It has to be properly decoded, carefully reverse engineering various corruptions, misunderstanding, rewritings, misperceptions, etc. Virtually no one is up to that task.
Those that aren't, though, are completely unaware of that fact and talk loud and with certainty about the Bible anyway.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?
If you're interested in the historicity (as they term it) of Noah's Flood, you may be interested in this:
A few years ago I read a book called "Gods of the New Millennium" by Alan Alford, published in 1999. Just as one tiny part of it, he attempts to date the Flood using a genealogy of patriarchs given in the Bible, starting with a generally accepted year of birth for with Abraham and backing up to Noah.
He observed, though, that the ages at which the men had their sons seemed to be off, being in their late 20's or early 30's, which is fairly late even these days. He surmised that over the immense time span, transcribers had monkeyed with the ages in two ways. First, they had misunderstood numbers written in the Sumerian sexagesimal system (base 60) as decimal. Later, others had thought the high numbers unreasonable and "corrected" them by dividing by a factor of what he believed was five.
Alford undoes these "fixes", adds up the ages, and comes up with a date of 10983 BC for the Flood. Sound familiar? That's pretty much exactly the date of the suspected Younger Dryas Impact, causing huge climatic changes and including a sea level rise of 400 feet. Sounds like we have our Flood!
Alford never mentions the Younger Dryas, the associated Impact Hypothesis, or Meltwater Pulse 1B. I think he was entirely ignorant of these and I believe much of the research had not yet been done. Yet there he is hitting the unknown target dead bullseye.
So then you flip it back around and see that the story of Noah's Flood has been handed down for 13,000 years, starting with people that were basically Stone Age. It makes you give that story a lot of leeway considering, you know, maybe some of the fine details might have gotten changed along the way... lol
It has to be properly decoded, carefully reverse engineering various corruptions, misunderstanding, rewritings, misperceptions, etc. Virtually no one is up to that task.
Those that aren't, though, are completely unaware of that fact and talk loud and with certainty about the Bible anyway.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?
If you're interested in the historicity (as they term it) of Noah's Flood, you may be interested in this:
A few years ago I read a book called "Gods of the New Millennium" by Alan Alford, published in 1999. Just as one tiny part of it, he attempts to date the Flood using a genealogy of patriarchs given in the Bible, starting with a generally accepted year of birth for with Abraham and backing up to Noah.
He observed, though, that the ages at which the men had their sons seemed to be off, being in their late 20's or early 30's, which is fairly late even these days. He surmised that over the immense time span, transcribers had monkeyed with the ages in two ways. First, they had misunderstood numbers written in the Sumerian sexagesimal system (base 60) as decimal. Later, others had thought the high numbers unreasonable and "corrected" them by dividing by a factor of what he believed was five.
Alford undoes these "fixes", adds up the ages, and comes up with a date of 10983 BC for the Flood. Sound familiar? That's pretty much exactly the date of the suspected Younger Dryas Impact, causing huge climatic changes and including a sea level rise of 400 feet. Sounds like we have our Flood!
Alford never mentions the Younger Dryas, the associated Impact Hypothesis, or Meltwater Pulse 1B. I think he was entirely ignorant of these and I believe much of the research had not yet been done. Yet there he is hitting the unknown target dead bullseye.
So then you flip it back around and see that the story of Noah's Flood has been handed down for 13,000 years, starting with people that were basically Stone Age. It makes you give that story a lot of leeway considering, you know, maybe some of the fine details might have gotten changed along the way... lol