They are certainly reaping what they have sown for so many years. I’m not sorry for them in that sense but glad they saying the right things and are getting a taste of what they have created.
In the larger scheme of things these large YEC ministries (and this applies to many other types of organizations) have become unable to change even if leaders were inclined to recognize some of their past errors. They have created followers that expect and demand particular reactions from their leaders. Ken Ham may think that vaccines are a gift from God but his followers have been primed to fall for all the anti-vax conspiracies and so rather than being a leader Ken Ham becomes the subservient follower or his followers giving them what they want. Its a viscous feedback loop that leads to every more insular and reality-detached viewpoints.
And right now thats true for both reputable venues and disreputable venues.
That’s because this is about politics and money, not religion, not science, not truth.
Great typo!
In my own experience, if there is a divide among YEC about vaccines, political beliefs are more predictive of anti-vaxx sentiments even than education. And people get really upset when they (maybe somewhat subconsciously) realize their views may not all have to do with truth or what the Bible says when someone with a similar background disagrees with them.
Tribalism makes us feel comfortable until someone rocks the boat. It’s true for almost anyone in society today.
But really it is a good thing if YEC ministries speak out. I hope they realize that too, even if they get backlash. Otherwise it is easy to forget that what they do is first about what the Bible says and not what science says.
I find no evidence that this is true, and lots of evidence (Romans, Mayans, Sumerians, Zoroastrians, Celts, Chinese, Egyptians, …) that it isn’t.
I was thinking of Israel’s more local context of Mesopotamia (so my use of most gave the wrong impression…the main point is that it didn’t originate with Israel)
That would include the Sumerians, who seem not to have had weeks at all. And the Babylonians, who had weeks of varying length to accommodate lunar cycles.
By “Most cultures”, you seem to mean “Hebrew-influenced cultures”, which rather destroys any suggestion that the 7-day week wasn’t related to the Bible.
Correct, as mentioned here.
No, my understanding (open to correction of course) is that ancient Israel was not the first. How/When they adopted this practice is unknown.
But that’s a very general statement.
More detailed sources state that the Sumerians/Babylonians divided months into halves/quarters, giving fortnights of 15 days and weeks of 7 or 8 days.
No generally accepted sub-divisions of the month into weeks are known from Ur III texts; the designations u4-sakar gu-la (“great crescent”), u4-sakar u4 1(u)-5(diš) (“crescent of day 15”), e2-u4-1(u)-5(diš) (“house of day 15”), and e2-u4-7(diš) (“house of day 7”), and variants of these qualifications, are suggestive of a simple division of the administrative 30-day month into two 15-day halves, and of each half into two “weeks” of 7-8 days.
Based in admittedly limited research, the change from weeks being fractions of months to weeks being 7-day periods independent of months occurred in Rome sometime around 50AD, was standardised by Constantinople in 321AD, and may well have been based on the Jewish 7-day week. Ancient Israel does seem to be the first culture to have a strict 7-day week.
But this is all beside the point, which was that most cultures (including Mesopotamian ones) did not have a seven day week.
P.S. It’s bad form to edit posts after some-one has quoted them, as it leads to the appearance of misquoting.
@Roy thanks for the interaction and push back. It makes me want to study more. This is not a particular area of expertise of mine, but in all my reading within my discipline, I’ve consistently come across the conclusion that Israel’s notion of a seven-day week had precursors, leaving us with some ambiguity on its origins within Israel. After all, the number seven is a highly symbolic number to Israel’s neighbors. But there may be more disagreement in the scholarship than I was aware.
I would challenge this from the opposite angle: it’s not clear ancient Israel had a strict 7-day week. One of the conundrums is how Israel reconciled the lunar and solar calendars. Though we don’t have explicit accounts, one of the reasonable and popular hypotheses is that Israel also added an extra day (and/or month) here or there (especially an extra Sabbath). I was first put onto this by LeFebvre’s The Liturgy of Creation, in which he deals both with the biblical (administrative vs. cultic calendars) and historical (lunar vs. solar) discrepancies of timekeeping. If this holds, it would be similar to what you posted above.
The questions then become (i) when/if they shifted from weeks that matched lunar cycles to weeks that didn’t, and (ii) whether any other culture had a week linked to their religious beliefs.
That summarizes my experience also. (I even have the all-too-expected Gleason Archer story lingering in my memories. He was a fun guy for casual Q&A and my question about this very topic kept him going for at least 15 miles of our Saturday morning drive to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.)
And that also brings to mind the debates about whether the Jubilee year was the 49th or the 50th year of the cycle— and even the Pentecost “omer count” cycle with its similar 49th or 50th day ambiguity.
All in all, Torah chronology and the extra days/years used to give me fits. Still does.
Been following this a long time. I’ve seen a lot of misrepresentations of ancient Christians. There’s obviously a lot of motivation to find evidence that ancient Christians had other ideas about the age of the earth. Never seen any.
Prior to 1600, maybe even 1700, there is zero evidence that any Christians even questioned the Genesis chronology, much less suggested an older age. There is tons of evidence that they accepted it as historically accurate.
That depends on what you mean by “the Genesis chronology”. If you refer to some general impression of the age of the universe, then you might be right. But there is considerable variation on how long creation week was.
There was not “considerable variation” on the length of creation week. The options were six 24 hour days and instantaneous creation. There was considerable variation on the age of the earth, but I haven’t seen any more than 8k years.
What about the various interpretations of one day being a thousand years? Not intended literally? But I should really stand aside and let the people who propose YEC as a recent phenomenon deal with this.
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