Continuing with J. Richard Middleton up to 31:14

Babel : Beginning My Answer to Middleton, up to 13:16 on the video · Continuing with Middleton to 22:33 · Continuing with J. Richard Middleton up to 31:14 · Richard Middleton Bungles OT "adumbrations" of the Trinity - part 1, "let us" passages 31 min to 41:35 min

Same video as previous two posts.

23:25 3000 BC? That's not ancient Sumerian, that's pre-Flood.

What is carbon dated as 3000 BC comes from times probably even after Abraham died, and he was born (Roman Martyrology for Christmas Day has a handy chronology of OT events relating to Christ's birth) as recently as 2015 BC. Genesis 14, when he was around 80 (76 - 86) would have been in around 1935 BC. And the Amorrhaeans evacuating En Geddi (called Asason Tamar in that chapter, En Geddi is a later name), evacuated a temple treasure on reed mats that are carbon dated to 3500 BC.

The real date 3000 BC, Noah would have been doing things finishing the Ark, or at least preparing it, the Flood was in 2957 BC (same source for my Biblical chronology). And the carbon dates from back then would be like 40 000 BP - fairly clearly not what you'd call Ancient Sumerian, more what you would call Late Neanderthals. Or Denisovans.

23:48 I definitely do think Genesis 11:1 - 9 is about one incident.

Why? Apart from the authority of the Bible and Church Fathers, because, after the Flood, even if you took 1000 years from then to Abraham, you'd not get languages as different as Egyptian and Sumerian. Not by the process that linguists study and call "language evolution" which is somewhat of a misnomer.

In 1000 years, we have gone from Icelandic and Danish being one language with very minor dialectal differences ("ring" would have been "ring" in Danish, "hring" in Icelandic, "wrath" - the adjective - would have been "vreither" in Danish and "reithr" in Icelandic, soft TH sound). Today they are incomprehensible, but if you learn both, they are very similar, more to each other than to English or to Dutch. Akkadian and Sumerian are like English to Chinese or like Dutch to Malay. Some incident was definitely not natural "language development" as linguists also call (or miss-call) the process.

However, this does not preclude that later Mesopotamian history is mirrored in this one incident. Like definite types of Church devotion are mirrored in seven local Churches of - the other end of Asia Minor, compared to its eastern neighbour Mesopotamia.

24:42 I think this one incident was before there was idolatry.

Historia scholastica dates idolatry to Ninus. Just because he founded Niniveh doesn't mean he's Nimrod. Nimrod was around in Qermez Dere, but the text of Genesis 10 takes into account that since then, Ninus founded Niniveh as a great city. Quoting the relevant wikis:

"Radiocarbon dating has estimated that Qermez Dere was built between c. 8500 BC and 7900 BC." Note, when Göbekli Tepe was covered in sand is carbon dated to 8600 BC. Real year, birth of Peleg 2556 BC.

Qermez Dere is from within a decade or even less from the end of Babel.

It's 36°31′0.01″N 42°49′59.99″E.

Now, let's go to Niniveh - it's 36°21′34″N 43°09′10″E. It's ten arc minutes further South, ten arc minutes further East. And it's later.

"Nineveh itself was founded as early as 6000 BC during the late Neolithic period."

That's in the life of Sarug. Around his birth. Like 2287 BC. That's when we look for Ninus. And that's where (later) we find the earliest image of Ishtar.

Nimrod's project was a secularist one, not an idolatrous in the sense of polytheistic one. No, the Bible is not "demythologising" the actual history of Mesopotamia, it is describing an event with a hero from the Neolithic who had made himself a myth in previous decades as an Upper Palaeolithic mammoth hunter, and cashed in on it as a man hunter.

25:20 In Exodus chapter one, there is no city named after any up to then Pharao.

Either the name Ramesses (which arguably is the same name as Ramses) is an anachronistic update by later scribes (something I think Moses authorised), or the later Ramessic Pharaos were named after that city.

I can only give Beverley as a name for persons that started out as a place name, right off the cuff, but yes, you do have this.

"Beverly or Beverley is a given name and surname. It is derived from an English surname, which was in turn taken from the place name Beverley. The place name derives from Old English, combining befer (beaver) and leah (clearing).

"It was at one time a common masculine given name, but is now almost exclusively a feminine name due to the popularity of a 1904 novel, Beverly of Graustark by George Barr McCutcheon."

So no, Exodus 1 features no Pharao naming a city after himself. Not that they weren't megalomanic enough, but that's not chronologically possible. Ramesses I founded the 19th Dynasty, and Moses was arguably born in the 12th, with himself surfacing as Amememhet IV (though I have heard the pharao of Exodus was Amenemhet IV too), and the Exodus event was 12th or 13th dynasty. The 19th dynasty started out with a pharao getting or taking his name from the city mentioned in Exodus 1, or he was megalomaniac enough to change the city's name or his successor did (St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad in 1924, by Stalin, not by Lenin himself). And in that latter case, the priests in the ... Tabernacle ... would have ordered the next copy to replace (for instance Avaris) by "Pi-Ramesses" in the next scroll.

25:50 I agree that God was not afraid of Nimrod getting up.

B U T the Babylonic nation is very anachronistic to mention here. What was really not good then was trying to get up in a rocket.

Have you seen how da Vinci imagined one could do an airplane? Thing is, if you tried it out, you would arguably fall to your death, unless you were a good swimmer and the test was made over a lake. That's how bad Nimrod's rocket model was. The one he was planning to launch from Göbekli Tepe. With "three step rocket" as one correct principle, but nothing else correct.

4500 years later, God had no problem with Gagarin or Armstrong getting up, but by then the rocket technology was also much better than what Nimrod could have provided in the Neolithic.

27:12 In Nebuchadnezzar's time, not every single person was at the building, but every person within what he counted as the world (i e the Babylonian Empire - confer the language of Augustus as for the Census) was on some level mobilised. The taxes he was paying were supporting the building force. And both tax "money" (this was before minted money, I presume, if Babylonians were conservative) and building force were from all nations Nebuchadnezzar ruled over.

In Nimrod's time, there was no money yet. But people were mobilised from all ethnicities and localities over the entire globe. In Göbekli Tepe you do find symbols now used by Australian Aborigenes, and also (the bird man) one from Polynesia. That global élite was drafting people from all over the world, a bit like how Inca rulers were taxing by drafting people to constitute a work force at more central locations. A N D that global governance was overturned by the new and manyfold, very sudden, linguistic barriers. What's the point of Mungo woman in Australia's grandsons sending a delegation to Göbekli Tepe if they no longer speak Hebrew (or some kind of such) at either place and not have any other common language either?

28:18 Both "king of the four quarters of the earth" (or corners, I think you find them in the localities today named Kamtchatka, Hobart, Puerto Williams / Cape Horn, Anchorage / Alaska) is an extravagant claim. But so is the name "Sumer" if it is indeed the same word as Shinar, which I think likely. About as extravagant as calling US citizens with some exclusivity "Americans" when they do not comprise Americanos from Méjico or Perú or Américains from Québec ... since Sumeria was just one small part of South East Mesopotamia, not all of it.

29:17 I totally agree with that relation between Gen 10:25 and Gen 11:1-9.

That's why I put the birth of Peleg (401 years after the Flood) as the Biblical and correct date for when Göbekli Tepe ceased to be built and was instead covered in sand.

2556 BC is "8600 BC" which is the carbon date of the uppermost level of charcoal found in Göbekli Tepe under that sand.

29:29 But Genesis 10:8-10 is not "earlier" just because it is earlier in the text. Nimrod is in Ham's genealogy and Peleg is in Shem's. (Btw, you have a typo, Genesis 20 is summarised as "Abraham sojourned in Gerara: Sara is taken into king Abimelech's house, but by God's commandment is restored untouched.").

Yes, Nimrod started out in Babel a k a Göbekli Tepe. When he had to bury that in sand, the ones he could speak to helped him build Arach ... I identity the five city lineup "Arach, Achad, Chalanne, Chale, Resen" with "Çayönü, Nevali Çori, Jerf el Ahmar, Müreybet, Abu Hureyra" and the single city Ninveh with Qermez Dere, starting out just after he had buried Göbekli Tepe.

What is the distance from Göbekli Tepe to Qermez Dere?

We can take Venerable Urfa and Mosul as modern standins. Distance between Sanliurfa and Mosul is 396 kilometers (246 miles) in Turkey, Iraq.

How long is it from Ur or Babylon to Nineveh? We can take Baghdad and Mosul as standins. It's 355.00 km.

Niniveh is about equidistant between Babel of Nimrod and Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar.

Btw, it is possible Arach = Ur of Chaldees = Nevali Çori in Nimrod's time. Nevali Çori is in Sanliurfa province, just as Qermez Dere is in Niniveh Governate.

29:39 It is not said that all of the cities are "on the plain of Shinaar" ... Niniveh is notably outside the Harran plain which is the one I analyse as found in Genesis 11:2. Göbekli Tepe is right on the edge of it, and the asset of this identification is, geographically and textually, the plain is really inside Shinaar, doesn't extend all the way to either Euphrates or Tigris.

29:44 Considering "in the time of Peleg" as a fabrication is having a fairly low view on the historic reliability of the Bible.

Creation vs. Evolution : Lining up Cities
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/03/lining-up-cities.html

jsbrads1

@Hans-Georg Lundahl if one is sure that Peleg isn’t the same period, if he predates the Babel story, that is no problem.

The families of Noah may have spread out in the land.

The tower could have been an ingathering of separate peoples. The ultimate failure of that new society would have been baked 😅into it origin.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@jsbrads1 "if one is sure that Peleg isn’t the same period, if he predates the Babel story, that is no problem."

Why would ANYONE be sure, contrary to basically universal Christian tradition, with Jewish at the side, that Peleg and Babel are NOT in the same period?

jsbrads1

@Hans-Georg Lundahl Jewish tradition does predate Peleg to the Tower. There is no problem with that interpretation.

One can maintain more than one assumption without knowing which is true.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@jsbrads1 One can.

But I can rule out Babel being from the time if ziggurats, by the fact of these being from the time of different nations already existing.

I wonder what Jewish tradition you are talking about, I think Josephus at least disagrees with you, though it was some time since I looked at him.

Oh, did you mean the "Abraham meets Nimrod" story? The one merit of that anachronistic story is, Abraham is put in Ur Kasdim = Urfa, not far from the site of Babel, Göbekli Tepe.

It makes more sense of languages if the confusion of languages came midway between the Flood and Abraham. I e, in the time of Peleg, of his birth.

31:14 Basically all older commentators consider Javan as ancestor of the Greeks.

"Athens has been inhabited from Neolithic times, possibly from the end of the fourth millennium BC, or over 5,000 years."

That would be carbon dated "3000 BC" or a bit earlier. In other words, just after Abraham's life time

But now look at the carbon dates for Franchthi Cave:

"Humans first occupied the cave during the Upper Paleolithic, appearing around 38,000 BC (and possibly earlier.)[1] Groups continued to live in or seasonally visit the cave throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras, with occasional short episodes of apparent abandonment.[2] Last occupied around 3,000 BC (Final Neolithic), Franchthi was used as a shelter for around 35,000 years and is one of the most thoroughly studied sites from the stone age in Southeast Europe."

So, Javanites were moving from Franchthi Cave, to Athens, in the time of Abraham. How did Franchthi Cave start?

"The Aurignacian, traditionally regarded as marking the beginnings of Sapiens in Europe,is notoriously hard to date, being almost out of reach of radiocarbon. Here the authors return to the stratified sequence in the Franchthi Cave, chronicle its lithic and shell ornament industries and, by dating humanly-modified material, show that Franchthi was occupied either side of the Campagnian Ignimbrite super-eruption around 40000 years ago. Along with other results, this means that groups of Early Upper Palaeolithic people were active outside the Danube corridor and Western Europe,and probably in contact with each other over long distances."

This is the abstract of a paper on Academia, by K. Douka, C. Perlès, H. Valladas, M. Vanhaeren & R.E.M. Hedges, which is called Franchthi Cave revisited: the age of the Aurignacian in south-eastern Europe.

If we had had one consistent series of human skeleta from these times, it would have refuted my theory of the correct date for the Flood.

As it is, it was probably used already in pre-Flood times, later on in post-Flood times, first Noah's close family when they passed by, later on more usually (and including the time of Babel) by Javanites. We do not have skeleta at all from the cave, it would seem. We cannot rule out that some pre-Flood user was a second cousin of Noah or even a Neanderthal (which he had some in inlaws, but was not probably himself descended from), and then later on, the last users before they founded very nearby Athens had a very distinct from that Javanite genome. Which is what I would consider a still viable working hypothesis.