I believe like many other stories in the Bible, generations of religious scribes have blurred the real stories behind events of our past. It is time to begin to take another look at stories we were taught at Sunday schools and begin to ask questions, because knowing will put us in a better position…
How would the Jibu people react if a Gripen Jet, one of the world most advanced aircrafts around today, suddenly emerges from the sky and lands in their village? These naked, going primitive, descendants of the Kwarafa kingdoms scattered around the mountains of Gashaka lands in Northern Nigeria, to whom clothing and civilisation is alien.
If we try to imagine how these natives would react upon sighting a well kitted white pilot emerge from such a spectacle, then maybe we could begin to appreciate what predicament our progenitors, those who saw and compiled our religious texts – the Torah, Bible, The Vedas etc. – faced in recording the events, many of which were oral stories picked from different cultures of our past.
Like my unlettered grandmother would describe an airplane as a huge ‘metal bird’ for lack of proper vocabulary for it, many of the stories in the Bible were ‘simplified’. For example, did the prophet Ezekiel see a spacecraft or a fiery chariot in his vision?
The same question applies to the flood, the fall of man, the tower of babel stories that, by the way, are not unique to the Bible alone, as they can be found in many Mesopotamian religious writings that predate the Bible by many hundreds of years.
Maybe another look at the Genesis account would drive my point home.
Genesis: 1. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’
Well, the cosmos is all there was, is, and science suggests that the universe may not have been created, that the current universe as we know it may actually be the latest reincarnation of an infinitely old birthing and dying of the universe. That matter, from which the earth was formed and which makes up the universe, was never created but has rather always existed and will continue to do so in various forms.
We know that there are over 200 billion galaxies in the universe; that each galaxy contains over 200 billion suns (stars) and many of these suns have planets like our earth revolving round them. We also know evolution is a fact. We know that, just like no normal human being would expect just one grain to sprout if one empties a sack of beans on a fertile land, it won’t be unreasonable to suppose many of these planets may support civilisations, many far older than ours to the extent that they may appear godlike to our accentors. Do our religious texts suggest that one of such civilisations visited our ancestors in the remote past?
Genesis: 2. ‘…and there was not a man to till the ground…and God said let US make man in our image…’
Does this suggest man was ‘created’ for the purpose of work, to ‘till the ground’? Maintain a sedentary lifestyle and you will immediately notice the dangers of it because our physiology confirms the benefits of work or some type of aerobics. So, the Hebrew, borrowing from the ancient Sumerians before them, used the word ‘Elohim’ for God and echoed the fact that man was created to work for the Gods. Who were these Elohim, the ‘US’ in Genesis?
But it would make more sense that, in time, having understood the ways of the gods, man made plans and decided to build space vehicles and a launch ‘tower’ by which they could ‘reach the heavens’. Then the Elohim, fearing that they would lose their workforce should man succeed in this ambition…
What if after millions of years’ evolution our ancestors were visited by an extra-terrestrial race with the capability for inter-stellar travel? What if they saw in our primate forefathers some potential for intelligence and use? What if our forefathers, like the Jibu people, saw the extra-terrestrials as Elohim, the gods? What if they engineered our ancestors’ DNA to ‘create’ a hybrid creature? What if they felt these hybrid mutations were not matured enough to be given to eat of the ‘fruit of the knowledge of good and evil’, to be taught the secrets of reproduction in the attempt to control the population? What if a member of these Elohim – the one who would later be known as Satan today – rebelled against his own kind, and then genetically engineered the ability to reproduce into these new hybrids, an offence that led to their punishment? What if our scribes misrepresented this event as ‘the fall of man’?
Genesis: 3. ‘Then God said, ‘now the man is like one of us…and now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever…’
I cannot imagine that anyone would argue that this was a literal tree, as much as an almighty God fretting about a couple eating from another tree in a garden. But I can imagine that if the Elohim, who already have in their DNA the ability to live long – they would have needed to be, crisscrossing the stars – having discovered that their creatures could now reproduce, decided to shut them out of the secrets of longevity, the ‘tree of life’, to prevent an uncontrolled population, hence the reason for the ‘casting out’ of ‘Eden’.
Genesis: 6. ‘Now, it came to pass…that the sons of God saw the daughters of men…and they took wives for themselves…and bore offspring who were the mighty men of old…and God was sorry he had made man…so Elohim said…‘I will destroy man whom I have made…’
I cannot imagine an all-knowing, perfect God who is not capable of making mistakes regretting his actions. But it makes a lot of sense if, having taught man the secret of reproduction, this member of the Elohim, who by now was an outcast to his own people, convinced other members to join him to free humanity from its infantilism, give humans the secrets of longevity. Because this ‘tree of life’ was protected by ‘flaming swords turning this way and that’ – or its a laser? -, he could not access it and so he and his group decided to inter-marry the daughters of men so as to mix GENES. And this appeared to have worked as even the Bible itself described the off-springs of this union as ‘the great men of old’.
Maybe this really was what led to the ‘war in heaven’ which was fought on the basis if an ideological difference among extraterrestrials, rather than on the basis of pride? Unless someone wants us to believe war, an unholy enterprise, could break out in a perfect heaven where a holy God dwells. Maybe it was the culmination of these events that led to the destruction of the rebellious extra-terrestrial and their human collaborators with a flood.
Finally, Genesis: 11. ‘Now the whole earth has one language…then men said, ‘let us build…a tower whose top is in the heavens…the Elohim came down and saw the tower…and God said, ‘come let us go down there and confuse their language…’
If this story was actually about a literal skyscraper, why would the builders choose a plane rather than the highest peak to build? Then I would expect an almighty God of all people to know that there are practical reasons why such a structure that ‘stretches into the heavens’ cannot be possible unless this story is misrepresented. But it would make more sense that, in time, having understood the ways of the gods, man made plans and decided to build space vehicles and a launch ‘tower’ by which they could ‘reach the heavens’. Then the Elohim, fearing that they would lose their workforce should man succeed in this ambition and finally achieve longevity, having been freed of ignorance, genetically altered human language to cause confusion.
I believe like many other stories in the Bible, generations of religious scribes have blurred the real stories behind events of our past. It is time to begin to take another look at stories we were taught at Sunday schools and begin to ask questions, because knowing will put us in a better position…
Albert Afeso Akanbi, a novelist, researcher and community worker, writes from Abuja.
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