Chapter 15

The World Before Adam

A civilization built in the space between two verses

Ten years after Finis Dake died, his publisher brought out a book on creation with a title that promises a great deal: Another Time... Another Place... Another Man.¹ Its editors open the first chapter with a scene.

Long before a man called Adam walked with God in the gardens of Eden, longer still before the flood of Noah covered the face of the earth, in a time called “the beginning,” God created the heavens and the earth. A grand and beautiful design, the earth as conceived by the Creator was an exquisite home for the creatures He had fashioned. The earth itself was a magnificent garden where life flourished in a dazzling display of variety. The ground trembled with the footsteps of the largest creatures (those we now call dinosaurs). Animals filled the trees, the skies and the oceans. From eternity God had planned this creation, and it was perfect in every way. God created men and they began to settle in villages, cities and nations. Angels, a part of this new creation, were given dominion over the earth, to rule with the authority of their Creator. It was the archangel Lucifer who ruled over the nations in all the splendor of the greatest of God's creations. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man, ch. 1, “In the Beginning,” pp. 1–2 (the editors’ words)²

A few lines later the editors say where all of this belongs: “All of this happened before Genesis 1:2.”³ Here are the two verses they mean.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Genesis 1:1–2 (NKJV)

The verses say nothing about dinosaurs, cities, nations or Lucifer. The editors did not invent the idea, though. It is printed in Dake’s own Bible. Beside the word “replenish” in Genesis 1:28, the original printings carry a note of one line.

b This proves a social system before Adam, when Lucifer ruled (Cp. 9:1; Isa. 2:6; 23:2; Jer. 31:25; Ezek. 26:2; 27:25) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, classic setting, O.T. p. 2, note b on Genesis 1:28⁴

Dake’s notes teach, as Bible fact, that men lived on the earth before Adam in cities and nations under Lucifer’s rule. They rebelled and drowned in a flood, and the six days of Genesis 1 rebuild the world they left in ruins. Genesis says none of this. Printing guesses as though God had revealed them is an error, and that is my verdict on this part of the notes. The whole structure rests on a Hebrew verb whose meaning is disputed, an English word from 1611, and prophecies that were written about Judah, Babylon and Tyre.

A modest reading that allows time to pass between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 is a view held within historic orthodoxy, and it is not what I am arguing against (see Chapter 1). My argument is with the world Dake built inside that gap, and with the rule that built it. In Chapter 4 we saw his rule for reading Scripture, which takes every word as literally as it can be taken. The same rule that gives God a body of ordinary size also fills the earth with people before Adam.

Why a world before Adam matters

Suppose a teenager in a Sunday school class asks the teacher where the dinosaurs fit. If the teacher opens a Dake Bible, he finds an answer printed beside Genesis 1, in the same binding as the text, and the answer uses the word “proves.” The student goes home believing that the Bible tells of a race that lived and died before Adam, when what he was given was a guess.

The guess also changes how Genesis reads. On Dake’s account the six days become a repair job on a damaged planet. God calls His work “very good” over ground that holds the bodies of a drowned race. Adam is no longer the first man, which raises questions for Paul’s gospel of sin and death entering through one man. And Dake himself said that much of his teaching on Satan, demons and hell depends on this world before Adam. A note that carries that much weight needs a clear text behind it.

What Dake’s notes teach

“Became” in place of “was”

The scheme begins with the verb in Genesis 1:2. Dake’s note on the word “was” reads as follows.

Heb. hayah, became. Trans. became 67 times (Gen. 2:7; 19:26; 20:12; 24:67; etc.); becamest (1 Chr. 17:22; Ez. 16:8); came and came to pass 505 times (Gen. 6:1; 11:2; 14:1; etc.); become 66 times (Gen. 3:22; 18:18; 48:19; etc.); come to pass 131 times (Gen. 4:14; 24:43; 27:40; etc.); and be in the sense of become (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, 14; 3:5; etc.). Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, Genesis p. 1, note l on Genesis 1:2⁶

The note tells the reader that the earth did not simply exist in a formless state. It “became” that way, which means something happened to it. The editors of the 1997 book draw the same conclusion in their own words.

In each of these passages (and many others), hayah clearly indicates a state of becoming that is the result of some type of cause-and-effect relationship. The same is true in Genesis 1:2. The earth became without form and void. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man, ch. 3, “Without Form and Void,” p. 34 (the editors’ words)⁷

With one English word changed, the verse describes a ruin. What caused it, the notes go on to say, was Lucifer’s rebellion and the flood that followed.

“Replenish” as “fill again”

The second support is the King James wording of Genesis 1:28, where God tells Adam and Eve to “replenish the earth.” Dake builds an argument on the first two letters of that word.

His reasoning runs like this. The prefix means “again,” so Adam was told to fill the earth again, and nobody can fill a thing again unless it was full before. He returns to the point at the end of the same note with a question: “Why was Adam told to replenish and not merely to plenish it?”⁹ In his course he even meets the obvious reply before anyone can make it: “Some argue that the Hebrew word for replenish means fill and not refill, but this proves nothing.”¹⁰ So Dake knew what the Hebrew word means, and he set it aside in favor of the English one.

People, cities and nations

Dake did more than allow for a world before Adam. He described who lived in it. His study note at Jeremiah 4:24 gives five proofs that the prophet’s vision shows “the original earth,” and the fourth reads this way.

The earth was created to be inhabited (Isa. 45:18); and it was inhabited from the beginning by man who lived in cities (v 25-26), by nations (Isa. 14:12-14), and a social system, the members of which were mortal and therefore capable of being drowned (2 Pet. 3:5-7); they were beings Adam could replace, for he was commanded to replenish the earth (Gen. 1:27-28). “5 Proofs This Was the Original Earth” (4:24), point 4, Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, p. 1353¹¹

That one sentence gives the earth a population of mortal men who lived in cities, formed nations and a social system, and drowned, and it gives Adam the job of replacing them. Among the proofs on the Genesis page, Dake says Jeremiah’s vision “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.”¹² He even lists the point among “15 Things the Bible Does Not Say.” Item 13 denies that Adam was the first man on the earth, because “Men and nations were on earth when Lucifer ruled.”¹³ The reader who holds the ordinary belief is the one being corrected.

Lucifer’s Eden

The ruler of that world comes from Ezekiel 28. Proof 11 of the same Genesis note reads it this way.

In Ez. 28:11-17 we have a picture of Lucifer before he fell, as the anointed cherub or protector of the earth, as being full of wisdom and perfect in beauty, as ruling in a garden of Eden (before Adam), as being created of God and perfect in his ways up to the time of his fall. The passage gives the reason for his fall and the result of it. The only time this could have been true of Satan was before the days of Adam, thus proving a pre-Adamite world. “The Pre-Adamite World (1:2),” proof 11, Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, p. 80 (classic p. 54)¹⁴

Ezekiel addresses the king of Tyre, so Dake needs a way to move the passage from Tyre to Lucifer. His note on Ezekiel 28:12 supplies it: “The supernatural king of Tyre was Lucifer, who is mostly referred to in this prophecy (v 11-19)”.¹⁵ A longer study note explains that everything said of the king must be read as a “double reference—to the earthly king of Tyre, a man; and to the supernatural king, Satan or Lucifer, who ruled Tyre through the earthly monarch.”¹⁶ Then, because the passage mentions Eden, he needs a second garden. His course supplies that as well: “This Eden, however, was the one that was on the original Earth before Adam.”¹⁷

What the world before Adam explains

At the end of his eighteen proofs, Dake tells the reader why the doctrine matters to him.

The actual findings of science regarding prehistoric animals and men, the age of the earth, its rock formation, and other facts can be recognized only if we believe the Bible's revelation of a pre-Adamite social system. There are many questions which cannot be answered apart from a belief in the pre-Adamite age. How did Lucifer become the devil and the prince of demons? When did he weaken the nations, ascend into heaven to exalt his throne above the stars, and fall from heaven as in Isa. 14:12-14? How did demons originate, for what purpose, and when? What caused the calamity of Gen. 1:2; Jer. 4:23-26; Ps. 104:6-9; 2 Pet. 3:5-6? Why was hell prepared for the devil and his angels as stated in Mt. 25:41, and why was it located beneath the earth (Mt. 12:40; Eph. 4:7-11)? Why was Adam told to replenish and not merely to plenish it? These and other questions go unanswered apart from a belief in the pre-Adamite world. “The Pre-Adamite World (1:2),” closing paragraph, Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, p. 80 (classic pp. 54–55)¹⁸

He calls the scheme “the Bible’s revelation,” and he hangs on it the fall of Lucifer, the origin of demons, the place of hell and the meaning of the fossils. His note on Genesis 1:1 says the same about the rocks. The first heavens and earth were “the whole pre-Adamite universe, to which all fossils and remains belong.”¹⁹ His note on Lucifer’s flood offers the scheme as a settlement with 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.”²⁰

What the Bible says

The verb in Genesis 1:2

The Hebrew verb hayah is one of the most common words in the Old Testament, and its ordinary work is the work of “is,” “was” and “will be” in English. It can also mean “became,” and nobody disputes that. Dake’s own note shows how flexible the word is, since he lists it as “became,” “came to pass,” “become,” “come to pass” and plain “be.” A word with that range cannot settle anything by itself. The sentence around it decides which sense fits.

Look at the first two examples on Dake’s list. In Genesis 2:7 man became a living being, and in Genesis 19:26 Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt. In both verses the verb stands first in its clause, in the form Hebrew stories use to report the next event.²¹ Genesis 1:2 is built differently. It opens with “and the earth,” puts the subject ahead of the verb, and so steps out of the sequence of events. Grammarians call this a disjunctive clause. It is the usual way Hebrew pauses a story to describe the scene.²² Verse 2 tells us what the earth was like when God began to work on it.

The rest of the verse agrees. It mentions darkness, deep water and the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. It says nothing about rebellion, judgment or ruin, and those are the things Dake needs it to say.

“Replenish” meant “fill”

The command in Genesis 1:28 is one Hebrew word, mil’u, from a verb that means “to fill.” Nothing in it means “again.”²³ The King James Version itself shows this. On the fifth day God blesses the creatures of the sea with the same verb.

And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” Genesis 1:22 (NKJV)

The King James translators rendered that verb “fill” in verse 22 and “replenish” in verse 28.²⁴ The fish had been made that same day, and there were no earlier fish to replace. The translators were using two English words for one Hebrew word, as they often did. In their day “replenish” meant to fill up or stock fully, and the narrower sense of filling a second time became the common one later.²⁵ Dake built a civilization on the aging of an English prefix.

His appeal to Noah does not help him. When God tells Noah to “replenish the earth” in Genesis 9:1 (KJV), the earth really is being filled a second time. We know that from the story of the flood in the chapters just before it, and the word has nothing to do with it. Genesis 1 tells no story of an earlier filling, and that missing story is exactly what Dake needed the word to supply.

Jeremiah’s vision is about Judah

Dake’s population comes mainly from Jeremiah 4:23–26, so it is worth reading the chapter around it. Jeremiah 4 is about an invasion. It opens with a call to repent, and then the alarm sounds: a destroyer is coming from the north against Judah and Jerusalem. At verse 23 the prophet describes what he sees in vision. The earth is without form and void, the heavens have no light, the mountains shake, no man is left, the birds have fled, the fruitful land is a wilderness and the cities are broken down. Then God explains the vision.

For thus says the LORD: “The whole land shall be desolate; Yet I will not make a full end. Jeremiah 4:27 (NKJV)

The word translated “land” here is the same Hebrew word translated “earth” in verse 23.²⁶ Jeremiah pictures the coming ruin of Judah as though creation itself were coming undone, and he borrows the words of Genesis 1:2 to do it. The prophets often describe God’s judgment in those terms. Dake’s own note grants the point.

The purpose of God in showing Jeremiah the total destruction of life on the earth in Jer. 4:23-26 was to reveal how the land of Judah would be destroyed, and to make a comparison between the two times. “5 Proofs This Was the Original Earth” (4:24), Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, p. 1353²⁷

If the vision was given to show how Judah would be destroyed, then it is a vision of Judah. Dake keeps that purpose and adds a second time, a lost world for the vision to be compared with. Jeremiah’s hearers were about to lose their own cities, and the picture of an unmade world told them how complete that loss would be. Nothing in the chapter points them to an earlier race.

Ezekiel’s lament is for the king of Tyre

Ezekiel 28 names its subject twice. The first oracle is addressed to the prince of Tyre (28:2), and the lament that follows is for the king of Tyre (28:12). Isaiah 14, which Dake also cites, names the king of Babylon in its fourth verse. Christians have long asked whether the fall of Satan stands somewhere behind these taunts, and interpreters within the historic faith have answered both ways.²⁸ I do not need to settle that question here. Even on the reading most favorable to Dake, neither chapter mentions Adam, dates anything before him, counts a population or describes a flood.

Ezekiel says, “You were in Eden, the garden of God” (28:13). Scripture knows one Eden, the garden God planted for Adam. To keep his scheme, Dake had to place a second Eden on an earlier earth, and nothing in Ezekiel tells us there was one. His “double reference” is the step that turns a lament for the king of Tyre into a history of the world before Adam.

Peter’s flood is Noah’s flood

Dake’s best New Testament text is 2 Peter 3. Peter writes that by the word of God the heavens and earth were formed out of water, and that by water “the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6, KJV). Dake reads that world as the one before Adam, and his editors treat the passage as the closest Scripture comes to stating the doctrine outright.²⁹

Peter is answering scoffers who say that the world goes on as it always has and that no judgment is coming. His reply needs a past judgment his readers already believe in, and he has named it in the previous chapter, where God “did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people.”³⁰ The argument is a pattern, water then and fire to come. A flood his readers had never heard of would prove nothing to them. Peter also says nothing about the people of that world, their cities or their ruler. He gives a flood and a warning, and Dake’s notes turn it into a civilization.

What God says about the six days

The plainest word on the six days is in the Ten Commandments, where God gives the reason for the Sabbath.

For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Exodus 20:11 (NKJV)

In Dake’s reading the heavens and the earth were made in the dateless past, and the six days only restored one ruined planet. God puts the heavens, the earth, the sea and everything in them inside the six days, and He does it in the reason attached to a commandment. The close of the first chapter adds a verdict of its own.

Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. Genesis 1:31 (NKJV)

On the pre-Adamite reading, God looks over an earth whose soil covers the drowned bodies of a whole race and the ruins of its cities, and He calls it very good. That is hard to fit with the text, and it should give any Bible teacher pause before he prints the scheme as fact. Dake’s favorite supporting verse needs a plain answer too.

For thus says the LORD, Who created the heavens, Who is God, Who formed the earth and made it, Who has established it, Who did not create it in vain, Who formed it to be inhabited: . . . Isaiah 45:18 (NKJV)

Dake reads the verse as a timeline. God did not make the earth empty, Genesis 1:2 shows it empty, and so something must have happened in between. Isaiah is speaking of purpose, though. God did not make the world for nothing; He made it to be lived in. Genesis 1 records Him doing exactly that over six days, and the account ends with people in the world. The verse states God’s aim and says nothing about a lost history.

One more question sits under all of this. Paul writes that “through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin,” and he calls Adam “the first man.”³¹ A race of mortal men who lived and drowned before Adam has to fit somehow into those sentences. I have never seen a convincing account of how it fits.

A note that says “proves”

A Christian is free to wonder about the ages before Adam. Curiosity about the deep past is healthy in someone who believes God made everything, and if Dake had written a book of speculation and called it that, I would only have disagreed with it. He printed these claims as notes in a study Bible, though, in the voice a study Bible uses, and the word “proves” does steady work in them. The Genesis 1:28 note says the command “proves a social system before Adam.” Proof 8 says “replenish” proves the earth had been filled before. Proof 11 ends “thus proving a pre-Adamite world.” Those words turn a guess into revealed fact, at the place where a reader is least able to tell the difference.

Dake’s own editors were more careful. In the sixth chapter of their defense of the doctrine, they stop to take stock: “No text to this point has explicitly spelled out the doctrine of the pre-Adamite world.” What they have found, they say, are clues that let them “piece the concept together like an intriguing puzzle.”³² That is an accurate description of the evidence. The notes in the Bible never call it clues, though; they say “proves.”

Didn’t respected teachers hold the gap theory?

Some readers will object that the gap reading was held by Thomas Chalmers, by G. H. Pember, by the Scofield Reference Bible and by many faithful Bible teachers, so an attack on Dake is an attack on them.³³ The objection mistakes what is under examination. Allowing time between the first two verses of Genesis is a reading of one verse, and men I respect have held it. I do not call it heresy, and nothing in this chapter depends on rejecting it. What I reject is the world Dake built inside the gap: a population, a ruler, cities, a flood and a second Eden, printed beside the text as things the Bible proves.

Doesn’t science need the long ages?

Dake pressed this point hardest himself. Geology seems to need long ages, the old reading of Genesis has no room for them, and the gap supplies the room without disturbing the six days. This book takes no position on the age of the earth. But whatever the rocks say, they do not say that the fossils belong to a race ruled by Lucifer, and Genesis does not say it either. Dake claimed that 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. His settlement also costs more than it saves. To make belief easier for one audience, it asks the reader to accept an unrecorded civilization, a flood the Bible never narrates and a race that lived and died outside the story of redemption.

Then where did demons come from?

This is the most sincere objection, and Dake asks it himself in his closing paragraph. Scripture says little about the origin of demons. The church has mostly held that they are fallen angels, pointing to the angels who sinned and to those who did not keep their proper domain.³⁴ Chapter 19 takes up Dake’s teaching on angels and demons. For this chapter one point is enough. An unanswered question does not prove any particular answer. “The Bible does not tell us much about that” is a true answer, and it is better than a detailed history that the Bible does not tell at all. A teacher who can say “I do not know” has given his students something worth having.

The God who made the world good

Dake’s notes teach, as Bible fact, that a civilization lived and died on the earth before Adam under Lucifer. That is speculation printed as revelation, and it is an error. The grammar of Genesis 1:2 does not support his verb, and his English word meant “fill” in 1611. His vision from Jeremiah was about Judah, as his own note says, and his passage from Ezekiel is a lament for the king of Tyre.

The God of Genesis 1 does not need a ruined world behind Him to be great. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” He spoke, and there was light. He made a world, filled it with living things, set a man and a woman in it to fill it further, and called it very good. A Bible that leaves some questions open is an honest Bible, and the God who gave it is not diminished by what He chose not to tell us. Chapter 16 follows the same literal rule forward, into what Dake taught about heaven and the life to come.