On Mon, 15 Oct 2001 PHSEELY@aol.com wrote:
> according to the vast majority of biblical scholars the Bible does say in Gen
> 11:1 that everyone on earth (the earth of Gen 10, neither just Mesopotamia
> nor the the whole planet) all spoke the same language until the Tower of
> Babel.
>
> Am I really to believe that your private interpretation is right and the vast
> majority of biblical scholars ancient and modern are wrong?
The Expositor's Bible Commentary is among the minority. Its position is
that since the Babel account interrupts the list of descendants of Shem
after the list of Joktan's descendants and then lists Peleg's descendants
after the Babel account, the people involved in the Babel account were
just one branch of Shem's descendants.
>
> The same question must be asked of your interpretation of the extent of the
> Flood.
Although the early church fathers apparently believed that the Flood was
global, it appears that some of them realized that there were some
problems associated with this view. Ambrose, for example, in considering
Genesis 8:1 observed that there is a lot of wind on the ocean, but sea
level is not dropping. Therefore he decided that the wind (or breath or
spirit in the Hebrew) referred to the Holy Spirit, a view that perhaps
noone holds today.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 16 2001 - 16:17:22 EDT