On Mon, 25 Sep 1995 15:01:31 -0500 you wrote:
>Stephen writes
SJ>Well then you have to assume that God told the Babylonians too!
Moses was about 1,500 BC whereas the Gilgamesh Epic dates from 2,500
BC:
BH>Perhaps God did tell the Babylonians. The Old Testament records
>instances of people outside of Israel who were God-fearing. Babylon
>doesn't seem like a good place to look for God-fearing people, but
>all it would take would be a single God-fearing prophet...it just
>seems like a possibility.
Well, anything's a "possibility"! :-) The point is that a
proto-Hebrew prophet teaching the Babylonians what was in his oral or
written tradition, eg."the account [lit. family histories] of Shem,
Ham and Japheth, Noah's sons" (Gn 10:1) would not require a special
revelation.
SJ>"The [Flood] story was widespread in the ancient Near East and
>excavations have yielded quite a number of texts or fragments which
>refer to the story of the Flood, although these differ in detail...
>Of special interest to Bible readers is a Gilgamesh fragment from the
>middle of the second millennium B.C., that is, from the Middle Bronze
>Age, found in level VIII at Megiddo." (Thompson J. A., "The Bible and
>Archaeology", Third Edition, 1982, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan,
>p15)
BH>They never seem to mention the fact that Egyptian records cover the
>period of the flood and don't mention it. I have also heard that
>Akkadian records record a drought at that time. Chinese records
>going back something like 9000 years don't mention anythng that would
>correspond to Noah's flood. I don't have the sources for these
>statements, although I would be willing to try and get them from the
>talk.origins folks if there is interest. I'm not saying that the
>flood didn't occur, only that correlating extrabiblical evidence with
>a literal reading of the genealogies is quite difficult.
What "time"? None of the Biblical scholars I have read give a date of
the Flood. Glenn has just posted that writing is only 5,000 years
old but you claim it goes back "9000" years. The Flood might
have happened 20,000 years ago or more, but even if it did happen
within Chinese or Egyptian historical times, a local Flood might not
be even known, let alone recorded in their annals as significant.
SJ>I do not rule out that Genesis 1 might have been revealed, but
>Genesis itself indicates it is made up of several written sources
>with the footer "These are the generations (ie. family
>histories)..." (Gn 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 10:32; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12;
>25:19; 36:1; 36:9; 37:2). This suggests that the "generations of the
>sons of Noah" Gn 6:10-10:1, which includes the Flood story, was a
>written tradition, probably on tablets (P.J. Wiseman, R.K.
>Harrison).
BH>And I agree that there is a great deal of historical material. I
>just get a bit impatient with those whose claims seem to imply that
>Moses had to get everything he wrote from historical records.
Well clearly he did get much if not all of Genesis from "historical
records", since Genesis itself contains the signatures of the source
material. When Moses got something by revelation it is
usually prefaced by: "The LORD said to Moses..."
God bless.
Stephen
-----------------------------------------------------------------
| Stephen Jones | ,--_|\ | sjones@iinet.net.au |
| 3 Hawker Ave | / Oz \ | sjones@odyssey.apana.org.au |
| Warwick 6024 |->*_,--\_/ | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sjones/ |
| Perth, Australia | v | phone +61 9 448 7439 |
----------------------------------------------------------------