Secularism teaches a very long, slow progress for humans. They believe that the discovery of fire, the wheel, and how to domesticate animals took millennia. With much trial and error, one culture very slowly evolved into another. The evidence, however, shows a very rapid, sudden, even explosive growth of population, civilization, and advanced technology from the very beginning.
Rapid, even explosive growth fits the records available in Hebrew History. Noah and his family left the ark about 2350 BC. (Ussher’s date) Arphaxad was born 2 years later, then Arphaxad and his wife gave birth to Salah 35 later, followed by Eber thirty years later. Thirty-four years later, one hundred one years after leaving the ark, Noah’s great, great, great grandson Peleg was born. And Noah lived another 249 years.
During Peleg’s lifetime men decided to rebel against God by building a tower. Ussher tells us that they went “into the valley of Shinar. Genesis 11:2 Here the people impiously conspired as we find in the book of Wisdom /APC Wis 10:5 to hinder this dispersion of them as commanded by God and began by Noah (as may be gathered from Genesis 11:4,6,8,9 compared together).” [Annals of the World] This took place during Peleg’s lifetime, somewhere between 101 and 340 years after the flood.
Josephus tells us, “Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah…” At this time there was only one language and only one culture. Under Nimrod’s leadership, they hunted down people to work on a tower. This explanation fits in with the rapid dispersment of nomad groups such as the Australian Aborigines and the Clovis people of the Americas. It also helps explain why the oldest artifacts show cave dwellers.
The Lord God intervened in the building of the tower. The languages were confounded and various people groups were divided. After the division, the various language groups began fighting among themselves. Unrepentant, they moved off and founded their own civilizations. Nimrod attempted to recapture these people for his own kingdom. This explains why civilizations suddenly appeared in China, Egypt, Europe, and the Indus Valley as well as Mesopotamia at nearly the same time. It shows why the Sumerian and Akkadian cultures are slightly older than the rest. It also explains why the oldest aspects of human culture are large buildings and warfare.
The tower of Babel and the confusion of languages took place near the beginning of the Ice Age. Meteorologist Michael Ord believes that the physical evidence shows that “the total length of time for a post-Flood Ice Age is about 700 years.”
Using a seven hundred year period for the end of the Ice Age, we look for an event at the end of this time period to indicate the end. The seven years of plenty in Egypt began in 1715 BC [Ussher] when Joseph was vizier of Egypt. That was 737 after the flood ended, according to Ussher’s dating. It would have been several decades after the flood before the ice began to accumulate. While there is nothing which says that the seven years of famine ended the ice age, it was a worldwide famine and the timing fits. The people of all the earth came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph, because the famine was severe in all the earth. Genesis 41:57 NASB
It is a reasonable assumption that Egypt, which depends on the flooding of the Nile, would experience greater harvests as the rapidly melting ice caps added more soil, nutrients and increased the areas flooded. It is another reasonable assumption that the areas formerly covered by ice in central Africa which had supplied the Nile with annual floodwater would be bare and unable to retain both rain water and water from the annual snow thaws. These areas which were barren because they were covered by ice needed to grow vegetation. The vegetation would keep the rain waters which used to be snow from immediately rushing down the Nile and out to sea without providing Egypt with annual floods. It is also possible that is the time Lake Victoria formed. Whatever the reason, at the end of seven years of drought, the Nile River returned to annual flood cycles. These are assumptions, but they are reasonable assumptions based on the facts.
II. The Post Flood World: the Ice Age
“And the Chaldaeans boasted further, that they had observed the Stars 473,000 years; and there were others who made the Kingdoms of Assyria, Media and Damascus, much older than the truth.” Sir Isaac Newton, (emphasis added), The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended printed posthumously by J. Tonson, J. Osborn and T. Longman. 1728, London, England
When Noah and his family left the ark, the volcanic activities of the flood made the oceans warmer than any time in earth’s history. It is probable that near the end of the flood that the mountains rose and the valleys descended.
You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
The waters were standing above the mountains.
At Your rebuke they fled,
At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away.
The mountains rose; the valleys sank down
To the place which You established for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass over,
So that they [the waters] will not return to cover the earth.
Psalm 104:6-9 NASB
As the sea level lowered, ice formed on the rising mountain peaks and the Ice Age began. This began soon after they left the ark; perhaps immediately but decades at the most.
Image credit: LAKE LOUISE, ALBERTA, CANADA, ICE CASTLE, GLACIER, BLUE http://www.pd4pic.com/lake-louise-alberta-canada-ice-castle-glacier-blue.html