Clough Genesis Lesson 25

Myths from Genesis 1-11; Fountains of the Deep/Rain – Genesis 7:11-12

Again, we return to our study of the flood portion of early history and once again I remind you that the image of the flood is basic to your understanding of the rest of Scriptural history; you just simply cannot understand what is coming in history unless you first grasp clearly what the flood is teaching. The flood narrative presents the awfulness of God’s judgments. We find in the doctrine of judgment/salvation that God judges man and nature, not just man, not just the psychological thing but a geophysical judgment. The flood is so important that the Lord Jesus Christ uses the flood and the flood alone as the single authorized picture of what the Second Advent is going to look like. This is a very key battle, a very key battle here at the flood. We have tried to do our best to present with all its force the Scriptural teaching, not hiding through any subterfuge and try to have a premature harmonization between what the Scriptures are teaching and what earth science in school is teaching. They are two totally different things and we might as well admit the difference.

Today we are going to look at Genesis 7:11-12 and then we’re going to see a film again; these particular films are available for certain details that I want to communicate to you from the text. That’s why I use the films, as I explained earlier, to show you portions of general revelation. God reveals Himself through special revelation, that is the Bible, and that becomes the authority. But the Bible is then made to be a handle, or a tool, or a device, to go out into general revelation, all around us, revelation of man’s nature, revelation in nature itself and to understand this. It’s always written against this background and if you don’t have appreciation for what’s out there then the full force of the Scripture simply is not going to strike you.

Now in Genesis 7:11 we have the date of the flood; the flood began, it says, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month.” Now once again we are back to the high longevity of the antediluvian peoples, when God had superintended this portion of history… remember there are several civilizations, there’s the postdiluvian civilization and the antediluvian civilization, separated by a flood, separated by one of the greatest cataclysms the world will ever see, and these two civilizations have two different physical arrangements in both the atmosphere and on the earth itself. The “six hundredth year” is again a biblical claim against all prevailing opinion of today that the people before the flood lived long; in fact they lived an average of some 900 years. And the reason they did so must be somehow linked to the presence of the antediluvian heavens and the earth of which we will see further later. The “six hundredth year” means that Noah was probably upper middle aged by the standards of his day. A very perceptive person that was watching the film last week on Noah was telling me that isn’t it interesting how our preconceptions carry over even when we make a film, like last week with the flood, and that film presented Noah with a big long white beard. Well, this presumes that he was old by the standards of his day, but six hundred out of nine hundred isn’t old by the standards of his day. Maybe Noah had a flattop, we don’t know.

Anyway, it happened in the six hundredth year of his life and the next thing is that is happened in “the second month, the seventeenth day of the month,” this is to be separated from the six hundredth year of his life; this is not part of his… in other words, time here is not being measured from his birthday; the next phrase, “in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month” is like if we label Roman numeral one for the month, it would be one plus seventeen days, with the Arabic numbers representing the days of the month not yet completed.

The seventeenth day is dated on the calendar in use. Now the question, what calendar was in use? Well, we know from various sources and so on that the calendar in use here is the Jewish civil calendar. Now there are two calendars that were used in Bible times, what we call the civil calendar and the religious calendar. The civil calendar had New Years starting about our month of September, and then went on by lunar months. And the reason for it we’ll get to in a moment. The religious calendar started the year in the spring, and in the spring was Passover, April, Exodus, and that was the birthday of the nation. So after Exodus and when the nation Israel began its historic existence the religious calendar took over in popularity, so that time was then measured from the birthday of the nation. However, before Israel and later on in some quarters, the civil calendar prevailed. It was a calendar the Jews shared with many other nations in the ancient world, all of which insist that the new year begins in the fall, about our October, about the autumnal equinox as we would say today.

So in verse 11 what we are to presume is that the calendar that begins in the fall of the year because it was presumed that creation occurred in the fall of the year. So that, according to their thinking, you have creation sometime at the end of September and then so on, so one month after the anniversary of the creation, the birthday of the world, then plus 17 or forty-seven days after, which would place it somewhere in October or November in time by our calendar. It was 1655 years after creation.

Now the more I have studied the text the more convinced I am that the Bible presents a very tight and logically coherent chronology. Ussher was not far wrong when he gave the date that everybody likes to tut-tut and ridicule, 4004 BC. Watch the symmetry here. In the Jewish calendar we have a number of feasts, and these feasts have two cycles, the spring and the fall cycles. In the spring you have Passover, First Fruits and Pentecost. Now observe that on those exact days Jesus Christ fulfilled His ministry. Jesus didn’t die just on any die; Jesus died to the day on the Jewish Passover by the calendar of His time. Jesus Christ didn’t rise just three days after any day but Jesus Christ arose the third day which would have made it First Fruits of that year. And when the Holy Spirit came in the book of Acts He didn’t come on just any day; He came exactly on the day of Pentecost.

So now what are we to make of this? That God has an accurate time system and He fulfills His prophecy right down to the day. Now if that’s the case, and we know that the spring cycle of Israel’s calendar has been fulfilled, obviously someone ought to raise the question, well what about the fall cycle? The fall cycle has the Feast of Trumpets, it has Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, and it has the Feast of Tabernacles, those are the three things in the fall. But those three dates in the fall have never been fulfilled… they’ve never been fulfilled yet in history. And so we say, we don’t know when the rapture is going to occur, we can’t set the date on that but we know that if Christ fulfills at His Second Advent the fall calendar the way He fulfilled the spring calendar on His First Advent it would tend to follow that the Feast of Tabernacles, which occurs in November, Jesus Christ will begin the millennial kingdom in the fall of the year. So we have a respect for the seasons in the Scripture, that things again happen again over thousands of years in separation exactly on these certain dates.

So here’s something very interesting. If creation is said to have occurred in the fall of the year, and remember now we’re talking about ex nihilo creation, we’re not talking about some molecule oozing into a man, we’re talking about fiat ex nihilo creation and it’s a point event, that it had to occur at some point in time; nothing hard about that. All right, if the universe was created in the fall, Jesus Christ sets up the millennial kingdom which is the seventy day, so to speak, of history, in the fall we have some sort of a symmetry here, with these things happening in the fall. So Genesis 7:11 is telling us about a certain calendar and that this was dated exactly in the fall of the year; the flood came, you might say God’s saying here that I created the world in the fall and I will destroy it in the fall, there’s the symmetry.

Now I have said and we showed in the film last week that if the Bible is the Bible, then what do you expect, if everything follows the way the Bible says it is and that every tribe, every country, has come through Noah, and if Noah had access to all this revelation of Genesis 1-11, doesn’t it follow that as the tribes disperse across the face of the earth that they’re going to carry pieces of this primary revelation with them, distorted, yes, because they don’t have the Holy Spirit to keep it pure and inerrant, only Israel has the Holy Spirit to keep that stream of truth pure and inerrant. But the other tribes that descend from Noah also carry pieces of revelation; they don’t maintain their purity, they get distorted mythologically. But certainly what do you do about those flood legends that were mentioned in the film last week? Now they’re there, and all tribes of the earth mention this particular kind of thing that happened a long time ago, when the human race was eliminated by the anger of the gods and a man was saved through an ark or through a coffin or through a chest as one of them had, but the outline is there.

Now, verse 11 is giving us a date on which this event happened and it just turns out that this too is remembered mythologically. One of the most famous of myths was from the homeland of Moses, Osiris. Osiris was an Egyptian deity with whom the liberals have much fun because they say ah, Osiris, like so many mythical deities in the ancient world was a dying and rising god, that is, he died in the fall and he rose in the spring; see, they say, well that’s just season worship, and this got embedded in the mythology of the world and then the Christians came along and they had this Jewish carpenter called Jesus and what they wanted to do was present Jesus as God to the world so what they simply did was simply take the dying and rising myth that they had borrowed from this pagan background and they said see, our Jewish carpenter rose, He’s a dying and rising God too. And so they took this primary datum of the dying/rising god motif and they tacked it on Jesus and that’s how we get Jesus dying and rising from the dead. That used to be the old liberal view in the 20s and 30s.

Well, an interesting problem is that as always, if you would look carefully at those Osiris myths you’d begin to say hey, maybe this isn’t a myth after all; maybe this does speak of death. In the Osiris myth observe this interesting facet: Osiris, in the fall of the year, of the seventeenth day of this particular month, Athyr, there’s some problem correlating that month with our calendar, on the seventeenth day of this month, every year the Egyptians would take an effigy of Osiris, put it in a coffin, and let him float in the water and it was called the disappearance of Osiris. And then he would be retrieved from the waters on the 27th of the month. It turns out the Bible says the end of the flood was in the 27^th day of that month, a year later but on the 27^th of that month. Now we ask, how is it that these myths have this common feature? Is everybody dreaming up the same dream, continent after continent after continent? Or are these myths simply weird, partially true, presentations of memory of the Scriptural record.

Now Osiris isn’t the only myth; if one were to trace some of the myths of the world he’d obtain a little list like this. All of these cultures remember something happened in the fall of the year: the Assyrians had a ceremony for the dead in the fall of the year. The Persians had a great celebration involving the angel of death that came to destroy mankind in the fall of the year. The Hindus had a celebration of the dead in the fall of the year. The Indians of ancient Mexico had a day of death in the fall of the year. The Celts had the end of their old year and the beginning of the new in the fall of the year. Now people would say oh, come, come, come now, all this is is just a season mythology, in the fall of the year we simply have the plants dying and in the spring we have the new life, so it’s just dying and rising correlating with the seasons. There are only two little problems in that list and they’re marked with asterisks. Those tribes lived in the southern hemisphere and in the southern hemisphere the fall of the year is the spring. So one wonders, then, why aren’t the myths different south of the equator. If the dying/rising motif is really seasonal it ought to be reversed, we ought to have a ceremony of death in the spring, not in the fall, south of the equator. But it doesn’t turn out that way, so therefore I say to my liberal critics, you are wrong in your interpretation that this is a seasonal myth. This is not seasonal phenomenon, because it doesn’t vary with latitude.

So we have the Peruvians carrying the corpse, they’d get up and they’d have a coffin and they’d carry it through… they don’t know why they do it but the Indians always did this in the fall of the year. And then in Australia, and some of you have seen the aborigines in National Geographic magazine or something, they paint the bodies and they have these white stripes on their bodies. Do you realize what they are doing? They’re painting skeletons on their bodies to indicate death, and they’re celebrating something of a vast area of skeletons commemorating those who died in some great cataclysm in the fall of the year.

In Ireland, Scotland and Wales, where most of us come from, by our heritage, we find the tradition of Halloween in the fall of the year, commemorating the ghosts of the dead, due to a great cataclysm of the past. And so once again in culture after culture after culture there are these memories of the great cataclysm of Genesis 7, glossed over, mixed up and so on but nevertheless there.

But that isn’t all, if we look more closely at some of these myths we’ll discover a few other things. We discover, for example, that one of the famous gods in the ancient world, the one after whom we name the first month of our year, January, the god Janus, is a two-faced god; he looks back to the old age and he looks forward to the new. And the question we raise: in Janus an imaginary individual, a figment of ancient imagination, or is this myth actually a faint, faint, foggy memory of another person who actually lived in history. We get a clue from Janus’ name; one of his names is the father of this world; another of his names is that he is inventor of ships. I suggest to you that Janus is none other than a false name of Noah; Janus is Noah as he’s been corruptly remembered in the myth around the Levant in the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Another exciting parallel that we find is an Indian god by the name of Vishnu. Vishnu was supposed to have preserved his righteous family through a flood; Vishnu, the name goes back to ancient Sanskrit, and Sanskrit is one of our ancient anchor languages behind the Indo-European family of languages; Sanskrit is a very crucial language to study if you’re interested in the linguistics of Indo-European languages. And it represents an ancient view. Now it just turns out that the Hebrew word for man is ish, and nu is just a shortened form or contraction of Noah, and so we find in Sanskrit the name “Noah” preserved” it’s called the man Noah; Vishnu is Noah.

So hopefully this will challenge some of you as you read and study mythology not to debunk it but if you are a real Bible-believing Christian and don’t just say you are, like so many people in the Bible belt that are so polite and courteous until you talk Jesus talk but then when it comes to actually affirming the real truth of the Bible then they back off. If you are that kind of a real Bible-believing Christian, when you study myths study it carefully and see if you can’t see parts of Genesis 1-11 popping up all over the place.

What happened? It says, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Now what are “the fountains of the deep?” The fountains of the deep apparently in the ancient world were vast subterranean caverns. We said earlier in the Genesis series that there was a great mountain of God in Eden and from the mountain of God in Eden there flowed a river; the river came up out of the earth, flowed eastward through Eden and then it forked into four rivers and text says these four rivers spread across the face of the earth. If all four rivers spread across the face of the earth it would imply there’s only one continent, not many, because a river can’t go from one continent, across an ocean and start again on another continent. So it would tend to suggest that the antediluvian world had basically one continent broken up by inland seas, perhaps. So we have this kind of a hydrologic cycle, we have no rain apparently, we’ll get into that specific question next week, but apparently no rain so we can account for the water draining from the mountain of God, we can account for this by gravity, simple gravity flow. The problem we can’t account for is that wherever this water flowed out of the river, lest the earth would suddenly be buried by all the water, is that that water must recycle and the question is by what energy system does it recycle, because our existing geophysical system cycles water through by evaporation. So for example on the high plains here some of it cycles by surface tension, but mostly it’s by evaporation.

Now in the ancient world, since the world’s surface itself physically was massively different than our surface today, remember no rain, there were artesian-like wells of water welling up, with mist and so on around it, in this situation there must have been a driving force up and this by creationist thinkers now tentatively has been suggested that the internal heat of the earth was being utilized in some way to pump the water upward, this is where the energy source would come from. But in the course of all of this the earth’s surface was covered by greater land area than it is now. Now I guess it’s something like 75% water, 25% land. In the ancient world, before the flood, presumably there were vast areas of the earth covered by land and very small by water. And in this situation you had vast areas of water stored underneath the earth’s surface.

It shouldn’t seem too strange to anyone who lives on this cap rock, you’re standing on a great underground water reservoir, the Ogallala formation, and interestingly as a side comment about this Ogallala formation, as Tech researchers have found, it’s very hard to recharge it and the problem is as we run out of water there’s going to be more and more pressure to save water and to pump from the {?} lakes down in the Ogallala formation, but when this is done a marvelous thing happens; once the water is withdrawn from the Ogallala it seems like that the formation loses its ability to hold water, its hydroscopic quality is decreased and this is why we’re having such a problem trying to pump the water back down and keep it down, it just domes up and refuses to spread out. So this also should suggest that anyone who thinks that the Ogallala could only have been created or only be a remnant of a flood, it couldn’t have…the water just didn’t get there by slow drainage because you can’t drain water into rock that has already dried. So the Ogallala formation itself is a residual puddle, we would suggest, from the flood.

But in the area before the flood, when we have these great underground, these are “the fountains of the deep.” And in some way on the day the flood began there was tremendous tectonic disturbances that cracked these open and this water came out. Next week I’ll present a thesis, an oceanographer who suggests that some 80% of the present water in the oceans was encapsulated in “the fountains of the deep.” We’re talking about millions of cubic miles of water cracking up through the surface; this is an awesome thing to behold.

It says, “and the windows of the heaven were opened,” and this was a picture of titanic rainfall, presumably from a canopy over the earth; presumably in the antediluvian atmosphere, in the upper levels of the atmosphere there were vast amounts of water; we’ll also speak to this later, but this gave a uniformly, or more uniformly warm climate before the flood. This is why we have tropical vegetation under the Antarctic ice cap, for example. And so we have a uniformly mild warm climate of the earth before the flood and this canopy collapsed.

Now it says, it rained for “forty days and forty nights.” [12, “And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.”] Since the amount of water, precipitable and otherwise in the atmosphere is only about four inches and you divide four inches by the number of hours in forty days you get a rainfall of about one or two thousandth’s inch per hour, which isn’t even a light drizzle. So obviously since the Hebrew word in verse 12, it says the “pouring rain,” it means heavy rain, now obviously it means to keep a heavy rain going for forty days it had to come from a different kind of atmosphere than what we’ve got today. And if we say a heavy rain equals an inch an hour, which is reasonable, you all recognize that as a heavy rain, an inch an hour over a forty day period would give 80 feet of water over the whole surface of the earth. So presumably there was something like 80 feet of precipitable water in the antediluvian atmosphere. That’s just a ballpark figure.

And underneath the rupture of these subterranean cavities gave the other percent. I will show evidence next week to say that the flood covered the earth for some 10,000 feet or about two miles and that would mean that 80 feet out of two miles or 10,000 feet is minimal but nevertheless it’s a significant amount of rain. So we have the tremendous torrential rains and the cracking up of “the fountains of the deep.”

Now there’s been one objection to all this and that is that some evangelicals who always want to harmonize the text prematurely have argued that “fountains of the deep” in verse 11 are nothing else than a synonym for ocean bodies of water and that what happens is like you have a glass or you have a dish of water on the table and somebody comes along the table and they shake it, and so you have the earth shook and you set up these resonate frequencies in the water and finally swhoosh, the water gets out of the basin, and that’s their idea of what caused the flood. The problem is, it doesn’t coincide with the text.

If you turn to Psalm 74:15 you’ll see how the word in the Hebrew was understood; that is, how this word “breaking up” was used. I warned you when we first started this series, particularly for those of you who have had a lot of college training and you’re well read in the subject and you recognize very early in this series that I am going way out on a very radical limb, I know how radical it is, I’ve studied it just as much as you have, and I am well aware of the radical nature of the statements I’m making. All I urge you to do is take all the 11 chapters of Genesis together, as a unit, and watch how together those 11 chapters will handle many of your problems; the ice age, the dinosaur, the cave man, the problem of radioactive dating over long periods, these will all come out in the wash if you’ll just hang in there and watch these details of the text.

Psalm 74:15, this is talking about the situation after the Exodus while the Jews were wandering around in the wilderness. And you remember there miraculous accounts given to us in the book of Numbers, Leviticus, about God cracking open the earth and what would come out? Water. Why? Because they are out in the desert, they needed water, and in Psalm 74:15 here’s a typical way that word “break open” is used. “Thou didst break open the fountain and the flood,” now in the context we know exactly what it’s talking about, no ambiguity in the interpretation there because we’ve got the whole book of Numbers to tell us what those events looked like; the earth cracked open and water came out. And that’s the same kind of thing that we tried to portray, you saw in the film last week with the fountain sticking up and everybody running around.

Let’s tie this together; this is a cosmic catastrophe in Genesis 7, it’s not somebody’s bathtub that overflowed in the Mediterranean area. This is a major, major incident. It’s so major that it can be worked into the overall design of the first 8 chapters of Genesis. Observe the literary structure. In Genesis 1 what do we start with in Genesis 1:2? We start with chaos. What happens in Genesis 1:3 through Genesis 2:3? We have God bringing order out of chaos, the days of creation—order. The order is maintained from Adam to Noah and then in Noah’s day we go back to chaos, and the agency for brining all of this about in Genesis 1:3 it talks about “and God separated the waters which were above from the waters which were below,” so we have waters in two places. And so we go from chaos to order, chaos to order. How? By the Word of God. And then when God wants to judge what does He do? He brings the windows of heaven, the waters above back down, He opens up “the fountains of the deep” and so now we merge once again from the same kind of chaos we had in Genesis 1:2. So the flood represents a cosmic catastrophe.

Now let’s turn to 2 Peter 3; we’re going to stop our exegesis at this point to view a film by the National Geographic Society; it therefore is filled with the evolutionary propaganda but you ought to have discernment, because I don’t want anyone here to be at all in doubt that when we are talking about a cosmic catastrophe in the past, Noah’s day, or in the future, our day, I’m not talking about a psychological thing, I am talking about something that happened in the physical environment.

In 2 Peter 3:5-7, “For this they willingly were ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and,” literally, “by means of water,” it’s not “in,” it’s “by means of water,” so however the heavens and the earth were constituted before the flood, in some way water was a holding agent. How I do not know, but it was some sort of anchoring, holding agent. [6] “Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. [7] But the heavens and the earth which are now,” and notice that expression, “which are now,” that means that the heavens and the earth which are now, that we know, we look out we see blue sky from the scattering, we see cumulus clouds, cirrus clouds, stratus form clouds, we see rain, snow, hail, etc. This atmosphere is deliberately contrasted with the old atmosphere. There are two different atmospheres operating with two different regimes. So “the heavens and the earth which are now,” Peter says, “by the same word,” that is the Word of God, “are kept in store, reserved unto fire,” so our present geophysical system is anchored by a fire principle, that is volcanism, the igneous rock of the mantle, this is somehow holding the present system together and this is going to be the trigger agent when God says I’ve had it, that’s enough, and He’s going to press the button. And don’t buy this popular apocalypticism that you’re finding in the theaters and books about man’s going to have the battle of Armageddon and nuclear war. God does not permit man to end history with man’s instruments. When history is going to be ended it’s going to be very clearly the work of God. God is going to end it by releasing these forces.

Now to give you a little concept of this, this film is on volcanism and these are the forces, you’re going to see a very trivial small scale illustration of volcanism. As you look at it, think, relax as you watch the film, it’s excellent photography as National Geographic always does, of volcanic phenomena and think to yourself, this is the end of the world, this kind of phenomenon is going to be used to terminate history, so this should give you good visual imagery to understand your Bible at this point.