The Ancients Knew of the Global Flood

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