Archaeology and the Bible
The Problem of Peleg
According to Genesis 10:25, Peleg was given his name "because in his days was the earth divided". According to the genealogy in Genesis 11, Peleg was born 101 years after the Flood. These two facts are a source of great difficulty to the Bible chronologist.
The first problem is to decide what is meant by "the earth divided". Some have understood the phrase to refer to a physical dividing, perhaps some huge earth movement such as the opening of the Great Rift Valley which divides Asia from Africa. Although we might expect that the effects of such a tectonic upheaval as the Flood would continue for some time after the event, something as huge as the opening of the Rift Valley, accompanied as it must have been by tremendous earthquakes and volcanic activity, would surely have left its marks in the archaeological record and the fact is that there are no such signs.
A more plausible suggestion is that the "dividing" refers to the division into language groups which occurred at the time of the Tower of Babel, but if so, we come up against the problem of population size. Let me illustrate this by doing some highly speculative calculations.
Let us suppose that immediately after the Flood Shem and his wife had a baby and that they continued to have babies, one every second year, thereafter. (This is not an unreasonable assumption: breast feeding has a naturally contraceptive effect and one baby every two years is feasible.) We will also assume that none of the babies died and that none of them were twins, two assumptions that cancel each other out, for the possibility of twins is balanced by the near certainty that at least some of the babies died in infancy. Finally, we will assume that these births took a regular pattern of boy-girl-boy-girl.
In the period which we are considering - from the Flood to the birth of Peleg - Shem and his wife would have had 50 children, 25 boys and 25 girls. We will assume that each boy married his next youngest sister, so we have 25 breeding pairs, whom we will call couples A, B, C and so on down to Y.
According to the data in Genesis 11, we cannot really expect that these couples will have married and started to produce their own children much before the age of 30, so let's work with that. At age 30 couple A have their first baby and continue to produce at the rate of one every two years for the next 71 years until the birth of Peleg. That means that during this period they will have 35 children. The male half of couple B is four years younger than his older brother, so he doesn't attain the magical age of 30 until 34 years after the Flood. Couple B therefore have four years less time in which to breed and so produce two fewer children - 33 children.
Couple C also produce two fewer children - 31 - and couple D only have 29 before the birth of Peleg. Adding all these numbers together we arrive at the figure of 324 children for Shem's children by the time Peleg is born.
Of course these children will reach the magic age of child-bearing 60 years after the Flood, so Shem's grand-children - we'll call them couples A1, B1, C1 and so on - start to give birth when there are only 41 years left until Peleg. That means that couple A1 will have 20 children, B1 will have 18, and so on. This generation, then, will produce 110 children by the time of Peleg's birth.
The final generation start to give birth 90 years after the Flood and with only 11 years to go manage to produce a mere 9 children before the birth of Peleg.
Adding all these figures together we reach a total of 493 as the number of Shem's descendants by the time of Peleg's birth. This seems an extremely small number to be responsible for so ambitious a project as the Tower of Babel!
Of course we could tweak these figures: we could assume a birth every year, we could assume that there was only one male to every two or three females and that every man had more than one wife, we could assume that all three of Noah's sons (and their descendants) were present for the Tower of Babel project, but however we manipulate the figures, we have difficulty in rising above 3,000-5,000 as the total population of Earth by the time of Peleg.
The real problem comes, however, when we look at the archaeological evidence. Assuming for the moment that the Bible chronology is exact, we have Creation around 4,000 BC with the Flood 1500 years after that - 2,500 BC. This is, of course, well after the first pyramids were built! Let us assume that the chronology of Egypt is in error by 600 years: that means that events given the date of 3,100 BC by conventional chronology actually took place in 2,500 BC. This removes the problem of the pyramids surviving the Flood but it introduces another problem.
According to the records we have, around 3,000 BC (in conventional chronology, 2,400 BC in a putative revised chronology) we have the first dawnings of civilisation in Egypt - the First Dynasty - which means that by then Egypt had a substantial population. At the same time - 3,000 BC - we have the first large-scale buildings and civilisation in Mesopotamia, which also implies a substantial population. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that there was a large civilisation in India around 3,000 BC, and China also has records going back to around this same figure of 3,000 BC. At the other end of the world, the earliest construction at Stonehenge in Britain has been dated to 3,000 BC (though a more plausible date is 2,500 BC).
This means that 100 years after the Flood - the time of Peleg - there were sustantial populations all across the ancient world, from Britain in the west to China in the east, populations large enough to warrant the building of big cities, large enough to be able to spare the work-force for such building projects as Stonehenge or the First Dynasty temples and tombs of Egypt.
Clearly there is something wrong here, for the archaeological evidence also points to a long period of pre-history when Neolithic cities were built and cultures such as the Naqada in Egypt flourished. Although we might be sceptical about the length of time attributed to these pre-historic cultures, it would be difficult to telescope them into a mere 100 years and impossible to find the people for them if we restrict ourselves to Noah and his descendants.
There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to conclude that Noah's Flood did not cover the whole earth but was restricted to some smaller geographic area, such as the Mesopotamian plains. It must be admitted, however, that the language used by the Bible to describe the Flood does not support such a conclusion. It seems clear that the author intended us to understand that the Flood covered the entire globe and wiped out all human life apart from Noah and his family.
The second is to conclude that the Biblical genealogies are accurate but not exhaustive. This is the explanation I favour - and here is why.
In Matthew chapter 1 we are given the genealogy of Christ, divided into three periods: Abraham to David, David to the Exile, the Exile to Christ. Verse 17 tells us that there were fourteen generations spanning each of those periods, a total of 42 generations. All very neat and tidy except for the inconvenient fact that the first period runs from 1800 BC to 1000 BC, the second from 1000 BC to 600 BC, the third from 600 BC to 0 BC. This means that one set of 14 generations covers 800 years, the second set covers 400 years and the third set covers 600 years. Statistically this is highly unlikely; someone who lives a long time in one generation is counterbalanced by someone whose life is cut unusually short in another generation.
It seems obvious that some names have been omitted from the list and that "begat" refers to grandsons or great-grandsons instead of sons. The repeated "14 generations" is not intended as a statement of absolute fact but as a convenient and clever mnemonic device to make it easy to remember a person's genealogy.
The fact that there are ten generations from Adam to the Flood and another ten from the Flood to Abraham points to the possibility that again we have a mnemonic rather than an exhaustive list. I conclude, therefore, that the period from Noah to Abraham was greater than the figures given in Genesis 11 indicate. At the same time, I do not subscribe to the idea that those figures are without value and that human history can be traced back hundreds of thousands of years.
Of course I realise that this conclusion satisfies neither the strict Biblical literalist, who would insist on Creation around 3,900 BC, nor the modern historian, who claims that Jericho was founded around 7,000 BC and some of the Neolithic cities several thousand years earlier. What is worse, there is no secure basis for my tentative suggestion that the world is around 10,000 years old - I am contradicted by both scientific dating and by Biblical dating! The reader is invited to consider the evidence and decide for himself.
sceptical The prehistoric remains that have been found are always assumed to pre-date the civilised historic period, simply because the people used primitive stone tools. That is not a safe assumption. After all, look at Australia, where primitive people using stone tools can be found almost within sight of modern cities with skyscrapers and electric lights!
A more compelling argument comes from carbon-14 dating, which is a subject that deserves its own chapter. Return
the possibility Some argue that the possibility of names being omitted is irrelevant. If the Bible says that Adam was 130 years old when he begat Seth then it doesn't matter whether Seth was his son or his grandson or even his great-grandson, the point is that Adam was 130 years old when this birth happened. I cannot argue with the reasonableness of such an assumption; I merely point out that it is an assumption and we cannot prove that that is how the genealogist would have viewed things. Return
10,000 years old As I note elsewhere, there is no Biblical support for the date 10,000 BC. I have picked it solely because it is the commonly accepted date for the end of the most recent Ice Age (and because it is a nice round number). I want to stress, however, that it is purely my personal "guesstimate" and the actual age may be much younger or much older. Those who wish to adhere to a younger date, however, have to produce a coherent and reasonable explanation for the prehistoric population of the world and if that can be done, I would be delighted to hear it! Return
