Hi Brigit and welcome,
First of all thank you for reminding me of Timo's website, I'd forgotten about it. (I think you will find that Timo is a male name).
You wrote:
Genesis 2:10-14: "Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four river heads." One river is described as "encompassing the whole land of Havilah," one "encompasses the whole land of Cush." One "goes toward the east of Assyria...The fourth is the Euphrates." These are odd verses and rarely ever referred
to, because they do not seem to match any terrain known today.
IMHO, this describes a smaller globe, and the four rivers were the great mid-ocean ridges, for reasons I will try to show.
From the Septuagint at
http://www.ccel.org/bible/brenton/Genesis/2.html
10 And a river proceeds out of Edem to water the garden, thence it divides itself into four heads.
11 The name of the one, Phisom, this it is which encircles the whole land of Evilat, where there is gold.
12 And the gold of that land is good, there also is carbuncle and emerald.
13 And the name of the second river is Geon, this it is which encircles the whole land of Ethiopia.
14 And the third river is Tigris, this is that which flows forth over against the Assyrians. And the fourth river is Euphrates.
So:
A. We the Tigris, the Euphrates, Assyria, Ethiopia (Cush) yet you say it does not seem to match any known terrain.
B. How does any of this passage imply a smaller globe?
C. How do you get 'mid-ocean ridges' from a country in the Middle East?
D. What four oceans would these be?
E. How does one plant a garden whose borders are mid-ocean ridges?
You wrote:
Gen. 11:25a: "To Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided..." This has always been interpreted as referring to the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9), a narrative most people are familiar with
(It's Gen. 10:25). A quick wiki:
Eber:
The name "Ever" עבר (Hebrew root letters ayin ע, bet/vet ב and reish ר, transliterated in English to "Eber" or "Heber") along with the name Habiru are considered by Biblical scholars to be the roots of the word "Hebrew" (ivri עברי and ivrit עברית, in Hebrew), with "ever" most often meaning "side" or "beyond", but also region beyond or across, opposite side, or passage, as in me'ever מעבר and maavar מעבר in both Biblical and Modern Hebrew as spoken in Israel today.
Peleg:
Peleg, Phaleg in the Douay-Rheims, (Hebrew: פֶּלֶג / פָּלֶג, Standard Péleg / Páleg Tiberian Péleḡ / Pāleḡ ; "Division") is one of the two sons of Eber, the ancestor of the Hebrews according to the so-called "Table of Nations" in Genesis x, xi and 1 Chronicles i.
Joktan:
Joktan or Yoktan (Hebrew: יָקְטָן, Standard Yoqtan Tiberian Yoqṭān ; Arabic: قحطان, Qahtan; "little") was the second of the two sons of Eber (Gen. 10:25; 1 Chr. 1:19) mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. His name means "small" or "smallness".
What, if anything does this tell us? It always strikes me as an amazing coincidence how the names of Biblical characters always reflects what the get up to in the Bible.
Gen 11:4 states:
4 And they said, Come, let us build to ourselves a city and tower, whose top shall be to heaven, and let us make to ourselves a name, before we are scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth.
This implies that they knew they were to be scattered abroad before the omniscient Lord spotted them (Gen. 11:5-6).
Gen.11:8 states:
And the Lord scattered them thence over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city and the tower.
Nothing is destroyed here - there is no catastrophe.
You wrote:
It was a catastrophe of such grand proportions that the people that were "scattered abroad over the face of all the earth" did not find each other again until 1492 AD--thousands of years later. It is interesting to note that the ages for cities and written languages in South America have been pushed back to 3,000 BC (see Caral), the same time they appear in the ME, indicating to me that man once moved with relative ease around the world.
Where to begin with this?
A. I've mentioned the non-catastrophe above.
B. My Biblical timeline based on the LXX shows that Peleg was around 2708 BCE. This is contemporaneous with The Egyptian 2nd Dynasty and the 1st Dynasty of Kish.
C. Sumer had been and gone.
D. India at this time was doing very nicely thank you.
E. Stonehenge was up and running.
F. The Clovis culture is reckoned to go back to 13,000 y.a.
G. History did not begin with Columbus.
You wrote:
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance give the meaning of the name "Peleg" as "earthquake." I submit that the earth was divided along the rivers mentioned in the Garden of Eden--or mid-ocean ridges--which separated the continents and formed the ocean basins, by expansion.
Can you give a link for where Strong's mentions 'earthquake'? I
couldn't find it, though the other words used could imply seismic activity.
If one looks at this (maximised) map:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_e ... c_2003.jpg
one will notice that the waters in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf are relatively shallow. One will also observe that, certainly in the Red Sea, there appears to be a deeper channel - possibly a former river?
There is a similar feature in the Persian Gulf but it is not so obvious on this particular map. Also notice how narrow the Red Sea is at Djibouti and the Persian Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz. If the channel in the Red Sea was a river then it would possibly qualify as the Gehon
which 'encompasses the whole of Ethiopia'.
If one then takes at peek at this map which shows the terrain:
http://map.vbgood.com/Iraq/middle_east%20map.jpg
one will notice that the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf is almost entirely mountainous while the Arabian Peninsula is pretty flat and exposed. In fact the terrain of the Arabian Peninsula is mountainous on the western side and the far North. This suggests to me that Noah's
world-wide Deluge was in fact a flooding of the Arabian Peninsula, i.e. between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.
Seismic activity, sea-level rises, plasma malarchy, or combinations thereof - take your pick. The arrival of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf would also account for your 'Earth was divided'. (At least until a nation of farmers learned how to build boats).
You wrote:
PPS, I noticed some of you think it is pure silliness that catastrophic events have always been interpreted as Divine judgment. I wonder how you can hold that position, if you are familiar with some of the practices of the ancient world. It is now well attested that canabalism
was widespread in N&S America and in Europe and Africa. You also are aware that the Central and South American Indians were not just makers of lovely calenders. Their gods required human sacrifices. In one temple it is said that 83,000 people were sacrificed in one day, by
removing the heart and throwing the kidnapped victim over the side of the ziggurat. People knew what they were doing was wrong.
It is not just 'some of us who think it is pure silliness', some of the world's greatest minds from several continents thought so too. It is
only the Abrahamic one-book-wonders who are obsessed with judgement, punishment and sin. Gods are a later invention of humans.
I would suggest that cannibalism only arrived post-castastrophe. And where did you get 83,000 people being sacrificed in one day from? They would have to be sacrificed by machine-gun to get through that many in a day. If you are referring to the Aztecs, which you sem to be, then they were not ancient but mediaval. And you may want to think about what those lovely god-fearing Christians were doing to people in Europe at the time. Ever heard of the Inquisition, the Crusades, witch-hunts, etc? Also you might want to try reading the OT to see how many Hebres,Jews and Israelites God slaughters either deliberately, incidentally or accidentally. To say nothing of the other peoples who are obliterated much to the glee of the authors of the OT.
You wrote:
People knew what they were doing was wrong.
Wrong by whose standards? The Aztecs thought they were re-charging the Sun by giving back the energy (or life-force) of the sacrificed. The 'victims' were sacrificed to save the world. Part of this ritual involved something called the 'opening of the mouth' which sounds entirely similar to an Egyptian ritual.