Class Three
A World Divided
Cave-men and Vagabonds
Genesis 7 to Genesis 11 and the beginning of recorded history
While secular scientists admit that early man was predominantly vegetarian and I quote from William H. McNeill’s 1976 work, “Plagues and Peoples”; “Dentition suggests an omnivorous diet, in which nuts and fruits, grubs, and perhaps some kind of vegetable shoots were more important than animal flesh”, they will deny the Biblical statements about God giving fruits and vegetables to Adam for food. And in keeping with the same train of thought, although many scientists admit to at least one and possibly several enormous ancient catastrophes they will deny the existence of the universal flood. But, as McNeill himself says in the same book, “Arguing from insufficient evidence can be misleading”. While atheistic and agnostic scientists argue about the early history of the earth we have the sure word of the Bible to go by.
Noah was called to build one of the most seaworthy vessels ever built, 450ft. long, 75ft. wide, and 45ft. tall, according to Henry Morris in “The Biblical Basis of Modern Science”. Oddly enough, there is no record of him using iron, first worked by Tubalcain back in Genesis 4, in its construction, as there was no use of any iron tool in the building of the temple by Solomon (1 Kings 6:7). At any rate, all human beings on earth today and virtually all animals come to us from these few creatures that were supernaturally led onto the ark of Noah. In it were preserved two of every living kind of animal at some stage of development.
Note that the Hebrew word for “kind” which is “min” is a larger subgrouping than “species”. Modern scientists define the word species in what I have counted as seven different ways. The science of genetics teaches us that there is enough “extra’ DNA in any animal or human to allow for a great many variations but there is no evidence anywhere that a lizard ever became an ape or, as the Smithsonian Institution was so quick to point out in its letter against the National Geographic, that a dinosaur ever became a bird.
So, in 2349BC, according to Archbishop Ussher, in his work, “Annals of the World”, or one year later according to Dr. Floyd Jones in his “Chronology of the Old Testament” after giving many years to the corrupt, decadent and violent old world to repent, Noah entered the ark he had built and the flood began which wiped out nearly all life on earth outside of the boat. The mountains were covered with 22.5ft. of water and everything that BREATHED died. Now, what is the evidence found in science for the flood that the Bible speaks of so clearly and in language that lacks the fantastic and incredible assertions of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (as in the ark was a cube)?
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Now, remember, geologists claim that the fossil record was formed through the same natural processes occurring today and that it was laid down gradually over a time span greater than 600 million years. The Bible makes it clear that the fossil record is the result of the flood of Noah, a single, catastrophic event.
While, a survey of history does not provide enough time to go into details regarding the science of the flood there are certain concepts we can mention that you might pursue independently. While the flood continued for 150 days, the tops of the mountains were not seen for 10 months. I would refer you to the work of Harlan Bretz, geologist and winner of that discipline’s highest honor; the Penrose Medal in 1979, with regard to the Scablands of Montana to see how a catastrophic, fast moving flood can change such a large area of land so quickly, producing what uniformitarian geologists would demand took millions of years to produce. I suggest reading the book by E.K. Peters titled, “No Stone Unturned: Reasoning about Rocks and Fossils” from 1991. I would also recommend you to study the results of the Mount Saint Helens volcano and of how so many changes that were previously assumed to take millions of years to occur could happen in a matter of hours.
Sedimentary rock, laid down by the action of water, blankets the entire earth and most fossils are found within it. Except where uplift or erosion has removed these layers, every inch of earth is covered by hundreds of feet or even kilometers of sedimentary rock. Limestone, which is composed of debris from invertebrate exoskeletons, is in such quantity it was used in construction of such manmade monuments as the Sphinx and the Pyramids.
I want to move on with our timeline of study in the history of the world but I would recommend the work of creationist Kent Hovind, also known as “Dr. Dino”, which can be found at www.drdino.com
In Genesis 9:1, Noah and his family leave the Ark. They are commanded to multiply and replenish the earth. They are told that animals will now be afraid of them, implying that before the flood animals co-existed peaceably with mankind. They are told that they can now eat animals, implying in confirmation of earlier scriptures that pre-flood man was a vegetarian. The first proscription is given against eating blood; a rule given here before the law, given in during the law in Leviticus 3:17, and after the law in Acts 15:20,29.
They are then given a statement about justice with regard to killing each other. Notice the contrast between Cain’s punishment, Lamech’s proud pronouncement, and the new standard of justice prescribed here by God.
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God then makes a covenant with Noah and all creation, a dispensation, and promises that this world wide flood will not be repeated again. Verse 19 of chapter 9 states clearly that the three sons of Noah are the progenitors of the entire human race. Noah takes up Adam’s role as a husbandman, taking care of a vineyard, which will have prophetic implications in Isaiah with regard to Israel. But, Noah gets drunk. Ham humiliates him and this results in his son, Canaan being cursed, perhaps because Ham had already been blessed in verse 1 of chapter 9. Canaan is the father of the later inhabitants of Palestine listed in chapter 10, verses 15 to 20, whose religious practices mirrored that of the rest of the depraved cultures of the ancient near east and even magnified the bestiality, incest, temple prostitution, and murder of their religions which God hated so intensely. Canaan, in Ham’s place, is cursed to be a servant of servants. This comes true when the Hebrews, former servants of Egypt, become the masters of the survivors of Israel’s conquest of Palestine. Shem, the ancestor of the Jews, is upheld in the next verse to become Canaan’s master.
Next, comes an extensive genealogy of Noah’s descendants, our ancestors. This is called “The Table of Nations” by many people and there are many theories as to how modern populations are descended from these early ancestors. It would be lacking in common sense to try to trace a direct, unbroken link from modern populations to one of the three sons of Noah without acknowledging that there was much interbreeding and interaction between the three racial groups and that many modern populations are a mixture of all three. You can find many ideas of who is descended from who and many versions of the “Table of Nations” but in order to keep us from following someone into that maze let me just say that, in general, Ham would be the father of the African, Dravidian Indian, and Australoid racial groupings (race is a term that except at the extreme ends has little usefulness), Shem of the Semitic and Asiatic racial groupings, and Japheth of the Caucasians who emigrated from the steppes of Central Asia to take Europe and to conquer India. However, even this distinction is controversial and since it must be emphasized that there has been on the borders of these groupings much interbreeding setting people apart by their ancestry to one of Noah’s sons is extremely difficult. Let us remember the following verse from Acts;
“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;” Acts 17:26
The first person we are going to deal with in regard to the rise of the nations to come is Nimrod, Ham’s grandson, aka Orion/Saturn/Tammuz. He was a hunter of men, the world’s first great human leader.
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The beginning of his kingdom was Babel and he was the instigator of the construction of the tower of Babel, the first great cooperative “United Nations” project, which led to the second greatest disaster for mankind. He built the cities of Erech, Accad, and Calnah in the plain of Shinar, the foundation of all false religion on the earth. In some way, most of the early religions of the earth were based on the worship of Nimrod and his wife. Nimrod, in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian history was also known as Ninus, who according to their histories conquered the people of Babylon before the city was even built. The ancient historian Diodorus Siculus and the 19th century historian Alexander Hislop tie in the most ancient of Babylonian history to this king. In mythology, Nimrod becomes Orion, the hunter. Bel, who is called the founder of Babylon, is Cush, Nimrod’s father, as Ham is Hermes or Mercury for Her-mes is an Egyptian synonym for “son of Ham”. Once again, I recommend a careful reading of “The Two Babylons” by Alexander Hislop, which is available and free online or through many Christian booksellers. Compare it to other mythology narratives. While there may be differences in some places the main theme of it will hold true if you study carefully.
Asshur went out of Shinar and built Nineveh. Asshur becomes deified, as does Nimrod/Ninus in later mythology as more than a mere mortal. He is the primary god of the Assyrians. He later becomes associated with the Sumerian Enlil.
Mizraim is also Menes, the founder of Egypt, known as the Great Embanker for the work he does on containing the Nile.
Now, as to chronology; the typical chronologies one finds in traditional textbooks on history are often at odds with each other. Whether it be the radiocarbon dating of pottery, looking for similar names in cultures which exist contemporaneously with each other, or the use of astronomical events to date historical periods there is no absolute agreement on dating. As the atheist historian, Will Durant, has said, “all theories of origins are pure conjecture”. Many problems arise with the insistence by scholars to use the standard accepted Egyptian dating as a yardstick. The dates from 2,000BC onward are regarded as being fixed and the dates of events in other ancient cultures are measured by that standard. One of the primary means of determining dates for Egypt is the Sothis Star theory with periods of 1460 years based on astronomical observations first enumerated by Eduard Meyer of the Berlin School of Egyptology at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth although the concept was first proposed by a man named Lepsius a few decades earlier. Before this time, each period in Egypt was given widely divergent dates by different Egyptologists, or those who study ancient Egypt. There are, however, many scientists who disagree with this system and historical data seems to undermine it. Last, but not least, it does not agree with the Bible’s chronology.
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When the evidence found does not agree or fit into the standard accepted Egyptian dating chronology such things as “dark ages” or “intermediate periods” are assigned which simply means that the finding of this or that is not consistent with what we believe about the Egyptian dating. For instance, according to this theory there was a great dark age in Greece of several hundred years where there is absolutely no evidence that anyone even lived, died, or traded there. This is accepted, that the events of the Greeks’ war with Troy and the “classical age” of Greece are separated by several hundred years with absolutely NOTHING happening in between even though the Greeks themselves said that these events occurred within only a few generations of their being reported by Homer in his Iliad and Odyssey. From a common sense point of view it would seem ridiculous and intellectually dishonest to claim that simply because the evidence you have found doesn’t fit your prejudicial assumptions that an entire period of someone’s history becomes a blank.
For instance, in Daniel Snell’s “Life in the Ancient Near East” we find this ridiculous statement, “In Mesopotamia a Dark Age ensues, the length of which we do not know, and the social and economic realities of which are obscure”. This is said all because evidence does not line up with their accepted dating methods so rather than question the methods they just insert a dark age and then spend page after page explaining what it MIGHT have been like. If I am going to carry an assumption, then it will be that the Bible is correct and everything else is just waiting to catch up to it. Of course, these scholars then go on to write assumption after assumption after conjecture based on previous guesswork, report it to students in college and high school as incontrovertible fact, and then determine your worthiness as a student and your test results on your ability to spit back at them their own fantasies.
So, according to the Bible’s own chronology, Noah leaves the ark in 2348BC. According to Ussher’s investigation, the Tower of Babel is started in 2247- 2242BC. God confounds the language of the people who have gathered together in the first great project of human cooperation and disperses the population. The remains of people living in caves and early nomadic populations can all be traced safely to the effects of this forced dispersion. The caveman of popular and Hollywood imagination can safely be relegated to fantasy. Since we are dealing here primarily with recorded history, the topic of cavemen, so to speak is for another place. However, all designations of Stone Ages, Bronze Ages, and Iron Ages all overlap and there are populations in remote parts of the world today that use stone tools such as the Tasaday of the Philippines as late as 1978. These “age” designations are artificial and in no way can be considered absolute. Quoting again from Snell; “Most observers have thrown off the simpler nineteenth century idea that there was linear human progress from ancient times to the present, that human societies and economies have gotten better over time……The terminology we sometimes use in characterizing
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archaeological ages implies some such sort of progress, as one moves from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. And yet archaeology shows that stone materials continued to be used right into the present century.”
The first great ancient nation we have to deal with is known as the Elam. Its center was a city named Susa. It is one of the oldest, advanced civilizations for which we have found archaeological evidence according to Durant’s ‘The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage, Volume 1’. The modern Iraqi town of Shushan is close by but much of Elam was in present day southwestern Iran. Elam was a child of Noah’s son, Shem, first mentioned in Genesis 10:22. The Elamites were found to have, according to Durant, copper weapons and tools, cultivated grains and domesticated animals, hieroglyphic writing and business documents, mirrors and jewelry, and a trade that reached from Egypt to India. Traditional dating of their advanced culture goes back to 4500BC although we know that due to the fallacies of the methods of dating Egypt these dates are greatly exaggerated. Bienkowski and Millard’s ‘Dictionary of the Ancient Near East’ says that the Elamite language is unrelated to any known ancient language. Common sense would tell us that it was related to the pre-flood language. Also, with only hieroglyphic, pictograph writing to go by, the modern scholar has to make a great leap of faith in himself to believe he even has their language figured out. Elam remained a powerhouse throughout the second millennium before Christ.
History now mentions descendants of Ham who founded a civilization south of Babylon and southwest of Elam called after a derivation of the word, Shinar, or Shunar, or Shumar which we call Sumeria. The Sumerian poets wrote about creation, a flood, and a lost paradise but, not being inspired, or in God’s will, they altered it and created a great fantasy which unbelieving historians claim for the original of the Judeo/Christian Bible’s account. This is nonsense as any reasonable person can compare the two accounts and see the difference between the Bible’s logical and matter of fact statements and the absurdities of Sumerian legends. Professor Wooley excavated in the ruins of Ur, which was one of their cities originally in 1929 and after discovering a mere 8 foot layer of silt and clay claimed to have found the so called “Great Flood” of the Bible. Of course, this is a great attempt to discount the Bible. As we have said before evidence of the Great Flood is all around us.
Sumerian king lists extend their history back over 400,000 years with kings named Tammuz (aka Nimrod) and Gilgamesh, hero of a later Babylonian epic. The Sumerians were constantly trying to fend off attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, at invasion by descendants of Shem, or Semites. Elam and the Hamitic Amorites battled with Sumeria before Hammurabi, king of Babylon, finally invaded them. Ur of the Chaldees was one of their greatest cities.
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It is interesting to note that Sumerians did not refer to themselves as Sumerian. Their language eventually became to be like Latin is to us today, the language of priests and scholars in the Ancient Near East.
Sumeria, like Egypt, was watered by the overflow of its great rivers, through a series of canals. The irrigation system, Durant tells us, was one of the great achievements of Sumeria and the foundation of its civilization. Their art was simple and their greatest known written work was the Epic of Gilgamesh written possibly when Sargon of Akkad, a nearby Semitic group, ruled this Hamitic civilization. Gilgamesh is non-Biblical history’s first “superman”, or as the Bible would put it, “mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Technologically, Sumeria was rather primitive by other standards of the Ancient Near East as most of their tools were made of either flint, bone, or clay, or at least the ones we’ve found, anyway. The chief method of transportation of goods and produce was apparently by water.
Sumerian worshipped the sun as Shamash, the light of the gods. They especially worshipped the virgin earth-goddess, Innini, known to the Akkadians as Ishtar, who became known later as Aphrodite-Demeter, Minerva, Ceres, Diana, Cybele, the virgin Mary, with names like Lady Liberty and the Goddess of Immigrants. They also worshipped the sorrowful mother-goddess, Ninkarsag, who interceded with the gods for them. They worshipped Tammuz, the god of vegetation who died and was reborn, who is a variation of Nimrod who is mourned by his mother/wife Semiramis as the child who dies and is resurrected. Sin, the moon god, with a crescent moon over his head, is worshipped. Much later, he becomes Allah of the Muslims. To the Sumerians, the air was full of spirits- good angels, with each Sumerian having one to protect him or her, and demons or devils trying to get rid of the protective deity and take possession of body or soul. It was common for women to be consecrated for temple duty as a wife of the gods. Speaking of women, they were nearly equal with men in regard to rights, but, of course, the man was lord and master and adultery for a woman was punished by death.
We will next discuss Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria and the struggle for dominance in the early part of the second millennium BC and how this affects the calling out of Abram, who came to be called Abraham, by God. First, though, I want to say a few words about the city he is called out of, Ur. It was a city of wealth and prosperity, a cosmopolitan city that had influence as far to the west as Egypt and east to India. The temple of Nannar was the example for all the great temples of the Ancient Near East with “pale blue enameled tiles; while its interior was paneled with rare woods like cedar and cypress, inlaid with marble, alabaster, onyx, agate, and gold.” (Durant). I would call to your mind, by comparison, the incredibly beautiful monuments of Washington, D.C. or New York to give you a comparison. Imagine having God tell you to leave the culture and architecture, the vibrant life and opportunities of New York, for something He had promised you but which you knew nothing about.
