Dear Editor,
Thank you all very much for your work producing en each month. I value the paper very highly and have read it cover to cover since the early 80s.
I wish to respond to the article by Dr John Peet on Genesis 1-11 in the February issue. I am grateful to him for arguments in support of this as early writing from Moses.
1) Gordon Wenham allows that the generations of these post-flood ancestors may be idealised (as in Matt 1 with 14 generations x 3) and may have gaps (also suggested by Kitchen). Careful examination of the ages of these individuals and reference to the Babylonian number system sees a deliberate pattern (www.jew-ishjournal.com/judaismandscience/item/bib lical_numbers_mathematics_and_attrib-uted_patriarchal_ages (Cassuto, referred to in Wenham’s commentary); www.biologos .org/blogs/jim-stump-faith-and-science-seeking-understanding/long-life-spans-in-genesis; www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/ PSCF12-03Hill.pdf
These evidences from the text itself lead me to believe we should not take the simple YEC reading of those genealogies. This means there is no difficulty for instance in accommodating the ages of 20,000-year-old cave paintings (Editor: chosen by editor as illus- tration, not John Peet) to our biblical understanding. By contrast, from a YEC perspective you are left with either a localised flood or a global flood prior to the cave paintings. Neither seems to accord with YEC advocates.
2) Though Dr Peet quotes from Dr John Walton in support neither he nor any other modern scholar or commentator on Genesis that I am aware of asserts that the Genesis text is of greater antiquity than other origin texts we have from Sumeria and Egypt (c. 1600 BC), though source fragments could be older (eg. Genesis 5.1f). The content, being from God by divine inspiration, is authoritative and reliable whether first recorded in written form before Moses or not.
Readers may be interested to know that Professor Kitchen reported on the Brooklyn Papyrus 35 from Thebes (c.1830 BC prior to the time of Joseph). www.brooklynmuseum .org/opencollection/objects/3369
Many thanks,
