Stop the Press!
Three days after The Hidden Beauty of Hebrew Genealogies: Harmonizing Old Testament Words and Numbers was finally delivered for general public use (Wednesday, January 12, 2022), multiple stories on the Internet reported the discovery of vast numbers of tombs in Saudi Arabia dating between 2600 and 2000 BC. The tombs line major routes to the north of Medina Arabia between long-established destinations. These networks are called funerary avenues. They stretch “for hundreds of kilometers and possibly thousands.” While they are well known to local residents, archaeologists only recently took serious interest in them. Over the last year they have counted around 18,000 tombs but expect to spend years pursuing this new field of research and find many more.
Walls up to six feet high surround each tomb. In aerial photographs they are obvious and at times tightly packed together. The tombs are either round or pendant in shape, and are still standing to their original height. “The level of preservation is unbelievable,” said one archaeologist. It is initially thought that the occupants farmed the land nearby and their tombs were placed on the highway so their descendants would remember them. A similar custom was linked to Greece and Rome in later history. Since similar tombs are found in Yemen, the avenues may stretch that far. Why did relatives stop building them around 2000 BC? The Ice Age had come to an end so the rain it delivered had stopped. The population had moved away and the land has been a barren, uninhabitable desert ever since.
This 4,500-year-old network of highways lined with well-preserved tombs in Arabia joins Ebla’s thousands of written documents dated between 2400 and 2250 BC to verify that civilization was going full tilt when some teach the Flood occurred. Therefore, the idea found in HB that Moses followed the common Hebrew practice of omitting generations when he recorded Shem’s list can hardly be dismissed.
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