DrW wrote:PrickKicker wrote:You do realise that JOB is a fictional character, Right?
Or in your mind is he like the flood and literal?
Believing that Job was a real person who lived in the belly of a big cetacean takes a lot less delusional thinking than does belief in a literal global flood from rain within the last 10,000 years.
by the way: Tarski and I had a discussion about this before Little Nipper joined the board. We pretty much agreed that putting the amount of additional water needed to cover the earth into the atmosphere would require the Earth's surface to be at a temperature well above the boiling point of water (in fact well above 400 degrees C) and would result in a pressure at the surface on the order of 90 bar (more than 1,000 psi) as I recall.
The Earth with enough water in the atmosphere to cover its surface would have an environment more like that of Venus. Noah and his family would have been boiled and crushed at the same time.
Simple physics.
It appears that you have confused the story of Job with the story of Jonah. Jonah was the one who was swallowed by a whale. I agree with you, though, that Job was almost certainly a fictional character. I strongly suspect that even the original author of Job never intended for it to be taken as literally true--any more than Jesus, in the new testament, intended for his parables to be taken as literally true.
Jonah, on the other hand, may well have been a real person, as someone by that name (Jonah the son of Amittai) was mentioned in 2 Kings, 14:25, which is one of the historical books of The Bible. According to
Asimov's Guide to the Bible, Jonah flourished in the time of Jeroboam II around 780 BCE.
Nevertheless, the Book of Jonah itself is clearly fictional, and was most likely written by some anonymous Judean around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah after the return of the Jews from Babylonian Exile. We know this, according to Asimov, because Scholars of ancient Hebrew and Middle Eastern history have determined that it was written using phraseology and language that was contemporary with that used in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (around 300 BCE). Besides that, the Book of Jonah contains anachronisms that preclude it from having actually been written during the time of the historical Jonah (around 780 BCE). For example: In the Book of Jonah, He was sent to convert the people of Nineveh, which is described as "'that great city,' the capital of the Assyrian Empire." This is an anachronism because at the time of the historical Jonah, the capital of Assyria was Calah, as it had been for five centuries. Nineveh was then only a small provincial town, which did not become the capital of the Assyrian Empire until a century or so after the time of Jonah. Besides that, there is no record in the historical books of The Bible (I Kings through II Chronicles) of any such dramatic conversion and change of heart on the part of Nineveh ever having taken place (nor is this mentioned in any other ancient historical record anywhere). Even if such a conversion of the Assyrians
had taken place, it certainly didn't last very long, because it didn't prevent the Assyrians from brutally conquering and/or oppressing their neighboring kingdoms and peoples (including Israel and Judah) during, and especially soon after the time of the historical Jonah.
