- Overview of the Book of Genesis
- Overview of the Gospel of Matthew
- Overview of the Psalms
- Overview of the book of Proverbs
SAB count: absurdities: 26, contradictions: 16, science and history: 7, women: 1, injustice: 3, interpretation: 1, sex: 1, cruelty and violence: 4, prophecy: 1.
This is one of those days when I feel like the SAB annotation counts are rather inflated. One of the things I dislike about the annotations is that they tend to count the same thing over and over again. Thus, for example, we get an injustice count for each time the text repeats that God is killing all the creatures on the earth with the flood.
Unlike some people, include the SAB, I'm not bothered by the long lives of these Biblical characters. They're like elves. They were probably pretty like elves too (the text explicitly said the women were beautiful enough to tempt the sons of God).
I find this genealogy interesting. Adam had only been dead 126 years when Noah was born. I wonder what the family dynamics were like when Adam was alive with all of Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech. Given that the world was descending into evil great enough for God to commit mass murder, Adam must have had a good number of "back in my day" conversations with his descendants.
Oooh, new characters! "Sons of God" who have sex with human women and produce giant Nephilites who "became the heroes and famous warriors of ancient times". I feel like there is a whole fantasy genre that must exist that I have been missing out on. Although one has to wonder where they come from and why they were so evil.
I won't waste much time wondering about the complete implausibility of the flood or the massive violence of it. That's been done before. Plus, I like the story. It is entertaining. I must say though, saying that Noah must take a single pair of every animal and then sentences later saying that he must take 7 pairs of some animals is just plain sloppy story telling.
I wonder what Lamech and Methuselah thought of all these flood preparations. Methuselah lived up until the start of the flood (600 years after Noah's birth) and Noah must have been preparing by the time Lamech died (595 years after Noah's birth). Did God communicate to them what was going on? Were they saddened to know that all of their other descendants were going to be killed? Was Methuselah killed by the flood or did he die peacefully before it? More great fanfic fodder.
New Testament
SAB count: absurdities: 3, contradictions: 5, intolerance: 2, injustice: 2, science and history: 1, language: 1, cruelty and violence: 1, prophecy: 1
Jesus' baptism and subsequent temptation has never really struck a cord with me.
Psalms and Proverbs
SAB count:
- Psalms: injustice: 1, intolerance: 1, cruelty and violence: 1
- Proverbs: 0
Today's proverbs reading has some good advice: stay away from people who think they can make a living by stealing and murdering.
I'm currently reading A History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christiandom (link is only to Volume 1; I can't find Volume 2 online) by Andrew D White. It alternates between being jaw-droppingly fascinating and jaw-droppingly boring, but it addresses Noah's Ark in great detail. You might not worry about the implausibility of Noah, but a lot of others have.
ReplyDeleteUntil around 1800, the story of Noah was considered literally true by almost everyone in Europe. Various ideas were created to reconcile this with reality. The most vexing issue was how to explain the distribution of species on the globe (rather than having all animals be native to Mount Ararat).
St. Augustine suggested that this distribution of species could be explained by men carrying them on ships to new lands, in order to later hunt them for sport. This theory mostly worked until Europeans learned about such far away places as the New World and Australia, at which point it became too implausible, and the hypothesis was rejected. In the late 1500s, Joseph Acosta wrote his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, in which he writes: "Who can imagine that in so long a voyage men woulde take the paines to carrie Foxes to Peru, especially that kinde they call 'Adas,' which is the filthiest I have seene? Who woulde likewise say that they have carried Tygers and Lyons? Truly it were a thing worthy the laughing at to thinke so."
Another prominent idea used to reconcile Noah with reality was spontaneous generation: the idea that new life could spring forth from putrid water and carrion (most often things like maggots and mosquitos). In the 17th century, Francesco Redi proved that spontaneous generation did not occur and therefore couldn't save Noah from carrying two of every little creepy-crawly thing on his ark.
St. Thomas Aquinas had developed a similar idea by saying that God imbued the earth with a secondary creative force when he made it, so that the earth could spontaneously create animals where they were needed (but that this is part of the original 6 days of creation because God gave the earth this power in those first few days). but by the 17th century this sort of talk was deemed heretical because it was too close to the more naturalistic theories that had started springing up to explain the diversity of animals.
I hadn't heard any of those attempts at reconciliation before. Will you eventually get to more modern attempts at reconciliation?
ReplyDeleteThe book was written in 1899, so it doesn't have anything from the 20th century in it.
ReplyDeleteAs for more modern-seeming ideas, there was a minor one where Noah had 2 of each genus on his Ark, and afterwards each genus split into a bunch of species. but that wasn't really accepted by a large number of people.
Once the book got into the 18th and 19th centuries, it focused more on the evolutionary ideas. The concept had been around since Aristotle (who got crazy close: he suggested that all traits exist because they're useful, and there is a Perfecting Principle that gets rid of useless traits and further develops useful ones), but ancient Greek society notwithstanding, these proto-evolutionary ideas weren't very influential until the literal version of Noah's Ark started to look implausible.
When Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1860 (side note: Darwin figured it all out in the 1840s but sat on it because he feared the repercussions; in 1859 he learned that Alfred Russel Wallace had independently come to the same conclusions, and the two of them presented their findings together. I think it's odd how one is now famous and the other is unheard of), the church could refute evolution by saying that if it were real then neither the story of creation nor that of the flood were true, and therefore the bible was not literally what happened (but since we know the bible literally did happen, clearly evolution is wrong). and this was a valid defense in 1860. By the time Darwin published Descent of Man in 1871, however, the rhetoric had dramatically shifted, and the church was trying to convince people that evolution and the bible were compatible with each other.
...come to think of it, I don't remember what all happened between the 17th century and Lamarck's work in the early 19th century. That must have been one of the boring parts of the book.
>Oooh, new characters! "Sons of God" who have sex with human women and produce giant Nephilites who "became the heroes and famous warriors of ancient times". I feel like there is a whole fantasy genre that must exist that I have been missing out on. Although one has to wonder where they come from and why they were so evil.
ReplyDeleteI think the most important truths here are theological. From this, we learn that demons are straight. Therefore, we need to rethink the whole being-evil-makes-you-gay line of reasoning.