The World That Then Was

The world that then was

Today we read Parashat Bereshit, from “In the beginning” all the way to Noach. Last week we discussed how our sages viewed the six days of creation as real, literal days. Next week, on Shabbat Noach, we will study the flood, and this afternoon at Minchah we will talk about the dinosaurs. This morning we ask a different question: what was the world like at the very beginning? Why did people live 900 years? Were there really giants? Were there cavemen? And what will the world be like when Hashem restores it?

Peter wrote about people in the last days who would not want to know these things:

“There shall come in the last days scoffers… saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water” (2 Peter 3:3–5).

The scoffers assume the world has always been the way it is now. But Peter calls the early world “the world that then was” (3:6). It was very different from ours. Let’s go visit it.

Waters above the heavens

On the second day, “God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament” (Genesis 1:7). The psalmist still sings: “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens” (Psalm 148:4).

What is the firmament? Not the ground: the birds fly “in the open firmament of heaven” (Genesis 1:20). The sun, moon and stars are also set “in the firmament of the heaven” (1:17). Paul speaks of being “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2): the sky where birds fly, the space where stars shine, and the dwelling place of Hashem. Our sages count even more: Resh Lakish names seven heavens, one above another (Chagigah 12b). Either way, the Hebrew word shamayim is always plural. There is more than one heaven.

And what were the upper waters? Our sages wondered too. The midrash says the upper waters hang in place by the word of Hashem alone (Bereshit Rabbah 4:3). The Talmud tells of the sage Ben Zoma, who was so lost in thought about the space between the upper and lower waters that he barely noticed Rabbi Yehoshua standing in front of him (Chagigah 15a).

Many creation teachers believe in what is called the “canopy theory.” Before the flood, they say, a layer of water vapor or ice surrounded the earth, high above the air we breathe. Like the glass roof of a greenhouse, it would have kept the whole earth warm and green, from pole to pole. It would have raised the air pressure, so that every breath held more oxygen. And it would have shielded people and animals from the sun’s harmful rays. When “the windows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11), the canopy came down, and the world was never the same. We will look at that story next week in Parshat Noach.

The haftarah usually read on Shabbat Bereshit begins: “Thus saith God Hashem, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth” (Isaiah 42:5). However He arranged the waters, He did it, and He did it for a reason.

Why did they live 900 years?

Read Genesis chapter 5 and the numbers are amazing. Adam lived 930 years. Seth, 912. Methuselah, the oldest, 969. Some people say these were really months, not years. But Enoch became a father at 65 (Genesis 5:21). If those were months, he would have been five years old!

After Noach, the numbers drop like steps on a staircase. Shem lived 600 years. His son Arpachshad, 438. Peleg, 239. Avraham, 175. Moshe, 120. And King David wrote: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten” (Psalm 90:10). Something changed.

Our sages give two answers.

The Ramban says Adam and his children lived long because they were the direct handiwork of the Holy One, and their bodies were strong. After the flood, he says, the air of the world changed for the worse, and lifespans grew shorter and shorter (Ramban on Genesis 5:4).

The Rambam says something different. Only the few people named in the Torah lived that long, either because of their special way of life and diet, or as a miracle (Guide for the Perplexed 2:47).

Both may be true. The first people were made perfect and lived in a better world. Regardless, both of these great sages believed in the literal ages of the people in Genesis. As sin spread and the world was damaged, life grew shorter. And Hashem set a limit: “his days shall be an hundred and twenty years” (Genesis 6:3).

Science gives us some interesting hints that the early world was different. Fossil hunters have dug up dragonflies with wings over two feet across, as wide as a seagull’s. The biggest dragonflies alive today have wings only about six or seven inches across. Fossils also show giant millipedes longer than a grown man and scorpions as long as your arm.

Why can’t insects grow that big today? It comes down to how they breathe. Insects don’t have lungs. Air enters through tiny holes along their sides and travels through tiny tubes deep into their bodies. In a small insect, the air doesn’t have far to go. In a giant insect, the tubes would be so long that not enough oxygen could reach the inside of its body. So in today’s air, a two-foot dragonfly would suffocate.

Many scientists think the only way these giants could have lived is if the air once held much more oxygen than it does now. Scientists have even tested the idea. When they raised dragonflies and other insects in air with extra oxygen, the insects grew bigger than normal. In 1987, two scientists reported that tiny bubbles of air trapped inside ancient amber, which is hardened tree sap, held about 30 percent oxygen. The air we breathe today has only 21 percent. The world that then was may have been a world where every breath was richer.

Richer air under higher pressure doesn’t just help things grow. It also heals. Normally, oxygen travels through our bodies on our red blood cells. But when you breathe pure oxygen under higher pressure, oxygen also dissolves straight into the liquid part of your blood, the plasma. Then it can reach places that red blood cells can’t easily get to, like damaged or swollen tissue. Doctors use this in hyperbaric chambers, which look like small submarines or glass tubes. A patient lies inside and breathes pure oxygen at two or three times normal air pressure. Hospitals use these chambers to help heal burns, deep wounds that won’t close, crushed limbs and certain infections. Some professional sports teams use them so injured players recover sooner.

One of the most famous cases happened in October 1987. Eighteen-month-old Jessica McClure was playing in her aunt’s backyard in Midland, Texas, when she fell into an abandoned well. The opening was only eight inches wide, and she slid down 22 feet and got stuck. For 58 hours, the whole world watched on television as rescuers drilled a tunnel through solid rock beside the well to reach her. When they finally pulled her out, one leg had been twisted above her head the whole time. Her foot had gone so long without blood that doctors feared they would have to amputate. Instead, they treated her in a hyperbaric chamber, breathing pure oxygen under pressure. Her foot was saved, and she lost only a toe.

If a few hours of rich, pressurized air could do that for one little girl, imagine a whole world where every breath was like that, every day, for centuries. “And Hashem God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). In the world that then was, that breath of life may have been fuller than anything we know today.

Many creation teachers also believe that the waters above shielded people from the sun’s harmful rays. Today the sun’s ultraviolet rays damage our skin every day, and after many years we see it in wrinkles and age spots. A shield overhead could have helped bodies last for centuries.

Ideal conditions make living things grow amazingly. At the 1985 World Expo in Japan, a single tomato plant, grown with perfect nutrients and care, became a tomato tree that produced more than 13,000 tomatoes. Imagine a whole world in ideal conditions. A world with richer air, a shield overhead and perfect food would have been a healthier world, with longer lives.

There were giants in the earth

“There were giants [Nephilim] in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:4). Later the spies saw giants in Canaan and felt like grasshoppers (Numbers 13:33). Og king of Bashan slept in a bed nine cubits long, more than thirteen feet (Deuteronomy 3:11). Goliath stood “six cubits and a span” (1 Samuel 17:4), more than nine feet. Our sages even teach that Og was a survivor from before the flood (Niddah 61a; Zevachim 113b).

Even in modern times, people have grown to giant size. Robert Wadlow of Illinois, who died in 1940, stood 8 feet 11 inches tall and wore a size 37 shoe. Goliath was only a little taller. Roman historians wrote that the emperor Maximinus was about eight and a half feet tall.

And there are many reports of much bigger people from long ago. Newspapers in the 1800s and early 1900s reported a skeleton 9 feet 8 inches long found in Brewersville, Indiana; skeletons 9 to 10 feet long in Nevada, near Humboldt Lake; eight skeletons 8 to 9 feet long wearing copper armor in Walkerton, Indiana; and skeletons said to be 12 feet long in Lompoc, California, and near Tucson, Arizona. A giant human thumb bone has been reported from near Mount Ararat in Turkey. Some believe museums have quietly set such finds aside because they do not fit the idea that man started small and grew bigger. The Bible teaches the opposite: man started bigger and stronger, and has grown smaller and weaker since.

Fossils also show that many animals were once much bigger than they are today:

• A millipede-like creature called Arthropleura, more than eight feet long

• Giant beavers up to seven feet long, found in Ohio and Wisconsin

• The “Irish elk,” a deer with antlers twelve feet across

• Bison with horns seven feet from tip to tip

• A wombat-like animal in Australia the size of a rhinoceros, and kangaroos over six feet tall

• A flightless bird in Australia about ten feet tall, weighing half a ton

• Megalodon, a shark perhaps fifty to sixty feet long, with teeth as big as your hand

• Archelon, a sea turtle fifteen feet long

• Ground sloths as big as elephants

Reptiles keep growing as long as they live. Imagine what a lizard might become if it lived for centuries! And when animals and people lived longer, ate better and breathed richer air, it is no surprise that they grew bigger.

Were there cavemen?

The Torah says man was made in the image of Hashem (Genesis 1:27). Textbooks have often shown a line of ape-men slowly standing up. But the history of those “missing links” is not pretty.

• Piltdown Man was announced in England in 1912 and taught for forty years. In 1953 it was exposed as a fraud: a human skull and an ape’s jaw, filed and stained to look old.

• Nebraska Man was drawn as a whole family from a single tooth found in 1922. A few years later, the tooth turned out to belong to a wild pig.

• Neanderthals were once drawn as hunched, hairy brutes. The famous skeleton that gave them that image turned out to be an old man with severe arthritis. On average, Neanderthals had larger brains than ours. Today scientists agree they buried their dead, made tools and jewelry, and even had children with other humans. In other words, they were people, just as creationists said all along. (Fun fact: the Neander Valley in Germany, where they were first found, was named after Joachim Neander, the man who wrote the hymn “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.”) One orthodontist, Dr. Jack Cuozzo, studied their skulls and suggested that their heavy brow ridges came from living a very long time, since the bones of the face keep growing throughout life. People who lived for centuries in the generations after Noach would look exactly like that.

• Java Man was announced in 1891 by a Dutch doctor who went to Indonesia determined to find a missing link. He had found a skullcap, a thigh bone and some teeth, not all from the same place. He did not tell the world for many years that he had also found ordinary human skulls elsewhere on Java.

• The Laetoli footprints in Tanzania, dated by scientists at over three and a half million years, look exactly like footprints of people who walk barefoot. One scientist who studied them said that if they were not thought to be so old, everyone would say a human made them. Maybe a human did.

There have always been people who lived in caves; David hid in one (1 Samuel 22:1). After the tower of Bavel scattered the nations (Genesis 11:8–9), many families had to start over with simple stone tools. That doesn’t make them half-apes. It makes them pioneers.

Paradise restored

In the garden, Hashem gave people and animals plants to eat: “to every beast of the earth… I have given every green herb for meat” (Genesis 1:30). No animal hunted another. Only after Noach did Hashem say: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you” (Genesis 9:3), and only then did He add: “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast” (9:2). Before that, the animals had no reason to be afraid.

But don’t sharp teeth prove an animal was made to eat meat? Not at all. Fruit bats have sharp teeth and eat fruit. The giant panda has the teeth of a meat-eater and eats bamboo. Gorillas have huge fangs and eat plants. And when the Torah speaks of life, it speaks of creatures that have nefesh chayah, “a living soul” (Genesis 1:30). Plants were given as food; they are not “living souls.” So in the garden, nothing with a living soul had to die so that another could eat.

Charles Darwin struggled with this. He wrote that there seemed to him “too much misery in the world” for a good God to have made it that way. But Hashem did not make it that way. He made a world that was “very good” (Genesis 1:31), and man wrecked it. The thorns came only after sin: “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (3:18). If you saw a smashed minivan, you would not blame the factory for building a smashed minivan. It left the factory perfect. It was wrecked later. Paul says all creation still “groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22), waiting to be repaired.

And it will be repaired. The prophets promise that Hashem will bring back what was lost:

“There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old… The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock” (Isaiah 65:20, 25).

Long life will return. The animals will go back to eating plants. And in the new Jerusalem, the tree of life that Adam lost will stand again: “and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).

Even the great creatures of the fifth day have a place in that future. “God created great whales [tanninim]” (Genesis 1:21). Rashi tells us who they were:

“The great sea creatures”: this is the Leviathan and its mate. He created them male and female, then killed the female and salted it away for the righteous in the World to Come. (Rashi on Genesis 1:21, from Bava Batra 74b)

The Talmud says that in the World to Come, Hashem will make a sukkah for the righteous out of the skin of the Leviathan (Bava Batra 75a). That is why, when we leave the sukkah for the last time, many say this prayer:

May it be Your will, Hashem our God, that just as I have fulfilled the mitzvah and dwelt in this sukkah, so may I merit next year to dwell in the sukkah of the skin of Leviathan.

The great creature made on the fifth day of creation becomes the sukkah of the World to Come. The beginning and the end meet again.

But the World to Come will be even more than Eden. Our sages say:

All the prophets prophesied only about the days of the Messiah. But about the World to Come, “Neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him” (Isaiah 64:4). (Berakhot 34b)

Paul quotes the same verse: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Think about it. Our eyes can see only a tiny sliver of all the light there is. We cannot see radio waves, microwaves, infrared or ultraviolet. What if, in the World to Come, Hashem opens our eyes to see all of it? What colors would we see that we have never imagined? What if we could hear colors, or see music? Whatever Adam saw in the garden, we will see more.

Think of it like a computer. When you upgrade from an old, slow computer to a new one, the same programs run, but faster and in color. If you enjoy the sights, sounds and tastes of this world, wait until the World to Come. We are headed for a systems upgrade. Paul was “caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:4). And after that, he wrote of “having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better” (Philippians 1:23).

A light to the nations

This Shabbat falls on the day before Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan. So instead of the usual haftarah for Bereshit, we read the special haftarah for the eve of the new moon: “To morrow is the new moon” (1 Samuel 20:18). If it weren’t for the new moon, we would have read on in Isaiah: “I Hashem have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes” (Isaiah 42:6–7).

The new moon itself is a picture of restoration. Every month the moon grows dark, and then it is renewed. And Isaiah promises that one day “the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that Hashem bindeth up the breach of his people” (Isaiah 30:26).

The world that then was had giants, long lives and a garden. The world that is now has thorns, sickness and death. But the world that is coming will be better than both. The same Hashem who said “Let there be light” will open blind eyes and make all things new.

So let’s not be scoffers who forget how the world began and how it will end. Let’s be people who remember where we came from and where we are going, and who live today as citizens of the world to come.

Shabbat shalom.