Whoever wrote the the story of the Flood pretty clearly intended to describe an amount of time much less than millions of years:
"Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made."
"For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth."
"The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days."
"By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. "
In any case, it all is said to happen well within the lifetime of one man, who lived for slightly less than a thousand years (!).
Perhaps the whole thing is not meant literally, but merely as "allegory"; if so, what is it an allegory
for?
(As far as I can tell, it fits very well into the "evolutionary tree" of Middle Eastern flood myths a myth like any other.)
Edited by Lenoxus, : typo
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