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BC Volume 8 (2002)


Volume 8, Number 1January/February 2002

The Cause of Reduced
Post-Flood Life Spans – Part IV


Introduction

The study of degenerative pathological changes of old age… may well belong to a future chapter of vitamin research.
        –Casimir Funk, 1949.
[1]

Review

In the three preceding articles in this series I have attempted to demonstrate that nobody dies of "old age" today—that what we call "old age" is simply a disease, like any other disease, and that death due to this disease has nothing really to do either with "old" or with "age". I have pointed out, for example, that since Genesis plainly shows us that people once routinely lived in excess of 900 years, even an age of 125 years is clearly not old for humans.[2] Far from supporting the notion that people die of "old age" today, Genesis makes it clear that even the most advanced in years among us are dying at tragically young ages.

I have further pointed out that there seems no good reason to believe in an intrinsic time limit on life—that each species has a fixed life span assigned by the Creator.[3] Biological organisms are not designed to "grow old" and die at all. They are designed to go on living forever. Time does not kill biological organisms; it is entirely benign. Death results only from mishap and disease.

"Old age" is no exception to this rule. We must not allow the complex of symptoms we call "old age" to fool us. "Old age" holds no special status in the field of medicine—it is simply a disease, like any other disease.

In a deliberate effort to leave the universal misconception—the myth—of "old age" behind us, I have previously suggested we (temporarily) call this disease "Malady X" (read "Malady X-bar").[4]

The Pressing Question

Once it is recognized that "old age" is a misnomer for what in reality is an ordinary disease, the pressing question becomes whether something might be done to cure this disease.

I call this question "pressing" for several reasons. It is "pressing" first of all because many millions of individuals are dying of this disease every year—over 100,000 people die of Malady X each day. It is "pressing" because hundreds of years of potential life span is clearly a very great loss for any individual. And it is "pressing" because Malady X affects each and every one of us—not only those we hold near and dear, but indeed even our very selves—robbing us year by year of strength and health and, ultimately, before the vast majority of us have seen even a dozen decades, of life itself. Neither science nor medicine can field any question today of greater practical importance or urgency than this one.

Is it possible to put a stop to this devastating disease—to discover its cause, and to elicit its cure?

A Moral Imperative

As I have attempted to show previously, it appears that Biblical chronology alone offers a platform from which an intelligent assault on this research problem can be launched. All indications are that the insight into human longevity which Genesis uniquely offers, coupled with the insight into Genesis which correct Biblical chronology uniquely offers, is worth more than any number of medical research degrees or any wealth of medical research funding in regard to this problem. It presently appears that the solution to this problem will be secured from the distinctive platform which Biblical chronology offers, or it will not be secured by any human means at all.

It is curious that such an obviously medical matter should emerge from the discipline of Biblical chronology. But indeed it has, bringing with it an unavoidable moral imperative to take up its cause and do something about it.

For me this has meant increasingly focusing all effort and all resources on this single issue over the past several years. For the past year it has meant going at it hammer and tongs, while neglecting all else, typically twelve to fourteen hours per day, six days per week. I think it likely that none will be more happy than I when the research is complete and the matter is finally resolved! Regardless, I am pushing this work forward as rapidly as personal health and strength permit.

It has meant significant sacrifice and investment of resources by a number of other individuals as well. These do not need or wish me to sing their praises here, but I am truly thankful for them, each one. Without them the work described in this series of articles would not have been possible.

Malady X is real, its toll on human life and health is immense, and, in consequence, the moral imperative to do whatever we are able in regard to it is clear.

Purpose

In this fourth article of this series I want at least to take us one step closer to the goal of elucidating the cure of Malady X. We must, of course, understand the nature of the disease before we can hope to prescribe a cure for it. My purpose in this article is to show which category of diseases Malady X belongs to. My thesis is that we must assign it to the deficiency disease category.

Deficiency Diseases

The human body is made up of billions of microscopic cells. Each cell can be thought of as a very complex and busy city, part of a vast empire (the body). Each moment raw materials flow into these busy cities, and, together with some waste, many finished products necessary to the overall growth, function, and maintenance of the empire flow out.

Among the raw materials flowing into these cities each moment are some which can only be obtained from outside the boundaries of the empire. (An obvious example is oxygen. Our bodies cannot manufacture oxygen. We must get it from the atmosphere, by breathing.) Many of these raw materials are absolutely vital to the cities—the cities cannot produce necessary finished products without them. If the supply of any one of these vital raw materials is halted for any reason (for example, lack of oxygen due to strangulation), production of one or more vital finished products ceases. The health of the empire then suffers and, if the lack of this vital raw material persists long enough, the empire eventually disintegrates (i.e., the body dies).

On the list of vital raw materials needed by our bodies are such things as oxygen, water, carbohydrates, fats, protein, certain minerals (calcium, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, chloride, magnesium, iron, copper, iodine, and many others in minute amounts), and a curious assortment of just over a dozen organic substances we call vitamins. If for any reason the cells of the body are unable to obtain one of these vital substances, a deficiency disease results.

The most common cause of deficiency disease is inadequate diet—the essential raw material is simply not being taken into the body. But there are other possible causes, such as a faulty digestive system resulting in inadequate absorption of an essential raw material once it has been ingested, or combination of the essential raw material with some other chemical and subsequent elimination, for example.

Of the list of essential raw materials needed by the body, the vitamins are of particular interest in the present context. I suggest that Malady X is, in fact, a vitamin deficiency disease.

Vitamin C

Scurvy is an example of a vitamin deficiency disease. It results from a diet deficient in vitamin C.

Before it was understood that scurvy is a deficiency disease, scurvy was a common disease of mariners. Vitamin C is abundant in fresh fruits and vegetables, so most of us get plenty of it in our normal diets each day. Vitamin C is easily subject to oxidation, however, so vitamin C levels decline in fruits and vegetables once they have been picked. Following prolonged storage, vitamin C levels in fruits and vegetables become inadequate to meet human dietary requirements for this substance. The difficulty of providing mariners with fresh produce on long sea voyages inevitably resulted in many cases of scurvy.

Long before vitamin C was discovered, a number of individuals began to understand that scurvy could be prevented by a diet containing adequate fresh fruits and vegetables. Ways were sought and eventually found to concentrate and preserve lemon juice which protected its anti-scurvy property. Early in the 1800's the British navy adopted regulations requiring daily consumption of lemon juice—bringing the scurvy plague to an end in the British navy. Eventually this simple remedy was adopted by commercial vessels as well. The substitution of cheaper lime juice for the original lemon juice led eventually to the slang designation of British sailors as "limeys".

The actual anti-scurvy factor in fresh fruits and vegetables—vitamin C—was only isolated, and its molecular structure determined (Figure 1), about seventy years ago.

Figure 1: The structure of the vitamin C molecule.

Vitamin C is a relatively simple organic molecule, but the human body is unable to synthesize it. This simple molecule is vital to human health. Without it connective tissues between cells degenerate. This results in a complex of symptoms at the whole-organism level. Most conspicuously, blood vessels become weak and hemorrhage results, and teeth lose their strength and become diseased.

Adult patients suffering from scurvy complain of weakness, pains in their legs, swollen and bloody gums and hemorrhages. Examination discloses petechiae, chiefly about the hair follicles of the lower extremities and sometimes brawny, tender thighs. All of these features are due to hemorrhage…

Weakness is usually the first thing complained of by persons suffering from vitamin C depletion. Fatigue, palpitation and breathlessness are also common. The patients dislike to stand or walk and often affect a rather characteristic standing position with their legs slightly flexed. The complexion is pallid and dirty looking. Gingivitis occurs, followed by loosening of the teeth, a consequence of resorption of the alveolar bones and infections about the teeth and is accompanied by a foul breath. Other signs of scurvy are hematuria, bloody diarrhea, nasal hemorrhage or hematomas about the jaw or bones of the lower extremities.[5]

Vitamin C is only needed in minute amounts—about one ten-thousandth of our daily food intake on a dry weight-per-weight basis. This miniscule daily requirement relative to the bulk diet is characteristic of all the vitamins. In the case of vitamin D the amount needed is roughly one five-millionth of our daily food intake. But though so little is needed, this small amount is absolutely essential. Without it our cells lose their ability to carry out their jobs, and, eventually, a complex of whole-body symptoms—a deficiency disease—develops.

Central Hypothesis

My central hypothesis is that Malady X is a vitamin deficiency disease resulting from the lack of some unknown vitamin—vitamin X. (The "bar" in Malady X (Malady X-bar) signifies negation. "Malady X" means "the disease due to not X" or "the disease due to lack of X". In this nomenclature scurvy is "Malady C", beriberi is "Malady B1", and rickets is "Malady D".) Support for this hypothesis is perhaps most easily gleaned by comparing and contrasting Malady X with scurvy.

Complex of Symptoms

Notice, first of all, that like scurvy, "old age" exhibits itself as a complex of whole-body symptoms: skin loses its elasticity, muscles weaken and decrease in size, hair loses its color and thins out, bones become brittle, eye lenses stiffen…

These are very diverse symptoms. Yet they show up together in "old age". One could suppose that they are all caused by independent physiological malfunctions of one sort or another, and that these independent malfunctions are all synchronized by some sort of master biological time-clock. But much simpler is the idea that these diverse symptoms are simply varied macroscopic manifestations of a single underlying malfunction operating at the microscopic, cellular level—just as is the case with scurvy.

Particular Symptoms

Not only is there a complex of whole-body symptoms in both cases, but some of the particular symptoms of "old age" show striking similarities to symptoms of scurvy.

Aschoff and Koch were greatly impressed with the similarity of the scorbutic [scurvy] lesions to those in senility. The changes in cortical bone are difficult, if not impossible to distinguish. … In both conditions the bones are notably thin and rarefied, susceptible to fracture and defective in the ability to form a callus once fracture has occurred. …

Westin interpreted the tooth lesions as similar to the atrophy of old age and said scurvy may be considered to hasten involution. In his cases the teeth showed the same resistance to caries that is seen in senility as well as the rarefaction common to advanced years.[6]

This demonstrates unequivocally that deficiency disease can produce precisely the same sorts of abnormal changes and injury to body tissues as those which are characteristic of "old age". Evidently then, at least some of the specific symptoms accompanying "old age" fall naturally within the deficiency disease category.

Apparent Contrast

An apparent contrast between "old age" and scurvy is that only a small percentage of individuals in a normal population ever contracts scurvy, while all individuals, if they live long enough, contract Malady X.

This apparent difference is easily explained. The reason for it, of course, is that normal diets of most individuals supply them amply with vitamin C—only the few individuals on deficient diets ever contract scurvy. In contrast, normal diets of all individuals since the Flood have been seriously deficient in vitamin X. (I hope to show the reason for this in a future article in this series.)

Variable Time of Onset

Another similarity between "old age" and scurvy is that the time of onset can be varied. Prior to the Flood men lived in excess of 900 years before they succumbed to "old age" and died. After the Flood men contracted "old age" at younger and younger ages, until the present, much-diminished life span near 75 years was reached (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Biblical life span data. The birth date of individuals whose life spans are plotted as solid vertical bars in column 2 are shown in column 1.

The time of onset of scurvy can be similarly varied:[7]

They found that less than 50 cc. of milk daily resulted in scurvy within thirty days, that 50 cc. delayed the onset of the disease until the seventy-fifth day and that 100–150 cc. of milk postponed evidence of scurvy for four months.

Why Life Spans Changed

Milk is a poor source of vitamin C. Thus all of the animals (guinea pigs) referred to in the previous quote were subject to a vitamin C deficient diet. Those getting less milk got less vitamin C. Thus the time of onset of scurvy is seen to be directly related to the daily dose level of vitamin C in the diet.

I suggest that this dose-dependent time-of-onset characteristic of vitamin deficiency diseases is the fundamental explanation of the change in human life spans which Genesis records following the Flood. I suggest that life spans diminished following the Flood because vitamin X became increasingly scarce after the Flood. (Note that the fact that none of the pre-Flood patriarchs lived more than 1000 years before dying of "old age" implies that vitamin X was already somewhat deficient in diets after the Fall and before the Flood.) By 2500 B.C. (one thousand years after the Flood) vitamin X had dwindled to the seriously deficient level which characterizes it today. (I plan to show why vitamin X behaved this way in a future article in this series.)

Age-specificity

A second contrast between scurvy and Malady X is that scurvy can be contracted at any age, even infancy, while Malady X ("old age") only (and inevitably) begins to show up in the fourth decade of life. "Old age" is age-specific while scurvy is not.

This difference is also easily explained. It is due to differences in the dose rates of the two vitamins involved.

Imagine that a certain rigidly controlled, somewhat deficient, fixed daily dose of vitamin C results in the onset of scurvy after ten years. If this dose was administered to the entire population from the time of birth on, then we would no longer see any cases of scurvy in infants. Rather, we would find that the entire population tended to develop scurvy around ten years of age, and expire of that disease sometime soon thereafter.

Our natural dose of vitamin X, I suggest, is of this sort. Nature uniformly meters out vitamin X to all individuals in a rigidly fixed dose from the time of birth on. For this reason the entire population tends to contract "old age" at approximately the same age, with death due to this disease generally following within a few decades.

Summing Up

I am aware of nothing about "old age" which is inexplicable in terms of deficiency disease. This category of disease seems to provide a complete explanation of the facts we possess in regard to "old age" and human longevity. To the best of my knowledge, this is true of no other category of known diseases.

Thoughts and Speculations

The analogy between scurvy and Malady X leads to several interesting predictions. Until confirmed by experiment these predictions can only be regarded as possibilities—speculations. In actual fact, the only experimental data we currently have on the behavior of Malady X at higher doses of vitamin X than that which pertains at present are those which the Bible affords, and these do not answer all of our questions, by any means. As a result we can only speculate on a number of important issues at present.

Curing "Old Age"

Notice, first of all, that we have seen that slight increases in vitamin C dose, in a diet which is deficient in vitamin C, result in lengthening delay before scurvy is manifest. Eventually, at large enough doses, the body's need for vitamin C is entirely satisfied and scurvy is never manifest.

By analogy we are led to believe that at large enough doses of vitamin X "old age" will also never be manifest.

When this happens the survival curve for humans is expected to revert from its present Curve 2 form (see Figure 2 of The Biblical Chronologist Volume 7, Number 5) to its proper Curve 4 form. Normal life expectancy for humans will then be measured in centuries or millennia rather than in decades as it is at present.

The probability of death will no longer increase as one advances in years in that case. The leading causes of death are likely to be accidents of one kind or another (like being in the path of a tornado in central Illinois in the spring) rather than "old age" or other disease as at present. All of this is very good news for the eventual cost of life-insurance premiums, of course. It is not good news for gerontologists and undertakers.

Nature of the Cure

A very large question regards the prospects for those of us who are already caught in the grip of Malady X—some more strongly than others. One can imagine two major possibilities for "the aged" upon restoration of diets to proper vitamin X levels. The first is that, though further "aging" is brought to a stand-still, what has already been lost to "aging" can never be regained. The second is that not only is further advance of Malady X halted, but substantial healing also takes place, restoring one's body to a more youthful health and vigor.

Of these two, the second is by far the most attractive. Happily, it receives substantial encouragement from the scurvy analogy. Eddy and Dalldorf state that "symptomatic recovery occurs very quickly under specific treatment".[8] These same researchers document the recovery of a "severe case" of scurvy in an adult in which "symptomatic recovery commenced on the fifth day and was complete on the tenth".[9]

At the microscopic, cellular level, typical observations are as follows:

These unique and specific characteristics are almost immediately altered by the administration of vitamin C. The fibro-blasts are promptly surrounded by a thin shell of osteoid material and resume their rounded form. Trabeculae rapidly form, irregularly at first and gradually becoming more orthodox in appearance until nothing remains to indicate that scurvy has been present.[10]

Delayed Development

Another interesting question regards the interplay of development, or maturation, and Malady X. Does childhood last longer when diets contain larger amounts of vitamin X?

The Biblical evidence we have concerning this question seems to answer in the affirmative. Notice that age 65 is the earliest any of the pre-Flood patriarchs is recorded to have fathered a son (Genesis 5). This list includes data from a total of ten males. Today we would anticipate an age closer to 20 years in such a case. Thus, it appears possible that maturation is being unnaturally accelerated today as a result of the physiological stress imposed by Malady X.

Unfortunately, I have, so far, been unable to find any data on this question from scurvy or any of the other deficiency diseases.

Morphological Change

A related question is whether proper doses of vitamin X would affect human adult morphology. A leading example here is that of jaw development. Today many individuals end up having their wisdom teeth extracted because there is insufficient space in their jaw for their wisdom teeth to come through. It seems impossible that such a state of affairs could be a design feature. The idea that it represents some sort of evolutionary development seems similarly deficient. Is it possible that the true explanation is that physiological stress due to vitamin X deficiency prevents full jaw development in many instances at present? Would people raised on a diet containing adequate vitamin X tend to have larger jaws than adults today?

While I have no data on jaw development in cases of scurvy, there is this on tooth development in guinea pigs:

The normal rate of growth of the guinea pig incisors is 0.7 to 0.8 mm. per day. In complete vitamin C deficiency, after a short period of lag, growth ceases. On partially deficient diets the rate of growth is roughly proportional to the amount of vitamin C in the diet.[11]

Fertility

The question of the length of the fertile phase of life is obviously one of great interest in the current context. The Biblical data show unequivocally that males on vitamin X enriched diets remain fertile much longer than today. Noah, for example, fathered sons at 600 years of age.[12]

We have much less data on Biblical women, but it is difficult to see why there should be any difference in the length of fertility in the two sexes. A small hint that women too may have enjoyed prolonged fertility is provided by the case of Eve, who bore Seth to Adam after Cain, her eldest son, had murdered Abel.[13] But this is admittedly far from definitive since such a sequence of births is possible for women even today.

Here again I have no analogous data from scurvy to help light the darkness. From a theoretical perspective, however, it is difficult to see why "perpetually youthful" and "perpetually fertile" should not coincide. It seems most likely here again that the physiological stress of Malady X is the entire cause of menopause and the natural loss of fertility in both women and men of advanced years today. In regard to guinea pigs, once again, we find:

Scurvy produces atrophy and degeneration of the germinal epithelium as Medes has shown, and early destroys the ability to sire litters. In the female the oestrus rhythm is maintained in moderate deficiency but is suspended if the deficiency is severe enough to produce emaciation.[14]

Population

The idea of perpetual fertility is sure to raise concern of population explosion in many minds today, especially when coupled with the prospect of a dramatically reduced death rate. However, given the modern availability and widespread use of birth control technologies, there seems little practical cause for alarm.

Of great interest in regard to rate of population growth is the evidence from archaeology that the world did not become overrun with people in the 1,650 years which separated the creation of Adam from Noah's Flood. This suggests that increased levels of vitamin X do not automatically imply an increased population growth rate. There are several possible reasons why this may be so. For example, if maturation is indeed delayed by vitamin X enriched diets, as discussed above, then the onset of fertility would also be delayed. As another example, it is possible that return of fertility following pregnancy may be significantly delayed on vitamin X enriched diets, so that the rate of conception is much reduced relative to today.

In any event, let us notice that the great problem faced by pre-Flood humanity, when superlongevity was normal, was not overpopulation. Rather, it was moral corruption and violence.[15] Perhaps we can learn this one important lesson from history, that people are not the fundamental problem; sin is the fundamental problem.

Social Change

The prospect of superlongevity raises many issues of social change as well. The normal modern life sequence of training for two or three decades, service for three or four decades, and then retirement until death, will no longer be practical. (Is this the way out of the mess the Social Security Fund is in?)

But what will replace this normal sequence? Will people cycle through multiple careers through the centuries of their lives? Or will they grow disillusioned with the rat-race of modern life after their first one or two centuries, and find ways to live quietly, modestly, and in peace? Or…?

And what will be the consequence for business and government when leadership begins to fall to individuals who have lived and learned for 500 years rather than just 50 years?

Change always entails uncertainty, of course. And uncertainty can easily spawn fear. But if we step back and view the matter unemotionally, there seems little legitimate cause for fear.

I have previously used the analogy of a small island population, cut off from the rest of the world, all of whom died before they reached forty years of age as a result of a genetic disorder.

We can easily imagine that individuals in such a population might suffer apprehensions in regard to the prospect of their genetic disease being cured, and their living beyond the "natural" limit of forty years. But I think most of us would feel that such apprehensions were a little silly.

Immediate Future

Regardless, it is premature to take on such concerns at this stage.

Having come to the understanding that Malady X is a vitamin deficiency disease, the obvious next step is to find out just what substance vitamin X is. I hope to share my thoughts and experience on this matter in future articles in this series. ◇

The Biblical Chronologist is a bimonthly subscription newsletter about Biblical chronology. It is written and edited by Gerald E. Aardsma, a Ph.D. scientist (nuclear physics) with special background in radioisotopic dating methods such as radiocarbon. The Biblical Chronologist has a threefold purpose:

  1. to encourage, enrich, and strengthen the faith of conservative Christians through instruction in Biblical chronology,

  2. to foster informed, up-to-date, scholarly research in this vital field within the conservative Christian community, and

  3. to communicate current developments and discoveries in Biblical chronology in an easily understood manner.

An introductory packet containing three sample issues and a subscription order form is available for $9.95 US regardless of destination address. Send check or money order in US funds and request the "Intro Pack."

The Biblical Chronologist (ISSN 1081-762X) is published six times a year by Aardsma Research & Publishing, 412 Mulberry St., Loda, IL 60948-9651.
Web address: www.biblicalchronologist.org.

Copyright © 2002 by Aardsma Research & Publishing. Photocopying or reproduction strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher.

Footnotes

  1. ^  Walter H. Eddy, Vitaminology: The Chemistry and Function of the Vitamins (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1949), Foreword.

  2. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part I" The Biblical Chronologist 7.2 (March/April 2001): 1–6.

  3. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part III" The Biblical Chronologist 7.5 (September/October 2001): 1–5.

  4. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part I" The Biblical Chronologist 7.2 (March/April 2001): 1–6.

  5. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 175.

  6. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 194.

  7. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 163.

  8. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 182.

  9. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 189.

  10. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 187.

  11. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 188.

  12. ^  Genesis 5:32.

  13. ^  Genesis 4:25.

  14. ^  Walter H. Eddy and Gilbert Dalldorf, The Vitaminoses: The Chemical, Clinical and Pathological Aspects of Vitamin Deficiency Diseases (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1937), 190.

  15. ^  Genesis 6:11, for example.


Volume 8, Number 2March/April 2002

Radiocarbon Dating the Exodus


The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred.
        –The New York Times, March 9, 2002.
[1]


In actual fact, the Exodus did occur. It occurred 2447±12 B.C. according to modern Biblical chronology. And, if objective archaeological evidence counts for anything, I might add that it occurred in just the way the Bible says it did.

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of The Biblical Chronologist, these facts are still far from common knowledge.

The quote above, from The New York Times, speaks for most of the scholarly, academic world today. It also speaks for a rapidly growing segment of their (misinformed) lay disciples. These Exodus-is-fiction folk believe "the entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred" because they think modern archaeology has proven this. They disdain conservative Christians, who cling tenaciously to their Exodus-is-fact view in the face of the overwhelming archaeological evidence (or, as is more often the case, in blissful ignorance of it).

In one sense their disdain is easily understood. People who hold religiously to the view that there is a live, full-grown elephant in the garage, when every zoo-keeper in the country has thoroughly investigated the garage and found it to be empty of elephants, hardly deserve to be applauded. And still less do certain members of this group deserve to be applauded when they declare the investigation inconclusive because an oil can on the windowsill has not been looked under yet.

But in another, more vital sense, the disdain of the Exodus-is-fiction group is seriously misplaced. For there is an elephant in the garage, perfectly plain for everybody to see if they will only look in the right garage! The elephant is not housed at 1447 BC Street; it is housed at 2447 BC Street.

"I really think you should all stop quarreling—you have all got the address wrong. If you will please follow me down the street a ways, there is something down at 2447 I think you all need to take a look at…"

Facts of the Exodus

The historically documented collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt was caused by the Exodus. Phiops II (also called Pepi II) was pharaoh when Moses was born. He is the pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites.[2] He came to the throne at age six, and died in his one hundredth year, having reigned for ninety-four years.

He was still a young man when Moses was born—only twenty or twenty-one years of age if history has accurately preserved his age at death. Thus the Hebrews suffered under his rule for the better part of a century. The book of Exodus remembers his long-awaited death with the words, "Now it came to pass in the course of those many days that the king of Egypt died".[3]

The successor to Phiops II was Merenre Antyemsaf II. This was the pharaoh whom Moses and Aaron confronted—the pharaoh who scoffed "Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice to let Israel go?"[4]—the pharaoh who lost his life in the Red Sea Crossing.

The Israelites left Egypt by means of the road which, from remotely ancient times, has stretched across the northern Sinai desert (Figure 1). When they had put as much distance between themselves and Egypt as their legs would bear that first day, they set up temporary camp. The result was a shanty town of makeshift booths and lean-tos in the middle of the desert. They called it "Succoth"—"Booths".

Figure 1: Map of the north Sinai peninsula. Open circles mark the location of the apparent hubs of archaeological site clusters; solid circles mark modern towns.

From there they moved on to Etham, at the edge of the desert, on the border of Canaan. They camped there for a time, but did not venture any further. They were not ready for war—and God was not yet done with the Egyptians. He commanded the Israelites to turn back, and camp in front of the sea at Pi-hahiroth.

It was, of course, just as unlikely back then as it is today that people could camp in a wilderness and leave no garbage in their wake. Modern campers tend to leave their empty drink cans and bottles strewn about the campsite. Back then it was broken earthenware. Several million Israelites make for a lot of broken, discarded pottery shards. Pottery shards are all but indestructible. They are still there today. Thus it is that the locations of Succoth, Etham, and Pi-hahiroth (and, therefore, the location of the Red Sea Crossing) are all clearly revealed by modern archaeology.[5]


The location of Mount Sinai, where the Israelites camped for a year after they had left Egypt, is revealed in the same way. Today it is called Mount Yeroham.[6] The desert plain at the base of Mount Yeroham is littered with pottery shards of the same styles found at Succoth, Etham, and Pi-hahiroth. Many of these shards, discarded by the Israelites four and a half thousand years ago, I have held in my own hands (Figure 2).[7]

Date of the Exodus

Figure 2: Ancient pottery shards from the desert plain at the foot of Mount Sinai (modern Mount Yeroham).

Modern Biblical chronology, restoring the millennium lost from the text of 1 Kings 6:1 in antiquity, dates the Exodus to 2447±12 B.C., as I have mentioned above.[8] The computation of this date is fairly simple. It was given in The Biblical Chronologist a number of years ago as follows:[9]

We begin with the accession date of Rehoboam, Solomon's son, which is given by Thiele[10] as 931/930 B.C. I assign an uncertainty of ±10 years to this starting date based upon the range of scholarly opinions I have seen regarding it. To this date we must add the length of Solomon's reign, which is given as 40 years in 1 Kings 11:42 and 2 Chronicles 9:30. We must then subtract 4 and add 1,480[11] years to take us to the date of the Exodus (1 Kings 6:1). This computes to 2447 B.C. Allowing 5 years uncertainty in the length of Solomon's reign, a 0.5 year uncertainty in the timing of the commencement of the building of the temple, and 5 years uncertainty in the 1480 year figure gives a total uncertainty in the date of the Exodus of about 12 years.

Reasons to Check the Date of the Exodus

I have previously pointed out that Biblical chronology, like all other fields of study, is a human endeavor, not a divinely inspired enterprise. Since humans are fallible creatures, the Biblical chronologies we construct need to be checked in whatever ways we can find to check them.[12]

There are three good reasons why we would like to check this 2447±12 B.C. Exodus date.

Reason 1

First, notice that this date rests upon the Biblical chronology foundation laid several decades ago by Thiele. That is, it starts with 931/930 B.C. as the accession date of Rehoboam.

This date was worked out by Thiele based upon his understanding of a virtual maze of Biblical chronological data for the reigns of the various kings of Israel and Judah, starting with a secular (extra-Biblical) anchor point. Because Thiele was fallible, like the rest of us, the accuracy of this date cannot be guaranteed.

In the quote above I assigned a (3σ) uncertainty of ±10 years to this date based on the range of scholarly opinions I had seen at the time regarding it. I feel it is important here to point out that history has proven scholarly opinion—even unanimous scholarly opinion—to be often very wide of the mark in areas of chronology. Despite the scholarly consensus in favor of 931/930±10 B.C. for the accession of Rehoboam, we still must not take this starting date as guaranteed. It requires an independent check of some sort before it can be held with confidence.

In the past it has not been possible to check this date by any independent means. But a controversy is presently raging in Biblical archaeology which promises to change this over the next several years.

The controversy is over the proper date of the Iron Age I and II in Israel. A great deal of time and effort is currently being expended to independently establish the proper absolute dates for Iron Age I and II using radiocarbon.

Some fear this may remove archaeological support for the reigns of David and Solomon if it comes out the wrong way. This, I suggest, is a needless worry. Based on my several decades of experience with Biblical chronology and archaeology I can confidently predict that the investigation presently underway will not falsify the Bible's history of David and Solomon. Though I have yet to investigate the issue in depth (there are much bigger issues demanding of my time at present), it strikes me as another, smaller-scale mixup of the missing millennium type.

That is, in the case of the missing millennium, traditional Biblical chronology specified a date for the Exodus of approximately 1450 B.C. The archaeologists went looking for the Exodus around 1450 B.C. and, when they failed to find anything remotely resembling the Exodus within a few centuries of that date, they concluded the Bible's history of the Exodus was false. For whatever curious reasons they failed to critically question traditional Biblical chronology, even though their archaeological data—at Ai, for example—harmonized in detail with the Biblical account, the only difficulty being that it dated a millennium earlier than expected. In any event, in actual fact, there is nothing wrong with the Biblical historical narrative of the Exodus; it is the traditional date of the Exodus which is wrong—it is out by 1000 years! The problem is with traditional Biblical chronology, not Biblical history.

Now notice the parallels in the present Iron Age controversy. Traditional Biblical chronology specifies dates for David and Solomon. The archaeologists of a generation ago went looking for David and Solomon at these dates, and felt they had found them in the archaeological remains of Iron Age I and II. But now a few modern archaeologists propose that Iron Age I and II date later than the traditional Biblical dates for Solomon and David, and then go on to conclude that the Biblical history of David and Solomon must be false because there is no archaeological evidence for David and Solomon at the traditional dates! Once again, for whatever curious reasons, they fail entirely to ask the obvious, "But how do we know the traditional dates for David and Solomon are true?"

While it is somewhat discouraging to see Biblical chronology issues misconstrued by Biblical archaeologists as Biblical historicity issues, Biblical chronology much appreciates the influx of new, independent chronological data resulting from such controversies. It is not at all impossible that the new radiocarbon data now being obtained on Iron Age I and II may expose errors in the Biblical chronology computations of Thiele and other scholars, altering the accepted date of the accession of Rehoboam by a few decades. This would then alter Biblical chronology dates for the reigns of Solomon, David, Saul and all earlier Biblical events—including the Exodus—by the same few decades. Obviously then—coming back to the main point—it is prudent to do whatever can be done to check this 2447±12 B.C. Exodus date.

Reason 2

The second reason we would like to check this 2447±12 B.C. Biblical chronology date for the Exodus is that it disagrees significantly with the modern historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt. Let me now explain how this comes about.

Biblical chronological (numerical) data lead to the conclusion that the Exodus happened 2447±12 B.C., as outlined above. Biblical historical data lead to the conclusion that the Exodus must be synchronous with the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. That is, the sorts of things (e.g., the plagues) the Bible informs us happened to Egypt at the time of the Exodus lead irresistibly to the conclusion that the nation of Egypt must have been all but destroyed by the time the Exodus was complete. Said simply, the Biblical history of the Exodus, when dealt with logically, intelligently, and honestly, calls for the collapse of the nation of Egypt in consequence of the Exodus.[13]

In addition the reigns of pharaohs Phiops II and Merenre Antyemsaf II provide an unambiguous synchronization with the Biblical account.[14] Basically, the Biblical narrative requires that the pharaoh of the Oppression rule in excess of 80 years, and that he be followed by the pharaoh of the Exodus whose reign should be very short and terminate with the nation of Egypt in a state of disaster. The 80 year reign requirement is in itself a complete give-away for the proper location of the Exodus in Egyptian history because Phiops II is the only pharaoh ever to have achieved this. And the fact that his reign is followed by the very short (1 year) reign of Merenre Antyemsaf II, which is followed by the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, provides as certain proof of the location of the Exodus in Egyptian history as anyone is likely ever to obtain for anything at all in history.

But this leads immediately to a clash with the modern historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt, which places the date of the collapse of the Old Kingdom around 2180 B.C.—several hundred years later than my 2447±12 B.C. date of the Exodus. Figure 3 shows this conflict. It shows my chronology of the Bible relative to Pater A. Clayton's historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt.[15]^,[16] Note that the collapse of the Old Kingdom comes at the end of the Old Kingdom. Thus, we expect the end of the Old Kingdom to be synchronous with the Exodus. But, in Figure 3, they are not. Clearly, either my Biblical date for the Exodus is wrong, or the modern historical/archaeological date for the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt is wrong. This obviously encourages us to check the Biblical chronology date in whatever way we can.

Figure 3: Aardsma's Bible chronology relative to Clayton's historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt, from 3000 to 1000 B.C. Radiocarbon date range for Phiops II tomb (see text) is shown by vertical bars on dividing line between the two chronologies.

Reason 3

The third reason we would like to check our Biblical date for the Exodus is simply because of its central importance to the dates of all of the Biblical historical events which precede it. The computation of the dates for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, the Flood, … on back to the creation of Adam all depend on the date of the Exodus. Any inaccuracy in this date automatically spills over to these earlier dates.

How to Check the Date of the Exodus

Radiocarbon provides the only truly independent means of checking the date of the Exodus today. It is independent because it is based on physical measurements made on ancient objects, not on historical records or scholarly opinions of any sort.

If I could pick whatever sample I pleased for radiocarbon dating the Exodus, I would pick the cereal grains the Israelites carried with them for food when they left Egypt. I would pick this particular sample because one can be reasonably certain the Israelites were eating grains that had grown that year. Thus the date the grains grew—which is all radiocarbon can hope to tell us—would correspond to the date of the Exodus, which is the date we wish to check.

This close correspondence of sample date to the date we wish to check is not as clear with many other samples. For example, a sample of cloth from one of the garments worn by the Israelites might have been several decades old already by the time of the Exodus. This is also true with the date of the Israelites' sandals, or their walking sticks.

But none of this really matters because nobody presently possesses either grains, or cloth, or walking sticks known to be from the Exodus.

Having said this I need to add that this is the state of affairs at present. I do not expect this state of affairs to go on indefinitely. What we now know about the route of the Exodus provides us with the potential of obtaining many objects which were contemporary with the Exodus and which might ultimately be used to check the date of the Exodus using radiocarbon. For example, there is all that broken pottery the Israelites discarded in the desert. Radiocarbon can be used to date certain types of pottery today (because of the organic substances present in the ceramic matrix). As another example, we now know the location of the Red Sea Crossing (Figure 1). From the Biblical historical narrative we know a lot of chariots were lost at sea at this crossing point. This raises the potential of archaeological work finding wooden parts from these chariots which might then be dated using radiocarbon.

But this is all future. For now we must work with what we have.

What we are in possession of at present are the tombs of many of the pharaohs, and it is through this link that we are able to check my Biblical chronology date of the Exodus at the present time.

Radiocarbon and The Tomb of Phiops II

We are able to check my 2447±12 B.C. Biblical chronology date of the Exodus by radiocarbon dating the pyramid of Phiops II, the pharaoh of the Oppression discussed above. This is an easy check for us to make because all the work of gathering and dating the sample has already been done for us. It was carried out by Bonani et al. as part of a large-scale radiocarbon dating program of Old Kingdom monuments. Their results are reported in the present issue of Radiocarbon.[17]

Bonani et al. describe their sample collection technique as follows:

In the field we looked for organic materials that were clearly linked to the construction of the monuments. Temples and pyramids built from mud bricks yielded grass, straw, and reed fragments, which were mixed into the clay and soil before shaping the bricks. Finding suitable materials in stone monuments was a greater challenge. In most of these monuments the stone building blocks were leveled and secured in place with mortar that was manufactured locally. This required massive fires to heat gypsum or limestone. The roasted minerals and the ashes from the fires were added to the mortar mix, along with remaining charcoal fragments. The usually very small fragments (1–2 mm) constituted the datable material. While searching the monuments, we examined seams between stone blocks for mortar filling and for black specks of charcoal inside the mortar.[18]

I have only seen the pyramid of Phiops II at some distance in a photograph, and I have been unable to find a description of its construction, but it was evidently made of stone with mortared joints because the sample used for radiocarbon analysis in this particular case is described by Bonani et al. as "charcoal", with the added note "S face, 1st course, amalgamated sample".[19]

The radiocarbon date range found for this sample of charcoal is shown in Figure 3. As usual the black bars mark the 1σ date range and the white bars mark the 2σ range. There is less than a 5% chance the true date of the charcoal sample lies outside the 2σ date range.

It is immediately clear that this radiocarbon date checks roughly with my 2447±12 B.C. date for the Exodus. It is also clear that this radiocarbon date range does not check with the modern historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt. The radiocarbon date range for this charcoal from Phiops II tomb is at least a century older than the date of the death of Phiops II according to the modern historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt—an unlikely temporal relationship.

This latter observation implies that the Old Kingdom of Egypt is at least one century, and probably several centuries older than the modern historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt allows. This conclusion is strongly reinforced by numerous other radiocarbon dates of Old Kingdom samples reported on in this same paper by Bonani et al. It is also strongly supported by a series of radiocarbon dates from Jericho, reported by Bruins and van der Plicht in this same volume of Radiocarbon. Bruins and van der Plicht conclude:

the collective 14C evidence of the Early Bronze Age from Jericho and other sites in the southern Levant as well as from Egypt for the Predynastic period and Dynasties 1-6 strongly challenges the current archaeo-historical time framework for these cultural and political periods. Most 14C dates overwhelmingly show that these periods are significantly older than currently accepted.[20]

Thus radiocarbon sides with modern Biblical chronology against the modern historical/archaeological chronology of Egypt in regard to the collapse of the Old Kingdom and date of the Exodus. Evidently the modern historical/archaeological chronology of the Old Kingdom of Egypt needs to be pushed back several centuries—as I indicated in my initial presentation of the missing millennium thesis nearly a decade ago.[21]

Limitations

This radiocarbon check agrees roughly with my 2447±12 B.C. date for the Exodus, as mentioned above. It shows clearly that this Biblical chronology date for the Exodus is certainly not out by 1000 years, for example. But notice that it still allows the possibility that this date for the Exodus is out by as much as a century.

Also notice that this radiocarbon check is just a single date on a single sample. As I have pointed out before, things can certainly go wrong with radiocarbon dates—radiocarbon, too, is a fallible human endeavor—so one must not put too much confidence in single dates. We would really like to check the reproducibility of this single radiocarbon result with a set of a dozen more dates from different charcoal samples from Phiops II tomb. But obtaining such dates is an expensive exercise, of course, and the monument itself is of priceless antiquity, discouraging repeated attacks upon it for charcoal samples, so there are limits to what can be achieved in practice. Fortunately, the single radiocarbon result in this case is backed by a large set of radiocarbon dates from many other Old Kingdom monuments, with which it displays general chronological consistency. This goes a long way toward certifying its reliability in this instance.

But there are yet other uncertainties. We don't know, for example, when this tomb was built for Phiops II relative to his death. Notice that the 2σ radiocarbon date range only overlaps our 2447±12 B.C. date for the Exodus by roughly two decades. Thus, all is fine as long as this tomb was built for Phiops II sometime during or after his final two decades of life. If the tomb was built earlier in Phiops II reign, say when he was fifty years old, then it was built forty-nine years before the Exodus. In that case this radiocarbon date range would imply that the 2447±12 B.C. date for the Exodus is several decades too old.

Finally, notice that radiocarbon does not directly date when the tomb was constructed. The radiocarbon date is only on the charcoal from the tomb. When one radiocarbon dates charcoal they get the date the wood grew from which the charcoal came. We do not know when this wood grew relative to the construction of the tomb. The chronological consistency of this radiocarbon date with many other radiocarbon dates from Old Kingdom monuments reported by Bonani et al. makes it unlikely the wood from which this charcoal came was centuries old by the time it was used in the construction of Phiops II tomb. But it is not at all impossible that it may have been a decade or more old by that time.

These limitations do not allow us to check the 2447±12 B.C. date for the Exodus down to the year, or even down to the decade, using this single radiocarbon result. We can legitimately conclude only the following:

  1. The 2447±12 B.C. date for the Exodus from modern Biblical chronology checks with a single radiocarbon date from Phiops II tomb within measurement uncertainties, and

  2. The 2447±12 B.C. date for the Exodus seems unlikely to be more than about a century too old, or more than about a decade too young according to this radiocarbon check.

Conclusion

The fact that the modern Biblical chronology date for the Exodus checks with this radiocarbon date from Phiops II tomb is very good news, of course. When one considers that the Biblical chronology date of the Exodus was out by a full thousand years just a little over a decade ago, there is obviously significant cause for rejoicing—very substantial progress has been made.

But we must not rest on our laurels, of course. We can, and must, do better yet. Many of the limitations with this single radiocarbon check could be overcome by radiocarbon dating other samples from other Exodus contexts, as discussed above. The Biblical Chronologist exists for just such a purpose. Our aim is to bring about suitable additional radiocarbon dates as rapidly as possible.

The Exodus did indeed happen—it happened 2447±12 B.C. according to modern Biblical chronology—and this fact of history cannot be undone by any amount of modern Biblical archaeological muddlement. ◇

Readers Write

Dear Dr. Aardsma,

Thank you for the copy of the issue on aging [ BC Volume 8, Number 1]. You present the problem of aging in a logical way. Can it be solved? …

Regarding the age "600" of Noah you state was the oldest he reached (or went beyond) for having children, I am not going to correct you even though it refers to age 500 in Genesis 5. …

Ken Klarner
Appleton, WI


Dear Ken,

The question of whether the problem of aging can be solved can be answered with an unequivocal yes—Isaiah 65:20 assures us of this fact. Whether now is God's time for this mystery to be revealed is quite another question. Time will tell.

You are quite right about the "600". It should have been "500". I referenced Genesis 5:32 in the article, which quite clearly says 500, and then, by mistake, typed 600, Noah's age at the coming of the Flood, rather than 500, his age when he fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Thank you for pointing this out. I am sure other readers wondered about it too.

Gerald E. Aardsma, Ph.D.
Loda, IL


Dear Dr. Aardsma,

I just read an article in Biblical Archaeology Review called "Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence" (Sept./Oct. '94) which traces city lists in Numbers 33, Joshua 10:36 and Judges 4–5 as recorded in Egyptian sources. The main chronological thesis is that these Egyptian lists are from the Late Bronze Age—1500 to 1300 B.C. This makes the Bible record [of the Exodus/Conquest at the traditional dates] seem to be "verified". However, the digs they mention seem to require that these cities were uninhabited or destroyed in the 1500 to 1300 BC period and only "existed" in ca. 900 B.C. – very late [and contrary to the traditional dates of the Exodus/Conquest].

The question, then, is do you know if any of the digs mentioned in the article are complete enough to go back your extra 1000 years? I.e., if any of these digs showed evidence of existence and or destruction in 2400/2300 B.C. it would support your chronology. What do you think?

William Francis
Alpine, CA


Dear William,

Yes, the archaeological evidence from the first two of the three cities discussed in this article by Charles R. Krahmalkov does support the missing millennium chronology.[22] (The third city, Qishon, is not mentioned in the Bible in connection with the Exodus/Conquest.) The first two cities, Dibon and Hebron, tell the same story as Jericho and Ai. That is, they are cities which, according to the archaeological evidence, were uninhabited at the traditional 1400–1200 B.C. dates for the Conquest (Late Bronze Age), but which were clearly inhabited 1000 years earlier (at the close of Early Bronze III) as the missing millennium chronology requires.

The first is Dibon, east of the Jordan, mentioned in Numbers 33, where the invading Israelites are said to have encamped. The excavation of Tell Dhiban, ancient Dibon, has revealed no city there in the Late Bronze Age II (c. 1400–1200 B.C.E.), when the Exodus supposedly occurred. Indeed, nothing was found there earlier than the ninth century B.C.E. How could the Israelites encamp at (and presumably conquer) a city that didn't exist?[23]

From The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land we find:

There is evidence for an Early Bronze Age occupation of the mound. At the southeast corner, a few sherds of this period (mostly from the Early Bronze Age III) have been found. These are mixed with later Iron Age sherds and apparently are not associated with any structures. Farther to the north, however, pure Early Bronze Age levels resting on bedrock have been reported and, in the northeast, a section of a curved and sloping wall and possibly a gate dated to this period.

After an apparent gap in occupation, there is important evidence for Moabite occupation (possibly as early as Iron Age I) on the summit of the mound.[24]

This shows both that the Early Bronze III strata required by the missing millennium chronology are present at Dibon, and that the Late Bronze strata required by the traditional dates for the Exodus/Conquest are absent.

Krahmalkov continues:

The second site is Hebron. According to the Bible, Moses sent spies to reconnoiter Hebron in preparation for the Israelite invasion: "And they went up into the Negeb and came to Hebron" (Numbers 13:22). When the invasion came, Hebron was a principal target (Joshua 10:36–37, 11:12 [sic; 11:21 possibly intended]; Judges 1:10). Again the skeptics call on the archaeologist to support their case: There was no city at Hebron in the Late Bronze Age.[25]

From The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land once again we find:

Settlement continued through the early Bronze Age II–III, but no remains have been excavated as yet. …

During the Late Bronze Age, the city of Hebron was abandoned; …[26]

So score two on two for the missing millennium chronology, and zero on two for the traditional chronology.

Having said this I feel I need to add that I don't find there is any real contest between these two chronologies any longer, at least as far as the evidence is concerned. In terms of evidence, it is unquestionably the case that a millennium has accidentally been dropped from the text of 1 Kings 6:1 in antiquity. Said another way, traditional Biblical chronology prior to 1000 B.C. is unquestionably wrong and should simply be discarded—one needs to restore 1000 years to 1 Kings 6:1 to get Biblical chronology right. How to get this simple chronological fact into the heads of Biblical archaeologists so they stop maligning Biblical historicity, and into the hands of lay Christians so they can defend their faith intelligently against the present barrage coming out of Biblical archaeology, are the only remaining difficulties.


Gerald E. Aardsma, Ph.D.
Loda, IL ◇

Biblical Chronology 101

I've asked my eldest son, Mark, to step into "class" this session and introduce us to a new tool he is putting together for us on the web. I am personally very excited about this new tool. Here's Mark.

Introducing Persona

In the fall of 1999 I was a sophomore in the communications program at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Adam Crumpton, my good friend and unofficial roommate at the time, was working through a large book on the history of art, and another thick volume called (as I recall) A History of the World. I was reading Francis Schaeffer's How Shall We Then Live, a historical review of western thought as it relates to the Christian worldview. We felt we needed a way to store and organize the mass of historical facts we were reading so we could find and use the information at a later date.

Adam and I began to visualize a computerized database of historical information. Adam, believing that history centers around persons, suggested the name "Persona" for this database. This seemed fitting since persona means a person as a character in a story.

From the start Adam and I wanted Persona to be able to generate custom timelines from the historical facts stored in its database. Geography, the study of the surface of the earth, is inherently spatial. It involves the use of physical coordinates to indicate the positions of places on earth. Although it is possible to communicate geographical information in words or lists of numbers, the graphical nature of maps makes it much easier to understand and learn geography. Similarly, history, the study of the past, is inherently chronological. It involves the use of calendar dates to indicate the positions of events in time. The "maps" of chronology are timelines. Just as good maps are helpful when studying geography, good timelines are helpful when studying history—including, of course, Bible history.

Adam and I quickly imagined web-based timelines that could be navigated, zoomed, and scrolled according to the user's interest and preference.

Now, almost three years later, our ideas are becoming reality. This month the beginnings of Persona are accessible on The Biblical Chronologist web site. I've entered the facts that are most relevant to this issue's discussion of the date of the Exodus and Old Kingdom Egyptian chronology into the Persona database. You can use Persona to view and browse this information at www.biblicalchronologist.org.

Figure 4: Screen shot of Persona in an early stage of development on the Biblical Chronologist web site.

This is just a beginning. The goal is to make it possible for users to input chronological information of interest to themselves. A typical example might be genealogical records from your family tree. Once entered, the information would then be easily viewable as a timeline on your computer screen, and easily compared with other timelines, such as your spouse's family tree, or the history of America. As another example, teachers and students of history could enter information relating to a project or theory, and then compare this information with other archaeological data or radiocarbon dates.

My desire is that Persona should contribute significantly to the ongoing research efforts of The Biblical Chronologist. I also desire to see it contribute significantly to effective communication of the truth about Bible history. I hope to develop Persona into a tool that is broadly useful for organizing, accessing, and presenting historical information of all sorts. By making it easier to "see" history and to see ourselves as part of history, I am hoping Persona will contribute to effective integration of historical truth into our lives today.

You are invited to be among the first to log on to Persona and learn to navigate it. There's a small amount of useful historical information to be found there already, and much more to come. ◇

The Biblical Chronologist is a bimonthly subscription newsletter about Biblical chronology. It is written and edited by Gerald E. Aardsma, a Ph.D. scientist (nuclear physics) with special background in radioisotopic dating methods such as radiocarbon. The Biblical Chronologist has a threefold purpose:

  1. to encourage, enrich, and strengthen the faith of conservative Christians through instruction in Biblical chronology,

  2. to foster informed, up-to-date, scholarly research in this vital field within the conservative Christian community, and

  3. to communicate current developments and discoveries in Biblical chronology in an easily understood manner.

An introductory packet containing three sample issues and a subscription order form is available for $9.95 US regardless of destination address. Send check or money order in US funds and request the "Intro Pack."

The Biblical Chronologist (ISSN 1081-762X) is published six times a year by Aardsma Research & Publishing, 412 Mulberry St., Loda, IL 60948-9651.
Web address: www.biblicalchronologist.org.

Copyright © 2002 by Aardsma Research & Publishing. Duplication or distribution in whole or in part by any means electronic or otherwise is strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher.

Footnotes

  1. ^  Michael Massing, "As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales are Wilting," The New York Times on the Web (March 9, 2002), www.nytimes.com.

  2. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel, 2nd ed. (Loda IL: Aardsma Research and Publishing, 1993), 78–80.

  3. ^  Exodus 2:23a, NASB.

  4. ^  Exodus 5:2, NASB.

  5. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Route of the Exodus," The Biblical Chronologist 2.1 (January/February 1996): 1–9.

  6. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Yeroham: the True Mount Sinai," The Biblical Chronologist 6.4 (July/August 2000): 1–11.

  7. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Report on the Excursion to Mt. Yeroham – Part III," The Biblical Chronologist 7.1 (January/February 2001): 1–16.

  8. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel, 2nd ed. (Loda IL: Aardsma Research and Publishing, 1993).

  9. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Chronology of the Bible: 3000–1000 B.C.," The Biblical Chronologist 1.3 (May/June 1995): 1–3.

  10. ^  Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, Zondervan Publishing House, 1983), 217.

  11. ^  See Gerald E. Aardsma, A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel, 2nd ed. (Loda IL: Aardsma Research & Publishing, 1993) for details of this number.

  12. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Biblical Chronology 101: On Checking Biblical Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 6.2 (March/April 2000): 12–14.

  13. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel, 2nd ed. (Loda IL: Aardsma Research and Publishing, 1993), 57–58.

  14. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel, 2nd ed. (Loda IL: Aardsma Research and Publishing, 1993), 78–80.

  15. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Chronology of Egypt in Relation to the Bible: 3000–1000 B.C.," The Biblical Chronologist 2.2 (March/April 1996): 1–9.

  16. ^  Peter A. Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994).

  17. ^  Georges Bonani, Herbert Haas, Zahi Hawass, Mark Lehner, Shawki Nakla, John Nolan, Robert Wenke, Willy Wölfli, "Radiocarbon Dates of Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments in Egypt," Near East Chronology: Archaeology and Environment. Proceedings of the 17th International 14C Conference, ed. Hendrik J. Bruins, I. Carmi, and E. Boaretto Radiocarbon 43.3 (2001): 1297–1320.

  18. ^  Georges Bonani, Herbert Haas, Zahi Hawass, Mark Lehner, Shawki Nakla, John Nolan, Robert Wenke, Willy Wölfli, "Radiocarbon Dates of Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments in Egypt," Near East Chronology: Archaeology and Environment. Proceedings of the 17th International 14C Conference, ed. Hendrik J. Bruins, I. Carmi, and E. Boaretto Radiocarbon 43.3 (2001): 1297–8.

  19. ^  Georges Bonani, Herbert Haas, Zahi Hawass, Mark Lehner, Shawki Nakla, John Nolan, Robert Wenke, Willy Wölfli, "Radiocarbon Dates of Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments in Egypt," Near East Chronology: Archaeology and Environment. Proceedings of the 17th International 14C Conference, ed. Hendrik J. Bruins, I. Carmi, and E. Boaretto Radiocarbon 43.3 (2001): 1310.

  20. ^  Hendrik J. Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht, "Radiocarbon Challenges Archaeo-historical Time Frameworks in the Near East: The Early Bronze Age of Jericho in Relation to Egypt," Near East Chronology: Archaeology and Environment. Proceedings of the 17th International 14C Conference, ed. Hendrik J. Bruins, I. Carmi, and E. Boaretto Radiocarbon 43.3 (2001): 1331.

  21. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel, 2nd ed. (Loda IL: Aardsma Research and Publishing, 1993), 60–61.

  22. ^  Charles R. Krahmalkov, "Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence," Biblical Archaeology Review 20.5 (September/October 1994): 54–62, 79.

  23. ^  Charles R. Krahmalkov, "Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence," Biblical Archaeology Review 20.5 (September/October 1994): 55.

  24. ^  A. D. Tushingham, "Dibon," The New Encyclopaedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 350.

  25. ^  Charles R. Krahmalkov, "Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence," Biblical Archaeology Review 20.5 (September/October 1994): 55.

  26. ^  Avi Ofer, "Hebron," The New Encyclopaedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 608.


Volume 8, Number 3May/June 2002

The Cause of Reduced
Post-Flood Life Spans – Part V

Is it possible for a son to die of old age while his father is yet in mid-life? Genesis says yes—and reveals important properties of vitamin X in doing so.

Introduction

The Biblical life expectancy data (right half of Figure 1) display a more-or-less uniform, natural decline from Noah to Moses. The only real irregularity in this uniform decline, allowing for normal scatter in the datapoints, is a sudden drop in life expectancies between Eber and Peleg (third and fourth life expectancy data points after the Flood). I have highlighted this irregularity by darkening the line connecting the Eber and Peleg datapoints.

Figure 1: Biblical life span data. The birth date of individuals whose life spans are plotted as solid vertical bars in column 2 are shown in column 1.

This sudden drop in life spans between Eber and Peleg has been used by some to argue for gaps in the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies from which much of these life span data have been taken (Table 1). The argument in this case is that it is unlikely that life spans would have changed so dramatically in a single generation—from 464 years for Eber to just 239 years for Peleg. If one makes the reasonable assumption—so the argument goes—that life spans continued a natural decline between Eber and Peleg, then clearly there must be a number of generations missing between Eber and Peleg.

Table 1: Selected Biblical life span data.

In point of fact there are no generations missing between Eber and Peleg. The sudden drop in life spans between Eber and Peleg is real history. That is, it really was the case that Peleg was Eber's direct, first-generation son, and that Peleg died of 'old age' nearly two centuries before his father died of 'old age', while his father was yet in mid-life.

I think I will have proven this assertion to everyone's satisfaction before too many more articles in this series have gone to press. For the present, however, my purpose is more modest. I want, this issue, to show only how such a thing is possible. And even this is secondary to the much more urgent goal of elucidating the properties of vitamin X—the anti-aging vitamin—in hopes of identifying what substance this elusive vitamin is. I aspire, this issue, to take a first small step toward this goal by demonstrating two properties of vitamin X: first, that it must have a relatively long biological half-life, and second, that it must have a relatively short environmental half-life. These properties both follow logically from the sudden drop in life spans which the Bible records between Eber and Peleg.

Biological Half-life

What is biological half-life?

Biological half-life is a measure of how long a substance tends to remain in the body before it is eliminated.

The biological half-life, T, of a substance in the human body can be measured by giving a person a small dose, N0 molecules, of that substance and measuring the number of molecules, N, of that dose remaining in the body after an elapsed time, t. The biological half-life is the time it takes for one half of the original dose molecules to be eliminated from the body; that is, the time it takes for N to equal N0/2.

Sodium, which we get from common table salt, sodium chloride, is used in tissues throughout the body. It has a relatively short biological half-life of just 29 days.[1] Calcium, on the other hand, tends to get tied up in bone, and has a relatively long biological half-life of 49 years.[2]

Biological Half-life of Vitamin X

I have previously argued that 'old age' is simply a poor name for what in reality is a vitamin deficiency disease.[3] I have dubbed the unknown substance which is responsible for preventing 'aging' "vitamin X".[4]

Imagine two modern individuals, Bob and Tom, of the same age—say twenty years. If neither is given supplemental doses of vitamin X, then both will die of vitamin X deficiency disease ('old age') within a few decades of seventy-five years. We know this with fair certainty because billions of individuals have proven it since the Flood.

Now imagine that Bob is given supplemental doses of synthetic vitamin X so that he gets all the vitamin X his body needs from age twenty on, while Tom remains at a natural, present-day (deficient) level of vitamin X. Tom will still contract 'old age' and die of it within a few decades of 75 years. But not so Bob. Bob will not contract 'old age' at all, any more than a person receiving an adequate diet of vitamin C will contract scurvy.

We see by this simple example that two individuals of the same age, living at the same time, can experience very different rates of 'aging' depending on their respective dose rates of vitamin X.

Now imagine that Bob is given synthetic vitamin X for one year only, after which he, like Tom, receives only a natural present-day level of vitamin X. What will be the result?

If vitamin X has a biological half-life measured in days, like sodium, then the benefit to Bob of his year-long supplemental dose of vitamin X will be merely to increase his life expectancy by one or two years. But if vitamin X has a relatively long biological half-life, say 49 years, like calcium, then Bob would be expected to outlive Tom by a century or more. The reason for this is that, in the case of a long biological half-life, vitamin X continues to be maintained at high levels in Bob's body long after supplemental dosing has stopped.

This is what happened in the case of Eber and Peleg. Since no means of artificially synthesizing vitamin X was available, Eber and Peleg were limited to only that dose of vitamin X which the environment naturally provided. Eber was born at a time when the amount of vitamin X in the environment was much higher than it is today. Sometime during the thirty-four years between the birth of Eber and the birth of Eber's son, Peleg, the amount of vitamin X in the environment declined dramatically. There is a very good reason why the amount of vitamin X in the environment declined this way, which I plan to explain in detail in a future article in this series. For now I want us merely to notice that, as a result of this decline, the natural dose of vitamin X received by Peleg was always much less than that which his father Eber had initially received.

From Peleg's birth on, both Eber and Peleg were receiving the same, relatively low, natural dose of vitamin X from the environment. But even though they were both limited to the same natural dose-rate of vitamin X from Peleg's birth on, Eber did not die of 'old age' at the same time Peleg did. Eber lived on for several centuries after Peleg, his son, had died of 'old age'.

Eber outlived his son Peleg by several centuries because Eber carried a higher level of vitamin X with him, in his body, long after vitamin X had declined dramatically in the natural environment.[5] This shows that the biological half-life of vitamin X must be relatively long—probably on the order of a century.

The long biological half-life of vitamin X is apparent in the Genesis life span data in many other instances than just Eber and Peleg. Notice, as a single additional example, that Shem, who accompanied his father Noah on the ark, outlived not only Peleg, his great-great-grandson, but even Terah, Peleg's great-great-grandson (and father of Abraham). Said another way, Shem, born before the Flood, died of 'old age' only 25 years before Abraham—born 350 years after the Flood—died of 'old age'.

Clearly, vitamin X has a long biological half-life.

Environmental Half-life of Vitamin X

In contrast to its biological half-life, vitamin X must have a relatively short environmental half-life. This is apparent from the rapidity of the drop in life expectancy between Eber and Peleg. This drop in life expectancy requires that the environmental abundance of vitamin X dropped dramatically between Eber's birth and Peleg's birth. The time between these two births was just 34 years.[6] Thus we learn that vitamin X in the natural environment can decline dramatically in a matter of a few decades or less. This is just another way of saying that vitamin X has a relatively short environmental half-life—on the order of a decade or less.

Conclusion

Is it possible for a son to die of old age while his father is still in mid-life? Genesis says yes—and there is really no sound reason to doubt it. ◇

Biblical Chronology 101

Though Ai, the second city of the Conquest, was excavated over sixty years ago, the average Christian, in America at least, knows nothing of the mass of factual information unearthed by the archaeologists at Ai. A large part of the reason for this widespread ignorance lies in the fact that the original excavator found no city existed at Ai at the traditional date of the Conquest. This problem caused a great deal of confusion in scholarly circles initially, which, with mounting evidence of similar problems everywhere in Palestine over the ensuing decades, slowly transformed into skepticism, and then outright rejection of the Biblical account of the Exodus and Conquest—as is the unhappy (and unnecessary) case at present.

A smaller part of the widespread ignorance regarding the factual data from Ai lies, I am convinced, in the simple fact that the excavation reports from the first major work at Ai were published in French. The shame here is that these original reports go a long way toward showing that both the archaeology and topographical situation of Ai match, in detail, with what one might naturally expect from the Biblical account of the Conquest of Ai. They thus show that the only real issue at Ai is the chronology of the site relative to the traditional Biblical chronology date of the Conquest.

I have previously shown that it is traditional Biblical chronology which has the problem—it has accidentally overlooked a full thousand years because of a minor copy error in 1 Kings 6:1.[7] Once this has been understood, all apparent difficulty between the archaeology at Ai and the Biblical narrative of the Conquest of that ancient city disappears.

The only remaining impediment to full appreciation of the archaeological finds at Ai, then, is the language barrier posed to much of the English-speaking world by the French of the early excavation reports.

My ability with foreign languages is extremely limited—despite the best efforts of some fine high school teachers several decades ago. Fortunately, however, my eldest son, Mark, demonstrates considerable aptitude with languages. He undertook to translate the excavation reports from Ai some months ago. I have invited him into class again this issue to begin to share with us—for no other reason than a general broadening of our knowledge—some of what he learned in this exercise. Once again, here's Mark.


I set out to translate Les Fouilles De 'Ay, (The Excavations of Ai[8]), the published report of the first major excavations at Ai, because I knew that Ai was an important archaeological site to modern Biblical chronology, and I wanted to make sure we hadn't missed anything important in our previous skimmings of the French text. I found no new grand facts or solutions to any major mysteries, but I found a story there that I believe is worth retelling. It's a story about people—men, women, and children who lived at Ai and died at the hands of Joshua's soldiers—and the story of a young woman whose greatest passion was to discover the long-forgotten truth about those people.

It is necessary to note that I am not a professional translator, nor even a fluent speaker, of French. I am doubtless to blame for any oddities or errors in the quotations below. Also, in the interest of accurate and precise transmission of the original content my translation tends to be more literal than paraphrastic, preserving the complex sentences and grammatical arrangements of the original. I ask your patience in reading the sections that don't flow as smoothly as they otherwise might. I think your patience will be rewarded, for here is an opportunity to participate in a valuable exercise, nearly extinct in modern society—looking back through the mists of time to learn from the ancient past.

The Resurrection of Ai: Part I

The 1st of July, 1936 Mrs. Judith Marquet-Krause was abruptly taken by a sudden and unrelenting illness, at the moment when she was going to undertake the preliminary report of her third campaign of excavations at et-Tell—Ai.

She had already organized the resumption of the work at the end of the summer of 1936 and previous success justified all expectations. The valiant explorer had considered an initial synthesis of the results, acquired in three years of labor conducted with a most desperate enthusiasm, to be in the very near future. The new campaign must be above all devoted to carry through the investigation on the essential elements of the archaeological reconstruction of Ai: the complex system of fortifications, the acropolis with its civil, military, and religious monuments, and a notable part of the ancient cemetery. Note cards of all kinds, more or less elaborate notes, inventories, plans, designs and photographs, accumulated over three years with the most ardent activity, clearly represented since that time, in the imagination of the young scholar, an archaeological resurrection of the famous forgotten city, of which some early records had only outlined the essential traits and sketched the development.

Destiny, the implacable guardian of the secret of Ai—the "Ruin"—has venged itself of her more courageous adversary, who took with her the vision of her victorious discovery.[9] % Documents and collections, which, looking empty, frozen by the cold of death, though ancient still, live and are organized under the wand of a fairy, and the treasure of materials, though laboriously recovered—changed from useless rubbish, has added her mournful silence to that of the ruins of Ai.

Judith Marquet-Krause was the wife of Yves Marquet, the writer of the foregoing poetic words. As a young woman in her twenties she was responsible for the first archaeological investigation (other than some preliminary soundings by Garstang) of the ancient ruins of the city of Ai. After her untimely death, her mother wrote:

I am interested in nothing more than the sole desire to see continued the dear memory of the child prematurely taken by her disease; her miserable mother must strive to express the sorrowful memories that set down for the reader the traits of Judith Krause-Marquet.

Born at Sedjera in 1906, in that enchanted part of Galilee from where one can see the mountains of Nazareth on one side and Mt. Tabor on the other, there she spent her earliest years. There she received her first moral and intellectual education and, in the house of her father, was instilled with a sense of honor and the love of work. From her tender infancy, a noble and generously inspired person.

She received her brilliant secondary schooling at the Tel-Aviv high school, where, in addition to Hebrew, the assigned language, she delved deeply into French, her mother language, and learned Arabic, English, and German. At the age of seventeen she returned to France to do her higher studies. Successively graduating from the Sorbonne, from the School of Higher Learning and finally from the School of Louvre, she acquired a degree in inscriptions, studying Syriac close at hand to the sympathy of Abbe Nau, then cuneiform, then archaeology. It is Mr. Rene Dussaud, now Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Scripts, who directed her studies and her first steps in her archaeological career.

After having worked a semester at the excavation of Jericho at the hand of Professor Garstang, she was charged with the mission by the sympathy of Baron Edmond of Rothschild and directed the three campaigns of excavations at Ai, of which the present volume reports her findings. …

In order to delve deeply into the literary and archaeological sciences, she loved to travel, mostly in Europe and the East. Consequently, along with the museums of Beyrouth, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Cairo, she visited a number of museums of eastern archaeology in Italy, Germany, Austria, and England. She likewise visited many archaeological work sites in Palestine and Syria. Her doctoral thesis was on work sites. God gifted her with a high superiority, of an exceptional nature whose mystery was full of promise. He had focused her thoughts toward a single ideal, scientific research. In spite of her great love for her parents, and for her husband, her work had the first priority. Nothing was more important to her than biblical history work, and she devoted herself to it with enthusiasm. It is more than certain that she had an intimate contact with her soil, she saw treasures there. The success of her work is remarkable. The importance of her discoveries is an army which can defend itself. She expected to work some years more at Ai, but she had already turned her sights toward the Tell of Hatsor, near Yessod Hamaalah, where she was convinced important historical remains lay hidden. The savage region, the malaria which reigns there, could not stop her determined idea.

When I saw the work in the caves, in the unbreathable air, I was then aware of the terrible dangers. Surrounded by the heavy gloom in which I had let go of the loss of my only son, I left in spite of being carried away on this slope which plunged me there still more deeply. Alas! at that very hour, my beloved Judith, that charming and noble soul, found herself at the hand of the Creator where she awaits our eternal reunion.[10]

Judith called Ai a "major biblical city" because of its prominent role in the biblical story of Joshua's conquest of Canaan. She excavated at Ai in the 1930's, a time when questions about the historicity of the biblical account of the Conquest were beginning to surface in the archaeological community. She wanted to find objective evidence and apply it to the issue. What she found almost didn't make it into print:

The present work would have appeared at the beginning of 1940—the last test was the editing of the books, at the eve of the declaration of war. But fate, unleashed on the whole world, fell upon the passing of the explorer. Having survived the catastrophe of May-June 1940, the proofs disappeared. Meanwhile the inhumanity of the occupants was exercised against the residents, the administration made them melt down the printer's type for transformation into ammunition.

By chance, a first proof, along with all the photographic plates, was saved.

This book goes therefore, at last, to see daylight, specifically due to the overthrow of the Nazis.[11]

Judith began her report on the first season of excavations this way:

With September 1933, the well-organized mission, at the generosity of Baron Edmond of Rothschild, to excavate the mound of Et-Tell, the presumed site of ancient Ai, found us at the outset of the work.

[At this point Judith thanks eight individuals who aided her excavation project. Among them are her mother, who helped to manage the project, and her father who handled the "delicate negotiations" necessary to arrange permission from the Arabs to work at the site. Her gracious (and lengthy) acknowledgments show an unselfish perception of the valuable contribution each person made.]

The work on the area was inaugurated on the 13th of September with about fifty workers recruited exclusively from the Arab village of Deir Diwan. None of them had ever had practice at this very particular kind of labor; but constant and firm direction did not take long to produce results. Half a dozen more intelligent and more flexible men, chosen with care, soon made a very useful special crew: an advantageous resource for the training of groups and the accomplishment of more difficult tasks.[12]

Conscious of the importance of positively identifying the correct site of ancient Ai, Judith Marquet Krause included the following remarks in one of her reports:

The location of the ancient city of Ai is clearly determined by the Old Testament. It is found on a hill to the east of Beitin, ancient Bethel, 25 kilometers north of Jerusalem.

Joshua 78:2: "Joshua sends some men towards Ai, to the east of Bethel..."

Genesis 12:8: "He (Abraham) moves towards the mountains to the east of Bethel and he pitched his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east."

The Tell, of nearly circular shape (plate LXXXIX) covers an area of 10 hectares [24.7 acres].

The spring is found at the west, outside of the city. Looking north, a natural system of defense is apparent, made up of a series of superimposed terraces. On the southern side, the slope is shallow. To the north and the west, the Tell is surrounded by a chain of hills which is separated by a deep ravine. Bethel, to the west, is invisible, in spite of the short distance. On the east side, the view reaches the Jordan Valley and the area north of the Dead Sea. One sees, to the north, the Arab villages of Tayibe (ancient Ophra) and of Ramoun (ancient Rimmon). All of this is in perfect harmony with the Biblical data.[13]

Judith's excitement is evident in her description of the first discoveries:

Our first effort naturally had to concentrate on the Acropolis, at the point culminating north-west of the Tell, the mound par excellence. No ancient remnant protruded, to tell the truth, from the pieces of rubble in which withered a couple of shriveled trees and some vine stumps. But from my first prospecting visits the preceding year, the situation from the terrace indicated privilege. Also, the strange combination of very ancient shards and Israelite shards from at least a millennium later convinced me that such a site must certainly not always have been the melancholy desert that it is at present. The pickaxe was soon made to confirm that deduction, and made some masonry complexes apparent, some of which were quite important.

The need for control and for registration [i.e., cataloging each piece of pottery, etc.] suggested at once the duplication of the work site. While a choice crew continued to uncover these buildings, the bulk of the work force, which was growing from somewhere day by day, was employed in the uncovering of the ramparts. Their general outline, probed not long ago from some scarce points, could be followed in an approximate manner on the surface by the movements of the soil or some mass of rubbish in between some tiered terraces. Checking at various depths along the perimeter of almost all of the mound gradually confirmed these superficial indications.

However, a thorough inspection of the lower slopes of the mound caused me to suspect the placement of the ancient necropolis [i.e., cemetery], I immediately employed a small section of my better workers on some soundings where I was visibly pleased by their ability for clandestine excavations. In a few days I had therefore marked out some underground tombs. The site was staked out under constant surveillance, and there was not the slightest surprise for our men at seeing that after hastily clearing out these tombs, we retained only one or the other of the men for stepping into them, those more dexterous and careful, to support us in a meticulous excavation, achieved, for the most part, with our own hands.[14]

All the crews competed for the activity of journalizing the alluring, and for the most part unexpected, finds. Therefore the mission prospered as well as one could wish, for six weeks, when suddenly exploded, toward the end of October, the most untimely political agitation in the Muslim centers of Palestine. Even though our relations with our workers at all points were excellent, as with all the Arab population in the vicinity, it was wise to suspend the work in order to let the outburst die down and to prevent the event of forceful conflict from compromising, after all, the most perfect clarification of the finds and a first registration of the copious material already accumulated. In the first days of November the continuance of trouble and the approach of the rainy season convinced us to conclude this initial campaign. The results greatly rewarded our efforts; they above all justified the project and calmed my urgency.[15]

To be continued.

The Biblical Chronologist is a bimonthly subscription newsletter about Biblical chronology. It is written and edited by Gerald E. Aardsma, a Ph.D. scientist (nuclear physics) with special background in radioisotopic dating methods such as radiocarbon. The Biblical Chronologist has a threefold purpose:

  1. to encourage, enrich, and strengthen the faith of conservative Christians through instruction in Biblical chronology,

  2. to foster informed, up-to-date, scholarly research in this vital field within the conservative Christian community, and

  3. to communicate current developments and discoveries in Biblical chronology in an easily understood manner.

An introductory packet containing three sample issues and a subscription order form is available for $9.95 US regardless of destination address. Send check or money order in US funds and request the "Intro Pack."

The Biblical Chronologist (ISSN 1081-762X) is published six times a year by Aardsma Research & Publishing, 412 Mulberry St., Loda, IL 60948-9651.
Web address: www.biblicalchronologist.org.

Copyright © 2002 by Aardsma Research & Publishing. Duplication or distribution in whole or in part by any means electronic or otherwise is strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher.

Footnotes

  1. ^  Joseph W. Kane and Morton M. Sternheim, Physics, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), Table 33.1, 577.

  2. ^  Joseph W. Kane and Morton M. Sternheim, Physics, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), Table 33.1, 577.

  3. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part IV," The Biblical Chronologist 8.1 (January/February 2002): 1–8.

  4. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part IV," The Biblical Chronologist 8.1 (January/February 2002): 4.

  5. ^  It is not necessary that it be vitamin X itself which is carried forward in time in the body. One or more metabolites of vitamin X will also do. I am ignoring the distinction between vitamin X and its metabolites in an effort to keep the present discussion as simple as possible.

  6. ^  Genesis 11:16.

  7. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel, 2nd ed. (Loda IL: Aardsma Research and Publishing, 1993).

  8. ^  Note that the word 'Ai' comes from a Hebrew word meaning "ruin" and should be pronounced aw-ee much like the word 'eye' in English.

  9. ^  Yves Marquet, "Avant-Propos" in Judith Marquet-Krause Les Fouilles De 'Ay. 1933–1935 (Libarie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, 1949), 1.

  10. ^  H. Krause, "La Personalité De L'Exploratrice" in Judith Marquet-Krause Les Fouilles De 'Ay. 1933–1935 (Libarie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, 1949), 6.

  11. ^  Yves Marquet, "Avant Propos" in Judith Marquet-Krause Les Fouilles De 'Ay. 1933–1935 (Libarie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, 1949), 2.

  12. ^  Judith Marquet-Krause, Les Fouilles De 'Ay. 1933–1935 (Libarie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, 1949), 8.

  13. ^  Judith Marquet-Krause, Les Fouilles De 'Ay. 1933–1935 (Libarie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, 1949), 14.

  14. ^  Judith Marquet-Krause, Les Fouilles De 'Ay. 1933–1935 (Libarie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, 1949), 8.

  15. ^  Judith Marquet-Krause, Les Fouilles De 'Ay. 1933–1935 (Libarie Orientalist Paul Geuthner, 1949), 9.


Volume 8, Number 4July/August 2002

Otzi the Iceman,
and Biblical Chronology

Otzi's body was found in 1991 in the high mountains of the Alps where he lived. Unusual weather conditions produced an unusually large melt of the Alpine glaciers that summer. Hikers happened upon the body, only partially freed from its icy tomb. Supposing they had found remains of an unfortunate modern climber, local authorities were notified.

Many modern climbers have accidents. The bodies are sometimes lost in the glaciers for decades. The team which came to remove the Iceman's body assumed this was simply another such case.

They soon changed their minds. Modern climbers do not carry flint knives and copper axes. In fact, that sort of gear has not been used in the Alps for at least 4000 years. It was soon apparent that the body was that of a man who had lived and died thousands of years previously.


He was soon nicknamed "Otzi" after the Ötztal Alps where he was found. Otzi is the world's oldest frozen mummy.

Otzi comes to us from thousands of years ago, almost as one frozen in time. Much of our knowledge of peoples of such ancient times has been surmised from their archaeologically excavated graves. But Otzi was not buried. He died on the mountain in the midst of his everyday activities. He was naturally mummified in ice, and hence preserved, with all of his gear around him. Thus Otzi allows an amazingly clear look into daily life in the Alps over four thousand years ago.

The discovery of Otzi created an immediate sensation around the world. It fascinated the general public, and turned out to be an archaeological gold mine.

Figure 1: Reconstruction of Otzi from the South Tyrol Museum web site www.archaeologiemuseum.it.

Purpose

I am not an expert on Otzi, by any means. In fact, I am not even especially well-researched on him. At present I continue to be absorbed, as I have been for several years now, by the problem of why human longevity declined following Noah's Flood.[1] At the moment several key experiments are underway in the longevity research laboratory, on which I am waiting for results. I think I am very near the end of this long quest; the experiments presently in progress will show just how near the end I may be. While I wait, a bit of a diversion would be welcome. Otzi nicely fills the bill.

While I am not an expert on Otzi, I am an expert on Biblical chronology. As an expert on Biblical chronology I have noticed for some time now that Otzi is able to make a contribution to our knowledge in this field, and vice versa. In fact, Otzi and ancient Bible history complement each other rather nicely, each shedding additional light on the other.

I have also noticed that nobody else seems to have noticed this affinity. I have seen reference to Otzi's antiquity relative to the pyramids of Egypt—which he predates—but never any reference to Otzi's antiquity relative to Moses, or Abraham, or Noah, for example. I hope, in the present article, at least to remedy this oversight.

I will not spend much time describing Otzi or his gear. You can learn plenty about these things through a simple search of the Internet. He wore carefully stitched leather clothes, a grass cape, and leather boots stuffed with dry grass for insulation (Figure 1). Besides the flint knife and copper axe, he carried a long bow, a quiver full of arrows, a backpack, and a utility belt with an assortment of tools. He was intimately associated with the smelting of copper ores. He appears to have died of an arrow wound in the back.

My goal in the present article is to bring Otzi and Biblical history together. This is clearly a reachable goal, because the history of the ancient past recorded in the Bible is a history of the very same planet—Earth—on which Otzi walked. And, as Biblical history reaches back over seven thousand years, it is certain to include the time when Otzi lived.

Bible History Review

Biblical history opens in Genesis with the supernatural creation of Earth, and the universe of which it is a part, 5176±26 B.C.[2] The early chapters of Genesis inform us of the creation of Adam and Eve and their Fall into sin.

A mere 1500 years later the earth was filled with people—and with violence. God singled out Noah to build a very large barge, by which means he and his family escaped God's judgment of mankind, sent in the form of a Flood.

The Flood happened 3520±21 B.C.[3] Much extra-Biblical data shows that the physical cause of the Flood was a cosmic projectile impact in the high northern latitudes.[4] Iceland seems the most probable site of the impact center at present.

The energetic impact of the cosmic projectile resulted in displacement of the inner core of the earth relative to the mantle and crust.[5] This produced a geoid warp (i.e., a gravitational anomaly) which caused the water of the southern oceans to flow into the northern hemisphere, resulting in ocean-deep flooding of the northern hemisphere. Only a few tall mountains would have poked above the surface of the Flood in much of the northern hemisphere, while southern land masses were left high and dry. This state persisted 150 days, until the velocity of currents generated within the molten outer core by the displaced inner core had decayed sufficiently for the inner core to begin to return to its normal, centered position.

The Flood terminated civilization throughout the northern hemisphere. The Flood is, for example, the cause of the extermination of the Neolithic civilization whose remarkably preserved agricultural fields and stone walls are found today beneath the peat at Céide Fields, Ireland,[6] and the cause of the extinction of Chalcolithic culture seen in archaeological remains throughout the land of Israel.[7]

Following the Flood, civilization in the northern hemisphere had to begin again from scratch. Noah's descendants stayed together initially. They followed the Tigris-Euphrates river system from the mountains of Turkey, where Noah's barge had come to rest, down-river toward the Persian Gulf. In the flat, fertile, desert plain between the rivers they determined to build a city and a tower. But God confused their languages so they could no longer understand one another. The result was the Dispersion of Noah's descendants from Babel into the far-flung regions of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa.

While civilization began afresh after the Flood, something had clearly gone wrong with Earth's environment as a result of the Flood. Prior to the Flood people had lived nearly a thousand years. Now life spans were declining rapidly. By 3300 B.C., little more than two hundred years following the Flood, average life expectancy had plummeted from 925 years to just 200 years.

Otzi's Place

Where does Otzi fit into all of this?

To answer this question it is only necessary to determine the proper absolute date of Otzi's death. Fortunately, radiocarbon dating provides a simple means of determining this date.

Date of Death

Many samples, both directly from Otzi's tissues and from items associated with Otzi (e.g., wood from his axe handle, grasses from his cloak, etc.), have now been radiocarbon dated.[8] I have plotted seventeen radiocarbon results reported by Rom et al. in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Otzi radiocarbon dates relative to Biblical chronology.

As usual, radiocarbon does not yield a single date for a sample. Rather, it yields date ranges with associated relative probabilities. The most probable date range from Otzi's tissues alone is 3360–3310 B.C. The date ranges from associated samples, shown in Figure 2, strongly support this range. Thus the best estimate at present of the date of Otzi's death appears to be 3335±25 (2σ) B.C. This date is shown in Figure 2 by the horizontal dashed line drawn through the radiocarbon date ranges.

Observation #1

The first thing to notice about this date is that it falls after the Flood, not before it.

This is as it must be, of course. It is not possible that Otzi and all his gear could have survived in place in the Alps through the Flood—with ocean water flowing in, covering everything for 150 days, melting the glaciers as it did at Devon Island,[9] then flowing back out again. Otzi must date after the Flood, as radiocarbon clearly shows he does.

Date of Birth

Determining the date of Otzi's birth is a much more difficult problem.

According to the reports I have read, the anthropologists who examined Otzi have placed his age at death around 45 years. If this estimate were dependable it would be an easy matter to calculate the date of Otzi's birth. It would then be simply (3335 + 45 =) 3380 B.C.

Unfortunately for the present purpose the anthropologists' estimate is almost certainly not correct. The difficulty is that they have failed entirely to reckon with the fact that people were living much longer back at that time than they do today. Otzi may look about the way a 45 year old man might look today, but that does not yield the automatic conclusion that Otzi was about 45 years old, as they have supposed, by any means.

How do people look who live for hundreds of years? This is not an easy question to answer because we have absolutely no data on it from living people today.

One could imagine that multi-centenarians from the ancient past aged in much the same way people age today. That is, they were quite visibly aged by 100, and they just stayed that way from then on.

But the Bible suggests otherwise. Isaiah, for example, prophesying about the restoration of longevity, says, "the youth will die at the age of 100…" [my emphasis].[10]

The Biblical vision of 100 year old youths opens the door to all sorts of possibilities, including even the possibility that people who lived multiple centuries in the ancient past retained a youthful appearance and vigor most of their lives, and only began to show the characteristic features of 'old age' in the final few decades of their lives.

This uncertainty obviously prohibits us from knowing for sure how old Otzi was when he died, but the anthropologists' estimate is almost certainly much too young. Notice that if we assume people aged in strict proportion to the rate of aging today (I am not recommending this as the correct choice) and if we interpret the anthropologists' 45 years to mean that Otzi appears to have been a little past middle age when he died, then he must have passed his one hundredth birthday. This follows from the Biblical life span data which show the life expectancy of a newborn at the time of Otzi's death to be still in excess of 200 years (Figure 3). Otzi may look the way 45 year-olds look today, but his true age at death was probably in excess of twice that figure.

Figure 3: Otzi's death date relative to Biblical life span data. The birth date of individuals whose life spans are plotted as solid vertical bars in column 2 are shown in column 1.

Otzi's Ancestry

Otzi lived and died only a few centuries after the Flood. Yet the equipment he carried with him was well adapted to life in the Alps. This implies that the Alps were his home, and that he had lived there for some time.

From the known depth and duration of the Flood in the region of the Alps,[11] it seems that all pre-Flood Alpine populations must have been entirely exterminated by the Flood. This implies that the Alps must have been repopulated from an outside source following the Flood—that Otzi's ancestors had not lived in the Alps.

By far the most reasonable choice is that Otzi was a descendant of Noah, and I will assume this to be the case in what follows. But please note that we do not know this with certainty. The Biblical historical record acknowledges the continuity of other than just Noah's genetic line through the Flood. This is explicitly seen in the existence of the genetic line of the Nephilim both before (Genesis 6:4) and after (Numbers 13:33) the Flood.

In addition to this Biblical evidence, the hemispherical Flood model also anticipates continuity of other genetic lines through the Flood. It allows the possibility of survival of some people in northern latitudes on very tall mountains, the peaks of which were not inundated according to this model. And it strongly implies continuity of non-Noahic genetic lines in southern latitudes, which were not flooded at all.

Nonetheless, the hemispherical Flood model leads to an expectation of survival of very few pre-Flood genetic lines in northern latitudes, both because of the rarity of sufficiently tall mountains, and because of the great difficulty the Flood would have presented to survival on such mountains.

Genesis 10 documents the origin from Noah's descendants of "the nations" surrounding the Mediterranean. Genesis 10:33 seems especially to imply that these nations were entirely and exclusively due to descendants of Noah. This implies a general absence of other genetic lines in the region surrounding the Mediterranean following the Flood.

These considerations lead to the conclusion that Otzi was almost certainly a descendant of Noah.

Otzi and the Date of the Dispersion

This conclusion has immediate implications for the Date of the Dispersion from Babel.

I have previously computed the date of the Dispersion as follows:[12]

In Genesis 10:25 we learn that the Dispersion happened in the days of Peleg (which name means division). From Genesis 11:10–16 we learn that Peleg was born about 100 years after the Flood, and from Genesis 11:18–19 we learn that Peleg died when he was 239 years old. Thus, the Dispersion must have occurred no sooner than about 100 years, and no later than about 340 years after the Flood.
Otzi allows us to narrow this range.

Otzi died roughly 185 years after the Flood. If we estimate that he must have lived in the Alps for at least a decade, as his specialized equipment implies, then he could have arrived in the area not much later than 175 years after the Flood. This suggests that the Dispersion from Babel must have taken place between 100 and (allowing for the ±25 year uncertainty in Otzi's date of death) 200 years after the Flood.

This eliminates most of the 240 year range for the date of the Dispersion given in the above quote, leaving only the first 75 years of it. The result is to refine the date of the Dispersion from 3300±120 B.C. to 3370±50 B.C.

Otzi's Life and Times

Noah himself was still alive when Otzi died (Figure 3), so Otzi was a contemporary as well as a descendant of Noah. It is quite possible that Otzi had personally met Noah. This possibility is suggested by simple population growth estimates.

55 live births per 1000 total population per year is considered to be a large birth rate for human populations.

The figure for the United States in 1800, when the population was undergoing as rapid an expansion as any known, has been calculated at 55 per 1,000.[13]
Assume that this figure applies to the post-Flood population in the centuries immediately following the Flood. Use of this large birth rate seems appropriate because the population in those early centuries would not have included any elderly people. For the same reason we do not need to worry about the effect of death due to 'old age' on the total population in those centuries.

If we assume that Otzi was 100 years old at the time of his death, then the population at the time of his birth would have been only about 750 individuals. It is not difficult for everybody to know everybody in an intimately associated group (e.g., a clan) of this size. Thus it seems possible that Otzi knew Noah personally.

Carrying on with these same assumptions, Otzi would have been at least fifteen years old at the time of the Dispersion. This implies that he was an eye witness and participant in that historic event. By that time the total population would have reached about 1,700 individuals—the right order of magnitude for the decision to build a city and a tower to keep everybody together.

By the time of Otzi's death, Noah's descendants would have numbered in excess of 160,000. (Another 100 years later they would have numbered in excess of thirty million.)

All of this is rather rough, of course. High precision is not easy to achieve when peering back over five thousand years. But these rough estimates give us a reasonable idea, in first approximation, of the world in which Otzi grew up, filling, I hope, some of the vacuum left by the secular scientists and popular press in this regard.

In closing, let me attempt a brief imaginative yet historically/archaeologically based reconstruction of Otzi's life and times.

Reconstruction

Otzi was born to Noah's clan as they migrated out of the Ararat region, following the river year by year, toward the southeast. They moved with some knowledge of where they were going—back toward 'the good land' of Noah's birth.

A century previously the rivers of this region had been busy with commerce, irrigated fields had lined their banks, and urban centers were a common sight. But now the clan moved when and where they pleased, unhindered and unchallenged. There was no one to stop them—the region had been completely depopulated by a great Flood some decades previously.

Otzi had reached his early teens when the clan came to a broad and lovely plain. They determined to make this spot their permanent home. Here they would settle down and begin to enjoy the good life. They would irrigate the fields once again, and reroot the urban way of life which the Flood had extinguished. They would establish for themselves a unified ethnicity and a high civilization in the land of their ancestors, of the sort the ancients had known.

But their plans were ruined before the city and tower had progressed very far. The clan came down with a previously unheard of cognitive disturbance which altered verbal communication. It only affected a few individuals at first, but within a few days nearly all were afflicted with it. In the virtual communication blackout which followed imaginations ran wild, unfounded fears mounted to panic, and people fled.

Otzi stuck with his family: his mother and father and brothers and sisters. They worked their way back up river, with their livestock and other possessions, in the direction they had originally come.

They traveled on for years. Most members of the group had been born into a migrant way of life. The land was wide open before them, food was abundant, and they saw no reason to settle down.

They came eventually to a region of soaring mountains. Here was a new sort of 'good land', with a great variety of natural plant and animal resources in close proximity to protected valleys, occasioned by the rapidly changing altitudes of the mountain slopes. Copper ore, too, protruded from the mountainsides in places. And the high altitude snow fields guaranteed there would never be a shortage of fresh water, even in the hottest, driest summers.

They moved into one such valley. Their descendants still inhabit it today. ◇

Biblical Chronology 101
Guest Lecturer: Mark Aardsma

In Part I of this series I invited you to look with me at an ancient ruined city, and at the young woman whose intense interest in Bible history caused those ruins—after thousands of forgotten, silent years—to reveal a story. Most of the story of this ancient city had perished and been forgotten, together with the many families who called Ai home. Only the end of the story had not been forgotten. It had been preserved and is still available to us in the book of Joshua, in the Bible.

Many have studied the story told by the archaeological ruins at Ai, and many more have read and studied the story of how those ruins came about in the Bible. These two stories should be integrated, of course. They should be woven together into what they in fact are: one reality that happened when an army of God-believing nomads attacked a population of idol-worshipers in their massively-walled city.

The Resurrection of Ai: Part II

The city of Ai sat proudly on its hilltop long before the Israelite army ever existed. Around 3100 B.C., about 400 years after the disaster we know as Noah's Flood, a group of people, possibly from area towns, decided to build a village on the hill. Maybe the other towns were getting too crowded. We don't know. Soon the village at Ai grew as more settlers moved into the region, apparently from north of Canaan. The settlement covered an area of about 10 acres, a size rivaling that of prosperous towns built in the same region 2000 years later.

Typical houses in the Early Bronze Age (the time period during which Ai was a city) had one main room, and sometimes a small adjoining storage room. The main room was usually rectangular with a single door set in one of the long walls. This characteristic gives this type of house the name broadhouse. Each family unit apparently designed and built their own house, so there are many variations on the basic broadhouse design.

The floors of the houses tended to be below street level, so a few steps led down from the street. The door turned on a stone socket and opened inward and to the left. Furniture included stone benches along the walls, and stone slabs set on the floor. The roof was supported by wooden poles. They appear not to have had many windows, perhaps to keep the hot sun and wind-blown sand out.

Another type of house which was common during this time is known as the "front-room" house. These houses had an open courtyard in front where a hearth or silo was often located.

Some of the pottery made by the settlers of Ai had shapes and decorations that hadn't been used in that area before. Archaeologists assume that they either invented these new styles, or learned them from foreigners who joined them in settling Ai.

About 100 years after Ai was founded, a new town layout was planned and built, complete with massive city walls for protection. These walls were over 15 feet (4 meters) high in some places. They were built of field stones. They probably had mud-brick walls built on top of them, making them even higher.

Generations of people lived and died at Ai, and there was no major destruction or reconstruction for the next 280 years (longer than the United States of America has been a nation). Then the city was destroyed, apparently by an earthquake which leveled buildings and caused an intense fire. The fire was hot enough in places to reduce stones to powder.

However, the people of Ai soon rebuilt their city and the fortification walls. They also seem to have moved their cult objects from the temple/palace building near the top of the hill into a building next to a part of the wall that was much thicker than the rest. This new temple is one of the greatest points of interest in the ruins of Ai. Here the people of Ai burned incense and offered sacrifices. Remains of sacrifices—poultry and cattle—were found in the temple, along with knife handles and pottery used in the cult.

We know the people of Ai were religious, although we don't know a lot about the cult they practiced. Some finds suggest that the "Dumuzi" cult was involved.[14] Dumuzi was the god of vegetation, according to Mesopotamian texts. When the hot summer came and the vegetation died, the death of Dumuzi was mourned.

No doubt the religion of Ai involved other and varied elements.

To be continued.

The Biblical Chronologist is a bimonthly subscription newsletter about Biblical chronology. It is written and edited by Gerald E. Aardsma, a Ph.D. scientist (nuclear physics) with special background in radioisotopic dating methods such as radiocarbon. The Biblical Chronologist has a threefold purpose:

  1. to encourage, enrich, and strengthen the faith of conservative Christians through instruction in Biblical chronology,

  2. to foster informed, up-to-date, scholarly research in this vital field within the conservative Christian community, and

  3. to communicate current developments and discoveries in Biblical chronology in an easily understood manner.

An introductory packet containing three sample issues and a subscription order form is available for $9.95 US regardless of destination address. Send check or money order in US funds and request the "Intro Pack."

The Biblical Chronologist (ISSN 1081-762X) is published six times a year by Aardsma Research & Publishing, 412 Mulberry St., Loda, IL 60948-9651.
Web address: www.biblicalchronologist.org.

Copyright © 2002 by Aardsma Research & Publishing. Duplication or distribution in whole or in part by any means electronic or otherwise is strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher.

Footnotes

  1. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part I," The Biblical Chronologist 7.2 (March/April 2001): 1–6; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part II," The Biblical Chronologist 7.4 (July/August 2001): 1–7; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part III," The Biblical Chronologist 7.5 (September/October 2001): 1–5; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part IV," The Biblical Chronologist 8.1 (January/February 2002): 1–8; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part V," The Biblical Chronologist 8.3 (May/June 2002): 1–4.

  2. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Toward Unification of Pre-Flood Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 4.4 (July/August 1998): 1–10.

  3. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Chronology of the Bible: 5000–3000 B.C.," The Biblical Chronologist 2.4 (July/August 1996): 1–5; Gerald E. Aardsma, "Radiocarbon Dating Noah's Flood – Part II," The Biblical Chronologist 6.2 (March/April 2000): 1–11.

  4. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Noah's Flood," The Biblical Chronologist 3.5 (September/October 1997): 1–14; Gerald E. Aardsma, "Zoogeography and Noah's Flood," The Biblical Chronologist 4.1 (January/February 1998): 1–7; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Opening Minutes of Noah's Flood at Céide Fields, Ireland," The Biblical Chronologist 5.6 (November/December 1999): 1–10.

  5. ^  See Gerald E. Aardsma, "Biblical Chronology 101," The Biblical Chronologist 4.3 (May/June 1998): 6–10 for an illustrated summary of the hemispherical Flood model.

  6. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Noah's Flood: The Irish Evidence," The Biblical Chronologist 5.3 (May/June 1999): 1–7.

  7. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Radiocarbon Dating Noah's Flood," The Biblical Chronologist 3.6 (November/December 1997): 1–11.

  8. ^  See Werner Rom et al., "AMS 14C Dating of Equipment from the Iceman and of Spruce Logs from the Prehistoric Salt Mines of Hallstatt," Radiocarbon 41.2 (1999): 183–197 and references therein.

  9. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Noah's Flood at Devon Island," The Biblical Chronologist 3.4 (July/August 1997): 1–16.

  10. ^  Isaiah 65:20.

  11. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Noah's Flood," The Biblical Chronologist 3.5 (September/October 1997): 1–14.

  12. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Research in Progress," The Biblical Chronologist 1.4 (July/August 1995): 8.

  13. ^  Marston Bates, "Population," The Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 22 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1962) 368–369.

  14. ^  Amnon Ben-Tor, "The Early Bronze Age," The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, ed. Amnon Ben-Tor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 117–118.


Volume 8, Number 5September/October 2002

The Age of the Earth, Virtual History, and Hebrews 11:3

There are Christians who hold that the Bible is the infallible textbook of Christianity, that all the truth of Christianity can be found there and there alone. There is no external appointed interpreter to its meaning: the believer and presumably the theologian will find its meaning clear and authoritative, the unalloyed word of God.

Most theologians have encountered this view of the Bible in its forthright simplicity. It has, however, had to face adverse criticism. First, the natural sciences developed in the 19th century an account of the universe which seemed irreconcilable with the story of creation and other details in the Bible.
– George Kilpatrick (theologian)
[1]

"Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true." – Albert Einstein (scientist)[2]

Introduction

The Bible teaches, without caveat or apology, that the earth was created approximately seven thousand years ago.

Modern science teaches, without caveat or apology, that the earth is four and a half billion years old.

Are these teachings irreconcilable?

A Simple Thought Experiment

Those who have followed my work in The Biblical Chronologist over the past several years know that I do not find these teachings to be irreconcilable.[3] It is easy to perform a thought experiment which illustrates immediately why these teachings are not irreconcilable.[4] Imagine for a moment creating a cat—bringing a full grown cat into existence out of nothing—so that it is this instant sitting on the floor at our feet licking its fur. We now ask whether the following two statements are irreconcilable: 1. The cat was created approximately five seconds ago. 2. The cat is at least a year old.

These two statements cannot be irreconcilable because they are, we realize, both true. That is, the cat was, in fact, only brought into existence five seconds ago, and anybody who knows anything at all about cats can see immediately that this cat is at least a year old.

Real and Virtual Histories

I have previously pointed out that creation miracles always lead to this sort of situation.[5] In the macroscopic world created things necessarily carry with them an appearance of prior existence. Although the cat was only created moments ago, it necessarily appears to have existed long before its actual creation.

I have previously pointed out that two separate histories attach to any created thing. The first is real history. The cat's real history is that it was brought into existence out of nothing only seconds ago. The second is virtual history. The cat's virtual history is that it was born a year or more ago, and has grown to its present adulthood since that time. Real history corresponds to what really happened. Virtual history is what one finds from analysis of the created thing itself.

These two types of history, real and virtual, are unavoidable in macroscopic created things. The earth is no exception. Its real history is that it was brought into existence out of nothing roughly seven thousand years ago. Its virtual history, as best it is understood by science today, is that it coalesced from stellar debris some four and one-half billion years ago.

It is an error to set these two histories in contrast to each other—to say that one is right and the other wrong. Rather, as with the wave-like and particle-like properties of light which have become familiar to modern physics, they are a duality. Both are valid descriptions in their proper context. One will not have a complete description of reality, which functions to explain all the facts in the present, if they attempt to exclude either a created object's real history or its virtual history.

False Contradictions

Unfortunately, failing to understand this duality, many—Christians and non-Christians alike—continue to suppose that the Biblical date of creation and the scientifically determined age of the earth are contradictory. This confusion has, unfortunately, had serious consequences. Indeed, this chronological issue seems, historically, to have caused the first real rift between science and the Bible.

But it was not the last issue arising out of this confusion over real and virtual histories of the created world to have done so. The full flowering of this confusion must obviously include at least the titanic struggle over evolution which followed Darwin's publication of Origin of Species. Here the specific confusion was over the fact that the Bible teaches that God supernaturally created all living things, including the first humans, Adam and Eve, while modern science finds that the data from all fields shows that all living things, including humans, have come about naturalistically by a process of evolution.

This apparent conflict, of course, is part and parcel of the same duality. The Bible reveals the real history of how the earth and its multitudinous creatures came to be—they were supernaturally created; science can elucidate only the virtual history it finds by analysis of the created matter itself. And, like our created cat, nothing about the created matter itself reveals that it was brought into existence only a little over seven thousand years ago.

Neither the Bible nor science is telling a lie. Both descriptions are valid in their proper context and each needs to be accepted in its proper context without denigrating the other, just as in our created cat example. Error only enters in at the point at which one or the other of these dual descriptions is denied. When, for example, the scientist says that the physical evidence shows only a history of natural cause and effect, so that the Biblical account of Creation is clearly not true, (as per the quote by Einstein at the beginning of this article) we have error. And when the theologian says that the Bible clearly teaches supernatural creation, so that the evidence from nature can not possibly show evolution, we have error. (We have an even more egregious error when the theologian says, as in the quote which opens this article, that since the scientific evidence shows only a history of natural cause and effect, the Biblical account of Creation cannot be accepted as historically true.)

Hebrews 11:3

It is easy enough to understand the confusion of the unbelieving materialist who mistakenly concludes from his study of the physical evidence that the earth has been around, in fact, for billions of years. Much more difficult to explain is the widespread, persistent dismay of Christians over this issue. The materialist has only atoms to fall back on. But the Christian has the revealed Word of God. And it informs us, rather clearly, in Hebrews 11:3, that "what is seen was not made out of things which are visible".

The materialist is obviously making a very basic mistake, according to Hebrews 11:3, if he supposes he can deduce anything about the date of Creation by analysis of its parts—by measurement of the thickness of its sedimentary strata, or measurement of the ratios of radioisotopes in its rocks. Can he deduce anything about the time of creation of our cat by measuring the length of its hair, or by counting its teeth?

The difficulty, of course, is that the cat "was not made out of things which are visible". That is, the cat was not made out of preexistent hair or teeth. These visible parts were called into existence out of nothing too.

When the materialist says, "I will take this ancient rock apart atom by atom to see how and when it was that this rock was made" he is saying, right at the outset, that what is seen (the rock) was made out of things which are visible (its atoms). Hebrews 11:3 says, not so. It says that the rock was made NOT out of things which are visible/tangible, but "by the word of God".[6] No amount of atom counting will ever reveal the true Creation history of a rock because the true Creation history of a rock can only be understood, Hebrews 11:3 informs us, by faith. Such is the nature of created things. Investigation of the material substance of a created thing—the fur or teeth or cells of a created cat, or the atoms of a created rock—will only reveal its virtual history, not its real Creation history.

And since this is the nature of the case with created things, including the earth, there is no reason why Christians should find their faith in the integrity of the Bible shaken in the least by whatever age science may pin upon the earth, or by any account of the origin of species scientists may piece together from data dug from the earth.

So I find it curious when Christians assert that the trouble with the age of the earth given by science is that the scientists' measurements are in error due to inaccurate tools—that radiometric dating is unreliable. If a veterinarian examines our created cat, and informs us the cat is over a year old, will they also say that the vet's method of estimating the age of cats is unreliable?

Conclusion

Hebrews 11 is sometimes called the "Faith Hall of Fame" of the Bible. Hebrews 11 contains one example after another of faith in action. But rather than noticing all the examples of faith which are found in this chapter, notice what is not found in this chapter.

After declaring, "By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God…" the author of Hebrews does not go on to say, "by faith we understand that Noah's Flood happened", or "by faith we understand that the Exodus happened". Hebrews does not make Bible history in general a matter of faith—and neither, I want to be very clear, do I. The Exodus, the Flood, and all the rest, are—unlike Creation—empirically verifiable facts of history.

That is why so much time and effort have been spent in The Biblical Chronologist in past issues deducing the true nature of the Flood from the chronologically controlled physical data bearing on that historical event, and why so much time and effort have been spent determining the true route of the Exodus, and the true Mount Sinai, from the chronologically controlled archaeological data bearing on the Exodus event. These events are not matters which can only be apprehended by faith—there is a wealth of physical data witnessing their veracity.

But not so the historical event which started it all—the supernatural Creation event. It is in a class by itself, intrinsically beyond the reach of scientific investigation. No amount of physical evidence will ever yield the conclusion that Creation happened. This event of history can only ever be apprehended by faith—by believing that God has told us the truth about it.


How much faith does this take? Given the overwhelming evidence verifying the Biblical historical narrative of the Flood, the Exodus, and so much else of Biblical history subsequent to Creation—evidence which has filled every issue of The Biblical Chronologist for 47 issues now—I suggest: not a whole lot more than the faith it takes to believe the sun will rise again tomorrow morning. ◇

Biblical Chronology 101
Guest Lecturer: Mark Aardsma

In parts I and II of this series I presented information about the history and culture of Ai before it was destroyed by Joshua. In this third and final part of the series I want to attempt a historical reconstruction of Ai's tragic end. The plot is supplied by the Bible in Joshua chapters 6, 7, and 8. The photographs of the scene are supplied by Judith Marquet-Krause's archaeological expedition. Speculative details are supplied by my imagination.

The Resurrection of Ai: Part III

The king of Ai took his seat in the grand room. He was eager to hear the latest news about the swarm of foreigners who were camped on the other side of the Jordan River. There had been news from various sources that these foreigners had produced quite a path of destruction behind them across the Jordan. He was well aware of what had happened to Egypt when they left there forty years previously. Most recently he'd heard that a couple of their spies had been seen in Jericho, but had somehow disappeared. It seemed they were intent on crossing the Jordan. He was getting concerned about the safety of his city.

As he waited for the messenger from Jericho to arrive, reports about the ongoing crop harvest were presented. But his thoughts drifted to a mental review of Ai's fortifications. They were impressive, no doubt about it. The massive walls had been built long before his time, but he had seen to it that they were skillfully maintained to a height of over fifteen feet. The few gates in the walls were securely constructed and well-guarded. Ai was built on a hill, giving it an intrinsic advantage over any adversary. Their gods and these walls had protected them for over 300 years. What did they have to be afraid of?

The breathless messenger was shown in and gave his news. The Jordan had magically run dry when the foreigners began to cross it, and 40,000 of them were equipped for battle and on the move in the plains near Jericho.

When the king heard the news he was relieved. Let Jericho fend for itself—at least his city wasn't under attack.


Over the next week the reports continued to arrive. The foreigners were acting strangely—marching around Jericho once a day. After nearly a week of that the bad news came—Jericho had fallen to the foreigners and was completely destroyed in a great massacre.

Then the king's worst fears began to come true. One of his lookouts thought he saw foreigners lurking around, probably spies. He sent his own spies to the foreigners' camp, and the report came back that attack appeared to be imminent.

That evening, after a day filled with preparations for battle, the king of Ai made his way through town to the temple.

The city was crowded with field hands and residents of the surrounding countryside who had come inside the walls for protection. Children played games in the crowded streets as mothers watched from doorways.

The king climbed the ramp to the temple entrance, walked through the thick smell of incense in the outer chamber, and into the altar room. The citizens of Ai watched nervously as a thin column of smoke rose from the temple. It made a faint silhouette in the western sky, still glowing with the sunset. They hoped their gods, their walls, and their men would protect them from the attack they knew was coming.

The watchmen saw nothing to disturb the peace that night, but the king didn't sleep. The next morning an army of about 3,000 could be seen marching toward the city. That was strange—40,000 men had marched on the plain at Jericho, and Ai was a city of 12,000. Why had they sent only 3,000 soldiers?

As the foreigners marched toward the city, the army inside waited in a hubbub of nervous excitement. The 3,000 foreigners continued their approach. The king and his army poured out of the gate into the plain before the city to meet them. Everyone knew battle was only minutes away.

As the battle was joined, confusion spread in the front ranks of the foreign soldiers. They were fleeing! The king ordered a full pursuit. Even his soldiers stationed inside the walls to guard the city streamed through the gate and down the hill on the heels of the desperately scrambling foreign soldiers. A few didn't scramble fast enough and were speared to death by the king's men. All over the city fear turned to pride and excitement. Their men, their walls, their gods, and their king had protected them once again.

That evening, after a day of celebrating, the king of Ai again made his way through town to the temple. Again the children stopped their games and the people watched as the sacrificial smoke rose against the western sky.


The unstoppable foreigners had been stopped. The king knew the significance of that, but he also knew that there were many more soldiers where those 3,000 had come from. It would only be a matter of time before they tried again.

Sure enough, just a few days later, the entire foreign army was on the move. They came up and camped north of Ai. Only a broad valley separated them from Ai.

It took nearly all day for the foreign army to move into position. As night fell the king attended the sacrificial ceremony he had attended so many times before, and the people of Ai saw the smoke rise as it always did. They knew that outside the walls the foreign army could see it too.


The next morning the king of Ai led his army out to meet the foreigners in battle. As the moment of battle drew near, the king noticed confusion in the foreigners' battle lines, just like before. They were fleeing again, and again the king ordered a full pursuit. All the men of Ai rushed to join in this second victory. The foreigners ran, and the men of Ai chased them, just like before.

As fear turned once again to familiar pride, the king turned to look at his city. His pride turned instantly to panic. Huge clouds of smoke were rising from the city—Ai was burning! He realized, too late, that part of the foreign army had been hiding in the ravine behind his city. He had been baited and ambushed. His city, which had sat on that hill much longer than anyone could remember, was going up in smoke.

Soon his whole army realized what was happening, and they started to panic. The king watched in shock as things went from bad to worse. The foreigners seized the moment of panic and turned on the men of Ai, killing them one after another. Then foreign hands grabbed him, and he was carried away.


That evening, as the sun set, the king's body swung lifeless from a tree. Columns of smoke still rose from the smoldering ruins of Ai. No children played in the streets, and no mothers watched from doorways. No men patrolled the walls, and no priests offered sacrifices in the temple. The men, the mothers, and the children were dead. The houses and the temple were ashes and stone rubble. The walls were broken through and useless now.

The king's body was removed from the tree and thrown down near the temple. As darkness fell swarms of victorious Israelite soldiers ran back and forth carrying stones which they threw onto a growing heap. Eventually the heap covered the king's body, the temple, and the thickest part of the wall.

And that was the end of Ai. The army of foreigners moved on to other battles, and the city sat in ruins with its heap of stones still marking the demise of its king.

The heap of stones sat undisturbed for 4,340 years—until Judith Marquet-Krause hired 100 men to move it so she could see what of archaeological interest might be found beneath it.

It took those 100 men one month of hard work to remove the heap of stones. But Judith was not disappointed. Underneath she found the ruins of an ancient temple, and a strongly fortified section of an ancient city wall.

Points of Conclusion

  • The Bible's story about Ai is a true story. The events it describes happened to real people in a real place. You can visit the scene of the battle and see excavated remains of the city of Ai in Israel today.

  • Skilled and dedicated archaeologists like Judith Marquet-Krause, as well as other scientists and scholars, have made a great wealth of factual information about history available. Such information can, and should, be used to illuminate our understanding of the Bible, and to strengthen and defend the historical reliability of the Bible.

  • God acted in judgment, and an entire city of real people—soldiers, fathers, mothers, and children—were mercilessly slaughtered. We ought to take Him, and His words, very seriously. ◇

The Biblical Chronologist is a bimonthly subscription newsletter about Biblical chronology. It is written and edited by Gerald E. Aardsma, a Ph.D. scientist (nuclear physics) with special background in radioisotopic dating methods such as radiocarbon. The Biblical Chronologist has a threefold purpose:

  1. to encourage, enrich, and strengthen the faith of conservative Christians through instruction in Biblical chronology,

  2. to foster informed, up-to-date, scholarly research in this vital field within the conservative Christian community, and

  3. to communicate current developments and discoveries in Biblical chronology in an easily understood manner.

An introductory packet containing three sample issues and a subscription order form is available for $9.95 US regardless of destination address. Send check or money order in US funds and request the "Intro Pack."

The Biblical Chronologist (ISSN 1081-762X) is published six times a year by Aardsma Research & Publishing, 412 Mulberry St., Loda, IL 60948-9651.
Web address: www.biblicalchronologist.org.

Copyright © 2002 by Aardsma Research & Publishing. Duplication or distribution in whole or in part by any means electronic or otherwise is strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher.

Footnotes

  1. ^  George D. Kilpatrick, "Theology," The Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 26 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1962), 519.

  2. ^  Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1971), 17.

  3. ^  See, for example: Gerald E. Aardsma, "A Unification of Pre-Flood Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 5.2 (March/April 1999): 1–18.

  4. ^  The fact that a created cat would necessarily possess many features in apparent contradiction to its real history was first brought to my attention several decades ago by a creationist book whose author and title I can no longer recall. The first to have treated this same basic observation with scientific thoroughness appears to have been the zoologist Philip Henry Gosse in his book, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, published in 1857.

  5. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "A Unification of Pre-Flood Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 5.2 (March/April 1999): 1–18.

  6. ^  Hebrews 11:3 says, "By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible" (NASB).


Volume 8, Number 6November/December 2002

The Origin and Antiquity of the Biblical Text

I do not think that there is in the Hebrew Bible written material that can be proven to be earlier than the ninth or eighth century [B.C.], except for vague memories, myths and folk tales.[1]
      – Israel Finkelstein (Biblical archaeologist)

My thesis in the present article contrasts sharply with the accepted viewpoint of many modern scholars regarding the origin and antiquity of the Biblical text. As the quote above illustrates, many modern scholars believe that the text of the Old Testament does not contain written material composed earlier than 1200 B.C., at the outside—Finkelstein (above) would lower this to 900 B.C. My thesis is that the text of the Old Testament contains historically accurate written material the origin of which dates back to at least 3500 B.C.

To Lay Christians

Before I begin to discuss how it is that I come to this view, I need to say a word about the whole subject of the composition and transmission of the Bible. In my experience, few lay Christians have studied the question of how we got our Bible. Some seem to work from a tacit assumption that God handed Adam a finished Bible on Day 6 of Creation Week. I do not wish to offend such brothers and sisters with the present article. My main purpose, as usual, is to defend the historical integrity of the Bible against unwarranted attack, not to challenge lay Christian views of its origin. But, as many lay Christians are likely to read this article, some groundwork is necessary at this point.

A little deliberate thought on the matter reveals that the Bible could not have been delivered by God fully composed. The Bible contains a great deal of historical narrative, and most of this historical narrative gives the impression of having been composed by contemporaries of the events described. For example, John writes in 1 John chapter 1 verses 1 and 3, "what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled… what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also". But if the Biblical historical narrative was composed by individuals who were contemporaries of the events described, then this historical narrative could not have been composed until after the events it describes had taken place. This leads immediately to the conclusion that there could have been no New Testament until after the birth of Christ. Similarly, there was no Biblical account of the Exodus prior to the Exodus, and no account of the Flood prior to the Flood.

The Bible has come to us through a process of composition which took place over many millennia. My view—normative to conservative Christianity—is that the events the Bible narrates were recorded by individuals who were contemporaries of those events, having access to first-hand knowledge of them—as we have just seen was the case with John.

This view does not exclude the possibility these first-hand reports were edited at a later date. For example, the book of Genesis, in which the description of the Flood is found, is generally credited by conservative scholars to Moses—indeed the Bible itself seems to allow no other possibility. Moses was born hundreds of years after the Flood. My view—normative to conservative Christian scholarship—is that Moses, under the inspiration of God, compiled and edited the Genesis account of the Flood, working from much earlier, written materials which had been originally composed by one or more eye-witnesses to the Flood event.

To this I would add that there seems significant evidence of a general updating of many of the place names, units of measure, and so forth of the Old Testament sometime in the first millennium before Christ. I have previously pointed out, for example, that "Ai" means "ruin", and that it is very unlikely the Canaanites called their city "Ruin". Rather, we may expect that it was the Israelites who, with the passage of many years, came to call the broken-down remains of this second city of the Conquest "the ruin"—"Ai". This is like the New King James Bible updating place names, units of measure, and so forth of the original King James to render it more comprehensible and less prone to misunderstanding by modern readers. It is important to be aware of the possibility of a general updating of the Old Testament in the first millennium before Christ because the evidence for this is frequently misconstrued by modern scholars as evidence for wholesale composition of much of the Old Testament in the first millennium before Christ. Because place names, units of measure, coinage … and even the meaning of words change with time, we may expect such updating to have been necessary probably on more than one occasion.

The Argument

The argument in defense of my thesis is really very simple. It is a personal argument, however, not shared by Bible scholars in general at the present time. My study of the Genesis Flood account, as a physicist, has given me a unique perspective on this ancient narrative. From this perspective it presently seems about as certain as a thing can be that the Biblical Flood narrative cannot be anything other than a first-hand, eye-witness record of the phenomenal events it describes. Since the date of the Flood is 3520±21 B.C., I find the conclusion inescapable that the Bible contains written material at least as old as 3500 B.C.

Eye-witness Details of the Flood

Figure 1: A hot gas jet from the impact crater propels the solid earth downwards. The oceans and inner core tend to stay behind because of inertia. (Not to scale; conceptual only.)

Much of my work as a scientist, since university days, has centered around Noah's Flood. A firm conviction has grown up and ever strengthened in me during these decades of study that nobody could possibly have concocted the Biblical Flood story. The fundamental reason for this is that the Flood event, as it is given in Genesis, is explicable on strictly scientific grounds, but the basic science which renders it explicable has only come to be known to mankind in the past century.

Figure 2: Most of the northern hemisphere winds up entirely under water, while ocean basins of the southern hemisphere run dry. (Not to scale; conceptual only.)

I have previously shown that the Flood can be explained scientifically as the result of a collision with earth, in the high northern latitudes, of a very high speed cosmic projectile.[2] Upon impact both projectile and target mass were ejected at very high velocity from the impact center back into space.[3] This, in turn, propelled the earth, altering slightly the inclination of its orbit about the sun. The acceleration of the earth, during this propulsion, displaced both the water of the oceans and the inner core of the earth northward, toward the impact center, because of their inertia. This displacement to the north of the water of the world oceans was what Noah experienced as the Flood.

It is possible today, based on what we know of the volume of water in the oceans and the size and distribution of the continental land masses, as well as the size and mass of the inner and outer cores of the earth, to calculate the depth of the water at any given point on the globe which would result from such an event. One finds that the water is deepest at the impact center and reduces monotonically away from the impact center.

Figure 3: Maximum Flood depth persists for roughly 150 days as the inner core is held pinned against the mantle by a rising plume of outer core fluid. The fluid was set in motion by the displacement of the inner core through it. (Scale diagram.)

The depth the water achieves at the impact center depends on how far the inner core of the earth moves toward the north. The displacement of the inner core toward the north produces a gravitational anomaly at the surface of the earth, which attracts and holds the water. As the inner core moves further toward the north, more and more water is attracted and held in the northern hemisphere. The displacement of the inner core and the depth of the water are rigorously coupled through Newton's Law of Gravitation.

This coupling is rather demanding—one cannot get just any depth of water for the Flood one pleases. Specifying the displacement of the inner core completely determines the depth of the Flood at every point on the globe.

Now it turns out that the maximum displacement of the inner core is, in fact, specified (i.e., pre-determined) by a physical constraint. The constraint is that the (solid) inner core of the earth cannot penetrate the (solid) mantle of the earth. The inner core of the earth can be displaced from its normal central position up through the liquid outer core (given sufficient energy), but further displacement is necessarily halted when the solid inner core meets the solid mantle. Thus there is a maximum possible displacement of the inner core, and this maximum displacement defines an absolute maximum limit on the depth the Flood could have attained at any location on the earth.

Now it further turns out that the Genesis narrative of the Flood records (somewhat inadvertently) the maximum depth of the Flood. It tells us that the water finally began to recede 150 days after the start of the Flood, and on this same day the ark came to rest in the mountains of the Ararat region. It is possible to deduce from the Biblical text which mountain in the Ararat region the ark landed on; I have previously shown this to be Mount Cilo.[4] The known altitude of the summit of this mountain today gives us what must be a very good approximation of the actual maximum depth of the Flood at that location on the globe.

Taking Iceland as the impact center, as now seems mandatory,[5] yields the remarkable result that the maximum depth of the Flood in the Ararat region which is demanded by Newton's Law of Gravitation and the known maximum possible displacement of the inner core, agrees, within calculation uncertainties of roughly ±10%, with the actual measured maximum depth of the Flood in the Ararat region based upon the landing place of the ark recorded in Genesis.

Historicity

Over five years ago, when I first discovered and announced that the Flood was explicable in terms of a cosmic projectile impact, I mentioned briefly the implication for Biblical historicity in the following words:[6]


It seems appropriate to pause for a moment here and reflect on just one thing. It now seems pretty clear that we have discovered that the Biblical Flood narrative is comprehensible in terms of displacement of the inner core of the earth. But what is most striking about this discovery is that it means that the existence of a solid inner core and a liquid outer core of the earth is embedded in and presupposed by the Biblical Flood narrative. Noah's observations cannot be explained apart from these concepts, while once they have been given it is possible to explain Noah's observations with mathematical precision. But these features of the interior of the earth have only been known to modern science for less than a century. Not even the most zealous Bible basher in academia would dare suggest that the Biblical Flood narrative originates any less, certainly, than two thousand years ago. If the Biblical narrative of the Flood is a myth, it is a mighty curious myth.

You will, no doubt, have noticed that I have understated my case. Not only must the existence of the inner and outer core of the earth be known to explain Noah's observations, but the fact that the earth is a sphere must be known, and the equation describing the force of gravity must be known, and Newton's Laws of motion must be known, and the volumes of water in the oceans of the world must be known, and the area of the continents must be known, and their relative distribution in the northern and southern hemispheres must be known, and their mean height above sea level must be known, and …. In fact, we have just seen that the very diameters of the inner and outer cores appear to be embedded in Noah's observations of the Flood.

Who, in the first millennium B.C., would have known all this science, so they could fabricate this tale, so wondrously, quantitatively explicable in the modern, scientific age?[7] Once we have come to understand the physical cause of the Flood, and then have come to see the close qualitative and quantitative correspondence which exists between the Biblical description of the Flood and what science reveals of cosmic projectile impacts, the idea that the Old Testament contains only "vague memories, myths and folk tales" prior to 1200 B.C. can no longer be taken seriously. It is obviously simply wrong.

A More Reasonable View

I could stop here, having explained my thesis and some of the evidence upon which it is built, but I would like to go one step further. The discipline of Biblical chronology has much more to offer on this topic of the antiquity of the text of the Old Testament. I would like to attempt a sketch of what presently seems to me to be a much more reasonable view of how we got our Bible.

The starting point of this view, as mentioned above, is the assumption that the events the Bible narrates were recorded by individuals who were contemporaries of those events and had access to first-hand knowledge of them. This is simply going along with what we are explicitly told was the case with John, for example, as noted above. It is validated by external evidence in many instances. I have given one example of this above, from the Flood narrative. Here is another example of the same sort, though less telling in the present context than that of the Flood.

"Pym"

Biblical archaeologist William Dever has pointed out that the Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 13:19–21 must have been composed reasonably contemporaneous with the events it describes (roughly 1050 B.C.) because the Hebrew word "pym" used in these verses (and only in these verses) refers to a balance weight (a fraction of a shekel, used when weighing out payment in silver) which went out of use and seems to have been forgotten after the seventh century B.C.[8] Not until recent times has the meaning of "pym" been rediscovered. Its meaning became clear when archaeologists found small weights inscribed with the Hebrew word "pym".

The King James translators, unable to assign a known meaning to "pym", guessed at it (incorrectly), supplying the translation "file". Thus, the King James translates these verses as follows:

Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears: But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock. Yet they had a file for the mattocks, and for the coulters, and for the forks, and for the axes, and to sharpen the goads.
The more modern NASB, taking advantage of current knowledge, translates them:
Now no blacksmith could be found in all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, "Lest the Hebrews make swords or spears." So all Israel went down to the Philistines, each to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, and his hoe. And the charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares, the mattocks, the forks, and the axes, and to fix the hoes.

Obviously, this passage could not have been composed many centuries later than the events it describes. It must have been composed while the meaning of "pym" was still known, that is, while these weights were still in use.

Great Antiquity

An immediate consequence of the premise that the events the Bible narrates were recorded by individuals who were contemporaries of those events and had access to first-hand knowledge of them is the inescapable conclusion that the Bible must contain written material of very great, unique antiquity. This follows because some of the events described in the Bible are of very great antiquity. The Flood, for example, happened five and a half thousand years ago, and Creation was supernaturally brought about more than another one thousand six hundred years before that. These are very ancient times. Absolutely no secular historical sources exist from such ancient times.

Oral Transmission

Because these are such ancient times we immediately encounter a problem. Archaeology reveals that the technology of writing is itself a human invention. The most ancient Biblical events substantially predate the invention of textual writing itself. We are thus forced to the conclusion that the most ancient historical narratives in the Old Testament cannot originally have been composed and preserved in written form.

As Tom Godfrey has previously discussed in The Biblical Chronologist, the earliest texts were written in Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets in Mesopotamia.[9] Conventional chronology for this region dates these earliest texts within a century or two of 3200 B.C. Biblical chronology suggests that the conventional chronology of this region for this remote period needs to be pushed back roughly 400 years.[10] Thus, the best estimate we can make at present of the date of the invention of written texts is 3600 B.C., with a margin for error of probably plus or minus two centuries.

Figure 4: Cuneiform tablet. [See J.N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (New York: Routledge, 1994), 57 for details and credits.]

Since the Flood happened 3520±21 B.C., it seems probable that the invention of textual writing was made only a century or two before the Flood. Thus, the Genesis Flood narrative may have been preserved in written form, in Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets, right from the start, but the earlier historical narrative in Genesis—Genesis chapters 1–5—must necessarily have been transmitted orally from generation to generation prior to its eventual transcription, probably within a few centuries of the Flood.

This deduction finds considerable support from the form of the Genesis narrative itself. Notice, for example, the changing terseness of the narrative. The first five chapters (Genesis 1–5) cover fifteen centuries of history. The next six chapters (Genesis 6–11) cover just five centuries. And the entire remainder of the book—thirty-nine chapters (Genesis 12–50)—cover somewhat less than three centuries.

I suggest that the practical reason the first fifteen centuries of the narrative are so very terse relative to the closing three centuries of the Genesis narrative is simply that it is a great deal more difficult to archive and transmit large quantities of information via memorization than it is to do so by writing—as we all know from personal experience.

Earliest Textually Composed History

Figure 5: A chronology of the composition of the Genesis historical narrative, and of the probable media used in composition and transmission of that narrative.

I would go on to suggest that the increased wordiness seen in Genesis 6–11 relative to Genesis 1–5 (roughly a factor of three) is not mere happenstance either. We have just seen that the invention of written texts only just predates the Flood. Genesis 6 begins the narrative of the Flood. I suggest that the Flood narrative is, in fact, the earliest historical narrative in the Bible to have been directly written down, without having first been preserved in oral form.

The nature of the Biblical Flood text supports this suggestion. It does not have the feel of epic poetry about it. Rather, with its carefully recorded calendar of events and observations throughout the year of the Flood, one feels they are reading a personal journal—a diary, a ship's log, and a science lab notebook together in one.

Change of Medium

To this I would add the further hypothesis that Genesis 6–11 is as terse as it is relative to the final thirty-nine chapters of Genesis because of the practical limitations imposed by transmission of writing on clay tablets. Clay tablets have the great advantages of being readily obtainable, extremely durable once they have been fired, and of the writing they contain being all but immutable. But they have the great disadvantage of being rather bulky. The number of words per unit of volume (or unit of mass) one can store on clay tablets is very much less than the number of words per unit volume (or mass) one can store on parchment or papyrus. I suggest that from Genesis 12 onward the first-hand recording of the Biblical historical narrative was no longer constrained to the medium of clay tablets, but rather began to make use of less bulky media, such as parchment. That this change of writing medium should happen beginning at Genesis 12, which records the move of Abraham from (initially) Ur in Mesopotamia, the homeland of the clay tablet, into Canaan, seems also not mere happenstance to me.

Facts of Oral Transmission

Now I must write a few words about oral transmission, to correct a common misapprehension in regard to it, before closing.

"The True Story"

The misapprehension is over the accuracy of information transmitted orally. Doesn't the hypothesis of oral transmission of the first five chapters of Genesis imply that the Creation account we have in Genesis 1, for example, must not be very reliable, after fifteen centuries of oral transmission? And how could one ever hope the detailed, lengthy, seemingly low-intrinsic-interest genealogical list of Genesis 5, with all of its numbers and names (so critically important to Biblical chronology), to be accurately transmitted orally from generation to generation?

Some objective light can be shed on such questions by making use of data gathered on the actual practice of oral transmission in preliterate cultures in the modern world. What one finds from such studies, in fact, is that a very high premium is placed on accurate oral transmission—on relaying "the true story"—as the following quotes illustrate.

The ideal is to sing correctly, not only as you heard it, but as it happened:

[bard/singer]
… by Allah, I would sing it just as I heard it, whatever was worth while; what's the good to change or to add. No sir.

[scholar/interviewer]
Why isn't it good?

[bard/singer]
It just isn't good to sing about what didn't happen, but one should sing it exactly as it happened.

… the strong insistence on correctness originates in the interest in the true story [emphasis in original]; the song is considered primarily as a vehicle of information on events in the past.[11]

All the odds are against creativity, even if the scholars [conducting the interviews] are for it. The singers are full of pride and self-respect, but they do not claim any kind of originality, not even in details; on the contrary, they categorically label any change as a mistake. …

As a rule the singers know from whom they learnt any given song, and they never claim to have made the songs themselves. The ideal of originality is non-existent; it would clash with the dominant ideal of the true story. The six singers are unanimous in repudiating originality, and this seems to have been general in Parry and Lord's experience.[12]

He [J. B. Hainsworth] points out that Odysseus' praise of Demodocus [in the ancient Greek epic, Odyssey] is very close in meaning to the Yugoslavian bards' ideal of singing "just as it happened" without contaminating things.[13]

Both scenes are expressive of how dominant is the ideal of the true story in the oral epic poet's understanding of the art.[14]

As in the case of Parry's Serbian singers, the quality that is explicitly praised is the true story [emphasis in original].[15]

We obviously must not think of ancient oral transmission as something akin to the modern gossip-line. Far from it. Highest value was placed on transmitting "the true story".

Catalogs

But what about the catalog of names and numbers found in Genesis 5—this difficult ten-generation genealogy? What bard would wish to sing such a low-drama mass of fact? And, with the audience presumably bored and half asleep, who would ever have noticed whether he got it right?

Catalogs of information are a common and important part of orally transmitted histories. Indeed, the presence of this catalog in Genesis 5 does much to strengthen the case for oral transmission of the first five chapters of Genesis of which it is an integral part. This list of names and ages is precisely the sort of thing one finds in orally transmitted histories. And we find, much to our surprise, that rather than being bored by such catalogs, preliterate audiences are enthralled with them.

A catalog with its compact mass of fact is the most admired part of a singer's repertoire, the part that is most demanding of memory and control of the material. It is a tour de force, and the audience react to it as such.[16]

G. Jachmann thought the catalog to be the poorest, latest part of Homer. On the contrary, to an aural audience it would be the most impressive part, demonstrating the supreme technique of the singer, and giving information of the highest importance.[17]

Conclusion

The assertion that there is not "in the Hebrew Bible written material that can be proven to be earlier than the ninth or eighth century [B.C.], except for vague memories, myths and folk tales" is, I suggest, simply wrong. The sum total of the evidence emanating from present-day work in the field of Biblical chronology leads to the conclusion that the Bible preserves text which is very nearly as old as the invention of textual writing itself. The earliest Biblical text dates back to at least 3500 B.C. Beyond this the Bible appears to preserve an orally transmitted historical record stretching back to the dawn of Creation, somewhat prior to 5000 B.C. ◇


Readers Write


Dear Dr. Aardsma,

My main reason for writing this letter is to comment on your lead article in the latest BC issue. …

We can agree that God can create a one-year-old cat, a twenty-year-old cat, a twenty-hour-old kitten, or whatever other age He prefers. We can also agree that a statement of the true virtual age of such a cat can be reconciled with a claim that the created cat came into existence much more recently than its virtual age would suggest. Therefore, we can also agree that the virtual age of the earth really cannot contradict our claim that it was created only a few thousand years ago.

The point on which we apparently disagree is your claim, "… modern science finds that the data from all fields shows that all living things, including humans, have come about naturalistically by a process of evolution".[18] I believe your created cat analogy can easily be extended to explain my reason for disagreeing.

Suppose we have a contest where people are challenged to guess the age of the created cat. We want some exact figure, say a number of days, so this contest would be a bit like the ones where you guess the number of beans in a jar. "At least a year old"[19] would not be exact enough. Now further suppose that many people participate [in this contest], from a wide range of backgrounds. One is a veterinarian who wrote a book on the life cycle of cats. Another is a kid growing up in a city environment without ever having seen any animals, except for an occasional bird flying overhead, so this created cat is the first cat he has ever seen. A host of other contestants fall between them on the spectrum of cat knowledge. I think we can already agree to expect a good scatter of virtual age estimates, with the one from the veterinarian being much closer to the age God determined than the estimate from the city boy, barring a lucky guess.

So what does this have to do with your position? "Neither the Bible nor science is telling a lie. Both descriptions are valid in their proper context and each needs to be accepted in its proper context without denigrating the other, just as in our created cat example".[20] "If a veterinarian examines our created cat, and informs us the cat is over a year old, will they [Christians who do not trust radiometric dating – T.G.] also say that the vet's method of estimating the age of cats is unreliable?"[21] To extend your thought experiment, let's ask ourselves which entry in the cat age guessing contest is most analogous to the position taken by "science" on the age of the earth.

I would like to suggest that your comparing the position of science to the vet's entry puts it in a far better light than it deserves, and even comparing it to the city boy's entry would be much too generous, since not even he would enter an estimate millions of times his own age. Science has never watched a planet age for billions of years, and no one has ever witnessed abiogenesis where a naturalistic process of evolution produces life all by itself. A veterinarian should know quite a bit about cat development through personal observation, so yes, his estimate should be reliable, but the same cannot be said for the age estimates of evolutionists who pretend to know how long ago the earth and life forms on it came into existence.

I would rather say that "modern science" (as presented by evolutionists) only claims and hopes—not "finds"—that all fields show that all living things, including humans, appeared naturalistically by a process of evolution. Some of its pontifications can easily be recognized as quite speculative and completely unworthy of our trust, even without any appeal to the notion that they must be wrong because they contradict the Bible. Modern science might be able to find physical evidence for evolution during many billions of years of existence, but I believe a good case has yet to be built for this view, even though it is quite politically correct in our day. Even if such a case could be built, it cannot really contradict the Biblical teaching about a young earth, as you pointed out, but in the meantime, we have no reason to jump credulously to the conclusion that evolution is a fact, even just in virtual history. What reason do we have to believe this story? The truth matters.

Your statement painted the controversy with a broad brush, and so did my reply. In reality, there are degrees of reliability among the pronouncements coming from evolutionists. When they talk about what happened ten thousand years ago, they may be on much firmer ground than when they talk about what happened ten billion years ago. I think we can suspect they may finally be onto something when we can rest assured that their presuppositions are correct.

Consider the issue of transitional forms. If a natural process of evolution should be accepted as an established fact of virtual history, then there ought to be thousands of nice series of life forms in the fossil record showing how one kind of plant or animal evolved into a quite different kind, with series that also branch nicely from a primitive root to form a family tree. Ask an evolutionist to show you one, and you will get either a series with quite different forms at the endpoints but huge gaps in between, or else you will get a nicely graded series with tiny gaps but endpoints that are very closely related, say a clam with one shape or size at one end, and a clam with another shape or size at the other. Where are the convincing series that their theory predicts? Someone may charge that I am just too skeptical, but I am not buying this story. The evolutionists may not exactly be lying, but I have concluded that they are either ignoring the creationist arguments, fooling themselves, or perhaps letting themselves be blinded by academic or professional peer pressure.


Thomas James Godfrey
Blacksburg, VA


Dear Tom,

Your second paragraph explains that you are in agreement with most of my article, so we are only discussing minor potential differences here, not a major disagreement over the whole concept of virtual history.

The points of minor potential difference are your feeling that I have given 1. radiometric dating, and 2. evolution more credit than they deserve. (You have tended to mix these two together in your comments. I would encourage you to separate them out one from another. They are, in fact, two separate areas of science, carried out by scientists with different backgrounds and different interests. In a university setting, radiometric dating is likely to be found going on in the geophysics department, where rocks and radioactive decay are the items of interest, while research into biological evolution is likely to be found going on in the biology department.)

We have a genuine difference of opinion in regard to the credit due to radiometric dating. You have argued that scientists' lack of first-hand observational knowledge of how planets develop with time reduces the reliability of their conclusions regarding the age of planets nearly to zero. I can find no valid epistemological basis for this view. Does the fact that no judge ever has first-hand observational knowledge of the murder cases he judges reduce the reliability of his conclusions regarding these murder cases nearly to zero?


I think the second potential difference, over my view of the validity of evolution, is more perceived than real—I think you have misunderstood the sentences from my article you have taken exception to.

But before I get into this let me discuss one bit of semantics from your letter. This is from the sentence, "Even if such a case [for evolution during many billions of years] could be built, it cannot really contradict the Biblical teaching about a young earth, as you pointed out, …".

I would not like readers to go away supposing that I believe the Bible teaches a young earth. The Bible teaches no such thing. The Bible teaches a recently created earth (if we may take the liberty of calling something which happened over seven thousand years ago 'recent'), and this is not the same thing as a young earth, by any means. Unfortunately, "young earth" and "recent creation" have often been used as synonyms in creationist literature, and I suspect that this habit of imprecise usage is the cause of the appearance of "young earth" in your letter.

To be perfectly clear, my position is that the Bible teaches the earth, and the universe of which it is a part, were created a little over seven thousand years ago. The Bible does not teach that the earth or the universe appeared "young" when newly created. The Bible does not address the issue of the apparent age of the earth or the universe following Creation. The Bible does teach that Adam and Eve were not young (i.e., babies, or perhaps better, newly fertilized single cells) when they were created, both by the use of the words "man" and "woman" in reference to them, and by the husband-wife relationship which existed between these first two humans from the beginning. So there is good Biblical reason to be skeptical of the extra-Biblical assumption that the earth was young when it was created.

Judging soberly, by all available scientific data bearing on the question of the age of the earth and universe, we are living on an old earth in a very old universe. (The use of the word "old" in this context is not meant to imply "about to expire" but only the idea of age measured in billions of years.) Putting what the Bible actually teaches together with what we may deduce from overwhelmingly abundant scientific data leads to the conclusion that we are living on an old earth which was only recently created.

Thus, my position is that we are living on an old earth which is part of a very old universe which was created in its entirety by God out of nothing only a little over seven thousand years ago. This should properly be called the "recent creation" position; it should not be confused with the "young earth" position which teaches that the earth (and universe) should appear to be just thousands of years old today. I know of neither Biblical nor scientific data in support of the "young earth" doctrine, despite decades of deliberate, personal investigation into the matter, so I do not wish to seem an adherent or proponent of this doctrine.


The Credit Due Evolution

Now let me tackle your concern regarding evolution. You feel my statement, "… modern science finds that the data from all fields shows that all living things, including humans, have come about naturalistically by a process of evolution", gives evolution too much credit—or, perhaps, too much credence. I think you have misunderstood me. I meant this as a factual summary of where science presently is at in its collective thinking—of what you will find if you open any standard college science textbook these days on the subject of human origins—not as a declaration of known truth emanating from science. I have previously stated my position on the very points you have raised in regard to evolution, and my position has not changed. Here is what I have previously said, with some bolding to highlight the most pertinent statements in the present context:[22]


Third and final, Christians need to stop squandering time and energy deriding evolution. The Bible says evolution didn't happen, not that it couldn't happen. The Bible says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"[23], not "In the beginning God evolved the heavens and the earth". So the fact that we got here by supernatural Creation is plain and settled. But evolution is still a perfectly legitimate scientific hypothesis of virtual history in proleptic time. Now please note that I did not say amoeba to man evolution is what virtual history shows. In point of fact I seriously doubt that amoeba to man evolution is what virtual history actually shows. I am trying to convey that the truly fascinating question now is what it is that virtual history really does show, in sharp contrast to the purely negative exercise of trying to prove that the data of virtual history do not show evolution.

The linchpin of evolution has been the belief that Biblical chronology and Biblical history have been falsified. That is, the linchpin of evolution has been the belief that supernatural Creation has been shown to be false. This has seemed to leave naturalism in possession of the entire playing field. As long as naturalism has had possession of the entire field, evolution has necessarily been the only game allowed. But we now understand that Biblical chronology and Biblical history have not been falsified. The linchpin of evolution has, in fact (whether any evolutionists ever admit it or not), been pulled. That being the case, Christians need to get involved in the exploration of virtual history in a positive way, formulating and testing other hypotheses of organic relationships in virtual history. They are the right ones to do this work; they are the ones whose eyes are now wide open.

Real history, the Bible informs us, is a mixture of natural and supernatural events. It would, therefore, not be surprising to find that virtual history was also such a mixture. Perhaps this is the true lesson to be learned from the systematic absence of transitional forms between fossil kinds. Perhaps this is the true lesson to be learned from the complete failure of modern science to demonstrate a naturalistic origin of the living cell. The field is wide open. It is time to stop the negative exercise of beating up on evolution. It is time for the positive exercise of finding out the truth about virtual history to begin.

Well, I still feel as strongly about all of this as I did when I first wrote these words over three years ago. So you can see that I am not calling evolution a fact, by any means.

You are concerned about my statements: "Neither the Bible nor science is telling a lie. Both descriptions are valid in their proper context and each needs to be accepted in its proper context without denigrating the other, just as in our created cat example".

Please note the words "in their proper context" and "in its proper context" in these sentences. The context of the idea of evolution is not one of revealed truth from God. Rather the theory of evolution exists in a context of the fallible human enterprise we call science. I was trying, by these statements you are concerned about, to make the point that the reason scientists don't see supernatural creation seven thousand years ago when they peer into virtual history is not because they are lying about what they are seeing in virtual history. And the reason the Bible fails entirely to mention one hundred million year old dinosaur bones is not because the Bible is lying about the history of the earth. When I say that science is not telling a lie about evolution I do not mean it has hit upon the true theory of origins in virtual history; I mean it is advancing a valid attempt at a theory of origins in virtual history. The fact that we may find this theory inadequate in several ways relative to the data it purports to explain does not mean that those who favor the theory of evolution are evil liars. It means that we have a job to do—we need to get on with the job of improving on their inadequate theory.

Many Christians have been fighting evolution, as if it were the Devil himself, for over 100 years now. I feel your letter evidences this (extra-Biblical) tradition to some degree.

Evolution is not the Devil. I will not deny that the Devil has used the theory of evolution to destroy or neutralize the faith of many. But so he uses many things. Evolution is a scientific theory of virtual history.

The history of science reveals many scientific theories which, though they held sway for some period of time, were eventually shown to be wrong or incomplete. This is very likely to be the ultimate fate of molecules-to-man evolutionary theory as well. I am eager to see this fate overtake molecules-to-man evolution theory. But I am perfectly sure that no amount of beating up on evolution or evolutionists will bring this fate about. This fate will only come about as better explanations of the data from virtual history, with greater predictive power, are proposed. And this will only come about when talented men and women of science cease the negative exercise of disparaging one view of origins while championing another, and get on with the job of synthesizing the two into a more accurate whole.

Evolution theory supplanted the old-style creationism theory because old-style creationism was shown to be severely incomplete. Old-style creationism was oblivious of virtual history. For example, old-style creationism was taken by surprise by fossil dinosaur bones. When had these creatures lived and died? Science answered unequivocally: long, long before the Biblical date of Creation. This left old-style creationists in dismay. A furious activity of patching and stretching the old theory followed: perhaps the Biblical days of creation were each eons of time in reality; or perhaps there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2; or perhaps science has misjudged the date of these fossils by a factor of twenty or thirty thousand(!), … And a furious activity of criticizing anything and everything about evolutionary theory grew up, until today it has become a tradition—a sacred right of fellowship in some circles.

But all of this criticism of evolution has done nothing to solve the inadequacies of old-style creationism—and never will! As C. S. Lewis put it in his preface to The Great Divorce, "A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on".[24] A vast flood of virtual history data has poured in over the decades—from 100 million years worth of radioactive decay in supposedly (according to Institute for Creation Research) post-Flood rocks,[25] to light from galaxies billions of light-years from earth.[26] And old-style creationism—with its misplaced devotion to the young earth doctrine, canonized misconception of the Flood, and blindness to virtual history—still has no scientifically defensible place to put any of these data.

It was inevitable that evolution would supplant old-style creationism under these circumstances. No scientific theory can withstand such a barrage of data, all fundamentally inexplicable within its established framework. And no amount of criticism of evolution or evolutionists will ever restore old-style creationism to ascendency again. Old-style creationism gives "a wrong sum".

Creation with virtual history shows how the "wrong sum can be put right". It reveals that evolution and old-style creationism are not contradictory theories about reality. Rather, they are complementary theories about reality. Evolution, we believe, has some serious inadequacies. But let us be fair and admit that old-style creationism has some pretty serious inadequacies too. Neither of these theories appears able to explain all available data by itself. But their unification—achieved in the theory of creation with virtual history—preserves all that is of value in both of these old theories, and offers new potential for moving far beyond either of these old theories to yet better explanations.

The old sum was wrong. We have gone back and found the error. Let us move forward with the task of working the sum afresh.


Gerald E. Aardsma, Ph.D.
Loda, IL


Dear Dr. Aardsma,

Am I to assume from your September/October 2002 issue of The Biblical Chronologist that you are saying that there is no examinable scientific difference between a cat that has been created five seconds ago and one that has grown up in the cold, cruel world for one year? Could we not examine its stomach to see if there is the remains of a mouse therein, or some other such test of bodily functions?


Mark Dagley
New Salem, ND


Dear Mark,

I once mentioned, in a seminar I was teaching, the idea that God could have created the world, with everything in it just as it now is, only ten seconds ago. I was trying to emphasize that He is able—big enough—to do such a thing.

One member of my audience went home and shared this idea with his nine- or ten-year-old daughter. Her response was an immediate, "No way—it couldn't have gotten this bad that fast."

Your question expresses the same basic thought. The idea behind it is that God would create all things good. Since the present state of this "cold, cruel world" can hardly be called good, it seems we should be able to tell the difference between things which have been newly created by God and those which have been around for a length of time.

I am in total harmony with the theological viewpoint which underlies this concern. That is, I accept the Biblical teaching that God created the world good, and that it has only come to its present state as a result of a historic Fall into sin by two historic representatives of mankind, Adam and Eve.

My created-cat thought experiment was only designed to help us recognize the essential nature of creation-type miracles—that they necessarily give rise to virtual histories. It left the issue of the Fall and its consequences aside. Your letter effectively asks for further clarification of the effects of the Fall and subsequent Curse.

I dealt with the Fall and Curse, in relation to virtual history, in my initial presentation of the idea of virtual history.[27] The essential point I tried to make was that the virtual history of the original creation would necessarily have been good, just as the original creation was good. Thus, originally created cats would not have had mice in their stomachs. But we don't get to see the virtual history of the original creation when we study the data of virtual history today. The Fall resulted in a Curse over the entire creation, subjecting the creation to futility, as Romans 8:20 teaches us. The Curse necessarily encompassed virtual history as well, subjecting it also to futility.

We must regard the Curse, then, as a creation-type miracle operative upon the entire cosmos. And in consequence of this, the virtual history of proleptic time which we now see must be regarded as an artifact of the Curse, not of Creation.[28]

So, to put my answer to your question in the simplest terms I know how, we fully expect that the cats God created on Day 6 of Creation Week had no remains of mice in their stomachs. But there is no reason why these same cats, emerging from the Curse subsequent to the Fall, should not have had remains of mice in their stomachs—just as Adam's garden emerged from the Curse with thorns and thistles growing in it. Since it is only these later cats that we can ever hope to learn anything about from the data of virtual history (from fossils of ancient cats, for example)—the (good) virtual history of the original creation having been displaced by the (futile) virtual history of the Fall and Curse—there is, it appears, no measurement science can make today to distinguish one of these originally created cats from any other cat in the fallen world today.


Gerald E. Aardsma, Ph.D.
Loda, IL


P.S. I have been teaching my own children, toddler through young adult in age, about creation with virtual history since I first came to understand it myself. I want them to grow up with a properly integrated view of the Bible and science—a view which disparages neither the Bible nor science, and which is able to handle the essential data from both the Bible and science with confidence and ease. And I want them to be equipped with a defense of their faith which is credible and functional in the modern world.

I have observed that my children have no difficulty catching on to the idea of creation with virtual history. They have little trouble understanding and accepting, for example, that dinosaurs are creatures of virtual history only, having never had any role in real history at all. This leads me to believe that there is nothing really difficult about the idea of creation with virtual history. Whatever difficulties we adults may experience trying to grasp this idea evidently spring from a lifetime of miseducation, not from any intrinsic abstruseness. (I am reminded of the terrible difficulty everybody had with the idea that the earth went about the sun, rather than the sun about the earth, back at the time of Copernicus; and of the great theological difficulties some had with the idea that there should be craters on the moon back at the time of Galileo.)

Recently my seventeen-year-old, home-schooled daughter, Laura-Lee, was required by her teacher (my wife) to write a brief essay on virtual history. Here is what she wrote.

Virtual history is what is found when one researches a created object. Real history, on the other hand, is the history of what really happened to the created object.

Let me use an example to clarify this theory. There is a magician, dwelling high in the mountains, and he decides to create a town for the sake of his own amusement. Down in the little valley he creates a small town, bustling with energy and productivity. This town would be the essence of virtual history. The children walking to school would look to be children just like any other children—children that had been born and lived for several years. The teachers in the classroom would teach just as though they had been through years of training. Men would hop in their cars—cars that looked as though they had been driven for years—and go to work at companies that would seem to have taken decades to grow to that size. The town itself would look like the work of generations. In fact, the old men sitting in the general store playing checkers are even now spinning yarns of the town back in the golden years.

How could the children be walking to school, teachers be teaching, men be working, and yarns be being spun if it was all just created a few seconds before by the magician on the mountain? What most people fail to realize is that there was no mention of the magician creating the town new and fresh. He wanted the town, and he didn't want to have to go to all the work to build it up from the ground. He wanted it now, and he wanted it complete and whole. And so he made it that way, and by making it that way he created it with a virtual history—a history that appeared to be what had happened, but wasn't what had happened at all. And nobody but the magician on the mountain will know how the town really got there no matter how much they study the history of the town in the valley.

Would historians be in the wrong if their history of the town went back hundreds of years, or would the magician be mistaken to say that it had only been there for a matter of seconds? After all, you can't have two different answers to the same question… or can you? ◇

Research in Progress

Research at present is entirely devoted to solving the mystery of why human life spans declined by hundreds of years following the Flood. This problem has absorbed my attention more or less completely nearly every waking moment for the past three years.

I have published in previous issues all of the groundwork I am free to publish on this topic.[29] In the cover letter sent out with the last issue I explained:

I have very much more that I am longing to share with you on this research topic, but I have reached a stage where it is difficult to tell more without telling all, and I am reluctant to tell all before I am quite certain I am right about the cause of aging and have had opportunity to apply for appropriate patents, necessary to the maintenance and progress of this unique "tent-making" ministry. This may take some months yet—I beg your patience and covet your prayers in the meantime.

This has placed me in a bit of a dilemma for several months now. The Biblical Chronologist exists to archive and publish current research in the field of Biblical chronology. Since, as best I can tell, I am the only research scientist in the world at present who is making anything like a full time effort in this vital field, The Biblical Chronologist has in the past necessarily drawn the great majority of its articles from my personal research. But now, for the first time, I have come to a place where I need to delay further publication of my research findings. My dilemma has been to determine what, then, is there which I can communicate to my friends and readers in The Biblical Chronologist.

There are, I feel, a very large number of interesting and informative articles which could be researched and written in this field at present. But I must say straight out that I do not feel good in my conscience about setting aside the longevity research for even a moment to work on other topics, no matter how intrinsically good they may be. If a medical researcher thought he was on the verge of discovering a cure for cancer, would it be morally right for him to set his cancer research aside for a time to pursue other interests, while thousands were dying of cancer every day? If you have followed my articles on aging to the present time you will understand that discovery of the cure of aging is of much broader humanitarian concern even than a cure for cancer.

Accordingly, I have determined to suspend publication of The Biblical Chronologist for one year—to publish no issues in 2003. I plan to resume publication on the normal schedule in 2004. I am hoping this will give me enough time to bring the longevity research to a definite conclusion. ◇

The Biblical Chronologist is a bimonthly subscription newsletter about Biblical chronology. It is written and edited by Gerald E. Aardsma, a Ph.D. scientist (nuclear physics) with special background in radioisotopic dating methods such as radiocarbon. The Biblical Chronologist has a threefold purpose:

  1. to encourage, enrich, and strengthen the faith of conservative Christians through instruction in Biblical chronology,

  2. to foster informed, up-to-date, scholarly research in this vital field within the conservative Christian community, and

  3. to communicate current developments and discoveries in Biblical chronology in an easily understood manner.

An introductory packet containing three sample issues and a subscription order form is available for $9.95 US regardless of destination address. Send check or money order in US funds and request the "Intro Pack."

The Biblical Chronologist (ISSN 1081-762X) is published six times a year by Aardsma Research & Publishing, 412 Mulberry St., Loda, IL 60948-9651.
Web address: www.biblicalchronologist.org.

Copyright © 2002 by Aardsma Research & Publishing. Duplication or distribution in whole or in part by any means electronic or otherwise is strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher.

Footnotes

  1. ^  Hershel Shanks, "A "Centrist" at the Center of Controversy," Biblical Archaeology Review 28.6 (November/December 2002): 44.

  2. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Noah's Flood," The Biblical Chronologist 3.5 (September/October 1997): 1–14.

  3. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Space Rock Impacts and Noah's Flood," The Biblical Chronologist 4.2 (March/April 1998): 1–11.

  4. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Ark on Ararat?" The Biblical Chronologist 3.2 (March/April 1997): 1–12.

  5. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Opening Minutes of Noah's Flood at Céide Fields, Ireland," The Biblical Chronologist 5.6 (November/December 1999): 7–10.

  6. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Noah's Flood," The Biblical Chronologist 3.5 (September/October 1997): 13.

  7. ^  My more recent work on the cause of reduced life spans following the Flood has uncovered further telling evidence of this same sort. I am not free to share the details of what I know in this regard at this time, but I hope to do so in the not too distant future.

  8. ^  Hershel Shanks, "Is the Bible Right After All?" Biblical Archaeology Review 22.5 (September/October 1996): 34–36.

  9. ^  Thomas James Godfrey, "Earliest Writing Confirms Missing Millennium," The Biblical Chronologist 7.6 (November/December 2001): 1–6.

  10. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "Toward Unification of Pre-Flood Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 4.4 (July/August 1998): 7.

  11. ^  Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1980), 65–66.

  12. ^  Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1980), 68.

  13. ^  Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1980), 70.

  14. ^  Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1980), 71.

  15. ^  Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1980), 72.

  16. ^  Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1980), 74.

  17. ^  Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1980), 79.

  18. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Age of the Earth, Virtual History, and Hebrews 11:3," The Biblical Chronologist 8.5 (September/October 2002): 2.

  19. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Age of the Earth, Virtual History, and Hebrews 11:3," The Biblical Chronologist 8.5 (September/October 2002): 1.

  20. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Age of the Earth, Virtual History, and Hebrews 11:3," The Biblical Chronologist 8.5 (September/October 2002): 2

  21. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Age of the Earth, Virtual History, and Hebrews 11:3," The Biblical Chronologist 8.5 (September/October 2002): 3

  22. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "A Unification of Pre-Flood Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 5.2 (March/April 1999): 17–18.

  23. ^  Genesis 1:1.

  24. ^  C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co., 1946, Fontana Books, 14th impression June 1983), 8.

  25. ^  Andrew A. Snelling, "Radiohalos—Significant and Exciting Research Results," Impact 353 (November 2002).

  26. ^  Richard Niessen, "Starlight and the Age of the Universe," Impact 121 (July 1983).

  27. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "A Unification of Pre-Flood Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 5.2 (March/April 1999): 1–18.

  28. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "A Unification of Pre-Flood Chronology," The Biblical Chronologist 5.2 (March/April 1999): 11.

  29. ^  Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part I," The Biblical Chronologist 7.2 (March/April 2001): 1–6; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part II," The Biblical Chronologist 7.4 (July/August 2001): 1–7; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part III," The Biblical Chronologist 7.5 (September/October 2001): 1–5; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part IV," The Biblical Chronologist 8.1 (January/February 2002): 1–8; Gerald E. Aardsma, "The Cause of Reduced Post-Flood Life Spans – Part V," The Biblical Chronologist 8.3 (May/June 2002): 1–4.

 
 
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