The Origin of Speeches? or just the collapse of Uruk?
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I've wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11.
But in "Linguistic Confusion and the Tower of Babel", National Catholic Register 6/21/2023, Dave Armstrong argues that the usual interpretation of the Tower of Babel story is simply a mistake, due to a bad job of sense disambiguation:
[T]he Hebrew word for “earth” (eretz) can mean many things, including the entire world (e.g., Genesis 1:1, 15; 2:1, 4), but also things like the “land” or “ground” of countries, such as Egypt (eretz mitzrayim) and Canaan (eretz kana’an), the dry land (Genesis 1:10), and ground from which seeds grow (Genesis 1:12). The New American Standard Bible translates eretz: country or countries 59 times, ground 119 times, land 1638 times; compare to earth, 656 instances, and world (3).
And, he argues,
The context indicates very strongly that Genesis 11 is not talking about the entire earth, but rather, the land which is described repeatedly as the place where the events occur: southern Mesopotamia, or Sumer, as it was known at the proposed period of history.
So he goes on to suggest that what really happened was the transition from a mono-ethnic (or at least mono-linguistic) culture, where everyone spoke (or at least understood) Sumerian, to an infiltration of other languages such as Akkadian, associated with the collapse of the Uruk culture.
I'm not sure that Armstrong can make the timeline work. But his proposed interpretation seems more plausible than the idea that humans everywhere spoke the same language before about 3000 BC, or even that there were no humans anywhere else on earth before that post-Babel dispersion.
Armstrong's version seems to make Genesis 11 much more pedestrian — no longer the explanation for world-wide linguistic diversity, but just the story of a specific culture's disintegration. Though Armstrong's last sentence proposes a partial restoration of the chapter's importance:
It may be identifying Babel or Shinar as the place where the dispersion of people began.
Which is pretty strongly contradicted by archeological evidence, I should think — so maybe there's still a place for an empirical argument about "wrathful dispersion theory".
Some relevant past LLOG posts:
"Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings", 5/5/2005
"Chomsky testifies in Kansas", 5/6/2005
"Wrathful Dispersion Theory", 12/2/2005
"Creationist Linguistics", 7/1/2007
"The science and theology of global language change", 12/30/2007
"Mailbag: The comparative theology of linguistic diversity", 12/31/2007
"The origin of speeches: Wrathful dispersion for real?", 12/31/2007
"Scientific Babelism", 4/1/2013
"'We should not have brought a linguist'",
"Edenics", 11/1/2013
"Linguists' Babel myth?", 9/8/2022
Daphne Preston-Kendal said,
June 23, 2023 @ 1:06 pm
> I've wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11.
I think we’re just small enough to be (mercifully) off the radar of such people. Nobody is teaching historical linguistics in school in any meaningful way, and as a society we’re seemingly perfectly happy to let people wander round with misconceptions about the history of English in their heads which are on the scale of dinosaurs-and-humans-coinhabiting-the-Earth beliefs about natural history in terms of their wrongness.
I’m not sure this is wrong, either – much as I would like to see more people introduced to Latin or (especially, even preferably) Greek or Sanskrit as part of their secondary education.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 23, 2023 @ 1:24 pm
I don't see any conflict, since wrathful-dispersionism is one parsimonious way to reconcile the intuitive likelihood of human language first arising via monogenesis rather than polygenesis with the discipline's utter inability to reconstruct proto-World and its probable inability to even reconstruct "Nostratic" with a degree of plausibility that will convince skeptics who claim to be entirely secular in their worldview.
There are, as I understand it, lots of people who would self-identify as viewing the Bible as inerrant who have convinced themselves that the apparent timeline that some have worked out (not always with the same exact results!) from some of the genealogical material need not be taken literally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism is a useful category precisely because there's also a thing called "old Earth creationism" which does not take the apparent timeline literally but still "holds literal interpretations of Genesis that are compatible with the scientifically determined ages of the Earth." It's easy enough for a parallel movement within wrathful-dispersionism to accept that the Babel event (giving sudden rise to rival proto-languages that cannot be shown to be related to each other) occurred long enough ago to be compatible with whatever minimum time depth secular historical linguistics would assume that proto-Semitic and proto-Sino-Tibetan and proto-Pama-Nyungan (or whatever) must have diverged by.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 23, 2023 @ 4:25 pm
Separately, not only did pre-20th-century English translators understand that "eretz" had a range of meanings and thus should be translated by different English words in different contexts,* the lengthy traditional (rabbinical and even pre-rabbinical) of exegesis of the Hebrew text conducted in Hebrew by those with a good working knowledge of Hebrew was no doubt likewise keenly aware of the range of meanings of the word. Did any pre-modern exegete or commentator in that tradition ever suggest that a narrower scope than "whole earth" was the correct scope of the word in the Babel story?
*E.g., the Hebrew translated in the KJV in the Babel story as "the whole earth" is identical (modulo a preposition) to the Hebrew of Job 42:15 that comes out in the KJV as "in all the land," which is where "no women [were] found so fair as the daughters of Job." The possibility that there were in fact even fairer women out there in some more remote part of the planet not immediately salient to the Job narrative is thus left open.
Jenny Chu said,
June 23, 2023 @ 10:48 pm
I don't know anything of the languages involved, but I'm also wondering if there was some sort of idiom or fixed phrase involved – like, when I ask my kid, "Where on earth did you get that?" I'm not actually suggesting that he circumnavigated the globe just to get that item.
Colin Watson said,
June 24, 2023 @ 12:03 pm
J.W. Brewer: I don't of course have an exhaustive grasp, but skimming through the principal rabbinic commentaries on the relevant verses, they generally seem to assume that it meant the whole world. I can think of two reasons to support this. Firstly, Genesis 11 consistently says "kol ha-aretz" (all the earth), not merely "eretz" (earth/land), and a rabbinic principle was generally that every word of Torah was meaningful: if it went out of its way to say "all" like that, that would have steered the Rabbis towards a broad interpretation. Secondly, contrary to Armstrong's assertion that the context makes it clear that this section is talking only about a particular region, the Babel story immediately follows the Flood, ending with "ume'ele nifr'du ha-goyim ba-aretz achad ha-mabbul" (from these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood"; it would seem surprising for the Rabbis to assume that the very next verse were talking about a narrower region when it used a broader term.
Colin Watson said,
June 24, 2023 @ 12:26 pm
Incidentally, while Armstrong and I certainly wouldn't see eye to eye, I don't think he's a biblical inerrantist. It would be surprising for a Catholic, to start with. But also, I hadn't heard of him before so I had a look around, and I found https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2023/04/when-was-the-exodus-15th-or-13th-century-b-c.html in which he writes: "It seems to me, at the very least, that at least some, if not many numbers in the Bible cannot be interpreted literally; nor were they intended to be literal. The seeming clashes of chronologies suggest non-literal, symbolic usage somewhere. Solutions to these difficulties for those who believe in an inspired, inerrant Bible need to be worked out and through." In context that seems to suggest that he's not such a person.
Rodger C said,
June 25, 2023 @ 9:51 am
Colin Watson: It sounds to me as if Armstrong is an inerrantist but not a literalist.
Terpomo said,
June 25, 2023 @ 4:10 pm
I've seen some Biblical literalists who argue that the existence of language families for which a common ancestor cannot be reconstructed is evidence for Babel; their respective proto-languages are the languages into which humanity was split at Babel, their reasoning goes.
Benjamin Orsatti said,
June 26, 2023 @ 8:40 am
I don't see how one can be a Biblical literalist in the first place.
Even if you're reading the KJV or the New American Bible (each translated from original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek sources), you're still reading it in translation, so you're stuck with the "literal" meaning of whatever the translator thought it was. (i.e., was it a dove or lightning that appeared at the Baptism in the Jordan? Are there any Koine Greek speakers around to ask?).
But the bigger problem is this, go read Genesis 1. Then read Genesis 2. Then go back and read Genesis 1. Then tell me how one can be a literalist. The inspired authors weren't _writing_ "literally," so why should we be _reading_ "literally"?
Rodger C said,
June 26, 2023 @ 9:38 am
Benjamin Orsatti: Because literalists are in thrall to the distinctly modern notion that literal meaning is the highest type of meaning.
Richard Hershberger said,
June 26, 2023 @ 10:39 am
"Biblical literalists" aren't hung up over historical linguistics because their literalism is in fact very shallow and situational. It serves as a rhetorical support for a handful of issues they care about for unrelated reasons. A bigger example of this than linguistics is cosmology. I'm sure you can people who insist on a "Biblical cosmology" but in practice these are a tiny fringe in the literalist community. This isn't to say it couldn't become mainstream. Biblical literalism turns out to be very flexible. "Biblical cosmology" could catch on and immediately be declared to be "conservative." But while "Biblical literalism" would be brought in to bolster the argument, it would not be the real basis.
The better question is why they are hung up on biological evolution. This too has nothing to do with a supposed commitment to a literal reading of scripture.
Richard Hershberger said,
June 26, 2023 @ 10:48 am
Benjamin Orsatti: There is a "King James Version-only" faction. They are outliers, even among self-proclaimed "conservative Christians," but they definitely are out there. The usual justification, among those smart enough to understand the issue, is to declare that the King James translators were inspired by God. This cuts through the mess that is the manuscript record of the New Testament, any questions of what is and is not the canon, and so forth. In other words, the KJV is the only pure Bible. I have also seen a variant, among those who don't want to wade through 17th century English, making Erasmus the inspired party in compiling the Textus Receptus. None of this is intended as an intellectually serious argument. The purpose is to wave away awkward questions.
As for inconsistencies in multiple accounts, there is a substantial body of literature devoted to "reconciling" these passages. If you squint just right while you tilt your head just so, and if the light is bad enough, it turns out that pretty much anything can be reconciled. This too is not intended as a serious argument.
And as I noted in my previous comment, even then, literalism is applied selectively. My go-to example is the opening of Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd." Read that literally and see what you get. But of course they don't.
Dave Armstrong said,
June 26, 2023 @ 10:56 am
Dr. Liberman,
Thanks for this interesting and thought-provoking comment on one of my articles. First of all, it should be understood that this 1000-word article is an abbreviated version of a blog article that was 4817 words long: almost five times larger:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2023/04/the-tower-of-babel-archaeology-linguistics.html
As an academic, you're surely well aware of the usefulness of presenting complex material in a more accessible form. That's what I was doing here, and what I often do in the course of my apologetics (I am a professional Catholic apologist and author of more than twenty "officially" published books, with six publishers).
In the shorter article, I stated, "I’d like to speculate a bit about Babel." That's all I was doing. It was a fascinating topic. I wrote in my longer original article:
"All must understand that the early chapters of Genesis (particularly the first eleven chapters) represent a genre and form of thinking that is very difficult for us to fully understand or interpret with an assurance that we are grasping the author’s intention. So everyone is engaging in guesswork to more or less degrees. That said, I submit this story is not simply myth, and it has several demonstrable connections to known history, verified by archaeology, as I will show."
I'm not an academic and don't claim to be an expert on this matter. That said, I don't think it's improper for the "layman" to speculate and think about topics like this. In my case, it's part of a larger project to understand the Bible in terms of secular learning; in this instance, linguistics, anthropology, historiography, and archaeology.
I had a book recently published, entitled, "The Word Set in Stone: How Archaeology, Science, and History Back Up the Bible."
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2023/01/books-by-dave-armstrong-the-word-set-in-stone.html
It's doing decently on Amazon, and has been in the top 100 in the category "Religious Antiquities & Archaeology" for two months now. The nature and goal of the book is evident in the title. The (longer) Babel article was intended as a chapter in a follow-up book.
I'll respond now to some of your comments:
"I've wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11."
Like all historical, orthodox Christians, I believe that the Bible is inspired revelation, and without error in what it *intends* to claim for itself. Of course the big question is: "what does it claim in the first place?" That gets into exegesis and hermeneutics. My point in my book, and generally, is that the Bible is a complex book (it has over 200 forms of figure of speech; many quite complex). One must determine what was intended to be literal and what was non-literal. The Bible is filled with both sorts of literature.
I am a theistic evolutionist, and contend that evolution per se is not in necessary conflict with the Bible. It is if one erroneously interprets Genesis hyper-literally, but that is what fundamentalists do": a tiny portion of all Christians today and throughout history. Nor do I have a problem with historical linguists (and I don't think it contradicts Genesis 11). My analysis of Babel was an attempt to synthesize the Bible with the relevant fields of secular knowledge. I don't claim much for it, but I think it has some strengths and perhaps made a few points worthy of consideration.
Christians — like everyone else, and far from being "hostile" — have learned a lot from secular sciences, and it has positively affected our biblical interpretation. Geology has shown how the earth is more than 6,000 years old, and Christian scholarship modified its view accordingly. Biology has shown that processes such as evolution occur, and we have taken that into account, although the basic idea is not as new in Christianity as many suppose. Both Augustine and Aquinas wrote about processes in biology that are distinct from instant creation: that God put potentialities into life.
Likewise, we have learned from astronomy and physics, and the Big Bang theory (developed by a priest and originally opposed by Einstein) has become consensus, and is completely consistent with the biblical account of creatio ex nihilo. Similarly, we can learn from anthropology and the history of language with regard to the story of Babel. I wrote about Noah's Flood in my book: arguing for a local Mesopotamian Flood, c. 2900 BC. Belief in a local Flood has been the standard view among both Protestant and Catholic scholars for well over a hundred years. We modify our views, as we learn more about science, just as all other thinkers do. A local Flood doesn't contradict Genesis: it helps to interpret it in a much more plausible, sensible fashion.
"his proposed interpretation seems more plausible than the idea that humans everywhere spoke the same language before about 3000 BC, or even that there were no humans anywhere else on earth before that post-Babel dispersion."
The Bible doesn't require either interpretation. I noted in my shorter article that "differentiation of language was already cited several times in Chapter 10 (10:5, 20, 31)." Genesis 10:5 refers to "each with his own language": RSV). Thus, before the Babel account, the Bible acknowledges people over wide areas (the ones known at that time), speaking different languages. That's why I argue that Babel is strictly about southern Mesopotamia (Shinar, or Sumer) at a time soon after the [local] Flood. It's not attempting to explain the origin of ALL language.
In my longer article I explain how archaeology has verified three important facts mentioned in the biblical account: the use of bitumen in construction, the use of the new technology of kiln-fired bricks, and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, that were the "towers" in that time and place. That's pretty significant for a text that ancient. It's not nothing. It shows that the account has historical elements that can be verified.
"Armstrong's last sentence proposes a partial restoration of the chapter's importance: 'It may be identifying Babel or Shinar as the place where the dispersion of people began.' Which is pretty strongly contradicted by archeological evidence, I should think . . ."
Well, you have interpreted it completely out of context, if that's what you think of that statement. I made it clear in my second paragraph:
"The context indicates very strongly that Genesis 11 is not talking about the entire earth, but rather, the land which is described repeatedly as the place where the events occur: southern Mesopotamia, or Sumer . . ."
After arguing for a local phenomenon, and discussing the local language (Sumerian, evolving into Akkadian, etc.), why would I switch on a dime at the very end and argue for Sumer as the origin of all languages? That makes no sense, and I didn't do it. The proper context was the previous paragraph, where I wrote:
"Whatever, or however many, the reasons, the end result was 'a sharp decrease in population' in southern Mesopotamian cities around 3000 BC, which is, of course, quite consistent with the biblical report of people in these regions being “scattered … abroad from there” (Genesis 11:8)."
If you or others here want to argue that there was no such population decrease or shift at that time or place, feel free. I think there was, from what I cold find on the topic, and if so, it's consistent with an interpretation of the text that I made: that such scattering may tie into the linguistic diversity that the text referred to.
I'd be glad to continue to discuss many aspects of this. Thanks for allowing me to express and clarify my views.
Dave Armstrong said,
June 26, 2023 @ 11:47 am
Colin Watson wrote: "skimming through the principal rabbinic commentaries on the relevant verses, they generally seem to assume that it meant the whole world."
This ties into my statement: "Christians — like everyone else, and far from being 'hostile' — have learned a lot from secular sciences, and it has positively affected our biblical interpretation."
"Everyone else" includes Jewish commentators and other scholars. As we believers in the Bible learned much more through the years about history, anthropology, and linguistics, including the origins and evolutions of language, we saw that a notion of all the people in the world being present in southern Mesopotamia and speaking one language is absurd and unable to be sustained in light of what we have learned.
This explains how the ancient rabbis might have had one interpretation (universality and single origin of languages) from reading the text over-literally, or prima facie, whereas both the facts of science and history suggest that a quite permissible non-literal interpretation of "all the earth," etc., is much more plausible and in line with known and demonstrable facts.
It doesn't follow that Genesis was "wrong" in this regard. I think it follows that historical *interpretation* in some regards was erroneous and that human beings (including us Christians, and our esteemed brothers in monotheism, religious Jews) have been wrong about some things in the past, just as we were about the age of the earth, prior to modern geology.
Religious, observant Christians and Jews are no different from anyone else. We learn over time. Scientists have believed in many things, too, that are laughable today (I've written about several). They evolved and learned over time. It's the same with Bible interpretation. The human condition is to continue to learn as we go through time.
The more I learn of science, the deeper my faith grows. This is what my latest book was about: the harmony of [primarily] archaeology and the Bible. When I learned that the historical accuracy of the Bible has been and continues to be affirmed again and again by archaeology and other sciences, my faith (including in biblical inspiration) is stronger.
"All truth is God's truth," as we like to say. We welcome developments in science, and thus far (after 42 years of engaging in apologetics), I have yet to see anything in science that causes me to have any fundamental difficulty in believing in Christianity. Faith and science exist together in a profound harmony.
This is one of the many reasons why I love being an apologist: working through and better understanding the harmony of faith and reason, including science, and passing along what I have learned.
Dave Armstrong said,
June 26, 2023 @ 12:27 pm
Is it okay to cite words from this thread in a blog post in my blog? I like to create dialogues, for teaching purposes (I am a socratic). Such a dialogue would have a full presentation of differing opinions, and links back here, which is best, in my opinion, but if there is objection, then only my side goes out, perhaps with a paraphrase of other positions.
If it's okay, if anyone objects to being named, or objects to being cited even if anonymous, please let me know. Thanks. A lot of people are offended by being cited. I wish to be considerate of folks' feelings and desires in this matter.
I myself have been cited many times out of context (usually by hostile parties, like the small fringe of anti-Catholic Protestants), and minus any link to my original article or book, where my entire thinking in context can be consulted. So I get it that many have similar concerns.
Bloix said,
June 26, 2023 @ 12:54 pm
"Go read Genesis 1. Then read Genesis 2. Then go back and read Genesis 1."
Benjamin Orsatti – there's been a couple of millenia's worth of Jewish commentary on the Bible by very intelligent and skilled exegesists who are well aware of passages that contain apparent inconsistencies. As they begin with the premise that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, they view these passages as a chance to explore His mind and intention in a way that more easily comprehensible passages do not, and to use the results of these explorations not only to resolve what appear to be inconsistencies, but as a guide to understanding and proper conduct.
The most important of these commentators is Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (known by the acronym Rashi), who lived in Troyes, 100 miles southeast of Paris, from 1040 to 1105. You can see his method in his commentary on the creation stories in ch's 1 and 2 of Genesis.
Rashi gives us two explanations for what appear to be the conflicting stories, with a focus on the creation of Adam. One explanation has recourse to a legalistic set of rules of Biblical construction, complete with a citation to authority. "I have seen the Baraitha [commentary] of Rabbi Eliezer the son of Rabbi Yose the Galiliean [a 2nd century scholar], dealing with the 32 rules of interpretation … and the following is one of them: when a general statement of an action is followed by a detailed account of it, the latter is a more particularization of the former. 'And he created the man is a general statement, but it does not explicitly state whence he was created and what God did unto him … " etc.
The other is a theological explanation, which is more, I think, to Rashi's liking. He tells us that an unusual doubling of a letter in the spelling of the word "and He formed" intimates "that there were two formations – a formation of man for this world, and a formation of man for resurrection."
https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.2.7.2?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
This sort of recourse to spellings and similar things in order to understand God's deeper meaning — things that might be viewed as ephemera to a naive reader — is common in Jewish exegesis.
So for an observant Jew, the problems of apparent inconsistency that arise in the text are not problems at all. They are opportunities.
Dave Armstrong said,
June 26, 2023 @ 1:13 pm
Plato, in his Timaeus, gives an account of creation that is also non-chronological, just as in Genesis 1 and 2, and even provides two different accounts, with different emphases, as in Genesis also:
"[T]he chronology and the sequence of the act of creation play no role in the Timaeus. Thus he sees himself compelled to report the creation of the celestial bodies before the world-soul, although he knows that this sequence is quite incorrect, and later he begins anew to describe the origin of the world in order to be able to express new ideas and qualities." (Thorleif Boman, "Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek" [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1960], 175)
Thus, between the poetic + historical nature of these chapters, and the very different Hebrew conception of chronology and time, any seeming contradictions are amply explained as not necessarily so at all.
Tower of Babel: Dialogue with a Linguist - Patheos - SATB KiNG said,
June 27, 2023 @ 1:41 am
[…] one of my articles cited on this blog, by Dr. Liberman. His words will be in blue; those of others (with permission) in various colors.*****I was cited in the article, “The Origin of Speeches? or just the collapse […]
Benjamin Orsatti said,
June 27, 2023 @ 6:57 am
Richard Hershberger: Maybe that's why it seems that "sola scriptura" often ends up becoming intellectually stultifying. If all you've got is a KJV and OED, you're cutting yourself off from all the richness that theologians, philosophers, scientists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, archaeologists (i.e., smart people who read a lot) can bring to exegesis.
Dave Armstrong: Thanks for stopping by! When apologists and linguists and laymen are all tossing around thoughts and research, interesting ideas always seem to come out of it. I've sometimes thought that it would be "neat" to print a Bible, the text of which would be printed in 4 different colors, to indicate "literal," "moral," "allegorical," and "anagogical" hermeneutic. I know that, strictly speaking, you're supposed to apply all four to any text, but maybe we could get a heads-up as to which one "prevails?"
Bloix: I forgot about Rashi! I have a Chumash at home that's going to get some attention… Jewish exegesis certainly puts the "Hermes" in "hermeneutic"! Just when you've got a handle on the "32 rules of interpretation" (easy, like statutory construction, right?), there's a "drift" into Kabbalah, where the point of interpretation turns on, say, how many crowns the scribe jotted on the tip of the vav. Endless pathways into mystical reality…
Dave Armstrong said,
June 27, 2023 @ 7:54 am
Hi Benjamin,
Thanks for the warm welcome.
I think if we were to pick one of the four approaches to exegesis and hermeneutics as one that "prevails", it would be literal, as a sort of "default" position: tied into the larger framework of the grammatico-historical method. But we must always be on the "lookout" for context, cultural background, non-literal figures of speech, and the general absence of a Greek "rationalist" outlook (which is how most of us think today).
The problem is that the factors I mentioned are largely overlooked, and we tend to either apply a hyper-skeptical or hyper-literal approach to Scripture. There is a happy medium that avoids both extremes (guided by some notion of historic "orthodoxy"), and I try to abide by it.
The Tower of Babel story is usually regarded as merely mythical, but I have shown that important elements of it can be verified by archaeology and what we know of history, in at least four significant ways. Even if there are mythical-type elements, there also seems to be preserved history, and it brings to mind C. S. Lewis' acceptance of Tolkien's suggestion (at the time he converted to Christianity) that there was such a thing as "a true myth."
Similarly, historians believe that King Arthur existed, notwithstanding the overlay of much mythology for some 1500 years now. We may have more objective verification of aspects of the Babel story than we do with Arthur, despite its being 3500 years older (!). And we do because we have this remarkable and extraordinarily accurate document, the Hebrew Bible.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 28, 2023 @ 7:43 am
This is why we always need a dedicated team of full-time theologians. It's difficult, at times, to distinguish in ancient texts between strictly doctrinal eternal truth, historical fact, and folklore. I'm not so sure the ancients themselves made a sharp distinction among the three. For example, what are we to do with the "Nephilim?" The Chabadnik Chassids translate "בְנֵי־הָֽאֱלֹהִים֙" (b'nei ha-elohim) in Gen. 6:2 as "sons of the nobles," (https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8171) which is a far more pedestrian interpretation. Interestingly, Gen 6:3 gives an alarmingly accurate prediction of the absolute upper limit to human longevity — 120 years (I think the oldest human so far has been, what, 122 years old?).
3And the Lord said, "Let My spirit not quarrel forever concerning man, because he is also flesh, and his days shall be a hundred and twenty years."
Dave Armstrong said,
June 28, 2023 @ 9:26 am
Lots of debates about the nephilim! I've never really looked into that issue.