Monday, October 28, 2024

Babel, Revisiting Modernist Views


Episode 81 (October 21, 2024), "You're Speaking My Language!"
Data Over Dogma | 21 Oct. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFp-3_c6QWQ


0:22 Two problems with your argument so far (it may be* part of a longer discussion later).

1) It presumes God's problem was their likelihood of succeeding. Notice God is not saying "lest they succeed in everything they do" but more like promises they will, and "therefore" ... gives mankind 4500 extra years before skyscrapers and rockets.
2) Nimrod was succeeding in drafting people from around whatever was inhabited in the world. Once new languages were different, with as yet no language courses and dictionaries and translators, or language teachers, that suddenly became impossible, and Nimrod had no longer a clue on how to continue. The one world state had to disband into several different unities.

[* It was part of this discussion:

how 24:12 much that just destroyed everything to uh to to separate out the the languages 24:20 seems to have take I mean it takes Humanity from literally the precipice of 24:25 godhood to oh now you're all just screwed H sorry you're all just dumb now 24:32 now you're Bronze Age goat herders]


24:37 More like "now you're Neolithic Anatolian Farmers, how about doing some farming instead?"

0:46 I think I might be combatting your disinformation, tribe of Dan ...



4:47 ... wait ... I was looking up "ediology" and it turns out you were speaking of "aetiology" ...

So, what is the aetiology of the US? George Washington, Boston Tea Party, No Taxation Without Representation, does that make it factually untrue? No.

Speaking of Boston tea party, Boston isn't exactly Boston, and the Babel we are dealing with hear need not exactly be Babel.

Like Botulf didn't do his exorcisms over demons in Massachusetts, and Daniel need never have been within hundreds of kilometers of where Nimrod had ruled.

5:08 Let's be precise.

I'm a kind of linguist. Very moderate polyglot (8 dialects of 2 language groups, so to speak). Latinist. Formerly even a Grecist.

If mankind had evolved, and language had evolved from bestial communications, it could have started out several times over.

With or without evolution, if the first men who spoke one language had spoken it 40 000 or 100 000 or 500 000 years ago, all of today's linguistic variety could be divergence from one single language. For perspective, Indo-European languages do have common traits over and above human language traits as such, and the Proto-Language for those believing in it, was spoken c. 3000 BC at the latest dates of still possible unity according to uniformitarian scholars, 2500 BC would on my view be directly after Babel, if it was one of the new languages.

But if people spoke Old Egyptian and Sumerian and Hittite and Hattic and Elamite in the time of Abraham, and that was c. 1000 years after the Flood, there is no way all this divergence could have happened through just normal linguistic change. Basque, in case you hadn't noticed, as well as Breton, aren't Romance languages. They are not products (like Romanian and French and Spanish are) of Latin diverging into different directions. Basque is a survivor of a pre-Roman language and Breton is probably an invader, subsuming a similar to itself survival, which died out elsewhere. Another example, Old Norse started diverging 1000 years ago, and Swedish and Icelandic are still very similar, if sufficient for mutual comprehension, at least for comparisons like:

Swedish: mann, manns, mannen, mannens (man, of man, the man, of the man).
Icelandic: maður, manns, manni, mann (man, including of), maðurinn, mansins, manninum, manninn (the man, including of the man).

So, given the timespan between a universal Flood and a time when Abraham met people of different languages, and I mean very different languages.

7:01 You are basically, and for no reason at all, denying Moses wrote Genesis, based on narratives from older participants ranging from Adam to the sons of Joseph.

8:48 which is supposed to be Babylonia

In times of the LXX translation.

It's probably Mesopotamia, to which also Assyria belongs, and Assyria stretches into Turkey, including parts West of Turkish Armenia.

Can you pronounce Göbekli Tepe?

9:03 "major stop number one as the groups were coming off the boat"

Other interpretation, it was not a resettling West and then South of mankind off the Ark, but of the élite's meeting place from Landing Place to a new site without direct memories of Noah.

9:35 Why is it not coming from the event via Abraham to Moses?

9:58 No?

St. Thomas in Postilla in Libros Geneseos (or if you prefer, an anonymous contemporary) considered there was already a spread. Man had obeyed God's command of spreading out.

The élite wanted to consolidate a central power and possibly (as Josephus says) do some ultra-apocalyptic and ultra-technological projects (comparable to sending out a space-ship before Earth explodes in a recent sci-fi), though St. Thomas was probably more into doing a parody of feudalism, saying "tower" is metonymically taken for "towers" and we are talking of a sky-line of a fortified city. Meanwhile, people would already have existed in China or Ireland or Americas, but they were sending their élites to do homage to Nimrod, and obey his bidding.

10:36 If geographical spread already exists, it makes sense a certain type of élite would prefer remaining an international (sorry, global) unity, and in the name of it rule over different parts, rather than allow each part to develop more or less democratically on its own, drowning the élite into the mass of people.

10:55 They are writing in a period when ...

Technically true about Moses and probably already Abraham.

But you are gratuitously presuming there was no oral story first ...

11:39 I have no problem with Nimrod imagining a rocket passing beyond the fix stars to God's palace or a skyscraper doing the same.

Just imagine he had been so busy hunting mammoths and sabre toothed tigers up to the Younger Dryas and somewhat inattentive to Noah's lessons.

Incompetence doesn't stop a man from gaining disproportionate power.

Just picture the guy at Göbekli Tepe saying in essence "we'll launch a rocket from here!!!" and God saying "you'll need a few language courses first, plus some other courses, up to Wernher von Braun ...." (starting with giving a need on the scale of the next two centuries to invent language learning).

13:40 It no where says "God gets very worried" ...

You are doing eisegesis about someone's interior state from his words that are not to the effect.

Did I say incompetence doesn't stop you from getting disproportionate power? Well, look at shrinks who erect that kind of eisegesis into pseudo-"empathy" and "treat" people for what they "read between the lines" ...

14:40 Look here.

What exactly were the men proposing?

One world states? Looming within reach now.

Getting up in the sky? Already done recently.

Getting to where Heaven is? Jesus opened the Pearly Gates.

Killing God? Did that on Calvary. Wasn't someone saying "God died, and we killed Him" about a century ago? Pretty accurate theology of Good Friday ...

Making themselves Gods? Several people from Odin to Antichrist, with Nebuchadnezzar nearly and Nero totally making it, socially have tried that. See also making oneself like God by grace, has also been made possible.

I think this exhausts the list of what they were, Biblically and in para-Biblical narrative, setting up to do. God simply made an accurate prophecy.

15:51 Holy Trinity.

[Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another's speech
[Genesis 11:7] was just cited]

16:45 Ah, notice what they did not explicitly leave off building ...

And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city
[Genesis 11:8]

Apart from the LXX, they did not leave off building the tower.

Stonehenge, stone circles at Karnak, Bretagne, Nabta Playa, this time it's Egypt, and later on observatories formed like Ziggurats.

Could the memory of a rocket project have lingered on for a while in each separate people?

17:26 Confer what I was saying about Boston and Boston.

It seems someone took the comment down.

42°21′37″N 71°3′28″W is not 52°58′26″N 0°01′17″W, but they are both Boston.

Equally, I think, 32°32′33″N 44°25′16″E was being built on and on and on, well after they had ceased to build the city, and indeed buried the city, at 37°13′25″N 38°55′18″E (which was only recently dug up by Klaus Schmidt). On the other hand, 32°32′33″N 44°25′16″E was started by Amorrheans, who back in Genesis 14 were just leaving 31°28′N 35°23′38″E (En Geddi or Asason Tamar) and hadn't arrived there yet.

17:53 No, Etemenanki was never there in Nimrod's day.



21:51 Babel as per Nimrod's Babel was neither Bronze Age nor Iron Age, but ceased when Peleg was born in 2556 BC in the Neolithic.

it's something that is a lot closer to the surface for the intelligencia the 27:32 elite of these nations so yeah this story would would um resonate with the 27:38 elite more than with anyone else which is probably uh how it was circulated 27:43 initially was among the elite yeah it does seem like the the the literate who are actually able to read this would be 27:50 the ones who would be the who who would be most sort of susceptible to its message yeah yeah the snootiest of 27:57 the snooty


Again, gratuitous guesswork about when this story is from.

If we go to Göbekli Tepe, it has no alphabet.

Before Göbekli Tepe there is an undeciphered proto-writing of 32 characters (including the hashtag) and it was used from Indonesia to Spain.

After Göbekli Tepe you get different new kinds of undeciphered proto-writing, but always very regional.

you and I were sort of exchanging videos earlier 29:49 and one of the creators that you sent me I I'm not even going to say who it was cuz I don't want anyone to look him 29:55 up cuz I don't want him to get any more uh views or whatever


That's somewhat of an admission to be willing to censor ...

When you definitely want people to know WHAT someone said, and DON'T want them to know HOW he argued it ...

This man is wrong, and I've argued against people saying exactly that, and I still do, but I don't actually censor them.

[signing off after he takes up "only Yeshua is valid" style men he doesn't cite,
Hans Georg]

No comments: