CriticalSock
Master Poster
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2008
- Messages
- 2,192
Yes, but it's mostly an argument of incredulity.
"Why should the Hebrews, who had no special expertise in ancient science and who borrowed heavily in other areas, have had a view different from other ancient peoples'?"
In other words, he argues that it is reasonable to believe that the Israelites had a cosmology similar to those of its neighbors at the time and that the Biblical text does not contradict such a worldview. And that's entirely true, but it's much different than actual proof that the Israelites had this worldview, or that they considered the Bible an inerrant codification of such a cosmology.
In post 5, you indicated you wanted to use the evidence of cosmology to counter the claim of Biblical literalists that the references to pillars and firmament are merely poetic. But even if the ancient Israelites believed that the Sumerian cosmology was a reasonable one, that doesn't mean they rejected the possibility of other cosmologies. They can use the current cosmology in a poetic sense to describe the stories they wanted to tell in a way that would be understood by their Bronze Age audience even while comprehending they don't know how the world actually worked.
Did the Ancient Israelites believe in a cosmology similar to the Babylonians? Probably. Would they have thought that a different cosmology was sacreligious or impossible because of the Bible's descriptions? For that we have absolutely no evidence, because the issue never came up. But we do know that centuries later, as new facts were developed, the Jewish descendants of the ancient Israelites had no religious turmoil in accepting a new cosmology, notwithstanding how the Bible described the heavens. There is no evidence that Jews rebelled against the idea that pi does not equal precisely 3, or rebelling at the idea of a round world, or a heliocentric solar system. So there's very little evidence that Jews took the description of the universe in the Bible as literal truth.
But God wouldn't have written his book that way. He would have dictated a real world account of events even if dressing it up in poetic language. Just like he wouldn't have had written that a mustard seed is the smallest seed or that a bat is a bird. This is a God of Truth remember. Truth with a capital T.