#256 Is Noah’s Ark Historically True?

Welcome back to Samus Popre. I'm Joe Hashemar, and I want to ask three questions today about Noah's Ark and the Great Flood.

Question number one, did it really happen, or is it just a retelling of older Babylonian stories?

Question number two, if it did really happen, was it a global flood or a local original flood?

And finally question three, are we missing the point of the story and asking these questions?

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All right, question number one, is the story of Noah's Ark historical, or is it just a retelling

of ancient Babylonian myths? The case for it being just a myth is that we find similar versions

of the Great Flood story and things like the Epic of Gilgamesh and scholars date these texts to

earlier than they date the Book of Genesis. And so the argument goes, the author of Genesis

just reworked these pagan stories and replaced their gods with the god of Israel.

Now that could lead to a complicated debate on the dating and authorship of the Book of Genesis,

but I suggest we just leave all of that aside because the true story is a bit more complicated

because it's not just in Gilgamesh and Genesis that we find an account of the Great Flood.

As the archaeologist John Henderson explains, we actually find similar Great Flood stories around the

world. I think there's no doubt that almost every culture in the world has a flood myth, a deluge

story, because we developed as a species within this pd devising sea level. So we find flood narratives

everywhere from India to the new world, and many of them like the Greek myth of Dukhaleon

follow the same basic pattern. The earth was dominated by man's greed and peace had completely

abandoned the earth. Zeus enraged took drastic action. He summoned Poseidon to Olympus.

The supreme god asked his brother to flood the planet, exterminating all men.

Okay, so humanity has wiped out, save for Dukhaleon and his family. Now there's actually different

versions even of this Greek myth, but in at least some of them, the pious Dukhaleon is spared,

so he and his family board a boat with pairs of every kind of animal to be saved from the flood.

The accounts are so obviously similar that St. Justin Martyr explicitly described Dukhaleon as

just a Greek name for Noah back in the 100s. Now amongst the different versions of the Great Flood

story told throughout the ancient world, the Mesopotamian ones, the ones from Babylon, are the

most important because they're the ones scholars believe are the oldest. But as the archaeologist

Tickva Frimer Kinsky explains, we actually have records of at least three different Babylonian

stories of a great flood. And like the three of Noah's Ark, they share some striking details with

the biblical account, despite some divergences. For instance, animals are placed in an ark,

the arc lands on a mountain, birds are sent forth to see if the waters have receded. Despite

the differences then, she refers to these as different retellings of an essentially identical

flood tradition. No, I would suggest that leaves us with basically three ways of accounting for

this evidence. One is to say, you know, floods are a recurring thing. Oops! Floods are a recurring

thing. Natural disasters were seen as evidence of designed disfavor, so it's not shocking to

imagine different cultures coming up with different stories involving floods. The movie Twister,

it's not a retelling of the Wizard of Oz, for instance, it's just tapping into the same basic

human fascination with and fear of tornadoes. No, I think that explains some of the stories we see.

I don't think that works completely. I don't think it can account for the number of details

we find in common in some of these ancient accounts. So it's going to get you some similar stories,

but it's not going to get you essentially identical ones. Okay, so the second theory is that everyone

is copying the oldest story, perhaps the atracist's epic, and retelling it in ways it makes sense in

their own culture, in their own region, or else they're copying those copies. There can be some

truth to that. As Pope Pius XII points out, it's perfectly possible to believe both that the ancient

sacred writers have taken things from popular narrations, and they did so with the help of divine

inspiration through which they were rendered immune from any error in compiling and transmitting

these sacred stories. What the third theory is just that these various floodments exist because

it really was a great flood. In other words, we find real and fictional accounts of the great flood

for the same reason that we find real and fictional accounts of the Civil War because it's a thing

that happened. It was a traumatic event that people wanted to talk about for ages afterwards. Maybe

they processed through art and storytelling. Well, the fact is, I think all three of these theories

might be true. They're not actually incompatible. It's perfectly possible to believe that floods are

a regular phenomenon. People like to talk about them. That there really was a great flood in which

God spared Noah and his family. They ended up on a mountain. And that the author of Genesis is

drawing upon earlier partially true tellings of that great flood story and presenting his own

divinely inspired version. We even have biblical precedent for this. In Second Peter II,

Saint Peter mentions that God casts a fallen angels into Tartarus. Now, he's describing an

event recorded in the Old Testament, the Fall of Satan. But he is employing the language of

Greek mythology to do so. That's where the idea of Tartarus comes from. So the author of Genesis

might be doing something similar with the language and framing of Babylonian mythology. Now,

all of that is to say that I think there are good reasons to believe that the great flood really

did happen. Even if a lot of the language used to describe it is mythological language. But just

how great was this great flood? That's question two. Growing up, I believe the great flood had to be

understood as global. After all, doesn't the Bible say the water prevailed so mightily upon the earth

that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered? And that it wiped out every living

thing that was upon the face of the ground? And that raises some practical difficulties. Things like

how did Noah keep polar bears and penguins in the like alive on the ark for 40 days? Or how was

there enough water on the planet to flood the entire world, including the highest mountains under

15 cubits that's about 25 feet of water? And if there was that much flooding over the entire earth,

where did all that flood water go afterwards? Now look, you can write all those difficulties off

as miracles. Obviously, God can do whatever he wants to do. But I think there's a bigger problem with

the way I'd heard the story as a kid and the problem is this. The Bible doesn't actually say

that the flood covered the entire earth. I know it says it in many English Bibles. But what it actually

says is that it covered the whole land. The Hebrew word there is just erets, which means land.

So word used for the holy land, for instance. And even colorets translated in many Bibles as the

whole earth, it means the whole land. In Genesis 13, Abraham says to Lot that the whole land,

colorets is before him because they're standing before the Jordan Valley. But he's not saying that

a lot is standing before the entire planet. He means the land before them, the whole area they're

looking at, not all of planet earth. So the Bible doesn't actually say that the flood was global.

But there are still people who insist that it must be read as if it did.

Answers in Genesis, for instance, argues that the flood must be understood as global because

Genesis refers to the face of the earth, erets, and the face of the whole earth, colorets being flooded.

But in the same article, they admit that erets also means ground, land, soil, or country.

So why insist on reading it as planet here? Well, they claim that it must mean the whole planet here

because in the flood narrative, the context doesn't indicate a geographically limited area.

In other words, they're just assuming it means the whole planet because the text doesn't explicitly

say how large the land is that got flooded. So the Bible says the whole land got flooded.

And answers in Genesis assumes that means all of planet earth because we don't know how much

land Genesis 7 is referencing. But there's simply no reason to accept that reading as the only

possible reading of Genesis 7 because the Hebrew doesn't require that. And also because there are

plenty of times in which the Bible sounds like it's saying the whole world when it's really only

talking about a small portion of the world. For instance, in Acts chapter 2, St. Luke says that

they were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. Now that

language actually sounds much more clearly like we're going to be dealing with the entire planet

rather than a vague expression like the whole land. And yet even here, there weren't literally people

from every nation under heaven. We know this partly because Luke actually records a list of who

was present in verses 9 to 11. And it's people from across and around the Roman Empire.

No one from the New World showed up at Pentecost, for instance. But neither do we hear of people

from places like Ethiopia or India or Spain, nations which we know the biblical authors,

like St. Luke, knew about because those places are referenced elsewhere in the Bible.

So it's not that St. Luke made a mistake here as if he thought every nation was present there

and we know better today. No, Luke knew that not literally every nation was there. He doesn't

literally mean the entire world. Modern readers are simply taking these texts in a stiffly literal way

that isn't how ancient authors tended to write. And the problem is we're doing the same thing when

we demand that a flood over the entire land must have covered all of planet earth instead of say

the entire region. Now to be clear, I'm not demanding that you read the great flood as a strictly

regional event. I'm simply pointing out that the arguments for it being global are often quite

and that demanding a global interpretation creates a number of difficulties in interpreting

the text. So please just don't force your personal reading on others if you are someone who

believes it was a global flood. For myself, I would suggest that the debate about the extent of the

flood geographically risks just missing the point entirely. And this is the third question I want

to explore because it'd be like reading the story of the prodigal son and focusing all of your

attention on trying to figure out what percentage of the property would have gone to the younger son

by right. Is he getting 50 percent or less? That's not the point of the story. As St. Paul said of

the Exodus, these things were written for our instruction. In other words, whenever we're reading

of a past event in the Bible, we don't just want to know what happened, but what am I meant to learn

from this? So how did the early Christians understand the point of the story of Noah? Three ways. First,

it's a foreshadowing of the final judgment. Jesus treats it this way in Matthew 24. At some point,

Jesus is going to return and God will wipe out the old world of sin just as He did in the days of

Noah. Only the righteous will be left behind. Second, the wood of the ark passing through the

waters of the flood is a foreshadowing of the saving power of the cross and baptism. St. Augustine

taught that Noah with his family is saved by water and wood. As the family of Christ is saved by

baptism as representing the suffering of the cross. For some of you, that might sound like a stretch,

but that actually lines up perfectly with how St. Peter describes the ark in the New Testament.

He said that in the ark, a few, that is, eight persons were saved through water. And then he adds

baptism, which corresponds to this now saves you. So it's through baptism that we're united with

Jesus Christ who died for sins once for all. The righteous for the unrighteous that He might bring

us to God. Or St. Paul puts it, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ

Jesus were baptized into his death? In other words, we are united with the wood of the cross

through the waters of baptism. And just as the old world of unrighteousness was destroyed in the flood,

so too we were buried therefore with him by baptism into death. So this Christ was raised from the

dead by the glory of the Father. We too might walk in newness of life. Our old unrighteous self

dies in the waters of baptism and we are reborn to new life through union with the cross of Christ.

Third, the ark represents the church. St. Cypriot of Carthage famously warned that you can no more

be saved outside the church than you could have escaped destruction if you were outside of the

ark when the flood came. Or in the words of St. Jerome, a church father that I know is beloved by

many Protestants, and his letter to Pope Damasus in 377, quote, my words are spoken to the successor

of the fisherman to the disciple of the cross. As I follow no leader, save Christ, so I communicate

with none but your blessedness that is with the share of Peter. For this I know is the rock on which

the church is built. This is a house where alone the Paschal lamb can be rightly eaten. This is the

ark of Noah, and he who is not found in it shall perish when the flood prevails.

End quote. My fear is this, if we spend our time fighting about the historical and geographical

details of the great flood that Noah's ark, we risk missing the deeper spiritual points,

the instruction we are meant to take. And I think that instruction is this. Someday,

maybe a long time from now, maybe any moment, God will come and set the world right again.

And on that day, we want to be left behind, like the righteous in the days of Noah,

and to do that, to be left behind, we need to be saved by the water and the wood, by baptism in the

cross. And thereby be incorporated into the ark of Christ, the church. Now, unfortunately,

many Christians today have been taught that it's actually bad to be left behind based on this

false teaching called the rapture. Now, if that's what you've been taught, I hope you'll take a

look at this biblical explanation that I've made, debunking the most commonly used proof text

for the rapture, and see that this whole idea is actually quite biblical. For Shamist Popery,

I'm Joe Hashmire. God bless you.