Division and Sway
Since the Tucker Carlson interview of Mike Huckabee dropped, reviews and commentary broke out from both sides in the nature of dozens of podcasts and dozens more articles. In this debate, nothing seems right down the middle. It divides into two clear groups essentially both in the Republican Party or Libertarian. It’s also very religious. Many Jewish podcasts swooped in, somewhat for Huckabee, but mainly against Carlson. Several evangelical Christians defended Huckabee too, but then many either religious or secular podcasts, people, and organizations defended and supported the position of Tucker Carlson.
Carlson himself has a lot of sway with a significant number of people. This can be seen in the comment section of his podcast. When I say this is religious, Carlson has Roman Catholics and Reformed or mainline Protestant denomination podcasters. He also embraces people who are just kooks, who don’t know what they’re talking about at all. Here in the Midwest, your average young redneck male, and I say that affectionately, superficially related to the Bible, cheers on Tucker and might even hate Mike Huckabee. They see the pro-Israel side as the neo-conservative, traditionalist, or Baby Boomer position, which will die someday soon.
Generational and Biblical
Some of the support for Tucker is a combination of economic, ethnic, and racial. Young men especially feel disenfranchised and blame it on Israel. Jordan Peterson would say, make your bed, clean your room, and stand up straight. Stop blaming other people. Get out there and work. Learn how to approach and interact with young women. Carlson sympathizes with these people. His children are about their age and maybe that generation seems like they’re getting the short end of the stick. These are mainly Generation X, Y, and Z, so after the Boomers. It’s the generation after those presently in charge and beyond that — think J.D. Vance and younger.
You can tell how much knowledge people have, mainly men, when they say that the Christian Zionists position comes from dispensationalism, which, they say, started in the 1920s or others guess sometime in the 1800s. Many include with that, “Left Behind,” the rapture, and something, they think, based on endtime prophecy. It’s new and very weird, they’ll say. And then laugh, which is their best argument: laughter. In fact, their position doesn’t take the Bible literally and is fundamentally based on either biblical ignorance (they’ll say they don’t understand it many times) or surely what they heard someone else say, not their own Bible reading or study.
Nick Fuentes represents what a lot of Tucker’s side thinks. He’s professing Roman Catholic, who in no way believes and practices the Bible, either in his thinking or how he lives. Essentially, he’s on team Pope and that’s where his loyalty lies. Fuentes says that men such as myself worship Israel and worship the Jews. He uses that exact language, which is warped to an extreme degree. No, men like myself take the literal and historical view that is separate from the allegorical, mystical approach to the Bible like Roman Catholicism, which I call the Gumby doll approach, twisting scripture. It’s even worse than that.
Segment on Christian Zionism
Halfway through the interview, Tucker started attacking Christian Zionism, at the same time saying he wasn’t an expert on it and just wanted to learn. First, he confronted Huckabee about the land, indicating that he wondered about the borders in light of Genesis 15. It was a difficult question for Huckabee in his political situation, because Israel has far less than what God promised. Second, he asked, who were the descendants of Abraham, who were recipients of God’s promises to His seed?
Tucker Carlson sees a conspiracy in the world, where Israel usurps the sovereignty of the United States, even manipulating a giant segment of the population with a wacky Christian Zionism. Instead of America First, which is Christian, these dupes are Zion First, which is Jewish. Perhaps there are a few evangelicals with too much loyalty to Israel, but it’s exaggerated exponentially by Carlson. Jews didn’t give Christians their eschatological position, called premillennialism. This goes back to the New Testament. You can also read it in the earliest Patristics before the beginning of Roman Catholicism.
In fact, the theological basis for anti-Israel and replacement theology arose from Roman Catholic theologians, who conformed their positions to the state power of Christendom. This is the novel position. It is worse than wacky, because it aligns itself with the ultimate conspiracy against God in a one world, globalist church. That is how everything will end. It too though is an eschatological position. The only way to get it from the Bible is by a mystical reading of it into the text of scripture. The authority is humanly derived, based on human traditions, very much like the apostasy of Israel at the time of Christ, leading to the Roman conquest in 70 AD.
Israel and Stonehenge?
Besides saying that today’s professing Jews in Israel were not the descendants of Abraham, Carlson said that the identity of the native British at Stonehenge predated Abraham. Huckabee never challenged Carlson on that and I do not know why. Why? I can only speculate. He just didn’t, which shows biblical ignorance on his part of something fundamental in a grammatical-historical interpretation of scripture. My guess is that Huckabee has been long under the influence of secularism, surrounded by government people. Abraham predating Stonehenge is rudimentary, like learning the A-B-Cs.
God separated the people at Babel in Genesis 11. He did it by confusing their languages. Does Huckabee believe this? I hope so. So then why not say it? This was shortly after the universal flood and Noah’s son Shem was still alive when this occurred. As much as God chose Abraham and his descendants and gave them the land, he follows a line of Noah and Shem that goes even further back to Enoch, Seth, and Adam. Relying on a literal, no-gap interpretation of the Masoretic Hebrew chronology found in Genesis 11, here is the breakdown of the ages and the evidence he provides.
The Ages at the Call of Abraham
According to the timeline:
- Noah: He was deceased. Noah died two years before Abraham (Abram) was born. Therefore, by the time God calls Abraham in Genesis 12 (when Abraham is 75), Noah had been dead for 77 years.
- Shem: He was approximately 465 years old. Shem lived a total of 600 years (100 years before the Flood and 500 years after). He was very much a contemporary of the Patriarchs.
The Evidence and Logic
The primary evidence for the dating of the events of Genesis, so that period of history, is the continuity of the patriarchal line as presented in the text. The dates provided in Genesis 11 are intended to be taken at face value to show how the godly line preserved the knowledge of God.
The Overlapping Generations
The overlap between these figures was God’s way of ensuring the history of creation and the Flood remained living history.
- Shem as the Link: Shem was an eyewitness to the pre-Flood world.
- Direct Testimony: Because Shem lived until Abraham was 150 years old, Abraham could have spoken directly to Shem. This means the account of the Flood wasn’t ancient folklore to Abraham; it was a first-hand account from his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
Rejection of Chronological Gaps
Many modernist, liberal academics suggest gaps in the Genesis 11 genealogy, using the meaning of “begat” or “fathered,” making it mean “became the ancestor of,” which the language of Genesis belies. How?
- The Math: The specific ages given (e.g., Arpachshad lived 35 years and begot Shelah) are too precise to allow for missing generations.
- The Purpose: The precision is there to provide a strict biological and chronological bridge from Noah’s sons to the birth of the nation of Israel.
The Table of Nations
The “Table of Nations” (Genesis 10) alongside the “Account of Shem” (Genesis 11) prove that the world was being rapidly repopulated. While the lifespan of humans began to drop sharply after the Flood (from 900+ to 600, then 400, then 200), Shem remained a “living monument” of the previous era during Abraham’s early life.
| Person | Status at Abraham’s Call (Gen 12) | Logic |
| Noah | Dead (for 77 years) | Died 350 years after the Flood; Abraham born 352 years after the Flood. |
| Shem | Alive (~465 years old) | Lived 500 years after the Flood; survived until Isaac was 50. |
| Terah | Alive (145 years old) | Abraham’s father; died at 205 in Haran. |
Naturalistic Worldview
Where does Tucker Carlson get the idea that Stonehenge predated Abraham’s call? It comes from speculation related to a naturalistic worldview. One cannot take seriously the Abrahamic covenant as it relates to the identity and veracity of the inhabitants of Israel and mix in a secular view of Stonehenge. Completely naturalistic and bereft of a biblical worldview and a grammatical-historical approach to Genesis, archaeologists and geologists generally divide the construction of Stonehenge into three main phases:
- Phase 1 (Earthworks): Started around 3000–2900 BC.
- Phase 2 (Timber/Burials): Roughly 2900–2600 BC.
- Phase 3 (The Stone Circles): The iconic sarsen stones were erected between 2600–2400 BC, with modifications continuing until 1600 BC.
True Dating with Biblical Presuppositions
With the biblical dating for the Flood (BC 2348) then, a significant overlap problem arises: Stonehenge would have been built before the Flood. Under a literal biblical worldview, any structure built before the Flood would have been destroyed by the global cataclysm. Conservative scholars with a biblical worldview provide two main arguments about dating conflicts.
- Fluctuating Carbon Levels: They argue the Flood significantly altered the Earth’s carbon cycle (burying vast amounts of carbon in fossils), which causes Carbon-14 tests to return dates that are “too old” for post-Flood objects.
- The “Intelligence” Factor: Instead of a slow climb from the Stone Age, the literalist view holds that humanity started highly civilized and then lost technology in some areas due to the isolation caused by the confusion of languages.
The Bible provides a specific chronological marker for the dispersion in Genesis 10:25:
And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided.
The ideas of Stonehenge came from the apostatized descendants of Noah through the line of Japheth. The confusion of languages occurred at Babel occurred on BC 2247. Abraham’s call was on BC 1921. How long would it take for this dispersion to occur and civilization on the British isles significant enough for the building of those pagan stones?
Stonehenge Later than Abraham’s Call
Post-Babel Migration
With the Babel dispersion at 2247 BC, Mizraim’s descendants (Genesis 10:6) would have reached the Nile delta within decades. By the time Abram arrives in Egypt in Genesis 12:10, Egyptians have a Pharoah and a developed court system. This “Old Kingdom” of Egypt was new, meaning the time of the Great Pyramid close to the period of Abram’s arrival there. The British isle was a fringe of the post-Babel migration. Japheth’s sons moved toward Europe. Scripture has names in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, but nothing about the people.
Stonehenge at best was a work in progress by the time of Abraham’s call in Genesis 12. God didn’t call Japheth’s descendants to the British Isles. They were idolatrous rebels against God, moved there as part of punishment for their idolatry and disobedience to God’s mandate to replenish the earth. They would have known this since Shem, one of the inhabitants on the ark, received that instruction directly from God. He was still alive at their dispersion.
Completion of Stonehenge Must Be After Abraham’s Call
As tribes moved North and West from Mesopotamia, they were early explorers. To make it to Britain, they would do something actually very new in their experience: build small boats, launch them, and then navigate them into the great mystery of the English channel. How long would it take for them to get to this northern shore of Europe, decide to leave those shores, get that done, and then come together into their new civilization? Then with their advanced masonry skills, start and complete those gigantic sarsen stones and move them into a very intricate pattern? At best for Tucker Carlson, they completed them around the same time as Abraham’s call.
The Stonehenge monuments served as calendars to track the changing seasons of a post-Flood world. The Earth’s climate had radically shifted after the “fountains of the great deep” broke up; the builders used the sarsens to re-establish a reliable agricultural and sacrificial cycle in a new and harsher environment. They weren’t in Mesopotamia anymore and they experienced increasingly shortened lifespans. It is unlikely they built them before Abraham’s call and much more likely at least fifty to over a hundred years later, considering the Bible chronology and the timeline.
Defense of Rights to a Land
How does a defense of the British Isles compare to one for the descendants of Abraham from Shem? It is very different in nature. The people who built Stonehenge might claim that soil, but not on bloodline. It’s more like the American Indians. Abraham’s physical descendants received their land from God for the purpose of fulfilling everything that the Bible teaches. God was committed to this endeavor to the extent that He sent these same people into Egypt for their preservation and then delivered them 400 years later. He worked in a sovereign and miraculous way to conquer the Canaanites forty years after that.
The world still operates according to God’s will. Someone can still read the Bible and know what that will is. The land promises to Israel still were not fulfilled at the end of the Old Testament. Jesus is still with that program in Acts 1. Peter backs this up in his sermons in Acts. Paul reinforces it in Romans 9-11. A literal interpretation of the Apostle John’s Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, which fits all the other prophetic passages of the Old and New Testament, also stays with this message for Israel. Agreeing with this is agreeing with God.
America First and Israel
The next question of Tucker Carlson to Huckabee relates to being America First and not Israel First. Dave Smith, the seemingly self-loathing Jew who hates Zionism, did a whole program after the interview, calling Mike Huckabee a traitor. Whether that’s true or not depends on whose view of the world is true. Carlson does not believe in blessing for those who bless Israel. Neither does the very secular Dave Smith. It comes down to believing the Abrahamic covenant in a literal way. One can hear from Tucker Carlson that he somewhat gets this. He opposes it, but he gets that it exists.
If Huckabee’s view of the blessing promise in Genesis 12 for those who bless Israel is true, then he’s no traitor. If his view is false, then Carlson and Smith are traitors. That’s how it seems to sort out. I wouldn’t call Carlson or Smith traitors, because they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re ignorant of the Bible’s teaching on this.
More to Come