Note also, that I have not merely made the claim that this theory of yours is of no value. I asked you directly what value it could possible have and what practical difference it could make. You had no answer.
I think you have made a lot of good points so far that I don't disagree with. But I did answer this question. I said that (to me at least) the difference this makes is none. Zero. I didn't write the paper but when I came across it there was no "Aha! Now I understand everything!" moment. My interest in it for the most part is
extrabiblical, involving ancient astronomy, which is just a hobby of mine. I was already aware of the Ein-Gedi mosaic and the obvious astronomical references it contains and the paper gives a fairly in depth analysis of it by someone who has obviously worked and published in astronomical and atmospheric sciences. Yes, his conclusion is based on purely circumstantial evidence. But historical reconstructions often are. We don't have any actual writings from the time period that states "Yep, that's what we did". As I said, it could just be a coincidence. But it fits with most of my (amateurish) understanding of this particularly niche topic as well as with my belief that some ancients likely had a better grasp of astronomy than what is currently accepted by the mainstream. Otherwise I would have dismissed it all as complete gobbled gook. Which I obviously don't think that it is. Yet this doesn't change anything I believe about the Bible. As I said before, we all agree that at least one significant event in the Bible coincided with astronomical phenomena -none of us believe that star of Bethlehem was just a coincidence.
My motivation in posting about this is mainly that no one else was talking about it. The paper is relatively recent but I have been sitting on it for sometime now. I've trying handing it off in private to a couple other people, perhaps in hope me being able to avoid the drama and to save my own time it took for me to do this on my own..but no one else had the time or the interest. So I had to decided on my own what to do and I didn't feel that, simply not saying anything was the right thing to do.
Methuselah being almost 1000 years of age at his death just prior to Noah's flood. It presents these ages as factual not allegorical representations of anything, much less Lunar cycles. If Methuselah died at an age dramatically different than what is reported in Genesis then that would undermine the whole of Genesis. The whole bible, including the whole of the New Testament, is predicated on the veracity of Genesis. If Genesis is undermined, so is everything else.
Well the focus is the
begatting ages. Not the
death ages. But even still, if we found out for certain that these ages were recorded in a way to preserve some sort of calendric knowledge and that Moses perhaps had no idea how old exactly Methuselah was when he died, this would change nothing. It might bruise our egos a bit but it wouldn't undermine the Bible, just our prior understanding of it.
What if God just didn't want the names of say, planets or constellations to be read aloud from the Torah, over and over again, knowing that the Israelites had a bizarre tendency towards idol worship, so he told Moses to instead refer to them as the ages of the patriarchs instead? Would the entire New Testament fall apart? No! It wouldn't affect it at all! The Bible is never underminded. Only our egos.
See what I mean?
