Genesis was written by biased men.

reply to post by Sigismundus



ever see david rohl's new chronology? i find him extremely interesting. i don't know if it's a 300 year error though, but it is compelling.

Hi UnDo—

Cool LINK…I ‘ve always liked Rohl’s ‘personable approach’ (compared to my far more dour professors at Durham in England) in breaking down complex Egyptian history for the layman, but his conclusions (despite his talent with a shovel) seem to me to be somewhat forced –probably in order to sell books and make a quick buck especially in the lucrative ‘bible friendly’ American ’sensationalist’ book markets (which one cannot make as an archaeologist, typically)

Scholars often complain that Rohl’s dates for the ‘conquest’ of Canaan by the Israelites shift back and forth depending on his need at the time to prove something---he hedges his bets alot apparently.. (if you read the ‘book of Joshua’ carefully in the Masoretic text shows that there are at least two different oral sources beind the text, one that claims the Conquest by Joshua over the Canaanites happened 'fast and furiously' and another source that said it happened more gradually over centuries, through intermarriages etc

David R. first claims an ‘early date’ for Joshua (ca. 1410 B.C.) for which there really is NO hard tangible archaeological evidence at all for a conquest or major wars in Palestine (but a lot of ‘words’ from David though!) and then he claims a later date for Joshua (which certainly fits the evidence such as we have it better (ca. 1210 B.C.) so he seems to waiver between the two dates as it suits his purposes at the time (‘hedging his bets despite his claim that his new chronology ‘solves the problem’ which is does NOT…archaeological evidence unfortunately is ‘silent’ i.e. cannot speak except ‘indirectly’ i.e. in supportive evidence of any single theory.

The Israelites were essentially semi-nomads until the United Monarchy period (BC 950) rather than city dwellers like the Canaanites with whom they first tried to dispossess then ended up racially intermingling. The Masoretic Text of the Bible depicts the Israelites during the time of the Judges following the Conquest as subservient to the surrounding nations and living in tents (Jgs 20:8; 1 Sam 4:10, 13:2) where they did not worship in permanent structures, but in a temporary Tent-Shrines set up at a centers such as at Shechem & Shiloh (Josh 18:1; 1 Sam 1:1-3). So they were still acting like ‘nomads’ at that time.

Rohl tries to make a case that the final Bronze Age city at Jericho was destroyed part way through the MB IIB period but this is not possible because there are Late Middle Bronze Age phases of Jericho attested by local pottery. Rohl connects the destruction of Hazor level XVI with the Joshua Conquest but this destruction if it happened at all would have happened around the very end of Middle Bronze IIC period and not midway through MB IIB, so Rohl's earlier time shifting back 300 years just DO NOT work…at least in the case near Jericho.

reply to post by Sigismundus


well i think, just based on the evidence i was personally interested (abydos), that the guy is brilliant, and if it doesn't work, he'll figure out why. he doesn't seem to be as forced as you say, to sell books. whatdya wanna bet his biggest customers are other egyptologists?

as far as racial purity goes... i think the tribe of judah was the only one that seemed to be the most pressed to do so and i don't think it meant what you think it meant..






[edit on 23-9-2009 by undo]

Hi again, Undo—

It’s nice to hear that David Rohl has a loyal following (i.e. among people who like his more down to earth style), but--when I see him ‘over-simplifying’ such a very complex subject which he does again and again, we are forced to dig a little deeper into the tools he is actually capable of using (bearing in mind his own specific Egyptological and archaeological training, but also note his specific lack of textual training in terms of biblical MSS, especially the DSS corpus, which he rarely if ever speaks about…which makes serious students like myself really wonder whether or not he has an agenda…)

I for one am always a little suspicious of any scholar who reaches down to the non-specialist audience…I hear ‘sell more books to the general audiences !’ being screamed by publishers somewhere in the background.

David Rohl NEVER takes the time to explain to his ‘general audience’ that with so many muddled and contradictory Hebrew texts that we are here dealing with we have (in fact) at least FOUR sets of different ‘biased’ (i.e. programmed) dates in the Torah (including Genesis, to refer to the general BIAS topic of this thread) e.g. the pointed/vowelled Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) of AD 960, based on single MS from Leningrad which makes up 480 year periods, e.g. between ‘Abraham’ and ‘Moses’, and between ‘Moses’ and the ‘Temple of Solomon’ etc. all neatly divided into 480 year groupings—which is totally unlike OTHER Hebrew text families of the Torah which have NO strict 480-year schemata and use vastly DIFFERENT dates for say the ages of the Patriarchs and the time spent in Egypt etc.) : this affects the overal date scheme of Rohl's apologetic date matching efforts...at least to date.

These OTHER non MT texts are RARELY if EVER discussed on ‘general audience’ books funded by larger publishing houses—and include the important Hebrew Underlay (‘Vorlage’) to the Greek Septuaginta LXX (c. BCE 200) once thought lost but was re-discovered in the late 1940s and early 1950s amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls in Caves 1-11, being hand-copied right alongside other non-matching DSS MSS who use ANOTHER set of Dates for the SAME periods

(e.g. DSS-A and DSS-B versions) and THEN there is the Samaritan Pentateuch Torah (c. BCE 400) which uses YET ANOTHER set of numbers/dates for e.g. the ages of the patriarchs and the time spent in Egypt etc.

So we cannot follow David Rohl's starting dates who ALWAYS uses the Masoretic Text as his chronological Hebrew text source with its fake 480-block years :

If he were as thorough as you think, he would have to lay out ALL the DIFFERENT dates he is working with in the Hebrew MSS traditions (which are highly contradictory and will open a HUGE CAN o’WORMS angering Protestants, Catholics and Jews alike) despite the dis-informative rhetoric from the Rebbes and Priests/Ministers claim (incorrectly) ad nauseam that the Masoretic Text of the OT matches ALL known ancient MSS closely—it does NOT especially when it comes to dates and numbers…..

reply to post by Sigismundus


please read all of this before you respond

well i compare it to my own research, which is all over the map i'm connecting ends to each other and where they match, i hang onto them as potential answers for bigger questions.

an example of this was the story of "the rebel" nimrod. now before you run off on a nimrod tangent, understand that i know how the texts have been historically translated and that is frankly, not my fault. my personal journey is to find what works, regardless of what any school of thought or translation may have said prior to now. that includes the copious amounts of scholarly books written on the subject since then.

if i find something in one of those books that bears further investigation, and find the investigation leads somewhere that answers questions I'M ASKING, i may revisit that book again. even then, i try to go strictly with etymology, artifacts and the actual ancient texts of the various ancient cultures. this frees me up from having to pay lip service to ANY SCHOOL OF THOUGHT, including the repeatedly beat to death "ancient history is a myth" people.

sorry.

One more point, then I will let you digest it a bit..

So persons however talented with a spade like David R. and his very positive work over the past 20 years in Egypt, cannot just take the MT ‘at face value’ and say ‘here is THE Hebrew version of the dates in Egypt and HERE is the Egyptian version of the same referral dates, and HERE IS HOW we can fix the variations between them’ etc. since we are in fact facing at least 4 different sets of dates in the muddled Hebrew traditions

In this way, by always using the MT, Rohl (and many scholars like him who reach out to general audiences) must by definition oversimplify what is in fact a VERY complex situation-- and the general reading masses simply NOT privy to this kind of detailed textual information (at least not yet, but may change now that we have more general audience scholars like Bart Erhman gaining a wider non-fundamentalist audience) because the larger powers that be (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant) have their own biases in making the common masses (esp in the US, an important book-market) believe we are ONLY dealing with a SINGLE Hebrew tradition when we speak of dates say of the Conquest as it lines up with the Egyptian king lists etc.—which we certainly are NOT.

Therefore without such a reference for the confused state of the Hebrew tradigions ('historical' traditions) for e.g. the ages of the patriarchs, the time spent in Egypt, the overall dates of the Conquest are thereby affected by even more than 300 years either way…all of which persons conversant with the Dead Sea Scroll corpus will tell you MUST be taken into consideration if you are going to try and line up anything 'biblical' with Egyptian recrods, such as we have them...

When referring to the Dead Sea Scroll corpus, I am only referring to the texts that were re-discovered in the time-capsule Caves 1-11, which were sealed up originally in AD 68, and I do NOT refer to the later Hebrew copies which follow the later protoMasoretic versions of the post-Javneh Council OT texts found at say, Wadi Muraba’at etc. (outside of Caves 1-11 and Masada) most of which date from the 2nd Failed Jewish Revolt against Rome in CE 136 under Shimeon bar Kosiba, aka Bar-Kokhba after Hillel II forced his own version of the text on to post destruction Rabinnic Judaeism in AD 90) when the Torah and Tanak related Hebrew canon was finally decided upon---both in actual books and in a more or less single 'proto-Masoretic' text type which eventually became 'normative' for Rabinnic Judaeism and later Protestantism

(but, interestingly NOT the Roman Catholic Old Testament, which follows Jerome's 5th Century Latin Vulgate, taken from the LXX Greek OT families, much of which is closer to some of the Cave 1-11 texts with their different date schemata...

All of this background however DOES fit into the larger discussion of "Genesis" being written by 'biased' men---especially if you discuss the final forms of the Masoretic Texts, with all of its editorial biased-dating schemes (e.g. 480 year periods) being forced onto older texts that DID NOT have such dates and numbers, changes to the older texts that were 'deliberately made' for 'theological' (and not 'historical') purposes...

reply to post by Sigismundus


ah but you see, he isn't just using the potential dates of egypt and israel interaction during the deutoronomy and exodus texts, but even earlier texts. AND, not only hebrew texts but akkadian, sumerian, babylonian and assyrian texts.

let's take the case of abydos, egypt, because that is the area i'm currently working on. abydos is a greek word. it obfuscates historical connections as do all the other greek names for egyptian places and things. language is such a delicate thing but it does leave a bread crumb trail provided the languages are not too far separated from each other in time. i realize greek and egyptian culture intermingled for a very long time, but 3000 BC, i rather doubt it.

Hi Undo

(just an FYI for those on this thread: one of the earlier names for Abydos was "Wep Wawut' or something that sounded like that, menaing, 'The Opener of the Roads' and was also the name of a local clan-god)

Now...I certainly would not undervalue what Rohl is doing in Egypt for Egyptology.

But ANY discussion of trying to line up ANYTHING in the post Javneh MT text version of the 'bible' will have to make a large discussion point that we are not dealing with 'pure positivistic' history in the MT but rather 'theology' and this can be applied to ALL the different families of Hebrew writings (they all had their OWN dating schemata) and Rohl would do very very well indeed to be able to say things like,

'The MT places this event in this period here in the x-centuryt, but the Hebrew Vorlage Underlay to the earlier LXX and ALSO the Sam Pent places the same event somewhat ealier in th y-century...interestingly the DSS B texts found in Cave 4 at Qumran places the very same event in yet another century altogether...'

In other words 'general audience scholars' need to start to bring out the force of the fact that we are not dealing with a single text family with firm dates when we are dealing with Hebrew MSS, but rather a watery pool of dates than can be shape-shifted back and forth.

This constant 'playing fast and loose with dates' process in the ancient records can also be seen in Egyptian monuments and papyri which were shape-shifted and biased here this way, here that way, for their own theological schemata at any one point in time and place, and the same also goes for temple sites in Assyria and Babylon and the Ugaritic corpus etc.--all of whose 'religious' chroniclers were looking for 'sacred patterns' that glorified their own states and their own gods etc.

So for anyone today trying to find 'firm historical dates' for alleged 'historical events' e.g. the Israelite 'Conquest' of Canaan or the so-called 'Exodus' with all the inflated population numbers and miracles, etc. requires a very deep knowledge of the different agendas of ancient cult sites in the Levant and elsewhere, and modern scholars like David Rohl need to start breaking down the limitations of his research from the beginning to the 'general masses' who tend alwayhs to assume that the single text tradition o the Masoretes they read in their King James Bible is the ONLY 'bible' and that Egyptian Records and other chroncles of ancient cultures are also 'monolithic' and 'factual' in listing their OWN historical data or king-list information (hint: they are NOT un-biassed, and the whole process is a very fluid target which is constantly moving, like several boats on water during a hurricane, and not like standding buildings with firm dates you can stick to...

So David Rohl and others like him are just going to end up confusing the masses more than they are already with this whole subject with his sliding date adjustments that purport to fit a single MSS tradition among so many others he totally ignores...one wonders what the heck he is trying to prove?

reply to post by Sigismundus


you have to play hard and fast with the dates because the dates are not correct. if, as time advanced, the dating scheme changed, you can rest assured it did so because the dates on the sumerian kings list and dynastic pharaohs list, also left the beaten path and headed into lala land.

The old testament and the new testament sound like two entirely different religions to me.

I believe that the old testament is largely a collection of stories that had been passed down verbally until such time that they could be written down. To me, they are mostly fable. Of course there could be some basis in fact.
But what happens when a story is passed down orally through dozens of generations? Is it still identical to the original?

reply to post by Wildbob77


the way to tell is to do comparative analysis with other texts that were contemporary to their time. keep in mind, however, that a couple of scholars from egypt and mesopotamia, during the greek empire, had a show down, to determine which had the most antiquity, and the end result was things like a sumerian king living for 25,000 years and no two pharaohs ruling at the same time.

i had always wondered why there was a crown for both lower and upper egypt but yet only one pharaoh ruled at a time. i realize there was also a double crown but what was the inspiration for the separate crowns in the first place, other than perhaps the really obvious possibility that at least some point in their history, they had dual pharaohs -- upper and lower. (too obvious, i guess)




[edit on 24-9-2009 by undo]

To say that Moses wrote the Torah is an automatic refutation of the Torah's claims...which is fine if that's where you're coming from.

If you claim to believe in what the Torah claims, however, you must concede that the Torah was given to Moses, fully written by the creator, himself.

This claim, if true, has some profound implications.

First, a believer's approach to Genesis should leave behind our current understanding of physics. The laws of the creation don't apply to the creator much as the laws of binary code don't apply to the programmer that types it on a keyboard.

Who's to say that where it's written "God created the Heavens and the Earth" it isn't meant "God wrote the basic codes that would eventually define a finite (or infinite) universe in a virtual space"?...or at least something very similar.

A video game character has little chance of understanding the functions that brought it into being. It is too far removed from the hard code that defines it's very essence.

How is it any different for us?
The universe is most certainly made up of numerical codes. Atomic codes. Even our biology is a long string of four digit sequences.

To say that it's impossible that God created the Earth before he created the sun is like saying it's impossible for me to write this reply before I actually post it. Who's to say God didn't "write" the Earth before he "wrote" the sun, then he "posted" them together or at different moments.

I'm just saying that with today's understanding of how to create virtual space in a binary computer system, how can anyone apply physics as we know it to "limit" the creative capabilities of any potential creator deity?

That established, the Torah actually claims to be the hard code of the creation. This code isn't binary but is 22 digits. It's also referred to as "The Book of Life".

In Revelations, John saw a vision of it. It was described as having writing "on the inside and the outside".

When John says "in the beginning there was the word"...and so on, this is what he means. We exist because of a string of code that issued from the creator's mouth...

...so to speak.

reply to post by Alpha Arietis


Are you familiar with Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum"? I gave you a star for the creative writing, but you know as much about the creation as my dog. It's all pure speculation.

Genesis 1:16

God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.

Age of earth 4.54 billion years.

Star found in our galaxy 13.2 billion years.

Also, "Let there be light" came after the earth was created.

Source: www.physorg.com...

Science is self-correcting. And those digits are not factual, they are theoretical. Nobody has lived for 4.54 billion years to actually measure that date right? It is all in theory. Theory = speculative.

Genesis 1:27

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The first few pages of the Genesis (creation) is a summary. The best thing that I can describe it is a "in a nutshell" story. Perhaps the early church who has compiled the Genesis felt that its readers may have a hard time reading it in full.

Since God created Adam, he also created Eve from Adam's rib. Hence, God created Eve.

Genesis 2:22

Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

See above.

Genesis 2:18

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

Unfortunately, this is the case. God favors men rather than women.

Genesis 1:25

God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Unfortunately, you are missing the point. When the Bible say Serpent. It doesn't mean that it's those reptiles we can see on Earth. The serpent is not of this earth. It is in Eden which is on the 3rd heaven in which Adam lives as a pet of God before Adam and Eve were banished to Earth and became of Earth (physical).

Genesis 3:14

So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, "Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.

Kindly refer to the above. The serpent is not the snake that you know of. It is a spirit that presides in the heaven. These serpents as of now are unknown and maybe the one's who are influencing humanity. This is speculation however.

Genesis 3:11

And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"

I can't comment on this part yet since I have not read enough to answer it. I'll get back to it. However, I do know that God isn't everywhere and He also cannot see everything. In the knowing everything part, I still cannot answer it.

Genesis 3:16

To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

Unfortunately for the feminism movement in the 90s this is the case. It isn't exclusive to the Genesis though, it is all over the Bible.



There is no double standard in Christianity. I think the closest we can get to double standards will be in pagan religions. If Christianity is your chosen religion then this is the consequence that you simply have to face.

As for me, I'm not a theist nor an atheist nor an agnostic. I'm still researching exhaustively the scriptures related to them. I just hope that I finish it before I die.

I'm planning on starting a thread regarding my thoughts on Christianity in general but I don't want to hi-jack this thread.


[edit on 4-10-2009 by Unregistered]

reply to post by Unregistered


You are not pirating this thread at all. I enjoy your reply. Please feel free to post your "take" on Christianity.

My comment to your post would be: it seems rather arbitrary to me what parts you take as factual and what parts of Genesis (or the Bible in general) you take as a metaphor. A snake is a snake is a snake. Otherwise Genesis should state that we're talking about spirits. Curiously other parts of the Bible always clearly mention when an angel or demon appears.

BTW: Of course science is self-correcting. Otherwise it would be a fixed belief-system LOL.


[edit on 5-10-2009 by Nichiren]

[edit on 5-10-2009 by Nichiren]

Hi Alpha Arietis--

However much I love the concept of ones and zeros--when discussing the creation myths of the post Exilic Judaeans, be very careful here: ones and zeros have NIET to do with the pre-scientific and TWO CONTRADICTORY Paleo Hebrew Creation Myths in Genesis--which are in turn just two of several thousand Creation Myths in the world today, many of which are far older and more 'sophisticated'.

If a Creator god (who just happens to be the local clan god of the group who is actually writing the accounts down !) were to come down out of a firey bush and say, look I made the earth and the Trees and Grass and Herbs ALL BEFORE the Sun and the Moon and even before the Stars (Gen 1:5-7), I'd tell him to go back into his golden box (or whatever rock from whence he crawled) and not come out until he stopped talking nutsy koo-koo that goes against what we know about the known-visible universe.

People who believe 'every word of the bible' by and large cannot read unpointed Paleo and even fewer even bother to read the TWO contradictory creation myths in Genesis (chapter 1:1 to 2:4a and 2:4b to 4:32) ---and most of these persons fully allow nonsense like trees before stars and talking snakes to pass for 'hard science' -- !!

reply to post by Sigismundus


... and then again. How can you be sure that 0s and 1s have nothing to do with creation?

I've come to the conclusion that all understanding of creation is pure speculation. We simply don't know. This subject might be forever beyond our brain's reach. So Genesis could be the truth, or anything in between.

Hi Nichiren--

Actually Genesis cannot possibly be the 'truth' since we have (2) contradictory creation myths in Genesis (Gen 1:1 to 2:4a and Gen 2:4b to 4:26) we are dealing with here---by two different writers with two different world views, writing style, sentence lengths, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, audiences, and time periods.

One has male and female created together by ELOHIM on the 6th day after several earlier 'days' of creation (including plants and trees being created before stars, the sun or the moon), the other starts with the earth then the heavens then some 'water from the ground' in some pre-existent garden and the clan god YHWH-Elohim 'forming' Adam from mud, then the animals, then Hayyah from his 'side' &tc. with the order of creation different in each case.

TWO different myths, offering TWO different Weltanschauungen written by TWO different writers expressed in TWO different dialects-both contradictory. Read the two accounts side by side--you'll see the differences better, and it would help if you highlighted the two creation myths in the text with two separate colours of highlighters. It makes it even clearer for the beginner.

genesis was NOT written by bias men,1 man wrote genesis, and he wrote as he was commanded, it was altered by bias men. to give men superiority over women.

reply to post by clever024


Really? Any back up data, or you're just saying ...