Evidence of the Flood.

According to Genesis 7:11-12, the floodwaters came from “the springs of the great deep” and “the floodgates of the heavens.” The respective Hebrew phrases are ma'yenoth tehom rabah and 'aruboth hashamayim. These terms refer to subterranean reservoirs, today called aquifers, and to heavy rain clouds.

            Like most desert plains, Mesopotamia has the characteristics that would favor formation of an enormous aquifer. Certain well-timed geologic events could bring all that water to the surface. And while rain is rare now in Mesopotamia, an “act of God” could certainly bring it to the region and sustain the 40-day torrent which Genesis records.

1. There are more than seventy different reports from various peoples around the world that are supportive of the narration of the Flood as found in the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis. The closest to the Bible is the Babylonian report. The universality of the tradition of the flood speaks seriously for its having a basis in some actual world-wide event which was imprinted on the memory of peoples and preserved during the course of many ages.

            The historicity of the Biblical flood account is confirmed by the tradition existing in many places as to the occurrence of a similar catastrophe. F. von Schwarz (Sintfluth und Völkerwanderungen, pp. 8-18) enumerates sixty-three such flood stories which are, in his opinion, independent of the Biblical account. R. Andree (Die Flutsagen ethnographisch betrachtet) discusses eighty-eight different flood stories, and considers sixty-two of them as independent of the Chaldee and Hebrew tradition. Moreover, these stories extend through all the races of the earth excepting the African; these are excepted, not because it is certain that they do not possess any flood traditions, but because their traditions have not as yet been sufficiently investigated. Lenormant pronounces the flood story as the most universal tradition in the history of primitive man, and Franz Delitzsch was of opinion that we might as well consider the history of Alexander the Great a myth, as to call the flood tradition a fable. It would, indeed, be a greater miracle than that of the deluge itself, if the various and different conditions surrounding the several nations of the earth had produced among them a tradition substantially identical. Like the Hebrews, Babylonians, Greeks, Norsemen, and other peoples of the Old World, many Indian tribes of North and South America had traditions of a deluge. . . . 'When the earliest missionaries came' . . . , the Reverend Myron Eells reported in 1878, 'they found that those Indians had their traditions of a flood, and that one man and his wife were saved on a raft.'” (Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest).

One Bible scholar correctly observed that “the destruction of well nigh the whole human race in an early age of the world's history by a great deluge appears to have so impressed the minds of the few survivors and seems to have been handed down to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that their remote descendants of the present day have not even yet forgotten it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries and among the most barbarous tribes.”

2. The geological research suggests there was indeed a vast, sudden and deadly flood around 5,600 B.C., close enough to the possible time of Noah. Until now, the best stab at modern scientific corroboration of the Flood was the work of British archeologist Charles Leonard Woolley, who caused a sensation with his 1929 book “Ur of the Chaldees,” said to be the most widely read archeology book ever published.

            Digging in present-day Iraq at the site of ancient Ur, the birthplace of the first patriarch Abraham, the Bible-believing Woolley found an ancient blanket of waterborne silt without human remains. It was evidence of a deadly flood that appeared to substantiate Genesis.

3. More recently archaeologists have discovered the remains of a man-made structure more than 300 feet below the surface of the Black Sea, providing dramatic new evidence of an apocalyptic flood 7,500 years ago. The expedition also spotted planks, beams, tree branches and chunks of wood untouched by worms or mollusks, a strong indication that the oxygen-free waters of the Black Sea's 7,000-foot-deep abyss may shelter intact shipwrecks dating back to the dawn of seafaring. Late the team discovered the outlines of an ancient coast 550 feet below the current waterline, the first visual evidence that a flood had occurred in the region eons ago. The expedition also found old tree branches, pieces of wood and a trash heap with polished stones and other debris indicating human habitation, Ballard said.

            Interest in the Black Sea quickened last year with the publication of “Noah's Flood” by Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman, suggesting that the modern-day sea was formed 7,500 years ago when melting glaciers raised sea level until the waters of the Mediterranean breached the natural dam at the Bosporus.

            Later a cataclysmic deluge followed. Seawater from the Mediterranean poured into the Black Sea basin at 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. The heavier salt water plunged to the bottom of the existing fresh water lake and began to fill the basin like a bathtub. Then the rising lake-sea inundated and submerged thousands of square miles of land, destroying communities, killing people and wiping out uncounted species of plants and animals as the ecosystem flipped from fresh water to salt water in a period of only two years.