Biblical Framework

Charles Clough

Lesson 35

We’re going to look at Genesis 10 and 11 and continue our background for these chapters. For those of you who may be growing a little impatient with some of the background material, let me assure you that it’s quite essential to put some of the pieces together of early Genesis, because inevitably what happens is that in the church, Genesis and other portions of the Bible are taught in such a way that they don’t seem to integrate with history. Then what happens is that we’ll have some Christian absorb the world view around them in a history course, or in a discussion or an article of something like that, and then because that doesn’t seem to fit the Scripture, then all kinds of doubts come in about gee, how can the Scriptures be authoritative when in fact there’s this constant fluctuation and tension. Last year we spent a lot of time going into the background. There are tremendously important basic ideas and as I said, there’s a simple elementary principle that operates: either you will let the Word of God interpret the world around you, or you’re going to let the world around you interpret the Word of God. It’s going to be one way or the other, it can’t be a mish-mash, it will always be one way or the other. This is why we’re being quite careful to point out, not just the pieces of direct text, but also some of the work that godly scholars have done who have submitted their hearts and their minds to the text of Scripture, and looked out upon the world and said what can we say about the world in light of the Scripture.

We’re going to take a quick overview of Gen. 10-11, because as you can see, the last verse of Gen. 9 finishes off with the story of Noah. In Gen. 10-11, if you go to the end of chapter 11, you see that beginning in Gen. 12 you have the call of Abraham, and that’s really the beginning of the Jewish race and the nation Israel, which characterizes the rest of the Bible and the rest of history. So these two chapters form a bridge and they take us from the flood to Abraham; that’s normally the way it’s taught. What I want to do is spend a little time to stimulate your thinking about the material of Gen. 10-11, because this is where we have the data that tells us how civilizations, nations, arose. All of us have come from the DNA of Noah, his sons and his daughters-in-law. That means that every race, every culture, has its origin in Gen. 10-11. This is the answer to the missionary who goes into a continent and it’s often said by secular anthropologists that these Christian missionaries are dangerous because they distort culture, because they’re bringing a western religion into the east, or their western religion somewhere else, or they’re disturbing the third world cultures, and this and that, as though the gospel of Jesus Christ is some sort of foreign thing that is utterly and completely unrelated to the fountainheads of these cultures. There again is where either the Word of God interprets the world, or the world will interpret the Word of God.

We’re going to look at cultures, and we’re going to ask the question about missionaries going into culture X,Y,Z. We’ve got to ask what does the Bible say about the origins of culture X,Y,Z. Don’t just talk about the gospel going into it, as sort of a target, but think of what the Scripture is saying about that culture. That’s what Gen. 10-11 is, this is the background for every world culture that exists. It’s also providing the justification for actual missionary and exclusivistic teaching of Scripture, i.e. why is the Scripture so dogmatic that one subset of the human race seems to have a corner on the truth, it seems so utterly undemocratic in a modern era like ours to make that claim. The audacity of Jesus to say that “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except by Me.” How arrogant, that’s how it strikes the modern person and that’s because the modern person has come up in an age when everything’s democratic, everybody has one vote, all cultures are equal, and there’s no choice, there’s no patterns to the culture. What we want to see is that in this rise of civilization out of which God called Abraham and into which He wants to propagate the gospel. We have to do a thorough background study on where we all have come. So in Gen. 10:1 you see that the three sons of Noah are featured, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Everyone else descends from those. There’s four men mentioned in Gen. 10:1, and there’s four women. That’s eight people, and those eight people are the fountainhead of all races, all cultures, on all continents, for all time. There isn’t any more genetic material than just those eight people. That means that if you trace your family back, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, all the way back, you ultimately will link up, if you could have the genealogical data, with these names in Genesis 10. These are your grandfathers and grandmothers. This is where we have come from, these people, this is Noah’s family.

Gen. 10 is divided; for example, verses 2, 3, 4, 5, if you mark it out, verse 2 starts with the sons of Japheth, and lists them. Then beginning in verse 6 you’ll see the sons of Ham, and they are listed, and it goes down to verse 20, then in verse 21 it is Shem, and all the way down to the end of that; then in verse 32, at the end of chapter 10 there’s a summary statement, “These are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, by their nations; and out of these the nations were separated on the earth after the flood.” We have a dispersion, so whether it’s the Eskimo, the Australian aboriginal, whether it is the Chinese, the Japanese, the Polynesians, the South Americans, the Africans, the Europeans, it doesn’t make a particle of difference, they all come out of this table, if we are to believe Scripture. We can kiss Scripture off as a sweet little story, but if we’re serious, and Jesus was quite serious about the way He took the Scriptures, if we’re to follow Jesus’ example and take the Scripture exactly the way He did, then we have to take this seriously.

If you look at Gen. 11 it’s the story of Shinar, and it’s the story there of Babel, and we’ll get into that as a profound event. If you look at the way the Bible is written, go back, for example, to Gen. 9 and remember how God was speaking to Noah, and then you notice that little section from verses 20-27, it’s that little vineyard incident, and you wonder what is this, we have this big long narrative and then all of a sudden smack dab in the middle of it Noah is getting drunk in a vineyard and running around nude. What does that have to do with history? Apparently it’s got a lot to do with history, because the Holy Spirit chose to make that a [can’t understand word] event. Can you think of the number of events that must have happened in Noah’s life, a man who lived for 5-6 centuries, I think you could write a lot of material about his life. But isn’t it striking that after the flood he lived 350 years, verse 28, and only one event of his life is mentioned, when he was drunk. Why is that? Because as we said, that incident reveals the flaw in all civilized society.

Now we come to Gen. 11 and there’s a similar thing. We’ve gotten through all the descendants, but then all of a sudden in the middle of it, in Gen. 11:1-9 there’s this other strange event, all about the people coming together to make a big tall tower that will reach unto heaven, and then verse 8-9, “So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth, and they stopped building the city. [9] Therefore its name was called Babel,” and that’s the word that we still use today, we have an English verb, “Babel,” which is a direct transliteration of this word, it’s a case where the English language has imported a Semitic word. So, “because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.” Now in verse 10, after that event, which of the three sons is mentioned? Watch what’s going on here. I’m trying to give you a broad brush of two chapters in a few minutes here.

We’re looking the origin of civilization according to Scripture. We have three sons, we have this mysterious event, and then all of a sudden, beginning in 11:10 the other two sons drop out, and from this point forward we have a concentration on one and only of the three sons, Shem. And then as we concentrate on this one son, something happens in the text, because from verse 10 forward, for every son there’s a detailed analysis of his age, at which he gave birth to the next patriarch, the age after that, and then it summed. It’s a formula that you’ll see and its precisely this formula in the text that argues that this text is to be taken literally. The human authors of the text must have intended that this be taken literally, without gaps. Why? Because you have this formula, you have so and so was born, he lived x years, he gave birth to the next in line, he lived y years after that, and then as if we couldn’t add, and all the days were z. x + y = z. And that formula is used on every single patriarch. So we have this formula, and this formula locks up the flexibility we have interpreting the text. This isn’t a piece of rubber that can be stretched any way you want it, there are certain controls in the language and in the very structure of the text.

Why are we making an issue out of this? Several things. You should have read over this material, you’ll see in verse 11 where he says “and Shem lived five hundred years after he became the father of Arpachshad,” and then it goes on, in verse 13 the next guy is 403, then you come down to verse 16, Eber lived 34 years and then 430 years, etc. So we have a diminishing age. And if you are imaginative and you have a piece of graph paper, and you take the time to do the exercise I suggested and plot each one of these men, this is the x axis, and then the y axis, you plot the age at death, you get something like there’s a little gap, and if you draw a line that best fits you get what we call an exponential decay curves, that’s very fascinating and holds a key to understanding history because that is an interesting case. And most engineers or science students recognize immediately, you get these kinds of curves when you move from one steady state to another.

For example, you take a glass of hot water and drop ice cubes in it and take the temperature every so often, that’s the curve you get. If you take the discharge of electricity across a capacitor and you could slow it down, you’d get that kind of a curve. Whatever area of science, when you move from one thing that’s relative steady and then you have a sudden change, the system takes time to adjust to that, and it usually does it in physical systems by means of what we call an exponential decay curve. What is remarkable is that when you take the data from this chapter, you get an exponential decay curve. This is not my imagination, this is not arbitrary, prove it for yourself, and the easy way to prove it’s an exponential decay curve is to go to the store and get log graph paper and plot the points out and draw a line through it, and you’ll find it’s a straight line, so that’s an exponential decay curve. This is just a feature of the text, it’s just there.

So the question is what do we make of this? We said last year, plus a lot of other things, that that is evidence that strange things were going on, and one of the things we mentioned, we have a case where before the flood it seems like the universe was structured in a certain way and after the flood the universe was structured in a certain way. There’s a gap here, something happened, there was a big discontinuity, and we said the New Testament commentary on the Old Testament, in 2 Peter, treats this as a universal cosmic event, not something just pertaining to the Mesopotamian river valley on planet earth. Let me just review because this carries over some things. This presses us as Christians who believe in the Bible, this gives us a tremendous problem because it doesn’t allow enough time to fit things in that we have been taught. This time interval, from this point of the flood on down to, say, Abraham, we can back date Abraham to about 2,000 BC, we’re not talking any more than 500-700 years here, that’s all the time we have. And in those 500-700 years every major civilization has to have arisen, the ice age has to have occurred, and numerous events have to go on during this time period, and it’s not because we’re trying to create a controversy, it’s just because that’s the way the text is. So we have to look at what we’re dealing with, and just by way of background, let me remind you of one thing that we covered toward the end of the course last year, when I mentioned that when you deal with time, the problem always is if you haven’t got eyewitness data to an ancient event, you do not have direct observational data.

The only way you can measure time is by assuming certain things to be constant, that’s the only way you can work an equation, you’ve got to have constants in the equation. We gave, as the key example, if you had your video camera going in the Garden of Eden five minutes after God created Adam and you trained your video camera on Adam, and I came along after that and asked you how old was Adam and you told me 5 minutes, I’d say you’re out of your mind, your video cassette just shows me a 30 year old man, how can he be only 5 minutes old. And that is the nature of the problem. When you study history if you don’t have eyewitness data you can’t endlessly create constants. Remember when we were going through this, I mentioned things like this: here are some clocks, and what this physicist who got this together did is just simply said okay, let’s assume things are constant, now look at the discord in ages. We have all these things about “scientific methods,” now here’s what scientific methods produce when you let them loose.

Particularly notice this one, population growth in recorded history. What’s interesting about these figures, these population growth figures is that the population growth on earth can be roughly calculated by looking at the Jew. We know there were no Jews before 2,000 BC. Since we have a starting point, and we know what the Jewish population is today, and you can’t argue that the Jews are an unusual group that overpopulated the world, they’ve been almost decimated three or four times in their historic existence, the Jew has been the subject of massive genocide, so if anything his population growth rate is slow, not fast. And we can extrapolate the growth rate of the Jew from 2,000 BC on up to the present day. It also turns out that if you do that backwards, assuming the total population of the earth, you come out with a figure of about 3,000 BC. So the point is that population statistics have caused a dilemma for people who think the human race has been around for a long time. If the human race was around for a long time we’d be five stories thick, crawling all over each other. And there are not that many people here. Therefore, why aren’t there, if man has been around for millions of years he had plenty of time to reproduce. He has not, so therefore the population growth rate is an argument for a young human race.

We showed others, non-equilibrium of carbon 14, we went into the helium content of the atmosphere, you get all kinds of dates here, and the propensity because in the evolutionary world view you have to support the idea of the continuity of nature, and you always pick the oldest clock. Then we said it’s not just terrestrial data, it’s also clock descriptions inside our own solar system, for example one of the most powerful evidences there is cometary life times, comets decay very rapidly, and the evidence would indicate from cometary decay of 6,000 years and no more.

Then we could go outside of the solar system to things like this, for example one of the most powerful arguments is spiral galaxies. Spiral galaxies are supposed to, you’ve seen these pictures of these arms, the question is that since we know the rotation of the galaxies, if they were sitting there for billions of years, they would have wound up; the galaxy wouldn’t be geometrically shaped that way, so we have a little problem. So wherever we go it’s not quite as airtight as we’re led to believe. Of course this kind of information that usually is carefully excised from most discussions.

As another piece of evidence I gave you last time, one of the strange events is this particular element, when radioactive decay elements decay, if you have a little point there which would be an element decaying, when it decays it sends energy out, and if that happens to be buried in a rock matrix, it leave burn marks. For example, here’s what Precambrian Mica looks like, there’s some burn marks, it’s where somebody took a slice of the rock, cut it and those radiuses are the termination points of alpha particles and other particles out of the nucleus on decay. So you can identify what these elements were, and what’s interesting is that some elements have very short half life. One of them, polonium 218, has a half life of three minutes. What’s fascinating about this is that polonium sometimes can be a daughter element of a previous element, but other times it starts out by itself. And this particular work by Mr. Gentry shows that here you have the strange spectacle in Precambrian rock, the oldest rock on earth, with these burn marks from an element that only has a half life of three minutes. This is a very interesting question, because if the earth really was molten and took millions of years to cool down, this thing would have exhausted its radioactivity long before the rock became cold, and there wouldn’t have been left any burn marks. However, the burn marks are there which shows clearly that the polonium decayed after the rock was cold and hard and fixed. So the case then is do we have polonium being generated ex nihilo and then suddenly died out in three minutes, or what? So there are evidences around, it’s just obviously because of the philosophical world view of the surrounding culture that carefully keeps this material away because they have a problem with it.

What we have in summary is two basic ways of handling this data. One is that you have a very short time scale given in the Bible where you have nucleo genesis of the chemical elements very quickly, the creation of the Precambrian granites, all of this activity happening before the present time of less than 6,000 years vs. the picture we all get from our educational experience, you have a big bang, stars form, supernova, the earth forms, and then you have the Precambrian granites over here forming after all the elements were here.

This is all by way of introduction to a problem that we have to deal with coming up in the text and that is the problem of during Genesis 10 and 11, what was going on climatologically, how are we to deal with the issue of glaciation. There’s an interesting point in Gen. 12:10, it’s going to figure prominently in the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But one of the backgrounds to the Abraham, Isaac, Jacob stories is a climatic shift that’s going on. In Gen. 12:10 we have a famine, and it forces them to go down to Egypt and that creates all kinds of problems, and then later on there’s an even greater famine that causes Jacob to go down and Joseph rescues him, etc. If you look carefully at the details of the text, the text reports to us that all nations, a-l-l, were suffering from the famine, not just Palestine, all nations. So here in the Abraham, Isaac, Jacob cycle of stories we’re seeing this tremendous famine take place. What’s very interesting is that in Gen. 13:10 you have a well watered situation in Sodom and Gomorrah. If you look at that today you see that it’s not too well watered, it’s the Dead Sea. So Lot picked out that area, it wasn’t a desert when Abraham was walking abound, it was a well-watered place, these guys were ranchers. Now granted, ranchers can run their businesses out in somewhat arid conditions, but you’ve got to give the guy a break, there’s no ranchers going out on the Negev.

Let’s look further in Genesis. Gen. 41:54, this is the passage I told you about in the text where it says there was famine all over the world. “And the seven years of famine began to come, just as Joseph had said, then there was famine in all the lands; but in all the land of Egypt there was bread.” So the backdrop of this is you have it starting off with Egypt and Sodom and Gomorrah area well-watered, watered enough for businessmen to be attracted to take their investments. Herds to a rancher is what capital is to a manufacturer or an owner of a business, it’s his capital investment. He’s not going to stick it out there in a place that can’t sustain his capital. There goes his business if he tries it. So these guys were picking out areas for their ranching businesses that were well watered.

Not turn to Job, we’ll come back to Job several times because Job appears to have been written during the time of Gen. 10-11. Israel isn’t in existence, the Exodus hasn’t occurred, you have a case where there are these strange notices in it. Job 38:29, when God talks to Job, we have this addressed to Job who lives in what is now Arabian desert, and God says to Job, “From whose womb has come the ice? And the frost of heaven, who has given it birth? [30] Water becomes hard like stone, and the surface of the deep is imprisoned.” The word “deep” there means big bodies of water, and they’re frozen. When did this happen in the latitude of Arabia? So we have these hints throughout the Bible of a climatic extreme, and we want to work on this a little bit tonight and a little bit in the notes that you have.

If you look at the notes you have, page 6, we’re going to examine this question of the ice age, and the reason for it is because there’s evidence of glaciation and it’s always said to be millions of years old, this and that. Here’s another classic example, like I showed you last time, remember the guy I showed you who went around and read all the geologic literature and asked the simple question, where’s the geologic column, so he plotted it all out and found about 3-4% of the earth’s surface had it, and this is what is being used to promote an absolute view of earth history. To start the problem off, there’s a map of the northern hemisphere. The area that’s in gray is the area where the glaciers reached a maximum. If you look carefully, it came down into the middle west, far south of Chicago, down into the Ohio valley, all the way into New York state and northern Pennsylvania. And by glaciers we mean solid sheets of ice that were powerful enough to move mountains, to plow up material ahead of them, and then melt and leave it there. This is the kind of awesome cold accumulated snow and ice that must have gone on.

The question is, from a uniformitarian point of view, this is the non-Christian, the secular view, how do you explain the ice age? There’s a real problem here, there’s never been an explanation for the ice age, everybody talks about it, everybody says they’re confident we had four or five glaciations and each one 100,000 years, etc. Excuse me, how did it get started. Here’s the problem of why scientists have always had a problem with the ice age, trying to get it started. They believe it happened, but they can’t figure out how it got started. There’s a little principle of physics involved, and that is that if you look at temperature, and ask the question of how much water can air hold at different forms of temperature, it turns out that cold air doesn’t hold much water. You’ve heard the expression it’s too cold to snow. It does get that way. In central Canada you basically have a desert in the winter because you can’t get snow out of cold air. Here’s why. Down here is the temperature, zero degrees, minus 20, minus 30, minus 40, and you can see in terms of water vapor capacity very little. Now what happens is when you heat it up you get [can’t understand word], that’s why it gets so humid in hot weather, because the hot air can hold so much water. The problem that they have found is in starting the ice age you need to do what to the temperature. You need to lower it; you’ve got to lower it enough so it doesn’t melt in the summer, right? What happens if you lower the temperature? Now you’ve lowered the capacity to carry water. Now where do you get the snow from that makes the glaciers? Very simple problem, but it’s a very complicated one and they’ve tried and tried and tried to figure out how do you do this because one principle is fighting the other one. You can’t get it started this way.

For example, here is a case where they tried in a computer to generate an ice age with dropping the temperature. Here is what they tried to do by lowering the temperature and ask the computer models what would you do, where would you show glaciation if we dropped, and get a load of the drops here, if we chilled the atmosphere by 10 to 12 degrees C, that’s 24 degrees F average temperature. That’s a massive cooling. What would happen, could you get the glacier started. Well, you cool the air, there’s not enough snow, and this is the little glaciation, the maximum glaciation you can get. But that’s not enough, because in the ice age the glaciers went all the way down here. So the cooler you make it to keep the glacier, the less water you have to make the glacier.

What’s so interesting is that the Bible has an answer to that problem, but people aren’t ready to accept the answer to that problem because they don’t like the time question. In the notes on page 5 the creationist meteorologist, Oard says, I’ll read the quote. This is the condition after, hypothesize, after the flood. “The picture emerges at the end of the flood catastrophe, the earth is a barren world with no trees, no plants, no animals or birds except on the ark, all air-breathing land based animals had died and were fossilized or were in the process of being fossilized in the sediments of the flood. The newly formed stratosphere would contain a thick shroud of volcanic dust and aerosols due to the extensive volcanic and tectonic activity during the flood. It probably was a dark, depressing world. The oceans would have been uniformly warm; the initial conditions would be established for a second, much lesser, catastrophe, a post-flood transition to the present day climate, this would be a post-flood ice age.” What Oard has done, a clever piece of work, is to note that if you had massive volcanic activity during the flood, which is clearly feasible, you would have had this following condition set up in the atmosphere, the opposite of a greenhouse. We talk about greenhouse today, keeping the earth in, actually it turns out if you have dust and aerosols in the high atmosphere you’re reflecting the sunlight back.

So now all of a sudden we’re having energy losses; that’s one thing to notice. At the same time we’re having that condition with the chilling of the air, how warm are the oceans? Where did the water come from that flooded the earth? Not just from the rain but also from fountains of the deep. The earth is warm, the waters that exuded in the flood were hot waters, in fact in Josephus and other passages and Jewish tradition says a lot of people were scalded to death by the heat of the water. So the oceans were left warm, the atmosphere is cooling. Isn’t this an interesting situation? And it turns out if you do the calculations, with that kind of a situation, a very warm ocean with this kind of situation in the atmosphere so you get chilling, it turns out that the North American continent would look like this. These would be the temperatures that would be encountered at the surface of the earth. Notice differences from today’s climate. In this case warm air all the way up into Labrador and Greenland. Why? Because all this water is warm, the oceans are all warm, all over the Pacific, the Arctic, etc. particularly the Arctic Ocean is warm. So what the Bible would present is evidence for, not a cold ice age, but for a warm one, in which the oceans, because they are warm, they are providing the moisture. Over the land you have the chilling effect because there’s no water there to keep it hot, and you have this tremendous temperature grading. That’s the grading I, as a snow lover always like to see, the temperatures grading like that on the East coast because that’s the sign we’re going to get a northeast snow storm. You don’t get northeast snow storms with heavy snow in very cold, dry weather. That’s not when you get them, you get them when the temperature is just as close to freezing as you can possibly get it without having it trip over the freezing mark, and you have all the energy of the atmosphere in a very narrow band.

This is precisely the situation that the Word points to would have happened after the flood. In particular, the edge of the storm tracks would follow exactly this band, which coincides with the math that I just showed you where the edge of the glaciers are. Now what we have is a feasible model of how glaciation began. The arrow there indicates the storm tracks, the storm tracks dumping snow on the leading edge of that glacier, constantly building it up during the summer, constant cloudiness so you have minimized melting, and you have this adjustment that the whole world is going through. Of course more and more water gets trapped in the glaciers, it lowers the sea level, the lower sea level all of a sudden now exposes land bridges. We have a land bridge established between Asia and Alaska. You can go on and model these things which he has done.

The other interesting thing and I point these out to you because this map is what would be the maximum glaciation; this map would be when the glaciers just started, and you’ll see a very interesting thing, if you look at the difference between those two maps. It’s normally thought, classical thinking, that the glaciers started at the north and worked south. If you look at this map that’s not true, the glaciers started in the south and worked north. The reason is, is because Hudson Bay is full of water and the water is warm, so the first glaciers actually started in this area, moved north as well as moving south, and there are indications, believe it or not, of scratches in the rock which show that the glaciers were moving north, it’s always been discounted because quote “we know it can’t happen that way.”

Here we have an amazing example, and it may be rough around the edges, but what I’m pointing out is not that this a total answer. I am suggesting that if people would submit their mentality to the Scripture and consume from the Scripture the data God has given us, and think it through, we might have a lot less conflicts with Scripture than we do. But we have this reticence, always leave the Scriptures to the last moment, leave them over in a carefully sanitized compartment while we do our science and our history over here, then we create this big edifice in conflict with the Bible and say oh-oh, how did that happen. The problem is we’re not bringing the data in at the first step from the Scripture, and here’s an example of a guy who did. Isn’t this amazing. This isn’t fluky stuff, you can prove it, you input this to a computer model and that’s what you get out of it. On a time span, here’s what it would have looked like. This happened during Gen. 10-11; during those years, from the time of Noah all the way down to the Shem, Ham and Japheth dispersions, the ocean temperature, that’s the key, because once the oceans cool down now we no longer have a water source. I was surprised to know that the average temperature of the ocean today is only 4 degrees C. If you average all the water, including the water that’s down deep along with the surface water, on every place of the earth, it only is 39 degrees F. That’s a pretty cold ocean.

What Oard is saying is that the ocean temperatures right after the flood were as high as 30 decrees C, that means about 86 degrees. This has a number of profound other effects that explain a lot of data. At this high ocean temperature you have massive changes in Co2 levels. This begins to affect the whole carbon 14 dating system. This affects the deposition on coral reefs. This affects the microscopic life in the sea. All kinds of things are disturbed by this kind of a profile, and interestingly, all this disturbs such that they appear older than they are. And what he says is that as the glaciers built up and built up and built up for the first 500 years, if we date the flood in Noah’s time, this would be around Abraham’s time, and this is independently of the text, this time scale comes out of just the physics of the model, the ocean temperature drops and at 700 years we reach the end of the ice age, and the ocean levels level off to where they are now.

It’s interesting, those disturbances of famines and everything else that’s going on in Genesis occur right in this time interval, right at the end of that glaciation. What’s also fascinating, and we want to show you one more thing, that once the oceans cool down and the storm tracks contract northward and toward the South Pole… [blank spot] …kind of hold that as a note because the notes that you have to read for next time will make mention of something that’s going on in Antarctica that’s crucial to the understanding of Ham, Shem and Japheth’s dispersion across the earth. Just so you’re set up for what’s coming, let me note that the growth of the glaciation in Antarctica is late, it is not the same as the glaciation over the rest of the world, and in particular when it first started vast areas of what we call Antarctica were ice free, and could be mapped. One of the startling finds in the notes handed out tonight is we think we’ve discovered the maps. Antarctica was mapped by human beings before it was covered with ice. When did that happen? On this model we know when it happened, it happened between the flood and the end of the ice age, when navigation could get into those areas and map them. The bays are now all under sheets of ice, they haven’t been mapped, they couldn’t be mapped. The only way we know why they’re there is because we can take radar and we can take infrared photography and we can map it, but these guys didn’t have that, they did it because they sailed their boats in there.

We want to understand it has a profound influence on how we view history, catastrophically. If I could summarize what we’re saying here is that if you’re to think Biblically about history, history is sort of like an airplane, the old saying that flying is tedious boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror; history is that way, history carries along in sort of a steady state that lulls everybody to sleep, and then suddenly it’s pounded with these catastrophic events. The Biblical view of history is that you have “high energy” events periodically occur. What’s the one coming? The Second Advent of Christ. Are we to think that this is unprecedented? When Jesus talked about His Second Advent, what did He deliberately liken His Second Advent to, several times in the Gospels? “As in the days of Noah.” Why would He have done that? Because it was the last great epic in history where we had similar catastrophes that were yet to come when He comes back to this planet. So that’s the Biblical view of history, history is not a quiet unperturbed sleep; history goes for a while and then suddenly things happen.

If you look in the notes on page 6, there are several other things that come out of this. “Much evidence points to the presence of abundant rain and even snow at the low latitudes of the Middle East during this period of history. Modern surveys,” and this is factual, everybody knows this, it’s just a question of dating, “Modern surveys as well as the ancient historian Herodotus show that the Sahara Desert had great lakes with much runoff.” There are river beds in the middle of the Sahara Desert, which tells you that obviously the climate has changed in North Africa very profoundly. The first Pharaoh of Egypt got his name because he kept the water from flooding all the farm lands there was so much water there. Africa was luxuriant at this time. What happened to it? “Abraham notes that the Dead Sea area as well as Egypt were ‘well watered everywhere’ (Gen. 13:10).” These are the verses I showed you. “By the time of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, great droughts lasting many years occurred in these areas.” “Postdiluvian nature, therefore, presented Noah and his family and their animals a uniquely stressful situation on land” a uniquely stressful situation.

On page 7 I’ve diagramed the duration of the patriarchs of Gen. 11, that’s where we’re getting our data. Look on that diagram, where it’s between 300 and 400 up at the top, do a little point with your pencil at 350, then open your Bibles and look at Gen. 9:28, how many years after the flood did Noah live. It says “And Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood.” If you write that point in the graph, the 350 year line, and draw a line from the point vertically downward to the bottom, do you observe anything in the data that’s happening there? Noah dies. Who’s dying with him? How many generations ahead, Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Ebor, Peleg. That’s five generations, that’s not his grandsons, that’s his great-great-grandsons. People look at this and they don’t think what they’re looking at. Think what we’re looking at here. Noah’s dying at the same time his great-great-grandsons are dying. His great-great-grandsons are dying of old age. At the same time they’re dying their great-great-grandfather has just died. What does that suggest about how they must have looked at the previous generation? If you’re going to the grave and your great-great-grandfather is still out walking the dogs, what do you think about him? He’s a pretty wiry guy. Who sold him a life insurance policy?

The point is that there must have been a profound thing happening here in history. This is the key to interpreting, if you don’t have this chart you cannot interpret history correctly. This is a diagram of what’s going on at the rise of civilization. If that line that you drew down vertically at 350 years, from that line if you drew another line down, say at 450 years, the two lines, 350 to 450 would bracket a descending curtain on past history because everybody was dying out that knew where history started. After that it was fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth generation removed. All of a sudden there was this massive loss of memory, a collective amnesia descended upon the earth, and people forgot their history. Amazing!

If you think that that’s unusual, think of this, if you look at the notes just handed out, there’s quote on page 12 by Cyrus Gordon, one of the great scholars of the ancient Near East, and it’s interesting, look at some of the data he says where we’ve had minor curtains come down. I’ll just read that quote, “Mankind . . . often lapses into collective amnesia. The Egyptians forgot how to read their ancestors’ hieroglyphs, and the Persians lost their knowledge not only of the script but also the history and very names of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Xerxes,” for some strange reason. They lost the memory of their own founders, couldn’t remember them. And “We [Americans] believe, at least tacitly, that white men did not come to America before Columbus’ discovery of our continent in 1492—or certainly not before the Vikings around A.D. 1000. And yet . . . the Greek author Theopompus in the fourth century B.C. wrote of an enormous land inhabited by a race quite unlike the Greeks. Three centuries later, Diodorus of Sicily described a great land, with navigable rivers, west of Africa, discovered by Phoenicians blown across the ocean by strong winds.” North America was known, North America was visited, repeatedly.

The point is that going back to the chart on page 7 we have this hiatus, this thing that happened in ancient history, that mankind hasn’t recovered from. The Bible alone preserves memories behind that curtain, and explains the curtain. For example, if you drew that line from 450 down vertically, on the other side of that barrier, between 350 and 450, if you were living then, your life span would be pretty much like it is today. Could you honestly come to believe that people were living 300, 500 years? It would take some stretch of the imagination to believe that. And it would seem strange. This is why, we believe, a key interpreting to the mythologies of all peoples, and the gods and goddesses that ruled. Those weren’t gods and goddesses; those were these antediluvian survivors and the immediate people after Noah. They appeared as gods and goddesses to these people because of their health, because of their longevity, because of their strength, their ability to survive and probably their brilliance. The earth was populated by these people.

Consider one other thing in your mind’s eye of imagination; looking again at this chart, think about this. Noah lived up to that line of 350. Go down the line and count the number of men who would have seen Noah. Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, maybe Peleg died before Noah died, Reu, Serug, Nahor, probably died before Noah died, and Terah, Abraham’s father. Abraham’s father…. Abraham’s father knew Noah. Now if it was true for 300-400 years and the population of the earth is mushrooming, and people are moving out into the continents as you will see in the notes, and they literally are mapping the world, all continents were mapped, North America, South America, including Antarctica before the ice cap. If that was all going on, where was Noah? Nobody knows, but do you suppose he traveled, do you suppose Noah and Shem and Ham appeared in different places, appeared in different places where different languages were spoken, and their names would have been remembered in different languages, on different continents by different cultures. Because they visited, they could have toured the world.

All during these 350 years, this is three and a half centuries that went by, surely if the rest of the world were being mapped and pioneering expeditions taking animals to various continents, we’ll point this out by our geography, why are the marsupials in Australia, is that a sign of evolution or is that a sign of colonization. If this is all going on, and we have Noah and Shem, Ham and Japheth visiting province after province, visiting Europe, visiting Africa, visiting Asia, visiting perhaps North and South America, what kind of a society is this? Does it shake you up in the way you look at history? It does me. It’s utterly unlike what we’ve learned; it is totally different from every historical reconstruction outside of the Bible. And there’s no argument with it, this is the facts of Genesis 11, there’s no arbitrary interpretation going on here, this is just what the text is telling us, and it’s telling us history started out a lot different than you guys are getting it, you’re getting a wrong line about how things started.

Why do we make such an issue out of this? Because we’re building up in the ensuing weeks to the point when God rejects this, and what we want to understand is why did God reject these magnificent achievements? What went wrong when civilization began, something profound was occurring, but something spiritually didn’t happen? And this causes you to grip this thing and see why God called Abraham out of Ur, and He called Israel into existence, and He called for missionary work, and He called for these elect people, elect out of this mass of geniuses that conquered the earth, that subdued the planet, early on. They weren’t eating bananas, they were building pyramids. By the way, they built the same kind of pyramid in this hemisphere as they build in the eastern hemisphere. We have pyramids in Central America, and it’s long been a problem, who built the pyramids in Central America. Why are they built with roughly the same architecture as the ones in the eastern hemisphere? The problem is, then, that we have a view of history that we as Christians must understand; we have got to submit to the Scriptures as we have never done. The church has not been good in this area, we have been careless, we have been sloppy, we have let the world take the initiative to set up their historical models, we haven’t challenged them, we haven’t done anything and then we come in the back door with out Bible and get laughed at because we haven’t been intellectually aggressive. We have let the world interpret the Scripture instead of the Scripture interpreting the world.

On page 7-8 I point out the other thing, that is the problem of the background of man, page 8, point 2, Human Dispersion and Migration, we point out the migration roots and there’s maps. Something else is very interesting. Not only is the ice age explained nicely in view of the Scripture, but something else is explained. If you take a map of the dispersion of men and you say I believe the Bible, therefore all men had to come out of the Ararat area. Notice what happens. What I’m trying to do on this map is to point out a very interesting thing. If you look at the areas of the world where primitive skulls and body parts have been found, for example, East Africa, for example in South Africa, the Peking Man, isn’t it striking that those finds are all remote from Ararat? And isn’t it interesting that in the Ararat area, where we do have finds of early man, they’re advanced. Why do we have this apparent decline in the peripheries of the world and in the immediate area we don’t have the decline. I think again the Scriptures are pointing to something.

In fact, what has happened anthropologically and anatomically to man is going out in the middle of this ice age stress, these men that we find, these primitive men, because they lived for centuries, the effect of physiologic stress in their body would have been multiplied, they would have been healthy but they would have been exposed to this tremendous climate, this adversity, lack of food, all kinds of physiologic stress. It’s no accident that in these areas where we would say this is the end points of the migration routes; those are the areas where we’re finding evidences of primitive man.

In other words, we’re suggesting that the evidences of primitive man are not due to evolutionary transitions that are happening; it’s due to the tail end of the deterioration process. Job speaks of cave men. [Job 30:1, “But now those younger than I mock me, whose fathers I disdained to put with the dogs of my flock. [2] Indeed, what good was the strength of their hands to me? Vigor had perished from them.”] Job 30:3, Job describes a people who, “From want and famine they are gaunt,” there’s the physiologic stress, “who gnaw the dry ground by night in waste and desolation, [4] who pluck mallow by the bushes, and whose food is the root of the broom shrub. [5] They are driven from the community; they shout against them as against a thief. [6] So that they dwell in dreadful valleys, in holes of the earth and of rocks,” caves. [7] “Among the bushes they cry out; under the nettles they are gathered together,” etc.

They seem to be a subset of the human race that were driven into the extremities of the dispersion. Perhaps they were being driven out ahead of the advancing columns of colonization. We don’t know the details, I am simply point out that when you get the data and begin to think seriously about the Scriptures, we have powers of explanation that we have not noticed before. That’s why on page 9 I say “human fossil skulls become more primitive in form the further their location from Ararat.” Now isn’t that strange.

I hope we’ve provoked some thinking about what was going on in the days of these 3 sons of Noah. We’re going to try to trace next week what they did. I urge you if you have a Bible dictionary to look up the names listed in Gen. 10 and see if you can trace where these people went. What are these names mentioned in Gen. 10, where do you think they went. If all the races and all the cultures came, what parts of Europe, Africa and Asia and Australia, who are they related to?

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Question asked: Clough replies: It turns out actually not, I think if you diagram it out he just kind of misses that, but what he does coexist with, and this becomes an interpretive problem, Abraham meets a mysterious personage called Melchizedek, and there’s a strong tradition in church history that Melchizedek is not the guy’s name, that Melchizedek was his title, that literally in the Hebrew Melchizedek is “Melech”, King, and “zedek” is righteousness, or the righteous king. And it that’s so, when we think of Melchizedek as a proper name we’re wrong. What Abraham is doing is he’s saying there’s the righteous king, unnamed because everybody knows who the righteous king was, he was Shem. And what’s significant about that passage is that he is passing the priesthood, passing it on to Abraham, he’s passing this on, and Jesus takes His priesthood in the book of Hebrews, not from the Jews, the Levitical priesthood, but Jesus becomes a priest after the order or Melchizedek, which links Jesus back to Gen. 10-11. The reason for that is because if Jesus was a Levitical priest, He was a priest of an order of a subset of the human race, whereas if you take the Melchizedek issue, Melchizedek was representative of all Gentile nations, so when Jesus claims, therefore, to become a priest after the order of Melchizedek, and interestingly in a very Jewish book, Hebrews, it’s an amazing statement, because it traces the fact that Jesus is a priest for all peoples.

Question asked: Clough replies: The author of Hebrews shows you it’s because of the way Melchizedek shows up without any heritage, without any lineage, and out of the story he’s making the analogy that Jesus was eternal, etc.

Question asked: something about x + y = z Clough replies: Genesis 11, the formula is so and so lived x years, he begat so and so and lived y years, and all the days of his life were x + y. Genesis 11 would be interpreted, because it follows Genesis 5, in Genesis 5 it’s x + y = z so if you have in Gen. 11, x y it would clearly be easy to interpret the same way in Genesis 5. The point is, those specific years lock up the flexibility we have in interpretation, they tighten things up.

Question about people disperse themselves, also with the language, each had a separate language if they dispersed, ? then you get back to the area of Babel which is east, ?? how would it affect the pattern of travel, in other words, you’re findings for primitive man have been found in different areas, how would that change if they were going out eastward and it became one language.

Clough replies: It’s true, that incident happens in Gen. 11, was east of wherever the author was, because the author is writing they journeyed east. That tells you that probably Noah was the author, because Noah’s homeland would have been Ararat, so what was east of where he was is the plain of Shinar where that event occurred. We’re not familiar, because the Bible doesn’t tell us about these migratory roots; that’s something God’s Word just kind of skips over and leaves, but there are several evidences for their existence, which we present in these notes. And the other evidence is that when prophecy, see the other reason for a lot of this stuff is that prophecy of the future, it talks about Magog and all these nations, and we always want to say that’s Russia, or that’s somebody else, and what we do every time we get in these prophetic passages in the future, we forget this passage, and the result is we try to politicize it. Now Russia or the Soviet Union is a political entity, that doesn’t correspond. The way prophecy looks is the genealogical origin of the people of the prophecy. So, when for example, there’s prophecies of the Jews, it’s not necessarily talking about the political state of Israel, it’s talking about the physical Jews. When it’s talking about Gog or Magog it’s talking about the people who have followed a certain genealogical descent in history.

So however the migratory roots were, they were the pathways for the genealogical reproduction, father/son, father/son, father/son, so you have this dispersion going out. Now how the language dispersion fit in, there’s so many details here that aren’t given to us, they’re left for us to kind of fill in. What we have to hold to as Christians is that the migration had to have been from Ararat, it wasn’t from Africa, there’s a lot of Afro centrism, it wasn’t from Europe, it wasn’t the white man doing his thing, it was these Shemitics, these Japhetics, and these Hametics moving out from the grounding of Ararat, and they went north, south, east and west. The group that went down into the Mesopotamia, that’s the problem of Babel, and there’s a big debate going on whether in Gen. 11:1-9 that was all of Noah’s family that spoke one language, all clustered in that one area at that time, or whether that is a subset, everybody was speaking one language but this event happened in a local area where you had particular apostasy.

Question asked: Clough says: Oh yea, it probably affected it, because God really sort of booted them out, and it was linguistically born in the sense that… probably there was coming vast amounts of strife. One of the evidences that I point out in the notes is the strange fact that you have this passage about in Peleg’s day and Eber’s day the earth was divided, etc., and something went on there because if you look at the data on that graph you’ll notice that after Eber, suddenly there’s a cut down, and from Peleg on in that graph they’re dying off rapidly. So something went on there.

Question asked: Clough replies: All I’m saying is that there are strange things that go on here and we would love to get into details but all we can do is say the Scripture gives us a clear mandate of descent of all cultures out of this matrix, and it clearly says geographically where it originated. Like you said, obviously there had to have been dispersion out of the Mesopotamian valley, because it’s clear in the text.

Question asked, something about Ararat and Babel, centered in the whole area of Jewish culture and history so that’d keep the main characters in that area. Clough replies: Yes, and this is why if you look at Gen. 10 and try to trace these sons, if you do the exercise of looking up the sons name in a Bible dictionary or something, you’ll notice a peculiar thing, that after about four or five generations the Japhetics are lost, they disappear into the wind some place, and then the Hamitics after a while, after the local intrigues of the Mesopotamian valley go away. Then you’re left in Gen. 11 with just one subset, and it’s the Shemites, and then they go into vast detail. So it tells you that the Scriptural story now beginning in Gen. 10-11 now starts narrowing its focus, and now, as it were, we’re leaving, we’re letting those people go out, it’s not denying they went out, our problem is just because Scripture doesn’t say it, we forget that every nation on earth came out of this matrix.

That’s what we want to remember because it’s vital when we start talking about missionary work, when we talk about the gospel going out. The gospel is not a white man’s religion that is going into some third world that never heard it before. The gospel is a wake-up call going out to cultures that have long since forgotten their own heritage, that’s the way to look at it. And there are very few missionary organizations that [can’t understand]. Thank God for New Tribes Mission, of all the missionary agencies at least they seem to have gotten their act together in Indonesia and that area, because they have preached the gospel in such a way to connect it with the ancient tales of the culture to which they’re trying to be missionaries. That way you avoid coming in looking like some disturbing European, western type, trying to butcher some non-western culture. The gospel is bigger than that, so that’s why you get your feet oriented back here, in the overall view of where history’s going.

And remember that history is viewed genealogically and we learn our history differently, because we go to school and you learn about 1500 dates, this happened in this year, this happened in this year, and then you manage to pass it on Monday and forget it by Friday so the next groups of dates… this is the way we learn history, and it’s tragic because by doing it chronologically we lose patterns, and the Bible speaks of patterns. If the Bible does do anything chronologically, here’s the way it does it: Such and such happened in the generation of …. It would be like we would learn American history, such and such happened when grandma …. Or such and such happened when your great-grandfather so and so, in his day this happened, rather than quoting it to a year. That’s not to say the years aren’t important, it’s just to say conceptually that links you, it was your father, it was your grandfather, it was your grandmother that was there, it connects you, and that’s the way the Bible teaches history, you’re always connected to it, it’s not some detached thing, oh, that happened in 1492. I’m not connected to 1492, I’m connected to my ancestors who lived in 1492, but 1492 doesn’t turn me on.

So that’s what the difference is in the Biblical concept of history here. So it’s just kind of setting us up for…in the Bible, in the prophets, when you get into Micah, Isaiah, and these guys that are prophesying, you say what are they doing? What they are doing is they’re prophesying to the descendants of these guys. That prophesy isn’t just political entities, they’re not talking about, necessarily, the nation Syria, they may be talking about the king of Syria and then that will be followed by certain names, and those names are the descendants of somebody who’s a descendant of these guys in Gen. 10. So prophecy is oriented that way. This is why in the book of Revelation you have the 144,000 witnesses; they’re all tribes of Jews. Why is that? Why is the tribes of Jews got to do with the return of Jesus in the book of Revelation? Because of the continuity of history.

We’ll see fascinating examples of that. Later on in the Old Testament you have this peculiar thing happen. Of all the tribes of Jews, there’s one tribe of Jews that says their name shall never be erased from history. You talk to the average Jew today and he’s forgotten what tribe he’s in or he can’t find out what tribe he’s in, except one group, there’s always a subset of Jews that know exactly the tribe they came from. Anybody with the last name Levi, or Cohane, “Cohane” means priest, “Levi” means tribe of Levi. So isn’t it strange that of all the Jewish names, the only tribe that remains today in the Jewish last name is Levi, and that’s the one the Mosaic Law said I will never let that name go away from history.

Question asked, something about glaciers move: Clough replies: They still are in Alaska, it’s just sheer weight, you get an expansion because you’re starting to get an accumulated mass and it has to go somewhere and gravity takes it, and what happens usually is they usually move in the warm season because there’s earth’s heat and it comes up from the bottom, and you get liquid and it acts like a lubricant. You see these pictures, these ice sheets in Alaska coming out and there’s a big cascading, tons of ice falling into the ocean. It’s pretty awesome to watch a glacier move, and sometimes they can speed up for reasons not well known, by the way, NOT well known, why do you suddenly have glaciers speed up and then they slow down, it’s not understood because you can’t get in there to observe what’s going on because the stuff is so thick. Some of these glaciers are a mile thick, there’s 5,000 feet of ice, pretty heavy stuff.

Question asked: Clough replies: Why is it thought to be warmer? Various theories that call for it to be warmer but primarily because if you measure the earth’s crust, the further down you go the warmer it gets, and when you get into the lava from volcanoes coming up from below, that’s just the measurements. There’s a lot of heat in the earth. The question is whether the earth is actually kind of a plasma at the core, or what is it, and nobody knows because nobody’s drilled it, there’s just a lot of theories, bouncing wound waves through it, etc. But nobody’s gone to the center of the earth to test it out.

Question asked: Clough replies: I’ve only been in a very mild earthquake so I can’t speak but when you see some of the power of these so-called natural catastrophes, maybe some of you have been in a hurricane and seen what wind does to water, and then you see an earthquake where the whole ground moves, and what’s so scary about that is no matter where you stand you’re moving. I prefer tornados and hurricanes, at least my feet are on the ground, but when the ground starts moving now you’ve got a real problem, and these kinds of things are the power of our God, and we’ve got to learn, we don’t worship nature, but when He wants to move the furniture, He can do it very easily, and if you look at the Psalms, when there’s worship, this is interesting, you often think of this as science and not connected to “religion,” but yes it is. How many times in the book of Psalms do you read about He who moves the mountains? Look it up in a concordance. Why is that? Because there’s something magnificent about a God who moves mountains.

You know, sometime I’ve got to break out of all the trivia of my life and get the big picture, of who it is we’re worshiping here. That’s what we’re trying to do here, is to get our minds purged, every day in our lives are thousands of details, and it’s so healthy just to back off and let them move the Appalachians for you, you know, that’s our God, yea, let’s go. And that makes you appreciate Him and feed upon Him, and that’s why I think the Psalm is so worshipful, because they worship a magnificent God. Years ago we did a study on Exodus 15; Handel wrote a piece of music wrote on Exodus 15. Exodus 15 is the hymn of the women who led a chorus when they were watching Pharaoh’s army get drowned in the Red Sea. Now it’s not quite the nice Christian sweet little music, these are women just relishing the fact that an army has been crushed. It’s a powerful type of thing. Why? It’s not because they’re relishing that the blood and the corpses are floating around, because they mention it, it’s not that they’re rejoicing over that destruction, it’s rather they’re rejoicing over the manifestation of the power of Jehovah God, that’s what turns them on. And that’s a great worshipful and grand, grand hymn in there, and where do we ever listen to this put to good music. So there’s a whole world or worship that’s involved in this, so when we get out of these details it’s neat to come back to the fact that the God who causes the ice, who causes the oceans to be warm, who bursts the fountains of the deep, this is our Savior, ultimately it’s the Lord Jesus Christ.

Question asked: Clough replies: Next week I’m going to try to bring a copy of one of these maps so you can see it. I can’t get into all the details, and again, I’m trying to be cautious, I’m not saying all these are the final thing, I’m just saying there’s a heck of a lot of evidence out there that has not been considered, and what we’ve done is we’ve been fed a line from childhood up about how things are, and that’s the way the world says how things are. And you’ve got to be very careful, because it poisons you, it distorts the way your eyes see the Scriptures. You’ve got to ask the Holy Spirit to open our hearts to what is the Scripture saying here, tear away the blinders that we’ve been wearing from the world. The world put blinders on, why, who’s behind the world system? What is his agenda? To diminish the glory and the grandeur of God. And how does he do it? Chip away a little here, chip away a little there, get people thinking God’s [can’t understand word/s] over here because after all there was no fall, God made things that way, the universe isn’t abnormal, it’s normal, it just reflects what a bad god made. All this little stuff that goes on. That’s the kind of things that you have to guard your mind and your heart.

Question asked: Clough replies: The thing of it is, just because a guy is a PhD and skilled, these guys are very skilled in languages, far more than any of us are, but that doesn’t make their conclusion right because they start off with the wrong starting point.

Our time is gone.