Rose-Tree Dryad wrote:That's very interesting! Considering that nearly all other ancient religions seem to divy up the forces of nature, giving power over fire to one guy and dominion over water to another, a text that tells of a creation where one Entity was the source and master of everything must have been pretty remarkable in that day and age. It seems likely to me that those who read and heard it were probably a good deal more preoccupied with the clear indication of monotheism than they were with anything else that the first chapter of Genesis might convey.
Exactly! The BAR article* I read about Daniel being a Babylonian official recounts the story of Belshazzar and the writing on the wall, among other things. The article wanted to assert that Daniel was not just writing about the events. He was an eye-witness as well. The Ancient Assyrians and Babylonians were inclined to think that if they were victorious in battle, then their gods were triumphant over the gods of defeated peoples, who were then expected to obey and worship Assyrian and Babylonian gods. And there is plenty in the stories of Daniel, in particular, to support what exactly you are saying about monotheism. Remember Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego.
As a historian of sorts, I am quite fascinated by those Medes that played such a tremendous role in that particular time frame between 722 BC, when the Assyrians 'came down (to Israel) like wolves on the fold" and 500 BC, which ushered in the Greek/Persian rivalry. Who were these people to whom the Israelites were sent by the Assyrians (II Kings, 17: 6)? How was it the Medes, who helped the Babylonians defeat the Assyrians at Carchemish, became later collaborators of the Persians who overran Babylon? And isn't it interesting that about 600 BC that an almost monotheistic religion - Zoroastrianism - started among the Medes and Persians, less than a century before the Persian takeover of Babylon & the return to Jerusalem? As far as I can find out, these Medes were the predecessors of the Kurdish people of today.
Ithilwen wrote:Indeed. Some people define day as "the space of time between one night and the next". Now, of course, that's a 24 hour period, due to the earth's movement and the sun. But during the first few "days" of creation, there was no sun. Light came from somewhere else; perhaps from God Himself, or perhaps from some temporary source. In that case, a "day" could be much longer than 24 hours. Perhaps even years. Centuries. Who knows?
Now this is where even Genesis 1 gets tricky, but there is still a way around it without denying the role of God in creation. Remember that the Earth, when it was first formed, according to geology, astronomy and much else, did so as a by product of the birth of the Sun. Since the Sun is mainly hydrogen and helium, with all other elements being created from derivatives of hydrogen and helium, including gold and uranium, the rocks ejected by the Sun in its formation, or captured from passing space debris, can be considerably older than the Sun, itself, measured by the amounts of varying elements in the rocks, and released by previous Supernovas. Or, being no expert, that is my amateurish understanding of what I have been reading about chemistry and the Sun.
The Rio Tinto display, which described the Earth as nothing more than a snowball initially, did say at the time it was a snowball that the Earth had no atmosphere as we know it now. So where did the Atmosphere come from? And by what process was it formed? Without the atmosphere we would not be able to see anything, even if there was anything with eyes to see with. And an entirely snow covered ball of rock would be too dark to see anything, anyway. So from a contemporary of the ancient Chaldean point of view, putting the creation of the Sun where it is in Chapter 1 makes eminent good sense. We are seeing individuals and we know best what we can see. And yes, there has to be light before we can see.
I've also read in the news and at other places, that the Sun in its origin, was considerably dimmer than it is now, putting out less energy. Somehow or other, the Sun became hotter, and the Earth changed as well. So Genesis' order of creation isn't quite as contrary to science as what was made out by the Catholic Church, this time, in the time of Galiliei Galileo, when people thought the Earth was flat, and that the Sun revolved around the Earth. By the way, the Vatican has one of the best scientific libraries in the world.
However, neither Nicholas Copernicus, nor Galileo, would for one second have denied that God made the world, however He made it. Neither would any of their contemporaries who happened to think they were on to something. Even today, it would only be a small group of odd-balls who insist the Earth is flat, let alone that the Sun revolves around the Earth. So why do we today get our knickers in a knot (to use a proverbial expression), in this day and age, over Evolutionary theory?
The Chaldeans, who had no hesitation in using Jewish captives to assist their pursuits, were such marvellous mathematicians and astronomers that they have been credited with the original idea of dividing a day into 24 hours, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute. As you say, Ithilwen, before that, a day was simply sunrise to sunset, or from nightfall to nightfall. But it took Nicholas Copernicus then Galileo, to show that the Earth revolved around the Sun for yearly measurements, not the Chaldeans. And even by that time we had first the Julian calendar, authorised by Julius Caesar, then the later Gregorian calendar, and we are all still living as a Christian faith, with the consequences of that change in time measurement in the times we celebrate Christmas and Easter.
EDIT (Jan 26th, 2014, 7.06 pm): *The BAR (Biblical Archaeological Review) article I referred to was actually from Archaeological Diggings Vol. 20 no. 6 2013, i.e Dec 2013/Jan 2014, published by Adventist Media Network (Wahroonga, NSW? ISSN: 1322-6525). The article is Archaeology and a Sixth century book of Daniel by Gary Webster, on pp.8-14.
