Lam,
I know you were asking about biblical, but I found this bit of info interesting and thought you might.
During my journey backwards through religion (Protestant-Catholic-Judasim) I found the book "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Judaism" by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, to be interesting.
Per the Rabbi the Jews don't claim the earth is only 6000 years old. Here is an excerpt.
quote:
Jews were always careful to stress that the calendar count starts not from the "first day" of Creation but from the "sixth." What's the big deal? you ask. Why make such a to-do over less than a week? Because, Jewish philosophers long ago explained, when the Bible speaks of "days" in the story of Creation, it obviously doesn't refer to the 24-hour periods of time we speak of today based on the relationship between the Earth and the sun. The Bible says the sun wasn't created until the fourth "day." Biblical "days" before man appeared on Earth weren't days as they would come to be defined by people. They were periods of time, states in the process of the world's development.
From the divine perspective they were as fleeting as a "day," but we would subsequently discover they really lasted for billions of years. That's why Jews aren't troubled by the apparent contradition between archeologists and the Jewish calendar. The world is much older than we are--and, just like Jack Benny, we like to count birthdays in a way that reminds us that we're much younger.
So I guess the question is, if in general the Jews don't consider the Earth to be only 6000 yrs old, why do some Christians?
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