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Don't have much to add, except that my main gripe is with people who make rather egregious mistakes because they're so wound up about proving the bible is errant, that they can't just admit that not everything they think is an error, actually is an error. But what are you gonna do?


I do not intend to prove that the bible is errant. The bible is not more errant than Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. It only becomes errant when you misunderstand it as a historic, geographic, or scientific record. The error is in the interpretation, not in the bible.

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I was under the impression that the "babylonian" influence idea had been left for dead.
My initial objection is that throughout history, the Hebrews had strong national pride and went through great pains to avoid any influence from outside cultures.


Your impression is wrong, but national pride was just the reason for the writing of Genesis 1. Its author, identified by historians as "P" because he was probably a priest, wanted a Hebrew creation story to stand out against the all-known Babylonian myth, which told that Marduk separated the waters. So the sentence:

"So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it."

probably just means: 'it wasn't Marduk; it was our Hebrew god'.

Now you see the problem of apologetics: when attempting to adapt bible sentences to today's science, you must utterly change their meaning. Originally the sentence just told that the world was full of water and God - or Marduk - split the water for creating a dry place inside. All the apologetic "explanations" - clouds, lower atmosphere, a canopy - are not contained in this sentence, and must be artificially interpreted into it.

It's a little ironic that just the apologists who claim to take the bible literally wildly re-interpret it in contradiction to its literal meaning. If they are right that a hell exists, they'll probably end up there for this .