Biology and the Jewish Bible

Jay Seegert

Adam and Eve – Perfect Creation

Exodus 15.26 Moses wrote,

Okay, what’s happening here? This is interesting background. God creates everything and it’s perfect. He creates Adam and Eve, and they’re perfect. But they sin and they disobey God. They get kicked out of the Garden. Their sin brought death and a curse into God’s perfect creation.

God could have just smashed them and started over, but he said, ‘No! I love them too much; I have a plan. I’m going to send my own Son to die on a cross to pay for their sins’.

Moses tells of God’s protection

God tried to protect His people. In this passage, Moses is saying: ‘listen to the health practices that God is giving to us, and we won’t see the diseases that we’re seeing in other nations around us’.

God’s trying to protect them but, we know from the Book of Acts, that Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. So, he went to Egypt.

Today, if someone goes to a university and they get a PhD, and then they write some books, you would assume a lot of the information in those books would come from what they learned at the university. That’s just kind of how it works.

Well, Moses goes to Egypt and then he writes five books, yeah, the first five Books of the Bible. Do we see Egyptian wisdom in the Bible? We should if Moses made it up on his own and that’s what sceptics say: ‘Moses was an ignorant goat herder; he just wrote a bunch of stuff down and now we got another religious book out there‘.

Well, if that’s true, we should see his education coming through in his writing, we should see Egyptian wisdom in the Bible.

Here’s an example of Egyptian wisdom. This is the Ebers papyrus, written about 1550BC, contains over 800 magical formulas and remedies, one of which is if you got a splinter, you’re supposed to apply worm blood and donkey dung.

Modern scientists look at this and they say you wouldn’t want to do that; it causes tetanus spores which causes lockjaw. You could get very sick; you could even die. So modern scientists say, we don’t know where the Egyptians got that but it’s just wrong. That’s bad, you don’t want to do that.

That’s the kind of stuff that Moses was learning in school. Then, he writes the Bible.

So, do we see things like this in the Bible? We should if Moses truly made it up on his own rather than being inspired by God.

Death, germs and bacteria VS cedar wood and hyssop

Let’s look what we see in the Bible. Moses talked about touching a dead body. Today, we know about bacteria and germ theory and, especially, with COVID and all that we know. You don’t want to touch a dead body or dead animal; you could get germs from that. You could get sick; you could even die.

We know about that today. This is what Moses wrote a long time ago in the Book of Numbers chapter 19.

What’s this water of purification? A few verses earlier, he tells us,

That sounds really bizarre. Most of you won’t relate to this but, in the United States, there was a television program on many years ago and there was a character in there named ‘Granny the Beverly Hillbillies’.

‘Granny’ was always doing really weird things in the kitchen, putting some possum in a pot and stirring it around and that’s kind of what this Bible passage sounds like, just a lot of weird things put together. However, modern scientists look at this passage and they say ‘no, that’s not strange at all; that’s really fascinating’. And here’s why. The cedar wood and the burning ashes of the cow/the heifer combined to make lye; that’s what we call ‘soap’. If you touch a dead body, washing with soap would be a good thing.

The hyssop plant converts into thymol; that’s isopropyl alcohol, it kills bacteria. If you touch a dead body, killing bacteria would come in handy.

The scarlet wool forms a gritty substance like we have things called S.O.S. pads in our kitchen; they’re very abrasive. Or there’s something we have called Orange Goop it helps get grease out of your hands. That’s what the scarlet wool does, it’s abrasive, it helps get these the germs out of your hands, and then applying this on the third and the seventh day.

Bacteria grow very well in a damp or a wet environment, so you want to wait a few days for everything to dry out and then you apply this, wait a few more days for it to dry out and you apply it a second time and you’re considered clean.

Modern scientists say this is a great natural remedy if you don’t have the antibiotics that we create today.

Now, did Moses know anything about bacteria and germ theory and isopropyl alcohol? Obviously not. This is evidence that God says: ‘Hey Mo! I want you to write some things down.’ And he writes it down, and then Moses says: ‘Wow! That was fascinating! Is there anything else you have to share with me?’ And God is thinking like, ‘Yeah, I got another one.’

So, let me just share, before I close, one more example here.

Blood clotting and God’s ordinance for a ‘day 8’ circumcision

A certain Jewish tradition that Moses wrote about in Genesis chapter 17 verse 12 for the generations to come.

Why did Moses say, ‘the eighth day’. He could have said anything. He could have said the third week, the fifth year, he could have said anything. But he said the eighth day.

Modern scientists have discovered some very interesting things about blood clotting. There are two major things in your blood system that are necessary to clot your blood. If you don’t have them, you can get a paper cut and bleed to death. They are Vitamin K and something called prothrombin.

Now, on a molecular level, there are about two dozen events that must occur in proper sequence to clot your blood. If you miss one of them, you bleed to death.

An event ‘a’ must happen first which triggers event ‘b’, ‘b’ then triggers event ‘c’ and ‘d’, and all the way on down the line. How did that evolve? Slowly by accident over millions and millions of years of evolution?

If a creature had just, by accident, encountered events ‘a’ and ‘b’, that doesn’t do anything; and then, 100 000 years later, it fulfils events ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’, and then, 2 million years later, it gets ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’, it still doesn’t do anything. Even if it had ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘h’, ‘I’, ‘j’, ‘r’, ‘w’, would that help event ‘a’? No! It’s got to have all two-dozen proper sequences right from the beginning. That sequence can’t evolve, it has to be designed.

On a larger level, we’re just going to look at Vitamin K and prothrombin.

Modern scientists have discovered that Vitamin K develops in a baby somewhere between days five and seven, that’s where it starts to develop.

Prothrombin looks like this if we graph it

and I will explain the graph here: the axis line across the left of the graph shows the normal level of prothrombin in your body. The numbers across the bottom are days after birth.

Scientists have figured out that a baby on day one has 90 percent of its prothrombin, that’s pretty high. It’s not bad but then it drops dangerously low down to only 30 between days two and five, that’s not good at all. But then, on day eight, it spikes to a hundred and ten percent of its normal level. It will never ever be that high again the rest of your entire life.

So, if you are a baby and you need a surgical procedure done, day eight would be the perfect day because, for sure, you have Vitamin K by then, and you have more prothrombin than you’ll ever have the rest of your entire life.

Moses didn’t know anything about Vitamin K and prothrombin, obviously not! That is, God said, ‘Mo, write it down’. He writes it down.

Now, when my wife and I had our children, when she was pregnant with our son Taylor – he was our first child – we went to the hospital to go through some classes to learn all about this process.

This was new to us, and the nurse said if you have a baby boy and would like this procedure, we will take them down the hall and then bring them back and I remember sitting there being very nervous, saying to myself ‘we’ll come back on day eight’. I thought about it, but I was too shy to say anything, the nurse kept talking and someone else raised their hand and said ‘Hey nurse, you just mentioned you’re giving the baby a shot right away, why? Why would the baby need a shot right away?‘ She said, ‘Oh that’s Vitamin K’.

So, today, they artificially introduce Vitamin K immediately and you have ninety percent of your prothrombin on day one so it’s not an issue to do the procedure today.

Even though I was very shy, I felt like God just lifted my hand up in the air and the nurse called on me and I shared with the entire class what Moses wrote in the Book of Genesis about this. I don’t know if they were excited or not, but it was an opportunity to talk about the authority of the inspiration of God’s Word.

So, it’s just kind of fascinating to learn some of these things.

The conclusion is, the Bible passes the test of Scientific Foreknowledge, and those are just a few examples. The Bible passes all four tests of Internal Consistency, Historical Accuracy, Prophetic Accuracy, and Scientific Accuracy.