Comments on: Rainbows

By: Fortigurn

Fortigurn — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 22:59:38 +0000

Your first question assumes that this was the first rainbow. There is nothing in the text to say this. You seem to forget that rainbows do not appear after every occurrence of rain, so for God to use a rainbow as a sign on this occasion does not necessarily mean there were no rainbows previously.

Your second question is irrelevant because the Bible says nothing about the rainbow being ‘a sort of gift to man’.

I’ve already demonstrated that the earliest Jewish commentaries didn’t interpret this as the first rainbow, so it’s clear the reading of the text you’re choosing isn’t exactly intuitive. It seems more like a motivated reading in a deliberate attempt to find problems with the text.

By: globalflood

globalflood — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 17:52:48 +0000

God sets his rainbow in the clouds. If there were already rainbows why would god have to set them in the clouds? The rainbow is also a sort of gift to man that will remind god to keep his promise, why would god give the Hebrews a gift they already had?

By: Fortigurn

Fortigurn — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 17:10:40 +0000

There is nothing in the Genesis text which says this was the first rainbow. Reading the classical Hebrew and Christian commentaries over the centuries (and certainly before Newton’s work on the prism), we find plenty who believed that this was not the first rainbow. Take the Jewish commentator Saadia Gaon for example (882-942 AD), who held the view that this was not the first rainbow – he could hardly have been asserting this on scientific grounds, as Newton might have.

But far earlier than Saadia is the Babylonian Talmud (compiled 6th century AD from earlier rabbinical sources), in which we find the rabbis commenting that the rainbow has been around since the beginning of creation (Babyloian Talmud, Seder Mo’ed, Pesahim 54b).