The Flood

Chapters four through ten of the book of Genesis tell us what happened between the time that Cain was exiled from Eden and the great Flood was sent upon the earth. It is a short portion of the book, but packed with much that must be explained from a historical point of view. We begin with the family of Adam. Cain’s family has begun a new life away from Adam and Eve. Abel has been replaced with Seth. The family of Adam as recorded in Genesis chapter five is meant to show us God’s faithful and providential care of His people down to the time of Noah. The entire genealogy focuses on this task. It begins with Adam (Gen. 5:1) and ends with Noah and his sons (Gen. 5:32).
Chapter six of Genesis begins to set up the world before the Flood. We refer to this as the ante-diluvian period. We see the very fast and very real corruption of sin in the lives of the people of the earth. Adam and Eve and their offspring have been faithful to procreate and fill the earth, but they have not been so careful to teach the ways of God to their generations. Certainly the offspring of Cain can be held partly responsible for this as well. We are told that the condition of humanity at this stage of history was on in which “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). God reached out with righteous judgment and destroyed the world He had so carefully made.
But God did not destroy every one. Noah found favor with God. Noah and his family were spared because of the righteousness of Noah. Noah was told to prepare an ark and store animals and food and his own family in it that they might be spared before the judgment of God. Then God sent rain. It had never rained before (Gen. 2:5) and Noah acted solely on faith that God was telling him the truth. You can bet Noah and his family persevered under tremendous ridicule while they built the ark and gathered all the animals into it. I often tell students that they should remember Noah and how his faith was vindicated by God the next time they suffer ridicule because of a biblical stance your parents have chosen for them (not watching certain types of TV or movies, not wearing certain clothes).
There is much to discuss about the event of the Flood because it is such a touchstone in history. The idea of a worldwide flood that destroyed every person except Noah and his family and most animals has come under great scrutiny in the last two hundred years. Geologists claim that the rock layers and formation cannot have resulted from a flood like the one described in Genesis. They claim that there is no evidence for such a flood. Many ideas have crept into our thinking over the past two hundred years that seem to argue against such a catastrophic phenomenon. Where do the dinosaurs fit in with a biblical chronology of history? How about all the evidence for the Ice Age? How about continental drift and Pangaea? What about cave paintings and the bones they keep finding that are neither human nor animal?
Let us begin with a total cosmology of the earth as it was created. The Bible indicates that when God separated the land from the ocean, he gathered all the water into one place, leaving a single mass of land. We cannot know the exact size of this landmass, but we can guess that since our continents do fit together somewhat, that all the land we now see was once part of a large landmass. Now let us fit this into the biblical details. According to Genesis 7:11 water not only fell from above but burst forth from “the fountains of the deep.” Some biblical scientists have attempted to explain this by suggesting that there was a dense canopy of moisture that essentially made the entire earth like a tropical rain forest. This helps explain several things. It is often surprising and difficult to understand how Adam lived 930 years. Some scientists suggest that a canopy of this kind would prevent the sunlight from aging the body in the way it does today. A longer lifespan can possible be attributed to this situation.
If there were such a canopy of water above the earth and this canopy condensed and fell as rain all of a sudden, the force of it would no doubt be tremendous. Scientists at the Institute for Creation Research have posited that the force of the water falling, combined with that of the “fountains of the deep” breaking open would be sufficient to explain the shattering of a landmass like Pangaea. Imagine carefully placing a broken plate in a large fish tank and then dumping several gallons of water on it at one time. When you stopped pouring water on it you would see that the plate had scattered around the fish tank, not stayed in one place.
It rained for forty days, according to Genesis. The flood waters stayed upon the earth for about three months after it had stopped raining. It took Noah two weeks for his dove to find land. He stayed in the ark an additional month and a half or so before he exited with all the animals and people. Noah immediately made a sacrifice to God and received a covenant bond signed by the rainbow. If the earth were covered by a dense canopy that made it feel like a tropical rain forest before the Flood, what must it have felt like afterward? Scientists have surmised that the much of the water would have frozen instantly at the poles. Even today, scientists tell us that if the poles were to melt, there would be enough water to cover the earth. Where did the rain go after falling for forty days? It froze and receded to the polar ice caps. Much of the earth would have been covered by ice for a while yet. Interestingly, we see that Noah and his family stay in the region of Ararat where the ark came to rest for a while still. However, the frozen landscape would offer evidence of an Ice Age and allow animals to migrate from one continent to the other after the Flood.
What about the problem of the technology of the ante-diluvian peoples? Why do we have no evidence of iron working or bronze working until much later than the Flood? Imagine what it would feel like to wake up tomorrow and find out that there were only a handful of people left on earth. It would be scary, but stay with me a moment. What would you do for breakfast? Well, you would likely still be able to stick a piece of bread in the toaster and toast it. Your refrigerator would likely still be operational and so you could still put butter or jam on it and be fine. But what about the next day? When the power finally did go out, where would you be? What about when things started breaking? Would you be able to repair or duplicate an incandescent light bulb?
I suspect this is the situation Noah and his children found themselves in right after the Flood. While the descendants of Cain did discover how to make things with iron and bronze; that knowledge perished with them in the Flood. Noah’s was a carpenter, or so it would seem. He and his children would have known how to use tools made of iron, but not how to create them. The simple explanation for why the Bronze Age does not begin until 3500 BC and why iron is not found in abundance until 1200 BC is that after the Flood, people had to relearn a lost technology. Artifacts surely exist from before the Flood, but they would be almost impossible to identify.