There is not such a thing as “Mt. Ararat” in the Bible! The Bible says that the ark rested in “the mountains of Ararat”. (My professor preferred “the hill country of Ararat.”) You’ve confused the scriptures with popular tradition.
Furthermore, nobody knows where the region was located. Nothing in the Bible implies modern day Turkey. The ancients had at least a half dozen
traditions for the ancient Ararat region.
Yet, even if there was a Mt. Ararat and even if the ark came to rest at the very peak of it (a bizarre notion in any case), how would that pose a problem??? Some lakes and seas are extremely deep. I’ve never understood why anyone would think that scenario would rule out a regional flood! Can someone explain that reasoning to me?
Consider the Dead Sea. The shores of the Dead Sea are around 1400 feet below sea level. That’s dry land more than a quarter of a mile below sea level! And the lowest point at the bottom of the Dead Sea is around 1000 feet below that! So just for the fun of it, let’s assume for the moment that Noah’s ERETZ was in that area of Israel and his village was where the shores of the Dead Sea can be found today. So if God wanted to flood Noah’s ERETZ (“land”) high enough to cover even a nearly half-mile high mountain, all he’d have to do is remove a few minor obstacles—and then let gravity do the rest. Not only would that flood and totally destroy everything in Noah’s ERETZ, that regional flood would remain to this day. No miraculous “flood containment walls” necessary!
By the way, because the Hebrew text simply says that the ark came to rest in a hilly or mountainous region, there is no support for the idea that the ark rested “on top of” some mountain.
Huh? Consider:
(1) Where does the Bible say that “hundreds of animals” was the quantity of animals on the ark? I’m curious how you came up that number. [As to the day-to-day logistics of animal maintenance, if one accepts the idea of a God who is powerful enough to control precipitation and “the fountains of the deep”, animal-tending would appear to be a minor matter. Young Earth Creationists have assumed since the days of Morris & Whitcomb’s 1962 The Genesis Flood everything from all animals going into a peaceful hibernation—thus, no food required, no waste disposal problem, and you can pack 'em into the ark like sardines! (Of course, even if food was necessary, recall the story of the never-emptying food supply of the widow and son who Elijah blessed with a miracle.)
In fact,it has always surprised me that Ken Ham doesn’t play his God-performed-a-miracle card more often than he does.
(2) Why couldn’t Noah’s ERETZ/region have hundreds of “kinds” of animals? I can’t imagine how one could make an anti-regional flood argument from that.
In fact, if these are the major points you are arguing, they sure would seem to me to operate to your disadvantage: totally destroying a “global flood” idea.
Simple:
(1) Noah was just a few generations after Adam. Thus, the population of “Image of God humans” who descended from Adam would be a modest number at that time. Seeing their genes passed down to all humans today poses no special problems that I can see. (Something like half of the males in Central Asia today carry the Y-DNA markers of Genghis Khan, who was being very fertile around A.D.1200.) So I’d be fascinated to hear more details about the problems you foresee that I’m missing.
(2) A theme in Genesis is that the descendants of Adam like to stay together in one place and not disburse as God wanted them to do. Of course, this is how people often tend to behave: they stay in their “home turf” and don’t spread out until resources dwindle. So why wouldn’t a few thousand (or even tens of thousands) of Adamic humans not all be found within one region? What’s the problem?
(3) Many would argue that other people groups which did NOT possess the Image of God (i.e., non-Adamic peoples) lived outside of the flood zone and that the same inter-mixing problem developed post-flood as before the flood: God’s people of the Adamic line intermarried with non-Adamic tribes.
Some read “Noah was pure in all of his generations” as meaning that he alone did not have “genetic contamination” of his ancestors intermarrying with non-Image-of-God peoples. Thus, the purpose of the flood (for which this text segment and what precedes it, which describes “the sons of God” mixing with “the daughters of men”, serves as the preface to the flood account) was to purify that Adamic line to its original state. Thus, there is no reason under that viewpoint to wipe out every hominid on the planet—just the impure members of the Adamic line.
Examples of such non-Adamic hominids would be the Nephilim, the Sons of God. Perhaps they were of larger stature. “Sons of God” is a very common descriptor in a great many cultures of tribes. People notice that the people of some neighboring tribe are larger and stronger, such that people fear them. They assume that those “giants” are the offspring of the gods. Think of the Titans of Greek mythology. Over time—like fish stories----the descriptions of large people get even bigger. Perhaps it started when a people averaging 5’ in height encounters a tribe where 5’10" is the average. After a few generations of storytelling, the tall and strong people become outright giants. So it is easy to conclude that they are the offspring of gods.
Anyway, keep in mind that there is no logical or genetic reason why all humans today could not be descended from a small group of people of a few thousand years ago----as long as one doesn’t claim that that small group of people was the ONLY set of ancestors. (Some claim that the “Image of God” in all people today is a “dominant trait” so that when there was intermarriage with non-Adamic people, the offspring carried the Image of God within them. So eventually, the human population of the earth became entirely Adamic because everybody inherited the Image of God from having at least one Adamic ancestor.)
Of course, I’m not saying that I necessarily personally endorse those interpretations of the Noah story. I’m just saying that your interpretations don’t fly because they confuse traditions with scripture and are unaware of the many varied ways Bible readers have understood those issues.
It is also worth pointing out that a key statement in the Hebrew text about the height of the flood waters is quite tricky to translate and an ambiguity of “punctuation” [I’ll not try to get into cantillation complexities] makes two readings possible. By the way, I mention height of the flood waters rather than depth because at that time it is doubted that the non-nautical culture had a Hebrew word for water-depth per se.
Let’s look at Genesis 7:20 in several translations:
New International Version
The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.
New Living Translation
rising more than twenty-two feet above the highest peaks.
New American Standard Bible
The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered.
King James Bible
Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
So you can see that there are two ways to understand Genesis 7:20.
I’ll not delve into a detailed exegesis of the Hebrew text and deal with the presence or absence of a major-stop. But there are two ways to read it:
(1) The waters rose to a height of 15 cubits. As a result, the hills/mountains were covered.
[The Hebrew word appearing in the text doesn’t distinguish between hills and mountains. English Bibles have tended to render the word with “mountains” but if Noah’s ERETZ was what we today would call the Fertile Crescent, those mountains were just modest hills. And remember: the author(s) would describe the situation according to the “world” known to him. He knows nothing of Mt. Everest and may have never seen any elevations taller than the modest “hill country” of his own experience in that ERETZ.]
(2) The waters rose to a height that surpassed the highest hills by 15 cubits.
Now which is more likely for a person with a basic sounding device (i.e., probably a weight tied to a rope and dangled off the side?) Will he measure the total depth of the water or will he figure out a way to find the tallest elevation in the area and take a sounding at that exact point so as to determine how much the depth of the water exceeds the height of the tallest point in the area? Obviously, #1 is far easier to determine and also makes a lot more sense in terms of the quantities of waters brought by 40 days and nights of rain.
When I’ve posted such regional flood observations on forums where Young Earth Creationist are present, they often make some of the most amusing objections, such as: “How do you explain the flood waters being restricted to one region to where such heights were achieved? Are you saying God performed a miracle by keeping the water from spilling out beyond the region? Did God make walls to contain the water? How did the waters pile up?” I ask them if they’ve never heard of lakes and seas, where waters accumulate to significant depths without anyone having to build walls to keep them contained! Of course, that’s why people who look for evidence of Noah’s Flood (such as Mr. Ballard, who discovered the Titanic wreckage) believe that the remnants of Noah’s Flood still survive as the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, or perhaps even the Mediterranean Sea. When it comes to “containing” the flood waters in one region, gravity and the well-known properties of fluids explains thing with no need for invoking miracles----although considering how liberally Young Earth Creationist are usually willing to apply miracles, I’m flabbergasted that they suddenly have difficulty in accepting the non-miracle of a localized flood! Go figure!—as my professor always liked to jest whenever he reflected on the self-contradictions of the YEC world.
Nevertheless, my main reaction (when I read protests like yours against the idea of a regional flood) is to wonder if you actually think Biblical scholars would be so casually unaware of the traditional arguments for a global flood. Yes, we have indeed read the Genesis text. And we do so in the original language, not just in the traditional English Bible translations. Furthermore, because we don’t automatically assume (as most YECs do) that the account is necessarily about an actual historical event, we have no vested interest in a global or local deluge. We are simply reading what is there in the text and trying to ignore what gets there purely as a matter of popular traditions. So if the Hebrew text described a global flood, I’d have no reason not to say so. And if it describes something else—which it most obviously does----I’m fine with that. It’s not my job to make the Biblical text more or less palatable to anyone.
{The following observation is speaking generically of Young Earth Creationist debaters in general—and is not meant as a potshot at George Brooks, whose participation here I greatly appreciate because he helps promote a lot of interesting discussions.}
Thus, it doesn’t really matter to me if someone accepts or rejects my reading of a regional flood. But it does amaze me whenever someone thinks that my conclusions from years of careful study of the Genesis text would be so easily toppled by a few shot-from-the-hip, cliched observations which previously had somehow escaped my notice.