Creation History

Category: Ancient History

Posted by: Kenneth

The Egyptians and Sumerians both recorded a cataclysm caused by a celestial bovine (yes, a cow) that caused famine and widespread destruction.  This may have been a reference to the comet Encke, which was the progenitor of the Taurid Meteor stream.  Encke in turn, appears to have originated from an earlier cataclysm.

When two orbiting objects in space collide, much of the debris from their collision continues moving in the original orbits and periodically returns to the scene of the crime.  This is why the Earth experiences meteor showers at predictable times of the year.  The Persid meteor shower is caused when the Earth passes through the orbital debris of the comet Swift-Tuttle. It appears each year in early August and appears to originate in the constellation Perseus. 

The Taurids are a much older and larger meteor shower that occurs around Halloween every year, and appear to originate in the constellation Taurus. The Taurids are believed to originate from two parent bodies, the comet Encke, and a dark asteriod with the terribly original name, "2004-TG10." The Earth passes through the debris streams of the orbit of both of these objects twice a year, with the main event being in late October, just around Halloween.  The secondary intersection with their orbit occurs in late June.

According to a recent study, there are large asteriods hiding in the Taurid Swarm that indicate Encke itself is probably debris from a larger object in the past. Encke and 2004-TG10 may in turn be remnants of an interaction or collision of the Earth with an even larger celestial object at the start of Noah's Flood.  Since the constellation Taurus means the bull, the ancients viewed this constellation as a celestial bovine.  Naturally, if a comet were seen to come from this constellation and strike the earth, the calamity would be viewed as having come from the celestial bull. 

The appearance of coming from the constellation Taurus does not mean the objects actually crossed interstellar space to get here.  They are merely rocks in orbit around the sun that appear to come from Taurus because that is what is behind them. Furthermore, the orbit of the Taurid Swarm has been modified by the planet Jupiter.  Jupiter has such powerful gravity that it herds the orbit of asteroids and rocks in the inner solar system into orbits that are inside of its own.  So, the orbit of the Taurid Swarm may not represent the original orbit of the theoretical celestial object that was associated with the start of the Flood.

The Day of the Dead

The Day of the Dead is a remembrance of the dead celebrated in some form by many cultures around the world in late October. In Christian cultures it is remembered as All Hallows Eve, or All Saints Day.  But this Christian holiday appears to be a baptized version of an older pagan holiday, shared by many tribes and nations. Several creationists have noted the apparent correspondence between the Day of the Dead and the outbreak of Noah's Flood on the seventeenth day of the second month. Following an earlier article by Frank Humphrey (1997), Bodie Hodge made the case that the Day of the Dead was originally a remembrance of the those killed by the Flood. 

In the paper, Chronological Framework of Ancient History - 4, Darrell White and I made the case that the Aztec remembrance of the great calamity that occured when the Pleiades culminated at midnight enables us to calculate the day that Noah entered the ark.  In the year 2348 BC, Ussher's date for the Flood, the Pleiades culminated at midnight about a week before October 30th. Noah entered the ark a week before the water broke out. And given that the ark did not have windows facing upwards, the night before he entered the Ark would have been his last chance to observe the stars. (Genesis 7:10) Thus the Flood probably broke out between October 30 and November 1 of that year.  (Of course, the Julian calendar was not used prior to the Roman Empire.  However, astronomers use Julian Days to pinpoint events in ancient history.)

The Enuma Elish

The Babylonian creation story is called the Enuma Elish.  It tells how their god, Marduk, cut the goddess Tiamat, or Earth, in half, and from her made the moon, asteroids, comets and other celestial objects.  The Enuma Elish appears to be an adaptation of two Biblical historical events: Creation, and the Flood.  Tiamat is though to be derived from the same word as the Hebrew "tahom" which means the watery abyss.

In both the Creation and the Flood, the Earth began as or became a ball of water.  In both events the true God, Jehovah, separated the land from the sea, creating or restoring terrestrial life.

The Sumerians and later Babylonians replaced Jehovah with their own chief god. For the Sumerians this was Nibiru, and for the Babylonians it was Marduk. Both names were applied to the planet Jupiter which was considered to be the "king" of the planets, of which it is the largest.

There may be some truth in the idea recorded in the Enuma Elish that a celestial object interacted with the Earth, causing a debris field.

The Bible does not record the physical cause of the Flood.  It only says that Jehovah had decreed the Flood, and warned Noah in time to build the Ark.  When the Flood broke out, it says the fountains of the deep were broken and the windows of heaven were opened. This describes what happened, but does not tell us how it happened. 

Various creationist groups, such as Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Answers in Genesis (AIG), and Walt Brown (creationscience.com), have their own geological models of how the Flood happened.  Creation History (this site) is not in the business of working out scientific flood models.  But anyone with eyes to see can observe that every solid object in the Solar System appears to have been heavily bombarded with debris in the relatively recent past.  Assuming the Flood to have been the greatest cataclysm the Solar System ever experienced, it is reasonable to conclude that the cataclysm which caused the Flood also made the big mess of debris in the Solar System.

In the preflood times the year seems to have begun around the time we now call the Autumn Equinox.  The first month in the civil calendar of the ancient world was Tishri, which usually begins in late September.  In the post-Flood world, most nations eventually adopted a solar calendar that begins with either the Winter Solstice, when the days start to get longer, or with the Vernal Equinox, which is the beginning of Spring, when the leaves turn green and a new growing season begins, in the Northern Hemisphere.

Given that the Day of the Dead is associated with the Taurid meteor shower, and Flood began on the 17th day of the second month, it seems quite possible that the Flood was triggered by some interaction or collision with a celestrial object which created an orbiting debris field now known as the Taurid Swarm. The Earth encounters the debris from that collision or interaction every year when it passes through the Taurid swarm.  Thus the date of the Flood may be memorialized for us in the sky every Autumn.

Some of the objects in the Taurid meteor stream were and still are large enough to cause major catastrophes if they collide with the Earth.

The First Seven Year Famine

In the CFAH series we identified two seven year famines that are recorded with precise dates in ancient history.  The first is dated to the reign of King Djoser of the Third Dynasty of Egypt, which the CFAH shows to have been contemporary with Uonephes, or Merneith, of the First Dynasty of Egypt.  In CFAH-5 we found that Ishtar, whom we view as the same person as Isis, or Merneith, ruled Uruk, using the male name Dumuzi, from 2036 to 1994 BC.  The seven year famine of Djoser corresponds to the last seven years of her reign.  Incidentally, according to Ussher, Abraham was born in 1996 BC, midway through this first great famine.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh after defeating Huwawa, he returns in victory to Uruk, where Ishtar proposes marriage to him.  After Gilgamesh rejects her, she asks Anu, chief of the gods, for the "Bull of Heaven" to use against Gilgamesh.  Anu warns her that the Bull of Heaven will cause a seven year famine.  She says that she has supplies stored and demands the "weapon" anyway.  She then uses it, causing a seven year famine and other calamities.  After seven years Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu are able to kill the Bull of Heaven.

A similar story is found in Egypt, called the Book of the Heavenly Cow.  In this story, which was popular in the 18th Dynasty, the goddess Hathor (a cow) transforms into a monster that begins devouring the people and the land to punish them for disobeying Ra.  In order to get her to stop, the gods colored beer red to look like blood. When she drank it up, she fell asleep and turned back into the docile Hathor they knew and loved.

Both of these legends seem to be polytheistic explanations for the first seven year famine which may have been caused by a comet or asteroid strike from an object in the Taurid Swarm, and thus appearing to come from the "Bull of Heaven." If such a large comet or asteroid struck the earth, it could have kicked up enough dust, ash, and water vapor to cloud the skies for several years, thus causing the famine.

The Younger, Older, and Oldest Dryas

In the field of Natural History, the dating of ancient events uses Carbon-14 dating and other methods which have been miscalibrated due to an evolutionary worldview. The dates we are given for the Ice Age are greatly inflated due to that bias. However, the order of events is still accurately recorded.

Studies of paleoclimate have found that there were three abrupt cooling periods toward the end of the Pliestocene Era.   These were the Oldest, Older, and Younger Dryas events.  They are named after the alpine wildflower, Dryas octopetala, whose pollen, when found in sediment layers in lake beds, indicates colder temperatures.

The Younger Dryas event is dated by evolutionists to about 10,000 BC.  It is believed by some scientists to have been caused by the impact of a comet which broke into several pieces and struck the North American ice sheet, causing the extinction of most large animals in North America.  This is called the "Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis."

The Younger, Older, and Oldest Dryas events may be correlated to Biblical history as the Exodus, the Seven Year Famine of Joseph, and the Seven Year famine of Gilgamesh, which correlates to the Bull of Heaven and the Book of the Heavenly Cow.  The book of Jubilees records the same famine as that of Djoser in the life of Terah.  According to Ussher's chronology, Abram would have been born midway through the famine in 1996 BC.

Year BC	Event	Climate Event
2001	Famine of Djoser	Oldest Dryas
1708	Famine of Joseph	Older Dryas
~1500	Fire of Phaeton, Exodus	Younger Dryas

While the events surrounding the Exodus are much more complicated, and clearly had a divine origin, as recorded in Scripture, it stands to reason that the Older and Oldest Dryas events were caused by impacts of comets or other large objects in the Taurid Swarm.  The Sumerians are thought by some researchers to have even recorded the path of the celestial object that impacted the earth, on a tablet called the K8538 Planisphere.