Were Adam and Eve cavemen?

We look upon this first man, not a cave-man, not a ferocious half-ape, not an unintelligent brute, but a being of wisdom and knowledge. He possessed superior knowledge of the creation to be put under him. He has names for every beast of the field and of the forest. Without a moment's hesitation he names them. Could our present day scientists do this? But the highest was not the superior knowledge of the first man, but his fellowship with God. He enjoys His presence, has communion with Him. And the Creator expressed His loving kindness towards the creature created for His pleasure. "Behold the Man!"

In what dense moral darkness was man, that Jehovah was to many unknown. In what depths of degradation and filth were they found, that God had to warn Israel against the ways of the nations of the land, both social and religious (18:24-28), because of which the land would vomit them out as a nauseous thing. What had man become, man made in the image of God, and originally after His likeness also? But how had this come about? Had he got into this condition, or was he originally made in it? Was primitive pre-historic man originally in a state of savagery, out of which he gradually raised himself by self-culture? God made man upright (Ecc. 7:29). Man before the flood was no savage, dwelling in caves or like habitations. Cain built a city. His descendants were noted for arts and musical instruments. Cain, too, at first tilled the ground, and Abel was a keeper of sheep. After the flood Noah became a husbandman, and Ham's descendants were noted as builders, and rulers. Man's primitive condition, whether before the flood or after it, was not a state of savagery, but quite the reverse. How, then, did he descend into the degradation and uncleanness characteristic of savagery and idolatry? As with earth, so with man, the chaotic state of the former, and the degraded state of the latter, were the consequences of causes at work after the creation of both the one and of the other. God did not create the earth a chaos (Isaiah 45:18), nor man a savage. This question, then, about man's condition, which history cannot answer, nor can archeology solve, God in His word has cleared up to us.

The modern notion of "the ascent of man" is downright folly. It was no savage that God created, with power and responsibility to raise himself from degradation to dignity. God created man perfect. The moral and physical degeneration, which perplexes the philanthropists and statesmen of today, is the result of sin and rebellion against God. Men appear to have lapsed into barbarism very early; witness Job's description, in Job 30, of the abjects of his time. But it was an absolutely perfect being that came forth at the beginning from the workshop of the Almighty.

There was language from the first. God spoke to the man and his wife (Gen. 1:28-30) and the man spoke to the beasts, etc., in giving them all their names (Gen. 2:20). What a different story the earth would be able to tell had its most gifted inhabitant remained loyal to his Creator, and refused all the overtures of the foe! But though Eden is lost beyond recovery, heaven stands open to all who, as confessedly ruined sinners, put their trust in the Saviour who died and rose again.

Unlike the Second Man, who in His wondrous grace was born a Babe, and "increased in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52), Adam came forth from the divine hand full of vigour from the moment that he first drew breath. He was, moreover, no savage having to work his way upward by painful stages; he was endowed with understanding from the beginning, able to receive and comprehend communications from his Creator (Gen. 1:28), capable also of giving names intelligently to all the lower orders (Gen. 2:19-20). The savagery subsequently observable in the greater part of the human family came in through sin, and especially as the fruit of idolatry. Rom. 1:18-32 shows this clearly.

What can be vainer than the dreams of men? From the only evidence we have, happily the highest, surest, and most authoritative of testimony we know that primeval man was as far as possible from savagery. He was set in a garden or park of delights, where grew every tree pleasant to the sight, and good for food. Even when transgression entailed man's expulsion from Paradise, and sons were in due time born, the elder was a husbandman, the younger a shepherd. Town life began for some, nomad habits for others, the forging of tools, bronze and iron, and the making instruments of music, wind and stringed all this before our first parents died.

However opposite, both are effects of departure from God. In an unfallen earth and the innocence of man, there was room for neither the savage nor the civilised state. No dream of unbelieving poets is more remote from the truth than the pictures they have drawn of early human beings unable as yet to converse, and subsisting on acorns, wild fruits, edible roots scooped with difficulty out of the reluctant earth; at length imitating the birds, or rising from ejaculations, to express wants and feelings. Then in the course of time, instead of wandering after precarious food, some conceive the idea of collecting seeds, and cultivating their growth in patches cleared from the forest or brushwood; others, again, betake themselves to the chace, and so provide food and clothing for themselves, and begin also to barter with those that tilled the earth, who bethought them too of rearing the animals capable of domestication in order to their supply or exchange. Later in time rude huts and ruder rafts or canoes were made for land and water and with the long awaited social life villages and towns would arise and give birth to the useful arts in their variety, and to the unlimited refinements of life.

We have already seen how the inspired history contradicts this fanciful scheme. In God's account of man sinless in the paradise of Eden we see our first parents surrounded by every good thing, endowed with mind and moral feelings as well as speech, with a given sphere for activity, and placed under a defined responsibility to the only true God Whose presence and intercourse they enjoyed, and Who thus blessed them whom He tried as bound to obedience under penalty of death. It was a state of natural blessings enjoyed with thanksgiving to Him Who gave them. Alas! they disobeyed Jehovah Elohim, and were expelled from their earthly paradise, but not without a fresh revelation suited in God's mercy to their fallen condition, and directing their hearts to a Deliverer. He from the nature of the case could not but be divine, yet One Who in some wondrous way must be human also, to suffer indeed but to triumph over the mighty and subtle foe — the bruised Seed of woman to bruise the Serpent's head. Alone, with this hope did Jehovah Elohim clothe them with coats of skin — with that which had its origin in death: a thing suggestive, especially in connection with the revelation then given, of grave but comforting assurance to guilty man, in lieu of a merely natural device in vain adopted to cover their nakedness.

But it is equally sure, according to scripture, that the arts of civilisation began and were developed in that family which rejected God's revelation for nature; which resented His disapproval and vented hatred on the believing brother, as righteous as Cain was not; and which in despair and defiance betook themselves out of a bad conscience and its fears to civic life in its cradle, and sought to make, if not a paradise, a substitute for it in the elegant arts and letters that embellish society. This is surely civilisation in the germ; and we see it in Cain's line from the earliest age ever expanding, and recounted for our serious thought in Genesis 4. To impute its rise or progress to revelation is what none could do who reads believingly.

As known in the world, civilisation supposes the fall, but so indeed does barbarism, though in a different way; in fact civilisation began, on man's being driven out from God, in Cain's family; Gen. 4:16-24. Adam in Paradise had no basis of civilisation, the simplicity of his life in innocence gave no occasion for it; what the effect of Genesis 1:28 might have been, supposing Adam had remained unfallen, can be only supposition. Barbarism was the natural effect of Adam's state when he had lost God, and civilisation is the effort to make, by the development of human faculties and the resources the earth furnished, the world pleasant without Him. What could a naked creature, thrown upon his own resources outside Paradise, be but a barbarian? - though the hunting state was a lower state when alone, and the means of life, but connected with natural energy as in Nimrod - though God had sent him out to till the ground, and clothed him with skins, not utter barbarism, but little more, only peaceful.

If we begin again with Noah, we get something more - barbarism was that into which men sank.

Revelation, as it kept intact two chronological lines in Gen. 5, here too supplies the manifest and invaluable light of God with a special view to His earthly people, followed by the moral cause laid before us in Gen. 11 which brings in (as it ought) the name of Jehovah throughout its earlier paragraph; whereas it only appears exceptionally, though for good reason, in Gen. 10:9. All the lessons and monumental records of all the earth combined are not to be compared for certainty or comprehensiveness with this sacred ethnography, grounded on genealogy, and linked with geography. God gave it by Moses as He alone could. Facts of great weight as to the antediluvians are related in Gen. 4, and, what to some may seem strange, in the family of Cain with religion but without faith. Therein arose city life, arts, and sciences, literary verse, among men who forgot the fall, ignored sin and the Saviour, and strove to embellish the earth into a worldly paradise. As the unity of the race was absolute at the beginning, so it was virtually in Noah after the deluge. The outward progress of mankind must have been all the greater because of their longevity. Whatever it was, the sons of Noah possessed all on their new start. No theory is more fallacious than the pretended ages of stone, bronze, and iron. Men, in their wanderings into rude forest life or other forms of savagery, fell into the circumstances of such facts, which still exist under similar conditions: to generalise them, as successive periods through which all passed, is mere myth, not history.

As we have seen already, this is denied in toto by evolutionists. Man has not fallen, they say, but risen; sin (as we call it), they affirm, is only a going back to the crudities of a former existence. But man’s history proclaims the fall. Instead of man ascending, he is degenerating. If sin is a reality we should expect this. Take cases patent before our very eyes, for instance, that of a drunkard. Do his children rise, or is the tendency to degeneration? Assuredly to the latter. Remember that the savage is not the condition of primitive man, but the savage is the degeneration of primitive man. We have this argued out in Romans 1. The garbled accounts which are found in all ancient countries of the creation, the fall, the flood—all speak of the knowledge of these things, as presented to us in the Bible, being general, but the truth and light has been given up, and man has descended in the scale of civilization, save where Christianity has come in and uplifted him. We read:

With regard to what men call the refinements or elegancies of life, there no doubt appears to be a general progress in the world from a ruder to a more cultivated state; but if we look a little below the surface, we shall find that these accessories have become necessary through man's taste being corrupted, that is, rendered more greedy of self-pleasing. Simplicity, of which we see abundant proofs in the early days of Old Testament history, is not barbarism, but is the evidence of nobility of nature, though to us it may seem rude; for where is it to be found now? It is, moreover, quite compatible with a high state of moral intelligence. Barbarism is moral degradation.

And the truth is not therefore, that barbarism is man's original state, and that he has gradually to be freed from that, and educated up to God. That notion assumes, if it dare not say, that man, as he came fresh from God's creative hand, was a morally degraded being, requiring to be perfected by his own or others' efforts. Apart from the shocking irreverence of this idea, we are plainly told that "God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good," — and also it is distinctly said that "God made man upright." So that such a condition as that of the heathen today is, if anything, the fitting and, in God's wisdom, the natural result of man's wilful disregard of Him; and if He bears with the world which exhibits such marks of declension from, and enmity to, Him, it is only that He, in His grace, may save some out of that which is wholly bad. The means, however, by which He acts on the few are ever seized and turned to bad account by the many, and it is so, as ever, with Christianity, so that access to privileges effects in itself no change on man: though doubtless they, by increasing the weight of his responsibility somewhat, prove to be the surer witnesses against him.