My understanding is that if Moses really wanted to make sure that everyone
would understand the Flood to have been global, he should have used the
Hebrew word tebel (to indicate the entire planet), but he didn't.
Another thing to keep in mind when trying to decide how the original
readers would have interpreted the account is that their mental picture of
what constituted a global flood would have differed from that of the
global flood advocates of today because their cosmology was different. In
the second millenium B. C. people didn't know what the extent of the earth
was and, as far as we know, didn't realize that it was a globe.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
> What would you have God say, that He has not already said to convince you
> that the flood was universal, given that the record was written by Moses
> 3000 years ago? If you are going to take this position, Glenn, you should
> at least acknowledge that you are doing so in the face of the most open
> reading of the account. While one can develop constructs of logic to allow
> most anything with the account, in its pure and unstrained reading, it says
> the flood was universal.