Evidence for the Biblical Record

Do you have any citations for that? And independent evidence as well? I think you may not have understood my point: the oldest written Hebrew that we know of is not as old as the oldest written Phoenician (whose writing system was adapted for use by the Hebrews); likewise, the oldest known Sumerian cuneiform and the oldest known Egyption hieroglyphs are older than the oldest known Hebrew.Archaeological and historical linguistic research has established that Hebrew derives from the same source as (but is slightly more recent than) Phoenician, and there are clearly differences between Phoenician and Hebrew. The research also shows that the Egyptian of the oldest hieroglyphs, and the Sumerian of the oldest cuneiform, were each distinct languages, quite different from one another (and from Phoenician and Hebrew), with different sound systems, different lexicons, different inflectional patterns on words, and different sentence structure.Now, if those those other writing systems existed before the "Babel event" supposedly took place, this clearly means that people were already speaking different languages before God got around to "confounding" them. The chronology you presented earlier for Babel (based on implausible dates for Peleg), combined with the known archaeological ages for cuneiform and hieroglyphics, leaves us with no other conclusion.Maybe, like the flood, this supposed "global" effect was actually just local... (i.e. the people involved in the "rebellion" might in fact have been speaking a single language, but lots of other people, in far-flung places, were not involved, and were already speaking other languages). But it really makes no sense under any interpretation -- until you decide to interpret it as a parable or fable or myth or allegory or... anything but history.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Surely, there is some extra-biblical evidence of a mass of holy men raising from the dead, yes? Surely someone else wrote about this event.......

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"Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Othersfor example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einsteinconsidered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws."-Carl Sagan"Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God." -Desmond Tutu

"That we know of"....yes, that may be the case, however it could also be circumstantial. If Hebrew really is the oldest, then its possible that the very oldest writings simply are too old to exist...or havent been found yet. Moses got information about Adam from, what he called, 'The book of Adams history' Pheneocian is a subgroup of the canaanite language. Canaan was Noahs grandson from Ham. This makes both pheneocian and canaanite younger then hebrew.I know you dont want biblical evidence, however Moses was able to get the names of the generations of mankind after Adam from somewhere. He called his reference 'the book of Adams history' This is not available anymore but it was obviously still around 4,000 years ago. dating methods can be flawed and not give accurate dates. Who's to say their dating of these languages is accurate? Can they prove accuracy? I dont think so. That is not my opinion. The bible is a record of human history not found anywhere else, it provides answers to questions not found anywhere else. It is in harmony with historical facts and time and again archeology digs up places and people whom critics have denied existed. This is why many people do accept the bibles history as fact.

Phoenician is a Semetic not Hametic Language

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

You will get the same responses I get to this question. Usually silence, but some will try bringing up 2nd and 3rd century sources. Evangelicals and Fundies evidently have trouble understanding the terms contemporary and extra-biblical.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

I'm going to mention Noah's Flood again, and then I'm going to giggle.Like my ass is it in harmony with historical fact. It is known, for certain, to be wrong.

Creation account? Global flood? Exodus? Timelines of certain people not lining up with the Biblical account (Philistines as one example), Herod slaughtering the innocents? Roman census? Dead walking out of their graves? Romans releasing a murderer to appease a crowd? Do false prophecies count (ignoring the typical mental gymnastics apologists need in order to make the problems disappear regarding prophecy, ie fall of Tyre)?These are just a few I can think of. Edited by hERICtic, : No reason given.

Sorry, but that doesn't fly. Can you present some sort of evidence that makes your assertion regarding the antiquity of Hebrew more likely than the conclusions drawn by professionals studying actual texts, archeological finds, etc.? If not, then to simply claim that "they could be wrong" carries no weight. What evidence do you have that the commonly accepted dates and relationships of Egyptian, Phoenician and Hebrew are wrong? Other than simply that you don't like these facts?

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John LydonWhat's the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a new puppy? The puppy eventually grows up and quits whining.
-Steven Dutch

Would such all-encompassing answers include the invention of the Mayan and Aztec calendars, the methods used in creating corn and potatoes from the original wild forms, and the full extent of the entire history of China?It appears the Bible may be more a local history, than a global history, and recent scholarship indicates a somewhat less than infallible source of even local history at that.Cheering the home team is nothing more than provincialism, it is not in any way related to a self-examined life.

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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman RushdieThis rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. - the character Rorschach in Watchmen

I like it

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Well, let's compare that to the Bible: it can be flawed and does not give accurate dates. Which source is able to quantify the range of its potential inaccuracy more carefully? In science, this range of inaccuracy is called the "margin of error", or the "confidence interval", and is usually measured in single-digit percentages. Please read RAZD's posts about the correlations among dating methods, in the "Dates and Dating" forum.Oh, and in case you want to claim that the Bible cannot be flawed, there is this one fundamental problem with that notion: every Bible in use today is a translation, and translations are imperfect. They always are. And whose fault is that? If we go with the Bible as "history", it's God's fault -- it was His idea to confound humans by scrambling their language. So the "divine wisdom" of the Babel event was to ensure that the Word of God would become immediately incomprehensible to most of the people alive in the world in that age, and to make sure that it would remain imperfectly perceived for the rest of time! Nice job.The Babel story, when you follow up to understand its consequences, represents a colossal blunder on God's part. Somebody (i.e. God, or rather, the person who cast this mythological fable into the OT scripture) really was not thinking this thing through very well at all.One last little diversion: in trying to find information about the relative ancestry of Semitic languages, I found this curious tidbit at National Geographic: National Geographic - 404Be sure to read both pages. Bottom line, as it applies to this thread: the form of Hebrew found in OT scriptures is different from a clearly attested form of a clearly related (parent) language, from which both Phoenician and Classical Hebrew are derived. Prior to any putative time frame for the Babel event, languages were already differentiated, and language change over time was already documented across independent historical and archaeological records, so the supposed effect of the Babel event was already in evidence well before the event could have occurred (not to mention that there really is no clear, independent physical evidence for the event).The Babel story as presented in the OT does not stand up as history, period -- quite apart from the fact that it makes no sense.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

And just how is this word pronounced?

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

Peg, No science is ever absolutely perfect. Anything that is right 99% of the time isn't perfect but it can still be highly accurate and very reliable. Absolute proof is for math, not science.But denial of science isn't helping you here. When different cultures have unbroken histories that run back before the tower of Babel story, who needs a dating method? When you can see their distinct languages, you can see the Babel story is wrong. When you look at how many distinct languages developed during recorded history and that had nothing to do with God, you see that the Babel story makes no sense. The entire story is ridiculous - if read literally.However, if one were to read the tower of Babel story metaphorically, they would see the lessons that are contained within and it makes sense.Edit, just wanted to address this, You're right that the bible provides answers to questions - but the problem is that it keeps giving wrong answers. And after these wrong answers are given, believers typically stop asking questions. And so begins the vicious cycle of religious ignorance.And if someone was to write a book of lies, they would still get all the names of people and places right. Why wouldn't they? So when the bible is correct about the names of cities and rulers, that doesn't mean that snakes can talk and people can walk on water or live in a whale for 3 days. If I said that the USA exists, Obama is its president, and I can fly - just because I was right the first 2 times doesn't mean I can fly. Edited by rockondon, : Addressed another point

Hi, I have enjoy silently lurking this forum =) (for a while) but I do have a few question in regards to the following comment. This is an incorrect way to interpret this word.The word "船(chun)" should be separate by left and right, not into 3 parts.Left side is "舟(zhōu)", which is the word use for boat (usually for small size) and ,in this case, the right side is known to be "形聲(xng shēng)" (a method use by many Chinese character to pronouns a word).The reason this is stated is because in "說文解字(Shuowen Jiezi)" the word 沿(yn)，鉛(qiān)，船(chun) (notice the similarity on the right side of the Chinese character) are categorized by separating the word left and right and not by separating into three parts.Another question is there are many word to describe ship, why only choose one and explore on it?
舟,舡,舲,船,舼,舩,艒,艖,艭,艦,舠,舺,舫,舶,艇,舸,艑,艓,艚.
Any of the above word can mean ship in Chinese literature.I was looking around and found this No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.yutopian.com/religion/words/, I am not sure if this is the source of your information? Without going deeper in to the actual word one obvious question cross me when I was reading. By what standard did the author define the stroke as a "(breath of) life"? I am deeply trouble and would like some clarification.I want to apologize for any error I have with English, as anyone could have guessed by now it is not my native language.Regards,WK

Hello wkward and welcome to EvC! Thanks for that explanation! Should make it very clear that Peg's arguments are based on nothing (in this case, at least)Now, some of the questions you asked: Because that was probably the only one they could twist enough to make it look like there was some merit to Noah's story. You'll tend to see that alot with apologetics. There's probably none, beyond the same fact of what I said above. They just twist it to suit what they want it to say, and rely on the ignorance of the people they tell it to (I mean, how many people can read Chinese? Aside from actual Chinese people that is). Again, that's what apologetics do. They twist everything to suit their goal, which is to convince ignorant people of the accuracy of their pet belief system (in this case aparticular interpretation of Christianity). I understood it perfectly, doesn't seem to be any problems with it so far.