Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles.

Thank you. Episode 1.4, Recovering Ancient Israel.

Welcome back to the History in the Bible podcast.

Last time we left the study of the Bible with Johann Semler,

who had begun a critical re-examination of the entire biblical canon in the late Enlightenment. As he wrote, natural philosophers were

conducting the first experiments and investigations into chemistry and geology. These people

would later be called scientists, Antoine Lavazier, Henry Cavendish, Joseph, Priestley and others

devised the theories and quantitative methodologies there would be the bedrock upon which the modern world was built.

The Scottish geologist James Hutton decided that the rock formations he studied could not possibly have been formed in a short period of time

by means of a catastrophe such as the Great Flood. They had been made by processes still happening on the Earth in the present day.

As these processes were very gradual, the Earth needed to be ancient to allow time for the changes.

His scientific successes in the early 19th century developed his work.

By the 1830s, natural philosophers generally accepted that the earth must be much older than the Bible said.

But in that chronology, the chronology of humans was still moot.

The universe could well have been created many thousands,

if not millions of years, before God made Adam and Eve.

In the 1820s, the French archaeologist Paul Tournale

scrimmaged amongst ancient cave floors

and found human bones and teeth mixed with crude pottery

and the bones of extinct and modern animals.

Until then, the orthodox view was that those old bones and tools were Celtic or Gallo-Roman.

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