Fair enough. But how come you get to pick and choose which sections of Genesis to take literally, and which to take metaphorically? Why is it so hard to understand God creating the earth in seven days, as being a metaphor for the multi-billion-year creation process since the Big Bang?
By means of disclosure, I think the Bible is bunk, but have no problem with others believing in it.
IT'S NOT HARD TO UNDERSTAND! Who said it was? That's easy to understand. We (creationists) are not stupid (most of us anyway). What we can't understand are things like: why isn't the sea saturated with salt by now? how can unstable structures like the rings of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune survive for 10 million years? where do short period comets come from? why are there no transitional forms between species? You know, things like that.
By means of disclosure, I think the Bible is bunk, but have no problem with others believing in it
Thanks. You seem to be one of the few around here.
Would you expect the writing style of the author of Beowulf to much resemble those of modern authors?
The people who wrote the books of the bible never wrote "John went to the bathroom"; they wrote "The Lord CAUSED John to go to the bathroom, for such and such a reason. You can take the part about the Lord any way you like; nonetheless in cases in which they wrote "The Lord CAUSED John to go to the bathroom...", you can pretty well believe that John went to the bathroom, i.e. they DIDN'T just make stuff up.
Moreover, ancient literature describes a number of things which we do not see in our present world, including:
JOS 10:11 And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.etc. In other words, the kinds of things Velikovsky wrote about.
When you see that when a bunch of Amorites get wiped by a meteorite storm, the bible talks about the Lord "casting great stones from heaven upon them", then you begin to get the feel for what's going on.
Not that God and the spirit world aren't real, but direct contact with the spirit world was lost at the time of the flood or shortly afterwards, and the people who wrote the books of the bible afterwards were attempting to see the hand of God in everything, whether it was there or not.
Ancient religion as we read of it in classical literature amounted to attempts to communicate with the spirit world using prophecy, oracles, idolatry, divination, electrical gadgetry such as the ark of the covenant etc. and it is remarkable we do not read of those things prior to the flood, but only afterwards. The words 'prophet' and 'prophecy' permeate the books of the OT after Genesis but do not appear in Genesis at all other than for the one vague reference to Abraham as 'God's prophet', after the flood. The most obvious interpretation of that is that communication with the spirit world prior to the flood did not REQUIRE any such gyrations.
The story of the flood is another case of people tossing out valid history because of the religious language in which the story is frame.
It is a dogma of establishment science that the tale of the biblical flood is a fairytale or, at most, an aggrandized tale of some local or regional flood. That, however, does not jibe with the facts of the historical record. The flood turns out to have been part and parcel of some larger, solar-system-wide calamity.
In particular, the seven days just prior to the flood are mentioned twice within a short space:
Gen. 7:4 "For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights;...These were seven days of intense light, generated by some major cosmic event within our system. The Old Testament contains one other reference to these seven days, i.e. Isaiah 30:26:Gen. 7:10 "And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth."
"...Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days..."
Most interpret this as meaning cramming seven days worth of light into one day. That is wrong; the reference is to the seven days prior to the flood. The reference apparently got translated out of a language which doesn't use articles. It should read "as the light of THE seven days".
It turns out, that the bible claims that Methuselah died in the year of the flood. It may not say so directly, but the ages given in Genesis 5 along with the note that the flood began in the 600'th year of Noah's life (Genesis 7:11) add up that way:
Gen. 5:25 ->"And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years and begat Lamech. And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.
<i.e. he lived 969 - 187 = 782 years after Lamech's birth>
And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years and begat a son. And he called his name Noah...
<182 + 600 = 782 also...>
Thus we have Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood; seven days prior to the flood...
Louis Ginzburg's seven-volume "Legends of the Jews", the largest body of Midrashim ever translated into German and English to my knowledge, expands upon the laconic tales of the OT.
From Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews, Vol V, page 175:
...however, Lekah, Gen. 7.4) BR 3.6 (in the week of mourning for Methuselah, God caused the primordial light to shine).... God did not wish Methuselah to die at the same time as the sinners...
The reference is, again, to Gen. 7.4, which reads:
"For yet seven days, and I shall cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights..."
The note that "God did not wish Methusaleh to die at the same time as the sinners" indicates that Methusaleh died at pretty nearly precisely the beginning of the week prior to the flood. The week of "God causing the primordial lights to shine" was the week of intense light before the flood.
What the old books are actually telling us is that there was a stellar blowout of some sort either close to or within our own system at the time of the flood. The blowout was followed by seven days of intense light and radiation, and then the flood itself. Moreover, the signs of the impending disaster were obvious enough for at least one guy, Noah, to take extraordinary precautions.
The ancient (but historical) world knew a number of seven-day light festivals, Hanukkah, the Roman Saturnalia etc. Velikovsky claimed that all were ultimately derived from the memory of the seven days prior to the flood.
If this entire deal is a made-up story, then here is a case of the storyteller (isaiah) making extra work for himself with no possible benefit, the detail of the seven days of light being supposedly known amongst the population, and never included in the OT story directly.
Greek and Roman authors, particularly Hesiod and ovid, Chinese authors and others, note that small groups of men and animals survived the flood on high places and on anything which could float for a year. I do not see an essential contradiction between this and the biblical account. Noah's descendants were probably unaware of anybody else surviving and wrote the story that way.