By the time Moses wrote Genesis (circa 1420 B.C.E.), men had already been living for some two thousand years in developed civilizations of considerable size, sustained largely by agricultural food production. In Genesis 1 Moses describes the creation of man – an event that occurred at some moment long before his time. According to anthropologists, the date of the appearance of man depends very much on which of our ancestral species one chooses to regard as having the characteristics that define it as being a creature worthy of the name “man”. In SHP it states that:

. . . we now know that we are the remote descendants of apes who lived in Africa about 5 million years ago. Modern apes, which are also descended from the same original stock, are kin, not ancestors. [p.30]

The Old Stone Age began nearly 3 million years ago, with the first rough tools made by the first rough beasts slouching towards humanity, and ended only 12,000 years ago . . . in human terms, the Old Stone Age is a deep abyss of time – more than 99.5 percent of our existence from which we crawled into the soft beds of civilization only yesterday. Even our modern subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, is between ten and twenty times older than the oldest civilization. [p.32]

Homo sapiens sapiens is also known as the Cro-Magnon man, who appeared about 130,000 years ago, at the same time as the Neanderthal man. We can safely assume that the “man” that Moses says God created in his own image is the modern man - Homo sapiens sapiens – the only kind of man Moses could have been aware of. Yet, as is stated above, this modern man was already ten to twenty times older than the civilization Moses was living in.

Before I proceed further, I must pose a question, the importance of which will become apparent in due course: Did the civilization in which Moses lived have any memory, written or word-of-mouth, of the history of mankind in the many centuries that preceded their own times?

I want to propose a “what-if” theory: What if Moses (or whoever wrote Genesis) had at least some sense, or inkling, of the huge span of human history that must have elapsed from the moment, postulated by the author of Genesis, at which God created man in his own image to the time when Genesis was written.

Moses himself had seen the Egyptian pyramids and had lived in that already highly developed civilization. Surely, Moses was an educated man, one who could read and write. Without knowledge of the history of the ancestors of his people - of Terah, the father of Abraham, who was born in Ur, of Noah who was flooded out of Eden - Moses (or perhaps his educated scribes, if such was the case) could not have related the events in the book of Genesis in the way that he, or they, did. And finally, surely reason, if nothing else, would tell him that man could not have progressed from the moment of his creation to a civilized state in one leap. Reason would tell him that much time must have elapsed just to satisfy God’s command to “be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth,” if for no other reasons.

Let us now go to SHP to see what it tells us about the times and places that are recounted in Genesis, having recourse to today’s large store of scientific knowledge on the subject:

The earliest [civilization] of all was Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq. The Sumerians, whose own ethnic and linguistic stock is unclear, set a pattern that Semitic cultures and others in the Old World would follow. They came to exemplify both the best and the worst of the civilized life, and they told us about themselves in cuneiform script on clay tablets, one of the most enduring mediums for the human voice, a writing like the tracks of trained birds. They set down the oldest written stories in the world, a body of texts known as The Epic of Gilgamesh, compiled in “strong-walled Uruk, the city of great streets” around the time that Stonehenge and the first Egyptian pyramids were being built. Legends we know from the Hebrew Bible – the Garden of Eden, the Flood – appear in Gilgamesh in earlier forms . . [p.65]

Had Moses and his contemporaries read The Epic of Gilgamesh? Did he perhaps have knowledge, passed on by word-of-mouth in the from of legends, of times even more ancient, of the first permanent human settlement at Jericho some 6500 years before his time, and perhaps of the cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers, the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, who inhabited the region we now call the Middle East even before Jericho - a place that figures prominently in the Bible - became a permanent settlement?

SHP tells us what devastation men wrought in the place called in the Bible “the Garden of Eden”, and in Sumer – the ancestral home of Abraham:

. . it’s a mistake to assume that the Fertile Crescent, for all its natural endowments, its plants and animals suitable for domestication, developed quickly or easily. Even after several thousand years of farming and herding, the biggest Middle Eastern settlements – Jericho (near the Dead Sea) and Catal Huyuk (in Anatolia) – were still tiny, covering only ten acres and thirty acres, respectively.

Insofar as the Garden of Eden had a physical geography, this was it. The serpent, however, was not the only enemy. Fortifications at Jericho and elsewhere speak of competition for land and a heavier human presence than the sites alone attest. Nor was the farming life easier or healthier than the hunting life had been: people were smaller in build and worked longer hours than non-farmers. Average life expectancy, deduced from burials at Catal Huyuk, was twenty-nine years for women and thirty-four for men. By 6000 B.C., there is evidence of widespread deforestation and erosion. Cavalier fire-setting and over-grazing by goats may have been chief culprits, but lime-burning for plaster and whitewash also destroyed the woodland, until it became the thorny scrub and semi-desert seen there today. By 5500 B.C, many of the early Neolithic sites were abandoned. . . But, . . . these people had room to flee and start again.

Self-driven from Eden, (God’s flaming sword being perhaps a glint of the fires they had set in the hills), they found a second paradise lower down on the great floodplain of the Tigris and Euphrates, the land called Mesopotamia, or Iraq. The look of this place is fresh in our minds from modern wars: treeless plains and dying oases, salt pans, dust storms, oil slicks, and burnt-out tanks. Here and there, crumbling in the ruthless sun and wind, are great mounds of mud brick – ruins of ancient cities whose names still echo in the cellars of our culture – Babylon, Uruk, and Ur of the Chaldees, where Abraham was born.

Back in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C., southern Iraq had been a marshy delta of channels teeming with fish, reeds taller than a house, and sandbars rich in date palms. Wild boar and waterfowl lived in the canebrakes. The alluvial earth, if tilled, could yield a hundredfold on every seed, for this was new land, laid down at the head of the Persian Gulf. “New” in a manner of speaking: the people who settled here had in effect followed their old fields, which had been washed from the worn hills by the great rivers flowing, as the Bible says, out of Eden

God had spread a second chance before the children of Adam and Eve, but in this recycled Eden, unlike the first, they would eat only by sweat and toil. “The exploitation of this natural paradise,” wrote Gordon Childe in his classic work, The Most Ancient East, “required intensive labor and the organized co-operation of large bodies of men. Arable land had literally to be created . . . by a ‘separation’ of land from water; the swamps must be drained; the floods controlled; the life-giving waters led to the rainless desert by artificial canals.” It seems that in this case at least, the hierarchies of civilization grew with the demands of water control.

The scattered mud villages grew into towns. And by 3000 B.C., these towns had become small cities, rebuilt again and again on their own debris until they rose above the plain in earthen mounds known as tells. Throughout most of its thousand-year run, Sumerian civilization was dominated by a dozen such cities, each the heart of a small state. Only twice was a unified kingdom briefly forged: first by the Semitic invader Sargon, and later by the Third Dynasty of Ur. It is thought that four-fifths of the Sumerian population lived in urban centers, and that the entire population was only half a million. [p.66-68]

A small civilization such as Sumer, dependant on a single ecosystem and without high ground, was especially vulnerable to flood and drought. Such disasters were viewed, then as now, as “acts of God” (or gods). Like us, the Sumerians were only dimly aware that human activity was also to blame. Floodplains will always flood, sooner or later, but deforestation of great watersheds upstream made inundations much fiercer and more deadly than they would otherwise have been. Woodlands, with their carpet of undergrowth, mosses, and loam, work like great sponges, soaking up rainfall and allowing it to filter slowly into the earth below; trees drink up water and breathe it into the air. But wherever primeval woods and their soils have been destroyed by cutting, burning, overgrazing, or ploughing, the bare subsoil bakes hard in dry weather and acts like a roof in wet. The result is flash floods, sometimes carrying such heavy loads of silt and gravel that they rush from steep ravines like liquid concrete. Once the waters reach a floodplain, they slow down, dump their gravel, and spread out in a brown tide that oozes its way to the sea.

Staggering alluvial forces are at work in Mesopotamia. In the 5,000 years since Sumerian records began, the twin rivers have filled in eighty miles of the Persian Gulf. Iraq’s second city of Basra was open sea in ancient times. The plains of Sumer are more than two hundred miles wide. In times of an unusually great flood – the kind that might happen once a century or so – a king standing in the rain on a temple softening under his feet, would see nothing but water between himself and the rim of the sky.

Not only did Adam and Eve drive themselves from Eden, but the eroded landscape they left behind set the stage for Noah’s flood. In the early days, when the city mounds were low and easily swamped, the only refuge would have been a boat. The Sumerian version of the legend, told in the first person by a man named Utnapishtim, has the ring of real events, with vivid detail on freak weather and broken dams. In it we may see not only the forerunner of the biblical story but the first eyewitness account of a man-made environmental catastrophe.

Rivers rinse salt from rocks and earth and carry it to the sea. But when people divert water onto arid land, much of it evaporates and the salt stays behind. Irrigation also causes water-logging, allowing brackish groundwater to seep upward. Unless there is good drainage, long fallowing, and enough rainfall to flush the land, irrigation schemes are future salt pans.

Southern Iraq was one of the most inviting areas to begin irrigation, and one of the hardest in which to sustain it: one of the most seductive traps ever laid by progress. After a few centuries of bumper yields, the land began to turn against its tillers. The first sign of trouble was the decline in wheat, a crop that behaves like the coalminer’s canary. As time went by, the Sumerians had to replace wheat with barley, which has a higher tolerance for salt. By 2500 B.C. wheat was only 15 percent of the crop, and by 2100 B.C. Ur had given up wheat altogether.

As builders of the world’s first great watering schemes, the Sumerians can hardly be blamed for failing to foresee their new technology’s consequences. But political and cultural pressures certainly made matters worse. When populations were smaller, the cities had been able to sidestep the problem by lengthening fallow periods, abandoning ruined fields, and bringing new land under production, albeit with rising effort and cost. After the mid-third millennium, there was no new land to be had. Population was then at a peak, the ruling class top-heavy . . . the Sumerians failed to reform their society to reduce its environmental impact. On the contrary, they tried to intensify production, especially during the Akkadian empire (c. 2350-2150 B.C.) and their swan song under the Third Dynasty of Ur, which fell in 2000 B.C.

The short-lived empire of Ur . . . [stuck] to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory. Canals were lengthened, fallow periods reduced, population increased, and the economic surplus concentrated on Ur itself to support grandiose building projects. The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered.

By 2000 B.C., scribes were reporting that the earth had “turned white.” All crops, including barley, were failing. Yields fell to a third of their original levels. The Sumerians’ thousand years in the sun of history came to an end. Political power shifted north to Babylon and Assyria, and much later, under Islam, to Baghdad. Northern Mesopotamia is better drained than the south, but even there the same cycle of degradation would be repeated by empire after empire, down to modern times. No one, it seems, was willing to learn from the past. Today, fully half of Iraq’s irrigated land is saline – the highest proportion in the world, followed by the other centers of floodplain civilization, Egypt and Pakistan.

As for the ancient cities of Sumer, a few struggled on as villages, but most were utterly abandoned. Even after 4,000 years, the land around them remains sour and barren, still white with the dust of progress. The desert in which Ur and Uruk stand is a desert of their making. [p.77-79]

In short, today we understand that it was man who destroyed the place called “Eden” and also the Sumerian civilization. Both were destroyed by reckless deforestation and soil erosion due to intensive farming, in order to meet the insatiable demands of a growing population. In Sumer there was also soil contamination through irrigation which delivered the coup de grace to this civilization

Archeological evidence suggests that “Eden” was abandoned by 5500 B.C.E., having been reduced to the “thorny scrub and semi-desert” that Moses could observe with his own eyes in his own time. The “Noah” flood probably occurred prior to that, because SHP infers that the people who settled in Mesopotamia “in effect followed their old fields, which had been washed from the worn hills by the great rivers flowing, as the Bible says, out of Eden.” [p.68] Best guesses, based on written records and archeology, estimate the time of the Gilgamesh flood to be around 3000 B.C.E. Thus, the “Noah” flood probably preceded the one in Sumer, although there is much controversy about both dates. In any case, the point I want to make here is that Moses probably knew not only about the two catastrophic floods but also that they were caused by men’s abuse and misuse of the land. Certainly, The Epic of Gilgamesh records in writing the fate of the Sumerian civilization in unmistakable terms.

All human civilizations, from the most ancient to the most modern, have been based primarily on agriculture; and all of them have committed nearly identical degradation of the land that sustained them. SHP documents the degradation which led up to the ultimate demise of many by-gone civilizations, and foretells the probable collapse of our own.

Moses, of course, could have had an inkling only of the reasons for the collapse of a couple of such civilizations – Sumer, and possibly “Eden.” He also had witnessed in person the periodic afflictions that visited the Egyptian agricultural civilization which was entirely dependent on the good behavior of the Nile river. The Nile was a not-so-obvious blessing for the Egyptian civilization; it was the Nile which in effect kept it in check, preventing it from over-populating itself. As described in SHP:

Egypt’s farming methods were simple – as conservative as the culture itself – and worked with, rather than against, the natural water cycle. The Nile valley’s narrowness and drainage slowed the salt build-up that poisoned Sumer; and . . . ancient Egyptians generally knew better than to build on farmland.

Egypt’s population growth was unusually slow. Throughout the Pharaonic, Roman, and Arabic periods, it stayed well below world average – taking 3,000 years, from the Old Kingdom to Cleopatra’s time, to rise from under two million to 6 million, and rising no further until the nineteenth century, when modern irrigation began. This tells us that 6 million people, or 400 per square mile, was the carrying capacity of the Nile farmland, a limit grimly enforced by famine when the river faltered and by high levels of water-borne disease. Nature made Egypt live within its means. [p.103-104]

Finally, Moses probably knew from stories and legends about the many kinds of wild animals that had once been plentiful in his region of the Middle East and were now scarce or absent. He must have known of the exotic creatures the Egyptian rulers liked to import, for show and amusement, from distant regions of Africa. Perhaps he understood that men had eradicated these animals from regions where they now cultivated their fields of crops and grazed their herds of domesticated creatures. But, we can be quite sure that Moses did not feel, or think, that there was anything wrong with this picture. Animals had no other value except for the use by man. After all, Moses was a Cro-Magnon man, the one he believed was created in God’s image. He had the same innate primordial instincts and cravings of the Cro-Magnon man that still lurk inside all of us humans today.

What we know today that Moses did not know