The Continents Will Become One Land?
- stephenstrent7
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Where Science Meets the Doctrine and Covenants, for the Come Follow Me lesson Nov 17-23; Doctrine and Covenants 133-134
We are told in Doctrine and Covenants 133:23-24 and 26-27, that at Christ’s Second Coming, “He shall command the great deep, and it shall be driven back into the north countries, and the islands shall become one land; And the land of Jerusalem and the land of Zion shall be turned back into their own place, and the earth shall be like as it was in the days before it was divided…And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep.”
The summary at the beginning of the section states, “…the continents will become one land…” That is not what the scripture says. It states, “…the islands shall become one land…” and “…the earth shall be like as it was in the days before it was divided.” The assumption in the section summary is that “the islands” are continents, which is not necessarily the case.
So, what was the erath like “…in the days before it was divided”? I assume that verse is referring to one single verse: Genesis 10:25: “And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.” (This verse is repeated with slight variation in 1 Chronicles 1:19.)
This is a very simple verse, listing the names of Noah’s descendants, around 2000 BC. The Hebrew wordהָאָֽרֶץ ׃ (hā·’ā·reṣ), in this verse, means “earth” or “land”2, so the King James Version of the Bible is correct in translating the word as “earth”, but equally correct would have been to translate the term as “land”, but not as “the Earth”, meaning our planet. That Hebrew word for the Earth is ארץ (eretz), which usually means “the Earth”. If Genesis 10:25 is changed by replacing “land” for “earth”, the sentence has a whole different context: “…the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the land divided…” The King James Version of Genesis 10:25 is very strange and obscure. That same verse with “land” replacing “earth” is equally strange and obscure.
According to modern geology, all the continents of the Earth (the Hebrew ארץ, eretz) were at one time a single supercontinent called Pangea. It formed around 335 million years ago, by the collision of earlier continents: Gondwana, Euramerica, and Siberia, and began to break apart about 200 million years ago. The drifting apart of the continents is still ongoing, and the present continents are expected to merge back into a supercontinent in about 250 million years from now.3
So, the earth (land) being divided at the time of Peleg, 4,000 years ago, and its coming back together when Christ returns must not be talking about the tectonic movement of the continents, which involves millions of years. If the division spoken of in Genesis 10:25, was a tectonic movement involving the whole Earth in the lifetime of Peleg, say around on hundred years; Africa and South America, which are roughly 5,600 miles apart, would have been moving away from each other at the rate of 56 miles per year—a speed that people living in 2000 BC, and there were lots of them, would have noticed. If the Earth had been divided in the year of Peleg’s birth, which is why his father named him that, then the continents were moving apart at the rate of 15 miles per day!
I really have no idea what sort of division occurred in the land at the time of Peleg. Many biblical scholars have opined that it may have been some sort of political division, or maybe the linguistic division at the time of the great tower. In my opinion, given what we now know of continental drift, the statement in Doctrine and Covenants 133:24 is very likely a metaphor, much like the statement that the wolf and the lamb will dwell together (Isiah 11:6-9), or that Christ would gather His people under His wing (Psalms 91:4; Matthew 23:37; Luke 13:34)
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. Image of pangaea made by en:User:Kieff, Wikimedia Commons
2. Bible Hub: Genesis 10:25
3. Rogers, J.J.W. and Santosh, M., Continents and Supercontinents, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 146, 2004