Seven days

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Topic:	Religions > Atheism
User:	"Mark"
Date:	21 Oct 2004 02:15:39 PM
Object:	Seven days

Hi,
I was having an discussion with a Christian friend of mine a few days
ago about religion.
He claims that in genesis the original Hebrew word for 'day' is a
mistranslation and actually means 'period of time'. Hence the world
was not created in a seven days, but instead 'seven periods of time'.
Now I must confess that I know nothing about Hebrew, could someone
here with more knowledge than I confirm or deny his claim. What word
was used for 'day' and does it have any alternate meanings?
Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for weeding out
similar alternate translations?
Thanks
.

User: "JTEM"
Title: Re: Seven days	22 Oct 2004 12:19:32 AM

"Mark" <marksmith_156@yahoo.co.uk> wrote

Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for
weeding out similar alternate translations?

You could have answered your own question with a 30
second google search.
To be honest though, it's pointless. If you accept the frigging
obvious -- that the bible is not literally true -- you just can't
give a damn if a word wasn't translated perfectly.
Fundamentalism is a sick & twisted disease. Best cure
yourself of it, rather than grep for technical outs.
.

User: "Mark Nutter"
Title: Re: Seven days	21 Oct 2004 08:44:57 PM

In article <e52d6693.0410211115.5a0f1cd7@posting.google.com>,

(Mark) wrote:

"Day" is a good translation for "yom" -- even in English, "day" doesn't
always mean a strict 24 hour period:
"In Isaac Newton's day, no one worried about invaders from Mars."
"We sleep at night and work in the day."
"Your package will be shipped within 5 business days."
Hebrew usage is not all that different from English usage--the term
"day" is normally understood to be either a roughly 24-hour period, or
else the daylight portion of a 24-hour period, unless the context
clearly suggests otherwise. In Genesis 1, the explicit references to
"evening" and "morning" seem to support the 24-hour interpretation
better than the "in so-and-so's day" interpretation. Plus what do you
do with the fact that the sun, moon, and stars aren't created until the
fourth "period of time"? Substituting "period of time" for "24-hour
day" won't get you out of that one. ;)
m
----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
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.

User: "quibbler"
Title: Re: Seven days	21 Oct 2004 10:44:29 PM

In article <e52d6693.0410211115.5a0f1cd7@posting.google.com>,
marksmith_156@yahoo.co.uk says...

They use terms like "erev", or "yom" which are usually translated
"evening" and "day". The thing is that at times they use these to
strictly refer to days or parts of days. If they don't consistently
mean a present 24 hour day then how can we trust any part of the bible
where it uses "yom"? Did Jesus literally die in under one day or do
they mean it in some fucked up metaphorical sense.

Hence the world
was not created in a seven days, but instead 'seven periods of time'.

Well, my understanding is that Hebrews have perfectly good terms for
periods like years or epochs. It's not clear why they would use the
term "day" when they had other terms that could unambiguously convey
longer time periods.
Another thing that you could ask the fundy is how many 24 hour days they
think those periods lasted. If those periods lasted multiple 24 hour
days then the apologist would effectively be maintaining that each
single "day" contained multiple "days".
--
Quibbler (quibbler247atyahoo.com)
"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the
threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow'
disease, and many others, but I think a case can be
made that faith is one of the world's great evils,
comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to
eradicate." -- Richard Dawkins
.

User: "Fatman"
Title: Re: Seven days	21 Oct 2004 03:38:35 PM

Mark wrote:

Hi,

I was having an discussion with a Christian friend of mine a few days
ago about religion.

He claims that in genesis the original Hebrew word for 'day' is a
mistranslation and actually means 'period of time'. Hence the world
was not created in a seven days, but instead 'seven periods of time'.

Now I must confess that I know nothing about Hebrew, could someone
here with more knowledge than I confirm or deny his claim. What word
was used for 'day' and does it have any alternate meanings?

Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for weeding out
similar alternate translations?

Thanks

The Hebrew word Yom does have many different meanings for periods of
time, it has to be used in context. All creation days used in Genesis
represent a day.
Gen, 1:5
And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And the
evening and the morning were the first day.
So, putting it in context, evening and morning were the first what?
Year? month? week? or how about maybe Day?
Google will tell you more if you ask it nice.
Fatman
--
"Once again decent citizens will be able to enter this house of
worship, kneel down in front of a nearly-naked man hanging from a
wooden apparatus by a series of gruesome body piercings, and engage in
their bizarre practices of ritualized blood-drinking and cannibalism
without being assaulted by graphic images of attractive young women
with bare breasts."-- A. Whitney Brown, "The Daily Show"
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."--Delos B.
McKown, PhD, US professor, philosopher, author, former clergyman
.

User: "W. Syme"
Title: Re: Seven days	22 Oct 2004 06:16:35 PM

On 21 Oct 2004 12:15:39 -0700,

(Mark) wrote:

Hi,

I was having an discussion with a Christian friend of mine a few days
ago about religion.

He claims that in genesis the original Hebrew word for 'day' is a
mistranslation and actually means 'period of time'. Hence the world
was not created in a seven days, but instead 'seven periods of time'.

Now I must confess that I know nothing about Hebrew, could someone
here with more knowledge than I confirm or deny his claim. What word
was used for 'day' and does it have any alternate meanings?

Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for weeding out
similar alternate translations?

Thanks

Tell your friend he's an idiot.
His position implies that:
1. God, being omnipotent, cannot even make sure there's a proper book
with his exact words. He can create universes, but somehow fails to
make a guy take a dictation.
2. Million upon millions upon millions through the ages have had
completely the wrong beliefs about God, and He just let it pass.
Didn't do a thing about it.
Your friend having trouble mixing science and faith. It cannot be done
for the obvious reason that science is rational and factual, and
religion is a bunch of made-up absurd BS. But that's no reason to come
up with all kinds of weak pathetic excuses for not facing reality.
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:21)
W. Syme (pseudonym), European, non-native English speaker, "soft" atheist.
Email will not be read.
.

User: "stoney"
Title: Re: Seven days	23 Oct 2004 05:14:43 PM

On 21 Oct 2004 12:15:39 -0700,

(Mark) wrote:

It's a 'red herring.' The various versions of the Bible are
advertised and promoted as the "Word of God(tm)."
The red herring indicates the Bible is totally worthless as no word
can be trusted.
Christians constantly demonstrate their terminal lack of integrity
when attempting this red herring. They also indicate their 'god' is
less than an idiot. Such also indicates their lack of intelligence as
only an idiot would follow an idiot.

Now I must confess that I know nothing about Hebrew, could someone
here with more knowledge than I confirm or deny his claim. What word
was used for 'day' and does it have any alternate meanings?

Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for weeding out
similar alternate translations?

Thanks

--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Vote for Bush. Why vote for the lesser of two evils?
No matter the candidates the superstition industry wins.
'Jesus' is a sock-puppet Christians utilize to add 'authority' to
whatever action they intend on taking. -Stoney
And Duty Imp and Rapscallion
.

User: "WiZeGuy"
Title: Re: Seven days	21 Oct 2004 11:41:40 PM

Over the past several months I have Googled several permutations of the
phrase 'history of written hebrew', in an attempt to find out when the
israelites started committing their 'divinely inspired' tales to preservable
mediums. I have been unable to find any evidence that that the israelites
possessed or used any form of written language before approximately 1000
B.C. Since the jewish calendar reputedly chronicles 6000 some-odd years of
jewish history, that would mean that for the first 3000 years jewish history
was preserved by oral tradition. Most probably the tales were told around
the evening cooking fires, and religious instruction was passed aurally from
one rabbinical shaman to the next. Furthermore, the early israelites were
not, apparently, a single cohesive tribe, but rather several nomadic 'clans'
who shared a common ancestry. Who can say that the tales told
generation-to-generation in one clan were exactly the same tales as told by
another clan?
Did you ever play the 'secret' game? You know, where you get a room full of
people and tell one person a 'secret' and then that person passes the secret
along, person-to-person, until the 'secret' gets back to the original
teller? How often did the 'secret' return to the original teller intact?
Now, multiply that principal by 10's or 100's or thousands of people, over
3000 years. Can anyone really believe that by the time the original jewish
stories and 'histories' were committed to preservable medium that they bore
any resemblance to the original tales? Who decided which tales, as told by
which clan, were 'divinely suited' for inclusion in the torah?
IMO, its not a question of the semantics of translation of particular words.
The whole of the text must be seen for what it is: a flawed and distorted
collection of tales told by primitive people with a primitive understanding
of their world. If today you were to go to a hypothetical village in the
Amazon, and there meet a primitive people who related how the great god
Jongo interracted in their lives, would you be compelled to believe in the
great god Jongo? Mind you, this primitive tribe has a long history of
'proof' of Jongo's existence, benificence, and retribution. Did not Jongo
show them the secrets of fire when lightning struck the makawari tree? Did
not Jongo bless them with life by making the rains to fall? Did not Jongo
punish them for blasphemy by sending sickness to their village? Of course
Jongo exists!
I would venture that not a single jew, christian, or muslim would be moved
by this primitive tribe's tales to believe in their god Jongo. Yet, is that
not exactly what jews, christians and muslims do when they claim that their
scriptures are 'truth'? Are they not reading the tales of ancient, primitive
people and accepting their primitive suppositions as truth and proof of
something that they would never believe if told by contemporary aborigines?
Regards,
thistlewait
"Mark" <marksmith_156@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:e52d6693.0410211115.5a0f1cd7@posting.google.com...

Hi,

I was having an discussion with a Christian friend of mine a few days
ago about religion.

He claims that in genesis the original Hebrew word for 'day' is a
mistranslation and actually means 'period of time'. Hence the world
was not created in a seven days, but instead 'seven periods of time'.

Now I must confess that I know nothing about Hebrew, could someone
here with more knowledge than I confirm or deny his claim. What word
was used for 'day' and does it have any alternate meanings?

Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for weeding out
similar alternate translations?

Thanks

User: "WiZeGuy"
Title: Re: Seven days	22 Oct 2004 12:10:50 AM

Hi,

I was having an discussion with a Christian friend of mine a few days
ago about religion.

He claims that in genesis the original Hebrew word for 'day' is a
mistranslation and actually means 'period of time'. Hence the world
was not created in a seven days, but instead 'seven periods of time'.

Now I must confess that I know nothing about Hebrew, could someone
here with more knowledge than I confirm or deny his claim. What word
was used for 'day' and does it have any alternate meanings?

Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for weeding out
similar alternate translations?

Thanks

User: "JTEM"
Title: Re: Seven days	22 Oct 2004 12:33:37 AM

"WiZeGuy" <No-One@NO-wheret.net> wrote

Oops, sorry, there's several critical errors in what you say
here.
The first is that biblical tales do date back futher than the
bible, further even than Hebrew. Only they weren't
biblical tales back then, they were Pagan tales.
Eden, the flood, numerous biblical Pslams and even
"Yahway" all date to before Hebrew and before the
emergence of any "Israelite" identity. As a result, there
is nothing to suggest this "Oral tradition" you speak of,
and plenty to suggest that the biblical tales were
latter day constructs which were built on (or co-opted)
older cultural traditions.
The bible itself clearly debunks your view, as there
was no way for God or Moses (depending on which
biblical passage you read) to have WRITTEN the
Ten Commandments without a language to write them
in. If that language was Hebrew, then even you would
have to conclude that there is no way the bible could
have pre-dated the proto Semitic (and proto Hebrew)
texts of 1,000 BC. It had to come later. It had to START
later.
That is, from a purely theistic point of view.
Absent the "Magic Fairy Dust," there's no reason to
deny the bibles more ancient roots in (Pagan) Canaanite
culture, and no reason to try and rationalize an oral
tradition when the bible itself requires a written language.
.

User: "wbarwell"
Title: Re: Seven days	22 Oct 2004 07:23:55 AM

WiZeGuy wrote:

Israel adopted Phoenician alphabetical writing about 1000
BCE. Only a few small ostrocons exist from early times, few
inscriptions, not much else.
Not until about 700 BCE do we see evidence of much
real writing in a literary sense.
Yet, these were a people who starting with 70
people, alledgely grew to 2 /12 millons over a
430 year period, in Egypt.
So you would expect that these people would have
marched to Canaan and taken heiroglyphics with it,
at least in the Heiratic simplified form, and would
then be literate. Since Moses preceeded Phoentic
alphabetic script by several hundred years, what
alphabet would he have used to write down
commandments?
In pre-Israelite Palestine, cunieform writing was
commonly used at that time. Most the Amarna letters
are written in cuniform.
Yet the early Israelites did not know that either.
All this tells us that these Israelites, whose language
was hardly distinguishable from their Canaanite
neighbors, were mostly illiterate.
Since the jewish calendar reputedly chronicles

6000 some-odd years of jewish history, that would mean that for the first
3000 years jewish history was preserved by oral tradition.

The first mention of Israel is Merneptah.
We have a few mentions of a village name YWH near mount Seir
in Egyptian sources about the time of Rameses II
Proto-Israel does not go back beyond the 18th dynasty.
Hardly 6000 years. Most Israelite mythology is pretty
derivative from their neighbors.
Most probably

the tales were told around the evening cooking fires, and religious
instruction was passed aurally from one rabbinical shaman to the next.
Furthermore, the early israelites were not, apparently, a single cohesive
tribe, but rather several nomadic 'clans' who shared a common ancestry.
Who can say that the tales told generation-to-generation in one clan were
exactly the same tales as told by another clan?

They weren't. Even Joshua and Judges differs wildly in parts of their
tales.
What is instructive is to note the tales of the gods from Ugarit circa
1370 BCE.
The god El, which is the most common early biblical name
of god, in Ugarit mythology, with his wife Asherah (consort of
Ywhaweh, El) is overthrown by Ba'al, and after a war of gods, is made
subservient to Ba'al and his wife, the war goddess Anat.
Here you may have the real start of the Jewish religion,
tall tale wars between gloating priests of Ba'al and El/Jehova,
denying these irritating myths from Ba'al priests. Ba'al priests made
up tales denying El by having their diety overthrow him,
and later Jehovists/Elohists counter by denying all gods
except Jehova all together.
Yahweh, a god of hosts, armies, is an aspect that overtakes
the older El who is depreciated for the more militant aspect of
Yahweh.
Somewhere along the line, Yahweh has to shake
Asherah, the last tell tale remnant of the fact Yahweh
is El, the defeated god of the triumphalist Ba'al priests.
One you read the Ugarit El-Ba'al myth cycle
and read the battle between the Yahwehists
of the 7th century, you can begin to see the undelying
what drives Yahwehism.
To save El, the old religion, from the sneering Ba'alists,
the old myths are relentlessly trimmed reminding
anybody of these old Ba'alist myths of a defeated El.

"Mark" <marksmith_156@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:e52d6693.0410211115.5a0f1cd7@posting.google.com...

Hi,

I was having an discussion with a Christian friend of mine a few days
ago about religion.

He claims that in genesis the original Hebrew word for 'day' is a
mistranslation and actually means 'period of time'. Hence the world
was not created in a seven days, but instead 'seven periods of time'.

Now I must confess that I know nothing about Hebrew, could someone
here with more knowledge than I confirm or deny his claim. What word
was used for 'day' and does it have any alternate meanings?

Also does anyone know of any resources on the web for weeding out
similar alternate translations?

Thanks

--
Kerry - two medals a silver and bronze star.
Bush? Well they don't give medals
for going AWOL, missing your medical and
getting grounded or falling off of a bar stool.
Kerry - a hero, Bush - a zero
Cheerful Charlie
.

User: "JTEM"
Title: Re: Seven days	22 Oct 2004 09:37:18 PM

"wbarwell" <wbarwell@munnnged.mylinuxisp.com> wrote

The first mention of Israel is Merneptah.

Even this much is under dispute.
Not only is there a dipute on how the word should be transliterated,
but there's a dipute over which actual hieroglyphs actually appear
on the stella.

We have a few mentions of a village name YWH near mount Seir
in Egyptian sources about the time of Rameses II

The name appears in the Ugarit texts, and usually represented as the
name of a minor diety.
At least by religious scholars.
http://www.theology.edu/ugarbib.htm

Here you may have the real start of the Jewish religion,
tall tale wars between gloating priests of Ba'al and El/Jehova,
denying these irritating myths from Ba'al priests. Ba'al priests
made up tales denying El by having their diety overthrow him,
and later Jehovists/Elohists counter by denying all gods
except Jehova all together.

I don't think you can deny the influence of the Nabateans. Their
tradition of an alter WITHOUT a depiction of a god is too close
a match to the Hebrew tradition.
.

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