Continuing with Middleton to 22:33

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 post.

13:51 If Nimrod was drafting everyone, Heber and Peleg were successful shirkers.

14:09 How about the idea, England was, for a time, at least, saved, by ceasing to be an Empire?

Much of it happened under the time of the late queen.

The first was like a lioness, and had the wings of an eagle: I beheld till her wings were plucked off, and she was lifted up from the earth, and stood upon her feet as a man, and the heart of a man was given to her.
Daniel 7:4

16:01 How does this work?

Genesis 10:32 By these were the nations divided on the earth after the flood.
Genesis 11:9 And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded: and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.

Well, pretty obviously, there is a change of wording which denotes a change of state.

Before Babel, all the earth (literally everyone everywhere) had one language. Verse 1, following up verse 32 says: And the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech.

However, "they" in verse two were not all of the earth, because "they removed from the East" ... and later "they" were scattered upon the face of all (different) countries.

I take it (as the author of Postilla in Libros Geneseos, sometimes thought to be St. Thomas Aquinas, it's not his typical Latin but could be a work of youth, when he lived with the Benedictines or just after arriving to Dominicans) "they" were a kind of global élite. And when "they" arrive back, each to his kinsmen, they understand him, but he wouldn't understand his colleague some way away - "they" are becoming, if not yet kings, at least aristocracy of different cultures.

Archaeologically this fits too.

Genevieve von Petzinger has gone to cave after cave from the Upper Paleolithic (most of it being early post-Flood, up to Noah's death, just before Babel) and found selections from the same set of 32 characters. Was it a Hebrew alphabet plus ten vowels? Or a Hebrew alphabet plus five vowels plus five extra signs? I don't know. But it's the same all over the world.

In Göbekli Tepe itself, you find nothing that looks like writing (a bit cheeky to say that when some estimate 95 % has not been excavated yet). But in carbon dates after Göbekli Tepe, you do find different proto-writings in the Balkans and in the Indus valley. It's no longer one earth, but different countries.

16:13 I do not think "all the earth" is anywhere used for "the Babylonians" ...

The Babel-builders, as Tolkien called them and their modern kin, he considered the Yalta conference as a kind of Babel building, are referred to as "they" ...

kal ha-aretz = all the earth, feminine singular
benaseam = (as) they journeyed, the person is third plural masculine.

So, the Babel-builders are very consistently called "they" (like the bullies in Experiment House, if you've read The Silver Chair), but they are never called "all the earth" even ironically.

16:57 Indeed. Most creation stories are only about the people who wrote the story.

Why do Norse societies have a stratification into nobles, freemen and slaves? Because Heimdall slept with three men's wives.

But the Bible both in Genesis 10, as to the common ground, and in Genesis 11, first part, as to the origin of linguistic division, very uniquely tells a story how different languages came to be (there is one among Amerindians, but that's across the Atlantic). There have been claims this was borrowed from Babylonian myth, but we have no preserved Babylonian myth stating how language differences came about.

The text often referred to, The Lord of Aratta, says sth else : it's a prayer to Enki to restore the unity of language of prayer.

The most prominent differences about Babylonian and Hebrew flood stories are:

• the Ark could have floated on a global ocean, the giant coracle of Babylonian myth could not;
• the god bringing the Flood (Enlil) and the god warning of it (Enki) are different, about as different as Zeus and Prometheus, except Enki is not punished - and neither has an ethical motive, like Enlil has headache, and Enki likes his creatures (more than he respects Enlil).

But it seems the prayer to Enki wasn't heard, and it certainly seems to involve no story about how the difference came about in the first place.

Genesis 11:1-9 really is a very unique text.

18:08 When you call this "an ethical move" you are supposing that Israel is telling myths which as stories are not based on facts, but on earlier, less ethical, myths among Gentiles. Perhaps including pre-Hebrews (ancestors of Hebrews who weren't Hebrews).

I have heard a Catholic say that no, Abraham could not have received even orally the text mass of Genesis 2 - 11 (the parts prior to when it became part of his autobiography, at leaving Ur), because he was born to a Pagan family. Not quite true. His father and grandfather, or his father and his brother, or all three of them could have been idolaters, doesn't mean greatgrandfather Sarug was, and he died when Abraham was 50 - plenty of time to teach him these stories and only 25 years up to his vocation.

When he was called, he knew from Sarug what being called by God would be like, at least sufficiently to know it was God who was calling him.

19:15 Oral legends have a very good resistance to deformation if they are either metric or short or both.

The oral legends from farmers and burghers in Austria are, mostly, I'd not include Paracelsus in the Küssdenpfennig, true to historic fact. A short story can "autofossilise" if I may coin the word, and intentionally and successfully.

2556 BC (birth of Peleg) - 2015 BC (birth of Abraham) = 541 years.

So, I'd say that the short oral legend is the ideal state of preservation of a journalistic report.

20:00 I am not so sure that Ur Kasdim is really the Sumerian Ur excavated by Woolley.

Because, Urfa, now Shahnly Urfa (venerable Urfa, Turkish spelling Şanlıurfa) could also qualify as an "Ur" and has been identified as Abraham's hometown by both Jews and Muslims of the area.

It's an Ur in Assyria, not Babylonia, and it is certain that at one point, Chaldaeic - the language of Chaldees - was spoken in Assyria but not yet Babylonia, at least not as far South as Ur of Woolley.

It's very close to the ruin of Göbekli Tepe, where I put the Tower of or at least City of Babel.

20:13 And if Abraham's Ur was Urfa, the Chaldees were already there, and Ur of the Chaldees was not an anachronism.

20:55 If the Assyrians imposed their language on all conquered peoples, it's perhaps because memories from the Genesis 11 event were still smarting - they just had to look to a hill covered in sand, where the ancestor of their first kings Bel and Nin (Chaldean and Sumerian for Lord, by the way), where the great Nimrod himself, had failed so miserably to keep mankind united.

21:25 Is Mesopotamia, all of it, an alluvial plain?

In that case, you find the country of Mesopotamia in a plain.

But in North West Mesopotamia, where Göbekli Tepe is - yes, there is a part of Turkey that's Mesopotamia - you do find a plain, quite near Göbekli Tepe which is just in the hills above it, within a hill country, that's Euphrates and Tigris around it.

And when they removed from the east,

Landing place, old international hot spot, on Mount Judi, just East of Tigris. In the commune of Cizre, and the Westernmost part of Turkish province Ermeni (Ararat means the geographic area of Armenia), then West, Göbekli Tepe is just East of Euphrates. 80 km East of Euphrates, I think. "They" made it the new international hot spot, while progressing from Palaeolithic to Neolithic in a very collectivist manner.

22:33 Everything you have said to the purpose of the story remains perfectly compatible with the story being literally true. And I mean, true as fact.