Noah's flood: Did it really happen?

According to the Bible, Noah’s Flood was both universal and catastrophic, resulting in the wholesale destruction of both human and animal life on the Earth. But is it possible that it really happened? I will quote from the Old Testament

“In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened.”

Many Christians take this account of the flood as described in Genesis as the gospel truth. Others, however, wonder if the story of Noah isn't rooted in some more local and less globally catastrophic event—one memorable enough, however, to spawn a series of flood legends. Besides the Biblical story of the flood, other civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean area also had significant flood legends, including the Greeks (who has Zeus creating a flood to punish the wicked), and the Sumerians and Babylonians, whose flood legends also include a righteous family, and an ark filled with creatures (the Sumerian version even had the ark's owner, a fellow named Utnapishtim, who released birds to find land.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is, perhaps, the oldest surviving written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script. It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk (somewhere between 2,750 and 2,500 BCE—meaning ‘before the common era’ as an alternative to ‘Before Christ’).

This story took place several thousand years after Noah appeared on Earth. One of the stories included in the epic relates to the deluge. The essential story revolves around the relationship between Gilgamesh, a king who has become distracted and disheartened by his rule, and a friend, Enkidu, who is half-wild and who undertakes dangerous quests with Gilgamesh. Much of the epic focuses on Gilgamesh's feelings of loss following Enkidu's death however the eleventh (XI) tablet contains the flood myth that was mostly copied from the Epic of Atrahasis. Some aspects of the epic also seem to be similar to the story of Noah's ark in the Bible, and also parallel flood stories in many other cultures around the world, although it is a complicated matter to say what is the original inspiration for any of these, on which modern commentators have always been divided. The epic doesn’t go into much detail as to the depth of the deluge but it is suffice to say that when the rivers in that area overflowed, it is conceivable that the writer of the epic thought of the flooding of the plains as a deluge.

 

In 1999, two Columbia University researchers named William Ryan and Walter Pitman put out a book called Noah's Flood, which offered a tantalizing suggestion. According to them, the flood in question happened near the Black Sea around 7,000 years ago. At this time, their theory goes, glaciers left on the European continent from the last ice age melted, sending their runoff into the Mediterranean Sea. As the Mediterranean Sea swelled, it breached the land at the Bosporus Strait, near where Istanbul stands. This breach released a flood of water into a freshwater lake that sat where the Black Sea is today. This freshwater lake was quickly inundated with salty Mediterranean water (at the rate of six inches per day) and grew to the present size of the Black Sea within a couple of years—bad news for the humans whose homes and villages were situated on the shores of the former freshwater lake, and certainly memorable enough to be the basis for many a flood story.

Ryan and Pittman's flood theory appeared to get a major boost in 2000, when famed underwater explorer Robert Ballard discovered the remnants of human habitation in 300 feet of water, 12 miles into the Black Sea, off the coast of northern Turkey. Ballard also found evidence of the Black Sea changing from fresh water to salt water: Sets of freshwater shells that dated back 7,000 years, followed by saltwater shells that dated back 6,500 years. Somewhere between those times, it seemed, the Black Sea was born out of a freshwater lake and it was sometime during that period of time that Noah and his ark allegedly appeared on the scene. The catastrophic flood in the general area of the Black Sea doesn't live up, perhaps to the flood in Genesis, which says it extended across the entire Earth, until "all the high mountains on the whole heaven were covered." But a deluge of the scope and depth documented by the new study may well have seemed to its survivors in the ancient Middle East as though the waters had covered the whole of the Earth.

The enormous glaciers of the Pleistocene ice age began to retreat approximately 10,000 years ago, and the melting took several millennia. Researchers think that some of the largest continental-scale glaciers, as they retreated, created ‘ice dams’ that held back vast seas of melt water. When these dams broke, there would have been unimaginable inundations covering hundreds of miles. To those who were there when these dams broke, would think of the inundations as deluges that covered the entire world. Remember, they didn’t have any real idea as to just how large the world was. Their world would probably have covered no more than a hundred square miles in their minds. If there were ice-dam floods at the end of the last ice age, they would have occurred all over the world, and thus many faiths and cultures might have accounts of an ancient horrible deluge

According to the Genesis account, it indicates that much of the water came from inside the Earth. Even today large underground reservoirs of water and a surprising number of underground streams exist throughout the Earth. But in the pre-flood world of Noah, these were likely even more common.

In the book, In the Beginning written by Walt Brown, he refers to reservoirs of water under the surface of Earth prior to Noah’s time. He wrote about a time when the Earth was very young. He said;

“The Earth had a large amount of salty, subterranean water—about half of what is now in the oceans. This subterranean water was contained in interconnected chambers that collectively formed a thin, spherical shell. It averaged about 5/8 of a mile in thickness and was located 10 miles below the Earth’s surface.” unquote Most of our planet’s surface is covered with sedimentary rocks—those that are often deposited under water or associated with water. In some areas, sedimentary deposits cover the Earth to a depth of some five miles.

Now we all know that mountains are continually growing and what are high mountains today used to be small hills millions of years ago. So in effect, millions of years ago, the surface of Earth was a series of hills interspaced with plains and oceans. It has been said that if you could reduce Earth to the size of a billiard ball as representing present-day Earth, the ball would be as smooth as a billiard ball. And if you then enlarged it to the size of a softball, as representing millions of years ago with its hills and no mountains, the ball would still be as smooth as a billiard ball.

What this means is that if a flood occurred millions of years ago, the surface of Earth would be covered by water because there were no mountains on Earth at that time (only low lying hills) and as such, the amount of water needed to cover the surface of Earth would be much smaller than if the flood took place in Noah’s time.

Walt Brown has suggested in his book that the original flood that took place millions of years ago occurred as a result of the following;

“Increasing pressure in the subterranean water stretched the overlying crust, just as a balloon stretches when the pressure inside increases. Eventually the shell of rock reached its failure point. At the time of its rupture, the strain energy in the crust (in any area of the crust) would have been about 20 X 10 (10 followed by 29 zeros). Multiply that figure by 20 to get the total amount of ergs. When the volcano Krakatoa exploded in 1883 and the entire island vanished, the energy released from that explosion was only 8.4 x 10 (10 followed by 26 zeros) Multiply that figure by 8.4 to get the total amount of ergs.

“Failure began with a microscopic crack. Stress concentrations at both ends of the crack resulted in its rapid propagation at about 2 miles per second. (3.21 kilometers a second. Using 6,371 kilometers as the mean radius of Earth, two ends of the crack moving in opposite directions would meet at the other side of Earth in 2.13 hours ) As the crack raced around Earth, the ten mile ( 16 kilometer ) thick roof of overlying rock opened up like a rip in a tightly stretched cloth. The pressure in the subterranean chamber immediately beneath the rupture suddenly dropped to almost atmosphere pressure. Water (then) exploded with great violence out of the ten-mile deep silt which wrapped around the Earth like a seam of a baseball. Along this globe-circling rupture, a fountain of water jetted supersonically into and above the atmosphere. The water fragmented into an ‘ocean’ of droplets that fell to the Earth great distances away. This produced torrential rains such as the Earth had never seen before.” unquote

It must be remembered that this occurred millions of years ago, long before Man ever appeared on Earth and certainly long before Noah arrived.

Eventually, all that subterranean water that shot out of the water chambers beneath the surface of the Earth had to land somewhere on Earth. Most of it landed in the oceans which in terms of both lateral space and volume, exceeds the land size and mass at the surface of Earth. Brown went on to say;

“The rising flood waters eventually blanketed the water jetting out of the rupture although water still continued to surge out of the rupture. Global flooding occurred over the Earth’s relatively smooth topography since today’s major mountains had not yet been formed.” unquote

This would be the first and only flood that covered the entire Earth and it occurred millions of years before Noah was born. As to how the writers of the Old Testament concluded that the flood that was supposed to happen in Noah’s time took place on the 17th day of the second month in his six hundredth year is beyond my understanding. I think we call that poetic licence. Certainly, that aspect of Genesis doesn’t need to be elaborated on with respect to it being considered part of a larger fantasy.

If there was a second flood which took place in Noah’s time, did it cover Mount Everest which lies between Tibet and Nepal in southern Asia? That mountain is nine kilometers high. The waters from the worldwide flood of Noah's time would cover Earth to a height of about three kilometers if it ever went that high. That being so, it follows that the so-called flood in Noah’s time didn’t cover the entire Earth. To have done so, as much as almost a thousand million cubic kilometres of water would have had to be added to the Earth's surface in 40 days. And if it was, where did all of that water go after the water began to recede?

Mount Everest was formed prior to Noah’s time. We know this because its higher parts contain fossils of sea creatures and seashells, showing that it is made of rock that was once under water when Mount Everest was merely a hill after the first flood millions of years ago. As the hill grew in height, the fossils in the rock that gradually was created was slowly thrust upwards also.

Verses 19 and 20 of chapter seven of Genesis says; “And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the Earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.” unquote

 
A cubit was the length of one’s forearm. There was no way in which Noah could have measured the depth of the flood in the Himalayas, the Andes, the Rockies or the Alps since his ark didn’t float that far from where he first built it and that being as it is, whatever depth he concluded was fifteen cubits above solid rock, had to be somewhere in the Middle East. At the time the Noachian passages were composed, no one even knew other continents and their high mountains even existed.

The Taurus Mountain Range is a rugged chain that extends across southern Turkey to its borders with Iraq and Iran. The highest point (Mt. Ararat) is located in the Eastern Taurus range. This extinct volcano is 16,583 ft. (5,137m) high. It is believed by biblical historians that Noah's Ark landed there. For his ark to have settled on that mountain; it means that the water had begun to recede and there has been no conclusions by biblical scholars that it landed on the peak of Mt. Ararat. They believe that it landed on the side of the mountain. This means that if it landed on the side of the mountain while the water of the flood was receding, and if Noah took a sounding (a method used from time past to determine how deep the water was) it had to be somewhere in the vicinity of the side of the mountain. This being as it is, he couldn’t have rightly concluded that the world was covered by at least fifteen cubits of water since the peak of Ararat had to have loomed above him when he took the sounding unless he took the sounding when the peak of the mountain was immediately below him by fifteen cubits and that seems unlikely. If that was so, the writers of Genesis were wrong with reference to the depth of the water encompassing Earth since there were a great many mountains far exceeding Ararat that were south, west and north of Noah while he took his sounding from the side of his ark.

This is clear proof that the world was not entirely under water when Noah and his family were floating about on the waters of the so-called flood and the writers of Genesis were wrong in concluding that the entire Earth was covered by water to a depth of 15 cubits (20 feet) above any land beneath the surface of the water.

Now one of the most perplexing questions often being asked about Noah’s flood is, ‘where did the water of the flood go after it reached its zeneth?’

It has been said that the water on Earth today, if placed in square cubes that are one cubic mile in volume and piled one on top of another, the pile would reach the moon.  That is the amount of water that is on Earth at this present time. In other words, if that water could pour down onto the Earth from space, it would fill all the cracks, nooks and crannies, streams, rivers, lakes, seas and oceans and underground caverns and streams so what Noah had then would be what we have today.

However, if all the water that allegedly rose to the highest peak in Noah’s time because of the so-called 40 days of rain were poured back onto Earth, where would it sink to? It would simply rise to the level of Everest and remain forever at that depth. That is because it would have nowhere else to go. But Everest is over 29 thousand feet above sea level so it is not conceivable that there was a flood that rose above Everest or any other high mountain including Ararat. The water simply would have nowhere else to go. It would remain above the highest mountain and Mankind simply would no longer exist beyond the lifetimes of Noah and his family.

Of course, scripture tells of many past events for which there is little or no firm evidence, and correspondences between scientific evidence and scripture might just be coincidence. Writers of scripture may have used as a starting point real events they personally witnessed or heard about, then created a supernatural gloss onto them and as the stories were passed from generation to generation and from millennium to millennium, the story of Noah’s flood grew in size and depth until it finally stopped growing when Genesis was finally put to print. In other words, what started out as a bad rainfall, ended up with a planet that was entirely covered with water at a minimum of 29 thousand feet.

 

It didn’t happen. It is great stuff for a movie however but only if the movie is classified and recognized as pure fiction.