A Firehose of Evidence Pointing to the Worldwide Flood

[Originally published as part of RSR’s List of Evidence for the Global Flood]

Biblical Global Flood References and Evidence

• Jesus, Peter, and Hebrews all mention Noah by name with Peter reminding us that only “eight people” survived the flood
• God “did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly” (2 Peter 2:5)
• “the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water” (1 Peter 3:20)
• [Ahead of the uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell & Charles Darwin] Peter warned about the claim that “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. For this they willfully forget… the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water” (2 Peter 3:4-6)
• “Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household,” (Hebrews 11:7)
• Jesus Himself described the world “before the flood,” with the majority ignoring God, “until the day that Noah entered the ark, and… the flood came and took them all away” (Mat. 24:38-39)
• Luke also records Jesus stating that “Noah entered the ark… the flood came and destroyed them all” (Luke 17:27)
• Jesus referred to each of the first seven chapters of the Bible in contexts affirming both the historicity of Genesis and its foundational significance
• Every New Testament author refers to at least one of the first eleven chapters of Genesis in contexts affirming both their historicity and their foundational significance
• Genesis explicitly describes a global flood which drowned all but eight humans, covered the tops of the mountains, required the building of a massive ark to save a breeding pair of all birds (unnecessary in a local flood) and every kind of land animal
• Moses uses the word “all” many times for all the mountains under heaven covered, all flesh died, all living things were destroyed from the earth, etc. with Genesis 6 – 9 providing dozens of instances emphasizing the flood’s global and comprehensive extent
• God promised to never flood the world again (Gen. 9:11, 15), a broken promise if Noah’s flood was local
• God created a perfect world so the Flood explains dangers that The Fall alone does not explain, such as storms, meteors, asteroids, comets, Earth’s radioactivity, earthquakes, and volcanoes
• Mankind’s 900-year lifespan suddenly decreased after the flood in a non-random exponential decay when the previous equilibrium rapidly fell to today’s life expectancy

Scientific Realities

• With the ark coming to rest in the Mountains of Ararat (Gen. 8:4), as Science reported, “the cradle of agriculture lay within a small region of the Fertile Crescent (in what is now southeastern Turkey/ northern Syria).”
• The hundreds of cultures around the world that anthropologists have documented that recollect an ancient flood share uncanny similarities with Genesis in their 500 separate flood tellings, including
  • that God judged man by sending a flood;
  • the giving of a warning;
  • the construction of some kind of vessel (or finding some other means of escape);
  • a terribly severe flood occurs;
  • the flood’s severity requires sending out of birds or other scouts to determine suitability of the land;
  • man is saved;
  • and some of the recollections even tell of animals being saved;
  • and then having survived man finds himself stranded in some of the recollections on a mountain or otherwise;
  • with some remembrances ending with the offering of a sacrifice and repopulating the earth
• Exceptions highlighted in catalogs of ancient flood recollections may be unreliable as suggested by Funk and Wagnall’s 1950 Dictionary of Folklore which stated that the world’s mythologies include a flood cataclysm, “The exceptions are Egypt and Japan…” but interestingly as CMI documents from the 1988 Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Legend, Egypt’s god Tem “was responsible for the primeval flood, which covered the entire earth and destroyed all of mankind except those in Tem’[s] boat.”
• The Table of Nations in Genesis 10, unique in the annals of the world, documents the origins of the major people groups and even some of the nations of the world as descending from Noah’s family

[Below originally published as part of the shownotes for the September 9, 2019 RSR Radio Episode]

Babylonian Enuma Elish Helps Corroborate Genesis:

Bias against the Scriptures leads scholars to a backward conclusion, as Joshua Mark does in the Ancient History Encyclopedia, they attempt to discredit Genesis by claiming that the Enuma Elish was the source material for the Bible’s creation account.

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To discredit Moses though, you have to do something other than provide evidence consistent with his account. And that’s all that such scholars have done. For if Genesis were true, then within a few centuries of the global flood, scholars would expect that the generations descended from Noah would be aware of the creation, fall, and flood accounts. And further, as documented in Scripture, in their rebellion they would twist God’s words and the truth into deception and worship entities of their own creation.

The wildly mythological Babylonian account is far more likely to be the derivative account, taken from their gradually blurring societal recollections of the true history of the world. Yet scholars think that the “primitive” Hebrews, whom they deride, retained the core of the idolatrous accounts but without the idols.

The extraordinary nature of this state of affairs is not so much that mainstream scholars haven’t discredited Genesis. It’s that they are fully incapable of recognizing that have done nothing but produce vast troves of evidence consistent with the Bible.

The source material for the Enuma Elish was the actual creation and flood, as recorded authoritatively through divine inspiration by Moses. Without performing a search of the literature, it is RSR’s impression (see for example the Ancient History Encyclopedia) that many critical accounts do not object to this latter explanation because they don’t even recognize it. In their deep bias these scholars presume that their discoveries consistent with Genesis have thereby discredited Genesis.