06.29.07

The Days of Peleg book review

Posted in reviews at 12:09 pm by Administrator

Truth be told, there aren’t too many creationist novels out there that I know about. The Days of Peleg by Jon Saboe is the only one I can remember actually reading that bases its story in the pre Abraham period of Genesis. That being said, the story is excellent. For those sick of suspending disbelief in favor of monkey to man nonsense, The Days of Peleg provides a refreshing relief, an oasis in a desert of secular superstition. It’s also a nice complement to the creationist nonfiction material, since it takes charts and graphs and scattered genealogies, and molds a narrative around them, painting a story that draws them all together.

The Days of Peleg centers itself on the man in the title, Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided. It is over a hundred years after the “Great Awakening,” and the secular city/state Peleg hails from selects him for an expedition to chart the unknown continents. The world depicted is in stark contrast to primitive picture created by evolutionists, and the sophistication of the ancients is revealed in every chapter, based on real world archeological evidence from around the globe. But in his adventures, Peleg finds not only resourcefulness, but also an array of beliefs. As a believer in objective knowledge, he continually attempts to sift out the fact from the myth while mapping the distribution of the human race after the “Great Awakening.”" Anyone who has studied OOPArts should be pleased with the story, with its many expected and unexpected tributes to the archeological field, but creationists will be particularly happy with how it is all weaved into the framework of the first chapters of Genesis.

The tale is epic and globe spanning, and the style used by the author allows for many perspectives. Peleg is of course the primary point of view character, but the narrative often spans multiple perspectives. It took me some getting used to, since I usually read books that have a “strict” third person style, but the switches between characters works well for what the book set out to do. My primary gripe is that the text contains its share of typos; specifically the types that go unnoticed by a computer spell-check. Despite that, I could still tell what was meant, and the rest of the book flows quite nicely. Saboe’s writing style is such that I couldn’t get bored. Everything flowed well enough that I hardly ever checked to see how many pages were left in the chapter (I have a habit of doing that to see how much further to a break point). Another minor point is that certain portions and themes of the story require huge amounts of speculation, but that was necessary for storytelling purposes, and for the most part cannot be said to be impossible. Many of these speculations get the mind wondering if something like that really could have taken place, however. Saying what in particular I’m referring to would spoil the story, though. Finally, certain sequences of events might be a little out of order, but that depends on which model you choose to use. It did get me to rethink some aspects of my model.

The story has a great deal of variety, and some characters will probably get you by surprise. One character I was expecting (hoping) to make a showing, and I wasn’t disappointed. In all, the more than six hundred pages, including appendixes, were well worth the twenty dollars. The book was thoroughly enjoyable, yet it is certainly not meant for creationists or even Christians alone. The research and reasoning that went into the whole package is something that anyone should appreciate. At the very least, it is a fun adventure that can be enjoyed just as much as a good science fiction or historical fiction novel.

The Days of Peleg homesite: http://www.daysofpeleg.com/

[edit: There is now a new edition available that has had the typos fixed. See comments.]

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