The Origins of the World and Mankind

For those interested, my post is here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/1595229/posts?page=10#10

~ Janice

The Origins of the World and Mankind (Evolution etc.)
Orthodox Publications ^ | 09-13-03 | Bishop Alexander (Mileant)
Posted on 03/12/2006 8:28:56 PM EST by jecIIny
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/1595229/posts

[snip]

3. The Flood.

All humanity known to the author of Genesis was
flooded, but not all of the earth: neither
Africa, southeast Asia, Australia, the Americas,
nor Greenland was covered by the waves of the
Flood. The Flood meant the death of humanity in
those places where sin reigned. To understand
this, we must recall why the Lord caused the
Flood: "God saw that the wickedness of man was
great in the earth… And the Lord said, I will
destroy man whom I have created from the face of
the earth." Consequently, we are completely
justified in seeing the Flood as the inundation
of the world known to the author.

All the same, we should not be confused by the
fact that the Bible speaks of the Flood as
spreading "on the face of the whole earth." The
Bible, and all religious literature that concerns
only the human soul, not geography, usually calls
just the area that people inhabit (sometimes the
area of a certain human culture ­ generally its
own) the "earth" or "universe." Thus Byzantium,
which was raised on the Bible, called the basin
of the Mediterranean Sea the "Universe," which is
why they called their emperors "masters of the
universe," and gave the patriarch of
Constantinople the title "ecumenical" or universal.

The time of the Flood is difficult to establish.
We discussed above the impossibility of
constructing a chronology based on the life spans
of the patriarchs as they are given in the book
of Genesis. By following archeological data,
however, we can suppose that it occurred sometime between 8,000 and 6,000 B.C.

Animals that lived in the area in which the Flood
was to take place were taken into the ark. There
is no mention in the Bible of any giraffes,
rhinoceroses, etc., which never lived in that
area (even hundreds of arks would not have
provided enough space for all the animals of the
world, and a whole army would have been needed to
feed and care for the animals). "And the Lord
said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into
the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me
in this generation. Of every clean beast thou
shalt take to thee by sevens (pairs), the male
and his female: and of beasts that are not clean
by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of
the air by sevens, the male and the female
[ducks, geese, chickens, possibly, which is
possible here? Possibly ...chickens or swans,
storks and others with which Mesopotamia was
rich, as well as doves and crows]; to keep seed
alive upon the face of all the earth." "And it
came to pass after seven days, that the waters of
the flood were upon the earth… the same day were
all the fountains of the great deep [i.e. the sea
and the ocean] broken up, and the windows of
heaven were opened." Of course, the expression
about the windows of heaven is figurative.

The activity of Noah and his family after the
flood contradicts the hypothesis of a global
catastrophe. It is written in Genesis that Noah
and his family began to cultivate the earth
immediately after they left the ark, which in the
case of global flooding would have been
impossible, since the landscape, under the impact
of strong erosion and other tectonic processes,
would have changed drastically. We also recall
that the dove plucked an olive leaf while the
water was still abating. No olive tree, much less
its leaves, could have survived a worldwide catastrophe.

One may surmise that a large-scale flood must
have left some substantial evidence behind in the
form of sediment, which today’s geologists would
have found. Many large alluvial deposits ­
evidence of a monstrous flood ­ have been
discovered in the Mesopotamian plain (T.C.
Mitchell, "Geology and the Flood," in The New
Biblical Dictionary, 2nd edition, editor J. D.
Douglas and others, Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1982,
pp. 382-383). At least one of them coincides time-wise with the Flood.

The Flood, though it was destructive, continued
for only one year and ten days. A flood of such
short duration usually passes by without leaving
traces substantial enough to be identifiable
after thousands of years. As an example, let us
examine the flood in California’s San Joaquin
Valley in 1970. Over the course of several
months, water stood in the valley at a depth of
three to four feet. A year later there was not a
single sign of the catastrophe left. Similarly, a
flood lasting just a year in Mesopotamia, even
with a water level of 200-300 feet, would have
left insufficient evidence behind to enable us
after several thousands of years to determine
precisely when the Flood had occurred.

The main thing is that the flood described in
Genesis 6-9 truly fulfilled the purification that
God intended ­ without flooding the whole planet.
It the sense that it catastrophically affected
the people and animals in a widespread region, it
might be called universal with respect to those
people and animals, but it wasn’t truly global in scope.

Proof of Flooding.

1. Throughout the world, there are more than
seventy different traditions among various
peoples confirming the description of the Flood
in the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis. The
Babylonians’ concurs best with the Biblical
account. Similarities in descriptions of the
flood compel us to conceive of it as an event of
"worldwide" scale, forever imprinted in the
memory of nations and preserved in legend for many ages.

According to Genesis 7:11-12, the floodwaters
came from "the springs of the great deep" and
"the floodgates of the heavens." The respective
Hebrew phrases are ma'yenoth tehom rabah and
'aruboth hashamayim. These terms refer
respectively to subterranean reservoirs, today
called aquifers, and to heavy rain clouds.

Like most desert plains, Mesopotamia has
characteristics that would favor formation of an
enormous aquifer. Certain well-timed geologic
events could bring all that water to the surface.
And while rain is now rare in Mesopotamia, an
"act of God" (i.e., a miracle) could certainly
bring it to the region and sustain the 40-day torrent which Genesis records.

The historicity of the Biblical flood account is
confirmed by the tradition existing in many
places as to the occurrence of a similar
catastrophe. F. von Schwarz (Sintfluth und
Völkerwanderungen, pp. 8-18) enumerates
sixty-three such flood stories which are, in his
opinion, independent of the Biblical account. R.
Andree (Die Flutsagen ethnographisch betrachtet)
discusses eighty-eight different flood stories,
and considers sixty-two of them to be independent
of the Chaldee and Hebrew traditions. Moreover,
these stories extend through all the races of the
earth excepting the African; these are excepted,
not because it is certain that they do not
possess any flood traditions, but because their
traditions have not as yet been sufficiently
investigated. Lenormant pronounces the flood
story the most universal tradition in the history
of primitive man, and Franz Delitzsch was of the
opinion that we might as well consider the
history of Alexander the Great a myth as to call
the flood tradition a fable. It would, indeed, be
a greater miracle than that of the deluge itself
if the various conditions surrounding the several
nations of the earth had produced among them a
tradition substantially identical. Like the
Hebrews, Babylonians, Greeks, Norse, and other
peoples of the Old World, many Indian tribes of
North and South America also have traditions of a
deluge. . . . "When the earliest missionaries
came . . ." the Reverend Myron Eells reported in
1878, "they found that those Indians had their
traditions of a flood, and that one man and his
wife were saved on a raft" (Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest).

One Bible scholar correctly observed that "the
destruction of well-nigh the whole human race in
an early age of the world's history by a great
deluge appears to have so impressed the minds of
the few survivors and seems to have been handed
down to their children, in consequence, with such
terror-struck impressiveness, that their remote
descendants of the present day have not even yet
forgotten it. It appears in almost every
mythology, and lives in the most distant
countries and among the most barbarous tribes."

2. The geological research suggests there was
indeed a vast, sudden and deadly flood around
5,600 B.C., fairly close to the possible time of
Noah. Until now, the best attempt at modern
scientific corroboration of the Flood was the
work of British archeologist Charles Leonard
Woolley, who caused a sensation with his 1929
book Ur of the Chaldees, said to be the most
widely read archeology book ever published.

Digging in present-day Iraq at the site of
ancient Ur, the birthplace of the first patriarch
Abraham, the Bible-believing Woolley found an
ancient blanket of waterborne silt without human
remains. It was evidence of a deadly flood that
appeared to substantiate the account in Genesis.

3. More recently, archaeologists have discovered
the remains of a man-made structure more than 300
feet below the surface of the Black Sea,
providing dramatic new evidence of an apocalyptic
flood 7,500 years ago. Their expedition also
spotted planks, beams, tree branches and chunks
of wood untouched by worms or mollusks, a strong
indication that the oxygen-free waters of the
Black Sea's 7,000-foot-deep abyss may shelter
intact shipwrecks dating back to the dawn of
seafaring. Later the team discovered the outlines
of an ancient coast 550 feet below the current
waterline, the first visual evidence that a flood
had occurred in the region eons ago.

Interest in the Black Sea quickened in 2002 with
the publication of Noah's Flood by Columbia
University geologists William Ryan and Walter
Pitman, which suggests that the modern-day sea
was formed 7,500 years ago when melting glaciers
raised the sea level until the waters of the
Mediterranean breached the natural dam at the Bosporus.

Later there was a cataclysmic deluge. Seawater
from the Mediterranean poured into the Black Sea
basin at 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls.
The heavier saltwater plunged to the bottom of
the existing fresh-water lake and began to fill
the basin like a bathtub. Then the rising
lake-sea inundated and submerged thousands of
square miles of land, destroying communities,
killing people and wiping out uncounted species
of plants and animals as the ecosystem flipped from fresh water to salt water.

Where the Ark Stopped.

Many are unreasonably sure that Noah’s ark
stopped on Mt. Ararat. At Ararat’s height of
5,165 meters above sea level, it seems very
unlikely! This notion is the result of an
unreflective reading of the Bible’s text. Genesis
8:4 informs us that the ark rested on the
"mountains (plural) of Ararat," not on modern Mt.
Ararat. This specification makes a very
substantial difference. The Ararat mountain chain
is in fact a complex of mountain chains
stretching to the northeast from Mt. Ararat
itself to the foothills bordering the
Mesopotamian depression. It covers more than
250,000 square kilometers. Noah’s ark could have
stopped anywhere within the boundaries of this huge area.

Thus Holy Scripture, the legends of many nations,
and geological findings in the area of
Mesopotamia and the Black Sea concur in
supporting the idea that the "worldwide" Flood really did occur.

[snip]
Received on Mon Mar 13 15:19:58 2006