Location and Language of Babel



              

by

Damien F. Mackey

  

Now, turning to geographical considerations, “eastward” and “plain of Shinar”, there may be

a pressing need to shift the conventional goal posts. And that is exactly what Anne Habermehl has done in her ground-breaking article, “Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel?”

 

Language of Babel

 

This heading is not so much concerned about the language, or languages, spoken at ancient Babel, as about a re-consideration of the meaning of the words/phrases particularly of verse 1: “whole world”; “eastward”; “plain of Shinar”.   

Here, as in the Pentecost event of Acts 2, translations might superficially convey the impression of a global event, “whole world” (Genesis 11:1), to be compared with Acts 2:5’s “every nation under heaven”. A pairing of Babel with Pentecost is relevant insofar as the disastrous confusion of languages in the case of the former, owing to the sin of pride (Genesis 11:4, 7-9), is Divinely undone by the miraculous phenomenon of “tongues” at Pentecost (Acts 7:11): “… we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”    

 

 

With the benefit of such a comparison it may be suggested that the confusion of languages was, just as was the Flood, only “local in geographic extent” (for full quote, read on further).

 

The different and contemporaneous Sumerian and Akkadian languages may have been a result.

 

Matt Lynch, however, has a somewhat different take on Babel and Pentecost (2016):

http://theologicalmisc.net/2016/05/pentecost-reversal-babel/

 

Pentecost — A Reversal of Babel?

....

Once, when I was teaching a church class, two people started speaking to each other in German. It made things easier for them because it was their native language. But it didn’t make things easier for Margaret (name changed). With deep frustration she exclaimed, ‘Can we just speak English here!’

 

The experience of linguistic diversity leads many to wish for unity—or rather, homogeneity. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone just spoke normal (i.e., English)?  That desire for intelligibility is understandable, but the desire for that language to be English can also betray ethnocentrism. Especially from where I come in the U.S., which has no national language, the fight to retain English can easily slide into a fear-driven attempt to keep ‘our’ culture and ‘our’ language dominant.

 

Confusion over Babel

 

Yesterday the church celebrated its founding linguistic event—Pentecost—an event that many hail as the definitive reversal of Babel. Whereas at Babel, God confused languages, at Pentecost, God brought people of all languages together and united them. At Babel tongues were confused. At Pentecost, tongues were understood. You get the idea.

However, Pentecost may not be anti-Babel in the way some suppose. For starters, the reversal idea assumes that a unified language was a good idea gone wrong, and that eschatological unity would somehow involve a return to one language—a Spirit language.

 

But Genesis never states that the confusion of languages was a bad thing. The only downside was for the Babelites, who couldn’t finish their Manhattan project. On the positive side, language diversification enabled humanity to get on with the task of ‘filling the earth,’ something they were meant to do but didn’t because of their big hero project. Notice the language in Gen 11:4:

 

Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

 

God had wanted humans to ‘fill the earth’ (Gen 1). Babel was in direct contravention of God’s intended vision of teeming diversity.

At Pentecost, God embraces language diversity. He doesn’t destroy it. So yes, the Spirit reverses the imperial unification of Babylon, but not the multiplication of languages.

 

Empires and Language

 

To see why the preservation of multiplication is important, it’s important to grasp the imperial function of language unification. Joel Green helps us here:

The wickedness of this idolatrous plan [to build Babel] is betrayed in the opening of the Babel story, with its reference to ‘one language’—a metaphor in the ancient Near East for the subjugation and assimilation of conquered peoples by a dominant nation. Linguistic domination is a potent weapon in the imperial arsenal, as people of Luke’s world themselves would have known, living as they did in the wake of the conquest of ‘the world’ by Alexander the Great and the subsequent creation of a single, Greek-speaking linguistic community.[1]

 

By confusing languages God was merciful, not punitive. He already recognized that ‘this is only the beginning of what they will do’ (11:6). Who knows what WMDs the Babelites would’ve created? Middleton writes, ‘Babel thus represents a regressive human attempt to guarantee security by settling in one place and constructing a monolithic empire, with a single language, thus resisting God’s original intent for humanity.’[2]

 

So God gave humanity a push toward its original purpose, to fill the world, cultivate it, build cultures, and grow. Linguistic diversity is a natural outgrowth of this process, and one which the Spirit rubber stamps at Pentecost.

 

Israel& the Nations

 

But before we land on Pentecost, it’s important to look at a few snapshots of Israel’s ‘universal’ vision in Isaiah:

 

In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. … For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. (Isa 2:2-3)

I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory… And I will also take some of them as priests and as Levites, says the LORD. … From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, says the LORD. (Isa 66:18, 21, 23)

 

In the first vision, the nations come to receive instruction from Israel. In the second, they come to worship, and some even becomes priests. They come as nations, with all their diversity of languages (‘nations and tongues’). And, they retain their identity as nations. They neither dissolve into one gigantic Israelite world empire nor isolate themselves completely.

 

Israel’s worship system includes foreigners and receives the nations’ offerings, while the nations receive teaching from Israel.

 

Pentecost—Preservation and Unification

 

When we turn to Pentecost, we see that the Spirit is similarly uninterested in unifying language: ‘Jews … from every nation under heaven … each one heard them speaking in the native language of each’ (Acts 2:5-6).

Things were getting out of hand, so Peter stood up to interpret the event. He did so by drawing on Joel 2, which anticipated a work of the Spirit that obliterated a different sort of division. Here’s Peter quoting from Joel 2:28-29:

 

In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

 

The point couldn’t be clearer—the Spirit gave without regard for status, sex, or nationality. In giving, the Spirit unified the people of God (‘tearing down the dividing wall of hostility’ Eph 2:14), but in a way that preserved their cultural diversity. One Spirit, many gifts. One Spirit, many languages. The Spirit doesn’t negate difference, but cultivates and leverages that difference in service of God’s mission toward all nations.

So yes, Pentecost reverses the homogeneity of Babel. And yes, Pentecost reverses any hostility that may have arisen in the wake of linguistic confusion. Yet, the Spirit puts the diversity of cultures (preserved in their languages) on display and empowers each for the proclamation of a de-centered Good News. This was a profoundly anti-imperial move.  The point isn’t that the Spirit speaks one language. Instead, the Spirit speaks your language—no matter who you are. ....

 

Returning now to the subject of geographical extent, for the Flood, for Babel, Rich Deem has written of “The Genesis Flood Why the Bible Says It Must be Local”:

 

“Psalm 104 directly eliminates any possibility of the flood being global (see Psalm 104-9 - Does it refer to the Original Creation or the Flood?). In order to accept a global flood, you must reject Psalm 104 and the inerrancy of the Bible. If you like to solve mysteries on your own, you might want to read the flood account first and find the biblical basis for a local flood.

 

The Bible's other creation passages eliminate the possibility of a global flood

 

The concept of a global Genesis flood can be easily eliminated from a plain reading of Psalm 104,¹ which is known as the "creation psalm." …. The verse that eliminates a global flood follows: "You set a boundary they [the waters] cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth." (Psalm 104:9)¹ Obviously, if the waters never again covered the earth, then the flood must have been local. Psalm 104 is just one of several creation passages that indicate that God prevented the seas from covering the entire earth.² An integration of all flood and creation passages clearly indicates that the Genesis flood was local in geographic extent”.

 

Now, turning to geographico-linguistic considerations re Babel, “eastward” and “plain of Shinar”, there may be a pressing need to shift the conventional goal posts. And that is exactly what Anne Habermehl has done in her ground-breaking article, “Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel?” (https://answersingenesis.org/tower-of-babel/where-in-the-world-is-the-tower-of-babel/), there shifting the geographical focus for the Tower of Babel incident away from southern Iraq (ancient “Sumer”), the customary “Cradle of Civilisation”, to the Khabur region of NE Syria. According to this new view, the biblical “land of Shinar” to whose “plain” men migrated after the Flood (Genesis 11:2), and thought to indicate “Sumer”, is roughly to be identified, instead, as the region of Sinjar (the scene of much fighting in our era).

This is how Anne Habermehl has introduced (summarised) her article:

 

Abstract

 

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is believed by many to be the record of a real historical event that took place after the worldwide Flood, at a time when the earth’s population still lived together in one place. The enduring archaeological question, therefore, is where the Tower of Babel was built. It is widely considered that Shinar, where the Bible says the Babel event took place, was a territory in south Mesopotamia; and that Babel was located at Babylon. However, an analysis of history, geography, and geology, shows that Shinar cannot have been in the south, but rather was a territory in what is northeastern Syria today; and that the remnants of the Tower must be located in the Upper Khabur River triangle, not far from Tell Brak, which is the missing city of Akkad.

 

An immediate point in Habermehl’s favour is that she has been able to, in her scholarly and well-researched article, provide a fairly compelling identification (namely, Tell Brak) for the lost city of Akkad (Accad), Nimrod’s city (Genesis 10:10), so famous in ancient times, but not identified even to this day.

 

Akkad is generally estimated to have been situated in the environs of modern Baghdad.

 

As to the word, “eastward”, one may have to ask, “eastward” from where?

Various translations of the word, the Hebrew miqqedem (מִקֶּדֶם), are “from the east”, “in the east”. The Ark survivors were last heard of “on the mountains of Ararat [Urartu]”, which is already close to the eastern extremities of the ancient world. It is unlikely that preserved humanity travelled even further “eastwards” (or its variants) than this in search of fertile habitable land.

Hebrew miqqedem also has the meaning “of old [long ago”], which makes more sense to me.

Further, regarding the location of the Tower of Babel, the Septuagint (LXX) Isaiah provides a geographical clue which, whilst conforming with Habermehl’s location of biblical “Shinar”, would not, however, support a conventional location of the land as Sumer, nor anywhere further “eastward”. In Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers we read this intriguing information, regarding Isaiah 10:9: “Is not Calno [Calneh] as Carchemish? is not Hamath as Arpad? is not Samaria as Damascus?” (“... instead of naming Carchemish, gives “Calanè, where the tower [ὁ πύργος] was built ...”):   “…. Is not Calno as Carchemish?—The six names obviously pointed to more recent conquests in which Sargon and his predecessors had exulted. One after another they had fallen. Could Judah hope to escape? (1) Calno, the Calneh of Genesis 10:10, Amos 6:2. That prophet had held up its fate in vain as a warning to Samaria. …. The LXX. version, which instead of naming Carchemish, gives “Calanè, where the tower [ὁ πύργος] was built,” seems to imply a tradition identifying that city with the Tower of Babel of Genesis 11:4. (2) Carchemish. Few cities of the ancient world occupied a more prominent position than this. Its name has been explained as meaning the Tower of Chemosh, and so bears witness to the widespread cultus of the deity whom we meet with in Biblical history as the “abomination of the Moabites” (1 Kings 11:7)”.   Some have even associated the god Chemosh with Ham himself, the son of Noah.

 

This switches the land of the Tower of Babel away from Sumer to the vicinity of Carchemish.

The name, Carchemish, including apparently the meaning of “Tower”, may indicate that this is where the attempted building of the Tower of Babel had been undertaken.

It could not have been in the well-known Babylon of Sumer, which city was begun much later.

Any map of Mesopotamia will show that - whether one believes Noah’s Ark to have landed on Mt. Çudi (Judi) in Kurdistan, or Mt. Ararat in Turkey - ancient Babylon is hundreds of kilometers directly south of both of these places. Various authors have pointed this out. “This somewhat inconvenient geographical fact (for those who believe that the people migrated eastward or westward) is downplayed by those who believe that the Tower was built at the city of Babylon, and requires inventing scenarios that move the people far enough south while still satisfying their perception of this Scripture”. (Anne Habermehl’s article)

 

Sadly, the location of other cities connected with Nimrod in this same Genesis verse (10:10): “The beginning of [Nimrod’s] kingdom was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar”, is also a matter of dispute. Some translations even get rid of “Calneh” altogether, by substituting “all of these [i.e., Babel, Erech and Accad] in the land of Shinar”.

Another point in Habermehl’s favour, I think, is that her choice of Sinjar (Shinjar) for “Shinar” is far more linguistically plausible than is “Sumer”.

 

Scholars and historians have been totally confounded by the abrupt rise of the Sumerian culture nearly 6,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This “sudden civilisation” seemed to appear out of thin air and refused to conform to the popular historical theory of linear development in cultural evolution.

Historian Professor Charles Hapgood squarely faces the issue when he writes that “today we find primitive cultures co-existing with advanced modern society on all continents… We shall now assume that 20,000 years ago while paleolithic peoples held out in Europe, more advanced cultures existed elsewhere on earth.”

 

Likewise the rise of Sumeria has been a major puzzle.

 

Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God writes, “With stunning abruptness… there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden… the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all high civilisations of the world.”

William Irwin Thompson puts it even more succinctly. “Sumer is a poor stoneless place for a neolithic culture to evolve from a peasant community into a full-blown civilisation,” he writes, “but it is a very good place to turn the plains and marshes into irrigated farmlands … In short, Sumer is an ideal place to locate a culture already having the technology necessary for urban life and irrigation agriculture.”

This would indicate that human settlement of Sumer, and the cities and culture that developed from this, had occurred somewhat later than was formerly believed.

 

There is to be considered the possibility that pre-Flood Cain-ites had settled there and that, after the Flood, when Sumer was re-settled, Cain-ite names were re-applied to the cities that now sprang up there. My earlier view had been, in line with others, that cities named after the Cain-ites (Enoch, Irad, Tubal-cain) were identifiable in the names of southern Mesopotamia cities. According to: http://xenohistorian.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/the-babylonian-connection-

 

David Rohl has proposed that both Uruk and Ur were named after Enoch, because their actual Sumerian names were Unuk and Unuki, respectively. Rohl goes on to see a connection between Bad-tibira and Tubal-Cain, because Bad-tibira means “City of the Metal Worker.” Finally, Eridu, which archaeologists and Sumerian historians believe is the oldest city of all, could have been named after Irad (according to Rohl) or Jared (according to Zecharia Sitchin).

 

Cain himself, though, as traditions seem to indicate, settled on the edge of “Seth’s land”. According to what we learned earlier, Cain had not moved far from the vicinity of the Garden of Eden.

 

As already touched upon, NE Syria is also more geographically proximate (than is Sumer) for the descendants of Noah from my point of view (Habermehl is obviously a global Floodist), according to which Noah’s Ark landed upon the mountains of modern Kurdistan (ancient Urartu). It might be expected, then, that humankind would soon find its way into the fertile Khabur region. That this region qualifies as a “plain” is apparent from Habermehl’s description of it (she includes a photograph):

 

“It is difficult to tell from what we know of history exactly where the boundaries of the entire land of Shinar were; indeed, those boundaries may not even have remained precisely the same at different times. However, we will generally describe Shinar as a land including the territory that is located immediately south of the Turkish mountains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This area is almost perfectly flat as far as the eye can see (fig. 2). It surely qualifies as “a plain in the land of Shinar,” as Genesis calls it”.

 

There is yet another most useful upside to Habermehl’s reconstruction; one that she herself has pointed out, and it is not favourable to the documentary theory: “One result of “moving” Babel from south Mesopotamia to the north of Syria is that secular historians will no longer be able to claim that the building of the Tower was merely a story inspired by the ziggurat at Babylon (for example, Parrot 1955, p. 17)”.

 

In fact, with the early Genesis scene shifted right away from Babylonia, then those old arguments according to which the Book of Genesis (e.g., the Flood) had borrowed from Mesopotamian lore will no longer carry any force.

It is well known where the ancient city of Babylon stood. But - and as Habermehl strongly - argues, Babylon and the “Babel” of Genesis 10:10 are not necessarily synonymous.

Habermehl herself does not actually identify the location of Babel. She presumes that it must lie at the approximate centre of the triangle of cities that she has associated with Genesis 10:10.

But might not the LXX be telling us, by substituting the name “Babylon” for “Carchemish”, that the impressive site of Carchemish (modern Jerablus) was itself a Babylon, a Babel? – perhaps in close association with Calneh – in the very region “where the Tower was built”?

 

One unusual French scholar, Fernand Crombette, whose unique and complicated method of translating ancient texts with the aid of Coptic has bemused many, had claimed that Carchemish was where Noah and his sons lived after the Flood, and that its modern name, Jerablus, actually translates as The Naked Man (L‘homme nu), referring to the incident of the drunken Noah (Genesis 9:20-25). Given that the region of Carchemish may have been the suitable place for grape vines: “In Mesopotamia, grapevines could be nurtured only in the north, notably in the region of Carchemish” (P. King, Life in Biblical Israel, p. 98), then Crombette may have got this right. Northern Syria might have been, for this very reason, the first place of choice for migrations after the Flood waters had begun to subside. 

 

That does not necessitate, however, that all human groups, post-Flood, had converged upon the fertile “plain in the land of Shinar”.

 

Carchemish, once excavated by the famed adventurer, T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), but now currently situated on the boundaries of a war zone, awaits a fuller archaeological effort. “Nicolò Marchetti of Bologna University, who leads the renewed investigations with a joint Italian-Turkish team beginning in 2011, says that, despite the city's historical significance, only 5 percent of the site has been excavated”.

 

I personally should be most interested to find whether further excavational work at the site of Jerablus (Carchemish), or its environs, might yield any evidence of the famous Tower of Babel. 

Post Flood man treks from Urartu (‘Ararat’) to Shinar and environs



by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

 

Noah and the other survivors of the Flood would presumably (of necessity) have spent some period of time in the region where the Ark had landed. Arabic sources from the 10th century mention a village called Thamanin, built by Noah at the foot of Mount Çudi (Judi).

 

 

 

Histories of the Sons of Noah

 

The fourth Genesis toledôt (“family history”) was written (owned) by the three sons of Noah:

 

 

4

Genesis 6:9b

Genesis 10:1a

Shem, Ham and Japheth

 

“This is the account of Shem, Ham and Japheth, Noah’s sons, who themselves had sons after the flood”.

 

 

This triple-authored history, which provides us with an eye-witness account of the great Flood, is followed by the famous Table of Nations (Genesis 10) and the incident of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11): all Shem’s toledôt.

 

5

Genesis 10:1b

Genesis 11:10a

Shem

 

By now, the three brothers must have gone their own separate ways.

 

But the repetition in the account of the Flood bespeaks their previous multiple authorship.

For example:

 

Genesis Chapter 7,

 

18: "And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth".

19: "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth".

20: "Fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail".

 

Also:

 

21: "And all flesh died that moved upon the face of the earth".

22: "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life and all that was in the dry land died".

23: "And every living substance was destroyed".

 

French physician, Jean Astruc (C17^th AD), claimed to have discerned “three accounts” of the Flood story, instancing in support of his claim these repetitious passages. It is with Astruc that the documentary theory (JEDP) first began. He was quite correct about the number of sources, but had no apparent awareness about their true origins.

The documentists have, in fact, given considerable attention to the Flood narrative, thinking that the Hebrews would have borrowed it from the Babylonian mythology. Eugene H. Maly, for instance, in his article “Genesis” for The Jerome Biblical Commentary (1968), will accredit to the J (Yahwist) source (2:44): “The Sons of Noah (9:18-27)”.

(Jawist (or Yahwist, from Yahweh) - describes God as Yahweh, and is dated around 850 B.C.). And Maly will attribute to the P (Priestly) and J source (2:45): “The Peopling of the Earth (10:1-32)”.

(Priestly - this encompasses writings scattered from Gen 1 through the notice of Moses’ death at the end of Deuteronomy. It is supposedly dated around 500 B.C.).

 

Let us briefly return to Noah. His other name is said to have been Menahem (“comforter”). “The apparent discrepancy in Gen. [5:] 29, where it is said that Lamech "called his name Noah, saying, This shall comfort us," is explained by the "Sefer ha-Yashar" (section "Bereshit," p. 5b, Leghorn, 1870), which says that while he was called in general "Noah," his father named him "Menahem" (= "the comforter")”. (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11571-noah)

 

It is generally agreed that 1656 years elapsed from the creation of Adam to the Flood.

 

I have tended to follow Philip Mauro’s (following Martin Anstey’s) biblico-centric biblical chronology (The Wonders of Bible Chronology) as a handy “backbone” for this period, though I do not consider it to be flawless.

Mauro’s date for the Flood, 2390 BC, will serve as an approximation.

 

Noah and the other survivors of the Flood would presumably (of necessity) have spent some period of time in the region where the Ark had landed. Arabic sources from the 10th century mention a village called Thamanin, built by Noah at the foot of Mount Çudi (Judi).

It is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to say any more about the duration of sojourn in this particular region.

Afterwards, did Noah and his sons, their wives and their children, remove to the “Shinar” region where there would later occur the Tower of Babel debacle as recorded by Shem?   

 

Ham’s ‘uncovering of his father’s nakedness’ (Genesis 9:22) is a euphemism for his having had sexual intercourse with Noah’s wife. This was forbidden by the Law of Moses, e.g. Leviticus 18:7, translated bluntly by NIV as: “Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your mother; do not have relations with her”.

Possibly, though, this wife of Noah was not Ham’s actual mother, but his step-mother.

“The "Sefer ha-Yashar" (l.c.) and Gen. R. (xxii. 4) both agree that Noah's wife was called Naamah. According to the latter, she was the sister of Tubal-cain (Gen. iv. 21); according to the former, she was a daughter of Enoch, and Noah married her when he was 498 years old. In the Book of Jubilees (Hebr. transl. by Rubin, iv. 46-47) Noah's wife is referred to as "Emẓara, daughter of Raḳi'el." Emẓara was his niece, and two years after their marriage bore him Shem”.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11571-noah

 

Old Tobit must have had some ‘inside’ information about Noah when he commanded his son, Tobias (Tobit 4:12): ‘Remember, my son, that Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our ancestors of old, all took wives from among their kindred. They were blessed in their children …’.

 

In biblical fashion Noah cursed, not Ham, but the offspring of this illicit union, Canaan (Genesis 9:25): ‘Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers’.

 

Table of Nations and their Spread

 

All the nations of the world, from the greatest to the least, descended from those who survived on the Ark. Shem has listed these nations in what we now call Genesis 10.

Much has been written about this “Table of Nations”.

According to one version: https://bible.org/seriespage/4-settlement-world-table-nations

 

Generally speaking, the Hamites are the most dispersed and diverse people, both ethnically and linguistically. They will be found, according to Genesis, in Asia Minor, Canaan, Egypt (North Africa), South Africa, and Mesopotamia.

 

Likewise, the Japethites represent the Indo-European peoples, that is, from Europe to India. This classification is usually referring to linguistic similarities rather than ethnic, although the latter is also a consideration. Looking at a relief map of the world, one can see that these people are often mountain people.

 

Finally, from a biblical point of view, the Semites are the center of God’s work. Semitic people come out of the desert. They are Assyrian, Babylonian, old South Arabians, and, of course, the descendants of Abraham. It is no coincidence that the three great monotheistic religions had their origin among Semitic people.

 

Anomalies arise, however.

The Hittites, for instance, descended from the Hamitic Canaan (Genesis 10:15): “Canaan was the father of Sidon his firstborn, and of the Hittites …”, are later classified as an Indo-European people. “Scientists trace evolution of Indo-European languages to Hittites”:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/nov/27/highereducation.artsandhumanities

  

Presumably, as the waters subsided after the Flood, individual clans would have reclaimed the best of the habitable lands of a world that had now, no doubt, been altered significantly due to the geo-tectonic upheavals caused by the mighty Deluge.

 

One of the arguments posed by Creationists against the notion of a non-global Flood - and it is quite a valid one - is that Noah could have, in such a case, moved elsewhere, rather than having to have gone to all of the trouble of building the Ark. The possibility needs to be considered, however (at least I think), that the antediluvian “world that then was” (2 Peter 3:6) was not structured the same as the post-diluvian world that later was. Noah may perhaps have been unable physically to escape from the confines of his world due to, say, a surrounding ‘Ocean’. Recall, for example, the ancient legends of an earth-encircling River Okeanos.

The spread of ice may also have been a physically limiting factor.

 

Previously I had suggested that “the sequence of Stone Ages, Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic, was both an antediluvian, and a post-diluvian, phenomenon”.

Lower Palaeolithic is conventionally and unrealistically (to say the least) dated 1.76 million to 100 thousand years ago.

But, in light of Dr. John Osgood’s “A Better Model for the Stone Age”, this inflated figure is in need of serious shrinkage. For Lower Palaeolithic conditions were part of the experience of the early post-Flood peoples - the Acheuleans being one set of these, according to Osgood - when the lands were still affected by left-over water:

 

A wet middle east and heavy strata build-up

 

The biblical model implies that there would have been much more water left over in land basins as a result of the great Flood than would necessarily be present today, and so we would look for evidence of large lake-like accumulations in such possible basin areas. The biblical model certainly does not insist on any particular weather conditions immediately after the Flood, but wet conditions would certainly be logical in God’s planning for the habitation of the post-Flood earth, and would be logical in terms of the necessary rapid build-up of plant and animal life again after the Flood. As a result of the Flood, there would have been much salt left on the land, so wet conditions would have caused a washing off of some of this salt from the land and a faster ability of non-salt-loving plants to grow adequately, allowing for quick afforestation, an abundance of plant life, and hence a multiplication of animal life after the great Flood. Wet conditions would have increased the breakdown of mud-brick buildings, increasing therefore the build-up of strata in tells during the early days in the Middle East and causing more rapid build-up in caves, particularly in dolomite and limestone caves.

There is strong evidence for a very wet climate in the Middle East and for left-over basins of water over many areas of the Middle East in the early days which the biblical model would allow to be called post-Flood, but which the evolutionary model would call the stone age.

 

Palestine in those early days showed evidence of great areas of water, particularly filling in the north of the Huleh Basin:

 

‘It is currently accepted that during the period of Acheulean occupation of the north-eastern tip of Upper Galilee, a large lake filled the entire Huleh Basin while the mountains were covered by oak forests incorporating several northern elements. such as Fagus. The surroundings were rich in various animals, including a number of large species. The Acheulean site was apparently located close to the ancient lake, in the vicinity of streams descending from the Hermon (Stekelis and Gilead, 1966; Nir and Bar-Yosef, 1976; Horowitz 1975-1977).’⁹

 

Also in south-central Sinai:

 

‘Strikingly thick accumulations of sediments occur in Wadi Feiran and its tributaries in south central Sinai (Fig. 1). Over the past three decades these have been the subject of discussion with reference to their origin (fluvial verses lacustrine) and their climatological and chronological significance. In this note we describe an in situ Upper Paleolithic site, the first known from south central Sinai, which places these deposits in a firmer chronological context of about 30,000 to 35,000 B.P. and lends support to previous climatological interpretations of a former wetter climate.’’^10:185

 

And:

 

‘Nevertheless, the widespread occurrence of Upper Paleolithic sites throughout the central Negev and down to the very arid southern Sinai would suggest a regionally wet climate, which enabled the Upper Paleolithic people to exploit an area which today is hyper-arid.’^10:189

 

Furthermore, in east Jordan:

 

‘Briefly, the stratification in the north, west, and south trenches reflects the existence of a Pleistocene pluvial lake that shrank until a widespread marsh formed during the Early Neolithic.’^11:28

….

‘During the Late Acheulian period of the Late Pleistocene, the scene around Ain el-Assad was quite different: an immense lake, roughly five times the size of the present Dead Sea (Rollefson 1982; Garrard and Price 1977) stretched to the northern, eastern, and southern horizons. Once again, animals would have been attracted to the lakeshore, yielding opportunities for Neanderthal hunters to fulfill their needs.’^11:33,34

 

Similarly, Alison Betts has suggested that in the Black Desert just close to the same area in eastern Jordan there was once lush growth and a large population of animals:

 

‘As far as hunting is concerned, the desert once supported large herds of game, particularly gazelle, and evidence for the wholesale exploitation of these herds is demonstrated by the complex chains of desert ‘kites’ lying across what were once probably migration routes.’¹²

 

Next, Dr. Osgood turns to Egypt:

 

In Egypt also, wet conditions prevailed:

 

‘Naqada I and II are very remote times, and it is now known that conditions in Egypt were then completely different from what they are today. At Armant, for instance, south of Luxor, large trees had been growing sparsely all over the low desert at a height of 20 or more feet above the present cultivation level and, therefore, probably about 40 feet above in pre-Dynastic times. The workmen told Mr. Myers that trees like this were to be found in every part of the Nile Valley. Some of these trees at any rate were earlier than either the Late or the Middle pre-Dynastic periods, for graves of these dates had been cut through their roots. Again, a small Wadi had been silted up and trees had been growing in it. This was all on the low desert, and similar wet conditions are found to have prevailed on the high.’¹³

 

The testimony seems uniform that in those early days, by whatever scheme they may be dated, conditions were wetter and large areas of water-filled geographical basins, a picture that is thoroughly consistent with the biblical model.

 

Such conditions, Osgood thinks, account for the widespread use of the hand-axe:

 

Wet conditions and afforestation may well be one of the explanations for the earliest type of culture found in many parts of the Middle East and Europe, that is the Acheulian, the most characteristic tool of which was the hand-axe. The need to clear land, to chop trees, and to build shelter from wet conditions, as well as to shape tools such as spears for hunting in that early survival culture, may well explain the ubiquity of the Acheulian hand-axe, a fairly basic tool. But then, the conditions also were very basic, and survival was the name of the game.

 

The most ancient sites of Jericho and Çatal Hüyük evidence of multiple rebuilding:

 

The wet conditions may also explain the very large number of stone-age, particularly Neolithic strata, in such places as Mersin, Catal Huyuk and Jericho, where the main building materials were sun-dried mud bricks. In north-eastern Iraq the Jarmo expedition found that the average expectation for a ‘casually built house with some dried mud bricks and mud finished roof’ was only 15 years.¹⁴ In much wetter conditions of earlier days the life of a building may well have been considerably shorter, even half that time, making rapid build up of strata with rebuilding of levels in tells a very highly likely proposition.

 

Even the layers at the Carmel Caves, Osgood suggests, may be explainable according to a Flood scenario:

 

Furthermore, the deep layers found in some of the caves, such as the Carmel Caves, which are dolomite, may well be explained by the wetter conditions which would give rise to the more rapid breakdown of rock from the roof. Such cave-ins, which were evident in some of the Carmel Caves, along with the increased trampling in of soil, dirt and mud as the people came home from hunting, would have led to a rapid build-up of strata in such caves. It is impossible at this point in time to give an accurate assessment of the time taken for the build-up of these strata. Long periods of time that have artificially been assigned to them simply cannot be sustained on any present evidence. For these reasons, the biblical model stands as a reasonably good scientific model on which to test the evidence.

 

Thanks to Dr. Osgood’s significant re-setting of the Stone Ages, now in a Flood context, those embarking upon a revision of history ought now be able to stand on far firmer ground, and with a clearer outlook, for co-ordinating pre-dynastic Egypt, Palestine (e.g., early Jericho), Turkey (Çatal Huyuk), and indeed the early post-Flood world in general, with a relevant stratigraphy.

 

Another Creationist, Anne Habermehl, has also made some interesting observations on the early post-Flood era, the Ice Age, and pre-dynastic Egypt:

http://www.creationsixdays.net/2013_ICC_Habermehl_AncientEgypt.pdf

 

HISTORY OF HUMANS IN EGYPT

 

Besides the geological indications, there are archaeological and historical reasons to believe that the Nile Delta was formed after the Ice Age.

 

Archaeologists find evidence of human settlement along the Nile and in the eastern and western desert areas in earliest times, which they call the Lower Paleolithic era. Secular chronology places these first settlers back as far as half a million to a million years (Bard, 2007, pp. 69–71; Midant-Reynes, 2000, p. 25; Vermeersch et al., 2000, p. 321; Wendorf & Close, 1999, p. 2). Biblical scholars believe that the descendants of Mizraim, son of Ham (Gen. 10:6) settled in Egypt; interestingly, Misr is the official Arabic name for Egypt today (Egypt, 2012). Habermehl (2011) argues that Shinar, where the Tower of Babel was built, was in northeast Syria, North Mesopotamia. The journey to the Nile area would have been about 1100 km for the group of Noah’s descendants who migrated in that southwest direction.

These first Nile settlers lived a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They have left many stone tools behind of a style called Acheulean by archaeologists, named after the site of St. Acheul, France (Bard, 2007, pp. 67–79; Lewin, 1999, pp. 145–47). This stone tool design was used widely in Europe, Africa and the Middle East by the most ancient peoples, suggesting that it may have been based on technology known before the Babel dispersion.

 

People continued to live in the Nile Valley through the Middle Paleolithic (about 250,000–50,000 yrs. ago) and Upper Paleolithic (about 50,000–12,000 yrs. ago) (Bard, 2007, pp. 73–78). These figures for the secular eras are approximate and vary with different sources. Because the ice sheet did not extend to Egypt during the Ice Age, as it did in Asia and other parts of the world, early people continued to live in Egypt along the Nile during the main glaciation period when conditions were very arid (Maisels, 1999, p. 39). The climate in Egypt during the Ice Age would have been much cooler than today. There appear to have been glaciers surprisingly close to the Nile, as is shown by moraines in the Sinai Peninsula (Huxley, 1883; Hume, 1901; Kurter, 1997, p. G1). Even those who are reluctant to accept this admit to the glacial evidences (Greenwood, 1997; Smykatz-Kloss et al., 2003, p. 112).

 

According to historians, those early people who had lived along the Nile moved westward after the Ice Age during the time of wild Nile flooding. They lived in the Sahara, which had become green and habitable from the northward-shifted monsoon rains and showed a sudden blossoming of archaeological sites (Goudie, 1999). During this period, there were no evidences of human habitation along the Nile. Humans stayed in the Sahara until the monsoon rains moved southward again, and the Sahara started to become a dry desert as before. Around 5300–3500 BC, secular timeline, these people then moved back to the Nile, which by now had settled down (Carey, 2006).

 

Some secular historians seem to miss the Ice Age as a factor in the pattern of human movement—e.g., Grimal (1992, pp. 17–22), who describes a break (end of 7th millennium BC, secular timeline) between the prehistory of Egypt and its history, for reasons that are “poorly known.” He does not mention either the Ice Age or the Nile’s wild flow. This shows that secular scholars can have the same problem of lack of crossover of geology and history as young-earth creationists.

 

Historians describe human occupation first in the southern part of Egypt, with migration northward to the delta region later. The first agricultural settlements in the Nile Delta date to about 5,000 BC on the secular timeline (Holtz, 1969). This is well before Abraham’s Egyptian visit, as we shall see shortly.

 

When people moved from the Saharan desert back to the Nile, Egypt started to develop gradually from many groups of people with very primitive living conditions to a more sophisticated civilization. At first they lived in separate city states, probably each centered around the worship of its own local god (Erman, 1894, p. 17). These city states developed into provinces called nomes (Egyptian “sepats”), ruled by leaders called nomarchs. In Lower (northern) Egypt, essentially the Delta, nomes were added as the delta land was drained and made habitable (Petrie, 1911, p. 29). Possibly the earliest Delta city was Buto, first settled nearly 5,000 BC secular time (Kemp, 2006, pp. 86–89; Midant-Reynes, 2003, p. 56).

There is now much historical material available about the late Predynastic Period, called Dynasty 0 by some (Raffaele, 2003; Bard, 2003, p. 57). A large number of kings are known to have reigned during this time, but some of these could have been ruling concurrently, since unification of Egypt under one pharaoh is believed to have occurred later at the beginning of the 1st Dynasty (Bard, 2003, pp. 63–64). Both the red crown of lower (northern) Egypt and the white crown of upper (southern) Egypt worn by the pharaohs for thousands of years are attested quite early in this Predynastic Period. The separate cultures of the two Egypts were therefore already developed before unification (Wainwright, 1923; Bard, 1994; Midant-Reynes, 2003, pp. 41–56; Yale News, 2011). An indication of late Predynastic occupation in the northern Nile Delta is an artifact found buried 7.4 m below the surface near the Mediterranean coast. The long, thin piece of dolomite is believed by scientists to have been carried there by humans and could not have been deposited by either the Nile or the sea (Stanley et al., 2008).

 

We can, therefore, conclude that there was considerable human activity along the Nile and on the Delta after the Ice Age but before the era of the Dynastic pharaohs.

 

A reliable indicator of climate is the clothes that people wear. All the depictions of the ancient Egyptians point to a very warm climate. For instance, the famous Narmer palette, a flat carved stone in the Cairo Museum, dating to the beginning of the 1st Dynasty, shows the king wearing only a very short kilt; captives and others are shown naked (El-Shahawy & Atiya, 2005, pp. 23–25). Clearly the Egyptian weather was warm by this early time, and the cool Ice Age weather was long gone.

 

Recognition that the entire Ice Age from beginning to end preceded the start of Egyptian civilization has clear implications for those who write about chronological matters. Wright (2008) states that there is a window of about 150–250 yrs. after Babel before Egypt began constructing the 4th-Dynasty pyramids. Courville (1971, pp. 140–52) believed that the Babel dispersion must have occurred only 37 yrs. before the unification of Egypt (beginning of 1st Dynasty). Usshur (2003, p. 22) says that Ham led his colony into Egypt around 2188 BC, about 54 yrs. after the Babel dispersion; he then lists the Hyksos kings of Egypt (13th Dynasty) as starting to rule in 2084 BC. In these problematic examples, there is no room for the Ice Age. ….