Noah's Flood
ŠLee Paul
According to the Bible, God said unto Noah, "Behold...I do bring a flood of waters upon the earth."
It is possible that no written words have survived as much skepticism or criticism as the story of Noah and the Great Flood. Barely a century ago, scholars dismissed it as a parable, believing that it was just another quaint old legend designed as moral fiber for mankind. They never suspected there might be some element of truth in the flood, or some way of proving its authenticity. But today, that evidence exists. Clues are everywhere and have been found in the most unexpected places.
Scholars now know that the story of a Great Flood is not confined to the Bible. Many cultures share a similar story. According to Greek myths, the gods flooded the world and destroyed the human race because of its wickedness. The Egyptian god, Osiris, was murdered by his brother, his body locked in a wooden chest and set afloat on the sea on the seventeenth of the month, the same day as that given for the beginning of the Biblical Flood. The Babylonian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, tells of construction of a great boat to protect both people and animals from the destruction.
All these ancient legends appear to have a foundation of truth. In fact, over 200 different cultures scattered around the world share the same basic story: a great flood covered the earth. For scholars to find proof of the Great Flood, however, was like trying to solve the greatest mystery story ever known. Nevertheless, some scholars believe they have solved it.
It all really began with a young British bank clerk named George Smith in 1872. He had been laboring for ten years piecing together and translating tons of 4,000-year old cuneiform tablets which were dug up in the old Assyrian capital of Nineveh near the Persian Gulf. The broken shards had been stored in the basement of the British Museum, and as an amateur Assyria-ologist, Smith donated his time working on the texts, occasionally publishing well-received papers on his labors.
As Smith worked on one section of a fragmentary text, which has since come to be known as the heroic Babylonian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, after its principal character, he noticed a line which sent chills up his spine..."an old man, Utnapishtim, took his family and all kinds of animals aboard the great boat, and the flood...." The next piece was missing.
Smith's hair stood on end. The Assyrian texts predated the Bible, and he thought the inscription could only mean one thing: proof of the Great Flood. But The Epic of Gilgamesh was only half recovered and all of it in fragments. Smith wondered if it were possible to find the rest of the text, and said as much in a series of articles, which lamented the misfortune that archeology and history suffered from the missing pieces.
The London Daily Telegraph finally decided to accept Smith's implied challenge. The editors offered a reward amounting to one thousand guineas for the missing pieces, assuming that no one would step forward to claim it. After all, they reasoned, the odds of finding just one of the tiny tablets in a ruined city full of broken tablets undergoing excavation was astronomical. It was a brilliant maneuver, and created a sensation tenfold more than they had expected.
But the editors of the Telegraph underestimated George Smith. Given sufficient financial reason (the one thousand guineas, which amounted to something like twenty-five thousand dollars at today's prices), Smith took the Telegraph up on their offer. In a matter of days, he was off to the parched wastelands of northern Irag, determined to find the missing pieces, if they still existed.
It wasn't as if George Smith was arriving at a virgin site. Everywhere he looked, the ancient city showed signs of extensive excavation. Some of the most brilliant archeologists of the time had been to Nineveh, and none had found the remainder of Gilgamesh. In fact, the celebrated French archeologist, Paul-Emile Botta, was still there. For amateur archeologist George Smith to find anything, it would take a miracle. He began digging, though, at the place he believed the other tablets had been found. Incredibly and against all odds, he eventually found the twelve missing tablets of the poem.
On tablet eleven of the now completely translated poem was the story of the Flood, almost exactly as it is recorded in the Bible. It suggested to many scholars that the Bible's authors had borrowed heavily from the Babylonian account. The Babylonian account contained the warning given to one person (Utnapishtim), the order to construct an enormous vessel to protect people and animals, the onslaught of destructive rains, the release of a dove and a raven to test for dry land, and the great boat coming to rest on the top of a mountain. The details were so exact, it seemed to confirm to many that Utnapishtim was just another name for Noah.
Although the Babylonian text was written around 2500 B.C., earlier fragments and versions suggested that the Great Flood story went as far back as an older Sumerian version dating from about 4,000 BC. The Sumerians, originally a nomadic people, migrated from the east and settled in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates around 3500 B.C. They kept 'King Lists,' and it was the discovery of these Sumerian king lists which fostered the belief of an ancient, great flood.
The Sumerian king lists divided Sumerian history into two basic periods: before and after the Great Flood. According to the king lists, the legendary Sumerian hero of the catastrophe was Ziusudra, and Ziusudra reigned during the pre-dynastic period, over a thousand years before the Babylonian text. Thus, the chronicles and heroic epics of the Sumerians and their cultural heirs, the Babylonians and Assyrians, all seem to regard the Great Flood as the primary event of their history.
In 1928, an eminent British archeologist did extensive excavations at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, located on the west bank of the Euphrates River. Sir Leonard Woolley, digging at the earliest levels of the site, uncovered what he considered to be evidence of the Great Flood. He dug through more than eight feet of "virgin soil" before he once again discovered pottery and flints. His discovery, like the discovery of King Tut's tomb a few years earlier, was staggering and well-received. But it has since been dismissed as Noah's Flood.
The Ur mud, although a flood deposit, was hardly that of the universal Flood of legend, said other scholars. It was found nowhere else, not even twenty miles away at the nearby city of Ubaid. It suggested that ancient Mesopotamian cities often suffered disastrous, but highly localized, floods from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Subsequent excavations at Uruk and Lagash on the east side of the Euphrates turned up similar deposits that settled during the same period. It led some scholars to suggest that when ancient Mesopotamians wrote of a great flood, they meant their own world, not the universal world. These scholars theorized that any catastrophic flood of the ancient cities would suggest to the inhabitants that the whole world was under water. Was the Great Flood, then, only a localized legend?
Apparently not. Although the Bible and The Epic of Gilgamesh incorporate two independent accounts of the same event, they have enough inconsistencies to suggest that both stories might have originated from one single kernel of historical truth. Scientists know that only a few feet of snow or a few days of rain can destroy a city. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after only two days of rain, the Potomoc River rose forty-six feet, killing twenty-five people. What would have happen if it had rained for forty days and forty nights as the Biblical deluge had? When rivers burst their banks or tidal waves sweep onto land, there is the power of flood.
The Bible said that "all the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened. All the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered." It said the waters prevailed fifteen cubits upwards, raining forty days and nights. At a depth of fifteen cubits, the highest mountains on earth would have been covered with more than twenty feet of water. It took more than a year for the waters to subside. Biblical scholars have estimated that the deluge would have killed one billion humans and thirty-five trillion animals.
And they say that it is exactly what God intended---to erase a wicked, violent world.
In studying the Genesis Flood legend, scholars discovered it was not simply the study of one local tradition. Every continent told the same amazing story of an ancient flood. Even the evolutionary scientists were puzzled by this consistency. How could Australia and South America have the same legend as Mesopotamia?
In India, for instance, the legend said a fish told a man to build himself a boat, and when the flood receded, the man found himself on top of a mountain. The African legend told of a rainmaker causing a great flood to destroy the wicked people. Some Native American tribes have an origin myth about a great snow that melted and caused a great flood to cover all the trees and Rocky Mountains; the animals were all saved because a man put them in his canoe.
Clearly, if anyone was going to find the Great Flood of the Bible, scientists would have to search for a source of water that could have flooded the entire planet, not just selected portions of it. They found it in melting ice.
As the geologists explained it, the earth's axis had shifted many times, most recently between about 8,000 and 15,000 years ago. The obvious consequence of such an action would have been a dramatic change in atmospheric conditions. The polar ice caps, suddenly transposed to the temperate belt, would melt, and the level of the oceans would rise accordingly. Volcanoes would erupt, suddenly filling the skies with ash. This protective canopy of vapor would react like a greenhouse ,and the resultant condensation would cause torrential downpours. The entire earth would be exposed to the full fury of waters above and below the earth...just as recorded in the Bible.
The scientists estimated that when the last ice age melted, the oceans rose 300 feet. They have also theorized that this could have happened very rapidly and was the basis for Noah's Flood. And they cite effects on North America from the melting polar ice to prove the global flood theory.
When the ice cap had thinned out considerably, it seemed to have collapsed and produced a giant flood down the Mississippi Valley. It also created giant floods in the western United States. According to Dr. Henry Morris, an expert in geology and the flow of water, and the founder of the Institute of Creation Research at San Diego, California, the earth's crust, from both above and below, was eroded, transported, and re-deposited. It was destroyed in its original form and a new world emerged after the flood.
Dr. Morris reports that wherever one looks all over the world---in the mountains, the valleys---there is evidence of a flood. The entire geological column speaks of catastrophic, hydraulic burial, and this is a flood. He points to the Grand Canyon as one dramatic example of rocks telling the story of flood. Not only in the Grand Canyon, but all over the earth, sedimentary rocks are found in great thicknesses. Further, there is no worldwide time gap or deformity deposited in the sediments, indicating the existence of one single world-wide event...the Flood. As the floodwaters receded, the canyons were quickly carved in the soft sediments. The present Colorado River just simply does not have enough energy in it. There is not enough energy in the dynamics of the water to cut that Canyon even in a trillion years. In other words, the only way you can have that Canyon is for there to have been soft sediments and a tremendously greater quantity of water than there is now, which started as a large mud crack or opening in the uplifted soft sediments. The whole Colorado plateau area, and that Canyon going through it, really speak of catastrophism and not of uniform materialism.
The fossil record also shows a universal global flood. Worldwide fossils of animals and fish have been found buried in swimming positions---suddenly and catastrophically preserved in a moment of time. Rhinos, zebras, and hippos have been found buried in volcanic ash in Nebraska in swimming positions. The Beresovka River mammoth of Siberia was discovered half-kneeling, half-standing with buttercups in its mouth. In Scotland, tons of fish have been found in positions of terror with their fins extended and eyes bulging. Another fossil graveyard in Germany shows a mixture of plants and insects from all climatic zones. When these kinds of fossils are found together, it is usually indicative of global flooding and rapid burial.
Other independent geologists have found evidence of the Great Flood, too. One geologist went to Mt. Ararat four times searching for Noah's Ark, and confirmed that the mountain was once covered with water. Finding great volumes of salt at 14,000 feet, he determined that the water level had to have been much higher than 14,000 feet. Furthermore, at 13,000 feet he found conglomerate rock, which he said was rounded and formed under water. He also found pillar lava all up and down the mountain. Pillar lava is a unique formation that occurs only when molten lava emerges from the earth below water and is quickly frozen. This alone indicates that it was once under water. He could, of course, have been off by a million years, if it weren't for the folklore legends of the Great Flood.
In the early 1970's, by measuring oxygen isotopes in the mud of the Gulf of Mexico, a professor of geology at the University of Miami discovered that almost 12,000 years ago, fresh cold melt water suddenly flowed across North America into the Gulf. Professor Cesare Emiliani further reported that a sea level rise in the Gulf would have created a catastrophic effect on the entire world's oceans. He estimated the peak flooding down the Mississippi Valley during the ice melt to be ten, perhaps twenty, times larger than peak flooding during any historical times.
Emiliani's theory was confirmed when Florida scuba divers found human skeletons in a cave dwelling under water. Warm Mineral Springs, a popular health spa, contains a 250-foot deep sinkhole. In this sinkhole, divers stumbled upon an ancient community, proving that it was at one time dry. Sonny Cockrell, a Florida state underwater archeologist, found an 11,000-year-old human skull perfectly preserved by the oxygen-free mineral water. His discovery offered a possibility that the Indian was a witness to the rising of the oceans at the end of the ice age.
Geologists now believe the collapse of the ice cap was, in some places, devastating. When glacial Lake Missoula broke through a huge ice dam, parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana were scoured by a 1,000-foot high wall of water in a single day. Was this Noah's flood? Possibly, but the experts really don't know.
There are some who theorize that Noah's Flood preceded the melting of the ice cap. They point out that at times there was a lot more ocean water on land because the capacity of the ocean basin was smaller. Putting more water into the system during those times would definitely create a "great flood." In fact, Northern Europe was flooded about thirty million years ago, and Italy didn't even exist---it came out of the ocean relatively recently. Any kind of additional water, therefore, becomes suspect for a universal flood. But was it Noah's Flood?
It is said that if Noah's Ark were found tomorrow, believers would say, "We told you so," and skeptics would still doubt. There is a curious coincidence, though. The collapse of the ice cap, the flooding of the Florida Indian caves, and Plato's story of the sinking of Atlantis all have the same date...approximately 11,000 years ago. Although the scientists are divided, they do agree on one fact: through 200 generations of folklore and legend, mankind has retained the memory of a prehistoric, universal flood