I felt it important to change and replace the Identities section here with the best introduction to genesis 10 Studies.
Please, anyone, reply freely with any thoughts you may have... RSM
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The Challenge ofGenesis 9 - 11
The Challenge
The text of Genesis 9-11 claims to narrate and outline the earliest origins of gentile Mankind. Yet a comparison of the text with the known facts of antiquity leaves an immense gap of information and Genesis 10:6, for example, names “Mizraim,” the general Hebrew word for Egypt, a “son” of Ham. Yet, there is not the slightest hint of the concrete steps by which this son or his offspring give rise to the civilization of Egypt.
The brevity of Genesis 9-11 makes its information deeply mysterious. There is no hint of how the different racial types of Mankind originated; or which languages resulted from the confusion of tongues at Babel; or where Noah’s family journeyed after having the mountains of Ararat; or how his family first divided; or why Noah’s curse fell on Canaan rather than Ham’s other sons; or why the Hebrew people spoke the “language of Canaan,” son of Ham, not Shem; or what the “language of Shem” would have been; or what the names and backgrounds of the wives of the ark were; or why there were only eight survivors of the Flood, just four couples and no children; or what the specific maternities of Shem, Ham, and Japheth were; or how and in what part of Noah’s family pagan idolatry arose; or what specific religious doctrines and practices served as background for the Tower of Babel; or how the high longevities of Genesis 11 influenced the social and political life of the early postdiluvian world. Christian scholars have generally ignored these questions for one reason. They have been intimidated by modern beliefs about world chronology; or, at least, they have not sought to challenge these beliefs by defending a recent, third millennium Flood. They either have rejected the chronology of Genesis 11, as a chronology, or have treated it as an apologetic liability.
The genealogy of Genesis 11:10-26 appears to contain a chronology for the interval between the Flood, named in 11:10, and the birth of Abram, named in 11:26. Shem’s son Arphaxad is said to have been born two years after the Flood, as though to initiate a chronological process ending with Abram. Each of Arphaxad’s descendants is said to have been begotten when his father reached a specified age. If these ages are summed without hypothetical gaps, only 220 years intervened between the births of Arphaxad and Abram’s father Terah. In 11:26, the time of Abram’s birth is established more vaguely as some time after Terah reached seventy. Even if Abram’s birth date is hypothetically delayed, the interval between it and the Flood could not have exceeded three or four centuries; and, from other chronological notices in the Old Testament, the Flood could not have occurred much earlier than 2500 B.C.
The doctrine of a third millennium Flood has become an apologetic embarrassment because of strong scientific trends established in the nineteenth century when historians closed ranks with geologists in the perception that the earth was much older than formerly believed. Although the age of the earth is not strictly the same question as the date of the Flood, chronological revision upward became a mark of scientific sophistication. The third millennium Flood began to seem naive and implausible. An extrapolation of Manetho’s Egyptian King List carried the accession of the first dynastic Pharaoh Menes back into the fourth millennium. Since 1900, the art of stratigraphy, development of refined chronological systems, and technique of carbon dating have all given the impression that progress in historical science depends on an evolutionary worldview at odds with any tightly structured, theologically coherent world chronology.
If, for example, we pick a Flood date at 2500, we run the risk of being suddenly embarrassed by purely scientific evidence that world population, at that time, was not eight but eighty million; or that some Middle Eastern city or network of cities was continuously inhabited between 2900 and 2000. A few historians may notice that 2500 often marks the boundary between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age or the dawn of written records. But the general impression that recorded history begins about 2500 cannot shake the Egyptian chronology or the evolutionary philosophy which that chronology complements.
The consensus is that empirical evidence alone has negated the third millennium Flood. But lurking beneath the surface of this scientific issue is a surprisingly intense ideological motive rooted in the of European Christendom. Noah’s family has not been clearly conceptualized because there is something truly frightening about such a family to scholars of the modern democratic era. We all know that prodigious forms of central political power existed in ancient times and have recurred in modern times. Early Christians faced the worst of such power in the reign of Nero, one of many emperors who have claimed to be gods. Yet emperor worship is no casual freak of the pagan spirit. To realize its value is to reconstruct what Noah’s family was; and, once we summon the imaginative power to realize such a thing, the chronological problem will tend to disappear, and the evolutionary philosophy along with it. The fear of falling victim to merciless despotism is the democratic soul of evolutionary thought, which refers the origin and maintenance of civilization to gradual or powerless processes rather than to charismatic power. A fourth millennium Pharaoh Menes is a harmless cipher; a third millennium, postdiluvian Pharaoh Menes is part of a sublime and terrifying spectacle. The latter chronology implies that Noah’s family was empowered to build world civilization overnight.
All Christians realize that the “powers that be are of God.” They do not necessarily agree on how gentile political power subsists. Some may fail to recognize that this power, like that of the Christian faith, is spiritual in nature as sourced in a God who is the comprehensive “
Father of spirits.” We are liable to conceive of gentile political authority as static “office” in abstraction from any sort of concrete empowerment. We delight in observing the weakness of mere office holders and abhor those despots who suppose that they are anything more than an office-holder. As democrats, we reserve the right to paint emperors in our own image. We do this at the risk of fulfilling the prophecy of Jude who warned that some of us would deny the “
monos despotes” Jesus Christ, through a popular distaste for despotism in general. Prior to the democratic revolutions of the later eighteenth century, scholars found it easier to think clearly about Noah than they do today, despite our advantage in positive evidence.
Euhemerism
Emperor worship is the practical analogue to the so-called euhemerist doctrine adopted by a school of historiographers who dealt seriously with Noah between 1650 and 1800. These writers included the French Samuel Bochart, Paul Pezron, and Antoine Banier, and the British Andrew Tooke, William Stukeley, and Jacob Bryant. Euhemerism is the belief that pagan gods such as Zeus or Osiris can be identified as ancient men. Bochart and Tooke, for example, believed that the Greco-Roman Titan Cronus-Saturn was a version of Noah. The nineteenth-century euhemerist Alexander Hislop, in the school of Bryant, identified the Egyptian Seth as a rather vindictive version of Shem.
Classic Christian euhemerism was iconoclastic. As practiced by Lactantius and others, it sought to satirize pagan religion by reducing the gods to mortal men. Because the Neoclassical Age (1660-1800) was an age of satire, it is easy to assume that the euhemerism of the period was a vehicle of satire. Radical cultural changes around 1800 doomed euhemeristic thought to a premature scholarly death. Because the Romanticism of the next century glorified the human spirit, Romantics generally eschewed satire; and German Romantic thinkers such as F. W. J. Schelling and Jakob Grimm despised euhemerism as petty satirical malice, preferring to view the pagan gods as “
creative powers.”
Nevertheless, iconoclasm is just one side of the euhemerist idea. There is an undercurrent of heroic enthusiasm in the writings of Pezron or Stukeley entirely inconsistent with satire. The roots of the euhemerist movement lay in the age of Bochart’s contemporary, John Milton, an epic poet devoted to grand and supernatural subjects and concepts. The true cultural model for Genesis 10 study is Milton’s Paradise Lost; and, although that work contains a satirical dimension, at the expense of Satan, its dominant spirit is perfectly consistent with the Romantic ideal of “
creative powers.” Instead of having to choose between euhemerism and German idealism, we can reconcile both schools in the simple perception that Noah’s family were “creative powers” of the highest order.
The mystery of euhemerism is established in principle in Exodus 7:1 where Moses, as charismatic leader of the infant nation of Israel, is described as a “god” in the eyes of Pharaoh: “
And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh; and Aaron, thy brother, shall be thy prophet.’ ” The verse means that Moses, a servant of God in “
judging the gods of Egypt,” shared in the same privileges as the family of Noah in the supernatural processes essential to founding nations. In effect, Moses was the last in a class of early postdiluvian “gods,” although the emperors of Rome, Japan, Peru, and other nations have persisted in claiming the same Noahic privilege of human, political deity.
More particularly, Moses was a god in the eyes of Pharaoh because the Pharaonic institution arose in the early postdiluvian lifetime of Noah as a product of such privileges. The Exodus itself marked an important stage in the dispensational decline of the Noahic or gentile theocracy. Subsequent claims of imperial deity have, no doubt, been presumptuous and blasphemous. The Book of Acts records a definitive instance in which Herod Antipas is destroyed by special judgement after a claim of charismatic political deity:
“
And the people gave a shout, saying, ‘It is the voice of a god, and not a man.’ And immediately an angel of the Lord smote him because he gave not God the glory; and he was eaten of worms, and died” (Acts 12:22-23).
Yet the angelic agency in Herod’s death reveals the extent to which despotic power on earth is shaped by and either sanctioned or judged according to the ethical framework of the angelic third heaven. In studying Noah’s world, the Mesopotamian cylinder seals, the Sumerian King List, or the Egyptian Geb-Nut Cosmogony - that angelic cosmos must not be forgotten. By viewing Noah as a mere survivor of the Flood rather than a builder of nations, we have not only neglected his 350-year postdiluvian lifetime, but have ignored those spiritual ideas which made the gentile world just that, a designed cosmos. When we term that cosmos satanic, we must recall that Satan is himself an angel and the member of an angelic order more ancient than the distinction between good and evil. Careful reflection on Exodus 7:1 will reveal what is meant by this logic. If the Pharaonic institution was nothing but an agency of Satan, how could God have made Moses a god in Pharaoh’s eyes, an object of “strong delusion,” without compromising Moses’ image as an agent of holiness? The conflict between Moses and Pharaoh was played according to Noahic rules, which, like the Law of Moses, were given by the “disposition of angels.”
The Gundestrup Caldron
Dispensational theologians have accurately recognized that Noah inaugurated a new dispensation of human government after the Flood. The Sumerian king list attests to the same fact, claiming that, “
kingship descended from heaven” after the Flood? This descent of power was far more like the Christian Pentecost than we imagine. Its universal gentile symbol was the “Ka” sign, the pictographic image of a man with arms upraised at the elbows. The “Ka” was the spiritual entity by which the Pharaohs participated in deity and acquired their theocratic powers. The “Ka” sign recurs among other nations. The Japanese “banzai” salute is a classic instance, among members of a Ural-Altaic linguistic stock, which ranks high among the languages of Noah’s theocracy.
The most striking example of the “Ka” posture is found as a sign of deity in the imagery of the Gundestrup Caldron, a Celtic artifact discovered in Denmark in the spring of 1891.” In the exterior panels of the Caldron, the “Ka” posture is duplicated in each depiction of the four male members of a set of four males and what are believed to have been four females. It is impossible to imagine a more graphic portrayal of the idea of a cosmos arising from eight survivors of a universal Flood, four male and four female, as biblical tradition affirms (I Peter 3:20). Arranged in a circle, the exterior panels and their internal counterparts are the embodiment of a cosmos, as anthropologists have easily recognized. Unfortunately, most anthropologists are not known for their devotion to the Bible and, as a class, are not well equipped to perceive an analogy, which is as obvious as anyone could wish. When it comes to archaeology, ancient art, and literary materials, such as with the Sumerian poems and cylinder seals they are as blind to Biblical typology as a Bat is to a color wheel.
The Celts of the Gundestrup Caldron were the ancient people of Bronze Age Europe. The term “Bronze Age” is empirical jargon for the early postdiluvian world of Noah. Although metalwork existed in the antediluvian period and ”Stone Age man” persists into modern times, the true Stone Age is the impression made by the antediluvian world on students of mute archaeology; and “Bronze Age man” is the corollary mute version of postdiluvian man. The antediluvian period was necessarily rather primitive or barbaric because of its abstraction from the charismatic revolution just noted. If kingship “descended from heaven” in a revolutionary way after the Flood, it and its civilizing effects were largely unknown before the Flood. The primitive cultures of Mankind are the antediluvian heritage as channeled through Noah’s family to certain parts of the larger postdiluvian populace.
The Egyptian mythology of Osiris identifies this god as a civilizing agent; and the same could be said of all the “gods,” including Moses. These were a race of charismatic geniuses, without whom high civilization would never have been realized. Thus, what high civilizations there were remembered them as the original divine creator octad. Although racists such as L. A. Waddell have clouded the issue of civilizing agency, the God of Noah created world civilization through a Pentecost of power just as surely as the Church is the concrete, historically defined product of the Apostolic Pentecost. For many nations, the use of bronze was a definitive mark of the Noahic heritage of nascent civilization. More impressive, however, is the Gundestrup statement, wrought in silver most probably contracted by Thracian silver smiths.
Any recognition of Noah’s family, however, in the Gundestrup octad must face critical skepticism and the larger issue of historical verification. The Caldron speaks through mythological imagery and contains no script. No matter what principles of historical verification are adopted, the foundation of history remains written literature. The Caldron itself speaks more clearly than it otherwise could if the Roman Lucan had not written of the Gallic gods Teutates, Taranis, and Esus in plain Latin.
In this respect, the challenge of Genesis 9:11 remains the brevity of the text and the paucity of coherently historical information from the nonbiblical third millennium. Sumerology is a godsend but is not without limits. Samuel Noah Kramer’s standard ‘The Sumerians’ is packed with invaluable insight; but it is no oversight that only a small fraction of the text is historical narrative. No one is prepared, today, to write a history of the third millennium replete with the sort of wealth of incident possible in histories of the Roman Empire, Crusades, or modern times.
The whole idea of historical verification loses some of its meaning in cases where certain events are knowable but too few in number to generate a sense of context. For example, Kramer can tell us just enough about the war between Erech and Aratta [Isfahan, and/or Jiroft] to make us sense that this was one of the chief events of the third millennium. But the sources are a set of Sumerian legends so imperfect in content and in state of preservation that we find no account of a climactic battle or of any specific hostilities: only a diplomatic war of words followed by an expeditionary invasion of undetermined consequence. We know a great deal more about the third millennium than did Bryant in 1774; but Bryant’s methodology remains relevant to us because our limitations are logically comparable to his.
Jacob Bryant’s Methodology
Bryant’s technique was a process of comparing and identifyingnames, often through mere similarity of sound. Despite its apparentnaiveté, this technique harmonizes with our general dependence onliterature because all reading depends on the identification of words,a kind of names. In effect, Bryant proposed the formation of aninternational language of Noahic names. Such a concept can coexist with the perception that radically distinct languages divided thehuman race in the third millennium.
* Names tend to resist changein passing from one culture to another; and, even when radicalchange occurs, the universality of Noah’s family enables us totranslate the names correctly.
[* At the time of Enmerkar of Unug (Uruk, Erech), linguistic diversity was considered a disadvantage to the “Babylonian” paradigm – a mindset for imperialistic centralized rule and the favoring of a single language. In the poem ‘
Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta [Isfahan, and/or Jiroft],’ it is recorded that before there was one language, there were many linguistic stocks, at least two in Sumer - “
two-tongued Sumer” (Line 142). The mention of “The Spell of Nudimmud” (Ea-Enki) suggests a creating of not only a written language, but also a single ‘spoken’ language to match. It was the desire of the god Enki to “
Change the tongues in their mouth” that “
the whole world of well-ruled people,” “
Will be able to speak to Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush) in one language” (Lines 145-46). This ancient text shows the grave error of modern interpretations of the confusion of tongues at Babel with God “creating” new languages, rather than destroying a universal language. There was not one language spoken before the confusion at Babel, but many, as it was the hope of the ancients that “
the speech of Mankind shall be truly one” (Line 155). See, ‘Epics of Sumerian Kings,’ by Herman Vanstiphout, p. 65.)]
To confirm Bryant’s method, it is essential to observe how
universal the ancient names have been. In the southeastern corner ofmodern Latvia is a pair of towns, Dagda and Indra. (7)Letter for letter, these names match the standard orthography fortwo Indo-European deities, “Dagda of the Gaels” and the East Indian storm god Indra. The Gaels, as Celts, belong to the Centum division of the Indo-European stock; the East Indians are definitive members of the Satem division, which extends southeastward from the Balto-Slavic speakers of Europe to Iran and India. (8) No one questions the comprehensive polarity of these two divisions. The two towns are arranged north and south as though to mark the spot where the two stocks divided in high antiquity. Because all Indo-Europeansare supposed to have originated at a point in White Russia not farfrom Latvia, the two names do not tell us a great deal that is notalready known. Nevertheless, they do display a feeling for systematicdesign inconsistent with evolutionary concepts, yet consistent withthe cosmos suggested by the Bible, the Gundestrup Caldron, andcertain dimensions of Sumerology.
(8)The designations “Centum” and “Satem” are from the words for “hundred” in these two divisions of the Indo-European system.
Because Indra and Dagda are separate deities, whom we do notseek to identify as one, the Latvian item has no direct bearing onthe euhemeristic technique of identifying gods with patriarchs. Suchobservations only serve to strengthen the assumption that god namesconstitute an international language.In the meanwhile, anthropologists have taught us to form qualifiedsorts of identifications between deities through common motifs, suchas Celtic Cernunnus’s pictorial resemblance to Dravidian ShivaPashupati, (9)or through explicit tradition, such as the lunar cult common to Sumerian Nanna and Akkadian Suen (10). Theoretically, these anthropological matches fall short of the kind sought by Bryant; but often they lead precisely in that direction. For example, we have found that the lunar cult of Mesopotamia was a species of worship first adopted by Shem’s son Arphaxad I and that this prince should be identified, euhemeristically, both with Nanna and with other lunar deities, such as Yerikh of Ugarit, Khons of Egyptian Thebes, and Daksha I of East India. None of these names is cognate in origin or similar in sound; so our technique of euhemeristic identification owes at least as much to anthropological concepts as to Bryant’s simpler logic of matching sounds. The goal of Genesis 10 study is not to advocate any one method of associating names but to use any and all means to remember the universal princes of Noah’s family.
(9)MacCana, p. 38.
(10)Thorkild Jacobsen, Toward the Image of Tammuz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 34.
The Table of Nations
The prerequisite for all such study is a firm faith in the universality of the Flood and, thus, in
the universal value of the names listed in Genesis 10. Since the days of Friedrich Schlegel, around 1800, Genesis 10 has been damned with faint praise through the Volkertafel or “Table of Nations” concept. Schlegel employed the word Volkertafel to reduce the meaning of the text from a Noahic record of the seminal nations of Mankind to a Mosaic record of a few nations in proximity to Palestine. His motive was to confirm J. G. von Herder’s theory of the purely local origin and meaning of all nations: the view that Jewish tradition should be confined to Palestine and that radically distinct nations, such as the Teutons, must go their own way. Schlegel realized that Herder’s view could be challenged if the Teutons could be traced from one or more of the princes or nations of Genesis 10. In earlier times, German Christians such as Martin Luther were content to trace themselves, with some delight, from a name such as Ashkenaz, son of Gomer, realizing
that Ashkenaz was a universal personality, adequate to give the Germans whatever degree of antiquity and glory they might desire. But Herder’s sense of glory lay elsewhere.
For Herder and Schlegel, it was a disgrace to be found in a Jewish book because, after all, “little Israel,” could not compare in size or contemporary importance with the Teutonic linguistic stock of the eighteenth century. Accordingly,
Schlegel sought to reduce Genesis 10 to a purely Semitic range of reference. He noticed, for example, that the largest block of sons assigned to any patriarch later than Shem, Ham, and Japheth is the Joktanites of 10:26-29. This, he felt, was proof positive of the narrow, pedestrian character of the chapter. The Joktanites, he believed, were nothing but the beni-Khitan of Arabia, perhaps a noble people, but hardly a major fraction of the earth’s population. He ignored the possibility that the beni-Khitan might be a mere fraction of Joktan’s progeny because
he rested in the old belief that Genesis 10 refers to “races, not men.” Thus the name Joktan, for him, meant little more than a part of Arabia.
Schlegel’s logic persists wherever the phrase “Table of Nations” is used because
the term precludes the idea that Genesis 10 is a “Table of Universal Progenitors.” There is no question that Genesis 10 refers, in part, to nations. We have seen that the name Mizraim is Hebrew for “Egypt.” Many of the names in the chapter are suffixed for plurality and ethnicity, for example, the “Anamim” of the Mizraim section and the “Hivite” of the Canaanite.
Misplaced Footnote:
(10) There was no mistaking Schlegel’s motive to put an end to the reign of Genesis 10 as a basis of universal origins: “Die Mosaische Viilkertafel zur Grundlage der allgemeinen Weltgeschichte zu dienen, wie man es fruherin so oft versucht hat, nie ohne grossen Zwang durchgefuhrt werden kann.” The implied warning is not to attempt this species of Christian apologetics but to let nature take its course in revealing the limitations of the Bible. The frequent attempts Schlegel refers to were the school of Bochart, Pezron, and Bryant. Friedrich von Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, in Siimmtliche Werke (Vienna: Ignaz Klang, 1846), XII, 186.
Nevertheless, Mizraim is called a “son of Ham for a very good reason.
If the entire human race could descend from Noah the whole of Egypt could certainly descend from one of his grandsons, a son of Ham. The son in question passed under a variety of gentile names, three of them cognate Egyptian Min, Celtic Mynogan, and Hellenic Oceanus. None of the names meant Egypt. Yet the Hebrew name Mizraim is interpretive and the interpretation hardly means that Mizraim had no personal existence, any more than the Duke of York had no existence because some called him “York” or because his name has found its way to an American city. The time has come to set aside facile skepticisms and to take stock of what
Genesis 10 actually is: the record of a systematic feudal system formed by Noah’s family for the purpose of generating “nati5ns, tongues, and peoples.”
Noahic Genetics
During twenty years of study, the central interpretive task in dealing with Genesis 10 has been to determine the concrete genetic history of Noah’s family and thus to counterpoint the political structural outlined in the text. The names in Genesis 11 form a genealogy; those in Genesis 10 do not. Even in Genesis 11, mothers are never named. Maternity forms a missing dimension of genetic linkage. We have found that the female survivors of the Flood were quite powerful and that a certain fraction of the names in Genesis 10 refer to females on the personal level:
Lehab, Naphtuh, Pathrus, and Caphtor in the Mizraim section;
Sin, Arvad, Zemar, and Hamath in the Canaanite section; and
Almodad, Jerah, Uzal, Sheba, Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab in the Joktanite section.
The maternal factor was supremely important because of Noah’s task of preserving a plenitude of racial types from the antediluvian world. In Genesis 10, the names Cush and Havilah reproduce the names of two antediluvian regions grouped together in the system of the four rivers in Genesis 2. Curiously, the name Havilah appears twice in Genesis 10, once in the Cushite section and again in the Joktanite section. The reason for this is that the two persons named in these sections were genetic bearers of the racial type, which had inhabited the antediluvian land of Havilah in 2:11.
In dealing with early Genesis, genetics must be treated as a metaphysical phenomenon. Adam and Eve were genetically unique for four reasons: (1) they had no human ancestry, (2) they possessed the genetic potential to generate all the racial types of Mankind, (3) their offspring could bear children only through various degrees of incest, and (4) their offspring enjoyed high longevities unknown to modern man.
In their lack of human ancestry, Adam and Eve were apocalyptic, standing at the boundary between the natural and supernatural. A basic rule of apocalypse is the ritual symmetry of metaphysics, the visible disclosure of such things as the four elements and four humors. Such symmetries are the stock in trade of pagan tradition because of the diligence of Noah’s family in preserving the Adamic heritage under the new empowerment of the dispensation of human government.
The racial types, which evolutionists treat as the casual accumulation of individual variations, express a fourfold metaphysical potentiality within the gene pool of the first couple. Such a system appears in the meso-American tradition [as well as other Creation myths color-coded quadrads] of the four Tezcatlipocas: red Chac, black Ed, white Zac, and yellow Kan.(12) These colors, assigned to the four ordinal directions, match the four basic racial types of Mankind: the red Amerinds of the two Americas, the blacks of the Indian Ocean, whites of Europe, and yellow Mongoloids of the Far East. (13)
(12)Irene Nicholson, Mexican and Central American Mythology (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967), p. 94.
(13)The ordinal directions of the four Tezcatlipocas fail to match the ethnography of existing races because they were based on antediluvian tradition.
These races are a living document of Adamic genetic potential and Noahic eugenic control. A fundamental goal of Genesis 10 study is to discover which survivors embodied which races and how these strains were mixed and consolidated in the earliest postdiluvian offspring. The four males of the Ark could not be the key to race because three were the sons of the fourth, necessarily sharing his racial character. Instead, races were embodied in the four wives, who were selected, for this purpose, from the four racial stocks implied by the fourfold antediluvian cosmos of Genesis 2:10-14:
“
Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from it parted and became four riverheads. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which encompasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that encompasses the whole land of Cush. The name of the third is Hiddekel; it is the one that goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is Euphrates.”
Henry M. Morris has noted the anachronistic effect of this passage, which blends together two worlds, the antediluvian and postdiluvian, as channeled through the minds of the original authors, in all probability Adam and Noah themselves.(14) Assigned to two of the four river-heads are the names of lands, Havilah and Cush. Both names reappear in Genesis 10, establishing traditional continuity between the two worlds.
(14)Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Record (San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1976), pp. 89-90.
How do we establish the racial type (color) of Havilah, Cush, and Mizraim? Although the passage in Genesis 2 contains no reference to race, we are justified in giving its geographic system racial value because of the familiar value of the name Cush. Traditionally, this name represents a land on the Upper River Nile in black East Africa, south of Egypt. The lands of Cush and Egypt are regionally complementary in the same way that the names Cush and Mizraim head the list of Ham’s sons in Genesis 10:6. If these two sons are embodied in the peoples of Ethiopia-Cush and Egypt, they were racially distinct because the ancient Egyptians were fair-skinned in contrast with their Ethiopian neighbors. The implication is that Cush was Ham’s son by a distinctly black woman, one of the four female survivors of the Flood. The duplication of the antediluvian name Cush in this woman’s son implies that she was a representative of the antediluvian land of Cush and its race, the black quarter of Adam’s progeny.
The corollary race of Havilah was the Amerind stock, traditionally conceived as “red” but distinguished by another racial characteristic: facial concavity, the familiar hook-nosed physiognomy. In Amerind folklore, the colors red and black are often grouped together. The Aztec god Tezcatlipoca is reckoned red and black; (15) and the same colors combine in masks of northwestern North America, where a ritual involving red and black arrows is also found. (16) A meso-American painting shows a warlike race, painted blood red, conquering black enemies. (17)
15. Harley Burr Alexander, Latin American, in The Mythology of All Races, ed. Herbert Louis Gray, XI (New York: Cooper Square, 1964), 62.
16. John Bierhorst, Four Masterworks of the American Indian Literature (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giraux, 1974), p. 70.
17. Nicholson, p. 124.
This coupling of reds and blacks echoes the antediluvian formula of Havilah and Cush. The two Havilahs of Genesis 10 are the Red Matriarch, appearing in the Joktanite section, and her antediluvian son Ham, who adopts the name Havilah as vassal to his own black son Cush in 10:7. The same two are pictured in the system of the exterior Gundestrup panels as chief subjects of the Braided Goddess and Dragon panels, where both display the same tendency toward facial concavity. The exterior panel of the Black Matriarch is missing; but she appears twice in the panel of the Braided Goddess as an attendant, symbolic of the distinct black races of Dravidian India and Cushite East Africa.
A limitation of the text of Genesis 2 is that the author does not bother to assign regional names to the antediluvian versions of the Tigris-Hiddekel and Euphrates, unless we take the anachronistic reference to Assyria as such. However, another antediluvian regional name, Nod, appears in the account of the curse of Cain in Genesis 4:16. The simplest explanation for the omitted regional names in Genesis 2 is that the author himself was familiar with the antediluvian lands of the Tigris and Euphrates because these were his own homeland. He names Havilah and Cush explicitly as remote from his experience.
The racial implication is that the author was neither Amerind nor black but belonged either to the Mongoloid or Caucasoid stock. Another evidence of the same limitation is his preoccupation with just two antediluvian stocks, Sethites and Cainites. These two stocks identify with the Mongoloid and Caucasoid respectively. The racist view that the blacks are Cainite is untenable because of the clear distinction between the lands of Cush and Nod.
*The “sign” of Cain was the low pigmentation extreme of fair skin; (18) and the antediluvian Cainite civilization was a prototype of the high material civilization achieved by the whites of Europe. Noah, as Sethite, was chiefly Mongoloid; and his features, in the Gundestrup panel of the Boar-Holding Men, are distinctly brachycephalic (broad-skulled), a standard Mongoloid trait.
[* Cainites and Canaanites not Black: This solves the debate as to the racial type (color) of Canaan (and the Canaanites), establishing him as mostly white – Canaan being the postdiluvian version of the antediluvian Cain, when we understand Ham as the epitome of Adam. “
over 90 percent of the genetic ancestry of present-day Lebanese was derived from the Canaanites," Tyler-Smith, Cell Press, Science Daily, July 27, 2017. “
Lebanese had comparable skin, hair, and eye colors (in general: light intermediate skin pigmentation, brown eyes, and dark hair.” “Archaeogenetics of the Near East” Wikipedia.]
(18) The so-called “mark” of Cain was a protective sign, a metaphysical blessing. All of the racial patterns have metaphysical sign value. Fair skin signifies the phlegmatic humor and a certain degree of physical helplessness (Genesis 4:l4), hence the classic Caucasoid reliance on the arts of civilization for protection. Noah’s white sons, Shem and Japheth, were a kind of redeemed remnant of the Cainite stock but, like Ham, Sethite in the male line.
Noahic Marital Ethics
Any reader of the Old Testament realizes that marital irregularities existed on a large scale in ancient times. It would be rather strange if Noah, father of the gentiles, had practiced a higher standard of marital ethics than polygamous Abraham, ancestor of the Israelites, or polygamous David and Solomon, leading kings of Israel. More important, a certain degree of marital irregularity, by our standards, is built into the biblical scheme of origins. Adam and Eve could generate a world community only through sibling incest among their children.
To all appearances, Noah and his three sons were monogamous. Why else were the survivors of the Flood confined to eight persons? It is quite clear that each of the four females who survived the Flood was reckoned the political wife of one and only one of the four surviving males. The principle of monogamy was well established in some peculiar code of behavior. Yet we can be equally certain that that code also included various degrees of sibling incest and, along with it, a pattern of polygamous concubinage rooted in eugenic planning.
If each of the four Noahic couples had practiced strict monogamy, each would have duplicated the function of Adam and Eve in establishing its own separate version of the human race. Four racial stocks of Mankind would have to be traced back to the four surviving males, as though Noah and his three sons were all racially diverse. Furthermore, we would expect to find a central type of each color group, a single “true” black race, red race, yellow race, and white race.
Such is not the case. The Dravidian blacks of India represent a distinct type from the blacks of Africa, just as “true” but radically different. The whites of Europe have been distinguished into Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean types; and the Amerindians display a characteristic “red” type in South and Central America and a more Mongoloid type in the north. To the biblical monogenist, these distinctions are far from haphazard.
The simplest and best explanation is that these radical diversities within each color group derived from a process of eugenic polygamy within Noah’s immediate family. Because all four males were closely related, they could not have displayed enough variation to account for the distinctly colored groups by the close of the third millennium. But this limitation did not apply to the females, whose parentage is not specified and who could easily have been chosen to represent a plenitude of all the antediluvian racial types. They are the key to the early appearance of the four basic color groups; and their polygamous relationship to the sons of Noah accounts for the radical distinctions within each group, assuming that each male was enough like Adam, in genetic potential, to place his peculiar stamp on each group.
For example, we have found that African blacks descended from Ham’s black son Cush; Dravidian blacks from Noah’s black son Riphath (a vassal to Gomer); Oceanic blacks, from Japheth’s black son Seba (a vassal to Cush); and the Amerindian blacks (Olmecs) from Shem’s black son Hul (a vassal to Aram). All four men were half-brothers by the same mother (Ophir), the universal Black Matriarch, a sole survivor of the antediluvian race of the land of Cush.
A truism of history is that feudalism results in the forced-match political marriage, adulterous courtly love, and other marital irregularities. Noah’s family was the quintessence [most perfect or typical example] of feudalism. Their task was to divide the postdiluvian world into theocratic fiefs, bind one ruler to another through vassalage or political sonship, and reign through the archaic principle of tribal dynasty over peoples formed from their own progeny. Until the demands of this task are weighed and measured, we are in no position to judge their moral lives, marital or otherwise; and, until we seriously consider the implications of their high longevities, we have no idea what we are trying to judge.
The Noahic Aristocracy
Like the short chronology of Genesis 11, the high longevities are treated either as an apologetic liability or as an ethical distinction, as though God were rewarding prodigious quantities of archaic sanctity with proportional quantities of years. This ethical explanation is unnecessary. The high longevities were another by-product of the metaphysical distinctiveness of Adam’s gene pool. The best explanation for the declining scale of longevities in Genesis 11 is that the general cataclysm of the Flood included the break-up of an atmospheric canopy which had protected the antediluvian world from penetration by destructive cosmic radiation.(19) After the Flood, the new influx of such radiation resulted in chromosome damage reflected in reduced longevity and other defects.
(14)John C. Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1964), p. 399.
A correlative of the protected genetic environment in earlier times was that incest could not have the damaging effects of later times. Incest is a necessary ingredient of any scheme of monogenetic origins and played a role in the families of both Adam and Noah. Sibling incest, for example, played a key role in creating the postdiluvian Caucasoid race of Europe because Noah’s white sons, Shem and Japheth, were prohibited from mating with their mother, the White Matriarch, and had to await the maturity of white sisters to generate such a race.
The high longevities of Noah’s immediate family combined with the gentile Pentecost of human government to make that family the most astounding aristocracy the world has known. Nothing in human experience can compare with it short of the Christian Apocalypse. According to Genesis 11:11, Shem lived for 502 years after the Flood: roughly the second half of the third millennium. During this period, all but one of the twenty-five dynasties of the Sumerian King list and the first twelve dynasties of Egypt ran their course. Shem outlived most of them and shared in a number of them, appearing as Balih in the international dynasty of First Kish, as Dadasig of Second Kish, as Tata of Awan, as Sahlamu of the Amorites, and as Melchizedek of the late, Abrahamic period of Genesis14.
If Moses was necessarily bilingual and bicultural,
Shem gave prodigious meaning to the concept of international feudal aristocracy. He personally authored the entire Indo-European linguistic stock, inherited the Semitic stock as his personal possession, governed both stocks in his fief of Akkad, and reigned afterward as a Sumerian, a Ural-Altaic, an Amorite, and an Egyptian. Joseph was not the first Semite to know Egypt. Shem camped forty-two years on the Nile two centuries before the nation of Mizraim existed. In the euhemeristic pantheons of the nations, he was Sumerian Ishkur, Syrian Adad, Ugaritic Aliyan Bal, Egyptian Amon of Thebes, Hellenic Heracles, Celtic Teutates, Teutonic Thor, East Indian Brahma the Originator, and Aztec Tlaloc. These identifications have nothing to do with cultural diffusion. Shem had put his hand on all nations of high antiquity in their birth hour, pre-existed them all by a full antediluvian century and was personally and independently known to all.
These radical views follow logically from the chronological perspective of Genesis 11 but explain why conservatives have preferred to expand the chronology of that chapter. Some aspects of Christian orthodoxy are conservative; others, radical or apocalyptic. Noah’s family was an apocalyptic phenomenon; and, like all such phenomena, this one requires a taste for “untying the knot,” sudden, radical simplification. Mysteries are made to be solved; and this one solves itself through processes of comparison, identification, and arrangement. In fact, once we accept the premise that Genesis 11 fixes chronology, the study of the third millennium is little more than an art of arrangement. The question is no longer whether the Hellenes remember Shem; it is merely which Hellenic name corresponds to Shem. In the Noahic context, neither Shem nor the Hellenes were hidden in a corner. To debate whether the Hellenes knew a traditional version of Shem is like asking whether Abraham Lincoln was familiar with Pennsylvania or had ever heard of Florida; and sectarian scruples about the great gulf fixed between Semite and Hellene are like denying Lincoln s awareness of Maryland because he was reared in Illinois.
Synthetic Historiography
Since 1860, the cause of Bryant, Faber, and Hislop has largely disappeared together with the general type of historiography which they represented. This type has been variously known as “prescientific,” “speculative,” “poetic,” or “synthetic.” To revive the monogenetic worldview (the Noahic cause) without reviving synthetic historiography is impossible for reasons contained within the subject itself. The principle of synthetic historiography can be defended by looking closely both at it and at its supposed opposite, the so-called “scientific” historiography of more recent times.
The word “science” is, of course, a synonym for “knowledge” with connotations from the power of experimentation to verify objectively. To claim command of a “scientific” historiography is to claim, in effect, that our knowledge of the past is subject to experimentation. In archaeology, for example, the social prestige of experimentation is achieved by registering sealed predictions that a given site will yield a certain kind of buried material and by testing such predictions against the event of digging in the predicted site.
Unfortunately, such “experiments” have no direct bearing on our knowledge of the past because they hold out no promise of physical interaction with past events. Because such events are physically nonfunctional, they are not subject to immediate experimentation. On the contrary, all knowledge of the past depends on the subjective mediation of “memory” or the power to convert documentation (objects of historical faith) into convincing images of past events. The memory remains a synthetic or “poetic” faculty; and, wherever the spirit of analysis gains complete mastery of the mind, all knowledge of the past disappears.
Nevertheless, scientifically minded scholars have done their best to create a scientific historiography by imitating the cultural patterns established in the world of experimentation. The “scientific” historian is guided by an ethical commitment to “truth and fact” and strives to achieve an objectivity of viewpoint even though his particular science will not allow him the luxury of immediate experimentation. He cultivates attitudes of critical skepticism and of devotion to large quantities of data as though he were an experimenter prepared to prove and disprove in the manner of physical science.
The need for synthetic historiography does not become apparent until we pay heed to the New Testament ethics of memory as Bryant and Hislop must have done. It is not enough merely to avoid misconceiving of past events as scientific skeptics suggest. Some events must be remembered whether we run the risk of misconceiving them or not.
The New Testament Greek word for truth, ‘
aletheia,’ means “
the unforgotten” or “
that which must not be forgotten.” The Apostle Peter brings this concept of truth to bear on the argument of II Peter 3, where a lawless indifference to the future Return of Christ is traced up from a sinful exercise in forgetting “what must not be forgotten.” The argument of the chapter begins with the motive to “stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance” as though the power to remember were an ethical principle, a form of righteous behavior. The author then warns against the advent of a generation of scoffers who would reject the Return of Christ by cultivating a certain attitude toward history, namely, that “
all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” In other words, these skeptics [prefer a type of uniformitarian view of the past, and] refuse to believe in the reality of past dispensational revolutions such as the Flood. The author traces this mistaken interpretation of history from an intellectual behavioral problem: a “willing” or “willful” disbelief in the biblical concept of origins.
According to the ethics of II Peter 3, the duty of historians is not just to select well-documented fields of history and neglect the rest but to see to it that certain branches of history are remembered, whether they are heavily documented or not. This ethic is the reverse of the logical positivist or empirical school of thought, which suggests that our intellectual duty is to refrain from synthesis, assertion, and interpretation, until masses of evidence move us of their own accord. The Christian historian cannot tolerate this policy. He must receive whatever evidence exists as a providential invitation to exercise one’s memory as fully as the facts will allow. Faith moves us to try as hard as we can to remember the great revolution of the Flood and to treat this revolution as foundation for a general interpretation of history. *
Bryant and Hislop understood perfectly well that the names listed in Genesis 10 constitute such an invitation: as profound and intense a scientific challenge as Christians have ever faced. A world of ancient names - tribe names, god names, kings’ names - lie dormant at the feet of Noahic history, waiting to be synthesized through identification with the names listed here. The task can be done well or poorly; but it must be done.
[* This describes the difference between a deductive and inductive approach to history in that one would deduce from an hypothesis of the flood that all the data points to it as opposed to inductive where no one is sure yet where it all points to. So far in historical science both fall short in conclusiveness.]
20.Originally, Shem was the priest of Yahweh only; and Ham, the priest of Elohim. Noah’s blessing of the “Yahweh Elohim of Shem” meant that he stripped Ham of the priesthood of Elohim and bestowed this privilege on Shem, giving the latter control of two linguistic stocks,Indo-Europeans and Semites. These events are summarized inchapter 4.
The Two-Stag Imdugud and the Identity of Shem
According to biblical logic, Shem was once a quarter of the male population of Mankind. He was destined to live throughout the second half of the third millennium, during which the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt grew from nothing to their full stature. A man of this importance cannot be confined to any one tradition. Although we have generally forgotten his relationship to the gentile nations, such relationships are a branch of truth, “
that which must not be forgotten.” [Now, think of what the consequences are when such important figures are forgotten - A blind paradygm, loss of cultural origins, a lost ancestral heritage.]
The Anzu Bird or Imdugud**
Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
International license.
In the present study, Shem has served to synthesize a variety of remote ethnic traditions. Two of the most fascinating are supplied by physical artifacts from Gundestrup and from Lagash in the eastern part of ancient Sumer, the Noahic land of Lower Mesopotamia. The similarity between these two imageries is self-evident, but, in the context of the present study, has served to confirm rather than to inspire a new synthesis. If archaeologists can claim to have “proved” the validity of their historical concepts through prediction, the same claim of “proof” exists here. Our synthetic logic, at work on the Gundestrup Caldron, had associated Shem with a very peculiar set of images before a totally distinct logical process turned up the same combination of images at Lagash as the depiction of a totally distinct version of the same patriarch. In effect, a reading of the Gundestrup Caldron predicted the existence of an artifact at Lagash.
Of the four males of the Gundestrup exterior panels, the subject of the Hirschnatur [Stag] panel (see frontispiece) was found to represent Shem. Rudolf Grosse’s ethical interpretation of the panel matched the implications of Shem’s identifications with Syrian
Adad, Teutonic
Thor, and Greek
Heracles. Each of these identifications claimed its own argument; but unifying them all was a perception that the “Yahweh Elohim of Shem” named in Genesis 9:26 was known to the Noahic polytheists as
a God of Storm, hence Shem’s identity with the heroic storm gods Adad and Thor, together with the traditional identification of Thor with the hero Heracles. The Gundestrup tradition added that the Celtic brethren of the Teutons remembered a version of Shem between two stags in either hand.
A separate line of argument traced Shem’s political and mythological image throughout the Sumero-Akkadian tradition of Mesopotamia. As Hislop and all Christian separatists recognize, the Mesopotamian world order became alienated from the God of Shem and, presumably, from Shem himself. We have found that the source of this alienation lay in the curse-blessing event of Genesis 9:26: a theocratic revolution favoring Shem and based on Noah’s alienation from Ham.” The revolution split the Noahic world into two warring factions: and the opposition faction (headed by Canaan, Sidon, and Nimrod) gained the upper hand in shaping the traditions of Mesopotamia.
In a Sumerian tradition hostile to Shem, the revolution termed a “
theft of the Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush)ship,” that is, of the power to control the Semitic linguistic stock and, ultimately, to establish law codes in the manner of Ur Nammu, Hammurabi, and Moses. Shem obtained these privileges, legitimately, through Noah’s blessing of the “Yahweh Elohim of Shem” and succeeded, historically, in imposing his name on the Semites and in precedenting the Law of Moses. But, in Sumerian mythology, he became the “
thief of the Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush)ship,” the monstrous bird Zu (Anzud), antagonist to Ninurta, pantheon version of Nimrod.” At Lagash, an early capital of Canaan’s faction, the Zu appears as the
Imdugud (meaning “heavy wind”) or Raincloud Bird,”* subject of one of the most beautiful pagan artifacts ever discovered. Like the Gundestrup version of Shem, the Zu or Imdugud is pictured between two stags. (21) Whether the Imdugud image “predicts” the two-stag panel of the Gundestrup Caldron or the Celtic image “predicts” the two-stag Imdugud makes little difference. The point is that two entirely separate synthetic developments of Shem, at work on two remote cultures, ended in two very different portrayals of the peculiar symbolic idea that Shem stood between two stags. Further interpretation identified the stags as the two inchoate (rudimentary) linguistic stocks obtained through Noah’s blessing: the Semites of the Air God “Elohim” and the Indo-Europeans of the Storm God “Yahweh.” In a remote sense, the Imdugud and Hirschnatur images symbolize the two languages of the Bible, Semitic Hebrew and Indo-European Greek. At the foundation of both, stood the righteous and ubiquitous Shem, enemy of the spiritually corrupt Mesopotamian world order and forerunner of separatistic Israel.
[* Alternately, “Thunderbird”. See “Myth of the Zu Bird” in Appendix II, Volume-5, p. 332
[** In Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, Anzû is a divine storm-bird and the
personification of the southern wind and
the thunder clouds. This demon—half man and half bird—stole the "Tablet of Destinies" from Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush) and hid them on a mountaintop. Anu ordered the other gods to retrieve the tablet, even though they all feared the demon. According to one text, Marduk killed the bird; in another, it died through the arrows of the god Ninurta. Inscribed head of a mace with Imdugud (Anzu) and Enannatum, the British Museum, London. Frieze of Imdugud (Anzu) grasping a pair of deer, from Tell Al-Ubaid. Anzu also appears in the story of "Inanna and the Huluppu Tree", which is recorded in the preamble to the Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld. Anzu appears in the Sumerian Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird (also called: The Return of Lugalbanda).]
(21)James B. Pritchard, “The Myth of Zu,” Ancient Near Eastern Texts(Princeton: University Press, 1955), pp. 1 1 1-13. The identification of Ninurta with Nimrod is a commonly held fundamentalist view, even where there is no euhemeristic policy. See Allen P. Ross, “The Table of the Nations in Genesis 10 - Its Content,” Bibliotheca Sacra, 138 (Jan-March 1981), 26.
Sample East Indian Pantheon
The ubiquitous (universal) dynamism of Noah’s family is best expressed by the statuary art of East India, a nation which has maintained its original pagan heritage more firmly than most. If the Gundestrup Caldron gives us the pictorial code of Noah’s world, East Indian art yields the truest ethical portrait of it. East India is the world’s monument to the peculiar energy of the third millennium. Another challenge of Genesis 10 study is to determine just why this is. It would almost appear that the Satem Aryans who invaded Dravidian India were the last stock to have hosted the inner circle of Noah’s family, giving to East India the same sort of traditional confidence that the deaths of the Apostles Peter and Paul, at Rome, yielded to Roman Catholicism. The Indian statues of Vishnu, Lakshmi, Shiva, Parvati, Rudra, and other gods exude an aura of confidence and pride tantamount to some grand millennial wedding feast. Some idea of the relationship between Indian tradition and Noah’s family can be gained by profiling the Indian pantheon as it translates into the princes of Genesis 10.
The Indian pantheon is just one of three especially rich or catholic presentations of the Noahic cosmos. The others are the Sumerian and Hellenic. Because of the urban cult principle of Sumer, the Sumerian is the most systematic and authoritative. The Hellenic is highly synthetic, producing double and even triple versions of the same princes in different thematic contexts. Despite the vast number of Hindu and Sumerian deities, canons of major deities can be isolated; and significant thematic differences exist between the canons of these two pantheons.
The following profile of the Indian pantheon displays which sections of Genesis 10 are included and excluded, that is, emphasized and deemphasized. The identifications are merely displayed here:
Genesis 10
Noah
Shem
Ham
Japheth
Gomer
Magog (son of Japheth)
Madai
Javan
Ashkenaz
Riphath
Togarmah
Canaan
Seba
Sabtah
Nimrod
Sidon
Jebus
Sin (2ed Yellow Matriarch)
Arvad (2ed Black Matriarch)
Zemar (2ed Red Matriarch)
Hamath (2ed White Matriarch
Elam
Asshur
Arphaxad II (Salah)
Lud (Peleg)
Aram (Joktan)
Hadoram (Arphaxad I)
Uzal
Sheba (Yellow Matriarch)
Ophir (Black Matriarch)
Havi1ah (Red Matriarch)
Jobab (White Matriarch)
East Indian Pantheon
Indra of the Maruts /Amorites
Brahma the Originator
Kama
Brahma Prajapati (Fornjot)
Himavan
Rudra (Norse wind god Kari,’
son of Fornjot)
Agni (Norse fire giant, Logi)
Soma
Maka
Bhat
Thammuz
Marichi
Shiva the Destroyer
Ganesa
Varuna
Kasyapa
Hellenic Zeus
Lakshmi
Parvati
Ganga
Sarasvati
Yama
Manu
Surya, Daksha II
Shiva (Celtic Cernunnus)
Vishnu the Sustainer
Daksha I (Sumerian Nanna)
Diti (Sumerian Inanna)
Durga
Kali
Mahadevi
Uma, Tattaka
The first noteworthy characteristic of this pantheon is its conservative preoccupation with the immediate family of Noah. All eight survivors of the flood are well defined except for the blurred distinction between Shem and Japheth as Brahma and Brahma Prajapati. The simple reason for this merger is that Shem originated the Indo-European stock; Japheth later assumed control of it. A similar tendency to blur distinctions is apparent in the Indian versions of the four females of the Ark, who appear as the Mahadevi complex. (23) In this case, the White, Black, and Yellow Matriarchs are treated as modes of the one Mahadevi (Havilah) or “Great Goddess,” whose distinct identity is that of the Red Matriarch, Noah’s royal wife (Tiamat in the Babylonian system of the Marduk Epic). This traditional elevation of the Red Matriarch explains why the Black Matriarch (Ophir) is pictured as her attendant in the Gundestrup panel of the Braided Goddess.
22. Jacobsen, p. 4.
23. Veronica Ions, Indian Mythology (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967), pp. 91-94.
India also supplies definitive versions of Noah’s chief postdiluvian children, who were eight in number: Gomer’s vassals Ashkenaz (Maka), Riphath (Bhat), and Togarmah (Thummuz) in Genesis 10:3; Cush’s vassal Sabteca, in 10:7; and four daughters (Sin-Lakshmi, Arvad-Parvati, Zemar-Ganga, Hamath-Sarasvati) listed at the bottom of the Canaanite set in 10:17-18. The males of 10:3 (Ashkenaz, Riphath, Togarmah) appear in a local tradition of the Punjab, not far from where Noah’s black son Riphath, father of the Dravidian race, obtained the first postdiluvian fief of the Indus Valley thirty-two years after the Flood. Noah’s daughters are Lakshmi (Sin), wife of Vishnu; Parvati (Arvad), royal wife of Shiva; Ganga (Zemar), another wife of Shiva; and Sarasvati Hamath), beloved wife of Brahma-Shem in an important marriage duplicated in West Semitic tradition under the names Anath and Aliyan Bal.
Aside from Noah’s immediate family, the strongest emphasis in the Indian pantheon falls on the consecutive Canaanite and Semite sections of Genesis 10:15-18 and 10:22. This emphasis means that the Satem Aryans retained a strong sense of the political importance of Brahma-Shem, especially Shem’s alliance with Marichi-Canaan through the marriage of Arphaxad’s daughter Uzal (Diti, Inanna) to Canaan’s son Surya-Sidon. (24) Thirty-seven years after the Flood, that marriage resulted in the birth of the next heir Marduk-Salah, the most powerful of all Noahic princes, (25) a virtual personification of gentile Mankind. No other name is so essential to a definition of the gentile cosmos. He appears in the genealogyof Genesis 11 as Salah but in the Volkertafel system of Genesis 10 as the Arphaxad of 10:22, virtually Arphaxad II, in honor of his maternal grandfather, Arphaxad I son of Shem. In Indian tradition he (Salah, Shelah) was the sun god Surya, father of Yama and Manu, Indian versions of the Hebrew Elam and Asshur, who head the list of 10:22 as chief vassals of Shem.
(24) Noah allowed the political line of Shem to pass into the genetic line of Canaan in order to compensate the latter’s faction for the political damage of the curse in Genesis 9:26. The female interval between Arphaxad and Salah explains the intervention of the Greek Septuagint’s cipher name “Cainan” in the Messianic genealogy of Luke 3:36. Contrary to common belief, there was nothing holy in the genes of Shem orprofane in the genes of Ham; but Shem’s theocratic supremacy, after the fact, was quite real and was carried genetically from Salah to the Messiah. Any notion of “polluting the godly seed” could not apply to the immediate members of Noah’s universal family. All eight survivors of the flood were ritually holy.
Traditional gentile versions of Salah-Shelah, father of Asshur are as follows:
Assyrian-Babylonian
Marduk
Sumerian
Asalluhe
Sumerian legendary
Lugalbanda, Eanna regime
West Semitic
Bull El or Tr Il
Roman
Mars
Teutonic
Tue
Celtic
Dagda
Other national identities are:
Greek war god
Ares, son of Zeus and Hera
[ED: The Zodiac ram Aries has nothing to do with the god Aries (Ares), despite the fact that they are both based on Greek mythology and they share the same name. Ares myths are essentially the same as the myths of Mars from Roman mythology.
https://www.gods-and-monsters.com/mythology-of-aries.html]
Kish King List
Barsalnunna, son of Enmenunna
Assyrian King
Belu, Belus or
Belos,
Babylonian
Bel-Marduk
Norse
Buri, father of Borr
Diklah, vessel son of Joktan
Pharaoh
Djoser, Old Kingdom, 3rd Dyn. Egypt
Nefertum, Egyptian Sun god, Lower Egypt
Roman
Picus (Stercutus), 1st King of Latium, son of Saturn
East Indian
Surya, the Sun god
Tibetan
Tukla, (as in Tukla valley)
Utuhegal, King 3rd Dyn. of Ur
Asklepius, Greek demigod of medicine
Pharoah
Sahure, 5th Dyn. of Egypt
[The Latvian towns Indra and Dagda, in codifying the distinction between Satem and Centum Indo-Europeans also codify the overall structure of the Indian pantheon in its dual emphasis on Noah (Indra) and Salah (Surya-Dagda)].
Noah died 350 years after the Flood” and could not have participated directly in the Aryan invasion of India. In fact, the Indian tradition assigns Indra to the Maruts or Amorites as though Noah spent his last years among the Semitic “Flood People,” the Amorites of the Syrian Desert. Such a destiny would explain why Noah’s antediluvian sons Shem and Ham reappear in the Amorite context of Palestine as Melchizedek and Bera of Genesis 14. But Noah’s impact on culture was great enough to explain the peculiar charisma of East Indian statuary art.
In Genesis 9, Noah seems to convict himself, as well as Ham, of sexual misconduct; and there is no mistaking the connection between “
the iniquity of the Amorites” and the sexual evils of
Bera’s notorious city of Sodom. Sexual anarchy was the tragic flaw of a people whose sexual privilege was to generate the entire human race. Perhaps it is fair to say that East Indian art is a sublimation of that privilege. The Bible nowhere teaches that sexual charisma is “animal instinct.” On the contrary, the premise behind high biblical standards of sexual morality is that sex is itself the marital sacrament, sourced in the Garden of Eden, a physical ritual to be supplanted by the higher charismatic metaphysics of the resurrection body. To those Christians who reason firmly from the general resurrection, eroticism is a kind of cultural lost cause, Adamic value given obsessive and criminal importance by the pagan spirit, the “
corruption that is in the world through lust.” But the charisma of East Indian statuary art is more than merely sexual. It memorializes the Noahic synthesis of values, a vital link in the dispensational history of man. The “
iniquity of the Amorites” is a moral veil covering the face of a beauty rare and strange.
There is little question that the sexual factor has inspired the attitude of blind abhorrence in control of euhemeristic works such as Alexander Hislop’s
The Two Babylons (1853). Hislop’s book is not just an anti-Roman Catholic work from the era of the Kingsley-Newman debate.
* It is anti-catholic in a broad sense. It is Judaistic. Hislop would have liked Shem to have been an Elijah. In some ways, Shem was a separatist; but he was no Elijah. If Shem were the moral equivalent of an Israelite, there would have been no need for the call of Abraham or the sacred history of the Israelites. Judaistic separatism is a vital link in the salvation history of Mankind, a link forged by Moses in the second millennium. The link forged by Shem and Noah in the previous millennium was fundamentally different. Ethically, the challenge of Genesis 9-11 depends on meeting the Christian challenge of Acts 10:28, the subordination of Judaistic separatism to new principles: “
Ye know that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean.” Dispensational theology, based on the logic of such passages, has liberated the twentieth-century euhemerist from the sort of negative obsession, which rivets Hislop’s attention on Nimrod as an incarnation of evil. Great evils existed in the third millennium; but the facile assumption that Nimrod was merely “common or unclean” destroys the subject by destroying any interest in what righteous Noah contributed to the formation of Nimrod’s world.
[* Protestant Charles Kingsley’s remark about Cardinal John Henry Newman “Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be.” In modern parlance, “All priests are liars and Newman is the worst.”]
Linguistic Specialization
Hislop’s preoccupation with Nimrod was not an isolated problem. Most of the euhemerists of Britain and France were too preoccupied with monolithic villains or heroes to give balanced attention to Genesis 10. More important, their scientific limitations compelled them to seek for Noah through single, favored linguistic stocks. Bochart was a Semitist preoccupied with the Phoenicians and Assyrians. Pezron and Edward Davies favored the Celts. Bryant invented a race, the “Cuthites,”* and gave it villainous glamor. Sir William Jones was a prototype of the conventional modern scholar in his development of an empirical and linguistic expertise in the study of the Satem Aryans of Persia and India.
[* Bryant says that the Cuthites are Arabs, and in that case, what do we make of the commonly-held belief that the Arab nations are descended from Ishmael, the son of Abraham and half-brother of Isaac? In the
Encyclopedia of Islam Myths, the supposed Ishmaelite descent of the Arabs is denounced as an invention based on vanity, and is an attempt to claim the inheritance that was promised to the descendants of Isaac and Jacob. The same source quotes the
Dictionary of Islam as saying that the pure Arabs are those who claim to be descended from Joktan, (Qahtan in Arabic), and those who claim to be descended from Ishmael are known as
mixed Arabs, or
Arabu ‘l-Musta’ribah. Joktan was a descendant of Shem, his pedigree being Noah, Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah, Eber, Joktan. He was the brother of Peleg, the patriarch of the division (Gen. 10), and we will come to that subject later. If the Arabs are descended from Joktan, it excludes them from any of the inheritance of Abraham, because they are an entirely different line. Abraham was the fifth-generation descendant of Peleg, the brother of Joktan… Bryant does not say anything about Semitic Arabs, and instead he describes the Arabs in a way that would lead the uninformed reader to believe that all Arabs are Cuthite. – Mike Gascoigne,
http://www.annomundi.com/history/cuthites_in_arabia.htm# ]
Today, Sumerologists, Egyptologists, and others maintain the Nineteenth century tradition, that specialization in language is the one thing needful in historical science. It is no coincidence, however, that such specialization usually serves the evolutionary philosophy. Specialization breeds the idea of polygenesis, the skeptical assumption that the various linguistic stocks are radically independent in origin. In writers such as L. A. Waddell, polygenetic bias took the form of virulent anti-Semitism; but basic polygenism is a calm and respectable assumption that a universal Noah is impossible because, after all, world civilization has evolved, at haphazard, from different physical environments in widely separate parts of the earth in widely separate centuries.
[This ‘earlier’ view is now questioned, and even discarded by the majority of modern geneticists, as DNA shows a monogenetic origin of humanity.]
The present writer is no linguistic expert. Recognizing the high importance of linguistic study, he hopes to profit from the work of others. Linguistic expertise in a single field is not the one thing needful [and neither is an ethnological expertise in a single field]. In fact, linguistic specialists have shown little aptitude or inclination toward grasping the logical potential of fundamentalist Christianity or the great Noahic hypothesis. The one thing needful is the willingness to shift quickly from one linguistic context to another in order to solve universal problems.
[A more advanced ‘comparative’ system in all the fields of research is what is needed, not leaving out, for instance, the Hebrew account by bias “antisemitic” nationalists.]
A case in point concerns the name “
Lelex” in the genealogy of Poseidon and Libya of Hellenic tradition. (26) This genealogy appears rather eclectic and international, to begin with, because one of its members, Belus, is evidently the Middle Eastern Bel Marduk; another,
Phoenix, the “eponymous ancestor” of Phoenicia; and another,
Cadmus, the alleged channel of the Phoenician alphabet into Greece. Conventionally, the genealogy is supposed to represent a Hellenic interpretation of certain foreign Asiatic motifs. We have found that it has much higher importance, furnishing some of the only insight into the genetic connection between the Javanites of Genesis 10:4 and Noah’s family:
Helenic PantheonGenesis 10
Poseidon Sidon (Canaanite list)
Lelex Elishah (Javanite list)
Agenor Amor (Canaanite list)
Belus Salah (Semite section)
Phoenix Tarshish (Javanite list)
Cadmus Kitt (Javanite list)
Danaus Rodan (Javanite list)
Eventually, a case must be made for each of these identifications. The special linguistic insight involves
Lelex, “eponymous ancestor” of the Leleges (Carians), a people of western Asia Minor named in Homer’s Iliad. (27)
25. Genesis 9:28.
26. The Poseidon-Libya genealogy is found in Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca. See various members of the genealogy in J. E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), passim.
27. Book X, 1. 429. Andrew Lang, trans., The Iliad of Homer, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1900), p. 196.
The Leleges inhabited Caria, a region of southwestern Asia Minor whose nominal people,
the Carians, belonged to the Asianic Semitic sphere of the Minoans of Crete. The Leleges are so obscure that we have not been able to identify their language; but the geographic context suggested that they might well have been Asianic Semites. The structure of the Javanite list suggests the same.
The Gomerites and Javanites of Genesis 10:3-4 form a sevenfold unit analogous to the septad of 10:2. Theory demands
that each such septad, with its feudal lord as eighth, formed interlocking relationships to all the other septads by distributing its members among the eight primary linguistic stocks of the cosmos.
Each set of names in Genesis 10 includes a Ural-Altaic member, Hamitic member, Semitic member, and so forth. The apparent linguistic arrangement of Genesis 10:3-4 is as follows:
Ashkenaz Ural-Altaic
Riphath Dravidian
Togarmah Sumerian
ElishahSemitic
Tarshish Indo-European
Kitt(im) Amerindian
Rodan(im) Hamitic
These archaic, personal associations are not to be viewed as exclusive. The Kittim of Cyprus were hardly Amerindian speakers; nor were the Danaans of Greece Hamitic. Lelex (Elishah) and Phoenix (Tarshish) form an interpretive crux because of the dual image of the Phoenicians: Semitic speakers in classic times but with an Indo-European undercurrent related to the Indo-European sojourn on the Syrian coast prior to their exile to the Baltic.
Special insight on this problem derives from a linguistic quarter radically diverse from either the Semitic or Indo-European.
The name Lelex, whatever its supposed Hellenic value,
resembles the Finno-Ugric word lelek, meaning “soul” and related to the word lil, “breath.’ (28) On the face of it, the existence of the word
lil adds weight to Francisco Jos Badiny’s theory (28a) that Finno-Ugric [old Turanian, Turkic] is virtually identical to Sumerian. The Sumerian word
lil means “wind” and is incorporated as such into the familiar god name Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush), “Lord Wind.”(29)
[Also,
http://sumerianturks.org/sumerian_turkish.htm]
28. Encyclopedia Britannica Micropaedia (Chicago: William Benton, 1974), VI, 134.
29. Jacobsen, p. 31.
This chain of coincidences adds technical weight to the theory that Lelex or Elishah was the designated Semitic member of the Javanite tetrad. Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush) was the Sumerian version of the universal wind or airgod, appearing, for example, in the Egyptian pantheon as Shu. Inour second chapter, it will be suggested that the wind god was thepagan counterpart to the Creator Elohim of early Genesis and thatthe
cult of Elohim was the definitive essence of the Semitic linguisticstock as a whole. In other words, the original Semites were the people of Elohim, Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush), or Shu. According to the Finno-Ugric suggestion, the name Lelex meant “
Subject of the Enlil (Canaan, aka Cush)ship” or simply“
Semitic Vassal” of Javan. Just why the Hellenes depended on analien Finno-Ugric word to designate such a relationship remains tobe seen; (29a) but the existence of such a word, evidently cognate witha Sumerian word of high cultic importance,
shows how powerfullystudy in all languages can illumine the Noahic cosmos.
Two Instances from Black Africa
Nevertheless, something is to be said for Bryant’s method of matching names, through mere similarity of sound, in cases where linguistic insight plays no part. The method works, in some cases, because an international language of primitive names really exists. This is especially true of tribe names, according to the familiar Bible principle that tribes bear the names of actual, personal progenitors.
In the nineteenth century, iconoclastic first-generation anthropologists scorned this principle, preferring to believe that Judah or Ephraim had no personal existence because names such as “Tupan and Guaran” could be interpreted as “eponymous ancestors,” fictitious persons invented to give identity to tribes without scientific historical knowledge of origins. The concept of “eponymous ancestry” loses much of its logical force, however, in cases where coincidences of tribal names are observed at second hand and owe nothing to assertions by the tribes themselves.
In the Ubangi-Chari region of central Africa are a wholesale series of matches between the tribes of Nilotic stock and a consecutive series of kings from the legendary solar line of East Indian Ayodhya. The matches are in two clusters based on kings 36-45 and 48-52. These matches of the solar line lie to the Nilotic west in the Central African Republic, Chad, and other lands. Kings of the parallel lunar line enter the picture five times, each time matching a tribe from the eastern Nilotic zone of Uganda, Kenya, and southern Sudan:
East Indian King list
36. Bahuka
37. Sagara
38. Asa-Manja
39. Karam-bha (lunar line)
40. Dili-pa
41. Bhagi-ratha
Sharnbhu (lunar line)
42. Suhotra (lunar line)
43. Nabhaya
44. Ambarisha
45. Madhu (lunar line)
48. Sarva-Kama
49. Su-Dasa 1
50. Kal-masha-pada
51. Ashmaka
Kukura (lunar line)
52. Mulaka
(30 )
African Tribes
Bwaka (Nilotic Zaire)
Nzakara (Nilotic CAR) -Sargon
Kara (Nilotic CAR)
Sokoro (Nilotic Chad)
Mania (Nilotic CAR) -
Manishtushu
Karamojong (Nilotic Uganda)
Sila (Nilotic Chad)
Bagirmi (Nilotic Chad)
Samburu (Nilotic Kenya)
Suk (Nilotic Kenya)
Baya (Nilotic CAR)
Mbere (Nilotic CAR)
Madi (Nilotic Uganda-Sudan)
Sara (Nilotic Chad)
Kum (Nilotic Chad)
Daza (Nilotic Niger)
Masa (Nilotic Chad)
Maka (Sudanic Cameroon)
Kuku (Nilotic Sudan)
Laka (Nilotic Cameroon)
(31)
The same name Sagara also appears in the Eastern Bantu Sagara of Tanzaniawhere it is flanked north and south by the Eastern Bantu Guru, a match for Upa-Guru solar Videha king No. 49.The crux names of the series are Sagara and Asa-Manja, whom Waddell identifies as East Indian version of the Akkadian emperors Sargon and Manishtushu. (32)
30. L. A. Waddell, The Makers of Civilization in Race and History (London: Luzac, 1929), p. 524.
31. “The Peoples of Africa,” Map, The National Geographic Magazine, 140 (December, 1971).
32. Waddell, p. 201.
The key to this African mystery is a pair of Bantu tribes between Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, the Haya and Tussi. These two names have the same sort of symbolic value for the African continent that Indra and Dagda have for the Indo-European world. Haia is the Sumerian pantheon name for Cush, general patriarch of black Africa. Because of the Sumero-Akkadian cultural synthesis, the proximity of the Haya to the Tussi suggests that the latter name represents the Akkadian Manishtushu, in a variant of the Akkadian form as oppose to the Indian form of the Nilotic Manja. The Haya and Tussi have the Sumero-Akkadian code value of the biblical “Cush and Mizraim,” inasmuch as Waddell builds a strong case for the identity of Manishtushu with the first Pharaoh Menes, builder of the Egyptian First Dynasty in Upper Egypt. On the eve of the Akkadian Empire both the Egyptian and black African stocks were camped near the Lower Tigris. Waddell shows evidence that Manishtushu used an imperial fleet of the Lower Sea to colonize Upper Egypt with Hamitic speakers (Egyptians). We need only add that the Akkadians treated the ancestors of black Africa in much the same way.
BantuSumero-AkkadianHebrewEgyptian
“Haya”HaiaCush
“Tussi”TushuMizraimMenes
According to our reconstruction, the Akkadian Empire commenced 270 years after the Flood and just ninety years after the Sumerian epoch of First Kish, which was virtually the beginning of human political history. The East Indian king lists commenced from the First Kish epoch as did other gentile traditions. The East Indian “Sagara,” Akkadian Sargon, appears as thirty-seventh king of Ayodhya because the previous ninety years were taken up by just thirty-six “reigns” of two-and-a-half years each. For some reason, the ancestors of the Nilotes (unlike the Sudanic West Africans) disregarded most of the rulers of the ninety-year pre-Akkadian period but absorbed the East Indian names of the Akkadian emperors as well as those of kinglets who continued to function as local rulers somewhere within the empire.
If the Akkadian regime left a mark on Nilotic and Eastern Bantu tribe names, the Sumerian regimes of Lagash left an even deeper impression on a more compact set of tribes in and near Sudanic Nigeria. In this case, the text of Genesis 10 plays a major role, confirming the belief, held by some ethnologists, that the Palestinian Canaanites were connected with Africa. In the Sumerian record, the house of Canaan (Lagashite Gunidu) appears at Lagash. (33) The Sudanic tribes match a composite of the house of Canaan formed by Genesis l0:15-17, the Lagashite names, and, again, the East Indian king list as tied to Lagash by Waddell. (34) The only part of the Canaanite section of Genesis 10 lacking from the Nigerian system is the last four names, which have a radically distinct value. The matching names are as follows:
33. Jacobsen, pp. 32-33.
34. Waddell identifies Ur-Nanshe and his five sons with Haryashva, East Indian king No. 15, and his five sons. In Waddell’s time,“Ur-Nanshe” was read “Ur-Nina”; and Waddell calls him “Uruash.” The Makers of Civilization, p. 111.
Hebrew Sumerian E. Indian African
(1) Ham Gurmu ----- Gurma (eastern Upper Volta)
(2) Canaan Gunidu ----- Gun (southwestern Nigeria)
Kundu (westem Cameroon)
(3) Sidon Gudea (Gadhi) Gude (northeastern Nigeria
- norther Cameroon)
(4)Heth Ekiti (southwestern Nigeria)(Chatti-Hittite)
(5) Jebus Ur-Nanshe (Haryashva) Jibu (eastern Nigeria)
son of Gunidu Ijebu, Ibo, ljaw (southern
Nigeria)
(6) Amor ---- ----Akyen (Ghana)
(Hellenic Agenor)
(7) Girgash Akurgal Mogalla lgala, Iyala (south- eastern
son of son of Nigeria)
Ur-Nanshe Haryashva
(8) Hiv Mugamimla Kampilya Mambila, Chamba
son of son of (eastern Nigeria)
Ur-Nanshe Haryashva
(9) Ark (Argandea (Markandeya Arago (central Nigeria)
(Hellenic of Erech) E. Indian) Margi (N. E. Nigeria)(35)
Arcas)
C
(1)
H
(9)
A
(3) D
(8)
V (9) (5)
O (8)
L (4) (7) (7)
T (6) (2) (5) (2)
A (5) (5)
All sixteen of the African tribes are contained within a rectangle bounded by Lake Volta and Chad in the southwestern and northeastern corners. Some idea of the specific distribution of these tribes can be gained from the following plot based on the numbers supplied in our list (seee above).
All of the tribes except the outlying Gurma of Upper Volta form a line running from Lake Volta to Lake Chad. To give some idea of the probability of chance coincidence in selecting such names from a larger field, we have omitted about eighteen Sudanic tribes shown by our source along the same line. Thus, our sample represents about 40% of the tribes within the given field of ethnography as supplied by our source.
35.“The Peoples of Africa.
The Heroic Mode
In treating the African tribe names as evidence, we have usednothing but raw similarity of sound. In fact, the logic of the situation calls for little else. The African tribes, like all nations, share in the common charismatic endowment of the Noahic cosmos. The names of the kings were essential divisions of that endowment. The eastern Bantu Sagara and Nilotic Manja bear the names of the legendary kings Sagara and Asa-Manja, versions of the emperors Sargon and Manishtushu; and, by the power vested in those emperors, they exist as tribes and have done so for four thousand years. Did we suppose that those tribes have no share in the “powers that be”? Their powers are now limited by such nation states as the Central African Republic, Sudan, or Uganda. But such tribes are no whimsy of primitive evolution; they share in the very essence of political reality.
Bryant’s effort to identify an international language of early postdiluvian names is no speculative fantasy, but the dawn of an absolute political science grounded in the world of spirit. Those who doubt that such a world exists or pertains to the phenomena of government have reason to be skeptical about the Mesopotamian origin of the Sagara, the Manja, the Mandara of King Mandaru, the Gurma of King Gurmu, or the Adamawa of King Adamu. They must reserve the right to confine Indian kings to India, Amorite kings to Tidnum, and Lagashite kings to Lagash. Their motives are indigenous to the human psyche, which interprets history according to its own laws.
It would be possible to illustrate from countless twentieth-century books how these psychological laws operate. The purpose of this study is not to criticize psychology or anthropology but to offer an alternative to the general tenor of antiquarian study in modern times. Our ethical goal is simple: to counter the elegiac pathos of the evolutionary worldview with a revival of the heroic mode. All Genesis 10 study is a sequel to the epic Paradise Lost, seeking to accomplish for the postdiluvian world what Milton accomplished for the antediluvian, with this difference: that Noah’s postdiluvian world was the beginning of the same world which we inhabit today,
opening the floodgate of positive historical evidence, rather than poetic tradition, to water the soil of the biblical account. Yet the distinction between epic poetry and scientific historiography or historical research of any kind is not absolute but relative.
Poetry and historical science are two modes of the same activity, not just because the ancient narratives are poetic, but because both aim at the synthetic process of personal memory. The student of tenth-century Europe must remember that Henry the Fowler actually existed or all documentation pertinent to him will be neglected, forgotten, and eventually lost.
The moral fact is that some men remember Noah as they read about him and others do not. Some readers sense thepresence of a unifying force in the data of the third millennium and others do not.
The spiritual distinction between elegiac and heroic literature lies at the heart of our ability to conceptualize the past. Elegy is the weeping genre which laments lost causes, the wretchedness of the world, and the frailties of mortal human nature. Much modern “realism” in fiction and drama means little else. Because the elegiac spirit emphasizes defeat, the scientific correlative of elegy is an obsession with negative result.
The objective scientist must be prepared to accept the limitations of human knowledge, the inadequacy of evidence to furnish answers, and the failure of theories.
Defeat, however, is more than an objective experience. There exists an elegiac spirit, a predisposition to defeat or negative result. While questioning the value of the Gurmu-Gurma coincidence, we should also question why such coincidences are not better known. Plenty of them exist.
The answer is that modern historical science is shackled to the elegiac mode. Such coincidences can seem irrelevant even before they are observed. Too much grandeur is implied by them to command modern respect. There is no argument against gloomy apathy.
Historical conceptions based on gloomy ideas of man’s bestial origins cannot be challenged from within the same culture, which first generated such ideas. The elegiac spirit must run its course.
The only answer to Darwinism is stark ideological revolution.
The lifeblood of Darwinism is high chronology. Evolution means nothing apart from vast periods of time. Such periods imply a world of mute prehistory, saharas of endless subhuman groping.
What do such stretches of time imply about the image of humanity? They simply mean that the majority of human beings have always been hapless, featureless peasants lost in seas of negative result.
Darwinism is the result of imaginative efforts to match the sea itself and the celestial sea of outer space with an appropriate reading of antiquity. Both the sea and outer space are natural realities, which happen to feed the Baconian, scientific hunger for negative result: dimension without content. Charles Darwin went to sea, discovered the gross apathy of the Tierra del Fuegans, and drew a predictable conclusion. Percy Shelley had drawn the same sort of conclusion from his impression of the vast blankness of Mont Blanc.
The time has come to question whether such impressions should continue to dictate our beliefs about early man.
In a more heroic age than Shelley’s or Darwin’s, Philip Sidney claimed that heroic literature clears away all “
misty fearfulness and foggy desire.” The given chronology of Genesis 11 has a unique capacity to accomplish just that. Short chronology puts the human spirit on war alert. The Darwinian sea of mute prehistory is the very projection of “misty fearfulness and foggy desire”: a world without power, name, volition, design, or literature. It knows nothing of the cosmic grandeur of the two eyes of Horus Khenti-Irti. The alternative short chronology implies power and intrigue, confrontations of good and evil, immortal glory and immortal shame. Once the human spirit begins to move again and reclaim its heritage, the “misty fearfulness” of negative result and the “foggy desire” of natural selection will lose their appeal both ethically and intellectually. The chronology of Genesis 11 is the clarion call to a better worldview and to a nobler world.
Marvelous place.