10-30-2021, 08:47 AM
You outlined it nicely, Jay. It's hard to pin down the details for the biblical Flood because we can be quite sure that the earth's landmasses and oceans now bear little resemblance to what it was before. For the Flood to have any reality at all would require massive amounts of rainfall, but the Bible also mentions a tremendous amount of underground water coming to the surface. That kind of upheaval, paired with the mention of Peleg and the earth's surface dividing, would indicate changes too massive to estimate from where we are now.
Keep in mind that the Scripture focuses on the thread of redemptive history, not the wider human experience. We have no way of knowing when Adam and Eve could be dated. The genealogy list is telescoped in typical ANE style. On top of that, there's every reason to believe the Lord started things here on earth in a used condition, not pristine. It had to be workable. The appearance of a history that stretches back billions of years could be just that -- an appearance. God is not limited to doing things the way we would. At any rate, nothing in Scripture provides a reasonable frame of reference for setting dates, particularly when our frame of reference is only what humans have figured out in recent history. The honest truth is that the only sure date we have is for the beginning of King David's reign. Everything before that is based on reckoning from a house of cards that could collapse completely with just one new archaeological discovery. Honestly, the date of anything before David all stands on very shaky guesswork, and Scripture is frankly fuzzy in how it uses the numbers.
It is not a rejection of Scripture to reject a modern analysis of what it says. We struggle to grasp the Hebrew minds that wrote most of the Bible just on those things for which we have sufficient samples to work from to indicate how we should read the symbolism. When it comes to something like the Creation narrative, that's the only example we have on that subject. The similarities between the Bible and other Creation and Flood narratives are pretty weak.
Keep in mind that the Scripture focuses on the thread of redemptive history, not the wider human experience. We have no way of knowing when Adam and Eve could be dated. The genealogy list is telescoped in typical ANE style. On top of that, there's every reason to believe the Lord started things here on earth in a used condition, not pristine. It had to be workable. The appearance of a history that stretches back billions of years could be just that -- an appearance. God is not limited to doing things the way we would. At any rate, nothing in Scripture provides a reasonable frame of reference for setting dates, particularly when our frame of reference is only what humans have figured out in recent history. The honest truth is that the only sure date we have is for the beginning of King David's reign. Everything before that is based on reckoning from a house of cards that could collapse completely with just one new archaeological discovery. Honestly, the date of anything before David all stands on very shaky guesswork, and Scripture is frankly fuzzy in how it uses the numbers.
It is not a rejection of Scripture to reject a modern analysis of what it says. We struggle to grasp the Hebrew minds that wrote most of the Bible just on those things for which we have sufficient samples to work from to indicate how we should read the symbolism. When it comes to something like the Creation narrative, that's the only example we have on that subject. The similarities between the Bible and other Creation and Flood narratives are pretty weak.