Daily Devotional – September 15

History

If there was an Ice Age ending only about 3500 years ago, shouldn’t the ancient cultures have a remembrance of it? We find just that in the ancient people groups’ legends. They speak of “the Great Cold” or “evil winters.” The Mayans of Central America record in the Popol Vuh that their ancient ancestors had sailed to their land from the east during a time of black rain and constant twilight. This would be consistent with rampant volcanic upheavals during the Ice Age bringing ash in the rain and constant twilight (dense cloud-cover). The ancient Avesta writing coming out of western Russia describe the early Ice Age as “Ten months of winter are there now, two months of summer, and these are cold as to the water, cold as to the earth, cold as to the trees… There all around falls deep snow, that is the direst of plagues.” These are not the only people groups that described this event. Here are some others: Toba Indians in South America, the Incas, the Tarahumara of northern Mexico, the Araucanians of Chile, the Mataco Indians of Argentina and many more. Many of these cultures associate the Flood with the subsequent period of cold, earthquakes, volcanoes, periods of darkness, and continual cloud cover. The Mayan Popol Vuh records that after the Flood there was “much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold.” Another Mayan source says “sunlight did not return till the twenty-sixth year after the flood. These people knew about the Ice Age and wrote of their experiences. All this fits perfectly within the biblical worldview!

Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north.

~ Job 37:9

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.