G
Gottle_of_Geer
Guest
This question has puzzled humanity since man’s introduction to the earth. If we use ‘earth days’, then we have to assume that God created dinosaurs in the morning, and killed them in the afternoon. Dinosaur bones are found all over the world, including in the area of the ‘Garden of Eden’. In the NT, we are told, that with God, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day. Some of the reptiles found today, bear an uncanny resemblance to dinosaurs.
Further to the above, “Did Noah include all of the reptiles found in the world today (and the many species of all animals that have gone extinct since the time of Noah), on the ark?” Did God flood the whole world, or only the portion that had been ‘defiled’ by the presence of the sins of man?
Was Moses aware of the other continents on the earth? Did God reveal them to him? We find many species of the land-based animal kingdom, unique to specific continents, islands, etc. Did Noah ‘collect’ two of each of these, or, were certain areas not flooded?
After the fall of the tower of Babel, people spread throughout the world, bonded by their common language. Why didn’t the modern age explorers know of the existence of these people, or the existence of the far-away lands, which they inhabited? These people inhabiting these lands, did so in the time of Moses (based on archeological findings), but there is no mention of them, in the books of Moses. The physical characteristics of these people (‘natives’), seem to either lean towards caucasian/negroid mix, or caucasian/mongoloid mix, tending to support the scientific theory of routes of migration.
It would be very interesting, to hear your thoughts on the above. Is it possible, that God did not reveal to Moses, things that Moses could not identify with, or perhaps served no purpose at the time, for revealing them to Moses, or perhaps were in fact revealed to Moses, but Moses was instructed to not reveal them to others, who would not understand them?
They are six days, of 24 hours. The measurement of time & the count of days, months, & years, was very important for one of the compilers of Genesis, because of his theological outlook, which emphasised the importance of the worship of Israel. That’s why the Sabbath occurs, in his account of the period before the Flood, as the culmination of a week of creative activity. It occurs in primeval time - as part of the origin of all things at God’s word; it’s not a mere historical event, but is “supra-historical”. It’s a day, & yet a primeval day, outside history, yet within time.
If the six days are periods of indefinite length, the Sabbath becomes a period of indefinite length - & the thread of continuity that runs from the first day of creation, to the Sabbath, to the time of the Patriarchs before the Flood, to the Flood, & after, down through the generations to Abram, is lost. The composer of the text may be “wrong” by our standards, in that his six days do not leave time for the geological eras; but that’s not the point: the author was not setting out to compose an eternally accurate God’s-eye-view of the origins of life upon earth; to complain of his - by our standards - inaccuracy, is as foolish as to think that the value of Dante’s account of Purgatory is destroyed by his having situated Purgatory on a mountain at the South Pole 3,000 miles high. The truth of Dante’s story lies in its allegory - the truth of the creation narratives in Genesis 1-2.4 lies in their theological meaning. And fussing about the trivia of geology & about how to “reconcile” scientific fact with the assertions in an ancient Israelite story, is an excellent way of overlooking the radical differences between the Israelite story, & those current elsewhere. The real contrast is not between past and present ideas of “how things came into being”, but between the faith of Israel, & the religions of its neighbours. Attempts to “prove” the “scientific truth” of the creation stories are very silly; people could & should know better than to torture the text in order to find what isn’t there - such attempts account for everything & anything except what really matters.
One might as well expect proof of the events chronicled in “The Lord of the Rings”; those books could tell us a lot about how the world came into being; especially about the Ice Ages & plate tectonics. That has not so far happened - but that was once true of Genesis 1-2.4 as well.