Christian apologist Damien Mackey left a post in The Skeptical Review’s debate forum linking readers to a criticism he’d written regarding my article, "The Loss of Paradise." That critique can be found at the URL linked to above. In that reply, Mr. Mackey reprints the entirety of my article, making comments where he felt they were appropriate. I do not wish to reprint my own article below (!) so I will simply reply to comments Mr. Mackey made which I, in turn, feel are directly relevant to my "Paradise" essay. He makes other assertions not directly related to my article (for instance, pairing Israel’s 10th century BCE King David with ancient Egypt’s 15th century BCE pharaoh Thutmose I; part of a larger theory of his that the standard chronology used by scholars to date periods of ancient history is incorrect), but since these comments do not concern the location of Eden, I don’t feel obligated to reply to them.
After my article had reviewed Kenneth Kitchen’s geographical setting as detailed in his book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, Mr. Mackey commented in his critique, “I have rejected this geographical scenario for Eden in my article: The Location of Paradise (Genesis 2:10-2:14).”
In that article (which precedes his response to my paper), Mr. Mackey argues for a different location of Eden than the one I proposed, based largely upon two main ideas. The first is that the four rivers mentioned in Genesis are not to be found solely in the lower Mesopotamian basin as my article argues and the second is that the global flood of Genesis 7 & 8 wasn’t as global as we’ve come to traditionally think. Mr. Mackey takes a great deal of his ideas from the work of the late Bible scholar Abraham S. Yahuda (1877-1951), much of which he quotes from throughout his own article.
While Mr. Mackey “rejects” Dr. Kitchen’s “geographical scenario” in preference for his own, his article contains no direct rebuttal of Dr. Kitchen’s argument. Dr. Kitchen has read the text of Genesis 2:10-14 and concluded, based upon the geographical markers in the story that the four rivers of Eden are limited to the area which is now southern Iraq. Dr. Kitchen notes that the Genesis author lists the rivers in an east to west configuration. Since modern geography knows that the Tigris flows to the east of the Euphrates, and the Genesis author names the Tigris before the Euphrates, Dr. Kitchen reasons the two unknown rivers, the Gihon and the Pishon, mentioned first before the Tigris and the Euphrates, likely flowed (following the directional pattern he sees in the text) to the east of the last two mentioned rivers. Therefore, from east to west, Dr. Kitchen believes the rivers are the Gihon, the Pishon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. That would mean that the Gihon and the Pishon lie closer toward the modern Iranian border with Iraq than far to the west in the land of Egypt as Mr. Mackey’s Professor Yahuda has argued. Mr. Mackey’s article in no sense refutes Dr. Kitchen’s reading of Genesis but merely prefers Professor Yahuda’s assumptions without mentioning Dr. Kitchen’s “geographical scenario” whatsoever.
Using the same biblical text but targeting a different interpretation, Professor Yahuda argues through Mr. Mackey’s article that the Gihon and the Pishon are actually one and the same river: the Nile; the Gihon flowing as the “Nubian Nile” in Upper Egypt, the Pishon the region of the Nile flowing through Egypt proper which Mr. Mackey’s Professor Yahuda calls the “Egyptian Nile.” Therefore, according to Mr. Mackey’s quotation of Professor Yahuda, “(T)he Pishon and the Gihon [are] the two portions of the Nile which in those days were regarded as two separate rivers.” Mr. Mackey, later in his sparse critique, does assert briefly his reason for making this assumption by noting, “Kush (Cush) [which is mentioned in Genesis 2 as the region through which the river Gihon flows] is Ethiopia, plain and simple. That is the only country editor Moses would have meant by that word. Moses led a pharaonic campaign/s into Ethiopia/Kush.” Mr. Mackey assumes, in line with many other biblical inerrantists, that a historical Moses existed and had a hand in the construction, if not the actual authorship, of the biblical text. Thus, he assumes that “Moses” would have meant Ethiopia when “he” wrote of Kush because “Moses” was only familiar with the Ethiopian Kush as “Moses” himself ventured there on “pharaonic campaigns.” Mr. Till pointed out the fallacy of this line of reasoning when he noted in one of his own essays regarding a different subject and a different Christian apologist, “He is saying, in effect, that if the Bible says X, then X must be right, because X is in the Bible.” Mr. Till may have been directing his comments at someone else, but they certainly are appropriate here. While I completely reject Moses as a true historical person (and Mr. Mackey does nothing in another article he penned regarding the “historicity” of Moses to physically evidence the existence of such a person but merely points to “clues” in the biblical text, relying on his own interpretations of the narratives and being guided by his preconception of biblical inerrancy), Moses’ historical personage plays no role in my article detailing the geographical location of the Garden of Eden and so, again, I do not feel obligated to get into such a discussion here. However, Dr. Kitchen does indeed mention in his book his reasoning that Kush should not be identified with Ethiopia as opined in Mr. Mackey’s comments. Almost in passing, Dr. Kitchen dismisses the location of the Gihon and Pishon in Egypt, writing, “It should be obvious that this Kush cannot have been Upper Nubia in East Africa [as Mr. Mackey asserts], most of two thousand miles away to the southwest of the Tigris zone… But directly east of the Tigris, through the mountains of western Iran…” (p. 429). Dr. Kitchen bases this argument, of course, on his interpretation of the geographical directions given in Genesis 2 by the naming of the rivers in an east-to-west configuration. As further noted in my article, Dr. Kitchen explains the recent (2003) discovery of ancient Pishon in the region of modern Kuwait, neighboring the rivers Tigris and Euphrates just as the Genesis author describes, not as merely a portion of the Nile as Mr. Mackey’s Professor Yahuda asserts. This is a discovery which could not have been known by Professor Yahuda whose work as Mr. Mackey references was written in 1934 and therefore could not have influenced Professor Yahuda in the formation of his thesis, now over 70 years old. [1]
While identifying the rivers of Genesis outside the ancient Mesopotamian basin, a problem remains for Mr. Mackey’s thesis and that is the source of these rivers. Genesis is clear that the four rivers emanate from a single source. Genesis 2:10 reads, “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.” Mr. Mackey acknowledges that there should be a one-river source for the other four mentioned in the text but concedes that “[t]he chief ‘problem’ is actually to identify the ‘... one river that went out from Eden to water the Garden.'” (emphasis mine) Siding with Yahuda, Mr. Mackey seems to think that the single source river that flowed from the garden of Eden “went underground” before it reemerged as the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Gihon and Pishon (or Upper and Lower Nile), but this doesn’t tell us how that “single source” which “went underground” can be identified. Mr. Mackey believes he has the solution. He writes, regarding the land of Canaan lying between the four river system (Tigris and Euphrates to the east, the Upper and Lower Nile to the west), “This ‘Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey’, was the site of the original Eden. Its well-known Jordan was therefore the one river that flowed from it to water the Garden.” So, according to Mr. Mackey, the Jordan was the single source river which disappeared somewhere underground, only to reemerge as the Tigris, Euphrates, and the source of the Nile. What evidence does Mr. Mackey have for this shocking assertion? He doesn’t have any. He merely states that identifying the Jordan as the source of the other great rivers is “a matter for hydrographers to investigate.” But he is mistaken. Having made such an assertion, the evidence for the Jordan as the source river is actually Mr. Mackey’s “matter” to investigate and substantiate. As a skeptic, I simply cannot take his say-so or accept his speculations and await someone else to confirm his hunches. To be sure, he quotes from Professor Yahuda’s work explaining this ancient belief in an interconnecting underwater source system, but that is all it was: a belief. As Professor Yahuda explains, quoted in Mr. Mackey’s article,
The narrator who conceived the whole earth, [adamah], with the exception of the oasis, [Edin], 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: under the earth, far away from the spot where the Paradise river disappeared, its waters flowed in various directions until it reached the sites where the sources lay from which the four rivers emerged and took their course on the surface of the earth (emphasis mine).
Of course, nothing in the biblical text gives Professor Yahuda or Mr. Mackey license to suppose that “the [Genesis] narrator…visualized the disappearance of the stream… being swallowed up by the earth, but that it continued its course underground,” else one or both of them would have quoted the appropriate passages in support of this assertion. In another of Professor Yahuda’s works referenced in Mr. Mackey’s article, I found written regarding this single source for the four rivers of Genesis,
This conception of a river vanishing in the desert and nevertheless continuing to flow subterraneously is not at all unknown to those acquainted with the contrast between oasis and desert land. A similar phenomenon is especially frequent in calcareous areas, in various parts of the world, where large rivers are sucked into subterranean cleavages and suddenly disappear from the surface, only to reappear a considerable distance away.
These new outflows were always regarded as distinct rivers, and even nowadays are so considered by the local population even in some European countries. In this connection, it should be observed that the belief in a subterranean course of the Nile for long stretches was also shared by Greek authors. Furthermore, the idea that distant rivers were connected underground with the Nile, was entertained by them in respect of the Indus, which they considered to be an upper reach of the Nile. The same was believed even much later by Arabic geographers concerning the Niger (169-170, emphasis mine).
What I’ve emphasized above in both of the quotations taken from Professor Yahuda’s work was all the use of speculative words without benefit of any physical proof. Professor Yahuda repeatedly used words like “believed,” “considered,” “regarded” in relation to the ancient’s view of this “single source” underground river. None of this constitutes proof that such a reality ever existed; it is merely Professor Yahuda’s speculative attempt to make connection with the Genesis narrative. To add credibility to his assertions, Mr. Mackey quotes from another source, scientist Charles Pellegrino. As Mr. Mackey explains from Pellegrino's book, Return to Sodom and Gomorrah regarding an ancient underground water source,
German archaeologists speak of an Ur Nil, or ancient Nile, of far greater dimensions than the present-day river of that name. This is presumably the same as is written about by scientist, C. Peregrino [sic] (Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, Bard, 1998)--who has also given a most interesting account of the thin river corridors of the Nile and Euphrates, so essential for sustaining life in the Fertile Crescent (I. “The Fabulous Riverworlds”)--when he writes for example (p.47):
Under the Nile itself are remnants of a deep valley to rival the Grand Canyon. River silts began covering it up as soon as the Gibraltar dam broke open and the Atlantic spilled in, but oil geologists drilling through thousands of feet of mud have located the solid bedrock of the Nile Canyon’s floor. It lies nearly two miles beneath the city of Cairo.
This is simply staggering!
Staggering? Why? There is no mention, as Mr. Mackey asserts, of a “thin river corridor” of the Euphrates in any relation with the Nile or this “Ur Nil." Mentioned here only is the remnant of “a deep valley” lying “two miles beneath the city of Cairo” in the stratigraphic record. What Mr. Mackey doesn’t tell his readers (because, I suspect, Pellegrino’s timeline conflicts with Mr. Mackey’s reworked chronology [2] ) is that this ancient Nile canyon is millions of years old, existing long before any modern human animal walked the face of the earth. Pellegrino explains,
For a brief time, for perhaps two or three thousand years…the [ancient] Nile poured over a cliff forty times higher than Niagara, but within a half million years, at a rate of inches per day, it had chewed back the bare limestone, slashing the Earth from Cairo to Aswan. The river ran east of Karnak in those days; the slash bypassed Karnak’s limestone fields, left them intact for stonecutting beings, who were then only a distant potential in dryopithecine descent.(p. 47)
What Pellegrino is describing is a Nile canyon that existed some 17 million years ago, too far in the distant past to have been part of the Eden story of Genesis. Nothing human lived on the earth in this era. A distant ancestor of humans and anthropoid apes, the dryopithecines, wandered this region. The first hominid, in direct line with modern humans, falling somewhere between Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus afarensis according to modern research, existed merely 4 million years ago or so. Thus, dryopithecine was hardly equipped to have an oral history which could have included a Tree of Knowledge, a Tree of Life and a talking serpent slithering somewhere near the “Ur Nil” valley of the Miocene Epoch.
As Dr. Kitchen concludes his own location of the four rivers out of Eden, based upon the evidence he provided, “(T)he ancient author’s enumeration runs counterclockwise, from southwest (Pishon) across east to the Gihon, then north and northwest to the Tigirs and Euphrates, in a continuous sweep” (ibid). I did not see any specific refutation in Mr. Mackey’s referenced article to this particular interpretation of the text. He provided no direct rebuttal which points the reader to logically and rationally reject Dr. Kitchen’s argument for the geographical location of Eden in favor of Professor Yahuda’s. Mr. Mackey’s argument in support of Professor Yahuda’s thesis seems to be based solely upon a personal preference for how this thesis supports Mr. Mackey’s preferred method of biblical interpretation. Therefore, I see no need to comment further on Mr. Mackey’s own argument for the geographical placement of Eden’s rivers since his response to my own article consisted merely of an off-hand dismissal of Dr. Kitchen’s interpretation of the text. I would be wholly justified in dismissing Mr. Mackey’s response in kind by writing: I reject Mr. Mackey’s geographical scenario for Eden in my article, The Loss of Paradise, in favor of Dr. Kitchen’s, and leave it to the reader to decide for themselves which of the “geographical scenarios” they prefer. But when they make this assessment, it is important to keep in mind that the location of Paradise requires a four river system (the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates) and a single source from which they flow. In Mackey’s article, the rivers are paired as the Tigris/Euphrates in Mesopotamia and the Upper and Lower Nile in Egypt, the pairs separated by roughly 800 miles. His “source” is an as-yet-to-be-discovered massive underground water system starting with Israel’s Jordan and feeding the Pishon, the Gihon (i. e., the Nile), the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Furthering his rebuttal, Mr. Mackey notes regarding my description of the biblical Flood as a worldwide cataclysmic event, clearly stated in Genesis 6:13 as an event in which the earth [Hebrew, ‘erets] itself perished along with all those living upon it, erasing any trace of the once beautiful and bountiful garden of Eden: “That is your version of the Flood, but obviously Genesis is telling us that the Flood did not entirely remove the original hydrographic contours. We need to take full notice of the biblical version of the flood, in relation to the geography of early Genesis.” This is Mr. Mackey’s second foundation upon which he builds his case. For even if he was correct in locating Eden in the Jordan valley, and that there is evidence for some underground water system linking the Jordan with the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile (which, mind you, he has not successfully demonstrated), the global cataclysm of Noah’s Flood, described in Genesis 7 and 8, would have wiped out these markers as I argued in my original article. It doesn’t matter where Eden was located in the antediluvian world, I had written, because the extreme violence of the worldwide flood would have wiped out any remnants of Eden and its river system. Mr. Mackey’s response is that the worldwide flood of Genesis 7 and 8 wasn’t worldwide afterall.
Of course, Mr. Mackey bases his conclusion that the flood “did not entirely remove the original hydrographic contours” of the pre-flood Near East on the circular argumentation which assumes an inerrant Bible. He writes in an unpublished article regarding the not-so-worldwide flood that he allowed me to preview, “‘God is his Truth.’ and hence there should be no conflict or disharmony whatsoever between religious (biblical) and scientific truth.” If the Bible is inerrant and mentions rivers in existence today as having flowed prior to the Great Flood, then the Great Flood really wasn’t so Great after all. It certainly was not Great enough to “entirely remove the original hydrographic contours” of the ancient Near East since these hydrographic contours clearly still existed by the time Genesis was written which was, obviously, post-Flood! This is, again, a case of “if the Bible says X, then X must be right, because X is in the Bible.” as Mr. Till so often likes to point out. In this unpublished article of Mr. Mackey’s he claims to have written an apologetic which argues that the Bible doesn’t mean what it clearly says: that a worldwide flood inundated the planet and snuffed the life out of every living creature on earth [Hebrew, ‘erets] save those rescued on the ark. What Mr. Mackey proposes is that the flood was local and limited, being “universal” in scope only insofar as the flood affected merely those living beings alive at the time in a very localized region of the ancient Near East. In other words, there was no global [‘erets] flood. The mechanisms of the flood were merely those narrowed to the Mediterranean region. As Mr. Mackey describes in his unpublished article,
Preceding that momentous day for humankind there must have been atmospheric and climatological upheavals and events and tectonic activity (possibly meteorites/bolides, volcanoes, glaciers and ice melts, rising water levels, natural dam bursts and flooding), not all known to--and certainly not scientifically understood by--the antediluvians.
I think that the reader would gain a deeper insight into all this by reading Ryan and Pitman’s account of the ‘Black Sea Flood’ (op. cit.>), too detailed to repeat here. Tectonic activity, volcanoes, and the destruction of barriers (such as the Gibraltar dam) that had kept out the Atlantic. (Surely the legend of Atlantis has to do with the Noachian Flood). These mechanisms served to destroy the natural boundaries that, whilst they had kept the antediluvians in, had also served to keep, out, such potential disasters. The Black Sea, a freshwater lake, was flooded by melted glaciers from the (newly created?) Mediterranean Sea. Seawater flowed over the lake at a rate 200 times greater than Niagara Falls. The swollen Mediterranean burst 600 miles southwards into Egypt, to as far as Aswan.
What Mr. Mackey does here is conflate a great number of historically true geological and climatological activities into a scant 40 day, 40 night period occurring a few short millennia ago. The “Black Sea Flood” studied by Ryan and Pitman mentioned above occurred roughly 7,000 years ago. The melting of the glaciers that would have raised the Mediterranean began to occur about 12,000 years ago. The breaching of the Gibraltar dam, spilling the Atlantic into the dry Mediterranean basin as described in Pellegrino’s book, is said to have happened nearly 6.5 million years ago. But, as I mentioned at the beginning of this reply, Mr. Mackey lives in a different world, chronologically. For Mr. Mackey, events separated by millions of years as evidenced in the geologic record or merely by centuries, occurred simultaneously. Thus, the adventures of the dryopithecines coincide with the creation of woman from Adam’s rib. The breaching of the Gibraltar dam followed, occurring alongside Noah's Flood and the inundation of the Black Sea. And, by the time David rose to the throne, the young king could have played Senet with the pharaoh Thutmose I. Needless to say, it is not a view shared by the majority of scholars in the appropriate fields. [3]
In addition to the flood being limited in scope, the enormous size of the ark in the biblical text is the result of, you guessed it, scribal error. As Mr. Mackey asserts in his unpublished article, “(B)iblical numbers can easily be misread by translators, who then pass on incorrect figures.” I addressed this “solution” to biblical number problems in my article on the excessive Hebrew population figures published elsewhere on The Skeptical Review. I had noted, based upon the widely held inerrantist belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God (“‘God is his Truth’”), “(I)t is nearly impossible to believe (bordering on the blasphemous) that an omniscient deity would have been careful enough to dictate his word to men of his choosing but remiss in keeping this carefully dictated document free from later scribal errors.” I see no argument in Mr. Mackey’s work to alter this point-of-view.
Concluding that the ark was a mere shadow of its biblical proportions based upon scribal error, and making the inerrant, omnisciently inspired words of the Bible tale seem even more ridiculous, Mr. Mackey reduces the need to clamor all the animal species of the world onto this tiny vessel and instead opines that,
Noah would have had to fit on the Ark only such animals as would have been needed for food, and later on for sacrifice, and for breeding and farming purposes: domestic animals, (cattle, sheep, goats, etc.)
But is that what the Bible really tells us? And wasn’t it Mr. Mackey who cautioned, “We need to take full notice of the biblical version of the Flood…”? Genesis 6:19 states that Yahweh instructed Noah, “And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.” It is quite clear here that Noah is being instructed to bring every living thing with him into the ark: two of every kind, of all flesh. This does not sound like it is meant only to include, as Mr. Mackey wishes to assert, “such animals as would have been needed for food, and later on for sacrifice, and for breeding and farming purposes: domestic animals...." Would not other local animals-–if even what Mr. Mackey asserts is true regarding the size of the ark and localized extend of the flood--be included on this tiny vessel? Creatures such as elephants, monkeys or exotic cats? As Karen Polinger Foster notes in her article “Gardens of Eden: Exotic Flora and Fauna in the Ancient Near East,”
From nearly every period come Mesopotamian texts or representations pertaining to exotic fauna. In the Sumerian literary composition “The Curse of Agade,” for example, the goddess Inanna describes the greatness of her city Agade, capital of the Akkadian empire ca. 2300 BCE: “Monkeys, mighty elephants, water buffaloes, and wonderful animals,” she says, “jostle each other in the public squares” (Cooper 1983). In like manner, the royal Palm Court at Mari ca. 1800 BCE requested many exotic and rare animals, including Elamite cats, bears, and chamois (Wiseman 1983)....
The embossed bronze bands made ca. 845 BCE for the massive wooden gates of a royal building at Balawat present Assyrian military and other enterprises, among them the royal visit to the source of the Tigris, or perhaps the Tigris Tunnel. The explorers wade through naturalistic grottoes, flares held high above the stream. The four sides of the ca. 825 BCE Black Obelisk bear register blocks showing tribute brought before Shalmaneser, including “camels whose backs are doubled,” elephants, simians, and a single-horned creature, possibly a hippotamus [sic].
What of these creatures inhabiting the region of the not-so-worldwide flood of Noah? Were they included on the diminished Ark of Mr. Mackey’s imagination? Or were they excluded, able to repopulate the area following the disaster, having rescued themselves by hanging onto floating debris in the aftermath of the flood or by running to higher ground on the outskirts of the cataclysm? And if these more exotic animals survived without need of an ark, why couldn’t other animals? Or even Noah himself? Didn't Noah have sufficient warning from Yahweh concerning this flood? While the Bible is not specific in how long it took Noah to build his ark, it surely didn't spring up overnight. In the same amount of time it took Noah to build that ark, round up a handful of animals (as Mr. Mackey asserts) and get them loaded on-board, could not have Noah just gathered the animals together and herded them to higher ground? Why build the ark in the first place if the flood only innundated a small region of the Near East? Why go to so much trouble? [4]
I am eager to see the publication of Mr. Mackey’s flood article and how his argument will play with the larger creationist community, particularly those at Answers in Genesis who advocate strongly for a global flood and have hosted one of Mr. Mackey’s own articles on another subject of interest to creationists.[5] How will those who have hitched their wagons to Mr. Mackey’s pro-Bible arguments in the past deal with Mr. Mackey’s new proposal that the model of the worldwide flood as “pioneered by Whitcomb and Morris… and still fervently promoted by ‘Creationist’ groups…” (including such figures as Jonathan Sarfati, Ken Ham and Carl Wieland whom he mentions by name in the article) [6] is “completely ridiculous”? So far, Mr. Mackey’s arguments for the preservation of the Garden of Eden offend general skeptics, mainstream scholars and biblical creationists alike!
After I mentioned AiG’s Mark Looy’s view of the Genesis Flood in my article, noting Looy’s assertion that the pre-Flood rivers Tigris and Euphrates cannot possibly refer to their modern namesakes since these pre-Flood river courses would have been destroyed in Noah’s cataclysm, Mr. Mackey commented, “Looy has to say that to support his preconceived notion of the Flood. But it is ridiculous.” I found this quite humorous as Mr. Mackey seems to be unaware that much of his argumentation revolves around his own preconceived notion that the Bible is inerrant and that if two passages from the text contradict one another-–as appears to be the case with the geographical markers for the pre-Flood Garden of Eden and the biblical description of a worldwide, wholly cataclysmic Flood which, based upon its violent destruction of the earth, should have wiped out these pre-Flood markers, as I’ve argued in my own article--then the contradiction must be reconciled even if that means twisting one’s arguments and the biblical text itself into contortions never before seen in the world of Christian apologetics. Indeed, Ecclesiastes is wrong when it comes to the fertile minds of biblical inerrantists: there certainly is something “new under the sun” when it comes to thinking up unique and original ways to maintain the inerrancy of the biblical text!
If the Bible mentions the Tigris and Euphrates, given a post-Flood geographical setting in a pre-Flood narrative, then, according to Mr. Mackey, the worldwide Flood of Genesis 7-8 could not have been worldwide in exact meaning, but that--to preserve the preconception of biblical inerrancy--the Flood was not global in the literal sense, but universal in a particular sense. Of course, it does not occur to Mr. Mackey that both the Eden story and the Flood story could both be wrong, historically speaking. Such a conclusion does not support his preconceived notion of biblical inerrancy. Mr. Mackey, as all inerrantist, is driven by a conclusion and the only stops along his journey are at those claims which support this preconceived notion. As Mr. Mackey concludes his “critique” of my article, “(T)he Genesis geography is perfectly true. It is Looy’s and colleagues’ interpretation of the Genesis Flood that is out of kilter and needs to be reassessed. We need to let the Bible tell us what it means, not the other way around.” And, of course, what the Bible “means” is what inerrantists like Mr. Mackey would like it to mean. Just ask them.
Notes:Regarding Mr. Mackey’s linking of the “Black Sea Flood” with the biblical deluge, this topic has already been covered by his friends at AiG. Seen as “just another attempt to undermine the integrity of the biblical account of Noah's Flood,” the members of AiG have already dismissed the Black Sea event as having any connection with the biblical flood. Go online here. Return to Text
Sources:
Foster, Karen Polinger (1998) “Gardens of Eden: Exotic Flora and Fauna in the Ancient Near East,” Yale Forestry & Environmental Studies Bulletin 103 accessed online 11/10/2005 here.
Kitchen, Kenneth A. (2003) On the Reliability of the Old Testament Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Pellegrino, Charles (1994) Return to Sodom and Gomorrah: Bible Stories From Archaeologists Random House.
Yahuda, A.S. (1934) The Accuracy of the Bible:
The Stories of Joseph The Exodus and
Genesis Confirmed and Illustrated by Egyptian Monuments and Language
William Heinemann
LTD.
