The Flood of Noah is one of the most familiar stories of the Bible. But even those who know it well often don’t think about how it actually envisions the world (or rather, universe) or know about comparable stories from other (even more ancient) Near Eastern cultures (though some will know about the Epic of Gilgamesh). If you are among that crowd, here is the post for you! These are two more side-boxes from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press), slightly edited here.
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BOX 3.4 THE THREE-STORIED UNIVERSE
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Thank you very much for explaining the flood narratives.
When I first became a Christian, I investigated what would happen if all the ice on Earth melted. I learned that even this would not produce nearly enough water to cover a mountain as high as Ararat. When I mentioned this to my pastor, he simply replied, “Anything can happen through a miracle.”
Because of the striking parallels with earlier Mesopotamian flood traditions, I assume that the story of Noah was influenced, directly or indirectly, by Sumerian or Babylonian traditions.
This also makes me wonder about the Israelite concept of God. The Hebrew words *El* and *Elohim* seem linguistically related to terms for deity in other ancient West Semitic cultures, while *El* was also the chief god in Ugaritic texts.
Is it historically plausible that Israel’s concept of God developed partly from the broader Canaanite or West Semitic religious world? If so, how did the Israelite understanding of Yahweh and Elohim gradually become distinct from the gods and divine councils of neighboring cultures?
Yes, the connectoins of ancient Israelite religion to other religions/cultures of the Ancient Near EAst has been a major field of study since the mid 19th c. especially, in no small measure because of the discovery of ancient texts such as the Giglgamesh Epic…
It seems like a rather “primitive” and simplistic way of looking at thigs, that if something bad happened, God did it, and God did it because we were bad.
Professionals say that children under the age of 8 or 10 think in much the same way. If something bad happens to them it is somehow their fault, and God did it because they were bad or there was something wrong with them.
There’s got to be a more intellegent way of looking at things.
I don’t have all the answers but perhaps it’s because God, and or being good people is a choice.
If children are born into bad circumatances, perhaps it’s because the people there have made bad and the wrong choices, and it has nothing to do with the child ’emself.
If people need population control there are better ways of doing it than creating or having a catastrophe.
Perhaps we should ship all the men out to install sustainable energy projects, and that would slow things down a bit.
For another view of how the ancients viewed the world and the possibility of a world wide flood (that wasn’t world wide) watch Irving Finkels YouTube of The Worlds Oldest Map.
I have read that, at the end of the last Ice Age, around 9000 BCE, the ice caps which were then far more extensive than now, melted and many low lying lands across the planet were flooded. This was long before Mesopotamian civilization but there were settlements at Catal Huyuk and Jericho so some memory of it may have been passed down. I understand flood myths existed across the world and many native American peoples have them.
Where did all the water that covered the Texas Permian basin go? Answer to the poles and mountain glaciers. What will happen is the future with global warming? Answer: it will all be back to where it was in prehistory.
The Permian Basin also lifted up. It was a shallow sea during the Permian era, but something pushed the continent up from the west. Maybe from pushing against and subducting some ocean plates. The sea is unlikely to cover the Permian Basin again anytime soon.
For example, as enthusiasts for the Blues will know, in 1927 there was a big flood on the Mississippi which led to a lot of songs.
Off topic, Dr Ehrman. I was wondering whether, when your current book writing commitments have been fulfilled, you might consider writing one on the history of the Eucharist, perhaps covering the first 3-400 years of the Church? There are other books on this subject but they are usually by priests/ministers and employ a lot of jargon and are often quite dense. Your accessible style would be a refreshing change. Arguably the Eucharist is a crucial aspect of Christianity. How different Christians regard it is currently the greatest obstacle to Church unity and during the religious wars of the early modern period hundreds of thousands of people died because of their differing views of the nature of the Eucharist. Just a thought!
Thanks! I’m afraid it’s a rather long queue just now…
I often pondered this story, after I got out of the nursery room with Noah’s Ark pics on the walls, of course. I think it unlikely that the educated ancients really believed it either. IMO it’s all common METAPHOR (see Liberal & Non-Orthodox Judaism). Something that created great change. Something amniotic. A rebirth for creation. A re-leveling after events/evolution had reached a certain stage. The ancient world, before the flood, had HUGE animals (Dinos) and was “Too Earthly-Evil”. And civilized humans as we know them are too recent. God(s) flooded the earth with harmony (Water = balance/harmony). Rebalanced-everything.
Too bad they didn’t know it was all really an asteroid impact that allowed the mammals to arise….that humans didn’t exist yet. They needed to explain evil, God adjusting corrupted-mankind’s nature, and doing “God Stuff” and if we aren’t careful, he might do something again (but not a flood, I guess). Water is that mystical “element” that is not solid (ice/rocks) and not gas (vapor, air) and not totally destructive (fire). It’s where new-life begins. It’s only natural that, at some point, God(s) flooded creation for a new era. The era of refined earth. 40 (Transformation/rebirth/purification) is a great mystical number…light/dark, days/nights.
The side box about the three-storied universe was especially interesting. It never occurred to me that God releasing the ‘fountains of the deep’ and the ‘vaults of the sky’ was essentially a reversion to the original state of chaos; going back to the original state of chaotic waters. Like God hitting the reset button on creation.
I’m old enough to remember having an Etch-a-Sketch as a kid. You could spend hours drawing something with it. Then when you wanted to start over from a clean slate, all you had to do was shake the thing vigorously a few times and presto! Reset back to starting position. 🙂
“Unfortunately (for this view) it is physically impossible for a flood to cover the earth, and, as it turns out,there is no geological evidence for any such thing.”
🎤🫳
Wow you are so good at breaking it down, Dr. Ehrman. I think the Mesopotamians thought they were “all the people of the world” because that was their shorthand for “civilization.”
Some of Noah’s [Comforter’s] story details even match the Mesopotamian iterations — sending the bird out, giving instructions for the boat. And when I look at Noah’s story in the Hebrew (with my AI), the form of God’s name changes, seemingly correctly parsing the Anu and Ea and Divine Council in the Mesopotamian story.
I hope you can comment on Dr. Baker’s Mesopotamian Civilization and The Origins of The New Testament book, Dr. Ehrman: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/mesopotamian-civilization-and-the-origins-of-the-new-testament/02FDFB2180AE377F552FD15C8418206D
He claims mediation through Uruk, Edessa and Palmyra. Those places are associated with NW Arabian routes, and I’m currently using Pre-Islamic Arabian literary forms to decode the Gospels ala Navajo code talkers! 🙂
Example: They use descriptors for names like Al Kutbay, “The Scribe.”
Christ = The Anointed One
Didymos = The Twin
The Anointed One could be a descriptor of the Hellenized name Malichus, “King”.
I second Serene’s interest in the links between the Old Testament and Mesopotamia, and also would be very interested in learning if anything in the Old Testament is based on Egyptian sources.
Bart:
“… it is physically impossible for a flood to cover the earth, and, as it turns out,there is no geological evidence for any such thing.”
Steve:
Not quite:
There was the Black Sea Deluge (Early Holocene). As the GLOBAL ice sheets melted in the early Holocene, global sea levels rose. Around 7,500 to 9,400 years ago, the rising Mediterranean Sea got so high it overflowed its natural boundary. It permanently flooded thousands of square miles of the southern European/Anatolian coastline, displacing early agricultural communities.
While that was happening, Mesopotamia was experiencing its own massive environmental transformation. As the ice sheets melted globally, the Indian Ocean rose and pushed its way up into what is now the Persian Gulf, blocking the exit of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, causing water to back up and spread out over the flat Mesopotamian planes.
Yes, there were massive and violent rainstorms at this time. During the Holocene Climate Optimum (9K to 6K years ago) climate created an era of intense rainfall over the region. The Indian Summer Monsoon grew and shifted west across the Arabian Peninsula into Mesopotamia–downpours hammering the Taurus mountains and the TigrisEuphrates Rivers.
I don’t think there was a universal flood. However, after reading some history and geology, I do believe that the rise of the oceans following the last ice age, coinciding with the time humans had started agriculture, there was at least one, or possible many, localized flooding episodes killing and displacing many people.
For example, I read somewhere that maybe what we call the Black Sea was a valley, or at most a lake, and the rise of the Mediterranean breached (the Dardanelles?!?) and suddenly flooded what is now the Black Sea.
Just a thought.
Agreed. Reading your post, I realized that there are two types of flooding. There is the sudden “flash” flood, and there is the gradual flooding as the ocean level rises (or land masses sink). The Younger Dyas is getting a lot of attention as the polar ice caps melted 12,000 years ago. A rising ocean is a universal flood if you live on the coast. (If you live inland on higher elevation, you “missed” the universal flood.) The last massive displacement in Europe was 500 CE. It started the Great Barbarian Migrations. The coastline of the North Sea was flooded by the rising ocean. Meanwhile, ancient Roman villas on the Mediterranean Sea went underwater. Alexandria, Egypt went underwater, too.
Yes, the Black Sea Lake coastal areas were inhabited. The Mediterranean Sea kept rising until the outlet from the lake became the inlet from the sea. Back to the North Sea, Doggerland was discovered a few decade ago. The British Isles were connected to continental Europe by a land bridge. Have a good day.
There are records of great floods. Could they be the ones of the myths?
The Mediterranean Ocean was created in an amazing quick flood but millions of years ago. I doubt that was recorded in any myths.
Doggerland final flood was about 6,200 years ago but again the Neolithic people may not have that myth either. It was quite far from the middler east.
Yes, that’s probably where the “world-wide” flood myths come from — local accounts.
Years ago I read a book titled Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About The Event That Changed History, by geophysicists William B.F. Ryan and Walter C. Pitman, published in 1998. Its thesis is that sometime around 5,600 BCE the Mediterranean Sea, fed by rising sea levels resulting ultimately from the melting of the glaciers after the Ice Age, overflowed through the Bosphorus, creating what we now call the Black Sea, which previously had only been a large lake (Lake Euxine). The resulting catastrophic flood would likely have inundated many settlements which had existed around the lake, and this event might have inspired all the ancient deluge myths shared in some form or another by the various civilizations of the Near East. I have wondered for decades about how this book was received among scholars in the relevant disciplines and maybe someday I’ll find time follow up on that, but as far as I can tell not very many people in the religious or historical communities are aware of it.
Jerry L. Floyd, Ph.D.
The basic theme is commonly espoused, that these stories were all written in places where a big flood, or many floods, had happened, resulting in similar acconts that also may have influenced each other.
If a maritime global catastrophe caused a massive extinction event, those events would be preserved in a flood myth. A large boat would be the metaphor for the surviving populations. India has a flood myth with a large boat. A swarm of asteroids hitting the oceans of the rotating Earth would result in tidal waves. Or, imagine if the whole planet “flipped” in a magnetic pole reversal. Or, the prehistoric Earth had a Hydroplate layer of an underground ocean(s). Or, all of the above in 100,000 years intervals. George Cuvier’s Catastrophism, but not Charles Lyell’s Gradualism.
The question is not if the Earth experienced a maritime global catastrophe and a massive extinction event. The question is how many?
Thank you Dr. Ehrman for another great post. On the subject of great floods in mythology, it should be noted that, at the end of the last great ice age (10 to 12 thousand years ago) the vast amounts of water that had been stored in ice returned to the oceans as the ice sheets melted. While we might think this happened so gradually that the rising waters would not be perceived as a flood, there is evidence that a few times this rise in sea levels happened rapidly. For example, much of North America was covered by the Laurentian ice sheet that, as it melted, created a vast inland sea. The level of this sea rose steadily as the glacier receded, and at some point breached the eastern coast, probably near where the St Lawrence seaway exists today. The resulting increase in sea levels would have been relatively sudden and significant. Consider that much of what is now the Persian Gulf was previously dry land, well populated and farmed, that became inundated around this time. I personally think these events may very well have inspired the various flood myths from ancient times.