Roger Hutchinson has left me with very little to do in responding to his second attempt to explain why Aaron's genealogy in Exodus 6:16-20 doesn't conflict with the biblical passages that say the Israelites spent 430 years in Egypt (Gen. 15:13; Ex. 12:40-41; Acts 7:6). He said that I "did [my] homework well, conducted an excellent analysis, and reached what [he believes] were logical conclusions." He further said that he agrees "that there are problems inherent in any effort to reconcile the genealogy in Exodus 6 with the 430 years in Exodus 12." So why doesn't he just admit that in this case we have an obvious example of biblical discrepancy?
In our correspondence, I have never put this question directly to him, but I suspect I know why he cannot bring himself to make such an admission. He is a Bible inerrantist, and as a rule, Bible inerrantists will go to just about any extremes to preserve their precious inerrancy doctrine. I remind the readers that in his first article, Mr. Hutchinson actually said that if I found one scripture that could not be reconciled with the scenario he was proposing to explain the discrepancy, he would have "to reject this particular scenario and look for another explanation" (Autumn 1995, p. 2). My response to this was to ask why inerrantists feel compelled to accept the Bible with such blind loyalty. "When a `scenario' that they devise cannot be reconciled with another scripture," I asked, "why don't they consider the possibility that reconciliation isn't possible for the simple reason that discrepancies and inconsistencies may actually exist in the biblical text?" They don't do this, of course, because their allegiance to a discredited idea has too strong a grip on them. Once they admit that errors may be in the Bible, they have lost their base of authority. They can no longer say, "You must do what the Bible says, because it is God's word," for they realize that a book with errors in it just cannot be the "word" of an omniscient, omnipotent deity. Hence, their desire to have a base of authority as an excuse to impose their views on others forces them to resort to all sorts of mental contortions to try to prove that errors aren't really errors.
We have seen this factor at work in Mr. Hutchinson's determination to show that the Exodus writer(s) made no mistake in the genealogy of Aaron (6:16-20) and a later claim that the Israelites had sojourned in Egypt 430 years (12:40). As already noted, he admits that my case was strong, that I did my homework well, that I conducted an excellent analysis, and that I reached what he believes were logical conclusions, but rather than admit that there just might be a real discrepancy between these two passages, he went back to the drawing board and looked for "another explanation."
The best I could tell, he seemed to be arguing that even though we may not understand everything about this problem, "there seems to be no reason to think that the information recorded in Exod us 6 would be wrong." Well, why isn't there reason to believe that the information is wrong? If Kohath was born before the Israelites went into Egypt (Gen. 46:11) and if the combined lifetimes of Kohath and Amram totaled only 270 years (6:18, 20), and if Aaron was only 83 at the time of the exodus (7 :7), how can anyone possibly find 430 years in these figures, especially when common sense tells us that Amram's life surely overlapped Kohath's and Aaron's overlapped Amram's?
Mr. Hutchinson argued that "if Mr. Till can look at these scriptures and see a problem, how much more would people in that day have seen the same problem?" I can't see this as a legitimate way out of the corner he has painted himself into, because he surely knows that textual criticism is a fairly recent development, and certainly it didn't exist in prescientific Israel to the degree that it does now. In fact, the literature of ancient times indicates that the prescientific minds of that era were apparently not as concerned with textual inconsistencies and discrepancies as we are today. I recall how that in my days as a believer in the inerrancy of "God's word," inconsistencies somehow went unnoticed when I was reading the Bible. Surely, this was because I was reading the Bible with the assumption that it was the word of God, and so I read it uncritically and just didn't notice the obvious. How much more likely would readers have used this approach in prescientific, superstitious times? Furthermore, Mr. Hutchinson seems to be arguing that if past generations did not notice a particular discrepancy in the Bible, then surely it isn't a discrepancy, and I can't see any logical basis for such a conclusion as this.
Most of Mr. Hutchinson's attempt at argumentation
this time centered on the meaning of the word *generation*, but
this is really an irrelevant issue. Whether four generations or ten
generations of Israelites resided in Egypt during their sojourn is
beside the point.
Exodus 12:40 says that the length of the sojourn was 430 years, and
even Mr. Hutchinson said he agrees that this is what the Bible
"clearly states." The problem, then, is that he must explain how that
the lifespans of Kohath (who was born *before* the Israelite descent
into
Egypt and lived only 133 years) and Amram (who lived only 137 years)
and
Aaron's age (83 years at the time of the exodus) could possibly allow
for a sojourn of 450 years. The figures simply do not add up, and Mr.
Hutchinson has even admitted "that there are problems inherent in
any effort to reconcile the genealogy in Exodus
6 with the 430 years in
Exodus 12." He just won't admit that the problems are so great that
they cannot be rationally resolved.
