A
couple of weeks ago, we talked about the Flood of Noah: both the physical and the historical evidence
that this huge catastrophe actually took place just as the Bible and other
ancient histories say it did. Today we
want to consider what happened after the time of the Flood.
The
earliest histories available to us put the landing place of the ark in
southeastern Turkey, in the area known as Ararat in the Bible or Urartu to
modern scholars. This is the same area
in which archeologists have found the earliest evidence of agriculture and
domesticated animals in the world. This
is just what we would expect to find if this is the area where the ark
landed.
Archeologists
also agree that from this mountainous area, people migrated down into the river
valley below in central Iraq. As the
Bible puts it, “And it happened in their
journeying in ancient times that they found a valley in the land of Shinar, and
they lived there” (Gen. 11:2). This
area, called Shinar in the Bible, is known as Sumer by archeologists. Here they drained the marshes and figured out
how to irrigate this fertile plain, which made it a very productive
agricultural region.
This
was a time, the Bible says, when a single language was spoken by all mankind: “And all the earth was of one language and
the same words” (Gen. 11:1). It's
not only the Bible that remembers this as a golden age of peace and
harmony. These same memories of a time
of peace with a single language can be found in ancient Mesopotamian writings (in
Iraq), in Egypt, and in the ancient Hindu (Vedic) literature of India, as well
as in Buddhism—and even in distant Norway.
Many modern archeologists agree that an early common language was spoken
here, and claim to have found traces of it in the names of different professions,
place names, and other words preserved by later languages.
This
time of peace is when the earliest traces of civilization appear, the first to
be found anywhere in the world, right here in Shinar or Sumer. Here is the first evidence of writing and
literature, of law, of city-states, of the potter’s wheel, the sailboat, the
plow, metalworking with bronze, and of advanced musical and architectural
forms; of weaving, leatherwork, and masonry.
For archeologists, the sudden full-blown appearance of civilization at
Sumer is a real puzzle. Why? Because there's no evidence for any small, gradual
cultural steps leading up to it. It just
appears suddenly. This is hard to
explain for evolutionary science. But it’s
exactly what we would expect to happen if there really was a Flood: that very soon after the Flood, mankind returned
to the type of civilization it had known before the Flood. The Bible mentions, for example, cities
before the Flood (Gen. 4:17), along with musical instruments (Gen. 4:21),
metalworking (Gen. 4:22), and agriculture (Gen. 4:2). These things had already been invented.
But
the Flood did not change the nature of man’s heart. Over time, as mankind multiplied, sin also
multiplied in the heart of man. The Laws
God had given to Noah were neglected and forgotten (Gen. 9:1-17). And eventually it came to a full scale
rebellion against God.
This
is the true subject of the story of the Tower of Babel (or Babylon, both names
are exactly the same in Hebrew): replacing
the original universal monotheism (the worship of one god) with a man-made
religion that rejected the kingship of God, and replaced him with other
gods. As it says in Gen. 11:4: "Come, let us build for ourselves a
city and a tower, and its top will be in the heavens..." The
word “top” here in Hebrew (rosh) can also be translated “ruler” or “leadership,”
referring to the false gods the people worshipped here.
In
ancient Sumer or Shinar, the tower mentioned here would not refer to an
ordinary tower of the kind we’re familiar with today, but to the temple towers they
used to worship false gods. These were step-pyramids
with big stairways up the front. In this
area they are known as ziggurats. They
were believed to be literally stairways to heaven on which the gods they
worshipped went up and down. This is
what the name “Babel” (Bab-illu) meant
in the local language: Bab means gate, illu means “of the gods.” This
was a place for people to meet with false gods, angels in rebellion against the
Almighty.
Some
older drawings show the tower of Babel with a circular design, spiraling
upwards. But this is because of modern
Muslim towers seen by Western explorers in the 19th century. No, the Tower of Babel was a huge stepped
pyramid, a symbolic holy mountain, an early ancestor of the many later
ziggurats built in the area.
These
were built exactly as the Bible describes it: “And
they said, each man to his neighbor, ‘Come, let us make bricks and burn them
thoroughly; and they used the brick as stone and tar as mortar’”
(Gen.
11:3). You can still see the tar today
in between the rows of bricks. Where did
they get the tar? From the many ancient
tar pits in the area. This is the same
area where so much of the gas and oil is pumped out of the ground that we use
in our cars and trucks today.
In
later ziggurats, at the time of the New Year’s festival, the king would be
symbolically married to a goddess (represented in the ceremony by a priestess). This marriage would take place with feasting
and merrymaking. Herodotus, an ancient
Greek historian, also tells us of priestesses being married to male gods in a
similar way. What was this? It was a reenactment of one of the same
horrible sins that led to the Flood of Noah:
angels interbreeding with humans (Gen. 6:2). In other words, these towers were used to
bring people into a spiritual relationship with demonic false gods!
This
idea of marriage to spirit beings is not entirely dead today. While we were living in the Philippines, we
read an article in the newspaper about several girls being married to the
spirit of a tree. And it’s a common
theme in horror stories and movies.
The
building of this tower temple was an act of rebellion that led people away from
a personal relationship with the Creator God.
It was also the beginning of powerful religious organizations controlled
by men based on the worship of false gods.
Jewish
and some Christian tradition connects the Tower of Babel with Nimrod (mentioned
in Gen. 10:8,9). He is the one, they say,
that “made all the people rebel against God.”
They say he was the first to make war on other peoples, and the first
man to rule the world. The Tower of
Babel, which they call the “house of Nimrod,” they say he built for the worship
of idols, and that he had all the world worship him as a god. They also say that Nimrod started magic,
astrology, and even human sacrifice.
Now
associating all these things with Nimrod has no historical or Biblical basis. The Bible only calls him a “great hunter” and
says that he ruled Babylon and surrounding cities in Shinar (probably after the
Tower of Babel, though the timing is not clear). But if we remove his name, this is a pretty
good list of all the terrible things that did come out of Babylon (or Babel). Both history and the Bible agree that Babel
is where the worship of idols began, and where the worship of idols was first used
for political purposes. Both modern and
ancient history trace astrology and certain kinds of magical divination back to
ancient Babylon. It has also been
connected with the origins of human sacrifice and ritual prostitution.
Because
of this evil Babylonian religious and political system, God judged the earth
again, this time by confusing the languages of the people—a curse that continues
right up until today (“Come, let us go
down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one
another's speech,” Gen. 11:7). And
because of that curse, wars and conflicts began to grow up between different
groups of people, which God used to separate the nations into their places all
over the world.
This
is a very different story about the origin of language than we hear from modern
science. If evolution were really true, and
we all come from monkeys, we would expect languages to start out very simple,
as a series of grunts, and get increasingly more complex over time. But in fact the opposite is true: the oldest known languages are the most
complex—including the languages of some tribal peoples—while modern languages
spoken in so-called “advanced” societies—like English or Chinese—have been greatly
simplified over the years. This is
exactly the opposite of what evolution predicts, and strong support for the
Bible.
The
wars brought about by the confusion of languages led to elaborate
fortifications that suddenly appear everywhere, huge walls around cities, that
had not been there before. This is what
archeologists call the Early Bronze Age.
This is when ziggurats, like the Tower of Babel, were first built all
over Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). But
this didn't just happen in Iraq: Step
pyramids made of stone or dirt can be found all over the world.
The
most famous pyramids are, of course, those found in Egypt, which unlike those
in Sumer are smooth on the outside. But
did you know that the oldest pyramids in Egypt are also step-pyramids (at
Saqqara and Maydum)? Other step-pyramids
can be found in Iran, in Sudan (ancient Cush), in Syria, in Turkey, in Greece, in
Spain (in the Canary Islands), on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, in France,
in England (Silbury Hill), in Norway, in Uzbekistan, in Ireland, on Mauritius (off
the east coast of Africa), in India, in Sri Lanka, in Cambodia, in Myanmar (Burma),
and in China where there are hundreds of large and small earth pyramids near
the ancient capital of Xian, including the pyramid built above the tomb of the
first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇 (259–210 BC), who was
buried with all those terracotta soldiers.
Other pyramids have been discovered in Inner Mongolia and in the Qinghai
province in western China, in Eastern China near Korea 將軍塚, in Korea, in Japan, in Indonesia, in
the Tonga Islands and New Guinea, in Tahiti,
in Western Samoa, and Micronesia.
But
the prize for the longest continuous use of pyramids goes to the New World—North
and South America—where they first appear in Peru in 2627 BC—at the same time
they first appear in Egypt. Here, in the
Americas, pyramid building continued through civilization after civilization
until the Spanish conquest in the 1600’s AD—a time span of more than 4,000
years! The largest pyramids in the world
are not in Egypt, but in Mexico. The
third largest pyramid in the world is in Illinois (in the United States)—a dirt
pyramid, which has recently been found to have a stone core. Hundreds of pyramids can be found all over
Mexico, Belize, El Salvador, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru.
The
stepped pyramids of South America are closely related to the ziggurats of Sumer
and Babylonia. Like them, they are step-pyramids
with a central staircase and a temple (shrine) at the top. Thousands of pyramids, made from dirt, can
also be found all up and down the Mississippi river in the United States, where
they are usually known as Indian mounds.
Most of the smaller mounds are simple burials, but many of the larger
ones are square-based dirt pyramids, which once held a temple on top, just like
the pyramids in Mesopotamia.
As
many as twenty of these dirt pyramids could be found in each of the larger
villages. A hundred and fifty years ago,
20,000 Indian mounds could be seen in Wisconsin alone. Now, because of land development, only about
2,000 remain. But hundreds more can
still be seen in Illinois, Alabama, Louisiana, Minnesota, Arkansas,
Mississippi, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, and Florida; and there's even a couple
in Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Utah, California, North Dakota, and South Dakota, with
one each in New Mexico, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Virgina, and Oklahoma.
One
of the remarkable things about these step-pyramids is that the earliest ones
outside of Sumer all appear at about the same time: 2700 BC, which is the same
date indicated in Genesis for the Tower of Babel (in the old Greek Septuagint version). The early step-pyramids of Egypt date to 2600
BC. The earliest pyramids in Greece are
dated 2700-2100 BC. The oldest pyramids
found in Uzbekistan are dated to 2700 BC.
The earliest pyramids in China’s Shensi province are dated to 2500 BC
and in Inner Mongolia to the same general time frame (~3,000 BC). Even the earliest step pyramid in England is
2660 BC, and the earliest in the New World, in Peru, is dated to 2627 BC. This is an amazing “coincidence”! What it means is that in a very short period
of time after God struck the Tower of Babel, maybe within one or two hundred
years, the Babylonian religious system had already been taken all over the
earth.
Why
did all these different cultures choose the same basic pyramid shape for their
temples? Why not some other shape? Why not five or six sided, or some other
number? Why a hill? Why not a depression in the ground? It’s hard to explain such great similarity
all over the world unless there is some historical link between them. That link is found in the Bible, in the story
of the Tower of Babel.
Something
else linking this “Babylonian world civilization” (or “pyramid religion,” if
you will) is a fascination with the stars and planets, in which the planets are
identified as gods. Archeologists have
found literally hundreds of examples of pyramids, as well as other ancient
buildings, structures, and tombs, built in alignment with the movements of the
sun, the moon, and the planets. Did you
know that the twelve Western zodiac signs, which divide the night sky into
regions of 30° each, were
invented by the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians? The 360°
circle, the 60 minute hour, the 24 hour day all come from ancient Babylon and
Sumer.
Their
interest in stars was not a purely scientific interest, though, but part of the
religion of astrology that is remarkably similar wherever it is found around
the world (except China). Did you know
that Western astrology, even today, is not based on how the signs actually
appear in the sky today, but on how they appeared more than 4,000 years ago, at
the time of the Tower of Babel? (Because
of the precession of the equinoxes, what was then in Aries is now in Pisces,
etc.) Here is another link with the Babylonian
world civilization (the pyramid religion) that was scattered all over the world
when God destroyed the Tower of Babel.
Another
similarity is the practice of human sacrifice around the world--in Europe, the
Americas, in Asia, and in Africa. It was
particularly bloody in the Americas, where at the top of their pyramids,
beating hearts were ripped out of living victims and offered to the sun
god. Human sacrifices are often found
buried in pyramids and other ancient religious structures. Often when a king died, his entire court was
killed and buried with him, which could be hundreds of people. In early Egypt (in Pre-Dynastic & First
Dynasty Egypt), servants and administrators were buried with the king or queen
by the hundreds. In the ancient African
kingdom of Kerma, with its dirt pyramids, as many as 500 people were buried
with a dead king.
In
Egypt (in the Old Kingdom period) someone
introduced the merciful idea of replacing living servants with little
model servants, shawabtis, that they
believed would come to life and serve the dead.
The same thing happened in China.
Originally, a dead leader would be buried with his wives, slaves, and
soldiers. But Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇, the first Chinese emperor, had a
huge terracotta army built instead. From
that time on the family and servants of an emperor were allowed to live (though
some say that human sacrifices were buried with Emperor Qin, too). In India, this kind of human sacrifice
continued up until the 19th century in the suttee ritual, in which a
wife was thrown on the funeral fire of her husband. Similar rituals were once observed by the
Thracians, Scythians, the Egyptians, the Scandinavians (where they were put in
burning ships), the Celts, the Chinese, and peoples of Oceania and Africa.
As
the Bible says, the fear of death brought people into slavery to death and to
Satan, who had the power of death (Heb. 2:14,15). By rejecting or simply forgetting about the
covenant between Noah and the Creator God, mankind lived in a world of fear and
uncertainty, in which the forces of nature were made into gods. This is just a tiny taste of the tremendously
bad impact Babylonian civilization had on the world with its spiritism and
demonism, its idolatry and slavery, its wars and oppression: all because of the human desire for sin that
leads people away from God and into horrible spiritual fear and slavery.
The
groups into which people were divided after the destruction of the Tower of
Babel are listed in Genesis 10, sometimes called the Table of Nations. These are the traditional seventy Gentile
nations of Jewish tradition. The
division of these nations into three large groups—the descendants of Shem, Ham,
and Japheth—matches what we know from history and historical linguistics (the
historical study of language), as well as from recent DNA studies.
The
descendants of Japheth are the Indo-European speaking ethnic groups—the
Caucasian peoples of the world. They
migrated into Europe, including Eastern Europe and the Caucasus area, Russia,
and north Asia. This includes Western
China where naturally preserved mummies of Caucasians have been found (the
Takla Makan mummies in Xinjiang province 塔克拉瑪幹木乃伊, some with blond
hair). These people are thought to be
mentioned in ancient Chinese writings.
Another wave of Japhethites migrated to India: these are the light-skinned Aryans that
brought the caste system to India.
The
descendants of Ham are the Hamitic peoples, which include the black Africans,
many South Asians, and native Australians.
There is strong evidence of an early Hamitic wave of migration across southern
Asia that extended as far as the Philippines (the Negritos), the South Sea
Islands and Australia, and possibly even as far as South America. Asia, therefore, is a complex combination of
Japhitic influence from the northwest, Hamitic influence from the south, and even
some Semitic influence from the southwest.
Egypt
was once an important Hamitic center.
But today, most modern Egyptians are no longer pure Hamites. They have been mixed with Japhitic blood from
the north during their many hundreds years of Greek domination, as well as Arab
Semitic blood from the east during their more than a thousand years of Arab
domination. This leads to the
interesting question as to whether the original Egyptians were black.
This
question was in the news a few years ago when measurements were taken of the
face that appears on the famous Egyptian sphinx at Giza. The dimensions of that face, as reported in a
front-page article in the New York Times, match that of the Negroid type, that is
of black Africans, more than the current Egyptian type. In other words, the sphinx has a black
African face, a Hamitic face. This has
not solved the question as to whether the early pharaohs were black or
not. But this was certainly a strong
possibility back in the time when there was much more Hamitic blood in Egypt
than there is today.
The
descendants of Shem are the Semitic peoples with their Semitic languages, which
include Hebrew and Arabic. They remained
mostly in the Middle East and East Africa.
However, there is evidence of Semitic migration into Asia, including the
famous Ten Lost Tribes, which may have affected populations as far away as
Japan.
Unfortunately,
in recent years the racial differences between different groups of people have
been used to create problems between them because of different theories about
racial superiority: that one race is
better than other races. Many of these ideas
came from the theory of evolution, which originally taught that the races had
evolved separately from each other, and that therefore some races were more
“evolved”—they were better—than others. This
idea has now been shown to be completely false.
So
how did the different races originate? The
amount of time for the different racial groups to appear does not require
millions of years, but only one generation.
This can be proved from a simple genetic grid that shows the influence of,
let’s say, the genes for skin color.
Starting with two parents with medium dark skin, AaBb, the chances are
one in 16 that their child would be AABB, the darkest skin color, and also one
in 16 that their child would be aabb, the lighest skin color. Only half of their kids would be the same
color as their parents, the others would be either lighter or darker.
Adam
and Eve must have had this kind of maximum genetic diversity. Otherwise, those varieties would not exist
today. This means that Adam and Eve
would themselves have had a medium color skin:
a brownish skin. But their
children would have had many different skin colors: from the darkest black to the lightest
white. This is just what happens in
India today. Within one family there can
be some with light, some with dark, and some with medium colored skin. Racial differences do not show evidence of
evolution, but rather of the amazing variety that God put within all created
things. Today, many groups have lost
this genetic diversity, which is why all the children in those groups are
similar. But when different races
intermarry with each other, some of this original diversity is restored (like
in India).
So
what have we learned? The Tower of
Babel, together with the story of the Flood, helps us understand the problem
with the human race. It explains why,
even though God is a good God and made a wonderful world for us, we have so
many problems. The answer is
simple: sin. As it says in Gen. 8:21, "For the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth." Even a worldwide flood did not solve the
problem, nor did scattering mankind all over the earth.
But
God has a solution. And what is that
solution? Personal faith in the Creator
God. This is the solution that God introduced
to the world through a simple shepherd in the Middle East by the name of Abraham. In spite of all the lawlessness and false
religion of his generation, Abraham believed in God. And
through him and his descendants, God raised up Israel to be a nation of
priests, holy to God, a testimony to the world of the true God until
today. And then through Israel, God
raised up the Messiah, who has made a relationship with the true God available
to all the peoples of the earth. On what
basis? On the basis of faith, just like
in Abraham’s day. But that doesn’t mean
there’s no evidence for what we believe.
There’s plenty of evidence for the truth of the Bible. But what you do with that evidence is the
decision that every person faces in their life.
What about you? Will you decide
for the true and living God? Will you
put your faith, your trust, in him, or in the ways of the world? Let’s pray.
