He collected some traditions, and he served as the central figure of at least a couple of them. He may even have put the final revisions on the Genesis collection. But he never wrote any of them. He never wrote anything.
Please cite your proof that Moses didn't write anything.
What indication do you have that he did? The Genesis fables are all supposed to be talking about events that happened many centuries before him, and which even you admit he couldn't have written. Deuteronomy includes his own death and burial, and he obviously didn't write that either. The remaining three, while they center around him, do not appear to have been written by him, but by others documenting his adventures from the stance of an outside observer. Even then, it seems that it was not directly observed, but recorded hearsay, just like the rest of the Bible. And of course the scholarship indicates this is the case; that except perhaps for a few of the ancient fireside stories, (Genesis/Job) the rest of the Pentateuch was composed many many years after Moses and the exodus were listed as the national memories of the Hebrew culture.
I believe he did exist. Many aspects of his story are obviously borrowed from some volcanic event which seems never to have occurred in Egypt. And Moses' character seems like a combination of four or five different people. But I believe there was a real Moses, and that he lead a band of fanatical desert bandits who were less like "God's chosen people" and more like the Taliban.
Although the figures recorded in the Bible are impossible exaggerations, there are still too many grisly accounts of inhuman genocide hamstrung cattle, and slaves being dragged from smoldering villages en route to the promised land to believe that none of it ever really happened.
This is typical actually. Skeptics want to allow the so called atrocities so that they can use them to show how tyranical God is but then claim that the Biblical figures themselves didn't exist.
Then why do you say this is typical? Because I said I believe this figure did exist. A tyrannical desert brigand isn't so hard to believe. And I make no comment about how tyrannical God is, because it seems clear (at least to me) that if God exists, he didn't do any of these terrible things. Men committed all these atrocities and then tried to justify their barbarism by claiming that God supposedly condoned, allowed, or ordered them to be done. But of course if God were really the being of light, wisdom, and love that the vast majority of his followers claim he is, then he wouldn't have had any part in these injustices and petty prejudice that is blamed on him. I blame these atrocities on men, not God, and that would still be the case whether God is real or not. I mean the Bible actually claims that Moses was the meekest man who had ever lived, and look at all the horror he brought about. Obviously, this cannot be the inerrent word of God but propaganda with the spin boasting the proud heritage of genocidal Jews in a militant theocracy.
How would they have found out about it? The Indo-Aryan linguistic and cultural division between what would become the Indian and Iranian nations began at about that time. But their (many) flood myths don't remotely match.
If it were a true worldwide flood, it would seem likely that all cultures would have information of such passed down within their own cultures which could explain the simularities and differences between the stories.
You're not paying attention again. At the time of the flood, there were already civilizations arising in Egypt and in several places in the Orient. The Indus and the Aryans divided into two powerfully-populated nations within a very few centuries of that date. But there were also tribal cultures of Oriental descent already dispersed throughout the Pacific Islands and the Americas thousands of years prior to that date, and continuously ever afterward. There were already Caucasians across Europe, blacks in Africa, and aborigines in Australia, all tens of thousands of years before your flood, and they're all still there. Likewise, at the time of your flood, there were already ancient renderings of leopards, lions, and housecats, and the scimitar cats were already extinct. That's four species known from three different genera of one supposed "kind" already known to precede and survive this mythic even that (once again) we know for certain never happened on a global scale and couldn't have.
The 1st through 4th Dynasties of Egypt continued right along, building pyramids requiring the assistance of hundreds of workers each.
Actually, it wasn't until the 3rd Dynasty that the pyramids were built.
I didn't mean to imply that the 1st dynasty was already building pyramids. But even in the 3rd dynasty, if your flood had really happened, there wouldn't have been enough people in the whole world to have begun that job, much less participate in all the wars that were fought in the interim.
I am just now looking at the flood story in accordance with historical documentation and I am unsure if I agree with the timing of it as current theories state. I find that the time of the flood could be dated as far back as pre-history. I really as I have stated before speak informatively on this subject.
That's alright. I obviously don't know everything either. I've heard all kinds of dates for the flood. But the flood of Shurripak (at the end of the Jemdat Nasr) is the only one supported by archaeological and geological evidence simultaneously.
This immediately after everyone in the world had drowned? And at the same time, more pyramids were going up in China.
Again, the time frame of the flood is not clear to me. It is based on some interpretation of geneology which to me seems somewhat contrived so I would need to have more knowledge to determine what I think about the timing. If I accepted any information at this point I would be merely regurgitating someone else's viewpoint and you will find that I very rarely accept anything without looking into it myself.
I would believe that if you hadn't cited Ussher's dates, which are no more than a flawed interpretation of geneology that is backed by nothing but regurgitated in many creationist websites as if it were scriptural.
"Ussher dated the arrival of Abraham in Canaan to 2126 BCE and the Noahic flood at 2349 BCE. The latter is unlikely, because historical records in China and Egypt continued without disruption through that date, and contain no record of a massive world-wide flood that would have wiped out their civilizations."
--
ReligiousTolerance.org
The city of Jericho represents another problem with the global flood. As the world's oldest (or rather earliest) city, Jericho was also uninterrupted by any global cataclysm, and is estimated to be 4,000 years older than Ussher's whole universe. The great sphynx, (or at least part of it) may be even older than that. Archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and geologists see the same thing all over the natural world, to say nothing of tectonics, dendrochronology, and genetics, as well as radiation thermodynamics, and of course cosmology. All of these independently indicate the same ultimate conclusion. There is just no question but that the Earth is about a million times older than Young Earth theology allows.
"A million-fold mistake is no small matter, and Biblical scholars surely need to give primary attention to resolving this tremendous discrepancy right at the very foundation of our entire Biblical cosmology. This is not a peripheral issue that can be dismissed with some exegetical twist, but is central to the very integrity of scriptural theology."
-- Henry Morris;
The Biblical Basis for Modern Science (1984), Page 115.
Sumer kept their records continuously up to, and after the flood. Yet in the first century after that event, they also recorded a series of civil wars. How could they have had enough people left to have even one war? Perhaps the same way the Greeks did, since their myth had many survivors on high ground.
The timelines of the Sumerians are very interesting and hold extreme time periods of their kings. It is hard to determine what their timelines actually mean.
The primary problem is the base-60 numeric system which led many to believe that people once lived for several centuries at a time. And for some reason, the further back you search, the greater the longevity continues to increase by an order of magnitude, so that at one point, "when the kingship descended from Heaven" we have individual persons living for tens of thousands of years longer than Ussher thought anything anywhere ever existed, because he also used the same, inaccurate reading of the zero-less numerals without ever questioning his beliefs or the logic behind it. This is just one example of why that's never a good idea.
Recent discoveries in archaeology and geology have revealed that the Black sea flooded, destroying a whole village some 7,000 years ago. The Sea of Galilee also flooded, destroying another shore-side village some 15,000 years ago. In the time since then, many lakes and rivers have come and gone in North America, fed or drained by the events of the ice age, often with profound effects that are undeniable to the observer as to what they are, and how they occurred.
I believe this to be true as far as I know, but I am not sure that the flood itself could have been long before this. Again though, I am just not informed enough to carry on any meaningful dialog on this subject.
The flood followed each of these events by a significant amount of time in every case.
All I want to know is this: Is there any quality or quantity of evidence you would or could accept to prove that the global flood never really happened, and that the men who fashioned the stories in the Bible merely exaggerated the details?
I think that you could give me both quality and quantity of evidence that would convince me that a global flood did not occur at a certain time in history. You may even convince me that the flood may not have had to be global as some interpretation must be used to determine the wording for earth. I will look at evidence both historically (secular) and Biblically and then I will have a foundation to build upon. It takes a great deal of research to come to any position when you are looking at thousands of years past. It may even be tens of thousands of years at this point....I just don't know. I am intriged though as I look at clay tablets that are thousands of years old that speak of the global flood. I have spent so much time in other areas of the Bible that I have not investigated the flood and I find my interest has been stirred.
But is there any quality or quantity of evidence I could ever show you that would convince you that the Bible was written subject to human error both in composition as well as interpretation? Or do you also hold a position similar to that of HuMaNaTeE, the ICR, the AIG, and my friend, the principle of the fundamentalist Christian school; that being that the priori conclusion that the inerrent authority of the Bible must never be called in doubt no matter what reason or evidence is ever brought to bare?