Shem, Ham and Japheth; Jericho and Göbekli Tepe

 I wanted to write something about the world’s first known city and the world’s first known temple site. Each were built within the Fertile Crescent following roughly an arc between Cairo and Babylon via Turkey south of the Atlas Mountains. Each date to about 10,000 B.C.

That era around 10,000 B.C. was a pivotal time in human history. The great Wisconsin Ice Age had nearly ended. Ocean water levels had risen 200 feet and would reach the high water mark about 8500 B.C. (until recent times of course with human caused atmospheric heating melting even more glacial ice and sending sea level up a little but higher though nothing so dramatic as before). The paleolithic era had nearly concluded having begun about 350,000 B.C. Mankind had not yet invented pottery yet would by 6500 B.C.

Göbekli Tepe is a great male-dominated hunter-gather society with great permanent stone temples decorated with animal carvings. It existed between 10,000 and 8500 B.C. The stone carvings were ritually buried on occasion. The final group of carvings are of humans. That is notable. Not only was hunting becoming less good with so many animals being killed, a son of Noah may have reached the pagan site and persuaded them to become followers of God rather than votaries of dumb animals even though they provided food and were important.

It is not as silly of an idea as it seems. Agriculture had not yet been invented yet was in the process. People were beginning to cultivate wild grain and animals were being domesticated for food and as tools (wolves into dogs). Adam and Eve may have s[pent their time in Eden sometime before 10,000 B.C. in a present desert region of the Saudi Peninsula or even in the Sahara during the ice age when each were far different than today. Adequate water existed then and the climate was milder. Having been tested by God they were cast out into the world; Eden literally disappeared with the end of the Wisconsin. Just as the land bridge named Berengia between Russia and Alaska disappeared by 8500 B.C. beneath the waters of the Bering Sea, the sea level Rose in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea burying any proton-human settlements along the shores. Adam and Eve may have lived alone or found a small group of people to live with along the Persian Gulf shore. It is probable that a first worldly city began there perhaps as early as 12 to 14,000 years before Christ. It was supposedly an industrious yet wicked and sinful people that God became discouraged with regarding their human nature. If they were living some were on a land-spit of the Euphrates river below the present sea level and if there was a flood arising up the Tigris-Euphrates from some burst of dammed up glacial meltwater during a rainstorm last forty days and nights the entire world of Noah’s experience may have been submerged and the mud dwelling destroyed.

There were evidently other humans existing in the world while the Adam and Eve experiment was being conducted. Maybe they were a test case to determine if humans created in perfect conditions could ever be worth a damn- who can say for sure? They failed and were moved out from Utopia to work for a living and give birth to short-lived kids (eventually) that could live for ever as they could have possibly if not for being found to be disobedient. It is possible that Genesis is itself a kind of history sketch of the natural history provided by God to the world in a kind of abstract summary given to inform humanity of general parameters until they were smart or learned enough to understand that.

Noah may have known the farming trade and given his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth the knowledge of farming and vine-keeping. They were sent out into the world to mix with a pre-existing population apparently. Earlier Cain who killed his brother Abel was cast out yet protected by a mark warning others not to kill him. He journeyed east of Eden, and perhaps north to the area of the fertile Crescent that gave rise to settlements like Göbekli Tepe and several others by 800 B.C.; city sites given names like Tel Caramel, Abu Huraya, Jerf El Ahmar, Karahan Tepe, Urfa, Cayonu and Nevali Cori. Maybe Cain farther east and organized people in his own way and the sons of Noah reached the settlements like Göbekli Tepe and Jericho. They have have brought significant cultural changes as missionary priests although the continuity was lost over passing millennia.

Jericho was a great for the era farming community with a different kind of pagan focus on Earth Mud-mother neo-dieties- maybe a different son had a different effect on the locals than the hunting nomads of Göbekli Tepe. Maybe the locals of Jericho took the agriculture knowledge and threw out the part about God. The first tower known to history was built excavated in Jericho. It is perhaps 30 feet tall- a speaking pulpit for an interesting, informative, edifying son of Noah?

It as of course much later when Abraham was called from Sumer to travel out of Southern Mesopotamia to journey north- as late as 2000 B.C. So it is easy to understand the great amount of time that was passed between a possible place-time for Adam and Eve during the middle of the end of the Wisconsin 18,000- 12,000 B.C.) until the bronze age (3300 B.C. to 1200 B.C.) and the Iron Age when David and Solomon lived.

One may interpret the Bible and history in numerous ways because the reference object to words and time become rather vague with time. One might find the work of Saul Kripke in 'Naming and Necessity’ add W.V.O. Quine in ‘Ontological Relativity and other Essays’ interesting and informative on the realist vs. nominalist nature of words and lexicons of language).