The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (24 page)

A defining achievement of nineteenth-century biblical criticism was teasing Genesis apart, verse by verse, to reveal two parallel narratives. Recently developed software that analyzes style and word choices to parse authorship of multiauthored texts has found the same thing. Both the low- and high-tech methods of analysis provide support for some kind of merging of stories as a reasonable explanation for contradictions such as that between Genesis 1, in which people were created after the animals, and Genesis 2, in which Adam was created first. Such dilemmas are problematic for the simplest of reasons. At most, only one version could be correct.

Did the Flood last 150 or 40 days? In Genesis 7:24 and 8:3, the Flood is described as lasting 150 days, whereas according to Genesis 8:6–12, the floodwaters receded from the earth in just two weeks after 40 days and nights of rain (for a grand a total of 54 days of flooding). Elsewhere, the Flood was projected to last ten and a half months between Genesis 7:11, which describes the Flood as beginning on the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah’s 600th year, and Genesis 8:13, which notes that the floodwaters receded enough for Noah to open up the ark on the first day of his 601st year. How can all of these things be true?

Similarly, did two or seven pairs of animals board the ark? In Genesis 7:2–3, God commands Noah to load up seven pairs of clean animals and birds but just a single pair of the other animals. Twelve verses later, only two of each kind march aboard.

Intent on explaining such inconsistencies, biblical scholars argued that the key to disentangling the two original versions of the story lay in identifying how each version referred to God, by either the divine name Yahweh (Jehovah), or Elohim—that is, as “Lord” or “God.” Perhaps the author of one version used the less formal “Elohim” because God first revealed his divine name to Moses, and so it would have made no sense to use “Yahweh” in describing the earlier history of the world. Likewise, different references to the number of animals may reflect one writer’s knowledge that it was long after Noah’s voyage that God revealed to Moses the distinction between clean and unclean animals.

The evidence was building for two original sources. By the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic experts alike agreed that the biblical flood story consisted of interwoven accounts fused into a single narrative during the Babylonian exile. While some biblical commentators have gone to great lengths to try to reconcile inconsistencies and apparent discrepancies, the simplest explanation for them is that earlier stories were combined. After all, how could Moses have written about his own death?

We know the New Testament was compiled from several traditions pieced together from Greek fragments, with compliers disagreeing about which books to include and which to leave out. Something similar may have happened centuries before when a newly enslaved people, desperate to preserve their oral history, wrestled over which stories to record for posterity.

The later history of the Bible shows how translation of the Hebrew word “eretz” and the Latin word “terra,” both of which can mean “earth,” “land,” or “soil,” influenced how Christians viewed topography and Noah’s Flood. Saint Jerome’s use of terra for both “eretz” and “adamah” (soil) in translating Genesis, and the later translation of terra as “earth,” bolstered the view of Noah’s Flood as a globe-wrecking deluge. But in Latin terra generally means land or soil; it does not typically imply the whole planet. The Latin word for planet Earth is “tellus.” If eretz had been rendered into English in key passages as “land” rather than “earth,” there might have been far less support for viewing Noah’s Flood as a global event that shaped the world.

In any case, theologians have long argued that the word “earth” does not necessarily mean the whole planet. More than a century ago, conservative Church of Scotland minister Robert Jamieson pointed out that in places the Bible used “earth” to refer to limited areas, such as regions or countries. For example, God calling the dry land “earth” in Genesis 1:10 clearly implies more restricted areas than the whole planet. In other passages eretz is translated as “ground” rather than the whole planet (Judges 6:37), or as “land,” when it clearly refers to a region such as the lands of Israel or Canaan (Genesis 2:11, 2:13, 13:9; Leviticus 25:9; 1 Samuel 13:3; 2 Samuel 24:8). When the same word can describe a local or regional event elsewhere in the Bible, must its use in describing Noah’s ordeal necessarily refer to a global flood? Perhaps misinterpretation and quirks lie at the root of the belief in a global deluge. After all, repeated references to unicorns in the King James Bible demonstrate the potential for meanings to become scrambled as words were translated from Hebrew to Greek or Latin, and finally English.
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By the close of the nineteenth century, Christian theologians generally considered it reasonable to suggest that Genesis provides a synopsized or allegorical explanation of how the world came to be rather than a comprehensive history of everything that ever existed. With this simple shift in perspective, the first chapters of Genesis come into focus as the foundation for establishing a moral context for seeing the world and humankind’s place in it, rather than an explanation of earth history. Reading Genesis as an epic poem intended to instruct and inspire the first monotheists rather than as a thorough blow-by-blow account of world history offers a reasonable way to solve otherwise awkward interpretive problems. But however reasonable this approach may sound, it doesn’t resolve the question of where humanity’s other flood stories came from—or why such stories were told all around the world.

Building on earlier work by missionaries, anthropologists had compiled hundreds of native flood stories by the early twentieth century. Missionaries, naturally, considered these tales to be degraded versions of the biblical story. Social scientists were more inclined to interpret the widespread distribution of flood stories as recording memories of prehistoric disasters, or as reflecting subconscious propensities to create flood myths. Interestingly, psychological hypotheses provide some of the most entertaining ideas. The celebrated professor of Assyriology Heinrich Zimmern claimed that the story of Noah’s Flood represented a Babylonian nature myth and that “the stories of Creation, of Paradise… and of the Deluge all rest alike on a foundation of Babylonian material adopted by the Israelites.”
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In the authoritative 1899
Encyclopaedia Biblica
, he maintained that the Deluge represented winter, with the Noah figure rescued in the boat standing in for the sun god. Along similar lines, the Catholic priest Ernst Böklen argued that the ark represented the moon serenely sailing across the heavenly ocean, with the moon god Noah at the helm.

After Sigmund Freud, interpretations changed. Sometimes a flood was not just a flood. One of Freud’s earliest disciples, Otto Rank, described flood myths as urination fantasies. Rank went on to distinguish simple versions from those involving more elaborate birth or sexual fantasies. In his view, primitive people tended to embrace garden-variety urination myths, whereas the story of Noah’s Flood represented the supreme example of a complex myth that had it all. The urinary origin of the flood was obvious enough to Rank, and to him the ark clearly represented the maternal womb, so disembarkation represented both rebirth and an invitation to procreate and repopulate the world. Other psychoanalytical approaches have also been applied to flood myths, but there is no way to either prove or disprove them—no matter how insightful or how ludicrous they may seem.

A key question is whether geology can explain flood myths and, in particular, if Noah’s Flood could have been a local Mesopotamian flood that swamped the lowlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. After the catastrophic floods that devastated nineteenth-century Baghdad, this possibility became far more plausible. For the most part, however, geologists avoided wading very far into biblical criticism, content to accept the premise that the story of Noah’s Flood described a regional flood.

It took an Anglican bishop to push the idea that Noah’s Flood was pure fiction. John William Colenso, a missionary in southern Africa who became Bishop of Natal, was greatly influenced by biblical criticism, geology, and biogeography. In
The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined
, published in 1864, Bishop Colenso reviewed the problems raised by believing that the flood story was true. According to the description of the Garden of Eden, the same rivers flowed in the same places both before and after the Great Flood, suggesting that Noah’s Flood did little to change Earth’s surface. The logistics of getting animals to and from the ark raised additional issues, as did the question of how the ark could have space for them all. But Colenso pointed out yet another conundrum. How could saving a single pair ensure the survival of species that lived in herds, like buffalo, or those that lived in hives, like bees? Without the resolution of these issues, how could people stake their spiritual salvation on belief in a global flood?

Unlike geologists such as Lyell, Colenso didn’t buy the idea of a local flood. In his view, that was the easy way out. Why did birds even need to be on the ark at all when they could have simply flown off to find dry land? No, a local flood didn’t make sense either. The bishop acknowledged that the Bible was clear in implying a universal flood. However, he just thought that the Bible was wrong. Noah’s Flood was just a good story.

Unsurprisingly, Colenso’s idea was not popular among Christian theologians. In the 1860s and 1870s, his contemporaries widely endorsed the idea of a local flood in response to the geological evidence uncovered in the first half of the century. In 1863, the authoritative
Dictionary of the Bible
dismissed the notion of a universal flood and suggested that a local flood in the lower valley of the Euphrates River provided an interpretation more compatible with geological evidence.

Secure in their faith that science and rational thought were God-given tools that could illuminate biblical interpretation, theologians from mainstream denominations acknowledged that if geology supplied evidence of only a local deluge, they would reinterpret scripture. The influential Cambridge Divinity professor Herbert Ryle expounded the belief that science was not the enemy of faith, even if the available scientific evidence required more nuanced interpretations of Genesis.

It must be the maxim of all reverent exposition to treat Science as the friend and not as the foe of Divine Revelation. It may be that Science seems to be but a disappointing friend when it shows the path of traditional interpretation to be no longer practicable. But the utterance of truth is the proof of purest friendship; and Science, if it closes one way, guides us to another which hitherto has been hid from view.
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Ryle saw the Babylonian flood story as an ancient legend that had been incorporated into Jewish lore. The primary differences between the Babylonian and biblical stories corresponded to basic contrasts in religious thought. The moral purpose and purity of the biblical version distinguished it from polytheistic Babylonian versions. Still, Ryle saw enough differences in the narratives to think the Jews did not adopt the Babylonian flood story during their captivity. They had their own story.

In his view, the resolution to the question of how two original versions of the same story arose lay in a common ancestral tradition of a disastrous local flood that submerged the Mesopotamian world between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

There is no indication that, since man appeared upon the earth, any universal and simultaneous inundation of so extraordinary a character as to overwhelm the highest mountain peaks has ever occurred… . The narrative of the Flood records to us some terrible but local cataclysm which overtook the original seat of the Semitic race.
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The global distribution of flood stories could be attributed to the fact that floods were common disasters all over the world.

As theologians like Ryle reconsidered traditional views, scholars began digging into the origin of flood myths and uncovered hundreds from around the globe. Most featured a hero who, like Noah, rode out the flood and repopulated the world. But there were enough differences in detail between the stories to foster debate over their origins and the question of whether they recorded a common, global disaster.

A landmark compilation of global flood traditions was included in French archaeologist François Lenormant’s
The Beginnings of History
, published in 1883, which described such stories from all around the world, except Africa. He nonetheless held that most flood traditions arose from a common prehistoric event and that the Hebrew and Mesopotamian stories were identical before Abraham left for the Promised Land. According to Lenormant, India’s story of Manu also came from Mesopotamia, and the Greek story of Deucalion’s flood mixed the original ancient story with memories of more recent local floods. Stressing the similarities among these flood traditions, Lenormant concluded that “the Biblical Deluge, far from being a myth, was an actual and historic fact, which overwhelmed at the very least the ancestors of the three races of Aryans or Indo-Europeans, semites or Syro-Arabians, and Chamites or Kushites.”
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North American flood stories were different enough from the biblical story to preclude their having been introduced by Christian missionaries. And the Fijian flood story sounded suspiciously like a local tidal wave (what we now call a tsunami). Although the world’s flood stories were rooted in fact, they didn’t all arise from the same flood.

Expanding on Lenormant’s study to compile a comprehensive collection of deluge traditions, Scottish anthropologist James Frazer’s 1918
Folk-lore in the Old Testament
detailed hundreds more stories of great floods. In case after case, peculiar local details appeared to be rooted in natural phenomena—a rising sea caused the flood in stories from the Pacific Islands, something Frazer thought reflected the region’s history of great earthquake-generated waves. In Frazer’s view, flood stories arose independently from local experiences.