I am currently reading through The Authenticity of the Book of Genesis by Bill Cooper, and it is fast becoming one of the treasures of my library. The evidence discussed for the great antiquity of the Book of Genesis, so far, has been numerous and varied. It has been linguistic, archaeological, historic, cultural, and philological. It has included (but not been limited to):
The overwhelming number of toledoth in Genesis, indicating connections between ancient clay tablets from the first ages …
Comparison of Babylonian and Genesis creation epics …
Pre-Flood geography and the grammatical/ historical construct of its description …
The temptation and fall of man present in various literatures and mythologies …
The Genesis genealogies and the Sumerian king list …
The antiquity of the Genesis calendar …
The historic and archaeological evidence for the Tower of Babel, the Table of Nations, Abraham, the Mesopotamian kings of Gen 14, Melchizedek, pre-Mosaic laws and customs, and Joseph in Egypt.
And that is just in the first part of the book! I have Flood traditions from around the world, and The Genesis Flood Tablet, still to go! But I read this this morning – what profound commentary on our modern educational system:
“What then, shall we say to these things? One piece of evidence for the antiquity of the Book of Genesis would be intriguing. Two would begin to be persuasive. But the body of evidences that we have considered here (and we have not exhausted the subject by any means) is surely compelling to the highest degree. If the Book of Genesis were indeed as young as its critics have claimed, and if it really had been copied and edited from older sources, then there would be many items of hard archaeological evidence to that effect. Certainly, not one of the evidences that we have been considering would even exist. Yet when we look to the modernist school for just one item of hard evidence for their claims, we are met with silence — or merely the time-honored mantra of doubt and confusion.
“Now it is no light thing to withhold evidence of any description, let alone when that evidence has to do with the Word of God. When we read the modernist claim that the kings of Genesis 14 are unknown to us from the historical record, and then see (as in Appendix Two of this book) that all four names of the Mesopotamian kings mentioned in that chapter are contained on a single clay tablet, and that they are also contained severally on other tablets of the time, then we have to ask what is really going on here. These tablets, though kept from the public eye, have been catalogued and translated, and have been lodged in the British Museum since the late 19th century. Their existence is well known to any enquiring scholar who cares to look into the subject. Yet the clear testimony that they bear to the truth of the Genesis 14 record is hidden away. But not only that. Their very existence goes unmentioned, and a deliberate and calculated lie is inserted in their place, the lie that the names of these kings are unknown to us from the historical record, and that the writer of the Book of Genesis either errs in his ignorance, or blatantly deceives those who read him.
“The information we that we have been considering is not just withheld from the public, of course. It is also withheld from all those students who are busy pursuing their degrees in modernist colleges and universities. Entirely unaware of the fact that they are learning and then propagating a lie, they go on to teach their own students and to write in their own publications the lie that they in turn have been taught. The education systems of the western world are geared to suppress independent thought, and open enquiry is discouraged at all levels. Let a student’s dissertation once range beyond the lecture notes that he has been fed, and let his conclusions raise but the smallest question mark over what he has been taught, and he will be severely marked down for it — even failed altogether if the question mark is big enough to embarrass his tutors. The much- vaunted ‘scientific method’ in all this, is a sham.
“This has always been the way of things, just as it always will be the way of things. No amount of evidence or persuasive argument will ever change that. The system is too big, too powerful, and is too firmly entrenched to offer the hope of ever being changed. Moreover, because the world itself rejects the Word of God out of hand, it welcomes a system which tells it how false that Word is, and will protect and nourish that system to the defiance of all logic and common sense.”