In The Beginning (Part Three)

It is such a privilege to be able to read the beautiful Word of God. It is true and righteous altogether. GodSaidManSaid is proudly committed to the Scriptures, without apology. On this website, we have outlined God’s instructions concerning proof, in Deuteronomy 19:15-19. Two or more credible witnesses are required. One visitor to this website challenged us to produce our firsthand witnesses to God actually creating the heaven and the earth. He felt confident that we couldn’t produce witnesses, yet witnesses are innumerable. Is our challenger looking for firsthand accounts? How about Jehovah, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, the host of heaven, the world’s most reliable history book, as well as a plethora of witnesses left in the earth? This is part three in four-part series titled “In The Beginning.”

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Has God left a record in the earth of His handiwork? GodSaidManSaid, which publishes a new feature article every Thursday evening, God willing, now offers over 300 subject articles confirming the credibility of the Word of God. In these features is an abundance of information dealing with the initial creation. Some of this information has been tapped for this four-part series with new information added. Yes, God did, and yes, there is a record.

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

MAN SAID: We just popped out of nothing and here we are. Man also believes Buddha’s statement, “No origin can be perceived.”

Now THE RECORD. A quick review of “In The Beginning (Parts One and Two)” follows:

1. The Bible said there was light on Earth before the sun was created. Science now theorizes that that was exactly the case.

2. The Scripture’s genealogical and chronological records declare the earth to be just over 6,000 years old. Science built on fact and not uniformitarian assumptions says yes to a young Earth.

3. God’s Word shows a record of a water canopy over the earth in the days before Noah, which produced dramatic benefits for all the earth, and evidence of it is abundant.

4. The Bible teaches in Genesis 1 that prior to sin and death, all the world’s creatures were vegetarian. The very ancient fossil of a vegetarian crocodile has raised a lot of eyebrows.

5. Man is simply recycled mud. God literally created us out of dirt and the record says yes. Plus, every child knows that when you die, you turn back to dust.

6. God said that He created one man named Adam, and one woman named Eve who were the parents of all mankind. Scientists now point to one common mother and father as the original ancestors of all who live today.

The Scriptures teach that the number seven is pivotal to all of creation. Genesis 1:31-2:3:

1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

The marvelous foundational principle of seven is established here. Seven is the number of completion. It is the number of rest. Seven is the number of the beginning. It is the number of Jesus Christ. In Genesis 2:2, God certifies the cyclical seven-day week, which is imprinted on all life and is also pivotal to all of life.

Man’s position is that the Bible has no relevant value to humanity, that there is no God as defined in the Scriptures, and that the seven-day cycle is a product of old, outdated religious superstition.

As a special note, I’d like to mention a couple of historical events concerning the common week. In 1792, the socialists of France, in their rebellion against the seven-day cyclical pattern of life, instituted a new calendar with a 10-day week. It created total confusion and was abandoned 14 years later. In 1929, the Communist leadership of Russia, in an effort to destroy any attachment to the Bible, instituted a five-day week which ended up in the trash can just three years later. They were operating in the rebellious spirit of the anti-christ to come, of whom Daniel prophesied in Daniel 7:25:

And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.

It’s surprising that anyone would reject the seven-day-week principle when one considers that a lunar month, which is a product of orbit in space and time, houses roughly four seven-day cycles. Those who suggest the seven-cycle comes primarily from a religious root should be advised that the number seven is not imposed on us from the outside, but from the inside. This becomes obvious when you note that plants, insects, and animals also have weekly cycles. The seven-day cycle is not a product of culture; to the contrary, culture is a product of seven.

God places enormous emphasis on the number seven from the very beginning of creation. It is interwoven throughout all of life, to which the following Scriptures will attest. The foundation of wisdom itself is the number seven. Proverbs 9:1 reads:

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars:

The very beginning of creation was completed in seven days. Noah’s new beginning also found itself beholding to the number seven. All animals were taken aboard the ark two by two, the male and his female, except for the fowl of the air and clean beasts, which were taken by sevens. When the ark finally rested on dry ground, it was in the seventh month (Genesis 8:4).

The number seven played a significant role in saving the children of Israel from starvation. Remember, it is through this lineage that Jesus Christ enters the world. (Genesis 41:2-3).

When Joshua and the children of Israel began their lives in the Promised Land, the number seven played an integral part. The following verses in Joshua 6 are in regard to the first conquest in the promised land—the famed city of Jericho—the city where the walls came tumbling down.

1 Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in.

2 And the LORD said unto Joshua, See, I have given into thine hand Jericho, and the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour.

3 And ye shall compass the city, all ye men of war, and go round about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days.

4 And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets.

5 And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him.

God commands Israel to free all Hebrew servants every seven years (Exodus 21:2). The land is required to have its Sabbath of rest: in the seventh year the land is not to be tilled or sown (Exodus 23:11). In Exodus 25:37, God gives instruction concerning the golden candlestick and its seven lamps that give light in the sanctuary. We see these again in Revelation 1:20 as the seven churches that minister life and light to a dark and dying world. Over and over again, the Bible emphasizes the dominant importance of the number seven.

There is a scientific discipline known as chronobiology, which is the research into how living things handle time. It has discovered, amongst a plethora of other things, that countless hormones crucial to human life processes are directed by an unseen conductor’s hand in predictable biological rhythms. Although secretions happen within ultradian and circadian time frames, they appear to occur in seven-day cycles. Perry and Dawson, authors of the book The Secrets Our Body Clocks Reveal, reported:

Weekly rhythms known in chronobiology as “circaseptan rhythms” are among the most puzzling and fascinating findings of chronobiology. At first glance, it might seem that weekly rhythms developed in response to the seven-day week imposed by human culture thousands of years ago. However, this theory doesn’t hold once you realize that plants, insects, and animals other than humans also have weekly cycles. Biology therefore, not culture, is probably at the source of our seven-day week.

Jeremy Campbell, chronobiologist, refers to the father of chronobiology, Franz Halberg:

Franz Halberg proposes that body rhythms of about seven days, far from being passively driven by the social cycle of the calendar week, are innate, autonomous, and perhaps the reason why the calendar week arose in the first place.

All of creation, including a whole society of approximately six billion people, marches to the beat of a seven-day rhythm. This biological clock is the handiwork of God.

Life begins at seven. Why seven? Why seven in “primitive” single-celled organisms? Why seven in bacteria? Why seven in all forms of life? The answer is God’s common design.

From the book Inner Time comes the following:

The best-investigated circaseptan rhythms concern our immunities. The common cold, for example, will last a week no matter how much we spend at the drug store. Patients with pneumonia or malaria face the greatest danger around the seventh day of their illnesses, and the symptoms of chicken pox usually appear around two weeks after exposure. The immune cells vital for our resistance to infections and cancer—T-cells and B-cells—fluctuate in number on a seven-day schedule.

This immune cycle can make a difference if we undergo surgery. After surgery, for example, the amount of swelling that patients experience varies on a seven-day cycle, worsening on the seventh, fourteenth, and twenty-first days. Doctors who perform kidney transplants know that the risk of rejection is highest one week after the procedure, and for a while danger zones continue to occur every seven days. Studies of animals have found similarly timed risks for heart and pancreas transplants.

In Leviticus 13:1-6, God gives instruction to His people concerning the dreaded, highly contagious disease of leprosy. When the disease is first suspected, the victim is quarantined for seven days, then viewed again for diagnosis, and so on. Leviticus 15:13 instructs concerning contagious illness and declares that after one is cleansed of his issue that he should perform a seven-day purification cycle. It reads:

And when he that hath an issue is cleansed of his issue; then he shall number to himself seven days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean.

In Numbers 31:19-24, commandments for cleansing and purifying are given concerning anyone who touches the dead. They are required to be quarantined for seven days before a final cleansing.

The plague that affects so many millions, commonly called yeast infection or Candida albicans, according to many in medical science, finds its remedy in a specially restricted seven-day fast. The pivotal power of seven is just becoming apparent to science. Of course, the creator understood the secret of seven as well as the life cycles of contagious contaminants all along.

Campbell expounds further on life’s rhythms:

Perhaps the most intriguing of these body rhythms are those that have a period of about seven days. These circaseptan (7-day) rhythms are one of the major surprises turned up by modern chronobiology. A central feature of biological time structure is the harmonic relationship that exists among the various component frequencies. A striking aspect of this relationship is that the components themselves appear to be harmonics or subharmonics, multiples or submultiples, of seven, a number that has played a disproportionately large role in human culture, myth, religion, magic and the calendar.

The following excerpt concerning HIV patients is from the website listed in the references of this feature:

While receiving seven-day-on, seven-day-off cycles of intermittent HAART, study participants had no significant increases in the amount of HIV in their bodies, as determined by tests that measured HIV in their plasma and lymph nodes, as well as within immune cells. In addition, patients’ CD4+ T-cell counts were maintained at pre-study levels, and no evidence suggested the development of resistance to HAART medications.

Importantly, the investigators also noted significant decreases in serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels, which frequently are elevated in HIV-infected individuals receiving HAART and can contribute to heart disease and other problems. Mean serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels dropped 22 percent and 51 percent, respectively, after 24 weeks of intermittent therapy.

Although more research needs to be done, preliminary data shows that circadian drug administration could reduce cost dramatically, improve effectiveness, and reduce side effects.

Consider the fact that approximately every seven years all the cells in your body are completely replaced. Imagine, your body is never older than seven years, at least until the cells cease to renew themselves. Skin cells live for seven days, and the sevens roll on and on.

Science begins to understand creation’s secret of seven.

The Garden of Eden was a place called Paradise. Did it actually exist? The first five books of the Bible are known as the Pentateuch and were given to Moses by God. Prior to Moses, a Bible did not exist. Moses entered the world stage nearly 2,500 years after Adam’s beginning. That is not to say that a record of creation, the Garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, and more, did not exist. Much ancient information has been uncovered that attests to the Scriptures at one level or another. In regard to the Garden of Eden in particular, we have ancient non-biblical records, archaeological discoveries, and geographical configurations. It must be noted that in regard to geographical configurations, the record cannot be conclusively certified simply because the flood in Noah’s day would have altered the earth’s geography.

The following excerpts are from Halley’s Bible Handbook:

The particular spot which tradition has fixed as the site of the Garden of Eden is a group of mounds, 12 miles south of Ur, known as Eridu (Abu Sharem). It was the home of “Adapa,” the Babylonian Adam. The Weld Prism says the first two kings in history reigned at Eridu.

Ancient Babylonian inscriptions say, “Near Eridu was a garden, in which was a mysterious Sacred Tree, a Tree of Life, planted by the gods, whose roots were deep, while its branches reached to heaven, protected by guardian spirits, and no man enters.”

The ruins of Eridu were excavated by Hall and Thompson, of the British Museum, 1918-19. They found indications that it had been a prosperous city, revered as the Original Home of Man.

The region around Eridu, excavations have revealed, was densely populated in the earliest known ages of history, and was for centuries dominating Center of the World; a region where many of the oldest and most valuable inscriptions have been found.

Ur, home of Abraham, was 12 miles from Eridu.

Fara, traditional home of Noah, was 70 miles away.

’Obeid (Al ’Ubaid), where the oldest known historical document was found, was only 60 miles from Eridu.

Lagash, where immense primitive libraries were found, was only 60 miles from Eridu.

Nippur, library center, was 100 miles from Eridu.

Erech, Nimrod’s city, was 50 miles from Eridu.

Larsa, where Weld Prism was found, was 40 miles from Eridu.

Babylon was only 150 miles from Eridu.

Early Babylonian inscriptions abound in references to a “tree of life”, from which man was driven, by the influence of an evil spirit personified in a serpent, and to which he was prevented from returning by guardian cherubs.

Among the information on these tablets is a story of “Adapa,” so strikingly parallel to the Biblical story of Adam, that he is called the Babylonian Adam.—“Adapa, the seed of mankind,”—“the wise man of Eridu,”—“blameless,”—then he “offended the gods,”—“through knowledge,”—then he “became mortal,”—“food of life he ate not,”—“sickness he imposed on the people,”—the gods said, “he shall not rest,”—“they clothed him with a mourning garment.” See Price’s Monuments and the Old Testament.

Other traditions of the fall of man include the Persian: our first parents, innocent, virtuous, and happy, lived in a Garden, where there was a Tree of Immortality, until an evil spirit in the form of a Serpent appeared.

Hindu: In the first age man was free from evil and disease, had all his wishes, and lived long.

Greek: the first men, in the golden age, were naked, free from evil and trouble, enjoyed communion with the gods.

Chinese: had a tradition of a happy age, when men had an abundance of food, surrounded by peaceful animals.

Mongolians and Tibetans: had similar traditions.

Teutons: the primeval race enjoyed a life of perpetual festivity.

All Barbarous Races: have traditions of a more civilized state.

The original story of the Garden of Eden was, no doubt, told by Adam to Methuselah, and by Methuselah to Noah, and by Noah to his sons; and in the national cultures that followed it became variously and grossly modified. [End of quote]

The following verses in Genesis 2:10-14 are central to all searches for the original Garden of Eden, but keep in mind that the speculative nature of this search is more a product of the flood than anything else. The verses in Genesis read:

10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.

14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

The famed Jewish historian Josephus, who lived and wrote after the days of Christ, recorded this about the river that proceeded from the Garden of God:

Now the garden was watered by one river, which ran round about the whole earth, and was parted into four parts. And Phison, which denotes a multitude, running into India, makes its exit into the sea, and is by the Greeks called Ganges. Euphrates also, as well as Tigris, goes down into the Red Sea. Now the name Euphrates, or Phrath, denotes either a dispersion, or a flower: by Tigris, or Diglath, is signified what is swift, with narrowness; and Geon runs through Egypt, and denotes what arises from the east, which the Greeks call Nile.  [End of quote]

David Rohl, author of Pharaohs and Kings, a book that was the basis of a January 1996 series on The Learning Channel, is also author of Legend: The Genesis of Civilization Today, which was published in 1998. BiblicalHeritage.org discusses Rohl’s book in the following excerpts:

Wouldn’t it be nice to find the actual location of the real Garden of Eden? In theological circles it would be a discovery that could equal that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Well guess what? Archaeologist David Rohl claims to have found the site described in Genesis as “Eden” in a lush valley beneath an extinct volcano in northern Iran.

The Jerusalem Report (February 1, 1999) broke the story in the article—“Paradise Found.”

Ten miles from the sprawling Iranian industrial city of Tabriz, to the northwest of Teheran, says British archaeologist David Rohl, he has found the site of the Biblical garden. “As you descend a narrow mountain path, you see a beautiful alpine valley, just like the Bible describes it, with terraced orchards on its slopes, crowded with every kind of fruit-laden tree,” says Rohl, a scholar of University College, London, who has just returned from his third trip to the area, where mud brick villages flourish today.

“The Biblical word gan(as in Gan Eden) means ‘walled garden,’ ” Rohl continues, “and the valley is indeed walled in by towering mountains.” The highest of these is Mt. Sahand, a snow-capped extinct volcano that Rohl identifies as the Prophet Ezekiel’s Mountain of God, where the Lord resides among ’red-hot coals’ (Ezekiel 28:11-19). Cascading down the once-fiery mountain, precisely echoing Ezekiel, is a small river, the Adji Chay(the name of which also translates in local dialect as ‘walled garden’). The locals still hold the mountain sacred, Rohl says, and attribute magical powers to the river’s water.

In order to make the journey to this most remote location, one must travel from western Iran, north through the Zagros Mountains of Iranian Kurdistan, down Mt. Sahand, and into the fertile Adji Chay valley. You quickly discover just how remote this location is when you try to find it on modern maps. The Jerusalem Report article gives a number of geographical locations. However, I did not find a single map that contained them all. I ended up with about five or six maps, each containing one or two of the places I was trying to find.

What made Rohl look in this location in the first place? One factor was that he read about it in ancient Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets held by the Museum of the Orient in Istanbul. The other factor was the work of the late, little-known British scholar Reginald Walker. The ancient tablets described a 5,000 year-old route to Eden. He has been researching the location since the late 1980’s through academic documents.

In April 1997, Rohl did something very remarkable to prove his point. He set out from the Iranian town of Ahwaz, near the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, with only his jeep driver for company. According to the article:

They traveled north toward Kurdistan through what Rohl calls ‘lawless’ terrain, trusting to luck to avoid the various guerilla factions active in the region. Rohl followed a route, documented in the Sumerian cuneiform epic ‘Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,’ supposedly taken 5,000 years earlier by an emissary of the Sumerian priest-king of Uruk. The emissary had been dispatched to Aratta, on the plain of ‘Edin’ — known to Sumerians as a land of happiness and plenty—to obtain gold and lapis lazuli to decorate a temple that Enmerkar was building in Uruk. The cuneiform epic describes the dutiful emissary’s three-month trek on foot via seven passes through the Zagros Mountains, to the foothills of Mt. Sahand—the outhern edge of Rohl’s Eden—and his successful procurement of the required valuable.

Rohl believes . . . the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all knew of an earthly paradise that had once lain beyond what they called the Seven Heavens. For them, Eden was still very much an earthly place.

The Garden described in the Bible places the headwaters of four rivers in it: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Gihon, and the Pishon. Obviously, the Tigris and Euphrates are well-known rivers, but the other two have been real problems in the past. Rohl has identified them as the Araxes and Uizhun which puts the headwaters of all four rivers in his Eden. Interestingly, the Uizhun, Rohl’s equivalent to the Pishon which the Bibles identifies with gold, is known locally as the Golden River, and meanders between ancient gold mines and lodes of lapis lazuli.

Making his case even stronger, Rohl says that he has found the “Land of Nod” which the Bible describes as “East of Eden.” Nod was Cain’s place of exile after the murder of his brother Abel. Today the area is called “Noqdi.”

But it doesn’t end there because a few kilometers south of Rohl’s Nod, at the head of a mountain pass, lies the sleepy town of Helabad. Formerly it was known as “Kheruabad,” which means “settlement of the Kheru people.” He believes that this could be a permutation of the Hebrew word keruvim that is translated as “Cherubs.” These people were a tribe of fearsome warriors whose token was an eagle or falcon. [End of quotes]

Was there actually a Garden of Eden? Does the record say yes? The following is from a book published in 1950 and updated in 1969. The book Archaeology and Bible History, written by Joseph P. Free weighs in on the Garden of Eden in the following paragraphs:

One of the main purposes of Genesis 2 is to describe the nature of Adam and Eve’s environment and the events leading up to the fall. All of the essential facts are carefully recorded. Even the general location of the garden of Eden may be ascertained from the facts given. The Bible records that two of the four rivers connected with the garden of Eden are the Euphrates and the Hiddekel (Gen. 2:14). The Hiddekel River is the same as the river which we now call the Tigris. This is demonstrated by Babylonian clay tablets which apply the name Idiglat (of which Hiddekel is a variation) to the river known today as the Tigris.

Thus we see that Eden was in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates, the area known geographically as Mesopotamia (Greek, meaning “between the rivers”), which today is the country known politically as Iraq.

Concerning the precise location of Eden within Mesopotamia, we note two views:

1. Friedrich Delitzsch located it just above Babylon, where the Tigris and Euphrates approach each other within a short distance.

2. George Frederick Wright, geologist at Oberlin College, favored the area further south, near the head of the Persian Gulf. This latter location is seemingly supported by the clay tablets which say that Eridu, a town in southern Mesopotamia, was reputed to have in its neighborhood a garden, “a holy place” in which there grew a sacred palm tree. This legend may still retain some significance in pointing to the location of the original Garden of Eden.

The location of man’s origin upon the earth has been the subject of much speculation, resulting in the theories which place the beginning of civilization in several different places, ranging from Egypt to China. Recent archaeological discoveries, however, point definitely toward the Near East and Mesopotamia, confirming the Biblical indication concerning Eden as the location of man’s origin. The present day scholar, William F. Albright, well summarizes the evidence when he says, “Archaeological research has thus established beyond doubt that there is no focus of civilization in the earth that can begin to compete in antiquity and activity with the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean and the region immediately to the east of it—Breasted’s Fertile Crescent.” [End of quote]

The following listings are a quick review of “In The Beginning (Parts One, Two, and Three):”

1. The Bible said there was light on Earth before the sun was created. Science now theorizes that that was exactly the case.

2. The Scripture’s genealogical and chronological records declare the earth to be just over 6,000 years old. Science built on fact and not uniformitarian assumptions says yes to a young Earth.

3. God’s Word shows record of a water canopy over the earth in the days before Noah, which produced dramatic benefits for all the earth, and evidence of it is abundant.

4. The Bible teaches in Genesis 1, that prior to sin and death, all the world’s creatures were vegetarian. The very ancient fossil of a vegetarian crocodile has raised a lot of eyebrows.

5. Man is simply recycled mud. God literally created us out of dirt and the record says yes. Plus, every child knows that when you die, you turn back to dust.

6. God said that he created one man named Adam, and one woman named Eve, who were the parents of all mankind. Scientists now point to one common mother and father as the original ancestors of all who live today.

7. God said He created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. All through the Scriptures, God emphasizes the pattern of seven in the earth beneath and the sky above. Academia claims that the seven pattern is a Biblical construct and had no foundation in truth. But now modern science has been forced to confirm that the seven-day (sevens) cycle is not a product of culture, but to the contrary, culture and life itself is a product of seven.

8. Was there a Garden of Eden where our great-grandmother and -grandfather once lived? Do ancient non-Biblical writings attest to it? Have scholars stepped forth to attest to its existence in the beginning? Have archaeology and geology discovered its testimony? The answers are yes, yes, and yes!

God has left a record in the earth. Be free to believe.

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

MAN SAID: We just popped out of nothing and here we are. Man also believes Buddha’s statement, “No origin can be perceived.”

Now you have THE RECORD.




References:

Authorized King James Version

Briggs and peat, The Turbulent Mirror, Harper and Row, 1989

DeYoung, D., Fascinating Facts From the World of Discovery, New Leaf Press

Free, J. P., Archaeology and Bible History, Scripture Press, 1973

Halley’s Bible Handbook, pp26-30

Josephus, F., Josephus Complete Works, Kregel Publications, pp25-26

Perry, S., and J. Dawson, The Secrets Our Body Clocks Reveal

“The Garden of Eden Discovered,” http://www.biblicalheritage.org/Archaeol ogy/eden.htm

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