Talk:Number of each "kind" on Noah's Ark
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[edit] 2 is equal to 14
If the base for your numbering system is negative two.
Note that only an insane mathematician (or a sadistic math professor) would use a negative base. MDB (talk) 11:46, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
[edit] Sacrifices
God remembred that he liked sacrifices and Noah would need some spares to offer up after the flood. Also 7 > 2 so if you take 7 you have also taken 2. If God had said takest thou 2 only, 1 is not enough and three is too many then there would be a problem. 67.72.98.45 (talk) 18:59, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
- Suddenly it's all so clear. Yes, the flood must have happened!--BobSpring is sprung! 19:07, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
- The point is that the original compilers wouldn't have thought these two stories contradicted each other. Unlike the narcissistic hypervigilance Icewedge has for logical inconsistencies, they would've been more inclusive. NOTE: Your opponents don't have to be all wrong for you to be right, and it doesn't make you worthless if your opponents don't see you as infallible.--Dbabbitt (talk) 16:01, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
- And 5 is right out - David Gerard (talk) 00:24, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
[edit] Mosaic law anachronism
I'm not really surprised when I see creationists coming up with ridiculous interpretations of the bible to attempt to justify their broader claims. An example is that Cain would have had to marry one of his sisters. The standard objection is that this is of course forbidden by Levitical law. I was just looking at Creation.com for my daily outrage and happened upon a smug and subtly hateful piece addressing this and other objections that the bible is merely a book about morality and salvation as "ignorance + unbelief." The crux of it is that the bible is a perfectly good history book and that the prohibition against marrying one's sister only applied to Moses' people and their decendants, which obviously doesn't include Abraham, who married Sarah his half-sister, and Cain, who presumably married his own full sister even though this and the mechanism for him populating an entire city are never explained in the bible. So what about this biblical claim that Noah was to have taken "clean and unclean" animals by certain numbers onto the ark. It's already been explained in this article that it's a bizarre anachronism, and one for which I've never seen an adequate explanation from creationists. Do they get to pick and choose which Levitical law is going to apply retroactively? How would Noah have known what was clean or not clean if those concepts were ostensibly explained hundreds of years later? I would imagine creationists would claim that the concept was well-known to people in Noah's time, though unwritten. That's not very satisfying. Anyone have an answer to any of this? Anyway, as I said I'm rarely surprised when I see creationists reading the bible to do whatever it is they want it to do, which is pretty easy on a case by case basis. What does surprise me is how incredibly arrogant and nasty they are about it, particularly when the facile answer they've just come up with is completely at odds with the rest of their rubbish. ![]()
User:Nutty Roux/sigtalk 18:25, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
- Nice clog. Obviously you didn't expect anything less ad hoc, did you? So basically, those patriarchs of old, pre-Moses, were in fact not bound by any Biblical laws. So they could have done what they wanted to, including killing, having other gods, generally being a complete heathen and so on and so forth. Yet they're recorded (let's assume the Bible is actual history for the sake of highlighting the contradiction) as not doing anything of the kind. So they had a morality that was clearly non-Biblical. But I thought this wasn't supposed to be possible as the Bible contained all morality (including abortion). Oh well. The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.
theist 19:52, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
- This one's interesting to me precisely because it's not addressed by the major web apologists, who would undoubtedly be aware of the problem and be able to muster some academic support for their spin on it if people were actually raising it. But we're at the top of the google results for this and there's not much else. I found Thomas Paine referring to the problem in his typically snarky way and will keep looking for more.

User:Nutty Roux/sigtalk 20:21, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
- This one's interesting to me precisely because it's not addressed by the major web apologists, who would undoubtedly be aware of the problem and be able to muster some academic support for their spin on it if people were actually raising it. But we're at the top of the google results for this and there's not much else. I found Thomas Paine referring to the problem in his typically snarky way and will keep looking for more.
[edit] Has food ever was brought up as an explanation?
Gen 6:20 says "two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive." and Gen 7:3 says " to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth." Apparently 5 of the 7 (whatever the unit of measurement, be it individual or pairs) does not need to be alive as long as their seeds are (Give birth to fertilized eggs, get eaten themselves?). ThiehZOYG I edit like Ken! 16:21, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
[edit] 4 unclean and 14 clean and birds
I'm always baffled by the readings of the numbers of animals. It seems very clear to me that "2 of every kind, male and female," means 2 males and 2 females, while "7 of every kind, male and his mate," means 7 males and 7 females. But no one seems to ever address this direct parallel and say that that means there were 4 of every unclean animal and 14 of every clean animal and bird. (This is setting aside the contradictions about the birds and Mosaic law, of course.) --50.81.123.31 (talk) 00:46, 14 June 2014 (UTC)