Re: The Eight of the Ark

I lived in the great rift valley in Ethiopia. Further north, in
Ethiopia there is a depression blocked off from the Red Sea but still
part of the rift valley depression. Between Addis Ababa and where we
lived we crossed the Awash river. It is a fair size river and flows
into the very hot depression of the rift valley that is below sea level
and simply evaporates, with nothing like the dead sea at the end,
although there are reputed to be marshes... It was normal in Addis
Ababa to see camels loaded with rock salt that had been surface cut in
big chunks and transported from that area up at least 8000 feet. Thus a
dam seems somewhat feasible.

Dave Wallace

D. F. Siemens, Jr. wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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 18:02:18 2006