Off-topic rant from Questions regarding evolution and creation

[frankglennjacobs@gmail.com]

Bishop Ussher neatly counted the ages and other indications found in the Bible and came up with a starting point, I believe, 4004 BC. Quite a work of scholarship, considering what he had to work with.

 

[it must have been like working chest-deep in a swamp. Hebrew is not his native language. It is full of strange poetic forms, strange parables and parabolic forms, and strange allegories. The writers were familiar with goats and lions and buzzards, but not with planets and stars and DNA. The best they could do is recognized as garbage by modern English-speaking scientists. And it had been translated to King James' English by hired linguists who knew King James didn't like the previous translations.]

 

But what was Bishop Ussher's starting point?

 

Not the formation of the earth. (Genesis 1:1 )

 

The birth of Adam? (Genesis 2:7)

 

But in Hebrew, "Adam" means "Mankind" as well as that specific man named Adam.

 

When God said Now let us make Man, did he mean to wave a magic wand and POOF! There he was?

 

Hardly. The record is in the rocks. There were men way before that. No doubt millions of men.

 

Then it says God made man in his own image. (Genesis 1:27)

 

Is that the starting point? When God made some portion of mankind to give birth to people who would LOOK LIKE HIMSELF?

 

Probably not.

 

Later, God did that famous and very important "Good and Evil" change in mankind. (Genesis 2:9 Genesis 2:16-17 Genesis 3:1-6) What EVER the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil might have been, this operation did a change in mankind (who already LOOKED like God). It made the descendants of some portion of them to know Good and Evil before they did it instead of only after (Whoops! Too late!) they DID it.

 

We can tell God wanted them to do this because afterward He said, "Now that man has become as one of us to know good and evil . . ." (Genesis 3:22) Those are words of blessing.

 

God married them (Genesis 3:16) and clothed them (Genesis 3:21).

 

He took them to a promised land. (Genesis 3:24)

 

They didn't like the promised land, but there it was.

 

Now THAT may well have been the starting point from which Bishop Ussher counted. Not the physical birth of the man named Adam, but the year in which some portion of the human race was given the ability to know Good and Evil -- perhaps the same year He took some of them from Eden out into the more ordinary world.

 

[While we are on the subject of the descendants of Adam and Eve, Genesis 5:4 specifies that Adam "begat sons and daughters". ]

Edited April 26, 2017 by frankglennjacobs@gmail.com