I was reading Genesis again today - chapter 8 and 9. And here are two additional curiosities I found now that the blinders are off.
8:12 - Apparently Noah releases this mischevious explorer dove, who in verse 12, ends up never coming back. This raises three questions. For one, why would Noah have to send out a bird three times to explore for dry land in order to see if it was safe to exit the ark? Why didn't he just ask Yahweh? The entire time prior to and after the flood, Yahweh speaks directly to Noah. If he has God on speed dial, then why the need for all the bird experiments?
Secondly, if the dove who left never returned, then how did the dove species survive? Assuming the dove was a male, then who was left to breed with the female dove and produce little dove offspring? (Were there 7 of each bird, or were there only two? If there were 7, then that might explain it)
Third, the account also speaks of a raven. So we have two very specific species of birds mentioned as residents on the miniature wooden Titanic. That contradicts the JW understanding which states that only certain family "kinds" were on the ark.
Then, in chapter 9, we have the invention of the Rainbow.
9:14,15 - "And it shall occur that when I bring a cloud over the earth, then the rainbow will certainly appear in the cloud. And I shall certainly remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living soul among all flesh."
We learn two things from this passage. For starters, clouds are not natural occurences. God brings clouds over the earth. Secondly, God needed to create a rainbow to remind him of his promise not to deluge the earth again and kill every living thing just in case he got real upset and forgot how catastrophic and costly his last temper tantrum was.
Later on in chapter 9, we have the story of Noah (good old righteous Noah, who walked with God and who was blameless and upright, and yet still managed to be drunk off his goard - which according to the bible is a serious enough sin to prevent one from entering into the kingdom of the heavens) being taken advantage of (presumably in a sexual nature) by his grandson while severely intoxicated. Canaan molests poor old grandpa, but rather than receiving a just punishment for his crime, his future descendants are cursed by Noah. Then, God follows up on the curse ensuring that Noah's words come to fruition by making sure that the Canaanites are massacred in a genocidal holocaust. This meets God's standards of justice per the Old Testement according to Exodus 20:5 - "I..Jehovah...am bringing punishment for the error of fathers upon sons, upon the third generation and upon the fourth generation, in the case of those who hate me."
So the poor Canaanites were doomed before they were ever born, before they were ever even conceived of as a nation or people, because they had to pay for the sin of their ancient ancestor. How loving and just. This account which portrays Canaan as a pervert also helps to explain why all his descendants were such repugnant sexual deviants. The sodomites were all homosexual rapists, down to the very last man, from the eldest to the youngest in the city. And the Canaanites practices homosexuality, bestiality, sexual orgies as a form of religious rites, male temple prostitution, and worshipped phalic symbols. Having a perverted distance ancestor as the father of their nation would be a convenient way to explain that, while also villifying them. Every culture or people must have a moral justification for the slaughter of another culture or people. The Romans had "bringing enlightened civilization to the barbarians" as their rationale. The Nazis had their own justifications. The Spanish conquistadores were spreading Catholicism and thus saving the souls of the heathen Indians, and the 19th century Americans had Manifest Destiny. The ancient Hebrews justified their horrific atrocities and brutality as chronicled in the pseudo-historical bible books by claiming that the Canaanites were all demented sexual perverts and child killers.
Strange that they were all homosexuals though. How could the entire population of a city like Sodom be homosexual? How did they reproduce? If they sacrificed children so much, then how was their population so large and intidimidating so as to inspire tremendous fear in the hearts of the Israelites, whose army numbered 600,000 men of war?
As for the Tower of Babel story, how could the world's population have swelled so much so as to accomodate or even necessitate the building of several cities, and the formation of an empire within 3 generations from Noah?
Also, how do we explain the continuance of the Sumerian civilization? Sumerian was NOT a semitic language. Linguistics allows us to trace back the evolution of languages to certain proto-languages which were predecesors of modern languages that diverged from a common parent langauge. Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) the Canaanite languages like Phonecian/Hebrew, and Syrian languages like Aramaic which all developed in the Levant, and the languaes of the Arabian peninsula, are all classified as sister languages within the Semitic family. All these languagues can be clearly shown to stem from a common ancestral language. Yet, Sumerian, an ancient language of the region and often associated with the Biblical land of SHINAR, was not a Semitic language. Explain that biblicial apologists! Yet according the Origin of the Nations presented in Genesis, all of the Semitic speaking peoples settled in lower Mesopotamia, when prior to that, all of humanity spoke only one single language. Jewish tradition and the Watchtower assert that Hebrew was man's original tounge, assuming the Shem would not have participated in the rebellion at Babel and that he and his descendants were thus spared the punishment of having their langauges confused. But then, why assume Hebrew was the first language? Shem had lots of other descendants other than the Hebrews according to the bible. Hebrew is a semitic language closely related to many other Semitic languages such as modern day Arabic, all of whom had a common ancestor, much the same way that modern Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese are all modern variants of their parent tounge, which was Latin.
So applying that reasoning only leads us to conclude that man's original language was some kind of Proto-Semitic tounge, the ancestral language of modern and now extinct Semitic languages such as Akkadian and Aramaic and Phonecian. Their reasoning (which is itself a huge leap of logic based on an interpretation of the verse which says that Jehovah was "Shem's God" - does this mean that Noah's two other sons who so faithfully and diligently worked alongside him building the ark and maintaining themselves morally clean and apart from the ungodly anti-diluvian world had for some inexplicable reason suddenly abandoned true worship after personally witnessing their miraculous deliverance at the hand of the God they worshipped when they themselves were the patriarchs of a new human society?) does not bring one to the conclusion that Hebrew was man's original language, since Hebrew would not exist as a distinct language, unintelligable from other descendant languages of Proto-Semitic for at least several hundred years.
Hence, the whole idea that even according to the bible, man's original language was Hebrew, and that therefore in the New World Order of paradise, all mankind will once again speak Hebrew is total hogwash and the reasoning used to arrive at this conclusion is totally uncogent/fallacious.