Q. Why are the pyramids of Giza never mentioned in the Bible? That’s an interesting question, because those pyramids are apparently visible from Goshen, where the Israelites lived in Egypt. (See the photograph below from the Matson Collection in the U.S. Library of Congress. The photo is entitled, “Egypt. Pyramids. The land of Goshen with pyramids in the distance.”) But let me try to answer your question. For one thing, the pyramids were constructed well over a thousand years before the time of Moses, so the Egyptians weren’t actively working on them in biblical times. Rather, the book of Exodus tells us that the Egyptians “put slave masters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.” So the Bible does refer to major construction projects in Egypt, but it describes the ones that intersect with the story of the covenant people. However, I think an even more important reason why the Bible doesn’t mention the pyramids is that they were assertions of power and even immortality by the pharaohs. Rather than acknowledge those claims and dispute them, the Bible simply ignores them! The case is similar with another of the “seven wonders of the ancient world,” the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. While it’s unclear whether they actually existed, tradition says that they were created by King Nebuchadnezzar. While the book of Daniel describes life in Babylon under that king, it never mentions the gardens. If they did exist, the Bible doesn’t give us any evidence for them. It quotes Nebuchadnezzar as speaking of “great Babylon I have built . . . by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty,” but it doesn’t provide any details that would glorify Nebuchadnezzar rather than the God he ultimately had to admit “is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes.” So the Bible’s silence about ancient wonders doesn’t indicate that it actually lacks a firsthand perspective on the events it describes. Rather, the Bible wants us to “praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven,” not any earthly ruler, whatever their achievements. 
Joseph got up, took the child and His mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. –Mt 2:14-15 A book about stones in the life of Jesus can hardly ignore the Pyramids of Egypt. Why? Because there is good reason to suppose that Jesus saw them as a child. Pyramids of Giza For anyone traveling in Egypt the Pyramids are hard to miss; Giza lies along the Nile River route that the Holy Family is believed to have followed. The family probably spent some years in exile, recapitulating their people’s history of bondage in that land. Jesus may have been as old as four, even six, when the family finally returned to Nazareth. What might have been the thoughts of a precocious boy upon seeing these monoliths, the largest manmade structures on earth? It’s easy to assume that almost everything important in Jesus’ life happened during the three-year period of His ministry. But what if we knew more of the stories of His childhood? Certainly the few accounts we have in the gospels—the birth narratives, and the twelve-year-old discoursing with His elders—are spectacular. It would be odd if these were the only outstanding events from the youth of the Messiah. Wouldn’t a boy who was God, whether He was trying to or not, have had an extraordinary effect on everyone around Him, on the very air, the trees, the animals, the rocks? After all, the angels and demons certainly knew who He was, and that alone must have caused a considerable stir throughout His life. Apparently Jesus’ neighbors did not see Him as exceptional: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” (Mt 13:55). But Egypt was a long way from Nazareth, and it’s hard to believe the Son of God could have been in a pagan land without leaving His stamp. The Coptic Church agrees. The Christian faith, brought to Alexandria by Mark the Evangelist in 41 AD, spread quickly throughout Egypt, the earliest churches being founded on sites where it was believed the Holy Family had visited. In the fifth century Pope Theophilus testified to receiving from Mary herself, in a vision, a detailed outline of their journey. His account happens to tally with oral traditions from the previous four centuries, relating supernatural occurrences that accompanied the Christ Child wherever He went: pagan idols falling, fountains springing up, miraculous signs and healings. An itinerary of such sites may be visited by pilgrims today, including a number of sacred rocks, such as the stone handprint of the Child Jesus in a cave at Gabal El-Tair, and a stone footprint at Sakha. How much of this is true? No telling. But the sheer weight of the tradition is as difficult to dismiss as the Pyramids themselves. In his book The Stones Cry Out, Randall Price describes climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid of the Pharaoh Cheops. From there he reflects that “these stones, which had seen the flowering and fall of the Egyptian empire, were already 1,000 years old when Abraham passed through to claim his inheritance in Canaan. They were a symbol of refuge in the days of Joseph when he brought his father Jacob and his sons to settle in their shadow. The Pyramids had witnessed the oppression of the Israelites and the exodus under Moses. They had watched the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah as he was taken from his captive land of Judah, and they beheld the infant Jesus in His flight from King Herod. If only these stones could speak, what stories they could tell!” My hunch is that their stories would largely be about the hoards of peasants who sacrificed their lives to the brutal labor of constructing colossal rock piles to the glory of a few miserable excuses for human beings. The Hebrews were far from being the only slaves in Egypt. The whole culture was enslaved, and that is what the Pyramids represent: an entire people dying for their king—in short, the diametric opposite of Christianity. (Photo by Ricardo Liberato, Wikimedia Commons) Next week: Jesus’ Bed of Stone
I’m surprised how often I am asked about the age of the ziggurats and pyramids, in particular the Great Pyramid of Giza, located in modern-day Egypt. If this date is correct, then the Great Pyramid existed before the Flood of Noah’s day. One of the main reasons for this question is that secular literature commonly dates the Great Pyramid around 2550 BC.1 If this date is correct, then the Great Pyramid existed before the Flood of Noah’s day, which occurred around 2350 BC and destroyed everything on earth (2 Peter 3:5–6)! Obviously, something is askew. Were the pyramids built before the Flood? Did the pyramids survive the Flood? Consider three points: First, the Great Pyramid of Giza lacks significant water damage. The Flood was incredibly destructive. Researchers point out that the entire surface of the earth was radically changed. The surface of every continent was destroyed and new mountains formed. Thousands of feet of mud and sand were dumped on every continent, burying and fossilizing creatures and plants. Nothing manmade could survive such a catastrophe. (By the way, that means that the location of the Garden of Eden is also lost.) Second, the pyramid is built on the fossil-bearing rock layers from the Flood of Noah’s day. Clearly, the Flood had to predate a pyramid built on top of the Flood layers. Third, the Hebrew word translated “Egypt” is Mizraim. Mizraim was Noah’s grandson, born to Ham after the Flood. So Mizraim’s descendants could not have built the Great Pyramid of Egypt (Mizraim) until after the Flood, and for that matter, after the events at the Tower of Babel that caused Mizraim’s family to move to the region of the Nile River. With all this evidence, the Great Pyramid is clearly post-Flood. So, why the older date for the Great Pyramid in secular literature? Many of the accepted dates for events in ancient Egypt came from an ancient list of pharaohs and the lengths of their reigns recorded by the historian Manetho, who lived in Egypt about 200 BC. Although there is much more to this, Manetho assumed the pharaohs’ reigns had been consecutive and so tallied them up sequentially to arrive at a very long Egyptian chronology. The problem, it appears, is that some of these pharaohs were reigning at the same time in different Egyptian kingdoms—the Upper Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, or Lower Kingdom. Sometimes fathers and sons seem to have reigned together for a long time, too. So the dates for the pharaohs are grossly inflated. As an analogy, if we took all the past state governors of the United States and stacked their terms sequentially, the nation would appear to be much, much older than it is! The problem should be obvious. In brief, the secular date for the Great Pyramid is incorrect, and all the pyramids and ziggurats across the world today are post-Flood construction. earned his masters degree from Southern Illinois at Carbondale in mechanical engineering. Since joining Answers in Genesis, Bodie has led various research teams and overseen the writing of several books, including the New Answers Books 1–3. |
What came first jesus or the pyramids
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