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Returning to Paradise

Amaic

PARADISE MISSED

 

A Response to Brett Palmer’s “Another Reply to

Damien Mackey Regarding My Article,

‘The Loss of Paradise’.”

 

http://bibleskeptic.googlepages.com/paradise3

 

Brett Palmer [BP] has never explained to me how he, a self-proclaimed skeptic, could be so certain, philosophically speaking, about matters pertaining to God and his work, the Bible – whether or not it is, in BP’s words, “the incorruptible Word of God” – God’s work, or even modern science, palaeography, ‘Eden is a fable and a fiction’, he claims, and modern dating methods.

The skeptic is well summed up by G.K. Chesterton as follows:

The Skeptic

• “It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism.” (ILN 5-4-07)
• “Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.” (The Common Man)
• “It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.” (ILN 11-30-12)
• “Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.” (ILN 2-6-09)
• “No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.” (George Bernard Shaw)
• “The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.” (Alarms and Discursions)
• “It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.” (Heretics)
• “Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended.” (Eugenics and Other Evils)

And F. H. Bradley (as quoted by G. Ardley at front of Aquinas and Kant):

“The straightening of the crooked rests on the knowledge of the straight, and the exercise of criticism requires a canon”.

 

For an excellent account of ‘philosophical scruples, their cause and cure’, one should read Gavin Ardley’s classic, Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), Ch. VII. A sample of this can be found at our philosophy and science site: http://brightmorningstar.blog.com

 

True to Chesterton’s assertion, that: “Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough,” BP never seems to come up with any scenario of his own, but expends all his mental energies in ‘breaking up’, ‘in barbarian fashion’, the theses of other people. BP, however, gives the impression that he firmly believes himself to be certain in regard to the received skeptical opinion concerning God and Creation, the Bible, Paradise, and especially the ‘truth’ of modern science; despite the fact that one system of dogmatic scientific ‘belief’ can eventually be replaced by another one, even in the space of a lifetime. Thus it is assuredly not something to which one ought to give anything like one’s complete trust. One supposedly unassailable scientific model gets thrown out, only to be replaced by another more pragmatically advantageous one. Or, as Gavin Ardley would have it (in his Aquinas and Kant), one ‘Procrustean bed’ is replaced by another ‘Procrustean bed’.

 

BP seems to accept with complete faith scientific dating methods, and the conclusions reached by the employment of these; even though these conclusions can fluctuate in time by tens or hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions, of years. A true science must be able to account for all of the major data. Thus one cannot honestly hold to the truth of the received geological succession, for instance, when there are examples of one rock formation layer situated above another that has been a priori estimated as being several million years younger than the former. Or when a tree is found growing through as many as three sedimentary layers (hence ‘polystrate’), each layer dated a million or more years differently from the other. Along similar lines, I have just received an e-mail with this interesting piece from geologist, Guy Berthault:     

 

A team of Russian sedimentologists directed by Alexander Lalomov (Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ore Deposits) applied paleohydraulic analyses to geological formations in Russia (examples are the Crimean Peninsular and the North-West Russian Platform). In the case of the Platform it is shown that the time taken for the sediments to deposit would have been no more that 0.01% of that ascribed to them by the geological time-scale. This demonstrated the lesson taught by geology historian Gabriel Gohau that “time is measured by the time taken for sediments to deposit, a fact upon which everybody is more or less agreed, and not by orogenesis of biological revolutions.” Evolution cannot, therefore, occur in such a short time.

 

BP’s vast ‘Eocene’ and ‘Pliocene’ estimates may perhaps need to be seriously reconsidered.

 

Identification of the Four Rivers of Genesis 2

 

It seems that most commentators today (e.g. Rohl, Kitchen, Zarins, Sauer, Johnson, Hamblin) accept that the rivers ‘Hiddekel’ and ‘Perath’ of the Eden geography (Genesis 2:10-14) are, respectively, the Mesopotamian rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. As do I.

The question is, therefore, did these two rivers enframe an Eden to the east of them, or to the west?

Whereas most, I think, would opt for the east, I myself would go the other way: west. I have taken as my basic template – though it may be in need of some re-designing – Professor A. Yahuda’s view that the other two rivers, ‘Pishon’ and ‘Gihon’, lay to the west. I fully accept Yahuda’s view (as expressed in The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian) that the Gihon is the Nubian Nile (BP wrongly says that I “have abandoned” my original argument, and now favour “a different identification of the Gihon …”), and that the land of “Kush” (Cush) that Genesis says the Gihon encompasses is Ethiopia. My only divergence from Yahuda as to the identification of the four rivers, now, is that I would probably take the recently-discovered ‘fossil river’ in Saudi Arabia (to which BP refers) as originally the Pishon of the gold-bearing region (possibly though anciently running also through the Egyptian gold region of “Koptos, Edfu and Ombos”, as referred to by Yahuda, thereby tying up these two regions).

This is simply a refinement of the original Yahuda-based template. Such a move is quite justified. BP does the same in his own critiques. So I am not, as he puts it, ‘gyrating’.

 

Jesus ben Sirach (C2nd BC) wrote, in the Book of Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach), of the Pishon and Gihon as rivers still flowing abundantly and being seasonal in his own day, along with the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Nile and Jordan (the latter two probably being Flood-and-earthquake, or catastrophe-effect additions to the original rivers of the region).

 

Sirach 24:25-27: “This is what makes wisdom brim like the Pishon, like the Tigris in the season of fruit, what makes understanding brim over like the Euphrates, like the Jordan at harvest time; and makes discipline flow like the Nile, like the Gihon at the time of vintage”.

 

Now, if the Pishon were indeed that ‘fossil river’ of Saudi Arabia, which BP – a follower of Kenneth Kitchen, who does accept this – seems to be suggesting, then, since this original river is thought to have dried up between 3500-2000 BC, Kitchen’s “in very far antiquity”, this would starkly show up again the inaccuracy of fossil dating methods. For we have evidence from Sirach’s ancient text (dated to the c. C2nd BC) that the Pishon was a flowing river at least at that late BC date – roughly 200 BC as opposed to 2000 BC (and that’s taking only the younger age estimate). Nor do we know how long it was after Sirach’s day that the river actually dried up.

 

BP, who has accused me of hitching my wagon, now to Yahuda, now to Gaines Johnson, might do well for his own part not to follow Kenneth Kitchen in complete blind faith. Dr. Kitchen has managed to make a total mess of the later Egyptian chronology. Noted Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner’s fears that Egypt’s so-called Third Intermediate Period (dynasties 21-25) may never be properly resolved certainly becomes prophetic at least in light of Kitchen’s tortuous re-assembling of these foreign dynasties (supposedly his great contribution to Egyptology). I know because I have tried to disentangle the entire mess in a recent post-graduate thesis. Kitchen had the audacity to dismiss David Rohl’s TV series/book, A Test of Time as “a waste of time”. Very funny. But the joke is actually on Kitchen. For Rohl’s effort to revise the conventional mishmash – flawed though it may be – is ‘light years’ closer to a real chronology of Egypt than is Kitchen’s Sothic-based version.

(For Sothic, see e.g. http://kinghezekiahofjudah.blogspot.com).

Kitchen (On the Reliabilityof the Old Testament – God help us!) has led BP right up the wrong Garden (Paradise) path by his trying to identify “Kush” as “Kashshu”, or the land of the Kassites. Kitchen, the Egyptologist, does not even know that “Kush” stands for Ethiopia, just to the south of Egypt! “Kashshu” land, or the Kassites is/are never once mentioned in the Bible, at least under that name.

Reland in 1706 had tried to identify “Kush” with the Kossaeans, apparently in Armenia. Keep guessing!

 

The traditional editor/compiler of the ancient Genesis text, namely Moses, (see http://www.specialtyinterests.net/Tracing_the_hand_of_moses_in_genesis.html), who had lived in Egypt and had campaigned in Ethiopia – had even married an Ethiopian, or ‘Kushite’, according to Numbers 12:1 (mentioned soon after the Exodus) – would mean, by “Kush”, only Ethiopia.

 

BP follows the out-dated, pre-archaeological view that early history could have been handed down only by “oral tradition”. The Genesis text however, as argued in my “Tracing the Hand of Moses in Genesis” (above), has all the earmarks of being a connected series of ancient patriarchal ‘written histories’, complete with their titles, signatures, dates, and catch-lines linking one tablet to another. Written documents are what was handed down from one Adam-ic and Hebrew generation to another.

King Ashurbanipal of Assyria (my ‘king of Nineveh’ of the Book of Jonah, see http://bookofjonah.blog.com) boasted of having read a tablet dating to before the Flood. And P.J. Wiseman himself testified to having perused such a tablet when present at excavations in Mesopotamia (mentioned in Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis).

 

BP does think that the “Fertile Crescent” (which I have argued was basically the ancient world of Adam to Noah), i.e. Egypt, to Levant, to Turkey to Persian Gulf, may have been once “lush and fruitful”, just as Paradise is described as having been. “Centuries of farming, grazing and deforestation has brought the region to what it is today”, he rightly says.

 

The Location of Paradise

 

There are several biblical texts from which Professor Yahuda quoted that liken Egypt to Paradise in its lush-ness; though he definitely did not try to locate Paradise in Egypt. The Old Testament and the New Testament are replete with references to Israel (and sometimes Lebanon) as Eden. I have alluded to these in my original article. Mount Zion (Jerusalem) is called in Psalm 47:2 “true pole of the earth”. And this tradition that Jerusalem was the “centre of the earth” persisted at least until the mediaeval Crusades. R. North, writing in The Jerome Biblical Commentary (73:22), considers the Promised Land of Canaan to have been a geographical ‘centre’, “the hub”,  of the “Fertile Crescent’ (emphasis added):

 

“Canaan, the promised land, was small and off to the SW corner of the Fertile Crescent. Yet it was in a strategic midposition between the rival merchant states: Arabia to the S, Egypt to the SW, Hittites to the N, Babylon to the E. Hence, if the lines of traffic and population density are set in proper perspective, Canaan may be considered the “hub” of the whole Fertile Crescent. Indeed it was the hub of the whole universe known from Abraham’s day down to Alexander the Great.

 

The ancient Egyptians called Lebanon (a land of fine timber and myrrh spices), “Punt”, and also ta netjer, “God’s Land”.

Jesus Christ himself held the pharisaïcal inhabitants of Jerusalem responsible for the blood of martyrs from Abel to Zechariah (Luke 11:51); a bit unfair had Abel been slain nowhere near the site of Jerusalem.

 

BP has logically argued that one cannot accept a global, all-effacing Flood, but still purport to search for the location of the Garden of Eden, as some ‘Creationists’ are currently doing. In fact it was the Genesis account of the geography of Eden and its rivers that served (along with other factors, such as Mesopotamian archaeology) to convince me that the Noachic Flood could not have been global in our terms. BP though wrongly states that the Flood is supposed to have covered the entire world as we know it. St. Peter, on the other hand, specifically tells us that “the world that then was” was destroyed by the Flood (2 Peter 3:6). Now, what was the only world that scripturally preceded the Flood? It was the world of the four rivers of Genesis 2. Basically, the “Fertile Crescent”. Even as late as the New Testament the ‘world’, ‘earth’ ‘ends of the earth’, ‘all under heaven’, were still being conceived in these limited terms. There are many examples of this, two classic cases being Acts 2 in which “every nation under heaven” (v. 5) is soon geographically specified (vv. 7-11) as from Persia to Rome (EW), Phrygia to Egypt (NS); and the “Queen of the South” (Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31), identified as Hatshepsut, ruler of Egypt and Ethiopia (see my “House of David”: http://www.specialtyinterests.net/david_abishag.html) – Josephus also tells of this queen’s having been a ruler of ‘Egypt and Ethiopia’ – who came from “the ends of the earth” to hear the wisdom of Solomon. 

All life in that relatively small Noachic world, what North calls “the whole universe” of the time, was extinguished by the catastrophic Flood, except for those on board the Ark, whose bitumen-covered remnants were still being collected from (Mount) Judi Dagh in neo–Assyrian times (e.g. by king Sennacherib, 700 BC). (See http://genesisflood.blog.com).

 

Zoning In on Eden Ground Zero

 

Professor Yahuda translated the Hebrew of Genesis 2:10 literally and accurately, when he rendered it: “And a river went out of the place of pleasure [i.e. Eden] to water paradise [i.e. the Garden], which [river] from thence is divided into four heads”. That small piece was the original Adam-ic text, with the subsequent naming and description of the four rivers (vv. 11-14) “having the character of a gloss”, according to Yahuda. It was most likely therefore a much later editorial addition, added by the Genesis compiler (editor), Moses, I suggest.

Yahuda explains how the Paradise river gave rise to the four named rivers:

 

The narrator who conceived the whole earth … with the exception of the oasis … as a wilderness, so visualized the disappearance of the stream, that, on reaching the sandy soil beyond the oasis, it gradually vanished, being swallowed up by the earth, but that it continued its course underground. Thereby the conception of the common origin in this one stream of the four rivers, widely separated from one another, was rendered possible …. 

 

And it is in this very fashion that the Egyptians conceived of the Nile’s origins, he tells:

 

… This interpretation, based on purely philological grounds, is illustrated in the most startling fashion by the conceptions which the Egyptians had of the origin of the Nile in the nether world, and its sources on the earth’s surface. According to these, it had is origin in a river (itrw) in heaven or the nether world, where it took it source in the twelfth gate of the beyond (Totb. chap. 146). Thence, in a mysterious way, it reached the earth, and through two spring-holes …below the first cataract between Elephantine and the Island of Philae it came out of the earth to flow through Egypt ….

 

This unusual scenario may serve to explain how it is said, at the beginning of the Flood, that “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth” (Genesis 7:11). The breaking up presumably of the subterranean riverine system would make it most difficult for us today to trace exactly the original plan of this system. Moreover, later, there was a further major cataclysm in the region that caused the end of Pentapolis, for what had originally been the fertile “Valley of Siddim”, in Abram’s day just before the destruction of Pentapolis, sank, so to speak, necessitating that an editor (Moses?) had to re-identify this region now as “the Dead Sea” (14:3). Thus: “… in the Valley of Siddim (that is, the Dead Sea)”, so that later generations could know to just which region of Palestine the original Abram-ic account was referring.

 

What I did gain from BP’s first critique – reiterated again in his second effort – was that I really needed to show how the un-named river that flowed through Eden could have been the source of these other four (named) rivers. It is for this reason that I appreciated Johnson’s article, which showed, using satellite technology, how these rivers could all possibly connect up (after due allowance for land cataclysmic upheaval) in either Lebanon or Israel.

The tapestry may not yet be complete, but a basic pattern has now begun to emerge upon it.

 

 

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