Most Ancient Days:
A Biblical Reconstruction of Ancient History
from Noah to Saul
By
Jack H
Copyright 2010
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Books by
Jack H:
Idols of the Cave:
the Arguments of Evolution
* * *
The Pillars of Heaven:
Creation, Fall and Flood
According to Science and the Bible
Dragons in the Earth:
According to Science and the Bible
* * *
The Serpent in
Fire-worship, Astrology and the Mystery Religion
from
* * *
Most Ancient Days:
a Biblical Reconstruction of Ancient History
from Noah to Saul
The Days of Brass and Iron:
a Biblical Reconstruction of Ancient History
from Saul to Alexander
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Table of Contents
Preface: World Views
The Age of Legend
1 — The Number of the Years: Biblical Chronology from Adam to Saul
2 — The Age of Evil Imagining: the confusion and scattering at
3 — The Generations of the Sons of Noah: the Table of Nations
4 — Cities of the Twin Rivers:
5 — Profane Fables: errors of the standard paradigm
6 — Kings of the
The Age of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
7 — Stones of
8 — Sands of
9, 10 — The Age of Base Metals: the confusion of the Bronze Age
The Scepter of
11 — Joseph Over the House of Pharaoh:
12 — The Pharaoh Who Knew Not Joseph: the "
13 — Moses, Prince of
14 — Into the Hands of the Living God: the Ten Plagues of
15 — Rise Up and Get You Forth: Exodus & Wilderness
Judges Over the Land
16 — Amalek, First of Nations: Dynasties XV & XVI
17 — The Kings of the East: from Sargon to Hammurabi
18 — When There Was No King in
19 — The End of Agag: Saul and Ahmose
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Preface:
World Views
Every reasonable person knows our world is billions of years old, and that the course of the planets have affected Earth only in the subtle, distant work of gravity. Everyone knows about the many ice ages, and that humans Evolved from lower forms. Everyone knows about the slow migration out of Africa of the ‛human’ animal which spread and Evolved over the past 100,000 years, and about the gradual increase in the complexity of human culture over scores of thousands of years, and about the 10,000-years-old settlement of Jericho. Everyone knows that there was no Adam and Eve, no Fall from grace, no Flood of Noah, no
Yet I maintain otherwise. You have before you a work which some may call lunatic-fringe, on a par with belief in a flat-earth. It may be accused of being religious, or ignorant, or of misusing evidence, or of not meeting the criterion of disinterestedness which is expected in any work of research. As to that, I trust that evidence and sound reasoning will speak louder than bigotry and ad hominem attacks.
I maintain that an issue should be decided on its merit — not on its popularity, and not on how readily it is ridiculed. I maintain that it is evidence, rather than conviction or bias, which should decide an issue. I propose a different set of ‛truths which everybody knows’.
When I was in my early teens, I read all the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the Pellucidar series which told of a fantastical, Mesozoic world at the core of our planet. Later, at age sixteen, I came across a book by a fellow who insisted that Earth actually was hollow, with openings at the poles. I dimly recall that he used as evidence the fact that icebergs were not salty: where else could such mountains of ice come from, if not from the very poles themselves? What he said about
I have encountered flat-earthers, and alchemists and ritual magicians, and communists and atheists and evolutionists and reincarnationists. And I have come to see that, while such world views may be fringe or mainstream, they are all based on uncritical faith and a less-than-rigorous acceptance of ‛evidence’.
Karl Marx spent years in the Library of the
Hinduism and Buddhism have been swallowed whole by New Agers, who regurgitate their faith in a form more palatable to Westerners. The hopelessness of karma is reinterpreted as a system of justice to which is added the escape tunnel of mercy. It is okay that women are raped and children tortured and babies murdered or born deformed, because that is karma, and they will get another chance, and they deserve what they get anyway for acts they committed in past lives. The First ‛Noble’ Truth, of Buddhism, is that life is pain, and the highest goal of life is to become non-existent. The godhood which reincarnationists claim for themselves does not last, since god ‛itself’ is an illusion — froth which sinks down once more into the sea of nothingness. But while we may put words together in a pretty or poetic way, the image and what is real need not be the same thing.
Atheists point to the fact that God has not in the flesh introduced Himself personally to them or any of their friends, and from this observation they conclude that there is no God. "Everyone who says otherwise is just too uncritical and emotional. Those who claim to have had communion with some Creator are deluded or brainwashed, or simple-minded or insane, or they're engaged in wish-fulfillment, or they can't tell when they're dreaming, or they're wrong in some other way . . . but they are wrong. Only randomness and unobserved laws of nature can explain the existence of ourselves and of the universe," says the atheist. "Only Evolutionism is true."
In my book Idols of the Cave I examine the arguments and the evidence used to support the claim that Evolutionism is scientific. The conclusion is that Evolutionism is a metaphysical philosophy dissembling as science, which distorts the fossil record with self-serving interpretations, rewrites the laws of nature, and uses shoddy and distressingly superficial ‛logic’. ‛Disinterestedness’ is not even an issue with regard to Evolutionism, since Evolution is absolutely foundational to the modern, naturalistic bias — no more to be questioned than one's own heartbeat.
Again, in The Pillars of Heaven and in Dragons in the Earth, I examine the positive case for Creationism. The age of the universe and of Earth and the six days of Creation, the physics of the Fall of Adam and the world and the great age of the pre-Flood patriarchs, the Flood and the fossil record and the geological evidence of stratified rock and of coal and of continental ‛drift’ and mountain-building, the Ark itself and the subsequent Ice Age — all these questions and more are dealt with from an evidentiary perspective. Here, my conclusion is that the more literally one takes the Bible, the closer one comes to reality — always remembering, of course, that there is such a thing as a figure of speech.
In The Serpent in Babel, I look at the origin and spread of paganism. Myths contain the hints and memories — though thoroughly corrupted — of the days before the Flood and of the time surrounding the confusion at
Now, in this book, Most Ancient Days, I address what I consider to be the final issue: not philosophy or physics or faith, but history. History and truth are different things, which may happen to agree. This is not a cynical or fatalistic statement, but simply a recognition of the limits of what history is. History is what we are told about the past. If it was not written down, it is not history. It may be archeology, or tradition, or myth, or even a correct guess, but it is not history. That some civilization once thrived may be a fact, but unless we can read their writings, or what their neighbors said about them, their civilization is not a historical fact, but rather an archeological fact. And we can learn a great deal from archeology — I do not mean any slight whatsoever. But just as a dentist and a barber do different jobs, so do the historian and the archeologist. Indeed, archeology is often the predecessor of history, as when libraries or archives are unearthed.
In this and its companion volume, The Days of Brass and Iron, I retell the history of mankind, from a precise beginning, to the Classical Age. We will proceed through history chronologically, as conceived in this reconstruction. I will not deal with one region at a time, but rather I will tell the story straight through. As a result, I cannot deal with, for example, each Egyptian dynasty according to its numerical order, and this will no doubt be a bit confusing: I am going to be talking about Dynasty XII before Dynasty III. Reference to the charts will be very useful. This topic is so large, and so challenging, that it must be, unavoidably, confusing. Where my prose fails, I hope the charts and tables will be of help, and visa versa. They are meant to complement each other.
In presenting this information, I affirm that I am certainly not disinterested in the conclusion. But my ‛yes’ means ‛yes’, and with that in mind I assert that I have striven to let the evidence speak for itself. In dealing with ancient history, the first and most troublesome problem is the lack of evidence, and the often contradictory reports of those elder historians who wrote before our ‛modern’ age. From the data, some information must be accepted, and some dismissed as corrupt. I have not given every detail, but I have given what I judge to be the relevant information. This is what every theorist does, and must do.
I have depended on the prior, ground breaking research of other writers, most prominently Immanuel Velikovsky. In his initial intuition that post-Exodus Egyptian chronology is grossly misunderstood, and in his proposal of an interplanetary cause for earthly catastrophes, Velikovsky arrived at great insight, and has significantly eased the task which I set for myself. He started with the Exodus, and allowed the logical implications to demand that conventional chronology be revised. While I disagree with some of what he proposes, this work would be significantly less detailed without his trailblazing effort.
In another sense, however, Velikovsky is irrelevant: the Bible demands a revision, and Velikovsky's greatest contribution was in providing an example of courage. For the most part, he revised only the history of post-Exodus
I started with the assumption that the Bible contained a recoverable and valid chronology. From this assumption, the requirement immediately appeared that ancient history as it is commonly understood be revised. Making some simple and reasonable judgments (and with the aid of Assyrian and Persian king lists), we can firmly date the Flood, the days of Abraham and Joseph, the Exodus and the reign of Saul. With some rigorous research, we can date the confusion at
Since virtually all of the more ancient dates produced by the conventional construction of history are in harsh contradiction with the data from the Bible, I will provide both systems, for ease of reference. To indicate the normal but incorrect dates, they will always be preceded by a symbol which indicates the specific erroneous timeline of some region and era.
The Old Babylonian (OB) timeline, generally off by about 700 years, is indicated by an asterisk [*]. Thus, the dates for Hammurabi (the great king of the Old Babylonian dynasty) are 1069-26/ *1792-50 — the first set is my correction, and the second is the standard albeit incorrect version of the
Now, there are passages in this work which may well be nothing but boring. I have given details of pharaohs about which almost nobody is likely to care. This is not an eat-your-vegetables book. If you are not interested in the topic of a paragraph, skim it or skip it. It is far more important that you see the over-all picture, than that you understand the minutia of archeology or historiography. But for the sake of completeness, and since it is in the details that a matter is established, I have been, admittedly, overly-precise.
But aside from the great wash of details, and behind the rigors of logic, the overriding theme of this book is that there is a God, who wrote a book by which we may come to know His character and the way to gain salvation — through Jesus Christ. I will not preach in this work, but that the Bible is true and Jesus is Lord is the backdrop against which every word appears. Some will take this clear statement of my bias as disqualifying my conclusions from serious scholarship. I offer no defense. Everyone has a religion. I state mine up front, and expect evidence to determine truth.
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