Genesis' "Random" Numbers Map Directly 10,000 Years (Unique Discovery)
Episode script. Originally published 2026-08-12 at https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/p/genesis-random-numbers-map-directly
In this episode of deep biblical literalism, Malcolm and Simone Collins unpack Genesis 5–11 not as a list of impossibly long-lived individuals, but as a precise civilizational timeline and map.
By treating the genealogies as sequential cultural phases rather than personal lifespans, the numbers align with the archaeological record of the Near East with startling precision — from Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük through the Halaf–Ubaid transition (the “Flood”) all the way to the fall of Ur and Abraham. The Table of Nations emerges as an improbably accurate ethnographic map spanning from Spain to the Gulf, matching modern genetic and archaeological data. The Tower of Babel tracks the Uruk expansion and the collapse of its shared administrative “one language.”
They also re-examine the Flood as a literary convention marking a real civilizational rupture, the Cain–Abel story as a lesson in emotional control, the Nephilim/Sons of God problem, the rainbow covenant, and why this reading makes far more sense of the text than surface-level literalism.
Companion deep-dive with maps, charts, and full ledger: https://technopuritan.com/genesis5
This is “deep literalism” — reading the Bible the way its original audience would have understood its literary forms, then testing those claims against the actual archaeological and genetic record. Malcolm Collins: This is not like normal Bible math. This isn’t like I take numbers from the Bible and I assume they’re supposed to be something totally different, or I, I move them around and I add a number here and I add a number here.
We are working with what the Bible appears to be talking about, early human civilization- Mm-hmm ... and just copying and pasting the numbers
To get an idea of just how insane this math is, the Hafal-Unyad transition is bracketed between 5500 BC and 5400 BC. So the boundary is only known to half a century. The computed flood would have happened if you use these numbers at 5444 BC, which isn’t just inside of this bracket. It lands six years from the bracket’s midpoint, which is astonishing when you’re looking at tens of thousand years of human history.
Malcolm Collins: Like, the size of this map, if you’re going to compare it to other maps of the time, would have to be a combination of the Phoenicians’ trading map and the Assyrians’ conquest map, right?
Mm-hmm. Like, the two largest maps anyone would’ve known during that period. If you compare it with the ancient Greek map, it just becomes laughable,
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. This is a crazy day for me because I decided to just sort of be like, well, if the Bible’s true, ‘cause I was, I was reading it. I was like, it’s probably not gonna have, at the very beginning, a bunch of stuff that just doesn’t matter. Because y- near the beginning of, of Genesis, there’s a few lists of names and ages and there’s...
And, and they don’t, like I think a lot of people when they’re reading ‘em generally just skip over them. Absolutely. They’re like, “Okay, whatever. Let’s
Simone Collins: get to the fun part.” Well, it’s very similar to the Iliad and Aeneid where you’re like, “Come on, like, I don’t need the whole lineage of this one soldier in the war over Trojan...”
You know. Yeah. It’s surprisingly... Okay, yeah, so.
Malcolm Collins: So, so you, you hit that and what this unfortunately does, at least after I went into it and I started trying to match these lists to things-
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm ...
Malcolm Collins: is it means you completely misread Genesis.
Simone Collins: Oh.
Malcolm Collins: You, modern reader, get to it. You read the, the first part, which is important.
Then you
Simone Collins: see a bunch of- And it’s so dense, it’s like, whoa, that was, like the, the world was created. Whoa, the Garden of Eden just came and left. Like, it goes so fast, right? Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: and then the, the whole- There’s
Simone Collins: no
Malcolm Collins: like- ... murder thing and that’s interesting. Then list, and it’s like, ah, boring, tuning out for the list.
Yes. Ooh, big interesting flood narrative happening
Simone Collins: here. Yeah, whoa, the, and I, literally the flood comes and goes so fast that I read it while falling asleep and I nodded off for a second and it just, I missed that whole part.
Malcolm Collins: And then a bunch of lists again. Oh, I’ll skip those. What this does is it causes you to read it in an inverted format to how somebody of the period it was written would’ve read it.
Simone Collins: Oh.
Malcolm Collins: They would’ve said, “Oh, some interesting lists that are telling us stuff.” Then they get to the flood narrative and they go, “Oh, another flood narrative. I’ve read a dozen- ... of those this week. Let’s just skip over that.” And, or, or rather they would’ve understood that the flood narrative meant something.
If you have a flood narrative in the middle of a collection of lists, traditionally in Sumerian writing from that period, what you are talking about is a transitional event, something really big transitioned between these two periods.
Simone Collins: Wait, so you’re saying flood narratives didn’t just turn out, up in the Old Testament of the Bible?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, flood narratives are everywhere during that period. So
Simone Collins: you weren’t kidding, like they, it was just, it was like a literary convention.
Malcolm Collins: It was a literary convention, yeah. It, it, it was a literary convention that meant something big just transitioned.
Simone Collins: Why does no, why does no one mention this? W- okay,
Malcolm Collins: wow.
I think a lot of people mention this. A lot of people are familiar with Gilgamesh at least.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but... God, I read it back in college. Was there a flood in Gilgamesh? I don’t remember there being a flood in Gilgamesh.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, and it, it- I just
Simone Collins: remember the bromance. That’s what we’re all here for, ladies.
Malcolm Collins: But what gets crazier is something I didn’t notice when I was first looking at these lists.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: And as soon as you notice it, you notice- That you’re actually looking at three different things. So list number one is unlike any list I have ever seen in my entire life or that we have any archeological evidence of.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: And a lot of people don’t notice this about it when they read it the first time.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: It does something very, very strange.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Instead of listing, you know, when people were born and when they die, or how long they lived and who they begat, it instead also lists their age when they had the kid The second list, well, rather the third list, the third list also does this. Yeah. So this is Genesis 5 and Genesis 10.
Simone Collins: And it’s really weird because why are some people waiting until they’re in their 80s to have kids? Like, people are just like, “This doesn’t make sense.”
Malcolm Collins: That’s, that’s not as important. Okay. What’s more important is we don’t have a single list like this anywhere in the Mesopotamian archeological record.
This is not the way people record their ancestors. Okay. And it’s a weird thing to do. Even today, you don’t typically record the age somebody was when they have a kid. Why would you do this? Why would you be recording the age somebody was at when they had a kid?
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: Because if you do that, you have something other than a list.
You have a timeline. It, you, you can know exactly how long the timeline is If you don’t know when a person was born and their parents lived 800, 900 years supposedly, they could have been born anywhere within that 800 to 900 years.
Simone Collins: That’s true.
Malcolm Collins: So you don’t actually have a timeline of events.
Simone Collins: Yeah, okay.
Malcolm Collins: This gives you a very tight, inalterable timeline. So then the question is, of course, is this timeline must mean something if it was recorded in the Bible for that long. What does it mean? Like, like, i- i- i- you could say, “Oh, it’s just a list of people’s ages and when they had kids.” Why is that important information?
And it also doesn’t make sense. They seem to be living an impossible amount of time for a human to live.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Right?
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: And they’re also not recorded the way that the Bible often records when it’s talking about actual people. You’ll notice something on these original lists. It’s single names. When the Bible later records a list of actual people, it’ll say Jesus of Nazareth.
Yes. John the Baptist. Oh,
Simone Collins: good point. Basically, everyone’s given- Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s differentiating them very explicitly ...
Malcolm Collins: yeah, like everyone’s given like a, a, a side hustle thing or a, a, a city that they’re from or something like this. Mm-hmm. So this appears to be talking about a different kind of thing.
So I thought, okay, what if it’s talking about cultural groups, right? Like, what if it’s talking about civilizations? This civilization, and then this civilization was birthed from that civilization, and then this civilization was birthed from that civilization, and many of these civilizations would have been concurrent to each other, right?
Well, I then lapped it on top of a specific period in history that makes a lot of sense to choose, and you actually get a near perfect timeline of civilizations that match the archeological record often within gaps of 30 years. We’re not talking like thousands of years off or anything like this. We are talking about from, from an archeological perspective, an infinitesimal gap, and this happens when you lay it out about 13 times.
Now, there’s a few names that don’t fully map to things, I’ll admit that. But we can always say- Mm-hmm ... the archeological record might be off here, or it might be describing a civilization that we haven’t found yet.
Simone Collins: Wow.
Malcolm Collins: But it gets stranger than that.
So we’re going... Because then you get the flood, right?
Which is a massive civilizational turning point that we’ll talk about that’s being talked about here. Crazy. And a real flood, but the, the flood and the civilizational turning point happen at different times. Mm-hmm. And the real flood doesn’t happen at the time the flood narrative does. But at the time the flood narrative happens, two other really important things happen, if you’re going by my timeline here, right?
Like, if, if the timeline I have. You have a regional high point of the seas in this region, globally speaking. It’s the highest they ever were. And you have the invention of sailing ships appearing for the first time which is also really interesting. And another thing we’ll get to is the actual dimensions for the ark, because that’s another weird thing.
Why are there dimensions for the ark here? Mm. And what we’ll go into is the dimensions for the ark are weird in how not weird they are. They would actually describe a boat that would work with technology that shouldn’t have been... Like, people at the time, when they made up ship descriptions- Yeah ... because they did in the Gilgamesh myth.
They, they made up a ship description. But the... For, for that flood narrative. But the ship description they made up in the Gilgamesh narrative wouldn’t have worked. It- Oh, like
Simone Collins: the ship would have immediately sunk or something?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it would have immediately capsized and sunk. Okay. But the ship laid out in the ark not only would have worked, it would have been the ideal way to build a ship for an event like that.
Okay. A rudderless large ship that just needed to stay afloat for a period. Huh. So we’re gonna get into all of this. Now I will note here, this is really big for me because the Noah story is the story that made my family not Christian anymore.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: My dad read it and he goes, “This seems stupid.”
Yeah. “This does not seem like-” Obviously not all of the animals on earth could have fit in a boat, and if they’re using magic, why not just say they’re using magic? That would have been easier. And even if so, how did he redistribute the animals to all of their correct regions after the flood happened without needing to mention- Oh, yeah
that there were massively-
Simone Collins: People came through a stretch, yeah, where they’re like, “Well, must have made it on a floating forest or something to Australia.” And marsupials can travel farther because their in- their infants can suckle inside their pouches. Yeah, that’s not necessary I guess per your view.
Yes. But I don’t know how that’s gonna... How, how are you gonna thread this needle? How is this-
Malcolm Collins: How am I gonna thread the needle to make- Yes ... this all work? Yes. So we’re gonna get into that because it’s crazy. I have a website that you guys can go to where I have the maps on it. Oh, also, also, there’s a really detailed and impossible map buried in this part of Genesis that we’re gonna get to.
Gosh. That literally goes from Spain to, like, the far Middle East region and then down to, like, the bottom of, like, Egypt which is wild because if you compare it to other contemporaneous maps of people like the ancient Greek ones and the ancient Egyptian ones, they are laughably bad in comparison to this map layout.
This was one when I was reading it, I go, “This sounds like a map to me and a genealogy. Is it accurate?” And it’s been scientifically genetically proven today that the genealogy is accurate, and it goes back to desi- describing events and with names like Uruk that would’ve been being written about, like, 10,000 years after the event.
But-
Simone Collins: Really? ...
Malcolm Collins: let’s go back. Let’s start at the beginning about how I, I got to all this, and we’ll get to a few other really, really, really crazy things here.
Simone Collins: Okay? Please, yes.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so- Let’s
Simone Collins: do this.
Malcolm Collins: I have before said that I thought the Garden of Eden, and I will make this more specific here, started at Gobekli Tepe, right? Right. Like, so this is the first human settlement we know. The Bible says the Garden of Eden is at the mouthwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. And actually one of the other rivers they describe, they mention having, like, gold deposits on it, and we’ve actually found a dry riverbed that would’ve dried up about 10,000 years before the Bible was written that had the same mouthwaters.
So a- again, information they shouldn’t have had access to during this period. But Gobekli Tepe is the, the first settlement. And then the last settlement of this period that we sort of will say is the end because this is where we begin to start our timeline, is Catalhoyuk. This is when you have the first permanent settlement.
Gobekli Tepe, while it is the first, like, built-up settlement that is exactly at the right location was not a permanent settlement. It was like a hunter-forager settlement, right? Now you wanna know what the most common inscription is at Gobekli Tepe, Simone? I didn’t know this until I was going over this with AI.
Simone Collins: No. No, what is it?
Malcolm Collins: I, I’m just gonna have you guess. From, from like, what would be the craziest thing to just be drawn all over Gobekli Tepe if it’s a, was what the Garden of Eden was talking about?
Simone Collins: Oops
Malcolm Collins: What? Come on, guess
Simone Collins: Well, well, pomegranates
Malcolm Collins: Snakes
Simone Collins: S- snakes
Malcolm Collins: Snakes are everywhere. It is, it- there’s a study- Snakes?
Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?
Malcolm Collins: that shows it’s the single most common inscription, and I’ll put some of them on screen here for you guys Oh, no and this was a site that wasn’t in use for over 10,000 years when the, the modern anthropological understanding of when these stories were written down happened Oh, my gosh. So- Snake ... so it gets crazier, right?
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: And, and so this would’ve been about an 8,000 window. The ledger that picks up below the moment of the Garden of Eden era ends, Adam’s year zero is the first fully agricultural metropolis. Put on the narrative and it chains together. You get a continuous coverage of Earth’s history from 96,000 BC to 2000 BC with dates.
This also, this period that it ends at was the early Holocene Humid Period, which was a planetary wet phase that made this entire area extremely green and verdant. So you actually would have had a Garden of Eden was in this region of Mesopotamia during this period Oh,
Simone Collins: my gosh.
Malcolm Collins: The other crazy thing about this story is that this region, like you might think, “Why is this Tell Le Thekke area important?”
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: It maps, so the story starts with Gobekli Tepe and it ends with Abraham. That’s where the, the rest of the narrative picks up again. In Abraham, you get two lists of names. One with impossible ages which will map to specific events. The second with that appear to be a real genealogy. And they, they’re, they’re book-ended, we’ll get to this.
But the real genealogy gets really, really interesting because the real genealogy has a list of names in it that now we, we only discovered this in 1950s to today. Oh. Nobody would have known this from the age of Babylon till today. But the list of names turns out to have been a list of town names around this area from around the age that Abraham would’ve been alive.
Simone Collins: So they’re not people, they’re settlements, they’re, they’re towns?
Malcolm Collins: Well, it might’ve been people named after settlements, or it might’ve been settlements named after people, but it’s irrelevant. What it tells us is a few things. One is, is if you know the story of Abraham, he, he’s in Ur, right? But he, as Ur collapsed, goes north to like where his kin are.
When he sends for wives, he sends north where his kin are, and that would map to this particular region. What’s interesting here is it means that we’re dealing with a story of largely one place throughout this entire period. , A place that would have lasted, if you’re looking like Gobekli Tepe to, to Aaron, a 10,000 year period.
It was completely lost to history, and then we found it again when we were able to re-read the, the language of the people of that period in archeological sites around there. Hmm. And I’m gonna put a map on screen here. So if you scroll down I actually created on the website here a map of all of the cities with names- Oh.
Of Ar-
Simone Collins: Oh ...
Malcolm Collins: of Abraham’s immediate ancestors. And you can see it’s, it’s, it’s not like one or two, it’s a lot of overlapping names- Look at that ... in a very tight geographic region. So Gobekli Tepe overlooks the Haram, Harran Plain, which drains into the Balikh River, the same valley where the, the ledger’s northern villages sit, and where Abraham’s grandfather and great-grandfather’s names survive as town names.
So then you have this beautiful handoff eons later, okay? The, the three names before Abraham are Serug, his great-grandfather, Nahor, his grandfather, and Terah, his father. So again, very unlikely to be coincident. Now here’s what the Cuneiform Reform record. Assyrian literacies and Mari letters turned up with no help from the Bible, real towns in the Haran district carrying the names abraham’s ancestors are the towns of his family’s district and the text keeps pointing there. The Terah moves from the family of Haran, Genesis 11:31. Abraham’s servant fetches Rebecca from the city of Nahor, Genesis 24.
Jacob runs to Haran, Genesis 28. So basically this tells us a few things. One, obviously same location, but two, th- these are real people in the location they say they’re from. And we also know that these are one of the descendant populations of the Jews, which again, is pretty interesting.
Simone Collins: This is crazy
Were you pulling from anyone else talking about this? Like, who else is looking at it from this perspective?
Malcolm Collins: A few people have mentioned that Tell le-Ahki might be what’s being talked about in the Garden of Eden, but the timeline that I found appears to be completely unique to me.
The, the- So people
Simone Collins: aren’t saying that these are settlements or cohorts rather than-
Malcolm Collins: No, no, no ... communities? The Abraham names, other people have picked up on that. That was, like, a crazy thing- Okay ... when people found that. But the really- Mm-hmm ... crazy thing we’re about to get to, as far as I’m aware, I am the first person to find this.
Simone Collins: Then go on.
Malcolm Collins: So now we are going to go to that first list of names, right? The, names, dates, kids, everything like that. Now if you scroll down look at the first chart here.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Whoa. Oh, cool.
Malcolm Collins: Right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So this chart, again, is not something I can mess with. I, I’m taking Çatalhöyük, the first known large, real settlement- Oh, yeah, with
Simone Collins: Adam and Seth
Malcolm Collins: And then I’m charting the names here on all of the cultures around that particular region, and we will actually, like, expand it out here. And what you see is incredibly tight matching here. So if you, if you map Adam onto the Çatalhöyük East mound- Mm-hmm ... w- along with the, the first kid, Seth you get very, very tight alignment with this.
Actually, I’ll, I’ll just read about these, these different people, because I think it’s really interesting.
Simone Collins: Wait, was Seth the first kid? I thought it was Cain and Abel. Am I super off here?
Malcolm Collins: Well, remember what happened to those two.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it didn’t end so well, so... Oh, then they had another kid, Seth?
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
That’s the one that everyone else- After ... refers to. Yes.
Simone Collins: Cain and Abel.
Malcolm Collins: Because Abel’s dead and Cain is a, a naughty boy. Naughty.
Simone Collins: He’s, he’s in the bad, yeah, the bad doghouse. Okay. Go on. Sorry.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So not only do you have in nine points really tight mapping to our archeological record of this period, but we have, if we take the flood as a break point that ends at the...
5444 BC, the moment Halaf Ubaid transition begins, the boundary at which every distinct culture of the old Neolithic world stopped existing, and exactly one cultural pat for the ch- ch- the Ubaid the irrigation and temple people of the southern marshes survived, spread, and repopulated the entire Near East.
Simone Collins: Oh,
Malcolm Collins: wow. So one, one group really did end up replacing all other people at the exact end of this period if you go by this dating metric.
Simone Collins: Really? So this, this global cold or arid shock That went from 6,200 to 6,000 BC that you’re talking about?
Malcolm Collins: No, no, that, that maps to a number of the events that are written about in genealogy.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: The flood is the end bar here, where you have the, the, the flood. We’ll, we’ll talk about that
Simone Collins: shot in a second. Oh, the flood. Oh, the flood’s the big red bar. Sorry, okay, gotcha. Yeah, I, I wanna hear more about the flood, but yeah, go on. I won’t... No spoilers or whatever. Go
Malcolm Collins: ahead. The flesh are what died in these, but not necessarily bodies, but within a few generations there were no more Halafians, no more Yamarian descendants, no more of anyone u- using the survivors’ pottery.
Whether the... Now, anthropologists are just like, “Oh yeah, after this period this one group of people ended up replacing everyone else, but it was mostly peaceful because we don’t see a lot of signs of battles and we don’t see a lot of signs of burning.” To which I’d respond, “Oh, well by that metric then the American colonization of the Native peoples was totally peaceful, because you’re not gonna find a lot of those there either.”
This is actually a phenomenon in archeology where they’ll say something is totally peaceful because they want to believe things are totally peaceful and these types of transitions happened peacefully, and then later we learn, no, it actually was a very violent transition where one group of people wiped out almost everyone else.
Mm-hmm. And what made this group different than all of the other groups? Well, they had a few things that made them different. They had standalone temples in the center of their cities, which nobody had before. Ooh, okay. They had settled agricultural lands and canals. They were essentially the first... It, it was essentially the most important transition post the introduction of agriculture.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And it’s captured perfectly. You have the first settled city, Catalhoyuk. You lay out the timeline the Bible gives us. You get the flood at exactly the moment this one culture comes through and wipes out almost everyone else.
Simone Collins: Okay.
You can really think of this as the end of the walkaway option for humanity. For 10,000 years before it, the human operation system was the autonomous village. You had your household, you had local, like in your house stored grains, but you didn’t have kings or armies, and when things went bad, people would just leave, as we see happening throughout this period.
, Irrigation really changed all of that, and this is where you get the, the beginning of that. Specifically, irrigation means capital invested in the ground, and when you combine that with a central temple that allows for centralized storage, redistribution, you get the beginning of taxes, administration, writing, and kingship.
, And this is why when you look at all of the civilizations after this, Uruk, Babylon, everything, they come from this. This is the central point where everything sort of recentralizes, and this is predicted to the date near perfectly if you start counting with the timeline we’re given at the Bible with Adam at the beginning of Çatalhöyük, the first permanent settlement period
Malcolm Collins: And the other really interesting thing here is if you look at the traditional narratives, a lot of people have had trouble with these dates.
Because it looks like, from the traditional dates given up here, that some individuals lived into the period of the flood. And certain Christian groups and certain Jewish groups have tried to redo the dates to make that not work. But if the flood doesn’t literally happen at this time, that actually doesn’t introduce a contradiction at all.
It shows that they were introducing a contradiction by going through and trying to rewrite it. Now how quick to, to what date does this happen?
So If you tie Adam to Çatalhöyük and then look at where you end up, .
the Hafal-Unyad transition is bracketed between 5500 BC and 5400 BC. So the boundary is only known to half a century. The computed flood would have happened if you use these numbers at 5444 BC, which isn’t just inside of this bracket. It lands six years from the bracket’s midpoint, which is astonishing when you’re looking at tens of thousand years of human history.
Malcolm Collins: for people who wanna see what these different people lived like, what their settlements looked like.
Ooh. I have AI images of each type of settlement here that goes along with what’s written about them in the Bible. Oh, cool. So we’ll go through this.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: All right. So let’s start with Catalhoyuk.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: The Bible here says about these people, “When Adam lived 130 years, he had a son of his own likeness, in his own lineage, and named him Seth. Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years and then died.” This appears to match to Catalhoyuk, a honeycomb of mud brick houses with no streets.
You walk the roofs and descended a ladder through a smoke hole. Dead and buried under the floors, skull-capped and plastered, painting certain history houses rebuilt in place for centuries. Up to 8,000 people with no palace, no temple, no rich quarters. The 8.2 kilometer climate shock broke the pottery and then it gets destroyed.
Hmm ... and this maps pretty closely. You can see it in the above here. Mm-hmm. Then you have the Unak Taking. Two centuries of cold and drought emptied the mega sites. Populations didn’t die out. They scattered into smaller and tougher villages. Mm-hmm. This aligns here with Uniak walked among the faithful with God, and then he was no more because God took him away.
Mm-hmm. A lot of people really focus on Enoch when they’re doing biblical histories and stuff like that- Why? ... because every other culture it’s mentioned is dying. But Enoch, whose end matches this cold period when you have a bunch of settlements just disperse and then reform later- Mm-hmm ... matches the being taken up to God, right?
Then you have the northern village world. This matches with Enosh and Kahan’s era. Mm-hmm. When Seth lived 105 years, he became his father Enosh. At that time, people came to call the land of the Lord. Small farming villages across Syria and Iraq dabak’s hunting outposts, the Balak Valley’s farmsteads, and the Saudi Arabia’s burnt village, so this would’ve been 6000 BC, preserved hundreds of stamped clay ceilings.
So this would’ve been the beginning of writing happening here. But this was also before property and before kings. Hmm. Actually, for people who wanna go through this, I imagine this is probably pretty boring here to go through every one of these historical periods, but I was able to build the map for you that you can see here and see all of these different things mapped to specific individuals.
And then it ends with, again, the most important civilizational change in human history up to that point other than the first settlements captured really tightly. So let’s look to see how, how tightly these are, these are captured here. Because I even did a map with gradings of the tightness of the captures, okay?
Simone Collins: Ooh.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, If you go with Adam, dies at the classic Catal Huyuk package breaks at the 8.2 cli- climate shock. Then for Seth the son born in his own likeness and in his own image, the same culture continuing, dies a century before the mound empties. So he, Seth was only within a century of the death of this settlement, but that’s still pretty close when you’re dealing with numbers like this.
And keep in mind, the archeologists could have it wrong. Then you have Enosh which means man, a doublet of Adam’s meaning, the refounded second village world after the collapse and the formalization of the first real religion or cult that you would have had. Mm-hmm. Then you have Ken. This one doesn’t map very closely.
Then you have Mahalal. This one is a close match. This one they also talk about praising of God, and it’s when we find early cult-like figures of some god in these settlements. The, the god that’s mentioned is Shorer Halgelon, but if you believe like a techno-puritan does that, like, the understanding of God evolved over this period, and that the ways that the early J- proto-Jews of this period understood God weren’t necessarily like the later Jews of this period.
I even think that that’s a normal Jewish understanding of, of this particular period. It, it maps pretty closely. Then the next one that we get that’s a pretty close match is Enoch the one lineage that was more for God or took him, dispersed, not died at 365, the, the solar year number. Then you have the longest-lived patriarch Methuselah which matches pretty closely.
And exactly at dies exactly as Halaf ends. This was one of the, the settlements here that you can learn more about if you wanna go in this. And then you finally get to the flood. Now the flood, I, I think was, was in 30 years if you put this whole list together and started at Catal Huyuk. Mm.
Which is absolutely wild to me. Now, we’re gonna go to the second list of names because I found that one really fascinating as well. Okay. So if that’s a timeline, then the question is, well, what’s with all these other inhumanly long lifespans that you see in the second list after the flood? Right.
All right. So here you have to say what’s real- what’s really cool about this is it ends in an, in an actual human who we know, like Abraham, who we can be quite sure seems to have been a, like this is when like human history as we understand human history in a modern context begins to be written about in the Bible.
Instead of talking about things using this language that the Sumerians used of stories and lists and impossibly long names that might have been meant to be civilizations rather than specific individuals So, Genesis 11 turns out to be two records spliced together. A real family pedigree, its fathering ages are normal, 29 to 35, carrying an inherited mythic payload, its lifespans are 600, 438, 433, 464, 239, 239.
You, you get the idea here, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Which sound a lot more like a king’s list with durations laid end to end, and then it splits- But what’s a
Simone Collins: king’s list?
Malcolm Collins: Because that’s the way that you would write king’s lists during those periods. I don’t know what a king’s list is. And it would basically be like a dynastic king’s list.
So it’d be a, a list of king’s families.
Simone Collins: Oh, so like, yeah, the House of Atreides ruled over Arrakis, and then whatever. Yeah. So it could be multiple people or generations, but it’s kind of a regime. Yeah. The lifespan of a regime, like the Kim regime in, in North Korea.
Malcolm Collins: So if you lead... put these end to end, and you say, “Okay, the flood is the transition into this new group of people,” when did that transition end?
That transition ended 5200 to 5000 BC. Okay? Then if you put that list exactly there, what happens at the end of that timed list, and again, I have this up here, is not just do a number of the births and deaths line up with important events within the region during that time period, but it also ends with the destruction of Ur and Abraham.
Like the, the dates actually match. Hmm. But let’s go to some of these matches, because I find them pretty interesting.
Simone Collins: Please.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, if you go to the end of Aphoradox, that does match. This is a boundary where you have the, the Uruk start period. And the mature Ubaid kingdom that we had talked about before that, that eventually sort of died out during this period, okay? So at the end of the first two lives, you have , a pretty important transition.
Note here what, what would be the end of Shem’s life. It appears to happen at the boundary of fourth rhythm versus the Ubaid third to fourth turn, but that’s not that big an event. But then we get a really important one, Eber.
His boundary is really close, only within 35 years of the boundary of the Uruk collapse 3065 BC. And pegs the days open where Genesis 10:25 puts the division of the earth. Mm-hmm. Then you get another big one here, which is the movement between the Faraid and Ed III period which is at the end of Renood’s life.
Okay. Then at the boundary of 235 five seven versus a Lagashali-Sargon period. This is the end of Sharak’s life. And then at the end of Tera’s life you have the chain of events end with the sack of Ur. Now I want to emphasize for people, when you’re, when you’re laying out the numbers in these ways, and I can be like, “Oh, this doesn’t really fit the archeological data here.
Good.” You’re like, “Oh, so then you’re just moving the numbers to match whatever the record means?” Mm-hmm. No, you can’t do that with the way the data is laid out in the Bible. The Bible, because it’s giving you the birth dates, if you get one wrong or it’s tied to some historical event that we’re unsure of, it doesn’t move the rest of the chain off.
Ah. The other thing that’s really interesting about this second list is if you look at the deaths where I’m like, “This death doesn’t seem to correspond to anything historically big that we’re aware of”-
Simone Collins: Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: what you will note is in every one of the periods where historians do make divisions, one of the deaths happens there.
So, so what I’m saying is that they caught all of the things that historians are aware of. What we might have is a case where the other deaths where I’m like, “Historians just aren’t aware of anything big there,” might not just have found it yet Which really shocked me to see this really tight mapping But now we’re gonna go to the map, because I found the map pretty crazy as well.
And again, you can go through a lot of this. This is put together with AI, so it reads very AI-ey because I did it with leading models, which aren’t as good at writing in natural language. Mm-hmm. But they are good at, like, having a ledger, because I had to- to do this. It wasn’t like... I probably spent a couple hundred dollars working on this guy, so I- I really spent the tokens on getting this done.
Simone Collins: Wow, doing the work.
Malcolm Collins: Using Fable to... Well, because I wanted to cross-reference as much as I could- Mm-hmm ... to get as accurate of an understanding of the region as I could. Sure. So go down to the map.
Simone Collins: I’m looking at it now.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So there’s a part in Genesis where it begins to start listing, without dates, a bunch of so and so begot so and so- Mm-hmm
and they are a descendant of this group. And what you’ll notice in this is a list of a bunch of real-world places like Egypt and Libya and stuff like this, right? And so then I began to go, “Wait, are all of these real places?” And they actually are. Really? This is basically a historic map that’s being laid out here, and it is a giant historic map that’s being laid out here.
Simone Collins: So is this map saying that Shinar is Babylon, AKA Uruk, AKA Akkad?
Malcolm Collins: Yes. So in a number of these places, what they will do... And you’ll see the names are really close, right? Like, Tubal-Tebal- Mm-hmm ... Meshech, Mashok, Tiras, Thrace a- a- as one that you would be familiar about. Madai, the Medes. And then Assyria is, like, just, like, Assyria, right?
Or a- they- they’ll- there’ll be translations that we’re familiar with from that particular period. Mm-hmm. Or, like, Caphtor, meaning Crete, like not that far. Rodanim, meaning Rhodes. And again, you could say, oh, you’re just finding names that are similar to each other. But they didn’t just give us a list of names here.
They say how these groups are culturally related to each other. They’ll say, No,
Simone Collins: in the Old- in the Old Testament they do. Oh.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, they do. They’re- they’re- they- they treat them as families. Like, it’s talked about as if it’s talking about a genealogical tree- Mm-hmm ... but then it has things like Egypt on the genealogical tree, so it’s, like, obviously not a genealogical tree.
Simone Collins: Mm. Yeah. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: So you can’t just scattershot anything close to anything, right? You actually have to put the name not just next to a culture or a group that seems very close to that name, but you have to do it in a region where they’re culturally related to each other.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And as you can see on this map, you see all the greens are culturally related to each other, all the purples are culturally related to each other, all the reds are culturally related
Simone Collins: to each other.
Oh, that’s the color coding Okay, okay, okay, okay. All right
Malcolm Collins: And it also picks up things that you wouldn’t get if you were from that region and you didn’t have knowledge. So a few crazy things that they get. Okay. They get Uruk and its cultural descendants even though it was 10,000 years before they were writing.
Wow. Right? No way they could’ve known about it. And they get things like that the Medes are actually descended from the people of the Turkish area, and not the surrounding area like you would’ve expected.
Simone Collins: Wow. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: If I,
Simone Collins: if I’m gonna read here- I guess it makes sense explaining these in a, in a family format if people are, like before the- So-
Bible was written down, people were just giving oral... Like, they’re passing down oral traditions. So to kind of, mm, it’s like a mnemonic device to make it about families, because I guess in- Yeah, the que- ... mind palaces or something ...
Malcolm Collins: the question here becomes, you, you could say anyone could have done this. Mm.
But the problem is, is if you are familiar with your ancient Greek history or ancient Egyptian history and you’ve read any of that, both of those societies were dramatically more learned. They had dramatically more money. Mm. They had dramatically more... Like, the size of this map, if you’re going to compare it to other maps of the time, would have to be a combination of the Phoenicians’ trading map and the Assyrians’ conquest map, right?
Mm-hmm. Like, the two largest maps anyone would’ve known during that period. If you compare it with the ancient Greek map, it just becomes laughable, right? Mm-hmm. And I note here, when you look at the ancient Greek maps or you look at the ancient Egypt maps, what do you see at the edges of those maps? It’s always like, “ Well, and here is where the mermaids live, and here is where the, the snake, the nagas live.”
Yeah. “And here’s where the cyclopses live, and here is-” Yeah ... “where the giants live.” Mm-hmm. But you don’t get that with this map.
Simone Collins: No, mm-mm. It’s pretty-
Malcolm Collins: Everyone here is a human group of some type.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Wow. Pretty uncanny Which is- Yeah, I’ve gotta say, this is a little trippy. This is cr- this is crazy. It’s,
Malcolm Collins: it’s trippier than you think.
Yeah, like, when to me, when I was reading that, I was like, “Wait, this sounds like a map and a list of descendants. Is it accurate?” And it’s accurate to modern DNA research. And, and also not- Okay ... intuitive to people of this period. And again, you can go through my out... I don’t wanna bore you with like, oh, this study, this study, this group that you’ve never heard of is actually descended from this group you’ve never heard of, because you don’t care about these people.
Well, these are What you care about- ... a page, though ... is that this seems implausible that they could have this level of knowledge.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, that’s crazy. That is crazy.
Malcolm Collins: Now I wanna talk about the other one that’s really crazy.
Simone Collins: Okay. ,
Malcolm Collins: When all of Earth had one language, the the story of
Simone Collins: Babel.
Oh, the Babel. The Tower of Babel. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This one really got to me because I was like that, that doesn’t seem to make a lotta sense.
Simone Collins: And I’m super curious about it because I, I, I don’t think I’ve gotten to that point in the Bi- Old Testament. Maybe I have, but like I, I do wonder what, what that is. I mean, it was alluded to in the recent papal whatever, the big announcement basically about AI that the latest pope released.
So people are, were talking about that particularly, particular biblical story recently.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it, it appears to be talking about Uruk. Mm-hmm. And it’s really fascinating that it’s talking about Uruk because it gets a bunch of things about Uruk right.
Okay. One of the really weird things it gets right about Uruk that you wouldn’t expect is- Mm-hmm ... it describes how they made brick during that period, which wasn’t something that they would’ve been aware of. That’s obviously so I’m just gonna read- ... a neat detail ... like an AI’s description here, which I think does a better job.
The Uruk expansion homogenized the Near East for the first time. The same mass-produced - pottery the same architecture, the same administration from the Gulf of Syria to Iran, and above all, the same proto-writing. The numeric tablets and ceilings of the late Uruk word are mutually readable from Uruk to Susan, t- f- f- to Habaal to Kabira on the- Mm-hmm
Syrian Euphrates. One symbol system across the entire known world. That’s the one language, an administrative fact. And after the collapse, the records show exactly what the story says happened. That one script diverges. Proto-Elamite splits off in Iran and becomes mutually unreadable from Proto-Cuneiform within a century.
Egypt’s system goes its own way. The uniform culture fragments back into regional styles. Yeah. The one language becomes many.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And what about the giant temples they were building into the sky? Well, Uruk’s Ana Ziggurat and the Inna Precinct, the first monumental platforms in the world were made of brick and not stone, as you would’ve assumed if they were writing it at that time.
Yeah. And they say here in the story, “Brick for stone, bitumen for mortar,” which would’ve been a weird way to make a temple like this in this later period.
Simone Collins: For sure.
Malcolm Collins: That clause exists for an audience that assumes stone, a highland audience being told how lowlanders built. So you, you get a description here of the very first monumental structures, the very first near universal administrative language within the region, and it actually falling apart within the time that we are talking about and that it appears within the larger narrative.
Simone Collins: That’s crazy.
And keep in mind here, I’m still taking a literalist, just a deep literalist approach, that the Bible means what it says in the way that people at the time would have understood it in these sort of over-the-top mythologized stories. , Which is very different than what you need to accept if you want to believe that l- literally there was once a town where all humans on Earth lived at the same time and spoke the same language that existed after the flood, and we don’t have archeological evidence of it or this giant tower they were building, and that God intentionally didn’t want humanity to work together and intentionally sowed discord in humanity.
It seems like that’s not really what he’s about. This to me seems more like a human description of what happened than God’s true intent. Although I do think that this can be seen as a story about God wanting a degree of diversity in human perspectives, so even when we take to the stars, why it makes sense to bring people who are not exactly like us and work with them is if not, we are recreating the Tower of Babel.
Simone Collins: I’m just trying to figure out, like, how people even got this straight as they were passing it on as an oral tradition before it all became written down. Well, they,
Malcolm Collins: they couldn’t have. It’s literally impossible that this is solely an oral tradition. Nowhere on Earth do we have oral traditions that are this good for this long.
Yeah. And it would’ve, Like, that, that I’m aware of, right? You, you do not get a 10,000-year oral tradition with this much fidelity normally. I’d actually argue, because you get things like the, the flood. So let’s, let’s talk about the flood for a second, because a lot of people get hung up on, “
Simone Collins: There
Malcolm Collins: was actually a flood in that region historically.”
You, I’ve been teasing this the whole time. I am dying to
Simone Collins: hear about this, this flood. Like, please.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. The problem with the flood is there’s actually four potential floods that you could be talking about within this region, and everybody loves to point to one of the four. And I think that actually trying to find the flood misses the point.
Simone Collins: Okay. Right. But wh- So everyone’s looking for water and, and high sea levels or something, and you’re saying no.
Malcolm Collins: No, no. Yeah. It’s a flood narrative. It was a standard way to put a break in a story during that period, and it was common in the way stories were told during that theory period. It can almost be thought of as a thematic element.
It, it, it wasn’t meant to be read as a real thing. But if we are talking about real floods in this region the, the giant one, if you’re talking about flooding the entire world that it could be talking about, would be the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, if you’re unaware of this is the result of the you know, the S- the Strait of Gibraltar?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So that used to be closed, and it, like, broke one day and then filled in the entire Mediterranean.
Simone Collins: Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So it was, it was a below-sea-level depression that was held by a natural dam?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Are you kidding? That’s crazy
Malcolm Collins: The problem
Simone Collins: is- Is that really melt, i, is that really a geological history thing?
Malcolm Collins: This is a real geological history thing, is that would have been a pre-hominid likely or, or early hominids if I remember correctly. And there’s no way we would have had a memory of that, none at all. And even so, anyone in the period there, a boat wouldn’t have saved you from that.
Oh ... that event in terms of its cataclysm, I don’t care how big your ark is, everything is vaporized.
Yeah, that’s, that’s a tidal
Simone Collins: wave. The ark isn’t gonna-
Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s not just a tidal wave. It’s a, it’s an amount of water moving so fast. The, the numbers we’re talking about are like atomic bomb numbers in terms of the amount of force that we’re talking about. Not only that, but very few things lived in that depression because it created this horribly arid desert- Hmm
with super, super hot temperatures.
Simone Collins: Okay, so you’re like, “Look, it flooded, but also probably no one was there.”
Malcolm Collins: Probably no one was there, so it doesn’t really matter.
Simone Collins: Okay, okay, gotcha.
Malcolm Collins: The next really big apocalyptic one is the Black Sea. So around 5600 BCE, the rising Mediterranean reconnected with the Black Sea.
This is sort of the right era. If a flash breach is right you would have had catastrophic flooding. But that’s the contested part. We’re not, we don’t have my understanding, a lot of record that this was actually catastrophic within this particular period.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And I, it’s a little early for anything that I think matches with the biblical events here.
Simone Collins: Sure, yeah. That’s fair.
Malcolm Collins: Then you have the one that is honestly most likely the real flood- Oh, okay ... the flood that’s remembered. Okay, okay, okay. And this is the Shuruppak river flood. Now- Where’s the Shuruppak River? The Shuruppak River is in Mesopotamia. So this is-
Simone Collins: Oh,
Malcolm Collins: I missed that one ... a real flood stratum that separates the Jemdet Nasr from the early dynastic layer of the Shuruppak and Kish. And the Mesopotamian tradition itself makes the flood hero a man of Shuruppak. Now, this is where it becomes problematic, right?
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: This assumes just as a presumption, that the Bible is taking a flood narrative that it is borrowing from this other group because the other group notes where the flood happened.
Mm-hmm. It says it happened in Shuruppak, and we can see in the archeological layer a flood in Shuruppak within living memory of when this would’ve happened.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: Now, this doesn’t match, none of these floods match the date of the flood in my chronology here, which is why I think the flood is meant to be me- like, used in the way floods were used in this period to mark changes in periods.
But I also think it’s a, a real event. So what, what actually matches the date that I have within this period? The Persian Gulf inundation. The post-glacial sea filled the Gulf basin and stood above today’s shoreline exactly across the ledger boundary, advancing up to a kilometer a year in some of the flattest land on Earth, fast enough to eat a community’s county within living memory.
It drowned out the tradition’s own source of geography, the pre-Ubaid coastal world. Eribub ends up under the waterline, which is why the era divider sits where it does.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: So this is what I, this is what matches with my timeline. Okay. What people would’ve seen happening within this particular period- Mm-hmm
is not a catastrophic flood, but a, towns disappearing in a matter of years.
Simone Collins: A troublesome- Right? ... flood, right, yeah, yeah. A significant climate-driven shift in, in the way that people lived or where they lived, you’re saying.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. And then this could’ve become conflated with flood myths of this period. Now, you’re saying, “Oh, this is blasphemous to say that other texts got roped into the Bible.”
I think that this happens commonly throughout the Bible. Like, look at the Adam and Eve story. If you go to S- Sumerian myths the, a, a, a famous Sumerian god is created by taking a rib- from somebody and a female god is created. And-
Simone Collins: So that was a Sumerian thing? This is just cucking,
Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, because it’s a, it’s a pun that works in Sumerian.
In Sumerian, the word rib means life.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay, okay.
Malcolm Collins: It’s a very weird thing to do in Hebrew if you came up with the story in Hebrew. Why a rib? What’s the point of a rib? Why not anything else? Why not, you know, like- But
Simone Collins: you’re saying it’s like a pun, so they just, they’re like, “Oh, it’s pippies.”
Malcolm Collins: Well, in Sumerian tradition it would have made sense.
It would have been metaphorical. It would have been poetic. But then another tradition is learning these stories from other groups- Yeah ... genuinely ancient beliefs, and they see that part and they’re like, “Oh, this is how- They’re like, “Oh, yes” ... women are created in the ancient myths.”
Simone Collins: The body part.
Malcolm Collins: Now, what’s important in the capturing of these ancient myths like that, like you could say, “Oh, that’s invalidating,” I take it to be quite the opposite.
What is shows is that these ancient scholars would copy where they could find the oldest traditions that they were aware of with as much fidelity as they could map them.
Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And what that says to me is, well, then it’s crazy that these old traditions appear to map with what we actually know from the archeological record.
Simone Collins: That is crazy. I mean, that combined with all the, the settlements, the mapping
Malcolm Collins: The settlements, the mapping, everything like that. And keep in mind how we techno-puritans believe the Bible came together. We think that genuine historic groups with genuine myths, the, the parts of those myths that were the closest, God’s easiest way of communicating to people- Mm-hmm
, What really happened in a way that they could understand. And keep in mind here, God’s talking to a different group. He’s talking to, like, scribes during the period of Ur or whatever, right? You know, so he needs to talk with them with a language of floods. He needs to talk with them with the language- Mm
of lists of genealogy, which is different than the way he’s speaking to people during the creation myths. Mm. Specifically the, what is often thought of as the two f- starting stories of Genesis, which are often thought of as separate stories. I think they probably were originally separate stories, but again, they all got brought together because they were the closest to true story that there could be Now I wanna talk about- The Bible
Simone Collins: flood was just cultural shorthand at the time, and the closest that could be described to get to a, a truth.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was the closest way that you could describe to a person of that period, “Okay, here’s a list of historic events. Here’s a list of cultural groups. Here’s a break, and then here’s another list of cultural groups. By the way, here’s a map.” Now, what I also think is very interesting is this information wouldn’t have been particularly useful to people of this period.
Okay. So the question is, is why is it kept in the Bible, right? Like, and the answer is, is because it’s a checksum for people of our period.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: What I mean by this is it’s something that the people who wrote it down couldn’t have had a way to check the genetic ancestry of these cultural groups. They couldn’t have had a way to explore the map to make sure these groups were where the Bible said they were.
It couldn’t have had anything close to an ancestral record of the past 10,000 years, right? But we today do. And so it allows us to go back and say, “Does this book seem genuinely divinely inspired, or does it not? Does it match a record in a way that nothing else could?”
Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay, so it wasn’t so much in there for more ancient populations, but rather for m- far further humans who would see it and realize that this book almost impossibly calls shots or, yeah, impossibly calls shots, meaning they should take greater heed of what it’s all about.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
And it has the secondary effect of giving and imbuing the chapters with additional meaning because it’s what is being focused on here. It is civilizational innovation and development, which is what which elucidates for people who can see it that that is something of critical importance to God in terms of where we should be focusing our efforts and what makes you a favored people in his eyes.
Malcolm Collins: I think that we’re supposed to basically treat this like a
That’s what I was thinking. A, a- an ARG, an augmented reality game.
But also it’s important to note because people of the past wouldn’t have been able to find out what these passages mean, it’s important that we don’t over key to things that, that don’t seem to make sense to us today.
Mm-hmm. This is why I often say, “If you get to something that seems like it doesn’t make sense, it might be for a different generation. It might just not be for you. It might not be relevant to you or people of your time,” because we’re seeing things here that are just not relevant to some people in the past in their point of time, but was kept with fidelity for tens of thousands of years within this tradition.
Now I wanna talk about a few quotes from these sections. So we’re gonna go over the flood, and the Cain and Abel story and , the post-flood narrative, because there’s a few really important parts here that I didn’t notice when I first read it.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay.
Malcolm Collins: So here’s the most important line, I think, from the entire Cain and Abel story, because I think it’s where God lays out that we are supposed to have emotional control.
Like, that is a mandate for humanity. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do right is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” So this reminds me of something I have told our children so many times, something I have told Simone as well so many times: you have to have emotional control.
Mm-hmm. It is absolutely critical to have emotional control. When I see one of our kids begin to get angry and begin to work themselves up, I sit them down and I’m like, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast,” right? If... and, and typically when they’re mad, it’s because they’ve been punished or something like that.
If you do what is right, will it not be accepted? Like, I’ve just scolded one of my kids. They then get pouty, and they wanna lash out at their siblings, right? Anyone who ha- had parents has seen this happen, and then you crouch down, and you have this conversation with them. I didn’t notice this conversation ever before when I read the Bible because I hadn’t had kids yet.
Oh. I hadn’t had this exact conversation 100 times with my kids, and I hadn’t realized that the, the point of the story is as much... Well, there’s a few core points to it. Point number one is Cain knew he did something bad even before the Mosaic tradition was handed down.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: God didn’t need to tell him murder is wrong.
Cain immediately tried to deflect from whether or not he murdered somebody, okay? Second the story tells us that we are not talking about a literal chain of descendants here. How do we know we’re not talking about a literal chain of descendants here? Because Cain’s grandson was able to work with bronze and iron.
Now, there is no way you can work with any sort of Biblical timescale that I’m aware of where that doesn’t put bronze and iron way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way before any human should have had bronze and iron from the historical record, okay? Mm-hmm. Now, you could argue that he was a magical person who had bronze and iron, right?
I, I guess, but it doesn’t say he had them because he was magic. It just said that he was good at working with them. Mm-hmm. Now, if you read it the way it appears to want to be read, because these are the same kids who are related to the guy who brags about murdering somebody for injuring him which he does, and he’s like, “Well, you know, it’s Cain.
Oh, you, you get it back seven times for me. Well, you get it back 77 times for me. I’m, I’m just that violent,” that maps to the way that cultures became a more violent during this period, which they actually did. Then, then i- i- it appears to be about cultures of this period. And, and who, who does that map to?
What was the first culture of this period that had good bronze a- and ironworking? You’re talking about groups like the Hittites and like the Assyrians that were known for being very, very violent groups
By the way, if you’re not familiar with this poem, this is where he, he sings this poem to his w- two wives. “Adah and Zillah, listen to me, wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech 77 times.” And note he- here, he’s not talking about two different people.
This is just a way they... Like, he, he says the same thing twice over and over again. “Adah and Zillah, listen to me. Wives of Lamech, hear my words.” See, that’s the exact same thing listed twice two different ways.
Simone Collins: Yeah, weird.
Malcolm Collins: And then I have k- I’ve... Th- then, “I’ve killed a man for wounding me, I’ve killed a young man.”
Simone Collins: That seems to happen a lot in the Old Testament, though. It’s super repetitive.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then and this is one of those things. If you don’t understand the way it’s written, if you don’t understand the w- the way flood narratives are used, you would think it’s talking about a literal, actual worldwide flood.
Mm. If you don’t understand this way of writing, you would think that he had killed two people. You wouldn’t see that it is very clearly talking about one person who was killed.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And, and this is where not understanding it within its context can lead to misunderstandings of it. It’s still a literalist reading.
It’s a literalist reading within the context of the f- people who wrote it. And note here, is this supposed to be a lesson or something we’re supposed to take away? No, it’s bad. So then when Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother and sister who sins against me, up to seven times?”
And Jesus answered him, “I tell you, not up to seven times, but up to 77 times.” So you see here Jesus is sort of inverting this old way of living.
Simone Collins: Hmm. Nice.
Malcolm Collins: The other one that I thought was pretty interesting here, a verse I wanted to go over was, “When human beings began to increase in number on Earth, and daughters were born to them, two...
The sons of God saw the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal. Their days will be numbered 120 years.’” So- Two really in weird things going on here that we need to address. First who are the sons of God in this context, right?
And second, w- well, why did God shorten our lifespans to that extent? Mm-hmm. This appears to be, to me, a bigger punishment than if you take a literalist reading than what was handed out in the Garden of Eden. Because I’m gonna be honest, I probably don’t wanna live more than 900 years. And if we’re dealing with lifespans of, like, 900, 800 years after being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, I’d be like, even that seems a little too long for my sake.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Second, it creates a problem here. If God means for 120 years to be the age maximum of humans, which I actually wouldn’t mind that as an age maximum of humans, as longevity technology improves. Keep us young until we’re 120 years old, then, then off with us. Why, why do other Christian groups treat that as a max?
Why do they regularly attempt to live past that? Why do they say that they’re doing something biblical when God is clearly like, “It annoys me when humans live longer than this”? Mm. And the other thing that’s really interesting about this is I tried to figure out this word. Like, what does he mean, my spirit will not contend with humans living longer than this?
And unfortunately, the verb used there, that’s literally the only time it’s ever used in any ancient Hebrew text ever.
Simone Collins: So it’s this r- random orphaned word that people maybe don’t know how to properly translate then?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Which word exactly in that sentence?
Malcolm Collins: The word that, that, like, will not contend with, contend with, it’s a verb.
Simone Collins: Oh. Huh.
Malcolm Collins: I- i- i- i- it, it, in context it sounds like he’s saying it is, like, a bad from my perspective, or it annoys me when humans live over 120 years. I’m going to argue from a techno-puritan perspective this makes sense. Ge- humans need to improve intergenerationally. If you look at, like, how unimproved the boomer generation is despite all the new information they might have access to as a generation we see this.
If we look at, you know, old people stuck in their ways, we see this. People appear to get stuck in their traditions, and the way that civilization advances and develops is we get to tell our kids what we believe about the world, and then our kids, like my dad telling me, “Well, we don’t, we don’t believe in any religion.”
Mm. I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t seem to work, so let’s, let’s try something else, okay?” But I’m only able to have that split because we get to live sort of this iterative case of intergenerational martyrdom- Mm-hmm ... that is allowed through these limited lifespans.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And again, I’ll note here it’s also pretty crazy that he actually did name about the upper natural limit of the human lifespan here, where I doubt they would’ve known many people who lived to the, around the age of 120.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Anyone in that period. So that’s, that’s also- spicy there. But then the second thing here, which becomes even clearer with this next line, is, “The Nephilim were on earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children with them. They were the heroes of the old, men of renown.”
So this part, I th- I, I do not like the traditional Christian read here. They say the sons of God being talked about here are angels.
Simone Collins: Huh? What?
Malcolm Collins: Or s- some, some part of the heavenly host. Oh. Because in other parts, which, well, I can get to them these same beings are talked about as hanging out with angels.
Note another traditional Christian interpretation here, which is used pretty frequently among evangelical communities in the US, is that the sons of God are the sons of Seth, and they are talked about as the sons of God specifically to set them apart from the descendants of Cain
Titan, please
Which kind of makes sense if this exact word wasn’t only ever used in other places to mean something that looks like it’s in some way involved with the heavenly host
Malcolm Collins: So you’ve got Job 1:6, “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.” Job 2:1. Now that one you could say, well, maybe this is talking about humans, right? Humans coming to God, and Satan being among them. I a lot of people are like, “Well, I don’t know.
I don’t know if I like that.” The second one here is, “Again, there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves to the Lord, and Satan also came among him to present himself to the Lord.” A, a different one here, but about the same thing. “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”
This is spoken at the moment of the Earth’s creation. Again, a lot of people say, “Well, how could humans have existed at the moments of the Earth’s creation?” Within techno-puritanism you don’t get this problem.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: Because you would say, well, if predestination exists, it’s the people who don’t exist yet singing for joy.
Like, because they exist outside of time before their specific period in which they do exist. And I sing for joy about the creation of reality. I think all humans sing for joy when they, when they talk about God creating reality, or most humans do. You know, not Buddhists or whatever. And so, this still works for me, humans being here.
But you can see why other people... The, the problem is, is that Satan appears to be among the sons of God often. Then in Songs 29:1, you have, “Ascribe to the Lord, O sons of God,” heavenly beings, “Ascribe to the Lord God in strengths.” Then Songs 89:6,7 “For who in the skies can be comprehended to the Lord?
Who among the sons of God,” heavenly beings, “Is like the Lord? A God greatly to be feared in a council of the holy ones.” So here the, the sons of God are in the, the holy ones. “And who is awesome to be around him.” And then Songs 29:1, “Ascribe to th- the Lord, O sons of God,” heavenly beings, “Ascribe to the Lord in glorious and strengths.”
And then th- finally Songs 89:6,7 “For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? For among the sons of God,” heavenly beings, “Is like the Lord? A God greatly to be feared in the council of holy ones, and awesome people all around him,” or ones all around him. Now, this gets really bad here, okay?
So if these are angels this is clearly and in no uncertain term saying angels at one point had sex with human women and had children.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that doesn’t make sense
Malcolm Collins: I don’t know
Simone Collins: And I’m glad
Malcolm Collins: No, th- there’s like a number of theological reasons I have a problem with that. First of all, in most traditional readings in both Jewish and Catholic readings, like if you look at St- St Augustus on this, or no Thomas Aquinas on this, he said that angels lacked free will except for the ability to choose to be on the, the good guy or the evil guy side of things.
Now, are these demonic angels fallen ones? No, that also doesn’t seem likely to me because they’re still angels and they would still lack free will, so why are they getting together with humans? And why wouldn’t God stop this? And y- the beings that they create become heroes. They become good beings, right?
Like, wh- why would that be the descendant of demonic angel beings and humans, right? Yeah.
No, the traditional read here is that yes, they are actually fallen angels. , And that while the text says that their children become heroes, , what it really means is more like they gain, , acclaim and power, not that they are good heroes. , And, and this is true.
This is what’s written in the text. But it’s also very clear that in the text, this is not condemned anywhere, nor is it explicitly said that they’re bad in any context, , outside of they are talked about right before God decides man has become too wicked. But
That even, even with all of that, even if it’s demons, even if you say their children were also evil, it still doesn’t sit right with me. , And note it is in, in nowhere that some people read the Nephilim as their children. That is definitely not what’s said in the text
Malcolm Collins: So let’s eat it here and say what’s being talked about here is not angels and is just humans. It’s talking about men, the sons of God, because God made Adam, and now in other places it’ll talk about the sons of Adam, which is true.
So maybe this type of human is a human that is set apart in some way because of their deeds or moral character or the way God relates to them. We do know that this happens because throughout the Old Testament, God talks about various people and various group as the sons of God. Now, he doesn’t use this phrasing.
He uses a different phrasing for the sons of God. This phrasing is very unique to this type of being that Satan appears to be among frequently. Okay. But i- given that we know that he does that, I’m okay with eating that and saying what’s being talked about here is not angels or demons having sex with humans.
And if you say that, I think this gets really easy. There’s no problem here, and then you get the other cool thing, which is it talks about the Nephilim. Now I note very clearly here it does not say that Nephilim had children with humans. A lot of people I’ve heard say this but if you read the, the text in, in Hebrew that is not what’s implied at all.
It’s the sons of God that are having children with humans, and the Nephilim exist alongside them.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: So who are the Nephilim?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Remember in our last episode we mentioned that God seemed to... There, there was Homo sapiens around- Yes ... before Adam and Eve, it appears- Mm-hmm ... from a number of verses, and we say that God just didn’t consider these things living beings yet, right?
Right. Well, now God considers some Homo sapiens living beings and some Homo sapiens not living beings. Calling the some he considers living beings the sons of God, that sounds believable to me, right? Like- Yeah ... that sounds like a good way to differentiate them. And then it also talks about another type of thing that’s like them, living among them.
Nephilim is sometimes translated as fallen one. Who do I think the Nephilim are? They are either other hominid species being described here, which would be pretty miraculous if that’s caught here, right? Yeah. Without laying out. Like, it doesn’t say angels or anything. Mm-hmm. Or it’s describing the NPCs that we talked about in the last Tract episode.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: shows that the sons of God sort of desire this group that’s not like the Nephilim that is the, the daughters of women, like a better, a better type of mate.
Note the traditional take is that Nephilim are some sort of like a giant race or even just v- a very strong variant of the human race, , that is larger than other humans. This is seen , the only other part they’re written about, the Israelites see Canaanite troops, and they say that some of them are the descendants of Nephilim, , and look very large in comparison to them.
, It could just be, an ethnic group, a very large ethnic group from this region as well, , that no longer exists anymore
Malcolm Collins: So I, I’ll go with that. But what’s cool is if you go with that and you say this group being described here as the sons of God is actually humans, then a lot of those other sections that I was reading begin to mean different things.
Any, any thoughts before I go further, Simone?
Simone Collins: Well, I just find that such a more compelling explanation than... Also, God p- is really big on playing favorites and having the people He likes and the people He doesn’t like, and the people He likes replacing the people He doesn’t like, so that He would have a name for the people He doesn’t like and talk about his chosen people as the sons of God.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It wouldn’t So what this would mean is if the sons of God are humans or a subcategory of humans with a special calling a, the other lines in which they are mentioned now take on a completely new meaning. Mm-hmm. It means two things. It means, one, Satan is in the category of these types of people, these sort of prototypes or archetypes of humanity, right?
And lives among them and is often among them, which I guess can mean temptation lives uniquely among these groups, or they will be uniquely tempted by Satan. Two- Mm ... they are called to account by Gods to witness things or to be an outer part of the heavenly host, right? Mm. Like, you are actually in communication and warriors for God in a very, very direct sense.
In the sense that an angel might be a warrior for God, you are a warrior for God, right? You, you have a place among the stars, have a place among God through your own actions. Mm-hmm. Now I personally find, one, that to be a very inspiring thing, if that’s what the Bible is saying here. And two, to any degree that might be sacrilegious, it feels less sacrilegious than angels having sex with humans and making babies.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: That to me, like at its, my heart feels like a grosser thing to say was happening. And God was doing nothing about it, and these angels were either... A- again, w- are they the good angels or are they the bad angels? If they’re the good angels, then why are they allowed to do this? And if they’re the bad angels, then why did all their kids turn out good?
Okay. Hmm Next we’re gonna talk a little bit about some lines from the Noah’s Ark. Take from y- you, with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird and male and female and keep their various par- kinds alive throughout the Earth.
Now, where this gets interesting is if you can’t eat animals, why are there clean and unclean animals already? Yeah. Huh? Now I’d note here you could say, well, it’s for sacrifices or not for sacrifices. Why-
Simone Collins: No, but it’s super, it’s super, super clear that you’re expected to eat the sacrifices.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, in, in later parts.
Yeah. So like, the other thing that’s important to note about the various flood locations that people choose when they wanna say it was the Black Sea flood or it was a Mediterranean flood- Mm-hmm ... is the flood is described as coming with long periods of rain, which do not describe those floods. Hmm. That much more describes a river basin flood.
I know because I live on a river basin that floods, and it’s really terrifying. Oh, yeah. So that again would say that the river basin flood theory is the most accurate in terms of the specific real human event that’s being remembered here. The other thing about the flood that I mentioned before is at the end, God says he’s not gonna do it anymore.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: But there’s something I, I noted here, which I did... Made me go, “Ooh,” ‘cause I didn’t catch this the first time I read this. Okay. “As long as the Earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” So this sounds like a great promise, right? Except it has a qualifier.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: As long as the Earth endures
Huh. He’s saying- That’s
Simone Collins: unsettling. What do you mean? Okay
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, ‘cause I was like, well, one day the Earth will be swallowed by the sun. Is it saying- Sure ... that somehow we’re destined to prevent that? One day the Earth could be hit by an asteroid and destroyed. Is it saying we’re destined to prevent that?
And the answer here- Mm ... is no, it’s not a promise that we’re destined to prevent that. No. It, it leaves a giant qualifier, protecting the Earth itself is on you, humanity.
Simone Collins: We need to get off-planet. Can we get off... No, mm, I don’t know. I don’t like space. This is tough. Okay carry on.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So that’s, that’s also...
Also, I’ll note here that the Bible clearly lays out in this part that it believes that humans are born evil, right? For the people who are like, “Humans are born good,” or, “Humans are born evil,” “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.”
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. “
Malcolm Collins: And again, never will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.” So note again, that has a qualifier. “Never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done through a flood.” He’s still allowed to through other means. This is where you get the, the fires at the end of time and stuff like that- Oh, yes
a lot of people talk about. But I think that the, the fires at the end of time are what we’re fighting right now, which is the bonfire of people’s own vanity that they are tossing themselves into.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. The trial of the lotus eaters, as you might otherwise call it.
Malcolm Collins: And note here- But- ... God may have, in this early flood, killed all living beings.
Simone Collins: Just leave the, the
Malcolm Collins: planet.
Simone Collins: Even though he didn’t flood the entire
Malcolm Collins: Earth. So let’s, let’s talk about this.
What you could argue is if the number of what God considered to be living beings was very small during this period, which might be the case given the qualifications for what counted as humans that we laid out in the last track, that you have to be willing and capable of taking moral accountability.
Well, not willing, but capable of taking moral accountability for your actions. It could be that in even a fairly small regional flood, everyone but one family lied, died that had that ability. Without wiping out every human on Earth still have the story to be in form true. Now, note the story does say it wiped out all animals.
There’s just no way that’s possible. So we have to assume that the story was being used as a footnote in the way it is in other Sumerian texts. But also about a real event. Next here This is something I didn’t know. Do you know what is the sign of the covenant between God and humans?
Simone Collins: The stone plate that goes on the Ark?
No.
Malcolm Collins: I’ll give you a hint. It’s been co-opted. The Ark of
Simone Collins: the Covenant. That’s
Malcolm Collins: not the sign. He was very clear about what the sign was.
Simone Collins: Burning bush?
Malcolm Collins: Rainbows.
Simone Collins: Rainbows.
Malcolm Collins: Rainbows are supposed to be the sign of the covenant, and it is interesting that, that is the sign- No. Wait. There was the column
Simone Collins: of the cloud.
The, the column of the cloud that tells you where the Ark... That you’re supposed to go ...
Malcolm Collins: That, that that, that sign has been so aggressively co-opted that many Christians today flinch at the sign of a rainbow.
Simone Collins: Don’t wanna, you
Malcolm Collins: know, those- And yet, God said-
Simone Collins: Where does it say the rainbow’s the sign of the covenant?
Malcolm Collins: I’ll, I’ll read it right now. Yeah, please. “And God said, ‘This is a sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for generations to come. I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the Earth.
Whenever I bring clouds over the Earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the Earth.’”
So-
Simone Collins: Oh, so the covenant of no more floods, I super-duper promise. That covenant.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. So God said to Noah, “This is a sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on Earth.”
Simone Collins: Okay. Now- The I won’t flood you again covenant ...
Malcolm Collins: if the throwing yourself into the bonfire of your own vanity is done under the sign of a rainbow, I think that has a, a degree of poetic justice.
Simone Collins: Dude. But- Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Right?
Simone Collins: Well, well, well.
Malcolm Collins: Another thing I didn’t know is, you know the be fruitful and multiply comes twice, right? There is-
Simone Collins: I’ve heard it a couple times, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a command... Well, it, it might come more than twice, but it’s a commandment that’s, like, over and over and over again as something you’re supposed to do.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Just seems like a, like, go for it, kid, you know? It’s... Now your job is to expand. God is very expansionist. If, if he likes you. If not, he wishes demographic collapse on you, and he will replace you with his favorite people, ‘cause he talks about that it seems- Memory serves Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And just to get an idea of how crazy all this is when you piece it together- Mm-hmm
is if you’re willing to say the flood was an artistic convention while being a real event, just not as big of an event as it’s made out to be, because i- in the artistic convention you always made everything bigger and more dramatic- Mm-hmm ... then what that allows you to have, like what do you get out of this?
If you say that that was an artistic convention and that this is a checksum describing real places, real maps, and not meant to be le- re- it’s meant to be read literally, but not in the lazy, literative way, right? What do you get out of that? You get a map and a genealogy that goes impossibly far back in time and covers an impossibly large geography for a group of that period, especially a nobody group of that period, which is what these people were at that time.
When you compare it to, like the ancient Greek, like historians, like if you read Herodotus, his... Like, he actually went out there and tried to map the entire world. His, his
Simone Collins: map- Yeah, and he’s all over the place. He’s making stuff up. He’s,
Malcolm Collins: yeah ... and stories are, like actually laughable- Yeah ... compared to these.
Simone Collins: That-
Malcolm Collins: Right?
Simone Collins: I mean, you make a really good point for people to be like, “Well, it’s 20 years off,” or, “It’s how many,” even hundreds of years off compared to Herodotus’ history, which we still reference upon.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, no. No, I’m not even talking about things being off now. I’m talking about the genealogy and map. Then in addition to the genealogy and map, you get a impossibly accurate timeline of tens of thousands of years of history, dated in a way where you can’t easily move, fudge, or play with the timeline.
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: And you also get an explanation of a civilization, of the civilization of the ziggurats, early civilization, that they couldn’t have understood during that period, and transitions in what it meant to be human.
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: But it all comes back to one thing. If these were the important things to take away from this chapter of Genesis, what it means is all of the important meat in Genesis, all of the 3D image that comes out from looking at it the right way-
Simone Collins: Yeah
Malcolm Collins: are about humanity civilizationally developing. Yeah. That appears to be what the story is critically interested in.
Simone Collins: Yeah, so very much an extension, but from a civilizational standpoint of the evolution described in the beginning.
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: That’s super interesting. Yeah, I mean it, now it makes sense. When you put it that way, now I’m not, like, glazing my eyes over when thinking about that section, for sure.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and what that means is God is a god, as we sort of laid out in the last video, of the civilized world, of being a civilized human. He is not a god- Well,
Simone Collins: but again, it’s a civilization that, that, that addresses the inherent sin within a human.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, exactly, and allows us to address that.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And he, he, he is, he is not a god of the savage, right?
And he doesn’t consider those living beings, right? Oh,
Simone Collins: and he really hates the gods of the savages as well, because they have gods.
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: He- He’s the god of civilization. He, you know the whole, like, a, you know, a- a man shall not pass his seed through the fire to Moloch. Like, all of this, he’s like, “No, we don’t do child sacrifice.
We don’t do all these...” Like, there are other gods. And I was also really confused when I first read the Old Testament, because I’m like, “Wait, what do you mean? What is... How is... Monotheism. You can’t have God ig- you know, acknowledging the existence of other gods. Like, this is, this is so screwed up.” But in the context of all this, and in the context of this being the god of civilization, of advancement, of humans rising above our most basic, violent, horrible instincts- Yeah
yeah, I mean, yeah. These, these other humans are capable of having gods. They’re not, they’re not good gods.
Malcolm Collins: And I’ll note that the punishments handed to Adam and Eve as a result of choosing this way of living actually work with it. The amount of labor that you have to do in a civilized society, in a, in a, a society where you use agriculture- Oh, yeah, well, if you wanna take a
Simone Collins: sapiens argument- Mm-hmm
you know, also it, it, it was God who introduced agriculture, which w- whatever his name is who wrote this.
Malcolm Collins: Therefore introduced labor. Oh, that’s when
Simone Collins: everything got so hard.
Malcolm Collins: And why- Life was so
Simone Collins: horrible ...
Malcolm Collins: why does childbirth hurt for human women and when it doesn’t hurt for any other mammal species?
It’s, it’s really weird. Large-brained
Simone Collins: babies? What?
Malcolm Collins: It’s because we have very large-brained babies- Okay ... and because we walk upright. Mm-hmm. But I think the large brain part is more important. We, we have the use of our hands ‘cause we walk upright, and large brains. Look at, look at
Simone Collins: this freaking noggin. Look at, look at this freaking noggin.
Malcolm Collins: These are part of having this agency, right? So it’s literally describing punishments that the people of this period wouldn’t have been particularly aware
Simone Collins: of. It’s the punishments of civilization to a great extent, and I guess m- greater human intelligence. The Neanderthals had giant heads, so I don’t know about that.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, sorry, I mean hominids, right? Like, Neanderthals appeared to have some degree of intelligence, they just never formed a civilization in the way that we did. So what I encourage people to do, because I skipped over a lot of my findings here. I had a lot laid out here. It’s just to, the way Fable writes, I’m gonna have to go over it with another AI and rewrite it all.
Just is so AI-ish, I don’t like it.
Simone Collins: Claude has a very AI voice Grok has, to me, the most natural sounding voice. I don’t know if you’re like-
Malcolm Collins: It does. So what I’d probably do is rewrite it with Grok. Yeah ... that said the, the layout of the findings that we got here genuinely astonish me. Mm. Like, I did not think it would be as easy as let’s just take that stupid timeline that people have tried to, you know, s- put all of her s- history into- Yeah
and just paste it to the first stable city we’re aware of, and then it fits in, like, nine different points to the archeological
Simone Collins: record. Slot in. Yeah. Yeah. Like a little Lego chunk.
Malcolm Collins: And then- Yeah ... let’s take the other story and just reverse paste it onto events that we’re aware of. And again, it just fits like a Lego chunk, like ka-chink.
It’s not even, like, hard. Like, it was like baby’s first ARG. That’s what I was thinking. A, a- an ARG, an augmented reality game. And it also surprises me, and I don’t know what to think of this, is that other people haven’t s- p- people can correct me if other people have gotten parts of this before that this isn’t something that’s, like, more widely talked about or a widely read way of reading the Bible is coming at it and being like, “No, the Bible’s not gonna have stuff in it that means literally nothing, but it’s also not gonna contradict what we are aware of in the archeological record.”
So, a- when I say, like, like, big things, like the people who are doing these archeologies, I’m not talking about, like, modern academics or whatever. I’m talking about, like, when every archeologist was a Christian and we, you know, could trust everything. It still wildly contradicts the archeological record to say something like s- copper and iron were within, like, three generations of the first humans.
Like, that, that doesn’t... That’s not plausible. And I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna buy something that’s not plausible because then I try to tell this to my kids, and they’ll just leave the religion, right? So I have to look and say, “Oh,” but when I look and say, “Oh my God, like, this fits both the archeological record inhumanly exactly,” why not just accept that, right?
Like-
Simone Collins: Well, could I... I, I have to wonder if perhaps this is because the first wave of biblical literists trying to ch- literalists trying to reconcile the Bible with technology did so at a time when a lot of technology was coming online, and we had a lot of the ability to disprove some of the previous interpretations, but not enough information to, to f- go all the way and prove how, “Oh, actually it is accurate.”
Like, they’re, they’re in- Yeah ... this middle ground, and then it kind of solidified as a tradition so much so that then there was almost this separate folk interpretation of the Bible where you had to start throwing out big swaths of the archeological record and our understanding of evolution and all these other things because- They, they didn’t wanna revisit it.
They just figured that digging deeper would lead to less proof of biblical literism, literalism rather than more.
Malcolm Collins: No.
Simone Collins: That’s, that’s kinda my guess, ‘cause I think there’s a lot of stuff, as you pointed out, that was only found relatively recently.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: And it has only become easier to actually draw all these connections just within the past even three months with AI as it stands now, to be able to say, “Well, can you, you know, cross-reference all these things and these historical events and these references in the Bible?”
That’s not... That’s not something you can- That’s not an easy thing to do. Yeah. And it, I mean, you can have biblical scholars working for a long time, and they have, but have they worked for, on, on this for such a long time with also the archeological record and understanding of biology and historical geology and all these other factors been, been, you know, as, as advanced?
No, I don’t think so. So-
Malcolm Collins: And, and, and note here, I wanna, I wanna take an aside here and, and you know, tell people This is not like normal Bible math. This isn’t like I take numbers from the Bible and I assume they’re supposed to be something totally different, or I, I move them around and I add a number here and I add a number here.
We are working with what the Bible appears to be talking about, early human civilization- Mm-hmm ... and just copying and pasting the numbers and what it says about the individuals within those numbers, because it, it will say, “X person lived at this time and they did X.” And then be like, okay, so it said that they were like a very godly people.
Let’s see if there’s anything unique about this civilization. Oh, they were known for making lots of statues of their deities. Right? Like, that’s a, that’s an interesting thing to note there. Yes. It’s, it’s not like the maximum sort of stretching you get when you’re trying to match other things in history, which I, I really don’t like.
This is just simple copy and paste in a way that genuinely shouldn’t work if without some help somewhere along the way.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. I, no, I appreciate that because I think when people try to fudge it, and again, I, I had watched that super long takedown by that primatologist about the Creation Museum in the United States.
What really bothered her as a primatologist who understood evolution, all these other things, was just how blatant blatantly ignored many things were, and how things were just conveniently left out. And when you do that, when you fudge it, you are going to hemorrhage faithful people. Like you can’t both be like, “It’s super real,” but then leave out really conspicuous things.
Because if someone values reality, they’re going to catch that. If they don’t value reality, they don’t need you to prove it anyway. They’ll go on the faith of it all. And so-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...
Simone Collins: it’s the worst possible approach to this. And I, I love, I love this approach to biblical literalism. It the techno-puritan religion makes so much sense and it’s so funny because we were just at first like, “I don’t know.
I think it would be a good idea for us to have a hard religion. Let’s just like pretend.” L- let’s
Malcolm Collins: read the Bible and see if it has anything interesting
Simone Collins: to say. Yeah, and we’re
Malcolm Collins: like, “Oh my God.” Oh my God, this makes it... Like as, as a person who ha- has read Herodotus because I like Herodotus, when I got to that point in Genesis, I was like, “What the...
What the The, what the is this? This map is insane. Yeah. Like this history is insane. They shouldn’t have this. Th- this makes Herodotus look like a, a toddler. And it’s just like- Well- ... dropped here, and every time you- What
Simone Collins: Herodotus had that the Bible lacks was a sense of humor, okay?
Malcolm Collins: And every time previously that I read it, it’s like I just skipped those parts because it seemed boring to me.
And I think, you know how it says like God hardens people’s hearts? Yes. I think he does that for certain groups over long periods of time, and certain people that prevent them from seeing obvious things like this. Because they’re not meant to see it, or maybe it’s supposed to come together all at once on this podcast.
I, I don’t know, right? Like maybe- Well,
Simone Collins: God plays favorites, I know that. It’s...
Malcolm Collins: Maybe seeing something like this is meant to affirm some of the other weird things in terms of our interpretation of the Bible- Mm-hmm ... for people who otherwise haven’t seen stuff like this or, or this is in a popular theory among their communities because it makes a lot of sense to them.
Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to work, and that’s why people’s minds were, were sort of hardened to seeing something that as soon as I read it seemed fairly obvious. It, it seemed as obvious as, you know when you open like, a Lord of the Rings book or something and there’s like a map at the beginning of it?
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: It really felt like opening Genesis, and it’s like, “What the... Why
Simone Collins: is there a map here?” Oh, it’s, it’s the map section.
Malcolm Collins: I don’t remember a map being here.
Simone Collins: Yeah. This is the elves and the orcs and the dwarves, and they live in this spot.
Malcolm Collins: So if you guys wanna see these, these do check out the page. If anybody wants to undertake the project of rewriting it in human language- In human language
Please take, undertake that project. Yes. I don’t wanna deal with it.
Simone Collins: No
Malcolm Collins: en
Simone Collins: dashes or semicolons allowed. No, I really resist that. I resent that so deeply.
Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, it just sounds obnoxiously AI.
Simone Collins: Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: but it was, it goes way deeper. So you get to actually see the civilizations develop in images and in descriptions of the way they lived, of the people that are being laid out here in Genesis, if my interpretation of this is correct.
And what that... And, and basically like fills in an entire chapter of Genesis that you’re supposed to decipher through ciphers. Fairly easy ciphers, I might
Simone Collins: add.
Malcolm Collins: Ciphers. Just-
Simone Collins: What, what do you mean fairly? Oh, just how, like, just connect the dots and-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s
Simone Collins: just connect the dots. It, it’s- Well, with ma- with freaking Fable, like, the best, smartest model that we’ve had access to so far.
Come on, man. Be a little more humbled by the technology. You know? But aren’t
Malcolm Collins: you pretty amazed by this? The, the map, the timeline, the-
Simone Collins: I am, I am very, I’m, I’m very amazed by it. I’m this was way more impressive than I thought it would be. And you
Malcolm Collins: always convince me. And this was me going into it with so much hubris.
Because where things have, like, come out in the past have been you know, the Bible’s probably true,” like that would further affirm my faith. This time I just went into it and I was like, “No, the Bible is true, and therefore this means something. And therefore, if I pop it on a map, it’s going to do something.”
And it did for three different data sets, which shocked me.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I was like, “Well, shit.” Yeah. “I guess, I guess this is true. I guess this is real.”
Simone Collins: There’s
Malcolm Collins: something to this, no? “And not just real, but this way of interpreting it is the correct way of interpreting it.” Mm.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: What do you wanna call our way of interpreting it?
‘Cause it’s a special type of literalism.
Simone Collins: The real biblical literalism literalism. Non-cope biblical literalism. Based biblical literalism.
Malcolm Collins: I guess, I guess I’d call it deep literalism to contrast it with surface literalism.
Simone Collins: Oh, I like deep literalism. That sounds
Malcolm Collins: good. Yeah, every story actually means something more than just a, an allegory, unless it’s, like, an obvious allegory.
But y- i- what that is won’t always be transparent from the surface level reading of the story Anyway, love you Simone. And this was a lot of fun I hope for you.
Simone Collins: This was absolutely fascin- I, I mean I, I’m really looking forward to going back and... Does this have, wait, did you get this the, the Genesis ledger you put this on?
Oh yeah, Technopuritan. Oh, okay, so this is on the website.
Malcolm Collins: It’s on the
Simone Collins: website. It’s the bottom- Technopuritan.com/genesis5. Why Genesis 5?
Malcolm Collins: Because that’s what, what I was looking at when I first built it, was let’s go into Genesis 5- Okay, okay, okay ... and see what this could map to. And there- Well, all right,
Simone Collins: nerds.
Go to technopuritan.com/genesis5 to get
Malcolm Collins: your- And, and the other thing that I think- ... deep literacy on ... is gonna surprise a lot of Christians and Jews, because I was unaware of this-
Simone Collins: Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: is the location that’s being talked about from the very beginning of the Adam and Eve story the, the mouse water, the Tigris and the Euphrates, all the way to the story of Abraham is within, like, a 20-minute drive of each other.
Like-
Simone Collins: Oh yeah, ‘cause you did this little tour. I’m not moving. Sorry. This- Oh, sorry. Oh.
Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s also nowhere near Israel. That also surprised me.
Simone Collins: Wait, so how far did you need to drive from Israel to go on that, that whole tour?
Malcolm Collins: Oh, no, no. I didn’t go to this region. This isn’t where Jesus was Oh, I thought you went to Syria.
This is a different region. Oh, okay. This, this region is in
like southern Turkey.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, Turkey-eh.
Malcolm Collins: But they... all of this, now still the descendants of the Jewish people, or one of them. But it’s a region that also makes more sense if you’re fanning culture out into ancient Greece, into, you know, ancient Europe, and into ancient Israel at around the same time.
Because they would have received, if you’re assuming a true Eve the g- genetics or cultural pollination from this region around the time the actual kingdom of Israel did. Which would explain why you see things like ancient Athens take off before ancient Israel because they were genuinely closer to that part of the world’s genetic stock.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: I- in terms of migration patterns and stuff like that. Which is also really fascinating. And I, I was surprised to see that as well. It’s totally reframed so much of Genesis for me, and I hope you guys had fun with it. I want... Do we need to do more
Simone Collins: deep literalism episodes? This is really fun.
Malcolm Collins: If you do, I can just keep going through and trying to figure out what’s going on.
Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah, I think that’d be really interesting. Thank
Malcolm Collins: you. And it also, d- going through this disgusts me more with strict s- surface level literalists. Because now I’m reminded of stuff that they believe that is super sacrilegious from my perspective.
Look what? Like, the angels were having sex with people and having children together. Oh, yeah,
Simone Collins: yeah. Come on, guys. You’ve
Malcolm Collins: perverted- Like, that to me just sounds like straight sacrilege, right? Like, Yeah, it does ... that completely changes the nature of what an angel is, what God’s relationship to angels are, what this celestial host is.
And I don’t, I don’t like that.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: like- I don’t, I don’t like it ...
Simone Collins: perverting the Bible with their sexual fantasies.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. About, I mean, obviously not, probably not all literalists. You guys can tell me who are literalists. Do you believe that angels had sex with people and they had kids together? And is any of that DNA still in humanity? Because it doesn’t say that Noah is not from one of these genetic lines. So we can’t really rule it out if you believe that.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I don’t know. I, I’m very curious to see the, the comments on this.
Malcolm Collins: It also, and I will note here, doesn’t lay this out as, like, a bad thing. It’s not like God got mad at them for doing this. Not, not explicitly anywhere. I mean, you can, you can say, “Well, he did send the flood in afterwards,” but it said he did that because of their level of wickedness, not because of the interbreeding thing.
He appeared to be fine with that, if you believe that’s what was happening. Mm-hmm. We, we don’t. We think it’s just talking about humans or a certain subsect of humans that’s right with God. In the same way that Jesus is set apart as the s- the Son of God. Which I, I like that interpretation a lot more.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I do too.
Malcolm Collins: All right, bye. Oh, for dinner tonight, what are we doing? What’s easy for you? Steak?
Simone Collins: So the steak is pretty f- still frozen solid. I, I, I- Okay ... promise you- We could do
Malcolm Collins: queso or quesadillas. Let’s do some queso.
Simone Collins: I’ll do queso. ‘Cause we can make
Malcolm Collins: a larger batch and, You’re cooking a couple nights in a
Simone Collins: row
try it with some of that salsa. Yeah, I mean, like, and also leftover queso with some chips and steak sounds like we were saying previously.
Malcolm Collins: Pretty, pretty good.
Simone Collins: Perfect. Yeah. Okay. Queso it is, friend. We will, we will do that.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, d- have you been using butter in your queso?
Simone Collins: Yeah. It, it’s from a roux.
Malcolm Collins: Great, great,
Simone Collins: great.
Butter is the base of a roux. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I thank you for your cooking knowledge, Simone.
Simone Collins: That was my mom. Thanks, Mom.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and your kids will, will know if you take the time to teach them.
Simone Collins: I do. I, I love doing cooking lessons with them when, when they’ll stop running around.
Malcolm Collins: Now do you wanna try to do a weekend episode, or do you wanna just go to bed early?
I
Simone Collins: would really like to go to bed early, so
Malcolm Collins: I- Let’s
Simone Collins: go to bed early. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I’ll get this episode ready for tomorrow. I... God, I, I, I thought this episode was so fun.
Simone Collins: I’m so... And I’m s- this is the first time that we’ve had a, made a companion website. Well, you, that you made a companion, a whole companion website.
Talk about show notes to a next level. It’s so cool. Oh
Malcolm Collins: yeah, and if you haven’t checked out the techno-puritan website in a while, it’s g- gotten a total overhaul, and it’s really nice now. It’s spruced
Simone Collins: up. It looks, yeah, it’s got pizazz now.
Malcolm Collins: I was, That’s the article ... the, the one that shocked me was in previous episodes I had laid out that I, I thought that w- whatever it was called, that T- Tev- Tev- Tev- Tev- Tevye was w- what was being talked about in Eden- Mm
and that really shocked me. And then again to be double shocked with snakes being the number one- Snakes ... sign. Oh
Simone Collins: my gosh. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: They’re- That- Just of all the things it could be, snakes. Of
Simone Collins: everything, yeah. It had to... It... Why does it have to be snakes?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, right? I gotta put that in. Yeah. That was so affirming for me as like, no, no, no, this isn’t coincidence at this point.
Because we’re predicting future coincidences. You can’t predict future coincidences with this degree of accuracy, right? Mm. It can’t keep being more and more and more things that affirm this interpretation.
Simone Collins: Well, and, a- going back to some of your earliest discussions of techno-puritanism a- and prophets, you, you, you call shot calling sort of the key...
The, the key designator of a prophet, you know, it could be that a key designator of a prophetic s- script, document, whatever you wanna call it text is, i- is its ability to call shots or to accurately-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...
Simone Collins: model these capacities. So- Well, we, we argue that’s the entire thing
Malcolm Collins: that affirms a text.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Well, that and, and, and its effect on the groups that follow it.
Simone Collins: Yeah
Malcolm Collins: Like if people who follow with... I, I really believe in by your fruits you’ll know them. If, if people who follow a thing end up living worse lives, it is a bad tradition. And not true, and not a source of, of, of truth. But very weird to have become this religious this quickly.
Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah, who woulda thunk it? Malcolm Collins.
Malcolm Collins: But it’s also put me in a very interesting perspective, because it makes me significantly less tolerant of specific things where I used to be able to say of religious people, “Well, we just disagree.” And now I’m like-
Simone Collins: Yeah. You’re like, “No, this isn’t what the text says.”
And you... Yeah, I, I-
Malcolm Collins: No, like when you, you were reading the Old Testament, and you came to me, and you go, “Malcolm, there are a lot of prohibitions against worshiping to, worshiping next to, worshiping in a carved stone. Yeah ... why aren’t people following those?” Like, you’re like, “The, the rulings against iconoclasm seem to be way bigger, way thorough.”
Simone Collins: Yeah, like idol worship, all that, yeah. It’s,
Malcolm Collins: Way more aggressive than you had remembered. Yeah. And I’m like, I just can’t lie down on that, right? Well,
Simone Collins: now it makes a lot more sense when you compare that to the idol worship of what you could call uncivilized religions that do things like practice in- incredible violence, all those other things.
Like idol worship is kind of iconic in all of them. And yeah, I could, I could see... I, I could, I could see the reasoning, the logic behind being like, “Nope, we’re not doing that this... This is a, this is different, okay?”
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, it also... If you look at the regions where there are denominations of Christianity where idols are worshiped, the, the- Mm-hmm
regions are typically less prosperous, more corrupt, more-
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah ... you know. It’s, it’s not
Simone Collins: good. Look, look, look, don’t make me reset the counter. Don’t... Let’s not go there.
Malcolm Collins: I, I didn’t- I’m gonna make you do it. I, I’m also talking about Orthodox regions. Don’t... I’m also talking about Orthodox regions.
Simone Collins: Okay. Okay, thank you. Yes. Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: You know, it’s, it’s not good. Like, the, the, I, like I think all these commandments were given to us to, to, to help us, right? You know, that’s the cool thing about
Simone Collins: them. Absolutely. No, I I have such a strong... I mean, I always had such a strong v- visceral negative reaction to idol worship, weirdly.
In every religious context where I’ve seen it, Shinto, Buddhist Christian, it, it, it really bothers me. But that’s always been in- intuitive in, in, in the past. So you’re, you’re never gonna have trouble convincing me that idol worship is, is not cool. But anyway, okay. I’m gonna go make quesadillas for you using the cheeses.
And why
Malcolm Collins: didn’t anybody tell me the Bible made so much sense? Why
Simone Collins: did I always believe- Because they were... Dude, because they were coping and gaslighting when they were trying to be like, “No, it’s all proven scientifically.” And, and they were otherwise just going, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la” when it came to science.
Like I just... We, we have the resources now that were just didn’t exist in the past. That’s what I think. Yeah. Well, yeah. But I, I can also imagine that there will be people, just like with your last episode, your last tracked episode, who chime in in the comments and are like, “Oh yeah, Rabbi So-and-So totally saw this too.
And, you know, this person wrote a book about it,” and things like that. So I, I, I wouldn’t be surprised if, if other people have, have at least seen part of this and this. Anyway, off I go. Yeah. Off I go. Off
Malcolm Collins: you go. Love you. Bye.
Simone Collins: Bye.
Speaker 3: That’s why I figured, look at that mess over there. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to clean that without like a chainsaw. Ugh, yeah. All those debris right there. Yeah, and if it’s light enough to walk out here with. Yes, Sadie. You’re doing so good. But also, you’re welcome to borrow anything from our tool shed.
Someone tried to bite me, I think. Oh, well let’s go home then, ‘cause I need to make dinner. It might be a snake. A snek. Okay. In the water. It, well, a water snake? Think so