Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and welcome to a new episode. At the moment, I'm trying to get through a little bit of my backlog of topics, so this one has been on my list of topics to address for a little while.
And the reason it's kind of been shoved down the list is because it's not really that serious of a topic. Like, it's not dealing with heresy. It's not dealing with the nature of God. It's not really dealing with our salvation or anything like that. But it is a topic that a lot of people talk about. And a lot of people who are kind of on the fringe of Christianity or who have been in Christianity all of their lives or who are, you know, Looking at entering into [00:01:00] Christianity, this is a topic that kind of gives a lot of people pause.
And so, it's very much worth talking about, and so we're going to tackle this today. Last week, when I talked about death before the fall, I mentioned that we don't need to be dogmatic about whether or not there was death before the fall. We can have multiple interpretations that are all valid as far as interpreting the text well.
A valid interpretation doesn't make the interpretation right. It only makes it possible. It means that it's an interpretation that has some support from the text. It's like a valid logical argument. Validity doesn't equate to being true. It just means it's possible. There are many topics that are like that, where we can land in different ways, because the evidence can be fairly taken in multiple ways.
But I said last week that you [00:02:00] cannot do that with the age of the earth, at least as far as saying that the Bible proves a young earth. And by that, I specifically mean the idea that you can use the Bible to calculate when Adam lived and when God created. You simply cannot do that with the data we have from the Bible.
I'm not dogmatic about a lot of things like this, but I am dogmatic about that. You just can't do it. Now, what I'm not saying is that you can't be a young Earth creationist. By all means, feel free to think that the Earth is young if you feel that all the evidence available to you points in that direction.
Just don't think that the Bible gives you as much fodder as you might think, because it doesn't. What I'm also not saying is that the Bible says anything about an old Earth, because it doesn't do that either. Well, you do have some [00:03:00] concordists out there that suggest the Bible can be interpreted to suggest the earth is old. But again, you cannot just use the Bible by itself to see that.
I've kind of put this episode on the back burner for a while because in the back of my mind, part of me thinks it's not an essential topic, and I just don't care what position you actually take in the age of the earth. But I know that there are people out there who like to discuss this And who are wondering about it. So, it's time to tackle it. The Bible and science are not opposites or antagonists.
So, in this episode, I'm going to reference two books primarily. The first is a very short, but very dense book that I recommend as often as this topic comes up in online discussions. This book is called The God of the Gaps. It's not talking about gap theology, where we have time in between the first two verses of [00:04:00] Genesis. It's referring to the genealogies of the Bible. The rather awkward subtitle of this book is, Gaps in Biblical Genealogies Make It Impossible to Calculate the Date of Creation.
It's written by Hugh Henry and Daniel J. Dyke. Henry is a physicist, and Dyke teaches theology. The book is not riveting reading, but it's short. And it's very inexpensive. This book is going to provide the basis for most of what we're going to talk about here today. But don't let the discussion here stop you from picking up a copy, especially because it does have some charts and lists that will help make all of this, make a little bit more sense.
The second book I'll reference is called The Creationists by Ronald L. Numbers. This book is not short. It's also dense and not exactly bedtime reading. [00:05:00] Or maybe it is good bedtime reading, I don't know, I guess it depends on your goals there. But it gives a detailed summary that tracks the Young Earth Creationist interpretation, especially in the last hundred plus years.
Again, I'm not trying to be oppositional to the position of Young Earth Creationists, but if that's your position, you ought to know a bit of this history, because so often, This position is presented as if it's a complete given, and an interpretation that has been the dominant interpretation for all of church history, and that's just not true. If we get time, I hope to get to some quotes from the early church fathers as well, to show the diversity of interpretation.
So for some people, this might not be the most riveting of episodes, but I think there will be something in it for everyone. If you're already sold on Young Earth Creationism, [00:06:00] then maybe this will give you some additional background. If you're Old Earth Creationist, then this might help you discuss your position with others. If this is something that has been a burden to you in your walk of faith, I hope that this can help ease that for you in opening some avenues of thought.
Okay, so starting with some basics. We need to know a bit about Bishop Ussher, who lived during the 1600s, Kind of right before the Enlightenment or so, and he made it his mission to calculate the date of the Earth using the Bible.
He landed on a creation date of the night before Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BC. Mankind was created on Thursday, October 28th.
If you're familiar with world chronology and calendars, you already have a sense of how insensible it is from the get go because of the difficulty in [00:07:00] accounting for calendar changes, of being certain that we even know when Jesus was born or Herod the Great died, not to mention adjustments for leap years. But we'll cut the bishop some slack here since he really was doing his best with the information he had.
But let's forget all of that practical difficulty with the more modern calendar and at least try to go backwards from the New Testament. Even if we can't get the exact year and month, we'd think that we could get within a margin of error of a decade or so, I'll show you why we can't, but it's gonna get complicated.
One thing we aren't going to do is talk about whether or not the Flood was global, Or whether there was really enough time to populate the earth and that kind of thing. It doesn't really matter for our main question. Henry and Dyke do get into some of that. And though it doesn't matter for our conversation here, it is a bit [00:08:00] interesting to consider because of the need for a population if you're going to have cities and all that kind of thing. Lining up the flood with the pyramids of Egypt is a strange kind of exercise in and of itself.
Another point we're not going to hit on too hard is the difference between manuscript traditions in regards to the ages of people. It doesn't matter that they have differences because what I'm actually concerned about is the internal biblical evidence, not text criticism of comparing translations. But I will at least lay that out briefly so that you're familiar and because this will at least enter our discussion in some ways.
What this whole thing is about is the difference between our extant Hebrew texts and the Greek texts. The Masoretic Text is the Hebrew version of the text, most manuscripts of which are later in time than [00:09:00] the Septuagint or the Greek version of the text. The years of the genealogies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 are longer in the Septuagint.
The longer chronology helps in some of the believability of the population growth needed. And also pushing the flood further back into the past, from the time of Abraham and things like that. But when you're talking about the age of the earth as a whole, it doesn't really matter which manuscript tradition you pick. We're not talking a really major difference. Scholars debate which text reflects the original, and which got either extended or shortened. But if you're following Henry and Dyke's work, they choose to settle with the Masoretic text. And do their calculations based on that.
Again, the ultimate conclusion isn't dependent on which version you choose because it's not the lengths of the years, but the internal inconsistencies, [00:10:00] yes, I said inconsistencies. The genealogies have inconsistencies, but it's not something to be concerned about because the genealogies aren't trying to be something they're not.
Every time we try to make the Bible something that it's not, we really will come into problems. But if we allow the Bible to be what it is meant to be, then the problems go away.
Now, I've already talked about chronology in the Bible in episode 52, and we've discussed how the ancient world did not use numbers in the way that we use numbers today. We tend to use numbers with the idea of scientific accuracy in mind. Accuracy and precision are things that we value. When we use numbers, this makes a lot of sense because our use of numbers often depends on the accuracy of those numbers.
Now, we still understand the value of [00:11:00] significant numbers and symbolic numbers, but many of those that we have today are not ones that we share with the ancient person. I mean, we get a sense that when we read the Bible very much that we see the number 10 show up a lot. We see the number 7 show up. And so those are obviously important, significant, symbolic numbers, but we still can't seem to drop the idea that when we see a number recorded in scripture, it must be scientifically accurate.
This is one of those places where we assume that the people in scripture aligned with our particular values and goals. But interestingly, it is one of the areas where there is the largest disconnect. Maybe I'm overstating that, but I really kind of don't think so with the number of people I see who will marry their view of inerrancy to this very thing.
I mean, it's really funny in, like, Arthur Fruchtenbaum's [00:12:00] commentary on Genesis. He talks about the purposes of the writer who wrote Genesis, and none of the purposes he lists has anything at all to do with science, or the age of the Earth, or however long it took to create the Earth, And yet, he calls those things out as very essential to understanding the Bible.
Anyway, like I said, I'm not going to go into the factors of population growth and things like that. The book, God of the Gaps, does get into some of that, which is interesting. Eventually, when we start talking a little bit more about the Tower of Babel in general, I'll talk a little bit more about this chronology and how the Tower of Babel may or may not fit into our actual chronology of time.
But anyway, one solid idea that is proposed for the genealogies that we see in Genesis is that some of them are not describing individuals, [00:13:00] but rather whole people groups. And I mean, even Genesis 10 brings in the idea of people groups. That is more or less obvious depending upon the translation you're reading.
And of course, most of us acknowledge that Canaan the person is associated with the Canaanites, And much of this genealogy is describing the state that the Israelites found themselves in when they came back into the Promised Land. It's not controversial to realize that this is describing the generation of a later time, but we still want it to be a very straightforward genealogy.
We need to realize, however, that according to this traditional look at the genealogy, the time between the Tower of Babel and Abraham really wasn't all that long. Lots of questions we could have about the pharaohs and pyramids of Egypt and how all [00:14:00] of that fits in, but much of that is about things external to the Bible. And of course, again, my point here is to say that the Bible cannot be used to calculate . So we're going to try and focus on that.
With that in mind, let's talk about summary numbers. A summary number is where the Bible gives us the amount of time or some other quantity for something that's important that happened in Israel's history.
Specifically, what we want to look at here is the time around the Israelites being in Egypt. Here's a quote from Bishop Ussher given by Henry and Dake.
Ussher says, quote, The holy writers had this purpose in noting the years of the world in their various places with such diligence, They sought to reveal to us the history of the world that otherwise no one could know. [00:15:00] For example, the Israelites left Egypt on the 15th day of the first month, Numbers 33 3. In the 480th year after their exodus, in the second month, on the second day, Solomon began to build the temple, 1 Kings 6 1. End quote.
Okay, that's the end of the quote from Ussher, and Henry and Dake go on to say, quote. But, Ussher is only partly correct in this statement. He has taken one major summary number and extrapolated it into a general theology that is unsupportable by the Bible as a whole, and he has ignored another major summary number that undercuts his methodology. In the Bible, major events are dated in relation to one another by the use of summary numbers, which establish the time distance between them. In addition, [00:16:00] lesser events between major events often have numbers that link them to other lesser events. The Bible contains two major summary numbers. The first is found in Exodus 12 and is stated with great precision.
Verses 40 and 41 in the NASB say, quote, Now the time that the sons of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years, and at the end of 430 years, to the very day, All the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.
Henry and Dake go on to say, The two linked events are the descent of Jacob and his family into Egypt in Exodus 1, 1 5, and their departure for the land of Canaan in Exodus 13, verse 17. These are exactly 430 years apart. Why is this important? The answer is in the Hebrew understanding of the promises made to Abraham. [00:17:00] He was promised three things. Land, descendants, and blessing. Abraham doubted the land promise and was told that after his death his family would be enslaved in a land that is not theirs. Genesis 15, 13. A land which historically turned out to be Egypt for 400 years. This event is an interruption in the fulfillment of the promise of a land But would not stand in the way, as God had every intention of bringing them back to the land. 400 is a round number, and 430 an exact number, which are essentially in agreement. The dating is done to show that God is in control, and that His purpose cannot be stopped. In His foreknowledge, He knows both the hiccup in His plan, and the ultimate completion of it. End quote.
Now I want to point out something kind [00:18:00] of interesting here. Like, we see 400 as a round number, it's kind of an estimate, and 430 is the real exact number. But I want to point out that it's still possible for 430 years to be symbolic, especially when you consider that between 430 and 500 is the difference of 70, which is another significant number. Now I have no idea what that might mean at this point, but I'm saying that We see the number 430, we're thinking that's an exact number, and it might actually still not to be an exact number. It still might be carrying symbolic significance.
At any rate, we have this summary number that says the Israelites were in Egypt for 430 years. Between Jacob going down with his family and the Exodus, this is the number of years it's [00:19:00] recording. But Ussher was given another summary number of 480 years. First Kings 6 is where we see this, quote, Now it came about in the four hundred and eightieth year, after the sons of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord. End quote.
So, four hundred and eighty years after the Exodus, we have the building of the Temple. Interesting that we have the Exodus as the hinge point for both of these dates. And this time, the temple is the end point. So with both of these summary numbers, we have the patriarchs, the exodus, and the temple all as our major points in the timeline.
I like this quote from Henry and Dake. Quote, Using a summary number to link the building of God's [00:20:00] temple to God's great victory over the Egyptians in the exodus seems to reflect what Meredith Klein refers to as the close interrelationship of the themes of victory and temple building, which was characteristic of the ancient Egyptians. End quote.
Something that Henry and Dake also point out with this is that neither of these summary numbers goes back to the creation. They don't even go back to Abram or Isaac or the birth of Jacob. So when Ussher says that the biblical authors are careful to record this history that otherwise no one could know, that's not really all that accurate, is it? These summary dates don't cover anything in Genesis, really. So, we don't have summary numbers for Creation, we don't have summary numbers for the Flood, and surely we would think that they would be important enough to have, wouldn't they? but that's not what [00:21:00] we see. What we see is the Exodus and the Temple.
There is a possible third summary number in the Hebrew Bible, which is found in Ezekiel 4 5. It gives the years 390 for the number of the years of their punishment, as translated by the ESV, or the NASB says, these are the years of the iniquity of the house of Israel. This might refer to the time between Jeroboam I and the decree of the return to Israel given by Cyrus of Persia. This of course isn't chronologically attached back to the first two summary numbers. There's an obvious gap between the building of the temple and the time of the exile.
Summary numbers are given to make particular points, and we have some less significant versions of the calculations of the tribes in the Book of Numbers, for instance. The numbers are all given, [00:22:00] and then a total is also given. So that's another example of summary numbers being used.
Now, of course, we can't know, really, if every number of the Bible we see is accurate, or figurative, or symbolic in some way. But with the practice of summary numbers, we can see clearly they knew how to be accurate or to emphasize an amount. No one's disputing their ability to calculate, but the writer of Genesis had no concern with the extreme accuracy of the years. If there was, a summary number could have been provided, and so we may in fact only have the appearance of precision rather than actual precision. In fact, I think we can't take things any other way once we look at the evidence.
When we look throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible, we will actually find a fundamental imprecision that is inherent in the recording of genealogies. And if they're going to be [00:23:00] imprecise in the later records that we might think would be easier to have more precision with, then there's no reason at all to suspect that Genesis is any more precise.
Actually, let's clarify something with that. When I use the word precise, I'm talking about our idea of precision. Where the dates and the ages and the people are all there. They're all listed. If, for instance, you're into modern genealogy, figuring all of your ancestors and branches of your family out, you want to include everyone possible. This isn't like that family tree in the Black family residence in Harry Potter, where the black sheep of the family were burned out. This isn't like removing someone from the inheritance. No, if you're doing genealogy, you're interested in all of that history. That's the kind of precision we think of when we look at the genealogies in the Bible.
I've heard many people say that the reason the [00:24:00] genealogies are listed for Jesus is so that we can know he was a real person. That's really not why they're there. That is putting a modern apologetics question into the text. The Bible isn't addressing that. No biblical writer was adding in genealogies to their writing because they were concerned that their readers wouldn't believe these events happened. That wasn't part of their motivation.
They weren't concerned with making sure no ancestors were skipped. There was a different kind of precision that they were interested in, and that was to tell a story in the form of a genealogy. And no, I'm also not talking about the idea that if you gather some of the names in Genesis and you look up their Hebraic meanings, that you'll find an English phrase that lays out the gospel.
Look, I don't have a problem with finding the gospel in Genesis, but we don't need to do that in order to make that happen. [00:25:00] You can't take Hebrew words, transpose them into English, and expect that it will be a sensible phrase, because that's not how grammar works.
But what I am saying is that the ancestors chosen to be in a genealogy are chosen because they themselves are telling part of the story. Sometimes that story might have to do with their ages. Sometimes that story has to do with the lives of the ancestors themselves. Sometimes there might be a few details, like adding up the numerical value of the letters in a name. That's called gematria, and it is a thing you can do in places in scripture, but we need to take care not to do that overly much. We quickly get into Bible code land, and that breaks down because of things like spelling and word choice and manuscripts. And editing and translation.
But anyway, there are several ways to see the fundamental imprecision in the [00:26:00] genealogies. One is that it seems evident that many names are just stand ins for people groups rather than individuals. I'm not going to go too deep into that, but you can read the God of the Gaps for some good examples of that. Another way we see fundamental imprecision is in telescoped genealogies. These are genealogical lists where we very obviously have missing individuals, either because you can compare the list to another longer list somewhere else, or because you know there's a time gap between people listed in the genealogies.
The trouble is, we can't always see these. If we knew the general age of a generation, that would maybe help, but of course that can vary over time. And sometimes the Bible even gives us numbers for how long a generation is, But that doesn't actually pan out when you look at the lists.
And there are genuine gaps in [00:27:00] the most prominent genealogies, including Moses, Aaron, David, and Jesus. It might actually be least surprising to find gaps in these genealogies when we consider that genealogies are part of telling a story. So, especially for a major figure, you're only going to include people in the list who are part of telling that story.
So, in relation to these gaps and how we see that, let's look at this Hebrew term, yalad, which we see translated in the King James Version as beget. Bishop Ussher and others assumed that this word necessarily means a parent child relationship. In actuality, the word in the original King James may have had a broader range of meaning than we assume, but this is an example of an unfortunate side effect of translation. Sometimes a [00:28:00] word is used, and it's taken to mean something more specific than what we have in the original translation.
Let me read what Henry and Dake say about this word. Quote, The key to timeline calculations is the meaning of the Hebrew word yalad, which is rendered begat in the King James Bible. Bishop Ussher and other scholars who attempt to calculate a timeline assume yalad always implies a parent child relationship. And this assumption is reflected in modern English translations of the word, such as became the father of, in the NIV, the NASB, the NET, or fathered, in the ESV. However, analysis of the full range of meaning of Yalad, as used in the Bible, demonstrates that this assumption is at best an oversimplification, which overlooks the complexity of the word.[00:29:00] It may be that the King James scholars recognized the subtlety of Yalad when they chose to use Begat rather than another word or words. The Oxford Dictionary states that Begat is derived from the Old English word Begeaten, which means to get or obtain by effort. And yalad is derived from the Hebrew word yeled, which is commonly translated child, and which Mickelson's Enhanced Strongs Dictionary describes as something born. Hence, yalad might be more precisely translated as produced a child or caused a child to be born. Indeed, since yalad can mean the production of a child many generations later, modern scholarship generally acknowledges that the word has a very flexible meaning and implies merely a general ancestral relationship or even less. [00:30:00] Thus, this early English rendering seems to capture the complex meaning of Yalad much better than the modern renderings which suggest a direct father son relationship. One must have empathy for the problems of modern translators. However, choosing to translate a complex word like Yalad in such a simplistic manner, may have an unintended consequence. It may be a principal reason why so many modern evangelical Christians accept the creation date calculations of Bishop Ussher and others, which in turn is causing young Christians to leave the church as discussed above. The above example of Misraim in a typical English translation of Genesis 10 13-14 provides a dramatic example of how Yalad is used for a relationship other than parent child. The objects of the Hebrew verb Yalad in this verse are not sons at all, but people groups.
Okay, [00:31:00] so let's consider words and translations for a minute. Almost every word we use has a range of meaning rather than just one meaning, and sometimes there is some overlap. I mean, a word can have different meanings that aren't related to one another, but often there's a range where there's related meanings and some are more restrictive meanings than others.
Take the word son, for instance. That is used in the Bible for a biological son, or a descendant, or some other relationship, like sons of God, for instance. The most restrictive meaning of the word son is in the biological sense, but that's not the only meaning. So when you come across the use of the word son, you can't automatically assume that it's being used in the most restrictive sense. Sensible interpretation first assumes the more general category unless you have a [00:32:00] reason to believe otherwise. The burden of proof, in other words, is for those who want to restrict the meaning in a more specific sense.
An example of a telescoped genealogy is in the one provided for Moses. I'll go ahead and read this quote from Henry and Dake about that quote. In contrast to those who assume yalad requires a parent-child relationship. The story of Moses offers strong evidence of genealogical gaps in the Biblical record, and hence that yalad implies only a general ancestral relationship. English translations of the Bible make it appear moses is the son of Amram and Jehochebed. The Bible records Amram as the grandson of Jacob's third son, Levi, in Exodus 6, 16 and 18. Amram married Jehokabed, Levi's daughter, [00:33:00] and Amram's aunt, who yalad, or bore in the NASB, Moses to him, in Exodus 6. 20 and Numbers 26. 59. Moses is described as the Ben, son or child, of Amram in the genealogical records in 1 Chronicles 6. 3 and 23. 13. However, closer scrutiny suggests it is impossible for Amram and Jehokabed to be Moses parents based on the chronological information in the Bible. Amram would have been at least 216 years old, 362 max, at the time of Moses birth. Yet, Amram died at age 137, according to Exodus 620. Similarly, Jehokabed would have been at least 255 years old, or 350 max, at the time of Moses birth.[00:34:00] If this were true, the story of Sarah bearing Isaac at age 90, Genesis 17, 17, and 21, 5 pales in comparison, yet the Bible puts great emphasis on it as a miracle of God. In light of Isaac's story, it seems unlikely Scripture would fail to mention that Moses was born to a woman of such advanced age, especially since he was the third child in a seemingly routine family in which two siblings, Miriam and Aaron, were only a few years older. There must be a gap in Moses genealogical records. These calculations assume a high date for the Exodus and a 430 year sojourn, as recorded in the Hebrew text of the Bible. They are detailed and charted in Appendix 2. With the 215 year sojourn implied by the Septuagint, this parentage is highly improbable, but not [00:35:00] impossible. It should be noted that genealogical gaps can occur before or after a named individual. That is, the gap might be between Levi and Amram and Jehokabed, or between Amram and Jehokabed and Moses. However, the detail provided in the narrative makes it probable that it is the latter in this case. end quote.
Okay, we're gonna stop there for a moment, but let's look carefully at the language of Moses birth in Exodus 2. Another quote from Henry and Dake quote, it is especially instructive to note that Exodus two verses one and two does not name Moses' parents. These verses say, now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived hara, and bore , yalad, a son. The difference between the verbiage in these verses and the genealogical record seems significant. [00:36:00] Moses's unnamed mother both conceived (hara) and bore (yalad) him, whereas Jehokabed only yalad. This difference seems to reinforce the suggestion that although Amram and Jehokabed are Moses's ancestors, they are not his parents. End quote.
So we see that there are different terms used, and some are more likely to suggest a direct parent child relationship than others. But there's no cut and dry use of single terms. The only way we know for certain a parent child relationship exists is if there is an associated birth narrative.
Remember that I said that genealogies are about story, and sometimes we're so far removed from the context of the stories that we might not always catch their drift. But in some places we can make good guesses, like for instance with Moses. Why [00:37:00] were Amram and Jehokabed named? Henry and Dake suggest it has something to do with the connection of sexual sin. Other prominent examples of sexual sin are found in Genesis 38 with Tamar, in Exodus 6, which mentions Simeon's sons, as well as the only women mentioned in Jesus genealogy, who are Tamar, Rahab the prostitute, Ruth the Moabitess, and Bethsheba the adultress,
Now, henry and Dake suggest the reason for this is to show that God knows us intimately. I don't want to be harsh in response to that suggestion, but that sounds like a very modern apologetic to me that would not have anything to do with the reason why the biblical authors put this in. But I do think that sexual sin is being highlighted in some genealogies, including that of Jesus. [00:38:00] This isn't the episode to get into that, but I definitely think that this is purposeful.
At any rate, if we have gaps in Moses own genealogy, then what can we assume for the genealogies of Genesis? Another interesting point. Do you remember what I said about the differences in the Masoretic text and the Septuagint?
Well, interestingly, Ussher seems to have switched between these manuscripts for portions of his calculations. We can, of course, only speculate as to why. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was the data he happened to have, though probably not. Two things we can note from this particular cherry picking of dates is that if he used the Septuagint dates for the sojourn in Egypt, then it makes it just barely probable that Amram is in fact Moses father. That ruins the summary number of [00:39:00] 430, but it fixes the gap in the genealogy.
Another thing it does is give some nice round millennial numbers, according to him, for both the building of the temple, as well as the birth of Jesus. The temple was built, according to Ussher, in the 3000th year of the earth. And Jesus was born a thousand years later.
How convenient that if you just pick the right numbers from the right manuscripts, you can get such round numbers. Insert some comments about dispensationalism here. Again, go read God of the Gaps for a brief discussion on the different dates for the sojourn, and more examples of genealogical gaps including some of the more specific grammatical arguments about the term yalad.
I'll make another few points from this book, including the ambiguity of Hebraic family terms. I'll quote again [00:40:00] from Henry and Dake quote, modern languages tend to be exacting about the terms father and son and ancestor and descendant. However, the Hebrew words father and son or child or daughter. Often mean ancestor and descendant. For example, as discussed in chapter 4, Genesis 46, 15 states 33 sons and daughters through Leah, but Genesis 46, 9 through 14 makes it clear that most of these sons and daughters were in fact grandchildren, and two may have been great grandchildren. Furthermore, Genesis 46, 16 through 25 shows that the same is true for Jacob's other wife, and concubines, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah. The Hebrew word mother, appears over a hundred [00:41:00] times in the Old Testament. Usually the narrative makes it clear that it describes a direct parent child relationship, but Genesis 3. 20 refers to Eve as the mother of all living. Also, as discussed in chapter 4, Moses unnamed biological mother is referred to as a daughter of Levi, even though she's only a descendant of Levi. And Moses himself is referred to as the son of Amram, even though the above calculations show he is only a descendant of Amram. Abraham says of his wife Sarah, Besides, she actually is my sister, the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother. However, the meaning of these Hebrew words is sufficiently flexible that Abraham could be saying that Sarah is his niece, the granddaughter of his father, as claimed by Josephus and Bishop Ussher. The ambiguity of [00:42:00] the Biblical Hebrew words indicating familial designations should come as no surprise. Biblical Hebrew does not have a separate word for grandfather, grandmother, grandson, or granddaughter. Let alone modern terms like third cousin twice removed. Furthermore, the stories of Moses and Abraham illustrate the custom in the ancient Near East of intermarriage with close relatives.
All right, end quote here. Now, I'm not going to go into the dates and ages and their potential symbolism of all of these from Genesis for a very good reason. And that reason is that it's already been done exceptionally well By T. J. Stedman over at the Answers to Giant Questions podcast. Check out Season 5 of his podcast and your head will be swimming in numbers, including looking at how these numbers in Genesis 5, in particular, may or may not relate to things [00:43:00] like the Sumerian Kings list. I don't need to redo work that was done so very well, so go check that out at some point.
In the end, what does all of this mean? Well, it means we can't calculate the age of the earth. Full stop. We just can't. There's no way to do that. We have no idea where the gaps in the genealogies are. We have no idea how long they were. We have no idea how long the various people groups mentioned lived or if they overlapped.
Now this might matter most to some forms of eschatology that want to calculate the date of Jesus return and such things. If we're not in those camps, we might say that, hey, all this just means that we can't say exactly when the Earth was made, but surely all of these genealogies still mean that the Earth is younger than millions and billions of years.[00:44:00]
Again, remember, I'm not trying to take down young Earth creationism as a whole here, but if you can't use the Bible in this high definition, scientific way, then Then maybe we shouldn't approach science with a presumption that we know much about it to begin with.
And that moves us into the second book I said I was going to mention, which is The Creationists, From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, by Ronald L. Numbers. This is, again, not a simple, straightforward read. He dug deep into the last couple hundred years to take a close look at the rise of fundamentalist ideas of creationism. And it's intersection with the modern realm of science.
It's detailed and gets a bit dull after a while, but one of the most interesting elements, I thought, that he clearly shows is how the so called creationist science was [00:45:00] basically created out of whole cloth by people who intentionally got science degrees in order to infiltrate the academy and push their particular narrative. Science be damned.
Many of the players in that drama either were or were egged on by Seventh Day Adventists. And I'm not trying to say anything against them personally. This is just the history. So Ronald Numbers looked at letters, he interviewed people, he found their printed literature within their own societies, and this is just the reality of it.
Now, I would not suggest that all creation science has this agenda today or that no legitimate science is being done in this realm, but we have to realize how science works. It's built upon the foundation of previous work. So much of the work that [00:46:00] creationist scientists are working from, if they're working from data from like the first little while here, is, it's just flawed information.
The methodology The data, it's just inaccurate. So much of that is built upon the false division of science and faith that was driven in the early part of the story of science studying the age of the earth.
Of course, all scientists bring presumptions into their work. They have to. It's part of what makes it science. But when you can't presume that the Bible is providing us with scientific dating, then the Bible shouldn't be inserted into this science at all. It's not that we have to keep science and the Bible separate. That's not the point at all. It's just that science is a venture that relies on a type of precise record keeping and the Bible is not providing us [00:47:00] that precise record keeping.
Again, I'm not saying we can't do things like archaeology and paleolinguistics, and all kinds of other things, but the data we bring in has to be analyzed with some care. The type of care that at least the early creationist scientists weren't attempting to do at all.
In my opinion, if the Bible isn't all that concerned with making sure we have accurate data for the age of creation, then I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it doesn't actually matter to our faith at all. We don't need to try to make geological data fit a Young Earth narrative.
All right, I said I would try to give some data on this from the early church. Now, first of all, hopefully you won't be surprised by this, but the age of the Earth wasn't really a big topic early on. [00:48:00] The Church Fathers had much more pastoral issues to deal with, and things like heresies and the like. When they dealt with Gnostics, who believed material existence was basically evil, there was some development of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the like, and we also have some concern about eschatology.
Now, what we can say is that there was a fairly widespread belief that the Earth would last 6, 000 years. This just fits neatly into the symbolism of numbers, doesn't it? The idea that the Earth would last 6, 000 years before a thousand year millennial reign parallels the days of creation perfectly. But of course, even with Ussher's calculations, we've gone beyond that nice neat package of time. Unless our current [00:49:00] calculations are wrong, perhaps.
Augustine believed that he was living in the 6th millennium already. But he also said that the millennial reign at the end of the world would be spiritual. So, that's slightly less helpful to precise dispensationalism. Of course, we could always add some thousands of years to the age of the Earth, if not mankind, if we take the days of creation to be a thousand years, as some Church Fathers seemed to do.
It's hard to know if they really were talking about each day of creation equaling a thousand years, though, or if they just meant that Adam would die within a thousand years because of the whole language of, on that day you shall die.
So notice that the Church Fathers aren't calculating anything into the past. They're just using the days of creation [00:50:00] as an analogy to the length of the earth. That's a form of using the Bible's information to say that the earth is young, certainly. But again, we've gone past that mark according to where the Church Fathers believed that they were at in relation to history. So, to put it bluntly, they were wrong about the age of the earth.
They were theorizing and projecting an analogy of the days of creation with the length that that creation would be allowed to exist in its mortal state. Since we've gone past that point, Well, here we are. The presumption is just wrong.
There are several creation dates proposed in the early church, but most of them are concerned more with eschatology than they are with creation, which makes sense because that's probably true of most people and the longer they went after Jesus was resurrected, the more people were [00:51:00] wondering why the Second Coming had not yet happened.
One thing I want to point out here is that just because the Church Fathers tended towards what we might call Dispensationalism to some degree, the fact that they thought the Earth would last 7, 000 years in total doesn't mean that they all jived with Modern Dispensationalism. Because Modern Dispensationalism goes down its own particular track that we shouldn't lay at the feet of the early Church Fathers.
Just like we can't use the Fathers to presume evidence for an old Earth either, or the idea that people in the early centuries were worried about the idea of evolution.
You can look into the early Church Fathers and they seem to be saying some very anti science things. For instance, Tertullian wrote, quote, For philosophy is the [00:52:00] material of the world's wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and dispensation of God. Indeed, heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy. What, indeed, has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart, away with all attempts to produce a stoic, platonic, and dialectic Christianity. We want no curious disputation. After possessing Christ Jesus, no Inquisition after receiving the gospel, when we believe, we desire no further belief for this is our first article of faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides end quote.
So that sounds like he's speaking against [00:53:00] science per se, but we have to remember that Greek philosophy was very broad and very varied. And trying to equate that exactly to what science is today, well, it's really not quite exactly the same thing. The point is, we can't presume that what they were talking about really relates to how we are thinking about things today.
While the evidence from the Church Fathers suggests that there was more Young Earth Creationism than Old Earth Creationism, the very labels are probably anachronistic. What we need to realize is in this time, there were various ways of interpreting the Bible. One of those is the plain reading of scripture, which just kind of takes it like it says according to what we think it says.
The other way of looking at it that was very, very common in the early church was the allegorical [00:54:00] interpretation. So if you could fit an allegory into something in the Bible, well, you're good to go. That's why we have young earth creationism rampant in the early church. It's not because they were calculating things and they thought that the Bible was proving something in some Greek scientific way, it's because they were allegorizing the days of creation. So all of this combined helps us see that we hardly have a united and uniform historical interpretation of the data at hand.
We today are blessed with such a wealth of information that it's almost to the level broaching unbelievability. I have quite a few quotes that I could be reading from the early Church Fathers that kind of relate to this, but I don't really want to cut that discussion short, and I think it might be a little bit more interesting if we did a whole episode on [00:55:00] what the early Church Fathers said about the Book of Genesis, especially the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis.
At any rate, if you want to defend a young Earth from the perspective of Using the Bible and using the early church, then what you're going to have to do is argue for the allegory of creation. And honestly, allegory can be a great defense for truth from time to time, but it's not really the same as scientific precision.
And you're really not going to be able to defend that to a lot of people in the same way that you can use science. Right? Like, you can say that there's this allegory here, or this metaphor, or this figurative thing that's going on, and that's reflective of a real reality, but that doesn't mean you can [00:56:00] just pick that up and plop it down into the science.
A lot of people are going to have some problems if you do that, and I don't blame them. It also kind of goes against the idea that we can calculate things like the end of the world precisely. Because the Bible seems pretty clear that we're not gonna be able to do that. Now, maybe we could say that the reason we can't do that is because there are these gaps, and so maybe we have this inbuilt system in the Bible to prevent us from calculating the exact age. But we're gonna be within a little bit of timeframe here, right? So maybe it looks like we've gone past 6,000 years now. But maybe we really haven't because of these gaps, except that, hang on a second, if there's gaps it means we've actually gone way [00:57:00] over 6, 000 years, not under it. So yeah, that doesn't really work, does it?
Of course, one other option we have is that we're missing time, that maybe we have a missing splice of time that our calendars today are missing. That maybe it's not the Bible's calendars, but our calendars that are off.
But no matter how you look at it, this is just beyond the scope of what we should be using the Bible for. It's obviously not going to work. We're obviously missing some information here.
At any rate, as always, I hope that you found something in this episode that was helpful. Or enlightening, or that you just enjoyed listening to the conversation. I do still have a backlog of topics, but I am exceptionally interested to address the things that you guys are [00:58:00] interested in.
So if anyone wants to throw out any concepts for episodes, feel free. I am always happy to address those. One thing I want to do is ask you guys what you want to see addressed regarding the topic of the Flood. Because there are places, as I've said, like Answers to Giant Questions, that are really deeply getting into the flood narratives already, and I don't want to redo their work. What I do want to do is address things that aren't being addressed in different places, and things like that. Or it might be helpful to do some basic overviews. We might be talking more about the ancient Near Eastern literature of the time and things like that.
So if you guys have any questions particularly about the flood, about anything surrounding the flood, if you want to engage in any [00:59:00] of the ideas that you've heard from elsewhere, let me know because I am absolutely happy to do that. You can get a hold of me either on Facebook or through my website at GenesisMarksTheSpot. com.
And at my website you can find things like blog posts, you can find guest profiles, you can do searches of my episodes including transcripts.
You can also go there to view my artwork as well as find out ways you can financially support me. I want to give a big shout out to those of you who are already doing that. Thank you guys so much. If you are a supporter and you're not aware, I am planning on doing some live meetups over Zoom, so make sure you get a hold of me if I haven't contacted you. But with that, I will wrap up and I will wish you all a blessed week and we will see you [01:00:00] later.
