Where do you see that they were told to "replenish"?
My ESV says "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth"
Wow really?? The KJV is all I study. It was taken from the Septuagint and from the Hebrew texts. Don't misunderstand that with any language translation there will be transliteration and the further you get from the original the worse that gets
KJV and ESV are both word-for-word translations from the original texts, neither of which even remotely kinda sorta hint at any existence whatsoever prior to Adam. Any notion of that is fully extra-biblical.
I suspect we may be confusing the similar commands from the Lord in Genesis 1 (to Adam)and then again in Genesis 9 (to Noah and his family after the flood). Without writing a book, the whole "first Adam and last Adam" terminology also refutes it.
I said I was not gonna open this thread, much less post in it, but I am weak.
IKB, I've read enough of your posts over the years to be sure that you know better than this, and just posted without thinking. The KJV is not a word for word translation from the original text. The Church of England committee that produced it did not have an original text of any Book of the Bible. They did have a few texts that were in the original languages, but all were copies, and copies made centuries after the text was written. The committee said they made extensive use of the Latin Vulgate, so the KJV is to at least some extent a translation of a translation. That said, I love the KJV and it's impact on the world has been considerable. But it's still just a translation.
I don't think the age of the earth is a hill to die on, as someone else already said. I don't think the Scripture itself requires such an understanding. It's easy to use our view of the world to understand the Bible, but what we really need to do is to first strive to understand the world view of the original audience. If we can figure out what it meant to them, that gives us a better chance to understand what it means to us. There is no doubt that some of the genealogies given in the Bible are condensed. That might seem like an inaccuracy to us, but the original audience would not have seen it that way. They considered a grandfather to be their father just as much as the actual father. Jesus looked at it this way as well. He called Zacchaeus a son of Abraham and nobody misunderstood what he meant. We can't apply our view of the world to an ancient people and insist they communicated exactly the same as us.
There are most definitely hills I'm willing to die on, but I'm not qualified to have a strong opinion on the age of the earth. I have not been to the ark in KY and doubt I will ever go. If it were close by I would go, but it's too far for me. It would be interesting to see a reproduction of the ark in actual size; can't imagine what a miserable time that was for those that had to endure that experience.
I do most certainly believe that the flood actually happened, but Noah had to have been limited in the animals he selected. It would have been impossible to fit every subspecies on the ark, so it seems to me that quite a bit of time had to go by for the animals to adapt to different environments. I think it unlikely we could see the diversity we have today in just 4000 years. I am only speculating and I could be wrong. It doesn't matter; my faith is not based on an interpretation of Genesis. It is based on the message of the Gospel - that Christ died on a cross for our sins, was buried, and rose again. That is the hill I will die on.
