Abraham was a Descendant of Nimrod

 

The diagram shows another example of the cousin bride's naming prerogative, a distinctive feature of the early Hebrew marriage and ascendancy pattern. Nimrod's Mesopotamian wife was a cousin and a princess. She named their firstborn son Asshur after her father. 

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

The so-called “begats” are king lists that predate the Sumerian King Lists by at least 1500 years. To gain a clearer understanding of the influence and authority of these early Hebrew rulers we must consider Genesis chapter 10. Here we are told that Nimrod was a son of Kush, a Hebrew ruler in the Nile region. That is where the oldest known site of Hebrew worship was located at Nekhen.

Nimrod became a high-ranking Hebrew official in Sumer and later in Mesopotamia. He is known for his expansive building projects in Shinar, a region of independent city-states as early as 4100 B.C. Eridu (Eredo) was the earliest known city in Sumeria. The Sumerian King Lists describes Eridu as the “city of the first kings”, stating, “After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu”.

Later Nimrod began building projects in Northern Mesopotamia which is referred to as “Assyria”. Genesis 10:11 states that Nimrod went into the territory of Asshur or Assyria. The words Asshur and Assyria are the same in Hebrew. Asshur the Younger had a brother named Arpachshad. Among Arpachshad’s descendants are Eber, Peleg, Joktan, Nahor, Terah, and Abraham (Gen. 11:10-33).

This diagram shows another example of the cousin bride's naming prerogative. Lamech the Elder's daughter Naamah named her firstborn son Lamech after her father. She married her patrilineal cousin Methuselah. 

Related reading: Nimrod's Mesopotamian Wife; Why Nekhen is Anthropologically Significant; Cousin Brides Among the Hebrew; The Cousin Bride's Naming Prerogative

An Anthropologist Looks at Genesis 11

Alice C. Linsley

In this series we have tracked the eastward movement of the early Hebrew out of Africa and demonstrated that the themes and customs found in Genesis chapters 1-11 are consistent with what is known about the early populations of the Green Sahara, the Nile Valley, and Canaan. 

Genesis 11:2 states that some of Abraham's ancestors migrated from the east to the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Clearly, the early Hebrew were widely dispersed before Abraham's time. However, we first meet Abraham in Mesopotamia because that is where his Kushite ancestor Nimrod established his kingdom.

Chapter 11 provides a transition to the subsequent focus on Abraham the Hebrew who left Mesopotamia for the land of Canaan. He came from the east and eventually established himself in a territory that extended between Hebron to Beersheba.

Genesis 11:10-32 provides a list of some of the Hebrew ruler-priests who descended from both Shem and Ham, though only Shem is mentioned in Genesis 11:10. The lines of Ham and Shem intermarried as did their ancestral lines of Cain and Seth. Though Asshur is not named in Genesis 11, he is listed as a son of Shem in Genesis 10:21. The diagram shows how Abraham is a descendant of both Ham and Shem. 

Note that there are two named Asshur: Asshur the Elder and Asshur the Younger. Here we have further evidence of the cousin bride’s naming prerogative. The pattern is evident also in the naming of Terah's son Nahor after his maternal grandfather, Nahor the Elder. Some of the descendants of Nahor the Younger are listed in Genesis 22:20-24.

Nahor the Younger ruled over Terah's territory in Mesopotamia after Terah died in Harran. Abraham became a sent-away son whose marriage to Keturah of the royal house of Sheba helped him to become a ruler in ancient Edom.

Linguistic diversity is expressed in the different names for the High God and His Son.

After the flood, God resorts to scattering humans by confusing their languages, as if by magic. Suddenly, there are many languages and the words that once were understood by all are now incomprehensible to many.

The focus on the tower in Shinar, presumably a ziggurat (Akkadian: zaqâru, "to rise high") indicates a Neo-Babylonian source. The principal ziggurat of Babylon was called “En-temen-An-ki” which means "Royal foundation of [the High God] An on earth". Among the Hebrew of Mesopotamia, God Father was called Ani/Anu and his son was Enki, meaning “Lord over the earth.” Among the Nilotic Hebrew God Father was called Ra and his son was called Horus from the ancient Egyptian HR, meaning "Most High One". Hebrew royal priests were associated with the prestigious temples of both Ani/Ra and Enki/Horus. The Hebrew believed in God Father and God Son and they were devotees of Hathor, the mother of Horus.

Explanation of Linguistic Diversity

Genesis 10 attempts to explain ethnic diversity and the dispersion of ancient populations. Genesis 11 offers an explanation of the diversity of languages that emerged from a common earlier language (Gen. 11:1). Though this account is far from scientific, linguists recognize that many of the populations named in Genesis 10 shared common consonant roots (radicals).

The great civilizations and peoples of the ancient world reflect advancements in technology, astronomy, architecture, and warfare. Written and spoken communication between the peoples facilitated trade and the exchange of ideas. Royal scribes were versed in multiple scripts (sipru) and Akkadian cuneiform was in use throughout the Ancient Near East. 

Akkadian, the oldest known Semitic language, appears to be a linguistic bridge between some of the older Afroasiatic languages and the Indo-European languages.

The Indian scholar Malati J. Shendge has concluded that the language of the Harappans of the Indus Valley was Akkadian. The Indian linguist Ajay Pratap Singh explains, "Comparisons of Akkadian and Sanskrit words yielded at least 400 words in both languages with comparable phonetic and semantic similarities. Thus Sanskrit has, in fact, descended from Akkadian."

The Bible scholar, E.A. Speiser, found that names taken to be Indo-European were often labeled "Hurrian" only to be identified eventually as Akkadian. E.A. Speiser called attention to Hurrian/Horite personal names associated with Shechem and with other areas whose inhabitants the Bible calls Hivites. Genesis 34:2 specifies Shechem as a Hivite or Horite settlement. He noted the juxtaposition of the Hurrian Jebusites and the Hivites in various biblical references and he concluded that “Hivite” was a biblical term for Horite/Hurrian. Speiser supported his identification of the biblical Hivites with the Horite/Hurrians by reference to Genesis 36:2 and 36:20, where the terms Hivite and Horite are used interchangeably. In Genesis 36:2, Zibeon is called a Hivite, and in Genesis 36:20 Zibeon is identified as a Horite descendent of Seir. 

Other examples of the interchange of the terms Hivite and Horite may be found by comparing the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Septuagint reads "Horites" for the "Hivite" of the Masoretic Text in Genesis 34:2 and Joshua 9:7.

There was no Hurrian or Horite language. The widely dispersed Horites employed the languages of the people among whom they lived. Thus, scholars today use terms like Hurro-Akkadian, Hurro-Urartian, and Canaano-Akkadian.

Related reading: Sarah's Story; The Marriage and Ascendancy Pattern of the Biblical Hebrew; Royal Sons and Their Maternal Uncles; The Hebrew Hierarchy of Sons; Our African Ancestors; An Anthropologist Looks at Genesis 10

Genesis and Inerrancy

Alice C. Linsley


From the perspective of anthropology, Genesis 1-11 is rich in data that enables us to identify the cultural contexts of Abraham’s ancestors. Though the material is not to be taken as a scientific account, it nonetheless contains data about Abraham’s ancestors that anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and DNA studies can confirm.

Noah was one of Abraham’s ancestors. Noah’s great grandson was Nimrod, a Kushite kingdom builder who left Africa and established a territory for himself in Mesopotamia. This explains why we first meet Abraham in Mesopotamia. However, his cultural context appears to be Kushite. (DNA studies have confirmed the Kushite migration out of Africa.)

We overcome most of the supposed contradictions between Science and Scripture once we identify the context of Abraham’s ancestors as Proto-Saharans and Nilotes living during the African Humid Period (African Aqualithic) when the Sahara was green and wet. Saharan petroglyphs dating to 4300-2900 BC depict boats transporting cattle. It is also significant that the only place on earth which is claimed by the natives to be Noah’s homeland is Bor-no (“land of Noah”) in the region of Lake Chad.

Noah would have lived in the Lake Chad area around 6000 years ago. At that time, God Father (Re) and God Son (Horus) were worshipped at the Horite Hebrew shrine city at Nekhen (Hierakonpolis) on the Nile. This was a very prestigious city as has been shown through archaeological discoveries there. The votive offerings and mace heads were larger than have been found elsewhere. There are numerous burial sites of high-ranking persons, some of whom had long wavy red hair (Burial 79). These are the likely ancestors of the Horites of Edom (Genesis 36). An Edomite chief named Esau is described as red and hairy. 

Some of the graves at Nekhen had painted ostrich eggs, symbols of the hope of resurrection. The earliest texts that speak of bodily resurrection are found among the Horite and Sethite Hebrew.

Using kinship analysis, a tool of cultural anthropology, the king lists of Genesis 4, 5, 10, 11, 25 and 36 have been shown to be authentic. They speak of historical persons. These were Horite and Sethite Hebrew rulers. They were a moiety, that is, one people divided into two ritual groups. We have writings from these ruler-priests that date to 4400 BC, roughly Noah’s time.

The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (2400-2000 BC) tell us that the Horites and the Sethites maintained separate settlements. Utterance 308 of the Pyramid Texts addresses them as separate but related groups: "Hail to you, Horus in the Horite Mounds! Hail to you, Horus in the Sethite Mounds!"

Utterance 470 contrasts the Horite mounds with the Sethite mounds, designating the Horite Mounds "the High Mounds.”

The Horite and Sethite Hebrew shared religious practices and beliefs, and they worshiped the same God and served the same king.

Though separate ritual groups, the Horites and the Sethites served the same king. Utterance 213 says: "O King, you have not departed dead, you have departed alive...The Mounds of Horus serve you, the Mounds of Seth serve you."

In his resurrection body the king is to "traverse the Mound of Horus of the Southerners" and "traverse the Mound of Horus of the Northerners" (PT Utterances 536 and 553). The risen king restores his settlements and cities, and opens doors to the Westerners, Easterners, Northerners and Southerners (Pt Utterance 587). He is to ascend to the heavens (PT Utterance 539).

The risen king unites the peoples, restores the former state of blessedness, and unites heaven and earth. When seen from this perspective, the Horite Hebrew religion appears to be the foundation of the Messianic hope that is fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. This expectation was expressed about 1000 years before Psalm 91 in Utterance 388 of the Pyramid Texts. "Horus has shattered (tbb, crushed) the mouth of the serpent with the sole of his foot" (cf. Genesis 3:15).

The Question of Inerrancy

Once we identify Noah’s cultural context, we may investigate further. The Lake Chad region was constantly threatened by floods during Noah’s time. The Lake Chad Basin is relatively flat and prone to monsoonal flooding. It is ringed by mountains from which water drains into the Basin. During the African Humid Period there was an extensive system of interconnected lakes and rivers across the Sahara. The western Nile watershed extended well into the Sudan. Hydrological studies indicate many periods of flooding from the Nile to the Atlantic coast of Nigeria.

The archaeological discovery that Proto-Saharan rulers kept menageries of exotic animals is especially pertinent to Genesis 7-9. It is likely that these rulers attempted to rescue their prized creatures when threatened by inundation.

One of the oldest known zoological collections was found during the 2009 excavations at Nekhen. The menagerie dates to about 5500 years ago and included hippos, elephants, baboons, and wildcats.

The Hebrew term for "earth" in the flood stories is eretz, which also means territory. From Noah's perspective in a flooded lake area, it would have appeared that his entire territory was under water.

Biblical scholars agree that Genesis 1-11 is a complex and layered body of material. It contains data that pertains to the earliest Hebrew ancestors and material that appears to have been redacted by at least two later sources: the Deuteronomist Historian, and Jewish Rabbis. The Deuteronomist writes from the context of the Neo-Babylonian Period (c. 700-300 BC), about 1500 years after Abraham. The Rabbinic insertions reflect an even later period. They date from the first century AD to c. 600 AD.

A contextual incongruity is evident in Genesis 6:4 which poses the Nephilim as fallen angels (a Rabbinic notion) while also presenting them as historical “heroes of days gone by, men of renown.” "Nephilim" is derived from the same root as the Aramaic npyl which means giant, as in great. This is equivalent to the Arabic nfy, meaning hunter. Noah’s great grandson Nimrod is described as a “mighty hunter” or a “mighty man” before the Lord.

The perspectives of Noah and the post-exilic Jews present contextual incongruities. It is a matter of different cultural contexts, and yet the significant data has been preserved in the Genesis Prehistory. Understanding the material requires unraveling the interwoven elements and paying attention to textual and contextual incongruities. Contextual incongruities are not errors.

It is best to read the biblical texts with some skepticism, but since God is truthful and He has superintended the Scriptures, they tell us truth. We should read them as if they were law briefs: there is a majority opinion and a minority opinion. To gain a better understanding of Genesis 1-11 we need to be aware of the different perspectives.

Related reading: The Historicity of Noah's Flood; The Genesis King Lists; Abraham's Faith Lives in Christianity; Righteous Rulers and the Resurrection; Contextual Incongruities in Genesis

A Scientific Timeline of Genesis

Alice C. Linsley

In this overview I am not attempting to provide a "history of humankind" but instead I am attempting to trace the dispersion of the ancestors of Abraham, Moses, David, Samuel and Jesus Christ.

Between JUST GENESIS and my other blog Biblical Anthropology, I have investigated the prehistoric roots of Biblical peoples more deeply than any other anthropologist to date and I have done so using the standard tools and methodologies: kinship analysis, comparative linguistics, comparative cosmologies, climate and migration studies, molecular genetics, and archaeology.


Africa is the point of origin of all living humans

It is accepted that Africa is where the first human populations emerged and the oldest human fossils have been found there. The oldest languages are in the Afro-Asiatic family and comparative study of these languages suggests a dispersion out of Africa. Scholars have recognized, for example, linguistic affinity between Manding and Japanese and between Manding and words found across Southeast Asia. Dr. Clyde A. Winters has demonstrated the linguistic connection between ancient Elamite, Dravidian, Manding and Sumerian. He believes that these diverged from a common Paleo-African language used by the Proto-Saharans.

The name Sulawesian, for example, is derived from the word Sulawe which appears to be related to ancient Egyptian and Dravidian words for rice and writing. The Egyptian word for writing is ssw; and the Mande sewe; and the Dravidian ha-verasu (referring to written record of rice sales). Likely, "Sulawesi" is a reference to written accounts of rice sales. If those who were moving from island to island were merchants, they would have recorded their transactions.

On Madagascar, the weight of one grain of rice is called vary, and corresponds to the Swahili wari and to the Dravidian verasu. The Hebrew word for rice is orez and Arabic ruz and these share the RZ root with Dravidian. The Dravidian word reflects the written records of commercial weights.

Linguistic connections are further evident in the term for slash and burn cultivation used in Sulawesi and East Africa. The word trematrema is used in Northeast Betsimisaraa to refer to a one to three year old slashed-and-burnt field. It is related to the Swahili word tema, ‘to cut’, and the redoubled form tematema, ‘to slash, to chop." This technique is used also by Sulawesians who practice "dry rice" planting.

Recent linguistic studies indicate that the basic phonemes found in virtually every language can be traced back to a words spoken by our Stone Age ancestors in Africa.

Anthropologists have noted similarities in religious practices pertaining to the ancestors, knob sticks used by rulers, burial in red ocher, and shrine settlements along major rivers and at elevated rock shelters called by various names, including kar/car, tamana, or ophel. The Bible is often critical of "the high places" because of some of the occult practices done there.

Genetic diversity

When the average person thinks of Africa today, they imagine people with a black or dark skin tone and wooly hair. This is a false idea. From the beginning the greatest genetic diversity has existed in Africa. There were black and red Nubians, for example. The San Bushmen, one of the oldest known groups in the world, have a skin tone associated more with the Chinese. The Khoisan-Japanese connection seems more probable when we consider the other names  Arabic name for the San: Wakwak (Arabic) and Wanege (Sandawe of Tanzania). Wa was the earlier name for Japan and the word appears in the name Okina-wa. The African variant is Jokinawah, which may be related to the names of the biblical rulers Joachin and Joktan.

Recent DNA studies have revealed that the Ainu of Hokkaido and the Ryukyuans of Okinawa have a closer genetic affinity than either group has to the Japanese.

For the Biblical Anthropologist, the peoples in the R1b Haplogroup (Y-DNA) and the X Haplogroup (MY-DNA) are of special interest. R1b is found widely in Africa, Southern Europe, France, and the British Isles. This dispersion took place over thousands of years beginning about 20,000 to 18,000 years ago.

Haplogroup R1b, also known as haplogroup R-M343, is the most frequently occurring Y chromosome haplogroup in Western Europe, some parts of Russia (the Bashkir minority), Central Asia (e.g. Turkmenistan) and in the region of Lake Chad and along the Nile.

This is the Haplogroup of Abraham's Proto-Saharan ancestors who dispersed widely and are known my many different names in ancient history: Kushites, Kushan, Ainu, Saka, Hittites, etc. Among them was a caste of priests known in ancient texts as 'Apiru, Hapiru, Habiru or Hebrew.

The word "Hebrew" appears in ancient Egyptian and Akkadian texts. The Habiru were already widely dispersed in the 14th-13th centuries B.C. Their spread was driven by their unique marriage and ascendancy pattern by which sons were sent away to established their own territories.


Forming a hypothesis using biblical data

The book of Genesis is an extremely valuable source of significant data about the earliest human populations. It provides details that are useful in reconstructing a picture of human origins, diversity of populations, migrations, technological development, religious practices, early rulers and the Afro-Asiatic worldview.

There is no conflict between the data of Genesis 1-12 and the concrete findings of science. Genesis provides an accurate and reliable picture of reality, as we will see in this scientific timeline of Genesis.



ca. 4.6-4.8 billion years the Earth formed. Genesis 1 begins with the Earth already formed. The primal substance is water in a chaotic state. The Breath/Spirit of God (Ruach) went forth and established order, separating the waters above from the waters below (vertical axis), and the dry land from the sea (horizontal axis).  Here the cross is already prefigured in Genesis 1.

Genesis 1:9 says that there was only one body of water (rendered "one mass" in the Greek; "one place" in the Hebrew). This indicates that there was one land mass at the beginning. God called the land "Earth" (Gen. 1:10). Scientists call this "Pangaea."

ca. 65 million years ago the great dinosaurs disappeared though the aviary dinosaurs continued to exist for some time.

ca. 4 million years ago humans appear suddenly and unheralded upon the Earth in the region designated as Eden. Genesis describes Eden as a vast area extending from East Africa to Mesopotamia.These archaic populations were fully human, as evidenced by human dentition, tools, controlled fire, evidence of hunting, and anatomical structure like modern humans.

ca. 100,000 - 20,000 years ago human populations had spread out of Africa to virtually every continent. During this time rulers were buried in red ochre powder, a symbol of blood, by which they expressed hope in life after death. Perhaps the oldest case (at least 50,000 years ago) involves the burial of a small boy in the Lebombo Mountains of Southern Africa. He was buried with a sea-shell pendant and covered in red ochre dust (ground hematite).

A man buried 45,000 years ago at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southern France was packed in red ochre.

The Fox Lady of Doini Vestonice in Czechoslovakia was covered in red ochre at her burial 23,000 years ago.

Ainu/MicMac of Canada

The Red Lady of Paviland in Wales was buried in red ochre about 20,000 years ago. Her skeletal remains and burial artifacts are encrusted with the red ochre. Another 20,000 year old burial site in Bavaria reveals a thirty-year-old man entirely surrounded by a pile of mammoth tusks and nearly submerged in a mass of red ochre. Native Americans used red ochre for ceremonies and also to bury their dead.

ca. 20,000 - 12,000 years ago there began to be a distinction between two main genetic and linguistic groups: African and Asiatic. This is remembered as a time when "the whole world had one language and a common speech" (Gen. 11:1). The two main groups of peoples were still so closely related that this period may be referred to as the "Afro-Asiatic dispersion" or the Afro-Asiatic Dominion.





ca. 8000 years ago the Ainu/Anu were migrating out of the Nile Valley toward Finland and Japan. They spread into Europe, Central Asia and the British Isles. From Finland they crossed to Greenland and Labrador and from Labrador to the eastern seaboard of Canada. The Ainu were a seafaring people. They ranged in skin tone from red to reddish brown and tan, and the men wore beards and had long wavy hair.

Ainu elder of Northern Japan

The Ainu are in mtDNA haplogroup X. The dispersion of haplogroup X is shown below. The greatest concentrations are indicated by the darker shade. MtDNA traces lineage by the mitochondria, received from the mothers.

There is a connection between Abraham's ancestors and the Ainu. Abraham's father held the title Terah/Tera which is an Ainu word, meaning "priest." Tera-ntr refers to a ruler-priest. Het/Heth was a Sidonian ruler-priest who ruled at a temple in Canaan (Gen. 10:15). The following image is from Petrie's 1939 archaeological discoveries.[1]

Note the skullcap with dark frontal piece, and the beard and moustache are like that of the Ainu elders shown above. Note also the knob stick, called "rod" in Numbers, where we are told that the rod of Aaron blossomed. This was carried by the clan chief and passed through the generations from chief to chief.

Further confirmation of the connection between Abraham's ancestors and the Ainu is the obvious correspondence of the Ainu and the Hebrew scripts. The Ainu were the original settlers of the islands of Japan. They are sometimes called "Hannu" which may be the etymology of Han, another script used in Japan. The character table shown below was developed during the 7th century and brought by Yuetzhi scribes who came to Japan via the Korean peninsula. It is believed to have been finalized by the Buddhist monk Kukai. The Yuetzhi were ethnically Kushite.

There also are many similarities in clothing, facial appearance, skin tone, and religious practices among the Kushan-Yuetzhi and the Nilotic Ainu. Both mummified their rulers. The gold medallion belts found at Kushan graves are similar to the roundel belts depicted on statues of ruler-priests found within the temple complex at Hatra between the Tigris and Euphrates. The rulers of Hatra controlled commerce that moved through their territory along the two main caravan routes that connected Mesopotamia with Syria and Asia Minor. The principle deity was Shamash whose emblem was the Sun. Shamash means "throne of the Sun" in Arabic. This is the same deity as Ra who overshadowed Hathor. She became pregnant and gave birth to Horus, called "son" of the Creator.

The rulers of Edom were devotees of Horus and therefore known as Horites. The Edomites are associated with the color red and edom means red. Probably some had red hair and a reddish skin tone. This is the Biblical description of Isaac's son Esau who was born red and hairy. Esau the Younger married a Horite woman of Edom, a descendant of Seir the Horite (Gen. 36).

Abraham's territory was entirely in the region of Edom. It extended between Hebron, where Sarah reside, and Beersheba, where Keturah resided.

There are many connections between Japanese and African words. For example, the name Isahi is a variant of Esau or Issa. Kishi appears to be a variant of Kish and Kush. Obito, the title for a regional chief in Japan, is related to the Edo (Africa)/Edomite (Southern Arabia) word for chief, which is Oba. The first ruler of Petra was the Horite ruler Obodas. These ancient rulers were said to have a reddish skin tone, as was the case with Esau and David. The ancient Greeks called Edom "Idumea" which means "land of red people." The original name of Tokyo was Edo.

The dispersion of the ruler-priests

Abraham's ancestors were priests who were devotees of Horus. They were called "Ha-piru" or "Ha-biru" which refers to the Sun temples (O-piru = Sun house/temple). Ha-biru (HBR) is the origin of the word Hebrew (HBR). This was a caste that of great antiquity and prestige. These priests were attached to rulers and kingdom builders from Africa to China and from Anatolia to Ireland.

ca. 6000 years ago Abraham's ancestors built temples to worship the Creator and His son Horus who was said to be born of Hathor, a virgin of their ruler-priest lines. Hathor and she conceived by the overshadowing of the Sun, the emblem of the Creator.  Her totem was the cow and she was portrayed as wearing the sun in the horns, as a sort of solar cradle, indicating divine appointment. At the Dedura Temple at Karnak she is shown holding her newborn in a manger.

One function of the ruler-priests was circumcision using flint knives such as the one shown here from the Naqada III culture (3200-3050 BC). The practice of circumcision originated in the area of the Nile and Sudan. This was a time of transition from loosely associated communities under local chiefs to the unification of the Upper and Lower Nile regions under powerful kings. King Menes was the first to unite the peoples of the Nile Valley and he instituted the Law of Tehut to govern his kingdom. 

Genesis 4 and 5 lists the Nilo-Saharan rulers who lived 5000-4800 years ago.    . Among them are Enoch, Cain, Seth, Methuselah and Lamech. These rulers had a unique marriage and ascendancy pattern that also served to drive many of their  sons out of Africa into Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley and Southern Europe. One of these sent-away sons was Nimrod who build a great kingdom in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Abraham is one of his descendants. 

Noah lived in the region of Lake Chad about 4500 years ago. This corresponds to a prolonged wet period in the Sahara know by various names: the Africa Humid Period, the Aqualithic, the Gurian Wet Period, etc.  This corresponds to the time of the Old Kingdom, a period of great cultural and technological achievement. This places Noah and his sons in relatively recent history, not at the dawn of human existence.

Possibly Noah was the last predynastic Proto-Saharan ruler. The Proto-Saharans are called "Kushites" in the Bible and Saka in Vedic texts. They are said to have ruled the ancient world for 7000 years.

Once we arrive at the time of Noah (2490-2415 BC), it is easier to calculate dates because there is a great deal of historical information about the Nilotic peoples and the rulers of Egypt.

Alignment of Egypt Chronology with Genesis King Lists, following Breasted’s Egypt timeline [2].

First Intermediate Period
7th - 8th Dynasties: 2475-2445 BC
Shem
Ham (2438-2363)
Japheth
Kush (2417-2342)

9th -10th Dynasties: 2445–2160 BC
Salah (2217-2042)
Eber (2196-2121)
Peleg (2175-2100)


Middle Kingdom
11th Dynasty: 2160-2000 BC
Reu (2154-2079)
Serug (2133-2058)
Nahor (2112-2037)
Terah (2091-2016)
Abraham (2039-1964)

12th Dynasty: 2000-1788 BC
Joktan the Younger, Abraham's firstborn son (1987-1912)
Esau
Jacob
Joseph

Note that the reigns of some of these rulers overlapped. For example, Tubal-Cain (Gen. 4:22) and Methuselah (Gen. 5:22-25) ruled at the same time. This is another reason that the "begats" of Genesis cannot be used to calculate the age of the Earth, as was attempted by Bishop James Ussher.


NOTES

[1] Flinders Petrie (1853 – 1942) was an English Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and preservation of artifacts. He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt.

[2] James Henry Breasted (1865 – 1935) was an American archaeologist and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the University of Chicago, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1919 he became the founder of the Oriental Institute at the University, designed to be a lab for research into the rise of civilization in the Near East. In 1905 Breasted was promoted to professor in the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States.


Related reading: When is the Evidence Sufficient?; Millions of Years a Stumbling Block;  The Kushite-Kushan Connection; Was Noah Mesopotamian or Proto-Saharan?; The Nile-Japan Ainu Connection; A Kindling of Ancient Memory; Genetics Confirms Biblical Migrations; The Horite Ancestry of Jesus Christ; The Genesis King Lists; Objections to the Fundamentalist Reading of Genesis 1-5; Abraham's Ainu Ancestors; Jesus Fulfills the Edenic Promise; The Biblical Evidence of an Old Earth; Millions of Years Between Genesis 4:1 and Genesis 4:17; Adam Was a Red Man

Genesis and Christian Apologetics

Alice C. Linsley


In a recent conversation with a pastor who is not seminary educated, I discovered that my research is irrelevant because it has to do with an historical approach to the Bible. That is, I trace the Horite rulers from Genesis 4 and 5 to the Jesus and his ruler-priest kinsman Joseph of Hara-mathea using the tools of kinship analysis. This pastor is bi-vocational.  He serves a small Baptist congregation and also teaches history in a public school. He recognizes that the Bible tells us about historical events and peoples. However, he sees little value in an anthropological understanding of who those peoples were, and like so many, is skeptical that the King Lists of Genesis 4, 5 and 11 are authentic history. What matters most to him is what the Bible tells us today in our time.

C.S. Lewis encountered a similar attitude in his conversations.  He wrote:

"I find that the uneducated Englishman is an almost total sceptic about history. I had expected he would disbelieve the Gospels because they contain miracles; but he really disbelieves them because they deal with things that happened two thousand years ago. He would disbelieve equally in the battle of Actium if he heard of it. To those who have had our kind of education, his state of mind is very difficult to realize. To us the present has always appeared as one section in a huge continuous process. In his mind the present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called “the old days”-- a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizabeth, knights-in-armour, etc. wander about. Then (strangest of all) beyond the old days come a picture of “primitive man.” He is “science,” not “history,” and is therefore felt to be much more real than the old days. In other words, the prehistoric is much more believed in than the historic." (From Lewis' Christian Apologetics)

At least this Christian pastor believes that the Bible is the Word of God and that it is reliable in all that it reveals about God and the salvation of repentant sinners.  He didn't question how the King Lists could have been preserved or whether or not the texts were authentic or corrupt. That is more likely the criticism of people who have never read the Bible.

C. S. Lewis encountered this also. He continues in Christian Apologetics:

He has a distrust (very rational in the state of his knowledge) of ancient texts. Thus a man has sometimes said to me, “These records were written in the days before printing, weren’t they? And you haven’t got the original bit of paper, have you? So what it comes to is that someone wrote something and someone else copied it and someone else copied that and so on. Well, by the time it comes it us, it won’t be in the least like the original” This is a difficult objection to deal with because one cannot, there and then, start teaching the whole science of textual criticism. But at this point their real religion (i.e. faith in “science”) has come to my aid. The assurance that there is a “science” called “textual criticism” and that its results (not only as regard the New Testament, but as regards ancient texts in general) are generally accepted, will usually be received without objection. 

I didn't raise the matter of textual criticism with this pastor because even the term is enough to raise eyebrows among his ilk. In his Baptist tradition, there have been some excellent textual critics (Bernard Ramm and Carl F.H. Henry come to mind), but textual criticism is still regarded as the work of people who seem intent on debunking the Bible.

In the end, my Christian apologetic hangs on the belief that each person is responsible for testing the evidence of the truth of Christianity, wherever that evidence may be found and however it may be investigated. As the great biologist St. George Jackson Mivart wrote:

Assuming, for argument's sake, the truth of Christianity, it evidently has not been the intention of its author to make the evidence for it so plain that its rejection would be the mark of intellectual incapacity. Conviction is not forced upon men in the way that the knowledge that the government of England is constitutional, or that Paris is the capital of France, is forced upon all who choose to inquire into those subjects. The Christian system is one which puts the strain, as it were, on every faculty of man's nature and the intellect is not exempted from taking part in the probationary trial. A moral element enters into the acceptance of that system.

Some individuals rise to the challenge of understanding the Christian Gospel, as much as it can be apprehended by the intellect. Some will engage only when their ears are tickled, and here the supernatural aspects can be used as bait. However, there is an inherent danger in this approach. Often those who seek drama and excitement are not seeking the Lord of Life and these may wander into obsession with Spiritualism.

The work of Christian apologetics also presents some danger to the apologist, as C. S. Lewis wrote:

I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result when you go away from the debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the reality--from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. That also is why we need one another’s continual help--oremus pro invicem. (Let us pray for each other.)

Related reading: C.S. Lewis' Christian Apologetics (1949), C.S. Lewis' Quotes

Theories of Creation: An Overview

Alice C. Linsley


Readers have asked me to explain my views on creation, but before I do so, I would like to present an overview of the main theories of creation.

Gap Theory creationism: In this theory, God created every original thing in six consecutive 24-hour days, but a gap of time between the first and the second verses of Genesis 1 explains the great age of the Earth. An early proponent of this view was Thomas Chalmers, a professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh.

Day-Age creationism notes that the Hebrew word yom may indicate a 24-hour day or an unspecified period of time that could entail a period of thousands or millions of years. This theory attempts to reconcile the differences between young-earth creationism and evolutionary creationism. According to this view, the sequence and duration of the seven "days" is representative of the cosmological events theorized to have happened, so that Genesis can be read as a summary of modern science, simplified for the benefit of pre-scientific humans.

Young Earth creationism holds to the six 24-hour days of creation but does not accept any gap of time. According to this theory the Earth is only between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. Within this camp, some accept the possibility of developmental change within species, but most believe that God created all living species in the beginning as an act of special creation. Proponents of this theory include Baptist Pastor and biochemist Duane Gish, and the late Henry M. Morris, a civil engineer and author of several books in which he developed young earth creationism.

Progressive creationism holds that God created new "kinds" of plants and animals over a period of millions of years. It estimates the age of the Earth in the millions, but generally rejects macroevolution as biologically untenable and without evidence in the fossil record. In this theory, it is not necessary for all humans to have decended from a common primal ancestor and Noah's flood is accepted to have been local rather than global. Proponents of this view include the late Bernard Ramm, a Baptist theologian and Bible scholar, and astronomer Hugh Ross, who holds that the Flood was local yet killed all humans except for those on the ark.

Evolutionary creationism (or Theistic Evolution) accepts the theory of evolution but insists that all change, growth and development over time is directed by God or by forces put into place by God. The greatest proponent of this view is Charles Darwin himself. He wrote in a 1879 letter to John Fordyce: "In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.”

Framework Theory holds that the creation account of Genesis 1 is not to be taken literally or used as a scientific text, but should be regarded as an ancient sacred text with a symbolic structure that points to God's orderly design and the importance of the Sabbath commandment. In this view Genesis 1 is independent of Genesis 2. In this view the more primtive story is the Genesis 2-3 account of the creation and the Genesis 1 account dates to a later time of the Priestly source. Proponents of this theory are Henri Blocher and Meredith Kline.

Intelligent Design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. In Chapter 6 of The Origin of Species, Darwin posed critiques of evolution. He admitted that it is difficult to imagine how "organs of extreme perfection and complication," such as the eye, evolved by natural selection. ID is a well-considered form Darwin's own critique. Building on logical doubts, ID theorists have developed the idea of "irreducible complexity."


An integrated approach that takes its lead from the Bible

Here is another approach to creation and the book of Genesis. It draws on Biblical Anthropology, climate studies, linguistics, genetics, and the Bible itself as an important database.

We find evidence in Genesis for climate change and catastrophic flooding. Noah lived in the region of Lake Chad approximately 2490-2415 BC, when the Sahara experienced a wet period (Karl W. Butzer 1966). Recent geological studies have found that the huge basins and troughs of the Sahara were interconnected so that boats could travel from Niger to the Nile. This was one of the last wet periods and it coincided with cultural and technological achievements in the Old Kingdom.

Using kinship analysis we discover a unique marriage pattern among Abraham's ruler ancestors who practiced endogamy. This is why geneticists can identify the Kohen gene.

Biblical data has led to the discovery of the Nile-Japan Ainu connection. It also has established links between the Kushites and the Kushan.

Most of these discoveries represent important breakthroughs. Such discoveries are possible because science and religion are companions in the search for truth.

I am an old earth creationist. I reject young earth creationism because it is bad science and even worse Bible interpretation. Young Earth Creationists use Archbishop James Usher’s chronology to date the age of the earth. However, Usher was ignorant of the marriage and ascendancy structure of Abraham's Horite people and therefore misrepresented these early rulers as the first people on earth. The Genesis "genealogies" are regnal not generational. They are king lists and some kings ruled simultaneously. Further, the Biblical data indicates that these rulers were kingdom builders, metal workers, and temple builders. They lived no earlier than about 7,000 years ago and millions of years after the dinosaurs!

Young earth creationism assumes that Genesis must be defended against Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism. God's word does not need to be defended. If anything, it needs to be defended from bad science that imposes a timeline that contradicts what Genesis reveals.

I believe that from "the beginning" God created humans in the divine image and fully human, and that humans and apes have always been separate species. Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin maintains that the complete sequencing of the gorilla genome challenges the theory that humans and apes have a common ancestor. Luskin says, "There is not a clear signal of ancestral relationships that is coming out of the gorilla genome once you add it into the mix."

Luskin, as with many who do not concur with conventional Darwinian views, is regularly pillored at evolution blogs and websites.

As far as I have been able to determine, finds of ancient fossils have been easily categorized as either ape or archaic human. Finds labled "hominids" in evolutionary taxonomy represent different archaic human populations.

After almost 100 years of frantic searching, there remains no material evidence that humans and apes had a common ancestor. This aspect of Darwin simply has not been proven. Until it is, I feel no compulsion to relent in my position. That's the empirical approach, afterall.

This doesn't mean that I reject a role for natural processes. These can be observed. I wonder why such observations must be forced into Neo-Darwinian interpretations. The air sacs being an example. Many features that Darwinians insist are evidence of evolution have other likely explanations. The morphology of the hyoid that suggests that A. afarensis had air sacks in the throat is not indicative of evolution of humans and apes from a common ancestor. The same hyoid bone feature has been found in other archaic human populations as an adaption to aquaboreal environments. Similar hyoid structure appears in the Kebara Cave population of Israel that lived around 60,000 B.C.

Genesis tells us that God created in an orderly fashion over a period of time and according to a plan. It is the work of science to discover the order and the work of theologians and Bible scholars to discern the plan. For Abraham's ancestors the order was perceived as fixed, though they recognized flux within the fixed boundaries. Their acute observation of the patterns in nature suggested a divine plan.

Since none of us were present to observe the beginning, we can speak only of what we think may have happened.  We tend to describe events according to our cultural understandings, our worldviews.  However, the book of Genesis presents the understanding of the Nilotic and Proto-Saharan peoples who were Abraham's ancestors, and it is their culture that we must consider. These ancestors migrated out of Africa to Pakistan, India, and even Cambodia. Anghor Wat, in Cambodia, was originally a Horite shrine city and the Horites originated in Egypt and Sudan.  Angkor is a variant of the ancient Egyptian Anhk-Hor, meaning "Life to Horus."  Wat means city or shrine settlement  In the ancient world the largest settlements were at water shrines tended by a caste of priests and defended by a caste of warriors.

One of the oldest known castes is that of the Hapiru or Habiru (Hebrew). This was a caste of priests and priest attendants who served at the water shrines and temples of the ancient world beginning as early as 4000 BC. They are sometimes called "O-piru" because they reveranced the Sun as the emblem of the Creator. The O in O-piru is a solar symbol.

Within this priest caste there emerged a cult devoted to Horus as early as 3500 BC at Nekhen in Sudan. These are called Horites. The Horites were a Proto-Saharan caste who later were found among the Kushites. The Kushite marriage and ascendancy structure speaks of the promised Son to whom God will deliver the eternal kingdom. Abraham's people were Horites. Even today Jews call their ancestors "Horim" which is a variant of "Horite."

Genesis is a valuable source of information about early modern human populations. It provides details that are useful in reconstructing points of origins, diversity of populations, migrations, technological development, religious practices, and the marriage and ascendancy structure of the early rulers and the spread of the Afro-Asiatic worldview. It connects many of the peoples living from Borno to Borneo and explains common mythological motifs such as the serpent, the tree of life, the solar boat, and falcon-shaped Harappan fire altars dedicated to Horus, the prefigurement of Jesus Christ. 

When it comes to theories of creation, people immediately think of the creation narratives in Genesis. However, Genesis is not about the origins of life on earth. Ultimately, it is about the origins of Messianic expectation among Abraham's Habiru ancestors, a caste of priests who spread their worldview far and wide. It is the story of Jesus' very ancestors to whom God made a promise thousands of years ago that a Woman of their caste would bring for the "Seed" of God (Gen. 3:15). Jesus is that Seed. He is a direct descendant of those people to whom that promise was made, and He is the fulfillment of Horite expectation.


Related reading: A Scientific Timeline of Genesis; Scientists Against Scientism; The Folly of Scientism; Biblical Anthropologists Discuss Darwin; Genesis: Is it Really About Human Origins; Between Biblical Literalism and Biblical Illiteracy; Who Were the Kushites?; Who Were the Horites?; Abraham's Ancestors Came Out of Africa