In 2014, two researchers from the Paleontological Museum in Argentina made a sensational discovery. In the far south of the country, in Patagonia, they came across enormous bones belonging to an animal from the group of Titanosaurs. After further excavations, they realized that they had uncovered a previously unknown species of dinosaur. With an estimated length of 37 meters and a weight of 70 tons—about twelve African elephants—it was one of the largest dinosaurs ever to walk the Earth.
Discoveries like this often raise the question of whether believing Jews might feel shaken in their faith: do fossils, dinosaur and mammoth bones—estimated to be millions of years old—not directly contradict the Jewish timeline?
At first glance, there appears to be a discrepancy between Judaism and science regarding the age of the world. Scientists estimate the Earth to be about 4.5 billion years old, while the Jewish calendar counts the year 5786 since the Creation of the world. And according to the Talmud (Sanhedrin 97a), the world as we know it will exist for only 6,000 years in total. How did rabbis throughout history explain this difference?
An intriguing explanation is found in a lecture delivered by Rabbi Yisrael Lipschitz (1782–1860) in 1842, later published under the title Drush Or HaChaim. Lipschitz, who lived in Danzig, was one of the leading Ashkenazic rabbis of his time.
In his lecture, he referred to the discovery of an almost completely preserved woolly mammoth in Siberia. It was recovered in 1806 by Michael Friedrich Adams and brought to St. Petersburg. Adams later published a detailed travel report that drew international attention. Around the same time, the first dinosaur skeletons were being scientifically described. The bones pointed to enormous, extinct creatures—suggesting great antiquity.
Did God make several attempts to create our world?
Rabbi Lipschitz wondered where these remains came from. To him, they seemed not to belong to our world. He cited a cryptic Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 3:7), which teaches that God created and destroyed several worlds before creating ours. This does not mean that God “needed multiple tries” to make a perfect world—there are profound Kabbalistic interpretations explaining why it was meant to happen this way. Rabbi Lipschitz explained that some worlds were utterly destroyed, leaving nothing behind, while others were only partially destroyed. The fossils and skeletons unearthed by scientists, he said, were remnants of those earlier worlds.
According to this view, the age of dinosaur skeletons—estimated by scientists to be up to 145 million years—would not necessarily contradict the Jewish chronology. The 5786 years recorded in our calendar refer only to the age of our world as we know it, while previous worlds could have existed and been destroyed millions of years earlier.
A different perspective is offered by Rabbi Meir Leibush Weiser (1809–1879), better known by his acronym Malbim. One of the foremost rabbis and commentators of the 19th century, he directly addressed the paleontological discoveries of fossils and the scientific attempts to date the Earth as ancient. Unlike Lipschitz, Malbim did not believe these were creatures from previous worlds, but rather beings that lived before the Flood (Mabul). He also argued that the Flood itself made the dating of fossils unreliable.
To understand his reasoning, one must first know how the age of fossils is determined. The most commonly used method today is radiometric dating, which measures how much radioactive isotopes in a material have decayed. Because the rate of decay is constant, scientists can estimate the age of the material based on how much decay has occurred. However, this method cannot be applied directly to bones—it only works for up to about 60,000 years. Instead, the surrounding rock layers are dated.
Even in Malbim’s time, scientists determined the age of fossils based on the rock around them. And that, he argued, was the flaw: “During the time of the Flood, the earth opened its depths through violent tremors from the underworld and the great abyss, turning the lower layers upward and the upper layers downward.”
Malbim believed the Flood disrupted the Earth’s geological layers.
According to tradition, the Flood was not merely heavy rain or tsunamis—it was a massive geological upheaval involving boiling subterranean waters heated by magma that covered the Earth’s surface for 150 days. These enormous waters destroyed all living beings and vegetation (except for Noah and the animals on the Ark). Thus, Malbim believed that fossils and dinosaur bones that survived the Flood were exposed to extreme conditions, making any dating of their surrounding rocks unreliable.
Even modern radiometric dating assumes that decay rates have remained constant—and under normal conditions, they have. But if, as Malbim suggested, the fossils and rocks were once subjected to extreme heat and pressure, isotope decay would have been altered, making dating uncertain.
Malbim’s argument—that such dating methods might be unreliable due to the Flood—remains thought-provoking even today.
Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (1816-1893), who headed the renowned Volozhin Yeshiva for almost 40 years, also wrote in his commentary “Emek Davar” that dinosaurs lived before the Flood. Interestingly, he adds that dinosaurs were not a separate species, but rather hybrids of different species, which explains their monstrous appearance.
How long did Creation really take?
The two 19th-century rabbis did not deny the existence of dinosaurs. They simply believed that their existence does not contradict Jewish chronology. They understood the six days of Creation quite literally.
However, other Jewish scholars interpreted the Creation story differently. They questioned whether those six “days” were indeed 24-hour periods, noting that the celestial bodies were not created until the fourth “day,” making the earlier concept of “time” entirely different. Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad (1832–1909), known as the Ben Ish Chai, citing Targum Yonatan ben Uziel, wrote that human beings are incapable of comprehending how long the six days of Creation truly lasted.
Religion and science should not be seen as adversaries.
According to this view, there is no real contradiction between Judaism and science regarding the age of the Earth or dinosaurs. The six “days” of Creation could have spanned hundreds of millions—or even billions—of years. The 5786 years of our calendar begin only after those six days.
Religion and science should not be seen as rivals competing for truth, but as two perspectives that complement one another. In the words of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:
“Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” (The Great Partnership, 2011).
Today, the skeleton of the Argentinian dinosaur stands in the American Museum of Natural History in New York—in a hall named after Jewish philanthropists Ira David Wallach and his wife Miriam. The dinosaur, nicknamed “Máximo,” is so large that its head protrudes into the next hall, greeting visitors as they step off the elevator—a striking reminder that majestic creatures once roamed this Earth. But it is by no means proof against the biblical narrative.
