Moments, Chronologic and Demographic

‘Upon the entrance of the night’, on Saturday, 22 October in the year 4004 bce, God created the universe. Thus did the erudite and scholarly Irish archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher (1581–1656), calculate the date of the creation of the world in his Annales Veteris Testamenti (1650), otherwise known as The Annals of the World.Footnote ¹ Ussher’s Annals of the World was intended to provide a complete account of all historical knowledge, Biblical and Classical, from the creation of the world down to just after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 ce. For Ussher, as for many others, the date of creation was a crucial date because the beginning of the world provided the anchor for the rest of human history, both sacred and profane. And the attempts to calculate the beginning of the world, of which Ussher’s was a particularly impressive and influential one, were also intended to put to rest a debate that had begun among philosophers in Classical times and had persisted into the seventeenth century. This was a debate about whether the world was created at some time or was uncreated and eternal.

The initial problem to be overcome was the choice of the text – that of the Masoretic version (the Hebrew version of the Old Testament) or of the Septuagint (the Greek version). Judaism, following the Hebrew version, had set the date of creation at 3760 bce or 1,656 years before the flood of Noah. The Septuagint differed from the Hebrew version by setting the year of creation 2,242 years before the flood. This was the result of the Septuagint’s adding approximately one hundred years to the ages of each of the early Biblical patriarchs in the genealogies in the book of Genesis. Thus, the chronology in the Septuagint had the year of creation around 5500 bce. This dating had the virtue for its translators of proving the antiquity of the Jews and their history against those who suggested that the Jews had come late into world history.Footnote ²

Within Reformation Europe, this mattered. Roman Catholicism was committed to the Greek Septuagint as the best version of the Old Testament. However, Martin Luther’s translation of the Old Testament was based upon the so-called Masoretic (Hebrew) text, produced by a group of Jewish scholars known as the ‘Masoretes’ between the seventh and tenth centuries ce. This was the text used by the Protestant translators of the Old Testament in the King James version of the Bible in 1611. Thus, within Protestantism, the Hebrew figures for ancient chronology were almost universally followed.

The acceptance of the Hebrew dating in the early modern period was also influenced by the tradition of the earth lasting for 6,000 years, 4,000 of which consisted of the period between creation and the coming of Christ. In the third century, for example, Julius Africanus (c.160–240 ce), the first Christian historian to produce a universal chronology, combined the six days of creation with the Biblical notion that a day for God is 1,000 years (Psalm 90.4 and 2 Peter 3.8) to generate the six millennia of world history. Lactantius, Augustine, Isidore of Seville, and Bede also divided the world into six ages to last six thousand years – from Adam to Noah, to Abraham, to David, to the Babylonian captivity, to Christ, to the Last Judgement.Footnote ³

No doubt, the tendency to settle on the year of creation as a century either side of 4000 bce was a consequence of the belief in the 6,000 years of world history, with estimates ranging from 4103 to 3928 bce.Footnote ⁴ That there was such variation is hardly surprising. For while it was feasible in the history of Israel to identify Biblical events with extra-Biblical data, the Bible itself does not give us a chronology, and where it does so, it is anything but clear. As Hugh Trevor-Roper neatly puts it,

Thus, on a reckoning based on the Hebrew Scriptures, the time between the creation and the flood, when Noah was 600 years of age, was 1,656 years.

Amongst all the various calculation for the date of creation, Ussher’s was to become the most widely accepted. Early in the next century, Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724) was to describe the Annals as ‘the exactest and most perfect work of chronology that has been published’.Footnote ⁶ The success of its chronology was assured by its inclusion in the margins of Bishop William Lloyd’s Bible in 1701. Despite the array of linguistic, mathematical, scientific, astronomical, and exegetical skills that Ussher brought to his task, he was undoubtedly ideologically driven. For there can be little doubt that all his effort was determined by his acceptance of the six ages and the desire to locate the creation exactly 4,000 before the birth of Christ.

The four years that remained out of the 4004 bce were the consequence of the work of the French chronologer Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609). He had shown that if the account of the slaughter of the innocents by Herod the Great were true (Matthew 2.1-28), Christ could not have been born in the year traditionally assigned. For Herod the Great, who had ordered the slaughter, had died in 4 bce, and therefore Christ must have been born in that or the preceding year. On these calculations, it was the year 4004 bce that was, according to Ussher, 4,000 years before the birth of Christ. This meant that the flood took place 1,656 years after creation, that is, in the year 2349 bce: ‘In the 600 year of the life of Noah, upon the 17 day of the second month, answering to the 7 of our Decemb, upon a Sunday, when he with his children, and living creatures of all sorts, were entered into the Ark, God sent a rain upon the earth forty days, and forty nights; and the waters continued upon the earth 150 days.’Footnote ⁷ In the left margin of his text, Ussher had written ‘1656’ and in the right margin ‘2349’.

This all meant that the population of the world, as it was, in the middle of the seventeenth century, had grown to its then number in the 4,000 years or so since God had said to Noah and his sons, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth’ (Genesis 9.1). That there was rapid population growth soon after the flood was looked upon as little short of miraculous. The English clergyman Andrew Willet (1562–1621) noted that the increase in mankind was so great that ‘within three hundred years, Ninus King of the Assyrians, had an army of seventeene hundred thousand footmen.’Footnote ⁸

It was perhaps inevitable that a mathematics of population growth would begin in the seventeenth century. Thus, for example, the French Protestant jurist Jean du Temps (Joannes Temporarius, 1555–?) pioneered the tradition of mathematically calculating growth in population in his Chronologicarum Demonstrationum (1596). Du Temps declared that Noah’s three sons produced twins annually, a male and a female. They, in turn, began having twins each year after their twentieth year, and so on. By the time of Peleg, some four generations after Noah (Genesis 10.25), and just before the building of the Tower of Babel, the population numbered 1,554,420. In his Turris Babel (1679), Athanasius Kircher adopted Temporarius’s assumption that each of Noah’s sons begat twins each year after the age of thirty. Thus, according to Kircher’s calculation, the world numbered 360 people thirty years after the flood, 21,600 after sixty years, and 1,994,000 after ninety years. By the time the Tower of Babel was built, 120 years after the flood, the world population had reached ‘23,328,000,000’ (although this is probably a slip of the quill by Kircher for ‘233,280,000’).Footnote ⁹

Sir Thomas Browne in the 1640s was to base his calculation of population growth after the flood on considerations of the growth of people before it. Unlike those who believed the earth to have been only slenderly populated before the deluge, Browne argued that there was a ‘populous and ample habitation of the earth before the flood’.Footnote ¹⁰ His criteria were twofold: first, the long duration of lives in the period before the flood, beyond seven hundred, eight hundred, and nine hundred years, that ‘conduceth unto populosity’; second, the large extent of time from the creation to the flood. For his first calculation, Browne assumed a life span of seven hundred years for a man, allowed two or three centuries after creation for enough ‘women fit for marriage’, estimated that a woman would beget children at the age of sixty, and calculated for having twenty children over a period of forty years. On these estimates, the earth would have a population of 1,347,368,420 souls at least some nine hundred years before the flood. Adjusting for longevity after the flood compared to before it, Browne went on to estimate ‘from probabilities, and several testimonies of Scripture and humane Authors’, that the world would have been as populous in 1,300 years after the flood as it was in the 1,650 years before it.Footnote ¹¹

‘The Multiplication of Mankind’

The developing science of demography in the seventeenth century was grounded in the more general issue of ‘the multiplication of mankind’, and that issue had to do overall with population growth from the time of the flood until the end of the world. Thus, for example, William Petty’s (1623–1687) essay on population growth in the City of London was set within the broader context of the growth of population since the time of the flood. Petty’s overall aim was to show that the population of London doubled every 40 years, and that of England every 360 years.

But his interest in global population growth was aroused by a ‘worthy Divine’ writing against sceptics ‘who would have baffled our belief of the Resurrection, by saying, that the whole Globe of the Earth could not furnish Matter enough for all the Bodies that must Rise at the last Day, much less would the surface of the Earth furnish footing for so vast a Number’.Footnote ¹² On this matter, Petty estimated that the some 20 billion people had died from the creation to the year 1682 with 320 million still alive. Thus, reckoning 4 million graves per square mile, ‘the Total of the Quick and the Dead, will amount but unto one fifth part of the Graves, which the surface of Ireland will afford, without ever putting two Bodies into any one Grave’.Footnote ¹³ The task that Petty set himself was arithmetically to work out how a population of eight after the flood had reached his estimate of 320 million living people in 1682 some 4,000 years (by his account) after the flood (in 2318 bce).Footnote ¹⁴

His calculation, Petty believed, needed to align with what was known about ‘the Scriptures and all other good Histories concerning the Number of the People in Ancient Time’.Footnote ¹⁵ He realised that, on the evidence provided in these sources, doubling the population every 150 years would never generate the population that was known, from the Biblical account, to be in the time of Moses (1,000 years after the flood) or in the time of David (1,400 years after the flood). On the other hand, doubling the population every 100 years would have ‘over-peopled’ the world by 1000 ce. His solution was to propose ‘a different Number of Years for the time of doubling the People in the several Ages of the World’.Footnote ¹⁶ Petty’s method of progressively reducing rates of doubling had the population at some 8,000 within 100 years after the flood, at over 1,000,000 by 350 years after, and at 16,000,000 in the time of Moses, some 1,000 years after the flood, until it reached 128,000,000 at the time of Christ, 256,000,000 at 1000 ce, and 320,000,000 by 1682. Petty also believed (in proto-Malthusian mode) that, in the next four hundred years, the world would become overpopulated, that there would then be ‘great Wars and Slaughters, and that the Strong must then destroy the weake, or the World must come (of necessity) to an end’.Footnote ¹⁷

Such arguments as those of Petty proceeded on the assumption that the Scripture contained a true account of the destruction of all living things, and that the flood was a universal one. So, Petty saw himself as offering ‘a brave argument against Scripture Scoffers and Prae-Adamites’.Footnote ¹⁸ No doubt he was thinking of that most eminent of Pre-Adamites, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676). Peyrère had not only argued for the existence of men before Adam but had also raised doubts about the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible and the universality of the flood. The deluge came only upon the land of the Jews, he declared, because of ‘the sins of the Jews’.Footnote ¹⁹ Aware that many cultures – Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, and American – all had flood stories, ‘why should we not grant to Palestine their particular deluge?’ he asked.Footnote ²⁰ And he seriously doubted that the whole world could be re-populated by the few survivors that the Bible reported had survived the flood. Could it be possible, he inquired, that within five generations after the flood, ‘they could inhabite China, America, the Southland, and Greenland, and whatsoever land lies betwixt them?’Footnote ²¹

Putting an end to all attempts to develop a universal chronology from the date of the creation of the world, Peyrère had also advanced the theory that the world was eternal and had no date of creation, or if it had, it was unknown. The foundations of the world, he declared, ‘were laid from eternal times, or from eternity, in regard of us, or from times and ages to us unknown, or from that beginning, of which there is no certain knowledge’.Footnote ²² All this rather put paid to the grand scheme of history embedded within Christianity – Creation, Fall, Deluge, Redemption, Last Things. Little wonder that the jurist Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676) in his The Primitive Origination of Mankind declared that, were Peyrère’s account true, it ‘would necessarily not only weaken but overthrow the Authority and Infallibility of the Sacred Scriptures’.Footnote ²³ Simply put, the universality of the flood and the re-population of the earth from the survivors of it were crucial to the credibility of Christianity.

As we will shortly see, Matthew Hale used fossil evidence as an argument for the universality of the flood. But it was only on the assumption of its universality that he could develop his argument about population growth from Noah and his family. Hale began with some general calculations about population growth. He took the average life span to be sixty years and each male and female to have two children by the age of thirty. Allowing each of these children to have two children before the death of their father, he was able to conclude that, within one generation, ‘They become increased in a quadruple proportion, and all coexisting.’Footnote ²⁴ If men and women began reproducing at the age of seventeen or eighteen, and men lived until sixty-five years of age, ‘the increase would be very much greater’.Footnote ²⁵ Increase the longevity and fertility to that of those who lived after the flood, and ‘within the compass of 215 Years after the Flood the Sons of Noah and their Descendents [sic] might without a Miracle increase to prodigious and incredible multitudes’.Footnote ²⁶ Hale was not averse to following the estimate of the French Jesuit Dionysius Petavius (1583–1652) that, within 215 years after the flood, the population may have been 1,219,133,512, all descended from one of the sons of Noah. The numbers based on the Septuagint would be significantly greater, he declared. But even on the Hebrew reckoning, the increase would be credible ‘without the help of a Miracle’.Footnote ²⁷

Peleg was the first person to die some 340 years after the flood (Genesis 11.16-19). His death provided a good point up to which the number of persons alive at that precise time could be calculated. Thus, for example, during the 1690s, Richard Cumberland (1631–1718), the Bishop of Peterborough, on the basis of the death of Peleg, postulated that the average age of the first three generations after the flood was four hundred years. Ignoring the possibility that Noah might have had more children after the flood, he postulated that each of Noah’s sons produced a similar number of children and that each produced a child for every twenty years after the flood, male and female equally. When each of these children reached twenty years of age, the cycle resumed at the same rate and recurred every forty years. At the time of Peleg’s death, Cumberland calculated the total human population to be 3,333,333,333 couples.Footnote ²⁸ He considered his calculation to be a modest one. Nevertheless, his calculation (and the table that he produced to demonstrate it) was sufficient, he believed, to ‘stop the mouth of those bold pretenders that say it was impossible that in this time men enough could be begotten to plant those kingdoms; concerning which we have good records’.Footnote ²⁹

Petty, Hale, and Cumberland assumed the universality of the flood, and thus the destruction of all people except those upon the ark. This enabled them to calculate the growth in population from the eight survivors of the flood. But conversely, the enormous growth in population before the flood, from Adam to Noah as it were, was also used to demonstrate the universality of the flood. Only a universal flood could thus have destroyed all the people who had spread by that time throughout the whole world. Thus, for example, Thomas Burnet (c.1635–1715), theological geologist or geological theologian (indistinguishable in practice), was focused, above all, on the universality of the flood, but he used population growth from creation to deluge as an important argument for it.

In his The Theory of the Earth, Burnet noted that, in the 1,600 or 1,700 years after the flood, when the world was renewed by only eight persons, people had rapidly filled Asia, Europe, and Africa. How much more so, he asked, would the population have increased in the same period, between creation and the flood, when people lived from six hundred to nine hundred years each and were more fruitful? The ‘longevity of the first Inhabitants of the Earth seems to have been providentially design’d,’ he suggested, ‘for the quicker multiplication and propagation of mankind.’Footnote ³⁰ In fact, the number of people would have been so great by the time of the flood that there would have been more difficulty caused by the abundance of them than by their scarcity. Burnet proposed that, at the end of the first century, the first couple would have left ‘ten pair of Breeders’. Within 1,500 years, there would have arisen a greater number of people than the earth was capable of sustaining, ‘allowing every pair to multiply in the same decuple [tenfold] proportion [as] the first pair did’.Footnote ³¹ So Burnet lowered his estimate of fruitfulness to a quadruple for humankind’s rate of population growth, reaching over 10 billion couples by the time of the deluge. He thought this to be a reasonable and moderate figure, and one not excessively high when compared with the present (for him) number of people over the whole earth, commonly estimated to be between 300 million and 400 million. Thus, granting the contemporary population compared to that before the flood, ‘it seems to me to be a very groundless and forc’d conceit to imagine that Judea only, and some Countries about it in Asia were stor’d with people when the Deluge was brought upon the whole world’.Footnote ³² Moreover, why would Noah have bothered to build an ark to save himself and his family ‘if he might have sav’d himself and them by only retiring into some neighbouring Country’.Footnote ³³

Complicating these matters further, there was another chronology in play alongside the Masoretic and the Septuagint versions of the Old Testament. This was contained within the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), written in Hebrew but in a different script to that of the Masoretic version. This Samaritan version became known to the West in the early seventeenth century. It added an extra layer to Catholic–Protestant polemics around the Greek and Hebrew versions of the Old Testament. Protestants were worried, with good reason, that the Samaritan would challenge the Masoretic version, thus strengthening the Catholic preference for the Septuagint. For, as early as 1631, the Catholic scholar Jean Morin (1591–1659) was using the Samaritan version to argue that it was superior to the Masoretic version favoured among most Protestants. As a Protestant, Thomas Browne favoured the Hebrew over the Greek version. But he did notice the difference in chronology between the Samaritan and Masoretic versions – according to him, 1,302 years between creation and deluge in the Samaritan version, compared to 1,656 in the Masoretic. He thought that the Samaritans ‘preserved the Text with far more integrity then [sic] the Jews’.Footnote ³⁴

Without putting too fine a point on it, the Samaritan version has different lengths of life for some of the patriarchs compared to those of the Masoretic text, significantly altering the chronologies both before the flood (in Genesis 5) and after the flood up to the time of the death of Terah, Abraham’s father (in Genesis 11). By my calculations, the Samaritan version has the patriarchs before the flood living some 488 years less than the Masoretic version. But it has them surviving after the flood some 650 years longer than the Masoretic version.

During the 1620s and 1630s, Archbishop Ussher had acquired a total of six of the Samaritan versions. For his own chronological calculations, Ussher stayed doggedly with the Masoretic text, ignoring the Samaritan variations. But on 22 May 1628, his scholarly colleague Joseph Mede (1586–1639) wrote excitedly to the Archbishop that he had come across ‘the chronology of your Samaritan Pentateuch, published to the view of the whole world’.Footnote ³⁵ He noted correctly that the Samaritan chronology ‘much more exceeded the Jewish in the genealogy of the patriarchs after the flood, than it came short in those before it’.Footnote ³⁶ So, assuming the end of the world to be 6,000 years after its creation, taking Scaliger’s date of the creation of the world as 3949 bce based on the Masoretic text, and adding in the extra years of the Samaritan over the Masoretic chronologies, Mede calculated that the world would end in 1736, much earlier than would have been expected under the Masoretic chronology. That said, Mede did wonder, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, if the differences in the accounts of the years of the world that the different chronologies produced ‘were not ordered by a special disposition of Providence, to frustrate our curiosity in searching for the time of the day of judgement’.Footnote ³⁷

Still and all, Mede remained curious. In a brief essay on the day of judgement coming six thousand years after the creation of the world, we see that Mede was inclining towards the truth of the Samaritan chronology. He wondered whether ‘the computation of the years of the world before the Promise made to Abraham were or could be certainly known or not.’Footnote ³⁸ For if it were possible, he thought, to add 350 or 360 years (as in the Samaritan and the Septuagint chronologies) more than is counted in the Masoretic version, then that ‘Tradition of the Seventh Thousand year to be the Day of Judgment and of the glorious Reign of Christ, will … have good probability of Truth: Otherwise, I cannot see how possibly it can be admitted.’Footnote ³⁹

According to Mede, after the flood, Noah and his family moved to the land of Shinar, where God had, at the beginning, placed Adam and Eve. Even though their numbers grew, they were reluctant to leave that place. So, God decided to make them speak with many languages (Genesis 11.7) to disrupt the unity of their society: ‘God in his wisedom saw that Plurality of Languages was the best means to force mankind into a Plurality of Societies.’Footnote ⁴⁰ By confusing their languages, they were forced to disperse from the place of Paradise all over the earth. Now, Mede was aware that the chronologists were troubled that the one hundred years from the flood to the time of the building of the Tower of Babel seemed ‘too small a time for eight persons to multiply unto such a number as may be presumed to have been at the building of the Tower of Babel, and at their dispersion thence’.Footnote ⁴¹ In fact, even though the increased time between the flood and the birth of Abraham better fitted his calculation of the end of the world, he did not use this extra time to endorse significant population growth after the flood. On the contrary, at the time of the dispersal, he believed that the population was small. When this division was made, after the people had established a city and built the tower, he declared, ‘[T]he number of mankind was small; for besides women and children, their number in all could not be above seven thousand.’Footnote ⁴²

Only a few argued, like Mede, for limited population growth after the flood. One of them was the eccentric English antiquary Aylett Sammes (c.1636–c.1679) in his Britannia Antiqua Illustrata (1676). The overall thrust of his 600-page work was to demonstrate that the antiquities of Britain were derived from the Phoenicians. And he began this project by examining ‘the increase of Man-kind in the Primitive Ages of the World’.Footnote ⁴³ Concerning the supposed enormous increase of humankind after the flood, he wrote, the Scriptures make no mention of it. Noah had but three sons, he declared, Japheth seven, Shem five, and Ham four. Nor, he believed, did the polygamy of the patriarchs make any noticeable difference. Even in the 192 years from the flood to Abraham, the land of Armenia where the ark had landed was not fully populated. A hundred years later, Simeon and Levi, without any assistance, destroyed a whole city, or at least the men within it (Genesis 34.25). Even three hundred years after Jacob went into Egypt, his 600,350 male descendants outnumbered the Egyptians (Exodus 12.37-8) – at most, only two-thirds of the present inhabitants of London and Paris.

It was unlikely, therefore, that a Britain emptied of people by the flood was populated early by the sons of Japheth. Rather, every generation added one step to the spread of population, so that ‘by long time, and short journeys’, people gradually diffused.Footnote ⁴⁴ For Sammes, the key to the settlement of Britain was the development of shipping among the Phoenicians some 1,270 years after the flood. Having escaped the persecution by Joshua and the Israelites when they lived in Canaan, ‘they were driven up into a slender Nook of Earth, too narrow to contain so great and numerous a Body, [and] dispersed themselves into good Shipping, to seek their fortunes in most parts of the World, of whose Company, Britain received a considerable share’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Sammes restricted the Phoenicians to the coasts of Britain. Others, like the Celts, he thought, might have beaten the Phoenicians to inland parts. Thus, Britain might have first been populated some 2,560 years after creation and 800 to 900 years after the flood. Rather fancifully, he suggested that the Phoenicians were giants because the time of their arrival in Britain coincided with the age of the giants in the Bible.Footnote ⁴⁶

Sammes’s proposal of the Phoenicians as early settlers in Britain was significantly influenced by the French Protestant scholar Samuel Bochart’s (1599–1667) Geographia Sacra (1646). Like Sammes, Bochart had identified the Phoenicians with the Canaanites that had been driven out of their land by the Israelites. Importantly, it was Bochart’s Geographia Sacra that had put the Phoenicians on the intellectual agenda of ancient geography, along with the Greeks and Romans.Footnote ⁴⁷ So, eccentric as he was, Sammes was sailing in respectable intellectual currents. We know that Isaac Newton both owned an extensively dog-eared copy of Bochart’s Geographia Sacra and had read it. It is more than likely that Newton had also read Sammes’s Britannia Antiqua Illustrata. And Newton was undoubtedly familiar with the Works of Joseph Mede. For he had copies of Sammes and Mede in his library.Footnote ⁴⁸ But Newton was having none of Bochart’s and Sammes’s derivation of the Phoenicians from the Canaanites who had been driven out of Israel by Joshua. And unlike Mede’s and Bochart’s penchant for the Samaritan chronology, Newton stayed firmly committed to that of the Masoretic version. But that said, like Sammes and Mede, Newton did hold to the idea of limited population growth after the flood. This was because, unlike those primarily interested in population growth, Newton was much more focused on the chronology of ancient kingdoms.

The slow rate of population growth for Newton was the consequence of his making the rise of ancient kingdoms later. He did this to be able to exalt Israelite kingship as amongst the oldest in the world. Simply put, Newton’s account of the origin of civilisation was along these lines: from the sons of Noah arose large numbers of families; growing populations led from families to towns; assemblies of ‘fathers’ produced laws; laws required a judge; towns with courts and judges evolved into cities; judges transformed into kings; and kingdoms slowly grew by conquest or merger. Thus, for Newton, the story of the flood onwards was one of a long road from simplicity to civilisation:

William Whiston (1667–1752) was Isaac Newton’s successor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. As we will see shortly, Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth (1696) was focused on the flood rather than its aftermath. But he found it hard to avoid at least some speculation about the rate of population growth after the deluge. Like Newton, he was committed to the Masoretic chronology, rejecting that of the Septuagint. But he thought the Masoretic chronology more than sufficient to account for the growth of population after the flood. The 427 years from the flood until Abraham went into Canaan, granting the average of 300 years for each man’s life, were enough ‘to produce the greatest Numbers of Men which in that, or the immediately succeeding Ages, any Authentick Histories of those Ancient Times do require us to suppose’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Whiston had read William Petty’s essay on the multiplication of mankind just as his A New Theory of the Earth was at the printer. Six years later, following the pattern if not the detail established by Petty, Whiston had thought his way more thoroughly into the issue. Thus, in his book on Old Testament chronology in 1702, Whiston assumed that the then present population of the earth did not exceed 4 billion. He also accepted that the overall population doubled every 400 years, ‘ever since the present Period of Human Life was fix’d in the days of [King] David’.Footnote ⁵¹ Further, he believed it was evident that, from the flood until the days of David, men lived six if not seven times longer than that which had obtained since then. Thus, beginning with the eight survivors of the flood, and doubling in number every 60 years from the flood until David (about 1,300 years), and then doubling every 400 years in the 2,700 years since, we reach the present 4 billion.

The diagram that Whiston devised to demonstrate population growth from the flood to the present demonstrated, he claimed, ‘that the number of years according to the Hebrew chronology, will very naturally account for the present number of Souls upon the face of the Earth’.Footnote ⁵² To have used either the Septuagint or the Samaritan chronology, he maintained, would have produced up to a thousand times as many as the present population of the earth. What Whiston’s diagram also showed, however, was that if he thought that the Tower of Babel and the dispersion of the people occurred around one hundred years after the flood, there was only minimal population growth up to that time. On his reckoning, there would have only been a few thousand to begin building the Tower of Babel – hardly enough to build a tower ‘with its top in the heavens’ (Genesis 11.4) or to spread ‘over the face of all the earth’ (Genesis 11.9).

The Universal Flood

Isaac La Peyrère, we recall, had questioned the universality of the flood. The deluge came only upon the land of the Jews, he declared, because of ‘the sins of the Jews’.Footnote ⁵³ Aware that many cultures – Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, and American – all had flood stories, ‘why should we not grant to Palestine their particular deluge?’ he asked.Footnote ⁵⁴ The argument could, of course, cut in exactly the opposite direction. If all these different cultures had accounts of a universal flood, then there must have been one. Thus, for example, John Webb (1611–1672) argued that the reports of the flood in Chinese history were nothing but reports of the universal flood of Noah. Not surprising perhaps, granted that he argued, a little eccentrically even for his time, that Noah himself, ‘before and after the Deluge lived in China’,Footnote ⁵⁵ and that Chinese was the original language of humankind, both before and after the flood.

Still, floods in Chinese history and elsewhere did seem to endorse the Biblical account of the flood as universal. All nations, declared Bishop Symon Patrick (1626–1707), had heard something of this flood. ‘And now it appears,’ he continued, ‘that the Americans have had a tradition of it, (as credible authors, Acosta, Herrera, and others inform us) which saith, The whole Race of Mankind was destroyed by the Deluge, except some few that escaped. They are the words of Augustin Corata, concerning the Peruvian Tradition, and Lupus Gomara saith the same from those of Mexico. And if we can believe Mart. Martinius’s History of China, there is the like among the People of that Country.’Footnote ⁵⁶

The flood was universal, but it had also destroyed the perfection of the world as it was when it was created. In the 1691 second edition of his The Theory of the Earth, Thomas Burnet wrote to King William III, ‘We still have the broken materials of that first World, and walk upon its Ruines; while it stood, there was the Seat of Paradise, and the Scenes of the Golden Age; when it fell, it made the Deluge; and this unshapen earth we now inhabit, is the Form it was found in when the Waters had retir’d, and the dry Land appear’d.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The purpose of his book was to give a natural explanation of how all this had come about. It was, in effect, a new scientific version of Paradise lost.

Burnet plunged right into the deep end with the issue of whence had come the vast amounts of water that were needed, not only to cover the whole earth but to do so to a height of fifteen cubits over the tops of the mountains. The story of the flood, he wrote, ‘is a short story of the greatest thing that ever yet happened in the world, the greatest revolution and the greatest change in Nature; and if we come to reflect seriously upon it, we shall find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to give an account of the waters that compos’d this Deluge, whence they came or whither they went.’Footnote ⁵⁸ The waters had to cover the surface of the earth, to above the tops of the highest mountains, ‘a prodigious amount of water,’ he declared.Footnote ⁵⁹ In all, he reckoned, ‘there would be at least eight Oceans requir’d, or a quantity of water eight times as great as the Ocean, to bring an universal Deluge upon the earth, as that Deluge is ordinarily understood and explained’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In short, there was no quantity of water sufficient for a universal deluge, either on, above, or below the earth. Moreover, if the earth had been deluged with such an amount of water, it could never have dissipated in the few months indicated in the Bible.

Still, Burnet was not willing to retreat from the idea of the universality of the flood. Nor would he countenance the idea that God would have specially created new waters for the flood and then miraculously removed them afterwards. The only solution was that the earth was radically different before the flood than after it. More specifically, ‘That face of the Earth before the Deluge was smooth, regular and uniform; without Mountains, and without a Sea … An Earth without a Sea, and plain [flat] as the Elysian fields; if you travel it all over, you will not meet with a Mountain or a Rock, yet well provided of all things requisite for an habitable World … and so continu’d for many hundreds of years.’Footnote ⁶¹ Thus, the amount of water then required to cover a smooth earth would be no more than that now contained in the oceans.

Burnet went on to give a theory of the formation of the earth at its beginning. According to this, there was originally a primordial chaos that consisted of all the materials and ingredients of all bodies, ‘but mingled in confusion one with another’.Footnote ⁶² The earth was created when the various parts of the chaos separated out. The heaviest matter formed a solid core at the centre, like the yoke and membrane of an egg. Above this, water formed in a sphere around the central core, like the white of an egg. Surrounding ‘the fountains of the deep’ (Proverbs 8.28) was the earth, like the shell of an egg.Footnote ⁶³ It was what the Psalmist was referring to, declared Burnet, when he said that God ‘spread out the earth on the waters’ (Psalm 136.6).

The whole earth then was paradisal with a perfect climate and no disruptions to nature. There was no ice, snow, hail, or thunder. Winds were neither impetuous nor irregular, ‘seeing there were neither Mountains nor any other inequalities to obstruct the course of their Vapours’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The earth was always the same distance from the sun, so all the seasons were the same. There was a perpetual spring and equinox over all parts of the earth. The climate perfectly explained the longevity of those who lived before the flood. Burnet was dissatisfied with all the traditional explanations for their longevity. He rejected the idea that it was due to the greater virtue of the fruits, herbs, and plants of those days. Rather, it was the consequence of the perfect weather:

This was all to be destroyed in the flood, when the features of the earth as we know it took shape, the earth’s diurnal rotation began, and the seasons came into being. For Burnet, the loss of Paradise had not occurred after Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but after the universal flood of Noah. Sadly, it was the result of the perfect climate that obtained before it. For the continual sun slowly dried out the earth, and cracks, wide and deep, penetrated its depth until great portions of the earth fell into the abyss beneath. The waters were forced upwards and spread over the whole earth. But Noah had been forewarned: ‘Providence that ruleth all things and all Ages, after the earth had stood above sixteen hundred years, thought fit to put a period to that world, and accordingly, it was reveal’d to Noah, that for the wickedness and degeneracy of men, God would destroy mankind with the Earth (Gen. 6.13) in a Deluge of Water.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Scientific and theological accounts were thus in accord with each other. ‘This seems to me,’ declared Burnet, ‘the great Art of Divine Providence, so as to adjust the two Worlds, Humane and Natural, Material and Intellectual … [that] they should all along correspond and fit one another, and especially in their great Crises and Periods.’Footnote ⁶⁷ As Basil Willey neatly puts it, ‘disproportion’d sin chimed punctually with Nature’s crash’.Footnote ⁶⁸ And then the full force of the flood came upon the earth. ‘And ‘tis not easie,’ wrote Burnet,

Here, there was no appreciation of the beauties of nature, no inklings of the infinite within the finite, as were to occur in Romanticism a century later. Mountains were quite simply blots on the landscape: ‘[I]f you consider them singly, they do not consist of any proportion of parts that is referrable to any design, or that hath the least footsteps of Art or Counsel. There is nothing in Nature more shapeless and ill-figur’d than an old Rock or Mountain.’Footnote ⁷⁰ The receding waters of the flood had become the ocean, filling the cracks in the once seamless surface of the world. When Burnet thought of the great trench beneath the oceans, ‘emptied of all its waters, naked and gaping at the Sun, stretching its jaws from one end of the Earth to another, it appears to me the most ghastly thing in nature’.Footnote ⁷¹

That mountains were not a part of the world as originally created had a long history within Christianity. Their existence was a consequence of the disruption to the earth that had been caused by the sin of Adam and Eve. But others, before Burnet, had also suggested that nature had been further corrupted by the flood. Thus, for example, the Anglican clergyman Godfrey Goodman (1582–1656) had suggested in his The Fall of Man (1616) that the deluge had brought about ‘the generall confusion of Nature’.Footnote ⁷² The unevenness of the earth – the hills and the vales – were caused by the flood of Noah. It was certain, he declared, ‘that all the terrible tokens, and signes of Gods anger and wrath, did accompanie the deluge; and as the waters did swell above measure, so the billowes and waves of the Sea did arise in a wonderful and fearefull manner; and these (surely) might well cause a great inequalitie in the earth’.Footnote ⁷³ But Burnet was unique in asserting the existence of a completely smooth earth without mountains, rivers, lakes, or seas before the flood.

Burnet’s account provoked many critical responses, both Biblical and scientific.Footnote ⁷⁴ But he had many admirers, not least Isaac Newton. ‘Of our present sea, rocks, mountains etc.,’ Newton wrote to Burnet, ‘I think you have given the most plausible account.’Footnote ⁷⁵ And despite its many critics, The Theory of the Earth remained much admired. As one of its most trenchant critics, John Keill (1671–1721), put it, ‘[p]erhaps many of his Readers will be sorry to be undeceived, for as I believe, never any Book was fuller of Errors and Mistakes in Philosophy, so none ever abounded with more beautiful Scenes and surprising Images of Nature; but I write only to those who might perhaps expect to find a true Philosophy in it. They who read it as an Ingenious Romance will still be pleased with their Entertainment.’Footnote ⁷⁶

Floods and Comets

For William Whiston, Thomas Burnet had gone way too far. To Whiston, it seemed that Burnet had reduced the Genesis account of the creation of the world from an historical account of how the world came to be to ‘a meer Popular, Parabolick, or Mythological relation; in which the plain Letter is no more to be accounted for or believ’d, than the fabulous representations of Aesop’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In addition, Whiston believed that Burnet’s scientific account of the beginnings of the world was seriously wrong. Thus, Whiston’s aim was both to get the science right and to demonstrate how the truths of science were in the greatest harmony with the truths of the Bible, however much Moses may have adapted his account to a ‘vulgar’ audience. As a professional astronomer, the key for Whiston to the harmony of science and scripture lay in cometology – the science of comets.

According to Whiston, the earth, in its original primeval state (‘a formless void’), was the atmosphere of a comet. Consequently, the description in the book of Genesis of the first six days of creation describes the process by which, over six years (for a day equalled a year during the six ‘days’ of creation), the earth developed from its original ‘cometic’ state in a natural way without requiring any supernatural intervention. The only miraculous event during the six ‘days’ of creation was the creation of man: ‘Tho ‘tis granted that all the other Days Works mention’d by Moses were brought to pass in a natural way by proper and suitable Instruments, and a mechanical Process, as we have seen through the whole Series of the foregoing Creation; yet ‘tis evident … That an immediate and miraculous Power was exercis’d in the formation of the Body, and Infusion of the Soul of Man.’Footnote ⁷⁸

The primeval earth was perfectly spherical, and the ‘Central Heat’, being equally distant from all parts of the surface of the earth, affected all parts of the globe equally. As a result, the earth was more equally habitable all over and more fertile than at present, capable of sustaining more inhabitants than currently. The seasons were only slightly distinguishable from each other, and the air was ideal, without winds and storms.Footnote ⁷⁹ Unlike Burnet’s primeval world, however, there were mountains, valleys, and plains. But the mountains, far from being eyesores, were as fruitful as the plains and valleys and able to sustain more animals than the plains. All this was to end when Adam and Eve sinned. However, God’s punishment of Adam and Eve occurred without any disturbance of the settled course of Nature. For the loss of Paradise aligned with the impact of a comet ‘hitting obliquely upon the Earth along some parts of its present equator’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The impact of the comet tilted the axis of the earth and produced the earth’s rotation around it. The shape of the earth then degenerated to that of an oblate spheroid. Seasons came into being.Footnote ⁸¹ Still, between the Fall and the flood, things were not too bad. Only gentle mists fell upon the earth, the absence of heavy rain precluding rainbows. Men and animals continued to live remarkably long lives, not least because of the purity of the air. The vegetables were more nutritious, and men and animals were vegetarian. Nor was there such an enormous division of the earth into oceans and continents as in the present.

The flood of Noah was to change all this. As with the Fall, divine punishment aligned with the natural order of things, more particularly in this case the passing by of a comet. ‘The precise time of the passing of the Comet,’ declared Whiston, ‘and thereby of destroying the World, is, in the most peculiar manner, and highest degree, the result of the Divine Providence. That exactly at a time which was fit and proper, and in an Age that justly deserv’d so great a Judgement, the Comet should come by, and over-whelm the World, is very remarkably and extraordinarily the Finger of God himself.’Footnote ⁸² On this occasion, the comet narrowly missed the earth. The earth only passed through its tail and atmosphere. ‘[I]f we consider that a comet,’ declared Whiston, ‘is capable of passing so close by the Body of the Earth as to involve it in its Atmosphere and Tail a considerable time, and leave prodigious quantities of the same Condensed and Expanded Vapours upon its Surface; we shall easily see that a Deluge of Waters is by no means an impossible thing.’Footnote ⁸³ This was the opening of ‘the windows of the heaven’ (Genesis 7.11). Moreover, the rainfall broke the surface of the crust of the earth allowing the ‘fountains of the great deep’ (Genesis 7.11) to gush forth.

Fortunately, Noah and the ark were some distance from where the downpour of the rain from the heavens and the eruption of the waters from the deep coincided. Thus, Whiston explained, ‘tho’ the breaking up of the Fountains of the great Deep, and the Fall of the Waters, were coincident, and upon the same day with the Entry into the Ark, as the Text most expressly asserts; yet the place where the Ark was, escap’d the effects of the same till the Evening; and while the rest of the Earth was abiding the fury of the same, enjoy’d so calm, fair and undisturb’d a day, as permitted their regular and orderly going into the Ark before the Waters overtook them.’Footnote ⁸⁴

Whiston was in no doubt that the flood was universal. The waters at their highest were some fifteen cubits above the highest mountains and three miles above the surface of the plains and seas. Fortuitously, the ark came to rest upon Caucasus, the highest mountain in the world, so that it would be safe immediately upon the end of the rains.Footnote ⁸⁵ This place remained as habitable and as fruitful as the whole earth had been before the flood, capable of sustaining all those in the ark, until, with the receding of the waters, the rest of the earth became habitable again: ‘To this spot therefore, by such a wonderful adjustment of all the requisite Circumstances of the Deluge, preserv’d and distinguish’d from all the rest of the World, the Divine Providence did conduct the Ark.’Footnote ⁸⁶ That said, the earth was never to return to its state of fertility before the flood. Both diet and climate after the flood progressively reduced human longevity. The vegetables after the flood were less nutritious and the air more polluted. Crucially, the polluted air after the flood reduced the longevity of the generations after it such that, within 800 or 900 years after the flood, length of life was reduced to that of the present day.

Whiston was not the first to look to a comet as the cause of the flood of Noah. The astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742) delivered a lecture to the Royal Society on 12 December 1694, some two years before the publication of Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth, on the cause of the universal deluge. Like Thomas Burnet, Halley was much exercised by the question of whence had come sufficient water to cover the whole earth and over the highest mountains. On both scientific and theological grounds, he was having nothing of Burnet’s solution of an earth without mountains and valleys. But he was not convinced that the Biblical account of rain for forty days and forty nights and the ocean rising onto the land were sufficient to explain a universal deluge. Rather, he suggested, the current world was the consequence of the shock (‘choc’) to it caused by the impact of a comet radically changing its nature – creating mountains from (what we would call) tsunamis sloshing back and forth, changing the length of the day and year, altering the axis of the globe, increasing the depths of the great lakes, and causing the extremes of climates. The difficulty, he suggested, would be in showing how Noah and the animals could ever have survived such a cataclysmic event. ‘That some such thing has happened,’ he declared, ‘may be guess’d, for that the Earth seems as if it were new made out of the Ruins of an old World.’Footnote ⁸⁷

Halley delivered ‘Some farther Thoughts upon the same Subject’ a week later. And he did go ‘farther’. For now he suggested that such collisions of comets with the earth were perhaps regular occurrences necessary for the well-being of the future world when it could no longer sustain life. It might be thought harsh, he reflected, that the whole race should be destroyed for the benefit of those who were to come later. But then, ‘if we consider Death simply, and how that the Life of each Individual is but of a very small duration, it will be found that as to those who die, it is indifferent whether they die in a Pestilence out of 100000 per Ann. or ordinarily out of 25000 in this great City, the Pestilence only appearing terrible to those that survive to contemplate the Danger they have escaped.’Footnote ⁸⁸ It was probably from Halley that Whiston had the idea of the periodic interaction of comets and the earth, an idea that led him to build comets into his accounts of creation, the Fall, the flood, and the final conflagration at the end of the world. It was the comet that appeared in 1680, subsequently named after Halley, that Whiston believed had brought about the deluge that, he calculated, began on 29 November, 1,656 years after the creation and 2349 bce: ‘Indeed,’ declared Whiston in 1717,

Fossils and the Flood

Cometologist Edmond Halley was convinced of the universal nature of the flood, not least because of the presence of marine fossils ‘found far from and above the Sea’.Footnote ⁹⁰ It was evident, he thought, ‘that those Parts have been once under Water: or, either that the Sea has risen to them, or they have been raised from the Sea’.Footnote ⁹¹ That marine fossils were evidence of a universal flood was an ancient tradition. Thus, for example, the second-century theologian Tertullian reminded his readers that there was a time when the whole earth changed, overrun by waters. Even to this day, he wrote, ‘marine conches and tritons’ horns sojourn as foreigners on the mountains’.Footnote ⁹² The beginning of the fourteenth century saw an alternative theory develop, namely that they were only rocks moulded into animal or vegetable shapes by the forces of nature.Footnote ⁹³

This question of the nature of fossils was still an open one in the latter part of the seventeenth century as the new science of fossils (palaeontology) was emerging. The founder of the science of shells in England (conchology), Martin Lister (1639–1712), declared to the Royal Society in 1671 that seashell fossils were ‘Lapides sui generis [stones constituting a unique class], and never any part of an Animal … it is most certain, that our English Quarry-shells (to continue that abusive name) have no parts of a different Texture from the rock or quarry they are taken, that is, that there is no such thing as shell in these resemblances of shells.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Lister’s was the majority opinion. When the letter was read to a meeting of The Royal Society, it was noted that some applauded Mr. Lister’s notion of it. But the eminent biologist Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who was present at the meeting, pushed back ‘endeavouring to maintain his own opinion, that all those shells are the exuviae [shells] of animals’.Footnote ⁹⁵

The controversy continued. In 1677, the naturalist Robert Plot (1640–1696) asked himself ‘the great Question now so much controverted in the World. Whether the stones we find in the forms of Shell-fish, be Lapides sui generis, naturally produced by some extraordinary plastic virtue latent in the Earth or Quarries where they are found? Or whether they rather owe their form and figuration to the shells of the Fishes they represent, brought to the places where they are now found by a Deluge, Earth-quake, or some other such means, and… turned into stones?’Footnote ⁹⁶ It was the physician and amateur fossil hunter John Woodward (1665–1728) who was to propose that marine fossils pointed inexorably to the universal flood described in the book of Genesis.

In 1695, Woodward published the book that was to become the most influential work on the history of the earth in eighteenth-century Europe – An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, especially Minerals. It began the ‘scientific’ tradition of diluvianism – that the earth had been formed in its present state by an ancient universal flood.Footnote ⁹⁷ According to Woodward, therefore, of the world before the flood, no trace remained:

The key evidence for this global catastrophe was the fossil record. Woodward made two crucial moves in the argument. First, as we noted earlier, at the time of his writing, the issue of whether fossils had an organic or inorganic origin was still an open one. Woodward’s first task was to demonstrate that shells and other marine bodies found on land ‘were originally generated and formed at Sea: that they are the real spoils [remains] of once living Animals: and not Stones, or natural Fossils, as some late Learned Men have thought’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Second, having determined that they were the remains of once living creatures, his task was then to explain how these marine creatures had been transferred from the seas, to be found ‘in all Parts of the known World, as well in Europe, Africa, and America, as in Asia, and this even to the very tops of the highest Mountains’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Woodward began by surveying eight different theories on the origin of marine fossils before concluding that they were ‘imaginary and groundless’. He then proposed that ‘these Marine Bodies were born forth of the Sea by the Universal Deluge: and that, upon the return of the Water back again from off the Earth, they were left behind at Land’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

How, then, did the deluge occur? Woodward believed that, beneath the crust of the earth, there was ‘the great Deep’ or ‘Abyss’ enclosed within the bowels of the earth, composed of a huge orb of water. The ocean on the surface was connected to this orb of water by chasms reaching down to the orb. The waters of the abyss, rising through these chasms, were more than sufficient, he believed, ‘if brought out upon the Surface of the Earth, to cover the whole globe to the height assigned by Moses; which is, fifteen Cubits above the Tops of the highest Mountains [Genesis 7.20]’.Footnote ¹⁰² So, before the flood, the waters under the surface of the earth were held in check by the strata of earth lying upon them. But at the time of the flood, those strata were ruptured, and the waters of the abyss broke through to the surface, flooding the whole world. Consequently, the ‘whole Terrestrial Globe was taken all to pieces and dissolved at the Deluge’ into a thick, earthy soup. The present earth ‘was formed out of that promiscuous Mass of Sand, Earth, Shells, and the rest, falling down again’ as the water subsided and returned into the abyss.Footnote ¹⁰³ The marine bodies, stranded on dry land as the waters receded, became lodged in different layers of earth, depending upon their relative density, ‘those which are heaviest lying deepest in the Earth, and the lighter sorts … shallower or nearer to the surface’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Woodward was later to provide an answer as to how this dissolution had happened. Simply put, it was down to gravity. Taking a leaf out of Isaac Newton’s account of gravity in his Principia Mathematica (1687), Woodward held that solid bodies were held together by the force of gravity. Thus, were gravity to be suspended, everything would dissolve. Thus, ‘the supreme Governor of the Universe’ almost completely suspended gravity to allow the waters of the abyss to ascend and everything to dissolve into them before later restoring gravity thus enabling everything to be ‘formed anew’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

For Woodward, rather than the sin of Adam, the flood reported in the book of Genesis was the crucial event in the history of humankind. This was true for the new science generally, not least because the flood was more amenable to the methods of the new science than events in the garden of Eden. Nevertheless, the flood was made necessary by human wickedness when, as Woodward put it, the world had become ‘little better than a common fold of Phrenticks and Bedlams’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ So, God supernaturally intervened ‘to reclaim and retrieve the World out of this wretched and forlorn state, the common Father and Benefactor of Mankind seasonably interposed his hand: and rescued miserable Man out of the gross Stupidity and Sensuality whereinto he was thus unfortunately plunged’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Mere punishment of humankind was not sufficient. Only a complete destruction followed by a radical re-creation of an earth less perfect than its original would be effective in rescuing humanity from its excesses of wickedness and ‘give it a Constitution more nearly accommodated to the present Frailties of its Inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The universal deluge was not only an exercise in the divine punishment of the generation before the flood but also an act of divine compassion for the generations to come:

Woodward’s Essay was much criticised. Despite that, it was translated into French, German, and Italian. An avid convert to Woodward’s cause, the Swiss naturalist Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) produced a Latin translation in 1704. And four years later, Scheuchzer produced his Complaints and Claims of the Fishes, a pamphlet in which the fish made their claim to eternal fame: ‘We, the swimmers, voiceless though we are, herewith lay our claim before the throne of Truth. We would reclaim what is rightly ours … Our claim is for the glory springing from the death of our ancestors … That race [of fish] which lived and was carried on the waves before the Flood … Moreover, we are defending an even greater cause: we bear irrefutable witness to the universal inundation.’Footnote ¹¹⁰

But more was to come – the discovery by Scheuchzer of what appeared (at least to him and many others) to be a fossilised human skeleton in a limestone quarry in Oeningen, Germany. Scheuchzer believed it to be the remains of one of the wicked who had been destroyed in the flood of Noah. He called it Homo diluvia testis – Man, a witness of the Deluge. On the face of it, this was the first fossil of human remains to be discovered. It wasn’t quite like discovering Noah’s ark, but it was close to it. Little wonder then that it provoked a sensation. It is certain, Scheuchzer wrote in his Physica Sacra (1731), that this rock ‘is the half, or nearly so, of the skeleton of a man: that the substance even of the bones, and, what is more, of the flesh and of parts softer than the flesh, are there incorporated in the stone: in a word it is one of the rarest relics which we have of that cursed race which was buried under the waters’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Why were such sacred relics of the flood so rare? Well, Scheuchzer had a deft answer. ‘Up to the present time,’ he wrote, ‘very few remains of human beings drowned in the Flood have been discovered. It may be that the reminders of blameless creatures such as plants, molluscs, fishes, even insects are more numerous because they deserved to be remembered better than the human beings – for all these latter, save for a few of Noah’s relatives … richly deserved to be condemned to eternal oblivion.’Footnote ¹¹² Doubts were eventually to be raised. In 1758, Scheuchzer’s student Johannes Gessner (1709–1790) suggested it was only the bones of a large fish. Almost thirty years later, the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–1789) thought it to be the bones of a large lizard. Still, for many, Scheuchzer’s Homo diluvia testis remained, for many, empirical confirmation of the Biblical account of the flood of Noah. Unfortunately for Scheuchzer, in 1811, the fossil was examined by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). He concluded that it was in fact a giant salamander belonging to the genus Andrias. Cuvier’s judgement was harsh: ‘[N]othing less than total blindness on the scientific level can explain how a man of Scheuchzer’s rank, a man who was a physician and must have seen human skeletons, could embrace such a gross self-deception. For this fragment, which he propagated so sententiously, and which has been sustained for so long on the prestige of his word, cannot withstand the most cursory examination.’Footnote ¹¹³ It would have been perhaps little compensation to Scheuchzer, fervent believer in the Biblical story of Noah that he was, that he had, in fact, discovered a new fossil and that, in 1831, it was named Andreas scheuchzeri in his honour.

The Age of the Earth

The credibility of diluvianism depended not only on the fossil evidence for a universal flood but also on a traditional Biblical chronology that believed that the earth had been created some 4,000 years bce and destroyed by a universal flood some 1,656 years later. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, doubts about the date of the creation of the earth and thus the date of the flood of Noah were creeping in.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In his poem, ‘The Task’, the English poet William Cowper (1731–1800) reflected disapprovingly in 1785 on the developing conflict between science and religion about the age of the earth:

Doubts about the age of the earth had been raised when the new science first began in the late seventeenth century. Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, and Isaac Newton had all flirted with the idea that the ‘days’ of creation were actually long periods of time. In 1693, the naturalist John Beaumont (c.1650–1731), in his response to Thomas Burnet’s The Theory of the Earth, declared that, were it possible to abandon the Biblical dating, he would be more inclined to think that the world was eternal, or at least that its origin was so indefinite as to be unknowable.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Edmond Halley accepted that the formation of man some 6,000 years (or 7,000 years, following the Septuagint) previously was the last act of creation. But he was uncertain how long the five days that preceded it may have been, since ‘we are elsewhere told [in the Bible], that in respect of the Almighty a thousand years is as one Day’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) in his Persian Letters (1721) appeared to agree with those philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition who denied any original ‘big bang’, who did not ‘believe that matter and created things have been in existence only six thousand years’, and who opted for the eternity of the world.Footnote ¹¹⁸

It was, however, another French aristocrat, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), who, in his Epoques de la Nature (1778), reinterpreted the Biblical seven days of creation in terms of seven epochs, ranging in length from 3,000 to 35,000 years and totalling 75,000 years or so since the beginning of the earth (although in private he estimated from 3 million to 10 million years). Buffon claimed to be a harmoniser of earth science and religion who reminded his readers that ‘Because all reason, all truth, comes equally from God, there is no difference between the truths that He has revealed [in scripture], and the truth that we are allowed to discover by our observations and our researches.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ But we can perhaps take this as a rhetorical subterfuge, intended to protect him from the guardians of religious orthodoxy in the college of Sorbonne. As a philosoph of the European Enlightenment, where reason and Scripture conflicted, Scripture had to give way. So, at the beginning of his Epochs, he made it clear that the book of Genesis was written for the vulgar in terms comprehensible by them: ‘Everything in the story of Moses is placed within the limits of the intelligence of the people … to whom it would not do to demonstrate the true system of the Earth.’Footnote ¹²⁰ Nevertheless, on the date of man’s creation, Buffon resisted going too far. Despite the long tradition that the earth was created some 4,000 years bce, Buffon pushed it out to ‘no more than six or eight thousand years ago.’ That said, Buffon’s earth science was nonetheless a radical rewrite of the early chapters of Genesis. All the great deluges, he maintained, had occurred in early epochs. The fossil evidence, far from being evidence of a universal Biblical flood, was only a relic of these earlier floods.

Moreover, it was no Edenic paradise into which primitive humanity was born at the beginning of the seventh epoch. There was no original fall from an original perfection, nor an expulsion from Paradise. It was always ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’, as Alfred Lord Tennyson was to put it seventy years later. For Buffon, the earliest humans were

Thus were local inundations transformed into universal catastrophes by the terror they created in those who were the victims of them. The ravages of floods, the chasms opened by earthquakes, the respect for certain mountains where people were saved from floods, along with the horror of those mountains that launched volcanic fires, created a durable and almost eternal memory of these misfortunes of the earth. ‘All of these feelings founded upon terror,’ Buffon declared, ‘have from then on taken possession forever of the heart and mind of man.’Footnote ¹²²

We look in vain in Buffon’s Epochs for specific reference to the flood of Noah. Perhaps he believed that to deny the universality of the Biblical deluge directly would be to open the floodgates, so to say, to accusations of his unorthodoxy. Whatever his reasons, in the history of the readings of Noah’s flood, Buffon’s is a turning point. For Buffon ignored the question of the universality of the flood of Noah that had dominated discussions of the history of the earth for over a century. He demonstrated that a complete theory of the earth could be developed without specifically placing Noah and the flood within it, and without relating a theory of the earth to divine Providence. Within the grand historical drama of the epochs of the earth penned by Buffon, Noah was no longer a key player. As Norman Cohn neatly puts it, ‘[S]et in such a context, the Biblical Flood was reduced to the status of a minor episode, a mishap too commonplace to be singled out for special mention.’Footnote ¹²³

The Irish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797) was moving in the same direction as Buffon in his Theory of the Earth in 1788 – heading back into what Buffon called ‘the dark abyss of time’. ‘The result, therefore, of our present enquiry,’ Hutton concluded, ‘is that we find no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end.’Footnote ¹²⁴ So, the world revealed no sign of any original creation, even if it nonetheless showed ‘an order, not unworthy of Divine wisdom in a subject which, in another view, has appeared as the work of chance, or as absolute disorder and confusion’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The fossil record, far from being evidence of a recent universal inundation, revealed vast periods of past time. Hutton’s earth worked like a Newtonian mechanical system in a law-bound and purposeful process of time rather than space. Of Mosaic history in general or the universal flood of Noah in particular there was no mention.

Opponents of Buffon and Hutton were faced with two alternatives. The first was to assert the literal truth of Mosaic history against the antiquity of the earth proposed by the earth scientists. This was the approach adopted by the Irish geologist and chemist Richard Kirwan (1733–1812) in his Geological Essays (1799). For the true account of the flood, it was Moses that mattered. ‘Passing over the systems of Burnet, Woodward, and Whiston,’ he wrote, ‘I recur to the account of this great revolution given by Moses himself, taken in its plain literal sense, as the only one that appears perfectly consistent, with all the new phenomena now known.’Footnote ¹²⁶ It was, therefore, Moses that Kirwan took as his guide ‘in tracing the circumstances of the most horrible catastrophe to which the human and all animal species, and even the terraqueous globe itself, had at any period since its origin been exposed’.Footnote ¹²⁷ And Moses ascribed it to a supernatural cause, namely ‘the express intention of God to punish mankind for their crimes’.Footnote ¹²⁸

Like earlier proponents of a universal flood, Kirwan argued that fossilised shells at high elevations indicated a universal deluge, as did the bones of elephants and rhinoceroses, brought to the lower parts of Siberia ‘by an inundation from warmer and very distant climates, betwixt which and Siberia mountains above nine thousand feet intervene’.Footnote ¹²⁹ According to Kirwan, the flood began in the southern ocean that reached from India and South America to the South Pole. Noah resided on the borders of this ocean, whence the ark was driven north-west to the mountains of Armenia. The deluge began, as Moses indicated, with continual rain for forty days, was augmented by the waters of the great abyss, and swept northwards, eventually reaching the mountains of Sweden. Mosaic devotee that he was, surprisingly, on the animals in the ark, Kirwan gave ground. ‘It does not however appear to me necessary to suppose that any others were collected in the ark but those most necessary for the use of man, and those only of the graminivorous [grass eating] or granivorous [seed eating] classes, the others were most probably of subsequent creation.’Footnote ¹³⁰ Carnivorous creatures were created after the flood ‘when the graminivorous had multiplied to such an extent that their carcases would have caused infection.’Footnote ¹³¹ The creation of carnivores after the flood explained the existence of animals ‘peculiar to America and the torrid and rigid zones’.Footnote ¹³²

That aside, for Kirwan, any compromise on the literal truth of Genesis was the thin end of the civilisational wedge. He, like many others, was no doubt shaken to his core by the French Revolution that was just coming to an end as he was writing in 1799. According to Kirwan, Buffon, Hutton, and others of their ilk were agents of atheism. ‘[R]ecent experience has shown,’ he wrote, ‘that the obscurity in which the philosophical knowledge of this [original] state [of the earth] has hitherto been involved, has proved too favourable to the structure of various systems of atheism or infidelity, as these have been in their turn to turbulence and immorality.’Footnote ¹³³ Geology, properly done, however, ‘ripens, or (to use a mineralogical expression) graduates into religion, as this does into morality’.Footnote ¹³⁴ In short, the role of geology was to be the handmaiden of theology, and theology was to be the housemaid of morality.

The second alternative was to acquiesce in the antiquity of the earth but argue nonetheless for the universal flood as described in the Bible. This was the position of William Buckland (1784–1856), Anglican clergyman, Oxford University’s first professor of geology, and most avid of diluvians. Thus, Buckland happily endorsed the view that the six days of creation in the book of Genesis were not to be understood as implying the same length of time that is currently occupied by a single revolution of the earth. Moses, he declared, was not so interested in those times not connected with the history of humanity. His only concern was to show that the world was not eternal and self-existent but rather ‘was originally created by the power of the Almighty’.Footnote ¹³⁵

Despite the antiquity of the earth, Buckland believed that, with reference to the presence of humanity on it, the facts established by geology led to the conclusion that ‘the existence of mankind can on no account be supposed to have taken its beginning before that time which is assigned to it in the Mosaic writings’.Footnote ¹³⁶ For its part, geology affirmed the event of a universal flood after the creation of humanity at the time that the book of Genesis suggested:

In short, according to Buckland, the Mosaic account was in perfect harmony with the discoveries of modern science – if the days of creation could be stretched to vast eons of time.

There was, however, a major problem for the supporters of Buckland in the 1820s, a period that came to be known as the ‘diluvian decade’. It was one that Jakob Scheuchzer had recognised a century earlier. If the flood had wiped out all humanity except Noah and his family, why had the geologists not discovered human remains? In 1831, the same year that the supposed human fossil that Scheuchzer had called Homo diluvia testis – Man, a witness of the Deluge was renamed as the salamander Andreas scheuchzeri after him, Buckland’s disciple Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), also both clergyman and professor of geology, gave his last address as president of the Geological Society. He recanted his belief in the universal flood of Noah:

By 1836, William Buckland too had retreated from his earlier belief in the flood of Noah, although not with such a noticeable splash as Sedgwick. In his Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology, Buckland moved away from any precise identification of eras in geology with the six days of creation in Genesis, a theory that later came to be known as the ‘day age’ theory. He settled on what was later called ‘the gap’ theory. This was the idea that ‘millions of years may have occupied the indefinite interval, between the beginning in which God created the heaven and the earth, and the evening or commencement of the first day of the Mosaic narrative’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Buckland had come to the modern realisation that the interval between the origin of the earth and recorded human history was boundless. We need to read between the lines of this work to conclude that he no longer believed that the evidence of geology supported a universal deluge of the Biblical kind. But in fact, he had, very quietly, let it go. He managed to maintain the harmony between geology and Genesis – if only just. But it was at the expense of the universal flood of Noah.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Within the domain of earth science, the Biblical story of Noah and the universal flood had moved from the realm of history to the realm of myth.