The World Before Adam

A decade after Finis Dake died, his publishers released a book with a title that promises something big. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man: A Biblical Alternative to the Traditional View of Creation.¹ Before Adam, the title asks you to believe, there was another mankind.

The book does not ease into it. On the very first pages, you get a warm, vivid scene. An earth full of animals, cities, and nations. All of it governed by the archangel Lucifer. And then this flat claim: All of this happened before Genesis 1:2.²

Try something for me. Open your Bible. Read Genesis 1:1. Now read Genesis 1:2. Count what is written between them.

Dake filled that space. He taught that Genesis 1:1 records an older creation, ages before Adam. He taught that men lived on that earth. They had cities and nations. Lucifer ruled over them, they rebelled, and God destroyed them all with a flood and a darkness. Genesis 1:2, on his reading, is the wreckage. The six days that follow are not creation. They are a repair job.

But I need to pause here, because fairness comes before a good opening. That 1997 book is a posthumous compilation. The copyright page says it is Based on the writings of Finis Dake, and it names Mark Allison and David Patton as editors. In their own preface they say plainly that the words will often be theirs, not his.³ So I will not hang any major claim on that book alone. Every doctrine I put in Dake's mouth here I can also show you from his study notes, quoted and cited from scans of the Bible itself.

Why It Matters

Why does a chapter about prehistory belong in a book about the doctrine of God? That is a fair question, and I want to answer it before we look at a single note.

First, because of the method. Chapter 4 showed you how Dake read his Bible. He pressed every word as literally as he could. He used margin notes as a place to settle things, not to wonder about them. That method drives everything in his system. This chapter lets you watch the method work. You give it one disputed verb, and it hands you back a civilization.

Second, because of the trust that comes with a study Bible. The notes ride in the same binding as the text. Same typeface. Same gold edges. When a teenager in your class asks where the dinosaurs fit, you want an answer. And Dake gives one. He gives it with real confidence. That confidence is the problem. Not the guess itself. The certainty he pins to the guess, printed right next to the words of God.

Let me be clear about what is not on trial here. The gap reading itself is not on trial. Good, godly Bible teachers have held some form of it. Thomas Chalmers argued for it in the early 1800s. G. H. Pember gave it wide reach. C. I. Scofield put a version of it in the reference Bible that shaped a generation of American fundamentalism.⁴ I do not hold the reading myself. But I do not think it is heresy, and I will not call it that.⁵

What is on trial is the distance between a reading and a world. A modest gap reading says that time may have passed between two verses. Dake goes much further. His notes tell you who lived in that time. They name the ruler. They put men into cities and organize them into nations. They place every fossil in the ground. They account for the origin of demons and locate hell. That is no longer a reading of Genesis 1:2. That is a history written into the margin of a Bible that never told it.

And there is something else. This scheme is load-bearing. If you pull it out, several other parts of the Dake system lose their footing. I am not guessing about that. He says it himself, and we will read his own sentence in a few pages.

Dake in His Own Words

Below is his case, built from his own pages. I have kept the quotations long enough that no fair reader can say they are clipped. Where a note appears in more than one printing, I say so.

Exhibit 1: The Thesis

Look at the kind of writing that is. It is not a careful suggestion that time may have passed between two verses. It is a scene. Dinosaurs walk. Birds fill the trees. Men build villages, then cities, then nations. An archangel sits on a throne. And the whole thing lands in one sentence: all of this happened before Genesis 1:2.

The claim is not that Scripture leaves room for such a world. The claim is that the world existed, and that we can describe it in detail.

Exhibit 2: The Grammar

The whole picture above hangs on one Hebrew verb. Here is what Dake's note says about it, printed right beside Genesis 1:2 in his study Bible.

In plain English, the note tells you the verb in Genesis 1:2 does not mean was. It means became. Then Dake lists every place where the King James translators put some form of become for that same Hebrew word. The numbers are supposed to do the work. The 1997 book makes the same argument at greater length and reaches the same place.

So the verse stops saying the earth was without form and void. It starts saying the earth became that way. Change one English word and a ruin appears where the text only described a condition.

Exhibit 3: The Word

The second pillar of his case is not Hebrew at all. It is an English word from 1611. Genesis 1:28 in the King James Version tells Adam and Eve to replenish the earth. Dake builds on the prefix.

The logic fits in one hand. Re means again. Adam was told to fill the earth again. You cannot fill a thing again unless it was filled before. So the earth had people on it before Adam.

Dake liked the point well enough to press it as a question elsewhere on the same page: Why was Adam told to replenish and not merely to plenish it?¹⁰ His note on Genesis 1:28 in the older printing says the same thing in one line. It tells the reader the command proves a social system before Adam, when Lucifer ruled.¹¹

Exhibit 4: The Inhabitants

Now we get to the exhibit that shows just how far the certainty goes. Dake did not stop at the idea of a world before Adam. He described the people who lived there. This note sits under Jeremiah 4:24, in the study notes at the back of Jeremiah.

Count the claims packed into that one sentence. Men. Cities. Nations. A social system. Bodies that could die. Bodies that did drown. And a job description for Adam: he was sent to replace a population that used to be here.

The same conclusion shows up elsewhere on the pre-Adamite page, stated as settled fact. Jeremiah 4:23–26, Dake writes, must refer to the same judgment as pictured in Gen. 1:2, thus proving further that a real social system—men, birds, fruitful places, cities—existed before Adam.¹³ And in a list called 15 Things the Bible Does Not Say, item thirteen tells the reader that Scripture does not say Adam was the first man to live on the earth. Men and nations were on earth when Lucifer ruled.¹⁴

Read that last one again, because the location matters. It is not filed under speculation. It is filed under things the Bible does not say. The list is there to correct you.

Exhibit 5: The Load It Bears

This last passage is the one I most want you to sit with. It comes at the end of Dake's eighteen proofs for a pre-Adamite world, and it tells you what the whole scheme is for.

He is not defending a curiosity. He is telling you that a whole set of other doctrines depends on this single idea. Where demons came from. Why hell sits under the earth. When Lucifer fell. What the fossils in the rock actually are. Take the pre-Adamite world away, and by his own account, those questions all go unanswered.

Two shorter notes round out the picture. On Genesis 1:1 he defines the old world as the whole pre-Adamite universe, to which all fossils and remains belong.¹⁶ And in his note on Lucifer's flood he offers the scheme as a peace treaty between the Bible and geology: When men finally agree on the age of the earth, then place the many years (over the historical 6,000) between Gen. 1:1 and 1:2, there will be no conflict between the book of Genesis and science.¹⁷

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

Now for the reply. I want to take his two pillars first, one at a time. Then I will look at his judgment texts, open the passages that speak most clearly, and close with the question I think matters most in this whole chapter.

1. The Verb Will Not Carry the Weight

Start with hayah, the Hebrew verb behind was in Genesis 1:2. It is the ordinary Hebrew verb for being. It shows up about 3,500 times in the Old Testament. Its normal job is what is, was, and will be do in English.

Can it mean became? Yes. Nobody argues about that. The question is when. In Hebrew, the became sense usually shows up when something in the sentence pushes it there. Most often a small word follows the verb, a preposition meaning to or into. Genesis 2:7 is the classic case: man became into a living soul. Genesis 19:26 works the same way: Lot's wife became into a pillar of salt.¹⁸

Genesis 1:2 has no such marker. And it does something else that matters. Hebrew stories normally push forward by putting the verb first in the sentence. Verse 2 does the opposite. It opens with and plus the noun, then the verb. Grammarians call that a disjunctive clause. It is the standard way Hebrew pauses the story to describe the background.¹⁹ Verse 2 is not reporting what happened next after verse 1. It is giving you the lay of the land.

Now look at Dake's own count again. He lists sixty-seven places where the verb was rendered became. Sixty-seven out of thousands. He offers that number as proof, but it argues against him. A usage that shows up about two percent of the time is the exception, not the rule. Exceptions need a reason in the text. Here there is none.

This is the difference between what a word can mean and what it does mean. The English word run can mean to campaign for office. That does not tell you anything about the sentence the water ran downhill. Context decides. In Genesis 1:2 the context gives no ruin, no rebellion, no judgment. It gives darkness, deep water, and the Spirit of God hovering.

2. “Replenish” Is 1611 English for “Fill”

The second pillar falls faster. It is not even an argument about Hebrew. It is an argument about how an English word has changed since 1611.

The Hebrew in Genesis 1:28 is one word: mal'u, from the verb male'. It means to fill. No again. No prefix. Nothing in the Hebrew word can carry this argument.²⁰

And there is a test case that Dake never raises. Six verses earlier, on day five, God blesses the sea creatures and the birds.

The Hebrew verb there is the same one. Identical. The fish had just been made that very day. There were no earlier fish. Nothing could possibly be filled again. And the King James translators put fill.²¹ Same Hebrew word, two different English words, six verses apart. The translators were reaching for a synonym. The 1611 men did that constantly.

In 1611, replenish meant to fill up, fully and completely. The narrower sense of filling a second time came later in the history of the word.²² Dake built a civilization on the aging of an English prefix.

His appeal to Noah in Genesis 9:1 actually helps the other side of the argument. Yes, filling again is the right idea for Noah. But not because of the word. Because the same book just told you about the earlier filling. The story provides the again. Context provides it, not etymology. Genesis 1 records no prior filling. That is the very thing Dake needs to prove, and a prefix cannot do it for him.

3. Jeremiah 4 Is About Judah (and Dake Admits It)

Dake's pre-Adamite population comes mainly from one poem. So let us go read it where it actually lives.

Jeremiah 4 is a war chapter. It opens with a call to repent. Then the alarm sounds: a destroyer is coming from the north, and the prophet can hear the trumpet. Verses 5 through 18 are plainly about Judah and Jerusalem facing an invasion. Then at verse 23, Jeremiah describes what he sees: a land without form and void, skies with no light, mountains shaking, no people, birds gone, farmland turned to desert, cities in ruins.

The word land there is the same Hebrew word translated earth four verses earlier.²³ Jeremiah is painting the coming destruction of Judah as if creation were coming undone. Prophets do this often. It is one of the most familiar moves in Hebrew poetry. That is why the vision borrows the language of Genesis 1:2 in the first place. The point is how total the ruin will feel.

Here is the part that surprised me. Dake actually concedes this in his own notes. After arguing at length that the vision shows the pre-Adamite earth, he writes this.

That is the right answer given to the wrong question. If the purpose of the vision was to show how Judah would be destroyed, then the vision is about Judah. A comparison needs one real thing and one picture. Jeremiah's hearers were about to lose their cities. The picture served them.

The same problem touches his other two texts. Isaiah 14 is an oracle. It names the target in verse 4: the king of Babylon. Ezekiel 28 names its target twice: the ruler of Tyre, then the king of Tyre. Christians have debated for a long time whether a shadow of Satan's fall stands behind those taunts. I am not going to settle that here.²⁵ I only need to point out what is not in either chapter. Neither one dates a flood. Neither one counts a population. Neither one mentions Adam.

One New Testament passage remains, and it is the strongest card Dake holds. Peter writes that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth stood out of the water and in the water, and by these things the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. Dake reads that phrase as the pre-Adamite universe. His editors go further. They call it the nearest thing in all of Scripture to a direct statement of the doctrine.²⁶

But read the letter for yourself. Peter is answering people who mock the idea that judgment is coming. His argument needs a past judgment his readers already believe in. And he has already named it. One chapter earlier, he writes about God bringing a flood on the world of the ungodly and saving Noah, one of eight people.²⁷ That is the flood Peter has in mind. The force of his whole argument is a pattern: water then, fire coming now. A destruction his readers had never heard of would prove nothing to them. The argument only works if the flood is one they already knew.

Notice what Peter does not do. He does not describe the people of that world, or their cities, or who governed them. He gives you a flood and a lesson. Dake's notes give you a civilization. The gap between those two things is the subject of this chapter.

4. What Scripture Does Say About the Six Days

Now let me open the verses that speak to this most directly. The first is not in Genesis. It is in the Ten Commandments, and it gives the reason for the Sabbath.

Set that against Dake's scheme. In his reading, the heavens and the earth were not made in the six days. They were made in the dateless past. The six days only repaired one ruined planet. But here God, giving Israel the ground of the fourth commandment, puts the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them inside those six days. This is not a passing remark. It is the reason attached to a commandment.

On the pre-Adamite reading, God is looking over a planet that is a graveyard. Under the new soil lie the drowned bodies of an entire race. Their broken cities, their fossils. And He calls the whole thing very good. I do not say that is impossible. I say it is strange enough to make any Bible teacher think twice before printing it as fact.

Dake reads this as a timeline. God did not create the earth empty. But Genesis 1:2 shows it empty. So something must have gone wrong between the two points. But Isaiah is not writing a chronology here. He is writing about purpose. The whole verse is about purpose. God did not make the world pointlessly. He made it to be lived in. Genesis 1 is the record of Him doing that, over six days, ending with people in it. The verse states God's aim, not a lost history.

One more question sits underneath all of this, and I raise it gently because good people answer it differently. Paul writes that sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin.²⁸ He calls Adam the first man.²⁹ A world full of mortal men who lived and drowned before Adam has to find room in those sentences somehow. I have never seen a convincing account of how.

5. Annotation Is Not Invention

A Christian is free to wonder about ages past. Wondering is not a sin. Curiosity about the deep past is a perfectly healthy thing in a person who believes God made everything. If Dake had written a book of speculation and called it that, I would disagree with his conclusions and shake his hand.

But that is not what happened. These claims are printed as notes in a study Bible. They use the voice a study Bible uses. And the word proves does steady, heavy work on these pages. The note on Genesis 1:28 says the command to replenish proves a social system before Adam. The Jeremiah note says the passage proves a real social system existed. That verb changes the genre. It turns the page from annotation into invention. And it does so right where the reader is least able to see the shift.

Here is the thing that settled the question for me. The 1997 book, written by Dake's own editors to defend this very doctrine, admits the problem in its sixth chapter.

Chapter 4 called this the hyperliteral method. Here you can watch it work. A verb that might mean something, a prefix that used to mean something else, and two prophetic poems about Babylon and Tyre get combined into a settled history of a lost race. Then the history gets used to answer questions Scripture never took up in the first place.

Answering the Defenses

Three defenses come up every time I raise this subject. All three deserve honest answers.

The second defense is about science, and it is the one Dake himself pushed hardest. Geology needs long ages, the old reading has no room for them, and the gap solves the problem without disturbing the six days. Dake said it plainly in the note we read a few pages ago. Once men agree on the age of the earth, the years can be placed between the first two verses and the conflict ends.

First, the deal does not deliver what it promises. This book takes no position on the age of the earth and treats no view of it as a test of fellowship. But whatever the rocks say, they do not say that the fossils belong to a race governed by Lucifer. That claim is not in the rock, and it is not in the text. Dake's own note says the opposite. It tells you the findings of science can be recognized only if we believe the Bible's revelation of a pre-Adamite social system. The findings of science require nothing of the kind.

Second, consider what the deal costs. To lower the price of belief for one audience, it hands the reader an unrecorded civilization, a flood the Bible never narrates, and a whole race of people who lived and died outside the story of redemption. That is not a smaller thing to believe. It is a much bigger one. And none of it is written down.

The third defense is the most sincere, and it comes as a question. Where did demons come from, if not from the pre-Adamite dead? I have to be honest here: Dake asks this question himself, and he asks it well. It is a real gap in what we know.

But an unanswered question is not proof of any particular answer. Scripture says very little about the origin of demons. The church has mostly said they are fallen angels, pointing to the angels who sinned and to those who left their proper home.³¹ That is a modest position. Its main advantage is that it stays inside what we actually know. Chapter 19 handles the angels and demons more fully.

What I want to press here is just this. The Bible does not tell us much about that is an answer. And it is a better answer than a detailed history the Bible does not tell us at all. A teacher who can say I do not know has given his students something valuable. Dake almost never says it.

Conclusion and the Words

Let me gather what we have seen. Dake's notes teach that Genesis 1:1 records an older creation. Lucifer ruled men who lived in cities and nations. They rebelled and drowned. The six days are a repair job. Two supports hold the whole thing up: a Hebrew verb read as became, and an English prefix read as again. Everything else is stacked on top of those two.

Both supports give way. The verb is the ordinary Hebrew word for being, sitting inside a clause built to describe conditions, not to report an event. The prefix belongs to 1611 English, not to Hebrew. Six verses earlier the same Hebrew word is used of fish who had no ancestors. Jeremiah 4 is about Judah, as Dake's own note concedes. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 are about Babylon and Tyre, as their opening verses say.

One word carries this whole chapter, and it is worth remembering the next time you hear it preached. Replenish did not mean refill in 1611. It meant fill.

Here is where I land. The God of Genesis 1 does not need a ruined world behind Him to be impressive. That is what the pre-Adamite scheme misses. It reaches for grandeur by adding ages and empires, when the grandeur was already right there in the first sentence. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. He spoke, and there was light. He made a world, filled it, and called it very good. He did not need a graveyard under the soil to be great.

Chapter 16 follows this same habit forward, into what Dake taught about heaven and the eternal future.³² The pattern is the same in both places: a real hope made smaller by being made too literal.

Ray told me once he taught the pre-Adamite world for years because the notes seemed so sure of it. I understand that. Certainty is comforting, and margin notes that answer every question feel generous. But a Bible that leaves some questions open is not a weaker Bible. It is an honest one. And the God behind it is larger than the gaps we try to fill for Him.

Notes

↑ 1. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man: A Biblical Alternative to the Traditional View of Creation, based on the writings of Finis Dake, ed. Mark Allison and David Patton (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Publishing, 1997), title page and copyright page. The resident copy is the Second Printing, March 2000. Citations in this chapter are to the Internet Archive digitization resident in the SB library; page numbers are taken from the running-head folios preserved in that digitization and checked against the printed table of contents.

↑ 2. Ibid., ch. 1, “In the Beginning,” p. 2.

↑ 3. David Patton, “Introduction to the Dake Doctrinal Series,” in ibid., front matter, dated January 1997: “Though the words will often be those of the editors, it is our intent to remain true to the vision of Finis Jennings Dake.” This is why the chapter treats the volume as a witness to Dake's teaching rather than as his own prose, and anchors every doctrinal claim in the Study Bible notes as well.

↑ 4. Thomas Chalmers advanced a version of the reading in his Edinburgh lectures early in the nineteenth century; G. H. Pember's Earth's Earliest Ages gave it wide circulation among English-speaking evangelicals; the Scofield Reference Bible carried a form of it in its Genesis 1 notes. These are named at the level of well-established fact; no page-pinned quotation is offered here because none of these works is resident in the project libraries.

↑ 5. This follows the standing rule of the book: positions held within historic Protestant orthodoxy are not treated as heresy, even where the author disagrees with them. The gap reading, held modestly, is one of those positions.

↑ 6. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man, ch. 1, pp. 1–2. The digitization breaks the word “creation” across a page turn; it is rejoined here without any change of wording, per the project's standing rule on OCR artifacts.

↑ 7. Finis Jennings Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, note l on Genesis 1:2. Transcribed from the resident scans in the SB library. The note reads identically in both resident editions: newer typeset edition (Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 1) and pre-1988 printing (01_Dake_Annotated_Study_Bible_Verses_on_Segregation_recognized.pdf, internal p. 2, classic p. 1). Two independent scans of two printings carrying identical wording is the cross-reading standard this book applies to image-derived text.

↑ 8. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man, ch. 3, “Without Form and Void,” p. 34, under the section heading “Widening the Gap.”

↑ 9. Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, study note “The Pre-Adamite World” (1:2), proof 8. Newer typeset edition p. 80; the dual-pagination running head reads “80 (54, 55) GENESIS NOTES CONTINUED,” placing this material on classic pp. 54–55. Transcribed by eye from the page image (Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 14, SB library). The pre-1988 printing cross-references the same study note at classic p. 54.

↑ 10. Ibid. The question stands in the closing paragraph of the same study note; see note 15 below for the full passage.

↑ 11. Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, pre-1988 printing, note b on Genesis 1:28, classic p. 2 (01_Dake_Annotated_Study_Bible_Verses_on_Segregation_recognized.pdf, internal p. 3, SB library). The wording is given here in paraphrase rather than as a block quotation: the transcription rests on the archive's optical character recognition, and the page image could not be rendered for line-by-line confirmation in the drafting session. The substance is independently established by the study note quoted at note 9.

↑ 12. Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, study note “5 Proofs This Was the Original Earth” (4:24), point 4, newer typeset edition p. 1353, running head “JEREMIAH NOTES CONTINUED 1353.” Transcribed by eye from the page image (Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 50, SB library). This page carries no classic page number in its running head; the newer-edition folio is given alone, per the project's rule against asserting numbers a page does not show.

↑ 13. Ibid., “The Pre-Adamite World” (1:2), proof 12, newer typeset edition p. 80 (classic pp. 54–55); transcribed by eye from Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 14. The em dashes are Dake's, as printed.

↑ 14. Ibid., study note “15 Things the Bible Does Not Say,” item 13, newer typeset edition p. 76 (running head “76 (51, 52) GENESIS NOTES CONTINUED,” classic pp. 51–52); Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 10. The list's premise is stated in its title: each numbered item is something Dake holds Scripture does not say. Item 13 therefore denies that Adam was the first man to live on the earth.

↑ 15. Ibid., “The Pre-Adamite World” (1:2), closing paragraph, newer typeset edition p. 80 (classic pp. 54–55); transcribed by eye from Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 14, SB library.

↑ 16. Ibid., note d on Genesis 1:1. Resident in both editions with identical wording: newer typeset edition (Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 1) and pre-1988 printing (01_Dake_Annotated_Study_Bible_Verses_on_Segregation_recognized.pdf, internal p. 2). The internal quotation is Dake's own citation of 2 Peter 3:6.

↑ 17. Ibid., study note “Lucifer's Flood” (1:2), newer typeset edition p. 76 (classic pp. 51–52); Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 10, SB library.

↑ 18. The construction is hayah followed by the preposition le prefixed to the predicate noun, the ordinary Hebrew idiom for becoming something: Genesis 2:7, wayehi ha-adam le-nephesh chayyah; Genesis 19:26, wattehi netsib melach. Standard reference grammars treat the plain stative use in Genesis 1:2 as unremarkable. Dake's list at note 7 above conflates the two constructions.

↑ 19. Hebrew narrative advances with the waw-consecutive imperfect, which puts the verb first. Genesis 1:2 instead opens with waw plus the subject noun (we-ha-arets hayetah), the standard disjunctive or circumstantial construction that supplies background rather than sequence. Had the writer meant to report a subsequent event, the expected form was available to him and was not used.

↑ 20. Hebrew mil'u (imperative plural of male', “to fill, to be full”), Genesis 1:28. Transliterated here as mal'u for readability in the body text. The verb takes no prefix corresponding to English re-, and Hebrew expresses repetition by other means entirely.

↑ 21. KJV Genesis 1:22, “fill the waters in the seas”; KJV Genesis 1:28, “replenish the earth.” The Hebrew verb is identical in both verses. The NKJV, quoted in the body, reads “fill” in both places, which is why the argument is invisible to readers of most modern versions.

↑ 22. The sense “to fill up, to stock abundantly” is the older and dominant one in early modern English, and is the sense the King James translators employ; the restricted sense “to fill again, to refill” becomes the ordinary one later. Readers who wish to test this can compare the King James Version's use of the word at Isaiah 2:6 and Ezekiel 27:25, where no prior emptying is in view.

↑ 23. Hebrew erets, which the King James Version renders “earth” at Jeremiah 4:23 and “land” at 4:27. The same ambiguity runs through the chapter and is one reason the vision reads as cosmic when lifted out of it.

↑ 24. Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, “5 Proofs This Was the Original Earth” (4:24), closing paragraph, newer typeset edition p. 1353; transcribed by eye from Dakes_Bible_PreAdamite.pdf, internal p. 50, SB library. The sentence continues by noting that in Judah's case God declared He would not make a full end, which is the point of Jeremiah 4:27.

↑ 25. Isaiah 14:4, “you will take up this proverb against the king of Babylon”; Ezekiel 28:2 and 28:12, addressed to the prince and then the king of Tyre. Interpreters within historic orthodoxy have divided over whether these taunt-songs carry a secondary reference to the fall of Satan. This book takes no side, because nothing in the argument of this chapter turns on it.

↑ 26. 2 Peter 3:5–7, quoted here in the King James Version as Dake prints it. For his application of the phrase to the pre-Adamite universe, see note 16 above. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man, ch. 6, “The World That Then Was,” pp. 83–85, builds its case on this passage and on the Greek kosmos (“world,” and by extension an ordered society) in v. 6.

↑ 27. 2 Peter 2:5 (NKJV): God “did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people.” The same letter, two chapters apart, identifies the flood its author has in mind.

↑ 28. Romans 5:12 (NKJV). The difficulty is not decisive on its own, since a defender may reply that Paul speaks of the human race descended from Adam. It is raised as a question the scheme must answer, not as a proof it cannot.

↑ 29. 1 Corinthians 15:45, “The first man Adam became a living being” (NKJV), quoting Genesis 2:7.

↑ 30. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man, ch. 6, “The World That Then Was,” p. 83. The digitization renders the dash in this sentence as a broken em dash; it is set as a comma here, with no change of wording. The chapter goes on to argue that 2 Peter 3:5–7 comes closest to an explicit statement of the doctrine.

↑ 31. 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6. The identification of demons with fallen angels has been the ordinary Christian position, though the New Testament nowhere sets out their origin as a topic in its own right. Dake's own angelology, including his fuller account of their beginnings, is documented in Chapter 19.

↑ 32. See Chapter 16, which documents Dake's teaching on the material heaven and the eternal state. The pre-Adamite past and the material future are the two ends of the same system, and both are handled by the hermeneutic set out in Chapter 4.