Tracing your Ancestry to Adam

what do you define as historical times?

Until Moses we have no biblical record of history, and then Moses could only write about what God revealed to him about past events.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm satisfied with what the bible says about history up to the time of Christ. Anything else is just speculation on our parts, except for recorded histories of othercultures from the same time, but still there is no written history that predates Moses' writings and which agrees with his history.

I'm sure if God thought it was vital information for us to have He would have included it for our reading pleasure.

He did scatter the nations and confuse our tongues, and he also made giants descendants of some and changed Ham in some way. It has been speculated many times that he is through whom the black race descends, but that can not be proven with scripture.

I believe that we change over time through "survival of the fittest" and what not, but I don't believe in genetical evolutionary changes that would alter our DNA and such.

Darker skinned people thrive in Africa because light skinned people would not have survived there for many generations...at least without air-conditioning. Light skinned people and people with smaller noses thrive in colder climates because other kinds of people would freeze to death.

There is nothing extra-biblical about any of this. It all has to do with which group survives and which group had children with another group of shared characteristics.

The reason I have red hair is because both of my parents have a recessive gene for red hair in theur families' bloodline. That's not evolution. That's the miracle of creation.

If you're looking for any other kind of explanation, I just don't know what to tell you because it isn't expressly given in scripture, our only rule of faith and practice.

 

Here is some information about Hebrew found in the Internet Encylopedia Wikipedia. It is important to remember that languages commonly change with time. They evolve. So there is not one language that is cast in stone as Hebrew but there are many versions of it.


Early history
Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic language. It is theorized that this language family probably originated in northeast Africa, and began to diverge around the 8th millennium BC, though there is much debate about the actual date. (The theory is espoused by most archeologists and linguists, but at odds with traditional reading of the Torah.) Speakers of Proto-Afro-Asiatic spread northeast, eventually reaching the Middle East.

At the end of the 3rd millennium BC the ancestral languages of Aramaic, Ugaritic, and other various Canaanite languages were spoken in the Levant alongside the influential dialects of Ebla and Akkad. As the Hebrew founders from northern Haran filtered south into and came under the influence of the Levant, like many sojourners into Canaan including the Philistines, they adopted Canaanite dialects. The first written evidence of distinctive Hebrew, the Gezer calendar, dates back to the 10th century BC, the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon. It presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after the city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks and Etruscans later became the Roman script used today in almost all European languages. The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where more modern spelling requires it (see below).


The Silwan or Siloam inscription, from the tomb of a royal steward, dates to the 7th century BC.Numerous older tablets have been found in the region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example Protosinaitic. It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian writing, though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from Egyptian. One ancient Canaanite document is the famous Moabite Stone; the Siloam Inscription, found near Jerusalem, is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Old Hebrew include the ostraka found near Lachish which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BC.

The most famous work originally written in Hebrew is the Hebrew Bible, though the time at which it was written is a matter of dispute. See dating the Bible for details. The earliest extant copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, written between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD.

The formal language of the Babylonian Empire was Aramaic (its name is either derived from "Aram Naharayim", Mesopotamia, or from "Aram," Canaanite for "highland," the ancient name for Syria). The Persian Empire, which had captured Babylonia a few decades later under Cyrus, adopted Aramaic as the official language. Aramaic is also a North-West Semitic language, quite similar to Hebrew. Aramaic has contributed many words and expressions to Hebrew, mainly as the language of commentary in the Talmud and other religious works.

In addition to numerous words and expressions, Hebrew also borrowed the Aramaic writing system. Although the original Aramaic letter forms were derived from the same Phoenician alphabet that was used in ancient Israel, they had changed significantly, both in the hands of the Mesopotamians and of the Jews, assuming the forms familiar to us today around the first century AD. Writings of that era (most notably, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Qumran) are written in a script very similar to the "square" one still used today.

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Later history
The Jews living in the Persian Empire adopted Aramaic, and Hebrew quickly fell into disuse. It was preserved, however, as the literary language of the Bible. Aramaic became the vernacular language of the renewed Judaea for the following 700 years. Famous works written in Aramaic include the Targum, the Talmud and several of Flavius Josephus' books (several of the latter were not preserved, however, in the original.). Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in AD 70, the Jews gradually began to disperse from Judaea into foreign countries (this dispersion was hastened when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem (and turned it into a pagan city named Aelia Capitolina) in 135 AD/CE after putting down the Bar-Kochba Revolt (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/revolt1.html)). For many hundreds of years Aramaic remained the spoken language of Mesopotamian Jews, and Lishana Deni (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=LSD), known also as Judeo-Aramaic, is a modern descendant that is still spoken by a few thousand Jews (and many non-Jews) from the area known as Kurdistan; however, it gradually gave way to Arabic, as it had given way to other local languages in the countries to which the Jews had gone.

Hebrew was not used as a spoken language for roughly 2300 years. However the Jews have always devoted much effort to maintaining high standards of literacy among themselves, the main purpose being to let any Jew read the Hebrew Bible and the accompanying religious works in the original (see rabbinic literature, Codes of Jewish law, The Jewish Bookshelf). It is interesting to note that the languages that the Jews adopted from their adopted nations, namely Ladino and Yiddish were not directly connected to Hebrew (the former being based on Spanish and Arabic borrowings, latter being a remote dialect of Middle High German), however, both were written from right to left using the Hebrew script. Hebrew was also used as a language of communication among Jews from different countries, particularly for the purpose of international trade.

The most important contribution to preserving traditional Hebrew pronunciation in this period was that of scholars called Masoretes (from Masoret 'tradition'), who from about the seventh to the tenth centuries AD devised detailed markings to indicate vowels, stress, and cantillation (recitation methods). The original Hebrew texts used only consonants, and later some consonants were used to indicate long vowels. By the time of the Masoretes this text was too sacred to be altered, so all their markings were in the form of pointing in and around the letters.

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Revival
The revival of Hebrew as a mother tongue was initiated by the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (אליעזר בן־יהודה) (1858-1922). Ben-Yehuda, previously an ardent revolutionary in Tsarist Russia, had joined the Jewish national movement and emigrated to pre-State Israel in 1881. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop a new language that the Jews could use for everyday communication.

While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous (http://www.jewishmag.com/43mag/ben-yehuda/ben-yehuda.htm), many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of pre-state Israel who at the turn of the previous century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries with many different languages. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. Later it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an organization that exists today. The results of his work and the Committee's were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew). Ben-Yehuda's work fell on fertile ground, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of pre-State Israel.

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Modern Hebrew

 

BenFranklin, I have asked you in other threads, I will ask you again here.

What is your view of the literalness of the Old Testament?

What is your view of the literalness of the New Testament?

The virgin Birth?

Jesus as the Son of God?

His miracles?

The flood?

Lay it out on the table so people who don't know what you are getting at will understand where you are going.

 

"Lay it out on the table so people who don't know what you are getting at will understand where you are going."

Reality exists regardless of a person's religious beliefs. I prefer to stick to the facts. If you disagree with my facts, then state your diagreement as well as you can.