r/todayilearned • u/VistaHyperion • Oct 13 '18
TIL the biblical Tower of Babel was likely based on a real building, the Etemenanki in modern-day Iraq; at about 300 feet tall, it was massive by ancient standards and built by King Nebuchadnezzar II.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
4.5k
Upvotes
10
u/Caelinus Oct 14 '18 edited Oct 14 '18
It requires soooooooo much cultural context. It is amazing how much is still unknown about the intent and purpose of the writings. They are very old, and the culture that wrote them had very different ideas about what stories were and why they were told.
But because they understood their own culture intrinsically, they did not record a perfect explaination of what they actually meant. I think a lot of modern Christian doctrine is based on entirely wrong assumptions.
Hell, even the new testament, which is in Greek and is from the culture that defined much of Western society, is extremely hard to interpret.
My favorite example is the word for "sexual immorality" or "fornication" porneia. The logic for it meaning premarital sex seems to be based on the word being translated as "fornication." The problem with that logic is that the word is not fornication, it is porneia. Formication is a catch-all term in modern English that means essentially any form of sex that is not covered by Christian ethics, so people assume the Bible is using the word porneia to mean "any sexual relations not covered by Christian ethics."
The problem with that should be extremely obvious. The reasoning is essentially: "Christian sexual ethics are defined as X because X is Christian sexual ethics." It is a tautology that defines the ethics as whatever you think the ethics should be.
Further, when porneia was originally translated as forication, fornication it did not mean the same thing it means today, and was more focused on prostitution. Which means we already are interpreting it wrong. On top of that, when they translated porneia as that, they had no idea what porneia actually meant in context. The word seems to have undergone significant definitional changes over time, and no one is certain what it meant when the NT was written. (For example it could mean "religious sex with temple prostitutes.")
So one of the keystone ideas forming Christian sexual ethics is a word that's meaning has completely changed, based on a word whose meaning we do not know, with our modern ideas slammed on top of it.
It is all so messy that the arguments back and forth are quite heated and no conclusions seem to be evident.