"The Flood"
Gen. 7:1-24
Sept. 1, 1996 

Text Comments

7:1 His family saved because Noah was righteous!

7:2 Additional clean animals and birds are added to the pairs of animals required to be taken into the ark in 6:19-20. The purpose of this will become clear later, the birds being used to reconnoitre the earth as the waters recede and the animals to be offered in sacrifice after Noah and his family are brought safely through the flood.

7:4 The Gilgamesh epic, the greatest of the ANE flood stories also mentions seven days, but takes it to be the time it took to build the ark! In any number of respects the ANE flood stories have the marks of myth all over them while the biblical account is straightforward, and has everywhere the appearance of a factual narrative. Interestingly the ANE epics concentrate on the heroism of the hero, who is very active in the story, building the ship, telling his neighbors a story as to why, and, at the end, he shuts himself in the ark, whereas Noah is presented in the Bible simply as an obedient servant of the Lord, he never speaks, and God shuts him in the ark. The living God, who graciously provides for the salvation of mankind is the actor in the Biblical account, heroic men who later become like gods and jealous, cowardly, quarrelsome gods of various kinds litter the ANE accounts. Indeed, in the old Babylonian version, the flood is a last resort to silence the rowdiness of man so that the gods might get a little sleep.

7:11 The precise date (without any numbers that are obviously symbolic suggests a plain fact, clearly remembered. The two sources of water, above and below, a vast upheaval of the sea-bed? and torrential rain, recall chapter one and the creation (1:6), but now the waters above and below the firmament are mixed together to undo the creation and bring back the featureless waste of water. The ANE flood stories also have the water coming both from above and below.

7:13 "On that very day" marks a particularly memorable occasion. Elsewhere in the Pentateuch it marks Abraham's circumcision, the exodus, and the death of Moses.

7:20 The figure perhaps derived from the draft of the ark, viz. there was enough water to float it over the mountain-tops. Some evangelicals, esp. advocates of flood-geology (more on that later) argue that the mountain ranges may not have been thrust up by this times so that the depth of the water would not have been anything like the 30,000 feet it would take to cover Everest or the 17,000 it would take to cover the present day Ararat. By the way, the Bible, in 8:4, does not say that the ark landed on Mt. Ararat, it says only that it landed on the mountains of Ararat, which is the Hebrew term for the kingdom above Assyria, a large area of present day eastern Turkey, southern Russia, and northwestern Iran, that is at the head of the Mesopotamian Valley.

The time has come for us to consider the flood as an historical event. It certainly is taught to have been a real event in space and time in the Bible and not only here in Genesis, but as well by the Lord and other authors of the Old and New Testaments. Our confidence in the historical report of Genesis 6-9 is bound up with our confidence in the accuracy of the rest of the Bible's reporting of historical events that are likewise stupendous or miraculous. One matter we can dispense with at the outset. This is historical writing we are reading in Genesis 7. It is not the language or the style of epic poetry or of religious myth, it is rather couched in the terms of sober history, connected historically before and after with figures and developments that are clearly taken to be historical and in some cases known to be historical. It intends to be taken as a narrative of what actually happened, an accurate report, even of details, that reflect a source derived from persons who were involved. It is not a religious epic, a myth in the technical sense, that conveys religious truth by means of a larger-than-life story. The rest of the Bible takes it to be history and it is written as history in the ordinary sense of the word.

The skeptics in our world, and there are many, including the array of unbelieving biblical scholarship, of course, finds simply preposterous the claim that Genesis 6-9 is a reliable historical account. A man building a great barge that would stand up to the demands of a year's worth of seaworthiness, all the animals showing up unbidden and in pairs to climb aboard, water deep enough to cover the mountains, all of this is patently mythical and cannot be taken seriously by inhabitants of the 20th century. What is more, geologists almost universally discount the occurrence of a world-wide flood of such proportion that the water covered the mountains to a depth of 15 feet. Such a flood should have left its mark and, they argue, no such mark can be found in the geological record of the history of the world. It is a myth, of that they are sure.

But, to make matters worse, even evangelicals, who believe in the flood, and the inerrancy of the Bible are not in agreement about how to take the Bible's account. For many years some have argued that the Biblical account does not have to be taken as describing a flood that covered the entire planet, but could, in fact, be giving an account of a deluge that covered and destroyed only that part of the world where Noah and mankind lived, the Mesopotamian valley and environs. A related issue and debate concerns the date of the flood. How long before Abraham, for example, did the flood occur? Some evangelicals, especially those who believe in a young earth, place the flood quite late in the history of the early world, others much earlier.

Now as you may know, the position that one takes on the flood has become in some circles a litmus test of one's fidelity to the Bible. Young earth creationists, in particular, regard a faithful reading of the Bible to require belief in a universal, world-wide flood, not so many generations before Abraham and not so many thousands of years after the creation of the world. It seems to them that this is what the Bible plainly says and to take seriously the skepticism of modern nay-sayers, even of modern geologists, is unbelief pure and simple.

In holding this view, these advocates of a young earth and a recent, world-wide flood have developed a theory of the geological formation of the world that is now called "flood geology." The thesis was stated in its modern form for the first time in John Whitcomb and Henry Morris's 1961 book, The Genesis Flood. It is the position now defended by the Creation Research Institute and a number of evangelical writers on science and the Scripture and accepted by vast numbers of Bible-believing Christians as the only possible position for someone who takes the Bible to be the inerrant word of God. Many folk in our own PCA circles are firmly persuaded of this view and for some of them any dissent from it is tantamount to a failure of nerve, a capitulation to worldly unbelief.

According to this view, flood geology, virtually the entire geological column, the macro-geology and topography of the earth's crust in its present form, is the result of deposits laid down at the time of the flood. Whether we are speaking of several miles' thickness of sedimentary rock or the Grand Canyon or vast coal deposits in Antarctica the common explanation and cause is the great flood reported in Scripture. The source of the petroleum being pumped from the earth today is the catastrophic mass burial of living matter, flora, by the deposits laid down by this flood which occurred, most would say, some six to ten thousands years ago.

Now, the fact that the prevailing consensus of scientific opinion leaves no room for such a view of the flood or its effects, by itself would not make me unwilling to believe that this is a generally accurate account of the history of the world and, in particular, the geological history of the earth. One thing one learns in graduate school, if he has not yet learned it in life, is the power of scholarly paradigms to blind otherwise intelligent people to the facts. Presuppositions powerfully shape our interpretation of data. In biblical scholarship, for example, there are any number of paradigms, ruling and controlling theories of the literary history of the Bible for example that I regard as wildly false. But those who have embraced these theories cannot see facts that lie plain and clear before their eyes. We would say the same thing about the theory of evolution and the frustration we feel that its advocates cannot be made to feel the weight of the immense problems posed by the data for that theory. But they are serene in their confidence and usually quite blithely unaware of the problems because they see and interpret everything in accordance with their fundamental assumption that life did evolve from lower forms.

If I were someday to learn that, as a matter of fact, flood geology was substantially correct and the ruling paradigms of scientific geology false, I would be little surprised.

But, it is not enough to leave the matter there. For there are reasons to doubt that flood geology and the view of a young earth that is always connected with it do in fact account for the evidence in a satisfactory way.

Let me say, before I say anything else, "let God be true and every man a liar." I believe that the history reported in Genesis 6-9 is true and is historically true in the common sense of that word. There was a great flood and there was an ark in which Noah and his wife, their sons and their wives were saved alive along with the animals and birds.

The question is not whether this is true history or not. The question for us is what exactly does the Bible tell us happened. I will admit something more. The idea of a universal flood with waters reaching the tops of mountains as tall as they are today has been from the beginning the general understanding of the Christian Church as it has read these chapters. The new look at Genesis is doubtless the result of the investigations of modern geology, anthropology, and archaeology. But that, in itself, does not prove that Christians are more ready to believe scientists than the Bible or that they are subjecting the authority of the Bible to the authority of modern science or that they are afraid to hold an opinion that the world would think ridiculous. It simply means that they have reason to ask whether they have understood the Bible correctly.

Knowledge that has come from other sources has many times changed the way the church has read the Bible and, I think few would doubt, has changed it for the better. For example, for long years the chronology of the Hebrew kings posed great difficulties. The numbers simply didn't add up. Bible believing scholars had to spin out elaborate harmonizations to make the length of one reign agree with the length of other reigns. The problem was that a "naive" reading of Kings and Chronicles gave the impression that the reigns of the kings were all to be understood as successive, one reign following another. But it is now understood, from the ANE data that archaeology has provided, that, as a matter of fact, co-regencies and the like were often a feature of royal successions and one king's number of years would frequently overlap with those of his son or successor, and so on. There is now in Biblical scholarship widespread agreement as to the dates and length of reign of the kings and to the fidelity of the Bible's report of that data, but it was extra-biblical knowledge that taught us to read the Bible accurately.

Jack Collins, in a fine paper on a related subject, reminds us that for centuries, Psalm 96:10, "the earth cannot be moved," was taken to be a proof-text against the earth's rotation. Galileo was right, of course, in arguing that the discoveries of the astronomers discredited only the interpreters of the Bible, not the Bible itself. That isn't what the verse means! But we came to know that from extra-biblical, scientific investigations.

This past week, I called a good friend of mine, an ardent, faithful Christian who has been a practicing geologist for many years, for most of them in oil exploration with British Petroleum, and now, as well, a PHD in geology. I want you to understand that this is a man of the old school when it comes to the authority of the Bible. If he thought that geology and the Bible were in actual conflict, he would stand with the Bible and be sure that somehow the geologists had goofed. But, he has no hesitation in saying that flood geology is untenable. I asked him to give me what he would regard as his basic objections and, no doubt dumbing-down considerably to meet me on my level, he gave me three. 1) What he called "non-conformities in sedimentary rocks. Surfaces of erosion in layers buried deep in sedimentary rocks. These, he said, are extremely common, but what they indicate is that, at one time that layer was on the top and it was hard -- it had lithified, already become rock, and then was eroded by natural forces before more sediment was laid on top which itself eventually became rock, and so on. But, in flood geology, all of these layers were buried at once and there could not have been such layers that had a chance to harden, then erode, before they were themselves buried by further sediment. 2) Coral reefs, thick layers of coral beneath further layers of rock, sometimes huge thicknesses of coral, which clearly grew there -- very slowly as coral does -- and was not buried with everything else all at once by the flood.

3) Great thicknesses of coal which, by no known theory, can be accounted for as the result of the process of a single year or a few years.

He was quick to tell me that he felt it very unwise to allow the extremes to dominate the discussion and debate, as if one had to choose between flood geology and evolution. I asked him about the flood and geology and his answer was that, at present, he was unaware of any geological record of such a world-wide flood. He said quickly that he wasn't saying there wasn't such a record, presuppositions and assumptions may be blinding geologists to what is staring them in the face, but, he was unaware of anything that could be construed as evidence of a world-wide deluge.

All this geology aside, concerning which we are all uninformed amateurs, at best, and on to the Bible itself. I read a most interesting article this past week in the Westminster Theological Journal, the journal of Westminster Theological Seminary, by a scientist at Regent University, the former CBN, the school that Pat Robertson founded at Virginia Beach, a school with some fine scholars on its faculty. The article itself is a learned piece of work.

The contention of this article was flood geology is in conflict with the biblical evidence itself. There was a great deal that was technical in the article, but the gist of the argument was this. In Genesis 2 we are given a description of Eden and its location. The countries round about and the four rivers that mark its location are named, two of which are the Tigris and the Euphrates -- that is, these rivers were connected with the watering of that lush garden. Moses wrote that description, on any historical reading of Gen. 2, to tell us where Eden was and something of its topography, nearby rivers and countries and so on. But, there are 9,000 meters -- what is that, more than five miles -- of sedimentary rock now lying beneath the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, rock in which are located vast deposits of oil, rock that according to flood geologists, was all laid down by the flood on top of the Garden of Eden.

The author summarizes this point this way: "[Moses'] description of the pre-Flood garden location was apparently intended to be meaningful in terms of a post-flood landscape. It was plainly implied that the post-flood landscape had real correspondence with the pre-flood landscape [i.e. same rivers, same countries, etc.], and that this correspondence was sufficiently close to permit the audience to generally understand the garden location." (p. 126) But "flood geology buries any lower Mesopotamian Valley location for the garden of Eden under 5-6 miles of rock. However, the Bible's own geographical data indicate that the site was on a landscape not greatly different from the present, i.e. superposing the rock." [p. 150] Do you see the point? The Bible itself does not permit us to think the world was all that different after the flood than it was before, certainly not in its geology and topography.

Could then, the flood have been less universal, a local flood, not, in fact, covering the whole earth, but rather simply that part of the world? Many Christians today would regard a "yes" answer to that question as a sell-out to unbelieving science, pure and simple. Does not the narrative say plainly that "all the high mountains under the highest heavens were covered" by the floodwaters and that every living thing that moved on the earth perished? But as a matter of fact, the matter isn't quite so simple.

It is a basic principle of biblical interpretation that a text should be taken on its own terms, that we must understand its meaning as an expression of the author's meaning from his perspective, with his purpose, according to the conventions of style and thought he shared with his audience. In that way we understand what was meant by the confusing numbers of the Hebrew Kings which are certainly not reported the way we would report them today. And in the same way, we find that the universalist language in v. 19 for example, may have reference only to the intention and perspective of the author -- all the mountains in that area of the world, all the area that concerned him as holding the population of mankind, all the area that was to fall under the judgment of God on account of human sin.

For example, you have a similarly universalist statement in Gen. 41:56-57 where we read that during the famine that Joseph had prepared Egypt for, all the countries came to Egypt because the famine was in all the world. Now, it is possible that Moses means to say that there was no population of people in the entire populated world that was not suffering from famine, but few evangelical commentators take him to mean that. They think he means only that part of the world and that part of its population that was before his view. It was the way they spoke and it is a fair way of speaking from the perspective of the author. And you find it everywhere in the Bible. In Acts 2:5 we read that there were Jews present at Pentecost "from every nation under heaven." But the nations that are thereafter listed come from a particular area of the world where, the Jewish diaspora was to be found.

Dr. R. Laird Harris, one of this century's champions of the inerrancy of the Bible in American evangelicalism was teaching years ago at Covenant Seminary that he did not feel that a fair reading of the Hebrew Bible required us to believe that the flood produced a water-level that covered the mountain ranges of the world -- only that it floated the ark above the mountains of that world, the world before the eye of the biblical narrator.

I don't know myself what to conclude. I'm happy with a universal flood, as little as we know about all that that might mean. I do not think it is necessary to believe that the flood was universal to be faithful to the statements of the Bible. I believe we must believe that the flood occurred in keeping with the history reported in Genesis 6-9. Exactly what we are taught did in fact occur is a fascinating question and I am happy to leave it there. It is by no means the only such question we are left with in reading the Bible. And it is by no means the only place where we must believe even when we can by no means satisfactorily explain. But, then, that is our happy duty: to trust the word of our God, come wind, come weather, to prove our loyalty to him by believing where we cannot prove, and leave it to him to vindicate that trust as he will.

Pascal wrote wisely long ago: "There is enough brightness in the Scriptures to illuminate the elect and enough obscurity to humble them." That should be good enough for us.

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