After creating man, “God said, Behold, I have
given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and
every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall
be for meat” (Gen 1:29). The first men were told to eat plants and fruits only.
In short, they were to be vegetarians.
But then, after the Flood, God told Noah,
“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb
have I given you all things” (Gen 9:3). Noah, his family, and their descendants
were now allowed to eat flesh. What had led to the drastic change in their
diet?
The Earth tilted?
Australian astronomer George Dodwell,
studying summer/winter solstice shadow measurements by ancient astronomers,
noticed that although shadow lengths were correct in relation to latitude, they
were wrong vis-à-vis the alignment of the Earth’s axis with the sun. A change
had occurred in the distant past.
Dodwell saw a correlation in
three cases of dating discrepancies – the Temple of Amen-Ra, the North Celestial
Pole observations of Greek astronomer Eudoxus, and the Stonehenge. He
constructed a mathematical curve and discovered that, around 2345 BC, the Earth
wobbled like a spinning top, but gradually stabilized to a new axis with a
tilt.
Noah’s Flood
It closely matched the year of Noah’s Flood –
2348 BC -- in the Annals of the World (1658) by Archbishop James Ussher of
Armagh, regarded by scholars as the most reliable Biblical chronologer.
In Noah’s Flood, the upsurge of subterranean
waters from under tectonic plates, together with massive global rains, brought
on an imbalance enough to make the Earth’s axis to tilt. The Bible tells of
“all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were
opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights” (Gen
7:11b-12).
Author Peter Lorie says: “a massive weight on
the planet’s surface would potentially cause a ‘wobble’ in the movement of the
natural axis… the Earth would slip into a different axis.” According to
National Geographic, when the enormous Three Gorges Dam in China filled with
water in 2006, it caused Earth’s axis to tilt by no less than an inch. How much
more a global deluge as the one in the time of Noah?
Paradise Earth
Scripture says and fossils show
Earth was once a paradise. If the planet’s axis used to be fully or nearly
vertical, warm air from the equator flowed all the way to the poles, while cold
polar air blew toward the equatorial zone. Result: a narrow tropical zone,
small arctic zones, and broad temperate zones. There were little or no
temperature variations worldwide -- no scorching summers and freezing winters.
Plants got the same amount of sunlight throughout the year.
Fossilized palm trees have been found in the
sub-Arctic region of Canada. Some coal seams discovered in Antarctica contain
fossilized plants that do not grow in the polar region – indicating they grew
at or near the pole under warmer conditions.
Giant plants and animals
On primordial earth, mosses were
2-3 feet high; horsetail reeds up to 50 feet. Plants grew to huge sizes. So did
animals that ate them. Paleontologists dig up fossils of very large herbivorous
animals – hornless rhinoceroses 30 feet long and 18 feet high; 12-foot-tall
sloths; birds standing 7-10 feet; gigantic wooly mammoths. The plant-eating
dinosaurs, which lasted for millions of years, were the largest creatures on
earth. It seems all the nutrients that the first men and animals needed were in
the plants that they ate.
Climate change
Climatic variations and seasonal extremes in
the world today, such as broiling hot summers and bitterly cold winters, are
the result of a 23.5o tilt in the axis of the Earth toward the
sun.
With the tilting of the earth’s
axis, plants were subjected to the stresses of uneven periods of light and
darkness, extreme heat and cold, drought and flooding, not to mention
destructive strong winds. The plants grew smaller… and, evidently, less nutritious.
A new diet
It appears the nutrients plants had provided
early men were no longer available in the usual amounts. It became necessary
for men to obtain their complete proteins from animals in the form of meat,
milk, eggs.
God forestalled nutritional deficiencies that
would have inevitably led to illnesses, and ultimately death and extinction, by
allowing men to eat the flesh of “every moving thing that liveth.”
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