World History, Chapter Three, Revised

Promise and Peril
Genesis 13 to Genesis 25 and the birth of two families
Portents of Christ
Genesis 26 to Exodus 2; a ladder to heaven, a coffin in Egypt, and an ark of bulrushes


As Genesis 13 opens Abram goes back to where he started from between Bethel and Hai, to the altar he had built previously and called on the name of the LORD. There was a dispute over grazing land for their grazing animals and Lot went to the plain of Jordan while Abram stayed in Canaan. God promises him all the land that he sees in every direction and his offspring forever in an unconditional covenant. Abram finally ends up at Mamre, in the area of Hebron, where he builds another altar. Chapter 14 begins with a rebellion of five kings against their four overlords.

The local kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar were apparently tributaries of a coalition which consisted of Amraphel, king of Shinar, whose identity is discussed in the Catholic “New Advent” Encyclopedia, which I will quote here;
“The identity of Amraphel and Hammurabi is now unanimously accepted by Assyriologists and Biblical critics. Phonetically, the two names are identical. The variants of the second form are Ammi¬rabi, Ammurapi, and Hammum¬rabi, etc. Hammu, or Ammu, was in all probability the name of a god, as it is found in many compound names such as Sumu¬hammu, Jasdi¬hammu, and Zimri¬hammu. The element rabi is very common in Babylonia, and it means "great"; the full name, consequently, means "The god Ammu is great", on the same analogy as names like Sin¬rabi, Samas¬rabi, and many others. According to Dr. Lindle, followed by Sayce and others, the name was also pronounced Ammurabi, and, so Dr. Pinches was the first to point out, the form Ammu¬rapi is also met with by the side of Hammurabi, and like many of the Babylonian kings of that period, he was deified, being addressed as ilu¬Ammurabi or Ammurabi¬ilu, i.e. "Ammurabi the god", ilu being the equivalent of the Hebrew El, which means "god". Now Ammurabi¬ilu or Ammurapilu is letter for letter the Amraphel, or Amrapel, of Genesis. According to another hypothesis, suggested by Dr. Husing, the l at the end of the form "Amraphel" is superfluous, for he would join it to the next word, and read: "And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, as Arioch king of Ellasar was over Shinar, that Chodorlahomer . . ." Another, and according to Dr. Pinches perhaps more likely, explanation is that this additional letter l is due to a faulty reading of a variant writing of the name, with a polyphonous character having the value of pil, as well as bi, which form may, in fact, still be found. But whichever hypothesis we adopt, the identity of Amraphel and Hammurabi is phonetically beyond dispute.
The political situation presupposed in Gen., xiv, reflects, furthermore, with a remarkable degreee of probability, the condition of the times of Hammurabi's reign. The leader of the force and the suzerain to whom the Chanaanitish princes were subject, was a king of Elam. Elam, therefore, must have been the predominant power at the time, and

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the Babylonian king must have been its vassal. The narrative, nevertheless, is dated in the reign of the Babylonian king, and not in that of the King of Elam, and it is to the reign of the Babylonian king that the events described in it are attached. Babylonia, however, was not a united country; there was another king, Arioch of Ellasar, who divided with the Amraphel of Sennaar the government of it, and like Amraphel, acknowledged the supremacy of Elam. Finally, the "nations" (goyim), whoever they were, were also subject to Elam, as well as the distant province of Chanaan. If we turn our glance to the political condition of Hammurabi's times and period, we shall find that the contemporary monuments of Babylonia are in perfect accord with the situation presupposed by Gen., xiv. “
Historians are not unanimous in this identification but do tell us that Hammurabi reigned for 43 years over Babylonia. After conquering his greatest enemies, building a great canal connecting Kish and the Persian Gulf for irrigation of a large area of land, and providing security and government to many tribes his reign may have gone into a decline. He built temples and coddled the clergy while at the same time doing great public works such as a bridge crossing the Euphrates. But, here, as part of this alliance he attempts to subdue these vassal states.
Ussher’s dating has this event occurring in 1912BC. The events of this chapter bear reading. (Read Genesis 14 aloud).

One thing to note is that these petty Canaanite kingdoms are little more than cities and their surrounding support areas ruled by kings which are more like mayors in our way of thinking or warlords. The area of Canaan was not one political entity and they spent a great deal of time fighting each other, engaging in trade, and only banding together in an alliance when faced with an outside threat and then only halfheartedly. Except under the nation of Israel and the European Crusader states, the area of Palestine has never been a cohesive political unit all its own, but rather the fodder of conquerors who passed through the region and recognized it as a strategic point between great centers of trade, such as Tyre, in Phoenicia, and Egypt. Look at the map and understand that for navies that had to travel close to land and be supported by and support an army marching along the coast, the area of Palestine or Canaan was very important.

To quote Durant, once again in his “The Story of Civilization, Volume 1, Our Oriental Heritage”; “The climatic history of the land tells us again how precarious a thing civilization is, and how its great enemies – barbarism and desiccation – are always waiting to destroy it. Once Palestine was “a land flowing with milk and honey”, as many a passage in the Pentateuch describes it. Josephus, in the first century after Christ, still speaks of it as “moist enough for agriculture, and very beautiful. They have abundance of
trees and are full of autumn fruits both wild and cultivated….They are not naturally watered by many rivers, but derive their chief moisture from rain, of which they have no want.” Try to reconcile that picture of Palestine with the one you see on your television screens today.

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Abram’s ability to defeat this coalition with such a seemingly small number of people, 318, has to do with God’s supernatural favor using the tactical advantage of a night attack. Later, Gideon performs a similar feat against the Midianites.

The true identity of the king to whom Abram offers his tithe is not a subject of this history study but has more to do with doctrinal applications of the Bible. We will attempt to limit our study to history and avoid doctrine except where that is impossible. In chapter 15 God asserts his promise to Abram and his PHYSICAL descendants of all of the land from the Nile, the river of Egypt, to the Euphrates, and dominion over the land that the descendants of Ham now currently occupied.

In chapter 16 we have the birth of Ishmael, the offspring of Abram, a descendant of Shem, and Hagar, the Egyptian, a descendant of Ham. We also have a prophecy of the way Ishmael’s descendants will interact with other peoples. This was not, by the way, the child he was promised, as the Bible makes clear. The Arab peoples look upon Ishmael as their common ancestor although many other people point out that Ishmael is only the father of the Ishmaelites. The term, Arab, is first found in Assyrian annals of the ninth to seventh century BC and the word probably means, nomad, according to “The Dictionary of the Ancient Near East”. One important thing to remember is that until the creation of modern Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and the petty states such as Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, etc. the Arabia peninsula had never been a single cultural or political unit, and even today, it is not. The Arabs always fought among themselves in tribal groupings and were only united by their common worship of many gods and ultimately by Islam, but that is a story for later.

In chapter 17, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and commanded circumcision as a token of the covenant between them. This later spread to the Egyptians after the Jews lived in that country. Chapter 18 reinforces God’s promise of a son to Abraham through his wife, Sarah, which name was also changed, from Sarai, in chapter 17. God’s intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah is revealed in this chapter, as well. Although modern students of the Bible dispute as to the location of these two cities Ussher makes the following statement regarding them;

“The monument of this (their destruction) remains to this day, even the Dead Sea,. The valley of Siddim, where these five cities stood in former times, was full of brimstone and salt pits. This has since grown into a vast lake which, because of the brimstone floating in it, is called Laces Asphaltitis or Lake of Brimstone and because of the salt, Mare Salsum or the Salt Sea.” He then refers to the historian, Solinus, for a description of the area.

I think it would be suitable to define “brimstone” here. It means “sulfur”. The American Heritage dictionary defines sulfur as “A pale yellow nonmetallic element occurring widely in nature in several free and combined allotropic (define) forms. It is used in black gunpowder, rubber vulcanization, the manufacture of insecticides and


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pharmaceuticals, and in the preparation of sulfur compounds such as hydrogen sulfide and sulfuric acid.”

According to a study initiated by the Institute for Petroleum and Organic Geochemistry, Juelich, Federal Republic of Germany, cited on the internet’s Department of Energy ‘Energy Citations Database’, the Dead Sea area is formed by oils, asphalts, and sulfur compounds. An interesting study would be for you to research the efforts by archaeologists to locate the cities that God destroyed at this time.

From reading the chronicle of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the perversion that plagued those cities and recalling the sexual content of ancient worship one can imagine the depraved nature of the ancient world. If you add this to the aforementioned manner in which the rebellious sons of God in Genesis 6 dealt with humanity we get a very negative picture of mankind’s moral standing before God.

Solinus was a Latin grammarian and historian of the 3rd century AD, by the way.

In chapter 21, we see the first persecution of the Abraham’s child of promise, Isaac, by his older half-brother, Ishmael. Ussher begins the 400 year persecution until the Exodus from this point. See Galatians 4:29; Genesis 15:13; Acts 7:6. Ishmael, the son of an Egyptian, and the father of the Arab nations, according to them, is still persecuting Isaac. It is interesting to note that the late Yasir Arafat was an Egyptian. Isaac’s feast and
Ishmael’s mocking occurred in 1891BC, according to Ussher’s chronology. Abraham’s testing with regard to Isaac’s “sacrifice” occurred in 1871BC according to the same chronology. Finally, Sarah’s death and Abraham’s first purchase of property in Canaan for her grave is given as 1859BC. Interestingly, Shem, Noah’s son, and Abraham’s ancestor doesn’t die until 1846BC. Dr. Floyd Nolen Jones in his 1993 “Chronology of the Old Testament” agrees in the main with Ussher, using computer models based on a literal application of the Bible.

At this time, traditional historians, believe the Middle Kingdom of Egypt was in power, starting with the 12th dynasty with well trained, professional armies, including Nubian auxiliary units. According to “The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History”, we are right on the edge of the Hyksos invasion of Egypt, its first foreign invasion by Semitic peoples who, according to Harper’s “introduced the horse and horse-drawn chariot in Egypt”. We’ll get to this later when we get to Joseph.

With this account we are also just before the Aryan migrations in India and the emergence of historical China. The earliest civilization that historians mention in India is the Mohenjo-Daro culture which they give as existent around 2900BC according to Durant. India is not so much a nation as Egypt or Sumeria but more like Europe, a polyglot of languages and cultures on a sub-continent called South Asia. The river Indus, a thousand miles long, had its name from the native Punjabi word for river, sindhu, which the Persians, changing it to Hindu, applied to all of Northern India, as Hindustan, the land

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of the rivers. Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, on the Indus river, were discovered in 1924 and may represent a more advanced civilization than even Ur, with the lowest strata of excavation being a more advanced culture than the upper and possibly representing the pre-flood civilization. Some of the things found include “household utensils, dice, chess-men, coins older than any previously known, over a thousand engraved seals done in an unknown pictographic script, stone carvings superior to that of the Sumerians, copper weapons and tools, a copper model of a two wheeled cart; one of the oldest examples of this vehicle, gold and silver jewelry finished and finely polished in such a manner that they could have come from a modern jewelry store, and, as mentioned earlier, the finds get more detailed and spectacular the deeper the archaeologists look. Many believe that the civilization of Mohenjo-Daro was the oldest in the world. Durant laments that “In India, or elsewhere, the beginnings of civilization are buried in the earth, and not all the spades of archeology will ever quite exhume them”.

There are some students of Hindu religious literature such as the Vedas and the Mahabharata that insist that they contain verses that describe airplanes and spaceships, and even descriptions of nuclear warfare. While flying machines are also mentioned in
Babylonian literature as being of quite ancient origin and also in Chaldean “writings” it is the claim that it may have been atomic warfare that destroyed Mohenjo-Daro which is most interesting. In 1979, David Davenport, an Englishman born living in India wrote a book that claimed that evidence of an event generating enormous heat is everywhere on the site of the city. However, most scientists regard his interpretation of the evidence as ranking right down there with Erik Von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods” book from the 1970’s which claimed that extraterrestrial alien life forms gave us our civilizations.

A source devoted to studying ancient Indian religious literature contained the following;

“Only seven years after the first successful atom bomb blast in New Mexico, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) Scientist, philosopher, bohemian, and radical. A theoretical physicist and the Supervising Scientist of the Manhattan Project, who was familiar with ancient Sanskrit literature, was giving a lecture at Rochester University. During the question and answer period a student asked a question to which Oppenheimer gave a strangely qualified answer:

Student: Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?

Dr. Oppenheimer: "Well -- yes. In modern times, of course.””

Whatever is true or mere fantasy, Durant is probably correct and there are simply a great deal of things we will never know in this life.



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Reliable historians state that no one knows where the Chinese came from, or what was the beginning of their race, or how old their civilization is. There is a great deal of fossil evidence in China and Mongolia to lead the atheistic scientist to conclude that Paleolithic, Stone Age man existed there for tens of thousands of years. But, since some of the most striking evidence of their early art and industry clearly came from Mesopotamia I would insist that once again we must look to the biblical narrative for answers. Some say that the Chinese descended from Ham, while others say Shem. Those who theorize that the Chinese came from Ham point to the son of Canaan called Heth. The cuneiform of the word Hittite is Khittae also known as Khitai which comes down to us as Cathay, an old word referring to the Chinese people. Quoting directly from Tim Osterholm who uses “Noah’s Three Sons” by Arthur Custance, “Genesis and Early Man” by the same author, Bill Cooper’s “After the Flood”, Henry Morris’ “The Genesis Record”, and Ruth Beechick’s “Genesis, Finding our Roots”, among others, as references;

“Sin (or Seni), a brother of Heth, has many occurrences in variant forms in the Far East. There is one significant feature concerning the likely mode of origin of Chinese civilization. The place most closely associated by the Chinese themselves with the origin of their civilization is the capital of Shensi, namely, Siang-fu (Father Sin). Siang-fu appears in Assyrian records as Sianu. Today, Siang-fu can be loosely translated, "Peace to the Western Capital of China". The Chinese have a tradition that their first king, Fu-hi or Fohi (Chinese Noah), made his appearance on the Mountains of Chin, was surrounded by a rainbow after the world had been covered with water, and sacrificed animals to God (corresponding to the Genesis record). Sin himself was the third generation from Noah, a circumstance which would provide the right time interval for the formation of early Chinese culture.
Furthermore, those who came from the Far East to trade were called Sinæ (Sin) by the Scythians. Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer, referred to China as the land of Sinim or Sinæ. Reference to the Sinim in Isaiah 49:12 notes they came "from afar," specifically not from the north and not from the west. Arabs called China Sin, Chin, Mahachin, Machin. The Sinæ were spoken of as a people in the remotest parts of Asia. For the Sinæ, the most important town was Thinæ, a great trading emporium in Western China. The city Thinæ is now known as Thsin or simply Tin, and it lies in the province of Shensi. Much of China was ruled by the Sino-Khitan Empire (960-1126 A.D.), which Beijing became the southern capital. The Sinæ became independent in Western China, their princes reigning there for some 650 years before they finally gained dominion over the whole land.
In the third century B.C., the dynasty of Tsin became supreme. The word Tsin itself came to have the meaning of purebred. This word was assumed as a title by the Manchu Emperors and is believed to have been changed into the form Tchina. From there the term was brought into Europe as China, probably from the Ch'in or Qin dynasty (255-206 B.C.). The Greek word for China is Kina (Latin is Sina). As well, Chinese and surrouding languages are part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Years ago, American newspapers regularly carried headlines with reference to the conflict between the Chinese

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and Japanese in which the ancient name reappeared in its original form, the Sino-Japanese war. Sinology refers to the study of Chinese history.
With respect to the Cathay people of historical reference, it would make sense to suppose that the remnants of the Hittites, after the destruction of their empire, traveled towards the east and settled among the Sinites who were relatives, contributing to their civilization, and thus becoming the ancestors of the Asian people groups. Still others migrated throughout the region and beyond, making up present-day Mongoloid races in Asia and the Americas. The evidence strongly suggests that Ham's grandsons, Heth (Hittites/Cathay) and Sin (Sinites/China), are the ancestors of the Mongoloid peoples.”

We will have much more to say about China and India as we move forward. These nations are particularly important in today’s world with regard to geopolitics and for conditions at the end time. Sam Cohen, father of the neutron bomb, in his book, “Shame”, has prophesied that in twenty years Asia will be using as much oil in a day as we do now in a year and will be importing more than half of it. This has serious implications when considering the ongoing struggles in the Middle East and Revelation’s “kings of the east” in Revelation sixteen.

The doctrinal applications of Abraham’s testing by God in chapter 22, dated at around 1871BC by Ussher, are not the subject of this study but different theologians give Isaac’s age as 25 to 35 at the time of this test of Abraham’s faithfulness.

Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and Isaac’s mother, dies and is buried in Hebron in a cave in a field Abraham purchased from the “sons of Heth”.

Chapter 24 deals with Abraham’s servant fetching a bride for Isaac from among his own people and Genesis 25 reveals Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. Esau aka Edom plays significant roles in future history as an enemy of Israel, although Esau himself eventually loses his own personal enmity against his brother. Edom, also called Seir, is part of the country of Jordan. In Roman times it was known as Idumea, the origin of the Herods, puppet rulers of Judea. Its worship of the spring festival of Ishtar is believed to be the reasoning for the King James translators controversial translation in Acts 12:4 by some. Edom, meaning red, and taken from the red pottage he bargained his birthright away for, used red in its banners, as Idumea, and was characterized by a particularly bloody reign over Judea.

One of the principal wonders of the area of Edom is the rock city of Petra, which figured into the movie, ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’. It wasn’t built until much later in history, presumably around the 6th century BC by Nabatean Arabs but I thought I would mention it here as nail to hang your memory of Edom upon as this area has a significant role to play in end time prophecy according to many Bible commentators.



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Now, I want to talk about the Hittite empire mentioned in the Table of Nations reference earlier. Most of traditional or non-Biblical scholars information about the Hittites comes from thousands of clay tablets excavated from their capital, Hattusas. The ‘Dictionary of the Ancient Near East’ claims that their power finally ended around 1200BC. However, Snell, in ‘Life in the Ancient Near East’, states that the texts that the knowledge about the Hittites is based on are hard to date and therefore, one would conclude, that any absolute dating by traditional historians is unsure. Durant claims that the Egyptians of this period mentioned importing iron from the Hittites. He states that they had spread their influence from south of the Black Sea to the area of Babylon. This would be around the time of Abraham’s journeys. Abraham buries Sarah and is buried by Isaac and Ishmael in a plot of land he purchased from a Hittite.

Genesis 26 opens up with Isaac repeating his father’s behavior during a famine, only this time the place of refuge is not Egypt but the land of the Philistines. While God’s promise to Abraham is repeated here to Isaac, things look pretty bleak for a couple for whom it was hoped back in chapter 24:60 would produce billions of descendants.

The Philistines are first mentioned back in chapter 21 and Abraham lived among them “for many days”, it says. Who were the Philistines? Snell states that Palestine derives its name from the Philistines, who were seafaring people who had “afflicted Egypt”. Those who settled around modern Gaza are best known and he also says that they were called something different, Tjekker, further north. They came from the Aegean Sea and brought Mycenaean pottery from Greece with them. They had five major cities, each ruled by a despot, and Snell says that they tried to control the hill country of Palestine, probably starting out as the Pharaoh’s mercenaries; of which the Egyptians used quite heavily. Greek mercenaries were used through the ancient near east affecting language and culture, preparing the way for Alexander’s eventual conquests and the spread of the common or Koine’ Greek language with which the New Testament was written. Bienkowski and Millard’s “Dictionary of the Ancient Near East” concurs with these statements. Durant barely mentions them in his history.

According to Ussher, quoting Christian historian Eusebius from his work ‘Chronicles’ who was quoting Castor of Rhodes, the reign of the Argives in Greece began in 1856BC. Also, quoting Varro from his work ‘Human Antiquities’ Ussher refers to Inachus as the first king About the time of Issac’s move to Philistia (1796BC?) for a respite from the famine, the Ogygian Deluge was supposed to have occurred in Greece and this is found in the works of Hellanicus, Castor, Thallus, Diodorus Siculus, Alexander Polyhistor, and Julius Africanus as reported by Eusebius.

Now, for some definitions. The Argives were of Argos one of the foremost Mycenaean cities of the Peloponnesus. In Homer's Iliad, "Danaans" ("tribe of Danaus") and "Argives" commonly designate the Greek forces opposed to the Trojans. The Greek geographer of the second century, Pausanius, as reported in the Encyclopaedia


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Britannica, states with regard to the Argives, "from the earliest times... have loved freedom and self-government, and they limited to the utmost the authority of their kings:"

The Peloponnesus is the part of Greece south of the Isthmus of Corinth. The Philistines may have come from there escaping the constant struggles that occurred as the Greek city states were forming.

Another possiblity is that they were refugees or colonists from the fallen Minoan civilization of Crete. The Minoans were a mercantile people who engaged in overseas trade and showed signs of a highly developed civilization from the middle of the last half of the second millenium (around 1700BC) onward. Things to remember would be the mythical king Minos and his labyrinth uncovered by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos, the palace of the Minoans. Their pantheon of gods was headed by a goddess. In mythology the labyrinth was an elaborate maze that contained the Minotaur, a half man half bull, which was eventually defeated by the Athenian hero Theseus, who Plutarch states was the son of Poseidon and was contemporary with the Atlanteans.

Another event of note was the Ogygian Deluge, which I just mentioned. This event is considered by many to be mythological while others consider it to be a real time happening. During the reign of Ogyges, King of Boetia, in Greece, there was supposed to have been a disastrous flood. The Roman writer, Varro, states that the Planet Venus underwent a strange change before this flood. Ev Cochrane reports that this planet was worshipped almost universally in the ancient world but not always as a good thing. The Aztecs in Mexico viewed Venus as a harbinger of disaster. The modern “alternative science” writer Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that the formation of and subsequent activities of the planet Venus was the cause of great catastrophes on the earth. The Ammizaduga tablets of Babylon, considered by some to be the oldest astronomical tablets extant or still in existence talk about Venus’ ability to adversely affect the affairs of mankind.

Back to the Minoan civilization and some things to remember. Before the Minoan civilization suddenly disappeared in the middle of the second millennium BC, possibly due to a huge volcanic eruption on Thera, which may have been the model for Atlantis in Plato’s work, it was a highly advanced civilization. A medical bag has been found in a tomb at Nauplion in Crete dating to about the time of the culture’s extinction that contained forceps, drills, scalpels, all made of bronze but at least a thousand years before their use in mainland Greece. The Minoans also used lightning rods on the temples built on high mountains. The palace at Knossos had indoor toilets which have not been improved upon until the present day. The Minoans enjoyed spectator sports and, if their artwork is a correct representation even had stadiums in which to enjoy them.

In Plutarch’s ‘Lives’, Theseus is the first hero mentioned. In keeping with Satan’s counterfeiting of the promise of the virgin birth of Christ in Genesis 3:15, Theseus, like Romulus, legendary founder of Rome, and so many other heroic figures of past

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mythology and history, including Alexander, was said to be the offspring of a human woman and a god. Satan’s lying deceptions are found interwoven throughout history and are not the subject of secret conspiracies for the truth of his falsehoods is written right on the surface for anyone who wants to see, to see, unless perhaps they suffer from the
blindness mentioned in 2 Corinthians 4:4 and the resultant delusions promised by God to the unbelieving evil world (Isaiah 66:4; 2 Thessalonians 2:11)?

At this point it might be worth mentioning an important event in Egyptian history, the invasion by the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings. Durant says that the Hyksos were just one of a series of nomadic peoples that conquered Egypt and were changed by the wealth and easy living of the conquered, then when they lost their tough, barbaric edge, they were defeated themselves. The Hyksos ended the Middle Kingdom era of Egyptian history. His statement that the Hyksos probably introduced the horse to Egypt is absurd on its face, as if the Egyptians had no prior contact with other Asian people or animals. Snell defines the period of the domination by the Shepherd Kings (we’ll see later that in Joseph’s time the common Egyptian detested shepherds while the ruling class welcomed them) as the Second Intermediate Period and dates it between 1786BC and 1558BC. Ussher, quoting ancient historian Eusebius quoting even more ancient historian Manetho, has them being defeated and leaving Egypt at least 30 years before the events of Genesis 26 while Dr. Floyd Jones has the Pharaoh who embraced Joseph later as being one of these Hyksos. As in the case of all conquerors or those who enslave others, the conqueror or enslaver usually adopts the culture of the conquered or the slave before the tables are turned. Bienkowski and Millard state that the Hyksos ruled the 15th dynasty between 1650 and 1550BC. Ussher has them expelled in 1825BC. Remember, barring any definitive dating that is not arguable or evidence which is subject to interpretation and controversy we can only conclude that the events described in this part of Genesis are occurring in the first half of the second millennium before Christ, somewhere between 1500 to 2000BC. The word, Hyksos, is a Greek derivation of an Egyptian phrase, meaning “rulers of foreign lands”.

Moving on past Jacob and Rebekah’s deception of Isaac and Esau, Laban’s deception of Jacob, and Jacob’s reunion with Esau in chapters 27 – 33, and passing over the ladder to heaven of chapter 28, which is the Lord Jesus Christ according to John 1:51, we come to the story of Joseph, which begins in Genesis, chapter 37. Joseph is sold into slavery and eventually winds up in the “employment” of an officer of Pharaoh. He winds up in prison which eventually results, in Chapter 41, in Joseph, now 30, as being second in command of the entire nation of Egypt, under the Pharaoh. The question many scholars ask if who was Joseph in the extra-biblical historical record of ancient Egypt? There are many beliefs as to his identity outside of the Biblical record. We know what God calls him but what did the ancient Egyptians call him? Verse 45 of chapter 41 says that the Pharaoh called him Zaphnathpaaneah, which, according to Strong’s concordance means “treasury of the glorious rest”.



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Durant would place Joseph’s life at around 1900BC but also implies he is only a mythical figure, the subject of poetic imagery. Most historians view the entire Bible in this light as what they hold as valuable in human history is in direct opposition to what God regards as of the utmost importance. Ussher places Joseph’s promotion at 1715BC which places him during the Hyksos domination of Egypt, as Floyd suggests.

According to the late Ron Wyatt, controversial and often ridiculed Biblical Archaeologist and the basis for Anchor Stone International at anchorstone.com, the identity of the biblical Joseph matches that of Imhotep, the vizier or prime minister of Pharaoh Djoser. This group reports on their website that Imhotep translated means the “voice of IM” or “I Am”. However, dating Imhotep to the building of the first pyramid creates a problem for traditional archaeology as there is a near 1,000 year discrepancy between Joseph’s sojourn in Egypt and the building of that pyramid.

The dating of Joseph’s influence in Egypt is certainly a topic of interest. The discovery of a canal and the extinct lake called the “Sea of Joseph” by the American engineer, F.C. Whitehouse, over a century ago and the inscriptions found in Egypt referring to the seven years of famine and the seven years of plenty are quite intriguing to say the least. The problems and controversies surrounding the various voices regarding the dating of ancient Egypt make this even more difficult to study. Egyptology and Biblical Archaeology are two of the most fascinating fields of the sciences dealing with the past. It is dangerous, however, to assume, without critical questioning, the stance of any one individual university or any one influential celebrity such as Flinders or Kenyon in regard to when things actually happened or if they happened at all. Many a person has lost their faith in the Biblical record over an assumption made by a science “celebrity” that was revealed by later discoveries to be wrong or a blatant falsehood. Before accepting any statement by someone outside of the Bible as being dogma please investigate for yourself. The so called “facts” of history can change with each new publication of a scientific journal and in the end it is only the Bible that you can count on as your final authority. It has been said that given enough time, science will catch up with the Bible. In saying this I do not mean to show disrespect for the scientific method. It is the best means we have of discovering the natural world, however, broad pronouncements and categorical statements about historical facts made with limited evidence and biased in favor of one theory or the other must be taken for what they are; conjecture.

Moving to China for a moment; it is at this time where the Shang Dynasty is supposed to sit in Chinese history. First, and I am speaking from Durant here, there is a period of legendary rulers clouded in obscurity and lost in the mists of time, then in the late third millennium according to traditional historians there began the reign of Fu Hsi, Shen Nung, the first Huang Ti, Yao, Shun, the Hsia Dynasty, Yu, Chieh Kuei, and then in the second half of the second millennium, the Shang. Remembering that the historical record can easily show, rather than consecutive rulers of a place, a list of rulers who reign concurrently, at the same time, you need to look critically at the way in which these reigns are dated. One belief of the origin of the Chinese was about the first man named

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P’an Ku, after working for 18,000 years to make the universe, finally accomplished the task in 2,229,000BC. As he worked his breath became the wind and the clouds, his voice became the thunder, his veins the rivers, his flesh the earth, his hair the grass and trees, his bones the metals, his sweat the rain, and the insects that clung to his body became the human race.

The earliest kings, the Chinese said, ruled 18,000 years each, and struggled hard to turn P’an Ku’s lice into civilized men. Before the arrival of these Celestial Emperors the people were supposedly like animals, eating raw flesh and knowing their mothers but not their fathers. Then came emperor Fu Hsi, who, with his queen, taught human beings marriage, music, writing, painting, fishing with nets, the domestication of animals, and the feeding of silkworms. He appointed Shen Nung upon his death, who introduced agriculture. Then Huang Ti, whose reign lasted only a century rather than thousands of years introduced the magnet and the wheel, built the first brick buildings, and the first observatory. Yao was such a good ruler that Confucius lamented that there was a golden age during his reign that China had fallen from over the centuries. Shun created the calendar and standardized weights and measures. Yu, a great engineer, mirrors the great embanker of Egypt fame who saves the Chinese from floods and establishes the Hsia or first civilized dynasty. The emperor, Chieh, makes 3,000 Chinese jump to their death in a lake of wine. Chou Hsin, inventor of chopsticks, brings the dynasty to an end. Western invaders founded the Chou dynasty which overthrew Chou Hsin. What is clear is that the feudal states that developed arose from isolated agricultural communities, each weak one being absorbed by a stronger neighbor until a handful fought for power. According to ancient tradition, before the Chou dynasty was the Shang. One of the Shang emperors, Wu Yi, was an atheist who defied the gods, blasphemed the spirit of heaven, and played chess with it, eventually being killed by a bolt of lightning. In keeping with Satan’s worldwide counterfeiting of the promise of the virgin birth of Christ in Genesis 3:15 the Jesuit missionaries were astonished to find in China the holy mother, Shing Moo, being pictured with a child in her arms and glory around her as if she had been painted by a Roman Catholic artist.

From Hislop’s ‘The Two Babylons’ we have; “The name of Shing Moo, applied by the Chinese to their "Holy Mother," compared with another name of the same goddess in another province of China, strongly favours the conclusion that Shing Moo is just a synonym for one of the well known names of the goddess-mother of Babylon. Gillespie (in his Land of Sinim) states that the Chinese goddess-mother, or "Queen of Heaven," in the province of Fuh-kien, is worshipped by seafaring people under the name of Ma Tsoopo. Now, "Ama Tzupah" signifies the "Gazing Mother"; and there is much reason to
believe that Shing Moo signifies the same; for Mu was one of the forms in which Mut or Maut, the name of the great mother, appeared in Egypt (BUNSEN'S Vocabulary); and Shngh, in Chaldee, signifies "to look" or "gaze."”




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It should of interest to compare the involvement of the “sons of God” with humankind in Genesis 6, and the worldwide legends of heavenly visitors giving special knowledge to people.

It is in this general period of time that the Aryan migrations and invasions of Dravidian India are said to begin. The Dravidian are the non-Indo-European inhabitants of India who now occupy the southern portion and Sri Lanka, which formerly was known as Ceylon. They Aryan invaders were closely related to Persians or Iranians today with regard to language. Very little is known of the warfare between the invaders and the dark-skinned early inhabitants. But, it was the synthesis of the Aryan and the Dravidian that produced the new Hindu civilization, after 1400BC, according to traditional historians.

It can be added that migration into South America and Oceania or the Pacific Islands begins in this time frame with a very limited historical record consisting of controversially dated ruins, human remains, pottery, and folklore. It will be a few hundred years before there is an historical record which we can study clearly. Australia will remain in the Stone Age until the European invasion and colonization thousands of years later.

It is by Joseph’s position of power in Egypt that the family of Jacob is able to survive yet another famine by taking up residence there. It is interesting also to note that Genesis begins with God, traces nearly half of human history, and ends with a coffin in Egypt, a land obsessed with death and the after-life. Petrie believed that they came into Egypt around 1650BC and left around 1220BC. Durant defers to him and says, in rejection of the Biblical record, that we don’t know if they entered as free men or slaves and like Westcott and Hort, the fathers of the modern Bible translation movement, believed that Moses was a mythical figure. Petrie suggests that they followed the path of the Hyksos, Egypt’s semitic invaders. Ussher has Jacob’s family moving to Egypt in 1706BC, using the strict Biblical record. Floyd, who gives a date of the Egyptian sojourn of 1780 to 1546BC, notes that the period under discussion is one of great obscurity in Egyptian history. After studying the works of L. Wood, J. Davis, M. Unger, Petrie, Breasted, Eerdmans, H.H. Rowley, Gardner, Hall, Harrison, W.F. Albright, Bunsen, J. Free, Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, and S. Schults, all noted Egyptologists and Bible scholars, and many quoted by everyone from Hislop to Durant, concludes that Joseph rose to prominence under a Hyksos king and Moses led the Jews out of Egypt under a native Egyptian king who would not have been so favorably disposed toward them.

The argument for a late sojourn and exodus based on the statement that they built the
treasure city of Rameses who did not rule until the 19th dynasty, according to some, is irrelevant in light of the use of the name, Rameses, before any Rameses ruled, in a burial painting of Amenhotep III of the 18th dynasty at least 60 years before the rule of any Rameses. In fact, Amosis, 16th century founder of the 18th dynasty bore the name of Rameses, meaning Son of Ra, probably as a throne name and perhaps representing a term much like Son of God, as Ra was the principal god of the Egyptians, the S-U-N.

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The residence of the family of Jacob in Egypt and the subsequent events of the story of the Exodus are hotly contested among traditional historians. Some regard the entire thing as a myth, while others say that there is no evidence either for or against. I have even read where some conjecture that it was the Jews who built the pyramids even though these structures are not mentioned by name in the scriptures. Moses’ identity in secular history is also one of debate and challenge. You will read some that say that the Egyptian woman who adopted the baby in the ark of bulrushes was the woman who eventually became Pharaoh herself, Hatshepshut. Not surprisingly, many archaeologists claim Moses never existed. The “fathers” of all modern Bible versions, the Anglican clerics, Westcott and Hort, also did not believe that Moses was anything but a mythological character. Moses is even thought of by some to have been an alternate name for the Egyptian pharaoh who commanded the worship of one god, Aton, the man who supposedly introduced monotheism, or the belief in one god, to the Egyptians, Akhenaton.

Nevertheless, there are so many gaps in our knowledge of ancient Egypt that basing your belief on the existence of a Biblical personage on whether or not some clue has been unearthed in an archaeological dig yet, is foolish to say the least and shortsighted at best. Belief in the Biblical record is much more certain and clear than relying on what has been found or will be found in an ancient, much robbed tomb or in an ancient garbage heap. Sooner or later, if you continue your education you will run into such works by unbelievers as Sigmund Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” designed to overthrow your faith. Freud will be mentioned in this course much later as one of the destroyers of western civilization but that is for much later.

According to Strong, Moses means “drawn”, as in “lifted out”. The scripture’s own built in definition in Exodus 2:10 agrees. There is no known secular record of his early life as an Egyptian prince outside of the much later recording by the Jewish traitor and historian, Josephus. As according to Kneisler there are approximately 80,000 flood stories in 72 languages there are also parallel stories concerning Moses’ birth and retrieval from the Nile. Satan counterfeited the birth of Moses in the account of the Akkadian king, Sargon, whose own mother allegedly saved him by hiding him in an ark of bulrushes as reported in Roux’s “Ancient Iraq”, written in 1964. Although you can find a few parallels to Biblical events in ancient myth all you have to do is to read these myths and read the Bible to see how fanciful and incomplete the myths are and how matter of fact, and reasonable the Biblical account is.

Ussher claims that Moses was born in 1571BC. Josephus calls the Egyptian princess who found him, Thermutis, as did Epiphanius and other chroniclers, according to Ussher. The next year, Cecrops, an Egyptian transported a colony of Egyptians to Greece. I mention this because I want to keep reminding you of the interaction between Greece and the superpowers of the Middle East at that time. According to Eusebius, but in opposition to Plutarch who insists on a more ancient origin, this is the basis for the founding of the city of Athens. Eusebius quotes another ancient historian, Castor. In spite of the claims of the writer of the modern book, “Not Out of Africa”, the Greeks themselves would later

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claim that they derived much of their science, philosophy, and religion from Egypt with key Greek historical celebrities even spending time in Egypt.

The Egyptian historian, Manetho, as quoted by Josephus, wrote that the Hyksos were removed from Egypt by Tethmosis, who was king of Thebes or upper Egypt, close to the Mediterranean Sea. This was in a place called Auaris. He had an army of 480,000 men. Unable to actually defeat the Hyksos, an agreement was made that they should leave Egypt. The chronicler Apion called this king Amosis in his lost work, ‘Egyptian Affairs’, quoted by Ussher, and also recorded by Justin Martyr in his ‘Exhortation to the Greeks’ and by Clement of Alexandria in his ‘Stromateis’.

Exodus 2 ends with God hearing the groaning of the Israelites who now were under a king who was not familiar with Joseph and who had no regard for them. The theory then is that Joseph came into Egypt under a Hyksos Pharaoh and Moses was raised by the family of a native Egyptian one. At this time, historians claim that Assyria was dominant on the other side of the Red Sea but that Canaan was ruled by independent towns or cities each with their own king but perhaps the Bible implies that Egypt was the superpower they called on when in trouble (Numbers 14:9). Canaanite religion was vile and degrading, the worst of the religions influenced by Satan, with temple prostitution, ritual child sacrifice, incest, and bestiality as common events although many of these things were common in religion from India to the Nile. The land that God had promised to Abraham was filled with the most wicked sin and depravity. The Jews were ready to leave Egypt and the land was ready to be cleansed of the evil that possessed it.

World History, Chapter Two, Revised

A World Divided
Cave-men and Vagabonds
Genesis 7 to Genesis 11 and the beginning of recorded history
Ancient Superpowers
Genesis 12 and problems in dating Egypt

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)? One of the books I would recommend reading is Alfred Rehwinkel’s “The Flood”.



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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.

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

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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.

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

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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. It is a highly controversial book, so read it critically. 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.

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

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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 along with Ussher’s calculations, 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 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

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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.

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.



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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.

Back in Genesis 11:1 the statement is made that the whole earth was of one language and one speech. Of the many different linguistic theories about the origins of language, this clear and simple statement would fall under the non-Biblical theory of the Proto-World Language, the existence of which is believed to have been discovered using the sciences of archaeogenetics (analysis of DNA in archaeological remains) by the phylogenetic (simply a reference to similarity of creatures biologically from an evolutionary perpsective) separation of all humans alive today, by studying mitochondrial DNA. While not accepting their dating of 200,000 years ago for this to have occurred we can see how some scientific theories agree with the Bible’s statement in this regard.

We will find, by studying those who studied history, that the problems associated with dating can be very confusing. Whether you are discussing Colin Renfrew, who is credited with coining the term “archaeogenetics”, or the famous Egyptologists (those who study ancient Egypt) such as Flinders Petrie or the archaeologists, Frederick Kenyon, and his daughter, Kathleen, you will find a wide disparity in dating Egypt, upon which all other Ancient Near Eastern cultures are dated.

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In verse 10 of chapter 12 of Genesis, we find Abram, who has now left Canaan, which he had been promised by God, to go into Egypt to be relieved due to a famine that was in the land. Here is the first instance of Egypt, later called “the iron furnace” (Deuteronomy 4:20), being a place where God’s people are nurtured and refreshed, although, later they are warned explicitly never to return there throughout the writings of the prophets. Ussher dated Abram’s sojourn in Egypt to 1921BC.

Finding out the name of who was actually ruling in Egypt at the time would be difficult as the date will vary widely depending upon whether or not you believe Champollion, Wilkinson, Boeck, Bunsen, Lepsius, Brugsch, Unger, Lieblein, Mariette, Lauth, Meyer, or any number of students of Egypt. The Encyclopedia Britannica said Amenhemet I, founder of the 12th dynasty, was pharaoh at that time reigning after a civil war. According to a strict literalist interpretation of the Bible, and according to Ussher, Mizraim or Menes, son of Ham, led his colony into Egypt about 2188BC. According to most traditionally dated chronologies from non-Biblical sources this would have had to have been around 4,000BC. The first verifiable person to the secular historian in Egypt’s history would be Imhotep, physician, architect, and chief advisor, to King Zoser around 3150BC, according to Durant.

Now, a word about the study of history in general and how to keep from falling into the trap into which many unbelieving historians fall. First, in any given country at any given time there can be more than one king presenting himself as the king of the entire country due to civil wars, dynastic power struggles, and invasions. For instance, history shows us that two kings can equally claim authority while neither one actually controls the entire country. Two dynasties might even run concurrent with each other in this case. Secondly, a king’s reign can be broken by revolt, invasion, or some other displacement as in the case of the more modern Vlad Tepes (Dracula) of Romania who reigned from Bucharest twice, separated by a few years. Thirdly, kings may adopt the name of a great hero or king of the past as their own to lend legitimacy or a sense of continuity and identification with a greater past to their reign such as various kings calling themselves Rameses, or even Henry or Charles or a Pope calling himself Benedict. Fourthly, the existence of foreign words or phrases in inscriptions can be misleading due to influence by such things as Greek mercenaries in ancient Egypt and Persia and the words they brought to those cultures which have confused modern, secular scholars in their dating of the book of Daniel. Foreign words and their derivation today are quite common in our language. Ultimately, an historian or archaeologist can only truthfully talk about what he has found, evidence which may be confusing or contradictory. The pronouncement in a
news article or a high school textbook that this or that is fact is not always an honest representation of conflicting evidence which has been unearthed. Your best option is to stick with the Biblical record whether you believe it represents world history to be 6,000, 10,000, or millions of years old.

As an example, we have the dating of the Great Pyramid. Everyone from Herodotus to Flinders Petrie has come up with different dates for its construction. I have read dates for

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its construction from after the Exodus of the Hebrews to 12,000BC. You can spend a lot of time just reading the debate on the dating of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. Interestingly, the word, pyramid, is not mentioned in the Bible unless you interpret the word, Migdol, or tower, in Exodus 14:2 as a reference to the Pyramids.

The ancient historians, Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, both said that in the early beginnings all Egypt was a sea. Herodotus says that in the reign of the first king, tradition held that the entire area of Lower Egypt or that closest to the Mediterranean was a marsh. Mizraim, Ham’s son, also comes down to us in inscriptions as Menes, the great embanker, who, according to Herodotus, claimed the land of Egypt by controlling the Nile as perhaps proudly proclaiming in Ezekiel 29:3. Even Durant concedes that at one time, the Nile Delta was undoubtedly a bay.

Creationists and Evolutionists alike describe a great sea in North Africa although they differ about the time of the existence of such a sea. Creationists state that after the flood there was a gradual drying out of a great deal of the earth and that many areas that are now desert were once wet. Evolutionists point out the great number of fossils, marine and otherwise, found under the desert ground of Egypt.

Another note about the study of history is pertinent here. Names found in history will vary a great deal for one person or place as you uncover writings in different languages. This is a great challenge for historians. For instance, the Islamic world of the era of the Crusades called the Byzantine Empire, Roma, due to it being the inheritor of the legacy of imperial Rome of the west, having been the eastern half of that empire. To them, Rome did not fall until 1453 when the Turks took Constantinople rather than 476 as our histories declare.

Let me make a couple of statements about the Sphinx, the lion with the human head which figures so prominently in our vision of the Great Pyramid of Khufu aka Cheops. Historians say that it must have been covered by sand for a long time because Herodotus, who recorded everything he saw and he saw practically everything, does not mention it.

Historians say it was built in or around 2500BC. Some legends of the Arabs say it was built before the Great Flood and others give it a extremely long ago date for an ancient civilization of as much as 12,000 years. Pharaoh Amenhotep II, in the middle of the second millennium BC said the Sphinx was older than the Pyramids. The “Inventory Stele” found by August Mariette in 1857 speaks of how Pharaoh Khufu or Cheops who is given credit for the Great Pyramid of Gizeh intended to excavate the already ancient Sphinx and restore it. In a research project by Mark Lehner conducted in the mid-1980’s Carbon 14 dating came up with dates of either 2746BC or 2086BC, take your pick. My pick will be the later date.

Durant dates the beginnings of Egyptian civilization at around 4,000BC whereas Ussher insists the march of Menes/Mizraim into Egypt to begin human life there after the

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flood as reported before at 2188BC. One of the ways he arrived at that date was by accepting the statement of Constatinus Manasses that Egypt existed as a state for 1663 years until Cambyses of Persia conquered it. The oldest known Egyptian building is the Step-Pyramid of Sakkara, a tomb. In fact, if Egypt were known for nothing else it would be known for its elaborate tombs and it is proper and fitting that the book of Genesis ends with the words, “in a coffin in Egypt.” Egypt was a civilization obsessed with death and the after life.

Traditional historians tell us that the first great king of Egypt, the tyrant and pyramid builder, Khufu, ruled around 2500BC. Obviously, the discrepancies in dating methods make such statements questionable. Herodotus calls him Cheops and says that he plunged Egypt into all kinds of wickedness and forced labor to build for himself, the results of which can be seen on any travel poster of Egypt. His successor and rival for building extravagance would be Khafre. They were excellent at building tombs. In the Great Pyramid attributed to Khufu/Cheops there are 2 and ½ million blocks, some of them weighing 150 tons, all of them averaging 2 and ½ tons, covering half million square feet area and rising nearly 500 feet in the air. A scientist named Bauval noticed that the three pyramids on the Giza plateau are lined up perfectly with the belt of the constellation, the hunter Orion, who ancient mythologists also knew as Nimrod, the great corrupter of mankind and rebel against God. Virginia Trimble and Alexander Badawy first noticed that the “air” shafts in the King’s pyramid point towards Orion. Clive Ross disputes this and claims that the three pyramids correspond to the size relationship between Mars, Venus, Earth, and Mercury. All of this in spite of no one finding one shred of evidence on the Giza plateau that the ancient Egyptians knew anything spectacular about astronomy.

Another Pharaoh of note was the one that traditional historians call Pepi II. His reign of 94 years, traditionally dated in the middle of the third millennium BC, is the longest reign
in Egypt’s history. Egypt’s early history is divided into the “Old Kingdom” and the “Middle Kingdom” but these are designations given by modern Egyptologists, not the ancient Egyptians themselves. In addition, Egyptian history is divided into dynasties, often as if one dynasty followed another rather than there being competing dynasties ruling the areas they could control at the same time which is always a possibility. The First Dynasty begins the Old Kingdom, the alleged pyramid builder Khufu would be from the Fourth Dynasty, Pepi II would be from the Sixth Dynasty, after that there is supposedly an intermediate period (we know that means that evidence has been found that upsets the continuity of the scholar’s dating preconceptions), then the Eighth and Ninth Dynasties through the Eleventh finish the Old Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom begins about the time, in traditional dating systems, that Ussher has Egypt being discovered after the Flood. There really is a great deal of controversy regarding the dates in question.

After the Twelfth Dynasty there is a second intermediate period of lost information. The Fifteenth Dynasty was ruled by foreign invaders, the Hyksos. The New Kingdom begins with the Eighteenth Dynasty. This is considered to be Egypt’s most important

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ancient dynasty and is where we find Tutankhamen listed. The third intermediate period finds Egypt ruled by priests. The Twenty Second Dynasty was Libyan. The Twenty Fifth dynasty begins the Late Kingdom and traditional dating coincides with the rise of Babylon, Assyria, and finally the Twenty Seventh is a Persian dynasty.

The Greco-Roman era begins with the conqueror, Alexander, who had himself declared “the son of God” while in Egypt to bolster his authority. The Roman Empire finishes Egypt as an independent power. However, Egypt never regained its former glory after the Persian invasion. Now, I am not giving you these dynastic or kingdom designations because I believe they are absolute or even completely reliable but to be historically literate you must at least be aware of the way they are conceived in the mind of the educators you will meet in college.

The common Egyptians lived and died based upon the seasonal flooding of the Nile River for growing crops and for transportation of those crops. Durant says that Egypt proper had no minerals and mining was done in conquered nations such as Nubia. The priests of the Egyptian gods were very powerful and along with the Pharaoh and the nobles kept order. They were responsible for the oldest public education system of which we know in temple schools. The Pharaoh himself was the highest authority to appeal to with regard to disputes, a sort of ancient Supreme Court. Royal incest was common, to keep dynastic power intact, but was not so among the common people. There was a high level of literature and personal life included an extensive possession of cosmetics and things we might even recognize. Egyptian medicine reached a great level of sophistication, as well, and the ancient Egyptians were performing medical routines that we only rediscovered little more than a hundred years ago.

In the period of time around Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt, the Egyptians were using a system of geometry, a numeral system, and tables of values for fractions. Their medical remedies are documented in papyrus fragments. Topics included medicine for arthritis, hookworm infection, and surgery for head injuries. By now, we have evidence that maps of cities and countries became useful tools in Mesopotamia where windmills were being used for irrigation and the Babylonians whom we will discuss more at length momentarily were using multiplication tables and compiling records of celestial observations, including star logs, as well as discovering the Pythagorean Theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras. The Sumerians developed squares and roots, cubes and cube roots, and quadratic equations. They also calculated an approximate value for Pi. Perhaps all of these things were just now being invented or rediscovered from the pre-flood civilization. In any event, Egypt was using glass ornaments, putting on plays in temples (consider this), and playing flutes, stringed lyres from Asia, and drums from Africa. More information about these ancient inventions can be found in “The Timeline Book of Science” by George Ochoa and Melinda Corey, as well as their “The Timeline Book of Arts”, printed in 1995 by Stonesong Press.



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Other things that are attributed to discovery by the Egyptians of that era were the use of monkeys to claim fruit from trees, beekeeping; hives and all, a sophisticated navy with large plank boats, canals to bypass impassable areas of the Nile though not as extensive as the Sumerians, water clocks, sophisticated linen manufacture for clothing, small bronze rings that could be weighed and hung onto larger bronze rings for money, basic dentistry, beer brewing, and apparently the use of tobacco as evidence from the forensics work done on the body of Ramses II would indicate. I say that with apologies to Sir Walter Raleigh, who is credited with introducing that plant to Europe from America, according to traditional historians. Much more evidence can be found in the book “Ancient Inventions” by Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ballantine Books, 1994. My point in bringing all of this up is to present to you the image of a very sophisticated and advanced civilization and society that nurtured the human spiritual ancestor of the Jews several hundred years before his descendants moved there en masse in response to another famine.

The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, edited by Trevor Dupuy, Harper Collins publishers, 4th edition, 1994, gives an image of the power and might of the Egyptian nation militarily with well trained and professional standing armies maintained by the Pharaoh supported by foreign mercenaries, many of whom as in other ancient near eastern countries, over time, came from the Greek city-states.

The scholars of Egypt were mostly priests who enjoyed the comfort and security of the temples, much like our tenured professors enjoy the comfort and security of our many colleges and universities as well as the high esteem in which educated men are held in our country. I would warn you, though, that education without salvation equals damnation, as a wise evangelist once said. These priests laid the foundations for Egyptian science which the Greeks confessed was the source of most of their knowledge. Egyptian legends credited their learning as having originated with the god, Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. We have already discussed that the sons of God who “left their first estate” and came to earth to interact with men as well as Satan himself, were credited with giving knowledge to mankind. The Greeks celebrated the god, Thoth, under the name of Hermes Trismegistus or Hermes (Mercury) thrice-great. He is credited with writing 36,000 volumes on science and learning for the Egyptians by the historian, Manetho. The glory of Egyptian science was medicine and they were masters at embalming the dead. The Ebers Papyrus reveals their detailed knowledge of the circulatory system. However, among the common people, amulets were more popular than medicine, according to traditional historians, as most disease was thought to be the result of possession by devils. They believed also that many diseases resulted from overeating. As one ancient saying goes, “we live on 1/4th of what we eat, our doctors live on the rest”.

The oldest worship in Egypt was of the moon god but the sun was the most important entity in their pantheon of gods. He is known as Ra or Re. Sun worship was prevalent in the ancient cultures around the earth.


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You would never know by looking at the waste today that was once Babylonia that you were looking at the civilization that appears to have almost created astronomy, made great strides in medicine, made language a science, and passed onto the Arabs scientific and architectural knowledge. Standing near the Tigris and Euphrates today you would be hard pressed to believe you were looking at the rivers that watered Sumeria, Akkad, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Babylonia was, some historians believe, the by-product of the union of the Sumerian and Akkadian. Babylon became in time the master of all of lower Mesopotamia. Hammurabi is counted by traditional historians as the first great lawgiver and conqueror of note. Later, we will see how some Bible students believe that Amraphel, king of Shinar, in Genesis 14 was this Hammurabi. Hammurabi is given credit for the writing of a code upon which all Babylonian law was based. At least, we are often told this in high school and college. However, according to ancient near eastern expert, Daniel Snell, as well as Bienkowski and Millard in their dictionary of the ancient near east, it was not really a code and was “not intended to particularly to be a collection of all kinds of provisions that were to be enforced in Hammurapi’s domains, neither was it a reform of the various city legal systems that Hammurapi united politically.” (Life in the Ancient Near East, page 60). The so-called code is found on one stone monument found at Susa and was a model of his idea of justice but there is no evidence anywhere that this code was ever enforced as law by any court (Dictionary of the Ancient Near East, page 139). One side of the monument shows the king receiving the code from Shamash, the sun-god. The instructions are secular but Hammurabi was smart enough to couch them with the authority of the gods, according to Durant. The Ur, the Babylonia that Abram left, represented a pitch of civilization which has never been equaled or surpassed in the Middle East according to Christopher Dawson, in his book, Enquiries into Religion and Culture, although many would argue that Persia under Xerxes I would refute that conjecture. The constant competition between Egypt and Babylon and the occasional invasions by barbarians (Hyksos in Egypt and Kassites in Babylon, for example) is revealed in the Amarna Letters in which the puppet kings of Babylon and Syria beg Egypt for aid against rebel invaders.

The Babylonians worshipped Ishtar, goddess of immigrants and liberty, known as Astarte to the Greeks, the prototype of Aphrodite, and the Roman Venus, the same as the Egyptian Isis, Ashtoreth to the Jews, and also Demeter, Minerva, Diana, with the Catholic Mary eventually assuming her position as “The Virgin”, “The Holy Virgin”, “The Virgin Mother”, “Queen of Heaven”, and “The Mother of God”.

Sacred prostitution was as vital a part of Babylonian religion as it was of Canaanite/Phoenician. Herodotus reports that here as in Phoenicia and elsewhere “every native woman was obliged to, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Venus, and have intercourse with some stranger” (Durant, page 245). With regard to women, their level of rights was lower than in Egypt or Rome but equal to that of classic Greece or medieval Europe. Among the upper classes of women, they were confined to a certain area of the

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house and were not permitted out without a chaperone in a very similar situation to Islam today.

Egypt was known for looking down on Babylon as an inferior culture and it is true that Babylon lacked the sophistication of Egypt. As Babylon eventually degenerated young men dyed and curled their hair, and perfumed their flesh and, as Herodotus declared, every man in his poverty prostituted his own daughters for money. The wealthier a civilization becomes, the more morally bankrupt it becomes.

Babylonia made maps of cities, such as Nippur, had knowledge of the sexuality of plants (something only rediscovered in 1694), played music on Lutes, used clay letters, clay envelopes and a postal system, and wrote in cuneiform script, a type of pictogram. They also developed positional notation based on the number 60. Their temple music changed from simple chanted hymns to a complete liturgical service, with five to twenty seven selections dispersed with instrumental music. Glass was used to form objects and vessels and as a glaze for pottery. The Babylonia, the Ur, of Abram’s age was not a primitive society but a rich cosmopolitan culture that traded for goods from India to Egypt and possibly beyond.

Durant gives us a further warning, though, in our study of history. He says on page 259 of his first volume on the Story of Civilization that “reconstruction of the whole from a part is hazardous in history, and the writing of history is the reconstruction of the whole from a part.” I would add, once again, to stick to God’s inspired word for your absolute standard of infallible truth, not any historian’s, including mine, feeble efforts.

The last superpower I will deal with briefly is Assyria, which developed into a formidable fighting force and is sometimes referred to as a type of Nazi Germany where loyalty to the state was the ultimate religion and where all other ethnic groups were mere fodder for displaying one’s warlike attributes. Assyria’s main god was Asshur, builder of Nineveh, Rehoboth, and Calah, and son of Shem. His worship was eventually integrated in with the Sumerian Enlil. Assyria grew out of the cities mentioned and the name of Shem’s son, although its predominant racial group may have been from a mixture of Ham and Shem. Nina, a version of Ishtar, was also worshipped. Nineveh eventually became home to over 300,000 people. The Assyrians took their common language and arts from
Sumeria and as most warlike nations were not particularly inventive on their own outside of vehicles made for war. At the time of Abram’s visit to Egypt in Genesis, chapter 12, they were developing into a fierce nation with which everyone would one day have to contend.

Finally, something should be said about the weapons of war these nations used in order to fight with each other. The axe, the mace, the dagger, and finally the sword were added to the spear and the bow and arrow for warfare and hunting. The chariot was a small cart, usually light weight, generally two wheeled with sometimes more, sometimes armored,


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and sometimes with sharp blades projecting from the axles, and drawn by armored horses. Sometimes you fought from them and sometimes you dismounted and fought. An
apparent Sumerian invention, the chariot was developed to its supreme value by the Assyrians, with light chariots for archers, and heavier chariots for up to four spearmen. I personally believe that cavalry developed from the string of mounted horsemen that would naturally have had to accompany the chariot as a source of replacement horses for those killed in battle. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that if I wanted to disable a chariot, killing the horses pulling it would be much easier than killing its occupants who were shooting at you. This appears to be clear from Biblical accounts of David and Solomon’s own military and their contact with the military machine of their neighbors.

Next, Abram leaves Egypt and travels to Canaan.

World History, Chapter One, Revised

Of ape-men and Gamma Ray Bursts, gods and monsters before the Great Flood


“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1

This first verse denies atheism. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” (Psalm 14:1).

The majority of modern scientists teach that all matter resided in a singularity, the size of a period in a sentence. This entity, containing all light, matter, and energy that there is, violently exploded and the universe has been expanding ever since. This is called the Big Bang* and is highly theoretical and not without detractors as some ask questions like, “where did the singularity come from” and “if empty space is part of the universe then what about the empty space just ahead of the explosion or a trillion miles in front of it?”. (Q is for Quantum, An Encyclopedia of Particle Physics, by John Gribbin, The Free Press, 1998).

Medieval Kabbalists, believers in an occult form of Judaism, believed that in the beginning God filled the universe, then withdrew from it, leaving something the size of a mustard seed, which contained all light, energy, and matter, and exploded, creating what we now know as the universe. The modern Big Bang theory in an oversimplified form sounds a lot like this occultic belief.

As quoted in the book, “The Whole Shebang, A State of the Universe(s) Report, by Timothy Ferris, Simon & Schuster, 1997”, astronomer Stuart Boyer admits, “Ultimately, the origin of the universe is, and always will be, a mystery”. I would suggest he read Genesis 1:1. That should help.

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2). Because the Hebrew word for “without form”, transliterated Tohuw, is translated as “ in vain” in Isaiah 45:18 and it is said he didn’t create it that way, some people believe there is a large gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, allowing for millions and millions of years, dinosaurs, ape-men and the like. The main problem with this theory is that there is the problem of death entering the world with Adam’s sin (Romans 5:12), not before. The counter to this is that the word “world” in that verse, is “Kosmos” referring to the world system, however, this is stretching the clear and literal meaning of the text. Anglican Archbishop Ussher calculated backwards from the Bible and other sources and came to a date of 4004 BC for creation or 6000 years ago. The current Hebrew year is 5770. The Hebrew year begins in the Autumn while the Hebrew day begins in the evening and 5770 began on September 18, 2009.

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3). As God did not create the Sun and the stars until the fourth day most scientists and many Christians scoff

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at this verse, claiming that, if they believe the verse at all, that there was a cloud cover over the earth blocking out the sun. But, not wanting to call the Biblical text a lie, let me just say that since 1967 a phenomenon known as Gamma Ray Bursts has been known in which a burst of light brighter than all of the universe’s suns combined lasts for a few seconds at random intervals each day. This is not to say that these bursts of high energy radiation explain God’s light but to say that there are sources of light not from the stars (although the basis for these bursts is theoretical, one theory is that they come from collapsing stars). Light being produced by sound passing through water is called sonoluminescence.

“4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Genesis 1:4-5). Notice the beginning of the first day was in the evening and that this refers to a normal day consisting of evening and morning. Another popular theory is that the “days” of creation were ages of billions of years. This so-called “Day-Age” theory has the problem of the reference to “evening and morning” and the fact that the reference is of “Day” versus “Night”.

“6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” Notice this day is not called good? (Ephesians 6:10-13; Isaiah 24:21; Job 41:31, 32 if referring to outer space).

The idea of the universe or outer space being a division between water in space and water on earth is made all the more interesting by the fact that, according to astronomers there is a large water vapor “factory” in the Orion Nebula (Job 9:9; 38:31; Amos 5:8) and Cornell University reported in the April 10, 1998 edition of Science Daily that it produced enough water to fill the earth’s oceans 60 times each day.

“9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”

Modern science dates the earth at approximately 4.5 billion years old and the universe at about 15 billion years. The earth’s date is figured most significantly by radiometric dating which estimate the age of rocks using calculations based on the decay rates of radioactive elements such as uranium, strontium, and potassium. Oversimplifying the problems for this discussion, let me just say that there are many anomalies with dates differing between methods of dating of hundreds of millions of years and even the most
enthusiastic believers in radiometric dating do not claim it’s a perfect way to obtain age estimates. I recommend the website for the Institute for Creation Research or icr.org.



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Another thing to note is the prevalent theory, that complements the Genesis account, that no matter when the earth was formed it did contain one super-continent called Rodinia, consisting of Gondwanaland, Euramerica, and Siberia, which then the theorists say drifted apart and came together again in another super-continent called Pangea, which then drifted apart again all within the span of a few hundred million years give or take a few hundred million years. This information was gleaned from Palaeos.com and ecology.com online.

“11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.”

Grasses include wheat, rice, corn, and other grains such as millet and rye according to the Washington State University website. Fruits would include apples, citrus fruits, melons, etc.
“14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. “
The stars and other objects in the universe are created in their current positions and distance which over rules using distance as age based on the Big Bang expansion. The Static Universe theory better fits observational data than the Big Bang according to T.C. Van Flandern of the US Naval Observatory and V. S. Troitskii from the Radiophysical Research Institute in Gorky, Russia.
“20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.”
Life from water is a no-brainer, even for a traditional modern scientist. The Hebrew word for “kind” transliterated as “Meen” is not a species as in a type of eagle but a more broad categorization such as a “Family” for example. The belief that creatures were not

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created but evolved from lower life forms, which is against the Bible, was introduced by the Greek philosopher, Anaximander* around 520 BC. (*‘Does God Believe in Atheists?’ by John Blanchard, Evangelical Press, 2000.) Evolution of life is a concept, although stated differently than the modern theory, in the Indian religion of Hinduism. In fact, in the Rig Veda (the Veda’s are ancient Hindu religious texts), the origin of all life comes from a cosmic egg, sounding similar to the Kabbala’s mustard seed and the Big Bang theory’s Singularity. Traditional modern scientists hold to life on earth either happening by chance on earth by a random mix of the vital elements for life over a long period of time or by the process of Panspermia, having been transported here on the solar winds or by meteorites from another planet.
Frances Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA helix, in ‘Life Itself: It’s Origin and Nature’, believes that it would have been mathematically impossible for life to have happened on earth by chance and that it must have come from somewhere else. However, geologist, astrobiologist, and paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer and astrobiologist and NASA scientist Don Brownlee in their book, ‘Rare Earth’, state that the Earth is so unique that it is unlikely that life, as we know it, could exist anywhere else. With so many conflicting theories on the origin of life with so few facts to back them up, what prevents us from accepting the Bible by faith, as our final authority rather than the musings of Frances Crick, Peter Ward or any number of other scientists? If life could not have happened here by chance and it most likely didn’t happen anywhere else by chance then what do they have left? Nothing.
This brings to mind the problem that science has with what keeps the universe together. Since they believe that mass is the basis for gravity they have found that there is not enough mass in the universe to keep it from disintegrating, according to their theories. Now, we know that the universe is held together by the Lord Jesus Christ (Colossians 1:16, 17). However, the scientist theorizes that there must be an invisible element called “Dark Matter”, which they say, according to ‘Q is for Quantum’, referenced beforehand, “is revealed by its gravitational influence on the bright stuff”. I would counter this with saying that the Lord Jesus Christ is revealed by His influence on the bright stuff, Mr. Bright Stuff.
“24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
Cattle, in the scriptures, refers to any domesticated livestock, not just beef cows but also sheep (Genesis 30:32). Once again, things do not change families or order. Dinosaurs, contrary to National Geographic’s fantasy in its November 1999 “Feathers for T. Rex” article by Christopher Sloan, did not become birds. The Smithsonian Institution vigorously protested that assertion in an open letter, a copy of which you can read on the net.

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“26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
Note, that here in verse 29, as in verse 12, “herb yielding seed” is mentioned as part of the original diet, not only of mankind but of other creatures as well. Herbaceous plants would include vegetables and legumes (beans) which are high in protein.
Traditional, modern science does not believe God created man. It believes that man evolved through several stages of development through “ape-like” creatures with names such as Australopithecine, Homo Erectus, Cro-magnon, Homo Habilis. For instance, recently, in Time Magazine, the same science celebrity who trumpeted his theory that whales and hippos have the same ancestor, which was a rip-off of another wild National Geographic story, Michel Brunet, claimed to have found the oldest pre-hominid skull in Africa, with a date of 7 million years. He was on the cover of Time. However, Brigitte Senut, of the Natural History Museum in Paris, explained that it was only the skull of a female gorilla. In fact, evidence has shown in virtually every case the bones found, declared to be that of some primitive form of ape-like ancestor of humans or near human is either the remains of an actual ape or of a variant of a human being contemporary with modern humans. These particular theories, that we have Neanderthals living among us, aren’t given much authority in the press.
Recently, it was stated that genetic studies had shown that we are not related to Neanderthals at all but the numbers given to prove that declaration were said by other scientists to be less than the variation between modern Chimpanzee groups that, after all, were still Chimpanzees. A great deal has been said about how apes have 98% of the DNA we do, and of how they are genetically similar to us. But, genetics teaches us that it is the expression of genes, not just their presence, which determines differences. After all, the London Telegraph, in August of 2003, reported an article from the science journal, Nature, that declared that we are even more closely related to the Swedish Mud Worm. So what?

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Let’s proceed to Genesis, chapter 2. “1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. 3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
Notice that “day” in verse 4 stands for a period of time. Notice, also that the system that is in place today of rain, evaporation, rain did not exist as such in the beginning. Man is formed out of the dust of the earth and God, not only creates him but gives him life directly by breathing into him. Compare this to John 20:22-23 when he gave those specific apostles authority while they were on the earth to carry out their mission.
Genesis 2:8-15 gives us the location of the Garden of Eden, which was lost after the Fall and the Flood. It also gives us the day to day job of the first man. Verses 16 to 17 give us the only stated restriction upon the man. Verses 18 to 25 reveal a very important concept in history, that the power to name was power of dominion over creation. This section finally ends with the creation of woman, the only creature not made out of dirt, and with the state of apparent innocence of the first couple.
Not speaking directly about the history of mankind but speaking directly to what eventually was to happen to mankind is the history given in Isaiah 14:12-14 and in Ezekiel 28:12-15 and chapter 31 as prophecy about contemporary tyrants points out how they are similar to Satan.
At this point it might be helpful to talk a little more about the current view of the majority of modern scientists with regard to evolution. One of the lynchpins of modern dating methods is the method known as Carbon 14 or radio carbon dating. Conventional radio carbon dating does not take into account specific differences between the activities of different carbon reservoirs. Natural variations in the amount of carbon brought on by such things as volcanic activity and variations caused by human interaction with the environment in regard to everything from atom bomb testing to pollution in the industrial age affect dating. Tree rings have been used to date things back as far as 8,000 years, according to scientists but tree rings are affected by the growing conditions around the tree, its location, and its interactions with catastrophe. To simplify a very complicated subject, let me just point out that modern manmade objects have given off dates of

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hundreds of millions of years and more importantly, modern objects such as cups have been found embedded in coal and other deposits that dated to the millions of years.
At this point a brief description of the scientific method as opposed to “science, falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20) might be in order. The scientific method, which true science is, is a method or way of finding things out that has to do with observation, experiment-tation, and then being able to reproduce the results of these experiments independently. As the atheist historian, Will Durant, said, “all theories of origins are pure conjecture”, so called scientific theories about the early earth and universe are more conjecture and guesswork than they are fact. Science can not reveal God by experimentation or observation because God is not the subject of experimentation but of revelation as He chooses to reveal himself as He will.
With regard to evolution let me quote the British Museum of Natural History’s former senior paleontologist Colin Patterson; “Ninetenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views. In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of the species.” (quoted in “Does God Believe in Atheists?, page 114) I will now read some other quotes about evolution.
“Neo-Darwinism has failed as an evolutionary theory that can explain the origin of species, understood as organisms of distinctive form and behaviour. In other words, it is not an adequate theory of evolution. What it does provide is a partial theory of adaptation, or microevolution (small- scale adaptive changes in organisms).” Brian
Goodwin, Professor of Biology, Open University, UK, “Neo-Darwinism has failed
as an evolutionary theory,” The Times Higher Education Supplement, May 19, 1995

“Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth- bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of `paleobabble’ is going to change that.” Dr. J. Alan Feduccia, Prof. Avian Evolution and world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina. Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms by V. Morell, Science 259(5096):764–65, 5 February 1993.
“One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.” Hubert P. Yockey, “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 67, p. 398.

“The older textbooks on evolution make much of the idea of homology, pointing out the obvious resemblances between the skeletons of the limbs of different animals. Thus the ‘pentadactyl’ [five bone] limb pattern is found in the arm of a man, the wing of a bird, and flipper of a whale, and this is held to indicate their common origin. Now if these various structures were transmitted by the same gene couples, varied from time to time

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by mutations and acted upon by environmental selection, the theory would make good sense. Unfortunately this is not the case. Homologous organs are now known to be produced by totally different gene complexes in the different species. The concept of homology in terms of similar genes handed on from a common ancestor has broken down.” William Fix, The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1984, p. 189.

“The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed.” George Gaylord Simpson, Temp. and Mode in Evolution (NY: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 105–106.

“What has closed the doors of the Academy to Mr. Darwin is that the science of those of his books which have made his chief title to fame-the ‘Origin of Species,’ and still more the ‘Descent of Man,’ is not science, but a mass of assertions and absolutely gratuitous hypotheses, often evidently fallacious. This kind of publication and these theories are a bad example, which a body that respects itself cannot encourage.” On why the Zoological Section of the French Institute denied Darwin’s membership in 1872. “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, D. Appleton and Co., London, 2:400, footnote, 1911”.

“Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a clue either–despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem.‘In the beginning,’ they will say, ‘there was nothing–no time, space, matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which...’ Whoa! Stop right there. You see what I mean? First there is nothing, then there is something. And the cosmologists try to bridge the two with a quantum flutter, a tremor of uncertainty that sparks it all off. Then they are off and away and before you know it, they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats.” Dr. D. Darling, “On creating something from nothing,” New Scientist, Vol 151, No. 2047, 14 September 1996, p.49.

“[The theory of evolution] forms a satisfactory faith on which to base our interpret-tation of nature.” L. Harrison Matthews,Introduction to ‘Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life’, p. xxii (1977 edition).

“Karl Popper warns of a danger: ‘A theory, even a scientific theory, may become an intellectual fashion, a substitute for religion, an entrenched dogma.’ This has certainly been true of evolutionary theory.” Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist. British Museum of Natural History, London. Evolution (1977), p. 150.



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“Evolution (as theory) is indeed ‘a conglomerate idea consisting of conflicting hypotheses’, and I and my colleagues teach it as such.” Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University, “Darwinism Defined: The Difference Between Fact and Theory,” Discover, January 1987, p65).

“The driving force behind Darwin’s theory of origins was blatant racism, not science. Remember, the evidence that Darwin was a racist is easily discovered, he did not hide it. It can be seen in the subtitle selected for his ‘The Origin of Species’. The words he chose to describe his effort were: ‘The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life’. That should be enough for anyone. Darwin was out to prove the superiority of the white race over the black. That goal was at the core of his stated thesis! He had an agenda, and that agenda was not scientific.”

“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of Evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.” Sir Fred Hoyle, Respected British physicist and astronomer.

“The irony is devastating. The main purpose of Darwinism was to drive every last trace of an incredible God from biology. But the theory replaces God with an even more incredible deity— omnipotent chance.” T. Rosazak, Unfinished Animal (1975), pp. 101-102.

“Not one change of species into another is on record....we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.” Charles Darwin

“We still do not know the mechanics of evolution in spite of the over-confident claims in some quarters, nor are we likely to make further progress in this by the classical methods of paleontology or biology; and we shall certainly not advance matters by jumping upand down shrilling, `Darwin is god and I, So-and-so, am his prophet.’” Errol White, Proceedings of the Linnean Society, London, 177:8 (1966).
“In any confrontation [with creationists], you should be prepared to show that evolution is scientific, not that it is correct...One need not discuss fossils, intermediate forms, or probabilities of mutation. These are incidental. The question is, what is scientific, and what is religious. Therefore, if you must confront the creationists, we suggest you discuss the nature of science, the kind of knowledge it can provide,
and the kind it cannot provide.” American Journal of Scientific Anthropology,
Article in entitled ‘A Recommendation to the Association Concerning Creation,’ Volume 2, 1983, 457-458.

“I have always been slightly suspicious of the theory of evolution because of its ability to account for any property of living beings (the long neck of the giraffe, for example).

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I have therefore tried to see whether biological discoveries over the last thirty years or so fit in with Darwin’s theory. I do not think that they do. To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all.” H. Lipson, “A Physicist Looks at Evolution,” Physics Bulletin, 31 (1980), p. 138.

“We have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not.” Niles Eldredge, Chairman and Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural History, “Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria,” Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p144).

“Evidence from fossils now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school. The missing link between man and the apes is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures. In the fossil record, missing links are the rule. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated.” Newsweek,
November 3, 1980.
“Darwinism is a creed not only with scientists committed to document the all-purpose role of natural selection. It is a creed with masses of people who have at best a vague notion of the mechanism of evolution as proposed by Darwin, let alone as further
complicated by his successors. Clearly, the appeal cannot be that of a scientific truth but of a philosophical belief which is not difficult to identify. Darwinism is a belief in the meaninglessness of existence.” R. Kirk, “The Rediscovery of Creation,” in National Review, (May 27, 1983), p. 641.

“The fact that a theory [evolution] so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard’ science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds.” Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Biologist.

“A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp ... moreover, for the most part these ‘experts’ have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on scientific grounds, and in some
instances, regretfully. The evolutionist thesis has become more stringently unthinkable
than ever before.” Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D. physicist and mathematician

“So heated is the debate that one Darwinian says there are times when he thinks about going into a field with more intellectual honesty: the used-car business.” Sharon Begley,
“Science Contra Darwin,” Newsweek, April 8, 1985, p. 80.

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Since this is not a course on Bible doctrine but on history I will only touch briefly on the fall of man and woman in Genesis 3. There are two very key verses from an historical point of view. The first if verse 15 and the second is verse 24. Satan’s attempt to counterfeit the prophecy of the virgin birth of the Messiah in verse 15 is at the root of virtually all of the earth’s religions in a prideful and vain attempt to thwart the last part of the verse.
Speaking to Satan, the pre-incarnate Jesus Christ, the living Word, and God, says: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
First, it must be noted that originally, according to Bienkowski and Millard’s “Dictionary of the Ancient Near East”, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, the goddess, Ishtar, who plays an extremely important role in history as a manifestation of Satan himself, was portrayed as a male deity in Venus, as the morning star, and , as the evening star, a goddess. This devil went on to become the biblical Ashtoreth. Finally, thousands of years later, in the Luciferian Madame Blavatsky’s “The Secret Doctrine” she/he/it is called “Lucifer, as Christ, the bright and morning Star;” (page 540, Volume 2).

The mother and child motif of ancient religion after the flood can not be dismissed if we are to understand history as it is tied to the Bible. Here, from Alexander Hislop’s “The Two Babylons” (chapter 2, section 2) we have this eye opening quote:

“The Babylonians, in their popular religion, supremely worshipped a Goddess Mother and a Son, who was represented in pictures and in images as an infant or child in his mother’s arms. From Babylon, this worship of the Mother and the Child spread to the ends of the earth. In Egypt, the Mother and the Child were worshipped under the names of Isis and Osiris. In India, even to this day, as Isi and Iswara; in Asia, as Cybele and Deoius; in Pagan Rome, as Fortuna and Jupiter-puer, or Jupiter, the boy; in Greece, as Ceres, the Great Mother, with the babe at her breast, or as Irene, the goddess of Peace, with the boy Plutus in her arms; and even in Thibet, in China, and Japan, the Jesuit missionaries were astronished to find the counterpart of Madonna and her child as devoutly worshipped as in Papal Rome itself; Shing Moo, the Holy Mother in China, being represented with a child in her arms, and a glory around her, exactly as if a Roman Catholic artist had been employed to set her up.”

Verse 24, which has to do with man being permanently kicked out of Eden, brings to mind the fact that mankind has futilely spent a great deal of time trying to get back to Eden. Much of history has to do with attempting to make the earth a paradise, for one person or a group of people, and slaughtering countless millions in that effort.




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For a moment, let’s go back to verse 20 of chapter 3. Eve, the mother of all living, is mentioned in modern genetic theories. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia:
“A comparison of the mitochondrial DNA of humans from many races and regions suggests that all of these DNA sequences have evolved molecularly from a common ancestor sequence. Under the assumption that an individual inherits mitochondria only from one’s mother, this finding implies that all living humans have a female line of descent from a woman whom researchers have dubbed Mitochondrial Eve. Based on the molecular clock technique of correlating elapsed time with observed genetic drift, Eve is believed to have lived about 150,000 years ago. Phylogeny suggests she lived in Africa.” S. Paabo, Science 268, 1141 (1995) & R.L. Dorit, H. Akashi, W. Gilbert, Science 268, 1183 (1995) reported a similar finding with regard to men, in which 38 men from all over the world were discovered to have, after examining over 27,000 base pairs of genes, identical genetic sequences. They call this supposed common ancestor of all mankind, emerging out of Africa, Adam, believe it or not.
More recently (1998), a study of 67 men, as reported in Human Molecular Genetics brought the supposed origin of modern man closer than what these earlier studies suggested from 188,000 to 150,000 years down to a possible 55,000. Keep trying, Sparky, is all I can say.
Finally, the size of the human brain alone, and its intense consumption of 60% of the body’s available energy, which is way out of proportion with other animals, is a problem for evolutionists. Gibbons, EVOLUTION: Solving the Brain’s Energy Crisis, Science 1998 280: 1345-1347.
Genesis 4 details the rejection by God of Cain’s mode of worship, his sacrifice. Cain, as the Bible later tells us, was “of that wicked one” (1 John 3:12) and we know who that “wicked one” is from Matthew 13 and 1 John 5:19 along with our own reasoning powers (Isaiah 1:18). It then goes on to tell us about Cain’s murder of Abel. One note of interest is God’s banishment of Cain which was mirrored in the justice system of several African tribes, as discovered by European explorers. Banishment from the tribe was the worst possible punishment. Common sense tells us that Cain’s wife was a sister, as Adam and Eve were the head of the only human family and there is nothing in the text to say that they did not have many children by this time.
The mark of Cain has long been disputed in Christian circles and has been the subject of extra-biblical assumptions by racists and a source of pride by gypsies.
Here is the report of the first city built, called Enoch, after Cain’s son. The location of this first urban center would have been wiped out by the flood and as names of people and places can vary over cultures, languages, and time we might have evidence of its existence under another name. For instance, Jericho, is believed by some to be the longest

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continually inhabited city on earth. But, more likely, the remains of this first city are yet undiscovered unless we are driving our cars on the remains of its inhabitants. More on that later.
Other candidates for the oldest city are Catal Hoyuk, which traditional modern scientists prefer to date at 8,000BC and regard as the world’s oldest and largest “Neolithic” city with a population in the thousands. Neolithic means “new stone” as Paleolithic refers to “old stone age”. These designations are used more to classify the types of artifacts found than as real attempts at actual dating as they are not consistent over the entire spectrum of human civilizations. Stone, bronze, and iron “ages” exist at the same time among different cultures around the world and some people still use stone and live in caves, such as the Tasaday in the Phillipines, as late as 1978.
Caral, in Peru, has also been dated to be of great age but it’s traditional date of 2600BC makes it much younger than either Jericho or Catal. The Phoenicians claimed that their city, Byblos, was the oldest city on earth.
We have Jabal, the father of nomadic herders mentioned in chapter 4, Jubal, of musicians, Tubalcain, of brass and iron workers, and then a hint of how violent this early human culture was in the statement of Lamech.
Finally, Seth is born to replace Abel. With the birth of his son, it would appear that formalized religion, or religion as we understand it, began with the mention in the last verse of calling upon the name of the Lord. The groundwork is laid in this chapter for all future religious wars. Less than two centuries have passed since creation, from a literal reading of the Biblical account.
One note of interest concerning so-called fossil fuels. There are two main theories as to the origins of the products which run our cars and provide us with so many other essential products for modern civilization. One is that they came from decayed plant and animal life and the other is that they were present at the formation of the earth and did not have an origin in living matter. In the first theory the organic molecules left by these decaying organisms form something called kerogens which are transformed into hydrocarbons (petroleum) by a process called catagenesis. How fast does this process occur? This can be done very fast in a process called pyrolysis with high heat and the absence of oxygen. The Petroleum Institute of Victoria, New Zealand has dated some petroleum deposits in the Gulf of Mexico at 6-7,000 years according to one source I read. I have not been able to verify that claim. However, I’d like to point out this article found on World Net Daily on May 25, 2004;





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“Sustainable oil?

________________________________________
Posted: May 25, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Chris Bennett

About 80 miles off of the coast of Louisiana lies a mostly submerged mountain, the top of which is known as Eugene Island. The portion underwater is an eerie-looking, sloping tower jutting up from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, with deep fissures and perpendicular faults which spontaneously spew natural gas. A significant reservoir of crude oil was discovered nearby in the late ‘60s, and by 1970, a platform named Eugene 330 was busily producing about 15,000 barrels a day of high-quality crude oil.
By the late ‘80s, the platform’s production had slipped to less than 4,000 barrels per day, and was considered pumped out. Done. Suddenly, in 1990, production soared back to 15,000 barrels a day, and the reserves which had been estimated at 60 million barrels in the ‘70s, were recalculated at 400 million barrels. Interestingly, the measured geological age of the new oil was quantifiably different than the oil pumped in the ‘70s.
Analysis of seismic recordings revealed the presence of a “deep fault” at the base of the Eugene Island reservoir which was gushing up a river of oil from some deeper and previously unknown source.
Similar results were seen at other Gulf of Mexico oil wells. Similar results were found in the Cook Inlet oil fields in Alaska. Similar results were found in oil fields in Uzbekistan. Similarly in the Middle East, where oil exploration and extraction have been underway for at least the last 20 years, known reserves have doubled. Currently there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 680 billion barrels of Middle East reserve oil.
Creating that much oil would take a big pile of dead dinosaurs and fermenting prehistoric plants. Could there be another source for crude oil?
An intriguing theory now permeating oil company research staffs suggests that crude oil may actually be a natural inorganic product, not a stepchild of unfathomable time and organic degradation. The theory suggests there may be huge, yet-to-be-discovered reserves of oil at depths that dwarf current world estimates.
The theory is simple: Crude oil forms as a natural inorganic process which occurs between the mantle and the crust, somewhere between 5 and 20 miles deep. The proposed mechanism is as follows:

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• Methane (CH4) is a common molecule found in quantity throughout our solar system – huge concentrations exist at great depth in the Earth.
• At the mantle-crust interface, roughly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, rapidly rising streams of compressed methane-based gasses hit pockets of high temperature causing the condensation of heavier hydrocarbons. The product of this condensation is commonly known as crude oil.
• Some compressed methane-based gasses migrate into pockets and reservoirs we extract as “natural gas.”
• In the geologically “cooler,” more tectonically stable regions around the globe, the crude oil pools into reservoirs.
• In the “hotter,” more volcanic and tectonically active areas, the oil and natural gas continue to condense and eventually to oxidize, producing carbon dioxide and steam, which exits from active volcanoes.
• Periodically, depending on variations of geology and Earth movement, oil seeps to the surface in quantity, creating the vast oil-sand deposits of Canada and Venezuela, or the continual seeps found beneath the Gulf of Mexico and Uzbekistan.
• Periodically, depending on variations of geology, the vast, deep pools of oil break free and replenish existing known reserves of oil.
There are a number of observations across the oil-producing regions of the globe that support this theory, and the list of proponents begins with Mendelev (who created the periodic table of elements) and includes Dr. Thomas Gold (founding director of Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research) and Dr. J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corporations, Houston, Texas.
In his 1999 book, “The Deep Hot Biosphere,” Dr. Gold presents compelling evidence for inorganic oil formation. He notes that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to “deep earth” formations, not the haphazard depositions we find with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life.
He also notes that oil extracted from varying depths from the same oil field have the same chemistry – oil chemistry does not vary as fossils vary with increasing depth. Also interesting is the fact that oil is found in huge quantities among geographic formations where assays of prehistoric life are not sufficient to produce the existing reservoirs of oil. Where then did it come from?
Another interesting fact is that every oil field throughout the world has outgassing helium. Helium is so often present in oil fields that helium detectors are used as oil-prospecting tools. Helium is an inert gas known to be a fundamental product of the radiological decay or uranium and thorium, identified in quantity at great depths below the surface of the earth, 200 and more miles below. It is not found in meaningful quantities in areas that are not producing methane, oil or natural gas. It is not a member

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of the dozen or so common elements associated with life. It is found throughout the solar system as a thoroughly inorganic product.
Even more intriguing is evidence that several oil reservoirs around the globe are refilling themselves, such as the Eugene Island reservoir – not from the sides, as would be expected from cocurrent organic reservoirs, but from the bottom up.
Dr. Gold strongly believes that oil is a “renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs.”
Smaller oil companies and innovative teams are using this theory to justify deep oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, among other locations, with some success. Dr. Kenney is on record predicting that parts of Siberia contain a deep reservoir of oil equal to or exceeding that already discovered in the Middle East.
Could this be true?
In August 2002, in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US),” Dr. Kenney published a paper, which had a partial title of “The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum.” Dr. Kenney and three Russian coauthors conclude:
The Hydrogen-Carbon system does not spontaneously evolve hydrocarbons at pressures less than 30 Kbar, even in the most favorable environment. The H-C system evolves hydrocarbons under pressures found in the mantle of the Earth and at temperatures consistent with that environment.
He was quoted as stating that “competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological materials since the last quarter of the 19th century.”
Deeply entrenched in our culture is the belief that at some point in the relatively near future we will see the last working pump on the last functioning oil well screech and rattle, and that will be that. The end of the Age of Oil. And unless we find another source of cheap energy, the world will rapidly become a much darker and dangerous place.
If Dr. Gold and Dr. Kenney are correct, this “the end of the world as we know it” scenario simply won’t happen.
Think about it ... while not inexhaustible, deep Earth reserves of inorganic crude oil and commercially feasible extraction would provide the world with generations of low-cost fuel. Dr. Gold has been quoted saying that current worldwide reserves of crude oil could be off by a factor of over 100.“

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Genesis 5 reveals the life spans of Adam’s offspring and ends with Noah and his three sons, the progenitors of the entire human race as we now know it.
Genesis 6 explains the foundation for all later mythologies about how the “gods” interacted with human kind. As in Genesis 3:15 we have the format Satan’s counterfeiting of the virgin birth through the miraculous births of Buddha and Lao-tze in India and China respectively, and for the death of the child and it’s resurrection in Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian mythology, as well as the goddess, known as the “mother of god” and the “queen of heaven”, “holy virgin”, in near eastern religion, we have here the starting point for later myths about the assault on creation by demonic beings.
The Greeks called their gods, Daemons, and Plato and others admitted that they were possessed by their own particular demon, however, they did not look at the actions of these beings as necessarily bad, but inspiring, and enlightening. They were givers of wisdom, which we can see mirrored in Satan’s statements about how the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would make one wise. Zeus, the chief of the pantheon of Greek gods, we know by the writings of the historian, Herodotus, to be the same god as Bel in Babylon or Baal in Canaan, who Jesus called Satan. Modern mythologists refer to Quetzcoatl in Mexico and Viracocha in Peru as well as Odin in Norse mythology to be the same as Zeus. This makes all of these gods to be mirrors of or representations of Lucifer himself. Let’s look at the particular verses in question.
1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Pre-flood man and later, we will state, by implication, animals were infested by heavenly beings who “kept not their first estate” and later cultures, in their apostate condition, referred to these beings as gods. Notice that verse 4 reveals that this occurred before AND after the flood. Of the many references to gods mating with women we will get to in a moment but just as a reminder of how the word of God views these creatures before we start.
“They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not.” Deuteronomy 32:17


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“Are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause rain? or can the heavens give showers? art not thou he, O LORD our God? therefore we will wait upon thee: for thou hast made all these things.” Jeremiah 14:22

Now, here are some much later myths regarding the polluting of god’s creation by these “alien” beings;

According to Greek mythology and writers such as Plutarch, the author of the biography, “Lives of Illustrious Men”, such heroes as the Athenian Theseus were thought to be the sons of gods such as Zeus or Poseidon. Now, we know from the words of Jesus and Herodotus that Zeus is another name for Satan. Men of history, such as Alexander the Great, the Bible’s “prince of Grecia” in Daniel 10:20, were said to be of his offspring by myths surrounding their birth. Aprhodite, who is also known as Venus, Ishtar, Minerva, Diana, Cybele, and Ashtaroth, aka in Babylon as “the holy virgin”, “the mother of god”, and the “queen of heaven”, in the Bible, had human lovers and offspring. She is also known as Erzulie in Voodoo, Oshun in the Afro-Caribbean religion, Tlazolteot in the Aztec/Mexican religion, Obatala and Ani in Africa, and Kali in India. As we will see later, the old “gods” of the pagan cultures were often both male and female. Essentially, they all come back to Satan/Lucifer himself as Madame Blavatsky, the mother of modern Satanism and the new age movement called him;
“Lucifer represents .. Life .. Thought .. Progress .. Civilization .. Liberty .. Independence .. Lucifer is the Logos .. the Serpent, the Savior.” pages 171, 225, 255 (Volume II)
“It is Satan who is the God of our planet and the only God.” pages 215, 216, 220, 245, 255, 533, (VI)
“The Celestial Virgin which thus becomes the Mother of Gods and Devils at one and the same time; for she is the ever-loving beneficent Deity ... but in antiquity and reality Lucifer or Luciferius is the name. Lucifer is divine and Terrestrial Light, ‘the Holy Ghost’ and ‘Satan’ at one and the same time.” page 539
Back to Zeus. Zeus/Satan had affairs with mortal men AND women. The pagan gods were known to appear as animals and it has been suggested that one reason that the animal world of the pre-flood had to be destroyed, except for those that God had chosen to go with Noah, was that even the animals had been polluted with sexual contact with these devils. Note myths of fantastic animals and how the Bible refers to such creatures of which we have physical evidence that are mixed in with descriptions of Satan himself as the “children of pride” in Job 41. Pride was Satan’s first sin. See Isaiah 14:12-14.
Not only were the so-called gods responsible for this perversion but they are credited with giving mankind knowledge and freeing him from the constraints set by God. Heretical Gnostic sects of early Christianity refer to Satan as “knowledge giver” and

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Lucifer, “giver of light”. In keeping with this theme one Polynesian legend tells that in the beginning heaven was so close to the ground that men had to walk bent over but that a god freed them so that they could stand up and heaven went far away.
The supernatural entities that corrupted the pre-flood earth are undoubtedly the “gods” of human memory and mythology who intermingled with humankind before “and after that” as the Bible clearly says. Special knowledge was granted by the gods in all the ancient mystery religions of the pagan world. As the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, probably a generic name for many practitioners of magic and alchemy from the days of Egypt on down to contemporary times, says ‘as above so below’ and then goes on to define the ultimate, if legendary, special knowledge given to man by the gods. We have secret societies with secret knowledge given to man by supernatural entities down through the ages. Legend has it that this tablet was first placed in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. It defines the deity of the sun, which was universally worshipped as a serpent in the ancient world as explained by Alexander Hislop in “The Two Babylons”.
The pre-flood civilization has been memorialized in legends, both real and imaginary, as Atlantis by the Greek philosopher, Plato, in his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, as well as many others, and as Mu in Indian folklore, a lost civilization that was the mother of all civilizations. The Vedas and the Mahabarrata, Hindu religious literature, written sometime in the middle of the first millennium BC refer to an ancient world where wars that appear almost nuclear in description with fire raining down from what is often translated as flying ships and what appears to be some type of rockets. Now, all of these references are highly controversial and not universally accepted as referring to anything but the object of a fertile imagination, however, it is very clear from both the Bible’s brief account and from legend that the pre-flood world was a violent and corrupted age.
6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. 7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. Genesis 6:6 & 7
The pre-flood history of mankind is marked by two great events. One has to do with mankind’s rebellion in sin which the Bible equates later with witchcraft;

“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.”Samuel to Saul in 1 Samuel 15:23. The same could have been said of Adam.

Satan’s offer of knowledge, special god-like knowledge, to Eve is mirrored in today’s science and ethics controversies with regard to cloning and other bio-ethics issues as well as our destructive capabilities.


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To quote from the foreword of the 1996 book, “Forbidden Knowledge”, by Roger Shattuck. “ One powerful reading of history points out that the most advanced nations on Earth have produced unthinkable weapons of destruction at the same time as they have developed a media culture that revels in images of destructive violence. Can such a combination fail to propel us toward barbarism and self-annihilation?”

The resultant spiritual death of Adam, in that day, as he physically didn’t die for several hundred years, is a great tragedy for all of mankind as we are born with a predilection for sin and must be born again to be saved from its consequences. Death is an aberration and the heritage of sinful mankind. See Romans 5:14.

To paraphrase the evolutionary biologist and professor of immunology at UCLA, William Clark in his book, “Sex and the Origins of Death”, death was not present in the original “creation”, a term he uses euphemistically to describe evolutionary processes and the formation of life, and in fact, he goes on to say that death is not necessary for the biological definition of life.

God has now called Noah to build the Ark and has announced “the end of all flesh” and of his covenant with Noah, mirrored in the fantastic Sumerian fable, the Epic of Gilgamesh as Utnaphishtim, who survives the greatest natural catastrophe recorded in the Bible. No one survives the great spiritual catastrophe recorded in these first few chapters of Genesis until the first advent of Jesus Christ and his death, burial, and resurrection, the last Adam, as Paul refers to him in 1 Corinthians 15:45.