DINOSAURS & the TORAH (Bilble, Old Testament)

Post 8

DINOSAURS and the TORAH (Hebrew Bible, Old Testament)


In Genesis 1:20 of Period 5 of the creation process, God spells out a mission statement for only two entities when He declared “The waters shall bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly over the earth across the lower heavens of the sky.”

But then in Genesis 1:21 “And God created the great sea giants (monsters) and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, with which the waters swarmed after their kinds, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that it was good.”

It would appear that something went awry in the chronological order of creation and why would God say the giant monsters were a ‘good’ creation when they eventually disappeared from the world? But this is only because we did not understand the order of creation and we were told by the great Sages of the past that the creation of the giant sea monsters was a mistake and because they eventually disappeared, that God never really intended for them to be created. Those Sages even philosophized that God created several worlds before He got it right.

Today we know that the Bible’s referral to giant sea monsters meant dinosaurs which we today classify as ‘ancient reptiles’ and although dinosaurs were not all amphibians we know that origin for all life started in the seas.

The primitive vertebrates were aquatic. There was a slow long transition for those forms of reptiles and ancient vertebrate that eventually appeared on land and some records show this stage as developed from 340-320 million years ago. Dinosaur fossils (known from rocks in Argentina and Brazil) are about 230 million years old. But the ancestors of all dinosaurs were small lizards-like reptiles that are believed to have appeared 330 million years ago.

Dinosaurs ranged in size from the Brachiosaurus that was the length of two large school buses and the height of a four-story building to the Compsognathus which was just slightly larger than a chicken.

Approximately 700 different dinosaur species existed until 65 million years ago when dinosaurs became extinct after having existed for about 165 million years. Dinosaurs were reptiles but some were amphibious.

So then the question is posed, why were those dinosaurs (giant monsters) made if they were not intended to survive? Today science answers that question and there is total agreement that dinosaurs served as the origin of birds.

We know today there were two major groups of dinosaurs, the ornithischians and saurischians. Birds descended from the saurischians and continue to live and dominate the skies as God said they would. The first birds of the types we see today developed about 100 million years ago as many original species of birds that developed from the small meat-eating dinosaurs became extinct. Many scientists, including Thomas Henry Huxley, believed the birds resembled the theropod dinosaurs (especially the coelurosaurs).

The earliest ‘creeping creatures with which the waters swarmed’ are classified as reptiles. Those that did survive the Cretaceous Period of 140 million years ago were killed off by whales when they took to the sea.

In summary, the answer for the reason for the creation of dinosaurs is because they were a needed building block for the development of birds. Many of the creeping aquatic creatures developed from the varied species of reptiles.

We could now appreciate that there was a perfect chronology of Genesis 1:21 events for giant sea monsters and the creeping creatures that swarmed in the waters with Genesis 1:20 where God asked for the swarming sea creatures and then the birds. In Genesis 1:21 the giant sea creatures were mentioned before the birds, but the birds did not evolve from them until after the swarming creatures were created. So Creation followed the time course of Genesis 1:20 for first the swarming creatures and then the birds.

So oh my, the Bible could only have been issued by a Supreme Power and no man could have had any input into it!!

Details for that period of history are found in chapter one of the book.