Were ancient days and years - orbits and rotations - different from modern ones?

The metaphor ancient people used for time was a circle, not a straight line. The Sun circled through the heavens from sunrise to sunset and back to sunrise. The Sun rose each morning next to a star on the horizon. It cycled through all the stars of the ecliptic to return to rise next to that same star next year. The moon also cycled through the ecliptic every lunation. They did not imagine that these cycles encoded linearity or fixed periods. They saw never ending changes in the very places we claim to see fixed periods of time.

Ancient people also saw cycles in history, catastrophes followed by new beginnings. They never recorded history as though it followed a linear timeline. They believed that the earliest people lived in the great time, the golden age. The Sumerian king list quantifies this concept by recording that the earliest kings reigned for tens of thousands of years compared to the few years of latter kings. The pagans called the great time the age of Kronos (time) when Saturn reigned. They told stories about Jupiter shattering the planet Tiamat and assigned tablets of destiny (orbits) to all the planet gods. The Bible refers to the shattering of a planet four times, using imagery similar to those of surrounding nations. Indeed, we find thousands of broken planet pieces orbiting our star (asteroids and comets) that contain volcanic crystals and minerals that formed in liquid water. This is simple evidence for a shattered planet.
 
Jacob echoed the thinking of his generation when he said that his days and years were shorter and worse than the days and years of his fathers (Genesis 47:9). Were ancient days and years really longer and better than latter ones? Job 14 describes geological events associated with the length of life - such as mountains crumbling and rivers washing away the dust of the earth. One of Job’s length-of-life markers was the Mediterranean Sea (Hebrew west) drying up. Core samples from the deep Mediterranean show that it dried up repeatedly. According to modern reckoning, this would take millions of years but Job used it as a marker for one lifetime. Job also mentions how their faces deformed before they died. The skull is the only part of our skeleton that keeps growing as we age. If we lived for geological ages, our skulls would grow Neanderthal, but our grandchildren would not have the extended brows - just like the fossils show. The records of the distance ancient people could travel in a day (Alexander and Xenophon's marches; Jacob's trip in Genesis 31; the Levite of Judges 19 and the Roman footmen marching to Antipatris in Acts 31) suggest that ancient days were indeed longer than modern days.

The earliest records from the Bible, India, Assyria and Babylon suggest a 360-day year with 12 30-day months. About 3,000 years ago, calendars added five days to the year and the lunar calendar became dynamic. The reason for this may have involved close Venusian passages mentioned by the Babylonians (see Judges 5:20). The earliest astronomical record preserves the lunar rise and set dates for Venus during the 21-year reign of King Ammizaduga. Venus spent far too many days on the far side of the Sun and too few days as a morning and evening “star” compared to its modern orbit. On one occasion Venus passed from west to east in only one day as if the solar system was much smaller. Very few ancient eclipses fit the dates or descriptions recorded, when we analyze them with the mathematics of fixed orbits.

The text of the Bible does not allow for fixed orbits. The first verse in Genesis tells us that FIRST Elohim finished creating the plural heavens and the earth - all of them. Yet the earth was without form and darkness covered its face. Then Elohim continued to command light to continue to be. Evidently it was then that matter began to have extension in space. Indeed, the earliest, most-distant galaxies were tiny and naked without starry appendages. Perhaps they were made of the tohu bohu (unformed, not yet spread out) matter mentioned in Genesis 1:2. Half way through the creation week Elohim continued to form the Sun, Moon and stars, evidently with the matter actualized by light on day one. He continued to place them in the raqiya, the spreading place. Raqiya is the noun form of the verb raqa - to spread out. Isaiah wrote that God spreads out the plural heavens in unbroken continuity like a tent. He continually calls the stars to come out, yet none are missing.

How can we verify that orbits spread out (accelerate), as the Bible so clearly implies? The Bible tells us of one place where knowledge is available to all. The plural heavens (shamayim - the galaxies) reveal God’s glory. The raqiya (the spreading place) reveals the work of His hands. The only place where we see the history of God’s handiwork is in visible galactic history. Does galactic history support the idea that orbits have fixed durations?

When we use telescopes to compare the shapes of ancient galaxies with closer ones at many ranges (eras), we see that the earliest galaxies were naked, without starry arms. We observe blue globs with equal spacing around the redder cores of many ancient galaxies. At closer ranges, we see how those blobs accelerated out, rotated around more and spread out. The stars emerged, spread out from compact galactic cores, growing into huge growth spirals. What could cause galaxies to intrinsically grow from compact balls to huge, dusty, local, growth spirals? We observe that ancient galaxies shone at tiny fractions of the frequencies of modern atoms and the differences get smaller the closer a galaxy is to Earth. Galaxies cannot spread out, the stars accelerating out, unless the properties of matter are emerging. A spiraling out orbit is an accelerating orbit. The visible history of galaxies demolishes the concept of linear time since atomic clocks and star streams keep on accelerating in billions of galaxies at many ranges.
Generations of astronomers recorded a decreasing solar parallax - as though the planets continue to spiral outwards. This has continued even into the 21st century during the 2004 transit of Venus and the 2003 opposition of Mars. Yet the distance to the Sun has remained fixed, when we use clocks to determine the distance (such as with radar). If clocks and orbits both change together, only optical evidence would be indifferent to the first principle of science, the assumption that the properties of matter are fixed, not emerging. Scientific mathematics, methods and measuring units encode the assumption that the properties of matter are fixed, not emerging.

There is a reason why ancient days and years should be longer than latter ones and it has nothing to do with the actuality of time. I will examine the cause of the long term effects of the gravitational phenomena in the next essay in this series.

Photo of Enuma Anu Enlil tablet 63 - often referred to as the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa (or Amimizaduga). It records the helical rise and set dates for Venus during the 21 year reign of the fourth king after Hammurabi. It was taken in the British museum by user Fae of Wikimedia Commons and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Last modified Septemeber 7, 2011