22 October 2022
A reader question wonders how I reconcile the apparent discrepancy between the age of Creation versus the general scientific opinion that it's millions or billions of years old.
First of all, let's remind ourselves that the Bible is not a book of magic, nor a magic book. What it has to tell us won't sound exactly the same in all contexts. It arose in a particular cultural and historical context that is far different from ours. One of my contentions has always been that we must read it from the perspective of the folks who wrote it. If you can't think like a Hebrew, then you cannot really understand the Bible.
You can cling to Bishop Ussher's chronology all you like, but there's not much point in asserting that the Garden of Eden was created in 4004 BC. The Garden of Eden was in Eternity. That is, Adam and Eve were eternal beings in the Garden. Stating an age for Adam and Eve is pointless until after the Fall, when humans became mortal and were placed under the constraints of time and space. Adam didn't age at all until the Fall, so his "age" could not include the "time" before being kicked out of the Garden, since time was not meaningful to his existence.
Next, you should be aware that the genealogy listed in Genesis was not meant to be read literally the way most westerners do. The Hebrew term for "begot" does not always mean lineal descent. It more often means "became the ancestor of" the next named individual. In other words, the list includes those whose names were remembered for whatever reason, not each and every generation. The issue is not how long the line was in years, but the pedigree. The last guy in the list was a blood descendant of the first one; that is more important than anything else. This is referred to as "telescoping" -- the list was not meant to include every human born in that chain of pedigree. It skips an indeterminable number of generations.
Nor would the Hebrews have cared much how many actual years came and went between the first and last on the list. The Hebrew language is notoriously inexact for numbering, given that they didn't have digits, but used words that often had other additional meanings. So, for example, the word for "thousand" also means a professional soldier who commanded up to a thousand conscripts in formation. Yes, there are times when a specific numerical count is meant, but most in most passages they referred to things in approximations, and often the numbers cited had symbolic meanings that eclipsed any literal meaning.
It would never occur to an ancient Hebrew scholar to worry about numerical precision in most cases. It simply was not important to them.
Only after the rabbis became infatuated with Aristotelian logic roughly 300 years before Christ do we see rabbinical traditions start to make a big deal out of precise and literal numerical representations. Thus, Matthew's reference to a numerical count in his first chapter was consistent with his theme of using rabbinical traditional assertions to prove the rabbis wrong. He was using their weapons against them. That's why it's hard to reconcile all the names with other similar lists in the Bible. He was using whatever the rabbis were citing at the time, and wasn't trying to show off his own scholarly research.
Luke's genealogy came from a different source and was cited with a different aim. Matthew as answering rabbinical questions, while Luke was addressing the Roman imperial court. Luke was in no position to research the genealogy himself, either. He just cited what he could get his hands on. The differences between Matthew and Luke could easily be explained in those terms. They aren't trying to answer the same questions, and the answers they gave were not meant to be take as gospel (pun intended), but were standard practice for the different audience each was addressing.
People who get angry when I say things like this don't understand why God preserved the Bible text. Do you notice my sarcasm here? He did not preserve the text of Scripture they way our western minds would expect. We don't have any originals of anything. We have copies and partial manuscripts that are many generations removed from the originals. Yet, despite the appearance of imperfection, we are still accountable to what the Scriptures say. Whatever variations there might be in the available manuscripts should indicate to us that it's simply a mistake to become hung up on documentary precision.
Hellenized Jews (like the Pharisees) might fuss over precise wording, but nobody in the ancient Hebrew tradition would do such a thing. For them, that kind of precision in wording would be a hindrance to divine revelation. That's why, when the Apostles in their New Testament writings quote from the Old Testament, it sometimes varies noticeably from the Old Testament copies we use for our English translations. God isn't pulling the wool over anyone's eyes; we are deceiving ourselves by insisting God, and His Word, have (or ought to have) traits that only a westerner would care about. God didn't create the West -- Satan built it. God built the ancient Hebrew culture as the only proper context to reveal Himself; the West is Satan's perversion of that idea. The Hebrew people never had our western attitude about this issue.
The ancient Hebrew culture was part of the wider Ancient Near East. That includes all the cultures and civilizations from the mountains east of Mesopotamia all the way down to Egypt. Moses was educated in both Aramaic traditions (Mesopotamian mostly) and Egyptian. His education informed him how he would talk to the nation that bore the complex background of Abraham, the unspeakable filthy Canaanites and their long sojourn in Egypt. Moses wrote the Pentateuch using the whole range of intellectual and customary traditions of all of that. If you could survey their existing literature, most of it was about religion and mythology. You would come to some interesting philosophical assumptions far, far different from those of the West.
The folks from that background would have never dreamed of a clinical language in the first place; all the known languages of the Ancient Near East were inherently symbolic. This is where I remind you that I believe reality is variable. I got that from my studies in the literature of the Ancient Near East. Reality isn't variable in the sense of "anything goes" but that it isn't all one thing locked down the way westerners imagine. When God created things, the viewpoint of the narrative in Genesis is that of someone who was outside of the time-space limitations of the fallen world. Time was simply not a factor, so references to day and night are symbolic. The whole purpose of the Creation narrative answers an entirely different set of questions than those westerners commonly bring to a text like this. I am convinced that, if you could interview a group of scholars from the Ancient Near East, and get them to answer you in English, they would say a lot of things they could not have said in their own tongues.
They regarded reality as variable, but invested an awful lot of effort into establishing the boundaries of variation that God programmed into His Creation. What would God allow? What is real and what is deception? Moses didn't balk at facing the snakes of Pharaoh's magicians with their "dark arts". It was real enough for them, but Moses served the God who made the rules those magicians used and thought were secret. People raised in the West would not believe it if they saw it, until one of those snakes bit them and they started to suffer.
At the point in the Genesis narrative where Adam and Eve leave the Garden, then time begins for the narrative. They became mortal and were no longer in their eternal form. You can never find the Garden of Eden in this world, because it was never here. Adam's age cited in Genesis cannot possibly include his life in the Garden as an eternal being. It starts with the Fall.
Finally, I hold that God dropped Adam and Eve into a world already in motion. Did this fallen mortal world exist before He put them there? We cannot possibly know. I rather think God had the idea in His head waiting for that moment, and then simply made it as real was needed for the purpose. Our reality only appears to be millions or billions of years old; God isn't bound by time and space. He brought it online in a condition it would have after significant development; it's actual prior existence served no purpose. Adam and Eve were forced into mortal bodies consistent with the mortal creatures already in that world. God makes all things from His own imagination in the first place, and whatever makes sense to Him at that point is what shall be.
And if He feels like adjusting that "reality" while it's running, it then depends on whether He wants to let anyone see the changes. Thus, fiery hail fell from the sky more than once, and nobody has seen anything like it since. The earth opened up and swallowed a bunch of Israelis who had revolted at the foot of Mount Sinai. The sun stood still in the sky for a whole day, or was the symbolic Hebrew language referring to a different kind of miracle? Fiery serpent bites could be rendered nontoxic by simply looking at a bronze serpent on a pole. And Jesus fed the 5000, plus walked on water.
And when He comes back, it will all be wiped clean and restored to what it was before the Fall. How old is the human race? The question almost makes no sense. Do you count Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc.? Did they ever actually exist, or was it just part of a sensible world God pulled into existence at the Fall. Consider that God says the human race is divided between the Elect and everyone else. The Elect are eternal beings imprisoned in flesh. Nothing is said about the rest of the human race, except in language that is symbolic. In other words, nobody knows. The Ancient Near Eastern scholars would tell you that you cannot "know" intellectually anyway. We are in the territory of "knowledge" on a different level, above that of the intellect, and cannot be codified in words. They knew better than to discuss such things without using symbolic language.
But that God uses the mass of humanity as little more than animals without souls is painfully obvious. The Book of Revelation does that, talking about massive death scenes as if it were just something we should expect. Were the Neanderthals capable of redemption? We won't know in this life. It doesn't appear they were mentioned in the Bible. We know almost nothing about the world before the Flood, and darned little about it for a long time after. Did the apparent millions/billions of years of prior existence actually happen? Or did God simply bring that up like a simulation and adjust it's condition to a very aged state for His own purpose?
I need no answer to those questions in order to obey the Bible. For the time being, the cosmos acts in a way that demonstrates a pattern of micro-novas hitting Earth every 12,000 years. I can work with that. Meanwhile, the Bible narrative starts outside of this mortal world under, in a situation without time-space constraints. There's nothing much to reconcile, really.
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