Before the Cataclysm
Summaries of the content in this section.
The biblical creation account is undoubtedly a stumbling block. Cosmologists dismiss it as a myth because it bears no resemblance to their own story. Creationists accept it as history but struggle to relate it to what is known about the present world. Others look for the middle road, claiming that the order of events comes close enough to what science says it was, or that its meaning is spiritual rather than literal, about the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’. This article takes a fresh look at the text and suggests that there is a better way, consistent with taking the account at face value but not rejecting what we know about the history of the universe.
The world that existed before the Cataclysm no longer exists, so we have no direct evidence of what it was like. Although many ancient traditions refer to it, our main source of information, the book of Genesis, describes a world significantly different from that which we know today. There were no oceans. The water supplying its rivers came from a subterranean body of water called the ‘deep’. The land had a different geography (though certain place names were carried over to the new world) and the interior of the planet was hot only by reason of its pressure. Over time it heated up, leading to eruptions of magma and deposits of metals such as gold, iron and copper. The same processes that resurfaced the Earth also resurfaced the Moon and the other terrestrial planets.
Plants and animals existed on Earth from the beginning. Most, however, would have looked very different from those of today, since the original kinds were the ancestors of creatures that over time increased in diversity and we see only their final forms. Here we consider the tradition that our earliest forbears kept tso’n, sometimes translated ‘sheep’. Sheep come at the end of a long line of evolution from animals that looked nothing like sheep. Is this mention of tso’n an anachronism, or is there another explanation?