Good evening to you, and the first thing I wanted to mention was a few weeks ago,
somebody said to me, oh, you got taught by an ancient historian, how old is he?
Which reminds me of some time ago when I was visiting somebody, and I came across
this lady, and because I'm a Christian, and she said, well, she said, oh,
I'm a believer as well.
I said, oh, that's amazing.
I said, so how long have you been a believer?
Oh, about 5,000 years or so.
She said, which is a very strange thing, sometimes you come across.
Well, this evening I'm going to be speaking about Genesis, tracing Genesis
through the ancient cultures.
And I'll be looking at, particularly focusing on the first 11 chapters of
Genesis, and seeing if there's any possible evidence in some of the ancient
cultures.
Before I do that, I just want to mention something, a couple of quotations,
real quotations from teenage blunders in their GCSE exams in ancient history.
And I just remembered I must switch my mobile off, in case that goes off.
And real life quotations from some teenagers in their GCSE exams.
The first one, the Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we
wouldn't have history.
The Greeks also had myths.
A myth is a female moth.
Extraordinary, isn't it, what you sometimes get in exams.
Another one, Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people
advice.
They killed him.
Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.
After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
I remember I used to be a teacher and marking some of these things had
extraordinary things sometimes.
But they're amusing.
But there's also something about it.
A couple of students I mentioned beforehand, yes, they had some true things
that were there in those statements.
Yes, the Greeks did have myths.
No, Herodotus, as I was taught, I mean, I was taught he was a father of
history.
But actually he wasn't.
That was just one of those things that was thrown out when I was, I suppose,
doing my, in those days, GCE O-Level.
And other things as well.
Socrates was a famous Greek teacher, but he did not die from an overdose of
wedlock, but of, anybody know what he was supposed to have died of?
Hemlock.
That's right.
A form of poison.
And these days I found that very often we are, everything seems to be sort of taught
through Darwinian evolutionary glasses.
So it doesn't mean, it doesn't matter what it is, it includes ancient history too.
And because of this particular academic bias that we actually often miss out some
things which would be even right under our nose, which could be very exciting and
unlock certain things in our understanding of history.
So tonight I want you to, to take you through something about ancient history,
let it speak for itself, and you as a listener to make your own judgments.
With the advent of Darwin's Origin of Species, 1859, as I said, a lot of the
things were viewed through evolutionary understanding, which included the Bible,
and it was a growth of liberal scholars, particularly in the 19th century going to
the 20th century, and became very sceptical of the Bible.
I want to just say in the outline, as we are going through tonight,
we are going to be looking at the antiquity, how far we can trace Genesis
back, looking at creation, the views of creation.
The first ancestors, the fall, that is when the first human beings,
according to the Bible, something went wrong a long way back, and they lost their
contact with their creator.
The flood, that was mentioned in Genesis.
The table of nations, how after the flood the people spread through the ancient
world.
And the Tower of Babel, when there was a confusion of languages.
And if I get time at the end, something which will find out what on earth is that,
the desire of the nations.
I want to have a look first of all, looking at the first part, antiquity of
Genesis.
And here is this chap I was mentioning earlier about evolutionary understanding
and influence on biblical thinking.
And he was a man, Julius Welhausen, who was one of the German high critics.
And one of the things he came up, he was, there was a bunch of them,
but he was particularly well known for the theory, which is called either documentary
hypothesis or literary theory, or some people refer to it as the JEPD,
which I'll explain in a moment.
Now, traditionally, both Jews and Christians had accepted that Moses had
written the first five books of the Bible, around about 1450 to 1400 BC.
Well, Welhausen came along and he began to look at it in a different way,
through his understanding of words and literature and so forth, applying that to
the first five books of Moses, as they've been traditionally called.
So they had this JEDP, which is, J basically was short for the name Jah,
or Yahweh, which is one of the names of God in the Old Testament.
And he reckoned that there were various writers that had written those books of
the Old Testament.
And the first one, he reckoned, had been written by some person about 850
BC.
The second one, E for El, or Elohim, a word for God.
Again, he thought it was another writer who had written in about 700 BC,
because he thought you couldn't have these two names being the same God, there must
be different writers.
And then D was short for Deuteronomy, the last book of the books of Moses,
which he reckoned a scribe had written around about 621 BC.
And the last one, priest, who had gone over the whole lot, and it had been
written about 500, putting things together, and then maybe refined and
purified later on, even by somebody else later back as 200 BC.
The only trouble is, when we actually look at it, the first thing is that there was
an understanding, because evolution sort of affected the whole way that people
thought, including understanding of religion.
They thought that the concept of God had evolved.
In other words, it had been a form of simple animism, right through to magic,
right through to many gods, finally to monotheism, or one creator God,
because that fitted in the theory of evolution.
However, and I'm going to go and look at this a bit later, I'm actually going to
show you the exact opposite is what we find in the archaeological and
anthropological record.
But another thing that they thought was that Moses, there's no way, back in sort
of 1450 or so BC, would ever have had a concept of a sort of complex legal system,
which you mentioned, which is mentioned in his writings.
Therefore, it couldn't have been written so early.
But archaeologists after Wellhausen had actually dug up the Code of Hammurabi,
about 1700 BC, which actually contains quite amazing legal understanding.
But he wasn't the only one.
There was also the laws of Lippit Ishtar, the king of Isin from Babylonia,
which was founded in 1945.
And that was dated about 1875 BC.
There was also the laws of Eshunna, about 1900 BC, founded in 1947.
The result of that was some of the evolutionists who had followed
Wellhausen's understanding actually changed their minds.
And they started saying, well actually Moses had copied it from an earlier
source.
So it went round the other way round.
So it was actually far more ancient than Moses.
They had to accept that.
So they changed their mind to fit what they wanted.
And then we look at the Ebla tablets.
Thousands of these were discovered and dated around about 2300 BC.
Which is amazing.
What was exciting about it was in the very same tablet written by the same scribe you
would find the two names El and Ya.
The different names of the God mentioned in Genesis in the Bible.
And obviously that completely defeated the idea that these had been two different
scribes writing a long, long time apart.
Just a simple dig and finding some evidence silenced that.
There was a man called Professor Alberto Casuto who was a well-known biblical
scholar.
And he actually said, I did not prove that the pillars were weak or that each one
failed to give decisive support.
But I established that they were not pillars at all.
That they did not exist.
That they were purely imaginary.
In view of this, my final conclusion that the documentary hypothesis is null and
void is justified.
Others, he went even further.
Professor Archie Gleason even said that this theory wouldn't even stand up.
It would be thrown straight out of a court of law.
So let's look something about the beginning of Genesis.
The first thing is that, as I said, traditionally, Jews and Christians have
reckoned that Moses had written the books of the first five books, 1450 to 1400 BC.
And the question I asked was, okay, but what happened before Moses?
Where did he get his information from for Genesis, for example?
And was it all oral tradition just passed down by the campfire?
Or were there actually written records that existed before Moses that somehow
Moses may have had access to?
The fact is the Bible does not actually speak at all about that.
Jesus, the apostles, and the Jews all accept Moses as the first five books.
But nevertheless, it makes you wonder, where did you actually get the earlier
parts from?
You think Moses, actually, he was a prince of Egypt.
And it says in Acts of the Apostles that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians.
In other words, he had access to libraries, and information, and scholars,
and a position of authority.
He would have been trained in reading and writing Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic
script, and also probably translating from Babylonian, and Sumerian, and possibly
Arcadian, which are some of the ancient languages.
If we look at a king, Ashurbanipal of Assyria, later, but he said this,
I have read the artistic scripts of Sumer, and the dark obscure Arcadian,
which is hard to master, and I now take pleasure in reading of the stone
inscriptions before the flood.
That came from a huge library from Nineveh that was discovered by archaeologists.
So the fact was that people actually were far more educated and literate than we
actually gave them credit to.
Certainly, the people who were very critical of the Bible in the early days
didn't realise just how much stuff there was.
You think Joseph was also prime minister to Pharaoh.
Again, he would have had access to all sorts of information about history,
and so on.
And then we get to Abraham.
Now, Abraham, again, we tend to think about, a lot of people think, Abraham is
this guy in a tent with all these people, you know, with the sheep, trying to kick
him out of the tent or something.
But actually, he came from Ur of the Chaldees, which was an ancient city,
and it was highly advanced, highly sophisticated for its time.
And if, for example, we look at some of the exquisite Sumerian jewellery from Ur
of the Chaldees, absolutely beautiful, some of the things they had in those days,
artistic work.
But it wasn't just that.
We look at some of the schooling in those days.
And this is a mathematical clay tablet.
And you can see on the top of that, you've got all these lines and triangles
and calculating distances of shorter side and longer side, hypotenuse and all that
kind of thing.
Don't ask me, I'm not very good at maths.
But they, presumably, were pretty good at it, going back sort of 5,000 years or
something like that.
And they were being taught.
These are things that were dug up.
This is the education of the children in those days.
And literacy was very high.
Architecture in those days.
Now that's obviously an artist's picture there.
But the buildings, I tell you what, they lasted much longer than a lot of our
buildings in the 60s and 70s, which are kind of falling down.
These are amazing.
In fact, I was talking to an architect who was building some amazing houses.
He'd actually modelled it on some of the Sumerian architecture, because he said it
was some of the best in the world.
Not only that, they had sewerage systems.
They had underground heating in their houses.
That kind of thing.
It was quite amazing.
They had a postal system.
Can you imagine that?
I mean, imagine your letterbox, somebody clunks in one of these clay
tablets, bonk, crash.
But they actually were doing that.
And you read some of the accounts, some of the letters on these clay tablets.
And about really mundane things.
About a woman's dyed her hair to please her husband.
And could he come back from his business trip soon to sort out the sun?
And there's another one about a son.
He's really angry.
He wants to thump somebody.
He's asking dad for advice.
And all this kind of typical everyday life kind of things that we have to deal with,
they were there on some of these clay tablets.
So, if they were dealing with those kind of things, how much more so the really
important things, such as genealogies, history and so on.
Quotation here from Professor William Albright, who was a leading archaeologist.
He said, concerning Abraham and the patriarchs, that's Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob.
He said, aside from a few diehards among older scholars, there is scarcely a single
historian, biblical historian, who has not been impressed by the rapid
accumulation of data supporting the substantial historicity of the patriarchal
tradition.
Something else is very interesting.
If you read in some of the chapters of Genesis, you come across editing of place
names for clarity.
This is not corruption of text, but this is actually to clarify what's
actually already there beforehand.
For example, you come across the name of a place called Bela, which the person
afterwards, to clarify it for those who will read it, because they didn't
understand the names of these places, he says, which is Zohar.
See, for example, imagine here in Edinburgh, we call this place Edinburgh.
At one time it was called Dunedin, or my parents live near a place called
Chester, which once was called Deva.
Or if you're in London, it was once called Lugdunium.
So these different names that there are, which change.
And so what you have here, I believe you've got Moses actually writing it,
but he has access to information before him.
And so he has these names, Vale of Sidin, which again is understandable for the
people he's there with, is called, which is the Salt Sea, or En Mishpat,
which is Kadesh.
Hobar, which is on the left hand of Damascus.
Vale of Sheva, which is the King's Dale.
Bir Lachiroi, behold, it is between Kadesh and Bered.
Kiriath Arba, can you imagine living in these places, you know, where do you live?
Oh, Bir Lachiroi, oh that's, what about, oh I come from Jirath Arba, goodness,
the same as Hebron in the land of Canaan.
So I believe what we're actually looking at is older records which are there in
Genesis.
Now here's an extraordinary thing.
I once came across this and I thought, what?
It mentions Genesis chapter 5, the book of Adam.
I thought, a book of Adam?
That's an amazing thing.
It says in Genesis chapter 5, this is the book of the genealogy of Adam.
In the day when God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.
He created them male and female and blessed them and called them mankind in
the day they were created.
So I thought, is it possible that there were some really ancient clay tablets
which people had access to?
Was there really a book of Adam?
Hmm, interesting.
There's actually a book of, it's an apocryphal work from about 250 BC.
It's called the book of Asatir.
And it speaks about this book of Adam and in fact other things as well.
But interesting sort of side point there.
If we look at Josephus in Antiquities, and he was quite a careful historian.
He was a Jewish general.
And he writes this, and the time of the flood, it's known as flood, is written
down in our sacred books, those who then lived having noted down with great
accuracy both births and deaths of illustrious men.
In other words, the Jewish people understood that there were very early
writings, such as on the flood and other things like that, which have been actually
recorded at some point.
Berossus was a Chaldean priest at the Temple of Bel.
And there are a number of accounts about the flood in Sumerian Babylonian
understanding.
But in this case, what you have is a reference here.
It says, the deity Cronus appeared to him, that Zuthros, which is another name for a
Noah, in a vision and gave him notice that upon the fifteenth day of the month of
Dacia there will be a flood by which mankind will be destroyed.
He therefore enjoined him to commit to writing a history of the beginning,
progress and final conclusion of all things.
So it's not just something we have in Jewish understanding, the Hebrews,
but it's something also in other cultures that there were very early writings
concerning some of these things.
So a man called Professor Sir William Dawson once wrote, I've long thought that
the narrative in Genesis 7 and 8, talking about on the ark, can be
understood only on the supposition that it is a contemporary journal or log of an
eyewitness incorporated by the author of Genesis in his work.
Now this man is, not just anybody saying that, but he's a chap who actually was a
chairman of the Royal Society of Canada and also the chairman for the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
Food for thought.
Well let's move on to creation and creation in the ancient world.
And what we find is there are essentially two views, pantheism and monotheism.
Pantheism basically that everything is God, monotheism there's one God that
created everything.
And if we look at the typical pagan cyclic universe, it had a beginning, it went
through and it had an end, there's silence for a bit, it starts all over again and it
continues.
In fact, look at this New Scientist, I saw this article for New Scientist
magazine, here's the cyclic universe and there's a serpent, the cosmic serpent,
which you often find in ancient history.
Mark helped me with that one, I'll actually get that one whirring around.
But that was something that was believed then.
Often people think, you know, multiverse theory, matrix and so on, many universes.
It was around before by the Greeks, they were discussing it at the time of
Augustine and people are discussing it again today.
There's nothing new under the sun, as one wise person once said.
If we look at Genesis, the first few verses it says, In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep,
and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
I mentioned earlier beforehand about evolution thinking, really going right
through even through religion.
I mentioned about people believing that the simplest form of animism, magic,
had evolved through to polytheism, lots of gods finally through to
monotheism, one God creating everything.
People like Fraser, you may have read Fraser's book or come across at the Golden
Bough, he was one of those people.
Tyler and Durkheim and others, they spoke about this kind of thing.
However, what we find in the ancient religions, as time went on, as
archaeologists dug, and as anthropologists studied amongst tribes, remote tribes,
they found it was actually the opposite.
They found a shadowy figure in the background, who was a supreme creator,
and that something had gone wrong, and it actually devolved, it's actually
gone the opposite direction, it corrupted from a purer form, through to polytheism,
and through to simple magic and spells and so forth.
In fact, if you look at today, even in our own time, what's called the
New Age movement, we've seen that this country one time was very strongly
monotheistic sort of Christian.
But since the 60s, the last sort of 40 years, there's been an amazing movement of
lots and lots of people just in a short period of time of 40 years, getting
involved in animism, various forms of crystal healing therapy and spells and all
that kind of thing, very popular, and it can happen quite rapidly.
If we look at Professor Langdon, he was an archaeologist from Oxford
University, he said, in his understanding in Sumerian history, he said, the history
of the oldest religion of man is a rapid decline from monotheism to extreme
polytheism, and a widespread belief in evil spirits.
It is, in a very true sense, the history of the fall of man.
And then we have another leading anthropologist.
This is Professor Evans Pritchard, again from Oxford University.
Whereas before the 1930s, an evolutionary concept of religion was that it developed
from animism and magic to polytheism and then finally to monotheism, fieldwork
reversed this and anthropologists now realise that belief in one God preceded
all other religious concepts.
This gradually corrupted to polytheism and finally to the placating of an extensive
array of nature spirits.
Let's look at some of the things in the early ancient historical record.
This is one clay tablet from Syria, Ebla creation account, 2300 BC.
And it speaks about the god Lurgu, the great one, the creator, who speaks by
the power of his word and the whole universe comes into being.
There, a very ancient sort of record.
Let's have a look at another one.
The Enema Elish, the seven tablets, some people have dated them 1894,
could have been the earliest originals, some have said 1595, some of the ones
we've got are later.
But, what you have, the first people, they found there were seven tablets and
immediately thought, seven, like seven in Genesis, well it's not actually
necessarily corresponding to that at all.
And in fact you read it, it's full of things like decapitation and sort of gods
fighting each other and it gets pretty barbaric and pretty nasty at times.
But nevertheless, you do find some things in there with a parallel with Genesis,
such as light being created before the sun and the stars and the order of creation
being the same in the bits that we do have.
The mention of the deep and chaos and the time of rest on the seventh day after man
is created.
Unfortunately, there are a number of lines missing and that's a real shame because
we'd be able to look at things like the order of how things came into being,
living creatures and so on.
But nevertheless, what you are seeing, I believe, are traces of an earlier,
purer form, which is a sort of a proto-Genesis or proto-Hebrew
understanding.
Let's look at another one.
An Egyptian creation account from Heliopolis about 1800 BC.
It says this, I am the creator of all things that exist that came forth from my
mouth.
Heaven and earth did not exist, nor had been created the herbs of the
ground, nor the creeping things.
I raised them out of the primeval abyss from a state of non-being.
In other words, there was some creator that brought the whole lot into existence.
We find the same thing in Hindu-Indian cultures.
There are about 120 creation myths.
Most of them have an eternal universe and there are many gods.
But occasionally you get glimpses of a kind of a genesis in there.
And here we have one from the Upanishads.
He, that's God, is the never-created creator of all.
He knows all.
He is the pure consciousness, the creator of time, all-powerful, all-knowing.
A Chinese creation account originally from at least 2205 BC.
And they had these ritual hymns which were recorded and kept going right the way
through.
They had an understanding of a creator called Shangdi, which eventually became
sort of, they sort of turned into sort of heaven.
But originally the concept was a creator, supreme spiritual creator of everything.
And there's this particular hymn.
Well, let's move on now to the first ancestors.
Meet the first ancestors.
And according to the Bible you have Adam, who is the first man who is created by the
minerals of the ground, by the dust.
And God breathes life into him.
And then he puts him to a deep sleep and produces his wife out of his side.
And you have that in Genesis chapter 3.
Well, let's have a look at a few things here.
You have a Babylonian kind of Adam and Eve.
Again, you have a bunch of gods.
You have a goddess involved with things.
There are different gods in different places.
The creation of man from clay is often, you find in Babylonian, Sumerian and
Arcadian understanding, is that there's the blood of a god mixed together with
clay to form a human being.
But you have a first couple.
And with the Sumerian Adam you have this.
There's actually a first man called Adamu.
And there's a paradise called Dilmun.
A place that was pure and clean and bright where the lion kills not, the wolf
snatches not the lamb.
There was no disease, pain, deceit or guile.
And the god Enki, great names, the god Enki, says to the goddess
Ninhursag, another great name, that his side hurts him.
And she says that she's caused a goddess called Ninti, lady of the rib,
to be born for him from his rib, from his side.
So you have traces of this sort of Genesis account amongst all these sort of gods and
so on.
In the Chinese account you have a record of the book called the Wai Xing.
And what you have is goddess made out of the clay.
If you look in ancient Egypt, in the pyramid text, we read that the god Khnum,
if I pronounce it properly, formed man out of clay on a potter's wheel.
And the goddess Hekat breathed life into him.
And so it goes on.
And you trace it right through African cultures, right through and so on.
There's so many it would take too long to go through them all.
But I want to look now at the so-called fall of man or the temptation in the
Garden of Eden as Genesis mentions it.
Now this was a clay tablet seal.
Some people said it was as many as 3000 BC.
I think a bit less than that, but that's what it's been put as.
Very small, but this has been enlarged.
But if you look and you see, you have a man over there, you probably can't see it
very well, but he's got horns in his head.
And there's a woman over here with some horns.
There's a fruit tree.
And there's a serpent upright behind her.
And there's this fruit here that's the centre of what's going on.
Now when first people discovered that, they said, ah, they called it the
temptation seal because it was obvious to them it was the Garden of Eden story in
Sumerian culture.
But somebody came along and said, no, no, no, I reckon it's just somebody's
date business.
I think, what a funny thing to have a date business.
And then somebody else said, well, it couldn't be Adam and Eve because
they've got clothes on.
Good point, because Adam and Eve up to this point were naked according to
Genesis.
However, if you understand Sumerian Babylonian culture, you have to try and
understand a few things.
There was a sense of a cosmic serpent right through.
And I'll show a few of those things a bit more.
Enlightenment or Godhood was something to be celebrated.
You see, in the Bible, for human beings to become God is seen to be sinful.
But in the Sumerian Babylonian culture, it was a wonderful thing to celebrate your
enlightenment as becoming a God.
So they were clothed, celebrating this thing.
And just in the same as Genesis, you have the serpent upright.
It's there apparently giving wisdom and the tree of knowledge of good and evil in
the middle.
Here's an interesting one, which I discovered recently.
It's called the bronze tree of, I don't know how to pronounce that,
Zhang Xingdui.
I don't know.
But anyway, I came across this interesting thing.
It's actually nearly four meters tall.
It's pretty big.
And it was discovered, this culture of the Zhang Xingdui people.
They existed in China between 2600 and 800 BC.
Unfortunately, I can't really show it on this picture because it's quite small
here.
I wish I could show a really big one.
But you have a dragon.
I don't know if you can see.
It's got horns and it's a dragon, which goes right underneath the whole
thing.
And this is supposed to be a tree.
You can't see from where you are, but there are fruit.
There's fruit on the tree.
And there's also a hand, which is down here, which is reaching out for the fruit.
Now, what do you think about that when you put those things together?
Bear in mind, this is an ancient thing from China.
Just hang on a minute.
Let's have a look at something else.
Chinese pictograms.
Scholars discovered ancient pictograms, 1000 BC, even going back a few thousand
BC.
And they found this story.
A serpent.
Trees.
Negative.
No, don't.
A woman.
Trees.
Desire or covet.
Two persons.
Stop.
Garden.
Equals stumble or fall.
In other words, two people were amongst these trees.
They were supposed not to do something.
They did it.
Somehow there was a serpent involved.
And they fell.
And, in fact, what you find in ancient writing is that, going right back to the
Zu dynasty, we find writings about angels, Chinese angels there, who were guarding
the way to heaven.
Just like you find in Genesis, that there were the cherubim who were
guarding the way to heaven at this time of rebellion.
Let's have a look at Tutankhamun now.
And some of the Egyptians.
Beautiful.
Absolutely amazing thing it is.
There is Tutankhamun.
You have the cobra.
And you have the whole headdress, which is a beautiful sort of cobra.
But you see that right through the Egyptian pharaohs.
You see this almost obsession with the serpent.
And it's to do with divinity.
Divine pharaohs that you see.
Hold on to that bit as we go on.
You see, in the Minoan culture, the Minoan goddess.
Over and over again you find women to do with the worship of a serpent,
often with trees, in ancient cultures celebrating these things.
In the palace at Knossos, the archaeologists discovered there were a lot
of spiral symbols in there, which again symbolised the cosmic serpent.
Pandora, that's the Greek tale.
According to the Greek version, Pandora was told, the first woman,
she was told not to open up this box, this wooden casket.
And she was tempted and she opened it up and all the evils came into the world.
The Garden of Hesperides, another Greek one.
And here you have women with a tree.
The tree is not a very good tree there actually, that artwork, because it
actually had gold apples, gold fruit on it.
And the serpent was guarding this particular tree.
You find it, as I mentioned, the Babylonian cosmic serpent appears right
the way through a lot of the astrology and the cultures, the culture of Babylonia.
You find it in Scandinavian people.
And what you've got here is the ancient serpent who is nibbling away at the tree,
the tree of life where all the animals and so on are, right at the root of the world
as it were.
And here, in Hinduism, you have the cosmic serpent.
And if you look, you can see this, again, whoops, I'm gone, I should have
gone there, there we go,
there we go, that's the one.
There's a whole bunch of cobra heads here.
And here's the god Vishnu lying on this serpent.
And here, instead of having a fruit tree, you have the lotus plant, which was seen
to be very similar to that of gaining knowledge of the gods.
And so you see it right through, shown in different ways in the cultures.
And again, in Hinduism, a form of yoga, and they believe in these seven energy
points going right to the body.
They sit and believe it's like in the shape of a pyramid, we'll find that later
on.
And they believe in a thing called Kundalini, or the serpent force within.
By various forms of meditation and mantras and so forth, they're seeking to raise up
what they call the serpent force within, a psychic energy, so that they themselves
become as god.
So if you think about, put that into mind concerning the perspective of Garden of
Eden, you find these things traced right through the ancient cultures.
Let's move on to the flood.
Now, was it a global flood?
Well, over 500 cultures mention a flood.
Now a lot of these, you have to bear in mind, were actually local floods.
Some of them record a whole number, like in North American Indians,
a number recorded of local floods.
Some were missionaries, Christian missionaries, who took that message of the
flood and it was mixed with tribal understanding.
However, you do find there's, in the ancient world, a talk about a global
flood.
The thing about Genesis, if you think, if it's only a local flood, you have the
highest mountains covered by water in a Genesis account, which would be very
difficult for it to be a local flood, because water finds its own level.
And secondly, the rainbow was supposed to be a sign of God's promise.
He'd never destroy the whole world by a flood again.
So if it was only local floods, if Noah's flood was only local,
then God's broken his promise hundreds and hundreds of times since, because there are
many, many local floods since.
And if you can't promise, take him in his word there, can you take him in on his
word on other things as well?
If you look at a picture of a local flood, that would be an artist's depiction of the
ark sitting on the ocean, the water there, right above the mountain tops,
which looks a bit foolish.
Another thing, a silly ark mentioned, often you see this in Sunday school or
something, a little cute little ark, usually with elephants and giraffes
sticking out, and a smiley white bearded Noah.
But actually the ark was something really quite different in the dimensions
mentioned in Genesis.
And if you can just see, there's a little person down there, helping another person
to get up.
So it was a massive thing with three layers.
Let's look at some flood quotations from other ancient historians.
Well, here's one.
That's Hippolytus, 200 AD.
Let's have a look at another one, going back later.
Look at another one, even older.
And what you have in common with all these things, it's not just rain coming down,
they emphasise most of the rain came from up.
Burst out from the earth's crust.
And there's talk about fire with it, and earthquake, and volcanic activity,
and whole geological transformation that's going on.
To such an extent that, for example, scientific Americans sculpturing the earth
from the inside out.
A kind of volcanism, which has been recorded, of reforming the earth at some
point in the history of the earth.
Or, subterranean oceans bursting out.
Scientists have discovered there's an awful lot of water under the earth's
crust.
And that's the kind of thing the Genesis and the ancient historians were referring
to.
There's also another interesting artefact that was discovered, going back a few
thousand years before Christ.
And this one was the ten pre-flood kings mentioned.
I won't give you the list, I probably wouldn't even be able to pronounce them.
But nevertheless, it's interesting, because in the book of Genesis it speaks
about ten patriarchs before the flood.
Here's Josephus.
He's speaking about the actual ark.
After this, that's the flood, the ark rested on the top of a certain mountain in
Armenia.
However, the Armenians call this place Aboterion, the place of descent.
The ark being saved in that place, its remains are shown there by the
inhabitants to this day.
Now all the writers of the barbarian histories make mention of this flood and
of this ark.
Among them whom is Berossus the Chaldean, for when he is described in the
circumstances of the flood, he goes on thus.
It is said there is still some part of the ship in Armenia, the mountain of the
Chordians, and that some people carry off pieces of bitumen which they take away and
use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischiefs or attacks by evil spirits,
I suppose, or something.
Hieronymus, the Egyptian also, who wrote the Phoenician Antiquities and
Nicaeus and a great many more, make mention of the same.
So what he is saying is basically all the ancient historians he had come across all
knew about this great big ark on top of a mountain.
But people were hacking off chunks of it and taking it all over the world as a
pilgrimage site.
Whether or not it exists today, I don't know.
Time will tell whether there is anything left and maybe there are traces of it,
who knows.
But certainly the ancient world, as far as they were concerned,
it did exist as a remnant.
Others, of course, the Gilgamesh flood, clay tablets, mentioning about the flood.
And they have different names for a newer figure.
But speaking of the same thing, the Chinese flood, they had pictograms.
Unfortunately, that's not the one I was trying to get, but I had to find a slide,
so I put that one up.
It's a tortoise on the belly of a tortoise.
They used to write their inscriptions, their pictograms and everything on it.
But they have an understanding of the Chinese flood, with eight people on board,
the same as Genesis.
The Hindus, they have eight people, again, on board a great big boat.
And animals, like the other ancient historians, animals were collected,
put on the boat, and there were just a handful of people.
Of course, how they repopulated the world, of course, is interesting, because they
were all men.
But anyway...
After the flood, so what happened after the flood?
Well, the interesting thing is, the descendants of Noah, the Bible said
they are at a certain place, which would have been in an area of Anatolia,
which spreads through that part of the world, part of Iran, Armenia, through into
Syria, and through into Iraq and so on, and Turkey.
And what people have discovered is that the origin of corn comes from that same
area, which was then taken and spread through the world.
In fact, if you look here, the Fertile Crescent, this area here, and you can see
how it was taken and spread through different parts of the world.
Agriculture, generally speaking, begins in the same area.
And here's a quotation from a conference that took place in 1969, a world
conference on this.
What we see today is decisive evidence that agriculture in the old world arose in
a single connected region, a nuclear zone of Anatolia, Iran, and Syria.
Let's look at the origin of domestic animals.
Again, what we find, scientists tell us, it's the same area that you find that.
And you find there are thousands of bones of different animals that were found,
domestic animals, whether sheep or goats or dogs and so on.
Domestication is the sum of the bones that were discovered in that area.
It was the origin of metallurgy, of metalworks, of going right back,
in fact, they reckon, the oldest metal factory was found by a chap called Dr.
Kriap Makurdzian in Medzamo, 15 miles from Ararat.
And it was dated about 2,500 BC.
You also find the origin of wine, very important for those who like wine.
But this was here.
The vineyards spread again.
The earliest record of wine was found and carbon dated from that same place.
Origin of language.
Again, language being sort of traced back to various, a group of languages,
but a number of people reckon there was a proto-language from that same area.
And here's something from Scientific American.
The landscape described by the proto-languages now resolved must be
somewhere in the Crescent that curves around the southern shores of the Black
Sea, south of the Balkan Peninsula, east across the ancient Anatolia.
That's today the non-European territories of Turkey.
And north to the Caucasus Mountains.
From Scientific American, 1990.
Let's move on to the Table of Nations.
And the spread of people and how they got dispersed from that area.
And what we find is this.
Noah's family tree.
And you have, there's Noah.
Shem, Ham, Japheth.
You have this line with Shem, Elam, Asher.
Elamites through into Persia, Asher, an area of Assyria.
And Amorites and Kashites through into the Far East and through into Africa.
Mizraim into Egypt and part into areas of Libya.
Canaan into a land of what we call Israel.
Gomer, this is going west now.
Any Welsh here?
There's a few.
I've got Welsh blood in me.
Gomer, the Gomerians became the Cimmerians.
And that's how you get Kimru, Wales.
And they spread right through into Europe.
Magog going up north with Meshech into an area of Russia and Scythia, as it was
called.
Madai Persians, Javan going to the Greek islands right through.
And so on.
And I haven't got time, unfortunately, to take a whole session just on that.
But it's just amazing.
Scientists who have actually investigated it show the accuracy of it.
That shows you something of dispersal of the people as they spread through from the
area going far afield.
Here's a quotation from somebody.
It stands absolutely alone in ancient literature.
The Table of Nations remains an astonishingly accurate document.
Professor William Albright, who was a Dean of Biblical Archaeology.
And another one.
The so-called Table of Nations remains, according to all results of monumental
explorations, an ethnographic original document of the first rank which nothing
can replace.
Professor Coucher, who was a leading archaeologist.
Tower of Babel.
Well, they were called ziggurats in the old days.
And this is one, a reconstruction based on what they would have been like.
And here's a, sort of a, somebody's sketch.
There was a temple dedicated to gods and a very part of their religious system.
Here you have them spreading further afield.
And this is Pharaoh Joseph's step pyramid, 2600 BC or thereabouts.
And it was a forerunner of the Egyptian pyramids, but very similar to the Sumerian
ones.
In fact, some people, some scholars reckon it was the Sumerians actually came over by
boats.
And the very first pharaohs and the very first Egyptian civilization we know of
came via Sumeria, is what some would say.
And here's an Egyptian pyramid which, of course, developed.
And instead of having seven steps, it developed its own cultural style.
Nevertheless, it was a burial place for a divine pharaoh.
The Aztecs and other parts of the world, they had their own sort of pyramids.
As it spread through the world.
Let's look at the Tower of Babel itself.
Now, this is an interesting thing that was discovered.
And if you look here, you have the sun, you have...
See, they often refer to the ziggurats, big like mountains.
And here you have this, and you have a whole load of people.
And you have a very large giant of a person, which some scholars reckon could
have been Nimrod.
Which is known in the ancient accounts as well as the Bible.
And who was responsible for the building of the Great Tower, which we know as the
Tower of Babel.
There's an interesting quotation from Nebuchadnezzar.
Now, I always think about Nebuchadnezzar, he was a very eccentric man.
And he was a bit full of himself.
In fact, he was obviously reminded a bit of also Saddam Hussein.
Some of the things he got up to.
But he's in the 6th century and there's this inscription.
I have completed... he's talking about one of these ziggurats.
I have completed its magnificence with silver, gold and other metals.
The most ancient monument of Babylon.
I built and finished it.
A former king built it, but he did not complete its head.
Since a remote time, people abandoned it without expressing their words.
That was his understanding.
So he came across this ancient... he refers to it again as being very ancient
ruins.
And he rebuilt it for his own glory.
And it was at Borsippa.
And it seems to be the most ancient of the ziggurats.
Tara Babel is mentioned by some of the ancient historians.
It's a Babylonian one from 1450 BC.
The building of this temple offended the gods.
In a night they threw down what had been built.
They scattered them abroad and made strange their speech.
The progress they impeded.
So you have the same thing about this temple, whatever it was, a ziggurat.
It offended the gods.
Of course, Genesis says it was God, not the gods.
And it was... the whole thing came to an end.
The people were scattered.
And there was a confusion of languages, just like it mentions in Genesis chapter
11.
Here's another one.
They built a high tower where now is Babylon.
And when it was already close to heaven, the gods sent winds and ruined the entire
scheme.
And men, having till then been all the same speech, received now from the gods
many languages.
And that was a Greek historian called Abidinus, about 350 BC.
And then we have the origin of language, which has been disputed.
And some scholars reckon there were 11 foundational languages in the world from
all the other languages that have come out of that.
But some have argued for a proto-language for the 11, but it's so difficult to
actually pin it down.
It's been argued back and forth over it.
However, here's one person says this.
The science of language thus leads us up to the highest summit from which we see
into the very dawn of man's life on earth.
And where the words which we have heard so often from the days of our childhood,
and the whole earth was of one language and of one speech, assume a meaning more
natural, more intelligible, more convincing than they ever had before.
And that was Professor Max Muller, the science of language, who was one of
the leading exponents of language theory.
I want to end with a couple of quotations that I'd come across, which really said
for me, it's in their own words and these are sort of experts, what I felt as I
spent 25 years working through ancient history and trying to dig around and find
out bits and pieces to see whether Genesis did have indeed some reliability,
some historical truth, or was it just legend and myth.
And this is a quotation from Professor Howard Vose, a biblical archaeologist.
I once summed through the book of Genesis and mentally noted that each of the 50
chapters was either illuminated or confirmed by some archaeological
discovery.
The same would be true for most of the remaining chapters of the Bible,
both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And finally another one.
It has been my long experience that when the Bible is rightly understood and
interpreted, it is never contradicted by archaeological and historical evidence,
when that too has been subjected to strict scrutiny.
And that was Professor Donald Wiseman, who is one of the world's leading
Assyriologists.
And there could be others too.
I could have taken from Professor Kenneth Kitchen, leading Egyptologist and various
others.
But I just want to leave it with that and hope you've enjoyed tonight and the talk.
I hope you found it interesting.
I was struggling a bit with clicking continually trying to get the thing going.
But my own personal thing I found, as I said, over the years, looking through
the evidence, not that I know it all or found it all or perhaps we won't
necessarily find all different things, but what I have found is substantial
evidence confirming the biblical record as it is.
And one of the things I did find was amazing.
I mentioned the last bit there about the desire of the nations.
Right back in Genesis, in chapter 3, there is mention, it talks about the
serpent and you've got the Adam and Eve and they've sinned, they've gone wrong,
they're trying to be gods.
And it mentions there that God promises in front of them all, one day a man's going
to be born of a woman, he's going to crush the head of this serpent, this devil
figure, this evil spirit creature.
And this man, whoever it is, is going to crush that and the serpent's going to try
and bite at his heel.
Well, the interesting thing, it was like a first prophecy.
And the anticipation that you found in the ancient world of some divine being that
would be born, who would break the power of sin that held us captive and deliver us
from an evil spirit and bring us back into a relationship with God.
And, of course, in the Jewish understanding you read right through there
are hundreds of prophecies going right through and it gets sharper and sharper,
like looking with binoculars, focusing, until eventually it focuses on the person
of Jesus Christ.
But in the ancient world, I often wondered when I studied, why was it there was a
huge surge of pagan people of all cultures turning to Christ?
And I think one of the reasons was, when those early Christians went out,
with their biblical understanding, a lot of the people recognised the things
they were talking about.
They recognised the Adam and Eve story.
They recognised the flood.
They recognised the Tower of Babel.
They recognised a number of these things in their common history.
But things had been sort of corrupted and confused.
And what came through was a clarity.
And many of them were anticipating a divine being who would come, who was even
symbolically in some of their fertility rites, represented by death and
resurrection, connected with fertility, but also the longing for this,
of overcoming death, of some sort of divine saviour, who would actually come
into the world.
Some of the cultures, even, quite extraordinary, in ancient Hindu culture,
had this system, this is before Buddhism came, before 600 BC.
They actually would pin a goat up onto a tree, drive nails into its hand,
they would put a crown of thorns, it's got a balusha on its head,
and they would spear it.
And then that one would be like a fellowship meal.
And it was something to do with sin, appeasing sin, and so on.
And then they would take another goat out, which would be a sign of a new life.
Now if you know anything about the Old Testament, that very same thing is to be
found in that system.
But also, people like the Chinese anticipated something.
There was a king, there was a great drought that came on the world,
about 2000 something BC.
And they had a temple system, they sacrificed to God in the temple,
and the king was also the high priest.
And they brought out, they said, well, we can't stop this, we can't get the
rain, it's drought continually.
The king was prepared to offer himself, and he, funny enough, he disguised himself
as a sheep, he put a sheep's wool on, and was prepared to, as it were,
symbolically give his life on the altar.
And then the rain came.
And what they did was, in thanksgiving to God, they then anticipated one day the
Lamb of Righteousness would come.
That he would be the one who would bring them back to the relationship with God
that their ancestors had lost contact with.
And you find over and over again, when missionaries have been in the world,
they come across tribes where they knew about an ancestor, this great supreme God,
and something went wrong, they lost contact with that God, and they were
worshipping the sun, moon, stars, serpents, whatever.
And some of them, even like Korea, knew about the son of God would come into
the world.
It's one of the reasons why Korea has been such a remarkable place in the world of
very fast, rapid church growth, because the early Christians realised
that, and they said Hanunim was the name of the creator.
And the promise was that his son one day would come into the world.
And they recognised it as Jesus Christ.
Well, thank you very much for tonight, and I hope you've enjoyed that.
Thank you.