(mods, feel free to move if this is the wrong place)
Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests
What implications, if any, does this have for those who argue divine creation?
(mods, feel free to move if this is the wrong place)
Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests
What implications, if any, does this have for those who argue divine creation?
, posting just to subscribe…
I don’t see a connection between finding older old testaments and the divine creation.
The date of creation is based on correlating the events of the bible to actual known history and extrapolating using bad archeology. Just finding texts 400 years older doesn’t change any of that.
What facts of any kind have ever mattered to those that believe in devine creation?
Since this is a religious rather than a factual issue, I’m going to move this from GQ to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Maybe my question was less than clear.
There are many organizations that purport to offer “science” to justify the Bible’s literalness as proof of how the world was created in 7 days, evolution is not real, etc. It is a mini-industry really
So I wonder how those most familiar with the details of the approaches of those organizations would react to this news. Would they simply deny the news to keep their prior 'theories"? Doe this new data not really conflict with with the “theories” anyway? Would they try to modify the “theories” that, as I understand it, are divinely created, and hence unchangeable because they arose from the “literal” interpretation" of the Bible?
My guess would be this. They’ll likely either ignore it, or claim it to be a fraud. Created by evil-utionists or Satan to fool them; or by God to test their faith. You can’t convince people with facts who think in religious fanatic/conspiracy theorist mode.
Sure, but you can anticipate their behavior and re-direct it for your own benefit…
As far as I’ve seen, the Young Earth Creationists take their timeline from the contents of the Bible, not from any physical evidence.
IIRC, they count up the generations listed in the Bible and figure backwards from Jesus’s birth. I don’t remember the details of how many years per generation. I do recall that the years per generation changes, because people lived longer before the Flood y’know.
So this information isn’t really going to affect anything. It’s either within the timeframe that they claim and doesn’t really matter, or it’s outside that timeframe and they’ll ignore it just like they do all the other evidence.
It only pushes back by a few 100 years the date for which portions of the Bible might have been written down. The only thing I can see this really doing is possibly confirming/debunking some historical facts in the Bible. But unless you get close to the point of creation (thousands of years earlier, according even to YECs), then it really doesn’t affect creationism one way or the other.
I should think they’d be perfectly happy. Isn’t the very latest date for creation over 4000 years BC? Actual written Hebrew from the date of King David would be thrilling. Assuming it doesn’t say something like “I just rewrote the entire book of Genesis, ahahahahah, signed Yusuf the scribe” it will be great news.
Jesus’ birth has not been fixed (it’s estimated between 7 and 3 BC, which is actually fairly conservative) , and would not be used. And it’s not like all Creationists are Christian, or have you not heard of the Jewish Calendar and anno mundi?
Figuring out what even they used to fixed the calendar seems to be beyond me, but I do know that the generations in the Bible actually list how many years each person lived before they gave birth to the next. Well, they do in Genesis proper, at least.
From what I gather, a fairly representative calculation can be made from using the Jewish year (which will be 5771 near the vernal equinox), add in the discrepancy between when it and secular sources date the fall of the first (Solomon’s) temple (165 years*). Taking into account that Adam was created in 2 AM for some reason, that says it has been 5,931 years since Creation. Finding writing from only 3,000 years ago isn’t going to change anything.
If anything, it will give them legitimacy, as specific parts of the Bible were supposed to have been written during the time of David.
*I actually knew this from an end-times prophecy book my mom got from some Jewish friends. In it, the idea is that, since 1000 years is to the Lord but a day, the 6000th year corresponds to the year when God rested, and thus the end of the world will start. It made more sense in the book.)
It’s not the Bible, it’s just Hebrew, and indicates that at least one literate Hebrew speaker, or his boss, was already concerned about the welfare of widows, orphans, slaves, and the poor. It proves that the age of the oldest biblical writings is not limited to 500 BCE by the development of Hebrew as a language, but not that those writings are any older than previously believed.
That is exactly right. This find suggests that certain Biblical documents were written at an earlier date than what was originally expected. This would have positive implications for the reliability of the Biblical texts, but it ultimately has no bearing (whether positive or negative) on creationism.
Can you spell out more explicitly why you think the discovery of biblical texts written in 1000BC would be evidence against creationism? I don’t see the connection.
There is none.
I agree with JThunder - I don’t see any relationship to creationist anything.
I thought there was more reason to think the Bible was brought together at this time than just the existence of Hebrew - clues inside the text, for instance. The combining of incompatible stories argues strongly, I think, that parts of the Bible long predated this period - if not, there wouldn’t be much of a reason to include them, would there? Plus, parts of Genesis seem to indicate a very different view of God than seen in the Prophetic writings closer to the date the Bible was collected. This is just an opinion, but I’d be very surprised if parts did not predate this period by hundreds of years. After all, the epic of Gilgamesh, from which the Flood story came, seems to have been around in 2,000 BCE.
Not much. It just moves the early bits of the Bible back to being the myths of David’s generation or even Joshua’s, rather than something confected during the reign of Josiah &/or the Babylonian Exile.
[reads more of thread]
Oh! Yeah, I don’t think hardcore Biblical literalists have ever taken seriously scholarly ideas of when the Bible was really written.