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Quote by: sonart "The Bible provides a complete genealogy from Adam to Jesus. You can go through the genealogies and add up the years. You'll get a total that is just over 4,000 years. Add the 2,000 years since the time of Jesus and you get just over 6,000 years since God created everything." -- MTA |
Most modern scholars (not idiots like me, people who have studied this for their lives) reject the traditional view of historicity, and hold instead that the genealogy reflects the ethnic groupings and changing socio-political alliances of the time and places of the oral traditions, perhaps re-edited at the time of the text's final composition in the 7th century BC.
If you look into the time period, this makes sense. those with whom the authors felt the closest affinity were grouped as descendants of Shem, those with whom there was the deepest animosity were grouped as sons of Ham (whose son Canaan was cursed by Noah), and the foreigners who were invading their shores from across the sea (Yavan) or from the East (Medes) were identified with Japheth.
"The Bible is the Word of God through human beings speaking in the idiom of their time, and the richness of the Bible comes from the fact that we don't take it as literally so; that it was dictated by God."
Desmond Tutu