Genesis 10 - How many can you count up who built the Tower of Babel from these names??

by hamsterbait 7 Replies latest jw friends

  • hamsterbait
    hamsterbait

    I am sitting looking at Genesis 10.

    This relates to the thread that the "TOWER OF BABEL BUILT BY BABIES".

    I reckon by counting the sons, and then counting at least one wife to carry the next generation of named sons we can arrive at a fairly accurate head count.

    Chapter 11 is also useful here as it gives the age of certain men when they had named sons.

    For example Seth was 100 when he fathered Apaxad. In the next 500 years he could not have fathered a total of 500 children, so we need a reasonable estimate.

    Some of the breed ing stock was 35 before producing a son (11:12)

    bear in mind also that the Shemite line had fertility issues so were not as profuse as other lines through Ham or japheth.

    I fail to get a total of much over 300 people and that is being generous. Yet we read of Nimrod going forth to build cities. (By our standards barely a one horse hamlet)

    If he was a "Hunter of men", then after doing this number crunching he comes over as nothing more than the village thug who bullied everybody.

    cAN YOU GET A HIGHER NUMBER?

    Do you think 300 too many?

    Do you think this question is a useful one to settle?

    HB

  • Philadelphia Ponos
    Philadelphia Ponos

    I don't understand where you're going with this. Are you saying there wasn't enough people to build the tower of Babel, or that Nimrod's kingdom wasn't heavily populated? Either way I think 50 men would of been more than enough to build a tower.

  • GOrwell
    GOrwell

    50 men? Today, possibly. 5,000 years ago, or whenver the story is purported to take place? C'mon, they'd need way more than that.

  • Philadelphia Ponos
    Philadelphia Ponos

    Why would need more than 50 men to collect and stack bricks?

  • GOrwell
    GOrwell

    Depends on the time-frame I suppose, which I don't think is mentioned in Genesis at all. If you had 500 years and replenishing supply of 50 men, I'm sure you could build a respectable tower..

    And where are you "collecting" these bricks from? Somebody's gotta make 'em..

  • Aussie Oz
    Aussie Oz

    maybe easier to work backwards?

    Does the WT give a number for population at that time?

    and then see what stretches of the geneological kind need to made to get that number?

    oz

  • J. Hofer
    J. Hofer

    even cain went to build a city in the land of nod...

  • undercover
    undercover

    The whole Tower of Babel story is so ridiculous...

    Genesis 11: 6,7

    After that Jehovah said: “Look! They are one people and there is one language for them all, and this is what they start to do. Why, now there is nothing that they may have in mind to do that will be unattainable for them. Come now! Let us go down and there confuse their language that they may not listen to one another’s language.”

    Well, duh, dumbass god. You created one man and one woman. You gave them speech. Of course they speak one language because they came from one ancestor.

    And what a god with such low self-esteem. He's so worried that a group of men can get organized and build cities and an enormous tower that he has to go fuck up their languages so it throws the construction of their city and tower into chaos. Does an all powerful, omnipotent god really need to stoop to such pettiness to assert his power and position?

    And maybe this god isn't so all powerful afterall. So he was able to screw around with a bunch of primitives who were building a primitive city and tower. Where's this god been while more modern men overcame the language barriers and built even more enormous cities and truly amazing towers that do reach into the heavens? It's like a bully kid picking on the weakest kid in the neighborhood but stays out of the way of kids who actually pose a threat to him.

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