Are the desert wastelands of biblical lands due to man or a curse?

by EndofMysteries 28 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  RubaDub

  Neither.

  Just reason on it this way:

  - If you wanted a great pasta dinner, would you choose a Swedish restaurant or an Italian restaurant?

  - If you wanted a high quality watch, would you go to a Jamaican watchmaker or a Swiss watchmaker?

  - So it you wanted to avoid a desert wasteland, would you trust landscapers from Asia Minor or landscapers from Mexico?

  It's obvious. Ask anyone in California how many of their landscapers are from Iraq, Greece, Turkey, etc. Good landscaping is just not in their genes.

  Rub a Dub
• 

  OnTheWayOut

  The collapse of the Greek economy is retribution from God for too much anal sex.

  Hurricanes are caused by the heat of gay sex on cruise ships in the Caribbean Sea with added rain from the angels crying over it.

  California earthquakes are from a number of things- divorce, premarital sex, dope smoking, the immoral movies from Hollywood.

  So of course the promised land must be dry because of some curse. Maybe its residual from Noah's drunkenness and nakedness in front of his adult sons.
• 

  Satanus

  Bwwaaahaaa @ what otwo posted. At that rate, eventually the whole earth is going to be a dried up clinker.

  S
• 

  Leolaia

  EoM....No, Europe was not a desert, nor is the land "forever ruined" (???), nor is this "bad news for Earth". As I said, this is an oscillating cyclical pattern throughout the Holocene (which one should remember is a temporary interglacial between ice ages). The Sahara has gone through wet and dry phases over the past several million years. The last wet phase was during the Neolithic/Chalcolithic Subpluvial (corresponding roughly to the Atlantic period of the Holocene epoch) between 7000-3500 BC; the Sahara was a wet grassland home to numerous prehistoric cultures. This wet period (warmer than today's climate) was preceded by the Boreal and Pre-Boreal periods which were more like today's climate, and before that was the Younger Dryas (ending around 9500 BC) which was an extremely dry and cold period. Then at the end of the Subpluvial, over several hundred years, the Sahara dried out and some cultures moved west to the Nile river valley, giving rise to the Egyptian civilization around 3200 BC. The next period was the Subboreal (3000-500 BC) which was increasingly dry but which was punctuated with wet and dry extremes. The first millennium corresponded roughly to the Early Bronze Age (EA) which was wetter than today but drier than the Subpluvial. The flood of 2800 BC that devastated southern Mesopotamia (the event that likely contributed to the Ziusudra/Utnapishtim/Noah flood myth) represents one particularly extreme "wet" moment in the ANE. The drought of c. 2200-2100 BC (called the 4.2 kiloyear event) was an extreme "dry" moment that brought the EA, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and the Akkadian empire of Mesopotamia to an end. The drought increased salination in the soil in southern Mesopotamia, shifting the power to more fertile central Mesopotamia (where Babylon rose to power). Then the Middle Bronze Age that followed brought wetter climate (but drier than the EA), and the Late Bronze Age then brought somewhat drier conditions. Then around 1200-1100 BC the NAO brought more moisture to Central Europe than the Near East, triggering the Bronze Age Collapse, bringing an end to the Hittite empire and (later) the New Kingdom of Egypt. New states in the Levant arose following the weakening of Hittite and Egyptian power, including Philistia, Moab, and Israel. Conditions continued to dry toward the end of the Iron Age. Then there was a reversal in the Subatlantic period, which is the current period we are in (beginning around 500 BC), bringing about the wetter Roman Warm Period. Then there was a cooling after AD 400 that lasted until the Medieval Warm Period. Then the cooler period The Little Ice Age followed, with the current period of warming coming next.

  Here are some graphs showing the alternation between dry and wet periods in the southern Levant over the historical era (from Finlayson et al., 2011, p. 196):

  
• 

  sizemik

  Natural climate and geography, wouldn't you think?

  The jetstreams change as climate changes . . . basically in response to changes in atmospheric moisture content and temperature.

  The last glacial ice age lasted around 100,000 years and ended it's peak only 22,000 years ago. Glacial advance and retreat provided this area with an abundant water supply as temperature increased. This, along with slightly higher ambient temperatures than today, provided a more tropical climate to large areas of the M. East. Glacial retreat continued and moisture levels fell. An explosion in pasturisation in favour of hunt/gath also took place hastening desertification. Archeological sites, most notably Gobekli Tepe (10-12,000 BC), depict just such an environment (as does the Garden of Eden legend). The volumes of ice melt during this period created vast inland seas behind massive terminal morain damns, which gave rise to devastating floods and huge sedimentary deposits world-wide. This too is reflected in the Noah's Ark account along with scores of other flood legends.

  EDIT; Oh shit . . . what Leo said.
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  Satanus

  Environmental damage is certainly not a modern novelty. It goes back to when humans learned farming, and maybe even further back. The north american indians may have had a hand in wiping out horses. Most certainly, they were involved in the extinctions of the mega fauna.
  
  'Today, the expressions fertile crescent and world leader in food production are absurd. Large areas of the former fertile crescent are now desert, semi-desert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain unsuited for agriculture. In ancient times, however, much of the fertile crescent and eastern mediterranian, including greece was covered with forrest. It's woodland were cleared for agriculture, or cut to obtain construction timber, or burned as firewood or for the manufacture of plaster. Because of low rainfall and hence low primary productivity , regrowth of vegitation could not keep pace with its destruction, especially in the presence of overgrazing by abundent goats. With the tree and grass cover removed, erosion proceeded and valleys silted up, while irrigation agriculture in the low rainfall environment led to salt accumulation. These processes which began in the neolithic era, continued into modern times. Thus, the fertile crescent and eastern mediterranian societies had the misfotune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They commited ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base.'

  That's from the book Causes And Progression Of Desertification by Helmut Geist. The fertile crescent was the middleast, basically.

  The same processes were applied to north africa and spain, under the roman empire. Egypt was the bread basket for rome.

  Of course, weather had a prt in making those areas fragile.

  S
• 

  Captain Obvious

  So the only reasons could be from man or from God? Hmm... Isn't that what we call a false dichotomy?

  http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=44462.0
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  Aussie Oz

  Look at australia, we pretty much all live on the outer edges on the west, south, and east coasts. The centre and top is desert or pretty harsh lands...

  who made it that way...god or man? Neither. IT JUST IS.

  we have not been on this planet long enough to know many of its whether and land cycles, who knows, in 100,000 years time Israel could be the most green place on the planet...

  Oz
• 

  fulltimestudent

  For those seeking information on the climate conditions of the past, a good source of information are the writings of the early geographers.

  For example ( and this is not a comprehensive list):

  First, there is Herodotus (5th Century BCE)- and, yes! some of his information is fanciful, but not more so than usual for the time.

  Second, Strabo and his Geography. Strabo lived (circa) 64BCE to 20 CE.

  Third, we could list Ptolemy ( 100 - 178 CE) and his Geographike Hyphegesis.

  And in the Islamic era, we could look for the writings of very scholarly works by Al Idrisi, Ibn Battutah and Ibn Khaldoun.

  Geographical information is found in lots of other sources also. In written Chinese records we can find descriptions of the climate etc, in the Tarim basin (in modern Xinjiang), as the early Han dynasty (BCE) were exploring this area. The early Silk Road trade routes had to cross this area and the feared Taklamakan desert in the centre featured in lots of travel stories. Two main routes to miss the desert developed, one to the north and one to the south, skirting the edges of the mountains that bordered the basin. Conditions today, are much the same as described in early writings.

  Better to base your understanding on the writings of men who attempted to describe the world around them, than on semi-religious writings threatening divine retribution to political enemies.