The timeline of the Bible

Wow, Rrhain! Your patience is amazing!What is it, Peg, that blinds you to the obvious so terribly? You've made up your mind, so now it's unchangeable? Or you just can't force yourself to say "Oh, I see now!"? Or the Cousin of Morton's Demon has you in his grip? Peg, you need to explain how to decide which parts of this biblical timeline are literal, while other parts are figurative. It's confusing to we uninitiated.

That's certainly the simplest "plain reading" of the text, and compatible with what else we know of middle eastern cosmology from the olden times.

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

That "obviously" doesn't appear to belong there, Kbertsche. Our planet was not a "planet," a "wanderer," to any of the ancient middle easterners. It was where we lived, and was variously set on pillars or foundations or "suspended on nothing," but appears, in all cosmology from around there, to have been surrounded by water. Perhaps there was a turtle or two below the surface of that water, but there is no hint of anything resembling a planet, whether in ancient or in modern language.

Truer words have never been typed.As I think Rrhain has already mentioned, why don't we spend this much energy on a chronology of, say, the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? It's better reading, for the most part! Rrhain has already, over 100 posts ago, clearly won the debate about the Biblical chronologies showing that Bishop Ussher was essentially right.The Bible is a YEC document that contradicts reality. So yeah, "chronological nonsense" sums it up nicely.

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

The one problem with that is that a large number of those guys in the lists of "begats" show up only in those lists. We aren't told that they ever did more than beget some other nobody who eventually begat his way to a somebody.