There they go again...

Trying to disprove the Bible.

I ran across this link, in a forum. The link is trying to prove the Bible wrong. To sum up, the author thinks that scribes either mis-translated, or otherwise edited old scripts.

The claim is that the mistranslation was done and ages of the original people in the Bible, such as Adam, Methuselah, Noah, and others from Genesis were overstated as a result of the mistranslation.  They went so far as to post an updated hypothesis of the "real ages" of these men, as well as explanations of how the "error" occurred. Naturally, this results in a completely altered history, where Noah is a king, and has a barge of grains and animals survive a local river flood.

Problems with the arguments:

This article fails in the following respects:
- It takes a known error in the Sumerian Kings list, and assumes a similar mistake was made by a Hebrew scribe.
- The similar mistake or mistranslation, involved the need to manipulate numbers, either on the order of ten, or one hundred. Base-10 numerology came about several hundred years after the Babylonian time frame to which they refer.
- Babylonian numerology was base-60, and so there would be no need or even desire to inflate the numbers by ten. Proof - the Smerian King list was known to have been mistranslated during the Babylonian time frame. The ages of the Sumerian Kings were off by a factor of 3600 - which just so happens to be 60 x 60.
- On this page, the author makes the argument that the author arbitrarily left out two other known survivors. Then asks the ridiculous question: "how many more did the author leave out?" We know people were left out, daughters and slaves were not mentioned in story lines unless they directly affected the story. That does not mean there were thousands of others that survived.
- The author reference the Epic of Gilgamesh many times. While this is an important historical document, it is also known to be a copy of a copy of another society's attempts to document history based on the Hebrew's documentation.
- The author frequently references Ziusudra as being the person the Hebrews called Noah. Problem is, there is no evidence of Ziusudra prior to the first Babylonian empire - when the Hebrews were taken hostage, and their history copied by the Babylonians (known to happen with many other ancient "stories"). It is safe to conclude that Ziusudra is the Babylonian copy of Noah. The Babylonians did this with other societies they captured, and historians call them on it. But historians with an attempted point to make (an anti-God point), will turn this around, and say the Hebrews borrowed this from the Babylonians. This despite the fact that the oldest texts we have are Biblical.
- The author "debunks" the Ark's size, based on the assumption that it was a local river flood. Of course, had it been a six-day river flood, there would have been no need for an ark at all - just move to the top of a mountain for a week. Also, there would be no need to transport any animals.



This article fails like this:
- First, it makes the same base-10 assumptions, then disproves them. Then in an effort to pick back up, it makes some very unlikely divisions of age using the father and the son, and then for the ones that don't fit are simply added with 100, or 10. Again, these numbers were not the base unit we think of them as. The scribes of the day would not likely have used them. It would be far more likely they would have used 60 than 100, and six than ten.
- There is no account for the known Hebrew tradition of 7's and 13's. The week was seven days, the year was thirteen 4-week 'months,' or four 13-week 'seasons.'
- Instead, they did assume that there was an error translating twelve months into the known thirteen that the Hebrews observed. Problem with that is that the 12-month calendar, known as the Gregorian Calendar, was not introduced until 1500, with it's 12-month predecessor, the Julian Calendar, being introduced just before the time of Christ in 46 BC.
- If you look at some of the proposed mistranslations, you would have to believe the scribes were about six-years old to make those mistakes.
- It uses the list of Sumerian Kings - already known to be factually flawed - as a base point from which to compare.


Both articles fail with known time lines:
- Abraham is known to be the tenth generation from Noah, and the twentieth from Adam. Both articles here will presume that Noah (or Ziusudra) lived around 2900 BC. Neither article disputes that. Neither article disputes the lineage or time frame from Noah to Abraham - ten generations. Abraham is known to have lived from 2000 BC to 1800 BC, or thereabouts. Ten generations spanning a thousand years? Nope. Noah landed more recently than that - about 2350 BC, according to the Bible. That means about 35 years per generation. Pretty standard throughout history.
- The remains of the Ark were discovered in 1948. It was found right where the Bible said it came to rest. The length was exactly 300 cubits. 300 Egyptian cubits. Remember, Moses wrote Genesis - he would have described the ark based on his (extensive) schooling in all modern Egyptian studies of the day.


Summary:
Again, folks with an agenda are out to try to disprove the Bible. Why?
Follow the money.

If there were more money in the Bible, then there would be more churches, and more people in these churches, and many of these same folks that try to disprove the Bible would be trying to preach the Bible for the money.

Also, old-Earth hypothesis is contrary to the scientific method, and is not, therefore, science. From a quote on what the scientific method:

To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.

 Folks, we have no accurate method of testing ages past 10,000 years. But some "scientists will deduce that, because they do not want to answer to a Holy and Righteous God, they can find a way of proving the Earth is over 4 billion years old. Nobody was there to observe it, and the methods to date the materials cannot be reproduced, as people have not been around millions of years to observe, so these claims are all phony science.