FLOOD

Overwhelming flood in the time of Noah, in a judicial act of God on an ancient world that had reached the height of iniquity.

The Scripture says that “the wickedness of men was great in the earth, and… every imagination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually…

And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was full of violence… all flesh had corrupted its way on the earth” (Gen. 6:5, 11, 12). This is why God ordered judgment through the destructive waters, declaring: “I will destroy them with the earth” (Gen. 6:13).

This whole event is narrated in chapters 6, 7 and 8 of the book of Genesis. The biblical story presents the Flood to us as a catastrophe of a universal nature, using the Hebrew word “mabbul”, which the Greek version LXX translates as “cataclysmos” (Gen. 6-8; Ps. 29:10); the NT uses the same Greek term, also denoting universal destruction (Mt. 29:38, 39; Luke 17:27; 2 Pet. 2:5).

The entire language of Genesis 6-8 points insistently to the fact of a destruction of a universal nature. “All the high mountains under all the heavens were covered” (Gen. 7:19).

One cannot turn around this statement or the multiple statements that are given about the Flood in this and in so many other passages without doing serious violence to the text itself, and without falling into the practice of introducing into the text concepts contrary to what that is taught there.

(a) Nature of the Flood.

The cataclysm of the Flood was a complex of events in which “all the fountains of the great deep were broken, and the cataracts of the heavens were opened, and there was rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights” (Gen. 7:11, 12). “All flesh” (a term that includes all terrestrial beings including man Gen. 7:21-23) was destroyed. The earth itself “the world of that time” perished (cp. 2 Pet. 3:5).

The phrase “the sources of the great abyss were broken” has clear implications of the collapse of vital sections of the Earth’s crust, with which marine and/or underground waters were thrown over the continents, while they fell onto the earth, with a devastating force, the “waters that were over the expanse” (cp. Gen. 1:7) existing in the world in its antediluvian order.

In this great complex of events, universal rains of an indescribable torrential regime, tremendous erosion, volcanic and tectonic convulsions, violent hurricanes giving rise to waves of water are indicated; The universal destruction of life forms necessarily gave rise, along with the intense erosion and denudation of the antediluvian land, to immense burials of groups and ecological niches, more or less intermingled, in stratified formations due to the classifying power of water.

Many of these formations would later be hardened by cementing agents that the waters carried with them in some locations. Thus the ancient world was completely buried.

(b) The ark and its occupants.

The large size of the ark, based on the dimensions given in the Bible (300 cubits, or about 137 meters in length), gave it a transport capacity of more than 500 cattle cars like those currently used in the railways.

Regarding the animals that entered the ark, it should be noted that large animals are relatively few. It has been calculated that the average size of the animals was that of a cat. Two of them would require very little space, less than half a square meter.

Not all of the numerous groups and subgroups we now know had to enter the ark. A good number of them have originated after the Flood, diversifying from a smaller number of common ancestors through mechanisms of genetic reduction and geographical isolation.

It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the concept of evolution, which demands an emergence of new structures, not a mere derivation of already existing genetic characters that, when the genetic background has great richness, can give rise to an enormous variety within the basic type (for a consideration of all these issues and others, we recommend examination of the bibliography at the end of this article).

The question has often been raised as to how the animals in the ark were able to feed themselves during the entire year they were inside. Apart from the fact that the capacity of the ark allowed for the transport of large quantities of provisions, one must take into account the hibernation mechanism that many animals resort to in extreme situations, and others normally in winter, and that God may well have accentuated. With respect to carnivores, they feed on vegetation when necessary, as is amply proven.

(c) Archeology and the Flood.

Underestimating the true magnitude of the Flood, there have been those who have identified the universal cataclysm with a layer of mud that was found in Ur, and that belongs to one of the numerous regional floods that have occurred in that place.

It is not in a small and not very extensive layer of mud that the great cataclysm of the Flood must be contemplated, but in large sedimentary masses full of fossils from a world that perished, and that cover the entire earth like a vast cemetery. Noah left the ark to a new world, in which the orography, climatological structure, and many other factors had changed radically (cp. Ps. 104:5-9 ff.).

On the other hand, numerous cultures and tribes around the world have preserved stories of a universal flood. The Babylonian stories (Sumerian and Akkadian) show their origin from a previous tradition, from which numerous Chinese, Japanese, Amerindian, and many other stories spread throughout the globe also descend.

The divergence of these stories from each other refutes the idea that Moses had relied on any of them to write the narrative, although it is proof that in the memory of the nations descended from Noah, the memory of the cataclysm persisted.

When the Flood ceased, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, in the region of Armenia (Gen. 8:4). There are popular stories about the presence of a large ship on the mountain, which is covered by perpetual snow and ice.

There have been explorers, such as the Anglican archdeacon of Jerusalem, Dr Nouri, who visited the region in 1882, who claim to have seen it in the snowdrifts south of Mt. After this date there are stories from people from very diverse backgrounds, including aviators, who claim to have seen it.

Currently there are several groups that carry out expeditions annually, including the “Institute for Creation Research” in San Diego, with qualified teams that include archaeologists, geologists and other specialists.

(d) The Flood in its theological perspective.

The Flood is a display of God’s sovereignty in judgment (Ps. 29:10).
The Flood of the past is shown as an example of that future day in which no one will be able to escape the action of God, when all who have rejected the saving knowledge of God will be faced with His righteous wrath in retribution (Mt. 24: 37; Luke 17:26; 2 Peter 2:5-9).

It was an event without parallel in all the previous history of man, and there is the express promise, which constitutes a further demonstration that it was not a local or regional phenomenon, that God is not going to bring it back to the earth (Gen. 9:11).

As a sign of this promise, the rainbow is established in the new climatic conditions of the earth (Gen. 9:12, 13), which has since then been a sign of grace, appearing even in the midst of the judgments of Revelation (Rev. 4:3; 10:1).

It is by faith that Noah prepared the ark (Heb. 11:7). Everything concerning the Flood was arranged by God; Noah simply had to follow the instructions received.

The same faith believes that all this was fulfilled just as it has been described; There is no difficulty in all of this, except if God is left aside, which should not be done under any circumstances, since it was a special intervention of God in history in judgment in a very direct way.

It was God who warned Noah; it was God who sent him the animals (Gen. 7:15, 16); it was God who closed the door of the ark (Gen. 7:16); It was God who caused a wind to pass over the earth (Gen. 8:11); In short, Scripture affirms that Jehovah presided over the Flood (Ps. 29:10).

However, the traces of the Flood are so eloquent that the apostle Peter affirms that those who deny it do so by willfully ignoring it (2 Pet. 3:5).

Sedimentary rocks, which bear eloquent testimony to their content of large quantities of animal and plant remains from a bygone world, have been “reinterpreted” in terms of great epochs of deposit production very slowly.

The last century saw the manipulation and suppression of numerous data that are evidence of cataclysm, giving rise to the current conception of “historical geology.” However, the evidence of the diluvial interpretation of geological deposits, imposed by their own nature, is maintained in excellent works.

(e) Objections.

Various objections have been presented as incontestable demonstration that geological deposits must have been deposited over long periods of time.
One of them is the existence of “anhydrite” or “evaporite” formations, a type of accumulation of various salts that are commonly interpreted as the remains of the evaporation of ancient seas.

However, the internal evidence of these deposits, due to their purity and absence of fossils or other remains indicative of marine origin, and due to other factors, demands their explanation by precipitation of brine mixtures of tectonic origin.

In all cases where objections of this kind are offered, there is no real reason to adopt an interpretation of long periods of deposition, but a close examination of the evidence shows that these formations, both “evaporites” and “fossil reefs” », such as diatom deposits, and many others, have been the subject of hasty interpretation in the past; Modern critical research reveals cataclysmic conditions in the formation of all these deposits.