Quote from the Book of Job: Stages of embryonic development from ancient peoples’ cultures

 We read from the Book of Job, Chapter 10

: 9 Remember that you formed me like clay; will you then turn me back to dust?
10 Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese?
11 You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews.

The peoples of the Middle East, especially the Fertile Crescent, believed that the fetus is formed in the mother’s womb as a result of the man’s semen coagulating if it mixes with the woman’s blood (her menstruation), and that this is the main reason for a woman not menstruating throughout her pregnancy. This is what the text of verse 10 above indicates, as it likens the man’s semen to milk and its coagulation to the coagulation of cheese!!!

This belief in the stages of fetal development was prevalent among ancient peoples - as we mentioned - from the third and fourth centuries BC until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among those who referred to this theory in one way or another were: Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen .

We read from the book Text Book Of Embryology, page 2:
(( Before the 17th century embryological knowledge was based on the writings of Aristotle and Galen. Embryology as a branch of biology was initiated by the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle He was the first embryologist to describe the development and reproduction of many kinds of organisms in his book entitled “Degeneration Animalium ”. He firmly believed that the complex adult organism develops from a simple formless beginning.Thus he laid the foundation for the basic principles of epigenesist a theory postulated after 2000 years later. For this Aristotle is honored as the father of embryology. Aristotle has written that the male contributes the semen and the female contributes the contamenia . The semen contributes nothing material to the embryo ))

We read an article from The Embryo Project Encyclopedia written by: Dorothy Regan Haskett, Valerie Racine, Joanna Yang
((Throughout his works, Aristotle expounded an empirical form of scientific investigation of the natural world and contributed to the field of embryology. His embryological work remained relevant for centuries, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when new technologies became available for scientists to observe developmental processes, Aristotle's theories resulted in Early microscopic controversies Observers reported what they claimed were miniature humans in either sperm or egg cells. In the late seventeenth century, the theory of preformation became popular among natural philosophers. The theory held that an embryo is a miniature version of an adult organism, and that the adult emerges as the embryo gets bigger By the eighteenth century, preformation became the dominant theory of embryonic development, gaining proponents who dismissed Aristotle's theory of epigenesis. This similarity is due
,

as we said, to the fact that the writer of the Book of Job was influenced by the cultural atmosphere that prevailed when he wrote the book .
We read from the modern interpretation of the Holy Bible, the Book of Job, pages 20-21:

((A book like the Book of Job was not written in a vacuum. God alone is the one who creates from nothing, and His creatures use the materials that He gave them, and the mind performs its function from the reality of human experience and from the result of human culture. If a person has a sufficient amount of education, he is supplied with the ideas of others . The writer of the Book of Job was not only sensitive and intelligent, but he was experienced and cultured. We can also infer from the book the society that fed his thinking. We do not know how much he had. From teaching, from reading travel, or from discussing the types of rhetorical images in his book or from his travels. We do not know if he could read languages ​​other than Hebrew, so we do not know if he quoted directly from the literature of neighboring countries.
But whatever the motive, his art is unique in its genre and But he is not isolated. In the first place, he is in agreement with the traditions of his people. He is Israeli in essence and belief, and at the same time universal in his humanity. He is It is a sample of the type of literature prevalent in the ancient world, which was universal in nature, that literature which is widely called “wisdom” literature .

And we read from the same source, page 165:
((If some of Job’s angry cries have made us fear that he is in danger of slipping into disbelief, this beautiful poem about creation shows that Job is a complete believer in God’s good intentions (see commentary on 10:3) in creating man. And he uses three or four beautiful images derived from technology to tell the story of the beginning of man, ..... and the most obvious image is the body scraping like cheese (10), which is a unique image in the Old Testament ))

We read in the margin of the page, commenting on what came before:
(((1) Later writers spoke after that about the clotting of semen or blood until it becomes a fetus ))

We read from the Jesuit monastic translation, page 1065, in the margin, a comment on Job 10:10:
(( Ancient medical science imagined the formation of the fetus as the congealing of the mother’s blood under the influence of the implantation element ))

And we read from John Trapp Complete Commentary:
((And curdled me like cheese?] Sic castissimo ore, et elegantibus metaphoris, said an interpreter; ie Thus, in a most modest manner, and with elegant metaphors, doth Job, as a great philosopher , set out man's conception in the womb Aristotle (whose manner is obscurioribus obscura implicare, as Bodin observes) hath some such expression as this, but nothing so clear and full (Bodin. Theat. Natur., 434. Arist. de Gen. Anim. cap. 20)
https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/jtc/job-10.html

And we read from George Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary:
((Milked. Hebrew, “poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?” (Haydock) --- See Wisdom vii. 1. The ancients explained our origin by the comparison of curdled milk, or cheese; (Arist.[Aristotle?] i. 10.; Pliny, [Natural History?] vii. 15.) which the moderns have explained on more plausible principles. (Calmet) --- Yet still we may acknowledge our ignorance with the mother of Machabees, 2 Machabees vii. 22. )) https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/hcc/job-10.html

This is what prompted the historian Joseph Needham in his book A History of Embryology to state that the theory adopted by the ancients about the stages of embryonic development is exactly what was indicated by Job 10:10
(( 'During the period when the biological school of Alexandria was at its height, that city became an important Jewish centre. Two centuries later It was to produce Philo, but now the Alexandrian Jews were writing that part of The modem Bible is known as the Wisdom Literature. In books such as the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Proverbs, etc. the typical Hellenic exclusion of gods in natural phenomena is clearly to be seen. There are two passages of embryological importance. Firstly, in the Book of Job (x. to), Job is made to say, Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast fashioned me as clay; and wilt thou bring me into the dust again? Host you didn't pour me out like milk, and curdled me like cheese? Thou hast clothed me with skin and flah, and knit me together with bones and sinews.
This comparison of embryology with the making of cheese is interesting in view of the fact that precisely the same comparison occurs in Aristotle's book On the Generation of animals, as we have already seen.' Still more extraordinary, the only other embryological reference in the Wisdom Literature, which occurs in the Wisdom of Solomon (vii. 2), also copies an Aristotelian theory, namely, that the embryo is formed from (menstrual) blood ))

From Joseph Needham's words, we see that the same idea is repeated in another text of the Old Testament among the Orthodox and Catholics,
where we read in the Book of Wisdom, Chapter 7:
2 And in a period of ten months she was made of blood by the seed of man and the pleasure that accompanies sleep .

Indeed, we find the same idea also present in the New Testament!!!!
We read in the Gospel of John, Chapter 1:
13 Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Tertullian (second century) used this text to confirm the same previous idea about the coagulation process that occurs when the man’s semen meets the woman’s blood in her womb.
We read from Tertullian’s book De Carne Christ, chapter 19:
((19 ‘What then is the meaning of, Was born not of blood nor of thewill of the flesh nor of the will of a man, but of God?’1 This text will
be of more use to me than to them, when I have refuted those
who falsify it. For they maintain that it was thus written, Were
born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh or of a man, but of God,2 as
though it referred to the above-mentioned believers in his name:3
and from it they try to prove that there exists that mystic seed of
the elect and spiritual which they baptize for themselves. But
how can it mean this, when those who believe in the name of the
Lord are all of them by the common law of human kind born of
blood and of the will of the flesh and of a man, as also is Valentinus
himself? Consequently the singular is correct, as referring
to the Lord--was born. . . of God. Rightly so, because the Word is
God's, and with the Word is God's Spirit, and in the Spirit is
God's power, and God's everything that Christ is. As flesh,
however, he was not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh
and of a man, because the Word was made flesh by the will of
God: for it is to his flesh, not to the Word, that this denial of a
nativity after our pattern applies; and the reason is that it was
the flesh, not the Word, which might have been expected to be
born that way. 'But in denying, among other things, that he was
born of the will of the flesh, surely it also denies that he was born
of the substance of flesh. ' No: because neither does the denial that
he was born of blood involve any repudiation of the substance of
flesh, but of the material of the seed, which material it is agreed is
the heat of the blood, as it was by despumation changed into
a coagulator of the woman's blood. For from the coagulator there
is in cheese a function of that substance, namely milk, which by
chemical action it causes to solidify. We understand, then, a denial
that the Lord's nativity was the result of coition (which is the
meaning of the will of a man and of the flesh) , but no denial that it
was by a parttaking of the womb. And why indeed does the
evangelist with such amplification insist that the Lord was born
not of blood nor of the will of the flesh or of a man, except that
his flesh was such as no one would suspect was not born of coition? ))
http://www.tertullian.org/articles/e...carn_04eng.htm

Note:
Some missionaries tried to respond to the criticisms directed at the text of Job 10:10 by claiming that the text contradicted the prevailing belief of the culture of its time, since the prevailing belief at that time - according to them - was the theory of the dwarf man, which is the theory based on the man's semen carrying a dwarf fetus inside him, where this fetus settles in the woman's womb and then begins to enlarge little by little!!!!

In response to this blatant lie, I say:
1. The theory of the dwarf fetus was not prevalent until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before that, and since the third and fourth centuries BC, the theory of coagulation resulting from the man’s semen and the woman’s blood was the prevalent theory among the peoples of the region .
We read from the book Text Book Of Embryology, page 2:
((Before the 17th century embryological knowledge was based on the writings of Aristotle and Galen. Embryology as a branch of biology was initiated by the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle He was the first embryologist to describe the development and reproduction of many kinds of organisms in his book entitled “Degeneration Animalium” . He firmly believed that the complex adult organism develops from a simple formless beginning.Thus he laid the foundation for the basic principles of epigenesist a theory postulated after 2000 years later. For this Aristotle is honored as the father of embryology. Aristotle has written that the male contributes the semen and the female contributes the contamenia . The semen contributes nothing material to the embryo ))

2. Saying that Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen spoke of the theory of the dwarf fetus is a complete lie!!

Aristotle mentioned both theories, but he preferred the theory of coagulation, as we mentioned earlier .
We read from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
((Embryology, the study of the formation and development of an embryo and fetus. Before widespread use of the microscope and the advent of cellular biology in the 19th century, embryology was based on descriptive and comparative studies. From the time of the Greek philosopher Aristotle it was debated whether the embryo was a preformed, miniature individual (a homunculus)or an undifferentiated form that gradually became specialized. Supporters of the latter theory included Aristotle ; the English physician William Harvey, who labeled the theory epigenesis; the German physician Caspar Friedrick Wolff; and the Prussian-Estonian scientist Karl Ernst, Ritter von Baer, ​​who proved epigenesis with his discovery of the mammalian ovum (egg) in 1827. Other pioneers were the French scientists Pierre Belon and Marie-François-Xavier Bichat. ))
https://www.britannica.com/science/embryology

As for Galen, he stated that the fetus’s body consists of two parts: a part from the man’s semen and a part from the woman’s blood. He never stated the theory of the dwarf fetus. We read from Meyer’s Essays on the History of Embryology Volume 2
((On the basis of their origin, Galen divided all parts of the body into two classes. One class of organs which was said to arise from sperm was called partes spermaticae, and the other class, partes sanguineae, because he believed they arose from the blood . This classification of Galen continued in use for several hundred years, and well illustrates the danger of speculation. ))
https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/e...f_Embryology_2

As for Hippocrates, he He stated that the fetus is formed by mixing the man's water with the woman's water (contradicting those who came after him, Carso and Galen), but he stated that human flesh is formed as a result of the woman's blood clotting in the womb and that bones are formed as a result of concentrated heat. On the woman's blood clotted in her womb .
We read from the book The Hippocratic Treatises "On Generation", On the Nature of the Child, page 7-8:
((The seed, then, is contained in a membrane, and it breathes in and out. Moreover, it grows because of its mother's blood , which descends to the womb... At this stage with the descent and coagulation of the mother's blood, flesh begins to be formed with the umbilicus through which the embryo breathes and grows, projecting from the center ))

We read from the same previous source, page 9:
(( The bones grow hard as a result of the coagulating action of heat; moreover they send out branches like a tree . Both the interior and exterior of the body now begin to separate into parts more distinctly))

We read from an article by Karen Wellner entitled A History of Embryology (1959), by Joseph Needham from The Embryo Project Encyclopedia
((The first written record of embryological research is attributed to Hippocrates (460 BC–370 BC) who wrote about obstetrics and gynecology. In this regard Needham declares that Hippocrates, and not Aristotle, should be recognized as the first true embryologist. Hippocrates believed that the embryo began development by extracting moisture and breath from the mother and he identified a series of condensations and fires that were responsible for the development of bones, belly, and circulation in the embryo and fetusHe also supported the view that the human fetus gained nourishment by sucking blood from the placenta. Needham credits Hippocrates with being one of the first to allude to the concept of preformationism with the Greek physician's belief that organisms were fully formed in miniature inside germ cells. This belief helped give rise to theological embryology or the idea that various souls entered the embryo as it grew.))
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/history...joseph-needham

And from this it becomes clear that the responses of the missionaries on this issue are nothing but illusions and lies that do not fatten or satisfy hunger and do not replace the truth in any way. They are merely failed patches resulting from a deep ignorance of the ancient cultures and ideas related to the stages of fetal formation.