The Genesis Account and How it Refutes Creationism

a reply to: LifeisGrand

You misread the statement. There IS NO DOUBT.

It did not say there is doubt.

If you are wondering about the calendar it is based on a lunar cycle, and begins on the new moon, and most of the times 14 days later is the full moon.

Nisan is the 1st month on the Jewish Calender. Nisan 14th is the full moon.

That was when the Israelites were released from slavery.

says who?

Theres no egyptian record of "Israel" being captive in egypt...

Almost no evidence at all really... aside from a few vague inscriptions

a reply to: Akragon

I guess that is a question for a different thread. This one is dealing with Genesis 1 and the creation account.

You are getting very far off topic, and in most threads your question would probably be deleted, if not to the agenda of the owners.

But as we are using the Holy Scriptures as understanding here, it should go there too.

If you don't know much about Egyptian records you should read up on them. They often times erased people from the historic record as far as they could, and often times embellished and lied upon their accomplishments, this is known historic fact.

If you are looking to the Egyptians for truth, then, it is much like opening an email from an Ethiopian telling you they have a fortune if you give them your bank account number and social security number. You are not only gullible you are a fool.

originally posted by: whereislogic
a reply to: chr0naut

Leviticus 23:5 (NW):

In the first month, on the 14th day of the month, at twilight* is the Passover to Jehovah.

* = Lit., “between the two evenings.”

Numbers 28:16 (NW):

“‘In the first month, on the 14th day of the month, will be Jehovah’s Passover.

Esther 3:7 (NW):

In the first month, that is, the month of Niʹsan,* in the 12th year of King A·has·u·eʹrus, they cast Pur (that is, the Lot) before Haʹman to determine the day and the month, and it fell on the 12th month, that is, Aʹdar.*

* = See App B15 Hebrew Calendar

But it is no longer the 14th from twilight of the 14th day after the New Moon. It becomes the 15th.

originally posted by: LifeisGrand
a reply to: whereislogic

There is no doubt that the Passover, the day Israel was freed from Egyptian slavery was on Nisan 14, 1513 B. C. E. 430 years after the Abrahamic covenant in 1943 B. C. E. on Nisan 14.

The Angel of death passed over during the night AFTER the first Seder meal. The following morning, upon finding the first born of every family dead, the Pharaoh released the Israelite's. To the Israelites it was the same day, to us it was the next.

a reply to: chr0naut

"on the 14th day of the month, at twilight* is the Passover to Jehovah." (Leviticus 23:5)

Nisan 14. Don't understand the mix-up.

And I guess you also couldn't resist spreading some misinformation about the name "Jehovah", but let's not get into that, just wanted to point out to other readers here that it's misinformation and half-truths for the clear purpose of dissing the name exactly as I predicted.I've often noticed that when I even dare use the name Jehovah people are compelled to share that twist you just did to discredit it.

Funny you don't have the same issues and twist for the name "Jesus" (btw, the Masoretic Texts dating back the 9th century already have the vowel marks for Yehowah):

originally posted by: LifeisGrand
a reply to: Akragon

I guess that is a question for a different thread. This one is dealing with Genesis 1 and the creation account.

You are getting very far off topic, and in most threads your question would probably be deleted, if not to the agenda of the owners.

But as we are using the Holy Scriptures as understanding here, it should go there too.

If you don't know much about Egyptian records you should read up on them. They often times erased people from the historic record as far as they could, and often times embellished and lied upon their accomplishments, this is known historic fact.

If you are looking to the Egyptians for truth, then, it is much like opening an email from an Ethiopian telling you they have a fortune if you give them your bank account number and social security number. You are not only gullible you are a fool.

And Jesus said what about calling people fools?

400 some odd years, yet not a mention of them...

You brought it up by the way.... Ideal to dismiss it when it doesn't suit your arguement

Well done

originally posted by: Akragon
a reply to: LifeisGrand

You misread the statement. There IS NO DOUBT.

It did not say there is doubt.

If you are wondering about the calendar it is based on a lunar cycle, and begins on the new moon, and most of the times 14 days later is the full moon.

Nisan is the 1st month on the Jewish Calender. Nisan 14th is the full moon.

That was when the Israelites were released from slavery.

says who?

Theres no egyptian record of "Israel" being captive in egypt...

Almost no evidence at all really... aside from a few vague inscriptions

Then who were the "stateless people" (Habiru), who were originally granted residence in the land of Goshen, according to the Armana Tablets, and then proceeded out to make conquests into Canaan?

The Bible coincidentally records the Hebrew tribes as being granted residence in Goshen. Similarly, the conquests of the Habiru in the Armarna tablets seem to be the same cities and over roughly the same period as the Bible records for the Hebrews.

The Armarna tablets also describes Pharaoh Akhenaten's monotheism (to the Sun god, Aten). Could this be an acknowledgement of a change in belief due to Hebrew monotheism? Earlier Egyptian beliefs were polytheistic, a status that was restored when Akhenaten was succeeded by Tutankhamun.

Also, the suspected pharaoh of the Exodus, Thutmoses III, had irregularities about his period of rule (apparently, his wife took over for a while but no reason for this is ever recorded). Possibly it may have been due to the events of the Exodus (such as the loss of his heir, the loss of his slave workforce and the then loss of his elite charioteers in the sea)?

originally posted by: whereislogic
a reply to: chr0naut

"on the 14th day of the month, at twilight* is the Passover to Jehovah." (Leviticus 23:5)

Nisan 14. Don't understand the mix-up.

And I guess you also couldn't resist spreading some misinformation about the name "Jehovah", but let's not get into that, just wanted to point out to other readers here that it's misinformation and half-truths for the clear purpose of dissing the name exactly as I predicted.

At twilight it becomes the 15th in the Hebrew calendar.

The difference is between a day (as in daytime, a period when the sun is shining) which occupies only 12 hours - and a 24 hour calendar day.

Count fourteen daytimes from the new moon and at twilight of that daytime, you begin 15 Nisan.

In Jesus' day, Nisan 14 was "the day of preparation for Passover" when the sacrificial lamb was slaughtered, or Erev Pesach (erev means before). The lamb was for the evening meal on the 15th Nisan, the Seder feast.

You gotta think Jewish, oy!

a reply to: chr0naut
it says "on the 14th day" in the bible. Perhaps I should quote the rest of Leviticus 23:5,6:

In the first month, on the 14th day of the month, at twilight is the Passover to Jehovah.

6 “‘On the 15th day of this month is the Festival of Unleavened Bread to Jehovah. Seven days you should eat unleavened bread.

You said:

That quoted passage states that Passover is on 14th of Nisan. That is incorrect.

Yes it does say that and it's correct, the passage is from the bible, a quick check via biblehub and I can see the following translations using the word "on":

NIV, NLT, ESV, NASB, HCSB, ISV, NET bible, JPS Tanakh 1917, NAS 1977, Jubilee Bible 2000, ASV, Darby, ERV, WEB and the YLT.

It's basically only the KJV showing that the translator didn't care about what it says in the Hebrew (as usual). Webster seems to have copied that behaviour (and I might have overlooked 1 or 2).

702 [e] : bə-’ar-bā-‘āh: בְּאַרְבָּעָ֥ה : on the four : Noun

Source: Leviticus 23:5 Hebrew Text Analysis

Cause I said something about the KJV:




Your argument regarding the name Jehovah is also mentioned in the last set of videos. Now the video below I'm only sharing for the first 3 minutes cause I'm not to sure of the rest, but I wanted to show that I wasn't kidding when I said that the vowel marks for "Yehowah" are already in the Masoretix Text dating back to the 9th century:

From Masoretic Text - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The oldest extant manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date from approximately the 9th century CE.

From Iehova - Wiktionary:

Latin

Etymology

Traditional reading of the Biblical Hebrew Tetragrammaton יהוה, based on the qeri perpetuum found in the Masoretic text (ca. 7th to 10th century). ...
The Greek equivalent ΙΕΗΩΟΥΑ is found even in Late Antiquity, in the Pistis Sophia (perhaps a 2nd century text, extant in 5th or 6th century manuscripts).

originally posted by: whereislogic
a reply to: chr0naut

You are correct, Easter is a Pagan festival, but you aren't correct about:

The Bible records that Jesus rose on Sunday...

The whole Sunday thing is because it's easier for Churches to get attendance on Sunday (it's a marketing choice), that's why they have their thing on Sunday every year, but since the Jews used a different calendar, it's on a different weekday every year.

Thanks luthier btw for a more fuller quote from Basil, I'm still noticing he might be talking about days in general though, what I mean is that if I would come across him saying something that confirms what your initial link said about him:

For him this special day was a type of eternity, meant to delineate the beginning of time, rather than demarcate a 24-hour period in an ordinary week.

It might not even conflict with what you just quoted if he was merely describing a 24-hour day without saying exactly that that was what the days in Genesis were or that Genesis 1:1 was included in the 1st creative day as young earth creationists teach (the subject being "a wish to determine the measure of day and night" in general "and to combine the time that they contain", perhaps he viewed the other days than the first to be 24 hours each, I find his words very confusing); he seems to be focussed on some other subject in this quote than identifying the days in Genesis as 24 hours each. Except for the 1 line that confuses me the most:

Now twenty-four hours fill up the space of one day—we mean of a day and of a night; and if, at the time of the solstices, they have not both an equal length, the time marked by Scripture does not the less circumscribe their duration.

The first part of the statement seems a general statement about days, yet the ending does seem to suggest he might be applying it to Genesis as well, or is he just talking about how "days" are to be viewed and appealing to Scripture for that view in general (not specificly the days of Genesis chapter 1) but not ignoring his other view that he might assume his reader is aware of?

I'm not expecting you to figure it out for me, just thinking out loud here. If he elsewhere gives an indication that "For him this special day was a type of eternity, meant to delineate the beginning of time, rather than demarcate a 24-hour period in an ordinary week", then that does sound rather contradictory indeed with what you just quoted. Like I'm used to getting from Plato when he's talking in contradictions about the myth of the immortal soul. So that does sound like the book The Fathers of the Greek Church got it spot on when they said regarding Basil the Great:

“His writings show that he retained a lifelong intimacy with Plato, Homer, and the historians and rhetors, and they certainly influenced his style. . . . Basil remained a ‘Greek.’”

Here's something I read from Plato, it's not as contradictory as some of the other stuff I've read from him but it still sounds weird and confusing, just like Basil:

“Do we believe that there is such a thing as death? . . . Is it not the separation of soul and body? And to be dead is the completion of this; when the soul exists in herself, and is released from the body and the body is released from the soul, what is this but death? . . . And does the soul admit of death? No. Then the soul is immortal? Yes.”—Plato’s “Phaedo,” Secs. 64, 105, as published in Great Books of the Western World (1952), edited by R. M. Hutchins, Vol. 7, pp. 223, 245, 246.

More weird stuff from Plato's teacher Socrates about that subject (I hope it's not too off-topic, but it sort of comes back to what I quoted from the online etymology dictionary regarding the word "creationism": "...originally a ...theological position that God immediately created a soul for each person born", which ties in with this Platonic way of thinking about the soul, I already quoted something about that before with a link with more details):

What is the origin of the teaching that the human soul is invisible and immortal?

The difficulty lies in the fact that the meanings popularly attached to the English word “soul” stem primarily, not from the Hebrew or Christian Greek Scriptures, but from ancient Greek philosophy, actually pagan religious thought. Greek philosopher Plato, for example, quotes Socrates as saying: “The soul, . . . if it departs pure, dragging with it nothing of the body, . . . goes away into that which is like itself, into the invisible, divine, immortal, and wise, and when it arrives there it is happy, freed from error and folly and fear . . . and all the other human ills, and . . . lives in truth through all after time with the gods.”—Phaedo, 80, D, E; 81, A.

In direct contrast with the Greek teaching of the psy·kheʹ (soul) as being immaterial, intangible, invisible, and immortal, the Scriptures show that both psy·kheʹ and neʹphesh, as used with reference to earthly creatures, refer to that which is material, tangible, visible, and mortal.

Source: Soul: Insight, Volume 2

Ah, now I found the whole thing, the rest of the quote does clear it up a bit that Basil indeed was not a young earth creationist and did not believe the days in Genesis were 24 hours each, he was indeed, as I suspected and tried to indicate, just referring to 24-hour days in general as per the topic of "a wish to determine the measure of day and night", the rest makes it clear that he did see the days in Genesis as ages or periods and that he actually viewed the whole first day/period/age as seperate from the other days (rather than just Genesis 1:1 seperate from the 6 creative days/periods/eras). Quoting Basil and continuing a bit more where you left off:

It is as though it said: twenty-four hours measure the space of a day, or that, in reality a day is the time that the heavens starting from one point take to return there. Thus, every time that, in the revolution of the sun, evening and morning occupy the world, their periodical succession never exceeds the space of one day. But must we believe in a mysterious reason for this? God who made the nature of time measured it out and determined it by intervals of days; and, wishing to give it a week as a measure, he ordered the week to revolve from period to period upon itself, to count the movement of time, forming the week of one day revolving seven times upon itself: a proper circle begins and ends with itself. Such is also the character of eternity, to revolve upon itself and to end nowhere. If then the beginning of time is called "one day" rather than "the first day," it is because Scripture wishes to establish its relationship with eternity. It was, in reality, fit and natural to call "one" the day whose character is to be one wholly separated and isolated from all the others.

Source: CHURCH FATHERS: Hexaemeron, Homily II (Basil)

Uh I think you are having some comprehension problem. Basil is not talking about a day n general. In the last part. You are not taking this in context of the total hommilies or what Basil in general says of Genesis and the bible being literal.

a reply to: whereislogic

That statement you quoted from Plato is not confusing or contradictory. I don't understand why you think so.

The quote you provided about Basil is an opinion it is not Basil himself. You would need to provide your own examples and proof to reflect why that is true. Your elongation of the homily does not do that. You are simply ignoring the last part of his statement or the con text of his hommilies in my opinion. This is not the only place he describes the bible is literal rather allegory. Hippo is considered to have changed the understanding of Genesis being allegory. Several other theologians have made young earth claims around Basil:s time. Not the same 6000 year timeline but less than a million years. Certainly far less than 4.5billion.

If you read the whole homily you can see he is ending this homily by saying if the bible meant day one was an age and not a day it would have said so as it does to describe other parts of the bible.

By the way that is not the whole thing that is the only the second homily.

a reply to: luthier

Basel says it later on what I quoted initially from the link you put in your comment:

Thus whether you call it day, or whether you call it eternity, you express the same idea. ...Thus it is... that Scripture marks by the word "one" the day which is the type of eternity, the first fruits of days, the contemporary of light...

Yeah, he talks weird, but he does say it. He didn't think the first day mentioned in Genesis was 24 hours nor necessarily any of the other days in Genesis chapter 1 (cause he's talking about ages elsewhere in the same text). But I don't wanna debate his beliefs with you. It's become clear to me (that he's incredibly vague but still said the above which matches the quote and opinion below), I've moved on.

In case it helps you, here was the quote from that Catholic source you linked:

He notes that the first day in the account is actually described not as the ‘first day’ but ‘one day’ (see Genesis 1:5). For him this special day was a type of eternity, meant to delineate the beginning of time, rather than demarcate a 24-hour period in an ordinary week.

originally posted by: whereislogic
a reply to: luthier

Basel says it later on what I quoted initially from the link you put in your comment:

Thus whether you call it day, or whether you call it eternity, you express the same idea. ...Thus it is... that Scripture marks by the word "one" the day which is the type of eternity, the first fruits of days, the contemporary of light...

Yeah, he talks weird, but he does say it. He didn't think the first day mentioned in Genesis was 24 hours nor necessarily any of the other days in Genesis chapter 1 (cause he's talking about ages elsewhere in the same text). But I don't wanna debate his beliefs with you. It's become clear to me, I've moved on.

It's anything but clear. You are seeing what you want to see.

If then the beginning of time is called one day rather than the first day, it is because Scripture wishes to establish its relationship with eternity. It was, in reality, fit and natural to call one the day whose character is to be one wholly separated and isolated from all the others. If Scripture speaks to us of many ages, saying everywhere, age of age, and ages of ages, we do not see it enumerate them as first, second, and third.

a reply to: whereislogic

I think IMO what you are mistaking is that he is saying it doesn't really matter in the context of meaning how long the day was but why would he use a day and not an age if it wasn't describing a 24 hour day.

It certainly isn't clear. Especially when taken into context the other comments he makes about the bible being literal.

The fact that so many scholars familiar with his works entirety don't agree kind of shows its not very clear.

Anyone know any more about Bishop Ussher's exact views?

Other than what I already quoted and related to the thread.

I still like to know more about Bishop Ussher's views, no one out there that knows any more details about it?

A link like I got about Basil would be great.

originally posted by: LifeisGrand
a reply to: Akragon
...
If you don't know much about Egyptian records you should read up on them. They often times erased people from the historic record as far as they could, and often times embellished and lied upon their accomplishments, this is known historic fact.

If you are looking to the Egyptians for truth, then, it is much like opening an email from an Ethiopian telling you they have a fortune if you give them your bank account number and social security number. You are not only gullible you are a fool.

Most here prefer to...

Like Akragon saying:

Almost no evidence at all really... aside from a few vague inscriptions...

And the similar phrases regarding the evidence of God's existence in other threads (more often using the phrase or a variation on: 'no evidence at all').