Navel Gazing

Did Adam and Eve have navels? They didn’t need navels because they did not form in a womb, but there is a theory called the Omphalos hypothesis that claims the world was created with an apparent age: Adam and Eve with navels, trees with rings in the Garden of Eden, light from distant galaxies created en route. The Omphalos hypothesis is sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card for creationists, because any evidence a skeptic presents proving the age of the earth or universe can be shot down with the assertion that God simply created it to look antique, like a rustic distressed coffee table from Pottery Barn.

But the situation changes when you get to the Noachian deluge. Here we are no longer dealing with the story of creation where “apparent age” can be used as a trump card. In the flood story, we find claims that can be scientifically verified or discredited. If a worldwide flood happened, there should be some trace of it left behind, whether geological, ecological or zoological. Or, historical traces since, according to biblical literalists, the flood was supposed to have occurred between 2300 and 2350 BCE, well within the confines of recorded history.

Skeptics have presented dozens of challenges to the veracity of Noah’s flood and creationists have found “creative” ways of answering most of those questions…to their satisfaction anyway. For example, a skeptic may question whether a large wooden structure like the ark would be seaworthy. Beyond a certain size, wooden ships bend and leak. But a creationist can argue that the ark was made of “gopher wood” and this wood, which no longer exists today, may have been as hard as steel for all we know. Or Noah was a master craftsman or God gave him special knowledge to construct the ark. 

Pretty sure it didn't look like this. ("Noah's Ark - The Homecoming" by Steve Crisp)

In the creationist literature, many appeals are made along the lines of “we don’t know what conditions were like on the pre-Flood earth.” Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? Maybe the pre-Flood earth didn’t have very high mountains or the oceans weren’t as deep. The tremendous weight of the water forced the oceans to become deeper and pushed the mountains up, so the water drained away from the land naturally. But geological shifts of this magnitude would have destroyed any trace of human civilization before the flood. Recall the flood is dated to approximately 2350 BCE and the Great Pyramid of Giza dates to 2560 BCE, 200 years prior to the flood. Yet the pyramid is still there when, according to creationists it should have been destroyed in the flood cataclysm. According to Gen 10:6, the founder of Egypt was Noah’s grandson, so the entire history of Egypt should post-date the flood, but Egyptian history is well-documented back to 3100 BCE and shows no discontinuity.

Either the dating of the flood is wrong, a theory creationists are loathe to admit because that puts the reliability of the Bible’s dates into question, or the generally accepted dates – not only for Egyptian history, but also for other ancient civilizations – must be wrong. But that poses another problem because the Bible dates to Exodus to around 1450 BCE, 900 years after the flood. Events over 1500 years of recorded Egyptian history would have to be crammed into 900 years. Far less than 900 years actually, because rebooting the post-Flood world with only 8 people would require many generations before there was enough of a population to form distinct cultures and societies.

And then there’s the problem of the animals and whether the ark was big enough to hold them all. Creationists claim that Noah didn’t have to bring every type of animal aboard the ark, but only land mammals, birds, and reptiles. Insects and amphibians were left to fend on their own and fish like water. And Noah didn’t have to bring a representative of every species, but only every “kind” and they define “kind” at the taxonomic category of “family” or, at worst, “genus.” For example, if Noah was only required to bring a pair from the “cat” family (felidae), that would cover house cats, cheetahs, lions, tigers, leopards, etc. That stretches credulity a bit, so most creationists will accept (for the sake of argument) that Noah would have to bring representatives of each genus. That’s over 4000 genera for mammals, birds and reptiles and there would be at least a pair of each and seven pairs for the clean animals, so it would be more like 10-20,000 animals.

And not just representatives of every living genus, but every genus that ever existed, dinosaurs included. Why? Because creationists use the flood to explain fossils, so all those extinct animals – pterodactyls, T-Rex, mammoths – had to be alive at the time of the flood. And Noah would have to bring their representatives – juveniles, to save space – aboard the ark, even though they apparently didn’t survive conditions in the post-Flood world. (God should have informed Noah not to bother with them.) One creationist estimates 16,000 animals in all, representing living and extinct genera. The number seems on the low side to me, but let’s go with it.

Animals vary in size, but creationists like to use a sheep as an average size. The ark had a volume of 1.5 million cubic feet, which they say is equivalent to 570 railroad stock cars, each of which can carry 240 sheep. That works out to 11 cubic feet per animal, so if you have 16,000 animals, they would need 176,000 cubic feet. It sounds like there would be a lot of room left over on the ark, but Noah had to provision food for one year. A human can eat 8 times his weight in food over a year and an ox or cow twice that, so factoring in 8 times the space required for each animal for food, you arrive at 1.4 million cubic feet. This uses up all the space on the ark, with no space left for corridors, ramps, ventilation, water reservoirs or waste storage. Perhaps God put the animals in suspended hibernation – like astronauts in a science fiction movie – so they would not require food or water. But if God could whip out a miracle to save the day, why put Noah through the trouble of constructing an ark in the first place? Why not transport Noah and the animals to the tallest mountain and have them wait it out?

Once the ark landed and the animals disembarked, you would expect to see population densities in decreasing amounts as you travel further away from the site where the ark settled, but that is not the case. Marsupials managed to travel across oceans to South America and Australia, about as far as you can get from the Middle East, without stopping to settle anywhere along the way. God could certainly have infused a migratory impulse within the kangaroos and koalas to head to Australia and use ice ages to conveniently create land bridges for them to cross oceans, but that’s taking special pleading to ridiculous levels. A more plausible scenario is that humans brought the animals with them, but if that is the case, why did they only bring marsupials and not placental mammals? And how did flightless birds – penguins – get to Antarctica?

This brings us back to the Omphalos hypothesis. What young earth creationists are asking us to believe is that not only did God manage to set up the conditions on a pre-Flood earth that would have made a worldwide flood possible, but God also did an excellent job of eliminating all evidence of a global flood. The flood obliterated any trace of the pre-Flood world while, at the same time, laid down a sedimentary and fossil record that gives the appearance that animals went extinct over a long period of time. Recorded human history begins, not with a few survivors trying to rebuild civilization after the flood, but with well-organized societies of thousands of people building massive structures like the pyramids. Within an incredibly short period of time after the flood, animals and humans spread throughout the globe, crossed vast oceans and rapidly adapted to specific environments.

Is God is setting up a series of logically absurd situations in order to test our faith in the veracity of the Bible? The answer is clearly laid out in this quote from creationist literature: “The principal error of this view is that it starts from supposed scientific anomalies, such as the fossil record, rather than from Scripture.” In other words, Scripture drives the interpretation of science, not the other way around.

What is Gopher Wood?

In northern Kentucky, the Creation Museum is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark, based on the specifications provided in Genesis 6:14-16:

Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. (RSV)

There’s not a whole lot of detail and it allows plenty of room for imagination. The Creation Museum ended up with a vaguely Egyptian-looking design. The Bible doesn’t define the length of a cubit but it is the length from the elbow to the tip of the fingers. If the standard measure is 18 inches, the dimensions of the ark would be 450 x 75 x 45 feet. The Creation Museum chose an Egyptian cubit of 20.4 inches, so that makes their Ark 510 feet long. By contrast, the Titanic was 850 feet long, but was made of steel. Noah’s Ark would have been bigger than any wooden ship that has ever been constructed.

“Entry of the Animals” to Noah’s Ark by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)

As you can see, the biblical description leaves a lot of wriggle room. And the dimensions and the description of the door and three decks are the clearest parts. The rest of the passage uses some rare words (that I have emphasized in bold), the meanings of which are much debated.

The Hebrew word translated “ark” is tebah. It is used many times in Genesis 6-9, but outside of the flood narrative, it only occurs in Exodus 2:3, 5 to describe the basket in which baby Moses was placed. (The word translated “ark” in Ark of the Covenant is a completely different Hebrew word.) Tebah is a loan word from the Egyptian language to describe a box or chest. The Vulgate translates it as arca, from which we get the word “ark.” To be consistent, the word should be translated as “box” in both Genesis and Exodus. While tebah does not mean a ship, functionally it serves as a lifeboat in both cases.

Next up, the ark is to be constructed of “gopher wood.” What the heck is gopher wood? “Gopher” is a transliteration of the Hebrew word goper and no one knows for sure what it means, except that it has nothing to do with a burrowing rodent. Many English versions of the Bible (KJV, RSV, NJPS, NAB, NABRE) don’t try to translate it. A few others (NEB, NIV, NRSV) translate it as “cypress” wood, but that is just a guess. Hebrew does have a word for cypress, so if that’s what the Priestly writer wanted to say, he could have used that word.

The problem is that goper only appears here in the entire OT. Such a word is called a hapax legomenon (meaning “said once” in Greek). The most reliable way to translate a word is from its context, but how do you do that when you only have one context in which it occurs? Well, we can look to see how it was translated in ancient versions of the OT. The LXX translates it as “squared timber” and the Vg as “smoothed wood.” Both translations are describing not a particular type of wood, but wood prepared in some certain fashion. Because the LXX and Vg were closer to the time of the biblical writings, they may reflect a knowledge of the word no longer available to us or they may have simply guessed at the meaning of the word.

The Hebrew word translated “rooms” in many English versions (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NABRE, NJPS, NIV) is qinnim. This word is the plural of qen (“nest”) which elsewhere in the OT appears only in the singular. Since the original Hebrew only contained the consonants with the vowels added later, some scholars have proposed a different set of vowels that would yield the word qanim, “reeds” (NEB, NJB). This would yield a neat parallelism in the translation: “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood, with reeds make the ark.” The implication being that the ark would be constructed of both wood and reeds, perhaps with the reeds helping to seal the gaps between the wooden beams. Reeds were also used in the construction of the boats in the other flood myths like Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, so its use here could reflect an influence from those tales.

The Hebrew word (koper) translated “pitch” only appears here in the OT. It is not a hapax legomenon in the strict sense because the word is used twice in the verse, as verb and noun: “and pitch it on inside and out with pitch.” Koper is only one letter different from the hapax goper, so there is a bit of wordplay here. Pitch, tar, or asphalt are petroleum-based products. This poses something of a problem for Young Earth Creationists because they insist that all petroleum products were formed during the Flood. So where did a pre-Flood Noah get his pitch?

V. 16 gives us another hapax in tzohar, which the Vg translates as fenestra (“window”). Modern translators turn to a similar Arabic word which means the back of a hand or a human back. The logical conclusion is that tzohar was used to refer to the top or roof of the ark. The next part of the verse (“and finish it to one cubit from above”) is somewhat incomprehensible, so it is not clear if a gap between the roof and the sides is being discussed or an overhang of the roof. 

What are we to make of all the rare words? One possible explanation is that those words were in the tradition that the Priestly writer received. Just like if we were retelling the nativity story, we might say something like “the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid to rest in a manger.” “Swaddling clothes” and “manger” are not everyday words for most people but those words from the King James translation are such a part of the tradition that we would repeat them as-is. Something similar may be happening here with words like “gopher wood”.

Between the vague specifications and the rare words with contested or unknown meanings, we can only have a general idea of what Noah’s Ark was supposed to have looked like. But if you want to see the Creation Museum’s version, The Ark Encounter is scheduled for a grand opening in the summer of 2016.

Clash of the Creationists

When you hear the word “creationist” do you think of a person who believes the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago in six 24-hour days? Properly speaking, that person would be a Young Earth Creationist (YEC). There are actually Old Earth Creationists (OEC) who believe the earth was created millions – if not billions – of years ago. OECs can be further sub-divided based on belief in a global flood or whether humans were directly created by God. A handy chart can be found here.

Until 50 years ago, most Bible-believing Christians were OECs. The YEC movement is a fairly recent phenomenon. The father of the movement was a Seventh-Day Adventist named George McCready Price (1870-1963), but it is only since the 1960s that YEC views became the dominant doctrine among evangelicals. (A brief history of how that came to be can be found here.) Many Christians still hold one of the many variations of OEC, but they are nowhere near as vocal or visible as the YEC adherents.

So it’s not at all surprising that creationists of all stripes hold conflicting views on how to interpret the first two chapters of Genesis. In a previous article I discussed how inconsistencies between the two creation accounts in Gen 1 and Gen 2 revealed the work as coming from different authors. Those among the creationists who assert that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible deny this. The YECs assert that the second chapter is simply a more-detailed explanation of what happened on Day 6 of creation week. The OECs hold different opinions on how to interpret Gen 1 and its relation to Gen 2.

The inconsistencies between the two chapters have to do with when plants and animals were created. According to Gen 1, vegetation was created on Day 3 after dry land was made to appear, and the birds of the air and the fishes of the seas were created on Day 5. Yet, when the second creation account begins (Gen 2:5-7), we are told that there were no “plants of the field” (wild plants) or “herb of the field” (cultivated plants) because there had been neither rain (which is all the wild plants need) nor humans to work the earth (what the cultivated plants need).

Why does the second creation account say there are no plants if they were created on Day 3? The YEC explanation is that in Gen 1:11 all grasses and herbs and trees were created except for the “wild plants” and “cultivated grains.” Those types of plants couldn’t exist before the creation of humans because wild plants have thorns (and thorns were a product of God’s curse in Gen 3:18) and cultivated grains require irrigation.

There are problems with this explanation. The plain sense of the text says there were no plants at all, wild or cultivated, in the beginning. And part of the reason for that was YHWH God had not yet sent rain. This itself raises another question because the land was covered with water just three days before and now it is so dry that plants can’t grow? Anyhow, in this barren wasteland, YHWH God plants a garden with fruit trees as an oasis for his newly created human to live. But if, according to Gen 1:11, the earth was covered with green plants and fruit trees since Day 3, why create a garden at all when the human could have simply been moved to a more verdant site?

How do YECs explain the birds? Although Gen 1:20-21 recounts God creating the birds on Day 5, Gen 2:19 says that “YHWH God formed from the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the heaven” as possible companions for Adam. YECs resolve the contradiction by translating “formed” as “had formed”. That is, God had already formed the birds on Day 5 and the land animals earlier on Day 6 but he’s just presenting them now to Adam to be named and considered as possible companions.


"Adam Naming the Animals" by Jan Saenredam (c. 1565-1607)

There’s a bit of special pleading in the assertion that the Hebrew word for “formed” should be interpreted in this instance as “had formed.” Every major translation (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NEB, JPSV, NJB) translates the word as “formed” because the context doesn’t meet the criteria for translating it as “had formed.” Only the NIV translates “had formed” because the translators wanted the second creation story to harmonize with the first.

This quibbling on the obvious meaning of the words or their translations is a typical ploy by biblical literalists. They insist the Bible is inerrant and must be interpreted literally, but when two passages contradict each other, they will read them in such a way that they don’t contradict, even when it requires that you have to ignore the plain meaning of the text, read something into the text that isn’t there, or re-translate the text to mean what they need it to say.

The OECs, on the other hand, don’t have to resort to such contortions. Although asserting Mosaic authorship of all of Genesis, they can allow that Moses is using an analogy of six creation days to teach the theological basis of the Sabbath day rest and, therefore, would not view Gen 1 as a literal account of how creation happened. Interpreting the six days of creation as topical, instead of chronological, they can more easily harmonize the scriptures with the findings of science.

In the final analysis, an OEC interpretation of the meaning and intention of Gen 1-2 may not be all that different from that of a biblical scholar who attributes the chapters to different authors, but it will be wildly different from the YEC interpretation. And the YEC apologists will attack the OEC proponents with the same vigor they would use against a proponent of atheism such as Richard Dawkins. OECs try to reconcile conflicts between scripture and the sciences of astronomy, physics and geology (if maybe not biology), but when confronted with a conflict between the Bible and science, YECs will always choose the Bible and will twist their understanding of science “facts” to fit their biblical interpretation.

If nothing else, OECs prove that it is possible to believe that the scriptures are inspired, yet do not need to be taken literally. Cardinal Baronius – not Galileo – once said, “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Allow me to make a slight modification of that: Genesis 1 and 2 teach us why God created, but not how God created. The “how” is answered by science.

Under the Dome

Young earth creationists are believers in biblical literalism; that is, interpreting the Bible according to a literal meaning of its words, not allowing for a figurative or metaphorical understanding. To know what the scripture text says is to know what it means. So when Genesis 1 says that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, that’s exactly how long it took. When they add up the dates from genealogies and other biblical chronological references, they come up with a date of 4000 BCE for the creation of the world, so the world must therefore be no older than 6000 years. Since for them the Bible is also inerrant, when science or history are in conflict with the Bible, science or history must conform to what the Bible says. Any facts have to be interpreted in light of the Bible’s clear meaning.

With this in mind, what are the implications of a literal interpretation of Genesis 1? When God set about creating the cosmos, there was nothing but chaos: “the earth was a formless waste and darkness covered the abyss and a mighty wind swept over the waters” (v. 2). One pictures a vast, wind-tossed sea covering the earth in utter darkness. It doesn’t say God created the primeval sea. It was already there. God’s first order of business is to create light (v. 3) to separate day from night.

God’s second creative act is to make a dome to separate “the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome” (v. 7). The Hebrew word raqiya (translated as “dome” or “firmament”) derives from a verb meaning to flatten or stamp down, suggesting a metal sheet that physically separates the upper waters from the lower waters. Later on (Gen 7:11), the Flood will be partially brought about by opening the “windows of the heavens”. In other words, openings in the solid firmament will allow the waters above the dome to flood the earth.

God’s third order of business is to gather the lower waters together in one place, allowing dry land to appear (v. 9). With this completed, the chaotic conditions present at the start of the first day have been reversed. The earth now has a form. It is bound by the sea, but the sea no longer covers it. Darkness is tamed by light and the chaotic waters of the abyss have been separated by a dome to prevent them from overcoming the earth.

With dry land in place, God can now bring forth vegetation (vv. 11-12). God will then go on to create the sun, moon and stars and place them in the dome of sky (vv. 14-18), as well as creating sea creatures and birds (vv. 20-22), land animals (vv. 24-25), and finally humans (vv. 26-27). In case you noticed, yes, light is created three days before the sun. And, yes, the sun and moon and stars are placed in, not above the dome. We’ll have to address those topics another time.




The heavens and earth according to the Bible



The ancient Near Eastern concept of the earth is not that of a sphere revolving around the sun, but more like a snow globe, except the water is above the dome and not contained within it. The land is a flat expanse surrounded by the primeval sea (Job 26:10; Prov 8:27) and is held up by pillars (1 Sam 2:8) to keep it from sinking into the waters. The dome of heaven is set upon the earth (Amos 9:6;), held up by mighty mountains, and the sun, moon and stars were placed within the dome. Together, the heavens above the dome and the earth below comprise the entire universe.

A literal reading of Genesis 1 is consistent with this view. However, I don’t think even the hardest-core young earth creationist would attempt to argue this literal reading of the text. Why is that? Because only the most deluded of people would try to argue that the earth is really flat with a metal dome for a sky. That might have worked for someone living in the Bronze Age, but anyone who has seen weather satellite photos taken from orbit knows that is absurd.

So the creationist will have to insist the true meaning of the text in Genesis 1 is something other than the obvious, literal meaning. They will insist that nothing in Genesis 1 is inconsistent with a spherical earth. The firmament is not a solid dome or, if it was at one time, that was before the Flood when it was destroyed, allowing the waters above it to drown the earth. Or maybe it was a vapor canopy or made of ice. If they get really desperate, they will claim that the words of the text are undefined or figurative in nature, even though we need to believe the universe was created in six 24-hour days, because that part has to be taken literally. How’s that for cognitive dissonance?

There is plenty of scriptural support for the ANE concept of a flat, immovable earth with a solid dome and waters above the dome. (This brief article sums up the biblical evidence for a flat earth.) It is every bit as “scientific” as a 6000-year old earth and creation of the universe in six days. But creationists deny the Bible describes the former and affirms it describes the latter. Furthermore, they will insist that we must believe this to be true because to deny any single part of the Bible is to deny all of the Bible. But aren't they denying a part of the Bible when they deny the scriptural view of a flat, immovable earth?