You are thinking desert nomads. The area was lush enough to be home to agricultural settlers. Hint, think Garden of Eden.
Having to move would make it memorable. No need for people to have died.
Actually I walked 2 miles to school each way (through 2 ft of snow, bare foot, uphill both directions). But, that was over improved roads and I was probably better nourished.
Just curious your (or anyone else’s) perspective… do you think Genesis is claiming a worldwide flood? I guess I’ve never understood people claiming that Genesis account itself is trying to present a regional flood, given God’s subsequent promise… “Behold the rainbow, a sign of my solemn promise that I will never send a regional flood again….”?
No – in context, eretz there should be rendered as “known world”; I assume “known to Noah”, but literature-wise it might be “known to Moses” (or whomever you might think the writer was).
At most, Genesis is asserting that the waters covered the flat earth-disk all the way to the edges of the solid sky-dome.
It does sound funny put that way. But taking eretz in context, it would be “I will never send a flood of the known world again”.
As written, I think it could be read either way, global or regional. As understood by the original audience, with no knowledge of the globe earth, they would understand it to be essentially all of the “known universe.” I take the story to be a myth with a theological meaning. I say this because once you start to accept any part of the story as “true”, as in actually happened, you have to start laying on miracle after miracle. Not to say God can’t perform the miraculous, but that He wouldn’t just to make the story “true”. There is also the problem for the global flood that there is no evidence remaining, which there should be. There is plenty of evidence for possible regional floods that could fit parts of the story and one or more of these probably provided the basic idea for the story with details added to get the message across.
Still, then, I struggle then to understand the promise… God solemnly vows that there will never again be any local floods….?
Also, since you mentioned it (and please forgive my ignorance as geology was a field in science I never studied)… What would serve as evidence of a global flood? i.e., if there had been a global flood of the magnitude suggested by the story, what would we expect to find?
The point is God has a covenant with mankind and the earth to not destroy them with water. Of course there is a prophecy He will destroy the earth with fire. Fire and water are kind of opposites of one another.
It wouldn’t be geology. In terms of geologic time it is a blink from the supposed flood to now.
From biology it would be recent evidence for the spread of life from the Near East to the rest of the world. For example, finding remains of kangaroos outside of Australia. But the problem is the current biodiversity argues against a recent global flood, unless you want to invoke a miracle to create new life in the far flung places.
From archeology it would be evidence an established culture was destroyed in the right time frame and a new, different one arose in it’s place. AFAIK the YEC folks have never addressed this. Just an observation, but it seems when lay people read the OT they have their focus on Israel and don’t think about what happens elsewhere.
That’s where that went! lol… Since we are looking at this time period for a local flood, another candidate might be the Caspian Sea. You can see on this map that it was dry and “lush” like the Persian Gulf. Caspian Sea is also adjacent to Ararat.
All that melting ice from the north is what filled the Caspian Sea. Here is what Google AI has too say (My query – Was the Caspian Sea basin lush after the last ice age?):
AI Overview
Following the last ice age, the Caspian Sea basin was not consistently lush but experienced significant and dramatic climate and sea-level fluctuations
. The post-glacial period saw cycles of high water levels (transgressions), which would have created more humid, fertile conditions, followed by low water levels (regressions), leading to drier, arid landscapes.
Post-glacial wet period
- Wetter conditions (10,500–8,400 years BP): During the early Holocene (the current geological epoch), the Caspian Sea experienced a major high-stand, or transgression, reaching its maximum post-glacial level between approximately 10,500 and 8,400 years ago.
- Large-scale flooding: This wet phase caused coastal landscapes to shift, with the sea advancing significantly onto the land, flooding coastal areas, and expanding the sea’s drainage basin.
- Lush coastal ecosystems: Coastal areas were dominated by productive lagoons and extensive wetlands, which supported thriving ecosystems. Fossil evidence from these periods includes rich shell deposits and organic matter.
Mid-Holocene drying
- Increasing aridity (after 8,400 years BP): Following the high-stand, the climate became drier, and the Caspian Sea’s level began to fall significantly.
- Regressive phases: Research from core samples reveals a regressive phase with more arid conditions around 7,700 years ago, evidenced by oxidized sediments. The mid-Holocene (around 6,000–4,000 years BP) saw the expansion of drier habitats.
- Shrinking shoreline: As evaporation increased, the shoreline receded, and productive wetland areas began to shrink.
The cause of the dramatic shifts
The intense fluctuations in the Caspian basin’s moisture balance were driven by large-scale climatic forces:
- Ice sheet meltwater: During deglaciation (20,000–14,000 years BP), massive volumes of meltwater from the Fennoscandian ice sheet drained into the Caspian basin via the Volga River, causing a major transgression known as the Late Khvalynian.
- Westerly wind patterns: The flow of moisture from the North Atlantic carried by the westerly winds had a strong influence on precipitation in the region. Shifts in these atmospheric circulation patterns caused alternating wet and dry episodes.
- Drainage basin changes: Isostatic rebound, the rise of landmasses after the weight of the ice sheets was removed, also affected river courses and the size of the Caspian Sea’s drainage basin, further influencing water levels.
Earlier in this thread I suggested that it was regional on a worldwide scale:
Here is what the world looked like at the peak of the flood (85 Ma), all the “high hills” are covered and the outline showing where Mesopotamia (the biblical “known world”) was is completely flooded:
Here I agree. I really think these more recent local floods are kind of a flashback of the real flood. The “known world” is much bigger than it was, so there really would have to be a future global flood for God to not keep His promise. There is not enough water for that to ever happen.
There is no shortage of possible candidates. A few others that have been discussed here (and I remember).
The refilling of the Mediterranean after the MSC. The largest known mega-flood.
The local flood in the Indus Valley.
The filling of the Black Sea.
Take your pick and place your bets.
I’ve always thought an unusually large flood in Mesopotamia from the Tigris and Euphrates is the best candidate. The culture that gave rise to the flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh is from the flood plains of those rivers as well as the marshland where those rivers meet the ocean.
One reason I have always been partial to the Persian Gulf idea is the slowing encroaching sea would push the population up the river valley where they would end up at the current mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Now what kind of story do you think they would come up with in Mesopotamia after that?
The reason I have never found this to be an attractive idea is that the flood myth describes a sudden flood. There is every reason to believe that the Tigris and Euphrates had some pretty epic flooding from time to time, as is the case for any similar river system. The fact that the waters rise and then abate is another clue, IMHO.
Something like the myth of Atlantis might be a better fit since the civilization disappeared and never came back. There were certainly civilizations all over the globe that experienced the slow rise of the oceans as the glaciers melted, and the archaeological sites they left behind are very interesting.
It all depends on which parts of the myth you want to take as true. And given this is a myth there is no way to tell which details are correct, which are embellishments, and which are taken from other remembered floods..
Until modern readers come to grips with the fact that what we now call hyperbole is a real thing, and a real tool in ancient literature, the Bible will be full of all sorts of difficulties. Locusts covered “the entire earth” in one of the plagues of Egypt, or this or that people were completely destroyed (never mind that some of those various enemy tribes show up again in later scriptures) - one quickly learns that in the language of scripture (and even modern worship still today!) we can make emotive claims like “my God never fails me” or “my enemies are vanquished” or “my God always cares for me!” And we don’t suddenly retract such worship the moment we get sick or the moment a loved one dies or the moment some enemy remains “unvanquished.” We understand that there are just some expressions of worship that are devotional and can include what would amount to “worshipful hyperbole” if analyzed as some sort of technically precise claim. Facing that reality, one no longer loses sleep over wondering whether every last mountain over what we now call the globe was technically underwater or not.
I see the analogy of the flood to be when the asteroid hit Earth and made the Atmosphere a Flood of darkness. This is what made Dinosaurs extinct and killed other living things.
It also created all the Fossil Fuel Oil we now should be grateful for. It basically gives Us an almost free Resource of Energy.
Not really. You can accept there was a Noah and family, that they survived a big flood in a boat of some kind, and that the known world was wiped out, while taking the numbers and such as symbolic. Then it’s a case of someone taking a real event and framing it to shows “the rest of the story” – mythologized/theologized history.
No, the promise is to never have one that wipes out the known world again.
Good question! I nearly got a geology degree but this isn’t anything that was covered.
I’ve never seen it addressed either by YEC, though it has been touched on in a couple of books I read.
Yes – we see that set of blinkers operating frequently here!
I used to favor that option but do so less and less.
That’s where I stand now, ever since a couple of articles showed how nearly the whole region could have been flooded.
BTW, here’s another set of blinkers: people fail to read the text from the point of view of the people in it! To someone adrift on that flood, all the high hills would have been covered and all they would have seen was water until they bumped aground.
One where Tiamat and Leviathan fought the gods of the cities that got wiped out and stole the land for the sea that they ruled.
Absolutely – that’s a killer for most of the proposals, e.g. Black Sea.
One book I read linked that to the Flood stories.
In mythologized history it’s the core events that are the real ones. Then it’s an argument over just how much of it belongs to the core.
One writer suggested that the two accounts woven together in the Noah story were from two different events. I found the argument weak at best, but it was an interesting suggestion.’
That turns out to be standard language for war. Heck, we saw it in the twentieth century as Both Germany and Japan reported the total annihilation of some enemy force more than once!
The same is true of numbers – ancient societies didn’t view numbers the way we do; sure, they were used for calculations, but they were regarded as mystical and could thus be used symbolically (as we would label it) as a way of asserting the significance of events.
Most definitely.
Reading back through the Epic of Gilgamesh:
Shurippak - a city which thou knowest,
(And) which on Euphrates’ banks is set -
That city was ancient, (as were) the gods within it,
When their heart led the great gods to produce the flood.[clipping out portions for brevity]
I watched the appearance of the weather.
The weather was awesome of behold.
I boarded the ship and battened up the gate.
To batten up the (whole) ship, to Puzur-Amurri, the boatman,
I handed over the structure together with its contents.
With the flirst glow of dawn,
A black cloud rose up from the horizon.
So the city was on the banks of the Euphrates, and they were told to build a boat. Once the boat was finished a terrible storm came about and a great flood ensued. To me, that sounds like a flooded river.
Identifying Noah’s flood with Cretaceous sea level highstands has several problems. The Cretaceous highstands weren’t dangerous floods (too slow) and people weren’t there to be flooded. Noah wasn’t a dinosaur. But also the highlands of the Ararat region did not yet exist. Ararat itself is a quite young volcano, and the regional uplift did not begin until much of the Tethys Ocean seafloor had been subducted and Africa was closely approaching Eurasia, well into the Cenozoic. Comparing modern elevations with Cretaceous sea level is not meaningful in tectonically active areas. Even in relatively tectonically quiet areas such as southeastern North America and young (late Neogene to Quaternary) sea levels, there has been enough change in local elevation to make comparisons problematic in detail.
Carol Hill’s book A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture has a fairly detailed meteorological model of how to flood Mesopotamia with an unusual weather pattern. Heavy rains and persistent southeast winds would produce a lengthy flood of the extremely flat plains in the region.
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