How do you decide what parts of scripture to ignore, and what parts to interpret re-write so that you can shoe-horn it into a fit for your theories?
I'm sorry, I made the assumption that you were a mainstream Genesis-is-literal-truth creationist. Are you not? Have you received some kind of personal revelation from God? Aliens? Um... Art Bell?
It is written... Gen 7:19 - "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered." Gen 7:23 - "And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground..." Sounds like a lot more than a little coastal flooding to me. Looks like everything's wiped out right up to the tree-line (about what? 11,000 feet above sea level?). Another big problem for mainstream creationists: after 150 days to 1 year underwater (Gen 7:24-8:13), pretty much every form of surface plant life has been killed off, but only fauna was herded on board the ark. So how come we still have a couple thousand species of plants on land? Heaven knows, they couldn't have evolved from waterplants....
The waters of the flood have not gone anywhere; there was simply not as much water on the Earth before the flood as there is now.
The ark settled on the mountains of Arrarat (Gen 8:4) and the waters "decresed continually" (Gen 8:5). And "the waters were dried from off the face of the earth" (Gen 8:13).
As to salt, that apparently came with the flood. There is no reasonable theory as to a source of the salt in the oceans, on this planet at least.
So what are you proposing? A "reasonable" theory that during the flood it rained saltwater, even though that flies in the face of science and isn't mentioned by scripture? You realize what that means, don't you? Noah had to stock a 1 year supply of fresh water for his family and all the animals. Like Roy Scheider said in Jaws: "We're gonna need a bigger boat."
You're assuming the Bible is the only book which ever got written prior to, say, 1954?
It IS mentioned in Midrashim and other very ancient literature. The waters of the flood were encountered, and did not come FROM the Earth.
It is a dogma of establishment science that the tale of the biblical flood is a fairytale or, at most, an aggrandized tale of some local or regional flood. That, however, does not jibe with the facts of the historical record. The flood turns out to have been part and parcel of some larger, solar-system-wide calamity.
In particular, the seven days just prior to the flood are mentioned twice within a short space:
Gen. 7:4 "For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights;...These were seven days of intense light, generated by some major cosmic event within our system. The Old Testament contains one other reference to these seven days, i.e. Isaiah 30:26:Gen. 7:10 "And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth."
"...Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days..."
Most interpret this as meaning cramming seven days worth of light into one day. That is wrong; the reference is to the seven days prior to the flood. The reference apparently got translated out of a language which doesn't use articles. It should read "as the light of THE seven days".
It turns out, that the bible claims that Methuselah died in the year of the flood. It may not say so directly, but the ages given in Genesis 5 along with the note that the flood began in the 600'th year of Noah's life (Genesis 7:11) add up that way:
Gen. 5:25 ->"And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years and begat Lamech. And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.
<i.e. he lived 969 - 187 = 782 years after Lamech's birth>
And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years and begat a son. And he called his name Noah...
<182 + 600 = 782 also...>
Thus we have Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood; actually seven days prior to the flood...
Louis Ginzburg's seven-volume "Legends of the Jews", the largest body of Midrashim ever translated into German and English to my knowledge, expands upon the laconic tales of the OT.
From Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews, Vol V, page 175:
...however, Lekah, Gen. 7.4) BR 3.6 (in the week of mourning for Methuselah, God caused the primordial light to shine).... God did not wish Methuselah to die at the same time as the sinners...
The reference is, again, to Gen. 7.4, which reads:
"For yet seven days, and I shall cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights..."
The week of "God causing the primordial lights to shine" was the week of intense light before the flood.
What the old books are actually telling us is that there was a stellar blowout of some sort either close to or within our own system at the time of the flood. The blowout was followed by seven days of intense light and radiation, and then the flood itself. Moreover, the signs of the impending disaster were obvious enough for at least one guy, Noah, to take extraordinary precautions.
The ancient (but historical) world knew a number of seven-day light festivals, Hanukkah, the Roman Saturnalia etc. Velikovsky claimed that all were ultimately derived from the memory of the seven days prior to the flood.
If this entire deal is a made-up story, then here is a case of the storyteller (isaiah) making extra work for himself with no possible benefit, the detail of the seven days of light being supposedly known amongst the population, and never included in the OT story directly.
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