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The
Ancients Knew
of the Global Flood
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by James I. Nienhuis
Since Noah's Ark landed in the mountains of Ararat (the
mountains rose at the close of the Flood), it is not surprising that
Noah's progeny migrated down the new Tigris River valley from the
mountains to found the earliest post-Flood civilizations such as Sumer,
Akkad, Uruk, and Nimrud (which later became Babylon), Haran, Jericho, and
Sidon (Phoenicia), and more distantly, Egypt and the Indus Valley of N.W.
India. (The Tigris and the Euphrates rivers were named after two of the
four pre-Flood rivers mentioned in the Bible that flowed from the Garden
of Eden.)
 Ancient Babylonian legend speaks of a pre-Flood series of
ten kings, the ancient Hindus (N.W India) spoke about a series of Ten
Pitris who ruled before the global Flood, and the ancient Egyptians
described Ten Shining Ones who ruled consecutively before the Deluge. Like
the Bible also says, these pre-Flood patriarchs lived much longer than we
do, and this was confirmed by the ancient historians Berosus, Nicolaus of
Damascus, Hesiod, Plato, Hecataeus, Mochus, Hieronymus, and Manetho.
The last of these kings in the aforementioned lists was
the hero who led seven others aboard a vessel in which they survived the
global Flood. In ancient Babylon, the hero's name was Zisudra who
spear-headed the survival on the Ark of seven other humans, the Seven
Apkallu. In ancient Egypt, the Flood hero was Toth who survived the Deluge
along with the Seven Sages. In ancient N.W. India, the hero was Manu who
survived the global-Flood "pralaya" with the Seven Rishis. The odds are
astronomically long that these supposedly distinct civilizations would
have the same legend of a global Flood with eight people surviving from
the pre-Flood population that was led by a series of ten kings if it were
not real history that happens to corroborate the Genesis account.
And the odds become even longer that Noah's Flood is not
an historical fact when one considers the hundreds of tribes from around
the world that have ancestral knowledge of the global Flood. And yet, we
are expected to ignore this overwhelming evidence because it contradicts
current mainstream science and archaeology. Also expected of us to ignore
are the many ancient legends from various people-groups that corroborate
the Biblical account of the confusion of language at the Tower of Babel
where Nimrod (also known as Menrot, Marduk, Merodach, Ninus, Sargon, Shun,
Bacchus, and Zarathustra) led an act of defiance against God about 150
years after the Flood which devastated the earth around 2400 B.C.
There are many other ancient historical factors, as well
as a plethora of geophysical, biological and anthropological indications
that support the Genesis rendering of ancient history which can be gleaned
from a variety of resources, such as my book Old Earth? Why Not! The
accuracy of Genesis is further attested to therein by an analysis of the
ancient Biblical names that were thought to be mythological until modern
archaeology confirmed their historicity, names such as Haran, Ur, Nahor,
Serug, and the Hittites.
Thanks to modern archaeology, these Biblical Hittites were
confirmed to be non-mythological, and were discovered to have also had a
legend about the global Flood, the same Deluge recounted in a legend from
the Tamils of southern India which was survived by again eight people,
Satyavrata (Noah), Sharma (Shem), Charma (Ham), Japati (Japheth), and
their wives. The Tamils apparently migrated from the Indus River valley to
the south around 1500 B.C. when the Ice Age ice-pack melted because of
climatic changes at that time which caused the sea-level to rise about 300
feet, with both inducing migrations of people-groups (such as the Aryans
from the north, who moved into the Indus Valley and displaced the Tamil
people who already were losing ground to the encroaching ocean at that
time).
Warmer than today's ocean-water must have been the
evaporation source for the dense cloud-cover that caused the Ice Age, and
the source of that warmer ocean-water was the "fountains of the deep" for
Noah's Flood. Many ancient Flood legends do speak of water and magma
hissing and venting-up through fissures in the earth's crust to cause the
Flood, like described in Genesis. This hot-water from below mixed with the
pre-Flood ocean-water to inundate the continents (as indicated by the
sedimentary strata on the continents), and thereafter settled in the
deepened post-Flood basins
Reasonable explanations for the cause of the Ice Age are
not forthcoming from old-earth-believing scientists because they do not
realize that significantly warmer ocean-water (which caused dense
cloud-cover from higher ocean-evaporation rates) must have been the cause
of the Ice Age, there is no other viable mechanism that could have
resulted in the dense cloud-cover necessitated. When the post-Flood ocean
cooled sufficiently, the Ice Age ended around 1500 B.C., which is
confirmed by submerged megalithic structures off N.W. India, S. India, and
S.W. Japan that were engulfed by the sea when the Ice Age ice-pack melted.
Hundreds of tribal legends and ancient accounts from
Egypt, Babylon, and the Indus confirm the account of Noah's Flood from the
book of Genesis. These tribes and ancient cultures obviously had no
interest in copying a Hebrew account about a global Flood, therefore, all
of these accounts must have been independently derived by the various
people-groups' ancestors from the eight who were on the vessel that
endured the global Flood. When the eight reproduced and spread out across
the Middle East, and soon thereafter, much of the world (as some were
demonstrably excellent mariners), the memory of the worldwide Flood was retained,
and to a not-surprisingly great degree.
James I. Nienhuis is a writer and speaker.
www.GenesisVeracity.com
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