Possible Severe JW Chronology issue - need help please - research thread

by donkey 13 Replies latest jw friends

  • donkey
    donkey

    How do I make that claim? I will explain the reasoning but I need some help and quotes from the insight book if some of you can help me since I currently have limited access to JW literature.

    The JW's believe that a global flood occurred and all mankind except for Noah, his 3 sons and their wives survived. That leaves only 1 family of the same language and nationality to "start over".

    The JW's believe that some time after the global flood Nimrod and others (there must have been many) sought to build a large tower - the tower of Babel. Jehovah got really upset and confused them by causing them all to speak different languages and split into different groups. This is where JW's teach that the other cultures, nationalities and languages originate from.

    Research topics/quetions:

    1. As I recall the JW's teach that the global flood occurred around 2200 BCE. Can someone verify that this is the date according to their teachings?
    2. How long after that did the tower of Babel occur? There would have had to be sufficient time so that there would be enough people to be split into multiple language groups.
    3. Any idea how many language groups (or people at the Tower of Babel) there would need to be for us to arrive at the current language count on the planet?
    4. The Great Pyramid in Egyptian was constructed in approximately 2800 BC (see http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5/pyramid.htm) . See the issue now? That means the pyramids would predate the global flood according to JW teachings. This would mean Egypt would have to be established, its religions founded, its government enforced and for the Egyptians to decide that they would construct pyramids to bury their monarchs and according to JW's this would have all have to occur AFTER the tower of Babel.
    5. Other examples of cultural items such as written parchments/memorial tombs etc that are found in places like China, Australia, South America etc? This can becaome a powerful tool to decimate the theory of a global flood and the JW chronology.

    Thanks for your help.

    Donkey

  • Cellist
    Cellist

    Hello. We dusted off the "Insight" books and it says there that the flood occurred in 2370 B.C.E.

    As far as the tower of Babel, they say that the timing can be estimated by Peleg who lived during that time. He lived from 2269 to 2030. It doesn't say how many languages. Neither does the "Aid" book.

    Hope that helps.

    Cellist

  • donkey
    donkey
    Hello. We dusted off the "Insight" books and it says there that the flood occurred in 2370 B.C.E.

    As far as the tower of Babel, they say that the timing can be estimated by Peleg who lived during that time. He lived from 2269 to 2030. It doesn't say how many languages. Neither does the "Aid" book.

    Thanks for that Cellist.

    Very interesting. I wonder how many people would be on the earth within 100 to 200 years if you started with Noah and his immediate family?

    another interesting tidbit: The Great pyramid consists of over 2 million stones. Now each stone weighs 1.5 stones. How many people (just in egypt) were needed to design the pyramid, cut the 2 million stones and then to construct the pyramid? How long would this take? If slave labor was used then the slaves would have had to have been bread after the tower of Babel and then captured by the Egyptians....thus further reducing the WTBS time frame of when the pyramids were built.

    Does the WTBS dispute established estimates of when the pyramids were built by this much? By clinging to the global flood and tower of Babel theory, and by dating the flood at 2,370 BCE they seem to....amazing.

    For more info on the Great Pyramid and some interesting logisitics/dates/facts refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid

    Donkey

  • donkey
    donkey

    It would also be interesting to ascertain when other Chrisitan religions who believe in the Global flood think it occurred as this evidence turns them upside down pretty easily too.

  • Leolaia
    Leolaia

    This was a BIG issue for me. I worked on this issue constantly in the latter part of 8th grade and the first half of 9th grade, until I gave up. I wanted so much to make "history" fit into the WT chronology. According to the Society, the Flood was in 2370 BC and Abraham was born in Ur in 2018 BC. It wasn't clear when the tower of Babel would have been built, but I used the reference to the "division" of the earth in the days of Peleg as the main clue. Peleg was born in 2269 BC, and since he was named when he was born, the division of peoples at Babel would have occurred when he was born. Plus, 2269 BC, being about 100 years after the Flood, would give barely enough time for people to be born to populate the cities of Nimrod's kingdom and to be scattered to populate the rest of the earth. It was also desirable to have a date as early as possible (unlike the date the Society suggests for the dispersion, 2189 BC) to give as much time as possible for Egyptian history and other peoples outside of Mesopotamia. At least with Sumerian history, I would have the advantage of being able to use that first century after the Flood.

    So I started Sumerian history about 30 years after the Flood, to give enough time for at least a few families to build cities in the land. Then I arbitrarily omitted about the first half of the first dynasty of each city as "mythical kings", and then shortened the reigns of the other kings to whatever length to make them fit. I shortened the reigns of the kings of the second and third dynasties as well on a similar basis. I also tried to maintain the synchronisms between the dynasties (i.e. making Gilgamesh of Uruk and Agga of Kish reign at the same time). Now I had a definite idea who Nimrod was. I thought when he was young he was known as Gilgamesh and built Uruk (so I omitted all kings who reigned before Gilgamesh, except for his father), and when he grew older he moved out, built Babel as his religious city and Akkad as his political city and became known as Sargon of Akkad. This meant that all early Sumerian dynasties had to precede Sargon's reign, and that Sargon's reign would have started by 2269 BC, if not sometime before. That also was barely enough time to squeeze in the Akkadian dynasty of his descendents and the Third Dynasty of Ur, to end shortly after Abraham was born so the city could still exist in his time. With those parameters, I had to reduce the lengths of Sumerian reigns down to like 1 year, 3 years, a really long reign would be 5 years, many were less than a year. Finally, I had a workable chronology, but then I looked at it and realized how implausible it was. Just a few decades after the Flood there were enough people born (the Bible mentions only 70), to populate several cities with competing dynasties, and then each city had very quick dynasties lasting just a decade, with many kings ruling for mere months, and then after the dispersion of Babel, the Egyptians had to hurry over real quick to Egypt so they could start all those Pre-Dynastic and Old Kingdom dynasties as fast as possible, because I didn't have much time to squeeze those in either, and then make the Chinese hurry fast over to China to start the early Chinese dynasties, etc. And to make the Egyptian dynasties work, I had to also shorten their reigns (I didn't have the luxury of regarding them as "mythical" since most are known historically), but this posed a problem because I needed enough time for each king to build their own pyramid, etc. But the death knell for my attempt at harmonizing the Society's chronology with history turned out to be non-chronological things I didn't even think of. I read about the royal tombs of Ur and the tombs of King Meskalamdug of the first dynasty of Ur and his wife Queen Pu-abi. Well, there were about 660 graves in all dating to the Early Dynastic period (i.e. before Sargon), and the royal tombs had the bodies of dozens of slaves executed so they would die with their king. Well, that wouldn't work at all! Genesis indicates that people generally lived for centuries after the Flood, so there shouldn't be any graves at all (or very few), and I had been assuming so far that cities in the first dynasties after the Flood had less than a 100 people to start out with....so why would there by so many dead people? And if they're trying to repopulate the world and populations were still fairly small, how in the world would they have the luxury of killing off dozens of people just so they would die with their king or queen?

    So I tried to change the basic parameters of my harmonizations, giving much more time for the early Sumerian dynasties. But that just took away critical time from the Egyptian dynasties, which were already some 800 years out of synch with secular chronology and I had to squeeze it down further (I tried to crunch down the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom). Plus it just seemed implausible that the sons of Mizraim would race quickly over to Egypt, build cities immediately, so that I would have as much time as possible to squeeze in all the kings and give them reigns as long as I could manage.

    Eventually I just gave up, and realized that the chronology could not be harmonized with history. Since I was not allowed to think this, I put the issue out of my mind for a few years.

  • Cellist
    Cellist

    That's just too much math for my brain New Year's Day morning.

    I would think that a religious person would simply doubt science's dating of the pyramids. After all, if they still believe in a flood they're discounting all the scientific evidence saying that it's physically impossible.

    But, you never know what will cut through the fog. After all, most of us here once accepted the flood story.

    Cellist

  • donkey
    donkey

    Leolaia

    Is your brain in a knot yet?

    lol...I am glad I am not the only one who had these "issues". It is astounding that people believe the mumbo-jumbo and it is even more so when you point it out to them and they make a silly statement like "carbon dating can't be trusted so how do you date the construction of the Great Pyramid?"

  • Siddhashunyata
    Siddhashunyata

    Leolaia, just a quick thank you for detailing a mighty effort to fit the facts to the WT chronology. Their system of thought is workable only if one asks the "right" questions. Unfortunatly , thinkers generaly ask the wrong questions.

  • Nate Merit
    Nate Merit

    "How long after that did the tower of Babel occur? There would have had to be sufficient time so that there would be enough people to be split into multiple language groups. "


    Nopers. It was Joe Hovah who spolit up the languages. According to La Biblia mankinf had one language up till the Original Space Program...that somehow threatened an almighty god. LOL

    NNNNNNNNNate

  • Balsam
    Balsam

    Thanks for the discussion, I had not realized that the world wide flood of Noah was suppose to have happen after the Egyptians built the pyramids. The flood is not mentioned by the Egyptians is it?

    Balsam

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