Skeptical Views On Noahs Ark Essay, Research Paper
Skeptical view of the flood myth
As skeptics have long been aware, there was no global flood in the last 5000 years, a boatload of animals did not ground on so-called Mount Ararat or on any mountain, and the world’s animals are not descended from two or seven pairs of each species that lived during the third millennium BC. Nor is there any archaeological proof that a man survived a flood by being on a boat loaded with animals, food, and drinking water.
The Noah’s Ark book summarized here does not claim historicity for Noah or the ark story, but the book does claim that some of the story elements in the Ancient Near East flood were based on an actual river flood. This archaeologically attested flood of the Euphrates River has been radiocarbon dated to about 2900 BC. This flood left a few feet of yellow mud in the Sumerian city Shuruppak, the ruins of which have been found at Tel Fara about 125 miles southeast of Baghdad. Some but not all Sumerian cities also show signs of this river flood at the beginning of the Early Dynastic I period. According to the Sumerian King List, a legendary king named Ziusudra lived in Shuruppak at the time of the flood. There was also a flood myth about king Ziusudra which includes several story elements very similar to the Genesis flood myth. Shuruppak was also the flood hero’s city according to the Epic of Gilgamesh. The flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh was adapted from an earlier myth, the Epic of Atrahasis which is also very similar to the Genesis flood myth. Six of these Ancient Near East flood myths contain numerous distinctive story elements that are very similar to the Genesis flood myth and indicate a literary affinity or dependency on a common body of myths about the flood hero Ziusudra and based on the Euphrates River flood of 2900 BC.
Parts of the original myths were physically possible, but other parts were not possible. The possible parts can be treated as an ancient legend to which mythical material was added later. However, without contemporary artifacts, it is not possible to prove how much of the original legend was true and how much was fiction based on a real flood. In the Noah’s Ark book, the original legend is reconstructed by piecing together fragments from the various surviving editions of the flood myth, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This reconstruction is governed by the requirement that each story element in the legend be physically possible, technologically practical, consistent with archaeological facts, and plausible for 2900 BC. Some of the impossible story elements were mistranslations or misunderstandings, and these are corrected before including them in the reconstructed legend.
The reconstructed legend is this: Ziusudra reigned for ten years as king of Shuruppak, a Sumerian city then on the Euphrates River. Ziusudra’s reign was at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period that ended with the flood of 2900 BC. Then as now, river barges were used for transporting cargo on the Euphrates River. This cargo included livestock, beer, wine, textiles, lumber, stone, metals, dried fish, vegetable oil, and other cargo. In June about 2900 BC during the annual inundation of the Euphrates River, the river was at crest stage. A six-day thunderstorm caused the river to rise about 15 cubits (22 feet) higher and to overflow the levees. By the time the river began to rise, it was already too late to evacuate to the foothills of the mountains 110 miles away. Ziusudra boarded one the the barges that was already loaded with cargo being transported to market. The runaway barge floated down the Euphrates River into the Persian Gulf and grounded in an estuary at the mouth of the river. After moving to dry land, Ziusudra offered a sacrifice to a Sumerian god on an alter at the top of a temple ziggurat, an artificial hill. Later, story tellers mistranslated the ambiguous word for hill as mountain. The story tellers then erroneously assumed that the nearby barge must have grounded on top of a mountain. Additional details in the reconstructed legend about Ziusudra (Noah) can be found in the Noah’s Ark book.
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The Noah’s Ark book reviewed here does not claim historicity for Noah or the ark story, but the book does claim that some of the story elements in the Ancient Near East flood were based on an actual river flood. This archaeologically attested flood of the Euphrates River has been radiocarbon dated to about 2900 BC. This flood left a few feet of yellow mud in the Sumerian city Shuruppak about 125 miles southeast of Baghdad. Some but not all Sumerian cities also show signs of this river flood at the beginning of the Early Dynastic I period. According to the Sumerian King List, a legendary king named Ziusudra lived in Shuruppak at the time of the flood. Zuisudra was the Sumerian Noah. There was also a flood myth about king Ziusudra which includes several story elements very similar to the Genesis flood myth. Noah was a Sumerian king of Shuruppak and son of Lamech (SU.KUR.LAM in Sumerian) who preceded Noah as king of Shuruppak. Shuruppak was the flood hero’s city according to the Epic of Gilgamesh. The flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh was adapted from an earlier myth, the Epic of Atrahasis which is also very similar to the Genesis flood myth. Six of these Ancient Near East flood myths contain numerous distinctive story elements that are very similar to the Genesis flood myth and indicate a literary affinity or dependency on a common body of legends about the flood hero Ziusudra (Noah) and based on the Euphrates River flood of 2900 BC.
Parts of the original myths were physically possible, but other parts were not possible. The possible parts can be treated as an ancient legend to which mythical material was added later. In the Noah’s Ark book, the original legend is reconstructed by piecing together fragments from the various surviving editions of the flood story, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This reconstruction is governed by the requirement that each story element in the legend be physically possible, technologically practical, consistent with archaeological facts, and plausible for 2900 BC. Some of the impossible story elements were mistranslations or misunderstandings, and these are corrected before including them in the reconstructed legend.
These are some examples of mistakes: The ambiguous word for hill or country was mistranslated as mountain. The words that identified the flood as a river flood were changed to indicate an ocean deluge. The archaic number signs in which the Genesis 5 numbers and Noah’s age were recorded, were mistranslated which made them about ten times their original value. The “flood” of Genesis 6-7 was confused with the “waters” of Genesis 8. A journey on foot to Mount Judi in the Mountains of Ararat was confused with a journey on the water of the Persian Gulf. The numbers in the Sumerian King List were also mistraslated by an ancient scribe.
The reconstructed legend is this: Ziusudra reigned for ten years as king of Shuruppak, a Sumerian city then on the Euphrates River. Ziusudra’s reign was at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period that ended with the flood of 2900 BC. Then as now, river barges were used for transporting cargo on the Euphrates River. This cargo included livestock, beer, wine, textiles, lumber, stone, metals, dried fish, vegetable oil, and other cargo. In June about 2900 BC during the annual inundation of the Euphrates River, the river was at crest stage. A six-day thunderstorm caused the river to rise about 15 cubits (22 feet) higher and overflow the levees. By the time the river began to rise, it was already too late to evacuate to the foothills of the mountains 110 miles away. Ziusudra boarded one the the barges that was already loaded with cargo being transported to market. The runaway barge floated down the Euphrates River into the Persian Gulf and grounded in an estuary at the mouth of the river. After moving to dry land, Ziusudra offered a sacrifice to a Sumerian god on an alter at the top of a temple ziggurat, an artificial hill. Later, story tellers mistranslated the ambiguous word for hill as mountain. The story tellers then erroneously assumed that the nearby barge must have grounded on top of a mountain. Additional details in the reconstructed legend about Ziusudra (Noah) can be found in the Noah’s Ark book.
Answers to Creationists arguments
Noah’s flood is the keystone in the belief system of the young-earth creationists who believe the flood was global and created massive geological changes in the earth’s crust. But there was no global flood. Creationist arguments are printed here in boldface:
According to Genesis 7:19-20 all the high mountains under the whole sky were covered with flood water. The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them 15 cubits deep. The reference to 15 cubits (22 feet) refers to the draft of the ark.
Mountains is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word har m meaning hills in this context. The King James Version of Genesis 7:19 translates hills correctly. There is no mention of draft or deep or depth in the Hebrew text of Genesis 7:20. A literal translation from Hebrew is “Five ten cubits upward rose the waters and they covered the hills.” Note that “hills” is not in the same clause as cubits or rose. The 15 cubits was how much the water rose, not how deep the water was. The depths would be different at different places. The tops of the hills in the clause “and they covered the hills” were less than 15 cubits above the normal water level during the annual inundation and were therefore covered when the water rose 15 cubits higher. “Under the whole sky” means within Noah’s visible horizon. All of the hills within Noah’s visible horizon were covered by the water when the river rose 15 cubits. If the flood water had been more than ten thousand cubits deep, the authors of Genesis would have said so. Fifteen cubits is consistent with a local flood.
The flood continued for more than one year. This cannot be reconciled with a local-flood theory. If nothing could be seen but the tops of mountains after the waters had subsided for 74 days, we must conclude that the flood covered the whole earth.
All commentators have assumed that the flood mentioned in Genesis 7:6-17 was the same as the deep “waters” that lasted more than a year. But nowhere in Genesis 8 is the word “flood” mentioned. Noah’s encounters with deep water were in two phases: a river flood phase that lasted less than a week and a deep water phase that lasted a year. The river flood floated Noah’s barge down into the Persian Gulf and the barge floated about the deep water of the Gulf for a year. The deep water that Noah experienced for a year was not a flood; it was the deep water of the Persian Gulf. The “tops of hills” above the water surface are commonly called islands. If only islands could be seen after the water became more shallow for 74 days, it means only that Noah’s barge was still several miles or more from the shore and dry land beyond the horizon. Deep water in the Persian Gulf for more than a year is consistent with a local river flood.
According to Genesis 7:11, all the fountains of the great deep were broken up. The great deep refers to oceanic depths and underground reservoirs. Presumably, the ocean basins were fractured and uplifted sufficiently to pour water over the continents. This continued for five months. Such vast and prolonged geologic upheavals in the oceanic depths cannot be reconciled with a local flood theory. Instead this upheaval was global.
The Hebrew word baqa translated as “broken up” in the King James version is translated “burst forth” in the Revised Standard Version and New International Version. The Hebrew word mayan for “fountain” can also mean a well or spring which share a common meaning: a source of water. References to sources of sea water breaking or bursting may have meant only that water from the Persian Gulf was bursting onto the shore during a storm. This frequently happens along a seashore during a storm. Noah and the others could not report on oceanic depths because they would have no way of knowing what was happening at oceanic depths. Bursting of Gulf water onto the shore during a thunderstorm was a local condition.
The Ark was unusually large. For Noah to have built a vessel of such huge magnitude simply for the purpose of escaping a local flood is inconceivable.
It is conceivable that Noah built a large river barge for hauling cargo. When a local river flood occurred, it is conceivable that Noah used the barge as a lifeboat. That may not have been what Noah had planned, but it certainly is conceivable that he used a large river barge to escape a local river flood.
There would have been no need for an ark at all if Noah s intent was to escape a local flood. How much more sensible it would have been for Noah to move to an area that would be unaffected by the local flood. The great numbers of animals could have moved out also. The entire story borders on the ridiculous if the flood was confined to some section of the Near East. The fact that he built the ark “to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth” (Genesis 7:3) proves that the flood was global.
The story would be ridiculous only if you accept the myth that Noah knew the flood was coming and built the barge solely as a lifeboat. Alternatively, if he built the barge to transport cattle and grain to market and had no inkling that a flood was coming until the rain began to fall, then using the barge to escape a local flood makes sense. When the river overflowed the levees, it was too late to evacuate to the foothills of the Zagros mountains which were 110 miles away. The phrase “all the earth” did not mean the planet earth, it meant all the ground, all the land in the flooded region known to Noah. He would have had no way of knowing what was happening to the land outside his local region.
The Apostle Peter in II Peter 3:6 refers to the “world that then existed was overflowed with water and perished.” Peter’s reference to the flood would have no value if the flood were only a local inundation.
Peter received his information on the flood from the same texts that we have and was therefore limited by the same ambiguities in the text that we can see for ourselves. Just because Peter referred in broad terms to a world that was overflowed with water, does not prove that the “world” in the original story was anything more than the local world known to Noah. Peter was using the flood story as a metaphor; he was not giving a discourse on geography.
Genesis 7:21-23 teaches that all mankind perished in the flood. Only Noah and his family were left. Since the human race had spread around the planet by the time of the flood, it follows that the flood was global.
If Noah and his family were the only survivors, then they would be the only source of information on the flood. There would be nobody from other parts of the world to report on conditions there. Noah would have had no way of knowing what was happening on the earth beyond his local area. It would have been impossible for Noah to travel all over the earth or even to all the cities of the Ancient Near East checking on whether anyone else survived. Noah and the author of his story cannot be used as a source of information on facts about which they could have no knowledge. The other survivors of the flood near where Noah lived were ignored by the author of Noah’s story, because they were beyond the scope of the story. A modern news report about people who survived a local river flood does not mention the billions of people who were not in the flooded area.
There are many places in Genesis where the words “all” and “every” must be understood in the literal sense. The constant repetition of universal terms throughout Genesis 6-9 shows conclusively that the magnitude and geographical extent of the flood was of primary importance in the mind of the writer. Unlike the limited scope of the word “all” in Genesis 41:57: “the people of all the earth came to Egypt to buy grain”, the word “all” in Genesis 1-11 deals with universal origins (the material universe, all plants, all animals, etc.) Genesis 1-11 contains many such superlatives which lose their meaning if limited to a local area observed by the narrator.
When a modern news reporter writes that everyone died in an airplane crash, readers are expected to understand that “everyone” does not apply to the entire planet. Likewise when the narrator of the flood story wrote in Genesis 7:21 that “every man” died, the reader is expected to understand that the scope of “every” applies only to the flooded region. People living outside the flooded region were not included in “every” and were not mentioned, because they were not affected by the flood and were beyond the scope of the story.
Many ranchers in the flooded region survived the river flood by climbing to hills or buildings that were higher than 15 cubits, but most of their livestock drowned. In contrast “every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle” that Noah owned or were in his custody were saved in his river barge. In other words, Noah did not leave any of his animals behind.
The scope of Genesis 1-11 is not all global. Genesis 2:14 refers to the river “which flows east of Assyria and the fourth river is the Euphrates.” This limits the scope of the story to a local region, the Tigris-Euphrates valley.
Not all species of animal were in the ark. There was need for no more than 35,000 individual animals on the ark. Many of the animals could have hibernated and therefore needed no food or drink. We do not really know how all this was accomplished.