Anyone following the latest on Noah's Ark?

FSSL said:
I maintain that these were normal days.
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It's your perogotive to maintain whatever you want to maintain. It's no skin off my nose.

I'll maintain that a normal day refers to a twenty-four hour day of explicit duration. However "yom" sometimes refers to indeterminate periods of time. That's just the reality of how the ancient Hebrews understood things.

FSSL said:
BALANCE: you have yet to prove you are the standard...
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Never claimed to be, so this comment is nothing more than obfuscation aimed at derailing the discussion.

FSSL said:
A historical/grammatical approach does not rely on "finding balance." It relies on the normal meaning of words and their usage by the same author.
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It requires both by necessity. Scholars utilize the historical records preserved ancient civilizations to better understand how primitive languages functioned.
 
Terry said:
It's your perogotive to maintain whatever you want to maintain. It's no skin off my nose.

I'll maintain that a normal day refers to a twenty-four hour day of explicit duration. However "yom" sometimes refers to indeterminate periods of time. That's just the reality of how the ancient Hebrews understood things.
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So, when 7.4 says it rained forty days and forty nights, we are supposed to believe this is an allegory (your words), then you shift to calling it an idiom that is an indeterminate amount of time.

I guess the number, 110 days in 7:24 must also be some idiom that stretches the story into an allegory as well?
 
Terry said:
I think there's a lot in the Genesis flood account that could be taken allegorically, so the lack of physical evidence has never really been a problem for me.
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The difficulty with taking a passage allegorically is that an allegory is an extended metaphor, so it needs to stand for something outside of its ordinary, face-value meaning. What is that?
 
FSSL said:
I guess the number, 110 days in 7:24 must also be some idiom that stretches the story into an allegory as well?
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I think you mean 150. Nothing in the Hebrew language or tradition would suggest that we should interpret it anything other than a literal 150 days.
 
Ransom said:
The difficulty with taking a passage allegorically is that an allegory is an extended metaphor, so it needs to stand for something outside of its ordinary, face-value meaning. What is that?
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You have to take into consideration that numbers in ancient Hebrew and Near Eastern tradition can have symbolic or structural meaning even when describing a real event.
 
Terry said:
You have to take into consideration that numbers in ancient Hebrew and Near Eastern tradition can have symbolic or structural meaning even when describing a real event.
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Just curious about your general hermeneutical approach, do you believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a big fish?
 
Terry said:
I think you mean 150. Nothing in the Hebrew language or tradition would suggest that we should interpret it anything other than a literal 150 days.
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Correct. The water continued another 110 days. 40 actual days plus 110 actual days = 150.

So, your 40 days and 40 nights idiom just blew up.
 
Terry said:
You have to take into consideration that numbers in ancient Hebrew and Near Eastern tradition can have symbolic or structural meaning even when describing a real event.
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I wasn't talking about numbers, though. I accept that they may have idiomatic meanings. I was addressing what you said about Noah's Ark being allegorical.
 
ALAYMAN said:
Just curious about your general hermeneutical approach, do you believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a big fish?
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I believe in the literal message that is intended to be communicated in that story.
 
Tarheel Baptist said:
To me, it appears he hasn’t studied hermeneutics.
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He is drawing from old, liberal commentaries (eg ICC) which favor the JEDP theories. That was the ONLY place I could find anything about "40 days and 40 nights" as being an idiom.

When I showed him from the biblical text that 40 days is as literal as 150 days by ADDING 110, he is avoiding.

All of my standard Hebrew Grammars and BDB lexicon (not exactly a conservative source) treat "40 days" as a number.

I don't understand why a person think that the Jews had to use an idiom to suggest that the sun going down and rising demands a nebulous, idiomatic timeframe... UNLESS you are attempting to remove the reality of an actual Noahic worldwide flood.
 
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Terry said:
I believe in the literal message that is intended to be communicated in that story.
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I don’t want to assume anything here and misunderstand you, so be patient with my follow-up question. Are you saying you don’t believe Jonah was literally swallowed by a fish and spit back out?
 
Ransom said:
My personal theory is that after landing on a mountaintop in a world where all the animal life had died and probably a good portion of the plant life, the ark would have been a handy source of lumber for building, at least until the trees grew back.
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Excellent point! hadn't thought of that but Gen 9 implies that they lived in tents after the flood.
 
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