Tag: Holy Bible

Genesis 12, the call of Abram, his journey.

 

The command came with a promise:

This promise is valid even for us Christians. It is the blessing that comes with faith:

And not Abraham’s offspring, but to all that has come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, as is written in

This is interesting. Abraham went in faith. Yet, when trouble started he did not have faith that God would protect him through the famine, but resorted to deceit to stay alive. It caused trouble, and God had to bail him out. This is one strong argument why I believe the Bible. It shows even Abraham with faults and failing faith.

 

Genesis 11, the tower of Babel

One candidate for the location of the tower of Babel is the tower in Babylon, located in the middle of the walled city:

This is one suggestion what the tower used to look like.

And Babylon is being restored, complete with the Ishtar gate.

To finance the building of the tower the oldest profession did its part. The temple of Ishtar was full of temple prostitutes, and to organize it more effectively the use of money in the form of coins was first used in Babylon as payment for transactions.

Ishtar is having a resurgence in modern western culture, promoting whatever was going on in old Babylon. There is nothing new under the sun.

This did end a predictable way

In the genealogy of Shem the Septuagint accord differs from Masoretic text. I do not know why, except that the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew original seems to be more complete.

The timeline from Adam in table form:

After the flood people did not live as long. Could sun exposure have something to do with it? Or was it viruses?  Anyhow, here is the

Genesis 9, the rainbow, the Noahic covenant and “the curse of Ham”.

Yes, the days of Noah are referred to in the New Testament, but even Isaiah waxes eloquent about the promises God made.

The rainbow is not mentioned much in the Bible, but Ezekiel mentions it in his famous vision in chapter 1 of Ezekiel, a vision which resembles a modern day helicopter invasion. (An end times vision?)

And the rainbow displays its promise again, Aug 3, 2017 over the White House. It means different things for different administrations.

doublerainbow

Then in Revelation the rainbow is mentioned again,

Ham saw Noah’s nakedness, but the curse is on Ham’s son, Canaan, not Ham himself!

It is from the Muslim literature and oral tradition we find “The curse of Ham”. It is not found in the Bible (or the Torah), nor is it found in the Quran.

Ka’b al –Ahbar (ca 652 A.D) wrote that Ham lay with his wife and gave birth to a black boy and girl. He claimed they were not his. They are, his wife responded “for the curse of your father is upon us.” The story goes on, and all blacks come out from four black children of Ham. Wahb ibn  Munabbih (ca 730 A.D.) wrote that Ham was a fine white man, but because of his Father’s curse God Almighty changed his skin color to black. He then became the father of all the black people. In the story collection “One Thousand and One Nights, A.K.A Arabian Nights” it is also found: Noah blessed Shem and Cursed Ham. (Source: The curse of Ham. By David M. Goldenberg)

 

 

 

Genesis 8, Noah sent forth a raven and a dove.

Notice it doesn’t say the top of Mt. Ararat. The mountains of Ararat covers the whole region.

Noah sent out a raven, and the raven did what ravens do. Was this the reference that inspired Edgar Allan Poe in his poem “The Raven”? Here is one verse from it:

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
    Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
    On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
            Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
Then Noah sent out a dove, and this is why the dove is the symbol of peace, especially when it returns with an olive branch.

 

Now Noah showed his thankfulness and sacrificed on the altar he built. That’s why he took with him seven pairs of all clean and sacrifice-able animals.

After Jesus Christ final sacrifice of himself on the cross, there are no more physical sacrifices. Here are some of the acceptable sacrifices for today:

Genesis 7, the flood.

In chapter 6 Noah was to take two of every kind, but now in Chapter 7 he is to take seven pairs of every clean animal. This becomes important later when Noah  sacrificed to the LORD.

Every living creature? It is clear God meant only mammals and birds, not every living being. The fishes hardly noticed.

A map of the last ice age.

It was cold. Ice covered Northern Europe, Northern Asia and Northern North America. The ocean levels was about 400 feet lower than today.  The CO2 level was about 180 ppm, less than half of today and could barely sustain plant growth. On the ice it snowed less than half of what snows on Greenland nowadays.

Then something happened. The ice started melting and the ocean levels started to rise. As we used to say in North Sweden, “Spring is not a season, it is a natural catastrophe.” One possible candidate for the flood was in the Persian Gulf, which got inundated about  10000 years ago. While probable, it is a gradual rise, not the catastrophic rise mentioned. A better candidate for the flood is  the melting ice cover in the North. The ice melted rapidly and formed  ice lakes south of the receding ice, both in Europe-Asia and North America. The water rises year after year, and suddenly it begins to form new rivers going south. When they break through the soil erodes and the lake empties suddenly. So it was with the Caspian sea, that made it rise until it finally emptied into the Black Sea.

 

And with this rapid ice melt came the deluge of rain. With the rapid ice melt the land under the ice rose rapidly, making the earth more spherical again. In fact, this is continuing to this day with the Bothnian bay rising out of the water by 3 feet per century and the Hudson Bay rising by four feet per century.

(Later the water emptied out in what is now Sweden, having risen out from under the ice.) The springs of the great deep burst forth, this was probably associated with a large number of earthquakes bursting forth geysers and springs in many places.

Yes, it is The LORD that opens and shuts.

Yes, the fishes and whales kept on swimming.

Here is another possible place for the Ark to have landed on Mt Ararat. The dimensions are right.

The water on Earth predates the sun. The bible tells me so.

There was an interesting headline in Los Angeles Times’ Science Now:

Water on Earth predates the solar system, and even the sun.

There is nothing new under the sun.

God Himself told us so in the Holy Bible.

Genesis 1:1-3(NKJV)

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

So it should come as no surprise that the water was there before the sun was formed.

Now the scientific paper in Science  from which Los Angeles Times quoted says it in scientific terms in its abstract: (by  L. Ilsedore Cleeves, Edwin A. Bergin, Conel M. O’D. Alexander, Fujun Du, Dawn Graninger, Karin I. Öberg, Tim J. Harries)

“Identifying the source of Earth’s water is central to understanding the origins of life-fostering environments and to assessing the prevalence of such environments in space. Water throughout the solar system exhibits deuterium-to-hydrogen enrichments, a fossil relic of low-temperature, ion-derived chemistry within either (i) the parent molecular cloud or (ii) the solar nebula protoplanetary disk. Using a comprehensive treatment of disk ionization, we find that ion-driven deuterium pathways are inefficient, which curtails the disk’s deuterated water formation and its viability as the sole source for the solar system’s water. This finding implies that, if the solar system’s formation was typical, abundant interstellar ices are available to all nascent planetary systems.”

The editor of Science tries to simplify it so all can understand:

Nature or nurture for solar system ices?

“We know that life’s favorite molecule, water, exists throughout the solar system. What we don’t know is whether present water levels reflect the chemical conditions of our parent nebula or whether they result from later reprocessing in the young system. The levels of deuterium and hydrogen in solar system water ice offer a tracer for chemical history, and Cleeves et al. model the processes at play. The analysis suggests that all nascent planetary systems may have the same water resources that we did.”

Science, this issue p. 1590

Methinks the beginning of the Holy Bible gives the best explanation of how Creation happened, completely void of scientific jargon.

In those three verses God establishes His principles:

In the Beginning – There was a beginning.

God – God was before the beginning of time and space.

Created – God Created all in the beginning

The Heavens and the Earth. – Yes, indeed every matter.

The earth was without form – Not even the sphere was formed.

And void -No life yet.

And darkness was on the face of the deep – No light was yet started, only matter, especially water.

And The Spirit of God hovered over the waters – The Holy Spirit – God’s Spirit was there at Creation forming everything.

And God Said – Here is introduced the Word that later became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus Christ was present and active during creation.

Let there be Light – And so, the creation of life could begin.