Posted by:
baura
(
)
Date: January 17, 2014 03:36PM
An email I just sent a TBM relative of mine:
According to the Pearl of Great Price Student Manual
https://www.lds.org/manual/the-pearl-of-great-price-student-manual/the-book-of-abraham?lang=engwe have the following chronology:
******BEGIN QUOTE*******
Who Is Abraham and When Did He Live?
Adam and Eve and the Fall (approximately 4000 B.C.), Enoch
(approximately 3000 B.C.), Noah and the Flood (approximately
2400 B.C.), and the tower of Babel (approximately 2200 B.C.)
preceded Abraham’s time. Abraham, who was born in about 2000
B.C., was the father of Isaac and the grandfather of Jacob,
whose name was changed to Israel. (See Bible Dictionary,
“chronology,” 635–36.)
******END QUOTE*******
My understanding is that, in Mormonism, Noah's flood is a real
event--that the entire earth was flooded and everyone on it
killed except for Noah, his sons, and their wives.
One problem is that there were continuous civilizations on the
earth from well before 2400 B.C. to well after 2400 B.C.
Narmer unified Egypt into a single nation around sometime
before 3000 B.C. There were separate kingdoms of upper and
lower Egypt before then. The "old Kingdom" continued until
around 2125 B.C. Egypt was a continuous civilization (with
intermediate periods of fractured governmental control) for
around 4000 years. There is no time for a world-wide flood.
The same can be said of Mesopotamian civilization. The
historical record for these civilizations extends back
centuries before 2400 B.C.
Of course things like geology and dendrochronology tells us
that there has been no such worldwide flood in the past 10,000
years.
The date of 2200 B.C. for the Tower of Babel is another
problem. The great pyramid had already been in existence for
300 years by then, and we have records going back nearly 1000
years before this date in separate languages. Mesopotamian and
Egyptian writing systems both came into existence around 3200 B.C.
The insistence of the literal reality of the flood and the
tower of Babel story, is just among the many reasons I can't
take Mormonism seriously.