Here at Tikkun we receive many advance copies of books from amazing authors, artists, and activists every day. It’s encouraging to encounter the powerful work our peers are engaged in, not to mention inspiring to see the sheer volume of it. Unfortunately, as with most small non-profits, we are stretched pretty thin and often don’t have the time to read or review the vast majority of what comes in.
One book that did catch my eye this week, though, was a title by Gregg Braden, Deep Truth: Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destiny, and Fate (you can check it out online here). While I haven’t had a chance to read it through all the way, I was fascinated by Braden’s presentation of emerging scientific evidence that suggests our classic understanding of human history, which posits that civilization developed roughly 5,000 years ago out of the “Fertile Crescent” that spans the intersection of Africa and Asia, is incomplete and flawed.
Drawing attention to sunken archaeological sites at the Gulf of Khambat site off the coast of India and the Yonaguni monument site off the coast of Japan, as well as to carbon dating and other scientific investigations at sites in Turkey and Missouri, among others, Braden argues convincingly that the evidence suggests a relatively advanced civilization that existed at least several thousand years before the Indus Valley cultures that are widely considered the birthplace of civilization. The submerged nature of the sites in India and Japan lends itself to the hypothesis that a more ancient culture or cultures existed during the last ice age (which ended 10,000 years ago), only to be covered up by sea level rise when the glaciers melted. (If this all sounds a bit woo-woo to you, google it: Gulf of Khambhat; Yonaguni Pyramid– not without its controversies, of course.)
While the prospect of an ancient civilization that predates modern humanity is intriguing from a historical standpoint, Braden’s work got me thinking about our effort here at Tikkun for rethinking religion. Specifically, the thought of submerged ruins immediately brought my mind toward some of the stories we know from Genesis.
When it comes to the Bible, most spiritual progressives are not literalists – particularly when it comes to the seemingly nursery rhyme stories of Bereishit, the Book of Genesis. If we place any credence at all in the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Babel and the Flood, it is likely through the Joseph Campbell-inspired lens of a mythologized history that reflects our inner genealogy as much as it does external or historical fact.
But what if the story of Noah and the Flood, as caricaturized and smoothed over as it may be (the ants come marching two by two…), were a preserved fragment of real historical experience? What if there was an ancient civilization in Noah’s day that was lost to the oceans – not because of God’s wrath (although who knows), but by the melting of the glacial ice caps? We know from our own historical moment that sea level rise is a real possibility, perhaps even an inevitability. We know from science that roughly 10,000 years ago, sea levels rose approximately forty meters. So who’s to say that the Flood didn’t happen – not metaphorically or allegorically, but quite literally, submerging the culture of its day?
The implications of such an interpretive shift are tremendous. Was there a real Tower of Babel? What does this suggest about the enigmatic and disturbing description of the Gods/Elohim who come to sleep with the daughters of man in Genesis 6? And was 9-11 an inside job?
Okay, maybe that last one’s another story altogether. And not to get too swept away in conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, as Jews begin the process this week of starting the Torah over from the beginning, we might ask ourselves how much the emerging scientific evidence draws us back toward stories that as moderns we’re reluctant to believe.
Gabriel Crane is Assistant Editor at Tikkun and Assistant to Rabbi Michael Lerner. He is also working on a novel that touches on such apocryphal topics. He can be reached at gabriel@tikkun.org.
Gabriel’s article is valuable in recognizing that events occurred in the past and witnesses to them, or those who heard of the event generations later, begin to weave stories trying to explain in some fashion what the event meant; how did it come about; what significance did/does it have. Of course, the first approach to making it explicable in as rapid a fashion as possible lends itself to supernatural explanations. Having such mighty powers existing that could have wrought what was observed or brought about that which we are told happened in the stories from the past, is both terrifying and comforting. The former if we disfavor those forces and the latter if we can learn to appease them, please them, and entreat them to protect us. So the start of religions may well have sprung out of the primordial human experiences of utter helplessness in the face of overwhelming, un-understandable events. The 40,000 (+) year old cave drawings, the recent discovery of an 11,500 year old worship temple found in Turkey before agrarian settlements existed, are examples of rituals that were done in the hopes of salvation and success.
So, my problem comes only in the very last sentence. “How much emerging scientific evidence draws us back to the stories …. we’re reluctant to believe.” The evidence does not serve to validate the elaborations into religion the ancients developed, that now can be believed. Rather, the stories lead us, now armed with all the elements of the Scientific Method and many of the “tools to test”, to an explanation not requiring any supernatural entities. Without the science, ancients observed, formed hypotheses from those observations, and came to understandably wrong conclusions involving the power and magic, omnipotence and omnipresence of a greater, supernatural, being(s) actions. We need not do so, for now we can apply the Method, draw hypotheses, and test them, leading to an understanding grounded in naturalism. Those stories were erroneous but great “explain-ors” in their day. Ours are testable. And when they don’t work, we don’t sacrifice another animal. We start the task over with another hypothesis.
The best, most evenhanded presentation I have seen on all this is
The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood
by David R. Montgomery
What we now know as the Black Sea, the Persian Gulf, and many other seas around the world were lush valleys inhabited by early Man at the time of the last ice age, and these all filled up with water rather suddenly when the ice melted. I have no doubt in my mind that this accounts for all the various flood accounts like the Noah account extant among tribes all around the world, and Noah himself was probably an inhabitant of the valley where the Black Sea is now, which would make sense that the story has his ark landing on nearby Mt. Ararat in Turkey. When you read the Biblical account, you mainly have to just read the references to “the whole world” as meaning “the whole world known to that community of early Man.”
But I think the message and importance of the Noah account for us today is as a powerful metaphor for the importance God places on preserving biodiversity. Human activity is causing a mass die-off of species on a par with the most catastrophic meteor strikes and other events in the planet’s history. We must rethink our ways. It is baffling and frustrating to me that American religious fundamentalists have no apparent interest in preserving the handiwork of God and denounce anyone’s attempt to do so as the activity of “extremists” and leftists. Sad.