Ethnology.
According to the Bible, all mankind have sprung from a single pair created by God six thousand years ago. Science does not admit that man is the result of a divine creative act, that all the races have descended from a single pair, or that his existence here is confined to the brief period of sixty centuries. She is not able to tell yet, even approximately, when man’s advent upon the earth occurred, but she has long since proved the Biblical record false, and shown that instead of his having occupied the earth but six thousand years he has been here at the least from ten to fifty times six thousand years.
Referring to the Biblical origin of man, Professor Huxley says: “Five-sixths of the public are taught this Adamitic monogenism as if it were an established truth, and believe it. I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of science, or duly instructed person, who does” (Methods and Results of Ethnology).
“There were giants in the earth in those days” (Gen. vi, 4).
The Bible, like the mythical records of other early nations, represents the earth as peopled with a race of giants. Yet the stature of man is as great to-day as it was five thousand years ago.
“And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years” (Gen. v, 5).
The Bible says that for a period of two thousand years men lived for centuries, that at least seven patriarchs attained to an age of nearly 1,000 years. The Egyptian records of that period show that man’s longevity was no greater then than it is now.
Not only the size and age of men, but their numbers are exaggerated by Bible writers. The Israelites, at the time they settled in Palestine, numbered, it is claimed, two or three millions. Out of this country, to make room for them, God cast “seven nations greater and mightier than” the Israelite nation (Deut. vii, 1). Palestine must then have sustained a population as great as Spain does now with a territory thirty times as large.
The census of Israel and Judah, taken in the time of David, places the number of warriors at 1,570,000 (1 Ch. xxi, 5). This makes the whole population twice as great as that of Illinois with an area nine times as large as Palestine and a soil ten times as fertile.
“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” (Gen. xi, 1):
“Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Gen. xi, 7).
The origin of the various languages of men is here attributed to a miraculous confusion of tongues. Science shows that languages had no such origin. Renan says:
“Far from placing unity at the beginning of language, it is necessary to look at such a unity as the slow and tardy result of an advanced civilization. In the beginning there were as many dialects as families.”
This Bible account of the confusion of tongues is contradicted by the preceding chapter of Genesis (x, 5, 20, 31), which, referring to the children of Japheth, Ham, and Shem, says they were divided “every one after his tongue,” “after their families, after their tongues.”