Old Testament World

[marksman]

So what? The passage is not even remotely describing the physicality of the world. Do you think readers thought the wicked would literally be shaken off the world while the righteous cling to it like lint?

 

[CriticalSock]

So what? The passage is not even remotely describing the physicality of the world. Do you think readers thought the wicked would literally be shaken off the world while the righteous cling to it like lint?

So if I was decribing a football match in similar terms would it make sense if I said "They skimmed the ball to each other, like a salt and vinegar Pringle"?

The language used conveys the underlying beliefs.

If the passage in Job went something like: "It is like a ball of clay in my hand, crushed until the fingerprints stand high as mountains" then it wouldn't argue against the divinity of the bible authorship.

 

[HansMustermann]

Are you sure it isn't describing the physicality, though?

As I was saying, for something to be a metaphor, it has to actually convey some knowledge about domain A to domain B. Otherwise saying A when you mean B it's not a metaphor, it's just muddying it and being crap at communicating.

As a metaphor for the formation of a round world, the clay seal metaphor is useless. It doesn't convey any actual information. All the known aspects of making a clay seal are all wrong for describing how Earth was formed. (Like most creation references, in fact.) Not only it's not flat, but was not made of mud and dried. It was not stamped or modelled with a mold, but it's a combination of own gravity and plate tectonics. Indeed if you did mould a shape into earth to any recognizable size, it would just be crushed back into a round shape by gravity. It doesn't even have the same kind of relief as a clay seal: if you made an accurate scale model of the Earth the size of a billiard ball, it would actually be smoother than a billiard ball. (Yeah, even the Everest doesn't do much on a 6,371.0 km sphere.) So, you know, it's nothing like a clay seal.

I'm not saying God meant any of those, but, really, I'm drawing blanks as to what information is he trying to illustrate for the Earth, by using a clay seal to illustrate it. Any detail, no matter how relevant or irrelevant, is just wrong for it to be a metaphor. It's not actually conveying any useful information at all, but at best just misleads.

So, you know, either it's not meant as a metaphor... or God is a moron who can't communicate. Just about every single of his metaphors or (especially in the NT) parables, just muddy the topic, AND use more space than just saying what he means, AND tend to create some rather unfortunate implications that draw attention from the actual topic.

And, seriously, if you look at known theology across history, practically any two theologians understood two different things from them. (Three, if they were rabbis) By now the body of conflicting interpretations of those "metaphors" is vastly greater than the actual text, and that's not even counting the midrash.

Frankly, it seems that the only way to find it a metaphor for how the earth was formed (or for morals, or whatever) is to already know what you must pretend to get from it. If you don't already know, say, that reptiles came before birds, or that complex plants with fruits and seeds came LONG after there was a visible sun, Genesis isn't going to illuminate you through metaphors, but give you all the wrong ideas.

Either that wasn't supposed to be a metaphor for anything, or, really, God is crap at communicating anything. And either of those doesn't exactly inspire confidence in getting any wisdom from him.

In fact, it's more like Bill Engval should give God a "here's your sign" so people know not to ask him anything

 

[CriticalSock]

Are you sure it isn't describing the physicality, though?

Wel,*I'm* sure that it's describing the physicality, as far as it was understood at the time.

Either that wasn't supposed to be a metaphor for anything, or, really, God is crap at communicating anything. And either of those doesn't exactly inspire confidence in getting any wisdom from him.

So crap in fact that it conclusively must have been written by a non-divine, non-omniscient being what is colloquially known as a "hooman"?

I'm still left with the question are there any carvings or descriptions of the world as shown in my image above from any civilisations, including the Hebrews, from around the time that the bible account of Genesis was written other than the bible itself?

 

[Myriad]

Wel,*I'm* sure that it's describing the physicality, as far as it was understood at the time.


So crap in fact that it conclusively must have been written by a non-divine, non-omniscient being what is colloquially known as a "hooman"?

I'm still left with the question are there any carvings or descriptions of the world as shown in my image above from any civilisations, including the Hebrews, from around the time that the bible account of Genesis was written other than the bible itself?

I think the problem is that there are relatively few other surviving documents of any kind from around that time and place. (If there were a carving anywhere that resembled that diagram in the OP, it would be the most well-known image in all of anthropology.)

However, we can compare that depiction with other depictions in other times and places, such as Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Asian, native American, and so forth. Doing so, we see that it's not atypical of such depictions, though it differs in detail (as those others differ in detail from one to another).

But I don't really understand where you're coming from on this. If you're trying to argue that the cosmology was not a true revelation by an omniscient god, is it not sufficient to note that it is dead wrong in every respect? How would showing that it is typical for its locale (as opposed to, say, the reasonable speculation of an individual priest or small isolated cult, based on simple observations of the world around them as I listed above) advance that argument any farther?

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[Humphreys]

The most literal translation of the Bible does indeed explain a Universe exactly as described in the image, Genesis in particular. Whether people back then generally believed this to be the way the world was or not, it seems likely this is the image the writers were trying to convey.

If you were to pick the Bible up, and knew nothing about the Universe at all, and had to model the way the world was based on Biblical descriptions, that is what you would come up with.

Read Genesis as if it were an actual account of the beginning of the Universe, and try to draw what is being described. You wouldn't be far off from the OP's picture.

 

[marksman]

So if I was decribing a football match in similar terms would it make sense if I said "They skimmed the ball to each other, like a salt and vinegar Pringle"?

In context, it might.

 

[marksman]

Are you sure it isn't describing the physicality, though?

Yes.

In context, God is talking to Job about determining who or who is not wicked. That's the whole point of the Job story, given that Job is lamenting that he had done nothing wrong and was getting the crap kicked out of him for it. God is telling him not to be so arrogant as to presume that he knows God's wisdom because Job wasn't there and doesn't know who everything is supposed to shake out. (And shaking out if the image he is using.)

Whether the world is flat or round is irrelevant to the message. Whether the world is moldable in God's hand (like clay under a seal), and whether God can sift through the righteous and unrighteous (like shaking dirt from linen) is.

Of course, God's justification is completely absurd given that we the readers know that Job got shafted because of a puerile bet with Satan. But he's definitely not stopping in the middle of lecturing Job to also give him a geography lesson.

Who are you puny mortal. Were you there when I formed the earth? Do you have the power to sort the righteous form the wicked? No! Only I do. (And, by the way, the earth is an oblong spheroid with an equatorial circumference of about 87.5 million cubits.)

It actually would make no sense for the character of God to bother including scientific information in the lecture. He is in that passage specifically referencing the ability to discern the righteous and the wicked, a topic specifically on point with Job's complaint. The nature of the earth has nothing to do with Job's complaint and would thus be irrelevant.

As I was saying, for something to be a metaphor, it has to actually convey some knowledge about domain A to domain B.

Except you're mistaken about what "domain" God is communicating about. He's not discussing the physicality of the Earth. he's talking about the ability to discern the wicked and the righteous.

As a metaphor for the formation of a round world, the clay seal metaphor is useless. It doesn't convey any actual information. All the known aspects of making a clay seal are all wrong for describing how Earth was formed.

Right. Because God isn't discussing how the earth was formed in that passage in any technical sense. All he's conveying is God's personal power.

 

[marksman]

Wel,*I'm* sure that it's describing the physicality, as far as it was understood at the time.

It may or may not be. The context doesn't make it clear, which thus makes it comepletely useless for your stated purposes.

 

[marksman]

The most literal translation of the Bible does indeed explain a Universe exactly as described in the image, Genesis in particular. Whether people back then generally believed this to be the way the world was or not, it seems likely this is the image the writers were trying to convey.

If you were to pick the Bible up, and knew nothing about the Universe at all, and had to model the way the world was based on Biblical descriptions, that is what you would come up with.

Read Genesis as if it were an actual account of the beginning of the Universe, and try to draw what is being described. You wouldn't be far off from the OP's picture.

Right, but good luck convincing a literalist of that now. It's clear that God speaks in metaphor all the time. So even literalists have no trouble handwaving away that argument. When he tells Abraham his descendants will be like satrs in the sky, he doesn't mean it literally. And anybody who is trying to convince literaists they're wrong by telling them they should believe that God promised to turn all his descendants into stars is going to be laughed at.

And that's what this argument boild down to.

"If you're really a literalist, you should believe X. You don't believe X. Therefore literalism is wrong!" ("X" here, being that the Earth is flat.)

Except the literialist doesn't think believeing the world is flat is necessaryto be a literalist. All that is being done is to create a definition of literalist that the target doesn't agree to and then flog that definition.

It's a straw man argument. (Which is itself a metaphor, since there is no actual straw involved.)

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, yes, let's look at Job's story, and how that fits in.

God makes a frat-boy bet with Satan as to how much it would take to break Job, a guy who was all devoted and God actually liked him. But, hey, I guess God would lose his psycho card if he started torturing and murdering only those he dislikes. So Job is pretty much crippled, his kids and servants are murdered, his wealth annihilated, etc, just to see if he'd snap and lose faith. Depending on how you read Job 7:14 (i.e., literally as Job's problem or a general lament about humans) it might even involve sending him nightmares horrible enough to make him wish he was dead, so, you know, the poor guy isn't even getting a break at night.

To add insult to injury, this is apparently in a society which expected a just God, and that such punishments be dished out only to horrible people. So now everyone, including all Job's friends think he must have committed some horrible sin.

Job doesn't judge God or anything, but just wants to ask him why. He wants to know: have I sinned? Am I a burden to God now? Why am I punished like this?

So, anyway, in chapter 38 the Deus Ex Machina happens, God's voice answers thundering from a big storm... and doesn't actually do more that tell him, basically, "Who the <bleep> are you to question me? Where were you when I did grand feats X, Y and Z? Have you too done A, B and C? Then who the <bleep> are you to ask me anything?" (Not a literal quote, but the general gist of it.)

And such feats include stuff like laying Earth's foundation (Job 38:4) or laying its cornerstone (Job 38:6) or for that matter knowing "On what were its footings set" (Job 38:6) or shutting the sea behind doors when it first burst, presumably so it doesn't flood the Earth again (Job 38:8) and setting its limits, again with doors and bars (Job 38:10.) Or knowing where the hail is kept only for special times of trouble, war and battle (Job 38:23). Etc.

I will not copy the whole 4 long chapters -- God really makes a huge speech out of it -- but basically the whole point of it is: 'You're unworthy to question me, because I did X, Y and Z, and you can't do that.'

Now that is a broken moral system anyway. There is no way having more achievements gives one the moral right to do some murder and torture too. There is no point where you can say about a Ted Bundy, 'Weeelll, he did torture and kill all those people, but he's the best architect, singer, and painter, and his stand-up comedy act is hilarious, so who are we to question him about a few murders?'

But the important thing is: it only works if God actually did all that. The whole point is that God did that, and Job can't.

It doesn't even work, if those are some vague metaphors and God didn't actually do any of that.

If those are metaphors... well, imagine I told you, "Hey, I'm greater than you, because I won the Nobel prize for Physics AND Chemistry. Can you do that? No? Sucks to be you. I'm waay greater than you." But if I didn't actually win a Nobel prize, and even as a metaphor it's for something I didn't really have all that much to do with, then that whole claim to greatness is null and void. Without those claims being true, it becomes something built on thin air, and which cannot stand. If you didn't do that, but neither did I, then it doesn't support the idea that I'm greater than you.

God's claim to greatness because he laid the cornerstone of the Earth, and knows what its foundations rest on, becomes just a ridiculous red herring, if God didn't lay the cornerstone either, and there is no foundation resting on anything. If that's the case, sure, Job didn't do any of that, but neither did God. The whole claim that God is so great that Job can't question him becomes just some fast-talking BS.

 

[marksman]

Well, yes, let's look at Job's story, and how that fits in.

And... as expected the thread just devolves into a "let's see how much we can mock crap."

Your tirade, as entertaining as I am sure you found it, is misdirected. As I apparently have to say every time I'm involved ina discussion of the Bible, I don't believe in God. I don't care whether God looks like an idiot in the stories. i don't care if you can redescribe Job to make Satan look like an antihero, of Job to look like Woody Allen, or God to look like Keanu Reeves. They're fictional characters in a fictional story.

That said, just as I would correct someone who is claiming that Ishmael's last name in Moby Dick is "McWhalelover", when I correct someone who mis describes the Bible, I am not saying that I believe the Bible or Moby Dick to be true stories.

But apparently, the convention here is that if someone mocks the Bible, pointing out that they do so inaccurately is some sort of social taboo, which warrants people coming on to out-clever each other in their ability to be mockingly clever.

What you wrote would only be relevant to someone who actually cares whether the Bible is true.

The only relevant part is this:

So, anyway, in chapter 38 the Deus Ex Machina happens, God's voice answers thundering from a big storm... and doesn't actually do more that tell him, basically, "Who the <bleep> are you to question me? Where were you when I did grand feats X, Y and Z? Have you too done A, B and C? Then who the <bleep> are you to ask me anything?" (Not a literal quote, but the general gist of it.)

And such feats include stuff like laying Earth's foundation (Job 38:4) or laying its cornerstone (Job 38:6) or for that matter knowing "On what were its footings set" (Job 38:6) or shutting the sea behind doors when it first burst, presumably so it doesn't flood the Earth again (Job 38:8) and setting its limits, again with doors and bars (Job 38:10.) Or knowing where the hail is kept only for special times of trouble, war and battle (Job 38:23). Etc.

Yes. But none of that requires God to be explaining anything in scientifically accurate detail. Why? Because his audience is Job the farmer, not Isaac Newton.

All God is doing, in poetic language, is doing exactly what you described "Who the <bleep> are you to question me? Where were you when I did grand feats X, Y and Z? Have you too done A, B and C? Then who the <bleep> are you to ask me anything?"

The grand feats are simply: Making the world, flooding the earth, making weather, creating light and darkness, and so on. But it's entirely irrelevant if he describes it in a scientifically accurate way, because he's has no need to be scientifically accurate because the whole point of the story is that Job doesn't have clue one about any of this and is thus supposed to be humbled because he's getting a lecture form the guy who supposedly did do those things.

So using Job 38 to evidence how the world works is beyond ridiculous. The whole point of the story is that Job can't know whether God is speaking accurately or not, because he's insignificant little Job.

It would be as if you were watching a particularly obnoxious physicist berate a third-grader because he thought the physicist said something wrong. So the physicist rattles off a bunch of physics he absolutely knows this third-grade wouldn't know anything about. He may even intentionally throw in crap he knows is wrong to show how easily he can befuddle the third-grader.

The point is if you said, "Well, I know up quarks and charm quarks have the same spin because Neil DeGrasse Tyson said so while he was making a third-grader cry," I wouldn't really accept that as evidence of the quarks' spin (even thought he statement turns out to be true) because Tyson didn't have to be accurate in that context and could easily have said "gluons" instead of charm quarks and the intended result is the same: the first-grader cries.

God is being a bully in this story. He is bullying Job into accepting the fact that Job (and more importantly, his dead wife, children, servants, and livestock) got shafted. He is not trying to teach him physics.

 

[HansMustermann]

Look, I don't care whether YOU believe in God. The point was whether there is reason to assume that they took it reasonably literally their world did have a foundation and some water locked behind the firmament, or it was from the start a metaphor. All I'm saying is that God's tirade in Job just makes no sense if they thought God didn't do all that.

As you say in your physicist example, then the guy doing that is basically just a bully, instead of actually having a claim to being greater.

If I have to listen to guy X berating guy Y for being inferior, but all he says is bullcrap that makes no sense, then I have to conclude until further proof is presented that guy X doesn't know that junk either. He's just a bully trying to bluff his way via some verbal bullying. That's all he has going for him.

And what I'm saying is that that's not what the moral of the story was supposed to be in God's case. Sure, they were trying to ret-con out the previous idea of a perfectly just God, but I don't think the moral was supposed to be "God is just a bluffing bully." I think a more straightforward reading, and more in line with really what all cults do, would be simply what it says: God is too great for you to understand and question, and to illustrate how much greater he is than you, here's a list of stuff he can do and you can't.

Or, if you will: God moves in mysterious ways, and is too great for you to understand.

And that's especially clearer when you look at some of the midrash and interpretation on the topic. They go overboard to make God the good guy who then gives Job even more wealth and servants and children to compensate him for the trial. (Which, I guess make it ok for the original set of servants and kids who got murdered just to test Job.) I don't really see how that squares with a moral like that God just bullying Job with BS.

And again, that isn't about how YOU take the bible. The question is how the heck did they take all those description back then.

 

[marksman]

All I'm saying is that God's tirade in Job just makes no sense if they thought God didn't do all that.

I disagree. I think it makes sense that God did it in a general sense, but there's no need for God to have done it in a hyperliteral sense. Which means there's no way that this argument is going to sway a single literalist.

I don't think the moral was supposed to be "God is just a bluffing bully."

It doesn't matter. Focus, Hans. The issue is whether any literalists is going to be swayed by the argument that God was offering a physics lesson to Job in this section.

Or, if you will: God moves in mysterious ways, and is too great for you to understand.

Exactly. He's not saying "Hey, I formed tectonic plates and shifted the Celestial Spheres at a 34 degree declension before introducing the five elements....

He's saying, "I made the universe and you're an insnigificant piece of it. You have absoutely no capacity to judge me"

And you can take it or reject it. (I reject it.) But you can't use Job as any sort of definitive statement of what the Biblical authors (which the literalist would believe is God) thought the world actually was.

And that's especially clearer when you look at some of the midrash and interpretation on the topic.

No Christian literalist is going to care what Jewish Midrash say. And Midrash, by definition, is noncanonical. Midrash can even contradict one another. So Midrash, while interesting and often entertaining, is by no means definitive. it's even less so for Christian literalists.

The question is how the heck did they take all those description back then.

No. The question is whether this passage is definitive proof of what the author believed to be the physical makeup of the universe. And it's not. At all.

You'd be better off trying to use the actual creation story of Genesis. But frankly, it's not like the literalists are unaware of the first chapters of the Bible that they take to be literally true. Which is why the OP's exercise seems so ridiculously fruitless. Does he really think that the literalists haven't thought of this stuff?

 

[Belz...]

What evidence, beyond the biblical description, is there that this is true?

We went to the moon, man. NONE !

 

[HansMustermann]

I thought the question was how those guys thought the world was, rather than if literalists will be swayed. We're talking people who manage to rationalize that fossils are put there by Satan to test their faith. I'm perfectly content with the idea that cognitive dissonance will get them back to square one, unless they were already ready to dump the ancient woowoo

As for midrash, I wasn't take it as canonical, but I think it does offer some insight into how people waay back understood the story.

 

[jj]

Well, the black sea flood would be better for the Noah myth, yes?

 

[CriticalSock]

We went to the moon, man. NONE !

Not evidence of the world view, evidence that this world view was widely believed when Genesis was written!

I have now found an article on the internets which aims to achieve what I'm talking about:

"I believe, however, that there is more than just poetry in the biblical creation account. In what follows I argue that we should take the Hebrew cosmology as a prescientific attempt to understand the universe. Parallel accounts in other ancient mythologies will be the principal evidence I offer."

http://www.aarweb.org/syllabus/syllabi/g/gier/306/commoncosmos.htm

It's not long, shall I farm some relevant quotes from it or will you have a read?

 

[marksman]

As for midrash, I wasn't take it as canonical, but I think it does offer some insight into how people waay back understood the story.

How so? Most Midrash were written in the Middle Ages, not the Bronze Ages.

 

[marksman]

I have now found an article on the internets which aims to achieve what I'm talking about

Yes, but it's mostly an argument of incredulity.

"Why should the Hebrews, who had no special expertise in ancient science and who borrowed heavily in other areas, have had a view different from other ancient peoples'?"

In other words, he argues that it is reasonable to believe that the Israelites had a cosmology similar to those of its neighbors at the time and that the Biblical text does not contradict such a worldview. And that's entirely true, but it's much different than actual proof that the Israelites had this worldview, or that they considered the Bible an inerrant codification of such a cosmology.

In post 5, you indicated you wanted to use the evidence of cosmology to counter the claim of Biblical literalists that the references to pillars and firmament are merely poetic. But even if the ancient Israelites believed that the Sumerian cosmology was a reasonable one, that doesn't mean they rejected the possibility of other cosmologies. They can use the current cosmology in a poetic sense to describe the stories they wanted to tell in a way that would be understood by their Bronze Age audience even while comprehending they don't know how the world actually worked.

Did the Ancient Israelites believe in a cosmology similar to the Babylonians? Probably. Would they have thought that a different cosmology was sacreligious or impossible because of the Bible's descriptions? For that we have absolutely no evidence, because the issue never came up. But we do know that centuries later, as new facts were developed, the Jewish descendants of the ancient Israelites had no religious turmoil in accepting a new cosmology, notwithstanding how the Bible described the heavens. There is no evidence that Jews rebelled against the idea that pi does not equal precisely 3, or rebelling at the idea of a round world, or a heliocentric solar system. So there's very little evidence that Jews took the description of the universe in the Bible as literal truth.