Despite this healthy skepticism, we do try to use sound reasoning and pay attention to evidence. For this reason, there are certain wild historical theories that I’ve never felt the need to engage with. One of these is the flat-earth theory.
Luckily for us, someone has already done the work for us.
Faulkner got interested enough in the flat-earth movement to study it. In this short piece, he gives a handy overview of the movement and a critique of its reasoning. The reasoning appears to depend on a radical skepticism not just about things that have earned some skepticism like social science and carbon dating, but about any and every kind of research or scholarship.
For those who take the early chapters of Genesis seriously as a history of the human race (albeit a not very detailed one), here are two different interpretations of the sons of Noah.
The sons of Noah are listed in Genesis 9:18 – 19 as “Shem, Ham and Japheth.” Though they are always listed in that order, this is not necessarily their birth order. Genesis is focused with laser precision on redemptive history. Thus, it foregrounds Shem, from whom the nation of Israel would later be descended. We are given a lot more detail about Shem than about the tribes descended from the other brothers. It’s possible that Ham was actually the oldest son.
It’s also worth noting that the
Table of Nations (Genesis chapter 10) gives a list of the tribes known to be
descended from each brother as of that
writing. This means that some tribes
are listed who were later lost to history.
Others are mentioned but are not followed all the way to where they
eventually settled centuries later. When
we are told where they lived, most of the locations are in and around the
Ancient Near East, even for tribes that we know later ended up in Africa (for
example Mizraim = Egypt and Cush = Ethiopia).
If we take the account of Babel as true
(which my novels do), then the human race first clustered around the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers and tried to build a centralized
civilization. Only later did they end up
migrating to the ends of the earth. So,
for a time, you had the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth living right on
top of each other.
Here are the two theories. I will spend more time on the second one,
because it is the more novel and interesting one.
The Traditional Theory: Most of the World is Japhethite
This is the theory that I was
taught when I studied Old Testament Backgrounds. It has been the majority interpretation of
the Table of Nations (which is, admittedly, hard to interpret). On this view, Shem was the father of all the
nations that traditionally speak Semitic languages: basically, the Hebrews and
the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula. (Yes, Arabs and Jews are related.) Ham
was the father of all the nations of Africa,
including the Egyptians, Ethiopians and all the subSaharan nations. And Japheth was the father of the
Indo-Europeans, East Asians, Pacific Islanders and (via the Land Bridge) the
Native Americans.
This view isn’t perfect, because no broad explanation of human distribution is perfect. That said, it does make some intuitive sense. This is the interpretation that I used when writing my novels, because it was the only one that I was aware of at the time. So the family that my story follows are, in the novel, all descendants of Japheth. One of them, Hur, has fair skin and hazel eyes, and his mother was blond. The others all have straight dark hair and more or less East Asian features, in some cases shading towards Native American. The books are set during a time that was pre-race. People knew each other by their extended families.
I now kind of regret that I used this theory for my novels, because the one that is coming up is so much cooler.
Arthur C. Custance Says Most of the World is Hamite
Only after I was well committed to my series did I discover the web site of Arthur C. Custance, where you can read a wide selection of essays and booklets by him. Here is his big theory. Like many sweeping, alternative theories of history, it takes some getting used to, but seems to make more sense the longer you look at it, if you are willing to look at it.
Arthur C. Custance believes the Table of Nations should be interpreted as follows. Shem was the father of the Semitic peoples, as above. Japheth, whose name probably means “fair” in Hebrew, was the father of just the Indo-Europeans. Ham was the father of everyone else: not just the African nations, but all the indigenous peoples of Asia, Polynesia, and the Americas. Basically, anyone who doesn’t have a historical tradition of being descended from Shem or else a freakily white complexion like us Indo-Europeans.
The Gifts of the Peoples per Custance
Custance’s theory is not just about physical descent. He also believes that each of these broad groupings of humanity have a gift to give the human race as a whole: some cultural feature that they are especially good at.
For Semites, it’s spiritual insight. Semitic groups have “gods that are gods of righteousness.” The Hebrews, obviously, received the revelations of God and gave an up until then very oppressive world the gift of ethical monotheism. The Arabs, also, have managed to found a monotheistic religion that is focused on righteousness and is a force to be reckoned with. In both cases, their main cultural focus is religion to a much greater degree than in most cultures.
The Japhethites’ gift is intellect. Their gods tend to be “gods of enlightenment.” Japhethite peoples, according to Custance, as a culture are basically the absentminded professor type. They excel at building elaborate intellectual systems of thought that may or may not have any connection to the real world. So, the Greeks gave us philosophy, but their natural sciences consisted of speculating about ideal plants and animals rather than doing fieldwork. The elaborate Hindu systems of philosophy were developed by the Aryans, an Indo-European group that invaded India from the North. The Germanic peoples gave us Freud and Nietzsche. (Thanks, guys.)
Japhethites, per Custance, are not, as a culture, good at practical matters. That is the special gift of the Hamites.
Custance argues that nearly every major urban civilization was founded by Hamites. This includes Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, ancient China, and the great cities of the Americas. It also includes the urban civilization of India, which was developed by the dark-skinned Dravidians before India was taken over by the Aryans, at which point, argues Custance, technological innovation in India basically stopped.
Furthermore, on this view the Hamites were the first to colonize the world. With their extreme practical survival skills, they made it all the way across Asia, the Americas, and Polynesia while the Semites were hanging out in the Middle East and the Indo-Europeans were still building kurgans on the plains of the Ukraine. This explains why almost anywhere people have gone in recorded history, they find that there are already dark-skinned people living there (for example, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Negritos of the Philippines, possibly the Etruscans in Italy, and the dark-haired, pre-Celtic inhabitants of Europe).
Now, I realize this is a broad brush. Obviously, every nation has some kind of tech and some kind of religion (philosophical systems come later and Custance argues that they are the least important of the three). And it’s not as though the nations of the earth have lived hermetically sealed lives. There has been plenty of migration, intermarriage, and spread of ideas, even starting in very ancient times. Custance’s idea is that when we trace the sources of ideas and innovations, we tend to find technological innovation coming from Ham, intellectual systems coming from Japheth, and spiritual insight coming from Shem.
I need hardly say that none of these gifts is “the best.” We need them all.
Custance also notes a pattern where Japhethite peoples tend to take over territory from Hamitic peoples and then adapt, benefit from, and often take credit for Hamite innovations and discoveries. Clearly this has happened in modern times, but there are examples that come from well before the modern age of European colonialism, such as the Aryans taking over India and the Greeks getting elements of their civilization from Egypt and Ethiopia. That said, because of the nature of the case there have necessarily also been many instances of Hamite peoples migrating into other Hamite peoples’ territory, such as the Austronesians migrating into the Philippines to find the Negritos already there. World history is complicated.
If you are intrigued by these ideas, I encourage you to visit Custance’s web site via one of the many links in this article.
If I had followed Custance’s theory when writing my books, Zillah and her children should have been Hamite, and Hur should not have been able to speak their language. He could not have stayed with them or eventually married into their family. So unfortunately, I can’t rewrite my entire series to follow Custance. Bummer.
But here is a song about when all the children of Noah worship together.
Genetic evidence about ancient populations is cool. Sometimes it tells you things that are fairly intuitive, like that the early Native Americans peopled the continent very quickly, and that at some point they got a visit from some Pacific populations.
At other times, genetic evidence (or the way it is interpreted) tells us some things that make sense and others that don’t. Take this article for example:
On the one hand, the genetic evidence presented here is said to indicate that there was once a lot more genetic diversity among humans than there is now. That makes a ton of sense, especially if you believe in a bottleneck such as the Flood.
On the other hand, this article also asks us to believe that these distinct human populations stayed away from each other for up to 700,000 years (!) and then met up again and interbred. That is really hard to swallow. How in the world did they manage not to bump into each other for that long? The world isn’t that big, is it?
One of the human (or “vaguely human-like,” as the article so flatteringly puts it) populations mentioned in the article above is the Denisovians, apparently a very hearty Central Asia population that was well adapted to high altitudes. For those who believe historical evidence that giants once walked the earth, the following article might be suggestive:
The “fun fact” has now become a “confusing fact.” Waitaminit! If that is true … then genetic analysis tells us basically nothing about the nature of a thing … then all of this is … worthless?
No, not really. It has helped me to remember that genes are not words or sentences, they are libraries. It is easy to imagine two vast libraries which have a 50% overlap (encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the like) but diverge wildly in the other 50% (one is all philosophy and ancient history; the other is all Dave Barry). That helps. Some. But it’s also a reminder that even the experts have “read” only a few volumes from any given library.
Sometimes genetic evidence tells a different story than that told by archaeology (with its many assumptions) or linguistics.
Here is a representative New Atheist argument from Richard Dawkins:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, page 31
Of course, each of these epithets could be backed up with an example from Scripture in which God calls Himself ‘jealous’ (not bothering to investigate what was meant by this), or appears to condone – or at least appears in the vicinity of – one of the crimes mentioned.
On its surface, this argument sounds really convincing and even damning … as long as you know nothing about the Ancient Near East. It basically blames God for all the pre-existing features of the cultures into which He was speaking.
Description Is Not Prescription
First off, let’s dispense with a very basic misunderstanding
that nevertheless seems to be widespread.
Just because an incident is recorded in the Bible does not mean that the Old Testament God endorses, let alone prescribes it. Much of the Bible is not prescriptive but is straightforward history. The Ancient Near East was a horrible place, and any history set there will contain horrors. In Genesis 19 there is an attempted homosexual gang rape. In Judges 19 there is a horrific, fatal gang rape, followed by a bloody clan war, followed by a mass kidnapping. In 2 Kings 6 there is cannibalism. And so on. It makes no more sense to blame God for these events than it does to blame a historian for the atrocities he documents.
God Commanded Animal Sacrifice, Holy War, Theocracy
But, let’s move on to the more difficult stuff. It is true that in the Old Testament, God commands His people to establish a theocracy by force. Furthermore, His worship involves animal sacrifice (which seems mild by comparison, but some people have a problem with this too). To modern eyes, all of this is very very bad. If God were really good, He would never have set up a theocracy.
I would like to ask the Richard Dawkinses of the world: What
kind of society, exactly, do you think the ancient Israelites found themselves
in at the time that God gave them all these laws?
Apparently, before the mean ol’ God of Israel came stomping through the Ancient Near East, all the other peoples there were living in a state of secular, egalitarian innocence. Everything found in the Old Testament was completely new to them. They had no gods, no priest-kings, no temples in their city-states. They did not offer animal or human sacrifices. They had no war, no rape, no slavery. They did not even eat meat. They were all vegans and went around with Coexist bumper stickers on their camels.
No, no, no. Come on. That picture is the exact opposite of the truth. There was no such thing as an egalitarian, secular society back then, and would not be for millennia.
The Actual Conditions in the Ancient Near East
Public Domain. Maarten van Heemskerck’s interpretation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. In the background, the ziggurat (temple) towers over the city.
When God began speaking to the Israelites, here are the
historical and cultural conditions that He had to work with:
In the Ancient Near East, literally every kingdom was a theocracy.
If you wanted to live in civilization, that meant that you lived in, or
were a farmer attached to, a city-state. At the center of your city would be the temple
of that city’s god. Typically the king
was also the high priest of said god and was considered his or her
representative on earth. So, the god was
ruling you through the king. Every
citizen of the city-state owed the king absolute obedience and the god service
and sacrifice. And how was that religion
practiced? Typically with animal sacrifice. This is pretty normal for cultures
in which livestock represent wealth. But
actually, animal sacrifice was the least of it.
Temple
prostitution (which could include ritual rape) was a frequent feature of
fertility cults. Human sacrifice, even child sacrifice, was also not unheard-of
and in some places it was common.
Public Domain image of Moloch, the Phonecian god. Children were sacrificed by being placed inside the fiery metal statue. In some versions, the statue is shown with arms stretched out in front of it, into which the baby is placed. This god was popular in Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest.
In other words, every single person in the ancient world lived in, not to mince words, a brutal theocracy. All of these kingdoms were far more authoritarian than the system set up by God for the Israelites. The power of the ruling class was considered absolute. Being enslaved was routine: because of your own debts, or your parents’, or because your city had been conquered, or because someone fancied you or because you had somehow annoyed the king. There was no concept of the lower classes having natural rights; and, in many cases, no sense of the rule of law. Nobody can be a snob or tyrant like an Ancient Near Eastern god-king.
For most people in the Ancient Near East, life was a horror show.
It Wasn’t the Bible World, It Was the Whole World
Public Domain. The temple of Jupiter towers over Rome during the days of the Republic.
Actually, this highly centralized kind of politico-religious system was not confined to the Ancient Near East. The early civilizations of the Indus Valley had a very similar system to that of ancient Sumer, even down to the temples and city layouts looking almost identical. The Indian style of centralized religious system can be spotted in Cambodia and Indonesia. Meanwhile, back in the Ancient Near East, this kind of system persisted, in the centuries following the giving of the Old Testament law, in the civilizations of Crete, Greece, the Hittites, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia. Thousands of years later, we see similar arrangements in Mayan, Aztec, and Incan culture. In fact, it is not too big of a stretch to say that until very recent times, a centralized, stratified, bureaucratic theocracy has been the norm, at least among major civilizations, throughout human history.
Public Domain. Pre-Aztec pyramid/temple complex at Teotihuacan.
But that kind of world is strange to us now. We are
accustomed to a very different kind of society: relatively open, free, and
secular, with lots of social mobility (and no
animal sacrifices whatsoever). For many
people, their first encounter with this once-familiar style of centralized
theocracy comes when they open the Bible.
They then attribute all this stuff to the God of Israel, as if He had
commanded all of this. But no, He was
not instituting theocracy, animal
sacrifice, arranged marriage, slavery, or any of the rest of it. Those things were already universal. He was, instead, speaking in to cultures for which these things were already the
norm. He spoke to them in their terms,
but at the same time transformed the terms to be more in line with His
character.
Well, Why Didn’t God Just Fix It?
You might say, “Well, then, why didn’t He tell them to stop having theocracies, sacrifice, and slavery, and to become a modern secular state?” This would, of course, have made no sense to them. They would have been completely unable to understand the message. If they had nevertheless tried to implement it, it would have led to a French Revolution-style Terror and a complete breakdown of their societies. You cannot completely and instantly transform a society without breaking it. But He did begin to transform those Ancient Near Eastern cultures by giving them a model of a good theocracy.
Suddenly, people had available to them the option to live in
a land where the local god was not represented by a statue (this was unbelievably counterintuitive) and where
instead of being arbitrary, He was “righteous” … where His worship did not
allow human sacrifice or temple prostitution, but only carefully regulated
animal sacrifice … where the behavior of priests was regulated and limited by
the law … where institutions like slavery and arranged marriage were, again,
limited by relatively humane laws … where each family was supposed to own their
own land … where, for many years, there
was no king.
If you wanted to set up a sane society in the midst of the
Ancient Near East, I don’t know how else you would possibly go about it.
Sources
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
Public domain images in this post come from the pages of Streams of Civilization, Vol. 1, 3rd ed., edited by Albert Hyma and Mary Stanton. (Christian Liberty Press, Arlington Heights, Illinois, 2016)
Information about life in the Ancient Near East, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the American civilizations comes from Streams of Civilization and from many, many other sources.
Here is a cool recent article about Neanderthals. Turns out they were more widespread than we used to think. This article does refer to them as humans. But it also distinguishes them from “modern humans.” And some articles refer to them as different “species.”
But they have tools at their sites, and the reconstructions of their faces look like people we might meet anywhere. (I know that’s an old joke, but it’s also a truism.)
And now, accompanied by a creepy speculative picture, we are told Neanderthals and modern humans were “lovers, not fighters.”
Guess when they are believed to have settled there? 10,000 years ago!
Follow the link, if not to read the article, then at least to see the panoramic picture at the top of the article that shows the region where these settlements were found.
On my shelf is a 2009 book called First Peoples in a New World by
archaeologist David J. Meltzer. I have learned many things from this book, not
least of which is that North American archaeology is really, really contentious. (I may post about this later.)
On pages 55 – 58, right in the
middle of a discussion of the causes of the Younger Dryas, is a long callout
box in which Meltzer goes on a delightful rant:
In 2001 the Mammoth Trumpet, a newsletter for a lay audience … carried an unusually long, highly technical article declaring there’d been a Pleistocene doomsday. A supernova-caused neutron bombardment centered over the Great Lakes had fried the earth 12,500 years ago … heated the atmosphere to over 1,800˚ Fahrenheit, and radiated plants and animals at the equivalent dose of “a 5-megawatt reactor for more than 100 seconds” … and so spiked atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations that ages on Paleoindian sites were thrown off by up to 40,000 years. … [In 2007] the supposed Pleistocene extraterrestrial catastrophe was hyped as fact from FOX News to The Economist.
Meltzer pp 55 – 56
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
This claim is now called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. The supposed comet impact or impacts are alleged to explain a number of phenomena:
Just as the last Ice Age was ending, right in the middle of a warming period, the climate unaccountably got cooler again for about 1000 years. This glacial encore is called the Younger Dryas. The idea is that a comet impact could have caused a bunch of glacial ice and water suddenly to be dumped into the North Atlantic, cooling temperatures there and interrupting the warming cycle.
The approximate date for the impact is around the same time that North America’s megafauna (mammoths, giant sloths) were dying out. Paleontologists are not sure why they died out, because it’s very difficult to get an accurate sense of numbers or of how quickly the extinctions happened. But if there was a comet impact, that would obviously be the #1 suspect in their demise.
Also around this time (about 10,800 BC) there is a geologic layer called the Black Mat, a carbon-rich layer that might be burned organic material or might be peat, as from the bottom of a pond. In some places, it contains nanodiamonds and other unique mineral things that are usually only formed with high heat and pressure.
This is also the time period in which some archaeologists think the Clovis culture (of humans) was dying out in North America, though this die-off too is controversial.
Impact, Schmimpact
Meltzer, in his 2009 book, is scathing: “The claim was so far out literally and figuratively … it was met with bemusement, or simply ignored.” He finds all kinds of evidentiary problems with the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. He doesn’t think an asteroid impact is required to explain the Younger Dryas, for one thing. (The cooling cycle could have been kicked off by meltwater from the North American glaciers even without a super-hot space rock, since the glaciers were already melting.) Furthermore, Black Mat evidence is inconsistent. So is Clovis evidence. So is evidence about the megafauna. And, the biggest problem of all, in 2009 when his book was published, no one had found an impact crater.
Well, that has changed. A 31-kilometer-wide impact crater was recently discovered under Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland. And the proponents of the YDIH have also discovered what they say is additional evidence of impacts as far away as Chile. (See the links below for more information.)
In Conclusion, We Are Not Sure the World Actually Ended
So, did a huge comet – or multiple pieces of a comet – really hit earth about 12,800 years ago? Nobody really knows. But – and this is the only point of this article – how can we not know this? How can we not be sure whether an apocalyptic, species-killing, continent-setting-on-fire event even happened?
The fact there can be controversy about such a hard-to-miss event just illustrates how difficult it is to figure out anything that happened even a mere 12,000 years ago. Pause for a moment and allow your jaw to drop, as mine did when I first read this, over all … that we don’t … know.
Sources
Fernandez, Sonia. “The Day the World Burned: Geologic and paleontological evidence unearthed in southern Chile supports the theory that a major cosmic impact event occurred approximately 12,800 years ago” posted Friday, March 8, 2019 on UC Santa Barbara, https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2019/019375/day-world-burned
Haynes, C. Vance, Jr.“Younger Dryas ‘black mats’ and the Rancholabrean termination in North America” Proceedings of the National Academcy of Sciences of the United States of America, published online 2008 April 24, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2373324/
Out of Babel Books 