The Great Pyramid and the Flood of Noah
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If your world view rests firmly upon the foundation of Bible accuracy matching the reality of history, sooner or later you’ll crash into the question of when the Great Pyramid was built.
Why?
Let’s see why…
2 Peter 3:5-6 Complete Jewish Bible (CJB)
5 But, wanting so much to be right about this, they overlook the fact that it was by God’s Word that long ago there were heavens, and there was land which arose out of water and existed between the waters, 6 and that by means of these things the world of that time was flooded with water and destroyed.
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If the Pyramid survived the flood, there are 3 points to consider.
The surface of every continent was destroyed and new mountains formed. Thousands of feet of mud and sand were dumped on every continent, burying and fossilizing creatures and plants. Nothing manmade could survive such a catastrophe.
Geologists have found that the pyramid is built on the fossil-bearing rock layers from the Flood of Noah’s day. Clearly, the Flood had to predate a pyramid built on top of the Flood layers.
The Hebrew word translated “Egypt” is Mizraim. Mizraim was Noah’s grandson, born to Ham after the Flood. So Mizraim’s descendants could not have built the Great Pyramid of Egypt (Mizraim) until after the Flood, and for that matter, after the events at the Tower of Babel that caused Mizraim’s family to move to the region of the Nile River.
Physical evidence is presumptive of proof :in order to keep Noah’s flood in the realm of reality, the Great Pyramid must needs be constructed AFTERward.
The secular date for the Great Pyramid must be refuted as an error, and all the pyramids and ziggurats across the world today are necessarily post-Flood construction. It is an either / or proposition.(See Bodie Hodge, Answers in Genesis)
Breakthrough in accurate dating of the Great Pyramid
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In 2000, At the University of Cambridge, a highly precise methodology for determining pyramid dates has convinced astronomers and Egyptologists, the only possible time for the kind of mind-blowing accuracy of construction used for the Great Pyramid would have depended on the alignment of 2 stars; one from the Big Dipper, the other, the Little Dipper.
4,500 years ago, each star was about 10 degrees from the celestial pole which lay directly between them. When one star was exactly above the other in the sky, Egyptian astronomers could find a line that pointed due north. On the Giza Plateau, Khufu's builders oriented his pyramid almost perfectly north. In fact, within .005 degrees accuracy.
But the alignment was only true for a few years around 2,500 BC. Before and after that time, the stars deviated from the north-south line and anyone using the stars to plot a direction would have made errors.
And it is these mistakes in alignment in pyramid construction before and after the Great Pyramid that a British Egyptologist now believes can be used to estimate very accurately when the pyramids were built.
Several Pyramids were built for the family of the Pharaoh.
Over a span of years, the alignment with true north varies less and less over time until the year of the Great Pyramid’s alignment. Subsequent pyramids built later show alignment becoming less and less accurate afterward. This variance is perfectly explained by the phenomena of 2 stars approaching alignment and passing the point toward less and less.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn174-pyramid-precision
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Had Egyptians used only one star, accuracy would have been constant.
Experts thought the ancient Egyptians might have watched a single star circle this imaginary point and aligned their pyramid with the circle’s centre.
Alternatively, they might have measured north by tracking the path of the Sun. Either way, the accuracy with which they mastered this should have been about the same during the entire pyramid-building period.
But the accuracy wasn’t constant, Kate Spence of Cambridge University points out. Instead, the alignment of successive pyramids first steadily improved up to the building of the Great Pyramid, then later deteriorated. This makes perfect sense, she says, if the architects were measuring the alignment using not one star, but two: Mizar in Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) and Kochab in Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper).
"We know that the ancient Egyptians were extremely interested in the night sky, particularly the circumpolar stars," she told the BBC.
"These circle around the North Pole, and as you can always see them, the Egyptians always referred to them as 'The Indestructibles'.
"As a result, they became closely associated with eternity and the king's afterlife. So that after death, the king would hope to join the circumpolar stars - and that's why the pyramids were laid out towards them." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1024779.stm)
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Rewinding the astronomical clock using modern computers shows that the two stars rotated around the pole opposite each other in the Old Kingdom sky. In other words, an imaginary line joining the stars passed through the north pole. When the two stars lay vertically above each other, both would mark the position of true north for the pyramid builders.
However, due to precession, the line joining Mizar and Kochab only drifted into precise alignment with the north pole in 2467 BC, then wandered away. The orientation of successive pyramids faithfully tracks this drift, Spence says, explaining the rise and fall of north-south alignment precision.
An Egyptian astronomer would have held up a plumb line and waited for the night sky to slowly pivot around the unmarked pole as the Earth rotated.
When the plumb line exactly intersected both stars, one about 10 degrees above the invisible pole and the other 10 degrees below it, the sight line to the horizon would aim directly north.
However, the Earth's axis is unstable and wobbles like a gyroscope over a period of 26,000 years. Modern astronomers now know that the celestial north pole was exactly aligned between Kochab and Mizar only in the year 2,467 BC.
Either side of this date, the ancient astronomers trying to find true north would lose some accuracy.
Kate Spence shows that the orientation errors of earlier and later pyramids faithfully track the slow drift of Kochab and Mizar with respect to true north.
And because the error in the Kochab-Mizar alignment can be readily calculated for any date, the error in each pyramid's orientation corresponds to a period of several years.
it is now possible to use astronomical records to date the pyramids to the nearest five years. For example, construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza began between 2487 and 2467 BC.
Kate Spence
Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, UK
Correspondence to: Kate Spence Correspondence should be addressed to K.S. (e-mail: Email: [email protected]).
NATURE 408, 16 Nov.2000 pp.297-8, Plotting the Pyramids, by Owen Gingerich.
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NOAH’S FLOOD--WHEN DID IT “HAPPEN”?
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Establishing a flood date is a matter of where you go and who you ask.
Here is a compilation of sources.
Archbishop James Ussher suggest 2349 as the flood date, the Samaritan Pentateuch has 2998, the Hebrew Bible has 2288, and the Septuagint lists 3246 has the date of the flood.
http://timeline.biblehistory.com/period/noah-and-the-flood 2781.
The Watchtower Society dates Noah's flood to 2370 B.C.E.
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What conclusion can be drawn from the uncertainty of methodology by Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular in discussions of Noah, the Great Pyramid, and Bible chronology?
Is it likely the Great Pyramid was built BEFORE or AFTER Noah’s flood?
Intellectual dishonesty rears its ugly head again and again.
For fun:
However, it should be noted that there are some who say that dinosaur bones and human bones are not found together because dinosaurs did not live in areas of human habitation.--"Awake!," 2/8/90, pp. 4-5.
FIND the DINOSAUR below:
Can you spot the drowning dinosaur?
Use of the Great Pyramid in Watchtower teachings was not without duplicity.
Source: JWFacts:
Chart of the Ages from Studies in the Scriptures - The Divine Plan
In a monumental display of deceit, when Russell revised his doctrine to focus more on 1914 than 1874, he updated his pyramid measurements in later editions of Thy Kingdom Come to suit his new interpretation. Russell originally used the size of a pyramid to prove that 1874 A.D. marked the beginning of the period of trouble, as shown below in the 1891 edition of Thy Kingdom Come. In the 1911 edition of Thy Kingdom Come, Russell changed the pyramid measurements by 41 inches, to show that 1914 would be the beginning of the time of trouble.
1874 was not removed entirely from Watchtower doctrine until 1943, when a change in how the 6000 years were calculated meant it could no longer be used as the end of the 6000 years. (see God's Kingdom on a Thousand Years Has Approached p.209)
The Watchtower’s excuse for the wrong date of 1874 was: The BIBLE used was inaccurate!
"According to an inaccurate chronology that had been worked out from the King James Authorized Version Bible, Russell calculated Christ's "presence" had begun in the year 1874 C.E., unseen to human eyes and seen only by the eye of faith." Man's Salvation Out Of World Distress At Hand (1975) p.287
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Floods, Dinosaurs, Pyramids, False dates of prophecy, wonky Chronology all mark the history of
Intellectual achievement by Jehovah’s Witnesses and evangelical Christians eager to marry reality with mythos.