Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 65 (9162 total)
5 online now:
Newest Member: popoi
Post Volume: Total: 915,815 Year: 3,072/9,624 Month: 917/1,588 Week: 100/223 Day: 11/17 Hour: 0/0


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   Why did Noah's descendents forsake God so quickly?
Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 9 of 74 (529911)
10-11-2009 2:25 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Izanagi
10-10-2009 12:41 PM


Izanagi writes:
quote:
So how can anyone explain this apparent immediate forsaking of a belief in God whose power was proven just a few hundred years prior?
Because the Bible, itself, doesn't remember its previously established facts. This is not surprising considering that it is a text that is cobbled together from multiple authors, redacted by yet others, and edited further by still others.
Specifically, Genesis 9 describes the blessing of Noah's family by god and the establishment of a covenant that god will never repeat his mistake of killing everybody.
But then in Genesis 10, we see the following passages:
10:5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.
Wait a second. "Gentiles"? What gentiles? Where did these gentiles come from? Same place as Cain's wife, I guess. There were no gentiles because the only people on earth were descendants of Noah.
And what was this about different tongues? The tongues won't be split until Genesis 11. This isn't a random comment for Gen 10 repeats it:
10:20 These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.
10:31 These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.
So why is it that just two verses after that last claim of different languages, Genesis goes on to say that "the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech"?
Simple: These texts really don't have anything to do with each other.

Rrhain

Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Izanagi, posted 10-10-2009 12:41 PM Izanagi has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 11 by Peg, posted 10-11-2009 7:48 AM Rrhain has replied

  
Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 16 of 74 (530050)
10-12-2009 2:11 AM
Reply to: Message 11 by Peg
10-11-2009 7:48 AM


Peg responds to me:
quote:
Genesis 10:5 does not read like that in all bibles.
So what makes you think your translation is any better? The word used in Gen 10:5 is "ha.go.yim." This means a nation or people, but mostly those who either aren't Jewish, are descendents of Abraham, or with regard to Israel. None of those other meanings make sense given what was established in Genesis 9. Abraham and Israel didn't exist yet.
And that's the point you are missing: Genesis 10 is describing events that cannot happen due to things that were established in Genesis 9. But if we abandon the idea that this text was a free-flowing, single piece of work, it starts to make sense.
quote:
Verse 1 explains it in the first few words:
And this is the history of Noahfs sons, Shem, Ham and Ja‘pheth.
What does that have to do with language? The languages won't be split until Gen 11 and here Gen 10 is already saying these people are speaking other languages. In fact, Genesis 11 mentions a specific city that was built by people listed in Genesis 10.
But since Gen 11 starts off by specifically saying that there was only one language in the entire world, then Gen 10 makes no sense.
quote:
Genesis is made up of scrolls. Individual scrolls of many different subjects.
Nice try, but that's my point to you: The reason why these texts have so many internal contradictions, why it cannot hold a single thought in its head for any length of time...somtimes losing track of what it had just said within a single sentence...is because these texts don't have anything to do with each other.
quote:
When reading the bible, its not good to be of the mindset that the writers wrote a novel. They didnt write like that.
You're making my point again: These texts don't have anything to do with each other. The Bible isn't a single, coherent piece of work. It's as if a whirlwind wandered through a library and someone randomly gathered up sheets and tried to make some sense of the pages found.
quote:
the orignal writers did not write it to ever be as a book.
This sentence shows you have no concept of the history of the Torah at least. It was an oral history. It was never "written" to begin with. Eventually, it was.
That fact, however, is irrelevant. Whether or not the story is written down or is sung by the Cantor, there is an order and progression to the passages. The first words are "In the beginning" and not "and there was evening and there was morning." Unless we accept the fact that it was cobbled together from multiple sources, bringing vastly different storylines together, we will continually to try and tell people that obviously contradictory statements are actually in perfect confluence.

Rrhain

Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by Peg, posted 10-11-2009 7:48 AM Peg has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 20 by Peg, posted 10-12-2009 4:43 AM Rrhain has replied

  
Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 71 of 74 (530809)
10-15-2009 2:58 AM
Reply to: Message 20 by Peg
10-12-2009 4:43 AM


Peg responds to me:
quote:
the problem with the word 'gentile' being used there is that the ancient hebrews called people from other nations 'Pagans' not gentiles. Gentile was a word that came many centuries later.
Irrelevant. Whether they called these other people "gentiles," "pagans," or "Mary Sue," the point you seem to be deliberately trying to avoid is that these other people couldn't possibly exist because all the people who existed came from Noah.
quote:
and if you look at wikipedia
Now, you know better than that. Wikipedia is not a source. At best, it's a place to start researching, but it is not any authority.
But again, you're missing the point. It doesn't matter what word was used to describe these other people. According to the events established in Gen 9, these other people literally do not exist because everybody died in the flood and Noah is now the patriarch of all humanity.
quote:
because its accurate and doesnt give the strange impression that the writer of genesis stuffed up some how.
But they clearly did. The word used to describe these people is irrelevant. The events established previous indicate that everybody on the planet died except for 8 people. None of these other people be they "pagans" or "maritime peoples" or "Susan" are in existence.
Everybody's dead.
But, as is typical for the Bible in general and Genesis in particular, the narrative has forgotten what has come before.
That is because this story literally has nothing to do with what came before. It was written by a different author at a different time to tell a different story. For crying out loud, the story of Noah's flood changes authors and stories in mid-sentence!
So it is not surprising at all to find that Gen 10 makes absolutely no sense given what happened in Gen 9.
It has nothing to do with it.
quote:
if you took a collection of steven kings novels and combined them into 1 novel continuous novel, what sort of sense do you think it will make if you tried to read it like 1 novel? It would make very little sense.
THAT'S MY POINT!
I don't know how else to say it to make it clearer to you: The Bible is literally equivalent to pulling out a chapter from dozens of books that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, shuffling them together in no particular order, sometimes even interleaving pages and even actual sentences together, and pretending that it makes some sort of sense.
It is the closest you can get to gibberish without being actual word salad.
quote:
For the same reason you cant read Genesis like a novel...its a combination of several different books.
THAT'S MY POINT!
When a sentence literally starts with one author and story and ends with a different author and story, the resulting passage is not rational. It is gibberish.
quote:
You need to read them individually on their own merit.
But that still doesn't help anything. We can unfold the two stories of Noah that are described in Gen 6-9, but that doesn't make them meritorious. At least one of them is a crock of shit because IT'S A DIFFERENT STORY BY A DIFFERENT AUTHOR WHO HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE OTHER ONE.
The fact that you can write a story about John and Marsha and I can write a story about John and Marsha completely independently of you and someone else can literally shuffle those two stories together such that one sentence starts with my words and ends with yours doesn't mean that there is anything of merit in that pile of gibberish.
quote:
One does not necesarily begin where the previous one left off. Its not chronological.
THAT'S MY POINT!
The reason why the text jumps around in such bizarre, schizophrenic ways is because the text was literally not written by a single person but rather but multiple people who had nothing to do with each other and had their stories cobbled together but a bunch of fools.
The text is as close as you can get to gibberish without being word salad.
quote:
if you know that then why are you critisizing it for not being in logical order.
Because the reason why it isn't in any logical order is because there is no coherency to the text of any kind. None of the passages have anything to do with each other. That's why the story of Noah is told twice. Ever notice that Noah gets on the ark twice? The animals get on the ark twice in different ways? The flood happens twice? The ark lands twice? Land is found twice? They leave the ark twice? That's because there are literally two different stories being told by two different people who had absolutely nothing to do with each other and had their work literally shuffled together, sometimes with a sentence starting with one and ending with another, and turning into a completely incoherent mess.
So of course it can't be read chronologically. That's because the individual pieces literally have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The are completely separate, isolated fragments of multiple oral traditions that were cobbled together.
That's why Gen 1 and Gen 2 contradict each other. They're two different stories told by two different people. That's why the god of Gen 1 is a polytheistic god (since that is where Judaism came from) while the god of Gen 2 is a monotheistic god.
The reason why Gen 10 makes no sense with regard to events established in Gen 9 is not because of a chronological skip but rather because Gen 10 is from a completely different author who had absolutely nothing to do with Gen 9 but had his work shoved in after and now we're all supposed to pretend that something coherent was done.
quote:
The books were placed in the order they are in by early translators...they didnt know the order that moses wrote them
But Moses didn't write the Torah. It contains a description of his funeral. It is impossible to write about your own funeral.
The Torah was written but multiple, unknown authors, none of whom had anything to do with each other, cobbled together by some priests, and then redacted.
No wonder it's gibberish.
quote:
he didnt number them, the translators did.
Who cares about numbers? I know there are no chapters or verses in the Torah. That's irrelevant. The point is that the text makes no sense.
It is the closest you can get to gibberish without being actual word salad.

Rrhain

Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 20 by Peg, posted 10-12-2009 4:43 AM Peg has not replied

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024