The Six Days of Creation: The Garden of Eden, Dinosaurs, and the Missing Billions by Alexander Hool

The Six Days of Creation: The Garden of Eden, Dinosaurs, and the Missing Billions Reviews

• 
  Reuven Klein

  The Six Days of Creation: The Garden of Eden, Dinosaurs, and the Missing Billions (Mosaica Press, 2023) by Alexander Hool
  
  
  Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein (Rachack Review)
  
  By now, Rabbi Alexander Hool has already gained a reputation for wading into questions that nobody else feels like they can attempt to answer. In this work, he tries to deal with the age-old question of the age of the universe. Like many other books devoted to reconciling Torah and Science, Rabbi Hool is bothered by the wide gap between the billions of years that science claims has elapsed since the creation of the Earth and the mere ~5,783 years documented by traditional Jewish sources.
  
  Like his previous books, Rabbi Hool proposes an original and ingenious way of reconciling Torah Tradition with secular sources. This time around, he draws on scholarship in the world of physics — particularly Einstein’s Theory of Relativity — to draw a distinction between fundamental time and general time. Based on that distinction, he argues that during the Six Days of Creation, time was stretched to amount to what we would nowadays consider a long duration of time than merely six days. This explains why some elements of cosmology and the earth sciences seem to point to the notion that the Earth is 13.8 billion years old. Rabbi Hool then demonstrates how traditional Jewish sources were already aware of the notion that the universe was expanding, but notes that according to those very same sources this expansion stopped during the Fifth Day of Creation. Later on, Rabbi Hool discusses the idea that dinosaurs once roamed the earth, and likewise argues that these giant reptilians went extinct on the Fifth Day of Creation.
  
  In this intriguing work, Rabbi Hool also engages in Jurassic paleogeography and the study of plate tectonics to discuss how the earth’s continents may have looked in Biblical Times (Pangaea). He does this in order to shed light on where the Garden of Eden might have been located, how the Holy Land was located at the geographic center of the world, and where the gold of Ophir might be found. Overall, Rabbi Hool shows great familiarity with scholarship on geography, geology, archeology, astrophysics, and other fields of science. His arguments are sound and well-formed, but it would take a real expert on these topics to truly assess the accuracy of what he presents. Whether or not what Rabbi Hool proposes is factually or historically correct, his charming book is chockful of information on the Bible’s creation story and how it collides with or merges with the findings of contemporary science.