EvC Forum: The Great Flood

Fear Friends

Here is my challenge to the old Flood models.
Still just a working paper though.

With my best regards
Damien Mackey.

Just How ”Global’
Was The Great Flood?
(Genesis 6-9)

Damien F. Mackey

PART ONE

I. Introductory Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pp. 1-13.
II. “The World That Then Was” (2 Peter 3:6) . . pp. 14-32.
Excursus A: Two Different Intellectual Emphases . . p. 18.

PART TWO

III. The Antediluvian Archaeology . . . . . . . ... pp. 33-57
IV. The Flood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... pp. 58-84.
Excursus B: Biblical Numbers . . ... . . ... . . .. . . . . . p. 70.

I. Introductory Section

For a long time my view of Noah’s Flood was shaped by books like The Genesis Flood, that classic by Whitcomb and Morris, and other like-minded writings on the subject. When the full implications of these writings hit me - of our terrestrial globe being entirely overflown by water, with a massive boat astride it all keeping safe the last eight humans, plus pairs of every known species of animal - I was like a man in a daze: overwhelmed. What an incredible image! Nothing in human experience seemed comparable to it. Later also I became intensely interested in the search for Noah’s Ark, and was quite convinced that a boat-shaped object that had been found on so-called ”Mount Ararat’ or Agri Dagh (Ari Dai) in (south) eastern Turkey was indeed Noah’s Ark. In those days I was often in touch with one of the key Ark-eologists (as they have been called), Dr. Allen Roberts, who was then making news with his visits to the Agri Dagh site and his colourful adventures there (allegedly being taken captive by bandits on one occasion). Dr. Roberts and I customarily exchanged phone calls and also articles. I even used to tell enthusiastic school children in a Scripture class that I was taking in a Sydney (Australia) suburb that Noah’s Ark had now been discovered on Mount Ararat; and we hopefully imagined that one day we might hire a helicopter and go visit the site. At this particular time I probably entirely fitted the image of the Ark tragic whom Professor Ian Plimer has described in his book, Telling Lies for God. Reason vs Creationism (Random House, Australia, 1997), chapter 4, “The great flood of absurdities”. I give firstly Plimer’s provocative description of an Ark-eologist - bearing in mind that he has a certain extreme type of Flood/Ark seeker in mind - followed by that of the latter’s nave disciple [p. 97]:
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To be an ark-eologist is not easy because one has to abandon logic, abandon history, forget geography, abandon interpretation of the Bible, abandon knowledge, abandon modern science and have a blind unreasoning faith that a mythical stupendous maritime wooden vessel sits atop a mountain in eastern Turkey.

Plimer continues [pp. 97-98]:

One can only admire those, who against all odds, go looking for wooden boats on mountain tops. There are those, notwithstanding, who sit at home waiting patiently for their favourite ark-eologist to return with tales of horrors, dangers, divine guidance and supreme success from yet another unsuccessful expedition to eastern Turkey. These devotees already know that Noah’s ark rests on Mt Ararat, have been reassured by the unconvincing ”evidence’ and acquiesce to supplementary purse-opening ark-eology ceremonies.

Yes, I could once identify with most of this. But, over time, ever so slowly, I came to question: (a) this ”global’ scenario for the Flood, and (b) the so-called Ark on the mountain - and, more recently (c) “Mount Ararat” as being the actual mountain of the Ark’s landing, or even of its ever having been submerged beneath the Flood (for more on this last, see IV. (c)) - since various lines of research I was pursuing, and methodologies, generally biblical, seemed to be conspiring against the possibility of such a scenario and were indeed pointing in the direction of a different model - indeed a far less vast one.
I refer to a combination of:

(i) looking to read the Scriptures (in this case, Genesis) more and more as ancient, not modern, texts, along the lines of P.J. Wiseman.
[See also Excursus A];
(ii) a developing geography of early Genesis that seemed to make apparent that the pre-Flood world could not have had its geographico-hydrological contours entirely erased, as ”global’ Flood proponents would tend to argue; and, correspondingly,
(iii) an apparent archaeologically-attested cultural continuity in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from the pre-Flood Cain-ites (descendants of Cain) to the post-Flood (early Dynastic) inhabitants.

Moreover, there were

(iv) those manifold scientific arguments against a ”global’ Flood, and lastly, but definitely not least,
(v) common sense.

These i-v will be my points of reference in the course of my arguments below.
So, whether or not K. Ham, J. Sarfati and C. Wieland of “Answers in Genesis” [AIG] are correct when they write on p. 137 of The Answers Book (Expanded and Updated) (Tribune Press, Brisbane, 2002) that:
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“People generally want a local flood because they have accepted the widely believed evolutionary history of the Earth, which interprets the fossils under our feet as the history of the sequential appearance of life over eons of time . ”, that generalization of theirs certainly does not apply to me, since I am not an evolutionist. And that, for the following two cogent reasons amongst others:

1. Regarding the supposed evolutionary progression of the Geological Ages, those polystrate trees alone are enough for me, rendering obsolete - seemingly in one blow - this presumed geological progression and thereby demanding a searching revision of the Geological Ages. The polystrate tree should be adopted as an emblem by anti-evolutionists and worn as their logo;

2. as far as the fossil record goes, the words of G.K. Chesterton still, to this day, hold good: “The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.” (Chesterton as cited at hissheep.org).

: “A spurious argument used by creationists refers to polystrate trees. These are fossil trees which, not unexpectedly, are found at a number of different sediment levels. It is interesting to note that such objects are of little interest to science, creationists have invented both the data and the terminology . ”. Unsatisfied by this, I popped into the Department of Geology at the University of Sydney one day and asked a geologist there if I could pose him a question. It was: How to reconcile the standard interpretation of the Geological Ages with the evidence of polystrate trees? Whilst he kindly obliged, he had never in fact heard of polystrate trees. When I, a scientific layman, tried to explain the phenomenon accurately to him, he completely missed the point of the multi-strata and its implications for his science. Plimer is perhaps right then in saying that “ . such objects are of little interest to science”.
2. Chesterton’s comment about the missing link is still most relevant. The cover story of the latest issue of TIME (Australia, August 15, 2005), “Evolution Wars”, has Darwinists like British biologist Richard Dawkins admitting to gaps in the fossil record; though still clinging to Darwinism with an unshakable ”faith’ and not wanting even to entertain any debate with proponents of Intelligent Design (genuine scientists like e.g. Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University). The hilarious Chesterton’s other pithy comment, that the most notable thing about the missing link is that it is “still missing”, probably sums up Darwinian evolution better than anything else, before or since.

Moreover, I am all for shortening conventional time scales. However, I do not personally believe that there is any intrinsic geological connection between the biblical Flood and the age of the earth, be it young or old, despite the ”Creationist’ insistence that there is.
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My initial doubts about the validity of the ”global’ model arose, then, not as a result of the sort of scientific criticism by people like Ian Plimer, Professor of Earth Sciences (or Geology) at the University of Melbourne, but from a scrutiny of the biblical data itself, especially in regard to the location of Paradise, and from what I now consider to be the pre- and post- Flood Mesopotamian archaeology (the latter to be discussed in III. & IV.).
It was indeed this biblico-archaeological foundation that then made me receptive to both the kind of scientific arguments that I would have in earlier days entirely rejected, and to the common sense that seemed to go hand in hand with many of these. All in all, I am now firmly convinced that the Genesis Flood could not have been ”global’ in our sense of the term; though it was indeed a ”universal’ Flood in the sense of its having ”affected all’ [persons alive at the time]. Thus I do not challenge the testimonies of the Old and New Testament that only 8 persons survived it (cf. Genesis 6:9 & I Peter 3:20), nor that we are all descended from Noah’s 3 sons (Genesis 9:19); a view that may now be being verified also by genetics, according to the following article (from which I shall quote several sections in IV. (d)):

In Search of Our "Biblical Common Ancestor"
by Patrick Young, Ph.D.
Forbidden

Indeed I must say at this point - and I do not mean this to be in the least bit demeaning, as I greatly admire the efforts of ”Creationists’ and ”global’ Flood modellers to verify the Bible historically - I now find the type of model pioneered by Whitcomb and Morris, and still fervently promoted by ”Creationist’ groups (though with various modifications and refinements), to be, and I would not want to put too fine a point on this,

completely ridiculous!

Fundamentalism taken to its most extreme limits!

Admittedly, there are certain common sense counterpoints (from a biblical standpoint) that one must immediately expect from the ”Creationists’ when espousing the view of a more localised type of Flood. Ham et al. (op. cit.), for instance, have listed some of these on pp. 138-141, preceded by the phrase:

“If the Flood were local, why . [followed by]

- did Noah have to build an Ark? He could have walked to the other side of the mountains and escaped . .
- was the Ark big enough to hold all the different kinds of land vertebrate animals to reproduce those kinds . ?
- did God send the animals to the Ark to escape death? There would have been other animals to reproduce those kinds . .
- would birds have been sent on board? These could simply have winged across to far-distant higher ground . .
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- people who did not happen to be living in the vicinity would not have been affected by it. They would have escaped God’s judgment on sin. . .
- How could the waters rise to 15 cubits (8 metres) above the mountains (Gen. 7:20)?
- God would have repeatedly broken His promise never to send such a Flood again. There have been huge ”local’ floods in recent times . .”

Proposed answers to all these questions will be provided in the course of this article.
Conversely, non ”Creationist’ scientists urge a common sense series of their own against the notion of a ”global’ Flood. Points of this type abound in Plimer’s book for example. Let me preface some of Professor Plimer’s points with his own question [op. cit., p. 75]:

“If there was indeed a ”Great Flood’, then . :

- how come we still have ravens, if one of the pair was sent off by Noah and never returned? [I think Plimer may mean here ”one of the pair of doves’. Genesis 8:13].
- from where did the dove get the branch if the whole earth was overlayed by miles of sediment?”

Or this series of questions [ibid., pp. 74, 105]:

- Could an ark be built to accommodate all the organisms?
- Did Noah really have the mathematical skills to solve the differential equations necessary to understand the bending moment, torque and shear stress associated with the roll, pitch, yaw and slamming expected in the turbulent globe-enveloping flood?
- What shipboard problems would exist on an ark of this size?
- How did the organisms travel from the beached ark to their current locations?”

Plimer will also, despite his off-handed treatment of the polystrate fossils, employ many scientific arguments (especially geological); for example, if the Flood were ”global’, then [ibid., p. 75]:

- every oil well, every coal mine, every drill hole in sedimentary rocks and every cliff profile would show a gradation from basal conglomerate to sand to uppermost siltstones, mudstones and claystones. . [but they don’t, Plimer maintains].
- in the record of rocks, we see evidence that some sedimentary rocks (and fossils therein) are formed in freshwater environments whereas other sedimentary rocks are formed in saline marine water. This presents a slight insuperable problem as the fictitious flood fluids were either fresh or saline but unquestionably could not be both”.

Points of this nature will also be re-visited in sections II.-IV. of this article.
[I am well aware that there has been plenty of debate between Plimer and AIG specifically over some of these points, as well as over many other issues].
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Anyway, for what it is worth, I shall now present my arguments against the ”global’ Flood concept of the ”Creationists’.

Certain Lines of Argument
Against a ”Global’ Flood

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. there sometimes occurs the ironical - even humorous - situation whereby agnostic scientists will occasionally call for a more enlightened exegetical approach to Genesis than do the upholders of the biblical tradition; whereas the latter will at times arrive at a more accurate interpretation of the scientific data than do their scientific opponents.
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Whilst a superficial reading of the Flood narratives of Genesis 6-9 might seem to suggest, according at least to a modern mentality (point i), that the Genesis Flood encompassed the entire globe, covering even the world’s highest mountains, such a ”total’ view I now urge is to impose upon the ancient Genesis texts (not to mention upon poor old Noah and his family) an unrealistic burden that they are quite incapable of supporting. This last is an exegesis that scriptural scholars well versed in ancient practices warn must be avoided. Ironically, it is even an exegetical method against which the agnostic/sceptic Ian Plimer advises (e.g. ibid., pp. 73f.). In fact there sometimes occurs the ironical - even humorous - situation whereby agnostic scientists will occasionally call for a more enlightened exegetical approach to Genesis than do the upholders of the biblical tradition; whereas the latter will at times arrive at a more accurate interpretation of the scientific data than do their scientific opponents.

”Tabula Rasa’ Effect

According to the most extreme ”global’ Flood view, held even by some useful revisionist scholars - like Drs. D. Courville, The Exodus Problem and its Ramifications, V. II, 1971 [pp. 153f.] and J. Osgood, see below - the Genesis Flood was so immense and powerful that it must completely have swept away all features of the antediluvian world, so that no trace whatever of that primeval world would remain today. It was, they argue, a total tabula rasa effect, wiping the slate clean. Proponents of this view consider it to be a complete waste of time now to go searching for the ancient site of Paradise, for instance; though this is exactly what I did in my recent Internet article, “The Location of Paradise” (http://www.catholicintl/catholicissues/paradise.htm) - and hence I would maintain against the proponents of tabula rasa that the concept of a Flood that removed all previous contours is un-biblical.
If I am right in this last assertion, then it would be highly ironical that that well-known advocate of the sola scriptura principle, Martin Luther, “maintained that the original location of the garden of Eden, though known to Adam and his descendants, was obliterated by the devastating effects of Noah’s flood”. (D. Hochner, Noah’s Flood, Angelfire - error 404).
Moreover, this tabula rasa approach turns out to be rather disastrous in terms of:
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(i) a necessary revision of the Stone Ages, and
(ii) archaeologically identifying some major early post-Flood events, all related, such as the era of Nimrod, the Tower of Babel incident and the consequent Dispersion (the last, a mass movement of people away from Mesopotamia, eminently lending itself to archaeological identification).

I shall elaborate on these points in the main part of this article (sections II.-IV.).
Dr. John Osgood of Creation Ex Nihilo (now AIG), who has cleverly synthesised Palestinian stratigraphy and pentateuchal history/& the Book of Joshua (notably in regard to the eras of Abram and the Conquest), and who has bravely attempted even a stratigraphical revision of the so-called Stone Ages (Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic), has nonetheless, in my view, made it completely impossible to bring this latter valiant effort of his to any worthwhile fruition owing to his tabula rasa ”global’ Flood preconception. I give here Dr. Osgood’s point of departure for his revision of the Stone Ages, and I am going to argue that he has immediately taken a wrong and fateful step with his major assumption (“A Better Model for the Stone Age”, EN Tech. J., Vol. 2, 1986, p. 90):

In order to arrive at a terminus for the so-called stone age against the biblical narrative a number of new details must be taken into consideration. Firstly, there should be the fact that the biblical chronology inserts a catastrophic world-wide flood of momentous proportions that was so devastating that it is unlikely that any artifacts of the world before that flood would be likely to be found on the surface of the earth today. . Therefore, the assumption must be made that all the surface artifacts of civilization with which the archaeologist deals must relate to mankind’s history after the great Flood of Noah which has been dated by this writer to be circ. 2,300 B.C.

Thus Osgood will try to squeeze the entire Stone Ages (estimated at over 2 million years) into the approximately half millennium between the end of the Flood (his c. 2300 B.C.) and the early days of Abram in Palestine (dated by Osgood to c. 1870 BC). And he will synthesize the latter (c. 1870 BC) with Palestine’s (specifically En-Gedi’s) Chalcolithic so-called Stone Age era (“The Times of Abraham”, EN Tech. J., Vol. 2, 1986, pp. 79-82).

[I fully accept, at least, Osgood’s compelling Abram/En-gedi-Chalcolithic/(Ghassul IV) synchronization, and I also agree with D. Rohl’s view (The Lost Testament, Century 2002, Ch. 6) that Abram was contemporaneous with the mighty Ur III dynasty in Mesopotamia. See my Internet article: Forbidden The implication here is that a highly advanced civilization in one place, the Mesopotamian city of Ur, can co-exist with a Stone Age scenario, Palestinian En-gedi, not geographically all too far away. Osgood has also argued for Jericho Neolithic to have been contemporaneous with the above-mentioned Ghassul-Chalcolithic phase, “ . Stone Age”, p. 95].

As I wrote above I am all for shortening conventional time spans. But, whilst I believe that Dr. Osgood was quite correct in his proposing the need for a drastic time reduction for the Stone Ages, I think he nevertheless needed to credit these Stone Ages with yet a further 1656 years - that being the usually accepted time span from Adam to the Flood (see e.g. P. Mauro’s The Wonders of Bible Chronology, Reiner, 1965, Ch. III).
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Thus the revised ages model outlined below (to be filled out in sections II.-IV.) for the antediluvian-postdiluvian sequence, interrupted by the Great Flood, will allow - differently from Osgood’s - for there to be an entire archaeology/palaeontology (that is, including the Stone Ages) even for the millennium and a half long antediluvian era:

” the terminus post quem of the Stone Age (i.e. the beginnings of the Palaeolithic age above bedrock) is to be dated back about 1656 years before the Flood (see above) - 1656 years being the full duration of the antediluvian age - to the beginning of man;
” likewise the eventual cultural evolution (beyond Palaeolithic) from Mesolithic to Neolithic must not be confined entirely to post-diluvian times, as Osgood had thought, but must be recognized as having its origins at least in antediluvian times, primarily with Cain, likely the first city builder (Genesis 4:17) - hence Neolithic? - and with Cain’s descendants, all in southern Mesopotamia, who became more and more ”civilized’, technologically speaking (Chalcolithic),
” all this ”progress’ culminating in the vibrant Chalcolithic mid-late Ubaid period (still antediluvian), at Eridu, Uruk and Ur in southern Mesopotamia, that absorbed the Hassuna, Samarra and Halaf cultures in the north, and beyond Iraq - this archaeological phase perhaps corresponding with the likes of the highly ”civilized’, polygamous Lamech and his sons before the Flood (Neolithic/Chalcolithic?).
” That this period of flourishing civilization, confined approximately to the area of the Fertile Crescent, was then interrupted by the Great Flood.
” But that, soon afterwards, Mesopotamian civilization in particular (cf. Genesis 11:2) was resumed, most notably, according to Rohl (op. cit., Ch. 5), by the Ham-ites such as the adventurous Cush; but especially by Nimrod, the empire builder (ibid., Ch. 4); Nimrod’s phase representing the imperial Uruk I and Jemdet Nasr archaeological civilizations in southern Mesopotamia (c. 3000-2900 BC, conventional dating).
” That finally, after Babel, there occurred the Dispersion primarily westwards, shown archaeologically most especially by the Jemdet Nasr expansion (c. 2900 BC, conventional dating), leading to the Early Bronze Age/Early Dynastic phase.

[Whilst I intend to enlarge upon these points of palaeontology/archaeology in sections II. and III., obviously it will require a future series of articles to deal adequately with them].

Courville, convincingly for mine, identified the relatively brief Jemdet Nasr transitional phase (last bullet point above), leading to the Early Bronze Era/Early Dynastic phase, with the post-Babel Dispersion - somewhat miraculously though, given his dubious starting point that the Flood had completely separated Palaeolithic man from Mesolithic man, between whom “not a single link has been found” (op. cit., cf. pp. 144f. & 153). Less fortuitous, I believe, was Osgood, who, having the Stone Ages commencing not much before the time I estimate that the postdiluvian Nimrod would already have started his expansion, consequently had to move the Jemdet Nasr phase down the time line by many centuries (thus away from the actual Dispersion era), and was thus forced to look for evidence of the postdiluvian Dispersion in a period that is in fact reasonably early antediluvian. Osgood may also consequently have confused an antediluvian Cain-ite dominance from southern Mesopotamia (Ubaid), over the northern Mesopotamian cultures, with the northward progression of Nimrod, postdiluvian.
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No ”Tabula Rasa’ Effect
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If my argument in “The Location of Paradise” - and also the view of others . - is correct, that the four antediluvian rivers were still active and discernible in Moses’ day, then this
premise in fact yields a scientific ”king-hit’ to ”Creationist’ Flood science, so-called!
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But there are other biblical-minded writers who, as I noted in “The Location of Paradise”, consider that Genesis 2 does indeed preserve a definite geographico-hydrological link between the pre- and post- Flood worlds. We saw that the four rivers referred to in the antediluvian Adamic toledt are actually named by the postdiluvian Moses as real rivers, running alongside (or around) real geographical locations. Moreover, Moses uses the very same 3rd person masculine singular Hebrew pronoun hu (comprising the Hebrew letters, he waw aleph), meaning ”he’ or ”himself’ (itself), in every one of the four cases, thereby directly connecting Adam’s four rivers with four known rivers of Moses’ time.
Now, this hu is again the exact same Hebrew pronoun that editor Moses would use in his geographical modification of Abra[ha]m’s history, where, in that famous case of Genesis 14:3 he advises his people that the site that was in Abram’s day “the Valley of Siddim” had now become the Dead Sea. Thus Moses: “Valley of Siddim (that is, the Dead Sea)”; the Heb. pronoun hu here being translated quite appropriately into English as, “that is”. But even though the Bible seems to be interpreting itself for us here, I have found that ”Creationists’, whilst willingly accepting the view that Moses was, in the case of Genesis 14:3, pointing to the very same geographical region that was intended in the Abra[ha]mic history (though now with considerable topographical alteration), will strenuously deny any geographical connection whatsoever in Genesis 2 between the pre-Flood hydrography and that later connected there by editor Moses with the pronoun hu.
Now the AIG (some of whose editorial staff at least I know to be keen on the Wiseman toledt theory in regard to Mosac editing of the Genesis texts) co-authors (Ham et. al.) also have argued against any sort of geographical connection before and after the Genesis Flood, in their section: “Answers to objections to a global Flood” (op. cit., p. 144, “Objection 2: The post-Flood geography is the same as the pre-Flood”). Here is how these co-authors tackle the tricky (in their context) matter of the Tigris and Euphrates:

Someone may ask, ”Then why do we have a Tigris and Euphrates today?’ Answer: the same reason there is a Liverpool and Newcastle in Australia; and London, Oxford and Cambridge in North America, although they were originally place names in England. Features in the post-Flood world were given names familiar to those which survived the Flood.

This, I find though, to be a typically modern ”surface’ reading of an ancient text, without coming to grips in any way with the realities of the ancient document; with, for instance (a) the fact that commentators consider the elaboration of the four rivers to be an editorial addition to the original text, (b) coupled with the use of the Hebrew pronoun hu, specifically linking the pre- and post-Flood rivers, as it indeed links geographical locations between the Abra[ha]mic history and the era of Moses.
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Nor can the AIG co-authors so easily dismiss the two other rivers, Pishon and Gihon, by simply stating (ibid.): “The Pishon is not mentioned post-Flood and Gihon is used of the locality of a spring near Jerusalem in the times of Kings David, Solomon and Hezekiah”. For I referred to Sirach’s testimony, in “The Location of Paradise”, that the Pishon and Gihon were, with the Tigris and Euphrates, still (in the C2nd BC) abundant, active rivers. So again I would emphasise the point (and this is pitched mostly at those who tend to operate according to the principle, sola scriptura), that to hold to a view of no geographical link whatsoever between the pre- and post- Flood worlds is to be un-biblical.

[A geographical note: This case of the 4 rivers and their associated lands, referred to in Genesis 2, seems to be the only occasion in Adam’s toledt where editor Moses has obliged us with his geographical indicators connected by the Hebrew pronoun hu. There does not appear to have been any such editorial intervention for instance for the purpose of later specifying the location of “the land of Nod” (Genesis 4:16), where the fratricide Cain settled after his becoming a fugitive; its general location “east of Eden” probably being a verse already embedded in the pre-Mosac original. That leaves us with the necessary task later of having to identify “the land of Nod” on a modern map in order then to build up an accurate archaeological picture of the whereabouts of the Cain-ite pre-Flood ”civilization’. Hopefully my previous article, “The Location of Paradise”, will greatly limit global options here, by at least serving to show just from where exactly Cain’s “Nod” was, if I may put it like this, “east of”].

According to my view, we must discard the notion of tabula rasa in regard to the Flood. Dr. David Livingston is somewhat more realistic here I presume than Drs. Courville and Osgood, and the AIG group, in his statement that: “Pentateuchal geography is very interesting in that pre-Flood geographic and geologic features must have been altered to some degree by the great Flood” (“Historical Geography of the Pentateuch”, http://www.ancientdays.net/histgeopenta.htm). Yes, indeed, “to some degree” as Livingston has well written, and thus apparently not to the extent as to be unidentifiable. Pentateuchal geography moreover, Livingston further notes, is entirely different from modern geography (point i): “The ancients did not have a notion of massive seas and continents as we do today”.

A Geological Blow to the ”Global’ Flood Model?

If my argument in “The Location of Paradise” is correct, that the four antediluvian rivers were still active and discernible in Moses’ day (and indeed even much later than that) - [and I noted therein that this view was shared by others, and I must now also add to this list Carol A. Hill and her, “The Garden of Eden: A Modern Landscape” (Science in Christian Perspective): http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2000/PSCF3_00Hill.html] - then this premise in fact yields a scientific ”king-hit’ to ”Creationist’ Flood science, so-called! Why? I shall let Carol Hill tell why [though, note, I do not share her reliance upon the conventional dating, e.g. of the Ubaid period, nor her views of:
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(i) the location of the ancient Paradise in Mesopotamia, nor
(ii) the location of the land of Cush in western Iran.

However:

(iii) Hill and others (see e.g. S. Caesar’s “Lost River of Eden Discovered By Satellite”, www.creationism.org) may actually have come up with a better (recently satellite detected) identification for the ancient river “Pishon” (now a dried up fossil river) than the one proposed by Professor Yahuda that I have followed in “The Location of Paradise” (for more see II. (B)].

Hill writes (op. cit.):

Implications for Flood Geology

So far in this paper, I have argued that the Bible locates the Garden of Eden at the confluence of the four rivers of ancient Mesopotamia [sic]. The Bible correctly identifies the Pishon River as draining the land of Havilah (Arabia), from whence came gold, bdellium, and onyx stone.

The Bible also correctly identifies the Euphrates and Tigris, both of which are modern rivers which drain approximately the same area of Mesopotamia as they did in ancient times.

The Gihon, while not positively identified, is probably the Karun (and/or Karkheh), which "encompasses" (winds around) the whole land of Cush (western Iran) [sic]. Thus, the Bible locates the Garden of Eden as somewhere near where the head of the Persian Gulf may have existed some 6000 years ago-- that is, on a modern landscape similar to that which exists in southern Iraq today.
Six Miles of Sedimentary Rock Below Eden
This interpretation of the Garden of Eden as existing on a modern landscape presents a major conflict between what the Bible says and what flood geologists say.67 The reason is this: there are six miles of sedimentary rock beneath the Garden of Eden/ Persian Gulf. How could Eden, which existed in pre-flood times, be located over six miles of sedimentary rock supposedly deposited during Noah's flood? What flood geologists are implying is that the Garden of Eden existed on a Precambrian crystalline basement and then Noah's flood came and covered up the Garden of Eden with six miles of sedimentary rock. But this is not what the Bible says. It says that Eden was located where the four rivers confluenced on a modern landscape. It says that the Garden of Eden was located on top of six miles of sedimentary rock, and thus this sedimentary rock must have existed in pre-flood times.
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[The Bible] says that the Garden of Eden was located on top of six miles of sedimentary rock, and thus this sedimentary rock must have existed in pre-flood times.

The fact that six miles of sedimentary rock exist beneath the Persian Gulf area is well known by geologists, since this area has been extensively drilled for oil, down to the Precambrian basement. The fact that the Persian Gulf is located in an area of oil recovery is equally as evident to the layperson who, in 1991, witnessed on television the numerous oil fires set off in Kuwait during the Gulf War. The six miles of sedimentary rock below the Garden of Eden area include Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and Paleozoic rock up to a depth of about 32,000 feet before the Precambrian basement is encountered.68 . .

Pitch for the Ark

If the above were not evidence enough, there is another Bible passage which confirms a pre-flood Mesopotamian world on a modern landscape. The Bible records that Noah used pitch in construction of the ark: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch" (Gen. 6:14). Pitch is a thick, tarry, oil product composed of a mixture of hydrocarbons of variable color, hardness, and volatility. Bitumen mixed with two or three parts of mineral and/or vegetable matter makes asphalt or pitch, a crude but versatile adhesive. Bitumen is a natural petroleum product derived from kerogen. It can be encountered by oil drillers in the subsurface, or it can move up cracks and faults and make its way naturally to the surface in the form of bitumen seepages.
Many bitumen seeps exist in the Middle East.69 Bitumen was used extensively by the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia for every type of adhesive-construction need, including the waterproofing of boats and mortar for buildings (e.g., "slime" for mortar; Gen. 11:3). The center of bitumen production in Mesopotamia was (and still is) at Hit, located along the Euphrates River . . The Hit bitumen occurs in "lakes" where lines of hot springs are welling up along deep faults.70 This water is sometimes accompanied by so much gas that the latter will burn. In the water, "snakes" of asphalt collect together, and the Iraqis consolidate them into lumps. It is likely that bitumen was collected in this same manner in ancient times, because similar lumps of asphalt have been found at Ur in levels dating from about 3000 B.C.71 Sir Leonard Woolley's famous expedition to Ur found a lump of bitumen just above his "flood layer" which had an imprint of a reed basket on it. Even today, bitumen is packaged into reed baskets and floated down the Euphrates in boats. The bitumen from Hit has been utilized by the people of southern Mesopotamia for thousands of years, as recorded at numerous archaeological sites. The earliest evidence of bitumen use is at al'Ubaid (5000-4000 B.C.) [sic], where reed matting plastered with a mixture of earth and bitumen was found during the excavations of Woolley.73
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Later in the Ubaid Period . bitumen-covered headdresses of clay figurine goddesses were made at Ur. However, while some bitumen has been found at very early sites such as these, the bitumen industry . had its beginnings between 3500-3000 B.C.74 . The essential point of the above discussion on bitumen now becomes evident. How could Noah have obtained bitumen from sedimentary rock for building his ark, if (as claimed by flood geologists) no sedimentary rock existed on earth? One cannot have it both ways. . .
[End of quote].

[Hit in Mesopotamia was not the only source of bitumen in the Fertile Crescent. Another notable place, for instance, was the “Valley of Siddim”, which was, according to Genesis 14:10 “full of bitumen pits”; these pits becoming death traps for “some” of the fleeing army of Sodom and Gomorrah upon their defeat by the Mesopotamian coalition of four kings. For an historical identification of these Mesopotamian kings, see my article:
Forbidden
Rohl (op. cit., Ch. 6) has independently arrived at largely the same identifications for the four kings. One will find in his discussion some other valuable information, as well, including why Genesis 14:4,5 seems to place the Elamite, Chedorlaomer at the head of the coalition, whereas the revised historical reconstruction clearly reveals the Elamite to have been subservient to the powerful Sumerian king, Amraphel (].

Carol Hill’s argument above, and its scientific conclusions, would of course be music to the ears of a Professor Plimer. But I believe that it is indeed also hard scientific (geological) fact, and at the same time perfectly in accord with the geography of Genesis.
Were the worldwide layers of sediment all to be regarded as an effect of the Great Flood, causing wicked humans to have perished on so vast a scale, then why don’t the oil geologists, when drilling down miles into this sediment, encounter masses of human bones? AIG’s Ham et. al. (op. cit., p. 32) have rightly claimed that evolution is contrary to the Scriptures, because it would mean that “the garden were sitting on a fossil record of dead things millions of years old” (contrary to Romans 8:19-22) - and they illustrate this with a marvellous cartoon of the Garden and Adam and Eve atop a huge pile of bones (p. 33) - but how do they account for the lack of human bones in the deep sedimentary layers? And why aren’t human fossils found contemporaneously with the fossils of dinosaurs? Plimer has tossed up this very issue in his “Footprints to Fantasy” (op. cit., p. 226f.). Ham et. al., (op. cit., p. 179f.) have, for their part, devoted an entire chapter (Ch. 15) towards settling this awkward matter. But my response to the title of their Chapter 15: “Where are all the human fossils?”, must be: Well, where are they?
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Two important Conclusions to be drawn from Carol Hill’s article:

” Both the Genesis geography (point ii) and modern geology (point iv) conspire to make nonsense of the ”Creationist’ model of the Flood.
” A new model must urgently be developed; one that is fully in conformity with both (a) the biblical texts, as reasonably interpreted (a sound exegesis) (point i), and (b) a genuine science (point iv).
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- That brings me to the main part of this Flood article (sections II.-IV.), but fully based on what has already been written in I. The Flood model that I shall be proposing in sections II.-IV. will be (as indeed was section I.), firstly, entirely dependent upon the major premise that I defended in “The Location of Paradise”, of a geographical link between the pre- and post- Flood worlds; but now to be coupled with the geological evidence just referred to, that the antediluvian civilization already sat above six miles of sedimentary rock - the latter in turn layered above a Precambrian basement.
- As a further support to this, the geologico-palaeontological development from bedrock of a realistic new Flood model, I shall be bringing in a basic archaeological model.
- My entire model hopefully to be suffused by a healthy dose of common sense.

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II. “The World That Then Was” (2 Peter 3:6)

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. my model of an antediluvian micro-world of human existence within our great globe will be my basis for answering AIG’s common sense (from a biblical standpoint) challenge about the veracity of God’s promise to Noah.
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Noah’s Weltanschauung (”World View’)
(A) in General

My threefold argument here will be that:

(i) the antediluvian ”world’ known to Noah - what the Apostle Peter called “ . the world [Gk. kosmos] that then was, [that] being flooded by water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6; cf. 2:5) - was essentially what today some scholars of the ancient Near East might call ”the Fertile Crescent’, ranging approximately (at least from East to West) from Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Egypt/Ethiopia; human habitation established along the riverine system described in Genesis 2 (a hydrological system that I detailed in “The Location of Paradise”);

and, consequently, that

(ii) for the Flood to have been ”universal’, to have destroyed all human beings save Noah’s family, it need not to have covered the entire globe as we now know it, nor all of its highest mountains. Noah’s micro-world is, I believe, still largely retrievable by archaeology; though, obviously, with some difficulty.

(iii) Nor was it necessary for Noah to have collected whatever birds and animals (including dinosaurs?) lived beyond his very small (by our standards) ”world’.
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Now my model of an antediluvian micro-world of human existence within our great globe will be my basis for answering AIG’s common sense (from a biblical standpoint) challenge about the veracity of God’s promise. This model does not however, of itself alone, answer those other questions regarding why Noah would need to have built an immense Ark, nor indeed any sort of vessel at all. These and related questions will obviously require more complex answers, pertaining to the singular structure/topography of Noah’s ”kosmos’ (see B. below) and to the distinctive Flood mechanisms (see IV. (a)).

‘ My antediluvian-to-Flood model will obviously be far less vast in scope than are any of the proposed ”global’ Flood models; these generally, I should think, presupposing an Eden that has since been completely submerged beneath the sea, or at least beneath layers of sediment.
‘ But my model will at the same time be significantly more vast in scope - and certainly more universal - than are those proposed models localized to just one ancient country or region, usually Mesopotamia (e.g. Rohl, op. cit. Ch. 3; Plimer, op. cit., pp. 94-95); Mesopotamia generally being also the preferred location for Eden (e.g. Hill, op. cit.; Rohl, op. cit. Ch. 1). It will also allow for a degree of contemporaneous upheaval or catastrophism in various other, uninhabited (by humans), parts of the globe (and therefore not affecting any human beings).
‘ In terms of geographical extent only, my model will be far closer to that of Rohl and Plimer than it is to what I consider to be the entirely unrealistic ”global’ Flood models.

The basically two opposing Flood models as outlined above (the ”local’ and ”global’) enable for their protagonists to arrive at two quite different estimations, respectively, of the person of Noah himself.
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. the open-ended model (at its most extreme) of a ”global’ Flood, that entirely erased all trace of the bygone world, allows for one imaginatively to reconstruct a ”Noah’ who can be
a superman, a physical and technological giant the like of whom we have never seen.
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Whilst the Flood model of, to use Professor Plimer’s words “a local, but great Flood” (op. cit., p. 94) - a description that can be entirely accommodated to my own model - would limit Noah and his ancestors to specific, known archaeological periods (contemporaneous with e.g. the Eridu, Ur, Ubaid and Halaf, Hassuna, Samarra phases in Mesopotamia), whose architecture, pottery, building methods, measurements and technology in general are now quite well known, the open-ended model (at its most extreme) of a ”global’ Flood, that entirely erased all trace of the bygone world, allows for one imaginatively to reconstruct a ”Noah’ who can be a superman, a physical and technological giant the like of whom we have never seen.
Scripture tells us that there were in fact giants in Noah’s day, the Nephilim, perhaps perverse fruit of the union between the once-godly Seth-ites and the ”fair’ Cain-ite women (Genesis 6:4). These ”Titans’ were amongst those destroyed in the Flood, whose cause the wise king Solomon discerningly attributed right back to Cain himself (Wisdom 10:3-4).
There were of course belligerent giants in post-Flood times as well (e.g. Numbers 13:33).
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According to a fascinating TV documentary, “In the Footsteps of Goliath” (Lost Worlds), the giants whose bones have been dug up in Palestine were no more than 2 metres tall. Whilst that conclusion might be disappointing for we who have grown up with tales like “Jack and the Beanstalk”, it was nevertheless extremely tall by the height standards of the day. The documentary explained that even the imposing Goliath himself was only approximately 2 metres tall, as verified by the more ancient Dead Sea Scrolls texts about the famous giant (replacing the previous view - based on later translations - that Goliath stood as high as 3 metres). It was even suggested that Goliath may have suffered from a form of gigantism that causes large features, a big tongue and a booming voice, tunnel vision (hence David’s advantage in speedy movement); though the down side of this would be the unlikely symptom that the giant might have been unstable in walking and shaky on his feet. And having to wear heavy armour would only have exacerbated such a condition.

Anyway, the Bible nowhere says or implies that the long-lived Noah was a gigantic man, and it would be most unlikely, given the perverse Nephilim of his day, that he was.

[Even the haughty and rebellious Nimrod, who was - according to Josephus - “a bold man, and of great strength of hand” (Antiquities, Bk. I, iv:2), was unlikely an actual giant. We have various representations of the historical Nimrod I think in Mesopotamian art, as Enmerkar, or N-M-R “the hunter” (].

Some propose a supposed hugeness for Noah and his sons in order to account for the fact, as they see it, that so few as 4 men had built an Ark so immense. For, according to Ham et. al. (op. cit., p. 172), Noah’s Ark had “the equivalent volume of 522 standard railroad stock cars, each of which can hold 240 sheep”. Or, as one Baptist minister seriously told me: “ . it [the Ark] was the length of the Melbourne Cricket Ground” (this ground has just recently held some 91,000 plus persons for a Grand Final). [The longevity of Noah and his sons is yet another factor sometimes argued in favour of gigantism].

According to my antediluvian model, to be set archaeologically in Eridu, Ur and Ubaid times, and palaeontologically in Neolithic/Chalcolithic times, for AIG’s Ark to have been produced then is just plain ridiculous! It defies common sense!

The fact that a boat of such alleged proportions was never even remotely matched by shipbuilders after the Flood, e.g. by Ham’s son, Cush, the seafaring colonizer of Ethiopia (if Rohl is correct, op. cit., Ch. 5), or his empire loving, God-defying hunter son Nimrod, nor even by the world-conquering Romans (millennia later than Nimrod) - whose technological skills astound even today - would be easily explained of course by ”global’ Floodists: the technology and know-how, they would say, was all totally lost in the upheaval of the Flood. However, I think that such an imagined vessel was never built in the first place; and that the answer to Plimer’s question, stated earlier: “Did Noah really have the mathematical skills to solve the differential equations necessary to understand the bending moment, torque . associated with the roll, pitch, yaw and slamming expected in the turbulent globe-enveloping flood?”, has to be an emphatic No!
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No one would be more surprised than Noah and his sons to learn of what stupendous mathematical and technological skills have been attributed to them by some moderns! The problem may be in the figures that have come down to us. The size of the Ark, like the alleged size of Goliath, has perhaps grown some substantial extra dimensions with the passing of time. (See also my Excursus B on Biblical Numbers in IV. (b)).
I shall be returning to this controversial matter of Noah’s Ark in more detail also in IV.

Ancient and Semitic Ways of Thinking

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If one is going to talk about biblical context: namely, in this case, the proper context for the geography of the Flood narratives . the particular geographical context could only be that of Genesis 2 . ..
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I wrote in “The Location of Paradise” that Canaan was the hub of the ancient world even down to the time of Alexander the Great (C4th BC). Indeed for Jesus and his fellow Jews it was, as I am going to suggest, still the point of reference as late as the C1st AD. And the mediaeval Crusaders considered Jerusalem to be the centre of the world in their day. ”Creationists’ though, making much of the fact that the Genesis Flood narratives use language that they say unequivocally indicates totality and universality - and indeed they surely do when read at face value, from a modern (western) point of view - are forced to situate Noah and his family in the same sort of vast global environment, virtually, as now inhabited by 3rd millennium man. Ham et al. (op. cit., pp. 141-143), for instance take such Hebrew phrases from the Flood narrative translated as e.g. “all flesh”, “all the earth”, “every living thing”, “under the whole heaven”, etc., as clearly implying a global Flood. Though they do note (ibid., p. 143), at least in regard to the word ”all’ (Hebrew kol), here, that:

Some have argued that since ”all’ does not always mean ”each and every’ (e.g. Mark 1:5) the use of ”all’ in the Flood account does not necessarily mean the Flood was universal. That is, they claim that this use of ”all’ allows for a local flood.

Again, the co-authors are adhering to a true literary principle - applicable to both ancient and modern writings - when they insist that the meaning of any word (such as ”all’) needs to be determined according to its [geographical] context; that: “From the context of ”all’ in Luke 2:1, for example, we can see that ”all the world’ meant all the Roman Empire”. D. Hochner (op. cit.), though, having also considered these same sorts of ”total’ Hebrew phrases in the Flood narrative, concludes that the Flood was not global. Here is what Hochner has to say, for instance, about the key word “earth”/“land” (Heb: eretz/erets):

Erets (#776 in Strong's), the Hebrew word that [is] translated "earth" throughout the flood account and it does not require a world-wide meaning. This word translated "country" (140 times) and "land" (1,476 times!) in the Bible. Many of them are often of limited land areas.
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Hochner then proceeds to produce a list of Old and New Testament usages of this word, eretz, to show that its meaning is often localized, and certainly never globalized in our modern sense. To give just one of his examples (his point e):

. Acts 11:28 speaks of a similar famine throughout all the world, yet it is not likely it really meant over the whole globe including the New World.

One encounters again, later in the Old Testament, a phrase very reminiscent of the Flood narrative, namely, ”spread over the face of the earth’ (Numbers 22:5,11): ”A people has come out of Egypt; they have spread over the face of the earth’, complains the Moabite king, Balak, of the Israelites on their way to cross the River Jordan. But how far ”spread over the face of the earth’ were the Israelites at this particular point in time? A few verses earlier (22:1) we are told just how far: “The Israelites . camped in the plains of Moab across the Jordan from Jericho”. Not very far at all according to a global context!
Thus, certain Semitic geographical phrases that would seem to us to imply ”total’, or ”global’, do not necessarily mean that!
Given the nature of Semitic thinking or reasoning though, as I am now going to discuss in the following brief Excursus A, lifted largely from Professor Stalker’s The Life of Jesus - contrasting the Oriental (Semitic) with the western way of human thinking - even ”context’ may not always be as obvious as we westerners might like it to be.

Excursus A: Two Different Intellectual Emphases

Whilst the mind is a faculty (of the spiritual soul) that is an integral part of each human being, the mode of intellectual emphasis amongst human beings can differ significantly.
So this little Excursus will be entirely a matter of mental emphasis, not a challenge to the Aristotelico-Thomistic epistemology.

Professor Stalker, in The Life of Jesus, has well and poetically explained how this applies, for instance, in the comparison between the oriental (more contemplative) cast of mind and the western (discursive, analytical) one (p. 65. I lack the full bibliographical details for this document):

“Our [western] thinking and speaking when at their best are fluent, expansive, closely reasoned. The kind of discourse which we admire is one which takes up an important subject, divides it out into different branches, treats it fully under each of the heads, closely articulates part to part . ”.

By contrast, the oriental or Jewish mind, Professor Stalker goes on to say (ibid.):

“ . loves to brood long on a single point, to turn it round and round, to gather up all the truth about it into a focus, and pour it forth in a few pointed and memorable words. It is concise, epigrammatic, oracular”.

Whereas a western speaker’s discourse, he continues (ibid.): “ . is a systematic structure, or like a chain in which link is firmly knit to link, an Oriental’s is like the sky at night, full of innumerable burning points shining forth from a dark background”.
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A fortiori should Professor Stalker’s enlightening contrast here between the eastern (Oriental/Semitic) and western mind-sets be applicable to the difference between the ancient (especially, for our purposes, Semitic), and the modern western, mind-sets. It is the kind of contrast of which one should always be well aware when approaching the ancient biblical texts.
Returning to ancient geography, then, I ask: How, for instance, are we meant to place in any proper geographical context Jesus Christ’s statement about “the queen of the south” as coming “from the ends of the earth” (Matthew 12:42), when Jesus himself gives no such specific context? Though it might greatly help if one were to know that the prophet Daniel had already, centuries earlier, used this broad phrase “of the south” to designate an un-named “king” who would rule Egypt and Ethiopia (e.g. Daniel 11:5); just as, it seems, “the queen of the south” would later rule Egypt and Ethiopia as ”king’ (pharaoh).

If one is going to talk about biblical context: namely, in this case, the proper context for the geography of the Flood narratives, with their frequent references to “the earth” (Hebrew eretz) - and several times to “all the earth” (e.g. Genesis 7:3; 8:9) - I suggest that the geographical context could only be that of Genesis 2: namely, that portion of the earth associated with the primeval riverine system.

Moreover, the Temple is yet still standing and the Sabbath restrictions are still in place, necessitating a scenario and date of composition pre-70 AD. If one is to talk about the literal level of meaning, then - substantially speaking - the Book of Revelation was literally fulfilled with the Jewish war against Rome (69-70 AD), culminating in the destruction of the Temple of Yahweh in 70AD. Despite all this, many extrapolate Revelation, literally, to a modern global scene. And they have done the very same, geographically - and with even less justification - with the most ancient Flood narratives.

[Further comment: I am not denying of course that the Holy Spirit has also endowed this extraordinary book (Revelation) with other levels of meaning, supra-literal, that make it spiritually applicable to all generations. Also, one seems to encounter in Revelation certain stunning parallels between St. John’s era and our times, and even certain intriguing details: e.g. St. John’s reference to “wormwood”, 8:11, and the fact that the Ukrainian name ”Chernobyl’ also apparently translates as “wormwood”, as pointed out in J. Foley’s gripping current article, “The Strange Association Between Fatima and the Number 13”, Immaculate Heart Messenger, July-September, 2005, p. 9].

So let us be wary of imposing our modern ways of thinking upon these ancient texts!

Examples from the New Testament, of how differently the ancients viewed the world (common sense should tell us that anyhow), are many. Here are just two such examples:

1. As earlier mentioned, Jesus recalled the “queen of the south” as having come “from the ends of the earth” to hear the wisdom of Solomon (Matthew 12:42). In modern terms, the biblical queen must have come from somewhere deep in our southern hemisphere: e.g. from New Zealand, or from South America, or from my homeland island of Tasmania.
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According to the common view though (but not mine, as I have noted above), the biblical queen was no further away from Jerusalem than Yemen (Sheba) in southern Arabia. And I am sure that ”Creationists’ generally would take Jesus’s description in a similar sort of localized, rather than ”global’, context.
2. To top it all off, consider how, at Pentecost, there were living in Jerusalem - and here is one of those ”total’ sorts of biblical phrases: “ . devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). From where did these various Jews hail? From each of the 5 continents? No, from ancient lands that were either right within the geographical sphere of Noah’s micro-kosmos, or closely adjacent to it:

”Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome . Cretans and Arabs . ?’ (vv. 7,8-10,11).

So, all of this strange modern interpretation of their ancient toledt documents would have been startling news to old Noah and to his three sons, and even also to St. John (Revelation) - but especially to the former. If Jesus, in his own day could use so broad a geographical phrase as “the ends of the earth” in connection with what any sensible person today would accept as intending quite a localized context, and if the inspired author of Acts 2 could use so global-like a phrase as “from every nation under heaven” merely to designate Jews from largely the region of the ”Fertile Crescent’ and its environs, then a fortiori must Noah and his sons (about two and a half millennia earlier) have meant something local by our standards. The ”world’ known by those 8 survivors of the universal Flood must have been one considerably more compact even than the world of the Roman empire known to St. Peter, who referred to Noah’s kosmos as “the world that then was”. Not St. Peter’s relatively large world; and certainly not our global one.

Whose Flood testimony then are we to believe:

The Answers Book of Sarfati, Ham & Wieland, or the
eye-witness toledt history of Shem, Ham & Japheth (Genesis 10:1)?

[Sorry, I could not resist the recurrence of the name ”Ham’ here!].
As noted at the start, I have no intention at all of ridiculing good people who are sincerely trying to seek out the meaning of the Bible. The Answers Book of Ham et. al. has much excellent and genuinely scientific material between its two covers. It is a superb reference book on Genesis related issues. Moreover, I too was for a long time a global Floodist. But, looking at it all now from a different perspective, one that hopefully (from my point of view) is truly biblically-based, then I cannot help but exclaim:

No wonder many scientists, and moderns in general, resist the Scriptures!
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And it could well be that some of these, perhaps ready to be persuaded, have nonetheless

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