Is Jericho older than Adam? From a Young Earth Creationist perspective, No! The series of work from the Torah and scientific alignments; Such as the Moshe Emes series, there are only two valid options.
- Either Jericho was founded prior to Moses recording the 5 books of Moses and the recording of Joshua from the book of Joshua.
- Or 9,000 BC is greatly inflated
The correct answer might surprise you. Both are actually true. The Moshe Emes series seems to present arguments for aligning the biblical timeline with archaeological findings, specifically suggesting that the widely accepted date of Jericho’s founding (around 9,000 BC) is significantly inflated.
In option number 2, starting from 11,000 thousand years (or 9,000 BC), The Moshe Emes series proposes that the actual founding date might be closer to 4,000 years ago. This perspective tries to find alignment between the biblical timeline, where events like the founding of Sodom (1996 AM) and the Exodus (leading to the fall of Jericho in 2448 AM) took place in the span of a few centuries.
If this interpretation is indeed true then the city of Jericho was founded but not too long before the birth of Abraham.
The same is true for the nearby towns of Sodom in 1996 anno mundi. Now using the highest probability science, including the max avail context; that is 4k rounded YA not 11k.
An old age interpretation:
It’s claimed that Jericho is older than Egypt. Egypt was founded in 3,100 BC. The first recorded Egyptian ruler was Hor-Orys; A pre-Dynastic Egyptian Ruler who was born in 3,496 BC and died im 3,443 BC. He was the son of Pathru’sim, the son of the biblical Mizraim, The first ruler of Egypt.
So was Jericho was founded sometime around 3,952 BC. Stating from the 9,000 year date and subtracting 4,000 years, we would end up with a time frame that’s between 5,000 BC and 4,000 BC For the founding of Jericho. This would make sense as theologians generally agree that it was build before the flood. (Note: the flood occurred sometime around 3,500 BC).
Using the logic from the given details and the mathematics of this situation, I can make a reasonable assumption that the city of Jericho would hand been built roughly 425 years prior to the flood.
This also makes sense given the corrected chronological that was presented by a theologian scholar named Nathan.
Source is here:
https://youtu.be/VI1yRTC6kGE?si=oqG310VYCd9kAdij
The Pre-Adamic age of Jericho!
Alright, in this option we can make a biblical chronology timeline based on both the archaeological data and the Jewish Talmudic commentary.
This commentary notes that the Torah was concealed for 974 generations before Adam. The Gemara then states that there were 26 generations between Adam and Moses, meaning the giving of the Torah occurred 1000 generations into Creation.
Using this interpretation, the 11,000 year date range that’s commonly attributed to the city of Jericho would make perfect sense because the earth would be roughly 48,000 years old if we were to consider this as scripturally biblical.
So what’s the catch?
Midrash Tehillim 90:13 says that God created and destroyed 974 worlds before this one. What exactly does that mean?
I’ve heard it used in defense of a modern understanding of evolution and cosmology but don’t really get why God would create a universe and destroy it 600 times, then create a universe and destroy it a couple hundred more times with our solar system, and then create it and destroy it another couple hundred times with slight variations of animal life. And then do the one final creation of everything again. I don’t grasp the logic behind that interpretation.
So what exactly does it mean to create and destroy 974 worlds?
So we’re not dealing with god creating and Destroying the earth 974 times, but rather there were 974 human generations that Pre-existed Adam and Eve.
I’ve come across two sources that shed some light on both issues: one from Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, and one from Alexander Poltorak, a Jewish theoretical physicist.
In Rabbi Kaplan’s The Age of the Universe, he proposes that according to the Sefer HaTemunah, as it is interpreted in the Sefer Livnas HaSapir (according to Rabbi Kaplan, the “most authoritative interpretation”), we are in the 7th sh’mitah cycle of 1000 years. Under this interpretation, the world was already 42,000 years old when Adam was created.
Since 1,000 years is equal to one day, and a single day is equal to 1,000 years, we can therefore conclude that naturally there are many different interpretations of the Sefer HaTemunah, so this answer is only meant as an introduction of Rabbi Kaplan’s article, in which he examines many such interpretations.
However, Rabbi Yitzchok deMin Acco argues that the years in the Sefer HaTemunah are God’s years, since they preceded man. This view Rabbi Kaplan combines with the Sefer HaSapira to argue that therefore the Sefer HaTemunah is speaking of 42,000*365,250 years, or about 15 billion years. Meaning the universe had existed for 15 billion years before Adam.
Even if Adam was the first man, we can still interpret the creation week to included, evolution, dinosaurs and even Pre-Adamic civilizations.
The quantum interpretation!
The premise is quite simple. Quantum Mechanics says the collapse of the wavefunction is caused by observation. Poltorak posits here that it’s not the physical observation, per say, but consciousness deriving from the Godly soul within man (and here he departs from other QM consciousness interpretations that theorize animal consciousness is enough to cause collapse). It’s important to note that wave collapse by consciousness is just as valid an explanation empirically as any other interpretation of QM. Under this interpretation, until the first observer with a Godly soul, Adam, the universe existed in a probabilistic superposition of all possible universes. Therefore, there were an infinite number of potential universes, one for each theoretically possible universe, that were “created [by God] and destroyed” when Adam’s consciousness limited reality to just one single, tangible universe.
Putting the two together, one possible interpretation of the 974 generations before Adam is that they existed and didn’t exist simultaneously. Being animal man, and lacking the Image of G-d and/or the Breath of G-d, they could play no role in the collapse of the universal wavefunction, and therefore where “stuck” in that immaterial state described by the probabilistic wavefunction. Not until Adam was there a conscious observer, and therefore, the age of Creation is counted from Adam, meaning the number of years since he collapsed the universal wavefunction. But since that collapse materialized ~13 billion years of history, the universe has two ages, each representing a different perspective.
The first age is the cosmic age of creation, of a span of 13 billion years that existed prior to Adam, which we didn’t start counting until Adam collapsed it. (Also hinted at in Romans 5:12-14).
Ands the second age is the counting of creation since this universal collapse by Adam.
Naturally, the “truest” one is the number of years since Adam. Under this interpretation, the 974 generations of “wicked” men are the conscious-less homo-sapiens that “existed” before Adam, but were only materialized when Adam first observed the world.
This is not to say that any of this must be correct. That’s a task for brighter and more scientifically and Kabbalistically educated minds than me.
So there you have it, a few interpretations for the age of the city of Jericho and how it fits into the biblical story.
Sources for this blog:
Name: the 1611 King James Version Bible
Author:
The King James Bible, or KJV, was not written by a single author. It was a collaborative effort by a committee of 47 scholars and clergymen over several years, overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft. While King James I commissioned the project, he did not write the translation himself.
Publication: 1611 AD
Link to page used:
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/
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Name: Were there Pyramids built before or after the flood?
Author: NathanH83
Publication: Approx. 2017
Posted on: YouTube
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Name: Rabbi Kaplan’s The Age of the Universe,
Author: Aryeh Kaplan
Publication: http://www.bnpublishing.com, 2007
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Name: Collapsing the Wave Function of Urim and Thummim.
Author: Alexander Poltorak
Publication: 2014
Brian's_Biblical_Research_Guide 