Re: [asa] Noah's local flood?

A couple of years ago I posted a link to a blog post from a military pilot
flying missions in Iraq (present day Mesopotamia). I don't have time now,
but if you search the ASA archives you can probably find the link. Anyway,
the pilot mentioned that he was flying over a lake somewhere in central
Iraq, and that from his perspective in the helicopter, at one point it
looked to him just like he was flying over the ocean -- he could see no land
or mountains on the horizons and all he could see was water in every
direction.

The point of this wasn't to suggest that this lake was the site of the
Noahic flood. It was simply to point out that one's sense of scale gets
distorted by looking at a map of the whole Arabian peninsula. Maybe there's
no way a flood could have filled the entire Mesopotamian basin, but as the
helicopter pilot flying over the Iraqi lake illustrates, there are plenty of
areas in which water can collect in ways that appear vast to a local
observer -- even an observer flying hundreds of feet above the ground in a
helicopter, reporting to us with the precision of a modern military pilot in
a literary genre unadorned by poetic stylization.

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:25 AM, William Hamilton <
willeugenehamilton@gmail.com> wrote:

> I like Phil's summary. The part about the ark being washed into the Persian
> Gulf and being blown eastward makes a lot of sense. One minor sticking point
> of course is that if God knew that the flood was going to be local, why did
> He have Noah load all the animals onboard the ark? Or as Bernie said, why
> didn't he just tell Noah to walk out of the path of the flood (he had time
> -- all the time he and his sons were building the ark)
> --
> William E (Bill) Hamilton Jr.
> Rochester, MI/Austin, TX
> 248 821 8156
>

-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
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