bible

[tweet]

Does the bible mention dinasaurs? If not why not? they did exsist long before jesus

Just like to add i don't wish to offend anyone im just curious

[bernardo]

No, because the Bible was written thousands of years ago, whereas dinosaurs were not properly discovered or identified until the 18th century.

[Hippy]

Seen fossilised bones and other relics of dinosaurs. EDDIE51, what makes you think Jesus existed 2000 yers ago or at any time?

tweet, consider the Bible to be a collection of ancient stories and fables. It is not, and I don't think ever was, intended to be a history book. A guide to good living, maybe; examples of heroic and worthwhile lives, probably; stories of selfish and bad people coming to sticky ends, certainly; but an accurate historical record, no.

[jenstar]

Well, you wouldn't really expect dinosaurs to appear in The Bible, considering that humans and dinosaurs never co-existed, and we didn't really know about them until the 19th century. Anyway, shouldn't this be in "Arts & Literature"?

[Clanad]

Many palentologists would argue that dinosaurs still live today as birds.  However, the timelines quoted here for the demise of the species we usually think of as dinosaurs, i.e., T. Rex, Brontosaurus, Triceratops, etc. is off by quite a bit.  They actually died out approximately 65 million years ago...

[bobclean]

No, Tweet, the bible does not mention dinosaurs.This is because the people who wrote the bible did not know that dinosaurs ever existed. (If the bible was true. and written by god, then dinosaurs would, of course, have been mentioned).

[tweet]

thank you bob clean thats kind of what i was interested in. Admittedly iv never fully read the bible so i was unaware if dinasaurs were perhaps mentioned in some part i just thought if god created the world in seven days etc dinasaurs surely would have had a mention.

Thanks for the replies everyone :0)

[gen2]

tweet, Even if God did create the world in 7 days and write the bible,  why would he selectively choose dinosaurs to mention?  Why not graptolites, trilobites, amonites, brachiopods, crinoids, lepidodendrons and so on?  It would be a very boring book if it had to mention every single plant and animal that ever existed.

[Clanad]

Although not worth arguing about, the Old Testament book of Job, in Chapter 40, talks at length about Behemoth... many Bible scholars believe that is a reference to a type of dinosaur.  In addition, the reference to Leviathan in Genesis, Isaiah and Psalms is also seen as such a reference.  Nothing in the creation description of Genesis requires translation of the Hebrew word yom for day, to mean a literal 24 your day as we know it...

[Peter Pedant]

the only problem with saying hebrew yom doesnt mean a day is that yawm, in a related language - Arabic means erm day.....

Do you realise that the same thing exists in Swedish, and our Monday does not come from Dies Latin a day, but from the northern langauges dag - which means the length of daylight in a day - or day-ish.....

Ho hum sme things dont change

Why doesnt the bible mention dinosaurs. there is nothing in the Bible that says only it has a monopoly on truth, fact and anything else is wrong.

Now does the Quran mention dynosaurs ? A much more interesting q as Muslims DO insist that all truth is in that book......

[Clanad]

Be that as it may, the Hebrew yom has at least three different meanings and applications in adjacent, unrelated books within the Old Testament.  Thanks for enlightening me to the fact that Hebrew is related to Swedish... unique concept...

By the way...

Arabic scholars on the Quran state the following:

From The Arabic Perspective

The Arabic word, translated in English as 'day' is 'yawm'.

The point that needs to be established from the Arabic perspective is that the word 'yawm' in the Arabic language, like the word 'day' in the English language, is not restricted in its meaning to the 24-hour interval of time.

Some references from the Arabic literature are provided below to establish this point:

One of the pre-Islamic poets says: (mata yusa'idona'l-wisa'lo wa dahrona yawman: yawmo nawan wa yawmo Sadudi)
The word 'yawm' in the above verses has been used to mean phases and periods, it can by no means be taken to mean the 24-hour time interval.
Amar ibn Kulthum says: beyawmi karihatin dharban wa ta`nan aqarra bihi mawa'li'ki'l-`oyu'na. wa inna ghadan wa inna'l-yawma rahnun wa ba`da ghadin bema la ta`lami'na
In this verse, the words 'ghadan', 'al-yawm' and 'ba`d ghadin' meaning tomorrow, today and the day after tomorrow have not been used in their literal sense but to imply the present, the near and the far-off future.

Where did you get your reference's please?

[jake-the-peg]

Excuse my butting in here but there's quite an interesting piece which kind of supports Clanad's case:

http://www.free-minds.org/articles/hadith/friday.htm

However it rather looks as if when the word is used to refer to a longer period of time than a 24 hour period that it is not specific in the number of "days".

Similarly we might say "every dog has his day" but we would be unlikely to say "every dog has his 6 days"

However there is a long history of mystical numerology and personally I think the most likely explanation is that 7 had long been seen as a mystical number ( 7 heavenly bodies - sun, mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, saturn the moon etc.) and this was behind the creation myth which was probably about long before it was written down by Moses or whoever you believe authored Genesis.