Bingo. Exactly my point. Welcome to the ancient world.
Back in grad school I remember I kept coming upon commentary that would say “Seven is the number of completeness.” (as in days of the first creation week) or “Ten is the number of completeness” (as in Ten Commandments) or “Twelve is the number of completeness” (as in 12 tribes of Israel.) So I remember asking the professor, “Is every number in Hebrew about completeness?” He smiled and said, “Yeah. Sort of. Isn’t that amazing.” and laughed.
Just for fun I bounced the question off the Google Bard/Gemini AI engine and it replied:
> In Hebrew, the number “seven” has the same consonants as the word for completeness or wholeness. The number seven, along with the numbers one through seven, all together symbolize completeness.
It is worth mentioning that there are basic properties of simple mathematics which we have known from the early grades of elementary school, so we take them for granted. Not necessarily so in the ancient world. These same simple properties were met with wonder and amazement (in an ancient world where numbers were the “latest discovery.”) Indeed, simple numbers became the basis of entire philosophical and religious systems. For an example, check out Pythagoreanism and the idea that the entire universe could be understood as a musical instrument with the ratios of notes on musical scales and chords offering all sorts of meaning. (Lots of people have heard of “the music of the spheres” but don’t know of its origins.)
I have a question. If all the descendants of Adam and Eve other than Noah and his family were wiped out in the Flood wouldn’t the GAE timescale have to start with Noah ? And in that case GAE implicitly assumed that the Flood didn’t do that, because it takes Adam and Eve as the start point.
As I understand it, if all of Adam’s descendants but Noah were killed, then it would start over with Noah and his wife (and his sons and their wives). But that’s not necessarily a problem depending on how long ago the Flood was, assuming it was a historical event. @swamidass argues in GAE that it only takes a few thousand years for someone to become a universal genealogical ancestor, so if the Flood were around 6500 BC as I speculated above, there’s no conflict.
That being said, it’s not clear that all the other descendants of Adam and Eve were killed. Gen. 4:20-21 suggests that the lines of Jabal and Jubal survived to the time that the narrative was written. Num. 13:33 suggests that some of the nephilim survived the Flood. It’s also been supposed that the “Cainites” or “Kenites” mentioned throughout the Old Testament are descendants of Cain’s line. There’s also some difficulties with this view, most notably that 1 Pet 3:20 says only “eight souls” were saved through the Flood. (Any thoughts, @AllenWitmerMiller?)
1] A population of Pre-Adam humans evolve as per the current state of evolutionary theory.
2] these pre-Adamites would be seen as inadequately competent in spiritual matters.
3] at some point in the timeline, say 6000 to 10,000 years ago, God sets up Eden as nursery/lab for cultivating 2 special humans.
4] God creates Adam & Eve de novo.
5] When the couple is inevitably expelled, they and their offspring begin to mix and mate with the pre-Adamite population.
6] Only a handful of genealogical lineages are able to persist from the time of Eden to the birth of Christ. Perhaps only the Adam lineage?
This is in no way a feature of GAE. In fact, the claim is that almost everyone who was alive and had children at the time of A&E would also be ancestral to everyone in the world by the time of Christ.
Finally, what if anything does all that have to do with Noah and the Flood? Who, in this view, died in the Flood? Who survived? How does it mesh with the biblical story?
It is obvious to any person with a three grade education that the A&E and the Noah stories are allegorical mythology written thousands of years ago in an ancient middle eastern culture.
Your Number 2 is total nonsense. Millions of humans across many human species lived for over a million years with the same intellectual capacity in spiritual matters as any human today has.
if God set up an Eden as a nursery/lab 6 to 10 thousand years ago, he must have cleaned it up after the fall as to make sure no future archeologist found it.
DNA studies of ancient DNA and current DNA shows no evidence of any of this.
That’s not at all obvious to many people with >3rd grade educations. The only thing in that statement that pretty much everyone can agree on is “written thousands of years ago in an ancient middle eastern culture.”
@Patrick
Seconding. There are plenty of people with good educations who take Genesis as literal. We might argue about the quality of their education, but that’s a different topic.
As for the question of Noah’s genealogy, if one insisted in a flood story with Noah … it makes things easier. Spiritual descent from Adam would be impossible to avoid. But how much science would have to be contradicted to include Noah’s global flood would be grim to consider.
Those are genetic lineages, specifically those of mitochondria and Y chromosomes. Nothing at all to do with GAE. Look at the title of the figure.
I don’t understand what you said there. Could you make your point more clearly?
Only mitochondrial and Y chromosome lineages are traced in that figure, and they aren’t even the lineages of Adam and Eve, but of the unrelated (and much older, presumably) mt-Eve and Y-Adam, two names intended metaphorically.
George, if you actually understand the cover it’s showing that most male-only or female-only lineages die out - but far more genealogical lineages survive. Indeed, Adam’s male-only lineage and Eve’s female-only lineage are both shown as having died out, That is a major point of the book. Your earlier post about the assumptions of the book is equally bad.
I suspect this would require a paleoclimatologist, rather than a geologist. It would raise questions of cloud formation (most likely in the North Indian Ocean tropical cyclone basin, prevailing winds, etc. Also, the wider the area covered by a single storm system would likely diminish the amount of rainfall available for any one place – could a single storm system generate enough rainfall for both the observed Arabian flood and significant flooding in Mesopotamia? Is it meteorologically feasible for two separate storm systems to have hit the Arabian peninsula and Mesopotamia with significant floods simultaneously? Hard questions, I would suspect.
Interestingly, the Ubaid period, which appears to be the first archeologically-observable civilisation in the Near East, arose in Mesopotamia c. 5500BC, about the time of this flood.
Not all genealogically surviving lineages are genetically surviving lineages.
However, all genetically surviving lineages are genealogically surviving lineages.
It would therefore seem that the level of genetic diversity currently observable is evidence of the survival of considerably more than “a handful of genealogical lineages” from “the time of Eden to the birth of Christ”.
