3
THE TRAGIC FLAW IN
CIVILIZED SOCIETY
Part II of this series concluded with discussion of
the covenant God made to establish the new “Noahic world order” after the great
global flood had subsided (Gen. 9). Noah and his family stepped into an
entirely new universe from the one they had known. Within only a few centuries
this family and its progeny had established our present civilization, migrated
with their animals into every continent, and formed every major racial and
linguistic sub-group of mankind. Such a view of civilization’s origin obviously
conflicts with the traditional view of ancient history.
Noah’s “new world order” began with great
possibilities. All eight people were believers. The universe and man were under
a new contractual arrangement with God, the first great biblical covenant (Gen.
8:15-9:17). It pictured the ultimate eternal state yet to come of total
security and peace in a redeemed universe. God “signed” this covenant with an
atmospheric phenomenon, the rainbow, analogous to the glory around His throne
(Ezk. 1:28; Rev. 4:3).
Mankind was thus assured that nature was going to
settle down after the great global flood and become predictable. With nature
operating in a steady-state mode under the Word of God, human natural knowledge
could expand rapidly. Mankind’s basic social structures were re-installed: the
divine institutions of responsible dominion, marriage, and family. A fourth
structure was added, the divine institution of civil government.
There was a spiritual flaw, however, in this new world
order. The effects of the fall were still present. The incident of Noah’s
drunkenness in Genesis 9:20-27 was a warning that civilization though
physically and intellectually glorious is seriously lacking in spiritual life.
To remind us of this fact, God made civilization fundamentally dependent upon
death through its carnivorous diet. Animals must die that we may live. Civil
government is given the power to take life from those who murder.
Genesis 9-11 records the first five centuries or so of
Noah’s new world order. Because the real historical situation was so different
from popular views of civilization’s birth, I will survey in this chapter some
details of that situation. Then I will discuss mankind’s response to that
situation so you will be prepared for God’s disruption of this new world order
with His elect nation of Israel..4
THE EARLY POSTDILUVIAN ENVIRONMENT
One way to look at the historical situation facing Noah’s family after the flood is to examine both nature and man at the dawn of civilization. First, let’s observe what sort of world they had to live in during the immediate aftermath of the global flood. With such a cosmic cataclysm[1], it would take centuries for the earth’s geophysics to settle down. This “settling period” had enormous effects on man’s body and his migration routes into the new continents.
Postdiluvian Land, Sea, and Atmosphere. Creationists in recent years have begun to
reconstruct earth history utilizing all the existing scientific data by
reinterpreting it within the biblical framework. This reconstruction effort has
grown out of the failure of the capitulation and accommodation strategies that
were tried by Bible-believing scholars in the nineteen and early twentieth
centuries[2]. While much work obviously remains to be done, from their work so
far I believe a rough outline of the early postdiluvian environment is now
possible. What here follows, therefore, is such an outline.
1. Mountain-Building and Continental Draining of the
Flood Waters. The sedimentary rock
formed during stages of the great flood was thrust upward in the great mountain
ranges we see today. Thus recent-appearing sedimentary strata with marine
fossils are seen at altitudes thousands of feet above sea level. Psalm 104:5-9
reports on this mountain-building action and simultaneous draining of flood
waters when God set His covenantal limitation against another such flood. These
post-flood mountains apparently were higher than those which existed prior to
the flood.
Various “land bridges” and exposed continental shelves
may have existed during this time of continental uplift. Evidences of such
exposure of these areas which now are below sea level consist of animal fossils
on islands and in shallow ocean areas within these bridge areas as well as
submarine canyons located far from today’s mainlands.
Continuing “after-shocks” of this post-flood
mountain-building would be accompanied by widespread volcanism on an
unprecedented scale. Thus widespread lava fields like those of the Pacific
Northwest cover areas many times larger than the worst volcanoes active today.
While continental areas were being uplifted, the ocean
basins were sinking. These basins even today show their youth by the relative
lack of sediments on the sea floors compared with the thick sedimentation on
the continents. Toward these basins vast quantities of water filled with eroded
material from the.5
continents cut out the world’s great river
valleys. Thus today large river deltas and alluvial plains exist with areas
many times larger than present river runoff can account for. Evidence of large
inland lakes in areas that are now arid deserts (e.g., Utah and the Sahara)
point to giant “puddles” left during this draining of flood waters into the
oceans. Some creationists think that the Grand Canyon formed during this era
due to tectonic processes combined with large drainage from the western US.
2. Oceans.
Since most of the waters of the flood came not from rain but from the
“fountains of the deep” (Gen. 7) and because the interior of the earth is hot,
the oceans immediately after the flood would have been much warmer than the
present average global ocean temperature of 4oC (39oF). Even before the flood
began, the oceans would have been warmer throughout the world to have supported
warm-environment fossils now found near both north and south poles. Michael
Oard has proposed a scenario of the ocean average temperature immediately after
the flood event of 30oC (86oF) due to both the higher initial temperature and
the flood extruded water!
Carbon-dioxide levels would have been high due to the
warm water as well as large amount of decaying organic material from the flood.
Moreover, both temperature and carbon dioxide would have been relatively
uniform throughout the ocean due to the violent mixing that had just recently
occurred.
3. Atmosphere.
Oard has pointed out that widespread volcanism during and after the flood would
have left massive amounts of volcanic dust in the atmosphere. If a global
vapor-canopy actually existed in the antediluvian world and collapsed during
the flood, the atmosphere would have become cooler in the northern and southern
polar areas.
The combination of continental uplift, uniformly very
warm oceans, and an atmosphere filled with volcanic debris would account for an
“ice age”. Oard writes: The picture that emerges at the end of the Flood
catastrophe is a barren world with no trees, plants, animals, or birds (except
in 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.[4].6
4. The “Ice Age”. Oddly enough it is precisely this biblical picture of the flood
cataclysm that can explain the heretofore dilemma of how to account for an ice
age. Uniformitarian science can’t get it started. Just as evolutionary biology
can’t account for the “jumps” between the higher level taxonomic groupings and
just as uniformitarian geology can’t account for the evidence of large-scale
sedimentary catastrophism, so uniformitarian paleo-climatology can’t account
for evidence of widespread glaciation. In each case the problem is the same:
high-energy and/or high-information events are required to produce the effects,
but both of these are virtually excluded by the pagan principle of the Continuity
of Being that is always assumed by these schools.
On the uniformitarian basis multiple ice-ages are
envisioned taking hundreds of thousands of years to cycle through. To get
glaciers started that don’t melt back in the summer, the uniformitarians
require a very cold atmosphere. Such frigid conditions, however, eliminate the
necessary moisture to fuel the glaciers and the storm dynamics to generate snow
in the proper areas.
Oard’s model, operating instead on the
creation-catastrophic basis, posits one ice age lasting only approximately 700
years. Utilizing the immediate postdiluvian conditions of land, ocean, and
atmosphere, it readily accounts for both the necessary cooling as well as the
large and frequent snowfalls in precisely the areas where glaciation evidence
exists. It also implies radical modification of dates based upon radiocarbon
and deep-ocean cores due to postdiluvian high levels of dissolved nutrients,
warm ocean temperatures, and abundant carbon dioxide in the air and sea. This
700 year period accompanied the growth and dispersion of the human race between
Noah and Abraham (Genesis 10-11) and must have played a crucial role in the
origins of civilization.
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 as well as the ancient historian Herodotus show that
the Sahara Desert had great lakes with much runoff. Apparently writing during
this period, Job testifies of solid ice (Job 38:29-30). Abraham notes that them
Dead Sea area as well as Egypt were “well watered everywhere” (Gen. 13:10). By
the time of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, great droughts lasting many years in
these areas (Gen. 41:54 speaks of “all lands”) point to big climatic change at
exactly the time Oard’s model shows glacial retreat.
Postdiluvian nature, therefore, presented Noah and his
family and their animals a uniquely stressful situation on land and sea and
even from the weather. What were some effects upon these people and their animals?
Postdiluvian Man and Animals. Not only was Noah’s natural environment utterly
different from what he had known and considerable different from what we
experience today, but so was the physiology of his descendents. Radical changes
were affecting human and animal life as well as the environment. Today’s
civilization arose in a unique situation unparalleled in human history. For
this reason pagan attempts as historical reconstruction based upon the
uniformitarian principle must fail.
1. Human Physiology. The key evidence in the Genesis text that supplies the true cause of
the “sudden” rise of civilization in the Middle East and, then, elsewhere on
other continents is the high longevity figures of Genesis 11. Any intelligent
reader can compare this chapter with Genesis 5 and present day experience and
see that between Noah and Abraham something unique was happening. If you plot
the duration of each of Noah’s progeny, as in Figure 1.1 you discover that Noah
and his sons were clearly far superior physiologically to their grandchildren
and great-grandchildren.
The simultaneous co-existence of Noah, Shem, Japheth, and
Ham with their distant progeny must have made for a dramatic contrast. The
founding patriarchs would have seemed as “gods” to the weaker future
generations. As Pilkey notes: “The high longevities of Noah’s immediate family
combined with the gentile Pentecost of human government to make that family the
most astounding aristocracy the world has known. Nothing in human experience can
compare with it short of the Christian Apocalypse.
During this period, all but one of the twenty-five
dynasties of the Sumerian King list and the first twelve dynasties of Egypt ran
their course. Shem outlived most of them. . . .[5]
This era of the cohabitation of the earth by men who
were virtual “gods” alongside men of more obvious mortality parallels the
future Millennial Kingdom when resurrected saints will coexist with mortal
humanity in building the greatest civilization history has ever seen.[6]
World population would have mushroomed rapidly since
all generations simultaneously existed for the first five centuries. During
this early rapid growth of each cultural and racial group, all of them would
have had direct knowledge of Noah and his sons. Their names, however, are not
obvious in the memory of the various world cultures. What happened?
Figure 1.1 hints at the solution. Immediately prior to
Abraham all of Noah’s progeny--the entire set of transitional fathers--died
within a few centuries of each other. The effects of this “dying out” cannot be
underestimated. The historical memory of mankind was suddenly lost. Add to that
the linguistic confusion of Babel (see second part of this chapter), and a
“curtain” descended upon the real story of civilization’s origin.
Noah and his sons must be known in world cultural
origin myths under alien names. Buried in the diversity of post-Babel language,
they await biblical scholars who can “decode” their identities. Pilkey is one
such scholar who believes he has decoded many of these identities. For example,
he thinks Shem is remembered as Balih of First Kish, as Dadasig of Second Kish,
as Tata of Awan, as Sahlamu of the Amorites, and as Melchizedek of Canaan.[7]
In addition to the civilization’s “sudden” origin, the
new physiology had other effects which I will discuss in the next section that
deals with mankind’s dispersion from Ararat.
2. Human Dispersion and Migration. To properly visualize the dispersion of Noahic
mankind, we must recall the natural environment in which they had to live. For
all five centuries between Noah and Abraham the Ice Age dominated the globe.
Migration routes were changed as the glaciers expanded. Storm tracks overran
what is now the dry Middle East. The natural environment shaped human as well
as animal dispersion routes and timing from the Ark’s landing sight. In fact,
Paul may have had this process in mind when in Acts 17:26 he appears to refer
obliquely to the “bounds” of inhabitable land which are linked to climate in
Psalm 74:17..9
In Figure 1.2 I have indicated how Oard’s model
pictures the areas where glaciation began due to the geophysical post-flood
adjustments and where the glaciers reached at the Ice Age maximum. Viewing the
changes, it is clear that the Noahic race would have used different ;land
routes of dispersion depending upon when they migrated out from the Middle
East.
With the climate deteriorating in the centuries that
followed the flood and the vastly longer lifespans than at present, physiological
stress would have been significant. The further men migrated away from the
Ararat area, the more primitive conditions and less advanced culture they
enjoyed.
This implication appears to be the only way to explain
the peculiar observation shown in Figure 1.3 that human fossil skulls become
more “primitive” in form the further their location from Ararat. Human
“primitive” fossil finds apparently show, not stages of evolution, but degrees
of stress along the land migratory routes into the new postdiluvian world. In
isolated regions of the earth, early settlers lived in caves. Job refers to the
stressful living conditions of cave dweller and city dweller alike (Job
12:24-25; 30:3-8).
The first settlements, therefore, even in the Middle
East were not the permanent structures of later Sumerian and Egyptian cultures
but lowly shelters of mud and clay. The Ice Age storm tracks with frequent
heavy rains repeatedly destroyed them. Thus in the lowest levels of ancient
cities, archeologists find many layers of rebuilt dwellings. Unfortunately, the
uniformitarian interpretation of these findings, thinking in terms of today’s
drier climate, estimates each such layer to be as long, perhaps, as a century
or two. Then these multiple levels are seen as proof of a “predynastic”
historic period lasting thousands of years. In fact, they show only a few
decades of marginal survival of Noah’s immediate descendents.
3. Animal Dispersion and Migration. Animals leaving the Ark experienced the same
environmental stress. If the original Ark pairs shared the vigor of
antediluvian mankind, for several centuries they, too, would have multiplied
rapidly. Their migration routes into the new world would also have been shaped
by the climate just as mankind’s routes. The earliest waves spread into
relatively warm climatic regions before the Ice Age took hold. As the climate
cooled and the glaciers grew, many populations of these early animals would
have been trapped and destroyed such as happened in the famous woolly mammoth
event.[8]
Animals dispersed not only through land migration but
also through human shepherding by land and sea. A creationist student of
postdiluvian animal dispersion, Woodmorappe, notes that the fossil record shows
that:
“many if not most living things have had a more
widespread distribution than they do today. . . As humans were forced to leave
their habitations around Babel, they undoubtedly took animals with them for
husbandry, game, and a reminder of their former area of living. . .
.Introductions into barren continents had a much greater effect on biogeography
than the later introductions of living things into already-populated
continents.[9]
Thus the very unique marsupial animals found nearly exclusively
today in Australia probably were introduced to that continent by early pioneers
from the Ararat area. As Woodmorappe points out, marsupials have traits that
make them suitable for long voyages: low rates of postnatal growth and lesser
food requirements.[10] Instead of showing “evolution in place”, such
specialized animal groups bear witness to the pre-Abrahamic dispersion.
Such dispersion also explains why antediluvian animals
like the dinosaur seemed to have survived after the flood in gradually
weakening form. Tribes across the earth remember them in art and myth. Job
speaks of their presence (Job 40:15-40:34). Modern fisherman have photographed
at least one dinosaur-like catch.[11].11
Between Noah and Abraham, then, the environment for
man and animal was utterly unlike anything we can easily imagine. It was in
that very different, “transitional” world that our civilization arose. I now
turn to a brief examination of what our civilization looked like in its
infancy, an examination that will show why God spiritually abandoned it to
begin a new work through Abraham.
The civilization that arose in the environment just
described was the result of an unprecedented, incredible program of global
colonization by those listed in Genesis 10. Their program has largely been
forgotten, buried by the evolutionary insistence that early civilization could
not have come from high intelligence and advanced technology. It had to have
come about, it is believed, through a lengthy process of upward evolution from
primitive humanoids.
In the following paragraphs I describe, in contrast, a
civilization arising quickly—within a few centuries—from humans as intelligent
or more so than ourselves. I refer to evidence now coming to light of the
Noahic new world order that coexisted with the Ice Age and suffered from local
pockets of “stone age” culture. Then I move on to civilization’s first major
crisis under Nimrod in Babylon and God’s resulting judgment upon it.
Early Intelligence and High Technology. In the evolutionary view millions of years were
required for man’s IQ to evolve high enough to support the cultural skills
necessary for civilization. To support this belief, evidences are cited such as
primitive man’s lack of inventiveness, the simplicity of his artifacts, the
extreme conservatism of his customs, and his smaller skull size.
The Canadian physiologist, Dr. Arthur Custance, years
ago refuted each of these evidences as IQ indicators. The majority of
intelligent people have never invented anything. Simplicity of artifacts are
often the best indicator of inventive genius. Conservative customs in an
extremely stressful environment is the safest way of survival. The most
intelligent people would have to limit themselves to well-tried technologies of
obtaining food, clothing, shelter, and warmth. Finally, small skull size is not
necessarily an indicator of low IQ, a crucial example being the modern writer
Anatole France whose cranial capacity was only 1100cc. [12]
Custance also noted that present-day “primitive”
cultural people when placed into a modern educational environment show no sign
of lower IQ at all. Many Eskimos and Australian aboriginals still live in what
would be classified as Old Stone Age cultures. Yet
their children do as well in school as any child from advanced Western culture.
He cites an authority who wrote:
The mental distance between a living so-called
“primitive” and a “civilized” person is regarded as equivalent to thousands of
years, but experience proves that this distance, where it exists, is equivalent
to no more than a few days, for man is everywhere and always man.[13]
The Old Stone Age evidences, therefore, indicate
nothing of their owners’ intelligence. They only point to local conditions of
marginal survival during certain phases of world colonization by Noah’s
progeny. We are about to see that they were contemporary with higher Bronze Age
culture elsewhere because both originated during the short Ice Age following
the flood.
Where are the evidences of high technology by Noah and
his immediate family besides early Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures? The
evidence is slowly coming to light. We must be reminded of what famed Ancient
Near Eastern scholar Cyrus Gordon wrote:
Mankind. . .often lapses into collective amnesia. The
Egyptians forgot how to read their ancestors’ hieroglyphs, and the Persians
lost their knowledge not only the script but also of the history and very names
of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Xerxes who made their ancestors the rulers of the
world. . . .We [Americans] believe, at least tacitly, that white men did not
come to America before Colombus’ 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.[14] Details evidences of
ancient Egypt and Sumer, we must recall, have really only been unearthed and
studied during the last two centuries. Do we really think that all the evidence
of civilization’s origins has been found?
Enough evidence, I believe, has already been found
that points to a coordinated world-wide colonization by a Semitic culture with
high technology during the Ice Age at the time Egypt and Mesopotamian cultures
were beginning. This evidence consists of two parts: detailed regional maps of every
continent composed as glaciers were retreating in the northern hemisphere (but
before the Antarctic icecap grew to its present size); and a worldwide presence
of key names of Semitic origin.
1. Ice Age World Maps. Geography professor Charles Hapgood.13 spent most of the 1950s and 1960s analyzing certain
world maps available to medieval navigators. He and his students worked with
librarians, cartographers, and historians in order to determine the sources
behind these maps. Using the tools of projective geometry and trigonometry,
Hapgood showed that several key world maps of the medieval period depended upon
very ancient originals. These original sources featured: (1) a value for the
circumference of the earth more accurate than that of Eratosthenes the Egyptian;
(2) great details of local regions on every continent far exceeding the
accuracy of medieval cartographers; (3) evidences of spherical trigonometry
before the Greeks; (4) details of Antarctica’s shorelines now buried under its
icecap; and (5) remnant glaciers in Britain, Sweden, and Germany.
Hapgood summarizes: “The evidence presented by the
ancient maps appears to suggest that in remote times, before the rise of any of
the known cultures, of a true civilization, of a comparatively advanced sort,
which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a
real sense, a worldwide culture. . . .In astronomy, nautical science, mapmaking
and possibly ship-building, it was perhaps more advanced than any state of
culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era. . . .
Mapping on such a scale. . .suggests both economic
motivations and economic resources. Organized government is indicated. The
mapping of a continent like Antarctica implies much organization, many
exploring expeditions, many stages in the compilation of local observations and
local maps into a general map, all under a central direction.”[15]
If it be remembered that Noah’s family operated under
the four divine institutions and had to quickly discover natural resources in a
virtually new planet, evidences of very early global mapping are not
surprising.
2. Worldwide Key Words of Semitic Origin. While Hapgood was investigating maps during the
1950s and 1960s, another innovative researcher was investigating the occurrence
around the world of certain key words. John Cohane assembled a rather short
list of word stems that appear in languages across the earth.
For example, he points to Eber/Ber/Bar. There is the
noun Hebrew, the name of Abraham and his descendents who were the progeny of
the Genesis 10 patriarch Eber. There is the Iberian peninsula named from the
Ebro river where the first known inhabitants settled. There is the classic name
for Ireland, Hibernia as well as one of the founders of Ireland in mythology,
Eber. There is the area which is now known as Georgia in what was the old
Soviet Empire, known since its ancient settlements as Iberia. Cohane traces
other key words like Adam, Eve, and Eloah (=God)
throughout cultures in both Western and Eastern hemispheres. [e.g.,
Eve/Hawah/Hawaii; Aloha/Eloah; etc.] He summarizes his findings:
“In prehistoric times. . .there were two dispersions
from the Mediterranean, the first truly worldwide, the second petering out
along the eastern coast of the
Americas in one direction, in Japan, the Philippines,
Australia, and New Zealand in the other direction.[16]
Besides the Ice Age maps and worldwide Semitic key words, there is the obvious rapid rise of sophisticated architecture with common forms (pyramids in Egypt and Mexico), advanced medicine including drilling of teeth (Egypt), gears, levers, wheels, animal breeding, and a host of other evidences of high technology right from the dawn of civilization.
Interestingly, the general area of the first
postdiluvian settlements--eastern Turkey, Palestine, and Mesopotamia—is the
area closest to all other areas of planet earth for surface travel. It
literally is the “center of the earth” as shown by computer research over two
decades ago.[17] How fitting that God had Noah’s Ark come to rest in exactly
the area that was the best place to begin filling the earth!
Crisis at Babel/Babylon). The high intelligence and technology of Noah’s new
world order made a great potential for a flourishing civilization on earth.
Through His covenant God had reinstalled the divine institutions after the
flood beginning with responsible dominion.[18] He ordered man to “fill the
earth” (Gen.9:1). That meant the sons of Noah would have to colonize the newly
“resurfaced” planet. The story of their response to His Word in the
postdiluvian environment and God’s
reaction is given in Genesis 10:1-11:9.
1. The “Filling of the Earth”. Genesis 10:1-11:9 is one of many sections in the
original language marked off by the introductory statement “these are the
generations of X”(note 5:1; 6:9; 11:10). Each section describes the history of
X’s progeny. Thus Genesis proceeds from X=universe, to X=Adam, to X=Noah, and
now here to X=Noah’s three sons in this section (10:1). It then proceeds to
give the history of only one of the three sons (X=Shem in 11:10).
Within the Genesis 10:1 section the general history of
Noah’s three sons is given in the first part (10:1-32). Then a crucial event
within this general history is expanded and discussed in a second part
(11:1-9). The general history section is known as the Table of Nations--a
unique document of the founding order of human civilization on planet earth. It
documents the fulfillment of God’s mandate in 9:1. The Table of Nations shows
that civilization had “filled the earth” by the.15
time of Abraham.
Each son’s role in filling the earth is given in terms
of four criteria: associated tribes, geographical domain, linguistic stock, and
national identities. Chapter 10 is not, therefore, strict genealogy like Genesis
5 and 11. The “sons” here include entire people groups (e.g., names ending in
“im” and “ites”). Japheth’s group apparently “filled” distant lands (note the
emphasis in 10:5 compared to 10:20, 31) spawning some of the European and
Asiatic peoples. Ham’s group seems to have “filled”
parts of the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and
Africa spawning many very diverse races from white to black. Shem’s group
“filled” many different areas of the Middle East and possibly Asia.
Genesis 10:1-32 lists seventy names. Moses points out
that there is a correspondence between this 70-fold structure in civilization
and the 70 descendents of Jacob (cf. Gen. 46:27; Deut. 32:8), a fact we shall
return to in a later chapter.
2. The Rebellion at Babel/Babylon. Notice in Genesis 10 there is a small “action
narrative” that interrupts the flow of the text in 10:9-11 concerning the first
“kingdom” in the Bible, a kingdom of man built by Nimrod at Babel. Another
“action” comment occurs in 10:25 about the earth being divided. In the
centuries between the flood and Abraham, only this event or events was worth
mentioning in the Word of God. It must, therefore, be critical in understanding
the plan of God for history.
What exactly happened at Babel is revisited in Genesis
11:1- 9. If Genesis 10 tell us that mankind did fill the earth, Genesis 11
tells us how God’s command was fulfilled. It turns out that mankind filled the
earth only after being forced to do it (in much the same way as the Church in
Acts became a witness only after being forced out of Palestine by persecution).
The “filling of the earth” was not, therefore, an act of obedience by the new
Noahic race.
The Tower of Babel story begins with mankind opposing
God’s command to fill the earth (11:4). Instead of submitting to the Word of
God, fallen man wants to be his own authority (“let us build for ourselves”,
“let us make for ourselves a name”). Here is the perversion of the first divine
institution (responsible dominion) I spoke about in Section II of this
Framework series. Man has eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and
wants, therefore, to decide matters for himself independently of God’s Word. He
insists upon interpreting (“naming”) all things as though he has omniscience
and can give meaning out of his own finite resources.
If we follow the traditional view that the Tower of
Babel.16 was a project initiated under the leadership of
Nimrod, we discover another feature. Nimrod built the first “kingdom” (first
occurrence of this word in the Bible). Such a kingdom would have involved
one-world political unity by coercion. Coerced race-wide unification in the
Tower project would have been the only way to guarantee that there could be one
and only one “name” or meaning or interpretation for all mankind. Absolute authority
outside of God can only come by coercion. Without such political and social
tyranny, every fallen man would do what is right in his own eyes.
This is confirmed by Jewish tradition through
Josephus: [Nimrod] persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it was
through his means they were happy, but to
believe that it was their own courage which procured
that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny--seeing
no other way of turning
men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a
constant dependence upon his power.[19]
The Tower of Babel itself, according to Josephus, was
to secure man against another flood-judgment of God, “being made of burnt
brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be
liable to admit water.”[20] Autonomous man tried, in addition to define the
meaning and goal of world society, to erect a place of perfect security--even
from God’s judgments! The high intelligence and technology of early
postdiluvian man had become prideful and arrogant.
Significantly, this event occurred at Babel or what
became later, Babylon. Babylon occurs throughout the Bible as a virtual synonym
for Satan’s world system (see Isa. 13-14, 47; Jer. 50-51; Dan. 2; Rev. 17-18).
It has great military and political strength (Isa. 14:4,6,16; 47:6; Jer.
51:25,55) and later forms the very foundation of the “times of the Gentiles”
(Dan. 2:37- 38). Ultimately, Babylon politically dominates the world (Rev.
17:18).
Babylon has vast wealth (Isa. 13:19; 14:4; Jer. 51:13)
including slavery (Rev. 18:13) and comes eventually to control world trade
(Rev. 18:3, 7-19). It elevates man’s knowledge (Isa. 47:10) including astrology
and other occultic arts (Isa. 47:12-13; Rev. 18:23). Babylon epitomizes Satanic
pride and defiance of God (Isa. 14:13-14; Jer. 50:24) and is pictured
simultaneously as a perpetual virgin (Isa. 47:1,7) and as a queenly whore drunk
with the blood of the saints (Isa. 47:5; Rev. 17:5-6; 18:7,24).
Thus the Babel crisis begins the work of the “mystery
of iniquity” that will be consummated in the coming great Tribulation and
Judgment by God on the earth. The arrogant Nimrodian agenda of ultimate human
autonomy derailed the godly.17 potential of the Noahic new
world order.
3. God’s Judgment. The text of Genesis 11:5-9 gives God’s counterpoint to this
rebellion. The Tower doesn’t reach to heaven; God has to come down to even see
it! Because of the potential for further evil with this newly created absolute
authority independent of God, the Lord destroyed the very heart of the project:
the unified language which now carried a perverted unified thought and meaning
shared by all men. Forever after Babel rebellion and perversion could never be
universal.
Just as the Lord in Genesis 3:22 bounded evil by
imposing limits on mortal life through death, so at Babel He further bounded
evil by fragmenting human language and thought. All such attempts at creating
an absolute standard independently of God will be frustrated and remain
unfinished projects like the Tower was. God alone is omniscient and holy and,
therefore, our absolute authority in all things. Our continual “distance” from
other people of different cultures and languages is the residue of Babel.
Ancient texts remember this event: “In those days the
land of Shuber (East), the place of plenty, of righteous decrees,
Harmony-tongued Sumer (South), the great land of the ‘decrees of princeship’,
Uri (north), the land having all that is needful, The land Martu (West),
resting in security, the whole universe, the people in unison, To Enlil in one
tongue gave praise.’[21]
Ancient languages show the effects of Babel: most of
them are pictographic rather than alphabetic. Pictographic languages were not due
to a lack of an alphabet; they were probably a reaction to the linguistic
confusion of Babel. As an illustration today, Chinese is an ancient
pictographic script that can be understood by all Chinese even though many
cannot understand each other’s present oral dialects. The script was begun
before the dialects developed and separated from each
other.
In like fashion, some believe that the language spoken
in Genesis 11:1 was some sort of proto-Semitic language. Evidence from the
Bible and history point in this direction.[22] As this language broke up,
Noah’s progeny separated and filled the earth in the pattern of Genesis 10.
With their intelligence and high technology, early postdiluvian mankind
migrated away from the Middle East into all the continents, mapping them,
building architectural masterpieces, and leaving traces of their still
Semitic-like language wherever they went..18
The new world order under Noah could have been a
millennial kingdom. Every vestige of the old order with its sin, violence, and
demonic infiltration has been destroyed in God’s judgment. His salvation of the
eight remaining believers provided a fresh start for humanity. He provided an
utterly unique situation for a quick “start up” of civilization.
For the first four or five centuries human leaders who
were virtual gods and goddesses cohabited with their more obviously mortal
progeny to shepherd and mentor them. Mankind had for the first time a legal,
clear-cut covenant that obligated God to maintain environmental stability and
to preserve the race forever. Men everywhere possessed special revelation of
God’s purposes (Gen.1-9). They were clearly aware that relationship with God
was based upon blood atonement as shown in the covenant through Noah. The
principle that their life depended upon sacrificial death faced them each day
they partook of their new carnivorous diet.
The most remarkable tool available to mankind,
however, was the new post-fall divine institution, civil government, the power
of the sword. Into their hands God delivered a function previously reserved for
Himself and His angels: judgment upon evil through the restitutionary principle
of “life for life”. This kingship authority looked into the future toward the
time when men will judge angels (I Cor. 6:3) and when with Jesus they will rule
the coming Kingdom of God (Rev. 2:26-27).
Yet in spite of what was accomplished during these
centuries—worldwide exploration, dispersion of the Ark animals into every
continent, the founding of many nations--only one event was selected by the
Holy Spirit for remembrance: the Tower of Babel and God’s subsequent judgment.
I conclude this chapter by reflecting on the far-reaching implications of the
Babel crisis in transforming the new order filled with promise into the
spiritually corrupt thing called in the New Testament the world (cosmos), the
Satanic system of paganism.
The Rapid Corruption of Postdiluvian Mankind. It took
only a few centuries for civilization’s spiritual flaw, first seen in the
Noah-Ham incident of Genesis 9:20-27, to manifest itself in the very structure
of the new world order. In tracing the transformation of the new order into the
cosmos, I follow the three-fold outline given by the Apostle John: the lust of
the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life (I John 2:15-17). Each
of these elements arise from rebelliousness toward God according to the Apostle
Paul (Rom. 1:18-32).
1. The Corruption of Human Imagination: the lust of
the eyes. The only alternative to
submitting to God as Creator is to exalt self as a god, to deny in principle
and in action the Creator-creature distinction. Paul notes in Romans 1:23 that
mankind universally replaced the glory of God seen in creation with “an image
in the form of corruptible man and of birds and of four-footed animals and
crawling creatures.” Note that “image” is singular, not plural, and that these
four classes of creatures are exactly those destroyed in the flood (Gen. 7:23).
When we make ourselves the final point of reference,
then all else relative to us (from God to animals to rocks) is seen as a set of
objects to be classified under our autonomous viewpoint. We automatically
produce the false doctrine of the Continuity of Being, the axiom of all unbelief
and paganism, the replacement of the Creator-creature truth. Rushdoony
comments: “Apart from biblically governed thought, the prevailing concept of
being has been that being is one and continuous. God, or the gods, man, and the
universe are all aspects of one continuous being; degrees of being may exist,
so that a hierarchy of gods as well as a hierarchy of men can be described, but
all consist of one, undivided and continuous being. The creation of any new
aspect of being is thus not a creation out of nothing, but a creation out of
being. . . .”[23]
As I pointed out in Section II of this course, paganism always holds to one-level view of existence whereas the Bible insists upon a two-level view existence. The difference is radical, and you will encounter it again and again throughout the Bible. Not only did early paganism reject creation, it rejected the fall. As Section II noted, paganism always insists upon the “normalcy” of evil, death, and chaos as part of eternal existence. Note in Romans 1:23 Paul contrasts the incorruptibility of God with the corruptibility of the idolatrous replacement. Continuity of Being plus this normalcy of evil, death, and chaos forms the heart of every pagan system, ancient and modern. Rushdoony explains the pagan image:
Both gods and men developed or evolved. . .out of the
original chaos of being. . . .Chaos or darkness generates life; it is both the
source of life and the enemy of life. . . .Chaos and life are thus in a
necessary tension.”[24]
Thus paganism always features a return to chaos, Mardi
Gras-like orgies, to rejuvenate life. Then, once again, the eternal cycle
returns to death. This resultant paganism, according to Paul, came from God’s
turning mankind over “to the desires of their hearts to uncleanness”. Their imaginative
powers succumbed to the power of sin and falsehood.
2. The Corruption of Human Devotion: the lust of the flesh. Once
the imagination is filled with a false view of reality, behavioral consequences
quickly follow. Daily life is expended in service to idols and, ultimately, to
self (Rom. 1:25). God furthers the slide into paganism by unleashing profoundly
unnatural passions such as homosexuality that cannot be controlled in the flesh
(1:26-27). A falsified vision of life with its misguided devotion to self,
therefore, eventually tries to redefine reality itself at the most intimate
level of human experience. Homosexuality is a hallmark of every pagan society.
3. The Corruption of Human Judgment: the pride of life. Essential to the sinful agenda of redefining reality
is to purge any consciousness of God and His righteous standards from view.
Such reminders of absolute accountability to Him stand in the way of rebellious
living (Rom. 1:28,32a). God, therefore, lets sin take over in every form the
autonomous human heart (1:29-31) with the result that mankind not only lives
out such sin, but goes on to call evil good and good evil (1:32b). In the end
pagan society always redefines deviancy.
God, according to Paul, allowed the nations to slide
into paganism (Acts 14:16; 17:30a). The cosmos developed out of Noahic
civilization as Noah’s progeny rebelled against God and suffered the downward
spiritual spiral that resulted from it. How did this downward spiral differ
from the original fall in Genesis 3 and its outworking before the flood?
The Manipulation of Civil
Government by Human Corruption. After the flood, mankind had access to the power
of the sword and kingship authority. A new area existed, therefore, into which
corruption could spread. In the postdiluvian order spiritually-corrupt mankind
could do a new thing—erect a corrupt kingdom. A one-world kingdom or government
would be able to enforce the new apostate, religious vision of the Continuity
of Being upon all men everywhere. All humanity could be controlled with a
deception ultimately from Satan.[25]
This is what Nimrod’s kingdom attempt at Babel/Babylon
tried to do. Rushdoony comments on the symbolism of the Tower: “The place of
creation is the primeval. . .mountain, or pyramid, arising out of the waters of
chaos to establish order. This sacred mountain or tower is. . .where
communication is established [in the Continuity of Being]. . . .The
significance of the Tower of Babel is thus apparent: it denied the
discontinuity of God’s being and asserted man’s claim to a continuity of being
with God and heaven. The Tower was the gate to God. . .signifying that man’s
social order made possible an ascent of being into the divine order.”[26]
If the Tower was like later Mesopotamian ziggurats or
the stepped pyramids of Egypt and Central America, it appeared
from every side like a staircase to heaven. It symbolized man saving himself by
his own effort through ascending to the level of the gods. Salvation was seen
as an evolution of being rather than a radical regeneration of ethical nature.
God’s judgment imposed a boundary upon evil,
preventing it from ever attaining global status through a one-world government.
Educated Bible-believers, therefore, oppose trends toward one-world government
as a harmful delusion.
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END NOTES FOR CHAPTER 1
1. See II Peter 3:5-7 which clearly implies
extra-terrestrial effects of the flood cataclysm and Section II of this series.
2. See discussion of these strategies in Section II.
3. Michael Oard, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis
Flood (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1990), p. 97
4. Ibid., p. 31.
5. John Pilkey, Origin of the Nations (San Diego, CA:
Master Book Publishers, 1984), p. 17.
6. Besides this event, two other times are with angels
before the flood and with resurrected saints in the Millennium.
7. Pilkey, p. 17.
8. Oard discusses how fossils of animals associated
with different climatic regimes came to be juxtaposed, including the famous
woolly mammoth findings where their carcasses were found frozen with fresh food
in them, pp. 80-91.
9. John Woodmorappe, “Causes for the Biogeographical
Distribution of Land Vertebrates After the Flood” originally published in
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Creationism (1990), pp.
362,364 and republished in the monograph collection, Studies in Flood Geology
(El Cajon, CA: Institute
for Creation Research, 1993).
10. Ibid., p. 365.
11. This famous incident on April 10, 1977 was
photographed and honored by Japan with a postage stamp. See the picture in Paul
S. Taylor, The Great Dinosaur Mystery (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1987), p.
47.
12. Arthur C. Custance, “Establishing a Paleolithic
I.Q”, in his.22
out-of-print series, Doorway Papers
published privately in Brockville, Ontario, Canada during the 1960s and 1970s.
13. The authority cited by Custance is Frithjof Schoon
in his book, Light On the Ancient Worlds (London: Perennial Books, 1965), pp.
107-108.
14. From Cyrus Gordon’s preface in John Phillip
Cohane, The Key (New York: Crown Publishers, 1969), p. 14.
15. Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
(Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1966), p. 193.
16. Cohane, p. 21.
17. Andrew J. Woods did a computer-aided study of the
minimum average distance along the earth’s surface from every point of
land area to any arbitrary point. The result was that
the area of Ararat, Jerusalem, and Babylon had the least average distance to
any other point on the earth’s land surface. The Center of the Earth (El Cajon,
CA: Institute of Creation Research, 1973).
18. See Section II of this course on the
re-installment of the divine institutions after the flood.
19. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, iv.
20. Ibid.
21. Frontispiece in Samuel N. Kramer, Sumerian
Mythology (Torchbook ed.; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961).
22. Augustine had suggested the pre-Babel language was
Hebrew (City of God, XVI, ix), but Custance relaxes the requirement to a
“proto-Semitic” language because: (1) Semitic
languages change relatively little through time compared to all other languages
so they should more closely approximate this earlier language; and (2) words
and names in Genesis 1-11, though remembered in other languages, have
contextual meaning only in Semitic languages.
23. Rousas John Rushdoony, The One and the Many
(Philadelphia: Craig Press, 1971), p. 36.
24. Ibid., p. 37
25. See Henry M. Morris’ recent suggestion that Satan
could have originated this concept by falsely interpreting his environment
immediately after he was created in The Long War
Against God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989), pp. 255-260.
26. Rushdoony, p. 40.