Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
to God, by either the divine name Yahweh (Jehovah), or Elohim—that is, as “Lord” or
“God.” Perhaps the author of one version used the less formal “Elohim” because God first
revealed his divine name to Moses, and so it would have made no sense to use “Yahweh” in
describing the earlier history of the world. Likewise, different references to the number of
animals may reflect one writer's knowledge that it was long after Noah's voyage that God
revealed to Moses the distinction between clean and unclean animals.
The evidence was building for two original sources. By the end of the nineteenth century,
Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic experts alike agreed that the biblical flood story
consisted of interwoven accounts fused into a single narrative during the Babylonian exile.
While some biblical commentators have gone to great lengths to try to reconcile inconsist-
encies and apparent discrepancies, the simplest explanation for them is that earlier stories
were combined. After all, how could Moses have written about his own death?
We know the New Testament was compiled from several traditions pieced together from
Greek fragments, with compliers disagreeing about which topics to include and which to
leave out. Something similar may have happened centuries before when a newly enslaved
people, desperate to preserve their oral history, wrestled over which stories to record for
posterity.
The later history of the Bible shows how translation of the Hebrew word “eretz” and
the Latin word “terra,” both of which can mean “earth,” “land,” or “soil,” influenced
how Christians viewed topography and Noah's Flood. Saint Jerome's use of terra for both
“eretz” and “adamah” (soil) in translating Genesis, and the later translation of terra as
“earth,” bolstered the view of Noah's Flood as a globe-wrecking deluge. But in Latin terra
generally means land or soil; it does not typically imply the whole planet. The Latin word
for planet Earth is “tellus.” If eretz had been rendered into English in key passages as
“land” rather than “earth,” there might have been far less support for viewing Noah's Flood
as a global event that shaped the world.
In any case, theologians have long argued that the word “earth” does not necessarily
mean the whole planet. More than a century ago, conservative Church of Scotland minister
Robert Jamieson pointed out that in places the Bible used “earth” to refer to limited areas,
such as regions or countries. For example, God calling the dry land “earth” in Genesis 1:10
clearly implies more restricted areas than the whole planet. In other passages eretz is trans-
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