The Great Flood: Genesis Chapters 6 through 9

Aside from popular opinion and the false impression left by Bible translators, the flood of Noah certainly did NOT cover the entire planet we call Earth. Speaking of the word earth in releation to these chapters of Genesis, we wrote the following in our commentary for Genesis chapter 6 titled The End of Sinners:

Here perhaps we should briefly discuss this word earth, which is translated from the Hebrew word ארץ or erets (# 776), a word which was translated as land over 1,500 times in the King James Version of the Bible, and as earth just over 700 times, according to Strong’s Concordance and other sources. It was also sometimes translated as ground, field, and, among other things, on four unfortunate occasions, as world. But in the 22nd Psalm where we read that “27 All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee”, the reference may very well be to land, to the land among which the nations of Israel, or even the Genesis chapter 10 nations, had their inheritance (i.e. Deuteronomy 32:8). Likewise in Isaiah chapter 23 we read: “17 And it shall come to pass after the end of seventy years, that the Lord will visit Tyre, and she shall turn to her hire, and shall commit fornication with all the kingdoms of the world upon the face of the earth”, where earth is the Hebrew term אדמה or adamah (# 127) and world would have better been translated as land, being this same Hebrew word erets.

The relatively small size of Noah's ark, the highly localized and diversely speciated distribution of many insect and animal species across the globe, the numbers of species known from the fossil record to have been diverse from one another and occupying specific locations long before Noah's flood, and many other facts from the animal world all help serve to demonstrate that Noah's flood must have been a local flood, having covered "the whole land" and not the whole earth.

Equally as convincing, are the effects of the pressure of 30,000 feet of water (assuming all the planet's mountains were covered) for a peak period of over 150 days, and how that would have easily destroyed all possible habitat and food supply for many decades, even centuries, leaving all of Noah's animals to starve to death, along with his own family. Never mind the effects on the world's fresh and salt-water oceans, on glaciers which would have by necessity been removed from their places, etc., all for which there is no convincing evidence. Indeed, upon close inspection and retrospection a belief that the entire planet was covered with water for such a length of time is not only implausible, it is absolutely ludicrous.

As for the age of the earth, we cannot know precisely how old it is. In the "days" of creation, the word translated as day also refers to a time, or an age, and there is nothing which informs us as to how long each of these ages may have been, but they could not have been literal days. They may represent huindreds of years, or hundreds of thousands of years, and we cannot know with absolute certainty. 

One common argument that the earth is only 6.000 years old is readily defeated: that there is not enough sediment in the world's oceans to support the idea that they are very old. Why it is wrong: because the great pressure under so much water quickly compresses sediment into the ocean floor, and closer to the shores sediment is constantly being washed out to sea.

Another common argument of those holding such a position is also easily defeated: that the mollusks found in mountain ranges such as the Andes must be a residue from the flood of Noah. Why it is wrong:  The tops of the mountains were only under water for ten months, which is stated explicitly in Genesis chapter 8, and mollusks do not swim. Rather, mollusks only spread very slowly, and it takes them many, many years to spread from one place to another. There is no possible way that mollusks could have travelled from the depths of the sea to the heights of very tall mountains in under ten months. 

Many other such arguments in favor of a world-wide flood in Noah's time (which is approximately 3186 BC according to our reckoning based on the Septuagint Chronology) are also easily and soundly defeated.

Contrary to the childhood tales upon which public opinions are frequently formed, the flood of Noah did not cover the entire planet. We had only begun to describe the ark which Noah had built in Part 10 of our Genesis commentary, The Sins of Men and Angels. But then in Part 11, The End of Sinners, we discussed the actual numbers of animals Noah had to care for on the ark, the actual length of time they would be kept within it, and some of the logistics issues, upon which we had elaborated on even further in a more recent Topical Discussions presentation, which proves by logistics alone that Noah could not have had even a single pair of all of the animals on the planet for any length of time in an ark of only about 150,000 square feet.

In our commentary, The End of Sinners as well as the one which followed it, titled Solid Ground we also discussed at length both the geography and geology of the Mesopotamian plain and demonstrated how a local flood could easily have covered "every high mountain" in the land which was visible to Noah and his family. All of the physical features of the land, including the distances to mountains much higher than those found in Mesopotamia, may easily provide the stage for the occurrence of a large-scale but local flood, generally contained to Mesopotamia.

Additionally, in our commentary on The End of Sinners we had explained that the later presence of certain alien tribes provides further support for these assertions. For example, which all of the sons of Noah are listed in Genesis chapter 10, and then in Genesis chapters 14 and 15 several tribes are mentioned who did not descend from Noah at all. Among them are the Kenites, who descended from Cain, the Rephaim, who were a family of the Nephilim, or fallen angels, and even a tribe called Zuzims, from a word which means only roving creatures", and therefore they did not even merit a proper name. However we did not elaborate on the identity of those tribes until we encountered them in those later chapters of Genesis.

While genealogies were obviously quite important to the Author of Scripture, the several tribes mentioned in Genesis chapters 13 through 15 which have no origination with the tribes of the sons of Noah include the Zuzims of Genesis 14:5, the Perizzites of Genesis 13:7 and 15:20, et al., and the Kenizzites and Kadmonites of Genesis 15:20. Also in Genesis Chapter 15, verses 19-20, are the Kenites and the Rephaim. It can be established from Scripture that the Kenites are the descendants of Cain listed in Genesis Chapter 4, and the Rephaim are the descendants of the Genesis 6 "giants", or Nephilim (cf. 2 Samuel 21:16-22 and 1 Chronicles 20:4-8). 

As the apostle Peter had attested, Yahweh had preserved eight souls on the ark, which are Noah, and his wife, his sons, and their wives. The fact that strange tribes are mentioned in Scripture so soon after the accounts of Noah's sons and their children, by itself proves that the flood did not cover the entire planet.

Certainly none of the Nephilim or the descendants of Cain were on the ark with Noah. Rather, the flood was to punish Adamic man, and not the Nephilim (Genesis 6:7). The Nephilim and Kenites survived because they were in a land other than the land of the flood. They were mentioned as late as Numbers chapter 13 where it is stated that the Anakim also descended from them, and trhoughout the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. Their descendants are still with us today in the Jews, Arabs and other mixed races. 

Resources: 

Noah's Flood Was Not Worldwide (Betrand Comparet)

Noah's Flood Was Not World Wide – a Critical Review of a sermon by Bertrand Comparet

Noah's Flood: Global or Local? (Donald Hochner and Richard Anthony) 

On Genesis, Part 10: The Sins of Men and Angels

On Genesis, Part 11: The End of Sinners

On Genesis, Part 12: Solid Ground

Topical Discussions, September, 2024 (for a further discussions on the challenges of logistics on the ark of Noah )