MJ wrote:
> However, if - as we believe - the mother tongue of Abraham and Lot > was Sumerian, and the event was first recorded not in a Semitic > language but in Sumerian, an entirely different and more plausible > understanding .... OK, at this point the discussion has wandered into *interpretations* of the events, and we are not assuming that all the words in the KJB are for-sure true exactly as written because they were dictated by an angel. Well and good; rationality has entered the discussion. However, as soon we we allow rational considerations to temper our discussion of the events in the early Old Testament, we must also admit that there was a interregnum or gap between the events and the moment when the stories were first written down which appears to have lasted some centuries. In other words, the stories were (very probably) just an oral tradition for a few centuries before they were written. Now, again assuming there was no angel dictating the stories into the ears of folks a couple centuries later in order to avoid the possibility of errors in the oral recitations, once we've come this far, we must consider the fact that oral histories are generally found to be extremely ephemeral. Events which took place much more than a century in the past tend to be almost entirely fictionalized, if not entirely forgotten, if the only means of transmission is oral traditions, unsubstantiated claims of fabulous memories among primitive peoples notwithstanding. Such is the conclusion which comes from observing a handful of cases in which a primitive society without writing had sporadic contact with an external society which kept written notes (sorry, don't have a citation handy). The society which depends on oral tradition is found to forget or mis-remember the "contact" events rather badly, in contrast to the society in which written records are kept. (For a bit of "internal evidence", compare the first, second, and third books of Maccabees, which appear to differ primarily in how long after the fact they were formally written down -- and, note well, Maccabees dates from a period when written records were kept.) Given that, it would seem that we're forced to the conclusion that the events in the early Old Testament are very probably sufficiently inaccurately recorded that they could be reasonably described as "mostly fictional", with an occasional grain of truth preserved in them. In other words, if you're going to consider possible *errors* in the text, then you need to consider the global consequences of "whisper-down-the-lane" effect and not just pick out one word which might have been "adjusted" a little. And with that conclusion one must really wonder what the point is in discussing the possible exact meaning of one particular word in one of these stories ... and that, on a mailing list devoted (more or less) to science. Like, who cares what Lot's wife is said to have turned into, since the story bopped around in the oral tradition for so long before being written down that it's quite probable that Lot wasn't named Lot, he may or may not have had a wife, his wife (if he had one) probably wasn't involved in the events to start with, and the whole thing is more likely to have come from a border dispute or other mundane event than the meltdown of an early (and secret) Iranian nuclear reactor (which seems to be where the discussion is headed). Sorry, guys, if you're not going to stick with a literal interpretation of the received text, then you're driving over a cliff in trying to interpret the minute details of a known-inaccurate history book. It just doesn't make sense to take it "sort-of literally" and draw far-reaching conclusions from that sort-of interpretation...
