Episode 2: A Forgotten History, part 1

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There are a lot of versions of history. How do you know yours is the right one?

This episode has a lot of the first two chapters of Genesis with some background details from the book of Exodus.

All the quotes from the Bible were were taken from the English Standard Version (see ESV copyright here) or the New King James Version. For the other sources, including commentaries, websites, or articles, you can find links and references in the show notes below in the order they appeared. If you have any questions, there’s a place to contact me at the bottom of the page.

Show notes:

  1. For more on the background of Genghis Khan, see here.
  2. For the sizes of various empires in history compared to one another, see this article.
  3. For the size of the Mongolian empire compared to the land area of Earth, see here and here.
  4. For more on Soviet repression of Mongolian culture during the Cold War, see this article.
  5. For more on the tourists deported from China for watching a documentary about Genghis Khan, see this article.
  6. For a common example of censorship in modern culture, see this article.
  7. For more on the history of the Cherokee, see here.
  8. For the Cherokee story of creation, see here.
  9. For more on “earth-diver” category of creation stories in general, see here.
  10. For the creation story of the Yoruba in Nigeria, see here.
  11. For the Mixtec creation story, see here. Details on p. 118 and p. 120.
  12. For the Hindu creation story, see here.
  13. For the creation story of China, see here.
  14. For the creation story of the Maori of New Zealand, see here.
  15. For details on the Bantu story of creation, see here as well as Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome (Kindle Locations 689-690). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
  16. For more on Greek mythology, which can get pretty involved, see here.
  17. This is an abridged version of the Viking story of creation, but either a lot of details are left out, or there are some inscrutable parts in the original that make a little hard to follow.
  18. For more on James Ussher, see Pierce, L., Pierce, M. (2012) The Annals of the World. (pgs. 891-892).
  19. There’s a little conflicting information about what version of Ussher’s dates went into the King James Bible margins and when they went in. It seems Ussher’s original numbers were probably adjusted and added to the Bible by Bishop Lloyd in 1701, though another reference suggests it was an unknown publisher in 1703. See here and also Jones, F.N. (2015) Chronology of the Old Testament (pgs. 6-7). Master Books.
  20. Even today, Ussher’s “standard” history holds up reasonably well. September 21 might be a little specific, but the year 4004 BC was derived as recently as 2015 by another author. For more see Jones, F.N. (2015) Chronology of the Old Testament (pgs. 6-7). Master Books.
  21. For anecdotal information on Gideon Bibles still containing Ussher’s timeline in the second half of the 1900s, see where it is mentioned in this article.
  22. All these creation stories either arose independently from humans being created in different ways in different parts of the world (which seems unlikely) or they are branches of the same story and might retain at least some bits of truth from that story. For similar comments about the likelihood that some piece of the myths around the world are true see Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome (Kindle Locations 680-681). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
  23. The start of creation was October 23, 4004 BC in the Julian calendar James Ussher used. I used the Gregorian modification of September 21. For more on Ussher’s dates, see Pierce, L., Pierce, M. (2012) The Annals of the World. (pg. 17).
  24. For a timeline of Moses’ life, see here.
  25. For Moses’ age when he was sent to free the Israelite slaves, see Exodus 7:7.
  26. For the number of former slaves who left Egypt, Exodus 12:37 counts 600,000 men besides women and children. Because of concerns about how the logistics would work for so many people, there are a lot of opinions about whether this number is translated correctly or ought to be understood as a number of families or some other way that makes the total smaller. That’s a debate for another time. For now, if you take that number at face value, it’s easy to get a total of 2 million or more people when women and children are included in the count.
  27. For the Egyptian creation story, see here.
  28. I use the term “Palestine” to refer to the area along the eastern shore of the the Mediterranean sea. This word probably refers to the Philistines who lived there around the 12th century BC, but in the Bible, the area is called “Canaan” as mentioned by Easton, M. G. (1893). In Easton’s Bible dictionary. New York: Harper & Brothers.
  29. For more on the story of Baal (known as the Baal Cycle) see, here and here. Further reading at the second source, above, points out that Baal didn’t really become ruler of the cosmos until another battle with the god of the underworld also occurred, but the ending is the same. For Baal having thunder and rain as part of being the storm god, see pg. XXV here. For Yamm being described as a tyrant, see here.
  30. For the Babylonian story of creation, see here.
  31. For a timeline of Israelite history, see Jones, F.N. (2015) Chronology of the Old Testament (p. 278). Master Books.
  32. For Moses’ family history around Babylon, note that Abraham (Abram) came from “Ur of the Chaldeans” in Genesis 11:31 and Ur was the port of Babylonia according to Easton, M. G. (1893). In Easton’s Bible dictionary. New York: Harper & Brothers.
  33. For the likelihood that Abraham’s family was steeped in moon-worship from their time in Ur, see Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
  34. For more on the history of “fifth-columnists” see here.
  35. There are a lot of reasons Moses might have known the history that everyone else forgot. It could be due to only a few generations between Moses and the people who lived before slavery. It might be from Moses’ time spent in exile as a shepherd among other descendants of Moses, or it could be from divine revelation. It’s possible, even likely, that Moses used documents passed down to him from earlier sources. For more, see here.
  36. There is only one real history, but there are many ways to present that history. Moses was telling the story of the world as things really happened, but the way he told that story was probably influenced by his own experiences and the audience who was listening to him. This doesn’t change the history, only the emphasis. Moses probably had to emphasize certain details that people in his day were confused about. If he were telling the story now, perhaps he would spend more time on the details we find befuddling today.
  37. The earliest description Moses gives of the world in Genesis is a reference to darkness over the “deep” and God hovering over the “face of the waters.” In the story, the creation of this ocean is never specifically mentioned, but given verses in the rest of the Bible (John 1:1-3 and Hebrews 11:3) it seems that God made this too, but the specifics of it weren’t mentioned in Moses’ account. In general, it should be noted that this is a story about the creation of the Earth, not a story about what did or did not happen before the Earth was created.
  38. The phrase ‘without form and void” appears only in Genesis 1:2 and Jeremiah 4:23 where Jeremiah describes the land of Judah as something so destroyed that it begins to be like the chaos of the whole world before creation. See Barker, K. L. (2002) NIV Study Bible. Genesis 1:2, note. Zondervan.
  39. Though the author of the book of Job is unclear, Moses may have written it too, and in Job 26:7 the same words for “emptiness” and “void” are used as in this first part of this creation story. The fact that the Earth is a wasteland at the start of creation does not imply that it was once destroyed to make it that way. Something can be a wasteland because it has never been organized or because someone or something came through and purposely disorganized it. The world at the start of creation seems to be an example of the former. For the authorship of the book of Job, see Easton, M. G. (1893). In Easton’s Bible dictionary. New York: Harper & Brothers. For further details on Genesis word origins, see Nichol, F. D. (Ed.). (1978). The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary. (Vol. 1, p. 209). Review and Herald Publishing Association.
  40. For details on the limits of human vision in low light, see this article.
  41. For details on the Orfield laboratories and their quiet room, see here and here.
  42. For the first aerial photos of the Earth taken from a V2 rocket, see this article.
  43. Maybe the Earth on that first day was a little like this blob of fluid in space, with fewer air bubbles in it.
  44. For a description of the full electromagnetic spectrum, see here. For why the sky is blue, see here. The thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere is found here.
  45. If you read the story of the second day of creation word-for-word, Moses says that God separated the water below from the water above and made a gap between them. That’s a little ambiguous from our modern scientific perspective, and people argue about what Moses meant. For a while, one popular idea was that God created a shell of some sort above the atmosphere all around the planet. That might be possible, but the theory has a lot of issues and isn’t really necessary. Currently, the best guess is that Day 2 was just the creation of the atmosphere without any appeal to more complicated ideas. This atmosphere might’ve been different in composition or pressure or a bunch of other ways than the one today, but was, in essence, the same concept. For more on issues with the water canopy idea, see this article, and for details about Day 2 simply being a reference to the atmosphere, see Nichol, F. D. (Ed.). (1978). The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary (Vol. 1, p. 211). Review and Herald Publishing Association. and Andrews Study Bible (2010) Genesis 1:6-8, note. Andrews University Press.
  46. You can get an ancient perspective on land rising up and valleys sinking down in Psalms 104:5-9.
  47. For more on the new island in Tonga see this for a general overview and this for a reference to the mud on the new island.
  48. For more on the types of plants God created on Day 3 of creation, see Nichol, F. D. (Ed.). (1978). The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary (Vol. 1, p. 212). Review and Herald Publishing Association.
  49. Unsurprisingly, bamboo that can grow 3-feet-a-day holds the Guinness World Record for fastest growing plant.
  50. For God’s definition of fruit, see Genesis 1:11.
  51. For modern definitions of fruits and vegetables, see here.
  52. For the Supreme Court case involving tomatoes, see here. The case cited several dictionary definitions, that stated that fruits were the parts of plants that contained the seed. See specifics here.
  53. For the switch at the end of the 3rd day of creation from forming-the-formless to filling-the-void, see Barker, K. L. (2002) NIV Study Bible. Genesis 1:2, note. Zondervan.

Update: Some of the audio and show notes related to Canaanite mytholgoy were updated on 6/4/2019 to correct details from a poor source. I further improved the sources for some information on 12/16/2019 and edited some misspellings on 2/12/2020.

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