2090~1740 Adam thru Noah
© Charles Chandler
Synopses Tanakh commentary 3761 Writing was invented by the Sumerians, making this the beginning of time-keeping, which on the calendar reform by Hammurabi in the became the beginning of time in the Jewish calendar. People coming from the East settled in Babylonia, meaning that they came from India, or perhaps Bactria. They all spoke the same language, which could be a reference to the spread of Indo-Aryan in . Then God confused the language, and dispersed the people, which would be the dispersion of the Babylonians after the fall of the 1st Dynasty. Genealogy of Adam through Noah. When Enoch walked with God, it would have been with Amenemhat III in . The sons of Noah repopulated the Earth, including such recognizable names as Cush, Egypt, Elam, Canaan, Havilah, Sheba, Caphtor (Crete), and Aram, as well as all of the ancient tribes mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. Lot went on to become the ancestor of the Moabites and the Ammonites by his daughters. (?) Events 2090 In the beginning, God created man & woman in his own image, in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. These passages are attributed to the Priestly source. 2090 The Jahwist version of creation is different — God created Heaven and Earth in a day. Then He created man from the dust of the Earth. Next He created the Garden of Eden, and then He created woman from the rib of man. But then Adam & Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and God banished them from Eden. This would have been the Bactrian version, since it mentions the Garden of Eden. From a variety of lines of reasoning, Adam's birth in Bactria can be dated to . 2060 Cain & Abel were born, who would grow up to be a farmer and a shepherd (respectively), perhaps as an allegory for the distinction between farmers & shepherds. Cain killed Abel, and was banished to Nod, east of Eden, where he started a family. 2030 Adam & Eve had another son named Seth, who had a son named Enosh. Around that time, they began to call on the name of the Lord, which would be an echo of the deification of Mentuhotep II in . 1750 The Cities of the Plain revolted against Elamite rule. Chedorlaomer sacked Sodom, and took Nimrod (not Lot) captive. (Lot's grandmother was from Ur, and since his father was born there, and died there, his mother was likely from there also. So Lot was a Babylonian. All of those details suit Nimrod. So the Lot in Genesis 13, who was Abraham's nephew, and who settled Moab while Abraham settled Judea, was in generation #21, but Chedorlaomer's captive would have been in generation #12 or #13, the most notable of whom being Nimrod (#13), Ham's successor.) 1750 Shem recovered Nimrod and all of the loot taken from Sodom. 1750 The pharaoh sent men to destroy them, but Shem (not Abraham) talked him out of it. This is hard to date, and simply goes somewhere before the airburst. 1740 A meteoric airburst over the north end of the Dead Sea destroyed Sodom & Gomorrah, with fire raining down from the sky (i.e., the meteor shower), and with a wave of biblical proportions that flooded the coastal towns & farms. Though this is presented as the history of Abraham, this actually occurred on Shem's watch, and might have been an important factor in legitimizing the star gazers in Babylon, whose ruler was Ham the Amorite, Shem's brother. The Nephilim roamed the Earth. This might be simply the echo of a common myth, that somewhere in the distant past, there had been people who were much bigger, based on the finding of bones of animals that had since gone extinct, such as dinosaurs & wooly mammoths. (See Adrienne Mayor: The First Fossil Hunters.) There also seems to be a common myth that the gods had visited the Earth, and that they left children before returning to the heavens. The hypothesized Younger Dryas meteoric impact (), could have been personified into a story of gods visiting the Earth, punishing the wicked, and leaving fragments (i.e., children) behind before returning to their homes in the night sky. If so, this story could have been inserted in Genesis just before the Flood, due to the common meteoric theme. Ancient lore has to include a Flood myth. There is no record of a catastropic flood in , but the substance of his story could have actually come from just about anywhere, ancient civilizations being centered on rivers, and rivers making a habit of flooding. Most people think that it would have been the Tigris and/or the Euphrates flooding, or the Nile, or maybe the flooding of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea in . Since Noah's sons appear in Vedic lore, another possible location is along the Indus River. The grand scale of the flood may have come from much older lore — people had found sea shells in the mountains, and had concluded that the entire Earth had to have been covered with water for that to happen, which they attributed to a global flood.
