Job and the Biblical Age of the Earth

The book of Job contains many details about creation and earth history not found anywhere else in the Bible. The text informs us that God carefully designed rain, thunderbolts and ice. He changed some animals (carnivores) and gave all animals their characteristics. The book describes two species of dinosaurs and the crushing of a great planet, an event that dominated the earth-history of all ancient people. Job also informs about Earth's age.

Job chapter 14 is a poem about the brevity of life. The poem begins by claiming that man who is born of women is of few days. It compares those few days to the sea (yam) drying up, a river drying up, mountains crumbling away, rocks moving from their place, water wearing away stones and torrents washing away the dust of the earth. None of these geological markers would apply to the brevity of life in our days.

It is possible to test one of Job's life-duration markers. If the sea (west) dried up, we should find evidence in the Mediterranean sediments. In 1970, the drill ship, Glomar Challenger, extracted numerous bottom cores from several kilometers under the present surface. They found layers of deep-sea oozes alternating with gypsum, anhydrite, rock salt and algal stomatolite. These are evidences that the sea repeatedly dried and refilled. Mathematicians estimate that if the straits of Gibraltar were closed, the Mediterranean today would become a brackish dessert in about a thousand years because evaporation exceeds the input from its rivers. At Gibraltar, a long U shaped channel reveals how the sea refilled through the straits.

Does other evidence support the drying of the Mediterranean? In the 1960's the Russians constructed the Aswan High Dam at the first cataract (rapids) on the Nile, 1000 kilometers from the sea. A Russian engineer, Chumakov, drilled 15 holes into the river bed to find bedrock. The Russians discovered a sediment filled canyon 290 meters (950 feet) deep. At its lowest part, the canyon had almost vertical walls cut through hard granite. The dam is 110 meters above sea level, so the ancient river bed is about 500 feet lower than the modern sea level. The canyon sediments in the bottom 150 meters (500 feet) contained saltwater fossils. Apparently the Mediterranean filled to its present level so that saltwater reached up to the first cataract. Only after the canyon silted to the present sea level did the sediments contain fresh water fossils. Was the Nile a narrow gorge that ran down into a sea vastly lower than it is today? Geologists discovered that at Cairo, the Nile canyon was 2500 meters (1.5 miles) deep. This ancient canyon was deeper than the Grand Canyon, but of course it is completely filled with sediments today. The Frenchman, Bourcart, examined the sediments in steep submarine canyons around the Mediterranean. The bottom of these canyons contained gravel. Apparently the ancient rivers cut down to a much lower Mediterranean. The ancient rivers were drowned when the Mediterranean filled and were then covered with marine oozes.

Why did Job associate the drying sea, water wearing away rocks and dust transported away by streams with the length of a single life? Chapter 14 ends with another claim for the length of life. Job said that their faces doubled, changed radically (shanah paniym) before they died. Our facial bones, (especially the brows) keep on microscopically growing as we age. If we lived for geological ages, our forehead would grow thick like a Neanderthal's brows. The Neanderthal child skulls did not have the massive brows of the old ones. Apparently our ancestors really did live for geological ages.

A Bible student could argue: "that is impossible since Job only lived 140 years after his first ten children died." All ancient societies looked back on the great time when the early people lived for eons. Aristotle wrote that the original meaning of the word eon (Greek aeon) was the length of a life. The Greek poet Hesiod wrote that the arms and legs of the first generations did not fail although they eventually died in their sleep. Ovid wrote that the first people lived before new seas formed and slept their lives away. Hesiod recorded that children played at their mother's knee for a hundred years. He groaned that in the iron age people never stopped laboring by day and dying by night. He believed this deterioration would continue until children were born with graying temples. Our ancestors had a radically different earth history than we do.

Job's place in biblical history is somewhere around 4,000 years ago. The scientists who measured the Mediterranean sediments estimated that the sea drying occurred between 15 million and five million years ago. These measurements do not violate a literal biblical earth history. For example, the Hebrew text of Genesis 1 states that God placed the Sun, Moon and stars in the shamayim raqiya - the spreading heavens. Orbits that continually spread out are accelerating orbits. For centuries, astronomers have continued to measure a decreasing solar optical parallax. Several other Bible texts agree with Job's world view. Jacob (at 130 years of age) said that his days and years were shorter and worse than the days and years of his fathers (Genesis 47:9).

How can we verify if Job's world view is valid? The universe is so vast that we can see cosmic history all the way back to the creation era. The atomic clocks in billions of ancient galaxies dithered at tiny fractions of the light frequencies of modern atoms. The fastest (normally energized) atomic clocks are local. We also observe the continuum of galactic history - how the galaxies formed. What we see verifies what the Bible states about the formation of the heavens. Galaxies existed as tiny naked globs before the stars began to form and accelerate out into huge growth spirals. When we observe the vast continuum of galactic history, we see that the atomic clocks and the galactic star streams accelerated together as billions of galaxies grew from the insides outwards. Every bit of matter in the universe is following the Apostle Paul's descriptive physics. The creation is phthora (changing) in an orderly, together way (Romans 8:19 - 22).

Job's answer to the Earth's age is not like modern attempts to interpret the Bible with science. Some creationists speculate that creation days were billions of linear years. Others imagine that creation days were short "24 hour days" - like modern days. Both of these attempts to tailor the Bible to fit science have failed to fit the evidence or the hermeneutical biblical text.

What could cause Earth's years and days to continually speed up throughout natural history? The smallest of all effects - the mysterious thing we call gravity. Read an essay on how, if gravity travels at a finite speed, it must accelerate both days and years. Essay on why gravity affects the duration of both days and years.

We see a biblical cosmic history whereas scientific versions of the cosmos are crammed full of undetectable matter and never observed unnatural processes like vacuum expansions and vacuums that change light. Carefully consider Job's, rather than evolutionary, OEC or YEC (scientific) versions of earth's age. Think about it.

The seafloor age map is from NOAA. The sequence of seafloor age is red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue and the oldest is violet. According to this map, at one point Earth's only major sea was the Western Mediterranean. Notice the fan of sediments (grey) that extends far out into the Mediterranean from the Nile.