Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Paine's radical argument shocked Christians who saw the credibility of Genesis as the
foundation for the credibility of the Bible. Discrediting the stories of Noah's Flood and the
week of Creation threatened the authority of the Bible and its promise of salvation.
Still, people on either side of the Atlantic recognized that the Bible itself had evolved,
if only because the New Testament was grafted onto the Hebrew Bible (also known as the
Old Testament). Long before the creation of the New Testament, after the fall of the King-
dom of David, Jewish traditions were brought together into a single history that could be
handed down to preserve the cultural identity of a vanquished people exiled into captivity.
It was relatively easy to accept the proposition that Jewish scribes had merged several ver-
sions of an oral tradition into a coherent whole.
A defining achievement of nineteenth-century biblical criticism was teasing Genesis
apart, verse by verse, to reveal two parallel narratives. Recently developed software that
analyzes style and word choices to parse authorship of multiauthored texts has found the
same thing. Both the low- and high-tech methods of analysis provide support for some kind
of merging of stories as a reasonable explanation for contradictions such as that between
Genesis 1, in which people were created after the animals, and Genesis 2, in which Adam
was created first. Such dilemmas are problematic for the simplest of reasons. At most, only
one version could be correct.
Did the Flood last 150 or 40 days? In Genesis 7:24 and 8:3, the Flood is described as
lasting 150 days, whereas according to Genesis 8:6-12, the floodwaters receded from the
earth in just two weeks after 40 days and nights of rain (for a grand a total of 54 days of
flooding). Elsewhere, the Flood was projected to last ten and a half months between Genes-
is 7:11, which describes the Flood as beginning on the seventeenth day of the second month
of Noah's 600th year, and Genesis 8:13, which notes that the floodwaters receded enough
for Noah to open up the ark on the first day of his 601st year. How can all of these things
be true?
Similarly, did two or seven pairs of animals board the ark? In Genesis 7:2-3, God com-
mands Noah to load up seven pairs of clean animals and birds but just a single pair of the
other animals. Twelve verses later, only two of each kind march aboard.
Intent on explaining such inconsistencies, biblical scholars argued that the key to disen-
tangling the two original versions of the story lay in identifying how each version referred
