The Great Flood

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I’ve been seeing more and more support for a very interesting theory, that there was a sudden flooding of the Black Sea at the end of the ice age. That this event was seared into the memory of those who survived and became the basis of folklore eventually evolving into the story of Noah’s Ark, probably picked up by the Jews during their exile in Babylonia.

foxnews.com/science/2012/12/12/archaeologist-claims-evidence-noahs-biblical-flood/

What I am wondering is how comfortable Catholics are with this “scientific” explanation for the story of Noah.
 
I read that book on the Black Sea Deluge theory. It’s a good approach to the question. It treats the Biblical story of Noah as possibly based on an historical event, rather than dismissing it as fiction. The book points out that myths in ancient societies often were used to convey some factual and historical information, within the mythical story.

The recent news story, though, was not about the Black Sea Deluge theory, but about a theory that the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last glacial maximum (about 12 thousand years ago) is the flood of Noah. That theory, too, considers that there may be an historical basis for the Flood. However, it seem to me that 12,000 years is too long ago. Also, the glaciers melted rather slowly, over a period of a few thousand years, so it does not seem like a good fit.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
I’ve been seeing more and more support for a very interesting theory, that there was a sudden flooding of the Black Sea at the end of the ice age. That this event was seared into the memory of those who survived and became the basis of folklore eventually evolving into the story of Noah’s Ark, probably picked up by the Jews during their exile in Babylonia.

foxnews.com/science/2012/12/12/archaeologist-claims-evidence-noahs-biblical-flood/

What I am wondering is how comfortable Catholics are with this “scientific” explanation for the story of Noah.
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No such thing as a Zen Catholic. Zen is Buddhism which is an atheist religion. The two are incompatible.
 
Ron_Conte said:
I read that book on the Black Sea Deluge theory. It’s a good approach to the question. It treats the Biblical story of Noah as possibly based on an historical event, rather than dismissing it as fiction. The book points out that myths in ancient societies often were used to convey some factual and historical information, within the mythical story.
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Yes, this is why I thought it an interesting question here. (Strictly speaking, it doesn’t even rule out the possibility of a real Noah escaping the flood.)
The recent news story, though, was not about the Black Sea Deluge theory, but about a theory that the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last glacial maximum (about 12 thousand years ago) is the flood of Noah. That theory, too, considers that there may be an historical basis for the Flood. However, it seem to me that 12,000 years is too long ago. Also, the glaciers melted rather slowly, over a period of a few thousand years, so it does not seem like a good fit.
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Although it doesn’t use the term “black sea deluge” it is implied:

“He says the Black Sea was once merely a freshwater lake – until an enormous wall of water from the Mediterranean 200 times more powerful than Niagara Falls swept it and everything else away. Including Noah and his ark.”

On the last point, this is not as problematic as it might at first appear and I’m sure the book you read must have covered this. The deluge theory is that there was a disparity in water levels between the mediteranean and the black sea (which would have accumulated over time) and that this broke at some point. The resulting flow of water to equalize the bodies of water would not have been instantaenous, of course, but it could easliy have been enough to cause flooding. And the key question is whether the water line would have advanced faster than people could walk to escape the flooding. That’s a mathematical function of the flow of water and the slope of the land.

Then again, even a slow flood that people could walk away from would still have been devastating requiring whole villages to pick up and move leaving behind anything the could not carry.

I’m not sure why you think the timing would be a problem. Genesis only puts it between the Fall and Abraham. Certainly a 12,000 year old incident would only be remembered vaguely in the form of myth and that would account for it’s widespread telling.
 
There are two different theories here:

Black Sea flood 7600 years ago (Ryan and Pitman theory)

Glacial melting flood 12,000 to 7,000 years ago (Teller, Glennie, et al. theory)

The news story that you cite mentions both ideas, but they are separate theories.
 
A lot of the glacial ice theories depend not on the gradual withdrawal of the ice cap, but on the ice dams collapsing in mountains. It was very common for there to be high altitude lakes that were held in place by glacial ice dams. One of the last of the monumental floods that occurred when one collapsed was in the Northwestern US during historic times, about 6kya, iirc. The natives still had oral history about it and geologists found the evidence.

The Caucasus Mts are directly north of the Holy Land, I believe and certainly would have had some of these dams and floods. I don’t now if anyone has found a specific likely suspect to account for the Noah story.
 
Ron_Conte said:
There are two different theories here:

Black Sea flood 7600 years ago (Ryan and Pitman theory)

Glacial melting flood 12,000 to 7,000 years ago (Teller, Glennie, et al. theory)

The news story that you cite mentions both ideas, but they are separate theories.
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Thanks for the clarificaiton. I doubt whoever wrote this story understood the distinction between the two and I hadn’t realized there were multiple theories.
 
Julia_Mae said:
A lot of the glacial ice theories depend not on the gradual withdrawal of the ice cap, but on the ice dams collapsing in mountains. It was very common for there to be high altitude lakes that were held in place by glacial ice dams. One of the last of the monumental floods that occurred when one collapsed was in the Northwestern US during historic times, about 6kya, iirc. The natives still had oral history about it and geologists found the evidence.

The Caucasus Mts are directly north of the Holy Land, I believe and certainly would have had some of these dams and floods. I don’t now if anyone has found a specific likely suspect to account for the Noah story.
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The virtue of the Black See Deluge theory/theories is that it would certainly lend credence to a “worldwide” flood myth as opposed to some local valley.
 
I prefer the theory of Edith and Alexander Tollmann, and a similar theory by W. Bruce Masse and Dallas Abboott, that the great Flood was caused by a comet or asteroid striking the deep ocean. This event caused massive tidal waves, threw vast amounts of water into the upper atmosphere, and severely affected the weather patterns worldwide. It explains why there are flood myths from cultures around the world, and all the content in those flood stories.

the Tollmanns date the flood to about 9500 years ago, whereas Masse dates the Flood to 2807 B.C.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
I’ve been seeing more and more support for a very interesting theory, that there was a sudden flooding of the Black Sea at the end of the ice age. That this event was seared into the memory of those who survived and became the basis of folklore eventually evolving into the story of Noah’s Ark, probably picked up by the Jews during their exile in Babylonia.

foxnews.com/science/2012/12/12/archaeologist-claims-evidence-noahs-biblical-flood/

What I am wondering is how comfortable Catholics are with this “scientific” explanation for the story of Noah.
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Unless it covered the entire world, it’s not Noah’s flood. It was not a local event.
 
garysibio said:
Unless it covered the entire world, it’s not Noah’s flood. It was not a local event.
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These are the notes from the USCCB website Scripture text (NAB) of Genesis 6:1-12, which indicate that the Church does not consider the story a literal account of an historical event:
  • [6:1–4] These enigmatic verses are a transition between the expansion of the human race illustrated in the genealogy of chap. 5 and the flood depicted in chaps. 6–9. The text, apparently alluding to an old legend, shares a common ancient view that the heavenly world was populated by a multitude of beings, some of whom were wicked and rebellious. It is incorporated here, not only in order to account for the prehistoric giants, whom the Israelites called the Nephilim, but also to introduce the story of the flood with a moral orientation—the constantly increasing wickedness of humanity. This increasing wickedness leads God to reduce the human life span imposed on the first couple. As the ages in the preceding genealogy show, life spans had been exceptionally long in the early period, but God further reduces them to something near the ordinary life span.
  • [6:2] The sons of God: other heavenly beings. See note on 1:26.
  • [6:4] As well as later: the belief was common that human beings of gigantic stature once lived on earth. In some cultures, such heroes could make positive contributions, but the Bible generally regards them in a negative light (cf. Nm 13:33; Ez 32:27). The point here is that even these heroes, filled with vitality from their semi-divine origin, come under God’s decree in v. 3.
  • [6:5–8:22] The story of the great flood is commonly regarded as a composite narrative based on separate sources woven together. To the Yahwist source, with some later editorial additions, are usually assigned 6:5–8; 7:1–5, 7–10, 12, 16b, 17b, 22–23; 8:2b–3a, 6–12, 13b, 20–22. The other sections are usually attributed to the Priestly writer. There are differences between the two sources: the Priestly source has two pairs of every animal, whereas the Yahwist source has seven pairs of clean animals and two pairs of unclean; the floodwater in the Priestly source is the waters under and over the earth that burst forth, whereas in the Yahwist source the floodwater is the rain lasting forty days and nights. In spite of many obvious discrepancies in these two sources, one should read the story as a coherent narrative. The biblical story ultimately draws upon an ancient Mesopotamian tradition of a great flood, preserved in the Sumerian flood story, the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, and (embedded in a longer creation story) the Atrahasis Epic.
 
I like to think that the Bible is a compilation divine revelations not a compilation of imaginative stories.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
I’ve been seeing more and more support for a very interesting theory, that there was a sudden flooding of the Black Sea at the end of the ice age. That this event was seared into the memory of those who survived and became the basis of folklore eventually evolving into the story of Noah’s Ark, probably picked up by the Jews during their exile in Babylonia.

foxnews.com/science/2012/12/12/archaeologist-claims-evidence-noahs-biblical-flood/

What I am wondering is how comfortable Catholics are with this “scientific” explanation for the story of Noah.
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I was taught it was a global flood. This topic is brought up here on a regular basis, and the more it is, the less and less I’m inclined to believe any scientific connection - and believe me, I’ve read all the previous attempts to explain away the global flood as a local/regional event.

The Bible was not - not - written by a bunch of guys who heard a few stories. We are explicitly told that the Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Inspiration meaning something more valuable than 'I wrote my story because I was inspired by something I read or heard."

The global flood event exists in almost all previous cultures, which suggests that it was not a local event.

Peace,
Ed
 
There are two scientific theories (not by Creationists) proposing a global Flood event as the Flood of Noah, with scientific evidence. Alexander and Edith Tollmann propose an asteroid or comet strike in the deep ocean about 9500 years ago. W. Bruce Masse and Dallas Abbott propose a similar event about 2807 BC. Their theories explain why so many cultures around the world have preserved stories of an ancient flood.

However, for either theory to be correct, we would need to interpret the Biblical passage on Noah’s Flood as being partly literal and partly figurative.
 
Ron_Conte said:
There are two scientific theories (not by Creationists) proposing a global Flood event as the Flood of Noah, with scientific evidence. Alexander and Edith Tollmann propose an asteroid or comet strike in the deep ocean about 9500 years ago. W. Bruce Masse and Dallas Abbott propose a similar event about 2807 BC. Their theories explain why so many cultures around the world have preserved stories of an ancient flood.

However, for either theory to be correct, we would need to interpret the Biblical passage on Noah’s Flood as being partly literal and partly figurative.
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Uh…no there isn’t. Those are not theories in the professional understanding of the term. They have no scientific support and much evidence against. An asteroid strike in the ocean simply would not and could not flood the earth. Too many laws of physics to break to get there.
 
Ron_Conte said:
Their theories explain why so many cultures around the world have preserved stories of an ancient flood.
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The simplest explanation for why many cultures have stories of great floods is that there have commonly been great floods. Japan just had a doozy.

But there were also many of these floods around globe in a relatively short time span during the melting after the last Ice Age when ice dams let go.

What’s also got to be considered is how many ancient cultures have no flood stories at all. Which would be most of them.
 
Julia_Mae said:
The simplest explanation for why many cultures have stories of great floods is that there have commonly been great floods. Japan just had a doozy.

But there were also many of these floods around globe in a relatively short time span during the melting after the last Ice Age when ice dams let go.

What’s also got to be considered is how many ancient cultures have no flood stories at all. Which would be most of them.
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Source please.

Ed
 
The flood of Noah had to be worldwide; it could not just be something that happened at the Black Sea although the Black Sea was affected by the global flood. I hold that there were several poll shifts involved each causing many great tsunamis and causing mountains to rise and fall melting and reformation of the ice caps almost surely caused by a series asteroids hitting the earth. The flood was just one of a series of these events mentioned in the Bible starting with the growth of the continents from under the ocean where land and sea were divided. The more recent events were the long day of Joshua and the going back of the sun in the days of Hezekiah. Revelation talks of a future event of this type. See my article scripturescholar.com/JoshuasLongDay.pdf
No were in Genesis 6 - 9 does it every say every part of the world was covered at exactly the same time also unless the flood was violent many people in ships, and animals adapted to the sea (crocodiles, polar bears, etc would have survived.
Grace and peace,
Bruce
 
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