When I first found this community, after 10 years in the trenches of a very similar crusade all on my own, I was excited to see the kinds of discussions happening around this topic in a community populated with such a rich knowledge base.
To my disappointment I didn’t find much of anything along this kind of thinking. So I decided to create my own thread dedicated to just this type of thing to see if maybe we can get this ball rolling.
The concept of GA justifies genetically the idea of the Adam and Eve story happening in an already populated world, where these two individuals were created just 6000 or so years ago.
The part of this that seems to have escaped any sort of wide spread consideration to this point, it seems, is the fact that there’s quite a lot known about human history within this time frame in the region specifically described in Genesis.
So the aim of this exercise is to test whether or not the evidence is consistent with the idea of two humans, created just as described, and placed in a region already populated by humans.
What would that look like? What should we expect to see? What kind of impact would this have had?
The thinking behind that date goes like this. Abraham was born just under 2000 years after Adam’s creation. Considering Abraham’s father was from a Sumerian city and Abraham interacted with a pharaoh in Egypt, Adam’s creation couldn’t be any earlier than roughly 5500 BC since Sumer and Egypt wouldn’t have been there until about 3500 BC.
But that’s definitely something I’d like to hear about. How scholars arrive at a date that far back.
I’m not sure whether a consensus exists on dating Adam, not least because (a) you have to be a conservative to consider him an historical figure at all, but (b) you may have to make some non-conservative decisions, for example, on taking the patriarchal ages literally.
I tend to go with your kind of argument from general historical and cultural background, to which I would want to add considerations about how long an oral tradition may be carried within a culture.
From 8,000 BCE to, say, Moses writing in the late 2nd millennium is an awful long time for a tradition to survive. Whereas an Adam dating from a few centuries before the earliest literary traditions - and covering much similar material to them - is eminently plausible to me.
Take this back a step. How would you date Adam? There seem two approaches: through biblical chronology, which would seem to point to around 6000 years ago, and through some expectation of what the archeological record should look like. But what exactly is that expectation in the second case, and why is it expected?
I created a framework around the time line given in Genesis and any potentially identifiable events or milestones along that time line.
0 - Adam’s creation
<130 - Cain banished / built a city
1656 - Year of flood
1756ish - Babel story
1756ish - Sumerian city Uruk named as being part of Nimrod’s kingdom
Then, using the idea above dating Adam to no earlier than 5500 BC I looked for patterns in the historical records to see I could find a series of events in that region’s history that line up.
Going backwards from what’s above, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established about 3800 BC. According to this and the Sumerian King’s list, Uruk was a post-flood city.
Flood evidence found by Arthur Whooley in the Sumerian city of Ur dated to right at 4000BC as the silt deposit found was said to be “sandwiched” between Ubaid(5500-4000BC) and Uruk(4000-3200BC) artifacts. This would seem to suggest that in this location the flood played a role in the end of the former culture.
As for Babel, there is an event right in that time (3900BC) and place that closely resembles what the Babel story describes. The 5.9 kiloyear event is an aridification event that transformed this region to desert and is said to have caused large human migrations out of the region.
Continuing along this same time frame/region, the Ubaid lasted 1500 years, which mirrors the period between Cain’s banishment and the flood. The beginning of the Ubaid is marked with the establishment of Eridu, the first Sumerian city. Could this be the city Cain built?
“Woolley’s popularization of his discoveries seems to account for much of the continuing visibility of the Ur flood thesis, but it has little actual claim to be the Flood of Mesopotamian and biblical literature. Despite the thickness of the deposit, it appears like the other Mesopotamian floods to have been a purely local event. Eridu, just seven miles distant, exhibited no sign of the Ur flood, although it was sought diligently there. On about the same or a slightly lower elevation than Ur, Eridu is separated from Ur by only a very low ridge. Equivalent strata at Eridu occupy a higher position on the mound that at Ur, yet no trace of the flood was found at all”
There are two things that give me pause regarding flood data in Mesopotamia.
1- Being this is modern day Iraq excavation hasn’t been done since the 1920’s.
2- the flood evidence in Ur suggests it ended the Ubaid culture in Ur. The thing is the Sumerian Ubaid culture wasn’t limited to Ur. It was consistent across multiple city-states in the region. So there’s something fishy about such a small flood having such a seemingly large impact.
According to the Sumerian King’s List, kingship resided in Shuruppak when the flood “swept over”, quite a ways north of Ur.
Third pause. The Sumerian Kings List shows the flood to have totally interrupted their governance rather than just being something that only affected a single city.
Not necessarily as both Genesis and the Kings List put Uruk as being established just after the flood.
A flood at 4000BC fits nicely into this. Especially given the divide between the Ubaid/Uruk cultures happens here which likely corresponds with the interruption in Sumerian history in the Kings List.
There’s a lot to dismiss based entirely on some very dated data.
Something I’d like to inject here in regards to trying to conceive of Adam and Eve and their potential impact in real world history.
If we’re going to treat the timeline/ages of Genesis as something to measure by, also consider history in the context of Adam/Eve and all of their descendants actually did live lifespans as described, where naturally evolved humanity did not.
Like it says in Genesis 6, the “daughters of humans” were described as ‘mortal’ in comparison to the “sons of God”, noting they only lived 120 years.
So, in that context…
The thing about the stories during Abraham’s time that I always found really intriguing was the idea that the people in the lands around him believed in gods other than God. This always seemed strange to me. According to the traditional interpretation Abraham was 20 generations removed from Adam and Eve. Everyone alive in the world was extended family. The Pharaoh and Abraham probably cousins only a few steps removed.
What about this? To a mortal like you or me, someone who looks the same in your day as they did in your great grandfather’s day would seem god-like.
I’ve also always found it interesting that only the ancient civilizations in that immediate region of the world had mythological stories about male/female gods living among them. All around the world if humans had any sort of belief in a higher power of any kind it was always a form of animism, where the world around them was animated by a spirit that connects us all. Yet in Sumer, Egypt, Greece, Rome, they all had very specific, very similar stories about gods who lived among them and interacted with them.
The Sumerian kings list has some serious gods in it, then. Some of those kings ruled for thousands of years. Or perhaps it doesn’t record actual durations. You think?
What’s odd about those reigns, other than the astronomically long lengths, is that they’re all divisible by 6.
The Sumerians are known to have used a base-60 numbering system. So anytime a Sumerian text is translated, base-60 is assumed for the numbers.
What’s interesting is if you convert those numbers given as base-10 instead, the reigns given are much more in line with the lifespans given in Genesis. Both in length and in the way they start at their longest, and drastically decline after the flood.
I think this observation is a good one. But lets apply it to the new, non-conventional interpretation:
The flood (regional) is intended to kill the unsuitable clans of Noah’s cousins… leaving Noah and the continuing population of evolved Pre-Adamites.
It is the existence of these pockets of evolved humans that make a multiplicity of god cults more believable.
Its the conventional view that seems farfetched. Between Noah and Abraham we have 10 generations, which in post-medieval terms would represent the gap between the landing of the Mayflower and the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy.
This doesnt provide a plausible timeline for Noah’s extended offspring to develop all these Gods… even WITH a confusion of languages (unless we argue for confused memories as well!).
