuoteAnd, as Martin notes, the taking of these promises literally coupled with the way oversimplified population dynamics above has led to all sorts of needless bloodshed, and the kind of situation that makes you wonder if the best thing might not be for the Middle East to be swallowed up by the Earth whole, so politically intractable has it been for so long.

Humans have got lots of form finding things to fight about, so I don't think killing one bunch of people who are fighting over stuff we think is irrelevant will help much.

I hoped that if we removed the land they were fighting over, then they might stop fighting... Not that all the people got crunched up.

I am a merciful God... More merciful than the guy who flooded the whole earth, anyhow.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 22, 2015, 04:10PMAnd it was all about genealogies, not genetics

So (assuming the story is about real people that once existed) I'd be genuinely surprised if there were a single person in the world today who is descended from one of Isaac and Ishmael but not the other. So many generations have passed.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 23, 2015, 03:18AMSo (assuming the story is about real people that once existed) I'd be genuinely surprised if there were a single person in the world today who is descended from one of Isaac and Ishmael but not the other. So many generations have passed.
Why would that even matter?  They're both descended from Abraham anyway...

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 23, 2015, 01:22AMI hoped that if we removed the land they were fighting over, then they might stop fighting... Not that all the people got crunched up.
I missed that distinction, it was a bit too nuanced for me.

QuoteI am a merciful God... More merciful than the guy who flooded the whole earth, anyhow.

I think the difference is that God cares a lot more about sin that we do.  Or at least me.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 23, 2015, 03:18AMSo (assuming the story is about real people that once existed) I'd be genuinely surprised if there were a single person in the world today who is descended from one of Isaac and Ishmael but not the other. So many generations have passed.

It wouldn't surprise me if the two "tribes" actually managed to remain fairly distinct, but it doesn't worry me, one way or the other.

And I don't know whether it makes any difference but I don't think the Palestinians are supposed to be descended from Ishmael either.  I'll have to check that out too.

If it was just the land, then why would all the Arabs complain about such a small allotment for the Jews?

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 23, 2015, 03:46AMWhy would that even matter?  They're both descended from Abraham anyway...

Well, quite! It's just not a sensible distinction to seek to make.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 23, 2015, 05:01AMAnd I don't know whether it makes any difference but I don't think the Palestinians are supposed to be descended from Ishmael either.  I'll have to check that out too.

The whole bunch of them are basically just all the same stuff mixed-up together.

Quote from: ddickerson on Sep 23, 2015, 05:22AMIf it was just the land, then why would all the Arabs complain about such a small allotment for the Jews?

If the UN got together with Obama, and they arranged without your consent to resettle you elsewhere while recreating Texas as a homeland for persecuted atheists, would you be happy?

Not a beautiful equivalence, but hopefully you get the idea...

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 22, 2015, 03:36PM
Comments and questions

 1) Again Abraham pulls out the jackpot, in terms of what he is promised. It's getting a little boring for me to keep saying it, but all this feels like an after-the-fact writing-up, slanted to make later actions look approved of.

You didn't respond to my counter to this in the last chapter.

Did you notice that this time the land promised is just the land of the Canaanites rather than the specific geopraphical area promised before.  I think that that area was quite a bit larger.  And last time there was nothing that Abraham and his descendants had to do, this time they have a task to do. Ouch! Not so much a jackpot for them was it, they take the pain, and the descendants 400 years later get the gain

Quote 2) Abraham's offspring are to hold the land of Canaan "for an everlasting possession". How does this square with the world eventually coming to an end in Jewish and Christian theology?

1. In later prophecies about the "End of the World" eg in Revelation, the world is going to be cleansed by fire and then the faithful will live there forever.  A bit like the flood.
2. Then Revelation talks about heaven coming down to earth, centred on the "promised land", with all the nations having to come to Jerusalem to worship God.
3. But Revelation is very symbolic so all will be revealed when we get there. 

Quote
3) Circumcision is a weird thing. I can imagine that it might have conferred some advantage of hygiene in unsanitary and dusty conditions. But mutilating the genitals of baby boys for no medical reason is to my mind frankly barbaric. It is also reported that it desensitises the area, making sex less fulfilling in later life.

Well from a secular point of view, they had different medical knowledge and valuesso you can't really judge them by what you know and by the values you hold that are a dependent on your knowledge.  Maybe it was best practice medicine at the time.  There was never any theological reason for Christians to do it, at least Paul banned it very early on.

But from a theological point of view the passage is a lesson that we have to rely on God as we don't have the ability to achieve what God wants for us.  Circumcision is an analogy to getting your penis cut off.  The immediate significance was that the heir that was essential to God's promise wasn't going to be conceived through human ability: Abraham was emasculated and Sarah was barren, it was all up to God.  And then this was to be done for everyone who would be included in Abraham's blessing as a so that they would remember that their blessing was all dependent on God.

In the NT the idea is extrapolated to mean that our salvation is dependent on God and not us trying to earn it by being good enough.  But ironically circumcision is made symbolic of the things that you might do to try and earn salvation - so don't do it.
   
Quote 4) Is there any reason of meaning behind Sarai's renaming?

Don't know.
Quote5) As Martin pointed out, Islam takes a different view of who these promises were made to. Do these traditions date to earlier than Mohamed? If not, it's hard to see this as anything but a naked attempt to rewrite the dominant narrative out of self-interest.
Don't know
QuoteApologies for being a little bit absent in the last few days; I've been busy getting various matters in hand ahead of a two week holiday, which will make me even more absent from next Monday until Thursday 8th October


But you're taking your internet and trombone with you aren't you?

And I've edited this to try and make a few things clearer.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 23, 2015, 02:59PMQuote from: MoominDave on Sep 22, 2015, 03:36PM 4) Is there any reason of meaning behind Sarai's renaming?
Don't know
This:
https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/all-women-bible/Sarah-Sarai-Sara
gives some interesting thoughts on the names (Sarai vs. Sarah).

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 23, 2015, 02:59PMQuote from: MoominDave on Sep 22, 2015, 03:36PM 1) Again Abraham pulls out the jackpot, in terms of what he is promised. It's getting a little boring for me to keep saying it, but all this feels like an after-the-fact writing-up, slanted to make later actions look approved of.You didn't respond to my counter to this in the last chapter.
Sorry, I've not been properly keeping on top of this thread in the last week. Let me check back... Do you mean this quote?

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 20, 2015, 05:16PMMost of the time history that is made up tends to brush aside the imperfections of its heroes, especially where they are significant.  So I think that the portrayal of flaws in Abraham and Israel would be indicative that the history is reliable.  But I'm not claiming that its proof.
It's highly plausible to me that later rewriters would want to present a realistic-sounding narrative. These were sophisticated people, invested in a system of moral control that they were bolstering by their writings. Again, not proof, rather an observation of human nature.

There is also the possibility that Abram was even less well behaved than is presented . I know, hard to imagine that a tough-as-nails Bronze Age tribal leader might not have been the generally good but occasionally doubting and devious man that his admiring descendants record him as... But it would be very of-a-piece with what we know of other leaders from the same period for him to have been much more of a hard and grasping man than is shown.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 23, 2015, 02:59PMDid you notice that this time the land promised is just the land of the Canaanites rather than the specific geopraphical area promised before.  I think that that area was quite a bit larger.  And last time there was nothing that Abraham and his descendants had to do, this time they have a task to do. Ouch! Not so much a jackpot for them was it, they take the pain, and the descendants 400 years later get the gain
That had passed me by. Yes, that's an intriguing duality; as with the creation and flood accounts, the juxtaposition of two not-quite-the-same-but-notably-similar narratives (here chapters 15 and 17) suggests more than one original source, with two stories included side by side because the compiler couldn't decide which was better / more authentic. So I don't read 17 as occurring after 15 - rather I read it as an alternative version of 15; in which case there's no decreasing of the promised amount of land to Abram, rather a question over which wording of the promise is the authentic one.

Comparison between 15 and 17:

1) Descendants:
 - 15 - Abram is promised offspring innumerable as the stars. Mothers not referenced.
 - 17 - "You shall be the father of a multitude of nations". Sarai explicitly referenced.
2) Sojourn:
 - 15 - 400 years.
 - 17 - Referenced but not described.
3) Land:
 - 15 - "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates".
 - 17 - "all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession".
4) Reminder:
 - 15 - Abram's pile of dead animals.
 - 17 - Circumcision.

I wonder if, in light of the specific exclusion of Ishmael from the covenant (Genesis 17:19), the second version is a later penning, intended to lay out some new political realities. It has more of a sectarian bite to it than 15 does.

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 23, 2015, 02:59PMQuote from: MoominDave on Sep 22, 2015, 03:36PM3) Circumcision is a weird thing. I can imagine that it might have conferred some advantage of hygiene in unsanitary and dusty conditions. But mutilating the genitals of baby boys for no medical reason is to my mind frankly barbaric. It is also reported that it desensitises the area, making sex less fulfilling in later life.Well from a secular point of view, they had different medical knowledge and valuesso you can't really judge them by what you know and by the values you hold that are a dependent on your knowledge.  Maybe it was best practice medicine at the time.  There was never any theological reason for Christians to do it, at least Paul banned it very early on.
I suspect you're on to something with the idea that it was medically approved of then - but medical evidence thresholds in 2000 BC were on the low side... And the idea that it was helpful ossified into dogma that we still suffer from today. It is a practice still widespread enough in the US that mainstream medical outlets there feel obliged to treat the idea of infant male foreskin removal with respect; it is easy to find online articles of indignant moral tone written by both sides of the debate. For me, the right of a child not to have a healthy and functional part of their body removed before it has any ability to consent to the operation trumps anything else. We wouldn't still do it if Abraham hadn't done it and the literature left after him hadn't demanded that those who followed him repeat it. I don't always (or even often) find myself with Paul on something, but I'm very much with him on this one. Do we have any idea what Paul's motivations were in banning it?

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 23, 2015, 02:59PMBut from a theological point of view the passage is a lesson that we have to rely on God as we don't have the ability to achieve what God wants for us.  Circumcision is an analogy to getting your penis cut off.  The immediate significance was that the heir that was essential to God's promise wasn't going to be conceived through human ability: Abraham was emasculated and Sarah was barren, it was all up to God.  And then this was to be done for everyone who would be included in Abraham's blessing as a so that they would remember that their blessing was all dependent on God.

In the NT the idea is extrapolated to mean that our salvation is dependent on God and not us trying to earn it by being good enough.  But ironically circumcision is made symbolic of the things that you might do to try and earn salvation - so don't do it.
This strikes me as open to interpretation... So it's a lesson that you should just leave everything up to God? Not a lesson that you should try to make things work as well as possible so that God doesn't need to intercede?

Quote from: drizabone on Sep 23, 2015, 02:59PMBut you're taking your internet and trombone with you aren't you?

Honestly, who wouldn't?

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 23, 2015, 10:54PMThis:
https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/all-women-bible/Sarah-Sarai-Sara
gives some interesting thoughts on the names (Sarai vs. Sarah).

Thanks for that. So it made the intention of the name in being the queenly ancestor figure more definite, more explicit.

Noting that there are individuals that turn up in early Mediaeval genealogies called things like "Basina", meaning simply "boss", I wonder if Sarah's name is not actually what she would have been called, but rather a description of her function, supplied when her name had been long forgotten. I've raised this idea before in dealing with some of the earlier genealogies, when names such as Peleg ("division") seem to match a description of their times better than a personal name.

Genesis 18 text

Highlights

 - Sarah is to have a baby.
 - Sodom and Gomorrah are to be destroyed.
 - Abraham pleads on behalf of Sodom.

Summary

 - Three men arrive at Abraham's dwelling.
 - He receives them as God and two others, having fine food prepared for them.
 - God foretells that Sarah will have a baby in the next year.
 - She laughs. He asks her why she laughed. She denies laughing. He asserts that she laughed.
 - The three men depart for Sodom. Abraham accompanies them for some of the way.
 - Abraham queries the fate of Sodom, pointing out that there must be some people worth saving there.
 - Abraham dickers God down from 50 worthy people in Sodom as the level for saving the city, to 45, to 40, to 30, to 20, and ultimately to 10.

Comments and questions

 1) Three men - God in one body plus two emissaries, or God in three bodies? This is the first time that we've been presented with God coming to Abraham in the human form that he more commonly appeared to earlier interlocutors in. Previously Abraham has been a man of visions.
 2) The laughing episode is a bit strange (also oddly petty). So Sarah apparently doesn't believe that God has powers at this stage? I suppose when things have only been appearing to Abraham inside his head, evidence has been a little sparse. But interesting that it is reasonable for her to be sceptical at this point when we have been following Abraham's story and its divine annotations for some time now.
 3) Why would the three men have needed Abraham to "set them on their way"? God doesn't need a map...
 4) The passage where Abraham pushes God to save Sodom for ever-decreasing numbers of "righteous" people - God clearly knows the outcome in advance, and that provided he doesn't go so low that he includes Lot's family the city is doomed.
 5) Trying to think what kind of historical occurrence might be lurking behind the story as it's come down to us... Abraham is a powerful man pleading with someone who has come to destroy a city. Is this a rewrite of another powerful local personage come to sack the city, stopping by Abraham en route for sustenance? Someone who Abraham doesn't dare offend, but whose actions he fears, at least on Lot's behalf?

Now seems as good a time as any to have a quick look back over The Story So Far... We've now been through enough of it that details of the narrative are dropping out of my brain...

Creation
 - Days of creation, the world and everything in it, Adam and Eve.
 - Tempting of Eve by the serpent; Eve and Adam eat the forbidden fruit.
 - The Fall; A&E expelled from the garden.
The first attempt at a human world
 - Cain murders Abel.
 - Humans spread. Some of them are bad people.
 - Many generations pass.
The flood
 - God becomes weary of human misbehaviour.
 - Noah told to build boat, gather family and animals.
 - Earth is flooded, everything else dies. [A point that we missed at the time occurs to me - if this is true, why do we have trees now? Did Noah take seeds as well?]
The second attempt at a human world
 - Many generations pass; listed lifespans decrease so rapidly that Noah's son Shem outlives all of them.
 - Language creation comes from the Tower of Babel story; Hebrew is specified as the earlier original language.
Abraham
 - Now the narrative focusses in on more detail.
 - Abram starts out from Ur (modern-day Iraq), travelling with family.
 - They settle in Haran (modern-day Turkey).
 - They move on to Canaan (modern-day Israel).
 - Then towards the Negeb (desert region in the South of modern-day Israel).
 - A famine drives them to Egypt, where Abram and Sarai are evidently politically highly placed.
 - Pharoah banishes them, they return to Canaan.
 - Deeds of Abram are recounted.
 - God promises Abram and Sarai lots of descendants, renames them Abraham and Sarah, demands circumcision.
 - Abraham pleads for the doomed Sodom.

Now read on...



And to note... In just over a month we've worked through 18 chapters. If we continue at this rate, we'll complete Revelation somewhere round about Xmas 2021. There is a lot in the Bible! We could use more of you that are just reading in the summarising effort - we're having fun here, but the thread wasn't originally envisaged to be a simple back and forth between two people, rather to reflect a range of viewpoints. It doesn't take a lot of effort - 15 minutes of your time summarises a chapter and raises observations on it; don't be shy, or embarrassed - there's no minimum or maximum level of prior knowledge required for this.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 25, 2015, 09:41AMComments and questions

 1) Three men - God in one body plus two emissaries, or God in three bodies? This is the first time that we've been presented with God coming to Abraham in the human form that he more commonly appeared to earlier interlocutors in. Previously Abraham has been a man of visions.

Interesting observation about human form verses visions.  I don't know the significance but it seems as though it would be.

I think this little act of visiting and hospitality is meant to be compared with the angels visiting lot in Sodom in the next chapter and the inhospitality then.  They two episodes seem to be to similar but opposite not to be a deliberate contrast.  But not sure of the point yet.
 
Quote 2) The laughing episode is a bit strange (also oddly petty). So Sarah apparently doesn't believe that God has powers at this stage? I suppose when things have only been appearing to Abraham inside his head, evidence has been a little sparse. But interesting that it is reasonable for her to be sceptical at this point when we have been following Abraham's story and its divine annotations for some time now.

I think its important for Abraham and Sarah to learn to trust God.

Quote 3) Why would the three men have needed Abraham to "set them on their way"? God doesn't need a map...

Agreed, God doesn't even need GPS.  I think the visit was to teach A and S. about faith and justice.

Quote 4) The passage where Abraham pushes God to save Sodom for ever-decreasing numbers of "righteous" people - God clearly knows the outcome in advance, and that provided he doesn't go so low that he includes Lot's family the city is doomed.

Yep God knows, but he's teaching Abraham.  See the verses before : I think its a lesson for Abraham.

17 The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, 18 seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? 19 For I have chosen[f] him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.”

God says he wants Ab. to do righteousness and justice.  And then we have the little cameo where Abraham explores what that means.  I think.

Quote 5) Trying to think what kind of historical occurrence might be lurking behind the story as it's come down to us... Abraham is a powerful man pleading with someone who has come to destroy a city. Is this a rewrite of another powerful local personage come to sack the city, stopping by Abraham en route for sustenance? Someone who Abraham doesn't dare offend, but whose actions he fears, at least on Lot's behalf?

Don't think so.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 26, 2015, 02:18AM<snip>
 - Earth is flooded, everything else dies. [A point that we missed at the time occurs to me - if this is true, why do we have trees now? Did Noah take seeds as well?]
<snip>
No need, vegetation floats, as would its seeds.  Note that Noah also didn't take non-vertebrates as near as I can tell - these too would almost certainly have floated on the vegetation.  Neither did he take fish or other marine life, for pretty obvious reasons I would think.

Hmm, makes one wonder about amphibious creatures or other animals like the crocodilians that spend a lot of time in the water but also need to spend time on land.  I imagine the crocs would probably have been on the ark, like the birds.

Alas though, the 1800 deg C temperature rise implicit from that much falling water would have rendered any seeds (floating or otherwise) sterile... Fortunate that Noah had a tungsten heat-shield on his ark, really.

And, as I'm going to be away from tomorrow until Thu 8th Oct, let's push this on slightly with another chapter...

Genesis 19 text

Highlights

 - Lot is retrieved from Sodom prior to its destruction
 - Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by a rain of sulphur and fire
 - Lot moves to a cave with his daughters. They get him drunk and seduce him to have children.

Summary

 - God's two companions from chapter 18 (called "angels" here) arrive in Sodom, meeting Lot at the gate; he presses them to stay with him.
 - The men of Sodom besiege his house, asking for the two male strangers to be given to them to have sex with. Lot demurs, offering them his two virgin daughters instead!
 - They take exception to his words, and attack Lot's house. But the angels create protection from them.
 - The angels ask Lot to gather his family to evacuate. His to-be-sons-in-law think he is joking and do not come.
 - They forcibly push Lot and his wife and daughters out of the city, telling him to run to the hills, and warning him not to look back. Lot bargains, asking to go to a smaller city, which can then be saved for his sake.
 - Sodom and Gomorrah "and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground" are destroyed in a rain of sulphur and fire. Lot's group escapes, but Lot's wife looks back, and is turned into a pillar of salt for her curiosity.
 - Lot is afraid of his new home, and goes to the hills after all, with his daughters.
 - Lot's daughters, wanting to preserve his line, ply him with drink, then have sex with him. The text claims that two tribes are descended from these unions.

Comments and questions

1) Longer chapter this one! And pretty salacious stuff.
2) Abraham's bargaining in chapter 18 regarding the number of people in Sodom worth saving does not seem to actually be tested anywhere? See also point (4).
3) The etymology of the word 'sodomy' is not a difficult one, based on this passage...
4) Women seem to not be considered people here... 19:4 "the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man". So it is established that all the men of the town are not worth saving - but there is not a word on the women of the city, who presumably numbered similarly to the men.
5) Lot's actions are morally rancid to modern eyes here; showing again how women were treated as subhuman. "You can't rape my guests, they're only visitors" - well, right conclusion, but wrong reasoning, then - "here, have my betrothed virgin daughters to molest instead" - ugh. Lot seems to be an unadmirable character all around, really, based on the various stories about him.
6) In fact, the sequence of events around Lot makes me wonder if he was given to undisclosed sexual waywardness himself: i) He moved to Sodom, a place that is a byword for sexual freedom; ii) The men of the town seemed to find it usual to come around to his house for gay sex; iii) He offered them his daughters for sex; iv) He bargained to be allowed to escape to another city that would have been destroyed in the same judgement (presumably for similar reasons?) rather than to the safety of the hills; v) He let his two daughters successively get him drunk and rut with him. We know with our modern knowledge that inappropriately sexual behaviour in offspring is very often the result of inappropriate sexual contact from adults. I find myself wondering quite strongly about just what Lot's habits were.
7) Saving Zoar so Lot can move there is not consistent with the I'm-going-to-smash-Sodom-and-Abraham-can't-argue-me-out-of-it attitude shown in chapter 18.
8) The destruction of S&G sounds very like what happens to people who live too close to an active volcano. It seems that I'm not the first person to ponder on that. It's not clear to me whether the local tectonics would support such a thing, or some other earthquake-based phenomenon. Anyone have relevant knowledge?
9) It would seem quite a plausible way for the story to have arisen for a natural disaster to have occurred, and then for the legend to have been written around that.
10) The same link makes the point that Sodom was not far from the Dead Sea, and that it is quite common in that area to find oddly-shaped structures made of salt, created by spray blowing off the lake. One could imagine quite easily Lot and his family fleeing for their lives, his wife unable to keep up, them running on ahead of her, her being caught up in the destruction, them looking for her later, and finding nothing where they thought they'd last seen her - except for an oddly-shaped pillar of salt that happened to have formed nearby. No need to invoke supernatural explanations.
11) Again Lot seems silly and ruled by cowardice. The place he bargained to escape to makes him fearful, so he goes where he didn't want to in the first place.
12) Then he gets his daughters pregnant. Different times, different places... But persistent difficult sexual matters seem to attach to Lot.
13) The idea that two tribes are descended from these two couplings is genetic nonsense, as already discussed regarding Isaac and Ishmael.

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 27, 2015, 01:38AMAlas though, the 1800 deg C temperature rise implicit from that much falling water would have rendered any seeds (floating or otherwise) sterile... Fortunate that Noah had a tungsten heat-shield on his ark, really.
Oh?  What "1800 deg C temperature rise implicit" from how much falling water?

Note, Vs.11 of Ch.10 tells use that a proportion of the water did NOT come from the sky, but "from the fountains of the deep".  It does not say what proportion came from which source.

Perhaps the simplest comment for me to make regarding how literally it can be sensible to take the flood story as presented is to quote my post from earlier in the thread:

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 08, 2015, 11:06AMA worldwide flood? The geological record does not support such a notion, and the amount of water required to cover Mt Everest is simply gargantuan (bigger than that - gargantuan to the power of enormous; bigger than that even). The effects of adding this much water to the world (warning - link treats this in pretty scornful and inflammatory language) would be huge and dramatic - the extra water would be 3 times as much as currently is found on Earth, and its arrival would cause amongst other effects a worldwide temperature rise of 1800 degrees C due to the energy imparted by the mass of falling water (a density of falling water, by the way, that would certainly have sunk any boat). It seems outstandingly clear that if this story relates to any real event at all, the numbers have become exaggerated by so many orders of magnitude over the years that we can deduce little meaningful from the passage.

One is going to need a very much lot more water than one can find in "the deep" to do this job. Even subtracting off all the water that we have on the planet isn't going to bring the temperature rise down to something Noah could have survived - and you can't do that anyhow on the large scale - the oceans would still have been full of the usual levels of water underneath the excess.

FWIW, I quite like the idea that what we see in the flood passage is a folk memory of the hypothesised devastating Middle Eastern flood that occurred when the Mediterranean overflowed into the Black Sea some 7,600 years ago. It has at least something of a ring of plausibility about it. It doesn't fit the dates given in the bible, but one of the fruits of this exercise has been to make it abundantly clear to those of us without a partisan interest that its early chronologies have been so bashed about over the years of transmission that they are to be treated with extreme caution.

You seem to assume Everest even existed at the time of the flood.  It seems to me that a worldwide flood as described in Genesis would see enormous tectonic upheaval.  Oh, and by the way, there is a LOT of water in the oceans...  They go deeper than Everest is high and it is not unreasonable to assume that the depths of the oceans got deeper too as a result of the ptobably tectonic upheavals.

As for "no evidence" of a worldwide flood, I suggest you need to broaden your reading base.  Plenty of evidence, only interpretations differ.

FWIW, we are dealing with forensic science here, and I have long held that the term "forensic" is simply a high brow way of saying "guess"...  Educated guess maybe, but nevertheless a guess - without eyewitness reports of actual events it can be nothing else.

Oh yeah, the flood, we DO have eyewitness reports...  Noah, Shem, Ham, Japeth and their wives, all of whom are likely to have contributed to the record that Moses later codified...

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 27, 2015, 06:26AMYou seem to assume Everest even existed at the time of the flood.  It seems to me that a worldwide flood as described in Genesis would see enormous tectonic upheaval.
The idea that Everest might have been created rapidly during an event in historical time doesn't fit with the geological record - further general comments on the sensibleness of questioning this in these terms below.

Tectonic upheaval... Well, ice caps depress land levels by their weight (very slowly), so the amount of water we're talking about could have some effect, I would have thought. And that 1800 deg C global temperature increase would arise from the imparting of an awful lot of kinetic energy from falling water. Without doing any sums, it seems vaguely plausible that dropping that much water on Earth's surface could cause tectonic effects. Though raising an 8.8 km mountain would be stretching it an awful long way from "we might shift something around a few cm". But even shifting plates around a little is a problem... What happens when you shift two tectonic plates against each other? Earthquakes, volcanos, etc. Taking place underwater leading to a neverending sequence of the most intense tsunamis that the Earth's ever seen. What would happen to a big, wallowy, overladen boat sailing on that sea? Perhaps Noah's tungsten heat shield also contained a deflector shield and an antigravity device...

Another point that I omitted to mention when we touched on this at the time was the leaf that the dove found. It was freshly plucked, from an olive tree. Do olive trees float? Can they survive an 1800 deg C temperature rise? Would they structurally survive immersion under 8.8 km of water? [NB The pressure at that depth would be nearly 900 atmospheres] Could one somehow come unscathed through these kinds of conditions? It's all very well asserting that vegetation floats, but flotsam would have been marmalised in these conditions - battered to tiny pieces and poached to a crisp. Maybe worth noting also that 1800 deg C is an awful long way above the boiling point of water...

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 27, 2015, 06:26AMOh, and by the way, there is a LOT of water in the oceans...
Yes, I know there is a lot of water in the oceans; this link offers some helpful visualisations, for example. 1.4e18 m^3 is an extremely large volume indeed when considered on the human scale. But let's put it in context:

Earth radius is 6.371e6 m, so the volume of the Earth is basically 4/3 pi r^3 = 4/3 * pi * 6.371^3 * 1e18 m^3 = 1.1e21 m^3. First observation - only one part per thousand of the Earth as it stands by volume is water. There's a huuuuge amount of water out there, but there's a massively huger amount of combined other stuff on our planet. This is the first clue to the scale of this problem.
So we can work out to what depth the Earth would be covered if it was made flat at sea-level and the existing oceans were poured on top of it. Letting R be the radius of the Earth to the new sea-level created, V_new_sea_level - V_oceans = V_old_sea_level ('V' for volume), i.e. 4/3 pi R^3 - 1.4e18 = 4/3 pi r^3 => R^3 = (6.371^3 * 1e18) + (1.4e18 / (4/3 pi)) = 2.6e20. So R is the cube root of that, i.e. 6,373,716 m. I've quoted that to an unusually large number of significant figures because we are about to take the difference of it with our original radius - which is only by a little amount smaller.

Thus the depth to which the Earth would be covered would be 6,373,716 - 6,371,000 m = 2.7 km. The height of Mt Everest above sea level is 8.8 km, over three times higher - and nor should we forget that as the depth on the sphere is increased we require more and more water to effect the same increase in depth. In fact, for the level to reach this height, one would have to pour the equivalent of 3.3 times the water on Earth onto it. And that's if we remove the existing oceans. In reality we also need the existing ocean volume to reach this height - so 4.3 times, minus a bit for mountain ranges - definitely more than 4 times the existing water on the planet.

And then there's another problem - where did all that water go? It isn't here now... And when it receded, the planet would have been scoured to the bedrock, all soil washed away. Noah and his family would have been utterly unable to pursue life on that post-flood world.

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 27, 2015, 06:26AMThey go deeper than Everest is high and it is not unreasonable to assume that the depths of the oceans got deeper too as a result of the ptobably tectonic upheavals.
Au contraire, mon ami. It's not reasonable to just assume that; see also comments on Everest above. But wait a moment - doesn't it if anything undermine the argument you're trying to make? The oceans would during the event come to take up more of the water than before, leaving less of it to be part of the deluge.

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 27, 2015, 06:26AMAs for "no evidence" of a worldwide flood, I suggest you need to broaden your reading base.  Plenty of evidence, only interpretations differ.
Those that start from a position of neutrality have yet to find any evidence - and contexts that would provide evidence if there had been one at this time have been very thoroughly examined by very many of these people.
Those that start from a position of wanting to prove that there was a worldwide flood have - surprise, surprise - spent a lot of time rehearsing their pre-existing confirmation biases. If one Googles 'evidence of worldwide flood', one finds a long list of links from fundamentalist Christian institutes trying to construct alternative geological narratives to the mainstream. The 'problems' raised in such organs with the mainstream model are, so far as I have seen, universally not problems - and even if they were, would simply be outstanding issues to work on the understanding of rather than a motivation for throwing out the whole field and replacing it with a theory that was scientifically discredited in the 19th century. There are very good reasons why the field of Geology decided most of 200 years ago (which is getting on for prehistory in a scientific field) that the theory of a historical worldwide flood didn't match the evidence that was being found. And that was in an age that was still keen to affirm Christian dogma...

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 27, 2015, 06:26AMFWIW, we are dealing with forensic science here, and I have long held that the term "forensic" is simply a high brow way of saying "guess"...  Educated guess maybe, but nevertheless a guess - without eyewitness reports of actual events it can be nothing else.
The definition of "forensic science" is here. The salient part of the definition is to do with it being an investigation in the name of the law - nothing to do with this here. I guess you're using it to mean the second definition without the critical 'court of law' bit, which would modified run: "Relating to the use of science or technology in the investigation and establishment of facts or evidence [in a court of law]". Is that fair?

Eyewitness reports are very useful things, likely to contain details otherwise inaccessible to the later researcher. But let us not forget that relying on eyewitnesses is a notoriously unreliable way of documenting things. It is not uncommon in the courts for jurors to have to weigh the probabilities when an apparently credible witness insists on the truth of something that other clear evidence flatly contradicts. People exaggerate, renarrate, fill in the gaps; and worst of all, do it non-consciously - we don't even realise that we do it, much of the time.

Quote from: Lawrie on Sep 27, 2015, 06:26AMOh yeah, the flood, we DO have eyewitness reports...  Noah, Shem, Ham, Japeth and their wives, all of whom are likely to have contributed to the record that Moses later codified...
So, having mentioned the unreliability of eyewitnesses, we should also mention the unlikeliness of faithful transmission over this massive period of time (we already talked about this, towards the start of the thread) - this would have been in all likelihood an oral record for great spans of time before it was written down (which may or not have been by a historical Moses, and there is a high probability that its form was substantially modified following that - we discussed that too). These were stories told around the campfire - and a worldwide flood that destroyed everything makes for a much more dramatic story than whatever real event might have been behind the original tale. This is not an "eyewitness account" in the traditional sense - it is an echo of an echo of an echo of a tale that had been first been told long ago and far away even in the time that Moses (say) wrote it down. We also touched on the existence of parallel flood narratives in other Middle Eastern cultures - these have similarities, but are not the same stories. Are these describing the same event? What makes one account true and another not so? How do we know?

We should also mention that these supposed eyewitnesses were not eyewitnesses to the whole of the flood - or even much of it, if we take the story at face value. If Noah says "it covered the whole world", we should ask him "did you sail up and down and around and about the whole surface of the planetary sphere to make that statement?".

Quote from: MoominDave on Sep 27, 2015, 03:19AMAnd, as I'm going to be away from tomorrow until Thu 8th Oct, let's push this on slightly with another chapter...

Genesis 19 text

Highlights

 - Lot is retrieved from Sodom prior to its destruction
 - Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by a rain of sulphur and fire
 - Lot moves to a cave with his daughters. They get him drunk and seduce him to have children.

I'd include that God protected Lot and his family from the disaster and Lot's "solutions" as a highlight.

Quote
Summary

 - God's two companions from chapter 18 (called "angels" here) arrive in Sodom, meeting Lot at the gate; he presses them to stay with him.
 - The men of Sodom besiege his house, asking for the two male strangers to be given to them to have sex with. Lot demurs, offering them his two virgin daughters instead!
 - They take exception to his words, and attack Lot's house. But the angels create protection from them.
 - The angels ask Lot to gather his family to evacuate. His to-be-sons-in-law think he is joking and do not come.
 - They forcibly push Lot and his wife and daughters out of the city, telling him to run to the hills, and warning him not to look back. Lot bargains, asking to go to a smaller city, which can then be saved for his sake.
 - Sodom and Gomorrah "and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground" are destroyed in a rain of sulphur and fire. Lot's group escapes, but Lot's wife looks back, and is turned into a pillar of salt for her curiosity.
 - Lot is afraid of his new home, and goes to the hills after all, with his daughters.
 - Lot's daughters, wanting to preserve his line, ply him with drink, then have sex with him. The text claims that two tribes are descended from these unions.

QuoteComments and questions

1) Longer chapter this one! And pretty salacious stuff.
Yep.
Quote2) Abraham's bargaining in chapter 18 regarding the number of people in Sodom worth saving does not seem to actually be tested anywhere? See also point (4).

God doesn't actually need to run a telephone survey to know whether people are righteous or not.  v 13 indicates that he knows what the situation is : "For we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it.”  Theres your test and the result.

Quote3) The etymology of the word 'sodomy' is not a difficult one, based on this passage...

Even I worked that one out. 

Quote4) Women seem to not be considered people here... 19:4 "the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man". So it is established that all the men of the town are not worth saving - but there is not a word on the women of the city, who presumably numbered similarly to the men.

So there was a test? and they failed.

That the women are not mentioned, doesn't mean that they are considered sub-human or that they were any better than the men that are.  They are just not considered significant in the narrative.  But its obviously a completely different culture.

Quote5) Lot's actions are morally rancid to modern eyes here; showing again how women were treated as subhuman. "You can't rape my guests, they're only visitors" - well, right conclusion, but wrong reasoning, then - "here, have my betrothed virgin daughters to molest instead" - ugh. Lot seems to be an unadmirable character all around, really, based on the various stories about him.

I agree with your assessment of Lot.  I expect that God wouldn't have allowed this solution.

Quote6) In fact, the sequence of events around Lot makes me wonder if he was given to undisclosed sexual waywardness himself:
i) He moved to Sodom, a place that is a byword for sexual freedom;
ii) The men of the town seemed to find it usual to come around to his house for gay sex;
iii) He offered them his daughters for sex;
iv) He bargained to be allowed to escape to another city that would have been destroyed in the same judgement (presumably for similar reasons?) rather than to the safety of the hills;
v) He let his two daughters successively get him drunk and rut with him. We know with our modern knowledge that inappropriately sexual behaviour in offspring is very often the result of inappropriate sexual contact from adults. I find myself wondering quite strongly about just what Lot's habits were.

i) that's just asking for trouble and seems to be the cause of his downfall from his position in chapter 13
ii) You're arguing from the specific to the general here I think.
iii) That's inexcusable.
iv) I can't see where Zoar was included in the zone of judgement.
v) You may be right but our cultures are probably too different for us to be able to tell if there were other factors behind the behaviour. I don't think its the major point that the writer is making anyway.  Its another "this is the origin of some bad tribes that Israel is going to have trouble with later" story. 

Quote7) Saving Zoar so Lot can move there is not consistent with the I'm-going-to-smash-Sodom-and-Abraham-can't-argue-me-out-of-it attitude shown in chapter 18.

I don't see that Zoar was saved because Lot went there.  I just thought it was a closer place to run too that was outside the zone of judgement.  Did I miss something? 

yep I did : verse 21.  Didn't notice that.  But God still "smashed" Sodom as he said he would.  And he also saved Lot as he said he would.  Why is it a problem if he doesn't smash Zoar when he didn't say he would?

Quote8) The destruction of S&G sounds very like what happens to people who live too close to an active volcano. It seems that I'm not the first person to ponder on that. It's not clear to me whether the local tectonics would support such a thing, or some other earthquake-based phenomenon. Anyone have relevant knowledge?

I've read the Wikipedia article, does that count?  It may have been meteors.

Quote9) It would seem quite a plausible way for the story to have arisen for a natural disaster to have occurred, and then for the legend to have been written around that.

Could have.

Quote10) The same link makes the point that Sodom was not far from the Dead Sea, and that it is quite common in that area to find oddly-shaped structures made of salt, created by spray blowing off the lake. One could imagine quite easily Lot and his family fleeing for their lives, his wife unable to keep up, them running on ahead of her, her being caught up in the destruction, them looking for her later, and finding nothing where they thought they'd last seen her - except for an oddly-shaped pillar of salt that happened to have formed nearby. No need to invoke supernatural explanations.

One could imagine that.  And one would be wrong to invoke supernatural explanation to justify a made up story.  Just as one would also be wrong to invoke natural events to explain a supernatural event too.

Quote11) Again Lot seems silly and ruled by cowardice. The place he bargained to escape to makes him fearful, so he goes where he didn't want to in the first place.

Yep.  Lot doesn't come out of this looking like a saint.

Quote12) Then he gets his daughters pregnant. Different times, different places... But persistent difficult sexual matters seem to attach to Lot.

The story makes the point that Lot was not responsible or in control he didn't even know what was going on.  Its the end of a sad fall for someone who in chapter 13 was being treated as an equal by Abraham.  All brought about by him choosing to live in a bad neighborhood that looked more appealing.

Quote13) The idea that two tribes are descended from these two couplings is genetic nonsense, as already discussed regarding Isaac and Ishmael.

How is that genetic nonsense when geneticists are happy to say that we all descended from the same set of maternal mitochondria that belonged to Lucy? 

But its pretty obvious that genetics is not the criteria that is being considered, how could it be when it wasn't discovered for another 4000 years.  Its a genealogiical statement.  And as we've seen the ancients were keen on genealogies so it would be entirely feasible to be able to draw a family tree to show that the amorites and moabites each descended from the daughters.