The biblical God of the Old Testament is commonly described by some as a ‘God of Wrath’,
especially when in comparison to how God is portrayed in the New Testament,
where some have described him as a ‘God of Love’. To believers and atheists alike, there can be
something of a discrepancy between the God of the Old Testament and the God of The New Testament,
where one is more resembling a forgiving father-type figure and the other is more about…
Not for the first time have I seen The Old Testament God described as
a God with a ‘dark side’. He is after all responsible for floods, plagues,
famines and sometimes just outright genocide. However, according to traditional believers,
it’s not so much the case that the Old Testament God is ‘trigger happy’ but that this more violent
side is just another part of God, who like us, is multifaceted. Stephen Fry refers to
God as ‘mean-minded’, ‘monstrous’ and even as a ‘maniac’ - blasphemous words indeed,
but ones that do reflect the opinion those might have on a deity that destroys cities, spreads
famine and diseases and at one point drowns the entire world. However, if we were to consult
with the traditional believer, they might say that these actions are justified and that these
acts are not ‘random vindictiveness’, but rather punishments owed to those who have done wrong.
On that note, in today’s episode, we’ll be analysing each and every
time God snuffs someone out of existence and hopefully,
we’ll have a more informed sense of what God’s final kill count looks like by the end of Genesis.
What may surprise some readers is that the Old Testament God is pretty peaceful for the first
six chapters of Genesis - even after being betrayed by Adam and Eve and later scorned
by their son Cain. It isn’t until Chapter 6 of Genesis does God start to get annoyed
by the disobedience and disrespect shown to him by humankind, where we are told,
”The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every
inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted
that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.” (Genesis 6: 5-6)
It’s with this notion that God decides that humanity needs a reboot and so decides to
flood the earth. It’s interesting how in some respects, God goes from zero to
one hundred having killed no one, to having killed… well, the entirety of the earth (with
the exception of Noah and his family who were spared for their piety). We are told,
“Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals,
all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.” (Genesis 7:21)
Now, we can’t possibly know how many people were on the earth during the times of Noah,
so some speculation is required when coming up with a number to represent
God’s kill count. We know from the chapters of Peter in the New Testament that there were
only 8 people aboard the ark who survived the flood, but the bible never determines how many
people perished. Some commentators believe that the earth’s population was relatively
low when you consider that back then, the world was extremely corrupt and violent
with frequent murders and wars (hence the need for the flood). Some believers of the Ethiopic
variation might even cite the Book of Enoch here, declaring that the Nephilim had wiped out much
of mankind anyway and so the number of humans vanquished in the flood was surprisingly small.
Others commentators have focussed on the fact that people in Genesis were cited as living
longer - some, in the case of Methuselah, living close to a thousand years. So,
if people were living longer, it would be indicative that the world
was perhaps even overpopulated, arguably even more populated then than it is now.
If we use the genealogy of Chapter 5 of Genesis, we can determine the dates of
certain occurrences and events by adding up the lifespans between fathers and sons.
By using this method, we can determine that from the time of Adam to Noah, 1056 years passed.
In Chapter 7 of Genesis, we are told that the flood came about in the
600th year of Noah’s life, leading many commentators to believe that
the flood must have therefore occurred 1656 years after the creation of Adam.
Using this same method, scholars have suggested that Adam and Eve were created in the year 4004
BC, so by taking away the 1056 years in which Noah was born and taking away the
600 years that it took for Noah to witness the flood, we arrive at the year 2348 BC.
So, how many people were alive in 2348 BC for them to then be drowned in the flood?
We’re not going to factor in the concept that people in the biblical account were
living into their 500s and 600s, because this would probably make the number of
people living on the earth at that time in the year 2348 BC even larger. Instead,
we’ll consult with studies by the historical database Hyde and the British polymath and
demographer Colin McEvedy which estimate that the world population was between 27 and 72 million.
If we were to play it safe and go somewhere in the middle,
this would put us at fourty nine million people. Again, with this number,
we aren’t factoring the biblical idea that people were living well into their hundreds.
Let’s take away the 8 people who survived the flood (which was Noah and his family),
which gives us the final number:
forty eight million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety two .
So, right off the bat, the moment God makes his first kill in Genesis,
he does so by killing over forty million people. Once more, this is just an estimation because we
cannot possibly know the exact number of people living during this time period and
when we factor in the biblical trope of people living into their late hundreds,
the total population becomes even blurrier. Still, one cannot argue that the biblical God
of the Old Testament doesn’t mess around when it comes to making a statement. At the very least,
he does show some remorse for this absolute massacre by telling Noah,
“And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.” (Genesis 8:21)
Still, this doesn’t mean to say he won’t kill at all…
In the years after the flood, God is pretty quiet for a few chapters and focuses more
on establishing his covenant with Abraham. It isn’t until God confides in Abraham that he’s
thinking about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah do we once again get a glimpse of the more dangerous
and violent version of the biblical God. Of the actual event, we are told in Chapter 19 of Genesis
“Then the Lord rained down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out
of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain,
destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land.” (Genesis 19:24-25)
Once more, the bible doesn’t specify how many people were living in Sodom and Gomorrah and thus,
we don’t know exactly how many people were essentially nuked during this episode.
If we consult the genealogy once more, we see that 292 years passed between the time
of Noah to the time of Abrahamh’s birth. Now, we know that it was during the 99th
year of Abraham’s life that he established the covenant of God before being told about God’s
plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. This means that only 391 years passed from the time of
the flood up until that very moment, meaning that there couldn’t have been as many people
living in the areas of Sodom and Gomorrah as there may have been in the pre-flood era.
As we see previously in Chapter 14 of Genesis, Abraham joins the King of Sodom and the King of
Gomorrah in a war against other Kings of the land with just 318 trained men in his household. This
has led some scholars to believe that considering Abraham received the gratitude of the King of
Sodom after the battle, that Abraham’s men were pivotal in their victory, thus suggesting that
these numbers may also have been reflective of the armies of Sodom and Gomorrah. We know from
biblical descriptions that Sodom had a gateway, it was big enough to have walls and it was big
enough to engage in such a conflict with other surrounding cities. For this reason, some have put
the number of residents at Sodom and Gomorrah as somewhere between 600-1200 respectively.
For the sake of this video, we’ll assume that both cities (seeing as they needed
Abraham’s servants to win their war) were on the low side with a population of 600 each.
Now, when Abraham hears of God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah,
he tries to vouch for the cities by making a deal with God. With this,
God promises not to destroy the cities if Abraham can find ten righteous men. It would seem apparent
that Abraham was unsuccessful in his mission because before long, God annihilates the two
cities to the point that in the morning, the only thing left of the area was smoke.
So, we add the 600 deaths at Sodom and the 600 deaths at Gomorrah bringing us to a total of 1200!
However, there is one more!
During the evacuation of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot is told by the angels who alert him to
God’s intentions that when they start running, they should not look back at what is about to
transpire. Lot’s wife however does indeed look back and for this, she is turned into a pillar
of salt. The bible doesn’t exactly describe her as dying, but I guess being turned into a pillar
of salt was an example of God’s punishment and thus, the taking of her life. With that in mind,
this brings the kill count of God’s time above Sodom and Gomorrah to 1201.
A few generations after Abraham, we are told of the story of Judah, who married a Canaanite
woman named Shua and had several children by her. According to Judah’s grandfather
Isaac (the son of Abraham), marrying Canaanite women was forbidden. There was an assumption
here that because the Canaanite women were not god fearing, they made for poor wives who were
more than likely to not only sin themselves, but lure their husbands into wicked ways too.
Of course, it’s likely that by the time of Judah that this ‘unwritten rule’ was probably
forgotten about and that considering Judah’s character, even if he was aware of it, likely
wasn’t that concerned about it. After marrying Shua, he has three sons: Er, Onan and Shelah.
The bible tells us,
“Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s firstborn,
was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death.” (Genesis 38:7)
We aren’t told anything as to why God killed Er,
aside from the fact that he was ‘wicked. We aren’t even given a method in which God used
to kill Er. All we know is that one minute Er was there, the next the Lord put him to death.
This left Tamar widowed, so Judah had Er’s brother Onan marry Tamar next and
instructed him to continue raising Tamar’s children so as to fulfil his role as her
brother in law. He is also instructed to impregnate Tamar to produce more children,
but because he didn’t want to do this, Onan always pulled out during sex. This, the bible tells us,
was very wicked and that when he had done it one too many times, God killed him too.
We are told, “What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight;
so the Lord put him to death also.” (Genesis 38:10)
In this chapter, God smites just two men for displeasing him, showing us it was not beyond the
Old Testament God to pick out people individually and decide their fate, as he did with Lot’s wife.
Towards the end of Genesis, we see Jacob’s son Joseph (who’s something of an interpreter of
dreams), come into the service of the Pharaoh of Egypt. Here, he interprets two of Pharaoh’s dreams
as being messages from God that pretty soon, God is going to send seven years of famine upon Egypt.
“The abundance in the land will not be remembered, because the famine that follows
it will be so severe. The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that
the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon.” (Genesis 41:31-32)
Because Pharaoh took the dreams seriously and employed Joseph to start preparing for the famine,
Egypt is able to mitigate much of the devastation it would’ve otherwise endured, by storing copious
amounts of grain. The rest of the world however, is not so lucky, and we are told that at this
point in time, people from all over the globe were coming to Egypt in order to buy resources,
because according to the bible, the famine wasn’t just in Egypt, it was ‘everywhere’.
The bible doesn’t give a reason as to why God sends a famine down to
the earth during this time. The wickedness of man is not brought into question during
these chapters and God himself is seen to be suspiciously quiet. Some argue
that the reason for the global famine was to promote the importance of Joseph and that God
sent down this terrible calamity in order to not only validate the claims made by Joseph,
but to also catapult him into the upper echelon of Egyptian society. In a way, you might say
that the reason for such a devastating plague was all for the benefit of one man.
Unfortunately, we cannot possibly begin to even guess as to how many people around the world at
that time died because of the famine. Some have made efforts to associate this famine
with something like the 4.2 kiloyear event, which was a long term global drought believed
to have happened in the year 2200 BC. Going by some theories, this event may have caused the
collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, as well as the collapse of the Indus Valley
civilisations. If we are to believe that these circumstances were the same during Joseph’s time,
that entire civilisations collapsed, we could easily put the number of deaths around
somewhere in the high millions. Of course, even coming up with an estimate is quite difficult
considering that there just simply isn’t enough information or data for us to really go on here.
Coming up with a convincing number for the death of the inhabitants of a pre-flood world was
probably the hardest part of this video because realistically, it cannot be done. The number
definitely does vary quite significantly depending on who you ask, and because the bible never
confirms the death toll, we can never really know. I also chose to go with an average of the numbers
I found most commonly suggested, so this should by no means be treated as a fact. In other circles,
the ‘pre-flood’ world is simply mythology and so, there can be no real historical effort to
obtain a precise number here. The same can be said when ascertaining the death toll
at Sodom and Gomorrah considering that whilst recent excavations may suggest that there were
such cities, they cannot exactly be verified nor attributed to the cities discussed in the bible.
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Until next time!