In our modern world, thanks in part to the Age of Discovery, the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and great men of science such as Columbus, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, our current idea of what the“Earth” is has dramatically changed in the 500 years since Tyndale first translated the Hebrew Bible into English.
The point of this thread is to point out that the Bible was in a time when we were still ignorant about the state of our earthly existence. It wasn’t until Copernicus and his heliocentrism that we developed a rudimentary understanding of our planet, and even then the church fought scientists every step of the way, all in the name of protecting the integrity of the Holy Scriptures.
Seeing as how the Judeo-Christian leaders of the time reacted so violently against scientific advancement, it should come as a surprise that modern Christians have a scientifically up-to-date view on the Bible (if that’s even possible). For some reason, many Christians believe the Bible is referring to the planet Earth when in fact the original writers had absolutely no conception of the Earth as a globe, and it would be absurd for anyone to think so.
If we go back to the original Hebrew, the word “eretz” is used collectively for “land”, “ground”, “country”, and even “promised land” in some instances.
What’s funny is that, with this interpretation of the word’s usage as opposed to the “planetary” view is that the Bible could very well be simply a history of just the Hebrew people, and not the entire world. This means that things like the Genesis account of creation and the flood were not global, but specific to the area in which the Hebrews lived at the time of its conception.
There are many aspects of the Biblical story that support this view, and this is where it starts to get interesting. Only in modern times does the flood story seem to suggest that the entire planet was flooded, partly due to the mistranslation of the original Hebrew. Prior to widespread acceptance of the Copernican model, no one would ever propose such a bizarre interpretation.
Oddly enough, it mentions nothing about sea creatures. Ever wonder why?
There’s no possible way the early writers of Scripture had a modern understanding of the planet. The Biblical flood is a perfect example of this. As the known part of the world increased, the presumed coverage of the flood increased with it. This is dishonest, whether conscious or unconscious, on the part of Christians who claim the universality of some Biblical events.
Hell, let’s look at the very first commandment:
“You shall have no other gods before me”. This suggests that maybe the Hebrew people were at least aware of other civilizations living at the time, and knew that many of them had their own gods and creation stories. If we are to take the OT as a single civilization’s history, perhaps they might have even believed other gods existed, but that they were the creators for civilizations other than themselves.
This makes sense when considering the scientific improbability of a global flood. In fact, if one wanted to, one could argue that God destroys singular, local civilizations for their grievances all the time. Remember Katrina? Depending on the crazy level of your resident fundies, it probably didn’t come as a surprise to hear self-righteous remarks about God’s judgment of all the rampant sin going on in New Orleans.
What is even more interesting is that there are no flood records from any other civilization at the purported time of the event itself. Perhaps they just didn’t notice it while floating around on a palm frond, or perhaps it was a confined event that led that particular civilization to believe it was universal due to their ignorance of the earth.
Even further evidence of the local nature of the Hebrew god presents itself. Just exactly where did Cain’s wife come from?
The ambiguity of exactly where Cain’s wife came from leaves room for interpretation. Did he marry her before traveling to Nod, or did he find her there? If we take the first one, that means he had to have married one of his sisters (which, again, the writers see fit to make no mention of before now), which opens up room for all sorts of contrived, ridiculous attempts at explaining away the shallowness of Adam’s gene pool. If we take the second one, that suggests that there were other civilizations at the time that the writers knew about, and the creation account cannot be take at face value.
Sorry if this was a little long-winded, but I thought this was important. I also left my text white for the OP to save people's eyes from burning up.
What are your thoughts on this?
Edit: I hope I beat Alt's record for longest OP; I'm going to search for his IP thread and tally up our wordcount.
, comparisons between science and the bible has very little to do with why people believe it in the first place is what I mean.
