Hi Mike, you wrote:
>Actually, the 2350 BC date has not been scientifically connected to any
>possible meteor impact. It has only been scientifically connected to a major
>change in climate in the ancient Near East by a study of tree ring growth.
>
>You wrote: and the flood date from the Masoretic text which itself varies
>from the Septuagint (3128 BC).
>
>Jewish history tells us that from about 300 BC the Mazorite copyists went to
>extreme lengths to make sure they perfectly preserved every single letter of
>the ancient Hebrew manuscripts they copied. So we have very good reason to
>believe that the Masoretic text is an extremely well preserved copy of the
>ancient Hebrew scriptures. On the other hand, the Septuagint is only a Greek
>translation of the Hebrew scriptures. A translation which shows many clear
>signs of carelessness, paraphrasing and deliberate tampering with the Hebrew
>text. These things being so, why would anyone think that the chronological
>information contained in the LXX might be more trustworthy than that
>contained in the MT?
In The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity, a book released in 1997
from Notre Dame University, Paul Lamarche writes:
"In what version was the Old Testament used and commented on by early
Christians? ... it is the Septuagint, the Greek translation which,
directly or indirectly, was fundamentally for all writings of the
early Christian centuries, and even after Jerome it is the text which
the Greek Fathers, including the Antiochenes, customarily used."
I won't get into a war over competing texts except to say that the
Samaratan Pentateuch was always in Hebrew, and its Genesis 11
genealogy more closely agrees with the Septuagint.
If you want to read more about the Septuagint versus the MT here is a web page.
http://www.christianseparatist.org/sixth/errancy.html
(BTW, this web page is put out by CSCS who have a variety of beliefs
I don't subscribe to.)
>You wrote: You have totally ignored the history of Mesopotamia which has been
>carefully assembled from numerous archaeological expeditions. ... The entire
>period breaks down into three sub periods: Early Dynastic I - 2900 to 2750
>BC; Early Dynastic II - 2750 to 2600 BC; Early Dynastic III - 2600 to 2370
>BC. ... Each of these periods is filled with history, all of which had to
>occur after the flood.
>
>Why do you say they all had to occur after the flood?
For starters, the Pre-Dynastic period begins with the post-flood
rulers at Kish. The Sumerian king list says: "Then the flood swept
thereover, after the flood swept thereover, kingship was restored in
Kish."
>How do you explain the following statement saying that history of the ancient
>Near East appears to harmonize with a 2350 BC date for Noah's flood?
>
>"The catastrophic effect of these [meteor impacts] could explain the mystery
>of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline around 2300 BC. They
>include the demise of the Akkad culture of central Iraq, with its mysterious
>semi-mythological emperor Sargon; the end of the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old
>Kingdom, following the building of the Great Pyramids and the sudden
>disappearance of hundreds of early settlements in the Holy Land."
I'm sorry, I don't read the word "flood" in this quote.
If you take a look at page 275 in my book you will see the dating of
flood sediments from four different excavations in the cities of
Kish, Shuruppak, Uruk (biblical Erech), and Lagash. All these
estimates from different teams of archaeologists coalesce around 2900
BC. Are you maintaining that all these archaeologists misdated the
sediment layers, or that these are from an earlier flood for which
there is no record, and that the biblical flood took place 550 years
later which left no sediment?
Yours in Christ,
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago"
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