I came to get along well with Japeth and his sons Gomer, Magog, and Javan.  We would often hunt together in the north.  Magog was a bit of a troublemaker though and would pick on his cousins relentlessly.  In total Japeth would have seven sons.

Ham was a good natured man yet his son Cush was a little different.  Nimrod would be the son of Cush which would bring so much turmoil into our future. 

Sheba and Dedan would be good guys.  In the future we would spend some time with them in their lands.  They would play a critical role in helping many of our people at the farm.  In total Ham would have four sons.

Shem was all about business, an amazing mathematician and engineer.  I learned a lot from him.  His children followed to be much like him in their own ways.  In total Shem would have five sons. 

The hardest part was seeing some of these boys go another way than their father’s walked.  I was beginning to make a connection to how Noah lived and the God he served leading to the results of life.

While I may not have yet made the connection with God in the way these men had, their way of life was addicting.  It was a life of home, family, peace, and striving to build something good.  I certainly couldn’t argue against that.  I had failed to do this in my own life.

I remember seeing Noah for the first time and believing that he may have been in his 40’s to early 50’s max.  I learned he was 603 years old when we met.  This leads to another conclusion I came to one night while thinking.

While it has been said population would double itself every 150 years, in this case as time moved forward, I found the calculation incorrect.  The modern assumptions from my time do not consider their lifespan nor the higher rates of birth.  In this case doubling the population would happen exponentially faster.

Learning From Shem, Ham, And Japeth

As the three brothers had their sons and grandsons, we had more freedom to explore the world.  All exploration was for the purpose of finding resources and mapping.  It would be here I would learn my survival skills outside of farm-based life.

I could not believe my eyes when I saw a tool used which to my knowledge did not exist until the mid-1700’s.  It was not perfectly identical, yet definitely the same tool but smaller.  The day I saw Shem use a sextant my jaw hit the ground.

The fact that they manufactured a compass was not a big surprise to me.  I could see how one could figure out a compass for navigation.  Still, it was the Chinese who “discovered” the compass according to proper history.

Upon seeing their first use I could not help but blurt out, “How is it possible that you have these tools?”.  I was in complete disbelief. Shem looked at me being rather confused.

Of course, they asked me what it was they should be using.  After pointing out these inventions would come much later, they laughed at me. 

Shem promptly joked saying “Did you think we were stupid or that we lived in a cave?”  I took a moment of pause at that comment.

Ham asked what we used for navigation in my world.  Attempting to describe satellites and cell phones with GPS was not easy.  I told them that without machines doing the calculations for us we could not survive.  No one remembered how to use the old tools.

The three were doing basic cartography of nearby areas.  While crude, I would later use these same methods.  A basic pace count was determined to be associated with a unit of measurement and the direction of travel.  A dot was marked on a skin, then the process repeated.

As this was done basic contours could be added on the map to scale.  It was rough, part art and part science, but it worked.  While I was witnessing this for the first time, Shem began to explain something I had never understood.

Knowledge From Adam To Noah

Growth in knowledge was not linear. Adam had been created with full knowledge.  In other words, he knew the sciences.  Mathematics, engineering, and so on, he knew them all.  He was not a flat earther.  He knew the Earth was not only a sphere, but that there were also planets and we all went around the sun. 

Shem detailed how as generations passed knowledge was lost from generation to generation.  The causes of this loss were many, but conflict would play a major role.  This I knew to be true from history if we were to look at the Dark Age.

Other causes were as simple as taking things for granted and a society that turned to self-gratification and pleasure rather than principles and education.  I began to wonder how well our modern society would fare if the internet shut down and we lost our cell phones.  In other words, how much do we really know or have the skills to go and do in order to survive?

Ham detailed how other issues impacted the world before.  Education while done within the family system like a home school, became tainted.  Revisionist history and a willful destruction of basic principles from God set into their minds.  This ultimately aided in the swift decline of society.

Japeth called our “modern society” arrogant and full of itself with its narrow view of their predecessors.  He detailed how before the flood the use of synthetic materials had also been employed.  They had knowledge of chemistry.

The key difference between their former society and our modern one was the use of electricity.  That was the ticket which separated the world they were from and mine.  Aside from the electrical benefits and technology which would come with it in my world, there were more similarities than differences.

Rediscovering Ancient Origins

In our journeys we would explore far reaching lands.  One trip could take months to complete.  Many nights would be spent sharing stories.  I always found the comparisons of what they said was before the flood shocking.

The three brothers one night explained to me the nature of what their experience was like from before the flood, to life after it.  In short, it would be like one of us being put on a spaceship and flown to an apocalyptic planet where we could barely survive.

It became apparent that the vegetation which survived in the post flood world would be seen in a similar way that my world views weeds in grass or a garden.  Compared to what was before, they stepped into a world with the bare minimum resources.

Shem pointed out to me that at the moment Adam was created the world was mature.  He could go to any plant or tree to take its fruit and eat it the second after God breathed life into him.  The world was completed for Adam and ready at his arrival.

By contrast, Noah and his family landed in a post flood world where all had been buried, washed away, and had to struggle in order to survive.  I learned that parts of the ark itself were scrapped as needed for resources.

I came to learn that the iron I saw them use came from the ark.  Iron bands had been used in places for structural support, but also iron ore had been stored for the future.  This iron was unlike anything my modern world knew.

The finished color was like a silver black.  It was exceptionally hard, but not brittle, and would hold an edge if sharpened.  When placed under stress it would flex, not visibly, yet at a molecular level disbursing that stress.

There was no iron to be found in the immediate area where we were located.  At least they had not found it.  This resource was therefore critical to survival, and I began to understand why these trips of exploration were so important.

The idea that mankind began as hunter gatherers out of caves was not only wrong, but it was also a slight and an arrogant lie.  This view required a humanist with evolutionary thinking.  My education would not end here.

The Beginning Of The Ice Age

On one trip we ventured to the far North for some days.  The further north we went the colder it became.  We summited a mountain and in the distance I could not figure out what it was I was seeing.  It appeared to be a solid wall of white.

Ham stated that we needed to turn back.  What we were looking at was a solid wall of ice.  Based on the sextant this wall of ice reached as far south as the latitude of Germany and Austria.  Japeth wished to continue forward to see if it was climbable.

The closer we came the higher we could see that it reached into the sky.  This was no glacier.  It appeared to be what should have been the northern ice cap.  Due to cloud cover we could not see its total height, yet it would appear to have been thousands of feet tall in places.

This is when it dawned on me, I am living within the ice age.  It took some time to wrap my head around this one.  The night of this discovery the three brothers explained what took place after the flood.

The Struggle Of Noah’s Family

It would take a year for them to begin moving out of the ark to establish the farm.  Shem stated it required 165 days for the ark to settle on dry land. After this when trying to settle they endured violent storms, extreme cold, and what seemed like a never-ending windstorm that would batter them. 

From the day the ark hit dry land, the last six months of that first year saw some stabilized weather patterns in their little valley. The nearby mountains and higher elevation shielded them from the worst. Japeth then stressed that what they endured was not easy but barely survivable.

Warmth would finally return to the Earth but it would take a few centuries for the Earth to appear “normal” again.  The habitable lands were closer to the equator.  Here you could farm consistently although it was not without its challenges.  I tried to do the math on this remembering science class.

In the northern hemisphere each degree of latitude was approximately 69 miles.  This placed the northern ice cap somewhere near 3,000 miles from the equator.  If the northern ice cap extended this far south, then the southern ice cap should also extend a similar distance north.

Through this I discovered what the thunderous cracking noise I would hear was. The ice was causing the earth to move and cutting away at its surface.  The thing about this was the earth was actually moving due to these changes.

By the time I appeared on the scene arriving at the farm, I was told that it was the first somewhat normal year in their weather patterns. Then again, how you define normal can be relative to one’s expectations.

Looking back I did think it was odd how temperatures would swing so widely, the frequent storms, and constant wild sounds of the shattering earth.

Redefining Geology As We Know It

The three brothers talked of their discoveries that according to my education were seen in a very different light.  After I finished college, I would argue against the insanity that dinosaurs and mankind lived together.  I would also call anyone insane that would claim the earth was about 6,000 years old.

Here I sit listening to these three speak of the world before, the events of the flood, and the evidence which they see.  That evidence showed the earth being ripped apart, new earth from the depths being churned up and slammed into the old.

Literally a massive single continent being ripped apart then buried as new earth formed new continents with the old.  In those 40 days they slammed into each other like two cars colliding at maximum speeds to be torn apart again.

What took place during the flood was nothing like I remember being described to me as a child at church.  It was not some bit of rain with rising sea levels.  It was violent and world changing. 

Shem stated that now the Earth was truly dying a slow death.  The atmosphere from before was gone, the air was thinner, and now polluted by volcanic activity.  The barrier of vapor which went from horizon to horizon surrounding the Earth protecting it was gone.

I was not sure how to interpret some of this.  The world in front of me now I could see.  I was certain that their experiences were real.  For some reason still I could not bring myself to believe everything.