"And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them 'Be fruitful, and multiply and fill the earth...bring forth abundantly on the earth, and multiply in it'" (Gen.9.1,7 RSV). The implication of Gen. 9 is that the present human race is descended from the sons of Noah; all others on the whole of the planet were blotted out by the Flood. It has been argued that the expression in v 19 "These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled" need only refer to that part of the earth with which the Bible historians were acquainted, and that other nations in other regions escaped the disaster. It is true that the Hebrew 'erets' 'the earth', can and does in its various occurrences refer sometimes to the planet as such and sometimes to the particular part of the earth under discussion without necessarily involving the whole. A similar assertion is made in Gen. 7.21 that all animal life died that moved upon the earth. but this can certainly not be taken to refer to the entire earth for there are still many species, of animals and birds peculiar to lands remote from south-western Asia, such as Australia, South America and certain tropical islands. All the evidence is that they have not migrated there from that centre. A more definite fact, one that is implicit in the Scripture account, is that, contrary to popular belief, no carnivorous animals ("beasts of the earth" in Bible language) went into the Ark at all. The herbivorous and the domestic animals were those gathered in by Noah; the lions and tigers and similar wild animals were left to roam the mountains and in many cases to survive the Flood and perpetuate their own kind when it was all over (compare Gen. 7.14, 8.17 & 9.10). One thing is certain; the plains of south western Asia were devastated by the Flood and no life there could have survived. If the Vailian hypothesis as to the cause of the Flood is the correct explanation, the same must have been true of many other parts of the earth's surface. There is also another consideration so far as the human race is concerned, alluded to by the geologist Hugh Miller in his "Testimony of the Rocks" (1857). Miller refers to the evidences of progressive physical degeneration in peoples migrating outward to wild inhospitable habitats from an initially civilised centre. Bereft of cultural, religious or spiritual stimulus, such peoples eventually die out and become extinct. He points out that these were the conditions obtaining before the Flood and that in all probability the human race, after first spreading over the earth, had almost died out again by the time the Flood came. Jewish tradition, as exemplified in the "Book of Jubilees" (150 BC), certainly gives this same picture. It could well be, therefore, that God had intervened to preserve alive this small party out of what was, by now a fast disappearing world population with which to make a fresh start in populating the earth. The unbridled sin of the antediluvians had all but brought the actual suicide of the human race. On this basis, this treatise is intended to demonstrate the practicability of the Genesis thesis, that all the present nations of the world owe their origin to the three sons of Noah. It relates the process of population growth to the span of time which appears to have elapsed from the day the little family emerged from the Ark to the beginning of recorded history so far as it can be deduced from the inscriptions and relics that have been recovered by archaeologists from the vanished settlements of the oldest civilisation at present known. So, Sumer carries that story onward until Abraham left the Sumerian city of Ur to find the land to which God had called him, and Bible history really begins.

So the story returns to that moment when the little group of eight people stood on the slopes of that mountain in southern Iraq looking over the wide expanse of mud-covered plain a thousand feet below them. They knew that they must now find themselves a place where they could live, build their homes, tend their flocks and, grow their crops. Most important of all they needed a place to raise children who would follow them in the ways of the Lord and create a new society upon earth in which the evil of the past bad old days would find no place. What kind of a life did these early pioneers experience in reality?

First, what were the physical conditions? What is known, in this 21^st century, of the nature of the world in general, five thousand years ago, and of southern Iraq and north-western Iran, where they found themselves? It would appear that they were living at a time of much more favourable climatic conditions than the world has known since. The leading authority on ancient climatic conditions is C.E.P.Brooks, who, in his "Climate through the Ages" (1970) says that between 5500 and 3000 BC the earth experienced what he calls a warm post-glacial optimum. In this period the seas and land were much warmer than now and there was no polar ice; the land was fertile and forest-clad up to the poles. At about 3000 BC there was a sudden and catastrophic change for the worse with abnormal volcanic activity over the next four centuries. This led to increasing cold and the onset of Arctic ice. The interest in all this lies in the fact that the Biblical indicated date of about 3300 BC for the Flood would imply that for three centuries the Sons of Noah enjoyed unusually favourable conditions for human life. S.F.Markham, in "Climate and the energy of nations" (1942), had already pointed out that the most virile civilisations have always flourished in those parts of the world where the normal temperature at the time encompassed the 70 F (approx 21 C) mark. Brooks' work shows that this in fact was the case world wide at the time in question. The implication of this is that by Divine overruling in the processes of Nature, the world was in the best possible condition to facilitate the rapid increase of the human race.

In this connection there is an interesting point in Gen. 9.7. God told the sons of Noah to "be fruitful, and multiply". "Bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein". There is an emphasis here which is lacking in the similar injunction given to the first human pair in the story of Eden. The Lord merely told them (Gen. 1.28) to "be fruitful and multiply". It is almost as if, in this later stage of history, there was an urge to a more than usual rapid increase in the growth of world population, to subsist at least until the emergent race had become sufficiently numerous to gain a good start, so to speak, in repopulating the earth. There is some correspondence here with the position of Israel in Egypt fifteen centuries later, when they also settled in the most fertile area in the land and increased so rapidly as to excite the alarm and resentment of the Egyptians (Exodus 1. 7,12). Strangely enough, the same expression is used there. They "were fruitful, and increased abundantly and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with them". In both cases it would seem there was an above normal and unprecedented rate of increase greatly assisted by the nature of the environment.

Nevertheless, it must have been a long time before there was any sizeable human community. Gen. 10 records the names of sixteen sons, leaving it to be inferred that there were as many daughters. It is most unlikely though, that there were no other children born to these three. Accepting the Scriptural statements that men at that time lived in the region of five or six hundred years it would seem that the period of fatherhood and motherhood must have been considerably in excess of the normal equivalent today and that families therefore were correspondingly larger. (It has already been shown in these pages that these apparently inordinately long lives recorded in Genesis are perfectly reasonable considered against relevant matters, one of which is the effect of the climatic conditions then obtaining.) It can well be, that the compiler of chapter 10 of Genesis, (the famous "Table of Nations"), recorded only those names who were the ancestors of nations then known to exist. On this basis it could be two centuries before the community numbered as much as ten thousand men, women and children. The children of Noah's sons would be born over the same period (out of the five or six centuries of the mother's life) with the parents taking longer to reach maturity than now. After that, matters would accelerate and in another century population could have reached a quarter of a million. In modern times parents who die at about a century have left as many as 250 descendants of five generations. The inference of data gleaned from Genesis is that successive generations then must have been in the region of at least fifty years apart. Modern parallels are probably of little use in forming an opinion. At any rate it is probable that the human population of the earth at the end of the first century did not exceed a few hundreds.

This implies a handful of village settlements. In all the excavations of primitive sites in the Iraq mountains the same general pattern is observed. As the community grows, sections 'hive off' and start new ones a distance away. In certain isolated areas people do exactly the same thing today. There is need to secure more land for food crops and farming stock, to find new sources of foodstuffs and an impulse to explore. These must have been important to Noah and his family. Such food stocks as remained in the Ark after twelve months afloat would have been quickly exhausted, and until a food-growing regime was established they must have relied on what Nature provided. Providentially, they were in the right locality for this. The Zagros mountains, that border the eastern side of Iraq, rise suddenly from the plain to twelve thousand feet or more, but at about a thousand feet there are wide terraces comprising grasslands and forest in which to this day there are abundant wild fruit trees such as figs, pomegranates, walnuts, almonds and grapes. Ghirshman in "Iran", 1954, is one authority for this and the same is noted by Braidwood and Howe in "Prehistoric investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan" (1966). The latter asserts that the Kurdistan foothills are the original source of the earliest village farming in the world.

This is an area which has received much attention in recent years. Some of the earliest sites show that the inhabitants lived exclusively on wild fruits and grains, wild sheep, goats, pigs and so on. Agriculture and stock-breeding had not yet developed. The evidence for this is in the types of implements discovered. Then came the first signs of cultivation and sheep and cattle rearing. Applying this to the present subject, by the time Noah's grandsons had children of their own, the increasing number of mouths to feed must have necessitated something more systematic than a sporadic wandering from one place to another gathering the bounty of Nature. So the nomadic style of life gave place to the settled agricultural one and villages began to be more permanent with houses built of sun-dried mud-brick and roofed with reeds and tree-trunks.

All this could have occupied a couple of centuries by which time some of the varied families and communities would have pushed many miles from the original landing place.

(to be continued)

AOH