Historical Genesis: Noah's Flood (S07, E05)

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason,

and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast, we are going through an eight-episode series looking at whether

Genesis should be taken as history or mainly as fiction.

In this seventh season of the podcast, we will look at different aspects of

what is known as primeval history,

the first 11 chapters of Genesis, and discover if the Bible's account of the

origins of the human race can be trusted.

Today, we dive into the topic of Noah's Ark and the flood of that time.

We will look at the Bible to see how it describes the flood,

as well as scientific and historic evidence to make the best determination on

whether the flood is a literal event in Earth's history.

Thanks for joining us as we dive into this discussion.

The first aspect that we're going to cover today is, was it a global or a regional flood?

And there are people on both sides and perspectives looking at it in this world.

So we all know from experience that there are regional floods,

that there is a times of heavy, intense rain where we have ponding that happens in yards.

We have overflowing rivers. We have the dams in Huntington that we have for

flood control measures, because that's what we experience.

And this is not a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a long time.

And the National Center for Science Education gets to study these sorts of things,

and they do see regional floods that have happened in Babylon,

the near eastern area where Noah would have been.

And in one of these instances, they see this type of thing.

They say, if the 3.4 meter thick layer of flood deposits in southeastern Mesopotamia

represents a huge flood of ancient times,

and if it is the remnants of the one described in the early Babylonian epics.

Then the authors of these epics were likely survivors who had lived in a village

on natural levees on the lower parts of either the Euphrates or the Tigris rivers

where the floodwaters covered their village.

Natural levees and adjacent floodplains for distances of 160 to 320 kilometers

so that no land could be seen and their whole world would have been underwater.

And so they're saying because of

these accounts that happened in a lot of ancient cultures about a flood.

They can perceive that they would understand it to be a worldwide flood because

of the area that they lived in, how deep the water was, and how vast it went.

And so they could see that it would be a localized regional flood in that way.

But it would have to be misinterpreted by those who are looking at what's going on.

They would have to be able to say, all right, it's as far as I can see,

and so it has to be a worldwide flood.

And so this is one explanation of what the flood of Noah's time was like.

But this does have some challenges, and the biggest challenge I would say to

this is what the Bible declares.

Because the Bible is very consistent in saying that it was not localized.

It was around the world. For instance, in Genesis 6, 11 through 13,

we read, Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence.

And God saw the earth, and behold,

it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.

And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh,

for the earth is filled with violence through them.

Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

And so here the phrase, all fresh, is used.

And it's hard to kind of reconcile that with just a small localized portion

of the word because it continues.

The next chapter, verses 20 to 23, says, the waters prevailed above the mountains

covering them 15 cubits, which is about 22 and a half feet deep.

And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock,

beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth and all mankind.

Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.

He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground,

man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens.

They were blotted out from the earth. only Noah was left and those who were with him in the ark.

And the concept here again is that Noah and the seven other passengers were

the only other living human beings on this planet.

We also have the mountains being

covered by at least 22 and a half feet of water, which is a lot of water.

Now, granted, the mountains of Ararat are, and this is today's estimate,

I don't know exactly if people would know how tall they were back then.

But the mountains of Ararat are 16,854 feet above sea level.

And I just know that if it's that high above sea level, like we're underwater

and almost everyone else is underwater as well.

Maybe the tops of the Tibetan range where Mount Everest is, maybe they're not

underwater, but it seems like everything is underwater.

And so the biblical account talks about it being a worldwide flood,

and it's not just in an Old Testament sense.

In the New Testament, this is how they understood the flood.

So Peter writes in 1 Peter 3, verse 20.

1 Peter 3:20

Because they formally did not obey when God's patience waited in the days of

Noah while the ark was being prepared in which a few, that is eight persons,

were brought safely through the water.

And so this is how Peter understood it as something that only eight human beings

survived this catastrophe.

So it's not necessarily just a localized flood. It seems to be a worldwide flood.

Lastly, if it was a localized flood, then some of Genesis would be wrong.

Because God said to Noah and to his sons, Behold, I establish my covenant with

you and your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with

you, the birds, the livestock,

and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.

It is for every beast of the earth that I establish my covenant with you,

that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood,

and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

And so we know that there are still localized floods today. There are regional

floods where you can see like the Mississippi Delta Basin is completely covered with water.

We saw what happened when Hurricane Katrina came on the United States in New

Orleans and the flooding that happened there.

It seems to be that God says, I won't do what I did here again.

But there are these regional floods that are still happening.

And so the biblical account seems to be pointing to a worldwide catastrophe,

and that's what the Bible is presenting as what happened in the days of Noah.

We have to either, A, go along with the biblical account and say it was a worldwide

flood, or we have to go with the regional flood constantly.

And think, all right, this is how they saw it.

Noah survived. It wasn't necessarily worldwide, but a lot of animals, a lot of people did die.

And the Bible isn't covering it in exact terms, but it's covering it in a metaphorical way.

People can think that there are truths in these stories, even if they're not historic.

And so those are the two ways that we can take the concept of this flood.

It's either going along with the biblical account or it was a regional flood

and just impacted that localized area.

It really demands of us to look at the evidence since those are the two possible

explanations of what happened with Noah's flood.

And what we find, or what at least I found, as I was trying to look through

and decipher what to share tonight is that the scientific evidence is not conclusive.

There are scientific evidences that they share that seem to point to not a worldwide

flood, but then there's also geologic evidence that says, all right,

yeah, it does seem like it's more than just a regional flood.

It would take a lot of pressure, a lot of work to do that. And Noah's flood

would answer that question.

So I'm going to present both to you, a couple of both to you that I saw and

that I just think could potentially help us to understand where we fall on this topic.

So the first piece of evidence is by Robert Cargill of UCLA, and he,

in his understanding of the atmospheric system, that there is not enough water

on Earth to be put in the atmosphere and to come down and to cover the whole Earth.

He writes, simply put, there is no evidence whatsoever for a worldwide flood.

In other words, it's impossible. There is not enough water in the Earth's atmospheric

system to even come close to covering all of the Earth's landmasses.

I don't know how you figure this out. It didn't go into that.

But he somehow understands the water cycle of the Earth to be at a place where

it could not completely cover the Earth.

One of the rebuttals that a believer in Noah's flood would say is that,

well, the springs of the underwater springs burst forth at that time,

and there was water that came through those as well.

This is a piece of evidence that people will point to to say it was a regional

flood, not a worldwide flood.

Then we also have another piece of evidence, and this is,

again, I mentioned them earlier, but the National Center for Science Education

has looked at in the geological record how,

and they will explain it here, but the idea here is simply that the sedimentary

rock would have formed first if there was this worldwide flood.

The sedimentary rock would have fallen first and would have been compacted,

and then there would have been a layer that they talk about here.

That layer would be at the top.

And so this is what they say they find in the geological records.

Because this flood was intended by God to destroy all flesh on earth,

according to Genesis 6.13,

and because sedimentary rocks on all the continents contain fossils that supposedly

represent the destroyed flesh of all life, it might be thought that the Bible

story describing a whole earth flood was true.

However, interlaid with these fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks on all continents

are layers of evaporite rock salt.

The red beds are red because they contain hematite or iron oxide,

which formed from magnetite grains

that were oxidized while the muds were exposed to oxygen in open air.

Therefore, one could expect these evaporites to be at the top of the supposed

Noachan flood deposits when the water supposedly receded and the land dried out,

but certainly not in different levels in between older and younger fossil ferrous flood deposits.

So the idea there is that as these people have discovered,

there are in between the fossilized sedimentary rock, which is where we find

some of the fossil record, there are these little strips of red evaporite rock salt.

And the reason that they're red is because they have oxidized.

They have come into contact with oxygen.

And so they're surmising from this bit of evidence that the redness in them

declares that they weren't underwater, that they had to be up above the water

line so that they would turn red.

And so that's what I get out of what the National Center for Science Education is talking about here.

The sedimentary rocks, what they would think they would find is the sedimentary

rocks were one on top of another.

But with that layer in between them, they're saying, and especially because

it's oxidized, that it doesn't make sense. It had to be above water.

It couldn't have been underwater to form that way.

Those are two bits of information that kind of describe the scientific idea

of not believing in a worldwide flood.

Again, I've only picked out two. There are other arguments that people will

use to try to comprehend and understand and make their determination of this.

But these are just simply two of those.

The ones that would point us, well, at least me, would point me to believe that

the worldwide flood is more likely to cause these events.

I'm going to start with the idea of the Grand Canyon.

So when I was in school, the Grand Canyon was described to me as being formed

by the Colorado River, going through it over millions of years,

and it's just taking down the rock face.

It is the rock erosion that this river was going to do.

But when you look at the elevation of where the Colorado River comes into the Grand Canyon Basin,

it is at a lower level than the highest plateaus of the Grand Canyon.

In fact, it's considerably lower. From sea level,

the top of the Grand Canyon is 9,165 feet, and the Colorado River comes in and

enters the Grand Canyon at an elevation of about 2,800 feet above sea level.

So that's quite a bit of difference.

And this is how Wayne Rainey describes it.

He says, oddly enough, the Grand Canyon is located in a place where it seemingly shouldn't be.

Some 20 miles east of Grand Canyon Village,

the Colorado River turned sharply 90 degrees from a southern course to a western

one and into the heart of an uplifted Kebab Plateau.

It appears to cut right through this uplifted wall of rock, which lies 3,000

feet above the adjacent marble platform to the east.

And so what he's saying is that when the Colorado River changes direction and

goes into the Grand Canyon, it is an oddity.

It should not have happened the way that we see it happening today because the

river would have just hit a rock wall like it wouldn't have gone above it.

It would have come to a stop because it was at this rock wall.

And over time, I guess you could say over millions and millions of years that

like that water stopped and is going to find a different way to escape.

If especially a rock wall of 3000 feet is just an immense imposing thing for this wall of water to.

Collect like a pool, it would not form the way we would see it today,

according to this rainy guy in his book, Carving the Grand Canyon,

the Evidence, Theories, and Mystery of It.

That's one idea. When you look at creation scientists,

and in particular young earth scientists, they will use the Grand Canyon as

a piece of evidence to believe only a catastrophic event of the immensity that

is described in the biblical story of Noah could form that.

It just took so much weight. It just took so much pressure from this wall of water that was coming.

That's what more than likely in their eyes caused this because where the elevations

of the plateau of the Grand Canyon and where the Colorado River comes in,

it just doesn't make sense that it happened the way scientists describe it happening,

or at least as I had it described to me when I was in elementary school.

And the idea of a river changing a landscape like the Grand Canyon,

there was a study done around 2010 by a Boston College geologist and one of his graduates.

And what they found is that more

than likely the change of the landscape around a river basin is going to be

caused by catastrophic flooding and not by slow periods of the erosion that

happens when water hits rock.

The geologist from Boston College, his name is Noah Schneider,

and his graduate was Lisa Kramer.

And what they did is they took aerial photographs over a 66-year period.

I mean, they didn't, this wasn't a 66-year study.

They found photographs that were 66 years old and compared how the river had changed in that time.

This is in Death Valley, California. And what they found is at some points,

the creek cuts into the land,

leaving deep slices in the bedrock from the surge of floodwaters brought on

by as little as a half inch to an inch of rain falling over the watershed that

rolls out of the funeral mountains.

At other points where soft sedimentary rock sits below the surface,

the creek has had a widening effect on its channel.

They're saying that when we have an event where Death Valley is one of the driest

spots in the world, where it gets like an inch of rain, like it's causing catastrophic damage there.

Much more damage than just this water, this stream that's always there running.

It's not causing much damage. It's not causing much erosion.

But the damage that they've seen in these aerial photographs and what they experienced

firsthand was that the catastrophic flooding is what caused the changes,

not the normal meandering of the water downstream.

So answers in Genesis adds this to this part of the story.

The press release also notes, and this is important,

that water's ability to reshape the earth is not due to the steady flow of a

routinely fed creek or river, but is instead the result of periodic storms.

Under normal conditions, the release explains, the effects of rivers and streams

take eons to clearly manifest themselves in the land.

But with the combination of man-made diversions and flash flooding,

such eons of geological work can take place over a short period of time.

And the concept there then is that it is all about a lot of pressure,

a lot of weight, a lot of erosion in a short amount of time because of the mass

amount of water that's being there.

That's what's more than likely going to change the landscape of a river.

Now, it is documented a river does change course. A river can cut out a new channel for itself.

No one disputes that. But the idea here is that that process is a long, long, long time.

And when we look at things like the Grand Canyon and other geological features,

what these two studies are saying is that it's much more likely to be a catastrophic

event than a long-term erosion event from a river that's just pushing water down the stream.

So, again, these are the two evidences against a localized flood.

These are two evidences that I would say push us more towards a global flood.

And the first two were ones that would push you more toward a regional flood than a global flood.

And like I said, when we began this section, science has differing statistics

that will point you in different directions depending on what you believe.

And I'm sure, like I mentioned with the atmosphere not having enough water to

flood the earth, creationists would say that, well, the floodwaters came up from below as well.

I'm sure that the people who believe in the really old earth and how the river

did it, like they have their rebuttals to these arguments as well.

So, again, I feel like the concept here is clearly that scientific evidence is not conclusive.

It is not, on the whole, something that we have a definitive answer to.

And so what I would say is that the way to really decide this is from the historical

evidence that we have in front of us.

And the historical evidence does include the story of Noah, but there are other records and lots.

I saw one estimate of more than 100 other ancient societies that have stories

about a worldwide flood. I'm just going to go over, outside of Noah,

I'm going to go over four others of those.

And these are very similar in their approach.

They all come from different areas of the ancient Near East,

but they are all declaring that there was an ancient flood.

So in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is from Babylon, this is what their flood story looks like.

So Enlil, who is a Babylonian god, becomes annoyed with human noise and wants them eliminated.

He has to work with the water deity known as Enki, but Enki likes a man who

has found favor with him and who warns him of the flood and encourages him to build a boat.

For seven days and nights, he and his wife are in the boat.

The boat lands after the flood recedes on top of a mountain.

He sends out a dove, a swallow, and a raven, the last of which does not return.

Then the man disembarks and offers sacrifices. The gods gather around as they

had forgotten how much they relied upon humanity for food.

And so when the sacrifices were being offered, they were there and they offered

this Noah-like figure in Gilgamesh an immortal life.

And so that's how that story goes. And we can definitely see some very similar

attributes to what happened in the story of Noah there.

That is the Epic of Gilgamesh. So in the Akkadian story, it's very similar to

the Epic of Gilgamesh, but they have different deity names.

The Noah figure is a different name, but it's still the same basic outline that's told in that story.

Then in the Eridu Genesis, and so the Eridu is the people, and their beginnings story,

when I haven't, But when people look at that, they say that it contains stories

of creation, the first cities, and a great flood, again with a different hero's name.

And then we have Mesopotamian accounts, where a subtle difference is that the

man saved his family, but also various

skilled workmen so that the arts of civilization could be preserved.

All of these have very similar stories where gods become angry at humans.

They send a flood to destroy humanity.

There is somehow, some way these human beings get the heads up that a flood is coming.

They build an ark and then the humanity is saved.

Looking at this historical evidence, and I've said it before in our Wednesday

night gatherings, But the more times that we see a historical account,

and it doesn't matter if there are differences or not,

but the more times we see a similar theme in historical accounts,

the more reliable that is.

If you have a source from 2,000 years ago, and just take the life of Jesus,

for instance, we have the sources of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Four different sources, four different stories of who Jesus was.

But outside of that, Jesus is attested to in the Jewish historian Josephus,

the Roman historian Tacitus.

And there are second century people of the 100s that write about Jesus and the apostles.

And so we have multiple levels of attestation of who Jesus was.

The more sources we have, the more reliable we can take that story.

And with these four plus Noah that we covered earlier tonight, these are five sources.

And again, like I said, I saw an estimate, more than a hundred of these sources

that talk about a great ancient flood.

This is where the Archaeological Study Bible sees that these stories fit in

with the greater scheme of the flood.

So assuming a later date for the biblical composition, I'll stop there for a moment.

What this is referring to is that the Sumerian text is dated to about 1800 BC.

So when they date the tablet that it's written on, that's the date that they get.

But Moses didn't come around to write Genesis until there's two different dates for the Exodus.

One is about 1500, the other one's about 1200 BC. So if the Sumerian text is

written in the 1800s BC and Moses comes around in the 1500s BC,

the Sumerian text is going to be older, and that's what it's talking about here.

So assuming a later date for the biblical composition, which means that it was

written closer to our time, some scholars have suggested that the Mesopotamian account.

May have served as a prototype for the narrative in Genesis.

But most researchers believe that the biblical account is not simply a modification

of the Mesopotamian stories, but one of several versions of a common story.

The differences can be attributed to the special revelation God gave the biblical

authors, including the writer of Genesis, by which he made known his plan of redemption.

The other versions provide extra biblical confirmation of the story of a great

flood rather than demonstrating, as some have suggested, that the biblical account is a myth.

So again, these extra biblical stories of the flood are pointing to a more historical

reliability of the flood actually happening.

And whether or not Moses wrote this down first does not matter because in this instance,

the archaeological study Bible is saying that it's the inspiration of God that

comes upon, that helps him to know the right details in which to add to the story.

So the other versions don't mean that it is a lie, a myth.

The other versions help us to point to the fact that it is more likely to be

true because there are different accounts of it.

Tonight, I'm going to end with the NIV Cultural Background Study Bible,

which has this to say about the topic.

The flood stories from the ancient Near East and from around the world offer

persuasive evidence that a flood of significant magnitude occurred and was remembered.

The account from the ancient Near East are closest to the biblical account and

help us see how the Israelites would have understood the whole event differently than their neighbors.

And so this is talking about a worldview. talking about,

all right, so the Babylonians came from a perspective where they had these two

deities that were conspiring together to bring the flood, whereas the Israelites

are not a polytheistic religion.

And so all of it is attributed to God.

So that's how they would understand the whole event from their worldview,

from their perspective, as compared to a society who is polytheistic and believes

in a concept of mini-gods and the sky being a god, the sun being a god,

the moon being the god, etc.

That's the concept that we see here.

From my vantage point and my perspective,

I think because the scientific evidence seems to be clashing with each other,

I think the historical accounts are something that we can take as reliable.

At least for me, that's how I would take it. That's how I do take it,

that the historical accounts and the multiplicity of those help solidify the

validity of it not being a regional flood,

but a worldwide flood of large consequences.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the ancient worldwide flood

as described in the Bible.

The historical evidence to me is compelling with there being at least four derivatives

of a similar story in other ancient cultures.

The Bible is a trustworthy document, and to have corroborating evidence in other

cultures points me to believe there was a literal worldwide flood.

If you would like more information about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week, we will look at dinosaurs and the dating methods used to date the

fossil layers in rocks to see where dinosaurs were at in Earth's history. Have a great week.