I found this instructional video very insightful on this biblical subject:
Tower of Babel built by Babies!
by Billy the Ex-Bethelite 54 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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jws
How many years are we talking? Billy says 100 years. Leolaia says a range that could add another 100 years.
Population grows exponentially and exponential numbers rise quickly. I've often read about how could the Israelites grow to such a number in Egypt. And while I believe them, because there are a lot of factors involved like mortality rates, etc. a believer could claim God's blessing to help them. No deaths except for old age, no infertility, longer breeding ages, whatever helps their cause.
I put together a spreadsheet to make some calculations. Under perfect conditions, I assume 1 baby each year from everybody within the ages of 16-40. Assuming 50/50 split of male/female. Assuming nobody is barren. Everybody pairs up. No twins/triplets. No deaths until you're old.
Starting with year 0, I put 3 babies (one from each son of Noah). My spreasheet has columns for the ages 0-90. Each year (rows going down), I copy the number of people in the previous row to the next column. ie. age 5 from previous year becomes age 6 the next year and so on.
I have a column for breedable people. I used the age range of 16-40. I don't care what modern norms are. Biology says when you start menstrating, you're old enough to have offspring. And when guys nuts drop, they're ready. Even so, I started at 16 which is older than today's ages. And I only went to 40 which is around today's age for females, give or take. Apologists might say God blessed them to continue into older ages which would make my results even larger.
New Births is the number of breedable people from the previous year divided by 2 (2 people, one baby).
I also created a column for workforce. This assumes males (half the population) of age 16-60. Again, people could say that they were closer to perfection, were able to work longer, etc.
I'll just give you the totals skipping by 25 years:
Year Population (up to 90) Workforce (Males 16-60) Breeding Population (16-40 0 3 0 0 25 17 2 3 50 155 15 28 75 1,647 181 333 100 17,745 1,928 3,545 125 189,957 20,542 37.766 150 2,031,595 219,735 404,056 175 21,735,630 2,351,362 4,323,891 Can't figure out how to resize this table without redoing it all, but at year 200, you have a population of 232,547,118 and a workforce of 25,156,576.
By year 239, your workforce reaches the 1 billion mark.
Again, not saying any of this would've been reality. But given the apologist and their appeal to "magic", how do you prove otherwise?
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Billy the Ex-Bethelite
In the rate of growth you're using, the numbers are not sustainable. I don't exactly understand your math, but I tried to use your population basis out to 50 years as a sample. I used years and each generation. By year 50 the population profile (adults are over 16, children under 16) would be:
Generation 1: 6 adults
Generation 2: 102 adults 18 children
Generation 3: 270 adults 690 children
Generation 4: 3 adults 987 children
Generation 5: 6 children
This gives you a population profile of about 381 adults to 1698 children. 4.5:1 ratio of kids to adults. So the agressive population approach you've used does have a steep increase; however, that population growth strongly favors the infants. At this point, granny of generation 1 is still dealing with her own 10 year-old 40th child, so don't expect her to help with your 16 kids between the ages of 16 to newborn. She spent her first 40 years popping out a baby every year, so she's already sick of looking at kids. Just imagine the first 8 adults (if we include Mr. and Mrs. Noah) living in the post-flood wasteland with 48 kids age 16 to infant. In a world of this kind of population growth, dad isn't going to have time to get together with the guys to build a tower.
That was why WT set a Towertime population of over 4,000 adult males.
I think I mentioned it earlier in this thread, but the bible doesn't really support aggressive population growth. Where families are named, only 4 or 5 sons are mentioned. Maybe there really were 20 sons for each instead of just the few? That's not what the bible says. It would have been easy to name the prominent ones and say "18 other sons". Instead, the bible sounds rather clear that it was naming them all. From the account, it sounds like Noah left the ark with some few remarks afterward about the few kids/grandkids. Then the story picks up shortly later with the world completely repopulated seemingly to pre-flood levels. Even the Nephilim are spoken of in Numbers. When you look at the example of Abraham and Isaac, fertility wasn't high. Jacob had a large brood... which was 12 sons... by 4 different women.
Sure, math can be used to propose a huge population. But it doesn't fit with the story. Similarly, as mentioned in this thread, the account of the Hebrew population growth in Egypt doesn't work. Conversely, in the story of Solomon's Temple, it goes to the other extreme. Where the Tower of Babel says nothing of the numbers involved and the math comes up small, the account of the temple uses astronomically large numbers for the amount of gold, number of cattle and sheep slaughtered, etc. Just evaluating the number of cattle compared to the small size of Jerusalem, and you realize... that's a lot of bull$h!t.
But I've gotten off-topic of my own thread. For more interesting analysis, read The Atheists Book of Bible Stories. If you don't have your copy, hopefully the link on this thread is working.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/154236/4/The-Atheists-Book-of-Bible-Stories#.U7CSG7HDuSo -
jws
Billy, I totally agree. It is not a practical solution.
However, I feel my spreadsheet is simple and the math in it is sound. The math can support huge population growth, but in reality, I'm sure it didn't happen that way. If you'd like to peruse a copy, pm me. I did make a few changes. Instead of dividing breeding age by 2 and leaving fractions, I truncated. Which brought populations down slightly. But I also put an extra 3 births every year for the first 10 years from Noah's children. Which increased the numbers significantly.
It is very agressive. A child every year from ages 16-40. That's 25 kids/couple. Assumes no deaths in those age ranges. No infertility, etc. I have no idea what practical rates are, but a lot less. There's mortality rates both in children and adults that cut short child-bearing. There's infertillity. There's desire to have more children and how often.
But to a believer, you can't argue practical reality because "magic" comes into play. If it's possible, no matter how slim the possibility, then God must have helped it to happen. If it wasn't specifically stated in the Bible to happen this way or that, they will make up any solution that lets the bible be true.
Bible believers will probably say that the earth had to be repopulated so God helped it happen. So God could have helped population grow like my spreadsheet, which does support some pretty large numbers.
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Billy the Ex-Bethelite
Genuine bible-thumpers will ignore any and all evidence to the contrary.
And discrediting the Noachian flood is more straightforward than this thread about the Tower of Babel. But in either case, the bible doesn't talk about the magic where the magic would need to be. Genesis talks more about the details of the size of the ark, the fact that god closed the door, the boring details of sending out the birds, and then finishing off with the account with promptly slaughtering some of the surviving animals and burning them to make god happy. Hmmm, that's a lot of fuss about rather odd details when the story could be talking about the amazing journey of the kangaroos to and from the ark, or where the fresh water came from, or how they fit all the required food and got rid of the poop... or was there a miraculous pooping of manna by all the ark-dwellers.
If there was magic population growth, why didn't the bible enumerate that anybody had a lot of kids. It doesn't. Rather, the bible talks about the magic ages, that these people lived to 600 years, 430 years, 209 years. Later in Chap 11, it uses the "meanwhile he became father to sons and daughters". If the numbers of kids was a miracle, why didn't it boast about that instead of their ages? ... Well, that's kinda how legends turn out.
As far as population growth, the numbers can be crunched to come up with rapid increases. But really look at the account, in context, in Gen. 11:1-9. The chapter before, names all the sons in the geneology, only about a page worth, and concludes with stating to the effect, "these were the ones that spread about to make the nations" (omitting nations like China that have a recorded history predating the flood). The account of the tower reads like a complete insertion between two sections of geneology. Besides giving no numbers, it names no human names, just naming the city Babel... however, the previous chapter already said that Nimrod established 3 other cities as well. That would mean the tower account would have been earlier in the life of Nimrod... which would be a very small population. The tower account suggests a very early timing, setting it when all mankind was one nomadic group wandering west, then settling at the Shinar valley. They start building a tower. Jehovah freaks out and sends them travelling in all directions when there's only about 100 families. Don't forget, God loves incest. So split up this population so brothers and sisters have to marry each other again.
For Genesis to supposedly be the inspired word of god, people have to fabricate a lot more stories outside the text to try to fill the huge gaps left by these disjointed legends.
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Iown Mylife
When you're tellin' lies, the fewer words, the better! lol
Love this thread, thank you for all the good points!
Marina
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Theredeemer
BTT
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kepler
Wow, sure a lot of serious deliberation about events in Chapter 11 of Genesis. I wonder if the original writer(s) of this book even realized they had all this in one chapter. First we get an account of the whole world speaking the same language, brick making procedures in the land of Shinar or Mesopotamia, then the Lord scattering everyone because they built the structure too high - and gave them new languages to boot. And then we get a lesson in post deluge geneaology. ... Coming to Abram.
All this supposed to happen about mid 3rd millenium BC. Trouble is, WRITINGS of Egypt and Mesopotamia are dissimilar already - and so are the languages. Egyptian hieroglyphics go back to the 4th. Akkadian cuneiform goes back a ways too.
Another problem with this formula for reaching the heavens. Mud bricks and bitumen???? Substituted for stone. No rebar. No iron. Wasn't even iron age back then.
Why not this: Maybe it was an early prophecy about the ascendancy of the WatchTower. Russell, Rutherford et al. ( another language injection) wanted to climb to heaven, but they needed to do it on a stack of books or publications - and they had to be DISSEMINATED in many languages. Consequently the publishers were dispersed.
Something else though. The story of brick making in the region of Babel or Bab-el, gate of god, sounds a lot like the description of making bricks in Egypt given in Exodus chapter one. Neither story tells of stone masonry. Neither knows of any pharoahs by name. The second story speaks of the cities of Ramesses without stopping to think that this was actually the name of the most likely Pharoah for the second episode. Have to wonder about the antiquity of the "final draft".
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kepler
Another proposition. A couple of time I have been tempted to ask people who take the Tower story literally whether they use it to account for the existence of Spanish, French, Italian and so forth. Do they believe they come from the Tower episode or that they are in effect dialects originating from Rome's Latin.
Would be interested to know how that turns out.
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naja
Mmxiv: Wasn't this impressive growth rate partially due to them being still so close to perfection back then?
Not so much when you look at Noah.
Genesis 5:32: After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth.