Theantediluvian (alternativelypre-diluvian orpre-flood) period is the time period chronicled in theBible between thefall of man and theGenesis flood narrative inbiblical cosmology. The term was coined byThomas Browne (1605–1682). The narrative takes up chapters 1–6 (excluding the flood narrative) of theBook of Genesis. The term found its way into earlygeology and science until the lateVictorian era. Colloquially, the term is used to refer to any ancient and murky period.
TheEridu Genesis is alleged to be the direct antecessor to the biblical flood as well as other Near Eastern flood stories, and reflects a similar religious and cultural relevance to theirreligion. Much as the Abrahamic religions, ancient Sumerians divided the world between pre-flood and post-flood eras, the former being a time where the God walked the earth with humans. Humans ceased to be immortal ever since Adam and Eve sinned, the flood was then punishment for the descendants of man because of their evil.[1][page needed]
In theChristian Bible,Hebrew Torah andIslamic Quran, the antediluvian period begins with the Fall of the first man and woman, according toGenesis and ends with the destruction of all life on the earth except those saved withNoah in theark (Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives). According to BishopUssher's 17th-centurychronology, the antediluvian period lasted for 1656 years, from Creation (some say the fall of man) at 4004 BC to the Flood at 2348 BC.[2] The elements of the narrative include some of the best-known stories in the Bible – the creation,Adam and Eve, andCain and Abel, followed by the genealogies tracing the descendants of Cain andSeth, the third mentioned son of Adam and Eve. (These genealogies provide the framework for the biblical chronology, in the form "A lived X years and begat B".)[3]
The Bible speaks of this era as being a time of great wickedness.[4] There wereGibborim (giants) in the earth in those days as well asNephilim; someBible translations identify the two as one and the same. The Gibborim were unusually powerful; Genesis calls them "mighty men which were of old, men of renown".[5] The antediluvian period ended when God sent the Flood to wipe out all life except Noah, his family, and the animals they took with them. Nevertheless, the Nephilim (literally meaning 'fallen ones', from the Hebrew root n-f-l 'to fall') reappear much later in the biblical narrative, inNumbers13:31–33 (where the spies sent forth byMoses report that there were Nephilim or "giants" in thePromised Land).
Early scientific attempts at reconstructing thehistory of the Earth were founded on the biblical narrative and thus used the termantediluvian to refer to a period understood to be essentially similar to the biblical one.[6] Early scientific interpretation of the biblical narrative divided the antediluvian into sub-periods based on thesix days of Creation:
Prior to the 19th century, rock was classified into three main types: primary or primitive (igneous andmetamorphic rock), secondary (sedimentary rock) and tertiary (sediments). The primary rocks (likegranite andgneiss) are void of fossils and were thought to be associated with the very creation of the world in the primary Pre-Adamitic period. The secondary rocks, often containing copious fossils, though human remains had not been found, were thought to have been laid down in the secondary Pre-Adamitic period. The Tertiary rocks (sediments) were thought to have been put down after Creation and possibly in connection to a flood event, and were thus associated with the Adamitic period.[8] The Post-Flood period was termed theQuaternary, a name still in use in geology.
As mapping of the geologicalstrata progressed in the early decades of the 19th century, the estimated lengths of the various sub-periods were greatly increased. The fossil rich Secondary Pre-Adamitic period was divided up into theCoal period, theLias and theChalk period, later expanded into the now-familiargeologic time scale of thePhanerozoic.[6] The termantediluvian was used innatural science well into the 19th century and lingered in popular imagination despite increasingly detailedstratigraphy mapping theEarth's past, and was often used for thePleistocene period, wherehumans existed alongside now extinctmegafauna.[6]
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Writers such asWilliam Whiston (A New Theory of the Earth, 1696) andHenry Morris (The Genesis Flood, 1961) who launched the modern Creationist movement described the antediluvian period as follows:[9][10]
However, there has since been debate among Creationists over the authenticity of arguments such as the one that there was no rain before the Flood and previous ideas about what the antediluvian world was like are constantly changing.[citation needed]
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the understanding of the nature of early Earth went through atransformation from a biblical ordeist interpretation to a naturalistic one. Even back in the early 18th century,Plutonists had argued for an ancient Earth, but the full impact of thedepth of time involved in the Pre-Adamitic period was not commonly accepted untiluniformitarianism as presented inCharles Lyell'sPrinciples of Geology of 1830.[11] While each period was understood to be a vast aeon, the narrative of the pre-Adamitic world was still influenced by the biblical storyline of creation in this transition. A striking example is a description fromMemoires of Ichtyosauri and Plesiosauri, 1839, describing fossil species in a world with land, sea and vegetation, but before the creation of a separate sun and moon, corresponding to the third day of creation in the Genesis narrative:
An "ungarnished and desolated world which echoed the flapping of [pterodactyl] leathern wings" was lit by "the angry light of supernatural fire", shining on a "sunless and moonless" world,before the creation of these heavenly "lights".[12]
A modern naturalistic view of the ancient world, along with the abandonment of the term 'antediluvian', came about with the works ofCharles Darwin andLouis Agassiz in the 1860s.
From antiquity,fossils of large animals were often quoted as having lived together with thegiants from theBook of Genesis: e.g. theTannin or "greatsea monsters" of Gen 1:21. They are often described in later books of theBible, especially by God himself in theBook of Job: e.g.Re'em in verse 39:9,Behemoth in chapter 40 andLeviathan in chapter 41.[13][14] With the advent ofgeological mapping in the early 19th century, it became increasingly obvious that many of thefossils associated with the "secondary" (sedimentary) rock were neither those of giant humans nor of anyextant animals. These included large animals such asichthyosaurs,mosasaurs,pliosaurs and the various giantmammals[clarification needed] found when excavating theCatacombs of Paris. The geologists of the day increasingly came to use the term 'antediluvian' only for the younger strata containing fossils of animals resembling those alive today.[15]