The Bible begins in Genesis 1:1 with the statement, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It was not talking about the beginning of God. It was talking about the beginning of the universe as we know it. God was already in existence.

This passage was written by Moses according to Bible history. Moses was actually only reporting it. He was not there when it happened and was only putting in writing the story that had been told through the generations of the Jews. It would have been told by Adam to his son Seth. Seth’s life overlapped with Noah and they could have known each other personally. Noah would have told the story to his son Shem. Shem was still alive when Abraham died and may have been the Patriarch that Abraham called Melchizedek that the Bible records as living in Jerusalem. Shem’s life also overlapped with Jacob and some of Jacob’s 12 sons may also have known Shem and heard him tell the stories of the creation and the flood.

Moses was probably 4 or 5 generations down from Joseph when the Jews lived in Egypt. He would have heard the stories from the Story Tellers who repeated the history of the Jews. This was the method of keeping history until that time. The stories did not go through very many people to get down to Moses. Moses was the most educated Jewish man that had ever lived at the time he began to lead Israel. Up until that time the Jews had no way to write down their history. Moses was educated in the palace of the King of Egypt and learned to make papyrus from the reeds that grew in the rivers. This became their paper, which was used as a medium for writing documents. The papyrus sheets were joined together and rolled on two rods to make a scroll. The Egyptians were the most intelligent and creative people of the time. Just to look at the pyramids and see how they were able to stack the large stones so high shows how intelligent they were at the time.

Moses probably personally recorded the history of the Jews in the book of Genesis as it was told to him. He did not compose the stories. He just wrote them for the first time the way that he heard them. I believe that God kept them accurate.

When Moses fled from Egypt, he went into what is today known as Saudi Arabia and lived with the descendants of Ishmael. The Saudis of today are the original Ishmaelites. Moses married an Ishmaelite woman who stayed with him for the rest of his life. The religion of Ishmael based in Mecca was already being practiced. The black altar that was built by Abraham and Ishmael was located in Mecca and has become known as the Kaba, which is the most holy place for the Islamic people. The religion of Ishmael was not the same as the religion of Islam. The teachings put forth in the Quran were all dictated by the Prophet Mohammed. Mohammed was not an educated man and never learned to read and write so he spoke the visions that the angel Gabriel gave him in the cave. Ishmael probably conformed to the religion of his father Abraham much more closely than does the Islamic religion of Mohammed.

Mecca is in the mountainous region of Saudi Arabia. It is much cooler than the desert areas and has fertile ground with plenty of water for raising food. It is likely the area where Moses spent his forty years of exile from Egypt. At this location, he would have been telling the same stories that he recorded in Genesis in the Hebrew Torah. Versions of many of the Old Testament stories appear in the Quran. This may indicate that Mohammed had heard the stories from descendants of the Ishmaelites of Moses’ time. Mohammed was born and raised in the city of Mecca, which was the same city that Ishmael had founded.

One story in the Quran is different from the story in the Bible. The Bible tells the story of how God sent Abraham and his son Isaac up on the mountain where Abraham put Isaac on an altar. He was about to kill his son Isaac to as a sacrifice to Jehovah God. In the Quran this story is told as if the son was the elder son Ishmael and the God was Allah.

There is a grave in the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia that is marked Eve – The Wife Of Adam. It is not a custom of the Saudis to mark graves with a name so this marked grave is unusual. Since I was an infidel and the grave was a Muslim Holy Place I was not permitted to visit the grave even though I was at the entrance to the location. I asked one of the Muslims if he believed that this was really the grave of Eve. He said that he did believe this. I asked him if he believed in the flood during Noah’s time. He said that he did believe this.

I told him that when the ark landed when the flood receded it was in the area of Turkey. Since everyone who was not on the ark died and Eve was already dead and buried, who had come to Jeddah and marked her grave? He said he never thought of that. We never discussed this subject again.