November 28, 2007 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is from the Advanced Bible Studies Series on the book of Genesis, which is available from Way of Life Literature.

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Many Bible commentaries today, even those who claim to be evangelical, deny that the Flood of Noah’s day was worldwide; but for the following reasons we know for certain that it was. There is no contradiction between the evidence that exists throughout the world and the Bible’s account of a worldwide flood. For those who have not been blinded by the unbelieving lens of uniformitarian evolutionary philosophy, the evidence clearly proves the biblical account.

1. THE BIBLE SAYS THE FLOOD WAS WORLDWIDE (Genesis 7:4, 19-23).

The first and foremost reason why I believe that the flood of Noah’s day was worldwide is because the Bible plainly says so. It is impossible to reconcile the Bible’s account with a local flood. If the flood was not universal and worldwide in scope, the Bible is not true, and if the Bible is not true Jesus Christ was not really the Son of God and we are therefore yet in our sins and without hope of salvation. For my part, it is a simple matter to believe that the Bible is true. Jesus Christ gave every evidence that He was the Son of God and His resurrection from the dead was witnessed by hundreds of people, and He taught that the every jot and tittle of the Old Testament is authoritative Scripture (Matthew 5:17-18; John 10:35). The Bible stands on better authority than any pronouncement by an evolutionist.

a. The flood of Noah’s day was not merely a long deluge of rain; the “fountains of the great deep” were also broken up (Gen. 7:11). This cataclysmic action would have resulted in massive tidal waves which swept across the world. The tidal waves created by just one volcano (Krakatoa) in 1883 produced immense waves at least 100 feet high; traveling up to 450 miles per hour they resulted in the death of nearly 40,000 people; the sound of the eruption could be heard 3,000 miles away (Simon Winchester, Krakatoa). When a series of earthquakes struck Chile in May 1960, the resultant tidal waves up to 50 feet high and traveling at 525 miles per hour caused massive damage in Japan one-third of the way around the world.

b. The Bible says the waters covered the mountains (Gen. 7:20). As a wise man has observed, “If Noah’s flood was local, it was the first egg-shaped flood in history!”

c. God instructed Noah to bring all the animals into the ark, which would make no sense if the flood was only local.

d. If the flood was local God could simply have instructed Noah to move! “The whole procedure of constructing such a vessel, involving over a century of planning and toiling, simply to escape a local flood, can hardly be described as anything but utterly foolish and unnecessary. ... The entire story borders on the ridiculous if the Flood was confined to some section of the Near East” (Whitcomb and Morris, The Genesis Flood).

e. God promised no more floods after the fashion of Noah’s day (Gen. 9:11), but there have been many large local floods, including those which have killed thousands.

• 65,000 drowned when a tidal wave hit Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755.
• 200,000 drowned when tidal waves swept across the Bay of Bengal in 1876.
• 27,000 drowned in Japan by a flood caused by a tidal wave in 1896.
• 6,000 drowned in a hurricane-associated flood in Galveston, Texas, in September 1900 .
• 3.7 million people drowned in a flood of the Yangtze river in China in 1931.
• 1,794 people drowned in the Netherlands in 1953.
• 10,000 drowned in floods in Iran in 1954.
• 2,000 died in a flood in Italy in 1963.
• 200,000 to 300,000 died in East Pakistan (modern day Bangladesh) by a tidal wave in 1970.
• 100,000 drowned due to flooding in the Red River Delta in North Vietnam in 1971.
• 1,300 drowned and 30 million became homeless from monsoon flooding in Bangladesh in 1988.
• 2,000 drowned in tidal wave floods in Papua New Guinea in 1998.
• 3,000 drowned in the flooding of the Yangtze in China in 1998.
• 5,000 drowned in flooding and mudslides in Venezuela in 1999.
• 2,000 drowned in monsoon floods in China, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh in 2002.
• 1,900 drowned in monsoon floods in Bangladesh in July 2004.
• An estimated 116,000 drowned in tidal wave floods in South Asia following a massive earthquake in Indonesia in December 2004.

f. Noah’s flood is compared in the Bible to the coming judgment by fire (2 Pet. 3:5-7). Both are universal.

2. THERE IS A WIDESPREAD TRADITION OF A WORLD FLOOD THAT DESTROYED ALL OF MANKIND EXCEPT ONE MAN AND HIS FAMILY.

“Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Greeks, Chinese, Phrygians, Fiji Islanders, Esquimaux, Aboriginal Americans, Indians, Brazilians, Peruvians, and indeed every branch of the whole human race, Semitic, Aryan, Turanian--have traditions of a Great Deluge that destroyed all mankind, except one family, and which impressed itself indelibly on the memory of the ancestors of all these races before they separated. ‘All these myths are intelligible only on the supposition that some such event did actually occur. Such a universal belief, not springing from some instinctive principle of our nature, must be based on an Historical Fact’” (Halley’s Bible Handbook). The Gilgamesh Epic (discovered by H. Rassman in Nineveh in 1853, from the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s library). “Gilgamesh was the 5th king of the Erech dynasty, which was one of the first dynasties after the Flood: ‘The assembly of the gods decided to send a deluge. They said, On the sinner let his sin rest. O man of Shuruppak, build a ship, save your life. Construct it with six stories, each with seven parts. Smear it with bitumen inside and outside. Launch it upon the ocean. Take into the ship seed of life of every kind. I built it. With all that I had I loaded it, with silver, gold, and all living things that I had. I embarked upon the ship with my family and kindred. I closed the door. The appointed time arrived. I observed the appearance of the day. It was terrible. All light was turned to darkness. The rains poured down. The storm raged; like a battle charge on mankind. The boat trembled. The gods wept. I looked out upon the sea. All mankind was turned to clay, like logs floating about. The tempest ceased. The flood was over. The ship grounded on Mt. Zazir. On the seventh day I sent out a dove; it returned. I sent out a swallow; it returned. I sent out a raven; it alighted; it waded about; it croaked; it did not return. I disembarked. I appointed a sacrifice. The gods smelled the sweet savor. They said, Let it be done no more’” (Halley).

3. THERE IS GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD WHICH TESTIFIES TO A UNIVERSAL FLOOD.

Two excellent books on this topic are John Whitcomb’s The World That Perished: An Introduction to Biblical Catastrophism and Whitcomb and Morris’ The Genesis Flood. The following is a summary of some of this evidence (part of this is from Willmington’s Guide to the Bible and Halley’s Bible Handbook):

a. Most of the earth’s crust consists of sedimentary rocks. “Over 70% of the earth’s surface rock is sedimentary rock (the rest of earth's surface rock is volcanic igneous and metamorphic rock). Sedimentary rock was originally formed in almost all cases under water, usually by deposition after transportation by water from various sources. Sedimentary rocks are made up of pieces of rock or other material which existed somewhere else, and were eroded or dissolved and redeposited in their present location. Sedimentary rock results from moving water which lays down layer upon layer by what’s called hydrologic sorting (sandstone, siltstone, shale, limestone, etc). This means that over 70% of the earth’s crust has been moved by a great movement of water giving strong evidence for the flood” (Steve Carr, “Evidence for the Flood,” http://www.calvaryag.org/apologetics/apologetics_11-evidence_flood.htm/).

b. Marine fossils have been found atop mountains. Clam fossils have even been found on the summit of Mt. Everest. Many Ammonite fossils (sea animals with shells), some with a diameter up to two meters, can be seen at 12,000 feet in the Himalayans in the Kali Gandaki River in Nepal (http://library.thinkquest.org/10131/geology_visual.html/). Clusters of gigantic fossilized oysters were found atop the Andes Mountains in South America. A whale’s skeleton was found on the top of Mount Sanhorn on the Arctic Coast and similar skeletons found a mile high on California’s coastal range. Thus, just as the Bible says, in ancient days flood waters streamed over the mountains.  “We now know, of course, that the earth has plenty of water to launch a global flood. It has been calculated that if the earth's surface were completely flat, with no high mountains and no deep ocean basins, that water would cover the earth to a depth of about 8,000 feet. But is there enough water to cover a 29,035 foot mountain? The key is to remember that the Flood didn't have to cover the present Earth, but it did have to cover the pre-Flood Earth, and the Bible teaches that the Flood fully restructured the earth. ‘The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished’ (II Peter 3:6). It is gone forever. The earth of today was radically altered by that global event. That Flood accomplished abundant geologic work. Eroding sediments here, redepositing them there, pushing up continents, elevating plateaus, denuding terrains, etc., so that the earth today is quite different from before. Today even mountain ranges rise high above the sea. Mt. Everest and the Himalayan range, along with the Alps, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Andes, and most of the world's other mountains are composed of ocean-bottom sediments, full of marine fossils laid down by the Flood. These rock layers cover an extensive area, including much of Asia. They give every indication of resulting from cataclysmic water processes. These are the kinds of deposits we would expect to result from the worldwide, world-destroying Flood of Noah’s day. At the end of the Flood, after thick sequences of sediments had accumulated, the Indian subcontinent evidently collided with Asia, crumpling the sediments into mountains. Today they stand as giants--folded and fractured layers of ocean-bottom sediments at high elevations. No, Noah’s Flood didn't cover the Himalayas, it formed them!” (John Morris, Ph.D., “Did Noah’s Flood Cover the Himalayan Mountains?” http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=520/).

c. Many fossil “fish beds” exist all over the world. The Science Magazine, January 9, 1959, states: “More than a billion fish averaging 6 to 8 inches in length died on 4 square miles of bay bottom off the California Coast line.” Ivan Velikovsky observes: “When a fish dies its body floats on the surface or sinks to the bottom and is devoured rather quickly, actually in a matter of hours, by other fish. However, the fossil fish found in sedimentary rocks is very often preserved with all its bones intact. Entire shoals of fish over large areas, numbering billions of specimens, are found in a state of agony, but with no marks of a scavenger’s attack” (Earth in Upheaval, p. 222).

d. Fossil beds demonstrate that parts of the world that are currently subject to harsh winters were once tropical. For example, the deposits found in Lincoln County, Wyoming, contain tropical palm leaves from 6 to 8 feet in length and from 3 to 4 feet wide and tropical animals such as alligators (The Genesis Flood, p. 157).

e. Fossil beds containing plants, insects, and animals are found throughout the world, preserving the fossils in such a manner that can be explained only by a flood of biblical proportions. “Never does one find, in the present era, great ‘graveyards’ of organisms buried together and waiting fossilization. But this is the sort of thing that is encountered in fossil deposits in many, many places around the world. ... To attempt to account for these vast graveyards in terms of present-day processes and events, except via the most extreme and unscientific extrapolation, is absolutely impossible” (The Genesis Flood, pp. 156, 161). For example, the lignite beds of Geiseltal, Germany, contain fossils of plants, insects, and animals in pristine condition. The chlorophyll is well preserved in the leaves as are the soft parts of insects, the feathers of birds, even the stomach contents of beetles.

f. The fossils are not deposited in an evolutionary order. “The fossils within the sediments do not exhibit strong evidence of a record of evolution with simple animals at the bottom, progressing type by type up to more and more complex animals. The order is often random or completely upside down or out of order for evolution. But this would be expected in a global flood catastrophe. Fossils from the supposed different 'ages' are often found mixed together. This indicates a huge mixing of animal bones that is not consistent with a local flood” (“Evidence for the Flood,” http://www.calvaryag.org/apologetics/apologetics_11-evidence_flood.htm/).

g. The fact of a vast flood covering the whole area of early civilization is established by the 8 foot layer of silt which cuts through the “culture levels” of all the Euphrates Valley archaeological sites. Halley describes three of these, at Ur, Kish, and Fara.

The excavation at Ur: “At Ur, city of Abraham, the Joint Expedition of the University Museum of Pennsylvania and the British Museum, under the leadership of Dr. C.L. Woolley, found (1929), near the bottom of the Ur mounds, underneath several strata of human occupation, a great bed of solid water-laid clay 8 feet thick without admixture of human relic, with yet the ruins of another city buried beneath it. Dr. Woolley said that 8 feet of sediment implied a very great depth and a long period of water, that it could not have been put there by any ordinary overflow of the rivers, but only by some such vast inundation as the Biblical Flood. The civilization underneath the flood layer was so different from that above it that it indicated to Dr. Woolley ‘a sudden and terrific break in the continuity of history.’ (See Woolley’s Ur of the Chaldees.)” (Halley’s Bible Handbook)

The excavation at Kish, on the east edge of Babylon. “The Field Museum-Oxford University Joint Expedition, under the direction of Dr. Stephen Langdon, found (1928-29) a bed of clean water-laid clay, in the lower strata of the ruins of Kish, 5 feet thick, indicating a flood of vast proportions. It contained no objects of any kind. Underneath it the relics represented an entirely different type of culture. Among the relics found was a four-wheeled chariot, the wheels made of wood and copper nails, with the skeletons of the animals that drew it. (See Field Museum-Oxford University Expedition to Kish, by Henry Field, Leaflet 28.)” (Halley’s Bible Handbook)

The excavation at Fara, about half way between Babylon and Ur, once on the Euphrates, now 40 miles to the east. “Excavated (1931) by Dr. Eric Schmidt, of the University Museum of Pennsylvania. He found the remains of three cities: the top one, contemporaneous with the 3rd Ur dynasty; the middle city, Early Sumerian; and the bottom city, Pre-Flood. The Flood Layer was between the middle city and the bottom city. It consisted of yellow dirt, a mixture of sand and clay, definitely alluvial, water-laid, solid earth, without relics of human occupation. Underneath the flood deposit was a layer of charcoal and ashes, a dark colored culture refuse which may have been wall remains, painted pottery, skeletons, cylinder seals, stamp seals, pots, pans, and vessels. (See University Museum Journal, September 1931.)” (Halley’s Bible Handbook).