I don't trust the expositions of Henry Morris on the Bible. I do believe he once wrote something from the book of Revelation trying to calculate how much physical space per person there was in the New Jerusalem.
I don't have much use for that kind of interpretation of the Bible.
me neither. i'm glad we can agree on this.
At the same time I think the overconfidence also occurs when people object to some expressions like pillars in regards to the earth or the moon not giving its light.
the question is exactly how much of an expression it is. we know a lot about the levantine views of cosmology, and they involve
literal pillars upon which a flat earth, with a solid domed sky, stands. so when the jewish mythology presents the same view, should we take it as idiomatical simply because we value this book more highly than others? should we say "it doesn't really mean that" because we demand the book be accurate? that seems like putting the cart before the horse, if you ask me.
are things like that used idiomatically? yes, all the time. but we must understand that different texts use language differently, and the grammar and context give us clues.
I am biased for the word of God. So I won't easily allow critics to try to make it sound foolish.
i think you'll find that many of us are the same way. but "obviously wrong, 2,000 some years later" and "foolish" are two different things. for instance, in a thread recently about the 120-year limit on man's lifespan in genesis 6, i stated that if there are two ways read a phrase, and one way is demonstrably inconsistent with the rest of the text (even the internal source), and the other way lines up nicely, we should take the way that lines up.
the people who wrote the bible didn't have access to modern scientific knowledge. that doesn't make them fools. it just makes them people who lived before modern science. even including contradictory things by way of redaction doesn't make them fools; just collectors. but saying, for instance, in one place "no one lives past 120 years" and then having every patriarch ever written about live longer than that, in the same set of stories? that's rather foolish.
and to suppose that it's all one source, god -- well, that does make those errors and contradictions foolish. if it's
people who wrote the bible, they were reasonably intelligent, creative, literate, knowledgable, and wise people, especially for ~600bc. but if it's
god, well, god should know better. to say it's god is, in my opinion,
an insult to god. god couldn't write something more concise, consistent, and less redundant? god
would have access to modern scientific knowledge, and could even have written about it in terms we would understand. and there is little excuse for vagueries of language, such as idiomatic expressions, if god is the author. god could have even written it in english and every other language ever to be spoken. who cares if the people taking it down didn't understand it?
I'm likely to point out that the same level of scrutiny they probably don't apply in other areas of language.
i do not apply any particularly high levels of scrutiny to the text, no higher than i apply to anything else. it's really the people who are worried about interpretting the text into something factual -- the biased people like yourself -- that are forced to put all this scrutiny into it. i just read it like any other book. if i catch a lot of details, it's because i enjoy reading it.