My response would be a combination of these, although I haven’t given it too much thought.
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I grant that this is a possibility - although I don’t think that limits on omnipotence - other than conflicts with other goals - have been offered as a reason.
However, I would argue that there is no need to start a religion at a single location. Even if we only need a single Christ why not at least spread the important teachings from multiple sources ? Why wait for human missionary efforts to do the work? This would require a far less blatant approach than telepathically informing everyone everywhere of the Truth.
Yes. If an omnipotent god existed and had a message he wanted to be received and understood by every human being who has ever existed, revealing it to small handful of people over a period of a few centuries in on small region of the earth, and then having it be spread by word of mouth and other means, is very far from the best way to go about this. The alternative possibilities, given this being’s omnipotence, can probably never be completely enumerated.
There is also, of course, a large number of possible reasons one could devise for why such a being decided not to use any of those other methods, and chose the one he did instead.
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Welcome @Jonah_Williams! I just now saw this post. Although I try to be active here at PS, I actually don’t venture on here on a daily basis, and usually stay within my own threads.
But…good to have you here.
That’s a good question. How do they get around it?? The text clearly indicates a global flood. So much so that to me reading this text as a local flood is irrational. It seems as if the author went out of His way to provide multiple means of communicating that it was a Global Flood.
Here’s a good summary, taken from https://youtu.be/HAQ8p-0-20Y?t=2271
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Purpose of the Flood: Destroy all people, & ALL land animals & ALL birds (not in ark) & the earth’s surface.
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Purpose of the Ark (save 8 people and each kind of land animal & bird to repopulate the whole earth).
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Universal terms (60x: all, every, under heaven, in whose nostrils was breath, …) This is emphatic!
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Rainbow promise: (to people, animals, & ALL offspring).
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Height of the flood (above ALL pre-Flood mountains)
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Duration of the Flood (1 year – no local flood would last for 1 year)
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Landing of Ark (top of high mountain in Ararat: 74 days before he could see any nearby mountains)
Again, to me it’s irrational to try and read this as a local flood.
This apparent can of worms that I’ve opened reminds me of the end of Orwell’s 1984 where Winston finally capitulates and traces in the dust 2 + 2 = 5. Surely if Big Brother can make it so, it should be a simple thing for an omnipotent God…
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I have always seen it as fiction – as an ancient fable. Or, perhaps more accurately, as Jewish folklore. What seems irrational to me, is taking it to be actual history.
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The rational alternative, then, is to suppose that the flood is mythical, perhaps not intended to communicate actual history. There is, after all, no evidence for such an event, and in fact good evidence that it would be physically impossible.
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I’m inclined to agree. If, contrary to the actual state of affairs, the scientific evidence was consistent with a global flood, I am absolutely certain that not a single believer in the Bible would interpret the OT as describing merely a local flood.
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Have you read it in Hebrew?
Also, it’s very clear that this:
Genesis 8:22b “I will never again destroy everything that lives, as I have just done.” - אסף עוד להכות את כל חי כאשר עשׁיתי
can’t possibly be taken as a literal statement, since Genesis tells us that Noah, his family, and the animals on the ark survived.
How do you address this–rationally?
To me it’s irrational to try and read this as anything but a mythological story.
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Remove the comma.
By the way @Jonah_Williams , I didn’t mean to discourage you too much from your original request:
I would actually like to see more discussion like this regarding the Word of God. I would have hoped there would have been more OECs here that would have joined into the conversation. I think it’s a good topic.
Thus Joshua smote all the land [kol ha-eretz], the mountain country and the Negev and the lowland and the wilderness slopes, and all their kings. He left nothing remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as YHWH God of Israel had commanded. (Josh. 10:40)
And all flesh died that moved on the land [al ha-eretz], birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the land, and all human beings; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the land [min ha-eretz]. Only Noah was left and those with him in the ark. (Gen. 7:21-23)
Can you tell me why one of these is obviously global and total in its scope, and the other is not?
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Why should it be removed?
He’s trying to say that it will be the fire next time.
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Because the Josh 10:40 passage frames the location as such:
So we know that wasn’t to be considered global.
So, reading your post:
My understanding is that you were focused on “destroyed everything that lives” and that there’s a conflict there since 8 did survive.
So removing the comma just helped to see that that last part of the sentence framed it properly: The “as I have just done” could be expanded to say: “with a global flood, and with 8 people and animals surviving it on an ark”. Hope that helps.
We also know that ERETZ in Hebrew simply means “land”, as in the opposite of “sky”. There is no suggestion of “globality” because there is no evidence that they knew that they were living on a sphere/globe.
As a word for “land”, Hebrew ERETZ also includes the semantic domains of the English words nation, country/nation, and region. Indeed, that is why ERETZ YISRAEL (“Land of Israel”) was the official name for that region during the League of Nations mandate (i.e., the years leading up to Israeli independence.)
This also explains why the KJV Bible for Deuteronomy 32:10 renders ERETZ to refer to a particular desert. (Yes, that is ERETZ as referring to a particular local region.)
Obviously, ERETZ in its plural form (ARATZOT) does NOT mean “globes/spheres” as in PLANETS. It means LANDS. Thus, in Genesis 10:5 the plural of ERETZ refers to the different lands populated by various people groups descended from Noah’s sons. Likewise in Genesis 10:20.
When the KJV Bible was translated, the English word EARTH was similar to the Hebrew word ERETZ because for most speakers it was about the land on which one stood and it was the opposite of the sky. (In general, the “entire ERETZ” was everything one saw to the horizon in all directions. Indeed, that is the meaning of “the circle of the earth” in the Bible—despite the desire of Ken Ham and many YEC leaders to pretend that it referred to the earth as a spherical planet. A sphere is not a circle. But the disk of land which upon which one stands is indeed a circle.)
But nowadays we hear the word EARTH and primarily think “planet earth.” And that is why some English translations have replaced EARTH with LAND in order to avoid the confusion—even though it angers traditionalists. (I can say from personal experience from my own academic career involved in Bible translation that the scholars generally pushed for precision/accuracy but the people who do Bible marketing often prefered to stick with tradition so as not to alienate and sabotage sales.)
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I was, particularly the word כל .
That’s not framing.
Why would you expand what the Bible says and include an exception that isn’t in the Hebrew, if you’re trying to be literal at all?
It does. It tells me that you literally don’t take the Bible literally.
I also asked a very simple question that you seem to be avoiding:
Have you read it in Hebrew?
Yeah. I was equally baffled.
By the way, there are certainly many hermeneutical and exegetical pitfalls in insisting that words like “entire” and “all” are absolutely-100%-all-encompassing. It reminds of a silly Bible interpretation maxim I used to hear sometimes when I was young. It was allegedly posed by a famous Bible commentator: “In the Bible All means all and that’s all that all means.” Rubbish, I say.
Indeed, the same Christians who quote that alleged maxim will freely admit that “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” does not apply to Jesus. Or angels. (And many Roman Catholics, especially since Pope Pus XII, believe that that verse somehow exempts Mary.) So even the biggest “literalists” qualify all/entire/every when it suits them.
And even many English language speakers tend to think they are being very literal much of the time, in routine conversation. Yet I hear these statements all the time:
“My wife makes the world’s best coffee.”
“That high school senior has got to be the world’s best relief pitcher.”
“We’ve been having the worst weather this year.” [I recall the same phenomenon in Greek grammar textbooks: a superlative word form which was actually meant to represent a comparative instead. Nobody would demand that this be an absolute 100% literal superlative.]
MY POINT: The Noahic Flood account must be read the same way. And in the “world of Noah”, the extent of human habitation was the disk of land to the horizon on which the ancients lived. Nobody was thinking, “Ya know, this flood is six miles high and its extent includes the Americas and Antarctica.” There certainly was no sphericity notion as in “global.”
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