genesis flood – The Back of My Mind

Similarity Breeds Contempt

Outline:
Which came first?
Common origin?
What constitutes a myth?
The Egyptian creation myth
The Bible’s use of non-Biblical sources

Yes, indeed it does! Contemporary scholarship is aware of many, many undeniable similarities between historical events, cultural traditions, and even cultic practices (temple construction and ritual) as recorded in the Bible and those recorded in the sometimes-earlier legends of various ancient pagan civilizations. Does this mean that the Biblical material is stolen, copied, or derived from pagan sources? Is the Hebrew Bible copycat literature? If so, should we question the Bible’s inspiration, inerrancy and authority?

The Flood Tablet. This is perhaps the most famous of all cuneiform tablets. It is the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic and describes how the gods sent a flood to destroy the world. Like Noah, Utnapishtim was forewarned and built an ark to house and preserve living things. After the flood he sent out birds to look for dry land. Photo by Mike Peel.

Which came first?

There may be copying, but it isn’t always clear who copied whom.

Most of you will have either heard or read somewhere that the Genesis Flood story is similar to pagan legends such as the ancient Gilgamesh Flood Myth. Since “everyone knows” that the pagan work is mythological and came first, then “surely the Biblical record must be mythological as well, and so it should not be believed by intelligent people.” The Hebrew Bible is copycat literature, right? Plagiarized!

Did the Babylonian Flood Myth really precede the writing of Genesis? The pagan myth resides primarily on Tablet 11 (of 12) of the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which contains gaps (lacunae) but is the most complete version known. This version is dated to the period 1300–1000 BC. Wikipedia claims that this is hundreds of years before Genesis was written, but by conservative Evangelical dating, Genesis can’t have been written any later than around 1406 BC, 40 years after the Exodus, when Moses died. However, earlier Gilgamesh tablets dated to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, 2100–2000 BC seem to contain an abbreviated version of the Flood Myth.

Common Origin?

For me, it isn’t worth quibbling about who scooped the story, because the actual event preceded both the Genesis account and all the flood myths in the world—of which there are a great many. A key reason for the existence of any cultural parallelism was that the different cultures shared a common ancestry.

Although writing began to appear as early as 3200 BC, history and legends were mostly propagated by mouth until well after Ur III. Everyone on earth was descended from Noah, and the story would certainly have spread from Babel along with humanity itself.

According to Ussher, the Flood occurred about (circa) 2350 BC and the Tower of Babel c2200 BC. I think those dates may be just a bit off. History records the 1st Dynasty of Egypt beginning c3100 BC. That had to be years after the Flood, and likely years after the Tower. Sargon the Great (probably Nimrod of the Bible) began ruling from Akkad from c2350 BC, and that would necessarily be some years after the Tower dispersion.

Whatever the dates, knowledge of the Flood would certainly have persisted as cultural lore for hundreds or even thousands of years—dinner-table tales passed from generation to generation.

Perhaps as important is the possibility that the immortal “sons/angels of God” that He placed over the scattered nations would always know of the Flood and would have engineered religious observances that exaggerated their own roles in His cosmos. This is a topic that will be foreign to most of you. I wrote about it in detail in Gods and Demons. Here I will just include one relevant passage:

8 When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God.
9 And his people Jacob became the portion of the Lord, Israel was the line of his inheritance.
—Deuteronomy 32:8–9 LXX-B

I would suggest that, instead of viewing such parallels as evidence that Scripture is mythical, it is more productive to view them as evidence that there may be more truth in the pagan writings than previously realized.

What constitutes a myth?

In a short blog I just released a day or two ago, titled Religion vs. Mythology, I endorsed an Egyptologist’s definition of “mythology” as allegorical stories about primordial events, which aren’t necessarily meant to be believed, but are rather intended to convey a particular worldview.

The Biblical Flood story, whether myth or history, is clearly a polemic (a “controversial argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine”—Webster) against pagan flood mythologies. The ubiquity of the mythologies supports belief that the Flood was real. I see nothing in the Biblical story to make me think it is not historically accurate. I’ve written a number of articles on the subject (see, for example, Fountains of the Deep and Ships, Boats, Floats and Arks).

What about creation stories? Like the Flood stories, they are ubiquitous in the ancient world. We observe a universe, in which we all reside. Obviously, it exists, so that ubiquity is not surprising. I believe in causality. If something happens, including creation, then it was caused. I have way less confidence in the idea that the universe just popped up spontaneously, or that it has simply always existed, either on its own or as a bud on a multiverse that has always existed, than in the idea that it was created.

The pagan creation stories are clearly mythology. Is Genesis 1?

The Egyptian creation myth

In my article Genesis 1:1–5, Day 1, I presented an artist’s conception of the Mesopotamian version of creation and described how it also seems to picture the Genesis 1 account. One way that historians differentiate between “religion” and “mythology” is that religion is meant to be believed in all its detail, while mythology is intended to impart lessons or principles, without requiring slavish belief in the story itself. Though I didn’t word it quite this way, what I suggested was in a sense that Genesis 1 deliberately presents a mythological picture, obvious to Moses’ audience, in order to teach the superiority of the God of Israel over the gods of the pagans. By definition, that constitutes a polemic.

Here, I will go into a bit more detail on the specifics of the Egyptian version.

Egyptian version of creation. Note the vaguely organic shapes on “earth” and the stars on “sky”, with the sun suspended in “air”.

In the beginning, there was the Ogdoad, a group of eight frog-headed “primordial gods”, in four pairs (both brother/sister and husband/wife):

Hok and Hoket, whose defining attribute was Formlessness.
Amun and Amunet, whose defining attribute was Invisibility.
Kuk and Kuket, whose defining attribute was Darkness.
Nun and Nunet, whose defining attribute was Fluidity.

As a group, the Ogdoad represents a chaotic state, reminiscent of Genesis 1:2 (“without form, and void (or hidden), and darkness on the face of the waters“).

Out of this watery chaos rose a primordial hill, on which stood Atum, from whom all else arose. He created himself and is the father of Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture).

Shu and Tefnut had two children, Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). This pair is pictured above wearing brown and blue, respectively. In some versions, their father, Shu, is jealous of the incestuous relationship of Geb and Nut and has squeezed himself in between them—”air” between “earth” and “sky.”

Moving beyond the creation of the cosmos, Shu and Tefnut have four children, the pairs Isis and Osiris (the good guys) and Seth (evil) and Nephis (good).

Genesis 1 in the Bible clearly describes the same cosmos as the Egyptian version (and those of other ancient pagan cultures). Clearly, the Bible teaches that the God we worship is Creator of all that exists. To me, that is indisputable. But at the same time, the description presented in Genesis 1 is too much like the pagan myths (but with Yahveh replacing all the pagan gods) and too little like the universe we live in to be taken literally. I would describe it as a polemic against the pagan versions, presented allegorically, like prophetic vision and Jesus’ parables.

The Bible’s use of non-Biblical sources

Still scandalized that the Bible stoops to make use of non-Biblical sources?

In the same way that modern scholarly writers frequently cite earlier sources, so did the Biblical writers. As I mentioned in some detail in Gods and Demons (under “Source Materials”), there are some 100 Biblical references to non-canonical sources actually cited by name by the Scriptural writers. A list can be found on Wikipedia.

Since few of these are now extant, you will often hear them referred to as “lost books of the Bible.” This terminology is unfortunate because it implies that they are inspired works that have somehow slipped through the cracks of history. Not so—I’m pretty sure that if God cared enough to oversee their writing in the first place, He would have protected them from loss.

But what if some of those lost writings were inspired? Then I’m quite comfortable assuming that they were written for a specific time and/or place in history and are no longer relevant. I refuse to waste my energy speculating on possibilities like that since it is all in God’s hand.

Another “but”: If inspired text references other writings, shouldn’t we consider them as inspired as well? Consider the following, for example,

[19] Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel.
—1 Kings 14:19 (ESV)

What this tells me is that the Biblical writers researched their material. It wasn’t merely whispered in their ears by the Holy Spirit. When Christian writers today cite Josephus, they are acknowledging that he was a 1st Century historian who had access to sources that are now unavailable. We believe that Josephus was mostly pretty accurate, so we use what he says where it makes sense, even though we know that (a) he did make occasional demonstrably incorrect statements; and (b) he did write with certain political biases, for a Roman audience. When we cite him without qualification, we are endorsing (at least provisionally) the material applicable to our own work, but not at all the rest of his writings. When a Biblical writer does the same, we aren’t to think that the source material is infallible, just that the Holy Spirit has infallibly endorsed the ideas gleaned from it.

Another use of the term “lost books of the Bible” is in reference to the so-called deuterocanonical (“second canon”) books. These include the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books found, for example, in Catholic bibles. Also sometimes included are various “gospels” that some folks think should be regarded as canon. They are not “lost” in the sense of being non-extant. All I’ll say about these is that many good books have been written about the selection of Christian canon, and I’m happy to take the position that the Church Fathers did the best possible job in setting the official canon. Though there is much I think can be learned from these sources regarding historical and cultural issues, and common beliefs that were held by ancient peoples, I agree that they cannot be considered inerrant.

Random pages from *The Complete 54-Book Apocrypha: 2022 Edition with the Deuterocanon, 1-3 Enoch, Giants, Jasher, Jubilees, Pseudepigrapha & the Apostolic Fathers*. ©Covenant Press

The Bible also contains a number of actual quotations from extrabiblical sources like the Book of 1 Enoch. That a non-canonical source was quoted does not mean that the source was Spirit-inspired, only that the Spirit approved the material from that source that was used by the Biblical author. That a passage from 1 Enoch was quoted by Jude and Peter likewise does not imply that the Book of 1 Enoch was inspired; but it does invest the quoted passage with a “seal of authenticity.” In other words, Jude and Peter were inspired in their restating of the quoted words.

I think that we sometimes err in not paying enough attention to such quoted material. Consider, for example,

14 It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones,
15 to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
—Jude 1:14–15 ESV

Jude may be the most underrated book of the Bible. At first glance it seems to have a very simple theme: In times past, and still today, God condemns heresy and wickedness. We are familiar with most of the historical examples of bad behavior given in Jude. Most studies treat them as simple examples of sinful humanity. I think there is way more to it than that. Pending a future blog on the subject, I’m just going to state now that the verses quoted above can’t be understood without also reading the source material, which in this case is still available.

Ships, Boats, Floats and Arks

Edited 1/6/2024

I know, this is far from the most important theological question most of us will face in our lives, but I’ll bet that most of us are at least a little bit interested. What Exactly is an “ark”? Answers in Genesis (AiG), parent ministry of the Ark Encounter theme park, who I frequently agree with and frequently disagree with, says, “Noah’s Ark was a ship; therefore, it likely had features that ships would commonly have.” No, and no…

My purpose here is not to question their motives or their overall theological purity, but rather to point out where my opinions and theirs differ on some textual interpretations and scientific/nautical engineering principles.

Artist’s conception: Noah’s Ark, somewhat as I envision it.

Linguistics

“Ark”

Nowhere does Scripture say the Ark was a ship! All that floats is not a ship. I did a search in several English translations to get a sense of the Biblical usage, concentrating mostly on KJV, NKJV, ESV, NIV and CJB. I found that the Hebrew “Oniy“ or the related “Oniyah” is translated as “ship(s)”, “boat(s)”, “sailing vessel(s)”, or “watercraft” in the Old Testament. The word can also refer to a fleet (of ships), a Navy, or seamen. Another Hebrew term, Tsiy is translated variously as “ships“, “boats” or “vessels (of papyrus reeds)”.

There are three contexts in which the term “ark” occurs in English translations of the OT. When referring to Noah’s Ark and the basket into which Moses was placed to escape Pharaoh’s attack on Israelite children, the Hebrew is “tebah“, which literally means “a box or chest“. When referring to the Ark of the Covenant, the Hebrew is “aron“, meaning “a box, chest or coffin“.

What is the difference in meaning between these words? AiG suggests that tebah is related to the Egyptian word for “coffin”, and comments that being sealed in the Ark would be like “being sealed in a coffin.” Their post says nothing at all about aron.

Ancient Hebrew and Egyptian were both Semitic languages of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It is possible, but not proven, that the Hebrew term is a loan-word from their Egyptian sojourn. The Hebrew alphabet, especially in its ancient form, is an “abjad“, meaning that it contains no vowels. “Tebah“, then, as transliterated to English, becomes “t-b-h“. The Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphs included a full set of phonetic glyphs. When using only these glyphs for writing, the similar word is transliterated as “t-b-t“, and according to the Brown-Driver-Briggs concordance, which I consider to be better than Strong’s, it does, in fact mean “chest, or coffin”. Nevertheless, the leap to comparing Noah’s Ark to a coffin is a total (and absurd) shot in the dark!

Based on my own survey of Jewish sources, I believe that tebah refers to containers for the “common“, while aron refers to boxes, chests, and cabinets dedicated to sacred objects.

Regarding the latter,

The Ark of the Testimony (Aron HaEdut) was “home” to God’s Sh’kinah, and contained, for a time, a jar of manna, Aaron’s staff that budded, and the stone tablets of the covenant. All of those are Jewish sacred objects.
For most of their history, the most sacred object associated with any Jewish synagogue has been their Torah scroll, and the second most sacred has been their Holy ark (aron HaKodesh) in which the scrolls are stored. These arks are cabinets, usually ornate, that stand against the synagogue wall most nearly facing Jerusalem and the Holy Mount (the west wall in Europe and the Americas).
When the Israelites left Egypt with Moses, they took with them, in an aron, the revered body of Joseph:

Genesis 50:26 (CJB)
[26] So Yosef died at the age of 110, and they embalmed him and put him in a coffin [aron] in Egypt.

“Gopher wood”

Some translations render it as “gofer wood” a direct transliteration from the Hebrew) and many as “cypress wood“. The actual meaning is obscure and may refer to a type of tree or a type of wood, for example.

Calling it “cypress wood” is only a guess, but not unreasonable, since cypress is water and rot resistant, pliable and toolable. Even today it is widely used in outdoor furniture and boat construction. Its growth is fairly ubiquitous in northern temperate regions, especially in warm climates that are periodically dry (for seed germination) and swampy (for subsequent growth). In Iraq, trees of any kind are scarce today, but in Noah’s day cypress was probably plentiful in the lower Tigris and Euphrates region.

Brown-Driver-Briggs suggests that “gofer wood” should be translated as “pitch-wood” since the Hebrew gofrith, meaning “brimstone” is from the same Hebrew root. This may still designate cypress, since it could refer to the oily sap that gives that species its water and rot resistance.

“Roof”

There are a number of ways to interpret Genesis 6:16a. I think JPS says it best:

“Hebrew tsohar is another unique word. It is either the “window” of 8:6, or it means “a roof.” Depending on which meaning is adopted, the unclear directive to “terminate it within a cubit of the top” (lit. “from above”) could variously mean that a space of one cubit is to be left between the top of the window and the roof, that the window itself is to be a cubit in height, or that the slanting roof should project one cubit beyond the side of the ark.
— Sarna, Nahum M. Genesis. The JPS Torah Commentary. Accordance electronic edition, version 3.2. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.

Perhaps it is important that, in addition to “roof” or “window”, tsohar can also, depending on context, mean “midday” or “noon”. I suspect that this is why some translators render verse 16a as, “Make a skylight in the Ark, within a cubit of the top you shall finish it…” (Alter, The Hebrew Bible“); or “You are to make an opening for daylight in the ark eighteen inches below its roof.” (Stern, The Complete Jewish Bible“). Emphasis mine in both cases.

Note that the “window” (Hebrew challon) of Gen 8:6 is capable of being closed, presumably by a shutter or shutters.

Because challon is not used in 6:16, and with an eye towards watertightness, I lean towards the interpretation that it is speaking of a roof with 18-inch eaves, providing shelter for some type of opening or openings for both light and ventilation. This may have been the shuttered window(s) of 8:6.

The high winds and torrential rainfall postulated by AiG would be incompatible with any type of open skylight or window. Even the shutters of 8:6 would be difficult to make watertight in ancient times. It took God, Himself to seal the door. The mechanism I propose in Fountains of the Deep would produce heavy global rains, but without heavy winds associated with hurricanes or other destructive forces caused by large pressure gradients.

Boat vs. Float

Ships, boats and barges, in all their myriads of varieties, generally have one thing in common: they are designed to transport people and/or other objects from one location to another, on or under the water. By “transport”, I mean to actively move them, using some form of energy, be it wind (in a sail), machine, or muscle. The term “ships” generally refers to relatively large vessels designed to withstand the rigors of navigating the open sea or large rivers and lakes. The term “boats” can include “ships” as a subset, but more commonly it refers to relatively smaller watercraft. A “barge” is usually a box-like vessel designed to be pulled or pushed by some external means, including ships, boats, or even oxen or powered vehicles alongside a river or canal.

By contrast, a vessel or platform, or even an air-filled vest, of any kind that is designed, not to navigate under any kind of propulsion, but simply to float on water and go wherever the forces of nature takes it, is called—well—a “float“! Noah’s Ark was not a ship; it was a float. God said, “Build this, get in it with a herd of critters, and let it float you to wherever I send it by means of the forces at my command.” If it was a float and not a ship or boat, then it doesn’t need to have had “features that ships would commonly have.”

Wind and Waves

The design on AiG’s Ark Encounter, in fact the basis of much of their flood theology, depends on an assumption that the Great Flood would have included catastrophic winds, waves and consequent destruction.

However, I think the argument is faulty. I see nothing in scripture to indicate that wind factored into the Genesis Flood in any significant way, so neither wind nor wave would have been an issue. According to Gen 7:11, “all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of the sky were opened.” I don’t believe that this event can be compared in any way to a modern storm. I have discussed a likely mechanism for the flood in Fountains of the Deep. In that post I suggest that the vast majority of the flood water was miraculously brought up from earth’s mantle transition layer, primarily through volcanic eruptions in the mid-oceanic ridges. This would have perhaps generated tsunamis on coastlines, but tsunamis cause very little disturbance in deep water, and even on shore, the damage to the coast itself (as opposed to structures and life) tends to be superficial except for erosion of coastal sands. Widespread volcanism generates huge amounts of ash, as well as CO₂and water vapor that would spawn torrential rain but could quell pressure gradients and suppress the worst of the winds.

The only mention of wind in the Flood text is in Gen 8:1b,”God caused a wind [ruach] to pass over the earth, and the water began to go down.” The Hebrew ruach can mean wind, breath, or any of a number of related English terms, but most often in the Bible, it means “spirit“, as in Gen 1:2b, “and the Spirit [Ruach] of God hovered over the surface of the water.” No amount of physical and literal wind could dry up that much water in the time allowed by Scripture; the waters of the deep were miraculously returned to their home in earth’s mantle through the power of the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit). I suggest that “wind” in Gen 8:1 is more akin to “God’s breath” than to a meteorological phenomenon. For more on God’s use of wind (see God with the Wind).

Architecture

As a Naval Officer back in the day, I put in a lot of both formal and informal time studying subjects related to my job. Not that I could ever build a ship “from the keel up”, but I do have training in naval architecture, both technical and historic. The small “n” in “naval” means both military and civilian watercraft.

AiG has tried to justify their design of a ship-like Ark at Ark Encounter, as opposed to a parallelepiped (rectilinear solid), box-like float of the same overall dimensions, by appealing to model studies in wave pools. I can tell you from personal experience and my knowledge of physics that because of their inertial characteristics, massive ships won’t perform anything like small models in either wind or waves. Not … even … close!

I have been at sea on a minesweeper (off Alaska), a destroyer (off California), a battleship (off California), and, for long periods, an aircraft carrier (in the North and South Atlantic, the North Sea and the Mediterranean). On all but the battleship, I have served on the “bridge” (a ship’s navigational control center) while under way, and experienced “heavy seas” (storm conditions). On the minesweeper and the carrier, I periodically “had the con“, meaning I had command over the vessel’s engines and rudders, as well as the bridge crew, engine and steerage crews, lookouts and other underway personnel. In Navy parlance, a minesweeper is a boat, and designed for operations in littoral, i.e., coastal, waters, though able to transit oceans if necessary. My other “rides” were smallish, large and very large ships, respectively.

My destroyer, the USS O’Brien, DD-725, was about 80% the size of the Ark, so it gives me a good basis for comparison. We definitely felt the waves, but when under power, it was easy to control our direction of advance. If we cut our speed to “all stop“, or “zero turns on the ship’s screw“, we would fairly quickly lose our forward motion (go “dead-in-the-water“), and eventually the forces on the hull would drag us around until we were parallel to the swells (that’s the proper term for deep-water waves). Once so “broached“, there is a tendency for any vessel to roll side to side. This isn’t comfortable, especially on smaller vessels, but sailors are used to it and prepared for it. Even in rough seas, very few ships will capsize from it, though, because buoyancy and inertia limit the magnitude of the roll. A box with the same dimensions as the ship will have less tendency to roll than a ship with a curved hull, given proper weight distribution aboard the two.

Water Wave Physics

Elsewhere in the AiG documentation, they state that waves would have driven the Ark forward. But that could happen only in near-shore surf where wind shear pushes surface water onto the shallows.

In deep waters, waves are propagated in a horizontal direction, but the only water movement is near the surface where molecules simply bob up and down in tight elliptical cycles. It is the bobbing action that moves along the surface, not the water itself.

In the diagram above, the motion of individual water molecules is depicted in red. In deep water, waves “propagate” away from their source (wind or a surface disturbance), but the water itself moves mostly in vertical directions. A solid object like a boat or a bottle will bob upwards on wave crests and downwards on wave troughs. As a crest approaches, the object will tend to move forward in the direction of the advancing wave as it slides down the wavefront, but then it will slide in the opposite direction after the crest passes. Winds above the waves or currents below the waves may push the object, but the waves themselves impart little or no net horizontal movement, either longitudinal or lateral.

As waves encroach into shallow water, on the other hand, the solid seafloor begins to disrupt the elliptical motion of the water molecules at the bottom of their cyclic movement. As a result, the peaks tend to overtake the troughs, and the wave tumbles forward. This causes the constituent water molecules to wash towards the shore at and near the surface, but then to rush back towards the open water near the floor. The return part of this cycle is the dreaded “rip tide.”

Features of the AiG Design

In several blog posts, AiG explains why, from a sea-worthiness perspective, they think that the Ark needed to be a ship-like vessel, rather than a box. They use this diagram to illustrate:

“Noah could have added a fixed ‘sail’ on the upper bow of the Ark so the wind could turn the ship into the rough waves.”

The idea here is that the raised bow fin would act like a weathervane, causing the Ark to pivot and turn end-on to the wind. But, just as a weathervane turns itself so that the “sail” is downwind, the AiG description makes no sense from a mariner’s perspective. Swells propagate in the direction the wind is blowing; that is, a wind blowing towards the east would cause waves that also “move” toward the east. “Into the rough waves” therefore implies that the fin would turn the Ark in such a way that the wind would be blowing bow to stern, but if the fin worked at all, it would cause the bow to turn away from (not “into”) the oncoming waves.

Functionally, the object of either “tuning into” or, the opposite, “following” the waves is to keep the Ark from broaching or turning broadside to the wind and waves. Facing either bow or stern into the waves is very much preferable, but unlike a light model, this fin design would not be workable with a massive ship. It would take a very large force against the fin to overcome the angular momentum of the massive Ark and its contents. Also, enough wind to push on the fin would push even more on the windward hull of the ship, resisting any pivot. A longitudinal sail in the bow of a ship like AiG’s Ark would make steering into the wind very difficult, if it had any effect at all.

“Noah could have added a fixed ‘rudder’ at the lower stern of the Ark to keep the ship turned into the rough waves.”

This is another statement that makes no sense. A fixed rudder, more commonly known as a “skeg“, is an underwater fin or projection that can be used to stabilize the motion of a powered watercraft. There is no reason to suppose that Noah, or God, provided the Ark with a propulsion mechanism, so the most that a skeg would have accomplished was a slight reduction of rocking. It would have no effect at all on the orientation of the Ark with respect to waves, since ocean swells involve no sideways motion beneath the surface (see above).

“A ship’s keel is a structure built along the bottom of the ship’s hull to support the main body of the ship. In some cases, the keel is extended downward to function as a stabilizer for the ship. Noah’s Ark, as described in Genesis 6, may have had a keel since it seems to have been an essential piece for the ship to survive the wind and waves.”

If the Ark was a ship, then given its size, a keel might have been necessary to anchor ribs (the curved side-to-side cross-pieces in the Jesus Boat, below, for example) and strakes (the fore to aft planks forming the hull of the Jesus boat). If the Ark was a box, then no such structure would have been necessary, since structural stability would be adequate using only rails (horizontal members of a frame), stiles (vertical member of a frame) and cross-braces (diagonals to prevent torquing of the frame).

There is no evidence from literature or archaeological findings that keels ever existed before they were invented by the Vikings in the 8th Century AD. Early ships and boats, including those built by the Egyptians and the Phoenician “Sea Peoples” were built by lashing or pegging planking (strakes) to bent or shaped ribs that ran perpendicular to the length of the craft. The 2,000-year-old “Jesus Boat” on display at Kibbutz Ginosar, Israel, was modeled on Phoenician boats from earlier centuries.

Earlier structures positionally related to keels did exist in ancient times. Egyptian vessels, for instance, featured what is now called a “plank-keel.” This was not a true keel, but rather a wide strake (hull plank) at the very bottom of the hull where keels would later be located. The function was primarily to give the boat a stable base while beached.

Another device that appeared frequently in ancient ships (and is still often used) is a “keelson“, which is a structural beam or cleat in the bilge area, but not extending outside the hull. It was used mainly to help support masts in sail-powered boats, but often did add strength to the hull. Neither of these features would function on an Ark. The Roman ship shown below, built prior to the invention of a keel, includes a short keelson spanning two ribs. The rectangular hole in the forward part of this keelson is most likely a mortise, made to hold a tenon at the base of a mast. Mortise and tenon joints (as in, “insert tab A into slot B”) have been used by craftsmen from ancient times to join perpendicular wooden or stone structural members.

“The box-like Ark is not entirely disqualified as a safe option, but sharp edges are more vulnerable to damage during launch and landing.”

Among many avocations, I have been a cabinet maker during my lifetime, and I still have a completely furnished cabinet and general woodworking shop in my basement. My opinion is that square corners (“sharp edges”) are vulnerable to dings and dents but are sturdier and more puncture-proof than a rounded wooden surface.

“Blunt ends would also produce a rougher ride and allow the vessel to be more easily thrown around”

A minor effect. Most ships and small boats have a “sharp” bow for “cutting through” the water, but the vast majority have a “blunt” stern, and many larger ships have “blunt” vertical sides, as well. How much a vessel is “thrown around” is more a function of its mass and how deep it sits in the water (its “draught“). And, of course, a flat bottom is much less prone to broach or roll than a ship’s curved hull.

“While many designs could work, the possibility shown here reflects the high stems which were a hallmark of ancient ships.”

Though I couldn’t find more explanation of what precisely this statement means, I assume it is referencing raised prows and sterns on many ancient ships. In the case of Egyptian vessels, these were carved, stylized papyrus umbels (flat-topped or rounded flower clusters). The Egyptians used the stem of papyrus plants to make sails, cloth, mats, cords, and paper, so these plants were appropriate decorative symbols of the realm. Other civilizations decorated their ships in the same manner with religious totems.

“Noah was 500–600 years old and knew better than to make a simple box that would have had significant issues in a global Flood (e.g., forces on the sharp corners would be too destructive, it could capsize if it is not facing into the wind and waves, and so on).”

This is yet more speculation by a writer with no technical expertise. If Noah had any training in shipbuilding, naval architecture or engineering dynamics, it isn’t mentioned in Scripture, and he sure would not have learned from practical experience. God may have coached him or given him engineering drawings or advanced physics training, but this is also unmentioned.

It is worth mentioning that most large ships today do incorporate a rough box shape, though with rounded corners and keels, because flat bottoms are intrinsically more stable and less prone to grounding, while vertical sides are more efficient for loading capacity. This is true for large military vessels, cargo ships, and even ocean liners. Not to mention…

In any case, Noah built an Ark, not a ship!

And yes, I’m quite willing to be dogmatic about this.

Fountains of the Deep

Posted on:

June 22, 2016

Modified on:

June 12, 2025

In ancient times, the peoples of the Middle East held a deep-seated, superstitious awe for the oceans and other large bodies of water. To them, the deep-water basins were abyssal, bottomless pits, full of monsters and evil spirits or demons. The continents floated on the ocean waters, which were also the common source of springs and subterranean rivers, so these source waters, too, were infested with evil spirits. Take, for example, the river Banias, which today flows from between rock strata down-slope from the famous cave at Caesarea Philippi. In Jesus’ day, the river flowed from the mouth of the cave. The pagans of Decapolis named the cave “The Gates of Hell” and surrounded its exterior with shrines to the god Pan.

The same ancient peoples who feared the deep waters also recognized that they were the source of life, providing fresh drinking water for humans and animals alike, water for the fields, and an abundance of fish, the staple of life for many civilizations.

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The Deep

The Hebrew word most often used in the Bible to refer to this interconnected reservoir of water, either in whole or in part, is tehom, usually translated as “the deep.” Exactly what elements are included in any particular reference to tehom must be inferred from the context or modifiers. In Gen 1:2, most would agree that it referred to an all-encompassing ocean, prior to the formation of dry land surfaces. In Gen 49:25, Jacob is giving his deathbed blessing to Joseph, speaking of “the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep [tehom] that lieth under…” (KJV) I believe that he is, here and in the parallel passage, Deut 33:13, referring to the entire, composite water system lying beneath the canopy of “heaven above.” In Job 28:14, in his discourse on Wisdom, Job defines his own usage of the term by means of the poetic doublet, “The deep says, ‘It isn’t in me,’ and the sea says, ‘It isn’t with me.’” (CJB) In Isaiah 63:13, tehom refers to the Red (or Reed) Sea, opened up for Moses and the Israelites.

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The Fountains & Floodgates

This diagram shows the cosmos as visualized by Moses, and by the people of virtually every culture in the Ancient Near East. Oceans, lakes, springs, and even the waters above the firmament were believed to be interconnected and were often collectively referred to as “the Deep.” Terrestrial waters rose to the surface of the land through fountains. Water falling from the sky was released by spirit beings through floodgates in the dome of the firmament.

Gen 7:11 – “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” (KJV)

Gen 8:2 – “The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;” (KJV)

What, then, are “the fountains of the deep”, or ma’yenot tehom, as mentioned in the Flood story? Ma’yenow (singular) denotes a spring, fountain, or source. Can this be taken literally, like a spring in the desert, or is it poetically descriptive of the fact that water from “the deep” was gushing freely from some aperture or region? When considered in parallel with “the windows of heaven”, wa’rubot (chimneys or windows) ha-shamayim (the heavens, or elsewhere, “firmament”), my own opinion is that the “fountains” and “windows” must both be poetic terms, whereas the water and the flood were most certainly literal!

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Identifying the Fountains of the Deep

Young Earth Creationists often take the view that “the fountains of the great deep” refers to continental springs, geysers, fissures, Artesian wells, and other surface openings that God miraculously ripped open and caused to spout abnormally great volumes of water from natural aquifers deep in the earth’s crust. This rending and subsequent flow, they say, caused cataclysmic changes in the topography, including newly up-thrust mountain ranges, massive erosion, and even the division of large supercontinents into the smaller continents we know today.

A fairly traditional view.

Others take the view that God caused volcanoes to sprout across the continents and spew water and, presumably, lava (since that’s what volcanoes do).

I can’t resist mentioning still another view that I ran across proclaiming, presumably with a straight face, that the unprecedented heavy rain was associated with a drop in barometric pressure so severe that water under the earth’s crust for some unspecified reason “pushed up and out … to come to the surface”, evidently causing the crust to pop like a balloon! Incredible, since the normal barometric pressure at sea level is typically below 15 psi, which is pretty much the same pressure that my own bare feet exert on earth’s crust when I stand on it!

An incredibly naive view.

My view is that the term “fountains of the deep” describes features of the ocean floor. Opening of these “fountains” may have caused some shifting of the tectonic plates and therefore some near-shore damage on the continents, but the main effect was a sudden simple rising of the sea level. I will discuss a probable mechanism below, but first I would like to present some brief arguments against continental “fountains”:

Scripture nowhere states that the flood caused catastrophic changes in Earth’s geology. This isn’t even a long-standing tradition. It is a theory that was proposed in my lifetime, and there is no valid scientific evidence that either the topography or the stratigraphy of the earth was greatly influenced by a single massive flood. The idea that the Genesis Flood accounts for the apparent old age of the earth is simply an assumption made in an effort to explain something that the Bible itself made no effort to explain. It is a defensive theology aimed at those scientists and others who deny scripture. Since it is in no way backed by scripture, it must meet the objections of science and of common observation, and it simply fails to do so. In a separate post, Geology a Flood Cannot Explain, I presented a substantial list of geological phenomena that to my personal knowledge cannot possibly be explained by the Genesis Flood. I also presented my credentials for addressing the various issues discussed.
Crustal aquifers exist, not in caverns, but in porous and permeable rock formations. While sometimes quite large, they are limited in their areal extent and thickness. Many thousands of deep oil and gas wells (including a number that I was involved in drilling and evaluating) and countless geophysical studies have shown no evidence of permeable rock formations in continental crust large enough to contain the enormous volumes of water that would be necessary to cover the highest mountains, even if they were much lower than they are today. And were they? Possibly a bit; the Himalayas, for example, are demonstrably rising even now as a result of plate tectonics and the ongoing collision of the Indian Plate with the Eurasian Plate. But consider Mt. Ararat: after God closed the windows of heaven and stopped up the fountains of the deep, Ararat, at Over 16,000 feet above the normal sea level, was still under the receding water!
Sufficient quantities of sub-continental water would most certainly have had to come from deep within Earth’s mantle unless they were created by God, on the spot (which I acknowledge to be theologically possible, but not necessary). Any continental aperture of sufficient depth to reach these depths and sufficient width to handle the volume of water necessary would, I think, have to be fairly humongous. Why are there no traces of anything like this?
Continental volcanoes might account for a large volume of deep-sourced water, but I don’t think there is evidence of enough continental volcanism to provide that much.
Finally, I think that Gen 7:11 provides an important clue. This passage states that it was the “fountains of the Great Deep” (tehom rabaah) that God opened to start the rising flood. That terminology in Scripture normally refers only to the abyssal ocean basins, not to continental features.

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Likely Mechanism of the Flood

There are two likely mechanisms, that I can see, that God might have used to bring that much water up from the deep, and then to store it again once He was done with it:

First, he could have simply created it on the spot, flooded the earth with it, and then de-created it again when he was done with it.
It seems to me, though, that His modus operandi as described in scripture is normally to wrap what He has already created in some sort of miracle when He wants to make a major power statement. I think that He “foreknew” what He was going to do and incorporated that plan into His original design.

Every school child since before my day has known that the earth has an upper “crust”, a central “mantle”, and a lower “core”. Geophysicists now believe that the mantle consists primarily of different forms, or “phases” of the mineral Olivine, which is a “magnesium iron silicate.” The simple Olivine of the upper mantle, under the heat and pressure of lower depths is converted to a phase called Perovskite in the lower mantle. Between the two regions is a transition zone consisting of Olivine phases called Wadsleyite and Ringwoodite. Both of these mineral phases can be very heavily hydrated and are now thought to contain as much as 3.5 times as much water as in all the earth’s oceans. Many young-earth creationists, as well as ancient-earth creationists like me, speculate that this is the primary source of the water that God used to flood the earth in Noah’s day.

mantle_water — Schematic cross-section of earth. The oceanic crust, riding on the plastic mantle rock beneath it, is welling up at the “mid-oceanic ridges” and sliding toward the continents at a rate of 1–2 inches a year. At the continental margin, this migrating crust then sinks back below the surface and circulates back to where it started, moving on great convection currents. Even in normal times, prodigious amounts of water are carried along with this cycle.

Most people probably think of the deep regions of the earth as simply dead, stagnant, unmoving rock. In reality, the earth is a dynamic, “living” system from surface to center. We have all been taught about the “water cycle”, where ocean water evaporates, clouds form, rain falls on the continents, and streams and aquifers return the same water back to the oceans. There is also a water cycle involving the mantle transition zone: ocean water is dragged, in prodigious quantities, into the depths of the mantle by the “subduction” of Earth’s oceanic tectonic plates. This water charges the transition zone, and much later is returned to the ocean through the agency of deep-ocean “smokers” (hydrothermal vents) and volcanism along the Mid-Oceanic Ridges; in the Island-Arc and Continental-Arc volcanoes near subduction zones; and in “hot spot” volcanoes like the Hawaiian volcanos and the Yellowstone super-volcano.

It turns out, paradoxically, that water itself is what spawns volcanic activity, because the melting point of rock is drastically lowered in the presence of water. There is, in fact, an intriguing theory that there should be a sheet of molten rock at the upper surface of the transition zone. From my own knowledge of petrology and fluid flow in rock, that makes me think that conditions in such a region could be right, under certain circumstances (like a gentle push from the Hand of God!) for water-laden, low viscosity, basaltic magma to suddenly channel rapidly through this discontinuity into the Mid-Oceanic ridges, causing a subsequent rise in sea level that could be described poetically as the “fountains of the great deep” opening up.

If this superheated and thus buoyant water were to bubble quickly to the ocean surfaces (or be injected directly into the atmosphere), I would expect it to quickly rise through the cooler air near the surface, and to spread out and rapidly cool near the stratosphere, setting off a global rain event. Since no pressure front would be active in forming this rain, I would not expect serious damaging winds such as are postulated by followers of Henry Morris.

Regarding the return of the flood waters to the transition zone: in my view, the text implies a direct miracle.

Gen 8:1 – “God remembered Noach, every living thing and all the livestock with him in the ark; so God caused a wind [ruach] to pass over the earth, and the water began to go down.” (CJB)

The Hebrew ruach can mean “wind” in scripture, but it often is translated as “spirit”. In Genesis 1:2, the Ruach of God hovered over the surface of the water. In 8:1, God caused His Ruach to hover over the face of the water-covered earth! In both cases, the earth was covered with an unbroken expanse of water, and God sent His Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) to deal with it! For more on the “wind of God”, see God with the Wind.

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Geology a Flood Cannot Explain

Posted on:

September 2, 2013

Modified on:

October 5, 2024

Examples

In a recent post, The Hijacking of Creationism, I discussed the currently obligatory conservative Christian view of why the earth appears to be billions of years old when traditional interpretations of Genesis 1 say it is only about 6,000 years old. I expressed my misgivings about that explanation, which proposes that all or certainly most of the appearance of age is due to damage to the earth’s crust caused by torrential rains and upheavals associated with the Genesis Flood. I also expressed doubts about the qualifications of Henry Morris, popularizer of the Flood Theory.

I do believe in the historicity of the Genesis Flood itself, but I don’t believe that the best explanation of how God brought this judgement about (see Fountains of the Deep, an earlier post) would have caused the level of devastation that Flood Theory requires.

As recapitulation of my own technical and professional qualifications: I am not a geologist, but I am well-trained in relevant aspects of geology. In a long career as a petroleum engineer, I worked extensively with and/or in place of geologists.

There are several sub-fields of petroleum engineering, and I have worked most of them. For most of my tenure with both large and small companies, both as an employee and as a consultant, I served as a petroleum reservoir engineer. As such I have had to be intimately familiar with all aspects of stratigraphy (rock layering), including rock and fluid properties, strata deposition mechanisms and deformations, fluid saturations and flow mechanisms, and, for diagnostic purposes, subsurface electrical and radioactivity profiles. As a well-site drilling engineer, I have examined rock cores and bit cuttings, electrical logs, pressure and flow tests, and more, from the surface to more than a mile deep. As a production engineer, I have observed how both productive and non-productive rock strata behave under a wide variety of external disturbances. In short, I probably know more about rock layers and how they behave than most geologists in non-petroleum fields.

One way to solve the age problem is to simply say, “What’s the problem? God simply spoke everything into existence exactly the way we would have seen it in 4004 BC!” Now, I don’t doubt for an instant that Almighty God is capable of just such a mighty act but just because He can, does that mean that He did? Observation suggests that He did not. To borrow a phrase from 1 Cor. 14:33, God is not the author of confusion, so why would His creation be so complex and appear so tremendously old, if it is not? Just to fool scientists and throw people off the track? I don’t think so!

Several years ago, before the advent of smartphones, I set out to make the 22-minute drive from my home to Belton, Missouri, where I was taking a semester of Theology at a Bible College. The topic of the day was to be Creation, and I knew that my professor was a proponent of Flood Theory. On the way I decided to pull out my microcassette recorder and list as many geological phenomena as I could think of, before I got there, that I know cannot be explained by the flood. I’ve since lost the list, but I recall most of what was on it. Here are some of the key items (in no particular order), with my reasoning added:

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Fine clastics

“Clastics” are the small, sometimes microscopic, rock fragments formed by “weathering” of larger fragments or massive rock formations. “Erosion” is the process by which clastics are subsequently moved from place to place and deposited in broad areas by the force of moving water, wind, glaciation, volcanic action, or simple gravity. When these clastic “sediments” become fused together over long periods of time by heat, pressure or chemical action, they become the sedimentary rock strata that we see today. My focus here is on the fragments themselves, not the strata.

Weathering of solid, non-sedimentary rocks like granite is generally not due primarily to frictional erosive flow in stream beds as most people think, but rather is caused by expansion/contraction cycles. Perhaps the most important of such processes, often called “frost wedging“, occurs when water enters small cracks and pores in the rock, freezes, expands, and wedges the openings larger. Over many alternate cycles of freezing and thawing, the two sides of the wedged rock can completely separate. Plant growth in these opening can accelerate the wedging. Another very common process that weathers rock is “exfoliation“, which occurs as the surface of a rock heats and cools more rapidly than the interior, causing layers near the surface to flake off.

The so-called “Split Rock of Horeb” is an archaeological fraud, but it illustrates both frost wedging and exfoliation. The large split and the rocks at its base are examples of wedging, and both the Split Rock itself and the foreground rocks show extensive exfoliation. From Google Earth.

Eventually, weathered rock fragments can become small enough to be transported by erosion. As they tumble along, they will be further broken up as they knock into other fragments, a process called “saltation“. Roiling water from the Genesis Flood could have redistributed loose fragments—soil, dirt, pebbles, and even larger rock—and further broken and shaped some of these fragments, but it could not, in a span of only 40 days, have caused any significant erosion of solid rock, even if heavily laden with abrasive silt. Nor could the Flood account for the rounding and blunting that we typically see in sand grains and many other clastics. The Flood, as cataclysmic as it was, simply did not last long enough or provide the temperature swings or friction surfaces needed to account for the clastic structure we see.

Can I prove this? No, but it is my professional opinion, and Scripture has nothing to say on the process. Scientific studies could be done to prove the feasibility (or not!), but I haven’t seen any such research. The relevant discipline to conduct such studies is called “rock mechanics“, and in fact rock mechanics was the focus of my own master’s thesis.

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Homogeneity and sharp boundaries

Sedimentary rock strata sometimes extend laterally for long distances—often hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles which, strangely, Flood Theory enthusiasts seem to regard as proof of their point. In general, the strata tend to be mostly homogeneous, with few random impurities indicating uneven mixing with other rock types during deposition. Furthermore, the boundaries between layers tend to be crisp and well-defined. A sandstone, for example, does not normally grade into a shale or a limestone.

These characteristics are the opposite of what one would expect of sediments transported by a violent flood. During the rain, and afterwards as the water receded, any large or dense rocks transported would quickly have sunk to the bottom, followed by smaller and less dense rocks, and finally silt. The final result would be a single, deep, turbidity layer, grading from heavy, dense rock at the bottom, to lighter clastics at the top. Sorting would be by size and weight, not by rock type.

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Limestone strata

Limestone is formed from the skeletal material of sea life. A critter dies and sinks to the bottom. Its soft tissues decay, and what remains calcifies. Over time, enough of this material accumulates to form beds that fuse into massive rock strata. In a Flood scenario, we should expect to see calcified remains more or less distributed throughout the single, thick stratum discussed above. Of course, we do see some distribution of calcified fossil remains in all rock types, but additionally we see massive continuous beds of relatively pure limestone interbedded with sandstones and shales and other rock types. I simply don’t see how this can be accounted for without repeated flooding over long intervals of time. Almighty God could have simply spoken it into being in this configuration, or He could have directed the Flood waters and upheavals in such a way as to “stack it” to His own specifications, but why? Only to fool us into discounting our own senses? If I could see anything in Scripture to make me think this way, I would accept it. But I simply don’t!

Let’s say that the cataclysmic geologic activity associated with such a flood caused mountains to cyclically rise and recede in a very short time span and caused rock and debris to wash into the low areas, burying forests and animal life forms. If the up-thrust rock was composed differently from place to place, couldn’t this alternating rise and fall account for the rock strata that we observe? No! Such a violent scenario would cause mixing of the materials, not sorting and stratification, particularly since most of the rock strata are composed of very fine-grained clastics that are themselves a product of weathering and subsequent erosion over long periods of time.

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Reversed sequences

Geologists have mapped the “normal sequence” of rock strata—the so-called “geologic column“—at many locations throughout the world. At any particular location, it is not at all uncommon to find that various members of the normal column are missing, since stratum thicknesses vary naturally from place to place, all the way down to zero; but the overall sequence is nevertheless still normally recognizable. It is also not terribly uncommon to find regions where the sequence is exactly reversed; in other words where we find the apparent age of the rocks decreasing with depth. This is evident, for example, in some of the rocks exposed by the Grand Canyon. Genesis Flood theorists are fond of chuckling at the irony they see in this. “Haha, geologists, the joke’s on you! Not only is the sequence wrong, but it is exactly opposite from what you expected!” In reality, this is easy to explain. Tectonic forces cause deformation and bending of entire sequences of strata. In nature we find them tilted to all angles, including completely flipped over. This is the same thing that happens when you use your fingers to push the left and right edges of a newspaper towards each other. The difference is that solid rock is more or less rigid, unlike newsprint. Such deformations over the course of days or even years or decades would cause the rock to crumble and the strata to disintegrate. Over geologic time, however, “solid” rock tends to undergo “plastic” deformation. In geologic (not meteorological) time, it can flow like a viscous fluid—in fact, exactly like a glacier.

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Discontinuities and crossbedding

An unconformity in the region of the Chimborazo volcano, Ecuador. The lower strata were deposited horizontally, uplifted to the right, and then after a period of erosion, the upper strata were laid horizontally across the exposed edge. Subsequent uplifting was to the left. From GeologyIn.com.

A related effect that we frequently see over geologic time is that strata get “tilted” to some angle by those same tectonic forces, then the tilting action stops and weathering/erosion cuts horizontally across exposed edges of the strata. Flowing water initially brings debris down from the highlands and cuts river channels in those transported debris fields, but then over time there is a levelling effect, forming the broad, flat plains between mountain ranges and the coastal peneplains. Still later, deposition may form new strata in horizontal beds lying across the eroded edges of the older rock. The interface between the canted strata and the horizontal strata is called a “discontinuity” or “unconformity“. “Crossbedding” usually refers to unconformities in aeolian sands (see below).

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Aeolian deposits

Crossbedded aeolian sand deposits at Antelope Canyon, near Page, Arizona. From imgix.net.

Not all rock strata are deposited by water. Sometimes wind blowing over long periods of time can deposit clastic materials and form rock strata. These “aeolian” deposits have a very distinctive structure that is readily recognizable to geologists. Fossilized desert sand dunes are a subset of this group. I see no possible way that the Genesis Flood could account for these.

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Glaciation

Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite National Park. Water spilling from a hanging valley into the glacial valley that cut across it.

Still other features are formed only by glaciers flowing slowly and plastically downhill. Flowing water cuts V-shaped valleys. Glaciers scoop out large and obvious U-shaped valleys, like using a giant spade. “Hanging valleys” are formed when one glacier melts away, leaving behind its characteristic U-shaped valley, and many thousands of years later a new glacier flows by at an angle to the first.

As glaciers flow, the debris that they scoop out of the canyons strings out to the side like snowbanks formed by plows after a storm. The debris itself is called “till” and it is tumbled and polished into a form that is easily recognizable. The so-called Split Rock of Horeb, in the first figure above, is a “glacial erratic” (a large, out of context rock pushed ahead of a glacier) sitting on a till deposited by a glacier during the last ice age, in what is now northwest Saudi Arabia. The ridges of till that I have described are called “lateral moraines.” The Genesis Flood could not in any way account for the effects of glaciation. Glacial ice, like rock strata, would crumble if it were deformed and forced to try and flow over a short time span.

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Evaporites

Salt, gypsum and a number of other deposits are laid down as a result of evaporation over long periods of time. Water simply cannot hold enough of these materials to form, in a short time span, the deep beds of such “evaporites” often found.

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Conclusions

I don’t think that God set out to destroy or remake the entire planet with the Flood! His purpose was to show fallen mankind after the Flood that He would not tolerate their evil ways forever. He saved Noah and his family. He saved animal species that could not swim. He did not destroy plant species or swimming animals, because they could survive the limited time span of the Flood. There was no reason to break up land masses, nor was there a mechanism for doing so, because “the fountains of the deep“, I believe, were the volcanic vents along the mid-oceanic ridges, and the rains were spawned by out-venting from those. So, far from being smashed by raging torrents and mudslides, the wicked were destroyed by rising waters, like in a huge bathtub. Similarly, the waters receded by means of suction into tectonic plate subduction zones, on a smaller scale, a proven and well-understood process.

Another important question not answered by the Flood Theory is, how would the Flood account for the apparent (and in my opinion, demonstrable) 13.7-billion-year age of the universe?

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