1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
The authors of one of the greatest scientific treatises of all time, the Hebrew Bible, also posited a Big Bang to start things off. Given the scarcity of reliable data way back then, we can hardly blame them for getting the date wrong. It was an Out of Africa theory too, though the Children of Israel crossed a different portion of the Red Sea. And they too saw the need for an equivalent to Cosmic Inflation, i.e., a one-time only fudge factor that could explain why things are the way they are now. They too realized that any event likely to produce large global differences had to come early. The Great Flood wouldn't do. It came early enough, but just started things over again from scratch, so the problem remained.
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The authors of one of the greatest scientific treatises of all time, the Hebrew Bible...
You must be kidding, right?
Maju: "You must be kidding, right?"
They knew how to ask the right questions. You could learn from them.
They knew how to write amusing fantasy tales. There are no questions asked: just false answers.
No, Maju, they don't ask questions. But their answers tell us they were aware of certain problems that required answers. And some of the answers they supplied tell us that they were thinking logically. Genesis answers the question of where the universe came from and the Biblical version is a lot like the Big Bang in some ways. It was a singularity for one thing. And it was certainly a bang. And it was BIG!
And their idea of human history is definitely phylogenetic, taking us back to common ancestors. And they even present an Out of Africa model.
And they realize that if we are going to end up with lots of different languages, there has to be a point, very early on, when that division takes place.
As with many myths, there is an underlying science at work, imo, which reveals itself in the kind of questions answered by the myth, which are often very logical questions.
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