Did Noah's Flood start in the Carmel?

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday.

The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood.

In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the Carmel Mountains villages - which include houses, temples, graves, water wells, workshops and stone tools - is by far "the most compelling" archeological evidence exposed to date for Noah's flood.

"What's more convincing scientifically, a flood in the Black Sea, so far away from Israel and the fantasy of a supposed ark marooned on the slopes of Mount Ararat, or six submerged Neolithic villages smack-bang in the middle of the Bible Land?" Kingsley said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post.

The panel depicting the Deluge from Michelangelo Buonarotti's frescoed ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, Rome, painted circa 1508-1512. Photo: Courtesy

He added that the site, which has been excavated by Israeli archeologist Dr. Ehud Galili over the last quarter-century, offers a "pretty convincing cocktail of coincidences," including submerged layers of villages in a critical location, and one that was known for its nautical revolution.

But Galili rejected Kingsley's theory, saying Tuesday that it could not be true.

"Based on our archeological finds, the village was not abandoned due to a catastrophic event, but due to the slow rise of sea levels which occurred all over the world," he said. "The pace of the increase in the sea level was very slow, so that it would not be significant enough for people to remember it in the course of their lifetime."

Galili noted that, following the major tsunami that hit Asia, there was a scientific trend in the world to hunt for mega-disasters that happened in the past.

"We did not find any proofs which indicate that a tsunami or other such catastrophe flooded the villages, even though there are proofs that a tsunami did occur in the Mediterranean Sea," he said.

Kingsley, a self-declared atheist, said he had begun studying the origins of Noah's flood five years ago as a result of his interest into "how mythologies came into existence," as well as a desire to connect the biblical story with global warming.

The alternate theory that the inundation of the Black Sea around 5,600 BCE was the source of the biblical flood is called into question by the fact that no villages, houses, cemeteries or graves have ever been found under its waves, Kingsley said.

Scholars agree the Black Sea flooded when rising world sea levels caused the Mediterranean to burst over land, turning the freshwater lake into a saltwater sea. The flood was so monstrous that it raised water levels by 155 meters and submerged up to 150,000 square kilometers of land.

But scholars are divided on when the flood occurred, and how rapidly. Most believe it took place about 9,000 years ago and was gradual.

The date of the massive flooding on the Carmel Coast, which Kingsley estimates to have taken place between the sixth and fifth millennia BCE, is another unknown.

"The precise timing of this localized flooding is still being worked out, but there is no doubt that the villages of the Carmel were lost not to earthquakes or tectonic movements but to killer waves," Kingsley said.

The lost villages cluster opposite the Carmel Mountains in depths of 12 meters. Atlit-Yam, 10 meters south of Haifa, is the largest submerged Neolithic village in the Mediterranean Sea.

Kingsley's theory about the origin of Noah's flood, an independent archeologist said, is interesting but dubious.

"Whether or not one can make a direct link between the biblical story and the submerged Neolithic sites is doubtful," said Prof. Shimon Gibson, an archeologist with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "But it does show that episodes of substantial flooding did occur in these parts of the world and that that kind of fear would have existed within the cultural conscientiousness [sic] of ancient peoples.

"The bottom line," he concluded, "is that overall evidence of [a] world submerged in flood does not exist."

Many Christians today think the Flood of Noah’s time was only a local flood, confined to somewhere around Mesopotamia. This idea comes not from Scripture, but from the notion of ‘billions of years’ of Earth history.

But look at the problems this concept involves:

If the Flood was local, why did Noah have to build an Ark? He could have walked to the other side of the mountains and missed it.
If the Flood was local, why did God send the animals to the Ark so they would escape death? There would have been other animals to reproduce that kind if these particular ones had died.
If the Flood was local, why was the Ark big enough to hold all kinds of land vertebrate animals that have ever existed? If only Mesopotamian animals were aboard, the Ark could have been much smaller.1
If the Flood was local, why would birds have been sent on board? These could simply have winged across to a nearby mountain range.
If the Flood was local, how could the waters rise to 15 cubits (8 meters) above the mountains (Genesis 7:20)? Water seeks its own level. It couldn’t rise to cover the local mountains while leaving the rest of the world untouched.2
If the Flood was local, people who did not happen to be living in the vicinity would not be affected by it. They would have escaped God’s judgment on sin.3 If this happened, what did Christ mean when He likened the coming judgment of all men to the judgment of ‘all’ men (Matthew 24:37–39) in the days of Noah? A partial judgment in Noah’s day means a partial judgment to come.
If the Flood was local, God would have repeatedly broken His promise never to send such a flood again.
Belief in a world-wide Flood, as Scripture clearly indicates, has the backing of common sense, science and Christ Himself.
1. Jonathan Sarfati, ‘How did all the animals fit on Noah’s Ark?’, Creation 19(2):16–19, 1997. See also John Woodmorappe, Noah’s Ark—a Feasibility Study, Institute for Creation Research, Santee, California, 1995.
2. Note that the Bible talks about mountains rising (in connection with God’s rainbow promise, so after the Flood): see CEN Technical Journal 12(3):312–313, 1998. Everest has marine fossils at its peak. Therefore, the mountains before the Flood are not those of today. There is enough water in the oceans so that, if all the surface features of the earth were evened out, water would cover the earth to a depth of 2.7 km (1.7 miles). This is not enough to cover mountains the height of Everest, but it shows that the pre-Flood mountains could have been several kilometers high and still be covered.
3. Some ‘progressive creationists’, who cannot accept a global Flood because of their commitment to millions of years for the ages of fossils, try to promote belief in a ‘universal’ Flood. This leads many unsuspecting evangelicals to think they believe in a world-wide Flood, but what they mean by this is that even though it was a local flood, all humanity outside of the Ark perished in it. However, it boggles the mind to believe that after all those centuries, no one would have migrated to other parts. Or that people living on the periphery of such a local Flood would not have moved to the adjoining high ground rather than be drowned.

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