Biblical Tall Tales

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Biblical accounts of Goliath puts him at over 9 ft. all - clearly gigantic

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However, the Dead Sea scrolls put him at about 6'9", still extremely tall, and amoung people standing 5'5" or so, very impressive.

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But this once again raises questions of the veracity of Biblical account.

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Was Goliath actually 9ft tall for the Creationists?

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If so, who were the giants that Moses' scouts found? Are those accounts to be taken literally?

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If we can't take these historical accounts on face, why take any of the numbers given in the Bible as anything more significant than Grampa's old story about the catfish that got away?

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I'm not sure why this is considered a big problem. I googled this and found a site that says, not just the Dead Sea Scrolls, but Josephus, as well as some Septuagint copies say, "4 cubits and a span" as well.http://www.challies.com/archives/001344.php Also from what I can gather, the precise measurement of a cubit is not perfectly known. Thus all foot, inches figures given, are only estimates anyways.From my own experience with studying Jospehus and the differences between the Mazoretic, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint, I'm inclined to agree with the 4 cubits 1 span measurement.This, however, in no way invalidates the Bible or makes it's claims dubious, since this discrepency amounts to nothing more than a copyist error. I'll concede that it is possible that some copier of an early Hebrew copy of the passage may have deliberately altered the figure. But this isn't neccessary to assume as fact. Neither does it prove Biblical innerancy, since the argument for it is that it was innerant at it's incpetion, not after it was copied many times.There are other passages in the Bible that clearly have copyist errors. Many are known. Likely some are not known. But as a whole, due to textual comparisons, we know that the Bible is remarkably well preserved.Simply put, copyist errors don't prove the Bible is not innerant.

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Just to elaborate, idontlikeforms, if we have only copies.... what to we compare it to to guage weather it's well preserved or not?

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Other copies. Liberal scholars are perfectly well aware of this too. So it's not some partisan statement.

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The problem is that this argument is held to be ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE by YECs. Since God himself guided every single translation (even contradictory ones) they are all 100% correct and absolute truth.

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I've never heard anyone, YEC, Evangelical, or any other person ever make this claim. I'm afraid you're simply misunderstanding the views, not just of YECers but all Christians.

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If we allow for numberic changes to the text, Noah could have brought 20 of every animal on the Ark. Or Creation could have taken 14 days.

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I doubt it. You got to keep in mind that, first of all, we know of this copyist error, because many of the known copies don't have it(no matter which figure is the one that is actually in error), and secondly the copiers were either almost always or always people who viewed what they were copying as the word of God. Thus they have a very big incepntive to be meticulous in their work. That being the case, it should not be a surprise, that compared to other ancient texts, the Bible reigns as king as far as preserved accuracy is concerned. Keep in mind we are not dealing with a colossal amount of copyist errors and yet the Bible usually runs over 1,000 pages, small print, in English. That should be viewed as simply remarkeable, even by die-hard skeptics.I'd like to think that there is some commonsense common ground between non-Christians and Christians in western civilization.

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The YEC possition is, and frankly has to be, that it's all absolutely correct. If they give a little, they aren't YEC, they are OEC.

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Well they never had the view you are suggesting they had to begin with. In fact you can google this matter and you'll get an insane amount of hits, where this or that Evangelical has some essay, explaining what I'm trying to tell you here and far better than I can do it too. Even in Evangelical Bible colleges, they teach what I'm telling you in a class titled "Exegesis" or "Hermeneutics," which is a freshman class BTW. So it's not like we are trying to hide our true viewpoint here. You are simply misunderstanding it.

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As for the DSS height for Goliath, there is no reason whatever to assume that that scroll is correct and ours incorrect simply because it predates ours. It may be, it may not be.

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Well keep in mind that it's not just the DSS that gives the 4 cubits and a span figure, it's also Jospehus and some copies of the Septuangint.IMO, these three combined ought to over-rule the Masoretic. In fact I've noticed a strong bias among many Evangelical Biblical scholars to tenaciously stick to the Mazoretic, no matter what the DSS, the Septuagint, or Jospehus says. This is inspite of the fact that the Septuagint predates it by a large margin and the NT quotes the Septuagint, rather than the Mazoretic, in places where it has a technically different wording than the Mazoretic does when using OT quotes.This compelled me to study the matter further. I even looked at lists on known discrepencies to figure which was the more accurate one. I found that the Septuagint is by and large more reliable than the Mazoretic and that the DSS lines up more closely with the Septuagint, rather than the Mazoretic. If you google the matter online, you'll find that plenty of people are arguing both views and only after actually comparing many of the discepencies, will you know for sure.And of course the problem here with just claiming the Septuagint, the DSS, and Jospehus are right and the Mazoretic is wrong, is that some Septuagint copies have the 6 cubit figure instead. Josephus likely used a Hebrew version, that predates the Mazoretic. But the Spetuagint predates Jospehpus even. So both figures could plausibly be correct or incorrect.

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Ours certainly didn't come down from the DSS. Those mss were off in their own little hideaway, from which copies were not necessarily made except for their own use. There were always many copies of Bible scrolls in circulation among the synagogues all over the Greek and Roman world at any given time. An error could show up anywhere. It could be perpetuated by further copyists. But there would always be other lineages of copies that could eventually be used to correct such an error. Eventually the OT was copied and circulated among the Christian churches too. There are enough preserved remnants of various Bible books going back to the 2nd century for it to be possible to determine which readings are most likely errors. Age has nothing to do with it, since they are all copies of copies of copies in any case. The originals are long long gone.

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Well, I wouldn't claim that all errors are known and that some manuscript or other, that is also known, always has the correct one. But on the other hand, there are so many manuscripts of the Bible that are extant that I think any intellectually honest person knowledgeable about the matter would be rather foolish to argue that we can't trust our modern version of the Bible, because it's likely been changed.

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So it's not like we are trying to hide our true viewpoint here. You are simply misunderstanding it.

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The YEC view, as well as the orthodox Evangelical view, is that the Bible is God-inspired, innerant, at its inception. That is that when each individual book was written by its author it was the literal word of God. And since then man has copied and translated the Bible. But it has by and large been preserved accurately. But mot neccessarily in 100% of the circumstances. This is the orthodox view taught in all Evangelical Bible colleges in Western Civ. Any other view will cause a flurry of protest by Sophmore, or higher, Bible college students.

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Thats a big problem. I mean, some books were written a long ass time ago. Hundreds of years before they were ever compiled into the bible. Meaning at that point they were just copies upon copies.

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Not to mention the council of nicea where they actually compiled the bible. You are basically saying god made those clergymen inerrant when compiling the bible. Despite the fact, of course, that they were all male, and had bitter disagreemends over various issues.

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I'm not saying this at all. God merely had to guide the outcome of the council. Much in the same way I would never argue that the Biblical authors were flawless, without sin. God merely had to guide them when they wrote the parts of the Bible that they did.

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So, one DSS scroll, Josephus and SOME Septuagint mss are put against the Masoretic text and some OTHER Septuagint mss?

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That's correct. I'm interested in knowing what the Talmud or Mishnah has to say on the matter too, if anything. But I didn't find anything.

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You seem to think it odd that Evangelical Biblical scholars stick to the Masoretic text, but the reason is that that tradition has a terrific reputation for accuracy. You say you discovered that the Septuagint is "by and large more reliable than the Masoretic" but then you go on to admit that some Septuagint mss contain the 6 cubit figure for Goliath and that "both figures could plausibly be correct or incorrect." This is the same as my saying the DSS may or may not be more accurate, which you in fact quoted. So what ARE you saying in the end?

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I'm saying that The Mazoretic and the Septuagint do not always have the most identical wording possible. In fact they have a number of places where one has an additonal line and the other one does not. They have a number of places where a different figure is given or they have a different word of slightly different meaning. Both are not 100% accurate. In some places the Septuagint is more accurate than the Mazoretic and vice-versa. Usually the one that is more accurate happens to agree with the DSS. Both agree and disagree with the DSS in various instances. Josephus often agrees with the Septuagint and he factors in these discrepencies too, or at least he ought to. A good number of these discrepencies are also logically correct with one and illogical with the other too.But inspite of all of this, many Evangelical scholars fanatically stick to the the Mazoretic anyways and will even claim as FACT that it is more accurate. I've discovered from studying these discrepencies that the Septuagint is the more accurate one.

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And again, since we have no originals of anything, that one copy "predates" another by simply having survived the ravages of time longer than others, is meaningless.

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Usually older copies are given higher credibility by Scholars. The Septuagint is older than the Mazoretic however. I think the main reasons why many prefer it is simply because it is in the original language and simply from habit. It's a view that has been passed on, without an opposing view being given much attention. Not unlike Evolution vs. Creation. But that's a whole nother issue.But it is important to keep in mind that the passages of contention are very few in light of the whole of the Bible. The vaste majority of the Bible is the same in the Mazoretic, Septuagint, the parts that are in the DSS, and what Jospehus has to say on the matter too. If one fails to recognize this, he's not viewing the matter accurately in its true context. As I've said the Bible is in fact remarkeably well preserved.

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That's fine, but it still renders claims of inerrancy or "specialness" useless. You basically got a fallible book by your own admisions.

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I never acknowledged this. This is twisting my words.

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Only the very fist copies pened were correct, well, what we have today are liek thousandth generation copies. I mean, really.

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Yes really Yaro. The content is essentially the same. It is essentially reliable.

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By the councils time, they had copies several hundred generations old.

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Several generations? I'm assuming you mean years.

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It's useless to claim any sort of inerrant quality in the bible or any sort of supernatural accuracy etc.

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I disagree. The Jews, pre-Christianity held that the OT was sacred. No controversy there. And even with the early Christian writings, the vaste majority of the early church leaders held that the same books were sacred. There was only minor contentions with a few of the books. The real reason for an established canon was not to create it, but to combat heresy and heretics spreading other "gospels," and spurious writings. The folks that were at the Nicaean council would definitely not view the matter the same way you do. They view those books as always being sacred and they wanted to exclude the non-sacred ones from being included by others. It's more like a profession of faith, than a restructing of what was considered orthodox theology at the time.

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Whatever of that there was in the past, simply isn't even there anymore.

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I don't see how you've shown this to be the case yet.

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But what on earth are your criteria for this?

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I googled the matter and printed out all the known discrpencies I could find. I found a pretty good amount, not including citations that were the same as others I already found. I then began adding them and comparing them, but gave up as I quickly realized that the innaccuracies in the Mazoretic easily exceeded the innaccuracies in the Septuagint.

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And which Septuagint mss?

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If I'm not mistaken there is a standard version of the Septuagint used by scholars today and that is what is being looked at.

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Makes sense. So GOD guided each of the councils to create different canon. He had the Ethiopians include Enoch as Biblical Scripture but guided the western church to exclude it, and She guided the Syrian Church to exclude all of the New Testament from the Bible.

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I never said this. The fact is that the church that convened the Nicaea Council was mainstream Christianity. They were there by direct Apostolic descent.The Ethiopian Orthodox church was an offshoot. Besides, there is scarcely anything in the extra Ethiopian Ortodox church's additional books that contradicts our standard Bible of today. So this cannot be used to debunk the Bible anyways.

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Do we have any first editions around?

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Second editions?

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How do we know how many copies down the line our oldest version is?

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I don't see how we've established that we must have original copies. Why do we need this for the Bible to be innerant, the word of God, authoritative?Are you equally zealous to attack the credibility of other ancient manuscripts? Like the writings of the Greeks and Romans? Are their histories fariry tales to you? Are the manuscripts we have of their writings horribly suspect too? Do you believe they are bascially unreliable? And yet, they have far less manuscripts for each writing and scarcely any originals or even secondary copies.This message has been edited by idontlikeforms, 01-01-2006 11:56 PM

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Sorry, but the Ethiopian Church and the Syrian Church may well be older than the Western Church.

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I'm afraid you misunderstand. The Westerm church has bishops, who were ordained by other bishops, in a direct line of descent going all the way back to the Apostles, even from the Bible itself. They have a continuous organizational, scholarly, and theological tradition that literally goes back to Jesus Christ's own followers.

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There is no one Bible. Canons vary. All are the product of theology, politics and culture. Which is mainstream Christianity? Why is one branch mainstream and another not mainstream? Why is one Canon better or more correct than any other?

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Because they are from direct Apostolic descent and it's a coninuous Christian body of believers going all the way back to the first Apostles. That makes it different.

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The Bible stories are just that stories. Inspired? I think so. But only when dealing with the message. They are not historical texts. They are not science texts. They were never meant to be taken or used for either of those functions. As I pointed out back in Well, it's a fable, a fairytale (Message 45) what we find are folktales, perhaps with some nugget of fact, but that have been modified, exagerated, changed to meet the needs of the storyteller, the culture and the era.

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This is incorrect. In fact the bulk of the Bible is narrative. It was meant to be history. For example you can read I & II Kings and you will see books being cited that are clearly historical. Even Christians and Jews have used them for historical purposes all along. It is true that they are not scientific writings, in the context that we use the word today anyways. But they were definitely meant to be used as history, even by the original authors.

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So the one you like is the one you are even less familiar with?

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I think the problem is you misunderatand how these things work. The NT functions the same way. Evangelical Scholars used a standard authorized text of the NT, in Koine Greek. They do not look at all the manuscripts and compare them. This has alredy been done for them. Without doing that. It is not meaningfull to talk in terms of "Mazoretic" or "Septuagint" in the first place. You can google this topic online yourself. If you do, you will find that there is a substantial amount of material on the issue and you can get a good feel for which side in the debate is correct and which isn't. It is not neccessary to be profficient in Greek and Hebrew and hold all the manuscripts in your own two hands.

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You haven't done the work you claim to have done, you don't know what the actual masoreh even are, and you have no concept of the text-tradition which constitutes the version you claim to favor.

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Well by all means. Please show how what I've done is worthless then.

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Oh? How do you know the content is the same? Things could have been omited, embelished, added, etc. Not to mention that for most of christian history, each book of the bible was it's own thing. Meaning you got hundreds of editions, copys, and variations of 66 books running around the middle east (and who knows where else). How do you know what was changed and what wasn't?

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Ever played a game of telephone? A general idea isn't going to cut it when it comes to claims of the supernatural.

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I think you give ancient Jewish scholars too little credit. To them it is sacred. Not propaganda leaflets being cranked in high volumes. When they copied it, they payed attention to detail. They have an extensive tradition. They have enormous incentive to be meticulous. They had a literal caste in their society dedicated to the preservation of their theology and the teaching of it.Perhaps it is difficult for you, a modern day skeptic, to envision the mindset of the scholarly community throughout Israel's history being that precise. But I myself have no preconcieved prejudices against them. When I study the history of them and analyze things in their own words and their mindset, I don't start with the premise that they are liars and clumsy. You need this to be the case for your argument to hold water. What evidence do you have that they did shoddy work and had little compunction about altering the text?We can go back and forth like this for some time, but if the bottom line is that it is your opinion, than what is the point? Either you got something that shows pretty clearly that the Bible is unreliable or you don't and then would have to logically concede that the Christians' view is at least plausible, even if you don't personally agree with it.

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This was pre printing press. Scribes were copying these things left and right and circulating different versions of the same texts all over the place.

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This is highly unlikely. From what we know of Jewish history, they tended to keep copies in Synagogues and by logical inference the Temple itself. This would lead to a much smaller line of copies and copies that were made fairly far apart and with a sizeable body of scholars working on them. Like I said, keep in mind, to them it is the word of God. Whether Christianity or Judaism is true or not, they have enormous incentive to be meticulous. Why do you think they don't? Personally I think it is just arrogant to assume ancient man was organizationally inept. I certainly don't give much weight to an argument that neccessitates such a baseless assumption.

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What OT? No such thing back then. No bible, remember? There are alot more sacred jewish books than are in the OT. Ask any Rabbi.

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They don't carry the same weight as the OT though. Also keep in mind that Jospehus actually comments on this matter too and he claims that the OT was viewed as sacred by the Jews. So there is a known tradition of the OT being viewed as cannon by the Jews for some time.

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Oh! Isn't that nice. Some guys got together, using a bunch of errant texts, with an agenda, and basically labeled everyone else they disagreed with a heratic. Isn't that a sweet way to establish an infalible text. I didn't know you could 'vote' on inerancy.

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They don't view the matter this way at all. This is merely your opinion. The fact is that the NT is logically consistent. There are reasons for why their own perosnal lists of cannons more or less were already in agreement with each others.But many of the spurious Christian writings are not logically consistent with the NT. They were simply making the refutation of heresies a more efficient matter.

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Seems obvious to me. You don't have a "first edition" of any of the books in the bible. The books have been passed down thrugh thousands upon thousands of manuscripts, oral traditions, and whatever else. There is no reason to expect that any sort of "inerrant" quality is still resident in the darn thing. Ever play telephone?

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This is an exaggeration. It seems logical to me that the high priest would have held an official copy and kept it for as long as reasonably possible and then used a large body of scholars to copy it when it was getting close to falling apart. That does not entail a chain of "thousands upon thousands of manuscripts." Neither does it make the ability to preserve the vaste majority of it accurately a farcical and completely improbable claim. I think you need to remove 21st century goggles when evaluating the plausability of evangelicals claims. I mean let's be honest, IF Christianity is false, it's still far more likely than not that the Bible is still basically accurate, from what was written the first time with each book.

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And the Syrian and Ethiopian Churches were not founded directly by the apostles? Come on.

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They are outside mainstream Christianity. The idea that they were not, is a recent liberal argument, likely aimed at attacking Christianity's crediblity. People in Antiquity would no doubt not agree.

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We don't even know where most of the original apostls went, and we don't even have a clue who was included in the second wave.

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I think the problem here is that you are not realizing the gravity nor the extent of the continous tradition I'm refering to. Even Eusebius, among others if I'm not mistaken, has chronicled the continous line of Apostolic descent for the major churches in Antiquity. So there are plenty of logical and historical reasons to suppose that the 1st century church at its core was basically the same theologically as the church council that convened at Nicaea. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

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You may believe that much of the Bible was meant to be history, and if you mean a cultural mythology then I'd agree with you. But that's pretty much the extent of it. We know for example that the stories of the conquest of Canaan, or the Exodus, or the Flood are definitely exagerated mythology at best. While there might be some kernel of fact in there, reality is nothing like the Biblical stories.

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It's an objective statement actually. Read the Biblical narratives then read other historical narratives. They are written in the same style. A better way to say it would be to say the narrative parts of the Bible were written as history with religious overtones. True or false, they are historical narrative. You can question the veracity of various parts of it, but that does not change its genre of literature. And yes the narratives are the largest component of the Bible.