Manner of the Postdilluvian Colonization

Post Reply New Topic

This is the manner of the Postdiluvian Colonization of the Earth, according to Josephus:

"AFTER this [the event at Babel] they were dispersed abroad, on account of their languages, and went out by colonies every where; and each colony took possession of that land which they light upon, and unto which God led them; so that the whole continent was filled with them, both the inland and the maritime countries. There were some also who passed over the sea in ships, and inhabited the islands: and some of those nations do still retain the denominations which were given them by their first founders; but some have lost them also, and some have only admitted certain changes in them, that they might be the more intelligible to the inhabitants. ..."



Flavius Josephus, Antiquities, Book I, section 5.1a, written in the first century A.D.

How delightful. Like the Voyage of the DawnTreader.

What's your point?

You enjoy a good fairy tale as much as the next man? IDK. Its your thread.

I lost a lot of points with a good linguistic friend once for pointing out the readily verifiable fact:

If you do - as I do, comparative linguistics, reconstructing original language forms is pretty smooth and easy up to a particular time depth. After that, similarities get rapidly shakier and harder to teace, low on regular correspondence, until they peter out. At about the same time depth in several languages groups, there is a kind of discontniuity, and not far beyond that there is nothing a reasonable person will grab as other than coincidental.

As it happens, the time of this discontinuity is pretty close to the point when cities start up in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India.

As I pointed out then - making him sorry for me, not mad at me [he is pretty flaky himself, but he knew what that would have done to my reputation - if I had had one]: That is not uninteresting in light of the way the Babel event is presented to us.