History Hound Travels

It won’t take us much longer to get through with Adam and His Kin, so if you are reading along with me (or want to start) it’s time to shop for our next book. I’ll be reading and talking about The Book of God by Walter Wangerin, Jr. next.

Please understand that when I pick a book for this site, I am not recommending it for it’s theology, but for it’s value in learning history. I won’t steer you in the direction of anything that is way off base theologically, and I will point out any problems I see as we go along, but the merit is in the historocity. Basically, in matters of faith consult the Bible. For more detailed study of history and culture than the Bible provides, choose an author who loves his/her subject.

I’ll be reading The Lives of Rachel by Joel Gross to go along with this part of our study, but will probably not discuss it in depth.

Technorati Tags: Adam and His Kin, The Book of God, Walter Wangerin, Jr, The Lives of Rachel, Joel Gross

These chapters cover life after the Fall up until the Flood. Vivid pictures are painted of the lives of the patriarchs. For our purposes, I just want to point out some of the time spans. I know for myself, when I read the Bible chronology, I don’t tend to think in sweeping segments of time. Because it is crammed in to so small a space, my mind compresses the time involved. I will not go through the entire geneology, but just highlight a few of the better known patriarchs for you.

We started with the premise of roughly 106 lifetimes between Adam’s creation and now. I’ve already pointed out that Adam had lived almost 2 lifetimes before his third child, Seth, was born. Although Adam and Eve had other children, we only know 3 by name: Cain, Abel and Seth. Cain murdered Abel, and moved away from the area of the Garden of Eden. Seth was born when Adam was 130 years old.

When Adam was 687 and Seth was 557, Methuselah was born. Methuselah was the son of Enoch, who “walked with God and was no more, for God took him.” When Methuselah was 369 years old, his grand-son Noah was born. Methuselah died at 969 years of age, just before the flood. So we can do some simple math and find that the flood occurred approximately 1656 years after creation.

In lifetimes: about 22. To put a little perspective on the length of patriarchal life spans, only 10 generations were recorded, inclusive of Adam and Noah from creation to flood, and Adam was still living when Noah’s father was born. Adam lived 930 years, almost an eon, almost 12.5 lifetimes.

We’ll stop here for now. I’ll be back on Wednesday, hopefully before midnight.

Technorati Tags: Flood, patriarchs, Bible, Adam, Cain, Abel, Seth, Methuselah, Enoch, Noah

The second chapter covers life in the garden before and immediately after the Fall. The themes are so heavily spiritual, that I did consider discussing them on Midlife Musings, but I have decided against that, mainly for two reasons:
1) you really can’t study this time period without investigating a few spiritual issues. Life is connected, after all.
2) the same issues that caused problems then continue to cause them today.

So, the earth has been created, and God has placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He visits them there. It is worth noting that God met face to face with these two people, communing with them and answering their questions. It is from Adam, in fact, that we get our earliest history. Surely one of the things he asked was “where did I come from?” It’s a question we still ask and struggle with today.

While Adam and Eve are enjoying God and the Garden, pride is entering the picture in Heaven, wrapped in the heart of the angel, Lucifer. This pride is what I meant when I said the same issues cause us problems today. Look at WWII, caused by the pride of one race of people thinking they were better than another. Look at Darfur, and South Africa today: same issue.

Lucifer became prideful and wanted to be on a level with God, and he convinced some of the angels to join him. They were ultimately defeated, and tossed out of heaven. Lucifer brought his disgruntlement down to mankind, and now here we are today, still full of trouble originally caused by pride.

The next thing worth noting from a purely historical view is that Adam was not deceived. He knew exactly what he was doing, and the consequences, when he took the fruit from Eve. He chose to enter into her punishment with her, rather than endure life alone. This same desire for acceptance and unity also plays a big role in historical events. Look at the atrocities above: in large part they occurred/are occurring because the people near the event choose to keep silent in order to enjoy acceptance.

The remainder of the chapter brings out themes of legalism and love, best handled on the blog I mentioned before.

Technorati Tags: God, Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden, pride, Lucifer, Darfur, South Africa

I know I said we would be back to Adam and His Kin today, but I want to discuss this instead, just to give a little perspective. I also have to admit that I haven’t done my own homework. How embarrassing is that? Rather than rush through it to throw something up, I’ll hold off until Friday to give you a better effort.

A friend of mine announced to me the other day that she found history boring, and saw no purpose in studying it. After I collected my wits from hearing this heresy, I told her to ditch the traditional history books. Sure enough, that’s what she was using to study history! She was stuck in all those dates. I told her to get some good biographies and start there, and then I listed several reasons why the study of history is important.

Yesterday leads to today. It is indeed true that there is nothing new under the sun. The world we live in today is a product of what happened before, and if we understand what happened before it is easy to trace those causal relationships. If we can trace the causal relationships we stand a chance of affecting the future in some ways. In other areas, we can accept that things cannot be changed, and that efforts in that direction will only lead to frustration and failure.

One such example of the latter is the middle east. For decades people have been trying to find a way to establish peace in the middle east. That will not happen. The middle east has been a land in turmoil since it’s beginnings and will continue to be so until the end of the world. The best we can hope for there is containment, and not cessation of violence. Why? It goes back to names you will recognize: Isaac and Ishmael.

My mother and I were discussing this site over lunch today, and she found my theory of counting history by lifetimes intriguing, and it occurred to me that I might take that a little bit further, while we are reading Adam and His Kin.

I’ve explained that I adhere to the young earth theory, and that will give us about 6,000 years of BC history, and of course about 2000 of AD history, rounding off a bit. That’s about 8,000 years. Given an average lifespan of 75 years, that’s just 106 lifetimes. Now I know that the lifespan has not always been 75 years, and so do you. But Biblical life spans were much longer, and that helps to balance the much shorter life spans during the middle ages.

My point with that is this: 8000 years ago can be hard to grapple with, mentally. 106 lifetimes is much easier to get a handle on, and shows that the course of human history is not as long as we sometimes think. And consider this: Adam had lived almost two of those lifetimes before his first child was born. We’ll get more into this later, but if you find it helpful, I’ll try to add in how many lifetimes ago certain things happened as we study.

I’ll be back here on Wednesday, and we’ll continue with Adam and his Kin

Technorati Tags: Adam and His Kin, young earth theory, history, Adam