Re: The Eight of the Ark

One theory that I don't recall seeing written up ties out-of-Africa to
the Flood. If all the human race were in the Rift Valley, a natural dam
could have formed upstream and drowned everyone not in an ark when it
broke. This would have happened something like 50,000 years ago, or
earlier. Whether it would have seemed to cover the entire earth and
lasted a year, I don't know. But I don't think that such a brief period
of high water would have left eroded terraces that could be found today.

The Rift Valley is the only place I can think of where all human beings
could have been at one time with modern human beings in existence as
evidenced by archeology/paleontology. Glenn, of course, has the entire
human race together in the dry Mediterranean earlier, when we have
evidence for no hominid more advanced than the australopithecines. He has
the advantage of getting an ark to the vicinity of the mountains of
Ararat. I haven't heard of an Ararat homonym in Africa, but there may be
one known to someone else.

As a matter of clarity, I subscribe to neither of these views.
Dave

On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 13:26:49 -0500 "David Opderbeck"
<dopderbeck@gmail.com> writes:
Following along on some of the recent "Arkeology" discussions, I recently
corresponded with a reasonably well-known OT scholar from an Evangelical
seminary who holds a "local" view of the flood. I asked him for some
references where Evangelical OT scholars discuss the possibility that the
flood was local anthropologically as well as geographically. I was
surprised that he said he didn't know of any. Citing 2 Peter 2:5, he
said the NT confirms that the only eight members of the human race
survived the flood. This seems odd to me, since this person would say
that 2 Peter 3:6 and its context don't require that the flood was
geographically global. If that's so, I'm not sure why scholars applying
the same literal-historical-grammatical hermeneutic to both passages
should be dogmatic about 2 Peter 2:5, which could be read along with the
more limited understanding of "cosmos" in 2 Peter 3:6 to mean that of the
people affected by the flood, only eight were saved. Moreover, unless
the Biblical flood was tens of thousands of years ago, the extra-Biblical
evidence pretty clearly shows that it couldn't have wiped out every human
being alive on the face of the earth (even if "human being" has a very
limited meaning). I have to believe that many ASA members with
Evangelical convictions, and probably many who teach at Evangelical
institutions which adhere to some form of "inerrancy," think along these
lines.

So anyway: does anyone here know of papers, commentaries, etc. from an
Evangelical perspective that discuss this particular question? Please
note that I'm not looking right now for a debate on the meaning or merits
of "inerrancy."
Received on Fri Mar 24 14:52:15 2006