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I wasn't sure if I should post this in Religion or Bloggers, but decided that General/Chat would be a good place since it doesn't focus on the religious aspects of the flood as the historical/archaeological/geologic evidence for whether such an event really occurred.

I know a lot of my evangelical friends will probably chastise me for posting what seems to be support for the "local flood" theory (that the Biblical deluge only struck the ancient Middle East) but that isn't my intention at all...in fact, in the past I've also written about the possibility of a global flood.

I just wanted to present evidence for how the flood affected Mesopotamia (the setting of Biblical story) specifically. If anyone disagrees with this approach, well...that's what the comments are for!

This should be fun!

My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge: Hosea 4:6.

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Evidence indicates that there is more water under the earth’s mantle than in all the oceans on the surface of the earth:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133963-theres-as-much-water-in-earths-mantle-as-in-all-the-oceans/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231014-700-deepest-water-found-1000km-down-a-third-of-way-to-earths-core/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-may-be-second-massive-ocean-deep-beneath-surface-180950090/

That’s a LOT of water. A whole lot more than a mere tsunami.

Scripture talks about how water first burst forth from “the deep,” and only after that point did the water from the heavens (a relatively thin layer of water) collapse onto the earth and flood it. Once the water burst forth, the tectonic plates certainly shifted in dramatic fashion, causing deep valleys and great mountains to form.

I have no problem believing that the flood was global. To me, that’s what Scripture points toward.

Fascinating stuff!

The geological and archaeological evidence is irrefutable. Sometime between 11,500 and 12,500 years ago, sea levels suddenly rose by 300 feet, worldwide.

Ten million square miles of coastal lands disappeared nearly overnight, and ancient texts bear witness to the event around the world. The oldest such account was preserved on clay tablets by the ancient Sumerians, six thousand years ago. It's eerily similar to Noah's flood story.

One righteous man is chosen to save our species

The common Y chromosome ancestor lived 250,000 years ago, not 4,000.

I have the National Geographic which revealed the Woolly findings. It is from the 20’s and is fascinating.

I often wonder why people expect to find the remains of a 5000 year old wooden boat. Unless it was encased in ice wouldn’t be much left.

That was fascinating read...

I have always had many questions about the flood. For example, did Noah bring with him all 12,000 species of ants and all 35,000 species of spiders with him. Or did all those species of ants evolve out of just 1 pair of them, ditto for the spiders. If Noah had 35,000 species of spiders, how did he keep them all separate so they would not eat each other, and how long did it take to hand feed 35,000 pairs of spiders and what did he feed them with?

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This foolishness has to stop soon.

There is nothing on Earth that is not strong evidence of the flood.

Things like the ark itself and all the anchor stones in the surrounding area should be enough, but they are actually the least of the evidence.

The glaciers that once covered a large portion of the land mass could only have been the result of the hot ocean that remained immediately after the land mass divided.

The fossil layers could only be the result of a flood and numerous collisions of large land masses.

That civilization arose such a short distance from the final resting place of the Ark is also hard to ignore.
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One of my biggest questions about the flood is this?

Where did black people come from?

From all accounts, the flood is reputed to have occurred some time between 3000 BC and 2300 BC. That is from 5000 to 4300 years ago.

Given that Noah was directly descended from Adam, and nobody in Noah’s family had black skin, how is it that people in Africa developed black skin in under 3000 years. We know that the Roman armies captured black prisoners from Africa and brought them back to Italy. So sometime in the 3000 years between the flood and Rome’s African conquests, Noah’s descendants in Africa developed black skin.

Can somebody please explain to me how that is possible. Because humans have not physically evolved much in the 2000 years since then. We have generally gotten taller, but I can’t think of many changes besides that.

So how was it that Noah’s descendants evolved from olive skinned people to Nigerian black in just 3000 years? I have always wanted somebody to explain this to me in provable scientific terms.

From Genesis 1:1 through the next 11 chapters there are two floods described... The first flood described is in Genesis 1:2... The purpose of the first flood was the casting down of the ‘devil’... you know that ‘hero’ Alinsky speaks of in his dedication in the book Rules for Radicals? (The phrase ‘foundation of the world’ , used by Christ and Paul come from the Greek word ‘katabolle’, and it means ‘casting down - overthrow.) One must go to Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 to get those details...of the over throw of the devil, although Peter describes it in IIPeter 3, and Jeremiah in chapter 4.

Noah's flood was for a specific cause ... Only Noah and his family were NOT infiltrated by the ‘sons of God’... Noah and his family were pure ... meaning the predesignated blood line to Christ would be preserved.

I find the ‘local flood’ theory plausible, given the dove found a ‘green olive leaf’ and that finding was not described as a miracle planting... It would take far longer than 150 days on the ark for an olive tree to be producing green leaves.

[snip]... you may have heard that Robert Ballard (the same guy who discovered the Titanic) has proposed an alternate explanation for the flood legends. In 1999, he came forward with the claim that the creation of the Black Sea was the inspiration for the tale of Noah. According to his theory, this vast body of water was a small freshwater lake in a large fertile basin about 8,000 years ago, when suddenly a natural disaster caused a sudden inflow of salt water. Early humans who fled the incoming deluge concocted the story of the ark. [/snip]

Ballard didn’t propose this, William Ryan and Walter Pitman theorized it based on seafloor evidence and cores from the Black Sea. And they didn’t say the Ark story was concocted, they followed in many footsteps and claimed the OT authors merely plagiarized the entire Deluge story during the Babylonian Exile. Hope that helps.

http://www.google.com/search?q=ryan+and+pitman+site:freerepublic.com

I think it’s important to understand that;

Just because something happened a long time ago, it doesn’t mean it took a long time to happen.

Another question.

Noah took at least 2 of each animal on earth to save. If that is the case, why is it that the 2 kangaroos he saved only exist 9000 miles in Australia? Ditto for Koala bears.

Why did the 2 Tasmanian Devils he brought back only exist on that island?

Why is it the Giant Panda is only found 4000 miles away in Western China? I mean, Noah opens the doors to the Ark 7 months after the rain begins, and 5000 years later, all the Giant Pandas in the world have migrated to Western China. Nowhere else.

I could go on and on with Bengal tigers and African elephants and so on.

Mighty neat trick that all these animals walked off the Ark 4500 years ago and and all gathered in one spot on the globe and nowhere else.

OK, last question about the great flood.

The flood covered the entire earth. That’s a lot of water. Now, when all that water covered the earth, it spread salt water to all the fresh water lakes, rivers, and estuaries of the planet.

We know that Noah did not take any fish on the ark. Just land animals.

So somebody please explain to me how all the fresh water fish and amphibians on the planet survived 7 months being subjected to salt water. Fresh water fish cannot survive salt water. There are only a handful of species that can survive in both environments, such as the bull shark and the saltwater crocodile.

I mean, how did all those bass and sturgeon and trout survive the great flood for 7 months living in salt water.

Oh, I know! “With God all things are possible”. So just magically, all of the laws of physics, biology, climatology, and physiology were just “magically” suspended for the 7 months the Ark was afloat and a long period of recovery afterward.

So 8 people produced 3 different races of man in only 3000 years. The Ark had room for 950,000 species of insect along with all the other various species of animals on the planet. They took no birds but the birds magically lived with no land access for food for 7 months. When the Ark finally landed aground, every species of the earth decided to just migrate to special places on the earth rather than fairly widely distributed over the globe. Yet all the freshwater fish on earth magically survived 7 months in salt water.

Got it. It’s magic.

How does Egypt play into the great flood and the Ark.

Egyptian history begins around 3150 BC, or 150 years before the earliest speculated date for the great flood and Noah’s Ark.

So how did all Egyptians drown in the great flood, but continue their rich history right through that period without skipping a beat. Did Noah repopulate Egypt and just by magic, they reverted back to being Egyptian people doing what Egyptian people do with their hundreds of gods. Was their something in the water of Egypt that caused Noah’s single God people to revert back into worshiping myriads of crasy gods?

Inquiring minds want to know.

A friend of mine posted a recent chat on her YouTube channel with an orthodox professor of Biblical studies who doesn't believe the first 11 chapters of Genesis should be taken literally. While he still maintains to be a Christian, he believes that the Garden of Eden, the flood, and the tower of Babel are myths that God used as symbols of his relationship with man.

Regarding Noah's ark, I regard that as a late introduction during one of the edits done to Biblical texts. As someone pointed out earlier, the Egyptian civ including its writing system had been around a while by the purported time of Noah, and the Giza pyramids date from about the time of his supposed flood. Even though the Egyptians must have all died in the flood, someone took over and picked up exactly where the deceased Egyptians left off, right down to the system of writing and their polytheistic religion. The usual way this is (poorly and partially) dealt wiith is to claim, quite ludicrously, that there were no writing systems prior to the flood, and that all inscriptions either postdate the flood, or are hoaxes.

The real event, the one that made such a deep impression on the Hebrews, is not the flood, but The Deluge. The great rain is the common story that survives in folklore and ancient religious works from outsiide the Biblical tradition. And trying to integrate claims that the flood story is universal runs aground, as it were, on the fact that there are not always survivors in the other flood stories (at least one from Precolumbian America), but even when there are, their tale of adversity is always quite different. There's no common righteous man aspect to the tales, at all. What it says is, there were survivors other than Noah and family, and they weren't all in the Middle East, and they didn't necessarily save any animals, and they didn't all build watercraft.

In 1929, legendary British archaeologist Charles Leonard Wooll[e]y made an amazing discovery in the ruins of Ur (the city of Abraham): a massive alluvian silt deposit. The strata ranges in depth from 8 to 11 feet (even a really bad flood will only leave a silt deposit of a few inches at the most).

If that had been anything other than a local event, it would have been discovered at the same level in every Sumerian city, indeed, would be diagnostic for dating purposes. It wasn't found, still hasn't been found. It was just a local flood of a city rather carelessly built in a flood plain. One version of this claims the layer is 334 METERS thick, and of clay. By and large (including in Woolley's acc't) it's silt, was laid down all at once, and is a few meters (between 3 and 4 meters) thick.

Woolley later retracted his identification of the Flood stratum, arguing that the deposit was too old to have resulted from the Biblical Deluge. The Ur-Flood? Uncovering the Deluge | Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt | Biblical Archaeology Review

As far as we have found, that prize goes to the Sumerian King List, which is on display at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Translated by Thorkild Jacobson in 1939 and dating to around the early eighteenth century BC (end of the Isin Dynasty), this clay prism lists two of the first kings of Mesopotamia (Alulim and Alalgar), then casually states “Then the flood swept thereover.” So this is a sign that very far back in Middle Eastern history, the great deluge was considered a historical event.

The king list also attempts to establish a sequential history, where each great city has a turn as capital, as if of a single Sumerian empire. The problem is, the kings of different cities have been found to have been contemporaries, meaning the dynasties were contemporary here and there. Also, there's never been a time when a single human lived 50,000 years -- but if there had been, the dating of the flood becomes a big mess. It also isn't compatible with a 6022 year old Biblical creation.