Lecture

This is number seven. In this lecture we must say something more about the flood and its date and the ark and the problems associated with it. Now this has been treated, of course, many times. The date of the flood, as I have said in the last lecture, cannot be gotten from archaeology. We only know that it must have taken place sometime before the rise of the early cities, which, for instance, Jericho exists in layer after layer from the date of approximately 8000 BC. If there were any flood of any extent, obviously Jericho would be washed out because it is at the bottom of a valley; water would pour into the Jordan Valley at a great rate and Jericho would surely be washed away.

However, if we put the flood not too long before the beginning of Jericho, it would fit in very nicely with a sudden increase in city life at about that time. There are cities in Asia Minor, I think, particularly of a place called Catal Huyuk, a Turkish name, and this is also an old city similar to Jericho. It is of some interest that these ancient cities in the earliest layers show a rather remarkable advance of man. For instance, in the early layers of Jericho you have a stone wall and fortification and tower, and in that tower you have a pair of steps going down inside the tower, which is rather a fine engineering achievement.

I have remarked that the Siberian mammoths were frozen at around 10,000 years ago (10 or 11,000. It’s hard to tell in detail). But these mammoths have been preserved and their flesh has been preserved so remarkably that it is clear that the ground around them has never thawed out in intervening years. If it had thawed out, they surely would have decomposed, and they are exposed now only because the erosion of rivers has exposed this particular land, as I understand it. The flesh of these mammoths has been eaten by dogs to this day. Though the smell of the decomposing flesh is considerable, their stomach contents have been analyzed and buttercups were found in their mouths; the hair still preserved on their skin. Long-haired, wooly mammoths they were, but they were not inhabitants of polar regions. You don’t have buttercups in polar regions, and also mammoths require a great deal of food, a great deal of vegetation—hay, grass—and so the mammoths are out of place there now. They were at one time living here and feeding on the plains, but now they are frozen and have been frozen ever since. So it would seem as if there was a sudden change of climate around 10,000 years ago, which could well be associated with the flood.

In the book that I referred to, my book Man: God’s Eternal Creation, on page 62, I give some other arguments in favor of something of consequence that happened about 10,000 years ago. There is a forest of spruce logs in Wisconsin that was overwhelmed at that time. Most people feel that this was done by a glacier, but it could have been done by some combination of glacier and flood. Even Dr. Albright, I believe, believes that what he would call the flood legend arose in connection with some kind of inundation as a consequence of the last glaciation. But whether there was a last glaciation or not, maybe debated perhaps, but at least at 10,000 something happened of consequence in Wisconsin, and the date is given by the spruce logs that were all overwhelmed as the forest fell, I believe, in one direction.

There is another very interesting subject that is not perhaps widely known, but Dr. J. L. Kulp, a confident geologist of Colombia University, has studied some ocean cores and found, to be brief, two ocean cores—one in the Caribbean Sea and one off the coast of the northwest states—Washington, Oregon—and these two ocean cores from widely different areas do show very remarkably an increase in sedimentation rate, a sudden tripling of the sedimentation rate at the bottom of these seas about 10,000 years ago like nothing in the previous 250,000 years according to his dating techniques. The meaning of these ocean cores is not entirely clear, but it would fit, it would seem, very nicely with such a flood as I describe at such a time. More details we cannot give now, but that can be read and references are given in those pages.

So I would urge that the flood is indeed a literal phenomenon, a worldwide phenomenon, a phenomenon that did what the Bible says it did; killed the animals and killed all men. If it were not widespread, why should the animals have been taken in a boat? There were plenty of places for animals to travel to the Persian highlands. If it were only a local flood, local animals only would have been killed, and there would have been no need for an ark at all. But God saw that the effects would be so universal that He told Noah to save the animals and build this great ship, for it was a large ship.

I may say that the book by Alfred Rehwinkle, The Flood, gives a very fine discussion of the ark and its contents and shows by close calculation of the number of species of any size that there would be plenty of room on the ark at the dimensions given in the Bible, to take all the animals that it was required to take. It would have been quite a job, of course, for Noah. Many people have made fun of the ark because it must have smelled. I imagine it did smell, but of course those who wanted to could have gotten off, one would say. But how could Noah have taken care of the ferocious animals? It is not impossible, you know, that in the providence of God the animals that were preserved in the ark were young animals. It would be much easier to take care of young tigers which are not much more than pets. It would be much easier to take care of young elephants also. And the other animals, of course, are small and could be taken care of as adults or pets either way, but at least it is quite possible that the problems are serious as some supposed. The Lord arranged it for Noah. God brought the animals and when they were on the boat, God shut the door.

But it says also that God remembered Noah and as the rain and the storm was over and the water subsided, Noah came off the ark and, remember the details, in how he sacrificed to God in thanksgiving after the flood. There have been considerable efforts lately to find Noah’s ark and much interest attaches to expeditions to the top of Mount Ararat. Whether the boat was on the top of Ararat or the sides of Ararat someplace, we do not know. Apparently something has been found quite a way up in Mount Ararat. It is a wild territory and politically difficult because it’s on the Turkish border, and yet some remains of hand-hewn wood are found. What these are is too early, as I speak, to say. Some expect to find an ark in due time, but these remains are at the bottom of a great deal of ice and it will not be easy to find what is there. Some on the other hand argue that it might be a monastery that some pious people built in years after the Christian era to commemorate the place where Noah would have landed the ark. These things we do not know in detail.

So now we come to the post-diluvium genealogies of chapter ten and chapter eleven—and I would like to remark that chapter ten is, as I have said, a table of nations. Here we do not have a strict genealogy. When it says the “Sons of Ham” in chapter 10, verse 6 “were Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.” And the sons of Cush are given and later on it speaks of the sons of Canaan. In verse 15 it says, “Canaan begat Sidon his first born, and Heth, and the Jebusite,” and so on. I think it is important for us to realize that Genesis 10 is not talking about individuals, but about tribes, nations, and cities. It may be difficult to tell which is which sometimes, and of course the sons of Noah were individuals, and it may be that Cush was an individual. We do not know. Mizraim very clearly is the nation of Egypt, and it has a do-all ending that is not applicable to an individual. It is the do-all ending that signalizes the union of upper and lower Egypt, such as was known in historic times.

To turn to verse fifteen when it says, “Canaan begat Sidon his first born, and Heth, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite.” Now it is clear here that some of these are Semitic tribes and some of them are non-Semitic tribes and that Canaan did not actually become the father of Sidon. But Canaan was the land and Sidon was its chief city and therefore called its first born. So as I say, these are a table of nations and not a genealogy as chapter eleven is. Chapter eleven verse ten and following is a genealogy of individuals and this is of some interest that the Hebrew verb form for begot in Genesis 10 is different from what it is in Genesis 11. In Genesis 11, it is what we call the hif’il or causative form, “Shem begot Arphaxad.” Now Arphaxad was his son. This refers to paternity, but in Genesis 10, it does not use the causative form, it just uses the general form of this verb to bear and it is referring to colonization or national relationships—geographical relationships rather than paternity.

So the table of nations here is of considerable interest for details, but we do not have time to go into those details, of course. It does speak of the Nimrod beginning the Kingdom of Babel and Erech, which is in archaeological circles called Uruk now and Accad. This would be the place of Sargon, the first king of Accad, in the land of Shinar. Shinar is equivalent to the old word which we call Sumer, so here you have the settlement of Southern Mesopotamia. Southern Mesopotamia was settled after Northern Mesopotamia and this was partly because it was too wet in Southern Mesopotamia, not because it was too dry. They needed irrigation, but it was too wet and they needed drainage, which came from the different canals that were dug and maintained in Southern Mesopotamia.

We turn now to Genesis 12, and in Genesis 12 we have the calling of Abram. “And the Lord had said unto Abraham, ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.’” So here we have the story of Abraham and from Genesis 12 – 25, we have an important section that deals with this great patriarch whom God called. It is, I think, important for us to see first of all that God was now doing a new thing. Heretofore, he had spoken to a man like to Noah, an individual, to Enoch, individual. As far as we know Enoch had not established any nation. God dealt with individuals and these individuals He revealed Himself too, and they spoke to others and the word was passed on by tradition. We must remember that there were many individuals that were saved between Adam and Abram.

But the world went down before the flood in sin, and after the flood again the world went down in sin. So God did a new thing here and called Abraham to establish a people in a place by themselves where they would be unified and purified presumably. And through Abraham there would be in the divine economy a preparation for the coming of Christ the Messiah. Abraham didn’t know all of that when he was called. We don’t know about Abraham’s salvation in early life. We know that he came into the land of Canaan at the age of seventy-five, and we know his ancestry and that is all. He took Terah, his father and Lot, his nephew and Sarah, who was his half-sister and his wife, and went out of Ur of the Chaldees to Haran.

Some have argued that we have a double story of the birth of Abraham. Of course, this is part of the higher-critical approach to the Old Testament. There is a great temptation to find doublets everywhere. The genealogy of Genesis 5 is said to be legendary and the genealogy of Genesis 11 is a duplicate of it. Of course, there are different names and so on. Also the genealogy of four and the genealogy of five are said to be similar. One the Canaanite; the other the Sethite genealogy. Doublets are found. Now actually in history many times there are curious phenomena that are very similar. Things repeat themselves. You have two kings by the same name. We’ve had two presidents by the name Roosevelt and so on. So in history sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. But at least there is an effort to find duplicates.

The flood story is divided into two duplicates by critics and contradictions are found between these two stories. Contradictions that nobody had found for several hundred years. We cannot, of course, go into these matters of the higher-critical approach to the Old Testament in detail. We refer you to the books on the subject. One that I feel is worthy of particular attention is one by Gleason Archer called A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, which he adequately takes care, I believe, of these critical theories.

The claim is made that Abraham according to one theory was born in Ur of the Chaldees, but according to the other story, he sends his son back to his birthplace to get a wife, and that turns out to be Paddan Aram in Northern Mesopotamia. There are then two varying traditions of his birth apparently—one in Ur of the Chaldees and South Mesopotamia and the other in North Mesopotamia. Well, I must say that the word birthplace is translated elsewhere in the Bible several places as kindred rather than birthplace. The King James translates it that way and the translation can be defended. It does not say that Abraham was born in Paddan Aram or that was his birthplace. This is where the servant of Abraham did get a wife for Isaac.

Whether or not Abram was born actually in Southern Mesopotamia—and that was his home—is not quite so certain. The Bible does say Ur of the Chaldees in four places—three here in Genesis and one in, I believe, Nehemiah. But the New Testament remarks that he came from the land of the Chaldees, and in every one of these four cases, the Greek translation makes it the land of the Chaldees.

There is some new information on this now. The word [or] is used in the Ugaritic tablets, a type of Hebrew from the northern part of the Canaanite Phoenician area around ancient Antioch, the Ugaritic tablets use the word [or] in the sense of field, and so it is not impossible that the Septuagint here was correct in that Abraham came from the land of the Chaldees. There is even a question whether the Chaldean peoples had yet gone into Ur in the days of Abraham. And for various reasons it seems as if Abraham’s background and the customs that he followed are more characteristic of the mid-northern territory of Mesopotamia rather than Ur way to the south. This is uncertain.

It is possible that he was in Southern Mesopotamia and that he had a combination of the customs of Southern Mesopotamia and of Northern Mesopotamia in his background. This much is sure, that the stories of the patriarchs as we have them in the central part of the book of Genesis are now very interestingly confirmed by archaeological research and particularly by the customs of the people called Hurrians. The Hurrians were not known some years ago, but now since the discovery of tablets in the ancient town of Nuzi in northern Mesopotamia in 1929, we have learned something of the laws and customs of these Hurrian peoples. They were non-Semitic, very capable people, and they had distinctive customs. We have some of their marriage contracts and their field sales and their adoption contracts and so on. We know a good bit about them and their language too. These are the people called in the Bible the Horites, of whom we used to know very little. In fact, we knew so little that in 1905 when the standard Hebrew dictionary, Brown-Driver-Briggs, was written, the Horites were called cave dwellers because of a false entomology. We know now that there’s no connection between them and the cave dwellers. They were an advanced people. Of course, even advanced people can live in caves and some do to this day. But at least the Hurrians were people who lived in Northern Mesopotamia with a distinctive culture and distinctive language, and Abraham had some relationships with them in his background and customs.

The net result is that the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are illuminated now and we can speak with confidence of the historicity of these patriarchal stories; whereas, a former generation of critics spoke of the legendary character of these stories and felt that there was no historical value in them at all and that these were not real people. But there is no reason to doubt the biblical record that there was an Abraham; he was given these promises of God, and the Abrahamic and patriarchal families lived as the book of Genesis says. Of course, it is true that the book of Genesis only gives a few of the incidents of the lives of these patriarchs and not necessarily in chronological order either. We cannot just trace Abraham’s experiences day-by-day, but we should perhaps take some time to give some archaeology illumination of Abraham’s life and times.

The general times of Abraham would have been around 1900 – 2000 BC. We don’t know exactly. It depends somewhat on textual readings of some verses that we will look at later. But roughly and provisionally, we may say that Abraham needs to be remembered and lived around 2000 BC.

And his occupation has been questioned. We know that he kept sheep, but he kept sheep perhaps not for the money involved, but that was his investment. They didn’t put money in the banks in those days. They put money on the hoof, and if he were a rich man he would have had a great many sheep and cattle and so on. What was the source of his wealth and what he was doing is not too clear. But according to the studies of Dr. W. F. Albright, who has gone into the matter thoroughly (all do not agree with him, but he does have some good arguments), Abraham was a man who spent his time organizing caravans to go from Mesopotamia to Egypt. They would have gone through Palestine. How far he went to each end we do not know. He went down into Egypt—we know that on one occasion at least—but that he might have indeed been a caravaneer and gotten a great deal of his money that way. This would have been one reason why he would have traveled back and forth so much. For details, we must turn to the writings of Dr. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, and other sources.

Abraham, however, when he left Mesopotamia, was a worshiper of the one true God. This much is clear. The New Testament says that he is the father of the faithful. Paul makes quite a point in Romans 4 that Abraham was not saved by his circumcision, but that he was saved and called by God to go. The book of Hebrews remarks that he did not know where he was going, but he was a man of faith and by faith he went out and by faith he held the promises that God gave to him. And when he came into the land of Canaan later on, God gave him the covenant of circumcision. Abraham offered sacrifices to the one true God. He was given revelations from God because Abraham was a prophet, and as a prophet he received the word of the Lord; God gave him many promises, and he obeyed the word of the Lord and was blessed accordingly.

Sarah was barren and they had no children, you remember, until Abraham was along in years. The outline of Abraham’s life tells of his marital problems and how he first apparently adopted his steward Eliezer. Then Sarah had the idea that he should take her slave Hagar and perhaps she would have a child by the slave.

We may stop right here and say that both of these strange customs have been well-witnessed to in the Nuzi tablets. The Nuzi tablets show a remarkable number of adoptions that you do not find in the later Israelite history. Yet we find Abraham adopting Eliezer, his steward, to be his heir. And then the birth of Ismael first and then Isaac and likewise, Jacob, it seems, was adopted. He sold himself to Laban in adoption in order that he might have enough money to buy his wife. He worked for seven years for his wife, and this was apparently an adoptive contract. Jacob, when he was dying, adopted if we note in Genesis 48, his two grandsons to be his sons. He says that Ephraim and Manasseh shall be his, just like Reuben and Simeon, his first born. So here he was adopting his grandsons to be his sons.

Well, in Nuzi they had two types of adoption. One of these types of adoption was an ordinary adoption where via a childless couple would take a boy and make him into their heir with the supposition that he would care for their old age; he would doubtless pray for them and pray for them when they were gone, perhaps as far as we know. At least they wanted a son, an heir, and they would adopt a child, a man like that to care for them. This would be a normal adoption.

It was specified in such cases that if a childless couple would adopt a child, if a natural child were born later, the first child, the adopted child would be displaced by the natural child. This is specified in adoption tablets in Nuzi. We realize, of course, that that’s exactly what happened. In Genesis 15:1, it says that Abraham complains that he has no son and Eliezer, his steward, is his heir. A difficult verse, but this is the general picture. Verse three, “Low one born in my house is my heir.” Though he would not be the heir if a natural son would be born.

Another kind of adoption in Nuzi is not so well witnessed in the Bible, and this was what is called a “sale adoption.” If a man in Nuzi would be poor through reverses in his farming, and he was down and nobody to pay the mortgage, we would say, he would in that case not be able to sell his land. The land was not salable in Nuzi. The land was tied to the person, and so instead of selling his land, he would adopt a rich son. He would adopt this rich son and the rich son then would have the property and it would be his in case the father would die. He would use it and use it as if it were his own, and he would pay the poor man the money that he needed. The poor man would transfer to all intents and purposes the title of the land to the rich man, and so a rich man would get himself adopted in Nuzi. This would be a sale-type of adoption.

Well, there are other customs that we have in Genesis that are illustrated in Nuzi such as the case of Hagar. We have Nuzi tablets that say specifically that a person marries a man and a man gives his daughter to someone else in marriage. It specifies that if she bears him no children, that she shall take a slave-wife (a woman of the Lulu country it says) a slave-wife and give it to her husband. The child born of the slave-wife would legally belong to the legal wife, a kind of a half-adoption. You would adopt a half-son that way, and so the father would have the son and the mother, the legal wife, would have the son too as her own. But again, in case a natural child would be born, well then the other would be displaced. And there were laws connected with this type of a slave-marriage arrangement. Just as in Nuzi this was the case, so doubtless Sarah felt constrained by her customs and background. This does not say that it was the best—it was God’s best, it doubtless was the part of Sarah’s lack of faith. God had promised Sarah herself a seed, and yet the action of Sarah is very much in line with the Nuzi picture.

I may say that even the details here are interesting. In chapter 16, verse 5, “After Hagar conceived and saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes and Sarah said unto Abraham, ‘The wrong done me be upon thee.’” Dr. Speiser remarks that this is actually equivalent to a legal term used in Nuzi and that what Sarah was saying is “I have been wronged by Hagar and now you take up my case and see it to its conclusion.” It is a legal term and has been preserved, even though it was not very well understood all these years; nonetheless, the archaeology here illustrates in detail the relationships of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and also similar relationships in the family of Jacob, which we will come to later on.