Correction from Yesterday

Creation vs. Evolution : Bricks at Göbekli Tepe or Close? · Is this too modest in my expectations? Bricks revisited · Correction from Yesterday · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Jericho and Babel Contemporary?

Here is verse 3 again:

And each one said to his neighbour: Come, let us make brick, and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar.

It does not just say they planned it ("each said to his neighbour"), it says they had it.

Why is this a problem?

Well, I believe in Biblical inerrancy, I consider Göbekli Tepe and surrounding area as a very good candidate for Babel, and no fire-baked bricks have been found there, even less fire baked bricks with a mortar of bitumen.

But if I have already interpreted the tower as a rocket and waters above the firmament as not just water molecules but also hydrogen molecules, why not bricks as rammed earth?

If Nimrod has a clumsy project for a space rocket, in Moses' time the idea even of such technology had been lost to the general public.

If waters above the firmament is not just H₂O but also H₂, in Moses' time chemistry was not a thing and the words he could use would have been either air or water, and since H₂ is a gas such that, if you mix it with air (specifically O₂ part of it) and add a spark you get water, which makes water the more appropriate word of the available ones.

But earth, mud, soil were clearly words available in Hebrew and a certain discussion about Raqiya indicates that so is the description "rammed". Hence, Hebrew in Moses' time should theoretically have a word or phrase for rammed earth, distinct from bricks and distinct from bricks baked with fire.

So, if bricks can degrade over millennia of humidity so as to look like rammed earth, that would be one possibility, but it's not a very likely one.

My best hunch is still, someone may find baked bricks in the area (and for the carbon dated or archaeologically layered era), even if they haven't done so yet, as far as we have been told./HGL