Posted on 07/24/2002 9:29:02 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
As suggested, this is a continuation of the Freeper Views on Origins thread with the purpose of continuing the discussion of origins, but shifting the focus to the period following creation through the patriarchs, including the Noah flood.
As with the previous thread, I offer my "take" and request all Freepers who wish to contribute, to please post their "take" along with any relevant source references and logic. The object of these "Freeper views" threads is to collect the different points of view in a single place for anyone who might be interested in them.
Thanks to all who are participating in this research! Alamo-Girl’s "take" on the patriarchs Where I left off in the previous thread, in my view, Adam – who had been made to reside in Eden (Paradise) in the spiritual realm – had been banished to live in the physical realm in the form of a hominid, a modern man.
Adam had been granted dominion over the physical realm before being banished and thus would have special knowledge not available to regular hominids. That special knowledge I believe is the reason the patriarchs lived so long and also the reason they got into so much trouble. The regular hominids probably thought Adamic men were super beings and might have even worshipped them or written legends (mythology) about them. If so, that would have soothed their damaged egos and might have caused them to become more self important and full of error.
I believe that Adam knew things that he passed on to his children, and them to theirs. Some things were probably lost as time went by, but I imagine Adamic men remembered the things most important to their personal welfare. Since he had been banished to experience death, and probably held no hope of eternal life after such disobedience, I believe he would have done everything he could to delay his own demise. If it was in his power, he probably suppressed the aging gene.
In the alternative, perhaps the hominid body into which Adam was banished specifically had the aging gene, the p21 gene, nullified. If true, this could either be an act of mercy or judgment (or both) from God.
Either way, in my view, it would take an extraordinary event – such as a murder or an accident or a catastrophe – to bring about the death of a physical descendant of Adam until the p21 gene was active in the Adamic lineage through inbreeding with regular hominids and/or until the original knowledge of Adam was lost.
By knocking out gene p21, research team temporarily thwarts human cells' aging process
Here are the patriarchs, the physical descendants of Adamic man – year born and year died – measured from the day Adam was banished to the physical realm (inception date of zero.) The patriarchs had other children who were also reproducing. Adam 0 to 930
*Enoch did not die in a physical sense, he was "taken." And Enoch walked with God: and he [was] not; for God took him – Genesis 5:24 Elijah is the only other one who has (so far) bypassed physical death. There will however be a generation of Christians who will escape physical death:
For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:
It may sound strange, but the manuscript of Enoch and the book of Revelation are significant in my understanding of the Noah flood.
The Enoch manuscript did not have the protection of the Jewish and Christian scribes over the years, but it contains at least some truth as follows:
The Book of Enoch (also known as 1 Enoch) was once cherished by Jews and Christians alike, this book later fell into disfavor with powerful theologians–precisely because of its controversial statements on the nature and deeds of the fallen angels… The theme of the Book of Enoch dealing with the nature and deeds of the fallen angels so infuriated the later Church fathers that one, Filastrius, actually condemned it openly as heresy (Filastrius, Liber de Haeresibus, no. 108). Nor did the rabbis deign to give credence to the book's teaching about angels. Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai in the second century A.D. pronounced a curse upon those who believed it (Delitzsch, p. 223). So the book was denounced, banned, cursed, no doubt burned and shredded–and last but not least, lost (and conveniently forgotten) for a thousand years. But with an uncanny persistence, the Book of Enoch found its way back into circulation two centuries ago. In 1773, rumors of a surviving copy of the book drew Scottish explorer James Bruce to distant Ethiopia. True to hearsay, the Book of Enoch had been preserved by the Ethiopic church, which put it right alongside the other books of the Bible… Though it was once believed to be post-Christian (the similarities to Christian terminology and teaching are striking), recent discoveries of copies of the book among the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran prove that the book was in existence before the time of Jesus Christ. But the date of the original writing upon which the second century B.C. Qumran copies were based is shrouded in obscurity. It is, in a word, old… There is abundant proof that Christ approved of the Book of Enoch. Over a hundred phrases in the New Testament find precedents in the Book of Enoch. Another remarkable bit of evidence for the early Christians' acceptance of the Book of Enoch was for many years buried under the King James Bible's mistranslation of Luke 9:35, describing the transfiguration of Christ: "And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, 'This is my beloved Son: hear him." Apparently the translator here wished to make this verse agree with a similar verse in Matthew and Mark. But Luke's verse in the original Greek reads: "This is my Son, the Elect One (from the Greek ho eklelegmenos, lit., "the elect one"): hear him." The "Elect One" is a most significant term (found fourteen times) in the Book of Enoch. If the book was indeed known to the apostles of Christ, with its abundant descriptions of the Elect One who should "sit upon the throne of glory" and the Elect One who should "dwell in the midst of them," then the great scriptural authenticity is accorded to the Book of Enoch when the "voice out of the cloud" tells the apostles, "This is my Son, the Elect One"–the one promised in the Book of Enoch. The Book of Jude tells us in vs. 14 that "Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied…" Jude also, in vs. 15, makes a direct reference to the Book of Enoch (2:1), where he writes, "to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly…" … Many of the early church fathers also supported the Enochian writings. Justin Martyr ascribed all evil to demons whom he alleged to be the offspring of the angels who fell through lust for women (from the Ibid.)–directly referencing the Enochian writings. Athenagoras, writing in his work called Legatio in about 170 A.D., regards Enoch as a true prophet. He describes the angels which "violated both their own nature and their office." In his writings, he goes into detail about the nature of fallen angels and the cause of their fall, which comes directly from the Enochian writings. Many other church fathers: Tatian (110-172); Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (115-185); Clement of Alexandria (150-220); Tertullian (160-230); Origen (186-255); Lactantius (260-330); in addition to: Methodius of Philippi, Minucius Felix, Commodianus, and Ambrose of Milanalso–also approved of and supported the Enochian writings… One by one the arguments against the Book of Enoch fade away. The day may soon arrive when the final complaints about the Book of Enoch's lack of historicity and "late date" are also silenced by new evidence of the book's real antiquity.
There are interesting similarities between Enoch and the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation contains a blessing for those who read it: Blessed [is] he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time [is] at hand. – Revelation 1:3
And the book of Enoch (1 Enoch) contains a blessing for the people in the end times.
The blessing of Enoch; with which he blessed the elect and the righteous who would be present on the day of tribulation at (the time of) the removal of all the ungodly ones. And Enoch, the blessed and righteous man of the Lord, took up (his parable) while his eyes were open and he saw, and said "(This is) a holy vision from the heavens which the angels showed me; and I heard from them everything and I understood. I look not for this generation but for the distant one that is coming. I speak about the elect ones and concerning them. (The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Volume I, 1 Enoch)
The book of 1 Enoch is difficult to read, like Revelation, for pretty much the same reasons. They both contain many metaphors and diaries of what each saw and heard in the spiritual realm. It seems to me it would be very difficult to describe spiritual realm observations using ancient language terms which were structured to address the physical realm. Both speak of horrific judgments and include timeline benchmarks. The book of Enoch speaks of the end time judgments as well as the Noah flood.
As a sidebar curiosity, 1 Enoch contains various statements which are strangely accurate considering the known age of the manuscript and the language, such as:
Then Uriel showed me another order (concerning) when light is beamed into the moon, from which direction of the bright sun it is beamed. 1 Enoch 78:10
They [sun and moon] do not depart from their orbit, neither increase or decrease it; but they keep faith one with another; in accordance with an oath they set and they rise. – 1 Enoch 41:5
In chapter 18, 1 Enoch describes a place so void it has no measure and no content, a pit "where the heavens come together." He records that the angel explained [v. 14] "this is the ultimate end of heaven and earth; it is the prison house for the stars and the powers of heaven…"
Getting back to the patriarchs, 1 Enoch says that some of the misbehaving angels ("Watchers") were breeding with earth women and creating giants who terrorized the earth. I believe those are the giants referred to in the following Scripture. I believe those horrors compounded the evil wrought by inbreeding and interaction of knowledgeable Adamic man with regular hominids.
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
According to 1 Enoch the giants were made to kill off one another (and by dying, releasing their spirits as demons) and the Watchers who fathered them were dealt with as spiritual beings, bound for later judgment --- but that would leave all the creatures (including hominids) that they had corrupted still needful of destruction.
The wording of the above passage from Genesis 6, especially the phrase "My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also [is] flesh" (emphasis mine) --- causes me to believe the flood was targeted to Adamic man and everything that he (or the Watchers) had corrupted.
Of the Adamic men, only Noah was found just and allowed to survive along with seven other souls (emphasis on the word "souls" i.e. Adamic.)
Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. - I Peter 3:20
These Scriptures suggest a targeted deluge by using the phrase the "breath of life":
And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. - Genesis 2:7
And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein [is] the breath of life, from under heaven; [and] every thing that [is] in the earth shall die. - Genesis 6:17
All in whose nostrils [was] the breath of life, of all that [was] in the dry [land], died. - Genesis 7:22
Also suggesting a targeted flood, the vision in 1 Enoch 89 describes water filling an enclosed area wherein the ark rises. Although we see the evidence of a simultaneous catastrophe worldwide, it seems to me the greatest devastation would be in the areas with the highest concentration of Adamic men. The flood waters in such an area would have risen over the highest boundary so none could escape. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
Again I saw, and behold, fountains were opened upon the ground of the great enclosed area, and the water began to swell and rise upon the ground; and I saw that enclosed area until the whole ground was (completely) covered with water. – 1 Enoch 89:4
Adamic man was given 120 years to clean up his act, but of course, he didn’t. In my view, he knew way too much and by breeding with other hominids and teaching their descendants, he was spreading his knowledge to people who couldn’t handle it. More specifically, I believe they were all using the knowledge in evil, wrongful, self-serving ways.
Because Adam’s descendants still had his special knowledge and dominion over the creatures, I believe they were doing horrible things to the creatures as well (1 Enoch implies as much) and thus they also had to be destroyed. In a nutshell, everything that Adamic man or the Watchers corrupted – whether animal life or environment – had to be utterly destroyed.
The converse would be true. Hominids, creatures and environment that had no contact with either Adamic men or the Watchers would not necessarily have to die in the edict. I suspect the flood was worldwide, but targeted, and I believe the physical evidence is consistent.
Almost every culture on Earth includes an ancient flood story. Details vary, but the basic plot is the same: Deluge kills all but a lucky few. • The story most familiar to many people is the biblical account of Noah and his ark... • Older than Genesis is the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, a king who embarked on a journey to find the secret of immortality… [Gilgamesh lived about 2700 BC but the story was written about 2000 BC] • Ancient Greeks and Romans grew up with the story of Deucalion and Pyhrra, who saved their children and a collection of animals by boarding a vessel shaped like a giant box. • Irish legends talk about Queen Cesair and her court, who sailed for seven years to avoid drowning when the oceans overwhelmed Ireland. • European explorers in the Americas were startled by Indian legends that sounded similar to the story of Noah. Some Spanish priests feared the devil had planted such stories in the Indians’ minds to confuse them.
Various articles agree that water levels rising from the last ice age would have caused global flooding naturally around 7500 BC, but that would predate the Noah flood by most calculations. And although the Sphinx erosion discoveries are interesting, they would also predate the Noah flood - except for the oldest dating for the inception of Adam.
Mainstream Egyptologists reacted with total disbelief when it was proposed that the famous Sphinx was much older than the 4th Dynasty [2500 BC] … This tentative estimate [7000 to 5000 BC] is probably a minimum date; given that weathering rates may proceed non-linearly (the deeper the weathering is, the slower it may progress due to the fact that it is "protected' by the overlying material), the possibility remains open that the initial carving of the Great Sphinx may be even earlier than 9,000 years ago…
Some marine archeologists believe they have discovered evidence of a huge flood in the Black Sea. Many believe this is the flood described in the Bible. By carbon dating, they figure the Black Sea turned from a huge lake into a small sea between 5460 BC and 4820 BC.
The scientists theorize that the Mediterranean Sea swelled about 7000 years ago, causing seawater to push through Turkey, through the narrow Bosporus and hitting the Black Sea with 200 times the force of Niagara Falls.
‘Home of Noah’ is found 300 ft. below Black Sea
For me, the Black Sea flood is still too old. By my calculation, the Biblical flood was at 1656 years from Adam’s banishment at 3761 BC based on the Jewish calendar which says we are at year 5762. That would put the flood at about 2105 BC. But here comes the caveat and the reason the book of Revelation is important to my understanding …
I know that my estimate must be wrong because we are not permitted to know the date of Christ’s return But of that day and hour knoweth no [man], no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. - Matthew 24:36
My estimate has an unknowable error if the 7000 year timeline of 2 Enoch is divinely inspired. The book of 2 Enoch (a different manuscript) says that eternity sets in after 7000 years:
An entirely different Enoch manuscript has survived in the Slavonic language. This text, dubbed "2 Enoch" and commonly called "the Slavonic Enoch," was discovered in 1886 by a professor Sokolov in the archives of the Belgrade Public Library. It appears that just as the Ethiopic Enoch ("1 Enoch") had escaped the sixth-century Church suppression of Enoch texts in the Mediterranean area, so a Slavonic Enoch had survived far away, long after the originals from which it was copied were destroyed or hidden away. Specialists in the Enochian texts surmise that the missing original form which the Slavonic was copied was probably a Greek manuscript. This may have been, in turn, based on a Hebrew or Aramaic manuscript…. One of the most fascinating passages of the Slavonic Enoch is the account of the dramatization of eternity found in Chapter 33. As the world was made in six days, so its history would be accomplished in 6,000 years, and this would be followed by 1,000 years of rest, when the balance of conflicting moral forces has been struck and human life has reached the ideal state. (A reference of this conflict is also found in The War Scroll, a future battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. These writings were recently discovered in Qumran Cave 1, which are part of the collection of The Dead Sea Scrolls). At the close of this 7,000 year cycle would begin the 8th Eternal Day, when time should be no more…
I believe the 1000 year reign of Christ on physical earth (Revelation 20:2-3) is the seventh thousand referred to in 2 Enoch, because it precedes the eternal, new heaven and earth (Revelation 21.)
Therefore, if my calculation were correct, the Christ millenium would be 238 years away from today. But since we cannot know the date of Christ’s return, I must therefore be wrong, and it would be less. It could also be more, but I doubt it because of other "signs of the times."
Moreover, a widely accepted method of dating – the Masoretic, Ussher method - disagrees with the Jewish calendar, and sets the Adamic inception date at 4004 BC instead of 3761 BC. If that date were correct, the flood would have occurred at 2348 BC and we would have already used up those 6000 years and Christ’s return would be slightly overdue by 6 years. So that number is not quite correct either.
Therefore, I suspect the true date of the Noah flood is somewhere between 2438 BC and 2105 BC and anticipate evidence dating to that time range.
I further expect the primary evidence to be geological in nature as it would record multiple catastrophes, such as earthquakes, sudden changes in elevation or climate - all indicative that a particular area was specially "targeted." I believe that God would have used such catastrophes to focus the devastation to utterly annihilate everything touched by the Watchers or Adamic man. There is such evidence:
COMETS AND DISASTER IN THE BRONZE AGE From: BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGY, Journal of the Council for British Archaeology, December 1997 At some time around 2300 BC, give or take a century or two, a large number of the major civilisations of the world collapsed, simultaneously it seems. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age civilisation in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilisation in India, the Hilmand civilisation in Afghanistan and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilisations in the world - all fell into ruin at more or less the same time. Why? … Some decades ago, the hunt for clues passed largely into the hands of natural scientists. Concentrating on the earlier set of Bronze Age collapses, researchers began to find a range of evidence that suggested that natural causes rather than human actions, may have been initially responsible. There began to be talk of climate change, volcanic activity, and earthquakes - and some of this material has now found its way into standard historical accounts of the period. Agreement, however, there has never been. Some researchers favoured one type of natural cause, others favoured another, and the problem remained that no single explanation appeared to account for all the evidence…. The hunt for natural causes for these human disasters began when the Frenchman Claude Schaeffer, one of the leading archaeologists of his time, published his book 'Stratigraphie Comparee et Chronologie L'Asie Occidentale' in 1948. Schaeffer analysed and compared the destruction layers of more than 40 archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East, from Troy to Tepe Hissar on the Caspian Sea and from the Levant to Mesopotamia. He was the first scholar to detect that all had been totally destroyed several times in the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age, apparently simultaneously. Since the damage was far too excessive and did not show signs of military or human involvement, he argued that repeated earthquakes might have been responsible for these events. At the time he published, Schaeffer was not taken seriously by the world of archaeology. Since then, however, natural scientists have found widespread and unambiguous evidence for abrupt climate change, sudden sea level changes, catastrophic inundations, widespread seismic activity and evidence for massive volcanic activity at several periods since the last Ice Age, but particularly at around 2200BC, give or take 200 years. Areas such as the Sahara, or around the Dead Sea, were once farmed but became deserts. Tree rings show disastrous growth conditions at c 2350BC, while sediment cores from lakes and rivers in Europe and Africa show a catastrophic drop in water levels at this time. In Mesopotamia, vast areas of land appear to have been devastated, inundated, or totally burned... Yet what was the cause of these earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, fire-blasts and climate changes? By the late 1970s, British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier of Oxford University had begun to investigate cometary impact as the ultimate cause. Then in 1980, the Nobel prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez and his colleagues published their famous paper in 'Science' that argued that a cosmic impact had led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.. He showed that large amounts of the element iridium present in geological layers dating from about 65 million BC had a cosmic origin. Alvarez's paper had immense influence and stimulated further research by such British astronomers as Clube and Napier, Prof Mark Bailey of the Armagh Observatory, Duncan Steel of Spaceguard Australia, and Britain's best known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. All now support the theory of cometary impact and loosely form what is now known as the British School of Coherent Catastrophism. These scholars envisage trains of cometary debris which repeatedly encounter the Earth. We know that tiny particles of cosmic material penetrate the atmosphere every day, but their impact is insignificant. Occasionally, however, cosmic debris measuring between one and several hundred metres in diametre strike the Earth and these can have catastrophic effects on our ecological system, through multimegaton explosions of fireballs which destroy natural and cultural features on the surface of the Earth by means of tidal-wave floods (if the debris lands in the sea), fire blasts and seismic damage… The extent to which past cometary impacts were responsible for civilisation collapse, cultural change, even the development of religion, must remain a hypothesis. But in view of the astronomical, geological and archaeological evidence, this 'giant comet' hypothesis should no longer be dismissed by archaeologists out of hand.
The dates given in the Old Testament are relative to the inception of Adam on earth and are in dispute in different manuscripts. I’m sure the anomaly is to keep us from being able to calculate the date of Christ’s return - but as a result, there are various different methods for estimating the Noah flood date. The possible Adamic inception dates range all the way back to 12,028 BC. The oldest would allow for some Sphinx erosion along with the Noah flood; some of the others would allow for the Black Sea being illustrative of the Noah flood. Of course, if any of the older ones were true it would be fatal to the authenticity of 2 Enoch but not necessarily 1 Enoch.
I believe the Adamic survivors of the flood, Noah and his descendants - still remembered some of the original "tongues" (sounds) as described in my "take" on origins. I believe they were attempting to find their own way back home to the spiritual realm by building the Tower of Babel. Notice how they are referred to as "children of men" in the following scripture. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
Once he lost the language, Adamic man lost most of his knowledge and power and continuing to inbreed, he would have lost his ability to retard aging and therefore, after the flood, Adamic men began dying at a younger age, more like the regular hominids.
But Adamic man still knew he was different, he had the desire to ascend and thus was constantly looking for a way to avoid death, to find a higher existence, a spiritual realm, a oneness. But being out of fellowship with God and no doubt confused, his answer was to make idols, household gods, gaze at the stars, fantasize, etc. This probably fed a whole series of strange religions.
I wondered what made Abraham break rank and, to my delight, I discovered in one of the Pseudepigrapha texts a story that "rings true." To sum it up, Abraham dropped one of his father’s household gods in the fire and of course it burned to ash. Abraham mocked the false idol, but his father praised it and said he’d make another.
But you made him with an axe and by your skill he was made a god. And behold he has already dried up and his fatness has perished…
The Bible begins the story of Abraham at the point where God tells him to get away from his father:
Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
And there established grace though faith as the method of returning home to the spiritual realm:
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: [it is] the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast - Ephesians 2:8-9 By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went
Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.
Jesus answered, If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God:
Seth 130 to 1042
Enosh 235 to 1140
Kenan 325 to 1235
Mahalalel 395 to 1290
Jared 460 to 1422
Enoch 622 to 987*
Methusela 687 to 1656
Lamech 874 to 1634
Noah 1065 to
Shem 1558 to 2158
Arpashad 1658 to 2096
Shelah 1693 to 2120
Eber 1723 to 2187
Peleg 1757 to 1996
Reu 1787 to 2026
Serug 1819 to 2049
Nahor 1849 to 1997
Terah 1878 to 2083
Abraham 1948 to 2123
Then we which are alive [and] remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. – I Thessalonians 4:16-17
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they [were] fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also [is] flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown.
And GOD saw that the wickedness of man [was] great in the earth, and [that] every imagination of the thoughts of his heart [was] only evil continually
And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. – Genesis 6:1-8
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that [were] under the whole heaven, were covered.
Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. Genesis 7:18-20
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top [may reach] unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the LORD said, Behold, the people [is] one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. - Genesis 11
And you say, Let me make another and tomorrow he will make my food for me…
And it came to pass as I was thinking things like these with regard to my father Terah in the court of my house, the voice of the Mighty One came down from the heavens in a stream of fire, saying and calling, "Abraham, Abraham!"
And I said "Here I am." And he said, "You are searching for the God of gods, the Creator, in the understanding of your heart. I am he…" – Apocalypse of Abraham
And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. – Genesis 12:1-3
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as [in] a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:
For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker [is] God. – Hebrews 11:8-10
Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.
And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, [saying], In thee shall all nations be blessed.
So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham. Galatians 3:6-9
Yet ye have not known him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying
Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw [it], and was glad.
Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. – John 8:54-58
The gosples have an unusual account of this period that wracks my brain as to it's meaning.
2 Peter 3:3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
My reading of this leads me to wonder if we may live in a completely changed world than the one inhabited by Noah.
When we read that the earth will melt with a ferverent heat, that the elements will melt, I take that to mean that we will go through yet another changing, a new heaven, and a new earth, the same yet changed, and mankind seems to be able to survive this change, a new universe overlaying and replacing the old, yet again?
FWIW, I place Eden in the spiritual realm because of the location attributed to the tree of life as follows:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. - Revelation 2:7
the infowarrior
If I understand it correctly, you are suggesting that the universe would be altogether new after Noah and then made new again in the final judgment.
I don't see how there could ever be a genetic clone of God. In my view, genetic material (like space and time) is part of creation and not something by or in which the Creator exists.
the infowarrior
There are several reasons for the antediluvian lifespans: one had to do with the vast proliferation of pathogens in the world due to the radiation unleashed on the world at the time of the flood; the stress on the human immune system prior to the flood was simply never as great as it is now.
Another had to do with gravity. Gravity is simply the most major form of stress on our bodies, and the same attenuation of gravity which allowed the gigantic animals which lived prior to the flood ( a brachiosaur would simply be crushed by its own weight in our present world) eliminated most of the physical stress which we experience now.
There is no real knowing what the word "year" meant prior to the flood but you don't need to know that to comprehend that antediluvians were biologically different from us as regards lifespans. The natural ratio of maturity to lifespan in our present world is something like 1 - 4; in the antediluvian world in which men were marrying and having first children at 70 and then living to 900, that ratio was more like 1 - 13 or so.
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.
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