Meanwhile, for the keyword adding poster who thinks this "belongsinreligion" forum, not only is that ignorant (as if beliefs are not related to conservation vales) but by that measure he do not belong on the officially pro-God (of the Bible) FR.
It doesn’t make them fictional, it just makes them non-Jewish. Noah was not a Jew.
On a related note: centuries before the ancient Greeks said that everything is made of 4 elements, Genesis said that God made Adam from the dust of the ground. Sounds to me like the Greeks were the copycats. LOL
There is absolutely no question that many of the Old Testament Bible stories were borrowed from previous sources.
So what? That does not make them untrue.
I call them “keyword cowards”.
They use keywords to take digs at the poster without having the manhood to do it publicly.
That said, other religions took what was known about God and corrupted it and it devolved into their own religion or mythology.
Y’all have to remember the Bible is the inspired
word of God.
If Genesis was written by Moses why are there
three creation accounts?
The Bible is not a history text,
it is many interpretations of the word of God
as the authors felt compelled to write and
Christian churches choose to include in their book.
It is all about faith.
One of the hardest things modern humans
have to do is have faith in something
they physically never saw, touched, or
experienced. Even Jews of his time could
not accept Jesus after seeing his works, death and resurrection in person.
It is all about Faith in something bigger than us.
And our God asks us to Love people we don’t like.
Allah demands them to kill people they don’t like.
Which is easier?
Bookmark.
In modern stories people destined for greatness rarely start off privileged. They are dropped off at the doorstep of an orphanage or abandoned in the rain. This literary motif goes back to ancient stories, where writers use the abandoned child theme to identify a character that rises from obscurity to privileged hero status. It’s a motif found in the biblical account of Moses’ birth. But is that really the whole story?
Moses’ story begins when Pharaoh feels threatened by the growing Hebrew population in Egypt and commands that all Hebrew male infants be killed (Exod 1:16–22). Moses’ mother hides her newborn son for three months and then devises a risky but calculated plan: She sets him adrift on the Nile in a small basket made of bulrushes, waterproofed with bitumen and pitch (2:1–3). Moses’ older sister, Miriam, watches as the basket floats to where the daughter of Pharaoh bathes. God uses these circumstances to bring Moses under the protection of Egypt’s ruler (2:4–10).
Ancient literature outside the Bible attests to several stories in which a child, perceived as a threat by an enemy, is abandoned and later spared by divine intervention or otherworldly circumstance. Roughly 30 stories like this survive from the literature of ancient Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, Egypt, Rome and India.
The Mesopotamian work known as the Sargon Birth Legend offers the most striking parallels to the biblical story. It relates the birth story of Sargon the Great, an Akkadian emperor who ruled a number of Sumerian city-states around 2000 bc, centuries before the time of Moses. The infant boy is born into great peril: His mother is a high priestess, and he is illegitimate. Consequently, his mother sets him adrift on a river in a reed basket. The boy is rescued and raised by a gardener named Akki in the town of Kish. He becomes a humble gardener in Akki’s service until the goddess Ishtar takes an interest in him, setting him on the path to kingship.
Some assume that the biblical story of Moses’ birth was based on the Sargon Birth Legend, but this is unlikely. Although ancient Sumerian accounts of Sargon the Great date back to his lifetime, the legendary account of his birth is known from only four fragmentary tablets—three from the Neo-Assyrian period (934–605 bc) and one from the Neo-Babylonian period (626–539 bc). During the Neo-Assyrian period an Assyrian king took the name Sargon II and likely commanded the legends to be written about his namesake (722–705 bc). By doing so, he would have linked himself to the ancient hero and glorified himself as a “revived Sargon” figure. This would suggest that the birth legend was composed for propaganda purposes well after the biblical story of Moses.
The existence of stories like the Sargon Birth Legend help us understand the biblical story. They show that the abandoned child theme was a popular literary strategy for the ancients. They used it to introduce a figure who rises from mundane origins after gaining favor from fate or the divine. The common elements in these rags-to-riches stories helped ancient audiences identify with the central figure and develop respect for his achievements.
Moses’ story is about more than parallels, though. While Moses briefly seems to find favor and protection in the household of Pharaoh, a quasi-divine figure for the Egyptians, his life takes a surprising turn. He ends up leaving the kingdom of Egypt fearing that Pharaoh will kill him. From there, the story is repatterned: In a wilderness of Midian, Yahweh appears to Moses, now an obscure shepherd “slow of speech and of tongue” (4:10). He tells Moses to act as His spokesperson before Pharaoh and lead His people out of Egypt.
Moses stands out against the stories of the ancient cultures because he isn’t promoted like their chosen figures, but saved and demoted to poverty so that he can lead others to salvation. He is the new archetype of the chosen hero—one who is promoted only for the benefit of others. Over and against the stories of worldly kingdoms, Moses’ story articulates God’s remarkable work for His kingdom. His values are different from ours, and as is often the case in retrospect, we can be grateful for that.
Remember a few years ago when agnostics and atheists tried to claim Jesus was really Mithra? They even had an illustration of Mithra on the cross. Professional archeologists and Middle Eastern theologians who studied such things said the illustration was a modern fake.
Over the years I have read of agnostics who concoct wild stories about Christianity and pass it into the Christian culture to see how fast it will spread.
Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade...
The Qu’ran was originally Aramaic and all about Jesus!
Reverend Al Fadi and Dr. Jay Smith discuss the new research being done on the Qur'an in Germany, but not spoken about much in the English-speaking world, because the Germans (and also the French) have kept their research to themselves. Some of the most damaging research is being carried out on the Qur'an itself, and mostly by German scholars such as Gunther Luling and Christoph Luxenberg, who have found that there is an enormous Aramaic influence on the Qur'anic text we have today. In the last 50 years (since 1970), they have found that the original Qur'an, the proto-Qur'an, was in fact derived from Christian lectionaries, hymns, and homilies, written in Aramaic, by preachers in the church in the centuries leading up to the 7th century. It was then taken from Aramaic, and translated into Arabic sometime in the 7th century itself, mostly in Syria and Iraq. These Arabic texts were then embellished with dots and vowels in the 8th - 9th centuries, so that the average Arabic speaking people could read and understand them, but because those who were writing the Qur'an in Arabic didn't know Aramaic, they chose to put their dots and vowels anywhere they wanted, creating 30 official Qira'at versions of the Qur'an by the 15th century. This became such a dilemma for the Muslim authorities that in 1924 they had to choose just one version among the 30, and so went with the Hafs Qur'an, which is the official Qur'an we use today in most parts of the Muslim world...but it all began with Aramaic. What's more, if we were to go back to the proto-Aramaic Qur'an, we would find that the lectionaries, hymns and homilies from which it was all borrowed were all about Jesus. So, we need to get back to that original Qur'anic material, all written in Aramaic, and all about Jesus.
Just recently found the camp where the Angels killed 185,000 Syrian soldiers.
Our Lord said that Moses wrote of Him. If Jesus accepts the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, then that’s good enough for me.