(02-24-2017, 04:39 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(02-24-2017, 04:10 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(02-24-2017, 03:51 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(02-24-2017, 03:37 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:Quote:Some Biblical literalists are Young Earth Creationists (who say the Earth is 6000 years old, as Bishop Ussher calculated), but other literalists are not YECs.
I question their "literalism", then. Next you're gonna tell me that they believe the Earth is "round" and does not have pillars.
Every kind of literalism is anything but. There is no 6000-year timeline stated in the Bible. It speaks of 7 days, the first few of which cannot even be days, since there was no Sun and Moon yet. There are in fact Young Earth Creationists and non-Young Earth Creationists, who both consider themselves "literalists" or at least "fundamentalists." That's why the term YEC exists.
But it's true that the Garden of Eden is assumed to be southern Mesopotamia.
"Eden" is another name for "Earth," and the term originated as a description of that region, which is where the basic Bible stories came from. So, to realize that Adam is black, you have to go beyond the Biblical tradition to that extent.
Each day was billions of years. People thousands of years ago had no concept of those types of time frames. Therefore, as Zoroastrian and subsequent Abrahamic holy books got written, they used the "day" as an arbitrary demarcation of time.
I'd heard someone propose that there was a lunar calendar in use when the "X begat Y" chapter was written. If you read the word 'years' literally, everybody lived much longer than most would believe possible. If you divide by twelve, things become a lot more believable. For example, Genesis 11:32, "And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran." What do you think? Would you go with 205 years, or 17 for a life span that far back in time?
No, that's stupid. Average life spans in premodern times were dragged down by largely by infant/child mortality rates and deaths in childbirth. People didn't literally grow old and die in 16, 20, or 35 years.
Lunar calendars are in use today, they don't restart every month. They are also generally properly lunisolar calendars, measuring the number of lunar cycles in one solar year, with some degree of padding to line them up. Even purely lunar ones like the Islamic calendar still have 12 months in a year.