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Posted:

4th February, 2008

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Was Moses an ignoramus?

Many depict Moses as an ignoramus of the highest order when it comes to earth science and astronomy. Piffle. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going to suggest that he knew about quasars, the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt or nitrogen-fixing bacteria. But by the opposite token, what he wrote in Genesis concerning the nature of the heavens and the earth accords just fine with modern scientific knowledge. At the heart of our modern misconception concerning the level of understanding in the ancient world concerning things scientific lies a fundamental thickness on our part - we don't seem to be able to distinguish between form and content, between modes of expression and truthfulness.

Even some scholars illogically assume that Scripture's different mode of expression betrays an entirely wrong way of looking at the world. Theodor Gaster writes in the article "Cosmogony" (The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible) that,

.all efforts to reconcile biblical cosmogony with modern science rest, in the last analysis, on a fundamental misunderstanding of its purport and intent and on a naïve confusion between two distinct forms of mental activity.

"Two distinct forms of mental activity" - that's where his own fundamental misunderstanding lies. He and many others confuse forms of expression with mental activity. In 1948, Henri Frankfort and others wrote a book entitled "The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man" in which, as the very title suggests, they assumed that the brains of ancient folks hummed a completely different tune from ours today. Truth is, the ancients thought no more differently from "us" than a living Muslim thinks from a living Christian, or an atheist from a theist. Christians and Muslims hold to very different belief systems, but who is going to suggest that their thinking processes or pathways of mental activity are poles removed, or that they pursue a different "intellectual adventure"? We have widely-varying worldviews today because people still haven't learned to think logically. As

Blacker and Loewe put it, "The notion that there is or was a mythological or pre-rational or pre-logical mentality, different in kind from a scientific, rational or logical mentality is at best grossly oversimplified and at worst a piece of dangerously misleading propaganda" (Ancient Cosmologies). Hear, hear.

If anything, the ancients thought more deeply and incisively than we do today, and their level of scientific knowledge is not to be sneezed at. But they expressed themselves differently from us. Can we not grasp the simple fact that when Job declared that, "He shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble" (Job 9:6) he did not believe the earth was resting on pillars? Saying that "the pillars tremble" was their way of saying that the earth shook, that's all.

Unfortunately, "modern man's" woeful lack of sensitivity to different modes of expression and idiom, combined with an equally woeful capacity to think clearly, leads to some shocking errors. The absurd doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine of the Eucharist is said to literally turn into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, arises from insensitivity to the meaning of Jesus' words when He said, "Take, eat, this is my body" (Matt. 26:26). So, too, the notion that Job believed the earth was held up by pillars or that Moses believed the sky was a solid vault comes from our own intellectual misadventure, not from their ignorance of science.

O.K., then. Establishing that premise does not automatically mean that what Moses wrote about the material world is scientifically correct. If we play the devil's advocate position and suggest that he was not inspired by heaven when he penned the Pentateuch we must acknowledge the possibility that he was totally wrong, just as we must acknowledge that something is amiss in the thinking of either Christians and Muslims or both. How can we know if Moses was talking scientific claptrap, as his words are interpreted in the excerpt below, or sound science? See "Moses, earth science, and the universe".

Excerpt from "Ancient Cosmologies", by Blacker and Loewe

The Biblical picture is clearly geocentric. The earth rests on pillars (Job 9:6). Stretched above the earth is the sky, "heaven" or "firmament", a solid substance (Gen 1:6-8) resting on pillars (Job 26:11). Just as the earth has an "end" so does the sky (Deut 4:32). The sun, moon and stars are positioned in, or just beneath, the firmament (Gen 1:14-17) and they move across it (Ps 19:1-7). Beneath the earth is Sheol, the abode of the dead (Num 16:28-34, I Sam 28:13-15, Is 14:9-11, Eccles 9:10). There are waters above the firmament (Gen 1:6-7) as well as beneath it. Some of the waters beneath the firmament were gathered together at the beginning of creation to form the seas (Gen 1:9-10) but, in addition, these waters flow beneath the earth (Exod 20:4, Deut 4:18, Ps 24:2) where they are connected to the waters of Tehom, the great deep (Gen 1:2)... The Deluge was caused by a tremendous outpouring of the fountains of Tehom as well as by the opening of the windows of heaven (Gen 7:11). Rain is produced by the clouds (Gen 9:11-17, Job 26:8, Eccl 11:3). The water in the clouds comes from the waters above the firmament so that when the heaven is "shut up" there is no rain (Deut 11:17) while when the "good treasure" of heaven is opened the rain falls in abundance (Deut 28:12).

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This blog continues a theme touched on three weeks ago. See Old Testament creation accounts: tainted by pagan mythology?

For more on the fascinating topic of biblical modes of expression, see the Dawn to Dusk article Biblical language











 
 

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