The seventh day is the modern or human era in geology; and, though it can not yet boast of any physical changes so great as those of past periods, it is still of much interest, as affording the facts on which we must depend for explanations of past changes; and as immediately connected in time with those later tertiary periods which afford so many curious problems to the geological student. The actual connection of the human with preceding periods is still involved in some obscurity; and, as we shall see, there has recently been a strong tendency to throw back the origin of man into prehistoric ages of enormous length, on grounds which are, however, much less certain than is commonly imagined. This question we have to examine; but before entering upon it may shortly sketch the actual import of the statements of the Hebrew Scriptures respecting what may be called the prehistoric duration of the human species. This is the more necessary, as the most crude notions seem very widely to prevail on the subject. I shall, therefore, in this place notice some general facts deducible from the Bible, and which may be useful in appreciating the true relation of the human era to those which preceded it. It will be understood that I shall endeavor merely to present a picture of what the Bible actually teaches, and which any one can verify by reading the book of Genesis.
1. The local centre of creation of the human species, and probably of a group of creatures coeval with it, was Eden; a country of which the Scriptures give a somewhat minute geographical description. It was evidently a district of Western Asia; and, from its possession of several important rivers, rather a region or large territory than a limited spot, such as many, who have discussed the question of the site of Eden, seem to suppose. In this view it is a matter of no moment to fix its site more nearly than the indication of the Bible that it included the sources and probably large portions of the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and perhaps the Oxus and Jaxartes. Into the minor difficulties respecting the site of Eden it would be unprofitable to enter, and it will matter little if we accept that view, which, however, I think less probable, that it was placed in the lower part of the valley of the Euphrates. I may merely mention one particular of the Biblical description, because it throws light on the great antiquity of this geographical delineation, and has been strangely misconceived by expositors—the relation of those rivers to Cush or Ethiopia and Havilah, a tribal name derived from that of a grandson of Cush. On consulting the tenth chapter of Genesis, it will be found that the Cushites under Nimrod, very soon after the deluge, are stated to have pushed their migrations and conquests along the Tigris to the northward, and established there the first empire. It is probably this primitive Cushite empire, called Ethiopia in our translation, which in the epoch of the description of Eden occupied the Euphratean valley, and being bounded on one side by the river called Gihon, was thus believed to extend over the old site of Eden. Thus the Cush or Ethiopia of the description has no direct connection with the African Ethiopia, and speculations based on such a supposed connection are groundless. On the other hand this feature furnishes an interesting coincidence with other parts of Genesis, and throws light on many obscure points in the early history of man; and since this Cushite empire had perished even before the time of Moses, it indicates a still more ancient tradition respecting the primeval abode of our species.
2. Before the deluge this region must have been the seat of a dense population, which, according to the Biblical account, must have made considerable advances in the arts, and at the same time sunk very low in moral debasement. [101] Whether any remains of the central portions of this ancient population or its works exist will probably not be determined with absolute certainty till we have accurate geological investigations of the whole country in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea and along the great rivers of Western Asia, though there is nothing unreasonable in the belief that some of the old prehistoric men whose remains are discovered in caves and river gravels in Europe may belong to the antediluvian race. Should such remains be found, we might infer, from the extreme longevity and other characteristics assigned to the antediluvians, that their skeletons would present peculiarities entitling them to be considered a well-marked variety of the human species, and this not of a low type of physical organization. We may also infer that the family of man very early divided into two races—one retaining in greater purity the moral endowments of the species, the other excelling in the mechanical and fine arts; and that there were rude and savage outlying communities of men then as at present. If the so-called palæolithic men of Europe are antediluvian, they were probably of such outlying tribes, and possibly of the mixed race which sprung up in the later antediluvian age, and who are described as mighty men physically, and men of violence. It would be quite natural that this intermixture of the Sethite and Cainite races should produce a race excelling both in energy and physical endowments—the "giants" that were in those days. [102] If any remains of the two central nations of the antediluvian period are ever discovered, we may confidently anticipate that the distinctive characteristics of these races may be detected in their osseous structures as well as in their works of art. Farther, it is to be inferred from notices in the fourth chapter of Genesis, that before the deluge there was both a nomadic and a settled population, and that the principal seat of the Cainite, or more debased yet energetic branch of the human family, was to the eastward of the site of Eden. No intimations are given by which the works of art of antediluvian times could be distinguished from those of later periods; but that curious summary of the treasures of antediluvian man contained in the notice that the land of Havilah produced gold and agate and pearl (Gen. ii., 12) would lead us to believe that the early antediluvian age was on the whole an age of stone, in which flint for weapons, and gold and shell wampum for ornaments, were the leading kinds of wealth. On the other hand, the notices of antediluvian metallurgy, and the building and construction of the ark, would lead us to infer that the later antediluvians had attained to much perfection in some constructive arts—a conclusion which harmonizes with the otherwise inexplicable perfection of such art soon after the deluge, as evidenced not only by the story of Babel, but also by the early works of the Assyrians and Egyptians.
3. When the antediluvian population had fully proved itself unfit to enter into the divine scheme of moral renovation, it was swept away by a fearful physical catastrophe. The deluge might, in all its relations, furnish material for an entire treatise. I may remark here, as its most important geological peculiarity, that it was evidently a local convulsion. The object, that of destroying the human race and the animal population of its peculiar centre of creation, the preservation of specimens of these creatures in the ark, and the physical requirements of the case, necessitate this conclusion, which is now accepted by the best Biblical expositors, [103] and which inflicts no violence on the terms of the record. Viewed in this light, the phenomena recorded in the Bible, in connection with geological probabilities, lead us to infer that the physical agencies evoked by the divine power to destroy this ungodly race were a subsidence of the region they inhabited, so as to admit the oceanic waters, and extensive atmospherical disturbances connected with that subsidence, and perhaps with the elevation of neighboring regions. In this case it is possible that the Caspian Sea, which is now more than eighty feet below the level of the ocean, [104] and which was probably much more extensive then than at present, received much of the drainage of the flood, and that the mud and sand deposits of this sea and the adjoining desert plains, once manifestly a part of its bottom, conceal any remains that exist of the antediluvian population. In connection with this, it may be remarked that, in the book of Job, Eliphaz speaks as if the locality of those wicked nations which existed before the deluge was known and accessible in his time:
"Hast thou marked the ancient way
Which wicked men have trodden,
Who were seized [by the waters] in a moment,
And whose foundations a flood swept away?"
—Job xxii., 15.
On comparing this statement with the answer of Job in the 26th chapter, verse 5th, it would seem that the ungodly antediluvians were supposed to be still under the waters; a belief quite intelligible if the Caspian, which, on the latest and most probable views of the locality of the events of this book, was not very remote from the residence of Job, [105] was supposed to mark the position of the pre-Noachic population, as the Dead Sea afterward did that of the cities of the plain. Some of the dates assigned to the book of Job would, however, render it possible that this last catastrophe is that to which he refers:
"The Rephaim tremble from beneath
The waters and their inhabitants.
Sheol is naked before him,
And destruction hath no covering."
The word Rephaim here has been variously rendered "shades of the dead" and "giants." It is properly the family or national name of certain tribes of gigantic Hamite men (the Anakim, Emim, etc.) inhabiting Western Asia at a very remote period; and it must here refer either to them or to the still earlier antediluvian giants. [106]
It is also an important point to be noticed here that the narrative of the deluge in Genesis is given as the testimony or record of an eye-witness, and is to be so understood; and that the terms of the record imply, not as usually held that all sorts of animals were taken into Noah's ark, but only a selection, the character of which is clearly indicated by a comparison of the five lists of animals given in the narrative. Bearing this in mind, and noticing that the writer tells of his own experience as to the rise of the water, the drifting of the ark, the disappearance of all visible shore, and the sounding fifteen cubits where a hill had before been, all the difficulties of the narrative of the deluge will at once disappear. These difficulties have in fact arisen from regarding the story as the composition of a historian, not as what it manifestly is, the log or journal of a contemporary, introduced with probably little change by the compiler of the book.
After the deluge, we find the human race settled in the plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, attracted thither by the fertility of their alluvial soils. There we find them engaging in a great political scheme, no doubt founded on recollections of the old antediluvian nationalities, and on a dread of the evils which able and aspiring men would anticipate from that wide dispersion of the human race that appears to have been intended by the Creator in the new circumstances of the earth. They commenced accordingly the erection of a city or tower at Babel, in the plain of Shinar, to form a common bond of union, a great public work that should be a rallying-point for the race, and around which its patriotism might concentrate itself. The attempt was counteracted by an interposition of divine Providence; and thenceforth the diffusion of the human race proceeded unchecked, carrying with it everywhere the memory of the celebrated tower, which perpetuated itself not only in the mounds of Assyria and Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, but in the teocallis and temple mounds of the New World. The Babel enterprise is in fact the first recorded development of that mound-building instinct which the earlier races everywhere evince, and which has been a distinguishing characteristic more especially of the Cushite or Turanian race, and has apparently made them the teachers of constructive arts to all other peoples. Perhaps a dread of the total decay and loss of the surviving antediluvian arts in construction and other matters may have been one impelling motive to the building of Babel. Perhaps it was connected with the communistic ideas of the Turanian race, and their conflict with the patriarchal habits of the Semites. Out of the enterprise at Babel, however, arose a new type of evil, which, in the forms of military despotism, the spirit of conquest, hero-worship, and the alliance of these influences with literature and the arts, has been handed down through every succeeding age to our own time. The name of Nimrod, the son of Cush, has been preserved to us in the Bible, and also apparently in the tablets and inscriptions of Assyria, as the founder of the first despotism. This bold and ambitious man, subsequently deified under different names, established a Hamite or Turanian empire, which appears to have extended its sway over the tribes occupying Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, everywhere supporting its power by force of arms, and introducing a debasing polytheistic hero-worship, and certain forms of art probably derived from antediluvian times. The centre of this Cushite empire, however, gave way to the rising power of Assyria or the Ashurite branch of the sons of Shem, at a period antecedent to the dawn of profane history, except in its mythical form; and when the light of secular history first breaks upon us, we find Egypt standing forth as the only stable representative of the arts, the systems, and the superstitions of the old Cushite empire, of which it had been the southern branch; while other remnants of the Hamite races, included in the empire of Nimrod, were scattered over Western Asia, and, migrating into Europe, with or after the ruder but less demoralized sons of Japheth, carried with them their characteristic civilization and mythology, to take root in new forms in Greece and Italy. [107] Meanwhile the Assyrian and Persian (Elamite) races were growing in Middle Asia, and probably driving the more eastern remnants of the Nimrodic empire into India, borrowing at the same time their superstitions and their claims to universal dominion. These views, which I believe to correspond with the few notices in the Bible and in ancient history, and to be daily receiving new confirmations from the investigations of the ancient Assyrian monuments, enable us to understand many mysterious problems in the early history of man. They give us reason to suspect that the principle of the first empire was an imitation of the antediluvian world, and that its arts and customs were mainly derived from that source. They show how it happens that Egypt, a country so far removed from the starting-point of man after the deluge, should appear to be the cradle of the arts, and they account for the Hamite and perhaps antediluvian elements, mixed with primeval Biblical ideas, as the cherubim, etc., in the old heathenism of India, Assyria, and Southern Europe, and which they share with Egypt, having derived them from the same source. They also show how it is that in the most remote antiquity we find two well-developed and opposite religious systems; the pure theism of Noah, and those who retained his faith, and the idolatry of those tribes which regarded with adoring veneration the objects and stages of the creative work, the grander powers and objects of nature, the mighty Cainites of the world before the flood, and the postdiluvian leaders who followed them in their violence, their cultivation of the arts, and their rebellion against God. These heroes were identified with imaginative conceptions of the heavenly bodies, animals, and other natural objects, associated with the fortunes of cities and nations, with particular territories, and with war and the useful arts, transmitted under different names to one country after another, and localized in each; and it is only in comparatively modern times that we have been able to recognize the full certainty of the view held long since by many ingenious writers, that among the greater gods of Egypt and Assyria, and of consequence among those also of Greece and Rome, were Nimrod, Ham, Ashur, Noah, Mizraim, and other worthies and tyrants of the old world; and to suspect that Tubalcain and Naamah, and other antediluvian names, were similarly honored, though subsequently overshadowed by more recent divinities. The later Assyrian readings of Rawlinson, Hincks, and the lamented George Smith, and the more recent works on Egyptian antiquities, are full of pregnant hints on these subjects. It would, however, lead us too far from our immediate subject to enter more fully into these questions. I have referred to them merely to point out connecting-links between the secular and sacred history of the earlier part of the human period, as a useful sequel to our comparison of the latter with the conclusions of science, and as furnishing hints which may guide the geologist in connecting the human with the tertiary period, and in distinguishing between the antediluvian and postdiluvian portions of the former.