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“What does the Bible say about ice ages?”

Weather and climate are two different things, a fact deliberately obscured by the Global Boiling true believers and those who make financial use of them.

Weather is short-term. It’s the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place. It happens today, tomorrow or next week. Ask me what the weather has been like this winter and I’ll answer that it’s been close to normal temperatures with perhaps a little more snow than usual.

Climate is long-term and big picture. It refers to the conditions that characteristically prevail across a region, not the outlying blips. Average out the annual temperatures and rainfall for the last hundred years, and you might start to have an idea what the climate is like where I live.

Climate Change in the Bible

Is there climate change in the Bible? That’s debatable. Certainly, we do not have a lot of teaching about it. We can observe that there were periods of famine now and then in various places, in one case as long as seven years. That was weather, not climate. After the famine ended, things went back to normal. The climate did not change, the weather did.

Then there is the Genesis flood. That was weather too. Forty days and forty nights of rain is a relatively short-term problem, however catastrophic it may be. However, if we believe Genesis, it was also climate change. There were major differences in human lifespan before and after the flood, and something happened to the “fountains of the great deep” that were opened at that time. Whatever that rather obscure phrase means, it was a water source in addition to the incredible rainfall. The result was permanent change to the post-deluvian environment. Some speculate that if our world has indeed experienced an ice age, it was the result of the after-effects of the Genesis flood.

Fact is, we weren’t there and we can’t say for sure. The great flood was a long time ago by human standards, and the effect of massive catastrophes is that they destroy all records and documentation.

An Ice Age in Job?

So is there anything in scripture that hints that an ice age may have occurred after the flood ended? The late Bernard Northrup believed there was. Northrup, who died in 2008, was a Christian Hebraist, Old Testament scholar and theologian who taught at several US seminaries and served as a translation consultant. He was a creationist and wrote a number of books, some of which you can still find online. He also believed in a literal flood catastrophe as scripture describes.

On this website, Northrup lays out the evidence for something that sounds like an ice age in the book of Job, one of the Bible’s oldest stories. Job is probably the most natural place to look for evidence of something that occurred thousands of years ago.

We do not know exactly where Job lived, but it’s a safe bet it was somewhere in the Middle East, where winter temperatures presently average around 50° F. The coldest winter on record in Israel’s last 74 years averaged 53.6° F. The coldest single day in that period was 29° F measured about ninety feet above sea level.

The Face of the Deep is Frozen

Something has definitely changed about the Middle Eastern climate since the story of Job began to circulate. Job contains multiple references to intense cold, a feature of the environment with which God obviously expected his audience to be familiar. One example:

“From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the frost of heaven? The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.”

That’s not snow at the top of a mountain or a couple of days of uncharacteristically chilly weather, things with which we might expect Job, Eliphaz, Zophar and Bildad to be familiar. That’s the sea freezing over, or at least a significant body of water, and doing it as a matter of course, not as some catastrophic exception to the norm.

For God’s argument to Job to make any sense at all, Job would have had to be familiar with the things the Lord described to him; for God to describe events that regularly take place at the North and South Poles would be entirely meaningless to Job and an unconvincing argument. But when would anyone in the Middle or Near East have seen even a small lake frozen over, let alone the sea? A day or two at three degrees below the freezing point would certainly not do it. There are no known records of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) icing over, let alone the Mediterranean.

Moreover, the Lord is saying this manifestation of frost and ice was not a one-off event but rather an ongoing pattern. It was climate, not weather. Job himself speaks of “torrential streams”, “dark with ice, where the snow hides itself”, again assuming his three friends had some idea what he was talking about. Er, where exactly?

Northrup documents numerous other verses in Job that strongly suggest he lived in a time that featured major climate differences from today’s Middle East.

Some Satisfactory Explanation

Now, of course, Dr. Northrup’s views about our world’s climate history are marginal at best. Numerous liberal Christians believe the Genesis flood was a local event and many even buy into the current views of mainstream scientism concerning the history of our world, however incoherent, oppositional and theoretical these may be. That said, any Christian who believes in the inspiration of scripture has to find some satisfactory explanation for more than a few verses in Job.

If the climate in the Middle East back then was vastly different than today’s, there has to be a reason. And if long-term climate change occurred, then perhaps so did an ice age. I’m certainly not prepared to dogmatize about it, but it’s definitely interesting.